The People's Queen (23 page)

It's not jealousy, exactly, she tells herself firmly as she heads through the trees. It's not passionate love she's felt for her patron-to-be, so why would it be jealousy she's so tormented by now?

But if Duke John's in love with Katherine Swynford - if his heart's one desire is to gaze at Katherine Swynford, and show her off to the court, and make the whole court stare up at the lady he loves with eyes as dazzled as if they're staring at the sun - then he'll never have the time or the inclination for the useful, easy, friendly, flirtatious relationship with Alice that she's seen developing, until now.

(The kind of friendship, she thinks, with a little stab of surprise, that has come about between herself and Chaucer. The kind of friendship where you can talk about everything and nothing, and feel at ease. She's missed that, these past couple of weeks.)

Alice knows she'll never be able to make a friendship with Katherine Swynford, either. The other woman's not exactly an enemy any more, but that's the best light you can cast on their relationship. Katherine Swynford hardly sees Alice; her lovely eyes just don't seem to be made for that. So Alice can forget about getting Katherine Swynford to murmur in her lover's ear that, yes, Alice is right on this, and why not do what Alice suggests about that?

Alice tries to keep her disappointment in check. It's a setback, she tells herself, but it's no worse than that. He still respects me; he's growing fond of me. And he's grateful for my advice.

But she can't stop the spiteful little voice in her head, replying: He's a lot fonder of
her.
He hardly noticed you, however hard you tried. You thought you had it all sewn up. But if he's got her, if he loves her, she'll be offering her own advice in between popping out the babies; and who's to say he'll want to support you at all? It's not going to be as easy as you thought, is it?

The thoughts that keep coming back to Alice, as she trails through the woods with her personal servants behind her, are all unpleasant, one way or another.

One thought is personal. She is coming to the end of her twenties, and it's not only her prospects fading. It's her looks. This morning, before setting off, she looked at herself in the mirror and identified wrinkles at eye and mouth that she'd never noticed before.

The other is financial. Until now, she has kept her two plans for the future in careful balance. She wants the profits from the Italian debt, of course, as her insurance against a future in poverty, and taking that profit involves taking money out of the Crown coffers. But she also wants her friendship with the Duke, which might save her from having that future in poverty in the first place. And the Duke is going to need money in the Crown coffers while he's at the peace talks; he'll want to be able to cow the French into offering better terms by threatening to go expensively back to war. She wants him to sit in Bruges, feeling pleased that he has more money than before to play with, and remembering that it's all thanks to Alice Perrers. She'd lose the Duke's friendship in a flash if he ever found out that while she's helping get money in, she's also helping part of it disappear into her own pocket. Knowing that hasn't stopped her, exactly, but it's slowed her down. She's been holding Latimer back from cashing in too much of the Italian debt too fast. Slowly is safely, she's been telling the chamberlain; little and often. Let's not be too greedy.

But what if, when Edward dies, the Duke's friendship fails to materialise? This is the first time Alice has been forced to think of this as a real possibility.

If that
were
to happen, and she
hadn't
maximised her gains from the Italian debt, she's thinking as the horses plod along, wouldn't she look a fool?

Perhaps she should rely less on the prospect of friendship with the Duke?

Perhaps she and Latimer and Lyons should, after all, start taking more?

She wraps the wet hood more tightly around her head, shaking off the snow melting against cheeks and hair. It's bitterly cold today, and, even with the servants' harness chinking and the horses blowing up those great white clouds of air, the loneliness of these grey woods feels eerie.

Her future might feel like this: a howling wilderness.

She knows her thoughts are racing foolishly. She knows she's panicking. Trying to get a grip, she tells herself there's no need to rush into decisions now, in the snow, while she's cold and miserable. That's a question for tomorrow.

Today all she needs is comfort, and a roaring fire.

And a friend.

