Despenser laughed. ‘You wonder at it? Sir Thomas is a better man than my worthless brother-in-law will ever be.’
‘I want him disgraced!’ snarled the countess. ‘I never want to suffer the sight of his upstart face at court again. Send him skulking back to his eldest brother’s Lancashire manor with his tail between his legs, so humiliated he will never think to pester my daughter again.’
‘What you ask is no small thing,’ he said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. ‘Why should I do this for you?’
‘Because you love me?’ she suggested.
‘No,’ he decided at last. ‘I’ll do it, aye, but not because I love you, nor because I’ve any great enmity for Sir Thomas, for in truth I care little for the man. But perhaps it will be amusing to help you in this deed. How do you intend to achieve his humiliation? As you say, his worth increases daily in the eyes of the king.’
The countess gestured dismissively. ‘The higher a man rises, further he has to fall, for fall he surely must. His very lust for Joan shall be the snare wherein we’ll trap him.’
* * *
With the arrival of Derby’s reinforcements before Calais, fears of Valois’ army melted away like snow in the springtime. The seasoned campaigners constantly reminded everyone to remain vigilant, but even they felt relief that Valois had been beaten in the race to raise more troops. Despenser took his two platoons of mounted archers and searched the Pas de Calais for Valois’ army, but failed to find it, returning with nothing more than further conflicting reports from the Frenchmen his troops had tortured. Fear of Valois had been replaced by contempt: once again the French usurper was proving sluggish in marching to battle.
Derby’s troops, meanwhile, were assigned to the defences along the River Hem. Preston’s platoon withdrew from the watch-tower and returned to its duties in the lines before Calais, where Holland’s banner was now added to those fluttering over the trenches and palisades in the marsh.
One evening late in June, Maud Lacy approached the lines along one of the causeways leading from Villeneuve, at the start of the night watch. She surveyed the banners in the light of the many torches and braziers that illuminated the scene and, recognising the white lion rampant on a blue field powdered with fleur-de-lys immediately, she advanced, leading a white jennet by its halter. A number of men lounged around in the vicinity of the banner, some of them standing around braziers, others crouched in a circle playing jacks and joking amongst themselves, but all of them keeping a watchful eye on the walls of Calais, a good four hundred yards away.
Even if Maud’s mistress had not explicitly told her to be discreet, she would not have liked the idea of approaching a gang of such rough-looking men. She could see only one man who was alone, sitting with his back to a wooden tun as he bound fletchings to an ash shaft. A bundle of shafts lay nearby, and some feathers spilled from a folded cloth next to them. He was a broad-shouldered young man with a scar on the left side of his head, disappearing into his hairline just above his ear. In spite of the scar – or perhaps even because of it – she had to admit to herself that she found him attractive. She approached him uncertainly, but he did not look up even when she came to within a few feet of where he sat.
She coughed to attract his attention. He stopped what he was doing with careful deliberation and looked up at her coldly. Something in those flint-blue eyes sent a shiver of excitement down her spine.
‘Are you one of Sir Thomas Holland’s men?’ she asked.
‘Aye,’ he replied curtly.
‘Can you pass something on to him for me?’
‘Depends what it is.’ Kemp picked up the arrow he had been fletching and went back to his work.
She glanced about her to make sure that no one was paying her undue attention, then tossed something into the archer’s lap. She had positioned herself between Kemp and his companions, so they could not see the movement. Kemp picked up the object – a lady’s velvet glove - and glanced at it briefly, before thrusting it inside his jerkin.
‘Tell no one but Sir Thomas of this,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sure he’ll reward you generously for your discretion.’
Kemp regarded her contemptuously. Holland did not need gold to earn his men’s loyalty.
‘Stand up,’ she commanded. She was a gentlewoman, if not a noblewoman, to judge by her accent and the fine cloth of her grey cloak, so Kemp obeyed instinctively. What happened next was so sudden that Kemp did not have time to prevent it.
