The People’s Queen

Then she began to talk, still very calmly, in a quiet, reminiscent, dreamy monotone, twitching her fingers through the rents and mends in her thin robe, about what she’d walked away from in London, and what she’d walked through on her tramp through Essex. Because she could see this poor little scrap didn’t know; didn’t have the least idea.

Death hadn’t just come stealing into this one village like black smoke. Whatever this girl thought, it wasn’t the sins of Kate’s mum, or dad, or Tom, or the no-good priest she kept going on about, that had made an angry God decide to smite them all dead, or whatever nonsense it was the priests kept spouting (till they died too).

There were people dying in their hundreds everywhere, Aunty said gently, trying not to shock the girl too much, while not blanketing her in mumbo-jumbo either. There were bodies in the lanes all over Essex: men, women, entire processions of penitents, lying where they’d dropped. Dead people, dead animals. In London they were piling up corpses in burial pits until the pits overflowed before filling them in, a bit. One pit would fill up with the dead before anyone had time to dig the next. Cadavers were dragged out of homes and left in front of the doors. London was no place to be while there was that going on, Aunty said. The air was too foul. They said husband was abandoning wife, wife husband, parents children, and the young their old folk. If you wanted to live, you had to walk. And she wanted to live.

‘So I thought, come and look up Tom and his family,’ she said, going back into the story from last night, about being some kind of relative.

If the girl was waiting to hear whether Aunty’s own family in London had all died, or if she’d been one of the ones who abandoned their own to save herself, she didn’t ask. Just sat there, round-eyed, open-mouthed, gawping. Aunty couldn’t tell if she was even really taking it in. Even if she was understanding the words, Aunty thought, it was probably too much to absorb their meaning all at once. Even for her, who’d seen it with her own eyes, it was hard enough to believe. So Aunty left the past in the past, and didn’t bother with her own story: the kids she couldn’t bury; the priest who wouldn’t say a Mass over them without money Aunty didn’t have. A shrug is all you can offer Fortune, in the end, when nothing will work out; and a calculation: they’re dead; nothing more you can do for them. You’ve got to look out for yourself. Time to go. Aunty just fiddled with the wiry ginger curls under her mended kerchief and went on with her sing-song account of the horror in the rest of the world.

Aunty said she’d heard people were dying even beyond England – all over Christendom, they said. The Mortality was said to have come from the East. People were dying of it in Italy a year ago. Maybe it had come to the ports of Italy in ships; maybe it was the earthquake in Italy that had let the foul sulphurous fumes out from the inside of the earth, from the hellfire below. And now, Aunty said, she’d heard tell of worse on the way. Strange tempests, with sheets of fire and huge murderous hailstones all mixed up together, so you couldn’t know whether you’d be burned to a crisp or battered to a pulp first. People said the fish in the seas were dying, and corrupting the air. But it didn’t matter whether you blamed the stinking mists and stagnant lakes and poisoned air on the Evil One or the Wrath of God. The important thing was to get away to somewhere clean.

‘But where,’ Aunty said, almost to herself. She looked round at the flat Essex field, the soft blue and green of the darkening sky, and wrinkled her nose. Surely the stink here was as bad as anything in London. ‘There’s the rub.’

Aunty paused, and then said, because talking was strangely comforting now she’d started, that she’d heard there were four hundred a day dying just in Avignon, where the Pope’s palace was. And all the cardinals were dead. Good riddance to them, Aunty added with grim pleasure.

She could see Kate couldn’t imagine four hundred people alive, let alone dead, and wasn’t sure what a cardinal was. So instead, timidly, the girl opened her pink lips at last and asked what must have been on her own mind all this time. ‘We couldn’t find Sir John. Tom, Mum…they didn’t have any last rites,’ she mumbled. ‘We prayed. Just the two of us. But I don’t think it was enough. And Dad. If he’s…gone…too. Do you think that means they’re all…’ Her voice faded.

‘Damned?’ Aunty finished for her, grasping her meaning. ‘Because there was no priest? Nah. That’s been the same everywhere – the priests too scared to minister to the dying. Scared they’re heading for hell themselves, after all their years of wickedness. Keen to keep out of their Maker’s clutches.’ And here, to stop her voice catching, she made it shrill, almost a shout: ‘And too greedy to look after the dead without payment, too, half the time. Trying to take money off people even to say a prayer over the bodies.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s priests for you. It’s not just your kin. We could all go to bloody Hell, and what would they care?’

