The Perfect Sinner
Will Davenport

In memory of Tony Dixon who knew this story. The estuary wil always be his merchant.

In all his life to any, come what might He was a true, a perfect gentle-knight. Speaking of his equipment, he possessed Fine horses but he was not gaily dressed. He wore a fustian tunic stained and dark With smudges where his armour had left mark.

Geoffrey Chaucer.

Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

HISTORICAL NOTE

Acknowledgement

Also by Will Davenport

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

All my life I have been burdened with a good reputation. I do not deserve it. I will be ripped on the racks of Purgatory until the Day of Judgement for what I have done.

Do you know what that would be like? I’m not afraid of wounds and I have had plenty of them. In battle the pain arrives later and always passes in time. A man can stand that. To be burnt and torn and stabbed for a thousand ages is another thing entirely. The fear of it stalks in the animal form of my sin. It scratches at my door and leaps on me when I wake and I cannot keep it away. My three sins came one after the other, a year between the first two and then two years to the third. I have confessed the first of them and been given inadequate penance. I have tried to confess the second, but the priests will not see it my way. I have kept the third and greatest entirely to myself, saving it for my deathbed.

The worst of it is that my wife Elizabeth shared that first sin and in the long and lonely years since she died, I have feared for her even more than for myself. Time crawls by in Purgatory and the punishment there is dreadful.

Now, in this year of 1372, on the day of the consecration of my Chantry, I was given hope because I saw Elizabeth again. I looked up from where I was doing my stiff best to kneel in prayer and I saw her standing up there in the new stained glass blazing with sunlight. She was young again and she spoke with that angelic voice which always plucked directly at my heart and she used it to bring me a gift.

I have been trying to make up for my second sin, you see. It took place in war and was a sin of omission. There was an act I failed to prevent. War has battered into me the slow realisation that it is man’s most natural state, a base business painted with glory only for disguise, but this act was the basest of its parts. I will speak out now as I should have spoken then. Our war with France has lasted all my adult life and now at last I know the shape of what I want to say. For an entire year I have been struggling for the right words. Now she came to me and flamed up there in the December sun. Elizabeth, a creature of pure light, gave me my opening line.

‘Old men who stay behind,’ she said, ‘old men who stay behind, do not inflame the young with words of war.’

Perhaps it came from inside me and not from her at all, but I don’t think so.

There are days which lie in ambush for you from the moment you are born. I had thought it was a day of endings, the dedication of my chapel, the setting in stone of the knowledge that came too late, my plea for forgiveness. Instead it was the very opposite, and before this winter day was finished I was to meet a man who would make me look at it all afresh.

As I stared up above the altar, Elizabeth slipped away from where she had stood smiling in the window and there was the Madonna Maria Virgine in her place, no less fine than she ought to be, but a picture on flat glass and no more than that. I fought down my keen regret because one should never feel regret at the sight of the Madonna, and there was some comfort to be taken. Elizabeth had seemed serene and the Madonna had let her share her space. She could be saved.

When Elizabeth died thirteen years ago, I had Hugh’s tomb in the Abbey opened and laid her next to him and there they lie, the two Despensers, just as if she had never been Elizabeth de Bryan, just as if two of my sins had never taken place. As if I had never been. It was not because I thought she loved him more than me. Indeed, I knew that could not possibly be the case. We had our years together, Elizabeth and I, and though they started later than they should have done, they were as sweet a time as I could ever have hoped for. Together, we had a natural harmony in everything we did, and our marriage felt to me like a long-delayed arrival home. It was just that in the Abbey, in the immediate sight of God, there was sin to consider and it seemed more proper that she should lie there with Hugh. When death comes for me they will put me close by, just across the aisle, in a tomb to match hers so that I will be but a hand-clasp away.

Hugh Despenser, you see, was the bravest and most admirable of men and he had to steel himself, against his natural inclination, to act that way, which makes my sins all the greater because two of them were against him. We first fought side by side a quarter of a century ago at the crossing of the Somme. He won the day for us at Blanchetaque, struggling through the water to beat the enemy off the far bank. He saved an entire English army that day with heroism that took your breath away and should have taken his.

Bad memories are the hardest rock and stand out more and more as the softer stuff gets washed away. What happened two days later in that August of 1346 ranks among the worst. We were across that bloody valley and they were coming up at us in numbers you could not believe. It was a typical late summer evening and, with the low sun behind us, they stood out so clearly, every detail of their equipment and their weapons, the straps and the steel, as fine and precise as a painting. In the glare they could not see how thin we were in our tired lines. We were dark reapers against the sun and we scythed them down until we were astonished by the slaughter and unsure if they would ever stop.

My post was by the King up on the hill, behind in his final reserve, and my duty was to watch, which is the hardest thing. They came in ranks a hundred soldiers wide, pushed forward by the weight of thousands more behind. Those behind had no clear view until those before them fell. Only then could they see that they were already as good as dead, invincible certainty draining into despair in the very last yards of their advance.

My second sin is coming with the smell of sulphur on its breath.

This tale will not allow the absence of its villain for a line longer, and there’s a pity. He has to come into it now. Sir John Molyns. Molyns the robber, Molyns the murderer. The King had hunted Molyns for his destructive violence. Now he was valued for that same quality. Now he was restored and there he was just ahead of me, down there in our line, about to commit a terrible act, and I should have prevented him from doing it. The King gave me the power to stop him and I chose not to use it. That was my second great sin.

My hands and my arms were shaking with exhaustion, holding the butt of the pole, and the wind got up again, whipping the King’s long standard, the Dragon banner of Wessex, as it billowed over my head. I was groaning from the concentrated effort it took to hold that standard upright and immobile and I knew how much it mattered. The flag, tugging at me in the gusts, was the weathercock of the battle, the final symbol. You could see the men snatch glances behind for the evidence that the Royal Will did not waver, that the Royal Person was resolute, sharing their own danger. The upright immobility of that standard was the proof. All very fine, but chivalry died that day.

There, in the torn and bloody earth of Crécy, chivalry died and perhaps I could have saved it.

A drizzle of holy water across my cheek pulled me back from that past, back to my new Chantry. In this other folded valley, a mile inland from the marching waves of Start Bay, I was pretending to kneel down. I was the sole member of the congregation in my own brand-new chapel, and there was nobody else here bar the priest to spot that my backside was still supported by the edge of the pew and my knees were a hand-span short of resting on the hassock. If the priest had noticed, he would have said nothing. William Batokewaye knew what a beating those knees had taken in the service of the King, after all, he’d been there for much of it.

A fine mist of sawdust still filtered down from the roof’s new-cut beams, filling the air with a spray of stained-glass sunlight. The pews smelt of sap and the stone itself showed the fresh face of sliced cheese. It was the forty-fifth year of the reign of his Royal Majesty, King Edward the Third and it should have been a red-letter day.

I watched William stumping up the aisle towards the altar as if he were attacking in the front rank of God’s army. He had always been a good man in a tight corner. Within a year of losing his sword-arm to a Frenchman’s axe, the stump barely healed, he had learnt a left-handed flick of the wrist which reaped soldiers like barley. These days, his only weapon was the holy water, but that same left wrist flicked back and forth to spread eternal life just as he had once spread death.

I was still in my reverie, half nightmare, half myth, embellished over years of remembering until it shone with the untrustworthy precision of a jewel from the devil’s diadem. I was remembering that moment in August of 1346 when three horses, lashed together, thundered at us through the piles of the dead. Then that rain of water arced across my face and shocked me out of my trance.

‘Wake up,’ rasped the priest, glancing back at me. ‘This is all for you, so you might at least pay attention.’

For a moment, I wasn’t quite sure which was then and which was now because that voice belonged to both times, but in those days the priest had all his limbs and I had a clear conscience.

He stopped his chanting and his spraying, stared around him at all the gilt and the fresh paint and the no-expense-spared glory of the place. He pulled an oddly irreligious face.

‘It’s done,’ he said, swivelling to stare at me. ‘Blessed and dedicated. Are you happy now? You should be.’

I could only look at him, and perhaps he saw something in my eyes because he put his thurible down, reached out to take me by the arm and helped me clamber to my feet.

‘Come on. Outside,’ he said.

There was complete and unexpected peace in the courtyard. It was warm for December. I had expected the usual scraping and hammering of the masons working on the rest of my buildings, forgetting I had sent them all off to work in the quarry to guarantee silence for the consecration. There was no sign of human life or so I thought for a moment. Then a tiny movement up above caught my eye. They are as keen as they ever were, my eyes, and I depend on them all the more now that my body is no longer quite so agile. It has always been second nature to watch for that betraying movement in the undergrowth that might save you from an ambush.

There was a man up there on the high ground, the hill which overlooks my village and my Chantry, and I saw him stand up. He didn’t look familiar.

‘Tell me what’s going on,’ William demanded and distracted me. We sat down side by side on a bench, the priest folding his robe under him. He looked at the mud drying on the back of it.

‘I wish you’d put drains down the street,’ he said. ‘I went right over on my arse.’

They like it the way it is, the villagers.’ I replied. ‘It’s always been like that. You know that better than me. This was your place before you ever brought me here. I didn’t even know about it until you told me.’

‘Slapton, eh?’ said the priest, looking around him, ‘It’s thirty years since I lived here last. There’s no kin of mine left here now and I feel almost a stranger. I went away to see the wider world and I’ve learnt to like a drier path to walk on. My grandfather used to call it Slipton because of that slippery old street. If I’m really going to live here again, I might have to do something about that.’ He looked around him and sniffed the air. ‘Now, shall we take stock? What have we got here exactly? One brand-new chapel, for the ease of souls and your soul in particular. One chapel, not staffed by one priest, oh no. Not even staffed by two priests. Your chapel will be staffed by one chaplain, which is to be me, plus five priests and four clerks, am I right? At a cost, I am told, of forty pounds a year. Forty pounds a year for ever. Not to mention a stone-built college for us all to live out the fullness of our lives in prayer, study and, if I know anything about my fellow priests, in dice and wine and maybe even the odd woman.’

I frowned.

‘Oh yes,’ he went on. ‘It won’t all be holy and they may be very odd women.’

That wasn’t why I frowned. I knew William Batokewaye well enough to overlook the licence he had just allowed himself. I’d often heard he had a wife tucked out of sight though if so, that was one of the few things he had ever tried to keep from me. My reputation again, you see. That sort of thing was allowed for lower orders but not for a mendicant friar as he was, or at least had been. Would he presume to bring her here to Slapton? That might test our friendship. I frowned because since that moment in the chapel the echoes of sweet Elizabeth’s forgotten voice, waking all my love, had been gradually fading in my head and now, knowing I had lost the sound of her, I was bereft.

‘My question is this,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, I’m not complaining. I look forward to a comfortable retirement from the rigours of the last thirty years. It is generous of you in the extreme to provide it, but, quite apart from the fact that I would have been prepared to mumble masses for you all day and most of the night for half that sum all by myself, what’s it all for?’ The priest was a year older than me and had been asking me that sort of question for as long as I could remember. Having no arm for defence, he only ever knew how to attack.

‘It’s a Chantry. You know what it’s for.’ I opened my arms to indicate the courtyard in which we sat, the church we had just left and its new stone tower which soared into the air, dominating the little village, overpowering the spire of the village church below.

‘I know what a Chantry’s for. What I’m asking is why do you need one?’

I looked at him, suspecting a trap. He had always been a plain speaker and not one to follow slavishly along dogmatic lines, but this was going too far.

‘You can’t disapprove, William. You and I usually agree on what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve built it so you and your priests will sing masses for my soul and for Elizabeth’s.’

‘And if we didn’t? If your soul had to stand up for itself without a lot of people, most of whom don’t know it very well, all singing flat on its behalf?’

I stared at him. I was deeply disturbed by his tone. This was dangerous ground. ‘You know the story? The story of de Mowbray?’ I sometimes felt it was all I had thought about for years now.

‘I might. Tell me anyway.’

‘He begged his chaplain to sing a mass for his soul the moment he died. Do you know what happened?’

Batokewaye sometimes looked as if he had been hewn from the huge trunk of an old elm tree and that look came upon him now, dense, unchangeable, so I went on. The chaplain ran straight from the deathbed. He was racing to the chapel but something stopped him. De Mowbray’s spectre, twisted and tortured. “You’ve broken your promise,” said the spectre. “No, I came straight here,” said the chaplain, “you died only a moment ago.” “In that time, twenty years have passed in Purgatory,” the ghost replied, “I have suffered twenty years of torment for your neglect. It is worse than Hell.”’

He just went on looking at me. I thought perhaps he hadn’t been listening.

‘Worse than Hell, William’ I said again. ‘If a few moments here is twenty years there, imagine how it will be. Your soul stays there, paying the price of your sins, until Judgement Day itself.’ It turned my guts around to think of it, to think I had that coming, hurtling at me.

He sighed. ‘Wherever I’ve been in the country, I’ve heard that story,’ he said. I’ve heard it said about Montague, Mauny, Beauchamp, Scrope, every single knight who has given up the ghost.’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe it?’

I’m saying that Purgatory is a very good idea from the clergy’s point of view. I’m delighted at the chance to live in luxury off a terrified Lord.’

‘Should we not be terrified of Purgatory? If we die in mortal sin aren’t we bound to suffer there? Isn’t that what the Bible says?’

The priest stared back at me, unblinking. ‘I know you, Guy. I’ve known you since long before you were a knight. I’ve heard everything you have to confess and I must say it’s been mild stuff. If you came to me to confess a real mortal sin, I’d know you were lying. All right, lying might be a sin but you’d have to try a lot harder to get committed to the eternal flames than by a grammatical paradox.’

He thought he knew me. He didn’t. I had told him nothing of the last and greatest of my three sins.

‘There’s Heaven and there’s Hell,’ he went on, ‘and each of us is bound for one or the other. You have to earn your way into both of them and all we can do is pray to Saint Peter that he’ll be kind if we’re somewhere in between, which is where most of us are. And by the way, no it’s not what the Bible says at all. The Bible is fairly silent on the precise question of Purgatory. It’s a modern invention.’ The priest stood up, turned to face me, looming over me.

‘Look at you. Sir Guy de Bryan, noble Knight of the very choice Order of the Garter,’ he growled, ‘King’s companion, steward, holder of the Great Seal, ambassador, royal envoy. Thought of throughout the length and breadth of the land for years past as the finest knight there ever was, so clearly honest that you cast no shadow in the sunlight. It passes straight through you. So fair, you’ve been called in twenty times a year since you were old enough to wear a sword to sort out every brawling squabble the greedy nobility gets itself into. Trusted equally by the King and the Commons and that’s rare enough. Not a spot on your soul and yet you’re so afraid you’ve hired a phalanx of priests. You’re getting much too pious. You need to ease up on the piety. Do you understand anything about our Lord?’ He wheeled round and thrust his hand, finger outstretched to the top of the tower.

‘What’s that up there?’ he demanded.

I looked up, squinting against the sun. The crucifix?’

‘That’s it. Don’t we take it for granted? Wasn’t it lucky Christ died on a cross?’

