Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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Guillaume’s one eye gazed at him balefully. ‘Of course you have. You’re a Vexille.’
‘I’ve never heard of the Vexilles,’ Thomas said. ‘My name is Thomas of Hookton.’
Thomas half expected Sir Guillaume to frown as he tried to remember Hookton, but his recognition of the name was instant.
‘Hookton,’ he said, ‘Hookton. Good sweet Christ, Hookton.’ He was silent for a few heartbeats. ‘And of course you’re a damned Vexille. You have their badge on your bow.’
‘My bow?’
‘You gave it to Eleanor to carry! She kept it.’
Thomas closed his eyes. There was pain in his neck and down his back and in his head. ‘I think it was my father’s badge,’ he said, ‘but I don’t really know because he would never talk of his family. I know he hated his own father. I wasn’t very fond of my own, but your men killed him and I swore to avenge him.’
Sir Guillaume turned to gaze out of the window. ‘You have truly never heard of the Vexilles?’
‘Never.’
‘Then you are fortunate.’ He stood. ‘They are the devil’s offspring, and you, I suspect, are one of their pups. I would kill you, boy, with as little conscience as if I stamped on a spider, but you were kind to my bastard daughter and for that I thank you.’ He limped from the room.
Leaving Thomas in pain and utterly confused.
Thomas recovered in Sir Guillaume’s garden, shaded from the sun by two quince trees under which he waited anxiously for Dr Mordecai’s daily verdict on the colour, consistency, taste and smell of his urine. It did not seem to matter to the doctor that Thomas’s grotesquely swollen neck was subsiding, nor that he could swallow bread and meat again. All that mattered was the state of his urine. There was, the doctor declared, no finer method of diagnosis. ‘The urine betrays all. If it smells rank, or if it is dark, if it tastes of vinegar or should it be cloudy then it is time for vigorous doctoring. But good, pale, sweet-smelling urine like this is the worst news of all.’
‘The worst?’ Thomas asked, alarmed.
‘It means fewer fees for a physician, dear boy.’
The doctor had survived the sack of Caen by hiding in a neighbour’s pig shed. ‘They slaughtered the pigs, but missed the Jew. Mind you, they broke all my instruments, scattered my medicines, shattered all but three of my bottles and burned my house. Which is why I am forced to live here.’ He shuddered, as though living in Sir Guillaume’s mansion was a hardship. He smelled Thomas’s urine and then, uncertain of his diagnosis, spilled a drop onto a finger and tasted it. ‘Very fine,’ he said, ‘lamentably fine.’ He poured the jar’s contents onto a bed of lavender where bees were at work. ‘So I lost everything,’ he said, ‘and this after we were assured by our great lords that the city would be safe!’ Originally, the doctor had told Thomas, the leaders of the garrison had insisted on defending only the walled city and the castle, but they needed the help of the townsfolk to man the walls and those townsfolk had insisted that the Île St Jean be defended, for that was where the city’s wealth lay, and so, at the very last minute, the garrison had streamed across the bridge to disaster. ‘Fools,’ Mordecai said scornfully, ‘fools in steel and glory. Fools.’
Thomas and Mordecai were sharing the house while Sir Guillaume visited his estate in Evecque, some thirty miles south of Caen, where he had gone to raise more men. ‘He will fight on,’ the doctor said, ‘wounded leg or not.’
‘What will he do with me?’
‘Nothing,’ the doctor said confidently. ‘He likes you, despite all his bluster. You saved Eleanor, didn’t you? He’s always been fond of her. His wife wasn’t, but he is.’
‘What happened to his wife?’
‘She died,’ Mordecai said, ‘she just died.’
Thomas could eat properly now and his strength returned fast so that he could walk about the Île St Jean with Eleanor. The island looked as though a plague had struck, for over half the houses were empty and even those that were occupied were still blighted by the sack. Shutters were missing, doors splintered and the shops had no goods. Some country folk were selling beans, peas and cheeses from wagons, and small boys were offering fresh perch taken from the rivers, but they were still hungry days. They were also nervous days, for the city’s survivors feared that the hated English might return and the island was still haunted by the sickly smell of the corpses in the two rivers where the gulls, rats and dogs grew fat.
Eleanor hated walking about the city, preferring to go south into the countryside where blue dragonflies flew above water lilies in the streams that twisted between fields of overripe rye, barley and wheat.
‘I love harvest time,’ she told Thomas. ‘We used to go into the fields and help.’ There would be little harvest this year, for there were no folk to cut the grain and so the corn buntings were stripping the heads and pigeons were squabbling over the leavings. ‘There should be a feast at harvest’s end,’ Eleanor said wistfully.
‘We had a feast too,’ Thomas said, ‘and we used to hang corn dollies in the church.’
‘Corn dollies?’
He made her a little doll from straw. ‘We used to hang thirteen of these above the altar,’ he told her, ‘one for Christ and one each for the Apostles.’ He picked some cornflowers and gave them to Eleanor, who threaded them into her hair. It was very fair hair, like sunlit gold.
They talked incessantly and one day Thomas asked her again about the lance and this time Eleanor nodded.
‘I lied to you,’ she said, ‘because he did have it, but it was stolen.’
‘Who stole it?’
She touched her face. ‘The man who took his eye.’
‘A man called Vexille?’
She nodded solemnly. ‘I think so. But it wasn’t here, it was in Evecque. That’s his real home. He got the Caen house when he married.’
‘Tell me about the Vexilles,’ Thomas urged her.
‘I know nothing of them,’ Eleanor said, and he believed her.
They were sitting by a stream where two swans floated and a heron stalked frogs in a reedbed. Thomas had talked earlier of walking away from Caen to find the English army and his words must have been weighing on Eleanor’s mind for she frowned at him.
‘Will you really go?’
‘I don’t know.’ He wanted to be with the army, for that was where he belonged, though he did not know how he was to find it, nor how he was to survive in a countryside where the English had made themselves hated, but he also wanted to stay. He wanted to learn more about the Vexilles and only Sir Guillaume could satisfy that hunger. And, day by day, he wanted to be with Eleanor. There was a calm gentleness in her that Jeanette had never possessed, a gentleness that made him treat her with tenderness for fear that otherwise he would break her. He never tired of watching her long face with its slightly hollow cheeks and bony nose and big eyes. She was embarrassed by his scrutiny, but did not tell him to stop.
‘Sir Guillaume,’ she told him, ‘tells me I look like my mother, but I don’t remember her very well.’
Sir Guillaume came back to Caen with a dozen men-at-arms whom he had hired in northern Alençon. He would lead them to war, he said, along with the half-dozen of his men who had survived the fall of Caen. His leg was still sore, but he could walk without crutches and on the day of his return he summarily ordered Thomas to go with him to the church of St Jean. Eleanor, working in the kitchen, joined them as they left the house and Sir Guillaume did not forbid her to come.
Folk bowed as Sir Guillaume passed and many sought his assurance that the English were truly gone.
‘They are marching towards Paris,’ he