Harlequin

  'The family doesn't know what else to do with her,' Thomas explained, 'and I don't know how to reach Flanders. I thought to go to Paris first.'

  'Not Paris,' the tavern-keeper's wife said scornfully, 'you must go to Fougeres.' Her father, she said, had often traded with the north countries and she was sure that Thomas's route lay through Fougeres and Rouen. She did not know the roads beyond Rouen, but was certain he must go that far, though to begin, she said, he must take a small road that went north from the village. It went through woods, her husband added, and he must be careful for the trees were hiding places for terrible men escaping justice, but after a few miles he would come to the Fougeres highway, which was patrolled by the Duke's men.

  Thomas thanked her, offered a blessing to the house, then took the food to Jeanette, who refused to eat. She seemed drained of tears, almost of life, but she followed Thomas willingly enough as he walked north. The road, deep rutted by wagons and slick with mud from the previous day's rain, twisted into deep woods that dripped with water. Jeanette stumbled for a few miles, then began to cry. 'I must go back to Rennes,' she insisted. 'I want to go back to my son.'

  Thomas argued, but she would not be moved. He finally gave in, but when he turned to walk south she just began to cry even harder. The Duke had said she was not a fit mother! She kept repeating the words, 'Not fit! Not fit!' She screamed at the sky. 'He made me his whore!' Then she sank onto her knees beside the road and sobbed uncontrollably. She was shivering again and Thomas thought that if she did not die of an ague then the grief would surely kill her.

  'We're going back to Rennes,' Thomas said, trying to encourage her.

  'I can't!' she wailed. 'He'll just whore me! Whore me!' She shouted the words, then began rocking back and forwards and shrieking in a terrible high voice. Thomas tried to raise her up, tried to make her walk, but she fought him. She wanted to die, she said, she just wanted to die. 'A whore,' she screamed, and tore at the fox-fur trimmings of her red dress, 'a whore! He said I shouldn't wear fur. He made me a whore.' She threw the tattered fur into the undergrowth.

  It had been a dry morning, but the rain clouds were heaping in the east again, and Thomas was nervously watching as Jeanette's soul unravelled before his eyes. She refused to walk, so he picked her up and carried her until he saw a well-trodden path going into the trees. He followed it to find a cottage so low, and with its thatch so covered with moss that at first he thought it was just a mound among the trees until he saw blue-grey woodsmoke seeping from a hole at its top. Thomas was worried about the outlaws who were said to haunt these woods, but it was beginning to rain again and the cottage was the only refuge in sight, so Thomas lowered Jeanette to the ground and shouted through the burrow-like entrance. An old man, white-haired, red-eyed and with skin blackened by smoke, peered back at Thomas. The man spoke a French so thick with local words and accent that Thomas could scarcely understand him, but he gathered the man was a forester and lived here with his wife, and the forester looked greedily at the coins Thomas offered, then said that Thomas and his woman could use an empty pig shelter. The place stank of rotted straw and shit, but the thatch was almost rainproof and Jeanette did not seem to care. Thomas raked out the old straw, then cut Jeanette a bed of bracken. The forester, once the money was in his hands, seemed little interested in his guests, but in the middle of the afternoon, when the rain had stopped, Thomas heard the forester's wife hissing at him and, a few moments later, the old man left and walked towards the road, but without any of the tools of his trade; no axe, billhook or saw.

  Jeanette was sleeping, exhausted, so Thomas stripped the dead clover plants from his black bow, unlashed the crosspiece and put back the horn tips. He strung the yew, thrust half a dozen arrows into his belt and followed the old man as far as the road, and there he waited in a thicket.

  The forester returned towards evening with two young men whom Thomas presumed were the outlaws of whom he had been warned. The old man must have reckoned that Thomas and his woman were fugitives, for though they carried bags and money, they had sought a hiding place and that was enough to raise anyone's suspicions. A friar did not need to skulk in the trees, and women wearing dresses trimmed with torn remnants of fur did not seek a forester's hospitality. So doubtless the two young men had been fetched to help slit Thomas's throat and then divide whatever coins they found on his body. Jeanette's fate would be similar, but delayed.

