The Ill-Made Knight (55 page)

I was drawn by a man and a woman’s voices shouting, and as I came closer, I realized it was Richard and Janet. I ran the last few steps to find that he had her arms, and she was dressed in my clothes – my worst arming cote, with laced-on sleeves, over a shirt of very dubious origins. He was trying to pull at her arms, and even as I rounded the pavilion behind mine, she snap-kicked him in the groin. He blocked the kick with his knee, and she, with breathtaking fluidity, predicted his defence and threw him over her hip – on his broken arm. He fell with his broken arm flapping like a wing, and I confess that I ran to his side, not hers.

‘His fucking arm is broken!’ I shouted at her.

She spat. ‘He treats me like a
woman.
’

Richard was writhing on the ground. The pain must have been incredible. ‘I’m trying to get her to pack!’ he spat.

‘I’m not leaving!’ she shouted. ‘I will not go back to being a lap-dog!’

‘Perkin!’ I roared. The poor lad ran up, my dented basinet in one hand and a rag of kirtle smeared with ash in the other. It was almost funny – trying to polish that old basinet was a little like trying to make a real knight of me.

‘Sir?’ he asked.

‘Perkin, get me a surgeon,’ I said. I turned to Milady. ‘We’re all leaving,’ I said. ‘There is no more Great Company. Petit Mechin is going to Burgundy. Sir John Creswell has said he’s going to Brittany.’ I forced myself to smile for her. In fact, she looked like a vicious shrew when she was angry: eyes narrow set, cheeks hard with rage and stubbornness.

She glared like a cat at Richard and then gave me the false smile women use when they are angry. ‘Where are
you
going?’ she asked.

John Hughes had been sharpening his long knife, and he stopped. Ned Candlewood was engaged in his usual off-duty pursuit: drinking hard at a bottle of wine. He put the glass bottle carefully on the ground. The brothers Arnaud and Belier – now fully armed and no longer servants – stopped fighting over a good basket and turned to look at me. Jack Sumner and Amory – no longer young Amory, either – stopped playing dice.

For good or ill, I was the captain of my own little band.

I propped Richard up against one of the ash-splint baskets that held my harness – when I had a good harness. ‘Richard? Would you care to come to Lombardy?’ I asked. ‘Sir John made me an offer. He wants me to use my money from the ransoms to raise a dozen lances to fight in Italy.’

‘Oh,’ Milady said. Her exhalation had some of the sound of a woman in the release of love. ‘Oh, Italy.’

Richard’s face darkened with blood. ‘I will
never
fight for that bastard again,’ he said. ‘I have a lord – the Count of Savoy. He will pay our ransom, and we will return to his court and
fight
John Hawkwood and his lawless brigands, thieves and rapists.’

I squatted down by him. ‘Richard, I’m not ransoming you. You are free to go. I told you so.’ I put a hand on his shoulder.

He shook it off. ‘You have seduced her!’ he spat.

For too damn long, I had no idea what he meant. I said something stupid, like, ‘What?’

Milady said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Richard.’ She said it with a certain bored lassitude.

Finally I understood. ‘No, by the saviour, Richard. There’s nothing between me and Janet.’

‘Why does she want to go to Italy? Why is she
against
going to the Count’s court?’ he spat. ‘I have bought her all the pretty dresses a woman could want.’

Now, before you say he’s a fool, remember that we were all twenty years old or so, and our blood was hot. He loved her.

‘I don’t want your fucking prison!’ she hissed. ‘Why do you want a wife who has to have three cups of wine to spread her legs? Go find a nice,
normal
girl and leave me alone!’

This to an audience of a dozen.

Richard turned to me. ‘You bastard,’ he said. ‘You . . . you . . .
fuck!
I’ll kill you when I’m able.’

His hate was palpable. I was young enough to imagine that it would fade. ‘Richard!’ I said. ‘Get a grip, man! I haven’t touched her, and I won’t.’

He
spat
at me. ‘Thief!’ he said. ‘
False Knight!’

I shook my head in disgust. As I say, I didn’t really believe his anger would last. He was wounded, a prisoner, and his woman was giving him a lot of crap.

His
woman. Heh, there speaks ignorance. He may have been her man, but she, I think, was never his. At some level, I think she hated him.

