'Lord Latimer didn't say. Just that the King had appointed Sir Robert Ashton in my place.' Scrope's forehead wrinkles. 'So he said.'

'But you don't believe it was the King's idea,' Sir Peter probes. 'You think it was Lord Latimer who wanted to be rid of you. So - why?'

Scrope puts big clean hands with big knuckles on the table. This is hard for him. 'Well,' he says. Then he stops, and shakes his head, and takes a big breath. 'I imagine because of you, sir, coming around and asking your questions.' As if to excuse himself for this boldness, he hunches his back; he's not a man to try and tower over whoever he's talking to, or dominate a conversation. 'Or else because the letters are to go out this week, summoning a parliament. It makes no difference. They're cleaning up.'

Sir Peter's eyebrows rise. 'Parliament!' he can't help exclaiming.

'April,' Scrope replies. A man of few words.

Next month, Sir Peter thinks, and his heart speeds up. But that isn't what's most important now. He must concentrate. 'Cleaning up,' he says, returning to the matter in hand. 'What do you mean?'

Scrope doesn't answer directly. Or perhaps he does, and Peter de la Mare just doesn't understand. He says, 'I'm not supposed to be here. But I thought you might like to see some of the detail of how my department has been run. I've been making copies of the household accounts I've prepared for the past two years - before they were corrected by my master for the fair copy that's gone on record. That's the record you've seen, sir. But my accounts are different. Parts get...struck out. Often. I thought you might be interested to make the comparison.'

'Aha,' says Peter de la Mare. He can hardly believe his luck. This is the missing piece in the puzzle. This is what he's been looking for all these months. This man, who doesn't look a bad sort, now he comes to think of it, who has conscience in the rumples of his brow, must have been uneasy with the way things were for a long time to have been keeping copies that differ from the recorded version of the truth, and to have them at hand, ready to bring him as soon as Latimer dismissed him. Scrope must have felt slighted that his careful accounting was changed; maybe, at first, purely from professional pride; later, with the dawning awareness that something must be gravely amiss within the government for his master to make those repeated changes. Even if Sir Peter doesn't understand everything yet about why, he sees the calculation that has brought this shy, correct man here. Wounded pride, of course; but also, the possibility of a future in some new government, if Latimer goes. So there must be some discrepancy in the two versions of these accounts - Scrope's raw ones, and Latimer's finished ones - that could topple Latimer.

He holds out his hand for the bag of doc.u.ments. He puts a warm hand on Scrope's shoulder. His heart is racing. This man is volunteering to teach him the language of Londoners cheating. In time for Parliament. He can't believe his luck.

He even cracks a smile. To think he was about to try and get away.

But he shouldn't crow too soon. Humbly, he adds, 'I'm no expert, of course.' And: 'Perhaps you'll talk me through the changes?'

SEVENTEEN.

Alice goes back to Edward, at Havering, and sits out the wintry last days of March. At least, with the King at her side, she feels safe, for now.

The letters of summons are going out across the s.h.i.+res. The Commons and Lords will soon be making their way to Westminster. Parliament will begin in a month. By then it will be late April. And Alice will be prepared: her affairs tidied up, her business papers transparent. There'll be spring, and hope, in the air.

She mustn't rush around, meanwhile, losing her nerve, doing things differently from usual, looking guilty. Chaucer has said she must just sit tight.

No one has ever tried to protect her as Chaucer is doing now, even though he disapproves of what she's done. Knowledge of his support sustains her; keeps her panic at bay. She doesn't want more any more - more houses, more money - because, as it is, she sees, her cup overflows. She's at the top of Fortune's wheel, and all she wants to do now is to stay there. If she can only do as he says, and wipe out as many traces as she can of her most recent manoeuvres, perhaps they will go unnoticed...and perhaps then she can go on living just as she is, and seeing him sometimes. In her present anxiety, that seems more than enough.

So she's quietly getting it all worked out. She's written to her land agents to tell them which leases to sell, which paperwork to clarify, and which to destroy; she'll meet them next month to make sure they've carried out her orders right.

She'll wait here at Havering till the Duke is back and Edward goes to Westminster to hear his son's account of this year of inconclusive peace talks. Then she'll slip off to Gaines to rea.s.sure herself that, failing all else, that escape route's still open; and see her children. It was a good idea of Chaucer's, that: getting Edward to knight Johnny; giving herself a route back to court, as a mother if not in her own right, whatever happens next. But doubts have surfaced in Alice's mind since that comforting talk with Chaucer. What will have Johnny and the girls become, running wild out there in Aunty's care? Chaucer can't know how little she's...Though she'd like to bring Johnny back with her, if he...And Edward's so far gone now that she might never even have to explain who the child is; she could probably sweet-talk Edward into knighting a young gentleman without his ever asking. But she needs to check. See for herself if Johnny will pa.s.s muster as a young gentleman.

