‘There must be some way we can warn him!’ Kemp said to Preston.
The serjeant turned to regard him with amusement. ‘Let’s bide a while and see, shall we?’
Then Holland’s sword flew from his grasp and he sprawled on his back, at the mercy of the unknown. Kemp had seen him fighting for real enough times to know that he would not normally make such a careless error. Holland, he realised, not only knew who his opponent was but had played along, pretending to be intent on winning the fight only to throw victory away at the last moment. Despite his earlier concern for his former master, Kemp felt disappointed that Holland should choose to be party to such a charade and deliberately lose a fight he could have won.
The unknown helped Holland to his feet and handed him his sword, clapping him on the back. Henry of Derby was next up and he fenced with the unknown just as ferociously as Holland had done, until the unknown’s whalebone blade snapped off near the hilt, leaving him unarmed and helpless. The crowd roared; lacking the expert eyes of experienced campaigners like Preston, Chaucer and Kemp, they did not realise it was mere mummery. Derby should have carried the day, and taken the unknown’s place to defend the passage-at-arms, but instead he went down on one knee before his opponent, and offered his own sword as a replacement. The crowd went wild, and even Kemp could not help but be impressed by such a chivalrous gesture.
The unknown accepted the sword with a bow, gesturing to Derby to rise, before removing his helmet. To Kemp’s complete lack of surprise, it was indeed the king. The crowd cheered and clapped ecstatically. There were few there who did not know the face of their king, the victor of Crécy and Calais, for it had been much in evidence during the past four days.
‘Today I have seen much evidence of the valour of my companions,’ said the king, his strong voice carrying clearly across the ward so that all could hear. ‘But I have witnessed nothing that I have not seen before, in countless campaigns against the Scots and the French, and other enemies of this realm. To honour these men, my companions-in-arms, I declare the foundation of a new order of chivalry. Its members shall be the twenty-four knights and noblemen you see standing before you here today, men who have gone unvanquished this week, in addition to myself and my eldest son, Prince Edward of Woodstock. Twenty-six shall be the total number of its members, and not one more member shall be admitted before the death of a member, the new member to be elected by the existing ones. The patron saint of this most holy and chivalrous order will be the patron saint I have chosen for my realm, the saint who has brought us victories on land and sea. The order shall be called the Most Chivalrous Companionship of the Knights of Saint George and its emblem shall be this garter.’ He untied the azure ribbon from his arm, and held it above his head, displaying it to the crowd. ‘And the motto of the companionship shall be this: “Honi soit qui mal y pense” – “Evil to him who evil thinks”.’
* * *
The Knights of Saint George dined in the great hall at Windsor Castle that night, before undertaking a night-long vigil in the castle’s impressive chapel, rededicated by the king to Saint George earlier that year. Each member was given a stall and the twenty-six men were divided into two teams, led by the king and the Prince of Wales respectively. It was not a specifically English order of chivalry: its members included the Hainaulter Sir Sanchet d’Aubercicourt, the Gascon Jean de Grailly, Captal de Buch, and the Flemish Sir Henri d’Eam. Nor was its membership exclusive to the higher nobility, for Sir John Chandos was a member, while the earls of Arundel, Huntingdon, Northampton and Suffolk were amongst those excluded by their defeats at the tournament. The captive Constable of France, Raoul de Brienne, Count of Eu, had been allowed to take part in the tournament, but he had been beaten by one of Holland’s younger brothers, Sir Otho, earning the latter not only a place in the companionship but also custody of the count until his ransom was paid, on condition that the count was not seen armed in public, or allowed to leave England. While the members of the order might range from the highest in the land down to some of the realm’s humbler knights, they were all to be equal, brothers-in-arms, and to be honoured before all others.
