BERNARD CORNWELL

Harlequin

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2000

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007338788

Version: 2018-04-20

HARLEQUIN

is for

Richard and Julie Rutherford-Moore

‘…many deadly battles have been fought, people slaughtered, churches robbed, souls destroyed, young women and virgins deflowered, respectable wives and widows dishonoured; towns, manors and buildings burned, and robberies, cruelties and ambushes committed on the highways. Justice has failed because of these things. The Christian faith has withered and commerce has perished and so many other wickednesses and horrid things have followed from these wars that they cannot be spoken, numbered or written down.’

JEAN II, KING OF FRANCE, 1360

Harlequin, probably derived from the Old French hellequin: a troop of the devil’s horsemen.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One BRITTANY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two NORMANDY

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Three CRÉCY

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Historical Note

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

Prologue

The treasure of Hookton was stolen on Easter morning 1342.

It was a holy thing, a relic that hung from the church rafters, and it was extraordinary that so precious an object should have been kept in such an obscure village. Some folk said it had no business being there, that it should have been enshrined in a cathedral or some great abbey, while others, many others, said it was not genuine. Only fools denied that relics were faked. Glib men roamed the byways of England selling yellowed bones that were said to be from the fingers or toes or ribs of the blessed saints, and sometimes the bones were human, though more often they were from pigs or even deer, but still folk bought and prayed to the bones. ‘A man might as well pray to St Guinefort,’ Father Ralph said, then snorted with mocking laughter. ‘They’re praying to ham bones, ham bones! The blessed pig!’

It had been Father Ralph who had brought the treasure to Hookton and he would not hear of it being taken away to a cathedral or abbey, and so for eight years it hung in the small church, gathering dust and growing spider webs that shone silver when the sunlight slanted through the high window of the western tower. Sparrows perched on the treasure and some mornings there were bats hanging from its shaft. It was rarely cleaned and hardly ever brought down, though once in a while Father Ralph would demand that ladders be fetched and the treasure unhooked from its chains and he would pray over it and stroke it. He never boasted of it. Other churches or monasteries, possessing such a prize, would have used it to attract pilgrims, but Father Ralph turned visitors away. ‘It is nothing,’ he would say if a stranger enquired after the relic, ‘a bauble. Nothing.’ He became angry if the visitors persisted. ‘It is nothing, nothing, nothing!’ Father Ralph was a frightening man even when he was not angry, but in his temper he was a wild-haired fiend, and his flaring anger protected the treasure, though Father Ralph himself believed that ignorance was its best protection for if men did not know of it then God would guard it. And so He did, for a time.

Hookton’s obscurity was the treasure’s best protection. The tiny village lay on England’s south coast where the Lipp, a stream that was almost a river, flowed to the sea across a shingle beach. A half-dozen fishing boats worked from the village, protected at night by the Hook itself, which was a tongue of shingle that curved around the Lipp’s last reach, though in the famous storm of 1322 the sea had roared across the Hook and pounded the boats to splinters on the upper beach. The village had never really recovered from that tragedy. Nineteen boats had sailed from the Hook before the storm, but twenty years later only six small craft worked the waves beyond the Lipp’s treacherous bar. The rest of the villagers worked in the saltpans, or else herded sheep and cattle on the hills behind the huddle of thatched huts which clustered about the small stone church where the treasure hung from the blackened beams. That was Hookton, a place of boats, fish, salt and livestock, with green hills behind, ignorance within and the wide sea beyond.

Hookton, like every place in Christendom, held a vigil on the eve of Easter, and in 1342 that solemn duty was performed by five men who watched as Father Ralph consecrated the Easter Sacraments and then laid the bread and wine on the white-draped altar. The wafers were in a simple clay bowl covered with a piece of bleached linen, while the wine was in a silver cup that belonged to Father Ralph. The silver cup was a part of his mystery. He was very tall, pious and much too learned to be a village priest. It was rumoured that he could have been a bishop, but that the devil had persecuted him with bad dreams and it was certain that in the years before he came to Hookton he had been locked in a monastery’s cell because he was possessed by demons. Then, in 1334, the demons had left him and he was sent to Hookton where he terrified the villagers by preaching to the gulls, or pacing the beach weeping for his sins and striking his breast with sharp-edged stones. He howled like a dog when his wickedness weighed too heavily on his conscience, but he also found a kind of peace in the remote village. He built a large house of timber, which he shared with his housekeeper, and he made friends with Sir Giles Marriott, who was the lord of Hookton and lived in a stone hall three miles to the north.

Sir Giles, of course, was a gentleman, and so it seemed was Father Ralph, despite his wild hair and angry voice. He collected books which, after the treasure he had brought to the church, were the greatest marvels in Hookton. Sometimes, when he left his door open, people would just gape at the seventeen books that were bound in leather and piled on a table. Most were in Latin, but a handful were in French, which was Father Ralph’s native tongue. Not the French of France, but Norman French, the language of England’s rulers, and the villagers reckoned their priest must be nobly born, though none dared ask him to his face. They were all too scared of him, but he did his duty by them; he christened them, churched them, married them, heard their confessions, absolved them, scolded them and buried them, but he did not pass the time with them. He walked alone, grim-faced, hair awry and eyes glowering, but the villagers were still proud of him. Most country churches suffered ignorant, pudding-faced priests who were scarce more educated than their parishioners, but, Hookton, in Father Ralph had a proper scholar, too clever to be sociable, perhaps a saint, maybe of noble birth, a self-confessed sinner, probably mad, but undeniably a real priest.

Father Ralph blessed the Sacraments, then warned the five men that Lucifer was abroad on the night before Easter and that the devil wanted nothing so much as to snatch the Holy Sacraments from the altar and so the five men must guard the bread and wine diligently and, for a short time after the priest had left, they dutifully stayed on their knees, gazing at the chalice, which had an armorial badge engraved in its silver flank. The badge showed a mythical beast, a yale, holding a grail, and it was that noble device which suggested to the villagers that Father Ralph was indeed a high-born man who had fallen low through being possessed of devils. The silver chalice seemed to shimmer in the light of two immensely tall candles which would burn through the whole long night. Most villages could not afford proper Easter candles, but Father Ralph purchased two from the monks at Shaftesbury every year and the villagers would sidle into the church to stare at them. But that night, after dark, only the five men saw the tall unwavering flames.

Then John, a fisherman, farted. ‘Reckon that’s ripe enough to keep the old devil away,’ he said, and the other four laughed. Then they all abandoned the chancel steps and sat with their backs against the nave wall. John’s wife had provided a basket of bread, cheese and smoked fish, while Edward, who owned a saltworks on the beach, had brought ale.

In the bigger churches of Christendom knights kept this annual vigil. They knelt in full armour, their surcoats embroidered with prancing lions and stooping hawks and axe heads and spread-wing eagles, and their helmets mounted with feathered crests, but there were no knights in Hookton and only the youngest man, who was called Thomas and who sat slightly apart from the other four, had a weapon. It was an ancient, blunt and slightly rusted sword.

‘You reckon that old blade will scare the devil, Thomas?’ John asked him.

‘My father said I had to bring it,’ Thomas said.

‘What does your father want with a sword?’

‘He throws nothing away, you know that,’ Thomas said, hefting the old weapon. It was heavy, but he lifted it easily; at eighteen, he was tall and immensely strong. He was well liked in Hookton for, despite being the son of the village’s richest man, he was a hard-working boy. He loved nothing better than a day at sea hauling tarred nets that left his hands raw and bleeding. He knew how to sail a boat, had the strength to pull a good oar when the wind failed; he could lay snares, shoot a bow, dig a grave, geld a calf, lay thatch or cut hay all day long. He was a big, bony, black-haired country boy, but God had given him a father who wanted Thomas to rise above common things. He wanted the boy to be a priest, which was why Thomas had just finished his first term at Oxford.

‘What do you do at Oxford, Thomas?’ Edward asked him.

‘Everything I shouldn’t,’ Thomas said. He pushed black hair away from his face that was bony like his father’s. He had very blue eyes, a long jaw, slightly hooded eyes and a swift smile. The girls in the village reckoned him handsome.

‘Do they have girls at Oxford?’ John asked slyly.

‘More than enough,’ Thomas said.

‘Don’t tell your father that,’ Edward said, ‘or he’ll be whipping you again. A good man with a whip, your father.’

‘There’s none better,’ Thomas agreed.

‘He only wants the best for you,’ John said. ‘Can’t blame a man for that.’

Thomas did blame his father. He had always blamed his father. He had fought his father for years, and nothing so raised the anger between them as Thomas’s obsession with bows. His mother’s father had been a bowyer in the Weald, and Thomas had lived with his grandfather until he was nearly ten. Then his father had brought him to Hookton, where he had met Sir Giles Marriott’s huntsman, another man skilled in archery, and the huntsman had become his new tutor. Thomas had made his first bow at eleven, but when his father found the elmwood weapon he had broken it across his knee and used the remnants to thrash his son. ‘You are not a common man,’ his father had shouted, beating the splintered staves on Thomas’s back and head and legs, but neither the words nor the thrashing did any good. And as Thomas’s father was usually preoccupied with other things, Thomas had plenty of time to pursue his obsession.

By fifteen he was as good a bowyer as his grandfather, knowing instinctively how to shape a stave of yew so that the inner belly came from the dense heartwood while the front was made of the springier sapwood, and when the bow was bent the heartwood was always trying to return to the straight and the sapwood was the muscle that made it possible. To Thomas’s quick mind there was something elegant, simple and beautiful about a good bow. Smooth and strong, a good bow was like a girl’s flat belly, and that night, keeping the Easter vigil in Hookton church, Thomas was reminded of Jane, who served in the village’s small alehouse.

John, Edward and the other two men had been speaking of village things: the price of lambs at Dorchester fair, the old fox up on Lipp Hill that had taken a whole flock of geese in one night and the angel who had been seen over the rooftops at Lyme.

‘I reckon they’s been drinking too much,’ Edward said.

‘I sees angels when I drink,’ John said.

‘That be Jane,’ Edward said. ‘Looks like an angel, she does.’

‘Don’t behave like one,’ John said. ‘Lass is pregnant,’ and all four men looked at Thomas, who stared innocently up at the treasure hanging from the rafters. In truth Thomas was frightened that the child was indeed his and terrified of what his father would say when he found out, but he pretended ignorance of Jane’s pregnancy that night. He just looked at the treasure that was half obscured by a fishing net hung up to dry, while the four older men gradually fell asleep. A cold draught flickered the twin candle flames. A dog howled somewhere in the village, and always, never ending, Thomas could hear the sea’s heartbeat as the waves thumped on the shingle then scraped back, paused and thumped again. He listened to the four men snoring and he prayed that his father would never find out about Jane, though that was unlikely for she was pressing Thomas to marry her and he did not know what to do. Maybe, he thought, he should just run away, take Jane and his bow and run, but he felt no certainty and so he just gazed at the relic in the church roof and prayed to its saint for help.

The treasure was a lance. It was a huge thing, with a shaft as thick as a man’s forearm and twice the length of a man’s height and probably made of ash though it was so old no one could really say, and age had bent the blackened shaft out of true, though not by much, and its tip was not an iron or steel blade, but a wedge of tarnished silver which tapered to a bodkin’s point. The shaft did not swell to protect the handgrip, but was smooth like a spear or a goad; indeed the relic looked very like an oversized ox-goad, but no farmer would ever tip an ox-goad with silver. This was a weapon, a lance.

But it was not any old lance. This was the very lance which St George had used to kill the dragon. It was England’s lance, for St George was England’s saint and that made it a very great treasure, even if it did hang in Hookton’s spidery church roof. There were plenty of folk who said it could not have been St George’s lance, but Thomas believed it was and he liked to imagine the dust churned by the hooves of St George’s horse, and the dragon’s breath streaming in hellish flame as the horse reared and the saint drew back the lance. The sunlight, bright as an angel’s wing, would have been flaring about St George’s helmet, and Thomas imagined the dragon’s roar, the thrash of its scale-hooked tail, the horse screaming in terror, and he saw the saint stand in his stirrups before plunging the lance’s silver tip down through the monster’s armoured hide. Straight to the heart the lance went, and the dragon’s squeals would have rung to heaven as it writhed and bled and died. Then the dust would have settled and the dragon’s blood would have crusted on the desert sand, and St George must have hauled the lance free and somehow it ended up in Father Ralph’s possession. But how? The priest would not say. But there it hung, a great dark lance, heavy enough to shatter a dragon’s scales.

So that night Thomas prayed to St George while Jane, the black-haired beauty whose belly was just rounding with her unborn child, slept in the taproom of the alehouse, and Father Ralph cried aloud in his nightmare for fear of the demons that circled in the dark, and the vixens screamed on the hill as the endless waves clawed and sucked at the shingle on the Hook. It was the night before Easter.

Thomas woke to the sound of the village cockerels and saw that the expensive candles had burned down almost to their pewter holders. A grey light filled the window above the white-fronted altar. One day, Father Ralph had promised the village, that window would be a blaze of coloured glass showing St George skewering the dragon with the silver-headed lance, but for now the stone frame was filled with horn panes that turned the air within the church as yellow as urine.

Thomas stood, needing to piss, and the first awful screams sounded from the village.

For Easter had come, Christ was risen and the French were ashore.

The raiders came from Normandy in four boats that had sailed the night’s west wind. Their leader, Sir Guillaume d’Evecque, the Sieur d’Evecque, was a seasoned warrior who had fought the English in Gascony and Flanders, and had twice led raids on England’s southern coast. Both times he had brought his boats safe home with cargoes of wool, silver, livestock and women. He lived in a fine stone house on Caen’s Île St Jean, where he was known as the knight of the sea and of the land. He was thirty years old, broad in the chest, wind-burned and fair-haired, a cheerful, unreflective man who made his living by piracy at sea and knight-service on shore, and now he had come to Hookton.

It was an insignificant place, hardly likely to yield any great reward, but Sir Guillaume had been hired for the task and if he failed at Hookton, if he did not snatch so much as one single poor coin from a villager, he would still make his profit for he had been promised one thousand livres for this expedition. The contract was signed and sealed, and it promised Sir Guillaume the one thousand livres together with any other plunder he could find in Hookton. One hundred livres had already been paid and the rest was in the keeping of Brother Martin in Caen’s Abbaye aux Hommes, and all Sir Guillaume had to do to earn the remaining nine hundred livres was bring his boats to Hookton, take what he wanted, but leave the church’s contents to the man who had offered him such a generous contract. That man now stood beside Sir Guillaume in the leading boat.

He was a young man, not yet thirty, tall and black-haired, who spoke rarely and smiled less. He wore an expensive coat of mail that fell to his knees and over it a surcoat of deep black linen that bore no badge, though Sir Guillaume guessed the man was nobly born for he had the arrogance of rank and the confidence of privilege. He was certainly not a Norman noble, for Sir Guillaume knew all those men, and Sir Guillaume doubted the young man came from nearby Alençon or Maine, for he had ridden with those forces often enough, but the sallow cast of the stranger’s skin suggested he came from one of the Mediterranean provinces, from Languedoc perhaps, or Dauphine, and they were all mad down there. Mad as dogs. Sir Guillaume did not even know the man’s name.

‘Some men call me the Harlequin,’ the stranger had answered when Sir Guillaume had asked.

‘Harlequin?’ Sir Guillaume had repeated the name, then made the sign of the cross for such a name was hardly a boast. ‘You mean like the hellequin?’

‘Hellequin in France,’ the man had allowed, ‘but in Italy they say harlequin. It is all the same.’ The man had smiled, and something about that smile had suggested Sir Guillaume had best curb his curiosity if he wanted to receive the remaining nine hundred livres.

The man who called himself the Harlequin now stared at the misty shore where a stumpy church tower, a huddle of vague roofs and a smear of smoke from the smouldering fires of the saltpans just showed. ‘Is that Hookton?’ he asked.

‘So he says,’ Sir Guillaume answered, jerking his head at the shipmaster.

‘Then God have mercy on it,’ the man said. He drew his sword, even though the four boats were still a half-mile from shore. The Genoese crossbowmen, hired for the voyage, made the sign of the cross, then began winding their cords as Sir Guillaume ordered his banner raised to the masthead. It was a blue flag decorated with three stooping yellow hawks that had outspread wings and claws hooked ready to savage their prey. Sir Guillaume could smell the salt fires and hear the cockerels crowing ashore.

The cockerels were still crowing as the bows of his four ships ran onto the shingle.

Sir Guillaume and the Harlequin were the first ashore, but after them came a score of Genoese crossbowmen, who were professional soldiers and knew their business. Their leader took them up the beach and through the village to block the valley beyond, where they would stop any of the villagers escaping with their valuables. Sir Guillaume’s remaining men would ransack the houses while the sailors stayed on the beach to guard their ships.

It had been a long, cold and anxious night at sea, but now came the reward. Forty men-at-arms invaded Hookton. They wore close-fitting helmets and had mail shirts over leather-backed hacquetons, they carried swords, axes or spears, and they were released to plunder. Most were veterans of Sir Guillaume’s other raids and knew just what to do. Kick in the flimsy doors and start killing the men. Let the women scream, but kill the men, for it was the men who would fight back hardest. Some women ran, but the Genoese crossbowmen were there to stop them. Once the men were dead the plundering could begin, and that took time for peasants everywhere hid whatever was valuable and the hiding places had to be ferreted out. Thatch had to be pulled down, wells explored, floors probed, but plenty of things were not hidden. There were hams waiting for the first meal after Lent, racks of smoked or dried fish, piles of nets, good cooking pots, distaffs and spindles, eggs, butter churns, casks of salt–all humble enough things, but sufficiently valuable to take back to Normandy. Some houses yielded small hoards of coins, and one house, the priest’s, was a treasure-trove of silver plate, candlesticks and jugs. There were even some good bolts of woollen cloth in the priest’s house, and a great carved bed, and a decent horse in the stable. Sir Guillaume looked at the seventeen books, but decided they were worthless and so, having wrenched the bronze locks from the leather covers, he left them to burn when the houses were fired.

He had to kill the priest’s housekeeper. He regretted that death. Sir Guillaume was not squeamish about killing women, but their deaths brought no honour and so he discouraged such slaughter unless the woman caused trouble, and the priest’s housekeeper wanted to fight. She slashed at Sir Guillaume’s men-at-arms with a roasting spit, called them sons of whores and devils’ grubs, and in the end Sir Guillaume cut her down with his sword because she would not accept her fate.

‘Stupid bitch,’ Sir Guillaume said, stepping over her body to peer into the hearth. Two fine hams were being smoked in the chimney. ‘Pull them down,’ he ordered one of his men, then left them to search the house while he went to the church.

Father Ralph, woken by the screams of his parishioners, had pulled on a cassock and run to the church. Sir Guillaume’s men had left him alone out of respect, but once inside the little church the priest had begun to hit the invaders until the Harlequin arrived and snarled at the men-at-arms to hold the priest. They seized his arms and held him in front of the altar with its white Easter frontal.

