The People's Queen Part 6

Alice stops breathing. It seems a long time before she realises her body has stopped obeying her, and tells her chest to expand and take in air, and let it out.

She says, and she no longer cares that her voice is trembling, 'You mean - I'd buy something for sixty marks, and exchange it for a hundred marks straight from the treasury?'

Doubling my money, or just about. Though Latimer would want a cut.

He nods. 'We'd split the profit.'

The candle flickers, but neither of them notices any more. All Alice can see is those golden orbs, dancing before her eyes.

After a long silence, she says, flat-voiced again, 'How?'

But she knows. The three hundred people of the royal household are divided into two layers, the upper one of which, the domus magnificencie domus magnificencie, numbers more than a hundred people, and centres on the King's chamber. It's run by Latimer. It's Latimer who formally controls access to the royal presence. It's Latimer who chooses the chamber staff of knights and esquires of the body, the King's closest attendants (apart from Alice). He's also in charge of the steward who's in charge of the domus providencie domus providencie, the lower part of the household, that teeming ma.s.s of people inhabiting kitchens and b.u.t.teries and pantries and spiceries and stables, and of the money kept and doled out to the traders and farmers who supply the court, as well as to the King's creditors, by the lower royal purse: the cofferer, the comptroller, and the man in charge of royal finance, the treasurer. Sir Richard Scrope: unruly hair, big bony knees and elbows, flaking skin on a brow furrowed from the counting of coin, a man with anxious, short-sighted eyes.

Somewhere very close to Alice, the white teeth flash again.

'I'm the chamberlain,' Latimer says through his grin. 'I can make it all right with Scrope. He's not a man for trouble.'

'Him...yes...anything for a quiet life,' Alice agrees, for the sake of saying something pleasant - but almost absentmindedly. She has blood drumming through her head, a great fast tattoo of it. She's thinking.

They'll...They'd make fortunes doing this. If they did it. She and Latimer would be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

But...it would also undo so much of the good that the deal she's dreamed up between King and merchants is supposed to bring to Edward, and the merchants, and the Duke of Lancaster, and the whole realm of England. She and Latimer (and probably Lyons, because, realistically, he'd find out, soon enough, and they'd have to cut him in too, wouldn't they?) would be taking at least some of the money meant for the war.

She'd be stealing from Edward, who loves her.

She'd be breaking faith with her new ally, his son, whose protection she wants.

But, then again, they almost certainly wouldn't ever find out. No one ever does, unless you're very unlucky.

And how rich she'd be.

As she ponders, a picture forms behind her eyes. Edward, lying back against his cus.h.i.+ons, his beard damp and combed into wet grey seaweed strands, blissfully unaware of her quiet disgust at the sore on his ankle, just enjoying the smell of the lavender oil she's ma.s.saging into it, snorting and grunting like an old animal, and not even bothering to listen as she explains how he could save his finances.

The ingrat.i.tude of him, she thinks.

And another picture. Edward, exhausted, eyes closing despite himself, and the trusting way he leans his weight on her as she shuffles him to the bed. He doesn't realise that he's so heavy, even now, in his touching helplessness, that she never quite knows if she'll be able to find the strength to heave him forward.

Or perhaps he just doesn't care.

For a moment, she's overwhelmed by the vision of the selfishness of old age that comes to her. Perhaps he'd be just as carelessly grateful to anyone young and willing, anyone who'd make him feel, for a moment here and a moment there, that he could push back the darkness and grab an extra hour or two of life.

It doesn't matter to him that she's the one beside him, she thinks, with a spike of silent rage. Letting him borrow her vigour and energy. Anyone would do.

'What do you think?' she hears.

She's been so lost in her thoughts - the will-I, won't-I whirligig - that she hasn't realised she's dropped her eyes till, recognising the suppressed impatience in Latimer's voice, she darts them quickly back up to his. A guilty thing surprised.

She shakes her head.

For once, she doesn't care if there's indecision on her face or in her voice. There's indecision in her heart too.

'I don't know,' she says.

Latimer's no fool. She can see, from the velvet look he gives her, that he's following her thoughts.

