Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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open the sack, but he was reluctant to travel without the sheaves that were wrapped in hempen bowstring cord and he used one cord to tie his knife to his left leg where, like his money pouch, it was hidden by the black robe.
He was ready to go, but the rain was now hammering the city like an arrow storm. Thunder crackled to the west, the rain pelted on the thatch, poured off the roofs and overflowed the water butts to wash the inn’s nightsoil out of the yard. Midday came, heralded by the city’s rain-muffled bells, and still the city drowned. Wind-driven dark clouds wreathed the cathedral’s towers and Thomas told himself he would leave the moment the rain slackened, but the storm just became fiercer. Lightning flickered above the cathedral and a clap of thunder rocked the city. Thomas shivered, awed by the sky’s fury. He watched the lightning reflected in the cathedral’s great west window and was amazed by the sight. So much glass! Still it rained and he began to fear that he would be trapped in the cart till the next day. And then, just after a peal of thunder seemed to stun the whole city with its violence, he saw Jeanette.
He did not know her at first. He just saw a woman standing in the arched entrance to the inn’s yard with the water flowing about her shoes. Everyone else in Rennes was huddling in shelter, but this woman suddenly appeared, soaked and miserable. Her hair, which had been looped so carefully over her ears, hung lank and black down the sopping red velvet dress, and it was that dress that Thomas recognized, then he saw the grief on her face. He clambered out of the wagon.
‘Jeanette!’
She was weeping, her mouth distorted by grief. She seemed incapable of speaking, but just stood and cried.
‘My lady!’ Thomas said. ‘Jeanette!’
‘We must go,’ she managed to say, ‘we must go.’ She had used soot as a cosmetic about her eyes and it had run to make grey streaks down her face.
‘We can’t go in this!’ Thomas said.
‘We must go!’ she screamed at him angrily. ‘We must go!’
‘I’ll get the horse,’ Thomas said.
‘There’s no time! There’s no time!’ She plucked at his robe. ‘We must go. Now!’ She tried to tug him through the arch into the street.
Thomas pulled away from her and ran to the wagon where he retrieved his disguised bow and the heavy sack. There was a cloak of Jeanette’s there and he took that too and wrapped it about her shoulders, though she did not seem to notice.
‘What’s happening?’ Thomas demanded.
‘They’ll find me here, they’ll find me!’ Jeanette declared in a panic, and she pulled him blindly out of the tavern’s archway. Thomas turned her eastwards onto a crooked street that led to a fine stone bridge across the Seine and then to a city gate. The big gates were barred, but a small door in one of the gates was open and the guards in the tower did not care if some fool of a drenched friar wanted to take a madly sobbing woman out of the city. Jeanette kept looking back, fearing pursuit, but still did not explain her panic or her tears to Thomas. She just hurried eastwards, insensible to the rain, wind and thunder.
The storm eased towards dusk, by which time they were close to a village that had a poor excuse for a tavern. Thomas ducked under the low doorway and asked for shelter. He put coins on a table.
‘I need shelter for my sister,’ he said, reckoning that anyone would be suspicious of a friar travelling with a woman. ‘Shelter, food and a fire,’ he said, adding another coin.
‘Your sister?’ The tavern-keeper, a small man with a face scarred by the pox and bulbous with wens, peered at Jeanette, who was crouched in the tavern’s porch.
Thomas touched his head, suggesting she was mad. ‘I am taking her to the shrine of St Guinefort,’ he explained.
The tavern-keeper looked at the coins, glanced again at Jeanette, then decided the strange pair could have the use of an empty cattle byre. ‘You can put a fire there,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but don’t burn the thatch.’
Thomas lit a fire with embers from the tavern’s kitchen, then fetched food and ale. He forced Jeanette to eat some of the soup and bread, then made her go close to the fire. It took over two hours of coaxing before she would tell him the story, and telling it only made her cry again. Thomas listened, appalled.
‘So how did you escape?’ he asked when she was finished.
A woman had unbolted the room, Jeanette said, to fetch a broom. The woman had been astonished to see Jeanette there, and even more astonished when Jeanette ran past her. Jeanette had fled the citadel, fearing the soldiers would stop her, but no one had taken any notice of her and now she was running away. Like Thomas she was a fugitive, but she had lost far more than he. She had lost her son, her honour and her future.
‘I hate men,’ she said. She shivered, for the miserable fire of damp straw and rotted wood had scarcely dried her clothes. ‘I hate men,’ she said again, then looked at Thomas. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘You must sleep,’ he said, ‘and tomorrow we’ll go north.’
She nodded, but he did not think she had understood his words. She was in despair. The wheel of fortune that had once raised her so high had taken her into the utter depths.
She slept for a time, but when Thomas woke in the grey dawn he saw she was crying softly and he did not know what to do or say, so he just lay in the straw until he heard the tavern door creak open, then went to fetch some food and water. The tavern-keeper’s wife cut some bread and cheese while her husband asked Thomas how far he had to walk.
‘St Guinefort’s shrine is in Flanders,’ Thomas said.
‘Flanders!’ the man said, as though it was on the far side of the moon.
‘The family doesn’t know what else to do with her,’ Thomas explained, ‘and I don’t know how to reach Flanders. I thought to go to Paris first.’
‘Not Paris,’ the tavern-keeper’s wife said scornfully, ‘you must go to Fougères.’ Her father, she said, had often traded with the north countries and she was sure that Thomas’s route lay through Fougères and Rouen. She did not know the roads beyond Rouen, but was certain he must go that far, though to begin, she said, he must take a small road that went north from the village. It went through woods, her husband added, and he must be careful for the trees were hiding places for terrible men escaping justice, but after a few miles he would come to the Fougères highway, which was patrolled by the Duke’s men.
Thomas thanked her, offered a blessing to the house, then took the food to Jeanette, who refused to eat. She seemed drained of tears, almost of life, but she followed Thomas willingly enough as he walked north. The road, deep rutted by wagons and slick with mud from the previous day’s rain, twisted into deep woods that dripped with water. Jeanette stumbled for a few miles, then began to cry. ‘I must go back to Rennes,’ she insisted. ‘I want to go back to my son.’
Thomas argued, but she would not be moved. He finally gave in, but when he turned to walk south she just began to cry even harder. The Duke had said she was not a fit mother! She kept repeating the words, ‘Not fit! Not fit!’ She screamed at the sky. ‘He made me his whore!’ Then she sank onto her knees beside the road and sobbed uncontrollably. She was shivering again and Thomas thought that if she did not die of an ague then the grief would surely kill her.
‘We’re going back to Rennes,’ Thomas said, trying to encourage her.
‘I can’t!’ she wailed. ‘He’ll just whore me! Whore me!’ She shouted the words, then began rocking back and forwards and shrieking in a terrible high voice. Thomas tried to raise her up, tried to make her walk, but she fought him. She wanted to die, she said, she just wanted to die. ‘A whore,’ she screamed, and tore at the fox-fur trimmings of her red dress, ‘a whore! He said I shouldn’t wear fur. He made me a whore.’ She threw the tattered fur into the undergrowth.
It had been a dry morning, but the rain clouds were heaping in the east again, and Thomas