Edward will never notice her absence. He'll be looking forward too much to the biggest moment of his own year: St George's Day, on 23 April, after Council, just before Parliament, when he'll be off leading the other doddery old men of the court, the ageing knights and grey-haired heroes of France, and his son the Duke, and even perhaps his skeletal dying eldest son, to Windsor to play at being parfit gentil Knights of the Round Table. They'll sit at the giant round table, letting their grey beards trail in the wine, and talk in cracked voices about all their vanished glories.

So, for now, Alice has nothing to do but to look after her old companion. She baths Edward and talks to him, but he's not really with her very often any more. It's hard not to feel impatient with him. He dribbles food down his front. Of course he does. He's lost all his teeth. And he spends most days in bed, not because of any particular illness but just because he lacks the energy to get up. Once, he catches her eye with a little of his old vigour, and says, 'It's not that I don't think of drinking and f.u.c.king any more,' but by the time she's laughed at that old joke, and patted his hand, she can see he's forgotten.

Experimentally, she says, 'Cher ami, will you knight my Johnny soon?' He nods, vacantly.

'Johnny,' he says. He doesn't say, 'Who?' It's a.s.sent, of a sort; but Alice doesn't feel rea.s.sured.

Fear spreads. Once you've let it in, it gets everywhere. Like love, perhaps.

For the first time, Alice finds she's leery of travelling alone. She takes an escort of palace servants because she'll have to leave the London road for the last few miles of her journey, and you can't trust the woods, these days. The woods are dripping, rustling refuges for violent companies of men and archers back from the wars, out from their tied fields, s.h.i.+fting and making s.h.i.+ft, living wild. No money to clear them out, and no one with the will to, either. People are quoting the Bishop of Rochester's latest thundering sermon: England, inundated by homicides, where men are swift to the shedding of blood. Nowhere is safe.

But she leaves the servants at the wayside inn at Upminster, a mile away from Gaines, because, even though the innkeeper says there are murderous footpads everywhere round here, she can't trust palace people either. Servants talk.

'Wait for me here,' she says, more bravely than she feels. 'I'll be back in two days.'

And she walks her horse on, slowly, through the silent drizzle, thankful for the wet that m.u.f.fles the sound of hooves. Every crack and rustle in the undergrowth sets her heart racing. Once she thinks she hears the snorting of another horse. She freezes. She waits. Nothing. There is no birdsong, either, though she hears a very occasional whir of flight. The woods still have the deadness of winter. Only the stream is full and racing. Yet, as the trees begin to thin out, she sees there are after all a few buds fattening and straining on the twigs slapping at her arms.

There will be spring. She'll just sit tight, as Chaucer said. She'll be all right.

She can't believe the exquisite sweetness of getting out of the woods; or the pearly afternoon light still in the sky as she lets herself through the gate and plods on up the track through the field.

Her breath comes more gently. Joy fills her at this flat, barren vista.

She thought, once, that she'd plant a great avenue of shade trees along the sides of this track, and that they would lead visitors to a warm, commodious, beautiful manor house, surrounded by gardens of waving roses and gillyflowers, with bees in the rosemary and lavender and doves fluttering through the orchards.

Tumbledown though it is, in reality, with those piles of timbers and broken-down carts and boxes and old cracked tiles that Aunty can never bear to throw out ('You never know, they might come in handy, love'), the windswept house ahead represents safety. Love. Home. And, today, that makes it beautiful enough.

Until, over there at the other end of the great field, she spots two young girls skipping. Even from here, she can see they're in rags, like peasant children. Their legs are muddy. Their rope's muddy. Even from here, she can see they're hers.

Her heart leaps with a painful, toxic rush of feelings.

Last time she came, she sent word to Aunty Alison beforehand. And the place was all scrubbed up, the priest in attendance, the children nicely turned out, if silent and careful in front of the stranger they knew to be their mother.

They weren't bare-legged and muddy when they knew she was coming.

But perhaps this is what everything's usually like when she's not around, she thinks with a rush of shame and understanding. Deep down, she realises, she's always known it must be - because how would old Alison know any different?

