The People's Queen (55 page)

'You know,' she confides, a little unsteadily, trying to smile, 'it's madness, I suppose, but before he got sick, there were two days when we were fetching and carrying for those poor women all day long; and Johnny was so kind to the Ewell girl...She, her husband, killed; she...' Alice chokes on whatever it was that was done to the Ewell girl. After a moment, she goes on: '...that I couldn't help imagining: that girl's only a year older than Johnny; one day soon, after her mourning's over, they might...'

Chaucer's heart wrenches. There's no place for him in these dreams. But it's right for him to encourage Alice in them, for this is where her future must lie.

'You see?' he says, as heartily as he can. 'You're already beginning to imagine it. Why wouldn't they marry? You've earned the lifelong gratitude of those women out there. You've saved them. You'll be a pillar of Essex society before you know it, with that lad a strapping young courtier, in the pink of health, with title to half of Essex, and the Ewell widow his bride, and your girls married to the finest young lords of the county after him.' He manages a watery smile.

'And a pack of grandchildren at my knees,' she replies, and she's almost smiling too, doing her best to enter into the spirit of the thing, just as he is, though her voice is as shaky as his. 'Each with an estate half the size of France, and a golden gown...'

She makes a little noise: a kind of sobbing laugh.

'And you, what will you be doing?' she asks, in that same trembling tone, stealing a glance at him that he's aware of, but can't bear to return. He knows what she's doing. She's memorising him, for all the tomorrows.

He swallows. 'Me,' he says. 'I'm going to try to teach this boy the most important thing his mother taught me.' He can't get rid of the lump in his throat.

'Finance,' she prompts, almost playfully.

He shakes his head. No, he won't be doing any more accounts. He already knows he'll never sit miserably at a desk adding up other people's numbers again. 'Courage,' he corrects her, and the word hangs in the air, opening new possibilities before it that he's not even thought, until now, that he might consider. Life's too short for all the cautious career-building he's gone in for until now; and where's it got him, anyway? He'll leave London; get away from what he saw in Walworth's eyes. He'll take the child out to some fresh air, and spend the money he's raised on the house giving his new son a braver and more honest life. It's time to follow his heart and devote himself to his child, just as Alice is going to do. And he thinks it will make him happy to sit in the sun writing his poetry and watching this little Lewis grow.

She deflects the compliment with a blink. 'Just don't make a poet of him,' she says, trying for brightness.

'One day,' he replies, almost to himself, 'I'll write a poem about you.'

She shakes her head, but gently. 'Let's just hope it's not a tragedy, then,' she whispers back, still trying to be pert; still failing. 'We've had enough of those.'

There's nothing more to say after that.

And when Chaucer stops talking, and she reaches down, and picks up the baby, and holds him for a long moment, rocking him, just a little, before kissing the top of his milky head and passing him to the still seated Chaucer, and says, very quickly, 'Now go; and God speed,' in a choked voice, and turns away, vanishing back behind the curtains where her older son is lying, Chaucer finds that there is no reproach left in his heart, and no regret, and no fear; all he feels is love.

He stands up with the baby, looking, for another moment, at the spot where Alice has just been standing. While he's there, he's still suspended between two worlds, half thinking he'll ignore all this and go after her and see if Johnny's better or worse, half wondering, dully, whether if he walks down to Rainham Creek, he'll find a boat before the baby gets hungry and starts to cry, and whether the baby will be satisfied for a few hours by damped-down bread crusts, or whether he'd be better heading for a village, and chancing his luck that there's a functioning inn somewhere near, or at least someone to give him milk.

And then he makes up his mind, and takes his first step towards the door before the pain of parting begins; and says, over his shoulder, as he moves away from her, the only blessing that his stunned mind can think to make: 'I wish you well.'

EPILOGUE
A World Begins

There's constant noise outside: men's heavy feet, tramping in and out of the barn where the soldiers are being billeted, and the kitchens, where the big cauldron is boiling with some greasy, stinking army stew, and the shouting of orders, and the jingle of harness.

But it's faded into the background. Alice doesn't notice it any more.

She's hovering around the bed, whose curtains are open to let some air circulate in the heat of midday.

She's watching her sleeping son. She's watching the dust motes dance around his face.

His coughing and sneezing and spluttering stopped yesterday. His fingers and toes never went black; no buboes ever developed. His fever seems to have passed, too. She changed the top sheet two hours ago, and it's still crisp and fresh. He's pale, but he's breathing regularly.

It doesn't hurt to hope. Or it shouldn't.

She gets up, tiptoes around to the bucket of water, dips the cup and puts it, full, by the bed. She's been piling up the drenched sheets in a corner for the whole of the past two days to keep out of the way of Will's soldiers. She still doesn't want to go downstairs, except in the quiet of the night. But she does want to get the odours of sickness out of here. So she picks up the whole armful, and takes it just outside the door, and drops it, quietly, at the top of the stairs.

