by Dan Davis
“No!” She scurried forward. “No, sire. Not her. You stay away from her. My family must be safe. My dear girls, my dear boys. You’ll not go near her if you know what’s good for you. Hear me, do you?”
“I am not sure I do. Why should I not seek justice? Perhaps it was your granddaughter who enticed away young Jamet from his village?”
Her face drained of colour. “No, no. It was me. It was all my doing, I swear it.”
“Tell it, then. How did you get a learned young boy to obey you? What magic did you employ?”
“No magic. It was a simple enough thing. Simple as any. He was on his lonesome, tossing stones into the pond. The little ones just want the attention of a kindly person. I asked him all about himself, usual questions, and they love to tell it all. All about themselves and what’s on their minds and the battles they been fighting with one child or another or with their mother or father. Don’t recall what he said in this instance. I asked him if he would like some sugar cakes and he said yes and off we went.”
“Why on earth would he follow you all the way back to the castle?”
“Don’t know why they do it, truth be told? Ain’t got no fear in them. Even when they been told to watch out for me, to watch out for La Meffraye, they just come along. Hop straight into my hand like a little bird what never seen man before. Innocent little lambs they are with no notion of danger. Can’t imagine the evil, sire. Ain’t in them. Then I gives him by the hand to Poitou and he leads the lad away into my lord’s chambers. And that be that.”
“Dear God Almighty. Your heartlessness is overwhelming. At least there is some comfort in knowing that you will hang for the evil that is in you.”
She let out a juddering sigh. “As long as my family goes on, I can die satisfied I did my duty.”
I was appalled by her hypocrisy at the time but later I realised she was behaving naturally. We all chose our own offspring, our own family, over the rest of the world. If we do not do so, in fact, it is we who are acting against nature. And to act against nature is to sin.
Overcome by her witless evil, I suddenly wanted to be done with it. All the endless questioning and feet dragging. The absurd denials by Gilles de Rais, or whatever his true name was, were simply drawing out the farcical trial. All the Dominicans from the Inquisition, all the bishops and the lawyers, all poking away to uncover a truth they would never find or not comprehend if they did. And, I was realising, I would never know it myself. None of his followers knew enough to fill in the gaps.
Returning to the chamber, I found Stephen sitting on a stone bench with his head in his hands.
“Is the Inquisition done with Henriet Griart?”
Speaking from within the shield of his own hands, Stephen groaned. “I am done with being a lawyer.”
“Good,” I said, sitting beside him and clapping a hand on his back. “It is a calling for scoundrels and knaves. Though I must say, you seemed quite suited to it.”
He laughed a little and sat up. “The things they did, Richard. I shall have to live now for the rest of my life knowing that men are capable of such things. And if men can act in such a way, what then can it be like in the bottom level of Hell?”
“You will never know. But those men will. And their master, too. Listen, Stephen. Get me into his quarters. Tonight.”
“Who? De Rais? You mean to kill him? After all this?”
“No, no,” I said, though I half expected that I would. “Soon, after all these statements are read to the court, he will be sentenced and executed. And I will never know where he came from. What my brother told him.”
And I will never know about her. Was she one of us? Was she a military genius who outwitted me on the battlefields of Orléans and Patay? Or was she just another poor victim of this monster?
“I shall have to use every favour I have yet to call in,” Stephen said. “He is well guarded and I may be rebuffed.”
“You must overcome their doubts. Tell them that you are prosecuting the crimes on behalf of the common people, who are too weak to do it themselves.”
He glanced at me with a dark look in his eye. “You continue to sneer at the common people as if you were not one of them yourself.”
“What do you mean by such a remark?”
“Nothing, sir. I am tired, that is all.”
“You say I am a commoner myself?” I pondered it for a moment. “I take it you say so because my natural father Earl de Ferrers was in fact a bastard son of Priskos? No, you are right, that is a fair observation. And yet my mother was nobly born, to a proper English lineage. And one might say, considering that Priskos spawned such men as Alexander and Caesar, that my blood is as noble as it comes.”
“All I mean, Richard, is that your blood might be noble but you are one no longer. A nobleman lives as one, holding land for his lord, and is recognised as one by commoner and by his peers and his king. But you spend all your time amongst commoners, all men see you as one, and your king does not know you. As far as the law is concerned, you are a commoner.”
“I do not know about that,” I said. “But I suppose you are right enough.” Even as I said it, I knew it was not the whole truth. The law applies to all men but it was never written with a man such as me in mind. Perhaps I was a lord no longer but I could not see myself as a commoner either. I was a knight in my heart but an immortal in my blood and what that made me as a whole, I did not know. “But I must speak with Gilles de Rais tonight. You can make it happen, I know you can.”
“If we are discovered, it could end badly.”
“Stephen, if it goes badly, I shall simply have to kill them all and we will have to escape before they catch us.”
He sighed. “Hardly the virtuous path.”
“We have done such sinful and illegal things before, have we not? At the least, I know I have done and will gladly do so again, if need be. Come, now. Take me to Gilles de Rais.”
