Czytaj książkę: «The Perfect Sinner»
The Perfect Sinner
Will Davenport
In memory of Tony Dixon who knew this story. The estuary wil always be his merchant.
In all his life to any, come what might He was a true, a perfect gentle-knight. Speaking of his equipment, he possessed Fine horses but he was not gaily dressed. He wore a fustian tunic stained and dark With smudges where his armour had left mark.
Geoffrey Chaucer.
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Epigraph
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
HISTORICAL NOTE
Acknowledgement
Also by Will Davenport
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
All my life I have been burdened with a good reputation. I do not deserve it. I will be ripped on the racks of Purgatory until the Day of Judgement for what I have done.
Do you know what that would be like? I’m not afraid of wounds and I have had plenty of them. In battle the pain arrives later and always passes in time. A man can stand that. To be burnt and torn and stabbed for a thousand ages is another thing entirely. The fear of it stalks in the animal form of my sin. It scratches at my door and leaps on me when I wake and I cannot keep it away. My three sins came one after the other, a year between the first two and then two years to the third. I have confessed the first of them and been given inadequate penance. I have tried to confess the second, but the priests will not see it my way. I have kept the third and greatest entirely to myself, saving it for my deathbed.
The worst of it is that my wife Elizabeth shared that first sin and in the long and lonely years since she died, I have feared for her even more than for myself. Time crawls by in Purgatory and the punishment there is dreadful.
Now, in this year of 1372, on the day of the consecration of my Chantry, I was given hope because I saw Elizabeth again. I looked up from where I was doing my stiff best to kneel in prayer and I saw her standing up there in the new stained glass blazing with sunlight. She was young again and she spoke with that angelic voice which always plucked directly at my heart and she used it to bring me a gift.
I have been trying to make up for my second sin, you see. It took place in war and was a sin of omission. There was an act I failed to prevent. War has battered into me the slow realisation that it is man’s most natural state, a base business painted with glory only for disguise, but this act was the basest of its parts. I will speak out now as I should have spoken then. Our war with France has lasted all my adult life and now at last I know the shape of what I want to say. For an entire year I have been struggling for the right words. Now she came to me and flamed up there in the December sun. Elizabeth, a creature of pure light, gave me my opening line.
‘Old men who stay behind,’ she said, ‘old men who stay behind, do not inflame the young with words of war.’
Perhaps it came from inside me and not from her at all, but I don’t think so.
There are days which lie in ambush for you from the moment you are born. I had thought it was a day of endings, the dedication of my chapel, the setting in stone of the knowledge that came too late, my plea for forgiveness. Instead it was the very opposite, and before this winter day was finished I was to meet a man who would make me look at it all afresh.
As I stared up above the altar, Elizabeth slipped away from where she had stood smiling in the window and there was the Madonna Maria Virgine in her place, no less fine than she ought to be, but a picture on flat glass and no more than that. I fought down my keen regret because one should never feel regret at the sight of the Madonna, and there was some comfort to be taken. Elizabeth had seemed serene and the Madonna had let her share her space. She could be saved.
When Elizabeth died thirteen years ago, I had Hugh’s tomb in the Abbey opened and laid her next to him and there they lie, the two Despensers, just as if she had never been Elizabeth de Bryan, just as if two of my sins had never taken place. As if I had never been. It was not because I thought she loved him more than me. Indeed, I knew that could not possibly be the case. We had our years together, Elizabeth and I, and though they started later than they should have done, they were as sweet a time as I could ever have hoped for. Together, we had a natural harmony in everything we did, and our marriage felt to me like a long-delayed arrival home. It was just that in the Abbey, in the immediate sight of God, there was sin to consider and it seemed more proper that she should lie there with Hugh. When death comes for me they will put me close by, just across the aisle, in a tomb to match hers so that I will be but a hand-clasp away.
Hugh Despenser, you see, was the bravest and most admirable of men and he had to steel himself, against his natural inclination, to act that way, which makes my sins all the greater because two of them were against him. We first fought side by side a quarter of a century ago at the crossing of the Somme. He won the day for us at Blanchetaque, struggling through the water to beat the enemy off the far bank. He saved an entire English army that day with heroism that took your breath away and should have taken his.
Bad memories are the hardest rock and stand out more and more as the softer stuff gets washed away. What happened two days later in that August of 1346 ranks among the worst. We were across that bloody valley and they were coming up at us in numbers you could not believe. It was a typical late summer evening and, with the low sun behind us, they stood out so clearly, every detail of their equipment and their weapons, the straps and the steel, as fine and precise as a painting. In the glare they could not see how thin we were in our tired lines. We were dark reapers against the sun and we scythed them down until we were astonished by the slaughter and unsure if they would ever stop.
My post was by the King up on the hill, behind in his final reserve, and my duty was to watch, which is the hardest thing. They came in ranks a hundred soldiers wide, pushed forward by the weight of thousands more behind. Those behind had no clear view until those before them fell. Only then could they see that they were already as good as dead, invincible certainty draining into despair in the very last yards of their advance.
My second sin is coming with the smell of sulphur on its breath.
This tale will not allow the absence of its villain for a line longer, and there’s a pity. He has to come into it now. Sir John Molyns. Molyns the robber, Molyns the murderer. The King had hunted Molyns for his destructive violence. Now he was valued for that same quality. Now he was restored and there he was just ahead of me, down there in our line, about to commit a terrible act, and I should have prevented him from doing it. The King gave me the power to stop him and I chose not to use it. That was my second great sin.
My hands and my arms were shaking with exhaustion, holding the butt of the pole, and the wind got up again, whipping the King’s long standard, the Dragon banner of Wessex, as it billowed over my head. I was groaning from the concentrated effort it took to hold that standard upright and immobile and I knew how much it mattered. The flag, tugging at me in the gusts, was the weathercock of the battle, the final symbol. You could see the men snatch glances behind for the evidence that the Royal Will did not waver, that the Royal Person was resolute, sharing their own danger. The upright immobility of that standard was the proof. All very fine, but chivalry died that day.