Unsure where this could be leading, I frowned at him. ‘It was surely more than lucky, it was blessed,’

‘That wasn’t what I meant. Supposing Pilate had given him the option,’ rasped the priest, bending down to put his enormous face right in front of mine. ‘Supposing he’d said, all right Jesus, it’s up to you. Your choice. You can either be crucified or you can be stung to death by bees.’

More heresy was in the wind. I stared at him.

‘Well, imagine,’ said the priest impatiently. ‘If he’d chosen the bees, what an inconvenient sign we’d have to make then.’ The priest waggled his hand around his face, fingers jabbing back and forth and let out a hoot of laughter.

I crossed myself quickly as the rooks took off from the trees around the tower adding their shrieks to the echoes of the laugh. Remembering the figure up on the hill, I looked up there to see if there had been a witness to this blasphemy. There was nobody there now.

‘Oh come on, man,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose you think that’s another hundred years of Purgatory added to your sentence. If God hasn’t got a sense of humour, what hope is there for the world? Indeed, what hope is there for any of us if someone like you has to spend half your fortune on a place like this?’

‘Have you lost your faith?’ I asked. ‘It’s a few years since I’ve seen you, old friend. You don’t sound like a believer any more.’

‘Oh, don’t you dare doubt my belief,’ retorted the priest. ‘I may be old-fashioned, but I believe all right.’

‘Do you believe in good and evil?’

‘In their place,’ said the priest, ‘I am not sure I have ever met a truly evil man. Have you?’

‘Oh yes. One. Just one.’

The priest looked at me. ‘Molyns?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘All right, I’ll grant you that,’ the priest went on. ‘One. But good and evil notwithstanding, what I don’t believe in is all this modern blackmail.’

‘You know what I did.’

‘I know what you think you did. Seems to me other people had a big hand in it.’

He didn’t know about my third sin. That was the problem and somehow I wasn’t yet ready to tell him. I had tucked it so far out of sight that I no longer quite knew its shape.

The wicket gate creaked open and a face looked round. It was the man from up on the hill. I didn’t want to be interrupted and certainly not by a stranger.

‘Not now,’ I called, perhaps a little impatiently, and the face disappeared abruptly.

‘Ah,’ said the priest, ‘sorry, he’s with me. I was just about to mention him.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s a squire in the King’s household. Well connected. Trusted. In with the people who matter. They send him to sort out things, very like you were at that age, I’d say. Oh and he’s married to the beautiful Philippa Roet, so that puts him in with Lancaster.’

‘Really? Why’s he here?’

‘You’re off travelling again. He’s going with you.’

‘Who says he is? Come to that, who says I’m going anywhere?’

William looked at me with a smug expression. ‘I am trusted with certain information, you know. He came down with me. I was asked to bring him to you. Up at court they thought he’d never find Slap ton by himself. I know where you’re going.’

He’d tried that sort of trick a few times before. ‘I don’t think you do,’ I said.

‘You’re journeying overland, avoiding France and all its friends. Your final destination is Genoa by way of the Rhine valley and the Alpine passes. Your purpose there is to negotiate an agreement whereby the Genoese will trade freely with us, using one port specially nominated for that purpose and hopefully granting free use of Genoa by English ships in return. Am I right?’

That removed any chance that he was guessing. ‘It’s supposed to be a secret. Who told you?’

‘Calm down. It is a secret. Lancaster told me. Is that high enough authority for you? This young man has been sent to give you a hand on the grounds that, many qualities though you undoubtedly have, fluency in Italian is not known to be one of them.’

‘I speak some Italian,’ I said, a little stung.

‘Enough to order food. Not enough to conduct high level negotiations.’

‘But why is he here now? We’re not leaving until the beginning of April.’

‘You mean nobody told you?’

‘Told me what?’

‘The King sent word last week. There’s a rush on. It’s all been brought forward. You really didn’t know?’

I shook my head.

‘You’re leaving in three days time from Dartmouth on the afternoon tide, on board your ship, Le Michel, captained by John Hawley, although why you should trust yourself to that rogue is a mystery to me. You are sailing up channel to Dordrecht in Flanders where you will join Sir James di Provan and John di Mari, two of the most irritating and self-regarding clots it has ever been my misfortune to meet, and with them you head south as soon as you possibly can.’

‘William, you know as well as I do nobody travels across the Alps in winter. Even the Brenner Pass is tough going now.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘It seems the King believes in your ability to do it. Someone apparently has to and he thought sending you would give the best chance.’

I knew him well enough to make an accurate guess. ‘Come on, you know more about this than you’re saying. What’s it really all about?’

He squirmed. At least he gave a tiny involuntary wriggle which is as close to a squirm as a man of William’s size and experience is ever likely to get.

‘I’ve heard a few things,’ he said eventually and I just waited.

‘It’s his bankers,’ he said in the end. ‘You know he still owes those Florentines a huge fortune?’

‘The Bardi family? Yes, I have heard.’

‘They’re pressing him hard. The Genoa deal is something to do with it. He has promised them agreement by the end of February, otherwise he is in default.’

I knew all too well what default would mean. Humiliation for the English crown. We all remembered the last time he’d had to pawn the crown and the shame that brought, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d done the same again. I loved my king, but sometimes he behaved like a complete idiot.

I rubbed my brow, suddenly aware of the enormous practical difficulties of this whole enterprise.

‘Three days to get all this ready? I don’t even know if Hawley’s in Dartmouth and the Michel hasn’t left his mooring since October.’

‘Hawley’s ready. I saw him on the way. The King’s messenger got that far, at least.’

‘Well, he didn’t get here. Oh, wait a minute. They found a man on the rocks below Strete. He’d been thrown off the cliffs, stripped of everything but his jerkin.’

‘That was him. Someone’s killed a King’s messenger in your lands. There’ll be a big fuss about that.’

‘There’s no time to lose. Is Hawley provisioning the ship?’

‘Yes. I told him to do it well. I can’t eat that vile stuff you usually serve on board.’

I stared at him in astonishment. ‘You’re coming to Dordrecht?’

‘No, no. What would be the point of that? I’m coming all the way to Genoa.’

‘Why?’ The thought of getting William’s great bulk over the Alps in the snow was appalling.

‘It sounded like fun,’ was all he would say, then before I had a chance to argue, the priest played his trump card.

‘I also hear, if the masons are to be believed, you’re going to leave your message on the walls here for all to see, and as far as the future of your soul and come to that, your neck, is concerned that seems to me to be the more pressing concern right now.’

That made me blink. ‘You know about that?’ I had thought the Declaration was a secret. There was nothing of it yet to be seen. It was all still forming in my head and the words had to be right before I would let the carver pick up his chisel. Second thoughts are best avoided when you set your words in stone.

‘I get to hear most things. Is that something to do with the clerks? I keep wondering why a Chantry needs all those clerks.’

He was a perceptive man and he knew me better than any now alive, perhaps better than anyone bar Elizabeth ever had done.

‘To a point. I have a great work in mind. The message, as you call it, is a small part of it. The clerks will work to draw together the thoughts that lie behind it.’

‘Has it struck you that the only ones likely to have learning enough to read your message are also the ones most likely to disapprove?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘And if the King reads it?’

‘Does the King know about it?’

‘Not yet, but when he does…’

‘All the better.’

‘Where’s it going to go?’ he asked. ‘If it’s going to be displayed on my church for all the world to see and disapprove, then I’d better know.’

‘I’ll show you.’

The plaque lay ready on the stonecutter’s bench. Its surface was smooth to the touch and the border had been chased out in folds to frame it.

‘Either you’ve got a lot to say or it’s going to be carved in big letters,’ said the priest. ‘What exactly is it going to say?’

‘You can read it when it’s finished. It’s too close to me, too raw. I can’t tell you yet.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

How could I not trust him, the man who came closest to understanding, the man who had risked the King’s fury to back me up in the days when we were all young, when he was a mere deacon, without the age and reputation to keep the royal wrath at bay?

‘I’ll tell you the first line,’ I said.

‘I’m listening.’

Elizabeth’s words came to me fresh. ‘Senes qui domi manent, nolite juvenes verbis belli accendere.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the priest. ‘I was afraid it would be something like that. Where exactly is it going?’

I turned around and gasped as the old wound in my knee caught at me. I pointed at the chapel porch. ‘Right above the door,’ I told him, ‘for all to see.’

The priest looked where I pointed and then cocked his head up to follow the height of the tower as it soared high into the air.

‘I predict trouble,’ he said. ‘If you want to enjoy a quiet old age, you should put it higher up.’

‘How much higher?’

The priest looked at the rooks wheeling around the summit of the tower, a dizzy height above us.

‘What about up there,’ he suggested, ‘right at the top. That might just save your neck.’

CHAPTER TWO

This is not a complaint, but I have spent more than half my life away from my own bed and probably a quarter of it away from any bed at all. This past year I have served Edward mostly at sea in the Channel against the Castilian galleys and I have now been granted the extra responsibility of Admiral of the Western seas. Oh, and I also had to address Parliament on his behalf, asking them for still more money. The King is no longer quite the active man he was, but a year or two ago he told me that if I had wanted a quiet life, I should have taken care to seem more of an idiot and more of a coward. I think it was a compliment.

When I began to notice the discomfort, I realised the King’s business took me along some well-worn routes and there was no good reason why I should put up with strange beds. I have therefore bought myself houses on some of those frequented paths, personal hostels for a personal pilgrim carefully spaced at a day’s travelling distance and now, most of the time, I can sleep in one of my very own beds. That’s England I’m talking about. Now we were going abroad and it was back to the bad old ways.

I was brooding on that when the Michel took a wave right over the bow and staggered almost to a halt. He is a good ship and he’d been built just the way I wanted him. He can go further to windward than any other ship I know, but it was asking a lot to expect him to fight his way up-Channel in a down-Channel gale. I called him after my dear old horse, the first of my chargers, killed under me by a Frenchman’s sword in his throat, and in truth they behaved the same way, the ship and the horse. The first Michel was there with me through thick and thin just as long as I kept him properly fed and properly shod and didn’t ask him to charge straight into a low sun. He didn’t like it when blades came at him out of the glare. He carried me for six years in the King’s service, which is quite a record when you think how much of that time was spent at the exact places where two armies were colliding. We talked to each other a lot, Michel and I. The second Michel, the wooden one, felt the same way about the wind as the first one felt about the low sun. The weight of the water forced his head further and further off course and the big sail slatted and cracked. I had seen this one coming and braced myself on the backstay, but the King’s squire, face down on the deck, short and fat with his head in a bucket, hardly seemed to care about the distinction between air and water any more. He was already soaked through before the wave hit him, so that the flood only lifted and swelled his sodden woollen jerkin as it passed. The priest was braced against the weather rail as ever, glaring at the vague horizon as if he were hoping for a fight. It was the fourth day of our three-day passage up-Channel, and I only minded the delay because William wouldn’t perform the office of Mass in any kind of storm. It was one of his few orthodoxies. He said he had seen too many people vomit up the Host and that was definitely disrespectful and possibly blasphemous. I was standing behind the steersman, staring forwards beyond the port bow, to where the sea blurred into the low, cantering clouds. White-caps were whipping from the wave tops in the wind that came driving from behind him again as the bow swung back on course. We had seen no sign of the sun for many hours and, though there should be nothing ahead of us, who could tell for sure whether it was wind, rock or sandbank that broke and frothed the sea?

My sailing master caught my eye and jerked his head down towards the well-deck. Hawley was not known for his soft heart or his thoughtfulness for those who didn’t share his complete indifference to the discomforts of the sea, but he seemed to like the squire. They had made friends in Dartmouth before we sailed. Not many people ever managed to make friends with Hawley. He didn’t like to cheat his friends, which may have been why he chose to have so few. The young man was showing signs of movement, doing his best to get to his knees. I dropped down the ladder and stood beside him. ‘How are you?’ I asked, and he swung his head to one side and then the other as if he could not quite locate me.

I’m still breathing,’ he gasped, ‘at least when there’s air to be had. The rest of the time I’m drinking. Are we nearly there?’

‘Visibility’s bad. I can’t see land at the moment,’ I said, knowing a fuller answer might nip this brave attempt at recovery in the bud.

The squire made a huge effort and reared his head higher than it had been since dawn. The Channel never seemed this wide before,’ he said uncertainly. ‘How far is it?’

I could not evade a direct question. ‘We’re a little west of where we started, doing what we can against a north-east wind.’

The squire reached out for the rail and hauled himself unsteadily to his feet. I put out a hand to make sure of him as the next wave heaved the bow higher. He had been a plump man when he came aboard, but I realised that the past four days had already served to trim him down a bit. He was looking around him aghast.

‘West? That’s the wrong way. Will the storm sink us?’

‘Storm? No, it’s not really a storm.’ I had another look at the sky. The clouds ended in a dark line which was drawing nearer all the time. ‘It will blow itself out in a short while, then we’ll make our way back up-Channel. At least it keeps the galleys away.’

‘What galleys?’

‘The French galleys, the Castilians. Take your pick. No galleys are good news. We are at war, you know.’

He was doing well for a man who’d been so sick minutes before. Standing up does that for some people. His habitual interest was showing itself again. He had an eye for everything, did this young man. He looked up at the rigging and seemed to be trying to frame a question. ‘I think you had better dry yourself,’ I said. ‘Come into my quarters.’

It was relatively peaceful in the cabin and I was able to study the squire as he rubbed himself as dry as he could, the first chance I’d had since he had come on board at Dartmouth.

‘I know your face,’ I remarked. ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

The squire nodded and managed to look both pleased and a little wary through his pallor. ‘First time was thirteen years ago,’ he said, ‘in France. That is, I was a nobody in the retinue of Prince Lionel and you were the great Lord Bryan with retained men of your own.’

I was even more impressed by his powers of recovery. The younger man showed resilience and that quality had always prompted my approval. ‘Thirteen years ago?’ I did the sums. 1359, the year my dearest Elizabeth died. ‘Rheims? You were at the siege?’

‘I didn’t get as far as Rheims. I was captured.’

‘How on earth did you manage that? There wasn’t a lot of fighting that year. Rethel, was that it? That little skirmish at the bridge? Were you captured there?’

‘No, no. Nothing so noble. You’ll remember how hungry we all were, surely?’

‘How could I not?’ Foul weather for week after week and the French had finally learnt their lesson. With his father, the King, a prisoner in England, Dauphin Charles changed the rules, decided taking the English on in battle was a mug’s game with only one outcome. Instead his French armies burnt the crops, laying the country bare so that we’d starve. It wasn’t glorious and it wasn’t at all chivalrous but it worked all too well. Starve was exactly what we did. Still, I suppose that after Crécy we could hardly claim the high ground on chivalry.

‘We were sent off to search for food,’ the squire explained. ‘Three of us, me and two Welsh archers. We walked into a farmyard and the barn was full of French. They thought I might be worth something. The other two got the knife.’

‘Who sent you off like that?’

The squire looked a little embarrassed and I wondered why, then I guessed.

‘It was me, was it? Did I send you?’

‘It’s all a long time ago,’ he said as if that made it less important. ‘And you also fixed my ransom.’

‘Did I now?’ I had fixed many, many ransoms. ‘How much were you worth?’

‘Sixteen pounds’ said the squire proudly, ‘and the King paid it.’

‘Sixteen pounds, eh? And how old were you then?’

‘Sixteen years.’

