Joanna (56 page)

Naturally, having been insulted in their own persons, the Poitevin lords gathered up their men, every last one, and deserted. But in their eyes was satisfaction and laughter, not anger. They had counted upon the Angevin temper to extricate them, without violation of their oaths, from a position they were unwilling to hold. John was between two very hot fires. He could not punish them, because Louis would fall upon him from the rear. He no longer had strength enough to fight Louis; if he stayed in Anjou he would be defeated. If Louis pursued him, he would be defeated anyway.

Whether John sensed the malicious delight of the Poitevins or his own loss of control affected him, Ian could not decide. All he saw was the effect. Suddenly John was shaken to the core. His absolute belief that God was his supporter had been destroyed. Ian could not understand it. The king had had setbacks before and had not doubted. Agreed, they could not continue the siege or fight Louis, but all was not lost. If Philip was defeated or taken prisoner by the army in Flanders, all might yet be well. The changeable Poitevins would come crawling back, and Louis could be brokenthat is, if they were not first broken themselves.   Ian was in a dreadful position. He knew John’s hatred for him had been viciously reinforced by his part in the quarrel with the northern nobles. For everyone’s sake, he avoided contact with the king as much as possible and now, in this bitter moment, he dared not offer either comfort or advice or even inquire as to John’s plans. He did not know whether John would send news of the situation to Flanders. Doubt held him inactive for a few days, but he dared wait no longer and wrote to Salisbury describing what had happened.

‘‘All is not completely black,” he concluded. “It seems that when Louis had news that we had lifted the siege of Roche-au-Maine he believed that we were moving to attack. him and, instead of coming to battle, he retreated in haste. This gave us good time to regroup and to move in good order and without loss to La Rochelle. I believe that Louis will remain on guard in this part of the country for a time, but it cannot be long before he understands the blow we have sustained. When he is sure the king is powerless, doubtless he will move the larger part of his army to his father’s support. Thus I urge you, if you intend to attack Philip at all that you do so very soon. If you defeat the French king, all may yet be saved and your chance of winning over him will be far greater before Louis’s forces are added to his own.”

The news from Aquitaine distressed Salisbury, but he agreed wholeheartedly with Ian, and his determination and that of the others to come to grips with Philip did not change. He, Ferrand, and Renaud Dammartin all wrote urging Otto to make haste. By the third week in July Otto had arrived at Vivelles, where he declared himself equally unshaken, and the combined forces moved on to Valenciennes immediately.

They were just in time to avert complete disaster. The delay caused by Otto’s vassals had given Philip the time to summon the full strength of his levies. The French king was already moving into Flanders with the intention of cutting Otto off from his English and Flemish allies. The meeting at   Valenciennes eliminated that hope. Philip turned back from Tournai and settled himself into an open plain near the village of Bouvines.

On the twenty-fourth of July, Salisbury, Dammartin, Ferrand, Otto and the chief men of each group met in person to discuss their next move. As his father’s right hand, Geoffrey was present. He knew he would have nothing to say about what was decided, but he had no quarrel with that. He had no special knowledge or skill that could excuse the intrusion of his opinion into this high-level council of war, and these menat least Dammartin and his fatherwere experts. Geoffrey’s business was to listen and to learn.

The first need was to arrange the men, and one of Ferrand’s people described to them the countryside, in particular naming the strongholds in the area and indicating their sympathies. At one point Geoffrey was startled by the familiarity of a name.

“Baisieux?” he interrupted. “Is the lord there called Léon?”

“He was, but he is prisoner in England, my lord. The keep is held by two ladies, his mother and his wife. They will offer neither harm nor help because they will not open their gates at all, except to a force too strong for them to resist.”

Geoffrey nodded and made a mental note to go and pay his respects to the ladies when the battle was over. He felt slightly guilty about Sir Léon, as if the fact that he had wounded him left a responsibility for his welfare. He had heard nothing about the man after he returned to England, but that was not surprising. The fact that, a full year later, he was still a prisoner meant that his womenfolk could not scrape together the ransom and that his overlord, Philip or whoever, would not pay for himor that the women did not want him back, of course. Whatever the cause, Geoffrey was curious about Sir Léon’s fate and stopped Ferrand’s man to get directions to Baisieux.

