no harm. In any event, what with one thing and another, Master Perrers quickly stepped into the baker’s shoes, and married her at the church door forty days after Tom Champagne’s funeral. Bar a change of address and a different set of servants and the need to go visiting if she wanted to see little Tommy or the rest of the ‘children’ of her first marriage (the eldest of the girls now grown-up enough to take over the care of the little boy, while an aunt tried to find the daughters husbands), her new life with a different rich, indulgent, older merchant soon became all but indistinguishable from before. Once you got out of the gutter, the Alice of those days was given to thinking, once you didn’t have to rush about emptying chamber pots or stealing from ruins any more to keep body and soul together, pleasing people became a much simpler question of vocabulary. Before, in the old house, it had been frisky bed-accented French, all oui, monseigneur, and oh là là, the muscles on the man, morning noon and night, with happy little whiffles of pleasure back from him. Now all she needed to make a new man happy was to talk recipes – the grander and more full of expensive ingredients the better. How intently he listened. How carefully he repeated it all back, imagining every flavour with brain and tongue, and grunting with joy: ‘Cream and nutmeg and cinnamon and pepper? Baked in the peacock’s juices? Gnn-h!’
If poor Jankyn Perrers hadn’t died so soon, Alice has sometimes found herself thinking recently (a heart attack over a lobster dinner did for him, less than a year after he moved to England and only a few months after their marriage) – well, who can say? She might have stayed in the City to this day, growing fat with contentment and spending her energy nagging at her husband, or the next one, for a new music teacher or string of beads or bit of silk. She was happy enough, back in those days. You can be happy with so little when you’re young, and not in love, and remember enough about being poor to be grateful you’ve got food in your belly and clothes on your back, and nothing more serious to worry about than the next flirtation, innocent or otherwise.
But another part of her thinks: No, I’d never have stopped there. Not when there’s so much more in the world, so much higher to fly. And she’s always been right to go on, and take a bit more, and try another thing, and keep her eyes open, until now.
Then again…
What she’s thinking of doing now…with Latimer…what she’s said she’ll do…
Well, isn’t it dangerous? Isn’t it the kind of thing that might tempt Fortune to flip you over the top, and send you down?
Alice sighs, and shakes her head, and nudges her horse on. Aunty will know.
It was after Jankyn Perrers died, and when she got her toehold at court, that Alice first went back to Essex and found Aunty.
Alison was still there, hanging on, by herself. To this day, Alice doesn’t know what happened to the boys she grew up with at the Henney tilery, old Aunty’s other orphans. All she could work out is that they were long gone. Aunty didn’t have much more idea than Alice where. ‘People grow up. They make their own luck,’ was her phlegmatic comment. All she could tell Alice was that Jack died, Johnny went for a carpenter, on the road, and Wat for a soldier, overseas. That’s probably all either of them will ever hear, Alice thinks.
Without the kids’ help, Aunty’s tilery business wasn’t doing so well. She’d got behind with a big order for her best customer, the Abbot of St Albans; he’d cancelled the contract; she’d been left with two thousand expensive tiles to shift. And that was impossible, in those hard new times, with the war gone wrong, and the gentry so tight and short of money. So Alice took Aunty on. It’s what the old woman was owed, for Alice’s childhood; and Alice found when she looked at that lined face that Aunty, for all her Essex rusticity, still felt like home.
Alice got the old woman to sell the kiln and the house. ‘Don’t get bogged down in the past,’ she said kindly. And, while they sat together at the old scrubbed table and worked out what Aunty could do next, Alice also told the old woman her own story, and asked for advice about what she should be doing next.
While she was talking, she was still thinking to herself: What am I asking her for? A broken-down old stick of a thing from the country? This isn’t stuff she knows anything about. It’s court: French, and velvet. How can she possibly…?
But Aunty knew, all right.
‘Seize the moment,’ Aunty said, calm and crack-voiced as ever, and without hesitating, as soon as Alice paused. ‘Do whatever you need to stay at court. You can; course you can, whatever you put your mind to. Just do it, and stop worrying. No point in agonising half your life away, wondering what to do, when you could have decided already and be off having some fun, is there now?’
And suddenly it all seemed easier; and Alice was grateful to have an adviser to hand who never did hesitate – who knew what she wanted, and just took it.
Alice bought Aunty a manor, further south, but still in Essex. And she’s kept Aunty, ever since.
Alice thinks Aunty learned her chirpy ruthlessness on the roads. From various half-understood comments in her childhood, made by neighbours and men at markets, Alice half knows that the tilery wasn’t always Aunty’s. Aunty probably only got her hands on it through some sort of trick. It’s fairly clear, from the droppings-in of the various uncles of long ago, that Aunty came from London. That may not have been the beginning of her story, though; she may have started from somewhere else, before. They’ve never been able to get it out of her. Alice doesn’t blame Aunty for keeping her wits about her, though. People have had to, especially since the Mortality turned every old certainty on its head.
Greed, ambition, call it what you will – the spirit of the age – has been set free by so much death. That’s what people say. Three bouts of plague since Alice was born, and half of Europe dead: only the naive should be surprised if people’s nature changed. Survivors of the Mortality didn’t bother to bless God for their astonishing luck (for, as a lot of people muttered, what did it have to do with God, their escape? When the Bishop of Bath and Wells tried to thank God for the plague’s passing, at the end of 1349, the howling people of Yeovil kept him and his congregation besieged in the church all night long). People who know what’s good for them have, since then, been too busy for God (who at least, as they often say with tough looks, didn’t hate them enough to strike them dead). They’re busy at each other’s throats, squabbling over the spoils. That’s only natural too.
The Mortality has brought so much change in its wake.
First, plain bewilderment: the glut of merchandise, not enough customers, prices plunging, and anyone still alive and with money in his pocket unable to believe his good fortune. That was the lesson old Alison and her London men friends learned so fast. Move into empty houses, sleep on strangers’ beds, take over dead men’s work (or don’t bother to work at all). Eat off silver.
Then marriages: many more marriages, but much less love. People married orphans, and widows, for greed of goods, then quarrelled their lives away.
Then the fury of litigation, as the courts filled up with inheritance disputes. The notaries were dead. The cases took lifetimes to settle. Meanwhile squatters or the Church took over abandoned property, brigands pillaged the countryside, and fraudsters tricked yet more orphans out of their lands. And all the while, in the background, in the fields (or what had been fields), with the shrinking of land farmed by men, a greening as the forest threatened to come back.
Briefly there was no heriot, no merchet, and no tallage for the unfree, those walking skeletons with the caved-in cheeks and the smudgy under-eye skin and the bare, scratchy, scarred stick legs. For a year
