The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic (8 page)

That summer the castle fell to the English just as Jeanette's husband had feared, and the following year the King of England spent the campaigning season in Brittany, and his army pushed back the forces of Charles, Duke of Brittany. There was no one great battle, but a series of bloody skirmishes, and in one of them, a ragged affair fought between the hedgerows of a steep valley, Jeanette's husband was wounded. He had lifted the face-piece of his helmet to shout encouragement to his men and an arrow had gone clean through his mouth. His servants brought the Count to the house beside the River Jaudy where he took five days to die; five days of constant pain during which he was unable to eat and scarce able to breathe as the wound festered and the blood congealed in his gullet. He was twenty-eight years old, a champion of tournaments, and he wept like a child at the end. He choked to death and Jeanette screamed in frustrated anger and grief.

Then began Jeanette's time of sorrow.
She was a widow,
la veuve Chenier,
and not six months after her husband's death she became an orphan when both her parents died of the bloody flux. She was just eighteen and her son, the Count of Armorica, was two, but Jeanette had inherited her father's wealth and she determined to use it to strike back at the hated English who had killed, her husband, and so she began outfitting two ships that could prey on English shipping.

Monsieur Belas, who had been her father's lawyer, advised against spending money on the ships. Jeanette's fortune would not last for ever, the lawyer said, and nothing soaked up cash like outfitting warships that rarely made money, unless by luck. Better, he said, to use the ships for trade. 'The merchants in Lannion are making a fine profit on Spanish wine,' he suggested. He had a cold, for it was winter, and he sneezed. 'A very fine profit,' he said wistfully. He spoke in Breton, though both he and Jeanette could, if needs be, speak French.

'I do not want Spanish wine,' Jeanette said coldly, 'but English souls.'

'No profit in those, my lady,' Belas said. He found it strange to call Jeanette 'my lady'. He had known her since she was a child, and she had always been little Jeanette to him, but she had married and become an aristocratic widow, and a widow, moreover, with a temper. 'You cannot sell English souls,' Belas pointed out mildly.

'Except to the devil,' Jeanette said, crossing herself. 'But I don't need Spanish wine, Belas. We have the rents.'

'The rents!'
Belas said mockingly. He was tall, thin, scanty-haired and clever. He had served Jeanette's father well and long, and was resentful that the merchant had left him nothing in his will. Everything had gone to Jeanette except for a small bequest to the monks at Pontrieux so they would say Masses for the dead man's soul. Belas hid his resentment. 'Nothing comes from Plabennec,' he told Jeanette. 'The English are there, and how long do you think the rents will come from your father's farms? The English will take them soon.' An English army had occupied unwalled Trèguier, which was only an hour's walk northwards, and they had pulled down the cathedral tower there because some crossbowmen had shot at them from its summit. Belas hoped the English would retreat soon, for it was deep in the winter and their supplies must be running low, but he feared they might ravage the countryside about La Roche-Derrien before they left. And if they did, Jeanette's farms would be left worthless. 'How much rent can you get from a burned farm?' he asked her.

'I don't care!' she snapped. 'I shall sell everything if I have to, everything!' Except for her husband's armour and weapons. They were precious and would go to her son one day.

Belas sighed for her foolishness, then huddled in his black cloak and leaned close to the small fire which spat in the hearth. A cold wind came from the nearby sea, making the chimney smoke. 'You will permit me, madame, to offer you advice?
First, the business.'
Belas paused to wipe his nose on his long black sleeve. 'It ails, but I can find you a good man to run it as your father did, and I would draw up a contract which would ensure the man would pay you well from the profits. Second, madame, you should think of marriage.' He paused, half expecting a protest, but Jeanette said nothing. Belas sighed. She was so lovely! There were a dozen men in
town
who would marry her, but marriage to an aristocrat had turned her head and she would settle for nothing less than another titled man. 'You are, madame,' the lawyer continued carefully, 'a widow who possesses, at the moment, a considerable fortune, but I have seen such fortunes drain away like snow in April. Find a man who can look after you, your possessions and your son.'

Jeanette turned and stared at him. 'I married the finest man in Christendom,' she said, 'and where do you think I will find another like him?'

