Vanora Bennett - The People’s Queen

Chaucer’s face keeps swimming into her head, mixed up with fleeting pictures of other people to whom she’s had debts of gratitude, whom she’s seen right. Her last glance back at the hall last night, when she saw Philippa Chaucer stalk up to her husband and start questioning him, and him politely waving her away – clearly refusing an invitation to gossip about Alice – has only confirmed the warmth she feels. She owes him. He won’t regret it.

The procession is passing out of Cripplegate to an especially deafening burst of horns, leaving the worst of the crowds behind. Alice has been focusing her mind on something pleasant she can do for someone, because she hasn’t enjoyed her ride through the City one bit as much as she’d expected. The crowd of burghers has been as hostile as any crowd might be on seeing one of its own elevated beyond what Londoners think is her rightful place. She’s seen the angry eyes, the men being muscled back from around the chariot by the sergeants-at-arms, the gob of wet landing on the side of the carriage, too close for comfort. She’s heard the low hissing, the mutters. Her golden sun-chariot is so low that she’s even made out some of the words. Not just the usual perfunctory unpleasantness due any rich nobleman’s mistress: ‘whore’ and ‘slack-legs’. Today it’s all been angrier and more heartfelt. ‘Grave-robber’, she’s heard; and ‘spendthrift’, and ‘Lady of the bleeding Night’, and ‘robbing the poor old King blind’.

Thank God it’s over, she thinks. She won’t bother with titles again.

Alice looks ahead to the tussocky ground stretching away towards the hill hamlets of Islington and Sadler’s Wells. In front of her is glitter and haze: the draperies, the scaffold for the ladies, the reds and golds, the elegantly dressed crowd of waiting gentry and nobility. Behind her, London: the walls of the Priory and Hospital of St Bartholomew and, further back, behind Cripplegate (where, now the citizens’ noise is more distant, she can hear the anxious lowing of the cows, moved for the week from their usual pre-slaughter pasture over here at the flat western end of the field), the two vast grave pits dug during the Mortality. Wherever you are, there’s no escaping reminders of the Mortality.

But it doesn’t trouble her. She’s not going to let anything trouble her. The thought of those grave pits only reminds her of her first conversation with Edward, and makes her smile. It seems so long ago, that day, back when she was a girl, even before the Queen had taken her in, sitting on a stool, pretending to be absorbed in needlework, cautiously eavesdropping on him and William of Windsor talking. She was admiring the calm way that handsome, grizzled William of Windsor addressed the monarch, with no sign his heart must be beating faster and his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth out of sheer awe at the presence of God’s Anointed. She heard William of Windsor say something about the Mortality, one of those pious commonplaces people uttered all the time while she was growing up: God’s retribution on the Race of Adam, a curse on sin, some such.

Before she knew what she was doing, Alice remembers, she found her mouth open and herself piping up, pert as anything: ‘Well, it wasn’t sent to kill me. I was born right in the teeth of it, and I survived,’ and she was grinning up at the pair of them, flashing her teeth, all bravado. Then, suddenly realising what she’d done by interrupting the King’s conversation, she stopped in terror. Both men were staring curiously at her. She sensed William of Windsor’s wide-open eyes were a signal to stop. But she pushed on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, she told herself. Seize the day. She put the grin back on her face, but she could hear her voice shake a little as she continued, with a smile: ‘…and I’ve lived to tell the tale through another bout of it, too…as we all have, with God’s grace. Who’s afraid of the Mortality?’

She very nearly went on to say the next things old Aunty Alison always used to say whenever she scoffed at the plague, back at Aunty’s kiln where Alice grew up. ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’ that hard old voice echoed in her head. ‘God’s curse for some; God’s blessing for others. So many people gone, but we’re still here, thank God, and they left it all behind for us, didn’t they? Just waiting to be picked up. The streets are paved with gold, if you only know where to look. Fortunes to be made, a king’s ransom many times over. All just waiting for anyone with a head on their shoulders to come along and take it.’ But fear overcame her again. She gulped and stopped. Then there was a long pause, during which Alice wished the earth would open and swallow her.

She’d always remember the way Edward’s eyes, eventually, softened and his great golden mane started to shake as he laughed. ‘Then you must be one of the very few of my subjects to be so blessed by God, little miss,’ he said, and his great lustrous eyes sparkled at her until she felt warm all over. He added, with a laugh that included her, ‘Or by the Devil, of course, who knows?’ and the look in his eyes told her she was allowed to laugh too. In the quietness that followed, he leaned forward, saying, very casually, yet with great courtliness, ‘Tell me, to whom do I have the honour…?’

She was so lucky in that first conversation with Edward.

At the time, she had no idea that Edward chafed as much as she did at the notion that the Mortality was divine punishment, and that there was nothing to do but lie down and die when it struck. Later she found out that the King of England had lost two children to the sickness himself – in that first bout of it, about when she, Alice, was born. But Edward was so reluctant to stay shut away from the world that, after a fretful winter in the relative safety of Oxford and King’s Langley, he came out at the height of the plague. That April, on St George’s Day, he forced hundreds of terrified knights to risk their lives coming together at his new castle at Windsor, for the first great meeting, at the giant Round Table he’d had built in homage to King Arthur, of the Order of the Garter. Edward prides himself on defying death. (Later still, once Alice and Edward were close enough for whispering, he laughed ticklishly in her ear with his story about how his ancestor, Count Fulke the Black, had married the daughter of the Devil, and about Countess Melusine shrieking and flying out through a window of the chapel, never to be seen again, when she’d been forced to go to Mass. Alice could see he very nearly believed he was descended from the Devil. It explained so much about his devil-may-care bravery, and about his luck, too. The King’s wind, they used to call it, the wind that blew him straight to France, and victory, every time he set sail across the Channel.) Of course he liked her death-defying talk, right from the start.

The chariot’s struggling over wooden planks to a platform.

Alice gathers the folds of her robe as the door opens. She can see Edward waiting for her on the dais, smiling in the distance. But Duke John is closer, on horseback, right behind her in the train of noblemen. To her pleasure, it’s he who dismounts and, taking the place of the groom, comes to her door to hand her down.

‘Jewels,’ her new friend says in her ear, with the beginnings of a smile and the beginnings of a compliment. ‘Beautiful ones, too.’ Then, in a different voice, looking suddenly taken aback: ‘Oh…but…isn’t that my mother’s necklace?’

‘Yes…your father got it out for me last night,’ Alice replies, feeling slightly apologetic all of a sudden, but trying not to sound it. His mother’s jewels – perhaps she should have thought? But it only takes a moment for blessed defiance to come back to her. She’s not stealing the jewels, for God’s sake, she tells herself. His mother’s been dead for years. Why shouldn’t she enjoy them? ‘And the other rubies. The rings…the bracelets…’ She can’t stop herself stretching out her right hand as she says the words.