The Ill-Made Knight (6 page)

I bowed again.

The lady’s words – and her unsolicited promise on her honour – are probably what prevented me from murdering my uncle on the last night I was in England. Before God, I thought of it often enough.

Her suggestion fired my blood and helped set me on the road to recovering from the darkness that surrounded me. Remember, gentles, I had lost my girl, my sister’s honour and my own.

I had nothing and I
was
nothing. Brother John was right: I’d have been a sneak thief in days.

But the lady gave me an odd hope, a sense of mission. I would take a ransom in France and buy my sister grace.

My sister had recovered some in three days. She was sorry to see me go, but truly happy to be staying with the sisters, even as a servant. She managed to embrace me and wish me well, and gave me a little cap she’d made me of fine linen, with the cross of her order worked into it. She saved my life with that cap. It may be the finest gift I ever got. At the time, I was so happy to hear her speak without whimpering that I paid it no heed.

At the gate, there was a Knight of the Order chatting with the porter. He smiled at me. He was one tough-looking bastard, with a tan so dark he looked like a Moor, a white line from his brow across one eye and across his nose. He wore a black arming coat with the eight pointed cross-worked in thread and black hose. I bowed.

‘You must be Mary’s brother,’ he said.

I bowed again. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘She says you go to France. To war.’ He fingered his beard.

I nodded, awestruck to be talking to one of the athletes of Christ. ‘I want to be a knight,’ I said suddenly.

He put his hand on my head and spoke a blessing. ‘Fight well,’ he said. His eyes had a look, as though he could see through me. ‘May the good shepherd show you a path to knighthood.’

We sailed for France in a ship so large I could have got lost in the holds. The ship was assigned to Lord Stafford and some young menat-arms. John had two doublets, a fine fustian-covered jack, a dented basinet and a pair of boots that were like leather hose. His sword was rusty and his buckler wasn’t as nice as the one my uncle had robbed me of.

I spent all my time on the boat fixing his gear. I’d done some sewing – how John, who’d been a monk, had avoided sewing is a mystery to me, but he wouldn’t sew a stitch. I begged needles and thread from some of the women. All the older archers had women –some were mere whores, but others were solid matrons, married to their archers. Two were dressed like ladies. A master archer after Crécy might have more money than a moneylender and could dress his lady as well as many knights.

Any gate, I was pretty enough, and by the standards of a company of archers, I had excellent manners, so they cosseted me and loaned me needles and thread, and I mended everything John owned. Our first night in Gascony, I took his helmet to an armourer – the castle was ringed with them after so many years of English armies coming – and begged the use of the man’s anvil and a mushroom stake. You don’t need a hammer to take the dent out of a helmet.

The armourer was kindness itself. I’ve often noticed that people will be friendly to the young where they might be stiff to an older man. So he fed me some cheap wine, and watched while I unpicked the liner of the helmet, laid it aside (filthy, ill kept and needing repair) and carefully bashed the dent against the stake – from the inside.

I couldn’t budge the dent.

Finally the Gascon laughed, took the helmet from me, and removed the dent with three careful whangs against the stake.

‘You know how,’ he said. ‘You just aren’t strong enough.’

It’s true. I’d watched a master armourer in Southwark take the dents out of a knight’s helmet once, so I knew the technique. I just didn’t realize that the simple motions required great strength and technique – there’s a lesson there for swordsmen, if you like. The armourer made it look simple. Like the master archer, eh?

Since the cheap wine was free and he fed me, I sat in the Gascon’s forge and repaired the liner, mending the places where the raw wool of the padding was leaking, washed it and hung it by the forge fire to dry. There truly are Christians in the world, and I mention him to God every time I hear Mass. He and his good wife fed me a dozen times during the weeks we were in Bordeaux.

My point is that I got John’s kit into better shape, and the master archer, Master Peter, saw it. That was good.

The cook was called Abelard the Deacon. The word in the company was that he’d been ordained a deacon as a young man, and they’d cast him from his order for gluttony. In truth, he wasn’t fat like other cooks; he must have had some curse on him, for he ate and ate and never gained. He was tall and very strong, and I saw him fight and he was a killer. He was like a monster – no skill, but lots of strength. Sometimes, they are the most dangerous men.

He was also well read, and when he found that I had read some of the words of the great Aquinas, my status changed more than it would have if I could have arrayed myself in new armour. He became my protector against archers with a tendency to young men, and against men who simply like to haze the young, and against my true foes, the squires.

By the sweet saviour, they were my first enemies. I hated my uncle, but he was just a sad sinner, a miser and a rapist. The squires were my age, nobly born and very full of themselves. Their leader, Diccon Ufford, had made a campaign the year before with his knight, but the rest of them were as green as I was, and eager to improve their status by putting themselves above someone else. I was just about the only man they could be lord of, as the archers treated them with the scorn they richly deserved. To be fair, Diccon scarcely troubled me, but his lieutenant in all things was Richard Beauchamps, and he never tired of humiliating me.

As the cook’s boy, it was my place to do whatever was asked of me, and I found that the squires devoted themselves to using all my time. My second night in Gascony, I was kicked awake to curry horses. The next night I cooked for my Lord and the captain of our retinue, Thomas de Vere, Earl of Oxford. I didn’t try to play on our relation. Richard Beauchamps was the lord’s squire; when I went to cut the beef, Richard took the knife from my hand and kicked me.

‘That for your impudence, bastard!’ he said. ‘Carving is for gentles.’

I watched him for a moment – I was proud of my control – as he failed to carve the beef. My hands were shaking with anger, but I made myself take deep breaths.

‘Then perhaps you’d like me to show you how to do it?’ I said in my mother’s best accent.

The Earl was watching us, and his squire couldn’t really attack me in public, so he turned.

