The People's Queen (14 page)

If poor Jankyn Perrers hadn't died so soon, Alice has sometimes found herself thinking recently (a heart attack over a lobster dinner did for him, less than a year after he moved to England and only a few months after their marriage) - well, who can say? She might have stayed in the City to this day, growing fat with contentment and spending her energy nagging at her husband, or the next one, for a new music teacher or string of beads or bit of silk. She was happy enough, back in those days. You can be happy with so little when you're young, and not in love, and remember enough about being poor to be grateful you've got food in your belly and clothes on your back, and nothing more serious to worry about than the next flirtation, innocent or otherwise.

But another part of her thinks: No, I'd never have stopped there. Not when there's so much more in the world, so much higher to fly. And she's always been right to go on, and take a bit more, and try another thing, and keep her eyes open, until now.

Then again...

What she's thinking of doing now...with Latimer...what she's said she'll do...

Well, isn't it dangerous? Isn't it the kind of thing that might tempt Fortune to flip you over the top, and send you down?

Alice sighs, and shakes her head, and nudges her horse on. Aunty will know.

It was after Jankyn Perrers died, and when she got her toehold at court, that Alice first went back to Essex and found Aunty.

Alison was still there, hanging on, by herself. To this day, Alice doesn't know what happened to the boys she grew up with at the Henney tilery, old Aunty's other orphans. All she could work out is that they were long gone. Aunty didn't have much more idea than Alice where. 'People grow up. They make their own luck,' was her phlegmatic comment. All she could tell Alice was that Jack died, Johnny went for a carpenter, on the road, and Wat for a soldier, overseas. That's probably all either of them will ever hear, Alice thinks.

Without the kids' help, Aunty's tilery business wasn't doing so well. She'd got behind with a big order for her best customer, the Abbot of St Albans; he'd cancelled the contract; she'd been left with two thousand expensive tiles to shift. And that was impossible, in those hard new times, with the war gone wrong, and the gentry so tight and short of money. So Alice took Aunty on. It's what the old woman was owed, for Alice's childhood; and Alice found when she looked at that lined face that Aunty, for all her Essex rusticity, still felt like home.

Alice got the old woman to sell the kiln and the house. 'Don't get bogged down in the past,' she said kindly. And, while they sat together at the old scrubbed table and worked out what Aunty could do next, Alice also told the old woman her own story, and asked for advice about what
she
should be doing next.

While she was talking, she was still thinking to herself: What am I asking her for? A broken-down old stick of a thing from the country? This isn't stuff she knows anything about. It's court: French, and velvet. How can she possibly...?

But Aunty knew, all right.

'Seize the moment,' Aunty said, calm and crack-voiced as ever, and without hesitating, as soon as Alice paused. 'Do whatever you need to stay at court. You can; course you can, whatever you put your mind to. Just do it, and stop worrying. No point in agonising half your life away, wondering what to do, when you could have decided already and be off having some fun, is there now?'

And suddenly it all seemed easier; and Alice was grateful to have an adviser to hand who never did hesitate - who knew what she wanted, and just took it.

Alice bought Aunty a manor, further south, but still in Essex. And she's kept Aunty, ever since.

Alice thinks Aunty learned her chirpy ruthlessness on the roads. From various half-understood comments in her childhood, made by neighbours and men at markets, Alice half knows that the tilery wasn't always Aunty's. Aunty probably only got her hands on it through some sort of trick. It's fairly clear, from the droppings-in of the various uncles of long ago, that Aunty came from London. That may not have been the beginning of her story, though; she may have started from somewhere else, before. They've never been able to get it out of her. Alice doesn't blame Aunty for keeping her wits about her, though. People have had to, especially since the Mortality turned every old certainty on its head.

