The People’s Queen

She’s done what’s expected of her.

There’s no reason for him to feel sad, he tells himself, even if she’s going, and even if he hasn’t seen the children. She has her work. They have their lives. This is how things are done in the courtly world. Perhaps it’s only being back among merchants, today, and remembering his own childhood, brought up closer to his parents than any courtier’s son could dream of, that’s making him chafe…

If only the carts weren’t rolling quite so loudly through the gate under his feet. If only he hadn’t drunk that third cup of wine. Or was it the fourth?

He’s slumped at the table, finishing off what’s in the bottom of the cup, listening to the servants behind the door, banging and talking as they clear up the trays and plates, with the sense of anticlimax and disappointment gathering strength inside, as the shadows thicken, when there’s a knock.

He’s astonished to see Alice’s face around the door.

She smiles brilliantly, and the shadows retreat. ‘I thought I’d drop by for five minutes while my men are picking up the platters out there. I’d ask you for supper at my house…but you’ve probably had enough already, haven’t you?’ She twinkles at him. Hastily, he straightens up. ‘You’d rather sleep, I expect…’

He’s on his feet before he knows it. ‘The kindness,’ he hears himself chirrup, excitedly, sounding far too eager. ‘The thought-fulness…finding the time to bring so much…your generosity…I can’t begin to tell you how overwhelmed I was…’

She doesn’t say anything. She looks straight into his eyes, almost tenderly. She shakes her head. After a moment, she says, ‘I’ve been thinking about you…About how strange it must have felt, for you, today – to be coming back to where you grew up.’ She takes his hand, not flirtatiously, more like a sister. ‘After everything else you’ve seen in your life.’ Her voice trails away, inviting confidences. ‘I could hardly imagine doing that, myself.’

A wave of emotion sweeps him. No one else has understood.

He’s felt so alone with those thoughts, until now. Suddenly he longs to pour out all the troubles in his heart. ‘A beautiful day,’ he begins gratefully; ‘I have so much to thank you for. Then: ‘I’m only sorry my children weren’t here to see it.’ He stops. It would have been an even greater pleasure, he’s been going to say, if Philippa hadn’t kept the children away. But he’s not quite a fool, even in his cups. He shouldn’t be sharing his troubles. ‘They went hunting instead,’ he adds hastily, choking off the self-pitying confidence he’s nearly shared, and trying to sound proud of his children’s courtly friendships. ‘At Sheen, Philippa said.’

It must be the memories of his own father that being in London today has awakened – that sudden recollection of a world in which a son’s place is at his father’s shoulder, learning his business, for all those formative years – that’s making him feel this sadness, almost grief, for his own absent children. Or it’s the drink. At any rate, Alice is giving him the casually concerned look of someone who doesn’t understand the pain he feels. He doesn’t think she has children of her own. For a moment he feels almost envious of the freedom from hurt that must represent; she can’t be expected to feel the twisting in his heart. He knows he’s talking too much.

Mildly, she says, ‘And there was me thinking you were going to tell me what it was like travelling in Italy.’ She laughs. He feels she’s expecting more. But he doesn’t know what.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Must be a little bit drunk.’ She doesn’t seem to mind. Her silence goes on being warm and inviting. It’s a relief to have been able to confess something so innocuous.

After a pause, she says, ‘Oh, well, who isn’t, after a splendid dinner like yours? I felt a little tipsy myself.’

Still 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 bows, out of courtesy and pleasure combined. Perhaps he’s just being flattered. But his own instinct, likewise, is to trust the three merchants he’s trying not to think of as Uncle Will, Uncle Nichol, and Uncle John. Still, he’s puzzled. The subtext of everything he’s been told in the past few weeks of briefings is that his job in London will be to stop these three men expanding their interests beyond what is proper, and taking for themselves what is rightfully the King’s. Yet, in this deep, comforting, familiar voice, he already hears a note of appeal. as if William Walworth and his friends fear that their own rightful interests are being eaten into.

Walworth’s saying: ‘Ever since I’ve held office in the City, we merchants have been complaining to the King that he was selling Italians too many special licences to export wool from England without paying customs to you’ – he bows at Chaucer the Customs Comptroller – ‘as all Englishmen have to. We’ve complained long and loudly. And, it seems, he heard us. For at least two, maybe three years, no more licences have been granted to Italians.’

Chaucer has to half jog to keep up with Walworth’s stride. He puffs, ‘Yes?’

‘But someone else has been granted a special licence.’ Walworth turns and arches an eyebrow. He wants Chaucer to guess who. It’s a test of Chaucer’s wit.

‘Lyons,’ Chaucer puffs, suddenly seeing it all – exactly how Lyons has become so rich, and why the merchants, who so obviously dislike and mistrust the Fleming, are nevertheless cautiously trying to bind him closer, and buy his loyalty to them, by giving him a post in their City administration. And why they’re smarting.

Walworth nods. He looks pleased with Chaucer’s quick response.

