The Half-Hanged Man

by David Pilling

  “Alcade, do your duty,” murmured Albuquerque, nodding meaningfully at a court official standing behind the ballasteros guarding the dais. The Alcade, a puffy-faced, burst-bellied man, gaped stupidly at him, then at Garci, and finally at Pedro. He knelt beside the throne and said something in a low voice that Eleanor couldn’t overhear, but whatever it was angered Pedro.

  “What’s that?” he yelled, glaring at the Alcade in fury, “you refuse to execute my orders?”

  The fat man backed away, almost tripping over the step in his haste to get away. “Majesty, I cannot!” he whined. “It is not just. I cannot give the order for Don Garci’s arrest.”

  Such defiance from a mere servant seemed to unhinge Pedro for a moment, and he struggled for speech. Meanwhile Garci and his brothers-in-law were seized by the ballesteros. The three men were too astonished to resist, even Carillo, and all eyes turned to the youth on the throne.

  Pedro’s words, when they came, were strangely hesitant and lacking in authority. “Soldiers, arrest this man,” he said, pointing at Garci. The order was scarcely necessary, since two of his men were already holding Garci’s arms.

  From her vantage point, unseen and unheard, Eleanor frantically cudgeled her wits for some way of rescuing her lover. What she could do against so many armed men? Her fingers curled around the hilt of the poniard at her hip, which was still to taste blood.

  Garci remained silent and outwardly calm, even when his brothers-in-law were hustled out of the hall. Neither went quietly, and roared impotent threats and curses at Pedro until the doors slammed shut on them.

  “Sire,” Garci said coolly, “I have two last requests to make of you. Let me have a priest to hear my confession, and send word to my wife, Doña Leonor, apologizing for my failure as a husband, and leaving all my estates in her keeping.”

  Eleanor put a hand to her mouth as she watched Pedro. Would the brute deny Garci the right of a confession?

  Seeing the King hesitate, Albuquerque intervened. “My confessor is in the chapel,” he said, snapping his fingers at the trembling Alcade. “You, make yourself useful and fetch him.”

  The servant hurried out, and returned moments later with a white-haired priest in tow. Garci obediently knelt to be shriven, and while he murmured his confession Pedro took an elaborate turn about the room, explaining with why his death was necessary.

  “You must understand my position, Don Garci,” he said, “Castile is rotten with conspiracy and treason, and I can only survive by making harsh examples of those that openly defy me. Burgos acclaimed the Lord of Biscay as King in my stead, and so the city must be punished. I am no tyrant, mind, and there will be no wholesale executions.”

  He paused, nodding to himself as if acknowledging some inner voice. “Yes. Rather, I see myself as a surgeon, extracting cancerous growths from the body politic. You are one such tumour, Garci Laso.”

  Garci paid him little heed, but bowed his head while the confessor gave him the sacrament. When it was finished, and the priest had made himself scarce, Albuquerque whispered into Pedro’s ear.

  The king nodded and beckoned to the captain of his ballasteros. Garci watched, bright-eyed and impassive, as the mace-bearer lumbered to his side.

  “What shall I do with this man, sire?” asked the captain, pointing with his mace at the kneeling penitent.

  Pedro raised his eyes to Heaven. “Kill him!” he hissed.

  Eleanor looked away, though she heard the mace whirl and shatter Garci’s skull like an egg, spilling his brains over the floor.

  Pedro the Cruel’s first assassination was complete. It was done in his presence, and at his command, so none can say he embarked on his murderous career by accident: rather, it was the fulfilment of his dearest wish. From this moment on, until his squalid death, he craved the sight and smell of bloodshed.

  Froissart stopped writing to cut a new quill and massage his wrist. “And what then?” he asked wearily. Once again he had worked through the night, oblivious to the tavern emptying around him and the landlord fastening the shutters, and the physical strain of two late nights in a row was starting to tell. His belly rumbled, his bladder felt over-full, his wrist ached, and purple spots danced in front of his eyes.

