The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  A week later, my uncle came home late, with his face puffy and his lip and eyebrows cut from punches. Footpads had set on him, taken his purse and pounded him.

  Next day, Brother John had two sets of split knuckles, and so did Brother Bartholomew. Perhaps they’d had a dust up.

  For a year, things were better. But better is an odd word to a boy who has to fear everything and everyone, and who has to fight every day. I’m not making excuses for what came later. Just saying.

  I’m coming to Poitiers in my own time. Listen, messieurs. When you face the arrow storm, when you face a big man in the lists or on the battlefield, when you stand knee deep in mud and your sword is broken and you cannot catch your breath and you have two bloody wounds – then you need to have something. Some men get it from their fathers. Some get it from God.

  So just listen.

  I always wanted to be a knight. In my boy’s head, my pater had been a knight – not strictly true, but a boy’s dreams are golden and that’s how it was. And yet, such is youth, when the Guildhall sent for me and I was entered as an apprentice – at the insistence of the Abbott, I think – I was puffed like an adder, over the moon with delight. I intended to be the best goldsmith since the Romans, and I worked like a slave. I went to another shop. My sister was working every day for the sisters of St John, serving the poor and thus safe from my uncle, so I could go and work the whole day with a free heart.

  As apprentices, we had thirty-five feast days a year. My master was John de Villers, and he beat me when I broke things. I never heard a word of praise from him, and I got a ration of curses, but that was only his way. He wasn’t a money-grubbing louse. He was a fine craftsman, and he didn’t make the cheap crap you see in the streets. He made nothing but scabbard fittings for the nobility, and he made things that caused me, as a boy, to gawk. Enamel blue, whorls of gold like the tracery on a cathedral – by St John, friends, he had the true gift of making, and all his bad temper didn’t stop him from teaching us. In fact, he liked his apprentices better than some apparently kinder men – most of his boys made their grade and got their mark.

  I worked in copper and learned my way. I did a lot more low work – I remember that I spent a week cleaning his stable shed, which can’t have taught me a thing about metal work – but he took the time to show me some things, and I loved the work, and I could tell that he could feel my enthusiasm.

  I made a set of clasps and hinges for a Bible for the monks, and Master de Villers said they were good enough. That was a great day for me. As far as I know, the monks still use that Bible – I saw it on the lectern in King Richard’s day.

  Oh, aye, messieurs, I’m older than dirt. I can remember Caesar. You asked for this story – fill my cup or go to your bed.

  That’s better.

  I was getting bigger. I had a little money. I finally bought a tuck – a sword. It probably wasn’t so much, but par dieu, gentlemen, it was the world to me, and I wore it out on Sundays’ under my buckler – a fine buckler with copper and bronze studs and a fine iron rim, all my work or my friends’ work. And when I swaggered swords with another boy, girls watched me.

  Well. When they danced, I watched them.

  And glances became looks, and looks became visits, and visits became hands brushing, and perhaps clasping, and then there was kissing . . .

  Heh, I’ll assume you know whereof I speak. So you know what comes next. I’m a sinful man, and lust has always had a place for me. A pretty face, a pair of breasts, a fine leg shown when tying a garter, and by our saviour, I’m off like a greyhound. I started young, and I’m not sure that I’m finished. But a chivalrous man is a lover of women – Lancelot was a lover of women, and Sir Tristan, and all the great knights. The priests clip us too close. There’s very little harm in a little love, eh?

  Any gate, by the time I was fourteen I was ready to be wed, and my chosen mate was Nan Steadman, whose da’ was an alderman. He thought me beneath her, but she had him wrapped around her fingers. She wed another, and I have a different life, but we still share a cup when I’m in London, Nan and I. Fifty years and more.

  Bah, I’m old. What I’m trying to say is that I had a life, a fine life. Hard, but I was making it, and with gentle manners and a good craft skill, there were no limits to what I might be. A fine life. I haven’t really said what an advantage my mother’s work on my manners were. But I spoke like a gentleman, English or French, and I could bow, carve, pour wine, read or speak a prayer. These may not seem like great achievements, but by our lady, without them you are doomed to be a certain kind of man. I had them, and as the alderman said, if I wasn’t hanged, I’d be Lord Mayor.

