Читать книгу Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 22

Perhaps Thomas was lucky. Perhaps his guardian saint, whether dog or man, was looking after him, for if he had been conscious he would have suffered torture. Sir Simon might have put his signature to the agreement with the Earl the previous night, but the sight of Thomas had driven any mercy from his mind. He remembered the humiliation of being hunted naked through the trees and he recalled the pain of the crossbow bolt in his leg, a wound that still made him limp, and those memories provoked nothing except a wish to give Thomas a long, slow hurting that would leave the archer screaming. But Thomas had been stunned by the flat of the sword and by the kicks to his head and he did not know a thing as two men-at-arms dragged him towards the oak. At first the Earl of Warwick’s men had tried to protect Thomas from Sir Simon, but when he assured them that the man was a deserter, a thief and a murderer they had changed their minds. They would hang him.

And Sir Simon would let them. If these men hanged Thomas as a deserter then no one could accuse Sir Simon of executing the archer. He would have kept his word and the Earl of Northampton would still have to forfeit his share of the prize money. Thomas would be dead and Sir Simon would be both richer and happier.

The men-at-arms were willing enough once they heard Thomas was a murderous thief. They had orders to hang enough rioters, thieves and rapists to cool the army’s ardour, but this quarter of the island, being furthest from the old city, had not seen the same atrocities as the northern half and so these men-at-arms had been denied the opportunity to use the ropes which the Earl had issued. Now they had a victim and so one man tossed the rope over an oak branch.

Thomas was aware of little of it. He felt nothing as Sir Simon searched him and cut away the money pouch from under his tunic; he did not know a thing when the rope was knotted about his neck, but then he was dimly aware of the stench of horse urine and suddenly there was a tightening at his gullet and his slowly recovering sight was sheeted with red. He felt himself hauled into the air, then tried to gasp because of a dreadful gripping pain in his throat, but he could not gasp and he could scarcely breathe; he could only feel a burning and choking as the smoky air scraped in his windpipe. He wanted to scream in terror but his lungs could do nothing except give him agony. He had an instant’s lucidity as he realized he was dangling and jerking and twitching, and though he scrabbled at his neck with his hooked fingers he could not loosen the rope’s strangling grip. Then, in terror, he pissed himself.

‘Yellow bastard,’ Sir Simon sneered, and he struck at Thomas’s body with his sword, though the blow did little more than slice the flesh at Thomas’s waist and swing his body on the rope.

‘Leave him be,’ one of the men-at-arms said. ‘He’s a dead ’un,’ and they watched until Thomas’s movements became spasmodic. Then they mounted and rode on. A group of archers also watched from one of the houses in the square, and their presence scared Sir Simon, who feared they might be friends of Thomas and so, when the Earl’s men left the square, he rode with them. His own followers were searching the nearby church of St Michael, and Sir Simon had only come to the square because he had seen the tall stone house and wondered if it contained plunder. Instead he had found Thomas and now Thomas was hanged. It was not the revenge Sir Simon had dreamed of, but there had been pleasure in it and that was a compensation.

Thomas felt nothing now. It was all darkness and no pain. He was dancing the rope to hell, his head to one side, body still swinging slightly, legs twitching, hands curling and feet dripping.

The army stayed five days in Caen. Some three hundred Frenchmen of rank, all of whom could yield ransoms, had been taken prisoner, and they were escorted north to where they could take ship for England. The injured English and Welsh soldiers were carried to the Abbaye aux Dames where they lay in the cloisters, their wounds stinking so high that the Prince and his entourage moved to the Abbaye aux Hommes where the King had his quarters. The bodies of the massacred citizens were cleared from the streets. A priest of the King’s household tried to bury the dead decently, as befitted Christians, but when a common grave was dug in the churchyard of St Jean it could hold only five hundred bodies, and no one had time or spades enough to bury the rest, so four and a half thousand corpses were tipped into the rivers. The city’s survivors, creeping out of their hiding places when the madness of the sack was over, wandered along the riverbanks to search for their relatives among the corpses that were stranded by the falling tide. Their searches disturbed the wild dogs and the screeching flocks of ravens and gulls that squabbled as they feasted on the bloated dead.

The castle was still in French hands. Its walls were high and thick, and no ladder could scale them. The King sent a herald to demand the garrison’s surrender, but the French lords in the great keep politely refused and then invited the English to do their worst, confident that no mangonel or catapult could hurl a stone high enough to breach their lofty walls. The King reckoned they were right, so instead ordered his gunners to break down the castle’s stones, and the army’s five largest cannon were trundled through the old city on their wagons. Three of the guns were long tubes made from wrought-iron strips bound by steel hoops, while two had been cast in brass by bell-founders and looked like bulbous jars with swollen oval bellies, narrow necks and flaring mouths. All were around five feet long and needed shear-legs to be swung from their wagons onto wooden cradles.

The cradles were set on planks of wood. The ground under the gun carriages had been graded so that the guns could point up towards the castle’s gate. Bring down the gate, the King had ordered, and he could release his archers and men-at-arms in an assault. So the gunners, most of them men from Flanders or Italy who were skilled in this work, mixed their gunpowder. It was made from saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, but the saltpetre was heavier than the other ingredients and always settled to the bottom of the barrels while the charcoal rose to the top so the gunners had to stir the mix thoroughly before they ladled the deadly powder into the bellies of the jars. They placed a shovelful of loam, made from water and clay soil, in the narrow part of each gun’s neck before loading the crudely sculpted stone balls that were the missiles. The loam was to seal the firing chamber so that the power of the explosion did not leak away before all the powder had caught the fire. Still more loam was packed about the stone balls to fill the space between the missiles and the barrels, then the gunners had to wait while the loam hardened to make a firmer seal.

