gunpowder. It was made from saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, but the saltpetre was heavier than the other ingredients and always settled to the bottom of the barrels while the charcoal rose to the top so the gunners had to stir the mix thoroughly before they ladled the deadly powder into the bellies of the jars. They placed a shovelful of loam, made from water and clay soil, in the narrow part of each gun’s neck before loading the crudely sculpted stone balls that were the missiles. The loam was to seal the firing chamber so that the power of the explosion did not leak away before all the powder had caught the fire. Still more loam was packed about the stone balls to fill the space between the missiles and the barrels, then the gunners had to wait while the loam hardened to make a firmer seal.
The other three guns were quicker to load. Each iron tube was lashed to a massive wooden cradle that ran the length of the gun, then turned in a right angle so that the gun’s breech rested against a baulk of solid oak. That breech, a quarter of the gun’s length, was separate from the barrel, and was lifted clean out of the cradle and set upright on the ground where it was filled with the precious black powder. Once the three breech chambers were filled they were sealed by willow plugs to contain the explosion, then slotted back into their cradles. The three tube barrels had already been loaded, two with stone balls and the third with a yard-long garro, a giant arrow made of iron.
The three breech chambers had to be worked firmly against the barrels so that the force of the explosion did not escape through the joint between the gun’s two parts. The gunners used wooden wedges that they hammered between the breech and the oak at the back of the cradle, and every blow of the mauls sealed the joints imperceptibly tighter. Other gunners were ladling powder into the spare breech chambers that would fire the next shots. It all took time – well over an hour for the loam in the two bulbous guns to set firm enough – and the work attracted a huge crowd of curious onlookers who stood a judicious distance away to be safe from fragments should any of the strange machines explode. The French, just as curious, watched from the castle battlements. Once in a while a defender would shoot a crossbow quarrel, but the range was too long. One bolt came within a dozen yards of the guns, but the rest fell well short and each failure provoked a jeer from the watching archers. Finally the French abandoned the provocation and just watched.
The three tube guns could have been fired first, for they had no loam to set, but the King wanted the first volley to be simultaneous. He envisaged a mighty blow in which the five missiles would shatter the castle gate and, once the gate was down, he would have his gunners gnaw at the gate’s arch. The master gunner, a tall and lugubrious Italian, finally declared the weapons ready and so the fuses were fetched. These were short lengths of hollow straw filled with gunpowder, their ends sealed with clay, and the fuses were pushed down through the narrow touchholes. The master gunner pinched the clay seal from each fuse’s upper end, then made the sign of the cross. A priest had already blessed the guns, sprinkling them with holy water, and now the master gunner knelt and looked at the King, who was mounted on a tall grey stallion.
The King, yellow-bearded and blue-eyed, looked up at the castle. A new banner had been hung from the ramparts, showing God holding a hand in blessing over a fleur-de-lis. It was time, he thought, to show the French whose side God was really on. ‘You may fire,’ he said solemnly.
Five gunners armed themselves with linstocks – long wands that each held a length of glowing linen. They stood well to the side of the guns and, at a signal from the Italian, they touched the fire to the exposed fuses. There was a brief fizzing, a puff of smoke from the touchholes, then the five mouths vanished in a cloud of grey-white smoke in which five monstrous flames stabbed and writhed as the guns themselves, firm-gripped by their cradles, slammed back along their plank bedding to thud against the mounds of earth piled behind each breech. The noise of the weapons hammered louder than the loudest thunder. It was a noise that physically pounded the eardrums and echoed back from the pale castle walls, and when the sound at last faded the smoke still hung in a shabby screen in front of the guns that now lay askew on their carriages with gently smoking muzzles.
The noise had startled a thousand nesting birds up from the old city’s roofs and the castle’s higher turrets, yet the gate appeared undamaged. The stone balls had shattered themselves against the walls, while the garro had done nothing except gouge a furrow in the approach road. The French, who had ducked behind the battlements when the noise and smoke erupted, now stood and called insults as the gunners stoically began to realign their weapons.
The King, thirty-four years old and not as confident as his bearing suggested, frowned as the smoke cleared. ‘Did we use enough powder?’ he demanded of the master gunner. The question had to be translated into Italian by a priest.
‘Use more powder, sire,’ the Italian said, ‘and the guns will shatter.’ He spoke regretfully. Men always expected his machines to work miracles and he was tired of explaining that even black powder needed time and patience to do its work.
‘You know best,’ the King said dubiously, ‘I’m sure you know best.’ He was hiding his disappointment for he had half hoped that the whole castle would shatter like glass when the missiles struck. His entourage, most of them older men, were looking contemptuous for they had little faith in guns and even less in Italian gunners.
‘Who,’ the King asked a companion, ‘is that woman with my son?’
‘The Countess of Armorica, sire. She fled from Brittany.’
The King shuddered, not because of Jeanette, but because the rotten smell of the powder smoke was pungent. ‘He grows up fast,’ he said, with just a touch of jealousy in his voice. He was bedding some peasant girl, who was pleasant enough and knew her business, but she was not as beautiful as the black-haired Countess who accompanied his son.
Jeanette, unaware that the King watched her, gazed at the castle in search of any sign that it had been struck by gunfire. ‘So what happened?’ she asked the Prince.
‘It takes time,’ the Prince said, hiding his surprise that the castle gate had not magically vanished in an eruption of splinters. ‘But they do say,’ he went on, ‘that in the future we shall fight with nothing but guns. Myself, I cannot imagine it.’
‘They are amusing,’ Jeanette said as a gunner carried a bucket of puddled loam to the nearest gun. The grass in front of the guns was burning in a score of places and the air was filled with a stench like rotted eggs that was even more repugnant than the smell of the corpses in the river.
‘If it amuses you, my dear, then I am glad we have the machines,’ the Prince said, then frowned because a group of his white-and-green-clad archers were jeering the gunners. ‘Whatever happened to the man who brought you from Normandy?’ he asked. ‘I should have thanked him for his services to you.’
Jeanette feared she was blushing, but made her voice careless. ‘I have not seen him since we came here.’
The Prince twisted in his saddle. ‘Bohun!’ he called to the Earl of Northampton. ‘Didn’t my lady’s personal archer join your fellows?’
‘He did, sire.’
‘So where is he?’
The Earl shrugged. ‘Vanished. We think he must have died crossing the river.’
‘Poor fellow,’ the Prince said, ‘poor fellow.’
And Jeanette, to her surprise, felt a pang of sorrow. Then thought it was probably for the best. She was the widow of a count and now the lover of a prince, and Thomas, if he was on the river’s bed, could never tell the truth. ‘Poor man,’ she said lightly, ‘and he behaved so gallantly to me.’ She was looking away from the Prince in case he saw her flushed face and she found herself staring, to her utter astonishment,
