And here, to stop her voice catching, she made it shrill, almost a shout: ‘And too greedy to look after the dead without payment, too, half the time. Trying to take money off people even to say a prayer over the bodies.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s priests for you. It’s not just your kin. We could all go to bloody Hell, and what would they care?’
She sensed, from the stunned quality of the girl’s silence, that she’d gone too far. ‘Priests…Don’t get me started on priests,’ Aunty said, a bit apologetically. ‘What you need to know is, some bishop’s sorted it out so that we don’t all burn for eternity because of their selfishness. He says laymen can make confession to each other if they can’t find a priest. The Apostles did that, didn’t they? And if there isn’t a man around to confess to, it can even be a woman. And if there’s no one around at all, then, they say, faith must suffice. And it does. Suffice. You keep that in your head. Your folks are not in Hell. Your folks are all right.’
The girl nodded, and took her saucer eyes off Aunty and gazed down at the baby. Aunty could see what she was thinking: no baptism, so, also, damned?
‘We’re all here. That’s the main thing. You, and me, and this new little life here,’ Aunty broke determinedly into that thought before the girl’s terror took hold. ‘All alive, all blessed by God, all ready to face tomorrow.’ She made the sign of the Cross over the baby. Then she made a wry sort of face. ‘No priest,’ she said, ‘no problem.’ She wagged her finger at Kate. ‘We don’t need them bastards any more to save ourselves, remember?’ She dipped her finger in the last bucket of water left and made the holy sign again on the baby’s face, and said a made-up blessing. ‘Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,’ she muttered against the baby’s crying. ‘Live long and well, little one. Be happy. Be a beauty. Make others happy, if they deserve it. Be lucky. And be rich if you can! Amen.’
The women smiled tentatively at each other. They both liked the strange little prayer – taking the ordinary chatter that fell from their lips as the Word of God. ‘I’m going to call her Alice,’ the girl said confidingly. ‘After you.’ Then, quite peacefully, as if Aunty had put her worries to rest: ‘Will you sing that song, the one I heard you whistling?’ She was just a child herself.
Aunty wrinkled her not-young face till slightly mocking lines criss-crossed it; in the shadows, she felt as though the sorrows of all the world were on it. ‘Thought it was a nice cheerful tune, did you?’ she said. ‘Catchy. Words a bit gloomier though. It was the tramping song I heard on the cattle road out. Toughened everyone up.’
She began to sing it, quietly, breathily, like a lullaby. She had a deepish tuneful voice. She kept her eyes on Kate, whose eyes were drooping as if she didn’t mind the words. ‘Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit!…Seething, terrible, shouting hurt…Great is its seething like a burning cinder…A grievous thing of ashy hue.’
Looking at the bright square of outside through the door frame, Aunty wondered, as she sang, how many other survivors were also watching the horizon. You couldn’t know if there were any; not really. She and these kids might be the last people of all, alone in the desolation.
Well, we’re all right, she thought stoutly, shutting out the blackness. We’ll get on our feet. And it wouldn’t be all bad, a world with just us, and no priests.
Kate let her head start to nod as she listened to the cracked voice, trying not to think of anything except the part of her that was still rejoicing in the touch of the baby, of skin and cloth on her skin. She yawned. She was tired, so tired. The yawn didn’t surprise her. But she hadn’t expected to start crying. She certainly didn’t expect the dirty wash of despair that now broke through her without any warning, the blubbery, snuffly sneezings and coughings, as if she were grieving for her losses and all the woes in the world, now, suddenly, all at once.
Aunty – Alison, Alice – stood up. There was something new in her face, something watchful. She picked the baby up off Kate’s breast.
‘Going to put her down for a sleep,’ Aunty said. With the baby held against herself, she twirled a blanket down over Kate’s nakedness without touching her. ‘She’ll be tired, after what she’s been through. You need a bit of quiet too, love. Shut your eyes.’
It was only when Aunty and the baby had stepped outside, into the strong morning light, and Aunty had quietly pushed the door to behind her, that Kate felt, through the aches and bruises of what her body had endured all night, a different kind of pain. There were swellings on either side of her throat, she realised, and where her legs joined her body. She twisted her wet face round, stiffly, because everything ached so much, and squinted into her armpit. It was too shadowy inside to be sure, but she thought the great pulsing engorged mound she saw there was turning black.
They’re late for the dinner; late enough that the light is beginning to fade, and the torches are lit, and the ice swans are beginning to melt, rivulets of water running between the silver channels down the table. They’ve clearly been bickering all the way to Westminster, these two. They look set-faced and stubborn, each in his own fashion. But then they’re an odd couple, by anyone’s book: the wife tall and graceful and long-necked as the ice swans, visibly at home in these grand surroundings, while the altogether shorter and stubbier husband’s only resemblance to a swan is that, like the icy masterpieces starting to sail down the vast table, he’s sweating, even before the dancing’s begun.
Philippa Chaucer sways down the table to her place, weaving her way among the throng of pages and serving men as if they were invisible, making it clear to her life’s companion, as he makes his way more awkwardly down the other side to his parallel place, that she’s noting how far they are from the grandees at the top.
‘If only,’ she mouths, somehow managing to form the chilly words without reducing her chiselled beauty by even a fraction, and indicating the luxury that surrounds them with a small, expert lift of one eyebrow, ‘if only you had even a tenth of that woman’s ambition, how different things might be for us.’
Geoffrey, her husband, only responds by looking around, as if he’s surprised by it all, at the eye-popping feast conjured into existence by the ambition of that woman, the King’s mistress. He furrows his brow in anxiety. He runs his fingers through his hair – or tries to. His fingers connect with the hat he’s forgotten he’s wearing. They knock it half off his head. He crams it back on, all wrong, and sits down with an embarrassing thump on the bench, interrupting the conversation of the men on either side of him. He goes red. He begins a wordy apology. Philippa looks at him, shakes her head very slightly, and sighs.
Dance, all of you, dance, Alice thinks, watching the crowd of sweating faces below, rather enjoying their sufferings. Go on. Higher, a tiny bit higher.
It’s an unusually hot April evening. It’s only ten minutes since Alice signalled for the tables to be pushed against the walls. The air’s still thick with sheep fat and fowl grease. But how they’re all throwing themselves about in the crowd below.
She can’t resist taking pleasure in examining them from the superior vantage point of the royal dais. The courtiers have fused into one heaving mass, energetically going through the motions of the saltarello. They’re glowing and glistening and panting under their turbans, inside their heavy velvets and silks. They’re all doing their best to show their King
