The People's Queen (52 page)

Wiping his mouth, straightening up, Chaucer tries to see reason. There must be a lot of Wats and Walters out there in Essex. It's a common enough name. But - he's still feeling dizzy - Wats who are tilers? And tilers with a grudge against Richard Lyons?

If...then...could Alice herself somehow be tied up with what started, back in Essex, as an uncannily well-planned attack on state finances, but, here in London, is blossoming into a gigantic act of hatred against the Duke and his allies?

His stomach churns again. He puts hands on his knees and surrenders to nausea.

Chaucer's still emptying his guts on the stinking cobbles when he feels hands on his shoulder.

Rough hands.

They pull him upright.

They're all around him. They stink. Their laughing eyes mock his fear.

'What's this, then? Delicate stomach not enjoying our justice?' a taunting voice comes from behind the wall of muscle. And, as Chaucer's hair is pulled back to force him to stare straight ahead, he sees the stringy, red and brown-streaked Wat, grinning at him with wild eyes.

'You a Fleming?' Wat says.

Chaucer doesn't like that grin. He shakes his head, or tries to; but he's held too tight. He can only move his eyes. He mumbles, 'No.'

'Just a sympathiser, then?' Wat says, sticking his face right near Chaucer's, so Chaucer can see the bloodshot whites of his eyes, and smell the black teeth and the wine.

Wat's got a blade in his hand. Chaucer's head's so far back that he can't get it properly in his sights. It's flashing around just below where he can focus.

'No,' he says. Wat only grins wider. There are guffaws from behind.

Chaucer thinks: Is
this
Alice's brother? He also thinks: Am I going to die?

The grinning stops. Chaucer didn't think it was possible for Wat to get any closer, but the face is right up in his now, eyeball to threatening eyeball.

'Your name, citizen,' Wat rasps. 'And your calling.'

They're still wondering, Chaucer sees, with the strange calm that has come over him since he felt the first hand on him, whether they haven't caught another foreigner, or at least someone in the Flemings' pay. Wat wants to kill again. But, Chaucer also sees, he's not far gone enough to do so without an excuse.

'I'm the wool comptroller at the port,' Chaucer forces out, gambling that the impeccable Englishness of this calling will work in his favour. 'Geoffrey Chaucer.'

It doesn't go down well with Tyler's men. 'Baa, baa!' one of them starts yelling, and they all burst out laughing. The others take the cry up. They start singing, 'Baa, baa, black sheep!' They're grinning at him. They're coming closer.

But Chaucer hardly hears them. He doesn't understand the look in Wat's eyes. A blink or two, as if astonished. Then the face pulls back, to maybe a foot or two away, far enough to focus, anyway, and Wat Tyler actually looks at Chaucer, seemingly searching for something. The blade goes out of sight.

'Not Alice's Chaucer?' Wat says in what sounds like a stunned, slack-jawed sort of question. 'The dad?'

The men behind and in front don't know how to respond. The jeers die away. The hands half pulling out Chaucer's hair loosen. Taking advantage of that, Chaucer shakes his head loose.

After another wondering shake of the head, Wat comes to. He waves a curt hand. The men drop Chaucer altogether.

'Go,' Wat tells him. And Chaucer walks.

It's only when Chaucer's moved his legs, one in front of the other, with excruciating care, all the way to the Catte Street turning, that he starts to shake. He leans against a wall, in blissful solitude, waiting for his jelly legs to regain their bone and muscle.

He let me go, Chaucer tells himself, over and over again. His teeth are chattering; he's cold and hot. Because I'm Alice's Chaucer. The dad.

He's too joyful at just being alive to wonder overmuch, for now. But he knows, at least, that he was right: Tyler is Alice's Wat.

She's not here, though. This can't be her doing. She's not here. Chaucer's too overwhelmed to do more than repeat that to himself for a few more moments.

But he hasn't got time to think of Alice now. He'll have to save that for later.

It's the thought of Wat pushing Lyons forward to his death - of those bulging eyes, and the darkness in them - that's propelling him. With the heat and excitement of that last encounter still on him, he sets off at a crazy pace, arms swinging, legs covering seven leagues with every stride, faster than he's ever walked before, to find Walworth; to stop the man with the murderous eyes.

The day and night that follow are the time of the Beast.

