‘I’m alive,’ she said without humour. ‘If this is life.’
Moses nodded. He rose and walked inside to warm some ale for her, as he had done every morning at about this hour for the last few days since the Bailiff, Keeper and Coroner had questioned him and killed Adam.
He could still scarcely believe the revelations about Adam. He had been such an easygoing fellow, so far as Moses had known. There were no other accusations of rape in the town that he knew of. Perhaps it was just the act of a man who was desperate and lonely while on ship?
But that was no excuse. The man had known that Mistress Amandine was his own master’s woman. The idea that he should take her was obscene, the worst form of treachery. And then he had accused two others of the crime he had committed and executed them. And also killed poor Danny to silence him – Danny, his own brother-in-law. It beggared belief. Perhaps if he had needed to, he would have killed Alice too. And her children.
The thought was enough to loosen a man’s grip on his sanity.
At least Master Pyckard had not known he was wrong as he died. He had thought he had so arranged matters that the men responsible for the rape and murder of the woman he adored had finally paid for their crimes – when all he actually managed to do was to help protect the guilty man.
He took the pot of ale out to Alice and stood beside her while she sipped the warm brew. She was thin, terribly thin, but he was ensuring that she ate and drank enough to keep body and soul together. He had been well trained in that during the last weeks of his master’s life.
She finished the drink and without looking up, passed him the pot. He took it, and as he did so, their fingers touched. Only for a moment, and then the contact was broken, but when he turned to go inside, he heard a sob, and stopped. Her hand grabbed for his belt and she pulled him to her, and for the first time since Adam’s death, Moses heard her weep for her brother and husband as she clung to him.
He had the pot in one hand, and the other hovered over her back and head – she was his brother’s widow, in Christ’s name – and then he crouched at her side and put his arms around her.
And from that day, she began to improve.
Epilogue
Rob was happy enough to go and watch the ships at every opportunity when his master would let him, or when Simon was away and he could spend his time more as he wanted. The sea held a particular fascination for him, and he liked to come to the jetty and watch the lighters rowing out to the great vessels in the haven.
It appealed to him, the idea of floating away from here, the sails filled with the wind, men sitting and lazing in the sun as the boat did all the work. Oh, yes. Rob knew all about sailing. The only hard work was when you arrived in a port and had to get the ship emptied and refilled with all the goods, but apart from that, all the work was easy. You sailed during the day, and when it grew dark, you stopped and slept. A sailor’s life was a good one, so far as Rob could see.
Of course there were some, like that old woman Stephen, who tried to warn him that ships were filled with men who had unhealthy interests in young boys, but Rob knew that was rubbish. He had a little knife in a sheath about his neck anyway, and if some matelot tried anything nasty, he’d soon see the filthy sod off. He wasn’t scared of anyone. Bailiff Puttock had also told him not to get involved in the sea, but that was just because the big lummock got seasick stepping over a puddle. Hopeless. No, it was the sea for Rob. Without a doubt the best way for him to earn a living.
One morning, he had had enough. He had risen as early as he could, and it wasn’t his fault that he was a little late to his master’s house. With all the complaints, you’d have thought he never bothered to turn up at all. He lit the fire immediately he got in, anyway, and that was all he was supposed to do. Light the fire, get some water heating, and warm up some food if there was anything. Well, there wasn’t that morning. He couldn’t help it, he had forgotten to buy anything the night before. He’d been on his way to the baker’s shop when an older seaman had offered to buy him an ale in the Porpoise, and he’d left there much later feeling a little wobbly.
But the Bailiff didn’t accept any of his reasons for the lateness of his start, and to be honest, Rob didn’t give a clipped ha’penny. Not now. He had friends on a ship, and he was going to go out and join them. He’d bet there was a place on a ship for him: all he had to do was ask. He was strong and fit. It’d be a piece of piss.
It took him only a little time to find his friend from the night before. The man was a great barrel-chested, black-haired giant with one eye and a mouth devoid of teeth on one side, where another man had hit him with a stool in a brawl.
‘I want to be a sailor,’ Rob told him eagerly.
The men with the giant looked rather taken aback. One laughed, but two others eyed him speculatively. The giant bent down and peered at him more closely with his single eye. ‘Why?’ he asked simply.
‘Because I don’t want to have to work so hard. I have to get up with the dawn now, and clean the house all day, and cook …’
He trailed off as all the men began to laugh.
One asked, ‘Do you get to sleep through the night?’
‘Do you get thrown out into the rain when the weather’s bad?’
‘Have you ever been whipped with a leather belt for being slow to run up a rope?’
Rob looked from one to the other, then back to the giant. ‘I want to be a sailor,’ he repeated.
‘You do?’ The giant took him by the shoulder. They were not far from the Ropery, a long building in which the hempen strands were twisted and joined to create long cables. Outside was a tall flagpole as advertisement. A long rope dangled from the top, thirty feet overhead. ‘Climb that.’
