The People's Queen (29 page)

She blinks. Under the linen, she stirs. He takes no notice.

'You've got to change,' he says. He doesn't know where his hard eloquence has come from. But he knows it's time for it. 'You should not touch any more Italian debt. You must go through your affairs, and make sure everything you do, and own, is strictly legal, and there's legal paperwork explaining everything. I don't know how much you own, and how clear your title is, but get rid of anything that's in the least...hazy...and get rid of some of it anyway; they'll be less likely to attack you if you're not one of the richest people in the land. And you should make one sensible preparation for a future after the King dies: this. Get him to knight your son, and gift the estate in Essex, and wherever else you can think of, to him. That will give you a clear reason to come back to court, or stay at court, whichever seems better, whoever's on the throne - to look after a young knight with a future. And then, once you've done all that, sit tight.'

Alice sits up, wrapping quilts around herself.

She nods at that last idea, at least. 'I'll want to go on being at court.' She mutters, 'I'll be able to go on seeing you, that way.'

Then she goes back to gazing, irresolutely, at him.

'There will be a Parliament,' she says finally, in a small voice, in the contrite manner of a child admitting misbehaviour. 'There'll have to be. The Duke's on his way home. After all that talk, he's only managed to get another truce. For one more year. And it doesn't look good for after that. And there's not enough money to rearm. So there'll have to be a tax. Latimer's going to tell Edward in the next few days. And Edward will be summoning the Parliament within a week.'

Chaucer shakes his head. The silence deepens. He's so overwhelmed by his yearning to somehow protect Alice, to save this oddly fragile creature cowering there, both from herself, and from her enemies, that he doesn't know what to say.

But at least he understands, now, why she's looking scared.

While Alice is irritating William Walworth at the Lady Day dinner in the City, Sir Richard Scrope, first Baron Scrope of Bolton, is setting out across the choppy grey river from the jetty at Westminster Palace. His raw red hands are clutching tightly on to the big sack on his knees. He doesn't want to let any river water splash it.

The boatman wonders if my lord treasurer has valuables in that bag, he's treating it so gently. But all he can see is bits of parchment peeping out of the top.

'Where to, my lord?' he asks cautiously. Sir Richard's skinny face is even sterner than usual. The man starts to row as soon as Scrope says, 'Kennington.'

Peter de la Mare is packing - or preparing to pack. He's looking at the changes of linen, and his two spare tunics and hosen, and his riding cloak, and the boots he's had cleaned of London mud, and the collection of notes he's amassed, all lined up neatly on the chest in his austere room at the top of Kennington Palace, and imagining them in a bag, on the back of his esquire's horse - and wondering how he can phrase a request to spend a short time at home, on his estates, if he requests leave from his task of the Princess. It will look like giving up, he knows.

He restrains a sigh. It will feel like giving up.

But then the one reliable thing he's learned in all his trips here, in all his fruitless journeyings and wasted days, is that he doesn't know enough about these London people to recognise the ways in which they cheat.

He doesn't like to admit it, even to himself. But it will be giving up, if he goes.

He's so bowed down, so weary with self-reproach, that he hardly turns his head when his esquire knocks at the door. 'I'm working,' he says. God won't be able to detect one more small lie in this polluted air.

'A visitor, sir,' the young voice says back.

Peter de la Mare doesn't remember, for a moment, where he's met this man, younger than him, but with a frame as lean as his, a face as tired.

'Scrope,' the man reminds him briefly, shifting the weight of the leather bag he's carrying.

'Of course,' Sir Peter says, with formality. 'My lord treasurer.'

He's rising from his formal bow when he realises Scrope is shaking his head.

'Not any more,' the younger man says. 'I've just been dismissed.'

A quiet fire kindles inside Sir Peter. 'I'm sorry to hear that,' he murmurs with more animation. He pulls out two stools from under the table. 'Well, sit down, sit down.' He sits down himself, and gestures at Scrope, who follows suit. A terrible impatience is dawning in him. But Scrope's just looking back at him, as if he doesn't know how to go on. 'Now, sir, what brings you to me?' he prompts.

