Thomas and Eleanor rode on.
The English marched east, ever further from the sea, searching for a place to cross the Seine, but every bridge was broken or else was guarded by a fortress. They still destroyed everything they touched. Their chevauchée was a line twenty miles wide and behind it was a charred trail a hundred miles long. Every house was burned and every mill destroyed. The folk of France fled from the army, taking their livestock and the newly gathered harvest with them so that Edward’s men had to range ever further to find food. Behind them was desolation while in front lay the formidable walls of Paris. Some men thought the King would assault Paris, others reckoned he would not waste his troops on those great walls, but instead attack one of the strongly fortified bridges that could lead him north of the river. Indeed, the army tried to capture the bridge at Meulan, but the stronghold which guarded its southern end was too massive and its crossbowmen were too many, and the assault failed. The French stood on the ramparts and bared their backsides to insult the defeated English. It was said that the King, confident of crossing the river, had ordered supplies sent to the port of Le Crotoy that lay far to the north, beyond both the Seine and the River Somme, but if the supplies were waiting then they were unreachable because the Seine was a wall behind which the English were penned in a land they had themselves emptied of food. The first horses began to go lame and men, their boots shredded by marching, went barefoot.
The English came closer to Paris, entering the wide lands that were the hunting grounds of the French kings. They took Philip’s lodges and stripped them of tapestries and plate, and it was while they hunted his royal deer that the French King sent Edward a formal offer of battle. It was the chivalrous thing to do, and it would, by God’s grace, end the harrowing of his farmlands. So Philip of Valois sent a bishop to the English, courteously suggesting that he would wait with his army south of Paris, and the English King graciously accepted the invitation and so the French marched their army through the city and arrayed it among the vineyards on a hillcrest by Bourg-la-Reine. They would make the English attack them there, forcing the archers and men-at-arms to struggle uphill into massed Genoese crossbows, and the French nobles estimated the value of the ransoms they would fetch for their prisoners.
The French battleline waited, but no sooner had Philip’s army settled in its positions than the English treacherously turned about and marched in the other direction, going to the town of Poissy where the bridge across the Seine had been destroyed and the town evacuated. A few French infantrymen, poor soldiers armed with spears and axes, had been left to guard the northern bank, but they could do nothing to stop the swarm of archers, carpenters and masons who used timbers ripped from the roofs of Poissy to make a new bridge on the fifteen broken piers of the old. It took two days to repair the bridge and the French were still waiting for their arranged battle among the ripening grapes at Bourg-la-Reine as the English crossed the Seine and started marching northwards. The devils had escaped the trap and were loose again.
It was at Poissy that Thomas, with Eleanor beside him, rejoined the army.
And it was there, by God’s grace, that the hard times began.
Eleanor had been apprehensive about joining the English army. ‘They won’t like me because I’m French,’ she said.
‘The army’s full of Frenchmen,’ Thomas had told her. ‘There are Gascons, Bretons, even some Normans, and half the women are French.’
‘The archers’ women?’ she asked, giving him a wry smile. ‘But they are not good women?’
‘Some are good, some are bad,’ Thomas said vaguely, ‘but you I shall make into a wife and everyone will know you’re special.’
If Eleanor was pleased she showed no sign, but they were now in the broken streets of Poissy, where a rearguard of English archers shouted at them to hurry. The makeshift bridge was about to be destroyed and the army’s laggards were being chivvied across its planks. The bridge had no parapets and had been hurriedly made from whatever timbers the army had found in the abandoned town, and the uneven planking swayed, creaked and bent as Thomas and Eleanor led their horses onto the roadway. Eleanor’s palfrey became so scared of the uncertain footing that it refused to move until Thomas put a blindfold over its eyes and then, still shaking, it trod slowly and steadily across the planks, which had gaps between them through which Thomas could see the river sliding. They were among the last to cross. Some of the army’s wagons had been abandoned in Poissy, their loads distributed onto the hundreds of horses that had been captured south of the Seine.
Once the last stragglers had crossed the bridge the archers began hurling the planks into the river, breaking down the fragile link that had let the English escape across the river. Now, King Edward hoped, they would find new land to waste in the wide plains that lay between the Seine and the Somme and the three battles spread into the twenty-mile-wide line of the chevauchée and advanced northwards, camping that night just a short march from the river.
Thomas looked for the Prince of Wales’s troops while Eleanor tried to ignore the dirty, tattered and sun-browned archers, who looked more like outlaws than soldiers. They were supposed to be making their shelters for the coming night, but preferred to watch the women and call obscene invitations. ‘What are they saying?’ Eleanor asked Thomas.
‘That you are the most beautiful creature in all France,’ he said.
‘You lie,’ she said, then flinched as a man shouted at her. ‘Have they never seen a woman before?’
‘Not like you. They probably think you’re a princess.’
She scoffed at that, but was not displeased. There were, she saw, women everywhere. They gathered firewood while their men made the shelters and most, Eleanor noted, spoke French. ‘There will be many babies next year,’ she said.
‘True.’
‘They will go back to England?’ she asked.
‘Some, perhaps.’ Thomas was not really sure. ‘Or they’ll go to their garrisons in Gascony.’
‘If I marry you,’ she asked, ‘will I become English?’
‘Yes,’ Thomas said.
It was getting late and cooking fires were smoking across the stubble fields, though there was precious little to cook. Every pasture held a score of horses and Thomas knew they needed to rest, feed and water their own animals. He had asked many soldiers where the Prince of Wales’s men could be found, but one man said west, another east, so in the dusk Thomas simply turned their tired horses towards the nearest village for he did not know where else to go. The place was swarming with troops, but Thomas and Eleanor found a quiet enough spot in the corner of a field where Thomas made a fire while Eleanor, the black bow prominent on her shoulder to demonstrate that she belonged to the army, watered the horses in a stream. They cooked the last of their food and afterwards sat under the hedge and watched the stars brighten above a dark wood. Voices sounded from the village where some women were singing a French song and Eleanor crooned the words softly.
‘I remember my mother singing it to me,’ she said, plucking strands of grass that she wove into a small bracelet. ‘I was not his only bastard,’ she said ruefully. ‘There were two others I know of. One died when she was very small, and the other is now a soldier.’
‘He’s your brother.’
‘Half-brother.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know him. He went away.’ She put the bracelet on her thin wrist. ‘Why do you wear a dog’s paw?’ she asked.
‘Because I’m a fool,’ he said, ‘and mock God.’ That was the
