Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

  The only obstacle to what Alice has in mind is that Lyons doesn’t actually know the King yet. (Those wool licences were all Alice’s idea, and it was Alice who, for a consideration, got Latimer’s signature on the documents. She didn’t see any need, back then, to bother the King with detail.) But now…well, Alice can introduce Edward to Master Lyons, nothing easier. It’s time they met.

  It will make Alice laugh to put old Walworth’s nose out of joint, too. Walworth: so smugly goody-goody, so given to quoting annoying little rules at people, so respectable and pompous and conventional, with his much-paraded friendship with the aristocratic Bishop Courtenay of London and his suspicion of all the new preachers who don’t much like the Church of Rome. She knows Walworth isn’t really quite the paragon of virtue he likes to pretend, whatever his angel face might suggest. She knows he earns a fortune from his Flemish whorehouses at Southwark. And she can’t see why he hasn’t been able to live and let live over the question of the tax-free wool exports, when it’s been such a nice little earner for her and Lyons for so long. But, with the public fuss Walworth’s insisting on making, going blabbing to everyone and their aunt about it, arresting people even, questions are being asked; she’s got no real alternative any more but to get Lyons to stop. Just for that, it’ll do Walworth no harm to get a bit of a jolt.

  Everyone else will be happy. For this is the plan Alice is about to set out.

  First, Master Lyons must agree to stop using his special licences to export wool tax free. (Chaucer will be pleased – England’s official take from the wool trade will go up, which will make him look good. He might get a pay rise. And it’ll be good for Lyons and Alice and Latimer to move on from wool, and stop the talk.)

  Next, Alice will introduce Master Lyons to the King. The Fleming will then be allowed to lend the King a first sum of £20,000. (The King will like that bigger, rounder number better than Walworth’s grudging £15,000 and lending a bit more, to demonstrate generosity, will be no skin off Lyons’ nose).

  Third, Lyons will earn a premium of £10,000 on that loan. This means he’ll eventually be repaid a total of £30,000. (That very high 50 per cent interest rate will keep him very sweet, and the King never notices the small print.)

  Other merchants won’t be so envious that Lyons has got into the King’s good books when they find out that the Fleming’s willing to accept just half his repayments from the King in actual clinking countable gold coin. He’ll take the other half in the old, discredited debt paper on which the King made his empty promises to the Italians, years ago. Since the King defaulted on this debt, also many years ago now, those worthless old paper promises will not be exchanged at their face value, but at only half what’s written on the page – so any paper signed by the King promising to repay an Italian finance house 100 marks will, now, count as being worth just 50. Even so, prudent City men might feel Lyons was a fool to accept a promise of even 50 from this particular shifty King. (Alice knows Lyons won’t care, even if the King never pays a penny back against the debt. Lyons’ pay-off will be coming from that fat interest rate he’s also getting. Better yet, he’ll be building a relationship with the King, which will stand him in good stead later. So he’ll have nothing to complain of.)

  Best of all, this deal might finally end the festering nastiness between King and Italians.

  The Italian financiers, who years ago wrote off their loans to the King of England, will suddenly start getting repayments from the Crown, after all. Only on half of what they originally lent, true, but that’s more than they’ve been expecting for all these years. So they’ll be happy. It might be enough to persuade them that the King of England is sorting out the country’s finances. It might even just be enough to persuade the Italians to start lending to the King again…and then, with a combination of Lyons and Italians at his back, who knows what might not happen with the war?

  No wonder Alice is pleased with this plan. It’s big. It’s public-spirited. It shows her new maturity. And it solves everyone’s problems.

  Most personally pleasing of all, to Alice, is the knowledge that it all grew out of a chance remark at Chaucer’s table, a meeting of eyes between her and Lyons and Latimer while Walworth twittered on about loans; a clear-sighted moment of foreseeing the possible. She’s quietly proud that, even now that she’s so comfortable, and no longer the dewy young girl she once was, she’s still got her wits about her.

  How pleased Edward will be, she thinks, as Sheen comes into view through the trees.