He purrs, 'My dear. You must think of yourself a little, you know.'

There's a longer silence. She wanted to be told that. She wanted to be cajoled. Still, Alice feels her face grow thoughtful - sullen, almost.

She looks down again. But she hears every word he says next.

'You have to think of your own future. This' - he pauses, giving them both time to hear the unspoken word, he he - 'isn't going to last for ever, you know.' - 'isn't going to last for ever, you know.'

She mutters, 'But the war...that money was going to help with the war...'

But Latimer must hear doubt, or insincerity, in that. He caps her: '...which will never be won if Duke John is leading it. There's no point in more war, with him.'

She looks straight at him now. She's beginning to lose the numbness she's felt for all these long moments with Latimer's eyes on her, a paralysis brought on by even contemplating this giant stride towards fully fledged dishonesty. She keeps thinking, instead, about how rich she'll be if she says yes. It's strange what a warming thought that is; how damp her skin, how fast her pulse. He nods encouragingly. His eyes are dancing, inviting her to laugh with him.

'A good peace is better for England than a bad war, isn't it?' he adds, scenting victory, suddenly almost jocular with relief. 'Honestly? And far cheaper, too.'

She'll be rich.

The silence yawns on. His hazel-gold eyes are on hers.

Both of them are almost surprised when Alice laughs, and takes a deep breath, and says, in her firmest, most resolute voice, 'Yes.'

SEVEN.

Fortune's Wheel Alice doesn't sleep well, that first night at Sheen. She tosses and turns. She's up before dawn. She's uneasy enough about what she's said to Lord Latimer that she makes her excuses to Edward, before he's even properly awake, gets his permission, and rides off, back through London, east to Ess.e.x.

She needs to talk to Aunty.

When Alice was only a girl, delivering tiles to St Albans with her old Aunty Alison on the cart (she can still hear old Aunty's indulgent voice saying, 'You've been a good girl, show you a bit of the world, why not?'), she saw a picture in stained gla.s.s in the church window there that she's kept in her heart all her life.

It's a picture you see all over the place. There are a lot of other people in post-Mortality England who are obsessed with the G.o.ddess Fortune and her wheel. She features in the rose window of churches all over the land.

There's nothing very Christian about Fortune, of course. But the priests turn a blind eye to the G.o.ddess's inconvenient paganness, because she packs in the crowds at Ma.s.s. To the brave, and to the chancers, and the gamblers, and the opportunists, Fortune represents hope: that effortless climb to the top of the wheel. But what she also represents - the capricious destruction of the greedy, later on - suits the gloomy, doomy mood of everyone else.

You see envy in the narrow eyes of every stay-at-home who doesn't dare venture out to try his luck in the rough new game of life, these days. Anyone who isn't making a quick fortune wants anyone who is to get his come-uppance quick. So thinking of the punishment Fortune has waiting at the end of the wheel she spins pleases the dourest of congregations in the churches, looking bitterly up at the rose windows, as much as the promise of hope pleases the people with dreams in their hearts.

What the congregation sees in the window: Fortune, that temptress, that s.l.u.t, smiles temptingly down, in jewel-bright light, luring people on to take a chance, to jump on her wheel, to make their name, to get rich quick.

And this is what happens next to the humans whirling round their little bubbles of coloured gla.s.s, chancing a dance with the G.o.ddess: once she's hooked someone in, you'll see her willing victim on her left, clinging to the turning wheel as it moves upwards, clockwise. This happy human figure with everything still to come has sun-kissed hair flying down and back as it floats effortlessly towards the top, with the prideful little word regnabo regnabo, which Alice likes to translate as 'I'm going to have it all', floating above their prideful little head.

Above Fortune's head, hanging on at the very top of the turning wheel, is a second little human figure who's happier still. This one crows, regno regno, 'I'm at the top!' in the same cramped black letters.

But it's the other side that most interests the losers in the congregation, because the wheel that has brought those human figures up keeps turning, and down they go again.

