The Ill-Made Knight (60 page)

It’s like the perfect sword cut. You don’t forget it, once you see it done.

He tore his eyes away and blushed. He met my eye.

‘You have done well, William,’ he said. He reached into his brown robe and produced – de Charny’s dagger. ‘I return this to you,’ he said. ‘I suspect that you’ll want it, as we’re going to England and you look naked without a weapon.’

Then he rose and embraced me. So did Juan.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we will go to the armourer and have you fitted for a decent harness. I’ll draw some munitions stuff for the trip. And you’ll want a sword,’ he added.

We drank. After some time – talking of arms, fighting and horses – he stood up. ‘I’ll leave you, gentles. I’m too old for this place.’ He managed a smile at Dark Hair, and she smiled back at him, damn her.

Juan and I had a second cup of wine. And a third, and perhaps a fourth.

We talked of everything: the world and the crusade. I stood up. ‘I’m for bed,’ I said.

Juan agreed, and we walked home on a clear summer evening. I left him at the door of our lodging and went to the outdoor jakes.

Then I went back to the inn.

Before the bells in the cathedral tolled for Matins, Dark Hair and I had repaired to her tiny bed in the eaves, hard by the pallets of a dozen other girls. She held my hand while she negotiated with them in rapid Provençal, and held out her free hand.

‘Give me a few moutons to pay them,’ she said, and flushed. I could feel it in the half-dark. ‘Ah, monsieur, I’m no whore, but a poor girl, and these are my friends who will lose a little sleep.’

I gave her a gold florin.

She bit it.

Another girl, as pretty in another way, watched this transaction and giggled. ‘For a florin, we could all stay and help,’ she said, but her friends led her away.

As it turned out, we didn’t need any help. Her neck was warm and salty, and her mouth was deep and tasted of cloves and cinnamon.

I saw Anne a dozen times before we left for Calais, and she welcomed me eagerly enough that I think, despite my florins, she liked me. I’ve known a hundred women like her – somewhere in the misty half-world between whoredom and ‘honest’ labour. We slipped out to walk the river and went out in a boat, and we ate fish in a riverside tavern, and we . . .

Never mind. It wasn’t love, but it was pleasant.

The last night, I told her I was going and she kissed me and said, ‘A girl likes a soldier ever so much better than a priest.’

The ride across France was like a chivalric
empris
. We camped almost every night because there were no inns; we rode armed all the time, and I had to practice the discipline my knight spoke of so often, washing what I could every day, changing linen without taking off my rented armour. As he had said, it wasn’t that hard. I learned every day – learned what many squires are taught by their knights, but no one had ever taught me.

I learned to wash my own clothes, and to dry them on the rump of the pack horse.

It wasn’t all learning. I taught
them
to cook. The three of us cooked in strict rotation, and their initial attempts were laughable for men who had lived in the field all their lives. But their cooking was of a piece with my swordsmanship – they’d never been taught better. I bought pepper, saffron and good honey and I showed them where, even in the ruin of France, one could pluck a few herbs from the foundations of a burned cottage.

I won’t bore you with what effect Richard’s betrayal had on me, except that I was not as quick to love Juan as I might have been. And while I loved Fra Peter – and I did – I yet contrived to keep a little distance between us.

The trip, and the dinner, however, eroded my intentions. We had no other companions and we became very close.

I was learning so much, so fast, that I don’t remember much of the scenery. I learned that I had never learned to properly care for a horse, because I had never been a real squire. When you are out in the rough for weeks, and it rains is cold, you must work very hard so that your great brute of a war horse is not made lame for life, or dies of a fever.

I learned how to start a fire – better, faster and from all sorts of things. Fra Peter could make fire with a stone and the pommel of his sword – it was like watching a priest perform a miracle.

I learned to cook a few new dishes from Anne, in Avignon, and I taught them as well. The one I liked best was the Provençal dish I had eaten so often in Avignon – cassoulet.

I learned to be a better scout, for a campsite, or an army.

And every day, I learned to ride better. I learned to saddle and unsaddle, tack and untack, faster and more gently. To clean and maintain all my equipment and Sir Thomas’s.

