The Perfect Sinner

‘I speak some Italian,’ I said, a little stung.

‘Enough to order food. Not enough to conduct high level negotiations.’

‘But why is he here now? We’re not leaving until the beginning of April.’

‘You mean nobody told you?’

‘Told me what?’

‘The King sent word last week. There’s a rush on. It’s all been brought forward. You really didn’t know?’

I shook my head.

‘You’re leaving in three days time from Dartmouth on the afternoon tide, on board your ship, Le Michel, captained by John Hawley, although why you should trust yourself to that rogue is a mystery to me. You are sailing up channel to Dordrecht in Flanders where you will join Sir James di Provan and John di Mari, two of the most irritating and self-regarding clots it has ever been my misfortune to meet, and with them you head south as soon as you possibly can.’

‘William, you know as well as I do nobody travels across the Alps in winter. Even the Brenner Pass is tough going now.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘It seems the King believes in your ability to do it. Someone apparently has to and he thought sending you would give the best chance.’

I knew him well enough to make an accurate guess. ‘Come on, you know more about this than you’re saying. What’s it really all about?’

He squirmed. At least he gave a tiny involuntary wriggle which is as close to a squirm as a man of William’s size and experience is ever likely to get.

‘I’ve heard a few things,’ he said eventually and I just waited.

‘It’s his bankers,’ he said in the end. ‘You know he still owes those Florentines a huge fortune?’

‘The Bardi family? Yes, I have heard.’

‘They’re pressing him hard. The Genoa deal is something to do with it. He has promised them agreement by the end of February, otherwise he is in default.’

I knew all too well what default would mean. Humiliation for the English crown. We all remembered the last time he’d had to pawn the crown and the shame that brought, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d done the same again. I loved my king, but sometimes he behaved like a complete idiot.

I rubbed my brow, suddenly aware of the enormous practical difficulties of this whole enterprise.

‘Three days to get all this ready? I don’t even know if Hawley’s in Dartmouth and the Michel hasn’t left his mooring since October.’

‘Hawley’s ready. I saw him on the way. The King’s messenger got that far, at least.’

‘Well, he didn’t get here. Oh, wait a minute. They found a man on the rocks below Strete. He’d been thrown off the cliffs, stripped of everything but his jerkin.’

‘That was him. Someone’s killed a King’s messenger in your lands. There’ll be a big fuss about that.’

‘There’s no time to lose. Is Hawley provisioning the ship?’

‘Yes. I told him to do it well. I can’t eat that vile stuff you usually serve on board.’

I stared at him in astonishment. ‘You’re coming to Dordrecht?’

‘No, no. What would be the point of that? I’m coming all the way to Genoa.’

‘Why?’ The thought of getting William’s great bulk over the Alps in the snow was appalling.

‘It sounded like fun,’ was all he would say, then before I had a chance to argue, the priest played his trump card.

‘I also hear, if the masons are to be believed, you’re going to leave your message on the walls here for all to see, and as far as the future of your soul and come to that, your neck, is concerned that seems to me to be the more pressing concern right now.’

That made me blink. ‘You know about that?’ I had thought the Declaration was a secret. There was nothing of it yet to be seen. It was all still forming in my head and the words had to be right before I would let the carver pick up his chisel. Second thoughts are best avoided when you set your words in stone.

‘I get to hear most things. Is that something to do with the clerks? I keep wondering why a Chantry needs all those clerks.’

He was a perceptive man and he knew me better than any now alive, perhaps better than anyone bar Elizabeth ever had done.

‘To a point. I have a great work in mind. The message, as you call it, is a small part of it. The clerks will work to draw together the thoughts that lie behind it.’

‘Has it struck you that the only ones likely to have learning enough to read your message are also the ones most likely to disapprove?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘And if the King reads it?’

‘Does the King know about it?’

‘Not yet, but when he does…’

‘All the better.’

‘Where’s it going to go?’ he asked. ‘If it’s going to be displayed on my church for all the world to see and disapprove, then I’d better know.’

‘I’ll show you.’