‘A pound a year.’ The man was twenty-nine now. I wasn’t sure he looked worth twenty-nine pounds, but someone thought he was if they had entrusted him with this mission. He wasn’t just a travelling companion. My instructions laid down that I must consult him over every aspect of the diplomatic negotiations once I got him to Genoa, though I was, in every other way, the leader.

‘That wasn’t it,’ I said with certainty. ‘That wasn’t what I remembered.’ I didn’t explain, didn’t say that grief had driven all other details out of that year, leaving only the black hole of tears which stood where Elizabeth had once been. ‘It was more recent than that.’

‘The year after? I was there at Calais when the Treaty was signed. You came straight from Paris. You swore observance for England in the King’s name. It was a fine moment.’

I shook my head. There had been huge crowds at Calais. It had been hard lawyer’s business for me, trying to see the holes in the Treaty through the blinding smoke of ceremony.

‘Where else?’ I asked.

‘The other time?’ he looked reluctant and his head drooped so that he looked down at the deck. ‘I suppose that must have been when we were with Lancaster,’ and I knew why he looked like that.

‘That bloody business at Limoges.’ Slaughter for its own sake. Licentious revenge on a town that had done no more than stand up for itself. It was the moment when I knew Lancaster for what he was, a bad commander and an unprincipled man, not a man to follow in war or in peace. The ending of the siege of Limoges had been another stepping stone on the way to my declaration. I’m not talking about old Lancaster of course, not Henry of Lancaster. He had been the noblest of men. This was new Lancaster, John the King’s son, made Duke by marriage and by convenient death.

‘There were things there I would rather forget,’ said the squire. ‘I decided at Limoges that war could do without me. I have not been in the wars since.’

‘If you have the chance of that choice, then make it so.’ I sat down to ease my leg and rubbed my knee. ‘I am sixty-five years old, young man. I should have made that same choice long ago. I wish you could know what I know. But you puzzle me. There were many thousands of us at all the events you mention and yet you seem to have singled me out.’

‘There were many knights, I grant you that, but I would not agree that there were many like you.’

My door flew open with no trace of a knock and the priest, spraying water like a dog leaving a pond, ducked his head to come inside and slammed it shut behind him.

‘Hawley says the wind’s backing,’ he announced. ‘It’s northerly.’

Thank you William,’ I said mildly, looking at the puddle forming under him. No crewman would have had the nerve to soak my cabin floor like that. ‘Will you join us in a glass? We’ll be heading back for Flanders in an hour or two, I should say.’

‘I will. Has he started interrogating you yet?’

‘Who?’

The priest jerked his head at the squire. ‘This one. It’s what he does best. Ask, ask, ask. He’s known for it. Unless he’s scared of you.’

The squire went a little pink or perhaps it was just that his colour was improving anyway. The motion of the boat had eased as the wind backed further. I could tell the wind and the tide were both moving to the east together.

‘No he hasn’t. What would he ask me? I’ve got nothing much to say.’

There was something,’ said the squire meekly. That’s if you don’t mind?’

I wouldn’t have minded at all if the priest hadn’t said that thing about being scared of me. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Sluys,’ he said. ‘You were there for the battle of the ships. Would you tell me what it was like?’

Sluys? I hadn’t thought of Sluys for a long time. He was a clever man, I realise now, opening my door like that, starting me off with a question he knew I would want to answer. I know now that he had no particular interest in the ancient history of Sluys, just as well as I know that William Batokewaye colluded with him, nudging him in the right direction in everything he did. It was only later on, when I saw that squire at work on other people that I recognised the technique of a master. Get them talking about anything at all, then when they’re moving, give them a nudge. It’s easier to steer a wagon when it’s already rolling. Oh, he was clever all right and, though I didn’t know it yet, they had a plan, those two.

Sluys, my first sea-fight, though you couldn’t really call it a sea-fight, with the French boats crammed together in the narrowing estuary of the Zwin and the wind, blowing straight in, keeping them there and carrying us to them. It was not so different to storming a town, a town with masts and wooden walls. So he got me talking, remembering the archers up our masts, shooting down, remembering the hand to hand on decks that might as well have been streets except for the splashes as the bodies went into the water, and even that splashing only lasted a short time. In no time at all, the sea was so thick with the corpses of dead French that the next ones in made little more than a soggy thump.

We were away. He knew more about it than I did in some ways because I had been in the middle of a struggling mob on the Saint-James, the big Dieppe ship. It was a grunting, heaving fight, too close to stretch out a sword arm and too crowded to see six feet away. That was all I knew about it until we had them subdued, four hundred bodies lying on the decks of that ruined ship alone, and by the time our friendly Flemings, seeing it going our way, had finally come out from Oostburg and Termuiden and Sluys itself and hacked into the rear rank of the smaller French boats, it was all but over. He knew the figures, this damp, little man, ‘Sixteen thousand French dead,’ he told me. ‘One hundred and ninety ships taken or sunk.’ He had it by heart, and from the look in his eyes, he was trying to live inside the flimsy house he was building out of my slow words.

‘It was the worst sight I had seen up to then,’ I told him. ‘Butcher work. Hacking and cutting and piercing with no time to know your enemy, but for all that there was still chivalry.’

He asked me this and that for a quarter of a candle’s length, then, having loosened my lips with old war stories, he made his one mistake. He turned much too sharply to the subject he really wanted to talk about. ‘Molyns,’ he said. Tell me about Sir John Molyns,’ and I looked sharply at William Batokewaye, wondering for the first time if the priest had put him up to it. Old William looked back at me, eyes wide and innocent, waiting for me to speak.

‘Molyns has been dead ten years and more,’ I said. ‘He’s a man best forgotten. Nothing he did is worth the effort of our memory.’

The squire closed his mouth and kept it closed.

‘He helped put the King on the throne,’ said the priest mildly.

‘He did that,’ I agreed, because what else could one say?

That thought was still in my mind a few days later, once we had swapped the Michel for horseback and were plodding south. Thinking of the far past, at my age, makes the present much more painful. I could ride for hours back then because I was so much lighter in my saddle and my joints had youth’s oil in them, but there was much I didn’t know in those days. I didn’t know how to scan the landscape ahead, to measure the dangers of the blind places which might hide who knows what. I didn’t have the voice of command which could still make even the toughest trooper do what I said without a moment’s question.

There was quite a crew of us by this time. The two Italians, di Mari and di Provan, would have little to do with me and I didn’t mind one bit. They weren’t my kind of men. They talked to each other in their own babble. Di Provan had a high-pitched mocking laugh which made me wince, with a carry to it shrill enough to tell any brigands we were coming a mile away. Occasionally, if they wanted something, they would refer to the squire, but they seemed to find me barbarous, unfashionable, useful as some sort of bodyguard, but no more. The squire asked me, rather anxiously, if he should explain that I was not only the leader of the party but also its designated chief spokesman. I got a certain amount of wry pleasure from letting them dig the hole of misunderstanding ever deeper. They were Genoese, these men, and a bit full of themselves, and they had two of their own crossbowmen with them. Now, I’ve seen a lot of men killed by crossbows and mostly they were the men who were holding them, not their targets.

I watched it close up sixteen years ago at Poitiers when we were creeping up on them through the woods. It was dreadful standing still while we waited because I had splits in my feet at that time, the awful itch that is best dealt with by keeping moving. Either that or taking off your boots to have a good rub though that never lasts long. Elizabeth cured it for me after years of torment with an oil of hers, and I remember her sitting on the floor of our bedroom in my house of Pool as she worked it in to my toes, looking up at me all the while, making the shape of little kisses with her lips, and when she had done, she spread the rest of the oil over both of us and we rubbed it in with the skin of our bodies. Anyway, back at Poitiers, trying to take my mind off my feet, I watched one of their crossbowmen at work and understood what a dreadful business it was, winding that string back up after each shot. He didn’t see us until we were well clear of the wood, and before he got off one shot, Gwynn put two arrows into him. It was always like that with crossbows. They pack a punch but they don’t always get to punch twice.

In an ambush you get one chance and that’s it. If you haven’t dealt with it by the time you count to five, the chances are you’re dead. On this journey the safety of these Genoese, of William and of the squire, depended entirely on my Welsh archers who now went ahead and behind, ready to chase away any band of hopeful brigands who might not be familiar with my standard and might imagine we were some sort of easy pickings. Of course we took the Dutch way, as they call it, down towards the Rhine as we’d been ordered. The French lay to the south west and France was barred to us by the war. We’d need more than a half-dozen archers to see the French army off. A few more anyway.

We had left the comfort of Bruges well behind, leaving the town after a Mass for travellers to which I had obliged William to add a personal mass for my own list of souls. The Italians had chafed at that but I ignored them and now we were all ambling through dull, open country. It was nothing like campaigning. The December rain was surprisingly warm and I knew we would sleep the night in one of Ghent’s fine inns.

In a dream prompted by the talk of the old days which seemed to please the squire so much, I was back in my youth, twenty years old and on my first long cross-country journey. The royal summons had come in the summer of the year 1327 and it was the single most exciting moment of my life until then. I was entirely delighted, not so much at the prospect of fighting Robert Bruce’s Scots, though ignorance invested even that with glamour, but more with the relief of getting away from the draughts of Walwayns Castle. My father’s ancient fortress stood by the corner of Wales where one coast faces the Atlantic and the other turns eastward to confront England. Even in summer, a cold wind straight off the endless sea blew through the stone walls as if they were chain mail and my father’s increasingly mad rages threatened all our lives.

‘You’re going to the bloody King?’ he screamed when the summons came. ‘I’m the King round here. Have I said you could go? Have I? You’d leave me with the goblins, would you? The goblins speak to me, you know. I could tell you what they think of you. You’re no better than I am. You just think you are.’

The Scots gathering to invade our northern borders could not be more dangerous than him. He was a normal man one moment and murderous the next. You needed eyes in the back of your head when he was like that. From the earliest moment I could remember, I had vowed to stick to reason and predictability in my own life and watched anxiously for signs in me that his blood might show.

Outside events got me out of there. Even in far Walwayns, miles from everywhere, out there on the very edge of the kingdom, we knew it was a year of divided loyalties, and the Scots had chosen a good moment to threaten invasion when attention was elsewhere.

Called to arms. A blast of trumpets rang through those words. However mad he was, my father couldn’t safely keep me there against the royal summons, so off I went, equipped as best I could manage, with the captain of the castle guard and his three best men, all of us pleased to be away from the mad rage of Walwayns. I pretended to command them and they indulged me by pretending to listen. We made our way across the country, accumulating others as we went, all experienced men-at-arms except me, and I was agog to hear their tales. The journey up to Durham took ten days, enough time to get used to my horse, my borrowed saddle and the heft of my grandfather’s old sword, but not nearly time enough to sort through the complex loyalties and mixed feelings of that band of fighters. By the time we reached the army’s gathering place in the north, a land I knew nothing of, I at least understood where the majority opinion lay.

The throne was effectively empty. The country lay somewhere between two kings. No one regretted the end of the second Edward, a vicious, corrupted waste of time who had entirely deserved his comeuppance. His wife Isabella was right to come back from France and kick him and his favourites out, that was the majority opinion. She was not so right, most men thought, to flaunt her lover in the way she did, and that lover, Roger Mortimer, they all agreed, was a most dangerous man. The pity of the country was that the second Edward had proved such a poor shadow of the first Edward, his brave father. All hope now lay in the new young king, the third to bear that name and the whispered slogan of the times was ‘third time lucky’. The signs were good. Physically he took after his grandfather, not his father, and people said he had the kingly manner.

The question everyone asked was, would Mortimer ever let him rule?

Our journey reached its destination one evening on a hilltop where a large patrol challenged us and then ushered us down into a valley so full of armed men that I could not understand what my eyes were telling me. They looked like a swarm of bees, jostling for position for their tents and their cooking fires. I had rarely seen more than fifty men in one place, and here were fifty fifties and ten times that again. All we lacked was an enemy. We moved down into that valley and found a place and slipped into the ranks. It was decided that we belonged in Montague’s troop, though as we were not part of his official retinue we had to fend for ourselves as far as food went, which was a hungry business. For days that stretched out into weeks, we patrolled those hills with absolutely no idea where the Scots were. I had time to set my old chain mail to rights and get something like an edge put on my sword, though it wavered in and out as you looked along it and would just as easily have sawn wood as sliced flesh. The Earl of Lancaster, the old Earl that is, was in command, and he was a fine man, but on my fourth day there, I saw young Edward, the new king, for the first time, and there was an even finer man. He was five years younger than me, but he was already bigger.

Those Scots had us looking like fools from the very first. They were light on their feet. They brought no baggage trains like we did. Each man carried a little bag of oatmeal, I heard, which they would mix into a paste and cook on a stone. We drank wine which the carts brought and they drank water which the rivers brought. How could we catch them? Rivers go faster than carts. We followed them, slogging through the thick country while they danced ahead in their own natural element, taunting us with smoke from the villages they burnt. I craned for another glimpse of the King and, as our numbers thinned, the footmen left trailing and lost as we who had horses did our best to keep going, I saw more and more of him. It got worse and then it got still worse again. Our rations grew shorter and shorter, our horses were going lame, and then the biting flies of summer were driven away by even worse downpours of driving rain. Rain gets into armour and rusts it and rubs your skin raw if you’re stuck in that armour all day and all night. Mine had been made for someone else long ago and it fitted only where it touched.

So far, it was a contest only with hunger and the weather, and I could stand up to that, but I needed more. I was desperate to test myself against an enemy, to know what it really was to stand up to another man in a real fight. It wasn’t that I wanted to spill another man’s blood, more that I needed to know how I would be. The strain of fearing that I might turn out a coward in the company of all these tough, quiet men was getting too much for me. I knew the rules of chivalry. I knew what was considered a fine way to fight and what was not. The Scottish knights had a brave reputation.

We found them in the end, mostly by luck. We crossed a river in a barren land and saw them on top of a hill ahead of us, in a well-prepared position with no way to attack except slowly and uphill into waiting steel, and we weren’t in a hurry to do that. Instead, we faced them for three days from our own side of the valley. They looked as though they grew from the landscape and belonged in it, in their rough cloth, while we, though the shine had long gone from our metal, seemed entirely out of place. I could not imagine what it would be like to attack them, to climb that hill and face those deadly men, but the moment of finding out was postponed. After the third night we woke to see the far hill was bare. They had slipped away.

I felt frustration but I also felt relief, a little song in my soul that my death had stepped a few paces back. Then our scouts returned and the word spread that the enemy had not gone far. They had found an even better protected hill and the stalemate set in all over again.

It was three days later that I met the King face to face and in the oddest manner. My wish had come partly true. I had experienced battle, but not in any ordered way, not in a way covered by the rules. My first taste of combat consisted of waking abruptly, confused as men rushed over my legs in the night, shouting ‘Raiders! To arms!’ Searching desperately in the dark for my sword, I found it with the scabbard all caught up in the tent ropes and got it out, cutting my other hand in the process, just in time to take a wild slash at a man who appeared out of the darkness in front of me with an axe. I missed him completely and that was just as well as he turned out to be one of ours. We beat them off, or they chose to leave – a bold party barely three hundred strong, who left mounds of our men behind them. The next night had us all wide awake and jumpy, peering into the mist fearing a repeat, but when day dawned, we found we were looking up at what seemed once again to be an empty hillside. Had they gone? As I looked, a band of our men rode up from behind me on horses.

