Agincourt

  “Prison?”

  “She did not want to be a nun. You know what her name is?”

  “Melisande.”

  “Melisande was a Queen of Jerusalem,” Père Michel said, smiling. “And this Melisande loves you.” Hook said nothing to that. “Take care of her,” Père Michel said sternly on the day they left.

  They went in disguise. It was difficult to hide Hook’s stature, but Father Michel gave him a white penitent’s robe and a leper’s clapper, which was a piece of wood to which two others were attached by leather strips, and Melisande, also in a penitent’s robe and with her black hair chopped raggedly short, led him north and west. They were pilgrims, it appeared, seeking a cure for Hook’s disease. They lived off alms tossed by folk who did not want to go near Hook, who announced his contagious presence by rattling the clapper loudly. They still moved circumspectly, skirting the larger villages and making a wide detour to avoid the smear of smoke that marked the city of Amiens. They slept in the woods, or in cattle byres, or in haystacks, and the rain soaked them and the sun warmed them and one day, beside the River Canche, they became lovers. Melisande was silent afterward, but she clung to Hook and he said a prayer of thanks to Saint Crispinian, who ignored him.

  The next day they walked north, following a road that led across a wide field between two woods, and off to the west was a small castle half hidden by a stand of trees. They rested in the eastern woods close to a tumbledown forester’s cottage with a moss-thick thatch. Barley grew in the wide field, the ears rippling prettily under the breeze. Larks tumbled above them, their song another ripple, and both Hook and Melisande dozed in the late summer’s warmth.

  “What are you doing here?” a harsh voice demanded. A horseman, dressed richly and with a hooded hawk on his wrist, was watching them from the wood’s edge.

  Melisande knelt in submission and lowered her head. “I take my brother to Saint-Omer, lord,” she said.

  The horseman, who may or may not have been a lord, took note of Hook’s clapper and edged his horse away. “What do you seek there?” he demanded.

  “The blessing of Saint Audomar, lord,” Melisande said. Father Michel had told them Saint-Omer was near Calais, and that many folk sought cures from Saint Audomar’s shrine in the town. Father Michel had also said it was much safer to say they were travelling to Saint-Omer than to admit they were headed for the English enclave around Calais.

  “God give you a safe journey,” the horseman said grudgingly and tossed a coin into the leaf mold.

  “Lord?” Melisande asked.

  The rider turned his horse back. “Yes?”

  “Where are we, lord? And how far to Saint-Omer?”

  “A very long day’s walk,” the man said, gathering his reins, “and why would you care what this place is called? You won’t have heard of it.”

  “No, lord,” Melisande said.

  The man gazed at her for a heartbeat, then shrugged. “That castle?” he said, nodding to the battlements showing above the western trees, “is called Agincourt. I hope your brother is cured.” He gathered his reins and spurred his horse into the barley.

  It was four more days before they reached the marshes about Calais. They moved cautiously, avoiding the French patrols that circled the English-held town. It was night when they reached the Nieulay bridge that led onto the causeway that approached the town. Sentries challenged them. “I’m English!” Hook shouted and then, holding Melisande’s hand, stepped cautiously into the flare of torchlight illuminating the bridge’s gate.

  “Where are you from, lad?” a gray-bearded man in a close-fitting helmet asked.

  “We’ve come from Soissons,” Hook said.

  “You’ve come from…” the man took a step forward to peer at Hook and his companion. “Sweet Jesus Christ. Come on through.”

  So Hook stepped through the small gate built into the larger one, and thus he and Melisande crossed into England where he was an outlaw.

  But Saint Crispinian had kept his word and Hook had come home.

  THREE

  Even in summer the hall of Calais Castle was chilly. The thick stone walls kept the warmth at bay and so a great fire crackled in the hearth, and in front of the stone fireplace was a wide rug on which two couches stood and six hounds slept. The rest of the room was stone-flagged. Swords were racked along one wall, and iron-tipped lances rested on trestles. Sparrows flitted among the beams. The shutters at the western end of the hall were open and Hook could hear the endless stirring of the sea.

