The People's Queen (53 page)

Tyler drops the boy, not out of respect for the other boy, the royal one, and not out of fear of the man, but just because he's obviously going to try to kill Walworth. He stabs at him. Hard, upwards, under the ribs. In the stomach.

The blade screeches against something hard, and sheers off. Thank God for that hidden breastplate, Chaucer thinks. He looks down at his hand in surprise. His own dagger is drawn. He's moving forward.

Walworth's cutlass is out before he even feels the dagger blade slide over his body armour. He brings his weapon down on the brute sitting on his shaggy little horse. It hits the man's shoulder. A jarring of bone. A blush of red. Tyler dropping on to the animal's neck. A groan.

Tyler isn't dead. He backs off the blade, with sick eyes. He turns his little horse. It sets off across the tussocky grass towards his kind, with the rebel slumped on top.

But then, midway, he falls. He lies flat. Walworth breathes.

But the undead rebel rises.

He gets to his hands and knees. In a voice loud enough for Walworth to hear, so maybe loud enough for the others to hear, too, he quavers, 'Treason.'

And then he collapses again.

Chaucer's blade is still out.

Chaucer is one of half a dozen men who turn to Walworth with the beginning of disbelieving euphoria in their hearts, and on their faces. They've beaten the darkness. A merchant's led them to victory. We've won, Chaucer starts to think.

But only for a moment.

Because Walworth's not looking around, offering sweet praise.

Walworth's off too, up on his horse, with no more than a curt nod to the King, with his men streaming behind him. back to the City, leaving behind a company of men who, now he's gone, don't know whether he's following some plan of his own, or has just cut and run, and are beginning to remember, with dread, the thousands of men on the other side of the field, still watching and waiting.

The rebels don't know what's happening, or what to do, any more than Wat did. They haven't been able to follow what their leader's been saying to the King's men. They're too far away.

But they can see something's wrong now. Why is he lying there, so still?

In the half-dark, they stir, with confused questions, then the beginnings of anger.

What did he mean: Treason?

If they've learned anything in these last days, it's to be brave. No one helps you unless you help yourself. You can always do a bit more. So some among them start to bend their bows and untruss their sheaves of arrows, ready to shoot into the royal party. What have they got to lose?

But then another horseman comes out of the reddish glow of the cortege at St Bartholomew's gate. A boy, in gold, with golden hair, riding at a thunderous canter, with his right hand raised. A boy followed by a smallish man in long merchant robes, who's wobbling in the saddle, holding tight to the leather with one hand, a dagger as well as reins fumbled in the other.

The men ignore the retainer. It's the King they stare at. They pause. They waver.

This is what they wanted: the reward for their courage, the reward for their journey. The King. God's anointed. He's come to them at last.

'Sirs, will you shoot your King?' the vision shouts boldly into the great shaggy Beast-shadow of the thousands of men, and his voice is just as you'd imagine a boy-king's voice: strong, and pure, and fresh, and as English as theirs.

'I will be your chief and captain,' the boy shouts. Only a boy, but with all the presence of mind and courage of his hero father, so beloved by them all. 'You shall have from me all that you seek, only follow me out to those fields there,' he finishes, and he points, decisively, to a place beyond the smoking ruins of St John's Clerkenwell, a mile further from the City.

Then the boy who is King of England turns his horse, and sets off there himself, at a walk, as if he's never even imagined fear, or an arrow in his back. After a quick glance back at the crowd, the retainer turns his horse and goes after him. After another moment, the bewildered men start following too.

They're sheep without a shepherd. They don't have a better plan.

They'll follow their chief and captain's plan. The trudge into the dusk becomes more certain, more rhythmic. How pink and white and fresh the King's cheeks are, in the red of sunset; how bright the gold glows, the gold of God.

The rescuers find them in the trampled wheat of Clerkenwell fields half an hour later: a sea of adoring men, clustered around their monarch, still shouting about their rights to fish in the rivers and hunt in the forests. King Richard hasn't lost his nerve. He's still talking back. It's nearly dark.

