I’ve known a lot of treason and seen many men change sides — benidictee, in Italy it was our daily bread — but Charles of Navarre was the only King I ever saw abandon a winning cause, and betray it to the enemy, when he had been leading it. I won’t say the Jacques thought they were fighting for King Charles.
They were just poor fools led by the nose.
Which didn’t make them any the less dangerous. They had thousands of men packed around Meaux, and inside the town — a rich town. They held the walls and the citadel, and they were building engines to batter at Marche. They were desperate — all the survivors of Mello fled to them, so they knew what was coming. They were determined to take Marche and use the Dauphin — or at least his wife and children — as hostages.
I had ridden into this trap like a fool — I had lorded it over Sam when we crossed at the ferry.
When he saw what we had at Marche — a party of military pilgrims returning from fighting in Prussia, led by the Captal and the famous Count of Foix, and the lord of the castle, the Sieur de Hangst and his conroy — we had perhaps sixty knights. Sam Bibbo was a fifth of all the English archers — the rest were in the Captal’s tail — and we had another twenty crossbowmen, and when he saw what we’d joined, he looked at me and laughed.
‘I may not pay you yet,’ he said.
Perhaps a hundred armed men, plus twenty male servants. The Princess had thirty women — all the daughters and wives of great nobles of France — and another fifty female servants, as well as a small horde of noble children. As I say, when Sam saw what we’d ridden into, he laughed in my face.
‘All safe now, eh, sir?’ he asked.
‘Who nursed you when you were sick?’ I asked. ‘Who rescued you when you fell from your horse and hit your head?’
‘And why was I there in the first place, I wonder?’ he asked.
‘We’re not dead yet,’ I said.
‘Not for lack of trying,’ he insisted.
The trouble was, we weren’t provisioned to stand a siege. The other problem was, we had too many hot-headed young knights and too many noble girls.
Women complicate everything.
I hadn’t been in that castle an hour when a pair of young women, wearing, may I add, clothes more daring than anything my girls in Bordeaux ever wore, confronted me on the stairs.
‘What is your name and style, messire?’ asked the taller of the two. She wore a flowered silk gown that clung to her hips and bound under her breasts. Her hair was down — a style I’d hardly ever seen, because women in military camps keep their hair under caps for all sorts of reasons.
I noted that her surcoat — also silk — had buttons on the side, under her arms, and that the gown was so tight the cloth puckered at the buttons and left gaps between.
Where you could see flesh.
Gentles, I don’t think I’d seen a woman who was alive and hearty in a month. That noble sprig was perhaps seventeen — my own age — and her womanliness burned like fire from between those close-bound buttons, so that I almost felt I could smell her, like a stallion smells a mare.
I was abashed. I don’t think I’d ever had cause to speak to a noble girl. On the other hand, I had learned the knack that women were, for the most part, women, and much the same as men. So, with about the same effort it took me to force a smile at the Bourc, I pushed one across my teeth at this apparition of Venus. ‘William Gold,’ I said.
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Never heard of you. Nonetheless, should you not be in your armour, messire? Perhaps doing some deed of arms, and not here in the castle, safe with the women? Eh?’
Had I been thirty years of age and a little more experienced, I’d have made an elegant answer — mentioned my prowess in riding to their rescue across half of France, for example.
Instead, I blushed, and stammered something about fatigue.
‘Fie! Sir Knight, we are a castle of maidens against an army of dogs. Get to the walls! And let us hear no more of your being tired.’ She and her companion, a pert, blonde thing a foot shorter in royal-blue wool with silken flowers in her hair and sleeves so long they trailed on the steps, pushed past me and vanished down the stairs.
‘You get to that,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll have a nap.’
In fact, the castle was full to bursting with beautiful women. The nuns were beautiful, the Dauphine herself was beautiful, and she surrounded herself with the prettiest — and richest — women in France.
I had no armour against them, and nor did any other man. Even grown knights who should have known better, like Jean de Grailly and the Count of Foix — a subtle bastard if every there was one — were unable to stop them from directing our defence. Young knights armed themselves, mounted their chargers and rode out across the fortified bridges, looking for a deed of arms.
Several were killed, dragged down and hacked to death, and the only thing that saved the rest of us was that we wanted our deeds of arms to be visible to the audience on the tall towers, and most of the peasants and Parisian militia were too quick-witted to linger under our walls.
It was a great time of vows, in my youth, and men would make vows without a thought. Amazing vows. I made a few myself, and suffered with some eye patches and the like. It was the vows that killed us in the castle of Marche — the vows and the lack of supplies. It was a great fortress, but the peasants had caught it unprepared. So while the young men swore not to bathe until they’d killed ten peasants, and other such pretty things, we had two days’ fodder for the horses and four days’ food at half rations. And 100 men against 10,000.
And a small army of nubile beauties determined to see us act out the chansons de geste under the walls.
War is never what you expect it to be. Sometimes, it is like theatre — like a passion play. Sometimes it is like the Black Plague — all death and horror.
Sometimes it has an element of humour.
I rose late the second morning. I think, now, that I had a touch of fever, and I was only just recovering. I’d been riding and fighting, and I’d missed a great deal of sleep. So my first morning at Marche, Sam let me stay abed — in a real bed, raised off the floor, in a small solar. I remember it had crude armorial frescoes on the walls and I thought it was a palace.
I awoke when Perkin, my English potboy from Poissy, brought me hippocras. He’d arranged for my two shirts to be washed, and all my caps, and they were dry and crisply ironed.
I felt like hugging him. That made me think of Rob, dead and buried in the damp soil of the Seine Valley.
Younger than me.
‘A party of gentlemen has just gone out to fight,’ he said. ‘Some of the older knights tried to stop them.’ He shrugged.
He brought me a basin of clean, hot water, and he’d borrowed me a razor. Considering I’d barely talked to him, he was bidding fair to be the best servant I’d ever had. Rob struggled to curry my horse, bless the boy, whereas Perkin seemed at home with the whole routine.
‘Whose razor?” I asked.
‘Milord de Grailly,’ he said proudly. ‘Eh, sir, mind the steel — it’ll rust if you look at it.’ This from a wizened lump of twelve years, half my size.
‘You sound like a Londoner, imp.’ I grinned.
‘So do you, sir.’ He produced a clean, dry linen towel. ‘Sit on the stool, sir, and I’ll make you trim for the ladies. Of whom there are a great many, and like the flowers of the fucking field. Begging your pardon.’
I laughed.
‘Don’t laugh, sir, or I’ll nick you — just when I have your shirt clean.’ He tried the razor on me and clucked like a hen. ‘Sit tight.’
Suddenly he vanished. There was some talk, and he came in followed by a man of twenty in a fine pair of boots and a stained leather jupon. Perkin had a strop in his hand.