There, in the torn and bloody earth of Crécy, chivalry died and perhaps I could have saved it.
A drizzle of holy water across my cheek pulled me back from that past, back to my new Chantry. In this other folded valley, a mile inland from the marching waves of Start Bay, I was pretending to kneel down. I was the sole member of the congregation in my own brand-new chapel, and there was nobody else here bar the priest to spot that my backside was still supported by the edge of the pew and my knees were a hand-span short of resting on the hassock. If the priest had noticed, he would have said nothing. William Batokewaye knew what a beating those knees had taken in the service of the King, after all, he’d been there for much of it.
A fine mist of sawdust still filtered down from the roof’s new-cut beams, filling the air with a spray of stained-glass sunlight. The pews smelt of sap and the stone itself showed the fresh face of sliced cheese. It was the forty-fifth year of the reign of his Royal Majesty, King Edward the Third and it should have been a red-letter day.
I watched William stumping up the aisle towards the altar as if he were attacking in the front rank of God’s army. He had always been a good man in a tight corner. Within a year of losing his sword-arm to a Frenchman’s axe, the stump barely healed, he had learnt a left-handed flick of the wrist which reaped soldiers like barley. These days, his only weapon was the holy water, but that same left wrist flicked back and forth to spread eternal life just as he had once spread death.
I was still in my reverie, half nightmare, half myth, embellished over years of remembering until it shone with the untrustworthy precision of a jewel from the devil’s diadem. I was remembering that moment in August of 1346 when three horses, lashed together, thundered at us through the piles of the dead. Then that rain of water arced across my face and shocked me out of my trance.
‘Wake up,’ rasped the priest, glancing back at me. ‘This is all for you, so you might at least pay attention.’
For a moment, I wasn’t quite sure which was then and which was now because that voice belonged to both times, but in those days the priest had all his limbs and I had a clear conscience.
He stopped his chanting and his spraying, stared around him at all the gilt and the fresh paint and the no-expense-spared glory of the place. He pulled an oddly irreligious face.
‘It’s done,’ he said, swivelling to stare at me. ‘Blessed and dedicated. Are you happy now? You should be.’
I could only look at him, and perhaps he saw something in my eyes because he put his thurible down, reached out to take me by the arm and helped me clamber to my feet.
‘Come on. Outside,’ he said.
There was complete and unexpected peace in the courtyard. It was warm for December. I had expected the usual scraping and hammering of the masons working on the rest of my buildings, forgetting I had sent them all off to work in the quarry to guarantee silence for the consecration. There was no sign of human life or so I thought for a moment. Then a tiny movement up above caught my eye. They are as keen as they ever were, my eyes, and I depend on them all the more now that my body is no longer quite so agile. It has always been second nature to watch for that betraying movement in the undergrowth that might save you from an ambush.
There was a man up there on the high ground, the hill which overlooks my village and my Chantry, and I saw him stand up. He didn’t look familiar.
‘Tell me what’s going on,’ William demanded and distracted me. We sat down side by side on a bench, the priest folding his robe under him. He looked at the mud drying on the back of it.
‘I wish you’d put drains down the street,’ he said. ‘I went right over on my arse.’
They like it the way it is, the villagers.’ I replied. ‘It’s always been like that. You know that better than me. This was your place before you ever brought me here. I didn’t even know about it until you told me.’
‘Slapton, eh?’ said the priest, looking around him, ‘It’s thirty years since I lived here last. There’s no kin of mine left here now and I feel almost a stranger. I went away to see the wider world and I’ve learnt to like a drier path to walk on. My grandfather used to call it Slipton because of that slippery old street. If I’m really going to live here again, I might have to do something about that.’ He looked around him and sniffed the air. ‘Now, shall we take stock? What have we got here exactly? One brand-new chapel, for the ease of souls and your soul in particular. One chapel, not staffed by one priest, oh no. Not even staffed by two priests. Your chapel will be staffed by one chaplain, which is to be me, plus five priests and four clerks, am I right? At a cost, I am told, of forty pounds a year. Forty pounds a year for ever. Not to mention a stone-built college for us all to live out the fullness of our lives in prayer, study and, if I know anything about my fellow priests, in dice and wine and maybe even the odd woman.’
I frowned.
‘Oh yes,’ he went on. ‘It won’t all be holy and they may be very odd women.’
That wasn’t why I frowned. I knew William Batokewaye well enough to overlook the licence he had just allowed himself. I’d often heard he had a wife tucked out of sight though if so, that was one of the few things he had ever tried to keep from me. My reputation again, you see. That sort of thing was allowed for lower orders but not for a mendicant friar as he was, or at least had been. Would he presume to bring her here to Slapton? That might test our friendship. I frowned because since that moment in the chapel the echoes of sweet Elizabeth’s forgotten voice, waking all my love, had been gradually fading in my head and now, knowing I had lost the sound of her, I was bereft.
‘My question is this,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, I’m not complaining. I look forward to a comfortable retirement from the rigours of the last thirty years. It is generous of you in the extreme to provide it, but, quite apart from the fact that I would have been prepared to mumble masses for you all day and most of the night for half that sum all by myself, what’s it all for?’ The priest was a year older than me and had been asking me that sort of question for as long as I could remember. Having no arm for defence, he only ever knew how to attack.
‘It’s a Chantry. You know what it’s for.’ I opened my arms to indicate the courtyard in which we sat, the church we had just left and its new stone tower which soared into the air, dominating the little village, overpowering the spire of the village church below.
‘I know what a Chantry’s for. What I’m asking is why do you need one?’
I looked at him, suspecting a trap. He had always been a plain speaker and not one to follow slavishly along dogmatic lines, but this was going too far.
‘You can’t disapprove, William. You and I usually agree on what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve built it so you and your priests will sing masses for my soul and for Elizabeth’s.’
‘And if we didn’t? If your soul had to stand up for itself without a lot of people, most of whom don’t know it very well, all singing flat on its behalf?’
I stared at him. I was deeply disturbed by his tone. This was dangerous ground. ‘You know the story? The story of de Mowbray?’ I sometimes felt it was all I had thought about for years now.
