The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett
purse: the cofferer, the comptroller, and the man in charge of royal finance, the treasurer. Sir Richard Scrope: unruly hair, big bony knees and elbows, flaking skin on a brow furrowed from the counting of coin, a man with anxious, short-sighted eyes.
Somewhere very close to Alice, the white teeth flash again.
‘I’m the chamberlain,’ Latimer says through his grin. ‘I can make it all right with Scrope. He’s not a man for trouble.’
‘Him…yes…anything for a quiet life,’ Alice agrees, for the sake of saying something pleasant – but almost absentmindedly. She has blood drumming through her head, a great fast tattoo of it. She’s thinking.
They’ll…They’d make fortunes doing this. If they did it. She and Latimer would be rich beyond their wildest dreams.
But…it would also undo so much of the good that the deal she’s dreamed up between King and merchants is supposed to bring to Edward, and the merchants, and the Duke of Lancaster, and the whole realm of England. She and Latimer (and probably Lyons, because, realistically, he’d find out, soon enough, and they’d have to cut him in too, wouldn’t they?) would be taking at least some of the money meant for the war.
She’d be stealing from Edward, who loves her.
She’d be breaking faith with her new ally, his son, whose protection she wants.
But, then again, they almost certainly wouldn’t ever find out. No one ever does, unless you’re very unlucky.
And how rich she’d be.
As she ponders, a picture forms behind her eyes. Edward, lying back against his cushions, his beard damp and combed into wet grey seaweed strands, blissfully unaware of her quiet disgust at the sore on his ankle, just enjoying the smell of the lavender oil she’s massaging into it, snorting and grunting like an old animal, and not even bothering to listen as she explains how he could save his finances.
The ingratitude of him, she thinks.
And another picture. Edward, exhausted, eyes closing despite himself, and the trusting way he leans his weight on her as she shuffles him to the bed. He doesn’t realise that he’s so heavy, even now, in his touching helplessness, that she never quite knows if she’ll be able to find the strength to heave him forward.
Or perhaps he just doesn’t care.
For a moment, she’s overwhelmed by the vision of the selfishness of old age that comes to her. Perhaps he’d be just as carelessly grateful to anyone young and willing, anyone who’d make him feel, for a moment here and a moment there, that he could push back the darkness and grab an extra hour or two of life.
It doesn’t matter to him that she’s the one beside him, she thinks, with a spike of silent rage. Letting him borrow her vigour and energy. Anyone would do.
‘What do you think?’ she hears.
She’s been so lost in her thoughts – the will-I, won’t-I whirligig – that she hasn’t realised she’s dropped her eyes till, recognising the suppressed impatience in Latimer’s voice, she darts them quickly back up to his. A guilty thing surprised.
She shakes her head.
For once, she doesn’t care if there’s indecision on her face or in her voice. There’s indecision in her heart too.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
Latimer’s no fool. She can see, from the velvet look he gives her, that he’s following her thoughts.
He purrs, ‘My dear. You must think of yourself a little, you know.’
There’s a longer silence. She wanted to be told that. She wanted to be cajoled. Still, Alice feels her face grow thoughtful – sullen, almost.
She looks down again. But she hears every word he says next.
‘You have to think of your own future. This’ – he pauses, giving them both time to hear the unspoken word, he – ‘isn’t going to last for ever, you know.’
She mutters, ‘But the war…that money was going to help with the war…’
But Latimer must hear doubt, or insincerity, in that. He caps her: ‘…which will never be won if Duke John is leading it. There’s no point in more war, with him.’
She looks straight at him now. She’s beginning to lose the numbness she’s felt for all these long moments with Latimer’s eyes on her, a paralysis brought on by even contemplating this giant stride towards fully fledged dishonesty. She keeps thinking, instead, about how rich she’ll be if she says yes. It’s strange what a warming thought that is; how damp her skin, how fast her pulse. He nods encouragingly. His eyes are dancing, inviting her to laugh with him.
‘A good peace is better for England than a bad war, isn’t it?’ he adds, scenting victory, suddenly almost jocular with relief. ‘Honestly? And far cheaper, too.’
She’ll be rich.
The silence yawns on. His hazel-gold eyes are on hers.
Both of them are almost surprised when Alice laughs, and takes a deep breath, and says, in her firmest, most resolute voice, ‘Yes.’
Fortune’s Wheel
Alice doesn’t sleep well, that first night at Sheen. She tosses and turns. She’s up before dawn. She’s uneasy enough about what she’s said to Lord Latimer that she makes her excuses to Edward, before he’s even properly awake, gets his permission, and rides off, back through London, east to Essex.
She needs to talk to Aunty.
When Alice was only a girl, delivering tiles to St Albans with her old Aunty Alison on the cart (she can still hear old Aunty’s indulgent voice saying, ‘You’ve been a good girl, show you a bit of the world, why not?’), she saw a picture in stained glass in the church window there that she’s kept in her heart all her life.
It’s a picture you see all over the place. There are a lot of other people in post-Mortality England who are obsessed with the goddess Fortune and her wheel. She features in the rose window of churches all over the land.
There’s nothing very Christian about Fortune, of course. But the priests turn a blind eye to the goddess’s inconvenient paganness, because she packs in the crowds at Mass. To the brave, and to the chancers, and the gamblers, and the opportunists, Fortune represents hope: that effortless climb to the top of the wheel. But what she also represents – the capricious destruction of the greedy, later on – suits the gloomy, doomy mood of everyone else.
You see envy in the narrow eyes of every stay-at-home who doesn’t dare venture out to try his luck in the rough new game of life, these days. Anyone who isn’t making a quick fortune wants anyone who is to get his come-uppance quick. So thinking of the punishment Fortune has waiting at the end of the wheel she spins pleases the dourest of congregations in the churches, looking bitterly up at the rose windows, as much as the promise of hope pleases the people with dreams in their hearts.
What the congregation sees in the window: Fortune, that temptress, that slut, smiles temptingly down, in jewel-bright light, luring people on to take a chance, to jump on her wheel, to make their name, to get rich quick.
And this is what happens next to the humans whirling round their little bubbles of coloured glass, chancing a dance with the goddess: once she’s hooked someone in, you’ll see her willing victim on her left, clinging to the turning wheel as it moves upwards, clockwise. This happy human figure with everything still to come has sun-kissed hair flying down and back as it floats effortlessly towards the top, with the prideful little word regnabo, which Alice likes to translate as ‘I’m going to have it all’, floating above their prideful little