The Harlequin, his sword in his hand, bowed to Father Ralph. ‘My lord Count,’ he said.

Father Ralph closed his eyes, perhaps in prayer, though it looked more like exasperation. He opened them and gazed into the Harlequin’s handsome face. ‘You are my brother’s son,’ he said, and did not sound mad at all, merely full of regret.

‘True.’

‘How is your father?’

‘Dead,’ the Harlequin said, ‘as is his father and yours.’

‘God rest their souls,’ Father Ralph said piously.

‘And when you are dead, old man, I shall be the Count and our family will rise again.’

Father Ralph half smiled, then just shook his head and looked up at the lance. ‘It will do you no good,’ he said, ‘for its power is reserved for virtuous men. It will not work for evil filth like you.’ Then Father Ralph gave a curious mewing noise as the breath rushed from him and he stared down to where his nephew had run the sword into his belly. He struggled to speak, but no words came, then he collapsed as the men-at-arms released him and he slumped by the altar with blood puddling in his lap.

The Harlequin wiped his sword on the wine-stained altar cloth, then ordered one of Sir Guillaume’s men to find a ladder.

‘A ladder?’ the man-at-arms asked in confusion.

‘They thatch their roofs, don’t they? So they have a ladder. Find it.’ The Harlequin sheathed his sword, then stared up at the lance of St George.

‘I have put a curse on it.’ Father Ralph spoke faintly. He was pale-faced, dying, but sounded oddly calm.

‘Your curse, my lord, worries me as much as a tavern maid’s fart.’ The Harlequin tossed the pewter candlesticks to a man-at-arms, then scooped the wafers from the clay bowl and crammed them into his mouth. He picked up the bowl, peered at its darkened surface and reckoned it was a thing of no value so left it on the altar. ‘Where’s the wine?’ he asked Father Ralph.

Father Ralph shook his head. ‘Calix meus inebrians,’ he said, and the Harlequin just laughed. Father Ralph closed his eyes as the pain griped his belly. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned.

The Harlequin crouched by his uncle’s side. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Like fire,’ Father Ralph said.

‘You will burn in hell, my lord,’ the Harlequin said, and he saw how Father Ralph was clutching his wounded belly to staunch the flow of blood and so he pulled the priest’s hands away and then, standing, kicked him hard in the stomach. Father Ralph gasped with pain and curled his body. ‘A gift from your family,’ the Harlequin said, then turned away as a ladder was brought into the church.

The village was filled with screams, for most of the women and children were still alive and their ordeal had scarcely begun. All the younger women were briskly raped by Sir Guillaume’s men and the prettiest of them, including Jane from the alehouse, were taken to the boats so they could be carried back to Normandy to become the whores or wives of Sir Guillaume’s soldiers. One of the women screamed because her baby was still in her house, but the soldiers did not understand her and they struck her to silence then pushed her into the hands of the sailors, who lay her on the shingle and lifted her skirts. She wept inconsolably as her house burned. Geese, pigs, goats, six cows and the priest’s good horse were herded towards the boats while the white gulls rode the sky, crying.

The sun had scarcely risen above the eastern hills and the village had already yielded more than Sir Guillaume had dared hope for.

‘We could go inland,’ the captain of his Genoese crossbowmen suggested.

‘We have what we came for,’ the black-dressed Harlequin intervened. He had placed the unwieldy lance of St George on the graveyard grass, and now stared at the ancient weapon as though he was trying to understand its power.

‘What is it?’ the Genoese crossbowman asked.

‘Nothing that is of use to you.’

Sir Guillaume grinned. ‘Strike a blow with that,’ he said, ‘and it’ll shatter like ivory.’

The Harlequin shrugged. He had found what he wanted, and Sir Guillaume’s opinion was of no interest.

‘Go inland,’ the Genoese captain suggested again.

‘A few miles, maybe,’ Sir Guillaume said. He knew that the dreaded English archers would eventually come to Hookton, but probably not till midday, and he wondered if there was another village close by that would be worth plundering. He watched a terrified girl, maybe eleven years old, being carried towards the beach by a soldier. ‘How many dead?’ he asked.

‘Ours?’ The Genoese captain seemed surprised by the question. ‘None.’

‘Not ours, theirs.’

‘Thirty men? Forty? A few women?’

‘And we haven’t taken a scratch!’ Sir Guillaume exulted. ‘Pity to stop now.’ He looked at his employer, but the man in black did not seem to care what they did, while the Genoese captain just grunted, which surprised Sir Guillaume for he thought the man was eager to extend the raid, but then he saw that the man’s sullen grunt was not caused by any lack of enthusiasm, but by a white-feathered arrow that had buried itself in his breast. The arrow had slit through the mail shirt and padded hacqueton like a bodkin sliding through linen, killing the crossbowman almost instantly.

Sir Guillaume dropped flat and a heartbeat later another arrow whipped above him to thump into the turf. The Harlequin snatched up the lance and was running towards the beach while Sir Guillaume scrambled into the shelter of the church porch. ‘Crossbows!’ he shouted. ‘Crossbows!’

Because someone was fighting back.

* * *

Thomas had heard the screams and, like the other four men in the church, he had gone to the door to see what they meant, but no sooner had they reached the porch than a band of armed men, their mail and helmets dark grey in the dawn, appeared in the graveyard.

Edward slammed the church door, dropped the bar into its brackets, then crossed himself. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said in astonishment, then flinched as an axe thumped into the door. ‘Give me that!’ He seized the sword from Thomas.

Thomas let him take it. The church door was shaking now as two or three axes attacked the old wood. The villagers had always reckoned that Hookton was much too small to be raided, but the church door was splintering in front of Thomas’s eyes, and he knew it must be the French. Tales were told up and down the coast of such landings, and prayers were said to keep folk from the raids, but the enemy was here and the church echoed with the crash of their axe blows.

Thomas was in panic, but did not know it. He just knew he had to escape from the church and so he ran and jumped onto the altar. He crushed the silver chalice with his right foot and kicked it off the altar as he climbed onto the sill of the great east window where he beat at the yellow panes, shattering the horn down into the churchyard. He saw men in red and green jackets running past the alehouse, but none looked his way as he jumped down into the churchyard and ran to the ditch where he ripped his clothes as he wriggled through the thorn hedge on the other side. He crossed the lane, jumped the fence of his father’s garden, and hammered on the kitchen door, but no one responded and a crossbow bolt smacked into the lintel just inches from his face. Thomas ducked and ran through the bean plants to the cattle shed where his father stabled a horse. There was no time to rescue the beast, so instead Thomas climbed into the hay loft where he hid his bow and arrows. A woman screamed close by. Dogs were howling. The French were shouting as they kicked down doors. Thomas seized his bow and arrow bag, ripped the thatch away from the rafters, squeezed through the gap and dropped into the neighbour’s orchard.

He ran then as though the devil was on his heels. A crossbow bolt thumped into the turf as he came to Lipp Hill and two of the Genoese archers started to follow him, but Thomas was young and tall and strong and fast. He ran uphill through a pasture bright with cowslips and daisies, leaped a hurdle that blocked a gap in a hedge, then twisted right towards the hill’s crest. He went as far as the wood on the hill’s far side and there he dropped to catch his breath amidst a slope drifted with a haze of bluebells. He lay there, listening to the lambs in a nearby field. He waited, hearing nothing untoward. The crossbowmen had abandoned their pursuit.

Thomas lay in the bluebells for a long time, but at last he crept cautiously back to the hilltop from where he could see a straggle of old women and children scattering on the further hill. Those folk had somehow evaded the crossbowmen and would doubtless flee north to warn Sir Giles Marriott, but Thomas did not join them. Instead he worked his way down to a hazel copse where dog’s mercury bloomed and from where he could see his village dying.

Men were carrying plunder to the four strange boats that were grounded on the Hook’s shingle. The first thatch was being fired. Two dogs lay dead in the street beside a woman, quite naked, who was being held down while Frenchmen hitched up their mail shirts to take their turns with her. Thomas remembered how, not long ago, she had married a fisherman whose first wife had died in childbirth. She had been so coy and happy, but now, when she tried to crawl off the road, a Frenchman kicked her in the head, then bent with laughter. Thomas saw Jane, the girl he feared he had made pregnant, being dragged towards the boats and was ashamed that he felt a sense of relief that he would not have to confront his father with her news. More cottages were fired as Frenchmen hurled burning straw onto their thatch, and Thomas watched the smoke curl and thicken, then worked his way through the hazel saplings to a place where hawthorn blossom was thick, white and concealing. It was there he strung his bow.

It was the best bow he had ever made. It had been cut from a stave that had washed ashore from a ship that had foundered in the channel. A dozen staves had come to Hookton’s shingle on the south wind and Sir Giles Marriott’s huntsman reckoned they must have been Italian yew, for it was the most beautiful wood he had ever seen. Thomas had sold eleven of the tight-grained staves in Dorchester, but kept the best one. He’d carved it, steamed the ends to give them a slight bend against the wood’s grain, then painted the bow with a mix of soot and flax-seed oil. He had boiled the mix in his mother’s kitchen on days when his father was away, and Thomas’s father had never known what he was doing, though sometimes he would complain of the smell and Thomas’s mother would say she had been making a potion to poison the rats. The bow had had to be painted to stop it from drying out, for then the wood would become brittle and shatter under the stress of the taut string. The paint had dried a deep golden colour, just like the bows Thomas’s grandfather used to make in the Weald, but Thomas had wanted it to be darker and so he had rubbed more soot into the wood and smeared it with beeswax, and he’d gone on doing it for a fortnight until the bow was as black as the shaft of St George’s lance. He’d tipped the bow with two pieces of nocked horn to hold a cord that was made from woven hemp strands that had been soaked in hoof-glue, then he’d whipped the cord where the arrow would rest with still more hemp. He’d stolen coins from his father to buy arrow heads in Dorchester, then made the shafts from ash and goose feathers and on that Easter morning he had twenty-three of those good arrows in his bag.

Thomas strung the bow, took a white-fledged arrow from the bag, then looked at the three men beside the church. They were a long way off, but the black bow was as big a weapon as any ever made and the power in its yew belly was awesome. One of the men had a simple mail coat, another a plain black surcoat while the third had a red and green jacket over his mail shirt, and Thomas decided that the most gaudily dressed man must be the raid’s leader and so he should die.

Thomas’s left hand shook as he drew the bow. He was dry-mouthed, frightened. He knew he would shoot wild so he lowered his arm and released the cord’s tension. Remember, he told himself, remember everything you have ever been taught. An archer does not aim, he kills. It is all in the head, in the arms, in the eyes, and killing a man is no different from shooting a hind. Draw and loose, that was all, and that was why he had practised for over ten years so that the act of drawing and loosing was as natural as breathing and as fluent as water flowing from a spring. Look and loose, do not think. Draw the string and let God guide the arrow.

Smoke thickened above Hookton, and Thomas felt an immense anger surge like a black humour and he pushed his left hand forward and drew back with the right and he never took his eyes off the red and green coat. He drew till the cord was beside his right ear and then he loosed.

That was the first time Thomas of Hookton ever shot an arrow at a man and he knew it was good as soon as it leaped from the string, for the bow did not quiver. The arrow flew true and he watched it curve down, sinking from the hill to strike the green and red coat hard and deep. He let a second arrow fly, but the man in the mail coat dropped and scurried to the church porch while the third man picked up the lance and ran towards the beach where he was hidden by the smoke.

Thomas had twenty-one arrows left. One each for the holy trinity, he thought, and another for every year of his life, and that life was threatened, for a dozen crossbowmen were running towards the hill. He loosed a third arrow, then ran back through the hazels. He was suddenly exultant, filled with a sense of power and satisfaction. In that one instant, as the first arrow slid into the sky, he knew he wanted nothing more from life. He was an archer. Oxford could go to hell for all he cared, for Thomas had found his joy. He whooped with delight as he ran uphill. Crossbow bolts ripped through the hazel leaves and he noted that they made a deep, almost humming noise as they flew. Then he was over the hill’s crest where he ran west for a few yards before doubling back to the summit. He paused long enough to loose another arrow, then turned and ran again.

Thomas led the Genoese crossbowmen a dance of death–from hill to hedgerow, along paths he had known since childhood–and like fools they followed him because their pride would not let them admit that they were beaten. But beaten they were, and two died before a trumpet sounded from the beach, summoning the raiders to their boats. The Genoese turned away then, stopping only to fetch the weapon, pouches, mail and coat of one of their dead, but Thomas killed another of them as they stooped over the body and this time the survivors just ran from him.

Thomas followed them down to the smoke-palled village. He ran past the alehouse, which was an inferno, and so to the shingle where the four boats were being shoved into the sea-reach. The sailors pushed off with long oars, then pulled out to sea. They towed the best three Hookton boats and left the others burning. The village was also burning, its thatch whirling into the sky in sparks and smoke and flaming scraps. Thomas shot one last useless arrow from the beach and watched it plunge into the sea short of the escaping raiders, then he turned away and went back through the stinking, burning, bloody village to the church, which was the only building the raiders had not set alight. The four companions of his vigil were dead, but Father Ralph still lived. He was sitting with his back against the altar. The bottom of his gown was dark with fresh blood and his long face was unnaturally white.

Thomas kneeled beside the priest. ‘Father?’

Father Ralph opened his eyes and saw the bow. He grimaced, though whether in pain or disapproval, Thomas could not tell.

‘Did you kill any of them, Thomas?’ the priest asked.

‘Yes,’ Thomas said, ‘a lot.’

Father Ralph grimaced and shuddered. Thomas reckoned the priest was one of the strongest men he had ever known, flawed perhaps, yet tough as a yew stave, but he was dying now and there was a whimper in his voice. ‘You don’t want to be a priest, do you, Thomas?’ He asked the question in French, his mother tongue.

‘No,’ Thomas answered in the same language.

‘You’re going to be a soldier,’ the priest said, ‘like your grandfather.’ He paused and whimpered as another bolt of pain ripped up from his belly. Thomas wanted to help him, but in truth there was nothing to be done. The Harlequin had run his sword into Father Ralph’s belly and only God could save the priest now. ‘I argued with my father,’ the dying man said, ‘and he disowned me. He disinherited me and I have refused to acknowledge him from that day to this. But you, Thomas, you are like him. Very like him. And you have always argued with me.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Thomas said. He took his father’s hand and the priest did not resist.

‘I loved your mother,’ Father Ralph said, ‘and that was my sin, and you are the fruit of that sin. I thought if you became a priest you could rise above sin. It floods us, Thomas, it floods us. It is everywhere. I have seen the devil, Thomas, seen him with my own eyes and we must fight him. Only the Church can do that. Only the Church.’ The tears flowed down his hollow unshaven cheeks. He looked past Thomas into the roof of the nave. ‘They stole the lance,’ he said sadly.

‘I know.’

‘My great-grandfather brought it from the Holy Land,’ Father Ralph said, ‘and I stole it from my father and my brother’s son stole it from us today.’ He spoke softly. ‘He will do evil with it. Bring it home, Thomas. Bring it home.’

‘I will,’ Thomas promised him. Smoke began to thicken in the church. The raiders had not fired it, but the thatch was catching the flames from the burning scraps that filled the air. ‘You say your brother’s son stole it?’ Thomas asked.

‘Your cousin,’ Father Ralph whispered, his eyes closed. ‘The one dressed in black. He came and stole it.’

‘Who is he?’ Thomas asked.

‘Evil,’ Father Ralph said, ‘evil.’ He moaned and shook his head.

‘Who is he?’ Thomas insisted.

‘Calix meus inebrians.’ Father Ralph said in a voice scarce above a whisper. Thomas knew it was a line from a psalm and meant ‘my cup makes me drunk’ and he reckoned his father’s mind was slipping as his soul hovered close to his body’s end.

‘Tell me who your father was!’ Thomas demanded. Tell me who I am, he wanted to say. Tell me who you are, Father. But Father Ralph’s eyes were closed though he still gripped Thomas’s hand hard. ‘Father?’ Thomas asked. The smoke dipped in the church and sifted out through the window Thomas had broken to make his escape. ‘Father?’

But his father never spoke again. He died, and Thomas, who had fought against him all his life, wept like a child. At times he had been ashamed of his father, but in that smoky Easter morning he learned that he loved him. Most priests disowned their children, but Father Ralph had never hidden Thomas. He had let the world think what it wanted and he had freely confessed to being a man as well as a priest and if he sinned in loving his housekeeper then it was a sweet sin that he never denied even if he did say acts of contrition for it and feared that in the life hereafter he would be punished for it.

Thomas pulled his father away from the altar. He did not want the body to be burned when the roof collapsed. The silver chalice that Thomas had accidentally crushed was under the dead man’s blood-soaked robe and Thomas pocketed it before dragging the corpse out into the graveyard. He lay his father beside the body of the man in the red and green coat and Thomas crouched there, weeping, knowing that he had failed in his first Easter vigil. The devil had stolen the Sacraments and St George’s lance was gone and Hookton was dead.

At midday Sir Giles Marriott came to the village with a score of men armed with bows and billhooks. Sir Giles himself wore mail and carried a sword, but there was no enemy left to fight and Thomas was the only person left in the village.

‘Three yellow hawks on a blue field,’ Thomas told Sir Giles.

‘Thomas?’ Sir Giles asked, puzzled. He was the lord of the manor and an old man now, though in his time he had carried a lance against both the Scots and the French. He had been a good friend to Thomas’s father, but he did not understand Thomas, whom he reckoned had grown wild as a wolf.

‘Three yellow hawks on a blue field,’ Thomas said vengefully, ‘are the arms of the man who did this.’ Were they the arms of his cousin? He did not know. There were so many questions left by his father.

‘I don’t know whose badge that is,’ Sir Giles said, ‘but I shall pray by God’s bowels he screams in hell for this work.’

There was nothing to be done until the fires had burned themselves out, and only then could the bodies be dragged from the ashes. The burned dead had been blackened and grotesquely shrunk by the heat so that even the tallest men looked like children. The dead villagers were taken to the graveyard for a proper burial, but the bodies of the four crossbowmen were dragged down to the beach and there stripped naked.

‘Did you do this?’ Sir Giles asked Thomas.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then I thank you.’

‘My first dead Frenchmen,’ Thomas said angrily.

‘No,’ Sir Giles said, and he lifted one of the men’s tunics to show Thomas the badge of a green chalice embroidered on its sleeve. ‘They’re from Genoa,’ Sir Giles said. ‘The French hire them as crossbowmen. I’ve killed a few in my time, but there are always more where they come from. You know what the badge is?’

‘A cup?’

Sir Giles shook his head. ‘The Holy Grail. They reckon they have it in their cathedral. I’m told it’s a great green thing, carved from an emerald and brought back from the crusades. I should like to see it one day.’

‘Then I shall bring it to you,’ Thomas said bitterly, ‘just as I shall bring back our lance.’