She sensed, from the stunned quality of the girl’s silence, that she’d gone too far. ‘Priests…Don’t get me started on priests,’ Aunty said, a bit apologetically. ‘What you need to know is, some bishop’s sorted it out so that we don’t all burn for eternity because of their selfishness. He says laymen can make confession to each other if they can’t find a priest. The Apostles did that, didn’t they? And if there isn’t a man around to confess to, it can even be a woman. And if there’s no one around at all, then, they say, faith must suffice. And it does. Suffice. You keep that in your head. Your folks are not in Hell. Your folks are all right.’

The girl nodded, and took her saucer eyes off Aunty and gazed down at the baby. Aunty could see what she was thinking: no baptism, so, also, damned?

‘We’re all here. That’s the main thing. You, and me, and this new little life here,’ Aunty broke determinedly into that thought before the girl’s terror took hold. ‘All alive, all blessed by God, all ready to face tomorrow.’ She made the sign of the Cross over the baby. Then she made a wry sort of face. ‘No priest,’ she said, ‘no problem.’ She wagged her finger at Kate. ‘We don’t need them bastards any more to save ourselves, remember?’ She dipped her finger in the last bucket of water left and made the holy sign again on the baby’s face, and said a made-up blessing. ‘Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,’ she muttered against the baby’s crying. ‘Live long and well, little one. Be happy. Be a beauty. Make others happy, if they deserve it. Be lucky. And be rich if you can! Amen.’

The women smiled tentatively at each other. They both liked the strange little prayer – taking the ordinary chatter that fell from their lips as the Word of God. ‘I’m going to call her Alice,’ the girl said confidingly. ‘After you.’ Then, quite peacefully, as if Aunty had put her worries to rest: ‘Will you sing that song, the one I heard you whistling?’ She was just a child herself.

Aunty wrinkled her not-young face till slightly mocking lines criss-crossed it; in the shadows, she felt as though the sorrows of all the world were on it. ‘Thought it was a nice cheerful tune, did you?’ she said. ‘Catchy. Words a bit gloomier though. It was the tramping song I heard on the cattle road out. Toughened everyone up.’

She began to sing it, quietly, breathily, like a lullaby. She had a deepish tuneful voice. She kept her eyes on Kate, whose eyes were drooping as if she didn’t mind the words. ‘Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit!…Seething, terrible, shouting hurt…Great is its seething like a burning cinder…A grievous thing of ashy hue.’

Looking at the bright square of outside through the door frame, Aunty wondered, as she sang, how many other survivors were also watching the horizon. You couldn’t know if there were any; not really. She and these kids might be the last people of all, alone in the desolation.

Well, we’re all right, she thought stoutly, shutting out the blackness. We’ll get on our feet. And it wouldn’t be all bad, a world with just us, and no priests.

Kate let her head start to nod as she listened to the cracked voice, trying not to think of anything except the part of her that was still rejoicing in the touch of the baby, of skin and cloth on her skin. She yawned. She was tired, so tired. The yawn didn’t surprise her. But she hadn’t expected to start crying. She certainly didn’t expect the dirty wash of despair that now broke through her without any warning, the blubbery, snuffly sneezings and coughings, as if she were grieving for her losses and all the woes in the world, now, suddenly, all at once.

Aunty – Alison, Alice – stood up. There was something new in her face, something watchful. She picked the baby up off Kate’s breast.

‘Going to put her down for a sleep,’ Aunty said. With the baby held against herself, she twirled a blanket down over Kate’s nakedness without touching her. ‘She’ll be tired, after what she’s been through. You need a bit of quiet too, love. Shut your eyes.’

It was only when Aunty and the baby had stepped outside, into the strong morning light, and Aunty had quietly pushed the door to behind her, that Kate felt, through the aches and bruises of what her body had endured all night, a different kind of pain. There were swellings on either side of her throat, she realised, and where her legs joined her body. She twisted her wet face round, stiffly, because everything ached so much, and squinted into her armpit. It was too shadowy inside to be sure, but she thought the great pulsing engorged mound she saw there was turning black.

PART ONE Regno I reign (#ulink_aaf617c8-6f16-5947-8146-974dffc63468)

ONE (#ulink_37841bd1-ae54-5c26-842d-e6475b2b9d32)

They’re late for the dinner; late enough that the light is beginning to fade, and the torches are lit, and the ice swans are beginning to melt, rivulets of water running between the silver channels down the table. They’ve clearly been bickering all the way to Westminster, these two. They look set-faced and stubborn, each in his own fashion. But then they’re an odd couple, by anyone’s book: the wife tall and graceful and long-necked as the ice swans, visibly at home in these grand surroundings, while the altogether shorter and stubbier husband’s only resemblance to a swan is that, like the icy masterpieces starting to sail down the vast table, he’s sweating, even before the dancing’s begun.

