The Ill-Made Knight

Brignais, 1362

Aye, messieurs, I was at Brignais, although there were damned few English left with the routiers by then. It was a fine fight, and a rich day for most of us.

Richard and I had ridden away from Bordeaux in the late winter of 1358. Sam Bibbo thought for three days about leaving us — he said he was done fighting — but in the end he came, and John Hughes came with him. Perkin had nowhere else to go, but he made no secret of his dissatisfaction at my being reduced to what he called, with some accuracy, banditry. By then, Charles of Navarre had tried, and failed, to make himself King of France. He would continue trying for some years, but by the summer of 1358, the banner of Navarre was nothing but a flag of convenience for every brigand, bandit and rapist from the Loire to Provence. Sir John Hawkwood was there, in the Auxerre, and so was Sir Robert Knolles and Jean de Grailly and the Bourc Camus and a great many other professional men-at-arms.

Richard didn’t want to go to Sir John Hawkwood. It was never stated between us, but I think we both felt that if we were going to be bandits, we’d be bandits where John Hawkwood couldn’t see us. Auxerre was big, and we were small men.

Those were the days in which the companies formed. The first ‘Great Company’ was that of the archpriest, Arnaud de Cervole. He grouped many of the Breton and Gascon mercenaries into one mass of killers in 1358 and tried to take Marseille. Richard and I were there. We failed, but we made some gold, covered our debts and drank a great deal. Jamais sold me a new war horse, who was never a patch on Goldie. He was a big brute and I called him Alexander. Mostly he liked to bite other horses and make trouble; he didn’t know the hundred fighting tricks that Goldie had known, and he was brutal to ride in a joust as he’d flinch from the spear point.

Not that I did a lot of jousting in those years. We rode, but seldom fought. When we did fight, it was to raid and counter-raid — a war of ambush and nerves, of convoys on roads and sudden descents.

In 1359, we went north with Sir Robert Knolles. There was a rumour that the King’s peace was falling apart and that the King would make a campaign in person. By one of the ironies of the profession of arms, my captain from the year before was now my adversary; we faced the archpriest as we skirmished among the ruined crops and devastated country of the upper Loire Valley. He was as incompetent facing us as he had been leading us, and Knolles took us to good booty.

It was brutal. Mostly we plundered peasants. We’d form a company of adventure — a group of men who made an oath about sharing plunder and standing by each other — these agreements were usually made between wolves at inns. The better captains employed spies to watch the roads and to visit towns that might have a weak wall or an undefended gate. The less professional, or simply temporary, companies were formed for a single ‘adventure’ based on the whim of the most famous ‘knight’. Oh, my friends, the language of chivalry was maintained at all times. We fought a ‘passage of arms’ with the desperate defenders of small towns, and then we ‘took them by storm’ in a ‘feat of arms’ that left a lot of peasants dead and their wives and daughters raped and sold. When we took a town, we plundered it down to the plate on the altars and the coins in old women’s money-boxes. Only after we’d sacked a town for a few days would we rally the surviving principal citizens and inform them of the patis they owed us — sometimes with individual ransoms for the richer men. If we chose to stay, we charged tolls on the road and exacted taxes from the same peasants we’d brutalized in the sack, and when the French sent an army against us, we faded away, split into small parties and ran for the safety of Gascony or Normandy, where we met up again — to plan the next raid.

Richard and I served with Knolles in the hope of being reinstated with the Prince’s household. We were never formally humiliated, but my reputation was very dark — a pimp, a thief and perhaps an unchivalrous lover. I led a lance, and Richard led another, but neither of us was trusted with a command, and as the campaign wore on, it seemed less and less likely that Knolles intended to unite with the King’s army landing at Calais, than that he was plundering France for his own benefit. I ended up in the garrison of Champlay in the Auxerre, bored, mildly prosperous and no closer to serving my Prince or cleansing my reputation, and every town from which I exacted patis made me dream of the ringing bell and the village of the dead.

I drank a lot.

I had found one way to salve my conscience. The Italian bankers followed us like vultures and wolves, and I put my money into their books and began to purchase my sister’s elevation. I wrote a letter on her behalf.

It was late in 1359 — September or October.

I sat on a well-built oak stool that had once belonged to a prosperous peasant, and I penned the letter by the light of his burning farm. I wrote to the prior of the commandery at Clerkenwell. I styled myself ‘William Gold, Squire’ and requested that the money go to a religious dowry for my sister.

I paid in almost everything I took. My sister probably needed 1,000 ducats. After I paid my lance and fed my horse and paid Perkin, I had perhaps forty ducats a month — for a life of utmost violence. But I paid it out, and every payment seemed to make me a little less black. I began to go to Mass for the first time in years.

And I began to look for ways to be a knight. Amidst the moral sewer that was war in the Auxerre.

In late October, our little garrison stormed a nearby manor house held by one of the Dauphin’s supporters. It was a fair bit of fighting. I was the first man into the house, through a shutter I caved in with my poleaxe, and Richard came in on my heels.

We penned all the women — high born and low — in the chapel, and protected them until all of our own men were gone. It was the beginning of something.

Richard and I didn’t talk of it, but when our eyes met. .

We knew.

About the same time, the King was landing at Calais, and with him was the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, Lionel and all the best English captains. Richard and I sat in a mercenary garrison and writhed with anger. We drank. It is a tribute to our friendship that we didn’t go for each other.

Richard and I were not captains of the town, by any means — that job went to a rising star in the companies, a Scotsman named Sir Walter Leslie — but we were captains of smaller companies, and if men thought us hard, that was all to the good. We staked out the Angel, the best inn left standing in the Auxerre, which had thirty girls and six good cooks. It was a fine inn, three storeys of whitewashed plaster and heavy dark beams, with good red wine and terrible ale.

Have I told you that inns are to soldiers as paradise is to priests?

My enemy, the Bourc Camus, held the next castle-town for Knolles. He raided the countryside that belonged to my town, as if we were enemies. Even among criminals and murderers, he was a byword for evil. He struck the weak whenever he could, and his special provenance was taking women and turning them into whores, whom he sold to traders like chattels.

My friends, we were hard men. We did many bad things, and our sins piled up like gold in a money-changer’s booth, but the Bourc was a different kind of evil. He pleasured himself in the abject humiliation of the weak.

We had a skirmish at night — we caught his retinue raiding our sheepfolds, and we drove them off. I tried to get to him, but my horse was too shy of the dark and wouldn’t cross a wall. The Bourc escaped, but we rounded up half a dozen of his brigands — peasant boys he’d turned into spearmen.

Of the six we cut off, three fought to the death.

Listen. In our kind of war, no one fights to the death except the peasants on whom we preyed. I confess that if one of the French lords were to capture men like this, they’d be hanged — not for nothing were they called brigands — but between ourselves, we’d sell them back. We had our own infantry by then: Gascon mountaineers. They carried small bucklers and a pair of wicked javelins, and they could fight in any terrain.

These boys were different. They weren’t Gascons at all; they were locals. There were men and women in Champlay who knew them, yet they were fighting devils.

The other three had to be beaten to the ground with spear-staves. It’s not that they were particularly good fighters, merely that they kept fighting.

When we tried to talk to them, they sat like sullen animals and said nothing. Even when John used a little rough persuasion.

I’d never seen the look those peasant boys had, except on broken men going to be hanged in London. Their eyes were dead somehow, and yet they burned with hate.

Three days later, the Captain of Champlay (as he called himself) had a parley with the Bourc at a stone bridge. The bastard sat on his horse with his black and white banner, and most of his followers in his own motley. He had two of the Albret bastards in their father’s arms, and a couple of Englishmen, but all the rest of his ‘knights’ wore his colours.

I sat on my bad war horse and watched him through my lowered visor. Neither my commander, Sir Walter Leslie, my friend Richard, nor I, trusted the Bourc a whit.

As Sir Walter parleyed with him, I watched his knights. They had miserable armour and one was mounted on a plough horse. The ones with open-faced helmet looked shockingly young.

Sir Walter released our three captives, and they stood, abject, by our servants. Finally, one of the archers pressed them forward at spear point, and they walked, like condemned men, across to the middle of the span.

The Bourc looked down at them. ‘You surrendered?’ he asked, laughing.

All three flinched.

‘Please, my lord, we were beaten to the ground,’ one boy whined. They were the first words I’d heard him speak, even when John Hughes broke one of his fingers.

The Bourc drew his sword and killed the boy with a single snap of his wrist.

The other two didn’t run. They just stood in the centre of the span until the Bourc’s sword took their souls.

Then he looked at Sir Walter. ‘Don’t bother bringing me any more trash,’ he said. He turned his horse and his eye caught mine.

He laughed. ‘Hello, Butt Boy.’

I was growing up. I didn’t flush or stammer. I rode forward and raised my visor. ‘Wounds all healed?’ I asked. ‘Or shall I kick your arse again to remind you which of us-’

He snarled. He had a sword in his hand, still dripping from the cold murder of three brigands, and he swung at me. Under a flag of truce.

Sir Walter raised his hand, even as the Bourc’s blow missed me by a finger’s breadth as I leaned back in the saddle. Our archers sprung forward, arrows to bows, and the Bourc raised his sword. He laughed. ‘You’re a dead man,’ he said.

‘I’ve heard all this before,’ I said. ‘And here I am.’

Richard had my bridle.

I pushed my big horse forward. The deaths of the boys penetrated my armour of vice. Many things did that autumn. Why? Because they were like me, those boys? Because I was not utterly lost to sin?

‘You are a coward and a caitiff, Camus, and I challenge you. I will prove on your body that you are nothing but a terror to boys and virgins.’

My words hit him like a flight of heavy arrows. Hah! I was growing up.

He turned. ‘Easy to challenge me when you have all these war bows at your back, Butt Boy.’ He spat. ‘Someday I’ll catch you alone and use you like a woman.’

‘Does that thought excite you?’ Richard called out.

The Bourc froze and his face grew as red as new blood.

We laughed.

‘Dead! Both of you! I will destroy your souls and send you to an eternity in the abyss!’ he hissed and rode away, and his retinue fell in behind him.

The peasants called him ‘the demon’.

I rode back into our little town as filled with emotion as if I had just fought a battle, and Richard and I laughed and embraced over it. A war of words, yes. But we won. There comes a point in every man’s life — perhaps in every woman’s, too — where you learn how to turn the words of your adversary. To fight word to word, like sword to sword. Some never learn. Some become word-bullies.

A few days later a party of Bretons tried to kill us and take the inn. Richard took a nasty wound in the thigh, and I might have died if Sam hadn’t put arrows into three men. They attacked without warning, but by then I slept with a dagger in my hand, and when I slept alone, I wore mail. There were loaded and cocked crossbows in three places about the inn, and we were wary when we went out.

We killed them all. Four of them were, as I say, Breton mercenaries, but the other two were young boys of twelve or thirteen.

I had been to Mass the day before — I was learning to pray again. I stood there with the blood of a twelve-year-old boy dripping down my longsword to form a puddle on the tiled floor and I prayed. Good Christ, how I prayed.

I prayed that there might be a God. That’s all I could manage.

I tell you true, monsieur. It took less than a week for God to answer.

Richard and I were sitting in the inn. In fact, we were discussing leaving Knolles and running for the coast — to see if the Prince, or Prince Lionel, would take us.

‘We have nothing to lose,’ Richard said.

‘They might hang us, or publicly degrade us,’ I argued.

Richard spread his hands, which were long-fingered and delicate compared to mine. ‘If I stay here much longer,’ he said, ‘I will be nothing but a criminal. A felon.’ He looked away.

We had probably had far too much to drink already when a party came in — probably the last party to get through the gate that day. There was a priest, a pair of monks and two nuns. The girls had a go at them because the church provided us with some ready customers, but the nuns didn’t even unveil and the monks were silent.

At some point I became suspicious of them, and I ordered Helen, one of the older girls, to see if the nuns were women at all. She took them a flagon of wine, leaned over the table and put a hand on a nun’s gown. The nun gave a very nun-like screech and backed into a corner.

Better safe than sorry, thought I, and gave Helen a moulin of silver for her trouble.

The priest ordered wine for all of them and they kept to themselves. He was a nondescript man in a brown gown that reached to the ground — what we used to call a long gown — but under the gown, he wore boots with spurs, like a knight. That made me suspicious.

The two nuns made me suspicious, too. As soon as they relaxed a little, they were too loud, too free, and they gave the man orders. Something about them wasn’t right.

After they had eaten, the priest asked Helen to speak to the innkeeper, and she sent for me. I went over to the table with Richard at my back. He was limping. I was ready to draw, my blade oiled and loosened in my scabbard.

The nuns sensed my alarmed hostility and became silent. More, the younger one cowered against the back of their snug. The monks glared with that mixture of fear and anger that characterizes the man with no fighting skills.

The priest, on the other hand, appeared very calm. He indicated empty places. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘join us and share a cup of wine.’

I sat, and Richard watched my back. That’s how it was.

‘I need to get to Avignon,’ he said carefully. His eyes flicked up to Richard. ‘You may sit. I confess that I have several weapons, but none of them to hand.’ He smiled.

I turned in time to see Richard return the smile.

I nodded. It was possible he really was going to Avignon. It didn’t add up, but it was possible. And the man himself looked familiar. The hood on his gown made his face difficult to see and read, and he wore a white linen cap, like a scholar — or a soldier, except that his was a clean, sparkling white despite days on the road.

‘Whom do I pay?’ he asked. ‘For passage?’

I glanced at Richard. ‘You want an escort?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘I had six men-at-arms and a dozen crossbowmen,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost all of them. I need to get to Avignon. With both of my brothers and both sisters. Intact.’ He nodded. ‘Alive.’

Again, he seemed familiar to me. But I couldn’t place him, and I didn’t know any priests, so I stopped staring at him and turned to Richard.

Richard sat. ‘I’m willing to discuss it,’ he said. ‘Messire.’

Richard and I still wanted to be great knights. We were more eager to do good deeds than farm boys safe at home. We had a great deal of sin to expiate.

‘It would be a bold adventure,’ I said.

But Richard shook his head. ‘Auxerre is packed with brigands,’ he said. ‘You are foolish to come this way.’

The priest shrugged. ‘I go where the good Lord sends me,’ he said. ‘I was with the convoy-’

‘What convoy?’ Richard asked.

‘The cardinals who went to make the peace treaty. We were with them on the road — they are too slow. And too rich.’ The priest smiled. ‘Everything about the church that I despise in that convoy. Arrogance. Worldly power. Pomp and display. Wanton sin.’ He shrugged. ‘My sisters are safer in an inn run by professional killers.’ He met my eyes. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I ask for your help.’

His eyes were not soft. Damn, I knew him from somewhere. His words — I know you — struck me like sword blows. He knew my kind? Or he knew me, personally?

I smiled, the way you smile when you think you may have to fight. ‘How far behind you is this convoy?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I will not be the agent of its destruction,’ he said, and I swear he knew exactly what he’d just revealed.

‘You are English,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I am a servant of God,’ he said. ‘Will you help us?’ He flipped back the hood on his gown. ‘Will you help us, William Gold?’

His face had a scar from the corner of his mouth to one eye. And a new scar — he was wearing a clean cap to cover a bandage.

I knew him then. He was the Hospitaller knight I’d met when I was about to flee London.

Richard was still hesitant. I wasn’t. I had prayed, and this was what God offered me.

‘I’ll take you past the worst of it,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you clear of the Auxerre.’

The priest — my eyes went to his right hand, and on it burned a ring — a red jewel with an eight-pointed cross, and the ring was on a hand with the swollen knuckles and scarred fingers of a swordsman. He wasn’t just a priest. But I knew that now.

He nodded. ‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘I am Fra Peter.’

That’s what comes of praying.

Richard was adamant. ‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take the convoy.’

We looked at each other for a moment, having switched roles too dramatically not to notice the change. Richard was going to raise a company of adventure to sack a church convoy, and I was going to escort nuns.

‘Why?’ I asked.

Richard shrugged. ‘The church has always been against the Prince,’ he said. ‘And they’re rich. They’re blood suckers, William. We can be rich.’

‘Come with me,’ I said.

Richard shook his head and wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I misdoubt we can do both. Your man asked for you.’

I took his shoulder in my right hand. ‘Richard, we talk about being better men. .’

Richard looked away, and then back into my eyes. ‘You go do what’s right for your sister,’ he said. ‘And so will I. I’ll split whatever I take with you. If you want to turn the money down, fine, but this is our chance to be free of this crap. This endless shit.’

I thought about it for half an hour. Then went and found him at a table with two of the Hainaulters we preferred, because they had no ties to the Gascons. ‘A word, Richard,’ I said.

Musard rose and followed me.

‘Better if I attack the convoy and you escort the nuns?’ I asked.

Musard shook his head. ‘No.’ He smiled. ‘But a damn courteous offer, brother.’

He didn’t call me brother often. Nor embrace — he didn’t like to be touched — but he threw his arms around me then.

We bought them a half-dozen Hainaulters for sixty florins — men we’d been with all summer, and knew. We made ten gold florins on the deal, and felt we’d done a good deed, as, in fact, we had.

I promised to lead them across the Bourc’s territory. I thought I could do it, and leave Richard to prepare a small army for us. A Company of Adventure. The cardinal’s convoy was crawling across France, and we wanted a piece of it. I thought I could be back before Richard marched. Richard did not.

But the priest — the knight, and I was sure he was a knight — needed me. And I was going to oblige him if it killed me.

It almost did.

The nuns were noblewomen — English noblewomen. They were, I think, in shock at the loss of their servants, who had been murdered. And as I heard their story, told in fits and starts, I realized that they seemed wrong, as nuns, because they were not demure. They were, both of them, women used to command. Shock, horror and violence only left them angry. Neither would tell me why they were crossing war-torn France.

The knight was from the Priory of St John at Clerkenwell, near London. That’s where I’d seen him. He was a brother-knight of the Order of the Hospital. The same order that protected my sister.

God had spoken, indeed.

Still, I wondered what he was doing escorting two nuns and two monks across war-torn France. The nuns held him in high esteem and the monks leaped to obey him.

The man had not said anything, but it appeared, from what the monks said, that he had single handedly held off six routiers in an ambush that had killed their men-at-arms. I was used to men who bragged all day — bragged about the women they bedded, bragged about knife fights in taverns — yet this man didn’t even show his weapons. He seldom smiled, and he never, that I saw, displayed temper. He was courteous to every soul he met, ready with a blessing, and he never cursed or blasphemed.

He was like a paladin from the chansons.

I worked very hard to please him.

We left the Angel an hour before first light. My Hainaulters were good men with good armour, and I took Sam Bibbo and John Hughes to scout and keep me alive. After the nuns were mounted, I led Fra Peter aside.

‘My lord,’ I began, and he put a steel-clad hand on my arm.

‘Fra!’ he said. ‘Brother. I am not a party to human lordship.’ Those words might have been said with false humility, but instead, they were said with something like humour. As if he found his own views amusing.

I bowed in the saddle. ‘My, er, Fra. We have to cross territory held by a man — a man whom even the brigands hold to be evil. I intend to take you north-’

‘We came from the north,’ he said quietly.

I nodded. ‘Yes, my lord. That is, Fra Peter. But there is, from here, but one road south, and the Bourc Camus lies astride it, with armed men on every river crossing. We need to go east along the great river first, and then we can pass through the eastern fringes of his territory with less risk.’

He had a short beard, and he ran his fingers through it and pursed his lips. ‘Good,’ he said.

‘Fra, if the Bourc attacks us in force. .’ I turned and looked at the two women. ‘None of us should allow ourselves to be captured.’

‘That is in God’s hands, not mine,’ he said. ‘We must do our best. Beyond that — Inshallah.’ He smiled, his dark eyes far away.

‘He is a horrible, brutal man,’ I insisted.

‘When you say, “man”, you include the horrible and the brutal,’ Fra Peter said. ‘We all bear the mark of sin.’ He looked at me, and I felt myself judged. ‘Will you ask about your sister, or have you forgotten her?’ he asked suddenly.

Sweet Jesu, I’d been with them for half a day and a night and I hadn’t asked. ‘How. . how is she?’

Fra Peter smiled. It was a slow smile, full of grace, and it lit his face. ‘She is a remarkable woman,’ he said. ‘Blessed by God.’ He looked at me with his hard, soldier’s eyes, and I was judged again.

He was starting to make me angry, pious bastard.

I led us north at a rapid pace. We turned along the lower Marne and crossed the river that marked the Bourc’s boundary about eight leagues from his precious bridge.

The knight of the Order came and rode next to me. ‘Tell me more about this Bourc,’ he said.

‘The Bourc Camus,’ I said. ‘He makes children into killers. He openly proclaims himself to be Satan’s son come to earth. He brags of it.’ I met the knight’s eye. ‘Nothing would please him more than to take a pair of nuns.’

The knight nodded. ‘He won’t take them,’ he said. ‘I chose you for a reason.’

Those words sat with me all day, I can tell you.

That night, under an autumn moon, and with a hard frost burning like white fire along the ground, I kept them moving. The English nuns were fine horsewomen, and too brave to grumble, but the monks were not. Despite which, we trotted across barren, burned fields with the cold orb of the moon high in the sky above us.

Sometime after the moon set, we saw movement to our right, in the high ground, where there were two fires. But I caught no sounds and saw no glint of reflected light, so we rode on in silence punctuated only by the rattle of armour and the jingle of horse harness.

I was very afraid, and I saw my fear as a penance and I revelled in it.

I have known drunkards who have stopped drinking and thieves who have stopped stealing. I’ve listened to their stories in convents and monastaries, and we all share this. You do not know what the bottom is until you have started to climb out of it.

It was a long dark night, and I didn’t lose my nerve, even when the first crossbow bolt snapped across the frozen air in front of Alexander.

Two years of petty war had taught me that, in a small party, the only possible response to ambush is to attack the ambush. I’m sure that this habit would eventually have seen me dead, but as a doctrine, it was as good as anything produced by the scholars at the University of Paris.

I flipped the visor on my basinet down and put spurs to Alexander. I got my lance couched, identified a crossbowman kneeling in the ditch by the road and went for him.

He decided he could get his weapon spanned. He was brave and determined, and so were his fellows — four more brigands in black and white. They were in the ditch on a long curve, so that they had 300 paces of clear shot.

I had almost 200 paces to ride, and my brute of a horse wasn’t very fast.

The Hospitaller knight was coming up on my shield side. I couldn’t see the Hainaulters and had to hope they were covering the nuns and monks, because ambushes usually had two parts.

One of the crossbowmen got spanned. He hesitated a moment, his eyes wild, his head jerking back and forth between me and the Hospitaller. I was in armour, however poor, while the Hospitaller was in a long brown gown.

The boy shot the brown gown.

He missed.

Fra Peter struck the four of them the way a hammer strikes an anvil. In two breaths, he had landed blows on each of them and they lay in their blood. His horse kicked in two directions.

I reined in, my sword unbloodied.

The Hospitaller dismounted. He knelt by each corpse and prayed. The third man moved and the knight pinned him gently and opened his clothes, after checking and shriving the fourth.

‘He’s alive,’ Fra Peter said and began to explore the man’s wounds.

The man. The boy. The brigand was perhaps fifteen.

I watched him carefully — the boy — and when he went for the basilard at his belt, I stepped ungently on his hand.

Fra Peter looked at the hand, took the dagger and shook his head.

‘You may as well just kill him,’ I said. ‘He won’t talk. He’s old enough that he’s been one of the Bourc’s killers for two or three years.’

‘He has a soul, and free will,’ Fra Peter said. ‘As do you.’

He was bandaged, tied and then tied to a saddle. I stood in angry silence. I was intelligent enough to know that Fra Peter had just equated me with one of the Bourc’s child-brigands.

A day’s ride saw us south of the Bourc’s territory. At each halt, the knight fed the boy and paid him no more heed. He took him away to defecate and brought him back, red with shame.

He was good, but he was also a clever, dangerous man. I saw what he was doing to the boy. He gave the boy nothing. The boy had nowhere to perform. No torture to resist. No statement to ignore. The knight’s complete disinterest was very clever.

We camped that night by a rushing torrent that was, thankfully, only ten paces wide. I crossed with John Hughes and we built a good fire and dried our clothes, then built a pair of brush shelters facing the fire, and hiding most of it, a tactic we’d learned from the bloody Gascons. By the time the main party rode up, we had hot water in kettles and Sam Bibbo was already high on the ridge above us, signalling the all-clear with a mirror.

Fra Peter dismounted, and very carefully picketed and curried his horse. His war sword, which he mostly carried on his saddle and not on his belt, was more than four feet long. I hadn’t seen many swords as long or as sharp. The point was elongated, like a cook’s skewer, and fatter at the point — reinforced for piercing armour. He allowed me to examine it with an amused raise of the eyebrows.

I emulated him and curried my brute of a gelding. I seldom did — horses had become mere tools since Goldie — but I was under his spell, and even as I resented him, I sought his favour.

Sam came in in the last of the light, by which time my Hainaulters and I had woven a hordle — a fence of brush — to block the wind and hide the fire from prying eyes to the north. Then we gathered round the fire and got warm. The nuns served wine — I was surprised — and the Hainaulters, who were for the most part men as hard as me, all muttered their thanks and searched their memories for the manners they should show to noble women. And nuns.

Fra Peter walked away from the fire.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked. ‘The Bourc’s men may be out there and we need to set a watch.’

Fra Peter nodded. ‘Of course. I will be happy to take a turn. In the meantime, I intend to kneel. And pray. You are welcome to join me.’

I must have flushed.

He put a hand on my arm. ‘It is easy to resist change,’ he said. ‘It is easy to wall God out of your heart. But I sense that you want something more than life as a killer. What do you think about, when you contemplate your life? What do you want — beyond gold?’

I couldn’t meet his eye. ‘I want to be a knight,’ I said. ‘But I am not sure what that means.’

He nodded. ‘Come and pray. Let me show you how.’

‘I know how to pray,’ I shot back. ‘And you? Brother? When you killed those three men today, were you holier?’

He led me two more steps away from the fire. ‘I am not holy,’ he said. ‘Listen, boy. And I call you boy, because that is what you are. Listen, boy. When we take our vows, they ask us, would we take the cross if we knew that in killing, we risk hell? So that other, weaker men and women might achieve salvation?’ His dark eyes cut me like blades. ‘If I risk hell, killing the enemies of the church, what are you?’

‘Damned!’ I spat, like the angry boy he called me. ‘I don’t care.’

He shrugged. ‘It is the ultimate defence, is it not? Indifference.’ He shrugged again. And smiled. ‘Listen, William. Will you allow me to teach you to pray?’

‘Paternoster, qui es in Caelis, santificatur. .’ I began.

He laughed. ‘That isn’t prayer,’ he said. ‘That’s repetition.’

Despite my anger — the kind of anger young men achieve mostly through understanding their own shortcomings — he had me. I was curious. I wanted his regard.

I wanted to change, too.

‘Can you see pictures in your head, William?’ he asked me.

I suppose I shrugged. ‘What kind of pictures?’ I asked.

‘Can you see your sister?’ he asked. ‘Look into the darkness and close your eyes. See your sister.’

‘This is praying?’ I asked.

‘Do you see your sister?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I admitted. Truth to tell, I was horrified by how hazy my visual memory of my sister was.

‘What is your favourite scene in the Bible, William?’ he asked.

‘Epiphany,’ I said. ‘The gifts of the magi.’

‘Splendid,’ he said with real satisfaction. His pleasure relaxed me. ‘Can you imagine the blessed Virgin?’ he asked.

I discovered, to my horror, that the blessed Virgin bore a striking resemblence to Emile.

‘See her, in a lowly stable, surrounded by animals, William. With the newborn Christ child on her knee.’ He was speaking quietly. I was simply obeying. As he imagined the scene for me, I obediently filled in the details.

‘Now, can you see the magi? The three kings?’ he asked.

I added them.

‘And their retinues. They are, after all, kings.’ There was gentle humour in his voice.

I added men rapidly: Sir John Chandos, sitting on his horse, and Sam Bibbo, on his. Sir John Hawkwood and Bertrand du Guesclin. It was an odd, mixed set of retinues, and my three kings looked very much like the Black Prince, the Dauphin and Charles of Navarre.

‘Now put yourself there, William,’ he said.

And there I was. With snow on the ground, and a bite in the air, and the rattle of horse-tack and the feel of fur at my throat. The virgin’s crown and halo were a glow of gold past my Prince’s shoulder, and my horse fidgeted.

‘Can you see the Christ child?’ Fra Peter asked.

I could not. I tried to push forward, but all the men in front of me — all the better knights — blocked my view. I realized that I was far at the back, and that I had a wall of famous men between me and the Christ child.

I made to dismount. .

. . And Fra Peter was holding me up. I was swaying in the darkness, my eyes unfocused and his arm was around my waist.

‘So,’ he said. His teeth showed in the new moonlight. ‘You are your sister’s brother.’

‘That is prayer?’ I asked.

He blinked. ‘To those who can achieve it,’ he said. ‘You will leave us in the morning?’

‘I must,’ I said. But I was wondering if I shouldn’t simply ride away and follow Fra Peter.

‘You should sleep,’ he said.

Indeed, I was so shaken I couldn’t think.

‘Try,’ he said. ‘Try the prayer, when you can. I will be in Avignon for a long time. Come and see me there.’

‘And my sister?’ I asked.

‘Needs her dowry. But in truth, young master, your sister is better at seeing to her needs than you are to yours. You should visit her.’ He shrugged. ‘Will you accept my blessing?’ he asked.

I bowed my head.

When he had pronounced his benison, he said, ‘You intend to attack the convoy.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No. Now I don’t know.’

He nodded. ‘Go with God,’ he said. ‘See where he takes you.’

The next morning he rode away, with his noble nuns, his two angry monks, his boy-soldier prisoner and six fully armed Hainaulters. I watched them until they were gone at the base of the valley.

‘I liked him,’ Sam said.

‘Me too,’ I allowed.

I thought about it all, silently, for the fifteen leagues of the ride back across the Bourc’s territory. Sam and John rode by me. We were as cautious as men crossing enemy territory in broad daylight can be. The ground was frozen, and we cut across fields, through hedgerows and over old stone fences, but often we had to go on the road.

We saw no black and white.

I came to the Bourc’s bridge from behind — from the Bourc’s side. Sam and I scouted it carefully, hearts hammering in our chests.

There were four men in a blind of branches, upwind of the bridge. Two were asleep and two awake. We were above and behind them, and Sam crept forward from cover to cover. I watched him from above as he went — an hour to move fifty paces.

I thought I was going to throw up. The tension was not my kind of tension. I prefer to be in the thick of it. I loved Sam Bibbo, and at another level, I’d saved him from the Plague, or whatever the hell he’d had, and he represented. . something. Something good.

I didn’t want him to die.

It was an education in stalking, watching him cover ground. Twice, I lost him, despite staring right at him from fifty paces away.

Finally, he rose to his feet with a slow inevitability. He had his bow in his hand, string, and four arrows in his fingers.

He drew and loosed so fast I scarcely followed the first shaft. I saw him draw the second to his ear, but I didn’t see him loose it, because I was on my feet and running for the Bourc’s men.

