The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  At another level, it meant there was some hope of getting my prisoner’s ransom paid, which would give me the money to—

  Good Christ, what was I going to do?

  The war had, at that point, dragged on for twenty years. France was bankrupt; England was better off, but the grumblings I heard from new drafts were that, despite recent victories, parliament wasn’t voting the King any more money to fight.

  It was like a lightning bolt. King John had shipped out of Bordeaux earlier that year, taking his growing retinue of fellow prisoners and servants, as well as all of the bloody Count of Armagnac’s silver plate. I only mention that as I was there when it arrived, and I directed its polishing – my goldsmith skills weren’t completely wasted – and King John thanked me.

  Well, I think it’s funny.

  Where was I?

  Oh!

  Peace.

  Sir John allowed me to digest this information. ‘If you were to take a return letter to Sir John Hawkwood, the Prince would esteem it a favour,’ he said.

  ‘He means that now we’re to have peace, you’ll be wanting a job at court,’ Chaucer quipped.

  ‘Of course I’ll go,’ I said, privately agreeing with the annoying boy’s assessment.

  Sir John nodded. ‘You’ll need an escort,’ he said.

  ‘I have a small retinue,’ I said. The arrogance of the seventeen-year-old knows no bounds. ‘And I’d esteem it a favour if I might have Richard Musard.’

  Sir John fingered his beard. ‘A retinue?’ He smiled. ‘How many men and how armed?’ He looked at me. ‘I seem to remember you as a cook, lad, not a great noble.’

  I glared, preemptively, at Chaucer. ‘My lord, I have an archer and four men-at-arms available for pay.’

  He nodded approvingly. ‘Muster them for me this evening in the courtyard with your horses and arms. You will be paid. I’d prefer it you would leave immediately.’

  I walked out of the palace floating on air – I was to have my own indenture for four weeks’ service as a direct contractor. It wasn’t just the money. Very well, it was the money, but it was also honour. For the rest of my life, I would be able to say that I mustered a retinue for the Prince of Wales.

  I ditched Chaucer at the gate – I didn’t like him – and ran to the inn.

  I ignored the castle lawyer – Christopher, as he proved to be called. ‘Where’s Sam?’ I asked Marie.

  ‘Riding Helene.’ She smirked. ‘He paid.’

  Richard made a motion with his hand to his dagger. It was rude, and it conveyed a great deal of information. Sam hadn’t wanted to pay, but he had paid.

  ‘Gentleman, a knight is with Petit Claire,’ Marie went on. She held up a solid gold Venetian ducat.

  ‘By Saint George, he can take her home for that.’ I grinned at my leman, who grinned back. ‘And keep her.’ Claire was by far and away our most beautiful girl; she was also a vicious, willful bully who probably needed a whipping from me. She got them from Marie instead – Marie insisted on being the only voice of discipline.

  I think she liked it.

  I walked over to Richard. ‘We have a contract – a retinue contract – from the Prince. To take a message to Sir John Hawkwood in Brittany.’ I grinned. ‘Four weeks full pay.’

  Whores and inns fell away. Richard bounced to his feet. ‘Ventre Saint Gris!’ he swore. ‘My harness!’

  ‘And mine. Send the inn’s boy to fetch them. Send one of the girls to the market for two wicker baskets. Send round to Rolf the armourer for two apprentices to bring it all up to fighting condition.’

  Marie looked at me. ‘You will spend all our money,’ she said.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘This is what it’s for, my sweet.’

  ‘For war? We lie on our backs and fuck strangers so you can make war?’ she spat at me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and went about getting horses.

  Richard and I didn’t have horses. Owning a horse in Bordeaux was fiendishly expensive. After Poitiers, I owned a fine golden war horse for a few weeks, but his stall and manger cost me more than I spent on my garret and my food, so he went to the first rich knight who offered.

  Now I needed a riding horse and a war horse, and the pleasure of it was that I was buying in a depressed market. The Prince hadn’t fought a campaign all year, and he was about to leave for England; there was no word of any fighting, and knights going with the Prince were selling out. Word of the peace was probably alive among the horse and arms merchants – they always know these things first.

