The People's Queen Part 33

What he's just said is honest enough to make her uncomfortable, though she's not going to show him that. Later, she thinks, she'll talk to him about how the greatest lords - she may even say the Duke's name - think they can take and take and no one will resist; and explain that this is what makes it important to stand together and show the Duke when enough is enough. But for now the best she can manage is a shrug she does her best to make nonchalant. She says, 'It's more complicated than you realise,' and, 'You're too young to understand it all yet.' Appeasingly, she smiles. But she isn't really surprised when he unfolds himself to his full scrawny height, gives her a disappointed look, and mooches out.

'They're talking about a new poll tax,' Wat says, back from Brentwood market, with bags of dowels and big eyes. 'In the Parliament.'

Aunty sniffs. She's stepped out of the kitchen, as soon as she heard the clop of hoofs, to meet him. She's left the door ajar. Alice is inside, listening.

'Well, we've been there there before,' she says with calm hatred. 'Those b.l.o.o.d.y swine.' before,' she says with calm hatred. 'Those b.l.o.o.d.y swine.'

Everyone in Ess.e.x is following the Parliament, even though it's so far away. The Speaker of the Commons this time is their own county's man: Sir John Gildesburgh. And everyone's afraid of a new tax. So news travels.

'No,' Wat says, urgently. 'This isn't like before. They want eight times as much eight times as much next year as they got last time. They want PS160,000. That's five groats a head.' next year as they got last time. They want PS160,000. That's five groats a head.'

The carpenters stop their door-hanging. The tapping falls silent at the windows. The yard goes quiet as all the peasant freemen start calculating how they can possibly pay out an extra two or three weeks' wages for every person in their household to the King, next year, on top of the ten per cent of their income they already pay the Church, and as well as the great t.i.thes - two-thirds of the value of their crops and cattle - and the lesser t.i.thes on everything else from wool to flax to leeks to apples to cheese to chickens to bees and honey. Half of them have houses stuffed with waifs and strays: war widows, old people, grown-up children who can't afford to marry. They'll have to stump up the same amount for each and every one of them. They live on barley bread and cheese as it is. Their worsteds are in rags. Here at Gaines is the only place they ever sniff meat.

If anyone in this yard is rea.s.sured by anything, in this bleak moment, it's the knowledge that at least they're not serfs. It will be even worse for the serfs, who pay even more, out of even less, to the lords who own them.

It's cold comfort, though.

'What, that little Sudbury asked for all that?' Aunty scoffs disbelievingly.

No one wants the job of Chancellor of England these days; it's too thankless. So they've forced it on the quiet old Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke's man, with his gentle Suffolk burr and his unquestioning obedience. Sudbury's a joke. He'll do anything the Duke tells him. Everyone knows that.

But surely, Alice thinks, even the Duke can't really believe he'll get that much? Even he can't be that cruel? Or stupid? He'd have to march an army across England to force all those thousands out of its people. Even he must realise that.

Then she hears Aunty's cracked, chirpy old voice. 'Well then, if they're really going to rob us like that, there'll be no harm in our cheating them a bit in return, will there? We'll just have to tell them our families have got smaller. We'll say our grannies have all died since last time the lawyers came for our money, and our granddads, maybe, and our children too if need be, so we're only going to pay a quarter as much this time.'

Aunty looks expectantly round. She likes an audience. She likes playing the clown. She likes applause, too. But this crowd's too stunned.

'What goes around comes around. Never meet stupidity halfway, that's what I say,' Aunty prods, doing all she can to encourage them to take the news lightly. At last, there's a first, hesitant ripple of laughter.

When Alice looks down at her page, ready to go on writing, she finds she's been writing, all along. The parchment is scored with heavy black lines. And all of them read the same thing.

Now is the tyme.

Now is the tyme.

Now is the tyme.