The chroniclers, locked away wherever they're hiding, will spill almost as much ink on their descriptions of the horrors that follow Corpus Christi as the rebels are now spilling blood.

Brother Thomas Walsingham, who, today, is not writing his usual spiteful chronicle in the scriptorium at St Albans, because, along with Abbot de la Mare, he's being frogmarched to London by rebels, will call the rampaging men the whores of the Devil, and describe the way they invade Princess Joan's bedroom in the Tower as if it were a rape. They search the most secret places there at their wicked will, he'll say; they lie on the fainting Princess's bed and demand she kiss them. They drive their swords violently into the bedclothes, over and over again.

These and other atrocities they committed, sparing none of any degree or order, whether in churches or public places, or in houses or the fields, and wherever they raised a clamour against anyone, the rest quickly gathered, knowing that he would be beheaded, without either fear of God, or reverence for Holy Church. And when they had spent the whole day in those and many other execrable deeds, at last they wearied of such work, and being flown with unaccustomed and immoderate quantities of wine, and the night approaching, they might be seen lying scattered in open places, or under walls, like so many slaughtered swine. And indeed during the night, many of them, in their drunken state, secretly slew companions against whom they had grudges, so that there was much bloodshed that night, among their own number as well as other people.

No law-abiding person goes out on the street, because there is nothing down there but the smell of blood, and the sound of burning, and the sting of smoke, and the crash of collapsing buildings, and noises round corners. Rumours pass from window to window. Tyler is going to light fires at the four corners of London and burn it down. Tyler will tie up the King to a horse and parade his prisoner around the shires. Tyler will abolish the Church and execute all lords and bishops. John Ball will be Archbishop. Tyler will be King of the Commons. Fear paralyses so many people. But does hiding from the Beast do any good?

At dawn on Saturday, the mob bursts into England's holy of holies, Westminster Abbey, and corners the fugitive Marshal of England, Richard Imworth. They find him hiding behind the marble pillars at the tomb of King Edward the Confessor, clinging to his belief that sanctuary won't be desecrated.

An hour's forced march later, his head joins the others lolling wide-eyed at the corner of Cheapside and Milk Street.

'It's not too late,' says Walworth the merchant, with iron in his voice. 'Attack.'

Chaucer's standing quietly behind him, his sallet chafing at his neck, trying not to feel sick. Walworth has no doubts. Walworth's plan is the last chance. But can it work?

Half of the noble lords whose job is to fight, but who yesterday counselled appeasement, are dead. The rest are too frightened to speak.

The young King takes a moment to put aside the belief of his entire short lifetime that the nobility is the only order of society with God's grace to defend the realm. Then, still doubtfully, he puts his faith in the merchant Mayor, and nods.

Preparations. The King at desecrated Westminster, praying with the hermit of the abbey gardens. Walworth, in London, repeating his instructions to Chaucer. Chaucer, slipping from one great house to the next, with his heart in his mouth, murmuring Walworth's instructions. Inside the courtyards, hushed clanking and whispers.

The sun hangs low and red and glowing in the sky by the time two hundred noblemen, on horseback, in velvets, make their way behind the boy-King to Smithfield, where, long ago, in the grassy space between the walls of St Bartholomew's Priory and Hospital and the Charterhouse and the Mortality mass graves, and the sluggish waters of Faggeswell Brook and the river Holborn, Alice Perrers once reigned for the day as King Edward's Lady of the Sun.

The rebels have been called to one more meeting. This time, Tyler has come.

The King's party draws rein on the east side of the square, in front of St Bartholomew's. Walworth's in his long merchant gown behind the King. Chaucer, in another long gown, behind Walworth. All along the western side, with the rivers behind them, are the tousled, stinking others, thousands of them, roaring.

Of all the royal party, it is Walworth who's ordered to ride across the empty space in the middle, and shout out for Tyler to present his demands to the King. Wat Tyler rides forward on his little hackney.

All eyes are on him.

Chaucer's whole body has become a drum beat. It's so loud and insistent that he can't think. So much could go wrong.

The rebels have been drawn outside the walls of the City. So far, so good. There are hundreds of mercenaries, armed and quietly waiting, inside those courtyards back there, ready to prevent the men's return, or come out and finish off Tyler and his men if need be. But the King doesn't want that. He wants the day to end without bloodshed. He wants to persuade these men to go home peacefully.