Philippa Chaucer sways down the table to her place, weaving her way among the throng of pages and serving men as if they were invisible, making it clear to her life’s companion, as he makes his way more awkwardly down the other side to his parallel place, that she’s noting how far they are from the grandees at the top.

‘If only,’ she mouths, somehow managing to form the chilly words without reducing her chiselled beauty by even a fraction, and indicating the luxury that surrounds them with a small, expert lift of one eyebrow, ‘if only you had even a tenth of that woman’s ambition, how different things might be for us.’

Geoffrey, her husband, only responds by looking around, as if he’s surprised by it all, at the eye-popping feast conjured into existence by the ambition of that woman, the King’s mistress. He furrows his brow in anxiety. He runs his fingers through his hair – or tries to. His fingers connect with the hat he’s forgotten he’s wearing. They knock it half off his head. He crams it back on, all wrong, and sits down with an embarrassing thump on the bench, interrupting the conversation of the men on either side of him. He goes red. He begins a wordy apology. Philippa looks at him, shakes her head very slightly, and sighs.

Dance, all of you, dance, Alice thinks, watching the crowd of sweating faces below, rather enjoying their sufferings. Go on. Higher, a tiny bit higher.

It’s an unusually hot April evening. It’s only ten minutes since Alice signalled for the tables to be pushed against the walls. The air’s still thick with sheep fat and fowl grease. But how they’re all throwing themselves about in the crowd below.

She can’t resist taking pleasure in examining them from the superior vantage point of the royal dais. The courtiers have fused into one heaving mass, energetically going through the motions of the saltarello. They’re glowing and glistening and panting under their turbans, inside their heavy velvets and silks. They’re all doing their best to show their King they’re happy to be where they are, and watching Alice where she is, at his side.

Alice fans herself complacently, and examines the rictus smile on the dark face of the Duke of Lancaster. He looked so dignified in his red a few minutes ago, but now his face is the same blood hue as his tunic. It pleases her that even the world’s most arrogant man is out there, gritting his teeth and leaping in the air, as determined as the rest of the scarletfaced courtiers to please the King his father and host by looking delighted with the entertainment laid on by Alice.

She turns a little, enough to murmur into the ear of the King his father and host, in a way that the Duke will be sure to see. (She’s wanted to make a relationship with Duke John for years, even though, between his long absences at the war in France, he’s not yet shown great interest in her. So it won’t do him any harm to show him the extent of her power now. She knows how power attracts.) The lords a-leaping down there won’t be able to hear what she’s saying to their master, but they’ll be able to guess at the tone of her voice from her sly sideways grin. ‘I don’t know how they all have the energy,’ she murmurs, affecting weariness, and fans herself. She has it all worked out. No one will ever expect Edward to dance, unless by some whim he chooses to. His age lets him off: rising sixty-two, and the long golden beard long ago turned silver. So he’ll be pleased she wants to sit it out too. And why not? There’s no point in her tiring herself out tonight. Her big day will be tomorrow. ‘In this heat…’ she adds, even more languidly. She likes the way the French comes sliding so naturally out of her mouth, as if she’d been born to it, even if, in reality, her French has been learned more at Stratford-atte-Bowe than in Paris. She’s had to work hard at it, in her time. But if she’s learned anything, it is that the point of hard work is to make things look easy. When Edward chuckles back, and pats her hand, she permits herself a slightly bigger smile.

They haven’t always been so eager to please, those courtiers down there. Let them dance to her tune now.

Tomorrow, Edward will show her off to the world, in a burst of glory the like of which England has never seen. Tomorrow, for a week, mercenaries, princes and dukes from all over Christendom will watch a pageant in which the influence of Alice Perrers, who has come so far already in her twenty-five years on this earth, and might yet go further, is finally made plain.

Tomorrow, at mid-morning, the court will walk through London dressed in red and white, the colours she’s chosen for the week. With the ladies holding the horses of their gentlemen by their golden bridles, they’ll set off from outside this window, from the Hill behind the Tower, and process along Tower Street and Chepe, then out of Aldersgate to the pasture-cum-jousting ground at Smithfield. And then the gentlemen of the court will joust, in her honour, while the people of the City, all dressed in their coloured liveries, watch and cheer. And she, and only she, Alice Perrers, who will be known for the week as Lady of the Sun (a title she’s thought of herself), as well as Queen of the Lists, will ride in a golden chariot, at the centre of everything. She’ll be wearing a cap encrusted with jewels, and a cloak of Venetian gold lined with red taffeta, on top of the red gown, lined in white, embroidered with seed pearls, and edged in royal ermine, that she’s got on tonight. She’s going to astonish. She’s going to impress.