Men like the Count of Armorica, the lawyer thought, were found everywhere, more was the pity, for what were they but brute fools in armour who believed war was a sport? Jeanette, he thought, should marry a prudent merchant, perhaps a widower who had a fortune, but he suspected such advice would be wasted. 'Remember the old saying, my lady,' he said slyly. 'Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.'

Jeanette shuddered with anger at the words. 'You go beyond yourself, Monsieur Belas.' She spoke icily,
then
dismissed him, and the next day the English came to La Roche-Derrien and Jeanette took her dead husband's crossbow from the place where she hid her wealth and she joined the defenders on the walls. Damn Belas's advice! She would fight like a man and Duke Charles, who despised her, would learn to admire her, to support her and restore her dead husband's estates to her son. So Jeanette had become the Blackbird and the English had died in front of her walls and Belas's advice was forgotten, and now, Jeanette reckoned, the town's defenders had so rattled the English that the siege would surely be lifted. All would be well, in which belief, for the first time in a week, the Blackbird slept well.

Thomas crouched beside the river. He had broken through a stand of alders to reach the bank where he now pulled off his boots and hose. Best to go barelegged, he reckoned, so the boots did not get stuck in the river mud. It was going to be cold, freezing cold, but he could not remember a time when he had been happier. He liked this life, and his memories of Hookton, Oxford and his father had almost faded.

'Take your boots off,' he told the twenty archers who would accompany him, 'and hang your arrow bags round your necks.'

'Why?' someone challenged him from the dark.

'So it bloody throttles you,' Thomas growled.

'So your arrows don't get wet,' another man explained helpfully.

Thomas tied his own bag round his neck. Archers did not carry the quivers that hunters used, for quivers were open at the top and their arrows could fall out when a man ran or stumbled or clambered through a hedge. Arrows in quivers got wet when it rained, and wet feathers made arrows fly crooked, so real archers used linen bags that were water-proofed with wax and sealed by laces. The bags were bolstered by withy frames that spread the linen so the feathers were not crushed.

Will Skeat edged down the bank where a dozen men were stacking the hurdles. He shivered in the cold wind that came from the water. The sky to the east was still dark, but some light came from the watch fires that burned within La Roche-Derrien.

'They're nice and quiet in there,' Skeat said, nodding towards the town.

'Pray they're sleeping,' Thomas said.

'In beds too.
I've forgotten what a bed's like,' Skeat said, then edged aside to let another man through to the riverbank. Thomas was surprised to see it was Sir Simon Jekyll, who had been so scornful of him in the Earl's tent. 'Sir Simon,' Will Skeat said, barely bothering to disguise his own scorn, 'wants a word with thee.'

Sir Simon wrinkled his nose at the stench of the river mud. Much of it, he supposed, was the town's sewage and he was glad he was not wading barelegged through the muck.

'You are confident of passing the stakes?' he asked Thomas.

'I wouldn't be going otherwise,' Thomas said, not bothering to sound respectful.

Thomas's tone made Sir Simon bridle, but he controlled his temper. 'The Earl,' he said distantly, 'has given me the honour of leading the attack on the walls.' He stopped abruptly and Thomas waited, expecting more, but Sir Simon merely looked at him with an irritated face.

'So Thomas takes the walls,' Skeat finally spoke, 'to make it safe for your ladders?'

'What I do not want,' Sir Simon ignored Skeat and spoke to Thomas, 'is for you to take your men ahead of mine into the town itself. We see armed men, we're likely to kill them, you understand?'

Thomas almost spat in derision. His men would be armed with bows and no enemy carried a long-stave bow like the English so there was hardly any chance of being mistaken for the town's defenders, but he held his tongue. He just nodded.

'You and your archers can join our attack,' Sir Simon went on, 'but you will be under my command.'

Thomas nodded again and Sir Simon, irritated by the implied insolence, turned on his heel and walked away.

'Goddamn bastard,' Thomas said.

'He just wants to get his nose into the trough ahead of the rest of us,' Skeat said.

'You're letting the bastard use our ladders?' Thomas asked.

