Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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a cottage so low, and with its thatch so covered with moss that at first he thought it was just a mound among the trees until he saw blue-grey woodsmoke seeping from a hole at its top. Thomas was worried about the outlaws who were said to haunt these woods, but it was beginning to rain again and the cottage was the only refuge in sight, so Thomas lowered Jeanette to the ground and shouted through the burrow-like entrance. An old man, white-haired, red-eyed and with skin blackened by smoke, peered back at Thomas. The man spoke a French so thick with local words and accent that Thomas could scarcely understand him, but he gathered the man was a forester and lived here with his wife, and the forester looked greedily at the coins Thomas offered, then said that Thomas and his woman could use an empty pig shelter. The place stank of rotted straw and shit, but the thatch was almost rainproof and Jeanette did not seem to care. Thomas raked out the old straw, then cut Jeanette a bed of bracken. The forester, once the money was in his hands, seemed little interested in his guests, but in the middle of the afternoon, when the rain had stopped, Thomas heard the forester’s wife hissing at him and, a few moments later, the old man left and walked towards the road, but without any of the tools of his trade; no axe, billhook or saw.
Jeanette was sleeping, exhausted, so Thomas stripped the dead clover plants from his black bow, unlashed the crosspiece and put back the horn tips. He strung the yew, thrust half a dozen arrows into his belt and followed the old man as far as the road, and there he waited in a thicket.
The forester returned towards evening with two young men whom Thomas presumed were the outlaws of whom he had been warned. The old man must have reckoned that Thomas and his woman were fugitives, for though they carried bags and money, they had sought a hiding place and that was enough to raise anyone’s suspicions. A friar did not need to skulk in the trees, and women wearing dresses trimmed with torn remnants of fur did not seek a forester’s hospitality. So doubtless the two young men had been fetched to help slit Thomas’s throat and then divide whatever coins they found on his body. Jeanette’s fate would be similar, but delayed.
Thomas put his first arrow into the ground between the old man’s feet and the second into a tree close by. ‘The next arrow kills,’ he said, though they could not see him for he was in the thicket’s shadows. They just stared wide-eyed at the bushes where he was hiding and Thomas made his voice deep and slow. ‘You come with murder in your souls,’ he said, ‘but I can raise the hellequin from the deeps of hell. I can make the devil’s claws cut to your heart and have the dead haunt your daylight. You will leave the friar and his sister alone.’
The old man dropped to his knees. His superstitions were as old as time and scarcely touched by Christianity. He believed there were trolls in the forest and giants in the mist. He knew there were dragons. He had heard of black-skinned men who lived on the moon and who dropped to earth when their home shrank to a sickle. He understood there were ghosts who hunted among the trees. All this he knew as well as he knew ash and larch, oak and beech, and he did not doubt that it was a demon who had spat the strangely long arrow from the thicket.
‘You must go,’ he told his companions, ‘you must go!’ The two fled and the old man touched his forehead to the leaf mould. ‘I meant no harm!’
‘Go home,’ Thomas said.
He waited till the old man had gone, then he dug the arrow out of the tree and that night he went to the forester’s cottage, crawled through the low doorway and sat on the earthen floor facing the old couple.
‘I shall stay here,’ he told them, ‘until my sister’s wits are recovered. We wish to hide her shame from the world, that is all. When we go we shall reward you, but if you try to kill us again I shall summon demons to torment you and I will leave your corpses as a feast for the wild things that lurk in the trees.’ He put another small coin on the earth floor. ‘You will bring us food each night,’ he told the woman, ‘and you will thank God that though I can read your hearts I still forgive you.’
They had no more trouble after that. Every day the old man went off into the trees with his billhook and axe, and every night his wife brought her visitors gruel or bread. Thomas took milk from their cow, shot a deer and thought Jeanette would die. For days she refused to eat, and sometimes he would find her rocking back and forth in the noxious shed and making a keening noise. Thomas feared she had gone mad for ever. His father would sometimes tell him how the mad were treated, how he himself had been treated, how starvation and beating were the only cures. ‘The devil gets into the soul,’ Father Ralph had said, ‘and he can be starved out or he can be thrashed out, but there is no way he will be coaxed out. Beat and starve, boy, beat and starve, it is the only treatment the devil understands.’ But Thomas could neither starve nor beat Jeanette, so he did his best by her. He kept her dry, he persuaded her to take some warm milk fresh from the cow, he talked with her through the nights, he combed her hair and washed her face and sometimes, when she was sleeping and he was sitting by the shed and staring at the stars through the tangled trees, he would wonder whether he and the hellequin had left other women as broken as Jeanette. He prayed for forgiveness. He prayed a lot in those days, and not to St Guinefort, but to the Virgin and to St George.
The prayers must have worked for he woke one dawn to see Jeanette sitting in the shed’s doorway with her thin body outlined by the bright new day. She turned to him and he saw there was no madness in her face any more, just a profound sorrow. She looked at him a long time before she spoke.
‘Did God send you to me, Thomas?’
‘He showed me great favour if He did,’ Thomas replied.
She smiled at that, the first smile he had seen on her face since Rennes. ‘I have to be content,’ she said very earnestly, ‘because my son is alive and he will be properly cared for and one day I shall find him.’
‘We both shall,’ Thomas said.
‘Both?’
He grimaced. ‘I have kept none of my promises,’ he said. ‘The lance is still in Normandy, Sir Simon lives, and how I shall find your son for you, I do not know. I think my promises are worthless, but I shall do my best.’
She held out her hand so he could take it and she let it stay there. ‘We have been punished, you and I,’ she said, ‘probably for the sin of pride. The Duke was right. I am no aristocrat. I am a merchant’s daughter, but thought I was higher. Now look at me.’
‘Thinner,’ Thomas said, ‘but beautiful.’
She shuddered at that compliment. ‘Where are we?’
‘Just a day outside Rennes.’
‘Is that all?’
‘In a pig shed,’ Thomas said, ‘a day out of Rennes.’
‘Four years ago I lived in a castle,’ she said wistfully. ‘Plabennec wasn’t large, but it was beautiful. It had a tower and a courtyard and two mills and a stream and an orchard that grew very red apples.’
‘You will see them again,’ Thomas said, ‘you and your son.’
He regretted mentioning her son for tears came to her eyes, but she cuffed them away. ‘It was the lawyer,’ she said.
‘Lawyer?’
‘Belas. He lied to the Duke.’ There was a kind of wonderment in her voice that Belas had proved so traitorous. ‘He told the Duke I was supporting Duke Jean. Then I will, Thomas, I will. I will support your duke. If that is the only way to regain Plabennec and find my son then I shall support Duke Jean.’ She squeezed Thomas’s hand. ‘I’m hungry.’
They spent another week in the forest while Jeanette recovered her strength. For a while, like a beast struggling to escape a trap, she devised schemes that would give her instant revenge on Duke Charles and restore her son, but the schemes were wild and hopeless and, as the days passed, she accepted her fate.
‘I have no friends,’ she said to Thomas one night.
‘You have me, my lady.’
‘They died,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘My family died. My husband died. Do you think I am a curse on those I love?’