Sir Giles stared to sea. The raiders’ boats were long gone and there was nothing out there but the sun on the waves. ‘Why would they come here?’ he asked.

‘For the lance.’

‘I doubt it was even real,’ Sir Giles said. He was red-faced, white-haired and heavy now. ‘It was just an old spear, nothing more.’

‘It’s real,’ Thomas insisted, ‘and that’s why they came.’

Sir Giles did not argue. ‘Your father,’ he said instead, ‘would have wanted you to finish your studies.’

‘My studies are done,’ Thomas said flatly. ‘I’m going to France.’

Sir Giles nodded. He reckoned the boy was far better suited to be a soldier than a priest. ‘Will you go as an archer?’ he asked, looking at the great bow on Thomas’s shoulder, ‘or do you want to join my house and train to be a man-at-arms?’ He half smiled. ‘You’re gently born, you know?’

‘I’m bastard born,’ Thomas insisted.

‘Your father was of good birth.’

‘You know what family?’ Thomas asked.

Sir Giles shrugged. ‘He would never tell me, and if I pressed him he would just say that God was his father and his mother was the Church.’

‘And my mother,’ Thomas said, ‘was a priest’s housekeeper and the daughter of a bowyer. I shall go to France as an archer.’

‘There’s more honour as a man-at-arms,’ Sir Giles observed, but Thomas did not want honour. He wanted revenge.

Sir Giles let him choose what he wanted from the enemy’s dead and Thomas picked a mail coat, a pair of long boots, a knife, a sword, a belt and a helmet. It was all plain gear, but serviceable, and only the mail coat needed mending, for he had driven an arrow clean through its rings. Sir Giles said he owed Thomas’s father money, which may or may not have been true, but he paid it to Thomas with the gift of a four-year-old gelding. ‘You’ll need a horse,’ he said, ‘for nowadays all archers are mounted. Go to Dorchester,’ he advised Thomas, ‘and like as not you’ll find someone recruiting bowmen.’

The Genoese corpses were beheaded and their bodies left to rot while their four heads were impaled on stakes and planted along the Hook’s shingle ridge. The gulls fed on the dead men’s eyes and pecked at their flesh until the heads were flensed down to bare bones that stared vacantly to the sea.

But Thomas did not see the skulls. He had gone across the water, taken his black bow and joined the wars.

PART ONE Brittany

Chapter 1

It was winter. A cold morning wind blew from the sea bringing a sour salt smell and a spitting rain that would inevitably sap the power of the bowstrings if it did not let up.

‘What it is,’ Jake said, ‘is a waste of goddamn time.’

No one took any notice of him.

‘Could have stayed in Brest,’ Jake grumbled, ‘been sitting by a fire. Drinking ale.’

Again he was ignored.

‘Funny name for a town,’ Sam said after a long while. ‘Brest. I like it, though.’ He looked at the archers. ‘Maybe we’ll see the Blackbird again?’ he suggested.

‘Maybe she’ll put a bolt through your tongue,’ Will Skeat growled, ‘and do us all a favour.’

The Blackbird was a woman who fought from the town walls every time the army made an assault. She was young, had black hair, wore a black cloak and shot a crossbow. In the first assault, when Will Skeat’s archers had been in the vanguard of the attack and had lost four men, they had been close enough to see the Blackbird clearly and they had all thought her beautiful, though after a winter campaign of failure, cold, mud and hunger, almost any woman looked beautiful. Still, there was something special about the Blackbird.

‘She doesn’t load that crossbow herself,’ Sam said, unmoved by Skeat’s surliness.

‘Of course she bloody doesn’t,’ Jake said. ‘There ain’t a woman born that can crank a crossbow.’

‘Dozy Mary could,’ another man said. ‘Got muscles like a bullock, she has.’

‘And she closes her eyes when she shoots,’ Sam said, still talking of the Blackbird. ‘I noticed.’

‘That’s because you weren’t doing your goddamn job,’ Will Skeat snarled, ‘so shut your mouth, Sam.’

Sam was the youngest of Skeat’s men. He claimed to be eighteen, though he was really not sure because he had lost count. He was a draper’s son, had a cherubic face, brown curls and a heart as dark as sin. He was a good archer though; no one could serve Will Skeat without being good.

‘Right, lads,’ Skeat said, ‘make ready.’

He had seen the stir in the encampment behind them. The enemy would notice it soon and the church bells would ring the alarm and the town walls would fill with defenders armed with crossbows. The crossbows would rip their bolts into the attackers and Skeat’s job today was to try to clear those crossbowmen off the wall with his arrows. Some chance, he thought sourly. The defenders would crouch behind their crenellations and so deny his men an opportunity to aim, and doubtless this assault would end as the five other attacks had finished, in failure.

It had been a whole campaign of failure. William Bohun, the Earl of Northampton, who led this small English army, had launched the winter expedition in hope of capturing a stronghold in northern Brittany, but the assault on Carhaix had been a humiliating failure, the defenders of Guingamp had laughed at the English, and the walls of Lannion had repulsed every attack. They had captured Tréguier, but as that town had no walls it was not much of an achievement and no place to make a fortress. Now, at the bitter end of the year, with nothing better to do, the Earl’s army had fetched up outside this small town, which was scarcely more than a walled village, but even this miserable place had defied the army. The Earl had launched attack after attack and all had been beaten back. The English had been met by a storm of crossbow bolts, the scaling ladders had been thrust from the ramparts and the defenders had exulted in each failure.

‘What is this goddamn place called?’ Skeat asked.

‘La Roche-Derrien,’ a tall archer answered.

‘You would know, Tom,’ Skeat said, ‘you know everything.’

‘That is true, Will,’ Thomas said gravely, ‘quite literally true.’ The other archers laughed.

‘So if you know so bloody much,’ Skeat said, ‘tell me what this goddamn town is called again.’

‘La Roche-Derrien.’

‘Daft bloody name,’ Skeat said. He was grey-haired, thin-faced and had known nearly thirty years of fighting. He came from Yorkshire and had begun his career as an archer fighting against the Scots. He had been as lucky as he was skilled, and so he had taken plunder, survived battles and risen in the ranks until he was wealthy enough to raise his own band of soldiers. He now led seventy men-at-arms and as many archers, whom he had contracted to the Earl of Northampton’s service which was why he was crouching behind a wet hedge a hundred and fifty paces from the walls of a town whose name he still could not remember. His men-at-arms were in the camp, given a day’s rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.

‘La Roche what?’ he asked Thomas.

‘Derrien.’

‘What does that goddamn mean?’

‘That, I confess, I do not know.’

‘Sweet Christ,’ Skeat said in mock wonder, ‘he doesn’t know everything.’

‘It is, however, close to derrière, which means arse,’ Thomas added. ‘The rock of the arse is my best translation.’

Skeat opened his mouth to say something, but just then the first of La Roche-Derrien’s church bells sounded the alarm. It was the cracked bell, the one that sounded so harsh, and within seconds the other churches added their tolling so that the wet wind was filled with their clangour. The noise was greeted by a subdued English cheer as the assault troops came from the camp and pounded up the road towards the town’s southern gate. The leading men carried ladders, the rest had swords and axes. The Earl of Northampton led the assault, as he had led all the others, conspicuous in his plate armour half covered by a surcoat showing his badge of the lions and stars.

‘You know what to do!’ Skeat bellowed.

The archers stood, drew their bows and loosed. There were no targets on the walls, for the defenders were staying low, but the rattle of the steel-tipped arrows on the stones should keep them crouching. The white-feathered arrows hissed as they flew. Two other archer bands were adding their own shafts, many of them firing high into the sky so that their missiles dropped vertically onto the wall’s top, and to Skeat it seemed impossible that anyone could live under that hail of feather-tipped steel, yet as soon as the Earl’s attacking column came within a hundred paces the crossbow bolts began to spit from the walls.

There was a breach close to the gate. It had been made by a catapult, the only siege machine left in decent repair, and it was a poor breach, for only the top third of the wall had been dismantled by the big stones and the townsfolk had crammed timber and bundles of cloth into the gap, but it was still a weakness in the wall and the ladder men ran towards it, shouting, as the crossbow bolts whipped into them. Men stumbled, fell, crawled and died, but enough lived to throw two ladders against the breach and the first men-at-arms began to climb. The archers were loosing as fast as they could, overwhelming the top of the breach with arrows, but then a shield appeared there, a shield that was immediately stuck by a score of shafts, and from behind the shield a crossbowman shot straight down one of the ladders, killing the leading man. Another shield appeared, another crossbow was loosed. A pot was shoved onto the breach’s top, then toppled over, and a gush of steaming liquid spilled down to make a man scream in agony. Defenders were hurling boulders over the breach and their crossbows were snapping.

‘Closer!’ Skeat shouted, and his archers pushed through the hedge and ran to within a hundred paces of the town ditch, where they again loosed their long war bows and slashed their arrows into the embrasures. Some defenders were dying now, for they had to show themselves to shoot their crossbows down into the crowd of men who jostled at the foot of the four ladders that had been laid against the breach or walls. Men-at-arms climbed, a forked pole shoved one ladder back and Thomas twitched his left hand to change his aim and released his fingers to drive an arrow into the breast of a man pushing on the pole. The man had been covered by a shield held by a companion, but the shield shifted for an instant and Thomas’s arrow was the first through the small gap, though two more followed before the dying man’s last heartbeat ended. Other men succeeded in toppling the ladder. ‘St George!’ the English shouted, but the saint must have been sleeping for he gave the attackers no help.

More stones were hurled from the ramparts, then a great mass of flaming straw was heaved into the crowded attackers. A man succeeded in reaching the top of the breach, but was immediately killed by an axe that split his helmet and skull in two. He slumped on the rungs, blocking the ascent, and the Earl tried to haul him free, but was struck on the head by one of the boulders and collapsed at the ladder’s foot. Two of his men-at-arms carried the stunned Earl back to the camp and his departure took the spirit from the attackers. They no longer shouted. The arrows still flew, and men still tried to climb the wall, but the defenders sensed they had repelled this sixth attack and their crossbow bolts spat relentlessly. It was then Thomas saw the Blackbird on the tower above the gate. He laid the steel arrow tip on her breast, raised the bow a fraction and then jerked his bow hand so that the arrow flew wild. Too pretty to kill, he told himself and knew he was a fool for thinking it. She shot her bolt and vanished. A half-dozen arrows clattered onto the tower where she had been standing, but Thomas reckoned all six archers had let her shoot before they loosed.

‘Jesus wept,’ Skeat said. The attack had failed and the men-at-arms were running from the crossbow bolts. One ladder still rested against the breach with the dead man entangled in its upper rungs. ‘Back,’ Skeat shouted, ‘back.’

The archers ran, pursued by quarrels, until they could push through the hedge and drop into the ditch. The defenders were cheering and two men bared their backsides on the gate tower and briefly shoved their arses towards the defeated English.

‘Bastards,’ Skeat said, ‘bastards.’ He was not used to failure. ‘There has to be a bloody way in,’ he growled.

Thomas unlooped the string from his bow and placed it under his helmet. ‘I told you how to get in,’ he told Skeat, ‘told you at dawn.’

Skeat looked at Thomas for a long time. ‘We tried it, lad.’

‘I got to the stakes, Will. I promise I did. I got through them.’

‘So tell me again,’ Skeat said, and Thomas did. He crouched in the ditch under the jeers of La Roche-Derrien’s defenders and he told Will Skeat how to unlock the town, and Skeat listened because the Yorkshireman had learned to trust Thomas of Hookton.

Thomas had been in Brittany for three years now, and though Brittany was not France its usurping Duke brought a constant succession of Frenchman to be killed and Thomas had discovered he had a skill for killing. It was not just that he was a good archer–the army was full of men who were as good as he and there was a handful who were better–but he had discovered he could sense what the enemy was doing. He would watch them, watch their eyes, see where they were looking, and as often as not he anticipated an enemy move and was ready to greet it with an arrow. It was like a game, but one where he knew the rules and they did not.

It helped that William Skeat trusted him. Skeat had been unwilling to recruit Thomas when they first met by the gaol in Dorchester where Skeat was testing a score of thieves and murderers to see how well they could shoot a bow. He needed recruits and the King needed archers, so men who would otherwise have faced the gallows were being pardoned if they would serve abroad, and fully half of Skeat’s men were such felons. Thomas, Skeat had reckoned, would never fit in with such rogues. He had taken Thomas’s right hand, seen the callouses on the two bow fingers which said he was an archer, but then had tapped the boy’s soft palm.

‘What have you been doing?’ Skeat had asked.

‘My father wanted me to be a priest.’

‘A priest, eh?’ Skeat had been scornful. ‘Well, you can pray for us, I suppose.’

‘I can kill for you too.’

Skeat had eventually let Thomas join the band, not least because the boy brought his own horse. At first Skeat thought Thomas of Hookton was little more than another wild fool looking for adventure–a clever fool, to be sure–but Thomas had taken to the life of an archer in Brittany with alacrity. The real business of the civil war was plunder and, day after day, Skeat’s men rode into land that gave fealty to the supporters of Duke Charles and they burned the farms, stole the harvest and took the livestock. A lord whose peasants cannot pay rent is a lord who cannot afford to hire soldiers, so Skeat’s men-at-arms and mounted archers were loosed on the enemy’s land like a plague, and Thomas loved the life. He was young and his task was not just to fight the enemy, but to ruin him. He burned farms, poisoned wells, stole seed-grain, broke ploughs, fired the mills, ring-barked the orchards and lived off his plunder. Skeat’s men were the lords of Brittany, a scourge from hell, and the French-speaking villagers in the east of the Duchy called them the hellequin, which meant the devil’s horsemen. Once in a while an enemy war band would seek to trap them and Thomas had learned that the English archer, with his great long war bow, was the king of those skirmishes. The enemy hated the archers. If they captured an English bowman they killed him. A man-at-arms might be imprisoned, a lord would be ransomed, but an archer was always murdered. Tortured first, then murdered.

Thomas thrived on the life, and Skeat had learned the lad was clever, certainly clever enough to know better than to fall asleep one night when he should have been standing guard and, for that offence Skeat had thumped the daylights out of him. ‘You were goddamn drunk!’ he had accused Thomas, then beat him thoroughly, using his fists like blacksmith’s hammers. He had broken Thomas’s nose, cracked a rib and called him a stinking piece of Satan’s shit, but at the end of it Will Skeat saw that the boy was still grinning, and six months later he made Thomas into a vintenar, which meant he was in charge of twenty other archers.

Those twenty were nearly all older than Thomas, but none seemed to mind his promotion for they reckoned he was different. Most archers wore their hair cropped short, but Thomas’s hair was flamboyantly long and wrapped with bowcords so it fell in a long black plait to his waist. He was clean-shaven and dressed only in black. Such affectations could have made him unpopular, but he worked hard, had a quick wit and was generous. He was still odd, though. All archers wore talismans, maybe a cheap metal pendant showing a saint, or a dried hare’s foot, but Thomas had a desiccated dog’s paw hanging round his neck which he claimed was the hand of St Guinefort, and no one dared dispute him because he was the most learned man in Skeat’s band. He spoke French like a nobleman and Latin like a priest, and Skeat’s archers were perversely proud of him because of those accomplishments. Now, three years after joining Will Skeat’s band, Thomas was one of his chief archers. Skeat even asked his advice sometimes; he rarely took it, but he asked, and Thomas still had the dog’s paw, a crooked nose and an impudent grin.

And now he had an idea how to get into La Roche-Derrien.

That afternoon, when the dead man-at-arms with the split skull was still tangled in the abandoned ladder, Sir Simon Jekyll rode towards the town and there trotted his horse back and forth beside the small, dark-feathered crossbow bolts that marked the furthest range of the defenders’ weapons. His squire, a daft boy with a slack jaw and puzzled eyes, watched from a distance. The squire held Sir Simon’s lance, and should any warrior in the town accept the implicit challenge of Sir Simon’s mocking presence, the squire would give his master the lance and the two horsemen would fight on the pasture until one or the other yielded. And it would not be Sir Simon for he was as skilled a knight as any in the Earl of Northampton’s army.

And the poorest.

His destrier was ten years old, hard-mouthed and sway-backed. His saddle, which was high in pommel and cantle so that it held him firm in its grip, had belonged to his father, while his hauberk, a tunic of mail that covered him from neck to knees, had belonged to his grandfather. His sword was over a hundred years old, heavy, and would not keep its edge. His lance had warped in the wet winter weather, while his helmet, which hung from his pommel, was an old steel pot with a worn leather lining. His shield, with its escutcheon of a mailed fist clutching a war-hammer, was battered and faded. His mail gauntlets, like the rest of his armour, were rusting, which was why his squire had a thick, reddened ear and a frightened face, though the real reason for the rust was not that the squire did not try to clean the mail, but that Sir Simon could not afford the vinegar and fine sand that was used to scour the steel. He was poor.

Poor and bitter and ambitious.

And good.

No one denied he was good. He had won the tournament at Tewkesbury and received a purse of forty pounds. At Gloucester his victory had been rewarded by a fine suit of armour. At Chelmsford it had been fifteen pounds and a fine saddle, and at Canterbury he had half hacked a Frenchman to death before being given a gilded cup filled with coins, and where were all those trophies now? In the hands of the bankers and lawyers and merchants who had a lien on the Berkshire estate that Sir Simon had inherited two years before, though in truth his inheritance had been nothing but debt, and the moment his father was buried the moneylenders had closed on Sir Simon like hounds on a wounded deer.

‘Marry an heiress,’ his mother had advised, and she had paraded a dozen women for her son’s inspection, but Sir Simon was determined his wife should be as beautiful as he was handsome. And he was handsome. He knew that. He would stare into his mother’s mirror and admire his reflection. He had thick fair hair, a broad face and a short beard. At Chester, where he had unhorsed three knights inside four minutes, men had mistaken him for the King, who was reputed to fight anonymously in tournaments, and Sir Simon was not going to throw away his good royal looks on some wrinkled hag just because she had money. He would marry a woman worthy of himself, but that ambition would not pay the estate’s debts and so Sir Simon, to defend himself against his creditors, had sought a letter of protection from King Edward III. That letter shielded Sir Simon from all legal proceedings so long as he served the King in a foreign war, and when Sir Simon had crossed the Channel, taking six men-at-arms, a dozen archers and a slack-jawed squire from his encumbered estate, he had left his creditors helpless in England. Sir Simon had also brought with him a certainty that he would soon capture some French or Breton nobleman whose ransom would be sufficient to pay all he owed, but so far the winter campaign had not yielded a single prisoner of rank and so little plunder that the army was now on half rations. And how many well-born prisoners could he expect to take in a miserable town like La Roche-Derrien? It was a shit hole.

