The People's Queen (24 page)

'Shouldn't you at least have thought to warn me beforehand that the merry widow Swynford, whom I've just had to spend the full twelve days of Christmas with, is with child? And that it's the Duke's?'

She turns to face him on the bench, putting her hands on his upper arms to drag him round so their eyes meet, so she can make quite sure he's understanding. She's ready to shake him into listening if he's not. But he is. She has his full attention. In fact, he's so startled that he no longer even looks drunk.

'What?' he says, a third time. But his voice is sharp now, sharp with disbelief.

'Their second child,' she finishes - a phrase she'd intended as the final blow of her tongue-lashing. 'And I didn't know.'

But her anger's dissipating, as the truth dawns on her.

'Oh,' she says flatly, realising too that there's more to Chaucer's misery about his wife than a single spat over the daughter. 'You didn't know either.'

For a little while, they go on sitting facing each other, hushed by the enormity of their shared discovery.

Alice finds herself comforted a little by his presence - by the sheer physical warmth of Chaucer's arms under her grasping hands. She's also reassured, in an odd way, to see how the news has shocked Chaucer into his own, separate, suddenly sober state of frantic preoccupation.

Behind Chaucer's dazed eyes, his mind is racing back through his picture of the past two years, taking apart what he knows of his wife and her sister, as if unthreading a tapestry with a mistake in it, and putting the coloured strands back together differently to make a new pattern. Not that he's ever had much to do with Katherine, who's always been disdainful with him, rolling her eyes and turning restively when he talks to her, like a palfrey about to buck off an unwanted rider. He's never enjoyed feeling like that rider. But, he's thinking now, of course, of course. He's had no idea why Katherine has taken to spending so much time in the country these last couple of years when until then she's seemed happy enough, in that careless aristocratic way of the de Roets, to leave her four Swynford children to grow up wild in the care of nurses and monkish tutors. All those apparently endless trips to Lincolnshire last year to supervise the building works at Kettlethorpe - while the Duke was in the North and Midlands, touring his domains...and perhaps she with him. And Philippa's wish to spend the whole of the last two summers at Kettlethorpe with her sister. She probably wanted to be there to play with the Duke's love-child. The first one. It's all beginning to make sense - even, perhaps, his children's growing distance from him. They were at Kettlethorpe last summer. They must be in the secret too.

If his own wife has known this all along, and never told him, then the relationship between the Chaucers must be deader than even he has imagined.

He shakes his head. He's counting months and absences. Katherine got her new job of governess to the Duke's little girls (rather than demoiselle to the Duchess, with Philippa) two years ago, after the first of her long absences at Kettlethorpe. That must be when it started.

It all makes sense, except that he's astonished by the compromise the Duke has made to see his lover more easily. What kind of morality can a man expect his mistress to teach his daughters?

After a long while, he thinks, still wonderingly, but with the first glimmer of resigned amusement, 'Well, I suppose a governess with a secret lover is like a poacher - the best game-keeper.'

It's only when Alice laughs too that he realises he's spoken his thought aloud.

He's almost surprised to find her arms still on his shoulders, and her face, creased into laughter that seems to have come from somewhere else, and doesn't have anything to do with the moistness about her eyes, so close to his. He's so near he can smell her: fur, and musky rose and sandalwood, and snow.

They're both almost surprised to find their bodies moving into an embrace. But by the time their lips meet, and their eyes close, the surprise has passed, to be replaced by the blind, questing hunger of the body.

He's lit a candle in the bedchamber. He's sitting up in the bed next to her, wrapped in a quilt, with his hands round his knees. She looks beautiful, naked. She's smaller, and more luxuriantly fleshed, and more pointy-kneed and curvy than he'd thought she would be, and there's something so mischievous about her long eyes and pretty, uptilted, naughtily freckled nose and bouncy black curls, sensuously spread out on the pillow like a dark halo, that he wants to laugh again, out of astonishment and relief, as they've both been laughing through the past hour, just looking at her.

