The name meant nothing to me. ‘I am not acquainted with the vicomtesse,’ I said, trying for my very best Norman French accent.
He looked down his long nose at me. ‘I think you are mistaken,’ he said. ‘If I were to mention that her baptismal name was Emile. .’ he added.
‘Par dieu!’ I said, all but springing from my bed.
‘I have not told her that I met you as an apprentice in a shop.’ He smiled.
Ha! I told her myself.
At some point I had stopped wearing her favour. There’s something particularly grim about wearing a woman’s favour while you threaten peasants and bully women into revealing where they hide their grain. I wondered where it was. Packed with my spare shirts? I had a leather bag of clean, dry linen shirts, and it lived with my good doublet, my two best pairs of matched hose without holes, and some bits of jewellery — in the wagon of a Genoese banker who rode with the Captal. He held all my ready money, too.
The next day, du Guesclin visited me. He was coming to be thought a great man amongst the French, which suited me — the more especially as he introduced me, at my bedside, to a room full of Norman and Breton knights.
‘William Gold, gentlemen. He took me in ’57 and was quite the gentleman about it; he helped save the Dauphine at the Bridge of Meaux — you know the story?’
‘By God, sir, did you save the Duke de Bourbon?’ asked a sprig.
‘Par Dieu, monsieur, I may have. I was busy, you understand,’ I drawled. Being a man of reknown — even a little reknown — was vastly more pleasurable than being thought a brigand, liar, thief or rapist.
I received a certain amount of hero worship, and I felt much better.
The worship of good men is itself anodyne, messieurs.
After they left, I wondered why it was that I was more popular with my enemies than with my own people.
A day or two passed. I hadn’t read a book in years, but my host, the French King’s lieutenant of Reims, had a library of over twenty books, and all of them were about chivalry. I had never seen a book about chivalry — I used to read a little Aristotle, but mostly Aquinas, psalms and sermons. I read a poem by John Gower once, and enjoyed it, although I’m pretty sure he wrote it against men like me.
I knew there were books on chivalry. I knew that the great de Charny wrote a list of questions for the Order of the Star, and I knew that the stories of Sir Lancelot, for example, were written down. But I had never read anything like Master Llull’s book of chivalry, and I devoured it. I read it through, and then read it through again.
When du Guesclin came, I asked him about the book. He shrugged. ‘I was never much of a reader,’ he admitted. ‘But my father’s master-of-arms says he was some sort of Spaniard — that he was a knight, and fought the Moors, and then became a hermit, and then a priest.’
‘He thinks that knights are chosen, by God, to protect the people.’ I looked down the page. ‘He thinks there ought to be schools to train boys to be knights.’ I looked at du Guesclin and he smiled.
‘Anyone can be a knight,’ he said. ‘Surely we’ve seen that in the last ten years. Give a peasant a good horse and a harness and a few year’s of training, and if he has a good heart and a set of balls, he can fight. You and I both know this.’
I gnawed my lip. ‘But. . isn’t there more to being a knight than having courage and a harness?’
Du Guesclin shrugged. ‘No.’ He smiled wryly at me. ‘Well, perhaps there is more. A good sword is a help.’
A voice from the doorway said, ‘Fie on you, Monsieur du Guesclin! I thought better of you, sir.’
Now, in France, as in England, when you are sick (if you are lucky and have rich friends) you are put in a closed bed, a bed with heavy hangings, many pillows and a pair of feather mattresses over a roped frame. You can’t see anyone beyond the hangings. This means that women may visit you so long as they don’t enter the hangings, so to speak.
That was Emile’s voice. I’d hoped, but how on earth could a noblewoman visit a routier without comment?
‘If any peasant with spirit can be a knight, why is this war so vicious?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it true that when we let any lad be a knight, they murder and rob at will, drunk on the power of their arms, whereas true knights have discipline and restraint?’
Du Guesclin was inside the hangings with me. His eyes met mine and he shrugged. ‘Madame may have the right of it,’ he said, ‘but when I need to go up a hill into a shower of English arrows, I care little about the ability my lads have to show restraint, and only that they have the spirit to face the arrow storm.’
Emile’s voice hardened. ‘And when you’ve beaten the English and they all go home? What then?’
Du Guesclin shook his head. ‘Not a problem for me, Madame. I am the merest fighting man.’ He rose from my bed.
I grabbed his hand. ‘May I write a letter to Richard Musard? I asked.
He shook his head. ‘The Black Squire has gone away south to Avignon on a mission. The Captal sent a squire — Thomas, an Englishman — with an offer to pay your ransom, which,’ he smiled, ‘I may have done you the disservice of accepting. He left before you returned to consciousness.’
‘I’d like some clothes and things,’ I admitted.
‘I’m sure you have friends in Reims who might arrange to dress you,’ said du Guesclin. ‘I must go. I’ll visit tomorrow. Do you know that the peace is signed? The King is to return to France at midsummer. The war is over.’
The words chilled my blood. I was a soldier. I was in the twilight between being a man-at-arms, a squire or a knight — a recognized member of the community, a ranking gentleman. A knight would never need to feed himself, whilst a starving man-at-arms was called a brigand.
The war was ending just as I was making my name.
But I had no more time to consider the destruction of my fortunes, because Emile said, ‘Do you, too, believe any man can be a knight?’
‘I have to hope so,’ I admitted, ‘because I’m rather like any man myself. If only high birth makes a knight, I will never make the grade. And yet, my lady, I agree with you this far. I have recently seen what happens when boys are broken in spirit and trained to war like dogs to the chase, and it is truly horrible. Certes, if a man is to be a knight, he must know something of the rules and customs of being a knight — of chivalry — or he is a mere killer.’ I paused and opened my curtain a touch. ‘I missed you,’ I said.
She was pregnant — well along, in a flowing kirtle that emphasized the pregnancy rather than hiding it. The whole kirtle was silk, figured in swans, her husband’s badge. Her kirtle and over gown were worth about twice my war horse’s value.
I cannot tell you which shocked me more, her preganancy, or the slavish adoration inplied in the heraldic dress — a gown that emphasized her condition and her master. That stressed that she was property. Like a retainer, or a man-at-arms.
All my thoughts must have been on my face.
She laughed, the nasty little laugh she used to hurt herself.
‘There, you see me as I am,’ she said. ‘Fat as a hog, blotchy-faced and ugly.’ She hung her head in mock contrition, then glared at me, eye to eye like an adversary, daring me to speak. ‘If you’d kept the curtain closed, you need not have known.’
‘You are just as beautiful pregnant as not,’ I said. It wasn’t quite true, but really, one doesn’t have to be bred to court to know what to say to a pregnant woman. ‘And I am yours, body and soul, whether you are beautiful as heaven or come to me with leprosy.’
Her smile.
But my sense of honour was as sharp — and double edged — as hers. ‘I can’t say that I’ve brought your favour much honour.’ I hadn’t realized how bitter I was until I heard myself whining like a baby. ‘Killing peasants,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Burning towns.’
We watched each other for some heartbeats.