‘I might. Tell me anyway.’
‘He begged his chaplain to sing a mass for his soul the moment he died. Do you know what happened?’
Batokewaye sometimes looked as if he had been hewn from the huge trunk of an old elm tree and that look came upon him now, dense, unchangeable, so I went on. The chaplain ran straight from the deathbed. He was racing to the chapel but something stopped him. De Mowbray’s spectre, twisted and tortured. “You’ve broken your promise,” said the spectre. “No, I came straight here,” said the chaplain, “you died only a moment ago.” “In that time, twenty years have passed in Purgatory,” the ghost replied, “I have suffered twenty years of torment for your neglect. It is worse than Hell.”’
He just went on looking at me. I thought perhaps he hadn’t been listening.
‘Worse than Hell, William’ I said again. ‘If a few moments here is twenty years there, imagine how it will be. Your soul stays there, paying the price of your sins, until Judgement Day itself.’ It turned my guts around to think of it, to think I had that coming, hurtling at me.
He sighed. ‘Wherever I’ve been in the country, I’ve heard that story,’ he said. I’ve heard it said about Montague, Mauny, Beauchamp, Scrope, every single knight who has given up the ghost.’
‘Are you saying you don’t believe it?’
I’m saying that Purgatory is a very good idea from the clergy’s point of view. I’m delighted at the chance to live in luxury off a terrified Lord.’
‘Should we not be terrified of Purgatory? If we die in mortal sin aren’t we bound to suffer there? Isn’t that what the Bible says?’
The priest stared back at me, unblinking. ‘I know you, Guy. I’ve known you since long before you were a knight. I’ve heard everything you have to confess and I must say it’s been mild stuff. If you came to me to confess a real mortal sin, I’d know you were lying. All right, lying might be a sin but you’d have to try a lot harder to get committed to the eternal flames than by a grammatical paradox.’
He thought he knew me. He didn’t. I had told him nothing of the last and greatest of my three sins.
‘There’s Heaven and there’s Hell,’ he went on, ‘and each of us is bound for one or the other. You have to earn your way into both of them and all we can do is pray to Saint Peter that he’ll be kind if we’re somewhere in between, which is where most of us are. And by the way, no it’s not what the Bible says at all. The Bible is fairly silent on the precise question of Purgatory. It’s a modern invention.’ The priest stood up, turned to face me, looming over me.
‘Look at you. Sir Guy de Bryan, noble Knight of the very choice Order of the Garter,’ he growled, ‘King’s companion, steward, holder of the Great Seal, ambassador, royal envoy. Thought of throughout the length and breadth of the land for years past as the finest knight there ever was, so clearly honest that you cast no shadow in the sunlight. It passes straight through you. So fair, you’ve been called in twenty times a year since you were old enough to wear a sword to sort out every brawling squabble the greedy nobility gets itself into. Trusted equally by the King and the Commons and that’s rare enough. Not a spot on your soul and yet you’re so afraid you’ve hired a phalanx of priests. You’re getting much too pious. You need to ease up on the piety. Do you understand anything about our Lord?’ He wheeled round and thrust his hand, finger outstretched to the top of the tower.
‘What’s that up there?’ he demanded.
I looked up, squinting against the sun. The crucifix?’
‘That’s it. Don’t we take it for granted? Wasn’t it lucky Christ died on a cross?’
Unsure where this could be leading, I frowned at him. ‘It was surely more than lucky, it was blessed,’
‘That wasn’t what I meant. Supposing Pilate had given him the option,’ rasped the priest, bending down to put his enormous face right in front of mine. ‘Supposing he’d said, all right Jesus, it’s up to you. Your choice. You can either be crucified or you can be stung to death by bees.’
More heresy was in the wind. I stared at him.
‘Well, imagine,’ said the priest impatiently. ‘If he’d chosen the bees, what an inconvenient sign we’d have to make then.’ The priest waggled his hand around his face, fingers jabbing back and forth and let out a hoot of laughter.
I crossed myself quickly as the rooks took off from the trees around the tower adding their shrieks to the echoes of the laugh. Remembering the figure up on the hill, I looked up there to see if there had been a witness to this blasphemy. There was nobody there now.
‘Oh come on, man,’ said the priest. ‘I suppose you think that’s another hundred years of Purgatory added to your sentence. If God hasn’t got a sense of humour, what hope is there for the world? Indeed, what hope is there for any of us if someone like you has to spend half your fortune on a place like this?’
‘Have you lost your faith?’ I asked. ‘It’s a few years since I’ve seen you, old friend. You don’t sound like a believer any more.’
‘Oh, don’t you dare doubt my belief,’ retorted the priest. ‘I may be old-fashioned, but I believe all right.’
‘Do you believe in good and evil?’
‘In their place,’ said the priest, ‘I am not sure I have ever met a truly evil man. Have you?’
‘Oh yes. One. Just one.’
The priest looked at me. ‘Molyns?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘All right, I’ll grant you that,’ the priest went on. ‘One. But good and evil notwithstanding, what I don’t believe in is all this modern blackmail.’
‘You know what I did.’
‘I know what you think you did. Seems to me other people had a big hand in it.’
He didn’t know about my third sin. That was the problem and somehow I wasn’t yet ready to tell him. I had tucked it so far out of sight that I no longer quite knew its shape.
The wicket gate creaked open and a face looked round. It was the man from up on the hill. I didn’t want to be interrupted and certainly not by a stranger.
‘Not now,’ I called, perhaps a little impatiently, and the face disappeared abruptly.
‘Ah,’ said the priest, ‘sorry, he’s with me. I was just about to mention him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s a squire in the King’s household. Well connected. Trusted. In with the people who matter. They send him to sort out things, very like you were at that age, I’d say. Oh and he’s married to the beautiful Philippa Roet, so that puts him in with Lancaster.’
‘Really? Why’s he here?’
‘You’re off travelling again. He’s going with you.’
‘Who says he is? Come to that, who says I’m going anywhere?’
William looked at me with a smug expression. ‘I am trusted with certain information, you know. He came down with me. I was asked to bring him to you. Up at court they thought he’d never find Slap ton by himself. I know where you’re going.’