Scrope takes off his hat; rumples his pepper-and-salt hair with skinny fingers. 'I thought we should talk,' he says baldly. 'And I had to come now. Before I leave, you see. I'm to return north, at first light, to my lands. Bolton. I'm to be escorted to the Great North Road by my lord Latimer's men. As a courtesy. So he says.' He smiles mirthlessly. 'Though one could plausibly think that he just wants to make sure I leave Westminster without talking to a soul,' he adds. There's bitterness in his voice. 'That's what he wants, you see. That must be the real reason I'm out - I'm sure of it - because he's worried. I know every detail of every entry in the accounts, you see. And he doesn't want anyone here who knows what I know. Anyone who might tell.'

There's nothing in that for Sir Peter to comment on. He can only give quiet thanks that the man's come straight to him like this, straight away, before Latimer's had the wit even to assemble his guard of honour. As to why Latimer wouldn't have been more thorough about getting Scrope out of town more efficiently, Sir Peter can only surmise that the man must have got smug and soft from all these years of easy living. And perhaps he never expected his underling to take such prompt action. Sir Peter asks, 'What exactly happened?' He knows better than to say more.

'Lord Latimer didn't say. Just that the King had appointed Sir Robert Ashton in my place.' Scrope's forehead wrinkles. 'So he said.'

'But you don't believe it was the King's idea,' Sir Peter probes. 'You think it was Lord Latimer who wanted to be rid of you. So - why?'

Scrope puts big clean hands with big knuckles on the table. This is hard for him. 'Well,' he says. Then he stops, and shakes his head, and takes a big breath. 'I imagine because of you, sir, coming around and asking your questions.' As if to excuse himself for this boldness, he hunches his back; he's not a man to try and tower over whoever he's talking to, or dominate a conversation. 'Or else because the letters are to go out this week, summoning a parliament. It makes no difference. They're cleaning up.'

Sir Peter's eyebrows rise. 'Parliament!' he can't help exclaiming.

'April,' Scrope replies. A man of few words.

Next month, Sir Peter thinks, and his heart speeds up. But that isn't what's most important now. He must concentrate. 'Cleaning up,' he says, returning to the matter in hand. 'What do you mean?'

Scrope doesn't answer directly. Or perhaps he does, and Peter de la Mare just doesn't understand. He says, 'I'm not supposed to be here. But I thought you might like to see some of the detail of how my department has been run. I've been making copies of the household accounts I've prepared for the past two years - before they were corrected by my master for the fair copy that's gone on record. That's the record you've seen, sir. But my accounts are different. Parts get...struck out. Often. I thought you might be interested to make the comparison.'

'Aha,' says Peter de la Mare. He can hardly believe his luck. This is the missing piece in the puzzle. This is what he's been looking for all these months. This man, who doesn't look a bad sort, now he comes to think of it, who has conscience in the rumples of his brow, must have been uneasy with the way things were for a long time to have been keeping copies that differ from the recorded version of the truth, and to have them at hand, ready to bring him as soon as Latimer dismissed him. Scrope must have felt slighted that his careful accounting was changed; maybe, at first, purely from professional pride; later, with the dawning awareness that something must be gravely amiss within the government for his master to make those repeated changes. Even if Sir Peter doesn't understand everything yet about why, he sees the calculation that has brought this shy, correct man here. Wounded pride, of course; but also, the possibility of a future in some new government, if Latimer goes. So there must be some discrepancy in the two versions of these accounts - Scrope's raw ones, and Latimer's finished ones - that could topple Latimer.

He holds out his hand for the bag of documents. He puts a warm hand on Scrope's shoulder. His heart is racing. This man is volunteering to teach him the language of Londoners cheating. In time for Parliament. He can't believe his luck.

He even cracks a smile. To think he was about to try and get away.

But he shouldn't crow too soon. Humbly, he adds, 'I'm no expert, of course.' And: 'Perhaps you'll talk me through the changes?'

SEVENTEEN

Alice goes back to Edward, at Havering, and sits out the wintry last days of March. At least, with the King at her side, she feels safe, for now.