She's forgotten all about trying to be philosophical about her fate. She's been forgetting it ever since she found out the baby was coming; and this news is the last straw. The picture of fire, and John Duke of Lancaster's burning head, is so vivid in her mind that it's almost hurting her. It is is hurting her. Or something is. A deep, dark ache is tightening through her gut. She clamps down on herself, crouching on her stool, arms wrapped round her knees. hurting her. Or something is. A deep, dark ache is tightening through her gut. She clamps down on herself, crouching on her stool, arms wrapped round her knees.

'Aunty,' she calls quietly, as soon as the pain eases a bit. She knows what it is now. 'Aunty. The baby's coming.'

THIRTY-EIGHT.

It's mid-morning, and Chaucer's at his window looking down at the little bands of men in ragged russet and black outside, who are looking back up at him: the peasant rebels' advance guard. They've been slying up since yesterday, from Mile End Meadow, to have a gawp at the City walls. They look in rude good humour, these Ess.e.x men. One of them even waves. 'Hey, you!' the man mouths cheekily up. 'Go downstairs and let us in!'

Chaucer steps back, feeling uneasy.

No one knows where the peasant rioting came from, but the whole of Ess.e.x and Kent have been up in arms for the past fortnight. And now they've come together, converged around London in two great armies, ready to invade the City itself.

Chaucer's waiting until he knows the outcome of the King's negotiations with the Kentishmen before he goes to Ma.s.s at St Helen's. He'll go at s.e.xt if he misses Terce. He wants to have something rea.s.suring to tell Elizabeth when he sees her afterwards. He doesn't like to think of all those poor girls cooped up in there, so scared, waiting; with no way of getting out.

They say it all started at Brentwood a.s.sizes a fortnight ago. They say the tax collectors tested the virginity of a village headman's daughter to see whether she could be counted as a woman and forced to pay. Chaucer can imagine the casual brutality of that that, the guffawing knights, the terror of the poor girl. They say that was the last straw.

But outrage doesn't explain how coolly intelligent the rioters have been. There hasn't been ma.s.s murder, even though thousands of men, armed only with sticks and their anger, have joined the riots and marched all over both counties, seizing towns and castles, even capturing Canterbury and Chelmsford, the county towns. There have only been carefully targeted attacks on the half-dozen men who run each of the counties: the MPs, the poll-tax collectors. Those few knights have been locked away, or murdered, or taken hostage. Their houses have been burned. But no one else has been touched. It's almost as if these unlettered peasants know instinctively whom to attack to decapitate government and stop the authorities in their tracks. Yet their leaders are only supposed to be village men, with rustic names: Jack Straw, Tom Baker, Wat Tyler. So how can they know? It's eerie.

It's also almost miraculous good luck, or organisation, that there are no armies to stop them, either. There's just the small garrison at the Tower of London, a couple of hundred men, and they're not venturing out; they're needed to protect the King. The Duke is away in the North, extending the peace agreement with the Scots. And the main body of the soldiers of the South is far away at in the south-west, at Plymouth, pursuing what is just emerging as the Duke's secret agenda: embarking to spend England's tax money, which was supposed to go on the French war, on another attempt to conquer Castile.

More uncanny still, the two peasant armies seem to be communicating. Just before both of them turned towards London, they held two great public bonfires on the same day, one in Canterbury, the other in Chelmsford, on which they threw every sc.r.a.p of doc.u.mentation sealed with green wax - the mark of financial papers - that they'd found in every public official's workplace. So there's no proof, any more, of who's paid, or not paid, their tax.

And now the wild men are all here, just beyond the City walls, again in tandem, howling that they're the true servants of the King, who's being betrayed by his lords and tax collectors, and demanding that he come to meet them and follow their advice. The Kentishmen from the South are over the river, camped beyond Greenwich, and the Ess.e.x men Chaucer keeps seeing are sleeping at Mile End Meadow, just a mile or so up the road from Chaucer's home at Aldgate.

The King's rowing out along the river this morning - now, probably - to meet the Kentishmen. Chaucer can only hope that seeing the King with their own eyes satisfies them, and that they go home.

