'I must have tripped up,' Alice says a bit shakily. She kicks at the flagstone. 'Careful of the floor.' She tries for a perky grin. She retreats to her stool, where Johnny brings her the first platter of food.

The meat's greasy. The smell of it turns her stomach. She doesn't want it. She prods at it and pushes it around, cutting bits of gristle off.

'Can I have that bit?' Joan says, growing in confidence. The little girls begin to fight over sc.r.a.ps from Alice's meal.

Alice half closes her eyes, trying to control the nausea. Even looking down, she can feel Aunty's eyes on her.

'Are you all right?' Aunty asks, sticking her head through Alice's bedcurtains with a lighted candle. 'You were white as a sheet, down there.' She clucks and peers closer. 'Looking a bit better now, though.'

Alice nods. She can't speak, because she's afraid any talk will break down the comforting certainty she's clinging to. Aunty knows, she's been thinking with something close to panic; Aunty delivered all the babies. Aunty remembers the last time: the weeks of bleeding, the fever, the panic. Something ruptured, something that nearly killed her. They even joked about it afterwards, deadpan Aunty-style: So G.o.d (or the Other One) nearly got you then, eh. Aunty will know, as surely as Alice knows, that she can't have any more babies. Alice has never even worried about getting with child again. It's never happened. Because it can't. And it can't be why she fainted, down there. Can it?

Aunty gives her an even more searching look. But the old woman's never been one to poke her nose in where she's not wanted. When she sees the closed look on Alice's face, she goes on, peaceably enough, 'Coming down with something, maybe. Get a good night's rest, eh?'

The children creep whispering and giggling into Alice's bed at dawn, with big eyes and the smell of outside on them, bringing her a daisy chain and a bunch of primroses in a little jug, chasing away the troubling wisps of her dreams. They sit playing clapping games in the warmth of the quilts. They have muddy feet, crossing over each other an endless kneading and squirming of limbs, like kittens in a basket. It's clear they're happy to be back home. Alice thinks they're also happy to be in this bed, curled up with her. They've never come to her like this before. She doesn't care about the mud, especially once Joan snuggles her head against Alice's shoulder, and then, seeming not to notice what she's doing, lets her arm cross over Alice's front. She curls up with them, sleepily enjoying their talk, trying to empty her mind of everything else.

Chaucer's there, though. Looking through the bedcurtains, nodding his head, grinning at her, one eyebrow up. 'There, you see,' he's saying. The thought's a soft knife-blow to the heart. She raises herself on her elbow, shutting him out; dislodging Joan, too, but the little girl just adjusts her position, leaning against her mother as if she were a comfortable settle, putting a trusting hand on Alice's shoulder.

'What shall we have to eat?' Jane's saying.

'Aunty's ham, of course,' Johnny says, forgetting his grown-up ways, flicking his hair back out of his s.h.i.+ning eyes.

Joan says, 'With the honey.'

For a moment, Alice feels sick at the thought of that ham, with the muslin on it to keep the flies off, with the great thick crust of white cold fat on the outside, blackened with charred honey. She lies very still. The feeling pa.s.ses.

It doesn't mean anything, she tells herself while the children go back to chanting 'Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip!' in thin high voices, crossing their hands over each other's as they clap. She hasn't lost her appet.i.te, not really. She's got a great thirst for milk. And cheese. And ginger, she'd like ginger jumbles, only there is no ginger out here, of course.

It's only after they've scampered off to make mischief downstairs, and Alice throws off the bedclothes herself, feeling warmer and more cheerful than on most mornings, and jumps out, that she finds her head rus.h.i.+ng and spinning dizzily again. Hastily, she sits down. She tells herself she's sat down, anyway. But she knows it was more like a fall.

It's three days till Wat comes, only after the Brentwood a.s.sizes, and, to the children's disappointment, the market. He must have ridden straight there from Johnny's in Kent, even though the straightest route to Brentwood Town is up this way, through Chafford Hundred, right past Gaines and Upminster, and it would have been no trouble to stop off here.