‘Are you armed and ready?’ said the nearest. ‘If you are, come with us and let’s see what’s up there.’

I was about to question the man’s right to command me in that way when he half turned and I saw that he had every right. I had taken him for a full-grown man, because he was big but the face I now saw was younger than the body. My king, Edward, aged just fifteen, was a fine man and his face had a smile on it which would have inspired loyalty in a piece of solid rock. I climbed into my saddle to follow him, thrilled, repeating his words to myself so that I had them by heart, the first words my king spoke directly to me. Ten of us went carefully up that hill, all in plain armour with no surcoats, no crests. There were three riding ahead in case all was not what it seemed. I had spurred forward to join them, but was waved back to my proper place. They were hard men, those others, men you wouldn’t want to tangle with, and as I looked around, I saw that only Edward and myself did not yet fully fit that description, though it was plain from the look on his face and the way he held himself in the saddle that for him, it was only a matter of time.

What a strange sight we found at the top. We rode through a band of mist which had us staring hard again and drawing swords, then it dispersed as we reached the summit so that we seemed to climb up into a place all of itself, remote from anything else I knew, floating in its own world. For a moment I thought we were the only living beings present, but then I heard a groan and saw ahead of me a slumped body, lashed to the trunk of a tree.

‘See to him,’ said the man next to me.

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s one of ours, snatched on a raid. Look to him.’

At that stage of my life, I was no good at tending the wounded, scared to face the pain of others without the knowledge to ease it. This man hung from the ropes, naked, and his face was somewhere behind the blood which ran in crusted streaks down his body. Both his legs were splayed out at an angle which showed the bones were smashed, and he whimpered when I tried to support him while I cut him down.

I gave him water and did what I could to wash the blood from his eyes.

I’m Guy,’ I said. ‘Help is coming.’

He croaked something in reply but it sounded more like a curse than a name. Laying him on the ground, with no idea what else to do I saw that beyond him there were four more, each lashed to another of the twisted mountain oaks. Three of them looked dead, but the fourth was tugging hard at his bonds as he saw us coming. Then he heard our voices and knew we were English and calmed down.

I did all I could for my man, and as I cleaned him I realised the extent of his wounds was worse than I could ever have imagined. He stared at me with gratitude as I mopped away the blood, but my kerchief was soon so drenched that it could take no more. I was kneeling over him, calming him with a hand on his forehead, talking to him in his pain so that he would know he was not alone, when a hand came from behind me and roughly thrust me to one side. I overbalanced backwards and saw the man who had led the way up the hill. He was perhaps approaching thirty with sandy hair and small, reddened eyes, close together. For just a moment, I felt sharp relief that he had come to help me, then I saw the knife in his hand. He held the knife out so that the poor soul on the ground would see it and the injured man began to shake his head from side to side, trying to raise his arms to protect himself.

‘Don’t do…’ that, I was about to say, but before the word was out, the knife had slit his throat and the rest of his life was bubbling and spurting out into the grass.

‘Why did you do that?’ I said to the sandy-haired man, and he turned his head to look at me with a grin on his face.

‘To spare his pain.’ His voice was shriller than you would expect from a soldier.

‘If that was the reason, why did you show him the knife?’

‘Every man should have the chance to prepare himself for death.’

‘That wasn’t it. You enjoyed…’

The next thing I knew, his left hand was clutching my throat and the knife in his right hand was pricking the skin just above my eyelid.

He shot a quick look around, but there was nobody near us to see.

‘I am not bound by your rules,’ he said in a whispered hiss. ‘You will be dead in a second if I choose. I kill who I like, when I like. You have qualms. You’re a baby. You’re worthless. Learn to respect me, young man. I am a true soldier and I am worth a hundred of you.’ The knife dropped away out of my sight and I tensed my belly for its thrust, but a voice was calling. His other hand let go of my throat and he turned away.

‘You’re wanted,’ he said.

I was sickened by the sight and the sound and the smell of him, but I couldn’t help staring at his face in fascination. I had no idea that I had just met the man who was to be the bane of so many years of my life.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘The chief wants you.’

I thought he meant the King, but the man who was waving his arm for me was much older. I had seen him in the camp with everyone paying him their respects, but I did not know who he was. Clearly of high rank, he wore a blue cape over gilded chain mail. Everyone except the King deferred to him and I should have asked his name of someone the first time I saw him. Now, I had left it too late and it would have seemed absurd.

I ran to him and made an awkward bow.

‘The King wishes to stay behind here with his thoughts. You stay with him,’ he said in a deep and slightly slurred voice. ‘Escort him back down as soon as he is done,’ he added. ‘There is no danger. They are gone.’

They all went off down the hill taking the surviving soldier with them and there we were, just me and the young King in unimaginable proximity. He looked at me, shrugged and turned his attention to the rest of that trampled hilltop, wandering through what had been left behind, with me close behind him. The horror of the last few minutes was still in me, but there was now more pressing business. I felt extremely important and kept my hand on my sword hilt, enjoying fantasies of an unexpected ambush and me gloriously saving my sovereign from a murderous Scot or two. No more than two I hoped.

They had departed in a hurry. Dead cattle, partly butchered, lay in a row in the heather. Stewpots full of cooling water stood by them and further off were heaps of something I could not at first identify. The King knelt by one of these mounds and I stood back, studying him, expecting him to show signs of kingship, perhaps even of immortality. He got up, turned to me and held something out.

‘Shoes,’ he said in a baffled tone. ‘Shoes beyond number. Why have they left us their shoes?’

He was right. There were shoes enough for the whole army, heaped up. I picked some up and looked at them. They were at the end of their lives, worn nearly through.

‘What is your name, silent one?’ the King asked me.

‘I am Guy, sire. Guy de Bryan of Walwayns Castle.’

He smiled at me. ‘Well Guy, tell me what you think of these shoes.’

I did not know enough to be talking to a king so I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘I think, sire, that by refusing battle, they have had to leave their soles behind them.’

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew both that it was a miserable attempt and also that someone like me should never have dared to try to joke with the King. I watched him anxiously and I saw his expression set, his mouth clamping shut and his eyes narrowing, then his mouth twitched and his shoulders shook and, to my vast relief, I saw he was choking back laughter which now burst and rolled out of him until tears streamed down his face. He laughed and laughed as if he had not been allowed to laugh for a great length of time. All I could think of was that Edward the Third, King of England, was laughing at my joke.

‘I thought you were the right one,’ he said. ‘I saw you down there at the camp and I liked the look of you. Might you be my friend, Guy de Bryan?’

‘Of course I might, I mean of course I will, sire.’

‘When we are alone, you don’t need to call me sire.’

I felt my ears heat with delight.

‘What did Mortimer tell you to do?’ he asked, grinning at my reaction.

‘Mortimer?’ I bit off the ‘sire’.

‘You don’t know Mortimer?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘The man who spoke to you last.’

‘The man in the fancy chain mail?’ I asked and wondered if I had gone too far again, but that only started the King laughing once more. That man was Roger Mortimer, the man who had set himself where this young king should be?

‘He said to bring you down as soon as you were ready.’

‘It is good that you don’t know him. I never know who he has in his pay, but none could doubt you’re telling the truth.’

‘I don’t know anyone really. This is the first time I have been called to arms.’

‘Not Molyns either?’

I shook my head. ‘Which one is he?’

‘The one who seemed to have a knife pressed to your face.’

‘Oh.’

‘John Molyns. Remember him. What did you think of him?’

I could only say what was in my mind. ‘He’s a dreadful man.’

‘He’s certainly worth dreading.’

‘Why…’ I stopped. My question was too direct.

‘Why do I have him in my army? Was that what you were about to ask?’

I nodded.

The King sat down on the grass and patted the ground next to him. ‘It’s not my army,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother’s army possibly and it’s Mortimer’s army possibly, but it’s definitely not mine.’

‘It is, sire,’ I insisted. ‘Everyone I’ve talked to thinks so.’

‘You may be older than me but you’re not necessarily wiser,’ he replied. ‘I don’t suppose the latest news from the court often gets as far as…What’s your castle called?’

‘Walwayns.’

‘Just before I have to be a king again, I want to tell you this. My earls and barons killed my father. My mother rules with Mortimer who acts as king instead of me. I’m not in a strong position. Mortimer has the taste for power and once you start murdering kings it can be hard to stop.’

‘My sword is at your service.’

He smiled. ‘I’d rather have your smile at my service, if it’s all the same to you. No, don’t look hurt. I don’t mean to be unkind. It’s just that I need a few more Molyns around me at the moment. If I’m ever to sit properly on the throne that is.’

‘Molyns?’

‘Guy, if you’re to live at court, you’ll have to get better control of your face. Sometimes you need a John Molyns around. The rest of the time, it’s better to be nowhere near him.’

‘What do you mean, live at court?’

‘If you’d like to, you may join my household, Guy. I need a page, but above all I need a loyal friend. Now, it’s time to get back.’

‘Are we going after the Scots again?’

‘It’s a nice idea,’ he said, ‘but the truth is they have left us these piles of old shoes as a sign that they are now well-shod in new ones and there is no point in us attempting to overtake them.’

CHAPTER THREE

It was early evening in New York and Beth Battock was already running ten minutes late when she got into the elevator heading down to the hotel lobby. She had wasted five minutes of that in front of her mirror trying to look American and thirty years old instead of English and twenty-seven. The other five had been spent watching the end of her recorded interview on NBC. Now she regretted all that lost time and she began to fret when the elevator stopped again on the next floor down. The middle-aged couple who got in were talking animatedly and barely gave her a glance and she began to fret even more when it dawned on her that what they were talking animatedly about was her.

‘She comes over here and starts telling us what we should be thinking. I’m sorry. I find that quite unacceptable,’ said the woman, frowning.

Her husband nodded. ‘She doesn’t understand our culture. She comes to this country for the first time and starts shouting her mouth off. She’s doing all this for her own self-importance and they’re all being fooled by it.’

His wife was so worked up she could hardly wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘You got it. That’s exactly what it’s all about. It’s all about her ego, that’s what it is. The bottom line is she’s too goddamned young to have opinions like that.’

It was quite clear to Beth that they had just been watching her on television. Cold anger rose in her and as the elevator ticked down the floors to the lobby, she couldn’t help herself.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘You might not have noticed but it’s me you’re talking about, isn’t it? Well, I think that’s quite rude and I also think you’re letting yourselves down as Americans by…’ but something was wrong. Instead of looking embarrassed or angry, they were staring at her with pure puzzlement written across their faces.

I’m sorry, miss,’ said the man. ‘I don’t have any idea who you are. We were just discussing my niece from Brisbane, Australia. Have we offended you in some way?’

The elevator door opened onto the lobby and Beth bolted out to the waiting limo.

‘You’re looking fine tonight, Ma’am,’ said the chauffeur as she ducked into the back seat, and she had no idea whether that was the sort of thing New York chauffeurs always said or whether he was stepping out of line, so for once she said nothing, breathing deeply and trying to refocus on the evening ahead.

‘Park Avenue?’ the man asked, and she nodded as he closed the door. The traffic was slow moving and she looked at her watch anxiously. Tonight mattered. She slowed down her breathing, deeply and deliberately, and by the time the car drew in to the kerb she felt she was back in control. The chauffeur opened the door for her and she thanked him as she got out, still unsure of the etiquette. It wouldn’t do to hurry, however late she was. Beth looked up for a moment, abruptly dwarfed and dizzied by the soaring perspective of the building above her. There was a banner above the doorway ahead and the words on it said, ‘To reach the future’s heights, freedom is the only ladder.’

Checking her appearance in the reflection of the glass door, she frowned at what she saw. However much time she spent scrubbing away with the hotel toothpaste, she still had English teeth. However much she had spent on new American clothes, she still wore them as an Englishwoman would, folding and crumpling and migrating to parts of her body where they weren’t meant to be. The women of this city seemed to have glued their clothes straight to their skin. However carefully she applied make-up, she could not achieve that perfect, sprayed-on look that she now saw on every side. The people entering the building around her wore that look effortlessly and Beth desired above all to merge with them, to show she was with them in body as well as in spirit. At that moment Beth thought that to be English seemed so dull. Her compatriots were so literal, so lacking in vision and suspicious of power. Above all else, she wanted to be taken seriously by the woman she had come to hear because, finally, she was somewhere where her ideas fitted in.

The revolving door took her into a crowded lobby and heads turned towards her. A photographer took her picture and suddenly there were people approaching her, breaking off their conversations and pushing through the crowd to greet her from all sides.

Beth had learnt to hate that certain sort of male smile that was aimed entirely at her face and not at the mind behind it. In most fields of human endeavour it helped to be a good-looking young woman but in the cynical world of the British political system, dominated by battered bruisers, it could count against you. Four years ago, they’d thought Beth too pretty to take seriously but then her tough message had started to chime with the shocking events of the times. She needed to be sure it was those ideas, not the way she looked, that had helped her up the political ladder. This crowded tour of the power-souks of America was her reward and it had already showed her just how good life could get. Her aide, her very own aide, had met her at the airport. Her schedule had been presented to her in the latest and tiniest of electronic notebooks along with the gift of the notebook itself. When she realised just how inappropriate her wardrobe seemed, so carefully chosen in London and so deeply provincial here, Marianne, her aide, had sensed her doubts and conjured a selection of New York’s best, brought by smiling women to her hotel room for her to try. They assumed payment would be no problem and so Beth had handed over her credit card and crossed her fingers.

The whole swirling melee of a Manhattan evening in spring was intoxicating. For a year, she had been the silent voice of her master, doing just what the chief adviser to a government minister should, breathing cues into his ear, drafting his speeches, stiffening his resolve. In these last few days, she had come out from her master’s shadow. People all along the East Coast had come to hear her, Beth Battock. Those people had risen to their feet and applauded her. Journalists had interviewed her, quoted her because what she had to say was just what they wanted to hear. She was no longer invisible. Her star was on the rise, the people now converging on her the proof of that, and tonight was the high point of her journey.

This time Beth had come to listen, not to speak. Tonight she would finally be in the physical presence of the woman who had been her inspiration and whose every word she had studied, borrowed and adjusted to fit the contours of British politics.

She checked the lobby quickly with her eyes but could see no sign of the woman she sought and then there was a man in front of her shaking her by the hand.

‘So glad you made it, Beth,’ he said. ‘It’s our great pleasure to have you here with us tonight. Athan Tallis, Vice President of External Affairs for the Institute.’ He let go of her hand and swept an arm towards the back of the room. ‘There are some members of our committee over here who are just dying to meet with you.’

She followed him through the crowd to a small, expectant semi-circle of older men and women and tried her best to catch all their names as a cold glass of white wine was pressed into her hand.

‘Miss Battock,’ said a gaunt woman in a long silver gown. ‘We’ve been reading your views with great interest and, if I might say so, with enormous approval. It’s been reassuring to see that some people in your country appreciate what our President is doing for the security of all of us.’

Beth nodded and was about to answer when another man joined the circle. Athan Tallis broke in. ‘Beth, this is Senator Packhurst. We’ve asked him to be your host for the evening.’

