Epic Historial Collection (252 page)

When she woke up at first light, she said to Jeanne: “Your grandsons—do you still have their clothes?”

The old woman opened a wooden chest. “Take what you want,” she said. “I have no one to give them to.” She picked up a bucket and went off to fetch water.

Caris began to sort through the garments in the chest. Jeanne had not asked for payment. Clothes had little monetary value after so many people had died, she guessed.

Mair said: “What are you up to?”

“Nuns aren't safe,” Caris said. “We're going to become pages in the service of a minor lord—Pierre,
sieur
of Longchamp in Brittany. Pierre is a common name and there must be lots of places called Longchamp. Our master has been captured by the English, and our mistress has sent us to find him and negotiate his ransom.”

“All right,” Mair said eagerly.

“Giles and Jean were fourteen and sixteen, so with luck their clothes will fit us.”

Caris picked out a tunic, leggings, and a cape with a hood, all in the dull brown of undyed wool. Mair found a similar outfit in green, with short sleeves and an undershirt. Women did not usually wear underdrawers, but men did, and fortunately Jeanne had lovingly washed the linen garments of her dead family. Caris and Mair could keep their own shoes: the practical footwear of nuns was no different from what men wore.

“Shall we put them on?” said Mair.

They pulled off their nuns' robes. Caris had never seen Mair undressed, and she could not resist a peek. Her companion's naked body took her breath away. Mair's skin seemed to glow like a pink pearl. Her breasts were generous, with pale girlish nipples, and she had a luxuriant bush of fair pubic hair. Caris was suddenly conscious that her own body was not as beautiful. She looked away, and quickly began to put on the clothes she had chosen.

She pulled the tunic over her head. It was just like a woman's dress except that it stopped at the knee instead of the ankles. She pulled up the linen underdrawers and the leggings, then put her shoes and belt back on.

Mair said: “How do I look?”

Caris studied her. Mair had put a boy's cap over her short blond hair, and tilted it at an angle. She was grinning. “You look so happy!” Caris said in surprise.

“I've always liked boys' clothes.” Mair swaggered up and down the small room. “This is how they walk,” she said. “Always taking more space than they need.” It was such an accurate imitation that Caris burst out laughing.

Caris was struck by a thought. “Are we going to have to pee standing up?”

“I can do it, but not in undershorts—too inaccurate.”

Caris giggled. “We can't leave off the drawers—a sudden flurry of wind could expose our…pretenses.”

Mair laughed. Then she began to stare at Caris in a way that was strange but not entirely unfamiliar, looking her up and down, meeting her eyes and holding her gaze.

“What are you doing?” said Caris.

“This is how men look at women, as if they own us. But be careful—if you do it to a man, he becomes aggressive.”

“This could be more difficult than I thought.”

“You're too beautiful,” Mair said. “You need a dirty face.” She went to the fireplace and blackened her hand with soot. Then she smeared it on Caris's face. Her touch was like a caress. My face isn't beautiful, Caris thought; no one ever judged it so—except Merthin, of course…

“Too much,” Mair said after a minute, and wiped some off with her other hand. “That's better.” She smeared Caris's hand and said: “Now do me.”

Caris spread a faint smudge on Mair's jawline and throat, making it look as if she might have a light beard. It felt very intimate, to be looking so hard at her face, and touching her skin so softly. She dirtied Mair's forehead and cheeks. Mair looked like a pretty boy—but she did not look like a woman.

They studied one another. A smile played on the red bow of Mair's lips. Caris felt a sense of anticipation, as if something momentous was about to happen. Then a voice said: “Where are the nuns?”

They both turned around guiltily. Jeanne stood in the doorway, holding a heavy bucket of fresh water, looking frightened. “What have you done to the nuns?” she said.

Caris and Mair burst out laughing, and then Jeanne recognized them. “How you have changed yourselves!” she exclaimed.

They drank some of the water, and Caris shared out the rest of the smoked fish for breakfast. It was a good sign, she thought as they ate, that Jeanne had not recognized them. If they were careful, perhaps they could get away with this.

