“I’m off!” Marie shouted to me, plunging away down a lane which led toward the fish quay.
I could not even shout a blessing, the smell of the smoke from burning buildings caught in the back of my throat like the stab of a knife and choked me into silence. The smell of smoke — the very scent of my nightmares — filled the air, filled my nostrils, my lungs, even my eyes, so that I could not breathe and my eyes were filled with tears so that I could not see.
From the ramparts above me I heard a high shriek of terror and I looked up to see a man on fire, the burning arrow still caught in his clothing, as he dived to the floor and rolled, trying to extinguish the flames, screaming like a heretic as his body burned.
I ducked from the doorway and started to run, anywhere to get away from the smell of a man burning. I wanted to find Daniel. He seemed like the only safe haven in a world turned into a nightmare. I knew I would have to fight my way through the chaotic streets, filled with frightened people rushing to the harbor, with soldiers pounding in the opposite direction to the ramparts, and somehow get through the cavalry, their horses wheeling and pushing in the narrow streets, waiting to charge out of the gates and push back the French army.
I pressed myself back against the walls of the houses as a company of horse mustered in the street. The big haunches of the animals pushed one against the other and I shrank back into the doorway, fearing that they would knock me over and I would be crushed.
I waited for my chance to get by, watching other people darting among the big hooves of the horses, seeing Daniel’s street at the other side of the square, hearing the men shout and the horses neigh and the bugler blasting out the call to arms, and I thought, not of my mother — who had faced death like a saint, but of the queen — who had faced death like a fighter. The queen — who had got her own horse and ridden out in the darkness to stand up for her own. And thinking of her, I found the courage to plunge out of the doorway and dart around the dangerous heels of the big horses and duck into a refuge further down the street when a great charge of horsemen came thundering by. Then I looked up and saw the standard they were carrying before them, smirched with mud and bloodied by an earlier battle, and I saw the bear and staff embroidered on the bright ground and I called out: “Robert Dudley!”
A man looked over at me. “At the head, where he always is.”
I pushed my way back, afraid of nothing now, turning horses’ heads to one side, sliding between their big flanks. “Let me by, let me by, sir. I am going to Robert Dudley.”
It became like a dream. The great horses with the men mounted as high as centaurs above me. Their great heavy armor shining in the sunshine, clashing when they brushed one against another, sounding like cymbals when they hammered their halberds on their shields, hearing their great raw bellow above the clatter of the horses on the cobbles, louder than a storm.
I found myself at the head of the square and there was his standard-bearer, and beside him…
“My lord!” I yelled.
Slowly, the helmeted head turned toward me, the visor down so he could not see me. I pulled off the cap from my head, and my hair tumbled down and I lifted my face up toward the dark knight, high on his great horse.
“My lord! It’s me! Hannah the Fool.”
His gauntleted hand lifted the false face of metal, but the shadow of the helmet left his face in darkness and still I could not see him. The horse shifted, held in powerful control by his other hand. His head was turned toward me, I could feel his eyes on me, sharp under the sharp points of the helmet.
“Mistress Boy?”
It was his voice, coming from the mouth of this great man-god, this great man of metal. But it was his voice, as intimate and warm and familiar as if he had come from dancing at King Edward’s summer feast.
The horse sidled, I stepped back on a doorstep, it raised me up four inches, nothing more. “My lord, it is me!”
“Mistress Boy, what the devil are you doing here?”
“I live here,” I said, half laughing and half crying at seeing him again. “What of you?”
“Released, fighting, winning — perhaps losing at the moment. Are you safe here?”
“I don’t think so,” I said honestly. “Can we hold the town?”
He pulled the gauntlet from his right hand, twisted a ring from his finger, threw it toward me, careless if I caught it or not. “Take this to the Windflight,” he said. “My ship. I will see you aboard if we need to sail. Go now, get aboard. We are to make a charge.”
“Fort Risban is lost!” I shouted above the noise. “You can’t sail away, they will turn the guns on the harbor.”
Robert Dudley laughed aloud as if death itself were a joke. “Mistress Boy, I don’t expect to survive this charge! But you might be lucky and slip away. Go now.”
“My lord…”
“It’s an order!” he shouted at me. “Go!”
I gasped, pushing the ring on my finger. It had been on his little finger, it fitted my third, just above my wedding ring: Dudley’s ring on my finger.
“My lord!” I cried out again. “Come back safe.”
The bugle played so loud that no one could be heard. They were about to charge. He dropped his visor over his face, pulled his gauntlet back on his hand, lifted his lance from its place, tipped it to his helmet in a salute to me, and wheeled his horse around to face his company.
“A Dudley!” he shouted. “For God and the queen!”
“For God and the queen!” they roared back at him. “For God and the queen! Dudley! Dudley!”
They moved toward the city walls, out of the square, and like a camp follower, disobedient to his order, I moved after them. To my left were the lanes running down to the harbor but I was drawn by the jingle of the bits and the deafening clatter of the metaled hooves on the cobbles. The roar of the siege grew louder as they got near to the gate, and at the sound of French rage I hesitated, shrank back, looked behind for the way to the harbor.
