Crown in Candlelight (26 page)

‘They have moved back towards Bapaume.’ Erpingham was astute and grim. ‘Our position was too firm for them. They will attack our flanks, your Grace.’

Weirdly the great army yet unseen had vanished. Citizens fired a few shots from the walls of Péronne, soon retreating as Sir Gilbert Umfraville’s party of horse raced in battle order towards the town. The army passed on to a crossroads. North-east, the fork led to Bapaume. Here the road had almost subsided and in the stew of mud, chilling to the heart, lay evidence of what faced the marchers.

An unimaginable host had passed this way. Tens upon tens of thousands of feet and hooves had churned the road. It was like a giant ploughed field as if all the horses in the world had trodden it and all fighting men ever born had set their mark upon it. Henry ordered a contingent of flank-guards to gallop off on the Bapaume road and the army went on towards Albert along the left fork. A heavy silence fell. Then, quietly at first and with growing exhortation, the chaplains in the King’s party began to pray, while the rain poured, relentless as fear.

The scurrier, sent forward through the advance on the orders of Edward, Duke of York, spurred his horse and it sprang strongly upwards. The steep way, more mountain than hill, rose abruptly from the Ternoise valley at Blangy. Rain fogged its summit. The rider stood in his stirrups to relieve the strong surging back beneath him. The wet wind buffeted his face and tossed his hair. He was young and bold, and his mount picked for speed and strength. Yet as the rain choked his mouth and eyes he felt urgently alone. He could almost believe that there was nothing over the summit, and that once there he would step off the world.

They had marched fast, nearly forty miles in two days. Always westerly, doubly vigilant with the knowledge that to their right, beyond the flank-guards, the owners of those myriad prints kept course with them along the Bapaume road. Little stone villages and towns came and went; Albert, Forceville, Acheux. At Lecheux, the Comte de St Pol’s château had leered from its crag with raised drawbridge and blank arrow-slits, token that the lord and his men had joined the war. For some hours before Blangy the way had been lost; they had missed the village where the night’s billet had been planned. They had picked their tired way on to Frévent, sleeping briefly, then passing over the Ternoise bridge for a reconnaissance in the shadow of the hill.

The horse began to labour and the bold weary young man stroked its neck. We’ll rest you soon, my boy. He planned to stand upon the ridge scanning the open country for some time, taking private ease, perhaps even closing his rain-sore eyes for a space. If he looked back he could see the little tents and insect figures of men and beasts. From his vantage point they were a small fussing knot. These moving toys were riders passing from camp to camp, that tiny waving rag the King’s standard. Very faintly he heard a trumpet call no louder than a midge’s whine; the knot began to tighten as men rode in for council, and the volume of the company diminished further within the sprawling dish of the valley.

He reached the summit and looked out, wiping his eyes.

Over the sheer drop before him the valley was clear as far as a small wood on the horizon, merging on the right with a dense forest, a million trees oddly luminous under the spearing rain. As he looked, the forest began to move. For a long moment his heart stopped. He closed his eyes, clenching them up tight. His pulse began again with a deathly galloping swiftness; he looked once more. His mind kept time with his pulse, gathering old pleasures for a last embrace: home, mother, father, his betrothed, a brown-eyed Kentish girl with plump breasts and a fine dowry; the archery contest won two years ago in sunshine, nights of gaming and cockfights, two sleek harriers, his saint’s-day gift. These treasures rushed on him, relived in seconds, joys never to be repeated. For what filled his eyes from the ridge surely cancelled out all future.

The whole world glittered there, packed close yet spread out as far as man’s eye could contain the sight. A rolling illimitable column, mighty as the hosts in the Bible, a legendary terror, a gargantuan forest dense as smoke: Lance upon lance, standard upon standard, an endless row of toothed weaponry, an incalculable number of death-devices: arblasts, mangonels, bombardes, veuglaires, crapaudins, ten times as deadly as the
King’s Daughter
left behind at Harfleur.

Swearing softly, corpse-cold, he wheeled his mount and plunged downwards back towards the English encampment. The horse stumbled and slipped under his goading. Faintly he heard his own moaning voice. We knew they were many, O holy blessed Virgin! We knew they were many, but not this many! Mary, Mother of Our Lord, deliver us! And let me not vomit before his Grace of York … sustain me until I have told … that the whole world waits to fight with us!

The fine horses, great unwearied destriers, no kin to our pining starved mounts.

