The Ill-Made Knight

Paris 1357-59

Paris? Paris was. . astonishing. Horrible. And damned confusing. When the French tried to rid themselves of their King. Oh, I was there.

After Poitiers, nothing went as we expected. I spent enough time with the Earl of Oxford and the Prince after the battle to know what they expected, and I was present — carving meat — when Sir Neil Loring came to Bordeaux from King Edward of England. He told us that all we had to do was hold the King of France and wait for all France to fall in our laps like ripe fruit.

But it didn’t happen.

What happened was much worse — for France and for us.

First, Paris declared itself to be the government. Ah, mes freres, that’s purest crap, but it’s true nonetheless. Before Poitiers, there were quite a few Frenchmen — nobles, merchants, peasants and churchmen — who thought King Jean was anything but ‘the good’, and after the battle, such voices were loudest, and instead of ransoming him, they as much as declared they could govern better without him.

Truth be told, he’d failed them. He’d never beat us in the field, and now he’d failed, lost and been captured. With him went, well, the government, eh? Dead or captured. His cowardly son, the Dauphin, slipped away and tried to govern, but Paris wasn’t having it, and when the parliament was summoned, they voted no money for ransoming the King of France and damned little for war.

Perhaps you remember, messieurs? Or do they tell a different story in Hainault? I’m damned sure the French tell a nicer story now. Not one about how they ate each other while we nibbled at the edges.

Paris ended in the hands of a mercer, who made himself the tyrant. He was named Etienne Marcel and, after a lot of blood and words, he emerged as the leader of a party. Charles of Navarre — you must know that name. I’m no follower of his, by the Virgin. Navarre was the son-in-law of the King of France and, despite that, the most treacherous, conniving bastard France ever produced. He was also the head of a party, even when in prison for treason, where King John had put him. He was put there because he and his brother gave us, the English, much of Normandy. When King John was taken at Poitiers, Charles of Navarre — still in prison, mind you — began to talk, and people began to listen.

I had a friend, a French knight — you’ll hear more about him — who used to say that Charles of Navarre was so poisonous he left a trail of slime wherever he crawled. Ha! Be your own judge.

Navarre’s brother, Philippe, wasn’t in prison, and he signed a treaty with King Edward, and the war moved out of Gascony and up north to Brittany and Normandy. Navarre handed over the keys to Normandy, will he, nil he, and every free companion — every man not bound by a feudal oath or retinue pay — picked up his harness, borrowed money from the Italians and headed north, where the ransoms were rich.

I was in love with being a gentleman, which I was, of sorts. In the big, rambling, tumbledown archbishop’s palace in Bordeaux, the Prince kept great state, and I was one of many squires who attended on him personally. I was loosely attached to the Earl of Oxford, who, himself, went back and forth between England and Gascony freely. No one provided me wages, so I had to scrounge in a distinctly ungentlemanly way to maintain myself in a tiny garret room under the eaves of a private house. But it was dry and warm.

Bordeaux became a rich town overnight, both as the Prince’s seat of government in Gascony, as the entrepot for the sale of all that loot, as the banking centre handling the ransoms of half of France’s nobility and, of course, as the centre of the English wine trade. There was a great deal of money moving about the town, and it was annoying to be poor. At the same time, the town was full of refugees and peasants, displaced from their homes by the war, and they were fleeced like sheep, and sometimes bought and sold like them, too.

Well, I can make a thousand excuses.

It started innocently enough — my landlord raised the rent of my tiny room, and I was in the street with too much armour and too little cash. Then and there I considered following Sir John to Normandy. He was taking his leave of the Earl of Oxford to go with Seguin de Badefol and Petit Mechin to see what ransoms they could gain in the north. But it was autumn, and I had released my own capture on parole to collect the gold for his ransom: 450 ducats. A Genoese offered me 100 ducats flat on the ransom — in cash. I was sorely tempted, as I wasn’t eating very often or well, and the high point of my week was waiting on the Prince’s table after Mass on Sundays and feast days, because with the other squires I could eat the pickings, which were richer than most food I could buy. I am not ashamed to say that sometimes I would fill a leather bag with food — roast peacock, roast beef, messes of rice with saffron — anything that the cooks would let me take.

The same evening that Sir John offered to take me to Normandy as a man-at-arms, he invited me to dinner at an inn called the Three Foxes. It’s still there.

I loved that place — my first castle. It was built where two streets emptied into a square, and the inn itself was laid out in a triangle, which narrowed as the two streets converged. It had some glass windows in brilliantly mullioned panels, and beautifully carved woodwork — carved, I’m given to understand, by an artist who could not pay his tab.

I had no duties that day, so after a contemplative walk across the river, where spitting over the edge of the bridge was considered a proper gentlemanly pursuit, I assure you, I searched my empty purse — a habit — and was properly amazed to find a half a silver bit wedged under the rivet that held the strap on the outside of the flap. I stood there like a fool, staring at the value of a night’s lodging.

A girl of perhaps my own age, if one is generous, approached along the bridge, dragging her sister, who was a year younger. Both were pretty, in a plain, wholesome French way, and dressed in smocks that did them no justice.

‘Suck your cock, messire?’ said the older girl. She smiled prettily. In fact, for a prostitute, she was the most cheerful creature I’d met with. ‘My sister’s a virgin. You can have her for. .’ She paused, my little merchant. ‘A gold ecu.’ She looked at me expectantly.

I must pause to mention that apparently I looked like a lord. I confess that I spent my loot — and I had some — from Poitiers on clothes and whores and their clothes — and some wine. I did not, for example, travel home to see my sister, or send her money. I thought I’d send her money when the ransom came in. I agonized about it, and as the weeks dragged on, I grew despondent. And despondent men sin. When you feel you are bad — well then.

‘An ecu for your sister’s ecu?’ I asked. I thought I was quite witty. Par dieu, possibly that’s the only reason I still remember this episode, mes amis.

She shrugged, unimpressed. ‘Well?’ she asked.

‘If I had any silver at all, I would buy the both of you dinner,’ I said. It was my turn to shrug. I held up my half of a silver penny. ‘This is all the cash I have, sister.’

She grinned. ‘It would buy all three of us dinner,’ she allowed.

‘I have a dinner engagement with some gentlemen,’ I admitted.

She frowned.

While we were flirting over money, there was an altercation at the south end of the bridge. I thought it was merely traffic, as the narrow streets of Bordeaux were never built for the traffic the English brought, but it was worse. It was a crowd. A mob.

Mobs formed quickly. The war and the Black Death had robbed us all of any pretence of common morality. We fornicated, and God did not care much. We killed each other — you know, eh? The two go wonderfully well together. Sin and sin. Murder and fornication. If you wish to understand my peers, know this: we were killers because of the Black Death.

The mob was made up of poor men, and they had a Jew. And some sort of African — black as pitch.

I’ll be honest, I want to tell the truth, messires. Had it just been a Jew, I might have let him die. I’d like to think I might have tried to save him, because Our Lady was a Jew, and Jews, despite what the Dominicans say, are people just like you or me, and if you deny it, I will cheerfully prove my assertion on your body with that sword right there. No takers? The ecumenical conference is over, gentles.

But the black man — I’d seen him at the palace. He was a big, pleasant fellow called Richard Musard, and men called him ‘The Black Squire’. Like me, he lived in the half-world, neither lord nor peasant. Men said he’d been a slave.

Either way, he was one of mine — whatever mine were.

The two men were tied to heavy wooden boards. I assume they were to be burned.

The two girls froze.

‘Get behind me,’ I said as kindly as I could. See, I went to hell from kindness!

Bah, don’t believe it.

At any rate, I handed the older girl my silver penny. ‘Run and eat,’ I said. ‘Meet me at the Three Foxes after evensong and you can work off the meal.’

She smiled. ‘Pleasant enough, messire.’ She took her sister by the hand, kirtled up her skirts and ran.

The crowd started up the span of the bridge.

I drew my sword. It’s worth noting that I wore my beautiful longsword all the time. And as a squire in royal service — even unpaid — I had every right to wear it. All the time.

When I drew it, I put myself above the crowd.

A knight carries justice in his scabbard.

‘Halt,’ I yelled. My adolescent voice was against me. My shout was more like a squeak.

The sword was loud enough, though.

The men at the front shuffled to a stop, while the men behind pressed them forward.

‘Halt!’ I shouted again. I pointed at the black man. ‘That man is a royal squire, and you will all die if you do not let him go.’

There were seventy or eighty men, a handful of hags, and more people gathering every minute.

I doubt they heard me. When you confront a crowd, you need to act quickly and decisively, and you must speak the same way.

‘Fuck your royals and their fucking taxes,’ roared one emaciated farmer at the front. He was almost speechless with rage and something else — something a crowd brings to men.

I cut him down. I knew how to use my point to open a man’s guts, and I was too fast for him. He fell to his knees on the bridge, looking at his intestines.

And I put my sword’s point into the chest of the next man in the crowd. ‘Want to die?’ I asked.

The farmer whimpered once and died at my feet. I killed him to quiet the crowd. No other reason. Just so you understand.

The fellow pressing against my sword spat in my face, so I cut him in the neck, and he pitched forward, spouting blood.

Now they flinched back from me.

I walked towards them. I had the upper hand and, like any other bully, I revelled in it. They backed away, crouching like the canaille they were, and then they began to run like whipped dogs.

I cut Musard off his log, and gave him my rondel in case they came again, then I cut the Jew free.

He hugged himself a few times, pulled his beard and, of all things, smiled.

Smiled.

He bowed. ‘Suleyman Bashid, at your service,’ he said, bowing, with a hand on his heart.

Good Christ — he lent money to the Prince. The crowd had been about to kill one of the Prince’s tax farmers and one of his servants.

Musard was as pale as old ashes, and he shook for a moment. Hell, I shook for a moment. Then he embraced me, and he was a big man.

‘By the lord our God, I thought this son of Israel and I were dead men, and that as barbarously as could be done.’ He was shaking.

‘Let’s get you away,’ I said.

‘Suleyman was due at the palace before vespers,’ Musard said.

I walked them back across the bridge, and right to the ruined brick gates to the palace courtyard, where a pair of belted knights sat in a shelter with fifteen men-at-arms day and night — the Prince’s guard, all in black with white ostrich plumes on their chests. I aspired to be one of them some day. Sir John derided them and said that real men-at-arms spent their days fighting, not watching the Prince eat.

Sir John Blankford received Musard and Bashid, paid me a thousand compliments and gave me a rag to wipe my sword clean. I still had it in my hand. I had rather hoped the Jew might reward me with something a little harder than his handshake, but I was to be disappointed. So I bowed to the knights and made my way back across the bridge, watching the corners and alleys carefully. I’d killed enough men by then to know that the two I’d just put in the mud had brothers, sons and cousins who might want me dead.

I made the Three Foxes in time, and Seguin de Badefol was sitting with Sir John, one of the younger Albrets, and Bertucat, known to everyone as the Bourc Camus.

Sir John rose to his feet and took my hand. The Gascons all grinned.

‘It’s the little cook,’ barked the Bourc. His eyes glittered. ‘What are you making for us tonight?’

When you are sixteen, such jibes seem to have real meaning, real intent to harm. In fact, with that mad bastard, I suspect he did intend harm, but I was too on edge.

I sat on a stool and sent the boy for a piece of tow and some oil.

Sir John ordered a pitcher of wine, a joint of beef and some bread and gravy. Two women, as hard in their way as the bread was in its way, came to serve our table. The Gascons fondled them — they appeared to appreciate the rough wooing with equal enthusiasm, which is to say none at all.

I felt uncomfortable.

They were all good men-at-arms, but I felt I was with criminals, not men of birth who sought glory and honour. I knew these men. I knew the Prince and his men.

I was no fool, messieurs. Sir John Chandos had the luxury of being courteous because he had manors and peasants to maintain him, and royal favour, and Sir John Hawkwood had his sword. It made them different men. But I aspired then, as I aspire now, to the status of knighthood, like de Charny.

Sir John waited until I’d eaten — I confess I ate a great deal — then leaned across the table. ‘Your health, my young friend.’

I drank with him, then I proposed the healths of other men. The Bourc sat up.

‘But why am I last?’ he asked. His eyes, as I say, glittered.

I’d had enough of his shit, even if he was the top sword in Gascony. ‘Last?’ I asked him.

‘You propose the healths of other men before me,’ he said.

‘You lie,’ I insisted. ‘I had no intention of toasting your health at all.’

Every head turned.

And Seguin de Badefol, who was a great lord and no one’s bastard, roared a great laugh, kicked his longsword from under the table with his left leg and slapped me on the back.

The Bourc was on his feet

Seguin shook his head. ‘No, Bertucat. I forbid it. He’s a boy, and a brave boy, and you only got what you had coming.’ He looked at me. ‘So, what of it, messieur? Will you come with us to Normandy?’

I intended to go with them. What did I have to hold me in Bordeaux? Poverty? The Prince? He scarcely knew my name.

‘What will we do in Normandy? Will we take service with a lord?’ I asked.

The four of them looked at each other, as wolves look around their circle when they discuss dismembering a flock of sheep, I imagine.

‘We will serve the King of England, of course,’ Seguin said. He twirled his moustache, which tapered to needle points. ‘But we will be the lords. We will be companions, and sign articles to form a Company of Adventure, as they do in Italy and Greece. We will take ransoms and share the profits; we will take castles and sell them to the King of England.’

‘And if he doesn’t want them, we will sell them back to the owners!’ said Albret — the younger one.

Sir John nodded. ‘A little scouting to find the weak lords and weak holdings, and then, in two or three weeks of work, we storm a dozen of them, sell the ransoms, put the screws to the peasants for protection, then sell the castle and move on.’ He reached out and took the lace point that tied my somewhat threadbare jupon. It had once been gilt bronze and the replacement was waxed leather. ‘A man can make a hundred Venetian ducats a month.’

‘Easily,’ Seguin de Badefol said.

‘A virgin like this won’t make a fart,’ Camus said. ‘Listen, cook’s boy. The fastest way to make silver is to take convents of nuns. Rape them all with your soldiers — rape a girl ten times and she’s a willing whore. You know why nuns make better whores, boy? Because they won’t kill themselves. They believe in God.’ Camus stared at me.

‘You speak like a horse shits, Gascon. God will punish you for suggesting such a course — no man would actually do as you suggest.’ My hand was on my sword, and my blade was four inches clear of the scabbard.

He laughed. ‘God is a lie, boy. There is only Satan, and I am his disciple.’

‘Shut up, Bertucat. You’re drunk.’ Sir John sounded merely weary, not disgusted.

‘I don’t like the little cook and I want him to stay here,’ said the Bourc. ‘But I need someone to rape the little choirboys. There’s men who will pay for that, too.’

Sir John put his hand on my arm. I had started to rise from my chair.

Camus leaned back and his eyes rested on mine. He was tall — taller than me — with black eyes. He was handsome, with high cheekbones. He had a bone in one ear instead of an earring — the bone of a woman, everyone said, but no one said which bone or whose it was.

‘Stop staring at me, catamite. I do not like your eyes.’ His, which were deceptively gentle, bored into mine.

‘No man tells me where I may look or not look. Much less a man who advocates the raping of nuns.’ I was on my feet.

‘I’ll kill you when Seguin is not here to stop me, little cook’s boy,’ he said. ‘I break things I do not like. I do not like you.’

I looked at him. My hands were shaking, but his mad gaze was no madder than my uncle’s. In fact, there was something similar about them, and my hate boiled over.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

Sir John grabbed my hand. ‘Not like this, boy. He’ll gut you. Let him go, Bertucat.’

‘Fuck that,’ I said with all the bravado of my sixteen years. I got to my feet and walked outside into the yard, turned and drew my sword.

The Bourc emerged from the inn, grinned and drew.

Sir John was behind him. It was dark in the courtyard, but there were torches.

He came at me while I was still thinking we might abuse each other with words, and I just managed to turn his first strike, which was as fast as an adder’s tongue and as strong as a smith’s hammer stroke. I fell back a pace and he cut at me again — one, two, to either side of my head.

I raised my sword to parry the two head cuts — each block took my hands higher. With a snort of pure contempt, he punched with his left hand at the pommel of my sword, flinging my arms over my head. I lost my balance, and he kicked me between the legs. I fell forward on the ground, puking from the pain.

Sir John roared, ‘No!’

Camus laughed and he kicked me again, in the back, so I fell forward in the mud. Then he stabbed his sword deep into my arse — once, and twice.

‘Butt Boy,’ he mocked.

I wished he’d killed me.

I tried to get to my feet. I was weeping, and rage, fear and humiliation warred for possession of my soul. Blood trickled down the backs of my thighs.

He laughed. ‘I’ll have your sword, Butt Boy,’ he said.

I wasn’t going to give it to him. I don’t know what he expected, but he clearly thought the fight was over and he grabbed at the sword.

I flicked it at him, one handed, a weak, false-edge rising cut fuelled only by fear and hate.

I caught the base of his left hand and cut off a finger.

He dropped his sword. ‘Merde!’ he roared in Gascon French.

I raised my sword to kill him. I was absolutely going to kill him, unarmed.

Sir John Hawkwood saved my life and my career. He had already picked up a piece of firewood, intending, he told me later, to stop Bertucat Camus from killing me. Instead, he hit me on the head from behind.

I fell to the ground unconscious.

When I came to, I was in the Three Foxes, in a room paid for by Sir John. And my two little whores were waiting on me hand and foot.

Over the next month or so, Richard Musard and I became fast friends, and we took over the running of the Three Foxes. It proved, after the fact, that the Gascons had ‘protected’ the place until they left it, charging the landlord protection money and running a string of prostitutes under the eaves. It’s good for an innkeeper to have a good sword on his payroll — a soldier can often talk other soldiers out of doing damage or fighting, and a really good sword discourages violence.

I lay in bed for three days, and Richard visited twice. The two girls — named Marie and Anne, in the best tradition of Gascony — worked the inn, and no one stopped them, of course, because the inn’s strong arm had just ridden north to Normandy.

I’ll make this brief — you all want to hear about Paris and Brignais. I want you to know what our lives were like in the companies, and this is all part of that. So, in short, by the time my wounds healed, I had fifteen girls, and the Black Squire and I ran the inn. The innkeeper was a big man, but not a brave one, and he was used to being bullied by a much more evil bastard than me. Musard terrified him, with his black skin.

As to the girls, I am not proud of being a pimp, but there are ways and ways. Even then, I wasn’t willing to pimp directly. In fact, Marie did all the work, and all Richard and I did was glare at the customers and collect the coins.

Sometimes a girl would come and say she’d had a problem.

The first time was the worst, but it made life easier for us. Anne was working on her back and the man she’d taken started to hit her with his fists. She screamed. Marie came for me, but I was already moving. I went into that room — a room barely big enough to fuck — and there’s a man my size, stinking of wine, his hose and braes off, his hairy arse bare, pummelling this small girl-

Good Christ.

I caught one of his hands the way I’d learned from Abelard, in a dagger lock. Look here — punch at me, see? I catch your hand like this — eh bien? — I could make you scream like a woman giving birth.

So I trapped his hand under my dagger blade and twisted, and he came off the girl. He followed me down the steep steps to the courtyard, bellowing curses and bile all the way.

I put his left hand on the chopping block in the inn yard and drove my rondel dagger through it. I left him there, nailed to the block, until Anne came, kicked him a few times, raised her skirts and pissed on him.

Afterwards, she kissed me and called me her true knight.

Aye, the paragon of chivalry and protector of women.

Here’s the funny thing, though. I took good care of Geoffrey de Charny’s rondel dagger, but I must have left the man pinned to the chopping block too long. Because when I took the dagger free, the whoreson’s blood had left a stain on the steel, and I couldn’t polish it out.

Ah, I have shocked you, messieurs. Let us discuss this like gentlemen.

Running an inn was hardly to be reconciled with the life of a knight, you might think, and yet, what men-at-arms do in the field is rape and murder. We kill each other and we kill peasants. We burn farms and we take loot — even in Italy, and twice as much when fighting pagans or saracens.

I went to a hard school that summer of Poitiers. And when I was done, I had learned how to kill and how to survive. I thought I was a fine sword, a good lance and a gentleman. I confess to you that what I knew of chivalry might have fit inside one of the illuminated letters monks use at the beginning of a gospel — just one. I wanted to be worth more. I wanted to fight, and be preux. That’s what I knew.

Of chivalry’s finer feelings, I knew next to nothing. In fact, I was worse than that. I heard the old troubadour songs about courtly love, honour and loyalty, and I thought them lies.

I did fear the law and the loss of respect. I knew full well that if the Prince ever heard of any of this, I’d have been out in an instant. But thanks be to God, our clients were discreet. We gathered girls, and they came to us, for no better reason than that neither Richard nor I beat our girls — Christ, men are animals. I was an animal. I rutted with every girl in my stable. I was their lord and master.

I confess, I ate well, dressed well and, twice a week, I waited at table on my Prince. I remember one evening, he stopped in a corridor where I was enjoying a cup of his wine with two of his squires. I was wearing a good black linen jupon, carefully embroidered with crosses, and matching wool hose, and I had a silk coat over the whole in a fine red-brown. It was my best, and my shoes matched, and I had de Charny’s dagger in my belt.

The Prince stopped and I made my obeisance.

‘You have done well for yourself, Master Gold,’ he said. I flushed, because he knew my name. ‘Has your prisoner paid his ransom?’

‘No, my Prince.’ I tried to smile, to make it a joke. ‘Some. . money from rents, your Grace.’

He laughed. ‘Ah, you have rents?’ he said, and I could see I’d just climbed in his estimation. ‘I am remiss, Master Gold. Are you John or William?’

‘William, your Grace.’ I bowed again.

‘I remember you from Poitiers, and elsewhere,’ he said. ‘I seem to remember you as a cook.’ He laughed.

‘I was a cook,’ I admitted. ‘My mother was a de Vere and my father served as a man-at-arms, but. .’

He nodded absently. ‘Yes, of course.’ His eyes scanned the crowd of courtiers, who were pressing in, wondering who I was. Sir John Chandos stepped up closer to the Prince and took my hand.

Sir John Chandos, shaking my hand.

‘I remember you at Poitiers,’ he said. ‘You were there when de Charny fell.’

‘I have his dagger,’ I said. I didn’t mention that I’d just used the paragon of chivalry’s dagger to pin a bad client to a chopping block so my whores could punish him. That seemed like a bad idea.

The Prince smiled at me. ‘You fought well,’ he said. ‘Men like you, with the help of God, gave me that victory.’

He turned away and I was aglow. For a moment I forgot that I was a pimp. I was a great man-at-arms, a soldier in the retinue of the finest prince in Christendom, the best lance in the west.

Sir John Chandos waited until the Prince swept on down the corridor. ‘You were a cook,’ he said pleasantly. ‘And now you seem on the road to being a knight.’

No one was more pleased to hear it than me. I had waited tables in the archbishop’s palace for almost a year, and suddenly my service was remembered.

I went home, floating on a cloud of knightly valour, and ordered Marie to wash herself and decline clients. I ordered wine and we had a fine night.

Towards morning, she kissed me. ‘Am I allowed to tell you that I like you, protector?’

I rolled on top of her and tickled her. We were very young to be so hard, and neither one of us was as hard as we pretended.

Sometimes, we had a fine time.

Spring came, in the year of our lord 1358. Sir John sent me a letter for the Prince, which seemed to me an odd conceit, but I read his covering letter, blushing at his praise of me. He had more than eighty lances, and he had fought his way across Brittany — not, as it proved, Normandy.

I read enough of his letter to the Prince — pardon me, gentles, but the only seal was on his letter to me — to know that he had seized castles for the King of Navarre and was offering them, unofficially, to our Prince.

I gave his letter into Sir John Chandos’s hands, and he looked at me very thoughtfully and gave me five golden ducats for the delivery — a great deal of money.

It wasn’t many days after, when I stood in my room at the inn — a fine room — dressing for court. I was not wealthy enough to have a male servant, but Marie generally saw to my appearance with the practicality of a farm girl. I remember she wanted to go to Mass, and wanted me to come — she wanted us to go to Mass together. I was not an enemy to God like the Bourc, but neither was I a hypocrite, and I didn’t relish facing God with a purse stuffed full of coins from whores.

Killing men is so much nobler, now, isn’t it? And look at that young cock — afraid to face God while aglow with praise from his worldly Prince, and still breathing hard from a fine morning ride with his whore. How many men live in a man?

At any rate, I was half dressed, in my hose and braes and a shirt and sleeveless doublet when there was a commotion in the inn’s yard.

I threw open the windows and looked out.

There were half-a dozen men on bad horses in the yard.

Richard Musard had his sword drawn.

You could tell at a glance that these were hard men, and that the talking part was over.

Listen, I had learned a dozen lessons from the Bourc Camus. I’d worked on my swordsmanship and my jousting all winter, because I was never going to allow myself to be so easily bested again. And I’d learned that when the talking is over, you fight. In fact, you can save a great deal of trouble if you start fighting while the other bastard is still talking.

The Three Foxes had a slate roof and lead drains. I was out the windows of my room, over the balcony and onto the stable roof before I’d really thought it through. I knew what to do.

‘It’s my inn now,’ said the leader. He was English, tall and broad like an archer. ‘You kept it warm for me. Now run along and play, Blackie.’

The other five men chuckled. They were hairy, about ten years older than me, with grey at their temples, flat purses and a lot of spring mud on their boots. They weren’t archers, though. Archers always have bows.

They were brigands. Mercenaries, or worse.

Richard didn’t budge. ‘Whose man are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m my own man, Blackie. And I won’t ask again. Walk away.’ He reached for his sword.

I felt he’d asked one too many times. After the Bourc, I’d learned a great deal about who was dangerous and who was merely tough.

I jumped onto his back from the stable roof. De Charny’s dagger went into the top of his head and he was dead before I had control of his horse. I wheeled the horse and dumped his body in the yard.

I backed the terrified horse — no horse likes the smell of blood — until I was at Richard’s side.

‘That took you too long,’ he said pleasantly enough. ‘I didn’t think I could kill them all myself.’

Oh, how I loved him. I never saw him lose his nerve — then or later.

‘Marie was dressing me,’ I said, as if the other five weren’t even there. ‘I was busy.’

The five men were disconcerted to say the least.

I raised my bloody dagger. ‘Get you gone,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll kill the lot of you. This is Bordeaux, not the marches. We don’t allow broken men here.’

The closest man to me met my eye, and I knew in a moment that he was the most dangerous of the lot. He didn’t care. His eyes were vague, empty.

I addressed him directly. ‘I’m the Earl of Oxford’s man,’ I said. ‘Get you gone.’

He looked down at his former leader, now leaking into the already foul mud of the inn yard. ‘Fuck me,’ he muttered and turned his horse.

The last man of the five was not as hard and looked as if he would weep.

‘Par dieu, messire! Have pity! We are Englishmen no worse than you!’

The fellow next to him was, one could see, the castle lawyer of the group. Seeing me hesitate — I’m death in a fight, but soft as a snail inside, as all the girls knew — he leaned forward.

‘It’s all a misunderstanding, messire. We need work.’ He smiled. I’m sure he meant it to be ingratiating, or reassuring, but his ugly breath and worse teeth were enough to cause grave offence.

‘And you meant to take my inn to have your work,’ I said.

‘We could help you run your inn,’ he said.

Marie leaned over the balcony. ‘Like fuck, messire! I don’t need five new rams poking at my ewes. eh bien?’

I summoned Christophe, the inn’s lord. ‘Messire, would you do me a favour and feed these men? And give them a place to sleep tonight?’ I asked.

He shrugged. He was making a fair amount of silver these days, as I took less out of him than the Gascons had. ‘For you? Anything, messire.’

‘What in the name of all the apostles are you doing?’ Richard asked me.

I shrugged. I didn’t know myself. In fact, in my heart I knew I’d done the wrong thing, and that they’d catch me sleeping, kill me and take my girls.

But they were English, and the empty-eyed man had been at Poitiers. I knew him immediately as one of Master Peter’s men. So I waited for the other five to pass me, and I held him back.

‘I know you,’ he said slowly. He fingered his dirty beard. ‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why let us stay?’ he asked slowly.

I had thought he was slow, or stupid, or had received an injury, but now I realized he wasn’t English. He was from the north. York, or even further.

‘You were at Poitiers,’ I said.

‘Heh,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Samuel Bibbo,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘An’ you too, eh?’

We shook.

I promise you that wouldn’t have ended well, but then, everything happened quickly. It was that evening at court that Sir John Chandos took me aside.

‘Master Gold,’ he said. ‘You have something of a mixed reputation. A fine blade, men say. And as brave as a lion.’

I could hear the ‘but’, so I didn’t let the praise go to my head.

‘Brave men are as common as lice here in Gascony. The Prince is here to govern, and not to loot his own lands.’ Chandos was a man I never wanted to cross — he was distant, careful and very slow to anger. He was always courteous, even to those he detested. ‘The Prince needs men who are brave and loyal and thoughtful.’ He sat back. ‘You are very young — and I think you had a misunderstanding with the law in London.’

I nodded, chilled to the bone. Was I about to be dismissed from the Prince’s court? I could feel it.

But Sir John Chandos was much more subtle than that. Instead, he let the threat of my colourful past stay on the table between us, so to speak. ‘Some men say you are cunning. One man — Sir John Hawkwood — says you are wise beyond your years. I understand you can read.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ I answered.

‘Like a clerk?’ he asked. He put a document in front of me. It was a draft, full of blots and misspellings. It was in Latin. A grant of lands to a Gascon lord.

I read a sentence of the mediocre Latin aloud. ‘It is a land grant,’ I said.

Sir John steepled his fingers. He rocked back and forth slowly. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Do you seek to serve the Prince?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. I was surprised at my own vehemence.