Greed, ambition, call it what you will - the spirit of the age - has been set free by so much death. That's what people say. Three bouts of plague since Alice was born, and half of Europe dead: only the naive should be surprised if people's nature changed. Survivors of the Mortality didn't bother to bless God for their astonishing luck (for, as a lot of people muttered, what did it have to do with God, their escape? When the Bishop of Bath and Wells tried to thank God for the plague's passing, at the end of 1349, the howling people of Yeovil kept him and his congregation besieged in the church all night long). People who know what's good for them have, since then, been too busy for God (who at least, as they often say with tough looks, didn't hate
them
enough to strike them dead). They're busy at each other's throats, squabbling over the spoils. That's only natural too.

The Mortality has brought so much change in its wake.

First, plain bewilderment: the glut of merchandise, not enough customers, prices plunging, and anyone still alive and with money in his pocket unable to believe his good fortune. That was the lesson old Alison and her London men friends learned so fast. Move into empty houses, sleep on strangers' beds, take over dead men's work (or don't bother to work at all). Eat off silver.

Then marriages: many more marriages, but much less love. People married orphans, and widows, for greed of goods, then quarrelled their lives away.

Then the fury of litigation, as the courts filled up with inheritance disputes. The notaries were dead. The cases took lifetimes to settle. Meanwhile squatters or the Church took over abandoned property, brigands pillaged the countryside, and fraudsters tricked yet more orphans out of their lands. And all the while, in the background, in the fields (or what had been fields), with the shrinking of land farmed by men, a greening as the forest threatened to come back.

Briefly there was no heriot, no merchet, and no tallage for the unfree, those walking skeletons with the caved-in cheeks and the smudgy under-eye skin and the bare, scratchy, scarred stick legs. For a year or two, till the panic eased, and it became clearer how much could still be farmed, villeins were allowed to keep their pennies. They didn't have to pay an annual cash sweetener to the manor. If their father died, they weren't forced to give the best beast away to the lord and the second best to the priest. For a few precious months, they didn't even have to pay when a daughter married off the manor, to compensate the lord for the loss of her future brood of children - tomorrow's human beasts of burden, each with a cash value in muscle weight, in rendered-down sweat.

It was only later, when the estate managers and the priests and the lords got their nerve again, and went back to demanding their dues from the skinny men-oxen they owned, that they realised there was trouble afoot.

For today there are too few villeins still alive, and too many empty fields needing hands, and too many tempting offers of work for cash. A reasonably brave, or greedy, man (and what's the difference, when it comes to it, between bravery and greed?) can choose to live better than his villein forefathers ever did.

And the men who have escaped out of their ruts talk. On the road, they talk to the other men with tools flocking on to farms and into towns, who've turned their backs on their earthly lords. They talk to the poor hedge-priests on the road, thin men with staring eyes and cheap russet robes - men who don't believe you need the Church of Rome to intercede for you with God, men who tell the crowds they can turn their back on their spiritual lords too, on the chant of the Latin they don't understand, and the fees they've always paid in the belief they're saving themselves from damnation, and yet not suffer for it in Hell. God's waiting, they whisper, in every field and cottage, not just in church, and He's a kindly God, too, not one to fear after all. You can find Him by yourself, if you only look. You don't need to pay. The talk's quiet, among the men who don't fear God or their lords any longer. But the look in every eye is dangerous.

It was all still all right, as far as the rulers of England were concerned - or just about all right - while the news from the war still warmed people's hearts, while drunk men could yell 'St George for Merry England!' in the taverns, and there was still a dream of glory.

But now the King's old. The knights are old. Their banners have faded. Their armour's rusting. And there have been no victories in France for years - just losses, and ransom demands. So the talk on the roads is getting louder, and the looks in the eyes of men no one wants to look at is getting uglier.

But Aunty loves it all: the muttering, the mischief, the men no one wants to look at. She's still taking in waifs and strays, even today, not children any more but furtive men with caps pulled down low on their foreheads to hide whatever burn marks are there. She gets them in to work her fields at her manor at Gaines. She loves that place. She doesn't act anything like a landlord, of course. She pays whatever they want, no questions asked. She shakes her head over their hard-luck stories. She lets them sleep in the barns they put up. She organises rough feasts for them on holy days. She shares her luck with them, and anyone else willing to have a laugh, and a drink, and a dance, and a chat. They love her for it.

