The Ill-Made Knight

Italy 1362-1364

We’re almost there, messieurs.

Italy.

I didn’t get there by any direct road.

Before they took the halter from around my neck, Sir Thomas — the Hospitaller — made me swear.

He made me swear to obey the law of arms. And to obey him.

And Father Pierre Thomas made me swear to go on crusade, when and where he commanded me.

Of course I agreed. I was about to die. It is something, when they offer you everything you want, and the punishment is the reward. And then. .

And then Father Pierre Thomas took the halter from around my neck. ‘Be reborn into the life of Christ,’ he said. His gentle smile was there, as if he saw humour in his own comment.

Sir Peter — fra Peter, as I was to find was proper — shook his head about my armour. He cut it away from me. He didn’t even unbuckle the straps; he cut them.

One piece at a time fell off me to lie under the tree. A pair of mis-matched splint greaves; a right cuisse in faded blue and copper, and a vibrant crimson cuisse in leather, studded with iron and brass in alternating rows of rivet heads. I fancied that cuisse, and it fit well. He cut the straps.

A heavy coat of plates — sixty or seventy in all, raw from the hammer and covered in leather on both sides, well-riveted in brass a long time ago, with a dozen tears, rents and weapon-wounds, some lovingly closed with expert stitches; some barely holding with old thongs or badly placed threads, or bound in wire. I would guess five or six men had worn that armour. It wept rust.

It made a noise as it fell to earth — an almost-human protest.

Arm harnesses — matched, but very poor. Badly made, garish, ill-fitting.

And my poor helmet. It was the last thing I had left of a finer harness — covered in dents, but lovingly maintained by my squire. The chain aventail shone and rippled, and the turban I’d wound around it to hide the worst damage. .

Clank.

I had a chainmail haubergeon. I’d had it since Poitiers. Perkin had kept it clean and it was a uniform, well-oiled brown. Fra Peter examined it.

‘It’s one thing to symbolize rebirth,’ he said. ‘And another to be a damn fool. Get the mail off and we’ll oil it for you.’

His squire came forward. He was not English but Spanish, Juan di Ceval. I had never met a Spaniard — even in the odd glow of ‘not-death’, I was curious to meet him. He came and collected my mail. He also unlaced my aventail from my old basinet. He took them both and rolled them in hides that were themselves so oily they shone in the sun.

Sir Thomas looked me over. ‘You stink,’ he said. ‘It’s not just sin. Do you really live this way?’

I was not in the mood to make excuses, but this stung. ‘I’m a soldier,’ I said.

Sir Thomas raised an eyebrow. ‘Young man, I have fought in the East for fifteen years. I wore my armour for three weeks at a stretch, during the siege of Smyrna. I am used to living in the open and fighting in all weathers. You are dirty because you choose not to practice the discipline that would allow you to be clean.’

I said nothing, which indicates, I think, that I was not an utter fool.

They stripped me to my skin. Father Pierre Thomas walked me to the stream beyond the crossroads and watched while I bathed with Fra Peter’s soap. Fra Peter brought me his razor. I had never owned a razor as fine as his — he even had a small bronze mirror in an ivory case.

He smiled, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I have a weakness for nice things,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I am a man, not a saint.’

I sat naked on a saddle, and he and his squire shaved my beard. It was odd, as if time was suspended. No other traffic came down the road. Birds sang. The sun came out for the first time in days. I shivered, warmed and shivered again.

Father Pierre Thomas opened his panniers and produced a pair of braes and a shirt. They were very fine, the cuffs lovingly worked.

He blushed. ‘People. . give me things.’ He shook his head in wonderment.

Sir Thomas nodded. ‘Because you are a living saint.’

Pierre glared at him. ‘Please stop saying that,’ he asked politely. ‘I am a sinful mortal like everyone else.’

Sir Thomas nodded, his head tilted to one side like a puppy’s. ‘Like everyone else, except that you cure the sick and bring happiness wherever you go.’

Father Pierre Thomas shrugged his shoulders. ‘I do not mean to show impatience,’ he said, ‘but while the saving of this young man’s immortal soul is worthy, we are due in Avignon.’

Sir Thomas nodded. I put the clean shirt and braes over my clean skin. Fra Peter handed me a pair of brown hose, my own boots and a long brown robe.

The brown robe had the eight pointed cross on the right breast.

‘I’m not worthy to wear this,’ I said.

‘None of us is,’ Fra Peter said.

Juan picked my spurs up from the road. He and Fra Peter re-strapped them in two minutes, from leather they had in a basket on a donkey. I was surprised.

I walked the stolen horse over to Father Pierre Thomas, now fully dressed. ‘Father?’ I asked quietly as he was looking out over the valley.

There was a great deal to see in that valley, if you were newly reborn. The sun shone on fifty fields choked with weeds; at the southern edge stood a stone keep, fire-blackened, the near wall cracked; closer to hand, a small ring of village huts had been burned, and their thatched roofs had fallen in, so that they appeared as black cups on the green board of the earth. And just off the road, where Father Pierre Thomas’s eyes went, was a church. Its destruction was too new to warrant the name ‘ruined’. It had been burned. A human skull lay on the lintel.

He sighed. ‘Yes, my son?’

‘Your horse,’ I said, holding out the reins.

He smiled. ‘A beautiful horse,’ he said. ‘Do you know that I am the papal legate for the east?’

I had no idea. I thought he was a village curate.

He laughed. ‘I am the least warlike of men, nor do I think that fire and sword are the weapons to convert Islam. Look what they do here.’ He shrugged. ‘But the Count of Toulouse, my father’s lord,’ he smiled again, ‘gave me this war horse. Because in his notion of the world, I would need such a beast to fight the infidel.’ He patted the horse’s nose, which, to be honest, I would have hesitated to do.

He looked at the horse. And at me. ‘Men like Fra Peter reassure me that not all violence is towards destruction. That some men must fight to cauterize the wounds that Satan makes on the earth.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not need a war horse. But you will.’

He leaned forward and breathed into my horse’s nostrils. ‘I was born a serf. My father is still a serf,’ he said. ‘We helped raise this horse. I know the dam and the sire. As there are horses, raised by hand with love for man’s purpose to fight well, so may there be men, trained with love, to fight well for God’s purpose.’

I asked no questions. It really was as if I’d died. I simply rode away with them and headed south. We rode through the ruptured landscape, and I was forced, through eyes just opened, to see what the last six years of war had done to the richest province in France.

Ah! You don’t want to hear about it? Eh?

War destroys, my friends. Sometimes, the builder must knock down the old foundations to build anew, but otherwise, we call a man who knocks down a house an arsonist, or worse. Eh?

We’d raped France a hundred times by then. We rode along roads choked with fallen branches and weeds. We rode through villages without a single roof, and we passed fifty churches whose stones were cracked and burned, like the teeth of a charred corpse. We saw vacant-eyed people on the roads. Some wore ragged finery. Had they been gentry, brigands or peasants?

You couldn’t tell. They all had the same empty eyes.

Once we were into Provence, the roads improved, and so did the scenery. The towns were walled, and most of them had destroyed their suburbs and walled up all their gates but one, which made entering and exiting a laborious process.

One of the curious aspects of donning a Hospitaller robe is that suddenly I was admitted to these towns without further question. I was served cheerfully at tables by young men and women who would have cringed to see me, or fled at the rumour of my approach.

Some days passed in a haze. It was, truly, as if I had been reborn. I’ll pass over that now.

We were south of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in country I’d never seen. I think it must have been our last night before Avignon. Fra Peter, Juan and I were to sleep on the floor of the common room of an auberge just inside the gate of the town — a small place, really just a house, recently converted to an inn by a young man and his wife, eager to benefit from the increase in trade from pilgrims travelling south. We had a leek soup that was delicious, and then Fra Peter sat back, unbuckled his sword and leaned it against the wall. He waved to the good wife, who appeared delighted to serve us.

‘My lord?’ she asked.

Fra Peter nodded. ‘How’s the wine hereabouts?’ he asked.

She nodded, eyes wide and serious. ‘My father has his own vines,’ she said. ‘Our wine is very good. A cardinal told me so.’

‘Well,’ Fra Peter said. He barked his odd laugh. ‘He’d know. Pour us a pitcher and bring us some cups.’

She curtsied and reappeared with wine.

I hadn’t had wine since I was hanged. I drank off my first cup rather quickly, and I looked up to find the squire and the knight watching me. Fra Peter was smiling.

‘Our Lord loved good wine, too,’ he said. ‘Never forget the Feast of Canaan.’

Juan drank his with relish. The pitcher was vast and deep, good red clay and nicely glazed. We poured our second cups.

‘You can’t wear my habit in Avignon,’ Fra Peter said. ‘Nor is it my intent to make you a brother knight. I can’t see it.’ He smiled down into his cup. ‘But that may just be my own arrogance.’

I said nothing. I confess I felt some disappointment. Odd, as vows of chastity and poverty would not have suited me at any time.

‘But you have sworn to accompany Father Pierre Thomas on crusade.’ He looked at me. ‘I wonder if you would wear the red habit.’

Juan smiled. ‘As I do,’ he said.

I had never seen Juan wear any habit at all. I said as much, and they both laughed.

‘Donats,’ they said together, and then Juan returned to his usual silence. Fra Peter nodded. ‘Young men of noble birth pay a large sum to the order to be trained. They owe some service later, and are called ‘Donats’. In battle, they wear a red habit.’

I sighed. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I believe that in fact you have some thousands of gold ducats due you.’ He drank more wine. ‘Money you have from taking ransoms in battle.’ He swallowed. ‘Better, at least, than money looted from peasants paying patis to keep their daughters from being raped.’

‘I have never raped,’ I said hotly.

He nodded. ‘Father Pierre Thomas would say that every woman you took, because she had no other choice, was rape.’ He sighed. ‘Father Pierre Thomas is a saint, and I am not. So I’ll confine myself to the reality of the man-at-arms. Few women can protect themelves. Will you protect them?’

‘I will,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Have some more wine,’ he said.

The next day we reached Avignon. I’m a Londoner, and to me, London defines what a city should be, but Avignon was a fine city. A little hag-ridden with priests, I confess, and more whores than all of Southwark ten times over, which says something about the state of the church, no doubt, but they were pretty and well-paid, and the churchmen were, for the most part, well-educated and clean. The palaces were magnificent, and the streets were well laid out, narrow but comparatively clean. There were influences that I learned later were Arab or Saracen — for instance, some of the streets had trees trained to run up the shop walls and cover the street from rain or sun.

You could buy anything in Avignon: a beautiful woman, a fine musical instrument, magnificent armour, a horse, the death of a cardinal. You could buy most of those things in London, but they were more expensive and harder to find.

My new-found Christian idealism received some near-mortal wounds. In Avignon, you could sit in a tavern drinking fine wine and watch a monk fondle a child too young to be in school while a priest and a nun embraced in a closed booth. Discussions of philosophy and theology could result in daggers drawn — and used. The Cardinals plotted for power and exercised what they had with a naked purpose that was at least more discreet among merchants and nobles in London and Paris.

That said, though, the new Pope, Urban V, was widely reputed to be the best man to hold the throne of St Peter in two generations, and he was advocating crusade on the one hand and church-wide reform on the other.

We were a week in Avignon before Father Pierre Thomas received an audience. To my shock, I was taken along — clean and clothed decently, in well-tailored dull-red hose and a matching cote with a short brown gown. There were apprentices in London who dressed better, but it was a world with a certain reversal of worldly fashion, and my clothes carefully proclaimed my status as a man-at-arms bound to a churchman. I had neither sword nor dagger. I missed de Charny’s dagger. Its loss was more real to me than the loss of armour. Like Emile’s favour, it had always been the physical embodiment of my chivalric desire.

The papal palace was both new and recently redecorated, and the paintings were as magnificent as the fabric in the hangings. I have always particularly loved gold leaf — the richness of gold, the way it looks over other colours, over leather, over wood. The papal palace at Avignon was a riot of gold leaf — there was more of the stuff than I’d ever seen before in one place in my life. The choir screen in the great cathedral was one solid mass of gold leaf, and the audience hall was decorated with two magnificent frescos, one on either wall. My memory is that one was the worthies of the church, including, of course, the last four popes, and that the other wall was the resurrection of Christ. Later, in Italy, I saw many better frescos, but that afternoon in late spring in Avignon, I had seen a few painted murals in England, but never the richness, the glow, the vitality, the gold leaf, of the frescos of Avignon. I gaped like a fish.

In fact, apparently I missed the whole of Father Pierre Thomas’s formal introduction. I did note that he was a bishop, not a mere priest, as well as being the papal legate to the east. His precedence in the papal palace was very high. I had had no idea. Bishops, in my experience, wore crowns and mitres and garments of gold and had magnificent rings on their fat fingers.

At any rate, the papal nuncio answered the Bishop’s greeting. Father Pierre Thomas — I always think of him that way — knelt and kissed the Pope’s slipper and then his ring. The Pope then rose and embraced Father Pierre Thomas.

I must form loyalties very quickly as, in my head, I was already his man. I was — transported is not too strong a word — to find that the man I served was embraced by the Pope.

The audience took most of the day. Urban had been elected after Father Pierre Thomas left for the east, and Pierre had raced from distant Candia back all the way to Paris to try and enlist King John of France for the crusade — and to try to get the Pope’s approval to use the Great Company as a tool against the infidel.

I didn’t know that at the time.

At any rate, I stood behind Fra Peter and flexed my knees. Wool is all very well, but May in Provence is like high summer in London, and there was sweat running down my back. I tried to catch Juan’s eyes — we were of an age, and he was the only man in the party who watched the pretty girls sway their hips and who licked his lips when the wine was served — but he was not interested in a whispered conversation in the papal palace.

My attention kept going to the frescos.

At some point, I looked up and saw the ceiling.

I heard several of the Pope’s attendants laugh. I continued to watch the ceiling. There were stars in gold leaf on a deep blue — I’d seen work this good in London — but also the devil and his legions, who looked strangely like men I knew, and God and his angels, who appeared to me to be led by the Count of Savoy and Richard Musard.

I may have laughed.

Christ sat enthroned between the hosts, and he judged men and women. Some were taken to hell under Satan’s feet, and others went in raptures towards heaven. Not all of the figures were clear, and some were not very well painted, but I remember particularly a woman — something in her expression reminded me of Emile, and she was poised. Christ’s pointing finger showed that eternal joy was her lot, but her face conveyed the doubt she’d had, the sins she’d feared.

Juan drove his finger into my ribs with the force you only use on friends. My head snapped down and I reached to snatch his hand, but he was too fast.

‘Hssss!’ he said, or words to that effect.

I looked around.

Father Pierre Thomas’s heavy gaze rested on mine.

Later, near the end of our interview, we were moved forward, and one by one we bowed and kissed the hem of the Pope’s robe. Juan was enraptured. Fra Peter was detached. I was willing enough.

The Pope touched his crozier to my back as I prostrated myself. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Young man, I take it you love paintings.’

My tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Father Pierre Thomas leaned forward. ‘A soldier, your Holiness.’

‘Your bodyguard?’ the Pope asked. The weight of his crozier on my shoulder was like the weight of a lead pipe.

Father Pierre Thomas laughed. I wager not many men laugh in papal audiences. ‘I have no bodyguard,’ he said. ‘I am one poor sinner, and my death will merely martyr one more Christian.’

The Pope’s crozier was removed, and he leaned forward. He, too, had eyes like Father Pierre Thomas. Gentle, and yet I reckon he’d run his abbey with a rod of iron. As I raised my head, he took my chin in his hand. ‘What kind of soldier?’ he asked.

‘I was a routier,’ I croaked. It was more than a statement; it was like confession — all my sins in one word.

He nodded. ‘I thought as much. What did you see in my paintings, young man?’

A woman who reminded me of Emile.

I remained silent.

‘Redemption, let us hope,’ the Pope said. His attention went to another man, and I was free.

It was in Avignon that I first trained with Fra Peter.

I had watched him train many years ago, in the courtyard of Clerkenwell, while I sat with my sister. I knew now that he’d merely been accustoming himself to a new war horse.

The Knights of Saint John had a preceptory — a house, almost a palace — in Avignon, and another to the south, overlooking the sea near Marseille. The preceptory was filled to overflowing, not with knights, but with princes of the church and great secular noblemen. However, the preceptory was also the command post for the papal army, which had at that time just been placed under the command of another Hospitaller knight, Sir Juan di Heredia, a name of great renown. In fact, my friend the donat squire was his nephew. Just to show you how small the world of arms is, it was Sir Juan — or Fra Juan — who had pursued us in the days just after the attack on Pont-Saint-Esprit, when Janet came to her senses.

I met him on the first day we were in town, and he never looked at me. But a week later, when I stood stripped to my shirt and hose, lifting stones in the yard, he stopped, a dozen men at his heels, and smiled at me. His eyes roved the yard of the palace for a moment and settled on Fra Peter, who was standing at a pell, breathing hard. He’d hit the pell so many times I’d lost count.

‘Is this red-headed barbarian yours, Pierre?’ he called.

Fra Peter crossed the yard, wiping his face on his shirt. It was already hot in Provence. Ah, the sun of Provence. ‘Oh, aye, he’s mine.’

Sir Juan nodded. ‘Good size.’

Fra Peter grunted.

‘Can he fight? Sir Juan asked.

Fra Peter. ‘Of course he can fight. He won’t win, but he’ll always fight.’

I must have flushed. Sir Juan paused. ‘You think you can win a fight with a knight of the order?’ he asked me.

I bowed. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said, ‘my lord.’

Sir Juan coughed and waved. ‘Looks to me like he’s on the path to wisdom,’ he said, and led his entourage to their horses.

That day was odd for me, because, absent a few days at the Three Foxes, I had never trained, purposely, since I had swaggered my sword against a partner’s buckler in London. I had fought — quite a bit — but the notion of lifting stones for strength, or practising balance on a beam, or vaulting over a wooden horse — I’d never done any such.

It takes time to learn exercises, and most young men resist them, annoyed or embarrassed or impatient. I was instantly in love. Exercise made a certain sense to me, and I could feel every stone I lifted, and how it related to the rest of my body.

When we went to the pell, Fra Peter made us fight the pell in a different way than we practised in England and Gascony. We didn’t just swing at the pell; we fought it. Juan would circle the pell like it was a genuine opponent, circling and stabbing, circling and cutting, parrying blows so well-imagined I felt I could watch them develop.

When I had my turn, the two of them stood silently, watching me hit the pell. I had a borrowed sword, and I felt the hilt was too short, but I cut until woodchips flew, and I stabbed repeatedly at a knot in the wood until I hit it.

A young man of seventeen or eighteen crossed from the lodging house of the preceptory and came to lean against the railings of the barricade that surrounded the pell. He and Fra Peter exchanged greetings. His French had the same heavy accent I’d heard from many mercenaries: southern German.

I went and attacked the pell again. More chips flew.

The young man on the barricade laughed.

That punctured my new piety and the focus I was growing to go with it. I whirled, furious.

He shook his head. ‘Ignore me,’ he said.

‘Would you care to show me what is so funny?’ I asked through my teeth.

He shrugged, an expressive, Italianate shrug. ‘I’m not sure even I could tell you what you do.’ He leaned back. ‘But I promise you it’s funny.’

‘Come in here and we will laugh together,’ I said.

I confess that I expected Fra Peter to interfere, but he did not. Juan opened the barricade, and the new boy stepped in. Juan solemnly handed each of us a wooden sword — we call them wasters in England. You can kill a man with a waster.

My adversary took up a ludicrous posture — legs apart, body rotated, sword cocked back so far that it came around his head and pointed at me. He looked like a mime or an acrobat mimicking a swordsman.

By this time in my life I had fought a lot of men. One thing I knew, and respected, was the authority with which he adopted his ludicrous pose. He snapped into it, and then he was still.

Mime or not, he was absolutely confident.

I held my sword in the centre of my body and edged towards him cautiously.

He stepped forward and his blow rolled off his shoulder as his hips uncoiled.

Juan poured water on my head. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘He does that to everyone.’

My head rang for a day, and I didn’t fight or exercise for three days. I mostly sat in my bed — an actual bed — in our inn, a fine hostel owned by the Knights of Saint John, who owned every building on the street outside their own gate, just as they did in London.

Then Fra Peter sent me on an errand to the commanderie by Marseille, which took me a week — it shouldn’t have, but the bailli there assumed I was really a donat, and sent me off on an errand to Carcassonne. From there I had a message to carry for Narbonne, and then back to Avignon. I was stiff as a board when I got off my horse in the yard of a stable in Avignon. I carried my message to Sir Juan di Heredia, and he opened my sealed satchel and read several missives. Eventually he looked up at me. ‘Get some rest,’ he said. ‘I gather you’ve had a busy week.’

Fra Peter was sitting with the German boy who had split my head in the common room of our hostel. ‘What took you so long?’ he asked, and I knew in a moment that he knew all about my trip already.

‘The bailli sent me to Carcassonne,’ I said. My eyes slid off his to look at the German.

Sir Thomas nodded. ‘The bailli was told to try you.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘You thought we’d just trust you?’

I guess I had thought they’d just trust me.

The German smiled and rose from his bench. He bowed. ‘I wish to apologize,’ he said. ‘My blow. . was not properly controlled. I hurt you.’ He made a motion with his hand. ‘It was a compliment, if you like.’

‘A compliment?’ I asked. By Christ, the German kid was annoying.

‘You were almost too fast for my blow,’ he said. ‘So I traded speed for. . control. I should not have. I’m sorry.’ He was stiff and formal, and Fra Peter permitted himself a very slight smile.

I was aware I had passed some sort of test with Fra Peter, and the joy of it gave me the grace to bow. ‘No one has ever apologized for hurting me, that I can remember,’ I said, but I took his hand. ‘Now will you tell me what was so funny?’

He raised an eyebrow and looked at Sir Thomas, who nodded.

