I learned how to start a fire — better, faster and from all sorts of things. Fra Peter could make fire with a stone and the pommel of his sword — it was like watching a priest perform a miracle.
I learned to cook a few new dishes from Anne, in Avignon, and I taught them as well. The one I liked best was the Provencal dish I had eaten so often in Avignon — cassoulet.
I learned to be a better scout, for a campsite, or an army.
And every day, I learned to ride better. I learned to saddle and unsaddle, tack and untack, faster and more gently. To clean and maintain all my equipment and Sir Thomas’s.
Every day, we practised with our swords, often cutting the innocent vegetation. This allowed Fra Peter to discourse on how to cut or thrust, and then to further discourse on how to clean and sharpen.
You might have thought that, as a professional man-at-arms, I’d have resented this.
Perhaps Fiore and I aren’t so different. When Boucicault dropped me in the road, I learned a bitter lesson.
I wasn’t anywhere near as good as I thought I was.
Messieurs, Sir Jesus had the right of it — those of us who live by the sword will die by the sword. To us, the only thing more dangerous than our enemies is our own complacency.
I wasn’t too far gone to learn. I was twenty-one, and I’d just started to grow.
Calais. A fine town, growing every year. By the saviour, it is still growing. I reckon the town fathers don’t want King Richard to renew the war: they make their profit from being England’s door into France.
I thought it was the end of our journey, but after a meeting with a papal officer, we took ship for England.
I was overjoyed.
We landed twice, but our little ship carried us up out of the chop of the Channel and all the way to London. We landed across the river because of some trouble — I can’t remember what it was. Our horses came up out of the hold, and it was a day before they were anything like recovered. Fra Peter went ahead to the priory at Clerkenwell, and Juan and I stayed with the horses.
When they were alert and well fed, we rode them over the bridge, and I had the immense pleasure of wearing my donat’s coat into London.
Juan was the perfect companion — happy to be pleased. We rode west through the streets, and I showed him the tower, the churches, the Cheaping, the goldsmiths.
I was enthusiastic about my city, and yet I was all too aware that it was small next to Paris and dirty next to Avignon.
My sister was no longer at Clerkenwell, but had moved to the sister’s convent in the country. Despite that, our arrival at Clerkenwell had a sort of homecoming air to it, and we were welcomed by the prior in person and fed in the great hall. I felt as if I was a member of this great order.
The hall and barracks were packed. The order had been recruiting for the crusade, and they had twenty donats, mostly veteran men-at-arms. It made me proud to be one of them.
We stayed a week. There was nothing for Juan and I to do except watch the more attractive scullery maids, exercise in the yard and swagger about the streets of London, which we did with the attentiveness and belligerence of young men. London had had a generation of swaggering young men, fresh from victories in France and Flanders, and we were tolerated or ignored.
The beer was good.
By the third day, I was torn between conflicting desires, the strangest of which was to leave before something — some nameless fear — came to pass. I think I feared arrest. It is hard to say.
But I had nightmares two nights, and I dreamed of the Plague — I think it was the first time, but scarcely the last.
I woke the fourth morning, in the quiet certainty that I had to go and see my uncle. It is difficult to explain even now — I feared and hated him, and meant him harm, yet I had to visit.
I rose, walked down to the Thames and swam, and helped two boys from the Priory to water horses. Then I went back to my cell and washed and put on clean clothes. I left my war horse and my donat’s coat, and I walked, dressed like a modestly prosperous apprentice or journeyman, through the streets to my uncle’s house, wearing dull colours and a hood.
As I neared it, my heart beat harder and harder, and my breathing grew shallower. I was afraid.
The door was shut, which it should never have been on a day of work.
I stood looking at it for a while.
I knocked, and there was no answer.
I was. . relieved.
I walked up the conduit to Nan’s house. I had been told never to visit her again, but on the other hand, she had probably been my closest friend.
The shield of the Order was a powerful one. I couldn’t imagine being shown the door by an Alderman of London. Not if he wanted to be buried in a church.
I didn’t call at the shop door, but went to the garden wall, as I had used to when we were courting. I think that I hoped she would lean out from her window — I know I looked at it.
Suddenly she appeared.
I think my heart stopped.
She was not the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen — not after France — but beauty is a wonderful thing, and when you decide on beauty, it never fades. Nan was. . herself. And my heart soared to see her.
The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as a man, judged me worthy of a second look and gave the slightest smile, not really flirtatious but a firm acknowledgement of me, my upright carriage and my muscles (women look at these things even when they don’t think they do) and then — remember, I had a hood and she couldn’t see my hair — something gave me away. Her eyes became fuller and deeper and her regard solidified, then she leaped to her feet, leaned out the widow, shouted, ‘William!’ and vanished.
I could hear her running down the twisting chimney stairs.
The garden gate flew open and there was her mother, who grinned.
An excellent sign.
‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ cackled her mother. ‘William Gold, you haven’t been hanged. How fares it with thee?’ And she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek.
I confess that I found the phrase ‘haven’t been hanged’ a little too close to the bone, but I laughed, and then Nan slammed into me. She’d added flesh since fourteen, and she was hardly light — her hug was as hard as a man’s — but despite some gains, I picked her up and twirled her around her father’s garden.
‘Stop that, William! I weigh ten stone, now, and you’ll hurt your back.’ She laughed. ‘I’m an old married lady with two daughters.’
Her mother put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come into the kitchen and tell us your adventures,’ she said.
So I did.
An hour on, with two cups of candian wine in me, I met Nan’s da, who came in wearing enough finery to be abroad in Avignon or Paris — wool hose in his guild’s colours, and a jupon with a long velvet gown over it, all trimmed in fur. For July in England, it was a bit much, and he started stripping off before he noticed me.
‘William Gold?’ he asked, and before I could fear his reaction, he was pumping my hand. ‘We heard you was at Poitiers with the Prince,’ he said.
They had?
‘Your sister wrote to us,’ Nan said, eyes cast down but smiling widely. ‘And again last autumn, to say you’d paid her way to be a full sister. That’s how we knew you were. .’ she looked up. ‘Prosperous.’
‘A sister of the Order!’ the Alderman said. ‘You must bathe in gold, young William. How fare ye? Are you. . a scholar?’
I laughed. ‘I’m a soldier, master. I serve a knight of the Order, myself. I’m a lay brother.’ I shrugged. ‘The ladies have already heard all my stories.’
Which is to say, I’d left out the horror, the love-making and the dirt, and told the war stories in which I seemed a hero rather than those in which I seemed a fool. Like most young men at home after war.