Ash: A Secret History (48 page)

His brothers looked all more or less in their twenties; the remaining nobleman a few years older. All of them had shoulder-length, curling fair hair, and a certain kinship of shabby leg armour and brigandines, and sword grips with the leather worn thin.

The youngest-looking of the de Vere brothers sat up in his saddle and said, in clear East Anglian English, “She dresses like a man, John! She’s a strumpet. We don’t need the like of her to get false Edward off the throne!”

Another brother, whose blue eyes squinted, said, “Look at that face! Who cares what she is!”

Ash sat her war-horse easily, and surveyed the four brothers with a relaxed expression. She turned her head towards the remaining noblemen, Beaumont. With the English she remembered from campaigning there, she remarked, “No wonder they say what they do about English manners. You have anything to add to that, my lord Viscount?”

The Viscount Beaumont held up a gauntleted hand in surrender, eyes twinkling appreciatively. When he spoke, a missing front tooth made his voice appealingly soft-edged. “Not me, madam!”

She turned back to the Earl of Oxford. “My lord, your brother there isn’t the first soldier to insult me for being female – not by about twenty years!”

“I am ashamed by Dickon’s
²⁰
lack of courtesy.” John de Vere bowed from his saddle. To all appearances confident of her, he said, “Madam Captain, you know how best to handle it.”

“But she’s a weak woman!” The youngest brother, Richard de Vere, turning amazed pale eyes to her, blurted, “What can you do?”

“Oh, I get it… You think my lord didn’t hire me for my fighting skills,” Ash said bluntly. “You think he just hired me because he wants to question me about the Visigoth general and the invasion that’s headed this way, and because you think Robert Anselm runs this company, and commands it in the field. Am I right?”

One of the middle de Veres, Tom or George, said, “Duke Charles must be of the same opinion. You’re a woman, what else can you do but talk?”

The Earl of Oxford politely said, “That is my brother George, madam.”

Ash wheeled Godluc away to face the youngest brother. “I’ll tell you what I can do, Master Dickon de Vere. I can reason, I can speak, and I can do my job. I can fight. But if a man doesn’t believe I can command, or thinks I’m weak, or won’t lie down after I beat him in a fair fight – which is the way I usually handle this with recruits – or thinks that any woman’s argument is best answered by rape … then I can kill him.”

The youngest de Vere’s face coloured up red from neck to hairline. Part embarrassment, part – Ash guessed – the realisation that it was probably true.

“You’d be surprised how much trouble it saves.” She grinned. “Honey, I don’t have to convince you I’m not vermin. I just have to fight your lord brother’s enemies, reasonably well, and survive to get paid.”

Dickon de Vere, red-faced, stared; suddenly very upright in his saddle. Ash turned back toward the Earl of Oxford.

“They don’t have to like me, my lord. They just have to stop thinking of me as a daughter of Eve.”

There was a snort from the Viscount Beaumont, something in English so rapid between the four brothers that she couldn’t follow it, and then the youngest brother flushed, burst out laughing; and only the two middle ones continued to glare at her. The Earl passed his hand across his mouth, possibly hiding a smile.

Ash narrowed her eyes against the sun, feeling sweat mat her hair under her velvet hat. A strong smell of horse and leather tack drifted up from Godluc; she felt it as something reassuring.

“Time for you to give me orders, my lord,” she said cheerfully. And then, catching his eye, “This
is
my company, my lord Earl. All eighty lances. And I’d like to know something. We’re too big for an escort, and too small for an army – why
have
you hired us?”

“Later, madam. When we dine. There’s time enough before you visit the Duke.”

About to insist, Ash caught sight of Godfrey leaving a conversation at the camp gate with three or four shabbily dressed men, and a woman in a green habit. His wooden pectoral cross bounced on his chest as he strode across the grass, robe flapping at his bare heels.

“I believe my clerk wants me. Will it please you to have Master Angelotti here show you our guns? They are in the shade…” She pointed down towards the trees at the edge of the river.

Meeting de Vere’s eyes, she became aware that the English nobleman was perfectly aware of the stratagem, perfectly used to such courtesies, and willing to consent.

Ash rose in her saddle and bowed, as Angelotti took the Earl’s bridle and led him towards the camp.

“Godfrey?”

“Yes, child?”

