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Beth suppressed a feeling of irritation.
He went into the kitchen and she heard him filling the kettle. It still made precisely the same sound it had always made, the tinny drumming of the water into thin metal. He had always filled it through the spout with the tap on full. She heard him light the gas.
Nothing had changed inside the house. The parlour was a dark place with split leather armchairs and the old prints of clipper ships on the walls. She crossed over to the bookshelf to distract herself from her discomfort. There were all the bird books and the botanical guides, but there also, to her astonishment, was a spine she knew well, her own little book from last year, The Opportunity of Crisis. It was in her father’s political section sandwiched between Will Hutton’s The State We ‘re In and Christie Kilfillan’s Last Chance, as if keeping matter and anti-matter apart.
He came back in from the kitchen and caught her looking at them.
‘I thought I’d better read what you had to say,’ he said quietly and sat down. ‘Won’t be long. The kettle takes a minute or two.’
She almost said, I know that, kettles are the same everywhere, but she bit it back. ‘What did you make of it?’ she asked instead, caught between a reluctant pride in his interest and a flash of anticipatory irritation.
He thought. He had never minded waiting to get his words right and that had stretched out the hours of Beth’s childhood often to breaking point. ‘It’s a great achievement to write a book,’ he answered in the end. ‘You feel passionately about it. I admire passion.’
‘But you don’t agree with what it says.’
‘You wouldn’t expect me to, would you?’
‘I suppose not, but surely you can see…’
He held up a hand. ‘There are other things to talk about first,’ he said. ‘The world can wait until after we’ve had our tea.’
She stood there and watched him go back into the little kitchen. That had always been their relationship, him doing the job of both parents and her doing the job of one child. Until she’d left.
He came back with two mugs. Hers had a picture of an otter on it, which was no surprise.
‘You’re still not on the phone then,’ she said.
‘No need. The Turners take messages. Peggy bangs on the wall if it’s urgent.’
‘Is it often urgent?’
He looked at her as if trying to detect sarcasm. ‘We had an injured egret down in the marsh last week.’
Beth wasn’t entirely sure whether an egret was an animal or a bird. For the first time, a part of her found something valuable in the relentless simplicity of his life. Her mobile was switched off and nobody could reach her. Not one single person in the outside world had any idea where she was. No one outside Slapton even knew she had a father. Here she could be safe while she sorted everything out. London political gossip wouldn’t reach down here. Her own father didn’t even know exactly what she did, who she had been working for.
That was when, looking down into his tea, he said, ‘Tell me, love. How bad is it with this man Livesay?’
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_43b62c8e-d7e1-5c7d-ad5a-5b082d5c07bf)
There is a chapel in the town of Ghent which owns a toe-bone of Saint Paul in a fine gold reliquary chest, and if you go to pray there, you may ask the priest for a twenty day notice. I went there alone as soon as I had seen to my men in their lodgings. The door had sagged so it caught on the sill and shook as I pushed it open, letting out a miasma of rotting cloth. Inside, it was very dark with only two candles burning and I didn’t see the priest sitting waiting at the confessional until he challenged me with a quavering voice.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded in the Flemish which I knew a little, and then in slower and imperfect French. ‘Are you a pilgrim? You don’t look like one.’
He probably thought I was a robber.
‘Tonight I’m a pilgrim,’ I answered, also in French. He stood up, held up one of the candles and looked doubtfully at my style of dress.
‘You have no scallop shell,’ he remarked.
‘I am not only on a pilgrimage,’ I said, ‘I am on the King of England’s business, but I intend to stop for prayer at wayside shrines along my way. I have come here to pray to your relic of the blessed Saint and to ask you for a certificate.’
That seemed to reassure him. ‘Do you need confession?’
Thank you, no. I have a priest with me. I make my confession to him.’
‘Have you sinned since your last confession to him?’
Had I sinned since the morning? I searched my memory and I couldn’t come up with anything immediate, so I said what I have always said when a strange priest asks me that.
