‘Thank you. I have been checking on my mare but, of course, it was unnecessary. Your stable is as well set up as your house.’
We entered the back door and climbed the narrow stairway from the front lobby. In the hall the table had been pushed to one end of the room and bread and jugs of ale were laid out on the cloth. There was evidence that we were not the first there but whoever had already eaten had also left. We took a bowl each and some bread to a small table by the hearth. Someone had stirred the fire back to life and a cauldron of pottage stood on a trivet keeping warm. The lawyer ladled some into my bowl.
‘My sister may not be good at mutton pie, but she does make decent pottage,’ he said, eyes twinkling. ‘She has breakfasted early and gone off to seek the makings of a good beef dinner and she has taken the girls to carry her baskets.’ He filled his own bowl and sat down opposite me, adding confidentially, ‘I am fortunate that she agreed to come and care for my daughters after their mother died. Elizabeth has a brusque manner but a good heart. I can trust her to do the best for the girls.’
‘I am sure you can,’ I said, breaking some bread to dip in the pottage and deciding it would be tactful to change the subject. ‘Your son tells me you travel frequently to France. Is that on wine business?’ I knew it was not but did not want to make trouble for Walter if he had told me too much of his father’s affairs.
Geoffrey Vintner pursed his lips. ‘Partly,’ he concurred. ‘But because of my knowledge of both French and English law, I am sometimes employed on missions for the king; a glorified messenger really between the English court and the governing councils of Paris and Rouen. Do you have family in France?’
I suddenly found the bread hard to swallow as a lump came to my throat, a problem which had started to occur more frequently lately as I struggled to come to terms with the extended separation from my children. I tried to clear it and spoke hoarsely as a result.
‘Yes I do but, sadly, they eat from different plates. My son is a huntsman in the dauphin’s household – I am sorry, I mean the Pretender of course …’ I blushed and rushed on, ‘and my daughter is married to a Parisian tailor and so now lives under English rule. She has a little girl, my granddaughter.’
Master Vintner ignored the dauphin/Pretender slip in favour of blatant flattery. ‘Saint’s bones! You are a grandmother? Impossible!’
I felt my cheeks burn even hotter and inwardly scolded myself for foolishness. ‘It is only too possible, sir,’ I said, avoiding his teasing gaze. ‘You might be a grandparent yourself if your son were a daughter.’
He thought about that for a moment. ‘Ah yes, I see what you mean. I find it difficult to contemplate the fact that my daughters are nearly of an age to take husbands. Am I the only father who hates that thought?’
I gave a small laugh. ‘That depends on the husbands they take. Fortunately mine chose well.’
He frowned. ‘Chose?’ he echoed. ‘You mean she chose her own husband? What was her father doing?’
My cheeks had cooled now and I gave him a direct look. ‘Sadly I lost my husband after the Battle of Agincourt. He was as much a casualty of that disaster as the Duke of York, even if he was not a nobleman.’
‘A disaster you call it?’ He kept his expression neutral. ‘Well I suppose for many thousands of your countrymen it was just that. Did he fight in the battle?’
I laid down my horn spoon to clasp my hands tightly in my lap. I did not wish to begin a detailed description of Jean-Michel’s miserable and unnecessary death. ‘No, he was a charettier. He drove supplies for the royal army. Although I serve the queen, I am not of noble stock, sir.’
Master Vintner struck his knee with the palm of his hand and laughed. ‘No more are my son and I, Madame, and yet we serve the king. These are changing times, are they not?’
I resumed my meal and we ate in silence for a few moments. ‘Where is Walter?’ I asked at length. ‘I do not imagine he is a lay-abed.’
‘No, no. I have sent him about his own business. He has gone to buy quills and paper. If you will permit me, I will escort you to the Tailors Hall myself. As it happens, I have done legal work for the guild and I think my introduction may ensure you more solicitous attention than my young son’s.’ He paused, observing me humbly. ‘I hope this arrangement does not offend you.’
In fact I found myself unexpectedly pleased by his offer but I restricted my response to a brief smile and a nod of appreciation. ‘Not at all, sir,’ I said. ‘It is very generous of you to spare the time.’
On Master Vintner’s advice I strapped pattens onto my shoes for the walk to Threadneedle Street and I was glad I had. The muckrakers may have been out at dawn, but the gutters in the lane had already received new and generous dumps of household waste and the main thoroughfares were liberally scattered with fresh droppings from travellers’ horses and the wild pigs that still apparently roamed the streets and gardens. London’s fifty thousand citizens had to eat and drink and pursue their livelihoods and so they also had to live with the side effects. Although the pattens made walking clumsy, at least they kept my feet and my skirt off the ground and my escort was kind enough to offer me his arm over the worst parts.
It was not far to the Tailors Hall and, on the way, we passed numerous workshops of crafts I would need to explore later; haberdashers, drapers, cordwainers, hatters, glovers and hosiers. London might be only half the size of Paris, but there seemed to be no lack of the skills necessary to maintain Queen Catherine’s reputation for setting the style, even when she began to change shape from her usual willow-wand slimness. The only question lay in whether there was a tailor who would be able to satisfy her demand for the new and avant-garde. My son-in-law Jacques had proved exactly the young and daring innovator she had wanted and I needed to find his equal in the lanes off Threadneedle Street.
By coincidence, while we waited in the dim oak-panelled hall for a meeting with the grand master of the guild, we witnessed an argument between a tailor and his wife which stirred my interest. For a guild freeman, which he clearly was, the tailor was a relatively young man; in his mid-twenties I would have guessed, his wife about the same, and their conversation centred on a subject which, in view of my own daughter’s position; working in Paris with her husband, was of particular interest to me.
‘Whatever happens, you are not to become excited and start shouting.’
These were the first words I heard as we drew near to the couple, who were among several groups and individuals standing around the long room. The young tailor was addressing his wife, who was already red-faced with suppressed irritation.
‘It will not help your cause and nor will it help mine, which is more important,’ he added.
‘It is unjust!’ she seethed, her voice vibrating with passionate indignation, ‘My work is lauded in the guild when it carries your name and yet I am not permitted to sell it as my own. I do not know how you can take all the credit when you know it is I who do the work.’
‘It is our business, Meg, and we are making our reputation,’ he insisted, keeping his tone deliberate and hushed. ‘When we married, you were happy just to have an outlet for your designs. Do not forget that you would have had no opportunity at all without the backing of my name.’
‘But it is not your name that actually does the designs, cuts the patterns and sews the seams, it is me! How would you like to have someone else receive all the praise and money for your singular endeavours?’
‘I would not stand for it, but I am a man and that is the way things are and you will not change it by shouting at the grand master like a Billingsgate fishwife!’
She looked mutinous, but simmered down enough to keep her thought process logical. ‘Perhaps the answer is for me to stop work and then we will see if our business makes any money!’ she muttered.