The People's Queen (45 page)

Alice shakes her head. 'I can't just disobey him, after all he's done,' she replies disingenuously, feeling shabby. She knows Aunty wants the children. Aunty's told her enough, and lovingly enough, that Alice, or a part of Alice, also wants to see them, with their freckles and nightmares and barrel chests. But Alice can't face them yet. She wants them to respect her; she wants them to know she's a successful woman, not a failure, a whore, a has-been. 'Let's see how it goes with the pardon first.'

Aunty's face falls. But she composes herself within seconds. She's not going to bully; she takes what life doles out, and never complains. 'Well then...you could help me write my letters,' she goes on chirpily enough, 'my eyes not being what they were...and me having never been so good with a pen?'

Alice laughs, and embraces Aunty. Her spirits are lightening with every step the tiny horseback figures take towards the horizon. Aunty's 'letters' are nothing of the kind, of course. They're insurrectionary concoctions with thoughts from the hedge-priests' sermons, which are circulated among the free peasants, the ones who've got a bit of book-learning from somewhere, enough to read. They're disguised as letters, in that they're addressed to 'Piers Plowman' and signed from 'John Carter' or 'Henry Hooper'. They're how members of the Magna Societas, Aunty's trouble-making secret society, think they'll persuade the peasantry to rise up against their oppressors, when the time comes. For now, they're just mustering. The letters are nailed to church doors, or tree trunks, or passed from hand to hand among the disaffected on the road. Alice isn't unsympathetic to the peasants' miseries; how could she be, considering where she's come from? And she's pleased it all keeps Aunty busy. But she thinks it's a nonsense, too - they'll never rise up, really. And she's a landlord, so why encourage them rise up against herself? 'No, I'm not writing your letters for you either,' she says affectionately, and the old woman's pale eyes laugh back at her. 'You just want to get me into trouble, don't you, you old rogue?'

'Nothing for it then,' Aunty replies, sly and swift. She's always liked a bit of banter. 'We'll just have to get Wat out here to tell us some tall stories.'

She gives Alice a beady look. This is what she's really been bargaining for. She wants more of her kids with her. Alice grins, feeling suddenly reckless, and raises her hands. 'All right,' she says cheerfully, seeing a future opening up of long card evenings and shady visitors by firelight, after long days on the farm, and not caring. It will pass the time. 'Find him. Why not?'

Alice busies herself once Will has gone and the energy that being with him leeched out of her comes back. She takes over running the farmland, and the repairs, and the women making butter and cheese, and the team of men gathering in the rents. She does it more kindly than Will has, and she pays better. The mood around Gaines lightens with every passing week. But she's more thorough than Aunty used to be, too. And the profits keep coming in. When spring comes, she even goes back to her original plan to beautify Gaines, and plants what will one day become a great avenue of beech trees along the sides of the track - weedy-looking saplings, for now, but by the time John has children, God willing, who knows? And she plants other, more immediately rewarding plants too: gardens of waving roses and gillyflowers, with bees in the rosemary and lavender, and doves fluttering through the orchards.

If only she could get her hands on the money she left behind the stones behind the fireplace at Pallenswick, she sometimes muses (her profits from several of those last-minute property sales), she'd buy up land all around, and turn this old hall into a manor to be proud of...but that money's gone. She'll never have a chance to get Pallenswick back. She's heard the Duke's got it.

So she tries not to think about that money, hidden away; a vestige of her past.

She tries to live in the present.

And, once Wat starts coming, Alice comes to date her months by the gossip he brings.

He's leaner and more ragged around the edges; he doesn't talk about how, exactly, he spends his days. But he's as entertaining as he ever was, and Alice, relaxing into Aunty's raffish rustic life, enjoys seeing him again. Wat's road to Essex from Johnny's in Kent takes him round the edge of London. He hears everything. He passes it all on: (other) brigands attacking travellers; women being kidnapped; despair in London at the failure of the Parliament to stop the new King's Council spending; the latest war failures; the Council pawning the old King's embroidered cloaks in the City; the plague breaking out in the North; the second poll tax being collected; the second poll tax, all PS27,000 that's been collected, vanishing. Don't give me robbers, Wat says, sententiously, the biggest robbers aren't the men on the roads (though he would say that, of course); they're the men of the Council. And, of course, the biggest robber of all is the man who leads the Council: the Duke.

They sit by the fire, of an evening, with the account books, and cider, and meat, and Wat's talk of the world outside; with Aunty nodding sententiously, and Alice poking the fire.

It's August 1379 when Wat remarks: 'You remember how I was saying that the Duke and the Genoese ambassador are plotting to screw the London merchants by moving the trade port to Southampton? The man with the funny name, Janus Imperial? Well, how about this, then? Proof. Someone's murdered the ambassador, right on his doorstep in St Nicholas Acon Street, in broad daylight.'

