Blood of the Innocents

by Michael Jecks

  ‘I’m well enough. There is nothing wrong with me just now that a good pint of red wine wouldn’t improve.’

  ‘The Infirmarer has left orders that you are not to be given strong drink. He said that it might inflame your passions and lead to arguments and violence that may break the mending flesh of your flank and back.’

  ‘Oh, did he?’ Berenger said, but just now the pain in his back was such that he could do no more than move a little before the stiffness and pain forced him to stop and let the breath hiss between his teeth. ‘That mendacious, unctuous . . .’

  ‘Talking about me again, my friend?’ the Infirmarer called. He was tending to another injured patient, a boy who had fallen into a mill and crushed his arm. It had been set as best the Infirmarer could manage, but the fellow would never hold a bow or a sword, he said. It would be withered forever.

  ‘Master Fripper, I have to leave,’ Denisot said.

  ‘We need you to help us. I thought you would remain with us on the way to the coast.’

  ‘As to that, just keep travelling west, and then south. But I have a wife who will wonder what has happened to me. One or two days away was to be expected,’ he lied, ‘but to be away for this long will leave her sorely concerned. I must get back.’

  ‘Very well. If you must,’ Berenger said. He gritted his teeth. The desire for a jug of strong wine was almost overwhelming. He had a cold sweat at his brow, and he felt as though insects were crawling under his skin. ‘You have my gratitude, in any case. You have saved my life, and I do not forget a debt.’

  ‘It was nothing. You owe me nothing. I am glad to have helped you, that is all.’

  ‘Well, if there is ever anything you need, find me. I will help as I may.’

  Denisot chewed at his lip. ‘There is one thing. When I met you on the road, I was seeking information about a murder. A girl was killed. Only a youngster, perhaps ten or eleven years old, with fair hair, curly, worn quite long. She may have been named Alicia.’

  Berenger considered. ‘She wore no coif?’

  ‘Perhaps. She had been raped when I found her, and dragged for miles from the look of her wounds. Did you see anything of a girl like her?’

  ‘Not that I recall.’

  ‘She was left dead. They crucified her and lifted her into a tree, whoever killed her. Was that something that your company might do?’

  ‘I will not lie: some of the men could have done that. I did not. When I had to kill a man, it was with a knife or sword. If it was a military punishment, I would allow a flogging or a hanging, but I’ve never seen an Englishman kill a man by crucifixion, let alone a child. If I found a man who raped children and tortured them by those means, I would see to it that he did not last in my army.’

  Denisot frowned. ‘This man who tried to kill you. Would he be capable of that kind of brutality?’

  ‘There is little I would not think him capable of,’ Berenger said heavily.

  Denisot nodded. He eyed Berenger seriously. He would be glad to be away from these mercenaries, but he could understand how men might become loyal to this vintener. ‘Farewell, Master Fripper. Travel carefully.’

  ‘Aye, well, Godspeed, my friend.’ Berenger stared after him when Denisot walked from the room. He would miss the Frenchman with the serious eyes.

  Thursday 4 August

  Although he had expected a painful reaction when he returned from his wanderings with the mercenaries, even Denisot was surprised by the depth of Gaillarde’s rage after his two day journey home.

  ‘You didn’t even think about me, did you?’ she screamed.

  He ducked as a pot narrowly missed his head and smashed in a cloud of red dust against the wall. ‘Woman! Gaillarde, what are you doing?’

  ‘You promised me one day, that you’d be back that same night. One night I could bear, but you were away for almost two weeks! How does that make a woman feel, do you think? Was there no messenger you could send? Did you not think or care what I might be thinking, stuck here in this vile pit? You have no feeling for me at all. You are an uncaring man! You only ever think about your job and your—’

  ‘Woman—’

  ‘What, does the word scare you? Your whores! There, I’ve said it! You’ve been away with them for the last week, and now you deign to return to me and your home, now you’re weary and full of the pox or some other disease from the bitches you’ve covered!’

