Читать книгу Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 19

The city’s cockerels woke Thomas to a brisk wind and pouring rain that beat on the cart’s leaking cover. He opened the flap and sat watching the puddles spread across the cobbles of the inn yard. No message had come from Jeanette, nor, he thought, would there be one. Will Skeat had been right. She was as hard as mail and, now she was in her proper place – which, in this cold, wet dawn, was probably a deep bed in a room warmed by a fire tended by the Duke’s servants – she would have forgotten Thomas.

And what message, Thomas asked himself, had he been expecting? A declaration of affection? He knew that was what he wanted, but he persuaded himself he merely waited so Jeanette could send him the pass signed by the Duke, yet he knew he did not need a pass. He must just walk east and north, and trust that the Dominican’s robe protected him. He had little idea how to reach Flanders, but had a notion that Paris lay somewhere close to that region so he reckoned he would start by following the River Seine, which would lead him from Rennes to Paris. His biggest worry was that he would meet some real Dominican on the road, who would quickly discover Thomas had only the haziest notion of the brotherhood’s rules and no knowledge at all of their hierarchy, but he consoled himself that Scottish Dominicans were probably so far from civilization that such ignorance would be expected of them. He would survive, he told himself.

He stared at the rain spattering in the puddles. Expect nothing from Jeanette, he told himself, and to prove that he believed that bleak prophecy he readied his small baggage. It irked him to leave the mail coat behind, but it weighed too much, so he stowed it in the wagon, then put the three sheaves of arrows into a sack. The seventy-two arrows were heavy and their points threatened to tear open the sack, but he was reluctant to travel without the sheaves that were wrapped in hempen bowstring cord and he used one cord to tie his knife to his left leg where, like his money pouch, it was hidden by the black robe.

He was ready to go, but the rain was now hammering the city like an arrow storm. Thunder crackled to the west, the rain pelted on the thatch, poured off the roofs and overflowed the water butts to wash the inn’s nightsoil out of the yard. Midday came, heralded by the city’s rain-muffled bells, and still the city drowned. Wind-driven dark clouds wreathed the cathedral’s towers and Thomas told himself he would leave the moment the rain slackened, but the storm just became fiercer. Lightning flickered above the cathedral and a clap of thunder rocked the city. Thomas shivered, awed by the sky’s fury. He watched the lightning reflected in the cathedral’s great west window and was amazed by the sight. So much glass! Still it rained and he began to fear that he would be trapped in the cart till the next day. And then, just after a peal of thunder seemed to stun the whole city with its violence, he saw Jeanette.

He did not know her at first. He just saw a woman standing in the arched entrance to the inn’s yard with the water flowing about her shoes. Everyone else in Rennes was huddling in shelter, but this woman suddenly appeared, soaked and miserable. Her hair, which had been looped so carefully over her ears, hung lank and black down the sopping red velvet dress, and it was that dress that Thomas recognized, then he saw the grief on her face. He clambered out of the wagon.

‘Jeanette!’

She was weeping, her mouth distorted by grief. She seemed incapable of speaking, but just stood and cried.

‘My lady!’ Thomas said. ‘Jeanette!’

‘We must go,’ she managed to say, ‘we must go.’ She had used soot as a cosmetic about her eyes and it had run to make grey streaks down her face.

‘We can’t go in this!’ Thomas said.

‘We must go!’ she screamed at him angrily. ‘We must go!’

‘I’ll get the horse,’ Thomas said.

‘There’s no time! There’s no time!’ She plucked at his robe. ‘We must go. Now!’ She tried to tug him through the arch into the street.

Thomas pulled away from her and ran to the wagon where he retrieved his disguised bow and the heavy sack. There was a cloak of Jeanette’s there and he took that too and wrapped it about her shoulders, though she did not seem to notice.

‘What’s happening?’ Thomas demanded.

‘They’ll find me here, they’ll find me!’ Jeanette declared in a panic, and she pulled him blindly out of the tavern’s archway. Thomas turned her eastwards onto a crooked street that led to a fine stone bridge across the Seine and then to a city gate. The big gates were barred, but a small door in one of the gates was open and the guards in the tower did not care if some fool of a drenched friar wanted to take a madly sobbing woman out of the city. Jeanette kept looking back, fearing pursuit, but still did not explain her panic or her tears to Thomas. She just hurried eastwards, insensible to the rain, wind and thunder.

The storm eased towards dusk, by which time they were close to a village that had a poor excuse for a tavern. Thomas ducked under the low doorway and asked for shelter. He put coins on a table.

‘I need shelter for my sister,’ he said, reckoning that anyone would be suspicious of a friar travelling with a woman. ‘Shelter, food and a fire,’ he said, adding another coin.

‘Your sister?’ The tavern-keeper, a small man with a face scarred by the pox and bulbous with wens, peered at Jeanette, who was crouched in the tavern’s porch.

Thomas touched his head, suggesting she was mad. ‘I am taking her to the shrine of St Guinefort,’ he explained.

The tavern-keeper looked at the coins, glanced again at Jeanette, then decided the strange pair could have the use of an empty cattle byre. ‘You can put a fire there,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but don’t burn the thatch.’

Thomas lit a fire with embers from the tavern’s kitchen, then fetched food and ale. He forced Jeanette to eat some of the soup and bread, then made her go close to the fire. It took over two hours of coaxing before she would tell him the story, and telling it only made her cry again. Thomas listened, appalled.

‘So how did you escape?’ he asked when she was finished.

A woman had unbolted the room, Jeanette said, to fetch a broom. The woman had been astonished to see Jeanette there, and even more astonished when Jeanette ran past her. Jeanette had fled the citadel, fearing the soldiers would stop her, but no one had taken any notice of her and now she was running away. Like Thomas she was a fugitive, but she had lost far more than he. She had lost her son, her honour and her future.