Everything depends on that. Because if they don't, if they won't...

The King and what's left of the nobility are out here, around Chaucer, utterly exposed to the enemy...endangered...

If the men won't go, it will be up to Walworth to change the strategy and attack. But Walworth's only a merchant. Because of the King's wish that there should be no bloodshed, Walworth's refused even to wear fighting clothes. It was all Chaucer could do to persuade him to put on a discreet metal breastplate under his gown, invisible to everyone, as Chaucer himself has done.

When it comes to it, does Walworth have the killer instinct? Will he dare attack?

Chaucer tries not to let his body tremble. He clenches his hands more tightly together. Don't give way to panic, he tells himself. Don't give way.

But he's scarcely breathing as the supremely confident Wat Tyler dismounts in front of the King, holding in his hand a dagger. The rebel leader half bends his knee, then takes the King by the hand, and shakes the boy's arm forcibly and roughly, saying to him, 'Brother, be of good comfort and joyful, for you shall have, in the fortnight that is to come, praise from the Commons even more than you have yet had, and we shall be good companions.'

Chaucer quakes at the brutal good cheer in that rough voice. The man's talking like a victor already; he dared call the King, God's anointed, 'brother'. But the King, small and young though he is, does not appear intimidated. All he says is, 'Why will you not go back to your own country?'

Chaucer can hardly hear the answer for the rush of blood in his ears. The man in front of him, in the pulsing centre of Chaucer's field of vision, starts ranting threateningly and waving his arms about and talking, on and on, in that strange, grating, rustic voice, about the charter that he and his fellows want, with all their demands met, before they'll go away. Only snatches of the wild demands come through the roar inside Chaucer's head: '...the Law of Winchester...no more lords, barring only the King...Church lands to the people...only one bishop to remain...the serfs to be freed...all men to be free and equal...'

Chaucer sucks in more air just before the last threat. 'You'll rue it bitterly if you don't settle this to our pleasure...' he hears, almost fainting with disbelief.

The menace is enough to make Chaucer splutter out that breath, near-choking on it. All around him, he's aware of the darting eyes, the panic.

Only the King remains calm. He inclines his boy head, and replies, without emotion, that Tyler can have all that he, the King, can fairly grant, saving only the regality of his crown - whatever that means. Chaucer can't imagine. Perhaps that's the point.

'So now,' the boy adds, level-voiced and majestic, 'go back to your home, without further delay.'

It seems to Chaucer that the two sides have reached stalemate.

The King has told the peasants what to do. He has no more to say.

Tyler has no more to say, either. But he won't go. He's swaying, on his feet, in front of the King, as if he doesn't understand what's been said to him.

Walworth's doing nothing.

Time is suspended.

And, far away, the thousands of men on that side of the field are waiting and watching, as intently as the two hundred men over here.

'Water,' Tyler croaks. But when it's brought by a pageboy and he's gargled it down his throat and chin and front, and spat some of it out, it still doesn't seem to have refreshed him, or resolved him to obey his King. 'Beer,' the rebel leader calls hoarsely, and spits near the King's feet.

Then, ignoring the horrified murmurs, and the hands going to belts and blades, he gets up on his knock-kneed pony again, and looks around, seeming dazed.

It's only afterwards that Chaucer pieces together what happens now with his mind: the various rushes of movement.

First, the pageboy, retreating to beside Chaucer, whispering loudly, 'No, it's him! It really is! The Canterbury highwayman! The greatest thief in Kent!'

Second, the skirl of horse-legs and harness, as Tyler lunges forward, apparently straight towards Chaucer, with death bulging from his eyes, bawling, 'You little fucker,' and Chaucer ducks and dives for the ground. It's only a moment later, when nothing further has happened to him, that he looks up, feeling foolish, and sees that it's the boy Tyler was after: the boy Tyler's now got by the front of his tunic. And Tyler's got his knife arm up, ready to strike.

'Stop,' says someone else. A deep voice. A tall man, in a long robe streaming down his horse's side, steps forward into Tyler's long shadow. Walworth, taking command at last. As Chaucer scrambles back to his feet, Walworth intones: 'I'm arresting you for drawing your weapon before the King's face.'