The Green Count Page 2

  ‘All your letters lean like drunken men,’ Chaucer announced.

  Gold, stung, drew himself up. ‘I do not make letters for my living,’ he said.

  Chaucer smiled. ‘And I do – no doubt there is something witty to be said about the pen being mightier. Let us, for all love, go off to Mass instead.’

  Aemilie’s father came out to see his two famous guests out of the courtyard, and then he came back in, the smile wiped off his face, to glare at his daughter.

  ‘Do not flirt with Sir William,’ he said. ‘Men like Sir William are … very dangerous. And not suitable … company.’

  Aemilie put her shoulders back and turned her head slightly away. ‘I can handle myself, mon pere. And he is a true knight —’

  ‘A true knight who has sent more souls to Satan than the Plague,’ her father said, and then ruffled her hair. ‘I’m sorry. I was rankled by Master Chaucer’s … words.’

  Aemilie nodded. ‘Why are they so friendly to each other? If they hate each other?’

  Her father smoothed his houpland and pulled the liripipe on his hood carefully through the belt that held his purse. ‘I don’t think they hate each other,’ he said carefully.

  ‘Master Chaucer speaks to injure Sir William,’ Aemilie said.

  ‘Hmm,’ her father said. ‘Yes. But perhaps … Sweeting, men are odd cattle, and these two have seen many things together. I think that they …’ He paused, looking into the kitchen, Whatever fatherly wisdom he was going to impart was lost in a crash of crockery and the sound of pewter flagons bouncing off stone and tile, and enough blasphemy to fill the circles of Hell so lovingly described by Chaucer’s hero, Dante.

  Three hours later, Sir William returned, accompanied not just by Chaucer but by his own squire and a dozen of his pages and men-at-arms and archers as well. If they were all nursing the results of the night before, none of them showed any sign. Aemilie directed her dozen women in serving wine and loaves of good bread and wedges of thick English cheese. Men who’d been to Mass had not eaten.

  Sir William met her eyes. ‘And you, mam’selle?’ he asked. ‘When do you go to Mass?’

  ‘Which I’ve been,’ she said with a curtsy.

  Chaucer nodded. ‘She’s been up an hour before we were, William. Probably heard Matins.’

  ‘And I say my own hours,’ she put in. And then curtsied, as she had spoken out of turn, but she was not willing that Master Chaucer would believe her a light of love.

  Chaucer smiled at her. ‘You have a book of hours, lass?’ he asked.

  She went behind the inn’s low bar and emerged with her book, which was long and narrow and conscientiously made. It had more decorations than Gold’s.

  ‘Flemish?’ Chaucer asked.

  Aemilie nodded. ‘My pater brought it to me. For Christmas,’ she said.

  Chaucer nodded. ‘Would you like a new prayer, Aemilie?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Are you a priest?’ She didn’t think he looked like a priest, but a woman could never tell.

  ‘Just a clerk, lady. But I write prayers. Here – how do you feel about Saint Mary Magdalene?’ he asked.

  Aemilie frowned. ‘I wonder …’

  Chaucer’s eyes sparkled with his particular and wicked merriment. He took a pen case off his hip and paused. ‘Perhaps not the right saint for an attractive young woman. Saint Catherine of Alexandria?’

  ‘The Blessed Virgin, if you please,’ she said, bobbing.

  Chaucer flipped through her book. He paused, took out his own, the most elaborate of the three on the table, and opened it to a pretty picture of the Annunciation.

  ‘Damn me, that is fine,’ Gold said.

  ‘You know where I got this,’ Chaucer said. He looked up from his pens.

  ‘By the sweet Saviour of man,’ Gold said. He weighed it in his hand as if it was made of gold and he found it wanting. ‘Hers?’ he asked, and his tone invested hers with a great deal of meaning.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Chaucer said.

  He began to copy his prayer to the Virgin into the young woman’s book. His script was perfect: neat and fine and dark.

  Even the innkeeper stopped to watch him write.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said.

  Chaucer smiled. He was concentrating; his mouth was slightly open, and Gold smiled to see it.

  Chaucer came to the mid-point in the prayer and breathed before writing domini.