‘I hate men,’ she said. She shivered, for the miserable fire of damp straw and rotted wood had scarcely dried her clothes. ‘I hate men,’ she said again, then looked at Thomas. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘You must sleep,’ he said, ‘and tomorrow we’ll go north.’

She nodded, but he did not think she had understood his words. She was in despair. The wheel of fortune that had once raised her so high had taken her into the utter depths.

She slept for a time, but when Thomas woke in the grey dawn he saw she was crying softly and he did not know what to do or say, so he just lay in the straw until he heard the tavern door creak open, then went to fetch some food and water. The tavern-keeper’s wife cut some bread and cheese while her husband asked Thomas how far he had to walk.

‘St Guinefort’s shrine is in Flanders,’ Thomas said.

‘Flanders!’ the man said, as though it was on the far side of the moon.

‘The family doesn’t know what else to do with her,’ Thomas explained, ‘and I don’t know how to reach Flanders. I thought to go to Paris first.’

‘Not Paris,’ the tavern-keeper’s wife said scornfully, ‘you must go to Fougères.’ Her father, she said, had often traded with the north countries and she was sure that Thomas’s route lay through Fougères and Rouen. She did not know the roads beyond Rouen, but was certain he must go that far, though to begin, she said, he must take a small road that went north from the village. It went through woods, her husband added, and he must be careful for the trees were hiding places for terrible men escaping justice, but after a few miles he would come to the Fougères highway, which was patrolled by the Duke’s men.

Thomas thanked her, offered a blessing to the house, then took the food to Jeanette, who refused to eat. She seemed drained of tears, almost of life, but she followed Thomas willingly enough as he walked north. The road, deep rutted by wagons and slick with mud from the previous day’s rain, twisted into deep woods that dripped with water. Jeanette stumbled for a few miles, then began to cry. ‘I must go back to Rennes,’ she insisted. ‘I want to go back to my son.’

Thomas argued, but she would not be moved. He finally gave in, but when he turned to walk south she just began to cry even harder. The Duke had said she was not a fit mother! She kept repeating the words, ‘Not fit! Not fit!’ She screamed at the sky. ‘He made me his whore!’ Then she sank onto her knees beside the road and sobbed uncontrollably. She was shivering again and Thomas thought that if she did not die of an ague then the grief would surely kill her.

‘We’re going back to Rennes,’ Thomas said, trying to encourage her.

‘I can’t!’ she wailed. ‘He’ll just whore me! Whore me!’ She shouted the words, then began rocking back and forwards and shrieking in a terrible high voice. Thomas tried to raise her up, tried to make her walk, but she fought him. She wanted to die, she said, she just wanted to die. ‘A whore,’ she screamed, and tore at the fox-fur trimmings of her red dress, ‘a whore! He said I shouldn’t wear fur. He made me a whore.’ She threw the tattered fur into the undergrowth.

It had been a dry morning, but the rain clouds were heaping in the east again, and Thomas was nervously watching as Jeanette’s soul unravelled before his eyes. She refused to walk, so he picked her up and carried her until he saw a well-trodden path going into the trees. He followed it to find a cottage so low, and with its thatch so covered with moss that at first he thought it was just a mound among the trees until he saw blue-grey woodsmoke seeping from a hole at its top. Thomas was worried about the outlaws who were said to haunt these woods, but it was beginning to rain again and the cottage was the only refuge in sight, so Thomas lowered Jeanette to the ground and shouted through the burrow-like entrance. An old man, white-haired, red-eyed and with skin blackened by smoke, peered back at Thomas. The man spoke a French so thick with local words and accent that Thomas could scarcely understand him, but he gathered the man was a forester and lived here with his wife, and the forester looked greedily at the coins Thomas offered, then said that Thomas and his woman could use an empty pig shelter. The place stank of rotted straw and shit, but the thatch was almost rainproof and Jeanette did not seem to care. Thomas raked out the old straw, then cut Jeanette a bed of bracken. The forester, once the money was in his hands, seemed little interested in his guests, but in the middle of the afternoon, when the rain had stopped, Thomas heard the forester’s wife hissing at him and, a few moments later, the old man left and walked towards the road, but without any of the tools of his trade; no axe, billhook or saw.

Jeanette was sleeping, exhausted, so Thomas stripped the dead clover plants from his black bow, unlashed the crosspiece and put back the horn tips. He strung the yew, thrust half a dozen arrows into his belt and followed the old man as far as the road, and there he waited in a thicket.

The forester returned towards evening with two young men whom Thomas presumed were the outlaws of whom he had been warned. The old man must have reckoned that Thomas and his woman were fugitives, for though they carried bags and money, they had sought a hiding place and that was enough to raise anyone’s suspicions. A friar did not need to skulk in the trees, and women wearing dresses trimmed with torn remnants of fur did not seek a forester’s hospitality. So doubtless the two young men had been fetched to help slit Thomas’s throat and then divide whatever coins they found on his body. Jeanette’s fate would be similar, but delayed.

Thomas put his first arrow into the ground between the old man’s feet and the second into a tree close by. ‘The next arrow kills,’ he said, though they could not see him for he was in the thicket’s shadows. They just stared wide-eyed at the bushes where he was hiding and Thomas made his voice deep and slow. ‘You come with murder in your souls,’ he said, ‘but I can raise the hellequin from the deeps of hell. I can make the devil’s claws cut to your heart and have the dead haunt your daylight. You will leave the friar and his sister alone.’