The other three guns were quicker to load. Each iron tube was lashed to a massive wooden cradle that ran the length of the gun, then turned in a right angle so that the gun’s breech rested against a baulk of solid oak. That breech, a quarter of the gun’s length, was separate from the barrel, and was lifted clean out of the cradle and set upright on the ground where it was filled with the precious black powder. Once the three breech chambers were filled they were sealed by willow plugs to contain the explosion, then slotted back into their cradles. The three tube barrels had already been loaded, two with stone balls and the third with a yard-long garro, a giant arrow made of iron.

The three breech chambers had to be worked firmly against the barrels so that the force of the explosion did not escape through the joint between the gun’s two parts. The gunners used wooden wedges that they hammered between the breech and the oak at the back of the cradle, and every blow of the mauls sealed the joints imperceptibly tighter. Other gunners were ladling powder into the spare breech chambers that would fire the next shots. It all took time – well over an hour for the loam in the two bulbous guns to set firm enough – and the work attracted a huge crowd of curious onlookers who stood a judicious distance away to be safe from fragments should any of the strange machines explode. The French, just as curious, watched from the castle battlements. Once in a while a defender would shoot a crossbow quarrel, but the range was too long. One bolt came within a dozen yards of the guns, but the rest fell well short and each failure provoked a jeer from the watching archers. Finally the French abandoned the provocation and just watched.

The three tube guns could have been fired first, for they had no loam to set, but the King wanted the first volley to be simultaneous. He envisaged a mighty blow in which the five missiles would shatter the castle gate and, once the gate was down, he would have his gunners gnaw at the gate’s arch. The master gunner, a tall and lugubrious Italian, finally declared the weapons ready and so the fuses were fetched. These were short lengths of hollow straw filled with gunpowder, their ends sealed with clay, and the fuses were pushed down through the narrow touchholes. The master gunner pinched the clay seal from each fuse’s upper end, then made the sign of the cross. A priest had already blessed the guns, sprinkling them with holy water, and now the master gunner knelt and looked at the King, who was mounted on a tall grey stallion.

The King, yellow-bearded and blue-eyed, looked up at the castle. A new banner had been hung from the ramparts, showing God holding a hand in blessing over a fleur-de-lis. It was time, he thought, to show the French whose side God was really on. ‘You may fire,’ he said solemnly.

Five gunners armed themselves with linstocks – long wands that each held a length of glowing linen. They stood well to the side of the guns and, at a signal from the Italian, they touched the fire to the exposed fuses. There was a brief fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touchholes, then the five mouths vanished in a cloud of grey-white smoke in which five monstrous flames stabbed and writhed as the guns themselves, firm-gripped by their cradles, slammed back along their plank bedding to thud against the mounds of earth piled behind each breech. The noise of the weapons hammered louder than the loudest thunder. It was a noise that physically pounded the eardrums and echoed back from the pale castle walls, and when the sound at last faded the smoke still hung in a shabby screen in front of the guns that now lay askew on their carriages with gently smoking muzzles.

The noise had startled a thousand nesting birds up from the old city’s roofs and the castle’s higher turrets, yet the gate appeared undamaged. The stone balls had shattered themselves against the walls, while the garro had done nothing except gouge a furrow in the approach road. The French, who had ducked behind the battlements when the noise and smoke erupted, now stood and called insults as the gunners stoically began to realign their weapons.

The King, thirty-four years old and not as confident as his bearing suggested, frowned as the smoke cleared. ‘Did we use enough powder?’ he demanded of the master gunner. The question had to be translated into Italian by a priest.

‘Use more powder, sire,’ the Italian said, ‘and the guns will shatter.’ He spoke regretfully. Men always expected his machines to work miracles and he was tired of explaining that even black powder needed time and patience to do its work.

‘You know best,’ the King said dubiously, ‘I’m sure you know best.’ He was hiding his disappointment for he had half hoped that the whole castle would shatter like glass when the missiles struck. His entourage, most of them older men, were looking contemptuous for they had little faith in guns and even less in Italian gunners.

‘Who,’ the King asked a companion, ‘is that woman with my son?’

‘The Countess of Armorica, sire. She fled from Brittany.’

The King shuddered, not because of Jeanette, but because the rotten smell of the powder smoke was pungent. ‘He grows up fast,’ he said, with just a touch of jealousy in his voice. He was bedding some peasant girl, who was pleasant enough and knew her business, but she was not as beautiful as the black-haired Countess who accompanied his son.

Jeanette, unaware that the King watched her, gazed at the castle in search of any sign that it had been struck by gunfire. ‘So what happened?’ she asked the Prince.

‘It takes time,’ the Prince said, hiding his surprise that the castle gate had not magically vanished in an eruption of splinters. ‘But they do say,’ he went on, ‘that in the future we shall fight with nothing but guns. Myself, I cannot imagine it.’

‘They are amusing,’ Jeanette said as a gunner carried a bucket of puddled loam to the nearest gun. The grass in front of the guns was burning in a score of places and the air was filled with a stench like rotted eggs that was even more repugnant than the smell of the corpses in the river.