‘Well,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘You have never been taught how to use a sword.’

I bridled, let me tell you, messieurs. ‘I’ve been using a sword since before you were born,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Do you know how to read?’ he asked with the warmth of a youth.

‘Yes,’ I said. Few men like me could read and I was quite proud of it. ‘Latin, French, and even a little English.’

He nodded, his point made. ‘So you’ve been reading as long as you’ve used a sword?’

‘Longer,’ I agreed.

‘You are aware that there are other men who read with more facility than you?’ he asked, leaning forward. ‘Faster, more accurately, more. . what word is it? More holding of knowledge?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you can ride?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Not really,’ Fra Peter said.

That was two slurs on my fighting skills.

‘Ah!’ said the German. Actually, by this time I suspected he was Italian and not German at all. Germans have a different kind of arrogance. ‘So you know how to ride, but you are not much of a rider?’

‘I have many failings,’ I snapped. ‘Where are we going with this?’

He shrugged again and looked even more Italian. ‘You have used the sword all your life, but because no one has ever taught you to use it, you have never learned to learn, and thus, you grow no better. I would go further. At some point — perhaps in a monastery — you studied the sword with the buckler.’ He stroked his stringy beard. ‘You have a developed imbrocatta and two interesting wrist cuts — inside and outside rolls of the wrist. These were taught to you. You practice them. Almost every other guard and cut you reason from first principles every time, like a small boy attempting to debate Aquinas.’

Unless a man is either very, very good or utterly lost, there come to him moments where things are revealed, and we know them immediately to be true. I have had this happen in various ways. I have heard something I knew to be true, but ignored it for years, and I have heard things that changed my life immediately. When the Italian said I had learned sword and buckler — that I had two wrist cuts and a thrust — that was true. Damn it, Thomas Courtney taught me those wrist cuts in a London square in the year ’50 or so.

But in that set of sentences, I was convinced. He’d hit me, and I hadn’t blocked his simple attack, and now that I thought of it, in a cascade of swordsmanlike considerations, his blow was very like the one Boucicault had used on me — twice. His words made sense.

‘Teach me!’ I said.

He shook his head, his face pained — really pained. ‘I am just a student,’ he said. ‘I have so much to learn. There are men in Swabia who teach this art — another man in Thuringia. One in Naples, I hear.’

Fra Peter shook his head. ‘Well, well, it is a day for me to eat crow. William, I imagined you’d take your horse and ride for Burgundy, and look, you came back to me, and now you really are my problem. And I sat here to keep you from attempting to murder our Friulian visitor, and instead, you ask him to teach you.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m delighted that you have shown yourself a better man than I expected.’ He rose and threw some coins on the table. ‘The House of Bardi has a table of accounting in the main exchange in the street of Goldsmiths,’ he said. ‘If you wish to take the next step, Sir Juan and I have set your donation at one thousand florins. Think of it as the ransom of your soul.’

It stung, the way he said it. But he paused by the door. ‘By the way, your sister is now a full sister or our order.’ He smiled, a sort of lopsided smile. ‘So perhaps saving Golds has become an empris — something our whole order is required for. Listen, William, I urge you to pay the donation. One of the things most missing in your life is a structure for your actions. Join us, and we will train you.’

I rose. ‘You will have me?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t imagine we’re choosy,’ he said. ‘We’re far more desperate than that.’

The Italian accompanied me to the street of goldsmiths. ‘I suppose I could teach you a few things,’ he said. ‘How to stand. How to move. A few postures.’

A year before, I’d have spurned him. Learn swordsmanship from a boy? But my eyes were open, and the mould of my life was broken. I had to start again. No reason not to start again as a swordsman.

The street of goldsmiths was three times the size of the similar confluence in London, and so richly adorned that to walk down the street was to see a greater display of crozier heads, inlaid swords, episcopal rings, copes, vestments, chalices and jewels than you would see on display in any palace in Europe.

At the south end of the street, there were twenty tables set up in a small square. There were a variety of hard men on display — some in mail, some in leather, some in coats of plates, all with large and very obvious weapons. On the tables were enough coins to ransom the King of France — well, perhaps not, but on those tables were at least 50,000 florins. You could change a Saracen coin for new minted Italian gold. You could change French debased coins for pure Flemish coins. And so on.

‘Messire, can you point me to the table of the Bardi?’ I asked a man who looked English. He proved to be a Dane, but his English was good and he had his mercenary walk me to the Bardi, half the street away.

I waited for a pair of Paris merchants on their way to the fairs to change their money, then I offered a slip of parchment from my purse. In truth, I was nervous — I expected a great deal of delay, and perhaps outright refusal. I think that in my head, I tied Richard’s and Sir John Creswell’s betrayal to the whole prisoner ransom scheme — I think I expected further abuse.

I was stunned when my local Bardi representative — Doffo, a senior man, more used to being an ambassador of Florence than a table banker — leaned across the table, took the slip of parchment from his nephew, read it, tapped his teeth with a gold pencil and looked at me.

‘You are William Gold, the English knight?’ he asked. He sounded respectful.

I probably simpered. ‘Yes, messire, I am he.’

He tugged his beard. ‘I heard you were dead,’ he said. He raised an eyebrow. What he meant was, prove you are who you say.

‘I had some troubles, it is true,’ I said, ‘but I was. . rescued by Fra Peter Mortimer. Of the Hospitallers.’

‘Eh?’ he asked. ‘Will Fra Peter vouch for you, young man?’

My Friulian leaned across the counter. ‘I will vouch for him, Messire Bardi. You know me.’

Of course. There could only be so many Italians in Avignon.

The pencil tapped again. ‘I will, of course, guarantee your money, messire. My memory is that you are an old customer, although we have never met. But — I apologize for the inconvenience — your share has been claimed.’

I had expected as much, but his gracious manner had given me hope. ‘Ah,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘No, no. Fear not. You are palpably alive — even your red hair testifies for you.’ He looked up at me. ‘May I offer an interest-free loan until we work this out? How much do you need?

‘A thousand florins,’ I said. ‘Make that one thousand and one hundred.’

‘By Saint Jerome,’ he said. ‘Are you buying a bank?’

‘I am becoming a donat of the Order of Saint John,’ I said proudly.

He brightened. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘This small fortune goes to the church?’

I nodded.

He offered his hand. ‘Done. A mere matter of notation then.’

Let me explain, if you do not know the banks and the church.

The better Italian banks took in specie — gold and silver — by collecting the papal tithes and other religious taxes and monies of account. They farmed these moneys: took them in and made a small profit.

Actually, an enormous profit, over time.

Imagine collecting the tithes from the entire Christian world, less only the schismatics of the east.

The money that they lent and brokered was that money. They didn’t actually move the money — the bags of silver collected in England largely sat in London. Can you see it? There’s a vault in a basement. It’s full of money. It is the Pope’s money, and he spends it in Italy. The Bardi use money collected in Italy to pay the Pope’s debts there. It’s all on paper. The money in England may go to pay for churches, or to reward nuns or feed the poor, but the rest — nine marks out of every ten — is used to loan out at interest. It engenders more silver as surely as girl horses and boy horses make more horses, except that the money never gets sick.

Over time, the effect has been to move the money slowly but surely to Italy. That’s not because of the Pope, rather because of the merchants and the banks. Once in a while, you see a specie train, guarded by a small army, taking gold over the Alps. You never see it go the other way.

Does this put you to sleep, messieurs? You are fools, then. For bankers, war is not about fighting. War is about gold.

At any rate, what my new friend Doffo was saying was that handing me 1,100 gold florins would have been a heavy risk, but writing me a note to the Hospitallers saying that I’d paid 1,000 to them actually cost him nothing in the short run, and he had plenty of time to check my story and put the screws to-

Ah. That thought reminded me. .

‘Who collected?’ I asked.

‘Sir John Creswell is marked as your captain,’ he said. ‘I believe he collected.’ He shrugged. He shrugged because 1,100 florins — more gold than most peasants would earn in their whole lives and the lives of their children — was not enough to seriously concern him.

Bankers.

He wrote me a receipt, and his spotty nephew counted me 100 florins. I signed. He signed. He sealed.

‘Check back,’ he said. ‘We have means to collect from Sir Creswell.’ He snorted. ‘When I have seen to that, I will happily pay you the balance.’

We shook hands and I walked away.

Messieurs, you want to hear about the fighting in Italy. So I will not dwell on the summer of the year of our lord 1362, except to say that it was among the hardest, and perhaps happiest, of my life.

England and France were at peace, and the Pope was attempting to organize a crusade against the Turks. I’ll speak plainly about the Turks later — I fought them many times over many years, as you will hear. They may be infidels, but they are fine soldiers, wonderful archers, men with a strong sense of honour, and all of them ride better than me.

Hah!

But at that time, the Turks had just taken two Christian cities in Europe, and it was the scandal of the world: Adrianople and Gallipoli. They were just names to me — I had no idea how well I’d come to know them later.

But although neither King Edward of England nor King John of France had committed to a crusade, it seemed possible, even likely, that they’d both go. That sort of negotiation was the reason Father Pierre Thomas was a legate, which, by the way, is an ancient Roman military rank. Well, I enjoy knowing such things!

So in high summer, Fra Peter, Juan and I carried letters from Father Pierre Thomas and the Pope to the King, all the way across France to Calais.

Before we left, I trained every day with Messire dei Liberi, the Friulian lad.

He reduced swordsmanship the way I had seen Cumbrians and Cornishmen reduce wrestling, to a set of postures called gardes. Some of the gardes I had heard or, or seen used, in London and Bordeaux. The Guard of the Woman is much the same everywhere, although different men use it differently.

But the Friulian had something — I think it was anatomy. He said he’d studied a year at Bologna — even in England, we know Bologna is the best medical school in the world. But he had theories of how the body moved, and how best to put strength and speed into your sword. Many were profound. A few were nonsense.

Here is where he was different from the many charlatans I have seen teaching boys to use their weapons: when you showed him that a theory or posture was nonsense, he grinned and dropped it from his repertoire.

Let me tell you a secret. Every master-of-arms knows this secret. I can impart it to you, but none of you will be able to learn from it. I’ll try anyway.

You can teach a man how to use a sword, but you cannot teach him to use it. The knowing how is not the same as the use. An untrained yokel — me, for example — can defeat a superbly trained man for many reasons. The Italians roll their eyes and say fortuna. The French, more piously, say, Deus Veult!’ The English say, ‘The luck of the devil’.

There is more to battle than training, armour, conditioning and good horses.

Because there are so many imponderables to a fight, many men who teach the way of the sword are charlatans. Or they are good swordsmen, but they add all sorts of falsity to their teaching.

Mercenaries like me may be bad men, full of sin, but we can spot this sort of chaff in an instant. Unlike many students, we have been in fights. Many fights. We have a simple rule — if you want to teach us about our profession, you must first prove you are better — not once, but many times.

So, it is not that I had never met a man who claimed to teach the way of the lance and sword before I met young Fiore. But I will say he was the first I ever met, and one of the few, who was utterly honest, almost ruthless, in his approach. He treated fighting as Aquinas treated religion. With logic and deep understanding of the most basic parts: the body, the sword, armour.

I remember one afternoon finding him in an armourer’s — really, a finisher who took pieces from a smith and prepared them for sale, with straps, coverings and fancy brass.

‘Have you seen the new Milanese stuff?’ Fiore asked me.

Imagine an eighteen-year-old sitting in an armourer’s shop, flexing shoulder armours. Picking up spaulders and testing the limits of their flexibility.

Of course, I had, however briefly, owned some Milanese armour. I said, ‘Yes. I had a breast and backplate for a year.’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘How did they affect your ability to cut across your body?’

I couldn’t remember, but I had a feeling it had limited my cut.

‘Ah!’ he said, and smiled. ‘Let us go play in the yard.’

In late spring, he announced that he was going to Nuremberg, in High Germany, to study with a sword master there. I was envious, but we embraced. I was leaving for England.

He was in the same sort of anomalous position as me. He was travelling about, fighting in tournaments and carrying messages for money. He did small duties for the Knights, and they gave him permission to use their preceptories as hostels. Something to do with his father.

‘I need to fight,’ he said.

I laughed. We were fighting every day, by then.

‘No — in battle,’ he said seriously. ‘It must be very different from duels and chivalric encounters.’

We’d had this discussion a dozen times, so I shrugged.

‘Come on crusade with me,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Of course, I must,’ he said. ‘I have already sworn it. I will be back in a few months.’

We embraced again, and he rode for Germany with a bag of letters for the banks. Meanwhile, I rode for England.

That was a happy trip.

First, I was formally made a donat in Avignon. I knelt all night at an altar, swore my devotion to the Knights, swore to obey and serve, and was given a red surcoat with a white cross, which I confess I wore every day for some months, I was so proud.

The ceremony was well attended. I was not a knight but a squire, in the eyes of the order, so I received silver spurs and the demand that I obey all knights. I thought of Sir John Hawkwood. After the ceremony and the vigil, I was bleary-eyed with lack of sleep, and Juan took me out to eat in a fancy inn with a gilded ceiling somewhat dulled by the fire in the hearth and greatly enhanced by half a dozen very attractive young women bringing the wine.

We had lamb.

After we ate, Fra Peter came and sat. I was pleased, in some remote, human way, to see that he watched the prettiest girl, a dark haired woman with an elfin nose and a smile that would stop your heart, who seemed determined to lean over my table for as long as it might take me to see to her naval.

I misdoubt but that Fra Peter was younger than fifty — perhaps younger than forty — but it pleased me to see that he watched her the way he watched a fight.

Why do other men’s failings please us?

Never mind. He tore his eyes away. By God she knew the effect she was having, and she minced away from us with a backward glance and a quarter of a smile — so well done, my friends, that I’m still talking of it, ain’t I?

It’s like the perfect sword cut. You don’t forget it, once you see it done.

He tore his eyes away and blushed. He met my eye.

‘You have done well, William,’ he said. He reached into his brown robe and produced — de Charny’s dagger. ‘I return this to you,’ he said. ‘I suspect that you’ll want it, as we’re going to England and you look naked without a weapon.’

Then he rose and embraced me. So did Juan.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we will go to the armourer and have you fitted for a decent harness. I’ll draw some munitions stuff for the trip. And you’ll want a sword,’ he added.

We drank. After some time — talking of arms, fighting and horses — he stood up. ‘I’ll leave you, gentles. I’m too old for this place.’ He managed a smile at Dark Hair, and she smiled back at him, damn her.

Juan and I had a second cup of wine. And a third, and perhaps a fourth.

We talked of everything: the world and the crusade. I stood up. ‘I’m for bed,’ I said.

Juan agreed, and we walked home on a clear summer evening. I left him at the door of our lodging and went to the outdoor jakes.

Then I went back to the inn.

Before the bells in the cathedral tolled for Matins, Dark Hair and I had repaired to her tiny bed in the eaves, hard by the pallets of a dozen other girls. She held my hand while she negotiated with them in rapid Provencal, and held out her free hand.

‘Give me a few moutons to pay them,’ she said, and flushed. I could feel it in the half-dark. ‘Ah, monsieur, I’m no whore, but a poor girl, and these are my friends who will lose a little sleep.’

I gave her a gold florin.

She bit it.

Another girl, as pretty in another way, watched this transaction and giggled. ‘For a florin, we could all stay and help,’ she said, but her friends led her away.

As it turned out, we didn’t need any help. Her neck was warm and salty, and her mouth was deep and tasted of cloves and cinnamon.

I saw Anne a dozen times before we left for Calais, and she welcomed me eagerly enough that I think, despite my florins, she liked me. I’ve known a hundred women like her — somewhere in the misty half-world between whoredom and ‘honest’ labour. We slipped out to walk the river and went out in a boat, and we ate fish in a riverside tavern, and we. .

Never mind. It wasn’t love, but it was pleasant.

The last night, I told her I was going and she kissed me and said, ‘A girl likes a soldier ever so much better than a priest.’

The ride across France was like a chivalric empris. We camped almost every night because there were no inns; we rode armed all the time, and I had to practice the discipline my knight spoke of so often, washing what I could every day, changing linen without taking off my rented armour. As he had said, it wasn’t that hard. I learned every day — learned what many squires are taught by their knights, but no one had ever taught me.

I learned to wash my own clothes, and to dry them on the rump of the pack horse.

It wasn’t all learning. I taught them to cook. The three of us cooked in strict rotation, and their initial attempts were laughable for men who had lived in the field all their lives. But their cooking was of a piece with my swordsmanship — they’d never been taught better. I bought pepper, saffron and good honey and I showed them where, even in the ruin of France, one could pluck a few herbs from the foundations of a burned cottage.

I won’t bore you with what effect Richard’s betrayal had on me, except that I was not as quick to love Juan as I might have been. And while I loved Fra Peter — and I did — I yet contrived to keep a little distance between us.

The trip, and the dinner, however, eroded my intentions. We had no other companions and we became very close.

I was learning so much, so fast, that I don’t remember much of the scenery. I learned that I had never learned to properly care for a horse, because I had never been a real squire. When you are out in the rough for weeks, and it rains is cold, you must work very hard so that your great brute of a war horse is not made lame for life, or dies of a fever.

I learned how to start a fire — better, faster and from all sorts of things. Fra Peter could make fire with a stone and the pommel of his sword — it was like watching a priest perform a miracle.

I learned to cook a few new dishes from Anne, in Avignon, and I taught them as well. The one I liked best was the Provencal dish I had eaten so often in Avignon — cassoulet.

I learned to be a better scout, for a campsite, or an army.

And every day, I learned to ride better. I learned to saddle and unsaddle, tack and untack, faster and more gently. To clean and maintain all my equipment and Sir Thomas’s.

Every day, we practised with our swords, often cutting the innocent vegetation. This allowed Fra Peter to discourse on how to cut or thrust, and then to further discourse on how to clean and sharpen.

You might have thought that, as a professional man-at-arms, I’d have resented this.

Perhaps Fiore and I aren’t so different. When Boucicault dropped me in the road, I learned a bitter lesson.

I wasn’t anywhere near as good as I thought I was.

Messieurs, Sir Jesus had the right of it — those of us who live by the sword will die by the sword. To us, the only thing more dangerous than our enemies is our own complacency.

I wasn’t too far gone to learn. I was twenty-one, and I’d just started to grow.

Calais. A fine town, growing every year. By the saviour, it is still growing. I reckon the town fathers don’t want King Richard to renew the war: they make their profit from being England’s door into France.

I thought it was the end of our journey, but after a meeting with a papal officer, we took ship for England.

I was overjoyed.

We landed twice, but our little ship carried us up out of the chop of the Channel and all the way to London. We landed across the river because of some trouble — I can’t remember what it was. Our horses came up out of the hold, and it was a day before they were anything like recovered. Fra Peter went ahead to the priory at Clerkenwell, and Juan and I stayed with the horses.

When they were alert and well fed, we rode them over the bridge, and I had the immense pleasure of wearing my donat’s coat into London.

Juan was the perfect companion — happy to be pleased. We rode west through the streets, and I showed him the tower, the churches, the Cheaping, the goldsmiths.

I was enthusiastic about my city, and yet I was all too aware that it was small next to Paris and dirty next to Avignon.

My sister was no longer at Clerkenwell, but had moved to the sister’s convent in the country. Despite that, our arrival at Clerkenwell had a sort of homecoming air to it, and we were welcomed by the prior in person and fed in the great hall. I felt as if I was a member of this great order.

The hall and barracks were packed. The order had been recruiting for the crusade, and they had twenty donats, mostly veteran men-at-arms. It made me proud to be one of them.

We stayed a week. There was nothing for Juan and I to do except watch the more attractive scullery maids, exercise in the yard and swagger about the streets of London, which we did with the attentiveness and belligerence of young men. London had had a generation of swaggering young men, fresh from victories in France and Flanders, and we were tolerated or ignored.

The beer was good.

By the third day, I was torn between conflicting desires, the strangest of which was to leave before something — some nameless fear — came to pass. I think I feared arrest. It is hard to say.

But I had nightmares two nights, and I dreamed of the Plague — I think it was the first time, but scarcely the last.

I woke the fourth morning, in the quiet certainty that I had to go and see my uncle. It is difficult to explain even now — I feared and hated him, and meant him harm, yet I had to visit.

I rose, walked down to the Thames and swam, and helped two boys from the Priory to water horses. Then I went back to my cell and washed and put on clean clothes. I left my war horse and my donat’s coat, and I walked, dressed like a modestly prosperous apprentice or journeyman, through the streets to my uncle’s house, wearing dull colours and a hood.

As I neared it, my heart beat harder and harder, and my breathing grew shallower. I was afraid.

The door was shut, which it should never have been on a day of work.

I stood looking at it for a while.

I knocked, and there was no answer.

I was. . relieved.

I walked up the conduit to Nan’s house. I had been told never to visit her again, but on the other hand, she had probably been my closest friend.

The shield of the Order was a powerful one. I couldn’t imagine being shown the door by an Alderman of London. Not if he wanted to be buried in a church.

I didn’t call at the shop door, but went to the garden wall, as I had used to when we were courting. I think that I hoped she would lean out from her window — I know I looked at it.

Suddenly she appeared.

I think my heart stopped.

She was not the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen — not after France — but beauty is a wonderful thing, and when you decide on beauty, it never fades. Nan was. . herself. And my heart soared to see her.

The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as a man, judged me worthy of a second look and gave the slightest smile, not really flirtatious but a firm acknowledgement of me, my upright carriage and my muscles (women look at these things even when they don’t think they do) and then — remember, I had a hood and she couldn’t see my hair — something gave me away. Her eyes became fuller and deeper and her regard solidified, then she leaped to her feet, leaned out the widow, shouted, ‘William!’ and vanished.

I could hear her running down the twisting chimney stairs.

The garden gate flew open and there was her mother, who grinned.

An excellent sign.

‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ cackled her mother. ‘William Gold, you haven’t been hanged. How fares it with thee?’ And she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek.

I confess that I found the phrase ‘haven’t been hanged’ a little too close to the bone, but I laughed, and then Nan slammed into me. She’d added flesh since fourteen, and she was hardly light — her hug was as hard as a man’s — but despite some gains, I picked her up and twirled her around her father’s garden.

‘Stop that, William! I weigh ten stone, now, and you’ll hurt your back.’ She laughed. ‘I’m an old married lady with two daughters.’

Her mother put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come into the kitchen and tell us your adventures,’ she said.

So I did.

An hour on, with two cups of candian wine in me, I met Nan’s da, who came in wearing enough finery to be abroad in Avignon or Paris — wool hose in his guild’s colours, and a jupon with a long velvet gown over it, all trimmed in fur. For July in England, it was a bit much, and he started stripping off before he noticed me.

‘William Gold?’ he asked, and before I could fear his reaction, he was pumping my hand. ‘We heard you was at Poitiers with the Prince,’ he said.

They had?

‘Your sister wrote to us,’ Nan said, eyes cast down but smiling widely. ‘And again last autumn, to say you’d paid her way to be a full sister. That’s how we knew you were. .’ she looked up. ‘Prosperous.’

‘A sister of the Order!’ the Alderman said. ‘You must bathe in gold, young William. How fare ye? Are you. . a scholar?’

I laughed. ‘I’m a soldier, master. I serve a knight of the Order, myself. I’m a lay brother.’ I shrugged. ‘The ladies have already heard all my stories.’

Which is to say, I’d left out the horror, the love-making and the dirt, and told the war stories in which I seemed a hero rather than those in which I seemed a fool. Like most young men at home after war.

Master Richard rose and embraced me. ‘Be free of my house,’ he said graciously. ‘Not that my wife and daughter haven’t made you so already, I have no doubt.’

I asked what I’d waited all that time to ask. ‘How. . is my uncle?’

Master Richard made a face like a man whose drunk bad milk. ‘He still has his mark, and he does some business,’ Master Richard said. ‘Your aunt died.’

Nan’s mother spat. ‘He killed her.’

Nan looked away.

Master Richard spread his hands. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said softly.

I heard other news — how Tom Courtney was a full member of the guild, one of the youngest ever; how my sister and two other sisters had come during an outbreak of the Plague and were held to have worked miracles, and how Nan’s husband, a mercer, had fought at Winchelsea when the French came, and now was an enthusiastic member of the London bands — the militia.

‘He’ll be home in a day,’ Nan said. ‘I pray you like him.’

I smiled at all of them. ‘I’m sure that I will,’ I said.

They invited me to sup and I bowed. ‘I have a friend,’ I said. ‘My fellow donat, a Spanish gentleman. I would esteem it a favour if I might bring him.

That was easily done. There’s no merchant in London who doesn’t like having a Spanish aristocrat at his table.

Before returning to the priory, I walked up the hill to the abbey. There was Brother Bartholomew, who gave me a great embrace, and, to my shock, there was ‘monk’ John, last seen on a battlefield. He, too, gave me an embrace.

We looked at each other warily.

He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t the life for me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’m meant for God, neither, but the food’s good.’ His eyes were far away. ‘I’m not. . it wasn’t. .’ he met my gaze and his was troubled. ‘You know what a life it was.’

I laughed — not a laugh of fun, but a laugh that understood. ‘John, I’m a lay brother of the Order of Saint John.’

His own roar of laughter probably said more about us and our lives than any speech, but he hugged me more warmly than before.

They took me to the old Abbott, who was no longer serving, but mostly sat in the cloister and read.

For a long moment, I feared he wouldn’t know me.

‘I’m Will Gold, Father,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. His hands, old as bones, came up and clasped mine. ‘God love us, child, you came back.’

Dinner with Nan was a delight. We shared a cup of wine while Juan entertained her parents with stories of Spain.

We met by chance in the passage by the stairs — me going to the jakes and she returning from the pantry. She leaned over and kissed me very hard, then shifted herself down the passage, as light on her feet as ever.

Later, at the door, her mother bussed me on each cheek and said, ‘Now you come back when you are in London, but not so often that you make Nan see stars. You hear me, Will Gold? Your manners are pretty and your friend’s a gentleman born; see you act one, too. Do I have to speak more clearly, young man?’

Nan sputtered. ‘Mother!’

‘Mother nothing, girl. I’m flesh and blood like you. I have eyes.’ She glared at us and then smiled. ‘Be off with you. I’ll go inside — for as long as it takes me to say a paternoster for you.’

I kissed Nan — the sort of kiss that lingers between what might be considered friendship and what might be considered lechery. She smiled at the ground, twined her fingers with me briefly and went back inside.

I decided I didn’t really want to meet her husband.

Juan and I walked through the darkening streets to the priory. He looked at me in the light of some cressets and said, ‘They are good, worthy people.’

I nodded, suddenly devastated to realize what I might have had.

The way I tell this, it may seem to you that I was almost hanged for my misdeeds, and then I was rescued, and like the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus, my life of sin was over. But I tell you, gentles, my heart varied between black and white, hope and despair. If you have comitted sins — bad sins, not the venal ones the priests rant about — and you spend time with good people, whether people like Fra Peter or people like Nan’s mother, you have to look at yourself. These good people are mirrors, and unless you are a liar and a caitiff, you see. Every day I saw. Some days — many days, if I wasn’t given exercise and hard work, like a troublesome colt — I considered slinking away.

Every day.

Bah! Never mind. But I tell this like it was ordained, and the truth is that I was still unsure. Still ready to bolt.

The next day I went to the Bardi factor in London and drew a little money. I bought the Abbott a pair of reading glasses — the Venetians made them. I’d seen them in France, and in Avignon everyone had them.

I bought Nan a brooch of pearls. I walked to the gate at sunset and pinned it to a ribbon, which I hung on the latch. Then I knocked and walked away.

Our last day in England, Juan and I rode the horses out to Southwark and prepared them for the ship, then I rented a hack and rode to the nunnery to visit my sister.

As a donat, I was allowed to meet her in the parlour, and she was so happy to see me, so happy that, in her eyes, I’d turned to God, that mostly all she did was cry. And yet, to my delight, when her eyes were dry, I saw that she had become one of those tough-minded nuns who gets things done. We fell into each other’s arms. I have seldom sobbed tears while grinning like a loon, but there I was.

She told me a few of her adventures — this brought on by my remembering Nan and her mother to her — and she grinned like a man.

‘Aye, the Plague, brother,’ she said. ‘My foe and Satan’s tool.’ She tossed her shoulders back. ‘I don’t understand the ways of men, and war, and yet, when I understand that there is Plague among the whores in Southwark, and my sisters and I pack to go to their aid, I feel something, and I wonder if it is the same thing you feel when you hear the trumpets.’

Courage comes in a number of forms. Going to a place with Plague — of your own free will?

But to gain a little benison in her eyes, I told her of the days when Sam and all my men had Plague, and Richard, too.

‘And you tended them?’ she asked.

‘What else could I do?’ I answered.

She kissed me. ‘God loves you, William Gold.’ She grinned, and for a moment she had a little imp in the corner of her mouth, as she sometimes did when we were children. ‘And so do I. Listen, brother, you paid my bride price, and I can never repay you, but I pray for you each day. And I fear you need it. You live with war. It is all around you, and a man who stands on a dunghill gets shit on his feet.’

She put a hand on my arm — I’d started to hear her swear.

‘I live more in the world than most married women,’ she said. ‘I try to heal the sick, with God’s help, and I see the shit every day.’ She paused. ‘Need you go back to war, brother?’

I had thought all these things, so I looked at the polished floor and said, ‘I’m a soldier, sister. I hope to be a knight.’

She hugged me tight. ‘Go with God, then. Write to me sometimes, when you aren’t too busy.’

I was the one who wept, then. To see her. . solid. Not just solid in her faith, but with humour, toughness and understanding. And love. She was better than me.

But it had all been for something. After I saw her, I think I saw myself differently. Again, it was no road to Damascus, but I think it was a road, and I could follow it to knighthood.

England had two more surprises in store for me.

Fra Peter was called to the tower to speak to the Chancellor of England — probably about the crusade — and Juan and I were left cooling our heels in Southwark for two additional days. Where ships called and where whores leaned out from inn balconies and called suggestions after you.

‘Hello, Red! You could be riding me in comfort on a feather bed before the bell rings?’ I remember that, because the lass was big enough to ride.

They could make me blush. It wasn’t like France or Avignon. Whores in London have rights, and they are. . English. At any rate, we tried hard not to commit various sins, although our attempts at abstinence were not cloistered, and we tempted ourselves constantly, all but patrolling the main thoroughfare. Ah, youth.

At any rate, we stopped to drink in the King’s Head. It was full of royal household men coming back from a royal hunting trip and debating money matters. There were two dozen royal archers and some squires.

I saw Sam Bibbo in the same moment he saw me.

And over his shoulder I saw Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer was a royal squire, or like enough. He sneered at me from a distance, but I could tell that he was interested to see me there, and eventually — the inn wasn’t that big — we came together. I was chatting to Bibbo.

I smiled at Chaucer, showing all my teeth. He’d helped with my sister after all, so I was prepared to let bygones go by.

He didn’t offer a hand. ‘You’re back,’ he said.

‘And away again,’ I allowed.

He looked at Juan, who was a quick study and had picked up my hesitation.

Juan bowed, gloved hand to his chest.

Chaucer returned his bow. ‘Spanish?’ he asked.

Juan smiled. ‘I am from Castile,’ he said.

Chaucer smiled. ‘Ah, it is warmer there, signor. And the towns are beautiful and the people the most courteous in the world.’

‘You know Castile?’ Juan asked, delighted.

‘I know that water can be more precious than wine, there,’ Chaucer said. Then he turned back to me. ‘We heard you were dead,’ he said. ‘Betrayed to your death by Richard Musard.’

I shrugged. The world of soldiers and arms isn’t that big.

‘Musard stabbed you in the back?’ he asked. ‘I’m surprised. I thought better of him. Even if you are a far cry from a gentil and perfect knight, you were his best comrade.’

This man always spoke faster than I. He made my head spin, asked hard questions and danced away like a swordsman demonstrating his skills. I wasn’t sure myself what I thought of Richard’s betrayal, but in that moment I found that I wasn’t ready to be shot of him. I took a deep breath. I said. ‘Richard was a friend.’ I met Chaucer’s eyes. ‘There was a woman involved.’

Chaucer barked his laugh. He had grown — he was no longer a wiry boy but a man. ‘A woman? Between you and Musard? By the saviour, monsieur, there was a time when I thought the two of you closer than men and women.’ He laughed his nasty courtier’s laugh, but then he looked at me and shook his head. ‘Your pardon, Gold. My mouth runs before me, sometimes.’

‘You haven’t changed,’ I said. ‘But par dieu, Master Chaucer, it is the first time I have ever heard you admit it.’

Juan looked at me and then at Master Chaucer, as if gauging the likelihood of violence. I took a step back. ‘Never mind, Master Chaucer. Perhaps I have only myself to blame, at that. I’m going back to Avignon with Fra Peter.’

‘Mortimer?’ Chaucer nodded. ‘I understand he’s going to Italy.’

‘Italy?’ I was thunderstruck.

‘Italy?’ Juan said, obviously delighted.

‘Italy?’ asked Sam Bibbo. He’d listened to every word without comment.

Sam Bibbo told me that evening he’d like to go to Italy. He said it would take him a week to tie up his affairs and leave the royal guard, so we sailed for Calais without him, but by the time we’d arranged to travel with an English pack train bound for the fair at Champagne, he arrived, with two horses, his weapons and armour.

Our first night on the road, after I’d introduced him to Fra Peter, we sat on our saddles, both of us sewing. I might have stepped back five years.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You were royal archer?’

He shrugged. ‘I took a wife,’ he said. ‘She died in childbirth. All my friends are dead, or in the companies. I don’t have a trade.’ His steady eyes met mine in the firelight. ‘Three weeks ago, we drove stags and hinds for the King and his court, and a dozen ambassadors. Thirty hours in the saddle and on foot, moving animals; guiding nobles decked out like merchants to their shooting stands; or frightening the beasts along the woods. Driving ’em to their deaths.’ He looked at the fire. ‘Half the lads hadn’t been at Poitiers or any other fight. Archers are yeoman’s sons, now, or better. It’s not the way it was.’ He looked away. ‘Like as not it’s all in my head. Mayhap I was away too long.’ He sewed a dozen stitches and looked up. ‘No one to talk to, neither. Neighbours all think I’m some sort of freak. Or a dangerous killer.’

That was a hell of a long speech for Sam Bibbo.

The next night, he said, ‘You taken religion, young William?’

I sat back. Had I?

He went on, ‘I mean to join one of the companies. If you are going to Avignon with the Knight, we’ll part at some point.’ He was embarrassed. He made a face. ‘Rather go with you.’

I leaned back. ‘Sir John Hawkwood invited me to join him,’ he said. ‘He told me to raise ten lances.’ I shook my head. ‘But I’m bound for the crusade, Sam. And I will not be foresworn.’

Sam tugged at his grey beard. ‘Huh,’ he said, and that was it for a day or two.

The ride back to Avignon was harder than the ride north, for a dozen reasons. The countryside seemed more dangerous — we were attacked east of Paris by men so desperate and skinny they seemed like another species. We had to trade watches at night. Sam was a vital addition, and I could see him and Fra Peter growing, if not closer, at least to some sort of arrangement.

We were in the Auxerre, less than a day’s travel from the tree where I’d almost been hanged, when Sam spoke up while we sat chewing rabbit.

‘Sir Knight, a bird in England told me you was bound for Italy. Is it true?’ he asked.

Juan sat up straight.

‘Perhaps,’ Fra Peter said slowly. He looked at his wooden bowl.

‘Why would a Knight of St John be in Italy?’ I asked. To me, it sounded like walking into a Southwark brothel — a little too much temptation.

‘Italy is. . at the centre.’ Fra Peter shrugged. ‘Of a number of things.’

Juan hardly ever spoke up. He was often silent, his lively eyes darting about, and when I had him alone, sometimes he’d boil over with questions, asking me ten or twenty things at once. But that night, his curiosity — and his pent-up desire to fight, like any normal boy — burst forth.

‘What things?’ he asked. ‘Why? Why Italy? Because of Rome? he war with Milan?’

It was as if he had just discovered the power of speech. We were all silent after his outburst, and then we all laughed, even Fra Peter.

‘Where do I begin?’ he asked. ‘I suppose it is about history, and about money.’

‘Money?’ asked the Spaniard. ‘How can a crusade be about money?’

More laughter. Is anything more amusing than a seventeen-year-old?

Fra Peter sighed. ‘Do you know what it is to be a Knight of St John?’ he asked quietly. ‘We are supposed to heal the sick and fight to defend the Holy Sepulchre, but Jerusalem was lost before I was born and I’ve never even worked in the hospital.’ He glanced at Juan and rocked his head from side to side. ‘I may be for Italy, yes. King Edward asked me to take a message to your Hawkwood. He made it clear that in doing this, I would be helping the cause of the crusade.’

He sat back and looked up. The stars were just coming out.

‘At the same time, the Pope, head of the church, is also a worldly seigneur with temporal power and temporal lands that must be defended, in Provence and in Italy. The Pope is at war with Milan. The routiers prey on the Pope, and the Pope seeks to send them to fight Milan and the infidel. The Pope ordered me and my brothers to spearhead this effort.’ He shrugged. ‘The Pope has an army, and the commander of that army is another of my brothers, who needs more knights to support his efforts to cleanse Provence of the routiers by force of arms. And in the east, more of us hold the island of Rhodes, and there we fight the Turks. Except that we don’t always fight them — sometimes we temporize or negotiate. Does Christ care whether you make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem through Christian lands or Moslem lands, so long as you go?’ He shrugged. ‘I have heard Venetians say that the sultans rule Jerusalem better than the Franks ever did.’

‘And the money?’ Juan went on.

‘Do you know what it costs to maintain Smyrna and Rhodes? Perhaps a hundred thousand florins a year, to maintain four hundred knights and six galleys. A crusade? If we want to have ten thousand men for a year,’ — he laughed — ‘three hundred thousand florins of gold, and that’s before we feed a man or a horse, or ship them to the Holy Land.’

Juan stared, eyes wide. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ he said. ‘Is there so much money in the world?’

Sam nodded. ‘So, you’ll go to Italy after you visit Avignon,’ he said.

Fra Peter spread his hands to the fire. The first hint of autumn was in the air. ‘Master Bibbo,’ he said, ‘I can’t predict where I will go next any better than a leaf on the wind. A year ago I thought that we were about to see the greatest crusade since good King Richard marched, but now, I’m sorry to say, I can’t guess when the King of England will go, or even send his son.’ He frowned. ‘I’m maudlin. So I’ll confess to you that I’m not convinced that a great crusade would be the best way to deal with the infidel. But to fail to have a crusade would itself be a blow.’ He lay back. ‘Enough lessons. When I am on the road, like this, eating rabbits under the stars. .’ His eyes met mine. ‘It’s not a bad life.’ He lay, looking at the wheel of heaven. ‘I’ll likely go to Savoy first. And then Italy. You’ll like Italy.’

Bibbo groused about our pace, but he stayed with us until Avignon. Messire Doffo Bardi was gone back to Florence, but his suddenly self-important nephew informed me that I had a balance of 855 florins, a small fortune. As we had come all the way south with some English and Dutch merchants, I went to the book market, bought a small and fairly undecorated copy of Galen, the old Roman doctor, with some receipts in Greek, and sent it to my sister in the care of the English merchants, with a note for her and another for Nan.

The harness I had ordered in the spring was complete.

I was so excited by this that somehow it took me three days to go and see it.

Young Fiore had been back from Nuremberg for two weeks when we came.

‘I fought a duel!’ he said by way of a greeting.

I laughed. I hadn’t fought anyone in five months. Well, I had played at sword and buckler in London with Juan, more for old times’ sake than anything. Juan and I had adjusted the English game to our longswords, and we would take turns cutting and thrusting at a buckler held by the other.

It turned out that the German master in Nuremberg had been less than enthusiastic about having a foreign pupil who was critical of each thing he taught; they’d fought, and Fiore had left him bleeding and had to flee the wrath of his students.

‘They should thank me,’ Fiore said with the sort of arrogance that always marked him.

‘Perhaps they loved the man,’ I said.

He grimaced. ‘He may have been a fine man,’ Fiore said, ‘but he was the merest inventor of tricks, as a swordsman.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘And so many pious mouthings and mysterious sayings.’ He drank wine, and his eyes met mine. ‘A charlatan.’

‘You learned nothing from him? I asked.

‘Oh, as to that,’ Fiore grinned. ‘I learned a number of things.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘He had a theory — he divided all fighting into two parts.’ He shrugged. ‘I will never think of a fight in quite the same way again.’

Juan leaned over and poured more wine. ‘Then, pardon me, Fiore, but he was no charlatan.’

Fiore sat back, ignored a magnificent pair of breasts passing at eye level and shook his head. ‘He knew a great deal,’ he said dismissively, ‘but he couldn’t sort his knowledge from his ignorance. Like a priest who preaches the true word of God and heresy by turns.’

Juan raised an eyebrow, turned to watch the beautiful girl pass off into the rough crowd of servants and soldiers by the wine barrels, and looked at me with one eyebrow faintly raised.

I agreed with Juan. I agreed about the girl, agreed about Fiore’s failure to react to the girl, agreed about Fiore’s arrogance.

All that in a glance.

But here’s the thing. Fiore was the real thing. Fiore is to fighting what a Dominican is to religion.

The armour fit well. Some of it was perfect, and some could have used another fitting before I left. The helmet was fine; the breast and backplates were Milanese work, altered to fit me. The arms were perfect, and the legs were a little large. But the whole sparkled in the sun, and I felt like a new man. I had not been so well armed since the morning after Poitiers.

I paid in gold florins.

I don’t know how long we were in Avignon — it was such a pleasant time, and such time passes swiftly. Juan, Fiore and I were inseparable, and we went to church, prayed, drank, played chess, rode about the countryside, practiced at arms, and debated the world. Fiore was a well-read man, and my trip to the book market for my sister had reawakened my spark. I bought a gloss on Aquinas and a small copy of Cicero’s letters in Latin — a new discovery from the ancient world that somehow seemed exciting to me, and the more I read, the more I wanted.

Fra Peter was busy all the time, and once his horse was curried and fed, Juan and I had no other tasks. I had money, and I spent it.

I think my favourite memory is waking in a cottage under the walls — a pretty place I’d heard of from a priest in the curia and rented for a few days. I woke with Anne under my hip, and we made love, then I lay with my head on her tummy and read Cicero to her.

‘Are you going to be a priest?’ she asked, and laughed.

Juan had a girl, as well, and the two of them, Anne, myself and Fiore went for a picnic in the late summer hills. Fiore never seemed to have a girl. Nor did he have a boy — he was above such things. He was a priest of the sword.

Very well! I’m boring you by remembering that some times were good times. Ingrates! I’ll go back to war and death.

At some point — a week or two after we returned — Fra Peter had us to dinner at the preceptory, in the hall. The invitation seemed to extend to all the donats — there were forty of us by then — and to the mercenary men-at-arms who had been serving the order in the papal army. Serving the order directly, that is, paid by the prior.

We received the Prior of Avignon’s thanks for our services — in the field and, specifically, on the embassage to England, which was more thanks than I ever received from the Prince of Wales. Let me tell you this of the Order. It could be venal, and it could be petty, and par dieu, it could bog itself down in petty politics and bureaucracy, but men were praised by their leaders and rewarded at every chapter meeting and every evening at prayer. This instant reward of even minor virtue taught me a great deal, and soothed my soul, as well. A man may change — and be rewarded for that change.

