Free The People's Queen by Vanora Bennett Page A

Things are far too tight as it is.'
    The vast amounts take Chaucer's breath away, even more than the tightness of the royal finances, the narrowness of the margins, and the King's reliance on a mixture of charm and bullying of the entrepreneurs whose language he doesn't even speak (the King sticks to French) to keep England staggering on. He feels naive to be so astonished by these enormous figures. But he is. Chaucer lives in small coin, on graces and favours. The sheer staggering weight of the money being talked about is beyond his ken.
    And when they disembark, his welter of conflicting emotions only swirls more wildly.
    He shouldn't be surprised, he tells himself. It's years since he's been surrounded like this by his father's acquaintances. He was a child. Watching these half-dozen mostly familiar faces now, the jowls and wrinkles more accentuated than he remembers, the stubble going grey or white on firmly jutting chins (though the furs on their long gowns, worn despite the heat of the day, are more splendid than ever), he feels, almost, a little boy again - the little boy his father used to get in to serve the merchants their wine in the Chaucer house on Thames Street. That smaller Chaucer used to listen admiringly to the talk about pepper imports and mackerel catches and the iniquity of the law allowing foreign merchants to retail their goods on English soil and the quality of this year's wine from Gascony, while outside on the wharves that you could see, dimly, through the glass windows (how proud his father had been of those glass windows), the men running like ants under the winches, watching the barrels swinging down, and the flash and splash of river traffic. Back then, Chaucer knew that any minute he'd feel his father's hand ruffling his head or patting his back. Those quiet, fond, proud touches, which in the manner of small boys trying to be big he never acknowledged, but which he always quietly put himself in the way of, are all that's missing now.
    He presses his lips and eyelids together. No point in regrets. John Chaucer, who so wanted to better himself that he spent the Mortality years trailing around France in King Edward's baggage train buying wine for the forces, and then for the King himself, would have been proud to see his son here today, stepping up to the Wool Wharf, the powerhouse where English wealth is made, measured and exported, in the very shadow of the Tower of London, being deferred to by the powerful men he worked so hard to make his own friends.
    Chaucer looks around. This year's Mayor is in the welcoming party (a stringy grey man from a lesser guild; Chaucer has no childhood memories of him ). More importantly, the man who's about to become Mayor for the next year is here too: William Walworth, fishmonger and alderman of Bridge Ward, a tall, ascetic-looking man with spun-gold hair and the innocent face of an angel. Chaucer remembers Walworth's long, thin legs, crossing and uncrossing themselves, the elegant, tendony ankles, the high-arched feet, from a very distant past in which the little Geoffrey played quietly under the table with his ball or top, listening to the men's voices. But it's another of these familiar men - Nicholas Brembre, tall burly Brembre, now alderman for Bread Street Ward - who steps superbly forward from the furry, velvety, bass-voiced cluster and takes it upon himself to reintroduce the rest. Walworth just stands behind Brembre, looking avuncular. Perhaps, now Walworth has secured the mayor's office for himself for a year, he's letting his friend show his paces in time for next year's selection - for, Chaucer knows, Walworth, Brembre, and the stocky, balding man at his side, John Philpot, a grocer like Brembre, are famous for sticking together and protecting each other's interests. Between them, the three victuallers pretty much run the City. They share the mayor's and sheriffs' jobs among themselves, year in, year out. And these are the three London men to whom the