He looked at me. His eyes didn’t move, and I suspect I fidgeted. I had a great deal about which to be nervous. Many secrets that could be used against me.

‘We will see. I will try you, and see what metal there is in your body. Come, Master Gold. You will have your future with the Prince’s household in your own hands. I have a man for you to meet.’

We walked along one of the bishop’s endless corridors to a small solar — like a closet with a fireplace, set in the wainscotting. There was a young man with an older man’s forked beard sitting on a low stool. He had ink stains on his right hand and a touch of ink at the corner of his mouth — a touch that added to the perpetual sneer he wore.

‘Master Chaucer,’ Sir John said. ‘This is William Gold, Esquire. He serves us sometimes. Master Gold, this is Geoffrey Chaucer, a page of Prince Lionel’s wife’s household, and with us at this time to do the Prince a service or two. I have a mind to send the two of you on an errand together.’

‘I am mere clay to accompany your Gold,’ Chaucer said. He looked at me. ‘Best send him on his own.’

His intent was uncivil, but he smirked and bowed.

Sir John Chandos was so unused to any form of cheek that he continued, assuming Chaucer had been respectful. ‘In light of the letter you brought from Sir John Hawkwood, the Prince would like an answer taken straight away. And perhaps, ahem, a further message for Paris.’

Chaucer looked at me. ‘He doesn’t have a clue what you are talking about, Sir John,’ he said. He smiled at me in a patronizing manner.

Sir John glared at him, having caught the tone. ‘Keep a civil tongue, young Chaucer.’ He looked at me. ‘This is all about the government of the Prince’s realm,’ Sir John said. ‘Can you keep your mouth shut?’ asked the old knight. Well, he was old to me, even if he was reputed to be one of the top fighting men in the world.

I bowed. Let’s be frank, comperes, never ask a man if he can keep a secret. Who will say no, eh?

‘Give me your solemn word,’ he said.

I knelt. ‘I swear to keep your secret, my lord,’ I said.

‘On his brothel, he swears it,’ Chaucer said.

‘What’s that?’ Sir John asked.

Chaucer smiled. He looked like a ferret when he smiled. ‘Nothing, my lord.’

Sir John looked at me, clearly off balance. Chaucer had the habit of putting you off balance. He was that kind of boy.

‘The King of France has negotiated a peace with our King Edward,’ he said portentously.

Now, in truth, this was mighty news. It struck me in ten ways. First that my employment was going to end, and I hadn’t even worn all my harness yet. In fact, all my looted armour was in pawn with the Italians — why redeem it when there was wine to be drunk — but now the war was going to end.

At another level, it meant there was some hope of getting my prisoner’s ransom paid, which would give me the money to-

Good Christ, what was I going to do?

The war had, at that point, dragged on for twenty years. France was bankrupt; England was better off, but the grumblings I heard from new drafts were that, despite recent victories, parliament wasn’t voting the King any more money to fight.

It was like a lightning bolt. King John had shipped out of Bordeaux earlier that year, taking his growing retinue of fellow prisoners and servants, as well as all of the bloody Count of Armagnac’s silver plate. I only mention that as I was there when it arrived, and I directed its polishing — my goldsmith skills weren’t completely wasted — and King John thanked me.

Well, I think it’s funny.

Where was I?

Oh!

Peace.

Sir John allowed me to digest this information. ‘If you were to take a return letter to Sir John Hawkwood, the Prince would esteem it a favour,’ he said.

‘He means that now we’re to have peace, you’ll be wanting a job at court,’ Chaucer quipped.

‘Of course I’ll go,’ I said, privately agreeing with the annoying boy’s assessment.

Sir John nodded. ‘You’ll need an escort,’ he said.

‘I have a small retinue,’ I said. The arrogance of the seventeen-year-old knows no bounds. ‘And I’d esteem it a favour if I might have Richard Musard.’

Sir John fingered his beard. ‘A retinue?’ He smiled. ‘How many men and how armed?’ He looked at me. ‘I seem to remember you as a cook, lad, not a great noble.’

I glared, preemptively, at Chaucer. ‘My lord, I have an archer and four men-at-arms available for pay.’

He nodded approvingly. ‘Muster them for me this evening in the courtyard with your horses and arms. You will be paid. I’d prefer it you would leave immediately.’

I walked out of the palace floating on air — I was to have my own indenture for four weeks’ service as a direct contractor. It wasn’t just the money. Very well, it was the money, but it was also honour. For the rest of my life, I would be able to say that I mustered a retinue for the Prince of Wales.

I ditched Chaucer at the gate — I didn’t like him — and ran to the inn.

I ignored the castle lawyer — Christopher, as he proved to be called. ‘Where’s Sam?’ I asked Marie.

‘Riding Helene.’ She smirked. ‘He paid.’

Richard made a motion with his hand to his dagger. It was rude, and it conveyed a great deal of information. Sam hadn’t wanted to pay, but he had paid.

‘Gentleman, a knight is with Petit Claire,’ Marie went on. She held up a solid gold Venetian ducat.

‘By Saint George, he can take her home for that.’ I grinned at my leman, who grinned back. ‘And keep her.’ Claire was by far and away our most beautiful girl; she was also a vicious, willful bully who probably needed a whipping from me. She got them from Marie instead — Marie insisted on being the only voice of discipline.

I think she liked it.

I walked over to Richard. ‘We have a contract — a retinue contract — from the Prince. To take a message to Sir John Hawkwood in Brittany.’ I grinned. ‘Four weeks full pay.’

Whores and inns fell away. Richard bounced to his feet. ‘Ventre Saint Gris!’ he swore. ‘My harness!’

‘And mine. Send the inn’s boy to fetch them. Send one of the girls to the market for two wicker baskets. Send round to Rolf the armourer for two apprentices to bring it all up to fighting condition.’

Marie looked at me. ‘You will spend all our money,’ she said.

I rolled my eyes. ‘This is what it’s for, my sweet.’

‘For war? We lie on our backs and fuck strangers so you can make war?’ she spat at me.

‘Yes,’ I said, and went about getting horses.

Richard and I didn’t have horses. Owning a horse in Bordeaux was fiendishly expensive. After Poitiers, I owned a fine golden war horse for a few weeks, but his stall and manger cost me more than I spent on my garret and my food, so he went to the first rich knight who offered.

Now I needed a riding horse and a war horse, and the pleasure of it was that I was buying in a depressed market. The Prince hadn’t fought a campaign all year, and he was about to leave for England; there was no word of any fighting, and knights going with the Prince were selling out. Word of the peace was probably alive among the horse and arms merchants — they always know these things first.

Richard and I issued our orders to servants and girls and went to the horse market under the walls. On second Sundays it was a proper market. The rest of the time it was a dozen dealers with a hundred horses, some of them right hard bargains.

To my immense delight — I felt God was on my side — my golden warhorse was standing in the lines, looking a little dejected. I walked up to the bastard we all called Jamais, because it was the word he used most often, and pointed at my former horse.

‘That horse looks familiar,’ I said. ‘Where’d you get him?’

I sounded not like a customer, but like a man looking for a stolen horse.

Jamais shrugged. ‘I forget,’ he said.

There you go, then.

‘What will you take for him?’ I asked.

‘Fifty florins.’ The florin was a Florentine gold coin, the standard coin of all France, let me add.

I had six florins. I had a lot of other coins, too, and some unminted silver and gold, but I only had six florins. ‘Give me that in Livre Tournois?’

He spat. ‘A thousand. But I won’t take French coins. Fucking Paris has devalued them all. Again.’

I had a great many French coins. ‘What?’ I asked.

He spat again. ‘The so-called Council of Eighty has ordered all the coins withdrawn. They plan to clip them, adulterate the silver and re-issue them at a profit because the fucking peasants won’t pay their fucking taxes. They are reducing the value of the coins by a quarter and charging a fee for the privilege. Got me, squire?’

I did. I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t understood. Now I knew why every customer all spring had paid in French silver. Parisian, especially.

Yes, our horse dealers had to be masters of international finance. So, apparently, did young men who ran brothels.

Richard was looking at horses, and he chose a fine dark bay, big and heavy. Like Richard, in fact. We both chose good riding horses.

‘I’ll let you have the lot for a hundred and fifty florins,’ Jamais said.

Richard grunted. ‘Seventy,’ he said.

‘By the sweet lord who gave his life for our sins, messieurs les gentilshommes, have a little mercy on an old horse thief.’ He had his dirty black wool cap clutched to his breast, as if he were a piteous spectacle while he gouged us for Italian gold we didn’t have.

Richard smiled. ‘Jamais, this is us. Richard and Will, penniless squires. We sell horses. We don’t buy horses. Now we have a contract with the Prince and we need to be mounted.’

Jamais leaned forward. ‘War?’ he asked eagerly.

I shook my head. ‘Courier.’

Jamais spat. Again. ‘Fucking peace. We’ll all be vagabonds. A hundred.’

That sounded fine to me. I’m poor at bargaining — I didn’t have a hundred, or even ten, but a hundred sounded like a bargain, as the knight who purchased my golden stallion had given me a hundred florins for him.

Richard shrugged. ‘Seventy-five.’

‘Fuck your mother!’ Jamais swore. ‘Kill me and take them, whore-master!’

We all laughed. Richard looked away. ‘Eighty.’

Jamais stared off into the heavens. ‘Next, you’ll be asking for credit,’ he said. As Richard began to comment, he held up a hand. ‘And you’ll ride off into France and die, and I’m out all my money. So yes, eighty. In gold.’

We spat in our hands and shook, and then Richard and I hoisted our bags and went off to the Italians.

The Riccardi were Lucchese bankers, and they had an office in Poitiers. But they’d been mostly ruined by the war, so we banked — if our constant pawning of armour and looted jewels could be called banking — with the Genoese house of Bardi. So we went there. We thumped our bags of French and English silver on the counters, and boys — banking apprentices — started counting the coins.

‘An armourer’s boy came for your armours, messires,’ said the master of the house, Raimondo. He bowed, as if we were really knights. I suspect we were all exactly the same to him. Whores and bankers — everyone is the same to them. And doctors, I suppose.

I nodded.

‘I thank you for such prompt repayment of your pledges,’ he said.

Richard glared at me.

Right, by taking our coin to the Genoese, we put ourselves in their hands. Now they’d take their cut first. And they’d handed all the gear over covered in rust, and mice had chewed our straps.

Christ, I hate bankers.

I noted they took all of our Italian coins, then all of our English coins, to cover the pawn of the armour. But that left a gleaming pile, and now they had six apprentices counting. Twenty girls earn a great deal of coin. And we hadn’t hit the inn for the protection money owed.

Maestro Raimondo fondled his golden beard and watched as the pile grew smaller and the stacks of French coins, gold and silver, grew. He shook his head. ‘French coin is virtually worthless,’ he said. ‘The Council of Eighty and the Provost of Paris have declared that the Dauphin’s latest coining scheme is illegal, so just now, there is no legal coinage.’ He made a clucking noise, as if all this was beyond his control. ‘I can give you, hmm, sixty florins for the lot.’

Unlike Jamais, he wouldn’t budge.

The most annoying thing is that he was making a huge — usurious — profit, and he knew it, but he didn’t care whether we took his offer or not. What was worse, he would loan the French silver at par — at true value.

Sometime in the long process of counting, Master Chaucer appeared to negotiate a bill on London, and with him was a senior notary of the Prince’s household, a fox-faced man named Michael Hoo; sometimes a customer of Marie’s, and known to me. I introduced young Chaucer to Richard. Richard liked him immediately — there’s no accounting for these things — and they talked nineteen to the dozen. Chaucer had never met an African and was asking Richard about his childhood, and Richard was delighted to have an audience.

I’d never even asked, so I felt a fool. Chaucer’s special talent.

While we stood there at the counter of the Italian bank, I learned that Richard had been born a Christian, in the far-away Kingdom of Prester John; that his father was noble and his mother less so; that he’d been taken as a boy by the Sultan of Cairo, who was, apparently, perpetually at war with the King of Aethiopia. It was a stirring tale, and Master Chaucer drank it in — intrigue in the Aethiopian court, the great knights of the realm, the fights with the Sultan.

Musard could tell a tale, too. He was just to the point of holding forth about the style of soft armour in Aethiopia, and the qualities of horses, when Maestro Raimondo returned to the counter from his clerks. He beckoned to me. ‘Even after recounting, I’m afraid I can do nothing for you. I have no need for French coin. Master Hoo? I believe you are next?

Hoo smiled at me. ‘Sir John Chandos can probably change your money,’ he said.

I looked at him. ‘Really?’

Master Hoo shrugged. ‘I have reason to know, the Prince runs his household in Livre Tournois. I’m sure he’ll give you a better rate.’

Chaucer smiled at Richard. ‘My pater’s a wine merchant, so we follow money markets. The fluctuation in France is. . temporary. As soon as King John pays his ransom, the markets will recover.’

Raimondo looked at the young page. ‘You have the mind of a banker!’ he pronounced.

‘Perish the thought,’ Chaucer said. ‘I’m sure you meant that as a compliment, but. . Christ, how disgusting. Still. .’

Raimondo spread his hands. ‘Do you gentlemen know something about King John’s ransom?’ he asked.

Chaucer grinned. ‘Yes, Maestro, but nothing I can share. Master William, if you collect your coins and pay the counting fee, we can go to the Prince.’

Master Hoo, the notary, leaned over the counter and whispered a few words to the banker.

Maestro Raimondo smiled. ‘Ah, perhaps I am over-hasty. I think, given news of the ransom of the King of France, I might manage eighty florins.’

Richard nodded. ‘A blessing on you, sir.’

Chaucer looked at Master Hoo and the notary shook his head. Chaucer grinned. ‘You’re being fleeced like a sheep. Come, the Prince will give you a hundred and twenty. Do your whores keep you so rich you can burn forty florins?’

Up until then, our whores and the court had been well separated. Chaucer threatened that. Men like Hoo never talked, but Chaucer talked all the time.

Nevertheless, he was a boy, and I underestimated him.

Everyone did.

Maestro Raimondo bowed. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps I could manage a hundred florins and no counting fee as a favour to such fine military gentlemen.’

‘Baaaa!’ Chaucer intoned derisively. ‘Baaa! Baaa!’

But we took it.

Later that afternoon, my shirts were patched and ironed, my trousseau was packed, my armour was clean and rust free, and in some cases newly riveted, with clean leather straps. If I listened carefully, I could hear the sound of the master armourer — a friend from my earliest days — putting new links into my haubergeon. We had a small cart, riding horses, food, wine. .

Sam and I sat at a table.

‘Hadn’t planned to go out again so soon,’ he said.

I wasn’t born yesterday. Very well, I was seventeen — I had been born yesterday — but I knew this gambit. ‘Double pay as an archer,’ I said. ‘Twelve pence a day, and a regard of a florin in gold.’ I leaned forward. ‘Half that for the rest of them — and I pay it to you.’

Sam fingered his moustache. ‘I knew I liked you.’ His smile was false, but we didn’t know each other yet, and he was an ancient man — twice my age.

I put the florin in gold on the table, and slowly added the other four. My archer was called Sam Bibbo. His men — first the castle lawyer, the mouthy and rather foul Christopher Shippen; then the youngest and least experienced, a former valet named Rob of Boston; another proper archer (shows how observant I am, not) John Hughes, whose father was a yeoman from the Lakes in the north of England, and Peter of Bramford, a cordwainer’s son, who’d followed his trade with the army to Poitiers and fallen into bad company — or so he said.

Of the four, I reckoned Sam a deadly man and a good archer, and I was right enough. I marked Christopher as useless, and I was dead wrong. I marked John as a fool, and I was right, but he made a fine servant; and rated Peter as a useful man, and I was far from the target.

However, once bought, they stayed bought. It might all have gone very differently, from the first, but par dieu, it did not. I think on it now. My reputation and my career started with these men.

Had they been false — eh bien, messieurs. It is as God wills it to be, eh?

Sam closed his hand over the money. ‘We serve the Prince?’ he asked. Even hard men, in those days, longed for the security and authority of direct service.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Deal.’

In my seventeen-year-old imagination, I expected a thorough examination of our horses and armour, a detailed evaluation, perhaps some criticism. We were polished and washed, and all four of Sam’s men — my men, now — had linen tapes in red woven in their horse’s manes by the girls.

I was proud as Lucifer. Probably prouder.

We made a fine show. Richard and I had good harness, if you ignored the fact that both of us wore a looted patchwork of armour where no two pieces went together. On mine, for example, I had fancy leather strapping with fine metalwork, but every strap was a different colour. Nothing to worry you in a fight, but any professional would look at my harness and know what a patchwork it was — I was an ill-made knight, and no mistake.

Richard was a little better, as his harness had been given him by the Prince, and all his leather was at least one colour — a boring brown, but it matched. None of it had been made for him, but the quality was good.

Our horses were excellent, though, and our men looked professional. Sir John Chandos came out on horseback, rode round them once, nodded to the clerk and grinned.

‘I know that bastard,’ he said, pointing at Sam.

Sam grinned. ‘I know you, too, sir.’

Sir John looked at me. ‘You’re lucky to have a man that experienced. Listen to him. He knows things. Understand me, sir?’

I nodded.

‘I am far easier in my mind knowing that you have him. Sam, this little mission matters, mind me? And see the boys make it back.’ He grinned.

Why did I find a good archer wandering lose as a criminal? Because God didn’t want me to spend my life in a brothel, friends. I have no other explanation.

The clerk drew up a letter of indenture, offering us all double pay — Richard and I were to be paid as knights, the rest as lesser men-at-arms, and Sam and John Hughes as archers. The rates were excellent. Of course, we all knew that it generally took the Prince’s household a little more than a year to clear accounts, so we wouldn’t be paid by Christmastide, but it was honorable pay, and all the moneylenders would give coin against it.

Chaucer followed us back to the inn on a rouncey. He had a sword, with rust on the hilt, and a pannier full of food and clothes. His horse wasn’t bad. Ahead of him, on a better horse, rode Master Hoo, in tall leather boots and wearing a woollen coat trimmed in fur and a hat worth as much as my sword. Master Hoo chose a girl, paid, smiled at me and paused on the stairs.

‘Early start, young sir?’ he asked.

I nodded.

He pursed his lips, then smiled at the girl and led her away.

Chaucer looked around the Three Foxes, examined the girls, then looked at me. Nervously.

‘I, er, want one,’ — he was not the pushy merchant’s son of earlier — ‘of the girls.’

I just looked at him.

‘What, er, do I do?’ he asked.

I let the silence lengthen. I’d taken a fair amount of shite from the boy, and I thought I should let him stew.

But Marie, damn her, liked the look of him — all sensitive and intelligent, I suppose. ‘Which lass do you fancy, my master?’

He bowed to her. ‘I. .’ he stammered.

She sent him upstairs with one of the older girls and strict orders to take her time and be polite.

Women.

Mind you, he paid cash.

When he was gone, I sat with Richard. He was sewing a small tear in the sleeve of his jupon, and his girl — Anne-Marie, I think, but they were all Anne or Marie — watched his minuscule sewing and laughed.

‘That was quite a tale,’ I said. As the only black man in Bordeaux, he was well known, and because he was black, some people thought he was a spawn of Satan, while others assumed he was a paynim. Some of the girls wouldn’t lie with him. That sort of treatment could make a right hard bastard, but he was far better bred than I in many ways; he was very well spoken and he wouldn’t cheat at any game. Not even to win money. He was a prankster when he was young, though, and he did like a tall tale.

Anyway, he grinned at me. Our eyes met.

‘You made it all up,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Well, you had me going,’ I said. ‘Where are you really from?’

He frowned. ‘Not sure,’ he admitted. ‘My mother said she was from Aethiopia. And that she was born a Christian.’

I nodded. Richard was indisputably Christian. He went to Mass often, and went to church at least once a day, sometimes three times. I went to church less than once a week, and hated the way every word in the Gospels seemed carefully written to remind me of how far I was from grace.

‘Where did you grow up?’ I asked.

‘At the court of Granada, in Spain,’ Richard said. He shrugged. There was a long pause. ‘I was a slave.’

The words cost him something.

But they cemented something, too. I remember that I looked away a moment, because it was a horrible thing to admit. And then I looked back, into his deep-brown eyes. ‘Well, if we do this well enough, you’ll be a knight,’ I said.

Anne Marie heard my leman calling her, and got up and walked to the common room.

‘I was an apprentice in London,’ I said. ‘If we become knights-’

He laughed bitterly. ‘They’ll never make either one of us knights.’

In the morning, there were many kisses and farewells, but we were on the road north before the sun was high. We moved fast, made small camps and saw virtually no one. Brigands weren’t likely to pick on us as we wore too much armour, and carried a small banneret displaying the Prince’s colours. Once we cleared Gascony, the marches were empty. There was a French garrison at Marmande; and Nadaillac and the town of Gourdon were held by a brigand-lord who fought both sides. Such men were becoming more common, and we skirted his hold, camped well up his valley, then Richard and I stripped to our arming clothes and went back at night and climbed the hill above his castle to take a look. Chandos had told Richard that the Prince was considering storming Nadaillac, and we felt that a little scouting might get us included in the expedition.

It was a strong place, set on a hilltop like a woman’s breast. The sides were steep, and a single road wound to the summit. But we watched six men water some horses, and two women haul pails on yokes, and came to the conclusion that the water inside the place wasn’t good as they all used the water from a spring halfway down the hill. It seemed worth knowing.

After Nadaillac, we had no further adventures until we were almost to the Loire. We rode along familiar roads and paths, discussing the campaign of Poitiers, pointing out to each other the places we’d fought, the towns we’d stormed — acting like pompous young pricks, in other words. Sam smiled at us from time to time and chose the camp sites.

We had a safe conduct signed by the King of France. This puzzled me, and puzzled Richard, since we were, as far as we knew, going to arrange the transfer of French castles held by Sir John Hawkwood to English control. By Christ, we were virgins in the ways of Kings and Princes. Master Hoo rode almost entirely silent. Young Chaucer spoke to him more than to the rest of us, and I sussed out that Chaucer was the older man’s apprentice.

As we entered Tours, I was nervous as a maid on her wedding night, riding under the portcullis. A single capture would beggar me, and I couldn’t afford even a small ransom. I was wearing my fortune, in armour and clothes and horses, and it seemed insane to ride openly into France.

But we did, and after the castellan looked at our documents, he wrinkled his nose. ‘Signed by the King,’ he said, and kissed the parchment. ‘Only twenty days ago. Did you gentlemen see him?’

Chaucer bowed. ‘I had that honour, monsieur. At a tournament in Westminster, not two weeks ago.’

The castellan, who had ignored Chaucer as a servant, now looked down his nose at the boy. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, monsieur. I give you my word. I received this and other safe-conducts into my own hand. Indeed,’ he smiled winningly, ‘I wrote them out.’

The castellan leaned forward, called for wine and treated us with more consideration. After we’d been served wine, he asked, as if by chance, ‘Is it peace, gentlemen?’

I looked away. The dissimulation of a seventeen-year-old is not something on which to depend. He grinned and Chaucer grinned back.

‘Please, my lord. You didn’t hear it from us.’ He bowed.

He had a way with him, that imp of Satan. Master Hoo glared at him, but said nothing.

The castellan poured more wine. ‘Ordinarily, I hate the English,’ he said, ‘but tonight, I will make an exception. To peace!’

We drank to peace.

I made the avert sign under the table.

North of Tours, there was war everywhere, and we rode through a wasteland of burned farms, ruined crops, weed-choked fields and rotting corpses. Some of them were very small.

‘Ah, chivalry!’ Chaucer spat when we found a mother and three children dead at a crossroads.

‘Leave off, by St Mary, you foul-mouthed clerk!’ I said. ‘You talk of what you do not know. This is not chivalry, but foul murder.’

‘Oh, aye, keeping maidens as whores in a brothel — that’s chivalry,’ he said.

‘Not a maiden among ’em,’ Richard said. ‘Leave off, Geoffrey. It’s our trade.’

‘That’s just my meaning,’ Chaucer said. ‘Take it at its best, your chivalry is nothing but strong men running a brothel. You protect the weak in return for exploiting them. When they mislike you, you kill them. When they are in the way, you kill them. When you need to punish another knight, you kill his weak people. Pimps and whores!’

I was stung. ‘The life of arms is a life of honour,’ I said. ‘Without men of arms-’

‘Murder, rape and thievery is not a trade,’ he said. ‘Dress it up in pretty armour and fine silk, it’s still crime.’

I punched him so hard he fell off his horse.

‘I didn’t kill these children,’ I said. In truth, the sight sickened me, and in my heart I suspected he was right — and hated him the more for it.

He sat in the horse manure on the road, rubbing his jaw. ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

Richard reached down a hand.

‘Fuck him. He hit me!’ Chaucer said. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

Sam watched impassively.

Christopher watched the hills around us.

Master Hoo whistled between his teeth. I realized he was laughing.

Richard smiled. ‘Sure, I’ll say something, master page. You had that coming. Watch your mouth.’ He reached down his hand again. ‘Care to get back on your horse?’

Chaucer didn’t speak again that day.

I don’t regret the blow. I understood his point — then and now. Remember, good sir, that we were children, all of us. Angry, violent children.

We had passes and sauvegardes to the Lieutenant of Brittany. His name was William Latimer, and he was no one’s idea of a paragon of chivalry, but that’s not part of my story. He and all his troops were with Lancaster before the walls of Rennes, and we rode in through the heaviest rain I’d ever seen. The siege was months old even then, and not likely to succeed — the walls were bad, but the French holding them were the best that France still had in the field.

Master Hoo had an audience with the Duke of Lancaster, and Chaucer saw some clerks he knew, and the news was the same: Sir John Hawkwood and his routiers were not in the field with the Duke’s army, where they were supposed to be. They were up country, serving under Sir James Pipe, who was supposed to be Lancaster’s lieutenant in Normandy. In despite of King Edward’s orders, Pipe and a dozen sub-contractors were seizing French garrison towns in Normandy, not towns turned over by supporters of Charles and Philippe of Navarre, but towns held by royal garrisons of the King of France.

Whatever Master Hoo said to my lord of Lancaster, he didn’t like it, and he made that clear in a hundred ways. We were all very glad to see the last of that camp.

As we rode north and east from Rennes, we entered what I can only describe as the world of war. If there had been burned fields and dead children in southern Brittany, Normandy was hell come to earth. Villages were blackened rubble. Whole forests had been burned to black sticks. In one field, I still remember an entire herd of sheep had been massacred, with the shepherd, his wife and their bairn all dead among their sheep. Not one sheep had had its hide lifted and no meat had been taken. They were blown up with gas — ten days dead, or more, bloated and horrible.

Chaucer looked at it all and said very little. But from time to time, he’d smile at me.

Sam Bibbo looked at it and spat. ‘Vermin,’ he said.

He didn’t speak a great deal, so I was interested. I rode up next to him. ‘You were a bandit,’ I said.

He looked at me and made a smacking noise, like a man blowing a kiss at his sister. He flushed red, and I thought I’d gone very wrong.

But then he looked at the ground. ‘Taking armed folk to ransom,’ he shrugged. ‘It ain’t pretty, but it ain’t the same as this, is it. Eh?’

It was late October by the time we found Hawkwood. He was holding Le Neubourg, a prosperous and very strategic town at the crossroads of southern Normandy. He had a dozen lances under him, and he’d laid the whole country around under his obedience, collecting patis far and wide — that’s a sort of informal tax that English garrisons collected from French peasants. Like protection money, only a little more feudal.

Anyway, he gave us a royal welcome.

I dismounted in the yard of the citadel, and John of Boston held my horse.

The gate guards sent for Hawkwood, and he came down, booted and spurred, to meet me. We embraced like old companions. I introduced him to Richard and to Master Chaucer, who was, for once, on his best behaviour, and to Master Hoo.

Hoo had been silent — ill, in fact — since Rennes. But now he fairly bounced with enthusiasm. ‘We have an answer to your query, Sir Knight,’ he said.

‘That was speedy,’ Hawkwood said.

‘From which you might deduce the Prince’s interest,’ Master Hoo said.

I looked at Richard. I thought we were the principals. Master Hoo smiled at me. ‘You can go — your work is done,’ he said, as if dismissing a servant.

I’d ridden across half of France, but it had never really occurred to me why we’d brought the notary and the page. They both spoke beautiful French, and Chaucer was good at buying things and making the locals like him — he had beautiful manners when he bothered, and I was learning a great deal of courtly behaviour from him, to be honest — but I’d assumed he was along for experience with us, the professionals.

Until that moment, when John Hawkwood squeezed my shoulder. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said.

Leaving me and Richard standing in the courtyard with our men.

I glared at young Chaucer’s back, as he followed the Prince’s notary into the keep. ‘It’s as if we were carters, and having gotten the wagon to market, the merchants no longer need us,’ I spat.

‘I think you got it in one,’ Richard said. ‘Let’s get a cup of wine.’

A day later, Hawkwood found me in the local wine shop and sat down. He nodded to Richard and to Sam, who was drinking with us.

‘Are you gentlemen at leisure to do a little fighting?’ he asked. ‘There’s a French knight troubling my garrisons and I plan to ambush him. I could use a few more swords.’

Sam shrugged. I remember grinning.

‘What’s with the secrecy?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Master Hoo and his boy?’

‘In the keep, where I can protect them,’ Hawkwood said. ‘This is Normandy, not London. I assume you lads can protect yourselves. Master Hoo is too valuable to risk outside the keep.’ He fingered his beard. ‘Mounted and ready to fight at sunset, after vespers.’

‘Harness?’ Richard asked.

Hawkwood shrugged. ‘If you want to stay alive,’ he said. ‘Unless that black skin is charmed?’

Richard flushed.