  The garrison commander and his elegant lady sat on one couch. Hook had been told their names, but the words had slithered through his head and so he did not know who they were. Six men-at-arms stood behind the couch, all watching Hook and Melisande with skeptical and hostile eyes, while a priest stood at the rug’s edge, looking down at the two fugitives who knelt on the stone flags. “I do not understand,” the priest said in a nasally unpleasant voice, “why you left Lord Slayton’s service.”

  “Because I refused to kill a girl, father,” Hook explained.

  “And Lord Slayton wished her dead?”

  “His priest did, sir.”

  “Sir Giles Fallowby’s son,” the man on the couch put in, and his voice suggested he did not like Sir Martin.

  “So a man of God wished her dead,” the priest ignored the garrison commander’s tone, “yet you knew better?” His voice was dangerous with menace.

  “She was only a girl,” Hook said.

  “It was through woman,” the priest pounced fiercely on Hook’s answer, “that sin entered the world.”

  The elegant lady put a long pale hand over her mouth as if to hide a yawn. There was a tiny dog on her lap, a little bundle of white fur studded with pugnacious eyes, and she stroked its head. “I am bored,” she said, speaking to no one in particular.

  There was a long silence. One of the hounds whimpered in its sleep and the garrison commander leaned forward to pat its head. He was a heavyset, black-bearded man who now gestured impatiently toward Hook. “Ask him about Soissons, father,” he ordered.

  “I was coming to that, Sir William,” the priest said.

  “Then come to it quickly,” the woman said coldly.

  “Are you outlawed?” the priest asked instead and, when the archer did not answer, he repeated the question more loudly and still Hook did not answer.

  “Answer him,” Sir William growled.

  “I would have thought his silence was eloquence itself,” the lady said. “Ask him about Soissons.”

  The priest grimaced at her commanding tone, but obeyed. “Tell us what happened in Soissons,” he demanded, and Hook told the tale again, how the French had entered the town by the southern gate and how they had raped and killed, and how Sir Roger Pallaire had betrayed the English archers.

  “And you alone escaped?” the priest asked sourly.

  “Saint Crispinian helped me,” Hook said.

  “Oh! Saint Crispinian did?” the priest asked, raising an eyebrow. “How very obliging of him.” There was a snort of half-suppressed laughter from one of the men-at-arms, while the others just stared with distaste at the kneeling archer. Disbelief hung in the castle’s great hall like the woodsmoke that leaked around the wide hearth’s opening. Another of the men-at-arms was staring fixedly at Melisande and now leaned close to his neighbor and whispered something that made the other man laugh. “Or did the French let you go?” the priest demanded sharply.

  “No, sir!” Hook said.

  “Perhaps they let you go for a reason!”

  “No!”

  “Even a humble archer can count men,” the priest said, “and if our lord the king collects an army, then the French will wish to know numbers.”

  “No, sir!” Hook said again.

  “So they let you go, and bribed you with a whore?” the priest suggested.

  “She’s no whore!” Hook protested and the men-at-arms sniggered.

  Melisande had not yet spoken. She had seemed overawed by the big m
en in their mail coats and by the supercilious priest and by the languorous woman who sprawled on the cushioned couch, but now Melisande found her tongue. She might not have understood the priest’s insult, but she recognized his tone, and she suddenly straightened her back and spoke fast and defiantly. She spoke French, and spoke it so quickly that Hook did not understand one word in a hundred, but everyone else in the room spoke the language and they all listened. She spoke passionately, indignantly, and neither the garrison commander nor the priest interrupted her. Hook knew she was telling the tale of Soissons’s fall, and after a while tears came to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks and her voice rose as she hammered the priest with her story. She ran out of words, gestured at Hook and her head dropped as she began to sob.

  There was silence for a few heartbeats. A sergeant in a mail coat noisily opened the hall door, saw that the room was occupied, and left just as loudly. Sir William looked judiciously at Hook. “You murdered Sir Roger Pallaire?” he asked harshly.