She turned to shake hands and the group broke up, leaving the two of them together. He was fifty-ish, tanned, attractively grizzled and decidedly predatory. ‘Forget the Senator crap,’ he said. ‘Call me Don.’

‘Beth Battock.’

‘Oh, I know that. I’ve been reading all about you, young Beth, and it makes a very interesting story. Hey, maybe we should go through and get our seats and then you can tell me how we get back all those British hearts and minds.’

She took a sip of the wine and looked around for somewhere to leave the glass.

‘Bring it in with you,’ he suggested. ‘We might need some refreshment.’

‘I don’t think I will,’ Beth replied a little sharply, and he raised an eyebrow.

‘I see you’re true believer,’ he said.

They went into the auditorium and sat down in the seats reserved for them right at the front. Don Packhurst started on a long anecdote about the last visit of the British Prime Minister as the other seats filled up but Beth was only half listening, her gaze fixed on the empty dais, eager for the event to start. She was more excited than she had ever been waiting for a play to start.

The speaker was announced by a former Vice-President. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said after an introduction hinting that he was responsible for many of the ideas they were about to hear, ‘I give you our inspiration, Christie Kilfillan,’ and Beth was on her feet, clapping with all the rest.

‘And so in conclusion,’ said Christie Kilfillan ninety minutes later, ‘I would ask you all to keep this idea firmly in your minds through the difficult months ahead. This country, this administration, this President, our brave men and women of the armed forces, they have all acted as they have done for the very best of motives and they deserve our continuing support. It has become fashionable to insist that democracy calls for a slower and more muddled approach to international affairs but I have this to say to you.’ She hunched nearer the microphone and narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t mess around with a cobra.’ Waiting until the eruption of applause faded away, she wagged a declamatory finger in time with her words. ‘You don’t call in the United Nations. You don’t put down a motion. You don’t set up an inquiry. You don’t consult the people. You take out your sword and you cut off its head.’

This time, the applause went on and on and on.

As the crowd filed out again, buzzing with the reaffirmation of their beliefs, Don Packhurst took Beth firmly by the arm and led her to the side of the stage where the star of the evening was holding court. She went up to Christie Kilfillan with all the thrilling trepidation of a pilgrim approaching a saint. Kilfillan stood there as the crowd swirled around her, fifty looking like forty, her face in profile as fine and fierce as a goshawk, tolerating the adulation as people manoeuvred to shake her hand, congratulating her on her speech and seeking to engage her in unsuitably long exchanges. Beth waited until Senator Packhurst, standing just behind her, urged her forward.

‘Just get in there,’ he said. ‘We don’t stand in queues like you Brits.’

Still Beth held back, watching for the right moment. She had waited seven years for this, more than two and a half thousand days since she had first read Kilfillan’s books and fallen under the spell of her argument. The strength of Kilfillan’s principles, the realisation of the complete and utter rightness of her stance on the world, had been as overwhelming as falling in love. Taking those principles, bending them to fit the softer politics of old England, arguing for a new form of the special relationship between America and Britain at the head of a new world order, had put Beth where she was now.

There was a second when a gap appeared and Kilfillan’s eyes focused on her through it, narrowing, considering. She knows who I am, Beth thought with delight. She’s read about me, been told about me. Maybe she’s even been to hear me speak. In the smaller Washington meetings at the State Department, at the Pentagon and the like, she had scanned the private audiences, hoping for a glimpse of Kilfillan, and she had been disappointed. The New York and Boston meetings which followed had been much larger, public events and anyone could have been there, lost in the haze of faces. Someone else wanting Kilfillan’s papal blessing filled the gap before she had taken more than a step, then Don Packhurst seized her by the arm and pushed her in front of her idol, so that there they were together, shockingly together.

‘Christie,’ he said.’This is our new British friend, Beth Battock. You’ve been hearing about her, I’m sure.’

Beth waited for her response, for the slightest sign of approval.

‘I can’t say I have,’ said Kilfillan with her characteristic rasp, failing to take Beth’s outstretched hand, giving her no more than a quick and supercilious glance.

‘You haven’t read the Post? “Message of support from Britain’s bright hope”? This kid’s the future of the old alliance and by the way, she’s also your greatest fan.’

Beth studied Kilfillan’s face while Kilfillan looked at the Senator with no hint of interest. Beth waited, mute, still certain that at any moment the woman in front of her would begin to engage, would smile, would reach out.

Kilfillan did look at her then, just for a moment, just long enough to say, ‘Right. That one. Yes, I caught it.’ Then she narrowed her eyes again. ‘You’ve got a way to go, little girl. A cute face won’t do it. You got backbone? I don’t think so,’ and turned away into the crowd.

Packhurst grimaced. That’s our Christie,’ he said. ‘Come on, I booked us a table at a place I know you’re going to love.’

Over the meal he did his best to persuade her it meant nothing.

‘She’s a tricky bitch, always has been,’ he said. ‘You’re the future. She sees that, you bet she sees that. The green-eyed monster was riding her back.’

‘Maybe she was right,’ Beth had said, not believing that for a moment as she chased seared scallops round her plate. She wished she’d picked something else which didn’t drip butter on the way to the mouth.

‘She was not. Listen, so far as we’re concerned, you’re Miss Great Britain. It’s all been music to our ears. Remember what they called you on CBS? Winston Churchill’s brain in Jennifer Lopez’s body? We thought our old allies were going cold on us until we heard you. Back to back, the Yanks and the Brits. Together we fear no one. That’s the stuff to give the troops.’

In another ten minutes they’d covered the full range of agreement on that one then he asked her, inevitably, to tell him all about herself.

‘Start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘I want to know how you got so smart. Your parents must have been something special.’

‘My mother died when I was born,’ Beth answered, slowly. ‘My father was a historian.’

‘Oh really? What’s his first name?’

‘Guy, Guy Battock.’

‘What’s he written?’

‘Nothing you would have come across. English medieval social history.’

‘I’ll look out for it.’

‘Oh, it was mostly academic monographs. Regional stuff. You won’t find it in the bookshops.’

‘Is he still writing?’

‘No, he’s dead too. Died a few years ago.’

‘OK. That’s tough. So you’re a poor little orphan.’ He reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘Are you a Londoner?’

‘Yes, born and bred there.’

‘And where did you study?’

‘The London School of Economics. I did my doctorate there.’

‘And then?’

‘I did the usual thing, I suppose. I got a job in television. I was a researcher on one of the political shows. And then I met Alan Livesay.’

‘A good man to meet.’

‘It was just after they made him a minister. I went to see him about a programme we were planning. You can guess the sort of thing, “the new hawk in the dovecote”. We got talking over lunch and I suppose he must have liked my ideas. He offered me a job.’

‘Every politician needs someone behind him with good ideas,’ said Packhurst. ‘You have to shake so many hands there’s never enough time for thinking. You’ve sure got the ideas. Your Mr. Livesay can count himself a very lucky man.’

‘It was lucky for me,’ Beth said. ‘No one took his ideas seriously enough until the war on terror started. He’s the right man at the right time.’

‘Well, I guess we’re all very happy that he sent you to us. Remind me, why exactly was it that he couldn’t come?’

The international situation. You know, after the Embassy bombs. He just couldn’t leave the Foreign Office at a time like that.’

Packhurst gave her a slow smile. ‘Oh sure. Even a junior minister has to feel indispensable. We’re all glad you came in his place. I guess you’re a star now.’

It was only then, trying to guess what lay behind that smile, that Beth first wondered if this trip had been wise. Advisers were meant to be invisible. They weren’t meant to step into the limelight and articulate the truths their masters didn’t dare utter.

When the check had been paid and the limo door was held open for her, Packhurst took her hand.

‘You’ve had a pretty full evening. If you want a little company and a chance to relax, I have a nice, quiet apartment nearby.’

It had a horrible inevitability about it and a few weeks earlier Beth might have said yes to a night with a US senator who combined power and good looks, but now her life was too complicated.

‘Sweet of you,’ she said, ‘but I have some work to do.’

Flying back to London the following day didn’t help her mood. First Class was full. There were no upgrades and the man next to her in Business Class wanted to tell her in detail all about the range of flashing jewellery he had just sold to a US mail-order giant. She closed her eyes and thought about the future.

At twenty-seven, Beth was on the young side for a British government minister’s political adviser. All advisers live in the grey area between politics and public service and are mistrusted by all sides. There was a food-chain at work and many other hungry mouths were clamouring for a bite of her master’s favour. Alan Livesay, junior minister in the Foreign Office, was busy climbing his own ladder while all those around him clung to his coat-tails, trying to hitch a free ride. Beth was good at getting noticed, and that was the key. She needed to catch the attention of Livesay’s boss, the Foreign Secretary. She had to get to the point where they needed her views to shape their speeches, their policies. It had been dog eat dog and she had lost a lot of flesh before she learnt to bite first.

Then, six months ago, she had played an accidental trump card and got ahead of the game. Six months ago she had widened her sphere of influence from Livesay’s private office to Livesay’s private bed. It hadn’t been a calculated decision. Beth had found out for herself how well power and desire cohabit and, being a new experience, it had not seemed at all like a cliché. Recently, lying together in the soft afternoon sheets, she had nearly let out the love word. He had forestalled her, for which she was grateful afterwards, fearing it would have proved a fatally mistaken kind of intimacy. Just as it was forming on her lips he had turned his head.

‘What planet do you really come from, Wonderwoman?’ he had asked. ‘I don’t know anything about you.’

‘You’ve read my CV.’

He traced the shape of her mouth with one finger. That was for your job. This is for me. You don’t need a Cambridge degree for what we’ve just done.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Fluid Mechanics might help.’

‘Don’t be flippant. I want to know.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. My parents are dead. No brothers or sisters. No family at all,’ she said and thought, but did not add, unlike you.

‘But you must come from somewhere?’

‘Not really, just London.’ Then she had blocked his mouth with her own to shut him up, because it was all lies. When they’d done it all again, in a hurry this time because both were aware of their alibis trickling to a halt, he had forgotten about it. As they were finding their scattered clothes, he had told her she was going to take his place for his American speaking trip. Even then, she had wondered if it represented a reward or simply funk on his part, putting her in the line of fire, a stand-in to replace a master who found it politically expedient to have his views expressed in a way he could disown if he had to. Perhaps he even wanted her to go too far, so he could get her out of his life. The career risk was enormous.

That thought had made no difference at all to the line she knew she must take. In her student days and in the doctoral dissertation that followed and which got her to the Foreign Office, Beth had developed the academic ideas that backed up her conviction, held since childhood, that to beat an attacker, you should always strike first. At school it had often got her into trouble. In the early twenty-first century, it got her into power, and Beth was starting to adore power. She decided she would take the chance with both hands and it had worked.

She woke from a short sleep to find the brief, uncomfortable night had passed and a stewardess was heralding their unpalatable return to English airspace with a tray of breakfast. All the glamour had evaporated somewhere over the Atlantic. London looked low, grey and drab as the plane sank slowly towards Heathrow. Beth switched her mobile on in the baggage claim then switched it quickly off again when the voice told her she had twenty new messages. She walked out through Customs, then stood in the arrivals hall wondering why there wasn’t a driver holding a sign saying ‘Ms Battock’. There was one likely-looking potential chauffeur but he was immersed in the Mail on Sunday. She walked closer and as the headline caught her eye, she suddenly understood why there were so many messages and no car waiting for her. ‘Love-Rat Minister Quits’, it said and the photograph was of Alan Livesay.

She walked quickly to the book shop, grabbed a Sunday Times and there it all was in banner headlines.

A cold wash of dread ran out to her fingers and all the way down to her toes. Her first thought wasn’t that her prized job had just gone down the pan. It was even less creditable than that. Her first thought was that Helen Livesay, patient, supportive Helen Livesay, who invited her down to Sunday lunch when she thought Beth needed feeding up, who sent her Vitamin C tablets and bottles of herbal cures when she heard her sneeze, had just found out that she, Beth Battock, had been sharing her husband’s bed in his afternoons and on his nights away from home. Then she looked further down the page to the blonde caught on a hotel step, kissing Livesay goodbye, and it all got even worse because the woman Livesay had resigned over was someone she had never seen before and not her at all. ‘His long-term mistress’, the story said.

The taxi took her to Clapham and she told the driver to drop her at the far end of her street just in case, but there was no one waiting for her outside. They arrived the following morning, when she went downstairs and found two men in her kitchen.

CHAPTER FOUR

The larger of the two men said, ‘Hello Miss Battock,’ as if this were a normal social occasion. His nose and mouth were submerged in pale cheeks as if his head had been over-inflated. ‘Sorry to walk in but the door was open. Thought we ought to check you were all right.’

‘The door? Which door?’ she said stupidly.

‘This one,’ he said.

The door to Beth’s flat was on the second floor. ‘What about downstairs?’

‘Someone was coming out. We walked straight up.’

She was absolutely sure her door had been firmly closed. ‘That doesn’t give you the right to walk in.’ Who were they? Not police.

‘Derek Milverton,’ said the first man, putting out his hand, ‘from the CPA. This is Phil.’ Phil was hiding behind him, taking in the room in jerky gulps of his eyes.

CPA? ‘Do you mean the Child Protection Agency?’ They must be in the wrong place.

‘No, Cunningham Press Associates.’

‘Which is?’

‘A news agency.’

She’d heard of. Specialists in sleaze. Always somebody else’s problem, until now.

‘We just wanted to know if you might like to say anything about your boss and his…’

‘Reporters? You’re reporters and you come busting in to my flat?’

‘No, no. Like I said, the door was open.’

‘Bullshit. You can open it again and go straight back out.’

‘Look it’s in your interests. You’ll be under siege here in half an hour. Talk to us and we’ll help keep the reptiles off your back, see?’

‘What do you mean? You are the reptiles. Why am I going to be under siege?’

The phone rang and all their eyes switched to the machine on the side table. She didn’t want to answer, not while they were still here. It rang three times, then the answering machine cut in and she realised, as she heard the caller’s voice, that it was switched on to ‘monitor’.

‘Hello, Beth my darling,’ said Alan Livesay’s unmistakable voice, ‘I’m so, so very sorry about…’ She hit the button and killed the call but it was far, far too late and the balance of power in the room had changed irrevocably.

‘Well, how about that, darling,’ said the larger man. ‘Isn’t that just our lucky day?’

‘He calls everyone that,’ she said, but she could feel the heat in her cheeks and she knew they could see it. The smaller man produced the camera he had been holding behind his back and something in her snapped. She reached for the closest object she could find, her kitchen fire extinguisher, pressed down the lever and sprayed foam all over both of them.

She propelled them out of her flat, downstairs and through the front door on a wave of sheer fury, then went back up and looked out of her window to see them stopping on the pavement for the larger one to use his mobile phone and the smaller one to take pictures of the front of her house. It was still only half past seven in the morning.

After a long time the phone rang again. In the intervening hour, she hadn’t moved from the kitchen chair where she sat staring at the table and her unopened pile of mail. The room already seemed to belong to a time line which had come to an end.

‘Beth, pick up the phone,’ said a familiar male voice, the voice of authority, of tradition, of the way things are meant to be done in the Civil Service. Sir Robert Greenaway, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, was not somebody you could ever ignore. She picked up the receiver as if it were a landmine.