Chaucer looks up almost disbelievingly at the measured thud of approaching hoofs. He's been standing very still beside Richard, with his dagger arm up, for so long that his weary muscles are aching - for so long that, even if they did attack, he doesn't know whether he'd still have the strength to strike back as they took him down. But there's been no need. They've ignored him all this time, King and men alike, just as they've ignored the other members of the King's party, most of whom have, gradually, and far behind Chaucer, reassembled somewhere near their master.

Through the shadows, Chaucer sees Walworth's eyes seek him out and, for a moment, rest on him with approval. He thinks he might see a flicker of surprise in that other face too, for who'd have thought that, of all the knights and lords in the royal entourage, it would be quiet little Chaucer standing guard, and with that unlikely weapon, too?

Walworth's brought forth an army: seven thousand men, riding out of Aldersgate to rescue the King. He and Brembre and Philpot are each at the head of a cavalry of property-owners, each under the banner of a different London district, and Sir Robert Knolles' one hundred mercenaries are deployed at the flanks, pushing forward as if to encircle the rebels. Walworth hasn't lost his nerve. This is the end for the rebels.

When they reach the King, a band of lances pushes through and ranges itself around him: a wall of shining points. Chaucer lets his arm drop. In the midst of this glittering battle scene, he feels strangely at peace. He's done his duty; more than. He steps back and sheathes his dagger. The boy is safe. Not that the boy seems to care. He's a lion in a child's body.

'It would be easy to kill them all,' Knolles murmurs to his monarch. There are maybe twenty thousand of them, three times his own numbers; but they're on foot, without proper weapons, and tired, and muddled...lost.

But the King calmly shakes his head. He murmurs in reply, 'No: they've spared me...and three-quarters of them were brought here by fear and threats. I won't let the innocent suffer with the guilty.'

He turns to the crowd. Ringingly, he shouts, 'I give you leave to depart!'

And, quietly, the tramp of feet starts again, as the former rebels obey their King, and turn, and head out to the fields, for Essex, for Hertfordshire, for home.

As the multitude begins to disperse, watched by a slight boy on a charger, Walworth dismounts and fumbles with his saddle-packs.

Walworth has brought something with him to Clerkenwell fields: Wat Tyler's head on a lance. He plants the lance in the ground beside the King. The head stares back: a man too brave; a man who didn't know when to stop. A man who brought forth the Beast. The crowds avert their fearful eyes.

When the fields have emptied, and the King has returned to his overwrought, overjoyed mother at the Royal Wardrobe, this head will go to London Bridge, and Archbishop Sudbury's, with its nailed-down mitre, will come down.

Before that, while they're still watching the streams of humanity drain away from the dark earth among the midges, the King will call Walworth and Brembre and Philpot to him: men of courage, despite their servile rank; men of the sword. He will knight them all.

But, even before the knightings, Chaucer has slipped back from the jostling, triumphant throng around the King, and started walking his horse slowly back towards Aldersgate and the City.

He's more tired than he's ever been. And he doesn't want to be here, or be part of this celebration. He looked into Walworth's eyes as the merchant leader drove the lance with that bloody head on it into the earth. And what he saw frightened him. He's had enough of bloodlust.

Besides, Chaucer needs to be alone. He's got something else to think about.

In the uncertain light of dawn, the law-abiding citizens of London cautiously put their noses outside their doors, and form groups to inspect the damage all around, and stand in knots on street corners, still looking over their shoulders, muttering, comparing fearful notes, but getting braver.

St Helen's is safe, though still barred. There are two ruined houses smouldering on Aldgate Street, but no more flames. Down at the Savoy, people say, there are still men screaming in the collapsed wine cellars.
Those
men.

But there are no markets working. No food coming into the City.

There are men barricaded inside a house in Milk Street, still fighting.