I might have saved my strength.

They had two crossbows cocked and ready, and neither of them ever left the blind, where they were pointed at the road. The four went down in five shafts. One died in his sleep.

When we went back to the road, John pointed mutely at the hillside behind us. He had a shaft in his own hand and he used it to point to a place on the hillside where a tree was dead.

Bibbo winced.

‘What?’ I asked.

John Hughes sucked in his cheeks and spat. ‘There’s a watch post to cover the rear of the one you heroes just stalked,’ he said. ‘It’s empty or we’d all be dead.’

We walked up the hill and looked at it. It had a hut, a pair of watch posts with woven branches and screens of brush, a firepit and the corpses of a young girl and a young boy.

‘Christ,’ Bibbo said. ‘I missed all this?’ He shook his head.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ John said. The corpses spooked him more than our poor scouting.

I followed some tracks outside and came to another clearing, this one with hoof prints.

I shook my head. I went back and put my hand on the ashes of the firepit.

‘They were just here.’ I scratched under my chin in thought, and Jesus my saviour vanished. ‘They’ve gone for the convoy, with every man they have,’ I said.

Bibbo nodded. ‘That’s it,’ he agreed.

‘Let’s ride,’ I said.

Hughes paused. ‘Give me two Ave Marias,’ he said, and disappeared into the woods.

I knew he was gone to fire the huts and the corpses. I was tempted to stop him, because it would warn the Bourc, but I also realized that if the Bourc turned back from his attack on the convoy, Richard would be safe.

We made the gate of our town alive and untouched, and I got to the inn to find that Richard had marched.

I got a nag for a riding horse, to spare my war horse, such as he was, the brute. Sam and John followed me as we rode at day’s end with three horses apiece, searching east along the valley for the convoy and our friends.

Perkin was at the inn. He said that Richard had gathered almost sixty men — thirty lances, almost two dozen Gascon spearmen, and a pair of English archers who belonged to Sir Robert Knolles but didn’t have anything better to do. Sixty men should have been easy to find.

We rode hard until the moon set, and then made a cold camp. A camp on the edge of November in the Auxerre highlands is cold indeed. No fire, no warmth except your horse. And it is brutal on horses, even horses like ours. We drank wine and rubbed our steeds down — even the nags.

An hour after the last horse was picketed, there was a noise. We jumped up to the maddened chaos of our horses and saw wolves. They were gone before we could kill one.

Sam shook his head. ‘I’m going to watch,’ he said. ‘I ain’t sleeping anyway.’

John and I pressed as close as we could. I slept for an hour, I think.

Sam woke us. He dismounted and gave his horse to Perkin, who had disobeyed me and started a very small fire and heated wine. God praise such a man.

Sam pulled the saddle off his poor hack. He set it on the ground, threw his three-quarter cloak over it and sat back with a groan.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘The Bourc’s men are out there. I spotted them down by the river — black and white banners.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s one device I know in the dark, eh? I’m guessing he’s going to stop the convoy and charge them a toll.’

‘Any idea where?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But John needs to get going and keep an eye on Camus.’ He nodded at Perkin, who handed him a beaker of hot wine. ‘Benidictee, lad. Master Gold, this is my last fight. I mean to do my part, but when we divide the spoil, I’m done.’

What could I say?

Sam Bibbo was a more famous man than me. He’d been at all the fights. He’d been down and up — famous, a criminal, a royal archer. He didn’t need to follow the likes of me, but his presence meant that other men took me seriously.

‘I’ll miss you, Sam,’ I said.

He nodded, looking into the fire. ‘John Hughes will stay, won’t you, lad?’ he asked.

Hughes, already rolling his cloak on his saddle, grunted.

‘He likes the life,’ Sam said.

‘Bollocks to you, Sam Bibbo,’ Hughes called softly.

Bibbo ignored him. ‘My bones hurt every morn, and my back — by the saviour, Will, I’d rather spend a night in the saddle than a night lying out on the ground.’ He looked at me. ‘And the Bourc — when men like that come to the fore, it’s bad. I served with Chandos and the Prince. Remember the man you killed in the tavern? He liked to hurt people. I should never have fallen in with him, either.’

I nodded, the way young men do when older men talk about pain. It’s the same way boys nod when men talk about sex. I had no idea what pains he meant.

Of course, now I do, eh?

But I was cut by his words. ‘Are you comparing me to the Bourc?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘I was glad you helped yon priest,’ he said. ‘You’re ten times the man the Bourc is. But will you be in ten years of this?’

We rose while there was still mist in the streambeds and we rode hard. John was gone before first light, off to watch the Bourc’s banners, and Sam, Perkin and I rode north and west, looking to find Richard.

But the Black Squire had moved at first light, too.

Bibbo sat on his horse, looking at the tramped ground and drowned fire, and cursed. ‘I should ha’ just ridden in and told him.’ He shook his head. ‘But, Plague take me, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want a spear in my gizzard in the dark.’

‘Nothing for it,’ I said, and changed horses. So did Sam and Perkin.

We rode into the fog.

An hour after the fog began to lighten, we heard movement — quite a lot of movement. The brilliant fog was so thick that we couldn’t see much beyond our horse’s noses, and dripping wet. I reined in, and Sam rode forward.

He came back and shook his head. ‘Unbelievable they’ve made it as far as they have,’ he said. ‘There’s gold tack on some of the mules. It’s two fucking cardinals. Twenty men-at-arms. He shook his head.

‘The three of us aren’t likely to take them. We need to find Richard,’ I said. My nerves were getting to me. The fog, the Bourc, the church convoy.

I could see the disaster coming. Even Sam’s determination to leave.

I dismounted from my horse in the dripping fog, knelt on the wet grass and prayed.

And then I rose and took three deep breaths. In my head, just as I could see, however dimly, the virgin Mary, so I could see the lay of this valley, with its broad flats at the base, its sharp angle halfway to the town of Guye, and the road along the flat. I could see the hedges along the heights, and the stone walls that crisscrossed the ruined fields.

If it was me, I’d hit the column where the Bourc was. At the narrowing of the flats.

If I was Richard, I’d be on the other side of the ridge, waiting for the fog to clear so that my Gascons and archers would be effective.

Bless Fra Peter. Looking at things inside my head is a habit I received from him, for good or ill.

‘I believe that the Black squire is on the other side of the ridge, above the fog, shadowing the convoy,’ I said.

Bibbo nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Yes!’ he added with a little more excitement. ‘I see sense in that. We ha’n’t crossed their tracks — that much I’d swear to.’

‘On me,’ I said, and mounted with an effort. My hips didn’t love a night on cold ground, even at the age of nineteen.

We rode carefully. The fog carried noise oddly — snatches of Avignon gossip, the shrill voice of a man who clearly thought himself in charge, an angry imprecation and a squeaky wagon wheel.

Then, as suddenly as the parting of a curtain, we rode clear of the fog. We moved as swiftly up the ridge as we could. Sam was ahead of me — he came to a gap in the hedge and stopped.

So did my heart.

Then he waved, and a broad smile crossed his face.

And in fifty paces, I was with Richard. He grinned and pounded my armoured back.

‘They’re right below us!’ he said. ‘What?’

‘The Bourc is just to the south, at the Narrows,’ I said. ‘With half a hundred men, or more.’

Richard paused.

‘We found one of his camps deserted. His whole area is deserted. Even the castle he holds for Knolles is empty. He’s after the convoy.’

Richard looked at me.

Richard Musard and I have fought over most of the things men fight over — women, loyalty, even money — but in some ways, we were two men with but a single will. He looked at the fog.

‘The Bourc will hit the convoy whatever we do,’ I said.

He smiled, and his smile spread until it covered his whole face.

‘And then — we save them.’ Richard shook his head. ‘Kill the Bourc, save the bishop-’

‘Sam says it is a cardinal,’ I put in.

Richard laughed aloud. ‘By God. By God. We’ll be knights in a week!’

I agreed. It all seemed like God’s will.

We had sixty men. We put all of them behind the ridge that lines the edge of the Seine, above the road, and we moved fast — at a canter — along the ridge top to our new position, which depended on my sense of the ground. I sent Sam and half a dozen of our Gascon bidets down into the valley to watch for John Hughes, while keeping a weather eye on Camus and the convoy.

As I’ve said before, waiting in ambush is one of the hardest things a soldier does. The waiting always seems to go on for ever. There’s lots of room for doubt — in fact, it’s a rare ambush where I don’t decide I’ve made an awful error.

But the two cardinals and their convoy moved across Auxerre with the reckless assurance of a drunken soldier who has just been paid. They were as brazen as an old whore, and just as well-defended.

John Hughes appeared out of the mist before we heard the convoy. He laid it all out for us — twenty men-at-arms, the number of mules, where the two great men were — in some detail. He added that there were seventy mules, ten horses and six wagons.

‘Have you seen Sam?’ I asked.

‘He’s watching the Bourc,’ Hughes said. ‘Bastard is moving along the valley.’

Tricky.

‘He wants you to let the Bourc hit the cardinals first,’ Hughes added.

Richard grunted. ‘We couldn’t stop him anyway.’ Richard looked at me. ‘Two cardinals? This will make us famous,’ he said.

I suppose I shrugged.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t like fighting for the church.’

‘Sit here if you don’t want to come,’ I said. ‘But I mean to have a piece of the Bourc.’

‘For that, I’ll join you,’ he said.

We moved along the ridge top, out of the mist and with good visibility for leagues. We moved carefully, watching and listening for the cardinal’s train at the bottom of the valley.

The mist burned off about an hour after a working man would have gone to his fields, if there had been anyone left to till the fields of the Auxerre, which there was not. As soon as the mist became transparent, the Bourc struck, his men-at-arms crashing through the riverside brush, panicking the pack animals and killing several of the papal men-at-arms in their first charge.

I brought my men up to the ridgeline and formed them. Men were still coming up and I needed every straggler. We sent our Gascon javelin men down the gullies. They moved like the cattlethieves they were, silent and almost invisible.

I saw the Bourc’s banner advance, and advance again. His men ripped into the pack animals, killing many of them outright. They opened every load, destroying manuscripts and textiles, chopping things like chalices and icons into pieces for the precious metal.

A month before, I might have done the same. But watching it was — different. And I hated the Bourc.

As the sun rose toward nones, my men reached their positions. The looters were like vultures and raven on a kill — gorging, with no notion of danger.

I looked at Richard, and he smiled and slammed down his visor.

We both raised our hands.

Our men-at-arms came forward at a canter. The bidets rose as one from their ambush and threw their darts at the horses of the Bourc’s men-at-arms, and my four English archers — all four of them at widely different points, standing in good cover with their arrows laid out before them — began to rain shafts on Camus’ troopers.

I hadn’t made a detailed plan of attack, but Richard and I knew our business; the archers were veterans of a hundred fights and as many hunts, and the Gascons, as far as I could tell, made war for sport.

Which meant, unfortunately, that the enemy Gascons knew what to do when ambushed.

The Bourc didn’t hesitate. His banner dipped once, and his men dropped the loot in their hands or scooped one more chalice into the leather bags they all carried, then they were charging down the road, low on their horses, with the lesser armed men behind. There were three or four horses down, and the javelin men were gathering in clumps to finish the dismounted riders or take them for ransom. The longbow arrows continued to reap horses. At least one shaft — probably one of Sam’s — caught a poorer man-at-arms in the unarmoured back and plucked him from the saddle.

Richard led our men-at-arms at his men-at-arms. I was already half a league off to the right, behind the fight as it developed below me, but I pressed my brute of a horse to a heavy gallop and rumbled along through a meadow of drying flowers that had recently been a monastery’s largest ploughed field. The Bourc was an evil bastard and I suspected he’d have another force. Perkin and I were all the reserve I had.

Camus saw Richard and turned towards him and his men followed. The two bands of men-at-arms were nearly equal in size, but Richard had the hill behind him. I thought it was all going well until a troop of horsemen in armour emerged from the road to the south. They were as far behind me as I was behind the fight. I stood in my stirrups, annoying my horse by trying to gallop while looking back over my cantle.

There they were, confirming my fears.

Gascons or Navaresse. A reserve — a blocking force behind the convoy, in case any of the rich priests tried to run.

It’s quite hard to count from the back of a galloping horse, but my impression was that there were as many armoured men coming up behind me as were ahead of me.

Gascons. They have no compunction about killing each other.

I knew where one of the archers was and I was going to pass his lair, so I rode down the meadow to the low stone wall and put my horse at it — not out of any desire to show my riding, but because I had no time to find a gate.

He tried to baulk.

I pricked him with both spurs. I wasn’t losing the Bourc this time.

He rose like an old cat and his hooves struck the wall — a wall no higher than my knees. We were over, and I was on the road. I knew arrows had come from here. I pulled on my reins and saw an apiary — abandoned, of course. ‘John!’ I roared.

It wasn’t John it was Sam. He appeared from the trees.

‘More men — behind me on the road. Slow them!’ I called. I had a moment’s hesitation — it was Sam’s last fight and I was ordering him to cover our rear.

He waved and went back to the trees.

I got my horse back to a massive canter and headed north along the riverbank.

The fight on the hillside was about 200 heartbeats old by the time I rode around the woods — a melee that was already spreading across the hillside. The Bourc’s men were holding — I assumed they were so bold because they knew they had reinforcements coming.

And a fortune in gold hanging in bags from their saddles.

I put my horse’s head at the Bourc’s banner and lowered my lance. Getting the lance into the rest was no longer the struggle it had been for me in the early days. Nobly born boys did this from age eight or nine, and I hadn’t started until fifteen or sixteen, but I was improving. I got my lance down, flipped my visor down with my left hand and tried to line my lance point up with the Bourc’s banner-bearer. I couldn’t find the bastard himself.

It is hard to see from inside a basinet. Until I closed my visor, I had some appreciation of the battlefield. Once I closed it, I could see one opponent. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

The strictest interpretation of the rules of war would have said I should have shouted or announced myself, as I was riding into the Gascons from behind, but I made a different choice. I hit the banner-bearer in the middle of his back and probably killed him instantly — my lance broke under his weight as he went off his mount — and the Bourc’s black and white standard went down.

There was an immediate reaction.

I got my longsword out of the scabbard and looked again for the Bourc. He was nowhere to be seen. I could see Richard, locked in mounted combat with one of the Albret bastards, and I could see several coats of arms I knew, but most of the Bourc’s men wore his black and white, and any of them could have been the man himself.

The fight came to me. I felt the thunder of my opponent’s approach in time to duck, almost to my horse’s neck, and his sword cut just touched my helmet — I had a glimpse of his black and white cote, and then I was sawing at the reins left handed, trying to get around. My brute of a horse didn’t like my idea and was, in fact, turning the opposite way, so that my opponent got a free cut at my back. I swear I felt the blow before it hit — I knew where it was and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it, and all because I had a poor horse.

He cut when he should have stabbed, so my backplate took the blow low, near the kidney — I pissed blood for days — and he must have taken a bit off the high back of my saddle, then I was around and our horses were flank to flank. I got my blade up and caught his — our cross guards locked. He had no visor, and I backhanded him in the face with my left gauntlet. Blood sprayed, and he fell back — his sword fell away from mine, and I stabbed twice, in rapid succession, as he tried to back his horse. My first stab caught his helmet and slid off, but the second went into his cheek and through the roof of his mouth, and he was done.

Then I was in the thick of a mounted melee. I’d never been in one before. Blows fell on my head and shoulders — my head was snapped around by a heavy blow, and I was shoved forward over the front of my saddle. I had just enough courage and spirit to snap back with my sword — short stabs with the point. I buried my blade in a horse’s unprotected neck, and horse and rider fell, and I thought, Jesu, I’ve put three of them down! Where is everyone?’

I leaned back against my saddle — my back shrieked in pain and I got my blade over my head and caught a mace coming in. My new opponent pressed, and I hammered him with the pommel of my sword — he drove the butt of his mace into my throat, and I got my left hand onto his visor and forced it up. I lost the visor.

We both fell from our horses together. I assume the two horses separated, leaving their human cargoes to fall, but before I even felt my brute’s change of weight, I was down and lost my sword.

He didn’t lose his mace, he swung it at me.

I got my dagger free — got it in both hands and parried.

See? De Charny’s dagger. I knew you gentlemen would want to see it. Three sided-solid steel, forged from a single piece. I’ve stopped a poleaxe with this; I’ve used it as a crow-bar in a burning building. It’s not so much a blade as a bar of steel with a point.

I got it in both hands, and he swung and I stopped the mace, then I got his wrist in my own left hand. He let go with his right and slammed me in the head, rocking me back, then he was trying to get atop me, but I had his right arm, now, in my left. He tried to pound at me with his left hand — my visor saved me and the dagger started searching his armour for a weak point. I rammed it up under his arm and his mail held — my point skidded off the cuisse protecting the top of his thigh.

He was still trying to get on top of me, to pin my arms with his knees. His steel-clad limbs looking for anything soft — between my legs, under my arms.

But I had his right arm, and my left hand made it to his neck — a basic wrestling lock that any English boy knows.

I rolled him and broke his arm.

He sagged immediately. The pain must have been like the kick of a mule, and I had him off me while he screamed. I knelt on his broken arm and pushed his visor up, and. .

. . It was the Bourc.

I won’t say it was the finest moment of my young life — it doesn’t quite rival Emile pulling her kirtle over her head — but by Christ it was good.

In retrospect, I should have killed him. But — here’s the irony — I had begun to see myself, as it were, reflected in this evil man. He was beaten and wounded. Screaming in pain.

I didn’t kill him.

Sometimes, the most moral decisions are the ones that cause everyone the most pain. Fra Peter taught me that, later.

I put him over his horse — what a struggle that was, and only Perkin’s appearance, like the miracle machine in a passion play, saved me from dumping him on the ground as a bad job. Perkin got under him and pushed, then roped him to his fancy saddle. I managed to get back into my own saddle — some horses don’t run away when you want them to.

Richard had just taken the older Albret boy.

Gaillard de la Motte — a good man, but at the time I barely knew him — was killing Camus’ men who’d been dismounted. He rode over, waving a lance head covered in gore. ‘They’re not gentlemen,’ he said, as if shocked. ‘They’re peasant boys dressed up like knights.’

So am I, I thought. Though I wasn’t precisely a peasant, I still felt some sympathy for those boys.

Who were dying. Every one. My men were offering them no quarter, and now the survivors of the cardinal’s men-at-arms were rallying and joining us, and they weren’t offering quarter either.

I got my men-at-arms together by raising the Bourc’s black and white banner and waving it. Richard roared his war cry, ‘The Black Squire, the Black Squire!’ Until we had a dozen mounted men, then we went back down the road. We left our squires and valets to plunder the enemy and find the gold.

We met the second force near the apiary. They had horses down, and they’d stopped to cover their wounded against the archers.

We blew right through them like falcons through a flock of songbirds, and they scattered. The fighting spread across the hillside, and then it was over — I don’t think I went sword to sword with a single man.

I was focused on Sam Bibbo, who was standing in the road, losing shaft after shaft at the Bourc’s men-at-arms as if he was in some personal Crecy or Poitiers. I positioned my horse just behind him, sword in hand. I was sure — as sure as I’d ever been — that he would die, and I was determined to keep him alive. I even prayed.

I’m guessing that God had a chuckle at our expense. Sam didn’t die. By the time the day was another hour older, we had a small fortune in gold, a dozen men-at-arms to ransom and only one man dead: a Gascon knight.

Late in the fight, as my Gascon mountaineers charged into the back of the melee on the hillside and started killing horses, I found that we’d migrated far enough west that we were in among the convoy. As de la Motte, his Hainaulters and our Gascons began to eliminate the last resistance, I found myself facing a cardinal. He had a long, ascetic face and a princely air, somewhat marred by a shrill voice.

‘Child of Belial! Thou creature of hell!’ he spat at me. ‘To rob the church! What is thy name, creature, that I may curse thee to the base of the pit of hell?’

I reined in and raised my visor. ‘Eminence,’ I said. ‘I believe our timely appearance has-’

‘Curse you and your kind!’ he screamed.

He was the Cardinal of Perigueux — Tallyrand. The most powerful man in Avignon. I met him again, as you’ll hear if you keep my cup filled.

He was not afraid. By God, he should have been, but his sense of his own power was absolute, and I could not get through to him. He began to say aloud the words of the sentence of excommunication.

‘My lord!’ I screamed. ‘We saved you.’

He struck me with the sceptre in his hand.

Richard Musard took my reins and hauled my horse around. ‘I do not think we’ll be made knights this day,’ he said quietly. ‘They think we’re the Bourc’s men.’ He thrust out his jaw — something he only did when he was angry.

Our men were lusty and loud as we turned our horses toward Champlay.

We rode back to Champlay and handed all our prisoners to Sir Walter. If I had considered handing the looted gold back to the church — and I did consider it — those thoughts were wiped away.

I remember that night, too. There are few treats as fine as feasting after victory. I tied the Bourc to a chair and then piled the gold coins — English leopards, French ecu, Italian florins and ducats — on the table. We had twenty-seven men-at-arms, four English archers and twenty Gascon mountaineers. We counted the archers as full shares and the Gascon spearmen as half shares, and everyone was satisfied. Some of the Gascons felt we might have done better to take the princes of the church and hold them for ransom, but such things weren’t done. Not yet. Not by us.

Richard and I drew double shares, as it was our aventur. I made 240 florins in cash, with a lot of gold bits, an ivory crucifix, a nice set of black onyx beads and a small reliquary, somewhat knocked about. I won that over dice that night.

Richard had taken the elder Albret bastard. We kept him, and the Bourc, as they were worth money, and we kept their horses and armour. I sold the Bourc’s horse for a hundred Florins the next day, and my own horse for thirty — make your own judgements on their merits — and I spent the whole sum on a single horse, another golden-tawny horse, rising sixteen hands, with clean legs and a pretty head. He wasn’t Goldie, but he was calm and smart, and I called him Jack. I was done giving horses romantic names. I liked Jack. Best of all, Jack liked me.

Young Albret, our prisoner, announced when I returned from a ride over the fields that he didn’t want to go back to serving Camus. His voice trembled when he said it.

Richard called me over. Albret was seated between Sam and John, and he was panting like a man who’d fought in the lists an hour. His eyes were full of tears.

‘You won’t believe this!’ Richard said.

Camus was conscious, and he sat at a table, tied to the chair. He watched us like a snake.

Albret pointed at him. ‘Take him away. He says he is Satan come to earth!’

Camus grinned.

Sam went and hoisted his arm behind him — his broken arm — and hauled him upstairs. He locked the Bourc in a room and left him with two black eyes and a broken right hand. I hadn’t been there to hear what the other men heard, but I gather it was pretty bad.

The Bourc caught boys young and made them monsters, like him. He had boys rape their sisters. He had them fight each other — to the death.

He kept the survivors and made them his own.

The Albret boy was terrified of him, and believed that he really was a servant of Satan come to earth.

Sam returned, sickened. ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ he said. ‘He makes me sick.’

Later in the morning, Sir Walter came and took the Bourc away. He was an important man in some circles, and too important for men-at-arms like us to string him up.

In our inn yard, he turned to me — two black eyes, broken arm, broken hand — and smiled. ‘Don’t let me catch you,’ he said. ‘You know nothing of what I can do to a man. You are weak. I am strong.’ He laughed. ‘You can’t even kill me.’

He was still laughing when he went out the gate.

By my reckoning, I could have saved almost a thousand people by ramming this dagger into his eye.

Sam took his time in leaving us. He stayed for a while because of a girl, and then he stayed because we launched a series of raids on the broken remnants of the Bourc’s band — of course, Knolles’ men weren’t supposed to make war on each other, but that was France in 1359. We took their territory and made it ours, collected their patis from the handful of surviving peasants, and blessed St John, they were a beaten and pitiful lot. One dark night in November, we crept up on the Bourc’s town of Malicorne. We’d build scaling ladders that we could assemble on the spot, and we put them to the wall and stormed the place.

There were about a dozen of his ‘children’ and some other broken men. We put them to the sword and felt better about ourselves. He now held nothing — he would return from his captivity, or wherever he was, to nothing.

I took my ready money to the Italian vultures and paid it toward my sister’s dowry. Maestro Giancarlo was kind enough — and he was much less of a bastard than the others — to point out that I was more than halfway to my goal.

Beyond the Auxerre, the world was moving around us. King Edward landed with a magnificent army and sat down to besiege Reims, which had somehow staved off the Earl of Lancaster in the year after Poitiers. The King of Navarre met with the Dauphin and surrendered to him. To this day, no one knows why. There’s those that say he felt he could hurt the cause of the Dauphin more from inside the government, and there’s those that say the bastard was so steeped in betrayal that he betrayed himself. But while Navarre took himself out of the war, his captains continued to fight in his name, even after he ordered them to cease — like Knolles and his brother Phillip — and the Bourc, who we heard was free and raising another force in Gascony. We never had a mouton for him — Sir Robert Knolles ruled that our capture of the bastard was against the laws of war.

As I’ve said, I should have killed him.

The King of England moved towards Paris in three great columns. The Captain of Troissy, one of Sir Robert’s most trusted men, Nicholas Tamworth, arrived at Chantay to raise a field force for an aventur in Burgundy. He promised fresh fields and untouched country.

He stayed in our inn, drank our wine and slept with our girls. He was a careful planner, and he sent a dozen men north into Burgundy to find a castle that was strong enough to be held, and vulnerable enough to be taken by escalade, without a siege.

He flattered us, me and Richard, a great deal. And he offered to make us corporals — commanders of a dozen lances.

Messieurs, I want you to understand. Richard and I, we wanted something better. We had tried to do something well, to act from conviction. And the cardinal branded us felons and published our names at Avignon as traitors to Mother Church. My name! In a scroll against the ‘criminals who serve Satan’! While the Bourc went free!

By our saviour, messieurs, we had some dark days. Tamworth seemed to offer us salvation. We’d been feasting him for two days when Geoffrey Chaucer rode through the inn yard, dismounted and yelled for wine.

We didn’t kill him. Firstly, we’d shared too many hard times, and second, it was clear from his beautiful boots and his fine cote that he was a man of some importance — and Tamworth treated him like a lord.

Richard spat with indignation. ‘He serves the King! While we fight for scraps!’

As it proved, he served Prince Lionel of Clarence, and we had hundreds of gold florins in bags at our Italian bank. But we both attributed our fall from the Prince’s grace to Chaucer, and he did nothing to dispel our anger. In fact, he pranced about our inn, demanding clean linen and sneering at everything — the girls, the wine, the cleanliness.

He sat with Tamworth for two hours, drawing on the table in wine, and then he slept a few hours, mounted a girl and tossed a few coins to one of the boys. He tried to avoid me, but I caught him in the barn. He was saddling his horse.

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said. ‘I’m a royal messenger.’

I leaned against the stall. ‘Richard was your friend,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind you treating me like a leper. But Richard?’

He had the good grace to look abashed, but he kept saddling his horse. ‘What was I to do?’ he asked. ‘Lie for you? The Prince’s senechal — one of your regular customers, may I add — blabbed, and you were done.’

I grabbed his shoulder.

He cringed away and drew his dagger. ‘I know what men like you do,’ he said. ‘I hate all of you. By God, if you touch me, I’ll see to it the Prince has you quartered.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said. ‘I want to know why you burned us. What have we done to hurt you?’

He spat. ‘You make me feel dirty,’ he said.

‘This from a fucking spy?’ I asked.

‘Spy?’ he asked.

‘Didn’t you just bring Tamworth his orders from the King?’ I asked.

He was pulling his horse out of the stall by the bridle. ‘Not your place to ask,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I don’t have the need to know?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t you go kill some peasants?’ he said.

‘For the King?’ I asked. ‘Or Good Prince Lionel?’

He mounted. ‘Keep your foul mouth shut,’ he spat, and rode out our gate.

The Constable of France picked him up a few hours later and ransomed him. I had nothing to do with it.

We went into Burgundy. We had sixty men-at-arms and as many archers, and Sam was still with us. We had regular lances by then, as I remember, so Sam was my archer and Perkin was my page. He was sixteen now, and still very small, but I had him in a good haubergeon, a fine steel helmet from Milan and steel gloves. He still seemed to know everything.

Richard had his own fighting page — more like a squire — named Gwillam, a Welch boy who’d come with the Cheshire men and somehow washed up with us. And we had a pair of Irish horse-boys, too — also the flotsam of the King’s army. They were Seamus and Kenneth, and they were big, they could ride anything, and they loved to fight — like Gascons, really.

As corporals, we each had a dozen lances — that is, a dozen men-at-arms, a dozen archers and a dozen armed pages or varlets. Each lance shared a fire and a tent. It was becoming a system — the boys entered as servants, grew to be armed pages and then graduated to be men-at-arms. The archers were getting thinner on the ground — there were never really that many of them, and by the winter of ’59, all the good ones were serving the King. All but Sam and John and a few hundred more like them. While we’d held Chantay against the Constable, Knolles had pushed south in Provence and been defeated — aye, it was a complicated year — and most of his good men deserted him.

I’m off my tale. We rode east and north into Burgundy, and we stormed the castle of Courcelles, which our archers had carefully scouted. It was deep inside Burgundy, and perfectly sighted to base raids. We took it in one assault — I was the first man on my ladder, and that was terrifying. I took a dose of hot sand all down my back, and it burned away all the leather straps on my old breast and back, but I got up the ladder, sent one Burgundian to the devil and the rest threw down their weapons.

Over the next three days we spread out like a plague. We took manor houses and small castles by storm, at night, killed the inhabitants and stripped the houses. We moved so fast that the locals couldn’t organize a defence, and twice we caught the local baron’s forces on the road, trying to intercept us, and beat them up. The second time, we took him prisoner — that’s the Count of Semur. I sent him along to the Prince of Wales, whose column was nearest to us, with my compliments. I did it with every sign of chivalry, and I know the count found me a good captor as he said as much.

And then one of the Prince’s squires rode in under a flag of truce and ordered Tamworth to cease making war in Burgundy under the pain of the Prince’s displeasure. King Edward met with the Burgundians at Dijon — an hour away from us, may I add — and they paid him 200,000 moutons for a three-year truce.

We didn’t see one mouton of it, and we’d done all the fighting. And messieurs, in case you’ve missed the point, this was royal war, not brigandage. Everything Tamworth did, he did on direct orders from King Edward. We were soldiers, not brigands — until the King disowned us.

To add to our ire, the Burgundians granted Courcelles — the castle I’d stormed — to Nicholas Tamworth. He kept a few men to hold it, but dismissed the rest of us.

And to crown it all, the Prince of Wales released my prisoner, the Count of Semur. Perhaps it suited his policy, but he stated to his council that the count had been taken ‘by bandits, and not in a regular episode of war’.

As the last straw, the squire who came to order us to desist also informed me, and Richard, that we should not return to court or to England.

As a soldier, my fortunes had never looked better. Tamworth praised me to the skies, and said my exile from the Prince was all politics and that he’d ‘look into it’, but the continuing exile stuck in my craw. Twice in one autumn, I had performed a good feat of arms and been punished for it.