‘Father, there is a sin I fear I have not yet confessed, the full weight of which is gradually becoming clear to me. Because I do not wish to confess less than the totality of that sin, I must wait before I ask forgiveness for it.’
He peered at me and in the dim light I could see his lips moving. He reached for a paper and held it out. It struck me he hadn’t understood a word of what I had just said.
‘I asked,’ he said doubtfully, ‘because tomorrow is our festival and if you come then I will give you forty days not twenty.’
‘Can I have twenty days now and another forty tomorrow?’ I asked, looking at the paper he had just given me.
He looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It is one or the other.’
I gave it back to him reluctantly, thinking I would regret my action if I died that night. Forty days would take my sum of indulgences to a total of more than two thousand days. For a moment, my heart lifted at the thought of nearly six years less in Purgatory, then I remembered how much faster time moved there and I thought how many, many more certificates I would need to make much difference. My six years certificates might win me six years in the time of this world, but that would only be a few minutes of relief in the time they follow in Purgatory.
I gave him five coins for five candles and said I would be back in the morning, then I returned to the Boar’s Head Inn and joined my men sitting down at the long tables. William Batokewaye was on the far side of the room, with several women at his table. He told me once that he was a priest when he was in England but that it was a precious burden best left safe at home when he was travelling. I have known him for too long to question that, apart from wondering whether, even in England, he could be regarded as entirely priestly, but at the centre of that man is something so solid, so true, that I do not feel qualified to judge him. He believes he will be forgiven and I hope he is right because I would not wish him to pass an age in Purgatory. When he dies, there will be masses said in my Chantry for him, though he does not know it.
The food came in those huge chafing dishes with the boars’ heads at each end for which the Inn was named. Lentils in a spiced sauce and three different meats with spitted duck shredded over the top of them all. The fine gentlemen from Genoa didn’t like it. I thought it was excellent. When I’m travelling, I’m on campaign and when you’re out there scouring the countryside, you’re grateful for anything that keeps your belly button away from your backbone. The squire was getting the worst of their complaints and doing his best to explain to the landlord what they wanted to eat. It wasn’t going to get him anywhere. I knew the landlord, Garciot, from old times, and no one had ever got the better of him yet. Before he bought the inn with the proceeds of his ransoms, he’d been one of John Hawkwood’s men for many a year. Hawkwood always said Garciot scared him stiff and, coming from Hawkwood, that was saying something. They lived for fighting, Hawkwood’s bunch, but they always knew what was right and wrong. You might well call them mercenaries, and it was true that they fought for money but they wouldn’t take that money from just anyone. They lived by a tough set of rules, but they stuck to them.
The evening ran its predictable course. The Genoese persisted with their complaint. Garciot stared at them without expression, then he took their food away and came back with something that looked almost the same but smelt far, far worse. He winked at me as he put it in front of them and I wondered what he could possibly have added to it out of sight in the kitchen to make it quite so repugnant. He excused himself for a moment to deal with the two Brabanters at the end of the table who had been making a drunken nuisance of themselves. He held the larger of them off the ground with one hand, while he patted his pockets for dinner money with the other, then he put one under each arm and showed them how to fly into the street. After seeing that, the Genoese managed to eat a surprisingly large amount of whatever it was on their plates and left to go to their rooms as soon as they could get away.
My men went about their own business, drifting towards William’s table while Garciot came and sat with us, the squire and me.
‘What are you doing, travelling with pants-wetters like those?’ he asked.
‘King’s orders. King’s affairs,’ I replied, not wanting to encourage him. Familiarity is to be expected when you’ve spilt blood together, but it wasn’t for me or for him to question the nature of the business my sovereign had charged me with.
‘I hear the King’s in his dotage,’ he answered, ‘watching his debts mount up, piling jewels on to this ugly mistress of his and letting the upstart John lord it over the country.’
The squire stiffened and, unbelievably, I saw his hand go to the grip of his sword.
‘Enough, Garciot,’ I said, and I thought I had said it quite quietly until I saw how many turned to stare.
He raised a hand quickly. ‘My apologies, Sir Guy. While he commands your loyalty, he is still a great king.’