The plaque lay ready on the stonecutter’s bench. Its surface was smooth to the touch and the border had been chased out in folds to frame it.

‘Either you’ve got a lot to say or it’s going to be carved in big letters,’ said the priest. ‘What exactly is it going to say?’

‘You can read it when it’s finished. It’s too close to me, too raw. I can’t tell you yet.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

How could I not trust him, the man who came closest to understanding, the man who had risked the King’s fury to back me up in the days when we were all young, when he was a mere deacon, without the age and reputation to keep the royal wrath at bay?

‘I’ll tell you the first line,’ I said.

‘I’m listening.’

Elizabeth’s words came to me fresh. ‘Senes qui domi manent, nolite juvenes verbis belli accendere.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the priest. ‘I was afraid it would be something like that. Where exactly is it going?’

I turned around and gasped as the old wound in my knee caught at me. I pointed at the chapel porch. ‘Right above the door,’ I told him, ‘for all to see.’

The priest looked where I pointed and then cocked his head up to follow the height of the tower as it soared high into the air.

‘I predict trouble,’ he said. ‘If you want to enjoy a quiet old age, you should put it higher up.’

‘How much higher?’

The priest looked at the rooks wheeling around the summit of the tower, a dizzy height above us.

‘What about up there,’ he suggested, ‘right at the top. That might just save your neck.’

CHAPTER TWO

This is not a complaint, but I have spent more than half my life away from my own bed and probably a quarter of it away from any bed at all. This past year I have served Edward mostly at sea in the Channel against the Castilian galleys and I have now been granted the extra responsibility of Admiral of the Western seas. Oh, and I also had to address Parliament on his behalf, asking them for still more money. The King is no longer quite the active man he was, but a year or two ago he told me that if I had wanted a quiet life, I should have taken care to seem more of an idiot and more of a coward. I think it was a compliment.

When I began to notice the discomfort, I realised the King’s business took me along some well-worn routes and there was no good reason why I should put up with strange beds. I have therefore bought myself houses on some of those frequented paths, personal hostels for a personal pilgrim carefully spaced at a day’s travelling distance and now, most of the time, I can sleep in one of my very own beds. That’s England I’m talking about. Now we were going abroad and it was back to the bad old ways.

I was brooding on that when the Michel took a wave right over the bow and staggered almost to a halt. He is a good ship and he’d been built just the way I wanted him. He can go further to windward than any other ship I know, but it was asking a lot to expect him to fight his way up-Channel in a down-Channel gale. I called him after my dear old horse, the first of my chargers, killed under me by a Frenchman’s sword in his throat, and in truth they behaved the same way, the ship and the horse. The first Michel was there with me through thick and thin just as long as I kept him properly fed and properly shod and didn’t ask him to charge straight into a low sun. He didn’t like it when blades came at him out of the glare. He carried me for six years in the King’s service, which is quite a record when you think how much of that time was spent at the exact places where two armies were colliding. We talked to each other a lot, Michel and I. The second Michel, the wooden one, felt the same way about the wind as the first one felt about the low sun. The weight of the water forced his head further and further off course and the big sail slatted and cracked. I had seen this one coming and braced myself on the backstay, but the King’s squire, face down on the deck, short and fat with his head in a bucket, hardly seemed to care about the distinction between air and water any more. He was already soaked through before the wave hit him, so that the flood only lifted and swelled his sodden woollen jerkin as it passed. The priest was braced against the weather rail as ever, glaring at the vague horizon as if he were hoping for a fight. It was the fourth day of our three-day passage up-Channel, and I only minded the delay because William wouldn’t perform the office of Mass in any kind of storm. It was one of his few orthodoxies. He said he had seen too many people vomit up the Host and that was definitely disrespectful and possibly blasphemous. I was standing behind the steersman, staring forwards beyond the port bow, to where the sea blurred into the low, cantering clouds. White-caps were whipping from the wave tops in the wind that came driving from behind him again as the bow swung back on course. We had seen no sign of the sun for many hours and, though there should be nothing ahead of us, who could tell for sure whether it was wind, rock or sandbank that broke and frothed the sea?