‘If it amuses you, my dear, then I am glad we have the machines,’ the Prince said, then frowned because a group of his white-and-green-clad archers were jeering the gunners. ‘Whatever happened to the man who brought you from Normandy?’ he asked. ‘I should have thanked him for his services to you.’

Jeanette feared she was blushing, but made her voice careless. ‘I have not seen him since we came here.’

The Prince twisted in his saddle. ‘Bohun!’ he called to the Earl of Northampton. ‘Didn’t my lady’s personal archer join your fellows?’

‘He did, sire.’

‘So where is he?’

The Earl shrugged. ‘Vanished. We think he must have died crossing the river.’

‘Poor fellow,’ the Prince said, ‘poor fellow.’

And Jeanette, to her surprise, felt a pang of sorrow. Then thought it was probably for the best. She was the widow of a count and now the lover of a prince, and Thomas, if he was on the river’s bed, could never tell the truth. ‘Poor man,’ she said lightly, ‘and he behaved so gallantly to me.’ She was looking away from the Prince in case he saw her flushed face and she found herself staring, to her utter astonishment, at Sir Simon Jekyll, who, with another group of knights, had come for the entertainment of the guns. Sir Simon was laughing, evidently amused that so much noise and smoke had produced so little effect. Jeanette, disbelieving her eyes, just stared at him. She had gone pale. The sight of Sir Simon had brought back the memories of her worst days in La Roche-Derrien, the days of fear, poverty, humiliation and the uncertainty of knowing to whom she could turn for help.

‘I fear we never rewarded the fellow,’ the Prince said, still speaking of Thomas, then he saw that Jeanette was taking no notice. ‘My dear?’ the Prince prompted, but she still looked away from him. ‘My lady?’ The Prince spoke louder, touching her arm.

Sir Simon had noticed there was a woman with the Prince, but he had not realized it was Jeanette. He only saw a slender lady in a pale gold dress, seated side-saddle on an expensive palfrey that was hung with green and white ribbons. The woman wore a tall hat from which a veil stirred in the wind. The veil had concealed her profile, but now she was staring directly at him, indeed she was pointing at him and, to his horror, he recognized the Countess. He also recognized the banner of the young man beside her though at first he could not believe she was with the Prince. Then he saw the grim entourage of mailed men behind the fair-haired youth and he had an impulse to flee, but instead nervelessly dropped to his knees. As the Prince, Jeanette and the horsemen approached him, he fell full length on the ground. His heart was beating wildly, his mind a whirl of panic.

‘Your name?’ the Prince demanded curtly.

Sir Simon opened his mouth, but no words would come.

‘His name,’ Jeanette said vengefully, ‘is Sir Simon Jekyll. He tried to strip me naked, sire, and then he would have raped me if I had not been rescued. He stole my money, my armour, my horses, my ships and he would have taken my honour with as much delicacy as a wolf stealing a lamb.’

‘Is it true?’ the Prince demanded.

Sir Simon still could not speak, but the Earl of Northampton intervened. ‘The ships, armour and horses, sire, were spoils of war. I granted them to him.’

‘And the rest, Bohun?’

‘The rest, sire?’ The Earl shrugged. ‘The rest Sir Simon must explain for himself.’

‘But it seems he is speechless,’ the Prince said. ‘Have you lost your tongue, Jekyll?’

Sir Simon raised his head and caught Jeanette’s gaze, and it was so triumphant that he dropped his head again. He knew he should say something, anything, but his tongue seemed too big for his mouth and he feared he would merely stammer nonsense, so he kept silent.

‘You tried to smirch a lady’s honour,’ the Prince accused Sir Simon. Edward of Woodstock had high ideas of chivalry, for his tutors had ever read to him from the romances. He understood that war was not as gentle as the hand-written books liked to suggest, but he believed that those who were in places of honour should display it, whatever the common man might do. The Prince was also in love, another ideal encouraged by the romances. Jeanette had captivated him, and he was determined that her honour would be upheld. He spoke again, but his words were drowned by the sound of a tube gun firing. Everyone turned to stare at the castle, but the stone ball merely shattered against the gate tower, doing no damage.

‘Would you fight me for the lady’s honour?’ the Prince demanded of Sir Simon.

Sir Simon would have been happy to fight the Prince so long as he could have been assured that his victory would bring no reprisals. He knew the boy had a reputation as a warrior, yet the Prince was not full grown and nowhere near as strong or experienced as Sir Simon, but only a fool fought against a prince and expected to win. The King, it was true, entered tournaments, but he did so disguised in plain armour, without a surcoat, so that his opponents had no idea of his identity, but if Sir Simon fought the Prince then he would not dare use his full strength, for any injury done would be repaid a thousandfold by the prince’s supporters, and indeed, even as Sir Simon hesitated, the grim men behind the Prince spurred their horses forward as if offering themselves as champions for the fight. Sir Simon, overwhelmed by reality, shook his head.

‘If you will not fight,’ the Prince said in his high, clear voice, ‘then we must assume your guilt and demand recompense. You owe the lady armour and a sword.’

‘The armour was fairly taken, sire,’ the Earl of Northampton pointed out.

‘No man can take armour and weapons from a mere woman fairly,’ the Prince snapped. ‘Where is the armour now, Jekyll?’

‘Lost, sir,’ Sir Simon spoke for the first time. He wanted to tell the Prince the whole story, how Jeanette had arranged an ambush, but that tale ended with his own humiliation and he had the sense to keep quiet.