He’d tried that sort of trick a few times before. ‘I don’t think you do,’ I said.
‘You’re journeying overland, avoiding France and all its friends. Your final destination is Genoa by way of the Rhine valley and the Alpine passes. Your purpose there is to negotiate an agreement whereby the Genoese will trade freely with us, using one port specially nominated for that purpose and hopefully granting free use of Genoa by English ships in return. Am I right?’
That removed any chance that he was guessing. ‘It’s supposed to be a secret. Who told you?’
‘Calm down. It is a secret. Lancaster told me. Is that high enough authority for you? This young man has been sent to give you a hand on the grounds that, many qualities though you undoubtedly have, fluency in Italian is not known to be one of them.’
‘I speak some Italian,’ I said, a little stung.
‘Enough to order food. Not enough to conduct high level negotiations.’
‘But why is he here now? We’re not leaving until the beginning of April.’
‘You mean nobody told you?’
‘Told me what?’
‘The King sent word last week. There’s a rush on. It’s all been brought forward. You really didn’t know?’
I shook my head.
‘You’re leaving in three days time from Dartmouth on the afternoon tide, on board your ship, Le Michel, captained by John Hawley, although why you should trust yourself to that rogue is a mystery to me. You are sailing up channel to Dordrecht in Flanders where you will join Sir James di Provan and John di Mari, two of the most irritating and self-regarding clots it has ever been my misfortune to meet, and with them you head south as soon as you possibly can.’
‘William, you know as well as I do nobody travels across the Alps in winter. Even the Brenner Pass is tough going now.’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘It seems the King believes in your ability to do it. Someone apparently has to and he thought sending you would give the best chance.’
I knew him well enough to make an accurate guess. ‘Come on, you know more about this than you’re saying. What’s it really all about?’
He squirmed. At least he gave a tiny involuntary wriggle which is as close to a squirm as a man of William’s size and experience is ever likely to get.
‘I’ve heard a few things,’ he said eventually and I just waited.
‘It’s his bankers,’ he said in the end. ‘You know he still owes those Florentines a huge fortune?’
‘The Bardi family? Yes, I have heard.’
‘They’re pressing him hard. The Genoa deal is something to do with it. He has promised them agreement by the end of February, otherwise he is in default.’
I knew all too well what default would mean. Humiliation for the English crown. We all remembered the last time he’d had to pawn the crown and the shame that brought, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d done the same again. I loved my king, but sometimes he behaved like a complete idiot.
I rubbed my brow, suddenly aware of the enormous practical difficulties of this whole enterprise.
‘Three days to get all this ready? I don’t even know if Hawley’s in Dartmouth and the Michel hasn’t left his mooring since October.’
‘Hawley’s ready. I saw him on the way. The King’s messenger got that far, at least.’
‘Well, he didn’t get here. Oh, wait a minute. They found a man on the rocks below Strete. He’d been thrown off the cliffs, stripped of everything but his jerkin.’
‘That was him. Someone’s killed a King’s messenger in your lands. There’ll be a big fuss about that.’
‘There’s no time to lose. Is Hawley provisioning the ship?’
‘Yes. I told him to do it well. I can’t eat that vile stuff you usually serve on board.’
I stared at him in astonishment. ‘You’re coming to Dordrecht?’
‘No, no. What would be the point of that? I’m coming all the way to Genoa.’
‘Why?’ The thought of getting William’s great bulk over the Alps in the snow was appalling.
‘It sounded like fun,’ was all he would say, then before I had a chance to argue, the priest played his trump card.
‘I also hear, if the masons are to be believed, you’re going to leave your message on the walls here for all to see, and as far as the future of your soul and come to that, your neck, is concerned that seems to me to be the more pressing concern right now.’
That made me blink. ‘You know about that?’ I had thought the Declaration was a secret. There was nothing of it yet to be seen. It was all still forming in my head and the words had to be right before I would let the carver pick up his chisel. Second thoughts are best avoided when you set your words in stone.
‘I get to hear most things. Is that something to do with the clerks? I keep wondering why a Chantry needs all those clerks.’
He was a perceptive man and he knew me better than any now alive, perhaps better than anyone bar Elizabeth ever had done.
‘To a point. I have a great work in mind. The message, as you call it, is a small part of it. The clerks will work to draw together the thoughts that lie behind it.’
‘Has it struck you that the only ones likely to have learning enough to read your message are also the ones most likely to disapprove?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘And if the King reads it?’
‘Does the King know about it?’
‘Not yet, but when he does…’
‘All the better.’
‘Where’s it going to go?’ he asked. ‘If it’s going to be displayed on my church for all the world to see and disapprove, then I’d better know.’
‘I’ll show you.’
The plaque lay ready on the stonecutter’s bench. Its surface was smooth to the touch and the border had been chased out in folds to frame it.
‘Either you’ve got a lot to say or it’s going to be carved in big letters,’ said the priest. ‘What exactly is it going to say?’
‘You can read it when it’s finished. It’s too close to me, too raw. I can’t tell you yet.’
‘You don’t trust me?’
How could I not trust him, the man who came closest to understanding, the man who had risked the King’s fury to back me up in the days when we were all young, when he was a mere deacon, without the age and reputation to keep the royal wrath at bay?
‘I’ll tell you the first line,’ I said.
‘I’m listening.’
Elizabeth’s words came to me fresh. ‘Senes qui domi manent, nolite juvenes verbis belli accendere.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the priest. ‘I was afraid it would be something like that. Where exactly is it going?’
I turned around and gasped as the old wound in my knee caught at me. I pointed at the chapel porch. ‘Right above the door,’ I told him, ‘for all to see.’
The priest looked where I pointed and then cocked his head up to follow the height of the tower as it soared high into the air.
‘I predict trouble,’ he said. ‘If you want to enjoy a quiet old age, you should put it higher up.’
‘How much higher?’
The priest looked at the rooks wheeling around the summit of the tower, a dizzy height above us.
‘What about up there,’ he suggested, ‘right at the top. That might just save your neck.’
