I might have choked.
‘You, my son, have sinned against him — and his marriage.’ His eyes bored into mine. ‘I’m told he is a bad man. Does that justify your actions?’
‘He serves your enemy!’ I said.
Father Pierre shook his head impatiently. ‘I have no enemies,’ he said. ‘I serve only Christ. I am not important enough to have enemies.’
‘Robert of Geneva seeks to destroy you and d’Herblay is his tool!’ I said, with some heat.
‘His death would suit you very well,’ Father Pierre said. ‘It is easy to rationalise sin, is it not? I tell you, my well-beloved William — if you kill this man, I will send you away.’
I looked at the floor, the magnificent parquetry floor.
‘I will obey,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Yes. And now,’ he took my hand, ‘I must give my thanks for saving us in Genoa.’
‘Sabraham saved us,’ I said with some asperity. Nothing is worse than to have one’s sins known.
‘Sabraham says that, but for you, we would all have died. I have thanked him anyway. William, saving you from the tree was one of the best days work I’ve ever done.’ He met my eye again, and though he smiled, his eyes were as hard as any killers. ‘Don’t make me send you away.’
A few days after, when the Hungarian horse dealers came to the camp at Mestre to sell warhorses to the men who’d wintered over, I took a barge to the mainland with my friends. I was past needing the convent, but I was utterly unwilling to leave Emile, and I loved it there, to be honest. I played chess with the abbess, who had less use for men than any woman I ever met but seemed nonetheless to like me, and I was swimming with Fra Andrea, and swimming better than I ever had before. And I was learning to enjoy children. I will not fill this annal with tales of parenting, but I spent any time that was allowed with the three of them, and as the spring improved, that became hours every day. Nor did I confine myself to Edouard. Emile’s other children were, I discovered, no less entertaining, nor could the three be separated easily, and as I played with them, I thought of d’Herblay. He was at Mestre, and I was not to kill him.
What a tangle.
At any rate, we went to the camp at Mestre, and after a day with the horse thieves, I chose a fine big bay of indeterminate ancestry. He had been well trained, and that was his greatest selling point. He lacked Jacques’ great heart — and I admit, I walked the lines the first morning, hoping against hope that Jacques had come to Mestre. After all, we had the greatest accumulation of men-at-arms in Europe that spring. Hawkwood, defeated at Cascina, had nonetheless held Pisa together. Pisa had a new tyrant, Lord Agnello, who sounded at least as brutal as the della Scala lord of Verona. All over the rest of Tuscany and Lombardy, the Pope’s Italian war with Milan dwindled away and contracts ended, and the market was flooded with out-of-work men-at-arms and soldiers. Many turned brigand and many came trudging across the late spring roads to the terra firma of Venice, looking for work.
I hoped to catch my enemies there.
But that bastard who took Jacques was not there, and I bought my bay and called him Gawain for my favourite knight of romance. He was a better horse than he looked. In fact, I suspect he was Jacques rival. But at the time I saw him as a poor second for he had none of Jacques beauty.
I missed Jacques. I purchased Gawain.
Having spent an entire day prowling the camp for my foes, on the second day I was off my guard. I had collected Gawain and needed a saddle, preferably used. I was counting my ducats and florins, walking towards the horse market, when I looked up and found the Emperor’s sword, walking along, the scabbard considerably the worse for wear. It hung from a belt a few men in front of me, and the scrofulous fellow wearing it was the same who’d taken it from the pile by the road. I didn’t know him at first — I confess, I wouldn’t have known any of them by sight.
But when he turned to talk to his mate, I knew his voice and the odd, sing-song Gascon-Catalan. I motioned to Marc-Antonio and chased them.
I suppose that I might have gone to the master of the camp, but I had something to prove to myself. Nor could I bear to let them from my sight.
I followed them into the tent lines and pressed closer as they slowed. The shorter man had de Charny’s dagger in his belt. Just beyond him, and to my joy, I saw Juan with Marc-Antonio.
Thank God, I thought about what I was doing. A knight has the right of justice, but justice is not the same as revenge. I knew the one man but not the other; his voice was not the voice of the brigand who took the dagger.
‘Messieurs!’ I called out.
Heads turned for fifty yards, and both men turned to face me.
The man with the sword knew me in an instant.
The other frowned. He had a heavy moustache — an Easterner, I thought. He had a riding whip in his hand, and he pointed it at me and said something.
I didn’t slow. ‘That’s my sword and my dagger,’ I said. Juan was coming from the other direction.
The man with the sword smiled. He didn’t have many teeth. He was old, forty or more, and he had on a worn, padded jupon with the stuffing leaking out. It didn’t go with the Emperor’s sword, although six months of bad care had helped the scabbard to match his style better.
His Hungarian mate was shouting for his friends. Hungarians are easy to spot in a crowd — long hair, sometimes in braids, and nobles wear pearls in their hair.
Every Hungarian in the tent row came at us at a run.
That didn’t slow me, either.
I think my lust for that sword — the completeness of my desire — shut out fear. I should have been afraid. A beating can break a man, and if I wasn’t broken, I was surely bent a long way.
But I saw nothing beyond my gap-toothed adversary. I walked towards him, and he drew his sword and stood there in the sunshine.
Everything seemed to still. Perhaps this is only memory playing tricks on me, but I think the crowd fell silent and the running Hungarians slowed and stopped.
Far off, one woman was singing.
Gap-tooth raised his sword in a poor imitation of the middle guard, posta breva.
The woman’s voice rose.
Three paces away, I drew. My sword swept up from the scabbard even as his fell. Up and up, covering me, and back along the same line, and he fell, dead. I’d slammed his sword out of line, up into the air with my rising stroke and then cut about two inches into his head and ripped the point all the way from his temple to his jaw with my descent, and then continued down into my first guard.
He fell without a cry.
The Hungarian stepped away from the body.
Gap-tooth’s hand twitched and I put my point through his neck into the ground, knelt, and retrieved the Emperor’s sword from his not-quite-dead hand.
At my back, Nerio, Juan, Marc-Antonio, Davide, Miles and Fiore all stood with their blades in their hands. Despite the blood and the flies that began to gather immediately, it is one of my favourite memories: I knew we could not be beaten, not all together.
And I knew I had never been so good.
And I admit, a little revenge can be like a drug.
I pointed the Emperor’s sword at the Hungarian. ‘Monsieur has my dagger,’ I said. ‘I am Sir William Gold, and I can prove my ownership if required.’
My Hungarian untied the dagger from his belt without outward fear or flourish. He bowed and handed it to me. ‘I believe I have just had all the proof any gentleman requires,’ he said in good French. ‘A pity. A fine weapon. I wondered why I had it so cheap.’
I offered to cover his purchase, and he grinned and shouted something in Hungarian, and twenty longhairs faded back into the camp.
‘Perhaps we can discuss a price if we meet again,’ he said.
He walked away, unruffled.
I bent and began to retrieve the scabbard from the dead man’s belt. I know he’d ruined it, but it had a bye knife and a pricker in the scabbard and pretty furniture, and I was sure that Bernard and I could run up a new scabbard on the old wooden core.