‘Then that mail coat will have to suffice,’ the Prince declared. ‘Take it off. And the sword too.’

Sir Simon gaped at the Prince, but saw he was serious. He unbuckled the sword belt and let it drop, then hauled the mail coat over his head so that he was left in his shirt and breeches.

‘What is in the pouch?’ the Prince demanded, pointing at the heavy leather bag suspended about Sir Simon’s neck.

Sir Simon sought an answer and found none but the truth, which was that the pouch was the heavy money bag he had taken from Thomas. ‘It is money, sire.’

‘Then give it to her ladyship.’

Sir Simon lifted the bag over his head and held it out to Jeanette, who smiled sweetly. ‘Thank you, Sir Simon,’ she said.

‘Your horse is forfeit too,’ the Prince decreed, ‘and you will leave this encampment by midday for you are not welcome in our company. You may go home, Jekyll, but in England you will not have our favour.’

Sir Simon looked into the Prince’s eyes for the first time. You damned miserable little pup, he thought, with your mother’s milk still sour on your unshaven lips, then he shook as he was struck by the coldness of the Prince’s eyes. He bowed, knowing he was being banished, and he knew it was unfair, but there was nothing he could do except appeal to the King, yet the King owed him no favours and no great men of the realm would speak for him, and so he was effectively an outcast. He could go home to England, but there men would soon learn he had incurred royal disfavour and his life would be endless misery. He bowed, he turned and he walked away in his dirty shirt as silent men opened a path for him.

The cannon fired on. They fired four times that day and eight the next, and at the end of the two days there was a splintered rent in the castle gate that might have given entrance to a starved sparrow. The guns had done nothing except hurt the gunners’ ears and shatter stone balls against the castle’s ramparts. Not a Frenchman had died, though one gunner and an archer had been killed when one of the brass guns exploded into a myriad red-hot scraps of metal. The King, realizing that the attempt was ridiculous, ordered the guns taken away and the siege of the castle abandoned.

And the next day the whole army left Caen. They marched eastwards, going towards Paris, and after them crawled their wagons and their camp followers and their herds of beef cattle, and for a long time afterwards the eastern sky showed white where the dust of their marching hazed the air. But at last the dust settled and the city, ravaged and sacked, was left alone. The folk who had succeeded in escaping from the island crept back to their homes. The splintered door of the castle was pushed open and its garrison came down to see what was left of Caen. For a week the priests carried an image of St Jean about the littered streets and sprinkled holy water to get rid of the lingering stink of the enemy. They said Masses for the souls of the dead, and prayed fervently that the wretched English would meet the King of France and have their own ruin visited on them.

But at least the English were gone, and the violated city, ruined, could stir again.

Light came first. A hazy light, smeared, in which Thomas thought he could see a wide window, but a shadow moved against the window and the light went. He heard voices, then they faded. In pascuis herbarum adclinavit me. The words were in his head. He makes me lie down in leafy pastures. A psalm, the same psalm from which his father had quoted his dying words. Calix meus inebrians. My cup makes me drunk. Only he was not drunk. Breathing hurt, and his chest felt as though he was being pressed by the torture of the stones. Then there was blessed darkness and oblivion once more.

The light came again. It wavered. The shadow was there, the shadow moved towards him and a cool hand was laid on his forehead.

‘I do believe you are going to live,’ a man’s voice said in a tone of surprise.

Thomas tried to speak, but only managed a strangled, grating sound.

‘It astonishes me,’ the voice went on, ‘what young men can endure. Babies too. Life is marvellously strong. Such a pity we waste it.’

‘It’s plentiful enough,’ another man said.

‘The voice of the privileged,’ the first man, whose hand was still on Thomas’s forehead, answered. ‘You take life,’ he said, ‘so value it as a thief values his victims.’

‘And you are a victim?’

‘Of course. A learned victim, a wise victim, even a valuable victim, but still a victim. And this young man, what is he?’

‘An English archer,’ the second voice said sourly, ‘and if we had any sense we’d kill him here and now.’

‘I think we shall try and feed him instead. Help me raise him.’

Hands pushed Thomas upright in the bed, and a spoonful of warm soup was put into his mouth, but he could not swallow and so spat the soup onto the blankets. Pain seared through him and the darkness came again.

The light came a third time or perhaps a fourth, he could not tell. Perhaps he dreamed it, but this time an old man stood outlined against the bright window. The man had a long black robe, but he was not a priest or monk, for the robe was not gathered at the waist and he wore a small square black hat over his long white hair.

‘God,’ Thomas tried to say, though the word came out as a guttural grunt.

The old man turned. He had a long, forked beard and was holding a jordan jar. It had a narrow neck and a round belly, and the bottle was filled with a pale yellow liquid that the man held up to the light. He peered at the liquid, then swilled it about before sniffing the jar’s mouth.

‘Are you awake?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you can speak! What a doctor I am! My brilliance astonishes me; if only it would persuade my patients to pay me. But most believe I should be grateful that they don’t spit at me. Would you say this urine is clear?’

Thomas nodded and wished he had not for the pain jarred through his neck and down his spine.

‘You do not consider it turgid? Not dark? No, indeed not. It smells and tastes healthy too. A good flask of clear yellow urine, and there is no better sign of good health. Alas, it is not yours.’ The doctor pushed open the window and poured the urine away. ‘Swallow,’ he instructed Thomas.