It’s time they realised – all these courtiers, all those Londoners – that a woman who’s already, by the grace of God and the generosity of the King of England (and her own financial acumen), one of the richest people in the land, has every intention of shining like the sun for the rest of her days.

She hasn’t forgotten her place entirely. Not really. She isn’t going to start acting like, or thinking of herself as, a real, born-to-the-throne queen. (Anyway, who would have let her if she tried? They all still worship the memory of dear old Queen Philippa, who’s been dead for most of the eight years of Alice’s supremacy; and Alice doesn’t have a drop of anything like royal blood in her veins, or noble blood, or even knightly blood. She’s a different kind altogether. She’s not even very interested in thinking of being a helpless, dependent, real queen; she likes her freedom too much to dream of sitting still in an expensive robe, smiling at posturing fools of knights-errant, for the rest of her days.) Still, only an idiot could ignore the meaning of her punning pageant title, and Londoners aren’t idiots. Edward’s royal symbol is the sun. If Alice Perrers is to be Lady of the Sun, at least for this week of glory, then she will be displaying all the power a queen commands. And power, at least the quiet kind that comes with wealth, she does enjoy.

Even before Edward, even as a very young woman, Alice was busy consolidating her position in this world. Every penny she’s ever inherited, or made, has been put back into snapping up leases on this property or that, taking on unconsidered trifles of fields or tenements here, there and everywhere, making improvements, building, putting up rents, and using the profits to buy more. She’s got a gift for it. She’s done extraordinarily well – far better than she would have if she’d set her sights purely on imitating the real born-to-it ladies of the court and becoming almost indistinguishable from them. But, of course, it’s been much easier for her to achieve wealth since the world came to realise that there’s a misty, unseen, kingly presence at her back. That knowledge concentrates people’s minds. It keeps them honest. No one cheats on a bargain with Alice, as her store of coin and leases grows. No one has, for a long time.

The real point of this week’s festivities, as far as Alice is concerned, is to make sure she can continue to enjoy the power that feeds and protects all the wealth she’s still building up – even after Edward dies.

For Alice has begun to understand that the enchanted dream she’s been living in until now – the best part of a decade as the indulged darling of a dear old man who, himself, has been on the throne for nearly half a century, and is loved, everywhere, as England’s greatest king – must soon come to an end. No one else seems to have noticed or to be planning their next move, although when Edward does pass on the end of his reign will surely affect them all. The gentry grumble about paying taxes to fund his war in France, true. But they carry on buying expensive clothes and jewels, far beyond their means, and raiding each other’s manor houses when they think they can get away with stealing a few fields, just as the courtiers carry on dancing and jousting and prancing off to the war at vast expense and raiding each other’s castles, as if they all thought they could somehow continue for ever in the golden sunset years of Edward’s reign, in more or less peace, and more or less prosperity, stuffing their faces with larks’ tongues and honeyed peacock breasts, and watching the ice swans melt at an unending succession of banquet tables.

But Alice has heard Edward mumbling in the mornings, unable to shake off the night’s dreams; sometimes calling her ‘Philippa’ after his wife, or ‘Isabella’ after his favourite, headstrong, high-and-mighty fool of a daughter. He’s still most of the time, at least in front of others, the sparkling, charismatic, dynamic man he always was; but, in his unguarded moments, alone with her, she also sees the confused old man he’s becoming, or is about to become. She treats the creeping wound on his leg, which won’t heal, so she knows the extent of his physical decrepitude too, just as she knows the folly of his having recently restarted the war in France, years after he’s past his fighting prime, and of expecting to go on having the luck of the Devil that he enjoyed in his muscular youth, and winning.

So she’s formed a view. She needs to think about the future, beyond Edward. And she’s decided that the best way to protect herself against that cloudy tomorrow is to cultivate the friendship of one of Edward’s sons. Not to become a mistress again, obviously, for Alice doubts that a prince who could have any woman in the land would want his father’s cast-off, no longer young; she’s realistic enough never to have mistaken her rounded plumpness and dark curls and cheeky freckles for beauty. What Alice wants next is respect and recognition; a relationship that will maintain something of her influence and visibility, while leaving her the freedom of manoeuvre she needs to carry on buying up land and extending her possessions.