  Despite his exhaustion, he was keen to reach the end of the tale. The beggar who claimed to be Thomas Page still sat opposite, his heavily-lined features partially lost in shadow.

  The beggar reached for his cup, which Froissart had paid to be filled and refilled many times during the course of the night, and moistened his lips with the dregs.

  “Then the rest of Pedro’s ballasteros dipped their knives into Garci’s body, just to make sure he was dead,” he rasped, “and at his command tossed it from a balcony into the arena of the bull-fight. The crazed bulls trampled and savaged the body, much to the horror of the people and the delight of Pedro.”

  He put down the cup and stared into the darkness of the hearth, as if reading his past in the cold grey ashes. “The mangled remnant was scraped up and placed on a bier on the ramparts of the palace, as a constant reminder of the price of rebellion.”

  Froissart nodded. During his travels through Spain he often had heard stories of Don Garci Laso de la Vega’s gruesome demise, and the beggar’s account accorded with what he had heard.

  “All well and good,” he said primly, dipping his freshly-cut quill into his depleted pot of ink, “and what of Eleanor? Did she stay in Burgos to witness the humiliation of her lover’s corpse?”

  “No. She stole away, as fast as she could, out of the city and out of Castile. The murder of Garci greatly affected her, and her loathing for King Pedro became an abiding hatred that lasted the rest of her days.”

  Froissart nodded as he scribbled this down. “Pedro was a hard man. Where did the Raven fly to next?”

  “To the Kingdom of Navarre, where she fell in with Charles the Bad. She was his bedmate for a time, until he tired of her and sold her to one of the mercenary captains in his employ. That was Arnaud de Crevóle, known as the Archpriest. She passed from his embrace into that of Humbert, the Bastard of Savoy, and so on down the long years, until she found me standing before the tympanum at La Charité-sur-Loire.”

  Froissart noted the beggar’s discomfort at talking of Eleanor’s time serving the sexual needs of most of the great princes and soldiers of Christendom, and decided it was another point in the man’s favour. Why would a fraud show distress at the whorish antics of a woman he had never known?

  “And her meeting with you,” he said dryly, “was no doubt the most significant of her life.”

  The beggar didn’t seem to register Froissart’s mocking tone, or if he did, he made nothing of it. “I do not say so,” he replied gloomily, “but of all her lovers, I was the one she stayed with, and the one she died for in the end. I do not flatter myself. There was some affection between us, true, but she regarded me principally as a source of funds and a tool for vengeance.”

  “Against Pedro?”

  “Against the world. But this is a story for another time. I am tired.”

  The beggar placed his big hands flat on the table, like a man bracing himself, and winced as he stood up.

  Froissart looked at him in dismay. “You are leaving? Again? But we have not yet reached the meat of your tale!”

  “My tale?” replied the beggar, with a wintry smile, “so you accept I am Thomas Page?”

  Froissart scowled. “Not quite. But you spin a decent narrative, whoever you are. You need not crawl back to whatever rough lodgings you are renting. I have a suite of rooms at the Tower, all at the Duke of Lancaster’s expense.”

  The beggar shook his head, smiling, and moved away towards the door.

  “Will I see you again tomorrow?” Froissart called after him. The beggar lifted his hand in a vague gesture that might have meant anything, and the door closed behind him.

  PART THREE: THE BULL OF NAJÉRA

  “To M. Jean Froissart.

  The Wolf is caged, but the Rav
en loves him at last.

  Come to Steventon.

  H. CALVELEY.”

  In the study of his private suite of rooms in the Tower, lavishly provided and paid for by his patron, Froissart puzzled over this brief note.

  It had been delivered to a guard on the outer gate by a man who provided not a single word of explanation, or indeed said anything at all, though the guard reckoned he knew an old soldier when he saw one.

  “He was dressed like a tradesman,” he informed one of Froissart’s servants as he handed over the note, “but there was no hiding the scars and calluses on his hands, or the way he carried himself. He was an old routier, or my name’s not John Tanner.”