Every day, we practised with our swords, often cutting the innocent vegetation. This allowed Fra Peter to discourse on how to cut or thrust, and then to further discourse on how to clean and sharpen.

You might have thought that, as a professional man-at-arms, I’d have resented this.

Perhaps Fiore and I aren’t so different. When Boucicault dropped me in the road, I learned a bitter lesson.

I wasn’t anywhere near as good as I thought I was.

Messieurs, Sir Jesus had the right of it – those of us who live by the sword will die by the sword. To us, the only thing more dangerous than our enemies is our own complacency.

I wasn’t too far gone to learn. I was twenty-one, and I’d just started to grow.

Calais. A fine town, growing every year. By the saviour, it is still growing. I reckon the town fathers don’t want King Richard to renew the war: they make their profit from being England’s door into France.

I thought it was the end of our journey, but after a meeting with a papal officer, we took ship for England.

I was overjoyed.

We landed twice, but our little ship carried us up out of the chop of the Channel and all the way to London. We landed across the river because of some trouble – I can’t remember what it was. Our horses came up out of the hold, and it was a day before they were anything like recovered. Fra Peter went ahead to the priory at Clerkenwell, and Juan and I stayed with the horses.

When they were alert and well fed, we rode them over the bridge, and I had the immense pleasure of wearing my donat’s coat into London.

Juan was the perfect companion – happy to be pleased. We rode west through the streets, and I showed him the tower, the churches, the Cheaping, the goldsmiths.

I was enthusiastic about my city, and yet I was all too aware that it was small next to Paris and dirty next to Avignon.

My sister was no longer at Clerkenwell, but had moved to the sister’s convent in the country. Despite that, our arrival at Clerkenwell had a sort of homecoming air to it, and we were welcomed by the prior in person and fed in the great hall. I felt as if I was a member of this great order.

The hall and barracks were packed. The order had been recruiting for the crusade, and they had twenty donats, mostly veteran men-at-arms. It made me proud to be one of them.

We stayed a week. There was nothing for Juan and I to do except watch the more attractive scullery maids, exercise in the yard and swagger about the streets of London, which we did with the attentiveness and belligerence of young men. London had had a generation of swaggering young men, fresh from victories in France and Flanders, and we were tolerated or ignored.

The beer was good.

By the third day, I was torn between conflicting desires, the strangest of which was to leave before something – some nameless fear – came to pass. I think I feared arrest. It is hard to say.

But I had nightmares two nights, and I dreamed of the Plague – I think it was the first time, but scarcely the last.

I woke the fourth morning, in the quiet certainty that I had to go and see my uncle. It is difficult to explain even now – I feared and hated him, and meant him harm, yet I had to visit.

I rose, walked down to the Thames and swam, and helped two boys from the Priory to water horses. Then I went back to my cell and washed and put on clean clothes. I left my war horse and my donat’s coat, and I walked, dressed like a modestly prosperous apprentice or journeyman, through the streets to my uncle’s house, wearing dull colours and a hood.

As I neared it, my heart beat harder and harder, and my breathing grew shallower. I was afraid.

The door was shut, which it should never have been on a day of work.

I stood looking at it for a while.

I knocked, and there was no answer.

I was . . . relieved.

I walked up the conduit to Nan’s house. I had been told never to visit her again, but on the other hand, she had probably been my closest friend.

The shield of the Order was a powerful one. I couldn’t imagine being shown the door by an Alderman of London. Not if he wanted to be buried in a church.

I didn’t call at the shop door, but went to the garden wall, as I had used to when we were courting. I think that I hoped she would lean out from her window – I know I looked at it.

Suddenly she appeared.

I think my heart stopped.

She was not the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen – not after France – but beauty is a wonderful thing, and when you decide on beauty, it never fades. Nan was . . . herself. And my heart soared to see her.

The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as a man, judged me worthy of a second look and gave the slightest smile, not really flirtatious but a firm acknowledgement of me, my upright carriage and my muscles (women look at these things even when they don’t think they do) and then – remember, I had a hood and she couldn’t see my hair – something gave me away. Her eyes became fuller and deeper and her regard solidified, then she leaped to her feet, leaned out the widow, shouted, ‘William!’ and vanished.