She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.
He stared at her in bewildered astonishment.
‘So no one will wonder why I was speaking to one of Sir Thomas Holland’s men,’ she explained, smiling archly.
‘Except me,’ he replied. But she had already turned her back on him, and was making her way back along the causeway to Villeneuve-la-Hardie.
* * *
The pale grey light of the false dawn had risen over Calais, silencing the nocturnal chorus of the frogs in the marsh, when Holland and his squire made their way to where Preston’s platoon was stationed early in the following morning. He found the serjeant and his men huddled around a brazier, trying to squeeze the last heat out of its dying embers.
Kemp doused his head in a barrel of icy water. Experience had taught him that if anything was going to happen, it was most likely to happen shortly before dawn. It was the time when the unwary were at their lowest ebb, towards the end of the night watch, tired and inattentive.
Holland greeted them cheerfully. ‘Good morning, men.’
‘Good morning, Sir Thomas,’ they responded.
‘A cold night.’
‘Aye, sir,’ acknowledged Preston.
Holland produced a stone flask and proffered it to Preston, who took a swig. It contained warm mead. ‘That should keep the chill from your bones.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Preston passed the flask on to the next man.
Kemp glanced across to the walls of Calais, where he could hear voices. He knew that out there somewhere in no man’s land were hundreds of ‘useless mouths’, starving to death. Jean de Vienne had expelled another five hundred since Derby arrived at Villeneuve, but this time King Edward had been less magnanimous, refusing to let them through the English lines. Kemp felt pity for them. He knew all about hunger; his family had gone hungry enough times after a poor harvest on his lord’s manor. He had no desire to return to that way of living. Holland had offered him a job as an archer in his retinue, but Kemp was a villein, and could not leave his lord’s manor without permission, permission which he knew Sir John Beaumont was sure to refuse. The only other way for a villein to win his freedom was to spend a year and a day living and working in a borough, and to that end Holland had offered to arrange for Kemp to get a place in some rich burgher’s household.
He suddenly remembered the glove Maud Lacy had given him. ‘Sir Thomas?’
‘What is it, Kemp?’
‘I was wondering if I could have a word in private, Sir Thomas? About that job you said you’d try to get me in London?’
Holland nodded, and the two of them walked a short distance away from the others. ‘Well? What is it?’
Kemp said nothing, leading Holland behind a palisade which gave them some degree of privacy. He produced the glove. ‘A lady asked me to give you this.’
For a brief moment, Kemp had the impression that Holland’s face had lit up, but then the knight’s customary impassive mask fell back into place. Kemp suddenly remembered that he had seen the woman before: she had been riding alongside Lady Joan of Kent when she and her husband accompanied the king on one of his hunting trips into the surrounding countryside.
Holland took the glove from him, thrusting it into his purse. ‘Tell no one of this,’ he muttered.
Kemp thought he detected a faint blush in his master’s complexion. ‘No, sir,’ he responded, a little hurt that Holland should think he might do otherwise.
‘Now, what was it you wanted?’
‘Nothing, sir. I just tho
ught I ought to use some other excuse for talking to you, so’s to be discreet.’
Holland turned away. Then he paused again, and looked back. ‘Kemp?’
‘Sir Thomas?’
‘Well done.’
* * *
The two skiffs moved silently through the night, relying on the wind in their sails rather than risk the plashing of their oars alerting anyone to their escape attempt. They sailed past the Rysbank, a narrow spit of land that formed a natural mole of sand enclosing Calais harbour. The English had built a wooden stockade on the tip of the Rysbank, from which they could shoot bows and siege engines at any ships that slipped past the blockade and tried to enter the harbour. The watchmen in the stockade were not looking for small vessels trying to slip out of the harbour. The two skiffs drifted past the stockade which loomed dark and threatening above them, and found themselves tossed violently by the rougher sea beyond the harbour.