‘Is that you, Beth?’

‘Yes, Sir Robert.’

He dispensed with courtesies. ‘There’s a story starting to run on the wires. It’s linking you and Livesay.’

‘Two men broke into my flat this morning. They said they were from a news agency.’

‘They were. Be quiet and listen please. I’m not going to ask you if it’s true. That can come later. We have quite enough on our plate here already thanks to your friend the late minister. Now, understand me clearly. I don’t want you anywhere near this place until further notice. I strongly advise that you leave your house in the next ten minutes if not sooner. After that you’ll have the whole of Fleet Street camping on your step. Go away somewhere they can’t find you. My office will call you on your mobile in a day or two. Don’t talk to anybody and get going now. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘Officially you are on sick leave. Pack what you need and get going.’

That was that. He had put the phone down.

The first of them arrived as she was leaving. He was very young and, as she came out of the gate, he was running down the street from a taxi stuck behind a truck a hundred yards down the street.

‘Elizabeth Battock?’ he called as he ran towards her.

‘No mate,’ she said in the best Australian accent she could muster. ‘She’s up on the second floor,’ and she left him ringing the bell as she got in her car and drove away.

West seemed the best direction, west out of London by the quickest route. She drove down the M4 for an hour and then the full irony of what she was doing struck her as she realised she had absolutely nowhere to go. Hotels were out of the question. She’d have to pay by credit card and after her New York shopping spree there was a double risk, identification and credit refusal. Friends? She could stay with a friend. No one in London, that wouldn’t do, anyway they were all in the politics business, people to share your triumphs with, not your crises. She wouldn’t trust any of them at a time like this, not when there were useful points to be banked by helping out a journalist or two. There was Maggie. Where did Maggie live now? She hadn’t seen her since graduation. Her address was somewhere, probably on the Christmas card list in her kitchen drawer. Beth could see the list in her mind’s eye. It was just the start of a list really.

Something quite like tiredness came over her then and she pulled over at the next service area. Wiltshire felt like a safe distance away and, after she’d unloaded her bitter-smelling coffee and pallid sandwich on to the most remote table, she rummaged in her bag for an address book just in case it showed she had a forgotten best friend somewhere. Instead, she found the stack of post that she had stuffed in there on the way out of the flat and, for want of anything better to do, she started opening the envelopes.

It was mostly dross, bills, junk mail, one wedding invitation from a colleague she didn’t much like and an invitation to speak at an Institute of Strategic Studies seminar, but there underneath was the other letter she had accidentally swept up with the rest, the letter she had left unopened before she went away to America, waiting for a right moment to open it, a moment which might never arrive.

The envelope was handwritten and postmarked Devon. It bore her old address in Fulham and someone had crossed that out and forwarded it, which, a whole year since she had moved, was the sort of miracle she would prefer not to happen. She stared at it for a long time before using a table knife to open it as if something inside might lunge at her fingers.

‘My dear Beth,’ it said, and she really had almost forgotten how to read his handwriting. ‘I know you are very busy these days, but I wonder if you might be able to come down to see us soon. It seems such an age since we talked and there is a lot to talk about. It is very beautiful down here at the moment. The flowers are out around the Ley. Eliza misses you. She would be glad to see you. She had a postcard, I know. Ring the Turners if you can come. They’ll give me the message. All my love, Dad.’

Tainted sanctuary. An invitation to the one place where nobody would go looking for her, the place nobody knew about. An invitation to the last place she wanted to go. There was no other hiding place in prospect but even then it was the most reluctant of decisions.

The motorway ended at Exeter and the endless stream of traffic heading towards Cornwall and the south-west tip of England clogged both lanes of the A38. Absurdly, she had to stop and check the map to be sure of her way. She had owned her own car for four years now and it was the first time she had driven down this way.

Below the teeming A38, Devon bulges down to the coast and that bulge is known as the South Hams. It is marked at first by miniature rounded hills, wearing clumps of trees as toupees on their very tops to stop the wind blowing the soil away. Further south, towards the coast, a gentle oceanic swell of ridges prepares you for the real waves ahead. Signs of tourism are all too plain on the larger roads that skirt around it, but in the middle of it all, inland from Start Bay, is a less trampled area of fields, lanes and not much else which retains some of the utter remoteness of past centuries.

Beth was not in a mood to be charmed as the hedges crept in on her and slowed her pace. She was a London driver to the depths of her soul, carving others up and expecting to be carved up in her turn, always ready with the quick hand gesture and always reacting in fury if she was given one first. The road from Totnes to Kingsbridge began to test her patience. With blind corner after blind corner, crests and hidden dips, there was nowhere to overtake for miles, The Dartmouth turning took her on to a road which was little better, but when she took the long-forgotten right turn signposted to Slapton, even the white line in the middle of the road disappeared.

It was a warm afternoon and she was driving with the window down, but the scent from the high banks bordering the road only made her feel uncomfortable and out of place. She hated the way the banks pressed in on her as if she were going down an ever-narrowing trap which might not allow her the space to turn around and escape again. After a mile or so she came up behind a small, silver Nissan which was being driven with quite unnatural caution. On the infrequent straight sections the driver, a very old man, would speed up to nearly twenty-five miles per hour, but when confronted by anything approaching a bend, he would slow to fifteen, restrained it seemed by his equally old wife who could be seen waving her hands in the air at any sign of a hazard. Once and only once the road straightened and widened enough for Beth to try overtaking, but the old man had no idea that she was behind him and pulled into the middle of the road as she began to pass. Neither occupant showed any response to her horn-blast so she added deafness to the list she was compiling of their characteristics and fell back in behind them again.

After a very long time and a fairly short distance, they came to a road junction where the couple in front, missing their chance to pull out, waited instead for a very slow tractor to pass in front of them. The tractor was followed by a long line of cars. When the road cleared, they still showed no sign of moving. She waited a little longer and gave another peep on her horn. There was no response. She got out, walked up to the other car and looked inside and her heart thumped. The man and the woman inside were indeed extremely old. They also looked quite dead, their heads lolling forward and their eyes closed. A series of irrational possibilities came to her. Had she killed them? Had her hooting given them both heart attacks? Could their exhaust be leaking? Maybe the carbon monoxide had been blown away by the wind until they stopped, then the inside of the car had filled up with a lethal dose. She took her courage in both hands and opened the driver’s door, and that was when the driver woke up.

‘Hello,’ he said with a puzzled smile, ‘can I help you?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Were you asleep!’

‘Asleep? No, no. Oh. Oh dear, yes, perhaps I was.’ He looked around and seemed to find nothing particularly unusual in that. ‘I think we must have been having a little nap. Been for a walk you see. Did you want something?’

‘You’re in the middle of the road.’

‘Bless my soul, are we? I’m so sorry. Did you hear that Em? We’ve been asleep. In the road.’ Em showed no sign of waking.

‘Look I’m in a hurry,’ said Beth. ‘Can you just pull over and let me by.’

‘Let me see, yes, of course, of course,’

Beth got back in her car and the car in front started to move, but instead of pulling over, it meandered off again in the same direction as her and she swore viciously. Then it occurred to her that it really didn’t matter. She couldn’t have been in less of a hurry. No one knew she was coming and she didn’t even want to arrive. It was just that there was nowhere else to go. As the road became still narrower, the car in front suddenly put on an unwise burst of speed and shot off out of sight, suggesting that some physical need more urgent than sleep had overtaken its occupants. Beth didn’t speed up. The lane she was now driving down, and it was no more than that, should have been intensely familiar. She had walked it a thousand times in her childhood when it had been the lane home, but that didn’t help. She recognised it as if someone had spent many hours describing it to her, not as if she had lived there for two thirds of her life. Adding to that feeling of disjuncture, she caught a momentary glimpse through a gap to her right of something genuinely unfamiliar, a large house down in the valley below the road where she had no memory of such a place. Then it was too late for unfamiliarity because she was coming down the hill. Slapton, steep, cramped Slapton crowded in on her, and there ahead, looming over the cottages with its squadrons of rooks flying around the ivy wrappings of its derelict battlements, was the dark tower which was all that remained of Slapton Chantry.

The main road was a twisting gulley running down between stone walls as the village came rushing in to smother her, and when she finally found a tiny gap to squeeze the car into, she sat in it and waited for the courage to do what came next.

The front door of Carrick Cottage opened straight on to the road and the flaking blue paint on the door was just as it had always been. Beth looked to the side and saw the same frayed blue curtains. She put her finger to the bell, then hesitated and ran her hand up and down the stones beside the door until she found the gap where the key used to be hidden. It was no longer there. No one else needed it these days. For a moment she was the child who had lived there, but only for a moment. She rang the bell just as a stranger would.

The man who came to the door was not at all as he had always been. He had changed so much that for a moment she thought he was someone else. He was two stone lighter than when she had last seen him, but despite that he had put on far more years than the calendar showed. He looked at her as if he were equally bemused.

‘Beth?’ he said, ‘It’s Beth!’ and she saw a gleam of moisture appear immediately in the corner of each eye.

‘Hello Dad,’ she said and, being unable to kiss him, she put out both her hands and took his as they stared at each other.

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ he said, ‘being so busy.’

She wondered if he still read a paper, if indeed he had any idea that the hounds were baying at her heels.

‘Yes, I’ve come,’ she said. ‘Can we go in?’

‘Can you stay for tea?’ he asked as if he expected her to disappear again at any moment.

‘I was hoping to stay a bit longer than that,’ Beth replied, ‘if that’s all right.’

He nodded. ‘That would be nice. Your room’s all ready, just in case.’

Beth suppressed a feeling of irritation.

He went into the kitchen and she heard him filling the kettle. It still made precisely the same sound it had always made, the tinny drumming of the water into thin metal. He had always filled it through the spout with the tap on full. She heard him light the gas.

Nothing had changed inside the house. The parlour was a dark place with split leather armchairs and the old prints of clipper ships on the walls. She crossed over to the bookshelf to distract herself from her discomfort. There were all the bird books and the botanical guides, but there also, to her astonishment, was a spine she knew well, her own little book from last year, The Opportunity of Crisis. It was in her father’s political section sandwiched between Will Hutton’s The State We ‘re In and Christie Kilfillan’s Last Chance, as if keeping matter and anti-matter apart.

He came back in from the kitchen and caught her looking at them.

‘I thought I’d better read what you had to say,’ he said quietly and sat down. ‘Won’t be long. The kettle takes a minute or two.’

She almost said, I know that, kettles are the same everywhere, but she bit it back. ‘What did you make of it?’ she asked instead, caught between a reluctant pride in his interest and a flash of anticipatory irritation.

He thought. He had never minded waiting to get his words right and that had stretched out the hours of Beth’s childhood often to breaking point. ‘It’s a great achievement to write a book,’ he answered in the end. ‘You feel passionately about it. I admire passion.’

‘But you don’t agree with what it says.’

‘You wouldn’t expect me to, would you?’

‘I suppose not, but surely you can see…’

He held up a hand. ‘There are other things to talk about first,’ he said. ‘The world can wait until after we’ve had our tea.’

She stood there and watched him go back into the little kitchen. That had always been their relationship, him doing the job of both parents and her doing the job of one child. Until she’d left.

He came back with two mugs. Hers had a picture of an otter on it, which was no surprise.

‘You’re still not on the phone then,’ she said.

‘No need. The Turners take messages. Peggy bangs on the wall if it’s urgent.’

‘Is it often urgent?’

He looked at her as if trying to detect sarcasm. ‘We had an injured egret down in the marsh last week.’

Beth wasn’t entirely sure whether an egret was an animal or a bird. For the first time, a part of her found something valuable in the relentless simplicity of his life. Her mobile was switched off and nobody could reach her. Not one single person in the outside world had any idea where she was. No one outside Slapton even knew she had a father. Here she could be safe while she sorted everything out. London political gossip wouldn’t reach down here. Her own father didn’t even know exactly what she did, who she had been working for.

That was when, looking down into his tea, he said, ‘Tell me, love. How bad is it with this man Livesay?’

CHAPTER FIVE

There is a chapel in the town of Ghent which owns a toe-bone of Saint Paul in a fine gold reliquary chest, and if you go to pray there, you may ask the priest for a twenty day notice. I went there alone as soon as I had seen to my men in their lodgings. The door had sagged so it caught on the sill and shook as I pushed it open, letting out a miasma of rotting cloth. Inside, it was very dark with only two candles burning and I didn’t see the priest sitting waiting at the confessional until he challenged me with a quavering voice.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded in the Flemish which I knew a little, and then in slower and imperfect French. ‘Are you a pilgrim? You don’t look like one.’

He probably thought I was a robber.

‘Tonight I’m a pilgrim,’ I answered, also in French. He stood up, held up one of the candles and looked doubtfully at my style of dress.

‘You have no scallop shell,’ he remarked.

‘I am not only on a pilgrimage,’ I said, ‘I am on the King of England’s business, but I intend to stop for prayer at wayside shrines along my way. I have come here to pray to your relic of the blessed Saint and to ask you for a certificate.’

That seemed to reassure him. ‘Do you need confession?’

Thank you, no. I have a priest with me. I make my confession to him.’

‘Have you sinned since your last confession to him?’

Had I sinned since the morning? I searched my memory and I couldn’t come up with anything immediate, so I said what I have always said when a strange priest asks me that.

‘Father, there is a sin I fear I have not yet confessed, the full weight of which is gradually becoming clear to me. Because I do not wish to confess less than the totality of that sin, I must wait before I ask forgiveness for it.’

He peered at me and in the dim light I could see his lips moving. He reached for a paper and held it out. It struck me he hadn’t understood a word of what I had just said.

‘I asked,’ he said doubtfully, ‘because tomorrow is our festival and if you come then I will give you forty days not twenty.’

‘Can I have twenty days now and another forty tomorrow?’ I asked, looking at the paper he had just given me.

He looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It is one or the other.’

I gave it back to him reluctantly, thinking I would regret my action if I died that night. Forty days would take my sum of indulgences to a total of more than two thousand days. For a moment, my heart lifted at the thought of nearly six years less in Purgatory, then I remembered how much faster time moved there and I thought how many, many more certificates I would need to make much difference. My six years certificates might win me six years in the time of this world, but that would only be a few minutes of relief in the time they follow in Purgatory.

I gave him five coins for five candles and said I would be back in the morning, then I returned to the Boar’s Head Inn and joined my men sitting down at the long tables. William Batokewaye was on the far side of the room, with several women at his table. He told me once that he was a priest when he was in England but that it was a precious burden best left safe at home when he was travelling. I have known him for too long to question that, apart from wondering whether, even in England, he could be regarded as entirely priestly, but at the centre of that man is something so solid, so true, that I do not feel qualified to judge him. He believes he will be forgiven and I hope he is right because I would not wish him to pass an age in Purgatory. When he dies, there will be masses said in my Chantry for him, though he does not know it.