‘Me?’ Rob squeaked, staring up at the flag fluttering from the top.
‘Go on!’
‘I can’t climb that, it’s too high!’
‘Come back again when you can,’ the man said, and returned to his friends, laughing.
Rob looked up at the flag again. ‘No one can do that!’
The oldest, greyest man strolled over and stood beside Rob. He looked down at the lad with a sorrowful expression. Then he sprang up lightly, gripped the wooden pole with his hands, crossed his shins about the wood, and quickly slithered his way up it to the very top. Once there, he kept on rising until he was sitting on the topmost button.
Rob didn’t wait to see him return to the ground. He walked homewards, disconsolate. At Simon’s house, he looked about him in the small parlour and began to re-lay the fire, throwing a faggot on top and wondering whether he’d ever be able to go to sea.
As luck would have it, that afternoon and evening there was a foul thunderstorm. Rob remained in the house while it raged, and Bailiff Puttock spoke of another storm he had known. He had been off the Islands south and west, when the storm struck, and the ship had almost foundered on rocks. He had been miraculously lucky to survive.
In his mind’s eye, Rob had a vivid picture: a ship with shredded sails, rolling and slipping towards rocks. The waves crested over the green/black shapes, exploding upwards as the ship moved towards them. And Rob saw a face at the prow, a face full of terror as he screamed the danger to the crew. It was his own face he saw.
And in that moment Rob decided he would prefer to remain on land.
Of all those who survived the murders of Dartmouth’s terrible September 1324, Peter Strete, disgraced clerk to the powerful John Hawley, was the most fortunate.
His injuries were a long while in the mending. However, when he could move again, and his eyes had healed and reopened, the Bailiff had him taken to the monastery at Buckfast for convalescence. There he gradually healed, under the careful nursing of the Brother Almoner, until at last he could walk unaided.
The Brother Almoner was a quiet, kindly old soul. When Strete gradually came to speak to him, and mentioned his tribulations in the gaming dens of Dartmouth, the old man cackled himself into a coughing fit.
‘I suppose th
ey preferred games of chance, like those with dice? Hazard or somesuch?’
‘Many dice games, yes,’ Strete admitted. ‘But they are safe, because they depend upon chance. That is as fair as any man could hope for.’
‘Unless the dice were marked, or had a little hole drilled in them so that a bit of quicksilver could be dripped in, and the hole filled. Then you only have to tap the dice once or twice to change the fortune of the thrower. A man can fleece another with ease like that. Dear oh dear. They must have taken all you had!’
Strete pondered that. They had beaten him cruelly for not paying them the debt which they had made him incur because they had used unfair dice. He had never heard of such a thing before. ‘They could have killed me for cheating me!’ he exclaimed. What a fool he had been.
‘Aye. They wouldn’t want someone else in town to hear that they’d let a man off too lightly when he owed them money, Peter. No, I think you’re much better off away from them. Where will you go now?’
Strete felt a great wash of enthusiasm. ‘I shall go to Exeter,’ he declared.
In Exeter, he knew, there were manufacturers of dice. With a little advance on his first winnings, he was sure that a man could be persuaded to make a special set for him.
‘What are we?’
‘No, Al, not again!’
‘Come on! What are we?’
‘I said no, Al. I’m not having it!’
‘What are we?’
‘Shit, Al, since you ask, we’re cold, we’re wet, we’re without a job since Dartmouth took so bleeding long, and we’re footsore and weary and pissed off. All right?’
There was a moment’s silence, and then a new voice: ‘Cor! Did you see her? She was looking at me, she was! Do you think if I was to go and—’
‘Shut up, Law!’
‘Once you’ve got a beard, boy, you can think about girls like that.’
‘Just because you couldn’t get a girl like that, Bill.’
‘What did you say, you young tyke?’
‘I said, old man, that you couldn’t hope to attract a girl like her. She wants young and fit like me!’
‘I think she’d prefer a man with brains, lad. Someone like me.’
‘So, come on, boys! We don’t mind a little rain, do we? No, because we’re bleeding paviours, that’s why!’
In unison the other two voices rose:
‘Al, will you shut up!’
And Alred smiled to himself under his cowl because when the two were bickering like this, all was right in his world. It was only when they sulked quietly that he worried.
For now he had not a worry in the world.
Author’s Note
This novel is partly based around the terrible Affair of the Silken Purses, in which the Queen of England, Isabella, saw gifts which she had embroidered herself and given to her sisters-in-law, being flaunted on the belts of three knights. In an age of Courtly Love, giving little tokens to a knight was hardly unknown, but to the Queen it must have seemed inappropriate, to say the least, for her brothers’ wives to give away her gifts.
Such treatment must have rankled. And so she went to her father, the King of France, and told him. I wonder whether she realised how catastrophic the results of this act would be? It led to the death of one sister-in-law, life-imprisonment for another, and it almost certainly caused the early death of her beloved father.
