The Ill-Made Knight Read online

  I’m not ashamed to say I fell to my knees.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  I almost died, because a Frenchmen couldn’t believe it either, and instead of surrendering, he smashed his axe at me. I got my buckler up, pushed to my feet under his blow, and his haft smashed into my helmet. I was stunned, and I made the mistake of throwing my arm around him. He punched me three times as fast as a dog would bite, but even his steel gauntlet made no progress against my coat of plates. I tried to hook his leg.

  I could smell his breath, and feel it on my face, because he had no visor.

  He kneed me in the crotch.

  The Earl’s poleaxe slammed into the French knight’s helmet.

  Both of us fell to the ground, entangled.

  It should have been over then, but it wasn’t.

  The Earl’s men-at-arms came up the ladder and cleared the catwalk, and in the time it takes a nun to say ‘Ave Maria’, we held two towers and fifty feet of wall. But then young Boucicault led a counter-attack.

  I was still breathing like a bull who scents a cow. I had my helmet off, and I was crouching there, bleeding like a stuck pig and panting. One of the men-at-arms shouted, and John – the man who’d served me wine, and who I now saw to have three scallop shells on a black chevron as his arms – ran by, paused and said, ‘Get up, William Gold.’

  Good Christ. He knew my name.

  I followed him. We ran along the wall, which is to say, I hobbled after him, and there were a dozen French knights in excellent harness fighting against the Earl and four of our knights. The catwalk was, as I said, only wide enough for two.

  Boucicault was everywhere. I had seldom seen a man fight so well, and I watched him drive the Earl back, blow after blow, thrown so fast that the Earl had trouble getting in a counter-cut. He was bigger and faster than our Earl and, frankly, better.

  Oxford fell back, and fell back again, until he was driven onto the hoardings of a small tower, where the flat area widened and all of us could join the fight. Now it was six men-at-arms – and one unhelmeted fifteen-year-old – against two French knights.

  Boucicault didn’t care. He leaped forward and hacked the Earl down with a great blow of his poleaxe, then stepped forward and blocked John’s cut, occupying the space. Another French knight pressed in, and another – we were going to lose the tower.

  John was suddenly toe-to-toe with Boucicault. He parried a blow of the poleaxe with his sword held in both hands, and then another, then he pushed in close to wrestle the French knight, and I took the opportunity to ring a heavy blow against the French knight’s helmet. He staggered, and John got a hand under the Earl’s armpit and dragged him out of the mêlée . . .

  Leaving me with the French knights.

  That was my first fight with Boucicault. I had a good sword and we were the same size, but he was fully armoured and I didn’t even have a helmet. He was dazed, and I had a leg wound.

  He was trying to regain his balance and I cut at him two handed. He caught my blow high, kicked me between the legs and down I went.

  That’s what happens when you fight a knight.

  You lose.

  I rolled on the ground, trying to master my pain, and got my dagger off my hip and blocked an attempt to kill me from above – I had no idea who threw that blow – then I felt a strong hand under my armpits, and I was dragged bodily from the fight.

  Behind me, Master Peter was setting the hoardings on fire. It had rained hard for a few days, but that had been a week ago, and now the wood was as dry as kindling. He’d smashed a railing to make splinters, and they caught, and that fire ran across the platforms like a living thing.

  The French grabbed their gallant captain and backed away, and the Earl’s man-at-arms carried me through the blaze.

  In later years, men in Italy asked me why I stayed so utterly loyal. John Hawkwood saved my life – that day and fifty other times. He was a right bastard – the coldest man I ever met, and bound for hell if he doesn’t rule it – but he was always good to me, and that day I would have died horribly had he not carried me out of the fire.

  While I was failing to beat one of the best knights in France, Peter had decided, like the professional archer he was, that we weren’t winning. He set the hoardings on fire to cover our retreat, and we retired from our dear-bought towers and climbed down the ladders, step by step.

  The hoardings burned – first where we lit them, then it all caught, and then one of the tower roofs caught fire . . .