It's the terror on the face of the little figure to Fortune's right that these people like to gloat over, the terror of someone being whirled back downwards by the wheel, realising it's all over, that day of glory, never to return, and howling, 'I'm finished', regnavi. regnavi. Best of all is the abjectness of the last little person, right at the bottom, dropping off the wheel, being trampled under Fortune's careless feet. 'Sum sine regno,' it whimpers. 'I've been left with nothing.' Best of all is the abjectness of the last little person, right at the bottom, dropping off the wheel, being trampled under Fortune's careless feet. 'Sum sine regno,' it whimpers. 'I've been left with nothing.'

Quite right too, says the congregation, through smugly pursed lips. Pride goes before a fall.

Alice remembers looking up at the first of these great glowing stained-gla.s.s temptations she ever saw, and saying to Aunty, a bit defiantly, in the way of children trying to find words for a serious idea, but still afraid they'll be laughed at for being naive, 'I don't see why you have to be destroyed by Fortune's wheel. Why can't you just get off when you've got where you want - stop at the top?'

And she remembers Aunty laughing, but kindly, in that way she's always had, of seeming peacefully to know what's what, without even trying, and answering, 'I know just what you mean, dear. The great trick to life is knowing when to stop.'

Alice must already have known, even back then, when she first saw Fortune, when she was, what, nine or ten, that she would try and hitch a lift on the wheel, too, as soon as she possibly could. She must already have been thinking out how.

But she couldn't have guessed how soon her chance would come.

It came on another uncertain day, back in Ess.e.x, and Alice a quick girl of eleven or so chasing Johnny and Wat and Tom through a cloud of cow-parsley, and everyone whooping and red-faced and light with laughter, when one of the boys - Wat, maybe, whoever was up ahead - stopped. So they all stopped. They were good like that - took their cues from each other, got the hint as quick as they could, a wink here, a nod there. They trusted each other, all old Alison's brood of waifs and strays, being brought up together, as if they were real brothers and sisters. So now they hunched down in the ditch beside him, stilling their breath, ragged and sharp-eyed, looking to see what he'd seen.

And there they were, a whole family of newcomers, leading horses back from the stream to the road, a lanky mother, complaining in an undertone, a henpecked-looking husband nodding his head and patting hopelessly at the air with his hands, five daughters, walking in order of size, the oldest only a bit smaller than Alice, but all with the same air of yawning discontent, and, still astride on a pony tied by a string to the manservant's nag, a little boy, half-asleep, nodding from side to side with the animal's movement. All in clothes without a tear or a mend in them. And every horse oat-fed and bright and fat as a barrel.

Sometimes it only takes a moment. From the moment Alice stepped out through the tall weeds and, smoothing down her rags, said, in her cheeriest voice, addressing the complaining mother, whom she guessed would be likeliest to respond, 'Need any help, lady?' her future was settled.

The Champagnes let her, and the other dancing-eyed urchins, take them home to the tilery. But it was only her they saw. And when they got home, Aunty Alison took one look at the cut of their clothes and saw them right. Told Alice to mind the little boy, show him the wooden toys on the shelf, make herself useful; got the other kids measuring out drinks and cutting hunks of bread, quickly now. Over a cooling draught of ale, the mum, dusting down the stool she was sitting on with a rag before putting her genteel behind down, told Aunty everything: how they'd left London to inspect the manor she'd inherited from an uncle, who'd died in the latest bout of the Mortality, last year. How lost they'd got with no one to guide them. How they couldn't have asked for directions; they'd feared for their lives in the fleapit inn they'd stopped at last night as it was. Those eyes, staring. It was out Sudbury way, where they were going. She'd been happy enough to bed down at the kiln for the night, the mum. A few fleas in the rushes were nothing to worry about, compared to the eyes of the men out there. The dad was happy too, too. But, oh, how those smeary-faced girls had whined and complained, sniffling and turning away from their food as if it would poison them, looking round with hunted eyes at the thick walls and low roof.

