The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ fuzzily, Chaucer now remembers that he’s asked quite a lot of people in this room, since his earlier exchange with Alice by the window, about her husbands. There’s been a quiet, nudging, whiskery sort of conspiracy about the answers he’s got, and more than one jovial ‘oh ho, my boy!’ But he senses that no one else really knows, either, what Alice was up to before she became the Queen’s demoiselle and the King fell in love with her. ‘She’s packed a lot into her years in this vale of tears, that one,’ someone said knowingly. ‘They say she was very friendly with Froissart, the Hainaulter,’ Lyons said, ‘and, or so I heard, with the knight who went to Ireland, what’s-his-name, Windsor.’ Lyons tried to wink at Chaucer but Chaucer shifted his eyes. ‘There was Champagne, the baker, I heard. When she was just a girl. And Perrers, obviously,’ someone else said. ‘After Champagne. Wasn’t she married to Perrers?’ Nods all round, though nods that didn’t seem to be backed by much precise knowledge as to which Perrers Alice might have lived with. One man opined, hazily, ‘Jankyn Perrers, was it? The Fleming?’ And, at the same time, another offered, ‘Sir Richard Perrers? Hertfordshire?’ All merchants know it’s a mistake to admit ignorance. Rumours and guesses – even foolish ones – are better than no knowledge at all. But still, this conversation soon petered out. The lack of real interest makes Chaucer see that, even to these men, who like to measure and map and mine every potentially useful relationship and contact, it hardly matters what Alice was before she was touched by the King’s grace, or whatever has made her the powerhouse she’s become. It’s her vivaciousness, and her current web of friendships, and her astonishing Midas touch, that interests them. Now, not the past.

      But all those questions come rushing back into Chaucer’s mind when he sees her. Suddenly brave, he thinks: No harm in asking.

      ‘So…’ he says, feeling his tongue thick in his mouth, ‘how did you come to meet and marry Master Champagne, if you grew up in Essex?’

      Country gentry families, in Essex as elsewhere, don’t, on the whole, marry their daughters into City trade families, unless they’ve fallen on hard times and happened upon a temptingly rich merchant suitor already buying land in the countryside near their home. What little Chaucer knows of Master Champagne the baker doesn’t seem to fit. If Master Champagne was indeed the first husband.

      Then he blushes. He’s given away the fact that he’s been prying into her past all afternoon now, hasn’t he? ‘If that isn’t an impertinent question,’ he adds hastily. But he isn’t too mortified. With Alice Perrers, he’s beginning to feel, he can ask, at least. She won’t hold a spirit of enquiry against him.

      He’s right. She doesn’t look offended. She even hesitates, as if she might confide in him. There are memories in her eyes. For the first time, Chaucer sees the beauty of her.

      But all she ends up saying, as Chaucer goes on looking expectantly into her eyes, is, ‘Oh…I hardly remember. A day on the river…cygnets and ducklings…liverymen notching their beaks…a lot of laughing…spring in the air, I expect. But you know how it is. It seems so important at the time, but then you forget…’

      Her voice grows lighter and more playful with every phrase. The moment has passed. She isn’t going to tell him anything.

      He shrugs. There’s something delicious in this conversation, even without the kind of confidences he’s been fishing for. So he doesn’t much care.

      But she isn’t just teasing him. He can tell from the little furrow that now appears on her forehead – which, strangely enough, makes her look very young for a moment, not old – that she’s thinking something serious, too.

      ‘You know, Chaucer,’ she adds (by now he likes the way she just calls him ‘Chaucer’), ‘I think people worry far too much about where they’re from. It’s not the past that counts, or where you’re from. It’s where you’re going, and what you do when you get there. That’s what matters.’

      Chaucer thinks this over, and finds that the honesty in this matter-of-fact statement of her ambition pleases him more than he might have expected it to. This clarity of hers must be what has so impressed the merchants. He thinks: I’ll do what they do in future and forget her past. No point asking foolish questions.

      There’s another pause. The red begins to bleed out of the shadows.

      She’s staring out again at the greying fields. Without turning towards him, with her eyes fixed out there somewhere, she adds, with that near-wistfulness she’s had earlier, that he took for the beginning of sincerity, ‘Anyway, you can marry all you want…but there’s only one person you ever truly love, isn’t there?’

      Chaucer wonders, but can’t for the life of him tell, whether she means the King.

      

      Chaucer goes to sleep in a mostly happy blur of impressions and memories, the majority of them concerning his new friendship with Alice Perrers. But when he wakes up before dawn with a pounding headache, full of worries again, what he remembers most clearly is that quiet, strange moment between Alice Perrers, and Lyons, and Latimer: the three of them muttering together, glancing quickly at each other, egging each other on to something he couldn’t grasp.

      Even when he thinks back on it now, in the scratchy predawn, tossing in his bed, reaching for the water jug, he can’t imagine what that conversation can have been about.

       FIVE

      ‘Why was Richard Lyons with us yesterday?’ Chaucer asks through his headache. ‘When he’s a vintner?’

      Walworth, who until July, when his mayoral job begins, will represent the City at the wool trade, looks up from his desk across the hall. Chaucer sees the fishmonger’s lean jaw clench, and the beautiful peaceful eyes go flinty, so you can see that, despite the angel’s golden hair, he’d be a bad man to cross.

      Then the merchant’s eyes clear and his wry smile comes, transforming the fighter back into a charmer. ‘Ah,’ Walworth says, easily. ‘You mean you don’t know why Lyons needed to meet the wool comptroller, since his business has nothing to do with wool?’

      The clerks at each man’s desk also look up. Chaucer’s one puts down his quill. There are faint, expectant smiles on both pink young faces. Chaucer can practically see them craning forward.

      Chaucer’s feeling a little wary now. He never expected such a strong reaction. But he nods.

      ‘As it happens, we’d all like to know the answer to that question, dear boy,’ Walworth says, nodding to the inquisitive clerks to go back to their columns of figures. They bow their heads. Then Walworth smiles a little wider, till his flawlessly ivory teeth glint in the sun. ‘Just why is Master Lyons so interested in the wool business, when, as you say, he’s a vintner?’

      Walworth does tell Chaucer what he thinks of the Flemish vintner, but only later, at midday, outside the Customs House, and out of the clerks’ earshot. He links arms with Chaucer and walks him up Water Lane to Thames Street. He has to lean down and sideways to reach, and to murmur in, Chaucer’s ear. He’s tall and wiry, and as strong as a knight in the lists.

      ‘We are very glad,’ he begins, with what to Chaucer’s ear sounds unnecessary formality, ‘all of us, that it is you who have been chosen as comptroller – a man we in the City can talk to without reserve. Someone we can trust.’

      Chaucer СКАЧАТЬ