Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt. Bernard Cornwell
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gestured towards the river gate. Thomas followed her down to the bank of the River Orne where they watched an excited trio of small boys trying to spear a pike with English arrows left after the city’s capture.
‘Will you help my father?’ Eleanor asked.
‘Help him?’
‘You said his enemy was your enemy.’
Thomas sat on the grass and she sat beside him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He still did not really believe in any of it. There was a lance, he knew that, and a mystery about his family, but he was reluctant to admit that the lance and the mystery must govern his whole life.
‘Does that mean you’ll go back to the English army?’ Eleanor asked in a small voice.
‘I want to stay here,’ Thomas said after a pause, ‘to be with you.’
She must have known he was going to say something of the sort, but she still blushed and gazed at the swirling water where fish rose to the swarms of insects, and the three boys vainly splashed. ‘You must have a woman,’ she said softly.
‘I did,’ Thomas said, and he told her about Jeanette and how she had found the Prince of Wales and so abandoned him without a glance. ‘I will never understand her,’ he admitted.
‘But you love her?’ Eleanor asked directly.
‘No,’ Thomas said.
‘You say that because you’re with me,’ Eleanor declared.
He shook his head. ‘My father had a book of St Augustine’s sayings and there was one that always puzzled me.’ He frowned, trying to remember the Latin. ‘Nondum amabam, et amare amabam. I did not love, but yearned to love.’
Eleanor gave him a sceptical look. ‘A very elaborate way of saying you’re lonely.’
‘Yes,’ Thomas agreed.
‘So what will you do?’ she asked.
Thomas did not speak for a while. He was thinking of the penance he had been given by Father Hobbe. ‘I suppose one day I must find the man who killed my father,’ he said after a while.
‘But what if he is the devil?’ she asked seriously.
‘Then I shall wear garlic,’ Thomas said lightly, ‘and pray to St Guinefort.’
She looked at the darkening water. ‘Did St Augustine really say that thing?’
‘Nondum amabam, et amare amabam?’ Thomas said. ‘Yes, he did.’
‘I know how he felt,’ Eleanor said, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Thomas did not move. He had a choice. Follow the lance or take his black bow back to the army. In truth he did not know what he should do. But Eleanor’s body was warm against his and it was comforting and that, for the moment, was enough and so, for the moment, he would stay.
Next morning Sir Guillaume, escorted now by a half-dozen men-at-arms, took Thomas to the Abbaye aux Hommes. A crowd of petitioners stood at the gates, wanting food and clothing that the monks did not have, though the abbey itself had escaped the worst of the plundering because it had been the quarters of the King and of the Prince of Wales. The monks themselves had fled at the approach of the English army. Some had died on the Île St Jean, but most had gone south to a brother house and among those was Brother Germain who, when Sir Guillaume arrived, had just returned from his brief exile.
Brother Germain was tiny, ancient and bent, a wisp of a man with white hair, myopic eyes and delicate hands with which he was trimming a goose quill.
‘The English,’ the old man said, ‘use these feathers for their arrows. We use them for God’s word.’ Brother Germain, Thomas was told, had been in charge of the monastery’s scriptorium for more than thirty years. ‘In the course of copying books,’ the monk explained, ‘one discovers knowledge whether one wishes it or not. Most of it is quite useless, of course. How is Mordecai? He lives?’
‘He lives,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and sends you this.’ He put a clay pot, sealed with wax, on the sloping surface of the writing desk. The pot slid down until Brother Germain trapped it and pushed it into a pouch. ‘A salve,’ Sir Guillaume explained to Thomas, ‘for Brother Germain’s joints.’
‘Which ache,’ the monk said, ‘and only Mordecai can relieve them. ’Tis a pity he will burn in hell, but in heaven, I am assured, I shall need no ointments. Who is this?’ He peered at Thomas.
‘A friend,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘who brought me this.’ He was carrying Thomas’s bow, which he now laid across the desk and tapped the silver plate. Brother Germain stooped to inspect the badge and Thomas heard a sharp intake of breath.
‘The yale,’ Brother Germain said. He pushed the bow away, then blew the scraps from his sharpened quill off the desk. ‘The beast was introduced by the heralds in the last century. Back then, of course, there was real scholarship in the world. Not like today. I get young men from Paris whose heads are stuffed with wool, yet they claim to have doctorates.’
He took a sheet of scrap parchment from a shelf, laid it on the desk and dipped his quill in a pot of vermilion ink. He let a glistening drop fall onto the parchment and then, with the skill gained in a lifetime, drew the ink out of the drop in quick strokes. He hardly seemed to be taking notice of what he was doing, but Thomas, to his amazement, saw a yale taking shape on the parchment.
‘The beast is said to be mythical,’ Brother Germain said, flicking the quill to make a tusk, ‘and maybe it is. Most heraldic beasts seem to be inventions. Who has seen a unicorn?’ He put another drop of ink on the parchment, paused a heartbeat, then began on the beast’s raised paws. ‘There is, however, a notion that the yale exists in Ethiopia. I could not say, not having travelled east of Rouen, nor have I met any traveller who has been there, if indeed Ethiopia even exists.’ He frowned. ‘The yale is mentioned by Pliny, however, which suggests it was known to the Romans, though God knows they were a credulous race. The beast is said to possess both horns and tusks, which seems extravagant, and is usually depicted as being silver with yellow spots. Alas, our pigments were stolen by the English, but they left us the vermilion which, I suppose, was kind of them. It comes from cinnabar, I’m told. Is that a plant? Father Jacques, rest his soul, always claimed it grows in the Holy Land and perhaps it does. Do I detect that you are limping, Sir Guillaume?’
‘A bastard English archer put an arrow in my leg,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and I pray nightly that his soul will roast in hell.’
‘You should, instead, give thanks that he was inaccurate. Why do you bring me an English war bow decorated with a yale?’
‘Because I thought it would interest you,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘and because my young friend here,’ he touched Thomas’s shoulder, ‘wants to know about the Vexilles.’
‘He would do much better to forget them,’ Brother Germain grumbled.
He was perched on a tall chair and now peered about the room where a dozen young monks tidied the mess left by the monastery’s English occupiers. Some of them chattered as they worked, provoking a frown from Brother Germain.
‘This is not Caen marketplace!’ he snapped. ‘If you want to gossip, go to the lavatories. I wish I could. Ask Mordecai if he has an unguent for the bowels, would you?’ He glowered about the room for an instant, then struggled to pick up the bow that he had propped against the desk. He looked intently at the yale for an instant, then put the bow down. ‘There was always a rumour that a branch of the Vexille family went to England. This seems to confirm it.’
‘Who are they?’ Thomas asked.
Brother Germain seemed irritated by the direct question, or perhaps the whole subject of the Vexilles made him uncomfortable. ‘They were the rulers of Astarac,’ he said, ‘a county on the borders of Languedoc and the Agenais. That, of course, should tell you all you need to know of them.’
‘It