I’ll make this brief — you all want to hear about Paris and Brignais. I want you to know what our lives were like in the companies, and this is all part of that. So, in short, by the time my wounds healed, I had fifteen girls, and the Black Squire and I ran the inn. The innkeeper was a big man, but not a brave one, and he was used to being bullied by a much more evil bastard than me. Musard terrified him, with his black skin.
As to the girls, I am not proud of being a pimp, but there are ways and ways. Even then, I wasn’t willing to pimp directly. In fact, Marie did all the work, and all Richard and I did was glare at the customers and collect the coins.
Sometimes a girl would come and say she’d had a problem.
The first time was the worst, but it made life easier for us. Anne was working on her back and the man she’d taken started to hit her with his fists. She screamed. Marie came for me, but I was already moving. I went into that room — a room barely big enough to fuck — and there’s a man my size, stinking of wine, his hose and braes off, his hairy arse bare, pummelling this small girl-
Good Christ.
I caught one of his hands the way I’d learned from Abelard, in a dagger lock. Look here — punch at me, see? I catch your hand like this — eh bien? — I could make you scream like a woman giving birth.
So I trapped his hand under my dagger blade and twisted, and he came off the girl. He followed me down the steep steps to the courtyard, bellowing curses and bile all the way.
I put his left hand on the chopping block in the inn yard and drove my rondel dagger through it. I left him there, nailed to the block, until Anne came, kicked him a few times, raised her skirts and pissed on him.
Afterwards, she kissed me and called me her true knight.
Aye, the paragon of chivalry and protector of women.
Here’s the funny thing, though. I took good care of Geoffrey de Charny’s rondel dagger, but I must have left the man pinned to the chopping block too long. Because when I took the dagger free, the whoreson’s blood had left a stain on the steel, and I couldn’t polish it out.
Ah, I have shocked you, messieurs. Let us discuss this like gentlemen.
Running an inn was hardly to be reconciled with the life of a knight, you might think, and yet, what men-at-arms do in the field is rape and murder. We kill each other and we kill peasants. We burn farms and we take loot — even in Italy, and twice as much when fighting pagans or saracens.
I went to a hard school that summer of Poitiers. And when I was done, I had learned how to kill and how to survive. I thought I was a fine sword, a good lance and a gentleman. I confess to you that what I knew of chivalry might have fit inside one of the illuminated letters monks use at the beginning of a gospel — just one. I wanted to be worth more. I wanted to fight, and be preux. That’s what I knew.
Of chivalry’s finer feelings, I knew next to nothing. In fact, I was worse than that. I heard the old troubadour songs about courtly love, honour and loyalty, and I thought them lies.
I did fear the law and the loss of respect. I knew full well that if the Prince ever heard of any of this, I’d have been out in an instant. But thanks be to God, our clients were discreet. We gathered girls, and they came to us, for no better reason than that neither Richard nor I beat our girls — Christ, men are animals. I was an animal. I rutted with every girl in my stable. I was their lord and master.
I confess, I ate well, dressed well and, twice a week, I waited at table on my Prince. I remember one evening, he stopped in a corridor where I was enjoying a cup of his wine with two of his squires. I was wearing a good black linen jupon, carefully embroidered with crosses, and matching wool hose, and I had a silk coat over the whole in a fine red-brown. It was my best, and my shoes matched, and I had de Charny’s dagger in my belt.
The Prince stopped and I made my obeisance.
‘You have done well for yourself, Master Gold,’ he said. I flushed, because he knew my name. ‘Has your prisoner paid his ransom?’
‘No, my Prince.’ I tried to smile, to make it a joke. ‘Some. . money from rents, your Grace.’
He laughed. ‘Ah, you have rents?’ he said, and I could see I’d just climbed in his estimation. ‘I am remiss, Master Gold. Are you John or William?’
‘William, your Grace.’ I bowed again.
‘I remember you from Poitiers, and elsewhere,’ he said. ‘I seem to remember you as a cook.’ He laughed.
‘I was a cook,’ I admitted. ‘My mother was a de Vere and my father served as a man-at-arms, but. .’
He nodded absently. ‘Yes, of course.’ His eyes scanned the crowd of courtiers, who were pressing in, wondering who I was. Sir John Chandos stepped up closer to the Prince and took my hand.
Sir John Chandos, shaking my hand.
‘I remember you at Poitiers,’ he said. ‘You were there when de Charny fell.’
‘I have his dagger,’ I said. I didn’t mention that I’d just used the paragon of chivalry’s dagger to pin a bad client to a chopping block so my whores could punish him. That seemed like a bad idea.
The Prince smiled at me. ‘You fought well,’ he said. ‘Men like you, with the help of God, gave me that victory.’
He turned away and I was aglow. For a moment I forgot that I was a pimp. I was a great man-at-arms, a soldier in the retinue of the finest prince in Christendom, the best lance in the west.
Sir John Chandos waited until the Prince swept on down the corridor. ‘You were a cook,’ he said pleasantly. ‘And now you seem on the road to being a knight.’
No one was more pleased to hear it than me. I had waited tables in the archbishop’s palace for almost a year, and suddenly my service was remembered.
I went home, floating on a cloud of knightly valour, and ordered Marie to wash herself and decline clients. I ordered wine and we had a fine night.
Towards morning, she kissed me. ‘Am I allowed to tell you that I like you, protector?’
I rolled on top of her and tickled her. We were very young to be so hard, and neither one of us was as hard as we pretended.
Sometimes, we had a fine time.
Spring came, in the year of our lord 1358. Sir John sent me a letter for the Prince, which seemed to me an odd conceit, but I read his covering letter, blushing at his praise of me. He had more than eighty lances, and he had fought his way across Brittany — not, as it proved, Normandy.
I read enough of his letter to the Prince — pardon me, gentles, but the only seal was on his letter to me — to know that he had seized castles for the King of Navarre and was offering them, unofficially, to our Prince.
I gave his letter into Sir John Chandos’s hands, and he looked at me very thoughtfully and gave me five golden ducats for the delivery — a great deal of money.
It wasn’t many days after, when I stood in my room at the inn — a fine room — dressing for court. I was not wealthy enough to have a male servant, but Marie generally saw to my appearance with the practicality of a farm girl. I remember she wanted to go to Mass, and wanted me to come — she wanted us to go to Mass together. I was not an enemy to God like the Bourc, but neither was I a hypocrite, and I didn’t relish facing God with a purse stuffed full of coins from whores.
Killing men is so much nobler, now, isn’t it? And look at that young cock — afraid to face God while aglow with praise from his worldly Prince, and still breathing hard from a fine morning ride with his whore. How many men live in a man?
At any rate, I was half dressed, in my hose and braes and a shirt and sleeveless doublet when there was a commotion in the inn’s yard.
I threw open the windows and looked out.
There were half-a dozen men on bad horses in the yard.
Richard Musard had his sword drawn.
You could tell at a glance that these were hard men, and that the talking part was over.