But the Order also existed in the world of sin and death.

Over wine, Fra Peter told us that he would be going to Italy, and that the crusade was delayed at least a year, and perhaps two.

‘I feared this,’ he said. ‘The King of Cyprus is on his way. He should be the leader of the crusade — he knows the enemy and the conditions — but the Pope has offered the command to the King of France. And there is more corruption involved than you’d find in the corpse of a week-old Plague victim. The crown of France and its dependents have an old claim to the crown of Cyprus. .’ Here Fra Peter showed more anger than I’d ever seen in him. ‘Talleyrand is using his influence to block the true King of Cyprus from coming here — to keep Father Pierre Thomas from exercising his authority.’ He sat back suddenly. ‘Merely in an attempt to get his own family some land grants in the east. In truth, young masters, it is not the Turks who will defeat Christendom. We will defeat ourselves — through greed. Routiers and cardinals. They deserve each other.’ He shrugged. ‘But I am not being a good knight. My lord, Father Pierre Thomas, will be going across the Alps to speak to the Count of Savoy, and I am to escort him.’ He looked at Juan, and then at me. ‘The Pope has great hopes that the Green Count will go on crusade.’

While I understand now what was at stake, at the time I was twenty-one years old and the shock of near death and betrayal had worn off. I had some new ideas of knighthood — and I had better armour.

I wanted some adventure.

The idea that the crusade was delayed for as much as two years dismayed me utterly. ‘What are we supposed to do?’ I asked.

Fra Peter was looking at the table. The Prior fingered his beard and looked elsewhere. The other knights present, including di Heredia, smiled silently into their wine.

The truth was evident at that table. The knights had been building up their strength — adding brother knights, donats and mercenary men-at-arms. Those men had stood the Pope in good stead when the routiers threatened Avignon, but now, with the Pope waffling on the idea of the crusade, the order was going to cut its losses. Men-at-arms were easy to find. Even donats — volunteers — cost money.

Di Heredia looked down the table at me. ‘You gentlemen are to be released from your obligation until the crusade becomes. .’ he looked apologetic. ‘Ahem. More. . likely.’ He looked wistful. ‘And thus the Order loses the best fighting men I’ve had under me in many years.’

The Prior leaned forward down the table. ‘Of course, you are all sworn to the crusade. When Father Pierre Thomas summons you, we expect you to come!’

Juan and I murmured with the other donats and men-at-arms.

I might have revolted. I was not so tied to my new life that having the Order spit me forth might have caused me to go back to my former life. I have seen it happen to other men.

I lay in my bed the next morning — not lifting stones, not wearing my new harness — but thinking to myself, like a routier, that the church had cozened me of 1,000 ducats and was now letting me go.

When Fra Peter knocked on the door of my little cell, I sprang up. I knew his footsteps. I flung back the oak door, and he was there — plain brown gown, eight-pointed cross and a smile.

‘Master Gold,’ he said. ‘You and Juan are to stay on and help me escort Father Pierre Thomas to Savoy, and if required, beyond.’

‘To Italy!’ I said.

He raised one eyebrow. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

In fact, it was typical of the complete chaos of the time that having just released almost 100 excellent men-at-arms that they had paid and trained for two years, the Priory of Avignon now needed to hire a dozen men-at-arms on short notice.

Fra Peter wasted a day chasing down a pair of our Germans who were, we heard, just a day’s ride away.

That afternoon, after I’d cleaned and oiled my new harness, which was in no need of care at all, I went to find Juan and we went out into the sunshine. I needed money — that’s what I remember.

Instead, I found Sam Bibbo with a pair of mounted men in patchwork harness. I remember thinking, Is that what I looked like? They were under guard by four papal officers, and they were riding very slowly.

Sam waved, spoke to the guardsmen and came up the street to me. In a moment, I was embracing John Courtney and William Grice. They were headed for Italy, but had come south from Pont-Saint-Esprit because they’d heard I was alive. At the gate — where they’d have been disarmed — they heard there was escort work at the Temple, and they gathered their city escort and came looking for me. I hadn’t seen them since the morning of Brignais, or a day before.

They were two men-at-arms among six travelling together. They’d fought in Brittany and in Burgundy, and they wanted better work.

William Grice met my eye. ‘It’s hell,’ he said. ‘Sweet Christ, Will Gold, you look like St Michael.’

‘Please do not blaspheme,’ Juan said.

Grice put a hand on his sword hilt and looked at me.

‘This isn’t hell,’ I said. ‘We don’t swear.’

Courtney laughed. ‘He is St Michael.’

That evening, after some wine and some stories, I sat down with Fra Peter. ‘I’ve found four men-at-arms interested in taking service in Italy,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Your own men.’ he said. ‘Your other life.’

‘I. . still want to be a knight. A real knight.’ I found the words difficult to say. ‘I know these men. Hard men, but true.’

He drew a breath and let it out slowly, then turned to face me. ‘Very well. My Germans have already gone — over the mountains to join Sterz in Italy. I’ll hire your routiers.’

We left Avignon under Fra Peter’s command. We were a fine company — John Courtney and William Grice, de la Motte, Fiore, young Juan, Sam Bibbo and I. I paid careful attention to how Fra Peter led these men, who had been my men. Unlike Juan, he didn’t seem to dwell on details, like swearing. Instead, he led by example, repairing his own tack and cooking. When William Grice proved to have a nasty abcess on an old wound, Fra Peter took us to an inn and spent two days there, draining it, filling it with honey and draining it again. He was an expert physician, but then, most members of the Hospital were.

Courtney muttered about being in the company of saints for a few days, and finally desisted. He made a great show of buying a whore in the inn, but this was wasted on Fra Peter.

Then Father Pierre Thomas joined us, and there was no more blasphemy. I had scarcely seen Father Pierre Thomas since my first days in Avignon. He had drawn another escort and ridden into Burgundy, trying to raise funds for his crusade. Now he went to Savoy on the same mission. He ate with us every night, whether we stopped in inns or hostels or made camp in the woods.

As the high ground east of Avignon rose towards Italy into the true Piedmont, we found fewer houses, and those we saw, we distrusted. The companies had been here, and they had despoiled both sides of the main market road for a league or more. Farms were burned, and towns gutted.

But the companies were not alone at fault. There were huge Plague cemeteries. Churches collapsed from lack of care. The third night, we camped in deep woods on the flank of a great ridge, and the air had the cold bite that portended winter. I was the scout, and I found a spring on the hillside with a ruined chapel above it. We used a pavilion roof and blankets from our pack mules to roof what had been a Mary chapel, and we were snug and warm when the freezing rain struck. It seemed blasphemous to light a fire by an altar, but the church was stripped to the walls, and only the remnants of some brightly coloured frescos suggested the place had ever known human hands.

I had been on scouting duty, which relieved me of camp chores, so I sat down with an oily linen rag and began to clean my harness.

Fra Peter sat heavily by me. ‘Good camp,’ he said. ‘Well chosen.’

I caught Will Grice’s eye. He smiled. But he saw me polishing away at my corselet and he laid his own out on the floor, got some ash on a piece of rag and began to hit the worst spots. ‘Easier on a nice bit of stone floor, eh?’ he asked me. He glanced at Fra Peter. ‘He treats you like a squire.’

‘I am a squire,’ I said. I remember that, because it settled something.

When I had my blade oiled — a day in the rain will work through the best scabbard in Christendom — I looked at the fire and found that our living saint, the papal legate to the east, was cooking.

I shot to my feet.

He pointed a wooden spoon at me. ‘Leave me be,’ he said. ‘I was a peasant boy cooking with my mother before I was the Pope’s friend.’

He made a beautiful bean soup. I have to say, he needed no cooking lessons from me.

That night, he told us all something of his life — how he had been born to serfs, how his parish priest had sent him to be educated by the Franciscans, and how he had risen in the Order, gone to the University at Paris, and become the voice of reform in the church, although he didn’t put it that way.

He was so easy to talk to, that Juan spoke up. ‘Father?’ he asked. ‘Is it right that the church has so much wealth?’

Every head turned. Grice and Courtney, playing dice, ceased. Sam Bibbo put down the bowstring he was making.

Father Pierre Thomas shrugged. ‘There is no easy answer,’ he said. ‘Our church is composed entirely of sinners — do you know that?’ He laughed. ‘Not a single sinless man amongst us since Jesus. Men are venal and greedy. Proud. In fact, men commit sins every day, and men of the church are no different. But the sins do not make the words of Christ less important.’ He rocked his head back and forth. ‘I have avoided your question — your true question — like a true man of law. Here it is, then. The church needs money, because the church must have money to face Islam, to save Constantinople, to feed the poor, to guide and protect pilgrims, and to build hospitals, schools and orphanages. It needs this money. But I do not say that the church uses the money this way.’ He looked away. ‘And that should make every Christian angry.’

The next day, Grice dismounted to get something out of his horse’s hoof. We were on a narrow trail, going almost straight up, or so it seemed to me. I was the last man, covering the rear against bandits.

Grice looked back at me and waved. When I came up, I expected some teasing. Instead, he said, ‘Never met one like him. The priest.’

I nodded.

‘If they was like him, the world would be a better place,’ Grice continued.

‘He saved my life,’ I said.

Grice nodded, as if something complex had been explained. ‘Ah!’ he said.

We practised every day the weather allowed. I remember Fiore unhorsing me with one of his infernal tricks in a meadow so high that it seemed I’d fall to my death. Instead, I just hurt my hip and cursed the Friulian for two days while it healed. But I was a better lance and a better blade, and I could now hit Fiore occasionally. More than that, I could go a long time not being hit myself. We practised odd things, too — one man against two or three, on horse and foot. Cuts with sharp swords; covers and parries. Facing a lance with a sword.

Sometimes we were merely playing. It’s something I have seen with troubadours and musicians. They will simply play an instrument, making odd sounds, slapping the sound board or thrumming the strings to see what new thing they can find. Thanks to Fiore, I saw weapons in a new way.

De la Motte took to the whole thing immediately, grinning as Fiore hit him in the head without any apparent effort. He grunted.

‘Perhaps we could be a travelling sword school,’ he said. ‘I’ll be the fool who makes the crowd laugh and throw pennies.’

Perhaps I tell this badly. It was a fine trip.

The Green Count was holding his court at Turin. He had a fine castle there and we were expected. I had had days to consider what it would be like to see Richard Musard. Days to consider his betrayal, or simply his inaction. Days to think what he must have thought of me.

The last night, in another ruined chapel, I knelt before Father Pierre Thomas and said my confession. When we were done, I placed my hands in his. ‘Father, I need your. . advice,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I know absolutely nothing of how to use a sword.’ His delivery was perfect, and we both laughed. ‘But I am at your service, my son. What advice?’

‘You will, I think, remember how you found me?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘A sinner. About to go to hell unshriven.’

I nodded. It was succinct and damningly accurate. ‘Yes, Father,’ I said. ‘Do you remember what led me to that place?’

‘A life of violence?’ he said gently.

‘Yes, Father. But. .’ I began to tell him of Richard Musard.

He raised a hand. ‘You love this man?’ he asked.

I paused for perhaps ten beats of my heart. ‘Yes, Father. He is — was — my closest friend.’

Father Pierre Thomas shrugged. Around us was the ancient chapel. Above Father Pierre Thomas’s head, an image of the lamb flickered in the firelight, and the Archangel Michael’s sword seemed to move. ‘Then that is all there is,’ he said. ‘What are this man’s sins to you? You see to your own. He betrayed you? Perhaps, and perhaps not, but our Lord was quite firm on what you should do: turn the other cheek.’

I hesitated.

Father Pierre Thomas laughed. ‘It is sometimes as if we have two religions; two versions of Christianity. One for the knights and one for the rest of us. Listen, my son. There is but one way. Jesus did not tell me to turn the other cheek and you to fight.’

I confess I smiled, too.

He was a good priest, but I’m not sure he would have done well commanding routiers. And yet. . sometimes I wonder if he might not have converted them all. He was not like other men.

We arrived at Turin. The Green Count was one of the richest nobles in Christendom, and we were escorted by his uniformed sergeants to an inn and housed like kings. The inn itself was prettier than many great houses in England, despite the mountains and the vast, grim fortress and the bad roads. We had blue ceilings, gilt stars, frescos and coats of arms everywhere.

And baths. Par dieu, there were bath houses, with vats of piping hot water, pools of icy cold water and giggling girls in thin linen shifts with towels. I tell you, messieurs, that the infldel promise their warriors a paradise populated by virgins, which has never seemed so attractive to me. But a paradise full of bath houses. .

At any rate, we were clean, and as neat as an army of loaned servants could make us. The Court of Savoy kept great ceremony, and the Count was as eager for us to appear magnificent as we were ourselves — all of us except Father Piere, who didn’t seem interested in any of it.

Still, I went and waited on him as his own squire when he put on his bishop’s robes, and before my eyes, the son of a peasant turned into a great lord of the church. Only the slight twinkle in his eye revealed that he held some secret amusement at his rank. I was learning about irony from Cicero — still in my baggage with Ramon Llull. I think that Father Pierre viewed his own promotion to legate with irony.

I was resplendent in my red surcoat over spotless armour. By chance, my white cross on my red surcoat was the same device the Savoyards wore. Fra Peter wore his white cross on black.

We filled the courtyard of the inn, seeing to last-minute buckles; William Grice’s swordbelt had broken, so there I was, my breath steaming in the cold winter air, snow falling and my fingers red, sewing like mad despite my finery and my harness. Grice was mortified — first, to be so shabby, and second, to be holding everyone up.

The Green Count’s escort arrived.

And, of course, it was commanded by Richard Musard.

I knew him instantly. I’d thought it through ten times since confessing, but I didn’t do any of the things I had so carefully planned, because I had a needle in my mouth and an awl in my hand.

I met his eye. He had a basinet on, but his visor was strapped up. He wore a beautiful harness and his surcoat had a coat of arms. He wore a fancy silver collar over the surcoat. His dark skin contrasted beautifully with his steel-silver helmet. He looked like a military saint in a painting.

His eye went right over me — about six times. I tried to watch him while I sewed Grice’s sword belt, and I suspect I both cursed and blasphemed, but I got the belt patched and began to replace my heavy needle in my precious needle case.

And there he was. His horse’s head was in my chest.

I looked up and grinned. ‘Hello, Richard,’ I said.

I’d say fifty emotions passed over his face. His eyes widened.

He turned his horse when one of his men-at-arms called, ‘Sir Richard!’ and he rode away. He flicked a backward glance at me and I got to see that he had golden spurs.

I breathed carefully and tested my new-found resolutions about. . everything.

‘Mount up,’ I said.

It was a difficult evening. The Green Count himself — Amadeus of Savoy — was the soul of courtesy to Father Pierre Thomas, but he ignored the rest of us as if we didn’t exist. There were fine ladies and gallant gentlemen. Fiore’s instruction had not included dancing, and I was only a squire, so I watched. I served Fra Peter at table, and was content.

It may seem odd that a man who had commanded, who had led men in battle, could stand at the side of the hall and carve roast swan, but there it is.

About midnight, we all trooped out of the Great Hall to hear Mass. There was snow falling and it was very cold. Fra Peter was given high precedence — after all, the Order was pre-eminent in the Christian world — and I was just a squire. I trailed along with the squires.

I stopped at the holy water font by the door and took some, and Richard grabbed my arm.

I bowed.

He just looked at my face. He did so for long enough that other men clearly thought we were about to fight. A savoyard stepped between us. ‘Messieurs!’ he hissed. ‘This is a place of God!’

Richard stuck by me.

Mass seemed to go on for ever. There was no way we could speak. Father Pierre Thomas consecrated the host with the local chaplain. Count Amadeus refused to take the host from Father Pierre Thomas, and I knew in a moment that our embassy, whatever it had been, had failed.

Fra Peter caught my eye and gave me a sign that said, ‘Get ready to move.’

When Mass ended, the courtiers went for the great hall. A very pretty woman dropped me a splendid curtsey. ‘Do you dance?’ she asked.

‘I do not,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Why are all the handsome men in orders?’ she asked, and flounced away before I could disabuse her notion.

Richard was by me, and he said, ‘You really are William Gold.’

I grinned and tried to embrace him.

He backed away. ‘You are alive?’ he said — three times. And his face was a study in conflict.

‘William!’ Fra Peter said. I turned and saw that he had Juan with him.

I turned to Richard. ‘You are a knight,’ I said. ‘I congratulate you.’

‘You are alive,’ he breathed.

‘Richard,’ I said. ‘It is all right.’

‘William! Now!’ Fra Peter called. I made a sketchy bow to Richard Musard and ran for my knight.

We gathered our men-at-arms in a hurry and got our horses. Fra Peter was tight-lipped, and Father Pierre Thomas looked as if he’d been struck.

‘Get some sleep,’ Fra Peter said. ‘We ride at dawn.’

‘Before the Green Count does something we’ll regret,’ Father Pierre Thomas said.

We did ride at dawn, but after two hours on the road, when we reached the turning point where the alpine passes stretch away to the east and the road runs down to the west into Provence and Avignon, Father Pierre Thomas had a brief conference with Fra Peter. He smiled at me, gave each of us a blessing, which all of us needed, and rode away west with only the men-at-arms he’d brought a week before.

Fra Peter watched him go, a rare look of indecision on his face.

‘What happened?’ I made bold to ask.

‘The last hope for the crusade just behaved like an arrogant child,’ Fra Peter said. hen he took a deep breath. ‘William, please forget I said that. Father Pierre Thomas has to go straight to the Pope. I am going to John Hawkwood.’

We arrived at Romagnano in late October — probably as late as we could come before the high passes closed.

It was like coming home. Yet a different kind of home — new men, new whores, new children. The whole town was ours — that is, it was the property of the English Company. I rode through the streets, suddenly conscious of how I looked. I had been on the road for four weeks, and I was cleaner and neater than most of the men-at-arms I passed.

I saw more and more men I knew as I passed into the heart of the town, where the taverns were. I saw Andrew Belmont — he hadn’t been at Brignais, but he had been at Poitiers. I saw John Thornbury, and he shocked me by running along the cobbled street and throwing his arms around me.

He pounded my back, despite my armour. ‘Will Gold!’ he said. ‘By the good God, Will Gold! We heard you was dead!’

He bowed to Fra Peter. ‘My lord. Pardon we poor Englishmen.’

Fra Peter extended a hand. ‘I, too, am a poor Englishman. Poorer than you, I’ll wager.’

Thornbury cast an eye over our ten lances. He grinned at Sam Bibbo, and reached to clasp hands with Bill Grice.

‘Tell me these men are for us,’ he said.

I probably had a grin as big as my face. ‘Sir John said bring ten lances,’ I said.

There was a whoop of epic proportions from a second-floor window, and John Hughes jumped from a narrow balcony into the streets. Alpine towns are high and narrow and clean, a perfect contract of white plaster and blackened beams. Town houses have high, narrow windows, but John Hughes got through the window, onto the balcony and down to the street faster than you can tell it. He pulled Sam Bibbo down from his horse.

Sam was grinning like a fool, but he said, ‘Now, John, I ain’t your girl. Put me down, you gowp.’

I was still mounted, but I looked down to find a neat young man, only a little shorter than my horse, holding my bridle. It took me a breath or two to realize this was Perkin. Master Smallwood, as I understood everyone called him now. He was dressed soberly, in black, and he looked. . like a man.

I dismounted and we embraced.

‘I. .’ He hung his head. ‘I heard you was alive, but until a month ago we all thought you was dead.’

And then there were all my old mates: Robert Grandice, not seen in a year; Belier, looking like a man-at-arms; even the two wild Irishmen, Seamus and Kenneth, who I hadn’t seen in three years. They no longer looked Irish, except for their facial hair. They had doublets and hose like civilized men.

I almost had my ribs crushed by Kenneth, who was bigger than me — few men are — and kept saying, ‘Been too long!’

Then, while I was introducing men to Fra Peter, Sir John came down from his commanderie. He looked wealthy — his clothes were the best in the street, and that said something. He had gold on — a gold belt of plaques, a gold earring and gold on the mount of his dagger scabbard — and he carried a short staff, like a great noble.

He and Fra Peter exchanged bows.

‘From the Pope?’ he asked straightway.

Fra Peter nodded.

Sir John nodded. ‘None too soon,’ he said. He looked at me and smiled. ‘William the cook, as I live and breathe.’ His smile broke wider. ‘These are your ten lances?’

My forty men — or Fra Peter’s, as the case may be — filled the street. Streets in Alpine towns wind like snakes, and climb and drop like — never mind. They can be steep and the houses press close. It’s like Cumbria, friends, except twice as steep, and on a cold day your iron-shod horse-hooves ring like an anvil against the cobbles as your horse climbs a street. My little column closed the town’s main street to all traffic.

So I turned. I remember my chest being tight with pride at it. ‘Yes, Sir John.’

‘Well, we’re full up at the moment.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ll have to speak to the captain about you.’

Thornbury laughed. ‘Our captain, Sir Albert Sterz.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Full up, my arse. Look at their armour, John! That’s Bill Grice, Bob Courtney and Sam Bibbo. Christ, these are proper soldiers.’

John Hawkwood met my eye and his eyes sparkled. ‘Shut up, Master Thornbury. I’m negotiating.’

We settled on thirty florins a month within an hour.

I confess I was a trifle put out when Sir John took Fra Peter to his rooms and left the rest of us to drink wine. It reminded me of Chaucer and Master Hoo.

Juan sat by me. He pushed in when I was reminiscing with Perkin — in the main, I was reassuring him and my other former mates that I held them no ill-will for riding away when I was to be hanged.

‘Please?’ Juan asked politely.

Perkin frowned at him.

‘What, Juan?’ I asked.

He frowned back at Perkin.

‘Gentlemen!’ I said, and thumped my dagger on the table.