‘We arrested some men at Southampton a week or so ago,’ he confirms. ‘They were loading cargo there. Sacks and sacks of wool, on a ship bound for Flanders. No stop at London or Middleburg planned, where they would have to pay customs. Naturally we tried to confiscate the cargo. My wool investigators are allowed to, even outside London, whenever they find contraband (and we’d had a tip-off that that’s what this would be). But we couldn’t, with this cargo, because there was nothing illegal about it. The men had a licence. An absolutely official licence, all green sealing-wax and royal stamps, straight from the King’s administration. Made out to Richard Lyons.’

Chaucer wishes he could catch his breath.

‘The King…wrote…Lyons a licence?’ he pants. ‘Himself?’ He doesn’t want to believe the King would have done down the merchants if he’d promised them not to sell any more foreigners any more special licences. Like everyone in the King’s service, and in the country, he adores the old man. But he’s heard about too many slips – and seen that fleeting, amused look in the royal eye too often – to know that loving the King and trusting him, at least with money, can’t always be quite the same thing.

The whole business with special licences has always been pure foolishness, in any case. In principle, the King is cheating his own royal coffers – and therefore himself – by selling foreigners the right not to pay England’s wool tax. But for a King who’s always short of money, right here, right now, who’s constantly scrabbling around for the coin to put down on that war-horse, or castle wing, or costume, on top of all the war expenses…well, in practice, it’s tempting, any offer of a bag of actual gold, in the hand, no questions asked. Of course it is. Chaucer understands that. And as for the King breaking his royal word to Walworth and the other merchants, well, Chaucer can imagine how the King might finesse that, too. He can see Edward telling himself, with a bit of a grin, that even if he’s promised not to sell any more licences to Italians, if it’s a Fleming who comes along, offering the right price, why, that’s quite a different matter…

There’s resignation in Walworth’s laugh. ‘Things are never that simple with my lord the King,’ he says. ‘No, he didn’t write the licence himself.’

Chaucer’s panting, and guessing, ever more wildly by now. ‘A forgery?’ he says, trying not to sound too hopeful. He’d rather it was that.

Walworth shakes his head. ‘Not that, either…the licence was signed’, he says sadly, ‘by Baron Latimer. It was quite legal. He’s the chamberlain. He’s authorised to sign on the King’s behalf. The King’s hand wasn’t on it, but he must have known.’

‘But then…’ Chaucer is utterly out of his depth by now. So the licence was legal, and the King just slyly hiding behind his servant’s signature. That much he’s got straight, now. But what he can’t for the life of him see is how Richard Lyons ever met the King to do this private deal in the first place? Flemish merchants don’t go running around at court without an introduction, and Walworth, who is sometimes received at court, would obviously never take along a chancer like Lyons. Someone else must have taken him to the King. But who?

It is only now that the other, separate, picture Chaucer woke up with today comes back into his mind. Latimer looking at Lyons, and Lyons looking back across Chaucer’s table, groaning with all that food provided by Alice Perrers. And Alice in between them, eyes darting from one to the other, and a little smile on her lips…

‘…Mistress Perrers,’ he says flatly. Of course. He’s known all along, really, bar the details. It will be Mistress Perrers who’s introduced the foreign merchant to the King, or simply made the deal for him without an introduction. She likes money, and she likes stirring things up, just for fun. She enjoyed putting Philippa’s nose out of joint with her feast, Chaucer saw yesterday, as much as she enjoyed making sure that the merchants were being properly fed. She’ll be taking a cut from this, just as Latimer will be. She has fingers in every pie, doesn’t she?

He shakes his head in reluctant admiration. You have to admire Mistress Perrers’ sheer audaciousness. Suggesting to him that he should be keeping watch on Walworth and his men, while all along she knows that if there’s mischief in the City, it’s happening somewhere entirely different; somewhere much closer to her own good self. No, there are no flies on her…

Chaucer’s almost smiling at this new insight into his new patron when Walworth interrupts his reverie by grunting with satisfaction and squeezing his arm.

‘You were always a bright boy,’ he says. Then, more hesitantly: ‘Of course, I can’t swear this is true, but they do say that the house Mistress Perrers got in the City last year was a gift from Master Lyons…’

He stops walking. He’s going to turn left down Thames Street, while Chaucer’s going to go straight over. The thoroughfare is crowded with salesmen shouting their wares. Elbows and baskets and carts knock into both men as the streams of human traffic part and sweep on past them. But neither Walworth nor Chaucer notice. Their eyes are locked. Walworth isn’t quite ready to bow farewell.

‘And of course, what really worries me is who might be behind Mistress Perrers, trying to undermine…’ Walworth pauses, searching fastidiously for the right word, then settling for, ‘…us.’ Chaucer understands him to mean us narrowly: the trio of merchant princes with power in the City. It doesn’t actually include him. Still, he’s flattered to be honoured by Walworth’s confidences so soon in their adult relationship. And he wants to know more, of course. He wants to know why Walworth thinks Alice Perrers has gone to the trouble of putting Chaucer in the City, and of sending him off on this wild-goose chase of suspecting the top merchants are dishonest, while they nurse their own quiet fears about her.