But even then, I might have stayed the course. I might have lasted out the exile.

Richard came into the house we shared and spat on the floor — something he never did. He collapsed onto a stool, stripped his helmet and aventail off his head before his Welshman could help, and hurled it at the walls so hard it broke the plaster and left a broad patch of willow lathe.

‘God’s curse on all of them,’ he said.

Perkin handed him a cup of wine.

He looked at it for a while.

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t fret, brother,’ I said. ‘Tamworth will see us right.’

He looked at me, and he didn’t look like himself. He had bright colour in his dark cheeks, and his eyes sparkled as if he was mad. His eyes were wide like a young girl’s.

‘Nothing will see this right,’ he spat.

‘We’ve lived through all this before,’ I said. ‘We’re good men-at-arms and they’ll bring us back.’

‘The Prince of Wales has just accepted the homage of the Bourc Camus,’ he said. ‘The Bourc is to be his liege man for Gascony and command part of his army.’ Richard’s eyes met mine. ‘Think it through, brother.’

I was pleased when my men chose to come with me. When I went south to find Seguin de Badefol, I took with me ten men-at-arms, including de la Motte, and ten archers and pages, and Richard did just as well. We were moving up in the world — our own twisted world. Mind you, my armour was a patchwork of rust and old leather, and every fight had left its mark — my leg armour was more dirt and horse sweat than leather and iron. My fine basinet was brown.

The King of England moved away from Burgundy with his great army and settled down to the siege of Paris. The end was coming — we all knew it. The Dauphin couldn’t hold Paris for long, and Paris had already survived the Plague, the Commune, Etienne Marcel and the King of Navarre. There were no reserves in Paris.

Then the weather struck. King Edward had campaigned through the winter, and the weather had been merciful; his ‘allies’ in the companies had isolated Paris and Burgundy from the rest of France for the critical time. Even though he’d failed at Reims, he now had Paris under his hand, and he had, in one day of negotiations, knocked Burgundy out of the war.

All England needed was three weeks of decent weather.

Instead, we had three weeks that reminded everyone of the passages in the Bible about the flood that cleansed the earth and floated the ark. The English army was tired, and despite the King’s political victories, men weren’t getting rich and the army was too big to feed itself. When they sat down to the siege of Paris, they were sitting on land that the English and Navarrese companies, the Jacques and the French themselves had devastated for four years. If Paris had no reserves, the Isle de France was a desert.

Seguin de Badefol had offered to take our lances, and he was three days ride from Paris — he had a contract to serve directly under the Prince as Prince of Gascony, and he offered us good rates. We caught up with the Prince’s forces at Gallardon. I saluted de Badefol — we’d been together several times — and bowed to Jean de Grailly, who promised to represent both of us to the Prince.

By my hope of heaven, I swear that the sky was blue. We could just see the towers of Paris, then a black cloud swept in from the north like the hand of God, and in the time it takes a swift man to run a league, it was dark as late afternoon and driving rain fell, and a great wind blew. The road turned instantly to mud and the carts stuck. Then the rain turned to hail, the temperature fell and things froze. Horses died. Men were soaked through their jupons, the heavy garments holding the freezing water against their skin, and night fell.

The King’s army wasn’t shattered. English armies had supply trains and remounts, fletchers and armourers — they could, and did, bring food all the way from England — but men and horses died that night, and carts were lost. Men called it ‘Black Monday’ for a generation. Most of us who are there say that Black Monday cost the King Paris, and thus France.

De Badefol’s men didn’t have regular supplies, so we had to forage, and as the rain fell and our horses starved, we had to go farther and farther into the countryside — up to forty miles from Paris — to forage. The Dauphin had come up with a strategy to avoid facing us and only raid our supplies — du Guesclin’s strategy, whether it was he who mouthed it or not — and we faced fighting every day as we foraged in the rain.

It was announced that the King was sending representatives to Chartres to arrange a peace.

At the time, I was almost at the borders of Normandy, trying to find enough grain to feed 200 horses for a few days. France was so badly scarred that it had begun to appear that there simply wasn’t any grain.

I was sitting on Jack at a crossroads. My archers were all searching the village to the south of us, combing the cellars, literally, for a trap door holding a treasure of grain. And to the north, most of my men-at-arms were plunging their lances into a series of sodden hayricks, looking for anything, or anyone, who could lead us to food. The rain poured down like God’s tears for our sins, and the road under Jack’s forefeet was as soft as mush.

I had sentries out in each cardinal direction — mounted men at the corners of fields. One was Perkin.

He sounded the alarm, blowing a small horn, and then bolted towards me.

I stood in my stirrups and turned Jack. It was hard to see in the rain, but something seemed to be moving across the fields to the north, and also behind me, to the south.

Richard was laying siege to Paris and I hadn’t seen him in days. This raid was all mine, and something was wrong.

I had to assume that the force behind me was French.

I rallied my men-at-arms, who reached me first. I formed them in a tight knot on the road and pointed at de la Motte. ‘Cut your way through them, make a hole for the archers and keep going.’

‘What are you doing?’ he asked me.

I pointed at our two Hainaulters and the younger bastard of Albret, who had stuck with my force since the fall. They all had excellent armour and were good men-at-arms.

‘We’ll be the rearguard. Go!’ I shouted.

Hainaulters are solid men. Antoine and Marcus shrugged, wiped the water off their faces and put on their gauntlets. With Perkin, who was the best mounted page, we had five men-at-arms. We rode along behind the main force, watching the body of French come down from the north like a hammer on an anvil.

Sam led the archers out of the village and joined de la Motte on the road. He waved at me and I waved back.

The force from the north was now close enough to count. There were forty of them.

Marcus whistled between his teeth.

‘Please tell me you are not going to fight all of them,’ he said in his clipped, Germanic way.

I watched as de la Motte’s men-at-arms slammed into the force to the south of us. I saw Sam wave his arms, and I saw my archers ride off into the fields, mud and all.

‘My lord,’ Marcus said.

The Frenchmen behind us were forming for a fight.

Perkin looked at me.

I shrugged. ‘We’re going to charge them,’ I said. ‘If we fight well, we can push through and run for it. If not, friends. . well, I’ll see you in hell.’

Marcus laughed. ‘We could just throw down our arms,’ he said. But he had his visor down.

We lowered our lances and charged.

I had the best horse, so I was in front. My adversary — I knew him immediately — also had the best horse. Jehan le Maingre. Boucicault.

I knew his coat armour when we were still forty horse lengths apart. I set myself and got two deep breaths.

As our lances crossed, his dipped slightly and slapped mine to the ground — his lance point caught me in the centre of the breastplate, just above my bridle arm, and slammed me back against my cantle. I lost my lance, but not my seat, and passed him.

By St George, he was a good lance.

Jack baulked at the dense mass of the French. Being a very different horse from Alexander, he turned and jumped the stone wall that lined the road, and as I was still trying to recover my seat from the lance strike, I came off.

My arse hit the wall and my shoulder hit the ground — I went upside down over the wall, and pain lanced through me. Still, I got to my feet, sword in hand, in the mud of the field.

I could just about stand. The pain in my lower back and hips was as intense as anything I’d ever known.

Bertrand du Guesclin rode up to the wall on the other side. I raised my sword in salute and he raised his visor. ‘If you’ll come back to the wall of your own free will, I’ll knock a hundred florins off your ransom,’ he said, grinning.

‘I don’t think I can climb the wall,’ I admitted. ‘But I yield to you.’ I took a few steps in the mud and fell, and that’s all I remember.

I returned to my wits in Reims. I’d been hurt badly — I had the black bruises to prove it — and I’d caught something in the cursed rain. But Perkin stayed by me and nursed me, and I lived. I missed about thirty days.

My ransom was set at 200 florins, which seemed to me unfair. It was a large sum, and I had no estates to pay it. But Boucicault explained to me that it was based on the damage I’d done to the French, which I suppose was flattering, in a way.

I was surprised to find the very noble Jehan le Maingre was willing to speak to me, but he sat on my bedside and laughed. He even laughed ruefully.

‘De Charny thought you had something, and he was never wrong,’ Boucicault said. He made a face. ‘In ’58, men said you’d raped my cousin, the Dauphine.’ He shook his head. ‘I almost killed you, but now I find that she rather likes you, and you helped defend her castle — bah. I’ll never kill a man for a rumour again. In fact, I owe you an apology.’

‘Which didn’t keep you from unhorsing me,’ I said, still smarting from the ease of his strike.

He held his arms wide. ‘That is war. I am a better knight than you, that is all.’ He saw me writhe and smiled. Jehan le Maingre set an international standard for arrogance. But he was handsome, slim, extremely rich, a fine musician and a brilliant soldier. He and du Guesclin vied to be the ‘best lance in France’. I, on the other hand, was a penniless Englishman, a self-taught man-at-arms, and who was I to resent him?

‘Indeed, you are lucky that your service to my cousin is so well known,’ he said. ‘The Dauphin ordered us to kill every routier taken in arms.’ He smiled — a very expressive smile that admitted he was no hypocrite and didn’t see routiers as very different from other kinds of soldiers. ‘Du Guesclin reminded him that you served him at Meaux, and he included you in his cartel. My old friend the Captal is covering your ransom. You have friends.’ He smiled. ‘Really, du Guesclin should have charged more for you.’

I will confess to you that this sign that some men accepted me as a knight — as a man-at-arms — made it worth being captured.

He paused in the doorway. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘The Vicomtesse d’Herblay is in Reims. She sends her regards.’

The name meant nothing to me. ‘I am not acquainted with the vicomtesse,’ I said, trying for my very best Norman French accent.

He looked down his long nose at me. ‘I think you are mistaken,’ he said. ‘If I were to mention that her baptismal name was Emile. .’ he added.

‘Par dieu!’ I said, all but springing from my bed.

‘I have not told her that I met you as an apprentice in a shop.’ He smiled.

Ha! I told her myself.

At some point I had stopped wearing her favour. There’s something particularly grim about wearing a woman’s favour while you threaten peasants and bully women into revealing where they hide their grain. I wondered where it was. Packed with my spare shirts? I had a leather bag of clean, dry linen shirts, and it lived with my good doublet, my two best pairs of matched hose without holes, and some bits of jewellery — in the wagon of a Genoese banker who rode with the Captal. He held all my ready money, too.

The next day, du Guesclin visited me. He was coming to be thought a great man amongst the French, which suited me — the more especially as he introduced me, at my bedside, to a room full of Norman and Breton knights.

‘William Gold, gentlemen. He took me in ’57 and was quite the gentleman about it; he helped save the Dauphine at the Bridge of Meaux — you know the story?’

‘By God, sir, did you save the Duke de Bourbon?’ asked a sprig.

‘Par Dieu, monsieur, I may have. I was busy, you understand,’ I drawled. Being a man of reknown — even a little reknown — was vastly more pleasurable than being thought a brigand, liar, thief or rapist.

I received a certain amount of hero worship, and I felt much better.

The worship of good men is itself anodyne, messieurs.

After they left, I wondered why it was that I was more popular with my enemies than with my own people.

A day or two passed. I hadn’t read a book in years, but my host, the French King’s lieutenant of Reims, had a library of over twenty books, and all of them were about chivalry. I had never seen a book about chivalry — I used to read a little Aristotle, but mostly Aquinas, psalms and sermons. I read a poem by John Gower once, and enjoyed it, although I’m pretty sure he wrote it against men like me.

I knew there were books on chivalry. I knew that the great de Charny wrote a list of questions for the Order of the Star, and I knew that the stories of Sir Lancelot, for example, were written down. But I had never read anything like Master Llull’s book of chivalry, and I devoured it. I read it through, and then read it through again.

When du Guesclin came, I asked him about the book. He shrugged. ‘I was never much of a reader,’ he admitted. ‘But my father’s master-of-arms says he was some sort of Spaniard — that he was a knight, and fought the Moors, and then became a hermit, and then a priest.’

‘He thinks that knights are chosen, by God, to protect the people.’ I looked down the page. ‘He thinks there ought to be schools to train boys to be knights.’ I looked at du Guesclin and he smiled.

‘Anyone can be a knight,’ he said. ‘Surely we’ve seen that in the last ten years. Give a peasant a good horse and a harness and a few year’s of training, and if he has a good heart and a set of balls, he can fight. You and I both know this.’

I gnawed my lip. ‘But. . isn’t there more to being a knight than having courage and a harness?’

Du Guesclin shrugged. ‘No.’ He smiled wryly at me. ‘Well, perhaps there is more. A good sword is a help.’

A voice from the doorway said, ‘Fie on you, Monsieur du Guesclin! I thought better of you, sir.’

Now, in France, as in England, when you are sick (if you are lucky and have rich friends) you are put in a closed bed, a bed with heavy hangings, many pillows and a pair of feather mattresses over a roped frame. You can’t see anyone beyond the hangings. This means that women may visit you so long as they don’t enter the hangings, so to speak.

That was Emile’s voice. I’d hoped, but how on earth could a noblewoman visit a routier without comment?

‘If any peasant with spirit can be a knight, why is this war so vicious?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it true that when we let any lad be a knight, they murder and rob at will, drunk on the power of their arms, whereas true knights have discipline and restraint?’

Du Guesclin was inside the hangings with me. His eyes met mine and he shrugged. ‘Madame may have the right of it,’ he said, ‘but when I need to go up a hill into a shower of English arrows, I care little about the ability my lads have to show restraint, and only that they have the spirit to face the arrow storm.’

Emile’s voice hardened. ‘And when you’ve beaten the English and they all go home? What then?’

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘Not a problem for me, Madame. I am the merest fighting man.’ He rose from my bed.

I grabbed his hand. ‘May I write a letter to Richard Musard? I asked.

He shook his head. ‘The Black Squire has gone away south to Avignon on a mission. The Captal sent a squire — Thomas, an Englishman — with an offer to pay your ransom, which,’ he smiled, ‘I may have done you the disservice of accepting. He left before you returned to consciousness.’

‘I’d like some clothes and things,’ I admitted.

‘I’m sure you have friends in Reims who might arrange to dress you,’ said du Guesclin. ‘I must go. I’ll visit tomorrow. Do you know that the peace is signed? The King is to return to France at midsummer. The war is over.’

The words chilled my blood. I was a soldier. I was in the twilight between being a man-at-arms, a squire or a knight — a recognized member of the community, a ranking gentleman. A knight would never need to feed himself, whilst a starving man-at-arms was called a brigand.

The war was ending just as I was making my name.

But I had no more time to consider the destruction of my fortunes, because Emile said, ‘Do you, too, believe any man can be a knight?’

‘I have to hope so,’ I admitted, ‘because I’m rather like any man myself. If only high birth makes a knight, I will never make the grade. And yet, my lady, I agree with you this far. I have recently seen what happens when boys are broken in spirit and trained to war like dogs to the chase, and it is truly horrible. Certes, if a man is to be a knight, he must know something of the rules and customs of being a knight — of chivalry — or he is a mere killer.’ I paused and opened my curtain a touch. ‘I missed you,’ I said.

She was pregnant — well along, in a flowing kirtle that emphasized the pregnancy rather than hiding it. The whole kirtle was silk, figured in swans, her husband’s badge. Her kirtle and over gown were worth about twice my war horse’s value.

I cannot tell you which shocked me more, her preganancy, or the slavish adoration inplied in the heraldic dress — a gown that emphasized her condition and her master. That stressed that she was property. Like a retainer, or a man-at-arms.

All my thoughts must have been on my face.

She laughed, the nasty little laugh she used to hurt herself.

‘There, you see me as I am,’ she said. ‘Fat as a hog, blotchy-faced and ugly.’ She hung her head in mock contrition, then glared at me, eye to eye like an adversary, daring me to speak. ‘If you’d kept the curtain closed, you need not have known.’

‘You are just as beautiful pregnant as not,’ I said. It wasn’t quite true, but really, one doesn’t have to be bred to court to know what to say to a pregnant woman. ‘And I am yours, body and soul, whether you are beautiful as heaven or come to me with leprosy.’

Her smile.

But my sense of honour was as sharp — and double edged — as hers. ‘I can’t say that I’ve brought your favour much honour.’ I hadn’t realized how bitter I was until I heard myself whining like a baby. ‘Killing peasants,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Burning towns.’

We watched each other for some heartbeats.

Both of us armed with the weapons to do the other hurt.

She nodded and looked away. Bright — even brittle — she said, ‘Monsieur du Guesclin says that you require clothes. I took the liberty of sending for a tailor on your behalf.’ She smiled then.

I was holding the hangings open to watch her, and now she rose — still graceful as a dancer. ‘As you are a cripple and I am a hog,’ she said, ‘I don’t think that the gossips of the world will be troubled if I open your curtains and this window and give you some air. I know that the best doctors are against it, but then, my midwife says all man-doctors are fools.’

I just sat back and smiled like a fool — and worried that I was unwashed and unshaven. ‘You will have to send the tailor back home,’ I said. ‘My ransom and the purchase of a new horse will wipe out what I’ve saved.’

She leaned in and brushed my lips with hers, as fast and controlled as a master swordsman. Then backed to her stool. ‘That’s as close to an embrace as I’ll dare,’ she said, matter of factly. ‘I’m watched. This baby is very important to my husband.’ Her eyes flicked to the door and she smiled. ‘But I’m more than rich enough to satisfy my fancy. And I fancy getting you some clothes that don’t look quite so, mmm, manly.’ She had my doublet in her hands, having picked it off the back of the chair. It was almost unrecognizable to me, it was so clean and well-repaired by the servants of the chateau, but she looked at it as if it was covered in bugs.

‘Did you. . make it yourself?’ she asked wickedly.

In those days, a doublet was a small garment. Not the sleeved cote of today, but a sleeveless vest, usually two layers of linen (hence ‘doublet’ or doubled linen) whose sole purpose was to hold up the hose — hose were separate then. Par dieu! Messieurs may remember how we dressed when I was young. At any rate, the hose were pointed, tied with laces to the doublet, which was worn over the shirt and under the cote, or jupon. While I owned a couple of nice cotes and gowns, they were in my baggage. I wore armour, all day, every day, and I didn’t need to wear a gown with it. In winter, sometimes one put a gown over the armour.

Ah! While we’re on the details of costume, I’ll add that sometimes I wore a quilted jupon over my doublet to protect my skin from my mail. That was a truly horrible garment. It smelled so bad that it attracted dogs. I saw that it was gone. Horrible as it was, it fit me and my mismatched harness perfectly.

And as a final note, the doublet took especial stress as it also served to hold up my leg armour — don’t imagine nice white armour, but leather and splint contraptions with plate knees that weighed too much and tore the fibre of my doublet from the constant stress.

Why have I shared all this?

At that moment, I hadn’t owned clean, dry, fashionable clothes in years. Or rather, I owned them; I just never wore them. I was dirty and my seams split all the time, and when I slept with a woman, I usually begged her to work on my clothes while she stayed with me. My shirts were all sewn by whores and camp-followers.

So when Emile asked me if I made it myself, I probably flushed.

‘Allow me to dress you,’ Emile said gently. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Your husband. .’ I said quietly.

‘You saved my husband’s life, very publicly. The Dauphine approves of you. The nasty rumour, which, I confess, I believe was spread by my husband, has died away. Pregnancy has given me,’ — she smiled, and the fire in her eyes would have burned a monk — ‘power. ‘Let me do this.’

‘As a service for an old friend?’ I asked. She wore his colours: she was his woman now. So spoke the angry boy we all have in our hearts.

She opened my small window — really, little more than an arrow slit. The air of spring wafted in. I could smell. . growth. I must have inhaled a great gout of air, because Emile laughed.

‘I will give my thanks to God that you are on the road to recovery,’ she said. ‘Du Guesclin despaired of you in your fever. You know I came then?’ she asked, somewhat hesitantly.

‘No,’ I said. The angry boy was silent.

‘Boucicault doesn’t approve of me,’ she said. ‘He never has,’ she added. ‘Prig. Prude. Sanctimonious hypocrite.’

I must have looked surprised.

She looked away. ‘I wasn’t. . a virgin when I was wed, somewhat hastily, to my husband. If I’d been a servant girl, I’d have been turned out of doors.’

I laughed lightly. In London, among merchants and artificers, this sort of occurrence was so commonplace that I’m not sure I can remember a girl who was wed without a bulge under her gown.

Emile choked, ‘I thought of killing myself,’ as if that was a matter-of-fact statement, a commonplace.

‘It is not so great a sin,’ I said. Odd to take the husband’s side. ‘It is really of no moment if your husband-to-be is a trifle ardent in paying his attentions-’

She looked at me, and I wasn’t sure what her face was saying — anger? Indifference? Daring my comment? ‘Not my husband, dear.’ She turned and looked out the window. ‘I was not a good girl.’

Why on earth do people tell each other these things?

She was trying to hurt herself. Not me.

It sat there, between us.

Perhaps to a real nobleman, this would have been crushing, a proof that she was a soiled flower, a worthless, honourless trull. There was something in her voice that told me she was, in fact, daring me to be appalled.

But I was a child of London and war, and all my other women were real whores. To me, she was the essence of — perhaps not modesty, but womanly dignity. Pregnancy sat lightly on her, and added. . maturity, perhaps, without detracting from allure. Oh, no. The allure was shouting at me, despite her folded hands and the anger on her face.

Perhaps it takes a many-times betrayed man of war to recognize a woman who has come a hard road, and is looking-

I shrugged. ‘So?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Emile, are you trying to tell me you are of no worth? Because I know your worth. I care nothing for your other lovers.’

She turned her head. Her face was in shadow, backlit by the spring sun. ‘How many do you think I had?’ she asked.

There’s a moment in a certain kind of fight where you think you are winning, and then, without warning, you lose control of something — perhaps your opponent’s left hand — and there is a particular feeling as you realize you have lost it, and you know the blow is coming. And there’s nothing you can do to stop the blow.

I cared nothing for how many lovers she’d had as a young girl — Holy Virgin, no one counted my score — but her face and her posture said that this was. . vital. Essential. And I had lost control of the trend of the conversation.

Except she wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to hurt herself, of course.

‘You had enough lovers to tarnish your reputation and harm your opinion of yourself,’ I said. ‘But not enough to affect my opinion of you.’ I leaned forward, regardless of the pain. ‘I know who you really are. I know who you were in the siege. That is all there is, to me.’

Her eyes widened. Leaping from the chair she sat in, Emile leaned over my bed and kissed me. ‘You are a true knight,’ she breathed. ‘I will treasure that.’ But she was gone before my left arm could pin her. ‘The tailor is a present from me. If you love me, don’t spurn him.’ She pulled a ring off her finger. ‘The Dauphine gave you a ring. Where did it go?’

I sighed. ‘I pawned it,’ I admitted.

‘Holy Mary mother of God, you had a love token from the Dauphine and you pawned it?’ She shook her head.

I shrugged. ‘Horses eat a lot,’ I said.

‘Will you promise not to pawn this one?’ she asked. ‘On your word as a knight?’

‘Does it come with a kiss?’ I asked. I shrugged. ‘I am scarcely a knight.’

She waved a hand in dismissal, as if my hopes and fears on that subject were of no consequence.

‘Emile, you see me a captive, taken in arms by a good knight. You knew me in the siege as a rescuer, a man from a grail romance.’ Was I spurred by her recital of her past lovers? I’d never said this much to Richard. ‘I’m no knight. I ride with routiers and collect patis from peasants and sometimes I rob the church.’

She set her jaw. ‘That is not who you really are,’ she said. Her eyes locked with mine, and they were as hard as diamonds. ‘We do what we must, eh, monsieur? But that need not be the sum of who we are.’ She pulled the ring from her finger and reached it out.

I tried to snatch her hand. She pulled it away.

‘If you aren’t faster than that, you’ll never beat Jehan le Maingre for me.’ She had avoided another attempt by my left arm to pin her to the bed. ‘I will visit again. Don’t get well too soon.’ She smiled and extended the ring again.

I held out my hand, and she placed it gently on my finger. ‘Be my knight,’ she said.

It is uncomfortable when you meet another person’s eyes for too long. It is as if you have no secrets left.

I cannot say how long we were like that.

It was long.

Like a fool, I broke it. ‘You are beautiful,’ I said. ‘Pregnancy makes you. .’ I tried to find a word for her.

‘Fat,’ she said. ‘A demain, m’amour.’

My ransom didn’t appear from the Captal. The tailor came every day for three days, measuring, cutting and showing me fabrics at my bedside. The truth is that I agreed to everything he suggested. If I had any taste of my own, it was mostly direct emulation of older men I had admired: Sir John Cheverston, Sir John Chandos, Jean de Grailly and, most especially, my sometime mentor and nemesis, Jehan le Maingre, whose slim good looks seemed to mock my large build and bright-red hair. I told the tailor, in some detail, what I liked on each of these men.

He was a patient man. He heard me out and asked some questions about styles. After two days, he pursed his lips and said, ‘Scarlet and black.’

‘What about them?’

‘Those will be your colours. Your, mmm, patroness has suggested that I design arms for you, as well. Gules and sable.’ He fingered his beard. ‘I have a little scarlet broadcloth — a very little, dyed before the war. Black is expensive, but everyone wears it. Your hair, coming out of a sable cap, will be. .’ he smiled. ‘You will be wanting a new arming coat,’ he said.

I agreed.

He nodded. ‘Two cotes, two doublets, two gowns, one with fur, six shirts, six braes, six black hose and six red hose. A hood hat. The short gown, trimmed in sable, and a second gown plain. Two pairs of shoes and a pair of boots.’ He smiled. ‘A pair of wicker panniers and a leather male, or trunk. A full cloak and a half cloak. Six linen caps.’ He looked up from his wax tablet. ‘Anything else?’

‘Gloves?’ I asked hopefully. I loved gloves. They protect your hands in brush, or in a street fight.

‘Gloves, for monsieur. My god-brother can make them. Chamois or deerskin?’ His stylus poised over the wax.

I had no idea what the difference was. ‘One each?’ I asked.

Judging from his face that was a foolish answer, but that’s what I got.

In between visits from the tailor, I read about chivalry. My host had de Charny’s questions, and I read them. Some of them made little sense to me — his refined sense of what might constitute right and wrong in the taking of a man’s horse and arms in a tournament were beyond my experience — and he didn’t seem to ask the questions to which I wanted answers. How many peasants can you torment for their grain before you cease to be a knight? Must you fight, regardless of the odds against you? When is surrender still ‘worthy’?

But other questions fascinated me.

And Vegetius might have been a captain of routiers. Some of his advice bore no relationship to war as I knew it, but his views on ambush and the chance of battle seemed solid enough. And scouting. Par Dieu, monsieur, the old Romans knew about scouts and spies, eh?

My host, the Captain of Reims, Gaucher de Chatillon, appeared at my bedside the next morning, dressed in immaculate green and gold. Three days closeted with a tailor had caused me to examine clothing. I still do.

He bowed at the doorway. ‘Monsieur, please accept my apologies for not attending you before. My lord the Marshal has told me how you helped to defend our cousin the Dauphine, and all French gentlemen owe you a debt of gratitude.’ He bowed again. ‘I am also given to understand that you preserved my friend the Duke de Bourbon in the face of the foe, and the Comte d’Herblay.’

It is very difficult to bow from a bed, but I tried.

‘Your lordship does me too much honour,’ I protested.

‘Faugh,’ he coughed. ‘I do not. But I am here with the pleasant duty of telling you that your ransom is paid and you are a free man. Indeed, I can go further and suggest that we travel together, as I am going to the King of England’s tournament and passage of arms at Calais, in honour of the peace, and I thought you might care to come. Peace may be in the air with spring.’ He coughed in his hand. ‘But the roads are still full of brigands.’

He handed me a scroll. I opened it to find a letter from the Captal.

‘I didn’t bring a man to read it for you,’ the Captain said with a bow. ‘I gather monsieur is a voracious reader, as I’m given to understand he is galloping through my small library.’

‘Ma fois, my lord! I had no idea there were so many fine books about chivalry!’ I said, or something equally passionate.

The Captal had arranged for me to fight on the Prince’s English team, if I was recovered.

I all but leaped from my bed. This was recognition — forgiveness — perhaps a permanent appointment, all at the tip of my sword.

A spike of pain rose from my right arm to the middle of my chest, and I gasped.

De Chatillon caught me as I stumbled. ‘I took a bad wound in ’57,’ he said. ‘It took me months to recover. Muscles forget their duty in bed.’

The French had treated me as a gentleman — in fact, as an aristocrat — so I couldn’t very well tell this famous knight that I needed the tournament at Calais as my chance to prove myself. Or perhaps I was just too proud.

‘I’ll be ready to ride,’ I said. ‘When?’

He smiled. ‘So eager,’ he said. ‘I won’t be at leisure until Monday next.’

So I had five days to be in shape to ride.

Du Guesclin came to tell me I was free. I undervalued you,’ he said ruefully. ‘Five hundred florins would have been a better price.’

‘At least I pay,’ I said, more nastily then I had intended.

When he asked, I told him about the knight I’d taken at Poitiers, who had never paid.

Du Guesclin tugged his beard. ‘This disappoints me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know the gentleman, but I will endeavour to find him.’ He came and sat on my bed. ‘Your horse and arms are safe,’ he said. ‘A certain person paid me a small patis to release them. I shouldn’t charge for your arms at all — really, my friend, you need a new harness.’

‘Alas, I would have to capture two or three worthy gentlemen to have the cost of a harness,’ I said. ‘Rather than enjoying your hospitality.’

‘It would seem unpatriotic if I wished you good luck,’ du Guesclin said, but he grinned. ‘Will you fight at Calais?’

‘If I’m healed enough. It means. . everything to me.’ I wasn’t afraid to admit this to du Guesclin. He knew me.

‘May I. . loan you some armour that I’m almost positive will fit?’ He looked away to hide a smile. ‘I have a fair amount. Captures and the like.’

As a brag, it was clever.

‘I can’t wear your captured English armour at Calais, you rogue!’ I laughed.

He made a very Norman shrug. ‘Armour has no name,’ he said. ‘And I have a nice cuirass from Italy — with a lance rest.’

‘Well. .’ I had tears in my eyes. Life hadn’t prepared me for people to be so kind. To be frank, I was suspicious, but I couldn’t imagine a reason for du Guesclin to humiliate me.

On Friday, between eating salt fish and trying to swat the pell with my sword, I was visited by the tailor.

Four young boys carried my panniers up the stairs to my tower and laid them on my floor, and he spent more than an hour showing me the ins and outs of my wardrobe. I had everything he’d written on his tablet, and more — a dozen black scarves, neatly folded; a new purse on a new belt with a hook for de Charny’s dagger, in red and black; a sable hat with a scarlet feather. Two pairs of gloves, one red and one chamois coloured. The malle had a razor and a small horn box for soap, and a sewing kit with hanks of red and black linen thread for maintaining all my finery, and needles, and white linen thread for shirts. There were hose and matching garters in red and black leather with fine buckles.