Out there, in the nowhere country somewhere between Greenwich and Rotherhithe, Alice Perrers suddenly has the first cheering thought of her day. She knows exactly where she can go for all those immediate things. She can take her disappointment, and her wounded pride, and her fears, to the City. She can take them straight to the apartment over Aldgate, where Chaucer, chained to his desk making his daily reckonings of wool taxes like a dog in its kennel, will have spent the holiday lonely and fretful, unaccompanied by his children, resenting his absent Roet-sister wife. Not that Alice can hope to ask Chaucer whether he thinks she should hang on and risk all in the hope of lasting patronage from the Duke or steal more from the treasury. There are limits to the frankness that's possible, even with your dearest friend. Even with Chaucer. But if she sticks to describing her resentment of the Roet sister she's been forced to spend this humiliating Christmas with, why, that's another matter. He'll certainly be in a mood to sympathise with that. He'll listen. He'll lap it up.

THIRTEEN

There's a snowstorm blowing through Aldgate. The fierce scurries of hard white on grey have sent most of the traders trying to get back to work after New Year in off the street again, though a few, mostly women, are still sheltering in doorways near their stalls. The snow gives Chaucer's chamber a greyish, unearthly, moonlight glow, even at midday. There is almost no traffic through the gate below as Chaucer and his wife, side by side on the cushioned bench drawn up to the fire, stare into the flames lighting the dark room and say hard things to each other that they wouldn't dare to if forced to meet each other's eyes.

The room is a mess. The table is scattered with quills with blackened ends carelessly laid down, staining the wood. It's piled high with papers, every sheet closely lined with small black squiggles whose uniformity of size suggests they've been written fast, in a frenzy of excitement, by someone who's forgotten the world outside as he works, or at least by someone who's been trying to. There are papers falling off one end of the table that have landed in a parchment snowfall of their own on the floor. There's a bowl of cold stew forgotten under another heap at the other end. There's a piece of bread sticking out from underneath, somewhere in the middle. There'll be mice soon, if no one gets to grips with the chaos. Fastidiously, Philippa Chaucer arranges her very clean white hands on her dove-grey silks. She's not here for long enough to start trying to organise Geoffrey's servants. It would be a waste of effort anyway. The mess will just start building up again as soon as she goes. So she's trying not to look.

On the floor, between them, are the New Year gifts she has brought Geoffrey from the children, who are not with her. Two silver-gilt cups, which she has ordered on their behalf, and, from her, a prettily worked ink-holder. In a bag, ready to go away with her, are the gifts Geoffrey has bought the children - gifts he thought, until she got here alone, that he'd be seeing them open.

The offended silence that followed her solitary entrance into the room has been broken, but the initial skirmishes - 'You've had no luck instilling any filial duty into Thomas and Elizabeth yet, I see; I can imagine how hard you tried' and 'I see you've been writing more poetry' - have been inconclusive. Seasonal greetings have been exchanged through gritted teeth, with averted eyes; the couple's embrace has left three fingers of empty air between their bodies. Chaucer has spent the past few minutes savagely prodding the fire with the poker, glowering.

If asked, neither of them would remember what it was that made them agree to marry. Not that it was ever overwhelming love, exactly, but there must have been a time when they had hopes of each other, and could take pleasure in each other's company, and believe marriage might bring them happiness. Philippa's long forgotten the agony she suffered, at the childlike age of twelve, over the other demoiselles' malicious tittle-tattle that she might be sleeping with Duke John. Likewise, Chaucer's put out of his mind the pleasure it once gave him when the Duke - as uncomfortable as Philippa about that rumour, which was upsetting his adored wife Blanche - took him aside for that awkward chat about marriage. 'Beautiful girl. No money, of course...but the bluest blood...and the apple of my lady mother's eye. Just the wife you need to set you on your way.' All Philippa now remembers is what the Queen told
her
about
him
in a separate quiet chat on the same day: 'Solid merchant wealth behind him, and one of the brightest and best of my lord's young men. A splendid future in governance, if he chooses it; unless he prefers to go back to the war, in due course. He's served in France already, brave boy...a knighthood on the horizon, either way.' It was enough at the time to convince an anxious orphaned girl from Hainault; but Philippa's been throwing that over-optimistic praise back in her husband's face ever after, and nothing, since then, has ever gone right for them. There were only a couple of nights of what Chaucer remembers as maybe inept, possibly puppyish, though interested, love-making, before Philippa was expecting her first child. A year or more later, though with more intensely long-suffering looks this time, there were a few more anxious fumbles; and then there was Thomas. A son. And the battle lines being laid out in earnest. You have an heir. I've done my duty. But what about yours? Where's the fortune, the war record, the knighthood? Philippa's disappointment in her husband is corrosive. It's grown more bitter with every day Chaucer's failed to advance as she expected, and with every comparison she's made, as the years pass, with all the other husbands she might have had. She's even envied her sister her penniless, semi-literate hulk of a spouse, because at least Sir Hugh Swynford was gently born, and believed in bravery, and had a good seat on a horse, and, died gallantly, fighting in France.