It did not take long to make the physical arrangements. The terrain was easy, flat and open, with a river behind the   French forces. Ferrand would hold the left flank; Otto, as fitted his rank and position as titular leader, would hold the center. Salisbury, with the English forces, and Dammartin, who had no real army but was followed by a group of devoted knights, would hold the right. That left only the time of battle to be decided.

“At once,” Hugh of Boves said. He quoted the proverb, “Delay is dangerous when things are ready.” With that, all agreed and the matter was settled.

Afterward, however, there was far too little planning for Geoffrey’s taste. He was accustomed to Ian’s relatively elaborate outlines for action and reaction in taking or defending a keep, and he had always given his own men detailed instructions for the attacks made in Wales. When he presented this notion privately to his father, Salisbury smiled at him.

“It is different,” he remarked. “A keep, even a large one, is small compared to what we have here. A plan can be settled because word can come from all parts of the battle in only a few minutes. Thus, orders may be changed or canceled. Here, we may be spread over a considerable distance and any messenger is more like to be killed or so delayed in fighting to protect himself that communication is almost impossible. Also, we do not know each other’s men very well.”

“You fear treachery?” Geoffrey asked, appalled.

“Not from Ferrand or Otto, but if one of their men should be in Philip’s pay, which is not at all impossible, and came to me saying I should change my plan, might not Otto or Ferrand think
I
was treacherous? It is better to act as the situation demands. Besides,” Salisbury added drily, “I do not think at my time of life I would like to be told how to arrange my battle or where or when to attack. And I do not believe Otto or Ferrand would like it either.”

It was all reasonable, but still Geoffrey was disturbed. He would have preferred to have one acknowledged leader to whom all could apply for help or direction. Of course, if the leader was a coward or a fool, that was disastrous, but at   least the disaster would be apparent early and enable the battle to break up with little loss. Geoffrey chided himself for carping. On his part of the field there was one leader, and a good one. If the other battles failed, they might still turn the tide or they would be able to hold together and withdraw with honor.

The last idea brought a pang of anxiety, restating a question that had come to his mind earlier in the day. Geoffrey was not a vainglorious fool in military matters. He understood the value of strategic withdrawal from a’lost battle, and he knew his father did also, but he wondered if that knowledge could have any influence on Salisbury’s behavior in this particular case. His father had been greatly distressed by the tone of John’s last letter. Would Salisbury fight on in the face of certain defeat, hoping for a miracle with which to restore John’s faith?

Eventually, Geoffrey slipped from his bed, lit a candle, drew on his surcoat in lieu of a bed robe, and sat down to soothe himself by writing to Joanna. He did not, of course, mention any of his doubts nor even much about the battle except to say it was useless to worry because it would be long over before she received the letter. Mostly it was a letter of love, of praise of her beauty and laments of how he missed her and desired her, of assurances of his fidelity, of comparison of her perfections to the failings of the women with whom he had been in company.

“I could almost hate you,” he wrote, “for you have destroyed any hope of joy for me outside of yourself. You are like to the sun and have so dazzled and blinded my eyes that I can see nothing else even when I can no longer see you. You will not believe me, I suppose, or will laugh at me, but I have not even taken a whore in all these weeks of weary nights. Beloved, I am sick for you. My loins ache for you. Yet I cannot ease myself elsewhere. You blame me, I know, for love of war, but believe that I do not love it for parting us. Indeed, so does the need for you grow upon me that I fear it will unman me in the end and make me hate war only because it parts us.”   The funnyor not so funnypart, Geoffrey thought, was that the whole thing was true, not merely the ordinary lies one wrote to a woman. He smiled wryly and wondered whether Joanna would believe himand then whether she would care. Then, abruptly, he signed and sealed his letter and laid it aside to be put in with the other dispatches for England. Although he had been glad enough of it at the time, he remembered with pain now that Joanna had never given the smallest sign of jealousy. She had never even mentioned the liaisons he had had with the ladies of the court of which she must have been informed. That notion was no more comfortable than the uneasy thoughts of the battle the next day. Nonetheless, the two discomforts edging each other in and out of his mind made for a kind of confusion that grew into a dazed weariness and slid away into sleep.