  ‘Will you tell Froissart about Jerusalem?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. It’s wet outside – the lads like a story and so do the lasses.’ Gold looked out of the narrow windows and shrugged. ‘Will you tell them about the Italian Wedding?’

  Chaucer frowned. ‘No. You may, if you like. I …’ He took a breath and finished the prayer. ‘I still see it.’

  Gold knew that Chaucer meant ‘I still see her. Dead.’

  He reached out and put a hand on Chaucer’s shoulder.

  An hour later, the common room was full again. Gold sat back to tell his tale. Froissart had a pen in his hand today, and so did Chaucer. But Chaucer was copying prayers for Aemilie, and filling her little book. Froissart was copying down what Sir William Gold had to say.

  Famagusta

  November 1365 – January 1366

  There are many advantages to word fame, and not the least that men will more readily follow you if they’ve heard your name.

  There were many men on Rhodes and Cyprus in the autumn of the year of our Lord 1365 who knew my name. I was not famous, but I had been knighted by an imperial knight on a famous field of battle and now I had played a small role in a crusade.

  So when I made it known that my friends and I planned to take an armed party to Jerusalem, there was no lack of volunteers.

  If you’ve been listening, you have heard all that I have to say about Alexandria. What happened there is still black to me, and just telling it seems like a lash upon my soul. I won’t tell it again. But I will say that as the gentle weather of that autumn kissed the streets of Rhodes, many men had time to repent the sins they’d committed in the streets of Alexandria, and to think that they’d best spend some of the loot they’d gained by visiting the holiest city in the world, the scene of Christ’s passion, the centre of the middlerealm, as the old monks would have it.

  Many of the routiers left for Italy as soon as the Venetians and the Genoese turned their ships for home, but many stayed, because the king of Cyprus said, or at least he said at first, that he would launch a second attack immediately. But from Rhodes, the capital of my Order and Christendom’s greatest fortress, we heard that the king had sunk into a lethargy. He had reason: his people were restless, he’d mortgaged his kingdom’s future on his crusade, and his wife, so men said, had been both unfaithful in body and unfaithful as a vassal, stirring treason. Although I was now a baron of Cyprus, I was not tempted to remain and be a courtier at that court.

  Not even a little.

  Besides, my friends – my surviving friends, Fiore dei Liberi, a knight of Udine, and Nerio Acciaioli, a Florentine knight, and Miles Stapleton, who was knighted on the beach of Alexandria with Steven Scrope – you know that name, don’t you, Chaucer? Of course you do … At any rate, my friends had sworn on our brother Juan’s tomb to go to Jerusalem. And I had promised my lady, Emile d’Herblay.

  We had originally thought that it would just be a few of us. In fact, when we first broached the idea on Rhodes, the older Hospitallers told us to go unarmed, as pilgrims. The Hospital is, in part, a business, and maintains hospices, inns, and hospitals across Europe for pilgrims going to any of the great sites: Padua, Rome, Compostela, Constantinople or Athens or Corinth or Jerusalem, holy of holies. In Outremer, they arrange letters of credit and travel passes with the local Islamic rulers. And let me just add, as a man of the world, that it was said on Rhodes by the oldest knights that the Holy Land was safer an
d easier for pilgrims under the Mamluks than it had ever been under Frankish rule.

  I suspect I’ll have a great deal to say tonight about the Mamluks and the Turks and their ways. I’ll let that be, for now.

  So we laid our plans, and then, perhaps a month after Alexandria and less than a week before we were due to board a Venetian great galley for the short dash to Jaffa, Nicholas Sabraham appeared as if out of the aether, as he usually did, and we sat in the courtyard of the English inn. The sunlight of the Mediterranean is still brilliant in October, and there were old sails from the Order’s fighting galleys rigged in most courtyards so that tired old soldiers could sit and tell lies in comfort.

  By the Cross, friends, I thought I was old that autumn. Old, wise, and tired.

  Sabraham was a favourite with my archer, John the Turk. They swapped some greeting in Turkish, and John fetched Sabraham a cup of wine, which he seldom did for me. John was a warrior and not a servant. As I have mentioned before, he would clean armour all day and his care of horses was divinely inspired, but laying out clothes and serving wine was generally beneath him. I should add for those new to the story that John was not a Turk at all, but a Kipchak, and he’d been sold as a Mamluk, taken by the Turks, forced to convert to Islam, and then taken by me and forced to convert to Christianity. I’m also sad to say, even now, that he was a better Christian than I.