Then I saw her. Daniel’s woman, bedraggled with her pretty dress half dragged from her shoulder, exposing her breast. Her child was on her hip, clinging to her, his dark eyes wide, her hair was tumbling down, her eye blacked, her face anguished, running like a hunted deer, skipping and stumbling on the cobbles of the street.
She recognized me at once. She had watched me, as I had watched her, every Sunday at Mass. Both of us confined to the poor pews at the back of church. Both of us trapped into shame by the other’s determination.
“Hannah,” she called out to me. “Hannah!”
“What is it?” I shouted irritably. “What d’you want with me?”
She showed me her child. “Take him!”
At once I remembered the intensity of my vision in church, the first time I had seen her. Then as now there was a screaming and a thundering noise. Then, in my nightmare, she had called out “Take him!” As she cried out the sky suddenly grew dark with a hail of missiles and I ducked into a doorway but on the other side of the street she came on, dodging through the falling rocks. “Hannah! Hannah! I need your help.”
“Go home,” I shouted unhelpfully. “Go to a cellar or somewhere.”
The last of the horses was moving out of the square, we heard the groan of the counterweights as they pulled back the great gates for Lord Robert and his cavalry to charge out, and the great roar of rage as they thundered out to meet the French army.
“They are leaving us?” she screamed in horror. “Running away?”
“No, going out to fight. Find yourself a refuge…” I yelled impatiently.
“God save us, they need not go out to fight them, they are in already! They must turn to fight! The French are here! They are in the town! We are lost!” Daniel’s woman shouted. “It was them…”
Her words suddenly penetrated my mind, and I whirled around to look at her again. At once I realized the significance of her black eye and her torn gown. The French were in the city, and they had raped her.
“They came in thr
ough the harbor! Ten minutes ago!” she screamed at me, and as she shouted the words I saw coming down the street behind her a tide of mounted horsemen, the French cavalry, in the streets and behind my lord, cutting off him and his men from the harbor, their horses foaming at the mouth, their lances down for a charge, their visors fixed so that they seemed to have faces of iron, their spurs tearing blood from their horses’ sides, the scream of hooves on cobbles, the absolute horror of a cavalry charge in an enclosed space. The first rank was on us in a moment, a lance plunging down toward me and without thinking I snatched the dagger from my boot and with the short blade I parried the thrust. The shock of the blow jarred my blade from my hand, but saved my life as it threw me back against the door of the house behind me. I felt it yield and I fell back into the darkness of an unknown house as I heard Daniel’s woman scream: “Save my baby! Take him! Take him!”
Even as she ran toward me with him held out before her, even as she thrust him into my hands, and he came all warm and soft and heavy, I heard myself say: “I can’t take him.”
I saw the lance run her through, spearing her spine, as she cried out again: “Take him! Take him!” and at that moment there was a dreadful crash like a forest falling down all at once and a rush of horses and men and danger, and I stumbled back into the dark interior of the house with the boy held tight against me, and the door swung shut on the street with a bang like a thunderclap.
I turned to thank whoever had saved me but before I could speak there was a roar of flames and a sudden blast of hot smoke, and someone pushed past me and threw open the door again.
The thatched roof of this temporary refuge was alight, burning like a pyre, blazing up like kindling in seconds. Everyone who had been hidden in the house was pushing past me to the street outside, more willing to face the merciless cavalry charge than death by burning; and I, smelling smoke like a frightened rat, dashed out after them, the child gripping to me, tight against my shoulder.
Mercifully, the streets were clear for the moment. The French horsemen had chased after Lord Robert’s troop in one mad dangerous dash. But Daniel’s woman was where they had left her with two great lance thrusts through her body. She lay in a deep puddle of her own blood, dead.
At the sight I snatched her child closer to me and started to run down the street, away from the gate, down the stone steps to the harbor, my feet thudding out a rhythm of fear. I could not wait to look for Daniel, I could not do anything but take the chance I had been given with Lord Robert’s ring. I fled to the harbor like a criminal with the hue and cry at my heels, and I was conscious all around me that everyone else was racing too, some carrying bundles of goods, others clutching their children, desperate to get out of the town before the French turned their horses and came back through again.
The boats were tied by just one rope, all sails furled ready to go at a moment’s notice. I looked desperately around for Lord Robert’s standard and saw it, at the prime position, at the very end of the pier where it would be easiest to slip away. I ran down the pier, my feet thudding on the wooden boards, and skidded to a halt when a sailor leaped from the ship and stood before the gangplank with a shining cutlass out of its scabbard, pointing at my throat. “No further, lad,” he said.
“Lord Robert sent me,” I panted.
He shook his head. “We could all say that. What’s happening in town?”
“Lord Robert led his company out in a charge but the French are in the town already, at his back.”
“Can he turn?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”
He shouted an order over his shoulder. The men on deck stood by the ropes for the sails and two men vaulted ashore and held the rope ready to cast off.
I held out my hand to show his ring gripped tight on my finger, above my wedding ring.
The sailor looked at it once, and then looked again more carefully. “His ring,” he said.
“His own. He gave it me himself. He saw me before he led them out. I am his vassal. I was Hannah the Fool before I came here.”