  ‘I’ve not been with any women!’

  But his protestations were pointless, as he knew they would be. He tried to explain about the attack on Berenger and the others, but she paid him no heed, just went on screeching at him. There was no talking to her when she was in this kind of mood, which was why it was ever more tempting to go away on business and leave her, each time for longer and longer. The return was always more painful than the last, but at least he had some freedom and peace of mind while he was away.

  He walked from the house and out to the roadway, so he didn’t see her face crumple and hear her passionate weeping.

  At the end of his street was the little wine shop run by Pathau, the man from Limoges who had turned up one year with a cask of wine and gradually made himself indispensable to the people of Domps. As Denisot took his seat on a stool in the sun, Pathau appeared with a cup and jug of wine, a large man with an enormous paunch and florid features hidden behind a bushy, gingerish, grizzled beard. He had a ragged cloth tucked into a cord bound about his waist to serve as a cleaning cloth, apron and face cloth. He threw a glance towards Denisot’s house before pouring. ‘She’s not happy, then.’

  ‘Gaillarde grows concerned when I go away,’ Denisot explained. He nodded to the wife of the smith, who stalked along in a hurry as always. She would be in a hurry on the day she died, he thought.

  ‘So I heard,’ Pathau said.

  ‘She is lonely.’

  ‘Yes. I heard her. I think everyone this side of Chamberet heard her.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘If you are going to try to have a discussion with her in that mood,’ Pathau began, but then set himself to sucking at his teeth. It was not his place to advise a man on how to control his wife.

  ‘I am sorry. She just flies into a passion sometimes.’

  ‘She must be told to keep the peace,’ Pathau said. It was the duty of all to see that the people in the village didn’t break the King’s Peace.

  Denisot nodded. ‘What would you do?’

  Pathau drew down the edges of his mouth into a characteristic grimace as he shrugged. ‘Me? I’d take her outside, tie her to a tree and whip her until she agreed to see reason. You can’t let a woman take control of everything.’

  Denisot made no comment. Pathau was besotted with his wife and would not raise his voice to her, let alone a whip. Denisot was not so fortunate. He had been happily married with his wife for the first years, until the plague struck. After that, all marital harmony was destroyed. He was too fond of her still – or his memory of how she had once been – to inflict that kind of punishment on her. However, if he was not careful, others in the village might decide to take charge.

  He didn’t hear the feet pattering up the street until the urchin was standing panting before him.

  ‘What?’ he snapped.

  ‘Bayle Denisot, please! You must come!’

  He rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Murder, Bayle! There’s been a murder!’

  Back in the house, Gaillarde spat, ‘Get out!’ to Suzette before rushing upstairs to her bedchamber, where she flung herself onto the bed and sobbed as though her heart would burst.

  He was uncaring! A thoughtless, feckless man with the brains of a flea! He didn’t care about her at all. She had been so upset for the last days, thinking him dead, and now he suddenly returns with a casual comment about helping some injured men, and not a thought for what she must have been thinking!

  She hated him. She loathed the ground he walked on. He was dim, a cods-for-brains lummox with the attention of
a sparrow when it came to her feelings. She detested him.

  It would be so much easier if she didn’t care.

  The child’s body was not a pair of miles from the village, the poor, frail little body half concealed in the trees to the east of the road to Chamberet. This was not the same as the murder of the first, though. Alicia had been dragged some distance before she was tied and nailed to her plank of wood. This child had not been dragged anywhere, but from the blood at her thighs, she had suffered the same indignities of rape before death.

  ‘Someone nailed her to that board and lifted her into the trees,’ said Gobert Piquier.

  Gobert was a barrel-chested farmer of two-and-forty with a square face and the clearest blue eyes Denisot had ever seen. It was his son who had summoned Denisot from the tavern, and who now stood sawing at the rope that held the small body aloft with a knife that was in sore need of sharpening, while his father clutched the small figure in his arms. Denisot was touched to see that the old farmer had tears running down his cheeks. At last the final cord gave way and Gobert took her full weight. ‘Poor little thing.’