  And by nightfall, Boucicault had to surrender: his hall was burning over his head. We took him and all his knights and soldiers. We treated them well and ransomed the lot. In fact, we fed the lords a fine dinner that night, in the best traditions of chivalry. I helped cook it, despite two wounds and aching balls. Abelard didn’t give a shit that I was injured, and said that if I volunteered for foolishness, I could pay the price. I hobbled about all evening in a daze, and went back to my empty blankets to lie down.

  There was still light in the sky when a page came looking for me. By name. William Gold.

  So I put my now stained livery coat and my best hose on over my filth, washed my face, and followed the page.

  Two pavilions had been set side by side to make a great hall of canvas and linen. On the dais sat the Prince and Boucicault and the Earl of Oxford, as well as Sir John Chandos, Warwick, Stafford and the Captal de Buch, Jean de Grailly. The tables in the tent were full of men-at-arms and knights – there was John Hawkwood, well down on the left, and there was my cousin, Sir Edward, sitting just below the dais.

  For a moment, it seemed to me I had been summoned to be knighted.

  Well, laugh all you like. A boy can dream.

  It was almost that good.

  My enemy, Richard Beauchamp, had summoned me.

  He looked like I felt. He had a black eye and two missing teeth, and he could barely talk.

  ‘Gan’ye serf?’ he asked.

  When you have been at odds with a boy, it can take an effort of will to decide you are not at odds. It looked as if he was calling me a serf, but I was sober enough to see that he was hurt, and so it was pretty fucking unlikely that he’d summoned me for casual harassment. Nonetheless, I remember bridling.

  Diccon, the senior squire, came by with a platter of roast beef. ‘Well fought,’ he said as he walked by. Casual. As if we’d always been friends.

  Well.

  Richard glared at me – or perhaps that was just how he looked in the fading red sunlight.

  The page at my side said, ‘I think Master Richard is asking if you could carve and serve. Sir.’

  I wasn’t being knighted.

  But I waited on table with the squires, and I wasn’t tripped. I carried a wine ewer and served the Prince with my own hands, and I ached with pride. I carved a goose under Diccon’s eye. He nodded, satisfied, and went off to see to other things.

  Boucicault drank, and the Prince drank, and Oxford drank. Long after dark, I was serving wine – still, to tell the truth, floating on air that I was serving my Prince with my own hands, which were none too clean. Despite the fact that my balls ached and I had pissed blood.

  Boucicault looked up from his conversation.

  He was the second French knight from the shop. The one who had been with de Charny the day I was arrested.

  He grinned.

  ‘I knew you would find a better profession,’ he said in French.

  The Prince glanced at me, and the Earl looked up. I wanted to burst into tears. Now it would all come out, and I’d be a thief all over again, I thought.

  ‘You know my young Judas?’ asked the Earl.

  Boucicault raised his cup of wine to me. ‘This young squire and I had a passage of arms today, did we not?’ he said. ‘And I remember him from a tourney in London. The last time I was a prisoner of you English.’ Everyone laughed. God, I have hated that man in my time, but he spoke for me that day.

  The Earl smiled at me. ‘Par dieu, young man. You fought in
a tourney in London, and yet you are serving at my table?’

  Other men laughed and that was the end of it. I went back to the sideboard, carved a morsel of kidney and put it neatly on a platter for a younger man to carry, and suddenly Richard was there. He took me by the elbow and led me out into the darkness.

  Put a cup of wine in my hand.

  We sat on a bench.

  ‘Thief,’ he said, pleasantly enough.

  ‘Whoreson,’ I replied, raising my cup to his.

  Diccon came, and Geoffrey de Brantwood and Tom Amble and several other men I don’t remember – all boys, then. We ate a quick meal of cast-off beef, and drank good wine. The pages waited on us.

  ‘Why didn’t you say you was a de Vere?’ asked Diccon, fairly late in the meal.

  I’ve thought of a hundred hot answers and a dozen cold ones, then and since, but I did the boy’s thing, and it was the right thing. I shrugged and took another bite of beef.

