The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett
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Название: The People’s Queen
Автор: Vanora Bennett
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007395255
isbn:
With all the charm in his armoury, he turns to her, opening his shoulders in an easy-going shrug. ‘Oh…’ he begins non-committally. ‘You know…’ Then he pauses, struck by the fact that he doesn’t really know. It’s ended well, thank God, but it was obviously insane to risk turning the Princess of England’s rage on himself.
It’s not even as if he knows Alice Perrers, especially. She’s just one of those people who’s always been around, at court, pretty much from the time he first came, at nineteen or twenty; he remembers her as rather younger than him, and not from a grand family, one of the waifs the old Queen used to appoint, on a whim, to be snubbed for the rest of their lives by the real nobility. She’s always looked a bit mischievous, though, as if it was never going to get her down that much. He’s always liked that in her. There’s a spark in her pale blue eyes; something that lifts her looks – rounded little limbs, pale skin, curly black hair that often escapes from its headdress – into occasional beauty. Chaucer remembers a younger Alice sitting next to Jean Froissart in church, and whispering something quiet that made the Queen’s boyish chronicler (another of those whimsical royal appointments) curl up and snort and rock with laughter, and then looking utterly composed while poor little Froissart desperately tried to control his shaking curls and heaving sides. That sort of thing was probably what made the Queen take Alice on for a bit when the Duke of Lancaster got one of her established demoiselles pregnant. The Queen, God rest her lovely soul, always loved laughter. And being able to make people laugh probably helped Alice cling on afterwards, Chaucer thinks, even though it was obvious she’d never have the instincts of nobility. She’s tough. She survived until the King got a soft spot for her, even though the things Chaucer’s Philippa said about her, with her sister, both of them looking at each other with those half-closed eyes, like two cats, full of the utter disdain of the born aristocrat for outsiders, which must have been the same sorts of things that other people were saying, were always so unkind…
Well, Geoffrey Chaucer thinks ruefully to himself, recalling moments when Philippa has given him that cat look too, and, raising her long and beautiful nose, referred to his own family’s background in less than flattering terms. Perhaps that’s why. ‘I was just easing things along,’ he tells his wife quietly.
She half closes her eyes. She half smiles. ‘Feeling sorry for the whore,’ she says, and though there’s no obvious cruelty in her voice he feels belittled by the very gentleness of her contempt. She wafts away.
Geoffrey Chaucer goes on standing there, while the courtiers talk around him, louder and louder. He does know, after all, why he intervened. He felt sorry for Alice Perrers, standing all alone with wine dripping down her face and off her hair, and her shoulders shaking, with that bullying old brute glaring at her as if she wished her dead, and a crowd gathered round staring as if they were at the bear-pit, hoping for blood. You could have all the jaunty courage in the world, and still it would do you no good if no one stood up for you.
Loyalty, Alice thinks, from her chariot, with its burning hot metallic sides. She’s turning her head graciously from side to side. She’s ignoring the low mutters from the crowd, and the heat. It’s almost like the old days, this spring heat, when she was young, before the weather went so cold, with the skies always lowering, the winters piled with snow, the summers passing in fitful grey. Yes, loyalty’s what counts. You stand by the people you’ve got. You help those who help you.
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. СКАЧАТЬ