The letters of summons are going out across the shires. The Commons and Lords will soon be making their way to Westminster. Parliament will begin in a month. By then it will be late April. And Alice will be prepared: her affairs tidied up, her business papers transparent. There'll be spring, and hope, in the air.

She mustn't rush around, meanwhile, losing her nerve, doing things differently from usual, looking guilty. Chaucer has said she must just sit tight.

No one has ever tried to protect her as Chaucer is doing now, even though he disapproves of what she's done. Knowledge of his support sustains her; keeps her panic at bay. She doesn't want more any more - more houses, more money - because, as it is, she sees, her cup overflows. She's at the top of Fortune's wheel, and all she wants to do now is to stay there. If she can only do as he says, and wipe out as many traces as she can of her most recent manoeuvres, perhaps they will go unnoticed...and perhaps then she can go on living just as she is, and seeing him sometimes. In her present anxiety, that seems more than enough.

So she's quietly getting it all worked out. She's written to her land agents to tell them which leases to sell, which paperwork to clarify, and which to destroy; she'll meet them next month to make sure they've carried out her orders right.

She'll wait here at Havering till the Duke is back and Edward goes to Westminster to hear his son's account of this year of inconclusive peace talks. Then she'll slip off to Gaines to reassure herself that, failing all else, that escape route's still open; and see her children. It was a good idea of Chaucer's, that: getting Edward to knight Johnny; giving herself a route back to court, as a mother if not in her own right, whatever happens next. But doubts have surfaced in Alice's mind since that comforting talk with Chaucer. What will have Johnny and the girls become, running wild out there in Aunty's care? Chaucer can't know how little she's...Though she'd like to bring Johnny back with her, if he...And Edward's so far gone now that she might never even have to explain who the child is; she could probably sweet-talk Edward into knighting a young gentleman without his ever asking. But she needs to check. See for herself if Johnny will pass muster as a young gentleman.

Edward will never notice her absence. He'll be looking forward too much to the biggest moment of his own year: St George's Day, on 23 April, after Council, just before Parliament, when he'll be off leading the other doddery old men of the court, the ageing knights and grey-haired heroes of France, and his son the Duke, and even perhaps his skeletal dying eldest son, to Windsor to play at being parfit gentil Knights of the Round Table. They'll sit at the giant round table, letting their grey beards trail in the wine, and talk in cracked voices about all their vanished glories.

So, for now, Alice has nothing to do but to look after her old companion. She baths Edward and talks to him, but he's not really with her very often any more. It's hard not to feel impatient with him. He dribbles food down his front. Of course he does. He's lost all his teeth. And he spends most days in bed, not because of any particular illness but just because he lacks the energy to get up. Once, he catches her eye with a little of his old vigour, and says, 'It's not that I don't think of drinking and fucking any more,' but by the time she's laughed at that old joke, and patted his hand, she can see he's forgotten.

Experimentally, she says, '
Cher ami
, will you knight my Johnny soon?' He nods, vacantly.

'Johnny,' he says. He doesn't say, 'Who?' It's assent, of a sort; but Alice doesn't feel reassured.

Fear spreads. Once you've let it in, it gets everywhere. Like love, perhaps.

For the first time, Alice finds she's leery of travelling alone. She takes an escort of palace servants because she'll have to leave the London road for the last few miles of her journey, and you can't trust the woods, these days. The woods are dripping, rustling refuges for violent companies of men and archers back from the wars, out from their tied fields, shifting and making shift, living wild. No money to clear them out, and no one with the will to, either. People are quoting the Bishop of Rochester's latest thundering sermon: England, inundated by homicides, where men are swift to the shedding of blood. Nowhere is safe.

But she leaves the servants at the wayside inn at Upminster, a mile away from Gaines, because, even though the innkeeper says there are murderous footpads everywhere round here, she can't trust palace people either. Servants talk.

'Wait for me here,' she says, more bravely than she feels. 'I'll be back in two days.'

And she walks her horse on, slowly, through the silent drizzle, thankful for the wet that muffles the sound of hooves. Every crack and rustle in the undergrowth sets her heart racing. Once she thinks she hears the snorting of another horse. She freezes. She waits. Nothing. There is no birdsong, either, though she hears a very occasional whir of flight. The woods still have the deadness of winter. Only the stream is full and racing. Yet, as the trees begin to thin out, she sees there are after all a few buds fattening and straining on the twigs slapping at her arms.