  The servant repeated these words to Froissart, who didn’t care what the guard’s name was, but did care very much about the meaning of the note. The references to Thomas Page and Eleanor de Menezes – the Wolf and the Raven, respectively - were clear enough, as was the identity of the sender.

  “H. Calveley” could only be Hugh Calveley, the famous mercenary captain who had terrorized most of his Europe during his career and was now enjoying a comfortable retirement in the English countryside. Steventon, in Berkshire, was one of his manors, bought with the plunder of his many campaigns. Froissart had met Calveley on a handful of occasions in Spain and France.

  They were all alike, these soldier-adventurers, Froissart reflected as he re-read the note. Calveley was cut from the same cloth as Robert Knolles, John Hawkwood, Bertrand de Guesclin, and the rest. Commoners, in his view, devoid of the chivalry and gentle blood that marked out the soldier-aristocrats he so admired.

  “The Wolf is caged,” he muttered to himself, tapping the thin strip of parchment against his forefinger. He remembered Thomas Page – or rather, the beggar who claimed to be Thomas Page – speaking of the enmity that had existed between him and Calveley’s worthless kinsman, William, and how Page had finally killed him in a messy duel in the streets of La Charité-sur-Loire.

  If the story was true, perhaps Hugh Calveley had taken a belated revenge on Page for the death of his kinsman. From what Froissart knew of Calveley, he was more likely to slaughter his enemies than incarcerate them, unless there was money involved.

  The man Froissart had met for two nights in succession in the Plough inn had lacked two farthings to rub together. Unless his beggar’s guise was a sham, and he was as rich as most other ex-mercenary captains who survived to old age. But why would anyone try and deceive Froissart? The Frenchman was a mere chronicler, a recorder of other men’s deeds, and of no great importance.

  Froissart sighed and massaged his forehead. He had been obliged to attend his patron at dinner, where the Duke had been more than usually tedious and prosed interminably about his campaigns in France - every one of which had been a disaster, not that you would know it from listening to him.

  All in all, Froissart would be happy to leave England, judging it a cold and dreary country peopled by coarse braggarts and ruffians. He could scarcely believe that this was the land that had birthed the likes of Edward of Woodstock, Henry of Grosmont, Thomas Beauchamp, and all the other noble English paladins whose deeds of arms had first inspired him to take up his pen. They were dust now, their glory faded and their places taken by lesser men.

  Only the beggar still intrigued him. Since taking down the story of the Raven of Toledo, Froissart had returned to the Plough for five nights in succession, and sat for hours at the same table waiting for him to appear. He never did, and Froissart’s attempts to question the landlord and other regulars at the inn met with curt rebuffs or blank stares. No-one, it seemed, knew anything about the mysterious man with the red scarf and the gold earring. Froissart had tried to glean more information by handing out a few discreet bribes, but that had only left him slightly poorer and none the wiser.

  And now Hugh Calveley had invited him to Steventon. Ordinarily, Froissart would have politely declined, for he knew the details of Calveley’s military career. There was nothing the man could tell him that would be worth adding to his Chronicle. However, judging from the note Calveley clearly knew something about the fate of Thomas and Eleanor.

  Froissart stared gloomily out of the window, at the slate-grey skies and the rain sheeting down the glass. He was an old man, almost sixty, and the prospect of splashing through the muddy winter roads to Calveley’s country manor at Steventon was enough to make his rheumatic joints ache.

  On the other hand, it would be something of an adventure. At heart Froissart was a knight-errant, of the sort that he loved to write about, but God had seen fit to make him a clerk. True knights, he knew, did not mind a little rain and discomfort.

  Besides which, he hated to leave a tale unresolved.

  In the days of his fame all manner of legends had gathered around Captain-General Sir Hugh Calveley, many of them based on his gigantic size and physical strength. Most legends are distorted, but in his case they were accurate. Calveley was indeed freakishly large, over seven feet tall in his black harness, and wielded with lethal skill a glaive that most men were incapable of lifting.

  That was how Froissart remembered him, but he arrived at Steventon to discover that illness and age had worked their crippling effect on this remarkable ogre.

