The People’s Queen

‘If only,’ she mouths, somehow managing to form the chilly words without reducing her chiselled beauty by even a fraction, and indicating the luxury that surrounds them with a small, expert lift of one eyebrow, ‘if only you had even a tenth of that woman’s ambition, how different things might be for us.’

Geoffrey, her husband, only responds by looking around, as if he’s surprised by it all, at the eye-popping feast conjured into existence by the ambition of that woman, the King’s mistress. He furrows his brow in anxiety. He runs his fingers through his hair – or tries to. His fingers connect with the hat he’s forgotten he’s wearing. They knock it half off his head. He crams it back on, all wrong, and sits down with an embarrassing thump on the bench, interrupting the conversation of the men on either side of him. He goes red. He begins a wordy apology. Philippa looks at him, shakes her head very slightly, and sighs.

Dance, all of you, dance, Alice thinks, watching the crowd of sweating faces below, rather enjoying their sufferings. Go on. Higher, a tiny bit higher.

It’s an unusually hot April evening. It’s only ten minutes since Alice signalled for the tables to be pushed against the walls. The air’s still thick with sheep fat and fowl grease. But how they’re all throwing themselves about in the crowd below.

She can’t resist taking pleasure in examining them from the superior vantage point of the royal dais. The courtiers have fused into one heaving mass, energetically going through the motions of the saltarello. They’re glowing and glistening and panting under their turbans, inside their heavy velvets and silks. They’re all doing their best to show their King they’re happy to be where they are, and watching Alice where she is, at his side.

Alice fans herself complacently, and examines the rictus smile on the dark face of the Duke of Lancaster. He looked so dignified in his red a few minutes ago, but now his face is the same blood hue as his tunic. It pleases her that even the world’s most arrogant man is out there, gritting his teeth and leaping in the air, as determined as the rest of the scarletfaced courtiers to please the King his father and host by looking delighted with the entertainment laid on by Alice.

She turns a little, enough to murmur into the ear of the King his father and host, in a way that the Duke will be sure to see. (She’s wanted to make a relationship with Duke John for years, even though, between his long absences at the war in France, he’s not yet shown great interest in her. So it won’t do him any harm to show him the extent of her power now. She knows how power attracts.) The lords a-leaping down there won’t be able to hear what she’s saying to their master, but they’ll be able to guess at the tone of her voice from her sly sideways grin. ‘I don’t know how they all have the energy,’ she murmurs, affecting weariness, and fans herself. She has it all worked out. No one will ever expect Edward to dance, unless by some whim he chooses to. His age lets him off: rising sixty-two, and the long golden beard long ago turned silver. So he’ll be pleased she wants to sit it out too. And why not? There’s no point in her tiring herself out tonight. Her big day will be tomorrow. ‘In this heat…’ she adds, even more languidly. She likes the way the French comes sliding so naturally out of her mouth, as if she’d been born to it, even if, in reality, her French has been learned more at Stratford-atte-Bowe than in Paris. She’s had to work hard at it, in her time. But if she’s learned anything, it is that the point of hard work is to make things look easy. When Edward chuckles back, and pats her hand, she permits herself a slightly bigger smile.

They haven’t always been so eager to please, those courtiers down there. Let them dance to her tune now.

Tomorrow, Edward will show her off to the world, in a burst of glory the like of which England has never seen. Tomorrow, for a week, mercenaries, princes and dukes from all over Christendom will watch a pageant in which the influence of Alice Perrers, who has come so far already in her twenty-five years on this earth, and might yet go further, is finally made plain.

Tomorrow, at mid-morning, the court will walk through London dressed in red and white, the colours she’s chosen for the week. With the ladies holding the horses of their gentlemen by their golden bridles, they’ll set off from outside this window, from the Hill behind the Tower, and process along Tower Street and Chepe, then out of Aldersgate to the pasture-cum-jousting ground at Smithfield. And then the gentlemen of the court will joust, in her honour, while the people of the City, all dressed in their coloured liveries, watch and cheer. And she, and only she, Alice Perrers, who will be known for the week as Lady of the Sun (a title she’s thought of herself), as well as Queen of the Lists, will ride in a golden chariot, at the centre of everything. She’ll be wearing a cap encrusted with jewels, and a cloak of Venetian gold lined with red taffeta, on top of the red gown, lined in white, embroidered with seed pearls, and edged in royal ermine, that she’s got on tonight. She’s going to astonish. She’s going to impress.