The old man dropped to his knees. His superstitions were as old as time and scarcely touched by Christianity. He believed there were trolls in the forest and giants in the mist. He knew there were dragons. He had heard of black-skinned men who lived on the moon and who dropped to earth when their home shrank to a sickle. He understood there were ghosts who hunted among the trees. All this he knew as well as he knew ash and larch, oak and beech, and he did not doubt that it was a demon who had spat the strangely long arrow from the thicket.

‘You must go,’ he told his companions, ‘you must go!’ The two fled and the old man touched his forehead to the leaf mould. ‘I meant no harm!’

‘Go home,’ Thomas said.

He waited till the old man had gone, then he dug the arrow out of the tree and that night he went to the forester’s cottage, crawled through the low doorway and sat on the earthen floor facing the old couple.

‘I shall stay here,’ he told them, ‘until my sister’s wits are recovered. We wish to hide her shame from the world, that is all. When we go we shall reward you, but if you try to kill us again I shall summon demons to torment you and I will leave your corpses as a feast for the wild things that lurk in the trees.’ He put another small coin on the earth floor. ‘You will bring us food each night,’ he told the woman, ‘and you will thank God that though I can read your hearts I still forgive you.’

They had no more trouble after that. Every day the old man went off into the trees with his billhook and axe, and every night his wife brought her visitors gruel or bread. Thomas took milk from their cow, shot a deer and thought Jeanette would die. For days she refused to eat, and sometimes he would find her rocking back and forth in the noxious shed and making a keening noise. Thomas feared she had gone mad for ever. His father would sometimes tell him how the mad were treated, how he himself had been treated, how starvation and beating were the only cures. ‘The devil gets into the soul,’ Father Ralph had said, ‘and he can be starved out or he can be thrashed out, but there is no way he will be coaxed out. Beat and starve, boy, beat and starve, it is the only treatment the devil understands.’ But Thomas could neither starve nor beat Jeanette, so he did his best by her. He kept her dry, he persuaded her to take some warm milk fresh from the cow, he talked with her through the nights, he combed her hair and washed her face and sometimes, when she was sleeping and he was sitting by the shed and staring at the stars through the tangled trees, he would wonder whether he and the hellequin had left other women as broken as Jeanette. He prayed for forgiveness. He prayed a lot in those days, and not to St Guinefort, but to the Virgin and to St George.

The prayers must have worked for he woke one dawn to see Jeanette sitting in the shed’s doorway with her thin body outlined by the bright new day. She turned to him and he saw there was no madness in her face any more, just a profound sorrow. She looked at him a long time before she spoke.

‘Did God send you to me, Thomas?’

‘He showed me great favour if He did,’ Thomas replied.

She smiled at that, the first smile he had seen on her face since Rennes. ‘I have to be content,’ she said very earnestly, ‘because my son is alive and he will be properly cared for and one day I shall find him.’

‘We both shall,’ Thomas said.

‘Both?’

He grimaced. ‘I have kept none of my promises,’ he said. ‘The lance is still in Normandy, Sir Simon lives, and how I shall find your son for you, I do not know. I think my promises are worthless, but I shall do my best.’

She held out her hand so he could take it and she let it stay there. ‘We have been punished, you and I,’ she said, ‘probably for the sin of pride. The Duke was right. I am no aristocrat. I am a merchant’s daughter, but thought I was higher. Now look at me.’

‘Thinner,’ Thomas said, ‘but beautiful.’

She shuddered at that compliment. ‘Where are we?’

‘Just a day outside Rennes.’

‘Is that all?’

‘In a pig shed,’ Thomas said, ‘a day out of Rennes.’

‘Four years ago I lived in a castle,’ she said wistfully. ‘Plabennec wasn’t large, but it was beautiful. It had a tower and a courtyard and two mills and a stream and an orchard that grew very red apples.’

‘You will see them again,’ Thomas said, ‘you and your son.’

He regretted mentioning her son for tears came to her eyes, but she cuffed them away. ‘It was the lawyer,’ she said.

‘Lawyer?’

‘Belas. He lied to the Duke.’ There was a kind of wonderment in her voice that Belas had proved so traitorous. ‘He told the Duke I was supporting Duke Jean. Then I will, Thomas, I will. I will support your duke. If that is the only way to regain Plabennec and find my son then I shall support Duke Jean.’ She squeezed Thomas’s hand. ‘I’m hungry.’

They spent another week in the forest while Jeanette recovered her strength. For a while, like a beast struggling to escape a trap, she devised schemes that would give her instant revenge on Duke Charles and restore her son, but the schemes were wild and hopeless and, as the days passed, she accepted her fate.

‘I have no friends,’ she said to Thomas one night.

‘You have me, my lady.’

‘They died,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘My family died. My husband died. Do you think I am a curse on those I love?’

‘I think,’ Thomas said, ‘that we must go north.’

She was irritated by his practicality. ‘I’m not sure I want to go north.’

‘I do,’ Thomas said stubbornly.

Jeanette knew that the further north she went, the further she went from her son, but she did not know what else to do, and that night, as if accepting that she would now be guided by Thomas, she came to his bracken bed and they were lovers. She wept afterwards, but then made love to him again, this time fiercely, as though she could slake her misery in the consolations of the flesh.

