When we speculated to Sir John, he told us to keep our views to ourselves.
And the last incident I remember before we marched was the brothers — the Ashleys, Hugh and Steven, who joined us that week. They were a pair of Englishmen, both knights, both well born and both attainted in England. Sir Hugh was attainted for multiple murders, and he was quite proud of them. He’d killed men who, as he said, ‘Got in his way,’ in his home county in the north of England.
They were big men and they, literally, threw their weight around. They’d never fought in France, but both had fought against the Scots, and against the French at Winchelsea.
They were determined to make names for themselves in France and get pardons, which had certainly worked before. But the end of the war and the Treaty of Bretigny, as it was being called, were flies in their very personal ointment.
I think it was a day or two after Richard and I talked of Avignon — again, I can place it because I was comfortably on a well-lit settle in the common room of an inn, drinking good wine and not swill — that Sir Hugh came in and stood by the fire — it was late autumn — and cut me off from my light.
I was sewing. What do you think soldiers do in their spare time?
‘I’m sewing,’ I said.
‘Proper in a young maid like yourself,’ Sir Hugh said.
‘You are in my light,’ I said.
‘My light now,’ he said.
I sighed, because I’d had two days to prepare for this. Sir Hugh was no bigger than me. No smaller, either.
I put three stitches through my lining to seal it off, bit my thread and put my needle in its case.
‘I’d rather beat the piss out of you outside,’ I said loudly. ‘But if you insist, I’ll do it right here.’
Every head turned.
‘And I thought you was just a blushing virgin,’ Sir Hugh said, and his right hand shot out.
He was a good fighter, but he couldn’t school me, and he barked his shin on the bench early in our bout and I got him on one knee and banged his head on the chimney despite the heat.
He roared like a bull and tried to throw me off. His left hand slammed into my temple and I saw stars, then my right punched him in the forehead and snapped his head back against the chimney, again, and down he went.
I didn’t kick him when he was in the rushes, and he turned and threw up, then got slowly to his feet, holding one hand between us. ‘Fair enough, sprig,’ he said. ‘Sew all you like.’
‘Thanks,’ I responded.
I won’t say we were friends after that. He and his brother were hard men, and they were happy to take things that weren’t offered. But after that fight, they let us alone.
We then we marched south, for Provence, with almost forty lances in our company, and on the road we merged with other companions, until there were thousands of us. The Bascot de Mauleon told me later that there were 10,000 of us that winter, headed for Provence. Perhaps.
We didn’t celebrate Christmas. I missed it — I love Christmas. But Christmas means a church that isn’t burned, a priest who hasn’t been killed and an abundance of bread and sweets and meat. And children. There’s no Christmas without children.
In 1360, in southern Auvergne, as we came down the passes, we had 10,000 professional soldiers and another 8,000 desperate men and women. We had war horses and armour and weapons, baggage carts, banners, the glitter of spear points like a thousand stars, the weight of mail like lost love tugging at your heart, the stirring song of serried companies singing.
But we didn’t have an abundance of anything except rain, and we had no children and no priests.
I did get a present for Yule. Richard called me down to the yard, where a royal messenger was riding away with his bodyguard archers. He tossed me a silk envelope and I opened it.
Master William Gold,
I have reached London, by the grace of our lord, and found your sister with ease. I have enclosed a few words in her own hand. I send my assurance she is well-housed and well-considered, although her house for the most part keeps silence, and I only saw her for as long as it took to push your letter through a grate. Hers arrived a day later, and now, I hope my friends in the Prince’s household will see it to you.
Send my best regard to Richard Musard, with my deepest wish that both of you may find a way clear of France. London is better.
Your servant,
Inside, a single parchment sheet folded very small.
Dear Brother,
Fra Peter told me that you lived, and indeed thrived, as it were, in service of our Prince. And bless you, the sisters are very kind to me, and treat me as if I was a novice and not a serving woman. The Commander has twice stopped me to tell me you sent money for my dowry. Good brother, no woman ever had better.
Let me say also that the Plague came here again, but I am salted, as you are, so I went out to the sick, and the good lord worked through me. I am very happy here.
Be safe. And may the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with you always.
I wept.
For me, the battle of Brignais started under the walls of Pont-Saint-Espirit. It was a day or two after Christmas, and we had marched south with the speed that only routiers could march — thirty and forty miles a day, despite rain and snow. We were hard men, and we could move quickly. We didn’t have servants to shave us, and farriers to look after our mounts. We went unshaven, and when a horse threw a shoe, we left him behind — and stole another.
We outran news of our coming.
Pont-Saint-Espirit was a bridge town on the Rhone, just twenty miles north of Avignon. Sir John Hawkwood said that Seguin de Badefol had spies in the town, and that we could take it by escalade, despite it being one of the strongest fortified bridge towns in all of France. Except, of course, that Pont-Saint-Esprit isn’t in France. It’s in Provence.
At any rate, the whole host pillaged Roquemaure and Codolet, in both cases we took the inhabitants by surprise, and we took everything.
Sir John came to us that night, and proposed that if we took a path over the mountains, with guides he trusted, we could take the richest prize — a whole city.
By then, I knew Sir John well enough to know when he was hiding something. He whipped his men into a fury at the thought of a whole town — a rich town — to take. He sounded disinterested in the ransoms and the money, and I smelled a rat, but I had no idea the scale of the rat I was taking on. Richard felt the same, and he tugged his beard and stared at the first stars.
‘What do you think this is about?’ he said.
We’d both seen the royal messenger. But we didn’t know anything, and that rankled.
Richard and I led the English vanguard. We climbed the steep pass, and at the top, we found piles of brushwood that Hawkwood had paid peasants to drag there. We made huge fires, and warmed ourselves, and then, at about the first hour of the morning, we went down the mountain on the other side.
The moonlight was pale and cold. The moon was full.
We assembled our ladders in the ditch, and detachments of archers stood directing us, like men unsorting a jam of wagons in Cheapside. I moved to the head of a ladder by right, and when Hawkwood gave the word, up I went. First man on a ladder, into a town with a heavy garrison.
I don’t remember a single fight from the storming. The garrison was unready and easily terrified. Most of the citizens surrendered abjectly, but the fifty richest families barricaded themselves in a church that had a strong stone tower in the north of the city. They took their jewels and their daughters, barricaded the doors, and swore they’d hold the church until rescued by the papal army, which was just twenty miles away.
Hawkwood came in on horseback, by a gate we’d opened after we butchered its defenders, and he rode to the church with twenty men-at-arms, looked at it and gave it over as a bad job. He swept through the town like a blade through butter, and I could see from the way his mounted company moved that they were looking for something.