If it doesn't, well, the danger could easily spread inside London too. It's Corpus Christi today, the holiday Thursday in June when no work is done and everyone is out holding summer pageants, in which the poor are allowed to dress up as kings and bishops, and ape their betters for the day - which means, in practice, that the streets of the City will be thronged all day with the poorer sorts of city folk, who are no less disgruntled than the country rioters, and they'll be idle, and probably drunk, and up for mischief.

So far, with no certain news, everything Chaucer sees is disquieting in the extreme. The streets downstairs, inside the City, are already full of crowds. If he crosses the room again, and looks down at the windows giving on to London, he'll see them. He chooses not to. He's been pacing from one side to the other all morning, biting his nails and staring. Some people in those holiday crowds have been in and out of town all week, or so people say, telling the wild men with sticks out there that they'll be welcome in the City when they get here. And the mood of the street people inside is scarcely less threatening than that of the lurking peasants outside.

Chaucer shivers. He's glad of the extra guard Mayor Walworth's put on Aldgate.

An hour later, he gives up on rea.s.suring news of the King's meeting with the rebels and heads up Bishopsgate to St Helen's anyway.

On the way, he hears that the King was so scared of the rebels' yelling from the riverbank at Rotherhithe - or his advisers were, because the rebels wanted most of the advisers killed - that the royal boat was rowed away without even trying to parlay.

That's torn it, Chaucer thinks, uneasily, as he scrabbles through the rowdy crowds crammed into Aldgate, pushing against burly shoulders, elbowing people in the gut if they won't get out of the way, remembering some of the unsettling stories doing the rounds. He's never liked crowds. When the peasants took Rochester Castle, he's thinking, they say they only had to shout, and the walls came tumbling down, like Jericho. So, that's torn it. If the King won't talk to them, it's obvious: they'll charge in anyway. Who's going to stop them? Didn't anyone tell him to try?

There are people caterwauling outside, right through Ma.s.s. In rough voices, they're chanting, 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?'

'Are you safe?' he asks Elizabeth as soon as he's shown into the visitor's cell with her. He doesn't care if she knows he's panicking. He's panicking for her.

She nods, but she doesn't look sure. 'They're shuttering up all the windows. Barring them, and the doors,' she says. Babbling. 'Great thick planks. Just in case. I was even thinking I should try and ask them to let you you join us. It's more secure here than over Aldgate, and you probably don't have enough bread to last you a day, do you? Whereas we have food and water, enough for weeks. There's even firewood.' She laughs, or tries to. It's so hot, and there's damp on her brow. She's trying to be brave. But she looks so young, with that baby face, that peachy skin. So vulnerable. A child. What if those savages get in? join us. It's more secure here than over Aldgate, and you probably don't have enough bread to last you a day, do you? Whereas we have food and water, enough for weeks. There's even firewood.' She laughs, or tries to. It's so hot, and there's damp on her brow. She's trying to be brave. But she looks so young, with that baby face, that peachy skin. So vulnerable. A child. What if those savages get in?

He can spot her straight away, as soon as he enters the church, however dark it is, however identical all the girls' black robes. She's the smallest of the novices by two inches. And today she has bitten nails, just like him.

But, perhaps precisely because of her size, Elizabeth's always made great efforts to be self-possessed. 'At least I'm not at Barking,' she says with another miserable little t.i.tter, because even she, shut away inside these big walls, knows that they've been all over Ess.e.x for days now, these wild men. Barking's not safe.

He's grateful for that remark; for the grace in it. So he lets her will for calm lead him. She's a wise girl, he thinks, and he tries to lighten his own breathing, and take comfort in what he can.

'Thank G.o.d for that, at least, eh?' he answers in as everyday a voice as he can manage, and he raises an eyebrow at her. She used to love it that he could move his eyebrows separately. She nods encouragingly. He thinks she's grateful in her turn. 'And thank G.o.d Thomas and your mother are safely at Hertford Castle. They're well out of all this. It's all quiet up there.'

