the one in the guts was a reward for my greed and the one to the leg was so I would limp down to hell. Then they left me to watch the corpses of my wife and children while I died. But I lived, thanks to Mordecai.’ He stood, wincing as he put his weight onto his left leg. ‘I lived,’ he said grimly, ‘and I swore I would find the man who did that,’ he pointed at the flagstone, ‘and send his soul screaming into the pit. It took me a year to discover who he was, and you know how I did it? When he came to Evecque he had his men’s shields covered with black cloth, but I slashed the cloth of one with my sword and saw the yale. So I asked men about the yale. I asked them in Paris and Anjou, in Burgundy and the Dauphiné, and in the end I found my answer. And where did I find it? After asking the length and breadth of France I found it here, in Caen. A man here knew the badge. The Harlequin is a man called Vexille. I do not know his first name, I do not know his rank, I just know he is a devil called Vexille.’
‘So the Vexilles have the lance?’
‘They have. And the man who killed my family killed your father.’ Sir Guillaume looked ashamed for a brief instant. ‘I killed your mother. I think I did, anyway, but she attacked me and I was angry.’ He shrugged. ‘But I did not kill your father, and in killing your mother I did nothing more than you have done in Brittany.’
‘True,’ Thomas admitted. He looked into Sir Guillaume’s eye and could feel no hatred for his mother’s death. ‘So we share an enemy,’ Thomas said.
‘And that enemy,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘is the devil.’
He said it grimly, then crossed himself. Thomas suddenly felt cold, for he had found his enemy, and his enemy was Lucifer.
That evening Mordecai rubbed a salve into Thomas’s neck. ‘It is almost healed, I think,’ he said, ‘and the pain will go, though perhaps a little will remain to remind you of how close you came to death.’ He sniffed the garden scents. ‘So Sir Guillaume told you the story of his wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are related to the man who killed his wife?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thomas said, ‘truly I don’t, but the yale suggests I am.’
‘And Sir Guillaume probably killed your mother, and the man who killed his wife killed your father, and Sir Simon Jekyll tried to kill you.’ Mordecai shook his head. ‘I nightly lament that I was not born a Christian. I could carry a weapon and join the sport.’ He handed Thomas a bottle. ‘Perform,’ he commanded, ‘and what, by the by, is a yale?’
‘A heraldic beast,’ Thomas explained.
The doctor sniffed. ‘God, in His infinite wisdom, made the fishes and the whales on the fifth day, and on the sixth he made the beasts of the land, and He looked at what He had done and saw that it was good. But not good enough for the heralds, who have to add wings, horns, tusks and claws to His inadequate work. Is that all you can do?’
‘For the moment.’
‘I’d get more juice from squeezing a walnut,’ he grumbled, and shuffled away.
Eleanor must have been watching for his departure, for she appeared from under the pear trees that grew at the garden’s end and gestured towards the river gate. Thomas followed her down to the bank of the River Orne where they watched an excited trio of small boys trying to spear a pike with English arrows left after the city’s capture.
‘Will you help my father?’ Eleanor asked.
‘Help him?’
‘You said his enemy was your enemy.’
Thomas sat on the grass and she sat beside him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He still did not really believe in any of it. There was a lance, he knew that, and a mystery about his family, but he was reluctant to admit that the lance and the mystery must govern his whole life.
‘Does that mean you’ll go back to the English army?’ Eleanor asked in a small voice.
‘I want to stay here,’ Thomas said after a pause, ‘to be with you.’
She must have known he was going to say something of the sort, but she still blushed and gazed at the swirling water where fish rose to the swarms of insects, and the three boys vainly splashed. ‘You must have a woman,’ she said softly.
‘I did,’ Thomas said, and he told her about Jeanette and how she had found the Prince of Wales and so abandoned him without a glance. ‘I will never understand her,’ he admitted.
‘But you love her?’ Eleanor asked directly.
‘No,’ Thomas said.
‘You say that because you’re with me,’ Eleanor declared.
He shook his head. ‘My father had a book of St Augustine’s sayings and there was one that always puzzled me.’ He frowned, trying to remember the Latin. ‘Nondum amabam, et amare amabam. I did not love, but yearned to love.’
Eleanor gave him a sceptical look. ‘A very elaborate way of saying you’re lonely.’
‘Yes,’ Thomas agreed.
‘So what will you do?’ she asked.
Thomas did not speak for a while. He was thinking of the penance he had been given by Father Hobbe. ‘I suppose one day I must find the man who killed my father,’ he said after a while.
‘But what if he is the devil?’ she asked seriously.
‘Then I shall wear garlic,’ Thomas said lightly, ‘and pray to St Guinefort.’
She looked at the darkening water. ‘Did St Augustine really say that thing?’
‘Nondum amabam, et amare amabam?’ Thomas said. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘I know how he felt,’ Eleanor said, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Thomas did not move. He had a choice. Follow the lance or take his black bow back to the army. In truth he did not know what he should do. But Eleanor’s body was warm against his and it was comforting and that, for the moment, was enough and so, for the moment, he would stay.
Next morning Sir Guillaume, escorted now by a half-dozen men-at-arms, took Thomas to the Abbaye aux Hommes. A crowd of petitioners stood at the gates, wanting food and clothing that the monks did not have, though the abbey itself had escaped the worst of the plundering because it had been the quarters of the King and of the Prince of Wales. The monks themselves had fled at the approach of the English army. Some had died on the Île St Jean, but most had gone south to a brother house and among those was Brother Germain who, when Sir Guillaume arrived, had just returned from his brief exile.
Brother Germain was tiny, ancient and bent, a wisp of a man with white hair, myopic eyes and delicate hands with which he was trimming a goose quill.
‘The English,’ the old man said, ‘use these feathers for their arrows. We use them for God’s word.’ Brother Germain, Thomas was told, had been in charge of the monastery’s scriptorium for more than thirty years. ‘In the course of copying books,’ the monk explained, ‘one discovers knowledge whether one wishes it or not. Most of it is quite useless, of course. How is