Next day – the morrow of the Feast of Saint George and the last day of the tournament – the two teams fought one another in a mêlée in an enclosed area in the middle of the tilting field, using their whalebone swords. The two Hollands found themselves in opposing teams: Sir Thomas in the Prince’s team, with the Earl of Warwick, Sir Bartholomew Burghersh and the young Sir James Audley; and Sir Otho in the king’s team, with Derby, de Grailly, Chandos and Sir John Beauchamp, the younger brother of the Earl of Warwick, who had borne the king’s banner at Crécy. Each of them wore an azure garter embroidered with the words ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ in gold thread, as well as whatever lady’s favour they saw fit. The two teams fought long and hard, occasionally breaking off to seek a short respite in one of the enclosures roped off for that purpose. Heralds stood by attentively with kerchiefs known as couvre-chefs de mercy tied to the ends of lances with which they touched knights who were seen to be in serious difficulties to signal that no further attack was to be made on them.
Perhaps inevitably, Holland found himself facing Montague. The two of them had not exchanged a single word since the night of the ball at Calais castle. Even so, Montague had not even suspected Holland’s intention to petition the Papal Court until a summoner arrived from Avignon, ordering that both he and Joan must either appear before a tribunal of the Papal Court or appoint attorneys to do so on their behalf. Joan’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Kent, had responded to this by insisting that her son-in-law keep his wife in seclusion, so that she would learn nothing of these proceedings.
Holland could not resist taunting Montague. ‘Where is Lady Joan, Sir William? I have not seen her once at this tournament, so far.’
‘She is not well enough to travel,’ muttered Montague as he tried to parry Holland’s thrust.
‘That is not what I have heard. Rumour has it that you are keeping her locked up in the Castle of Mold so she cannot appoint a proctor to act on her behalf in our dispute. What are you afraid of, Montague? That she may not love you?’ Holland was by far the superior swordsman and he played with Montague, dictating the younger man’s every move by keeping him on the defensive.
‘She loves me well enough,’ asserted Montague. ‘What concerns me is that, despite your fraudulent claim to be her lawful wedded husband, you wear the favour of another lady on your crest.’
‘Another lady?’ Holland threw back his head and laughed, without letting down his guard for one moment. ‘Do you not recognise the coverchief? It was given to me by your wife, after all.’
‘You God-damned whoreson!’ Montague roared. And he launched himself at Holland with such fury that even the older knight was caught off-guard and was hard-pressed to defend himself against a rapid succession of blows which had all the savagery of Montague’s uncontrolled wrath behind them. Then Holland’s superior skill and control began to tell once more. He regained the initiative, driving Montague back with a succession of forceful strokes until finally Montague’s sword flew from his hand, leaving him unarmed.
Suddenly Montague whipped a dagger from his belt, and thrust it at the eye-slit in Holland’s visor. Holland jerked his head aside and the razor-sharp blade of the dagger glanced off his helmet. He drove his gauntleted fist into Montague’s stomach. Despite his mail habergeon, Montague was winded by the blow, giving Holland the chance to raise his opponent’s visor and punch him on the nose. Knocked out cold, Montague went down, blood splashing on his upper lip where Holland’s gauntlet had broken his nose. A herald rushed forward to touch Montague with his couvre-chef de mercy, and Sir Otho and Sir James Audley hurried to restrain Holland before he could deliver further blows in anger. But Holland was in control of his temper, and he allowed his fellow knights to hold him without struggling in their grip.
As the knights stopped fighting to see what was going on, the two sides parted, and the king
made his way between them to where Montague lay. Chandos was already crouching over the unconscious young man. ‘He’ll live, sire,’ he remarked.
‘What befell here?’ demanded the king, gazing at them each in turn.
‘I saw it, your Majesty.’ Sir Hugh Despenser, excluded from Companionship of Saint George by his defeat at Sir John Beauchamp’s hands in the lists, climbed over the barrier at the edge of the enclosure in his red and white robes. ‘Sir Thomas raised my noble brother-in-law’s visor and struck him in the fae. A villainous blow if ever I saw one.’
‘If ever you saw a villainous blow, Sir Hugh, it was one you struck yourself,’ retorted Holland.