  Except on the battlefield.

  Sabraham was another odd one, an Englishman who was a veteran of the East. Some said his family were Jews; that’s possible, as the Hospitallers generally aided English Jews and still do. Sabraham spoke ten local languages and had lived in Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo and he knew more about the East than any Englishman I ever met, even in Venice. He generally led any exploratio of the infidels, and often went by himself. He was friends with Nerio’s uncle, the great knight Niccolò Acciaioli. Did I not say that I myself enjoyed some little word fame? Sabraham was widely regarded as one of the best knights, in council or in a fight, to adorn the Order in many years.

  There he sat, in the bright sunlight of Outremer, dressed in a dreadful fustian arming coat that had been new when Caesar commanded armies in Gaul and padded arming hose so grimy with dirt and oil that they were somewhere between grey and black.

  ‘You are going to the Holy Land?’ he asked, when his wine was in his hand.

  I waved vaguely at the Grand Master’s palace. ‘I have our passports,’ I said. ‘Quite a sheaf of letters and several pounds of seals.’

  Sabraham drank wine. ‘Good for nothing but starting fires, unless they can be scraped clean,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I sputtered, or something equally nice. I’d spent the better part of two weeks walking from one office to another, arranging for all the parchment to get us to Jerusalem.

  Sabraham sat back and fingered his beard. A pair of squires came into the yard with swords, saw us, and went somewhere else. My young scapegrace, Marc-Antonio, appeared and poured wine and muttered apologies.

  ‘Oh, go and train, you worthless boy’ I snapped. He was late to rise because he was fornicating. I didn’t give a whit what he did in his late hours, but as I was chaste and he was not, I resented him. I didn’t know the girl, but barracks rumour had it that she was Genoese and pretty and well-born, which suggested that there might be trouble.

  Sabraham raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘You are not usually so surly, Sir William,’ he said.

  ‘Your pardon, my friend,’ I muttered. I wanted to be going to Jerusalem for a wide variety of reasons, a few spiritual, and most of them petty and even venal. My lady would not hear of a wedding, or anything beyond a chaste kiss, until we had been to Jerusalem.

  Given the passion of her welcome to me on my return from the crusade, I had expected more.

  Ah, yes, the endless ability of men to layer sin on sin. Fornication, adultery, impiety …

  I was distracted by my thoughts.

  Sabraham cleared his throat so I started, and then nodded, as if accepting my apology. ‘I am sorry if I bear bad tidings, William,’ he said. ‘But Mamluk rule on the coasts of the Holy Land has collapsed. The sultan has recalled almost all of his soldiers. There is no military governor in Jerusalem, even if he would accept a letter from a hostile power, which we are, just now. Does the Grand Master think that we can sack Alexandria and then casually return to the status quo ante bellum?’ Sabraham finished his wine in two great gulps.

  ‘I am not alone in surliness, I find,’ I said, in a friendly voice. One does not want to be mistaken with a man as deadly as Sabraham.

  He waved a hand in the air, dismissing my remark. ‘Would you consider going armed?’ he asked.

  I suspect my smile split my face. To go armed to Jerusalem … that would be a great empris. Or so I thought then. Age and wisdom and a little reading have forced me to acknowledge that my Saviour had little time for weapons and armour and those who wore them, and might have preferred that I go with humility.

  Humility has never been my strongest attribute, I fear.

  I knew that Sabraham had his own reasons. He had been to Jerusalem enough times to have a wife there, or so men said, and, while he was not a knight of the Order, men would follow him.

  ‘How many?’ I asked him.

  ‘As many armed men as we can raise,’ Sabraham said. ‘I have just seen Fra Peter. If he is recovered, he will captain the empris. He would like you as his lieutenant.’ He made an odd face. ‘And I would take it as a favour if you would fetch Acciaioli. I have … news for him.’

  I had last seen Fra Peter in a bed in the great hospital of Famagusta, still recovering from three wounds taken in one fight at Alexandria’s stone bridge.