He insisted that I try every garment. Meanwhile he and his boys sat on my floor, despite his own fine clothes, and re-tailored the lining of my red and sable coat; adjusted the fit of all my hose, the four of them stitching back seams at the speed of running mice. Finally, they all worked on my arming coat, parti-colour in red and black. It came in panels of heavily quilted wool fustian, and they constructed it before my eyes, chatting away merrily.

I felt a pang of longing for my master’s shop. I tried to sit and help, and the master shook his head.

So I watched, and chatted, and marvelled that all these riches were to be mine.

I am only repeating last Sunday’s sermon to say that the outer man often reflects the inner man. At Reims, I did some good for Emile and began to learn a little about chivalry — and in return Emile clothed me. Indeed, she set my taste for life — par dieu, gentlemen, I still wear those colours, as you can see.

I attended Mass on Sunday dressed in my new clothes. No one commented on them, but for a day, I was as fine as Jehan le Maingre and I outshone du Guesclin, who glanced at me at the holy-water basin and said, ‘To look at us, monsieur, men would think you took me. I knew I charged you too little.’ But he winked, and I couldn’t take offence.

I wore Emile’s ring, as well.

My hip hurt, but I could ride and walk and swing a sword.

Emile came to see me after Mass. I had made it to Mass and back under my own power.

She had two women and a man with her, and I heard her laugh from the base of my stairs. She came in like a breath of spring, and even as I bowed, carefully showing a fine length of sable fur trim, she laughed again.

‘By the Virgin, sir, I heard that you were so eager to be gone from us that you leaped from the bed on hearing there was to be a tournament at Calais.’ She had on a high head-dress that made her look like a Turk — or at least, how I imagined a Turk back then. The scarf fluttered in front of her eyes when she curtseyed.

I blushed and stammered.

She smiled at my confusion. ‘Here are some friends of mine,’ she said. ‘This is my sister, the Vicomtesse de Chartres. You remember my friend Isabelle from the castle at Meaux?’

‘How could I forget so old a friend,’ I said.

The small blonde woman frowned, and snapped me a quick and rather empty courtesy. ‘Monsieur,’ she muttered.

‘And the foremost musician of our age,’ she said. ‘My friend Guillaume.’

He raised his eyebrows slightly, gently turning away the flattery. ‘I love music, and I serve it, but there are better men then I and better women, too, in every convent and monastic house.’ He smiled. ‘My lady thought it might please you to hear some music.’

What could I say? I had hoped that she would contrive to visit me privily, and I had imagined. . well, I had imagined things.

Love is jealous. Here I was, with her, and yet already bitter. Why had she brought all these people?

The man called Guillaume was dressed far more richly than I, and I put him down as a popinjay. He played the lute and sang so well that I dismissed him. The three women talked among themselves, and I sulked.

Youth. Wasted on the young.

Thankfully for everyone, my host appeared with du Guesclin. Du Guesclin had two boys with armour. Chatillon bowed to me and then to the musician.

‘Ah, monsieur!’ he said.

The musician rose and bowed with an irony that moved him up in my estimation.

‘Our musician was knighted by the King,’ Chatillon said with a wry smile. ‘Now he is Monsieur de Machaut.’

‘So our worthy captain forced me to bear arms and fight you English in the siege,’ Machaut said.

Now I was interested. ‘How did you find it?’ I asked.

Machault shrugged. ‘Terrifying,’ he admitted. ‘I am not bred to it like your gentlemen.’

‘Monsieur Machaut is too modest,’ du Guesclin said. ‘He stood in the gate for an hour, crossing swords with the flower of English chivalry. He honoured his name and the act of his knighting.’

Machaut laughed. ‘I was beaten to the ground by three men wearing Clarence’s colours, and then I lay under their feet, trying not to be killed or taken for ransom.’ He was competely at ease — unafraid, in this company, to own up to his failure as a man-at-arms.’

Suddenly, I saw a great deal in him to admire. ‘We are all terrified, are we not, messieurs,’ I said. ‘Not once the fighting starts, but before, yes?’

‘Faugh!’ said Chattilon. ‘I wouldn’t admit to such a thing. For myself, I know no fear. I sometimes shake with eagerness to be at the foe.’ He bowed to the ladies. ‘Sometimes I shake so hard in my eagerness that my knees strike together.’

Du Guesclin nodded his approval. ‘It is in facing the fear that we are brave, not the absence of fear,’ he said.

Machaut caught a louse in his collar and killed it between his nails. ‘Yes — well. I fought three times, and it was harder to make myself go forward each time.’

My eye met du Guesclin’s and we both knew what we knew.

It gets harder to go forward.

For all the seriousness of the conversation, I had a new appreciation of Machaut’s quality, and now I listened more attentively to his music. In some way, he reminded me of Chaucer. He was witty and widely read. Every time he mentioned a writer — he sang us a poem by the great Italian, Dante, and then he said the words in French — I was determined to read everything they’d written.

I was determined to learn to ride better, to read more, to learn to fight better and to joust constantly. What I needed was enough money to live like a gentleman. A gentleman could do all these things.

My little room was crowded with all these people and my panniers of clothes and armour, and Chatillon graciously allowed us to move to his wife’s solar, which was the next level in the tower and a much larger room. I was the last out my door, and Emile was just ahead of me — she rested her hand on mine in the doorsill, leaned back as if to speak and put her lips on mine.

I have met Catherine of Sienna, the living saint. She said that God came to her like colour to a blind man. In the minute she said as much, all I could imagine was that kiss of Emile’s.

She moved away, and I was left unable to breathe.

The rest of the afternoon slipped away — idyllic. I tried to touch her again, but there was no chance and too many eyes. I told a few tales, and du Guesclin recounted how I took him in the darkness, and Chatillon told some tales from the sieges. Machaut sang us a lay of Lancelot, and another of Sir Tristan.

When the ladies rose to leave, du Guesclin’s eyes met mine.

‘Next time I find myself questioning the value of chivalry,’ he said, ‘perhaps I will think of this afternoon.’ He glanced at Machaut. ‘He surprised you, yes? He surprised all of us. He was really very brave.’

‘I can see that,’ I said.

As Emile made ready to depart, I took her hand and bowed. ‘I owe you a great deal,’ I said to her hand.

‘Ma fois, my dear,’ she said. ‘It was a pleasure, and doubly so to see you so fine, and with men of your own caliber. This is where you belong. I wanted you to taste this.’ She leaned forward. ‘Come back to me, my Lancelot. I shan’t always be fat as a hog.’

Her hand squeezed mine, caressing the ring.

‘I will come back,’ I said. ‘On the sanctity of the cross I swear it.’

She smiled, and then she was gone.

We rode north and west across Normandy to Calais. The company was excellent — Chatillon was years my senior, but a gentler man, a better knight, I don’t think I ever met. He reminded me of Chandos — indeed, they were peers. His household were men of his own stamp, and du Guesclin and I were fast friends by the end of the ransom time.

When we came to Calais, after much sorting of safe conducts and the like, we found that the peace talks, far from being over, were still going strong, with the King of England and the King of France locked in a fight over the precedence of their renunciations. The King of England had to renounce his claim to the throne of France, and the King of France had to renounce his claim to the parts of France being ceded by treaty to England. Neither man relished the prospect. Half a thousand churchmen seemed to gather around them like vultures and ravens at a battlefield.

The first night in Calais, I found a note from Emile inside my chamois gloves. I read it a dozen times. I still have it, and I’ll be damned if I share it with you, but she did mention in an appendage that she was looking into the ransom of my prisoner from Poitiers.

Somehow, that little detail brought home to me that we would meet again.

I was three days in Calais before I could arrange a meeting, through Tom, with the Captal. I attended him at breakfast — he had a whole inn, while I lived under the eaves of a cottage.

‘The Prince will receive you,’ he said. ‘Now that you are ransomed, I’ll try and get you in today. Tomorrow at the latest.’

Sure enough, I attended the Black Prince that very evening.

I bowed my very best bow. The Prince was having a dinner for many of the French knights he’d taken at Poitiers, and the Captal arranged that I be invited. I sat with du Guesclin, who had most definitely not been taken at Poitiers.

Chaucer was there. I found it hard to hold on to my dislike of him, and I greeted him warmly. He, however, kept his distance.

Sadly for me, the Prince’s reception was about the same. Sir John Chandos took me by the arm, the Captal stood by me, and I made my best bow to the Prince as Sir John said, ‘My lord, here is Master Gold, who has done your Grace and his father good service in Gascony since we last heard of him.’

‘We heard of him quite recently, and under circumstances most entirely creditable to a squire,’ the Prince said. He glanced at me. ‘I am told that Master Gold was falsely accused by a man. To the great detriment of his repute,’ he said, somewhat acerbically. ‘The enmity of a peer of France is not timely, Master Gold. Sir John Chandos has been unstinting in your praise. Sir Robert Knolles states that you are the best man of your companions.’

My Prince had never spoken to me so long, or so fairly, and I was almost unable to move.

‘And Monsieur de Chatillon and Monsieur de Guesclin are your ardent admirers.’ The Prince leaned a little closer. Not for nothing was he called the black Prince. He was at the edge of anger, and his scowl was dark. The Captal cleared his throat. ‘Your Grace,’ he said chidingly.

‘John, I cannot have him,’ the Prince said very distinctly.

I flushed.

‘Sir John did not let go my hand. ‘Your Grace,’ he began.

‘I detest to be made to appear ungracious to my vassals.’ He took my hand. ‘Master Gold, you deserve better by me, but while you hold the determined dislike of a peer of France, I cannot have you by my side in a tournament that has enough political difficulties to start a new war.’ His brow clouded over as fast as an April day in London. ‘John — enough. Master Gold, whatever passed between you and a Princess of the royal house of France, the rumour that sticks to you precludes your direct employment by the crown of England. And you have the reputation of a brigand and a routier.’

I stood perfectly still, trying to make the words go away.

‘Perhaps in a year or two, something can be done. In the meantime, I imagine that Sir John will provide you with work.’ He inclined his head.

I bowed. Should I have barked? Spat? Damned him for an ungrateful Prince?

Perhaps I should have asked, ‘Who gives us our orders?’

But I bowed deeply and withdrew.

The Captal clamped my arm in his and pulled me, literally, through a curtain. I knew where I was — this was the side-table where the squires and cooks prepared meats for table.

The Captal looked at me — that look, again; the one that said he was sorry for the injustice of it — but he was going about his business.

Sir John Chandos put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, lad. I thought, after du Guesclin spoke up for you, that you were made.’ He gave a little sniff. ‘I’ll send you word. You’d best go.’

Tom appeared from the torchlight and took my arm.

I found it hard to see.

I was crying.

I was living in a tent — I couldn’t afford an inn in Calais. I went to my tent, and Perkin, who had already heard the news through the endless network of servants, handed me a cup of wine.

Before I could be drunk, du Guesclin appeared. He came straight in through the flap and caught me sobbing.

Monsieur, have you ever been offered all you want? And then had it taken away?

When I left Emile, it was to fight in the lists as a gentleman beside my Prince, wearing her favour. Win or lose, I would have been made. If the Prince didn’t place me in his retinue, with steady, honorable pay, then some great lord would have done so. Perhaps even Oxford or Lancaster.

In an hour, because of an ugly rumour started by a man whose life I once saved, that was gone. And yet, while I wallowed in it, I also saw that like Sir Gawain, I was the author of my own failure. I lay with Emile, and earned the pettish hatred of this man, who in that hour, I hated more than I hated the Bourc.

Du Guesclin came into my tent. Perkin poured him wine.

‘I’m sorry, my lord. I am unmanned.’ I was helpless to talk.

Du Guesclin shrugged. ‘They are all much alike, Princes,’ he said, and drank some wine. ‘Mine thinks I’m a routier, too.’

In the end, we played chess. I’d like to say we spoke of love, or chivalry, but instead, he offered to sell me a good horse at a reasonable price.

I was moving a piece, and my glance fell on Emile’s ring.

‘Would you take a letter — to a friend?’ I asked.

Du Guesclin’s eyes went to my ring. ‘You ask a great deal,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Par dieu, monsieur, if it were not for the great love I bear you, I might try to know your sweet friend the better myself.’ He leaned back. ‘I will take you her letter. And any other you send me.’

I leaped to my feet. ‘By Christ, monsieur, you are a true friend.’

Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘For an English routier, you are a good man.’

I warmed my hands on the brazier and wrote Emile a note.

Madame,

The writer of this missive wishes you every felicity, every comfort in your delivery and every hope for. . I paused. Women — young women — died like flowers in childbirth. What I wanted to wish her was life. I stared at my small square of parchment — where did Perkin find these things?. . every hope for a speedy recovery for mother and child.

A sudden chill prevents the writer from paying his devotions in person. Be assured, my sweet friend, that the writer will think of no other until. .

Until what? Until I earned so much notoriety that I was just another routier? A hired killer? A collector of patis? What other endgame was there?

By God, I was determined to find one.

. . Until your devoted servant is able to come to your side.

I finished it.

Du Guesclin held out his hand. ‘Let me see it before you seal it,’ he said gruffly. ‘If I’m to carry my death warrant-’

‘Is d’Herblay so dangerous?’ I asked.

‘He represents a certain. . kind.’ Du Guesclin shrugged. ‘He has money, and the ear of the Dauphin.’

As I finished folding my note, I heard a stir. I had a moment of hope that it might be Sir John Chandos, coming to tell me that all was forgiven? At some level, I wondered that the Prince hadn’t even mentioned our original transgression, the Three Foxes. Forgotten? I put wax on it and jammed my seal into the wax.

As if summoned in a passion play, Master Chaucer poked his head into my tent.

‘Pax?’ he asked. He was parchment white — afraid of me, and little wonder. The beeswax candles and the oil lamps together couldn’t give him a ruddy glow, he was so pale.

‘Monsieur du Guesclin?’ I said with a bow. ‘Master Chaucer, an English squire. Who you may recall.’

The two men eyed each other warily.

Du Guesclin palmed my note, sealed and folded a dozen times. He bowed. ‘I must go prepare for the lists,’ he said. ‘I remain sorry that I will not face you there.’

‘Monsieur may be satisfied that in the fullness of time, we will meet on some field or other,’ I said.

We embraced. Chaucer watched us like a falcon, and when du Guesclin was gone, he shook his head.

‘But you’ll gut each other with poleaxes,’ he said.

‘Have you met Guillaume de Machaut?’ I asked.

Chaucer paused. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, as if I’d dragged it from him. For once in our relationship, I had him off guard.

‘I met him at Reims. He impressed me deeply. And I thought of you.’ I shrugged.

Chaucer was dressed to ride, in a short wool gown and tall boots. ‘Sir John Chandos is sending me to Hawkwood,’ he said. ‘He said that you would escort me.’

He turned to face me and our eyes met.

‘The Prince employs Hawkwood, then? Unofficially?’ I asked.

He looked away. ‘Not my damned business to answer.’

‘I’m just a routier?’ I put in again.

Chaucer bit his lip. ‘You know the score as well as I do.’ He turned away, his nerves showing. ‘Damn it, Gold! I didn’t rat you out to the Prince in the first place! In fact, I tried to make it better.’

I shrugged. ‘There’s a lot of dirty water under that particular bridge,’ I assured him. ‘I’ll escort him. I assume that Sir John Chandos expects me to take service with Hawkwood?’ I paused. ‘Even in peacetime?’

Chaucer set his face. ‘It’s a dirty business, Gold, and no mistake.’

My name was struck from the rolls of the lists at Calais. I collected my borrowed armour and the clothes my love had bought me, and I rode east, looking for Sir John Hawkwood. I had Chaucer at my side, and Perkin, and I picked up almost a dozen English archers in Calais. They knew which way the winds were blowing. The King was selling his garrisons in France to the King of France, and when that happened there’d be no employment for archers at all.

The end of the war was forcing change, and some of those changes were hard on the professional soldiers. The King of France had to hand over more than a hundred castles to the King of England, but the King of England had to hand another sixty to the King of France. The problem both men faced is that of these almost 200 castles, routiers and brigands held two-thirds of them. They sat in all the vital castles and towns, collecting patis and fighting each other, looting the countryside and taking what they wanted. Some of them flew the flag of France, some the flag of England, and some of Navarre. The treaty included them, but no one had asked their opinion.

Sir John Hawkwood had a company in his own name, operating from a pair of castles in the Auvergne country in the very centre of France. They flew the flag of Navarre, and they served no interest but their own.

Sir John welcomed me with open arms. He spoke for two hours with Master Chaucer, who rode away again. Then he inspected my English archers and embraced me as warmly as du Guesclin had.

‘About time, lad. I’ll make your fortune,’ he said.

And that was my new goal. A fortune. And the settlement of a certain dispute with the Comte d’Herblay.

Richard Musard returned to Sir John in late September. He’d gone to Avignon with an English knight on an official embassage — and returned to Calais to find that he, too, was officially repudiated by the Prince. The Captal told him where to find me, and despite our shared anger, we were delighted to be reunited. We drank a great deal and he admired my clothes, which were still well-preserved at that point. There was very little fighting that summer. Everyone was waiting, on edge, to see what the King of England would do. Whether peace would be signed.

Richard had John Hughes with him, and I had Perkin — the last remnants of our former lances. The rest of the men had melted away — most of the Hainaulters had gone to other companies, and Marcus, who could write, sent to us inviting us to join the German Albert Sterz in pillaging the north of France, but Sir John offered us steady employment and a home. Besides, most of his men-at-arms were English, and men like John Thornbury and Thomas Leslie kept the company well-ordered, if not prosperous. De la Motte joined us from a Gascon company, with news of the Bourc Camus, who was rising in favour with the Prince.

One of the developments of that autumn was that the moneylenders slowed their flow of cash to us to a trickle. It was clear that peace was to be signed. We were not going to get wages from anyone. Some of the men left for Brittany, the last active theatre not covered by the treaty.

There were rumours that we might get employment in Spain, or Italy. There was a papal order that all routiers prepare to go on crusade.

So with no credit, I had to bear the expenses of a war horse, two pack horses, a squire, four archers and my own food. Perkin had had a war horse, which he lost when he was taken outside Reims. As my status fell, his did, as well.

In the autumn of 1360, it looked as if I was to have nothing. Richard complained of my temper, and Perkin tended to watch me out of the corner of his eye — I had hit him several times.

I was glad that Emile was not there to see me. I folded my red and black finery away and went back to my old clothes and my old ways. I even prepared a letter — a letter full of self pity, I promise you — to tell her to forget me, as I was nothing but a bandit.

In late autumn, a man came with a retinue. He bore no arms, but I knew him. Chaucer. And John Hughes knew the archers.

‘King’s men,’ he said smugly, in his Cumbrian accent. ‘Bodyguard archers.’ He pointed them out. ‘Sam was one of ’em, for a while. Paid by the King, or the Prince. The best.’

I thought that Chaucer would stay, but he was ahorse in our yard again in the time it took me to lace my doublet. I ran down in my hose and Hawkwood caught me at the base of the stairs.

‘Better hurry, Master Gold,’ he said. ‘Your friend isn’t staying.’

It was cold. Steam rose off the horses, and their nostrils vented smoke like dragons.

Richard had one of Chaucer’s hands in his when I went out.

‘I’m for London,’ Chaucer said. ‘I’m done with playing courier.’ He smiled his old, sly smile. ‘I’ve found something better.’

‘I’m glad someone has,’ I said. ‘Can I trouble you to take a letter to my sister?’

He looked at his archers, who shrugged.

‘I could do wi’ a cup o’ cheer,’ said the big bastard by Chaucer’s right side. He swung a leg over.

I ran into my corner of the common room, where most of the men-at-arms slept, and I wrote Mary a letter — a long letter.

I told her most of the truth — of what I was and who I served. I told her that I had paid a little less than two thirds of her dowry, and that the rest might have to wait, as I was short on war. I smiled when I wrote that. I smiled to think of her.

I folded it, sealed it and addressed it care of Clerkenwell.

Then gave it to Chaucer. He finished a jack of wine and poured more into his flask. ‘Clerkenwell?’ he asked, looking at the address. ‘Damn, Gold, you make me feel as if I was home already.’

‘Will you be back?’ I asked.

He looked at Richard, and then at me. ‘Not unless I have no other choice.’ He looked both ways. ‘What they are doing now. .?’ He shook his head.

‘If you see my sister, will you write to me?’ I asked.

Chaucer smiled. ‘You kept me alive a few times,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll write you about your sister.’

We bowed to each other, and he embraced Richard. Not me.

Then he rode away.

It was two days after Chaucer came and went that Sir John summoned us to the great hall, and we sat at trestle tables.

He came out in a gown, like a lord. ‘Fear not,’ he announced. ‘We have employ.’

Richard shouted, ‘Where?’ into the cheers.

Sir John laughed. ‘Provence,’ he said, and Richard frowned.

A great deal happened in a few weeks and I may not get the order of events the right way round, but the way I remember it, the first thing that happened was that Richard came to the room we shared. The word room is far too grandiose and makes one imagine a closed bed and a fine chimney, when what we had was the slates of the roof at the level of our necks so we had to stoop all the time, no window, and a space a little smaller than a soldier’s tent, which we shared with our armour, our spare saddlery, our clothes, and a woman or two with her own basket of goods.

I was sitting on my spare saddle, sewing a patch on my beautiful arming coat and thinking bitterly of Emile.

Richard arrived, not by the door, but by the smoke hole, which was an easier way into our little loft if one was superbly muscled. He lit a cresset.

‘You are sewing in the dark, brother,’ he said.

I snorted.

‘I think it’s time that someone told you that you have become a churl and a barbarian,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Cheer up. The world is not as dark as you seem to think.’

‘Sod off,’ I said. ‘I assume you got the miller’s daughter to lie in the leaves.’

Richard shook his head. ‘Nothing of the kind, brother. I went to visit our banker and arrange for a little loan.’

I kept my head down and continued sewing. My stomach turned over, though. I could face a dozen French knights, but the banker — good Christ how I hate bankers.

‘He informed me that we had a credit — if I may use the term we in the broadest sense — of two hundred and fifty florins.’ Richard grinned.

‘You are fucking with me,’ I said.

‘Not in the least, and may I add that I find this distrust injurious? Seriously, brother, you have been an arse and a half the last month. I’ve wonder what ails you.’

‘You were turned away by the Prince just as I was,’ I said.

‘Nor do I intend to live for ever as a routier but, brother, here we are, and we have enjoyed this life ere this. Have we not?’

I growled.

Richard pressed on, ‘So I must speculate that there was, or is, something more — something you lack that makes you such a snark.’

I turned on him, ready to put him on the floor for his presumption. I’d had enough of his shit, and I could tell he was mocking me the while.

Then I saw that he was holding a scroll, sealed with a swan.

‘And I asked myself, who is the Viscomtesse d’Herblay?’ he continued, stiff-arming me and holding the scroll as far from me as he could manage. ‘And will a letter from the lady help you or make you worse?’

‘You bastard!’ I shouted, and the two whores in the next smoke hole pounded on the wattle partition between our rooms.’

‘Untrue!’ Richard said. ‘I’m no bastard.’ He and I were well-matched in a hundred mock fights and a few real ones, and I couldn’t get the scroll from him.

‘Give me your word to cheer up!’ he shouted.

‘I swear!’ I promised.

Christ, I loved that man.

He gave me the scroll. Two months old, but most welcome nonetheless.

She had found my capture, and used her social wiles to force him to pay me his ransom. And she wrote, ‘Whatever your foolish Prince may think, you remain for me a true and gentle knight.’

Whatever my boil of loathing, she lanced it. With money and soft words.

‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘You and this countess are friends?’

‘We were at Meaux together,’ I said.

‘Ah, she helped you hold the bridge?’ he said. ‘Or perhaps she is a nun?’

I looked at him, and he desisted. Real friendship is knowing when to stick the needle in, and when to leave off. Richard — perhaps because he’d been a slave — was always very tender with me when I was down.

‘She found my French knight and made him pay his ransom!’ I said.

Richard smiled. ‘I gather that this cures whatever has been ailing you,’ he said.

I went to the bankers that day and paid a hundred florins on my sister’s dowry.

I think it was a few days later and Richard and I were eating a good meal in a good inn, which is why I think I must have gotten my long-lost ransom, when he told me of his trip to Avignon.

‘The Pope is a Frenchman,’ he said, which I acknowledged. All Popes were French, in my experience. I poured him some more good wine.

‘So the King — our King — sent to him to ask if he’d help raise the King of France’s ransom. To which the Holy Father agreed. After a great deal of negotiation.’ Richard shrugged. ‘One of the things our embassy guaranteed in the King of England’s name is that no English or Navarrese companies would attack Provence. So I ask myself why a royal messenger guarded by royal archers has come to Sir John.’

‘And now we march on Provence,’ I added in. ‘I can see through a brick wall in time,’ I added, one of John Hughes’ best expressions.

‘You can?’ asked Richard. He’d taken the rest of my archers, or rather, we shared them so that we had the biggest lances — the largest number of men. They were all gathered around, because we made the archers loose shafts every Sunday, and we rode at tilt or swaggered swords — anything to keep the edge on.

Amory, the youngest of my new archers, a Staffordshire man with no home to go to with peace, sat cross-legged, making bowstrings. He looked up.

‘Well, sirs, mayhap I cannot see through the wall. What’s it mean?’

Richard and I glanced at each other. He gave a slight nod, as if to say, You say it.

‘Good King Edward and his son — you’re all loyal to them, eh?’ I began.

The King himself would have been heartened by the response — the grunts and smiles from ten hard men.

‘If we went back to England, how would he get us back here to fight?’

Amory took the question seriously, rather than rhetorically. ‘On ships?’ he asked. ‘I come on a ship.’

Jack Sumner laughed, but I speared him with a glance. ‘Right you are, Amory. But that ship costs money, and arraying you in Staffordshire costs money and, who knows? Even an imp of Satan like yourself might go home and find a wife and decline to serve his Prince.’

Men laughed.

‘As long as we have employment in France,’ I said, ‘we are here, ready to hand. And by fighting here, we make France weaker.’

Amory grinned. ‘Aye!’ he said.

‘But Provence? An’ the Pope?’ asked Jack Sumner. ‘The Pope’s gathering the King o’ France’s ransom.’

‘And if he never pays it?’ Richard asked.

‘Sweet virgin,’ Amory said. ‘We keep France.’

I shrugged. ‘We keep France, and we keep the Pope’s money, and the King of France is a broken shutter, banging against an empty barn.’

The archers grinned. Easy money. And service to the crown.

It didn’t sound like glory, a better repute and a fortune to me. Nor did I hate the French so much.

When we speculated to Sir John, he told us to keep our views to ourselves.

And the last incident I remember before we marched was the brothers — the Ashleys, Hugh and Steven, who joined us that week. They were a pair of Englishmen, both knights, both well born and both attainted in England. Sir Hugh was attainted for multiple murders, and he was quite proud of them. He’d killed men who, as he said, ‘Got in his way,’ in his home county in the north of England.

They were big men and they, literally, threw their weight around. They’d never fought in France, but both had fought against the Scots, and against the French at Winchelsea.

They were determined to make names for themselves in France and get pardons, which had certainly worked before. But the end of the war and the Treaty of Bretigny, as it was being called, were flies in their very personal ointment.

I think it was a day or two after Richard and I talked of Avignon — again, I can place it because I was comfortably on a well-lit settle in the common room of an inn, drinking good wine and not swill — that Sir Hugh came in and stood by the fire — it was late autumn — and cut me off from my light.

I was sewing. What do you think soldiers do in their spare time?

‘I’m sewing,’ I said.

‘Proper in a young maid like yourself,’ Sir Hugh said.

‘You are in my light,’ I said.

‘My light now,’ he said.

I sighed, because I’d had two days to prepare for this. Sir Hugh was no bigger than me. No smaller, either.

I put three stitches through my lining to seal it off, bit my thread and put my needle in its case.

‘I’d rather beat the piss out of you outside,’ I said loudly. ‘But if you insist, I’ll do it right here.’

Every head turned.

‘And I thought you was just a blushing virgin,’ Sir Hugh said, and his right hand shot out.

He was a good fighter, but he couldn’t school me, and he barked his shin on the bench early in our bout and I got him on one knee and banged his head on the chimney despite the heat.

He roared like a bull and tried to throw me off. His left hand slammed into my temple and I saw stars, then my right punched him in the forehead and snapped his head back against the chimney, again, and down he went.

I didn’t kick him when he was in the rushes, and he turned and threw up, then got slowly to his feet, holding one hand between us. ‘Fair enough, sprig,’ he said. ‘Sew all you like.’

‘Thanks,’ I responded.

I won’t say we were friends after that. He and his brother were hard men, and they were happy to take things that weren’t offered. But after that fight, they let us alone.

We then we marched south, for Provence, with almost forty lances in our company, and on the road we merged with other companions, until there were thousands of us. The Bascot de Mauleon told me later that there were 10,000 of us that winter, headed for Provence. Perhaps.

We didn’t celebrate Christmas. I missed it — I love Christmas. But Christmas means a church that isn’t burned, a priest who hasn’t been killed and an abundance of bread and sweets and meat. And children. There’s no Christmas without children.

In 1360, in southern Auvergne, as we came down the passes, we had 10,000 professional soldiers and another 8,000 desperate men and women. We had war horses and armour and weapons, baggage carts, banners, the glitter of spear points like a thousand stars, the weight of mail like lost love tugging at your heart, the stirring song of serried companies singing.

But we didn’t have an abundance of anything except rain, and we had no children and no priests.

I did get a present for Yule. Richard called me down to the yard, where a royal messenger was riding away with his bodyguard archers. He tossed me a silk envelope and I opened it.

Master William Gold,

I have reached London, by the grace of our lord, and found your sister with ease. I have enclosed a few words in her own hand. I send my assurance she is well-housed and well-considered, although her house for the most part keeps silence, and I only saw her for as long as it took to push your letter through a grate. Hers arrived a day later, and now, I hope my friends in the Prince’s household will see it to you.

Send my best regard to Richard Musard, with my deepest wish that both of you may find a way clear of France. London is better.

Your servant,

Inside, a single parchment sheet folded very small.

Dear Brother,

Fra Peter told me that you lived, and indeed thrived, as it were, in service of our Prince. And bless you, the sisters are very kind to me, and treat me as if I was a novice and not a serving woman. The Commander has twice stopped me to tell me you sent money for my dowry. Good brother, no woman ever had better.

Let me say also that the Plague came here again, but I am salted, as you are, so I went out to the sick, and the good lord worked through me. I am very happy here.

Be safe. And may the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with you always.

I wept.

For me, the battle of Brignais started under the walls of Pont-Saint-Espirit. It was a day or two after Christmas, and we had marched south with the speed that only routiers could march — thirty and forty miles a day, despite rain and snow. We were hard men, and we could move quickly. We didn’t have servants to shave us, and farriers to look after our mounts. We went unshaven, and when a horse threw a shoe, we left him behind — and stole another.

We outran news of our coming.

Pont-Saint-Espirit was a bridge town on the Rhone, just twenty miles north of Avignon. Sir John Hawkwood said that Seguin de Badefol had spies in the town, and that we could take it by escalade, despite it being one of the strongest fortified bridge towns in all of France. Except, of course, that Pont-Saint-Esprit isn’t in France. It’s in Provence.