When you command – when you put yourself above others, to lead them – you learn a great deal. Some of the lessons are harder than diamonds. Some cut like blades. People have many motivations, and damaged people never show you the things they hold most dear.

The next day, or perhaps two – we lay in a state of exhaustion for a long time – the Genoese established all the ransoms and agreed on a schedule of payments that satisfied us all. Well, not all, as you’ll hear.

I had d’Herblay at my fire that afternoon. It was April, cold and wet. He didn’t have many clothes, and he was obviously suffering, so I offered him a cloak.

‘Why don’t I just live in your cast-offs?’ he asked bitterly. ‘On your fucking charity.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Five
thousand
florins!’ He spat. ‘I’ll have to sell estates, you little thief.’

I wasn’t as raw as I’d been two nights earlier. ‘If you can’t afford it, perhaps you should have stayed home,’ I said, with Fra Peter’s calm voice.

‘You
do
know she’s dead?’ he said. It was a strange turn in the conversation. I lacked the experience of men like d’Herblay to know how desperately he wanted to hurt me. I was used to men who used violence to settle hatred. D’Herblay used words.

At any rate, he watched my face like a lover. I took too long to understand. I’d taken several blows to the head at Brignais, and I must have been slow. I swallowed.

‘Dead?’ I asked.

‘In childbirth,’ d’Herblay said, with obvious relish. ‘Dead. A corpse. Stinking in the ground.’ He laughed, perhaps a little wild.

I sat as if my sinews had been cut.

You don’t know what you take for granted, until it is taken from you. I suppose I always imagined I’d win her in the end. Or perhaps I made an effort not to think about her in those terms at all.

I also realized that I had been walking around for three days with her favour – torn from her favourite dress – pinned to my aventail. In front of her husband.

By the sweet and gentle saviour of mankind, I can be a fool.

Oh, but the height of my folly was yet to come.

I’ve heard men say that loss gives way to anger, and others that most of us deny loss – I heard a very good sermon on that at Clerkenwell one Easter. But the loss of Emile hit me like a longsword to the helmet, and I reeled from moment to moment as if I could not get the ground to be steady under my feet.

I went to a meeting with fifty other men-at-arms where Petit Mechin told us how the ransoms would be apportioned and how the money would work. It wasn’t complicated.

‘A week hence, we’ll send convoys of prisoners to the relevant royal lieutenants,’ Mechin said, as if this was an everyday matter. ‘They will sign for the prisoners and present us with receipts, and we will pass those receipts to the bankers, who will pay us, and collect the ransoms at their leisure.’ He shrugged. ‘No doubt they will make an enormous profit but, messieurs, the only alternative is that we go and attempt to collect each ransom ourselves. The truth is that we have no one with whom we can negotiate.’ He gave a lopsided smile and twirled a moustache. ‘The government of France has effectively ceased to exist.’

To give you an idea of the scale of the rapaciousness of the Italian banks, my two ransoms totalled a little less than 6,000 gold florins. Under the scheme proposed by Mechin, I was to receive, in actual currency, about 500 florins, and letters of credit equal to another 1,000.

A superb recompense for a few hours of fighting, you might say, but assuming Messieurs Bardi made good on the ransoms, they would have another 3,500 florins merely for handling the paperwork.

At the meeting, I noted that Sir Hugh Ashley stood with the Bourc Camus. I remarked it, and I remarked it when I found the Count d’Herblay wrapped in a new cloak, sipping wine from a good horn cup at my fire, and talking to a very young man in black and white livery.

I remarked it, but it didn’t penetrate the moral concussion I had received from the anger of my closest friend and the death of my love. Know this, messieurs, I was courteous to other women – I even lay with one or two – but I never, ever forgot Emile in those days. She
was
my chivalry. I worried that I had not heard from her, but I never forgot her for more than an hour.

The next day, Sir John Hawkwood passed my camp. His lances were ready to march, his baggage carts loaded, and he himself was dressed like a popinjay, in a fine long gown over a short jupon of golden silk, with a great bag-hat on his head. He looked like a wealthy merchant.

By contrast, I didn’t even have a change of clothes, because Milady was wearing my spares.

He didn’t dismount, but clasped my hand. ‘Sir John Creswell asked for you to be a deputy,’ he said. ‘I assume he did it in a bid to hold you here, but I like anything that raises you in men’s estimation.’