Sir Amerigo de Pavia sat in the prow of one skiff, heavily muffled against the cold sea breezes, and reached inside his cloak for the umpteenth time to make sure he still had the letter for King Philip with which de Vienne had entrusted him. It was now nearly ten months since King Edward had begun the siege of Calais, and still there was no sign of any relieving force. Despite the occasional victualling fleets which had managed to reach the harbour before the stockade was built on the Rysbank, the garrison of Calais was now desperately short of food, and could not hold out much longer. The letter contained a final impassioned plea for help. De Vienne had tried smuggling out another message with the second batch of ‘useless mouths’ he had expelled a fortnight earlier but the message, like the messenger who bore it, was still trapped in no man’s land with the rest starving to death there; not that they were much worse off than the people inside the walls.
It had been de Pavia’s idea to try to slip out by sea. He had been elated when de Vienne agreed to his plan, but now the moment of danger approached he was wondering if he might not be safer inside the walls after all. He reminded himself he had been dining on horseflesh for the past two weeks, and that soon he would be feasting on venison.
The stockade remained dark and silent and de Pavia was beginning to think they might make it to safety when a single fire-arrow was launched from one of the cogs in the blockade; at least one of the English mariners had good eyes. At once the smaller vessels in the English flotilla slipped anchor and began to converge on the two skiffs, many of them putting out cock-boats which scudded quickly across the waves.
The two skiffs parted, heading in different directions, one back into the harbour, the one de Pavia rode in turning to the west. The Genoese mariners pulled on their oars, desperate to escape capture, the need for silence past.
The men on the shore were fully awake now, the archers in the fort on the Rysbank shooting volleys of arrows at the first skiff as it rowed back down the channel into the harbour. The channel was only two hundred yards across at its widest point, optimum range for a longbow, and the first volley straddled the skiff, killing some of the men on board. Turning to the west, the second skiff slipped past the wooden piers that had been built out from the shore to stop small boats from slipping past in the shallows where the deeper-draughted English cogs could not go.
But now the cock-boats were closing in on the second skiff, cutting off all hope of escape. They were close enough for the archers on board to get a clear shot at the men in the skiff, despite the rocking of the boats. Three arrows struck home, killing oarsmen. With half the rowers dead, the remaining men lost control of the skiff. De Pavia clung to the bulwarks, white-faced with fear and dizziness.
The tide was coming in, the currents driving the skiff towards the beach. De Pavia could see a dozen archers standing on the shore, the surf surging between their ankles as it rushed across the sand. They had arrows nocked to their bows, taking no chances in case the Genoese mariners tried to put up a fight, but were not aiming, confident that the flood tide would drag their quarry to them. Seeing that capture was imminent, de Pavia reached underneath his cloak and took out the letter de Vienne had given him, wrapped in waterproof oilskin. He searched about on the floor of the boat and found an old axe-head, tying the letter to it and flinging it as far out to sea as he could, to stop it from falling into the hands of the English. It landed in the water with an audible splash, sending a brief plume of water into the air.
The surviving oarsmen were still trying to row clear of the beach, but the massive breakers were against them. A huge wave drove them high on to the beach, and stranded them there. They tried to drag the boat back down towards the sea, but it was too heavy for them to make much progress. Then the archers surrounded them, swords drawn.
‘Don’t kill them!’ ordered Preston. ‘Their lordships will want to question them. Besides,’ he added with a grin, ‘one of them might be worth ransoming.’ He turned to Kemp. ‘Which one did you see throw something in the water?’
‘This one.’ Kemp’s voice was positive as he indicated de Pavia.
‘All right, Conyers, you speak French,’ said Preston. ‘Ask him who he is and what he thinks he’s about.’
The Lombard spoke arrogantly in response to Conyer’s question, turning up his nose at the English archers.
‘What does he say?’ demanded Preston.
‘He says he doesn’t have to answer any of our questions.’