Next morning they left, going north. Summer had come, clothing the countryside in thick green. Thomas had disguised the bow again, lashing the crosspiece to the stave and hanging it with bindweed and willowherb instead of clover. His black robe had become ragged and no one would have taken him for a friar, while Jeanette had stripped the remains of the fox fur from the red velvet, which was dirty, creased and threadbare. They looked like vagabonds, which they were, and they moved like fugitives, skirting the towns and bigger villages to avoid trouble. They bathed in streams, slept beneath the trees and only ventured into the smallest villages when hunger demanded they buy a meal and cider in some slatternly tavern. If they were challenged they claimed to be Bretons, brother and sister, going to join their uncle who was a butcher in Flanders, and if anyone disbelieved the tale they were unwilling to cross Thomas, who was tall and strong and always kept his knife visible. By preference, though, they avoided villages and stayed in the woods where Thomas taught Jeanette how to tickle the trout out of their streams. They would light fires, cook their fish and cut bracken for a bed.

They kept close to the road, though they were forced to a long detour to avoid the drum-like fortress of St-Aubin-du-Cormier, and another to skirt the city of Fougères, and somewhere north of that city they entered Normandy. They milked cows in their pastures, stole a great cheese from a wagon parked outside a church and slept under the stars. They had no idea what day of the week it was, nor even what month it was any more. Both were browned by the sun and made ragged by travelling. Jeanette’s misery was dissolved in a new happiness, and nowhere more than when they discovered an abandoned cottage – merely cob walls of mud and straw decaying without a roof – in a spinney of hazel trees. They cleared away the nettles and brambles and lived in the cottage for more than a week, seeing no one, wanting to see no one, delaying their future because the present was so blissful. Jeanette could still weep for her son and spent hours devising exquisite revenges to be taken against the Duke, against Belas and against Sir Simon Jekyll, but she also revelled in that summer’s freedom. Thomas had fitted his bow again so he could hunt and Jeanette, growing ever stronger, had learned to pull it back almost to her chin.

Neither knew where they were and did not much care. Thomas’s mother used to tell him a tale of children who ran away into the forest and were reared by the beasts. ‘They grow hair all over their bodies,’ she would tell him, ‘and have claws and horns and teeth,’ and now Thomas would sometimes examine his hands to see if claws were coming. He saw none. Yet if he was becoming a beast then he was happy. He had rarely been happier, but he knew that the winter, even though far off, was nevertheless coming and so, perhaps a week after midsummer, they moved gently north again in search of something that neither of them could quite imagine.

Thomas knew he had promised to retrieve a lance and restore Jeanette’s son, but he did not know how he was to do either of those things. He only knew he must go to a place where a man like Will Skeat would employ him, though he could not talk of such a future with Jeanette. She did not want to hear about archers or armies, or of men and mail coats, but she, like him, knew they could not stay for ever in their refuge.

‘I shall go to England,’ she told him, ‘and appeal to your king.’ Out of all the schemes she had dreamed of, this was the only one that made sense. The Earl of Northampton had placed her son under the King of England’s protection, so she must appeal to Edward and hope he would support her.

They walked north, still keeping the road to Rouen in sight. They forded a river and climbed into a broken country of small fields, deep woods and abrupt hills, and somewhere in that green land, unheard by either of them, the wheel of fortune creaked again. Thomas knew that the great wheel governed mankind, it turned in the dark to determine good or evil, high or low, sickness or health, happiness or misery. Thomas reckoned God must have made the wheel to be the mechanism by which He ruled the world while He was busy in heaven, and in that midsummer, when the harvest was being flailed on the threshing floors, and the swifts were gathering in the high trees, and the rowan trees were in scarlet berry, and the pastures were white with ox-eye daisies, the wheel lurched for Thomas and Jeanette.

They walked to the wood’s edge one day to check that the road was still in view. They usually saw little more than a man driving some cows to market, a group of women following with eggs and vegetables to sell. A priest might pass on a poor horse, and once they had seen a knight with his retinue of servants and men-at-arms, but most days the road lay white, dusty and empty under the summer sun. Yet this day it was full. Folk were walking southwards, driving cows and pigs and sheep and goats and geese. Some pushed handcarts, others had wagons drawn by oxen or horses, and all the carts were loaded high with stools, tables, benches and beds. Thomas knew he was seeing fugitives.

They waited till it was dark, then Thomas beat the worst dirt off the Dominican’s gown and, leaving Jeanette in the trees, walked down to the road where some of the travellers were camping beside small, smoky fires.

‘God’s peace be on you,’ Thomas said to one group.

‘We have no food to spare, father,’ a man answered, eyeing the stranger suspiciously.

‘I am fed, my son,’ Thomas said, and squatted near their fire.

‘Are you a priest or a vagabond?’ the man asked. He had an axe and he drew it towards him protectively, for Thomas’s tangled hair was wildly long and his face as dark as any outlaw’s.

‘I am both,’ Thomas said with a smile. ‘I have walked from Avignon,’ he explained, ‘to do penance at the shrine of St Guinefort.’

None of the refugees had ever heard of the Blessed Guinefort, but Thomas’s words convinced them, for the idea of pilgrimage explained his woebegone condition while their own sad condition, they made clear, was caused by war. They had come from the coast of Normandy, only a day’s journey away, and in the morning they must be up early and travelling again to escape the enemy.

Thomas made the sign of the cross. ‘What enemy?’ he asked, expecting to hear that two Norman lords had fallen out and were ravaging each other’s estates.

But the ponderous wheel of fortune had turned unexpectedly. King Edward III of England had crossed the Channel. Such an expedition had long been expected, but the King had not gone to his lands in Gascony, as many had thought he would, nor to Flanders where other Englishmen fought, but had come to Normandy. His army was just a day away and, at the news, Thomas’s mouth dropped open.

‘You should flee them, father,’ one of the women advised Thomas. ‘They know no pity, not even for friars.’

Thomas assured them he would, thanked them for their news, then walked back up the hill to where Jeanette waited. All had changed.

His king had come to Normandy.