At any rate, the whole host pillaged Roquemaure and Codolet, in both cases we took the inhabitants by surprise, and we took everything.

Sir John came to us that night, and proposed that if we took a path over the mountains, with guides he trusted, we could take the richest prize — a whole city.

By then, I knew Sir John well enough to know when he was hiding something. He whipped his men into a fury at the thought of a whole town — a rich town — to take. He sounded disinterested in the ransoms and the money, and I smelled a rat, but I had no idea the scale of the rat I was taking on. Richard felt the same, and he tugged his beard and stared at the first stars.

‘What do you think this is about?’ he said.

We’d both seen the royal messenger. But we didn’t know anything, and that rankled.

Richard and I led the English vanguard. We climbed the steep pass, and at the top, we found piles of brushwood that Hawkwood had paid peasants to drag there. We made huge fires, and warmed ourselves, and then, at about the first hour of the morning, we went down the mountain on the other side.

The moonlight was pale and cold. The moon was full.

We assembled our ladders in the ditch, and detachments of archers stood directing us, like men unsorting a jam of wagons in Cheapside. I moved to the head of a ladder by right, and when Hawkwood gave the word, up I went. First man on a ladder, into a town with a heavy garrison.

I don’t remember a single fight from the storming. The garrison was unready and easily terrified. Most of the citizens surrendered abjectly, but the fifty richest families barricaded themselves in a church that had a strong stone tower in the north of the city. They took their jewels and their daughters, barricaded the doors, and swore they’d hold the church until rescued by the papal army, which was just twenty miles away.

Hawkwood came in on horseback, by a gate we’d opened after we butchered its defenders, and he rode to the church with twenty men-at-arms, looked at it and gave it over as a bad job. He swept through the town like a blade through butter, and I could see from the way his mounted company moved that they were looking for something.

By nones the next day, the Bourc Camus arrived with another company. Richard and I avoided his black and white clad men. Houses were burned, but Hawkwood’s archers kept the mercenaries under control, and he began to negotiate a ransom for the whole town with several of the town’s magnates, who he already had in hand.

The papal army didn’t move.

It was the second day after the storming when the situation exploded. Richard and I were counting our winnings; we’d taken over a house, and if we roughed up the inhabitants, I swear to you we were the gentlest tenants in that place. We had coins and some gold objects, and Richard had acquired a squire named Robert and a pair of servants, two likely French lads named Belier and Arnaud. John had found himself another senior archer as a companion, Ned Candleman, and we had another eight archers. So we had mouths to feed and the loot had to be shared. We were already planning to start our own company, even then.

John Thornbury appeared in the street, shouting for us. I remember going to the window, my brigantine unbuckled — my armour was in a sorry state by then — and all I could think was that the papal army was going to attack us.

I leaned out into the street. ‘What ails you, John?’ I asked.

He was looking north. ‘Gather your lance. There’s going to be trouble with the Gascons.’

Nothing would please me better. A fight with Camus?

Richard and I had our men together and moving before you could say five paternosters. We pounded through the narrow streets and terrified locals cowered in doorways or slammed their doors shut.

We were late to the party.

We came to the square in front of the church, and it took me a moment to determine what was happening, because I came expecting a fight, not a massacre.

The Bourc had grown bored of laying siege to the church, so he offered them their lives and freedom in exchange for surrender — if they gave up the church and left the town, he’d let them take everything they could carry. It was a common enough solution to strongly held houses in the countryside.

Remember that these were the fifty richest and most noble families in the town. Remember, too, that Hawkwood was looking for something. The truth is, he’d encouraged Camus to get the little siege over with. Whatever Hawkwood was trying to find, it had become obvious that it was in the church.

As we came up to the square, the oath had been sworn, the Bible kissed, and the great nail-studded oak doors of the church were opening.

The Bourc Camus sat on his great black war horse in the middle of the square in front of the church, watching as the doors to the nave were thrown back. About forty men stood there, with their swords in their scabbards. Behind them cowered a hundred women. Most of the men and women were richly dressed, and all of them had bundles, like peasants.

The men began to file out the cathedral doors, led by a priest with a cross.

Camus spat on the ground in sheer disgust.

I was watching Hawkwood. He was looking at the newly surrendered refugees the way a man buying a horse watches the horse — eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. He touched his horse with his spurs and rode past Camus into the square. ‘Which of you,’ he said, ‘is Pierre Scatisse?’

The man at the head of the column was a nobleman. You could tell — straight back, unbowed head, angry eyes. A young woman clutched his arm. She glared at Hawkwood with the same look of contempt as her father.

The man stopped. ‘By what right do you ask anything of us?’ asked the man. ‘And where is our escort?’

‘Which of you is Pierre Scatisse?’ asked Hawkwood again.

The little column began to shuffle past him.

‘By God!’ he shouted. ‘Produce Monsieur Scatisse or take the consequences!’

The nobleman stopped. ‘None of us is Monsieur Scatisse,’ he said. ‘I live here. I would know.’

Hawkwood trembled with frustration. I could see his anger, and it transmitted to his horse, who began to fret. Later — much later — I learned that Scatisse was the man who was taking a convoy with the Pope’s contribution to the French King’s ransom.

And he wasn’t there.

Camus laughed. He rode his horse along the column, his horse’s hooves ringing on the square’s cobblestones in the cold air. He passed the nobleman, drew his sword and cut down at the priest, severing the man’s cross and cutting into his neck.

‘Kill them all,’ he called.

The nobleman whirled, drawing his sword. He cut down the first brigand to come for him, and the second, but Camus towered above him, hammered through his guard and split his head.

Every mercenary in the square fell on those folk. Except two.

The men were killed.

The women were raped.

The nobleman’s daughter took her father’s sword, stood over his corpse and fought. She didn’t last long before a pair of Gascons threw her down and took her.

And that was the end of me.

I gather that I stood there for a long moment, watching the massacre unfold, neither helping nor harming. I have no memory of that time.

But when the two Gascons threw the girl down, something snapped.

I killed them.

I don’t remember it.

But I remember Camus. He was sitting on his horse, watching the rape and murder like Satan, with a gleam of savage satisfaction. This was his world. This was all he wanted of it — that men humiliate each other; that men suffer degradation whether they are victims or criminals.

I rammed my longsword’s point into the soft back of his thigh before he even knew I was there, and then I slammed an armoured fist into his hip and hammered him out of the saddle. His head hit the pavement with a hollow sound, like an empty gourd, and I raised my blade-

And John Thornbury took my sword arm from behind.

Both of the Ashleys had my arms, and Richard Musard stood between me and my prey. Camus lay on the stones and his eyes wouldn’t focus. Behind him, the French girl who’d used the sword tried to cover herself. She was bleeding and weeping.

Sir John planted himself in front of me. ‘William,’ he said, as if I was a fool. ‘What am I going to do with you? This is no place for a private quarrel.’ He spoke to me as if I was a small child.

‘Sir John, we swore to protect these people. To escort them to Avignon. We swore!’ I think I was sobbing. The French girl got a dagger from her father’s corpse.

Sir John shook his head. ‘You don’t know what this is about, lad. It’s not on your head. Now, be a good lad, take your men and walk away.’

John Hughes saw what the girl was about, bless him. She put the dagger to her throat, but before she could do it, he had the dagger. She raked her nails across his face, and he slugged her hard enough to put her down.

Then he picked her up and threw her across his shoulder, and we left the square.

The next day, John Thornbury brought me thirty day’s pay and told me that I had to go. He sat at my table, had a cup of French cider and apologized for Sir John.

I knew what was coming. It had been happening my whole life.

‘Sir John asks that you go away until the Bourc is somewhat calmer,’ he said. ‘We need the Bourc’s men, and his allies.’ He shrugged. ‘He’s a monster, and that’s the saviour’s own truth, but we can’t be too picky just now.’

I drew a deep breath and said nothing.

He went on, as embarrassed men do, speaking to hide silence. ‘If we’d found the ransom money here,’ he began.

‘What’s that?’ asked Richard.

Thornbury looked at both of us, his eyes narrow, then he looked away. ‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ he said.

But Richard started to stand up. ‘You mean all of this was about the King of France’s ransom,’ he said quietly.

Thornbury got to his feet. ‘Come back in a few days,’ he said. ‘Send Perkin or Robert to make sure of your welcome.’

We were all on our feet.

‘You mean to say,’ said Richard, ‘that the King of England, having made a treaty with the King of France based on his ransom, tipped you off to come and steal that ransom? So he could abrogate the treaty?’

‘And beggar France?’ I put in.

Thornbury spat. ‘You two children need to go to school. This is the world. We’re not knights of spotless renkown. We’re soldiers. We kill and maim. That’s what we do. If the King orders us to do something and it will make us all rich, who are we to question it? We should have picked up 400,000 florins when we took this town. Think of that, you two pious fucks — 400,000 florins. Your share would have been between 400 and 800 florins each. Enough to buy all the French girls in the world. Buy masses, if you want. Buy an indulgence from the Pope, if that’s what your pretty little conscience needs.’ He glared at Richard. ‘Don’t come back until you’ve mastered your tender soul, Monsieur. It’ll get you killed. Until you do, you are not welcome in this company.’

He pushed past me and left.

I stood there, breathing hard, then I looked at Richard. He was nearly red, he was so furious. ‘I will never come back,’ he shouted at John Thornbury. ‘Tell Sir John Hawkwood that I spit on him.

‘I doubt he cares,’ Thornbury shouted back.

I suppose we should have been worried that the Gascons would attack us, or that Hawkwood would take some revenge, but it didn’t happen like that. We collected our loot and summoned our people — Ned and John; Perkin and Robert; Arnaud and Belier; Amory and Jack and the other six. And the girl, whose name I didn’t know, who stared in stony silence. She’d eat and dress herself, but she hadn’t said one word since she came along with us.

‘Friends,’ I said, ‘Richard and I have been dismissed from Sir John’s company. We are not short on money and we can continue wages.’ My confident speech petered out — I had no idea where I was going or why, so I guess I frowned.

Richard nodded. ‘If you come with us, there could be some hard times,’ he said.

Arnaud laughed aloud. ‘Hard times?’ he asked. He shook his head. ‘I’ve eaten more in the last month than in the last five years.’

Belier said nothing, but I saw his eyes on the woman. Even stone-faced and silent, she was pretty. More than pretty.

‘Leave her alone,’ I said.

John Hughes nodded. ‘What do you reckon, gentles?’ he asked. ‘Take service with another lord? Petit Mechin has a company — and I hear he hates Camus like we do.’

In that moment, I loved John Hughes. The words ‘hates Camus like we do’, that moment of solidarity, rang like a clarion and was engraved on my heart.

‘Where’s Mechin?’ I asked. ‘Or Seguin de Badefol?’

Richard shook his head. ‘I think we should leave this life.’

Even in the circumstances, I remember being stunned. ‘And do what?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I only know that if I don’t walk away soon, this will be the sum of who I am.’

I heard Emile, then: But that need not be the sum of who we are.

They all came with us, and we rode out of the gates of Pont-Saint-Esprit on the first day of the new year, 1361.

You want to hear about Brignais, so I’ll spare you the whole tale of my next year. We rode with de Badefol, and we came in sight of the Mediterranean, and swept like a horde of locusts along the Cote d’Azur until, by August, we came to Narbonne. The woman we’d taken — did we save her? I’m still not sure — rode with us. She didn’t speak, and nor did she lie with any of us. When an archer tried, I hit him.

She also didn’t bathe or brush her hair or behave like a woman, and after a few weeks, her presence was a burden on every campfire. We didn’t even know her name, so we called her Milady.

We took some small towns, but in general, the Narbonnais and their cousins in the Rouergue were ready for us. Their towns were strong and well-garrisoned, and we were always short of food and fodder, so we could never sit down to lay siege to so much as a fortified house without feeling hunger. We moved fast, trying to repeat the victories of the fifties, when companies of English and Gascon freebooters had surprised towns all over France, but the easy pickings were gone, and by a process of elimination of the weakest, only the strong remained.

The knights and militia of Carcassonne and Toulouse knew their business — perhaps having Gascons as neighbours had made them hard. They shadowed us night and day, struck our camps, killed our sentries, stole our horses and murdered our sick and wounded. Not that they had it all their own way. When we caught a party of them, the tables were turned, and if a man of Carcassonne wasn’t worth a ransom and we took him in arms, we hung him from a tree.

One day in May — already hot, under a magnificent blue sky — we fought four Provencal knights at a ford. We’d found a dovecote in which to camp, and they’d seen our smoke and come at us — four mounted knights and a dozen of their own routiers with spears and helmets.

It was a bitter little fight, with no quarter asked or given. I dropped one of their knights in the ford with my lance, and Richard got another, then we were fighting for our lives. Ned and John made all the difference, and as we fought on, they stood on the bank and slowly killed their way through our opponents, unhorsing the mounted men and killing the unarmoured footmen.

Finally, the last knight and half a dozen footmen broke and ran.

We killed them.

I rode the knight down, caught him and beat him from the saddle with my sword. Richard put his sword through a gap in the man’s coat of plates while he writhed on the ground, but he never requested our mercy. Then we chased the footmen.

All of them.

It took us some time, and when we returned to the ford, John and Ned were stripping the corpses with Arnaud and Belier. A slim young man was just lacing his hose on the river bank. I didn’t know him, but Ned didn’t seem to pay him any heed.

Provencal’s were good fighters, but their equipment was antiquated — mail shirts and leather reinforcement. The smallest of them had a nice pair of steel greaves, which I admired, but my legs were about a foot too long for them. John Hughes took them and, as I watched, he gave them to the young man.

The fellow looked up at John and smiled.

I had never seen her smile, but I knew immediately that it was Milady. I was still mounted and I rode over.

She looked up at me. She didn’t appear afraid. She said, ‘I know how to fight.’ She said it as if we’d had a hundred conversations.

I was dumbfounded. ‘You washed your hair,’ I said.

‘It was filthy,’ she said. ‘I cut a lot of it off.’

‘Leave her be,’ said John in a low voice.

‘I’m going to be a man, now, if you don’t mind,’ she said.

Later, in Italy, we had twenty women in harness. We were famous for it, and the Italian men-at-arms shat themselves to think they were fighting women — and losing. But in the summer of 1361, there weren’t a lot of women fighting in armour in the world. I thought about it.

‘That’s fine,’ I said.

John Hughes gave me a small, approving nod.

Milady took a place in our little company as if born to it. She could fight and she could forage. She was small, but her riding was a far sight better than mine or even Richard’s, and her use of the lance was as pretty as. . as she might have been.

The next night, when Richard produced his dice box, she joined in.

I still have no idea what happened. It was as if she lost her soul, and then, one day, she found it — or another soul, the soul of a harder person. A man.

No. Not a man, as you’ll hear.

Her name was Janet. And in the complex cross-currents around us, as dangerous as the currents in a river when boys are swimming, the fact that she kept a woman’s name said something.

She changed our people.

The very first day she recovered her voice, we were sharing the loot from the dead Provencal knights, and Milady — we continued to call her that — looked at me.

‘Just give me the fucking money,’ Jack Sumner said for the third time to young Amory, who apparently owed him gambling debts.

Milady looked at me and frowned. ‘I will not have swearing,’ she said. ‘Not among my lord’s retainers.’

Jack looked abashed. He mumbled and apologized.

I reached for my share of the money.

‘You should have a man to carry your purse,’ she said to me. ‘It is ignoble for you to handle this money yourself. You practice largesse — you give to the poor, you host others in your hall. You pay no attention to money. That is the way of being a knight. Let another man watch it for you.’ Her mad eyes bored into mine. ‘When did you last give money to the poor?’

Perkin bowed to her. ‘Milady, I am Master William’s squire, and I will carry his purse.’

She sniffed. ‘See that it is done.’

Perkin beamed at her.

We mounted up and rode, heading north to rejoin the main ‘army’ of routiers. We called ourselves the Grand Company, and we had a good few men-at-arms.

As we rode through the sunshine, Milady began to sing. She was a southerner, an Occitan, and she sang the old songs. Her French — it wasn’t really all French — was hard to understand, but par dieu, she sang comme une ange, like an angel. She sang the songs of courtly love, and songs of war. She sang of Richard Coeur de Lion, and she sang of a peasant girl on a hillside refusing the love of a knight.

She held us spellbound.

That night — the first night of her speaking — we paid for a sheep from two terrified young peasants, butchered it and ate it in the shepherd’s stone cot, which was open on one side, where we built a roaring fire. The sheep we did in parts, not whole, and we had wine. Then Richard produced a deck of cards — the new cards that all the routiers spoke of. I hadn’t seen them. Some men said they came from the east — from India, even.

The cards Richard had were like the ones the Dominicans used to teach the catechism, except that the religious symbols had been replaced by those of venery — stags, ducks, spears and hawks. They were beautiful — hand-painted on fine parchemnt and pasted like artworks on fine paste board. Richard had taken them off a merchant we’d despoiled in the taking of Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Milady pounced on them like a young girl on a silk ribbon. ‘Do you play?’ she asked. ‘Piquet?’ She smiled. ‘I promise that I will deal gently with you, messieurs. My father taught me to play.’

At the words ‘my father’ her whole body gave a convulsive shudder. Then she pasted a smile on her face. ‘No matter. Let me teach you, eh bien?’

I remember that I leaned forward. ‘Would you rather dice, my lady?’

And she shook her head. ‘Dice are all very well, but a gentleman plays cards.’

I wanted to humour her — even then. ‘For high stakes?’ I asked.

‘A true knight never counts the cost, my lord,’ she said. ‘He wagers whatever he will, and if he loses, why, he pays. Rich or poor, a true knight never counts his coins like a merchant.’

Richard laughed. ‘This is why merchants own more and more of the world!’ he said. ‘And why Italian bankers defeat French knights.’

She frowned. ‘No, sir. Whatever amount of coin they amass, they are men of no worth. Only those who put their bodies in peril can be accounted preux. Those who will not risk death can have no preux.’ She smiled at me. ‘Surely I need not tell you this, monsieur.’

She smiled at me, and at Richard.

I sat back. ‘What of us? We take coin to fight.’

She shrugged. ‘Bah! A gentleman must feed his horses and his servants. Only a fool. . my father. .’ She paused and a shade passed over her face. ‘My father says only a fool or the Pope can expect a man to fight for nothing.’

I liked her nonsense. ‘And can a base-born man enoble himself by a life of arms?’ I asked.

She smiled. It was the pure smile of a maiden — lips slightly parted, eyes bright. ‘Of course!’ she maintained. ‘Who but a malcontent or caitiff would say else?’

Richard was grinning like a fool, or a big, happy dog. ‘Jesus,’ he said aloud.

‘And I will thank you not to take the lord’s name in vain,’ Milady said. ‘A knight is at all times respectful of his lord’s passion. A knight, by the pain of his armour and the labour of his wars, suffers with our lord every day.’

I think I swallowed. Hard.

But we drank, we played cards, and all the silver from my purse went into Milady’s. She giggled. ‘I will need my own squire,’ she allowed. Her eyes fixed on Amory. ‘You — you have a gentle way with you. Do you fancy being my squire?’

The snap of her words brought the boy to a position of deference and he leaped to do her bidding.

I think we all did.

The next few days were spent moving fast. We stared down a pair of knights at a river crossing and convinced them to move aside. We saw a strong force coming on the road an hour later, and we judiciously moved into the high hills south of Narbonne, with the sheep and the wolves. I don’t remember much of those days, except that we were enjoying her company so much we scarcely noticed that we were suddenly the focus of a papal hunt for malcontents. There were twenty papal men-at-arms chasing us, and another twenty mounted corssbowmen, and we were riding through deadly country, where a sudden rockfall could kill your horse. But again, Milady knew the area, and again, she knew how to move through it.

‘We hunted here,’ she said with a brittle smile, because hunting reminded her of her father, which reminded her of Pont-Saint-Esprit. I could follow her thought, and I was careful not to mention anything to do with that place. Richard was not so quick, and I had to kick him a few times.

There are few things as fatiguing as commanding men — and women — in flight, and doing so while attempting to control their tempers and their emotions. Richard couldn’t take his eyes off Janet, despite some admonitions from me. Amory was in the same state — not so much love as helpless adoration. John Hughes looked at her with a fatherly, protective air, which made him surly with me. And so on.

It wore on my temper, and when the load slipped on Jack Sumner’s mule, I lost my temper.

‘Get your head out of your arse and see to that animal!’ I shouted. ‘By the mother that bore you and god’s Grace, I should leave you to be taken. And the papal knights will string your useless corpse up by the roadside unshriven!’

Sumner had hovered by the pre-dawn breakfast fire instead of taking care with his packing. I’d noted it.

He didn’t quite meet my eyes and his face was working.

I could feel her coming. I could hear the horse picking its way along the hillside.

I thought I knew what she was going to say, and I was ready to have it out with her. Her presence was focusing our men on the wrong things.

She rode up next to me without so much as jostling my horse on the narrow track. Among her other abilities, she rode like a centaur in one of her romances.

‘Well?’ she said, imperiously, to Sumner.

He looked at her.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘You have justifiably angered your lord,’ she said.

Sumner stammered. Sumner was a tough bastard who’d have knifed his own mother to get a fresh horse, but he stammered.

She cocked an eyebrow at me and turned her horse’s head. I trotted up our column in a state of shock. I’d expected her to take his side, which, in retrospect, was foolish of me. She always deferred to my command.

At the head of the column, she motioned to Richard to fall back — he’d been riding with her — and when we had the privacy afforded by rapid movement on a narrow track, she said, ‘A knight does not lose his temper.’

‘Then I’m no knight,’ I said, spoiling for a fight.

She looked at me. ‘You are a knight. And if you seek the rank, and achieve it, it is on your shoulders to support it. A knight is in control of his temper — always. This is the essence of courtesy, and courtesy is at the heart of knighthood.’

I thought of Chatillon, and du Guesclin, and Sir John Chandos. And even Hawkwood.

I had never seen Sir John Hawkwood lose his temper. Then I considered Boucicault.

I winced.

She smiled. ‘If you wish to command others, you must always show that you are in command of yourself. This my father taught me.’ Her eyes met mine — too wide, too open, too bright.

‘Perhaps I’m just a common churl who kills men for money,’ I spat.

Her mad eyes met mine. ‘You saved me,’ she said in a low voice.

I couldn’t hold her eyes. There was something burning there and I had to look away.

I also remember another evening — we’d outrun our pursuit and found a stream coming out of the high hills towards Spain, so we washed off the dust and dirt, and in some cases blood, of five days of moving fast. She bathed with us — like the man she’d made herself — sometimes.

I refused to let myself look at her body, but I was aware of it.

And afterwards, we lay around the pool. All the men had put shirts on — that was the effect she had — so she put on a shirt.

That’s not what makes the moment memorable, nor was the flask of Gascon wine that was going around. Amory and Ned were in the rocks above us, on watch. John Hughes, moving carefully, climbed up to them with wine.

‘I could teach you to ride better,’ she said. She lay between Richard and me, and it was hard to tell which of us she addressed.

‘What is wrong with my riding?’ Richard asked. He raised his head.

She smiled at the blue sky. ‘You are not in command of your horse, and he knows it.’

Richard sat up. ‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She turned her head and smiled at me. Her teeth were much whiter than a peasant girl’s. ‘And you are no better. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you were afraid of horses. Did you learn late?’

Par dieu, mes gentils! I sat up and found myself nose to nose with Richard.

She laughed.

I think that Richard had only known prostitutes and camp women. He was tough as nails, gentle and true, but he was a fool with women, and he never had a chance. My Lady had all the skills of the nobility — all the skills, to be frank, that Richard and I lacked. While we rode, she would chat, or even discourse. It was as if, having been silent for two months, she had to make up for lost time.

I liked her a great deal.

Richard was hit with a poleaxe.

In a matter of days, our lives changed and changed again. We caught up with the Grand Company, and as we rode past Narbonne and turned north into the Rouergue, Richard changed, too. One night, he saw his love to bed — not a sign, by the by, that his feelings were returned — and came to sit with me at the fire.

‘This is no life for a lady,’ he said.

I guess I’m an insensitive brute. I thought it was a fine life for her. Emile had given me some notion of what a well-born girl had to look forward to — and worse if she’d been publicly shamed like Milady. A convent? At best? Whereas with us, she was safe as houses. She seemed to me to be blooming like a summer flower in high heat.

So I shrugged. ‘She looks fine to me,’ I said. ‘Better every day.’

‘When I was in Avignon,’ he said, ‘I met a man — a great lord. The Count of Savoy.’

‘The Green Count?’ I asked. He was a great noble and a famous knight. One of the few great men who still risked his body in the field. I was picking up Milady’s language.

Richard nodded. ‘I could take service with him.’

‘He has a great name,’ I agreed, ‘but I doubt he’d accept Milady as a lance.’

‘Oh, as to that,’ he said dismissively. ‘She doesn’t need to continue that charade. I’ll provide for her.’

That didn’t sound like what I saw every day, but on the other hand, I was more interested in a little loot, and in where my captain intended to spend the winter. The loot was because I had just two payments left on my sister’s dowry. When it was paid, I was a free lance. And spending the winter? I was determined to ride to Emile. Time spent close to Milady Janet had convinced me I needed Emile.

A rumour had come that Sir John Hawkwood and some of the other companies had gone over the mountains to Italy after cutting a deal with the Pope. The rumour came from one of the Florentine bankers who rode with us, and when he’d told me the rumour, he handed over two letters — one from Sir John Hawkwood, requesting that I rejoin his company for the spring campaign, and one — a small, well-wrapped package — from Bertrand du Guesclin. He thanked me for the return of the borrowed armour — the fine breast and backplates he’d loaned me for the tilt at Calais — and he enclosed a note from ‘a friend’.

Monsieur my heart,

I hear from our mutual friends that you are alive, still brave and still in the field. My thoughts turn to you often, even while I sit at my high window and spin. In the spring I will bear my lord another child — but these are the petty concerns of a young matron, and I pray that wherever you are, you spare a thought for one who thinks of you each day.

I enclose something that I hope you will treasure for my sake, and for your own.

And she signed it, the little fool: ‘Emile d’Herblay’.

I sat on my horse with an army flowing around me, and a great rage rose in me because she was pregant, again. Because I was not with her. Because, in fact, she went on with her life, doing as a wife must, and I went on with my life, doing as a mercenary must.

We weren’t just an army of mercenaries. To understand the years of the sixties, you have to understand that we weren’t an army or a nation, but we had aspects of both. Badefol’s version of the Great Company had about 8,000 professional soldiers, but another 12,000 men, women and children — desperate people, yes, but some merely looking for a better life or tired of oppression and tyranny. We had, in one vast army, men who had been Jacques, women who had fled brutal husbands, children who fled hateful parents; men who had been Flemish burghers, men who aspired to be English knights. It was not an army of looters and rapists, although we committed those crimes with increasing frequency.

It was also a very young army. I was about to be twenty-one, and I was older than most of the women and quite a few of the men. I had been at war for five years — some of the men-at-arms had been at war for twenty, but most were on their second or third campaign.

At any rate, we attracted a surprising number of women. We had women who had been nobles, like Milady, and women who had been merchant’s wives, and women who had been peasants, serfs, nuns, whores — the whole morality of our moving tribe was shockingly at odds with the morality of the towns. We had very few rules.

Of course, we lived by the sword, and we died like lemmings. Our women died of exposure, childbirth and famine; our children were thin beggars, and our men fed their horses before they fed the women and children. I’m not moved to argue that there was anything particularly noble about our army of mercenaries, except to say that, for a great many men and women, it was the closest thing to power they ever achieved. Odd, because many of our people were refugees from other bastards just like us. I’d read Aristotle and Aquinas, by then. So I would sit with my back against my saddle, some nights, and contemplate such things.

Emile’s cursed note came with a package. It proved to be a book. It was, in fact, Sir Ramon Llull’s book of chivalry. It was a beautiful thing, with gilt capitals and four magnificent, painted miniatures — one of two knights jousting, and one of a hermit talking to a knight.

That night, I sat with my back to my saddle and flipped through the pages of the book. And out of nowhere, my eyes filled with tears and I wept.

Janet came. She picked up the book and laughed aloud. ‘Par dieu, this is a fine book!’ she said.

She ignored my tears, read a passage aloud, then put the book back down and returned to the fire.

In mid-September, Richard, too, received a letter. He and I rode to Arles with our lances, and no one troubled us on the road. We weren’t allowed in the town — towns were very wary of us — but Richard got a tailor to come out and fit him for some new clothes. We also sold an armourer a lot of cast-off stuff — mostly mail — and he fit Richard with a better coat of plates and matching arms, so that Richard looked less of a routier and more of a gentleman.

My take as a man-at-arms about equalled the daily cost of maintaining an archer, a squire and a page. I didn’t have the money to care if my armour was brown with rust, nor could I afford to care if my straps matched, or whether my rivet heads were decorated. I just cared that it all fit, didn’t weigh too much and lasted well in the rain. By that fall, I had two different leg harnesses, two different arms, a coat of plates that had once been very beautiful but was now a uniform black with sweat and rot, and I was on my fifth war horse, a heavy animal that had once, I suspect, been a cart horse and never really been properly broken. But I made the second to last payment for my sister’s dowry.

The bankers were still with us, so somewhere I had two suits of good clothes and a fine cloak, but really, what would I use them for?

I digress. On to Brignais.

We returned from Arles to find a papal officer in our camp. He was recruiting for the Pope’s army in Italy, and for the crusade that had been preached. Our rambling, unsanitary morass of a camp covered three hillsides, and it was several days before I found myself looking at him.

He wore a simple brown wool habit, like a Franciscan, over spurred boots. By his side hung a fine sword in a red leather scabbard. He was tanned so darkly he might have been Richard Musard’s brother, and he had a long, very white scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his mouth on the right. It showed even through his magnificent moustache which was as berry-brown as his gown, but white where the scar crossed it.

I’d seen him before, of course. In England. And I’d helped him take a party south through the chaos of ’58. I bowed. ‘Fra Peter,’ I said. ‘What news of my sister, my lord?’

He smiled. ‘The blessings of the Lord be with you, my son,’ he said. ‘Your sister will be a light of the church.’

‘And with you, father,’ I responded automatically.

‘Brother,’ he corrected gently. ‘I am but a brother-knight. I have taken my vows, but I am not a priest.’

How do you make small talk with people like that?

‘I fear it has been some time since I confessed my sins,’ I said weakly, hoping he had a flash of humour.

He shrugged. ‘I can’t help you, as I’m not a priest.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘And as you are excommunicate.’

‘I. . what?’ I choked. Oh, I know men who take the prospect of eternal damnation lightly. I am not one of them. ‘What?’

‘After the events of Pont-Saint-Esprit, the Holy Father excommunicated every routier in Provence.’ My knight Hospitaller shrugged. ‘Would you like to know more of how your sister fares?’

I must have smiled. ‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Yes, Fra Peter!’ he barked.

I laughed, because I admired him so, and I’d made him bark. ‘Yes, Fra Peter,’ I answered like a dutiful schoolboy.