Yet he rode up and down beneath its walls, hoping some knight would take the challenge and ride from the town’s southern gate that had so far resisted six English assaults, but instead the defenders jeered him and called him a coward for staying out of their crossbows’ range and the insults piqued Sir Simon’s pride so that he rode closer to the walls, his horse’s hoofs sometimes clattering on one of the fallen quarrels. Men shot at him, but the bolts fell well short and it was Sir Simon’s turn to jeer.

‘He’s just a bloody fool,’ Jake said, watching from the English camp. Jake was one of William Skeat’s felons, a murderer who had been saved from the gallows at Exeter. He was cross-eyed, yet still managed to shoot straighter than most men. ‘Now what’s he doing?’

Sir Simon had stopped his horse and was facing the gate so that the men who watched thought that perhaps a Frenchman was coming to challenge the English knight who taunted them. Instead they saw that a lone crossbowman was standing on the gate turret and beckoning Sir Simon forward, daring him to come within range.

Only a fool would respond to such a dare, and Sir Simon dutifully responded. He was twenty-five years old, bitter and brave, and he reckoned a display of careless arrogance would dishearten the besieged garrison and encourage the dispirited English and so he spurred the destrier deep into the killing ground where the French bolts had torn the heart out of the English attacks. No crossbowman fired now; there was just the lone figure standing on the gate tower, and Sir Simon, riding to within a hundred yards, saw it was the Blackbird.

This was the first time Sir Simon had seen the woman every archer called the Blackbird and he was close enough to perceive that she was indeed a beauty. She stood straight, slender and tall, cloaked against the winter wind, but with her long black hair loose like a young girl’s. She offered him a mocking bow and Sir Simon responded, bending awkwardly in the tight saddle, then he watched as she picked up her crossbow and put it to her shoulder.

And when we’re inside the town, Sir Simon thought, I’ll make you pay for this. You’ll be flat on your arse, Blackbird, and I’ll be on top. He stood his horse quite still, a lone horseman in the French slaughter ground, daring her to aim straight and knowing she would not. And when she missed he would give her a mocking salute and the French would take it as a bad omen.

But what if she did aim straight?

Sir Simon was tempted to lift the awkward helmet from his saddle’s pommel, but resisted the impulse. He had dared the Blackbird to do her worst and he could show no nerves in front of a woman and so he waited as she levelled the bow. The town’s defenders were watching her and doubtless praying. Or perhaps making wagers.

Come on, you bitch, he said under his breath. It was cold, but there was sweat on his forehead.

She paused, pushed the black hair from her face, then rested the bow on a crenellation and aimed again. Sir Simon kept his head up and his gaze straight. Just a woman, he told himself. Probably could not hit a wagon at five paces. His horse shivered and he reached out to pat its neck. ‘Be going soon, boy,’ he told it.

The Blackbird, watched by a score of defenders, closed her eyes and shot.

Sir Simon saw the quarrel as a small black blur against the grey sky and the grey stones of the church towers showing above La Roche-Derrien’s walls.

He knew the quarrel would go wide. Knew it with an absolute certainty. She was a woman, for God’s sake! And that was why he did not move as he saw the blur coming straight for him. He could not believe it. He was waiting for the quarrel to slide to left or right, or to plough into the frost-hardened ground, but instead it was coming unerringly towards his breast and, at the very last instant, he jerked up the heavy shield and ducked his head and felt a huge thump on his left arm as the bolt slammed home to throw him hard against the saddle’s cantle. The bolt hit the shield so hard that it split through the willow boards and its point gouged a deep cut through the mail sleeve and into his forearm. The French were cheering and Sir Simon, knowing that other crossbowmen might now try to finish what the Blackbird had begun, pressed his knee into his destrier’s flank and the beast obediently turned and then responded to the spurs.

‘I’m alive,’ he said aloud, as if that would silence the French jubilation. Goddamn bitch, he thought. He would pay her right enough, pay her till she squealed, and he curbed his horse, not wanting to look as though he fled.

An hour later, after his squire had put a bandage over the slashed forearm, Sir Simon had convinced himself that he had scored a victory. He had dared, he had survived. It had been a demonstration of courage, and he lived, and for that he reckoned he was a hero and he expected a hero’s welcome as he walked toward the tent that housed the army’s commander, the Earl of Northampton. The tent was made from two sails, their linen yellow and patched and threadbare after years of service at sea. They made a shabby shelter, but that was typical of William Bohun, Earl of Northampton who, though cousin to the King and as rich a man as any in England, despised gaudiness.

The Earl, indeed, looked as patched and threadbare as the sails that made his tent. He was a short and squat man with a face, men said, like the backside of a bull, but the face mirrored the Earl’s soul, which was blunt, brave and straightforward. The army liked William Bohun, Earl of Northampton, because he was as tough as they were themselves. Now, as Sir Simon ducked into the tent, the Earl’s curly brown hair was half covered with a bandage where the boulder thrown from La Roche-Derrien’s wall had split his helmet and driven a ragged edge of steel into his scalp. He greeted Sir Simon sourly. ‘Tired of life?’

‘The silly bitch shut her eyes when she pulled the trigger!’ Sir Simon said, oblivious to the Earl’s tone.

‘She still aimed well,’ the Earl said angrily, ‘and that will put heart into the bastards. God knows, they need no encouragement.’

‘I’m alive, my lord,’ Sir Simon said cheerfully. ‘She wanted to kill me. She failed. The bear lives and the dogs go hungry.’ He waited for the Earl’s companions to congratulate him, but they avoided his eyes and he interpreted their sullen silence as jealousy.

Sir Simon was a bloody fool, the Earl thought, and shivered. He might not have minded the cold so much had the army been enjoying success, but for two months the English and their Breton allies had stumbled from failure to farce, and the six assaults on La Roche-Derrien had plumbed the depths of misery. So now the Earl had called a council of war to suggest one final assault, this one to be made that same evening. Every other attack had been in the forenoon, but perhaps a surprise escalade in the dying winter light would take the defenders by surprise. Only what small advantages that surprise might bring had been spoiled because Sir Simon’s foolhardiness must have given the townsfolk a new confidence and there was little confidence among the Earl’s war captains who had gathered under the yellow sailcloth.

Four of those captains were knights who, like Sir Simon, led their own men to war, but the others were mercenary soldiers who had contracted their men to the Earl’s service. Three were Bretons who wore the white ermine badge of the Duke of Brittany and led men loyal to the de Montfort Duke, while the others were English captains, all of them commoners who had grown hard in war. William Skeat was there, and next to him was Richard Totesham, who had begun his service as a man-at-arms and now led a hundred and forty knights and ninety archers in the Earl’s service. Neither man had ever fought in a tournament, nor would they ever be invited, yet both were wealthier than Sir Simon, and that rankled. My hounds of war, the Earl of Northampton called the independent captains, and the Earl liked them, but then the Earl had a curious taste for vulgar company. He might be cousin to England’s King, but William Bohun happily drank with men like Skeat and Totesham, ate with them, spoke English with them, hunted with them and trusted them, and Sir Simon felt excluded from that friendship. If any man in this army should have been an intimate of the Earl it was Sir Simon, a noted champion of tournaments, but Northampton would rather roll in the gutter with men like Skeat.

‘How’s the rain?’ the Earl asked.

‘Starting again,’ Sir Simon answered, jerking his head at the tent’s roof, against which the rain pattered fitfully.

‘It’ll clear,’ Skeat said dourly. He rarely called the Earl ‘my lord’, addressing him instead as an equal which, to Sir Simon’s amazement, the Earl seemed to like.

‘And it’s only spitting,’ the Earl said, peering out from the tent and letting in a swirl of damp, cold air. ‘Bowstrings will pluck in this.’

‘So will crossbow cords,’ Richard Totesham interjected. ‘Bastards,’ he added. What made the English failure so galling was that La Roche-Derrien’s defenders were not soldiers but townsfolk: fishermen and boatbuilders, carpenters and masons, and even the Blackbird, a woman! ‘And the rain might stop,’ Totesham went on, ‘but the ground will be slick. It’ll be bad footing under the walls.’

‘Don’t go tonight,’ Will Skeat advised. ‘Let my boys go in by the river tomorrow morning.’

The Earl rubbed the wound on his scalp. For a week now he had assaulted La Roche-Derrien’s southern wall and he still believed his men could take those ramparts, yet he also sensed the pessimism among his hounds of war. One more repulse with another twenty or thirty dead would leave his army dispirited and with the prospect of trailing back to Finisterre with nothing accomplished. ‘Tell me again,’ he said.

Skeat wiped his nose on his leather sleeve. ‘At low tide,’ he said, ‘there’s a way round the north wall. One of my lads was down there last night.’

‘We tried it three days ago,’ one of the knights objected.

‘You tried the down-river side,’ Skeat said. ‘I want to go up-river.’

‘That side has stakes just like the other,’ the Earl said.

‘Loose,’ Skeat responded. One of the Breton captains translated the exchange for his companions. ‘My boy pulled a stake clean out,’ Skeat went on, ‘and he reckons half a dozen others will lift or break. They’re old oak trunks, he says, instead of elm, and they’re rotted through.’

‘How deep is the mud?’ the Earl asked.

‘Up to his knees.’

La Roche-Derrien’s wall encompassed the west, south and east of the town, while the northern side was defended by the River Jaudy, and where the semicircular wall met the river the townsfolk had planted huge stakes in the mud to block access at low tide. Skeat was now suggesting there was a way through those rotted stakes, but when the Earl’s men had tried to do the same thing at the eastern side of the town the attackers had got bogged down in the mud and the townsfolk had picked them off with bolts. It had been a worse slaughter than the repulses in front of the southern gate.

‘But there’s still a wall on the riverbank,’ the Earl pointed out.

‘Aye,’ Skeat allowed, ‘but the silly bastards have broken it down in places. They’ve built quays there, and there’s one right close to the loose stakes.’

‘So your men will have to remove the stakes and climb the quays, all under the gaze of men on the wall?’ the Earl asked sceptically.

‘They can do it,’ Skeat said firmly.

The Earl still reckoned his best chance of success was to close his archers on the south gate and pray that their arrows would keep the defenders cowering while his men-at-arms assaulted the breach, yet that, he conceded, was the plan that had failed earlier in the day and on the day before that. And he had, he knew, only a day or two left. He possessed fewer than three thousand men, and a third of those were sick, and if he could not find them shelter he would have to march back west with his tail between his legs. He needed a town, any town, even La Roche-Derrien.

Will Skeat saw the worries on the Earl’s broad face. ‘My lad was within fifteen paces of the quay last night,’ he asserted. ‘He could have been inside the town and opened the gate.’

‘So why didn’t he?’ Sir Simon could not resist asking. ‘Christ’s bones!’ he went on. ‘But I’d have been inside!’

‘You’re not an archer,’ Skeat said sourly, then made the sign of the cross. At Guingamp one of Skeat’s archers had been captured by the defenders, who had stripped the hated bowman naked then cut him to pieces on the rampart where the besiegers could see his long death. His two bow fingers had been severed first, then his manhood, and the man had screamed like a pig being gelded as he bled to death on the battlements.

The Earl gestured for a servant to replenish the cups of mulled wine. ‘Would you lead this attack, Will?’ he asked.

‘Not me,’ Skeat said. ‘I’m too old to wade through boggy mud. I’ll let the lad who went past the stakes last night lead them in. He’s a good boy, so he is. He’s a clever bastard, but an odd one. He was going to be a priest, he was, only he met me and came to his senses.’

The Earl was plainly tempted by the idea. He toyed with the hilt of his sword, then nodded. ‘I think we should meet your clever bastard. Is he near?’

‘Left him outside,’ Skeat said, then twisted on his stool. ‘Tom, you savage! Come in here!’

Thomas stooped into the Earl’s tent, where the gathered captains saw a tall, long-legged young man dressed entirely in black, all but for his mail coat and the red cross sewn onto his tunic. All the English troops wore that cross of St George so that in a mêlée they would know who was a friend and who an enemy. The young man bowed to the Earl, who realized he had noticed this archer before, which was hardly surprising for Thomas was a striking-looking man. He wore his black hair in a pigtail, tied with bowcord, he had a long bony nose that was crooked, a clean-shaven chin and watchful, clever eyes, though perhaps the most noticeable thing about him was that he was clean. That and, on his shoulder, the great bow that was one of the longest the Earl had seen, and not only long, but painted black, while mounted on the outer belly of the bow was a curious silver plate which seemed to have a coat of arms engraved on it. There was vanity here, the Earl thought, vanity and pride, and he approved of both things.

‘For a man who was up to his knees in river mud last night,’ the Earl said with a smile, ‘you’re remarkably clean.’

‘I washed, my lord.’

‘You’ll catch cold!’ the Earl warned him. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Thomas of Hookton, my lord.’

‘So tell me what you found last night, Thomas of Hookton.’

Thomas told the same tale as Will Skeat. How, after dark, and as the tide fell, he had waded out into the Jaudy’s mud. He had found the fence of stakes ill-maintained, rotting and loose, and he had lifted one out of its socket, wriggled through the gap and gone a few paces towards the nearest quay. ‘I was close enough, my lord, to hear a woman singing,’ he said. The woman had been singing a song that his own mother had crooned to him when he was small and he had been struck by that oddity.

The Earl frowned when Thomas finished, not because he disapproved of anything the archer had said, but because the scalp wound that had left him unconscious for an hour was throbbing. ‘What were you doing at the river last night?’ he asked, mainly to give himself more time to think about the idea.

Thomas said nothing.

‘Another man’s woman,’ Skeat eventually answered for Thomas, ‘that’s what he was doing, my lord, another man’s woman.’

The assembled men laughed, all but Sir Simon Jekyll, who looked sourly at the blushing Thomas. The bastard was a mere archer yet he was wearing a better coat of mail than Sir Simon could afford! And he had a confidence that stank of impudence. Sir Simon shuddered. There was an unfairness to life which he did not understand. Archers from the shires were capturing horses and weapons and armour while he, a champion of tournaments, had not managed anything more valuable than a pair of goddamned boots. He felt an irresistible urge to deflate this tall, composed archer.

‘One alert sentinel, my lord,’ Sir Simon spoke to the Earl in Norman French so that only the handful of wellborn men in the tent would understand him, ‘and this boy will be dead and our attack will be floundering in river mud.’

Thomas gave Sir Simon a very level look, insolent in its lack of expression, then answered in fluent French. ‘We should attack in the dark,’ he said, then turned back to the Earl. ‘The tide will be low just before dawn tomorrow, my lord.’

The Earl looked at him with surprise. ‘How did you learn French?’

‘From my father, my lord.’

‘Do we know him?’

‘I doubt it, my lord.’

The Earl did not pursue the subject. He bit his lip and rubbed the pommel of his sword, a habit when he was thinking.

‘All well and good if you get inside,’ Richard Tote-sham, seated on a milking stool next to Will Skeat, growled at Thomas. Totesham led the largest of the independent bands and had, on that account, a greater authority than the rest of the captains. ‘But what do you do when you’re inside?’

Thomas nodded, as though he had expected the question. ‘I doubt we can reach a gate,’ he said, ‘but if I can put a score of archers onto the wall beside the river then they can protect it while ladders are placed.’

‘And I’ve got two ladders,’ Skeat added. ‘They’ll do.’

The Earl still rubbed the pommel of his sword. ‘When we tried to attack by the river before,’ he said, ‘we got trapped in the mud. It’ll be just as deep where you want to go.’

‘Hurdles, my lord,’ Thomas said. ‘I found some in a farm.’ Hurdles were fence sections made of woven willow that could make a quick pen for sheep or could be laid flat on mud to provide men with footing.

‘I told you he was clever,’ Will Skeat said proudly. ‘Went to Oxford, didn’t you, Tom?’

‘When I was too young to know better,’ Thomas said drily.

The Earl laughed. He liked this boy and he could see why Skeat had such faith in him. ‘Tomorrow morning, Thomas?’ he asked.

‘Better than dusk tonight, my lord. They’ll still be lively at dusk.’ Thomas gave Sir Simon an expressionless glance, intimating that the knight’s display of stupid bravery would have quickened the defenders’ spirits.

‘Then tomorrow morning it is,’ the Earl said. He turned to Totesham. ‘But keep your boys closed on the south gate today. I want them to think we’re coming there again.’ He looked back to Thomas. ‘What’s the badge on your bow, boy?’

‘Just something I found, my lord,’ Thomas lied, handing the bow to the Earl, who had held out his hand. In truth he had cut the silver badge out of the crushed chalice that he had found under his father’s robes, then pinned the metal to the front of the bow where his left hand had worn the silver almost smooth.

The Earl peered at the device. ‘A yale?’

‘I think that’s what the beast is called, my lord,’ Thomas said, pretending ignorance.

‘Not the badge of anyone I know,’ the Earl said, then tried to flex the bow and raised his eyebrows in surprise at its strength. He gave the black shaft back to Thomas then dismissed him. ‘I wish you Godspeed in the morning, Thomas of Hookton.’

‘My lord,’ Thomas said, and bowed.

‘I’ll go with him, with your permission,’ Skeat said, and the Earl nodded, then watched the two men leave. ‘If we do get inside,’ he told his remaining captains, ‘then for God’s sake don’t let your men cry havoc. Hold their leashes tight. I intend to keep this town and I don’t want the townsfolk hating us. Kill when you must, but I don’t want an orgy of blood.’ He looked at their sceptical faces. ‘I’ll be putting one of you in charge of the garrison here, so make it easy for yourselves. Hold them tight.’

The captains grunted, knowing how hard it would be to keep their men from a full sack of the town, but before any of them could respond to the Earl’s hopeful wishes, Sir Simon stood.

‘My lord? A request?’

The Earl shrugged. ‘Try me.’

‘Would you let me and my men lead the ladder party?’

The Earl seemed surprised at the request. ‘You think Skeat cannot manage on his own?’

‘I am sure he can, my lord,’ Sir Simon said humbly, ‘but I still beg the honour.’

Better Sir Simon Jekyll dead than Will Skeat, the Earl thought. He nodded. ‘Of course, of course.’

The captains said nothing. What honour was there in being first onto a wall that another man had captured? No, the bastard did not want honour, he wanted to be well placed to find the richest plunder in town, but none of them voiced his thought. They were captains, but Sir Simon was a knight, even if a penniless one.

The Earl’s army threatened an attack for the rest of that short winter’s day, but it never came and the citizens of La Roche-Derrien dared to hope that the worst of their ordeal was over, but made preparations in case the English did try again the next day. They counted their crossbow bolts, stacked more boulders on the ramparts and fed the fires which boiled the pots of water that were poured onto the English. Heat the wretches up, the town’s priests had said, and the townsfolk liked that jest. They were winning, they knew, and they reckoned their ordeal must finish soon, for the English would surely be running out of food. All La Roche-Derrien had to do was endure and then receive the praise and thanks of Duke Charles.

The small rain stopped at nightfall. The townsfolk went to their beds, but kept their weapons ready. The sentries lit watch fires behind the walls and gazed into the dark.