There will be spring. She'll just sit tight, as Chaucer said. She'll be all right.

She can't believe the exquisite sweetness of getting out of the woods; or the pearly afternoon light still in the sky as she lets herself through the gate and plods on up the track through the field.

Her breath comes more gently. Joy fills her at this flat, barren vista.

She thought, once, that she'd plant a great avenue of shade trees along the sides of this track, and that they would lead visitors to a warm, commodious, beautiful manor house, surrounded by gardens of waving roses and gillyflowers, with bees in the rosemary and lavender and doves fluttering through the orchards.

Tumbledown though it is, in reality, with those piles of timbers and broken-down carts and boxes and old cracked tiles that Aunty can never bear to throw out ('You never know, they might come in handy, love'), the windswept house ahead represents safety. Love. Home. And, today, that makes it beautiful enough.

Until, over there at the other end of the great field, she spots two young girls skipping. Even from here, she can see they're in rags, like peasant children. Their legs are muddy. Their rope's muddy. Even from here, she can see they're hers.

Her heart leaps with a painful, toxic rush of feelings.

Last time she came, she sent word to Aunty Alison beforehand. And the place was all scrubbed up, the priest in attendance, the children nicely turned out, if silent and careful in front of the stranger they knew to be their mother.

They weren't bare-legged and muddy when they knew she was coming.

But perhaps this is what everything's usually like when she's not around, she thinks with a rush of shame and understanding. Deep down, she realises, she's always known it must be - because how would old Alison know any different?

She stops and looks. Her joy in what she sees is fading as fast as the light.

A tall scarecrow of a figure comes out of the house up ahead and moves through the complicated gloom of the courtyard to stand, silhouetted against the sky, staring out across the eastern field. Then Alice hears Aunty's remote voice hollering, off towards something - someone - approaching her from over that way: 'It's late - what kept you?' and 'Whatcha get?'

The little girls begin to chirrup in thin, excited voices. Aunty's got her back turned to them, but they're excited too at whoever's coming home. Alice sees them pick up their rope and run, heels flashing, rat's-tail hair flying, to the farmhouse.

Alice carries on plodding quietly forward on her tired horse, watching them all watch the eastern field.

She's quite close before she sees who it is they're waiting outside for.

There's a boy's head, bobbing along in the bare furrow of a turned strip of field. Dark hair, brown jerkin, brown soil, but she makes out a pale face and white hands. She sees Johnny's thin little legs working hard, lifting up high at each step, to avoid getting stuck in the claggy soil. That must be making him tired, walking like that. With the painful tenderness of recognition, she thinks: How tall he's got.

Behind him, a man. Taller than Johnny, a bit taller than Alice too, maybe, but not tall as men go; and stocky, with a big mess of hair. He's got a bag on his shoulder. He's got a big stick in his hand.

'Not bad for an afternoon's work!' she hears the distant, excited answering cry, as his head goes back. 'Five nobles!'

Five nobles, Alice thinks. That's nearly two pounds. You don't get that kind of money for honest farm work.

'Who from?' Aunty's just yelled back at him with gusto when, hearing the cautious clip-clop of a horse approaching from an entirely different direction, she shuts up, smartish, and turns towards Alice.

'Alice,' Aunty says. Her face goes still, her body too. Her voice is without emotion. She's not giving anything away. She's obviously not planning to, either. There's a sullenness in the set of her shoulders that says: Don't even bother asking awkward questions.

The little girls have heard the old woman speak and caught on too. When they see where Aunty's looking, they both turn and stare at Alice, as expressionlessly as Aunty, but more uncertainly, as if they don't know how to greet this visitor.

At the same time, Alice hears the man-voice calling his reply from not so far away in the squelchy field any more: 'A posse of fat priests!'

A moment later, there's a high boy-laugh, too: 'Scared stiff, they were! Shittin' themselves!'

Alice holds Aunty's gaze a moment longer, making clear that she's heard everything, and understood everything.