‘She thrives. She works hard, but she is devoted to Christ and to St John, and well-beloved of the sisters. It is her dearest wish to be allowed to join the order.’ He tilted his head slightly to one side. ‘I have arranged to have our Holy Father issue her an exemption from the article that requires a certain patent of nobility.’

I hadn’t considered the patents of nobility. A lump formed in my throat. ‘I have paid her dowry,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I hoped I would find you. I take my vow of poverty seriously — I have nothing. The order requires the full payment of the dowry for a new sister. I expect that you have some money, as you are a. . mm. . a professional man-at-arms.’

I laughed. ‘You want me, a penniless mercenary, to give money to the church?’ I held my temper in check. I had been practising, since Milady put the matter to me so clearly. ‘Fra Peter, I have given almost every ducat to your order for more than a year.’

His eyes never left mine. ‘You must do as you think best,’ he said carefully. ‘But if you can complete her dowry while I have the document for her patents. .’ he shrugged and looked away. ‘I’m sorry, Master Gold. But not every member of my order feels as I do about your sister’s pedigree.’

I have no idea why that set me off. I have never been proud of my birth — nor ashamed. My parents were wed, which is more than some can say, and my pater served good King Edward as a man-at-arms. That was as gentle as a man needed to be, I felt.

Perhaps it was because I had so much admiration for Fra Peter, but his words, ill-chosen or not — perhaps I was just touchy — seemed to cut me.

‘My sister’s pedigree is as good as any woman’s in England,’ I spat.

His eyes met mine and I regretted my outburst. So, like any young man, I threw oil on the fire.

‘And anyway, aren’t you supposed to be recruiting us for the Pope’s war in Italy?’ I asked with all the heavy sarcasm a twenty-year-old can muster.

He stepped closer to me. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Are you interested?’

‘Do I have to donate my time?’ I asked.

He looked at me. His eyes didn’t express hurt or disappointment. More. . amusement. ‘Do you still seek to be a knight?’ he asked. ‘Or do you imagine that you have reached that estate already?’

That was the closest he had come to an insult, and as cuts go, it was deep and true.

Once again I was looking at the toes of my boots. ‘No,’ I confessed.

‘No,’ he agreed.

That night, Richard came and announced that he was taking Milady and riding away to join the Green Count. Well, he’d never hidden it, and I knew what he planned.

I must say, he looked very fine in green and sable — the Black Squire, in all truth. His armour looked good, his horse gleamed and his clothing was clean and neat. He had new shirts and new braes that almost shone white.

I was very sad that he was leaving me. I think that just then, I hated Milady for coming between us, but her conquest of him had been so sudden and so complete that I knew the cause was hopeless.

Let me be clear. I don’t think she meant to conquer him. She was simply, singly, and fully herself.

We had a fine night. We sat by a fire and drank, and we talked. If I have time, I might tell you half the things we said. Some were antic, and come were deadly serious. Milady sat with us, and John Hughes, Ned, Amory and Jack. Men I knew came by to say goodbye to Richard — all the remaining English and Scots knights who hadn’t gone to Italy, and there were a few: Walter Leslie and Bill Feldon were there, and a dozen more who made their names that summer or the next, or died trying.

But as conversations will go around a fire, a moment came when Milady had me all to herself. She was expert at arranging things like that. She was sitting with her back to John Hughes, and she suddenly leaned over to me. ‘Come with us,’ she said.

I was damned sure that was not what Richard had in mind. ‘Perhaps when I get a good ransom,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘You will.’

I shrugged.

‘What do you want it for? This ransom?’ she asked.

I looked into her mad eyes. They were still too wide and they still sparkled too much. ‘I love a lady,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘That is as it should be.’

‘Winning her will require. . some money,’ I said.

Janet laughed and sat back. ‘My father said. .’ she began, and the old shadow fell across her face.

‘Never mind,’ I said.

Janet shook her head, hard — too hard — and leaned forward. ‘He said, “Never count the money and never count the odds.”’ Her eyes met mine.

And I thought, Why is she going with Richard?

‘What do you want, Janet?’ I asked. We were close enough to kiss. I didn’t want Milady, but there is something — when you can feel the warmth of another person’s face — something beyond intimacy.

She pursed her lips. ‘I want to be a knight,’ she said. ‘It is all I’ve ever wanted. My father had no son.’

So. And so.

Sometime after the North Star began to go down, the Hospitaller came. We made him welcome — anyone could see he was a great knight.

‘Wine, brother?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘I never say no to wine,’ he said, and he drank a fair amount. He hindered our conversation for a little while, but he was so mild a man that after a time we went back to our own ways. And in truth, Milady had mended our manners with nothing but gentle derision.

Eventually, I raised a cup of Burgundy to Richard. ‘I will miss you. My best friend.’

Richard was drunk. He came and put his arms around me and rested his forehead against mine. ‘I want to be a knight, he said. ‘Not a fucking killer for hire.’ He took a deep and somewhat drunken breath. ‘You should, too. You’re too good for this shit.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wasn’t worthy. But at least I knew it.

As I left his embrace, I saw the Hospitaller watching me.

I lay under a cloak, looking at the stars, and listened to Richard and Milady make love. Or rather, I listened to him make love. It’s a common enough set of camp sounds, and I wager I’ve made them as much as any man, and yet, almost painful to listen to, especially when you lie alone with only the darkest of thoughts. I thought of us all — me, Richard, Milady and Fra Peter. Three of us wanted to be knights. Half the men in our camp wanted to be knights.

I knew the words. I knew Sir Ramon’s book almost by heart.

When Janet left Richard’s blankets, I heard her movement and I got up. It was early autumn, and I found Milady sitting by the fire. She smiled at me and relieved me from some shadowy apprehensions. I’m not sure what I feared — for him or for her — but her smile seemed relaxed.

‘I don’t think I’ll be a good wife,’ she said. ‘Don’t sell my armour, eh, mon amie?’

‘Of course you will be,’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘Promise!’

I nodded, built up the fire and went back to my cloak.

The next morning, with a hangover of epic proportions, I watched them ride away. His squire, the welsh boy — now a man — went with him. Her squire, Amory, and her archer — my friend John Hughes — stayed with me.

‘I’m not welcome,’ Hughes said.

I sat down with him as he stared at the fire.

‘He wants her to be a wife,’ Hughes said. ‘It won’t work. But Master Musard said if I went with them, I’d put her in mind of her harness and her horse.’

I forced a smile. ‘John, I promise that if I go to get married, I’ll take you along.’

He looked up. ‘You’d better,’ he said. ‘She made us better men. Can we stick to what she taught?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it.

I left John Hughes to watch my kit, and I went to the Genoese. I extracted my small balance, and I had him write me a letter of credit. I sold him all my nice clothes, and every other item I owned, everything Emile had bought me, except the armour I wore every day, and her favour, and Llull’s book, which I left with him — my sole deposit.

Then I took my money to the Hospitaller. He was praying, and I had to wait for him. Eventually his mild eyes crossed mine, and he rose smoothly to his feet and tucked his prayer beads into his sword belt.

‘William?’ he said. I swear he knew exactly what I’d done.

‘One hundred and seventy florins,’ I said. ‘Every copper I possess. I kept five florins back to pay for fodder for my horses.’

I handed him the letter of credit. He read it and fingered his beard. ‘I share your views of Mother Church,’ he said. ‘Many men do.’ He rolled the letter and tucked it into his purse. ‘My order is very rich. We also spend a great deal on the poor, on arms against the infidel, on nursing and on food. But none of that matters. What matters to you is that you have taken this money by force, and now it will go to benefit your sister.’ Again, his eyes locked on mine. ‘You are better than this life around you,’ he said.

I was looking at the tips of my toes. ‘No, brother,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

He put his hand on my head and blessed me. ‘My God thinks you are better,’ he said. ‘He made you in his image, not to rob and murder, but to protect the weak and defend the defenceless.’

Rudely, I shrugged off his benison with all the desperate cynicism of a twenty-one-year-old. ‘You have all my money, ‘I said. ‘You can keep the blessings. Besides,’ I said, with a dark joy. ‘I’m an excommunicate, remember?’

I walked away.

Youth is truly wasted on the young.

Later that morning, I took my riding horse and rode out into the country. I was looking for a fight.

Instead, just outside of camp, I found a small crowd of peasants. They were mostly women, and they were looting a corpse.

I knew one of the women; she had sewed for me and her name was Alison. She was bent over the corpse, her breasts showing under her kirtle, her hands bloody. She was taking the rings off the man’s fingers.

She grinned at me. It was a scary grin, but I think she meant it to be comely. I dismounted, dropped my reins — my former cart horse didn’t have the spirit to walk away — and knelt. The women scattered, except Alison — women gave men-at-arms a wide compass, unless they were drunk or liquorish. And for good reason.

He was one of ours, a Gascon. In fact, he was one of the Bascon de Moulet’s men, a corporal. He had good wool hose and clean linen braes — not so clean now that he’d voided his bowels into them.

He had one puncture wound under his jaw. Somewhat idly, I pushed my eating skewer into it, and it went right up into his brain. I cleaned my skewer on his shirt, and yes, I ate with it that night.

Later, I took Alison back to my blankets and we made the beast with two backs — about six times. In daylight. I had been fiercely loyal to Emile for a long time, but word of her second pregnancy gave me the excuse I craved to behave badly. Alison was wild, and not altogether of our world; her eyes glittered in an odd way. On the other hand, she had hair as red as mine and no inhibition that I encountered, and if I wanted to lose myself in a body, her body was made for me.

When we were tired, or sore, I watched her play with my clothes. She knelt, naked, on my blankets, and she tied every set of points on my doublet. She arranged everything, almost like I had the clothes on.

I was admiring her, and wondering why she had to fuss endlessly, when she said, ‘Who killed him?’

If you are a man, a naked man on an early fall day, lying with a naked woman, it’s not murder that comes to mind. More especially, if you are a killer, and murder is done every day. ‘Foot pads?’ I said, running a finger over her hip. ‘A brigand?’ I added, meaning it as a joke.

‘I knew him,’ she said.

‘So did I,’ I added.

‘No, I lay with him,’ she added, without shame. Alison wasn’t much on shame. ‘He was kind the way you are. Why don’t you have points all the same colour?’

Her changes of subject were always too much for me. ‘Who cares?’ In truth, I had leather laces on a third of my points, and four or five different colours of wool and silk cord, and some linen. Half my ‘points’ no longer had their metal tips. I looked like a rag-picker’s child.

‘I care,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t come with you. You look. . lopsided. Uneven.’ She ran her hand over my stomach. ‘Naked, you look right. Animals are never lopsided. That’s why they look right.’

Mad as a drunken monk.

‘When an animal is lopsided — when a cow loses a horn — other animals worry about her and stay away.’ She looked at me. ‘One of my breasts is larger than the other. I’m lopsided.’ She smiled. ‘That’s all right. I’m getting used to it. I must go.’ She pulled her kirtle over her head. She didn’t kiss me; she just walked away, hips swaying. If one of her breasts was larger than the other, it didn’t show in clothes.

I stayed with Seguin de Badefol until November, then we signed an agreement with the Lieutenant of Languedoc and collected a small ransom. De Badefol kept most of the money and left us.

The Great Company began to break up.

John Hughes, Perkin and I sat around a small campfire. It was raining, but we were old campaigners — we had a set of other men’s cloaks and blankets rigged to make a pretty fair shelter, and we had a good fire and some stolen wine.

Hughes sat on his blanket roll, sewing a pair of hose. Patching, probably. We looked like jesters in suits of motley. ‘John Hawkwood is on his way back,’ he said. ‘He was fighting for Montferrat in Italy, now he’s coming back this way.’ He looked up. ‘That’s what the bankers say.’

For John Hughes, that was a long speech.

‘You want me to go back to Hawkwood,’ I said. ‘He sent me a letter.’

‘We all know,’ said Perkin.

Hughes met my eye. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ll be brigands in a month at this rate, preying on travellers.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve done it. I’m a soldier. The line may be thin, but I know which side I want to be on.’ He looked at the fire. ‘And there’s Perkin and Amory and the rest. You agree?’

The other men looked up.

‘If we don’t show them something better, what will they become?’ Hughes said.

I grunted and thought, What have I already become?

‘Let’s go find Hawkwood,’ I said.

Out trip across northern Provence was perilously close to brigandage. My carthorse developed something grim and died, suddenly, on a rainy December day — and we waylaid a small convoy of churchmen, took their money and their horses, and rode on. They had six men-at-arms and a dozen crossbowmen. We took an insane risk, and it paid off: the crossbowmen all ran and the men-at-arms were worthless.

As a side comment, routiers had a saying in those days that if a man-at-arms was worth a shit, he was with us. And only the cowards and the worthless men were on the other side.

It had some truth in it, or perhaps it’s just the lies men tell to justify themselves when they kill. In this case, the priest leading the column sat on a magnificent war horse and cursed his own defenders for being faithless cravens. I noted that he had nothing but a clean shirt, his Franciscan habit and his horse. I ordered him off the horse, and he dismounted with the strangest smile. I looked in his script and his bags. He had two clean shirts, a fine silk rope belt and a rope of coral beads around his waist. His horse had the plainest saddle, and his malle proved to hold two books of sermons and an unilluminated gospel. Every other priest in the convoy wore wool and silk and carried gold and silver, but this man, the leader, had nothing.

I’ll be honest. I almost killed him, simply for having nothing. But I didn’t. The rain was pouring down and he stood unshivering in the road — I took my own heavy cloak off my cantel and put it around his shoulders.

He raised his hand and blessed me.

We left him alive, and warmer.

We were chased by a French royal force for three days. If they’d taken us, they’d have hanged us at the roadside as brigands and highwaymen. And I suppose we were. But we eluded them and slipped north to Chalons, where we found Sir John Creswell. I knew him a little, and he knew of me, and here I was with three lances, short only a man-at-arms, and he hired us on the spot. He and his men were rich — they’d forced the Green Count himself to pay a huge ransom. I heard that Richard, my Richard, had saved the Green Count from capture and been richly rewarded.

I was glad for Richard. And I was damned glad I’d given the good priest my cloak, even when I was wet through.

Well. It’s good when a friend makes good. You have to be pretty low to curse another man’s good fortune.

And I tried not to curse, tried not to blaspheme. I fought to control my temper, to give to the poor.

But I swallowed a great deal of cursing that month. Another Christmas came and went, and I didn’t celebrate it. I rode out on patrols, collecting patis from peasants who hated me, beating a few of them for insolence or for hiding grain I needed for my mounts. I was good at all this, and I didn’t think of Emile, or of Geoffrey de Charny or Ramon Llull or the Hospitaller. I thought of my sister once or twice. She was safe, and I hoped that she would pray for me. I imagined her becoming a full sister. In my head, it was a knighting ceremony.

I envied the others, because all the other men-at-arms were rich, and had fine armour and good horses, while I looked like one of the mounted brigands we’d mocked in the days after Poitiers.

However, I was good at my work and known to be so, and just after Christmas, Creswell made me a corporal. In those days, a corporal was a man-at-arms who led many lances, often thirty or forty. Forty lances can be more than a hundred men.

My promotion raised a lot of hackles. Sir Hugh Ashley — an actual belted knight — had moved from Hawkwood to Creswell in the mountains, expecting promotion, and he made it clear that he felt I was a poor choice.

In truth, I was a late-comer to his company, and Creswell was busy adding men while he had the money to pay them — he said he planned to take us back east to Brittany to fight in the war there. I had to recruit my own men, but I found some, and I had ten lances. I borrowed money from a Jew — his rates were far kinder than the Genoese, whatever the church may say — and bought myself a good coat of plates and some repairs to my arms and legs. I got myself a new saddle for the first time in three years. When you command other men, looks matter.

I missed Richard. I missed having a man as good as I am myself, to trust. Perkin was solid, and John Hughes was worth his weight in minted gold coin, but Richard. . By Christ, I missed him. Because Richard was my friend, and friendship is more than trust and shared experience.

Our new Great Company was commanded by Petit Meschin — have I mentioned him before? Terrible bastard — a fine fighter, but cut from the same cloth as the Bourc Camus. The jest of it was that he was a Frenchman, not a Gascon or a German or an Italian. He was actually a vassal of the King of France, and he’d spent the Poitiers campaign fighting against us as a loyal servant of the French crown. But in the late winter of 1362, he rallied the little companies that Seguin de Badefol had largely abandoned in Languedoc and led them north, towards Burgundy. All told, we had almost 16,000 fighting men. Most of them were Gascons, but we had Germans, Hainaulters, Italians, Bretons, Scots, Irishmen, Frenchmen and a handful of Englishmen, which has its own dark comedy, because after Brignais, most men thought of our army as English.

In fact, there were just three English companies there — Creswell’s, Hawkwood’s and Leslie’s — although Sir Robert Birkhead was there, too. He had a company, but all his men were Gascons. Of course, Hawkwood already had Italians and Germans, and there were a handful of Englishmen in the Gascon companies.

But by then, most of us had been together at least two years. We were no longer a mass of brigands and robbers assembled to loot. We were like a moving nation, with our own customs and own laws, and we had a certain spirit that’s hard to describe. We had contempt — deep contempt — for the fighting abilities of the enemy. And the enemy was anyone richer than we. Or weaker. Even our long tail of peasants and camp-followers had begun to develop a spirit.

In late winter, we pounced on the Auvergne by rapid marches. We joined forces with Peter of Savoy — another bastard son — to take towns on the Rhone, while the King of France scrambled to raise armies ahead of us and behind us. My old captain the archpriest, Arnaud de Cervole, was put in charge of raising a mercenary army to fight us, but of course, all the best men were with us, and the King of France didn’t offer enough money.

Jean de Bourbon, who I had rescued on the Bridge of Meaux, was appointed commander of a second French army. I imagined that Emile’s husband, the Count d’Herblay, would be with him. Indeed, their estates were in Burgundy.

When I sketched this out on the frozen ground, I became very keen for the new campaign.

But instead of sweeping a victorious, vengeful horde into Burgundy, the vice began to close on us in early March. We’d heard that there was another Great Company operating in the south — the Spaniards — and that they would occupy the King of France’s field army, but they accomplished nothing and made a truce, so a third French army was freed to contain us from the south.

Creswell got sick. We were all sick that winter, because we were out in the open with no fires all day in rain, snow and mud — it never ended, and as the noose of steel closed around our necks, we had to move faster and faster to avoid getting hanged. At any rate, Sir John Creswell summoned me to his pavilion — a grandiose name for a simple square tent with a wattle-and-daub chimney laid up to allow for a fire — and ordered me to take command.

I had never commanded anything but a handful of lances, and as the rain fell and the roads, such as they were, were churned into ever deeper mud, I had to coax several hundred men and their lemans and servants to rise with the sun, harness their carts, pack their goods and move. When all our lances were together, we had almost 300 lances in Sir John Creswell’s company, and as we marched north and west, the other corporals joined us, and my job became more difficult — twice. First, simply because I had more men to command. Second, because none of the other corporals thought I was the right choice to command.

I suppose it was difficult, but I can’t remember being as happy since I was in the Prince’s service. I rode up and down, put my shoulder to a camp-follower’s cartwheel, dragged donkeys out of the thick black soup that filled the holes in the road, and generally led. . by example.

Every day, I practiced the lessons that Milady had taught.

Courtesy — even to a prostitute with a stubborn mule.

Largesse — to peasants burned out by their own knights.

Loyalty — to Sir John Creswell, too sick to take command, and to my own people.

Courage — the physical kind never came hard, but as that March wore on, a true Lent of the soul, the skies never once let us see the sun, and I had to be everywhere — cheerful, and sure.

High up the Rhone, I rode across country with a pair of men-at-arms — good men who later followed me many years, John Courtney and William Grice. I knew them from better days and they came with me willingly enough. I needed to find the other companies we were supposed to make a rendezvous with, and plan our next move. We’d lost touch with Petit Mechin in the mountains, and I only knew the whereabouts of Peter of Savoy.

I found him sitting on his horse in the watery March sunshine with Sir John Hawkwood and John Thornbury. They were wearing their arms, like noblemen, and Sir John had his own arms on a banner held by a man-at-arms, and I remember thinking, By God, he’s done well for himself.

I didn’t ride very fast. I wasn’t sure what reception I’d get, and I wasn’t sure whose actions had been the right ones. But a fair distance away, Sir John raised a gauntleted hand and gave me a salute, and when I rode up, he clasped my hand and embraced me as if I was the prodigal son. Thornbury was more reserved, but he clasped my hand warmly enough.

‘I hear you are running Creswell’s company,’ Sir John said.

‘Trying, Sir John,’ I admitted.

Sir John nodded. ‘I know you have it,’ he said simply. ‘I’m sorry we had a difference of opinion,’ he added.

I think I burst into smiles. Until I saw black and white colours coming down the road.

It’s strange what can set a man off. I think I would have apologized to Sir John then and there — from his point of view I’d broken discipline, and I understood that better now that I was doing a little commanding of my own — but one sight of Camus and I was angry, ruffled and unrepentant.

Sir John’s eyes went where mine had been and he put a hand on my reins.

‘He’s not worth the stinking carcass of a rotting dog,’ Sir John said. ‘Don’t rise to him.’

Our eyes locked.

What he was saying, for those of you too young to understand, was that if I crossed the Bourc in public again, Sir John would have to back him, and I’d lose my command. Or be dead. And that Sir John understood this to be unfair.

This injustice is woven into the story of my life. Like Nan’s da, the alderman. He thought it was unfair, too. Even when he told me to never enter his house again.

Perhaps I’d grown a little, or perhaps I was so in love with command that it steadied me. Perhaps all those lessons on knighthood were finally getting a grip on my stubborn heart. Camus rode up to join us with Peter of Savoy, and he turned his mad eyes to mine. ‘The Butt Boy,’ he said.

I just sat my horse and bowed to Peter of Savoy. ‘I’m here for Sir John Creswell,’ I said. I explained that we had lost touch with Petit Mechin, and they all nodded, even Camus.

Savoy shrugged. ‘Marshal Audreham is close behind us,’ he said. ‘We must take a couple of towns and win ourselves a crossing of the Rhone, or we are well and truly fucked.’

Sir John nodded. To me, he said, ‘I believe I may have been mistaken in coming back from Tuscany.’ He smiled. ‘You have to see Tuscany to believe it. Impossibly rich. Beautiful.’ He smiled. ‘And full of little, foolish men who want to hire us to fight for them.’ Just for a moment he looked like Renaud the Fox.

‘Eh bien, Sir Jean. We are not in Tuscany, but right here, facing the might of France.’ The Bourc was wearing the kind of armour I dreamed of owning — Milanese white armour. Probably made for him. His eyes met mine again and he said, quite evenly, ‘Soon, I will kill you.’ He smiled. ‘I will humiliate you and then kill you, so men will mock you for ever after you are dead.’

I turned to Sir John. ‘Is this how knights talk to each other?’ I asked.

‘I mean it,’ hissed the Bourc.

I shrugged. ‘Horse or foot. Any time, any weapon. To the death. I’ll make my challenge public, so that if you have me murdered, every man-at-arms in the army will know you for what you are.’ I straightened my back and met his eyes.

Blessed Virgin. Later, in Italy, I read how the Goddess Athena, who the old men believed in before Christ came, used to whisper in the ears of heroes, sending ‘winged words’ to help them. I didn’t hear any words, and yet, the words came to me as if from God, and they struck him like the hammer blows of a poleaxe. I’m proud to say that I delivered my words in a tone of banter.

Peter of Savoy laughed. ‘Fight Camus when we’re clear of the French, eh, Gold?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, my lord.’ I said it crisply and loud.

And men — these knights of ill-reknown — laughed. Not at me, but at Camus.

We dismounted at an old roadside auberge — gutted, ruined, rebuilt, burned again and now roofed by a daring sutler with an old red and black striped pavilion. He’d collected stools and benches from the local town and made a decent sitting area that was snug. So snug, in fact, it was hard to breathe.

As the leaders of three companies, we got a table and stools of our own. We drank small beer and Sir John made our plan. We had about 900 lances and we had to assume that Petit Mechin was on the other side of the ridge behind us, with the French right behind him.

‘Lyons,’ Sir John said. ‘If we take Lyons, they’ll have to pay us to leave. We’ll be rich. Best of all, we’ll be safe.’

Peter of Savoy shook his head. We’ll never get into Lyons,’ he said. ‘Last spring they raised the wall. It has a bailli, two thousand men and two out-castles.’ Even as he spoke, he was drawing — in beer, of course — the course of the river. He put filberts down. ‘Rive-de-Gier and Brignais. And here’s Le Puy.’ He sighed. ‘I can’t see taking Lyons by escalade.’

Sir John thought.

Peter of Savoy grunted. ‘We have no choice. Needs must when the devil drives.’

Camus sat slumped.

‘William Gold and I will take Brignais and Rive-de-Gier,’ Sir John Hawkwood said. ‘By escalade. You two wait six hours and try Lyon. If the garrison is alert, light the suburbs afire and retreat on us.’

None of us disagreed. We had the more difficult task, and yet I was well satisfied. I finished my small beer and rode away into the watery sunshine.

I was filled with confidence as we rode cross-country, and then, as I came down on my own convoy, I watched the line of carts and wondered why they were tailing along behind instead of protected in the middle of the column.

I got my horse to a heavy trot, and rolled down the hill, headed for the front of the column, the priest’s excellent war horse labouring in the heavy mud of the unploughed fields.

At the front, there were half a dozen horsemen, arguing. There was Sir Hugh and Richard Cressy, two other corporals and John Hughes. Hughes was as red as a beet. There was a dead man lying under the horse’s hooves.

I knew immediately that Sir Hugh had usurped command in my half-day absence, and that he’d made some error that caused the others to come after him. I could see it all in their postures and those of their horses. I put my gauntlets on and made sure my sword was loose in my scabbard.

They roared at each other like stallions fighting over a mare, and I rode up behind Sir Hugh without being noticed.

‘Gentlemen?’ I said, as I pushed my horse in behind his. I wasn’t too gentle.

Cressy didn’t really know me. He was a good man-at-arms, as big as a small house and cautious. He was barely capable of being a corporal and lacked even the most rudimentary organizational skills.

He also lacked both courtesy and self-control. Although even at twenty-two, I was learning that courtesy — the very foundation of knighthood — was all about self-control.

I mention this because, alone among the corporals, he’d never suggested, by word or deed, that he thought he’d be a better acting captain that I was. His eyes met mine. ‘This idiot,’ he said, pointing at Sir Hugh.

Sir Hugh tried to wheel his horse. He didn’t like having me behind him, and he was afraid of what I might do.

‘He took the wrong fucking turn and killed our guide!’ Cressy said.

‘He betrayed us!’ Sir Hugh said. ‘I made no error!’

He had his horse around, now, and he was glaring at me with a hand on his sword.

John Hughes, who was the informal captain of the archers, just shook his head. ‘He grabbed command from Cressy and fucked it away,’ he said. ‘Order of march changed, down the wrong road, all so he can grab some market town that isn’t where he thought it was.’

I looked at him. I didn’t think anyone would back him — if he’d had skills like that, he’d have been a corporal. ‘I’m surprised any of you obeyed him,’ I said.

Hughes spat. ‘He said he had orders from Sir John Creswell,’ he said.

‘Well, Sir Hugh? I asked. An hour with Sir John Hawkwood and I was emulating his careful, clipped speech and mannerisms.

Sir Hugh glared at me. ‘I, sir, am a belted knight, a landed man, a servant of the King. I should be in command here. These men obey me as their natural superior.’

I nodded. ‘Prepare yourself,’ I said. ‘We’re going to fight right here. If you unhorse me, you can try and command the company, but in truth, Sir Hugh, you couldn’t command a sack of meal in a mill. If I unhorse you, I expect nothing but silent obedience from you. We have an adventure ahead of us, and I, for one, don’t have any more time to waste on you.’

‘With pleasure, boy, he said. He gathered his reins and drew his sword. ‘Butt Boy!’

I put that away for later. The Bourc’s insult in Sir Hugh’s mouth?

He came for me without the formality of choosing ground or seizing a lance. He held up his sword, high above his head, and cut at me — one, two, three times. He wanted to close and grapple, and he pushed in as close as his horse could manage.

My horse — the horse I’d stolen from a priest — proved to have more fight than I’d imagined. He side-stepped and bit Sir Hugh’s mount savagely, ripping off a piece of the other horse’s nose and scattering blood.

Sir Hugh’s horse stumbled and half-reared, and I got my sword in both hands and thrust Sir Hugh cleanly through the aventail. My sword went in just where the collarbone met the breastbone. I’ll be honest, I didn’t care if I killed him, because he was large and dangerous and I needed to get on with my part in Sir John’s plan.

My two-handed thrust penetrated his chain aventail and stuck in bone, but the whole force went into his breastbone, and he lost his seat and fell to the ground. The fight was over.

To add insult to injury, my horse kicked him when he tried to rise. Compared to the kick of a stallion, my little poke was a pinprick.

I ignored the man under the hooves of my horse. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said. ‘We are going to try a bold adventure — to seize the walls of Brignais this very night.’

Ah. Preux. yes, I had preux. Courtesy, loyalty, largesse, courage and preux.

Four hours later, we left our warm fires of the previous light and mounted our horses. Our pages carried our ladders. We rode along the web of roads, following John Hughes and Ned, who had scouted the route, and we assembled our ladders in the ditch without being challenged.

I had about ninety men. I’d left the rest in camp, under Cressy.

‘Fast as you can, mes amis!’ That was my first battlefield speech.

We went up the ladders, and instead of being first, I waited with Courtney and Grice and six other men-at-arms with good harness and good fighting reputations. We were the reserve.

We didn’t even have to fight. We utterly surprised the garrison, and took the place while most of them were locked into their guard rooms from the outside. As soon as we had the gate tower in our hands, I sent Courtney for the rest of the company.

We stripped the garrison to their braes, and threw them out into the night, then built up the fires and gorged on their stores. We moved into their guardrooms and barracks and stables.

A day later, Sir John Creswell came and took the reins away from me. His news was grim — Sir John had taken Rive-de-Gire, but the Bourc and Savoy had failed with Lyon and failed even to fire the suburbs. The main French army, with the archpriest and the Lord of Tancraville, was closing in on us from the north.

He was coldly polite to me, and the only thing he said was, ‘Hawkwood says you’ve run the company better than I do myself.’

Well, messieurs. I’m sure Sir John meant it as praise, although it is possible he meant it to sting Creswell. Hawkwood wasn’t called ‘The Fox’ for nothing.

The second day after we stormed the place, Creswell sent me to find Petit Mechin with six lances. Every man he sent with me was one of my friends — men, squires and archers. With the countryside crawling with French troops, it was an insane risk to take. In fact, like David with Bathsheba’s husband Uriah, he was sending me out to die. He knew it, and I knew it, and worst of all, when he ordered me out, Sir Hugh stood at his shoulder, his right shoulder a mass of linen bandages, and smiled at me. He had what he wanted.

