by Robert Nye
So I remained for those three years in skirts. At the end of them the Duke came back from Ireland. One morning I woke and found my doublet returned, my gowns all gone. Whether my mistress feared that her husband would notice my disguise, and suspect her of perversion in having a boy-page in girl’s clothes by her in her chamber, I do not know. I had to assume boy’s garb again and be once more Jack Fastolf. I was growing quickly, and I was called therefore soon into more manly affairs of the household – such as learning how to groom my master’s dogs, and how to polish his armour.
I enjoyed being young Jack, the Duke’s page. But I had enjoyed also being Joan, my lady the Duchess of Norfolk’s seventh maid.
Chapter Thirteen
About a menu
12th April
The hell with Clio. The girl’s a whore. Muse, you do not amuse me. You’re a pain in the imagination, less than a bubble in the wine, more than I can bear. I’m glad I never married you.
God damn it all – there have to be times when a man does not care to fare back further than his last dinner. Worcester, get the boy to fetch the menu from the cook, and you set down what we did tonight at table. That should make war enough for today.
MENU
An olive, stoned, inside a warbler;
the warbler in an ortolan;
the ortolan inside a lark;
the lark inside a thrush;
the thrush inside a quail;
the quail, in vine-leaves, in a golden plover;
the plover inside a lapwing;
the lapwing inside a partridge;
the partridge inside a woodcock;
the woodcock inside a teal;
the teal inside a guinea-fowl;
the guinea-fowl, well larded, inside a duck;
the duck inside a pheasant;
the pheasant in a goose;
the goose inside a turkey;
the turkey inside a swan;
the swan inside a bustard.
This bird served with onions stuffed with cloves, with carrots, with celery, with coriander seeds, with garlic, for Mr Worcester, Mr Scrope, Mr Hanson, Mr Nanton, Mr Bussard, and Fr Brackley.
For the second course of the same
Four yards of black pudding, London measure;
13 lbs of cherries;
custards;
a dozen wheaten loaves;
two pounds of sweet butter.
For the third course ditto
Twelve apples piping hot and twelve cold pears with sugar candy.
For Sir John Fastolf
Piment, claret, hippocras, Vernage, Greek, malmsey,
Candia, ribolla, rumney, Provence, Montross, Rivere, muscatel, rosette, Oseye, Rhenish, Beaune, Saint-Emilion, Chablis, Epernay, Sézanne, Saint-Pourçain of Auvergne.
NB: No wines of Gascony, which parch the blood. No wines of Bordeaux, which block the bowels. No wines of Orleans or Château-Thierry, which fly to the head. The malmsey is your natural wine from Madeira, mulled and spiced, and not the concoction some make to that name – which is mere water, honey, clary juice, beer grounds, and brandy.
PS FROM THE COOK
The butcher wants paying £7 15s. 8d.
The taverner wants paying £70 10s. 6d.
I want my wages for the last five months.
The undercook wants his flute back, and his marmoset.
There is also the matter of the £13 9s. 11d.
outstanding from our deliberations with the dice.
Chapter Fourteen
How Sir John Fastolf went to war & about the sea fight at Slugs
13th April (Friday too)
As you will have gathered from my successful impersonation of a girl, my figure in those days was shapely. I had no trouble in seeing my toes. I could even have touched them, if I’d wanted to. I was so thin in the waist, I could have slipped through an alderman’s ring. I was assiduous also, and eager, and athletic. So, from being Mowbray’s page I progressed to being Mowbray’s squire. Oh my ambitions were limited enough in those innocent days. I thought it a very great thing to wear a liripipe hat.
When Mowbray went to the wars, young Jack (just-lately-Joan) went with him.
To tell you the truth, that puking, treacherous Duke of Norfolk never stumbled out with blue fire in his belly towards even a brawl in a tavern yard. He was hardly a warrior by nature. He preferred to sit and plot and plait his beard. But King Dick – remembering no doubt how his grand-dad had once responded to a French invitation to do homage with the remark that he would only ever go to Paris with his helmet on his head and sixty thousand men behind him – King Dick was beginning to make anxious noises about France. (The English kings have a habit of doing this when things are going badly with their wives. Richard was no good in bed with Isabella.) My master Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, knew that he would have to make a move to preserve his own credit. He went through the motions of an expedition up and down the Channel. King Dick cheered up. Isabella imported a Turkish dildoe.
We had seven ships when we sailed out of Yarmouth. It was the first time I had been to sea. The wind blew and the rain fell and the waves slopped up and down. I did not care for it. One part of the sea is much the same as another, take my word.
We met the French at Slugs. It was a Sunday, a day of thick fog, about the feast of the Trinity, and they had been burning our port of Rye and other mischief, and then dashing off again always before we could get at them. At Slugs, though, they made a stand, on account as we thought of the weather.
This was the order of the battle. We had seven vessels. The French had nine. We saw them a mile away, the fog drifting off awhile like spindrift, and as they saw us at the same time there was nothing for it but a fight.