  Thomas put his first arrow into the ground between the old man's feet and the second into a tree close by. 'The next arrow kills,' he said, though they could not see him for he was in the thicket's shadows. They just stared wide-eyed at the bushes where he was hiding and Thomas made his voice deep and slow. 'You come with murder in your souls,' he said, 'but I can raise the hellequin from the deeps of hell. I can make the devil's claws cut to your heart and have the dead haunt your daylight. You will leave the friar and his sister alone.'

  The old man dropped to his knees. His superstitions were as old as time and scarcely touched by Christianity. He believed there were trolls in the forest and giants in the mist. He knew there were dragons. He had heard of black-skinned men who lived on the moon and who dropped to earth when their home shrank to a sickle. He understood there were ghosts who hunted among the trees. All this he knew as well as he knew ash and larch, oak and beech, and he did not doubt that it was a demon who had spat the strangely long arrow from the thicket.

  'You must go,' he told his companions, 'you must go!' The two fled and the old man touched his forehead to the leaf mould. 'I meant no harm!'

  'Go home,' Thomas said.

  He waited till the old man had gone, then he dug the arrow out of the tree and that night he went to the forester's cottage, crawled through the low doorway and sat on the earthen floor facing the old couple.

  'I shall stay here,' he told them, 'until my sister's wits are recovered. We wish to hide her shame from the world, that is all. When we go we shall reward you, but if you try to kill us again I shall summon demons to torment you and I will leave your corpses as a feast for the wild things that lurk in the trees.' He put another small coin on the earth floor. 'You will bring us food each night,' he told the woman, 'and you will thank God that though I can read your hearts I still forgive you.'

  They had no more trouble after that. Every day the old man went off into the trees with his billhook and axe, and every night his wife brought her visitors gruel or bread. Thomas took milk from their cow, shot a deer and thought Jeanette would die. For days she refused to eat, and sometimes he would find her rocking back and forth in the noxious shed and making a keening noise. Thomas feared she had gone mad for ever. His father would sometimes tell him how the mad were treated, how he himself had been treated, how starvation and beating were the only cures. 'The devil gets into the soul,' Father Ralph had said, 'and he can be starved out or he can be thrashed out, but there is no way he will be coaxed out. Beat and starve, boy, beat and starve, it is the only treatment the devil understands.' But Thomas could neither starve nor beat Jeanette, so he did his best by her. He kept her dry, he persuaded her to take some warm milk fresh from the cow, he talked with her through the nights, he combed her hair and washed her face and sometimes, when she was sleeping and he was sitting by the shed and staring at the stars through the tangled trees, he would wonder whether he and the hellequin had left other women as broken as Jeanette. He prayed for forgiveness. He prayed a lot in those days, and not to St Guinefort, but to the Virgin and to St George.

  The prayers must have worked for he woke one dawn to see Jeanette sitting in the shed's doorway with her thin body outlined by the bright new day. She turned to him and he saw there was no madness in her face any more, just a profound sorrow. She looked at him a long time before she spoke.

  'Did God send you to me, Thomas?'

  'He showed me great favour if He did,' Thomas replied.

  She smiled at that, the first smile he had seen on her face since Rennes. 'I have to be content,' she said very earnestly,
'because my son is alive and he will be properly cared for and one day I shall find him.'

  'We both shall,' Thomas said.

  'Both?'

  He grimaced. 'I have kept none of my promises,' he said. 'The lance is still in Normandy, Sir Simon lives, and how I shall find your son for you, 'I do not know. I think my promises are worthless, but I shall do my best.'

  She held out her hand so he could take it and she let it stay there. 'We have been punished, you and I,' she said, 'probably for the sin of pride. The Duke was right. I am no aristocrat. I am a merchant's daughter, but thought I was higher. Now look at me.'

  'Thinner,' Thomas said, 'but beautiful.'

  She shuddered at that compliment. 'Where are we?'

  'Just a day outside Rennes.'

  'Is that all?'

  'In a pig shed,' Thomas said, 'a day out of Rennes.'

  'Four years ago I lived in a castle,' she said wistfully. 'Plabennec wasn't large, but it was beautiful. It had a tower and a courtyard and two mills and a stream and an orchard that grew very red apples.'