‘Why is Fra Peter speaking to this Sir John?’ he asked.

I shrugged and drank more good Piedmontese wine. It was a little lighter and thinner than the Provencal stuff I’d been drinking, but for all that, a better flavour. The blonde lass who waggled her hips as she walked away was pleasing as well. I liked the town, and I liked the sense of. . order that I got from the men I’d seen. There was more discipline here than de Badefol had ever managed.

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But I’ll guess, if it pleases you.’

Juan nodded. He slipped a glance at Perkin, who frowned.

I remember thinking, Sweet Christ, why can’t they just get along?

‘The Pope is at war with Milan. I assume that Fra Peter brought orders for the English Company.’ I turned to Perkin. ‘How many lances?’ I asked.

‘With yours added?’ Perkin asked sweetly. ‘About two thousand.’

I spat wine. ‘Two thousand lances?’ I asked. ‘Eight thousand mounted men?’

Perkin nodded. ‘We have every village around here crammed to the rafters. We purchased food from Genoa before the winter weather came.’ He smiled. ‘We raid into Savoy when we want sport.’

‘Ever see Richard?’ I asked.

Perkin smiled a lopsided smile. ‘I hit him in the head not a week ago, but his helmet turned the blow, bad cess to it.’ He drank. ‘Fucking traitor.’

Six months with men of religion had had a certain effect on me. ‘I’m not sure that’s how he sees it,’ I said.

‘What?’ Perkin asked. There were other men sitting around — don’t imagine it was just me, Perkin and Juan, because there were sixty of us crammed in a little slope-sided auberge, trying to talk and listen and trade tales all at the same time.

I shrugged. ‘Later,’ I said.

Perkin leaned over. ‘Tell me you are staying?’ he asked.

‘Up to my knight,’ I said. ‘Fra Peter.’

Later, after another round of introductions, reminiscences and war stories, we sat in another inn, the walls crowded with the heads of dead animals, and listened to a pair of musicians play. It was richer music than I’d heard in France — Avignon may have been full of whores, but there wasn’t any music but church music — but these two were fine — a pleasure to hear — and then they sang together with a woman, and the three wove their voices together like a turkey carpet. I couldn’t understand a word they said — it was Italian.

I had just introduced Fiore to Perkin, and he began interpreting the song — gradually the other voices fell away, though, as everyone became quiet because the music was so good.

Darkness fell outside, and when I went out into the sharp night air to piss, I heard wolves. There’s a moral there, I have no doubt.

When I went back into the inn, there was a boy from Sir John. I went with him, and met the famous Albert Sterz.

Sterz was German, from Swabia, and as tall as me, if rather heavier and older. I’d seen him of course — seen him at Pont-Saint-Esprit and elsewhere — but he was a knight, and one of the commanders of the companies, and I was, well, a squire.

But he took my hand with every evidence of good will.

‘I hier you haf a fine array of lances,’ he said. I won’t weary you with my attempt to imitate his Swabian accent, but he spoke fine English.

I stammered something.

‘Your arrival couldn’t have been better timed,’ he said.

Fra Peter sat by the chimney on a stool. His face was blank.

The next morning, he had all his kit in the street at first light. I curried his horse from habit, fetched him some bread and wine from a surly girl whose night had clearly not ended early, and broke my fast with him. We prayed together, and then he went out and looked over his horse.

‘I can’t stay,’ he said. He seemed to be talking to his saddle. ‘William, these men are not. .’ He paused and took a breath. ‘You like it here?’

‘They are better than when I last saw them,’ I said. ‘Better disciplined. Better fed.’

He grimaced. ‘They’ve turned every woman in the town into a whore, and every house into a wine shop. They are even now planning to descend into Lombardy and burn the fields and kill the peasants.’ His eyes met mine. ‘For their master, the Pope.’ He looked away.

I understood. ‘And you brought the orders,’ I said.

‘Orders from the Pope — suggestions from the King of England,’ he said. ‘Do you know that the Visconti of Milan are providing a great deal of the money for the King of France’s ransom?’

I hadn’t known. I tried to work it out.

Fra Peter smiled. ‘I’ll have pity on you. The Chancellor — of England — told me that as long as the King of France’s ransom is unpaid, England keeps the rents and income of twenty counties and a hundred castles. And while that ransom is unpaid, and English garrisons sit in the mightiest fortresses of France, the King of France is powerless to end the truce, break the treaty, go to war or on crusade. You saw what the companies did to France.’ He started to pack his mule, and I stepped to the other side of the animal to help. ‘France is to be kept crippled.’

I bit my lip. ‘Fra Peter, I’m sure they all have Christian souls, but I’m an Englishman. So, when we make war on Milan, we do it for England?’ I confess I grinned. ‘I can’t say I’m worse pleased.’

Fra Peter pulled a cord tight and tied it off. ‘I’m an Englishman, too. But I’m a knight of the church — and watching the destruction of the riches of France sickens me. Is Italy now to be treated the same? I’m sworn to crusade, and without France, there will be no crusade.’ He got one end of a forty-pound bag of grain, I got the other and we hoisted it over the panniers onto the mule and began to tie it down. ‘Have I shown you this lashing, William?’

‘Yes, Fra Peter.’

‘Perhaps I’m just old, and sick of the whole thing. I’d like to fight other men like me, in an honourable way, in a good cause, and not rape anyone in the process.’ He shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but Savoy demanded of Father Pierre Thomas that we order the English out of his province. He told Father Pierre Thomas that until the companies are gone, he will not swear to go on crusade.’

Well, I’d caught rumours of this at Turin.

‘What did Father Pierre Thomas say?’ I asked.

‘Can you guess, William?’ he asked. He smiled at me over the saddle.

‘I guess he informed the Count that the crusade was an atonement for his sins and not a matter of political advantage,’ I said.

Fra Peter snorted. ‘You really are getting the hang of this,’ he said. ‘Of course, when Father Pierre Thomas speaks that way, he means every word.’

‘But you just told Hawkwood to continue his fight against Milan,’ I said.

He looked at every lashing, and then gave me a great hug. ‘Go fight, William, but do your best to fight with honour. Protect the weak, war down the strong and help the poor.’ He sprang into the saddle like a much younger man. ‘When the order summons you, come. In the meantime, remember that you are not William Gold, mercenary bandit. You are William Gold, esquire, donat of the Order of St John the Baptist, and behave accordingly.’

I wept, but I rallied. ‘Even when my opponents lie, cheat, steal and betray me?’ I asked.

‘Especially then. We practise chivalry because it is right, not because other men can be expected to do the same. The sword of justice — tempered with mercy.’ He laughed. ‘Remember what Father Pierre Thomas said of the church? Full of sinners? Imagine that the order of chivalry is entirely full of caitiffs trying to be knights.’

Those words stuck in my head, I can tell you. That’s what we are. No one is without sin. No man is a perfect knight. We are caitiffs, but it is the striving that makes us better.

He mounted on the mounting block.

‘Stay alive! My blessing on you, William Gold.’

He laid his hand on my head and rode off into the dawn.

Juan cried that he’d missed his master leaving.

Perkin mocked him for it, and the two of them stripped to their shirts and wrestled in the tiny inn yard. I let them.

Perkin was thrown first and hit his head, but he came back at Juan, and was put down again. Juan had been practising with Fiore, who was watching.

Perkin rose, rubbing his head. ‘You have more wrestling tricks than a Cornishman,’ he said.

Fiore laughed. ‘I see I will have new students.’

We celebrated Christmas like gentlemen. It was my first proper Christmas in years, and I exchanged gifts with my friends, kissed a pretty whore under a sprig of greenery and went to Mass in a good church. I went blithely to confession, and said my beads — my new habits stuck.

We feasted with the town — Sterz had a fine notion of how to keep the townspeople on our side, and we brought in a herd of beef from the coast at our cost. Our company was now so large that we had armourers and basket-makers and butchers. This was not a nation of thieves like the Great Company of Brignais. This was an army, like the army of the Prince of Wales or the King of France. We had a seneschal and a marshal; laws and police. Men who pissed in the streets were punished. Two days after Christmas, an Englishman tried to force a girl in one of the villages — she put a knife into his thigh and escaped, and her father complained. Sir John oversaw a trial as if he was an English magistrate, and the man was found guilty, beaten with rods and his money given to the girl. Then he was dismissed from the company.

On New Year’s day, we rode for Lombardy. We travelled for two days down a long pass, and then, in bleak midwinter, we descended into the fields of Lombardy. I remember my first sight of Italy, and I thought that it couldn’t be a coincidence that we were leaving the Count of Savoy’s land.

I remember thinking, with the old ways of a routier coming back, that it was the richest country I’d ever seen — even in winter.

We rode to the gates of Milan. Milan is a magnificent city, and should, you’d think, have been well-defended. It’s well-walled, but the lords thereof are tyrants — I’ve fought for and against them, and I know whereof I speak. So they have a fortified palace inside the city to defend against their own citizens, and fortress walls to keep the likes of me out.

Our orders were exact and our discipline was excellent. We were to rob and burn our way to the gates, killing as few men as possible and outraging no women. Sterz summoned all the leading men on the night before we raided Milan, and stood by his camp table.

‘What we want is to force Visconti to make peace,’ he said. ‘What we do not want is a lot of enraged Milanese demanding further war. Murder and rape won’t get you a florin, lads. Rob them, burn them out, push their sorry arses into the walls. That’s all it will take.’ He smiled.

Sir John nodded. ‘Enough angry Milanese inside his walls,’ he said, ‘and Galleazzo might find himself overthrown.’

We had assignments and guides — towns, monastries, fortified houses. Mine was written out, and I had a Milanese exile, a bitter old man named Bernabo Pieto. He led me through the cold winter’s night, and we stormed a house full of soldiers — killed a couple, took the rest, and turned the noble family out into the cold, stripped of jewels and gold.

By morning, we’d struck to the very gates and posted the Pope’s demands there; we had twenty senior Milanese officials to ransom and we hadn’t lost a man. Milan did nothing in response — Galeazzo cowered in his palace and let his countryside burn.

If I felt a trifle dirty from the rampage, I had 300 florins in gold from my share.

He might have been slow on the battlefield, but he was quick enough, politically. Galeazzo reacted by hiring the most famous mercenary in Italy — the German captain, Konrad von Landau. That is, he was famous, but we’d never heard of him.

He brought a great company of German lances — almost 4,000. He arrived in early March, and drove us back into the hills — or perhaps Albert Sterz had always meant to retire. Certainly there was no haste to our movements.

Sterz was a good officer, but a harsh disciplinarian. When we camped, he would punish men for fouling the streets outside their tents — sensible, I confess, but not a way to win an archer’s love. He never hesitated to apply punishments, and we had the impression that not only did he like to order punishment, he liked to see it carried out, too. Some men get drunk on authority. Sterz wasn’t one of them. He merely liked the taste.

A company of Hungarians joined the Germans. Most of us had never seen a Hungarian, but we heard they had bows which they could shoot from horseback. The archers shook their heads and said they must be puny things that couldn’t penetrate armour, and the handful of men who had fought the Turks said it was all horse shit.

All the fears and angers of the days before battle.

We were badly outnumbered, but we were confident. It worried me, the casual arrogance of the English.

We had a steady stream of Milanese ambassadors coming into our camp. I became the officer responsible for meeting them and bringing them to Sir Albert, because of my good manners and genteel air. They were really emissaries, often accompanied by heralds with all the trappings of chivalry, yet they came to spy. Their intention was to count our archers and look at our entrenchments and the shape of our camp.

So we greeted them each day with the same ten lances — mine — in full armour, and we rode them into our camp by different routes. This amused us more each day. One day, I showed them men-at-arms practising on horseback in groups of 100; the whole was an elaborate stage show, like a passion play, staged by Sir John. The next day they rode through an empty camp — the army, right down to our whores, was behind the next ridge.

And I was present as the Milanese offered Sir Albert and Sir John ever more elaborate bribes. I was even offered one myself.

After a week of this, I was with Sir John after we escorted a particularly unctuous Milanese churchman back to the Milanese lines. When he was gone, I turned to Sir John. ‘If the French had offered us 20,000 florins to retreat the night before Brignais,’ I said, ‘Mechin would have taken it, split it with a half-dozen captains and ridden away.’

Sir John nodded. He had a hint of red to his beard and moustache, and I had seldom seen him look so much like a fox. ‘That was a different empris,’ he said. ‘We had too many Gascons. Too many brigands.’ He shrugged. ‘Here, we are professional soldiers, and we have some faith in each other. I’m sure Albert would ride away and abandon the Pope for enough money.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘I would myself. A hundred thousand florins?’

‘Par dieu!’ I said, shocked. That was a King’s ransom. Swearing was returning to my vocabulary.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The world is changing, William. If we were someone’s army — your friend the Green Count’s, for example — and the Visconti offered him twenty thousand florins to go away, why, he’d take it. Twenty thousand florins is a fortune.’ He nodded. ‘But in our army, a hundred thousand florins is still only forty florins for each man-at-arms.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s one month’s pay — not enough to break the contract. It only makes it less likely the next bastard won’t hire you, or play fair on the condotta.’

Condotta was the first word every Englishman learned in Italy. It means ‘contract’.

Sir John reined in and looked back at the Milanese camp — the German and Hungarian camp. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘this is the richest country in the world. The banks are here, William. All the money comes here from all over Christendom.’ He watched as fires sprang into being, like the rising of the evening stars. My little company passed behind us, harness rattling.

‘In France, we took grain from peasants,’ he said as he turned and looked at me. ‘Before we’re done here, we’ll take the gold from the banks.’

The next morning, a Flemish merchant came over the passes behind us. He sent a pair of his men-at-arms to negotiate with Sterz, who charged tolls like a lord, of course.

Perkin led one of the patrols, and told me that evening that the merchant had 200 mules loaded with wool — a fortune — and another 100 loaded with goods meant for us.

‘Good English wool — undyed and white as virtue.’ He laughed. ‘And all the things we need: thread, bronze kettles, tin bottles, wool cloaks.’ He showed me his new water bottle.

The next day, the merchant opened a small fair in Romagnano. Now that we were back at our base in the Count of Savoy’s lands, I wondered how he was doing in his negotiations with the Pope.

I was slipping away from the life of a donat, and becoming an officer in a mercenary company.

At any rate, 2,000 lances of soldiers is a fair number of customers, and this man’s company had many things we wanted — razors, for one. Cups, Flemish cloaks, goatskin boots, pewter chargers.

His wool shipment was for the dyers of Florence, but fashions spring up very quickly among soldiers. Andrew Belmont, who was a devilishly handsome fellow, bought three cloth yards of white wool and a tailor threw him off a fine surcoat in an hour — it didn’t have to be lined, of course, because he wore it over his armour. The wool was beautiful and warm. A dozen of us saw him in his fine surcoat that evening — and laughed when he spilled red wine on it — and in the morning there were fifty of us, me included, in white surcoats. Three days after the Fleming arrived, he’d sold 4,000 cloth yards of his fine white wool.

Most soldiers can sew. I made my own coat; I hung my breast and backplate on a cross of wood and tailored the wool, coached by Perkin, who was working his own and teaching Fiore, while Juan emulated him from afar while pretending he wasn’t involved. We had to send a boy to buy shears — from the Fleming.

I dagged my sleeves. Hah! There was a rumour that Sir John Hawkwood had been an apprentice tailor in London — not true, on my honour — but we had some tailors, and they taught us, so we were all popinjays.

At any rate, we were still retreating — very slowly — before von Landau’s advance. But the same day the Fleming arrived, Sterz told the Milanese envoys that he saw no further point in their sending spies to his camp dressed as heralds — a mortal insult, even though the honest truth. And our German challenged their German to a contest of arms. He offered to meet von Landau on horse or foot, with lances, spears or swords — man to man, twenty against twenty, a hundred against a hundred, or army to army.

The very next morning, Konrad von Landau led his 12,000 men across two small streams and formed in close order by the castle of Canturino. We rode down the opposite ridge.

We were formed in six divisions and mine was commanded by Sir John. I had fifteen lances on the right flank of the centre battle.

I have some things to say that might matter to your account.

I was wearing the best armour I’d ever worn into a fight, and I was with better men then I’d ever had around me, except at Poitiers, and I didn’t know anything, then. I trusted the men on my right and my left; I trusted the man leading my battle, and I trusted the man leading the battle to the left and to the right. I trusted Albert Sterz.

I ate well the night before the fight, the week before and the month before and, in fact, most of the year before. I was in the best physical state of my life, and I had slept well. I prayed, and was shriven by a priest.

I had changed. The order had changed me. But at the same time, the whole world of the companies had changed. These men around me were not routiers. Like me, some had been, but in Italy, they were professional soldiers, and war was about to become an entirely different affair.

When you ride at the enemy on a good horse, in good armour, surrounded by your friends and well rested and fed — truly, lads, you have to be a coward to fight badly. Or a fool, which may be the same.

We were all afraid — the Germans outnumbered us — but not with a fear that paralyses, but with a fear that pushes you to strive harder.

We stared at each other across the stream for half an hour.

Sterz rode down our front. ‘Dismount!’ he called. We dismounted in a orderly way — the pages came forward, took the archers’ horses first, then the knights’ chargers, and there was, I confess, a moment of chaos as every man sought his place in the ranks. Then, like a sword going home in the scabbard, we were set, with only a few unhandy sods still pushing.

Front rank: knights and men-at-arms.

Second rank: armoured squires and pages.

Third rank: archers.

Fourth rank: men with less armour.

In my lance, I stood in front, armed cap-a-pied. Behind me stood a new man, Richard Grimlace, both of us with heavy-headed seven-foot spears. Then Sam Bibbo. Then Arnaud, in a good jack and brigantine, with a second quiver of arrows for Sam and a spear and a sword and buckler, a basinet on his head. We had 2,000 of these little units.

Sir John stayed mounted, and so did Sterz, Belmont and a few other officers.

Sterz trotted to our front and waved his baton. ‘Front!’ he roared. ‘Let’s go!’

We moved forward to the very edge of the stream.

It was fairly full of ice-cold water, and I remember staring down into the depths of the stream at my feet. It was, of course, a mountain stream, filling its stone banks to the brim.

There was a trout in it.

The old Romans lived by signs — animals, birds — I was reading Ovid by then.

That trout made me absurdly happy.

‘Ready!’ called Sterz.

All along the third rank, the archers nocked arrows. Heavy, quarter-pounder war-bow arrows.

Opposite us, the Germans were 100 paces away, sitting on their horses, listening to a trio of Germans address them.

I had a long look at the Hungarians. They were moving; their horses fidgeted.

I pointed them out to Sir John, who was sitting on his charger just behind Arnaud.

‘They’re not happy and they haven’t been paid,’ Sir John said with infinite satisfaction. ‘Watch and learn, William the Cook.’

‘Draw!’ called Sam Bibbo at my back. No one had named him master archer, but archers aren’t men-at-arms: they have strange, craftsmanlike notions of leadership. Sam was widely held to be the best bow, and that made him master archer.

When you see 2,000 war bows bent in earnest, it stops your heart. The white bows go down, swooping like hawks, then they rise as the archers bend them, like a great flock of birds turning and rising together, and at the top of their flight-

‘And loose!’

Two thousand shafts, loosed in the same breath.

They make a noise, like 100 nuns whispering at Mass.

‘Nock!’ Sam roared.

‘Draw! And loose!’

There were horses down all along the German ranks, and a few men. Germans don’t bard their horses like the French do.

Because unlike the French, they don’t fight us.

Horses scream.

‘Nock!’ Sam screamed. He was out of practice and his voice broke a little.

‘Draw! And loose!’ Another 500 pounds of steel and wood went off to meet the Germans. Every war arrow weighs almost a quarter of a London pound.

The trio of German officers were yelling at the top of their lungs — you could tell that from their posture. As I watched, one took a clothyard of ash under his arm, right through his body, and fell.

‘Nock!’ Sam called.

‘Draw!’ The only noise from the English was the muscular grunt of 2,000 men drawing their great bows together.

‘Loose!’

The Hungarians broke.

They turned and ran, their small, swift horses carrying them clear of the arrow fall. They were led by knights, who wavered longer, but the mounted archers were gone in as long as it takes to tell the story.

All 3,000 of them.

Sterz held up his baton.

Fingers reaching for shafts stopped, paused and reached instead for swords.

‘Forward!’ he called.

By the sweet and gentle Christ, my friends, and by all the saints, that water was cold. And it came to my hips. Ice water to your balls!

Every one of us gasped as we hit that water. It filled my sabatons, my greaves and my clothes.

But 8,000 men can break the force of any stream. It was six paces across, and our front was well dressed — that is, we were all level with each other. Back then, we never practised any such thing — then we were scrambing up the far bank. Men grabbed bushes and trees — it was a three-foot climb out of the icy torrent — men behind pushed.

Then we were up, and it felt as if I could reach out and touch the Germans.

Even then, I thought the Germans would charge and make a fight of it.

Konrad von Landau rode to the front and called something in German. I don’t know what he was saying, but he sounded like he was saying, ‘Stand! Stand!’

They were melting away.

We formed and we did it quickly — we’re not the Legions of Heaven, or Old Romans, but we were a company and we had spirit. Then we started forward, spears held two-handed. The closer we got to the Germans, the faster we were going. Men stumbled and fell — I remember that field, and it looked as smooth as a tile in a Flemish bath, but it was covered with fist-sized rocks, left by the glaciers, and if you got one under your heel, down you went.

As is often the way, everything suddenly happened at once.

The Germans nearest von Landau charged, but they’d waited far too long, and we were closer than twenty paces, and their horses were unsure from their first steps whether to face our spears or not. Others among the Germans were running, or sitting where they were.

I’m going to guess they didn’t trust the men to their right and left.

Fiore was three men to my left. I heard him say, quite distinctly, ‘But we won’t get to fight at all!’

The Germans came at us, but their horse flinched, and we charged into them rather than the other way round.

