I shook my head in disgust. As I say, I didn’t really believe his anger would last. He was wounded, a prisoner, and his woman was giving him a lot of crap.
His woman. Heh, there speaks ignorance. He may have been her man, but she, I think, was never his. At some level, I think she hated him.
When you command — when you put yourself above others, to lead them — you learn a great deal. Some of the lessons are harder than diamonds. Some cut like blades. People have many motivations, and damaged people never show you the things they hold most dear.
The next day, or perhaps two — we lay in a state of exhaustion for a long time — the Genoese established all the ransoms and agreed on a schedule of payments that satisfied us all. Well, not all, as you’ll hear.
I had d’Herblay at my fire that afternoon. It was April, cold and wet. He didn’t have many clothes, and he was obviously suffering, so I offered him a cloak.
‘Why don’t I just live in your cast-offs?’ he asked bitterly. ‘On your fucking charity.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Five thousand florins!’ He spat. ‘I’ll have to sell estates, you little thief.’
I wasn’t as raw as I’d been two nights earlier. ‘If you can’t afford it, perhaps you should have stayed home,’ I said, with Fra Peter’s calm voice.
‘You do know she’s dead?’ he said. It was a strange turn in the conversation. I lacked the experience of men like d’Herblay to know how desperately he wanted to hurt me. I was used to men who used violence to settle hatred. D’Herblay used words.
At any rate, he watched my face like a lover. I took too long to understand. I’d taken several blows to the head at Brignais, and I must have been slow. I swallowed.
‘Dead?’ I asked.
‘In childbirth,’ d’Herblay said, with obvious relish. ‘Dead. A corpse. Stinking in the ground.’ He laughed, perhaps a little wild.
I sat as if my sinews had been cut.
You don’t know what you take for granted, until it is taken from you. I suppose I always imagined I’d win her in the end. Or perhaps I made an effort not to think about her in those terms at all.
I also realized that I had been walking around for three days with her favour — torn from her favourite dress — pinned to my aventail. In front of her husband.
By the sweet and gentle saviour of mankind, I can be a fool.
Oh, but the height of my folly was yet to come.
I’ve heard men say that loss gives way to anger, and others that most of us deny loss — I heard a very good sermon on that at Clerkenwell one Easter. But the loss of Emile hit me like a longsword to the helmet, and I reeled from moment to moment as if I could not get the ground to be steady under my feet.
I went to a meeting with fifty other men-at-arms where Petit Mechin told us how the ransoms would be apportioned and how the money would work. It wasn’t complicated.
‘A week hence, we’ll send convoys of prisoners to the relevant royal lieutenants,’ Mechin said, as if this was an everyday matter. ‘They will sign for the prisoners and present us with receipts, and we will pass those receipts to the bankers, who will pay us, and collect the ransoms at their leisure.’ He shrugged. ‘No doubt they will make an enormous profit but, messieurs, the only alternative is that we go and attempt to collect each ransom ourselves. The truth is that we have no one with whom we can negotiate.’ He gave a lopsided smile and twirled a moustache. ‘The government of France has effectively ceased to exist.’
To give you an idea of the scale of the rapaciousness of the Italian banks, my two ransoms totalled a little less than 6,000 gold florins. Under the scheme proposed by Mechin, I was to receive, in actual currency, about 500 florins, and letters of credit equal to another 1,000.
A superb recompense for a few hours of fighting, you might say, but assuming Messieurs Bardi made good on the ransoms, they would have another 3,500 florins merely for handling the paperwork.
At the meeting, I noted that Sir Hugh Ashley stood with the Bourc Camus. I remarked it, and I remarked it when I found the Count d’Herblay wrapped in a new cloak, sipping wine from a good horn cup at my fire, and talking to a very young man in black and white livery.
I remarked it, but it didn’t penetrate the moral concussion I had received from the anger of my closest friend and the death of my love. Know this, messieurs, I was courteous to other women — I even lay with one or two — but I never, ever forgot Emile in those days. She was my chivalry. I worried that I had not heard from her, but I never forgot her for more than an hour.
The next day, Sir John Hawkwood passed my camp. His lances were ready to march, his baggage carts loaded, and he himself was dressed like a popinjay, in a fine long gown over a short jupon of golden silk, with a great bag-hat on his head. He looked like a wealthy merchant.
By contrast, I didn’t even have a change of clothes, because Milady was wearing my spares.
He didn’t dismount, but clasped my hand. ‘Sir John Creswell asked for you to be a deputy,’ he said. ‘I assume he did it in a bid to hold you here, but I like anything that raises you in men’s estimation.’
It was hard not to be flattered by that. I looked up at him, tried to smile and remembered that Emile was dead.
‘What’s wrong, lad?’ he asked.
The problem. .
Companions, the problem between me and Sir John was that while he saved my life and built my career, he was never a man you’d tell about love or death. His mind was a thing of cogs and gears, not flesh and blood. He was loyal, though; he was always a good friend to me.
But if I had told him about Emile, he would have given me that look he saved for men far gone with drink, or professing a desire to die in the field, or other failings. I once knew him to say that the only difference he could discern between women was the quality of their banter. I saw him kill a nun in Italy to prevent two men-at-arms from fighting over her.
He was not the man to share my sorrow.
So I shrugged. ‘A deputy?’ I asked, feigning interest.
‘You take the convoy to Auvergne,’ he said. ‘With Camus.’
I must have shuddered.
He shook his head. ‘Drop your foolish feud before it kills you,’ he said. ‘Think of him as a bad horse that must be ridden. Get through the ride to Auvergne and come to Italy.’ He grinned. ‘Remember, some of those prisoners are mine!’
It was almost two weeks before my convoy was ready to ride, and I stayed clear of Camus, but we had problems every day, because my men and his had to struggle over the same ground to find forage and fodder. The army was breaking up, faster every day, and there was less and less authority. Sir John Creswell held Brignais, and he didn’t even let the rest of us in the gates. He was afraid that another routier captain would take it from him — that sort of behavior was the order of the day.
Truly, there is very little honour among thieves.
The women were gone, and that made more trouble, because Milady was the last woman in the camp except a pair of old whores who had nowhere to go. Richard would not speak to me. Neither would he leave without her.
I lived in a fog of emotion, and I was surrounded by more of it — John Hughes said he’d rather have gone to hell than spend another night in that camp. It was like that.
There was a lot going on around me, and I was mostly deaf to it.
It was on a Sunday that we mounted, gathered our prisoners and rode west over the ridges for Auxerre.
We didn’t have to go so far. The other prisoner convoys had left earlier, and there was some attempt to keep them apart so that the royal lieutenants couldn’t conspire against us, but ours was held in camp — Sir John Creswell seemed to be the reason, and I was vaguely angry. I say vaguely, because I was so unaware. Milady rode at my side, dressed in looted armour, and I wore my harness; so did all my men and all Camus’ men. Sir Hugh rode with us, and he was all honey to me. I thought nothing of it, even when he drank with the Count d’Herblay all three nights on the road.