My sailing master caught my eye and jerked his head down towards the well-deck. Hawley was not known for his soft heart or his thoughtfulness for those who didn’t share his complete indifference to the discomforts of the sea, but he seemed to like the squire. They had made friends in Dartmouth before we sailed. Not many people ever managed to make friends with Hawley. He didn’t like to cheat his friends, which may have been why he chose to have so few. The young man was showing signs of movement, doing his best to get to his knees. I dropped down the ladder and stood beside him. ‘How are you?’ I asked, and he swung his head to one side and then the other as if he could not quite locate me.

I’m still breathing,’ he gasped, ‘at least when there’s air to be had. The rest of the time I’m drinking. Are we nearly there?’

‘Visibility’s bad. I can’t see land at the moment,’ I said, knowing a fuller answer might nip this brave attempt at recovery in the bud.

The squire made a huge effort and reared his head higher than it had been since dawn. The Channel never seemed this wide before,’ he said uncertainly. ‘How far is it?’

I could not evade a direct question. ‘We’re a little west of where we started, doing what we can against a north-east wind.’

The squire reached out for the rail and hauled himself unsteadily to his feet. I put out a hand to make sure of him as the next wave heaved the bow higher. He had been a plump man when he came aboard, but I realised that the past four days had already served to trim him down a bit. He was looking around him aghast.

‘West? That’s the wrong way. Will the storm sink us?’

‘Storm? No, it’s not really a storm.’ I had another look at the sky. The clouds ended in a dark line which was drawing nearer all the time. ‘It will blow itself out in a short while, then we’ll make our way back up-Channel. At least it keeps the galleys away.’

‘What galleys?’

‘The French galleys, the Castilians. Take your pick. No galleys are good news. We are at war, you know.’

He was doing well for a man who’d been so sick minutes before. Standing up does that for some people. His habitual interest was showing itself again. He had an eye for everything, did this young man. He looked up at the rigging and seemed to be trying to frame a question. ‘I think you had better dry yourself,’ I said. ‘Come into my quarters.’

It was relatively peaceful in the cabin and I was able to study the squire as he rubbed himself as dry as he could, the first chance I’d had since he had come on board at Dartmouth.

‘I know your face,’ I remarked. ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

The squire nodded and managed to look both pleased and a little wary through his pallor. ‘First time was thirteen years ago,’ he said, ‘in France. That is, I was a nobody in the retinue of Prince Lionel and you were the great Lord Bryan with retained men of your own.’

I was even more impressed by his powers of recovery. The younger man showed resilience and that quality had always prompted my approval. ‘Thirteen years ago?’ I did the sums. 1359, the year my dearest Elizabeth died. ‘Rheims? You were at the siege?’

‘I didn’t get as far as Rheims. I was captured.’

‘How on earth did you manage that? There wasn’t a lot of fighting that year. Rethel, was that it? That little skirmish at the bridge? Were you captured there?’

‘No, no. Nothing so noble. You’ll remember how hungry we all were, surely?’

‘How could I not?’ Foul weather for week after week and the French had finally learnt their lesson. With his father, the King, a prisoner in England, Dauphin Charles changed the rules, decided taking the English on in battle was a mug’s game with only one outcome. Instead his French armies burnt the crops, laying the country bare so that we’d starve. It wasn’t glorious and it wasn’t at all chivalrous but it worked all too well. Starve was exactly what we did. Still, I suppose that after Crécy we could hardly claim the high ground on chivalry.

‘We were sent off to search for food,’ the squire explained. ‘Three of us, me and two Welsh archers. We walked into a farmyard and the barn was full of French. They thought I might be worth something. The other two got the knife.’

‘Who sent you off like that?’

The squire looked a little embarrassed and I wondered why, then I guessed.

‘It was me, was it? Did I send you?’

‘It’s all a long time ago,’ he said as if that made it less important. ‘And you also fixed my ransom.’

‘Did I now?’ I had fixed many, many ransoms. ‘How much were you worth?’

‘Sixteen pounds’ said the squire proudly, ‘and the King paid it.’

‘Sixteen pounds, eh? And how old were you then?’