There are bowmen still picking off victims from the Guildhall roof.

Yet Mayor Walworth's guards are already going round the wards making arrests. There'll be executions soon enough. Exemplary ones, they say. Arms and legs chopped off. Quarterings. They say he's going to let the widows of the Flemings who were murdered kill their husbands' killers with their own hands.

But you still don't want to go too far afield. Not yet.

You certainly don't want to go outside the City walls. Because even if London's almost safe again, out there, all over the east, and to the south, and up in the Midlands, and beyond, who knows? They wanted the Duke,
those
men. And he's still out there, on the loose. Who's to say
they
won't still get him?

Chaucer is one of the first out into the changed City.

He's lost his fear. He's made up his mind.

Before other Londoners are up, before the dawn's even properly broken, he's already picked his way through the rubble to the Customs House, checked it's safe, picked his way through more rubble in Vintry Ward to his father's neighbour's house, banged, got a sleepy Henry Herbury up, asked the bewildered old man to stand in as his deputy at the Customs House for a few days, and got him to sign a document temporarily taking control of Chaucer's property (including old Chaucer's large and gracious house, currently rented out), with instructions to pass it on to Geoffrey's children in the event of his death, just in case anything goes wrong. He leaves a letter for Elizabeth. In exchange for signing over his property, Chaucer also gets Herbury to sign a letter of credit for ninety pounds. Cash money wouldn't be safe, not today. He scarcely draws breath.

'But...where are you going?' Herbury says. 'You must be careful, my boy. These are dangerous times.'

'Do what I can to make things safe,' Chaucer says tersely.

Herbury nods sagely. 'Ah, joining a guard, eh? Admirable...admirable. I've heard Walworth's calling for volunteers,' he says. 'A great day for Walworth, this. And all of us Londoners. Splendid.'

'Out of London,' Chaucer says, reaching for the paper. But Herbury's got his hand on it. Herbury wants to talk. 'They say the Earl of Kent will have the Governor of Dover to help him calm Kent...Trivet, isn't it? One of the old
condottieri
?' he muses, happy at the thought of order being restored. 'Suffolk's off to Suffolk with five hundred lances...'

Chaucer reaches again for the paper, and then pulls back.

'And everyone seems to be going to Essex - the King's going himself, the Earl of Buckingham's being brought back from France...I also gather there'll be an army under Thomas of Woodstock...I've heard Sir Thomas Percy. And the usual suspects, too, of course. Locals like Fitzwalter; tough old war-horses like William of Windsor. They'll give those creatures something to think about. Brutes, one and all.' He chuckles.

'Me too,' Chaucer says, almost snatching the paper from under dear old Herbury's palm. He's heard the same stories on the street since last night: the same commanders' names.

'What, a brute?' Herbury asks.

'Off to Essex,' Chaucer says as he leaves.

FORTY-ONE

Chaucer glides by the hallucinatory landscape of Essex: in smoke, with splintered trees, quietly burning houses, and, every now and then, an unexplained body, lying half-in, half-out of a fishing boat or swinging, peacefully, from a tree.

He could have ridden, of course. He could have passed through Stratford, West Ham, Barking, on up to Hornchurch and Romford, then to Brentwood and Upminster. Or he could have taken the longer northern route, the courtly route, along the good wide road through Edmonton and Chingford and Waltham forest to the palace at Havering-atte-Bower, then cross country through Romford to Upminster.

But he doesn't want to go through the forests, with their green twilight and great silences and disconcerting sounds. Not now.

Who'd want to be stopped by strangers, sweating strangers, the kind who might ask, 'Halt! With whom hold ye?' He would have no idea who would kill him for answering, 'With the King and the True Commons,' and who would kill him for answering anything else.

He's heard the local landlords are out with loyalist thugs retaliating. And he's heard the rebels are still desperately calling men to arms south of Chelmsford, the county town, at Great Baddow and Rettendon and Billericay. So he's better off by boat. Even with the price he had to pay for this ride, since there are hardly any fishermen out.