The matchless armed riders, well-fed, sprung full of health, a giant race beside our sick-bellied sadness.

The number!

He sped sobbing down towards the Duke’s pavilion, one thought paramount.

I must find a priest.

Humphrey of Gloucester kissed his French paramour with rough and final zest. She had been with him, carefully concealed, throughout the whole
chevauchée
. She was a blonde from Provence, thrice-widowed and sometime wealthy, whose passionate enjoyment it was to follow armies.

She did not care whose. She parted from the English lord with no regrets. She had passed a substantial degree of information to Boucicaut’s agents during the weeks with Humphrey. Now work and play were done.

‘I’ll miss you, Madame,’ he said. She smiled.

‘I’ll have Masses said for you when you are dead. Though doubtless you’ll be ransomed. Did you know that you and your royal brother are worth a six at dice?’

‘What?’ Sharply he stepped from her.

‘Ah, yes. Other nobles count a five, skilled men four, doctors and chaplains three and two, captains and sergeants one, but the poor archers,
hélas
! They’re worth a blank! Are you not glad you weren’t born an archer?’

Appalled, he said: ‘They dice thus, for our persons?’

The lady was gathering up her jewels and, discreetly, some of Humphrey’s into a bundle.

‘To my countrymen, the English archer is lower than a worm. A clown, a fool. Adieu, my lord.’

‘Wait until dusk,’ he said uneasily.

On her way from the tent she walked suddenly into Owen, creeping with his guarded lantern down the line to chat with John Page. For an instant both he and she were badly frightened. She was wearing a cowled cloak; he thought she was a friar until he held up his light. Then she smiled and on tiptoe kissed him on the mouth, half mockingly, half because he was a beautiful young man soon to die. Her musky flowery perfume breathed over him. She walked rapidly away, pulling the cowl close. Stunned and delighted, Owen called softly after her—‘
Hé
, Madame!’ but she was already a friar again, a shadow, darkness, gone. The weirdest feeling came to him, as if the incident had happened before, perhaps in a dream, and was instantly dispelled by the next person he met—York’s scurrier, coming from the chaplain, his face still glazed with shock. He challenged Owen, drawing a blade, and when reassured went off muttering. The words blew back through the rain-dark evening.

‘Locusts,’ Owen repeated to John Page. ‘A innumerable horde like locusts, league on league, spreading across the Calais road, growing wider and deeper every minute. Are you listening?’

Page stuck his quill behind his ear.

‘I was trying to set it down, what I’ve seen, and what I feel, and nothing comes. Now death seeks me, and fate holds me. Only prayer helps a little. And you, with your charmed life—have you made confession?’

‘The priests are too busy.’

Suddenly Davydd Gam stood beside them, flanked by two sergeants. With an angry oath: ‘
Annwyl Crist!
Why are you from your place? I could have killed you for a spy!’ And Owen rose quickly and Page hurriedly hid his writing and began to grease a bowstring.

‘Yes. Ready your gear,’ said Gam more kindly. ‘We’ll soon be moving upward on the ridge.’

‘To fight?
Now
?’ said Owen.

Unexpectedly, oily terror churned his bowels.

‘Chivalrous leaders do not carry war by night!’ Davy smiled wryly. The throat-tightening panic grew in Owen. I am alone. Let me borrow your smile, your experience. Let me rub against your knowledge. This chance was all my desire. But I am alone, afraid, ashamed.

‘I’ll be riding close by you in the King’s party.’ Gam was watching him. ‘But ask me not when or where we will fight. Only prepare yourself.’ His hand on Owen’s shoulder, he said softly: ‘What Glyn Dwr would have given for this!’

‘He hated the English …’

‘Not all of them. He loved a fight. Remember him. Be worthy.’

Henry opened the treasure chest. Reverently he lifted out the crown. Even he had almost forgotten its beauty. Wrought of purest gold it was embellished with sapphires, rubies, and a hundred and twenty pearls the size of hazelnuts. The delicate fleurons of its circle lay snugly against the gold battle helm over which it would be worn. He regarded it for some moments while the lords crowded into his pavilion.

‘Have all the men now seen the enemy?’

Sir Walter Hungerford, one of the chief advisers, nodded. His eyes were puffed and streaming from a heavy cold, the latest plague to sweep through camp.