  “I killed him, sir.”

  “A good deed from an outlaw,” Sir William’s wife said firmly, “if what the girl says is true.”

  “If,” the priest said.

  “I believe her,” the woman said, then rose from the couch, tucked the little dog into one arm, and walked to the rug’s edge where she stooped and raised Melisande by the elbow. She spoke to her in soft French, then led her toward the hall’s far end and so through a curtained opening.

  Sir William waited till his wife was gone, then stood. “I believe he’s telling the truth, father,” he said firmly.

  “He might be,” the priest conceded.

  “I believe he is,” Sir William insisted.

  “We could put him to the test?” the priest suggested with scarcely concealed eagerness.

  “You would torture him?” Sir William asked, shocked.

  “The truth is sacred, my lord,” the priest said, bowing slightly. “Et cognoscetis veritatem,” he declaimed, “et veritas liberabit vos!” He made the sign of the cross. “You will know the truth, my lord,” he translated, “and the truth will set you free.”

  “I am free,” the black-bearded man snarled, “and it is not our duty to rack the truth out of some poor archer. We shall leave that to others.”

  “Of course, my lord,” the priest said, barely hiding his disappointment.

  “Then you know where he must go.”

  “Indeed, my lord.”

  “So arrange it,” Sir William said before crossing to Hook and indicating that the archer should stand. “Did you kill any of them?” he demanded.

  “A lot, my lord,” Hook said, remembering the arrows flying into the half-lit breach.

  “Good,” Sir William said implacably, “but you also killed Sir Roger Pallaire. That makes you either a hero or a murderer.”

  “I’m an archer,” Hook said stubbornly.

  “And an archer whose tale must be heard across the water,” Sir William said, then handed Hook a silver coin. “We’ve heard tales of Soissons,” he went on grimly, “but you are the first to bring confirmation.”

  “If he was there,” the priest remarked snidely.

  “You heard the girl,” Sir William snarled at the priest who bridled at the admonition. Sir William turned back to Hook. “Tell your tale in England.”

  “I’m outlawed,” Hook said uncertainly.

  “You’ll do what you’re told to do,” Sir William snapped, “and you’re going to England.”

  And so Hook and Melisande were taken aboard a ship that sailed to England. They then traveled with a courier who carried messages to London and also had money that paid for ale and food on the journey. Melisande was dressed in decent clothes now, provided by Lady Bardolf, Sir William’s wife, and she rode a small mare that the courier had demanded from the stables in Dover Castle. She was saddle-sore by the time they reached London where, having crossed the bridge, they surrendered their horses to the grooms in the Tower. “You will wait here,” the courier commanded them, and would not tell Hook more, and so he and Melisande found a place to sleep in the cow byre, and no one in the great fortress seemed to know why they had been summoned there.

  “You’re not prisoners,” a sergeant of archers told them.

  “But we’re not allowed out,” Hook said.

  “No, you’re not allowed out,” the ventenar conceded, “but you’re not prisoners.” He grinned. “If you were prisoners, lad, you wouldn’t be cuddling that little lass every night. Where’s your bow?”

  “Lost it in France.”

  “Then let’s find you a new one,” the ventenar said. He was called Venables and he had fought for the old king at Shrewsbury where he had taken an arrow in the leg that had left him with a limp. He led Hook to an undercroft of the great keep where there were wide wooden racks holding hundreds of newly made bows. “Pick one,” Venables said.

  It was dim in the undercroft where the bowstaves, each longer than a tall man, lay close together. None was strung, though all were tipped with horn nocks ready to take their cords. Hook pulled them out one by one and ran a hand across their thick bellies. The bows, he decided, had been well made. Some were knobbly where the bowyer had let a knot stand proud rather than weaken the wood, and most had a faintly greasy feel because they had been painted with a mix of wax and tallow. A few bows were unpainted, the wood still seasoning, but those bows were not yet ready for the cord and Hook ignored them. “They’re mostly made in Kent,” Venables said, “but a few come from London. They don’t make good archers in this part of the world, boy, but they do make good bows.”