'For now, at least,' Elizabeth says. She sounds suddenly sombre. 'It's them I'm worried about, to be honest, Papa,' she says, and her fingers go up towards her mouth; but she remembers herself in time, and starts fidgeting with her rosary instead. 'More than about myself. Because all these people shouting outside, well, I can't help hearing what they're shouting...and it's all bad things about my lord of Lancaster. They hate him, don't they? Really hate him. And I've been thinking, Aunt Katherine was with him for at least part of the ride north. She was going to leave his train at Leicester and go home...but you know how she is...'

Chaucer shakes his head in genuine ignorance. No one ever tells him about Katherine and the Duke.

'Well, sometimes she doesn't go,' Elizabeth says, as if this is common knowledge and her father's being a bit dense. 'So she might still be with him. And I'm not sure that's safe. Because what if there's more of this... this...up there there?'

Chaucer doesn't care about Katherine; not as he does about this wise, beautiful child. But he doesn't want to look unfeeling. He even senses his voice might be too glib as he says, 'Oh, you mustn't worry about them. If she's with him at the border, there's an army with him too, after all. And if she's not...well, then, she's safe enough.'

Elizabeth looks doubtful. He feels doubtful too, in private. If a ravening mob wanted revenge on the Duke, why wouldn't they descend on the man's mistress, at Kettlethorpe?

But there's more on his daughter's careful mind. She's wrinkling her lovely forehead. He wants to kiss away her worries.

She blurts it out. 'If Mama and Thomas are with my lady of Lancaster - even if the Duke's nowhere near - how safe are they going to be, really?' Suddenly all her grown-up poise has gone. She's got damp eyes and fingers twisted into her mouth.

He takes her in his arms and cradles her. 'Don't worry,' he soothes, so swollen with tenderness he thinks he might burst, 'don't worry, Lizbet. It will all be over in a day or two. They'll be safe. We'll all be right as rain.'

It's years since she's shown him her heart like this. It makes everything worthwhile. His closed-down life; the goodbyes; Alice. For a frivolous moment, he's almost grateful to the rebels.

They let him out through the little door in the gate.

He almost walks under the hoofs of Mayor Walworth, parading down the street through the threatening-looking low-lifes as if he can't see them. The Mayor's at the head of a newly mustered guard of property-owning worthies, who are mostly sat like sacks on their horses, looking uncomfortable in their little-used armour, giving the street people scared little looks from under their metal caps.

'Master Chaucer,' Walworth says, taking off his hat. He doesn't look like an angel today. He looks taut and tight and stern. Walworth's always been an excellent organiser. He's the most successful of this whole generation of men who've made the English merchant's calling a glorious one, almost the equal of the powerful merchant princes of Italy; men who've made friends, and supplicants, of kings. But suddenly Chaucer also sees that, if he'd been born of n.o.ble blood, Walworth might have made an excellent soldier, too. He's got a good commanding seat on a horse. He doesn't look as though he'll be afraid to cut down a few wild men. Might enjoy it, judging from that gleam in his usually cautious eye. Walworth might even be a better soldier, and a better general, than the military leaders England has had in recent years. Chaucer almost laughs: Walworth could hardly be a worse commander than most of the lords who've done the job, after all.

Walworth's saying: 'Customs House secured, I hope. Locked, barred, shuttered?'

A slightly intimidated Chaucer nods to cover himself, while making a private note to go and double-check now.

'Then we have to arm,' Walworth continues. For a moment, his war face relaxes, and he laughs, a little shyly, as if he's embarra.s.sed by the apt.i.tude he's showing for flexing his warrior muscles. 'The Mayor's duty, you know.' He leans down, straight-backed. He's far n.o.bler today, Chaucer thinks, than most of those harum-scarum knights you see in the lists at tournaments. He gives Chaucer an eagle's glare. 'You're a man of property, Chaucer. One of us. And a man of duty. So will you ride out with us? Protect London?'

'Oh, I'm not a man of arms,' Chaucer says hastily, aware that he's lowering the high chivalric tone. 'I'd be more of a hindrance than a help.'