  Richard and I issued our orders to servants and girls and went to the horse market under the walls. On second Sundays it was a proper market. The rest of the time it was a dozen dealers with a hundred horses, some of them right hard bargains.

  To my immense delight – I felt God was on my side – my golden warhorse was standing in the lines, looking a little dejected. I walked up to the bastard we all called Jamais, because it was the word he used most often, and pointed at my former horse.

  ‘That horse looks familiar,’ I said. ‘Where’d you get him?’

  I sounded not like a customer, but like a man looking for a stolen horse.

  Jamais shrugged. ‘I forget,’ he said.

  There you go, then.

  ‘What will you take for him?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifty florins.’ The florin was a Florentine gold coin, the standard coin of all France, let me add.

  I had six florins. I had a lot of other coins, too, and some unminted silver and gold, but I only had six florins. ‘Give me that in Livre Tournois?’

  He spat. ‘A thousand. But I won’t take French coins. Fucking Paris has devalued them all. Again.’

  I had a great many French coins. ‘What?’ I asked.

  He spat again. ‘The so-called Council of Eighty has ordered all the coins withdrawn. They plan to clip them, adulterate the silver and re-issue them at a profit because the fucking peasants won’t pay their fucking taxes. They are reducing the value of the coins by a quarter and charging a fee for the privilege. Got me, squire?’

  I did. I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t understood. Now I knew why every customer all spring had paid in French silver. Parisian, especially.

  Yes, our horse dealers had to be masters of international finance. So, apparently, did young men who ran brothels.

  Richard was looking at horses, and he chose a fine dark bay, big and heavy. Like Richard, in fact. We both chose good riding horses.

  ‘I’ll let you have the lot for a hundred and fifty florins,’ Jamais said.

  Richard grunted. ‘Seventy,’ he said.

  ‘By the sweet lord who gave his life for our sins, messieurs les gentilshommes, have a little mercy on an old horse thief.’ He had his dirty black wool cap clutched to his breast, as if he were a piteous spectacle while he gouged us for Italian gold we didn’t have.

  Richard smiled. ‘Jamais, this is us. Richard and Will, penniless squires. We sell horses. We don’t buy horses. Now we have a contract with the Prince and we need to be mounted.’

  Jamais leaned forward. ‘War?’ he asked eagerly.

  I shook my head. ‘Courier.’

  Jamais spat. Again. ‘Fucking peace. We’ll all be vagabonds. A hundred.’

  That sounded fine to me. I’m poor at bargaining – I didn’t have a hundred, or even ten, but a hundred sounded like a bargain, as the knight who purchased my golden stallion had given me a hundred florins for him.

  Richard shrugged. ‘Seventy-five.’

  ‘Fuck your mother!’ Jamais swore. ‘Kill me and take them, whore-master!’

  We all laughed. Richard looked away. ‘Eighty.’

  Jamais stared off into the heavens. ‘Next, you’ll be asking for credit,’ he said. As Richard began to comment, he held up a hand. ‘And you’ll ride off into France and die, and I’m out all my money. So yes, eighty. In gold.’

  We spat in our hands and shook, and then Richard and I hoisted our bags and went off to the Italians.

  The Ricca
rdi were Lucchese bankers, and they had an office in Poitiers. But they’d been mostly ruined by the war, so we banked – if our constant pawning of armour and looted jewels could be called banking – with the Genoese house of Bardi. So we went there. We thumped our bags of French and English silver on the counters, and boys – banking apprentices – started counting the coins.

  ‘An armourer’s boy came for your armours, messires,’ said the master of the house, Raimondo. He bowed, as if we were really knights. I suspect we were all exactly the same to him. Whores and bankers – everyone is the same to them. And doctors, I suppose.

  I nodded.

  ‘I thank you for such prompt repayment of your pledges,’ he said.

  Richard glared at me.

  Right, by taking our coin to the Genoese, we put ourselves in their hands. Now they’d take their cut first. And they’d handed all the gear over covered in rust, and mice had chewed our straps.

  Christ, I hate bankers.