They took their leave of Jeanne and rode off. As they breasted the rise before Hôpital-des-Soeurs, the sun came up directly ahead of them, casting a red light on the nunnery, making the ruins look as if they were still burning. Caris and Mair trotted quickly through the village, trying not to think about the mutilated corpse of the nun lying there in the debris, and rode on into the sunrise.

47

B
y Tuesday, August 22, the English army was on the run.

Ralph Fitzgerald was not sure how it had happened. They had stormed across Normandy from west to east, looting and burning, and no one had been able to withstand them. Ralph had been in his element. On the march, a soldier could take anything he saw—food, jewelry, women—and kill any man who stood in his way. It was how life ought to be lived.

The king was a man after Ralph's own heart. Edward III loved to fight. When he was not at war he spent most of his time organizing elaborate tournaments, costly mock battles with armies of knights in specially designed uniforms. On the campaign, he was always ready to lead a sortie or raiding party, hazarding his life, never pausing to balance risks against benefits like a Kingsbridge merchant. The older knights and earls commented on his brutality, and had protested about incidents such as the systematic rape of the women of Caen, but Edward did not care. When he had heard that some of the Caen citizens had thrown stones at soldiers who were ransacking their homes, he had ordered that everyone in the town should be killed, and only relented after vigorous protests by Sir Godfrey de Harcourt and others.

Things had started to go wrong when they came to the River Seine. At Rouen they had found the bridge destroyed, and the town—on the far side of the water—heavily fortified. King Philippe VI of France was there in person, with a mighty army.

The English marched upstream, looking for a place to cross, but they found that Philippe had been there before them, and one bridge after another was either strongly defended or in ruins. They went as far as Poissy, only twenty miles from Paris, and Ralph thought they would surely attack the capital—but older men shook their heads sagely and said it was impossible. Paris was a city of fifty thousand men, and they must by now have heard the news from Caen, so they would be prepared to fight to the death, knowing they could expect no mercy.

If the king did not intend to attack Paris, Ralph asked, what was his plan? No one knew, and Ralph suspected that Edward had no plan other than to wreak havoc.

The town of Poissy had been evacuated, and the English engineers were able to rebuild its bridge—fighting off a French attack at the same time—so at last the army crossed the river.

By then it was clear that Philippe had assembled an army larger by far than the English, and Edward decided on a dash to the north, with the aim of joining up with an Anglo-Flemish force invading from the northeast.

Philippe gave chase.

Today the English were encamped south of another great river, the Somme, and the French were playing the same trick as they had at the Seine. Sorties and reconnaissance parties reported that every bridge had been destroyed, every riverside town heavily fortified. Even more ominously, an English detachment had seen, on the far bank, the flag of Philippe's most famous and frightening ally, John, the blind king of Bohemia.

Edward had started out with fifteen thousand men in total. In six weeks of campaigning many of those had fallen, and others had deserted, to find their way home with their saddlebags full of gold. He had about ten thousand left, Ralph calculated. Reports of spies suggested that in Amiens, a few miles upstream, Philippe now had sixty thousand foot soldiers and twelve thousand mounted knights, an overwhelming advantage in numbers. Ralph was more worried than he had been since he first set foot in Normandy. The English were in trouble.

Next day they marched downstream to Abbeville, location of the last bridge before the Somme widened into an estuary; but the burgesses of the town had spent money, over the years, strengthening the walls, and the English could see it was impregnable. So cocksure were the citizens that they sent out a large force of knights to attack the vanguard of the English army, and there was a fierce skirmish before the locals withdrew back inside their walled town.

When Philippe's army left Amiens, and started advancing from the south, Edward found himself trapped in the point of a triangle: on his right the estuary, on his left the sea, and behind him the French army, baying for the blood of the barbaric invaders.

That afternoon, Earl Roland came to see Ralph.