He stepped back and raked me with a quick glare. “I’d not have recognized you,” he said. “And this? Your son?”
“Yes.” The lie was said and gone before I had time to think, and then I would not have recalled it. “Let me aboard. It is my lord’s order that I go to England.”
He stepped to one side and nodded me up the narrow gangplank and then positioned himself square at the foot again. “But you’re the last,” he said decidedly. “Even if they come with a lock of his hair or a love knot.”
We waited for a long hour while others poured down from the town to the quayside. The sailor had to call for other men to come to push the refugees away from Lord Robert’s pier, and curse them for cowards, while the winter afternoon grew dark and no one could tell us whether Lord Robert had broken the French ranks or whether they had entered the town behind his back and cut him down. Then we saw the town lit up from one point to another as the French besieging army broke through the walls and fired one thatched roof and then another.
The sailor on guard at the gangplank snapped out orders and the crew made ready. I sat very quietly on deck, rocking the child against my shoulder, terrified that it would cry and that they would decide that an extra passenger was not worth the extra risk, especially if my lord was not coming.
Then there was a rush of men and horses down to the quayside and a check and a flurry as they flung themselves from the saddle, threw off their armor and hared up to the waiting ships.
“Steady, boys, steady,” came the stentorian shout from the sailor on guard at the gangplank. Six guards stood behind him, shoulder to shoulder with naked blades at the ready, and they checked every man who tried to come aboard for a password, and turned away a good few who raced back down the pier looking for another boat that would take them in. All the time from the town came the explosion of burning gunpowder and the crack of breaking roof tiles and the roar of buildings fired.
“This is not a defeat, it is a rout,” I said in bewilderment in the baby’s tiny ear and he turned and yawned with his little rosebud mouth in a perfect “ooo” as if he were in utter safety and need fear nothing.
Then I saw my lord. I would have recognized him in any crowd. He was walking, broadsword in one hand, helmet in the other, trailing his feet like a defeated man. Behind him came a train of men limping, bleeding, heads bowed. He led them to the ship and stood aside as they went up the gangplank and threw themselves down with a clatter of dented armor on the deck.
“That’s enough, sir,” the sailor said to him quietly when we were fully loaded and my lord looked up, like a man newly wakened from sleep, and said: “But we have to take the rest. I promised they would serve me and I would take them to victory. I can’t leave them here now.”
“We’ll come back for them,” the sailor said gently. He put one strong arm around my lord’s shoulders and drew him firmly up the gangplank. Lord Robert went slowly, like a sleepwalker, his eyes open but seeing nothing.
“Or they’ll get another passage. Cast off!” the sailor shouted to the man at the stern rope. The man flung the rope on shore and the others unfurled the sails. Slowly we moved from the quayside.
“I can’t leave them!” Robert, suddenly fully alert, turned to the widening gulf of water between ship and land. “I can’t leave them here.”
The men left ashore let out a pitiful cry. “A Dudley! A Dudley!”
The sailor caught up Lord Robert in a great bear hug, holding him away from the rail of the ship, preventing him jumping ashore.
“We’ll come back for them,” he assured him. “They’ll get safe passage in other ships, and if the worst comes to the worst then the French will ransom them.”
“I can’t leave them!” Robert Dudley fought to be free. “Hey! You! Sailors! Turn for port. Get to the quayside again!”
The wind was catching the sails, they flapped and then as they trimmed the ropes, the sails went taut and started to pull.
Behind us in Calais there was a resounding crash as the doors of the citadel yielded and the French army spilled into the very center of English power in France. Robert turned, anguished, toward the land. “We should regroup!” he cried. “We are about to lose Calais if we go now. Think of it! Calais! We have to go back and regroup and fight.”
Still the sailor did not release him, but now his hold was less to restrain the young lord and more to hold him in his grief. “We’ll come back,” he said and rocked him from one foot to another. “We’ll come back for the rest of them and then we’ll retake Calais. Never doubt it, sir. Never doubt it.”
Lord Robert went to the stern of the boat, scanning the harbor, seeing the disorderly retreat. We could smell the smoke drifting in a pall across the water from the burning buildings. We could hear people screaming, the French were avenging the insult of the starving burghers of Calais who had surrendered to the English all that long time ago. Lord Robert looked half-minded to throw himself in the water and swim back to take charge of the evacuation of the harbor, but even he, in his rage, could see that it was hopeless. We had lost, the English had lost. It was as simple and as brutal as that and the path of a true man was not to risk his life in some mummer’s piece of overacting, but to consider how to win the next battle.
He spent the voyage gazing over the stern to the receding coast of France, long after the formidable profile of the fortress had sunk below the horizon. As the light drained early from the gray January sky he remained standing, looking back, and when the small cold moon came up he was still there, trying to discern some hope on the black horizon. I knew, because I was watching him, as I sat on a coil of rope at the mast, just behind him. His fool, his vassal, wakeful because he was wakeful, anxious because he was anxious, sick with fear for him, for myself, and for whatever the future would bring when we made land in England, an odd trio: a renegade Jew with a Gentile bastard on her hip, and a newly released traitor who had led his men to defeat.
The Queen's Fool Page 46