'Never seen anything like it in my life,' Aunty muttered, winking at her own brood, when the little boy, pulled away from the toy Wat had brought him because his mum wanted him and his sisters to wash in the stream, started stamping his feet and shrieking the place down. 'Never been said no to, that one, that's for sure.' Then, as it turned out, the kid wouldn't have anyone but Alice take him to wash. Alice had had him roaring with laughter a minute before, playing with Wat's toy, snuffling, 'Giddyup giddyup!' as she made the imaginary farmer fall off his carved wooden horse. 'Want her her!' he was howling, and Alice felt old Alison's eyes suddenly thoughtful on her back as she skipped the boy energetically off, away from his grey-faced, relieved parents. She could tell what Alison was thinking. She'd had the same thought already. Alice was the best of old Alison's kids, the sharpest of anyone at spotting whatever it was in the weed-grown manor houses and crumpled Mortality cottages the kids spent their days exploring that might fetch a good price, the best too at remembering what might be useful where, and to whom, and sidling up to the right person on market day to sing out, 'Wasn't it you looking for fire-irons?' or 'Didn't you say you wanted a cook-pot?' So it was natural she'd see this chance as quickly as Alison. She'd heard enough, not just from Alison, but also from the various uncles and cousins who came down from London to take away the tiles to whichever abbey or priory had put in an order, or to take on the other things the kids found, or to leave behind a new child picked up on their travels (old Alison had a soft heart for kids left, as she'd once been, to fend for themselves; and even orphans must be worth something now, with people so desperate for children). Alice had grown up with the knowledge that the streets of London were paved with gold.

She was back with the freshly washed, angelically sleepy toddler in time to hear Aunty Alison's voice, in the twilight, putting her own thought into words: 'You want someone to look after some of them for you, and my Alice, she's a good girl.' They were two of a kind, her and Aunty Alison. And Aunty, who was always telling her there was more to life than a tilery in Ess.e.x, that there was a whole world out there, just waiting to be discovered, was winking at her now, winking and grinning, as if she'd struck lucky.

She had. The next morning she was off with the family; Alice leading the little boy's pony, and ignoring the familiar eyes watching from behind the cow-parsley, and not letting herself see the thin boy-arms of Tom and Ham and Wat and Johnny and Jack waving goodbye, because she didn't want to feel sad, and she was already too busy making herself indispensible to these new friends - daisy chains for the girls, stolen apples for the little boy, bright sweet nothings for the mum and dad. She was seizing the moment.

Of course the Champagnes were bitterly disappointed when they actually saw their manor - another of the weed-shrouded ruins Alice knew so well, with its villeins long gone, off hunting higher wages somewhere. She could have told them how it would be before they started, but she was twelve, old enough to know hard truths weren't her business. So she cooed and comforted instead. She trapped them a hare to roast on a little spit. By the end of another week, when the Champagnes, already eager to forget their embarra.s.singly naive dream of sudden landed wealth, were sighing with relief at the sight of London on the horizon, they still had Alice with them. 'Look,' she was saying to little Tommy Champagne, managing not to look astonished herself at the great wall rearing up ahead, or the gate, or the soldiers. 'Home soon now.'

She'd always thought she would climb high. It had only ever been a question of time, and opportunity.

When, weeping, the silver-haired Master Champagne put his wife into the grave a year later, then turned to Alice the capable maidservant and wept into her hair, and stroked it, and kissed her shoulder, she didn't hesitate for a moment. She knew at once what she'd do. Even if she'd thought that you might only love - truly love - once in your life, and her true love certainly wasn't dear wrinkly old Master Champagne, whose egg always went down his front in a forgetful yellow trail, she also knew there'd be no harm in him. He'd do for now.

A good man he turned out, too, in the rest of his short time in this vale of tears. He let her be the st.u.r.dy, independent sort of person she was. He laughed at her stories. In return for her good humour at sharing a bed with a spindle-shanked, grey-skinned old husband, he also became a more willing giver of ribbons from the fair than his daughters remembered him having been before. Also of new robes, not just the old mistress's altered in the details, and (as Alice's knowledge of what she might ask for increased) embroidery silks, and finally even French lessons, so she could act the lady rather than the baker's wife with Master Champagne's well-heeled clients.