An ambush — a mounted ambush — is complex to lay and complex to use, and deadly dull to wait in. Mounted men need to be well hidden by deep brush or trees, but they need to be able to ride out of their covers with ease. The ideal ambush is deep, old woods with little underbrush. France has a plentiful supply of deep, old woods, because the nobility has the peasants cowed and forces them to accept private hunting woods. They dot the landscape, and sometimes the roads run through them.

We rode for two hours, in near total darkness, with a dozen scouts ahead of us on light horses. Sam, I’ll note, went out with the prickers.

A little before midnight, we met another band. Hawkwood clasped hands with the leader, and we rode in among them in the soft moonlight. Their captain was Sir Robert Knolles, a famous knight. He had a forked black beard — that’s about all I could say about him in the dark.

Together we made about fifty men-at-arms and another fifty archers. We headed north.

‘If we catch him, we string him up,’ Knolles said. He was speaking of the French knight we were out to ambush.

Hawkwood shrugged.

‘No one will ransom him. In fact, there is no one to ransom him. The French have collapsed. The whole country is a bunch of grapes, ripe for us to pluck.’ Knolles barked a laugh. ‘Are we agreed?’

Hawkwood was watching one of his prickers, a vague form in the moonlight. ‘Sir Robert, we seem to have arrived. If you and your men will take the left side of the road, we’ll take the right.’

Sir Robert nodded. ‘Helmet!’ he called out. A pageboy brought him his heavy basinet. He looked old to me. And wicked.

We filed off into the woods. Sam came and helped Richard and me to get our horses under cover.

‘Should we dismount?’ I asked.

Sam grinned in the moonlight. He was missing a few teeth, and his smile was no maiden’s joy. ‘I would,’ he said. ‘Why be the first man into a fight?’

Where we were placed, we couldn’t see the road, or the moon, or even the sky. It was so dark that when I let go my reins to turn and piss, I almost lost my horse. When Richard needed to piss, I held his reins.

By these tiny steps does a man go from being a raw recruit to a veteran — such as knowing how to tie your hose and braes so you can piss while wearing armour. I showed a young man last year at Chioggia.

No shame to being new-minted. Often, the new-minted coin has better gold.

The waiting went on and on, and we moved too much and our horses nickered and other men snored — yes, someone went to sleep, but it wasn’t one of mine. At some point, I realized it was lighter than it had been.

I felt as if someone had poured sand behind my eyeballs.

And then I heard an owl hoot twice — the signal — and everything happened very fast.

There was a crashing sound to my left front. I got my sabatonned left foot in the stirrup of my tall, golden horse, and then he moved, damn him, with me bouncing along off the ground.

There’s good things about wearing armour. One is that if your horse bounces you through deep brush, all that happens is that you get pine-needles in your visor. I slammed a tree, ripped through a thicket, then I got my right foot over the saddle. I saw something move ahead of me and reached for my sword, all while trying to tuck my right foot into my stirrup. I got it, and stood in my stirrups — that’s how you ride a war saddle — and got my sword out of my scabbard.

My horse burst out of the trees into a clearing.

There was another man moving ahead of me on a horse as big as mine. His horse was black and his armour glittered in the moonlight. His helmet had an impossibly tall peak. He saw me, and turned his horse and spurred at me.

But of course the clearing wasn’t a clearing. It was a bog.

He went down so suddenly I thought he’d been sucked into the earth. There was a tiny rivulet running down the middle of the boggy meadow — tiny, but three feet under the level of the grass — and his poor horse stepped in it and he was thrown.

He was on his feet in a moment. I was sure he wasn’t one of ours, and I swung down at him and my sword hit his helmet solidly.

Against a good helmet, you can swing all day and not accomplish much. On the other hand, most men don’t like being hit on the head.

Goldie was a fine animal, and he backed on command and half-reared, and I cut again at the Frenchman — at least, I hoped he was a Frenchman. I connected again, this time atop his shoulder.

He stumbled and Goldie kicked him. I heard his hoof strike, a hollow sound against the French knight’s breastplate. He had one of the new ones — just two pieces — and it didn’t cave in.

He was knocked flat.

I backed Goldie.

The injured horse screamed.

I could hear fighting, sword on sword, very close by.

The French knight wasn’t moving, so I slid down from my saddle. I ran to the French knight as he tried to get to his feet, and slammed my pommel into his helmet. Down he went again, and this time I sat on him.

I opened his faceplate.

He glared at me. ‘Bah!’ he said. ‘God is against me. I am taken.’

‘Are you worth anything?’ I asked.

It is hard to shrug while an armoured man sits on you, especially when you are in a swamp. But he wriggled. ‘Not a hundred florins,’ he said. ‘Perhaps fifty? I am du Guesclin. You know the name?’

I didn’t, so I shook my head.

‘Would you do me the service of killing my horse?’ Du Guesclin said. ‘He was a fine horse. Christ only knows how I will replace him.’

Richard appeared while I cut the horse’s throat — somewhat ineptly as I was splashed in blood. My harness was already a squire’s nightmare — bogs and armour are not friends, and my sabatons collected the most remarkable amount of stinking mud.

He laughed, and then he saw the French knight.

‘You lucky bastard!’ Richard said.

‘I’ll split the ransom with you,’ I said sportingly.

Richard slapped me on the back. ‘I’ll do the same.’ He stripped his right gauntlet and held out his hand to the Frenchman. ‘Richard Musard,’ he said.

‘Bertrand du Guesclin,’ said the Frenchman.

Richard looked at me and shook his head. ‘I think we’re supposed to hang him,’ he said. ‘He’s the French brigand Sir Robert is hunting.’

‘Is that Sir Robert Knolles?’ Du Guesclin asked. He laughed. ‘That rapist is calling me a brigand? I live here. This is my country.’

Sam appeared out of the darkness. The sky was almost light, and he looked at the French knight and shrugged.

‘That’s him, right enough.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you plan to do, my lord?’

I don’t think Sam Bibbo had ever called me ‘my lord’ before.

‘If you gentlemen will release me, I’ll pay my ransom wherever you want it sent,’ du Guesclin said.

‘If you don’t inform Sir John. .’ Sam made a face. ‘He’ll know. Sooner or later.’

I sent Richard to find Sir John. I moved my prisoner across the meadow, hobbled Goldie and ate a sausage. I shared half with du Guesclin, and gave him some wine. He was my King John. He was a real knight, and I waited on him the way I thought he deserved. This was the chivalry for which I yearned.

He handed me back the leather bottle of wine. ‘You are a cut above the routiers,’ he said. ‘Could I try one more time to entice you to let me go? I will pay — and I’m not worth any more. Your Sir John will kill me.’

I shook my head. ‘No he won’t,’ I said confidently.

Half an hour passed, and then a party of horsemen came into my meadow from the north. Richard dismounted to cross the brook, and Sir John and three of his men-at-arms rode around the perimeter.

He dismounted and bowed. ‘Messire du Guesclin. I have long wanted to meet you.’

Du Guesclin smiled bravely. ‘Sir John Hawkwood. I cannot say I feel the same about you, messire.’ Nonetheless, he took Sir John’s hand.

Sir John turned to me. ‘You took him?’

I nodded.

Sir John nodded. ‘William, you have just made your reputation.’ He looked at me — not old man to young, but man to man. ‘What do you intend?’ he asked.

Everyone was quiet. I felt very much out of place. The sand was back behind my eyes. I was aware, in some dark part of my head, that I hadn’t taken this man fairly — it was simply that his horse had stumbled in the dark.

‘He’s offered a hundred florins ransom and I’ve accepted. I intended to let him go. Saving your Grace.’

Sir John laughed. ‘Christ, I have Galahad serving in my convoy. But yes, William. You have my grace.’ He nodded to me. He turned back to du Guesclin. ‘Yesterday, I’d have strung you up from the nearest tree, messire. But. . things change. May I take you aside and whisper in your ear?’

Du Guesclin tensed — I think he expected to be taken aside and killed — but his sense of his own dignity overcame his desire to live, and he bowed. ‘I put my trust in you, sir,’ he said.

I put a gauntleted hand on Sir John’s steel-clad arm. ‘I’d take it amiss if he was to die here,’ I said.

Sir John gave me a cold glance. ‘Galahad,’ he spat, and beckoned to du Guesclin, who followed Sir John into the woods.

They were gone for far longer than I expected or liked. I was walking across the meadow, my thighs burning with fatigue and my head swimming, when I saw the sun dazzle off Sir John’s steel arms.

Du Guesclin was with him, and not face down in the forest.

When they emerged, du Guesclin nodded to Sir John.

Richard bowed. He ordered John Brampton to dismount and share Christopher’s horse, and gave the boy’s horse to the French knight.

Du Guesclin embraced us both. ‘I thank God I was taken by two such gentle knights,’ he said.

‘Two such great fools,’ Sam muttered.

‘The Inn of the Three Foxes,’ Richard said. ‘At Bordeaux.’

Du Guesclin mounted, got the feel of the little horse and smiled. ‘I’ll pay by the end of the day,’ he promised us.

And he trotted his horse away.

Sir John rode with me on the long road back to his keep. ‘You have become a canny man-at-arms,’ he said. ‘But that might have gone badly for all of us. It might have been better if you’d put your whittle into his eye, eh?’ He looked at me. ‘You heard Sir Robert say we were to kill him.’

‘I didn’t hear you agree,’ I said. ‘And to the best of my knowledge, my lord, we are not at war with France. Indeed, Master Hoo is carrying the word of the truce far and wide, is he not?’

Hawkwood looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time. ‘So, there is something inside that head besides empty chivalry. You know that, eh? Do you know what else Master Hoo is saying?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Thank God, then. Listen, my young friend. Things change. Kings change. Their policy changes. Kings are the most inconstant creatures — more so than young maidens.’ He laughed.

‘But you are a routier — you serve your own ends, and not the King’s,’ I said.

Sir John stroked his beard. We rode on a ways, and he played with the length of his stirrup for a while. He spoke to one of his scouts. I assumed we were done when he turned to me.

‘I serve the King as surely as if I wore his livery and served under his banner,’ Sir John said. ‘Routier, my arse.’

It is odd what can sting a man.

That night, I dined with Sir John and his men-at-arms in the great hall of his keep. Master Hoo was there, and young Chaucer waited on the table. I worried he might piss in my wine.

I was pleased to be allowed to dine with the knights. Richard and I sat quietly. Nothing was said of the capture of du Guesclin. Nor of peace.

In fact, they were all planning to march on Paris. It sounds absurd, but a few hundred Englishmen were planning to take Paris. Hawkwood was in on the enterprise, and so was Sir Robert Knolles and Sir James Pipe — all the King’s officers in Normandy, in fact.

I found myself sitting by Master Hoo late in the evening. I leaned over, emboldened by wine. ‘How can they attack Paris?’ I asked. ‘We’ve made peace with France?’

Master Hoo looked at me over his nose and grunted.

He was almost too drunk to talk.

I admit I was shocked.

Chaucer leaned over, sloshed wine into his master’s cup and sneered at me. ‘Paris isn’t currently held by the King of France or his son, either,’ he said. ‘Paris has declared itself. .’ he seemed at a loss for words.

‘Communes,’ Master Hoo enunciated clearly. ‘Paris and Amiens and the northern cities.’ He nodded gravely. It would have been more impressive if his cap hadn’t slipped further down his head at every nod.

‘So Sir John and the other bandits plan to plunder the Isle de France while no one can protect it,’ Chaucer said. ‘King John will return to find he is king of a graveyard full of corpses.’

‘Which will suit our master perfectly,’ Master Hoo allowed.

Lads, until that moment, I had imagined there were two kingdoms, France and England. I had thought that in France, a bad king ruled a hard nobility who abused hordes of ignorant peasants, while in England, a good king and a fine parliament ruled benignly over good men and true. Laugh all you like. I thought that our king went to make war in France by right, and to protect England from the deprivations of France. And did so openly and honestly, making war justly.

Following Sir John and listening to Master Hoo was undermining these assumptions as surely as a good engineer undermines the walls of a town.

So I turned to Sir John — full of indignation as only a young man can be — and I couldn’t contain myself.

‘You are destroying France?’ I asked. ‘For the King?’

He laughed. ‘Destroy? France is ten times the size of England.’ He shrugged. ‘But France will never threaten England again, that I can guarantee you.’ He grabbed my shoulder suddenly. He was a little drunk and very strong. ‘Come!’ he said, and he started to climb the tower’s stairs, which coiled like a worm up one flank of the keep. Up and up we climbed, the stairs turning so tightly that a misstep could send an unwary man crashing to the bottom.

My calves were burning by the time we emerged on the castle’s roof. There were four men on duty — Sir John was very a careful captain. He led me to the edge of the roof and pointed east, towards Paris.

As far as the eye could see, there was fire.

All the way up the Seine valley, towns and hamlets burned.

‘Do you not think the silken girdle that binds all of France is parted this night?’ he said and laughed. ‘Listen, virgin. Every man of blood in England is here this autumn. We’ll take ten thousand ransoms, we’ll burn their fields, we’ll throw down their churches, we’ll unbind peasant from lord. There’s no one to stop us. By the time King John returns from his tournaments and festivals in England, he’ll have a merry time finding his own ransom.’

It was. . horrifying, and yet so bold. So much fire. Like the twinkling of all the stars in the heavens.

‘But surely the King is against this-’

‘Judas,’ Hawkwood smiled. ‘William, the King, ordered this.’

At last I understood, or thought I did. ‘Ah!’ I said. ‘And Master Hoo has come to order it to end.’

Hawkwood shook his head. ‘I’m drunk, or I wouldn’t say so much,’ he said. He looked at me from under his brows. ‘But I want you to understand, lad. Master Hoo has come to order us to work faster. And to turn over the towns we take to his officers, and not those of the King of Navarre, as per the treaty.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s why I sent the letter to you.’ He sat with his back against the wall. ‘That, and it seemed a pity that you waste your youth in Bordeaux when there’s a fortune to be made here.’

‘The Prince is paying me double wage for guarding Master Hoo,’ I said.

‘How’s the Three Foxes?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘It does very well.’

Sir John nodded out over the ruins of France. ‘Imagine, then, that there was another inn that rivalled yours — indeed, that it was ten times the size and the girls were more beautiful, more skilled at love, the inn was better, the rooms cleaner. And imagine how many men they could employ to harass your inn. Imagine that you came to blows; imagine that by good fortune, you won a fight with the other inn. Would you walk away, letting bygones be bygones?’

I frowned. ‘As soon as they rally, they’ll come and burn me out,’ I said.

Sir John nodded. ‘And so, once you have them backing away, you stay at it. Until the other inn is burned to the ground and yours is the only one standing. Eh?’

Two days later, I declined Hawkwood’s offer of employment. I was a retinued man-at-arms, and I couldn’t be forsworn.

He embraced me. ‘When you want to be rich, come and fight with me,’ he said.

And we rode away.

Sam set us on the road for Rennes, and we rode about three hours, then Master Hoo came alongside me.

‘Now that we are free of Sir John’s spies,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to turn our party toward Paris.’

‘Paris?’ I said, dumbfounded.

‘Paris,’ said the notary.

We made good time up the Seine. Sam was alert all the time, and he put us on our guard. We ran across an English band on the second day, but they passed us as soon as we hailed them in English.

The fourth day, and we were riding hard. We were just west of Maule, and suddenly Sam pointed, and we saw smoke and movement across the valley, and the sparkle of the autumn sun on armour.

We made what preparations we could. We had letters of passage from both sides, but the routiers were seldom interested in letters, so we put arrows to bows, loosened our swords in their scabbards and donned our helmets.

Sam tried to take us around whatever was happening in the valley, but there were no road signs and no directions, so we rode along the edge of the valley for almost a mile, only to run into a web of hedges and stiles. Sam dismounted and crossed a hedge, and came back.

‘No way through,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should wait for darkness?’

In four weeks of travelling, it was the hardest decision I’d had to make yet. I looked at Richard.

Richard nodded. ‘Darkness might be good,’ he opined.

Master Hoo shook his head. ‘Time is of the essence,’ he said. ‘I’ve been too long on the road already.’

He turned his horse’s head and began to ride back the way we’d come, forcing our hands.

An hour later we were spotted by a pair of brigands, and we saw them run around a barn and up a slope, calling as they went.

‘That tears it,’ said Sam.

We began to trot. I led the way, and we dashed along the valley floor, the Seine sparkling on our left hand. The road cut in, away from the river, and we cantered along it.

There was a village on fire to the south, and another just to the west on a stream, and a religious house at the bottom of the stream’s valley. I could see that the road crossed the stream at a ford below the religious house.

And I saw armed men mounting horses in the religious house’s yard.

Even as I watched, armed men emerged from the abbey’s gate, riding to cut us off from the ford.

‘Ride for it!’ Sam called.

We went to the gallop. I didn’t like the way Master Chaucer rode — he seemed to bounce like a sack of turnips — so I turned to shout to him, and there was the Bourc Camus, fifty feet behind Chaucer and riding a jet-black horse like a fiend of hell. He yelled and Chaucer turned to look, but the horse interpreted his change of weight as indecision and threw him.

Just for a moment, I thought of leaving him.

But I was on retainer to the Prince to protect him, so I pulled up, turned Goldie’s head, and readied my lance.

I had no idea if the Bourc Camus was a fine jouster, but I knew damned well that I was not. I was a better rider than I had been the last time I’d had to fight on horseback, but the tiltyard hadn’t been a big part of my training.

I decided to kill his horse. It’s not done, in jousting, but this seemed different.

Camus flipped his visor down and brought his lance into line about ten strides out.

My lance wasn’t a heavy one, but I misjudged my strike. My lance came down, and instead of hitting his horse, my lance struck his lance — perhaps he raised it to guard himself — and both spear points went down into the earth. We both had to let go our spears or we’d have unhorsed ourselves.

Master Chaucer flung himself out from under our hooves.

Goldie spun under me, and Camus was struggling to draw his sword. I got mine out first and I cut at his arm.

‘Merde!’ he shouted.

I cocked my arm and cut again.

It’s very hard to hurt a fully armoured man with a sword, even a heavy longsword.

There’s a way to do it. I just didn’t know how yet.

Camus got his blade free and cut at me.

I ducked and cut, blind, even as more of his men-at-arms came down the road. He hit me in the head and his blow twisted the basinet on my head, making everything harder. I cut again, desperation and panic fuelling my blows, as his second blow hit my helmet.

My blow caught something soft and cut through it.

There was a pause in the rain of blows, and I managed to get my visor up and my hand on the beak of my helmet, then with one tug I reseated the helmet on my head.

Richard, bless him, had blown through Camus’s retainers at full gallop, unhorsing one with his lance — he was clearly a better jouster than I — and riding clear.

Camus was fifty paces away, trying to control his war horse with only his legs. I’d cut his reins and his hands.

Richard waved at me.

I got Goldie under me, backed him a few steps, and found Chaucer cowering by the stone wall to my left. I extended my left hand, and he took it like a drowning man — I hauled him up behind me.

Richard crashed into the men-at-arms again, but they didn’t have much armour and weren’t eager for a second encounter. Even as he closed, a single arrow from across the ford buzzed by like a huge wasp and buried itself in one horse’s withers, and that was the end of the fight. Richard came out of the dust, sword high — I turned and followed him, and we trotted across the ford in a fine spray of water.

Sam and John Hughes had their bows in their hands on the far side. Master Hoo was farther up the bank with Christopher and Peter. Rob had caught Chaucer’s horse and was ludicrously proud of himself.

Camus got control of his horse and rode down to the ford as we got Chaucer mounted.

‘Shoot him?’ John asked me.

‘Only if he tries to cross,’ Richard said.

Camus had his visor up. Visored basinets weren’t all that common back then, but all the Gascons had them. I think they spread them.

‘Ah,’ he yelled at me. ‘The Butt Boy.’

‘You ride beautifully,’ I called. ‘Is it a Gascon style?’

‘I’ll have your head on a spear, Butt Boy!’ he yelled.

‘If your horse comes another step, my archer will drop you in the water,’ I said. ‘I have a warrant and a safe passage from the Prince of Wales, and you are in defiance of him.’

‘Fuck your Prince,’ he said, and forced his horse into the water. ‘We are the masters here now.’

Sam loosed.

The arrow went into the horse’s head just below where the mane emerged between the ears, and the horse dropped in the river as if poleaxed. An expensive horse, too.

Men piled into the shallow ford to pull the Bourc clear of the water.

‘Let’s ride,’ I said. I slapped Sam Bibbo on the shoulder and he grinned.

‘I’ll pay you double for that,’ I said.

‘Putting that evil bastard in the water was my treat,’ Bibbo said.

An hour later, we found four nuns and a priest at a crossroads.

Richard rode up to the priest. ‘Can we be of service!’ he asked.

One of the nuns began to scream.

She screamed and screamed.

Another nun began to beat at Richard with her fists. Considering she was about five feet high and he was a fully armoured knight on a war horse, you can see why this sticks in my memory. She meant him harm. She didn’t care what harm she took in return.

Richard backed his horse away. ‘Sweet Jesu,’ he said. ‘Leave off, ma soeur. I’ve done you no harm.’

‘All of you,’ she shrieked. ‘All of you! I’ll kill you all, you hell-spawn!’

The priest just shook his head. ‘Ride on,’ he said. ‘And do us no harm, I beg.’

The nun stood in the road behind us. ‘May Satan rape you! May demons rip out your eyes! May he grind your flesh with a mill — rip you with red-hot pincers! May you take the plague!’ she shrieked. ‘Boil in oil! May worms eat your eyes, you shit-eating English!’

We rode a little faster, as if her curses carried weight.

Chaucer watched me. I felt his eyes on me, and I looked away from the nuns and at him. ‘What?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Hawkwood’s men, or Knolles’, or Camus’ or one of the other captain’s men raped them all. Good fun. Very chivalrous, no doubt.’ He nodded. ‘Perhaps they had it coming.’

‘Camus’ men are Gascons, not Englishmen,’ I said.

Chaucer nodded. ‘That makes it different, I’m sure,’ he said.

She was still screaming. She was too far away for her words to carry, but the shrill tone was like a witch, I thought.

I leaned towards him and he flinched.

‘Richard and I saved your life,’ I said.

Chaucer shrugged. ‘My ransom, I expect.’ He smiled his annoying, superior smile. ‘Camus wouldn’t kill me. He’d just sell me to the Prince.’

I got control of myself and rode away. Richard rode with me.

‘Let me hit him, next time,’ he said. He grinned. ‘By God, William, that was a good fight.’

It was our first one together, as brothers-in-arms, so to speak.

The next day, we made contact with Sir James Pipe’s men, and Master Hoo gave them some sort of password, and we were taken to the Lieutenant of Normandy. Bah — perhaps he was made Lieutenant of Normandy later. I can’t remember.

Sir James held the convent of Poissy. From the walls, we could see Paris on the horizon.

He had fewer than 500 men, and he was waiting for Knolles and Hawkwood. He met with Master Hoo for half an hour, and Hoo emerged looking grey. I’d just seen to the horses — by then I was resigned to being a sort of military servant, and I’d admitted to myself that Hoo was the one in charge of the expedition. Richard and I got the convent’s servants to curry our horses. Given what we’d seen on the road, the convent made me. . anxious.

There wasn’t a nun to be seen, and all I could think of was the Bourc Camus’ assertion that nuns made good whores.

By the blessed virgin, this courier duty was giving me heartache.

At any rate, the horses were fed and clean for the first time in six days, and most of the men were already asleep. Chaucer was lying across a saddle, out cold.

We were tired.

‘We need to ride. Immediately,’ Hoo said.

I just looked at him. But he was not given to dramatics, and he hardly ever spoke.

‘It is. .’ he shrugged. ‘I can’t say. But we must go. Now.’

As I say, I’d realized he was the true commander of our enterprise, so I hauled our tired horses out of the stables, kicked the men awake — I didn’t kick John Hughes or Sam Bibbo, by the by. That would have been foolish.

Richard shook his head. ‘What the fuck?’ he asked.

Chaucer got to his feet. ‘You curried my horse!’ he said to Richard.

Richard shrugged. ‘William curried your horse, you ingrate.’

Chaucer looked at me as if waiting for the trick. He probably was.

Richard raised an eyebrow. ‘Why don’t you repay him by finding out why the hell your master needs us to ride right now?’

Chaucer nodded. ‘I’ll try,’ he said.

Of course, while he tried, I had to saddle his mare. I looked at Goldie and shook my head. I’d been on him for two solid days and he needed rest, so I saddled my riding horse.

We were out the gate with three hours of late autumn light left.

‘Paris?’ I asked Master Hoo.

He nodded.

‘Messire, may I ask how dangerous this is?’ We were moving briskly.

Hoo shrugged. ‘In truth, lad, I have no idea. Everything just went to hell.’ He looked at me. ‘You and your friend have done a fine job of keeping us alive so far. You are luck’s own child. Let’s pray you haven’t burned it all.’ He stopped for a moment. ‘I have good credit with the Prince. I swear to you that if you get me to Paris, I’ll see you well.’

‘Can I ask what all this is about?’ I tried.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ I muttered, or something equally blasphemous.

We reached St Cloud by the simple expedient of riding all night and not giving way to the temptation to hide. There was fire all around us, but very few people, and the roads were clear. I have seen this many times — if you move fast on a good road it’s very hard for an enemy to ambush you, and in many cases, no one will lay an ambush on a highway.

Luck? Good strategy? Whichever way you take it, we entered St Cloud as the sun rose, in heavy winter rain. There were guards on the gate, in hoods of crimson and royal blue — the colours of Paris. Their weapons were ill-kept and they had the indefinable air of incompetence that marks the militiaman.

Master Hoo spat. ‘Fuck me,’ he said bitterly. He glanced at me. ‘Be very, very calm, messire. This is not-’

He had no more time to speak, because we were surrounded by the militia at the gate.

They read Master Hoo’s sauvegarde over and over, until I became convinced that none of them could read. My hands were numb, the gloves of my steel gauntlets were soaked through and bitter cold, and rain was running down the middle of my back between my shoulder blades, having soaked through my best three-quarter cloak about two in the morning.

The ‘captain’ of the gate was younger than I was and very full of his own importance.

Master Hoo looked bored.

I began to grow angry. I was cold and wet, and I at least wanted into the warmth of the guard room, but none of the Paris militiamen seemed inclined to offer us so much as a cup of small beer.

‘May we come in and get warm?’ I asked.

The man nearest me snarled. He had a partisan — a spear with heavy side lugs. He raised it and made to place it against my throat.

I caught it in my left hand. I was still mounted, and without thinking I gave my riding horse the command to back, and he backed, dragging the Frenchman off his feet. He let go his weapon.

Quite a few crossbows were suddenly levelled at me.

‘Your English friends are burning their way across France,’ the captain said. ‘We hesitate a little to let you into our city? Eh?’ he asked.

‘Your man tried to poke me with a spear,’ I said. I extended the spear to the captain. ‘Then he seems to have dropped it.’

‘Fucking aristo,’ spat the man whose weapon I’d taken. ‘Let’s just kill them all.’

‘Why are you here?’ the captain suddenly asked John Hughes.

The Cumbrian looked blankly at him.

Now, I happen to know that John had been in France ten years, and spoke good, if Gascon, French. But he glared sullenly at the French captain, and the captain went from man to man. ‘Why are you here?’ he finally asked me.

I shrugged. ‘To escort that man,’ I said. I waved at Hoo. Let him fight his own battles.

‘Your sauvegarde is signed by the King of France,’ the captain said. ‘The King is a prisoner in England and no longer the head of our state. Your safe conduct is worthless.’

‘Let’s kill them all,’ said my friend, who had his spear back.

‘Shut up, Guillaume,’ said the captain. I saw this as a positive sign.

Master Hoo shrugged. ‘I have. .’ he paused. Getting words out of Master Hoo was like pulling the teeth of a healthy man, and I think he was guessing what he should say. ‘I have certain information — for the consideration of the government.’

‘What information?’ asked the captain. ‘What part of the government? Don’t ask me to believe that King Edward of England will treat with the Provost of Paris.’

‘Is the Provost of Paris now the head of government?’ Master Hoo asked.

I looked at Chaucer.

There were about twenty Paris militiamen on the gate. The more I looked at them, the more I thought we could take them. But we’d need to have a little surprise.

So I stopped looking to Chaucer for information and started catching Richard’s eye.

‘Perhaps,’ said the captain.

Master Hoo reached into his pouch. ‘I have a letter for Master Etienne Marcel,’ he said.

The captain reached for it.

Hoo held it out of his reach — we were all still mounted, remember.

‘For Master Marcel himself,’ he said.

The captain rolled his eyes. ‘Very well — why didn’t you say? I’ll send an escort — the Bois de Boulogne is full of Navarrese renegades and Englishmen. And fucking Gascons.’ He smiled grimly.

An hour later, we were escorted over the Seine on the St Cloud bridge.

The Paris militiamen weren’t very good, and they didn’t ride particularly well, but they were enthusiastic, and from them, in an hour, we learned that the Dauphin was a virtual prisoner who signed whatever the Provost and the Bishop of Laon, Robert Le Coq, told him to sign.

I saw Master Hoo take note, and I was ready when he caught my eye.

‘Eh, messire!’ I called. ‘Your girth is slipping.’

All the Parisians were happy for a break, for all that we were deep in the woods of the Bois de Boulogne and supposedly surrounded by broken men. In fact, it was pouring sheets of cold rain from a lead-roof sky and I assumed we were safe — no self-respecting Gascon criminal would go abroad on such a day.

Men dismounted, and I went to Master’s Hoo’s horse and played with his saddle.

‘Can you take our escort?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Do it,’ he said.

I went straight to Richard. ‘Hoo says we have to kill the escort. Right now.’

Richard looked around.

Someone in the escort understood English. Or, just possibly, they’d been told to kill us in the woods.