They argued that night. Jeanette was suddenly convinced they should turn back to Brittany and Thomas could only stare at her in astonishment.

‘Brittany?’ he asked faintly.

She would not meet his eyes, but stubbornly stared at the campfires that burned all along the road, while further north, on the night’s horizon, great red glows showed where larger fires burned, and Thomas knew that English soldiers must have been ravaging the fields of Normandy just as the hellequin had harrowed Brittany. ‘I can be near Charles if I’m in Brittany,’ Jeanette said.

Thomas shook his head. He was dimly aware that the sight of the army’s destruction had forced them both into a reality from which they had been escaping in these last weeks of freedom, but he could not connect that with her sudden wish to head back to Brittany.

‘You can be near Charles,’ he said carefully, ‘but can you see him? Will the Duke let you near him?’

‘Maybe he will change his mind,’ Jeanette said without much conviction.

‘And maybe he’ll rape you again,’ Thomas said brutally.

‘And if I don’t go,’ she said vehemently, ‘maybe I will never see Charles again. Never!’

‘Then why come this far?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She was angry as she used to be when Thomas first met her in La Roche-Derrien. ‘Because I was mad,’ she said sullenly.

‘You say you want to appeal to the King,’ Thomas said, ‘and he’s here!’ He flung a hand towards the livid glow of the fires. ‘So appeal to him here.’

‘Maybe he won’t believe me,’ Jeanette said stubbornly.

‘And what will we do in Brittany?’ Thomas asked, but Jeanette would not answer. She looked sulky and still avoided his gaze. ‘You can marry one of the Duke’s men-at-arms,’ Thomas went on, ‘that’s what he wanted, isn’t it? A pliant wife of a pliant follower so that when he feels like taking his pleasure, he can.’

‘Isn’t that what you do?’ she challenged him, looking him in the face at last.

‘I love you,’ Thomas said.

Jeanette said nothing.

‘I do love you,’ Thomas said, and felt foolish for she had never said the same to him.

Jeanette looked at the glowing horizon that was tangled by the leaves of the forest. ‘Will your king believe me?’ she asked him.

‘How can he not?’

‘Do I look like a countess?’

She looked ragged, poor and beautiful. ‘You speak like a countess,’ Thomas said, ‘and the King’s clerks will make enquiries of the Earl of Northampton.’ He did not know if that was true, but he wanted to encourage her.

Jeanette sat with her head bowed. ‘Do you know what the Duke told me? That my mother was a Jewess!’ She looked up at him, expecting him to share her indignation.

Thomas frowned. ‘I’ve never met a Jew,’ he said.

Jeanette almost exploded. ‘You think I have? You need to meet the devil to know he is bad? A pig to discover he stinks?’ She began to weep. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘We shall go to the King,’ Thomas said, and next morning he walked north and, after a few heartbeats, Jeanette followed him. She had tried to clean her dress, though it was so filthy that all she could manage was to brush the twigs and leaf mould from the velvet. She coiled her hair and pinned it with slivers of wood.

‘What kind of man is the King?’ she asked Thomas.

‘They say he’s a good man.’

‘Who says?’

‘Everyone. He’s straightforward.’

‘He’s still English,’ Jeanette said softly, and Thomas pretended not to hear. ‘Is he kind?’ she asked him.

‘No one says he’s cruel,’ Thomas said, then held up a hand to silence Jeanette.

He had seen horsemen in mail.

Thomas had often found it strange that when the monks and scriveners made their books they painted warfare as gaudy. Their squirrel-hair brushes showed men in brightly coloured surcoats or jupons, and their horses in brilliantly patterned trappers. Yet for most of the time war was grey until the arrows bit, when it became shot through with red. Grey was the colour of a mail coat, and Thomas was seeing grey among the green leaves. He did not know if they were Frenchmen or Englishmen, but he feared both. The French were his enemy, but so were the English until they were convinced that he was English too, and convinced, moreover, that he was not a deserter from their army.

More horsemen came from the distant trees and these men were carrying bows, so they had to be English. Still Thomas hesitated, reluctant to face the problems of persuading his own side that he was not a deserter. Beyond the horsemen, hidden by the trees, a building must have been set on fire for smoke began to thicken above the summer leaves. The horsemen were looking towards Thomas and Jeanette, but the pair were hidden by a bank of gorse and after a while, satisfied that no enemy threatened, the troops turned and rode eastwards.

Thomas waited till they were out of sight, then led Jeanette across the open land, into the trees and out to where a farm burned. The flames were pale in the bright sun. No one was in sight. There was just a farm blazing and a dog lying next to a duck pond that was surrounded by feathers. The dog was whimpering and Jeanette cried out for it had been stabbed in the belly. Thomas stooped beside the beast, stroked its head and fondled its ears and the dying dog licked his hand and tried to wag its tail and Thomas rammed his knife deep into its heart so that it died swiftly.

‘It would not have lived,’ he told Jeanette. She said nothing, just stared at the burning thatch and rafters. Thomas pulled out the knife and patted the dog’s head. ‘Go to St Guinefort,’ he said, cleaning the blade. ‘I always wanted a dog when I was a child,’ he told Jeanette, ‘but my father couldn’t abide them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was strange.’ He sheathed the knife and stood. A track, imprinted with hoofmarks, led north from the farm, and they followed it cautiously between hedges thick with cornflowers, ox-eye and dogwood. They were in a country of small fields, high banks, sudden woods and lumpy hills, a country for ambush, but they saw no one until, from the top of a low hill, they glimpsed a squat stone church tower in a valley and then the unburned roofs of a village and after that the soldiers. There were hundreds of them camped in the fields beyond the cottages, and more in the village itself. Some large tents had been raised close to the church and they had the banners of nobles planted by their entrances.