Master Champagne loved the idea of his wife chatting in French with the gentry so much that he never said a cross word, or had an ugly thought, either, about the merry friends.h.i.+p Alice had had in those months before he pa.s.sed away with the curly-haired young French master from Hainault. Young Jean Froissart was glad enough to earn some extra pennies as he set himself up in England, just by spending an afternoon in the City every week or two, chatting to a nice-looking girl so eager to learn; it all worked out well for everyone. As old Aunty Alison always said, 'Pick up whatever you can by the wayside; you never know when it might come in handy.'

The French lessons paid off, all right, though maybe not as Tom Champagne expected. Or Alice, either, come to that.

Eight months after their marriage, he left behind the fuss and bustle of earthly life. He died straining on the chamber pot in the night, an indignity that Alice tactfully tidied up, when she woke up in the morning to find him cold on the floor, before calling for the servants. The poor old dear, she thought, opening the windows, having rearranged him, and wiped him down, and covered and hidden the pot; how he'd hate to have been seen like that. The French lessons were swapped for widow's weeds. But a certain Master Perrers of Hainault, who'd advanced the Champagne family some money so their baking business could be expanded, and thus been part of the discussions with the lawyers that marked the settlement of the estate, had been as impressed by the young widow's few words of elegantly p.r.o.nounced French as he had by her sudden fortune (or so he said). Master Perrers, a plump lover of the pleasures of the table, who could be reduced to ecstatic groans by a good description of a rich sauce or a fine wine, was old enough, and foolish enough, to enjoy Alice's flattering suggestion that he might be related to the gentry family of Perrers who'd once bought tiles from the kiln. Not that she'd told him, exactly, that this was her connection with that n.o.ble family; she couldn't recall exactly, but she just might have teased him with the idea that those Perrerses were distant cousins of her own, for it pleased him so to think she might have a drop of gentry blood in her, and how would he, as a foreigner, ever know the difference? It did no harm. In any event, what with one thing and another, Master Perrers quickly stepped into the baker's shoes, and married her at the church door forty days after Tom Champagne's funeral. Bar a change of address and a different set of servants and the need to go visiting if she wanted to see little Tommy or the rest of the 'children' of her first marriage (the eldest of the girls now grown-up enough to take over the care of the little boy, while an aunt tried to find the daughters husbands), her new life with a different rich, indulgent, older merchant soon became all but indistinguishable from before. Once you got out of the gutter, the Alice of those days was given to thinking, once you didn't have to rush about emptying chamber pots or stealing from ruins any more to keep body and soul together, pleasing people became a much simpler question of vocabulary. Before, in the old house, it had been frisky bed-accented French, all oui, monseigneur, and oh la la, the muscles on the man, morning noon and night, with happy little whiffles of pleasure back from him. Now all she needed to make a new man happy was to talk recipes - the grander and more full of expensive ingredients the better. How intently he listened. How carefully he repeated it all back, imagining every flavour with brain and tongue, and grunting with joy: 'Cream and and nutmeg nutmeg and and cinnamon cinnamon and and pepper? Baked pepper? Baked in in the peac.o.c.k's juices? Gnn-h!' the peac.o.c.k's juices? Gnn-h!'

If poor Jankyn Perrers hadn't died so soon, Alice has sometimes found herself thinking recently (a heart attack over a lobster dinner did for him, less than a year after he moved to England and only a few months after their marriage) - well, who can say? She might have stayed in the City to this day, growing fat with contentment and spending her energy nagging at her husband, or the next one, for a new music teacher or string of beads or bit of silk. She was happy enough, back in those days. You can be happy with so little when you're young, and not in love, and remember enough about being poor to be grateful you've got food in your belly and clothes on your back, and nothing more serious to worry about than the next flirtation, innocent or otherwise.

But another part of her thinks: No, I'd never have stopped there. Not when there's so much more in the world, so much higher to fly. And she's always been right to go on, and take a bit more, and try another thing, and keep her eyes open, until now.

Then again...

What she's thinking of doing now...with Latimer...what she's said she'll do...