  We took Romorantin, and our march route was clear, but we didn’t go far. Two days later we were before Tours. We wanted the bridges over the Loire, and the French wanted to hold the town, which was the biggest we’d tried yet. They got a garrison into it, led by their Marshal, Clermont, and the Count of Anjou.

  The Prince put Lord Burghersh in charge of the assault.

  It failed.

  I cooked. We had fresh, virgin countryside to despoil, and I made a soup of sausages and leeks and some poor woman’s carefully hoarded chicken broth. The soldiers gulped it down with fine wines from an abbey cellar.

  I was serving my third kettle of the stuff – I liked good copper kettles, still do for that matter. I had paused to loot three matching pots from the ruins of an inn that morning. I made up the soups, cutting vegetables straight into the pots, while the assault went up the walls. I moved my stolen three-legged stool around the fire to avoid the smoke and to have a good view of the attack. The Captal’s Gascons were brave, but the walls were high and the defenders were even more numerous than they had been at Romorantin. Burghersh was the Chancellor of England, and while he may have been a competent man-at-arms, he wasn’t loved like Oxford, Stafford or the Prince, and that love can get a man one more rung up the ladder, one more push forward onto the wall.

  At any rate, I was on my third big kettle of soup, and out of bread, when my cousin appeared out of the smoky, humid evening. He held out a wooden bowl and I filled it.

  He sat – on my stool. Well, he was a knight.

  He ate, I refilled his bowl, and he ate again. I found him the last – the very last – of the good French bread that Abelard had looted. He devoured it. I doubt he noticed that it was fine ground or white.

  ‘You made all this?’ he asked.

  ‘Not the bread,’ I admitted.

  He laughed, but then his face grew solemn. ‘You really are a cook,’ he said. ‘Lord Boucicault told me – privately – that you were taken in London as a thief.’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. I started an explanation, but he held up his hand.

  ‘No one here cares,’ he said. ‘Listen, my squire is being sent back to Bordeaux. He broke both legs falling off a ladder.’

  That’s falling off a siege ladder, friends.

  ‘I need a squire. And God has sent you to me.’ Sir Edward spoke of God as if they were personal friends. Perhaps they were – he was a fine knight.

  Abelard appeared out of the falling darkness. ‘Are you taking my apprentice cook, Sir Thomas?’ he asked.

  They exchanged a look, and I knew that Abelard had, somehow, made this happen for me.

  We didn’t take Tours.

  What happened instead was not good. The King of France marched to Blois and crossed the Loire to our side. We heard about it from scouts about the hour of matins, and by the end of matins we were packing to move south, abandoning the siege of Tours, if one failed assault can be called a siege.

  I didn’t understand at the time – in fact, I was bitter that we were retreating – but Marshal Clermont had roughly our numbers inside Tours, and the King had twice our numbers and was coming up behind us. They held all the crossings over the Loire and cut us off from the Duke of Lancaster absolutely, so there was no way we could face them. Thus we turned south, abandoned most of our booty and ran for our lives.

  I’ve heard it made to sound more glorious, but that’s how it was. I lost two of my three copper kettles, but not one of my gold or silver coins, which should give you a fine idea of how accurate Master Peter’s advice was.

  In the suburbs of Tours, I did pick up a donkey. Talk about the miracles of God – a healthy donkey, wandering free, in the middle of a war. I loaded her as much as she could bear with Sir Thomas’s goods and a few of my own, and we ran south. As a former cook and a provident squire, I foraged food as we went.

  We crossed two rivers in a single day.

  River crossings are an army’s nightmare, and the rivers were high for early autumn. The fords were about four horses wide and stony enough, but the slowness of the crossing made the whole army nervous and caused us to huddle up. By this time, the army had added a train of servants – French boys desperate for food – and whores – French girls desperate for food – and they huddled along with us.

  At the second river, the Prince ordered them driven away from the army. This was military routine – we couldn’t feed them any more and we were going to move fast. No one questioned it and yet, to me, it seemed the most brutal thing we’d done. We had, in effect, taken these people by force, to show that the King of France could not protect them. Now we could not protect them.