  “They do,” Hook agreed. He had pulled one of the longest staves from the rack. The timber swelled to a thick belly that he gripped in his left hand as he flexed the upper limb a small amount. He took the bow to a place where sunlight shone through a rusted grating.

  The stave was a thing of beauty, he thought. The yew had been cut in a southern country where the sun shone brighter, and this bow had been carved from the tree’s trunk. It was close-grained and had no knots. Hook ran his hand down the wood, feeling its swell and fingering the small ridges left by the bowyer’s float, the drawknife that shaped the weapon. The stave was new because the sapwood, which formed the back of the bow, was almost white. In time, he knew, it would turn to the color of honey, but for now the bow’s back, which would be farthest from him when he hauled the cord, was the shade of Melisande’s breasts. The belly of the bow, made from the trunk’s heartwood, was dark brown, the color of Melisande’s face, so that the bow seemed to be made of two strips of wood, one white and one brown, which were perfectly married, though in truth the stave was one single shaft of beautifully smoothed timber cut from where the heartwood and sapwood met in the yew’s trunk.

  God made the bow, a priest had once said in Hook’s village church, as God made man and woman. The visiting priest had meant that God had married heartwood and sapwood, and it was this marriage that made the great war bow so lethal. The dark heartwood of the bow’s belly was stiff and unyielding. It resisted bending, while the light-colored sapwood of the bow’s spine did not mind being pulled into a curve, yet, like the heartwood, it wanted to straighten and it possessed a springiness that, released from pressure, whipped the stave back to its normal shape. So the flexible spine pulled and the stiff belly pushed, and so the long arrow flew.

  “Have to be strong to pull that one,” Venables said dubiously. “God knows what that bowyer was thinking! Maybe he thought Goliath needed a stave, eh?”

  “He didn’t want to cut the stave,” Hook suggested, “because it’s perfect.”

  “If you think you can draw it, lad, it’s yours. Help yourself to a bracer,” Venables said, gesturing to a pile of horn bracers, “and to a cord.” He waved toward a barrel of strings.

  The cords had a faintly sticky feel because the hemp had been coated with hoof glue to protect the strings from damp. Hook found a couple of long cords and tied a loop-knot in the end of one that he hooked over the notc
hed horn-tip of the bow’s lower limb. Then, using all his strength, he flexed the bow to judge the length of cord needed, made a loop in the other end of the string and, again exerting every scrap of muscle power, bent the bow and slipped the new loop over the top horn nock. The center of the cord, where it would lie on the horn-sliver in an arrow’s nock, had been whipped with more hemp to strengthen the string where it notched into the arrows.

  “Shoot it in,” Venables suggested. He was a middle-aged man in the service of the Tower’s constable and he was a friendly soul, liking to spend his day chattering to anyone who would listen to his stories of battles long ago. He carried an arrow bag up to the stretch of mud and grass outside the keep and dropped it with a clatter. Hook put the bracer on his left forearm, tying its strings so the slip of horn lay on the inside of his wrist to protect his skin from the bowstring’s lash. A scream sounded and was cut off. “That’s Brother Bailey,” Venables said in explanation.

  “Brother Bailey?”

  “Brother Bailey is a Benedictine,” Venables said, “and the king’s chief torturer. He’s getting the truth out of some poor bastard.”

  “They wanted to torture me in Calais,” Hook said.

  “They did?”

  “A priest did.”

  “They’re always eager to twist the rack, aren’t they? I never did understand that! They tell you God loves you, then they kick the shit out of you. Well, if they do question you, lad, tell them the truth.”

  “I did.”

  “Mind you, that doesn’t always help,” Venables said. The scream sounded again and he jerked his head toward the muffled noise. “That poor bastard probably did tell the truth, but Brother Bailey does like to be certain, he does. Let’s see how that stave shoots, shall we?”