He's surprised again, this time at how easily their friendship, this wish to talk that they've shared from the start, has become physical. He's never realised until now that he wants her. He's surprised, too, at how relaxed she is at finding herself here. She still thinks it's funny. She's laughing up at him from her pillow. She doesn't feel guilty, or sinful, or worried. And he can see from her casual grin that the act of love hasn't made her think she's in love with him any more than he's in love with her. With relief, he understands she's too much of a realist for that.

But their being here together, the touching of their bodies, the ease and languor of satisfied desire, isn't without its worrying aspects. He's trying to banish the thought: I have the King's lover in my bed; but other, almost equally paralysing, anxieties can't be kept off his mind.

He whispers, biting his lip, 'You couldn't, could you, be...' but doesn't know how to finish the thought.

'Pregnant, you mean?' she says, impishly. 'Is that what you're worrying about now?' He's relieved and shocked in equal measures by her frankness. He nods. She shakes her head and smiles reassuringly up at him.

He leans down and kisses her forehead. 'Well, thank God for that, anyway,' he says, releasing a whoosh of pent-up breath. Then, worrying he's sounded unkind, if barrenness really is, as he's sometimes thought, the secret tragedy at the heart of Alice's life, he goes on, more tenderly, 'Did you ever want to have children?'

She gives him a long, thoughtful look. Chaucer looks at the damp dark curls, and the delicious freckles on her nose, and is just thinking he might kiss them, when she answers.

'But I do have children,' she says, and she isn't laughing at all. The confession comes out in a rush of air. 'I just don't tell people about them.'

Chaucer is mid-way down to land his kiss, with one bare flexed arm holding his weight.

But that stops him. He hovers there, staring at her face, trying to see if she's teasing him, imploring her with his eyes to be teasing him. She isn't.

He blinks. Slowly he rises again, and reclasps his hands around his knees, trying, with less success, to rearrange his thoughts. For the past hour, he's felt as though, by making love with Alice Perrers, he's taken back at least a little control of his life, just as, sometimes, finishing a well-made poem makes him feel master of all he surveys, at least for a moment. Not any more. Now life's rushing by again, making shapes and patterns he doesn't understand, and he's back with that dizzying sense of freefall in the pit of his stomach.

'What do you mean?' he says, helplessly. 'What children...?'

'Oh, don't give me that lapdog look,' she answers slightly impatiently, though not unkindly. 'I'm trying to tell you, aren't I?'

For a moment, as she starts her story, he thinks: Perhaps she's making it up. But her voice is too steady for that. No, it's clear that what has passed between them tonight has prompted her to trust him with a secret. He should be flattered. But he can't help it: his gut is churning.

The father of her children, Alice is saying through the blood beating its tattoo in his temples, is William of Windsor.

Now, Chaucer knows of William of Windsor. Who doesn't? He's the King's Lieutenant in Ireland, a knight from Westmoreland, did well in France in the old days, became friendly with Lionel of Ulster, has been the King's man in Ireland since Lionel's death, has maintained extremely costly defences there against the French, is said to have treated the Irish savagely, has periodically been recalled to be reprimanded for it...Chaucer knows, too, that the man's old - in his forties - though he can see that advanced age might not in itself bar him from Alice's bed. Chaucer tells himself he'll probably be able to remember all kinds of other snippets about William of Windsor too, if he thinks hard enough. But he'd have no reason to, in the normal course of things. This is because, except for the times William of Windsor's been called home to be reprimanded - including one longish visit, several years ago, maybe ten, if Chaucer's remembering right, the year before Chaucer's son was born and his father died, the year when Chaucer himself went overseas, marvelling at the size and aridity of the Pyrenees - the man's been in Ireland for the past fifteen years. Chaucer's never met him.

But ten years ago, he thinks, and his brow furrows as the facts obstinately refuse to fall into place, Alice was just starting at court as the Queen's demoiselle. Alice can't have had much opportunity to meet him either, since then.

'Good God,' he says faintly. 'But...how?'