It’s time they realised – all these courtiers, all those Londoners – that a woman who’s already, by the grace of God and the generosity of the King of England (and her own financial acumen), one of the richest people in the land, has every intention of shining like the sun for the rest of her days.

She hasn’t forgotten her place entirely. Not really. She isn’t going to start acting like, or thinking of herself as, a real, born-to-the-throne queen. (Anyway, who would have let her if she tried? They all still worship the memory of dear old Queen Philippa, who’s been dead for most of the eight years of Alice’s supremacy; and Alice doesn’t have a drop of anything like royal blood in her veins, or noble blood, or even knightly blood. She’s a different kind altogether. She’s not even very interested in thinking of being a helpless, dependent, real queen; she likes her freedom too much to dream of sitting still in an expensive robe, smiling at posturing fools of knights-errant, for the rest of her days.) Still, only an idiot could ignore the meaning of her punning pageant title, and Londoners aren’t idiots. Edward’s royal symbol is the sun. If Alice Perrers is to be Lady of the Sun, at least for this week of glory, then she will be displaying all the power a queen commands. And power, at least the quiet kind that comes with wealth, she does enjoy.

Even before Edward, even as a very young woman, Alice was busy consolidating her position in this world. Every penny she’s ever inherited, or made, has been put back into snapping up leases on this property or that, taking on unconsidered trifles of fields or tenements here, there and everywhere, making improvements, building, putting up rents, and using the profits to buy more. She’s got a gift for it. She’s done extraordinarily well – far better than she would have if she’d set her sights purely on imitating the real born-to-it ladies of the court and becoming almost indistinguishable from them. But, of course, it’s been much easier for her to achieve wealth since the world came to realise that there’s a misty, unseen, kingly presence at her back. That knowledge concentrates people’s minds. It keeps them honest. No one cheats on a bargain with Alice, as her store of coin and leases grows. No one has, for a long time.

The real point of this week’s festivities, as far as Alice is concerned, is to make sure she can continue to enjoy the power that feeds and protects all the wealth she’s still building up – even after Edward dies.

For Alice has begun to understand that the enchanted dream she’s been living in until now – the best part of a decade as the indulged darling of a dear old man who, himself, has been on the throne for nearly half a century, and is loved, everywhere, as England’s greatest king – must soon come to an end. No one else seems to have noticed or to be planning their next move, although when Edward does pass on the end of his reign will surely affect them all. The gentry grumble about paying taxes to fund his war in France, true. But they carry on buying expensive clothes and jewels, far beyond their means, and raiding each other’s manor houses when they think they can get away with stealing a few fields, just as the courtiers carry on dancing and jousting and prancing off to the war at vast expense and raiding each other’s castles, as if they all thought they could somehow continue for ever in the golden sunset years of Edward’s reign, in more or less peace, and more or less prosperity, stuffing their faces with larks’ tongues and honeyed peacock breasts, and watching the ice swans melt at an unending succession of banquet tables.

But Alice has heard Edward mumbling in the mornings, unable to shake off the night’s dreams; sometimes calling her ‘Philippa’ after his wife, or ‘Isabella’ after his favourite, headstrong, high-and-mighty fool of a daughter. He’s still most of the time, at least in front of others, the sparkling, charismatic, dynamic man he always was; but, in his unguarded moments, alone with her, she also sees the confused old man he’s becoming, or is about to become. She treats the creeping wound on his leg, which won’t heal, so she knows the extent of his physical decrepitude too, just as she knows the folly of his having recently restarted the war in France, years after he’s past his fighting prime, and of expecting to go on having the luck of the Devil that he enjoyed in his muscular youth, and winning.