“Come with me!” She eased Godluc forward, Godfrey at her stirrup. “Tell me
everything
you’ve found out about the situation in Dijon, while I’m inspecting the camp. Everything! I have no idea what’s going on in the Burgundian court, and I’m going to be standing in front of the Duke in four hours!”

Her command tent, when she reached it, was a scrum of servants rushing in and out, setting up a table, and strewing the sharp straw underfoot with sweet new rushes. Ash stomped behind the dividing curtain and dressed for the coming meal in extreme haste, knowing this would be the gear in which she would go before the Duke.

“It’s
Burgundy,
Florian! It doesn’t get any better than this!”

Floria del Guiz sat cross-legged on a chest, unimpressed. She rapidly lifted her feet up out of the way. “You don’t even know you’ll be fighting with the Duke. Robert’s mad Earl might take us God-knows-where.”

“De Vere wants to fight Visigoths.” Ash held her forearms up, speaking to Floria while taking no notice of Bertrand and Rickard tying the doublet’s points down to her wrists. The sleeves puffed fashionably at the shoulders.

Bertrand whimpered. Ash fidgeted.

“I’m not going to look as good as I should – that bitch kept my armour!”

The surgeon drank from a silver goblet snatched from Henri Brant’s servers. “Oh, wear what you like! He’s only a Duke.”

“Only a – fucking
hell,
Florian!”

“I grew up with this.” The long-legged woman wiped sweat from her face. “So, you haven’t got your armour. So?”

“
Fuck!
” Ash found no words to explain what putting on full armour does, no way to say to Floria,
But you feel like God when you’ve got it on!
And in front of all those people, all these bloody Burgundians, I want to do myself and the company credit—

“That was full harness! It cost me
two years
to earn the money to pay for it!”

A quarter-hour by the marked candle saw every chest turfed out, Bertrand in tears at the thought of re-packing, and Ash with German cuisses strapped to her thighs, Milanese lower leg armour, a blue velvet brigandine with brass rivets showing dull against the cloth, and a polished steel plackart that, strapped around her waist over the brigandine, would come up in a point over her breastbone, to a fretworked metal finial. And be boiling hot.

“Oh shit,” she said. “Oh shit, I’m having an audience with Charles of Burgundy, oh shit,
oh
shit…”

“You don’t think you’re taking this a
little
too seriously?”

“What they see – is what I am. And I’d rather worry about this than…” Ash opened a small mirror-case in her hand, tilting the tiny reflective circle to try and see her face. Bertrand jerked her hair with his comb. She swore, threw a bottle at the boy, tugged her silver hair down loose over the injured part of her scalp, and stared into dark, dark eyes, the colour of ponds in wild woods. The faintest tinge of sun coloured her cheekbones, making her scars stand out the more pale. Apart from the scars, and the thinness that illness had given her, a flawless face stared back at her.

Don’t worry about the armour, because that isn’t what they’ll be looking at.

Floria stepped out of two men’s way, watching Ash give orders to lance-leaders and efficiently dismiss them. Her smile became sardonic. “You’re going to court with your hair down? You’re a married woman.”

Ash gave the surgeon a reply she had been practising in her mind on her sickbed. “‘My marriage was a sham. I swear to God that I am in exactly the same state now as I was before I was married.’”

Floria made a long, rude noise. “No, boss! Don’t try that one here. You’ll make even Charles of Burgundy crack a smile.”

“Worth a try?”

“
No.
Trust me. No.”

Ash stood still while Bertrand belted her sword around her waist. The brigandine’s velvet-covered metal plates creaked as she breathed.

From the sepia shadows cast by canvas, the tall woman said, “And what are you going to tell our noble Earl about meeting the Visigoth general? More than you’ve told me? Christ, woman, is it likely I’m going to betray a confidence? We’re all—”

“We?” Ash interrupted.

“—me, Godfrey, Robert…
How long do you expect us to wait?
” Floria wiped the top of one of Ash’s four silver goblets with a grimy thumb, and glanced up with bright eyes. “What happened to you? What did she say to you? You know, your silence is deafening.”

“Yes,” Ash said flatly, not responding to the woman’s effortful flippancy. “I’m thinking it through. There’s no point going off at half-cock. It could affect the company’s future, and mine, and I’ll call an officer-meeting when I’ve got it straight in my head – and not until then. Meanwhile, we have to deal with the Grand Duke of the West and a mad English Earl.”