CHAPTER TWO
This is not a complaint, but I have spent more than half my life away from my own bed and probably a quarter of it away from any bed at all. This past year I have served Edward mostly at sea in the Channel against the Castilian galleys and I have now been granted the extra responsibility of Admiral of the Western seas. Oh, and I also had to address Parliament on his behalf, asking them for still more money. The King is no longer quite the active man he was, but a year or two ago he told me that if I had wanted a quiet life, I should have taken care to seem more of an idiot and more of a coward. I think it was a compliment.
When I began to notice the discomfort, I realised the King’s business took me along some well-worn routes and there was no good reason why I should put up with strange beds. I have therefore bought myself houses on some of those frequented paths, personal hostels for a personal pilgrim carefully spaced at a day’s travelling distance and now, most of the time, I can sleep in one of my very own beds. That’s England I’m talking about. Now we were going abroad and it was back to the bad old ways.
I was brooding on that when the Michel took a wave right over the bow and staggered almost to a halt. He is a good ship and he’d been built just the way I wanted him. He can go further to windward than any other ship I know, but it was asking a lot to expect him to fight his way up-Channel in a down-Channel gale. I called him after my dear old horse, the first of my chargers, killed under me by a Frenchman’s sword in his throat, and in truth they behaved the same way, the ship and the horse. The first Michel was there with me through thick and thin just as long as I kept him properly fed and properly shod and didn’t ask him to charge straight into a low sun. He didn’t like it when blades came at him out of the glare. He carried me for six years in the King’s service, which is quite a record when you think how much of that time was spent at the exact places where two armies were colliding. We talked to each other a lot, Michel and I. The second Michel, the wooden one, felt the same way about the wind as the first one felt about the low sun. The weight of the water forced his head further and further off course and the big sail slatted and cracked. I had seen this one coming and braced myself on the backstay, but the King’s squire, face down on the deck, short and fat with his head in a bucket, hardly seemed to care about the distinction between air and water any more. He was already soaked through before the wave hit him, so that the flood only lifted and swelled his sodden woollen jerkin as it passed. The priest was braced against the weather rail as ever, glaring at the vague horizon as if he were hoping for a fight. It was the fourth day of our three-day passage up-Channel, and I only minded the delay because William wouldn’t perform the office of Mass in any kind of storm. It was one of his few orthodoxies. He said he had seen too many people vomit up the Host and that was definitely disrespectful and possibly blasphemous. I was standing behind the steersman, staring forwards beyond the port bow, to where the sea blurred into the low, cantering clouds. White-caps were whipping from the wave tops in the wind that came driving from behind him again as the bow swung back on course. We had seen no sign of the sun for many hours and, though there should be nothing ahead of us, who could tell for sure whether it was wind, rock or sandbank that broke and frothed the sea?
My sailing master caught my eye and jerked his head down towards the well-deck. Hawley was not known for his soft heart or his thoughtfulness for those who didn’t share his complete indifference to the discomforts of the sea, but he seemed to like the squire. They had made friends in Dartmouth before we sailed. Not many people ever managed to make friends with Hawley. He didn’t like to cheat his friends, which may have been why he chose to have so few. The young man was showing signs of movement, doing his best to get to his knees. I dropped down the ladder and stood beside him. ‘How are you?’ I asked, and he swung his head to one side and then the other as if he could not quite locate me.
I’m still breathing,’ he gasped, ‘at least when there’s air to be had. The rest of the time I’m drinking. Are we nearly there?’
‘Visibility’s bad. I can’t see land at the moment,’ I said, knowing a fuller answer might nip this brave attempt at recovery in the bud.
The squire made a huge effort and reared his head higher than it had been since dawn. The Channel never seemed this wide before,’ he said uncertainly. ‘How far is it?’
I could not evade a direct question. ‘We’re a little west of where we started, doing what we can against a north-east wind.’
The squire reached out for the rail and hauled himself unsteadily to his feet. I put out a hand to make sure of him as the next wave heaved the bow higher. He had been a plump man when he came aboard, but I realised that the past four days had already served to trim him down a bit. He was looking around him aghast.
‘West? That’s the wrong way. Will the storm sink us?’
‘Storm? No, it’s not really a storm.’ I had another look at the sky. The clouds ended in a dark line which was drawing nearer all the time. ‘It will blow itself out in a short while, then we’ll make our way back up-Channel. At least it keeps the galleys away.’
‘What galleys?’
‘The French galleys, the Castilians. Take your pick. No galleys are good news. We are at war, you know.’
He was doing well for a man who’d been so sick minutes before. Standing up does that for some people. His habitual interest was showing itself again. He had an eye for everything, did this young man. He looked up at the rigging and seemed to be trying to frame a question. ‘I think you had better dry yourself,’ I said. ‘Come into my quarters.’
It was relatively peaceful in the cabin and I was able to study the squire as he rubbed himself as dry as he could, the first chance I’d had since he had come on board at Dartmouth.
‘I know your face,’ I remarked. ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
The squire nodded and managed to look both pleased and a little wary through his pallor. ‘First time was thirteen years ago,’ he said, ‘in France. That is, I was a nobody in the retinue of Prince Lionel and you were the great Lord Bryan with retained men of your own.’
I was even more impressed by his powers of recovery. The younger man showed resilience and that quality had always prompted my approval. ‘Thirteen years ago?’ I did the sums. 1359, the year my dearest Elizabeth died. ‘Rheims? You were at the siege?’
‘I didn’t get as far as Rheims. I was captured.’
‘How on earth did you manage that? There wasn’t a lot of fighting that year. Rethel, was that it? That little skirmish at the bridge? Were you captured there?’
‘No, no. Nothing so noble. You’ll remember how hungry we all were, surely?’
‘How could I not?’ Foul weather for week after week and the French had finally learnt their lesson. With his father, the King, a prisoner in England, Dauphin Charles changed the rules, decided taking the English on in battle was a mug’s game with only one outcome. Instead his French armies burnt the crops, laying the country bare so that we’d starve. It wasn’t glorious and it wasn’t at all chivalrous but it worked all too well. Starve was exactly what we did. Still, I suppose that after Crécy we could hardly claim the high ground on chivalry.