Their leader was a journeyman butcher, a big brute with a huge falchion — a sword like a meat axe.

He shouted, ‘Paris! St Denis!’ and killed Master Hoo with one contemptuous swing of his enormous weapon.

Hoo never even called out. He slumped and fell, blood from his almost-severed neck pumping onto the muddy woods road.

Richard had his sword in his hand immediately and cut down the Parisian nearest him.

I was a horse length from the butcher, who was obviously the most dangerous man in the party. I drew and touched Goldie’s sides to send my sword into his back.

But, of course, I wasn’t on my war horse.

I was on my riding horse, who shied.

The big bastard was on me in one turn of his horse.

I didn’t, honestly, think I could parry that meat-cleaver with my longsword, but a few moments later I was still alive, and his sword had passed harmlessly down the length of mine, like water running off a roof. He was open. I cut at him.

He had a kettle hat on, and my blow caught the brim and slammed it down into his mouth. He couldn’t see and it must have hurt.

He swung wildly and killed my horse.

Par dieu! I was in armour, or I wouldn’t be here to tell this, because another of the militiamen put his spear into the middle of my back, but my backplates and mail held. My poor palfrey fell forward onto its front feet and slumped to the ground, and I managed to get my feet under me.

I thought the butcher was huge before, now he was eight feet above me, and his weapon crashed down. I got a piece of it on my sword, but the rest blew through my guard and, thanks to God, slipped down my pointed helmet, slamming into the top of my shoulder. It bit through my pauldron, stopped on my mail, and left me a bruise that lasted weeks, but I wasn’t dead. That’s what armour’s for.

I backed off the road into the trees, dragging my two opponents after me. I had no idea what was happening — rain on a helmet drowns most of the clues your ears give as to where anyone is — and there were horses and men moving everywhere.

In London, when we practised two and three on one, I had learned that the best way is to take the easy boy first, and then take your time with the tougher boy. The bastard with the spear was terrified — doing his duty, but scared spitless, and he was just prodding at me.

He prodded with the spear while the butcher was getting control of his horse, and I got the shaft in my left hand and cut along it with the sword, so that thumbs and fingers sprayed. He was out of the fight.

I had taken too long, though — I could feel the butcher coming at me in the rain, and I let myself fall to the ground in a clanking pile, as his blade parted the air over my head. I took too long getting up, and he had his horse turned.

He came at me, his horse giving a little half-rear. But it wasn’t a war horse, and when I shouted, it shied — he cut too early, and I let the blow go and slammed my sword into him.

He rode by and turned his horse.

Armour. It goes both ways. He was in chain from his knee to the crown of his head, with leather pieces buckled over and a heavy coat of plates.

There’s something terrible about giving your best blow and having it fail. I had hit him hard — twice.

He came at me again.

I spiked his horse in the muzzle with my point and stepped out of the way.

His horse screamed and reared.

Lightning crashed, and a levin bolt blew across the sky so brightly that, for a moment, I couldn’t see anything.

I stumbled back and crashed into a tree just as a second tree came down, apparently struck by the lightning.

I looked left and right. Despite the cold rain and winter wind, I was sweating like a horse and choking for breath — and I’d lost my opponent. I flung my visor up and turned through a circle.

The rain was crashing down now, and I couldn’t see the next tree. There was thunder all around me, and I couldn’t tell, through my helmet, what was fighting and what was nature.

I bent forward and breathed, water running down my nose and over my face.

Something gave him away. I raised my sword before I even raised my head and his blow fell on my outstretched blade, near my hands, and skittered along the blade — sparks flew as his edge bit at mine.

As soon as his blade was clear of my body, I used the force of his blow to turn my sword, as I had on horseback, but since he kept throwing the same overhand blow, I was getting practice at turning it back against him, and my counter strike — this time I ignored his head and armoured torso. I cut into his arms just above his heavy leather gauntlets, below the cuffs of his chain shirt. He had some protection, but whatever it was, it didn’t stop me from breaking both of his arms. He screamed and stumbled back, and I reversed my weapon, holding it as I had at Poitiers, like a two-handed pick, and I drove it into his face.

Three or four times.

Later in life, I learned to be a competent swordsman, praise God. But in the Bois de Boulogne, in the pouring rain, I learned that the point, not the edge, is what rules in a fight between armoured men.

When I was sure he was dead, I stumbled out onto the road.

All of our men were gathered around Master Hoo.

He was still dead.

Chaucer was shaking his head.

The rain poured down.

‘What a fucking waste,’ Chaucer said. His voice broke. Perhaps he wept — who could tell?

Richard looked as tired as I felt. ‘You put that big fuck down?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘No thanks to you.’

‘I was a little busy,’ he said.

I was proud. Du Guesclin had fallen over a brook, and it took ten of us to bring down de Charny, but the Paris Butcher, while no knight, was all mine. I’m a different man now than I was then, but that was a fair fight, and more than fair.

He banged his helmet against mine. ‘Well struck!’ he said. ‘I got two,’ he added.

Chaucer turned to me. ‘While you two crow over your murders,’ he said, ‘my master is dead.’

Sam was holding his cloak over his head. Like most veterans, now that the fighting was over, he was just trying to stay dry. He never mentioned how many men he’d put down, if any, but he looked at Hoo and shook his head. He pointed north and east. ‘St Denis is that way,’ he said. ‘If we leave the road, we might get clear.’

Chaucer slapped my breastplate to get my attention. ‘Are you abandoning the enterprise, messire?’ he asked.

‘What enterprise?’ I asked. ‘Only Master Hoo knew what the hell we were doing here. If he knew himself.’

The rain poured down.

Chaucer reached down and took the heavy leather scrip that Hoo always wore under his short cloak. He made heavy work of getting the scrip off Hoo’s corpse.

‘We should bury him,’ I said.

Richard nodded.

Christopher shook his head. ‘Jesus fuck! Are you two children mad? Wood? We’re in the heart of France! Every man is agin’ us! Can we just get the fuck out of here?’

Chaucer took Hoo’s cloak.

‘Take his boots,’ Sam commented. ‘Those are good boots.’

Chaucer hesitated.

Sam looked at me, but I was too tired and too rattled by the fight to understand his look.

John Hughes coughed. ‘Take his boots or I’ll take ’em myself, yunker.’

‘Monastery,’ I said.

Richard understood immediately. ‘We can do that,’ he said. ‘Put him over his horse.’

Chaucer looked at us as if we had multiple heads. ‘We may have the fate of two kingdoms in our hands,’ he said. ‘He’s carrying a copy of the draft treaty for the Dauphin. Master Hoo told me it’s essential to King Edward that the Dauphin ratify the treaty.’

The rain poured down.

‘Why? For the love of God? By the virgin, Chaucer. .’ I shook my head. ‘Is this one of your stories? Why is the Dauphin’s treaty so important?’

‘Because the treaty gives us half of France,’ Chaucer said.

‘Christ,’ Richard said. ‘By the Virgin.’

‘Which half?’ asked Sam.

No one laughed.

‘So why the rush?’ I asked.

Chaucer looked at me a long time.

The rain fell.

I was being judged by a sixteen-year-old inkpot, the son of a rich wine merchant.

‘You don’t have the need to know,’ Chaucer said quietly.

Sam sighed. It was audible over the rain. ‘Because Sir James Pipe told Master Hoo that Charles of Navarre escaped from prison four days ago,’ he said. ‘He’s headed for Paris, and if he gets to the Dauphin first, the treaty is cooked. Right, Master Chaucer?’

Chaucer glowered at him. If anger were fire, Chaucer might have kept us all warm.

‘Yes,’ he spat.

I looked at Richard. ‘Why couldn’t I know that?’ I asked.

Richard shrugged.

‘Can we get the fuck out of here?’ asked Christopher.

‘How can we get to the Dauphin?’ I asked Chaucer.

Sam spat. ‘You boys are mad,’ he said. ‘Wood. Solid wood. I don’t know how Master Hoo planned to penetrate Paris, but he was good at this part. The crowd there would rip us apart.’

Boys was the right word. Chaucer was sixteen, and Richard and I were a year older.

Sometimes, mad boys do things.

‘Where’s the Dauphin?’ I asked Sam. ‘Do you know?’

Sam nodded. The dead men said he was in the Louvre.’

‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

Sam blew out his cheeks in exasperation.

‘We’ll see it as soon as we ride out of the woods,’ Chaucer said. He looked at me. He was no coward. I admit that. That is to say, he was scared of a great many things, like any man, but he could control his fear and act. . like a brave man.

‘Does it have its own gate?’ I asked.

Sam sighed. ‘Yes. Listen, gentles. Recall what Sir John Chandos said — to listen to me? This adventure is at an end. You are brave. We fought well. We cannot fight our way into Paris.’

‘I can ride up to the porter of the Louvre and we’ll be with the Dauphin before vespers,’ Chaucer shouted.

Richard looked at Bibbo. ‘We have to try, Sam,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Sam said. He looked at Hoo’s body. ‘There is a small monastery house just past the wood on the right. I lodged there in forty-eight.’ He looked at me. ‘We can take Master Hoo that far. Leave coin for a Mass or two. I’d. . like to see him fair.’

I nodded.

Sam looked at Chaucer. ‘And then we’ll see,’ he said.

‘We can do this,’ Chaucer said. He might have seemed brave, but he really sounded desperate.

Sam shook his head. ‘I’ll come along,’ he said. ‘If only to see what the hell you do when you die.’

If the monks found anything remarkable about a party of Englishman riding abroad on the Isle de France, they didn’t say a thing. They didn’t seem afraid — the day porter opened the gate, and let us in. We gave him Master Hoo’s corpse, and explained that he’d been murdered by brigands. Apparently that sounded likely.

We left the monk ten gold florins for candles and a Mass. It was past noon when we left, and only as we went back into the rain on our tired horses did I see how big Paris was. Paris was, and is, about ten times the size of London.

Nevertheless, we could see the Louvre looming over the fields and shanties. We were on the right side of the river. All we had to do was ride six miles through the largest city in Europe. Being boys who believed we could save the world, we had to try.

And Sam Bibbo humoured us.

We came up under the walls of the Louvre almost unchallenged. That is to say, a number of men in red and blue hoods yelled at us. We rode on, and they ignored us, because it was pouring rain. No one is brave in a downpour. At least, no one dry is brave. If you are already wet, it’s different.

Chaucer had never been to Paris, but he’d heard a great deal about it, and read books. Sam had been to Paris, as an archer in a retinue during the long truce. But he didn’t know how to get into the Louvre.

Really, we were fools.

But God smiles on fools and lovers. Doubly on men who are both, and I have always been a good lover of women. So we rode up to the Louvre, and there was a sort of shanty town running back away from the ditch. I felt at home, because it’s like that around the Tower, too, but this was worse, and bigger.

Christopher had the idea of asking. We were trying to be secretive, but he got fed up and asked a whore who was standing in the cold rain as if that was her job. She had a soaking red dress and looked to be twelve.

She didn’t seem to be afraid of us, which, to be frank, I found odd.

‘Can you take us to the Louvre? To the gate where they admit visitors?’ Chaucer asked her.

She shrugged. ‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘I might.’

Richard held up a gold florin. Lo, the mighty knights will achieve their quest, but only if they have a florin.

Gower never wrote a romance like this, and neither did Chaucer, although he might have. Hah! That makes me laugh.

We gave her ten days’ wages in gold, and she took us around a corner of nasty tenements and up what I’d have taken for an alley, except that it ended in a wicket gate with a half door and a very elegant small portcullis.

It was closed.

‘Oh!’ she said. Now she was frightened. ‘Ne’er seen it closed before.’

It had been a long day. The sun was setting somewhere far beyond the clouds, and the rain was falling as if God had elected to cleanse the earth again. I knew that if we rode away, we’d never get this close again. I knew how lucky we were to have reached the wicket of the Louvre.

‘Blessed St Michael,’ I said aloud. I drew my sword, rode to the great wooden half door behind the portcullis and started pounding on the gate with my pommel.

Richard joined me.

Chaucer pulled his hood tighter around his face. ‘We’re all going to die,’ he said.

Sam laughed aloud. ‘You think they’re mad?’ He laughed into the rain. ‘We’re following them.’

Far off, Notre Dame rung the half hour.

Chaucer was cold. His lips were blue. He wasn’t as well dressed as we — armour may look cold, but it blocks the wind, and good plate will keep the clothes under it dry. Or perhaps it would be better to say, warm and damp in a cold, clammy way. Mind you, my cloak had soaked through a full day ago, so my warmth was a relative thing.

Still, Chaucer’s mind was working. ‘She isn’t used to this being closed,’ he said aloud, and his teeth chattered. ‘The Dauphin thinks that Charles of Navarre is in Paris.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not fucking fair.’

Richard looked down the alley. There were a dozen people watching us. So much for secrecy.

‘Write a note.’ Richard grabbed Chaucer’s arm. ‘Say we’re on a special errand from the King. Say anything. Write a note.’

Chaucer shook him off. ‘In a downpour?’

Richard laughed. ‘We can fight in the rain. You can write in the rain.’

In the end, he could, although it took Sam holding his huge Scot’s wool cloak over the notary while he scribbled. As we waited for the ink to dry on the scrap of parchment, Geoffrey told us why he had a scrap of parchment. .

Richard looked at Sam. ‘Now you shoot it over the wall.’

Sam was completely still for a moment. Then he nodded. ‘Of course I do.’

We tied the note to a shaft, and covered it with a bit of silk from the lining of my arming jack. This all took time, and it was getting dark.

Then we held the cloak for him, while he bent his bow and strung it. He took the shaft and, in one swift movement, he bent the bow and sent the shaft into the air.

The twenty or so people watching all said, ‘Oooh,’ together.

‘Good Christ,’ muttered Chaucer. ‘Shall we ask the whore if she has a place for all of us to sleep?’

‘With our horses and armour?’ Richard asked. ‘No thanks.’ But he smiled at her.

She smiled at him. Women who could see past his dark skin always liked him.

Suddenly the wicket gate opened.

There was a big man — older, but a fighter, you could see. He was in armour, with a heavy pole-hammer in his fists, and there were ten men like him at his back.

The portcullis stayed down.

‘Who are you? State your names and styles.’

Chaucer was too cold.

Richard looked at me.

‘I’m William Gold. I’m a gentleman of. .’ Christ, what was I getting us into? ‘Of the Earl of Oxford’s retinue. I have escorted this worthy man.’ That for Chaucer, and he never thanked me. ‘From Bordeaux. He has a copy of the King of France’s agreement with the King of England. Messires, we are cold and hungry, and we have fought brigands and Paris militia, and we would very much appreciate it if you would let us in.’

Chaucer glared at me, so apparently I’d said too much.

But the older man in armour nodded brusquely and removed his helmet. ‘I’m Robert de Clermont,’ he said.

Didn’t mean a thing to me, but his sergeants were opening the portcullis.

An hour later, still damp and cold, Richard, Geoffrey and I were standing before the Dauphin. King Charles V as he later was.

He was young — about my own age. His brother Philippe was even younger, and stood by him, playing with the hilt of his dagger. He looked like a saint: pale, dark-haired, with translucent skin, a long face and a noble brow.

His hands never stopped moving. He should have been a tailor, not a King. His eyes never met mine, but darted around the room. I understood that the Paris Commune played him a merry dance and treated him badly, that he was riding a bad horse as best he could. But I also thought that he’d lost Poitiers for France by leaving the field.

We bowed very deeply. He looked us over carefully.

‘But you are just boys?’ he said — rather spontaneously, I think.

Chaucer had fortified himself with two cups of hippocras and he smiled. ‘No younger than your Grace,’ he said with a fine bow.

The Dauphin nodded and looked at his brother, then at the Marshal of Normandy, Robert de Clermont.

Chaucer bowed again, was suffered to approach and handed the Dauphin a heavy scroll.

‘The draft of the treaty,’ he said. ‘My. . I was sent to ask for your approval.’

‘Who sent you?’ the Dauphin asked. He might suffer from battlefield anxiety, but he was as sharp as a new knife.

‘My lord, the King, your father,’ Chaucer said boldly.

‘You met him?’ the Dauphin asked.

‘Yes,’ Chaucer said.

‘In person?’ the Dauphin asked.

‘Yes, your Grace,’ Chaucer replied. ‘I copied out our safe conduct as his express direction.’

I nodded in secret approval. When lying, it’s best to stay close to the truth.

The Dauphin nodded.

Chaucer bowed again. ‘My lord, if I may?’

‘Speak, sir,’ said the Dauphin.

‘Your Grace knows that the King of Navarre has escaped from prison?’ Chaucer said.

The Dauphin pursed his lips.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We wanted to reach you before. . the King of Navarre.’ Chaucer sounded unsure of himself for the first time.

‘Why?’ The Dauphin asked.

Chaucer stood as if dumbfounded.

‘Why?’ he asked again. ‘Do you imagine I have any freedom of action? I might have, but Charles of Navarre will rob me of that. What does my father imagine I’m doing here. Governing? I am not completely in control of the gates of this building. I do what I’m told. When I don’t, the Provost has some of my friends beaten. Or killed. And this agreement. . is worthless. Because there are no funds to pay my father’s ransom — because the Provost of Paris is the law, and not I.’

Chaucer’s mouth moved like that of a fish out of water.

‘When Charles of Navarre comes — I’ve already signed his safe conduct — I will sign whatever he orders me to sign. He will give me orders in his own name, and in the name of his ally, the King of England. Whom you gentlemen claim to represent. As if the King of England is suddenly solicitous for the health of France. A murderer might stab a victim a few times and then hold his hand and ask after his health, eh?’ The Dauphin was halfway off his chair now.

He turned to the Marshal of Normandy. ‘See to it these men are fed — and outside the walls before Charles arrives in the morning.’ He laughed. ‘With his English army.’

He rose from his chair, walked to the fireplace and threw the whole treaty — seals and all — in the fire. When he laughed, he sounded a little mad.

We were escorted out. Politely.

We were fed. Well enough.

A very efficient house staff — this was the property of the King of France, and he had the very best domestic servants in the world, I think — dried our clothes.

It didn’t matter. Because we left in the dark, into a steady rain. Sam led the way. He knew where he was going, give or take a few miles. The ground was soaked and our horses were not recuperated after only six hours rest. Young Bob was all but crying with fatigue, and the rest of us weren’t much better.

But we made it away from the walls of Paris. As we rode north, across the fields and on small farm roads, we saw Navarre’s patchwork army marching down the main road from St Denis. I saw his colours on his banner at the head of his army. And I saw Sir James Pipe’s banner.

Chaucer reined in.

Sir James Pipe passed within a few hundred paces of us.

‘We’ll have a clear road to Normandy,’ Sam said. ‘These gentry have cleared it for us.’

I saw the Bourc Camus’ colours, black and white. And de Badefol’s. And Hawkwood’s.

I just sat there, dumbfounded. ‘Are we on the wrong side?’ I asked.

Chaucer breathed in and out a few times, like a dying man. When he spoke, his voice was gasping. ‘I. . how? We talked about it. He said the treaty was everything. That we had to reach the Dauphin.’ He looked at me.

For the first and perhaps only time, I felt bad for him. He’d been really brave, resourceful, loyal and capable. By my standards, he’d proved himself.

Richard shrugged. ‘I don’t think we’re all going to be made Knights of the Garter this time,’ he said.

A crowd was pouring out of Paris, cheering Charles of Navarre. Now Paris had three masters: the Provost, the Dauphin and Charles of Navarre.

I met Richard’s eye. ‘We cocked this up,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘We did what we were ordered to do,’ he said.

‘That’s our story,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s stick to it.’

That was hard. The feeling of failure. The feeling that somehow we were on the wrong side.

I remember looking at my little pennon with the Prince’s white feather in white on a black field. I wasn’t sure I should still be displaying it openly.

But I had days riding across the devastated landscape of the Isle de France and the Seine valley to contemplate just how we’d got the whole thing so wrong.

Every night, at small fires that didn’t really warm us, we shared looted wine and chewed it over again and again.

I had begun to harbour a suspicion that we — that is, Master Hoo — had been used. The fourth night on the road, we were camped in a corner of a burned-out stone barn. It had enough of the upper floor left intact to provide a feeling of dryness — mostly false, but with a fire of dry timber from what had once been the house, we did well enough.

I was trying to work some oil into the straps on my sabatons. The straps under the feet were about to give, and that required an armourer to pull the rivets. Rich men pointed the sabatons to their shoes, but that meant having a steady supply of shoes that fit just right.

Richard was sewing.

Chaucer was staring into the fire.

Sam was asleep, as were the other men. We were young and raw, so we sat and talked. They were older and knew how desperate our situation was, so they slept.

‘May I have your beeswax?’ Richard asked.

I tossed him my housewife — a small fabric pocket that held my horn needlecase, my silver thimble, my beeswax and my sewing knife. Every soldier has one.

He missed his catch and it went splot into the muddy water at the edge of the fire.

I shot to my feet. ‘By all the saints, you useless mongrel! All my thread wet! And my pins ruined! Give me that-’

‘I meant no offence. .’ He looked very hurt. Richard had been treated worse than me as a boy and he didn’t stand up well to harsh words. Blows, yes — he was brave as a paladin — but words. .

‘Leave off,’ Chaucer said. ‘Your foul temper is your least attractive trait, on a long list of them.’

‘You’re a canting hypocrite, and your lying story landed us in this state-’ I barked.

‘You can’t kill everything you don’t like, bully-boy,’ Chaucer said. ‘I never lied-’

‘Yon story about the treaty — Master Hoo never said such a word! Or if he did, he didn’t say it to you!’ I shouted.

Chaucer deflated. ‘Never said it to me — aye. That’s the truth. But I heard him say it to Sir John Hawkwood.’

‘Leave off, Will. You do have a foul temper and we don’t need it just now,’ Richard added.

‘And some of us are trying to sleep, gentle knights,’ said Christopher.

‘Ah, my friends. Tempers flaring?’

I whirled. My sword was on my bed-roll; his sword was at my nose.

Bertrand du Guesclin, of course.

‘My turn to be host, I think?’ he exclaimed.

He had twenty men-at-arms with him, emerging out of the rain.

I saw Sam Bibbo strike Christopher sharply, and the two of them rolled out from under the wooden floor into the rain and were gone.

Du Guesclin never even saw them go.

I sighed. ‘God’s curse is on me,’ I said.

Du Guesclin smiled. ‘What do you think you are worth to ransom?’

We spent Christmas with the French knight. He was growing more famous every day, so Frenchmen were flocking to his banner. As yet he had no office — in fact, part of his problem was that there was no government to give him an office — but in Normandy he was the French commander.

We slept warm, in wattle huts in the woods.

We were spoiled of all our armour. And our horses.

‘Just a loan,’ he quipped. ‘I know full well you didn’t strip me, but France’s need is great.’ He smiled. He wasn’t a cruel bastard, but he did lord it over us.

He must have gone on a long raid — a chevuachee — but he came back after a week, and he had a great hart, a boar and other meat, so we had a proper Christmas feast. He let us hunt, and Richard and I managed two brace of hares — we fed the camp for a day and a night.

The wine flowed. And talk turned to feats of arms and the war, as it was bound to do. It took du Guesclin a fortnight to ask us why we were abroad in France — with so many routiers riding, he took us for another such party until some chance remark of Chaucer’s got his attention — it was Candelmas night, I think. We’d just heard Mass from du Guesclin’s priest, a big fellow with a weight of muscle that belied a quick head. Unlike most priests, this one — Pere Joseph — read Latin well, and knew his gospels and his Aquinas. He hated Englishmen, but we got on well enough, and he taught me the new beads I’d only seen monks use: prayer beads. I’d all but stopped praying until I was taken. I owe Pere Joseph for that. With him, I started saying the paternoster and the Ave Maria like a son of the church.

But that bores you, I’m sure.

At any rate, we were seated around a great open fire. It was Candelmas eve, we’d all taken Communion, and we were sitting together like comrades — he had six other English knights, a dozen prosperous archers and ten of his own men gathered around a bon-fire, like an open-air round table.

He turned to Chaucer. ‘What treaty is this you had?’ he asked.

I missed whatever had led up to this, but at the word treaty, all fell silent.

Chaucer bit his lip and looked at me.

‘If there ever was a secret,’ I said, ‘it scarcely matters now.’

Du Guesclin’s eyes locked on mine. ‘What treaty?’ he asked.

‘King John signed a treaty with King Edward at Windsor — in August.’ I shrugged. ‘Master Chaucer was there — he can tell it full. We had orders-’ suddenly I had that feeling again that I was in over my head. The worst of it was that I liked du Guesclin. Better than I liked Robert Knolles or the Bourc Camus.

‘Yes?’ du Guesclin asked.

‘To take a copy to the Dauphin,’ I said.

The Frenchmen present all became quiet. The Englishman closest to me was a man-at-arms from the north, James Wright. I saw him again in Italy. He made a face as if he’d eaten something bad. ‘The Dauphin? He is the enemy, surely?’

Du Guesclin leaned forward. He put a skewer of deer meat across two big stones, moved his riding boots a little to see they were toasted, and held out a silver beaker for a villain to refill. ‘You never made it?’ he asked.

Richard laughed bitterly. ‘We made it. An hour before Charles of Navarre rolled into Paris.’ He shrugged. ‘Your Dauphin burned the treaty.’

Du Guesclin narrowed his eyes. ‘You were on a diplomatic errand?’

I nodded.

‘You took a little time off to fight me?’ he asked. Aside, in his broad Norman French — to an Englishman, the language of lawyers! — he said to his friends, ‘He captured me — the ambush at La Foret.’ He made a motion as if to say ‘that story I’ve told you’.

It was my turn to laugh. ‘John Hawkwood made me. When he asks me to ride, I ride.’

Several of the French men nodded in approval. One said, ‘That’s how it is,’ and nodded emphatically.

Du Guesclin rubbed his beard with his left hand and sipped wine. ‘Really, then, I should release you all.’

Richard nodded. ‘Yes!’ he said.

Du Guesclin looked off into the dark.

‘Perhaps you could decide that the lot of us were worth a hundred florins,’ I said.

‘Hah! I’ve already paid you,’ he said.

‘I’ll just send it back,’ I said. I could tell we were winning this round.

He sighed. ‘So many gold florins slipping through my fingers.’

‘You lucky bastard!’ Jamie Wright said. ‘Well done!’

The next night, we watched snow fall. Du Guesclin restored Goldie to me — an act of true friendship, and one I treasure. My horse and arms were his by right. No one in Normandy in those days made quibbles about diplomatic missions and sauvegardes. We were lucky — had one of the other French routiers taken us, we’d have been dead or bled for silver.

The way we’d have done if we took them.

Du Guesclin had an iron stool; it folded, and he sat on it like a King. ‘Tell me of the Dauphin,’ he said. ‘Our commander, de Clermont-’

I was sitting on carefully broken-up firewood, and I was more sprawled than sitting. ‘The Marshal of Normandy,’ I said. ‘I met him in Paris. We almost exchanged blows.’

‘That would have been honour for you,’ he said. ‘He is a great knight, and a most puissant man-at-arms.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘He had a pole-hammer and I had a horse.’

Du Guesclin laughed. ‘I like you. For an Englishman, you are not so very bad.’ He leaned forward. ‘Tell me of the Dauphin.’

I shrugged.

‘Many in Normandy would have me support Charles of Navarre,’ du Guesclin said. ‘Men say he’s reached an accord with the Dauphin.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m a country boy. I don’t pretend to understand what is happening in Paris.’

‘Nor I,’ I said. ‘Bertrand, it’s not my place to tell you how to run your country.’

‘The more so as you’ve done your part to pull it to pieces, eh?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘But nonetheless.’ He laughed.

‘Well. .’ I remember sitting, not sure what to say, when Chaucer joined us, bringing me wine — he wasn’t always an arse. I made space for him on the wood pile, and he shared the wine.

‘Bertrand wants to know what’s happening in Paris,’ I said.

Chaucer shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘I think that might count as comforting the enemy.’

I took a swallow of wine and spat it in the snow, where it showed like new blood. ‘Who exactly is the enemy?’ I asked.

Chaucer met my eye and nodded. ‘Sometimes, even you have a point,’ he said. He turned to du Guesclin. ‘Paris is rent by factions, and anything I tell you is probably already changed, but there are at least four factions. The Dauphin’s party — men who consider themselves the government.’

‘But they are not the government,’ du Guesclin said. ‘The King is the government.’

Chaucer waved his arms. ‘Just so, mon vieux. The second faction is the King’s party, men who served the King — many of them were at Poitiers and are now prisoners — some released or ransomed, some who escaped from that field. They consider themselves the government, and the Dauphin to be either a tool of the enemy or a dupe.’

‘Yes!’ du Guesclin said.

‘The third faction is that of the Paris Commune. It, itself, is split into two factions, one led by the Mercer, Etienne Marcel, who seems to want to be the Tyrant of Paris — he and Robert Le Coq and the Council of Eighty intend to rule France, I guess, by assembly and election.’

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘I have heard all this, of course, but never put this way. Surely this Parisian grocer has little power.’

‘Twenty thousand men, an army and many professional soldiers,’ I said. ‘Your Marshal told me he had hired a professional knight to train the militia — Pierre de Villiers.’

Du Guesclin nodded. ‘I know that name. He is from here.’

‘The other Parisian faction is less tied to the assembly. It is led by the richest merchants, who want a complete reform of the laws and the coinage, and who accuse the King of gross mismanagement,’ I said. Chaucer cast me one of his few approving looks.

‘And into this mess rides Charles of Navarre,’ Chaucer said.

‘That imp of hell,’ du Guesclin said. ‘He leaves a trail of slime wherever he goes, like some foul snail.’

I laughed. ‘I wish you’d speak your mind,’ I said. ‘Stop sitting in resentful silence.’

Even Chaucer laughed.

