Chaucer feels his mouth open and close as he stumbles towards the best reply. All his vague but tumultuous hopes for his new life have vanished as soon as he hears that question. He just feels sick. He wonders if she knows how difficult he’s finding it, or if she’s just hit by chance on his worst fear for the day.
The plan is this. After being shown his desk at the Customs House this morning, he’s to play host at dinner in his new home to the Mayor and all the greatest merchants of London.
Geoffrey hopes Philippa understands how elaborate this meal should be, how London citizens are as grand as Florentine merchant princes in their habits and expectations, and how lavish they’ll expect the hospitality of the man who will dare to check their books to be.
But he’s miserably aware that there was something too dismissive about his wife’s shrug when, at their last meeting three days before, as she set off to move their cushions and tapestries and silverware into the new City apartment, he asked for a list of dishes.
‘It’s all in hand,’ Philippa said, refusing to be drawn. When he started to say something more, she just flapped her hands at him. ‘It’s going to be a Friday,’ she added, too calmly. ‘Fish. Yes?’ And she wafted off.
Unhappily, he thinks: I can influence most people. If only I could my wife. He lifts hangdog eyes to Alice Perrers’ face, and sees she understands the whole family drama he isn’t going to tell her.
‘They’ll expect the best,’ is all she says. Then she pats his arm, comfortingly, though the gesture reminds him, uncomfortably, of Thomas’s similar one during that other conversation. ‘But of course you know that, don’t you?’
He nods. He’ll just have to hope for the best. He’s glad to see, behind Alice’s back, that the two shapes he’s been looking for are finally here, and sauntering closer. He’ll feel better once they get started. He doesn’t want to have any more time to worry.
Yet unease follows Chaucer on to the river, and beyond.
He tries to relax on the mouldy cushions of the boat. He watches a swan and her cygnets float by, their beaks marked with the two lines of the Vintners’ Company, and begin an altercation with a family of ducks. He flexes his fingers. He bites his lips.
Kindly, Latimer lets him be. The chamberlain starts a quiet conversation with Stury, on the other bench. But Latimer’s voice, from those earlier briefings, still fills Chaucer’s head.
England’s biggest export is wool. The wool trade has been booming for decades, even if the last couple of years haven’t been so good, what with the war. The merchants who buy wool from farmers around England and sell it overseas at the Flanders cloth markets have become both rich and powerful – the richest among them with incomes greater than those of the mightiest prince, wealth extraordinary enough to take on even the princely traders of Florence and Venice. The King, who understands the ways of his barons and peasants, but doesn’t completely understand this new kind of man – a man governed by coin, not chivalry – needs eyes and ears to help explain the merchants to him; explain how best he should love them, and how best to attract their money to him.
The King needs to know, because the King needs those merchants, now he’s up to his own eyeballs in war debt; oh, how he needs them. Their wool and their taxes pay for his war. And, because, over time, he’s shown himself willing, every now and then, when his need is great, or the opportunity is tempting, to cheat them – just a little, as is his royal right, in the interests of the nation – they don’t fully trust him, any more than he fully trusts them. They might want to cheat him back. It’s to be Chaucer’s job to stop them if they try.
The two hundred English merchants run the wool export trade as a monopoly (from a headquarters that for years before the war was based, for convenience’s sake, at Calais, the English-ruled garrison mid-way between England and Flanders; only now that the war’s started again, and Flemish buyers can’t get across enemy French territory to Calais, the Wool Staple’s had to be moved to the safety of Middleburg, in Flanders itself, so the merchants don’t go broke). The Merchants of the Staple still finance the King’s garrison at Calais, even in these hard times, when they can’t actually trade there. They don’t have much choice. The King asks for their money, with tears in his handsome Plantagenet eyes, with a tremble in his elegant French, ‘for the sake of our beloved England’. Their French isn’t as good as his, but they understand. They pay up. They make an agreement with the King as to how he’s going to repay them, one day, by letting them off some of their future wool customs dues to the Crown. It’s all signed and sealed with many-coloured wax, but no one can really hope to be repaid. But, after that, right here and now, the merchants must provide actual gold and silver, and make coins at the mint they’ve set up at Calais, and give it over to the soldiers waiting and grumbling in the salt swamps of north France.
So it makes the Merchants of the Wool Staple angry with the King if they find out he’s been cheating them – for instance by granting special licences to the Italian merchant community trading out of London, so the foreigners can bypass all the weighing and measuring and customs-paying that English merchants have to endure at Calais or Middleburg. This blithe cheating keeps the Italians happy, as they get to make a bigger profit margin while undercutting the English merchants’ sales prices later, at the Flanders wool fairs. It makes the King happy, too, because how can the Italians then refuse when he asks them for a direct loan, to help pay for his war in France?
But there isn’t much the Merchants of the Wool Staple can do about being ripped off by their King, except grin and bear it and, when the King then asks them for a direct loan, too (since the Italians have been so generous), to agree, and ask to take on the Italians’ loan, too, on condition the Italians have their special licences cancelled, so the English, at least, get their monopoly of wool exports back. And then they’re left shouldering a double debt burden, with no guarantee that the King might not, tomorrow or the next day, take it into his head to do another quiet little deal with another Italian to get off scot free from all taxes for a quick cash payment now. There’s nothing the merchants can do openly to let off steam. Sometimes the English merchants’ apprentices, having heard unpleasant things said about the Italian merchants of London at their masters’ tables, get drunk and go and beat up the nearest Italian. The apprentices are savagely punished. Hanged, often. There’s never any question of calling the King to account.
Chaucer’s job will not be to call the King to account. It will be to be the royal eyes and ears inside London. He will deal with the pre-exports: what leaves England. London is the last place a King’s man can, realistically, get at the wool due for export; after that it’s entirely in the hands of the merchants themselves. For almost the entire wool crop leaving England goes through London, where it is packed and weighed and warehoused by merchants; and it’s here that the greatest merchants live. It will be Chaucer’s job to reweigh the wool crop, sack by sack, and go through the merchants’ paperwork, and to form his own view of how big the English trade in wool really is, and how much the merchants should really have paid the King for these exports, or for others, and, generally, to increase the King’s income from the City merchants in whatever way he sees fit.
‘Be one of them,’ Latimer has told Chaucer. ‘Make them feel at home with you. Listen to their privy talk. You’ll know how. But always remember the reckoning. The bill for these past three years of war has been £200,000, and the truce that’s holding now won’t last for ever. As long as you’re clearing more than 25,000 sacks of wool a year, and getting an annual yield of £70,000 on it, England’s still afloat. More or less,’ and here, Chaucer recalls, the Baron’s face wrinkled into a long, mirthless grin that was more like a snarl. ‘At least, as long as the Pope doesn’t also come back with his begging bowl. Thirty thousand for his Italian wars, indeed. We can’t afford to pay to fight the French and for him to wage wars too. Things