‘We were sent off to search for food,’ the squire explained. ‘Three of us, me and two Welsh archers. We walked into a farmyard and the barn was full of French. They thought I might be worth something. The other two got the knife.’
‘Who sent you off like that?’
The squire looked a little embarrassed and I wondered why, then I guessed.
‘It was me, was it? Did I send you?’
‘It’s all a long time ago,’ he said as if that made it less important. ‘And you also fixed my ransom.’
‘Did I now?’ I had fixed many, many ransoms. ‘How much were you worth?’
‘Sixteen pounds’ said the squire proudly, ‘and the King paid it.’
‘Sixteen pounds, eh? And how old were you then?’
‘Sixteen years.’
‘A pound a year.’ The man was twenty-nine now. I wasn’t sure he looked worth twenty-nine pounds, but someone thought he was if they had entrusted him with this mission. He wasn’t just a travelling companion. My instructions laid down that I must consult him over every aspect of the diplomatic negotiations once I got him to Genoa, though I was, in every other way, the leader.
‘That wasn’t it,’ I said with certainty. ‘That wasn’t what I remembered.’ I didn’t explain, didn’t say that grief had driven all other details out of that year, leaving only the black hole of tears which stood where Elizabeth had once been. ‘It was more recent than that.’
‘The year after? I was there at Calais when the Treaty was signed. You came straight from Paris. You swore observance for England in the King’s name. It was a fine moment.’
I shook my head. There had been huge crowds at Calais. It had been hard lawyer’s business for me, trying to see the holes in the Treaty through the blinding smoke of ceremony.
‘Where else?’ I asked.
‘The other time?’ he looked reluctant and his head drooped so that he looked down at the deck. ‘I suppose that must have been when we were with Lancaster,’ and I knew why he looked like that.
‘That bloody business at Limoges.’ Slaughter for its own sake. Licentious revenge on a town that had done no more than stand up for itself. It was the moment when I knew Lancaster for what he was, a bad commander and an unprincipled man, not a man to follow in war or in peace. The ending of the siege of Limoges had been another stepping stone on the way to my declaration. I’m not talking about old Lancaster of course, not Henry of Lancaster. He had been the noblest of men. This was new Lancaster, John the King’s son, made Duke by marriage and by convenient death.
‘There were things there I would rather forget,’ said the squire. ‘I decided at Limoges that war could do without me. I have not been in the wars since.’
‘If you have the chance of that choice, then make it so.’ I sat down to ease my leg and rubbed my knee. ‘I am sixty-five years old, young man. I should have made that same choice long ago. I wish you could know what I know. But you puzzle me. There were many thousands of us at all the events you mention and yet you seem to have singled me out.’
‘There were many knights, I grant you that, but I would not agree that there were many like you.’
My door flew open with no trace of a knock and the priest, spraying water like a dog leaving a pond, ducked his head to come inside and slammed it shut behind him.
‘Hawley says the wind’s backing,’ he announced. ‘It’s northerly.’
Thank you William,’ I said mildly, looking at the puddle forming under him. No crewman would have had the nerve to soak my cabin floor like that. ‘Will you join us in a glass? We’ll be heading back for Flanders in an hour or two, I should say.’
‘I will. Has he started interrogating you yet?’
‘Who?’
The priest jerked his head at the squire. ‘This one. It’s what he does best. Ask, ask, ask. He’s known for it. Unless he’s scared of you.’
The squire went a little pink or perhaps it was just that his colour was improving anyway. The motion of the boat had eased as the wind backed further. I could tell the wind and the tide were both moving to the east together.
‘No he hasn’t. What would he ask me? I’ve got nothing much to say.’
There was something,’ said the squire meekly. That’s if you don’t mind?’
I wouldn’t have minded at all if the priest hadn’t said that thing about being scared of me. ‘What?’ I asked.
‘Sluys,’ he said. ‘You were there for the battle of the ships. Would you tell me what it was like?’
Sluys? I hadn’t thought of Sluys for a long time. He was a clever man, I realise now, opening my door like that, starting me off with a question he knew I would want to answer. I know now that he had no particular interest in the ancient history of Sluys, just as well as I know that William Batokewaye colluded with him, nudging him in the right direction in everything he did. It was only later on, when I saw that squire at work on other people that I recognised the technique of a master. Get them talking about anything at all, then when they’re moving, give them a nudge. It’s easier to steer a wagon when it’s already rolling. Oh, he was clever all right and, though I didn’t know it yet, they had a plan, those two.
Sluys, my first sea-fight, though you couldn’t really call it a sea-fight, with the French boats crammed together in the narrowing estuary of the Zwin and the wind, blowing straight in, keeping them there and carrying us to them. It was not so different to storming a town, a town with masts and wooden walls. So he got me talking, remembering the archers up our masts, shooting down, remembering the hand to hand on decks that might as well have been streets except for the splashes as the bodies went into the water, and even that splashing only lasted a short time. In no time at all, the sea was so thick with the corpses of dead French that the next ones in made little more than a soggy thump.
We were away. He knew more about it than I did in some ways because I had been in the middle of a struggling mob on the Saint-James, the big Dieppe ship. It was a grunting, heaving fight, too close to stretch out a sword arm and too crowded to see six feet away. That was all I knew about it until we had them subdued, four hundred bodies lying on the decks of that ruined ship alone, and by the time our friendly Flemings, seeing it going our way, had finally come out from Oostburg and Termuiden and Sluys itself and hacked into the rear rank of the smaller French boats, it was all but over. He knew the figures, this damp, little man, ‘Sixteen thousand French dead,’ he told me. ‘One hundred and ninety ships taken or sunk.’ He had it by heart, and from the look in his eyes, he was trying to live inside the flimsy house he was building out of my slow words.
‘It was the worst sight I had seen up to then,’ I told him. ‘Butcher work. Hacking and cutting and piercing with no time to know your enemy, but for all that there was still chivalry.’
