Vanora Bennett - The People’s Queen

It’s a picture you see all over the place. There are a lot of other people in post-Mortality England who are obsessed with the goddess Fortune and her wheel. She features in the rose window of churches all over the land.

There’s nothing very Christian about Fortune, of course. But the priests turn a blind eye to the goddess’s inconvenient paganness, because she packs in the crowds at Mass. To the brave, and to the chancers, and the gamblers, and the opportunists, Fortune represents hope: that effortless climb to the top of the wheel. But what she also represents – the capricious destruction of the greedy, later on – suits the gloomy, doomy mood of everyone else.

You see envy in the narrow eyes of every stay-at-home who doesn’t dare venture out to try his luck in the rough new game of life, these days. Anyone who isn’t making a quick fortune wants anyone who is to get his come-uppance quick. So thinking of the punishment Fortune has waiting at the end of the wheel she spins pleases the dourest of congregations in the churches, looking bitterly up at the rose windows, as much as the promise of hope pleases the people with dreams in their hearts.

What the congregation sees in the window: Fortune, that temptress, that slut, smiles temptingly down, in jewel-bright light, luring people on to take a chance, to jump on her wheel, to make their name, to get rich quick.

And this is what happens next to the humans whirling round their little bubbles of coloured glass, chancing a dance with the goddess: once she’s hooked someone in, you’ll see her willing victim on her left, clinging to the turning wheel as it moves upwards, clockwise. This happy human figure with everything still to come has sun-kissed hair flying down and back as it floats effortlessly towards the top, with the prideful little word regnabo , which Alice likes to translate as ‘I’m going to have it all’, floating above their prideful little head.

Above Fortune’s head, hanging on at the very top of the turning wheel, is a second little human figure who’s happier still. This one crows, regno , ‘I’m at the top!’ in the same cramped black letters.

But it’s the other side that most interests the losers in the congregation, because the wheel that has brought those human figures up keeps turning, and down they go again.

It’s the terror on the face of the little figure to Fortune’s right that these people like to gloat over, the terror of someone being whirled back downwards by the wheel, realising it’s all over, that day of glory, never to return, and howling, ‘I’m finished’, regnavi. Best of all is the abjectness of the last little person, right at the bottom, dropping off the wheel, being trampled under Fortune’s careless feet. ‘Sum sine regno,’ it whimpers. ‘I’ve been left with nothing.’

Quite right too, says the congregation, through smugly pursed lips. Pride goes before a fall.

Alice remembers looking up at the first of these great glowing stained-glass temptations she ever saw, and saying to Aunty, a bit defiantly, in the way of children trying to find words for a serious idea, but still afraid they’ll be laughed at for being naive, ‘I don’t see why you have to be destroyed by Fortune’s wheel. Why can’t you just get off when you’ve got where you want – stop at the top?’

And she remembers Aunty laughing, but kindly, in that way she’s always had, of seeming peacefully to know what’s what, without even trying, and answering, ‘I know just what you mean, dear. The great trick to life is knowing when to stop.’

Alice must already have known, even back then, when she first saw Fortune, when she was, what, nine or ten, that she would try and hitch a lift on the wheel, too, as soon as she possibly could. She must already have been thinking out how.

But she couldn’t have guessed how soon her chance would come.

It came on another uncertain day, back in Essex, and Alice a quick girl of eleven or so chasing Johnny and Wat and Tom through a cloud of cow-parsley, and everyone whooping and red-faced and light with laughter, when one of the boys – Wat, maybe, whoever was up ahead – stopped. So they all stopped. They were good like that – took their cues from each other, got the hint as quick as they could, a wink here, a nod there. They trusted each other, all old Alison’s brood of waifs and strays, being brought up together, as if they were real brothers and sisters. So now they hunched down in the ditch beside him, stilling their breath, ragged and sharp-eyed, looking to see what he’d seen.

And there they were, a whole family of newcomers, leading horses back from the stream to the road, a lanky mother, complaining in an undertone, a henpecked-looking husband nodding his head and patting hopelessly at the air with his hands, five daughters, walking in order of size, the oldest only a bit smaller than Alice, but all with the same air of yawning discontent, and, still astride on a pony tied by a string to the manservant’s nag, a little boy, half-asleep, nodding from side to side with the animal’s movement. All in clothes without a tear or a mend in them. And every horse oat-fed and bright and fat as a barrel.

Sometimes it only takes a moment. From the moment Alice stepped out through the tall weeds and, smoothing down her rags, said, in her cheeriest voice, addressing the complaining mother, whom she guessed would be likeliest to respond, ‘Need any help, lady?’ her future was settled.

The Champagnes let her, and the other dancing-eyed urchins, take them home to the tilery. But it was only her they saw. And when they got home, Aunty Alison took one look at the cut of their clothes and saw them right. Told Alice to mind the little boy, show him the wooden toys on the shelf, make herself useful; got the other kids measuring out drinks and cutting hunks of bread, quickly now. Over a cooling draught of ale, the mum, dusting down the stool she was sitting on with a rag before putting her genteel behind down, told Aunty everything: how they’d left London to inspect the manor she’d inherited from an uncle, who’d died in the latest bout of the Mortality, last year. How lost they’d got with no one to guide them. How they couldn’t have asked for directions; they’d feared for their lives in the fleapit inn they’d stopped at last night as it was. Those eyes, staring. It was out Sudbury way, where they were going. She’d been happy enough to bed down at the kiln for the night, the mum. A few fleas in the rushes were nothing to worry about, compared to the eyes of the men out there. The dad was happy too, too. But, oh, how those smeary-faced girls had whined and complained, sniffling and turning away from their food as if it would poison them, looking round with hunted eyes at the thick walls and low roof.

‘Never seen anything like it in my life,’ Aunty muttered, winking at her own brood, when the little boy, pulled away from the toy Wat had brought him because his mum wanted him and his sisters to wash in the stream, started stamping his feet and shrieking the place down. ‘Never been said no to, that one, that’s for sure.’ Then, as it turned out, the kid wouldn’t have anyone but Alice take him to wash. Alice had had him roaring with laughter a minute before, playing with Wat’s toy, snuffling, ‘Giddyup giddyup!’ as she made the imaginary farmer fall off his carved wooden horse. ‘Want her !’ he was howling, and Alice felt old Alison’s eyes suddenly thoughtful on her back as she skipped the boy energetically off, away from his grey-faced, relieved parents. She could tell what Alison was thinking. She’d had the same thought already. Alice was the best of old Alison’s kids, the sharpest of anyone at spotting whatever it was in the weed-grown manor houses and crumpled Mortality cottages the kids spent their days exploring that might fetch a good price, the best too at remembering what might be useful where, and to whom, and sidling up to the right person on market day to sing out, ‘Wasn’t it you looking for fire-irons?’ or ‘Didn’t you say you wanted a cook-pot?’ So it was natural she’d see this chance as quickly as Alison. She’d heard enough, not just from Alison, but also from the various uncles and cousins who came down from London to take away the tiles to whichever abbey or priory had put in an order, or to take on the other things the kids found, or to leave behind a new child picked up on their travels (old Alison had a soft heart for kids left, as she’d once been, to fend for themselves; and even orphans must be worth something now, with people so desperate for children). Alice had grown up with the knowledge that the streets of London were paved with gold.