Walworth just looks coldly impatient. He thinks Chaucer will find his courage in a minute, and say yes. They both know this is Chaucer's duty. But Chaucer also knows that nothing on G.o.d's earth would ever persuade him out into even a possible battle again, not even the thought of Elizabeth's admiration, if it was safely behind him and he could go back in there and tell her about it, pretending to be modest. So he ducks his head awkwardly towards the Mayor, without quite meeting his eye, feeling ashamed, but also relieved to have made his decision, and scurries on. Another friend lost, Chaucer thinks; someone else who thinks less of me. He doesn't much care.

Chaucer doesn't make it home. He's only just finished supervising the full barring of the Customs House, and sent away the two clerks he's called in to help him for an hour, despite the holiday. He's standing on the dock, leaning against the crane, looking out towards Southwark and the bridge, trying not to be too frightened that there's a crowd he's never seen the like of over there, and hearing, with a chill, that they're yelling something that, perhaps distorted as it comes over the water, sounds like, '--ill!--ill!--ill!' when the shouts suddenly change, turning to raucous hoots and hurrahs.

He sees why at once. The drawbridge in the middle of Bridge Ward is going down. Walworth must have given up. They're letting the Kentishmen in. Chaucer turns and starts running up Water Lane as fast as his feet will carry him. If he's quick, if he dodges round the back of the Tower, and through the lanes, he might still make it home before they get here.

But there are so many other people also running at full pelt through the streets that he can't choose his route. This lot aren't running away, like him. They're great oxen of men. Not Kentishmen: London men, but the rough kind, all with sticks and knives. Horribly excited. They keep banging into him, bashing him with their lowered heads. And they're all heading west, and at full pelt. He tries to cut across Thames Street, and continue north, but he can't. He's swept west. He tries to cut north across Tower Street. The same thing happens. There are so many of them. Soon there's no way he can do anything but hang on to his hat and join them, streaming along Cheapside towards Ludgate, running like lunatics for London's western exit. He knows where they're heading because of what they're panting at each other, and even more because of the look in their eye. The Duke's palace on the Strand: the Savoy. It's a magnet for hate, and the London mobsters want to beat the foreigners to it. They want to be the first to destroy the Duke.

A kind of wonder takes Chaucer over as he pants up Fleet Street and past the walled orchards and gardens of this lovely riverside suburb for princes of kingdom and Church.

This isn't mob action, not really, even if there were men back there shouting that they were off to break into Newgate Jail and set the prisoners free.

It's something else. Something he's never seen, or imagined.

These men don't loot. They aren't trying to get rich, or even just get fed. They're not remotely interested in picking up a few unconsidered trifles from the palaces they're pa.s.sing, however lovely the houses are, however manicured the gardens.

They're here to destroy. And they know their targets.

They ignore the Bishop of Salisbury's palace, with all its rich treasures, as if it didn't exist. They ignore the Whitefriars convent. But a huge detachment of men charges yelling into the next great enclosure, the Temple, where the lawyers of London have their chambers and their libraries. Cautiously, Chaucer follows them down Middle Temple Lane and watches, from a safeish distance, from behind a tree. There are men rushing in and out of every building he can see, busy and systematic as ants. They're bringing out book after book of legal doc.u.ments. They're building them up into a giant bonfire outside the old round church - which is a copy, as Chaucer knows, and perhaps they do too, of the temple on the site of Christ's Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and considered as sacred as the Jerusalem Sepulchre itself - and these men are not in the least bothered that this bonfire that some are setting light to now, and others are cheering on, is almost certainly sacrilege and will have them burning in h.e.l.l for ever. Chaucer retreats, carefully, back up to Fleet Street.

He's missed the worst of the crowd pounding down to the Savoy, ignoring the Bishop of Exeter's inn, and the Bishop of Bath's, and the Bishop of Llandaff's, and the Bishop of Coventry's, and the Bishop of Worcester's, too. It's calmer now on the road. And there's no point in hurrying. He already knows what he'll see.

He can smell the smoke.

The Savoy is no longer white.

It is black, and red, and crackling, and there are guards in bloodied uniforms slumped ominously unmoving at the gates, with dark stains under their p.r.o.ne forms.