Gilles de Rais had been in command of the forces that crushed us at the climax of the Loire campaign eleven years earlier and on my way to speak to him, face to face, I could not get that final battle from my mind.
16. The Battle of Patay
June 1429
After we abandoned the Siege of Orléans on 8 May 1429, our armies withdrew to our nearby garrisons all along the Loire. We were split into smaller groups and companies and distributed fairly in this fortress or that. I was commanded to join the garrison at Meung-sur-Loire, not much more than ten miles away from Orléans, downriver to the southwest.
It had been an enormous setback, there was no doubt about that. But equally, it was not an unrecoverable military disaster. We still had thousands of superbly equipped and supplied veteran soldiers holding well-fortified positions in towns that were large enough to support us on both sides of Orléans up and down the river.
Still, there was something indefinable in the air. A vague sense of disquiet over and above that which might be expected from such a setback.
“Bunch of whiners,” Walt said about our fellow garrison troops, who grumbled about being defeated weeks before.
“Ain’t used to defeat, are we,” Rob said. “They’ll get over it and then we’ll charge back in and finish them off. Right, Richard?”
I did not answer, because I was as disquieted as anyone. Though, I did not make my feelings known and as much as I could, I kept my concerns to myself and instead focused my attention on the defences and getting to know the men that I found myself garrisoned with.
They were good men. About five hundred had been in the forts around Orléans and the other eight hundred had been established there before our evacuation. Our defences at Meung-sur-Loire consisted of three components. The walled town, the fortification guarding the bridge over the Loire, and a large walled castle just outside of the town. The castle was small but well-made and served as the headquarters for our commander the Earl of Shrewsbury John Talbot. I did my best to keep out of his way.
We bedded in and waited for our reinforcements t
o arrive. Word had been sent that Sir John Fastolf was on his way from Paris with a reinforcing army of several thousand, headed for the Loire River valley.
Once they arrived, we might actually attack the French again or perhaps we would continue to wait for them to come and attack us. A surprising number of our soldiers did not believe that the French would follow up on their victory, for they had conducted only defensive campaigns for decades and as the days turned to weeks, it seemed ever more likely that they were right. The French forces held at Orléans, as if they had no idea what to do next.
As the atmosphere of indecision settled over us, I increasingly wondered why I was there at all. I was doing nothing at all for the English cause in France, and I was certainly not acting to further the aims of the Order.
“We can’t leave, Richard,” Rob said beside me from the top of the walls of the town, where I had raised the question with my men. “Can’t leave our friends to their fate.”
“Can’t we?” Walt asked. “What good we doing sitting here on our arses?”
It had been a month since fleeing Orléans and we wondered if we would pass the whole summer without fighting again. Many soldiers are happy with avoiding battle. But not me and not my men.
“You are right,” I admitted. “I should have made myself a lord. Going about in war as a commoner is no use at all. It seems that no lord these days cares one whit whether a man has ability if he is not a gentleman of some description. It was foolish of me to think that my inherent nobility, and my knightly qualities, would shine through and overcome the limitations of my apparent station. If I was a lord in this moment then I could do something about all of this but instead my presence simply angers them.”
“When you made us knights,” Rob said, “we knew we would rarely be recognised as such. But you told us that we would be knights in our hearts and so we have been from that day to this. And you have fought, as we have, for free companies and captains, from Athens to Avila, and never were we regarded by our companions as knights or nobles but we knew in our hearts that we must act with knightly virtue in all things. And so we did, come what may.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “And so we will continue to do. But this is different. Our companions are Englishmen, fighting for the King of England. And even if he is a useless boy and his lords are witless cowards, they are the lords of England. I had expected that they would respond to my suggestions more favourably rather than to dismiss me as a useless commoner.”
“Talbot hates your guts, alright,” Walt said, grinning.
“Fastolf and all,” Rob added. “When he gets back here, you’ll be getting it in both ears.”
“I do already from you two damned jesters.”
Walt shook his head. “Perhaps if, instead of making yourself a lord, you should have pretended to be an obedient soldier, Richard.”
“Aye,” Rob said. “That’s what makes the lords angry. Choose one or the other. You can’t be both.”
“Yes, yes, very amusing, I am sure.”
“True though, ain’t it,” Walt said.
In the distance, a group of horsemen rode hard toward the town. Dust kicked up behind them and even from so far away I could see that their horses were struggling and the men were agitated.
“That our men?” Walt asked, squinting.
Rob nodded. “They were watching Orléans. Look at the state of them. Must have been galloping all the way.”
“Only one reason to ride like that,” Walt observed.
“Yes,” I said. “The French are coming.”
The French army came up quickly and in great numbers. We had been expecting a siege of the town and castle but instead they threw all their numbers at the fortified bridge over the Loire and took it by storm inside of a single day.
Joan of Arc controlled a force that included captains Jean d'Orléans, Gilles de Rais, Jean Poton de Xaintrailles, and La Hire. The French had five thousand soldiers. Bypassing the city and the castle, they staged a frontal assault on the bridge fortifications, conquered it in one day, and installed a garrison. Immediately they had cut off our ability to move south of the Loire.