‘You’re dead,’ he said. ‘I’m going to beat you blue and make you beg me to stop.’

I smiled.

War.

Our war amused the archers. I’d love to say they all backed me, but they didn’t. Most of them were twenty-five, or even older, and the affairs of boys were beneath them. Even John, who liked me and was truly grateful, then and later, for my work on his kit, still thought that any bruises I got from boys my own age were either deserved or part of growing up.

Try the organized hatred of six older boys.

When I carried a tray, I was tripped. When I curried a horse, dirt was poured on its back. When I cooked, hands would pour pepper and salt into my dishes. When I built a fire, people would piss on it.

The archers found it funny, in the way mistreating a mongrel dog can become funny.

I may have red hair and a temper, but I had never been the scapegoat, the Judas, before. I was usually top boy or close enough. I didn’t have the right armour for the contest, and a bitter month passed while I grew some.

It wasn’t the beatings. Richard beat me three times, I think. He lacked the pure evil to kill or maim me, and he wasn’t as vicious as my uncle. But the endless hatred had an effect.

I never seemed able to get one of them alone, yet they quite regularly got me, three or four to one. The worst was when I was bathing. They took my only set of clothes and burned them. Then three of them beat me very thoroughly, leaving me bruised and naked by the river. Walking naked through a military camp is a good way to make yourself known to a great many men, let me tell you. I was the laughing stock of the camp for two days.

John found me clothes – too big to fit, dirty and full of lice.

I survived.

But I yearned to turn the tables, though I never seemed to manage it. I lay in wait for one of them and he never came to water his knight’s horse, even though he’d done it three days in a row. I put salt in their food, and they either didn’t notice or I hadn’t used enough.

It was the cook who saved me. He liked to talk, so we talked, and after a few doses of Aquinas he started to protect me. Just in small ways.

‘Two boys seem to be waiting under the eaves of the armoury tent,’ he said one evening.

‘A mysterious hand tried to salt the goose,’ he mentioned the next day.

‘I found a squire with no work to do, so I made him wash pots,’ he grinned a week later.

At the same time, I had found something to love, and that was riding. I had never owned a horse. Indeed, I’d scarcely learned to ride, even while learning to joust – like many young men, it was enough to stay on through the course. I laugh now at what I thought was good riding, back as a boy in London.

Master Peter purchased me a small riding horse. I’ll never know what the old archer saw in me, but he saw something – that horse cost him nine silver pennies of Gascony. I rode every day, everywhere I could – I remember fetching six leather canteens full of water on horseback, once, to the vast amusement of the archers.

The truth is that, when I tell this tale, I make my life sound hard. The other boys annoyed me, and sometimes they hurt me, but I was also outside, riding, cooking, getting taught how to use a sword and a spear. The knights – men I worshipped the way the ancient men worshipped their gods – were not distant beings. They were right there with us, and every day I had a chance to speak to one or other of them.

My favourite, of course, was our own Earl of Oxford. He was a great lord, but he had the common touch. He spoke to the older archers as if they were comrades, not inferiors, and he ruffled my hair and called me ‘Judas’, which may sound harsh, but it was better than ‘bare arse’, which is what most of the men called me after the river incident. We were in his contingent; Peter was one of his sworn men, and we all wore the Oxford badge on our red and yellow livery.

Like many boys, I was in a constant state of anxiety about my status. Technically I was a cook, not a soldier, and I was worried I would be left behind – either when the army marched or when the day of battle dawned. By blessed St George, what a pleasure it might be to be left behind for a battle! Bah. I lie. If you are a man-of-arms, it is in arms you must serve, and that was my choice. But fear of being left behind made me work very hard, both as a cook and as an apprentice soldier. I was big, even then, and I would walk out into the fields below the castle to cut thistles with my cheap sword, or to fence against a buckler held by my friend the cook.

One day – I think we’d been in France about two weeks, and the war horses were getting the sheen back in their coats after the crossing – I was cutting at the buckler, and Abelard was cutting at mine. This is a good training technique that every boy in London knows by the time he is nine years old, but I’ve never see it on the Continent. You cut at your companion’s buckler and he, in turn, cuts at yours. The faster you go, the more like a real fight it can be, but relatively safe, unless your opponent is a fool or a madman. The point is that you
only
hit the opponent’s shield.

We were swashing and buckling faster and faster, circling like men in a real fight. Abelard was two fingers taller than me and broader, but fast. He was trying to keep his buckler away from me, and I was trying to close the distance.

Suddenly there was the Earl of Oxford and half a dozen men-at-arms with hawks on their wrists. The Earl motioned to Master Abelard, who came and held his stirrup, and the earl dismounted.

‘So, Master Judas,’ he said. ‘Those who live by the sword will die by the sword, or so it says in the Gospels.’

I bowed and stammered. I’d like to say that I held my head up and said something sensible or dashing, but the truth is that I stared at my bare feet – my dirty bare feet – and mumbled.

‘He’s very good, my lord.’ Abelard didn’t seem as tongue-tied as I was. It was also the first time anyone had told me I was good with a sword. I’d had suspicions, but I didn’t
know
.

The Earl took Abelard’s buckler and drew a riding sword from his saddle. ‘Let’s see,’ he said.

I bowed and managed to stammer out that he did me too much honour – in French.

The Earl paused. ‘That was nicely said. Are you gently born?’

I bowed. ‘My father was a man-at-arms,’ I said. ‘My mother—’ I must have blushed, because several of the men-at-arms laughed and one shook his head. ‘No better than she needed to be, I suppose.’ He laughed.

It must be hard to be bastard born. Luckily, I’m not, so I felt no resentment. And, praise to God, I was intelligent enough not to claim to be a distantly related de Vere then and there.