Thomas’s mouth was dry, but he obediently tried to swallow and immediately gasped with pain.

‘I think,’ the doctor said, ‘that we had best try a thin gruel. Very thin, with some oil, I believe, or better still, butter. That thing tied about your neck is a strip of cloth which has been soaked in holy water. It was not my doing, but I did not forbid it. You Christians believe in magic – indeed you could have no faith without a trust in magic – so I must indulge your beliefs. Is that a dog’s paw about your neck? Don’t tell me, I’m sure I don’t want to know. However, when you recover, I trust you will understand that it was neither dog paws nor wet cloths that healed you, but my skill. I have bled you, I have applied poultices of dung, moss and clove, and I have sweated you. Eleanor, though, will insist it was her prayers and that tawdry strip of wet cloth that revived you.’

‘Eleanor?’

‘She cut you down, dear boy. You were half dead. By the time I arrived you were more dead than alive and I advised her to let you expire in peace. I told her you were halfway in what you insist is hell and that I was too old and too tired to enter into a tugging contest with the devil, but Eleanor insisted and I have ever found it difficult to resist her entreaties. Gruel with rancid butter, I think. You are weak, dear boy, very weak. Do you have a name?’

‘Thomas.’

‘Mine is Mordecai, though you may call me Doctor. You won’t, of course. You’ll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of Christian children.’ This was all said cheerfully. ‘How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life’s lessons.’

‘Doctor?’ Thomas croaked.

‘Thomas?’

‘Thank you.’

‘An Englishman with manners! The world’s wonders never cease. Wait there, Thomas, and do not have the bad manners to die while I’m gone. I shall fetch gruel.’

‘Doctor?’

‘I am still here.’

‘Where am I?’

‘In the house of my friend, and quite safe.’

‘Your friend?’

‘Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, knight of the sea and of the land, and as great a fool as any I know, but a goodhearted fool. He does at least pay me.’

Thomas closed his eyes. He did not really understand what the doctor had said, or perhaps he did not believe it. His head was aching. There was pain all through his body, from his aching head down to his throbbing toes. He thought of his mother, because that was comforting, then he remembered being hauled up the tree and he shivered. He wished he could sleep again, for in sleep there was no pain, but then he was made to sit up and the doctor forced a pungent, oily gruel into his mouth and he managed not to spit it out or throw it up. There must have been mushrooms in the gruel, or else it had been infused with the hemp-like leaves that the Hookton villagers had called angel salad, for after he had eaten he had vivid dreams, but less pain. When he awoke it was dark and he was alone, but he managed to sit up and even stand, though he tottered and had to sit again.

Next morning, when the birds were calling from the oak branches where he had so nearly died, a tall man came into the room. The man was on crutches and his left thigh was swathed in bandages. He turned to look at Thomas and showed a face that was horribly scarred. A blade had cut him from the forehead to the jaw, taking the man’s left eye in its savage chop. He had long yellow hair, very shaggy and full, and Thomas guessed the man had been handsome once, though now he looked like a thing of nightmare.

‘Mordecai,’ the man growled, ‘tells me you will live.’

‘With God’s help,’ Thomas said.

‘I doubt God’s interested in you,’ the man said sourly. He looked to be in his thirties and had the bowed legs of a horseman and the deep chest of a man who practises hard with weapons. He swung on the crutches to the window, where he sat on the sill. His beard was streaked with white where the blade had chopped into his jaw and his voice was uncommonly deep and harsh. ‘But you might live with Mordecai’s help. There isn’t a physician to touch him in all Normandy, though Christ alone knows how he does it. He’s been squinting at my piss for a week now. I’m crippled, you Jewish halfwit, I tell him, not wounded in the bladder, but he just tells me to shut my mouth and squeeze out more drops. He’ll start on you soon.’ The man, who wore nothing except a long white shirt, contemplated Thomas moodily. ‘I have a notion,’ he growled, ‘that you are the godforsaken bastard who put an arrow into my thigh. I remember seeing a son of a whore with long hair like yours, then I was hit.’

‘You’re Sir Guillaume?’

‘I am.’

‘I meant to kill you,’ Thomas said.

‘So why shouldn’t I kill you?’ Sir Guillaume asked. ‘You lie in my bed, drink my gruel and breathe my air. English bastard. Worse, you’re a Vexille.’

Thomas turned his head to stare at the forbidding Sir Guillaume. He said nothing, for the last three words had mystified him.

‘But I choose not to kill you,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘because you saved my daughter from rape.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘Eleanor, you fool. She’s a bastard daughter, of course,’ Sir Guillaume said. ‘Her mother was a servant to my father, but Eleanor is all I’ve got left and I’m fond of her. She says you were kind to her, which is why she cut you down and why you’re lying in my bed. She always was overly sentimental.’ He frowned. ‘But I still have a mind to slice your damned throat.’

‘For four years,’ Thomas said, ‘I have dreamed of slitting yours.’

Sir Guillaume’s one eye gazed at him balefully. ‘Of course you have. You’re a Vexille.’

‘I’ve never heard of the Vexilles,’ Thomas said. ‘My name is Thomas of Hookton.’

Thomas half expected Sir Guillaume to frown as he tried to remember Hookton, but his recognition of the name was instant.

‘Hookton,’ he said, ‘Hookton. Good sweet Christ, Hookton.’ He was silent for a few heartbeats. ‘And of course you’re a damned Vexille. You have their badge on your bow.’