He asked me this and that for a quarter of a candle’s length, then, having loosened my lips with old war stories, he made his one mistake. He turned much too sharply to the subject he really wanted to talk about. ‘Molyns,’ he said. Tell me about Sir John Molyns,’ and I looked sharply at William Batokewaye, wondering for the first time if the priest had put him up to it. Old William looked back at me, eyes wide and innocent, waiting for me to speak.
‘Molyns has been dead ten years and more,’ I said. ‘He’s a man best forgotten. Nothing he did is worth the effort of our memory.’
The squire closed his mouth and kept it closed.
‘He helped put the King on the throne,’ said the priest mildly.
‘He did that,’ I agreed, because what else could one say?
That thought was still in my mind a few days later, once we had swapped the Michel for horseback and were plodding south. Thinking of the far past, at my age, makes the present much more painful. I could ride for hours back then because I was so much lighter in my saddle and my joints had youth’s oil in them, but there was much I didn’t know in those days. I didn’t know how to scan the landscape ahead, to measure the dangers of the blind places which might hide who knows what. I didn’t have the voice of command which could still make even the toughest trooper do what I said without a moment’s question.
There was quite a crew of us by this time. The two Italians, di Mari and di Provan, would have little to do with me and I didn’t mind one bit. They weren’t my kind of men. They talked to each other in their own babble. Di Provan had a high-pitched mocking laugh which made me wince, with a carry to it shrill enough to tell any brigands we were coming a mile away. Occasionally, if they wanted something, they would refer to the squire, but they seemed to find me barbarous, unfashionable, useful as some sort of bodyguard, but no more. The squire asked me, rather anxiously, if he should explain that I was not only the leader of the party but also its designated chief spokesman. I got a certain amount of wry pleasure from letting them dig the hole of misunderstanding ever deeper. They were Genoese, these men, and a bit full of themselves, and they had two of their own crossbowmen with them. Now, I’ve seen a lot of men killed by crossbows and mostly they were the men who were holding them, not their targets.
I watched it close up sixteen years ago at Poitiers when we were creeping up on them through the woods. It was dreadful standing still while we waited because I had splits in my feet at that time, the awful itch that is best dealt with by keeping moving. Either that or taking off your boots to have a good rub though that never lasts long. Elizabeth cured it for me after years of torment with an oil of hers, and I remember her sitting on the floor of our bedroom in my house of Pool as she worked it in to my toes, looking up at me all the while, making the shape of little kisses with her lips, and when she had done, she spread the rest of the oil over both of us and we rubbed it in with the skin of our bodies. Anyway, back at Poitiers, trying to take my mind off my feet, I watched one of their crossbowmen at work and understood what a dreadful business it was, winding that string back up after each shot. He didn’t see us until we were well clear of the wood, and before he got off one shot, Gwynn put two arrows into him. It was always like that with crossbows. They pack a punch but they don’t always get to punch twice.
In an ambush you get one chance and that’s it. If you haven’t dealt with it by the time you count to five, the chances are you’re dead. On this journey the safety of these Genoese, of William and of the squire, depended entirely on my Welsh archers who now went ahead and behind, ready to chase away any band of hopeful brigands who might not be familiar with my standard and might imagine we were some sort of easy pickings. Of course we took the Dutch way, as they call it, down towards the Rhine as we’d been ordered. The French lay to the south west and France was barred to us by the war. We’d need more than a half-dozen archers to see the French army off. A few more anyway.
We had left the comfort of Bruges well behind, leaving the town after a Mass for travellers to which I had obliged William to add a personal mass for my own list of souls. The Italians had chafed at that but I ignored them and now we were all ambling through dull, open country. It was nothing like campaigning. The December rain was surprisingly warm and I knew we would sleep the night in one of Ghent’s fine inns.
In a dream prompted by the talk of the old days which seemed to please the squire so much, I was back in my youth, twenty years old and on my first long cross-country journey. The royal summons had come in the summer of the year 1327 and it was the single most exciting moment of my life until then. I was entirely delighted, not so much at the prospect of fighting Robert Bruce’s Scots, though ignorance invested even that with glamour, but more with the relief of getting away from the draughts of Walwayns Castle. My father’s ancient fortress stood by the corner of Wales where one coast faces the Atlantic and the other turns eastward to confront England. Even in summer, a cold wind straight off the endless sea blew through the stone walls as if they were chain mail and my father’s increasingly mad rages threatened all our lives.
‘You’re going to the bloody King?’ he screamed when the summons came. ‘I’m the King round here. Have I said you could go? Have I? You’d leave me with the goblins, would you? The goblins speak to me, you know. I could tell you what they think of you. You’re no better than I am. You just think you are.’
The Scots gathering to invade our northern borders could not be more dangerous than him. He was a normal man one moment and murderous the next. You needed eyes in the back of your head when he was like that. From the earliest moment I could remember, I had vowed to stick to reason and predictability in my own life and watched anxiously for signs in me that his blood might show.
Outside events got me out of there. Even in far Walwayns, miles from everywhere, out there on the very edge of the kingdom, we knew it was a year of divided loyalties, and the Scots had chosen a good moment to threaten invasion when attention was elsewhere.
Called to arms. A blast of trumpets rang through those words. However mad he was, my father couldn’t safely keep me there against the royal summons, so off I went, equipped as best I could manage, with the captain of the castle guard and his three best men, all of us pleased to be away from the mad rage of Walwayns. I pretended to command them and they indulged me by pretending to listen. We made our way across the country, accumulating others as we went, all experienced men-at-arms except me, and I was agog to hear their tales. The journey up to Durham took ten days, enough time to get used to my horse, my borrowed saddle and the heft of my grandfather’s old sword, but not nearly time enough to sort through the complex loyalties and mixed feelings of that band of fighters. By the time we reached the army’s gathering place in the north, a land I knew nothing of, I at least understood where the majority opinion lay.