Still, we expected that they would invest Meung-sur-Loire but instead they marched on without attacking town or castle and turned to march to Beaugency just five miles away downriver and put it under siege.
At the same time, another French army assaulted and defeated our garrison at Jargeau on the other side of Orléans which was commanded by Suffolk, William de la Pole. Their defences were good and there were seven hundred men under his command. Somehow, the French simply overwhelmed them and there was another fortress lost. We suffered heavy losses and Suffolk was captured.
Unlike Meung-sur-Loire, the main stronghold at Beaugency was inside the city walls, forming an imposing rectangular citadel. By the time the French had assaulted the walls a couple of times, our soldiers abandoned the town and retreated into the castle. The French brought up their cannons and bombarded the castle with artillery fire. That evening, with the cannons still firing at the walls and towers of the castle, the French received more reinforcements from the east.
Hearing news of an English relief force approaching from Paris under Sir John Fastolf, d'Alençon negotiated the English surrender and granted them safe conduct out of Beaugency.
Our long-awaited reinforcement army under Sir John Fastolf, which had set off from Paris following the defeat at Orléans, now joined forces with survivors of the besieging army under Lord Talbot and Lord Scales at Meung-sur-Loire.
“We must launch an assault on the French now, my lords. We must.”
“Why do you insist on speaking when we care nothing for your opinions?”
“If we do not stop this wave of assaults now then we will not do so at all. They will roll over us all the way to Paris.”
“Do not be absurd, man,” Fastolf snapped. “We cannot risk a pitched battle against a foe who so outnumbers us.”
“Why not?” I said. “Overall numbers matter only in the minds of the soldiers. What is important is how many soldiers we can bring to bear at any one time.”
“We must retreat back to Paris,” Fastolf said.
“No, we cannot abandon the remaining garrisons to their fate,” Talbot argued. I thought that he was coming around to my way of thinking but that was too much to hope. “We must find another town to take and hold. If we can encourage the French to besiege us, we can split their forces and assault them in turn, perhaps in spring next year.”
“That is madness,” I said. “We would then be crushed in turn.”
“You are not part of this conference and you will now leave.”
There was nothing left to do but follow Fastolf's plan to retreat towards Paris.
Our forces were in constant contact and so when we marched away northward, the French set off immediately after us.
We were in the lead and had half a day on them, so it should have been a simple thing to outmarch the enemy. We had done so many times before. Yet again, though, it was down to a matter of will. Ours was perhaps not broken but it was subdued. Even though we knew the enemy was after us, it seemed that the men trudged in weary defeat rather than raced away for the sake of their lives. We had not gone fifteen miles when they caught up with us near to the village of Patay.
That little village was one I knew well enough, for it was just a day’s ride north from Orléans and our patrols had gone around it and through it a dozen times.
“That city is cursed,” Walt said, spitting, as the enemy horsemen massed through trees and hedgerows to the south. “Why can we not win when we are near it?”
“Not the city, is it,” Rob said, stringing his bow. “It’s the witch.”
“Can it be true?” Walt asked. “Is she using magic?”
I thought she probably was.
“No,” I said. “Her presence has put the wind up them, that is all. It will take one sharp defeat for the French to return to their craven ways, mark my words.”
“Form up,” came the orders relayed from Fastolf.
In this battle, we employed the same methods we used in the victories at Crécy in 1346 and Agincourt in 1415, deploying an army composed predominantly of longbowmen behind a barrier of sharpened stakes driven into the ground to obstruct any attack by cavalry.
This time, however, it would not go so well.
“The French are coming. They be right on our heels, sir.” Rob said. “We won’t make it to a better position.”
“Where is Talbot?” I asked the fleeing archers around me. “Where are the lords?”
“Ahead,” they said. “Far up ahead. Not here.”
“Got to do something, sir,” Walt said. “Look, there. Riders gathering.”
“Listen to me,” I shouted. “Pass the word. Fill the trees by the road and prepare to ambush the enemy as they pass. They will not charge us in the trees. Pass the word.”
Wonderful men, they were. Proper soldiers. The senior men chivvied the new lads and together they took positions along three hundred yards at the edge of the woodland and made ready for the mounted men-at-arms to approach along the road below. They were tense. We all were. But we had plenty of arrows and stood a good chance of driving the enemy vanguard away with heavy casualties and by then our own soldiers would hopefully return and deter the rest of the French army.
Talbot and his knights rode back toward us. They were just a score but dozens more came behind him.
“Thank God,” Rob muttered.
“About bloody time,” Walt said.
When Talbot approached, he began issuing commands all along the line and our archers began trudging down the hill toward the road.
“What in the hell are you doing?” I shouted, riding toward him.
“We must block the road,” Talbot called, irritated by my question and yet answering all the same and indicating the position with his sword. “Archers to redeploy. Five hundred of them will hold the road with the remaining men to shoot from the flank.”