  It’s chaos in the royal chambers: pale bare stone walls, an uncovered bed frame like a lone ship with no sails, a sea of half-open chests and sacks, and a tide of people sweeping over them, whispering furiously. They’ve turned up late at Sheen. Now tired ladies with muddy hems are doing their best to make up for lost time, pulling out hangings from boxes and pummelling the cushions their demoiselles are yanking from travel bags. Boys with brooms are banging the dust from them. The windows are open, and a chilly summer breeze is gusting at everything. Taller boys on stools and ladders are heaving up heavy brocades and tapestries, stretching to hook the worked cloth from knobs sticking out of the stones, accidentally kicking people passing by carrying clothes or brushes or bed linen or pomanders or perfumes, and hissing and cursing under their breath at all the fiddly effort required to create instant royal splendour.

  Alice glides among them with the vague smile she’s always found so useful at court, the one that signifies: ‘I’m not angry, but don’t speak to me just now. I am busy and important. I have better things to do than to be associated with your inefficiency.’

  She has a bag in her hand. She doesn’t say a word to anyone. She just floats away into the antechamber, where the window looks out over the park with its drowned greens and greys. Despite the season, a fire is burning (he feels the cold, poor old Edward), and the enormous bathtub, hung with cloth and green ribbons for modesty’s sake, is already steaming.

  Edward’s sitting on a stool by the window, still in his soursmelling travelling cloak, with his shoulders sagging, an old man near the end of his days staring out at nature, to which even a king must one day return. He looks round, startled, when he hears her. But then he smiles – only you – and goes back to his faraway thoughts as she moves about behind him.

  Detail matters. Edward loves to wash off the dirt of the journey as soon as he arrives in a new place. It’s how he shuts the world out until he’s composed himself enough to behave like a king again. So Alice makes a ritual of it.

  She’s ordered the Sheen servants to have water boiling from midday on, so he wouldn’t have to wait. A king shouldn’t wait for his pleasures. From the moment they left Westminster, she hasn’t for a moment taken her eyes off the man on the horse carrying the bag containing the great sweeps of towel and the bath hangings – the finest embroidered lawn, great cloudy sheets of it, with enough green vines and blue flowers and birds on it to blind a dozen seamstresses. She’d need that bag as soon as they reached Sheen: the moment when, as she knows from experience, the mess of arrival would be at its worst. Edward loves those hangings. They go everywhere with him.

  She’s kept the little bottle of rose oil in her own saddlebag, and the exotic sponges provided by Brembre and Philpot’s grocers’ guild, and the gold-backed combs, and the silverchased scissors, and the oil of lavender to rub the sore on his ankle with, and the strips of bandage. She’s also personally carried three red roses plucked this morning from the gardens at Westminster Palace, wrapped in a damp rag, encased in a small wooden box.

  Now she arranges all this on the window ledge. She tips a few drops of rose oil through the steam, watching the little ring of it cloud and dissipate in the water, sniffing at the rich scent of gardens in sunlight that suddenly fills the steam.

  Finally, she opens the box.

  ‘Look,’ she says, and his eyes turn. Neatly, murderously twisting off the heads of each limp rose in turn, she pulls out three great handfuls of dewy pink petals and, with the air o
f a magician, opens the curtains and throws them on the water.

  The mysterious scent of summer happiness wafts out to where the King is sitting. At last Edward smells it, and, now he can see the floating rose petals, seems to understand. Faintly, he smiles. It’s the first time today that he’s met her eye.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he murmurs, and fumbles for her hand. He’s as grateful as if it’s the first time she’s done this, and as surprised, she thinks sadly. ‘You’re very good to me, my dear.’

  She kisses the top of his head. ‘I like to make you happy,’ she murmurs back as, putting her hands on his shoulders, she eases off the cloak.

  Human decline – the slow return of dust to dust and ashes to ashes – is a strange business, she thinks as she undresses him down to the skinny arms and legs, the roughened barrel of chest, the bent back, the privy member hanging uselessly below, and braces herself to half push, half lift him into the water. He’s got so thin, but he’s still heavy enough to take her breath away.

