I folded it, sealed it and addressed it care of Clerkenwell.
Then gave it to Chaucer. He finished a jack of wine and poured more into his flask. ‘Clerkenwell?’ he asked, looking at the address. ‘Damn, Gold, you make me feel as if I was home already.’
‘Will you be back?’ I asked.
He looked at Richard, and then at me. ‘Not unless I have no other choice.’ He looked both ways. ‘What they are doing now. .?’ He shook his head.
‘If you see my sister, will you write to me?’ I asked.
Chaucer smiled. ‘You kept me alive a few times,’ he admitted. ‘I’ll write you about your sister.’
We bowed to each other, and he embraced Richard. Not me.
Then he rode away.
It was two days after Chaucer came and went that Sir John summoned us to the great hall, and we sat at trestle tables.
He came out in a gown, like a lord. ‘Fear not,’ he announced. ‘We have employ.’
Richard shouted, ‘Where?’ into the cheers.
Sir John laughed. ‘Provence,’ he said, and Richard frowned.
A great deal happened in a few weeks and I may not get the order of events the right way round, but the way I remember it, the first thing that happened was that Richard came to the room we shared. The word room is far too grandiose and makes one imagine a closed bed and a fine chimney, when what we had was the slates of the roof at the level of our necks so we had to stoop all the time, no window, and a space a little smaller than a soldier’s tent, which we shared with our armour, our spare saddlery, our clothes, and a woman or two with her own basket of goods.
I was sitting on my spare saddle, sewing a patch on my beautiful arming coat and thinking bitterly of Emile.
Richard arrived, not by the door, but by the smoke hole, which was an easier way into our little loft if one was superbly muscled. He lit a cresset.
‘You are sewing in the dark, brother,’ he said.
I snorted.
‘I think it’s time that someone told you that you have become a churl and a barbarian,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Cheer up. The world is not as dark as you seem to think.’
‘Sod off,’ I said. ‘I assume you got the miller’s daughter to lie in the leaves.’
Richard shook his head. ‘Nothing of the kind, brother. I went to visit our banker and arrange for a little loan.’
I kept my head down and continued sewing. My stomach turned over, though. I could face a dozen French knights, but the banker — good Christ how I hate bankers.
‘He informed me that we had a credit — if I may use the term we in the broadest sense — of two hundred and fifty florins.’ Richard grinned.
‘You are fucking with me,’ I said.
‘Not in the least, and may I add that I find this distrust injurious? Seriously, brother, you have been an arse and a half the last month. I’ve wonder what ails you.’
‘You were turned away by the Prince just as I was,’ I said.
‘Nor do I intend to live for ever as a routier but, brother, here we are, and we have enjoyed this life ere this. Have we not?’
I growled.
Richard pressed on, ‘So I must speculate that there was, or is, something more — something you lack that makes you such a snark.’
I turned on him, ready to put him on the floor for his presumption. I’d had enough of his shit, and I could tell he was mocking me the while.
Then I saw that he was holding a scroll, sealed with a swan.
‘And I asked myself, who is the Viscomtesse d’Herblay?’ he continued, stiff-arming me and holding the scroll as far from me as he could manage. ‘And will a letter from the lady help you or make you worse?’
‘You bastard!’ I shouted, and the two whores in the next smoke hole pounded on the wattle partition between our rooms.’
‘Untrue!’ Richard said. ‘I’m no bastard.’ He and I were well-matched in a hundred mock fights and a few real ones, and I couldn’t get the scroll from him.
‘Give me your word to cheer up!’ he shouted.
‘I swear!’ I promised.
Christ, I loved that man.
He gave me the scroll. Two months old, but most welcome nonetheless.
She had found my capture, and used her social wiles to force him to pay me his ransom. And she wrote, ‘Whatever your foolish Prince may think, you remain for me a true and gentle knight.’
Whatever my boil of loathing, she lanced it. With money and soft words.
‘Ah,’ said Richard. ‘You and this countess are friends?’
‘We were at Meaux together,’ I said.
‘Ah, she helped you hold the bridge?’ he said. ‘Or perhaps she is a nun?’
I looked at him, and he desisted. Real friendship is knowing when to stick the needle in, and when to leave off. Richard — perhaps because he’d been a slave — was always very tender with me when I was down.
‘She found my French knight and made him pay his ransom!’ I said.
Richard smiled. ‘I gather that this cures whatever has been ailing you,’ he said.
I went to the bankers that day and paid a hundred florins on my sister’s dowry.
I think it was a few days later and Richard and I were eating a good meal in a good inn, which is why I think I must have gotten my long-lost ransom, when he told me of his trip to Avignon.
‘The Pope is a Frenchman,’ he said, which I acknowledged. All Popes were French, in my experience. I poured him some more good wine.
‘So the King — our King — sent to him to ask if he’d help raise the King of France’s ransom. To which the Holy Father agreed. After a great deal of negotiation.’ Richard shrugged. ‘One of the things our embassy guaranteed in the King of England’s name is that no English or Navarrese companies would attack Provence. So I ask myself why a royal messenger guarded by royal archers has come to Sir John.’
‘And now we march on Provence,’ I added in. ‘I can see through a brick wall in time,’ I added, one of John Hughes’ best expressions.
‘You can?’ asked Richard. He’d taken the rest of my archers, or rather, we shared them so that we had the biggest lances — the largest number of men. They were all gathered around, because we made the archers loose shafts every Sunday, and we rode at tilt or swaggered swords — anything to keep the edge on.
Amory, the youngest of my new archers, a Staffordshire man with no home to go to with peace, sat cross-legged, making bowstrings. He looked up.
‘Well, sirs, mayhap I cannot see through the wall. What’s it mean?’
Richard and I glanced at each other. He gave a slight nod, as if to say, You say it.
‘Good King Edward and his son — you’re all loyal to them, eh?’ I began.
The King himself would have been heartened by the response — the grunts and smiles from ten hard men.
‘If we went back to England, how would he get us back here to fight?’
Amory took the question seriously, rather than rhetorically. ‘On ships?’ he asked. ‘I come on a ship.’
Jack Sumner laughed, but I speared him with a glance. ‘Right you are, Amory. But that ship costs money, and arraying you in Staffordshire costs money and, who knows? Even an imp of Satan like yourself might go home and find a wife and decline to serve his Prince.’
Men laughed.
‘As long as we have employment in France,’ I said, ‘we are here, ready to hand. And by fighting here, we make France weaker.’
Amory grinned. ‘Aye!’ he said.
‘But Provence? An’ the Pope?’ asked Jack Sumner. ‘The Pope’s gathering the King o’ France’s ransom.’
‘And if he never pays it?’ Richard asked.
‘Sweet virgin,’ Amory said. ‘We keep France.’
I shrugged. ‘We keep France, and we keep the Pope’s money, and the King of France is a broken shutter, banging against an empty barn.’
The archers grinned. Easy money. And service to the crown.
It didn’t sound like glory, a better repute and a fortune to me. Nor did I hate the French so much.