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘He tried to buy me when he escaped.’ He glared at the fire. He really wasn’t much older than we. ‘Now his army is full of Englishmen. And yet he prates about saving France. He would be all things to all men, but he has no honour.’

Chaucer sat back. He had Master Hoo’s boots on, I noted. ‘Honour,’ he said dismissively. ‘How can you two — knights — prate of honour? You saw the raped nuns on the road, William. What honour is there?’

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘There is honour everywhere! Almost every day, I fight. Every child in Normandy knows my name.’ He spoke with complete satisfaction. ‘I’ve faced the very flower of England and Gascony — and in the main, I have won.’ He bowed in his seat to me. ‘Sometimes, fortune has been against me. I rape no nuns; I fight my King’s enemies. There is honour everywhere.’

‘Master Chaucer is quick to see the flaws in chivalry and slow to see the glory,’ I said.

Chaucer grunted. ‘This from a man who runs a brothel to pay for his horses.’

To be honest, I had forgotten the brothel. Just for a few days, at the clearing in the woods of Normandy, I had prayed with a priest, practised my sword cuts with Jamie Wright and felt like a knight.

‘Who will protect the weak, if not the men-at-arms?’ I asked.

‘Sweet Jesu, William! How can you even ask that? Who in the name of God oppresses the weak? It’s only you men-at-arms. If you all died of a plague tomorrow, every peasant in France and England would only cheer.’ Chaucer drank more wine.

Du Guesclin narrowed one eye and raised an eyebrow — it was a look he had, when he was thinking. ‘But surely this is what the “hoods” in Paris say?’

Chaucer looked at his hands. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted.

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘Foolishness. What would you prefer? A tyranny of money? Look at Italy! Men are bought and sold by merchants. Men-at-arms are at least men who crave public renown and fame, who are strong and well-trained and enobled by the thousand penances of war and pain. Are there bad men among us? Bien sur! But by St Denis, there are bad priests and bad Popes, and no one says that Christ should be dismissed! Is Paris so well-directed? What I hear is a tale of greed and crime, of women oppressed, of churches despoiled for their silver by the crowds.’

Chaucer looked surly.

‘What of the Turks?’ I asked.

Du Guesclin looked at me.

‘Surely it is noble to fight the Turks — who threaten all of Christendom?’

Chaucer spat. ‘Go fight them then.’

‘Perhaps I will yet,’ I said.

Du Guesclin laughed. ‘You two must be a pleasure to ride with, hein?’

Du Guesclin had another problem, which was that suddenly all of the King of England’s officers in Normandy had become the captains of Charles of Navarre. Du Guesclin wasn’t at war with Charles of Navarre — it complicated his operations, and our release as well. I sent word to the Three Foxes — a letter copied fair by Master Chaucer — asking that one hundred florins be paid to du Guesclin’s agent, who proved to be our Genoese banker.

Du Guesclin pointed this out to Chaucer. ‘You think it is the men-at-arms who make war,’ he said. ‘Ask who takes the gold from both sides.’

I spent January learning to use a lance. Du Guesclin was a fine lance, and he was surprised I was so bad at using the weapon. He had a quintain in the woods, and when the ground was frozen hard, I rode at it every day. Jamie Wright hooted at my poor horsemanship, and Richard winced when I was struck by the sack of turnips on the back of the swinging arm. Almost a week into my training, I cocked it up so badly that I managed to fall onto frozen, bumpy ground.

Du Guesclin stood over me and shook his head. ‘By St Lo,’ he said. ‘One hears this story, but never actually sees it.’

All around the clearing, men were laughing.

Jean de Flery and Michel de Carriere, two of his most trusted men, were laughing so hard that they sat in the snow.

De Carriere looked at me and pointed, unable to speak. He wheezed and finally looked at his friend. ‘How is it these men are driving us out of Normandy?’ he asked.

Richard, who was quite competent with the lance, rode a course, slammed his point into the shield so that splinters flew and trotted up to the laughing pair. ‘It’s the long bow,’ he said. ‘It’s faster than the lance.’

Well, that shut them up, but it killed the bonhomie of the clearing for a day.

I was black from the bottom of my arse to the top after that fall. It didn’t heal for two weeks, and every time I bathed, they all laughed again.

Pentecost came, and we heard Mass again — it was more churching then I had had in years — then du Guesclin got word that our ransom had been paid.

‘I have Sir James’ ransom as well. And letters from the King of Navarre.’

We had dinner, and all the French knights were silent. It was not a festive occasion.

It can be hard with men who are both friends and enemies, but who speak a different language. I wasn’t sure about their silence — it might have been the season, with Lent about to start, or it might have been the war.

We didn’t want to ask. In truth, although I’ve glossed over and made light of it, we were prisoners, and from time to time, an angry Frenchman would propose killing the lot of us. It’s happened. We were eager to go. It was so close that we all feared some last-minute difficulty.

The tension at dinner that night was like the heavy air near the sea in mid-summer.

After a few sallies that failed, I turned to my host. ‘What troubles you, my lord?’ I asked boldly.

Chaucer stepped on my foot. But I thought then, and still do, that some things are best met head on.

Du Guesclin made a face. ‘In this, I will hope that you can share our anger. Michel wants me to be silent — he thinks that to tell you this will be to tell a secret, yes?’ He looked at de Carriere, who glared at him.

‘The person of the Dauphin was seized by Etienne Marcel three days ago. They took him prisoner and killed Marshal Clermont and every other servant of the King that they could find in Paris.’ Du Guesclin pursed his lips.

‘And the King of Navarre condones it!’ shouted de Carriere — he was usually a pleasant, if silent, man, as young as we ourselves, but he had drunk deep, and his anger was as deep as his draughts.

Chaucer spoke carefully. ‘This is what we. . sought to prevent.’

‘So you say,’ de Carriere said.

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘If you English dismember France,’ he said, ‘what will be left? Who will till and work the land? Who will pray? Have you English thought on what will happen if France collapses into anarchy?’

There was, in decency, no answer we could make.

The next day, wearing our own armour and riding our own horses, we rode away. We rode into Normandy, where there was no royal administration to be found. The siege of Rennes was over, and the men who’d participated in it were all serving in the King of Navarre’s armies.

We rode south through lands that were already showing signs of recovery. It was early March and the men were tilling. Women leaned on stone walls and watched us ride by.

This part of southern Brittany had never been a theatre of war, but now it was English, as English as Gascony. And when we reached Gascony, it looked prosperous. Spring was peeking out of every sunny morning; birds sang.

We reached Bordeaux late in March. Lent was almost out. The air was clear, the girls were pretty and we sang as we rode the last few miles.

The Three Foxes looked about the same, except that there was a table in the front of the yard, and at it sat Christopher Shippen and John Hughes, playing dice. I bridled, but Marie threw herself into my arms, and Sam Bibbo came down the stairs — was it her door that had opened?

He clasped my hand, and we had to tell our stories ten times as wine was served and all the girls had a holiday. Ah, I had sworn a hundred times to give her up, cease my fornications and send the girls away.

That good change did not last out my Marie sitting on my lap and telling over our accounts. Taxing me with having run risks and been captured.

I put de Charny’s dagger on the oaken chest by our bed, looked at it and thought hard thoughts.

But that didn’t keep me out of the bed.

The Prince was in England for a tournament, and so was Sir John Chandos. The Prince’s Lieutenant for Gascony was Sir John Cheverston, and he was reported to be marching up the Dordogne valley. Richard and I rested a day, gathered our retinue and rode north after him.

Fortune is a fickle mistress.

After months of hardship and failure, we arrived at the siege of Nadaillac, young Chaucer in tow, in time to present Sir John Cheverston with our damp and somewhat moth-eaten array of sauvegardes.

He was a hard man, with a greying forked beard and heavy moustache, a broad forehead and a ferocious temper. His steward warned us before we were taken to this tent that he was in a mood.

‘How long were you two scamps on the road?’ he asked. ‘Chandos must have been scraping the barrel when he chose to send you. Where’s Master Hoo? He’s been sore missed by the Prince.’

‘Dead,’ I said. ‘Killed by the militia in Paris.’

Sir John’s squire helped him get his aventail over his head, and his stained arming cap emerged. ‘Where in the nine hells were you two, that he was killed?’

‘Fighting,’ I said.

He looked at us and shook his head. ‘And you were captured,’ he said in disgust.

‘Yes, my lord,’ I answered humbly.

‘Am I allowed to know exactly why two such very young scallywags and a rogue of a notary were sent to Paris?’ he asked.

‘We thought you might tell us?’ I said quietly.

Cheverston spat and took a cup of wine from his squire. ‘I’m of half a mind to send you back,’ he said. ‘The Prince ordered me to acquire a safe-conduct from the French so that I could clear the bandits from the Dordogne, but he didn’t leave me orders as to where I should get such a document.’ He sighed. ‘You boys have had a hard winter — its in your faces — and I suppose you expect to be paid?’

What do you say to that?

We stood silently. With our caps in our hands.

Richard leaned forward. ‘May we. . stay on for the siege?’ he asked.

Cheveston shrugged. ‘If I’m paying your wages, you might as well be of some help. I don’t suppose you know anything about the Chateau of Nadaillac?

Richard and I spoke out at about the same time. ‘We scouted it last autumn,’ we said in unison, like monks chanting.

We showed him the spring on the hillside.

It took me six months to accomplish nothing for my own reputation. It took one evening for me to make it.

Richard and I took ten men-at-arms and a dozen archers in light harness, and we worked our way up the hillside in the dark. There was very little cover, and we made noise, but the siege had gone on for weeks and the garrison was lax — they expected Sir John to buy them out soon enough, and the fighting had been sporadic, to say the least, as the men inside were mostly the same kind of Gascon routiers who made up most of Sir John’s army.

Let me tell you about lying all night on sandy soil. It’s dull. Every noise is an enemy; every rock digs into you, despite your harness. I wore my brigantine and my arm harness, and no legs, sabatons or breastplate. I couldn’t be comfortable.

Sam Bibbo snored behind me.

The stars crept across the sky.

When you go out to lay an ambush, you go out full of the soundness of your plan and the excellence of your men. By the time the moon has crept halfway across the sky, the plan seems like lunacy and the men with you a paltry force to face the destined counter-ambush, or far too large and noisy for the task. The enemy is never coming.

What I remember best was the tricks my eyes played on me and the plans I hadn’t made. Somehow I’d forgotten to tell everyone under what circumstances we’d retreat. I lay there and worried as my stomach roiled, and I farted too much.

Ah! Command. Everyone desires it. But once you have it, it’s a fool’s game, and you are always better off having some other man, who you tell yourself is brilliant, preux, daring and sure — let him make the decisions.

A night ambush is for a monster of self-assurance.

I kept thinking that the sun was rising, that it was lighter. I have no explanation for this, except that as I rolled over to start telling men to withdraw — this happened at least twice — I realized that it was still black as pitch, even with moonlight.

When I heard the clink of metal on stone, I assumed it was from one of us.

Then a boot scraping, and then metal.

Sabatons. A knight in full harness, walking on the road.

I raised my head.

In the moonlight, they were like a procession of the dead — twenty men at least, in harness, coming down the road.

Was it a sortie?

But they had another half a dozen men with yokes.

They’d come for water.

So much for my night of worries.

I had chosen a spot below the road, with a clear view. My archers were all to my right, so they had unobstructed shooting, and my men-at-arms were on both sides of the road but a little lower down.

I waited, my heart beating so hard that I could watch my brigantine’s plates move in the moonlight.

The last man passed me.

I stood up. ‘St George and England!’ I roared.

We killed or took them all.

It wasn’t a great feat of arms, but all the famous names were off fighting in the north with Navarre, and so Richard and I made our names. I took the Captain, Philippe de Monfer — he was the man in sabatons — sword to sword. He hacked at me overhand — most men do, to be frank — but in two years I had learned a few things about the longsword. I held mine in two hands — one hand on the hilt and one almost at the point — caught his first great blow over my head, threw my blade around his neck and threw him to the ground, using my sword as a lever. He went down with a crash, and Sam stripped him of weapons while I stood on his sword arm and fought off his squire. The squire had an axe. I cut at his hands until I broke his fingers. He gave himself up.

Richard took four men. He was getting better, too.

The rest threw down their weapons. These were routiers, not great knights. They weren’t worth much — in fact, Cheverston hanged a few of them — but we made a fair amount on our ransoms.

That was all in the future, though. The taking of Nadaillac was an event, as much for the French as for us, because the ‘captain’ had preyed on both sides. Cheverston had a writ from the Black Prince to clean out every nest of robbers in the Dordogne, and with the fame of our deed behind us, Sir John sent us, as he had threatened, back into France to get him the permission he needed to make war against the brigands who preyed on both sides. He also gave me letters to Charles of Navarre, two of the King of France’s officers and the Dauphin.

He read them over very carefully after a scribe had copied them fair. ‘Listen, Master Gold. None of us really knows who is governing France these days. We do not want to break the truce, but we do not want to offend the wrong. . hmm. The wrong government. If you can, get me a sauvegarde from all three: the Dauphin, the King of Navarre and the King’s lieutenant. Understand?’

I think I smiled. ‘All too well, my lord,’ I said.

‘Sir John Chandos says you have a good head on your shoulders,’ he nodded. ‘Governing is not all about swords, eh? Get this done for the Prince and I’ll see you are rewarded.’ He looked at me. ‘I’d have sent Master Chaucer on this mission, but he, mmm, is not available.’

I bowed gratefully.

A letter had come to the army from England and ordered Chaucer home for a wedding. I wasn’t that sorry to see him go, but Richard was. We gave him a fine dinner, and so did Marie, as he passed through Bordeaux.

We rode north in spring. Our horses and gear were the worse for wear after almost ten months’ constant campaign, but we had just made our fortunes and we were cheerful. We sang. We told stories. That’s when we missed Chaucer the most, of course — he was an endless fund of stories, and that’s before he went to Italy.

We repeated our earlier route to Tours. The same royal officer passed us, with the same courtesy — this is one of the reasons the same men are used as couriers again and again. Once you are known, passing borders and gates is much easier.

North of Tours, we stayed within France and rode on to Paris. We passed north through a sullen country, full of furtive people. Bibbo was on his guard. I’d learned my lesson from du Guesclin, and now we went into our cloaks as soon as we’d eaten, and we kept watch all night. My page, Rob, was growing into a man, and had a good sword from Nadaillac; the rest of them were solid enough. We were used to each other’s ways — we could halt and, in an hour, the food was cooked, the fire out, the horses curried, fed and picketed, the blanket rolls laid on firesh-cut bracken of whatever type the area allowed, whether plundered straw or pine boughs. The taking of Nadaillac had improved our kit by four small tents, simple wedges of white linen that went up easily and stowed flat in wicker panniers. We often used them to roof over other structures, byres and barns and roofless hovels, but they were better than a sky full of rain, even by themselves.

By day, very little moved across the country. We never saw a wagon or a cart. Sam and John took to riding with their bows strung and over their shoulders, because despite the spring sun, there was an air of thunder over the whole country.

Twice we passed manor houses with smoke coming from the chimneys, but they weren’t interested in having us, so we rode on.

Forty miles south of Paris, at Etampes, we found the town taken and full of an English garrison. They claimed to be holding the town for the King of Navarre, but they gave us lodging, let us refill the feed bags for our horses and baggage animals, and we got wine and news.

The news was that the Dauphin had escaped from Pairs and was raising an army.

Word was that he was at Meaux, on the far side of the Seine. That set us a fine problem as we didn’t relish entering Paris, especially Paris controlled by Etienne Marcel and his red and blue hoods. Word was they were killing every aristocrat they could find.

The English held the lower Seine, but it was a hundred dangerous miles round Paris to the English-held crossings.

We discussed trying our luck.

But the captain of Etampes told us that the Isle de France was ‘the very cockpit of war’, so we elected to go south around Paris. We decided to go straight to the King of Navarre.

I wanted to see the trail of slime, I guess.

We rode north first. We weren’t following a rational route, but rather jumping from English-held manor to English-held castle. It was interesting to talk to the captains — all new men, as far as I could tell, many as young as me, and some — you may laugh to hear me say this — the sweepings of English prisons. Hard men were pouring into France from England. They were here for plunder and nothing else. Most had only the vaguest idea of what side they supported in the French civil war.

Most of the lesser men thought they were fighting for England. Even more of them thought of France as an enemy country to be mined of silver.

To be frank, none of that bothered me unduly, but it was starting to trouble Richard. Twenty leagues west of Paris, we almost had to fight for our lives when Richard accused a tiny garrison — just six men, all drunk as lords — of being ‘thieves and rapists’. Unsurprisingly, free — born Englishmen, even when they are thieves and rapists, resent the term.

Not that criminal behaviour was limited to Englishmen. The Gascons were unbelievably bad, and the Breton and Norman French were, if anything, worse. The whole countryside from Rennes east to Meaux had become a carpet of fire and smoke, and a generation of prosperous Frenchmen watched their carefully horded surplus destroyed in two hideous summers.

It is my observation that beaten men do not revolt. Beaten men lie under the lash and abandon hope.

But men who have had hope, men who have seen a way out of grinding poverty and injustice, men who have the wherewithal to own weapons and use them, they revolt.

Our party was camping in a small hunting lodge — ruined, of course — in a patch of woods close enough to Paris that we could see the haze of smoke Paris cast into the air. Sam said that from the rooftrees he could see spires.

We were there, of course, because Richard had made the ‘garrison’ of the local manor house so angry.

During the middle watch of morning, I was shaken awake by Rob, my page.

‘Fighting, Master Will.’

I was up and out of my cloak. I climbed the old ladder to the roof — or rather the remnants of the roof.

The manor house was on fire. Someone like du Guesclin had just taken out an English garrison less than a mile away.

‘To arms,’ I said.

Rob woke everyone. John and Sam came up, stringing their bows, both still naked from the waist down and looking like frowzled satyrs.

The screams started almost immediately. Richard was arming, but he kept looking up at me — he wanted to ‘do something’. A man was being killed very slowly, perhaps two men.

In the summer of 1358, raids were mostly a matter of a few men — twenty men-at-arms was a big force. Charles of Navarre’s ‘army’ never mustered more than a thousand men, and the Dauphin had about the same. I say this to justify our actions as we therefore assumed that our party would be roughly the size of any enemy we encountered.

Perhaps we should have been warned by the screams.

It took us an hour to arm everyone and pack the camp in the dark. We left a very scared Rob with six pack horses and all our spare gear, and the rest of us struck out cross country, which is difficult at night, and it took us another half an hour to cross the half-mile of farmland that separated us from the manor house.

The two voices kept screaming.

On and on.

You don’t think a man can scream that way for long.

He can.

There was the first light in the sky — the so-called false dawn — when we emerged from the hedgerows to a small, ditched farm road hard by the manor house.

It was crammed with men. Armed men. Perhaps 200 men, perhaps 500.

‘Back!’ I roared. The hedges must have blocked the sound.

They were as shocked as we.

In a glance, I saw the fields around the manor teaming with men, most of them in jacks, or mail, with helmets, but some in smocks, with farm implements. The manor house was burning, and there were two men crucified like our saviour on roof beams, being roasted alive.

I was backing Goldie.

For once, the mad man was Sam. He had his bow strung, and suddenly it was in his hand. He nocked an arrow, and loosed. Nocked again — now the crowd had seen us, and there were shouts, a growing wave of shouts.

He loosed again.

I realized he was killing the men on the crosses.

He feathered one man in mail who was running at us, and then I had to cut down into a crowd, because I’d waited too long and they were coming out of the field to my right.

Goldie was a war horse, and he knew his business. I gave him the touch of the spurs that told him to clear me a space, and his iron-shod hooves went into action like four immensely strong knights wielding maces. He whirled and I hung on. I hit one carl — he had a jack and a skullcap, and my blade bounced off his skullcap, but he went down like a slaughtered pig anyway.

And then I started clearing them off Sam Bibbo, who was trying to put men down with his bowstave. He’d tried to keep loosing arrows, and he, too, had missed the tide of men coming out of the fields.

I couldn’t leave him.

His horse panicked. There were too many men with too many agricultural implements in the dark, and the rouncey reared.

One of our assailants put a pitchfork into the animal, and she screamed and threw Sam — he flew a good horse’s length and hit the ground hard enough to make a noise.

If you want a good idea of your fighting skills, try fighting an endless tide of men in the dark for possession of the unconscious body of a friend.

You want me to talk to you of chivalry and knighthood?

I did not run and leave my friend.

I didn’t know just where he was, but I gave Goldie the spurs again and we leaped forward; he shot out hooves in all directions, and I cut and thrust into the mob. It seemed to go on for ever, but in fact took less time than saying three paternosters, according to Richard.

Who, thanks be to Christ, now appeared, also fully armed and also on a warhorse.

The two of us cleared the space of a small Parish churchyard. And John Hughes, bless him, came up, dismounted between us, and found Sam. Sam’s horse was down and dead. So were ten other men, or more.

We put Sam over John’s saddle, John held my stirrup leather and we rode off into the darkness.

We picked up Rob and our pack animals, and moved from cover to cover all day. We could see the roads full of men — armed men.

Sam was unconscious, and for the first time, Richard and I realized how much we relied on the old archer. We both kept wanting to ask him things.

Like, ‘Who the fuck are those men?’

Richard watched them from a tree. He was still in all his harness. ‘If the Dauphin has this many men, why hasn’t he driven us back to Calais?’ he asked.

I watched them too. ‘They look like Paris militia,’ I said. ‘But they are twenty miles from Paris and there isn’t a hood to be seen.’

‘No cavalry; no knights.’ Richard shook his head.

We climbed a low, wooded ridge and followed it for a few miles.

At evening, we halted. We had no idea where we were. We had moved across France by asking our way — there were no signs and the roads were appalling. Usually Sam knew the way, and when he was wrong, we didn’t comment.

Now, on our own, all ways appeared the same.

However, after a restless night — Richard and I never took off our harnesses — we woke to a beautiful spring day. In the distance, we could see a church tower. The bell was ringing. It was unreal.

Richard and I left the rest with Sam, who seemed better — his colour had improved and he was muttering, whilst his eyes were moving beneath the lids. We cantered along the paths towards the steeple we could see.

There was a town. It wasn’t a big town, but prosperous enough.

It was, in fact, a village of the dead.

They had died a while before — perhaps the October or November of 1357. There were corpses in the door yards, and corpses in the streets. The women mostly still had their hair, and some of the people wore the remnants of clothes. There were children.

The bell continued to ring.

I rode to the tower.

Richard reined in, and then started to back his bay. ‘Are you mad?’ he asked. I want no more of this. They look like they could rise in the dance macabre!’

‘I want a look from the tower,’ I said.

The truth is that the sights of that town are with me yet, but I needed some sense of where I was, and I knew I’d get that in the tower.

I dismounted at the church door and left Goldie with Richard. I’d never seen him so jumpy.

I assumed that the wind was ringing the bell.

Wrong.

It was a young man. At least, I guess he had been a man. Someone had flayed all the skin from one side of his face, very neatly, and it had scabbed over, while the other side of his face sagged.

I think I gave a shout. I may even have shrieked like a maiden.

He put his hands over his head. He had no thumbs. They’d been severed and healed.

He had one eye.

I think you lads are getting the message.

It took me twenty breaths to get over the shock. I’ve never seen a man so disfigured and yet alive, and the wonder of it was that he was so terrifying — he, who could not have hurt a small child. The wreck of a man — why is the wreckage so full of fear? Is it just that we all of us fear death? Christ, I fear that death — unmanned. Made hideous. The Lord be with him.

I was tempted to kill him. Yes, I was.

Instead, I walked around him, as if he might do me harm, and climbed the bell tower.

In the room above the bell pulls, I found a corpse. Not so old. Bloated. A woman. And the thing below me began to bellow like a bull.

I was paying a high price for a look from a church tower, I can tell you. There’s more wounds than those you take from swords. The dead woman — his mother? His sister? — and the monster himself — they people my dreams, some nights.

Who was he?

Who was she?

I climbed.

In the belfry were half a dozen men, strung up in the rafters like sausages being kept for winter.

Richard says I roared my war cry. Bless him, I think he lies. I think I burst into tears, but I truly don’t remember.

I do remember looking out from between the rotting legs of one poor bastard and seeing Paris, and in another direction, the Seine, clear as the shoe’d foot that had fallen away from the corpse by the eastern arch.

I fled. I’d like to say I cut the men down and saw them buried, but I fled. I almost fell down one of the ladders, and I tried not to look at the bloated corpse of the woman, and would have passed the wreck of a man, but he was on his knees.

‘Kill me,’ he said. His lips were ruined and it was difficult to understand him, but he was obvious enough. ‘Why not kill me? Why leave me alive? Kill me!’

I backed away from him.

‘Kill me!’ he shrieked. ‘Was I not good enough to be killed?’

I fled.

I vaulted onto my horse, and Richard and I rode through the streets so fast our horses’ hooves threw sparks, and we didn’t stop until we were in our little rock fall camp.

‘Sam’s awake!’ John called. ‘St Michael, you two look like you’ve seen ghosts.’

We moved north cautiously. The bell was ringing again, but we avoided the town and came down out of the low hills onto the flat by the river. To the east, we could see men — perhaps thousands of men — on the road.

‘Who killed them?’ Richard asked. He was almost grey under his dark skin. ‘Who would do that?

I shrugged. We both knew that any of the bands hunting the Isle de France might have massacred a town — French, Gascon, English.

It had happened six months earlier.

We rode on.

Sam was off his head — awake, but raving, calling out to men who weren’t there — and in the mid-afternoon, John started puking his guts out.

Rob’s armpits had swelling in them. He had a high fever and he fell from his horse, which was the first I knew he was sick.

Christopher spat and backed his horse away from Rob, who was lying in the road where he’d fallen from his horse.

‘Plague,’ he said.

Peter — silent, morose Peter — turned his horse, threw his cloak over his head, and rode away. I could hear the sound of his hoof beats for a long time in the early summer evening. He galloped.

Christopher dismounted under a spreading oak tree that was a thousand years old. ‘I’ll find a camp site and I’ll make a fire, but I won’t tend him and I won’t breathe the same air. The miasma.’

I was already touching the boy. Besides, I’d spent a day with the corpses of my parents, and the Plague, which had hit London again and again, had never troubled me or my sister. We were hardened, like good steel. Or perhaps just pickled.

Richard dismounted. ‘I thought it was that town,’ he said. ‘I’ve had trouble breathing. All. Day.’

Then I became afraid. Plague isn’t an enemy you can fight, and who it touches, it kills. Not five in a hundred walk away.

In a way, I was lucky, because there was so much to do.

Christopher was as good as his word. He found a camp site 200 paces off the road, where four oaks made a clearing by the stream that ran down to the Seine. He got the tents up, saving one for himself, which he set at the top of a small rise, about fifty feet away.

We set to gathering firewood. We only had one axe, but with the peasants cleared out of the surrounding country, there was a staggering amount of good oak just lying on the ground. We collected ten armloads or so, and broke it up in a forked tree — quicker than using an axe. I put our two pots on, full of water.

‘I’ll get some food,’ Christopher said. ‘Listen, cap’n — I want to help. I just don’t want to die.’

I managed a leaderly smile. ‘You didn’t just ride off, and that’s something.’

He nodded at Sam, who was muttering in a tent. ‘He’s got it, too. Bet ya.’

I hadn’t even considered that.

Christopher rode off to forage, and left me alone with three very sick men. I hoped he’d come back. Richard struggled against the sickness for a few hours, then suddenly he was in the heart of it, silent, sweating, with swellings on his groin and armpits as big as eggs. Bibbo was slower, but he was raving. He thrashed, and I considered tying him down. But I got a tisane of herbs into both of them.

I could do nothing with Rob. He was burning hot, dry as a bone, and had trouble swallowing, and before Christopher returned, Rob was dead. I wrapped him in his cloak and carried him a hundred paces or so into the woods.

Believe it or don’t, but tending them was so hard on me that burying Rob was like a rest. I dug — the soil was good, even in the trees. France is so rich — why can’t they govern themselves?

Heh. Mayhap we help with that.

I didn’t put him deep, but I was a good three hours at it. When I came back from the woods, Christopher was kneeling by the fire. He had four hares, each on a separate green stick, and a pot of warmed wine. It was a hot day.

‘The boy’s dead?’ he asked.

‘I buried him,’ I said. With those words, I realized that Richard, Sam, and John were doomed as well.

‘Let’s eat,’ he said. ‘Roads are full of French. No cavalry. I almost got caught — had to lie up.’ He shook his head. ‘This is all fucked up, you know that, right?’ His voice cracked a little.

‘We’ll make it,’ I said.

He looked at me. He was older than me, and for all his carping, he was a steady man. But just then, he needed me to tell him that everything was going to be all right.

‘We have food. There’s two of us, so we can keep watch. We can’t be more than a day from the English garrison at Poissy. Tomorrow I’ll send you-’

He just shook his head. ‘I’m not going back out there alone,’ he said. ‘The roads are covered in men and women. Peasants. Everywhere. I lay up in a little wood a mile north of here, listened to a man give a speech.’ He looked at me. ‘It’s a rebellion. They’re going to kill all the English and all the gentry.’ He shrugged. ‘I think they got Peter. I think they strung him up and opened his guts by the road. But I didn’t stop to be sure.’

‘We’ll need to take turns on watch,’ I said.

‘Why?’ He asked. ‘I mean, you and me, we can take what, five of the bastards? Better to die.’ He shook his head. ‘Like the end of the world. Maybe it is. Mayhap-’

I reached over and flicked the end of his nose.

‘Eh!’ he bridled. ‘No call for that!’

‘We’re not dead yet. Nor are our companions. Let’s do our best.’ Christ, I sounded pompous, even to me.