Ideally, she’d have preferred this respect and recognition to come from the son who is destined to be the next King of England. But the noble Prince Edward of England, heir to the throne, the former war hero, the ex-ruler of southern France, and as widely admired at court and among the peasants and soldiery as Alice finds him evil-tempered and vindictive, is not an ideal choice of patron for several reasons. One is his wife, Princess Joan, who’s made it clear to Alice for years now that she will never have time for a nouveau riche from nowhere. The other is that the Prince of England has been dying, agonisingly slowly, of some Castilian dropsy caught on campaign, for longer than Alice cares to remember. He’s still clinging to life for the moment; but Alice doubts he will make it to become King Edward IV. And there’s no point in hoping that, when the Prince does die, she’ll get anywhere with his little boy, Richard, a child in the nursery, guarded by his disagreeable mother, that bloated ex-beauty of a princess with the pursed lips and nostrils that flare and dent white whenever she sees Alice.

That leaves the other royal son: John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, the man out there, sweating as he dances. Son number three originally, but since the death of his brother Lionel he’s been son number two; and with every chance that his eldest brother Prince Edward hasn’t long left in this vale of tears either, he’s all too likely, all too soon, to be the King’s eldest surviving son.

It’s a matter of whispered conjecture whether Duke John might, in that eventuality, try and get the throne for himself, rather than protect it for his little nephew, his brother’s son. Some people point to Duke John’s innate nobility, the courteous conservatism in every thought and gesture, and say he wouldn’t. But most people think he would.

There’s no doubt that Duke John’s a good-looking man, in body. There’s a grace to the way he bows his long lean frame, a beauty in the line of eye and cheekbone, and his voice is deep and authoritative. He has a natural dignity of behaviour. But Alice isn’t so sure this beauty extends to his soul. Nor are most other people. After all, Duke John has already claimed one throne, after taking as his second wife a disinherited princess of Castile. He likes to call himself ‘We, the King of Castile’ in his correspondence, and is always threatening to go and conquer Castile and win back his wife’s country (at the expense of the English taxpayer). The suspicious way most people see it is this: would a prince who’s so greedy for a crown that he’ll go all that way in pursuit of one turn up his nose at the much more glorious Crown of England, if he got a chance to grab it? Of course he wouldn’t.

The very fact that people are so ready to believe the worst of the Duke of Lancaster, with no proof one way or the other, shows what an unpopular man this John of Gaunt is. Not without reason, Alice knows. He’s the scratchy kind. He rubs people up the wrong way, even when he doesn’t mean to; and all too often he does mean to. Even among the aristocrats of this court, he’s considered unusually arrogant; considering the competition, Alice thinks wryly, that’s quite an achievement. Certainly he’s not loved among his social inferiors. He hates his father being so dependent on the merchants of London for money. To the merchants’ pained displeasure, he talks too much about the nobility of the nobility and the crawling servility of the lesser orders. And merchants and noblemen alike now have an excuse to dislike and despise Duke John because, in the absence of his sick brother, he’s been in charge of the English armies in France in this disastrous past year, so he’s the one to carry the can for losing pretty much all of English Gascony and costing the country a mint of money. In fact, it’s a good job the Duke’s the richest man in England, with territories from the Scottish border to the South, because he has precious few friends anywhere, and if it weren’t for his money, he’d have none at all.

John of Gaunt needs more than money. He needs to learn to be popular – especially if, as Alice thinks likely, he’s one day going to have a try for the English crown. Alice’s nose for money tells her that any king nowadays will need finance from outside his own estates. Rents aren’t what they used to be, now that there are only half the number of Englishmen to farm the land and pay the landlords. The nobility is poorer. So the most important lesson the Duke needs to learn is how to get on with the London merchants, who are becoming as powerful as the merchant princes of Italy were right after the Mortality (until Edward bankrupted all of them with an earlier lot of colossal war debts). The top few merchants are richer than all the noblemen of England put together. Duke John’s got to stop treating them like dirty sheep-shearing tinkerish no-good thieves. He’s got to respect them as the financiers of today’s England. And it’s Alice’s private belief that there’s only one person who can teach him all that – who understands both court and City, and can explain it right. That person is her.

So Alice has dreamed up this week of glamorous frivolity, this (to her mind) insanely expensive joust in red and gold, with feasts every night for the court and wine flowing instead of water in the conduits of London for the commoners. The week is not so much in honour of the courtly love between swooning knights and the cruel ladies they’re fighting to impress, which the tourney’s officially supposed to celebrate; Alice has no time at all for the foolishness of chivalry. Nor is it just to amuse and entertain the court, or even to impress on the people of England her own royal-favoured status. What she really wants from it all is to help this man she would like to know better.