I hadn’t faced another man in combat for a year — almost to a day.

I punched my spear into the armpit of the first German I met. He raised his sword to cut at me, and down he went, over the cantle of his saddle. I had to push past his horse to go on — the horse just stood its ground like an equine statue; I’ve never seen the like.

I remember the next man because I took him for ransom. He had a lance, which he endeavoured to use against me with both hands. I slammed it to earth with my spear and returned his stroke with a blow to his aventail, rocked him in the saddle and stabbed him three times in as many heartbeats. Each blow turned by his breastplate, but I had practised this at the pell — my point was looking for a weak joint and he couldn’t shake me.

My fourth blow popped his visor and went into his helmet — by an odd twist of luck and armouring, it went over his head, between his head and the padding of his helmet. So instead of instant death, it stretched his spine and gaffed him from the saddle as his horse tried to turn, so that he was on his back. By ill luck, he hit one of the small stones and was knocked unconscious.

Or perhaps it was good luck. He lived.

My third German knight was trying to run. I killed his horse from behind, and left him for Robert or Arnaud. They took him.

I was now deep into the German lines and the battle was over. The Germans were running, except for a band of perhaps 100, gathered around their great knight, von Landau, and they were facing Sir John’s men — and mine. I left off pursuing stragglers and ran at the rear of von Landaus’s stand. Of course he didn’t want to be taken, and he was still calling on his men to stand and not run. The English no longer had any order — everyone was going in all directions, looking for men to take and ransom.

War between mercenaries can be formulaic, but battle is always chaos and death.

The knot around von Landau grew smaller and smaller; it was very like the end at Poitiers. I faced a Milanese knight in superb armour, and he beat my spear aside with his sword; I caught his sword on my spear haft, and he cut into it, once, twice, and then the spear broke. I threw the shards at his horse to make it shy and drew my longsword. He came at me again, the horse pressing against me, so I dropped and went under the horse — got a nasty knock from the beast — and came up under his stirrup. I cut into the unarmoured back of his thigh and he yelled. Kenneth, the Irishman, got his other leg and pulled him out of his stirrups. He screamed — that must have pulled every muscle in his hips — and then he was dead, with Seamus’s great axe through his head.

Waste of a ransom, in my opinion, but the Irish are mad.

I was one horse from von Landau. If I could kill him or take him, someone would knight me — I could feel it and it was all I wanted.

He was sword to sword with Fiore.

He hammered the man on foot, and Fiore covered himself, so that he seemed to live in a tent of steel — every blow fell like a hammer only to trail away. Some fell so hard on Fiore’s sword that sparks flew in broad daylight. Blow after blow.

It is not done, even among mercenaries, to interrupt a fair fight between peers. So even though von Landau was mounted and a famous name, no one came forward to gut his horse.

Landau urged his mount into the Italian.

I prepared to put him down. But I’d have to do it in single combat, and I didn’t want Fiore to die just so I could get my spurs.

Fiore’s sword took another hammer blow and snapped.

He ducked under Landau’s next blow, fell to one knee and picked up one of the fist-sized rocks.

As Landau’s sword went back, Fiore threw. The stone hit just above the mercenary captain’s open visor, and Landau fell as his horse reared.

He hit the ground stone dead.

Hah! True as the gospel, messieurs. It’s in Villani! The best swordsman who ever lived killed Konrad von Landau with a rock.

That night, we were in a clean inn in Romagnano — not in a camp or a muddy tent, nor lying on the ground. I rather liked war in Italy, so far.

I was sitting at a decent oak table, drinking good wine.

Fiore and Juan were refighting the battle with Perkin and Robert, who’d managed to get his arm broken but was nonetheless in fine spirits because he’d picked up all my prisoners and made himself enough florins to buy a good horse and become a man-at-arms.

A Swiss girl with the face of a London urchin and the manners of a fine lady was hovering around, fussing over him. Smart lass. Tend a man when he’s sick or wounded and you own him.

‘Now you’ve seen a battle,’ I said, only partly in jest. ‘Does it affect your theories?’

He rocked his head back and forth. ‘I killed an armoured knight with a rock,’ he said. He sounded disappointed.

There was something in the way he said it — a combination of pride at having done it, wistfulness at having missed the ransom and annoyance at God’s plan for having to use a rock and not a weapon requiring more skill — that made me burst out laughing, and all the others followed suit. The laughter spread, as laughter does — one man told another, one girl whispered and giggled, and the inn rafters rang with it.

He frowned for a moment, and then he had the grace to laugh with us, though I swear to you he didn’t know why. Maestro Fiore, as we know him now, was not without humour, but in some ways he lived with the gods, not with mere men.

For example, he’d killed the enemy commander, he was young, exceptionally fit and rather handsome; he was the hero of the hour. He was, quite literally, surrounded by attractive young women — English, Italian, German, Swiss and Provencal. He did look at them from time to time, but I don’t think he had any idea how to proceed beyond that.

I’m losing the thread here. We were laughing; he was laughing. And then, through the crowd of camp followers, came a young man. The pretty blonde girl I had been eyeing near the door suddenly flinched aside as she looked at the new man; her nose wrinkled in distaste.

The man had short, dark hair cut in the latest Italian fashion, a sort of bowl cut that went well under a helmet, and he had tight leather boots to the thigh, a neat blue doublet and a matching blue belt with a sheathed dagger — slim and long. He didn’t look like anyone I knew, and my eyes passed over him.

Another girl glared at him and he glared back, then I knew who he was.

He was Milady.

Perkin saw her and shuddered. He knew trouble when he saw it.

I rose and bowed, and she smiled at me. ‘I couldn’t stay away,’ she said. ‘I gather I missed the battle.’

Fiore bowed. ‘I haven’t had the pleasure,’ he said. ‘Do you always dress as a man?’

That was Fiore, too. He watched people in a way that most men do not. He knew she was a woman instantly. Most men didn’t, but many women did.

She smiled at him and offered her hand, like a woman. ‘I do not dress like a man,’ she said. ‘I become a man, if I want to.’ She tilted a head to one side. ‘I missed you, William Gold.’

‘Thanks, Janet.’ I bowed. I hadn’t missed her. Or I had?

I suspect I wore the same face that Richard wore when he saw me.

Why, though? She was a good companion, and what I had of gentle manners I owed to her. ‘How’s Richard?’ I asked.

She smiled. ‘Well, when I left him.’

That could mean anything.

‘Are you. . visiting?’ I asked.

She frowned. ‘No, William. I plan to stay and lead a lance.’ She looked around, daring us to protest.

Fiore bowed. ‘May I be your squire, Madame?’

She snapped her fingers. ‘No, messire. I have a lover — I couldn’t possibly satisfy a second. Even in the most chaste and chivalrous way, men are tiresome. Except when you are one, and then men are a delight.’ She looked up and her eyes met his.

He said, ‘Do you have any skill with the sword?’

She shrugged expressively. ‘I’m a better jouster,’ she said, ‘but I have been known to use the sword and the dagger.’

‘Ah,’ sighed Fiore. A woman who could use a sword.

We were all doomed.

We ate and drank, and in an hour she was part of us again. When Andrew Belmont came by to congratulate Fiore, he noticed her. He put an arm around her waist, and she dropped him on his arse.

Andrew was a true knight, for all his failings, which were many. He bounced to his feet and grinned. ‘Horse or foot, messire,’ he said. ‘If you dress like a man, you’d best fight like one.’

She grinned. ‘Horse,’ she said.

Belmont paused. I think he still thought she was a whore playing dress-up, but he shrugged. ‘Dawn, by the bridge,’ he said.

We were young, and we were still awake when it was time to arm her. She had a fine harness — still some bits we’d picked up in the fight in Provence, which seemed ten years ago but was only two. She was drunk as a lord, and suddenly flirtatious and angry by turns. She kissed Fiore while he struggled to get her brigantine closed, which I promise you is not the best way to get your squires to arm you quickly, or well. On the other hand, it does seem to get devoted service.

It took three of us to get her on her horse, and I held the bridle all the way down to the bridge. Andy Belmont was there, and so was half the White Company, as we had taken to calling ourselves, drunk as only successful mercenaries — and sailors — can manage. The rumour had gone round that the handsome Belmont had run afoul of a whore who intended to fight him. Remember, to us there was nothing funnier than watching two cripples fight with sticks — an incontinent dwarf who could drink wine and piss it in the same action could keep a dozen men laughing for an hour. So a knight jousting with a whore?

The sun was just above the rim of the world.

Somehow I’d become the marshal. I had severe doubts about the whole thing — I was afraid for her, and afraid that someone would be killed. Both of them rode expensive horses, and a dead horse was both dishonour and financial ruin.

They set their chargers at either end of the course. We didn’t have a barrier, but then, we did this for a living.

Andrew motioned to me, and I trotted to his stirrup.

‘She’s not a whore, is she?’ he asked.

‘She wishes to have a lance and fight,’ I said. ‘She used to fight. She’s been with us before.’

He made a face. ‘Very well,’ he said. He was drunk, too. ‘I won’t hit her too hard.’

I went to my place and held my neck-cloth aloft. It fluttered in the cold wind and someone called, ‘Get on with it!’

I let it go.

Andrew leaned forward slightly, and his horse gave a small rear, then began to head down the list.

Milady’s horse came from a stand to a dead gallop in three steps, accelerating like an arrow from a bow.

His lance struck her in the shoulder and rocked her backwards. She was light, and so was her horse, and suddenly both of them were crashing to earth.

Her lance tip caught him dead in the centre of the breastplate, and even as she went down, her lance tip continued to track him, bursting the girth on his saddle and throwing him back over the rump of his horse.

Both of them crashed to earth.

We stood in shocked silence, broken only by the hoofbeats of Andrew’s riderless horse galloping down the rest of the list.

Then Milady’s small horse got to his feet. He shook like a dog and walked a few steps. Uninjured.

Milady sat up and said, ‘Fuck.’

Andrew just lay there for a moment, then he rolled over to get a knee under him — most of us have to do that, in full armour — and he was laughing. He got to his feet, tottered over to her and extended a hand.

She looked up at him. ‘Don’t we have two more courses to ride?’ she said.

‘Absolutely not,’ Belmont said, and we all burst into cheers.

Our victory over von Landau shocked Italy. Von Landau had been very famous, and we killed him.

After the battle, everyone called us the White Company. I don’t know who started it — I’m sure it was the white surcoats, although I’ve met some useless bastards who say it was our spotless reputation — I sneer — or our shining armour — to which I’ll attest that at Canturino, there were maybe fifty Englishmen in white harnesses. Five years later, we all had them, but that’s another story.

We were famous.

In days, the envoys arrived, and Milan sued for peace with the Pope. We didn’t even bother to burn their countryside again.

I wasn’t knighted, but as I sat drinking wine with other men — Andrew Belmont, John Thornbury, Perkin and Fiore — I felt like a knight. We had fought well, for something reasonably worthy. I’d shown mercy and I hadn’t done evil.

It was hardly great reknown, but it was a start.

By mid-June, the war was over. Crops were growing all over the plain of Lombardy, and Italy looked rich and at peace. We did not burn the peasants or rape their women.

Offers rolled in. We sat and practised, drilled and rode, read and played music. Fiore fell in love with Milady. It was so predictable, it was like one of the romances. He taught her his way of the sword, and they jousted, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She would turn to me after her third cup of wine and say, ‘Would you keep the swordsman from following me like a puppy?’

In late June, there were ten rumours in camp about our next contract, but most of us who knew Sir John knew that the two highest bidders were Pisa and Florence, and since Florence was the richest, most secure state in Italy, we were pretty sure we’d be fighting for them.

I noted that if we accepted either contract, we would leave alpine Savoy. And the Green Count might have his deal with the Pope, after all.

That was the night that Fiore followed Milady out into the spring air, and came back with a handprint on the side of his face. He wouldn’t talk about it. Someone had given him bad advice. Juan sat and talked with him.

Later, when I ‘went for a walk’ with one of the girls who had made herself available, I passed a couple by the stream — they weren’t making love, merely talking, but for my money, they were Andrew Belmont and Janet — Milady — and they weren’t particularly overdressed.

I don’t tell you this so you can gossip. It’s all relevant.

Two days later, a priest coming over the pass from Turin said he’d found a body. One of our archers had wandered a bit too far from town and been knifed.

The general verdict was that it was probably time we moved on.

The next morning, Sir John announced that we’d been hired — by Pisa.

Pisa hired us, not Florence. I didn’t even know where Pisa was; it was only a matter of months since I’d found that Pisa was a place, not a man.

‘Florence is our enemy,’ Sir John said, with enormous, foxlike satisfaction.

We were going to Tuscany to make war on the banks. We were a professional army, and not one of us was a great lord. We were an army that bore every resemblance to a guild of craftsmen, and we were marching into the richest part of the Christian world.

The Florentines lost a battle to us before we even arrived. War in Italy, in general, was smarter than war in France — both sides used strategems worthy of the old Romans, and ambush and subterfuge were part of those battles. The most cunning general was held to be the best. It was the same with the way they did business — I’d seen that first hand. Italians admired sleight of hand. They admired you if you beat your opponent in such a way that showed you were smarter, rather than merely stronger.

Consequently, the moment Florence’s envoys knew for sure that the White Company was off to serve Pisa, Florence hired a dozen small German bands close by and sent them to devastate the Pisan contada (countryside). The Germans moved quickly, crossing the frontier in just a week.

But the White Company had a fine reputation for fast marches, and we arrived in Pisa the night the Germans crossed the frontier. By the time they’d burned a dozen small farms, their scouts and spies brought them word of our 8,000 mounted men (and one woman) riding in triumph through the streets. We outnumbered them, and we had a high repute — a sovereign preux. The Germans retreated over the frontier, leaving so quickly they abandoned some of their food carts.

The cream of the jest is that we were still two weeks of hard marching to the north, but such was our repute that the Pisans mounted their best young men, armoured them, and had them ride all night — in one city gate and out another — wearing white surcoats. they fooled their own citizens well enough to fool the spies.

By late July we were in Pisa, where they gave us a parade in earnest — young women ran out of respectable houses to hand me cups of wine and kiss me. Ah, Italy! Making war in France is like having sex in a dirty room. Making war in Italy is like. .

That was a good year, but we knew our business and the German captains knew theirs, so we manoeuvred and collected our thirty florins a month. My ransoms came in from Canturino. I took over a dozen lances from other men — a Scotsman who was going home, an Englishman who retired and married a rich Pisan woman.

I wanted to be a corporal.

I wanted to be knighted.

And despite being a junior officer in a company of mercenaries, I practised what I had learned.

Pisa didn’t trust us, particularly, so were seldom inside the city walls, but Tuscany was beyond beautiful — magnificent, like a fine horse, a beautiful woman, a good bottle of wine and a choir singing all at the same time. The trees are tall, the farms perfectly managed, the sky a colour of blue that just doesn’t occur in England. In Tuscany, I ate olives for the first time. I knew the oil, but the fruit itself. . Superb! And the wine — if French wines are good, and they are, and Piedmontese wines are better, and they are, the best vintages of Tuscany are, well. .

Perfect. If there is wine in heaven, it comes from Tuscany.

The bread is good, and the food is good, if you like garlic, and I do.

Tuscan woman know what they want. Many of them didn’t want anything to do with me, but those who did — I very much preferred their manner of address, to steal one of Milady’s phrases.

Janet was my entree into polite society. Despite her past — perhaps because of it — and despite riding abroad dressed as a man — or perhaps because of that, too — young women of good family flocked to her. A few wanted to emulate her. Most did not, but wanted to be seen with her, or to be seen to approve of her. Gentlewomen in Italy — rich merchants’ wives and daughters, and aristocrats — were sometimes cloistered and sometimes exceptionally free.

At any rate, they were well-educated and free enough to ride abroad in camps full of mercenary foreigners who leered at them — I leered as much as the next man, I promise you. No camp girl, not the prettiest, easiest or most free of them, can compete with a woman of the same age who has the advantage of clothes, posture, diet and a good horse.

At any rate, through Janet, I met Pamfilo di Frangioni, a young noblewoman of Pisa. Her family owned sixty or seventy farms, and she rode out to our camp most days with her brothers, all of whom were, in fact, gentlemen of Pisa and served with us by turns. They were decent men — a little odd-seeming and foreign to me, but good hearted, and they loved their sister. She could ride like a Turk, and she dressed — you know, she wore pearls in her hair every day I saw her, and she never wore the same clothes twice. It took me weeks to realize that she did this apurpose; that she was, in her sixteen-year-old way, perfectly aware that she had several hundred young Englishmen panting every time her horse skimmed along the road and she jumped the barricade into our camp.

From her, I learned a little of how to flirt.

Pamfilo was not going to run off to the bushes with a mercenary, no matter how attractively red-bearded. But she might discuss the matter — she would certainly allow the nape of her neck to be kissed on a warm evening, and she might, after a glass of wine, run her bare foot up your leg to the thigh under the table while chatting with her mother.

I am not sure whether I loved her or not, merely that she was great fun, and seeing her raised my heart every time.

From her I learned what Emile might have taught me of courtly love — about how love can make you a better knight.

We usually made camp within an hour’s ride of the Frangioni castle, and many of us would then wait to see how many hours passed before we saw the tell-tale dust rising as, dressed in silk, she galloped her horse across the fields, her brothers trailing behind.

Twice that autumn we marched on Florence. Florence went so far as to recruit Rudolph von Hapsburg — another famous knight, this one with a name I’d heard, from one of the most powerful families in Swabia. He promised to catch us and — a nasty piece of work — crucify us.

Well. I find Englishmen love to be threatened by fools.

We marched and he marched, and the dust rose. I spent long days in the saddle, siting ambushes that were never sprung, looking for his supply convoys and watching his main force from scrubby trees at the edge of the largest wheat fields in Europe. I had one small feat of arms that fall — I met a German knight at a ford and unhorsed him. I let him go — he was a penniless adventurer — but my name gained a little lustre, and I made him go back to Florence and tell every lady he met that he was the slave of Pamfilo di Frangioni.

When Sir John heard of it, he summoned me to his tent.

‘William, what are you playing at?’ he asked.

I thought I was the wit of the world. ‘Courtly love,’ I said.

‘By St George, young man, our business is war. Tup a ewe if you need to, but make war, sir. Good day.’ He turned and went back to his letters.

I ignored him. To John Hawkwood, of course, war was a business.

In November the weather turned — even Tuscany gets cold rain, and that was the coldest winter anyone could remember. We headed south, but before we’d gone two days march, some of Sterz’s German barbutes turned us from our usual campsites and we were sent west around the city and far from the Frangioni’s.

It was the Plague.

Plague went through us like lettuce through a goose, and we lost men — not many, as most Englishmen were salted, by then — but a great many girls and some of the German men-at-arms. Juan’s pretty lass died, and he never got it. To his immense credit, the Spaniard stayed by her side, moved her to his own tent and breathed her air until she passed. Then he paid for Masses for her soul.

We lost about 300 lances to the Plague.

I thought of my sister, and for the first time in a year, I sat down in an inn and wrote her a long letter, six pages on vellum that cost, each page, as much as the best woman you could buy in our camp.

I rode into Pisa with a safe conduct from Sir John, and purchased another manuscript, this one a selection of Latin recipes from Constantinople. I wrapped the letter and the book in Egyptian fustian and some fine silk, and sent it with a Florentine merchant bound for England. Despite being at war, we traded with Florence pretty freely.

The process of writing and sending my letter caused me to search my trunks — I had two — for wax. By now, even our French boys were men-at-arms, and Perkin commanded a lance, but I still asked him to find things for me. When I explained my problem, he struck himself in the face — a little over-dramatic, but he meant it.

‘By the virgin, William!’ he said. ‘I have your. . your things. From the factor.’ He shook his head. ‘Your old clothes and things.’

There followed a joyful searching through a chest unopened in almost two winters. My clothes were food for moths and worms, as they had been put away filthy. I lifted them from the old trunk with a knife, they were so dirty.

They smelled like old sins, but under the old sins lay one bright virtue.

The trunk held Emile’s favour. I had long assumed it lost. I think I held it and stared at it for most of the time it took my companions to play a full game of piquet, which the Pisans were busy teaching us in order to lighten our wallets, little knowing that the companions had known it for five years. I tucked it into my doublet, walked to our local chapel and paid for a Mass for her soul.

The next day, I heard that Pamfila had died of the Plague. I was riding into Pisa to fetch new clothing, and I met her mother, dressed all in black. She was on a mule, and she rode up to me.

I knew immediately.

She took my hand and cried a little. I had almost no Italian back then, and I had to wait until Fiore came to translate.

She’d taken the Plague only two weeks earlier. She’d swelled for a day, breathed badly and died. But her mother said that before the pustules broke, a man came with a letter from a friend of hers in Florence to tell her the quaint story of having met a German knight who said he was her eternal slave because he’d been taken in a fair empris.

Fiore turned to me. ‘She says, my daughter died with your name on her lips,’ and she says, ‘Always will our family see you as one of us.’

That, too, changed me. If you don’t get why, well. .

Sir John Hawkwood was named captain of Pisa.

It was, in its way, as great a compliment as he could ever have received, and it moved him to the top of our profession. He had been Sterz’s marshal for two years.

But I think it ruined his relations with Sir Albert. I agree that we — the White Company — were a little tired of Sterz’s ways. We would sit in camp for weeks, but we had to rise at dawn every morning. We never slept in, and we never missed a day of lacing, cleaning. .

He was like that. But so was the Order of St John, so I didn’t mind as much as men like William Grice did.

