Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2004
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007310326
Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338801
Version: 2018-04-20
‘The battle scenes, as always, are masterful; and the vignettes of everyday living, in times of extreme hardship, have the ring of simple truth’
Sunday Telegraph
HERETIC
is for Dorothy Carroll,
who knows why
CONTENTS
Part One: THE DEVIL’S PLAYTHING
PROLOGUE
Calais, 1347
The road came from the southern hills and crossed the marshes by the sea. It was a bad road. A summer’s persistent rain had left it a strip of glutinous mud that baked hard when the sun came out, but it was the only road that led from the heights of Sangatte to the harbours of Calais and Gravelines. At Nieulay, a hamlet of no distinction whatever, it crossed the River Ham on a stone bridge. The Ham was scarcely worth the title of river. It was a slow stream that oozed through fever-ridden marshlands until it vanished among the coastal mudflats. It was so short that a man could wade from its source to the sea in little more than an hour, and it was so shallow that a man could cross it at low tide without