The food came in those huge chafing dishes with the boars’ heads at each end for which the Inn was named. Lentils in a spiced sauce and three different meats with spitted duck shredded over the top of them all. The fine gentlemen from Genoa didn’t like it. I thought it was excellent. When I’m travelling, I’m on campaign and when you’re out there scouring the countryside, you’re grateful for anything that keeps your belly button away from your backbone. The squire was getting the worst of their complaints and doing his best to explain to the landlord what they wanted to eat. It wasn’t going to get him anywhere. I knew the landlord, Garciot, from old times, and no one had ever got the better of him yet. Before he bought the inn with the proceeds of his ransoms, he’d been one of John Hawkwood’s men for many a year. Hawkwood always said Garciot scared him stiff and, coming from Hawkwood, that was saying something. They lived for fighting, Hawkwood’s bunch, but they always knew what was right and wrong. You might well call them mercenaries, and it was true that they fought for money but they wouldn’t take that money from just anyone. They lived by a tough set of rules, but they stuck to them.

The evening ran its predictable course. The Genoese persisted with their complaint. Garciot stared at them without expression, then he took their food away and came back with something that looked almost the same but smelt far, far worse. He winked at me as he put it in front of them and I wondered what he could possibly have added to it out of sight in the kitchen to make it quite so repugnant. He excused himself for a moment to deal with the two Brabanters at the end of the table who had been making a drunken nuisance of themselves. He held the larger of them off the ground with one hand, while he patted his pockets for dinner money with the other, then he put one under each arm and showed them how to fly into the street. After seeing that, the Genoese managed to eat a surprisingly large amount of whatever it was on their plates and left to go to their rooms as soon as they could get away.

My men went about their own business, drifting towards William’s table while Garciot came and sat with us, the squire and me.

‘What are you doing, travelling with pants-wetters like those?’ he asked.

‘King’s orders. King’s affairs,’ I replied, not wanting to encourage him. Familiarity is to be expected when you’ve spilt blood together, but it wasn’t for me or for him to question the nature of the business my sovereign had charged me with.

‘I hear the King’s in his dotage,’ he answered, ‘watching his debts mount up, piling jewels on to this ugly mistress of his and letting the upstart John lord it over the country.’

The squire stiffened and, unbelievably, I saw his hand go to the grip of his sword.

‘Enough, Garciot,’ I said, and I thought I had said it quite quietly until I saw how many turned to stare.

He raised a hand quickly. ‘My apologies, Sir Guy. While he commands your loyalty, he is still a great king.’

He turned to the squire and whispered something. The squire’s indignation drained out of him. My hearing is still sharp, but the room was full of the noise of feasting men and when Garciot had gone off to see to his guests I demanded to know what he had said.

‘Nothing bad,’ said the squire quickly.

I wasn’t sure I believed him. Garciot was certainly capable of a final sarcastic quip. ‘Then what?’

‘He told me I should study at your feet and mark every word you spoke.’

Oh really. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

‘I don’t lie, Sir Guy.’ For a short, fat studious man, he suddenly looked quite fierce.

‘I’m sure you don’t. Please excuse my bad manners. It’s just that I will not tolerate people abusing our king.’

He nodded. ‘And I won’t stand for people abusing my lord Lancaster.’

I didn’t show my amusement at the thought of him in hand-to-hand combat with Garciot because he so clearly meant what he said. The fight would have been over before a man could sneeze.

‘You have a high regard for Lancaster?’ I enquired.

That was who Garciot meant by his ‘upstart John’. King Edward’s youngest son, born only yards from where we now sat in Ghent and therefore known as John of Gaunt, as his mother, a Hainaulter, called the town. I wouldn’t have wanted to upset the squire further, but privately I had some sympathy for Garciot’s opinion. John had lately styled himself ‘King of Castile’, which seemed to me to be coming it a bit rich. He was never a man who had much understanding for those below him and I couldn’t fully forgive him for that slaughter at Limoges.

‘I had the highest regard for his Duchess.’ The squire sounded sad. He crossed himself, giving a deep sigh. ‘I wrote a poem to her.’

The beautiful Blanche. I thought of her and joined him in his silence because whenever I had seen Blanche I had thought immediately of Elizabeth, who had the same hair and the same forehead, but who shaded Blanche like a cathedral choir shades a tavern singer. I still long for Elizabeth every single day. We did not have enough time together. I know this life on earth is only our qualification for whichever place comes next, and I would not fear my time to come in Purgatory if it were just for myself. I deserve to suffer. No, what I cannot bear is the thought that I might spend an aeon there, locked away from her. Even worse is the other possibility that, through our sin, I might meet her there.

They sang her mass every day at Tewkesbury just as they would be singing it now at Slapton. I prayed that would work.

In the years we had together, right up until the end, she had a way of looking at me which suspended time and conscious thought so that we would gaze at each other in private delight. From across a room our souls could still embrace.

‘Sir Guy,’ said the squire, a little hesitantly, jerking me back to this noisy inn.

‘Yes?’

‘I would not wish to upset you or intrude upon you in any way,’ he said, waving a hand for another jug of wine, ‘but I have a great desire to hear men’s stories, and there is still so much I want to ask you in particular.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I know that what the landlord said was right. Whenever I have heard your name spoken, it has always been with respect and trust. I want the chance to hear the story of great events told without having to worry about discerning truth and falsehood in the telling.’

‘Oh now be careful, young man. My memory is sixty-five years old. All memories are changed in the use and the retelling. I cannot guarantee you truth.’

‘I will take the risk.’

‘We have a long way to go,’ I said, ‘and precious little other company worth the name.’ It was clear we both felt the same way about our Genoese companions, and my archers, all fine fellows, were men of few words. ‘Ask what you want.’

‘When did you first meet this priest?’ he asked, staring over at William who was singing vigorously in the crowd of girls.

‘On the twenty-seventh day of August in the year thirteen hundred and forty six, just after the middle of the night.’

‘And you question the power of your memory?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘That is a fuller answer than anyone could expect. Where was it?’

‘In the Valley of the Clerks.’

‘I don’t know of it. Where is it?’

‘It is some two hundred yards below the windmill on the down-slope of the plateau beside the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu.’

‘Oh.’ He made a face. ‘That valley. Stupid of me. The great battle. Do you still remember it well?’

Remember it well? I thought of it almost as often as I thought of Elizabeth.

‘It’s an old tale and well-known,’ I said. ‘Were you born then?’

‘I was three.’

‘I met William in the night when the battle was over. The windmill was burning to light the battlefield and there were fires everywhere to honour the dead.’

‘More of theirs than ours.’

‘Oh yes. Far, far more. It had been a slaughter.’

‘Not just a slaughter,’ he objected. ‘An honourable and magnificent fight, surely? You had been outnumbered by ten to one.’

‘Time and willing lips will always twist a tale. Some say it was four to one, others say five. All the same, you could have searched high and low for honour on that field and not found quite enough of it.’

I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He pounced on it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘another time perhaps.’

‘Please go on. What happened that night?’

‘Nobody slept. You never do after a battle. You know that yourself, but the French didn’t seem to know it was over. More and more of them kept blundering up the valley like moths to a candle. They were wandering in from the far end, for hours afterwards, thinking to join in the spoils. They just didn’t seem to realise that all the bodies heaped up were their own countrymen.’ I drained my wine and he refilled it.

As ever, what was in my mind was the moment when the troops parted for the doomed charge of a blind king, John of Bohemia, lashed between his friends’ horses.

It was blind John’s fate that drew me to the heaps of dead. I thought I knew where I had seen him fall. A stupid thought. From up on the ridge by the windmill I had marked his passage fairly well, but then chaos hid his end and now, down below in the dark there were hills of dead piled to head-height, horses and men mixed together in heaps which had formed a rising barricade. The French had gone on leaping and clambering over that barricade, taking arrows for their trouble and piling it ever higher in the process.

I was weary to my bones, barely able to drag myself through the churned earth of the battlefield, stumbling over arrows and helmets and arms and legs, and I turned over a battalion of bodies before I found him. It was only when I saw the lashings around a harness that I finally knew where to look. Pulling the other corpses off the three of them left me sweating and soaked in crusting blood, and I couldn’t get them free, you see? There was a black horse lying across them, a real charger, solid, stiff and utterly dead. In the morning, they were using teams of men with ropes and poles to prise those piles apart, but there in the night, there was just me and the flickering light of the nearest fire. The legs I thought belonged to John were sticking out from under the horse, and I was pulling as hard as I could when I found I was no longer alone. A huge man in a woollen tunic had joined me.

‘You take one leg,’ he said, I’ll take the other.’

‘I’m not looting,’ I said sharply, because most of the men out on that field were our camp followers, using their knives to dispatch the nearly dead and cut from them whatever they could find of value. I had taken off my mail and I was in a plain jerkin. I could have been anyone and I didn’t need another fight.

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you with the King all day, holding up the Standard. You did a good job. I don’t expect you need to loot, I guess you’ve got a castle or two of your own.’ There was nothing subservient about him, but right across that battlefield that night, in the aftermath of the desperate fight, men were talking to other men as equals and no one could be so proud as to mind.

‘One castle,’ I said, ‘and it leaks.’

He laughed harshly. ‘I know why you’re here. You and I saw the same thing,’ he said, ‘or thought we did, and we both need to know, don’t we?’

‘I’m Guy de Bryan,’ I said holding out a hand.

‘Are you indeed?’ he said as if he knew me. ‘Well now, there’s a fine thing. I am William Batokewaye,’ he squeezed my hand in his own much larger one. In those days he still had both arms. ‘In the service, for the present, of young Lord Montague, which is why I am here rooting around the carrion in the dark.’

Montague again. The Montagues were always embedded somewhere near the heart of my story. Let me get this right because, looking back, the order of all these events does get a little muddled in my head. That’s because so many of the things that really mattered in my life happened in such a short space of years, and so many of them involved the Montagues. They had given me no great reason for gratitude. Old Montague had harboured the villain Molyns, then imprisoned me, then done all he could to see his daughter, my dear Elizabeth, marry another man. When it came to the precipice of my sin, it was me who plunged over, but it was Montague’s hand that led me to the edge.

Now we had the new Earl of Salisbury, the younger Montague, and he was a fighter too, just like his wily, warrior father. Would he now set a curve of his own into the passage of my life? Molyns was still in his retinue. Molyns had done the deed that brought the two of us to root among these corpses in the dark.

I looked at the outline of William Batokewaye against the flaring firelight of the windmill collapsing behind him. ‘You’ll have to explain,’ I said. ‘What business does young Montague have here?’

‘His dead father’s business. Don’t you know the story?’ He looked at the leg he was holding, ‘This man saved the old Earl. Six years ago, soon after Sluys?’

‘Montague was captured.’ It was a busy time. I had forgotten the details.

‘Montague and the Earl of Suffolk, and something went amiss with the ransom,’ said Batokewaye. ‘Phillip of France threatened to kill both of them, and the only thing that stopped him was this man here. John of Bohemia taught young King Phillip a thing or two about chivalry that day, and he shamed him into letting them live. My master wishes to make sure blind John gets a Christian burial before the crows get to him. He deserves it after a death like that.’ He sighed.

I wasn’t sure if he meant the feathered crows or the human variety which were creeping around us on the edge of the darkness. I let go of my leg for a moment.

‘It was magnificent,’ I said and crossed myself.

‘Of course it was magnificent, but what did he think he was doing?’

‘He was riding to the aid of his men,’ I answered.

‘Lashed to his knights? As blind as a mole? What difference could he hope to make?’

‘You know the answer to that as well as I do. It’s a question of the spirit.’

‘It’s a question of being dead.’

We were both silent again and I knew we were both thinking about the means of his death.

‘If you’re in Montague’s retinue, you will be familiar with Sir John Molyns,’ I suggested.

He spat.

I waited, but it seemed that was all the answer I was going to get. It was certainly the sort of answer I most wanted, because I liked this man.

I pressed him. ‘Were you with Molyns today?’

‘Molyns was on his own business today, or perhaps the King’s business but certainly not Montague’s.’

I wanted to see where he stood.

‘What business do you think that was?’

‘The devil’s business.’

We agreed on that.

‘Come on then, heave,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

We heaved and he came out with a wet slither like a very old baby being born. He had new armour plate around his chest, one-up on chain mail, but it hadn’t done much for him. Batokewaye strode off and pulled a brand out of the nearest fire. By its light we examined the sad remains of King John of all the Bohemians, and it confirmed my very worst fears.

‘I’ll find a priest,’ I said. ‘We should say a prayer to see his soul through to daybreak.’

‘No need,’ said the big man as he studied the corpse. ‘You’ve found one. I am a priest.’

He didn’t look like a priest. He looked like a man who’d been on the winning side of many bloody fights, but we said our prayers, the two of us, there in the flickering dark, in a night that was threaded with the moans of the dying, and then we both sat down on the blood-soaked ground to keep the old king company until the sun rose.

‘I couldn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘I knew Molyns was planning something, and I couldn’t prevent it. No one else seemed to think it was wrong.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ said Batokewaye. ‘You’re a young man still. You can’t stop what can’t be stopped.’

‘It was a great sin and it should have been prevented. We’re not animals. There are rules. Even in battle we must remember…’

‘No.’ His voice was loud, cutting across me. ‘We may not be animals, but tell me this. You’re alone, walking in the darkest forest and you hear something rustle behind the next tree. What would you most want it not to be?’

‘A wolf,’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘A bear?’

‘Not a wolf, not a bear, not a snake, not a lion.’

‘What then?’

‘Another man.’

‘Yes.’

‘I tell you, we’re not animals, we’re more dangerous than any animal.’ He looked down at poor dead John. ‘When did an animal do that to one of its own?’

We talked until the sun first showed itself far away across the Somme, and by that time we were, what? Friends? Not exactly, not yet. Two people who sensed they were to know each other for years to come. Two people bound down the same road. I already knew that William Batokewaye would be a good companion on that road.

At dawn, we saw King Edward’s great mathematical exercise begin, his clerks edging their cautious way onto the butchers’ field to reckon exactly how many flowers of the French nobility we had plucked. Sir Reginald Cobham, that stalwart soldier, called together anyone with knowledge of the French colours, because in so many cases, it was only paint and crests and armour which still distinguished one pulped face from another. I closed my eyes when I had seen enough, but the distinctive noise of the aftermath made just as vivid a picture through my ears. I could hear the horse teams snorting and stamping and the sliding apart of the piles as they pulled. The clank of armour against armour and the wet thud of dead flesh hitting the ground as the bodies of horses and men were tugged apart. Every now and then there would be a sigh or a moan as air squeezed from dead lungs and, in amongst it, all the time, there was the cheerful shouting of men who found what they were doing to be perfectly acceptable.

‘I want to find a peaceful place,’ I said. ‘Somewhere to think and to gather those thoughts and to say prayers. Somewhere away from Molyns and his like. Somewhere away from war.’

‘You have your leaky castle,’ said Batokewaye.

‘Walwayns? Walwayns is a hard place to get to and a harder place to stay in. Walwayns spells struggle not peace. It is all I can do to stop it coming to pieces around my ears. Every day I spend there, I am beset by troubles. The people are full of complaints, the air is full of rain and falling rocks, the fields are full of weeds and the kitchens are full of rats. Walwayns is a penance.’