‘My bow?’

‘You gave it to Eleanor to carry! She kept it.’

Thomas closed his eyes. There was pain in his neck and down his back and in his head. ‘I think it was my father’s badge,’ he said, ‘but I don’t really know because he would never talk of his family. I know he hated his own father. I wasn’t very fond of my own, but your men killed him and I swore to avenge him.’

Sir Guillaume turned to gaze out of the window. ‘You have truly never heard of the Vexilles?’

‘Never.’

‘Then you are fortunate.’ He stood. ‘They are the devil’s offspring, and you, I suspect, are one of their pups. I would kill you, boy, with as little conscience as if I stamped on a spider, but you were kind to my bastard daughter and for that I thank you.’ He limped from the room.

Leaving Thomas in pain and utterly confused.

Thomas recovered in Sir Guillaume’s garden, shaded from the sun by two quince trees under which he waited anxiously for Dr Mordecai’s daily verdict on the colour, consistency, taste and smell of his urine. It did not seem to matter to the doctor that Thomas’s grotesquely swollen neck was subsiding, nor that he could swallow bread and meat again. All that mattered was the state of his urine. There was, the doctor declared, no finer method of diagnosis. ‘The urine betrays all. If it smells rank, or if it is dark, if it tastes of vinegar or should it be cloudy then it is time for vigorous doctoring. But good, pale, sweet-smelling urine like this is the worst news of all.’

‘The worst?’ Thomas asked, alarmed.

‘It means fewer fees for a physician, dear boy.’

The doctor had survived the sack of Caen by hiding in a neighbour’s pig shed. ‘They slaughtered the pigs, but missed the Jew. Mind you, they broke all my instruments, scattered my medicines, shattered all but three of my bottles and burned my house. Which is why I am forced to live here.’ He shuddered, as though living in Sir Guillaume’s mansion was a hardship. He smelled Thomas’s urine and then, uncertain of his diagnosis, spilled a drop onto a finger and tasted it. ‘Very fine,’ he said, ‘lamentably fine.’ He poured the jar’s contents onto a bed of lavender where bees were at work. ‘So I lost everything,’ he said, ‘and this after we were assured by our great lords that the city would be safe!’ Originally, the doctor had told Thomas, the leaders of the garrison had insisted on defending only the walled city and the castle, but they needed the help of the townsfolk to man the walls and those townsfolk had insisted that the Île St Jean be defended, for that was where the city’s wealth lay, and so, at the very last minute, the garrison had streamed across the bridge to disaster. ‘Fools,’ Mordecai said scornfully, ‘fools in steel and glory. Fools.’

Thomas and Mordecai were sharing the house while Sir Guillaume visited his estate in Evecque, some thirty miles south of Caen, where he had gone to raise more men. ‘He will fight on,’ the doctor said, ‘wounded leg or not.’

‘What will he do with me?’

‘Nothing,’ the doctor said confidently. ‘He likes you, despite all his bluster. You saved Eleanor, didn’t you? He’s always been fond of her. His wife wasn’t, but he is.’

‘What happened to his wife?’

‘She died,’ Mordecai said, ‘she just died.’

Thomas could eat properly now and his strength returned fast so that he could walk about the Île St Jean with Eleanor. The island looked as though a plague had struck, for over half the houses were empty and even those that were occupied were still blighted by the sack. Shutters were missing, doors splintered and the shops had no goods. Some country folk were selling beans, peas and cheeses from wagons, and small boys were offering fresh perch taken from the rivers, but they were still hungry days. They were also nervous days, for the city’s survivors feared that the hated English might return and the island was still haunted by the sickly smell of the corpses in the two rivers where the gulls, rats and dogs grew fat.

Eleanor hated walking about the city, preferring to go south into the countryside where blue dragonflies flew above water lilies in the streams that twisted between fields of overripe rye, barley and wheat.

‘I love harvest time,’ she told Thomas. ‘We used to go into the fields and help.’ There would be little harvest this year, for there were no folk to cut the grain and so the corn buntings were stripping the heads and pigeons were squabbling over the leavings. ‘There should be a feast at harvest’s end,’ Eleanor said wistfully.

‘We had a feast too,’ Thomas said, ‘and we used to hang corn dollies in the church.’

‘Corn dollies?’

He made her a little doll from straw. ‘We used to hang thirteen of these above the altar,’ he told her, ‘one for Christ and one each for the Apostles.’ He picked some cornflowers and gave them to Eleanor, who threaded them into her hair. It was very fair hair, like sunlit gold.

They talked incessantly and one day Thomas asked her again about the lance and this time Eleanor nodded.

‘I lied to you,’ she said, ‘because he did have it, but it was stolen.’

‘Who stole it?’

She touched her face. ‘The man who took his eye.’

‘A man called Vexille?’

She nodded solemnly. ‘I think so. But it wasn’t here, it was in Evecque. That’s his real home. He got the Caen house when he married.’

‘Tell me about the Vexilles,’ Thomas urged her.

‘I know nothing of them,’ Eleanor said, and he believed her.

They were sitting by a stream where two swans floated and a heron stalked frogs in a reedbed. Thomas had talked earlier of walking away from Caen to find the English army and his words must have been weighing on Eleanor’s mind for she frowned at him.

‘Will you really go?’

