and vindictive, is not an ideal choice of patron for several reasons. One is his wife, Princess Joan, who’s made it clear to Alice for years now that she will never have time for a nouveau riche from nowhere. The other is that the Prince of England has been dying, agonisingly slowly, of some Castilian dropsy caught on campaign, for longer than Alice cares to remember. He’s still clinging to life for the moment; but Alice doubts he will make it to become King Edward IV. And there’s no point in hoping that, when the Prince does die, she’ll get anywhere with his little boy, Richard, a child in the nursery, guarded by his disagreeable mother, that bloated ex-beauty of a princess with the pursed lips and nostrils that flare and dent white whenever she sees Alice.
That leaves the other royal son: John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, the man out there, sweating as he dances. Son number three originally, but since the death of his brother Lionel he’s been son number two; and with every chance that his eldest brother Prince Edward hasn’t long left in this vale of tears either, he’s all too likely, all too soon, to be the King’s eldest surviving son.
It’s a matter of whispered conjecture whether Duke John might, in that eventuality, try and get the throne for himself, rather than protect it for his little nephew, his brother’s son. Some people point to Duke John’s innate nobility, the courteous conservatism in every thought and gesture, and say he wouldn’t. But most people think he would.
There’s no doubt that Duke John’s a good-looking man, in body. There’s a grace to the way he bows his long lean frame, a beauty in the line of eye and cheekbone, and his voice is deep and authoritative. He has a natural dignity of behaviour. But Alice isn’t so sure this beauty extends to his soul. Nor are most other people. After all, Duke John has already claimed one throne, after taking as his second wife a disinherited princess of Castile. He likes to call himself ‘We, the King of Castile’ in his correspondence, and is always threatening to go and conquer Castile and win back his wife’s country (at the expense of the English taxpayer). The suspicious way most people see it is this: would a prince who’s so greedy for a crown that he’ll go all that way in pursuit of one turn up his nose at the much more glorious Crown of England, if he got a chance to grab it? Of course he wouldn’t.
The very fact that people are so ready to believe the worst of the Duke of Lancaster, with no proof one way or the other, shows what an unpopular man this John of Gaunt is. Not without reason, Alice knows. He’s the scratchy kind. He rubs people up the wrong way, even when he doesn’t mean to; and all too often he does mean to. Even among the aristocrats of this court, he’s considered unusually arrogant; considering the competition, Alice thinks wryly, that’s quite an achievement. Certainly he’s not loved among his social inferiors. He hates his father being so dependent on the merchants of London for money. To the merchants’ pained displeasure, he talks too much about the nobility of the nobility and the crawling servility of the lesser orders. And merchants and noblemen alike now have an excuse to dislike and despise Duke John because, in the absence of his sick brother, he’s been in charge of the English armies in France in this disastrous past year, so he’s the one to carry the can for losing pretty much all of English Gascony and costing the country a mint of money. In fact, it’s a good job the Duke’s the richest man in England, with territories from the Scottish border to the South, because he has precious few friends anywhere, and if it weren’t for his money, he’d have none at all.
John of Gaunt needs more than money. He needs to learn to be popular – especially if, as Alice thinks likely, he’s one day going to have a try for the English crown. Alice’s nose for money tells her that any king nowadays will need finance from outside his own estates. Rents aren’t what they used to be, now that there are only half the number of Englishmen to farm the land and pay the landlords. The nobility is poorer. So the most important lesson the Duke needs to learn is how to get on with the London merchants, who are becoming as powerful as the merchant princes of Italy were right after the Mortality (until Edward bankrupted all of them with an earlier lot of colossal war debts). The top few merchants are richer than all the noblemen of England put together. Duke John’s got to stop treating them like dirty sheep-shearing tinkerish no-good thieves. He’s got to respect them as the financiers of today’s England. And it’s Alice’s private belief that there’s only one person who can teach him all that – who understands both court and City, and can explain it right. That person is her.
So Alice has dreamed up this week of glamorous frivolity, this (to her mind) insanely expensive joust in red and gold, with feasts every night for the court and wine flowing instead of water in the conduits of London for the commoners. The week is not so much in honour of the courtly love between swooning knights and the cruel ladies they’re fighting to impress, which the tourney’s officially supposed to celebrate; Alice has no time at all for the foolishness of chivalry. Nor is it just to amuse and entertain the court, or even to impress on the people of England her own royal-favoured status. What she really wants from it all is to help this man she would like to know better.
‘We need to do something to take their minds off the war,’ Edward said, back at New Year. He looked at her with his eyes dancing the way they always used to, with his lips and eyebrows slightly raised in a near-smile of expectation, with all his old confidence that the fire in him would communicate itself to her, and that she’d come up with some exuberant, extrovert, extraordinary idea, worthy of the King he was and the life they lived together. ‘We need to stop them raging against John.’
She knew exactly how to answer. ‘A pageant…a joust!’ she murmured excitedly back, without a pause, with the golden delight that being with Edward has always brought her, with the sense that, when she’s with him, she’s breathing in air that tingles with stardust (or devilment – he’d probably prefer her to think of his magic as a bit satanic). ‘We’ll have a joust – we’ll remind them of the glory of England in arms. They’ll forget their gripes with my lord of Lancaster in no time, once they’re drunk as drowned mice on free wine, watching the knights fight. It’ll be all songs and glory talk instead.’ He laughed at that. How handsome Edward is, still, when he throws his head back like that and laughs.
‘It can’t be too obvious,’ she warned him. Edward’s prone to getting carried away. Sometimes she has to remind him to be more subtle. ‘It can’t be too much about my lord. With the mood the people of London are in right now, they might not even come if they thought they were just going to have to applaud him for days at a stretch. So…we’ll give it a theme, not about him at all. Something innocent…to do with love, maybe…and we’ll give them free wine…And, on the second or third day of tourneying, he’ll win his bout, once they’re all in a mood to remember the might of England. And that’s when everything will calm down.’
Edward accepted that, of course. It’s Alice who, soon afterwards, thought of the spring sun-worshipping theme, and the title of Lady of the Sun, and accepted the role for herself, graciously, when Edward offered it; of course she did. She doesn’t care, especially, about the title. Titles, in her view, are an encumbrance; they make you too visible; every jealous nobody can take a pot-shot at you. Alice runs the royal households everywhere from Windsor to Sheen to Havering-atte-Bower, controlling the lives and purses of hundreds of servants. She’s so important that the Pope himself petitions her for diplomatic favours. Yet in the entire five years since Philippa died, she’s never had any official court status beyond the shadowy calling of demoiselle to a long-dead queen. She doesn’t altogether mind that, to this day, no one knows whether to call her ‘my lady,’ or just ‘Mistress Perrers’. But this title is a piece of glorious frivolity. She’ll enjoy it while it lasts, just as she’ll enjoy the wonderful robe and cloak and cap she gets, worth a king’s ransom. It never hurts to take a gift, she thinks. And it never hurts to ask for a bit more afterwards either.
It will be fun. It will all be beautifully organised (because it’s been organised by her). But the important thing in her mind is that, by the end of this week, Alice is determined she will have made the difficult Duke feel gratitude to her; she’ll have made John of Gaunt her friend.