  I had everything required to succeed, in London.

  And in two afternoons, I fucked it away.

  I was learning to ride and joust and use the bow. Nay, don’t shake your heads – the Londoners over there nodding know that by law any free man of London, and that includes an apprentice, may bear arms and ride the joust – eh? Just so, messieurs. And such was my passion for it that I took Nan to see some foreign worthies fight at barriers in the meadows – knights and squires. There were Frenchmen and Germans and Englishmen and even a Scot. We fought the French, but we hated the Scots. But the Scottish knight was preux, and he fought well, and the French knights fought brilliantly – one of them like the god Mars incarnate – and one of the Brabanters was no great swordsman, but he was brave and spirited and I admired him. He was in the Queen’s retinue, I thought – she was a Hainaulter, and she brought more than a few of them with her.

  Things were different then, and when he was in his pavilion disarming, I walked in, bowed and paid my compliments on his fighting. He was older than I thought, and he was very pleased to have his fighting complimented by any man; it was nothing to him that I was an apprentice, and we talked for some time and I was served wine like a gentle. I think it went to my head, the wine and the company.

  There were other men about, and my Nan, looking a tad embarrassed as women are want to be when out of their element. But Sir Otto, as he was called, was courtly to her, and she blushed.

  A young English knight came in. They’d fought three blows of the sword, and they embraced, and I saw that the knight knew me. And I knew him. He was a cousin, on my mother’s side. A De Vere. He winced when I said I was a goldsmith.

  We might have had hot words, but then he shrugged. I didn’t want to admire him, but I did; he was everything I wasn’t, and suddenly he, by existing, burned my happiness to the ground.

  I didn’t want to be a goldsmith. I wanted to be a knight.

  He was Edward. Well, everyone was Edward in those days. He was a little too courtly to Nan, who ate his admiration the way a glutton eats pork. He had fine clothes, beautiful manners and he’d just fought in armour. Every one of you knows that a man never, ever looks better than when he’s just fought in harness. His body is as light as air. Fighting is a proper penance for sin – a man who has endured the harness and the blows is as stainless as a virgin for a little while. Edward had golden hair and a golden belt, and even then and there, I couldn’t resent Nan’s attention.

  Besides, after some initial hesitation, he treated me as family, and that only made me seem higher. I was glad. Nan would go home to her father and say we’d been served wine by gentlemen who were my relatives.

  The French knights came – they were prisoners of the war in France, waiting in England for ransom. The older knight was courtly to Nan and quite polite to me – no foolish distance. His name was Geoffrey de Charny, and if my cousin Edward looked like a true knight, De Charny looked like a paladin from the chansons. He was as tall as me – and damned few men are – a good six feet in his hose, and maybe a finger more. He had a face carved from marble, and hair the colour of silver-gilt, with blue eyes. He looked like the saint of your choice. He was the best fighter in armour that I ever saw, and he had the most perfect manners, and the reputation of being the fiercest man in the field. In fact, he was considered the greatest
knight of his generation – some men say the greatest knight of all time.

  You know of him, messieurs, I’m sure. Well, I will have more to say of that noble gentleman.

  The other man knight was as young as me, or Nan, but he wore the whole value of my master’s shop on his back. The first silk arming jacket I ever saw, with silk cords pointed in figured gold – and this a garment meant to be worn under armour and unseen.

  Nan was the only woman in the tent, and she received a great deal of attention, and I tried not to be angry or jealous. I was so busy hanging on de Charny’s every word that I scarcely noticed her. But young men are fools, and she blushed and smiled a great deal, and eventually came and stood by me, and Messire de Charny told her that she was very beautiful. She still tells that story, and well she might. He asked her for a lace from her sleeve, and promised to wear it the next time he fought.

  I admired him so much that I restrained my jealousy and managed to smile.