The same ant-men are inside, surging and scurrying around, thousands of them. There's a crowd of them right in front of Chaucer, just inside the gates, with a beautifully embroidered quilted body-protector stuck up on a pole. They're drawing arrows at it, like archery practice, yelling, after every thw.a.n.g of the bowstring, as uproariously as if they were drunk (but they're not), 'We will have no king named John!' It must be the Duke's, Chaucer sees; they must have got into the treasury. He should feel sad to be a witness to this festival of hate; but he doesn't feel anything, even fear, even these men's excitement. He's just eyes, for now; just stunned, stunned eyes.

Hesitantly, Chaucer moves on in through the gardens. He doesn't think anyone will notice him. He feels invisible. They aren't interested in him.

Yes, they've got to the treasury. There are dozens of them dragging out gold and silver plate on to the terrace that overlooks the river. It's like a mad workshop out here, in the battering afternoon sun. Men sweating as they swing axes to bash and dent the finest work in Christendom with hideous metallic screeches. Men stuffing jewels into mortars and trying to grind them into k.n.o.bbly paste. Men jumping on glittering necklaces, trying to smash them to bits with their boots (if they have boots, which many of them don't). Men ripping tapestries and cushions and napery and hangings with their rippling blacksmiths' or ploughmen's arms. Men chopping up furniture, or pulling it apart in obscene games of tug-of-war. There are even two men who've put their hands through the sleeves of robes of cloth of gold, far too small for them, and are mincing about like great hairy ladies, yelling, 'Will you dance, sweet madame?' and tearing at each other's bodices to reach for imaginary b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and thrusting their lanky pelvises at each other in quick, rhythmic snuffles of mirth.

Everywhere is the same. Men laughing insanely. Men shouting. Men sweating. Men grabbing at bits of shattered stuff and hurling it into the Thames.

There are rumblings and crashings from below, too: shouts, and the smash of metal on wood. They'll have got into the wine cellars. They'll be breaking open the barrels.

There are two directions the men go in, Chaucer sees, as the logic of the scene shifts and settles in his mind. There's one stream of them throwing the unburnable valuables - what's left of the jewels and metals when the axemen have finished with them - out over the terrace into the Thames. And there's another stream of them carrying account books and papers, great piles of them, from buildings all over the compound into the oak-panelled great hall, where the shredded textiles are also heading.

The great hall is also where the smoke is coming from, and the crackling.

Chaucer's not the only gawper lurking near the terrace, not by any manner of means. They're all around, the other shadows and starers, like ghosts: shaking their heads, mouths hanging open. Mostly, no one notices any of them; they don't even seem to notice each other. Not always, though. 'Be you coming 'long of us?' one of the wreckers yells at one of his audience, cheerfully, without threat, and he's rushed by before the man he's addressed has a chance to fade back, or tremble, or faint with terror, which, Chaucer sees afterwards, were the only options on the watcher's mind. It takes Chaucer another moment to realise, from that dialect, that the Kentishmen have got here too.

But, because he still feels invisible, Chaucer keeps moving on, as if in a trance. And when he comes upon one higgledy-piggledy heap of the Duke's accounts that he recognises - in which his own pension, and those of Philippa, and probably (who knows?) the Duke's various gifts to Katherine, are entered - lying on the terrace, abandoned, perhaps because they're not sealed with green wax, he's even bold enough to lean down and open his bag and stuff the rolls inside, before making a few vague steps in the direction of the men making the paper bonfire, as if to suggest he's on his way there too. There's not much he can save. But this is a G.o.d-given chance to do something, at least. It's only after a few more moments, when he's rea.s.sured himself that no one is looking at him, that he corrects his course again and goes on gliding inside.

How Alice would rejoice, he's thinking, allowing his mind to consider her for the first time in a long time, because in that strange suspended state his mind is in right now there's no pain. This is almost exactly what she said she wanted to see, the last time they spoke, isn't it? He can almost hear her voice again, now; almost see that bleak look on her face. 'I'd like to burn down the Savoy, with the Duke right in the middle of the bonfire...and his smug mistress, and your smug wife and my husband, too, if only I could think how...'