Or, as it turned out, Sir John Hawkwood. But the lads had the notion that Sir John would be easier — and they also knew he was English, while our enemies kept being German. All in all, I think Sir Albert was as good a captain as I ever served under — he was brave, he was careful, he planned well and men liked him. But he didn’t have the — I can’t describe it — the sprezzatura that Hawkwood had. Sir John seemed to do things well — without effort. He had wonderful spies and he used them to stay ahead in everything. He rode well, and he could joust, and he spent the autumn learning to use a hawk and hounds so that he could hunt or falcon with Italian noblemen. He learned these things because he saw it all as part of his profession.

At any rate, Hawkwood was made captain of Pisa. Directly he took the baton — I think it was February of the year of our lord 1364 — he led us on a raid across Tuscany, into Florentine lands in mid-winter.

It had worked against Milan, and I think it had been his idea. But we tried to go too far into the highlands, and the snow was the worst in fifty years — so much snow that the horses couldn’t get grass and began to die. A dead war horse is the single most expensive corpse you’ll ever see.

We passed Carmignano undetected, but the passes were blocked with snow, and after a particularly nasty skirmish at the gates of the Mugello — nasty because everything that hurts, hurts more in bitter cold, and I got knocked off my horse by a German I never saw — Sir John admitted we were beaten and we retreated.

We had no supplies and no baggage train.

Men started to die.

A battle is a crisis, if you like, but it is one for which you plan and train, and it isn’t a surprise — one hopes. That march taxed all of us to, and beyond, our limits. And the strain didn’t come all at once; it built day by day.

I was injured — not wounded, merely badly hurt. I’d fallen well, if falling off a tall horse is ever good, on my arse. I had a bruise as big as Lombardy and a roll of muscle that seemed like an internal wound, it hurt so badly, but I could ride and I could give orders.

Instead of fighting the enemy, we were foraging and building fires, and that became the limit of my command. Men would wander off in the snow and vanish and we’d never see them again. Except that when it was Juan, I turned my horse’s head — still the war horse I’d taken from Father Pierre Thomas, in what seemed like a different world — and rode back along our trail until I found him.

‘I’m sleepy,’ he said.

I put him on my horse and pinned him against me until I reached Janet’s fire.

‘Some men will do anything to sleep with me,’ she quipped, and put him in her blankets while her squire piled wood on her personal fire.

He lost all the toes on his left foot.

Richard Grimlace wasn’t so lucky. He went into a stone barn and peasants killed him. We rode back to find him, and we killed the peasants — even though I knew that was wrong.

We made a fort of their barn and waited out the last of the snow there, with a fire in the corner. We had seventy men and one woman in that barn, and all of us lived to see Pisa.

I slept between Perkin and Milady. At some point in the night — you have to imagine us packed like salt herrings, so banish any salacious thought — I knew she was awake. In her ear, I said, ‘Do you ever miss Richard Mussard?’

‘No,’ she said.

I paused. ‘He wanted to marry you,’ I said. ‘I seem to remember.’

She rolled a quarter turn. ‘We did marry,’ she said. She shrugged, and John Hughes, sleeping on her other side, groaned. I suspect I groaned, too.

‘He’ll get over me,’ she said.

I thought of Richard at Turin. It occurred to me that she’d already run away from him by then — and then he’d seen me. What would he think?

When the snow cleared, we rode for Pisa. We collected another twenty men on our way, but the White Company would have lost fewer men in a heavy defeat. The snow did to us what the Germans could not. We lost 400 lances and were half the size we’d been the summer before.

There was talk of taking the command from Sir John. I had never seen him so low — he slept too much, went to meetings with Pisans and spent too little time with men like Andrew Belmont and me.

The Pisans tightened their belts and hired another famous knight — one of the most famous: Hannekin Baumgarten. He was a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, a member of two famous orders of chivalry and a dozen well-known tournament societies. He was a big, handsome man, and his Cologne German was less offensive to the English than Swabian. He was also a fine jouster.

He brought a small army of Germans. Each ‘nation’ had about 1,000 lances.

Spring came and seemed to dispel the last of the Plague. I received a letter from Fra Peter when the passes opened, and another, from my sister, in the same packet. They made me happy. I sat and wrote back to them the same day, and spent from my dwindling store of florins to send them to Avignon and London.

We had two incidents that spring, neither of which brought me any pleasure.

We marched on Florence in mid-April, as yet unpaid. We marched as far as Pistoia with Baumgarten, but our 8,000 cavalry was too much for one web of narrow roads, so we elected to go our seperate ways. Sir John was back in command, and he sent Andrew Belmont to sieze Prato by night — the way we’d taken Pont-Saint-Esprit. We rode hard, caught them with the drawbridge down, and then everything went wrong and Andrew was badly wounded.

I got to him, pinned him to his saddle and got him clear of the crossbow bolts.

We tried again that night, but they were ready, and the only thing we could do was ride around the town, whooping like imps of Satan. While my men distracted the militia on the walls, I climbed down into the ditch and crawled to the main gate, where I stood up and pounded on it with my fists.

‘I summon this town to surrender in the name of the White Company!’ I roared.

It had no effect on the campaign, but was much talked about. When we returned to the army, Sir John summoned me.

‘I’m appointing you corporal,’ he said.

Corporals commanded fifty lances — 200 men.

I took Belmont’s division while he went back to Pisa. It was a very left-handed way to achieve command, though, and it made me uneasy.

Janet was quick to congratulate me.

I was surprised. ‘I thought you had a-’

She looked at me in such a way as to deprive me of the power of speech. ‘Gentlemen don’t say everything that comes to their minds,’ she spat. ‘Andrew Belmont is nothing to me.’

The second incident took place a few days later. It was not my day to patrol and I was in camp. A patrol of Rudolph von Hapsburg’s encountered a patrol of ours — of mine. It was led by Perkin — Master Smallwood. They met at the corner of a wood and it was a surprise to both parties. A German officer — Sir Heinrich, as the heralds reported to us — charged. He was reported to me as being a giant mounted on an elephant, but those Germans beat my men so badly I couldn’t get a straight story out of any of them.

Sir Heinrich’s lance caught Perkin in the body armour. He didn’t have a steel breastplate and the blow crushed his ribcage. He probably died when he hit the ground. Seamus died there, too, cut from the saddle by a German knight’s axe.

Kenneth had been in camp with me, and his reaction was so violent I ordered his squire to watch him every minute — I was afeared he’d desert to try and kill a German. The Irish are the most fiery men on the face of the earth.

But Seamus and Perkin didn’t die for nothing. I went with a herald and reclaimed their corpses, giving Hapsburg’s camp a careful look as I did. The Swabians were contemptuous of us, and I met the giant Heinrich in person — I’m a big man, and he over-topped me by a head. He didn’t bother to conceal his camp, and he returned my friend to me with the trappings of chivalry, but few, if any, of the essentials.

‘He was easy to put down,’ Heinrich said in his heavily accented English. ‘None of you English is any match for a knight.’ He laughed. ‘Pitiful.’

I turned to the German herald who accompanied us. ‘Is this what passes for courtesy in Swabia?’ I asked.

‘Save your tears, Englishman,’ Heinrich said. ‘None of you are knights. We know what you are: peasants who have stolen armour. We are not afraid of your White Company.’ He laughed.

Perhaps I could have said something inspired, or merely insulting, but instead, I marked their banners and penants as carefully as I might. I put Perkin and Seamus in carts, and Arnaud, who had driven a few carts in his life, helped me drive them back to our lines.

Courtesy and control. And perhaps, simply biding my time. Treating war as a business.

We buried them and our other dead that night and a priest said Mass. And then we slipped away. We retreated.

We left Rudolph von Hapsburg with nothing. He sat there for three days, waiting for us to attack him, so I’m going to guess that his Swabians weren’t as sure of themselves as Heinrich sounded.

We pounded south, back to Prato, then we drove east, along the same path as Sir Hannekin. We broke up into smaller divisions to cover more ground, looting and burning across an empty countryside. We ate well, but something had gone out of me with Perkin’s death.

I wanted to avenge him. I loved Father Pierre Thomas, but I was not going to turn the other cheek for the German bastard who’d killed my squire.

It had become more personal and less chivalrous in the Hapsburg camp.

Professional war is an odd thing, and personal animosity is not useful. As an example, when we passed through Prato the second time, we received reinforcements — both English and German. Erich von Landau joined us at Prato. The next night, at the fire, while our Italian servants cooked, Erich spoke to Fiore in German, and Fiore stood up carefully and nodded.

Erich said something in Italian.

Fiore nodded. Sadly, I think.

Erich went and shook his hand, and that was that. I don’t know that they discussed that the Friulian had killed Erich’s brother, but I assume that some accommodation was reached.

I was watching Milady as she was behaving oddly. The day after Perkin died, I found her in camp, dressed in a kirtle and gown. She looked down her nose at me and I rode on.

Perkin left a hole in my lances, and in my life — I couldn’t find anything. I never had six pair of lace points that matched. I didn’t have a squire just then, so I picked up the youngest man-at-arms to join us at Prato, an English boy still young enough to have pimples, who had come all the way out from England to fight in Italy. We were becoming famous. His name was Edward, and his father, he said, was a bishop.

Edward Bishop, he called himself. And with the same draft from England came a Scot — or an Irishman — Colin Campbell.

We rode further east and linked up with Baumgarten in the hills of Montughi, where we camped. Rudolph von Hapsburg had finally stopped waiting for us on the other side of the city and had retreated to Florence proper. All our marching hadn’t got us clear of him, though. We could see his camp fires.

Beyond his fires, we could see Florence in the distance. Baumgarten and Hawkwood put their pavilions side by side, and we saw the two of them, sitting on camp stools, drinking wine.

We drank wine, too. Probably too much. We were angry — angry as soldiers are when they feel they have not been well led. Soldiers — professional soldiers — are like the men and boys who put on the passion plays at Clerkenwell. You work and work — make your costume, write and rewrite your lines, and then you put on your performance, and for a few days you are the toast of London. But then some other guild puts on their bit — they have a splendid King Herod, a fine Jesus who moves the women to tears — and your brilliant bit is forgotten. We’d had our moment at Canturino, but since then, we’d been defeated by snow and the Germans; the crowd no longer sang our praises, but those of the Germans. Our own Italians were deserting. We’d left Pisa with 2,000 lances of English and Germans, and another thousand Italian men-at-arms. Now we had just a few hundred.

I sat on a leather trunk, sewing a grommet. Grommets are the very sinews of armour — for every piece, there are a couple of grommets in your arming coat to hold the whole thing together. Sewing made me think of Perkin, who was, sans doute, the best squire I’d ever had. My new squire couldn’t sew and clearly thought the whole thing beneath him, so I sat in the firelight with my arming doublet, trying to coax the torn out holes back into shape so I could lace on my leg harnesses the next day — if we were going to fight.

Perhaps I should have punished him. What I remember is being tired all the time. Tired with fatigue and — men tell you this often, monsieur? — tired of it all. When Perkin died, it was as if the whole game had no point. Let me tell you how it is. The more times you face the fight, and the more men you kill, the harder it is to smile, to laugh, to see the glory in the day. Even to have a friend or a lover. What comes easier is to drink hard, gamble and never, ever go inside your head to see what’s there. Perhaps I should have punished my lazy, arrogant squire, but had I roused myself, I might simply have killed him, because that is where you go, when all you do and all you breathe is fighting and death.

Chivalry is the answer. Just as men have developed laws to protect us from greed — pale reflections of God’s law, perhaps, but rules nonetheless — so we have chivalry to protect us from violence. So that if we must kill, we have rules.

I remember that night, because we were all there. Not Robert, killed by peasants, and not Seamus, killed by Germans, nor Perkin. But Janet was there, slim and blue, drinking from a Venetian glass and sitting in a broad chair her squire had stolen from a church. John Hughes was there, leaning over her, making a joke, and Sam Bibbo was quietly sharpening arrows. Fiore was watching her, but he was talking about feats of arms he’d heard of, and he had Juan’s attention and William Grice’s. Courtney was trying to shave in the dark, with a dozen men ‘helping’ by making suggestions, most of which would have made a Southwark girl blush. Arnaud was trying a pair of leg harnesses, and a patient armour merchant — a Florentine, no less — was making adjustments. John Thornbury was playing cards with de la Motte and a pair of Baumgarten’s men-at-arms. Kenneth MacDonald was repairing his jupon — a great deerskin coat stuffed with sheep’s wool — and trading Irish jibes with Colin Campbell.

I watched them all, and I thought of all the others. Ned Candleman. Chris Shippen. Richard.

Christ, I missed Richard.

And drinking and thinking about Perkin made me angry.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, and everyone stopped. I must have sounded like a madman. Wode. Milady turned and looked at me, and her eyes were wide.

‘Tomorrow, we should show the Germans what we are,’ I said.

Fiore looked at me and smiled. ‘Do you intend some feat of arms?’ he asked.

‘By God, that’s just what I intend,’ I said.

Just after dark, a boy came and fetched me to Sir John Hawkwood. He had his feet up, and he was holding a silver cup. He looked quite relaxed. Sir Hannekin was sitting by him.

‘William,’ he said and nodded.

‘Sir John?’ I asked.

‘Hannekin, this is William Gold, whom I’ve known since he was a boy. He’ll command Andrew Belmont’s lances. William, we’re going to try for the city. We won’t take it — Florence has more people than we have grains of wheat in this camp — but I intend to drive in Hapsburg’s outposts and break his barricades.’

‘I’m in,’ I said.

‘You’d best be in, young William,’ Sir John said. ‘Your battle has the best armour. You are the vanguard. I want you to go first — right at their barricades.’

I nodded. ‘Consider it done,’ I said. Or something equally brash.

Baumgarten laughed. ‘Quite the young cock,’ he said. ‘I offered my best German knights, but Sir John must have you. I’ll have my eye on you, Master William.’

I was given wine. I tried not to sound too drunk, and after a little while, and some polite noises, I went back to my people.

They all looked at me.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I mean to avenge Seamus and Perkin. And win my spurs, or die trying.’

No one said a thing. The fire crackled and I went to my cloak.

I mean, what else was there?

I didn’t have Richard, and I didn’t have Emile, and I wasn’t ever going to be a knight. I was full of anger. And I thought, Plague take them all. I’ll just cut my way to the gates of hell.

We rose before dawn. I didn’t have a hangover, and after two leather bottles of water, a cup of wine and some hard bread and honey, I felt ready to face my armour. It was the first of May. I remembered May — the month of love. I took Emile’s favour out of my clothes and attached it to the peak of my helmet.

‘Let’s get this done, Edward,’ I said.

He sighed.

I put on a clean shirt and my arming doublet, the one I’d repaired the night before, over clean braes and my best red hose. He pointed my hose to my doublet. ‘This is servant’s work,’ he muttered.

I said nothing.

Perkin used to lay all my harness out on dry blankets. Edward didn’t know what to do — I think he’d only armed in dry castles and nice big pavilions. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ he said.

‘You attach the greave to the cuisse with the little key,’ I said. ‘Before you put it on my leg.’

‘I know that,’ he said, hurrying to do as I’d said, as if he’d known all along. He knew, at one level, but at another, he’d forget what he was doing.

He was afraid, of course.

He stopped to put my sabatons on, and he spent far too much time on just two buckles. Then he seated the left leg and closed the greave.

‘I need more light,’ he said.

I said nothing.

He took an aeon getting the buckles closed on the cuisse.

Then he tackled the second leg. I had time to think how easy he had it — Perkin had had to arrange different armour all the time, as I damaged a leg, or plundered something I liked better. He’d been shaping into a good knight.

I had only learned to be a squire under Fra Peter, and only after I’d been a man-at-arms for years.

I was lucky, I decided. I had a lump in my throat and I was close to tears.

‘This belt is too stiff,’ Edward said.

‘Take a moment. Breathe. There’s no rush,’ I said.

Milady Janet pranced by, fully armed.

I laced my own points, cinching the points tight to the arming jacket. When you fight on foot, the worst thing that can happen is to have your leg harnesses slip down even a little.

‘I can do that,’ he insisted.

No you can’t, I thought, but I didn’t say so. I was kind enough to know he didn’t need to face his first battle feeling like he’d failed me.

Of his own accord, he fetched me a stool. I sat, and John Hughes put a cup of hippocras into my hand. He smiled. He was Milady’s archer again, and very happy with it.

Sam Bibbo came up. He was eating a sausage. The two of them counted over their shafts while I armed.

Edward came back with my Milanese breast and backplates.

‘Unseat the lance rest,’ I said. ‘I won’t need it today.’

That started a murmur.

‘Sir John says we’ll fight on foot. We’re to go for the barricades.’ I smiled. I felt better.

I sat and drank hippocras, and thought about May and love. And Emile. And Fra Peter, and Father Pierre Thomas. And Richard, and a lot of other things. Chivalry. Fear.

I rose and shrugged on my haubergeon, looted from Poitiers.

Edward and Sam put the breast and backplates around me and closed it like an oyster’s shell — buckled it home and fetched the arms.

The left arm went on, and was laced to the haubergeon, and then the right. I flexed each one in turn.

Three of them put my white coat over my armour.

All around me, in the growing light, all the men I liked best were doing the same things — the gradual process of arming. A young woman came with a basket of rolls, warm from an oven somewhere, like a miracle of loaves and fishes brought to the White Company camp.

‘For luck,’ she said. Just for a moment, she looked like Emile.

I ate the roll; it was delicious.

Edward came with my gauntlets and helmet.

‘Go get armed yourself,’ I said. I had the wisdom to know that the worst fear of a young man-at-arms is the fear of being late.

Sam brought me my war sword — four feet of good steel, made in Germany. He belted it around my waist and buckled it.

Arnaud appeared with de Charny’s dagger. ‘You’ll miss this, if you don’t have it,’ he said. We tied it to the sword belt, and I drew it a few times. A rondel dagger has to flow into your fist in a fight. When you want it, you have to know just where it is.

Men were pale shapes flitting like moths when I rose from my stool. I could see Sir John in his full, new harness, all steel, and the light made him a statue of molten silver, or the shape of an angel — a very incongrous shape for Sir John Hawkwood. I walked to my horse, and spent some precious spirit vaulting into the saddle. My men were watching.

Pierre, my warhorse, was eager. Edward had made him gleam. That, he was good at.

I sat on Pierre and watched my lances form. The sun was just going to crest the horizon.

They had to know we were coming.

Kenneth MacDonald sprang onto his charger. He looked very dull, in a leather jupon instead of a breastplate. He wore a great aventail as big as a cloak, hanging down from the most steeply pointed German basinet I’d ever seen. He looked like a great orange bird of prey.

Milady looked like a very small, sleek steel falcon.

Juan looked showy; he wore a red cloak pinned at his shoulder, and his lady’s favour — a little beaten about — was pinned to his shoulder. Fiore was very plain; he didn’t have a steel breast and backplate, but his white coat hid his poverty.

Pages scurried about, collecting spears we’d use if we dismounted, picking up last requests, handing out cups of wine — many men drink hard before a fight. My page was eating a winter apple with one hand while trying to manage a horse with the other.

Edward was the last man in my battle to mount his horse.

Around us, other battles were in the last stages of preparation. Thornbury had all veterans, and he was ready — his whole company sat on their mounts, mocking the latecomers. The Germans were much slower — I could see a German man-at-arms who didn’t have his breast and backplates on yet.

Sir John rode up to me. He looked over the camp and the Field of Mars — the place where we formed. As I watched, he came to a decision.

‘You decide how far you can go,’ he said. ‘This is mostly for honour. Hapsburg has too many men for us to win a real victory. I’d like a man to touch the barricades.’

It was an honour, in a chivalric fight, to have reached the enemy barricades. I knew this language.

You might ask, mon dieu, if Sir John Hawkwood was making war into a business, why should touching the enemy barricades matter.

Look you. We were an army of a few thousand men, facing a city with a population of a hundred times that, defended by an army four times our own size. Even if we obliterated our enemies, we couldn’t take Florence.

But men are not clockwork. They are flesh and blood. Taunts sting us. Insults hurt us.

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

He tapped me on the shoulder with his steel-clad fist. ‘I imagine you will, William.’

He looked around.

An Italian priest — doubtless a Pisan — came forward with a censer, and said a prayer over us. I said a paternoster. A boy handed me a clay cup of water and smiled.

‘I want to be a knight when I grow up,’ he said in pretty fair English.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the water.’

I turned to my lance and raised my fist.

‘On me,’ I said.

We filed off, and I led the way out onto the road. A dozen exiled Florentines — gentlemen — were gathered there, and two of them left their ranks. They led us down the road almost two leagues, and then we went across farm fields for as long as it would take a nun to sing Mass.

In the distance, I could see the Florentine forces forming. I remember thinking, Sweet Virgin Mother, they’ve had all night, they know we’re coming, and they still aren’t ready. It lit a small fire of hope in me.

My gentleman guide pointed with his sword. ‘The gate of San Gallo,’ he said.

It was a great gate, big enough for ten men to ride in abreast, and in front of it were entrenchments and barricades. They were full of men — crossbowmen from the guilds and German men-at-arms. They were about 500 paces distant, and the ground was as clear as a farmer’s field from us to them. It rose steadily, too.

But the men manning those makeshift walls weren’t steady. They seethed like maggots on a wound. Some were still arming, and others. .

Who knows why men are late?

‘Companions!’ I called out, and all the muttering behind me died away. Something was forming in my head: Anger. And hope. I raised my hand again.

‘The best way to do this is very quickly. We form a line right here on my command. We will ride to long crossbow shot and dismount, as fast as lightning, and we will go forward to the barricades without stopping to dress our line or issue challenges or any other formality.’ I looked back. ‘As soon as Sam finds the distance comfortable, the archers are to fall to the rear and loft over us — steadily.’

‘Comfortable, is it?’ Sam said.

‘All the way to the barricades,’ I said. ‘And over them, into the town.’

I had fifty lances. There were 3,000 men at the barricades.

‘All the banks in the world are here,’ I said.

That got a happy grumble.

‘Drink water!’ I ordered.

I loosened my sword in its sheath and checked de Charny’s dagger.