Well, isn't it dangerous? Isn't it the kind of thing that might tempt Fortune to flip you over the top, and send you down?

Alice sighs, and shakes her head, and nudges her horse on. Aunty will know.

It was after Jankyn Perrers died, and when she got her toehold at court, that Alice first went back to Ess.e.x and found Aunty.

Alison was still there, hanging on, by herself. To this day, Alice doesn't know what happened to the boys she grew up with at the Henney tilery, old Aunty's other orphans. All she could work out is that they were long gone. Aunty didn't have much more idea than Alice where. 'People grow up. They make their own luck,' was her phlegmatic comment. All she could tell Alice was that Jack died, Johnny went for a carpenter, on the road, and Wat for a soldier, overseas. That's probably all either of them will ever hear, Alice thinks.

Without the kids' help, Aunty's tilery business wasn't doing so well. She'd got behind with a big order for her best customer, the Abbot of St Albans; he'd cancelled the contract; she'd been left with two thousand expensive tiles to s.h.i.+ft. And that was impossible, in those hard new times, with the war gone wrong, and the gentry so tight and short of money. So Alice took Aunty on. It's what the old woman was owed, for Alice's childhood; and Alice found when she looked at that lined face that Aunty, for all her Ess.e.x rusticity, still felt like home.

Alice got the old woman to sell the kiln and the house. 'Don't get bogged down in the past,' she said kindly. And, while they sat together at the old scrubbed table and worked out what Aunty could do next, Alice also told the old woman her own story, and asked for advice about what she she should be doing next. should be doing next.

While she was talking, she was still thinking to herself: What am I asking her for? A broken-down old stick of a thing from the country? This isn't stuff she knows anything about. It's court: French, and velvet. How can she possibly...?

But Aunty knew, all right.

'Seize the moment,' Aunty said, calm and crack-voiced as ever, and without hesitating, as soon as Alice paused. 'Do whatever you need to stay at court. You can; course you can, whatever you put your mind to. Just do it, and stop worrying. No point in agonising half your life away, wondering what to do, when you could have decided already and be off having some fun, is there now?'

And suddenly it all seemed easier; and Alice was grateful to have an adviser to hand who never did hesitate - who knew what she wanted, and just took it.

Alice bought Aunty a manor, further south, but still in Ess.e.x. And she's kept Aunty, ever since.

Alice thinks Aunty learned her chirpy ruthlessness on the roads. From various half-understood comments in her childhood, made by neighbours and men at markets, Alice half knows that the tilery wasn't always Aunty's. Aunty probably only got her hands on it through some sort of trick. It's fairly clear, from the droppings-in of the various uncles of long ago, that Aunty came from London. That may not have been the beginning of her story, though; she may have started from somewhere else, before. They've never been able to get it out of her. Alice doesn't blame Aunty for keeping her wits about her, though. People have had to, especially since the Mortality turned every old certainty on its head.

Greed, ambition, call it what you will - the spirit of the age - has been set free by so much death. That's what people say. Three bouts of plague since Alice was born, and half of Europe dead: only the naive should be surprised if people's nature changed. Survivors of the Mortality didn't bother to bless G.o.d for their astonis.h.i.+ng luck (for, as a lot of people muttered, what did it have to do with G.o.d, their escape? When the Bishop of Bath and Wells tried to thank G.o.d for the plague's pa.s.sing, at the end of 1349, the howling people of Yeovil kept him and his congregation besieged in the church all night long). People who know what's good for them have, since then, been too busy for G.o.d (who at least, as they often say with tough looks, didn't hate them them enough to strike them dead). They're busy at each other's throats, squabbling over the spoils. That's only natural too. enough to strike them dead). They're busy at each other's throats, squabbling over the spoils. That's only natural too.

The Mortality has brought so much change in its wake.

First, plain bewilderment: the glut of merchandise, not enough customers, prices plunging, and anyone still alive and with money in his pocket unable to believe his good fortune. That was the lesson old Alison and her London men friends learned so fast. Move into empty houses, sleep on strangers' beds, take over dead men's work (or don't bother to work at all). Eat off silver.