So she’s formed a view. She needs to think about the future, beyond Edward. And she’s decided that the best way to protect herself against that cloudy tomorrow is to cultivate the friendship of one of Edward’s sons. Not to become a mistress again, obviously, for Alice doubts that a prince who could have any woman in the land would want his father’s cast-off, no longer young; she’s realistic enough never to have mistaken her rounded plumpness and dark curls and cheeky freckles for beauty. What Alice wants next is respect and recognition; a relationship that will maintain something of her influence and visibility, while leaving her the freedom of manoeuvre she needs to carry on buying up land and extending her possessions.

Ideally, she’d have preferred this respect and recognition to come from the son who is destined to be the next King of England. But the noble Prince Edward of England, heir to the throne, the former war hero, the ex-ruler of southern France, and as widely admired at court and among the peasants and soldiery as Alice finds him evil-tempered and vindictive, is not an ideal choice of patron for several reasons. One is his wife, Princess Joan, who’s made it clear to Alice for years now that she will never have time for a nouveau riche from nowhere. The other is that the Prince of England has been dying, agonisingly slowly, of some Castilian dropsy caught on campaign, for longer than Alice cares to remember. He’s still clinging to life for the moment; but Alice doubts he will make it to become King Edward IV. And there’s no point in hoping that, when the Prince does die, she’ll get anywhere with his little boy, Richard, a child in the nursery, guarded by his disagreeable mother, that bloated ex-beauty of a princess with the pursed lips and nostrils that flare and dent white whenever she sees Alice.

That leaves the other royal son: John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, the man out there, sweating as he dances. Son number three originally, but since the death of his brother Lionel he’s been son number two; and with every chance that his eldest brother Prince Edward hasn’t long left in this vale of tears either, he’s all too likely, all too soon, to be the King’s eldest surviving son.

It’s a matter of whispered conjecture whether Duke John might, in that eventuality, try and get the throne for himself, rather than protect it for his little nephew, his brother’s son. Some people point to Duke John’s innate nobility, the courteous conservatism in every thought and gesture, and say he wouldn’t. But most people think he would.

There’s no doubt that Duke John’s a good-looking man, in body. There’s a grace to the way he bows his long lean frame, a beauty in the line of eye and cheekbone, and his voice is deep and authoritative. He has a natural dignity of behaviour. But Alice isn’t so sure this beauty extends to his soul. Nor are most other people. After all, Duke John has already claimed one throne, after taking as his second wife a disinherited princess of Castile. He likes to call himself ‘We, the King of Castile’ in his correspondence, and is always threatening to go and conquer Castile and win back his wife’s country (at the expense of the English taxpayer). The suspicious way most people see it is this: would a prince who’s so greedy for a crown that he’ll go all that way in pursuit of one turn up his nose at the much more glorious Crown of England, if he got a chance to grab it? Of course he wouldn’t.

The very fact that people are so ready to believe the worst of the Duke of Lancaster, with no proof one way or the other, shows what an unpopular man this John of Gaunt is. Not without reason, Alice knows. He’s the scratchy kind. He rubs people up the wrong way, even when he doesn’t mean to; and all too often he does mean to. Even among the aristocrats of this court, he’s considered unusually arrogant; considering the competition, Alice thinks wryly, that’s quite an achievement. Certainly he’s not loved among his social inferiors. He hates his father being so dependent on the merchants of London for money. To the merchants’ pained displeasure, he talks too much about the nobility of the nobility and the crawling servility of the lesser orders. And merchants and noblemen alike now have an excuse to dislike and despise Duke John because, in the absence of his sick brother, he’s been in charge of the English armies in France in this disastrous past year, so he’s the one to carry the can for losing pretty much all of English Gascony and costing the country a mint of money. In fact, it’s a good job the Duke’s the richest man in England, with territories from the Scottish border to the South, because he has precious few friends anywhere, and if it weren’t for his money, he’d have none at all.