  'You will see them again,' Thomas said, 'you and your son.'

  He regretted mentioning her son for tears came to her eyes, but she cuffed them away. 'It was the lawyer,' she said.

  'Lawyer?'

  'Belas. He lied to the Duke.' There was a kind of wonderment in her voice that Belas had proved so traitorous. 'He told the Duke I was supporting Duke Jean. Then I will, Thomas, I will. I will support your duke. If that is the only way to regain Plabennec and find my son then I shall support Duke Jean.' She squeezed Thomas's hand. 'I'm hungry.'

  They spent another week in the forest while Jeanette recovered her strength. For a while, like a beast struggling to escape a trap, she devised schemes that would give her instant revenge on Duke Charles and restore her son, but the schemes were wild and hopeless and, as the days passed, she accepted her fate.

  'I have no friends,' she said to Thomas one night.

  'You have me, my lady.'

  'They died,' she said, ignoring him. 'My family died. My husband died. Do you think I am a curse on those I love?'

  'I think,' Thomas said, 'that we must go north.'

  She was irritated by his practicality. 'I'm not sure I want to go north.'

  'I do,' Thomas said stubbornly.

  Jeanette knew that the further north she went, the further she went from her son, but she did not know what else to do, and that night, as if accepting that she would now be guided by Thomas, she came to his bracken bed and they were lovers. She wept afterwards, but then made love to him again, this time fiercely, as though she could slake her misery in the consolations of the flesh.

  Next morning they left, going north. Summer had come, clothing the countryside in thick green. Thomas had disguised the bow again, lashing the crosspiece to the stave and hanging it with bindweed and willowherb instead of clover. His black robe had become ragged and no one would have taken him for a friar, while Jeanette had stripped the remains of the fox fur from the red velvet, which was dirty, creased and threadbare. They looked like vagabonds, which they were, and they moved like fugitives, skirting the towns and bigger villages to avoid trouble. They bathed in streams, slept beneath the trees and only ventured into the smallest villages when hunger demanded they buy a meal and cider in some slatternly tavern. If they were challenged they claimed to be Bretons, brother and sister, going to join their uncle who was a butcher in Flanders, and if anyone disbelieved the tale they were unwilling to cross Thomas, who was tall and strong and always kept his knife visible. By preference, though, they avoided villages and stayed in the woods where Thomas taught Jeanette how to tickle the trout out of their streams. They would light fires, cook their fish and cut bracken for a bed.

  They kept close to the road, though they were forced to a long detour to avoid the drum-like fortress of St-Aubin-du-Cormier, and another to skirt the city of Fougères, and somewhere north of that city they entered Normandy. They milked cows in their pastures, stole a great cheese from a wagon parked outside a church and slept under the stars. They had no idea what day of the week it was, nor even what month it was any more. Both were browned by the sun and made ragged by travelling. Jeanette's misery was dissolved in a new happiness, and nowhere more than when they discovered an abandoned cottage — merely cob walls of mud and straw decaying without a roof — in a spinney of hazel trees. They cleared away the nettles and brambles and lived in the cottage for more than a week, seeing no one, wanting to see no one, delaying their future because the present was so blissful. Jeanette could still weep for her son and spent hours devising exquisite revenges to be taken against the Duke, against Belas and against Sir Simon Jekyll, but she also revelled in that summer's freedom. Thomas had fitted his bow again so he could hunt and Jeanette, growing ever stronger, had learned to pull it back almost to her chin.

  Neither knew where they were and did not much care. Thomas's mother used to tell him a tale of children who ran away into the forest and were reared by the beasts. 'They grow hair all over their bodies,' she would tell him, 'and have claws and horns and teeth,' and now Thomas would sometimes examine his hands to see if claws were coming. He saw none. Yet if he was becoming a beast then he was happy. He had rarely been happier, but he knew that the winter, even though far off, was nevertheless coming and so, perhaps a week after midsummer, they moved gently north again in search of something that neither of them could quite imagine.

