Soissons,’ he went on grimly, ‘but you are the first to bring confirmation.’
‘If he was there,’ the priest remarked snidely.
‘You heard the girl,’ Sir William snarled at the priest who bridled at the admonition. Sir William turned back to Hook. ‘Tell your tale in England.’
‘I’m outlawed,’ Hook said uncertainly.
‘You’ll do what you’re told to do,’ Sir William snapped, ‘and you’re going to England.’
And so Hook and Melisande were taken aboard a ship that sailed to England. They then travelled with a courier who carried messages to London and also had money that paid for ale and food on the journey. Melisande was dressed in decent clothes now, provided by Lady Bardolf, Sir William’s wife, and she rode a small mare that the courier had demanded from the stables in Dover Castle. She was saddle-sore by the time they reached London where, having crossed the bridge, they surrendered their horses to the grooms in the Tower. ‘You will wait here,’ the courier commanded them, and would not tell Hook more, and so he and Melisande found a place to sleep in the cow byre, and no one in the great fortress seemed to know why they had been summoned there.
‘You’re not prisoners,’ a sergeant of archers told them.
‘But we’re not allowed out,’ Hook said.
‘No, you’re not allowed out,’ the ventenar conceded, ‘but you’re not prisoners.’ He grinned. ‘If you were prisoners, lad, you wouldn’t be cuddling that little lass every night. Where’s your bow?’
‘Lost it in France.’
‘Then let’s find you a new one.’ The ventenar said. He was called Venables and he had fought for the old king at Shrewsbury where he had taken an arrow in the leg that had left him with a limp. He led Hook to an undercroft of the great keep where there were wide wooden racks holding hundreds of newly made bows. ‘Pick one,’ Venables said.
It was dim in the undercroft where the bowstaves, each longer than a tall man, lay close together. None was strung, though all were tipped with horn nocks ready to take their cords. Hook pulled them out one by one and ran a hand across their thick bellies. The bows, he decided, had been well made. Some were knobbly where the bowyer had let a knot stand proud rather than weaken the wood, and most had a faintly greasy feel because they had been painted with a mix of wax and tallow. A few bows were unpainted, the wood still seasoning, but those bows were not yet ready for the cord and Hook ignored them. ‘They’re mostly made in Kent,’ Venables said, ‘but a few come from London. They don’t make good archers in this part of the world, boy, but they do make good bows.’
‘They do,’ Hook agreed. He had pulled one of the longest staves from the rack. The timber swelled to a thick belly that he gripped in his left hand as he flexed the upper limb a small amount. He took the bow to a place where sunlight shone through a rusted grating.
The stave was a thing of beauty, he thought. The yew had been cut in a southern country where the sun shone brighter, and this bow had been carved from the tree’s trunk. It was close-grained and had no knots. Hook ran his hand down the wood, feeling its swell and fingering the small ridges left by the bowyer’s float, the drawknife that shaped the weapon. The stave was new because the sapwood, which formed the back of the bow, was almost white. In time, he knew, it would turn to the colour of honey, but for now the bow’s back, which would be farthest from him when he hauled the cord, was the shade of Melisande’s breasts. The belly of the bow, made from the trunk’s heartwood, was dark brown, the colour of Melisande’s face, so that the bow seemed to be made of two strips of wood, one white and one brown, which were perfectly married, though in truth the stave was one single shaft of beautifully smoothed timber cut from where the heartwood and sapwood met in the yew’s trunk.
God made the bow, a priest had once said in Hook’s village church, as God made man and woman. The visiting priest had meant that God had married heartwood and sapwood, and it was this marriage that made the great war bow so lethal. The dark heartwood of the bow’s belly was stiff and unyielding. It resisted bending, while the light-coloured sapwood of the bow’s spine did not mind being pulled into a curve, yet, like the heartwood, it wanted to straighten and it possessed a springiness that, released from pressure, whipped the stave back to its normal shape. So the flexible spine pulled and the stiff belly pushed, and so the long arrow flew.
‘Have to be strong to pull that one,’ Venables said dubiously. ‘God knows what that bowyer was thinking! Maybe he thought Goliath needed a stave, eh?’
‘He didn’t want to cut the stave,’ Hook suggested, ‘because it’s perfect.’
‘If you think you can draw it, lad, it’s yours. Help yourself to a bracer,’ Venables said, gesturing to a pile of horn bracers, ‘and to a cord.’ He waved towards a barrel of strings.
The cords had a faintly sticky feel because the hemp had been coated with hoof glue to protect the strings from damp. Hook found a couple of long cords and tied a loop-knot in the end of one that he hooked over the notched horn-tip of the bow’s lower limb. Then, using all his strength, he flexed the bow to judge the length of cord needed, made a loop in the other end of the string and, again exerting every scrap of muscle power, bent the bow and slipped the new loop over the top horn nock. The centre of the cord, where it would lie on the horn-sliver in an arrow’s nock, had been whipped with more hemp to strengthen the string where it notched into the arrows.
‘Shoot it in,’ Venables suggested. He was a middle-aged man in the service of the Tower’s constable and he was a friendly soul, liking to spend his day chattering to anyone who would listen to his stories of battles long ago. He carried an arrow bag up to the stretch of mud and grass outside the keep and dropped it with a clatter. Hook put the bracer on his left forearm, tying its strings so the slip of horn lay on the inside of his wrist to protect his skin from the bowstring’s lash. A scream sounded and was cut off. ‘That’s Brother Bailey,’ Venables said in explanation.
‘Brother Bailey?’
‘Brother Bailey is a Benedictine,’ Venables said, ‘and the king’s chief torturer. He’s getting the truth out of some poor bastard.’
‘They wanted to torture me in Calais,’ Hook said.
‘They did?’
‘A priest did.’
‘They’re always eager to twist the rack, aren’t they? I never did understand that! They tell you God loves you, then they kick the shit out of you. Well, if they do question you, lad, tell them the truth.’
‘I did.’
‘Mind you, that doesn’t always help,’ Venables said. The scream sounded again and he jerked his head towards the muffled noise. ‘That poor bastard probably did tell the truth, but Brother Bailey does like to be certain, he does. Let’s see how that stave shoots, shall we?’
Hook planted a score of arrows point down in the soil. A faded and much punctured target was propped in front of a stack of rotting hay at the top of the stretch of grass. The range was short, no more than a hundred paces, and the target was twice as wide as a man and Hook would have expected to hit that easy mark every time, but he suspected his first arrows would fly wild.
The bow was under tension, but now he had to teach it to bend. He drew it only a short way the first time and the arrow scarcely reached the target. He drew it a little further, then again, each time bringing the cord closer to his face, yet never