Many times I have been asked whether I use the internet much for research. This book is a prime example of why the internet is of no use whatsoever to a serious researcher, other than as a guide as to where to look for further information.
When looking into the matter of the silk purses, I first consulted my own collection of books, then went to the web to see what I could glean from there. It was wonderful. I found lots of reports of the ‘Case of the Tour de Nesle’ as the matter became known. However, no one account was the same. I do not propose to go into the variations available on the web, but suffice it to say that I have so far come up with five different estimates of Isabella’s birthday. The problem with the web is, you can never tell whether the research is genuine or whether it was compiled during an hour’s tedium by an acne-ridden youth from Idaho.
The great advantage of a book written by one such as Doherty, Weir or Mortimer (see my list at the end of this Author’s Note) is that the publisher will have checked the credentials of the writer; the latter will have gone to great lengths to validate any conclusions he or she has reached; the editors will have gone through their material in detail, and copy editors and others will have added their own five penn’orth. This is why I have more faith in words written on paper than material on computer.
What I also rely on, to a greater or lesser degree, is my own gut-feel based on two decades of research. Usually I can make a good estimate of what might have happened in the past, and on the occasions when I’ve not been able to confirm facts, it has astonished me how regularly I have been proved right subsequently.
Of course, the problem for an historian is that many of the original histories were themselves written decades or even centuries after the events; we are relying on the words of chroniclers like Froissart and hoping he had good sources. Froissart was probably born about 1337, and didn’t get to England until about 1361, so he certainly did not write about Isabella from the perspective of a first-hand witness.
This book is set almost entirely in the beautiful Devon port of Dartmouth. At the time of this story, Dartmouth consisted of three different areas: Tunstal up on the hill; Hardness down at the river’s edge but north of the mill pool; Clifton, south of the mill pool. The southernmost part of Dartmouth, which is still known as Southtown (a name first recorded in 1328), was a separate administrative district in 1324, a part of the neighbouring manor of Stoke Fleming, and was only brought into Dartmouth’s borough officially in 1463. I’m afraid I’ve let Baldwin and Simon play fast and loose with the borough boundaries in this book, because the alternative would have been to have a novel that was even longer than this one turned out to be!
Dartmouth has always been a very important part of Britain’s history. It had a marvellous deep-water harbour that was used for the Second Crusade in 1147 and the Third Crusade in 1190. There was space for hundreds of ships, and it became a popular naval port because it was relatively easily defended as well as being superbly well sheltered.
As the years passed, Dartmouth grew in importance. It depended originally on cloth exports from Totnes, but with the acquisition of large parts of south-western France by Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the city expanded with the wine trade.
One of Dartmouth’s most famous sons is John Hawley. However, the keen-eyed reader will wonder how it was that he could have so stimulated Chaucer during a meeting in (probably) 1373 or so that Chaucer wrote about The Shipman in his Canterbury Tales, based on a man who was already a reasonable age in 1324. Well, the John Hawley of Chaucer’s time was the son of another John Hawley. It seems clear to me that the Hawleys were simply following that good old tradition of re-using a perfectly adequate Christian name. ‘If “John” worked for father and grandfather, it’ll do for the lad’ seems to have been the attitude. I have no idea whether the John Hawley who so impressed Chaucer had a grandfather also called John, but it is not an unreasonable assumption.
The two books I would recommend for anyone seeking a little more information about Dartmouth, if you can find them, are W.G. Hoskyns’s mammoth tome Devon, published by Devon Books in 1954 and updated regularly since. The other book is Dartmouth by Percy Russell, published by BT Batsford Ltd in 1950.
In the course of my search for accurate information about Isabella, her husband Edward II, and the appalling Despensers, I have acquired a goodly library. To any reader, I can heartily recommend the following titles, in no particular order. Alison Weir’s marvellous Isabella – She-Wolf of France, Queen of England (Jonathan Cape, 2005); Charles Hopkinson and Martin Speight’s The Mortimers – Lords of the March (Logaston Press,
2002); Edward II by Mary Saaler (Rubicon Press, 1997); the excellent The Greatest Traitor, The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England 1327–1330 by Ian Mortimer (Jonathan Cape, 2003); Harold F. Hutchinson’s Edward II – The Pliant King (Eyre & Spottiswode, 1971); Paul Doherty’s Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II (Constable, 2003); not forgetting Michael Prestwich’s The Three Edwards – War and State in England, 1272–1377 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980) and R. Perry’s Edward the Second – Suddenly, at Berkeley (Ivy House, 1988) – and last but certainly not least, Georges Duby’s France in the Middle Ages 987–1460 (Blackwell, 1991).
A final thought: as always, any errors or omissions are my own responsibility …
… or the fault of the teenager from Idaho. May his acne never fade if he has led me astray!
Michael Jecks
North Dartmoor
October 2005
The Death Ship of Dartmouth: (Knights Templar 21) Page 39