Having taken so long to find rest, Geoffrey overslept the next morning. By the time Tostig felt it was necessary to wake him, he had missed mass and needed to rush himself into his armor and then out to organize the men and perform the duties imposed by being his father’s aide, while bolting down some bread, cheese, and wine. At the last moment he remembered his letter, seized it, and thrust it up his mailed sleeve. Here it would not interfere with his movement and would be held in place by his gauntlet but could be withdrawn quickly as soon as he found the messenger who was to carry the dispatches.

Geoffrey’s first sight of the battlefield, gained from the top of the little rise that had screened the English camp from the French, drove all thoughts of letters or any extraneous matters from his mind. The French were already under arms but Philip had apparently elected not to attack. However, that was not what startled Geoffrey. Philip had ordered that the bridge that spanned the river Marcq be destroyed. It was plain that the French king did not regard this as any ordinary battle. By destroying the bridge, he had eliminated any chance of easy retreat for his men and himself. He planned to fight until he won or was killed or taken prisoner. Geoffrey rode back to tell Salisbury, but his father did not seem surprised. He merely nodded and agreed that this battle would, indeed, break France.

The reply woke a surge of enthusiasm in Geoffrey. If they won, if Philip was forced to disgorge the Angevin territories he had swallowed, perhaps John would be eased in his heart and be willing to live at peace with his barons. Geoffrey thought of the few peaceful months he had had at Hemel with Joanna. Even those had been strained by tension and anxiety, but if that were gone? It would be a sweet lifea sweet life. Only this battle, this one battle in which Philip could be taken, and then home, and Joanna.

Certainly it was a fine day for fighting, clear and bright. The odd stretching of time before a battle was already in effect. It seemed to take terribly long for the men to form, for the knights and mounted men-at-arms to get into the saddle. Geoffrey’s own movements seemed to him to be weirdly slow and dreamlike. Yet, when he glanced at the sun, what he believed to have taken hours had occupied no more than minutes.

Knowing that his time sense was unreliable was no real help. Geoffrey found that he was biting his lips, clenching and unclenching his hands, and breathing faster. Orage danced and bucked as the rider’s growing tension communicated itself. Geoffrey cursed and curbed the stallion, then patted and praised it, knowing the fault was his own. Although Geoffrey now led his own contingent of knights and men-at-arms, his place was not far from Salisbury. It was arranged that if Salisbury should fall, Renaud Dammartin should command the battle, and if he should be killed or taken prisoner that the responsibility should devolve upon Geoffrey.

Soon, Geoffrey thought, curbing himself as he had curbed his destrier, soon. He could see his father rising in the stirrups to look up and down the field. A squire was sent off. Under his breath, Geoffrey groaned and cursed again. Someone was late or out of position or something else was wrong. More delay. Geoffrey’s head lifted sharply. Off to the left there was a confused murmur of sound. Ferrand was   engaged! It must be Ferrand because the noise would be louder, the individual cries and clangs cleaner, if it were Otto’s force.

“Let us go,” Geoffrey hissed. “Let us go so that both edges will pinch Philip and drive him forward into Otto’s arms.”

That Salisbury’s thought was similar was apparent because he was straining upright, almost seeming ready to climb to his feet on top of his horse the better to hurry his squire. Geoffrey ground his teeth with impatience, his eyes set fixedly on Salisbury. He was almost afraid to blink lest he be a part of a second late in driving forward once Salisbury gave the signal to move. At lasthours, weeks, months laterpossibly in real time four or five minutes, the young man could be seen returning. Geoffrey lowered his lance into position, tensing all his muscles as he did so to control the trembling of his body.

It did not help, of course. Possibly the tenseness increased the shaking, but Geoffrey did not know how to subdue his characteristic reaction and he was ashamed of it. He was always afraid those near him would believe he shook with fear. In fact, he was not sure that was untrue. Mostly he felt excited and eager, but there was, somewhere inside him, a sense of chill, a dread of being no more or of being so maimed that he would no longer be a man. Had he been capable of attending to what went on around him, beyond his fixed concentration on Salisbury, he would have been relieved of the worry about being thought a coward.