  Thomas knew he had promised to retrieve a lance and restore Jeanette's son, but he did not know how he was to do either of those things. He only knew he must go to a place where a man like Will Skeat would employ him, though he could not talk of such a future with Jeanette. She did not want to hear about archers or armies, or of men and mail coats, but she, like him, knew they could not stay for ever in their refuge.

  'I shall go to England,' she told him, 'and appeal to your king.' Out of all the schemes she had dreamed of, this was the only one that made sense. The Earl of Northampton had placed her son under the King of England's protection, so she must appeal to Edward and hope he would support her.

  They walked north, still keeping the road to Rouen in sight. They forded a river and climbed into a broken country of small fields, deep woods and abrupt hills, and somewhere in that green land, unheard by either of them, the wheel of fortune creaked again. Thomas knew that the great wheel governed mankind, it turned in the dark to determine good or evil, high or low, sickness or health, happiness or misery. Thomas reckoned God must have made the wheel to be the mechanism by which He ruled the world while He was busy in heaven, and in that midsummer, when the harvest was being flailed on the threshing floors, and the swifts were gathering in the high trees, and the rowan trees were in scarlet berry, and the pastures were white with ox-eye daisies, the wheel lurched for Thomas and Jeanette.

  They walked to the wood's edge one day to check that the road was still in view. They usually saw little more than a man driving some cows to market, a group of women following with eggs and vegetables to sell. A priest might pass on a poor horse, and once they had seen a knight with his retinue of servants and men-at-arms, but most days the road lay white, dusty and empty under the summer sun. Yet this day it was full. Folk were walking southwards, driving cows and pigs and sheep and goats and geese. Some pushed handcarts, others had wagons drawn by oxen or horses, and all the carts were loaded high with stools, tables, benches and beds. Thomas knew he was seeing fugitives.

  They waited till it was dark, then Thomas beat the worst dirt off the Dominican's gown and, leaving Jeanette in the trees, walked down to the road where some of the travellers were camping beside small, smoky fires.

  'God's peace be on you,' Thomas said to one group.

  'We have no food to spare, father,' a man answered, eyeing the stranger suspiciously.

  'I am fed, my son,' Thomas said, and squatted near their fire.

  'Are you a priest or a vagabond?' the man asked. He had an axe and he drew it towards him protectiv
ely, for Thomas's tangled hair was wildly long and his face as dark as any outlaw's.

  'I am both,' Thomas said with a smile. 'I have walked from Avignon,' he explained, 'to do penance at the shrine of St Guinefort.'

  None of the refugees had ever heard of the Blessed Guinefort, but Thomas's words convinced them, for the idea of pilgrimage explained his woebegone condition while their own sad condition, they made clear, was caused by war. They had come from the coast of Normandy, only a day's journey away, and in the morning they must be up early and travelling again to escape the enemy.

  Thomas made the sign of the cross. 'What enemy?' he asked, expecting to hear that two Norman lords had fallen out and were ravaging each other's estates.

  But the ponderous wheel of fortune had turned unexpectedly. King Edward III of England had crossed the Channel. Such an expedition had long been expected, but the King had not gone to his lands in Gascony, as many had thought he would, nor to Flanders where other Englishmen fought, but had come to Normandy. His army was just a day away and, at the news, Thomas's mouth dropped open.

  'You should flee them, father,' one of the women advised Thomas. 'They know no pity, not even for friars.'

  Thomas assured them he would, thanked them for their news, then walked back up the hill to where Jeanette waited. All had changed.

  His king had come to Normandy.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  They argued that night. Jeanette was suddenly convinced they should turn back to Brittany and Thomas could only stare at her in astonishment.

  'Brittany?' he asked faintly.

  She would not meet his eyes, but stubbornly stared at the campfires that burned all along the road, while further north, on the night's horizon, great red glows showed where larger fires burned, and Thomas knew that English soldiers must have been ravaging the fields of Normandy just as the hellequin had harrowed Brittany. 'I can be near Charles if I'm in Brittany,' Jeanette said.

  Thomas shook his head. He was dimly aware that the sight of the army's destruction had forced them both into a reality from which they had been escaping in these last weeks of freedom, but he could not connect that with her sudden wish to head back to Brittany.