The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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       THREE

      Master Geoffrey Chaucer, newly appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy on Wool, Sheepskins and Leather for the Port of London, can tell from the stillness and the shimmer on the water that it’s going to be another hot June day.

      He’s early. It’s not yet properly light. But then he’s nervous.

      Any minute now he’ll be joined on the jetty at Westminster by his companions for his first day in his new job – an old friend and a new. Meanwhile, all he can do is wait and listen to the bells ring for Lauds behind him in the royal village.

      Soon, he knows, there’ll be pandemonium at the palace. All the servants will be up, running around, sweeping, carrying pails and boxes and bags and piles in and out of every imaginable gate and doorway, feeding horses or killing fowl for the table, smelling the bread smells rising from the ovens. The King’s court is to move to Sheen in a day or two, now that the mystery plays and celebrations of Corpus Christi are over. By St John’s Eve, not a fortnight hence, it’ll be off again, having eaten its many-headed way through the local food supplies, for a midsummer interlude at Havering-atte-Bower. Chaucer’s always liked the peace of Havering. He pulls his robe around his shoulders and steps on to the jetty, wishing he could feel more whole-heartedly happy to be leaving behind that brightly coloured wandering life.

      It seems no time at all since Alice Perrers materialised beside him at one of the masques she so energetically organised for her week of spring festivities (one in which the players on the Passion wagon were re-enacting a Crusade, with piercing cries and dramatically flowing crimson blood and a real fire engulfing the mock-castle as Saladin dropped writhing to his death. An incongruous background for conversation, he remembers thinking). She slipped a confiding arm through his, and whispered, with her eyes all persuasively lit up, that the King was minded to give him high Crown office in the City, if he was minded to accept…?

      He couldn’t believe it at first. This is what Philippa most chides him for – failing to seek out preferment – and here it was coming at him without his even trying, in the person of the King’s favourite, this chirpy little barrel of fire, who was holding on to his arm and grinning slyly up at him as if they were old friends sharing some tremendous joke.

      But going back to the City – even to do this responsible job, which will certainly earn him the King’s favour if he’s successful – seems in so many ways like a step back into his past that it’s thrown him into inner turmoil. This turmoil has gone with him through every one of the meetings with government officials that Alice Perrers has been whisking him through in the past few weeks. Every imagining he has of a future waking up to the cries of the City’s streets, and walking through those too-familiar lanes to a job among men he knew as a child, is accompanied by a prickly cloud of difficult memories of the other life he’s become accustomed to, these past twenty years.

      He might see more of Philippa if he’s to be in London all the time – and Alice Perrers has made plain he will be expected to be at his desk at the Customs House every day, checking the merchants’ accounts. Philippa’s Castilian mistress, the wife of the Duke of Lancaster, likes her long stays at the Savoy (and who wouldn’t? Chaucer thinks, as the memories of those bright avenues and splendid halls fill his mind – another soft little knife in his side, another bittersweet sigh). The Lancastrian palace on the Strand, where Philippa spends so much of her time working as demoiselle to the Duchess, is only a boat ride away. Now, seeing Philippa is a mixed blessing at the best of times, but what most concerns Chaucer is that he might also have more time with his children, if he’s always in London, than he has while he’s been attached to the King’s court, as one of thirty esquires kept at my lord’s side to be quietly useful, plunging up and down the land on that endless crusade of cushions and silver-gilt cups, not necessarily going the same way, at the same time, as the Duke and Duchess of Lancaster’s court, or seeing nearly enough of little Thomas and Elizabeth.

      That’s a good part of what’s made his eyes glitter at the prospect of this new job. What has made Philippa’s eyes glitter is learning of the extra pension he’ll be getting now for the Customs post, added to the ones the Duke of Lancaster (a better master by far than the tricky old King when it comes to payment) has already secured for both of them for their service to various members of the royal family. Between them, their income will now add up to nearly sixty pounds a year. For the first time, they’ll be comfortable by anyone’s reckoning. Philippa knows, of course, that she’ll be expected to do a little visible wifely duty in return – attending City dinners with him, from time to time, that sort of thing. But he knows her, and her suspicion of merchant ways, too well to expect that she’ll do more than the bare minimum. Still, he must be grateful. She’s told him, gently enough, that although she won’t live with him in the City (he couldn’t expect her to give up her life at court for merchants, after all) and she won’t hear of Thomas being taken away from court where he does lessons with the Duke of Lancaster’s daughters, and being sent instead to St Paul’s almonry school in the shadow of the cathedral, to mix with the sons of merchants, (which is where Geoffrey Chaucer got his book-learning), she and the children will, at least, spend holidays with him in London. At least sometimes. He’s almost sure she’ll keep her word. At least, she will if she isn’t in a mood, as she too often is, to whisper to the children that their maternal de Roët blood is nobler than their father’s, and to have her own coat of arms, not his, embroidered on their clothes.

      Geoffrey Chaucer sighs. There’s no point in false optimism. He knows that really. She’s turned the children against him. More and more, he can see she has. All his absences, all his eager plans to win rewards from the King for his subtle negotiating, have left the children alone with their mother for too long, and Chaucer has come to realise he can’t trust her to represent him fairly to them while he’s gone. ‘You’re only nine,’ he said to Thomas, when he first noticed that СКАЧАТЬ