He turned to the squire and whispered something. The squire’s indignation drained out of him. My hearing is still sharp, but the room was full of the noise of feasting men and when Garciot had gone off to see to his guests I demanded to know what he had said.
‘Nothing bad,’ said the squire quickly.
I wasn’t sure I believed him. Garciot was certainly capable of a final sarcastic quip. ‘Then what?’
‘He told me I should study at your feet and mark every word you spoke.’
Oh really. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’
‘I don’t lie, Sir Guy.’ For a short, fat studious man, he suddenly looked quite fierce.
‘I’m sure you don’t. Please excuse my bad manners. It’s just that I will not tolerate people abusing our king.’
He nodded. ‘And I won’t stand for people abusing my lord Lancaster.’
I didn’t show my amusement at the thought of him in hand-to-hand combat with Garciot because he so clearly meant what he said. The fight would have been over before a man could sneeze.
‘You have a high regard for Lancaster?’ I enquired.
That was who Garciot meant by his ‘upstart John’. King Edward’s youngest son, born only yards from where we now sat in Ghent and therefore known as John of Gaunt, as his mother, a Hainaulter, called the town. I wouldn’t have wanted to upset the squire further, but privately I had some sympathy for Garciot’s opinion. John had lately styled himself ‘King of Castile’, which seemed to me to be coming it a bit rich. He was never a man who had much understanding for those below him and I couldn’t fully forgive him for that slaughter at Limoges.
‘I had the highest regard for his Duchess.’ The squire sounded sad. He crossed himself, giving a deep sigh. ‘I wrote a poem to her.’
The beautiful Blanche. I thought of her and joined him in his silence because whenever I had seen Blanche I had thought immediately of Elizabeth, who had the same hair and the same forehead, but who shaded Blanche like a cathedral choir shades a tavern singer. I still long for Elizabeth every single day. We did not have enough time together. I know this life on earth is only our qualification for whichever place comes next, and I would not fear my time to come in Purgatory if it were just for myself. I deserve to suffer. No, what I cannot bear is the thought that I might spend an aeon there, locked away from her. Even worse is the other possibility that, through our sin, I might meet her there.
They sang her mass every day at Tewkesbury just as they would be singing it now at Slapton. I prayed that would work.
In the years we had together, right up until the end, she had a way of looking at me which suspended time and conscious thought so that we would gaze at each other in private delight. From across a room our souls could still embrace.
‘Sir Guy,’ said the squire, a little hesitantly, jerking me back to this noisy inn.
‘Yes?’
‘I would not wish to upset you or intrude upon you in any way,’ he said, waving a hand for another jug of wine, ‘but I have a great desire to hear men’s stories, and there is still so much I want to ask you in particular.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because I know that what the landlord said was right. Whenever I have heard your name spoken, it has always been with respect and trust. I want the chance to hear the story of great events told without having to worry about discerning truth and falsehood in the telling.’
‘Oh now be careful, young man. My memory is sixty-five years old. All memories are changed in the use and the retelling. I cannot guarantee you truth.’
‘I will take the risk.’
‘We have a long way to go,’ I said, ‘and precious little other company worth the name.’ It was clear we both felt the same way about our Genoese companions, and my archers, all fine fellows, were men of few words. ‘Ask what you want.’
‘When did you first meet this priest?’ he asked, staring over at William who was singing vigorously in the crowd of girls.
‘On the twenty-seventh day of August in the year thirteen hundred and forty six, just after the middle of the night.’
‘And you question the power of your memory?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘That is a fuller answer than anyone could expect. Where was it?’
‘In the Valley of the Clerks.’
‘I don’t know of it. Where is it?’
‘It is some two hundred yards below the windmill on the down-slope of the plateau beside the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu.’
‘Oh.’ He made a face. ‘That valley. Stupid of me. The great battle. Do you still remember it well?’
Remember it well? I thought of it almost as often as I thought of Elizabeth.
‘It’s an old tale and well-known,’ I said. ‘Were you born then?’
‘I was three.’
‘I met William in the night when the battle was over. The windmill was burning to light the battlefield and there were fires everywhere to honour the dead.’