John of Gaunt needs more than money. He needs to learn to be popular – especially if, as Alice thinks likely, he’s one day going to have a try for the English crown. Alice’s nose for money tells her that any king nowadays will need finance from outside his own estates. Rents aren’t what they used to be, now that there are only half the number of Englishmen to farm the land and pay the landlords. The nobility is poorer. So the most important lesson the Duke needs to learn is how to get on with the London merchants, who are becoming as powerful as the merchant princes of Italy were right after the Mortality (until Edward bankrupted all of them with an earlier lot of colossal war debts). The top few merchants are richer than all the noblemen of England put together. Duke John’s got to stop treating them like dirty sheep-shearing tinkerish no-good thieves. He’s got to respect them as the financiers of today’s England. And it’s Alice’s private belief that there’s only one person who can teach him all that – who understands both court and City, and can explain it right. That person is her.

So Alice has dreamed up this week of glamorous frivolity, this (to her mind) insanely expensive joust in red and gold, with feasts every night for the court and wine flowing instead of water in the conduits of London for the commoners. The week is not so much in honour of the courtly love between swooning knights and the cruel ladies they’re fighting to impress, which the tourney’s officially supposed to celebrate; Alice has no time at all for the foolishness of chivalry. Nor is it just to amuse and entertain the court, or even to impress on the people of England her own royal-favoured status. What she really wants from it all is to help this man she would like to know better.

‘We need to do something to take their minds off the war,’ Edward said, back at New Year. He looked at her with his eyes dancing the way they always used to, with his lips and eyebrows slightly raised in a near-smile of expectation, with all his old confidence that the fire in him would communicate itself to her, and that she’d come up with some exuberant, extrovert, extraordinary idea, worthy of the King he was and the life they lived together. ‘We need to stop them raging against John.’

She knew exactly how to answer. ‘A pageant…a joust!’ she murmured excitedly back, without a pause, with the golden delight that being with Edward has always brought her, with the sense that, when she’s with him, she’s breathing in air that tingles with stardust (or devilment – he’d probably prefer her to think of his magic as a bit satanic). ‘We’ll have a joust – we’ll remind them of the glory of England in arms. They’ll forget their gripes with my lord of Lancaster in no time, once they’re drunk as drowned mice on free wine, watching the knights fight. It’ll be all songs and glory talk instead.’ He laughed at that. How handsome Edward is, still, when he throws his head back like that and laughs.

‘It can’t be too obvious,’ she warned him. Edward’s prone to getting carried away. Sometimes she has to remind him to be more subtle. ‘It can’t be too much about my lord. With the mood the people of London are in right now, they might not even come if they thought they were just going to have to applaud him for days at a stretch. So…we’ll give it a theme, not about him at all. Something innocent…to do with love, maybe…and we’ll give them free wine…And, on the second or third day of tourneying, he’ll win his bout, once they’re all in a mood to remember the might of England. And that’s when everything will calm down.’

Edward accepted that, of course. It’s Alice who, soon afterwards, thought of the spring sun-worshipping theme, and the title of Lady of the Sun, and accepted the role for herself, graciously, when Edward offered it; of course she did. She doesn’t care, especially, about the title. Titles, in her view, are an encumbrance; they make you too visible; every jealous nobody can take a pot-shot at you. Alice runs the royal households everywhere from Windsor to Sheen to Havering-atte-Bower, controlling the lives and purses of hundreds of servants. She’s so important that the Pope himself petitions her for diplomatic favours. Yet in the entire five years since Philippa died, she’s never had any official court status beyond the shadowy calling of demoiselle to a long-dead queen. She doesn’t altogether mind that, to this day, no one knows whether to call her ‘my lady,’ or just ‘Mistress Perrers’. But this title is a piece of glorious frivolity. She’ll enjoy it while it lasts, just as she’ll enjoy the wonderful robe and cloak and cap she gets, worth a king’s ransom. It never hurts to take a gift, she thinks. And it never hurts to ask for a bit more afterwards either.

It will be fun. It will all be beautifully organised (because it’s been organised by her). But the important thing in her mind is that, by the end of this week, Alice is determined she will have made the difficult Duke feel gratitude to her; she’ll have made John of Gaunt her friend.

Watching the heads, Alice’s eyes light on Philippa Chaucer, somehow managing to bring grace even to the saltarello. When her heart does its usual nervous little leap at the sight of that lovely, and too familiar, back, it reminds her that she hasn’t always been so phlegmatic about her position at court.

