by A L Berridge
I stared. It was hurting him, it had to be, I saw him grimace every time, but he was making that arm do what it had to and fuck what it cost him. Bouchard deliberately knocked it with his forearm as he curved round for a stab at the face, we all heard André’s gasp of pain, but it didn’t stop him swivelling into the riposte, he never even broke tempo.
And that was Bouchard’s second mistake. He’d come into this fight for the sheer cruel joy of it, but André was fighting for his life and his honour, he was going to kill Bouchard if he had to die himself to do it and nothing in the world was going to stop him. I looked again at Bouchard’s face and all I saw in it now was fear.
But Stefan was right, and even a cornered rat will fight with all it’s got. Bouchard stepped out of reach, bent down swiftly and came up with Charlot’s sword. He’d realized what André had, that the best way against a left-hander is to give yourself a guard on that side. He was going to fight two-handed.
‘You can fight the gentleman’s way, can’t you, Chevalier?’ he said. ‘Or didn’t they teach you that in the stable boy’s home?’
The bloody, bloody bastard. I looked desperately at the boy, but he only looked angry and wary. He was still going to kill the man, he was set on it, his brain was just furiously trying to work out how.
I think maybe I was as mad as he was. I reversed my sword in my hand, said ‘Catch!’ and threw it to him.
He caught it. His arm might be torn up, but no one had a stronger hand or wrist than André, he caught it and hardly winced.
I said ‘It’s our uncle’s, André. You’ve got them both now.’
Something happened in his face, his eyes blazed with something that wasn’t just hate and revenge, something only I understood. Then he bent his right elbow, extended his left arm in the proper two-sword guard, smiled at Bouchard and said ‘What are you waiting for?’
It was impossible what I was looking at, and Bouchard knew it too. I can’t imagine the pain André was in, but he used that wounded right arm to block and guard like it was steel itself. He did all the skilled stuff with the left, he was feinting and dropping, binding and sliding under Bouchard’s blade, he pricked him in the arm, the thigh and the hip, but he used his right to keep the blades away from his own guard and the bastard never touched him.
I actually sat down. André had his father’s sword and his uncle’s, the one I’d used myself, it was like we were every one of us there in the fight with him, us and the one man who’d fenced us and loved us all four. I looked down at Charlot and thought he’d have been proud of his Chevalier now.
‘Making yourself useful, I see,’ said Stefan, sitting beside me.
It was nearly over. The neat four-rapier formation had long since broken up, Bouchard was backing away, doing little more than slash down with each hand alternately like he’d never had a fencing lesson in his life. André was more ragged now, his face grey-white, his bandage smearing red wherever it touched, he was panting and gasping, he was all but bloody sobbing, but his footwork was perfect and his hands never wavered, he was driving the bastard back for the kill.
Hooves were crossing the plain behind us, but I didn’t turn, there’d been movement round us the whole time and no one had approached us. But these were slowing, I felt a presence at my back, then someone said ‘Good God!’ and I whirled round fast because it was d’Enghien.
He’d got Brunel with him and an officer I recognized as Gassion, but none of them were looking at me. André was fighting, André with two swords and the kind of passion you go to hell for. He was upping the tempo, in and out and sharp back, he feinted at Bouchard’s face, dropped for the chest and got him, right hand slashing clean across to sweep away the parry and nearly slicing Bouchard’s face in the process. The man was jerking his head back, feet stumbling, doing nothing but parry wildly with both blades as if they were great wide broadswords and could save him like armour.
They couldn’t. He tried one last thing, a great strong thrust on the high inside line with all his weight behind it, but André’d expected it. He dropped my sword, smacked his right hand on the grass for balance, thrust back his leg and threw the force of his whole body in one almighty lunge at the groin. The passata sotto, and I’ve never seen it more savage. Bouchard screamed high as a woman, dropped both swords and dashed his hands to his mutilated torso, knees crumpling as he collapsed and writhed on the hard ground.