Someone must be worried, then. No smoke without fire.

He comes back later in August, full of it: 'Here we go. Mayor Philpot's had two men picked up for knocking off Janus Imperial. Bruisers from the guilds. Londoners. John Kirkby and John Algor, they're called. Algor says he picked the fight with the Genoese servants. Kirkby says he stabbed Janus Imperial in the head. Twice. They say the wound went seven inches deep. Nasty, that. Angry.'

By the autumn Wat is rubbing his hands with glee: 'You'll never credit it. The Duke doesn't want those killers tried for murder - because he's got something worse lined up. He says Janus Imperial was ambassador to the Crown, so killing him was
lese-majeste.
He wants those blokes tried for treason - a hanging, drawing and quartering job. What they're saying in the City is, this is going to be how he fingers the merchants...'

Returning in January of the new year, Wat tells his fireside family of the new Parliament meeting at Westminster. The King begs for more money. Money is somehow granted, through a mix of appeals to merchants and more sell-offs of royal property. But the Parliament makes the little boy who rules England, thirteen now, promise to hold off for at least another eighteen months before asking again for the people of England to pay his bills for him. What he gets off his own vast acreage of royal estates must, surely, be enough till then.

All this gossip about the government being short of money worries Alice. They'll never give up the estates they've confiscated from her, not now, will they?

But at last, in March 1380, they do.

Remarkably, considering the temptation it represents in this time of financial troubles, Alice's confiscated property is all (bar what the Duke has taken for his own people) made over to her husband, who's still in Cherbourg. The banishment order on her is formally revoked, too.

And Alice gets her chance to thank Chaucer.

THIRTY-FIVE

Alice goes to London to receive her pardon. It is made out to her, and stamped, signed, sealed and delivered into her hand, at Westminster, in the Painted Chamber, on 15 March.

She has Wat bring her to London, not on horseback, but on his quiet river route up the Thames. It's how he gets over to Kent, these days, hopping on fishing boats south to Dartmouth. He knows the ways of the watermen. This time he isn't going on to Kent until he's seen her home afterwards. He'll be waiting for her here, south of the river, in some fleapit inn in the shadow of St Mary Overie in Southwark, listening to the choirboys sing in their wavering trebles, remembering being a boy. She doesn't want to stick around, she says gratefully; she'll maybe spend a night in town, though; visit a few old friends; but she'll be quick. Wat understands how strange this partial reprieve must feel to her. She knows that when she realises he can't bear to set foot in London; won't cross the bridge, even. Not in the state he's in now: as a no one, a has-been. London's a place for a man in his glory days, he says, with a bit of money to spend and a dash to cut. Southwark's near enough, for now. But she buys him a meal, and he cheers up a bit, and they both look north, imagining the rooftops of the City proper, and he squeezes her hand, and says, 'One day, though, Allie love, we'll be back in all our glory. You know that, don't you?'

It's a soft day, with flashes of sun between dancing clouds. But Alice's mood is neither soft nor flashing with sunlight as she slinks through the streets. She's got an hour to kill, and, even though there's no need, she finds her feet taking her away from the river, up to Aldgate. She looks up at Chaucer's windows, but there's no familiar head behind the glass, waving. Shaking her head, she heads back to the river for a Westminster boat. For the entire walk, she doesn't see a soul she knows. She's just looking at the scene in front of her as if through glass. In ways she can't quite put her finger on, things have changed. For the first time, walking down to the jetty, she realises she's not altogether sure that she still belongs here. As she fails to recognise men on guard, or on boats, or, once she gets to Westminster, the new King's new officials scurrying through the corridors, she's numb with the possibility that she might not. Alice is modestly dressed, like a country lady, and she does her best to comport herself quietly, as befits a wronged but respectable matron. But the worm turning in her gut is screaming for attention. No one seems to see her. They're all so busy. There are uniforms she's never seen; new passwords; new rituals.

She comforts herself: It will all change once I have the pardon in my hand. I'll stay a little, visit a little, begin to gather my team about me again...and surely the little King will remember that I held out his New Year gift to him, with Edward, last time we met; he'll smile; he'll say something gracious...it will be a beginning. Very soon, all the new things will seem familiar. I won't even remember the strangeness of this morning. I'm going to start living again.