  How long is it since she first saw him like this, with that wondering, uncertain look in his eye? She can’t even remember the early shivers of anxiety she must have had when he started to forgot a word here, or a name there.

  What she does remember is the time when she was still confident he was all right. She has to work back from those happy moments to find the shadows. For instance, he was definitely all right the day she heard him talking to prim little William of Wykeham. It was a conversation she probably wasn’t intended to overhear, but how could she not, since she was in the chamber with them, making them comfortable, pouring out wine, embroidering something in a corner, turning her alert eyes down, keeping herself quiet, keeping her lips tight together, keeping her ears open as she always did? He said, in that mocking way he used to have, in response to one of the Chancellor Bishop’s gentle naggings about his failure to make confession often enough, ‘But I’ve had to give up fucking and jousting since I saw sixty on the horizon, dear man, so what would I tell you?’ She’ll never forget the poor Bishop of Winchester’s shocked pink face. She had to bite her own lips tighter together and look down harder than usual at whatever never-to-be-finished piece of work was in her frame to stop herself from laughing. It still makes her smile now to remember it. Of course Edward didn’t mind shocking the Bishop. He just went on, with all his old bright brutal cheerfulness, ‘Though I still think about them. So you could be right. Perhaps it is time for confession.’

  When was that? Before William of Wykeham was sacked as Chancellor, which must be three years ago, for Alice has had his confiscated manor at Wendover for two years already. And not that long before Edward turned sixty. And this greyness of mind has crept up on him since then, she doesn’t know when…whenever she isn’t looking.

  It’s worse than his body going. That was understandable, at least. She can’t remember when she last made love with Edward, but it was certainly some time before that jocular remark of his to William of Wykeham. She doesn’t really even want to remember those last bouts of careful, non-jolting, old-man love, with both of them trying their best, and sometimes even having a quiet chuckle together over the slow indignity of age. Those last times have faded and blended in her mind. She prefers to remember the first times: the breathless excitement, the shape of his nakedness, the lion smell of him, before it was medical oils and piss.

  Not that he’s faded, altogether. Even now, sometimes, Edward can still be so well, and his talk so full of energy and mischief and jest, that it seems as if days like today are only a cloud that has passed. Alice treasures those moments.

  ‘You,’ she says lovingly, supporting him back to the stool, catching her breath, then kneeling to towel him vigorously down. She looks up, over the sagging mound of his stomach, into the beautiful long eyes fixed on her above the damp beard. This is intimacy, in the winter of your life. This is all it can be. It must be sad for a man who once so enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh. She makes her voice a little throatier. ‘The handsomest man in Christendom, still.’ Sensuously, she strokes his blotchy thigh.

  He’s feeling revived after the bath. He grins with some of his old charm. He even puts a gnarled hand on her head, as if he might push her down on himself. She knows from experience that he won’t. He knows that her flirtatiousness doesn’t really mean she expects him to make love to her. He just appreciates the make-believe. He’s playing along.

  This is what they’ve always shared: a love of games; a belief you can play with the realities that no one else has the nerve to question; a faunish, pagan sense of fun. This, she tells herself, is why it doesn’t matter what age does to him.

  He’s humming as she pulls the nightshirt over his head, and slips the slippers on his feet, and leads him away to dress the sore on his ankle.

  Once they’re alone in the bedchamber, when he’s comfortable on the padded armchair before the fire, she puts one of his feet in the basin of lavender water and kneels before the other. She rubs unguent gently over the dry, flaking edges of the scab that won’t heal, then winds the bandages she’s cut carefully round the ankle whose skin was too old to renew itself, trying to stop the quiet horror inside herself at the thought of the bone just inside there, under the decaying skin, the white mark of death, waiting to come through.

  It’s only now, when she sees Edward leaning back against the cushions, enjoying the feel of her young flesh rubbing the cold of death away for a moment more, and every now and then grunting a little – but himself again, more or less, with a twinkle in his eye – that she judges the time to be right.