'Nasty, out Essex way,' the thieving boatman says gloomily, as if trying to make up for his greed earlier on with a running commentary. 'Every big 'ouse torched, seems like. Half the villages gone, just like that. And the forests crawling with outlaws. And now this Buckingham, back from France to sort 'em out: they say he's well 'ard. And plague, too, I've heard: up Colchester way. A punishment for our sins. We'll be having a hot summer out 'ere all right.'

Chaucer nods, and nods again, trying to look calm, just in case the man sniffs fear on him and tips him over the side to steal his purse.

Still, his heart's in his mouth when the boatman, who's never once indicated where his own sympathies lie or asked Chaucer what he's doing heading out into this mobsters' heartland, steers him up to a sandy creek and says, roughly, 'Right, Rainham Creek, out 'ere. Up the little river there. Upminster, eight miles north, Gaines, maybe six,' because the smooth marshy coast turns, almost at once, back into forest.

In the embrace of the green, he hears men. He hears hogs. He hears deer. There are ghosts, and clatterings, and the breaking of branches just out of sight. Birds cry in alarm. A fox screams. It takes a good hour to cross the forest, and there isn't a moment when Geoffrey Chaucer, Esquire, isn't scared half out of his wits.

But he keeps going, up the splashy little river, jutting his jaw, puffing up his chest.

Nothing will stop him getting to Alice now.

Elizabeth is safe. It's over. She's alive. They'll be opening the doors of St Helen's any time. The worst that's happened to the women inside is a couple of sleepless nights; oh, and they might be hungry. But Elizabeth doesn't need him right now.

Chaucer has to come here, because Alice is the one who needs him.

Chaucer's known he'd have to do this ever since he heard the first rumours that Walworth would be organising his own punitive bloodbath in the City, and all those noblemen would be going out to put the provinces to fire and the sword.

He's always known there's a hard streak in Walworth. Those half-starved Flemish tarts, opening their legs for a penny: weren't they proof enough? The parliamentary attacks on Alice? But now the man's tasted blood. He's out to prove himself a grandee; a noble knight in deed as well as word. And Chaucer doesn't want to see any more blood flow, or any more men turn into brutes.

He doesn't want to be part of the reprisals, either. And this is going to be a time when loyalties are tested; when Walworth, who's grown fond of him, might conceivably want him to do...well, something, to help the authorities in their clampdown. Or the Duke might. Or any number of other noble lords who have a claim on him. And if they asked, he might not have the courage to refuse.

Most importantly, he doesn't want Alice to be part of the reprisals. If she
has
been--He stops himself on that naive thought. Because of course she has been. The early stages of this rebellion, at least, have her handprints all over them. Before the bloodletting began.

She's been sitting out there in the wilds, alone (for Chaucer doesn't think for a moment that she'll have taken his advice and fetched her children back). Brooding. And she'll have been going over her humiliation with...Chaucer can't bring himself to think the name of Alice's near-brother...
that man.
Obsessively. She'll have made another of her plans; trying to get her own back on the Duke. And now it's all gone so terribly out of control, and
that man
is dead, she's got no one. No one but Chaucer can save her.

He's got to save her, and himself.

He's going to take her away. Far away. On that pilgrimage, maybe. He's got that letter of credit here. It'll pay for years of travel.

If he hurries, he'll be with her before William of Windsor gets near Essex.

Eventually the trees thin out, and there's Upminster township smoking on the horizon, and a hodge-podge of patchwork fields, and closer up a collection of burning village houses, and more roofs closer still, the only unburned roofs in the whole ruined landscape, which must be the manor of Gaines.