It was night, it was winter, it was cold and the besiegers had one last chance.

The Blackbird had been christened Jeanette Marie Halevy, and when she was fifteen her parents had taken her to Guingamp for the annual tournament of the apples. Her father was not an aristocrat so the family could not sit in the enclosure beneath St Laurent’s tower, but they found a place nearby, and Louis Halevy made certain his daughter was visible by placing their chairs on the farm wagon which had carried them from La Roche-Derrien. Jeanette’s father was a prosperous shipmaster and wine merchant, though his fortune in business had not been mirrored in life. One son had died when a cut finger turned septic and his second son had drowned on a voyage to Corunna. Jeanette was now his only child.

There was calculation in the visit to Guingamp. The nobility of Brittany, at least those who favoured an alliance with France, assembled at the tournament where, for four days, in front of a crowd that came as much for the fair as for the fighting, they displayed their talents with sword and lance. Jeanette found much of it tedious, for the preambles to each fight were long and often out of earshot. Knights paraded endlessly, their extravagant plumes nodding, but after a while there would be a brief thunder of hoofs, a clash of metal, a cheer, and one knight would be tumbled in the grass. It was customary for every victorious knight to prick an apple with his lance and present it to whichever woman in the crowd attracted him, and that was why her father had taken the farm wagon to Guingamp. After four days Jeanette had eighteen apples and the enmity of a score of better-born girls.

Her parents took her back to La Roche-Derrien and waited. They had displayed their wares and now the buyers could find their way to the lavish house beside the River Jaudy. From the front the house seemed small, but go through the archway and a visitor found himself in a wide courtyard reaching down to a stone quay where Monsieur Halevy’s smaller boats could be moored at the top of the tide. The courtyard shared a wall with the church of St Renan and, because Monsieur Halevy had donated the tower to the church, he had been permitted to drive an archway through the wall so that his family did not need to step into the street when they went to Mass. The house told any suitor that this was a wealthy family, and the presence of the parish priest at the supper table told him it was a devout family. Jeanette was to be no aristocrat’s plaything, she was to be a wife.

A dozen men condescended to visit the Halevy house, but it was Henri Chenier, Comte d’Armorique, who won the apple. He was a prime catch, for he was nephew to Charles of Blois, who was himself a nephew to King Philip of France, and it was Charles whom the French recognized as Duke and ruler of Brittany. The Duke allowed Henri Chenier to present his fiancée, but afterwards advised his nephew to discard her. The girl was a merchant’s daughter, scarce more than a peasant, though even the Duke admitted she was a beauty. Her hair was shining black, her face was unflawed by the pox and she had all her teeth. She was graceful, so that a Dominican friar in the Duke’s court clasped his hands and exclaimed that Jeanette was the living image of the Madonna. The Duke agreed she was beautiful, but so what? Many women were beautiful. Any tavern in Guingamp, he said, could throw up a two-livre whore who could make most wives look like hogs. It was not the job of a wife to be beautiful, but to be rich. ‘Make the girl your mistress,’ he advised his nephew, and virtually ordered Henri to marry an heiress from Picardy, but the heiress was a pox-faced slattern and the Count of Armorica was besotted by Jeanette’s beauty and so he defied his uncle.

He married the merchant’s daughter in the chapel of his castle at Plabennec, which lay in Finisterre, the world’s end. The Duke reckoned his nephew had listened to too many troubadours, but the Count and his new wife were happy and a year after their wedding, when Jeanette was sixteen, their son was born. They named him Charles, after the Duke, but if the Duke was complimented, he said nothing. He refused to receive Jeanette again and treated his nephew coldly.

Later that same year the English came in force to support Jean de Montfort, whom they recognized as the Duke of Brittany, and the King of France sent reinforcements to his nephew Charles, whom he recognized as the real Duke, and so the civil war began in earnest. The Count of Armorica insisted that his wife and baby son went back to her father’s house in La Roche-Derrien because the castle at Plabennec was small, in ill repair and too close to the invader’s forces.

That summer the castle fell to the English just as Jeanette’s husband had feared, and the following year the King of England spent the campaigning season in Brittany, and his army pushed back the forces of Charles, Duke of Brittany. There was no one great battle, but a series of bloody skirmishes, and in one of them, a ragged affair fought between the hedgerows of a steep valley, Jeanette’s husband was wounded. He had lifted the face-piece of his helmet to shout encouragement to his men and an arrow had gone clean through his mouth. His servants brought the Count to the house beside the River Jaudy where he took five days to die; five days of constant pain during which he was unable to eat and scarce able to breathe as the wound festered and the blood congealed in his gullet. He was twenty-eight years old, a champion of tournaments, and he wept like a child at the end. He choked to death and Jeanette screamed in frustrated anger and grief.

Then began Jeanette’s time of sorrow. She was a widow, la veuve Chenier, and not six months after her husband’s death she became an orphan when both her parents died of the bloody flux. She was just eighteen and her son, the Count of Armorica, was two, but Jeanette had inherited her father’s wealth and she determined to use it to strike back at the hated English who had killed her husband, and so she began outfitting two ships that could prey on English shipping.

Monsieur Belas, who had been her father’s lawyer, advised against spending money on the ships. Jeanette’s fortune would not last for ever, the lawyer said, and nothing soaked up cash like outfitting warships that rarely made money, unless by luck. Better, he said, to use the ships for trade. ‘The merchants in Lannion are making a fine profit on Spanish wine,’ he suggested. He had a cold, for it was winter, and he sneezed. ‘A very fine profit,’ he said wistfully. He spoke in Breton, though both he and Jeanette could, if needs be, speak French.

‘I do not want Spanish wine,’ Jeanette said coldly, ‘but English souls.’

‘No profit in those, my lady,’ Belas said. He found it strange to call Jeanette ‘my lady’. He had known her since she was a child, and she had always been little Jeanette to him, but she had married and become an aristocratic widow, and a widow, moreover, with a temper. ‘You cannot sell English souls,’ Belas pointed out mildly.

‘Except to the devil,’ Jeanette said, crossing herself. ‘But I don’t need Spanish wine, Belas. We have the rents.’

‘The rents!’ Belas said mockingly. He was tall, thin, scanty-haired and clever. He had served Jeanette’s father well and long, and was resentful that the merchant had left him nothing in his will. Everything had gone to Jeanette except for a small bequest to the monks at Pontrieux so they would say Masses for the dead man’s soul. Belas hid his resentment. ‘Nothing comes from Plabennec,’ he told Jeanette. ‘The English are there, and how long do you think the rents will come from your father’s farms? The English will take them soon.’ An English army had occupied unwalled Tréguier, which was only an hour’s walk northwards, and they had pulled down the cathedral tower there because some crossbowmen had shot at them from its summit. Belas hoped the English would retreat soon, for it was deep in the winter and their supplies must be running low, but he feared they might ravage the countryside about La Roche-Derrien before they left. And if they did, Jeanette’s farms would be left worthless. ‘How much rent can you get from a burned farm?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t care!’ she snapped. ‘I shall sell everything if I have to, everything!’ Except for her husband’s armour and weapons. They were precious and would go to her son one day.

Belas sighed for her foolishness, then huddled in his black cloak and leaned close to the small fire which spat in the hearth. A cold wind came from the nearby sea, making the chimney smoke. ‘You will permit me, madame, to offer you advice? First, the business.’ Belas paused to wipe his nose on his long black sleeve. ‘It ails, but I can find you a good man to run it as your father did, and I would draw up a contract which would ensure the man would pay you well from the profits. Second, madame, you should think of marriage.’ He paused, half expecting a protest, but Jeanette said nothing. Belas sighed. She was so lovely! There were a dozen men in town who would marry her, but marriage to an aristocrat had turned her head and she would settle for nothing less than another titled man. ‘You are, madame,’ the lawyer continued carefully, ‘a widow who possesses, at the moment, a considerable fortune, but I have seen such fortunes drain away like snow in April. Find a man who can look after you, your possessions and your son.’

Jeanette turned and stared at him. ‘I married the finest man in Christendom,’ she said, ‘and where do you think I will find another like him?’

Men like the Count of Armorica, the lawyer thought, were found everywhere, more was the pity, for what were they but brute fools in armour who believed war was a sport? Jeanette, he thought, should marry a prudent merchant, perhaps a widower who had a fortune, but he suspected such advice would be wasted. ‘Remember the old saying, my lady,’ he said slyly. ‘Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.’

Jeanette shuddered with anger at the words. ‘You go beyond yourself, Monsieur Belas.’ She spoke icily, then dismissed him, and the next day the English came to La Roche-Derrien and Jeanette took her dead husband’s crossbow from the place where she hid her wealth and she joined the defenders on the walls. Damn Belas’s advice! She would fight like a man and Duke Charles, who despised her, would learn to admire her, to support her and restore her dead husband’s estates to her son.

So Jeanette had become the Blackbird and the English had died in front of her walls and Belas’s advice was forgotten, and now, Jeanette reckoned, the town’s defenders had so rattled the English that the siege would surely be lifted. All would be well, in which belief, for the first time in a week, the Blackbird slept well.

Chapter 2

Thomas crouched beside the river. He had broken through a stand of alders to reach the bank where he now pulled off his boots and hose. Best to go barelegged, he reckoned, so the boots did not get stuck in the river mud. It was going to be cold, freezing cold, but he could not remember a time when he had been happier. He liked this life, and his memories of Hookton, Oxford and his father had almost faded.

‘Take your boots off,’ he told the twenty archers who would accompany him, ‘and hang your arrow bags round your necks.’

‘Why?’ someone challenged him from the dark.

‘So it bloody throttles you,’ Thomas growled.

‘So your arrows don’t get wet,’ another man explained helpfully.

Thomas tied his own bag round his neck. Archers did not carry the quivers that hunters used, for quivers were open at the top and their arrows could fall out when a man ran or stumbled or clambered through a hedge. Arrows in quivers got wet when it rained, and wet feathers made arrows fly crooked, so real archers used linen bags that were water-proofed with wax and sealed by laces. The bags were bolstered by withy frames that spread the linen so the feathers were not crushed.

Will Skeat edged down the bank where a dozen men were stacking the hurdles. He shivered in the cold wind that came from the water. The sky to the east was still dark, but some light came from the watch fires that burned within La Roche-Derrien.

‘They’re nice and quiet in there,’ Skeat said, nodding towards the town.

‘Pray they’re sleeping,’ Thomas said.

‘In beds too. I’ve forgotten what a bed’s like,’ Skeat said, then edged aside to let another man through to the riverbank. Thomas was surprised to see it was Sir Simon Jekyll, who had been so scornful of him in the Earl’s tent. ‘Sir Simon,’ Will Skeat said, barely bothering to disguise his own scorn, ‘wants a word with thee.’

Sir Simon wrinkled his nose at the stench of the river mud. Much of it, he supposed, was the town’s sewage and he was glad he was not wading barelegged through the muck.

‘You are confident of passing the stakes?’ he asked Thomas.

‘I wouldn’t be going otherwise,’ Thomas said, not bothering to sound respectful.

Thomas’s tone made Sir Simon bridle, but he controlled his temper. ‘The Earl,’ he said distantly, ‘has given me the honour of leading the attack on the walls.’ He stopped abruptly and Thomas waited, expecting more, but Sir Simon merely looked at him with an irritated face.

‘So Thomas takes the walls,’ Skeat finally spoke, ‘to make it safe for your ladders?’

‘What I do not want,’ Sir Simon ignored Skeat and spoke to Thomas, ‘is for you to take your men ahead of mine into the town itself. We see armed men, we’re likely to kill them, you understand?’

Thomas almost spat in derision. His men would be armed with bows and no enemy carried a long-stave bow like the English so there was hardly any chance of being mistaken for the town’s defenders, but he held his tongue. He just nodded.

‘You and your archers can join our attack,’ Sir Simon went on, ‘but you will be under my command.’

Thomas nodded again and Sir Simon, irritated by the implied insolence, turned on his heel and walked away.

‘Goddamn bastard,’ Thomas said.

‘He just wants to get his nose into the trough ahead of the rest of us,’ Skeat said.

‘You’re letting the bastard use our ladders?’ Thomas asked.

‘If he wants to be first up, let him. Ladders are green wood, Tom, and if they break I’d rather it was him tumbling than me. Besides, I reckon we’ll be better off following you through the river, but I ain’t telling Sir Simon that.’ Skeat grinned, then swore as a crash sounded from the darkness south of the river. ‘Those bloody white rats,’ Skeat said, and vanished into the shadows.

The white rats were the Bretons loyal to Duke John, men who wore his badge of a white ermine, and some sixty Breton crossbowmen had been attached to Skeat’s soldiers, their job to rattle the walls with their bolts as the ladders were placed against the ramparts. It was those men who had startled the night with their noise and now the noise grew even louder. Some fool had tripped in the dark and thumped a crossbowman with a pavise, the huge shield behind which the crossbows were laboriously reloaded, and the crossbowman struck back, and suddenly the white rats were having a brawl in the dark. The defenders, naturally, heard them and started to hurl burning bales of straw over the ramparts and then a church bell began to toll, then another, and all this long before Thomas had even started across the mud.

Sir Simon Jekyll, alarmed by the bells and the burning straw, shouted that the attack must go in now. ‘Carry the ladders forward!’ he bellowed. Defenders were running onto La Roche-Derrien’s walls and the first crossbow bolts were spitting off the ramparts that were lit bright by the burning bales.

‘Hold those goddamn ladders!’ Will Skeat snarled at his men, then looked at Thomas. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘I think the bastards are distracted,’ Thomas said.

‘So you’ll go?’

‘Got nothing better to do, Will.’

‘Bloody white rats!’

Thomas led his men onto the mud. The hurdles were some help, but not as much as he had hoped, so that they still slipped and struggled their way towards the great stakes and Thomas reckoned the noise they made was enough to wake King Arthur and his knights. But the defenders were making even more noise. Every church bell was clanging, a trumpet was screaming, men were shouting, dogs barking, cockerels were crowing, and the crossbows were creaking and banging as their cords were inched back and released.

The walls loomed to Thomas’s right. He wondered if the Blackbird was up there. He had seen her twice now and been captivated by the fierceness of her face and her wild black hair. A score of other archers had seen her too, and all of them men who could thread an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces, yet the woman still lived. Amazing, Thomas thought, what a pretty face could do.

He threw down the last hurdle and so reached the wooden stakes, each one a whole tree trunk sunk into the mud. His men joined him and they heaved against the timber until the rotted wood split like straw. The stakes made a terrible noise as they fell, but it was drowned by the uproar in the town. Jake, the cross-eyed murderer from Exeter gaol, pulled himself alongside Thomas. To their right now was a wooden quay with a rough ladder at one end. Dawn was coming and a feeble, thin, grey light was seeping from the east to outline the bridge across the Jaudy. It was a handsome stone bridge with a barbican at its further end, and Thomas feared the garrison of that tower might see them, but no one called an alarm and no crossbow bolts thumped across the river.

Thomas and Jake were first up the quay ladder, then came Sam, the youngest of Skeat’s archers. The wooden landing stage served a timberyard and a dog began barking frantically among the stacked trunks, but Sam slipped into the blackness with his knife and the barking suddenly stopped. ‘Good doggy,’ Sam said as he came back.

‘String your bows,’ Thomas said. He had looped the hemp cord onto his own black weapon and now untied the laces of his arrow bag.

‘I hate bloody dogs,’ Sam said. ‘One bit my mother when she was pregnant with me.’

‘That’s why you’re daft,’ Jake said.

‘Shut your goddamn faces,’ Thomas ordered. More archers were climbing the quay, which was swaying alarmingly, but he could see that the walls he was supposed to capture were thick with defenders now. English arrows, their white goose feathers bright in the flamelight of the defenders’ fires, flickered over the wall and thumped into the town’s thatched roofs. ‘Maybe we should open the south gate,’ Thomas suggested.

‘Go through the town?’ Jake asked in alarm.

‘It’s a small town,’ Thomas said.

‘You’re mad,’ Jake said, but he was grinning and he meant the words as a compliment.

‘I’m going anyway,’ Thomas said. It would be dark in the streets and their long bows would be hidden. He reckoned it would be safe enough.

A dozen men followed Thomas while the rest started plundering the nearer buildings. More and more men were coming through the broken stakes now as Will Skeat sent them down the riverbank rather than wait for the wall to be captured. The defenders had seen the men in the mud and were shooting down from the end of the town wall, but the first attackers were already loose in the streets.

Thomas blundered through the town. It was pitch-black in the alleys and hard to tell where he was going, though by climbing the hill on which the town was built he reckoned he must eventually go over the summit and so down to the southern gate. Men ran past him, but no one could see that he and his companions were English. The church bells were deafening. Children were crying, dogs howling, gulls screaming, and the noise was making Thomas terrified. This was a daft idea, he thought. Maybe Sir Simon had already climbed the walls? Maybe he was wasting his time? Yet white-feathered arrows still thumped into the town roofs, suggesting the walls were untaken, and so he forced himself to keep going. Twice he found himself in a blind alley and the second time, doubling back into a wider street, he almost ran into a priest who had come from his church to fix a flaming torch in a wall bracket.

‘Go to the ramparts!’ the priest said sternly, then saw the long bows in the men’s hands and opened his mouth to shout the alarm.

He never had time to shout for Thomas’s bow stave slammed point-first into his belly. He bent over, gasping, and Jake casually slit his throat. The priest gurgled as he sank to the cobbles and Jake frowned when the noise stopped.

‘I’ll go to hell for that,’ he said.

‘You’re going to hell anyway,’ Sam said, ‘we all are.’

‘We’re all going to heaven,’ Thomas said, ‘but not if we dawdle.’ He suddenly felt much less frightened, as though the priest’s death had taken his fear. An arrow struck the church tower and dropped into the alley as Thomas led his men past the church and found himself on La Roche-Derrien’s main street, which dropped down to where a watch fire burned by the southern gate. Thomas shrank back into the alley beside the church, for the street was thick with men, but they were all running to the threatened side of the town, and when Thomas next looked the hill was empty. He could only see two sentinels on the ramparts above the gate arch. He told his men about the two sentries.

‘They’re going to be scared as hell,’ he said. ‘We kill the bastards and open the gate.’

‘There might be others,’ Sam said. ‘There’ll be a guard house.’

‘Then kill them too,’ Thomas said. ‘Now, come on!’

They stepped into the street, ran down a few yards and there drew their bows. The arrows flew and the two guards on the arch fell. A man stepped out of the guard house built into the gate turret and gawped at the archers, but before any could draw their bows he stepped back inside and barred the door.

‘It’s ours!’ Thomas shouted, and led his men in a wild rush to the arch.

The guard house stayed locked so there was no one to stop the archers from lifting the bar and pushing open the two great gates. The Earl’s men saw the gates open, saw the English archers outlined against the watch fire and gave a great roar from the darkness that told Thomas a torrent of vengeful troops was coming towards him.