When he does come, he's got news. He's going to get married. He's looking less ratty and s.h.i.+fty than she's seen him for years: he's scrubbed up, in newish leggings, with his hair and beard trimmed. He swings the children round, making them whoop and wail. But she can see straight off that he's got something on his mind. He tells her and Aunty when the kids are in bed. The girl is Nan, daughter of Tom, the baker, of Fobbing. Alice has never got so familiar with this southern end of Ess.e.x, down near Havering-atte-Bower, as she once was with the wild northern flats of her childhood, but she knows Fobbing is not far away, maybe fourteen or fifteen miles west of Gaines, one of the many farming villages of Barstable Hundred whose senior men have to attend every session of the a.s.sizes at Brentwood, to hear the King's wishes for them, and the manorial court sessions, too, to know the will of the lords of Ess.e.x for them. That's why he's been hanging out at the fair that goes with the a.s.sizes, then. He's settling down.

She can't believe the soppy, happy look on Wat's face. It reminds her...

It takes a moment to come out of the mora.s.s of other half-thoughts, in which Chaucer features, and the other black-bearded face, the Duke's, burning.

She squeezes Wat's arm in hers. Aunty's out in the pantry, clattering around. Looking for cider, Alice supposes. A celebration. 'How strange that we've both ended up back here, isn't it?' she ventures a little wistfully. 'As if nothing that happened out there there' - she gestures west, back towards London and beyond - 'was real at all.'

His eyes are on her now, expressionless, totally attentive. His face has changed. He's probably shocked that she's even invoking that past. No one does. But he's interested, she can also see; more than interested. There's a brooding darkness in him, too, a mora.s.s of memories and crushed hopes and resentments, just waiting to come out if anyone gives him half a chance.

His face twists. 'No point remembering,' he says shortly. 'Is there? We're here now. Best make the best of it, that's all.'

But Alice nags on; she can't let go. 'But do you think you can ever forget? Really?' She almost wants him to say yes; to tell her that the past goes away. It might help her to learn to live in the present, if she sees that he can.

He doesn't. He narrows his eyes. He turns so he's fully facing her, and puts both arms on her shoulders. 'No,' he says grimly. 'Well, I never have, anyway. The past's still there, always, somewhere inside, isn't it? I dream about it every night. And not just Italy, the hills, the freedom, the golden light...It smelled of rosemary, you know, wherever you went, and of thyme. But that's not what I dream about. It's him him: Richard Lyons, the richest man in England, humiliating me. Punching me down in front of my men, disrespecting disrespecting me, telling me to get lost. After all I'd done for him. I was done for after that. Shamed. But in my dream, sometimes, it comes out right. I'm chasing him down the street, down Cheapside, running so fast it feels as though I'm flying, and there's a sword in my hand, and people cheering me on. He's running for his life. I'm gaining on him...' me, telling me to get lost. After all I'd done for him. I was done for after that. Shamed. But in my dream, sometimes, it comes out right. I'm chasing him down the street, down Cheapside, running so fast it feels as though I'm flying, and there's a sword in my hand, and people cheering me on. He's running for his life. I'm gaining on him...'

His face sags. 'And then I wake up.'

Here.

'I know,' Alice says. 'I dream about the Duke like that.'

They look at each other, a look too deep for words. But what can they do?

It's only after they've all gone away again, leaving just Aunty, grumbling away about the priest upstairs ('Eating us out of house and home, and for what?' 'For their lessons, that's what,' Alice answers firmly, sending the children slowly and miserably up the stairs to their books and their tutor, as Aunty mutters, 'What do they need Latin for? b.l.o.o.d.y priests. English is good enough for me. Always has been...'), that she has time to think about her current predicament again.

She's managed a dish of eggs at dinner. But she's gone outside and been sick since. She's still dizzy all the time too. And she's tired, so tired; she's had to drag herself out of bed this morning, and she dozes off at every opportunity. She sits staring into the fire in the kitchens, half listening to Aunty going through the pantry and b.u.t.tery, privately counting the days since her last bleeding, back a good week before she went to London. Six weeks ago tomorrow.

There's no doubt. Not really.

The flames leap and vanish.

Soon she'll have to find the courage to tell Aunty; tell the children, too, and Wat.

She tries to think that through calmly. She's finding it hard to force herself into admitting, even in her private thoughts, that there could be a child growing in her belly. But she has to start. It won't be so bad, she thinks, folding her hands over her stomach, terrified of it yet protecting it at the same time. They'll all be happy, her family. They're good people. They love her. They'll help her hide the baby, keep it safe; they'll work something out, between themselves. They might tell Will it's another of Aunty's foundlings. They might tell Will it's Wat's eldest, with Nan. It's not as if Alice hasn't done something like this before - hidden her babies. It's not as if she doesn't know how. It's not as if she isn't a fighter.