Chaucer waits for Walworth to go on.

But then the future Mayor looks down at him, and, almost regretfully, puts his lips together. He begins gently to shake his head, as if wondering at himself. With a visible change of mood, he says, much more briskly, ‘Listen to me, gossiping away like a Billingsgate fishwife – and you hungry and looking forward to your dinner. Age, dear boy, age. You’ll have to forgive me.’ He turns, and, smiling gaily over his shoulder, says, brightly, ‘Till tomorrow.’

No point in showing disappointment. Chaucer waves and bobs his own cheerful bow. Thoughtfully he crosses Thames Street. But, on the other side, he stops again, looking back at the crowds packing the busy street without really seeing them. Who was Walworth about to say he suspected of being ‘behind’ the shifty money-making tactics of Mistress Perrers and Richard Lyons? And what stopped him finishing that thought?

It can’t have been, can it, that for some reason, remembered at the last minute, long after he’d started confiding, William Walworth has suddenly got it into his head that he should also be wary of him, Geoffrey Chaucer?

Chaucer shakes his head in wonderment. What would have given the merchant that idea? It can’t surely have been something he said?

He shrugs. He can’t think what he can have said, or done. He probably won’t be able to guess, either. Not yet. He doesn’t know enough about the City yet.

So Chaucer’s about to turn around again and head on home, towards the dinner he’ll buy at a cookshop somewhere (no point in keeping a houseful of cooks if there’s just him to look after) when he notices a tall gold-and-silver head back on Thames Street, sticking out above the crowd, a few yards down from where he and Walworth have just parted.

Walworth, like him, has stopped, deep in thought, and is looking back unseeingly at the people, towards where Chaucer was standing a few moments before. Even at this distance, Chaucer can see him slowly shaking his head.

It is later still before Chaucer finally puzzles out what was on Walworth’s mind. Late enough that it’s dark, and the torches are at their windy last gasp out on the terrace where he’s sitting with Stury, looking out over the rushing water at the fire of stars above.

It’s Stury who explains. The knight is pouring out more wine with an unsteady hand (unsteady because they have been here for hours, since before sunset, and they haven’t bothered much with supper, because what do two poets need with food when they can drink and admire the view?).

‘Your merchant friend was going to say he thinks Madame Perrers is the Duke of Lancaster’s creature,’ Stury says with hazy pronunciation but complete certainty.

‘Well,’ Chaucer says, after a pause. ‘Is she?’

He’s not aware of any relationship between Alice Perrers and the King’s son; the only time he’s ever even seen them talk was at that ball, right after Princess Joan threw the wine. But unravelling what goes on in the City is making him realise how little he knows about anything. Nothing would surprise him any more.

Stury lifts his shoulders. ‘Not that I know of, dear boy,’ he says blithely. ‘Though with her, who can say? Always two steps ahead, that one.’ He raises the cup towards the full moon (he’s given to toasting the goddess Diana), and then, after drinking the top inch, goes back to talking. ‘All I can tell you for sure…no love lost between the Duke and Master Walworth and company here in the City, we all know that. If La Perrers and Lyons have got some scheme going, Walworth’s automatically going to put one and one together and make three, and see the Duke lurking in the background.’

Chaucer nods. That makes a kind of sense. The Duke’s hostility to the big three merchants is well known. He wants them humbled. So Walworth might easily imagine that the Duke is sponsoring a rival clique to unseat his City government, or just that the Duke is turning a quiet penny by protecting that rival clique. Chaucer’s immediate reaction is that there can’t be any actual truth in any of it, of course. The Duke’s not only the soul of honour. He’s also the richest man in the land. So he certainly doesn’t need money from dubious City deals; and he surely wouldn’t take it if it were offered.

Chaucer likes Duke John. The two men are of an age; they’ve crossed paths often at court; there’s always been affection between them. Chaucer remembers the Duke’s grief when his first wife died. Chaucer even wrote a poem in memory of that first Duchess. The Duke was grateful. Chaucer knows him for a man who can love deeply. And Chaucer admires that, the more so now that he knows how complicated marriage can be. He doesn’t necessarily think the Duke’s idea for a wife for him was the right choice; but giving him Philippa as a bride was well meant. He’s grateful. He also admires the Duke’s loyalty. John of Gaunt looked after him and Philippa (and her sister, Katherine) financially after that first wife’s death cost the two girls their jobs as demoiselles. The Duke arranged their pensions. He lets the Chaucer children share the lessons of his daughters, when at court. Chaucer’s also grateful that the Duke (unlike Philippa) admires his poetry, and has invited him to more than one court evening to read it out. He’s even sympathetic to the Duke’s brusqueness of manner, in which he sees shyness, not arrogance. The Duke takes pains. You can’t not respect that.