style="font-size:15px;"> ‘He is a bastard,’ Thomas said, ‘but he’s not the only one,’ and he told her about the lance, about the day his village had been murdered, about his father dying, and about the man who carried a banner showing three yellow hawks on a blue field. He told the story slowly, through bloody lips, and when he had finished Jeanette shrugged.
‘So you want to kill this man, yes?’
‘One day.’
‘He deserves to be killed,’ Jeanette said.
Thomas stared at her through half-closed eyes, astonished by those words. ‘You know him?’
‘He is called Sir Guillaume d’Evecque,’ Jeanette said.
‘What’s she saying?’ Father Hobbe asked.
‘I know him,’ Jeanette said grimly. ‘In Caen, where he comes from, he is sometimes called the lord of the sea and of the land.’
‘Because he fights on both?’ Thomas guessed.
‘He is a knight,’ Jeanette said, ‘but he is also a sea-raider. A pirate. My father owned sixteen ships and Guillaume d’Evecque stole three of them.’
‘He fought against you?’ Thomas sounded surprised.
Jeanette shrugged. ‘He thinks any ship that is not French is an enemy. We are Bretons.’
Thomas looked at Father Hobbe. ‘There you are, father,’ he said lightly, ‘to keep my promise all I must do is fight the knight of the sea and of the land.’
Father Hobbe had not followed the French, but he shook his head sadly. ‘How you keep the promise, Thomas, is your business. But God knows you made it, and I know you are doing nothing about it.’ He fingered the wooden cross he wore on a leather lace about his neck. ‘And what shall I do about Sir Simon?’
‘Nothing,’ Thomas said.
‘I must tell Totesham, at least!’ the priest insisted.
‘Nothing, father.’ Thomas was just as insistent. ‘Promise me.’
Father Hobbe looked suspiciously at Thomas. ‘You’re not thinking of taking your own revenge, are you?’
Thomas crossed himself and hissed because of the pain in his rib. ‘Doesn’t our Mother Church tell us to turn the other cheek?’ he asked.
‘It does,’ Father Hobbe said dubiously, ‘but it wouldn’t condone what Sir Simon did tonight.’
‘We shall turn away his wrath with a soft answer,’ Thomas said, and Father Hobbe, impressed by this display of genuine Christianity, nodded his acceptance of Thomas’s decision.
Jeanette had been following the conversation as best she could and had at least gathered the gist of their words. ‘Are you discussing what to do to Sir Simon?’ she asked Thomas.
‘I’m going to murder the bastard,’ Thomas said in French.
She offered him a sour grimace. ‘That is a very clever idea, Englishman. So you will be a murderer and they will hang you. Then, thanks be to God, there will be two dead Englishmen.’
‘What’s she saying, Thomas?’ Father Hobbe asked.
‘She’s agreeing that I ought to forgive my enemies, father.’
‘Good woman, good woman,’ Father Hobbe said.
‘Do you really want to kill him?’ Jeanette demanded coldly.
Thomas shuddered with the pain, but he was not so hurt that he could not appreciate Jeanette’s closeness. She was a hard woman, he reckoned, but still as lovely as the spring and, like the rest of Will Skeat’s men, he had harboured impossible dreams of knowing her better. Her question gave him that chance. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he assured her, ‘and in killing him, my lady, I’ll fetch you your husband’s armour and sword.’
Jeanette frowned at him. ‘You can do that?’
‘If you help me.’
She grimaced. ‘How?’
So Thomas told her and, to his astonishment, she did not dismiss the idea in horror, but instead nodded a grudging acceptance. ‘It might really work,’ she said after a while, ‘it really might work.’
Which meant that Sir Simon had united his enemies and Thomas had found himself an ally.
Jeanette’s life was encompassed by enemies. She had her son, but everyone else she loved was dead, and those who were left she hated. There were the English, of course, occupying her town, but there was also Belas, the lawyer, and the shipmasters who had cheated her, and the tenants who used the presence of the English to default on their rent, and the town’s merchants who dunned her for money she did not have. She was a countess, yet her rank counted for nothing. At night, brooding on her plight, she would dream of meeting a great champion, a duke perhaps, who would come to La Roche-Derrien and punish her enemies one by one. She saw them whimpering with terror, pleading for mercy and receiving none. But in each dawn there was no duke and her enemies did not cringe, and Jeanette’s troubles were unrelieved until Thomas promised to help her kill the one enemy she hated above the rest.
To which end, early in the morning after her conversation with Thomas, Jeanette went to Richard Totesham’s headquarters. She went early because she hoped Sir Simon Jekyll would still be in bed, and though it was essential he knew the purpose of her visit, she did not want to meet him. Let him learn from others what she planned.
The headquarters, like her own house, fronted the River Jaudy, and the waterfront yard, despite the early hour, already held a score of petitioners seeking favours from the English. Jeanette was told to wait with the other petitioners. ‘I am the Countess of Armorica,’ she told the clerk.
‘You must wait like the rest,’ the clerk answered in poor French, then cut another notch in a tally stick on which he was counting arrow sheaves that were being unloaded from a lighter that had come upriver from the deepwater harbour at Tréguier. A second lighter held barrels of red herrings, and the stench of the fish made Jeanette shudder. English food! They did not even gut the herrings before smoking them and the red fish came from the barrels covered in yellow-green mould, yet the archers ate them with relish. She tried to escape the reeking fish by crossing the yard to where a dozen local men trimmed great lengths of timber propped on sawhorses. One of the carpenters was a man who had sometimes worked for Jeanette’s father, though he was usually too drunk to hold a job for more than a few days. He was barefoot, ragged, hump-backed and hare-lipped, though when he was sober he was as good a labourer as any in the town.
‘Jacques!’ Jeanette called. ‘What are you doing?’ She spoke in Breton.
Jacques tugged his forelock and bobbed down. ‘You’re looking well, my lady.’ Only a few folk could understand his speech for his split lip mangled the sounds. ‘Your father always said you were his angel.’
‘I asked what you are doing.’
‘Ladders, my lady, ladders.’ Jacques cuffed a stream of mucus from his nose. There was a weeping ulcer on his neck and the stink of it was as bad as the red