She stops and looks. Her joy in what she sees is fading as fast as the light.

A tall scarecrow of a figure comes out of the house up ahead and moves through the complicated gloom of the courtyard to stand, silhouetted against the sky, staring out across the eastern field. Then Alice hears Aunty's remote voice hollering, off towards something - someone - approaching her from over that way: 'It's late - what kept you?' and 'Whatcha get?'

The little girls begin to chirrup in thin, excited voices. Aunty's got her back turned to them, but they're excited too at whoever's coming home. Alice sees them pick up their rope and run, heels flas.h.i.+ng, rat's-tail hair flying, to the farmhouse.

Alice carries on plodding quietly forward on her tired horse, watching them all watch the eastern field.

She's quite close before she sees who it is they're waiting outside for.

There's a boy's head, bobbing along in the bare furrow of a turned strip of field. Dark hair, brown jerkin, brown soil, but she makes out a pale face and white hands. She sees Johnny's thin little legs working hard, lifting up high at each step, to avoid getting stuck in the claggy soil. That must be making him tired, walking like that. With the painful tenderness of recognition, she thinks: How tall he's got.

Behind him, a man. Taller than Johnny, a bit taller than Alice too, maybe, but not tall as men go; and stocky, with a big mess of hair. He's got a bag on his shoulder. He's got a big stick in his hand.

'Not bad for an afternoon's work!' she hears the distant, excited answering cry, as his head goes back. 'Five n.o.bles!'

Five n.o.bles, Alice thinks. That's nearly two pounds. You don't get that kind of money for honest farm work.

'Who from?' Aunty's just yelled back at him with gusto when, hearing the cautious clip-clop of a horse approaching from an entirely different direction, she shuts up, smartish, and turns towards Alice.

'Alice,' Aunty says. Her face goes still, her body too. Her voice is without emotion. She's not giving anything away. She's obviously not planning to, either. There's a sullenness in the set of her shoulders that says: Don't even bother asking awkward questions.

The little girls have heard the old woman speak and caught on too. When they see where Aunty's looking, they both turn and stare at Alice, as expressionlessly as Aunty, but more uncertainly, as if they don't know how to greet this visitor.

At the same time, Alice hears the man-voice calling his reply from not so far away in the squelchy field any more: 'A posse of fat priests!'

A moment later, there's a high boy-laugh, too: 'Scared stiff, they were! s.h.i.+ttin' themselves!'

Alice holds Aunty's gaze a moment longer, making clear that she's heard everything, and understood everything.

Then she dismounts, and leads the horse to the trough, and lets it drink, and loosens its saddle, and ties up the reins.

Her hands are shaking. She closes her eyes.

Only when she's splashed freezing water on her own face, and composed herself a little, and heard the panting breath and steady tread of man and boy coming right up, almost to the edge of the yard, is she able to open her mouth.

Her voice is still trembling as she says, 'Aunty. Children.' And as she says, 'Wat.'

They're silent enough as they troop into the kitchens. Alice hopes it's shame that's got their tongues, because she's ashamed, too, now she's seeing them through other eyes, Chaucer's maybe, and seeing how far she's let things slide. But once they're inside, where there's a pot on the fire and chicken in the stew, they quickly thaw out in the golden glow, in the bustle of getting the boots and sodden outer layers off, and the silence turns into barely suppressed pleasure and the beginning of talk. They're not ashamed at all, Alice sees; they were just shocked, for a moment, to be caught. But now they've decided it's all right; because Alice is one of them. 'Here, let me do that, your fingers are frozen,' Aunty tells Johnny, and he turns willingly, with a bit of a grin, even, to let her strip off his jerkin. Jane and Joan are ladling out stew and putting steaming bowls on the table. Wat's back from the larder with cups and a jug of ale. They know they shouldn't be, but they're all still pleased with their afternoon's work. There's a cheery light in every pair of eyes.

Alice shakes her head. She hasn't the strength to walk straight in and tell them it's all wrong. So she just sits tight and lets the children's stories start coming out, which they soon do, in those high, excited little voices. She hears, first, that Wat's taken Johnny out robbing on the roads three or four times already. He's nearly twelve. High time, Wat says. There's a proud light in the boy's blue eyes when Wat tousles his hair and says proudly, 'Got ourselves a good little fighter here.' Then she hears that Aunty's taught Joan and Jane to climb through windows, and wriggle under cracks in doors, and pick pockets, and set snares for hares, just as she taught Alice, long ago.