We left before dawn, and I led my band away from Brignais and headed directly north; they didn’t question me. I’d had time to think, by then, and what I decided was that Camus was in league with Sir Hugh. I know that sounds insane, but command in an army of criminals and mercenaries isn’t about chivalry. Or gentility.

No, that’s wrong. The qualities of chivalry had given me a good reputation. The men would follow me. I was just. I was well-spoken and temperate. It was my supposed peers who disdained chivalry and justice.

So we went north until the sun began to rise, and then, when we could see Arnaud de Cervole’s outriders, I led my men into a stream bed, and rode along it until I’d crossed most of the archpriest’s front. Twice we stopped and stood, knee deep in icy water, holding our horse’s heads, but they were terrible scouts and we really needn’t have worked so hard.

When we emerged from the stream, we were between the expanding crescent of his scouts and the main French army. We swept west, riding slowly and carefully from copse to copse, raising no dust. Four times that long late winter’s day, I came in sight of the main French host. I counted banners and whistled, then groaned. Jacques de Bourbon, Count of La Marche; Jean de Melun, Count of Tancraville; Jean de Noyers, Count of Joigny, and Gerard de Thurey, the Marshal of Burgundy, were all arms I knew and banners I could read. And, of course, there was the Count d’Herblay, in azur and or checky — I saw him immediately. I counted thirty-nine banners and had the whole of an apple down to the core while watching them from under a tree. I estimated they had more than 6,000 men-at-arms and another 4,000 armoured infantry.

This scout of mine is accounted one of my finest deeds of arms, but in all sober truth, I ran little risk. Cervole was a poor commander, and besides, Bourbon owed me his life, and if I’d been taken, I’d have made them release me, or so I told myself.

At dark, I slipped Cervole’s forward pickets and rode due west. I assumed that if the archpriest was marching towards a target, that target must be Petit Mechin. But I overestimated the archpriest’s scouting, and by dawn the next day, I still hadn’t found Petit Mechin, or even his outriders or foragers.

The sun was high in the sky when we turned back south, because we could see — well, John Hughes and I thought we could see — a smudge of dust on the far horizon.

Hughes and I sat just below the edge of a ridge line, so we couldn’t be seen silhouetted against the bright sky.

‘Should we just ride clear?’ I asked him.

Hughes had an apple, too. He chewed, groaned, then took another bite. ‘You’d know better than me,’ he said.

We moved fast, despite fatigue, fear and horses near done — that was a long day, and a hard one, with our goal moving almost as swiftly as we did ourselves, so that every time we descended a small ridge, we lost all sight of them and our spirits went lower than our horse’s bellies.

After nones we found foragers stripping a stone barn, and they were from Badefol’s company — that cheered me again, because despite the fact that he’d run off taking all our money the autumn before, he was a good leader and a brave man, and we were in a tight spot. In effect, he came out of retirement in Gascony when he heard how badly we’d fared.

At last light, I rode in among his company from the north, and his lieutenant John Amory took me to the great man himself, where he sat on a camp stool, listening to a man recite the Chanson of Alexander. De Badefol was an old-fashioned man, but he rose and grinned.

‘Looking for work?’ he asked.

‘I come from Sir John Creswell,’ I said. ‘And I’ve seen Bourbon’s army.’

Instantly, his banter went away. He took my shoulder. ‘Come, we must find Mechin,’ he said.

We walked up the hill a little further. I wanted a fire and some of the wine — I swear I could smell wine a mile away in those days — but we walked over the rocky ground to the great captain’s pavilion, set with his banner high on the hillside.

I had to explain everything that had happened for a week since we’d lost him in the hills.

Mechin, as you may have heard, was not a big man. He was quite small, and he had the temper we always pretend Frenchmen have. He burned like a torch, for all that his hair was grey and his beard as white as mine is now, but he shared with John Hawkwood the kind of intelligence that allows a man to think his way out of a trap, or through a contract, or into a great marriage alliance.

About the time that I said I’d taken Brignais, he bounced out of his seat. ‘Par dieu!’ he said. ‘Then we have a crossing of the Rhone, yes?’

I had to demur. ‘Brignais doesn’t have its own bridge,’ I began.

‘We can put across a bridge of boats,’ he said.

‘Like Great Alexander!’ said Seguin de Badefol. He was obviously delighted to be emulating the great conqueror.

Mechin all but bounced up and down. ‘We will pass over the bridge and pft — we’re gone.’

I took a little while to describe the archpriest’s army. Forgive my digression — now I know that Tancraville was commander, but given my bias for professional men-at-arms, I took it for granted that Cervole, for all his failings, would have the command. More fool I!

I told my story, and my count of banners, and Mechin winced. ‘By God, gentles,’ he said, ‘we do not want to face these armies together.’

Badefol had scouted the army of Marshal Audreham to the south, and he reported fifty-four banners and two marshals of France. Now it was my turn to wince. Three to one — perhaps as much as five to one.

We faced three armies: Audreham, the archpriest and Tancraville. Each of them was larger and better armed than our own. Worst of all, they took us seriously, and they moved with minimum baggage and no women, so that they moved faster than our ‘nation of thieves’.

‘Where’s Hawkwood?’ Mechin asked.

I laid out the world around us as best I could: beans for the castles, grains of barley for our forces and peas for the enemy. I put in Lyons and Brignais and everything I could remember.

Badefol slapped my shoulder. ‘You discourse about war like a priest talks theology’ he said. ‘Better, because you aren’t full of shit!’

Well, you have to take flattery where you get it, I suppose.

Mechin looked at my little illustration and nodded, fingering his moustache. ‘Let us turn further south,’ he said. ‘Let us turn towards the good Marshal Audreham.’

Badefol nodded, satisfied. I was many years and social levels their junior, but I was temporarily one of them, and I dared greatly and asked, ‘Why?’

Petit Mechin grinned. ‘You have a head on your shoulders and no mistake, young man, and your illustration on the table does me as much good as a painting of Christ does a poor sinner. So listen to me. If you have to fight two men in an alley, what do you do?’

I stammered. ‘Run?’ I murmured.

Mechin laughed. He had a woman’s laugh, high and wild, but genuine and happy, not mad like Camus. I liked him immensely for such short acquaintance.

‘No, young man. Or rather, certainly, but if your back is to the wall and you must fight them both?’

Sometimes, being questioned freezes the head — you just stare at your interrogator and wonder. This was not my finest hour.

Badefol got it. ‘You feint a thrust at one to buy a moment’s peace and run the other bastard through,’ he said.

‘I can see you’ve fought in some alleys,’ Mechin said.

I was humbled. But they laughed and slapped my back, and someone finally put a cup of wine into my hands.

The next day we marched south along a high ridge line. I took my six lances and we rode out far ahead of the army with most of Badefol’s company, and after nones we came in sight of Audreham’s advance guard.

We had our orders.

We attacked. We had sixty lances all told, and they had twice as many, and we met them in a ford, and drove them from it. We had about twenty English and Flemish long bow men, and they dismounted and ran to the streamside and began to loose shaft after shaft into the southerners. I saw a dozen enemy lances head upstream.

‘Follow me!’ I called, and led my men: Grice and Courtney, Perkin Smallwood and Robert Grandice, de la Motte — he’d just rejoined me — and a few others. Ah, messieurs, I should remember their names and styles, for they were good men of arms, every one, and that was a feat of arms for any book. We rode west through broken country for a quarter of a league or less and there they were, breasting the stream.

Our opponents chose a terrible crossing, took a risk and paid. We caught them in the water and gaffed them like spawning fish with our spears. I captured a young knight — I was disappointed when he proved too small for his beautiful new harness to fit me. It fit Perkin, though, and he took it and wore it. I sent the young man home on parole to get me a thousand Florins, a price he named himself.

An afternoon’s fighting, I didn’t lose a man and I made a thousand florins. It’s a tale of its own how I came to be paid, but par dieu, gentlemen. With a dozen men-at-arms and ten archers, I held a mile of streamside against 300 knights.

Another thing, the horse I’d stolen from the priest was magnificently trained. Every day I rode him, I learned another trick he could do — there were hand commands, knee commands and spur commands. I would discover them by mistake, but after three weeks on this magnificent animal, I spent time with him, riding around a field and trying different combinations. I suspected he had voice commands — he was a very intelligent animal, for a horse — and he fought brilliantly at the ford, backing under me and changing direction as soon as he felt a shift in my weight.

As soon was we’d beaten them and seen their backs, we rode back north to find de Badefol, who sat twirling his moustache like Satan’s lieutenant — he was an evil-looking man, and no mistake. He grinned and nodded when he saw our prisoners and haul of armour.

‘If you weren’t such a giant, you’d be easier to arm!’ he called.

In truth, after that skirmish I was the worst-armed man in our band, and it rankled. We were fighting in winter and had no servants — everything I owned was brown and orange, and my clothes were all besmottered with rust.

And yet, 1,000 gold Florins, even in expectation, seemed to cure all my woes. And I was proud of my feat, and prouder still that I’d behaved with steady courtesy to the young knight I’d taken. I hadn’t had to despoil a peasant or burn a house in weeks.

As soon as we were sure we’d driven them from the field, we turned tail and ran ourselves, all the way back to Mechin, who was waiting six miles up the valley with the rest of the Great Company, at the crossroads to Lyon.

He already knew from our outriders, and before we reached him, the army was marching north. By chance, I was the first officer to reach the little man, and he hugged me. ‘The ill-made knight triumphs!’ he said, and other men laughed.

Well, I hated the name, but when you are a mass of rusty brown, you know what you’re being teased for.

We marched north. At the edge of night, there was a stir at the front of the column and I was afraid we were fighting. I assumed that the archpriest had stolen a march and surprised us.

I had my gauntlets on, and Perkin was slipping my helmet over my head when John Thornbury reined in by my horse.

‘Not an attack, then,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘We burned the castle at Rive-de-Gier and ran,’ he said. ‘The whole royal army of France appeared from over the river. Brignais is under siege.’

I thought of my beans and peas and barley. Brignais under siege threatened everything. ‘Does Mechin know?’ I asked.

Thornbury nodded. ‘I’m to fetch de Badefol. Sir John’s with the little Frenchman now.’

I followed him. No one asked me, and I certainly didn’t have enough lances to count as a captain, but he didn’t say me nay. I’m glad I went.

When I came in with Thornbury and de Badefol, Sir John Hawkwood was sitting across a two-board table from Petit Mechin in the ruins of an abbey hall. The army was halted outside on the road, and the word was we were moving all night. A pair of whores were satisfying a line of clients outside the burned-out hall, and a small boy was collecting coins from the men in the line.

Life in the field. I want you to see this — the best soldiers in France were planning their battle to the accompaniment of the grunts of twenty customers.

Very well. You want Brignais. The end of the companies. The death of the Nation of Thieves.

Mechin was picking his teeth when I came in. He had both Albret’s at the table, Camus, of course, Sir John Hawkwood, Leslie, Birkhead, Naudin de Bagerin and another half a dozen captains. He looked at me and smiled.

‘Heh,’ he laughed. ‘You all know the news?’

I think we all nodded.

‘Worse than Poitiers, and no mistake,’ Sir John said.

Mechin smiled. ‘I didn’t come out so well at Poitiers,’ he said. ‘And you did, you dog of an Englishman.’

Sir John smiled.

‘Listen,’ Mechin went on. ‘Creswell is in Brignais with half a thousand men. Even if we could leave him, our ill-made knight and his friends have all too efficiently fixed Marshal Audreham in place astride the road south. The archpriest has the north road to Lyons.’ He shrugged. ‘We have no choice. We are trapped like a badger in his earth.’

‘Fight?’ asked de Badefol.

‘Fight,’ said Sir John, with professional distaste.

‘Fight,’ said Mechin, and his eyes sparkled.

We marched all night.

Mechin made the plan, and it was a good plan. He divided the army into two parts. All the lesser men-at-arms — the brigands and the routiers and the men with bad horses — went with Mechin himself. They marched straight at Brignais. Two hours before dawn, they dismounted, formed in close order and marched to the top of the high ridge that towers over the castle of Brignais and emerged into the open, spear tips sparkling. Then Mechin sent a herald, as if he was the King of France himself, to the Count of Tancraville, inviting him to try the issue in combat. Listen, I’m not proud of what I did as a routier at times. I was just learning what it might mean to be a knight, to have honour, to be just. But I’m proud of that moment — an army of little men and squires challenging France’s very best men-at-arms. With a certain joy.

The Count of Tancraville accepted Mechin’s challenge to battle. He took the time to arm his men, and he knighted his son and a dozen other rich young men. He formed his army in three great battles — the first led by the archpriest, the second he led in person, and the third led by Jacques de Bourbon.

The archpriest begged Tancraville to wait until the sun burned off the morning mist. And he insisted that attacking Mechin up the hill would lose him knights he didn’t need to lose.

Most of the archpriest’s men were routiers like me, and the Count of Tancraville replied, with stunning honesty, that he didn’t care if the archpriest’s whole command was killed.

I wasn’t there for any of this. I agree that my account isn’t the same as that rascal Villani’s, or others you may have heard, but by the Virgin, messieurs, I knew a thousand men who were there, and neither of those fellows was within a hundred miles of the spot. I wasn’t there, because I was with Seguin de Badefol and John Hawkwood, riding like the devil.

We went south, again, in the darkness, along the left side of the same great ridge that had been on our right the day before. We were all well-mounted, and we’d left all the riff-raff — even our own riff-raff — behind.

Perhaps the greatest jest of Brignais is that the peasants helped us. Never forget the Jacques, friends. French peasants hate their masters, who screw them for silver the way a laundress twists cloth. Someday, mark my words, Messieurs, some day the Jaques will have their way. Their hate can suffocate you, though. So great that they would help us — the routiers — defeat their own aristocrats, who claimed to be their defenders. Twenty local men led us south and then east over the next ridge. At midnight, with no moon, we were climbing the ridge with our reins in our hands, on foot, our spurs clanking with every step. But first light found us coming upon Brignais from the south, and if the French knew we were there, they didn’t give a hint of it.

We came up about the time a man eats his bread and drinks his small beer after his first prayers. We dismounted again and stood by our horse’s heads in a deep fold in the ground, and we couldn’t see a thing.

John Thornbury came by and ordered us, on pain of death, not to enter the woods in front of us to look at the enemy.

An hour later, when we could clearly hear fighting, Sir John Hawkwood came in person. In my small battle — Seguin de Badefol’s division — we had 600 men-at-arms. There were four of these divisions.

Petit Mechin had all the archers, crossbowmen and spearmen.

Sir John reined in two horse lengths from where I sat. Harness is heavy, so most of us were sitting in the wet grass.

‘Messieurs!’ he called. Some dozen men were already mounting — there’s always some excited bastard who moves before he’s ready. It was their horses that pay the toll.

‘Mechin has beaten the archpriest — held the ridge and driven de Cervole down the hill with heavy loss.’ He held his hand for silence. ‘Twice. Now the Count de Tancraville’s banners are moving forward.’ He grinned. ‘By the time I’m done speaking, Tancraville will be past our position and well up the ridge.’ He looked back and forth. ‘In two hours, we will all be very rich, or very dead. It’s at the points of your lances, messieurs. Fight hard, and France is ours.’ His smile didn’t crack when he said, ‘Fail, and we’ll all hang like criminals.’

I think that’s when I realized that we had no priests among us. Listen, friends, no man likes to imagine himself to be the villain, eh? But we were all excommunicate, by the Pope himself, and we didn’t even say prayers as we formed. That got me in the gut. It made my insides roil.

Perhaps for comfort, I dismounted, reached into my purse, took out Emile’s favour and pinned it to my aventail. I knelt in the wet grass and thought of being the lowliest man-at-arms following the Three Kings.

We mounted, and filed off from the right, passing in long files through the wood to our front; the manoeuvre seemed to take for ever. In fact, it took longer than de Badefol intended, and the hammer of Tancraville’s attack fell fully on the spearmen and archers.

And they held. That wasn’t the plan, and I know damn well from John Hughes that they were cursing us by then, thinking themselves abandoned, or that we had lost our way in the darkness. The plan was risky — too complex — and we were late.

I remember emerging into the full light of a moist March day. The sky was full of water, and while it wasn’t raining, the cold wind that blew from the north was damp.

The French host was laid out below us like a carpet of eastern stuff — all colours and glitter, in patterns made by the more uniformed conroys of the great nobles. By the gentle Jesus, they looked like the mightiest host in the history of Christendom, with more banners than I’d seen at Poitiers, all in one great mass, pressing into our poor footmen.

In once glance, I saw Tancraville’s banner. And pressed close behind it, Bourbon’s banner, and close to it, my friend the Count d’Herblay’s. And just downhill from that, the banner of the Marshal of Savoy.

All packed into the bowl of open ground at my feet. There was nothing between us but a gentle slope of grassland that rolled from the edge of the forest all the way down to the castle of Brignais, a little more than two leagues away.

De Badefol was tense, and even Sir John was nervous. It was plain as the nose on your face that we were late, and waiting for the next 300 men-at-arms to trickle out of the forest was killing us, the more especially as our surprise was over. As soon as we emerged, the game was up — the French commanders saw us and began to wheel the third battle to face us. Bourbon, with the Burgundian lords and the Savoyards.

Christ, it was close.

They were badly ordered, and had already been ordered forward into the slowly folding footmen at the top of the next hill.

Our men were losing. Step by step, the foot were driven back. The shafts no longer flew fast from our archers, and any veteran of Poitiers could tell that our archers were too few.

I was among the first of the men to emerge from the wood; the rest of our men-at-arms seemed to be picking their way with ludicrous slowness, so that I despaired.

I watched the left flank spears — Gascons — fold. They had stout hearts, but more and more of the fresh French knights got into their ranks and cut them down. They didn’t run; they just seemed to collapse like a tent with its ropes cut.

Now the enemy had their third division formed. They were eager to be at us, and so on they came.

On the far flank, the archpriest rallied his mercenaries for one more charge into our archers. You’d think, the way the archpriest’s men been sacrificed, that they might have changed sides. But they didn’t. Damn them.

Seguin de Badefol sat on his war horse, watching men emerge from the woods behind us. He watched us and watched the Bourbon division. I could read his mind. At some point, we would have to act — or retreat and abandon Mechin.

That point was close.

Sir John Hawkwood had all his men in line. They were mounted, lances up, ready to ride. He trotted over to me.

‘William, if this goes like a sow’s belly, follow me out. We’ll get clear or surrender to someone I know.’ He gave me a friendly nod. ‘There’s better pickings than this in Lombardy.’

I nodded, but I had already pretty much settled on dying. A ransom would break me. I had nothing.

In fact, I was tired to death. I had spent everything — my soul, if you like — the last few weeks. To see it all lost. .

Men were shifting.

When the field is lost, and all about you quail, that is where you find out who you are.

I rode out ahead of my section of the line and pushed up my visor.

‘Par dieu, friends!’ I called. ‘We have nothing to worry about.’ I pointed my lance, one-handed, at the French chivalry. ‘There’s enough ransoms there for every man here! Stop squabbling.’

When I returned to my rank, John Thornbury slapped me on the back, and other men grinned.

Seguin made his decision. He raised his lance, held it over his head — no mean feat — and called out.

‘To hell!’ he shouted.

In terms of pre-battle speeches, it was the best I’ve ever heard. We knew we were beaten. We knew where we were going. He didn’t pour honey on it.

We had about 2,000 men-at-arms when we started down the long hill at a walk. The wet wind had become a rain. I was to the right of the centre and had become aware that d’Herblay was opposite me. My last conscious thought was not about strategy or tactics, honour or chivalry, or even ransoms and wealth, but whether Emile would thank me for making her a widow.

I shouted with the rest, and we fell down the hill like an avalanche of steel and horse flesh.

I aimed my priest’s horse at d’Herblay.

We came together at the speed of two galloping horses. It had taken two days to get to this point, and then the battle ran faster and faster — like a runaway cart on a downslope, suddenly there was no controlling it. No predicting its course.

I don’t remember the moment of impact. I remember the long charge — the rain, the sound of 2,000 horses rumbling down a hill. The feeling of a wonderful horse under me. The knowledge that, for once, my lance-point was on target, steady and easy.

It was. . beautiful.

And then I was through their line, my lance shattered in my hand, and I was drawing my sword while a pair of coustilliers — lesser men — tried to pound me from the saddle with spears.

I couldn’t see any of my men — Perkin generally stayed at my shoulder, but the only man I could see was Seguin de Badefol, and he was surrounded.

I cut my way to him. He must have had ten knights on him.

Here’s what happened.

One man was in Burgundian colours; he was closest to me. I came on him from behind, and in one swing of my war sword I dropped him — concussed, dead, or merely smart enough to drop the ground, he was out of my fight. The next fellow in green and gold whirled in his saddle, but he had to stretch across his body to reach me, and I spiked him in the armpit with my point two handed, and he was gone. So was his squire, who tried to reach me. I killed his horse as mine danced under me — forward, back, a half-rear, a lashing forefoot. Why a country priest had been riding a prince’s war horse was beyond me.

Seguin and I ought to have died right there, but I fought better than I’d ever fought before, and my nameless, stolen horse powered me from opponent to opponent.

So instead. .

John Thornbury erupted from the back of the melee and slammed into the man-at-arms, hammering Seguin with a mace. Blood flew like the rain, and the man seemed to jump off his horse.

The Burgundians melted away. It was shocking how fast they vanished, and I was slow to react. I was, in fact, so sure we were all about to be killed that I was hunching my shoulders, breathing like a bull, ready to fight to my very last ounce of strength.

Then I saw one of Camus’ black and white villains grab the reins of a knight in Bourbon’s arms, and I realized that we were not losing. When routiers take the time to take ransoms, it means we’re winning.

Companions, it was like the sun bursting into full flower over the battlefield. I was a dead man. .

. . and then I was not.

I stood in my stirrups and had a look. I had time — no one near me was fighting. To my left, up the ridge, there were still men fighting against Mechin and our footmen. But in front of us, the northern levies of the King of France were melting like snow in the desert, or throwing themselves off their horses and begging to be ransomed.

To my right, I saw Jacques de Bourbon. I’d saved his life once, and I determined to have him. He had two sons by him, and either of them was worth a fortune. But in the time it took me to ride ten horse lengths, they were already ringed with men like me, so I carried on, angling my horse to my right, downhill.

I caught a knight’s reins without having to try — he cut himself free from the rear of the crush and there I was. I took his reins and he begged my aid. He opened his visor and gave me a gauntlet.

‘Ride with me, monsieur, and I will protect you,’ I said.

Twenty horse lengths further on, I found myself among Hawkwood’s men. We were all intermixed, but I was watching for Savoyards, and there they were. Sir John took the Marshal of Savoy under my nose.

There was still a knot of men fighting. One had green and black arms, and I cantered at him. At lance-length, I rose in my stirrups — he was hammering Sir Robert Birkhead — dropped my sword and leaped at him, right out of my stirrups, arms spread. I hit him, wrapped him in my arms and carried him out of his saddle to the ground.

We hit hard. He broke his arm and I wrenched my left shoulder.

Nonetheless, he tried to rise. I put a hand on his elbow, opened my visor and said, ‘Yield, brother.’

Broken arm and all, he barked a laugh.

We were lying under a tangle of horse’s legs and hooves, and it seemed comfortable to be out of the fight. He was in pain, but he grabbed my hand. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I never thought we’d lose. Milady is in the camp.’

Rape and murder. That camp was about to become hell on earth.

‘Save her, William,’ he begged, and passed out. Damn him.

Men made their fortunes in the fight. Mercenaries retired from arms and went to live on rich manors.

The French army, on the brink of victory — or past it, if you ask me — suddenly collapsed. Mechin’s desperate footmen held past all expectation, then surged forward down the hill to complete the rout. Within an hour, we were in their camp.

I had taken two more knights, so that I appeared to be leading my own conroy. I had lost Perkin and Robert and de la Motte, but I wasn’t worried. They’d find me. I had one goal in mind from the moment Richard spoke. I rode into the Savoyard camp and rode my war horse up and down the tented streets, calling, ‘Milady! Janet!’

The rout of their army was behind me and all around me, and archers and Gascon spearmen were pouring down the hill. The more able women were already running, and a few had horses.

‘Milady!’ I screamed.

It was an odd moment, for me. I was trying to save someone. It was suddenly very, very important to me.

‘Milady!’ I roared. I turned to the knights I’d captured. ‘Gentlemen, will you support me in an attempt to save a lady?’

The Burgundian knight flushed. ‘But of course, monsieur!’

The other Savoyard didn’t answer.

We spread out. The edge of the wave of murder was just washing against the tents at the southern edge of the camp, and the screams had begun. Why hadn’t the other women run? They had children; they had things they valued too much; they wanted to wait for their men. Or they couldn’t believe they’d lost.

I couldn’t find her. Simple calling wasn’t working, for whatever reason. I decided to reason it out. The Green Count himself wasn’t in the field, but Richard was. On the battlefield, he’d been near the Marshal of Savoy. I found the Marshal’s arms on a tent off to my left and rode to it.

One street away, two Gascon spearmen were taking turns stabbing a priest. They roared and he screamed.

Hell.

I rode off to the right. Two tents past the marshal’s pavilion was a long, low tent of simple white linen, but the third tent in had a green pole striped black. I rode for it.

A woman screamed.

A man came out of the tent clutching his side. As I watched, he fell to his knees, blood flooding under his brigantine.

I heard the woman scream again and I was sure it was Milady.

Still mounted, I used my sword to cut through the side of the tent.

He had her hair. She had a wicked, long dagger, but he was wrenching her back and forth by the hair while using his other hand to raise her kirtle. He was laughing at her efforts to kill him.

I put the point of my sword into his laugh.

I reached down, caught her and boosted her across my saddle. In the same motion, I stripped the long dagger out of her hand.

‘Milady!’ I shouted at her. I couldn’t slap her — in gauntlets, you can kill a person with a slap — I just backed my horse through the slit.

My Burgundian had his sword across his saddle-bow and was covering me. The other knight I’d taken was nowhere to be seen. He’d ridden away.

I wonder what de Charny would have said about the situation. Eh, messieurs?

We rode north to get free of the looters. In fact, we made a great loop — almost five leagues — to stay well free of anyone who could hurt us, and by the time we capped the ridge Milady knew who I was. She was shaken. In fact, she was silent.

But as I set her down by my old wreck of a tent, she smiled. ‘I’m going to be a man again, if that’s all right,’ she said, very quietly. ‘I want to be a knight,’ she said.

I nodded. ‘Me, too,’ I said.

There’s a particular exhaustion that smashes you down after a day of fighting in harness. It’s not just fatigue — the mind can only handle so much violence, in my experience. Add the stress of leadership, the quest for a woman who is about to be hurt, and hurt badly, and the likelihood of defeat. .

After Brignais, I lay down on my pallet in my squalid tent and went to sleep, still wearing all my harness. Other men seized ransoms or pursued the beaten French. I was asleep.

I came to with that confusion that comes with fatigue, sleep and darkness. Night was falling and our camp was in a state of near riot.

Milady was shaking me. ‘Hello?’ she said, over and over, with a certain brittle cheerfulness.

I didn’t know who she was or where I was for long heartbeats. I thought for some reason that I was in the Castle of Meaux, with Emile.

Perkin cured my confusion by leaning into the tent. ‘Sir? he asked. ‘I have all your prisoners, but it’s getting pretty bad out here.’

It was, too. Never, even in storming a town, did I see a lawless riot like the night after Brignais. The men were exhausted and elevated at the same time. Men of low birth, men who had, until a few months earlier, tilled the earth, suddenly had captured lords worth the value of a hundred farms or more.

Men were killing each other for their prisoners, or gambling a dozen fortunes away at dice, while friends gathered around them with weapons drawn. A young woman — whore or not, she was young and pretty — came past us dressed only in a kirtle, and she had two French knights on a rope. I have no idea how she came to have them, but they were her prisoners.

Armoured as I still was, it was all I could do to get to my feet, and my muscles protested — the skin at my hips where the weight of my awful coat of plates rested was rubbed raw, and under my arms, at the top of the muscles that rest where a woman has breasts, it hurt like the lash of a whip every time I raised my arm.

Stooping to exit the tent required an act of will.

Perkin had Richard Musard and my brave Burgundian, whose name I didn’t know, and two more knights. They were stripped to their arming clothes, and they were sitting at a small fire.

Musard was lying on a pallet. The Burgundian had a drawn sword in his hand.

I leaned over Richard, who winced. ‘You broke my fucking arm,’ he said.

‘I could have spent the time capturing someone worth money,’ I said.

Richard managed a small smile. ‘I’m worth a ransom, Will. Never doubt it.’

I shrugged. ‘Listen, brother, there is no ransom between us. I’m sorry about your arm, but when the coast is clear, you are free to go.’

‘How like a trained ape he is, your black man,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll do the same favour for me? I’m almost family, am I not?’

Firelight and muzzy-headedness didn’t help. It took me a moment to know him.

‘You don’t remember me? Oh, you knew my wife so much better, I think.’ His sneer was palpable, like a blow.

‘The Count d’Herblay,’ I croaked, with a bow.

‘I won’t rise,’ he said.

Perhaps foolishly, I looked at Perkin. ‘Whose capture is he?’ I asked.

‘Yours, sir,’ he said. ‘You put him down, man and horse together. I reined in to take him before the other jackals had him.’ He grinned.

I grinned back. But then all of d’Herblays’ barbs made sense.

I ignored him. I was sad, and afraid, that he knew too much and would punish Emile. And I wanted to kill him. I very much wanted to kill him.

My Burgundian bowed. ‘You let me keep my sword,’ he said, ‘and your squire chose to allow me to help him defend us against-’ he coughed delicately into his fist, ‘marauders.’

‘Your brothers and sisters in arms,’ said the Count d’Herblay. ‘I didn’t know that there were so many criminals in the world. And whores to service them.’ He nodded with apparent amicability at Milady as she emerged from the tent.

‘Better men-at-arms than you, it would appear,’ I said. He made me angry very easily. Why not? He had what I most wanted in the world, and he didn’t seem to place any value on her. But then I thought of everything Milady had taught me — and other men. I thought of how well it had worked, to show nothing to the Bourc. So I showed d’Herblay nothing, either. Nothing but courtesy.

He shrugged. ‘Any thug can swing a sword or wield a lance,’ he said. ‘That’s all knights are, thugs in fancy dress. You and your companions prove it.’

The Burgundian whirled on him. ‘Do not allow despair and defeat to rob you of your honour, monsieur. These gentlemen have taken us today. That is the fortune of war, which may turn in our favour another day. Fortune does not rob chivalry of its power.’

‘Chivalry is a myth for ignorant little men,’ d’Herblay said with a superior air. ‘To gull the small-minded into fighting.’ He looked at me. ‘Or to excuse the tyranny of raw force.’

I bowed to my Burgundian. ‘William Gold,’ I said.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I know of you. You don’t appear so very like Satan as you are described, monsieur. However, you will want my name and style, and I’m afraid I will prove a disappointment. I am merely a squire, Anglic de Grimard, and I doubt I’m worth 500 florins. Indeed, even that would beggar me.’

