Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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‘What’s your name?’
‘Eleanor.’
He doubted it would serve much purpose to search the house, though he did, but there was no lance of St George hidden in any of the rooms. There was no furniture, no tapestries, nothing of any value except the spits and pots and dishes in the kitchen. Everything precious, Eleanor said, had gone to the castle a week before. Thomas looked at the shattered dishes on the kitchen flagstones.
‘How long have you worked for him?’ he asked.
‘All my life,’ Eleanor said, then added shyly, ‘I’m fifteen.’
‘And you never saw a great lance that he brought back from England?’
‘No,’ she said, eyes wide, but something about her expression made Thomas think she was lying, though he did not challenge her. He decided he would question her later, when she had learned to trust him.
‘You’d better stay with me,’ he told Eleanor, ‘then you won’t get hurt. I’ll take you to the encampment and when our army moves on you can come back here.’ What he really meant was that she could stay with him and become a true archer’s woman, but that, like the lance, could wait a day or two.
She nodded, accepting that fate with equanimity. She must have prayed to be spared the rape that tortured Caen and Thomas was her prayer’s answer. He gave her his arrow bag so that she looked even more like an archer’s woman. ‘We’ll have to go through the city,’ he told Eleanor as he led her down the staircase, ‘so stay close.’
He went down the house’s outer steps. The small square was now crowded with mounted men-at-arms wearing the badge of the bear and ragged staff. They had been sent by the Earl of Warwick to stop the slaughter and robbery, and they stared hard at Thomas, but he lifted his hands to show he was carrying nothing, then threaded between the horses. He had gone perhaps a dozen paces when he realized that Eleanor was not with him. She was terrified of the horsemen in dirty mail, their grim faces framed in steel and so she had hesitated at the house door.
Thomas opened his mouth to call her and just then a horseman spurred at him from under the branches of the oak. Thomas looked up, then the flat of a sword blade hammered into the side of his head and he was pitched forward, his ear bleeding, onto the cobblestones. The falchion fell from his hand, then the man’s horse stepped on his forehead and Thomas’s vision was seared with lightning.
The man climbed from the saddle and stamped his armoured foot on Thomas’s head. Thomas felt the pain, heard the protests from the other men-at-arms, then felt nothing as he was kicked a second time. But in the few heartbeats before he lost consciousness he had recognized his assailant.
Sir Simon Jekyll, despite his agreement with the Earl, wanted revenge.
Perhaps Thomas was lucky. Perhaps his guardian saint, whether dog or man, was looking after him, for if he had been conscious he would have suffered torture. Sir Simon might have put his signature to the agreement with the Earl the previous night, but the sight of Thomas had driven any mercy from his mind. He remembered the humiliation of being hunted naked through the trees and he recalled the pain of the crossbow bolt in his leg, a wound that still made him limp, and those memories provoked nothing except a wish to give Thomas a long, slow hurting that would leave the archer screaming. But Thomas had been stunned by the flat of the sword and by the kicks to his head and he did not know a thing as two men-at-arms dragged him towards the oak. At first the Earl of Warwick’s men had tried to protect Thomas from Sir Simon, but when he assured them that the man was a deserter, a thief and a murderer they had changed their minds. They would hang him.
And Sir Simon would let them. If these men hanged Thomas as a deserter then no one could accuse Sir Simon of executing the archer. He would have kept his word and the Earl of Northampton would still have to forfeit his share of the prize money. Thomas would be dead and Sir Simon would be both richer and happier.
The men-at-arms were willing enough once they heard Thomas was a murderous thief. They had orders to hang enough rioters, thieves and rapists to cool the army’s ardour, but this quarter of the island, being furthest from the old city, had not seen the same atrocities as the northern half and so these men-at-arms had been denied the opportunity to use the ropes which the Earl had issued. Now they had a victim and so one man tossed the rope over an oak branch.
Thomas was aware of little of it. He felt nothing as Sir Simon searched him and cut away the money pouch from under his tunic; he did not know a thing when the rope was knotted about his neck, but then he was dimly aware of the stench of horse urine and suddenly there was a tightening at his gullet and his slowly recovering sight was sheeted with red. He felt himself hauled into the air, then tried to gasp because of a dreadful gripping pain in his throat, but he could not gasp and he could scarcely breathe; he could only feel a burning and choking as the smoky air scraped in his windpipe. He wanted to scream in terror but his lungs could do nothing except give him agony. He had an instant’s lucidity as he realized he was dangling and jerking and twitching, and though he scrabbled at his neck with his hooked fingers he could not loosen the rope’s strangling grip. Then, in terror, he pissed himself.
‘Yellow bastard,’ Sir Simon sneered, and he struck at Thomas’s body with his sword, though the blow did little more than slice the flesh at Thomas’s waist and swing his body on the rope.
‘Leave him be,’ one of the men-at-arms said. ‘He’s a dead ’un,’ and they watched until Thomas’s movements became spasmodic. Then they mounted and rode on. A group of archers also watched from one of the houses in the square, and their presence scared Sir Simon, who feared they might be friends of Thomas and so, when the Earl’s men left the square, he rode with them. His own followers were searching the nearby church of St Michael, and Sir Simon had only come to the square because he had seen the tall stone house and wondered if it contained plunder. Instead he had found Thomas and now Thomas was hanged. It was not the revenge Sir Simon had dreamed of, but there had been pleasure in it and that was a compensation.
Thomas felt nothing now. It was all darkness and no pain. He was dancing the rope to hell, his head to one side, body still swinging slightly, legs twitching, hands curling and feet dripping.
The army stayed five days in Caen. Some three hundred Frenchmen of rank, all of whom could yield ransoms, had been taken prisoner, and they were escorted north to where they could take ship for England. The injured English and Welsh soldiers were carried to the Abbaye aux Dames where they lay in the cloisters, their wounds stinking so high that the Prince and his entourage moved to the Abbaye aux Hommes where the King had his quarters. The bodies of the massacred citizens were cleared from the streets. A priest of the King’s household tried to bury the dead decently, as befitted Christians, but when a common grave was dug in the churchyard of St Jean it could hold only five hundred bodies, and no one had time or spades enough to bury the rest, so four and a half thousand corpses were tipped into the rivers. The city’s survivors, creeping out of their hiding places when the madness of the sack was over, wandered along the riverbanks to search for their relatives among the corpses that were stranded by the falling tide. Their searches disturbed the wild dogs and the screeching flocks of ravens and gulls that squabbled as they feasted on the bloated dead.
The castle was still in French hands. Its walls were high and thick, and no ladder could scale them. The King sent a herald to demand the garrison’s surrender, but the French lords in the great keep politely refused and then invited the English to do their worst, confident that no mangonel or catapult could hurl a stone high enough to breach their lofty walls. The King reckoned they were right, so instead ordered his gunners to break down the castle’s stones, and the army’s five largest cannon were trundled through the old city on their wagons. Three of the guns were long tubes made from wrought-iron strips bound by steel hoops, while two had been cast in brass by bell-founders and looked like bulbous jars with swollen oval bellies, narrow necks and flaring mouths. All were around five feet long and needed shear-legs to be swung from their wagons onto wooden cradles.
The cradles were set on planks of wood. The ground under the gun carriages had been graded so that the guns could point up towards the castle’s gate. Bring down the gate, the King had ordered,