But nothing happens quite as she imagines. Her case is not news any more, that much is clear. It's just a moment's adjustment of paperwork; an old story. That might have felt a relief, considering how terrifying she once found all those hostile eyes fixed on her in the chamber at the height of the scandal. But now, ignored by everyone, she almost misses the terror she felt before. She's only called into the session for a few moments. Briefly, she's shocked to see the Duke, the author of all her woes, standing beside the little boy she hardly knows, who is now King. She holds her breath, and steels herself: she might have expected this, after all. She's heard enough about how the Duke and Princess Joan are competing with each other, politely (for now), to be the power behind the throne. And it might have been just as bad, or worse, if it had been the Princess standing there. Alice ignores the Duke as she bobs her curtsey to the King; he ignores her too.

But she can't stop herself glancing up from under her lashes when she thinks no one's paying attention. And so, inevitably, sooner or later her eyes do meet the Duke's. And when he sees her looking, he makes a point of moving protectively closer to the young Richard II and saying, loudly, with tremendous emphasis, 'our beloved nephew, whom we hold so dear,' all the while looking significantly at her through those narrowed, angry eyes she remembers so well.

Alice lets the stirrings of long-forgotten rancour settle. She tries for a jocular, jaunty, 'what, he's
still
blaming me for all that?' frame of mind. She tries to make herself laugh at the Duke's black gaze. She doesn't want to let this man's hostility distress her, just at the moment when things are coming a bit more right for her again. He's nothing to her any more. Why should she care?

So she looks away. She lets her shoulders perform the smallest of shrugs.

She's aware he's noticed her insouciance. She can sense his indrawn breath.

But so what? It doesn't matter if he feels cheeked. She'll be out of here in a minute, with her papers.

Won't she?

At the very last, as the pardon's actually being handed to her, the Duke speaks.

He says, in an exhausted, peevish voice, 'Let the woman return to her son's manor in Essex, and not come back to London, on pain of our displeasure.' He nudges the little King. The little King looks sideways, briefly puzzled, as if this wasn't in the plan. But then he nods - what's it to him, after all? He hardly knows Alice, and he won't have heard anything good - and the paper is taken back, and a new line is added to the pardon.

Not come back to London? No glory days? Alice's gut is churning at this unexpected extra mark of the Duke's spite, or displeasure, or indifference, or whatever it is. But she's trapped, behind her glass. She can do nothing but narrow her eyes and bob again. At least the Duke can't see inside her mind, where horrible scenes are being played out. If I had a knife...she thinks, and lets herself, just for a moment, imagine his startled eyes fixed on her as 'the woman' drove it up under his ribcage. That would make him look, all right, even if it was the last thing he did. But in real life she doesn't have a knife. And in real life his gaze is fixed grandly elsewhere. So Alice meekly takes her paper and leaves, walking behind a guard, who sees her down to the jetty and calls a boat. 'Thank you,' she says, almost timidly (she's always been friendly with servants), trying to make a connection, hoping to see an answering flash of warmth in the other eyes; but the man just nods, without looking, and sets off back towards the palace.

As Alice glances back at the splendour of Westminster, she recognises, painfully, that this may be the last time she sees the domain she once more or less ruled. Every stone and bench looks familiar, but it no longer feels familiar. Looking at it now reminds her of seeing Will for the first time after all those years. This place has become separate from her, and she has become invisible.

Alice is aware of all sorts of uncomfortable personal things as she sits in the bobbing boat in the uncertain sunshine. She feels the dryness of the skin under her eyes, the limpness of the skin under her neck, and the tightness of the laces around her waist. Her hands are no longer soft; she's been checking on too many furrows ploughed badly, and counting the feed bags. How could they have stayed soft? There has been no one, in these gloomy country months, whose attention she has wanted to attract; no one to notice if she's looking beautiful, or not. Perhaps, without even realising, she has just stopped being a woman whom people look at. And perhaps she was always worthless; perhaps the gloss has gone off her, and the rot of age beneath is becoming visible...

Vigorously, she shakes her head. Stop that, she tells herself, stop that right now.

She pushes down the rising panic and stokes up her anger. Anger makes her feel alive. If she's going down, she might as well go down fighting. Once again, the Duke's spoiled everything for her. She can't go and spend a couple of days in the City, now. Her own house in Vintry Ward hasn't been returned to her as part of the pardon, but given to the King's half-brother, so she'd have had to stay at the Dancing Bear; but at least she could have found John Broun and the rest of her men and made plans for a future she can see now isn't going to happen. She can't go and visit her old friends; she can't do anything. She's supposed to scurry straight back off to Essex with her tail between her legs.

But how will they know? Defiance grips her. She doesn't have to meet stupidity halfway, surely. There are still things she can do. She can, at least, go and see Chaucer. She can show him her pardon. She sees his hand in every line of it, after all. Surely the Duke won't know, and couldn't complain even if he did, if she at least paid her debt of honour to her old friend by thanking him for remembering her, even at the bottom of the wheel, and for saving her. Who could argue with that? He's at Aldgate. It's on her way home. Well, not really, not if she's going to Southwark, over the river, to meet Wat. But it might be.