  After handing Froissart’s horse over to a groom and ushering his servants away to the kitchens, Calveley’s steward showed him into the hall of the fine half-timbered manor house, where the man himself was seated beside the hooded fireplace. Froissart paused on the threshold to study his host.

  His first impression was that Calveley was not long for this world. The old soldier’s extraordinary length was stretched out on a huge leather-cushioned sofa that looked as though it had been made especially for him, and wrapped in furs and a padded night-gown. His large skull rested on a bolster, and the mane of flaming red hair that had once spilled over his armoured shoulders was now white, sparse and straggling, with only a few patches of faded colour hinting at its former glory. Calveley’s skin was a ghastly shade of yellow, stretched tight over long, brittle bones.

  His eyes were half-closed, and his big hands cradled a cup of some steaming liquid that filled the hall with a pungent stench of mixed herbs and spices.

  “Monsieur Froissart,” murmured the fallen giant, his eyes widening a little, “how long has it been, twenty years?”

  “Something like that, Sir Hugh,” Froissart replied, stepping into the hall and bowing stiffly from the waist, “I believe the last time we met was in Aquitaine. I can still smell the burning villages.”

  Calveley’s lips twitched into the ghost of a smile. He beckoned Froissart over to a spare chair next to the fire. “Sit,” he rumbled, slowly lifting his cup to his mouth, “Adam, go and fetch our guest some rations.”

  The steward bowed and hurried away through a door at the far end of the hall, leaving the two men alone. Froissart took his seat and looked around him.

  “You have done well for yourself,” he said politely. The hall was large and spacious, with white-plastered walls, red tiles on the floor and heavy black beams supporting the roof. It would have been the pride of any modestly wealthy country gentleman.

  Froissart knew that Hugh Calveley had once been the lord of great lands and castles in Spain, before he frittered much of his money away in endless unprofitable campaigns. The Frenchman suspected that enforced retirement in such modest surroundings could only be a disappointment to him.

  So it proved. “Well?” Calveley growled, something of his old fire kindling in his tired, deep-set eyes, “you call this living well, do you? Don’t try and flatter me, sir. It is a glorified barn, nothing more.”

  He subsided, wincing at some private pain, and took another long drink from his cup. “Milk of the poppy,” he gasped, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand, “the only thing that soothes my arthritis. Damn this failing body of mine. It always was too damned big, and now it is breaking apart. Too many scars, Froissart, too many old wounds and stretched tendons and fractured bones.”

/>   Froissart, whose own bodily ills had been aggravated by several hours in the saddle, enduring the wind and rain and rough roads from London to Steventon via Reading, grew impatient.

  “I received your note,” he said, digging the strip of parchment out of his purse, “what do you mean by sending me this foolish riddle? I have no time for games, Sir Hugh.”

  At that moment Adam returned with a bowl of broth, half a loaf of wheaten bread, a jug and a cup on a wooden tray. Silence reigned as he settled the tray on Froissart’s lap, poured out a generous measure of wine, and padded out again.

  Froissart generally didn’t take much notice of servants, but he took a closer look at Adam as he departed: a big, heavy-set man, bald as an egg, his pugnacious face criss-crossed with old scars.

  “That’s Adam Maker, the man I sent to London with the message,” said Calveley, “an old comrade of mine from the wars. He’s a mute. He spent some time in a dungeon in Brittany, where the local castellan had his tongue torn out.”

  Froissart cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “About this message,” he said, “what is the meaning of it? I presume it refers to Thomas Page and Eleanor de Menezes.”

  “It does.”

  Calveley took another sip of his foul-smelling drink and stared at the leaping flames in the hearth. “I have hunted Page for years,” he murmured, “he was the man you met in Eastcheap.”

  Froissart almost dropped his spoon. The broth was good, hot and spicy and full of shredded beef, but he had suddenly lost his taste for it. The beggar had been telling the truth after all!

  “How did you know I had met him there?” he demanded.

  “My agents saw you. They had lost his trail for a while, but spotted him sitting with you in the Plough.”