It was hard not to be flattered by that. I looked up at him, tried to smile and remembered that Emile was dead.

‘What’s wrong, lad?’ he asked.

The problem . . .

Companions, the problem between me and Sir John was that while he saved my life and built my career, he was never a man you’d tell about love or death. His mind was a thing of cogs and gears, not flesh and blood. He was loyal, though; he was always a good friend to me.

But if I had told him about Emile, he would have given me that look he saved for men far gone with drink, or professing a desire to die in the field, or other failings. I once knew him to say that the only difference he could discern between women was the quality of their banter. I
saw
him kill a nun in Italy to prevent two men-at-arms from fighting over her.

He was not the man to share my sorrow.

So I shrugged. ‘A deputy?’ I asked, feigning interest.

‘You take the convoy to Auvergne,’ he said. ‘With Camus.’

I must have shuddered.

He shook his head. ‘Drop your foolish feud before it kills you,’ he said. ‘Think of him as a bad horse that must be ridden. Get through the ride to Auvergne and come to Italy.’ He grinned. ‘Remember, some of those prisoners are mine!’

It was almost two weeks before my convoy was ready to ride, and I stayed clear of Camus, but we had problems every day, because my men and his had to struggle over the same ground to find forage and fodder. The army was breaking up, faster every day, and there was less and less authority. Sir John Creswell held Brignais, and he didn’t even let the rest of us in the gates. He was afraid that another routier captain would take it from him – that sort of behavior was the order of the day.

Truly, there is very little honour among thieves.

The women were gone, and that made more trouble, because Milady was the last woman in the camp except a pair of old whores who had nowhere to go. Richard would not speak to me. Neither would he leave without her.

I lived in a fog of emotion, and I was surrounded by more of it – John Hughes said he’d rather have gone to hell than spend another night in that camp. It was like that.

There was a lot going on around me, and I was mostly deaf to it.

It was on a Sunday that we mounted, gathered our prisoners and rode west over the ridges for Auxerre.

We didn’t have to go so far. The other prisoner convoys had left earlier, and there was some attempt to keep them apart so that the royal lieutenants couldn’t conspire against us, but ours was held in camp – Sir John Creswell seemed to be the reason, and I was vaguely angry. I say vaguely, because I was so unaware. Milady rode at my side, dressed in looted armour, and I wore my harness; so did all my men and all Camus’ men. Sir Hugh rode with us, and he was all honey to me. I thought nothing of it, even when he drank with the Count d’Herblay all three nights on the road.

It was mid-April when we rode down a long ridge to the crossroads, where the road to Gascony crosses the road to Paris and the Road to Provence – a crossroads in Auxerre that every routier of that time must have known like an old friend. It was pissing with rain, and we came down the ridge just about nones – not that Auxerre had a working set of bells to announce the hour. We routiers had seen to that.

Ahead, we could see fifty men-at-arms sitting in sodden splendour on the road, watery red, blue and gold.

At the same time that we came down the ridge to the east of the crossroads, there was another party – a dozen wagons and twenty horsemen – coming down the far ridge towards us. I knew a moment of fear until I saw their colours.

They were churchmen, with a heavy escort of men-at-arms.

I ignored them. I rode up our column to the Bourc, and nodded as politely as I could manage. ‘How do we handle this?’ I asked.

He smiled. It was a horrible smile, one full of knowledge. So might Satan have smiled at Eve in the garden. ‘Any way you like,’ he said, with real amusement.

I knew right there that something was wrong. I knew he
wanted
me to know something was wrong.

At some further level, I didn’t care. I think I knew then that I was betrayed, and I was prepared to let it happen. Why not? Emile was dead.

‘Who is the lieutenant of Auxerre?’ I asked, staring into the rain.

Camus barked a mad laugh. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘I have a safe conduct.’

It was true.

We rode down the ridge.

The Lieutenant of Auxerre was my old friend and enemy, Boucicault. Seeing him cheered me, and I rode up to him with my hands bare of gauntlets and offered my hand to him.

He let his horse shy slightly, widening the distance between us. The distaste on his face was palpable.

‘My lord, I have the prisoners for exchange,’ I said into the silence.