  ‘How long has she been up here?’ Denisot wondered to himself.

  ‘I was here two days ago, and she wasn’t here then,’ Gobert said with certainty. ‘She has not decayed much. With the warm weather, I would have expected her to have rotted more than this if she had been here more than three days.’

  ‘Yes. That is reasonable. When you were last here, did you see anyone about?’

  ‘No. But I wasn’t looking. There were men up here, though, I remember. Some English devils, I think. They rode through from the Chamberet road.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday they passed my house. I don’t think they saw me.’

  ‘Are there any reports of them killing others like this?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard.’

  Denisot considered. Perhaps they had passed through. He had heard that such men would often ride out with scouting parties, and return later to despoil those places that looked most likely to hold a large amount of booty. He left the body and began to cast about.

  There had been rain the day before yesterday. A party of riders might have left traces of their passage in the drying mud.

  He did not have to look far.

  A matter of only twenty yards from the roadside he found a place where the vegetation had been trampled into the mire by a number of horses, and then he found a little area where the grasses were flat. It was only six feet by five at the widest. Someone could have lain here. Denisot closed his eyes. He could easily imagine a man tempting a maid to join him here on a blanket, but a child? It made him feel sick to think that a man could catch a girl and rape her, but he knew such horrors, and worse, were a commonplace where mercenaries took hold of the land.

  Denisot crouched and stared at the ground, as though it could tell him of the horror of that child’s last moments. The terror of being captured and brought here, to be held down and entered by all the men of the party, raped multiple times, and then not even given the dignity of being left alone to huddle and try to find some comfort, but to be nailed to a cross-bar and then hauled up into the trees to die slowly, dangling. Perhaps she was already dead. He hoped so, he prayed so, but Denisot doubted it. Such men did not care for their victims. They enjoyed watching their suffering, like men who enjoyed the bear baiting or who went to watch dogs fighting. This was another form of amusement. The men who did this to her would have enjoyed watching as her last moments passed by.

  The men who did this deserved to die in a similar manner.

  Thomas de Ladit was content at last. His feet were healing with the new boots that Sir John had provided, and the thicker cloak and new tunic were much to his liking. It was more in keeping with his importance in Navarre, he felt.

  There was much that he had been forced to explain when Sir John interrogated him. Why he was here, why he had left Uzerche, what had happened in Normandy when the French King broke into his own son’s hall and arrested all the men there.

  ‘What was the atmosphere between the King and the Dauphin when King John took Navarre and executed the others?’ Sir John asked.

  ‘It was not good.’

  ‘And yet the Dauphin is said to be marching against us with his father?’

  ‘Of course he is! He is the heir to the throne of France! He would hardly leave the kingdom in peril because of a quarrel with his father. I think your sovereigns have had arguments with their children over the years! Even in Navarre we heard tales of your King’s father, Edward II and his bitter disputes with his own father. Yet both would don armour to protect their lands.’

  ‘That is true,’ Sir John said. ‘Then the rift between the two is healed?’

  ‘I think not. But they will seek to preserve the throne no matter what their personal feelings.’

  ‘And your master?’

  ‘He is held imprisoned unjustly,’ Thomas said stoutly.

  ‘You think he was innocent of all the offences laid at his door? He attempted to ally himself with us to bring about the end of the reign of King John,’ Sir John observed.

  ‘He never meant to.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Thomas was flustered. He had not intended to let slip the fact that Navarre had deviously used the English as bargaining chips in his negotiations with the French. ‘I . . . I mean he was forced into seeking an accommodation with your King because he could see no future with the King of France. King John is always too indecisive, and when he does make a decision it is invariably ill-considered and foolish.’

  ‘I see,’ Sir John said, but there was a steely glint in his eye as he absorbed this.

