The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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.

      But Chaucer is a man of measure. After a moment, he realises that when it comes to judging whether the Duke might dislike Walworth and his independent-minded London friends enough to encourage a rival clique, just to bring down his enemies…to destabilise London’s leadership purely out of spite…well, Chaucer doesn’t really know enough. Yet.

      He certainly doesn’t understand why Stury’s mouth is beginning to twitch.

      ‘You don’t know why Walworth got cold feet and ran off in the middle of that conversation, do you?’ Stury’s saying. He stops, waiting for Chaucer to catch up with the joke, grinning encouragingly at him.

      When Chaucer’s face fails to lighten, Stury drains the rest of his cup and bangs it down on the table. ‘Sharpen your wits, dear boy,’ he says mock-warningly. But he’s still almost snuffling with barely restrained laughter. ‘Welcome to the undeclared war of London. It’s because it suddenly occurred to poor Walworth that, even if he likes you, even if he thinks of you as “that clever Chaucer boy, I’ve always said he’d make good”, he can’t trust you either…’

      Chaucer has no idea what’s so funny. ‘But why?’ he says, baffled. ‘Why?’

      Stury bursts out: ‘Because he’s bound to think you’re the Duke of Lancaster’s creature too, of course!’

      ‘But…’ Chaucer begins to stammer through the splutters across the table. He’s about to say, in the tones of an injured innocent, ‘But I’m not. I’m the King’s man.’ Which, at least in a formal sense, is true. But then all the other circumstantial things come rushing back into his head too – the pensions and the school lessons and the fact that he’s known to admire the Duke and the job obtained for him by Alice, whom Walworth suspects of being in the Duke’s pocket – and he realises that, yes, someone who fears the Duke might indeed see Chaucer’s appointment as just another part of some dark design by the Duke.

      Then the sight of Stury, now helpless with laughter at the idea of him, Chaucer, plotting for financial or political gain, gets to him. He picks up his cup. He drains it. He’s shaking his head at this first dizzying glimpse of how busily people in this City, peaceful though they seem, actually hate and fear and suspect each other. Stury’s right; it is all so absurd that it’s funny. Whatever happens to him in London, he’s beginning to see, at least, that he’ll never be bored. After a moment, he too begins, rather hesitantly, to chuckle.

       SIX

      As far as you can see, forward and back, are horses’ rumps, fat and sheeny, some carrying people, some loaded with carpets and hangings and cushions, some pulling carts piled with boxes and cups and dishes, but all ambling forward through Surrey towards the palace at Sheen.

      Alice rides along through the spit of rain in a glow of contentment.

      She’s aware of boys putting sacking over ladies’ knees up and down the train, to protect them in case the drizzle gets heavier. There are geese honking in the reeds. A young man somewhere just behind Alice is singing a melancholy love song near the reasonably pretty, and unbelievably rich, Eglantine de la Tour. I know what you’re up to, you greedy boy, Alice thinks, not allowing the thought to alter her serene don’t-bother-me-I’m-busy smile. She also thinks: Good luck to you; someone’s got to get that girl’s money; why shouldn’t it be you? Let’s face it, who, in the normal run of things, does anything but protect their own interests?

      Yet, whatever her own doubters and detractors in the City might be thinking about her, the reality is that Alice is not, for now, thinking of any new money-making scams. She’s done enough of that in the past.

      She’s done so well out of so many sharp business ideas, even before she took up with the King nearly ten years ago. She’s made a good bit out of property, of course – buying, or begging, or borrowing, or just taking, always on the cheap, then sending in her team of quiet assessors and deputies to make improvements, buy up the next-door bits of land, build stout new buildings, take on good farm men to work the land, push back the forests, and generally shoot up the rental value, which she ploughs back into the next property that comes her way. In her time, she’s also done good business advancing scared noblemen the bags of coin they need to pay the ransoms on their poor beloved sons held in France (and relieving the hand-wringing fathers of collateral in the shape of their spare manor houses, so hard to sell or raise money on, or just charging them an excellent rate of interest). And, most recently, she’s been coining it, on the quiet, out of the wool trade, along with Richard Lyons.

      But