Thomas still hesitated, reluctant to finish these good days with Jeanette, yet he knew there was no choice and so, bow on his shoulder, he took her down to the village. Men saw them coming and a dozen archers, led by a burly man in a mail hauberk, came to meet them.

‘What the hell are you?’ was the burly man’s first question. His archers grinned wolfishly at the sight of Jeanette’s ragged dress. ‘You’re either a bleeding priest who stole a bow,’ the man went on, ‘or an archer who filched a priest’s robe.’

‘I’m English,’ Thomas said.

The big man seemed unimpressed. ‘Serving who?’

‘I was with Will Skeat in Brittany,’ Thomas said.

‘Brittany!’ The big man frowned, not certain whether or not to believe Thomas.

‘Tell them I’m a countess,’ Jeanette urged Thomas in French.

‘What’s she saying?’

‘Nothing,’ Thomas said.

‘So what are you doing here?’ the big man asked.

‘I got cut off from my troop in Brittany,’ Thomas said weakly. He could hardly tell the truth – that he was a fugitive from justice – but he had no other tale prepared. ‘I just walked.’

It was a lame explanation and the big man treated it with the scorn it deserved. ‘What you mean, lad,’ he said, ‘is that you’re a bloody deserter.’

‘I’d hardly come here if I was, would I?’ Thomas asked defiantly.

‘You’d hardly come here from Brittany if you just got lost!’ the man pointed out. He spat. ‘You’ll have to go to Scoresby, let him decide what you are.’

‘Scoresby?’ Thomas asked.

‘You’ve heard of him?’ the big man asked belligerently.

Thomas had heard of Walter Scoresby who, like Skeat, was a man who led his own band of men-at-arms and archers, but Scoresby did not have Skeat’s good reputation. He was said to be a dark-humoured man, but he was evidently to decide Thomas’s fate, for the archers closed around him and walked the pair towards the village. ‘She your woman?’ one of them asked Thomas.

‘She’s the Countess of Armorica,’ Thomas said.

‘And I’m the bloody Earl of London,’ the archer retorted.

Jeanette clung to Thomas’s arm, terrified of the unfriendly faces. Thomas was equally unhappy. When things had been at their worst in Brittany, when the hellequin were grumbling and it was cold, wet and miserable, Skeat liked to say ‘be happy you’re not with Scoresby’ and now, it seemed, Thomas was.

‘We hang deserters,’ the big man said with relish. Thomas noted that the archers, like all the troops he could see in the village, wore the red cross of St George on their tunics. A great crowd of them were gathered in a pasture that lay between the small village church and a Cistercian monastery or priory that had somehow escaped destruction, for the white-robed monks were assisting a priest who said Mass for the soldiers. ‘Is it Sunday?’ Thomas asked one of the archers.

‘Tuesday,’ the man said, taking off his hat in honour of the sacraments, ‘St James’s day.’

They waited at the pasture’s edge, close to the village church where a row of new graves suggested that some villagers had died when the army came, but most had probably fled south or west. One or two remained. An old man, bent double from work and with a white beard that almost reached the ground, mumbled along with the distant priest while a small boy, perhaps six or seven years old, tried to draw an English bow to the amusement of its owner.

The Mass ended and the mail-clad men climbed from their knees and walked towards the tents and houses. One of the archers from Thomas’s escort had gone into the dispersing crowd and he now reappeared with a group of men. One stood out because he was taller than the others and had a new coat of mail that had been polished so it seemed to shine. He had long boots, a green cloak and a gold-hilted sword with a scabbard wrapped in red cloth. The finery seemed at odds with the man’s face, which was pinched and gloomy. He was bald, but had a forked beard, which he had twisted into plaits. ‘That’s Scoresby,’ one of the archers muttered and Thomas had no need to guess which of the approaching soldiers he meant.

Scoresby stopped a few paces away and the big archer who had arrested Thomas smirked. ‘A deserter,’ he announced proudly, ‘says he walked here from Brittany.’

Scoresby gave Thomas a hard glance and Jeanette a much longer look. Her ragged dress revealed a length of thigh and a ripped neckline and Scoresby clearly wanted to see more. Like Will Skeat he had begun his military life as an archer and had risen by dint of shrewdness, and Thomas guessed there was not much mercy in his soul’s mix.

Scoresby shrugged. ‘If he’s a deserter,’ he said, ‘then hang the bastard.’ He smiled. ‘But we’ll keep his woman.’

‘I’m not a deserter,’ Thomas said, ‘and the woman is the Countess of Armorica, who is related to the Count of Blois, nephew to the King of France.’

Most of the archers jeered at this outrageous claim, but Scoresby was a cautious man and he was aware of a small crowd that had gathered at the churchyard’s edge. Two priests and some men-at-arms wearing noblemen’s escutcheons were among the spectators, and Thomas’s confidence had put just enough doubt in Scoresby’s mind. He frowned at Jeanette, seeing a girl who looked at first glance like a peasant, but despite her tanned face she was undoubtedly beautiful and the remnants of her dress suggested she had once known elegance.

‘She’s who?’ Scoresby demanded.

‘I told you who she was,’ Thomas said belligerently, ‘and I will tell you more. Her son has been stolen from her, and her son is a ward of our king’s. She has come for His Majesty’s help.’ Thomas hastily told Jeanette what he had said and, to his relief, she nodded her agreement.

Scoresby gazed at Jeanette and something about her increased his doubt. ‘Why are you with her?’ he asked Thomas.

‘I rescued her,’ Thomas said.

‘He says,’ a voice spoke in French from the crowd and Thomas could not see the speaker, who was evidently surrounded by men-at-arms, all wearing a green and white livery. ‘He says that he rescued you, madame, is that true?’