  We had too much wine, and on the way home we found a lane and we dallied. She had never been so willing – grown men know about women and wine, but young ones don’t know yet. She was liquorice, and I was hot for her. Her mouth tasted of cloves. We played long, but we stayed just inside the bounds, so to speak.

  I took her to her door, begged her mother’s forgiveness for the hour and escaped alive. Just.

  So when I came home to my uncle’s house, I thought I was safe and whole, relatively sinless.

  He was raping my sister. She was crying – whimpering and pleading. I could hear them from the back door, and all the while I climbed the stairs I knew he had her and was using her, and that as a knight, I had failed, because I had not been there to protect her. Climbing those stairs still comes to me in nightmares. Up and up the endless, narrow, rickety stair, my sister begging him to stop, the sound of his fist striking her, the wet sound as he moved inside her.

  Eventually I made the top. We lived in the attic, under the eaves, and he had her on my pallet. I went for him. I wasn’t ten years old any more, and he never trained to arms.

  I’ll make this brief – you all want to hear about Poitiers.

  I beat him badly.

  I dragged him off her, and locked one of his arms behind his back, using it to hold him, then I smashed his face with my fists until I broke his nose. As he fell to the floor, arse in the air, I kicked him. I made his member black by kicking him there fifteen or twenty times.

  The next day, he stayed abed. I had to mind his shop, and I sent a boy round to my true master and said my uncle was sick. It was evil fate riding me hard.

  The French knight Geoffrey de Charny – the one who had fought so well the day before – came to the shop. The younger knight was with him. De Charny had a dagger, a fine thing, all steel – steel rondels, steel grip, steel blade – and better than anything I’d seen in London. It was a wicked, deadly thing that shouted murder across the room. He laid it on the counter and asked how much it would cost to put it in a gold-mounted scabbard.

  After I named a price, he looked down his nose at me. In French, he asked me if he hadn’t seen me at the passage of arms the day before.

  I spoke French well, or so I thought until I went to France, so I nodded and bowed and said that yes, I had been present.

  He pursed his lips. ‘With the very handsome woman, yes?’ he asked. He looked at the younger knight, who grinned.

  I nodded. I didn’t like that grin.

  ‘And the English knight, Sir Edward, is your cousin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ I said.

  ‘But you are in a dirty trade. Your hands are not clean.’ He made a face. ‘Why do you betray your blood like this?’

  Perhaps my anger showed in my eyes, but he shrugged. ‘You English,’ he said. ‘I have insulted you, and truly, I mean no insult. You look like a healthy boy who would not be useless in arms. Why not turn your back on this dirt and do something worthy?’

  I had no answer for that. I do not think that trade is dirty. Good craft still makes my heart sing like sweet music, but something he said seemed to me to be from God. Why was I intending to be a goldsmith?

  You might ask why I wasn’t seeking the law and revenge for my sister. I’m telling this badly. In fact, I spent the morning taking her to the nuns before I opened the shop. I went to Nan’s father and swore a complaint. I did all that, and the French knight’s visit was, if anything, a pleasant diversion from my thoughts. Perhaps I should have killed my uncle myself. That’s what a man-of-arms does – he is justice. He carries justice in his scabbard. But in London, in the year of our lord 1355, an apprentice went meekly to the law, because the King’s courts were fair courts, because the Mayor and Aldermen, despite being rich fucks, were mostly fair men, and because I believed then – and still do, friends – that the rule of law is better than the rule of the sword, at least in England.

  My uncle wasn’t bound by such rules.

  When I closed the shop, I didn’t want to spend another minute under his roof, so I went to evensong, and then I walked. I’d been in the great passion play at the hospital as Judas – I already mentioned that – and I knew a few of the knights, that is, the Knights of the Order. They sometimes allowed me to watch them while they practised their arms, and my sister worked there. Now my sister was lying on a bed among the sisters, so my feet took me out Clerkenwell way to the hospital priory. I saluted the porter and went to find my sister. I sat on her bed for three quarters of an hour by the bells, listening to the sound of sheep cropping grass, and to the squawking of hens and the barking of dogs and the sounds of a Knight of the Order riding his war horse, practising, in the yard. Twice I went and watched him.

