The Earl of Northampton had been summoned from Brittany to be one of the Prince of Wales’s advisers. The Prince was just sixteen, though John Armstrong reckoned the boy was as good as any grown man. ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with young Edward,’ he told Thomas. ‘Knows his weapons. Headstrong, maybe, but brave.’

      That, in John Armstrong’s world, was high praise. He was a forty-year-old man-at-arms who led the Earl’s personal archers and was one of those hard, common men that the Earl liked so much. Armstrong, like Skeat, came from the north country and was said to have been fighting the Scots since he had been weaned. His personal weapon was a falchion, a curved sword with a heavy blade as broad as an axe, though he could draw a bow with the best of his troop. He also commanded three score of hobelars, light horsemen mounted on shaggy ponies and carrying spears.

      ‘They don’t look up to much,’ he said to Thomas, who was gazing at the small horsemen, who all had long shaggy hair and bent legs, ‘but they’re rare at scouting. We send swarms of yon bastards into the Scottish hills to find the enemy. Be dead else.’ Armstrong had been at La Roche-Derrien and remembered Thomas’s achievement in turning the town’s river flank and, because of that, he accepted Thomas readily enough. He gave him a lice-ridden hacqueton – a padded jacket that might stop a feeble sword cut – and a short surcoat, a jupon, that had the Earl’s stars and lions on its breast and bore the cross of St George on its right sleeve. The hacqueton and jupon, like the breeches and arrow bag that completed Thomas’s outfit, had belonged to an archer who had died of the fever shortly after reaching Normandy. ‘You can find yourself better stuff in Caen,’ Armstrong told him, ‘if we ever get into Caen.’

      Thomas was given a sway-backed grey mare that had a hard mouth and an awkward gait. He watered the beast, rubbed her down with straw, then ate red herrings and dry beans with Armstrong’s men. He found a stream and washed his hair, then twisted the bowcord round the wet pigtail. He borrowed a razor and scraped off his beard, tossing the stiff hairs into the stream so that no one could work a spell on them. It seemed strange to spend the night in a soldiers’ encampment and to sleep without Jeanette. He still felt bitter about her and that bitterness was like a sliver of iron in his soul when he was roused in the night’s dark heart. He felt lonely, chill and unwanted as the archers began their march. He thought of Jeanette in the Prince’s tent, and remembered the jealousy he had felt in Rennes when she had gone to the citadel to meet Duke Charles. She was like a moth, he thought, flying to the brightest candle in the room. Her wings had been scorched once, but the flame drew her still.

      The army advanced on Caen in three battles, each of about four thousand men. The King commanded one, the Prince of Wales the second while the third was under the orders of the Bishop of Durham, who much preferred slaughter to sanctity. The Prince had left the encampment early to stand his horse beside the road where he could watch his men pass in the summer dawn. He was in black armour, with a lion crest on his helm, and escorted by a dozen priests and fifty knights. As Thomas approached, he saw Jeanette was among those green-and-white-blazoned horsemen. She was wearing the same colours, a dress of pale green cloth with white cuffs, hems and bodice, and was mounted on a palfrey that had silver curb chains, green and white ribbons plaited into its mane and a white saddle cloth embroidered with the lions of England. Her hair had been washed, brushed and coiled, then decorated with cornflowers, and as Thomas came nearer he thought how ravishing she looked. There was a radiant happiness on her face and her eyes were bright. She was just to one side of the Prince and a pace or so behind him, and Thomas noted how often the boy turned to speak to her. The men in front of Thomas were pulling off their helmets or caps to salute the Prince, who looked from Jeanette to them, sometimes nodding or calling out to a knight he recognized.

      Thomas, riding his borrowed horse that was so small his long legs hung almost to the ground, raised a hand to greet Jeanette. She stared into his smiling face, then looked away without showing any expression. She spoke with a priest who was evidently the Prince’s chaplain. Thomas let his hand drop. ‘If you’re a bloody prince,’ the man beside Thomas said, ‘you get the cream, don’t you? We get lice and he gets that.’