‘Tell him he does if he doesn’t want me to cut off his bollocks, smother them in pig-shit and stick them up his nose,’ Preston responded cheerfully. ‘Ask him what it was he threw overboard.’
But de Pavia knew Preston did not have the authority to carry out his threat, and refused to say anything. The serjeant ordered him and the other prisoners to be taken back to the fort, where Holland could decide what was to be done with them. ‘It’s no matter,’ Preston added to Kemp, as the rest of his men escorted the prisoners back up the beach. ‘We’ll soon find out what it was he ditched overboard.’
‘How d’you mean?’ asked Kemp.
Preston grinned. ‘Low tide in a few hours, lad. He didn’t throw it nearly far enough out to sea.’
Chapter Three
To add spice to the search and to make sure his men’s hearts were in it, Preston told them that if it was treasure, whoever found it could keep it. They swept the beach around the spot Kemp indicated, prodding the wet sand with the tips of their swords, but their initial search turned up nothing. ‘Are you sure it was here?’ asked Preston.
Kemp nodded, his brow creased in thought.
‘The undertow could’ve dragged it further out to sea,’ pointed out Jarrom. ‘The currents could’ve carried it further up the beach. Lord Christ! It could be anywhere by now.’
‘We’re going about this the wrong way,’ Kemp said suddenly. ‘We want to be more orderly.’
‘How do you mean?’ demanded Preston.
‘We should divide up the beach into parts and have one man search each part, marking off the parts that have already been searched.’
Using their arrows as markers, they began their search once again, more methodically this time. The tide started to turn and Preston was beginning to lose all hope of finding whatever it was that Kemp had seen thrown overboard, when suddenly Brewster shouted that he had found something and sank to his knees, clawing at the sand with his hands. The others abandoned the search and swarmed around him.
‘What is it?’ asked Tate, as he crowded with the others to see what was being unearthed.
Brewster had scooped away enough sand to reveal something that shone in the summer sunlight. ‘An axe-head,’ he announced, disappointed.
‘Is that what you saw?’ Preston asked Kemp.
‘It could have been,’ admitted Kemp. He thought he could remember something glinting in the pale light of dawn.
‘Hold on a minute, there’s something tied to it,’ said Brewster, scraping away more sand to pull out an oilskin package. He ripped it open and took out a crumpled piece of parchment with a wax seal on i
t. The package had leaked, and the address on the front had been all but washed away by the sea, but it was obviously a message of some kind, and important enough for the man in the boat not to want it to fall into the hands of the English.
‘We should take it to Sir Thomas,’ said Tate, as Brewster handed the letter up to Preston.
‘All in good time,’ replied Preston, breaking open the seal. ‘Let’s see what it is first, shall we?’
‘What does it say?’ asked Conyers.
‘Nails and blood!’ Preston snapped irritably. ‘Do I look like a tonsured scholar? Where’s Pisspants? He can read. He’s always got his nose stuck in some book or other.’
The men moved aside to let Inglewood through. He looked at the parchment. The sea water had made the ink run, but the neat script was still clearly legible. ‘It’s in French,’ he observed.
‘Well, of course it’s in God-damned French,’ grumbled Preston. ‘You didn’t think the governor of Calais would write it in English for your benefit, did you?’
‘Listen to this,’ said Inglewood. ‘It says: “There is nothing in the town which has not been eaten, even cats and dogs and horses, so there is nothing else to live off unless we eat human flesh. Earlier you wrote to say I was to hold the town as long as there was food; now there is none. So we have agreed that if we do not receive aid soon, we shall make a sortie beyond the walls into the marshes, to fight for life or death. For we would rather die honourably in the field than eat one another”.’
Jarrom shrugged. ‘If that’s the way they want it…’
‘And it finishes: “Unless some other solution can be found, this is the last letter that you will receive from me, for the town will be lost and all of us that are within it.” Then it’s signed John of Vienne, Governor of Calais, and dated on the Feast of Saint Eligius at Calais. That’s yesterday, I think.’
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