Two orders reduced the outer pavilion to order, and got the side panels of canvas unhooked. The canopy continued to give shade; the open sides admitted stinging mites, white butterflies, and the swooping green metallic darts of dragonflies, and let a breeze blow over Ash’s face from the rush-choked river.

She took a brief survey of the table, clothed in regrettably yellow linen. The silver plate shone bright enough to leave after-images on her retinas. Smart men-at-arms from one of van Mander’s lances were forming a guard around the central area of the camp. Three of the camp women played recorders: an Italian air. Henri and Blanche stood with their heads together, talking heatedly.

As Ash looked, the steward wiped his red, streaming face on his shirt-sleeve, and nodded; this just as the sun caught bright golden curls beyond him, and she realised it was Angelotti leading the Earl’s party back towards the command tent.

She saw John de Vere register the unusual fact of Blanche acting as a server, and Ludmilla’s lance-mate Katherine Hammell standing with her crossbow and a leash of mastiffs as part of the command tent guard.

Half as a question, John de Vere remarked, “You have many women in your camp, madam.”

“Of course I do. I execute for rape.”

It jolted the viscount, she could tell from Beaumont’s expression; but the Earl of Oxford merely nodded thoughtfully. She introduced Floria del Guiz with some care, but the Earl greeted the surgeon as a man; and Godfrey Maximillian.

“Please you be seated,” she said formally; and let the servants place each man at table according to his degree, herself ceding the head of the table to John de Vere. The music ceased while Godfrey’s rumble intoned a grace.

As she sat down, half her mind on how far the Visigoths might have advanced in six days, and the other half thinking how best to behave in Duke Charles’s court with an invasion due, a memory clicked suddenly into place.

“Good God,” Ash blurted, as Blanche and a dozen others put the first remove on the table, “I do know you. I’ve heard of you. You’re
that
Lord Oxford!”

The English Earl quaked, with what, after a split second, she realised was laughter. “‘That’ Oxford?”

“They put you in Hammes!”

Floria, on the far side of the table, glanced up from a dish of quail. “What’s Hammes?”

“High-security nick,” Ash said briefly; then coloured, and began to serve John de Vere personally from the one large silver trencher they still possessed. “It’s a castle outside Calais. With moats and dykes and … it’s supposed to be the toughest castle in Europe to get free from!”

The Earl of Oxford reached over and slapped Viscount Beaumont heartily on the shoulder. “And so it would have been, but for this man. And Dickon, and George, and Tom. But you’re wrong in one thing, madam: I made no escape. I left.”

“Left?”

“Taking my chief jailer, Thomas Blount, with me, as my ally. We left his wife garrisoning the castle until we should return with troops for the house of Lancaster.”
²¹
John de Vere smiled. “Mistress Blount is a woman even you would find formidable. I doubt not but that we can go back to Hammes any time these ten years, and find it still ours!”

“My lord of Oxenford’s famous. He invaded England,” Ash said to Floria. She sniffed back a laugh; no malice in it, only vicarious pride. “Twice. Once with the armies of Margaret of Anjou and King Henry.” A mirthful snuffle. “And once on his own.”

“On his
own!
” Floria del Guiz turned an incredulous face to the Earl. “You’ll have to excuse boss’s manners, my lord of Oxford. She gets like this sometimes.”

“I was hardly alone,” Oxford protested, deadpan. “I had eighty men with me.”

Floria del Guiz subsided in her chair, gazing at the English nobleman with wine-bright eyes and her infectious smile. “Eighty men.
²²
To invade England. I see…”

“My lord the Earl took their Michael’s Mount in Cornwall,” Ash said. “And held it – how long, a year?”

“Not so long. From September of ’73 to February of ’74.” The Earl looked at his brothers, whose loud voices were rising in easy talk. “They were staunch for me. But not the men-at-arms, once it was clear no relieving force would come from France.”
²³

“And after that, Hammes.” Ash shrugged. “
That
Lord Oxford. Of course.”

“The third time, I shall put a better man on Edward’s throne.”
²⁴
He leaned back against the carved oak chair. With steel under his tone, John de Vere said, “I am thirteenth Earl of a line that goes back to Duke William, that time out of mind were great lords and Chancellors of the realm of England. But since I am in exile, no nearer a king of Lancaster than you are near Pope Joan, madam, and since we have these Goths to contend against, then – ‘that Lord Oxford’ it is.”