‘More of theirs than ours.’
‘Oh yes. Far, far more. It had been a slaughter.’
‘Not just a slaughter,’ he objected. ‘An honourable and magnificent fight, surely? You had been outnumbered by ten to one.’
‘Time and willing lips will always twist a tale. Some say it was four to one, others say five. All the same, you could have searched high and low for honour on that field and not found quite enough of it.’
I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. He pounced on it. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘another time perhaps.’
‘Please go on. What happened that night?’
‘Nobody slept. You never do after a battle. You know that yourself, but the French didn’t seem to know it was over. More and more of them kept blundering up the valley like moths to a candle. They were wandering in from the far end, for hours afterwards, thinking to join in the spoils. They just didn’t seem to realise that all the bodies heaped up were their own countrymen.’ I drained my wine and he refilled it.
As ever, what was in my mind was the moment when the troops parted for the doomed charge of a blind king, John of Bohemia, lashed between his friends’ horses.
It was blind John’s fate that drew me to the heaps of dead. I thought I knew where I had seen him fall. A stupid thought. From up on the ridge by the windmill I had marked his passage fairly well, but then chaos hid his end and now, down below in the dark there were hills of dead piled to head-height, horses and men mixed together in heaps which had formed a rising barricade. The French had gone on leaping and clambering over that barricade, taking arrows for their trouble and piling it ever higher in the process.
I was weary to my bones, barely able to drag myself through the churned earth of the battlefield, stumbling over arrows and helmets and arms and legs, and I turned over a battalion of bodies before I found him. It was only when I saw the lashings around a harness that I finally knew where to look. Pulling the other corpses off the three of them left me sweating and soaked in crusting blood, and I couldn’t get them free, you see? There was a black horse lying across them, a real charger, solid, stiff and utterly dead. In the morning, they were using teams of men with ropes and poles to prise those piles apart, but there in the night, there was just me and the flickering light of the nearest fire. The legs I thought belonged to John were sticking out from under the horse, and I was pulling as hard as I could when I found I was no longer alone. A huge man in a woollen tunic had joined me.
‘You take one leg,’ he said, I’ll take the other.’
‘I’m not looting,’ I said sharply, because most of the men out on that field were our camp followers, using their knives to dispatch the nearly dead and cut from them whatever they could find of value. I had taken off my mail and I was in a plain jerkin. I could have been anyone and I didn’t need another fight.
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you with the King all day, holding up the Standard. You did a good job. I don’t expect you need to loot, I guess you’ve got a castle or two of your own.’ There was nothing subservient about him, but right across that battlefield that night, in the aftermath of the desperate fight, men were talking to other men as equals and no one could be so proud as to mind.
‘One castle,’ I said, ‘and it leaks.’
He laughed harshly. ‘I know why you’re here. You and I saw the same thing,’ he said, ‘or thought we did, and we both need to know, don’t we?’
‘I’m Guy de Bryan,’ I said holding out a hand.
‘Are you indeed?’ he said as if he knew me. ‘Well now, there’s a fine thing. I am William Batokewaye,’ he squeezed my hand in his own much larger one. In those days he still had both arms. ‘In the service, for the present, of young Lord Montague, which is why I am here rooting around the carrion in the dark.’
Montague again. The Montagues were always embedded somewhere near the heart of my story. Let me get this right because, looking back, the order of all these events does get a little muddled in my head. That’s because so many of the things that really mattered in my life happened in such a short space of years, and so many of them involved the Montagues. They had given me no great reason for gratitude. Old Montague had harboured the villain Molyns, then imprisoned me, then done all he could to see his daughter, my dear Elizabeth, marry another man. When it came to the precipice of my sin, it was me who plunged over, but it was Montague’s hand that led me to the edge.
Now we had the new Earl of Salisbury, the younger Montague, and he was a fighter too, just like his wily, warrior father. Would he now set a curve of his own into the passage of my life? Molyns was still in his retinue. Molyns had done the deed that brought the two of us to root among these corpses in the dark.
