The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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 it pleased him so to think she might have a drop of gentry blood in her, and how would he, as a foreigner, ever know the difference? It did no harm. In any event, what with one thing and another, Master Perrers quickly stepped into the baker’s shoes, and married her at the church door forty days after Tom Champagne’s funeral. Bar a change of address and a different set of servants and the need to go visiting if she wanted to see little Tommy or the rest of the ‘children’ of her first marriage (the eldest of the girls now grown-up enough to take over the care of the little boy, while an aunt tried to find the daughters husbands), her new life with a different rich, indulgent, older merchant soon became all but indistinguishable from before. Once you got out of the gutter, the Alice of those days was given to thinking, once you didn’t have to rush about emptying chamber pots or stealing from ruins any more to keep body and soul together, pleasing people became a much simpler question of vocabulary. Before, in the old house, it had been frisky bed-accented French, all oui, monseigneur, and oh là là, the muscles on the man, morning noon and night, with happy little whiffles of pleasure back from him. Now all she needed to make a new man happy was to talk recipes – the grander and more full of expensive ingredients the better. How intently he listened. How carefully he repeated it all back, imagining every flavour with brain and tongue, and grunting with joy: ‘Cream and nutmeg and cinnamon and pepper? Baked in the peacock’s juices? Gnn-h!’

      If poor Jankyn Perrers hadn’t died so soon, Alice has sometimes found herself thinking recently (a heart attack over a lobster dinner did for him, less than a year after he moved to England and only a few months after their marriage) – well, who can say? She might have stayed in the City to this day, growing fat with contentment and spending her energy nagging at her husband, or the next one, for a new music teacher or string of beads or bit of silk. She was happy enough, back in those days. You can be happy with so little when you’re young, and not in love, and remember enough about being poor to be grateful you’ve got food in your belly and clothes on your back, and nothing more serious to worry about than the next flirtation, innocent or otherwise.

      But another part of her thinks: No, I’d never have stopped there. Not when there’s so much more in the world, so much higher to fly. And she’s always been right to go on, and take a bit more, and try another thing, and keep her eyes open, until now.

      Then again…

      What she’s thinking of doing now…with Latimer…what she’s said she’ll do…

      Well, isn’t it dangerous? Isn’t it the kind of thing that might tempt Fortune to flip you over the top, and send you down?

      Alice sighs, and shakes her head, and nudges her horse on. Aunty will know.

      

      It was after Jankyn Perrers died, and when she got her toehold at court, that Alice first went back to Essex and found Aunty.

      Alison was still there, hanging on, by herself. To this day, Alice doesn’t know what happened to the boys she grew up with at the Henney tilery, old Aunty’s other orphans. All she could work out is that they were long gone. Aunty didn’t have much more idea than Alice where. ‘People grow up. They make their own luck,’ was her phlegmatic comment. All she could tell Alice was that Jack died, Johnny went for a carpenter, on the road, and Wat for a soldier, overseas. That’s probably all either of them will ever hear, Alice thinks.

      Without the kids’ help, Aunty’s tilery business wasn’t doing so well. She’d got behind with a big order for her best customer, the Abbot of St Albans; he’d cancelled the contract; she’d been left with two thousand expensive tiles to shift. And that was impossible, in those hard new times, with the war gone wrong, and the gentry so tight and short of money. So Alice took Aunty on. It’s what the old woman was owed, for Alice’s childhood; and Alice found when she looked at that lined face that Aunty, for all her Essex rusticity, still felt like home.

      Alice got the old woman to sell the kiln and the house. ‘Don’t get bogged down in the past,’ she said kindly. And, while they sat together at the old scrubbed table and worked out what Aunty could do next, Alice also told the old woman her own story, and asked for advice about what she should be doing next.

      While she was talking, she was still thinking to herself: What am I asking her for? A broken-down old stick of a thing from the country? This isn’t stuff she knows anything about. It’s court: French, and velvet. How can she possibly…?

      But Aunty knew, all right.

      ‘Seize the moment,’ Aunty said, calm and crack-voiced as ever, and without hesitating, as soon as Alice paused. ‘Do whatever you need to stay at court. You can; course you can, whatever you put your mind to. Just do it, and stop worrying. No point in agonising half your life away, wondering what to do, when you could have decided already and be off having some fun, is there now?’

      And suddenly it all seemed easier; and Alice was grateful to have an adviser to hand who never did hesitate – who knew what she wanted, and just took it.

      Alice bought Aunty a manor, further south, but still in Essex. And she’s kept Aunty, ever since.

      

      Alice thinks Aunty learned her chirpy ruthlessness on the roads. From various half-understood comments in her childhood, made by neighbours and men at markets, Alice half knows that the tilery wasn’t always Aunty’s. Aunty probably only got her hands on it through some sort of trick. It’s fairly clear, from the droppings-in of the various uncles