She doesn't call the servants. No point seeking trouble. She lets herself in. She still has the key.

It's strangely neat in Chaucer's rooms. There are no traces of paper anywhere. There are no festering jugs of drink. There are spring meadow flowers in the jugs, and a small fire burning, and the cushions plumped up, and fresh rushes on the floor, and food laid out on the table.

When Chaucer comes in, he's strangely neat too. He has a new tunic on. His beard is trimmed. His skin looks fresher. He smells of lavender.

'Chaucer,' Alice says, turning towards him from the window, where she's been looking back at Essex, and feeling suddenly shy. Perhaps he won't want to see her either.

For a moment, he looks confused. He still has anxious eyes. Her heart stops. Then they light up, and he cries, 'Alice!' and he rushes to her, and embraces her, very tenderly, but correctly too, like an old friend, and all her shyness drops away. 'I didn't realise it was today, your hearing,' he says. 'No one said.' Her heart stops again at that. They're not even gossiping about her in the taverns. But then she hears his voice again, from somewhere near her ear, and it's cheerful, as if a weight's been lifted off his mind at the sight of her, and she starts to breathe again: 'So are you done with the Parliament?' Then, pulling his face back so he can look into her eyes from close up: 'Have you got the pardon?'

Here, in the rippling sunlight on these familiar walls, Alice finally knows she's safe. She laughs. She kisses his nose. Not leaving this embrace, she lifts her right hand and holds up the pardon, which she's kept treasured in her hands all this way, not even in a bag, cradled gently as a baby bird. She's going to offer to return the money he laid out on her escape: the bag of coins, the price of the horse. She's always paid her debts. And she's going to make the speech of thanks she's been thinking out: careful, gracious, grateful.

But she can't. He's already talking. As usual, she thinks fondly. 'Forgive me,' he says, 'if I looked puzzled to see you just now.' His arms are warm and tight round her back. He's holding her very close. She's always liked that in him, the way his body seems to expect that they'll mould to each other until they merge. She's so grateful to him for being pleased to see her; so grateful that he's looking at her at all. 'For a moment I thought you were Philippa, come early. I'm expecting her, you see...'

'Oh,' she says, disappointed, but not stepping back; still relishing the warmth.

'She lives at Kettlethorpe, these days,' Chaucer's explaining, and as usual she's astonished at the speed with which words and explanations and ideas pour from his lips. How does he move them that fast? 'When she's not with the Duchess. You won't know any of this, will you? Well, she's through with me. Not to worry, though. Old history now. It's for the best for everyone, really. And we've patched things up a bit, over time, enough to be going on with, anyway. We don't disgrace ourselves, or each other; we don't let scandal touch our names; I keep my nose clean, and my rooms tidy, and do my job properly; I pick up one of her pensions for her, at Westminster; and we go to see Elizabeth together, at the convent, around every quarter day, and divide the money over dinner.'

He laughs, a little regretfully. 'My reward, you see. For good behaviour. Being allowed to see my daughter.'

'I was wondering why you'd got so tidy,' she says affectionately, entering his story, relieved to leave the emptiness of her own day behind.

'Not easy,' Chaucer admits. 'For me.' He pulls a tragicomic face. 'But then I'm not allowed to get drunk any more, either. Which makes it easier, I suppose.' He steps back, but keeps an arm round her waist. 'You're looking so well,' he says appreciatively. (Or is he just being kind?) 'If only we could talk now. I want to hear everything.
Everything.
But...' He suddenly looks anxious again, and glances round at the door.

'I know,' she says, looking into the fire, at all those dancing possibilities, changing shape. They all burn out in the end. 'Philippa.'

She steps back. She can't interfere with Chaucer's new life. There's no space in it for her. She'd better go.

But then she sees he's looking at her with his old glinting mischief, and not saying goodbye at all. 'We
could
talk, of course, only it would have to be later,' he rushes on, brimful of his new idea. 'If you had time, that is?' She nods. What else does she have to do? If she's this invisible to everyone, perhaps, she can even stay at an inn after all. No one will know, or care, will they? 'Listen: wouldn't you go and eat dinner at the Dancing Bear? They're doing delicious pork stew there today. I know, because I've ordered some of it in for Philippa. Kill a couple of hours there. And after she's gone off, clinking her money-bag, come back.' He's nodding at her with imploring lapdog eyes, begging her to agree.

She almost weeps at the warmth and charm of him. She nods. There's a lump in her throat. She can't speak.

He blows her a kiss. 'Thank you,' he says, sounding as light-hearted as she feels, though hurried, and then rushing her towards the door. 'Now, don't let her catch you. Quick, run!'