The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (9 page)


Gunpowder?

Blackbeard grinned. ‘Gunpowder has more uses than blowing heads off Turks.’

When Nicholas awoke it was dark. Hodge still snored beneath his blanket, exhausted by all this travel in foreign parts.

A fire burned low in a shallow pit, and Stanley was turning two leverets on a spit. Blackbeard was quickly skinning a third, and then the mother hare. She was paunched and gutted, her legs and head cut off and skin pulled free and all buried in half a minute.

Stanley questioned Nicholas quietly. Where was his father buried? What was the cause of Crake’s enmity? He could answer neither question, except to say that Crake was a Puritan. But there was more to it than that.

Where were his sisters?

Nicholas told him, and Stanley brooded.

‘This will weigh on you. The responsibility of it. But they will be cared for well enough. One day, in time, you will return.’

‘I mean to.’

‘And where do you and your man make for meanwhile? Are there uncles, cousins?’

‘There are,’ said Nicholas, ‘but none will want to take in the children of a traitor.’

‘Your father was no traitor, and such would be hard to prove before a court.’

Nicholas shrugged. ‘I’d not burden any distant kin, nonetheless. We make for Bristol.’

‘Bristol?’

Nicholas looked at him steadily. ‘To take ship for Malta.’

Slow, uncomforting smiles spread over Smith and Stanley’s faces.

‘Malta?’

‘Malta of the Knights,’ said Nicholas.

‘Well.’ Smith tore off a large chunk from the hare’s thigh and chewed it slowly, savouring this childish fantasy as much as the sweet spring meat.

‘Malta, you say. And how exactly do you propose, you and your steadfast manservant here, to pay for your passage to Malta? Do you imagine Bristol shipmen have charitable hearts? And once at Malta – I presume you’re not going there to grow pomegranates, but to wage noble war upon the Turk – how do you propose to arm yourself? Do you have any idea of how much armour costs? A sword? Or perhaps you’re taking your catapult – the terror of all the sparrows in Shropshire?’

Stanley coughed sharply. It wasn’t right to mock the boy overmuch. He had lost a father, his family estate, given up his sisters, taken to the road – and they themselves had some part in it. Young Ingoldsby had nothing left, but still this boyish dream. It was not so contemptible, though ludicrous.

But Nicholas needed no defending, and his voice was steady.

‘We go to Malta with your aid or without. Your sneers cannot hurt me. The death of my father before my eyes, the lash of a whip, winter’s hunger, dishonour, these can hurt me. But not your sneers and mockeries. Hodge is no longer my manservant, since I have no money to pay him. But he is my companion still, and goes where I go.’

He tugged free a shoulder of the roast hare, glistening with dark meat, and ate. The boy had self-possession, no question.

‘You might help us on our voyage, but you cannot hinder us.’

Even Smith looked at the boy’s set expression with a faint, grudging respect.

‘Besides,’ said Nicholas swallowing, ‘here we will never be safe. This country is cursed for me.’

‘Never curse your country, lad,’ said John Smith. ‘You might as well curse your mother that gave you birth and suck.’

Stanley stoked up the fire. ‘Times are evil in all Christendom. In Holland they have slaughtered Huguenots by the thousand, and in France. In England they begin to persecute Catholics. The Body of Christ is divided and cut in pieces once again.’

‘All the more reason to flee such troubles for Malta,’ said Nicholas.

Smith snapped a thin bone and sucked at the marrow. ‘We might as well lead you into an abattoir, boy. Into a firestorm, the mouth of a volcano.’

‘Are there no women and children on Malta too?’

‘Aye. That stubborn and mulish peasantry will never leave their barren rock of an island, not if all the Legions of Hell were sailing on them.’

‘Well, if women and children are preparing themselves to face your firestorm and your terrible Turk, so can we.’

Stanley and Smith were silent. The boy was speaking some skewed sense, damn him.

Meanwhile the boy sounded ever more like a man.

‘Do not mistake me. You came to my father’s house, and I do not mean to … to turn that into a weapon against you. Yet you will agree that your coming to my father’s house was the origin of my misfortunes.’

‘We owe you nothing,’ growled Smith.

‘No. Nor do I mean to blackmail you. My father would roar me out of the house for such a thing.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I can hear him roar now. Nevertheless, the start of our troubles was your coming. So could it be that now we are meant to go with you? What else has providence got for me? Beatings and beggary. What would my father wish from you?’