For the past two hours the army had stood, dismounted, on the ridge, staring down to where the Tramecourt woods merged with that other fleshly forest in all its shattering immensity. Noise was muted. The loudest sounds were the nervous whickering of the horses and the unceasing murmur of the confessors as the soldiers knelt for absolution, and the wet wind moaned along the ridge. They had seen the massed monster below break and reform into thick columns which moved back into the densely wooded terrain behind the small village of Maisoncelles. Now these detachments lay across the country as far as could be seen, though it was difficult to know where enemy ended and trees began.

‘Lord Jesu!’ Hungerford’s voice was choked with cold and emotion. ‘Sire, the Gascon didn’t lie: We are outmatched four to one. Would to God we had ten thousand more bowmen!’

There was something almost rapt about the cadaverous smile that touched the red-brown eyes as Henry said:

‘By Heaven’s grace on whom I have relied for my victory I would not, if I could, increase our number by one. For those whom I have are the people of God!’

He rose from his seat, lean and vibrant, looking older than his twenty-eight years.

‘Do you not believe that the Almighty with these, his humble few, is able to conquer the haughty opposition that waits so proudly out there?’

He held up the crown close to his eyes, so that the jewels ran into rainbow prisms and the pearls glowed like running tears. ‘Tonight, we move down into the valley, south of the trees. I feel that Almighty God planted those trees for a purpose. He has us all in his protection. When the men are encamped again, I shall go and tell them so.’

George Benet, master cordwainer, worked under canvas while the rain drummed above. With a long curved needle he drove into Cordovan morocco leather, fashioning the last eyelet through which gold laces would pass, and trimming the edge with minute stitches. He worked close to a tiny light shielded from the midnight world outside by his crouching apprentice. Finally he laid down the supple shoes fashioned for a man’s slim light feet, and sighed deeply. The apprentice gave a sudden bellowing sneeze.

‘Quiet, you knave. Do you want to lose your right ear?’ Absolute silence had been ordered through this night, on pain of ear-lopping for inferior persons and loss of horse and armour for any knight. At sundown the tense, excitable army had been shouting around the village, looking for billets and bedding, the armourers racketing with hammer and file, even the animals infected with noisy anxiety.

‘His Grace wants the French to think we’ve run away. Keep your carcass over that light!’ He stroked the soles of the little shoes, ‘Fine work, though I say it …’ Next moment he was hastily on his feet, managing to kick the youth into a kneeling position at the same time. The King’s face materialized, ghostly between the weak glint of shaded lanterns. He was in half-armour, and smiling.

‘How goes it, Master Benet?’

‘You do me great honour, Sire.’

Henry said to the apprentice, ‘Get up, child. Are you ready for the morrow?’

The youth, who had never before been so close to the sovereign, nodded dumbly. While Benet marvelled: out of all this host of servants he remembered my name! Henry’s eyes were benign, with a look so calm it was almost of fulfilment.

‘Are you busy?’

‘There’s much mending to do after the march; your Grace. But these–’ he pushed the new shoes forward shyly ‘are holy work.’

Henry studied them in the gloom, touching them with tender curiosity.

‘Beautiful,’ he said.

Tomorrow—today now,’ murmured Benet, ‘is our patron’s day, the Guild will be performing in London. These shoes would have been worn by a man who plays our Lord. But I have made them anyway in honour of the saint.’ With hanging head: ‘I would deem it greater honour if your Grace would accept them as a gift of love.’ In the dimness, sudden tears burned Henry’s eyes. I have marched them, worked them to death and near death, and still they speak of love. He said steadily: ‘We are pleased and we will cherish them. But you will live to make me many more pairs of shoes. You know that God is with us and will never desert us?’

Benet bowed his head. Withdrawing into the blackness and the rain, the King said: ‘My calendar is out of sorts after this march. What day is it? Which saint has you in his care?’

Benet smiled proudly. ‘We have two, my liege, both shoemakers. Today is Saint Crispin and Crispinian.’

Through the soaking dark and the quiet lines he moved on. His foot brushed against a threadbare soldier, lying curled against a fire of dead ashes, his bare feet in a pool of rain. He never stirred, his exhausted face was bland as the dead. Scores of similar shapes littered Henry’s progress. Their longbows were stacked close at hand; they lay with arms clasped about sheaves of arrows and the sharp stake each had carried for eight days was planted nearby in the ground. Further on a man knelt upright in the mud, whispering urgently to a priest. Henry passed them stealthily, his head averted. What sin could that man have, to look so sorrowful? Could he bear a burden as great as mine? My children. My people of God. He trod carefully so as not to disturb the sleepers as he went.