Aunty's voice cracks with pride as, forgetting her watchfulness earlier, she says, 'Yeah, they're as good as you ever were, by now, dear. Could send them out any day to earn themselves a living, if they had to.'

Alice asks: But where's the priest who was supposed to be teaching the children their letters and Latin?

'Oh, gone, dear,' Aunty replies blithely. 'No loss, either. We couldn't be doing with him. A right old woman, he was. Always nagging us to give everything we grew to the Bishop and spend our Sundays on our knees. Well, I said to him, we got no time for that. Too busy. And if we give you all our turnips, what'll we eat ourselves? So he went.'

Alice says weakly, 'But, Aunty...'

But Aunty's never had any time for priests. Alice has always known that, too. So she has no real right to be shocked now.

'There's a lovely young man comes to the village sometimes, dear. Much better,' Aunty confides. 'They lock him up sometimes, but he always gets out. Pops up in the market place. Gets a good crowd, he does. Preaches a lovely sermon.'

It's little Joan who picks up Aunty's story. In a deep imitation-man voice, the ten-year-old intones: 'My good friends, things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until everything shall be in common.' Wat and Aunty start to laugh and clap their big raw hands against their thighs.

It would be enough to make anyone howl with laughter, if anyone weren't a mother who'd somehow managed to convince herself that her children were turning into little ladies and gentlemen out here in the countryside, and not the budding Lollards and thieves she now sees stuffing themselves with stew.

Alice keeps quiet. She's thinking. Thinking wearily of the unbridgeable gap between here and Aldgate; of the impossibility of explaining to Chaucer, or anyone else she knows in that other life in the centre, how things are here. Not knowing, herself, which of her own selves to be, because a part of her would like to be laughing along with the rest of them, not giving a d.a.m.n about anything outside these walls. She's spent all these years working so hard at getting rich, but how rich does she need to be, really? And what for? She's flown so high, yet she'll never be truly respectable, however far she climbs. At least, she'll never, despite that dizzying ascent she's already made, have the grand worldly position that truly n.o.ble blood brings. And suddenly she's weary of the fear and anxiety that her strivings have brought her along with the wealth. Wouldn't she be happier just stopping trying, and joining in with her family's roars instead, and embracing their view of things?

No one notices her silence. There are tears of mirth coming into everyone else's eyes as Alice's child goes on, grinning and enjoying the attention she clearly knows she'll get, because this is clearly something she often does: '...when there shall be neither va.s.sal nor lord and all distinctions levelled...when lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.'

You can't send Johnny out with Wat, she whispers to Aunty, in the darkness, inside the bedcurtains, when she thinks the children, and Wat, in the other two beds, are asleep, when the whole world, outside, has gone that velvet quiet of a country night. What were you thinking? Robbing priests, indeed.

Aunty knows that, at least, really. She just doesn't want to admit it.

You never even said you had Wat living here, Alice goes on. He's got to go. Get rid of him.

Aunty wriggles, rebelliously, at her side.

Well, I will then, Alice hisses. First thing tomorrow. And I'm sending another priest down here, too, for the schooling. So don't you scare that one off.

Wat knows, really, too. She catches him in the morning, first thing, shakes him up from his bed and takes him out into the yard, bundled up in any old clothes that came to hand in a hurry, to talk. 'Ow, all right, Allie,' he mumbles, grinning sheepishly as she tweaks his shoulder and nudges him along, 'only stop that pinching, do, I'm coming.' He'd like to make her laugh, and relent. But even as he tries to jolly her along, he's avoiding her eye, because of course he's ashamed to have been caught here, taking advantage of her hospitality on the sly.

The awful thing is, she almost does laugh. It's not that she can't see the funny side herself, at least while she's out here. She just can't afford to.

So she hardens her heart and takes Wat off to the squeaking gate, and they both lean on it, and look out at the big sky, while she says, 'Right, you. A joke's a joke, but you've got to move on.'

Wat just nods. He didn't really think she'd let him off, teaching her kid to be a highwayman. He's already thought out what he'll do next. He says, straight away, 'Yeah...I know...I'll go to Johnny.'