‘Yes,’ Jeanette said. She frowned, unable to see who was questioning her.

‘Tell us who you are,’ the unseen man demanded.

‘I am Jeanette, dowager Countess of Armorica.’

‘Your husband was who?’ The voice suggested a young man, but a very confident young man.

Jeanette bridled at the tone of the question, but answered it. ‘Henri Chenier, Comte d’Armorique.

‘And why are you here, madame?’

‘Because Charles of Blois has kidnapped my child!’ Jeanette answered angrily. ‘A child who was placed under the protection of the King of England.’

The young man said nothing for a while. Some in the crowd were edging nervously away from the liveried men-at-arms who surrounded him, and Scoresby was looking apprehensive. ‘Who placed him under that protection?’ he eventually asked.

‘William Bohun,’ Jeanette said, ‘Earl of Northampton.’

‘I believe her,’ the voice said, and the men-at-arms stepped aside so that Thomas and Jeanette could see the speaker, who proved to be scarce more than a boy. Indeed, Thomas doubted he had even begun to shave, though he was surely full grown for he was tall – taller even than Thomas – and had only stayed hidden because his men-at-arms had been wearing green and white plumes in their helmets. The young man was fair-haired, had a face slightly burned by the sun, was dressed in a green cloak, plain breeches and a linen shirt, and nothing except his height explained why men were suddenly kneeling on the grass. ‘Down,’ Scoresby hissed at Thomas who, perplexed, went on one knee. Now only Jeanette, the boy and his escort of eight tall men-at-arms were standing.

The boy looked at Thomas. ‘Did you really walk here from Brittany?’ he asked in English, though, like many noblemen, his English was touched with a French accent.

‘We both did, sire,’ Thomas said in French.

‘Why?’ he demanded harshly.

‘To seek the protection of the King of England,’ Thomas said, ‘who is the guardian of my lady’s son, who has been treacherously taken prisoner by England’s enemies.’

The boy looked at Jeanette with much the same wolfish appreciation that Scoresby had shown. He might not shave, but he knew a beautiful woman when he saw one. He smiled. ‘You are most welcome, madame,’ he said. ‘I knew of your husband’s reputation, I admired him, and I regret that I will never have a chance to meet him in combat.’ He bowed to Jeanette, then untied his cloak and walked to her. He placed the green cape over her shoulders to cover the torn dress. ‘I shall ensure, madame,’ he said, ‘that you are treated with the courtesy your rank demands and will vow to keep whatever promises England made on your son’s behalf.’ He bowed again.

Jeanette, astonished and pleased by the young man’s manner, put the question that Thomas had been wanting answered. ‘Who are you, my lord?’ she asked, offering a curtsy.

‘I am Edward of Woodstock, madame,’ he said, offering her his arm.

It meant nothing to Jeanette, but it astonished Thomas. ‘He is the King’s eldest son,’ he whispered to her.

She dropped to one knee, but the smooth-cheeked boy raised her and walked her towards the priory. He was Edward of Woodstock, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall and Prince of Wales. And the wheel of fate had once again spun Jeanette high.

The wheel seemed indifferent towards Thomas. He was left alone, abandoned. Jeanette walked away on the Prince’s arm and did not so much as glance back at Thomas. He heard her laugh. He watched her. He had nursed her, fed her, carried her and loved her, and now, without a thought, she had discarded him. No one else was interested in him. Scoresby and his men, cheated of a hanging, had gone to the village, and Thomas wondered just what he was supposed to do.

‘Goddamn,’ he said aloud. He felt conspicuously foolish in his tattered robe. ‘Goddamn,’ he said again. Anger, thick as the black humour that could make a man sick, rose in him, but what he could do? He was a fool in a ragged robe and the Prince was the son of a king.

The Prince had taken Jeanette to the low grassy ridge where the big tents stood in a colourful row. Each tent had a flagpole, and the tallest flew the quartered banner of the Prince of Wales, which showed the golden lions of England on the two red quarters and golden fleur-de-lis on the two blue. The fleur-de-lis were there to show the King’s claim to the French throne while the whole flag, which was that of England’s king, was crossed with a white-toothed bar to show that this was the banner of the King’s eldest son. Thomas was tempted to follow Jeanette, to demand the Prince’s help, but then one of the lower banners, the one furthest away from him, caught the small warm wind and sluggishly lifted its folds. He stared at it.

The banner had a blue field and was slashed diagonally with a white band. Three rampant yellow lions were emblazoned on either side of the bar, which was decorated with three red stars that had green centres. It was a flag Thomas knew well, but he scarcely dared believe that he was seeing it here in Normandy, for the arms were those of William Bohun, Earl of Northampton. Northampton was the King’s deputy in Brittany, yet his flag was unmistakable and Thomas walked towards it, fearing that the wind-rippled flag would turn out to be a different coat of arms, similar to the Earl’s, but not the same.

But it was the Earl’s banner, and the Earl’s tent, in contrast to the other stately pavilions on the low ridge, was still the grubby shelter made from two worn-out sails. A half-dozen men-at-arms wearing the Earl’s livery barred Thomas’s way as he neared the tent. ‘Have you come to hear his lordship’s confession or put an arrow in his belly?’ one asked.

‘I would speak to his lordship,’ Thomas said, barely suppressing the anger provoked by Jeanette’s abandonment of him.

‘But will he talk to you?’ the man asked, amused at the ragged archer’s pretensions.

‘He will,’ Thomas said with a confidence he did not entirely feel. ‘Tell him the man who gave him La Roche-Derrien is here,’ he added.