Chaucer isn't frightened when at last he does see men, and they're scuttling around just outside the gates at Gaines, even though they're low men, in ragged clothes, with cut faces and bruises. He only hesitates a moment when, as he passes through the gates himself, a pair of them, busy poking papers into the end of a bonfire, look up, straight at him. He sees the fright in their eyes at the sight of a stranger. He has no monopoly on fear any more. Even when one of them growls, with what's supposed to be a fierce look, 'Oi, you! With whom hold you?' he scarcely misses a beat, because, after that last hour in the greenwood, he trusts his instincts; he knows whom he's dealing with. 'With the King and the True Commons,' he says evenly. 'I'm here to see Alice Perrers.'

The man doesn't deny she lives here; he only shakes his bandaged head doubtfully. The lid of one eye is twitching. Chaucer steps closer, and sees what they're burning: letters. The kind that were nailed on trees, that say, 'To John Sheep, from Jack the Lad: rise up!' He nods, and the sadness grows. Letters she wrote, he can guess. Oh Alice, he's thinking. You fool.

'Will you take me to her?' he presses gently.

The man says, 'She's not at the house. There's only the women in there. The...' His face twists bitterly. '...the
ladies.
The ones she took in. 'S why we're out here, innit?'

Chaucer looks from one to the other. He doesn't understand, or perhaps these men don't. Then he puts the flicker of doubt out of his mind. They're just peasants, these men. He needs to find Alice. 'Well, where is she?' he persists.

The other man puts a last handful of letters on the big pile of burning embers. Quickly they flare up; glowing ash flies out. 'We're off now,' he mutters as the flames die away.

They don't want to help. They're too scared, Chaucer sees. They're longing to lose themselves in the forest. Two days ago, they might have been in the mob in London. They might have killed him, with gleeful yells on their ugly lips. But looking at them now, Chaucer finds himself almost pitying their wasted, skinny limbs; the years of rye bread and watered-down milk; the missing finger on the taller one, the mark of a woodworker; and their dull, hopeless fright. They know there's nothing ahead for them, he sees. They just don't know how the darkness will come.

He sets off away from them, towards the manor house, along the avenue of slim young beeches someone (Alice, he presumes) will have planted for shade in years to come. It's an incongruously pretty sight that meets his eyes, after everything he's seen today. There are scented roses and gillyflowers in bloom in the garden, and beans and salad leaves and herbs sprouting in the kitchen garden, and vines tumbling over a barn with a new roof. There's a new section built on the tilting old house, too, with spacious doors and windows, smelling of fresh wood and straw. He can guess at the high ceilings from outside. And he's almost soothed by the low crooning of doves, and the buzz of bees in the lavender hedges, and the brightness of the well-tended fields all around. He can guess at the energy she's brought to the project of renewing this place in her short time here; shaking his head, almost laughing, he wonders how the locals coped with her energy.

He offers the fidgeting men a last scrap of help over his shoulder. 'They say the King and his army are heading out of London for Waltham Abbey,' he says calmly as his feet scrunch, left, right, over the bits of stuff. 'So don't go north.'

There's a crowd of women at the back of the manor house, when he reaches it. Ladies patching well-made but torn skirts, and quiet, quiet children. They look at him with fear as he comes around the corner. Two middle-aged servants come towards him, trying to look threatening, with big sticks in their hands.

'I've come from London to look for Mistress Perrers,' he says to reassure them.

'London,' they sigh, calmed by his gentleman's voice, craning closer.

'It's over,' he says, and they sigh again, and their faces relax in well-bred relief.

Who are these ladies? Chaucer's wondering, suddenly made uneasy again by their reaction. They're no rebels. What are they doing here at Alice's home? He can't, can he, have been wrong...?

'Mistress Perrers?' he nudges.

'She's up at the farmhouse,' the lady in the far corner with the beaten-up face says, looking curiously at him. 'Since the sickness started. They're all there.'

All? Chaucer thinks, feeling his heart sink. But he shuts his mind to the question of how both those men outside, and these women here in the courtyard, can be connected to Alice. She'll explain it all when he finds her. Hastily, he sets off in the direction the lady points him towards.