Then she dismounts, and leads the horse to the trough, and lets it drink, and loosens its saddle, and ties up the reins.

Her hands are shaking. She closes her eyes.

Only when she's splashed freezing water on her own face, and composed herself a little, and heard the panting breath and steady tread of man and boy coming right up, almost to the edge of the yard, is she able to open her mouth.

Her voice is still trembling as she says, 'Aunty. Children.' And as she says, 'Wat.'

They're silent enough as they troop into the kitchens. Alice hopes it's shame that's got their tongues, because she's ashamed, too, now she's seeing them through other eyes, Chaucer's maybe, and seeing how far she's let things slide. But once they're inside, where there's a pot on the fire and chicken in the stew, they quickly thaw out in the golden glow, in the bustle of getting the boots and sodden outer layers off, and the silence turns into barely suppressed pleasure and the beginning of talk. They're not ashamed at all, Alice sees; they were just shocked, for a moment, to be caught. But now they've decided it's all right; because Alice is one of them. 'Here, let me do that, your fingers are frozen,' Aunty tells Johnny, and he turns willingly, with a bit of a grin, even, to let her strip off his jerkin. Jane and Joan are ladling out stew and putting steaming bowls on the table. Wat's back from the larder with cups and a jug of ale. They know they shouldn't be, but they're all still pleased with their afternoon's work. There's a cheery light in every pair of eyes.

Alice shakes her head. She hasn't the strength to walk straight in and tell them it's all wrong. So she just sits tight and lets the children's stories start coming out, which they soon do, in those high, excited little voices. She hears, first, that Wat's taken Johnny out robbing on the roads three or four times already. He's nearly twelve. High time, Wat says. There's a proud light in the boy's blue eyes when Wat tousles his hair and says proudly, 'Got ourselves a good little fighter here.' Then she hears that Aunty's taught Joan and Jane to climb through windows, and wriggle under cracks in doors, and pick pockets, and set snares for hares, just as she taught Alice, long ago.

Aunty's voice cracks with pride as, forgetting her watchfulness earlier, she says, 'Yeah, they're as good as you ever were, by now, dear. Could send them out any day to earn themselves a living, if they had to.'

Alice asks: But where's the priest who was supposed to be teaching the children their letters and Latin?

'Oh, gone, dear,' Aunty replies blithely. 'No loss, either. We couldn't be doing with him. A right old woman, he was. Always nagging us to give everything we grew to the Bishop and spend our Sundays on our knees. Well, I said to him, we got no time for that. Too busy. And if we give you all our turnips, what'll we eat ourselves? So he went.'

Alice says weakly, 'But, Aunty...'

But Aunty's never had any time for priests. Alice has always known that, too. So she has no real right to be shocked now.

'There's a lovely young man comes to the village sometimes, dear. Much better,' Aunty confides. 'They lock him up sometimes, but he always gets out. Pops up in the market place. Gets a good crowd, he does. Preaches a lovely sermon.'

It's little Joan who picks up Aunty's story. In a deep imitation-man voice, the ten-year-old intones: 'My good friends, things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until everything shall be in common.' Wat and Aunty start to laugh and clap their big raw hands against their thighs.

It would be enough to make anyone howl with laughter, if anyone weren't a mother who'd somehow managed to convince herself that her children were turning into little ladies and gentlemen out here in the countryside, and not the budding Lollards and thieves she now sees stuffing themselves with stew.

Alice keeps quiet. She's thinking. Thinking wearily of the unbridgeable gap between here and Aldgate; of the impossibility of explaining to Chaucer, or anyone else she knows in that other life in the centre, how things are here. Not knowing, herself, which of her own selves to be, because a part of her would like to be laughing along with the rest of them, not giving a damn about anything outside these walls. She's spent all these years working so hard at getting rich, but how rich does she need to be, really? And what for? She's flown so high, yet she'll never be truly respectable, however far she climbs. At least, she'll never, despite that dizzying ascent she's already made, have the grand worldly position that truly noble blood brings. And suddenly she's weary of the fear and anxiety that her strivings have brought her along with the wealth. Wouldn't she be happier just stopping trying, and joining in with her family's roars instead, and embracing their view of things?