held out her hand so he could take it and she let it stay there. ‘We have been punished, you and I,’ she said, ‘probably for the sin of pride. The Duke was right. I am no aristocrat. I am a merchant’s daughter, but thought I was higher. Now look at me.’
‘Thinner,’ Thomas said, ‘but beautiful.’
She shuddered at that compliment. ‘Where are we?’
‘Just a day outside Rennes.’
‘Is that all?’
‘In a pig shed,’ Thomas said, ‘a day out of Rennes.’
‘Four years ago I lived in a castle,’ she said wistfully. ‘Plabennec wasn’t large, but it was beautiful. It had a tower and a courtyard and two mills and a stream and an orchard that grew very red apples.’
‘You will see them again,’ Thomas said, ‘you and your son.’
He regretted mentioning her son for tears came to her eyes, but she cuffed them away. ‘It was the lawyer,’ she said.
‘Lawyer?’
‘Belas. He lied to the Duke.’ There was a kind of wonderment in her voice that Belas had proved so traitorous. ‘He told the Duke I was supporting Duke Jean. Then I will, Thomas, I will. I will support your duke. If that is the only way to regain Plabennec and find my son then I shall support Duke Jean.’ She squeezed Thomas’s hand. ‘I’m hungry.’
They spent another week in the forest while Jeanette recovered her strength. For a while, like a beast struggling to escape a trap, she devised schemes that would give her instant revenge on Duke Charles and restore her son, but the schemes were wild and hopeless and, as the days passed, she accepted her fate.
‘I have no friends,’ she said to Thomas one night.
‘You have me, my lady.’
‘They died,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘My family died. My husband died. Do you think I am a curse on those I love?’
‘I think,’ Thomas said, ‘that we must go north.’
She was irritated by his practicality. ‘I’m not sure I want to go north.’
‘I do,’ Thomas said stubbornly.
Jeanette knew that the further north she went, the further she went from her son, but she did not know what else to do, and that night, as if accepting that she would now be guided by Thomas, she came to his bracken bed and they were lovers. She wept afterwards, but then made love to him again, this time fiercely, as though she could slake her misery in the consolations of the flesh.
Next morning they left, going north. Summer had come, clothing the countryside in thick green. Thomas had disguised the bow again, lashing the crosspiece to the stave and hanging it with bindweed and willowherb instead of clover. His black robe had become ragged and no one would have taken him for a friar, while Jeanette had stripped the remains of the fox fur from the red velvet, which was dirty, creased and threadbare. They looked like vagabonds, which they were, and they moved like fugitives, skirting the towns and bigger villages to avoid trouble. They bathed in streams, slept beneath the trees and only ventured into the smallest villages when hunger demanded they buy a meal and cider in some slatternly tavern. If they were challenged they claimed to be Bretons, brother and sister, going to join their uncle who was a butcher in Flanders, and if anyone disbelieved the tale they were unwilling to cross Thomas, who was tall and strong and always kept his knife visible. By preference, though, they avoided villages and stayed in the woods where Thomas taught Jeanette how to tickle the trout out of their streams. They would light fires, cook their fish and cut bracken for a bed.
They kept close to the road, though they were forced to a long detour to avoid the drum-like fortress of St-Aubin-du-Cormier, and another to skirt the city of Fougères, and somewhere north of that city they entered Normandy. They milked cows in their pastures, stole a great cheese from a wagon parked outside a church and slept under the stars. They had no idea what day of the week it was, nor even what month it was any more. Both were browned by the sun and made ragged by travelling. Jeanette’s misery was dissolved in a new happiness, and nowhere more than when they discovered an abandoned cottage – merely cob walls of mud and straw decaying without a roof – in a spinney of hazel trees. They cleared away the nettles and brambles and lived in the cottage for more than a week, seeing no one, wanting to see no one, delaying their future because the present was so blissful. Jeanette could still weep for her son and spent hours devising exquisite revenges to be taken against the Duke, against Belas and against Sir Simon Jekyll, but she also revelled in that summer’s freedom. Thomas had fitted his bow again so he could hunt and Jeanette, growing ever stronger, had learned to pull it back almost to her chin.
Neither knew where they were and did not much care. Thomas’s mother used to tell him a tale of children who ran away into the forest and were reared by the beasts. ‘They grow hair all over their bodies,’ she would tell him, ‘and have claws and horns and teeth,’ and now Thomas would sometimes examine his hands to see if claws were coming. He saw none. Yet if he was becoming a beast then he was happy. He had rarely been happier, but he knew that the winter, even though far off, was nevertheless coming and so, perhaps a week after midsummer, they moved gently north again in search of something that neither of them could quite imagine.
Thomas knew he had promised to retrieve a lance and restore Jeanette’s son, but he did not know how he was to do either of those things. He only knew he must go to a place where a man like Will Skeat would employ him, though he could not talk of such a future with Jeanette. She did not want to hear about archers or armies, or of men and mail coats, but she, like him, knew they could not stay for ever in their refuge.
‘I shall go to England,’ she told him, ‘and appeal to your king.’ Out of all the schemes she had dreamed of, this was the only one that made sense. The Earl of Northampton had placed her son under the King of England’s protection, so she must appeal to Edward and hope he would support her.
They walked north, still keeping the road to Rouen in sight. They forded a river and climbed into a broken country of small fields, deep woods and abrupt hills, and somewhere in that green land, unheard by either of them, the wheel of fortune creaked again. Thomas knew that the great wheel governed mankind, it turned in the dark to determine good or evil, high or low, sickness or health, happiness or misery. Thomas reckoned God must have made the wheel to be the mechanism by which He ruled the world while He was busy in heaven, and in that midsummer, when the harvest was being flailed on the threshing floors, and the swifts were gathering in the high trees, and the rowan trees were in scarlet berry, and the pastures were white with ox-eye daisies, the wheel lurched for Thomas and Jeanette.
They walked to the wood’s edge one day to check that the road was still in view. They usually saw little more than a man driving some cows to market, a group of women following with eggs and vegetables to sell. A priest might pass on a poor horse, and once they had seen a knight with his retinue of servants and men-at-arms, but most days the road lay white, dusty and empty under the summer sun. Yet this day it was full. Folk were walking southwards, driving cows and pigs and sheep and goats and geese. Some pushed handcarts, others had wagons drawn by oxen or horses, and all the carts were loaded high with stools, tables, benches and beds. Thomas knew he was seeing fugitives.
They waited till it was dark, then Thomas beat the worst dirt off the Dominican’s gown and, leaving Jeanette in the trees, walked down to the road where some of the travellers were camping beside small, smoky fires.
‘God’s peace be on you,’ Thomas said to one group.