Which meant La Roche-Derrien’s time of weeping could begin. For the English had taken the town.

Jeanette woke to a church bell ringing as though it was the world’s doom when the dead were rising from their graves and the gates of hell were yawning wide for sinners. Her first instinct was to cross to her son’s bed, but little Charles was safe. She could just see his eyes in the dark that was scarcely alleviated by the glowing embers of the fire.

‘Mama?’ he cried, reaching up to her.

‘Quiet,’ she hushed the boy, then ran to throw open the shutters. A faint grey light showed above the eastern roofs, then steps sounded in the street and she leaned from the window to see men running from their houses with swords, crossbows and spears. A trumpet was calling from the town centre, then more church bells began tolling the alarm into a dying night. The bell of the church of the Virgin was cracked and made a harsh, anvil-like noise that was all the more terrifying.

‘Madame!’ a servant cried as she ran into the room.

‘The English must be attacking.’ Jeanette forced herself to speak calmly. She was wearing nothing but a linen shift and was suddenly cold. She snatched up a cloak, tied it about her neck, then took her son into her arms. ‘You will be all right, Charles,’ she tried to console him. ‘The English are attacking again, that is all.’

Except she was not sure. The bells were sounding so wild. It was not the measured tolling that was the usual signal of attack, but a panicked clangour as though the men hauling the ropes were trying to repel an attack by their own efforts. She looked from the window again and saw the English arrows flitting across the roofs. She could hear them thumping into the thatch. The children of the town thought it was a fine sport to retrieve the enemy arrows and two had injured themselves sliding from the roofs. Jeanette thought about getting dressed, but decided she must find out what was happening first so she gave Charles to the servant, then ran downstairs.

One of the kitchen servants met her at the back door. ‘What’s happening, madame?’

‘Another attack, that is all.’

She unbarred the door to the yard, then ran to the private entrance to Renan’s church just as an arrow struck the church tower and clattered down into the yard. She pulled open the tower door, then groped up the steep ladders that her father had built. It had not been mere piety that had inspired Louis Halevy to construct the tower, but also the opportunity to look downriver to see if his boats were approaching, and the high stone parapet offered one of the best views in La Roche-Derrien. Jeanette was deafened by the church bell that swung in the gloom, each clapper stroke thumping her ears like a physical blow. She climbed past the bell, pushed open the trapdoor at the top of the ladders and clambered onto the leads.

The English had come. She could see a torrent of men flowing about the river edge of the wall. They waded through the mud and swarmed over the broken stakes like a torrent of rats. Sweet Mother of Christ, she thought, sweet Mother of Christ, but they were in the town! She hurried down the ladders. ‘They’re here!’ she called to the priest who hauled the bell rope. ‘They’re in the town!’

‘Havoc! Havoc!’ the English shouted, the call that encouraged them to plunder.

Jeanette ran across the yard and up the stairs. She pulled her clothes from the cupboard, then turned when the voices shouted havoc beneath her window. She forgot her clothes and took Charles back into her arms. ‘Mother of God,’ she prayed, ‘look after us now, look after us. Sweet Mother of God, keep us safe.’ She wept, not knowing what to do. Charles cried because she was holding him too tight and she tried to soothe him. Cheers sounded in the street and she ran back to the window and saw what looked like a dark river studded with steel flowing towards the town centre. She collapsed by the window, sobbing. Charles was screaming. Two more servants were in the room, somehow thinking that Jeanette could shelter them, but there was no shelter now. The English had come. One of the servants shot the bolt on the bedroom door, but what good would that do?

Jeanette thought of her husband’s hidden weapons and of the Spanish sword’s sharp edge, and wondered if she would have the courage to place the point against her breast and heave her body onto the blade. It would be better to die than be dishonoured, she thought, but then what would happen to her son? She wept helplessly, then heard someone beating on the big gate which led to her courtyard. An axe, she supposed, and she listened to its crunching blows that seemed to shake the whole house. A woman screamed in the town, then another, and the English voices cheered rampantly. One by one the church bells fell silent until only the cracked bell hammered its fear across the roofs. The axe still bit at the door. Would they recognize her, she wondered. She had exulted in standing on the ramparts, shooting her husband’s crossbow at the besiegers, and her right shoulder was bruised because of it, but she had welcomed the pain, believing that every bolt fired made it less likely that the English would break into the town.

No one had thought they could. And why besiege La Roche-Derrien anyway? It had nothing to offer. As a port it was almost useless, for the largest ships could not make it up the river even at the top of the tide. The English, the townspeople had believed, were making a petulant demonstration and would soon give up and slink away.

But now they were here, and Jeanette screamed as the sound of the axe blows changed. They had broken through, and doubtless were trying to lift the bar. She closed her eyes, shaking as she heard the gate scrape on the cobbles. It was open. It was open. Oh, Mother of God, she prayed, be with us now.

The screams sounded downstairs. Feet thumped on the stairs. Men’s voices shouted in a strange tongue.

Be with us now and at the hour of our death for the English had come.

Sir Simon Jekyll was annoyed. He had been prepared to climb the ladders if Skeat’s archers ever gained the walls, which he doubted, but if the ramparts were captured then he intended to be first into the town. He foresaw cutting down a few panicked defenders then finding some great house to plunder.

But nothing happened as he had imagined it. The town was awake, the wall manned, and the ladders never went forward, but Skeat’s men still got inside by simply wading through the mud at the river’s edge. Then a cheer at the southern side of the town suggested that gate was open, which meant that the whole damned army was getting into La Roche-Derrien ahead of Sir Simon. He swore. There would be nothing left!

‘My lord?’ One of his men-at-arms prompted Sir Simon, wanting a decision as to how they were to reach the women and valuables beyond the walls, which were emptying of their defenders as men ran to protect their homes and families. It would have been quicker, far quicker, to have waded through the mud, but Sir Simon did not want to dirty his new boots and so he ordered the ladders forward.

The ladders were made of green wood and the rungs bent alarmingly as Sir Simon climbed, but there were no defenders to oppose him and the ladder held. He clambered into an embrasure and drew his sword. A half-dozen defenders lay spitted with arrows on the rampart. Two were still alive and Sir Simon stabbed the nearest one. The man had been roused from his bed and had no mail, not even a leather coat, yet still the old sword made hard work of the killing stroke. It was not designed for stabbing, but for cutting. The new swords, made from the finest southern European steel, were renowned for their ability to pierce mail and leather, but this ancient blade required all Sir Simon’s brute force to penetrate a rib cage. And what chance, he wondered sourly, would there be of finding a better weapon in this sorry excuse for a town?

There was a flight of stone steps down into a street that was thronged by English archers and men-at-arms smeared with mud to their thighs. They were breaking into houses. One man was carrying a dead goose, another had a bolt of cloth. The plundering had begun and Sir Simon was still on the ramparts. He shouted at his men to hurry and when enough of them had gathered on the wall’s top, he led them down into the street. An archer was rolling a barrel from a cellar door, another dragged a girl by an arm. Where to go? That was Sir Simon’s problem. The nearest houses were all being sacked, and the cheers from the south suggested the Earl’s main army was descending on that part of the town. Some townsfolk, realizing all was lost, were fleeing in front of the archers to cross the bridge and escape into the countryside.

Sir Simon decided to strike east. The Earl’s men were to the south, Skeat’s were staying close to the west wall so the eastern quarter offered the best hope of plunder. He pushed past Skeat’s muddy archers and led his men towards the bridge. Frightened people ran past him, ignoring him and hoping he would ignore them. He crossed the main street, which led to the bridge, and saw a roadway running alongside the big houses that fronted the river. Merchants, Sir Simon thought, fat merchants with fat profits, and then, in the growing light, he saw an archway that was surmounted by a coat of arms. A noble’s house.

‘Who has an axe?’ he asked his men.

One of the men-at-arms stepped forward and Sir Simon indicated the heavy gate. The house had windows on the ground floor, but they were covered by heavy iron bars, which seemed a good sign. Sir Simon stepped back to let his man start work on the gate.

The axeman knew his business. He chopped a hole where he guessed the locking bar was, and when he had broken through he put a hand inside and pushed the bar up and out of its brackets so that Sir Simon and his archers could heave the gates open. Sir Simon left two men to guard the gate, ordering them to keep every other plunderer out of the property, then led the rest into the yard. The first things he saw were two boats tied at the river’s quay. They were not large ships, but all hulls were valuable and he ordered four of his archers to go aboard.

‘Tell anyone who comes that they’re mine, you understand? Mine!’

He had a choice now: storerooms or house? And a stable? He told two men-at-arms to find the stable and stand guard on whatever horses were there, then he kicked in the house door and led his six remaining men into the kitchen. Two women screamed. He ignored them; they were old, ugly servants and he was after richer things. A door led from the back of the kitchen and he pointed one of his archers towards it, then, holding his sword ahead of him, he went through a small dark hall into a front room. A tapestry showing Bacchus, the god of wine, hung on one wall and Sir Simon had an idea that valuables were sometimes hidden behind such wall-coverings so he hacked at it with his blade, then hauled it down from its hooks, but there was only a plaster wall behind. He kicked the chairs, then saw a chest that had a huge dark padlock.

‘Get it open,’ he ordered two of his archers, ‘and whatever’s inside is mine.’ Then, ignoring two books which were of no use to man or beast, he went back into the hall and ran up a flight of dark wooden stairs.

Sir Simon found a door leading to a room at the front of the house. It was bolted and a woman screamed from the other side when he tried to force the door. He stood back and used the heel of his boot, smashing the bolt on the far side and slamming the door back on its hinges. Then he stalked inside, his old sword glittering in the dawn’s wan light, and he saw a black-haired woman.

Sir Simon considered himself a practical man. His father, quite sensibly, had not wanted his son to waste time on education, though Sir Simon had learned to read and could, at a pinch, write a letter. He liked useful things–hounds and weapons, horses and armour–and he despised the fashionable cult of gentility. His mother was a great one for troubadours, and was forever listening to songs of knights so gentle that Sir Simon reckoned they would not have lasted two minutes in a tourney’s mêlée. The songs and poems celebrated love as though it was some rare thing that gave a life enchantment, but Sir Simon did not need poets to define love, which to him was tumbling a peasant girl in a harvest field or thrusting at some ale-reeking whore in a tavern, but when he saw the black-haired woman he suddenly understood what the troubadours had been celebrating.

It did not matter that the woman was shaking with fear or that her hair was wildly awry or that her face was streaked with tears. Sir Simon recognized beauty and it struck him like an arrow. It took his breath away. So this, then, was love! It was the realization that he could never be happy until this woman was his–and that was convenient, for she was an enemy, the town was being sacked and Sir Simon, clad in mail and fury, had found her first.

‘Get out!’ he snarled at the servants in the room. ‘Get out!’

The servants fled in tears and Sir Simon booted the broken door shut, then advanced on the woman, who crouched beside her son’s bed with the boy in her arms.

‘Who are you?’ Sir Simon asked in French.

The woman tried to sound brave. ‘I am the Countess of Armorica,’ she said. ‘And you, monsieur?’

Sir Simon was tempted to award himself a peerage to impress Jeanette, but he was too slow-witted and so heard himself uttering his proper name. He was slowly becoming aware that the room betrayed wealth. The bed hangings were thickly embroidered, the candlesticks were of heavy silver and the walls either side of the stone hearth were expensively panelled in beautifully carved wood. He pushed the smaller bed against the door, reckoning that should ensure some privacy, then went to warm himself at the fire. He tipped more sea-coal onto the small flames and held his chilled gloves close to the heat.

‘This is your house, madame?’

‘It is.’

‘Not your husband’s?’

‘I am a widow,’ Jeanette said.

A wealthy widow! Sir Simon almost crossed himself out of gratitude. The widows he had met in England had been rouged hags, but this one…! This one was different. This one was a woman worthy of a tournament’s champion and seemed rich enough to save him from the ignominy of losing his estate and knightly rank. She might even have enough cash to buy a baronage. Maybe an earldom?

He turned from the fire and smiled at her. ‘Are those your boats at the quay?’

‘Yes, monsieur.’

‘By the rules of war, madame, they are now mine. Everything here is mine.’

Jeanette frowned at that. ‘What rules?’

‘The law of the sword, madame, but I think you are fortunate. I shall offer you my protection.’

Jeanette sat on the edge of her curtained bed, clutching Charles. ‘The rules of chivalry, my lord,’ she said, ‘ensure my protection.’ She flinched as a woman screamed in a nearby house.

‘Chivalry?’ Sir Simon asked. ‘Chivalry? I have heard it mentioned in songs, madame, but this is a war. Our task is to punish the followers of Charles of Blois for rebelling against their lawful lord. Punishment and chivalry do not mix.’ He frowned at her. ‘You’re the Blackbird!’ he said, suddenly recognizing her in the light of the revived fire.

‘The blackbird?’ Jeanette did not understand.

‘You fought us from the walls! You scratched my arm!’ Sir Simon did not sound angry, but astonished. He had expected to be furious when he met the Blackbird, but her reality was too overpowering for rage. He grinned. ‘You closed your eyes when you shot the crossbow, that’s why you missed.’

‘I did not miss!’ Jeanette said indignantly.

‘A scratch,’ Sir Simon said, showing her the rent in his mail sleeve. ‘But why, madame, do you fight for the false duke?’

‘My husband,’ she said stiffly, ‘was nephew to Duke Charles.’

Sweet God, Sir Simon thought, sweet God! A prize indeed. He bowed to her. ‘So your son,’ he said, nodding at Charles, who was peering anxiously from his mother’s arms, ‘is the present Count?’

‘He is,’ Jeanette confirmed,

‘A fine boy.’ Sir Simon forced himself to the flattery. In truth he thought Charles was a pudding-faced nuisance whose presence inhibited him from a natural urge to thrust the Blackbird onto her back and thus show her the realities of war, but he was acutely aware that this widow was an aristocrat, a beauty, and related to Charles of Blois, who was nephew to the King of France. This woman meant riches and Sir Simon’s present necessity was to make her see that her best interest lay in sharing his ambitions. ‘A fine boy, madame,’ he went on, ‘who needs a father.’

Jeanette just stared at him. Sir Simon had a blunt face. It was bulbous-nosed, firm-chinned, and showed not the slightest sign of intelligence or wit. He had confidence, though, enough to have persuaded himself that she would marry him. Did he really mean that? She gaped, then gave a startled cry as angry shouting erupted beneath her window. Some archers were trying to get past the men guarding the gate. Sir Simon pushed open the window. ‘This place is mine,’ he snarled in English. ‘Go find your own chickens to pluck.’ He turned back to Jeanette. ‘You see, madame, how I protect you?’

‘So there is chivalry in war?’

‘There is opportunity in war, madame. You are wealthy, you are a widow, you need a man.’

She gazed at him with disturbingly large eyes, hardly daring to believe his temerity. ‘Why?’ she asked simply.

‘Why?’ Sir Simon was astonished by the question. He gestured at the window. ‘Listen to the screams, woman! What do you think happens to women when a town falls?’

‘But you said you would protect me,’ she pointed out.

‘So I will.’ He was getting lost in this conversation. The woman, he thought, though beautiful, was remarkably stupid. ‘I will protect you,’ he said, ‘and you will look after me.’

‘How?’

Sir Simon sighed. ‘You have money?’

Jeanette shrugged. ‘There is a little downstairs, my lord, hidden in the kitchen.’

Sir Simon frowned angrily. Did she think he was a fool? That he would take that bait and go downstairs, leaving her to climb out of the window? ‘I know one thing about money, madame,’ he said, ‘and that is that you never hide it where the servants can find it. You hide it in the private rooms. In a bedchamber.’ He pulled open a chest and emptied its linens onto the floor, but there was nothing hidden there, and then, on an inspiration, he began rapping the wooden panelling. He had heard that such panels often concealed a hiding place and he was rewarded almost instantly by a satisfyingly hollow sound.

‘No, monsieur!’ Jeanette said.

Sir Simon ignored her, drawing his sword and hacking at the limewood panels that splintered and pulled away from their beams. He sheathed the blade and tugged with his gloved hands at the shattered wood.

‘No!’ Jeanette wailed.

Sir Simon stared. Money was concealed behind the panelling, a whole barrel of coins, but that was not the prize. The prize was a suit of armour and a set of weapons such as Sir Simon had only ever dreamed of. A shining suit of plate armour, each piece chased with subtle engravings and inlaid with gold. Italian work? And the sword! When he drew it from the scabbard it was like holding Excalibur itself. There was a blue sheen to the blade, which was not nearly as heavy as his own sword but felt miraculously balanced. A blade from the famous swordsmiths of Poitiers, perhaps, or, even better, Spanish?

‘They belonged to my husband,’ Jeanette appealed to him, ‘and it is all I have of his. They must go to Charles.’

Sir Simon ignored her. He traced his gloved finger down the gold inlay on the breastplate. That piece alone was worth an estate!

‘They are all he has of his father’s,’ Jeanette pleaded.

Sir Simon unbuckled his sword belt and let the old weapon drop to the floor, then fastened the Count of Armorica’s sword about his waist. He turned and stared at Jeanette, marvelling at her smooth unscarred face. These were the spoils of war that he had dreamed about and had begun to fear would never come his way: a barrel of cash, a suit of armour fit for a king, a blade made for a champion and a woman that would be the envy of England. ‘The armour is mine,’ he said, ‘as is the sword.’

‘No, monsieur, please.’

‘What will you do? Buy them from me?’

‘If I must,’ Jeanette said, nodding at the barrel.

‘That too is mine, madame,’ Sir Simon said, and to prove it he strode to the door, unblocked it and shouted for two of his archers to come up the stairs. He gestured at the barrel and the suit of armour. ‘Take them down,’ he said, ‘and keep them safe. And don’t think I haven’t counted the cash, because I have. Now go!’

Jeanette watched the theft. She wanted to weep for pity, but forced herself to stay calm. ‘If you steal everything I own,’ she said to Sir Simon, ‘how can I buy the armour back?’

Sir Simon shoved the boy’s bed against the door again, then favoured her with a smile. ‘There is something you can use to buy the armour, my dear,’ he said winningly. ‘You have what all women have. You can use that.’

Jeanette closed her eyes for a few heartbeats. ‘Are all the gentlemen of England like you?’ she asked.

‘Few are so skilled in arms,’ Sir Simon said proudly.

He was about to tell her of his tournament triumphs, sure that she would be impressed, but she interrupted him. ‘I meant,’ she said icily, ‘to discover whether the knights of England are all thieves, poltroons and bullies.’

Sir Simon was genuinely puzzled by the insult. The woman simply did not seem to appreciate her good fortune, a failing he could only ascribe to innate stupidity. ‘You forget, madame,’ he explained, ‘that the winners of war get the prizes.’

‘I am your prize?’

She was worse than stupid. Sir Simon thought, but who wanted cleverness in a woman? ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I am your protector. If I leave you, if I take away my protection, then there will be a line of men on the stairs waiting to plough you. Now do you understand?’