'If he wants to be first up, let him. Ladders are green wood, Tom, and if they break I'd rather it was him tumbling than me. Besides, I reckon we'll be better off following you through the river, but I ain't telling Sir Simon that.' Skeat grinned,
then
swore as a crash sounded from the darkness south of the river. 'Those bloody white rats,' Skeat said, and vanished into the shadows.

The white rats were the Bretons loyal to Duke John, men who wore his badge of a white ermine, and some sixty Breton crossbowmen had been attached to Skeat's soldiers, their job to rattle the walls with their bolts as the ladders were placed against the ramparts. It was those men who had startled the night with their noise and now the noise grew even louder. Some fool had tripped in the dark and thumped a crossbowman with
a pavise
, the huge shield behind which the crossbows were laboriously reloaded, and the crossbowman struck back, and suddenly the white rats were having a brawl in the dark. The defenders, naturally, heard them and started to hurl burning bales of straw over the ramparts and then a church bell began to toll, then another, and
all this
long before Thomas had even started across the mud.

Sir Simon Jekyll, alarmed by the bells and the burning straw, shouted that the attack must go in now. 'Carry the ladders forward!' he bellowed. Defenders were running onto La Roche-Derrien's walls and the first crossbow bolts were spitting off the ramparts that were lit bright by the burning bales.

'Hold those goddamn ladders!' Will Skeat snarled at his men,
then
looked at Thomas. 'What do you reckon?'

'I think the bastards are distracted,' Thomas said.

'So you'll go?'

'Got nothing better to do, Will.'

'Bloody white rats!'

Thomas led his men onto the mud. The hurdles were some help, but not as much as he had hoped, so that they still slipped and struggled their way towards the great stakes and Thomas reckoned the noise they made was enough to wake King Arthur and his knights. But the defenders were making even more noise. Every church bell was clanging, a trumpet was screaming, men were shouting, dogs barking, cockerels were crowing, and the crossbows were creaking and banging as their cords were inched back and released.

The walls loomed to Thomas's right. He wondered if the Blackbird was up there.
He had seen her twice now and been captivated by the fierceness of her face and her wild black hair.
A score of other archers had seen her too, and all of them men who could thread an arrow through a bracelet at a hundred paces, yet the woman still lived. Amazing, Thomas thought, what a pretty face could do.

He threw down the last hurdle and so reached the wooden stakes, each one a whole tree trunk sunk into the mud. His men joined him and they heaved against the timber until the rotted wood split like straw. The stakes made a terrible noise as they fell, but it was drowned by the uproar in the town. Jake, the cross-eyed murderer from Exeter gaol, pulled himself alongside Thomas. To their right now was a wooden quay with a rough ladder at one end. Dawn was coming and a feeble, thin, grey light was seeping from the east to outline the bridge across the Jaudy. It was a handsome stone bridge with a barbican at its further end, and Thomas feared the garrison of that tower might see them, but no one called an alarm and no crossbow bolts thumped across the river.

Thomas and Jake were first up the quay ladder,
then
came Sam, the youngest of Skeat's archers. The wooden landing stage served a timberyard and a dog began barking frantically among the stacked trunks, but Sam slipped into the blackness with his knife and the barking suddenly stopped. 'Good doggy,' Sam said as he came back.

'String your bows,' Thomas said. He had looped the hemp cord onto his own black weapon and now untied the laces of his arrow bag.

'I hate bloody dogs,' Sam said. 'One bit my mother when she was pregnant with me.'

'That's why you're daft,' Jake said.

'Shut your goddamn faces,' Thomas ordered. More archers were climbing the quay, which was swaying alarmingly, but he could see that the walls he was supposed to capture were thick with defenders now. English arrows, their white goose feathers bright in the flamelight of the defenders' fires, flickered over the wall and thumped into the town's thatched roofs. 'Maybe we should open the south gate,' Thomas suggested.

'Go through the town?' Jake asked in alarm.

'It's a small town,' Thomas said.

'You're mad,' Jake said, but he was grinning and he meant the words as a compliment.

'I'm going anyway,' Thomas said. It would be dark in the streets and their long bows would be hidden. He reckoned it would be safe enough.