The throne was effectively empty. The country lay somewhere between two kings. No one regretted the end of the second Edward, a vicious, corrupted waste of time who had entirely deserved his comeuppance. His wife Isabella was right to come back from France and kick him and his favourites out, that was the majority opinion. She was not so right, most men thought, to flaunt her lover in the way she did, and that lover, Roger Mortimer, they all agreed, was a most dangerous man. The pity of the country was that the second Edward had proved such a poor shadow of the first Edward, his brave father. All hope now lay in the new young king, the third to bear that name and the whispered slogan of the times was ‘third time lucky’. The signs were good. Physically he took after his grandfather, not his father, and people said he had the kingly manner.
The question everyone asked was, would Mortimer ever let him rule?
Our journey reached its destination one evening on a hilltop where a large patrol challenged us and then ushered us down into a valley so full of armed men that I could not understand what my eyes were telling me. They looked like a swarm of bees, jostling for position for their tents and their cooking fires. I had rarely seen more than fifty men in one place, and here were fifty fifties and ten times that again. All we lacked was an enemy. We moved down into that valley and found a place and slipped into the ranks. It was decided that we belonged in Montague’s troop, though as we were not part of his official retinue we had to fend for ourselves as far as food went, which was a hungry business. For days that stretched out into weeks, we patrolled those hills with absolutely no idea where the Scots were. I had time to set my old chain mail to rights and get something like an edge put on my sword, though it wavered in and out as you looked along it and would just as easily have sawn wood as sliced flesh. The Earl of Lancaster, the old Earl that is, was in command, and he was a fine man, but on my fourth day there, I saw young Edward, the new king, for the first time, and there was an even finer man. He was five years younger than me, but he was already bigger.
Those Scots had us looking like fools from the very first. They were light on their feet. They brought no baggage trains like we did. Each man carried a little bag of oatmeal, I heard, which they would mix into a paste and cook on a stone. We drank wine which the carts brought and they drank water which the rivers brought. How could we catch them? Rivers go faster than carts. We followed them, slogging through the thick country while they danced ahead in their own natural element, taunting us with smoke from the villages they burnt. I craned for another glimpse of the King and, as our numbers thinned, the footmen left trailing and lost as we who had horses did our best to keep going, I saw more and more of him. It got worse and then it got still worse again. Our rations grew shorter and shorter, our horses were going lame, and then the biting flies of summer were driven away by even worse downpours of driving rain. Rain gets into armour and rusts it and rubs your skin raw if you’re stuck in that armour all day and all night. Mine had been made for someone else long ago and it fitted only where it touched.
So far, it was a contest only with hunger and the weather, and I could stand up to that, but I needed more. I was desperate to test myself against an enemy, to know what it really was to stand up to another man in a real fight. It wasn’t that I wanted to spill another man’s blood, more that I needed to know how I would be. The strain of fearing that I might turn out a coward in the company of all these tough, quiet men was getting too much for me. I knew the rules of chivalry. I knew what was considered a fine way to fight and what was not. The Scottish knights had a brave reputation.
We found them in the end, mostly by luck. We crossed a river in a barren land and saw them on top of a hill ahead of us, in a well-prepared position with no way to attack except slowly and uphill into waiting steel, and we weren’t in a hurry to do that. Instead, we faced them for three days from our own side of the valley. They looked as though they grew from the landscape and belonged in it, in their rough cloth, while we, though the shine had long gone from our metal, seemed entirely out of place. I could not imagine what it would be like to attack them, to climb that hill and face those deadly men, but the moment of finding out was postponed. After the third night we woke to see the far hill was bare. They had slipped away.
I felt frustration but I also felt relief, a little song in my soul that my death had stepped a few paces back. Then our scouts returned and the word spread that the enemy had not gone far. They had found an even better protected hill and the stalemate set in all over again.
It was three days later that I met the King face to face and in the oddest manner. My wish had come partly true. I had experienced battle, but not in any ordered way, not in a way covered by the rules. My first taste of combat consisted of waking abruptly, confused as men rushed over my legs in the night, shouting ‘Raiders! To arms!’ Searching desperately in the dark for my sword, I found it with the scabbard all caught up in the tent ropes and got it out, cutting my other hand in the process, just in time to take a wild slash at a man who appeared out of the darkness in front of me with an axe. I missed him completely and that was just as well as he turned out to be one of ours. We beat them off, or they chose to leave – a bold party barely three hundred strong, who left mounds of our men behind them. The next night had us all wide awake and jumpy, peering into the mist fearing a repeat, but when day dawned, we found we were looking up at what seemed once again to be an empty hillside. Had they gone? As I looked, a band of our men rode up from behind me on horses.
‘Are you armed and ready?’ said the nearest. ‘If you are, come with us and let’s see what’s up there.’
I was about to question the man’s right to command me in that way when he half turned and I saw that he had every right. I had taken him for a full-grown man, because he was big but the face I now saw was younger than the body. My king, Edward, aged just fifteen, was a fine man and his face had a smile on it which would have inspired loyalty in a piece of solid rock. I climbed into my saddle to follow him, thrilled, repeating his words to myself so that I had them by heart, the first words my king spoke directly to me. Ten of us went carefully up that hill, all in plain armour with no surcoats, no crests. There were three riding ahead in case all was not what it seemed. I had spurred forward to join them, but was waved back to my proper place. They were hard men, those others, men you wouldn’t want to tangle with, and as I looked around, I saw that only Edward and myself did not yet fully fit that description, though it was plain from the look on his face and the way he held himself in the saddle that for him, it was only a matter of time.
What a strange sight we found at the top. We rode through a band of mist which had us staring hard again and drawing swords, then it dispersed as we reached the summit so that we seemed to climb up into a place all of itself, remote from anything else I knew, floating in its own world. For a moment I thought we were the only living beings present, but then I heard a groan and saw ahead of me a slumped body, lashed to the trunk of a tree.
‘See to him,’ said the man next to me.
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s one of ours, snatched on a raid. Look to him.’
At that stage of my life, I was no good at tending the wounded, scared to face the pain of others without the knowledge to ease it. This man hung from the ropes, naked, and his face was somewhere behind the blood which ran in crusted streaks down his body. Both his legs were splayed out at an angle which showed the bones were smashed, and he whimpered when I tried to support him while I cut him down.
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