That was a long night. Christopher made his apologies and withdrew to his little fortress on the hill.

I sat by the fire with de Charny’s dagger and some tow, some lard and some powdered pumice. I meant to get the stain out of the blade. I knew I’d be up all night, and my head was doing some strange things.

Richard fouled himself and had to be cleaned. I suppose I could have left him. In fact, I thought about leaving him in his own dung. By the Virgin, I even thought of getting Goldie and riding away.

Instead, I cleaned him and dripped some warm rabbit broth into him.

John awoke and demanded food. He looked like a monster in the glow of the fire, his eyes wild, his long hair everywhere. I gave him a joint of hare and some broth — he vomited bile and sat suddenly, then rolled over and threw up everything he’d just eaten, before falling forward into it.

I cleaned him.

Sam sat up and looked at me. In a perfectly normal voice, he said, ‘I have the Plague, don’t I?’

I got up and went to him. Christopher had set the tents up like awnings, with one side lifted on poles, so the air could pass through easily and I could go from man to man. I could see them all from the fire. I went and knelt by him. ‘I think so,’ I admitted.

He shook his head. ‘I’s salted. Had it as a young’n. Ain’t right.’

That put the chill of pure fear into me.

‘You had a bad fall-’ I said.

But he was gone again, his eyes closed, his breathing coarse, like a man snoring.

John staggered to his feet — I assume with some notion of going somewhere to be sick — and vomited all over himself, then fell headlong across the fire. The burning coals galvanized him, and he leaped to his feet again before collapsing.

I poured water over him, but not until I’d found embers in the pitch darkness and put them together carefully, found bark and made up the fire again, adding twigs and small bits of oak.

Thank God it wasn’t raining. Thank God.

I thought of Master Peter. Hiring me because I could start a fire.

‘What happened?’ asked Christopher out of the darkness.

‘John fell in the fire,’ I said.

Christopher came into the edge of the firelight. ‘Need. . help?’ he asked.

‘John just threw up all over himself and then fell in the fire. Sam’s raving. Richard may be dead. I haven’t been to sleep-’ My voice was wild.

I tried to get control of myself.

Christopher grunted. ‘I’ll clean John,’ he said.

‘He has the Plague,’ I said.

Christopher came into the firelight and sat on his heels. ‘Maybe not,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Sam doesn’t have a pustule on him, does he?’

I hadn’t checked in hours, but I looked — high and low, so to speak — while Christopher held a lit taper.

‘None,’ I said. ‘And he said he was salted.’

‘There you go, then.’ He looked at John. ‘John’s got something bad, but it’s in his guts.’

‘Rob died of Plague,’ I said. ‘I know what Plague looks like.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll take my chance,’ he said.

There are many forms of courage.

When the sun rose, Christopher was on a pallet of ferns. He was hot all over and had swellings in his armpits. He lay there, saying ‘fuck’ over and over, then he was silent.

The shattering work came to an end. I made them as clean as I could. I burned what they had been wearing.

About noon, a dozen armed peasants came. I heard them, but I didn’t have the energy to get into my harness, so I walked to my bedroll — still roped tight — picked up my beautiful longsword and drew it.

They came down the forest trail. The leader had a good brigantine and a fine helmet. In fact, he had Peter’s helmet.

The men behind him had a wide variety of arms and equipment, but the last fellow wore the red and blue hood of the Paris Commune.

‘Stop where you are,’ I said. In French, of course.

The leader paused.

‘We have Plague,’ I said.

They all froze.

‘Fucking Englishman is just saying that,’ spat the third man in the line.

‘Want to come look?’ I said. I think my voice and my fatigue must have carried conviction.

‘May you all die of it,’ said the leader.

Then they walked away — quickly.

I drank the rest of the broth and ate the cold rabbit. Then I went to my bedroll and took out the cheese and sausage I had there and ate it all. I didn’t feel sick, which was a miracle.

Then I drank the wine I had. It wasn’t enough.

I cleaned them all and tried to give them a little white wine that Richard had.

Then I sat by the fire, polishing Sir Geoffrey’s dagger. When I couldn’t face that any more, I said my beads. The beads made a tiny, regular noise as I told them, almost like a weaver’s shuttle moving against the loom.

I prayed a long time. I lost myself in it.

I came out because Sam was asking for water. I had filled all the leather bottles, so I took him one and he drank deep. ‘Fever broke,’ he whispered. ‘Sweet saviour, I’m weak.’ His eyes met mine. ‘I want to make my confession,’ he whispered.

‘I’m no priest,’ I said.

A tiny smile flickered around his eyes. ‘Just go and fetch one for me, sir?’ he said.

I heard his confession. Like most of us, he’d gone through the commandments pretty thoroughly.

That’s between him and God.

The thing that did me a world of good is that as he spoke, his voice got stronger. I left him for a few minutes to hold Richard’s hand, and when I came back, he was up on one elbow.

‘Master William, I think I may stay in the vale of sin,’ he announced.

I wanted to kiss him.

In the morning, he was able to move around. He helped clean John and Christopher.

About noon, Christopher died.

I just sat by the fire for a while. ‘Is it the Plague? What the hell is this?’ I asked.

Sam just shook his head. ‘Soldiers get sick,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have the Plague, but Chris did. Look at him.’

He stank.

I carried him, wrapped in his cloak, and buried him by Rob. Something had tried to dig Rob up, but failed.

I spent time putting Chris just as deep.

You know how long it takes to dig a hole for a man?

I stopped twice to go back and check on the others. Sam was better each time, and by the third evening he was boiling water, setting out tapers and cleaning the camp.

On the third morning, Richard was better. John ate and didn’t throw it up.

We were two more days there.

I hadn’t lost a man in months of campaigning, and in four days I lost Peter, Rob and Chris.

We were thin when we rode on. Goldie had lost weight, but we now had enough horses — sad, but brutally necessary.

We rode along the Seine, riding as hard as my recuperating men could handle, and came to Poissy by evening. They made a long chalk of letting us in the gates, but in the end we satisfied them that we weren’t carrying Plague and that we were English. I put Richard and John into the charge of the nuns, and rode off with a potboy from the hospital as my page, and Sam, armed to the teeth, to find Charles of Navarre. The garrison was petrified by the peasants’ attacks — easy pillage had turned into hard duty. They weren’t even looking over the walls.

We crossed the river and rode north and east. Charles wasn’t hard to find — he was stringing up every peasant he found on the roads — and the trees laden with rotten fruit, sometimes fifty or a hundred in a row, are another of the beautiful memories I carry of that summer.

The second day, we found his army. Almost the first banner I saw was du Guesclin’s; near it was Sir John Hawkwood’s, and some other unlikely comrades — a Bourbon, a minor Ribercourt, a Scottish mercenary called Sir Robert Scot and Sir James Pipe. I didn’t know most of the knights, but their arms were all French, although I saw the black and white eagles of the Bourc Camus and gave his tents a wide birth.

Navarre’s army was just settling for the day. They were very well-organized — as they should have been, with a thousand professional soldiers from both sides as the core of the force. Navarre had almost the whole chivalry of the north under his banner. The Jacquerie had terrified the first estate, and the men of war were not amused.

Sir John Hawkwood received me like a prodigal son — the more so when I told him of my errand for Sir John Cheverston.

He smiled his thin-lipped smile and raised a silver cup, almost certainly the spoil of a church. ‘Here’s to a fine feat of arms, young William. I knew you had the makings of a knight.’

I shrugged and possibly even blushed. This praise was delivered in public, in front of forty men.

‘It was nothing — we took them by surprise.’ I shrugged.

Du Guesclin pushed through the crowd to me. ‘Were they armed? Awake?’ he asked.

I grinned. ‘Very much so, Sir Knight.’

He laughed. ‘Then the contest was fair. And before the eyes of half a thousand English knights, a fair deed of arms.’

He warmed my blood. I dismounted, gave my horse to my potboy and embraced du Guesclin. ‘What brings you here, messire? I have seen the trail of slime — or rather, the human fruit in the trees.’

Du Guesclin shrugged. ‘The canaille make war on us all — rape maidens, kill nobly born children. They are the common enemy, and my lord the Dauphin,’ he shrugged, ‘is not in the field.’

‘The Dauphin has found it more politic to leave us to fight the Jacques while he cowers in his mighty fortress.’ Hawkwood’s contempt was absolute.

‘I saw them on the way here. They wiped out an English garrison on the south of the river — burned two men alive on crosses.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve seen our men do as much to them.’

Hawkwood nodded. ‘As have I. But if we let them feel their power — they’ll overturn the world order.’

Du Guesclin spat. ‘You have brought this on us, messire. So many good knights are dead-’

Hawkwood laughed. ‘Ah, messire, you are better born than I — a mere English yeoman. You should know better than that. The Jacques are out for your blood because you have failed to defend them. I heard a tale a month back — pardon me, it does no credit to a French knight. A deputation of wealthy peasants came to a lord not far from here. My men had just burned their barns. They went to their lord and asked him if he would go and fight — with my men.’ Hawkwood smiled a grim smile. ‘He explained that he stood no chance at all of defeating a hundred Englishmen with just he and his son.’

Du Guesclin, his friend de Carriere and a dozen other French knights all nodded along.

‘And the leader of the peasants said, “We don’t care whether you win or lose, my lord. As we owe you our tillage whether it rains or the sun shines, so you owe us your very best effort in our defence, whether you win or lose. For this is the obligation of l’homme arme to the men who till the soil.’ Hawkwood looked around.

The French knights were silent.

‘And the lord said, “But we will fail. And die.”’ Hawkwood laughed. ‘And the leader of the peasants said, “Then go die, my lord. That is all we ask.”’

Du Guesclin was angry. His shoulders were tense under his blue jupon and I could see the muscles in his neck. ‘This does not justify the wholesale murder of my class,’ he said.

Hawkwood shrugged. ‘To the Jacques, it does. You have failed them.’

Du Guesclin turned on his heel. ‘We do not need to stay and listen to this.’ He walked away, taking a mass of Frenchmen with him. A few paces away, he whirled. ‘If you love them so much, why not fight for them? Eh? Why fight with us?’

‘You’re paying,’ Hawkwood laughed. ‘You’re paying me and a thousand other Englishmen to kill the peasants who pay the taxes that maintain you.’

Du Guesclin didn’t turn around. He walked away and his men followed him.

I winced.

‘That was impolitic,’ I hesitated. ‘I like him.’

Hawkwood grimaced as if he’d been hit. ‘Do you ever look at the blood, the dead peasants, the wrecked villages, the burned barns, and wonder what it’s all for?’ he asked.

I looked at the ground. ‘All the time,’ I admitted.

Hawkwood nodded. His jaw jutted slowly, as it did when he was moved by great emotion. ‘It’s our living, and never forget that. They are amateurs. They are not like us.’ He shook his head. ‘But sometimes. . I think it is all worthwhile if we destroy them. As individuals, many are fine men, but as a whole. .’ He shook his head.

‘But you are fighting for them,’ I said.

He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘They’re paying, lad. Take care of yourself first.’ He waved and shrugged. His shrug dismissed the suffering of France.

I had letters to the King of Navarre, so I went to his great pavilion and spent an hour cooling my heels on a bench with a dozen Gascons, all waiting for an audience. The King of Navarre’s star was climbing — his Spanish officers were haughty as cardinals, and a mere ‘English adventurer’, as I heard myself called, was unlikely to impress anyone, most especially as I declined to offer a bribe to the boy who tracked ‘appointments’.

After an hour, I saw a man in black and white parti-colour approaching. I wanted to vanish, but I wasn’t about to give up my place on the bench. It was the Bourc Camus, trailing men-at-arms, and he came to the bench. Two of his men seized it and dumped us all on the ground.

While he was laughing, I put my fist in his face.

Gascons fear nothing, it is true, and I wasn’t going to cow a dozen Gascons with a dagger, but neither was I capable of backing down. So I drew de Charny’s dagger and snapped the flat pommel into one miscreant’s jaw.

The rest of them took me seriously, so they formed a rough circle.

‘Eh, messire,’ said one gap-toothed rogue. ‘You will pay now.’

‘The King of Navarre sends to ask why this unseemly disturbance?’ said a man with an arrogant lisp to his French. He was as tall as I am, with broad shoulders and the belly most men get in middle age, but he was so big he commanded immediate respect. He looked at me.

Camus bounced to his feet. ‘This English bastard tried to steal my place,’ he said with a winning smile.

My heart was beating sixteen to the dozen, but I forced a smile, too. ‘Pardon me, messire, but I believe you, not I, are the bastard,’ I said.

Camus went white.

You know that bourc means bastard, eh? I’m sure a herald knows such things.

Camus’ hand went to his dagger.

I turned to the big man as if the Bourc didn’t exist. ‘Is it nothing to the King that I am here from the King of England’s Lieutenant in Gascony? I am not on some idle errand, messire.’ I looked at Camus, implying he was on an idle errand.

‘By Christ’s passion, you are a dead man,’ Camus said, and he came at me, dagger high.

I stopped his blow with my left wrist, the way every English boy learns, and the Navarrese men-at-arms parted us.

Suddenly Charles of Navarre was there.

He was of middling height, very handsome, with curling dark hair, a fine beard, sparkling dark eyes and a warmth that I usually associate with the most beautiful and clever women. He almost always wore a smile, and he had a way of fixing his gaze on you that made you feel you were the most important person in the world. Sadly, he also had a way of giving in to fits of childish temper that dispelled the illusion that he was a great man and left the observer with the feeling that the King of Navarre was less than he might be.

He had immense presence, though, and all the men immediately fell silent.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said softly, and turned his smile on each of us in turn, like a ray of sun on a cloudy day. ‘Friends, we are embarked on a high and dangerous empris, and many beautiful ladies, and many innocents, depend utterly on our good faith, our brave hearts and our strong arms. Is it right that any of you indulge in a private quarrel when so many depend on us against a rising tide of chaos?’

I bowed.

Camus whispered, ‘He cannot save you, little boy.’

I ignored Camus. ‘Your Grace, I have letters from the Lieutenant of Gascony. To whom shall I pass them?’

Navarre looked at me with very little interest. He gave a slight shrug — he was assessing the impact of his pretty speech on the crowd. The big Spaniard gave a small nod, and I stepped over to him, bowed and handed him the two scrolls of parchment that were addressed to the King of Navarre, whose domains, may I add, touched on Gascony in several places.

‘Martin Enriquez de Laccarra,’ he said, offering his hand to clasp. ‘I am the King’s gonfalonier. You are the English squire — Gold. There’s a Gold and a Black, yes?’

I had heard of him, of course, the captain of the Navarrese in Normandy. The Prince spoke highly of him as a knight. I was flattered that he shook my hand. ‘Black is my friend Richard,’ I said. ‘He is recovering from a sickness at Poissy.’

‘You two make good fame together — very proper,’ Enriquez said. ‘In brief, what does Sir John Cheverston want?’

‘He asks safe conducts for all his men, so he can exterminate the brigands in the high valleys, north and south. Even going over borders, if required.’ I explained about his army and the quest set him by our Prince.

King Charles passed me, going back to his pavilion. He paused in the curtained doorway, where, I think, he thought none could see him. He held up his right cuff, where I saw that he had a small mirror set in the cloth, and he used it to look at himself.

My friends, I’ve never seen a woman, even in the East, with a mirror attached to her clothes. Good God.

Enriquez saw what I saw, and effected not to notice.

‘You have a quarrel with the Bourc Camus,’ he asked quietly.

‘I do,’ I admitted. ‘None of my making.’

He shrugged. ‘My Prince has forbidden all forms of joust or duel until the peasants are crushed,’ he said. He smiled pleasantly enough, but something of his manner reminded me of Hawkwood, or Chandos. ‘I mean to see his will enforced.’

I bowed. ‘I will obey,’ I said.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I predict the King will sign your safe conducts as soon as I can catch his attention.’

Sam, John and I slept in Hawkwood’s camp in borrowed blankets.

The next day, servants brought us a breakfast of wine and stale bread with good soft cheese, then a French priest said Mass. Two Gascons tripped me and a third tried to kick me in the groin while I was down, but Sam broke one of the bastard’s fingers, quick as that.

Afterwards, Sir John surrounded me with his own men. His chief officer was John Thornbury, a solid man from the Midlands, a few years my senior and a head shorter, but already a famous fighter.

‘Camus hates you,’ he said, and I admitted this was true.

He laughed. ‘We’ll see you right, Will Gold.’ He spat. ‘Fucking Gascons, eh?’

I found myself quite popular with the English. I wasn’t used to popularity, but my recent feat of arms and my ‘official’ status acting for Sir John Cheverston gave me a name in an army full of famous men.

I liked it.

Reputation is everything — any boy knows as much. To enter a strange camp and discover that a thousand men know your name is a heady drink for a boy of seventeen.

At any rate, we were on the road after sunrise, and a little after midday we reached Mello, a small town twenty miles north of Paris, where, army rumour said, the leader of the rebels lived.

We made camp, observed at a distance by half a hundred cavalrymen. Sir John took us out from the camp, riding hard, to drive the enemy off, and we chased them north and east almost two miles, and saw their camp — a well-dug-in position on a round-crested ridge with steep sides. We sat our horses at the base of the slope, letting the animals breathe, while we looked up at the palisade at the top.

‘That’s steep,’ I said.

Sir John stroked his beard.

John Thornbury whistled. ‘They look pretty good,’ he said.

I started and pointed. Just above us, in a watch-port, were a dozen well-armed men in red and blue hoods.

Sir John looked at them under his hand. ‘Paris militia,’ he said.

‘But. . the King of Navarre is the master of the Paris militia!’ I said.

Sir John shrugged and smiled his small smile. ‘Today, he has chosen to be the brother-in-law of the King of France,’ he said. ‘Another day, he may choose to pose as the defender of Paris.’

We rode well to the north, in a great circle, looking for a hill that would overlook the peasant army, but we didn’t find one.

That night, men in our camp said their confessions and saw to their armour. The veterans went to sleep, and the new men — among whom I include most of the French knights — stayed awake all night bragging about their prowess.

Morning dawned and we all armed ourselves. An army of men-at-arms putting on their harness is like a nest of ants when a horse kicks it up: all at sixes and sevens, and I thought all morning that if the peasants had the sense to attack us at dawn, they might have won a great victory.

As it was. .

When we were fully armed, we learned that the King of Navarre had arranged a parley with the leader of the peasants, a local man named Guillaulme Cale. Martin Enriquez drew us up in three battles, with one mounted battle and two dismounted; I went with Sir John Hawkwood in the mounted battle. Bertrand du Guesclin was six horses to my left.

We stood by our chargers on a beautiful June morning and watched Guillaulme Cale ride down the steep hill from his nearly impregnable position. He rode across the fields between his camp and ours, with just two men, both of whom looked like knights, to my great surprise.

I expected the King of Navarre to ride out meet him, like the Prince at Poitiers with King John, but there were no cardinals here, and no rules. About fifty paces from our front lines, Enriquez and a dozen Navarrese men-at-arms closed around Cale and threw him from his horse. They bound him.

He was about twenty paces from me, and I heard him call out, ‘Is this your courtoise, monsieur the King?’

Charles was on foot, with a poleaxe. He was deep in conversation with one of the French knights, and he didn’t turn his head. Cale was dragged past him, kicking and demanding justice, and taken to the rear in our camp.

‘You gave me a safe conduct, you liar! Caitiff! God will punish you!’ cried the peasant leader.

He was beaten into silence.

All this was done in full view of the peasants on the hill. Many had come down the hill to see the parley, and more had come pouring out of their fortified camp at word that their leader was taken.

Enriquez trotted his charger across our front. He waved to Sir Robert Scot, who commanded the mounted men.

Scot closed his visor.

We all followed suit.

Next to me, Sir John said, ‘Through them — and straight up the hill before they can form. Or we’ll have a hard fight.’ He pointed at the crowd at the base of the hill.

We started forward to the sound of a trumpet. We went forward at a walk, harness jingling. The very harmony of Mars — the sound of horses and armour.

I had a borrowed lance, and I blessed du Guesclin for his patient hours of training me. I’d have been terrified of using a lance in a crowd this dense, but now I felt confident. Indeed, riding in a cavalry charge is the closest a mere man can feel to God’s angels. The power is immense. The feeling of power is. . like what priests prate of.

And riding through badly armed, poorly disciplined peasants is a special, evil pleasure. They stood in arms against us. They were our enemies, I had no doubt of that. I owed them for Peter.

But they were poor devils, for all that. The better armed men stayed together in clumps, and we ignored them and smashed through the men who turned to flee. It’s always that way when cavalry rides down infantry.

I’ve heard men brag about how many Jacques they killed that day. I’ll save my bragging for more worthy foes. I killed my share.

We rode over them, and up their long hill — diagonally to save our horses. Two hundred good spearmen could have held us all day on that slope, but after smashing the front line — if you can call it a line — we rode unopposed up the ridge and fell upon their camp, and the whole peasant army broke and ran for their lives.

And died.

Down on the plain, the better armed men reformed in our wake and met the whole of the King’s battle, all the dismounted knights, English and French, who went through them like the scythe cuts the wheat.

The lucky ones died there.

The unlucky ones were taken.

Their camp was full of women, and they died hard. None of them surrendered, that I remember. They knew what was in store for them.

Every child in that camp was spitted on a sword.

I have seen every horror war can offer, but here was something I didn’t expect: the worst atrocities weren’t done by us. The English did their part in the battle, and most of them rode or walked back to camp.

It was the local French knights who killed the children.

The worst was Camus. He tried to coral a group of women and coax them to surrender, and when they fought, he promised them horrible deaths and made sure his promises were carried out. I was dismounted — Goldie had taken a spear point in his breast and I was seeing to my horse — when he ordered his men to kill them all.

I didn’t want to hear any more, so I got my armoured leg over my saddle.

‘Leave one!’ he shouted. ‘Flay her face and leave her alive to tell others not to defy me!’

Sam Bibbo grabbed my reins from me and rode down the hill — I couldn’t stop him.

At the base of the hill, Sam put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re a nice lad,’ he said. ‘Soft, in some ways. That’s what happens — yon. Worse when a town is stormed.’

I gritted my teeth. ‘Camus is a worm. A serpent. A demon from hell.’ I thought of the man with half his face flayed away, and I knew who had massacred that town.

Sam shrugged. ‘That’s as maybe. You may do as thee list — after I take you to camp. You cannot rescue them.’ He waved at a dozen wounded men — our whole tale of casualties. ‘Poor John took an arrow in the leg — bad luck. I’ll see him well bedded.’

I followed him.

I felt like scum.

It wasn’t that I could have done anything.

It was only that, like the French lord in Hawkwood’s story, I could have died.

The pursuit of the Jacques went on for a day and a night, and whole villages were wiped out — every human creature killed — for ten miles around our camp. The celebrations started immediately, with terrified, peasant-born servants offering us wine and bread made by men and women whose blood was now fertilizing the earth.

I didn’t sleep well. John Hawkwood did, though. I know, as he shared his tent with me.

Thanks to his good offices, my safe conducts were signed by King Charles. Since we were less than a day’s ride from the Dauphin’s castle at Meaux, I collected my goods, thanked Sir John and made to leave.

Sir John rode with me until we were a mile or so from camp. He pointed to a group of riders shadowing us.

‘Bertucat means to kill you,’ he said.

‘I’d be pleased to meet him any time,’ I said. ‘When it is one to one, and not twenty of his against three of mine.’

Hawkwood nodded. ‘Twenty to three is more the Bourc’s speed. Can you take him?’

I nodded.

Hawkwood nodded back. ‘I think so, too. If I can arrange it, I’ll send word. It would do great things for your renown. And I’d like to see him wiped away, like a stain on the earth.’

‘I should be back in a day or two,’ I said.

Hawkwood embraced me and we were away.

Meaux is a mighty town, with the fortress of Marche on the opposite bank, and walls as high as ten men. It rises straight out of an island in the river, and has two bridges with wicket gates on each.

I thought — indeed, we all thought — that the rebellion was broken. So Sam and I rode along roads peopled only by the dead — mostly men cut down from behind as they fled, by the flower of French chivalry.

We passed south of Clermont, and the bodies dwindled away to none, then we came across a party of tired knights. They were all local men, knights of the Beauvais, and they saluted us as we passed.

‘We had a sharp fight this morning, messires,’ one called out. ‘The curs are not yet beaten.’

I wanted no part of them, so I rode on.

But as we saw Meaux rising out of the valley in the distance — you can see it from eight miles away — we began to see the size of the army laying siege to it.

An army the size of the one we’d just faced, or larger.

I had the wildest notion — what if every peasant in the world had risen against their lords? What if this was the end of the world? I’ve heard that in monasteries during the Plague, men died believing the whole of the human race had been destroyed, and looking at the host gathered against the walls of Meaux, I wondered the same.

We turned our weary horses north. I changed from my riding horse to Goldie and loosened my sword in its scabbard.

‘We should go back,’ Sam said.

That meant riding half the night, in the dark, on narrow, unmarked French lanes.

‘No,’ I said. We rode on down to the river Marne.

‘We’ll be killed,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll offer odds on it.’

‘I’ll take that wager,’ I said.

The ferry was open.

I’ll not belabour the point, but imagine what the ferryman was like. He cared nothing for death or rebellion. He’d never heard of Guillaulme Cale. He demanded an exorbitant fee, then he took us over the river to the north bank. The peasant army was on the south.

I felt vindicated and Sam laughed. ‘I’ll be happy to pay,’ he said.

At nightfall, we approached the royal castle of Marche from the north. We were challenged by a party of horsemen in sight of the gate, and when I said I was a messenger for the Lieutenant of Gascony, one of the men-at-arms approached.

‘What’s your name, sir?’ he asked. I knew him immediately.

He was Jean de Grailly, the Captal de Buch. I’d seen him lead the charge at Poitiers.

I raised my visor. ‘William Gold,’ I said. ‘I was at Poitiers, my lord.’

I was embraced and taken home to the castle, to dinner.

The Dauphin wasn’t at Marche. He was away in Burgundy, raising an army to fight Charles of Navarre. As it proved, he needn’t have bothered, but when he went, he had no way of knowing.

In the meantime, Etienne Marcel had sent an army of Parisian militia to snatch the Dauphin at his headquarters, at Meaux. And the Mayor of the town opened the gates to the Parisians.

The Parisians joined hands with the Jacques.

Wait, lads. I know you want to hear about the battles, but there’s a delicious irony to all this. Charles of Navarre was making himself a hero to the nobility of France in crushing the Jacques. The Dauphin was ruining his standing as the ‘first noble’ by ignoring the rising.

But — at least wherever I was — the Jacques were allied with Marcel’s communal troops, and they were acting for the King of Navarre. God knows, the attempt to seize the Dauphin at Meaux was all for King Charles.

I’ve known a lot of treason and seen many men change sides — benidictee, in Italy it was our daily bread — but Charles of Navarre was the only King I ever saw abandon a winning cause, and betray it to the enemy, when he had been leading it. I won’t say the Jacques thought they were fighting for King Charles.

They were just poor fools led by the nose.

Which didn’t make them any the less dangerous. They had thousands of men packed around Meaux, and inside the town — a rich town. They held the walls and the citadel, and they were building engines to batter at Marche. They were desperate — all the survivors of Mello fled to them, so they knew what was coming. They were determined to take Marche and use the Dauphin — or at least his wife and children — as hostages.

I had ridden into this trap like a fool — I had lorded it over Sam when we crossed at the ferry.

When he saw what we had at Marche — a party of military pilgrims returning from fighting in Prussia, led by the Captal and the famous Count of Foix, and the lord of the castle, the Sieur de Hangst and his conroy — we had perhaps sixty knights. Sam Bibbo was a fifth of all the English archers — the rest were in the Captal’s tail — and we had another twenty crossbowmen, and when he saw what we’d joined, he looked at me and laughed.

‘I may not pay you yet,’ he said.

Perhaps a hundred armed men, plus twenty male servants. The Princess had thirty women — all the daughters and wives of great nobles of France — and another fifty female servants, as well as a small horde of noble children. As I say, when Sam saw what we’d ridden into, he laughed in my face.

‘All safe now, eh, sir?’ he asked.

‘Who nursed you when you were sick?’ I asked. ‘Who rescued you when you fell from your horse and hit your head?’

‘And why was I there in the first place, I wonder?’ he asked.

‘We’re not dead yet,’ I said.

‘Not for lack of trying,’ he insisted.

The trouble was, we weren’t provisioned to stand a siege. The other problem was, we had too many hot-headed young knights and too many noble girls.

Women complicate everything.

I hadn’t been in that castle an hour when a pair of young women, wearing, may I add, clothes more daring than anything my girls in Bordeaux ever wore, confronted me on the stairs.

‘What is your name and style, messire?’ asked the taller of the two. She wore a flowered silk gown that clung to her hips and bound under her breasts. Her hair was down — a style I’d hardly ever seen, because women in military camps keep their hair under caps for all sorts of reasons.

I noted that her surcoat — also silk — had buttons on the side, under her arms, and that the gown was so tight the cloth puckered at the buttons and left gaps between.

Where you could see flesh.

Gentles, I don’t think I’d seen a woman who was alive and hearty in a month. That noble sprig was perhaps seventeen — my own age — and her womanliness burned like fire from between those close-bound buttons, so that I almost felt I could smell her, like a stallion smells a mare.

I was abashed. I don’t think I’d ever had cause to speak to a noble girl. On the other hand, I had learned the knack that women were, for the most part, women, and much the same as men. So, with about the same effort it took me to force a smile at the Bourc, I pushed one across my teeth at this apparition of Venus. ‘William Gold,’ I said.

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Never heard of you. Nonetheless, should you not be in your armour, messire? Perhaps doing some deed of arms, and not here in the castle, safe with the women? Eh?’