‘Hold your tongues, the pair of you!’ snapped the king, and turned to Holland. ‘Well, Sir Thomas? Is there any truth in Sir Hugh’s accusation?’
Holland, who did not doubt that Despenser had seen the whole incident, bowed low before replying. ‘Sir Hugh speaks the truth, your Majesty, as he saw it; but I do not believe he saw it all. I acted only in self-defence. Sir William grew over-excited in the heat of the mêlée, and such was the fire in his veins that when I successfully deprived him of his sword, he drew his dagger on me.’
‘Sir Thomas speaks faithfully, your Majesty,’ said Chandos, removing Montague’s dagger from his gauntleted hand. ‘Here is the proof.’
‘Enough,’ said the king. ‘I did not form the Companionship of Saint George so the best knights in my service might fight one another with such hostility, when Valois openly seeks to renew the war. Sir Hugh, you and Sir Otho shall take Sir William and see to it his injuries are attended to. The rest of you will return to your quarters and prepare for supper. We dine at the Round Table in Saint George’s Hall tonight. No, not you, Sir Thomas. I would have words with you.’
Holland nodded and marched alongside his king across the upper ward towards the keep. ‘Sir William acted wrongly, that I will accept,’ said the king. ‘He is young, and his spirit is fiery. Are you certain you did not say something to provoke that temper of his, Sir Thomas?’
Holland said nothing.
‘You are so much older than Sir William,’ continued the king. ‘You should know better. You made reference to my cousin Joan, I presume? Aye, I know all about your petition to the Pope, and I cannot say I am pleased you have gone behind my back to see that which I have decreed overturned by a foreign pope.’
‘Forgive me, your Majesty. If I could have found an English Pope…’
The king began to scowl, but then laughed instead. ‘An English! Now, that’s not such a bad idea… but in all seriousness, Sir Thomas, I beg you: end your persecution of Sir William, out of love for me if for no other reason.’
‘That I cannot do, sire. Call it treason if you will, but my love for the Lady Joan is greater.’
‘I do not call it treason, Sir Thomas, for I have been in love myself and have acted as foolishly as you are doing now. But there are those who say your claim on the Lady Joan is false; that you had never met her before you returned from Prussia and were given an appointment as steward of her household; that the two of you became lovers, and cooked up this scheme whereby her marriage to Montague could be annulled, and she could have you in his place, and you could have access to her legacy.’ He shrugged. ‘Such is what they say, at least.’
Holland looked his king boldly in the eye. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks, sire,’ he said coolly.
* * *
As the time left until the end of the truce grew short, messengers came to England from the Papal Court. A little over a month after the tournament at Windsor, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Bishops of London and Norwich, received letters from the Pope demanding that the Lady Joan of Kent be set free, so that she could appoint a proctor to act on her behalf in the dispute between Holland and Montague. Shortly after that, the Pope wrote to both the English king and Philip of Valois, exhorting them to prolong the truce a little longer, until a more long-term peace between their countries could be arranged. Plantagenet and Valois reluctantly agreed, and the truce was extended until September.
Summer came and went, and it was the most miserable one Kemp had ever known. Rain fell continuously, turning roads into rivers and fields into lakes. Kemp’s thoughts turned to the fields of Knighton and he wondered if the weather was as bad there as it was in London. If so, then the harvest would be poor, the crops drowned before they could ripen. He thought of his mother and his eldest brother, and old Simkin Sewell, and he wondered how much would be left for them once Beaumont had taken his share of the harvest.
September finally came, and the truce was extended for another two months, until the end of October. There was no let-up in the weather, however. It was raining one day early in October, when Kemp accompanied Chaucer down to Three Cranes Wharf, both wearing their hoods pulled up against the constant deluge. There they found Curtis’s ship, the Magdalen, tied up. At a hundred and fifty tonnes, the Magdalen was a relatively small cog. Curtis was overseeing the unloading of her cargo of Gascon wine, the first press of that year’s harvest. He was in a grim mood. His debts still hung over him like the sword of Damocles, and the profits from his next trading venture in the Magdalen would do little to pay them off.
