Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (27 page)

Arthur slept in the adjacent room with his nanny. Though having him in bed with us was often comforting—to all three of us—he was a very active sleeper, and Lili and I slept better without him.

I looked at William. “How do we know they’re landing at Hythe?” It was a town of roughly two thousand, southwest of Dover.

“A fisherman spotted the sails in the channel and turned for shore to warn the town. He says the boats must carry hundreds of men and horses, sire.” William’s face was pale in the torchlight. I was impressed with the way my other advisers were continuing to ensure that it was William who brought me news, rather than any of them, and I wondered at what point he would figure out that it wasn’t the honor he thought it was.

“The Portsman of Hythe himself sent a rider to Dover to tell us of it.”

Some, who didn’t know the intricacies of England’s maritime alert system, might call it luck—and we seemed to be getting our share of it—but the fishermen of Kent had been sent out from every port and village to watch for the French, so it was no coincidence that one of them had reported back as soon as he’d spied the fleet. As with Dover, the men of Hythe constituted a Cinque Port: owing service to the crown to defend England from invasion. Since yesterday, the word had been sent up and down the coastline, from Weymouth all the way up to Yarmouth, that the French were coming.

Some of my advisers had questioned my decision to retain the Cinque Ports as a semi-military unit once I established the royal navy. They saw the ports as independent to a fault and difficult to control. I couldn’t disagree with their assessment—the portsmen
were
difficult to control. Sometimes trying to get them to agree on anything was like herding cats. It was worse than Parliament. But as I was a red-blooded American, my sympathies lay with them. I understood their drive for self-governance. In the long run, England would be better off with more of it, not less.

As it turned out, after a somewhat rocky start, the two halves of our defense fleet had been rubbing shoulders without an excess of rivalry or conflict, once the Cinque Ports understood I wasn’t planning on closing them down or restricting their privileges. This threat from the French was lighting a fire under both organizations.

The Navy had never been called upon to fight and wanted to prove itself in battle. Since Lacy had been the first to warn me that the French might be coming, the initial bragging rights had gone to them. The Cinque Ports would want to even things out by being the first to take on the French, and the Portsman of Hythe would want to prove to me that his people were capable of defending England and were still relevant.

I didn’t care who took on the French first, as long as they were stopped. It would be better if nobody decided to be a hero and go it alone, but we might not have a choice about that. Though all the fleets were on alert, it would take time for word to reach each town and for the boats to sail to Hythe, which meant that the men of that town had to hold out until reinforcements arrived.

I could see why the French had chosen Hythe as the best place to land their fleet. It had a good flat beach, and it was one of the few beaches along the Kent coast that didn’t have massive cliffs overlooking it. When Julius Caesar had attempted to land at Dover, the sight of the opposing army of Britons standing on the cliffs above the port, brandishing their weapons and screaming at him, had sent him scurrying north to Walmer to find a better place to land. Such was the Roman war machine that Caesar had managed not only to land his ships, unload men and horses, and form up, but he’d done it while under constant fire from above, since the Britons had followed him up the coast. I could see them now in my mind’s eye, taunting him the whole way.

I had no idea if Philip knew his history, but Walmer had certainly been a possible landing spot for him, particularly if he knew about the army I had standing on the cliffs of Dover. My men, like their long-dead brethren, were ready to repel an invasion. Also like the ancient Britons, my army was mobile, but I didn’t exactly have a convoy of trucks by which to move them. Caesar had come across the English Channel at its narrowest point, not knowing what lay on the other side. Philip knew that the center of my fleet was at Dover, and wisely had chosen to land at a spot fifteen miles away. I could be grateful that he hadn’t decided to go fifteen miles farther to Dungeness.

William recognized the expression on my face. “Sir Stephen says the men of Hythe will be crushed.”

“And what does Jack Butcher say?”

William cleared his throat and looked down at the ground. “I cannot repeat it in your presence, sire, other than to say that he respectfully disagreed.”