The war between the Chaucers has become a matter for concern even outside their family. The Queen is no longer there to see the hostility that husband and wife can barely conceal, even in public. But the Duke's obvious discomfort at having pushed the pair of them together may explain why he's gone on, for all these years, encouraging his second wife to keep employing Philippa as a demoiselle, even though Constanza would really rather only have Castilian ladies around her. It's a relief, Philippa's job, as well as a muchneeded extra income. At least the Duchess's travels give the Chaucers the excuse they need to live more or less apart, while preserving the outward decencies. Chaucer went on hoping, at least until he came to the City, that his wife might soften towards him during her long absences, but has given up even that hope in the past few months; he is grateful for the absences, at least. He's grateful, too, for the feelings of guilt he suspects have prompted the Duke to stay hovering on the edge of his life, praising and commissioning his poems, and, periodically, reminding the King to give a man too modest to push for his own advancement at least something in the way of pensions and favours and rewards.

But there's nothing anyone can do to make a real peace between the Chaucers.

Now both of them are marshalling their defences, waiting for the sly ambush they each suspect the other of being about to initiate. It is Philippa's announcement that she and her sister have been corresponding that opens the real hostilities. The sisters have decided, she continues, pleating her skirts, to enrol their daughters, who will both be ten this year, as nuns at Barking Abbey in the summer they both turn twelve - the year after next.

Chaucer is so shocked that, for a moment, he forgets the rules of engagement. Little Elizabeth's face flashes up inside his head - a bit younger than now, back when he saw her all the time, with eyes full of delighted mischief and blonde curls bouncing as she tottered towards his hand to snatch a sweet from it, gloating, 'Lizbeff got daddysweet, Lizbeff got daddysweet,' as he chuckled back down at her, and shrieking with terrified laughter, a moment later, when he swept her up off her feet into a whirling embrace: 'Daddy you tickle!' Thomas is lost to him, he can see that, though he can't begin to understand how the sweetness died out of those other beloved eyes. But Elizabeth is his darling. If she goes to a nunnery, he'll never see her again. He has to be here in London every day; he wouldn't be able to go traipsing off through the Essex countryside on whatever rare occasions the Abbess saw fit to allow visitors. He thinks: I can't lose her too.

He is still holding the poker as he turns to face his wife, suddenly desperately wanting to turn this conversation into a blazing row of the kind Philippa refuses to have. 'What do you mean?' he almost howls, waving the poker emphatically in the air to punctuate his words. 'I don't care what Katherine does with her child. She can marry her to the King of France for all I care. You're not sending my daughter to a nunnery.'

But he can't get in front of Philippa to meet her eye. She's picked her ground too carefully. She keeps her face turned resolutely towards the fire. She purses her lips.

'It's our family tradition,' she says faintly. 'The de Roets. My sister Elizabeth went. The oldest daughter always does. That's why we named Lizzie for my sister. You know that.'

'She's just a child,' Chaucer shouts, but he's recollected himself enough to lower the poker, and he's shouting at the fire now. With a lurching in his heart, he knows that means she's winning. He lowers his voice, a bit, but he talks faster. 'It's completely different. You can't start talking about sending her away for ever. It's absurd. She's hardly out of the nursery.'

'Children grow up. You know that, Geoffrey.' How dare she sound so condescending?

'Yes,' he says, teeth gritted. 'Of course I know that. I just don't see why I should want to give my little girl away before she's even had her childhood.'

'Traditions are what make a family,' Philippa says, through thin lips. 'Of course it's not always easy, saying goodbye. But it's important to have standards. And you have to plan ahead to get the best. This is an opportunity. Surely even you can see that, Geoffrey. It's - well, Barking, you know. Not just any nunnery.'