  I noted they took all of our Italian coins, then all of our English coins, to cover the pawn of the armour. But that left a gleaming pile, and now they had six apprentices counting. Twenty girls earn a great deal of coin. And we hadn’t hit the inn for the protection money owed.

  Maestro Raimondo fondled his golden beard and watched as the pile grew smaller and the stacks of French coins, gold and silver, grew. He shook his head. ‘French coin is virtually worthless,’ he said. ‘The Council of Eighty and the Provost of Paris have declared that the Dauphin’s latest coining scheme is illegal, so just now, there is no legal coinage.’ He made a clucking noise, as if all this was beyond his control. ‘I can give you, hmm, sixty florins for the lot.’

  Unlike Jamais, he wouldn’t budge.

  The most annoying thing is that he was making a huge – usurious – profit, and he knew it, but he didn’t care whether we took his offer or not. What was worse, he would loan the French silver at par – at true value.

  Sometime in the long process of counting, Master Chaucer appeared to negotiate a bill on London, and with him was a senior notary of the Prince’s household, a fox-faced man named Michael Hoo; sometimes a customer of Marie’s, and known to me. I introduced young Chaucer to Richard. Richard liked him immediately – there’s no accounting for these things – and they talked nineteen to the dozen. Chaucer had never met an African and was asking Richard about his childhood, and Richard was delighted to have an audience.

  I’d never even asked, so I felt a fool. Chaucer’s special talent.

  While we stood there at the counter of the Italian bank, I learned that Richard had been born a Christian, in the far-away Kingdom of Prester John; that his father was noble and his mother less so; that he’d been taken as a boy by the Sultan of Cairo, who was, apparently, perpetually at war with the King of Aethiopia. It was a stirring tale, and Master Chaucer drank it in – intrigue in the Aethiopian court, the great knights of the realm, the fights with the Sultan.

  Musard could tell a tale, too. He was just to the point of holding forth about the style of soft armour in Aethiopia, and the qualities of horses, when Maestro Raimondo returned to the counter from his clerks. He beckoned to me. ‘Even after recounting, I’m afraid I can do nothing for you. I have no need for French coin. Master Hoo? I believe you are next?

  Hoo smiled at me. ‘Sir John Chandos can probably change your money,’ he said.

  I looked at him. ‘Really?’

  Master Hoo shrugged. ‘I have reason to know, the Prince runs his household in Livre Tournois. I’m sure he’ll give you a better rate.’

  Chaucer smiled at Richard. ‘My pater’s a wine merchant, so we follow money markets. The fluctuation in France is . . . temporary. As soon as King John pays his ransom, the markets will recover.’

  Raimondo looked at the young page. ‘You have the mind of a banker!’ he pronounced.

  ‘Perish the thought,’ Chaucer said. ‘I’m sure you meant that as a compliment, but . . . Christ, how disgusting. Still . . .’

  Raimondo spread his hands. ‘Do you gentlemen know something about King John’s ransom?’ he asked.

  Chaucer grinned. ‘Yes, Maestro, but nothing I can share. Master William, if you collect your coins and pay the counting fee, we can go to the Prince.’

  Master Hoo, the notary, leaned over the counter and whispered a few words to the banker.

  Maestro Raimondo smiled. ‘Ah, perhaps I am over-hasty. I think, given news of the ransom of the King of France, I might manage eighty florins.’

  Richard nodded. ‘A blessing on you, sir.’

  Chaucer looked at Master Hoo and the notary shook his head. Chaucer grinned. ‘You’re being fleeced like a sheep. Come, the Prince will give you a hundred and twenty. Do your whores keep you so rich you can burn forty florins?’

  Up until then, our whores and the court had been well separated. Chaucer threatened that. Men like Hoo never talked, but Chaucer talked all the time.

  Nevertheless, he was a boy, and I underestimated him.

  Everyone did.

  Maestro Raimondo bowed. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps I could manage a hundred florins and no counting fee as a favour to such fine military gentlemen.’

  ‘Baaaa!’ Chaucer intoned derisively. ‘Baaa! Baaa!’

  But we took it.

  Later that afternoon, my shirts were patched and ironed, my trousseau was packed, my armour was clean and rust free, and in some cases newly riveted, with clean leather straps. If I listened carefully, I could hear the sound of the master armourer – a friend from my earliest days – putting new links into my haubergeon. We had a small cart, riding horses, food, wine . . .