Alice smoothes the red folds of her robe over her knees, remembering. She touches Edward’s arm with a hand; she leaves it trailing there, against his sleeve, so he can see her fingers. They aren’t particularly beautiful hands, hers – too square and strong for a lady. How mortified she was, back at the beginning (sitting very obediently at Queen Philippa’s feet, sewing her tiniest stitches, carefully watching every courtly female in the room from under her lashes for fear of making a mistake), to realise that the two goddess-like demoiselles sitting on cushions beside her were whispering about her hands. ‘Meat cleavers,’ she made out, puzzling over the foreign words before she understood the sharp looks her way and sly hints of smiles. ‘Wherryman’s oars. Bear’s paws. Don’t you think?’ Then, with dawning shame, ‘Thick ankles, too…’ She remembered her eyes widening as her insides turned over. One of them saw she was eavesdropping, and nudged the other, and they both quickly bent over their embroidery. Alice hadn’t been there long enough at that stage to be sure which of the sisters was which. They were both blonde and long-limbed and apricot-skinned in that un-English Hainaulter way (Queen Philippa liked to surround herself with other people from the Low Countries). They were both self-assured with it, and so alike they might have been twins. Her first thought was to stick out her chin and make a fight of it with the pair of them. But she wasn’t such a fool as that. She knew she didn’t know how to fight here, yet. So she just sat on beside them, numb and prickling, fighting alternating desires to hide her shameful hands and to use them to give the smug, beautiful sisters a good slap round the face. She was burning with the slight. But she could feel herself absorbing it too. She thought: I’ll bide my time, for now (though I’ll get my own back later).

She was wrong to want to hide her hands, at least. She’s learned that since. Her hands might not be as white and slender and long-fingered as Katherine or Philippa de Roët’s, but they’re young. Firm. Fresh-skinned. That’s what Edward likes about them. He often holds her hands, even nowadays. He doesn’t just hold them. He holds them up, and looks at them with eyes whose pale, pale blue is beginning to go cloudy, and strokes the skin. Alice’s hands make him nostalgic.

But that isn’t why she wants him to notice her hands tonight; why, next to him, she’s fiddling and pleating so insistently at her robe or his sleeve. Or at least it’s not the only reason. Perhaps the sight of Philippa de Roët’s effortless beauty has made Alice feel insecure, and reminded her of the other small matter on her mind.

Even though Alice’s robe is the most splendid in this hall, and has no doubt cost dozens of seamstresses the best of their eyesight to be finished in time, her fingers and wrists are bare.

She should have jewels all over her hands to match the thousands of seed pearls sewn in cloudy swirls all over the silk.

There’s nothing glittering at her neck, either. And no jewels dressing her hair, just a thin glitter of gold thread from the caul net holding the dark waves in place under her cap.

It looks shocking to have nothing. Naked. Almost improper.

When Edward doesn’t immediately look down at her bare hand, she moves it to cover his. Blue veins; knobbles; big brown freckles. But the face above them, still fine-boned and lean, is so handsome, so noble. He’s still a god among men. Her King Arthur.

She’s aware of the quizzical look on Edward’s face. She thinks: He knows what I’m going to say.

He almost certainly does know what she’s up to, and the favour she’s going to ask. He’s no fool, Edward. They play games about gifts: she begs, or he begs; she holds out, or he holds out. They both like bargaining. They’re both fascinated by money. It’s one of the things she likes about him.

‘Do I look enough the Queen of the Sun in this, do you think?’ she asks, raising the hand to his shoulder and running it down his arm with the beginning of sensuality. Edward smiles and shivers pleasurably, like an old cat lying in the sun having its tummy tickled. He’s always ready to take pleasure where he finds it. From the floor, she’s aware of the Duke of Lancaster’s eyes boring into her too. She ignores him. Let him wait his turn. She says, ‘My lord…truthfully now?’

Edward half smiles, with half-hooded eyes, and inclines his head forward. But he doesn’t look at her hands, or her bare throat. ‘You are a paragon of loveliness, mon amour,’ he says, but she’s aware of the distance creeping into his playfulness. ‘More every day. Today especially. You’ll astonish the world.’

‘Even’, she says delicately, ‘without jewels?’