Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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and gorics?’ Thomas asked.
‘They are spirits,’ she said, ‘evil ones. They once haunted the whole land, and I pray daily to the saint that he will banish the hellequin as he drove out the nains. You know what the hellequin are?’
‘We are,’ Thomas said proudly.
She grimaced at his tone. ‘The hellequin,’ she said icily, ‘are the dead who have no souls. The dead who were so wicked in life that the devil loves them too much to punish them in hell and so he gives them his horses and releases them on the living.’ She hefted his black bow and pointed to the silver plate tacked to its belly. ‘You even have the devil’s picture on your bow.’
‘It’s a yale,’ Thomas said.
‘It is a devil,’ she insisted, and threw the bow at him. Thomas caught it and, because he was too young to resist showing off, casually strung it. He made it appear effortless. ‘You pray to St Renan,’ he said, ‘and I shall pray to St Guinefort. We shall see which saint is the stronger.’
‘Guinefort? I’ve not heard of her.’
‘Him,’ Thomas corrected her, ‘and he lived in the Lyonnaise.’
‘You pray to a French saint?’ Jeanette asked, intrigued.
‘All the time,’ Thomas said, touching the desiccated dog’s paw that hung about his neck. He did not tell Jeanette anything more about the saint, who had been a favourite of his father’s – who, in his better moments, would laugh at the story. Guinefort had been a dog and, so far as Thomas’s father knew, the only animal ever to be canonized. The beast had saved a baby from a wolf, then been martyred by his owner, who thought the dog had eaten the baby when in truth he had hidden it beneath the cot. ‘Pray to the blessed Guinefort!’ had been Father Ralph’s reaction to every domestic crisis, and Thomas had adopted the saint as his own. He sometimes wondered whether the saint was an efficient intercessor in heaven, though perhaps Guinefort’s whining and barking were as effective as the pleas of any other saint, but Thomas was sure that few other folk used the dog as their representative to God and perhaps that meant he received special protection. Father Hobbe had been shocked to hear of a holy dog, but Thomas, though he shared his father’s amusement, now genuinely thought of the animal as his guardian.
Jeanette wanted to know more about the blessed St Guinefort, but she did not want to encourage an intimacy with any of Skeat’s men and so she forgot her curiosity and made her voice cold again. ‘I have been wanting to see you,’ she said, ‘to tell you that your men and their women must not use the yard as a latrine. I see them from the window. It is disgusting! Maybe you behave like that in England, but this is Brittany. You can use the river.’
Thomas nodded, but said nothing. Instead he carried his bow down the nave, which had one of its long sides obscured by fishing nets hung up for mending. He went to the church’s western end, which was gloomily decorated by a painting of the doom. The righteous were vanishing into the rafters, while the condemned sinners were tumbling to a fiery hell cheered on by angels and saints. Thomas stopped in front of the painting.
‘Have you ever noticed,’ he said, ‘how the prettiest women are always falling down to hell and the ugly ones are going up to heaven?’
Jeanette almost smiled for she had often wondered about that same question, but she bit her tongue and said nothing as Thomas walked back up the nave beside a painting of Christ walking on a sea that was grey and white-crested like the ocean off Brittany. A shoal of mackerel were poking their heads from the water to watch the miracle.
‘What you must understand, madame,’ Thomas said, gazing up at the curious mackerel, ‘is that our men do not like being unwelcome. You won’t even let them use the kitchen. Why not? It’s big enough, and they’d be glad of a place to dry their boots after a wet night’s riding.’
‘Why should I have you English in my kitchen? So you can use that as a latrine as well?’
Thomas turned and looked at her. ‘You have no respect for us, madame, so why should we have respect for your house?’
‘Respect!’ She mocked the word. ‘How can I respect you? Everything that is precious to me was stolen. Stolen by you!’
‘By Sir Simon Jekyll,’ Thomas said.
‘You or Sir Simon,’ Jeanette asked, ‘what is the difference?’
Thomas picked up the arrow and dropped it into his bag. ‘The difference, madame, is that once in a while I talk to God, while Sir Simon thinks he is God. I shall ask the lads to piss in the river, but I doubt they’ll want to please you much.’ He smiled at her, then was gone.
Spring was greening the land, giving a haze to the trees and filling the twisting laneways with bright flowers. New green moss grew on thatch, there was white stitchwort in the hedgerows, and kingfishers whipped between the new yellow leaves of the riverside sallows. Skeat’s men were having to go further from La Roche-Derrien to find new plunder and their long rides took them dangerously close to Guingamp, which was Duke Charles’s headquarters, though the town’s garrison rarely came out to challenge the raiders. Guingamp lay to the south, while to the west was Lannion, a much smaller town with a far more belligerent garrison that was inspired by Sir Geoffrey de Pont Blanc, a knight who had sworn an oath that he would lead Skeat’s raiders back to Lannion in chains. He announced that the Englishmen would be burned in Lannion’s marketplace because they were heretics, the devil’s men.
Will Skeat was not worried by such a threat. ‘I might lose a wink of sleep if the silly bastard had proper archers,’ he told Tom, ‘but he ain’t, so he can blunder about as much as he likes. Is that his real name?’
‘Geoffrey of the White Bridge.’
‘Daft bastard. Is he Breton or French?’
‘I’m told he’s French.’
‘Have to teach him a lesson then, won’t we?’
Sir Geoffrey proved an unwilling pupil. Will Skeat dragged his coat closer and closer to Lannion, burning houses within sight of its walls in an effort to lure Sir Geoffrey out into an ambush of archers, but Sir Geoffrey had seen what English arrows could do to mounted knights and so he refused to lead his men in a wild charge that would inevitably finish as a pile of screaming horses and bleeding men. He stalked Skeat instead, looking for some place where he could ambush the Englishmen, but Skeat was no more of a fool than Sir Geoffrey, and for three weeks the two war bands circled and skirted each other. Sir Geoffrey’s presence slowed Skeat, but did not stop the destruction. The two forces clashed twice, and both times Sir Geoffrey threw his crossbowmen forward on foot, hoping they could finish off Skeat’s archers, but both times the longer arrows won and Sir Geoffrey drew off without forcing a fight he knew he must lose. After the second inconclusive clash he even tried appealing to Will Skeat’s honour. He rode forward, all alone, dressed in an armour as beautiful as Sir Simon Jekyll’s, though Sir Geoffrey’s helmet was an old-fashioned pot with perforated eye holes. His surcoat and his horse’s trapper were dark blue on which white bridges were embroidered and the same device was blazoned on his shield. He carried a blue-painted lance from which he had hung a white scarf to show he came in peace. Skeat rode forward to meet him with Thomas as interpreter. Sir Geoffrey lifted off his helmet and pushed a hand through his sweat-flattened hair. He was a young fellow, golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a broad, good-humoured face, and Thomas felt he would probably have liked the man if he had not been an enemy. Sir Geoffrey smiled as the two Englishmen curbed their horses.
‘It is a dull thing,’ he said, ‘to shoot arrows at each other’s shadows. I suggest you bring your men-at-arms into the field’s centre and meet us there on equal terms.’
Thomas did not even bother to translate, for he knew what Skeat’s answer would be. ‘I have a better idea,’ he said, ‘you bring your men-at-arms and we’ll bring our archers.’
Sir Geoffrey looked puzzled. ‘Do you command?’ he asked Thomas. He had thought that the older and grizzled Skeat was the captain, but Skeat