So does Alice. However grand Alice has become, these past few years, she's gone on taking her worries to Aunty.

As she goes under the Aldgate, looking up from her horse to see if there's any sign of life at Chaucer's window (there isn't), Alice thinks that it's been good for her to be reminded by Aunty of how things look for the men on the ground. Because there's more and more reason for the stinking, resentful runaways - the men of the road - to be angry. Because the people who are doing well, especially the post-Mortality new rich, who are doing well so very suddenly, are more dangerously, visibly extravagant than anyone has ever been before.

And that's what Alice's personal experience of the changes, in the walk of life she's chosen, has been.

Clothes, for instance, are lovelier and more expensive than ever before, and on backs ever less noble. In the year Alice first came to court, the envious in Parliament were so anxious that the natural, static, eternal order of things was being upended by the shocking vanity of men in curly-toed shoes and women with a hunger for cloth of gold that the Members of Parliament vainly tried to stop the new rich flaunting themselves. They passed a law insisting that everyone dress according to their rightful station in life.

The sumptuary law was an ass, everyone agreed. Yeomen and their wives, for instance, were forbidden to wear cloth of silk or silver, girdles, knives, buttons, rings, garters, brooches, ribbons, chains, or any gold, silver, embroidered or enamelled items. But what fun would it have been for a wealthy yeoman's wife to deny herself all that when she'd extracted the money from somewhere, or someone, and was looking forward to buying it? If you paid heed to the law, it was russet wool only for carters, ploughmen, oxherds, cowherds, shepherds, dairy workers and other keepers of beasts and threshers of corn. But who was going to stop a shepherd who'd found the money to buy a knife, or a ring, and take it off? Naturally, no one took any notice. Naturally, yeomen's wives glittered and preened like peacocks.

'King Canute had no more luck stopping the sea coming in than they'll have enforcing the sumptuary law,' a much younger Alice snickered. A widow, for the second time, but just out of her black and white cowl in time for the one-year mind in her husband's memory. She went on snickering over the sumptuary law for the next four or five years, as her lovers changed, and her own clothes grew more luxurious. By the time she found her way into the King's bed, the law had been repealed.

Alice has tried, in her time, to give Aunty beautiful clothes; jewels. But Aunty only laughs incredulously at them. 'Not me, dear,' she croaks, calm as ever. 'Whatever would I do in one of
them
?' Alice has given up long ago. All she's bringing with her this time is a bunch of flowers she's picked by the roadside, and money for wages.

Aunty's great plus, in Alice's view, is that she's flown a good few rides on Fortune's wheel, but always known when she wants to stop. That's why Alice has gone on asking for the old woman's opinion. She's never met anyone else who knew, so precisely, just how far they could go.

It's not just the clothes Aunty doesn't want - the aping of a gentility she doesn't aspire to. There's Gaines, too. When Alice first found the run-down old place, she was only thinking of it as a stopgap. What Alice really wanted, when she bought it, was to bide her time, then get revenge, on Aunty's behalf, on the Abbot of St Albans.

It took Alice's bailiffs at her grand Wendover manor in Hertfordshire (conveniently close to St Albans) months and years of sitting in taverns and listening to gossip to find a man with a grudge against the Abbot that had a cash value, and might stand up in court. When they'd got Thomas Fitzjohn in to see her and he'd told her the Abbot had laid false claim to Oxhey manor - forcing him into the courts to defend his rights, where he might well be cheated of his rights by powerful friends of the abbey, so, effectively stealing it - Alice looked at his light eyes, filled with the familiar hope, the dream of instant money, and something in them reminded her of Jack and Tom and Johnny and Wat and herself, back in the day. Accepting his claim to the property, she bought the lands from him on the spot, for a substantial sum, knowing she was really buying his dispute with the Abbot. Without recourse to any courts, she moved her land agents in. The tenants at Oxhey were happy enough to answer to her, not the grasping Abbot. It was only Abbot de la Mare, that strange old broomstick of twiggy, stringy limbs and white-flecked nose and white eyebrows inside the abbey, who was furious.