When she comes back into the room, Johnny's eyes are open.

He's looking around, not moving his head. Just those quiet blue-green eyes. He looks puzzled, as if he doesn't understand something. He's still not quite a man. But illness has made him a child again.

'Mam,' he whispers when he sees her, and his face is transformed by the dawning trust in that small smile, which is all he can manage.

She goes to the bed; sits down on the edge of it. As she sinks down, she suddenly feels her legs might not support her any more, she's trembling so much. She leans down and burrows her arms around the weakened body on the cushions, burying her face in his neck.

'Mam,' he whispers, 'you're crying.'

'Oh,' she mutters, smelling his skin, 'it's nothing.'

It will take a lot of explaining before Johnny understands how much everything has changed since he fell ill; understands what he's allowed to remember from the recent past and what he'd be better off forgetting. Alice will have to school Aunty and the girls, too, once they're back, to forget anything they ever knew about the rebellion Will's returned to crush. Just as she's schooling herself.

So much has gone. Her little Lewis, whose entire tiny hand curled around just one of her fingers, whose baby head smelled of milky innocence when she kissed it...and Chaucer too, with him (though there's sweetness in her pain, at least, at the thought of the two of them together). Wat's dead; and if they grieve for him, after this, she and Aunty, it'll have to be in secret. Gone, as well, the Tom Bakers and Piers Plowmans and Jack the Lads of the rebellion, the ordinary men of England she's listened to, and the heroic versions of them she's made up in her letters; gone with all their songs and dreams and grievances, being hunted down and exterminated. So many hopes. So many vain hopes.

It strikes Alice now, in the strange peace she's finding as she holds her near-miraculously living son close, that the turmoil she's suddenly so weary of has been going on since long before this revolt. Upheaval has been part of life since that first Mortality, the plague she was born in. It's a sickness that's never abated; a sickness that's made its delusional sufferers go on grabbing for dead men's gold, go on being feverish with ambition, go on burning for land and change. But maybe it's all burned out now, not just in her own heart, but throughout the land. Alice still can't help hoping, somewhere inside herself, that this last great outbreak of public loathing and derision for the court will, somehow, have damaged the Duke she hates. But the intensity of even that desire has faded. It's a wistfulness, now, a memory of mischief; no longer strong enough to act upon - just as the physical plague that started it all seems to have weakened enough to let its sufferers occasionally, by some miracle, survive, as Johnny has. Maybe life will quieten down for all those who've made it through these years, and who now choose peace, rather than adventure. Maybe, if it stops seeming to the toughest that anything is now possible, some gentler order will prevail.

Perhaps even Aunty, to whom Alice has been writing, while she waits for Johnny to wake up, to tell her to bring the girls back - Aunty, who's always been so keen on her girls and boys going out to grab whatever they can, whenever they can, for as long as Alice can remember - will be relieved if that's the way things turn out. It's conceivable that Aunty wants nothing more, now, than to sit at home, contentedly watching her children's children live uneventful, but happy, lives. That might be all she's wanted for years, even, if Alice had only been willing to see it: a quiet life, with her family, at Gaines.

For the first time, Alice lets into her head the thought of herself, an older, calmer version of herself, watching Johnny take the place she's earned for him in the life that lies ahead for them all, standing at the altar with the Ewell girl, perhaps, and her, afterwards, bursting with pride, sipping apple wine with one or other of the Sir Johns as their children ride out past the terrace, laughing...of herself discussing pasturage rights, or the details of marriage contracts, or the latest developments in the law courts, with the fathers, politely, gently, without ever again going too far in pursuit of gain.

That's not a picture for now, of course. For now, there's just Will, with a fierce gleam in his eye, marching around and barking his orders, too busy to pay much mind to wife and child in the sickroom above; too busy enjoying the cruelty of his calling. For now, just him and these other men in the kitchen, made in his mould.

She sighs. But then she brightens again, and hugs Johnny closer.

For there's this, too: the treasure she's not counted until it was nearly too late. This boy, limp against the bedding, looking at her from that wasted face in which she sees both him and herself, with trust in his eyes. With concern. With love.

In that moment, with the dust motes lit up like gold, that seems more than enough.

'Happy,' she says indistinctly. 'Why I'm crying. You've been so ill. I thought you might die. I thought I'd lost you.'

Then Alice raises her son's head and shoulders, very tenderly, and begins moving the cushions around behind him to prop him up a little, so he can begin to take in the world he doesn't yet know has changed. As she tries to make him comfortable, she murmurs, 'But you're back. And it's all going to be all right.'

a cognizant v5 original release september 16 2010

HISTORICAL NOTE

It took the rest of the summer of 1381 to clean up the last flickers of the Peasants' Revolt.

