fingers and a servant tossed him a shirt from within the tent. He pulled it on and tucked it into his hose. ‘God’s teeth, boy, do you expect me to save you from Sir Simon’s vengeance? You know he’s here?’
Thomas gaped at the Earl. Said nothing. Sir Simon Jekyll was here? And Thomas had just brought Jeanette to Normandy. Sir Simon could hardly hurt her so long as she was under the Prince’s protection, but Sir Simon could harm Thomas well enough. And delight in it.
The Earl saw Thomas blanch and he nodded. ‘He’s with the King’s men, because I didn’t want him, but he insisted on travelling because he reckons there’s more plunder to be had in Normandy than in Brittany and I dare say he’s right, but what will truly put a smile on his face is the sight of you. Ever been hanged, Thomas?’
‘Hanged, my lord?’ Thomas asked vaguely. He was still reeling from the news that Sir Simon had sailed to Normandy. He had just walked all this way to find his enemy waiting?
‘Sir Simon will hang you,’ the Earl said with indecent relish. ‘He’ll let you strangle on the rope and there’ll be no kindly soul tugging on your ankles to make it quick. You could last an hour, two hours, in utter agony. You could choke for even longer! One fellow I hanged lasted from matins till prime and still managed to curse me. So I suppose you want my help, yes?’
Thomas belatedly went onto one knee. ‘You offered me a reward after La Roche-Derrien, my lord. Can I claim it now?’
The servant brought a stool from the tent and the Earl sat, his legs set wide. ‘Murder is murder,’ he said, picking his teeth with a sliver of wood.
‘Half Will Skeat’s men are murderers, my lord,’ Thomas pointed out.
The Earl thought about that, then reluctantly nodded. ‘But they’re pardoned murderers,’ he answered. He sighed. ‘I wish Will was here,’ he said, evading Thomas’s demand. ‘I wanted him to come, but he can’t come until Charles of Blois is put back into his cage.’ He scowled at Thomas. ‘If I give you a pardon,’ the Earl went on, ‘then I make an enemy out of Sir Simon. Not that he’s a friend now, but still, why spare you?’
‘For La Roche-Derrien,’ Thomas said.
‘Which is a great debt,’ the Earl agreed, ‘a very great debt. We’d have looked bloody fools if we hadn’t taken that town, miserable goddamn place though it be. God’s teeth, boy, but why didn’t you just walk south? Plenty of bastards to kill in Gascony.’ He looked at Thomas for a while, plainly irritated by the undeniable debt he owed the archer and the nuisance of paying it. He finally shrugged. ‘I’ll talk to Sir Simon, offer him money, and if it’s enough he’ll pretend you’re not here. As for you,’ he paused, frowning as he remembered his earlier meetings with Thomas, ‘you’re the one who wouldn’t tell me who your father was, ain’t I right?’
‘I didn’t tell you, my lord, because he was a priest.’
The Earl thought that was a fine jest. ‘God’s teeth! A priest? So you’re a devil’s whelp, are you? That’s what they say in Guyenne, that the children of priests are the devil’s whelps.’ He looked Thomas up and down, amused again at the ragged robe. ‘They say the devil’s whelps make good soldiers,’ he said, ‘good soldiers and better whores. I suppose you’ve lost your horse?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘All my archers are mounted,’ the Earl said, then turned to one of his men-at-arms. ‘Find the bastard a sway-backed nag till he can filch something better, then give him a tunic and offer him to John Armstrong.’ He looked back to Thomas. ‘You’re joining my archers, which means you’ll wear my badge. You’re my man, devil’s whelp, and perhaps that will protect you if Sir Simon wants too much money for your miserable soul.’
‘I shall try to repay your lordship,’ Thomas said.
‘Pay me, boy, by getting us into Caen. You got us into La Roche-Derrien, but that little place is nothing compared to Caen. Caen is a true bastard. We go there tomorrow, but I doubt we’ll see the backside of its walls for a month or more, if ever. Get us into Caen, Thomas, and I’ll forgive you a score of murders.’ He stood, nodded a dismissal and went back into the tent.
Thomas did not move. Caen, he thought, Caen. Caen was the city where Sir Guillaume d’Evecque lived, and he made the sign of the cross for he knew fate had arranged all this. Fate had determined that his crossbow arrow would miss Sir Simon Jekyll and it had brought him to the edge of Caen. Because fate wanted him to do the penance that Father Hobbe had demanded. God, Thomas decided, had taken Jeanette from him because he had been slow to keep his promise.
But now the time for the keeping of promises had come, for God had brought Thomas to Caen.
The Earl of Northampton had been summoned from Brittany to be one of the Prince of Wales’s advisers. The Prince was just sixteen, though John Armstrong reckoned the boy was as good as any grown man. ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with young Edward,’ he told Thomas. ‘Knows his weapons. Headstrong, maybe, but brave.’
That, in John Armstrong’s world, was high praise. He was a forty-year-old man-at-arms who led the Earl’s personal archers and was one of those hard, common men that the Earl liked so much. Armstrong, like Skeat, came from the north country and was said to have been fighting the Scots since he had been weaned. His personal weapon was a falchion, a curved sword with a heavy blade as broad as an axe, though he could draw a bow with the best of his troop. He also commanded three score of hobelars, light horsemen mounted on shaggy ponies and carrying spears.
‘They don’t look up to much,’ he said to Thomas, who was gazing at the small horsemen, who all had long shaggy hair and bent legs, ‘but they’re rare at scouting. We send swarms of yon bastards into the Scottish hills to find the enemy. Be dead else.’ Armstrong had been at La Roche-Derrien and remembered Thomas’s achievement in turning the town’s river flank and, because of that, he accepted Thomas readily enough. He gave him a lice-ridden hacqueton – a padded jacket that might stop a feeble sword cut – and a short surcoat, a jupon, that had the Earl’s stars and lions on its breast and bore the cross of St George on its right sleeve. The hacqueton and jupon, like the breeches and arrow bag that completed Thomas’s outfit, had belonged to an archer who had died of the fever shortly after reaching Normandy. ‘You can find yourself better stuff in Caen,’ Armstrong told him, ‘if we ever get into Caen.’
Thomas was given a sway-backed grey mare that had a hard mouth and an awkward gait. He watered the beast, rubbed her down with straw, then ate red herrings and dry beans with Armstrong’s men. He found a stream and washed his hair, then twisted the bowcord round the wet pigtail. He borrowed a razor and scraped off his beard, tossing the stiff hairs into the stream so that no one could work a spell on them. It seemed strange to spend the night in a soldiers’ encampment and to sleep without Jeanette. He still felt bitter about her and that bitterness was like a sliver of iron in his soul when he was roused in the night’s dark heart. He felt lonely, chill and unwanted as the archers began their march. He thought of Jeanette in the Prince’s tent, and remembered the jealousy he had felt in Rennes when she had gone to the citadel to meet Duke Charles. She was like a moth, he thought, flying to the brightest candle in the room. Her wings had been scorched once, but the flame drew her still.
The