‘I don’t know.’ He wanted to be with the army, for that was where he belonged, though he did not know how he was to find it, nor how he was to survive in a countryside where the English had made themselves hated, but he also wanted to stay. He wanted to learn more about the Vexilles and only Sir Guillaume could satisfy that hunger. And, day by day, he wanted to be with Eleanor. There was a calm gentleness in her that Jeanette had never possessed, a gentleness that made him treat her with tenderness for fear that otherwise he would break her. He never tired of watching her long face with its slightly hollow cheeks and bony nose and big eyes. She was embarrassed by his scrutiny, but did not tell him to stop.

‘Sir Guillaume,’ she told him, ‘tells me I look like my mother, but I don’t remember her very well.’

Sir Guillaume came back to Caen with a dozen men-at-arms whom he had hired in northern Alençon. He would lead them to war, he said, along with the half-dozen of his men who had survived the fall of Caen. His leg was still sore, but he could walk without crutches and on the day of his return he summarily ordered Thomas to go with him to the church of St Jean. Eleanor, working in the kitchen, joined them as they left the house and Sir Guillaume did not forbid her to come.

Folk bowed as Sir Guillaume passed and many sought his assurance that the English were truly gone.

‘They are marching towards Paris,’ he would answer, ‘and our king will trap them and kill them.’

‘You think so?’ Thomas asked after one such assurance.

‘I pray so,’ Sir Guillaume growled. ‘That’s what the King is for, isn’t it? To protect his people? And God knows, we need protection. I’m told that if you climb that tower,’ he nodded towards the church of St Jean that was their destination, ‘you can see the smoke from the towns your army has burned. They are conducting a chevauchée.’

‘Chevauchée?’ Eleanor asked.

Her father sighed. ‘A chevauchée, child, is when you march in a great line through your enemy’s country and you burn, destroy and break everything in your path. The object of such barbarity is to force your enemy to come out from his fortresses and fight, and I think our king will oblige the English.’

‘And the English bows,’ Thomas said, ‘will cut his army down like hay.’

Sir Guillaume looked angry at that, but then shrugged. ‘A marching army gets worn down,’ he said. ‘The horses go lame, the boots wear out and the arrows run out. And you haven’t seen the might of France, boy. For every knight of yours we have six. You can shoot your arrows till your bows break, but we’ll still have enough men left to kill you.’ He fished in a pouch hanging at his belt and gave some small coins to the beggars at the churchyard gate, which lay close to the new grave where the five hundred corpses had been buried. It was now a mound of raw earth dotted with dandelions and it stank, for when the English had dug the grave they had struck water not far beneath the surface and so the pit was too shallow and the earth covering was too thin to contain the corruption the grave concealed.

Eleanor clapped a hand to her mouth, then hurried up the steps into the church where the archers had auctioned the town’s wives and daughters. The priests had thrice exorcized the church with prayers and holy water, but it still had a sad air, for the statues were broken and the windows shattered. Sir Guillaume genuflected towards the main altar, then led Thomas and Eleanor up a side aisle where a painting on the lime-washed wall showed St John escaping from the cauldron of boiling oil that the Emperor Domitian had prepared for him. The saint was shown as an ethereal form, half smoke and half man, floating away in the air while the Roman soldiers looked on in perplexity.

Sir Guillaume approached a side altar where he dropped to his knees beside a great black flagstone and Thomas, to his surprise, saw that the Frenchman was weeping from his one eye. ‘I brought you here,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘to teach you a lesson about your family.’

Thomas did not contradict him. He did not know that he was a Vexille, but the yale on the silver badge suggested he was.

‘Beneath that stone,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘lies my wife and my two children. A boy and a girl. He was six, she was eight and their mother was twenty-five years old. The house here belonged to her father. He gave me his daughter as ransom for a boat I captured. It was mere piracy, not war, but I gained a good wife from it.’ The tears were flowing now and he closed his eye. Eleanor stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, while Thomas waited. ‘Do you know,’ Sir Guillaume asked after a while, ‘why we went to Hookton?’

‘We thought because the tide took you away from Poole.’

‘No, we went to Hookton on purpose. I was paid to go there by a man who called himself the Harlequin.’

‘Like hellequin?’ Thomas asked.

‘It is the same word, only he used the Italian form. A devil’s soul, laughing at God, and he even looked like you.’ Sir Guillaume crossed himself, then reached out to trace a finger down the edge of the stone. ‘We went to fetch a relic from the church. You knew that already, surely?’

Thomas nodded. ‘And I have sworn to get it back.’

Sir Guillaume seemed to sneer at that ambition. ‘I thought it was all foolishness, but in those days I thought all life was foolishness. Why would some miserable church in an insignificant English village have a precious relic? But the Harlequin insisted he was right, and when we took the village we found the relic.’

‘The lance of St George,’ Thomas said flatly.

‘The lance of St George,’ Sir Guillaume agreed. ‘I had a contract with the Harlequin. He paid me a little money, and the balance was kept by a monk in the abbey here. He was a monk that everyone trusted, a scholar, a fierce man who folk said would become a saint, but when we returned I found that Brother Martin had fled and he had taken the money with him. So I refused to give the lance to the Harlequin. Bring me nine hundred livres in good silver, I told him, and the lance is yours, but he would not pay. So I kept the lance. I kept it in Evecque and the months passed and I heard nothing and I thought the lance had been forgotten. Then, two years ago, in the spring, the Harlequin returned. He came with men-at-arms and he captured the manor. He slaughtered everyone – everyone – and took the lance.’