I laughed. “I bet you can’t. Let me put on my boots and you can help me into my armor.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“We’ll need every archer,” I said, with a glance at the door through which Lili lay sleeping. My archers accompanied me everywhere, but we didn’t have two hundred horses available for them. They had nearly fifteen miles to march to reach Hythe beach.

“Lord Ieuan already has them moving.”

“How late are we going to be?” Whether because she couldn’t lie there and wait for the news or because she could hear me through the door, Lili had risen and now stood in the doorway. She’d lit the candles in our room. Branwen, her maid, and Jeeves, my manservant, had entered the room through a side door and were bustling about, choosing clothing. William and I returned to the room. Jeeves would help me dress, but William was my squire and would arm me. He began laying out my gear while I put on a pair of socks.

“Dawn is less than hour away, my lady, and it seems the French intend to make the beach before the sun rises,” William said.

I exchanged a look with Lili, and her expression showed worry. We couldn’t reach Hythe in an hour, not with the kind of force we needed to repel an invasion. Our need to organize ourselves was going to give the French precious time on the beach at Hythe. Both successful invasions of England by the French—the first in 1066 and the second in 1215—had succeeded in part because the landings had been unopposed.

If I were invading the beaches of France, I would have chosen the gray light before dawn too. At that hour, the white beach would stand out, and sometimes you could see all around you more clearly than a few minutes later when the sun was shining behind you. Not that we’d had a plethora of sunny days recently.

I wasn’t going to second-guess Dover’s Portsman about the doughtiness of the men of Hythe, but unless they’d been practicing their archery such that they were better than my Welshmen, they didn’t stand a chance against the French fleet and would be better off waiting for our reinforcements. The best I could hope for now was containment.

“What do you want from me?” Lili said.

Jeeves had polished my boots until they shone, and he handed the right one to me. I paused before putting it on, surprised she’d asked the question in front of everyone else. And then I realized she’d done so because she knew what my answer was going to be and was going to accept it. “I want you to help defend Dover, which will need defending if we’re wrong about where the French are landing. I can think of a scenario where Philip sends an expeditionary force to Hythe to distract us, while the main body of the fleet lands right underneath us here.”

Lili nodded, looking down at her feet. I leaned sideways a bit to see into her face, but when she looked up, it showed simple concern, not the intensity of yesterday.

“Do you have a further thought?” I said hopefully.

She shook her head. She couldn’t force the
sight
to come to her; we just had to be grateful when it did. I consoled myself that at least she wasn’t having foresight of my death.

“All the Cinque Ports are on alert, my lord,” William said. “The men of Dover are moving into position now. Ships have put to sea and are sailing for Hythe as we speak.”

“From what direction comes the wind?” Jeeves said. He might not be a warrior himself, but he knew a thing or two about warfare.

“The southwest, as usual,” William said.

I grunted my disappointment. “Our ships won’t beat those of us on horseback there—and maybe not even those on foot, not sailing into the wind like that.”

“No, sire.” William bowed his head.

“I don’t suppose a storm is coming?” Lili asked.

“Portsman Jack cursed the absence, my lady,” William said. “We can’t count on such luck today.”

I sighed, accepting the fickleness of the weather without too much resentment. The rainy summer had put water in the ditches at Dover, which had allowed me to dispense with Lee, so I could hardly complain that it wasn’t going to come through for me on all occasions. Besides, before I’d been crowned King of England, a storm had saved Wales from domination by a rogue alliance of Norman barons, led by William de Valence. It would be unfair to expect divine intervention twice.

“Where’s Edmund Mortimer?” I said.

“The riders who went in search of him have not yet returned, sire,” William said. “If he was in Herefordshire like my father, as last we heard, it will take days to reach him there, and more time for them to return.”

I nodded, accepting the truth of William’s words. It would do no good to curse the fact that an earthquake hadn’t brought Mortimer’s castle a hundred and fifty miles closer to Dover overnight.