Alice pulls herself up on to one elbow. She's trying to marshal her thoughts. She's never told anyone this story. She doesn't have words prepared. She certainly doesn't have words to explain that once in her life she, who prefers to think of herself as the Queen of Planning and Profit, the Queen of Heartlessness, felt...well, that tumult, that torrent of heightened emotions, something so sharp it seemed more like a sickness or a wound than a blessing, something that sent her shamelessly off down corridors and round corners in the hope of just a glimpse of those shoulders, that grizzled head. She's never, before or since, felt that she might faint, just looking at the way a man's fingers grew out of his hand, or at the set of his limbs on his torso.

But facts, she can tell the facts. Some of them, at least. If she tries. That she met William of Windsor at a joust, with Froissart, before she'd even come to court. That soon after the Queen took a fancy to her and gave her a job as a demoiselle, they'd developed an...understanding. She feels foolish about the gulp in her voice at that inadequate word. That she fell pregnant, but couldn't tell anyone, because she needed that demoiselle's job if she were to make her way at court, and she'd only been taken on as a replacement because Marie de Saint-Hilaire had conceived a bastard, and
she
hadn't been allowed back, so Alice could see at once that she could never confess the truth to the Queen. So instead she made up a pitiful story about going home for the summer to a sick mother, which touched the Queen so much that she promised Alice she could come back in three months. Then Alice went away to have her baby in the quiet of the countryside...twins, as it turned out. A boy and a girl. John and Jane. The next year, she had to make another heart-rending plea to be allowed to tend her sick old mother again. And, after Joan was born, and Alice had recovered from a birth so difficult that they'd told her she'd never have children again, she went back to the Queen, and, with tears in her eyes and black on her back, said her mother, God rest her, had died. And the Queen, bless her, was so moved that she paid for Alice's mourning robe. The best woman in the world, Queen Philippa...That then, one day soon after, some chance cheeky remark Alice had made about not being scared of the Mortality had turned the King's eyes towards her.

'And...?' Chaucer prompts.

Alice has stopped again. She's wrinkling her nose, so the constellations of freckles change their configuration, and wondering. This is more difficult than she's realised it was going to be. There is so much in this story that makes her uncomfortable.

Will Chaucer, whose wish for self-advancement is so measured, who waits for favour to drop unexpectedly from the skies, who never actively does anything to seek his fortune, have any chance of understanding what came next? That she and William of Windsor, whose love was based from the start on recognising each other as equally hungry and driven, ready to move relentlessly forward to fill the holes and tears left in the tapestry of life by so much death and the changes it brought, both understood the promise of the King's favour being held out to her as the biggest opportunity she might ever get in life? That, a year or two later, when the King's son Lionel of Ulster died of plague, William got his greatest opportunity ever: promotion over the water to do Lionel's job? That they quietly agreed, between themselves, that it would be best to put aside their relationship so she could reap the greater benefit of the King's and he could make his fortune in Ireland? That he gave her a lump sum for the children's care, and left them in her hands? That, because of the way they both were, neither of them could have imagined doing anything else?

She doesn't think so. Chaucer won't ever be able to imagine the purpose of William, though he might understand the bleakness she felt, all those years ago, when the only man she'd loved got on his horse and rode away. William said, 'It's not for ever, we both know that,' and then he kissed her. A dry, regretful kiss. The words a lie; truth in the kiss. They both knew he wouldn't be back. Sometimes, even now, she finds herself hoping that one day, after all, he just might return, and that, if he did, she might again feel...that. But she knows it for foolishness. After all these years, that hope has taken on the qualities of a much-fingered pebble; it's become familiar, dry and warm with use, impossible to imagine as it once was, glistening and lovely with water rushing over it. She loved him. He's gone. It's long over.

Alice would like Chaucer's sympathy. She thinks he might like to hear that she kept the King waiting for a while. She doesn't like to remember how short a while it was, in reality. She stretches the time out in her mind. She tells herself that it was for many long months that she devoted herself to her kindly, trusting mistress the Queen's ailments, the gout, the aches and pains and bed rest, and enjoyed only the flash of glances and the occasional stifled laugh at the King's pleasantries, and that it was only when the Queen herself, in her last days, made sure that there was no one around her except her husband, and her youngest son, and one devoted handmaiden, Alice, to nurse her out of this life, and positively pushed the two of them together, as if she wanted them to love each other, that Alice finally let Edward catch her, just outside the sickroom, and...