She can't tell Chaucer. She won't see him again.

She lets her eyes lose focus, lost in the flames. A thought pops unbidden into her head. Lewis, she'll call him, if, G.o.d grant, he makes it into this world; if he's a boy. Chaucer once told her it means 'famous warrior', in French. He'd like that: his son a famous warrior. The name will keep the child safe; keep enemies at bay.

Because G.o.d knows he'll need to fight well, this helpless new little life she's going to bring into the world. He's going to need every sc.r.a.p of cunning and aggression she can instil in him. Because he won't be raised as Will's child. He's not going to have the same life as Alice's other children - who, for all the threadbare, carefree life they're leading today, do, at least, now have money waiting for them, and a t.i.tled father, and a future, of sorts. The hard-faced Ess.e.x county leaders will wrinkle their noses at Alice, of course; that's to be expected. But they'll all come sniffing at the money she's earned for her sins. So John and Joan and Jane will, at some point, she imagines, probably be asked to marry the children of one of the Sir Johns - Gildesburgh the parliamentarian, or Sewale the sheriff, or Bampton the ex-sheriff. Which isn't quite becoming princes, but isn't to be sniffed at.

But this little Lewis - if he lives - he's not going to be part of the rich. He's going to be part of the poor: of the army of disgruntled, discontented Wats and Aunties teeming through the land, listening to hedge-priests, pinning up letters on roadside trees, dreaming of rebellion and a fairer ordering of things. The long-ago world they talk about, before the Mortality; before even that. Before the lords and the priests and the lawyers carved everything up, wrote it down in French, and cut out the rest. The ancient Law of Winchester, Wat calls it; the Book of Domesday. Aunty's hedge-priests want to bring it back. Some hope. She'll throw her child what sc.r.a.ps she can, of course she will. But still, it's clear: he'll be one of the ones who struggle.

It clears her mind to think that. It shows her clearly what she's been beginning to see ever since she came back here, knowing she couldn't leave. The pieces of the puzzle in her mind s.h.i.+ft and take on new shapes: whom she should count herself with; whom she should value. As the mother of this unborn child, she'll be one of the have-nots again, or as good as. She'd better brush up her fighting skills, for Lewis's sake.

'Aunty,' Alice calls, sitting up straighter. 'Do you still want any help writing those letters?'

THIRTY-SEVEN.

'For now is the time to beware,' Alice writes, in big clear letters. The child kicks inside her. Lewis. She sighs and looks up.

There's iron in the earth, and snow on the ground outside, and Christmas is coming, but nothing stops Wat building. He's making a farmstead down the road from here. He and his wife-to-be are going to become Alice's tenants. Men from Fobbing have been coming, even before the summer was out and the harvest in, to help the locals and men from the roads whom Alice and Aunty have drafted in dig foundations, and fill them in with flinty mix, and put together the timber frames. Wat's been back for good since the instant Johnny Tyler's crops were in, down in Kent, directing the work on the new house and barns.

'You didn't need to go to so much trouble,' Alice says sometimes, looking up from her letters as his men pa.s.s. 'You could have shared our farm buildings.'

But she doesn't really mean it. The calm of pregnancy has set in (even if it doesn't stop her dreams), and Wat pats her swelling belly every time he pa.s.ses her and the children, who gather around, softly marvelling, stroking her, feeling the unborn child kick and play inside her. Alice can't think where the money for all this building's come from, if it's not from years of highway theft; but she doesn't ask. Perhaps miracles can be achieved, if you're just calling in favours after years of doing right by village people. Because village people are good people; they stand manfully together; they do right by each other. And anyway, if Wat's to take her child and raise him, just down the hill, on the other side of the stream from her, she wants Wat and his wife to be living as comfortably as they can.

Besides, she likes the non-stop procession of men through Gaines. Men from Fobbing, men from Henney and the next-door village of Bocking, north Ess.e.x people Aunty knew, and has given a few weeks' work to, and townsmen, craftsmen of one sort or another, from Brentwood. Alice likes the tramp of feet, and the smell of broth and bread, and the deep voices. It makes her feel alive.