The peasants lost everything, even the vaguest hope of liberation from serfdom. 'Villeins you are, and villeins you shall remain,' King Richard II told the sullen, scared men of Essex as the royal armies began to pacify the shire, and the executions began. The young King grew arrogant and capricious on the memory of his success in crushing the uprising. Eighteen years later he was forced off the throne by his cousin Henry, the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.

John of Gaunt escaped the uprising with his life. So did his wife. Still, he was so shocked and terrified by the hatred of him that the uprising revealed that he made a public confession of immorality and renounced his mistress, Katherine Swynford. He called her a 'she-devil'. He changed his mind several years later, after his wife's death, and married Katherine. But he never rebuilt the Savoy.

Sir William Walworth served on two commissions to restore the peace in Kent, and died, at the peak of his powers and reputation, in 1385. His fellow-merchant, Sir Nicholas Brembre, whose fortune amounted to PS10,000 (the equivalent of almost PS3.9 billion in 2007) by the time of his death, had a less developed sense of when to stop. Brembre became close to King Richard II in his last years. He also tyrannised the City, stealing two mayoral elections in 1383 and 1384. He executed opponents, some without trial, regularly accused opponents of treason and crushed dissent by filling London with armed men. His relationship with the King ultimately cost him his life, after lords hostile to Richard took control of government. Brembre was hanged at Tyburn in 1388, on the treason charge he'd so often levelled at others.

The de la Mares lived out the remainder of their lives more peacefully. Peter de la Mare served in several further Parliaments in the 1380s. He is last heard of as a feoffee to Richard Burley in 1387. Thomas de la Mare remained at St Albans after the Peasants' Revolt, serving as Abbot until his death in 1396.

William of Windsor, who returned to Essex from Cherbourg in the wake of the revolt, was part of the King's force that put down all traces of rebellion in East Anglia. He did this with his usual severity. His reward from the King was to be made a baron. He did not spend his last years with Alice or the children. Within a year, he returned to his family home in the North to die in 1386, in debt.

Alice Perrers lived out her days at the Essex estate at Gaines, dying nearly twenty years later, in 1400, in the same year as Chaucer. She married her son and two daughters off to local landlords when they came of age and stayed geographically close to them for the rest of her life. Alice also campaigned, with only limited success, to get back the property she'd amassed in her glory days. Richard II never really helped, but, after the death of his mother, Princess Joan of Kent, in 1385, he did at least allow Alice back on occasional visits to court. There is no evidence that Alice ever saw Geoffrey Chaucer again.

Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer lived apart after the Peasants' Revolt. A few years after entering St Helen's in Bishopsgate, their daughter Elizabeth transferred to Barking Abbey to be with her cousin, Margaret Swynford. Geoffrey Chaucer left his job as comptroller of wool customs in the City for good in 1382, and went to live in Kent, where he stayed for the rest of the decade and served as a parliamentarian in 1386. He later held office as Clerk of the King's Works between 1389 and 1391, and as deputy forester of the Royal Forest at North Petherton in Somerset from 1391, and he was still active on the King's business in 1398. A year later, when Henry IV, John of Gaunt's son, seized the throne, he renewed Chaucer's grants from the previous King and added forty marks a year for life. Chaucer died in October 1400. In his later years, he devoted more and more time to writing poetry.

In 1391, ten years after the Peasants' Revolt, Chaucer dedicated his
Treatise on the Astrolabe
to 'lyte Lowys my sone, of the tendir age of ten year', and wrote the child an affectionate foreword. Lewis Chaucer, whose birth date suggests Philippa was not his mother, was listed in public records just once more, in a retinue roll at Carmarthen Castle in 1403, which listed him next to his elder brother, Thomas Chaucer. Thomas, Geoffrey Chaucer's eldest son, did go on being mentioned in the records. He was to become one of the most wealthy, influential and distinguished men in England. Through his daughter Alice's marriage to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, he was the ancestor of a future heir to the throne of England.

After the death of Philippa Chaucer (probably in 1387, accompanying her Duchess to Castile for John of Gaunt's last unsuccessful outing overseas), Geoffrey Chaucer went on a pilgrimage to Canterbury in 1388.

His writing is oddly - or perhaps diplomatically - short on references to the turbulent current affairs of his time. Yet there are hints of the upheavals Chaucer lived through in his work.

His greatest comic creation, in his unfinished poem about a pilgrimage,
The Canterbury Tales
(which he wrote in fits and starts over the rest of his life), was the Wife of Bath. This portrait of a rambunctious, wise-cracking, irreverent, independent-minded, profit-seeking female, who's buried five husbands and may be out for a sixth, who has no time for priests yet loves nothing more than a good pilgrimage, is often said to be based on the character of Chaucer's sometime patron, and King Edward III's last mistress, Alice Perrers.