Mowbray paced up and down, gnawing at a rotten apple.
‘Not too close, gentlemen. Not too close.’
I stress: This was my introduction to the noble and ancient art of war. I was fifteen years old. The behaviour of my superiors did not impress me. Our seven English ships pursued through the water a zig-zag which had nothing to do with advancing on the enemy. The Frogs meanwhile seemed undecided. It is well known that in these situations the favoured tactic of the French navy is to send word to stir up their friends the Scots, encouraging a few diversionary northern battles of passionate local ferocity while they retire to review things from the brothels of Flanders. No one could believe that such diplomacy was on the cards this time. Because of the fog the two fleets had come too close together for either to withdraw without disgrace. But while we bore down on them at a rate of knots (even if sideways) through deep seas, the French vessels had stopped moving altogether. They looked indeed remarkably low in the water.
‘They have great weapons!’ Mowbray shouted, like a nun about to be raped by monkeys. How he knew they had any weapons at all when his eyes were shut I can’t begin to tell you. ‘To port!’ he cried. And then: ‘To starboard!’
I perceived that my captain’s master plan was to shoot past the French fleet as amazingly and irretrievably as possible. In this manner he would be seen by history to be not retreating. Possibly he might even fire a few hundred arrows into the foam as we vanished into the shrugging sun. The important thing was that he had no intention of engaging the enemy direct, if he could help it.
Nor, to be truthful, and despite my resemblances to Achilles, had I. The prospect of a noble death may be said to appeal to you at fifteen with rather more force than it does at twenty-five or a hundred and five. The imagination is picturesque at that age, you might say, and reaches after adventures with both hands. But the prospect of death in any guise has never made appeal to me. I like the sun on my back, my shadow on the ground. For that reason I busied myself in the rigging aft. It was not aft enough for my liking. But it was aft.
We met (O navigation, O my stars) the French.
I still do not understand how it came about that we met them. Our progress was, roughly, south-south-west. Theirs, so far as they had any progress, was south-south-east. Stud
ents of geometry and metaphysics might well suppose the two fleets could have travelled alongside each other on endless small divergence until shortly before the day of doom. So it should have been. So I am convinced my costive lord of Norfolk would have liked it. But at some point south of Grongue, on that foggy afternoon of intermittent sunshine, we met. Rather, our ship, the St George, collided with the biggest of theirs, the St Denis.
A sickening crunch. A splintering of timber. Sails suddenly collapsed, flapping against the masts like swans nailed up.
‘O God,’ remarked Mowbray. ‘O merciful Mary, mother of us, pray for me now at the hour of my death. Down! We’re going down!’
‘French warship engaged, sir,’ reported his first lieutenant, a great skulking hammer of a man, with an axe to swing. ‘Permission to board.’
‘Do what?’ shrieked Mowbray.
‘Permission to go aboard and defeat the enemy, sir,’ requested the lieutenant.
Mowbray was halfway down the ladder to his cabin. ‘Oh very well,’ he muttered. ‘If you insist. I’m just going to fetch my sword. Don’t let me make you late.’
The reader might well suppose that this conduct on the part of the Earl Marshal of all England was not altogether what was expected of a warrior in the wars in France. If every great captain had behaved as Mowbray did, in his country’s behalf, would we have won the battle of Agincourt? Ah, reader, the question betrays your innocence of the ins and outs of war. Agincourt, as you shall come to learn from one who fought there, was not the clearcut nonsense imagined by a generation of armchair soldiers since. It was random, bizarre, bloody, absurd. It was a parcel of chaos imperfectly given shape by its survivors, who looked back on the events of the day, counted the dead, and said: ‘We won this; you lost that. I’m still alive – so I am victor.’ I have been a professional soldier, and I know what I am talking about. Mowbray’s mean demeanour that day at Slugs was admittedly extreme. He took small care to mask his cowardice. He made his determination to survive apparent to the youngest squire up his aft rigging. In this, he was more brazen than most, but typical of what many felt and thought. Oh certainly, by the Devil’s thin belly, sir, there were those in France who thought and fought about higher things, such as glory. All of those madmen are still in France. About six feet in.
Our men were swarming and tumbling into the French vessel where she lay fast beside us, held by long grappling hooks. There was a lot of hacking about with swords. The odd arm flew. An ear. A hand. A head on a marlin spike.
Bone smashed.
Gristle torn.
Skull bashed in.
Brains and blood on the deck. Thick and thin. Grey stuff and red stuff. Men falling face-forwards, fighting.
The enemy offered little real opposition, though – even my inexperienced eye could tell that. Those who did fight seemed unable to control or co-ordinate their movements. Did all Frenchmen walk like this? I wondered. Was every Frenchman so casual, so careless of self-defence? I could not believe it. A surprising number of them seemed to have lost all interest in life. They moved about with contented smiles, awaiting the eventual buffet which sent them pitching straight down the salty gap between the boats.