‘So what are you worried about?’ demanded Chaucer, who seemed cheerful in spite of the weather. ‘You weren’t expecting to be able to pay off your debts after a single trading voyage, were you?’
Curtis shook his head, the water running off the brim of his hat in torrents. ‘No, but I was hoping I might be allowed to use the Magdalen for a second trading voyage. The king’s ordered that she be discharged of her cargo so that she can be employed in his service again. A team of his carpenters is coming by next week to convert her for war.’
Chaucer shrugged. ‘Look on the bright side. The turrets they will build on her will prove useful next time you encounter those French pirates you’re always crossing swords with.’
‘Aye, unless the Magdalen is sunk in service against the French before then,’ Curtis replied bitterly.
‘The war is to be renewed, then?’
‘So it seems.’
Chaucer looked grave. War was bad for trade, and Curtis’s ill-humour was infectious. ‘I hear of dark portents. They say the bells of Saint Mark’s in Venice were set ringing, yet when the priest went to investigate, there was no one in the bell tower.’
‘If it’s portents you seek, then look closer to home,’ replied Curtis, who was normally dismissive of such omens. ‘They say a pillar of fire was seen over the Pope’s palace at Avignon one dawn, and the market place at Villach burst open in the shape of a crucifix, and vomited blood. In the Bay of Biscay I came across a ship without a living soul left aboard her.’
‘Did you bring her in for salvage?’
Curtis shook his head. ‘The stink of death was upon her – a pestilential vessel if ever I saw one, the steersman dead with his hands still on the tiller, steering a course for hell I’ve no doubt. I for one would not step aboard her, and could hardly order my mariners to do that which I feared to. There is a pestilence sweeping across Christendom from the east, a foul disease that slays all who are infected by it.’
Chaucer crossed himself. ‘Saints preserve us!’
‘Aye,’ agreed Curtis, and managed a dry, humourless laugh. ‘It’s enough to make even a heretic like me seek absolution!’
They heard a cry and turned in time to see one of the mariners slip from the rain-slick gangplank as he carried a cask of wine down on to the quayside. He fell into the dock and the cask bounced off the gangplank before splashing down on the patch of water where he had gone under.
They waited for an instant that seemed like a century before the mariner finally appeared, surfacing just to one side of the floating cask. He was face-down in the water.
Curtis whipped off his hat and handed it to Kemp with his right hand, at the same time using his left hand to unclasp the brooch which held his cloak in place. Even as the cloak fell to the ground, Curtis
was diving off the quayside into the dock, cleaving the water like a dagger. Surfacing, he swam across to the unconscious mariner and rolled him over so that he floated on his back, before dragging him across to some stone steps cut into the quayside.
Several of the marines were waiting for him on the steps, and they lifted their companion’s body out of the water, laying it on the quayside. Curtis sloshed out after them, water streaming from his sodden clothes.
One of the mariners crouched over his companion’s body and searched for a pulse in his neck, before slumping down beside him. ‘He’s dead.’
Curtis looked at him in surprise and then his face became grim. ‘He’s not been paid off yet,’ he growled. ‘No one in my employ dies before I say they can.’
The assembled mariners laughed uncertainly. In such violent times, death was an every day occurrence, but not one for jesting about.
Curtis sat astride the dead man’s hips, put his hands on the man’s stomach and pushed up, towards his ribs, expelling water from his lifeless lips. Then he bent over him, putting his mouth over the dead man’s, and breathed air into it.
‘You cannot restore the dead to life, Master Curtis,’ Chaucer told him gently, while Kemp watched, fascinated, wondering what the shipmaster was trying to achieve. ‘The gift of life belongs to God alone…’
And then the dead mariner coughed and spluttered, his eyes blinking open. The watching mariners crossed themselves in awe; Curtis merely smiled with relief.
‘You would cheat Death?’ one of the more superstitious mariners asked incredulously.
Curtis shook his head. ‘Merely a postponement. Death gets us all in the end.’
Kemp Page 18