  She begins to tell him about her idea.

  She goes on rubbing as she speaks. He goes on grunting.

  ‘Lyons will take the Italian debt off your hands,’ she says.

  ‘Gnn-h.’

  ‘And you’ll sort out the wool problem too – he’s promised it will stop.’

  ‘Gnn-h.’

  He should sound more excited.

  ‘You’ll have the money you need for this year…and the Italians may come back too…’

  With a flicker of impatience, she wonders if those sounds he’s making are actually an acknowledgement of what she’s saying, or just the sounds of pleasure at being massaged. It’s even possible that they’re snores. He sometimes does nod off while people are talking to him. And he’s just had a bath.

  ‘That would be good,’ she goes on experimentally. ‘Don’t you think?’ She looks up while her hands tie the little knot at the end of the bandage.

  His eyes are only half-shut. He’s half smiling, like an old alley cat, with torn ears and eyes and scars and a missing limb or two, purring on a sunny wall. It’s only when she takes away her hands and takes his bandaged foot out of her lap that he stops. With an air of surprise, he peers down at her.

  ‘Don’t you think?’ she repeats sharply. She can hardly believe he’s taking no notice. She’s been so sure he’ll be overjoyed. Grateful. He should be. It’s the most astute fund-raising idea anyone in his service has come up with in years.

  ‘What, what?’ he splutters. ‘Oh…Yes indeed.’

  He hasn’t been listening to a word, but thinks he can get away with pretending. All Alice’s impressive statesmanlike thought, all that careful weighing of percentages and outcomes, all that convincing herself that, through today’s good idea, she’s proving herself capable of becoming the intelligent strategist of tomorrow, the good angel at Duke John’s shoulder: all gone to waste…ignored.

  Alice is not always perfectly statesmanlike. The flash of rage she’s having that her idea has had such a disappointing response is too vivid to allow measured self-criticism. She doesn’t ask herself questions such as: Was this, really, the best moment? Is Edward truly in a state to take in talk of debt today?

  Instead, she thinks: Is this all I am to him, after all these years? Someone whose voice he can just ignore? A servant, a nurse, a bloody pair of hands?

  Then, mastering herself a little, she moves on to: Well, if he doesn’t want t
o listen, it’s not the end of the world. He’d agree all right if he had a sensible bone left in his body. He’d be jumping at the idea.

  Finally, taking a deep breath, Alice tells herself that it’s up to her to help him make the right decision.

  She says, briskly rushing him on, in tones that suggest she’ll brook no nonsense, ‘Lord Latimer agrees with you – that taking out this loan could be the solution to several problems at the same time.’

  Edward answers, ‘Latimer…a good man, Latimer. Very good.’ But he sounds a little fretful now. He’s looking around. He’s beginning to understand that the massage is over, the bandage tied. There’ll be no more till the morning.

  That’s assent enough, Alice judges. There’s no need to feel exasperated with him. He’s agreed.

  ‘You’re tired…we’ll get you into bed,’ she says, much more gently. He nods. His eyes are drooping – a child deprived of a treat.

  She heaves him up. He stands, helpless, with his arm limp over her shoulder. When she begins to walk, in tiny steps, he shuffles along with her to the bed.

  ‘So shall I tell Latimer to prepare the papers you want drawn up? And send him to you in the morning?’ she says as they move.

  He nods. He’s forgotten the whole conversation already, she can see. He just wants to be stroked and comforted and tucked into bed.

  She blows kisses all the slow tiptoeing way to the door, gentle kisses, as if to a baby. His eyes are shut long before she gets there.

  But once she’s out on the other side, she picks up her skirts and runs, as fast as she can, down the corridor, feeling the power in her legs, pushing her up and away, rejoicing as she goes in the quickness of her breath and the pink on her cheeks and the heat of the blood coursing through her. She can’t help herself. After hours of going so slow, she has to celebrate being young and alive.