Ralph had been fighting in Roland's retinue for seven years. The earl no longer regarded him as an untried boy. Roland still gave the impression that he did not much like Ralph, but he certainly respected him, and would always use him to shore up a weak point in the line, lead a sally, or organize a raid. Ralph had lost three fingers from his left hand, and had walked with a limp when tired ever since a Frenchman's pikestaff had cracked his shinbone outside Nantes in 1342. Nevertheless, the king had not yet knighted Ralph, an omission which caused Ralph bitter resentment. For all the loot he had garnered—most of it held for safekeeping by a London goldsmith—Ralph was unfulfilled. He knew that his father would be equally dissatisfied. Like Gerald, Ralph fought for honor, not money; but in all this time he had not climbed a single step up the staircase of nobility.

When Roland appeared, Ralph was sitting in a field of ripening wheat that had been trampled to shreds by the army. He was with Alan Fernhill and half a dozen comrades, eating a gloomy dinner, pea soup with onions: food was running out, and there was no meat left. Ralph felt as they did, tired from constant marching, dispirited by repeated encounters with broken bridges and well-defended towns, and scared of what would happen when the French army caught up with them.

Roland was now an old man, his hair and beard gray, but he still walked erect and spoke with authority. He had learned to keep his expression stonily impassive, so that people hardly noticed that the right side of his face was paralyzed. He said: “The estuary of the Somme is tidal. At low tide, the water may be shallow in places. But the bottom is thick mud, making it impassable.”

“So we can't cross,” said Ralph. But he knew Roland had not come just to give him bad news, and his spirits lifted optimistically.

“There may be a ford—a point where the bottom is firmer,” Roland went on. “If there is, the French will know.”

“You want me to find out.”

“As quick as you like. There are some prisoners in the next field.”

Ralph shook his head. “Soldiers might have come from anywhere in France, or even other countries. It's the local people who will have the information.”

“I don't care who you interrogate. Just come to the king's tent with the answer by nightfall.” Roland walked away.

Ralph drained his bowl and leaped to his feet, glad to have something aggressive to do. “Saddle up, lads,” he said.

He still had Griff. Miraculously, his favorite horse had survived seven years of war. Griff was somewhat smaller than a warhorse, but had more spirit than the oversize destriers most knights preferred. He was now experienced in battle, and his iron-shod hooves gave Ralph an extra weapon in the melee. Ralph was more fond of him than of most of his human comrades. In fact the only living creature to whom he felt closer was his brother, Merthin, whom he had not seen for seven years—and might never see again, for Merthin had gone to Florence.

They headed northeast, toward the estuary. Every peasant living within half a day's walk would know of the ford if there was one, Ralph calculated. They would use it constantly, crossing the river to buy and sell livestock, to attend the weddings and funerals of relatives, to go to markets and fairs and religious festivals. They would be reluctant to give information to the invading English, of course—but he knew how to solve that problem.

They rode away from the army, into territory that had not yet suffered from the arrival of thousands of men, where there were sheep in the pastures and crops ripening in the fields. They came to a village from which the estuary could be seen in the far distance. They kicked their horses into a canter along the grassy track that led into the village. The one-room and two-room hovels of the serfs reminded Ralph of Wigleigh. As he expected, the peasants fled in all directions, the women carrying babies and children, most of the men holding an axe or a sickle.

Ralph and his companions had played out this drama twenty or thirty times in the past few weeks. They were specialists in gathering intelligence. Usually, the army's leaders wanted to know where local people had hidden their stocks. When they heard the English were coming, the sly peasants drove their cattle and sheep into woods, stashed sacks of flour in holes in the ground, and hid bales of hay in the bell tower of the church. They knew they would probably starve to death if they revealed where their food was, but they always told sooner or later. On other occasions the army needed directions, perhaps to an important town, a strategic bridge, a fortified abbey. The peasants would usually answer such inquiries unhesitatingly, but it was necessary to make sure they were not lying, for the shrewder among them might try to deceive the invading army, knowing the soldiers were not able to return to punish them.