They sing as they work, the men. They sing the songs of an England systematically robbed from the top for as long as they can remember, misruled and mismanaged for years now, decades, ever since the Mortality robbed them of innocence and justice. They hoist the joists up, from shoulder to shoulder, yelling, 'Now lechery is without shame, and gluttony is without blame,' and, bitterly comparing the lords' bullying might with the peasants' forgotten rights in this topsy-turvy state, 'Might is right, light is night, fight is flight.' And Alice can think of nothing that could chime more perfectly with her own quiet bitterness than that melancholy ba.s.s chorus in the morning mist.

For everyone who's a part of this remote manor is coalescing and unifying, though not in the quiet, orderly, loving way that an earlier Alice might once have imagined. It's their hatreds (and their guilts) that are starting to bind them together.

Everyone has his secret, and everyone's secret fuels his anger. If Wat, for instance, almost howls with resentment against the thieving n.o.blemen of an evening, it may be partly out of guilt that he's concealed so much from his family-to-be about his own past thieving, whether abroad, in London, in the ports of the south, or down in Kent. It may equally be that Aunty Alison feels guilty that, by keeping the tilery up at Henney for herself, she once, long ago, stole the birthright of the baby Alice; and it may be that, even though she's done right by Alice ever since, this is what makes her so full-throated in her rage against the lordly robbers, who take so much more than she ever did, yet never feel so much as a pang. Alice may well still feel guilty that she once quietly got Wat sacked from his post with Richard Lyons and ruined his prospects. She's doing right by him now, so she can afford to shut out that thought. But it probably makes her more vociferous than she might otherwise have been in her condemnation of the misrule of the Duke and his latest circle of advisers.

(Strangely enough, Alice has never felt guilty for dancing into court on the take in the first place; for having, once upon a time, been right at the heart of the corruption against which these men sing their songs of anger. If it hadn't been her, someone else would surely have come along and done the same thing, wouldn't they? She's only ever been a little person, she tells herself. It isn't her fault if England started going to the dogs. It's theirs - the thieving lords' fault, the cunning lawyers'. The Duke's. And they're the ones who should pay.) Who knows what private guilts the men from the road are hiding as they come in singing their angry songs? After a lifetime of the blithe hunt for money that the Mortality ushered in - a bribe here, an overcharging there, a swindling somewhere else; or a glib lie, or a dishonest marriage, or a quiet pocketing of some trifle - everyone probably has something on his conscience.

Even Alice's children perhaps feel guilty (in their way) that they've grown up wanting to know their father, but that, when he finally appeared, they couldn't love him; or that they aren't fulfilling the destiny they learned up north should be theirs, to become lords and ladies. If they do have these feelings, however, they remain obscure to those around them. No one asks.

Everyone is busy, this autumn, not just with building Wat a house, but with turning their backs on their own secrets, and pasts, and private regrets and evasions and dishonesties. Everyone wants to find someone else to blame for whatever wrongs have been done in the past. They tell themselves, and each other, that they're hunting for justice. They tell themselves they want the truth.

Truth is the old way. Truth dates back to the time when your word was your bond, and you didn't need papers in a language you couldn't understand to compel you to act honestly. Truth is what governed England in the time of Alfred, in the days of Winchester: truth, and the men of the village. Englishmen could live by truth again, if there was nothing, and no one, standing in their way.

Truth is more necessary than ever, because confusions and corruptions are growing so fast. Even G.o.d has become doubtful, for the Church of Rome has split in two. There's a mad pope in Rome, and a French pope in Avignon, and, even though the English acknowledge the mad Roman pope, because he's not French, no one knows who really has G.o.d's spiritual authority, or should receive the t.i.thes and taxes taken for the Church; the belief is seeping into every heart that neither of these false foreign popes is the man.

As for the war that's ruining England, back in the spring, at the last Parliament, the King promised not to bring out his begging bowl again for at least another eighteen months. But now there's more talk of a French invasion, and another.

Parliament being called, this November, up at Northampton (the Duke being too unpopular to dare to try calling the legislature to London). The begging bowl's out again. And the lords will soon be wanting the people to pay again.

'Mam,' Johnny says.

Alice is humming one of the workmen's angry songs, as softly as a lullaby, as she writes. His voice, still treble, most of the time, breaks through hers.

'Mm,' she answers, not looking up.

'Mam, not that song again,' Johnny says plaintively. 'Please.'

She looks up.

He's sitting on the hearthstone, with his nearly mannish bony knees up against his chin, and his arms wrapped round his legs. He's been sitting there for hours, she realises. And, for all his new height, he's the picture of childish dejection.

