The rain ended at dawn. A chill wind came from the west and the rain slid away across France and the sun fought against cloud as the enemy gunners hammered the newly made sow with gun-stones that wasted their power on the thick log parapet. Hook and his archers slept, sheltering under the crude cabins they had made from tree boughs, earth, and ferns. When Hook woke he found Melisande scrubbing his mail coat with sand and vinegar. “Rouille,” she said in explanation.
“Rust?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You can polish my coat, darling,” Will of the Dale said as he crawled from his shelter.
“Do your own, William,” Melisande said. “I cleaned Tom’s, though.”
“Well done,” Hook said. All the archers were worried about Thomas Scarlet whose customary cheerfulness had been buried with his twin brother. Scarlet scowled these days, or else sat by himself, brooding. “All he wants,” Hook said quietly, “is to meet your father again.”
“Then Thomas will die,” Melisande said bleakly.
“He loves you,” Hook said.
“My father?”
“He let you live. He let you stay with me.”
“He let you live too,” she said, almost resentfully.
“I know.”
She paused. Her gray eyes watched Harfleur, which was ringed with gunsmoke like a sea fog shrouding a cliff. Hook put his wet boots to dry beside the campfire. The burning wood spat and shot sparks. It was willow, and willow always protested against burning. “He loved my mother, I think,” Melisande said wistfully.
“Did he?”
“She was beautiful,” Melisande said, “and she loved him. She said he was so beautiful too. A beautiful man.”
“Handsome,” Hook allowed.
“Beautiful,” Melisande insisted.
“When you met him in the trees,” Hook asked, “did you want him to take you away?”
She gave an abrupt shake of her head. “No,” she said, “I think he is a bad angel. And I think he is in my head like the saint is in yours,” she turned to look at him, “and I wish he would go away.”
“You think about him? Is that it?”
“I always wanted him to love me,” she said harshly, and started scouring the mail again.
“As he loved your mother?”
“No! Non!” She was angry, and for a while she said nothing, then relented. “Life is hard, Nicholas, you know that. It is work and work and work and worry where the food will come from and it is more work, and a lord, any lord, can stop all that. They can wave their hand and there is no more work, no more worry, just facile.”
“Easy?”
“And I wanted that.”
“Tell him you want that.”
“He is beautiful,” Melisande said, “but he is not kind. I know that. And I love you. Je t’aime.” She said the last words decidedly, without apparent affection, but Hook was struck dumb by them. He watched archers bringing firewood to the camp. Melisande grimaced with the effort of scrubbing the sand on the mail coat. “You know of Sir Robert Knolles?” she asked suddenly.
“Of course I do,” Hook said. Every archer knew of Sir Robert, who had died rich not many years before.
“He was an archer once,” Melisande said.
“That’s how he started,” Hook agreed, wondering how Melisande knew of the legendary Sir Robert.
“And he became a knight,” Melisande said, “he led armies! And now Sir John has made you a ventenar.”
“A ventenar isn’t a knight,” Hook said, smiling.
“But Sir Robert was a ventenar once!” Melisande said fiercely, “and then he became a centenar, and then a man-at-arms, and after that a knight! Alice told me. And if he could do it, why not you?”
That vision was so astonishing that Hook could only stare at her for a moment. “Me? A man-at-arms?” he finally said.
“Why not?”
“I’m not born to that!”
“Nor was Sir Robert.”
“Well, it does happen,” Hook said dubiously. He knew of other archers who had led companies and become rich. Sir Robert was the most famous, but archers also remembered Thomas of Hookton who had died as lord of a thousand acres. “But it doesn’t happen often,” Hook went on, “and it takes money.”
“And what is war to you men but money? They talk without end of prisoners? Of ransoms?” Melisande pointed her brush at him and grinned mischievously. “Capture my father. We’ll ransom him. We’ll take his money.”
“You’d like that, would you?” Hook asked.
“Yes,” she said vengefully, “I would like that.”
Hook tried to imagine being rich. Of receiving a ransom that would be more than most men could earn in a lifetime, and then he forgot that dream as John Fletcher, who was one of the older archers and a man who had shown some resentment at Hook’s promotion, suddenly flinched and ran toward the midden trench. Fletcher’s face looked pale. “Fletch is ill,” Hook said.
“And poor Alice was horribly sick this morning,” Melisande said, wrinkling her nose in distaste, “la diarrhée!”
Hook decided he did not want to know more about Alice Godewyne’s sickness, and he was saved from further details by Sir John Cornewaille’s arrival. “Are we awake?” the knight bellowed, “are we awake and breathing?”
“We are now, Sir John,” Hook answered for the archers.
“Then down to the trenches! Down to the trenches! Let’s get this goddam siege done!”
Hook donned his damp boots and half-scrubbed mail, pulled on his helmet and surcoat, then went to the trenches. The siege went on.
SIX
The sow shuddered each time a gun-stone struck its sloping face. The logs that formed the face were battered, split, and bristling with springolt bolts, but the enemy’s missiles had failed to break the heavy shield or even weaken it, and beneath the layers of timber and earth the Welsh miners went to work.
Other shafts were being driven on Harfleur’s eastern side where the Duke of Clarence’s forces were camped, and from both east and west the guns roared and the stones clawed at the walls, the mangonels and trebuchets dropped boulders into the town, smoke and dust erupted and plumed from the narrow streets while the mines crept toward the ramparts. The eastern shafts were being driven under the walls where great caverns, shored with timber, would be clawed out of the chalk and, when the time came, the timber supports would be burned away so that the caverns would collapse and bring down the ramparts above. The western mine, its entrance guarded by the sow Hook had helped make, was intended to tunnel under the vast battered bastion that protected the Leure Gate. Bring that barbican down and the English army could attack the breach beside the gate without any danger of being assaulted on their flank by the barbican’s garrison. So the Welshmen dug and the archers guarded their sow and the town suffered.
The barbican had been made from great oak trunks that had been sunk into the earth and then hooped with iron. The trunks had formed the outline of two squat round towers joined by a brief curtain wall, and their interior had been rammed with earth and rubble, the whole protected by a flooded ditch facing the besiegers. The English guns had splintered the nearest timbers so that the earth had spilled out to make a steep unstable ramp that filled one part of the ditch, yet still the bastion resisted. Its ruin was manned by crossbowmen and men-at-arms, and its banners hung defiantly from what remained of its wooden ramparts. Each night, when the English guns ceased fire, the defenders made repairs and the dawn would reveal a new timber palisade and the guns would have to begin their slow work of demolition again. Other guns fired at the town itself.
When Hook had first seen Harfleur it had looked almost magical to him: a town of tight roofs and church steeples all girdled by a white, tower-studded wall that had glowed in the August sun. It had looked like the painted town in the picture of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian in Soissons Cathedral, the picture he had stared at for so long as he said his prayers.