That was a sharp question. Like father, like son.

Nicholas kept them wriggling, like playing two trout at once.

‘I am the only son of your brother knight, Sir Francis Ingoldsby. Is that how you requite him?’

Damn the boy.

Stanley looked at Smith. ‘We have truly failed on this journey of ours into England.’

Smith grunted agreement. ‘Which we were supposed to conduct with as little hubbub as possible.’

To Nicholas, Stanley resumed, ‘We will find you some better protection before we go. Some position in an old Catholic household, perhaps? One of my own, in Derbyshire—’

The boy’s voice rose in anger now and Hodge stirred.

‘In the bitter winter I protected my sisters, I found them shelter. We have wandered the length and breadth of the shire, Hodge and I, under snow for a blanket. We have slept in barns and pigsties and bartons not fit for beasts. Yet I am no Prodigal Son, with father to run home to.’

‘You have proved yourselves tough and cunning, I grant you.’

‘We had no choice in the matter. Neither I nor Hodge have father nor mother nor inheritance. If you will not go with me to Malta, yet I will find my way, through every hardship. It is my fate. You came to our house, and my father died. Yet it was me you came for, though you did not know it.’

The fire crackled in the still night. A fox barked. The boy spoke with conviction and a sublime simplicity.

At last Stanley stirred. ‘I do not agree with your interpretation, boy. But—’

Smith said brusquely, ‘Have you shot a fowling piece?’

‘Of course. And I can bring down a woodcock.’

‘How is your swordsmanship?’

‘Not so much. But I will learn.’

‘It takes years.’

‘Well then, I will learn in a month. The Turk is coming soon.’

Now Smith and Stanley exchanged a different smile. The boy was unstoppable. The son of Sir Francis Ingoldsby, Knight Grand Cross.


Malta?
’ said Hodge. ‘Where in the back-of-beyond the Forest of Clun is Malta?’ He looked around, all three faces smiling now. ‘You mean we’re going to
Wales
?’

The moon was high when they rode out of the glade onto the frosty road, the night cold and clear. The sound of their hooves would carry, dogs would bark as they passed by.

‘We need to move fast,’ said Stanley. ‘The whole country will be looking for two men and two boys on stolen plough horses.’

‘Two boys?’ pondered Smith. ‘What day is today?’

‘Near Lady Day. The twentieth in March, I think.’

‘’Tis a Monday. Washday.’ He turned in his saddle. ‘You are shivering, lads. But we will find you new garments, if some addled housewife has left her linens on a hedgerow overnight.’

Within a few miles they saw such linens cast over a holly hedge, gleaming in the moonlight. Smith made his choice, and hung a small purse of silver pennies from the gatepost in payment.

He tossed the clothes to the boys. They were stiff with frost.

Nicholas and Hodge stared down. Kirtle, pinafore and white lace-fringed mob cap for each.

‘That’s right,’ said Smith. ‘You’re going to Bristol as girls, never mind what Saint Paul says against men dressing up as maids.’

‘And your names shall be …’

‘Nancy,’ suggested Smith.

‘And Matilda,’ said Stanley.

For some reason, this was so amusing that the two knights had to stifle their laughter on their sleeves.

‘We also need a whore,’ said Smith at last.

The boys looked startled.

Smith grinned and offered no explanation.

It was a party of five who arrived unmolested at Bristol docks a week after. Mr Edward Melcombe, man of law; his brother Simon. His wife, a somewhat raddled-looking older woman called Margaret, whom he had picked up only recently in a dubious alley in Ludlow. And their two daughters, Nancy and Matilda, regrettably ill-favoured maids, both being of strapping build and with a distinct foreshadowing of beard about the jawline.

9
 

In Bristol the boys lay overnight in the door of a warehouse, sleeping fitfully as sailors bawled drunkenly and sometimes tried to nudge them awake, thinking they were waterside whores, or catamite boys. Stanley and Smith said they had business in the town. Business best conducted by dark.

At dawn they were kicked awake again.

‘On your feet!’

The two knights were now laden with bundles and bags over both shoulders.

‘We sail in an hour,’ said Smith, hulking dark against the red sunrise. ‘Into many a springtime storm.’

The boat was called the
Swan
of Avon
. It smelt bad.