Thomas stared at the black flagstone. ‘You lived?’

‘Scarcely,’ Sir Guillaume said. He hauled up his black jacket and showed a terrible scar on his belly. ‘They gave me three wounds,’ he went on. ‘One to the head, one to the belly and one to the leg. They told me the one to the head was because I was a fool with no brains, the one in the guts was a reward for my greed and the one to the leg was so I would limp down to hell. Then they left me to watch the corpses of my wife and children while I died. But I lived, thanks to Mordecai.’ He stood, wincing as he put his weight onto his left leg. ‘I lived,’ he said grimly, ‘and I swore I would find the man who did that,’ he pointed at the flagstone, ‘and send his soul screaming into the pit. It took me a year to discover who he was, and you know how I did it? When he came to Evecque he had his men’s shields covered with black cloth, but I slashed the cloth of one with my sword and saw the yale. So I asked men about the yale. I asked them in Paris and Anjou, in Burgundy and the Dauphiné, and in the end I found my answer. And where did I find it? After asking the length and breadth of France I found it here, in Caen. A man here knew the badge. The Harlequin is a man called Vexille. I do not know his first name, I do not know his rank, I just know he is a devil called Vexille.’

‘So the Vexilles have the lance?’

‘They have. And the man who killed my family killed your father.’ Sir Guillaume looked ashamed for a brief instant. ‘I killed your mother. I think I did, anyway, but she attacked me and I was angry.’ He shrugged. ‘But I did not kill your father, and in killing your mother I did nothing more than you have done in Brittany.’

‘True,’ Thomas admitted. He looked into Sir Guillaume’s eye and could feel no hatred for his mother’s death. ‘So we share an enemy,’ Thomas said.

‘And that enemy,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘is the devil.’

He said it grimly, then crossed himself. Thomas suddenly felt cold, for he had found his enemy, and his enemy was Lucifer.

That evening Mordecai rubbed a salve into Thomas’s neck. ‘It is almost healed, I think,’ he said, ‘and the pain will go, though perhaps a little will remain to remind you of how close you came to death.’ He sniffed the garden scents. ‘So Sir Guillaume told you the story of his wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are related to the man who killed his wife?’

‘I don’t know,’ Thomas said, ‘truly I don’t, but the yale suggests I am.’

‘And Sir Guillaume probably killed your mother, and the man who killed his wife killed your father, and Sir Simon Jekyll tried to kill you.’ Mordecai shook his head. ‘I nightly lament that I was not born a Christian. I could carry a weapon and join the sport.’ He handed Thomas a bottle. ‘Perform,’ he commanded, ‘and what, by the by, is a yale?’

‘A heraldic beast,’ Thomas explained.

The doctor sniffed. ‘God, in His infinite wisdom, made the fishes and the whales on the fifth day, and on the sixth he made the beasts of the land, and He looked at what He had done and saw that it was good. But not good enough for the heralds, who have to add wings, horns, tusks and claws to His inadequate work. Is that all you can do?’

‘For the moment.’

‘I’d get more juice from squeezing a walnut,’ he grumbled, and shuffled away.

Eleanor must have been watching for his departure, for she appeared from under the pear trees that grew at the garden’s end and gestured towards the river gate. Thomas followed her down to the bank of the River Orne where they watched an excited trio of small boys trying to spear a pike with English arrows left after the city’s capture.

‘Will you help my father?’ Eleanor asked.

‘Help him?’

‘You said his enemy was your enemy.’

Thomas sat on the grass and she sat beside him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He still did not really believe in any of it. There was a lance, he knew that, and a mystery about his family, but he was reluctant to admit that the lance and the mystery must govern his whole life.

‘Does that mean you’ll go back to the English army?’ Eleanor asked in a small voice.

‘I want to stay here,’ Thomas said after a pause, ‘to be with you.’

She must have known he was going to say something of the sort, but she still blushed and gazed at the swirling water where fish rose to the swarms of insects, and the three boys vainly splashed. ‘You must have a woman,’ she said softly.

‘I did,’ Thomas said, and he told her about Jeanette and how she had found the Prince of Wales and so abandoned him without a glance. ‘I will never understand her,’ he admitted.

‘But you love her?’ Eleanor asked directly.

‘No,’ Thomas said.

‘You say that because you’re with me,’ Eleanor declared.

He shook his head. ‘My father had a book of St Augustine’s sayings and there was one that always puzzled me.’ He frowned, trying to remember the Latin. ‘Nondum amabam, et amare amabam. I did not love, but yearned to love.’

Eleanor gave him a sceptical look. ‘A very elaborate way of saying you’re lonely.’

‘Yes,’ Thomas agreed.

‘So what will you do?’ she asked.

Thomas did not speak for a while. He was thinking of the penance he had been given by Father Hobbe. ‘I suppose one day I must find the man who killed my father,’ he said after a while.

‘But what if he is the devil?’ she asked seriously.

‘Then I shall wear garlic,’ Thomas said lightly, ‘and pray to St Guinefort.’

She looked at the darkening water. ‘Did St Augustine really say that thing?’

‘Nondum amabam, et amare amabam?’ Thomas said. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘I know how he felt,’ Eleanor said, and rested her head on his shoulder.

Thomas did not move. He had a choice. Follow the lance or take his black bow back to the army. In truth he did not know what he should do. But Eleanor’s body was warm against his and it was comforting and that, for the moment, was enough and so, for the moment, he would stay.