Vanora Bennett - The People’s Queen

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.