‘Sixteen years.’

‘A pound a year.’ The man was twenty-nine now. I wasn’t sure he looked worth twenty-nine pounds, but someone thought he was if they had entrusted him with this mission. He wasn’t just a travelling companion. My instructions laid down that I must consult him over every aspect of the diplomatic negotiations once I got him to Genoa, though I was, in every other way, the leader.

‘That wasn’t it,’ I said with certainty. ‘That wasn’t what I remembered.’ I didn’t explain, didn’t say that grief had driven all other details out of that year, leaving only the black hole of tears which stood where Elizabeth had once been. ‘It was more recent than that.’

‘The year after? I was there at Calais when the Treaty was signed. You came straight from Paris. You swore observance for England in the King’s name. It was a fine moment.’

I shook my head. There had been huge crowds at Calais. It had been hard lawyer’s business for me, trying to see the holes in the Treaty through the blinding smoke of ceremony.

‘Where else?’ I asked.

‘The other time?’ he looked reluctant and his head drooped so that he looked down at the deck. ‘I suppose that must have been when we were with Lancaster,’ and I knew why he looked like that.

‘That bloody business at Limoges.’ Slaughter for its own sake. Licentious revenge on a town that had done no more than stand up for itself. It was the moment when I knew Lancaster for what he was, a bad commander and an unprincipled man, not a man to follow in war or in peace. The ending of the siege of Limoges had been another stepping stone on the way to my declaration. I’m not talking about old Lancaster of course, not Henry of Lancaster. He had been the noblest of men. This was new Lancaster, John the King’s son, made Duke by marriage and by convenient death.

‘There were things there I would rather forget,’ said the squire. ‘I decided at Limoges that war could do without me. I have not been in the wars since.’

‘If you have the chance of that choice, then make it so.’ I sat down to ease my leg and rubbed my knee. ‘I am sixty-five years old, young man. I should have made that same choice long ago. I wish you could know what I know. But you puzzle me. There were many thousands of us at all the events you mention and yet you seem to have singled me out.’

‘There were many knights, I grant you that, but I would not agree that there were many like you.’

My door flew open with no trace of a knock and the priest, spraying water like a dog leaving a pond, ducked his head to come inside and slammed it shut behind him.

‘Hawley says the wind’s backing,’ he announced. ‘It’s northerly.’

Thank you William,’ I said mildly, looking at the puddle forming under him. No crewman would have had the nerve to soak my cabin floor like that. ‘Will you join us in a glass? We’ll be heading back for Flanders in an hour or two, I should say.’

‘I will. Has he started interrogating you yet?’

‘Who?’

The priest jerked his head at the squire. ‘This one. It’s what he does best. Ask, ask, ask. He’s known for it. Unless he’s scared of you.’

The squire went a little pink or perhaps it was just that his colour was improving anyway. The motion of the boat had eased as the wind backed further. I could tell the wind and the tide were both moving to the east together.

‘No he hasn’t. What would he ask me? I’ve got nothing much to say.’

There was something,’ said the squire meekly. That’s if you don’t mind?’

I wouldn’t have minded at all if the priest hadn’t said that thing about being scared of me. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Sluys,’ he said. ‘You were there for the battle of the ships. Would you tell me what it was like?’

Sluys? I hadn’t thought of Sluys for a long time. He was a clever man, I realise now, opening my door like that, starting me off with a question he knew I would want to answer. I know now that he had no particular interest in the ancient history of Sluys, just as well as I know that William Batokewaye colluded with him, nudging him in the right direction in everything he did. It was only later on, when I saw that squire at work on other people that I recognised the technique of a master. Get them talking about anything at all, then when they’re moving, give them a nudge. It’s easier to steer a wagon when it’s already rolling. Oh, he was clever all right and, though I didn’t know it yet, they had a plan, those two.