D’Herblay laughed nastily. ‘Why, then, you should have stayed home!’ he said. You are like a man who wagers on a game of dice and then announces he has no money to pay.’

De Grimard whirled on him. ‘I obeyed the summons of my lord,’ he said.

D’Herblay shrugged. ‘The more fool you,’ he said.

You can imagine that by this time I wished with all my heart that I’d killed the noble bastard ten times, but that was who he was: an endless drip of caustic commentary. It is a commonplace to say that such people hate themselves most of all — it doesn’t really help to know it.

I’ll add that all around us that night, men were being murdered for no better reason than that they were not worth a ransom. I could have killed him. My life might have been very different if I had killed him.

I never thought of it, though. He was Emile’s husband. I’d saved his life at the Bridge of Meaux, and I wasn’t going to ruin that now.

The last knight was really John Hughes’ capture — a knight from Tancraville’s retinue, A member of the Rohan lineage named Jean de Meung. He rose and bowed.

‘I am most pleased to find that I am the prisoner of a gentleman,’ he said, a little stiffly.

‘Don’t believe it!’ said d’Herblay. ‘He’s a branded thief, a traitor to his sworn lord and an excommunicate.’ He smiled at me. ‘Aren’t you, my dear?’

At any rate, men came out of the darkness — twice in the next fire-lit hour — and tried to take my captives. They were all Gascons, and they were. . wanton. Feral.

One group we chased away with a display of arms — we faced them down like you face down a pack of wild dogs, with shouts and gestures, and they slunk away.

The second group did the same, but again, like feral dogs, they turned at the edge of the firelight and threw themselves on us. They had little armour and a wretched array of weapons. I don’t even know if they were Gascon routiers or merely desperate men who had joined for plunder. They attacked us by firelight and we killed them. Richard held a dagger and did his best; de Grimard and I fought back to back at one point; de Meung stood by the Count d’Herblay and put men down with a great two-handed axe. John Hughes emerged from the darkness with Ned Candleman and Jack Sumner and our two servants, both of whom had good mail shirts and pole-arms. They were all drunk, but they were all alive, and after they came back to us, our little camp was secure and our prisoners could stop defending themselves.

Sometime after midnight, the tumult died away. Perkin helped me disarm, and we rolled dice for watches. I drew the very last watch before cock-crow — the best watch of all — and I fell onto my pallet and darkness came down.

The morning after Brignais was the beginning of the end of the Great Company. Who would have predicted that victory would destroy as effectively as defeat? We smashed the remaining armed power of France and took a fortune in ransoms, but we were not really an army. We had no King. We served no legitimate authority. We were under ban of excommunication. We didn’t really have a single commander, or if we did, Petit Mechin was interested in money and glory, not in, for example, making himself the King of France. We’d won a victory that, in a proper war, would have ended in a major concession of territory, but we were routiers, and we held no ground.

The truth was that by the morning after Brignais, most of the footmen were already hungry. We’d picked the district clean before the battle happened. There wasn’t enough forage for the horses. There wasn’t enough food for the men. The Army of Thieves, as the French called us, had 20,000 human mouths to feed, and we didn’t have a supply train. We lived like animals, from day to day.

Not that our victory was useless. After all, had we lost, we’d all have been executed — our captives were remarkably truthful about that. And we had a great many captives — most of the high and middle nobility of Northern France, and a few from the south as well.

Hawkwood immediately formed a company for the purpose of getting our ransoms paid. He enlisted two Genoese bankers and Petit Mechin, who, as a Frenchman, knew what men were worth and where they lived. I joined his company immediately and handed over the Count d’Herblay and the Frenchman, de Meung. Camus, who had taken a dozen ransoms, also joined the enterprise, and I spent a morning — a damp, dull morning — standing too close to the mad bastard while he glowered at me.

Twice I saw him talking to d’Herblay.

That should have troubled me, but I was having difficulty — exhaustion, combat and too much wine had left me less than half a man. My body ached, my head ached and my spirit hurt. I became disgusted with the whole proceeding — an essential part of the management of war, but a tedious and bureaucratic one, whereby each prisoner was entered into the accounts of the enterprise with his home and his potential value, and negotiations began as to his ability to pay. A single man-at-arms couldn’t hope to force a noble prisoner to pay a ransom, although sometimes we could resort to the courts — the very courts of the defeated country. I do not jest — Richard Musard sued a French lord in the court of Paris and won, for cheating on his ransom! But by then, Richard had the support of the Green Count and all his ‘interest’ in Paris. A small man like me had nothing. We needed to band together and purchase the interest of the great banks. Messieurs, have I said how much I hate banks? They made such a profit from all our fighting.

Hawkwood stopped me at the slanted door of the Genoese pavilion. ‘I’m off to Italy in a week,’ he said. ‘Thornbury and I all but deserted our company to come here.’ He smiled — one of his rare, genuine smiles; not the smile of the fox, but the smile of the friend. ‘I’d like to recruit you, William. Italy is rich and the contracts are regular. It is not banditry.’ His face registered some emotion: disgust? He was a hard man to read. ‘You deserve better than this,’ he said.

I assumed he meant my clothes. In truth, I looked like a rag-picker.

I don’t remember what I said. I probably shrugged; I may even have blushed.

Sir John put an arm around my shoulder. ‘D’Herblay is worth three or four thousand Florins,’ he said. ‘Perhaps more. Meung is worth eight hundred. For that much, you can purchase a fine harness, a couple of good mounts and raise the service of a dozen more men-at-arms.’ He hugged me tight. ‘It’s business, William. Come to Italy and make your fortune. If you still want it, in Italy you can be a knight. But don’t come a pauper. Come with a dozen lances and you’ll make your way.’

I embraced him. He told me that the rendezvous was at Romangnano, in Savoy.

‘Savoy?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘We’re making war on the Green Count,’ he said. ‘Well, in the spring, anyway.’

I went and wandered the camp. I think that I wanted a woman, but I couldn’t find one. What I found was exhausted chaos, in-fighting and desertion. Many of the Gascon lords were already packing — the Albrets were among the first to go. They had a fortune in ransoms, and they didn’t need to form a league with the Italian bankers to get their money.

I was drawn by a man and a woman’s voices shouting, and as I came closer, I realized it was Richard and Janet. I ran the last few steps to find that he had her arms, and she was dressed in my clothes — my worst arming cote, with laced-on sleeves, over a shirt of very dubious origins. He was trying to pull at her arms, and even as I rounded the pavilion behind mine, she snap-kicked him in the groin. He blocked the kick with his knee, and she, with breathtaking fluidity, predicted his defence and threw him over her hip — on his broken arm. He fell with his broken arm flapping like a wing, and I confess that I ran to his side, not hers.

‘His fucking arm is broken!’ I shouted at her.

She spat. ‘He treats me like a woman.’

Richard was writhing on the ground. The pain must have been incredible. ‘I’m trying to get her to pack!’ he spat.

‘I’m not leaving!’ she shouted. ‘I will not go back to being a lap-dog!’

‘Perkin!’ I roared. The poor lad ran up, my dented basinet in one hand and a rag of kirtle smeared with ash in the other. It was almost funny — trying to polish that old basinet was a little like trying to make a real knight of me.

‘Sir?’ he asked.

‘Perkin, get me a surgeon,’ I said. I turned to Milady. ‘We’re all leaving,’ I said. ‘There is no more Great Company. Petit Mechin is going to Burgundy. Sir John Creswell has said he’s going to Brittany.’ I forced myself to smile for her. In fact, she looked like a vicious shrew when she was angry: eyes narrow set, cheeks hard with rage and stubbornness.

She glared like a cat at Richard and then gave me the false smile women use when they are angry. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

John Hughes had been sharpening his long knife, and he stopped. Ned Candlewood was engaged in his usual off-duty pursuit: drinking hard at a bottle of wine. He put the glass bottle carefully on the ground. The brothers Arnaud and Belier — now fully armed and no longer servants — stopped fighting over a good basket and turned to look at me. Jack Sumner and Amory — no longer young Amory, either — stopped playing dice.

For good or ill, I was the captain of my own little band.

I propped Richard up against one of the ash-splint baskets that held my harness — when I had a good harness. ‘Richard? Would you care to come to Lombardy?’ I asked. ‘Sir John made me an offer. He wants me to use my money from the ransoms to raise a dozen lances to fight in Italy.’

‘Oh,’ Milady said. Her exhalation had some of the sound of a woman in the release of love. ‘Oh, Italy.’

Richard’s face darkened with blood. ‘I will never fight for that bastard again,’ he said. ‘I have a lord — the Count of Savoy. He will pay our ransom, and we will return to his court and fight John Hawkwood and his lawless brigands, thieves and rapists.’

I squatted down by him. ‘Richard, I’m not ransoming you. You are free to go. I told you so.’ I put a hand on his shoulder.

He shook it off. ‘You have seduced her!’ he spat.

For too damn long, I had no idea what he meant. I said something stupid, like, ‘What?’

Milady said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Richard.’ She said it with a certain bored lassitude.

Finally I understood. ‘No, by the saviour, Richard. There’s nothing between me and Janet.’

‘Why does she want to go to Italy? Why is she against going to the Count’s court?’ he spat. ‘I have bought her all the pretty dresses a woman could want.’

Now, before you say he’s a fool, remember that we were all twenty years old or so, and our blood was hot. He loved her.

‘I don’t want your fucking prison!’ she hissed. ‘Why do you want a wife who has to have three cups of wine to spread her legs? Go find a nice, normal girl and leave me alone!’

This to an audience of a dozen.

Richard turned to me. ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘You. . you. . fuck! I’ll kill you when I’m able.’

His hate was palpable. I was young enough to imagine that it would fade. ‘Richard!’ I said. ‘Get a grip, man! I haven’t touched her, and I won’t.’

He spat at me. ‘Thief!’ he said. ‘False Knight!’

I shook my head in disgust. As I say, I didn’t really believe his anger would last. He was wounded, a prisoner, and his woman was giving him a lot of crap.

His woman. Heh, there speaks ignorance. He may have been her man, but she, I think, was never his. At some level, I think she hated him.

When you command — when you put yourself above others, to lead them — you learn a great deal. Some of the lessons are harder than diamonds. Some cut like blades. People have many motivations, and damaged people never show you the things they hold most dear.

The next day, or perhaps two — we lay in a state of exhaustion for a long time — the Genoese established all the ransoms and agreed on a schedule of payments that satisfied us all. Well, not all, as you’ll hear.

I had d’Herblay at my fire that afternoon. It was April, cold and wet. He didn’t have many clothes, and he was obviously suffering, so I offered him a cloak.

‘Why don’t I just live in your cast-offs?’ he asked bitterly. ‘On your fucking charity.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Five thousand florins!’ He spat. ‘I’ll have to sell estates, you little thief.’

I wasn’t as raw as I’d been two nights earlier. ‘If you can’t afford it, perhaps you should have stayed home,’ I said, with Fra Peter’s calm voice.

‘You do know she’s dead?’ he said. It was a strange turn in the conversation. I lacked the experience of men like d’Herblay to know how desperately he wanted to hurt me. I was used to men who used violence to settle hatred. D’Herblay used words.

At any rate, he watched my face like a lover. I took too long to understand. I’d taken several blows to the head at Brignais, and I must have been slow. I swallowed.

‘Dead?’ I asked.

‘In childbirth,’ d’Herblay said, with obvious relish. ‘Dead. A corpse. Stinking in the ground.’ He laughed, perhaps a little wild.

I sat as if my sinews had been cut.

You don’t know what you take for granted, until it is taken from you. I suppose I always imagined I’d win her in the end. Or perhaps I made an effort not to think about her in those terms at all.

I also realized that I had been walking around for three days with her favour — torn from her favourite dress — pinned to my aventail. In front of her husband.

By the sweet and gentle saviour of mankind, I can be a fool.

Oh, but the height of my folly was yet to come.

I’ve heard men say that loss gives way to anger, and others that most of us deny loss — I heard a very good sermon on that at Clerkenwell one Easter. But the loss of Emile hit me like a longsword to the helmet, and I reeled from moment to moment as if I could not get the ground to be steady under my feet.

I went to a meeting with fifty other men-at-arms where Petit Mechin told us how the ransoms would be apportioned and how the money would work. It wasn’t complicated.

‘A week hence, we’ll send convoys of prisoners to the relevant royal lieutenants,’ Mechin said, as if this was an everyday matter. ‘They will sign for the prisoners and present us with receipts, and we will pass those receipts to the bankers, who will pay us, and collect the ransoms at their leisure.’ He shrugged. ‘No doubt they will make an enormous profit but, messieurs, the only alternative is that we go and attempt to collect each ransom ourselves. The truth is that we have no one with whom we can negotiate.’ He gave a lopsided smile and twirled a moustache. ‘The government of France has effectively ceased to exist.’

To give you an idea of the scale of the rapaciousness of the Italian banks, my two ransoms totalled a little less than 6,000 gold florins. Under the scheme proposed by Mechin, I was to receive, in actual currency, about 500 florins, and letters of credit equal to another 1,000.

A superb recompense for a few hours of fighting, you might say, but assuming Messieurs Bardi made good on the ransoms, they would have another 3,500 florins merely for handling the paperwork.

At the meeting, I noted that Sir Hugh Ashley stood with the Bourc Camus. I remarked it, and I remarked it when I found the Count d’Herblay wrapped in a new cloak, sipping wine from a good horn cup at my fire, and talking to a very young man in black and white livery.

I remarked it, but it didn’t penetrate the moral concussion I had received from the anger of my closest friend and the death of my love. Know this, messieurs, I was courteous to other women — I even lay with one or two — but I never, ever forgot Emile in those days. She was my chivalry. I worried that I had not heard from her, but I never forgot her for more than an hour.

The next day, Sir John Hawkwood passed my camp. His lances were ready to march, his baggage carts loaded, and he himself was dressed like a popinjay, in a fine long gown over a short jupon of golden silk, with a great bag-hat on his head. He looked like a wealthy merchant.

By contrast, I didn’t even have a change of clothes, because Milady was wearing my spares.

He didn’t dismount, but clasped my hand. ‘Sir John Creswell asked for you to be a deputy,’ he said. ‘I assume he did it in a bid to hold you here, but I like anything that raises you in men’s estimation.’

It was hard not to be flattered by that. I looked up at him, tried to smile and remembered that Emile was dead.

‘What’s wrong, lad?’ he asked.

The problem. .

Companions, the problem between me and Sir John was that while he saved my life and built my career, he was never a man you’d tell about love or death. His mind was a thing of cogs and gears, not flesh and blood. He was loyal, though; he was always a good friend to me.

But if I had told him about Emile, he would have given me that look he saved for men far gone with drink, or professing a desire to die in the field, or other failings. I once knew him to say that the only difference he could discern between women was the quality of their banter. I saw him kill a nun in Italy to prevent two men-at-arms from fighting over her.

He was not the man to share my sorrow.

So I shrugged. ‘A deputy?’ I asked, feigning interest.

‘You take the convoy to Auvergne,’ he said. ‘With Camus.’

I must have shuddered.

He shook his head. ‘Drop your foolish feud before it kills you,’ he said. ‘Think of him as a bad horse that must be ridden. Get through the ride to Auvergne and come to Italy.’ He grinned. ‘Remember, some of those prisoners are mine!’

It was almost two weeks before my convoy was ready to ride, and I stayed clear of Camus, but we had problems every day, because my men and his had to struggle over the same ground to find forage and fodder. The army was breaking up, faster every day, and there was less and less authority. Sir John Creswell held Brignais, and he didn’t even let the rest of us in the gates. He was afraid that another routier captain would take it from him — that sort of behavior was the order of the day.

Truly, there is very little honour among thieves.

The women were gone, and that made more trouble, because Milady was the last woman in the camp except a pair of old whores who had nowhere to go. Richard would not speak to me. Neither would he leave without her.

I lived in a fog of emotion, and I was surrounded by more of it — John Hughes said he’d rather have gone to hell than spend another night in that camp. It was like that.

There was a lot going on around me, and I was mostly deaf to it.

It was on a Sunday that we mounted, gathered our prisoners and rode west over the ridges for Auxerre.

We didn’t have to go so far. The other prisoner convoys had left earlier, and there was some attempt to keep them apart so that the royal lieutenants couldn’t conspire against us, but ours was held in camp — Sir John Creswell seemed to be the reason, and I was vaguely angry. I say vaguely, because I was so unaware. Milady rode at my side, dressed in looted armour, and I wore my harness; so did all my men and all Camus’ men. Sir Hugh rode with us, and he was all honey to me. I thought nothing of it, even when he drank with the Count d’Herblay all three nights on the road.

It was mid-April when we rode down a long ridge to the crossroads, where the road to Gascony crosses the road to Paris and the Road to Provence — a crossroads in Auxerre that every routier of that time must have known like an old friend. It was pissing with rain, and we came down the ridge just about nones — not that Auxerre had a working set of bells to announce the hour. We routiers had seen to that.

Ahead, we could see fifty men-at-arms sitting in sodden splendour on the road, watery red, blue and gold.

At the same time that we came down the ridge to the east of the crossroads, there was another party — a dozen wagons and twenty horsemen — coming down the far ridge towards us. I knew a moment of fear until I saw their colours.

They were churchmen, with a heavy escort of men-at-arms.

I ignored them. I rode up our column to the Bourc, and nodded as politely as I could manage. ‘How do we handle this?’ I asked.

He smiled. It was a horrible smile, one full of knowledge. So might Satan have smiled at Eve in the garden. ‘Any way you like,’ he said, with real amusement.

I knew right there that something was wrong. I knew he wanted me to know something was wrong.

At some further level, I didn’t care. I think I knew then that I was betrayed, and I was prepared to let it happen. Why not? Emile was dead.

‘Who is the lieutenant of Auxerre?’ I asked, staring into the rain.

Camus barked a mad laugh. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘I have a safe conduct.’

It was true.

We rode down the ridge.

The Lieutenant of Auxerre was my old friend and enemy, Boucicault. Seeing him cheered me, and I rode up to him with my hands bare of gauntlets and offered my hand to him.

He let his horse shy slightly, widening the distance between us. The distaste on his face was palpable.

‘My lord, I have the prisoners for exchange,’ I said into the silence.

‘I am required to ask for your letters patent and your safe conduct,’ he said.

This was the sort of tedious bureaucracy that ruled our lives — the French seemed more hag-ridden with it than anyone else, but I hadn’t been to Italy yet.

I reined my horse to one side, writhing at the humiliation of having my hand refused by Jehan le Maingre.

I was in harness, with my dented basinet on my head — Christ, I remember thinking how marvellous Boucicault appeared in shining blue and gold harness, with all his points tipped in real gold, all his harness leather in matching blue, his eagles worked in enamel on his shoulder rondels.

My eye caught movement and I saw Richard take Milady’s bridle, and for the first time in two days I thought, Why is Richard here?

Milady screamed, ‘William! It’s a trap!’

In that moment, I saw it.

I saw Sir Hugh flip his visor down.

I saw the uncontrollable smile spread over d’Herblay’s face.

I saw Richard strike Milady, and I saw her fall back, and he took her.

I saw Camus, convulsed with laughter.

I saw Boucicault turn on me. He didn’t smile or frown. He said, ‘William Gold, I arrest you in the name of the King of France as an infamous bandit.’

As I say, I saw it. Creswell had held me back until Sir John was gone so that he could take my name off the safe conduct.

Like the blow that puts you down, I never saw it coming.

I think, if things had been different, I’d have fought better. If I’d thought Emile was alive. If Richard hadn’t betrayed me.

Instead, my realization of the betrayal was all at a distance, and if Camus hadn’t laughed so heartily, I might have let them take me without a fight. But his derision — and his long-repeated promise of the humiliations he would heap on me and my corpse — caused me to back my horse. Two French knights tried to get my reins, and one got my steel-clad elbow in his teeth. I eluded the other by luck — I half ducked and his armoured fist brushed the top of my basinet and carried on; he lost a stirrup and I put the toe of a sabaton into his horse’s side. The horse reared, he was down and I was a free man.

Things were happening over in our convoy. I got my longsword clear of the scabbard and half-reared my horse, looking for an opening.

Jehan le Maingre nodded heavily. ‘He’s mine,’ he called to his men-at-arms.’ He flicked me a salute with his sword and flipped down his visor.

Jehan le Maingre was, in that moment, the knight I wanted to be. Confident. Brave. And courteous. He saluted me, man-at-arms to man-at-arms.

I sat on my stolen horse with my rusty armour and put my spurs in, unwilling to go easy.

It is a tribute to what chivalry really is, even on that day, that no one interfered. They let us go at each other. Camus’s mad laugh rang in my ears.

Boucicault’s sword swept up, two handed. He was a fine horseman, and he guided his stallion with his knees, pointing its head for my midriff. I raised my sword one handed to guard my head on the left side.

His horse crashed into mine as his blow fell like a bolt from Jove in the heavens, and it was so sudden and so hard that it went through my guard and struck me on the helmet. My horse turned away from his, and his second blow, fast as an adder, hit my left shoulder. I couldn’t get my arm up high enough to parry his blows — my leather and splint arm-harnesses didn’t fit well enough. He hit me a third time, and I responded by snapping a blow behind me.

I missed.

I got my horse around as he hit me in the head — again.

I was reeling now, but I gritted my teeth and gathered my horse under me for one final effort. The nobly born bastard was beating me. I wasn’t used to being beaten.

I caught his next blow, and our blades ran down, hilt to hilt. I powered my blade over his, rotated the point, wagering everything on getting my point into his neck or his faceplate.

I caught his faceplate. I ripped a gouge across it, and his pommel caught me in my visor and punched me off balance, then his back cut to my head knocked me from the saddle.

When I hit, I hurt. When I say hurt, I think, in that moment, something died.

So I didn’t twitch when the sergeants came and took me.

I didn’t move when they cut the spurs from my heels, and I didn’t shout or fuss.

In fact, I noted with a sort of detached satisfaction when Richard Musard rode away, because he had Ned Candleman, John Hughes, Perkin and Robert Langland with him. He had our two French boys and Amory Carpenter and Jack Sumner. Camus said something. Richard Musard shouted back, Sir Hugh rode his horse in between them, and all my people rode away. I’m happy to say that John Hughes and Perkin never took their eyes from me all the way up the ridge until they passed out of sight.

Then the French put a noose on the tree.

Camus wrote out, ‘William Gold — Thief’ on parchment. He rode up. ‘To hang around your neck,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Don’t fear, Butt Boy. When you are dead, I’ll take your body and make leather of your skin.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe I’ll have you stuffed.’ He smiled. ‘I wanted this moment to tell you that I did this. Me. I bested you, merely by using my head. I undertook to make your friends — your own captain, Sir John Creswell, and your friend Richard — betray you. I hope you like it. I hope that you see you are utterly defeated, and I am victorious. You are nothing — worm dung.’ His voice burbled and rather ruined the effect of his own superiority.

He leaned over. ‘I’ll have the woman, as well,’ he said, grinning. ‘And eventually, the black squire. In this world of shit, destroying you and your friends is the greatest satisfaction I can have.’ He laughed. ‘All of you will be my slaves in hell!’

I’d like to say that he didn’t scare me, but a royal sergeant was preparing my noose and I was excommunicate. I was going straight to hell, and for excellent reasons.

Camus, the very tool of Satan, was grinning at me. I was about to die.

‘Tell my master, hello,’ he said. He turned and rode away.

Boucicault rode up. I noted he had a crease in his beautiful helmet and another on his right pauldron. ‘I’d like to give you a priest,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t have express orders to the contrary, William, I’d save you just to spite Camus. For my part, I’m sorry. I’m doing my duty.’ He glanced at Camus. ‘I promise you that in time, I’ll make that one pay.’

I couldn’t bow as my hands were tied behind me, and I could barely stay in my saddle because the sergeants had cut my stirrups. But I nodded. ‘If you get him,’ I said. I managed a shrug. ‘He’s evil.’

Boucicault made a face. ‘All of you are about the same, to me.’ He looked around, clearly hesitant to get on with it. ‘But de Charny said you had it — had the makings of a knight. This. . is the wrong end for you.’

I wanted to beg. I really did. I wanted to say that I’d start again, that I wouldn’t be lured by easy money and fighting, that I’d try to learn all the rules and please my Prince and. .

Hah. I was too proud. Add to my sins, too stupid and arrogant to beg for life from a man who, however much I may sometimes have loathed him, was not happy with hanging me.

‘You know what I hate?’ he said in a low voice.

Camus yelled, ‘Get on with it!’

Boucicault ignored him. ‘You know what I hate?’ he asked. ‘I hate that d’Herblay, whose worthless arse you saved at the Bridge of Meaux, actually helped contrive this.’

I shrugged again. It was all getting far away, somehow.

Emile was gone, and so was Richard. I had lived a worthless, sinful life. You know what I said to Boucicault, there in the rain, with the noose around my neck?

I said, ‘I forgive you, Monsieur le Maingre.’ I nodded and drew myself erect.

Listen, you wretches. I’m very proud of this part.

I said, ‘I’m going to pray a paternoster. When I’m done — maybe even a word or two before. .’ I shrugged.

He bowed. ‘You should have been a knight,’ he said.

I started my prayer.

‘Paternoster, que est in caelus. .’

It is remarkable how we can think about many things at once.

The prayer was genuine. I had led a worthless life, and my soul was condemned to hell, but I truly repented, and my understanding was that my repentance was good for something. Even from a worthless murderer like me.

But at the same time, it was curious how long I’d taken to say the first line — it was as if time slowed. I had time to think about several things, about the taste of Emile’s skin in my mouth. .

Santificeteur nomen tuum. .

About the feeling of the charge of 2,000 lances. .

Adveniat regnum tuum. .

About the moment when the gates closed on the Bridge of Meaux and I had saved Jacques de Bourbon. .

About serving the Prince at table. .

Fiat voluntas tua. .

About meeting de Charny in the shop. .

Sicut in cael, et in terra. .

About putting my dagger in him at Poitiers. .

About my sister, and my uncle. .

Panem nostrum cotiadianum da nobis hodie. .

About Nan, my first woman. .

Et dimitte nobis debita nostra. .

Meeting Richard; the Inn of the Three Foxes. .

Sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. .

The Abbott, my sister, Emile, Richard, Sir John, de Charny, Sir John Chandos. .

Et ne nos inducas in tentationem. .

Almost at the end.

The convoy of churchmen had arrived. I could hear them — the creaking of the carts, the hooves.

‘Stop!’ said a loud, harsh voice.

I opened my eyes, Hoping against hope. Why not?

I saw the Franciscan whose horse I was riding.

His heavy blue eyes met mine. ‘That is my horse,’ he said.

Camus laughed. ‘When he’s dead, you can have it back.’

The Franciscan looked at Camus, and I swear the servant of Satan flinched. ‘It is my horse, and I will talk to this man,’ he said, riding up to me.

He was a poor rider. You could see that.

In a moment of about-to-die insight, I guessed my wonderful horse had been given to him by a rich patron, precisely because he rode so badly.

His eyes weren’t mad, but they had something of the same quality as Camus’. This was not a man who saw things in shades of gray. ‘Have you confessed?’ he asked me.

I shook my head. ‘Nay, father, I’m excommunicate,’ I said.

He smiled and his face lit. ‘It happens,’ he said, ‘that I have a special power conferred by the Holy Father to shrive such as you,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry I stole your horse,’ I admitted.

‘Is that the sum of your confession?’ he said with a surprisingly gentle smile. ‘Perhaps your good cloak was a fair exchange. I never needed a war horse.’

‘Father, I’ve led a hard life, and my sins are about as black as they can be.’ I didn’t shrug. It was for everything — me, this priest and my soul.

‘Are you in a hurry to die, then?’ he asked.

Can you imagine a man who makes you smile when you have a halter around your neck?

I bowed my head. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned grievously, and I can’t even remember when I last made a full confession.’

‘Better,’ he said.

I heard hoofs — clip clop. A damn big horse.

But I kept my eyes down. I began my confession. I won’t bore you with it, messieurs. You’ve heard the meat of it, anyway.

The Bourc Camus shouted, ‘Hang him — push the priest off. By Satan! Must I wait all day?’

‘Silence,’ ordered Boucicault.

‘Fuck you,’ said Camus. ‘I knew I should have put the sword to him when I had the chance. I will not be gainsayed.’

‘I don’t believe you were done confessing,’ said the priest.

But I had to look.

Camus drew his sword.

Boucicault drew his sword.

The black and white men-at-arms outnumbered the French at this point, but I don’t think Camus could have taken Boucicault.

It didn’t matter, because one of the men-at-arms from the religious column, dressed in the long black riding cloak of the Hospitallers, trotted up the road. He didn’t even have a sword in his hand. He reined in between the French and Camus.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said firmly, as if they were his children.

Boucicault breathed deeply. ‘Sir Knight,’ he said and sheathed his sword.

Camus laughed. ‘Out of my way,’ he said, and he slammed his blade two-handed at the black-cloaked knight.

It wasn’t magic. I saw what he did. When you are on the edge of death, you see things.

His right hand collected the cloak and intercepted the blow. It must have hurt, but he showed no sign, and his right hand ran up the blade and seized it near the point, while his left hand, travelling with the speed of a thought, seized the hilt. He leaned forward and his horse lunged powerfully — it must have been trained to do just that — and he used Camus’ sword against him like a staff, getting the point right under his chin.

Using the Gascon’s own sword as a lever, he threw him from the saddle. Camus hit the ground and didn’t move.

The Hospitaller nodded to Boucicault. ‘My lord is taking this man’s confession,’ he said. For the first time, I think, he actually looked at me.

It was, of course, my acquaintance. How many Hospitallers did I know? How many were riding the roads of France that spring?

Two black and whites came and took their master.

Boucicault bowed. ‘May I leave this in the hands of the church?’ he asked. ‘I mislike the murder of this man, even given the life he’s led.’

The priest nodded. He had the accent of a Provencal — of a peasant, in fact. He nodded. ‘I take responsibility,’ he said. ‘Body and soul.’

Boucicault nodded at me. I swear he might have winked.

Had he kept us waiting there all that time, waiting for the priest? I won’t ever know.

But I think he did.

The Hospitaller walked his horse to me.

I swear, all he did was look into my eyes. ‘Pierre?’ he asked the priest.

‘I am only a few months into this young man’s life,’ he said. ‘I would despair, except that he is but the product of Satan’s will in our time.’

The Hospitaller tugged at his beard. His eyes never left mine. ‘Look at his cap,’ he said.

By happenstance — in an attempt to dress myself better, I suppose — I was wearing my best arming cap. The one my sister had made, with the cross of the Order of St John on the crown.

‘Tell me what you want more than anything,’ he said suddenly.

There are times when, despite inclination, all we can do is tell the truth.

‘I want to be a great knight,’ I said.

‘More than you want to live?’ he asked. ‘More than you want to save your soul?’ he asked.

Now that I had said it, I wondered at myself.

I burst into tears and said, ‘Yes.’

There I sat, a halter around my neck, on a stolen horse in rusted armour, weeping my fool heart out.

For me, that’s the end of Brignais.