The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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      Sometimes it only takes a moment. From the moment Alice stepped out through the tall weeds and, smoothing down her rags, said, in her cheeriest voice, addressing the complaining mother, whom she guessed would be likeliest to respond, ‘Need any help, lady?’ her future was settled.

      The Champagnes let her, and the other dancing-eyed urchins, take them home to the tilery. But it was only her they saw. And when they got home, Aunty Alison took one look at the cut of their clothes and saw them right. Told Alice to mind the little boy, show him the wooden toys on the shelf, make herself useful; got the other kids measuring out drinks and cutting hunks of bread, quickly now. Over a cooling draught of ale, the mum, dusting down the stool she was sitting on with a rag before putting her genteel behind down, told Aunty everything: how they’d left London to inspect the manor she’d inherited from an uncle, who’d died in the latest bout of the Mortality, last year. How lost they’d got with no one to guide them. How they couldn’t have asked for directions; they’d feared for their lives in the fleapit inn they’d stopped at last night as it was. Those eyes, staring. It was out Sudbury way, where they were going. She’d been happy enough to bed down at the kiln for the night, the mum. A few fleas in the rushes were nothing to worry about, compared to the eyes of the men out there. The dad was happy too, too. But, oh, how those smeary-faced girls had whined and complained, sniffling and turning away from their food as if it would poison them, looking round with hunted eyes at the thick walls and low roof.

      ‘Never seen anything like it in my life,’ Aunty muttered, winking at her own brood, when the little boy, pulled away from the toy Wat had brought him because his mum wanted him and his sisters to wash in the stream, started stamping his feet and shrieking the place down. ‘Never been said no to, that one, that’s for sure.’ Then, as it turned out, the kid wouldn’t have anyone but Alice take him to wash. Alice had had him roaring with laughter a minute before, playing with Wat’s toy, snuffling, ‘Giddyup giddyup!’ as she made the imaginary farmer fall off his carved wooden horse. ‘Want her!’ he was howling, and Alice felt old Alison’s eyes suddenly thoughtful on her back as she skipped the boy energetically off, away from his grey-faced, relieved parents. She could tell what Alison was thinking. She’d had the same thought already. Alice was the best of old Alison’s kids, the sharpest of anyone at spotting whatever it was in the weed-grown manor houses and crumpled Mortality cottages the kids spent their days exploring that might fetch a good price, the best too at remembering what might be useful where, and to whom, and sidling up to the right person on market day to sing out, ‘Wasn’t it you looking for fire-irons?’ or ‘Didn’t you say you wanted a cook-pot?’ So it was natural she’d see this chance as quickly as Alison. She’d heard enough, not just from Alison, but also from the various uncles and cousins who came down from London to take away the tiles to whichever abbey or priory had put in an order, or to take on the other things the kids found, or to leave behind a new child picked up on their travels (old Alison had a soft heart for kids left, as she’d once been, to fend for themselves; and even orphans must be worth something now, with people so desperate for children). Alice had grown up with the knowledge that the streets of London were paved with gold.

      She was back with the freshly washed, angelically sleepy toddler in time to hear Aunty Alison’s voice, in the twilight, putting her own thought into words: ‘You want someone to look after some of them for you, and my Alice, she’s a good girl.’ They were two of a kind, her and Aunty Alison. And Aunty, who was always telling her there was more to life than a tilery in Essex, that there was a whole world out there, just waiting to be discovered, was winking at her now, winking and grinning, as if she’d struck lucky.

      She had. The next morning she was off with the family; Alice leading the little boy’s pony, and ignoring the familiar eyes watching from behind the cow-parsley, and not letting herself see the thin boy-arms of Tom and Ham and Wat and Johnny and Jack waving goodbye, because she didn’t want to feel sad, and she was already too busy making herself indispensible to these new friends – daisy chains for the girls, stolen apples for the little boy, bright sweet nothings for the mum and dad. She was seizing the moment.

      Of course the Champagnes were bitterly disappointed when they actually saw their manor – another of the weed-shrouded ruins Alice knew so well, with its villeins long gone, off hunting higher wages somewhere. She could have told them how it would be before they started, but she was twelve, old enough to know hard truths weren’t her business. So she cooed and comforted instead. She trapped them a hare to roast on a little spit. By the end of another week, when the Champagnes, already eager to forget their embarrassingly naive dream of sudden landed wealth, were sighing with relief at the sight of London on the horizon, they still had Alice with them. ‘Look,’ she was saying to little Tommy Champagne, managing not to look astonished herself at the great wall rearing up ahead, or the gate, or the soldiers. ‘Home soon now.’

      She’d always thought she would climb high. It had only ever been a question of time, and opportunity.

      When, weeping, the silver-haired Master Champagne put his wife into the grave a year later, then turned to Alice the capable maidservant and wept into her hair, and stroked it, and kissed her shoulder, she didn’t hesitate for a moment. She knew at once what she’d do. Even if she’d thought that you might only love – truly love – once in your life, and her true love certainly wasn’t dear wrinkly old Master Champagne, whose egg always went down his front in a forgetful yellow trail, she also knew there’d be no harm in him. He’d do for now.

      A good man he turned out, too, in the rest of his short time in this vale of tears. He let her be the sturdy, independent sort of person she was. He laughed at her stories. In return for her good humour at sharing a bed with a spindle-shanked, grey-skinned old husband, he also became a more willing giver of ribbons from the fair than his daughters remembered him having been before. Also of new robes, not just the old mistress’s altered in the details, and (as Alice’s knowledge of what she might ask for increased) embroidery silks, and finally even French lessons, so she could act the lady rather than the baker’s wife with Master Champagne’s well-heeled clients.

      Master Champagne loved the idea of his wife chatting in French with the gentry so much that he never said a cross word, or had an ugly thought, either, about the merry friendship Alice had had in those months before he passed away with the curly-haired young French master from Hainault. Young Jean Froissart was glad enough to earn some extra pennies as he set himself up in England, just by spending an afternoon in the City every week or two, chatting to a nice-looking girl so eager to learn; it all worked out well for everyone. As old Aunty Alison always said, ‘Pick up whatever you can by the wayside; you never know when it might come in handy.’

      The French lessons paid off, all right, though maybe not as Tom Champagne expected. Or Alice, either, come to that.

      Eight months after their marriage, he left behind the fuss and bustle of earthly life. He died straining on the chamber pot in the night, an indignity that Alice tactfully tidied up, when she woke up in the morning to find him cold on the floor, before calling for the servants. The poor old dear, she thought, opening the windows, having rearranged him, and wiped him down, and covered and hidden the pot; how he’d hate to have been seen like that. The French lessons were swapped for widow’s weeds. But a certain Master Perrers of Hainault, who’d advanced the Champagne family some money so their baking business could be expanded, and thus been part of the discussions with the lawyers that marked the settlement of the estate, had been as impressed by the young widow’s few words of elegantly pronounced French as he had by her sudden fortune (or so he said). Master Perrers, a plump lover of the pleasures of the table, who could be reduced to ecstatic groans by a good description of a rich sauce or a fine wine, was old enough, and foolish enough, to enjoy Alice’s flattering suggestion that he might be related to the gentry family of Perrers who’d once bought tiles from the kiln. Not that she’d told him, exactly, that this was her connection with that noble family; she couldn’t recall exactly, but she just might have teased him with the idea that those Perrerses were distant cousins of her own, for СКАЧАТЬ