      Thomas said nothing. Jeanette’s dismissal had left him embarrassed. Had the last weeks been a dream? He twisted in his saddle to look at her and saw she was laughing at some comment of the Prince’s. You are a fool, Thomas told himself, a fool, and he wondered why he felt so hurt. Jeanette had never declared any love for him, yet her abandonment bit his heart like a snake. The road dropped into a hollow where sycamore and ash grew thick and Thomas, turning again, could not see Jeanette.

      ‘There’ll be plenty of women in Caen,’ an archer said with relish.

      ‘If we ever get in,’ another commented, using the five words that were always spoken whenever the city was named.

      The previous night Thomas had listened to the campfire talk that had all been about Caen. It was, he gathered, a huge city, one of the biggest in France, and protected by a massive castle and a great wall. The French, it seemed, had adopted a strategy of retreating into such citadels rather than face England’s bowmen in the open fields, and the archers feared they could be stranded in front of Caen for weeks. The city could not be ignored, for if it was left untaken its huge garrison would threaten the English supply lines. So Caen had to fall and no one believed it would be easy, though some men reckoned the new guns that the King had fetched to France would knock down the city’s ramparts as easily as Joshua’s trumpets had felled the walls of Jericho.

      The King himself must have been sceptical of the guns’ power for he had decided to scare the city into surrender by the sheer numbers of his army. The three English battles moved eastward on every road, track or stretch of meadow that offered a path, but an hour or two after dawn the men-at-arms who served as marshals began halting the various contingents. Sweaty horsemen galloped up and down the masses of men, shouting at them to move into a rough line. Thomas, wrestling with his stubborn mare, understood that the whole army was being formed into a huge crescent. A low hill lay in front and a hazy smear beyond the hill betrayed the thousands of cooking fires in Caen. When the signal was given the whole clumsy crescent of mailed men would be advanced to the hilltop so that the defenders, instead of seeing a few English scouts trickle from the woods, would be presented with an overwhelming host and, to make the army seem double its real size, the marshals were pushing and shouting the camp followers into the curved line. Cooks, clerks, women, masons, farriers, carpenters, scullions, anyone who could walk, crawl, ride or stand was being added to the crescent, and a host of bright flags were raised over those bemused masses. It was a hot morning and the leather and mail made men and horses sweat. Dust blew in the wind. The Earl of Warwick, Marshal of the Host, was galloping up and down the crescent, red-faced and cursing, but slowly the cumbersome line formed to his satisfaction.

      ‘When the trumpet sounds,’ a knight shouted at Armstrong’s men, ‘advance to the hilltop. When the trumpet sounds! Not before!’

      That army of England must have looked like twenty thousand men when the trumpets tore the summer sky with their massed defiance. To Caen’s defenders it was a nightmare. One moment the horizon was empty, even though the sky beyond had long been blanched by the dust kicked up by hooves and boots, and then there was a sudden host, a horde, a swarm of men glinting iron-hard in the sun and topped by a forest of raised lances and flags. The whole north and east of the city was ringed with men who, when they saw Caen, gave a great roar of incoherent scorn. There was plunder ahead of them, a whole rich city waiting to be taken.

      It was a fine and famous city, bigger even than London and that was the biggest city in England. Caen, indeed, was one of the great cities of France. The Conqueror had endowed it with the wealth he stole from England, and it still showed. Within the city walls the church spires and towers stood as close as the lances and flags in Edward’s army, while on either side of the city were two vast abbeys. The castle lay to the north, its ramparts, like the pale stone of the city’s high walls, hung with war banners. The English roar was answered with a defiant cheer from the defenders, who clustered thick on the ramparts. So many crossbows, Thomas thought, remembering the heavy bolts thumping from La Roche-Derrien’s