André stood again and wiped his face. There was no expression on it at all.
‘Bravo, Chevalier,’ said the Duc.
André whipped round, then lowered his sword and relaxed. Bouchard went on screaming, but he was sobbing too, a horrible, embarrassing noise that made me want to look away.
‘Finish it,’ said d’Enghien. ‘The creature’s an affront to humanity.’
Bouchard was openly weeping, on his knees and weeping, rocking to and fro as his hands clutched his groin. He looked up at André with tears on his face, and said ‘Please. No. It’s not fair. Please.’ When André raised his sword he almost wailed, and I felt my own cheeks burn with shame.
André turned away. ‘Might he have a surgeon, Monseigneur?’
D’Enghien leaned forward. ‘You wish him to live to face trial?’
André said ‘I wish him to live.’
Stefan muttered under his breath ‘Mistake, kid. Big mistake,’ but d’Enghien gave a pleased laugh.
‘Magnanimity. You’re right, it’s one of the pillars of honour.’ He turned to Brunel, said ‘See to it,’ then leaned back in his saddle to look at André. The boy was battered and bloody but d’Enghien didn’t seem to mind. He was scruffy himself, come to that, his velvet torn and his face bloodied, he looked like a dirty little boy playing at war.
He bowed. ‘You’ve done well today, Chevalier. His Majesty will be delighted.’
André bowed back. He nearly fell over but he bowed back. ‘I doubt His Majesty will be delighted at any achievement of mine.’
‘Ah,’ said d’Enghien. ‘Perhaps you should know that King Louis XIII died five days ago at Saint-Germain. I don’t think His Majesty King Louis XIV will care for past prejudices of that kind, do you?’
The King was dead. There’d been a Louis XIII since before I was born, but all I felt just then was hope that maybe the old politics would die with him and André would get a fresh start.
D’Enghien began to turn his horse. ‘Do you join us for the campaign, Chevalier?’
André managed a better bow this time. ‘I regret, Monseigneur, that I am to be married in four days.’
‘Regret?’ said d’Enghien. He laughed so loudly his horse sort of shied. ‘Then we have more in common than you think. But come to us afterwards when your wound’s healed.’
André hesitated. ‘If I’m welcome in your army …’
‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said d’Enghien. ‘You’re welcome anywhere I say. Who’s going to say no to the victor of Rocroi?’ He gave a huge grin and cantered away with Gassion.
I didn’t blame him for being triumphant. He was right, he’d be really powerful after this, and now the King was dead we’d got a chance of real justice at last. Then I watched Brunel’s minions carrying off Bouchard as a bleeding, sobbing wreck, and thought in some ways we’d already had it.
We’d won something else too, and there was evidence of it all over the field. Trumpets were sounding in Rocroi, soldiers gathering up Spanish flags as trophies, and little bursts of music were coming from all over, drums and singing, and from the Écossais that horrible wailing of pipes. We’d done the impossible. We’d fought a huge battle and smashed the Spanish tercios to pieces, we’d done what the boy always said we’d do and were driving them right out of France.
I turned to him in wonder, but he was knelt down by Charlot, gently massaging his injured arm as he gazed about the field. Stefan said ‘Not bad for Trooper Thibault,’ and André said ‘Fuck off, sergeant,’ and they laughed together at a joke I didn’t understand. I looked at his face and didn’t see anyth
ing like exultation in it, just a kind of quietness that hadn’t been there for a long, long time.
I looked again at the field, and now I noticed other things among the noise and jubilation. Chaplains were praying over the fallen, surgeons’ assistants going around with litters, boys clanking along with buckets to give the men water. I remember one musketeer pouring his mug all down his face and the white runnels it made on his smoke-blackened cheeks. I remember a pikeman hauling a friend’s arm across his shoulders, saying ‘You’re all right, chum, I’ll get you to the surgeons, you’ll be all right.’ I remember civilians coming out of the town, women and children who’d have fallen to the Spaniards if we hadn’t driven them off, and the children were running round making banging noises like guns, and nobody cursed them, even the wounded ones looked at them and smiled. I remember seeing two figures staggering towards us over the grass, and one was Grimauld with a face so black he might have been a Moor, and the other was Gaspard with bandages right up his leg, but both of them smiling with the same kind of quiet in their faces I’d seen in André’s.