  Thomas was unpleasantly sure that he had not pulled the wool over the knight’s eyes. He only hoped that he would not be witness to this knight meeting his master any time soon.

  There was an all-pervading stench of burned wood and thatch as Grandarse rode into the hamlet that afternoon.

  He did not need to give orders. Clip and Dogbreath were already scurrying on foot towards the main door of the wreckage. Once this would have been an important property, with many buildings. Now it was a devastated mess, with half-butchered cattle lying rotting on the ground.

  ‘Anything you can find,’ Grandarse bellowed as his men scattered in among the barns and sheds.

  It was a shame to see a place so devastated. Once this would have been a thriving little hamlet with enough space for three or four families. Since the plague had arrived many similar farms had been left abandoned to rot as survivors of the pestilence fled, but this place had been burned and sacked by men who delighted in horror.

  ‘How many?’ he asked as Clip came back.

  ‘Ach, seven all told, men and lads.’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘One old crone, but no others.’

  ‘All taken, then?

  ‘Or escaped. But if they escaped, why were the menfolk all slaughtered?’ Clip said. He shook his head. ‘It’s not the way Frip used to behave.’

  ‘He didn’t join in with the sack of towns in those days,’ Grandarse agreed, ‘but a man changes in ten years. Besides, this could have been another group. There’s nothing to say that it was Frip who commanded this.’

  ‘No.’

  Grandarse and the men had already covered fifteen miles that morning. He had them dismount and feed and water their horses, sending Clip and Dogbreath to scout about the place while the others had some bread and meats.

  ‘Why us?’ Clip whined.

  ‘Because you’re the least valuable,’ Hawkwood called from his vintaine.

  ‘You think that’s funny?’ Clip scowled.

  ‘Yes!’ Hawkwood said, while the men around him laughed.

  ‘You wouldn’t cope without me and him,’ Clip sneered.

  ‘How could we?’ Hawkwood said. ‘We shall just have to muddle on through, if you are killed.’

  ‘Us? We won’t be alone.’ Clip shook his head as he return
ed to his accustomed prediction. ‘We’ll all be killed, you wait and see. You can chuckle now, but soon you’ll be begging for your mothers to come and save you. We’ll all die on this campaign. What, with the whole might of the French army here to avenge what we did to them at Crécy and Calais? They’ll trample us into the mud, Vintener, you mark my words. Into the mud.’

  Grandarse grunted, hoicked his belt up and spat accurately into the fire. ‘But not before you’ve gone and found ’em, eh? Go on, bugger off, Clip, you lazy git.’

  ‘Just make sure that there’s some food kept by for them as do all the work,’ Clip said.

  ‘Work?’ Hawkwood said with apparent surprise.

  ‘Aye, well, you wouldn’t recognise it if it bit your arse,’ Clip said, leading his pony away. ‘It’s just lucky some are more dedicated than you.’

  Denisot was back in the village late in the afternoon. He went to his house, carefully avoiding Suzette in case his wife should get the wrong idea, and packed a small bag. Outside he saw a young churl playing with a hoop and sent him, with the promise of a coin, to fetch Ethor. Then he went to his wife. He found her at the back, feeding grain to the chickens.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said when she heard he must leave once more.

  ‘This is a dead child, woman,’ he said. ‘I must take a cart to fetch her so that she can be buried as a child should be.’

  ‘Why you? You have only just returned to me!’ she said.

  He saw the brittle despair in her eyes. ‘I am the bayle, Gaillarde. What would you have me do? If it were our child . . .’

  He had said the wrong thing, he realised immediately.

  ‘Our child? We have no children, do we?’ she said, her voice a wail. ‘They are dead already, and we shall never have another!’

  ‘Gaillarde, my love!’

  ‘You are going to seek a woman!’

  ‘Wife, why would I? I love only you,’ he protested. ‘We are both sad, since Pons and Fabrisse died, but we are still alive. We have to be strong for their memory.’