Had I been thirty years of age and a little more experienced, I’d have made an elegant answer — mentioned my prowess in riding to their rescue across half of France, for example.

Instead, I blushed, and stammered something about fatigue.

‘Fie! Sir Knight, we are a castle of maidens against an army of dogs. Get to the walls! And let us hear no more of your being tired.’ She and her companion, a pert, blonde thing a foot shorter in royal-blue wool with silken flowers in her hair and sleeves so long they trailed on the steps, pushed past me and vanished down the stairs.

‘You get to that,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll have a nap.’

In fact, the castle was full to bursting with beautiful women. The nuns were beautiful, the Dauphine herself was beautiful, and she surrounded herself with the prettiest — and richest — women in France.

I had no armour against them, and nor did any other man. Even grown knights who should have known better, like Jean de Grailly and the Count of Foix — a subtle bastard if every there was one — were unable to stop them from directing our defence. Young knights armed themselves, mounted their chargers and rode out across the fortified bridges, looking for a deed of arms.

Several were killed, dragged down and hacked to death, and the only thing that saved the rest of us was that we wanted our deeds of arms to be visible to the audience on the tall towers, and most of the peasants and Parisian militia were too quick-witted to linger under our walls.

It was a great time of vows, in my youth, and men would make vows without a thought. Amazing vows. I made a few myself, and suffered with some eye patches and the like. It was the vows that killed us in the castle of Marche — the vows and the lack of supplies. It was a great fortress, but the peasants had caught it unprepared. So while the young men swore not to bathe until they’d killed ten peasants, and other such pretty things, we had two days’ fodder for the horses and four days’ food at half rations. And 100 men against 10,000.

And a small army of nubile beauties determined to see us act out the chansons de geste under the walls.

War is never what you expect it to be. Sometimes, it is like theatre — like a passion play. Sometimes it is like the Black Plague — all death and horror.

Sometimes it has an element of humour.

I rose late the second morning. I think, now, that I had a touch of fever, and I was only just recovering. I’d been riding and fighting, and I’d missed a great deal of sleep. So my first morning at Marche, Sam let me stay abed — in a real bed, raised off the floor, in a small solar. I remember it had crude armorial frescoes on the walls and I thought it was a palace.

I awoke when Perkin, my English potboy from Poissy, brought me hippocras. He’d arranged for my two shirts to be washed, and all my caps, and they were dry and crisply ironed.

I felt like hugging him. That made me think of Rob, dead and buried in the damp soil of the Seine Valley.

Younger than me.

‘A party of gentlemen has just gone out to fight,’ he said. ‘Some of the older knights tried to stop them.’ He shrugged.

He brought me a basin of clean, hot water, and he’d borrowed me a razor. Considering I’d barely talked to him, he was bidding fair to be the best servant I’d ever had. Rob struggled to curry my horse, bless the boy, whereas Perkin seemed at home with the whole routine.

‘Whose razor?” I asked.

‘Milord de Grailly,’ he said proudly. ‘Eh, sir, mind the steel — it’ll rust if you look at it.’ This from a wizened lump of twelve years, half my size.

‘You sound like a Londoner, imp.’ I grinned.

‘So do you, sir.’ He produced a clean, dry linen towel. ‘Sit on the stool, sir, and I’ll make you trim for the ladies. Of whom there are a great many, and like the flowers of the fucking field. Begging your pardon.’

I laughed.

‘Don’t laugh, sir, or I’ll nick you — just when I have your shirt clean.’ He tried the razor on me and clucked like a hen. ‘Sit tight.’

Suddenly he vanished. There was some talk, and he came in followed by a man of twenty in a fine pair of boots and a stained leather jupon. Perkin had a strop in his hand.

‘I’m not letting it out of my sight,’ said the young man, then he stopped. ‘Pardon, my lord.’

‘Think nothing of it. Come in and share my hippocras.’ I motioned to the other stool. My solar was the size of a lady’s closet, you have to imagine.

He was my own age — smaller, but his hands looked as hard as mine. ‘Squire?’ I asked.

He grinned. ‘To Milord de Grailly,’ he said. ‘One of six,’ he added. ‘My da is one of his great friends.’ He grinned. ‘Tom Folville.’

I considered that this was exactly the kind of sprig of nobility who had tormented me during my first campaign. On the other hand. .

Perkin touched up the razor and handed the squire the strop. ‘Nice kit,’ he said.

‘You know how to use that thing,’ the squire said. ‘By the saints, Perkin, will you teach me?’

‘Mayhap after the peasants kill us all,’ Perkin nodded, ‘I’ll have time.’ He grinned.

If you haven’t guessed that Perkin was as great a find as Sam, well, think again. He had that gift of making people like him. Lords and commons, men and women. He wasn’t big or handsome. He was brave enough in a pinch, but he was not a doughty man.

Well, you’ll hear more of him.

He shaved me, all the while telling me the state of the food in the castle and how little fodder was left for the horses. He didn’t tell it like gossip — he noted where he’d heard each titbit and what validity he attributed to the teller.

I hadn’t been shaved neatly in so long I’d become used to looking like some wild hermit in the tales of Arthur. It felt odd to have most of my beard gone. He put beeswax into my moustache.

‘Ladies about,’ he said with a twinkle.

‘How’d you come to be a potboy in Poissy?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘My knight died,’ he said. ‘You came along, eh? And you needed me.’ He smiled.

That was that.

‘You are from London, though,’ I said.

‘Temple Bar,’ he said proudly. ‘Apprentice tailor.’ He shrugged.

‘I was to be a goldsmith,’ I said suddenly.

He grinned. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I aim to be a famous knight, meself.’

Well, well.

Groomed and clean, wearing clean clothes and with all the lice out of my arming coat, I went down into the hall. There were no women to be seen. I ate some bread and cheese, and walked across the hall to where the curtain wall steps rose into the smoky heights of the rafters. Since no one challenged me, I climbed the steps and walked out onto the wall.

There I found twenty young women on the wall, watching a fight on the bridge.

Most of them had their hands to their mouths.

One had already fainted.

I leaned out over the wall and saw why.

A dozen young knights — on foot — were trying to hold the main bridge over the river. Two were down.

‘Where are the other knights?’ I snapped at the nearest girl. ‘Where is the Captal?’

My pretty friend from the day before, still wearing her ‘gates of hell’, pointed down the north wall. ‘They have gone across country!’ she shouted.

Sometimes, folly is so rampant it’s hard to credit. But the party from Prussia had elected to probe north and find food, and in the absence of any professional soldiers, a dozen young sprigs had vowed to hold the bridge all day.

I watched for ten breaths.

‘Christ almighty,’ I said aloud.

My pretty friend put her hand on my chest. A very, very affecting gesture.

‘Will you — save them?’ she asked me.

Her eyes were a beautiful hazel-brown. She had a snub nose, and a dress that showed little glimpses of her naked flanks. She was tall, and better born than me, and she was, in effect, asking me to go die for her.

‘Yes,’ I said into her eyes.

I armed as fast as I ever had in my life. I had Perkin to help, and Jean de Grailly’s squire. Tom Folville got my arms on me, laced them to my hauberk and stood back.

‘I could come with you,’ he said.

I thought about it. To be honest, I thought that if he came with me, it might lessen the glory, but there were an awful lot of militia on the bridge, and only the eight knights.

‘Will you run when I say run, and retreat when I say retreat?’ I asked.

He nodded, his eyes huge.

I wondered suddenly if he had been hoping that I would say no.

‘Ever fought before? For real?’ I asked.

‘Every day, in Prussia,’ he said.

That was reassuring. I had my legs laced and Perkin was closing the straps. ‘Get in your harness,’ I said.

He vanished. Perkin finished the buckles on my legs and got my breast and back — opened them on the hinges and closed them again and began buckling me in. ‘This doesn’t really fit you,’ he said.

‘What?’ I asked. I’d worn that harness for more than a year.

‘It’s too big. Too much play at the hips.’ He slapped my back and the backplate moved. ‘Made for a fatter man. Can’t be helped. Hold out your hands.’

He put my gauntlets on, raised my helmet, slipped the aventail over my head and seated the cloth liner with two practiced jerks, one front, one back.

I took my longsword and walked, clanking softly, down the hall and down the steps to the main hall, then out into the bright June sun. There were four crossbowman on the bridge gate. I turned and looked up at the battlement, and there they were: twenty beautiful women.

Well.

Tom came at a run — high boots, a good brigantine, plate arms, and an open-faced basinet. Let me remind you that most men wore them open-faced back then.

‘Stay with me and keep men off my back,’ I said. ‘You’re too lightly armed to step into them. Understand me?’

He nodded soberly.

Perkin appeared with a pottery cup of. . water. ‘Drink,’ he said.

Sam came across the courtyard in his shirtsleeves and hose. His hair was unbound, and he had his bow and a big quiver of arrows. He shook his head. ‘Lost your wits, lad?’ he asked.

I raised my visor. ‘I won’t be long,’ I said.

‘By St George,’ he began, but a fluttering handkerchief caught his eye. ‘Good Christ,’ he said. ‘Women.’

Perkin collected the cup, refilled it and handed it to Tom.

Sam tossed his hair. ‘If I kill ten men, you think I’ll get one of they?’

Perkin smiled.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘professionally speaking, yon’s a fine audience. Just don’t die.’

I nodded again.

The sergeants on the gate got it open. Suddenly, there was a great deal of screaming from the ladies on the wall.

I thought it was for me, so I pranced my way out onto the bridge like, well, like a young man performing for young women. This was just like a London square, except that I had a lot more armour.

The rights and wrongs of it meant nothing to me, in case you wonder.

But as soon as I was clear of the gate, I saw what they were screaming about. Two of the young knights were down.

I ran.

Running in plate legs is — not as hard as it sounds, but it requires some practice. Legs are soft. Steel is not soft. Everything has to fit, or the top of your greave pounds into the top of your instep, or the back of your greave slams into your ankle, or your knee gets clamped in the main plates of the articulation. .

Really, there’s a lot to go wrong.

I ran.

It was about fifty paces to where the two knights were down. They were in full harness, but the nearer of the two had a Jacques on his chest and another towering over him with an axe.

I didn’t save him.

Sam did. His first arrow spitted the lad on the knight’s chest the way a butcher spikes a carcass.

The axe man swung, and buried his axe in the Jacques who’d just swallowed Sam’s arrow. Bad luck.

The axe man could see me coming. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. He got his axe up over his shoulder and stepped back for room to swing.

I cut off his hands. Maybe not ‘off ‘, but I didn’t stop to check.

Then I knocked him flat as his limbs pumped blood onto the cobbles of the bridge.

The man behind him got my pommel in his face. I caught the tip of my sword in my left hand and started using the whole weapon like a two-handed dagger. I ignored blocks and attacks — that’s what you do in armour, when your opponents have no armour. Anything an untrained man can throw one-handed can be ignored.

Maybe not always, but in a crisis.

Some of them had staves and many had spears. A few had axes or pole-hammers. Of all those, the spears are the most dangerous if well-used. Spear blows I had to turn. But some got through. Early on, one came in and hit my faceplate, raised it a fraction and went in under the plate, slicing along my cheek and punching in between my head and the helmet liner.

I killed the bastard.

I was sure I was dead. I had a spear sticking out of my helmet.

It fell out.

There was some blood, but I didn’t seem to be dead.

I made it to the second downed man. Another of the young knights had straddled him and was holding his ground.

I stepped up next to him and roared, ‘Form a line!’

I took a breath, knocked a spear aside with a flick of my blade, turned my whole body — one thing you can’t do well in harness is turn your head — and shouted, ‘Tom, kill everyone behind us!’

Then I faced front, made a sweeping two-handed parry and started clearing space. I made wide, sweeping two-handed cuts, and the unarmoured men stepped back.

One of the young French knights stepped up on my left.

Something hit my leg, caught in the butterfly on my right knee, and suddenly my leg was bleeding. I stepped back onto something squishy.

Tom had a man in red and blue up against the bridge railing, and another was crouched over the clothyard shaft in his guts, the red blood running between his fingers. He was praying to the Virgin.

A fourth knight joined our impromptu line, and we filled the bridge.

In front of me, a big sergeant in good mail raised a huge, spiked club — what the Flemings call a ‘Guden Tag’. He called, ‘They are only four! We can-’

One of Sam’s arrows buzzed over my head like a huge wasp and struck him, and dust came off his mail and coat. He looked at the arrow and I thought, You never think it will be you.

‘At them!’ I called, and the four of us charged.

They gave way.

We killed a few. I was already tiring. Armour makes you almost invulnerable, and it’s really very comfortable, but when you fight on foot in armour, you spend your strength like a drunkard in a brothel. And I had not yet learned to save my strength.

Nevertheless, we cleared the bridge all the way to the chapel at the far end — the Meaux bank.

A crossbow bolt hit my breastplate like a punch in the gut and I staggered.

The man next to me took one in his vambrace, and it deformed the metal and broke his arm.

‘Back!’ I shouted. Christ, why hadn’t they just pelted us with crossbows from the first?

The whole thing was insane.

‘We can’t retreat,’ said the man at my right. ‘Ladies are watching.’

‘We cleared the bridge, messieurs. They will have to deem that enough chivalry for one morning. I bid you retreat, messieurs.’

I suited action to word.

Another bolt struck, and this one whanged off my helmet.

The man on my right took a bolt in his thigh, right through his cuisse, which, on examination, proved to be boiled leather over iron splints.

He gave a squawk and fell, and the Jacques came for us in a wave.

Paternoster, qui est in caelis.

We were in a lot of trouble.

The knight with the broken arm had already walked back. He was halfway across the bridge, and he was the smartest of the lot.

As the knight on my right went down, he stumbled into me, and by habit I let go my sword with my left hand — I had my right on the hilt and my left near the point — and caught him. I had him from behind and my luck was holding, so I began to back across the bridge, dragging the young scapegrace.

The Jacques wanted him, though, and they bayed like dogs as they ran after us and started stabbing with their spears. These weren’t peasants with pitchforks, but prosperous men in hauberk who probably served in the Arriere-ban. But, to be honest, they were mostly stabbing at the man I was dragging, so I kept backing.

The man on my left turned and ran. I won’t say he didn’t choose wisely; I’ll just say that he left me.

I backed another few paces, and Tom ripped into the men on my left like a harrow cutting spring earth, and bounced away like a boy playing ball. He was light on his feet. I had time to admire him.

I made another few steps. There were blows to my feet and blows to the back of my legs, chest and arms. A hail of blows.

Every step became harder. Oddly, it wasn’t the weight of my armour, although that was something, nor the pain of my left leg harness, which was killing me — I didn’t know till later that a chance blow had cut my thigh strap — it was the weight of the French knight, all on one arm. A body is an unwieldy thing at the best of times, and an armoured body is heavy, floppy and very smooth. And I couldn’t quite get my arm all the way around him.

Tom bought me a moment’s respite.

I decided that I had to change grips. I tried to hoist the wounded, or dead, man on my hip, and I lost him and he fell.

He screamed, because he fell on the crossbow bolt, which was firmly wedged in his leg.

On a positive note, he was alive.

There were a dozen adversaries right there. In a fight, one thing can lead to another as firmly and logically as one note leads you to sing the next at Mass. I parried a spear-thrust, a half-sword parry that turned my body to the side, left leg forward. A spear shaft slammed into my left side, knocking me off balance, but I stepped with it and snapped a cut up from below. Then I hit something and the spearmen fell away — I swept my sword up over my head and flicked it from side to side, the way a man with a scythe cuts grain.

I thrust one poor bastard though the body, and my sword stuck fast. I took a blow, staggered and got the tip free, rolled my wrist in a little windmill and drew blood.

Tom finished a man I’d wounded, then killed his partner.

I couldn’t breathe. I’d reached a point of fatigue where I couldn’t raise my arms.

I looked back.

Sam was on the bridge. He had four arrows in the fingers of his bow hand, and he ran at us.

The Jacques nearest me flinched away.

I got a deep lungful of air, bent over and passed my sword blade under the French knight’s arms, so I had him from behind, pinned against me, with the blade in front like a deadly embrace. He slumped forward and the blade bent.

If it broke, we were done.

I began to shuffle back as fast as I could go.

Sam’s first arrow picked up the man closest to me and spun him around like a heavy punch.

As I stumbled back, Sam leaped up on a bridge stanchion for a clear shot, balanced a moment and loosed into the next Jacques, who fell noisily. I gained another three paces.

Tom blocked a spear thrust.

Sam feathered a third man.

He had one more arrow, and he showed it to the Jacques. He flicked them two fingers and they cursed and growled, then he drew his great bow all the way to his ear and held it there, in their faces. Tom spiked the boldest fellow in the knee, and we gained five more shuffing paces.

The castle’s crossbowmen loosed a volley, all together — six or seven bolts that felled the front rank of the men on the bridge in a spray of blood — and we were in the gate.

My French knight was alive.

I wasn’t sure I was, and I sat in the dirt and bled for what seemed to me a long time.

Perkin appeared. He handed me a cup of water and I drained it, then another and another. He began to unbuckle things.

My hazel-eyed Venus appeared. I was sitting on a barrel in the yard with Perkin under my arm, unlacing my left arm harness while I drank water with my right hand. She curtseyed.

‘You were brilliant,’ she said. ‘The Dauphine sends you this as a token of her esteem, messire.’

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I don’t think I’d ever wanted a woman as much.

She had an embroidered riband in her hand, and she was, I think, a little put out that I wasn’t leaping to my feet. She leaned down.

I smiled at her. ‘My lady, I beg your pardon, but I’m not at my best,’ I said.

‘You could unlace his right shoulder,’ Perkin said.

‘Oh!’ said my beautiful visitor. She took the cup from my right hand and drew off the gauntlet. She smiled at me and draped my right arm over her shoulder as Perkin had my left.

‘There’s blood-’ I said.

‘Christ on the cross,’ Perkin muttered. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

But my chivalrous lady reached in and unlaced the right harness at the groin — her eyes flicked to mine — and then she unbuckled the straps inside the thigh — one, two — and brought her hand away covered in blood.

She smiled at me and licked at the blood on her fingers.

I swear to you.

‘I love a brave man,’ she said.

By our sweet and gentle saviour, I was ready to be transported to heaven in that instant — or to kill every Jacques in the town.

Or to have her on the straw.

She wiped her bloody hand on her fine gown and got to the buckles on the greaves. She and Perkin took the whole right leg off in one pull.

There was a lot of blood in my hose.

And then I was gone.

I awoke when the hot iron touched the back of my leg. I wanted to scream, but there was something nasty clenched between my teeth.

My first thought was, Sweet Christ, I’ve lost my leg. And it was my last.

I wasn’t out long. A barber was rubbing ointment over the whole wound, and it hurt as if all the demons of hell had decided to torment my right knee.

Then he pasted honey over the ointment. He looked at me. ‘It’s really nothing,’ he said. ‘Happens to horses all the time — get a wound right on a blood vessel. Easy physic, if I get to it in time.’ He held out his hand and Perkin handed him a length of fine white linen, which he began to wrap around the wound.

Perkin leaned me forward and looked into my eyes. ‘You in your right mind?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

He smiled and handed me a cup of mint tisane with honey. ‘Drink this. Here, chew on these,’ he said. He handed me two wizened red things like dried flowers. They had a wonderful taste.

‘Chew. Chew more. Now spit,’ he said, holding out his hand.

I obeyed.

‘Now drink the rest of the cup,’ he said.

The surgeon tied off the cloth. ‘Change it twice a day. Tell me if the flesh gets proud.’ He smiled. ‘Horses don’t get gangrene,’ he said, then he bowed and withdrew.

‘What was that stuff?’ I asked.

‘Drink it all,’ he said.

I complied.

He took the cup. ‘Good night, m’lord.’

It always made me feel funny when men addressed me as ‘my lord’, as I was lord of nothing but a horse, a sword and some armour.

I lay back, wondering what the sharp-tasting drug had been.

There was a very quiet knock and my chivalrous friend opened the door. She smiled sweetly and slipped in, carrying a wax taper in a stick. ‘The Dauphine says one of us must sit with you all night,’ she said.

She had on a plain working woman’s kirtle with an apron.

‘I’m sorry that I bled on your lovely gown,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I will wear it at court. My dear man, there is no better adornment. I will say, ‘Oh, that’s the blood of William Gold, who saved the Duke de Bourbon on the Bridge of Meaux. I was helping him with his armour.’

There was another knock, and she went to the door and took a covered cup.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘It’s honeyed milk with a little spice. My father used to take it when. . he was hurt.’ She smiled.

I had seen rings on the fingers of the hand holding the cup.

‘Am I being served by all the Dauphine’s ladies?’ I asked.

‘Two at a time,’ she said.

‘Am I so dangerous?’ I asked.

‘I imagine that you are quite fearsome to your enemies, messire,’ she said. For the first time since the courtyard, she let her eyes meet mine. ‘But as I have a high heart of my own, I believe that I can meet you in an encounter — alone. I felt that two of us might put you. . at a disadvantage.’

‘Ah, mademoiselle, I’m afraid I am no match for you, and you alone have me at a grave disadvantage,’ I said. I’d listened to a romance or two. The girls at the Three Foxes used to read them aloud, those as could read. And players would recite them. The Provencal ones and the Italians were the best.

She settled gracefully on the edge of my bed. ‘Drink from our cup,’ she said.

‘Does the cup come with a kiss of friendship?’ I asked.

She leaned over, almost bored, and kissed me lightly on the lips. I caught her — my hand against her back — and kissed her harder.

I’m not sure what I expected from a high-born girl. But I didn’t expect her mouth to melt open under mine, and for her to lean into me and breathe into my mouth.

Later, she said, ‘Did you expect me, then?’

I denied it, and she jumped off the bed and hit me lightly. ‘Liar!’ she said. ‘I’m too predictable. A light of love.’

‘My sweet and beautiful friend, I had no expectation but of an uncomfortable night with a nasty wound.’ I smiled at her — winningly, I hope.

She frowned. ‘And yet you chewed a clove. I can taste it in your mouth.’

‘Medicine,’ I said.

‘Only for foul breath,’ she said, but she laughed. ‘Perhaps our horse doctor uses it.’

‘Please come back,’ I said, patting my narrow bedstead.

‘No, messire. Too many such kisses and a girl may find herself with an unwanted swelling about the waist.’ She smiled. ‘Do you think my blood is any less hot than yours?’

I knew the answer to that.

‘I do hope that you stay on watch all night,’ I said, ‘because I’m not sure my strength is up to two or three or four of you.’

‘Fie!’ she said, swatting me. ‘That was ungentle.’

‘Benidictee! You may tax me, and I may not tax you back.’ I was getting the pace of her conversation.

She smiled. ‘Precisely, messire. I am to be adored, not to be teased.’

‘I could, perhaps, adore you more effectively if I knew your name.’ I smiled.

She nodded. ‘I am Emile de Clermont.’

I put my hand on hers without thinking about it. ‘Your father was the Marshal of Normandy?’

She dropped her eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘I met him. At Paris. With the Dauphin.’

‘You did?

‘Last autumn. I was acting as courier for the Prince of Wales. Your father came to the gate of the Louvre, fully armed. We-’ I smiled. ‘We almost fought. Par dieu, we were so cold and wet.’ I smiled at her. ‘Clermonts must be destined to rescue me.’

I was prattling on in this manner when I realized that she was crying. Like my touch to her hand, her tears were not in the game. She was truly crying.

‘They killed him,’ she said. ‘By My lady the Virgin, the canaille killed him. And two days ago, I saw my mother’s castle burn. Christ — I want to be braver than this.’ She stood up. ‘I’m sorry, Master Gold, you are a better man than I thought. Let go my hand.’

Instead, I pulled. I didn’t pull hard.

In a fight, you can learn everything — everything — from an opponent at the moment when your swords meet. The contact of the two blades is so intimate that a more experienced swordsman can read intentions, skills and weaknesses in one quick beat of a man’s heart.

How much more, then, can a boy or girl learn from the touch of a hand?

She didn’t want to go.

She came into my arms and turned her head away.

I wiped her tears with my free hand and then licked my fingers.

‘That’s not funny!’ she said. ‘You are mocking me.’

‘Perhaps,’ I admitted. ‘You are afraid.’

‘So? I’m a weak woman. Women are afraid of everything. So I’m told.’ She was pulling away.

‘I was afraid today,’ I said. She relaxed.

‘You’d have been some sort of a monster if you hadn’t been, I think,’ she said.

‘So I can be afraid, and you cannot?’ I asked.

She began to relax against me. ‘If I just lie here,’ she said, ‘will you — not entice me to do as I would rather do?’

‘Depends,’ I said.

‘On what?’ she asked.

‘On whether you lie on my right knee or not,’ I said.

Much later, she said, ‘You were an apprentice goldsmith?’

‘Why so shocked? I can kill your enemies and repair your jewels.’ She laughed and then burst into tears. ‘You are very much not what I expected an English knight to be.’

I had enough experience of women to know not to explore every comment.

She had a bad dream and gave a low scream.

I woke her up.

‘They’re going to kill us all,’ she said.

‘Not unless they get better armour and some siege machines,’ I said. Will, the bold, bluff English squire, that was me.

Suddenly she was kissing me.

I’d been the most honorable of men for long, dark, pain-filled hours, and suddenly, in heartbeats, her kirtle was gone and we were. . far beyond what might have been agreed, if such a thing could be discussed.

She hoisted my shirt.

‘Sweet Emile,’ I said.

‘Psst,’ she said. ‘I will be dead in two days.’

I pulled her shift over her head. ‘You will not, on my honour.’

She laughed, the way I have learned women laugh when you utterly fail to understand them.

And there was no sleep after that.

She dressed, kissed me and went out just as the stars dimmed. The blonde girl in the blue wool dress came in directly and looked at me with a fiercely disapproving glare.

My knee hurt like fire. I was in a castle out of food, under siege by a sea of enemies who intended our destruction.

I couldn’t have been happier.

My disapproving blonde friend sat primly, as far across the solar as she could manage.

I chivalrously went to sleep.

The older knights returned at first light, and I was awakened by the clatter of their hooves on the bridge.

In the second hour after matins, Jean de Grailly came. He praised me, I praised his squire Tom, and he explained that they’d brought in very little food.

‘We think we’ll mount every man-at-arms in the castle and sortie,’ he said. ‘Perhaps cut our way through the canaille. The Count of Foix believes we can lift the siege. The Dauphin is just two days north of us, and the King of Navarre is a day’s march away.’ He paused. ‘The Dauphine says she would rather die than be rescued by the King of Navarre.’

‘My lord, I can understand that sentiment,’ I said.

De Grailly laughed. ‘And I, too! Can you ride?’

I tested the leg. ‘If I was helped onto my horse,’ I suggested.

‘Excellent. You are a man after my own heart. I might even mistake monsieur for a Gascon.’ He grinned. ‘I will send your squire to arm you in the second hour after midday.’

‘In that case, my lord, I’ll eat,’ I said.

‘I trust you slept well,’ he asked me, and I swear his eyes sparkled.

‘As much as I needed,’ I agreed.

He grinned. ‘Very like a Gascon.’

Perkin was my next visitor. ‘How was my lord’s night?’ he asked.

‘Are you mocking me, you rogue?’ I asked.

‘Mmm. On balance, yes, my lord, I think I am mocking you.’ He put a wet towel and a bowl of steaming water on a stool. ‘I believe you can wash yourself, messire? And may I mention that messire has a certain perfumed smell to him that, unless messire has been visited by angels, might have come from a certain lady?’

‘Perkin, did you give me cloves for my breath?’ I asked.

‘By our sweet saviour, m’lord, someone had to. You might have killed her, else.’ He didn’t smile. ‘I think that m’lord’s left leg harness is badly damaged and doesn’t fit worth spit anyway.’

I had to admit he was right. I’d worn it all over France, but not in a fight — and it didn’t fit. It was two inches too short — the greaves caught on the sabatons and I had bruises on both insteps. Fine for riding — hopeless for fighting on foot.

‘First, I think I prefer Master Gold to M’lord.’ I met his eye.

He frowned. ‘I’ll consider it. Do you have the ready silver to purchase leg armour?’

I shook my head. ‘You have our purse, Perkin. What’s in it?’

He took it off his belt and opened it. ‘A little more than forty livre tournois. Not enough to buy anything but food on the road.’

‘Can the armourer fix the strap on the cuisse?’ I asked.

‘Already fixed,’ he said. He really was the best squire and servant any knight ever had. He unrolled the bandage on my knee, sniffed the wound and then began to re-bandage it. It hurt like all the sins of all the sinners in hell, and I groaned. I might even have squeaked.

‘She’s married,’ he said.

I was too busy being in pain. This cut took several heartbeats to register.

‘Her husband had his arm broken in the fighting. Rumour has it they detest each other, but I thought you needed to know.’ He leaned close. ‘He knows where she spent the night. She made a point of making sure he knows.’

Par dieu, messieurs. This was my introduction to the lives of the rich and titled. It didn’t matter. I’d already given her my heart. That brave, yet terrified girl.

Why didn’t you tell me? I thought. I was in a state of mortal sin. I was about to fight, and possibly die, in a state of mortal sin.

Just for a moment I thought of her, and her kirtle going over her head, and I thought. . Oh well. An eternity in hell.

I smiled. Friends, I still do. Do you really think God sends you to hell for the disport of two willing friends? I think the priests clip us too close, and I am reckoned a pious man for a man-at-arms. But I was younger then, and the whole thing preyed on my mind.

About midday, Tom came and, with Perkin, he began to arm me. And when I had my cursed leg harnesses on — the bases of the greaves already cutting into yesterday’s bruises — Emile slipped in the door. She looked angry. Her chin was high, she was slightly flushed.

‘Monsieur,’ she said, and put a cup on the table with a click.