  Sam and I sat at a table.

  ‘Hadn’t planned to go out again so soon,’ he said.

  I wasn’t born yesterday. Very well, I was seventeen – I had been born yesterday – but I knew this gambit. ‘Double pay as an archer,’ I said. ‘Twelve pence a day, and a regard of a florin in gold.’ I leaned forward. ‘Half that for the rest of them – and I pay it to you.’

  Sam fingered his moustache. ‘I knew I liked you.’ His smile was false, but we didn’t know each other yet, and he was an ancient man – twice my age.

  I put the florin in gold on the table, and slowly added the other four. My archer was called Sam Bibbo. His men – first the castle lawyer, the mouthy and rather foul Christopher Shippen; then the youngest and least experienced, a former valet named Rob of Boston; another proper archer (shows how observant I am, not) John Hughes, whose father was a yeoman from the Lakes in the north of England, and Peter of Bramford, a cordwainer’s son, who’d followed his trade with the army to Poitiers and fallen into bad company – or so he said.

  Of the four, I reckoned Sam a deadly man and a good archer, and I was right enough. I marked Christopher as useless, and I was dead wrong. I marked John as a fool, and I was right, but he made a fine servant; and rated Peter as a useful man, and I was far from the target.

  However, once bought, they stayed bought. It might all have gone very differently, from the first, but par dieu, it did not. I think on it now. My reputation and my career started with these men.

  Had they been false – eh bien, messieurs. It is as God wills it to be, eh?

  Sam closed his hand over the money. ‘We serve the Prince?’ he asked. Even hard men, in those days, longed for the security and authority of direct service.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Deal.’

  In my seventeen-year-old imagination, I expected a thorough examination of our horses and armour, a detailed evaluation, perhaps some criticism. We were polished and washed, and all four of Sam’s men – my men, now – had linen tapes in red woven in their horse’s manes by the girls.

  I was proud as Lucifer. Probably prouder.

  We made a fine show. Richard and I had good harness, if you ignored the fact that both of us wore a looted patchwork of armour where no two pieces went together. On mine, for example, I had fancy leather strapping with fine metalwork, but every s
trap was a different colour. Nothing to worry you in a fight, but any professional would look at my harness and know what a patchwork it was – I was an ill-made knight, and no mistake.

  Richard was a little better, as his harness had been given him by the Prince, and all his leather was at least one colour – a boring brown, but it matched. None of it had been made for him, but the quality was good.

  Our horses were excellent, though, and our men looked professional. Sir John Chandos came out on horseback, rode round them once, nodded to the clerk and grinned.

  ‘I know that bastard,’ he said, pointing at Sam.

  Sam grinned. ‘I know you, too, sir.’

  Sir John looked at me. ‘You’re lucky to have a man that experienced. Listen to him. He knows things. Understand me, sir?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I am far easier in my mind knowing that you have him. Sam, this little mission matters, mind me? And see the boys make it back.’ He grinned.

  Why did I find a good archer wandering lose as a criminal? Because God didn’t want me to spend my life in a brothel, friends. I have no other explanation.

  The clerk drew up a letter of indenture, offering us all double pay – Richard and I were to be paid as knights, the rest as lesser men-at-arms, and Sam and John Hughes as archers. The rates were excellent. Of course, we all knew that it generally took the Prince’s household a little more than a year to clear accounts, so we wouldn’t be paid by Christmastide, but it was honorable pay, and all the moneylenders would give coin against it.

  Chaucer followed us back to the inn on a rouncey. He had a sword, with rust on the hilt, and a pannier full of food and clothes. His horse wasn’t bad. Ahead of him, on a better horse, rode Master Hoo, in tall leather boots and wearing a woollen coat trimmed in fur and a hat worth as much as my sword. Master Hoo chose a girl, paid, smiled at me and paused on the stairs.

  ‘Early start, young sir?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  He pursed his lips, then smiled at the girl and led her away.

  Chaucer looked around the Three Foxes, examined the girls, then looked at me. Nervously.