It was something of a cross between a cog and carvel, having a triangular lateen sail on its mainmast and a full square-rigger on its foremast. A small, scruffy vessel, no more than a hundred tons and badly in need of a paint. Certainly it carried no gilding. Nicholas only hoped it was better maintained below the waterline, where it mattered. A crude swan had been painted on the flat face of the stern, looking more like an Aylesbury duck, and then a crucifix surrounded by flames, added for good measure as an afterthought. It bore no flag.

The master was a tall, lean, pockmarked fellow with a wandering gaze and two daggers in his belt. He was taking English broadcloth to Spain, and bringing back oranges and Canary wine. As for an island called Malta, he knew nothing of it.

He eyed Nicholas and Hodge, still in their thin disguise. ‘Your daughters, you say?’

Stanley nodded. ‘Nancy and Matilda.’

The captain sneered. ‘What you runnin’ from?’

‘None of your business.’

He grunted, and told them they’d have to bring their own food and drink, and keep out of his mariners’ way. Other than that, they’d not be molested.

‘And remember to spew at the stern,’ he added.

Nicholas and Hodge spewed all the way to the Scillies and beyond. But as they came in sight of France – Brittany, Stanley said – the sea began to calm, though the west wind was still biting cold. At least they were allowed to jettison their maids’ clothes and return to their own.

Exhausted and thinner than ever, they lay against a coil of tarred rope in the weak sun, wrapped in blankets. Smith came and dumped a bundle on the deck nearby. He took a leather flask from his bag and handed it to them.

‘A swig each,’ he said.

Nicholas unstoppered the cork. It smelt of rotting seaweed.

‘Scurvy grass soaked in ale,’ said Smith. ‘Drink it. It’ll stop you getting the Dutch Disease. Your gums rotting and your teeth falling out.’

Stanley came by whistling.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘A draught of Dr Smith’s sovereign anti-scorbutical infusion. The foulest concoction yet brewed this side of hell. So how are our young crusaders?’

Nicholas swallowed the liquid morosely. ‘Not dead yet.’

‘Well said, well said.’ Stanley grinned broadly, his ruddy cheeks becoming ruddier daily in the sun and wind, his thick fair hair blown back from his fine broad brow, his whole appearance so powerful and leonine.

‘Strange to remember you’re a monk,’ Nicholas blurted out.

Stanley gazed out to sea.

‘When we were born, this ruffian here and I—’ he indicated Smith, who ignored him – ‘England was a Catholic country still, under Henry. Many younger sons of my family have served the
Knights for generations. It is the highest honour.’

‘But – you can never marry.’

Smith grunted. ‘There’s another blessing.’

‘Taking that oath, and swearing fealty unto death, lifts all trouble from the mind. It makes life simple. Such a Brotherhood,’ said Stanley softly. ‘Such a band of brothers.’

Feeling a little more alive, Hodge and Nicholas explored the ship, as far as they were allowed.

It was a thing of wonder, despite the frequent sighting of rats and the smell.

‘You think that smells rosy,’ said one old mariner, ‘try opening the hatches of the bilges. ’Twill knock you senseless into next week.’

He was called Legge, and had but one. There were other mariners like Craven and Bloodisack, who barely spoke to them but to snarl. There were landsmen, apprentice mariners, and lowest of the low, pages: boys of no more than twelve or so, who emptied out the slop buckets, killed the rats, scrubbed the decks, and worked the bilge pump banded to the mainmast, hour by exhausting hour. They hardly dared speak, but looked at Nicholas and Hodge with fraternal pity.

There was Vizard, the blasphemous bosun, who sang obscene songs when not shouting, and Pidhook the helmsman, who treated them with a pinch less contempt than the others. He showed them where he stood on the upper deck called the bridge and swung the whipstaff left and right, turning the great rudder hanging from the sternpost likewise. He showed them his half-hour sandglass, which told the time and reckoned the watches in and out, and his dry compass mounted in a gimbel, a cunning device which kept the compass needle flat to the horizon, no matter which way the ship tilted.

Old crock though she was, the mariners seemed to have a sturdy confidence in the
Swan of Avon
.

At the end of the first eight-hour watch around dawn, the mariners took their breakfast. One tossed a slab of hardtack to the boys. ‘Here. Test your pearly teeth on that, young sprat.’

Nicholas couldn’t even break into it. They laughed. ‘Ye’ll have to soak it a while yet.’

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