‘I know a better place,’ he said quietly.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘It is in a fold of valleys and gentle hills, a short stroll inland from a friendly sea. A long lake, full of fish, protects it from that sea and there is a drawbridge on the lake to keep off raiders. The village is sheltered from the winds and it soaks up the sun like a sponge. It has a twisting narrow street, houses built of stone and the fields around it are full of fat beasts. It is close to Heaven and there is always beer in the jug and food in the pot.’

‘You come from this blessed place?’

‘I do.’

‘I wish it were mine to live in,’ I said.

‘It is, Lord,’ he replied.

‘I’m not a lord,’ I said.

‘The place I’m talking about is Slapton in Devon,’ he said, looking at me expectantly. ‘That’s why I call you Lord.’

‘What?’

‘You have not heard of it?’

‘No,’ and then, slightly irritated, ‘why did you laugh? Is it such a famous place?’

‘It should be,’ he answered, ‘to you at least. You are Lord of the manor of Slapton, as well as Nympton St George, Satterleigh, Newton, Rocombe and Northaller.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Did your father not tell you?’

For the last ten years of my father’s life he had told me that I was the child of Satan, that he could fly like a bat, that we could eat the stones of the castle’s tower if we only boiled them long enough, and that he was the rightful king of the lost tribes of Egypt. He had never mentioned Slapton. ‘No, he didn’t,’ I said. ‘Does that mean you knew who I was all along?’

‘Not until you told me your name,’ said Batokewaye. ‘I knew Guy de Bryan was serving the King, but I didn’t know which one you were. I’m glad it was you.’

‘Did you know my father?’

‘I was ten years old the last time he came to Devon. It always puzzled us that he didn’t come again. It’s a fair place and there are rents collected year by year.’

‘Who collects them?’

‘My father’s the steward. He’s an old man now, but he’s honest’

‘Is there a house?’

‘There is Pool.’

‘What’s Pool?’

‘The manor house, a great house indeed. It lies in the bottom of the little valley that runs inland from Slap ton. It is a shaded place but well built in stone and it has more chimneys than you ever see in that part of the world, and there is enough wood stored in Pool’s barns to make smoke come out of every one of them. You’ll like Pool.’

‘I’ll come to see it, William Batokewaye. I need a quiet place. Shall you and I go there together when this war is through?’

‘There’s a lot more Frenchmen where these came from,’ he said. ‘That may be a while yet.’

CHAPTER SIX

Having erased Slapton so successfully from her own story of herself, it had simply not occurred to Beth that Slapton’s inhabitants would not have done the same. If no one in London knew she came from Slapton, it seemed that everyone in Slapton knew she had gone to London and even had quite a good idea of what she was doing there. It didn’t occur to Beth that her father might be proud of her, that he might talk about her as if they were often in touch. Carrying in her head the scornful childish caricature of this place as somewhere so cut off from the modern world that it lacked television, radio and newspapers, she had been counting on anonymity. It had come as an absurd shock to find that her father knew exactly what had been happening to her in the past forty-eight hours, that the neighbours had told him, that people here were gossiping about her.

Head down, hurrying, Beth left his house and took refuge in the back lane. It led out of the side of the village towards her grandmother’s cottage, and it had served the younger Beth as an escape route many times before. There was nobody around in the lane, but she imagined eyes inside every window, looking at her, matching her to the stories in their morning papers, and it was a relief to leave the houses behind.

But Slapton wouldn’t leave her behind. It was coming back at her from the closed cupboards of memory, the stony surface of the path, the gate she used to sit on when she had somehow got annoyed with both parent and grandparent at once, and the fence where the dog had cornered her. In the first field, she saw the bushes where she used to make her camp and where, on her tenth birthday, she had buried a tin filled with the toys she decided she had outgrown, vowing to herself that she would never dig them up again.

The path led downhill between two more fields, then up into trees and by the stile she took the old branch to the right that led to Quarry Cottage. This was the spot, she had always felt, where you started to feel Eliza’s presence spreading out through the countryside around her house. She was going to take the familiar short cut straight through the deserted quarry, but something had changed. It was no longer deserted. New gates closed the gap between the trees. The roofs of the old sheds beyond had been repaired, the brambles had gone and a truck was parked on fresh gravel where the big puddle always used to be.

Eliza’s path ran around the far side of the quarry between the trees and Beth intended to take it but, out of mild curiosity and more from an unexpressed wish to delay her arrival at the old woman’s house, she walked towards the new gate, opened it an inch or two and looked in, straight up into the face of the man who had been walking quietly towards it from the other side. He wore overalls and he was pulling off a pair of heavy leather gloves. His face was painted with matt grey dust which accentuated the sharp planes of his cheeks. He was smiling at some private joke and his eyes shone. What was even more surprising was that he stopped, looked at her calmly and said ‘Hello Beth, I heard you were back,’ and for a moment, she had no idea who he was.

‘Lewis?’ she said, after a giveaway pause. ‘Is it you?’ For just one absurd moment, she had taken him for Lewis’s older brother, but Lewis didn’t have an older brother. Seven years had filled him out and toughened him. She knew it was seven years because the last time she had seen him, they were each home from university and she had given him the cold shoulder. Then they’d both moved away.

‘You went off somewhere,’ she said. ‘Scotland?’

‘Ireland. I came back. What about you?’

‘I…seem to be back too. Just for a day or two.’ She looked in through the gate. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘Hasn’t Eliza told you? I reopened the old place.’

‘As a quarry? I thought it died on its feet years ago.’

‘Come in and see,’ he suggested, ‘if you’re not in too much of a rush.’

‘I ought to go on.’

‘It’ll only take a minute. I can’t be too long myself. I’ve got to be in Dartmouth in half an hour. It would be handy because I’ve got a bag of Eliza’s shopping in the shed. You could save me time by taking it with you. That’s if you don’t mind?’

Seven years on, and they were talking about Eliza’s shopping. She didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

Inside, the tall face of the quarry loomed out of the trees to their left. Rows of rough-cut stone slabs were laid out on the ground. He took her to the larger of the two sheds.

‘You remember, this whole place was my granddad’s?’ he said as he unlocked the door. ‘He never worked the stone, not after the war anyway. When he died he left it to me, so I decided I’d have a go.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Me and Rob. He’s here part-time.’

‘Who’s Rob?’

‘You must remember Rob. Robin Watson? He was in primary with us. He went to the comprehensive.’

For a moment Beth rejected the very idea that she might remember someone from junior school, that even more connections might be waiting in this place, ready to trap her and wind her back in, but all the same she had a vague memory of a large, shambling boy. The comprehensive? She and Lewis had both gone on to the grammar school, the only ones from Slap ton who did. Seven years of that long bus ride together, twice every day.

‘You make a living out of this?’ she asked, looking around.

‘You mean is it just a hobby? No, it’s a job.’

She bit back her words. She wanted to say, you were bright, you could have done anything. Why are you wearing dirty overalls with stone dust in your hair? Why are you wasting time in Slapton? You got away, why did you come back?

His eyes changed as if he remembered her capacity for scorn. ‘It’s a little gem, this place.’ He checked his watch, ‘Do you know anything about geology?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Have you ever been to Purbeck?’

‘No.’

‘On the Dorset coast? Maybe, oh I don’t know, sixty miles east of here. The Isle of Purbeck? It’s not really an island. They just call it that. It’s this side of Weymouth.’

‘I haven’t been there, no.’ He talked as if he could persuade her she had.

‘Well, it was always famous for Purbeck marble. There’s not much left to be had now. Come in and have a quick look, I’ll show you.’

On a bench inside was a carved and fluted column in a stone so dark green it was almost black. It glistened.

‘It’s not really marble,’ he said, running one hand over it. ‘That’s just what they call it. It’s a sandstone, you see, but it’s packed full of tiny, hard shells and when you cut it clean you can get a real shine on it. Beautiful, isn’t it? They always used it for the fine work in churches and places like that.’ His voice had an unexpected reverence in it.

Despite herself, the stone drew her attention and she traced the path of his fingers with her own. ‘So you get it from Purbeck and you carve it here?’

‘Oh no, no. This came from here. That’s the whole point. This is a geological oddity, you see, our very own little outcrop of the marble on the south-west, north-east line. The only place you find it west of Purbeck itself.’

‘So people still want it?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘What’s this bit for?’

‘Restoration work for a church in Winchester.’

‘And they come all the way here for it?’

‘Beth, this is where they came originally when they were building that same church. The marble looks just a little bit different in every seam, you see, the colour, the shade. You want to match it, you got to come back to the same place.’ He had always had enthusiasm and she could remember how much that had annoyed her when enthusiasm in any form was the last thing she admired. He bent down and pulled out a section of a column from the floor below the bench. It was dull and half of it had crumbled away. ‘This is the bit they want to replace. I’ve been down into a few of the old holes and I reckon I’ve found the very same face it came from in the first place. I’m carving the exact same stone.’

‘Why’s it in such a state?’ Beth asked, looking at the crumbling piece on the floor between them.

Lewis frowned. ‘It was just poor stuff. There was a pocket of mud in it and they carved it badly anyway. They should never have let it leave the quarry.’ He sounded irritated, almost angry, as if the family had let someone down.

‘When was that?’ Beth asked, thinking perhaps it was back in the fifties or sixties when his grandfather was still working.

‘Thirteen twenty-two,’ said Lewis. ‘They’ve still got all the old records. Very bad. You shouldn’t let anyone down like that. This stone should be good for thousands of years.’

She looked hard at him and saw he meant what he said. He was annoyed with stone cutters who had been dead more than seven centuries for letting the business down.

‘Any chance you can come back tomorrow?’ he said, looking at his watch again, ‘I’d like to show you the rest. See what you think.’

‘Maybe,’ said Beth. ‘I’m not sure how long I’m staying.’

‘Do you mind giving this to Eliza?’ he asked, picking up a shopping bag. ‘Her change is in it.’

‘If she’s there. I was going to take potluck. She doesn’t even know I’m here yet.’

‘Oh yes she does,’ said Lewis. ‘That’s how I knew you were here. She told me.’

Eliza already knew she was here. How could that be? All at once Beth found she needed to be out in the fresh air again, away from people who knew things. There was no escaping her grandmother though. Not if she knew.

‘Do you see much of her?’

‘She drops in most days for a chat and a cup of tea.’

She was heading for the door when she first noticed the fragments of the old stone slab. They were laid out on a flat table, eroded and camouflaged with lichen. She paused for a moment to look and Lewis stopped too. It had once been a stone rectangle, but at some point, long ago, it had broken apart into a dozen constituent pieces and the jagged edges had been softened and blurred with all the time that had passed since. Someone, Lewis presumably, had laid it out carefully on the wooden table, fitting it together like a jigsaw, but there was a large gap where one piece was missing. Faint lettering was incised into it, but that too had eroded almost away.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘I’m doing some restoration,’ Lewis said. ‘It came from the Chantry tower. They want me to put it back together if I can.’

‘Who’s they? English Heritage?’

‘No. The tower’s privately owned. The house and the tower. Don’t you remember? I think it’s changed hands since your time.’

She did remember, vaguely. The great tower had never been an important part of her life in Slapton, having no function.

‘What is this? A memorial of some sort?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Do you know what it says?’

‘Only part of it. You’ve heard of Guy de Bryan?’

‘No.’

He looked surprised for a moment then glanced at his watch yet again. ‘I really should get going. Come back when you’ve got a bit of time. I’ll tell you all about it.’

So then he was gone and she was alone again, outside the quarry, watching him drive away and pushing down the memories which seemed too childish to be allowed. She turned back to the path to Eliza’s, knowing there was no alternative but to walk on down it and knowing that at the far end was the wonderful, dreadful woman who was her grandmother and who loved her and disapproved of her in equal measure.

She sighed and started walking. It had never before struck her as odd that when the path bent around to the left and delivered her, still unprepared, to the house, it was the rear of the house that she saw and not the front. The house sat in a clearing in the trees facing the wrong way, as if it had one day heaved itself up in a sulk and turned its back on its visitors. The garden was here, on this side. The front faced nothing but the dense and ragged trees which Eliza had left untended for years so that they pressed against the front windows, scraping the glass when the wind blew and shading the sitting room. Eliza never bothered to open the curtains. She lived in the kitchen most of the time, except when she was out in her sheds doing obscure jobs with the wrong tools.

Eliza was standing there outside the back door as if she had been expecting her.

‘Have you come by yourself?’ was the first thing she said, taking the shopping bag and peering past Beth at the trees as though she might have to repel an invading horde.

‘Yes,’ said Beth ‘Hello Gran.’

‘You’d better come in before anyone sees you.’

That made Beth look around too, but all was quiet in the clearing in the trees and there was no one there but the two of them.

Eliza’s kitchen was the same as ever. In the middle stood an old oak table and around it were a sofa and three armchairs which, even before they had sagged with half a century of use, had been much too low for the table. Since Beth had first known this room, which was as far back as she could remember, she had always had to lean forward from the swaying nest of springs and horsehair to reach up to the table for her plate or cup. Meals at Quarry Cottage were eaten on your lap, and if Eliza was sitting opposite, you wound up talking to the top of her head because that was all you could see.

‘I’ve got elderflower or mead,’ said Eliza. ‘The mead’s sweeter but the elderflower’s older.’

‘Could I just have a glass of water?’ Beth nearly said mineral water before she remembered where she was.

‘From the tap?’ Eliza sounded shocked. ‘I’d have to boil it.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s coming out a bit green. The pump’s been greased.’

‘A cup of tea then?’

Eliza went into the larder and came out with two tumblers of a thick amber liquid. Beth recognised the sweet honey smell of her mead and resigned herself. Her grandmother put one on the table and drained most of the other one at a gulp. She was the same as ever, as thin as a kipper, as she always said, and much the same colour. Eliza’s skin was as tough as tanned leather. She looked as if she’d been smoked. Scorning hairdressers after a woman in Dartmouth had once tried to charge her a pound for a cut and wash in the nineteen seventies, she had bought a pair of electric clippers and kept her white hair shorn in a bristly crew cut. She was not much more than five feet two inches tall, but she was not in the slightest bit fragile.

She stood looking down at Beth, who was trying to find a section of the sofa where the ends of the springs weren’t so sharp.

‘You’ve got yourself in a pickle, girl,’ she observed. ‘I never thought going off to London was a good idea. Don’t know what’s wrong with Slapton.’

Eliza didn’t read the papers. She said bad news would come and find you soon enough if it mattered. There wasn’t a radio in the house and Beth was pretty sure her grandmother had never watched television in her entire life.

‘I asked Lewis,’ the old woman said, divining Beth’s puzzlement. ‘They were talking in the churchyard yesterday. I heard your name before they saw me.’

So Lewis knew all about it too.

‘You got thinner,’ Eliza observed, inspecting her.

Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. That’s not a compliment. You look like a refugee. Have you been doing what I said? A mug of hot milk every night, with local honey in it? Got to be local. The bees give you what you need, see? The pollen from the flowers around about where you live, that’s the best thing for you.’

There’re not many bees in central London, Gran.’

Eliza snorted. ‘Course there are. There’s bees everywhere. You’re just too busy to notice as well as too busy to eat properly. Well, I suppose I thought you’d be more different.’

‘I haven’t been away that long.’

‘Oh yes you have. Two letters and one postcard in getting on for three years? I suppose I should be counting myself lucky. It’s more than your dad’s had.’

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