I could hear her running down the twisting chimney stairs.

The garden gate flew open and there was her mother, who grinned.

An excellent sign.

‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ cackled her mother. ‘William Gold, you haven’t been hanged. How fares it with thee?’ And she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek.

I confess that I found the phrase ‘haven’t been hanged’ a little too close to the bone, but I laughed, and then Nan slammed into me. She’d added flesh since fourteen, and she was hardly light – her hug was as hard as a man’s – but despite some gains, I picked her up and twirled her around her father’s garden.

‘Stop that, William! I weigh ten stone, now, and you’ll hurt your back.’ She laughed. ‘I’m an old married lady with two daughters.’

Her mother put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come into the kitchen and tell us your adventures,’ she said.

So I did.

An hour on, with two cups of candian wine in me, I met Nan’s da, who came in wearing enough finery to be abroad in Avignon or Paris – wool hose in his guild’s colours, and a jupon with a long velvet gown over it, all trimmed in fur. For July in England, it was a bit much, and he started stripping off before he noticed me.

‘William Gold?’ he asked, and before I could fear his reaction, he was pumping my hand. ‘We heard you was at Poitiers with the Prince,’ he said.

They had?

‘Your sister wrote to us,’ Nan said, eyes cast down but smiling widely. ‘And again last autumn, to say you’d paid her way to be a full sister. That’s how we knew you were. . .’ she looked up. ‘Prosperous.’

‘A sister of the Order!’ the Alderman said. ‘You must bathe in gold, young William. How fare ye? Are you . . . a scholar?’

I laughed. ‘I’m a soldier, master. I serve a knight of the Order, myself. I’m a lay brother.’ I shrugged. ‘The ladies have already heard all my stories.’

Which is to say, I’d left out the horror, the love-making and the dirt, and told the war stories in which I seemed a hero rather than those in which I seemed a fool. Like most young men at home after war.

Master Richard rose and embraced me. ‘Be free of my house,’ he said graciously. ‘Not that my wife and daughter haven’t made you so already, I have no doubt.’

I asked what I’d waited all that time to ask. ‘How . . . is my uncle?’

Master Richard made a face like a man whose drunk bad milk. ‘He still has his mark, and he does some business,’ Master Richard said. ‘Your aunt died.’

Nan’s mother spat. ‘He killed her.’

Nan looked away.

Master Richard spread his hands. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said softly.

I heard other news – how Tom Courtney was a full member of the guild, one of the youngest ever; how my sister and two other sisters had come during an outbreak of the Plague and were held to have worked miracles, and how Nan’s husband, a mercer, had fought at Winchelsea when the French came, and now was an enthusiastic member of the London bands – the militia.

‘He’ll be home in a day,’ Nan said. ‘I pray you like him.’

I smiled at all of them. ‘I’m sure that I will,’ I said.

They invited me to sup and I bowed. ‘I have a friend,’ I said. ‘My fellow donat, a Spanish gentleman. I would esteem it a favour if I might bring him.

That was easily done. There’s no merchant in London who doesn’t like having a Spanish aristocrat at his table.

Before returning to the priory, I walked up the hill to the abbey. There was Brother Bartholomew, who gave me a great embrace, and, to my shock, there was ‘monk’ John, last seen on a battlefield. He, too, gave me an embrace.

We looked at each other warily.

He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t the life for me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’m meant for God, neither, but the food’s good.’ His eyes were far away. ‘I’m not . . . it wasn’t . . .’ he met my gaze and his was troubled. ‘You know what a life it was.’

I laughed – not a laugh of fun, but a laugh that understood. ‘John, I’m a lay brother of the Order of Saint John.’

His own roar of laughter probably said more about us and our lives than any speech, but he hugged me more warmly than before.

They took me to the old Abbott, who was no longer serving, but mostly sat in the cloister and read.

For a long moment, I feared he wouldn’t know me.

‘I’m Will Gold, Father,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he said. His hands, old as bones, came up and clasped mine. ‘God love us, child, you came back.’