fans herself complacently, and examines the rictus smile on the dark face of the Duke of Lancaster. He looked so dignified in his red a few minutes ago, but now his face is the same blood hue as his tunic. It pleases her that even the world’s most arrogant man is out there, gritting his teeth and leaping in the air, as determined as the rest of the scarletfaced courtiers to please the King his father and host by looking delighted with the entertainment laid on by Alice.
She turns a little, enough to murmur into the ear of the King his father and host, in a way that the Duke will be sure to see. (She’s wanted to make a relationship with Duke John for years, even though, between his long absences at the war in France, he’s not yet shown great interest in her. So it won’t do him any harm to show him the extent of her power now. She knows how power attracts.) The lords a-leaping down there won’t be able to hear what she’s saying to their master, but they’ll be able to guess at the tone of her voice from her sly sideways grin. ‘I don’t know how they all have the energy,’ she murmurs, affecting weariness, and fans herself. She has it all worked out. No one will ever expect Edward to dance, unless by some whim he chooses to. His age lets him off: rising sixty-two, and the long golden beard long ago turned silver. So he’ll be pleased she wants to sit it out too. And why not? There’s no point in her tiring herself out tonight. Her big day will be tomorrow. ‘In this heat…’ she adds, even more languidly. She likes the way the French comes sliding so naturally out of her mouth, as if she’d been born to it, even if, in reality, her French has been learned more at Stratford-atte-Bowe than in Paris. She’s had to work hard at it, in her time. But if she’s learned anything, it is that the point of hard work is to make things look easy. When Edward chuckles back, and pats her hand, she permits herself a slightly bigger smile.
They haven’t always been so eager to please, those courtiers down there. Let them dance to her tune now.
Tomorrow, Edward will show her off to the world, in a burst of glory the like of which England has never seen. Tomorrow, for a week, mercenaries, princes and dukes from all over Christendom will watch a pageant in which the influence of Alice Perrers, who has come so far already in her twenty-five years on this earth, and might yet go further, is finally made plain.
Tomorrow, at mid-morning, the court will walk through London dressed in red and white, the colours she’s chosen for the week. With the ladies holding the horses of their gentlemen by their golden bridles, they’ll set off from outside this window, from the Hill behind the Tower, and process along Tower Street and Chepe, then out of Aldersgate to the pasture-cum-jousting ground at Smithfield. And then the gentlemen of the court will joust, in her honour, while the people of the City, all dressed in their coloured liveries, watch and cheer. And she, and only she, Alice Perrers, who will be known for the week as Lady of the Sun (a title she’s thought of herself), as well as Queen of the Lists, will ride in a golden chariot, at the centre of everything. She’ll be wearing a cap encrusted with jewels, and a cloak of Venetian gold lined with red taffeta, on top of the red gown, lined in white, embroidered with seed pearls, and edged in royal ermine, that she’s got on tonight. She’s going to astonish. She’s going to impress.
It’s time they realised – all these courtiers, all those Londoners – that a woman who’s already, by the grace of God and the generosity of the King of England (and her own financial acumen), one of the richest people in the land, has every intention of shining like the sun for the rest of her days.
She hasn’t forgotten her place entirely. Not really. She isn’t going to start acting like, or thinking of herself as, a real, born-to-the-throne queen. (Anyway, who would have let her if she tried? They all still worship the memory of dear old Queen Philippa, who’s been dead for most of the eight years of Alice’s supremacy; and Alice doesn’t have a drop of anything like royal blood in her veins, or noble blood, or even knightly blood. She’s a different kind altogether. She’s not even very interested in thinking of being a helpless, dependent, real queen; she likes her freedom too much to dream of sitting still in an expensive robe, smiling at posturing fools of knights-errant, for the rest of her days.) Still, only an idiot could ignore the meaning of her punning pageant title, and Londoners aren’t idiots. Edward’s royal symbol is the sun. If Alice Perrers is to be Lady of the Sun, at least for this week of glory, then she will be displaying all the power a queen commands. And power, at least the quiet kind that comes with wealth, she does enjoy.
Even before Edward, even as a very young woman, Alice was busy consolidating her position in this world. Every penny she’s ever inherited, or made, has been put back into snapping up leases on this property or that, taking on unconsidered trifles of fields or tenements here, there and everywhere, making improvements, building, putting up rents, and using the profits to buy more. She’s got a gift for it. She’s done extraordinarily well – far better than she would have if she’d set her sights purely on imitating the real born-to-it ladies of the court and becoming almost indistinguishable from them. But, of course, it’s been much easier for her to achieve wealth since the world came to realise that there’s a misty, unseen, kingly presence at her back. That knowledge concentrates people’s minds. It keeps them honest. No one cheats on a bargain with Alice, as her store of coin and leases grows. No one has, for a long time.
The real point of this week’s festivities, as far as Alice is concerned, is to make sure she can continue to enjoy the power that feeds and protects all the wealth she’s still building up – even after Edward dies.
For Alice has begun to understand that the enchanted dream she’s been living in until now – the best part of a decade as the indulged darling of a dear old man who, himself, has been on the throne for nearly half a century, and is loved, everywhere, as England’s greatest king – must soon come to an end. No one else seems to have noticed or to be planning their next move, although when Edward does pass on the end of his reign will surely affect them all. The gentry grumble about paying taxes to fund his war in France, true. But they carry on buying expensive clothes and jewels, far beyond their means, and raiding each other’s manor houses when they think they can get away with stealing a few fields, just as the courtiers carry on dancing and jousting and prancing off to the war at vast expense and raiding each other’s castles, as if they all thought they could somehow continue for ever in the golden sunset years of Edward’s reign, in more or less peace, and more or less prosperity, stuffing their faces with larks’ tongues and honeyed peacock breasts, and watching the ice swans melt at an unending succession of banquet tables.
But Alice has heard Edward mumbling in the mornings, unable to shake off the night’s dreams; sometimes calling her ‘Philippa’ after his wife, or ‘Isabella’ after his favourite, headstrong, high-and-mighty fool of a daughter. He’s still most of the time, at least in front of others, the sparkling, charismatic, dynamic man he always was; but, in his unguarded moments, alone with her, she also sees the confused old man he’s becoming, or is about to become. She treats the creeping wound on his leg, which won’t heal, so she knows the extent of his physical decrepitude too, just as she knows the folly of his having recently restarted the war in France, years after he’s past his fighting prime, and of expecting to go on having the luck of the Devil that he enjoyed in his muscular youth, and winning.
So she’s formed a view. She needs to think about the future, beyond Edward. And she’s decided that the best way to protect herself against that cloudy tomorrow is to cultivate the friendship of one of Edward’s sons. Not to become a mistress again, obviously, for Alice doubts that a prince who could have any woman in the land would want his father’s cast-off, no longer young; she’s realistic enough never to have mistaken her rounded plumpness and dark curls and cheeky freckles for beauty. What Alice wants next is respect and recognition; a relationship that will maintain something of her influence and visibility, while leaving her the freedom of manoeuvre she needs to carry on buying up land and extending her possessions.
Ideally, she’d have preferred this respect and recognition to come from the son who is destined to be the next King of England. But the