The man-at-arms looked startled. He frowned, but just then the tent flap was thrown back and the Earl himself appeared, stripped to the waist to reveal a muscled chest covered in tight red curls. He was chewing on a goose-bone and peered up at the sky as though fearing rain. The man-at-arms turned to him, indicated Thomas, then shrugged as if to say he was not responsible for a madman showing up unannounced.

The Earl stared at Thomas. ‘Good God,’ he said after a while, ‘have you taken orders?’

‘No, my lord.’

The Earl stripped a piece of flesh from the bone with his teeth. ‘Thomas, ain’t that right?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Never forget a face,’ the Earl said, ‘and I have cause to remember yours, though I hardly expected you to fetch up here. Did you walk?’

Thomas nodded. ‘I did, my lord.’ Something about the Earl’s demeanour was puzzling, almost as though he was not really surprised to see Thomas in Normandy.

‘Will told me about you,’ the Earl said, ‘told me all about you. So Thomas, my modest hero from La Roche-Derrien, is a murderer, eh?’ He spoke grimly.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Thomas said humbly.

The Earl threw away the stripped bone, then snapped his fingers and a servant tossed him a shirt from within the tent. He pulled it on and tucked it into his hose. ‘God’s teeth, boy, do you expect me to save you from Sir Simon’s vengeance? You know he’s here?’

Thomas gaped at the Earl. Said nothing. Sir Simon Jekyll was here? And Thomas had just brought Jeanette to Normandy. Sir Simon could hardly hurt her so long as she was under the Prince’s protection, but Sir Simon could harm Thomas well enough. And delight in it.

The Earl saw Thomas blanch and he nodded. ‘He’s with the King’s men, because I didn’t want him, but he insisted on travelling because he reckons there’s more plunder to be had in Normandy than in Brittany and I dare say he’s right, but what will truly put a smile on his face is the sight of you. Ever been hanged, Thomas?’

‘Hanged, my lord?’ Thomas asked vaguely. He was still reeling from the news that Sir Simon had sailed to Normandy. He had just walked all this way to find his enemy waiting?

‘Sir Simon will hang you,’ the Earl said with indecent relish. ‘He’ll let you strangle on the rope and there’ll be no kindly soul tugging on your ankles to make it quick. You could last an hour, two hours, in utter agony. You could choke for even longer! One fellow I hanged lasted from matins till prime and still managed to curse me. So I suppose you want my help, yes?’

Thomas belatedly went onto one knee. ‘You offered me a reward after La Roche-Derrien, my lord. Can I claim it now?’

The servant brought a stool from the tent and the Earl sat, his legs set wide. ‘Murder is murder,’ he said, picking his teeth with a sliver of wood.

‘Half Will Skeat’s men are murderers, my lord,’ Thomas pointed out.

The Earl thought about that, then reluctantly nodded. ‘But they’re pardoned murderers,’ he answered. He sighed. ‘I wish Will was here,’ he said, evading Thomas’s demand. ‘I wanted him to come, but he can’t come until Charles of Blois is put back into his cage.’ He scowled at Thomas. ‘If I give you a pardon,’ the Earl went on, ‘then I make an enemy out of Sir Simon. Not that he’s a friend now, but still, why spare you?’

‘For La Roche-Derrien,’ Thomas said.

‘Which is a great debt,’ the Earl agreed, ‘a very great debt. We’d have looked bloody fools if we hadn’t taken that town, miserable goddamn place though it be. God’s teeth, boy, but why didn’t you just walk south? Plenty of bastards to kill in Gascony.’ He looked at Thomas for a while, plainly irritated by the undeniable debt he owed the archer and the nuisance of paying it. He finally shrugged. ‘I’ll talk to Sir Simon, offer him money, and if it’s enough he’ll pretend you’re not here. As for you,’ he paused, frowning as he remembered his earlier meetings with Thomas, ‘you’re the one who wouldn’t tell me who your father was, ain’t I right?’

‘I didn’t tell you, my lord, because he was a priest.’

The Earl thought that was a fine jest. ‘God’s teeth! A priest? So you’re a devil’s whelp, are you? That’s what they say in Guyenne, that the children of priests are the devil’s whelps.’ He looked Thomas up and down, amused again at the ragged robe. ‘They say the devil’s whelps make good soldiers,’ he said, ‘good soldiers and better whores. I suppose you’ve lost your horse?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘All my archers are mounted,’ the Earl said, then turned to one of his men-at-arms. ‘Find the bastard a sway-backed nag till he can filch something better, then give him a tunic and offer him to John Armstrong.’ He looked back to Thomas. ‘You’re joining my archers, which means you’ll wear my badge. You’re my man, devil’s whelp, and perhaps that will protect you if Sir Simon wants too much money for your miserable soul.’

‘I shall try to repay your lordship,’ Thomas said.

‘Pay me, boy, by getting us into Caen. You got us into La Roche-Derrien, but that little place is nothing compared to Caen. Caen is a true bastard. We go there tomorrow, but I doubt we’ll see the backside of its walls for a month or more, if ever. Get us into Caen, Thomas, and I’ll forgive you a score of murders.’ He stood, nodded a dismissal and went back into the tent.

Thomas did not move. Caen, he thought, Caen. Caen was the city where Sir Guillaume d’Evecque lived, and he made the sign of the cross for he knew fate had arranged all this. Fate had determined that his crossbow arrow would miss Sir Simon Jekyll and it had brought him to the edge of Caen. Because fate wanted him to do the penance that Father Hobbe had demanded. God, Thomas decided, had taken Jeanette from him because he had been slow to keep his promise.

But now the time for the keeping of promises had come, for God had brought Thomas to Caen.