Within another few minutes, William had armed me. Lili walked with me to the door, and I kissed her goodbye. “Be safe,” she said.

“Always,” I said.

We didn’t discuss the fact that we spoke the same words to each other every time I left, but no king could lead his men into battle and remain safe. That was the reality of war in the Middle Ages. I was facing death for the fourth time in four days.

Chapter Twenty-seven

A
force of two thousand men, including my two hundred archers, marched towards Hythe. While my cavalry and I could reach it in two or three hours at worst, fewer than five hours was probably pushing it for those on foot. At least in this case, we had no baggage—it was a straight shot down the road as quickly as we could travel. We would worry about food and supplies once we knew what we were facing.

The Archdeacon of Canterbury, one Richard de Ferings, had a castle and church at Lympne, two miles to the northwest of Hythe. He might find himself descended upon tonight by me and more men than he thought he could feed. Given how things had gone back in Canterbury, however, I assumed he wouldn’t complain about it or feel he had anyone he could complain to, barring Pope Boniface himself.

Since the incident with Lee, I’d almost forgotten about my dispute with the pope. It was odd to think that two days ago I thought I could—and needed to—put my concerns about Lee on the back burner. At least, with the French spies locked in the basement, I had their testimony to fall back on when it came time for negotiations with Philip and the pope. I had every intention of putting both Archbishop Romeyn and Geoffrey de Geneville to good use as my ambassadors. For once, I’d have gravitas on my side.

The sun was well up by the time we rode from the cliffs at Dover, keeping to the high ground more than three hundred feet above sea level. The sick pit of tension in my stomach drove me forward, and all of us kept our eyes on the sea to the southeast, straining to see the sails of the French fleet and praying we would reach Hythe before the French did.

We didn’t.

And what’s more, it didn’t matter.

We approached the town, still on the high ground, and came to a complete halt. At the top of the ridge, with still a half-mile to go to the beach, we could see sails in the distance off shore, but they weren’t coming inland to join the handful of ships that had already landed. I pulled out my binoculars and stared through them until the men around me grew impatient with my sudden stillness and silence.

Finally, Clare said, “What is it? What’s happening?”

I scanned up and down the beach. All along it, men, women, and even children mingled, while others worked to lay out dead men in rows. There must have been at least a hundred dead on one section of the beach, while a smaller number—perhaps two dozen—had been laid together fifty yards closer to the town.

As I watched, one man stabbed a flagpole, with a French flag flying from it, into the sand and set it alight—to match the three others that were already burning farther down the beach. The people seemed completely unconcerned about the French ships that remained in the Channel.

At first I gaped, speechless, and couldn’t answer the men, and then I laughed. “See for yourself.” I handed the binoculars to Clare. “The army we brought appears surplus to requirements. Portsman Jack Butcher of Dover is going to be very, very happy that he was right.”

I spurred my horse. Clare was slow to respond, since he’d been looking through my binoculars. I would have thought he’d have acquired his own by now, but maybe they were in the bottom of his saddle bags. Regardless, he and my other companions caught up to me quickly.

I led the cavalry down the hill and through the town of Hythe. Not a single person came out to greet us, not surprising since the entire village was on the beach. Five minutes later, we spilled out onto the wide sand—flags flying, armor glinting in the sunlight—into a fight that had already been won.

Three French galleys—large, well-built, and empty—had been pulled up onto the sands. Englishmen swarmed over them, some passing items to other men and women who’d made a path through the shallow water from the ships to a stash of goods that was piling up a few yards above the high water mark.

At first nobody noticed us, and then a man in a hat with a flamboyant white feather raised his hand above his head and waved. “The king! The king is here!”

As one, the people on the beach stopped what they were doing, turned to look at us, and sent up an enormous cheer, complete with hats tossed into the air in jubilation. I shook my head in wonder. The dead men on the beach weren’t English fisher folk. Uniforms tended to be haphazardly worn in the Middle Ages, but I could tell the difference between the villagers’ attire and that of the dead French soldiers.