The line she's been repeating goes 'envy reigneth with trea-son, and sloth is always in sea-son.' It's true, she's had it on her mind all day. She may have been singing it all day. That might be annoying, if you were in a mood to be annoyed.

'What's up with you?' she says, not especially sympathetically.

'Bored,' he says. 'Bored of that song. Bored of...oh, everything.' Unexpectedly, his eyes fill with baby tears. Furiously he blinks them away.

'Well, go and do something,' she says carelessly. 'Help Wat's men or something.'

'Do a bit more singing out there, you mean?' Johnny says, and she can hear anger in his voice now. 'And bang at a bit of wood?'

She looks curiously at him. She can't think what's got into him.

'You could write a letter for me,' she says, trying to please. 'If you like.'

She's taken over Aunty's letter-writing, and made the old woman's scrawls into art. These letters are supposed to be read by travellers, or men in taverns, or men outside churches. They don't have a specific instruction to deliver, a 'go here' or 'do that'. They offer only general inspiration. They say: 'Be angry', or 'Be aware', or just 'Beware'.

Alice addresses the letters to, and signs them from, the working men whose discontents she's tapping: Piers Plowman, Jack Trueman, Jack Carter, Jack Miller, John Nameless. Sometimes she allows herself to imagine Chaucer, with secret laughter in his eyes, writing at his own table, as she turns out her vague, but stirring, poems to the n.o.bility of the sons of earth, with G.o.d at their back.

Jakke Trewman giveth you to understande that falsnes and gyle have regned to long, and trewthe has bene sette under a lokke, and falsnes regneth.

Trewthe shal help you, she writes, day after day.

Be ware or be woeful...

Now is the tyme.

Usually Johnny enjoys all this. At least she thinks he does, because he's hardly left his mother's side in weeks and months, except when she sends him out to pin her letters on trees on the highway. Usually he comes back in, pink-faced and exhilarated, chanting, 'Jack the Miller grinds small, small, small!' And he laughs in delight when she (or someone else) calls back the answering catchphrase: 'The King's son of Heaven shall pay for all!'

But not today. Even the offer of writing his own letter hasn't cheered him up this time. He just shakes his head, and slumps lower against his knees.

'Well, do you want to read to me?' she asks in the end.

Perhaps it's just since the priest went last week that Johnny's got so fractious. It hasn't taken long for Aunty to win the campaign she was waging against the priest teaching the kids Latin, the language of 'clerks and con-men', as Aunty puts it (she has equally scathing things to say about French, the language of 'liars and lawyers'). What finally did for the scared little priest was coming into the laundry and finding Aunty pinching diamond marks into the pleats of his sheets. She'd been saying, for weeks, with grim satisfaction and nasty little nods, 'Diamonds...the mark of death, they say.' He stared at her, open-mouthed. He was gone by dawn.

If Alice is aware that it was illogical for her to have let the priest go and the children's education stop - to be saying goodbye to the world of the elite, and turning her face against the Gildesburghs and the Bamptons and the Sewales, where her children's best prospects lie, while embracing the interests of the angry men of the fields and the road, and to be bringing the children whose advancement she's claimed all her life to be working for back into the rustic hardscrabble of Ess.e.x - she hasn't let the thought in. She hasn't found a new tutor. She's done with priests, she thinks. Aunty was right.

But now, for a moment, she wonders whether she hasn't made a mistake.

'Come on,' she says with a little laugh, trying to jolly his gloom away. 'Tell me. What's biting you?'

He takes a deep breath. He lifts his chin off his knees. 'I wish you'd leave off those letters, that's all,' he says.

Then he stops, and bites his lip, and looks down.

She stares. 'But why?' she says, in bafflement. 'I thought you liked...'

Timidly, he looks back up, as if he's been expecting her to sound crosser, and is trying to work out whether to trust her. 'I just don't see why you'd want to write them,' he finally confides in a rush. 'Or sing those songs.' There's a pleading softness on his face now that almost hurts her, it's so transparently loving. 'Because we're not serfs, are we? You're the Lady of Gaines. And I'm a knight. And I'm not a bad swordsman, and I was doing all right at my French, and Latin, till Aunty...' He blinks again, and hurries on. 'I mean, do we actually want the Law of Winchester, mam? You and me? Isn't all that just what old village men go on about when they're drunk?'

'Oh, Johnny,' she says.