It's quiet in the farmhouse. There's no fire burning on the kitchen hearth. Just embers.

He looks around, wondering where to go. It's well appointed downstairs: neat, simple furniture, clean rushes on the floor, silver and pewter in the cupboard.

But it's too neat...and so quiet...as if there's no one left.

He can hear his own footsteps, heavy as a threat. He can hear his own breathing. But that's all.

Chaucer only hears Alice when he opens the inside door: quick breathing, damped behind wool. Sobs, even, maybe. She'll be scared, too.

There are two big beds, with their curtains drawn around them.

'Alice,' he says. 'Come out. It's me. Chaucer.' His voice is soft.

He isn't expecting the look on her face when she pokes it out from between the far bedcurtains: the drawn whiteness, the indescribable relief, and the shining, grateful love in those reddened eyes.

'You,' she whispers, staring at him as if he were God himself.

He isn't expecting, either, the next thing he hears, from the other closed bed: a baby's awakening, experimental whimper; the prelude, he knows from experience, to loud shouts of hunger.

('Alice's Chaucer? The dad?' suddenly echoes in his head; dead Wat's voice.)

There's no time for Chaucer to ask about the baby.

Alice's face crumples into fretful helplessness at the sound of crying. 'Oh no...I can't...not now,' she mutters, pleating her fingers together, scrunching up the wet rag she's holding. To Chaucer: 'Please, will you get the baby?' Then, as if to herself: 'No, no...he'll wait.'

She gazes at the stunned Chaucer, as if she's made her mind up to something. And Chaucer, for all his resolve, for all his certainty that this time it's he who will set the agenda, put his case to her, and insist that she does as he says, finds himself drawn in, as usual, to the world according to Alice. He waits. 'Please,' she says, quickly, 'tell me what you think.' She puts a finger up to her lips, muttering, 'Shh.' And then she pulls him inside the bedcurtains, into the half-dark, and sits him down by the side of the bed.

There's a boy under the quilts. A youth, a bit taller and skinnier than Thomas, but then Thomas has always been small, so they might be the same age. This boy has freckles and black hair. Just like Alice's.

It takes Chaucer's eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness; his heart a moment to adjust to the darkness closing in on it.

It's Alice's son. She's had her children with her here, all along...and if she has them with her, then what good is it that he's turned up to save her from her solitary fate? He's misunderstood. He doesn't know how, yet, but he can see that he's got it wrong, all wrong...

Then he sees that Alice's son's hair is plastered to his skull, and sweat's dripping off him, and his skin is whiter than it possibly could be in nature, healthy nature at least, though he's not dead, because he's still moaning under his breath.

In the middle of his private sorrow, Chaucer's overcome by a father's tenderness. He leans forward and puts his hand on the lad's forehead. It's raging hot. The boy - John; Johnny, Chaucer remembers he's called; Sir John, now - moans again.

'Thirsty,' he whispers, in a dry little voice, a child's voice, though the boy must be well into his teens by now. 'So thirsty.'

Chaucer turns to Alice. He can see the fear in her face. He can feel it in his.

The boatman told him. It's back in Colchester. He can see Alice already knows it's the Mortality, even though there are no buboes at his neck, and no blackness where the skin has started rotting around his fingertips.

'Plague?' he mouths, so the youth with the closed eyes can't hear. She'll want him to say what he thinks. Alice has never shied away from knowing the truth.

From beside him, she nods. She isn't surprised. Without a word, she bends down and scoops up water from the bucket on the floor. There's infinite tenderness, and infinite sadness, on her face as she puts the cup to her son's lips. Johnny swallows. Then he starts to cough. There's panic on her face as she pulls out the other cloth she's been pleating, and puts that to his lips. When the spasm's exhausted him, and he drops it back on the quilt, Chaucer sees, as bright as roses, the blood in the slimy spit.