Then I understood. After all the fog and lies of politics we’d come here to the smoke of cannon and the open green field where ordinary people fought and died to make the lies come true. We’d come to the shattering violence of the battlefield at Rocroi, and what we’d finally found there was peace.
Thirty
Bernadette Fournier
We dressed her ourselves for her wedding, she would have no one but me and Jeanette. Her dress was not Spanish gold and silver now, Monsieur, it was creamy white and cascading like a waterfall with lace from Reims. I myself placed the orange blossoms round her neck, fresh that morning from the Ancre hothouse, and their scent warmed the air like a promise. She touched them with tentative fingers and said ‘Do I look silly, Bernadette?’ and I looked at her and said ‘No.’
So we rode with her into Dax, and as the carriage approached the square we saw André ahead of us by the church steps, pacing anxiously as if convinced she would change her mind and refuse to come. I laughed and said ‘How silly he is, he must hear the carriage,’ but Anne looked at me wonderingly and said ‘But he is deaf in one ear, Bernadette, did you not know?’ And then I felt foolish, for indeed I had not.
But that is how it is, Monsieur, there is always more to a person than any one other can ever know. Even I had my own little piece of André de Roland, for I had shared his lowest times like no one else, and nothing would ever take that away.
It did not trouble me, for as I descended the carriage there was Jacques waiting for me with a look on his face that was brighter even than Anne’s. I stood on the church steps with the sun on my face and my hand in his arm and would not have changed places with a queen. I watched Anne walk the last steps over the scattered blossoms, I watched the look on André’s face when he turned and saw her, and I did not grudge them one scrap of their happiness, for I knew I had something precious of my own.
Anne de Roland
Extract from her diary, dated 23 May 1643
I had thought to write this last night, but had scarcely trimmed the quill before there came a rustle of bedclothes behind and I saw André watching me.
He said ‘Anne, please tell me you’re not writing your diary.’
I said ‘I thought you were asleep.’
‘I was,’ he said, and looked at me through half-closed eyes. ‘I was dreaming I’d married the most beautiful woman in the world, but when I reached for her I found nothing but pillow.’
I said ‘I couldn’t sleep, I was too happy and wanted to write it down.’
He smiled like a king and stretched himself out over the bed as if he would conquer it all. ‘That’s all right then, you can read it to me if you like.’
Something squeezed like a fist inside me for love of him, and I could not resist. I looked at the blank page and said aloud ‘Only to my diary can I write this, for I would not wish my husband to realize my disappointment on my wedding night …’
There was only a flurry of bedclothes to warn me, and I had hardly time to lay down the pen before his arm was about me and I was thrown flat on my back on the bed I had so recently vacated.
I said feebly ‘André, your arm.’
‘Never you mind my arm,’ he said, and indeed his hands were already busy removing my nightdress. ‘This is a question of duty. I cannot have my wife disappointed.’
He knew I was not, he could not fail to know, but it was so much pleasure to have him prove it I could not bear to say anything that would make him stop.
But in the morning he was quieter. I lay with my head on his shoulder while he kissed the back of my neck, but then his lips lifted from my skin and I felt his breath there instead, warm at first, then leaving little cool patches in its wake.
I said ‘André?’
He quickly kissed behind my ear. ‘Yes, sweetheart?’
I said ‘What’s wrong?’
He stilled. Then his hand pressed down into the softness of the mattress and he twisted round to face me.
‘Nothing.’
I put my hands either side of his face and looked at him.
He lowered his eyes. ‘I don’t want you disappointed in anything, Anne. You should be in Paris, being fêted, attending court. You shouldn’t be hiding in a little village in Picardie, because your husband is afraid to go out.’