  After a few enquiries as to Fra Peter’s health and recovery, I left Sabraham with a pitcher of wine and ran up into the inn to find Nerio and Miles Stapleton. Fiore, I knew, was off at the ‘sand pits’ as we called them, training squires to be knights.

  Nerio was dressing. His new Genoese squire was Achille, a tall man with a broken nose, a former oarsman who had also apprenticed as a tailor. He had washed up on Rhodes like driftwood, and Nerio had just lost his squire Davide at Alexandria.

  ‘Move the button, there’s a good fellow. I’ll wait,’ Acciaioli said with his charming smile. ‘Ah, Ser William?’

  ‘Sabraham says we may go to Jerusalem armed,’ I said. I was elated. So much for cynicism. ‘And he wants to see you,’ I said more seriously.

  ‘A letter from home, perhaps?’ Nerio said. Sabraham moved around more quickly than most men. We knew he had returned to Cyprus, at least.

  Through this, Nerio was looking at himself.

  Nerio had a small, round mirror of silver set in ebony. He was the only man I knew who owned a mirror. It was hung over his washbasin – we had monks’ cells. He must have taken down the wooden crucifix to put the mirror up, and that says all you need to know.

  He looked at himself in the mirror, took a long look, and smiled, satisfied by what he saw. Only then did he turn, smile broadening.

  ‘Marvellous,’ he said. ‘Wonderful. How glad Juan would be.’

  We embraced.

  ‘Sabraham wants me to raise routiers for the trip,’ I said.

  ‘Money?’ Nerio asked. He generally funded us. He was very rich, and we were not.

  I no longer fought against his riches. I shrugged. ‘Not yet. Surely men will go to Jerusalem for their souls,’ I said.

  We exchanged a look, and I sighed.

  Nerio was the vainest of my close friends, and had the worst temper, the worst habits of body, the most waste and the least energy. Despite which, he and I were probably the most alike. Nerio had a low opinion of men in general.

  He was seldom disappointed.

  ‘Or not,’ he muttered.

  Miles Stapleton was the very opposite of Nerio in almost every way. He boiled with energy at all times. He was
modest and humble, never putting himself forward. If he had a vice, I never saw it – he didn’t chase girls or boys, he drank little, he didn’t experiment with any of the vices of the Levant … Did I mention Sabraham and Acciaioli playing the devil with hasheesh?

  Miles could be dull though, and Nerio was never dull. There’s a sad comment there on the condition of knighthood, because while Miles was certainly destined for eternal paradise, he wasn’t always much company for an evening. Nerio seemed to care little for his immortal soul, but he was witty, even brilliant, and his loyalty and generosity trumped his other sins.

  I do no justice to Miles. He was not so much a prig; he never commented on the rest of us except to praise us, and he was loyal, faithful to a fault. And he leaped on the Jerusalem empris like a dog on a marrowbone. But he could be too easy to tease; if one of Nerio’s ladies exposed two inches of her breasts, Miles would flush and turn his head away, which would only egg us all on, if you take my meaning. And then pretend to indignation with humour.

  Word spread rapidly. Indeed, Miles borrowed a pen, ink, and parchment from Ser William de Midelton, the turcopolier and head of the English langue, and we all three scribbled as best we could, writing handbills. Even Sabraham took a turn, and there we were. Most of the ‘Crusaders’ who remained on Rhodes were at their own expense, and in the style of Venice, the Hospitallers thought it best to keep them outside the walls. They had a camp, comfortable enough in late summer but now, I’d guess, a little chilly as the autumn winds began to blow from Thrace.

  Sabraham took Acciaioli aside. They spoke for a while, and Nerio stood straighter. Finally they both returned to the table at which we were writing.

  ‘Ser Niccolò is dead,’ Nerio said without preamble.

  I must digress again. The Acciaioli are incredibly famous in Italy – Florentines, bankers, and lords, too. There is no one in England quite like them. Niccolò, whom I had met, had risen from errand boy to great lord, the Grand Seneschal of Naples, no less, as well as one of the finest jousters of his day and a lord of Achaea in Frankish Greece. He had told me that Nerio was his son; in public, they were uncle and nephew, at least at times, and I confess that Niccolò had a wider variety of … relationships … than most men. Some said he had been the lover of the Empress Catherine; many claimed that the Prince of Achaea was actually his son.