  The Hospitallers – the Knights of St John – have always, to me, been the best men, the best fighters, the very epitome of what it means to be a knight. So even while my sister wept with her face to the wall, I watched the knight in the yard.

  When I went back to her bedside and tried to hold her hand, she shrank into a ball.

  After some time, I gave up and went back to get some sleep. I walked up to the servant’s door of my uncle’s house, and two men came out of the shadows and ordered me to hand over my sword.

  I did.

  And I was taken.

  I want you, gentlemen, to see how I came to a life of arms, but I’ll cut this part short. I was taken for theft. My uncle swore a warrant against me for the theft of the knight’s dagger. I never touched it – I swear on my sword – but that boots nothing when a Master Goldsmith swears a case against an apprentice. I was taken. I wasn’t ill used, and all they did was lock me in a plain room of the sheriff’s house. I had a bed.

  The next day, I went for trial.

  Nothing went as I expected. I have always hated men of law, and my trial for theft confirmed what every apprentice knows: the men of law are the true enemy. I could tell from the way they spoke that none of them – not one – believed me guilty. It was like the passion play, they acted out the parts of accuser and accused. My uncle said that I had always been bad and that I had stolen the dagger. The French knight, Sir Geoffrey, appeared merely to say the dagger had been his. He looked at me a long time. When the court thanked him formally for attending, he bowed and then said, in French, that my case was what came of forcing a nobly born boy to ignoble pursuits.

  Given it was a court of merchants and craftsmen, I’m fairly sure his words did me no good. Most of the court talk was in Norman French, which I understood well enough. My advocate wasn’t much older than me, and seemed as willing to see me hanged as my accuser. No one seemed to care when I shouted that my uncle had raped my sister.

  I was found guilty and condemned to be branded.

  They branded me right here, on my right hand. See? Of course you can’t, messieurs. I was branded with a cold iron, because Brother John and the Abbott appeared as if from a machine and told the court that I was in lower orders. I read one of the psalms in Latin when the Abbott ordered me to. It was like having a feve
r – I scarcely understood what was happening.

  I was dismissed from the guild.

  My uncle burned all my clothes and all my belongings. He had the right to do so, but he made me a beggar.

  Nan’s father told me never to come to his house, but in truth he was decent about it. He didn’t say it in words, but he made it clear that he knew I was no thief. And yet . . .

  And yet, my life was done.

  I went and slept on the floor of the monks’ chapel, where I swept their floors. I was there three days, and they gave me some cast-off clothes, while the Abbott made me a reader – I read the gospel two mornings – so as not to have lied in court.

  I’ll never forget those mornings, reading the gospel to the monks. I am a man of blood, but for two whole days, I loved Jesus enough to be a monk. I considered it and the Abbott invited me.

  But the third day, Brother John came and took me on a walk.

  We walked a long way. I was still so shattered I had no conversation, and he merely walked along, greeting all who looked at him, winking at the maidens and sneering at the men. We walked along the river to the Tower and back.

  Just short of our chapel, having walked the whole of London, he stopped. ‘I’m giving up the habit,’ he said suddenly.

  I doubt I looked very interested.

  ‘The Prince is taking an army to Gascony,’ he said. ‘The indentures to raise the troops are written – it’s spoken of in every tavern. I’m not cut out for a monk, and I mean to try my hand at war.’

  I suppose I nodded. Nothing he said touched me at all.

  He put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Come with me, lad,’ he said. ‘If you stay here, you’ll be a thief in truth soon enough.’

  I see you all smile, and I’ll smile with you. It is the hand of God. I was born to be a man-of-arms, and then the plague and the devil and my uncle came to stop me. But every work of the devil rebounds to God in the end. The Abbott taught me that. My uncle tried to hurt me, and instead he made me tough. Later, he made me a criminal, and because of him . . .