'What, our our Johnny?' Alice says, caught out of breath again. She knows Wat doesn't mean her son this time. He means the smallest of Aunty's kids, Johnny with the red freckly nose and the perpetual sniffs. Johnny with the stag beetle collection in his purse, who could turn cartwheels. Johnny who grew up and went for a carpenter on the road. The Johnny Wat told her once he'd found again, grown up. With a bit of land, and a family, in Kent. Grown dull and respectable. Johnny?' Alice says, caught out of breath again. She knows Wat doesn't mean her son this time. He means the smallest of Aunty's kids, Johnny with the red freckly nose and the perpetual sniffs. Johnny with the stag beetle collection in his purse, who could turn cartwheels. Johnny who grew up and went for a carpenter on the road. The Johnny Wat told her once he'd found again, grown up. With a bit of land, and a family, in Kent. Grown dull and respectable.

'Yeah. He's settled down. In Dartford. Married, children, working, everything. I told you, didn't I? He'll put me up for a bit, help me find my feet.'

Doubtfully, Alice says, 'What, you, farming with Johnny? You'd be better off overseas.' She's thinking: I'd I'd be better off if you were safely back overseas. Didn't I do my best to get Richard Lyons to send you back over the water? But Wat's not interested in foreign parts any more. be better off if you were safely back overseas. Didn't I do my best to get Richard Lyons to send you back over the water? But Wat's not interested in foreign parts any more.

'Don't fancy it. Plenty to be getting on with here. And Kent's a good place. Down by the sea. Busy. Plenty on the roads.' So you won't be farming, then, Alice thinks; but it's not for her to criticise. She hasn't helped his career, so why turn her nose up if he makes his crust from the roads? 'Anyway,' he adds truculently, 'I've got a reason to stay.' She must have looked blank. 'Lyons,' he explains. 'I don't take kindly to being humiliated. And he fired me. Made a fool of me in front of my men. I want my own back. I'm biding my time, mind. But one of these days I'll get him. And I can't do that from overseas.'

She laughs a bit at that. 'No chance,' she says. 'Not with Richard Lyons.' Still, there's admiration in the kiss she gives him. He's right. Lyons, back then, took no notice of her idea to set Wat up with money to go back abroad. So no wonder Wat feels resentful that the man just discarded him when Wat could be of no more use to him in England. He's got spirit, Wat. Always had.

He's gone within the hour. 'Well, 'bye,' is all he says. They watch him stride off towards the river with his bag on his shoulder. Presumably the five n.o.bles are in there with his clothes, as no one has mentioned them again. The house seems quiet without him. Aunty clanks reproachfully around the kitchen. The children are quiet too. Johnny disappears. The girls sit by the fire, playing pick-up sticks, muttering something that Alice hopes isn't betting talk. No one meets Alice's eye.

Alice sits at the table, feeling unpopular. Making alternative plans. Because she can't bring Johnny with her to London now. Not the way these children have got.

But the idea of letting go of any of the solutions Chaucer's thought of brings back the panic. So she needs to make compromises; make it all still seem possible.

She's thinking she'll send her old friar down here for a couple of months. She'll tell him not to bother Aunty with priest-talk: no lectures about Ma.s.s, or t.i.thes. Then perhaps Aunty will return the favour and leave him in peace too. And Friar John will school the kids a bit. Maybe before the end of Parliament he'll have undone the damage. Taught them some manners. Bring Johnny back with him, possibly. She can think about trying to get him his knighthood then.

She stays the night. She leaves the next morning. Those servants waiting at Upminster will be fretting, at the Boar.

But first she gets the children to sit up in their bed and gathers them all awkwardly into her arms for an experimental embrace. This might be what Chaucer might imagine her doing, she thinks. They're surprised, though not unwilling. They melt sleepily against her. Just for a moment, touching their hot animal little bodies, she lets herself be lost in might-have-beens. But she stops herself getting emotional. What good would that do?

Instead, she pats them, and gets up again, and says, briskly, 'I'll be sending another priest along. You make sure you do your studies with him, mind. And don't let Aunty bully him into going this time, do you hear?' The eyes that look back at her are wild eyes - the same wild watchful eyes she and Wat and Johnny and the others must have had, years ago - and the heads that nod 'yes' have other ideas in them. They look like her, true. Alice loves the way she recognises her own fingers and toes and nose and sharp eyes on their grubby bodies; but at the same time, she thinks wearily, they're strangers. They're not the children she should have raised, knowing what she knows now, having become who she is now; they're just another brood of Aunty's kids. The thought of changing them - turning them into clean, groomed, well-schooled playmates for Chaucer's children, say, lapping up their Latin and a dab hand with a sword - seems impossible in that discouraged moment. She's failed them, she thinks. She can only hope there's still time for the errors of the past to be reversed.