He held my hand while a pair of archers splinted my left arm after straightening it, then he led me back onto the darkening battlefield. We didn’t have the time other men had, and many of the choice bodies had been picked clean already, but the corpse of Walter de Brienne was found by the heralds just as we passed into the area the locals now call the Champs de Mars. He’d been lying at the bottom of a pile of bodies, including a horse.
As soon as Hawkwood saw him, he called to Master Peter, who was busy stripping purses, and a dozen of our archers, including Monk John.
‘I’ll pay cash for that corpse,’ he said. ‘Intact.’
They rolled the horse off Walter de Brienne in no time, and six men pulled him out of the pile. He was in head-to-toe plate, the very latest. And he was my size — a big man. Sir John had seen that immediately.
His beautiful breast and backplate would never fit me, because he was old and overweight, but his legs and arms fit well enough. I was going to spurn his helmet as he’d vomited blood into it.
‘Are you a blushing virgin?’ Hawkwood said. ‘This is a brothel, miss, and this is a man’s prick.’ He shoved the helmet at me. It was far, far better than mine, with a magnificent aventail of fine mail, but the man’s blood and bile was all over it. I turned and heaved, and John laughed.
Monk John stripped de Brienne’s arm harnesses and stacked them and the upper and lower legs like firewood beside me. I was trying to recover, and he slapped me on the back.
‘I owe you, laddy. Here’s the payment. You’ll be a man-at-arms. Who knew, when you were a little thief at the door of the Abbott?’ John laughed. ‘You’ll be a gent. Remember us little archers, eh?’
I got to my feet, and the archers made a game of it. ‘We’re building a knight,’ they said, laughing. They ran all over the field, squandering their spirit like drunkards — indeed, we were all drunk on victory and fatigue. I got a new-fangled Italian steel frontplate, and a magnificent blue velvet-covered brigantine, and a pair of fine hardened-steel shoulder rondels in the Italian style and several pairs of gauntlets.
‘They like you,’ Hawkwood said. He was sitting by me in the dark as Abelard came and dropped a chain hauberk in my lap. The links were superb — almost white in the moonlight. ‘They like to see one of their own go ahead,’ he added.
They did, too, because while we sat there, men came and embraced Sir John and complimented him on his knighthood. And men brought us wine. Abelard drank deep. ‘I’m waiting to hear some praise for that shirt,’ he said.
Hawkwood spotted a hole. ‘Didn’t help the last owner,’ he said.
Abelard grunted. ‘I carried that fucking mail across the field,’ he said. He grinned at me. ‘The Duke de Bourbon,’ he chortled. ‘Never say I didn’t do anything for you, Judas.’
And that was the Battle of Poitiers.
Paris 1357-59
Paris? Paris was. . astonishing. Horrible. And damned confusing. When the French tried to rid themselves of their King. Oh, I was there.
After Poitiers, nothing went as we expected. I spent enough time with the Earl of Oxford and the Prince after the battle to know what they expected, and I was present — carving meat — when Sir Neil Loring came to Bordeaux from King Edward of England. He told us that all we had to do was hold the King of France and wait for all France to fall in our laps like ripe fruit.
But it didn’t happen.
What happened was much worse — for France and for us.
First, Paris declared itself to be the government. Ah, mes freres, that’s purest crap, but it’s true nonetheless. Before Poitiers, there were quite a few Frenchmen — nobles, merchants, peasants and churchmen — who thought King Jean was anything but ‘the good’, and after the battle, such voices were loudest, and instead of ransoming him, they as much as declared they could govern better without him.
Truth be told, he’d failed them. He’d never beat us in the field, and now he’d failed, lost and been captured. With him went, well, the government, eh? Dead or captured. His cowardly son, the Dauphin, slipped away and tried to govern, but Paris wasn’t having it, and when the parliament was summoned, they voted no money for ransoming the King of France and damned little for war.
Perhaps you remember, messieurs? Or do they tell a different story in Hainault? I’m damned sure the French tell a nicer story now. Not one about how they ate each other while we nibbled at the edges.
Paris ended in the hands of a mercer, who made himself the tyrant. He was named Etienne Marcel and, after a lot of blood and words, he emerged as the leader of a party. Charles of Navarre — you must know that name. I’m no follower of his, by the Virgin. Navarre was the son-in-law of the King of France and, despite that, the most treacherous, conniving bastard France ever produced. He was also the head of a party, even when in prison for treason, where King John had put him. He was put there because he and his brother gave us, the English, much of Normandy. When King John was taken at Poitiers, Charles of Navarre — still in prison, mind you — began to talk, and people began to listen.
I had a friend, a French knight — you’ll hear more about him — who used to say that Charles of Navarre was so poisonous he left a trail of slime wherever he crawled. Ha! Be your own judge.
Navarre’s brother, Philippe, wasn’t in prison, and he signed a treaty with King Edward, and the war moved out of Gascony and up north to Brittany and Normandy. Navarre handed over the keys to Normandy, will he, nil he, and every free companion — every man not bound by a feudal oath or retinue pay — picked up his harness, borrowed money from the Italians and headed north, where the ransoms were rich.
I was in love with being a gentleman, which I was, of sorts. In the big, rambling, tumbledown archbishop’s palace in Bordeaux, the Prince kept great state, and I was one of many squires who attended on him personally. I was loosely attached to the Earl of Oxford, who, himself, went back and forth between England and Gascony freely. No one provided me wages, so I had to scrounge in a distinctly ungentlemanly way to maintain myself in a tiny garret room under the eaves of a private house. But it was dry and warm.
Bordeaux became a rich town overnight, both as the Prince’s seat of government in Gascony, as the entrepot for the sale of all that loot, as the banking centre handling the ransoms of half of France’s nobility and, of course, as the centre of the English wine trade. There was a great deal of money moving about the town, and it was annoying to be poor. At the same time, the town was full of refugees and peasants, displaced from their homes by the war, and they were fleeced like sheep, and sometimes bought and sold like them, too.
Well, I can make a thousand excuses.
It started innocently enough — my landlord raised the rent of my tiny room, and I was in the street with too much armour and too little cash. Then and there I considered following Sir John to Normandy. He was taking his leave of the Earl of Oxford to go with Seguin de Badefol and Petit Mechin to see what ransoms they could gain in the north. But it was autumn, and I had released my own capture on parole to collect the gold for his ransom: 450 ducats. A Genoese offered me 100 ducats flat on the ransom — in cash. I was sorely tempted, as I wasn’t eating very often or well, and the high point of my week was waiting on the Prince’s table after Mass on Sundays and feast days, because with the other squires I could eat the pickings, which were richer than most food I could buy. I am not ashamed to say that sometimes I would fill a leather bag with food — roast peacock, roast beef, messes of rice with saffron — anything that the cooks would let me take.
The same evening that Sir John offered to take me to Normandy as a man-at-arms, he invited me to dinner at an inn called the Three Foxes. It’s still there.
I loved that place — my first castle. It was built where two streets emptied into a square, and the inn itself was laid out in a triangle, which narrowed as the two streets converged. It had some glass windows in brilliantly mullioned panels, and beautifully carved woodwork — carved, I’m given to understand, by an artist who could not pay his tab.