‘I think,’ she said coldly, ‘that the Earl of Northampton will offer me better protection.’

Sweet Christ, Sir Simon thought, but the bitch was obtuse. It was pointless trying to reason with her for she was too dull to understand, so he must force the breach. He crossed the room fast, snatched Charles from her arms and threw the boy onto the smaller bed. Jeanette cried out and tried to hit him, but Sir Simon caught her arm and slapped her face with his gloved hand and, when she went immobile with pain and astonishment, he tore her cloak’s cords apart and then, with his big hands, ripped the shift down the front of her body. She screamed and tried to clutch her hands over her nakedness, but Sir Simon forced her arms apart and stared in astonishment. Flawless!

‘No!’ Jeanette wept.

Sir Simon shoved her hard back onto the bed. ‘You want your son to inherit your traitorous husband’s armour?’ he asked. ‘Or his sword? Then, madame, you had better be kind to their new owner. I am prepared to be kind to you.’ He unbuckled the sword, dropped it on the floor, then hitched up his mail coat and fumbled with the strings of his hose.

‘No!’ Jeanette wailed, and tried to scramble off the bed, but Sir Simon caught hold of her shift and yanked the linen so that it came down to her waist. The boy was screaming and Sir Simon was fumbling with his rusted gauntlets and Jeanette felt the devil had come into her house. She tried to cover her nakedness, but the Englishman slapped her face again, then once more hauled up his mail coat. Outside the window the cracked bell of the Virgin’s church was at last silent, for the English had come, Jeanette had a suitor and the town wept.

Thomas’s first thought after opening the gate was not plunder, but somewhere to wash the river muck off his legs, which he did with a barrel of ale in the first tavern he encountered. The tavern-keeper was a big bald man who stupidly attacked the English archers with a club, so Jake tripped him with his bowstave, then slit his belly.

‘Silly bastard,’ Jake said. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt him. Much.’

The dead man’s boots fitted Thomas, which was a welcome surprise, for very few did, and once they had found his cache of coins they went in search of other amusement. The Earl of Northampton was spurring his horse up and down the main street, shouting at wild-eyed men not to set the town alight. He wanted to keep La Roche-Derrien as a fortress, and it was less useful to him as a heap of ashes.

Not everyone plundered. Some of the older men, even a few of the younger, were disgusted by the whole business and attempted to curb the wilder excesses, but they were wildly outnumbered by men who saw nothing but opportunity in the fallen town. Father Hobbe, an English priest who had a fondness for Will Skeat’s men, tried to persuade Thomas and his group to guard a church, but they had other pleasures in mind. ‘Don’t spoil your soul, Tom,’ Father Hobbe said in a reminder that Thomas, like all the men, had said Mass the day before, but Thomas reckoned his soul was going to be spoiled anyway so it might as well happen sooner than later. He was looking for a girl, any girl really, for most of Will’s men had a woman in camp. Thomas had been living with a sweet little Breton, but she had caught a fever just before the beginning of the winter campaign and Father Hobbe had said a funeral Mass for her. Thomas had watched as the girl’s unshrouded body had thumped into the shallow grave and he had thought of the graves at Hookton and of the promise he had made to his dying father, but then he had pushed the promise away. He was young and had no appetite for burdens on his conscience.

La Roche-Derrien now crouched under the English fury. Men tore down thatch and wrecked furniture in their search for money. Any townsman who tried to protect his women was killed, while any woman who tried to protect herself was beaten into submission. Some folk had escaped the sack by crossing the bridge, but the small garrison of the barbican fled from the inevitable attack and now the Earl’s men-at-arms manned the small tower and that meant La Roche-Derrien was sealed to its fate. Some women took refuge in the churches and the lucky ones found protectors there, but most were not lucky.

Thomas, Jake and Sam finally discovered an unplundered house that belonged to a tanner, a stinking fellow with an ugly wife and three small children. Sam, whose innocent face made strangers trust him on sight, held his knife at the throat of the youngest child and the tanner suddenly remembered where he had hidden his cash. Thomas had watched Sam, fearing he really would slit the boy’s throat, for Sam, despite his ruddy cheeks and cheerful eyes, was as evil as any man in Will Skeat’s band. Jake was not much better, though Thomas counted both as friends.

‘The man’s as poor as we are,’ Jake said in wonderment as he raked through the tanner’s coins. He pushed a third of the pile towards Thomas. ‘You want his wife?’ Jake offered generously.

‘Christ, no! She’s cross-eyed like you.’

‘Is she?’

Thomas left Jake and Sam to their games and went to find a tavern where there would be food, drink and warmth. He reckoned any girl worth pursuing had been caught already, so he unstrung his bow, pushed past a group of men tearing the contents from a parked wagon and found an inn where a motherly widow had sensibly protected both her property and her daughters by welcoming the first men-at-arms, showering them with free food and ale, then scolding them for dirtying her floor with their muddy feet. She was shouting at them now, though few understood what she said, and one of the men growled at Thomas that she and her daughters were to be left alone.

Thomas held up his hands to show he meant no harm, then took a plate of bread, eggs and cheese. ‘Now pay her,’ one of the men-at-arms growled, and Thomas dutifully put the tanner’s few coins on the counter.

‘He’s a good-looking one,’ the widow said to her daughters, who giggled.

Thomas turned and pretended to inspect the daughters. ‘They are the most beautiful girls in Brittany,’ he said to the widow in French, ‘because they take after you, madame.’

That compliment, though patently untrue, raised squeals of laughter. Beyond the tavern were screams and tears, but inside it was warm and friendly. Thomas ate the food hungrily, then tried to hide himself in a window bay when Father Hobbe came bustling in from the street. The priest saw Thomas anyway.

‘I’m still looking for men to guard the churches, Thomas.’

‘I’m going to get drunk, father,’ Thomas said happily. ‘So goddamn drunk that one of those two girls will look attractive.’ He jerked his head at the widow’s daughters.

Father Hobbe inspected them critically, then sighed. ‘You’ll kill yourself if you drink that much, Thomas.’ He sat at the table, waved at the girls and pointed at Thomas’s pot. ‘I’ll have a drink with you,’ the priest said.

‘What about the churches?’

‘Everyone will be drunk soon enough,’ Father Hobbe said, ‘and the horror will end. It always does. Ale and wine, God knows, are great causes of sin but they make it short-lived. God’s bones, but it’s cold out there.’ He smiled at Thomas. ‘So how’s your black soul, Tom?’

Thomas contemplated the priest. He liked Father Hobbe, who was small and wiry, with a mass of untamed black hair about a cheerful face that was thick-scarred from a childhood pox. He was low born, the son of a Sussex wheelwright, and like any country lad he could draw a bow with the best of them. He sometimes accompanied Skeat’s men on their forays into Duke Charles’s country and he willingly joined the archers when they dismounted to form a battleline. Church law forbade a priest from wielding an edged weapon, but Father Hobbe always claimed he used blunt arrows, though they seemed to pierce enemy mail as efficiently as any other. Father Hobbe, in short, was a good man whose only fault was an excessive interest in Thomas’s soul.

‘My soul,’ Thomas said, ‘is soluble in ale.’

‘Now there’s a good word,’ Father Hobbe said. ‘Soluble, eh?’ He picked up the big black bow and prodded the silver badge with a dirty finger. ‘You’ve discovered anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘Or who stole the lance?’

‘No.’

‘Do you not care any more?’

Thomas leaned back in the chair and stretched his long legs. ‘I’m doing a good job of work, father. We’re winning this war, and this time next year? Who knows? We might be giving the King of France a bloody nose.’

Father Hobbe nodded agreement, though his face suggested Thomas’s words were irrelevant. He traced his finger through a puddle of ale on the table top. ‘You made a promise to your father, Thomas, and you made it in a church. Isn’t that what you told me? A solemn promise, Thomas? That you would retrieve the lance? God listens to such vows.’

Thomas smiled. ‘Outside this tavern, father, there’s so much rape and murder and theft going on that all the quills in heaven can’t keep up with the list of sins. And you worry about me?’

‘Yes, Thomas, I do. Some souls are better than others. I must look after them all, but if you have a prize ram in the flock then you do well to guard it.’

Thomas sighed. ‘One day, father, I’ll find the man who stole that goddamn lance and I’ll ram it up his arse until it tickles the hollow of his skull. One day. Will that do?’

Father Hobbe smiled beatifically. ‘It’ll do, Thomas, but for now there’s a small church that could do with an extra man by the door. It’s full of women! Some of them are so beautiful that your heart will break just to gaze at them. You can get drunk afterwards.’

‘Are the women really beautiful?’

‘What do you think, Thomas? Most of them look like bats and smell like goats, but they still need protection.’

So Thomas helped guard a church, and afterwards, when the army was so drunk it could do no more damage, he went back to the widow’s tavern where he drank himself into oblivion. He had taken a town, he had served his lord well and he was content.

Chapter 3

Thomas was woken by a kick. A pause, then a second kick and a cup of cold water in his face. ‘Jesus!’

‘That’s me,’ Will Skeat said. ‘Father Hobbe told me you’d be here.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Thomas said again. His head was sore, his belly sour and he felt sick. He blinked feebly at the daylight, then frowned at Skeat. ‘It’s you.’

‘It must be grand to be so clever,’ Skeat said. He grinned at Thomas, who was naked in the straw of the tavern stables that he was sharing with one of the widow’s daughters. ‘You must have been drunk as a lord to sheathe your sword in that,’ Skeat added, looking at the girl who was pulling a blanket over herself.

‘I was drunk,’ Thomas groaned. ‘Still am.’ He staggered to his feet and put on his shirt.

‘The Earl wants to see you,’ Skeat said with amusement.

‘Me?’ Thomas looked alarmed. ‘Why?’

‘Perhaps he wants you to marry his daughter,’ Skeat said. ‘Christ’s bones, Tom, but look at the state of you!’

Thomas pulled on his boots and mail coat, then retrieved his hose from the baggage camp and donned a cloth jacket over his mail. The jacket bore the Earl of Northampton’s badge of three green and red stars being pounced on by a trio of lions. He splashed water on his face, then scraped at his stubble with a sharp knife.

‘Grow a beard, lad,’ Skeat said, ‘it saves trouble.’

‘Why does Billy want to see me?’ Thomas asked, using the Earl’s nickname.

‘After what happened in the town yesterday?’ Skeat suggested thoughtfully. ‘He reckons he’s got to hang someone as an example, so he asked me if I had any useless bastards I wanted to be rid of and I thought of you.’

‘The way I feel,’ Thomas said, ‘he might as well hang me.’ He retched drily, then gulped down some water.

He and Will Skeat went back into the town to find the Earl of Northampton sitting in state. The building where his banner hung was supposed to be a guildhall, though it was probably smaller than the guardroom in the Earl’s own castle, but the Earl was sitting at one end as a succession of petitioners pleaded for justice. They were complaining about being robbed, which was pointless considering they had refused to surrender the town, but the Earl listened politely enough. Then a lawyer, a weasel-snouted fellow called Belas, bowed to the Earl and declaimed a long moan about the treatment offered to the Countess of Armorica. Thomas had been letting the words slide past him, but the insistence in Belas’s voice made him take notice.

‘If your lordship,’ Belas said, smirking at the Earl, ‘had not intervened, then the Countess would have been raped by Sir Simon Jekyll.’

Sir Simon stood to one side of the hall. ‘That is a lie!’ he protested in French.

The Earl sighed. ‘So why were your breeches round your ankles when I came into the house?’

Sir Simon reddened as the men in the hall laughed. Thomas had to translate for Will Skeat, who nodded, for he had already heard the tale.

‘The bastard was about to roger some titled widow,’ he explained to Thomas, ‘when the Earl came in. Heard her scream, see? And he’d seen a coat of arms on the house. The aristocracy look after each other.’

The lawyer now laid a long list of charges against Sir Simon. It seemed he was claiming the widow and her son as prisoners who must be held for ransom. He had also stolen the widow’s two ships, her husband’s armour, his sword and all the Countess’s money. Belas made the complaints indignantly, then bowed to the Earl. ‘You have a reputation as a just man, my lord,’ he said obsequiously, ‘and I place the widow’s fate in your hands.’

The Earl of Northampton looked surprised to be told his reputation for fairness. ‘What is it you want?’ he asked.

Belas preened. ‘The return of the stolen items, my lord, and the protection of the King of England for a widow and her noble son.’

The Earl drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, then frowned at Sir Simon. ‘You can’t ransom a three-year-old,’ he said.

‘He’s a count!’ Sir Simon protested. ‘A boy of rank!’

The Earl sighed. Sir Simon, he had come to realize, had a mind as simple as a bullock seeking food. He could see no point of view but his own and was single-minded about pursuing his appetites. That, perhaps, was why he was such a formidable soldier, but he was still a fool. ‘We do not hold three-year-old children to ransom,’ the Earl said firmly, ‘and we don’t hold women as prisoners, not unless there is an advantage which outweighs the courtesy, and I see no advantage here.’ The Earl turned to the clerks behind his chair. ‘Who did Armorica support?’

‘Charles of Blois, my lord,’ one of the clerks, a tall Breton cleric, answered.

‘Is it a rich fief?’

‘Very small, my lord,’ the clerk, whose nose was running, spoke from memory. ‘There is a holding in Finisterre which is already in our hands, some houses in Guingamp, I believe, but nothing else.’

‘There,’ the Earl said, turning back to Sir Simon. ‘What advantages will we make from a penniless three-year-old?’

‘Not penniless,’ Sir Simon protested. ‘I took a rich armour there.’

‘Which the boy’s father doubtless took in battle!’

‘And the house is wealthy.’ Sir Simon was getting angry. ‘There are ships, storehouses, stables.’

‘The house,’ the clerk sounded bored, ‘belonged to the Count’s father-in-law. A dealer in wine, I believe.’

The Earl raised a quizzical eyebrow at Sir Simon, who was shaking his head at the clerk’s obstinacy. ‘The boy, my lord,’ Sir Simon responded with an elaborate courtesy which bordered on insolence, ‘is kin to Charles of Blois.’

‘But being penniless,’ the Earl said, ‘I doubt he provokes fondness. More of a burden, wouldn’t you think? Besides, what would you have me do? Make the child give fealty to the real Duke of Brittany? The real Duke, Sir Simon, is a five-year-old child in London. It’ll be a nursery farce! A three-year-old bobbing down to a five-year-old! Do their wet nurses attend them? Shall we feast on milk and penny-cakes after? Or maybe we can enjoy a game of hunt the slipper when the ceremony is over?’

‘The Countess fought us from the walls!’ Sir Simon attempted a last protest.

‘Do not dispute me!’ the Earl shouted, thumping the arm of his chair. ‘You forget that I am the King’s deputy and have his powers.’ The Earl leaned back, taut with anger, and Sir Simon swallowed his own fury, but could not resist muttering that the Countess had used a crossbow against the English.

‘Is she the Blackbird?’ Thomas asked Skeat.

‘The Countess? Aye, that’s what they say.’

‘She’s a beauty.’

‘After what I found you prodding this morning,’ Skeat said, ‘how can you tell?’

The Earl gave an irritated glance at Skeat and Thomas, then looked back to Sir Simon. ‘If the Countess did fight us from the walls,’ he said, ‘then I admire her spirit. As for the other matters…’ He paused and sighed. Belas looked expectant and Sir Simon wary. ‘The two ships,’ the Earl decreed, ‘are prizes and they will be sold in England or else taken into royal service, and you, Sir Simon, will be awarded one-third of their value.’ That ruling was according to the law. The King would take a third, the Earl another and the last portion went to the man who had captured the prize. ‘As to the sword and armour…’ The Earl paused again. He had rescued Jeanette from rape and he had liked her, and he had seen the anguish on her face and listened to her impassioned plea that she owned nothing that had belonged to her husband except the precious armour and the beautiful sword, but such things, by their very nature, were the legitimate plunder of war. ‘The armour and weapons and horses are yours, Sir Simon,’ the Earl said, regretting the judgement but knowing it was fair. ‘As to the child, I decree he is under the protection of the Crown of England and when he is of age he can decide his own fealty.’ He glanced at the clerks to make sure they were noting down his decisions. ‘You tell me you wish to billet yourself in the widow’s house?’ he asked Sir Simon.

‘I took it,’ Sir Simon said curtly.

‘And stripped it bare, I hear,’ the Earl observed icily. ‘The Countess claims you stole money from her.’

‘She lies.’ Sir Simon looked indignant. ‘Lies, my lord, lies!’

The Earl doubted it, but he could hardly accuse a gentleman of perjury without provoking a duel and, though William Bohun feared no man except his king, he did not want to fight over so petty a matter. He let it drop. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘I did promise the lady protection against harassment.’ He stared at Sir Simon as he spoke, then looked at Will Skeat, and changed to English. ‘You’d like to keep your men together, Will?’

‘I would, my lord.’

‘Then you’ll have the widow’s house. And she is to be treated honourably, you hear me? Honourably! Tell your men that, Will!’

Skeat nodded. ‘I’ll cut their ears off if they touch her, my lord.’

‘Not their ears, Will. Slice something more suitable away. Sir Simon will show you the house and you, Sir Simon,’ the Earl spoke French again, ‘will find a bed elsewhere.’

Sir Simon opened his mouth to protest, but one look from the Earl quietened him. Another petitioner came forward, wanting redress for a cellar full of wine that had been stolen, but the Earl diverted him to a clerk who would record the man’s complaints on a parchment which the Earl doubted he would ever find time to read.

Then he beckoned to Thomas. ‘I have to thank you, Thomas of Hookton.’

‘Thank me, my lord?’

The Earl smiled. ‘You found a way into the town when everything else we’d tried had failed.’

Thomas reddened. ‘It was a pleasure, my lord.’

‘You can claim a reward of me,’ the Earl said. ‘It’s customary.’

Thomas shrugged. ‘I’m happy, my lord.’

‘Then you’re a lucky man, Thomas. But I shall remember the debt. And thank you, Will.’

Will Skeat grinned. ‘If this lump of a daft fool don’t want a reward, my lord, I’ll take it.’

The Earl liked that. ‘My reward to you, Will, is to leave you here. I’m giving you a whole new stretch of countryside to lay waste. God’s teeth, you’ll soon be richer than me.’ He stood. ‘Sir Simon will guide you to your quarters.’

Sir Simon might have bridled at the curt order to be a mere guide, but surprisingly he obeyed without showing any resentment, perhaps because he wanted another chance to meet Jeanette. And so, at midday, he led Will Skeat and his men through the streets to the big house beside the river. Sir Simon had put on his new armour and wore it without any surcoat so that the polished plate and gold embossment shone bright in the feeble winter sun. He ducked his helmeted head under the yard’s archway and immediately Jeanette came running from the kitchen door, which lay just to the gate’s left.

‘Get out!’ she shouted in French, ‘get out!’