This desultory brutal brawling went on for perhaps a quarter of an hour. The swirling fog made everything vague – time as well as place. I busied myself higher and higher in the rigging. It was interesting how high you could get, once the necessity presented itself. There was no view to speak of. Occasional splinter of sun on the sea. Mostly fog. But I was above the battle.
A gull drifted past. I reached out my hand and touched it as it flew. The poor thing nearly turned inside-out with fright.
I began to sing to myself a song which I had heard the girls sing behind the barn at Caister:
When I was a young maid, and
Washt my mammy’s dishes,
I put my finger up my cunt and
Pluckt out little fishes.
TRUMPETS! Lord God! The ship lurched violently. Reared. Plunged. Lurched again. I clung to the mast. I was suddenly drenched with spray. We had been hit! We were on fire!
There was smoke everywhere. As much smoke as fog. Below me, a foggy inferno. The flames licked higher. I would be cooked on my spit, if it didn’t snap first with the heat. I heard a deal of shouting and screaming. Men caught fire and jumped into the sea.
The gull floated back across my vision, unconcerned, and flapped to rest in a cloud. Only it was not a cloud. It could not be, since the gull folded its wings, and sat as gulls sit when they have a solid perch.
I screwed up my eyes, tears in them from the smoke, and made out the tracery of another set of rigging just to my right. I swung out. I attached myself to this, sending the gull off downwind again with an irritable scream. A moment later my former home collapsed like a blown-through spider’s web.
Thus, Jack Fastolf came to board the troopship of the Duc de Aquitaine!
Sir – (I do hope your pox is giving you no trouble today?) – I had climbed into the rigging of the enemy vessel. I was not frightened, not at all. I considered my vantage point in the battle. (Perspective is everything in warfare.) I could hear French voices cursing down below me in the fog. I tried to climb higher – but there was no higher. I was right atop the Frenchman’s mast, next to the fleur de lys!
I determined to do what any Englishman would do, in that position. I would capture the enemy flag and then return to my master, the Duke of Norfolk. I reached for the fleur de lys – I had it in my grasp –
Fig me!
I fell!
Either a swing of the vessel, or a stray volley of arrows, or a sudden explosion of sun through fog to dazzle my eyes – I don’t know which: One or the other made me fall. Down, down, down, like Humpty Dumpty – to land smack bang on the Duc de Aquitaine!
It was said later that I fought like ten men. This may well have been true. I always fight like at least seven men. But as a matter of fact the Duc’s neck snapped cleanly when I landed on his head, and he was dead before his body hit the deck. As for his crew, they ran from me as from an avenging angel. Only later did I work it out that this was probably because I dropped out of heaven close-wrapped in the flag – and appeared to those shit-scared, drunken Frenchmen as their own national colours come to life, exacting a terrible final vengeance on the commander who had led them to their doom.
By God’s damsons, madam, I swear that that was what they were, to a man: drunk.
The boat was loaded to the gunnels with sack, pillaged from English cellars, and those Frenchmen had been drinking it all the way home from Rye. They were pissed as newts. I had only to pop my face out of the fleur de lys and shout ‘Death!’ and they fell over their swords to surrender.
Such was the manner in which I went to war and took my first French prisoners. By this time, Mowbray’s men, my companions, were all around me, and when they saw me extricating myself from the flag, bent over Aquitaine’s corpse, I was set up on their shoulders as a hero.
Mowbray came up scowling. The fire on the St George had to be extinguished, and while that was being done he had transferred to the enemy vessel. I am sure he deplored my part in its capture, but the men were adopting me as the mascot of a great victory, and he was diplomat enough to fall in with their wishes.
‘Well, sir squire,’ he said, chewing his beard, ‘I hear that you elected to drop in for the coup de grace.’
Men have gone down to history with witty cracks like that. I avoid them like the plague. Speaking of the plague, we English fell to and drank up a great many more gallons of our own sack in accordance with my uncle Hugh’s prescription. There never was a better antidote to death. Besides, nothing tastes as sweet as stolen wine regained.
I drank my share and I sang my round of the chorus in the victory party which followed. But it was the next day’s engagement, when the bulk of the French fleet came back and bumped into us again in the fog, which made the name of Fastolf so terrible to the enemy.
Chapter Fifteen
About the sea fight continued, & how Sir John Fastolf made his name terrible to the enemy
14th April
The next morning the French came back. Perhaps they had never been away? It was hard to tell. The weather was so foggy. You breathed out and it disappeared. What is certain is that at about eight bells the enemy loomed up nasty on the starboard bow, firing burning arrows and parlez-vousing away fifteen to the dozen across a sea as calm and pale as milk. You could smell the garlic on their breath. Distance seemed discredited by such a day.
The crew of our bonny half-burnt vessel, the St George, were gigantically drunk. We lay alongside that captured ship of the French fleet, the St Denis, from which sufficient quantities of sack had been removed to make our night memorable. Now the time of reckoning had come. These foreign waiters were at hand to present the bill.