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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