No one said, ‘This is insane.’

No one suggested we should stop.

‘Ready?’ Men at the barricade were pointing at us. We were so few, I assume they thought we wouldn’t attack. Indeed, militiamen were already trailing away, back into the town. Looking for breakfast, the lucky sods.

I drew de Charny’s dagger from my belt. ‘I took this from Geoffrey de Charny at Poitiers!’ I roared.

Men cheered.

‘I will give it to the first man to touch the barricades!’ I called.

They roared.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

Twenty yards into the empty field, I raised my fist, and my lances flowed forward from the right and left. A well-trained company can array itself faster than most folk can imagine. I didn’t finish the first five lines of my paternoster before they were ready.

‘Forward!’ I called. I turned to look back, and saw Sir John with Thornbury’s battle coming up on my left.

I didn’t wait. I was, I hoped, doing what I’d been told. And I thought, To hell with it. Hell was probably where I was destined.

The Germans looked half armed and asleep. All 2,000 of them.

We covered fifty paces at a fast trot. Then another fifty. Not a bolt was loosed at us. Another fifty. We were moving well — I was proud of my lances, because we were in good order and well-bunched up.

We crossed the line I’d imagined for crossbow range, and since we received no bolts, I let us go on. Every heartbeat ate another pace.

A dozen bolts came out of the barricades. I’d aligned my attack with the rising sun. I looked back — it was a red ball behind us.

Another flight of bolts, and most of them went well over me. Somewhere one struck with a nasty hollow metallic sound. A horse screamed.

The crossbowmen would be spanning.

‘Halt!’ I roared. And then, ‘Dismount!’

I swung my leg over, turned sideways, put my breastplate against my saddle and slithered to the ground.

My page emerged from behind me, slipped past me and took Pierre, who gave me a look.

The page dropped my spear at my feet. I stooped to get it, rose and looked right and left. I turned back towards Florence and began to walk the last 200 paces to the barricade.

A bolt struck my left spaulder and skidded away. It felt like a heavy punch from a strong man. There was a rattle of bolts — a dozen must have struck — but as far as I could see, all my men were still moving forward. And, of course, when you are going forward, you can’t see your dead.

I looked down at the ground beneath my feet. Green tufts were springing to life in the old cart track, and there were the remnants of a house, probably pulled down the night before.

There was another rattle of crossbow bolts and a long, joyless scream.

The crossbow bolts were coming faster now. I took one more look, right and left, and closed my visor.

I think I laughed. I was empty. Empty of need or desire. I didn’t care about my next meal or about John Hawkwood’s next plan or Emile or our saviour. I was going to touch the barricade.

The barricade was eighty paces away, a little lower than a man and lined with men in armour that lit up red in the sun.

War-bow shafts began to fall like wicked sleet on the barricade and the men behind it.

I hadn’t intended to run, but I found myself trotting, and the line trotted to keep up with me.

There were shouts ahead.

I felt. . strong. There was no reason that a frontal assault on the barricades should be going this well, and I had time to consider that it was a trap — that there was cavalry concealed to my left. But my last glance at my men had shown Thornbury’s battle coming up on my left and Thomas Biston’s on my right. If it was a trap, their Germans would need a hell of a lot of cavalry.

Baumgarten was deploying behind me.

We were as well placed as we were going to be.

I was running — in sabatons. Somewhere in my line was a man cursing his squire, but that day it was not me. Our line was fair enough, and the rising sun turned the tips of our spears to fire.

The men behind the barricades were seething. Men ran back and forth — fifty voices were calling and, as I watched, a guildsman tried to force his way to the barricade to loose his weapon and was roughly forced back by a German man-at-arms.

I looked for the pennants I wanted.

Twenty paces from the barricade, I realized that unless God and his legion of angels came down to stop us, we’d make the barricade. The crossbows had been ill-aimed and desultory, for whatever reason.

Typically, when men fight at barricades — at least in the lists — men stand on either side of a waist-high wooden wall and exchange blows. You can’t be hit below your breastplate and your opponent can’t grapple.

I’d never fought at a barricade.

But I’d stormed a few towns, and I had a different notion of how to tackle the wall. I had no intention of giving any other man de Charny’s dagger.

Five paces out, I lengthened my stride. There were half a dozen Germans waiting for me, jostling to be the one to face me across the barrier.

All or nothing.

I leaped.

I almost didn’t make it, which would have shortened this tale immensely, but I got my left foot on the barricade, my spear struck something, and then. .

Ah, and then I fought.

I landed deep in their ranks. Armour protects you from the abrasions and cuts of small blows, and for the first few cuts, it was all I could do to get my feet under me. I was close in — I had a man right against my breast, and my spear shaft was already broken — no idea how. I drew de Charny’s dagger and stabbed — one, two, three times, as fast as my hand would move. It came away bloody, then I turned and stabbed behind me. I put my left hand on the pommel of the dagger, received a great blow to my head that rang bells, and grappled close to a man. He got one hand on the dagger, but his other held his sword, and my two-handed grip overcame him. He had no visor, and my dagger went in over his nose.

I kicked out behind me on instinct, and then I had space. I stumbled and put my back against the barrier, and for three deep breaths the Germans stood back. I put the dagger back in my sheath — St George must have guided my hand — and drew my longsword.

I took the time to bow and salute them. And breathe.

And then, of course, I attacked them.

I put my sword down in one of Fiore’s guards — the boar’s tooth — and cut up at the first German’s hands. He had heavy leather gloves rather than steel gauntlets, and he sprayed fingers and screamed. My down cut stopped on his arms and I pushed it into his face.

The other two hammered blows at me, but they were thrown too fast, with too much fear. Both hit — one dented my left rebrace, and the other fell on the peak of my helmet, cut away a portion of Emile’s favour, and glanced off the overlapping plates of my right spaulder.

I cut at the second man’s head. He had a red coat over his coat of plates, and a full helmet that covered his face. My adversary swatted heavily at my blade, and I allowed his blow to turn mine and hammered his faceplate with my pommel, knocking him back a step. He raised his hands. I passed my blade over his head and kicked him in the gut while I held him, and he dropped — neck broken or unconscious. Either way, down.

Blows hit me. Many blows. A man in armour can take all the blows that don’t kill him. My armour was good.

There were voices calling in English all around me. I pushed forward, and my opponents backed away.

To their rear, I saw Rudolph von Hapsburg’s banner go up.

All around me, men were calling, ‘George! St George and England!’ and I narrowly avoided putting my point into Milady’s basinet — she, of all people, I should have known in a melee. I have no idea how she’d passed me, but I fought from behind her for as long as a man takes to mount a horse. I pinked some Florentine in the leg, stabbing down, and she slammed her sword into his head. I doubt he fell dead — I suspect he’d merely had enough.

I think by then my whole battle — my command — was over the barricade and in the muddy trench behind it. A few guildsmen stood, and a few local men-at-arms were ashamed to show fear in front of their ladies, who even then were on the walls behind them. But most of the local men ran for the gate, leaving the Swabians to face a rising tide of Englishmen and Germans.

Rudolph von Hapsburg may have been proud and boastful — Messire Villani says he was — but he was brave. He led his knights in person, and he charged at us. But it is harder to charge through a rout of fleeing men than it is to charge through a deluge of arrows or crossbow bolts. His men were pushed aside — they came at us in packets.

I wanted the giant. I could see him — he was a head taller than any other man, his pennon was black and he had a spear and an axe — he was off to my right. I shamelessly stepped back from an opponent and left him to Edward, passed behind Fiore, got two more paces — it was like pushing through a crowd at a fair — and there he was, hammering at MacDonald with his axe. MacDonald caught all three of his heavy blows, then tripped on a corpse — all those war-bow shafts had reaped more than a few Florentines — and his fall kept him from the giant’s smashing blow.

I stepped into the gap. I remember as I stepped up, seeing a flash of gold on the helmet hard by Sir Heinrich. It had to be a gold cornet, and that meant the next knight to the left was Rudolph.

Heinrich raised his axe and cut. Big men are supposed to be slow. He wasn’t. The axe flicked back and shot forward — I cut it to the right with an underhand blow, and he turned the axe in mid air and cut back at me. I had to put my left hand on the blade of my sword to parry — a technique Fiore taught me. I made my sword a staff.

I was close to him, and I smashed my guard into his visor. It wasn’t much of a hit, but every hit counts.

He stumbled back one step, and I cut at him from the shoulder, as hard and fast as I could.

He caught it on his axe blade.

A blow caught my helmet squarely and I stumbled.

Apparently, single combat is an Anglo-French convention. Rudolph’s sword was pushing for my eye-slits, but I batted it down and my back cut only just saved me from the axe.

Rudolph’s sword licked out again and slammed my hand, but I had good gauntlets. He broke my little finger and it hurt like fuck. He punched the point at my head as my gaurd weakened, and his point went in between the base of my helmet and the chin of my aventail — suddenly my mouth was full of blood.

I had a few breaths to live, if that. He’d cut open my mouth — look, this scar right here — I still have the devil’s smile, as we call it.

I pivoted toward Rudolph, fought through the pain and cut down at his shoulder. Then I pushed in with my other foot, driving forward with my not-inconsiderable size, flinching in my head from the inevitable axe-blow. I wagered my life that I could get so far forward into Rudolph that Heinrich wouldn’t be able to hit me. I had no choice. It was all or nothing.

I was mostly right, and the staff of the axe slammed into my shoulder plates as my blow deceived Rudolph and hit his arm just below his shoulder armour — it landed on mail, but it broke the arm. Heinrich’s hit on my shoulder landed on my pauldrons. That hurt, but pain was just pain.

I thrust for Rudolph’s face — my best blow. Halfway to the target, I dropped my point the width of his sword and changed the direction subtly, so his parry moved nothing but the wind. My point missed his face but got into the chain aventail at his neck, bit deep, through chain and padding, and came away red.

I caught that at the edge of my vision, because I was already turning to parry the axe. The giant cut, and I counter-cut at his hands. I hit first. I hit his hands so hard he voided his blow.

Kenneth MacDonald got to his feet. He, too, had an axe, and he raised it.

Heinrich rotated fully to face me. I’d cut away a finger and he bellowed like a bull, while MacDonald’s axe slammed into his chest. It didn’t cut through the heavy iron plates of his coat, but it must have broken ribs, and he sat down, falling back across his Prince.

A trumpet was sounding the recall.

I was breathing so hard I could hardly keep my point in line.

Heinrich bounced to his feet again, blood pouring from his left gauntlet.

I cut up from the boar’s tooth again, and took off the giant’s thumb. MacDonald passed behind me and cut at yet another man, probably saving my life, but that’s a melee. I was utterly focused on my giant.

He had killed Perkin.

He leaped forward off Rudolph von Hapsburg and I cut down, into his exposed thigh. He pushed through it and kept his feet a heartbeat, but the leg wouldn’t hold him, and I was reversing my sword, holding it with one hand on the hilt and the other at the point, as if it was a very short spear, or a shovel for digging.

As he tried to get his balance, I slammed it into his faceplate. The visor held.

The man fell back.

The Germans were retreating, but they were also just realizing that their lord was lying on the ground at my feet. Heinrich had fallen across him as he tried to rise, crushing him to the ground. He fell with his arms spread — he’d lost fingers on both hands, and there was blood coming from under his helmet.

I stepped on his right hand, pinning the axe hand to the ground. I could see his eyes. Not mad, or filled with hate.

Just blue.

I put the tip of my war sword against his throat, where the skin showed. He’d fallen with his head back, so his aventail didn’t quite cover his chin.

I won’t say the battle stopped, just that I could hear men screaming in Italian and German, but very few men moving and everyone watching me.

I put the slightest pressure on the pommel of my sword.

So he’d know that I was the better man.

‘Yield!’ I said. Like a knight.

‘Ja!’ he said.

They let us go from the barriers. For one terrifying moment, they thought I was going to kill their Prince, and when I accepted Heinrich’s surrender, Rudolph ‘graciously’ allowed us to retire.

That’s what knights do.

When they’re badly beaten.

I had to have help to get over the barricades. With 15,000 people watching me from the walls and from our lines, I could barely walk without limping, because my left leg-harness had slipped a fraction and every step hurt.

I forced myself to walk like a gentleman, with all the time in the world. I had to get my visor up to spit blood — my mouth was full of it and my white coat was covered.

Baumgarten’s knights were cheering like heroes. They’d covered the barricade behind us, and many of them had fought, so no discredit to them. They walked back with us, slapping us on our backplates and calling things, which Fiore, who was all but glowing, refused to translate.

‘That was. .’ he said. He said it twice.

Baumgarten himself came forward, which seemed odd, since we were retreating. We’d made our point. In fact, we’d scared the piss out of Florence. Juan, Milady and Grice were apparently able to touch the gate before we retired.

The archers were yelling, ‘George and England.’

Baumgarten headed straight for me. His armour sparkled, and he wore the gold belt of a Knight of the Empire. He looked like a king.

He opened his visor.

A few paces from me, he stopped and handed his squire the baton he carried.

‘William Gold!’ he roared, so that they could hear him in the squares of Florence.

I stopped in front of him, so utterly exhausted that I had lost the power of speech.

Sir John came up — he was all but running — and men-at-arms crowded in.

‘William Gold,’ Buamgarten said again. ‘Kneel!’

Kneel?

Sweet saviour of man, I might never get up.

But I knelt.

Edward appeared from the crowd and began to fumble with my aventail. ‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘My God, sir!’

He got it over my head. There was a lot of blood in it from my mouth wound.

Baumgarten turned to Sir John. ‘Do you wish to do this?’ he said.

Sir John shook his head. ‘If you do it here, in bowshot of the walls, no one will ever be able to question the making.’

Sir Hannekin Baumgarten drew his sword. ‘William Gold — birth enobles, but nothing enobles like a life of arms. A deed such as I just witnessed-’

‘Guildsmen coming. Winding their crossbows,’ muttered a squire.

Sam Bibbo, I’m told, loosed a shaft then and there. I didn’t see it, but men who did say it flew 300 paces and frightened the wits out of a trio of Florentine guildsmen. Or killed all three, if you believe some.

The sword smacked down on my right shoulder, a little too damned hard. ‘I dub thee knight,’ Baumgarten said.

‘By St Nicholas! What was it all for?’ cursed my lady Janet as we rode south.

The days after my knighting were not pleasant. I had a fever from my mouth wound, and it wouldn’t heal. I got it stitched twice.

If I were telling you a set of stories, monsieur, I’d tell you some pleasant fiction: that Florence sent out emissaries to Sir John, and he drove a hard bargain and settled an honourable peace.

That sounds well, does it not?

But what Florence actually did while I lay in my tent and moaned, was to pay a number of men, including the Imperial Knight who’s buffet had just enobled me in front of 20,000 onlookers. Florence paid them enormous bribes, and our army, victorious in the field, vanished like alpine mist under a Tuscan sun. The Germans left first, but the money went far — even into the White Company.

In a week, those of us who didn’t sell out were retreating across the Florentine contada. Hawkwood was sanguine. I still don’t know if he received money, or not. You must know he has a sovereign price — a fine reputation — but he loved money.

Any road, we retreated on Pisa. And Pisa, who had nearly bankrupted themselves to buy us, was none too happy. Neither were we happy. The men who’d been bought had ridden south — Andrew Belmont, who was angry over my elevation; Sterz himself, probably smarting that Pisa had chosen Hawkwood instead of him, and a dozen other officers. Belmont’s little company actually changed sides to serve Florence.

Just north of Pisa, we made a camp — a walled camp covered by the Arno River. Hawkwood stayed in command, and began to buy a new army.

Across the river, Florentine agents competed with ours to buy every available lance. And Sir Walter Leslie, from France, no less, arrived to compete as well. He was bidding for the pope, or so I understood. For a crusade.

On our second night in the new camp, we threw a party. We had horse races and a military dance — a hundred of us danced in armour, in full sight of our adversaries. To show we were still the White Company. To thumb our noses at the men who had taken money to change sides.

I came back from the dancing tired, but feeling better than I had in a week, to find Fra Peter was having a cup of wine with my lady. She smiled at me — truly smiled. She was alight with happiness.

Fra Peter was wearing his scarlet surcoat, the uniform of his order. He stood up as I approached.

‘William?’ he said.

I grinned. ‘Sir William, to you,’ I said.

He threw his arms around me and crushed me. I thought he might collapse my breastplate. Then he held me at arms length. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘It sounds like a marvellous feat of arms.’ He looked at me. ‘You don’t seem surprised to see me.’

I shrugged and grinned like a fool. Praise from Fra Peter was praise indeed. ‘Leslie’s recruiting for a crusade,’ I said. ‘Or so I hear. So I expected you.’

Fra Peter nodded. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come and walk with me.’

‘Are we going to pray?’ I asked. I meant it as a jest.

‘We might, at that,’ he allowed. We walked a ways, stepping carefully over tent ropes and horse dung. I was still in armour and I had that bone-wrenching fatigue you can only experience from wearing iron on your body.

‘That was. . a woman. In arming clothes, at your fire,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, instantly on my guard. ‘She’s a fine lance. She’s won her place here.’

Fra Peter nodded again. ‘Women can be trouble in war,’ he said. ‘But that’s Sir John Hawkwood’s business and none of mine.’ We’d come a long way, by then, right to the bank of the river. It was a soft summer night in Tuscany, and we sat under a chestnut tree as doves cried their haunting cries.

‘She is not my lover,’ I said, with all the righteousness a young man can project.

There were campfires across the river — so close, in fact, that the conversations of the men at those fires carried. A loud voice proclaimed that someone was a ‘fucking sodomite’ and a ‘son of a whore’ in Thames-side English.

Fra Peter’s craggy face — he had a big nose — was outlined against the firelight of the enemy camp, and he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking across the river.

Finally, he spoke. ‘Will you come on crusade?’ he asked. ‘The King of France has taken the cross. Father Thomas has even convinced the Green Count to take the cross.’

I thought that through. ‘Because the pope got John Hawkwood to leave his lands?’

Fra Peter’s head made an odd motion. ‘Perhaps. I prefer to think that it was Pierre Thomas and his preaching.’ He shrugged. ‘You served with Hawkwood. What do you think of war in Italy?’

‘I think it is much like being a routier. Except we behave a little better and we are paid a great deal more.’ It was my turn to shrug.

‘You are a corporal now. You have rank — men follow you.’ Fra Peter turned, and his eyes were dark. ‘Aye, tis possible that you have all you want here.’ He continued to look at me, then he looked away. ‘I am wasting time, I think. I want you to come with me on crusade, but before I ask you, I have to give you something. This thing. .’ His dark eyes were on mine like the heavy blade of an adversary. ‘This thing came into my hands without my seeking it. I think it may be wrong for me to give it to you. Father Thomas says no. He says that you must have your free will.’

He reached into the breast of his red coat with the white cross and handed me a small envelope. It was of coarse brown cloth, covered in oil, and inside was another envelope of heavy parchment.

I took an eating knife from my purse. ‘Is it. .’ I think my voice was full of hope. ‘Is it from Richard?’ I asked. ‘Richard Musard?’

Fra Peter blinked. ‘No, lad. Hah!’ His laugh sounded grim. ‘I’ll have to call you Sir William soon. No, but it is from Turin. When I took Father Thomas back to Turin, I was at the Green Count’s court for some days.’

I got my eating knife and carefully slit the old cloth to get at the parchment. There was a small seal.

Even in the dark, as soon as my thumb touched the seal, I suspected.

My heart beat as fast as it would have in combat. ‘She sent me a letter before she died!’ I said.

And Fra Peter shook his head. ‘No, William. She is still alive.’ He paused. ‘I have seen her — and spoken to her.’

I ran. Wearing my armour, I ran to the nearest campfire, leaving the older man sitting with his back to a chestnut tree. I came up to a fire where a dozen servants sat — not men I knew. They scattered in real fear — fear of an armed man running at them for the darkness.

I knelt by the light of their fire and used my eating knife to break her seal. The parchment unfolded, slim and short, and there was a tiny enclosure, shaped like a sacred heart.

Dear William.

I have learned that you think I am dead. I am not. I have so much to tell you.

My husband, it would appear, used this story of my death to hurt you. I had a long recovery from my second child — I might have died — but — I smile to write this — I did not. In the last few days, at the court of the Green Count, I have learned many things, about you and about the Count d’Herblay and the part he has played. I have had opportunity to talk with Sir Richard Mussard.

Monsieur, my husband has done all in his power to destroy you. I think it is worth adding that short of physical violence he dares do nothing to me, as I am not only the mother of his children, but the holder of his purse strings. I have my own retainers, indeed, now I have my own household. And so it shall remain, this I promise you.

I send you this letter by means of the very good knight Fra Peter of London, in hopes that he will find you in good health — the way I imagine you every day — a true knight. Be all a knight should be, and if God so wills it, perhaps we will yet see a day.

But I will commit no more to this parchment. Nor will I say adieu. Only, let your deeds so shine before men that I will hear of them, and clap my hands together.

Emile d’Herblay

I read the letter five or six times. I remember trying to decide. . anything. It all went around like a meaningless whirl of words. She was alive.

Alive.

Apparently, I cared very much. I remember that letter the way I remember wounds I have taken — the shock of the pain, the shock of the blood.

I actually fell over. I was kneeling by the fire and I lost my balance and fell. I lay there as if I had taken a blow, and then, as I got to my feet, the heart-shaped scrap of parchment came out of the envelope and fluttered to the ground like a moth.

It was very small. On it, a fine hand had written, ‘Perhaps I will go on a pilgrimage.’ There was no signature.

Pilgrims, like crusades, went to the Holy Land by way of Venice. And Rhodes.

Fra Peter was standing a distance away.

I pushed the letter and the heart into my purse and went to him.

‘I will go on crusade,’ I said.

Fra Peter’s eyes twinkled in the firelight. ‘God works in mysterious ways,’ he said.