I said ‘You’re not afraid. You’ll be going back to the army, won’t you? And I’m sure the Duc will make things all right everywhere else.’
‘I think he will,’ he said, and began absent-mindedly to play with my breasts. ‘But I still won’t go to Paris, my darling, because I don’t think I can face it.’
I have never heard him admit such weakness, and was astonished how fierce it made me feel.
I said ‘Then we shan’t go. Why need we? We’re perfectly happy here.’
‘Are you?’ he said. ‘Perfectly?’
I stroked his chest, then let my hand stray down to follow the fine little hairs that pointed like an arrow to the thicker growth below. ‘Well, perhaps if …’
Afterwards we clung together in the warmth of our own sweat, and for a little while there was no other world beyond the curtains of our bed. I was careful not to allow the talk to return to Paris, and he did not ask again.
Jacques de Roland
He’d got no choice. He’d only been married a week when we got a letter from d’Enghien saying he’d been writing to people and the King wanted to meet him. He wrote ‘You’re to be publicly cleared in any event, but it will look rather ungracious if you don’t at least visit.’ Even I knew ‘rather ungracious’ was another way of saying ‘bloody rude’, which is not a good thing to be to a new King. The Comte knew it too, he ignored all André’s excuses and made an appointment to present him right away.
We’d got time to do a few things first. Crespin’s body had been returned to his family, but we’d brought Charlot’s back to Dax to lay in the family vault itself. He was the only one in there who wasn’t actually a Roland, but André said he might as well have been, and the Comte and Comtesse both agreed. We even had a plaque put up for him in St Sebastian’s alongside Philibert’s to say he’d given his life for the Sieur of Dax. I said that wasn’t true any more, I hadn’t been Seigneur since André officially got his property back, but the boy just smiled and said ‘You’ll see.’
I did. We went to the notary’s to make André’s new will, and my uncle changed his at the same time. He didn’t need me as a spare any more, but he included me anyway, he made me a proper official second son so when André became Comte I’d still get Dax for my own. I saw it on the paper myself, then I went to tell Mother and she cried. Bernadette didn’t, she drew herself up and said ‘Now you are truly nobility and will not want to know me,’ so I showed her I did, then we sat in the back meadow and I put a chain of daisies round her hair like a crown.
My uncle and grandmother set off for Paris first, and they took Gaspard with them to convalesce with h
is family. We got a litter to take him to the carriage, but he said ‘It’s a coach, Jacquot, not a hearse, I shall enter it in the style of a gentleman,’ and walked to it all by himself. I felt very solemn watching him being driven away, waving an immaculate hand from the window. He was the very last of the Puppies.
Stefan and Grimauld weren’t coming to Paris, they were too bloody comfortable where they were, but they were both joining us for d’Enghien’s campaign afterwards. That puzzled me with Grimauld, I mean André had given him a pension, he didn’t need the money, but I think the truth is he just liked making things go bang. André said he’d get him a position with the engineers and he went round grinning with all four teeth. I didn’t understand why Stefan was coming either, he’d always banged on about wanting to be independent in the army, but he said ‘Maybe I like having an officer I can tell to fuck off,’ and stared me right out.
André was very quiet the last day. Anne told me he’d been having nightmares, and we both knew what about. He was doing it again, that stuff he did straight after the amende honorable, that twitching with his shoulders when he felt people looking. He went out alone in the afternoon, and when it got near dusk I set out to find him.
He was doing what I’d guessed he’d do, fencing all by himself on the back meadow where we’d trained together all those years ago. I stood and watched till he noticed me and lowered his sword.
I said ‘You shouldn’t be doing that, you’re meant to be resting your arm.’
His face darkened at once. ‘It’s always “should”, isn’t it? Doesn’t it ever matter what I want to do?’
I waited. After a moment he looked down and flicked his sword irritably through the grass. ‘All right. I know I’ve got to go to Paris, you don’t have to tell me.’