Thomas, riding close behind Sir Simon, stared at her. She was indeed the Blackbird and she was as beautiful at close range as she had been when he had glimpsed her on the walls.

‘Get out, all of you!’ She stood, hands on her hips, bareheaded, shouting.

Sir Simon pushed up the pig-snout visor of the helmet. ‘This house is commandeered, my lady,’ he said happily. ‘The Earl ordered it.’

‘The Earl promised I would be left alone!’ Jeanette protested hotly.

‘Then his lordship has changed his mind,’ Sir Simon said.

She spat at him. ‘You have already stolen everything else of mine, now you would take the house too?’

‘Yes, madame,’ Sir Simon said, and he spurred the horse forward so that it crowded her. ‘Yes, madame,’ he said again, then wrenched the reins so that the horse twisted and thumped into Jeanette, throwing her onto the ground. ‘I’ll take your house,’ Sir Simon said, ‘and anything else I want, madame.’ The watching archers cheered at the sight of Jeanette’s long bare legs. She snatched her skirts down and tried to stand, but Sir Simon edged his horse forward to force her into an undignified scramble across the yard.

‘Let the lass up!’ Will Skeat shouted angrily.

‘She and I are old friends, Master Skeat,’ Sir Simon answered, still threatening Jeanette with the horse’s heavy hoofs.

‘I said let her up and leave her be!’ Will snarled.

Sir Simon, offended at being ordered by a commoner and in front of archers, turned angrily, but there was a competence about Will Skeat that gave the knight pause. Skeat was twice Sir Simon’s age and all those years had been spent in fighting, and Sir Simon retained just enough sense not to make a confrontation. ‘The house is yours, Master Skeat,’ he said condescendingly, ‘but look after its mistress. I have plans for her.’ He backed the horse from Jeanette, who was in tears of shame, then spurred out of the yard.

Jeanette did not understand English, but she recognized that Will Skeat had intervened on her behalf and so she stood and appealed to him. ‘He has stolen everything from me!’ she said, pointing at the retreating horseman. ‘Everything!’

‘You know what the lass is saying, Tom?’ Skeat asked.

‘She doesn’t like Sir Simon,’ Thomas said laconically. He was leaning on his saddle pommel, watching Jeanette.

‘Calm the girl down, for Christ’s sake,’ Skeat pleaded, then turned in his saddle. ‘Jake? Make sure there’s water and hay for horses. Peter, kill two of them heifers so we can sup before the light goes. Rest of you? Stop gawping at the lass and get yourselves settled!’

‘Thief!’ Jeanette called after Sir Simon, then turned on Thomas. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Thomas, madame.’ He slid out of the saddle and threw his reins to Sam. ‘The Earl has ordered us to live here,’ Thomas went on, ‘and to protect you.’

‘Protect me!’ Jeanette blazed at him. ‘You are all thieves! How can you protect me? There is a place in hell for thieves like you and it is just like England. You are thieves, every one of you! Now, go! Go!’

‘We’re not going,’ Thomas said flatly.

‘How can you stay here?’ Jeanette demanded. ‘I am a widow! It is not proper to have you here.’

‘We’re here, madame,’ Thomas said, ‘and you and us will have to make the best of it. We’ll not encroach. Just show me where your private rooms are and I’ll make sure no man trespasses.’

‘You? Make sure? Ha!’ Jeanette turned away, then immediately turned back. ‘You want me to show you my rooms, yes? So you know where my valuable properties are? Is that it? You want me to show you where you can thieve from me? Why don’t I just give you everything?’

Thomas smiled. ‘I thought you said Sir Simon had already stolen everything?’

‘He has taken everything, everything! He is no gentleman. He is a pig. He is,’ Jeanette paused, wanting to contrive a crushing insult, ‘he is English!’ Jeanette spat at Thomas’s feet and pulled open the kitchen door. ‘You see this door, Englishman? Everything beyond this door is private. Everything!’ She went inside, slammed the door, then immediately opened it again. ‘And the Duke is coming. The proper Duke, not your snivelling puppet child, so you will all die. Good!’ The door slammed again.

Will Skeat chuckled. ‘She don’t like you either, Tom. What was the lass saying?’

‘That we’re all going to die.’

‘Aye, that’s true enough. But in our beds, by God’s grace.’

‘And she says we’re not to go past that door.’

‘Plenty of room out here,’ Skeat said placidly, watching as one of his men swung an axe to kill a heifer. The blood flowed over the yard, attracting a rush of dogs to lap at it while two archers began butchering the still twitching animal.

‘Listen!’ Skeat had climbed a mounting block beside the stables and now shouted at all his men. ‘The Earl has given orders that the lass who was spitting at Tom is not to be molested. You understand that, you whoresons? You keep your britches laced up when she’s around, and if you don’t, I’ll geld you! You treat her proper, and you don’t go through that door. You’ve had your frolic, so now you can knuckle down to a proper bit of soldiering.’

The Earl of Northampton left after a week, taking most of his army back to the fortresses in Finisterre, which was the heartland of Duke John’s supporters. He left Richard Totesham as commander of the new garrison, but he also left Sir Simon Jekyll as Totesham’s deputy.

‘The Earl doesn’t want the bastard,’ Will Skeat told Thomas, ‘so he’s foisted him on us.’

As Skeat and Totesham were both independent captains, there could have been jealousy between them, but the two men respected each other and, while Tote-sham and his men stayed in La Roche-Derrien and strengthened its defences, Skeat rode out into the country to punish the folk who paid their rents and owed their allegiance to Duke Charles. The hellequin were thus released to be a curse on northern Brittany.

It was a simple business to ruin a land. The houses and barns might be made of stone, but their roofs would burn. The livestock was captured and, if there were too many beasts to herd home, then the animals were slaughtered and their carcasses tipped down wells to poison the water. Skeat’s men burned what would burn, broke what would break and stole what could be sold. They killed, raped and plundered. Fear of them drove men away from their farms, leaving the land desolate. They were the devil’s horsemen, and they did King Edward’s will by harrowing his enemy’s land.

They wrecked village after village–Kervec and Lanvellec, St Laurent and Les Sept Saints, Tonquedec and Berhet, and a score of other places whose names they never learned. It was Christmas time, and back home the yule logs were being dragged across frost-hardened fields to high-beamed halls where troubadours sang of Arthur and his knights, of chivalrous warriors who allied pity to strength, but in Brittany the hellequin fought the real war. Soldiers were not paragons; they were scarred, vicious men who took delight in destruction. They hurled burning torches onto thatch and tore down what had taken generations to build. Places too small to have names died, and only the farms in the wide peninsula between the two rivers north of La Roche-Derrien were spared because they were needed to feed the garrison. Some of the serfs who were torn from their land were put to work heightening La Roche-Derrien’s walls, clearing a wider killing ground in front of the ramparts and making new barriers at the river’s edge. It was a winter of utter misery for the Bretons. Cold rains whipped from the wild Atlantic and the English scoured the farmlands.

Once in a while there would be some resistance. A brave man would shoot a crossbow from a wood’s edge, but Skeat’s men were experts in trapping and killing such enemies. A dozen archers would dismount and stalk the enemy from the front while a score of others galloped about his rear, and in a short while there would be a scream and another crossbow was added to the plunder. The crossbow’s owner would be stripped, mutilated and hanged from a tree as a warning to other men to leave the hellequin alone, and the lessons worked, for such ambushes became fewer. It was the wrecking time and Skeat’s men became rich. There were days of misery, days of slogging through cold rain with chapped hands and wet clothes, and Thomas always hated it when his men fetched the duty of leading the spare horses and then driving the captured livestock home. Geese were easy–their necks were wrung and the dead birds hung from the saddles–but cows were slow, goats wayward, sheep stupid and pigs obstinate. There were, however, enough farm-bred boys in the ranks to ensure that the animals reached La Roche-Derrien safely. Once there they were taken to a small square that had become a slaughteryard and stank of blood. Will Skeat also sent cartloads of plunder back to the town and most of that was shipped home to England. It was usually humble stuff: pots, knives, plough-blades, harrow-spikes, stools, pails, spindles, anything that could be sold, until it was said that there was not a house in southern England which did not possess at least one object plundered from Brittany.

In England they sang of Arthur and Lancelot, of Gawain and Perceval, but in Brittany the hellequin were loose.

And Thomas was a happy man.

* * *

Jeanette was loath to admit it, but the presence of Will Skeat’s men was an advantage to her. So long as they were in the courtyard she felt safe in the house and she began to dread the long periods they spent away from the town, for it was then that Sir Simon Jekyll would haunt her. She had begun to think of him as the devil, a stupid devil to be sure, but still a remorseless, unfeeling lout who had convinced himself Jeanette must wish nothing so much as to be his wife. At times he would force himself to a clumsy courtesy, though usually he was bumptious and crude and always he stared at her like a dog gazing at a haunch of beef. He took Mass in the church of St Renan so he could woo her, and it seemed to Jeanette she could not walk in the town without meeting him. Once, encountering Jeanette in the alley beside the church of the Virgin, he crowded her against the wall and slid his strong fingers up to her breasts.

‘I think, madame, you and I are suited,’ he told her in all earnestness.

‘You need a wife with money,’ she told him, for she had learned from others in the town the state of Sir Simon’s finances.

‘I have your money,’ he pointed out, ‘and that has settled half my debts, and the prize money from the ships will pay much of the rest. But it is not your money I want, sweet one, but you.’ Jeanette tried to wrench away, but he had her trapped against the wall. ‘You need a protector, my dear,’ he said, and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. He had a curiously full mouth, big-lipped and always wet as though his tongue was too large, and the kiss was wet and stank of stale wine. He pushed a hand down her belly and she struggled harder, but he just pressed his body against hers and took hold of her hair beneath her cap. ‘You would like Berkshire, my dear.’

‘I would rather live in hell.’

He fumbled at the laces of her bodice and Jeanette vainly tried to push him away, but she was only saved when a troop of men rode into the alley and their leader called a greeting to Sir Simon, who had to turn away to respond and that allowed Jeanette to wrench herself free. She left her cap in his grasp as she ran home, where she barred the doors, then sat weeping and angry and helpless. She hated him.

She hated all the English, yet as the weeks passed she watched the townsfolk come to approve of their occupiers, who spent good money in La Roche-Derrien. English silver was dependable, unlike the French, which was debased with lead or tin. The presence of the English had cut the town off from its usual trade with Rennes and Guingamp, but the shipowners were now free to trade with both Gascony and England and so their profits rose. Local ships were chartered to import arrows for the English troops, and some of the shipmasters brought back bales of English wool that they resold in other Breton ports that were still loyal to Duke Charles. Few folk were willing to travel far from La Roche-Derrien by land, for they needed to secure a pass from Richard Totesham, the commander of the garrison, and though the scrap of parchment protected them from the hellequin it was no defence against the outlaws who lived in the farms emptied by Skeat’s men. But boats from La Roche-Derrien and Tréguier could still sail east to Paimpol or west to Lannion and so trade with England’s enemies. That was how letters were sent out of La Roche-Derrien, and Jeanette wrote almost weekly to Duke Charles with news of the changes the English were making to the town’s defences. She never received a reply, but she persuaded herself that her letters were useful.

La Roche-Derrien prospered, but Jeanette suffered. Her father’s business still existed, but the profits mysteriously vanished. The larger ships had always sailed from the quays of Tréguier, which lay an hour upriver, and though Jeanette sent them to Gascony to fetch wine for the English market, they never returned. They had either been taken by French ships or, more likely, their captains had gone into business for themselves. The family farms lay south of La Roche-Derrien, in the countryside laid waste by Will Skeat’s men, and so those rents disappeared. Plabennec, her husband’s estate, was in English-held Finisterre and Jeanette had not seen a penny from that land in three years, so by the early weeks of 1346 she was desperate and thus summoned the lawyer Belas to the house.

Belas took a perverse pleasure in telling her how she had ignored his advice, and how she should never have equipped the two boats for war. Jeanette suffered his pomposity, then asked him to draw up a petition of redress which she could send to the English court. The petition begged for the rents of Plabennec, which the invaders had been taking for themselves. It irked Jeanette that she must plead for money from King Edward III of England, but what choice did she have? Sir Simon Jekyll had impoverished her.

Belas sat at her table and made notes on a scrap of parchment. ‘How many mills at Plabennec?’ he asked.

‘There were two.’

‘Two,’ he said, noting the figure. ‘You do know,’ he added cautiously, ‘that the Duke has made a claim for those rents?’

‘The Duke?’ Jeanette asked in astonishment. ‘For Plabennec?’

‘Duke Charles claims it is his fief,’ Belas said.

‘It might be, but my son is the Count.’

‘The Duke considers himself the boy’s guardian,’ Belas observed.

‘How do you know these things?’ Jeanette asked.

Belas shrugged. ‘I have had correspondence from the Duke’s men of business in Paris.’

‘What correspondence?’ Jeanette demanded sharply.

‘About another matter,’ Belas said dismissively, ‘another matter entirely. Plabennec’s rents were collected quarterly, I assume?’

Jeanette watched the lawyer suspiciously. ‘Why would the Duke’s men of business mention Plabennec to you?’

‘They asked if I knew the family. Naturally I revealed nothing.’

He was lying, Jeanette thought. She owed Belas money, indeed she was in debt to half of La Roche-Derrien’s tradesmen. Doubtless Belas thought his bill was unlikely to be paid by her and so he was looking to Duke Charles for eventual settlement. ‘Monsieur Belas,’ she said coldly, ‘you will tell me exactly what you have been telling the Duke, and why.’

Belas shrugged. ‘I have nothing to tell!’

‘How is your wife?’ Jeanette asked sweetly.

‘Her aches are passing as winter ends, thank God. She is well, madame.’

‘Then she will not be well,’ Jeanette said tartly, ‘when she learns what you do with your clerk’s daughter? How old is she, Belas? Twelve?’

‘Madame!’

‘Don’t madame me!’ Jeanette thumped the table, almost upsetting the flask of ink. ‘So what has passed between you and the Duke’s men of business?’

Belas sighed. He put the cap on the ink flask, laid down the quill and rubbed his thin cheeks. ‘I have always,’ he said, ‘looked after the legal matters of this family. It is my duty, madame, and sometimes I must do things that I would rather not, but such things are also a part of my duty.’ He half smiled. ‘You are in debt, madame. You could rescue your finances easily enough by marrying a man of substance, but you seem reluctant to follow that course and so I see nothing but ruin in your future. Ruin. You wish some advice? Sell this house and you will have money enough to live for two or three years, and in that time the Duke will surely drive the English from Brittany and you and your son will be restored to Plabennec.’

Jeanette flinched. ‘You think the devils will be defeated that easily?’ She heard hoofs in the street and saw that Skeat’s men were returning to her courtyard. They were laughing as they rode. They did not look like men who would be defeated soon; indeed, she feared they were unbeatable for they had a blithe confidence that galled her.

‘I think, madame,’ Belas said, ‘that you must make up your mind what you are. Are you Louis Halevy’s daughter? Or Henri Chenier’s widow? Are you a merchant or an aristocrat? If you are a merchant, madame, then marry here and be content. If you are an aristocrat then raise what money you can and go to the Duke and find yourself a new husband with a title.’

Jeanette considered the advice impertinent, but did not bridle. ‘How much would we make on this house?’ she asked instead.

‘I shall enquire, madame,’ Belas said. He knew the answer already, and knew that Jeanette would hate it, for a house in a town occupied by an enemy would fetch only a fraction of its proper value. So now was not the time to give Jeanette that news. Better, the lawyer thought, to wait until she was truly desperate, then he could buy the house and its ruined farms for a pittance.

‘Is there a bridge across the stream at Plabennec?’ he asked, drawing the parchment towards him.

‘Forget the petition,’ Jeanette said.

‘If you wish, madame.’

‘I shall think about your advice, Belas.’

‘You will not regret it,’ he said earnestly. She was lost, he thought, lost and defeated. He would take her house and farms, the Duke would claim Plabennec and she would be left with nothing. Which was what she deserved, for she was a stubborn and proud creature who had risen far above her proper station. ‘I am always,’ Belas said humbly, ‘at your ladyship’s service.’ From adversity, he thought, a clever man could always profit, and Jeanette was ripe for plucking. Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.

Jeanette did not know what to do. She was loath to sell the house for she feared it would fetch a low price, but nor did she know how else she could raise money. Would Duke Charles welcome her? He had never shown any sign of it, not since he had opposed her marriage to his nephew, but perhaps he had softened since then? Perhaps he would protect her? She decided she would pray for guidance; so she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, crossed the yard, ignoring the newly returned soldiers, and went into St Renan’s church. There was a statue of the virgin there, sadly shorn of her gilded halo, which had been ripped away by the English, and Jeanette often prayed to the image of Christ’s mother, whom she believed had a special care for all women in trouble.

She thought at first that the dimly lit church was empty. Then she saw an English bow propped against a pillar and an archer kneeling at the altar. It was the good-looking man, the one who wore his hair in a long pigtail bound with bowcord. It was, she thought, an irritating sign of vanity. Most of the English wore their hair cropped, but a few grew it extravagantly long and they were the ones who seemed most flamboyantly confident. She wished he would leave the church; then she was intrigued by his abandoned bow and so she picked it up and was astonished by its weight. The string hung loose and she wondered how much strength would be needed to bend the bow and hook the string’s free loop on the empty horn tip. She pressed one end of the bow on the stone floor, trying to bend it, and just then an arrow span across the flagstones to lodge against her foot.

‘If you can string the bow,’ Thomas said, still on his knees at the altar, ‘you can have a free shot.’

Jeanette was too proud to be seen to fail and too angry not to try, though she attempted to disguise her effort which barely flexed the black yew stave. She kicked the arrow away. ‘My husband was killed by one of these bows,’ she said bitterly.

‘I’ve often wondered,’ Thomas said, ‘why you Bretons or the French don’t learn to shoot them. Start your son at seven or eight years, madame, and in ten years he’ll be lethal.’

‘He’ll fight as a knight, like his father.’

Thomas laughed. ‘We kill knights. They haven’t made an armour strong enough to resist an English arrow.’

Jeanette shuddered. ‘What are you praying for, Englishman?’ she asked. ‘Forgiveness?’

Thomas smiled. ‘I am giving thanks, madame, for the fact that we rode six days in enemy country and did not lose one man.’ He climbed from his knees and pointed to a pretty silver box that sat on the altar. It was a reliquary and had a small crystal window that was rimmed with drops of coloured glass. Thomas had peered through the window and seen nothing more than a small black lump about the size of a man’s thumb. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘The tongue of St Renan,’ Jeanette said defiantly. ‘It was stolen when you came to our town, but God was good and the thief died next day and the relic was recovered.’

‘God is indeed good,’ Thomas said drily. ‘And who was St Renan?’

‘He was a great preacher,’ she said, ‘who banished the nains and gorics from our farmlands. They still live in the wild places, but a prayer to St Renan will scare them away.’

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