That's what's impressed her, Geoffrey thinks, as the sick awareness of defeat he's been trying to keep at bay comes closer. Barking bloody Abbey. Well, it would. Barking is grand. The Abbess has the status of a baron and is the foremost Abbess of England. Only the daughters of the rich and influential can get in. You have to be personally nominated by the King to be accepted.

'She'll never get the nomination, anyway,' he says, voicing the reassuring thought as soon as it comes into his head.

But Philippa has thought of that. 'As it happens, she will,' she ripostes coolly. 'Katherine's already asked my lord the King. He thinks it's a beautiful idea.'

Chaucer suppresses an oath. The blood is beating in his temples.

'She's a Chaucer. She's
my
family. I decide,' he says. He has no other weapon left.

Philippa holds up her beautifully manicured fingers and regards them with interest. They both know she has saved her best blow till last.

She waits. She's a master of timing, Philippa. The room goes so quiet you can hear the logs settle and die.

'Actually, you're wrong,' Philippa finishes. 'Since the King has given his permission, it's not up to you any more. The decision's taken. And Elizabeth's thrilled at the idea of being with Margaret at Barking. She
wants
to go.'

The snowstorm blows out by afternoon. The streets have become magically white and clean.

Chaucer's in no mood to appreciate the joys of nature. He answers the door with glassy eyes.

What Alice sees, from the doorway, is wildly rumpled hair. His usually trim dark beard's longer than it's supposed to be, and there's stubble on his cheeks. His hands are shaking. It's not difficult to work out why. There's an empty flagon of wine on the floor beside the fireside bench he's been lying on, and a half-drunk one beside it. Just one cup.

Recognition dawns only slowly in his eyes as she stalks in, shaking snow on to the floor with the tumble of her cloak.

'You look terrible,' he says. 'What's happened?' She hears sympathy in his voice. She also hears the slur of too much alcohol.

'I could say the same for you,' she replies tartly. She could do without anyone's sympathy making her feel worse than she already does,, especially if it's the sympathy of someone in the state Chaucer's in. She could do without him being drunk, too, if it comes to that. She's been hoping for the comfort of some of his spry wit. Seeing him sodden with drink surprises her, if she's honest. She's always thought he'd be too...precise...or puckish, to abandon himself alone like this.

He gestures down at the jugs. 'Been worshipping at the temple of Bacchus,' he intones, and then, with such profound gloom that, despite herself, she bursts out laughing: 'drowning my sorrows.'

'We're a right pair,' she says after a moment, through the last of her harsh snorts. For all her own darkness, that moment of laughter has given her the new strength she needs to be at least a bit sympathetic. Something terrible must have happened to him. 'Just look at us. What's the matter with
you
, then?'

'Wife,' Chaucer offers vaguely, sinking back down on to the bench. Or was that 'wine'?

She shakes her head. Then she shrugs. Why not? She can see he's going to be some time telling her his troubles. She sits beside him and sips.

But as he confusedly pours out his troubles, and she strains forward to make sense of the slurred words and meandering phrases, she realises he did mean 'wife', not 'wine'. Her sympathy evaporates when she realises how trivial his trouble is. The only thing that actually seems to be wrong is that his wife has raised the possibility of sending their daughter to the poshest nunnery in the land, and even that only in two years' time - and, for the love of God, even if he hates the idea, how much can change in two years!

All at once, it comes to her that part of the reason she wants to see Chaucer is that she's furious with him. La Swynford is his wife's sister, after all, the very wife he's moaning away about now. And the sisters are thick as thieves, always have been. So Chaucer must have known for years about Katherine and the Duke. But he never breathed a word. Thinking of the disloyalty of it stings the beginning of tears into her eyes. After all she's done for Chaucer, he might have dropped a hint. Even if he doesn't realise how desperately she wants to strengthen her ties to the Duke, he must have seen it would be useful information. For a moment more, she's speechless. But then she's off.

She sits up straight. She breaks through his self-pitying drone. She says, sharp as a needle, 'Master Chaucer, haven't you got anything more useful to tell me than this?'

He stops, staring slack-jawed and uncomprehending at her. He's never seen her angry. He says, 'What?'

She crackles on: 'I've heard quite enough about your wretched daughter. What I
haven't
heard nearly enough about is your wife's sister.'

'What?' Chaucer repeats, dumb as an ox.