  Bah, perhaps I should have been a monk. I was glad I’d sent Marie north, because I’d have died in my heart as a knight to drive her away from me with the flat of my sword, as I saw other men – even men wearing the spurs and golden belts – do.

  At any rate, we crossed, and when the French appeared to harass our rearguard, Sir John Chandos and a few knights and a hundred archers drove the French right back north up the road.

  You may note in this tale that the French always seem fearsome as individuals, but not nearly so preux in bodies. It is hard to say why. Man for man, their best knights were better than ours – not the Prince or Sir John Chandos, but most of the rest of ours. They feared our long bows, but I seldom saw a French knight with an arrow in him. I’ve heard dozens of stout yeoman who’ve never loosed a shaft in anger tell me that the bent stick won us our territories in France. Perhaps. I was always happy to have the archers close to hand, but fights are won sword to sword. And sword to sword, the French should have been our betters, but they never were.

  We were usually fed, often paid, and most nights we got some sleep. The same men led us in the field and ate with us in camp. That wasn’t the way with the French, and I think that eating, sleeping and getting paid are fundamental to war.

  But then, I was a cook.

  We halted at Montbazon, where the French cardinal Talleyrand met our army. He’d been to England, trying to negotiate peace for the Pope, but his bodyguard were all Frenchmen and greedy bastards to boot. Considering how intimately I later came to know part of the papal court, I wish I could tell you that I met Talleyrand, but I didn’t. He was closeted with the French or hiding in his rooms.

  We sent messengers and scouts west, looking for Lancaster. It was no secret that the Prince was desperate. To the north, the King of France marched to Tours and joined forces with his son, the Dauphin, then turned south after us with four times our number. We retired on Le Haye – that’s a military way of saying we moved as fast as we could to get clear of the gathering French force, which wasn’t just behind us, now: there were small bands of Frenchmen in every ford and behind every hedge. Abelard took a wound ‘foraging’.

  I remember this part well, because now I was waiting on tables every night with the commanders. I heard it all – every squire did. The Prince wasn’t afraid, but he was deeply worried, and while he tried to watch his words, we all knew how important Lancaster’s army
– and his reputation and experience – were to us.

  But the next morning, when I packed in darkness and left my favourite cup by the fire in my rush to get my knight on the road, the French were coming after us. As we marched out of the south of Le Haye, the French came in from the north. It was that close. Luckily, they missed us, and having marched all night, they halted for a rest, and it was noon before they knew how close we’d come.

  We took Chatellerault without too much effort the next day, and the rumour was we’d hold it until relieved by Lancaster – it was a bridge town, and with it in our hands we could whistle at the French and wait for Lancaster to come down from the north. It was a lucky capture, and all agreed we were saved – indeed, that now we held the whip hand.

  I curried horses. I had time to help Abelard. I made an early decision not to cut my ties with him or the company of archers. I was proud to be a squire, but I had no friends there. The squires had no love for me. While no one beat me or played tricks now, I had no friends among them. I seldom ate with them, and Richard and I were creeping back towards a fight. It was like a dance – and we were dancing towards a duel. We both knew it, and the other squires knew it, too. Since this was serious – sword in the guts serious – they didn’t torment me. They just waited for me to be dead.

  At any rate, I kept working with Abelard whenever I had time. We were in the same retinue, and now I knew everyone – not just Abelard and archer John, my former mentor, but John Hawkwood; Peter Trent, the master archer; Sir Edward Cressey, my master, and Thomas de Vere himself. As well as fifty other men – archers and men-at-arms and squires and servants.

  Everything was fine, except that Lancaster didn’t come. He couldn’t. He was the best soldier England ever grew, but he couldn’t get his army over the Loire. We waited three days for him, and there was more wine drunk at every dinner in the Prince’s pavilion, and by the third night, tempers were flaring and Boucicault, who was still with us, used the term ‘trapped’ in a sentence.

  That night, as I carved some questionable venison, a messenger came in and reported that the King of France was just east of us, at Chauvigny.