The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

still. This one crows, regno, ‘I’m at the top!’ in the same cramped black letters.

      But it’s the other side that most interests the losers in the congregation, because the wheel that has brought those human figures up keeps turning, and down they go again.

      It’s the terror on the face of the little figure to Fortune’s right that these people like to gloat over, the terror of someone being whirled back downwards by the wheel, realising it’s all over, that day of glory, never to return, and howling, ‘I’m finished’, regnavi. Best of all is the abjectness of the last little person, right at the bottom, dropping off the wheel, being trampled under Fortune’s careless feet. ‘Sum sine regno,’ it whimpers. ‘I’ve been left with nothing.’

      Quite right too, says the congregation, through smugly pursed lips. Pride goes before a fall.

      Alice remembers looking up at the first of these great glowing stained-glass temptations she ever saw, and saying to Aunty, a bit defiantly, in the way of children trying to find words for a serious idea, but still afraid they’ll be laughed at for being naive, ‘I don’t see why you have to be destroyed by Fortune’s wheel. Why can’t you just get off when you’ve got where you want – stop at the top?’

      And she remembers Aunty laughing, but kindly, in that way she’s always had, of seeming peacefully to know what’s what, without even trying, and answering, ‘I know just what you mean, dear. The great trick to life is knowing when to stop.’

      

      Alice must already have known, even back then, when she first saw Fortune, when she was, what, nine or ten, that she would try and hitch a lift on the wheel, too, as soon as she possibly could. She must already have been thinking out how.

      But she couldn’t have guessed how soon her chance would come.

      It came on another uncertain day, back in Essex, and Alice a quick girl of eleven or so chasing Johnny and Wat and Tom through a cloud of cow-parsley, and everyone whooping and red-faced and light with laughter, when one of the boys – Wat, maybe, whoever was up ahead – stopped. So they all stopped. They were good like that – took their cues from each other, got the hint as quick as they could, a wink here, a nod there. They trusted each other, all old Alison’s brood of waifs and strays, being brought up together, as if they were real brothers and sisters. So now they hunched down in the ditch beside him, stilling their breath, ragged and sharp-eyed, looking to see what he’d seen.

      And there they were, a whole family of newcomers, leading horses back from the stream to the road, a lanky mother, complaining in an undertone, a henpecked-looking husband nodding his head and patting hopelessly at the air with his hands, five daughters, walking in order of size, the oldest only a bit smaller than Alice, but all with the same air of yawning discontent, and, still astride on a pony tied by a string to the manservant’s nag, a little boy, half-asleep, nodding from side to side with the animal’s movement. All in clothes without a tear or a mend in them. And every horse oat-fed and bright and fat as a barrel.

      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.