Sluys, my first sea-fight, though you couldn’t really call it a sea-fight, with the French boats crammed together in the narrowing estuary of the Zwin and the wind, blowing straight in, keeping them there and carrying us to them. It was not so different to storming a town, a town with masts and wooden walls. So he got me talking, remembering the archers up our masts, shooting down, remembering the hand to hand on decks that might as well have been streets except for the splashes as the bodies went into the water, and even that splashing only lasted a short time. In no time at all, the sea was so thick with the corpses of dead French that the next ones in made little more than a soggy thump.

We were away. He knew more about it than I did in some ways because I had been in the middle of a struggling mob on the Saint-James, the big Dieppe ship. It was a grunting, heaving fight, too close to stretch out a sword arm and too crowded to see six feet away. That was all I knew about it until we had them subdued, four hundred bodies lying on the decks of that ruined ship alone, and by the time our friendly Flemings, seeing it going our way, had finally come out from Oostburg and Termuiden and Sluys itself and hacked into the rear rank of the smaller French boats, it was all but over. He knew the figures, this damp, little man, ‘Sixteen thousand French dead,’ he told me. ‘One hundred and ninety ships taken or sunk.’ He had it by heart, and from the look in his eyes, he was trying to live inside the flimsy house he was building out of my slow words.

‘It was the worst sight I had seen up to then,’ I told him. ‘Butcher work. Hacking and cutting and piercing with no time to know your enemy, but for all that there was still chivalry.’

He asked me this and that for a quarter of a candle’s length, then, having loosened my lips with old war stories, he made his one mistake. He turned much too sharply to the subject he really wanted to talk about. ‘Molyns,’ he said. Tell me about Sir John Molyns,’ and I looked sharply at William Batokewaye, wondering for the first time if the priest had put him up to it. Old William looked back at me, eyes wide and innocent, waiting for me to speak.

‘Molyns has been dead ten years and more,’ I said. ‘He’s a man best forgotten. Nothing he did is worth the effort of our memory.’

The squire closed his mouth and kept it closed.

‘He helped put the King on the throne,’ said the priest mildly.

‘He did that,’ I agreed, because what else could one say?

That thought was still in my mind a few days later, once we had swapped the Michel for horseback and were plodding south. Thinking of the far past, at my age, makes the present much more painful. I could ride for hours back then because I was so much lighter in my saddle and my joints had youth’s oil in them, but there was much I didn’t know in those days. I didn’t know how to scan the landscape ahead, to measure the dangers of the blind places which might hide who knows what. I didn’t have the voice of command which could still make even the toughest trooper do what I said without a moment’s question.

There was quite a crew of us by this time. The two Italians, di Mari and di Provan, would have little to do with me and I didn’t mind one bit. They weren’t my kind of men. They talked to each other in their own babble. Di Provan had a high-pitched mocking laugh which made me wince, with a carry to it shrill enough to tell any brigands we were coming a mile away. Occasionally, if they wanted something, they would refer to the squire, but they seemed to find me barbarous, unfashionable, useful as some sort of bodyguard, but no more. The squire asked me, rather anxiously, if he should explain that I was not only the leader of the party but also its designated chief spokesman. I got a certain amount of wry pleasure from letting them dig the hole of misunderstanding ever deeper. They were Genoese, these men, and a bit full of themselves, and they had two of their own crossbowmen with them. Now, I’ve seen a lot of men killed by crossbows and mostly they were the men who were holding them, not their targets.

I watched it close up sixteen years ago at Poitiers when we were creeping up on them through the woods. It was dreadful standing still while we waited because I had splits in my feet at that time, the awful itch that is best dealt with by keeping moving. Either that or taking off your boots to have a good rub though that never lasts long. Elizabeth cured it for me after years of torment with an oil of hers, and I remember her sitting on the floor of our bedroom in my house of Pool as she worked it in to my toes, looking up at me all the while, making the shape of little kisses with her lips, and when she had done, she spread the rest of the oil over both of us and we rubbed it in with the skin of our bodies. Anyway, back at Poitiers, trying to take my mind off my feet, I watched one of their crossbowmen at work and understood what a dreadful business it was, winding that string back up after each shot. He didn’t see us until we were well clear of the wood, and before he got off one shot, Gwynn put two arrows into him. It was always like that with crossbows. They pack a punch but they don’t always get to punch twice.