‘Madame,’ I said with a slight emphasis. But I smiled at her. I confess to you, gentlemen, as I have confessed to a hundred priests, that the sight of a woman like that is usually far more to me on the edge of death than all the promises of all the Popes in history.

Her eyes dropped. At the door, she flicked her eyes up at me. I was there, as she hoped. She paused in the door while a man might count three. She smiled and licked her fingers. And was gone.

Lying on the table under the cup was a triangle of pinky-red linen.

I picked it up and put it in my doublet next to my heart. Please note that I did not wear it outside my armour. There’s fools and fools.

I did wear the Dauphine’s favour from the day before, however. I had Perkin attach it to the peak of my basinet.

Tom had to help me down the stairs. My knee had stiffened and I couldn’t make it do its duty, so it was tiring quickly. Tom got me out to the courtyard, where Perkin had Goldie and a pair of stools. They got me up on the tallest stool, and then, with some pushing, they got my bad knee over the saddle, so I was on.

I was the first knight mounted, but the Captal came out, approached, took my hand and then looked carefully at my knee.

‘You really might be a Gascon. How are you?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I said.

He laughed, and Tom started to arm him at the stable door. By now the captain of the castle and all the older men were arming, and a number of the younger knights. When the Captal was mounted, Tom went to help the Count of Foix, who had two squires of his own and a dozen knights in his train. His equipment was the most magnificent I’d yet seen, and he appeared to be going to a tournament, not a mortal fight. He had a panache in his helmet of peacock and ostrich; he wore a silk coat over his magnificent brigantine which was studded with golden nails.

You get the picture.

When he was armed and mounted, he rode over to me and raised his visor. ‘I understand Madame the Princess gave you that yesterday,’ he said conversationally.

I bowed in my saddle. ‘My lord is correct.’

He nodded. ‘Do you really think you are the best man among all these worthy and noble gentlemen?’

His intention was to be rude. He was tense and what the French call ‘disobliging’.

I bowed again. ‘My lord, after Madame the Princess was kind enough to grant it to me, I thought it would be rude not to wear it.’

‘It looks like a brag, to me. But you are young, and English, and probably don’t understand such things.’ He shrugged — no easy feat in armour — and turned his horse away.

I was too young to answer the bastard as he deserved. I just sat there, my knee hurting, thinking about what I’d do to him if I ever had the chance.

Fast, dashing talk is hard. You have to practice. You have to read — the romances are full of bon mots to shoot at your opponents. I vowed to read more. I sat on Goldie, stared at his back and stewed.

It was as hot as the hell I was destined to visit with my soul steeped in the mortal sin of adultery. Sweat soaked my cap and my helmet liner, and trickled down my back under my arming coat and shirt. Knights came one and two at a time into the yard and armed, and the appearance of each was a little event — ladies cheered; men shook hands.

It was my first chance to see the French — from inside, so to speak. They were, and are, great knights, but there is an element of performance to everything. Each knight had to be seen and admired; had to arm publicly and hear the plaudits of the ladies. Meanwhile I sat and sweated as my knee burned like sin.

Until Emile entered the courtyard. I was watching the French knights, trying to imagine which one was her husband. There was a murmur — I turned my head and there she was, dressed in her gown, with my blood on it. She paused by one French knight’s horse and curtsied, back straight, eyes down. Then she danced among the horses, crossed the yard — the English and Gascons were all together, and the French were all together, and a few feet separated us like a wall — and paused under Goldie’s nose. She curtsied.

What could I do? Spurn her? I grinned. ‘Madame,’ I said.

‘I. . we. . put all our faith in you,’ she said distinctly.

There was a murmur of outrage from the French.

I drew my sword and saluted her. ‘I will try to be. .’ I began, and then I thought of a line from the Alexander Romance. My mother used to read it to me when I was little — the monks had a copy which I’d used to learn French. I waved my sword. ‘Only death, madame, will prevent my return. Victorious.’

She flushed and smiled. A French lady at the edge of the yard clapped her hands together.

The Captal grunted. ‘Excellent, my big English mastiff. When we’ve killed all the Jacques, we can fight the French.’ But he grinned wolfishly at me. ‘Never mind them, stay close to me, or the Sire de Bourbon will have you off your horse in the melee.’ He shot a glace at one of the French knights. ‘Her husband’s brother. Eh?’

We were not a band of brothers. Somewhat shamefacedly, I put my sword away, and emotion made me shove it home in the scabbard a little too hard.

The captain of the castle arranged us in ranks, and we shuffled about the yard, forming a dense column. The enemy was already formed on the far bank, their flanks anchored on stone buildings either side of the bridge entrance, and they had crossbowmen in the houses.

De Grailly had half a dozen professional archers, and Sam was with them in the bridge-gate tower. That was all the support we were going to have.

Let me add that the Jacques were fools to come out and fight at all. Much less to pack in like lemmings at the entrance to the main bridge.

The main gate opened.

I was in the third rank, behind the Captal’s shoulder, with Tom — the last man mounted — at my right hand. The Count of Foix was in the front rank, with the captain of the castle and the Duke de Bourbon. They were there from social precedence, although, to be fair, they also had the very best and latest armour.

The Captal was far and away the most famous knight — and the best, I think. As a mere Gascon, however, he was in the second rank.

The French. Well might you all shake your heads.

We walked out the gate. As soon as we were on the bridge, the head of the column began to move faster — it was a tricky manoeuvre, getting the column to a charge on the bridge without crashing into the enemy in dribs and drabs.

Just as I passed into the brilliant sunshine beyond the bridge gate, the first flight of English arrows hit the Jacques and men fell.

The Duke de Bourbon put his spurs to his horse. The captain’s horse shied, and the Captal pressed past him — I stayed with him, and we galloped down the narrow path, barely three horses wide. I was struggling to get my lance into its rest when I felt a change, and my left rein hung slack. One of the French knights had cut it as I rode past.

By St Thomas, gentleman, try riding with a lance and no control of your horse on a bridge just five ells wide! I was saved by the closeness of the press — Goldie had nowhere to go but forward, and I grabbed the curving cantle of my war saddle with my left hand, jamming my shield against my left thigh and losing the reassuring cover of its shadow against the crossbows. I put my head down, and rose slightly in my stirrups as Bertrand du Guesclin had taught me.

Some poor bastard in the front rank took my lance in the chest and died instantly. My lance tore a great hole in him, then snapped, and I bounced back against the rear of my saddle and snapped forward again as the lance broke. Goldie, maddened by the blood, the gallop and the waiting, crashed into the press, kicking and biting, and I had no control over the damned horse, who was going like a demon from hell. I reached for my sword as Goldie did a curvet that almost unseated me, but I got my right hand on my hilt and pulled — the sword stuck fast.

Good Christ, that was a terrible moment. A crossbow bolt struck my visor and tore it off its hinge, so it hung from the right, bouncing against my head and face. What was worse, the forcible removal of my visor showed me that Goldie had carried me past the Jacques and I was all by myself, with men all around me, reaching for my harness — a bill slammed into my right foot, and the sabaton held, but the weight of the blow hurt my ankle.

I fell back against my cantle, and Goldie caught the change in weight, bless him, reared and kicked.

I got my right hand back on my sword hilt and pulled.

The belt moved on my hips and the sword stayed scabbarded.

Not that I stopped to make choices, but I couldn’t dismount — I was surrounded by foes — and I couldn’t control my horse, either.

And I had no weapon.

My right knee throbbed like some devil’s torment. And some of the knights on my own side were trying to kill me.

I got Goldie to rear again and kick. As he came down on his forefeet, I pinned my scabbard with my left hand, shield and all, and pulled at the hilt with my right, with all the power of desperation.

A spear point caught me from behind and threw me forward over my horse’s neck, which of course made Goldie bolt forward.

Finally the sword came loose in my hand. I sat back, hard, to try and slow my mount. Now I was deep in the ranks of the Jacques — I cut, more from habit than from a feeling of combat, and they scattered.

Another bolt struck the top of my left shoulder and it felt as if a giant had punched me. But if you must be hit by a heavy missile, the top of the shoulder is the place — overlapping metal plates lie over chain, and under the base of the helmet’s aventail, there are three or more layers of steel. It’s the very best armoured part of the body.

I had a bruise for two weeks, and I still almost lost my seat. I rocked back and forth, trying to find an opponent, every sway in the saddle forcing me to grip with my knees.

Behind me, there was a roar, a panicked shriek, and suddenly the whole mob of Jacques was in flight.

I attribute it to divine intervention. I didn’t break them, and neither did the Captal, or Tom, who, it proved, was close behind me. We shattered their ranks, but they were ten to one against us, and they had crossbowmen on the roofs. Sooner or later, they could have killed every one of us, but they didn’t. Instead, they succumbed to fear and broke.

And the dashing French knights hunted them through the streets.

I took my time gaining control of Goldie, who was mad with battle-rage. I had one rein, and that was not enough, so we rode deeper and deeper into the town, and eventually, without intending to, I emerged at the land gate on the south side, with Tom at my shoulder. There was no guard at the gate.

‘If we hold the gate,’ I called. I remember how tired I was. ‘If we hold the gate, they can’t escape.’

He dismounted, caught Goldie’s bridle, and I got off — and fell to the ground. My right knee didn’t want to take my weight.

Tom dragged me clear of the gate and some fugitives ran past us.

‘Tom, run for it,’ I said. It was clear I couldn’t fight, and he wasn’t going to live long, trying to hold two horses and cover me, too.

He shook his head. ‘If I repair your bridle, can you fight?’ he asked.

‘Just prop me up and go,’ I said.

So I spent the rest of the fight leaning on a water barrel in the gateway, with Goldie’s bridle in my hand, helping to hold me up. Tom rode for the Captal, who came soon enough. I don’t remember much after that, except that I watched the French knights hunt the Jacques through the town and through the countryside. I didn’t see anything like it again until Cremona — that’s another story — but I knelt there on one knee and wondered how men who called themselves knights could hate their own peasants with such ferocity.

I wanted to be a knight, but I was beginning to think that in the process, I might have to change what knighthood was.

I was in the castle of Meaux for five days. I had six wounds — Jean de Viladi swears to them, and who am I to complain? I was much doted on by the ladies, and one lady in particular. I worried I’d be poisoned, but the Captal assured me that this was not the French way.

As far as the ladies were concerned, I’d ridden into the Jacques, first of all the knights, and cut my way through. I hope the irony of this wasn’t lost on the man who cut my reins. The bastard.

For two nights — two beautiful, sin-filled nights — Emile came to my room, but on the third night, she came with another woman, who would not leave, and on the fourth night, she didn’t come at all. Instead, the Princess came.

I tried to bow, and she came to my bedside and smiled somewhat hesitantly. She put a hand on my hand. ‘Monsieur,’ she said. ‘My husband will return tomorrow from Burgundy, and with him comes a great army to smash this rebellion — and take Paris, too.’ She smiled bravely. ‘I will leave it to him to reward you as you deserve for coming to our defence,’ she said. She smiled, then frowned and looked around the room, as if for support.

I knew some of the language of chivalry. ‘I need no reward but your thanks, my lady,’ I said. ‘I hope that you feel I did justice to your favour?’

She flushed. ‘Monsieur, I was very foolish to give you such a thing, and I must ask for its return.’ She had the good grace to look ashamed.

Well, to have a favour revoked is. . not a good thing.

‘Send Perkin for it. It is attached to my helmet,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I. . disappointed you.’ Really, what could I say? English squires don’t chat with Princesses, much less task them.

She looked at me under her lashes — not flirtatiously, but more questioningly. ‘Ah, Monsieur, you were never disappointing. But this has become a matter too elevated for me. Or you.’ She leaned forward slightly. ‘A certain person is leaving — with her husband. She wishes to send her. . farewell. Yes? And I cannot be seen to favour you. I’m sorry. My honour is engaged.’ She leaned back.

‘Please tell the certain person. .’ I said.

She turned her head away. ‘Monsieur, you cannot imagine I would carry messages between you.’

By the head of St John! I had imagined that very thing. She inclined her head graciously, and as I couldn’t bow, I took her hand.

She allowed it, and I felt something hard in my hand. She nodded and left the room.

I had a ring — a very beautiful ring in gold and enamel.

I was still shaking my head when the Captal entered with Perkin. ‘Can you ride?’ he asked.

I nodded.

He pursed his lips. ‘I’m on my way to the King of Navarre. I think I’d best take you with me. There’s a nasty little rumour making the rounds in this castle. It might cost you your neck.’

I looked away. ‘I’d be honoured to travel with you, my lord,’ I said. ‘But I was sent by the Lieutenant of Gascony to get a safe conduct signed by the Dauphin, and I fear it is my duty to wait on him.’

The Captal nodded. ‘Let me have it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see that it is signed today — they owe you that — but I promise you, my young faux Gascon, that if you sleep alone here, you won’t wake up.’

I must have flushed. I know I straightened up in bed and said, ‘But she’s gone, and her stinking husband with her!’

The Captal shook his head. ‘My young scapegrace, no one cares about the state of your amours with the lady in question. The Dauphin has been told that you, ahem, slept with his wife.’ He shrugged. ‘These things happen. It will all blow over in a few years.’

We travelled south to Paris across a landscape dotted with peasants and Parisians swinging from trees. In some places, we passed manor houses burned to the ground — at one road junction, I saw two Parisian ‘hoods’ swinging in the wind, rotting away, and just a few yards further down the road, a young nobleman’s corpse was being pecked by ravens — the corpse, you understand, was a few days older, and had yet to be cut down.

The roads of the Beauvais were packed with refugees, and the refugees were themselves from different sides. There were noble refugees, clinging to their few remained valuables or hollow-eyed with torment — some noble women with their children, looking as if they had endured more than they could bear. And peasant women, in much the same state, but with fewer possessions. And then peasants with their men folk — these the victims of the English and Navarrese — the more routine depredations of our professional looters.

But the French nobles — the remnants of Charles of Navarre’s army, and the great army the Dauphin was bringing from Burgundy — saw all concentrations of refugees as potential gatherings of Jacques and tended to attack them without too much investigation.

Perhaps it was the fever of my wounds — the ongoing pain in my knee scared me — or the weight of my sins.

Perhaps it was the children. There were dead children everywhere.

Christ, even now. .

We rode, tight lipped and silent. I wanted to be done with the whole thing, and for the first time in three years, I considered going back to smithing. Knighthood didn’t look very noble in the June of 1358. Can deeds of arms be measured against raped women? Can bravery in battle and loyalty to your lord be weighed against murdered children? Were we supposed to protect these people or not?

I didn’t even notice where we were going until I could see Paris. I only remember the dead and the blank-eyed, then waking in a stinking pile of straw in a barn outside St Cloud. There was sheep-dip in the straw — it was all I could get.

Well, that and Richard Musard, who threw his arms around me as soon as I dismounted. ‘Did you get the sauvegardes?’ he asked, ever practical.

I nodded weakly.

‘We’ll be famous!’ he said. Richard had a great deal more confidence in the honour of Princes than I did just then.

‘Have you got John?’ asked Sam.

Richard nodded. ‘I brought him here on a cart; he’s finally on the mend. The wound festered. .’

Sam nodded. ‘I want to see him.’

I wanted to see him, too. The trip had bound us together.

‘When did you get to St Cloud?’ I asked.

Richard shrugged. ‘As soon as I healed up, we were on the road. Sir John Hawkwood has taken good care of me.’

St Cloud, the very gateway to Paris, had an English garrison, and Sir James Pipe was the captain of it. The King of Navarre was rallying an army — to liberate Paris, or so he said.

After we visited John Hughes, we put our camp gear with his and made up beds of dirty straw. Sir John Hawkwood himself brought me wine, and news, and Perkin sat on a barrel end, repairing my kit. He found me a pair of leather and splint legs — pretty enough, but heavy and clumsy compared to my beautiful steel pair that didn’t quite fit. With the help of a mercenary armourer, he was fitting the legs to me, while I lay on my dirty straw, getting bitten by insects and considering an end to my career of war.

I wanted to be interested in Sir John’s news, and I finally asked, ‘If the King of Navarre is making himself captain of Paris, why the hell did he smash the Jacques? Surely they were on the same side?’

Hawkwood looked away. It was evening, there was a fire burning in the barnyard and Sir John’s twenty or so lances were cooking their food or watching their servants cook. The fire backlit his face and made his expression hard to read.

‘I’m not sure whether my employer knows from day to day what he’s doing,’ he admitted. ‘But unlike all the other sides, he pays regularly.’

‘How many sides? The Navarrese, the English, the Dauphin, the Parisians, the Jacques — have I left anyone out?’ I asked.

Hawkwood continued to watch the women by the fire. ‘Well, there’s the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope — and the King of France, in England.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not really jesting — the Pope and the Emperor have their fingers in this dough. The Pope is supposedly working to raise the King’s ransom.’

You have to remember that back then, the Pope was a Frenchman who lived in Avignon, not an Italian in Rome. Eh?

‘But when Charles of Navarre smashed the Jacques,’ I insisted, ‘he was attacking his own power base.’

‘Worse,’ Sir John said. ‘He was helping the Dauphin recruit — even though I understand the Dauphin found it prudent to spend the time in Burgundy, leaving his wife to face the Jacques. Eh bien?’

Perkin coughed in his hand, and arranged my rolled-up riding cloak as a pillow so I could sit. Then he elevated my right knee, which was less swollen.

Hawkwood laughed. ‘A pox on your coughing, you rogue. I’ve heard the story and I’m as curious as the next varlet. Did you cuckold the Dauphin?’

‘No!’ I said with, I confess, a little too much spirit.

Sir John smirked. ‘Of course not. But every French knight is looking for you. I promise you, lad, it’s going to be rough on you. Word is she came to your room to thank you and you, ahem, took advantage of her.’

‘I was never alone with her,’ I hissed.

‘Course you weren’t.’ Sir John grinned. ‘Well, it’s one conquest the French can’t take back, eh?’ He got to his feet and said, ‘I was going to ask you and Sam to join me as a lance — the money is the best it’s ever been — but I think Paris might be a little hot for you this year. Best you go back to Gascony.’

I all but ground my teeth in frustration. I thought of the knight with the broken arm on the bridge — I’d never seen his face, the bastard, but he was her husband. I’d saved his life, and he’d done this: poisoned the well against me — with words.

My beautiful deed of arms, ruined by malicious gossip.

For the first time, I began to hate the French.

I left the suburbs of Paris a day later, with my knee almost a normal size and my fever abating. I didn’t wear harness for a day, but the woods were full of desperate men, and our second day south of the bridge, Sam put an arrow in a lout by the roadside, and we stopped by the cooling corpse so I could put on the whole harness.

It wasn’t very pretty any more.

My breast and back had a dozen creases and a deep pit in the front where I’d taken the bolt on the bridge of Meaux. There was rust darkening the bottom of every crease — the best squire in the world can’t get into the bottom of a crease every day. My left shoulder piece was badly deformed by another crossbow bolt. My helmet had two dozen cuts and nicks, each with a corresponding dent. My beautiful leg armours were gone, replaced by leather and splint — done by an enthusiastic amateur, and a livid blue-purple that didn’t match any other part of my harness. My arm harnesses were still beautiful, although somewhat hacked about. The brazen edging on the elbows had several deep cuts.

My gauntlets were a book in which you could read every missed parry and botched cover of my last ten months.

I walked with a limp and I leaned too far to the right when I rode.

But two armoured men and an armed archer seemed enough to keep the roads empty. We passed the village of the dead — we didn’t go through. The bell tower was silent.

We didn’t mention our own dead, but we both knew we’d lost men. I won’t say their shades came to our fires, but I will say that I thought about them a great deal, especially Rob, whose death seemed the most unfair.

There were flowers in fields that should have been tilled, and many, many scavengers in the air and on the ground, peasants who moved silently from field to field, slithering like animals — mere movement, and feral movement at that, along the hedgerows.

A day north of Tours, we saw a party approaching — half a dozen knights and men-at-arms, with a closed box being carried by two mules, and a cart, and a dozen mounted crossbowmen. We watched them carefully, but I knew the arms — the flag was that of Jehan le Maingre, whom I had last seen being taken prisoner before Poitiers.

We were the smaller party, and we had only a small flag of truce, which Perkin bore on his spear below the arms of the Prince of Wales. I was minded to ride around them, but Richard was sure we’d get a good reception from such a famous knight, and he rode across the fields to them with Perkin at his side.

My heart hammered in my chest. I was afraid that at any moment they’d kill him. I had lost any faith I’d ever had in chivalry. I trusted my friends and no one else. I had even been a trifle uneasy with Sir John Hawkwood.

At any rate, Richard came back quickly, and I could see from his riding that something was wrong. Perkin stuck to him like glue.

Richard reined in. ‘It’s Le Maingre,’ he said. ‘He demands to fight you. He says it is a matter of honour — a private quarrel — and so, despite his state as a prisoner, he can fight. Or so he says.’

‘He’s still a prisoner of the Prince,’ Perkin said. ‘And you, sir, are wounded. You cannot fight him.’

I shook my head. ‘What the hell? Why does Jehan le Maingre want to fight me?’

Across the fallow field, 200 paces distant, a shining figure detached from the column and started toward us. His horse’s hooves raised puffs of dust from the field. He was moving quite fast. He had a lance.

If anger can be read in the way a man rides — and it can — this was rage.

‘By the passion of Jesus,’ I swore and seized a lance from Sam. Sam’s face was a study in disinterest and he said just one word.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

But I was tired of Frenchmen and their rules and gossip, so I took my lance — a sharp lance, the type we use in war — and rode at Le Maingre.

My knee wasn’t bad. I got myself straight on my horse, and I got the lance down and into my lance rest without shaming myself. I steadied the lance and aimed it at the crest of his helmet as I’d been taught, leaned a little forward and touched Goldie with my spurs.

All in all, it was probably the best run with a lance I’d ever had. I got it all together, and my lance point was on target-

He smashed me to the ground. I bounced. If I hadn’t had a steel breastplate, I’d have been dead. As it was, my once-beautiful breastplate took a tremendous dent — he hit just a few fingers width from the crossbow bolt — and broke some ribs.

I was knocked unconscious. Which is just as well, because le Maingre informed Richard Musard that if I’d been conscious, he’d have killed me.

He took Goldie — that was his right by the law of arms as he’d bested me in single combat — and rode away.

Young men recover quickly. I did — I was up the next day and riding a plug, while Richard, looking like a lord, rode his magnificent bay. Every man on the road assumed I was his squire.

My pride took longer to heal. I had put some thought into leaving the life of arms, but now I wanted revenge.

The difficult part was that I wasn’t sure just who I wanted to take my revenge against.

It was clear to me that chivalry was a closed company. That the men who lived inside it — at least the French — would use any means, no matter how dishonorable, to exclude outsiders.

And to be fair, it was equally clear to me that we English used the language of chivalry as a cloak of convenience under which to conduct ruthless war for profit.

Nothing makes a young man angrier than the discovery that he is not valued, not respected, and that his best efforts are wasted. Wait, I lie. The thing that most angers a young man is the confusion of discovering that the philosophy he allows to govern his actions is a nested set of lies.

I glowered at every man on the road — I wanted a fight every day, to prove to myself that I wasn’t a loser. Not a fool. Christ, the ease with which le Maingre had put me in the dirt. I really didn’t understand, then, how great was the divide between the competent man-at-arms and the trained man-at-arms.

I hid from my various moral dilemmas — adulterer, murderer, false knight — if that was possible, and instead concerned myself with my worldly repute. All I could think about as we entered Gascony and rode south along the good roads through the unburned farms was that I’d been made to look a fool. That I had failed. I had no worth, no preux. And that somewhere in the north, Emile would be told by her smirking husband that I’d been taught manners by a French lord, who’d dropped me in a field like the goldsmith’s apprentice I was.

So much for giving up a life of arms.

Richard more than stood by me. Richard probably saved me from hell.

Every night, we sat at campfires, me with broken ribs and more badly damaged than my scarred and rusting armour. Richard lived in a simpler world. His gentle Jesus was closer, his Virgin Mary was always there for him. He didn’t doubt knighthood; he merely found many men wanting.

Pardon — he didn’t say any of those things, right out.

But when we were close to Bordeuax, he handed me a cup of wine. ‘Remember, what you said? When I said I was a slave? And you said you had been a London apprentice?’

‘What does that have to do with it?’ I asked. I was entirely surly.

‘You said that some day, we’d be knights.’ Musard stared out at the stars for a little while. ‘Did you think it would be easy?’ He leaned forward. ‘They don’t want us, William. They want to keep it all for themselves. The power, the riches, the pretty girls. Even the honour. Honour is like money, William. There’s not really enough of it for everyone. If you’d saved — I don’t know, if you’d saved Sir John Chandos on the bridge — he’s rich enough in honour to let you have some. But this French lord? He isn’t going to let you have any.’

I nodded. ‘That’s what I’m saying!’ I spat.

Richard sat back and crossed his legs. ‘If you were a black man who’d come to all this from Spain, you’d have thicker skin, brother. Do you believe in God?’

‘Of course! What do you take me for, some heretic?’ I snapped.

‘No. But listen.’ He spoke slowly, as if speaking to a child. Which, that night, I was. ‘Do you believe in priests? In the Mass?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Of course. Where’s this going?’

‘Yet some priests are foul bastards, lecherous and vile. The Pope is a Frenchman who may be our enemy. That Talleyrand, a cardinal of the church, is hardly living in poverty. People say he’s the richest man in the world.’ Musard shrugged. ‘Bad priests don’t touch the truth of our saviour. Bad knights don’t touch the truth of chivalry.’

I was angry, and I wanted to stay angry, but his words went home.

We rode into Bordeaux just before the gate was closed the next day, and I had begun to feel a little better. England would save me. I allowed myself to think about my sister. To think that my outstanding ransom from Poitiers might be paid. That and the pay from a year in the saddle for the Prince.

I began to see another life.

We rode in, an hour before sunset, just after the feast of the birth of St John the Baptist. The guards at the gate stopped us, despite our arms.

One of the gate guards was a northern retinue archer. He knew Sam, and he beckoned to him and they exchanged words. Sam came back to us and shook his head.

‘I know you gentlemen won’t do as I ask, but I aim to ask anyway. I’d like the four of us to ride away, now. Just turn your horses and ride.’ Sam shrugged. ‘The Three Foxes is no longer ours.’

I grew hot. I wanted a fight. ‘I’ll kill all of them!’ I said.

Sam put a hand on my bridle. ‘No. Things have changed, here. That’s what Harry was telling me. The Prince is back, and there’s good law here. And the Prince’s men-at-arms do not run brothels.’ He looked at the two of us. ‘The Prince knows.’

‘Fucking Chaucer,’ said Richard. His lips were tight.

Sam shrugged.

‘But we have the safe guards!’ I said.

Sam raised an eyebrow. ‘If Sir John Cheverston ever really wanted them, he still does. He’s in the field. I propose we go and take him the sauvegardes — and send them via Perkin. See if we can collect our pay without being arrested.’

Richard whistled. ‘Arrested!’

The word was like a bolt of levin going to my heart.

Sam nodded. ‘I’m guessing that they intend to declare you outlaws and degrade you from the rank of squires.’

Richard sat silently on his horse.

I thought about the French. ‘To hell with them,’ I said.

Richard met my eye. He was crying. ‘God damn them all to hell,’ he said. It was the first time I’d ever heard him speak openly against the Prince, whom he loved.

Two days later we fell in with the Captal and headed to his own estates in the south. Richard poured his heart out to the Gascon lord while I just sat on my horse and hated everyone.

By the time Richard was done telling our tale, we were sitting on stools around a fire — the Captal had a pavilion and had invited us to dine with him, which was lucky, as we were penniless as well as friendless.

He rubbed his chin and watched the fire. ‘You two wastrels ran the Three Foxes?’ he asked. He grinned. ‘You sound very Gascon to me. Have I said this before? Listen, the Prince will not forgive such a thing. No shadow must touch his honour — he sees himself as the greatest knight in the world, the very pinnacle of chivalry.’ De Grailly made a face. ‘In truth, I think perhaps he is, and it is a very difficult rank to hold. Men gossip. You must not only be a great knight, but you must keep men from hating you for it.’ De Grailly watched the fire. ‘May I loan you two a little silver? I would not recommend that you visit Sir John Cheverston. He won’t want to arrest you, but he will. He is the Prince’s man, and whatever he thinks privately, he will degrade you.’

For the first time in years, I thought of my branding as a thief. Of how men who knew perfectly well I was innocent stood by and watched. I sat by the fire and hated. Now there would be no money. Nothing for my sister. Nothing for me.

But to tell the truth, messieurs, it sat easier on me than on Richard. I’d had my doubts about princes. I had tasted the bile before. Richard, despite slavery, believed that if he served loyally, he would be rewarded, and he took it very hard.

Richard shook his head. ‘It’s not fair,’ he said, with the tone of every young man who makes this discovery. ‘We have spent a year — your pardon, my lord — but a year in the saddle for the Prince.’

Jean de Grailly shook his head. ‘You did run a brothel,’ he said. ‘Save your protests! I’m not against you. Listen, if you don’t ride to Sir John Cheverston, he can’t arrest you and you won’t be degraded. I’ll see to this, I give you my word. Give me your sauvegardes and I’ll pass them to Sir John. I have influence with the Prince. In time. .’

‘By God, we don’t have time!’ I said. ‘We beggared ourselves to make this trip. What are we to do, my lord?’

De Grailly spread his hands. ‘I say you remind me of Gascons,’ he said. ‘Go be Gascons. Join the companies.’

The companies. The men who raped and murdered for money. Like organized brigands or pirates under a false flag.

‘Seguin de Badefol is recruiting,’ De Grailly said. ‘I can give you lads a letter.’

Richard spat. ‘I will be the Black squire indeed,’ he said. ‘God’s curse on them all.’