The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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