The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic

by Bernard Cornwell

  Thomas made the sign of the cross. 'What enemy?' he asked, expecting to hear that two Norman lords had fallen out and were ravaging each other's estates.

  But the ponderous wheel of fortune had turned unexpectedly. King Edward III of England had crossed the Channel. Such an expedition had long been expected, but the King had not gone to his lands in Gascony, as many had thought he would, nor to Flanders where other Englishmen fought, but had come to Normandy. His army was just a day away and, at the news, Thomas's mouth dropped open.

  'You should flee them, father,' one of the women advised Thomas. 'They know no pity, not even for friars.'

  Thomas assured them he would, thanked them for their news, then walked back up the hill to where Jeanette waited. All had changed.

  His king had come to Normandy.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  They argued that night. Jeanette was suddenly convinced they should turn back to Brittany and Thomas could only stare at her in astonishment.

  'Brittany?' he asked faintly.

  She would not meet his eyes, but stubbornly stared at the campfires that burned all along the road, while further north, on the night's horizon, great red glows showed where larger fires burned, and Thomas knew that English soldiers must have been ravaging the fields of Normandy just as the hellequin had harrowed Brittany. 'I can be near Charles if I'm in Brittany,' Jeanette said.

  Thomas shook his head. He was dimly aware that the sight of the army's destruction had forced them both into a reality from which they had been escaping in these last weeks of freedom, but he could not connect that with her sudden wish to head back to Brittany.

  'You can be near Charles,' he said carefully, 'but can you see him? Will the Duke let you near him?'

  'Maybe he will change his mind,' Jeanette said without much conviction.

  'And maybe he'll rape you again,' Thomas said brutally.

  'And if I don't go,' she said vehemently, 'maybe I will never see Charles again. Never!'

  'Then why come this far?'

  'I don't know, I don't know.' She was angry as she used to be when Thomas first met her in La Roche-Derrien. 'Because I was mad,' she said sullenly.

  'You say you want to appeal to the King,' Thomas said, 'and he's here!' He flung a hand towards the livid glow of the fires. 'So appeal to him here.'

  'Maybe he won't believe me,' Jeanette said stubbornly.

  'And what will we do in Brittany?' Thomas asked, but Jeanette would not answer. She looked sulky and still avoided his gaze. 'You can marry one of the Duke's men-at-arms,' Thomas went on, 'that's what he wanted, isn't it? A pliant wife of a pliant follower so that when he feels like taking his pleasure, he can.'

  'Isn't that what you do?' she challenged him, looking him in the face at last.

  'I love you,' Thomas said.

  Jeanette said nothing.

  'I do love you,' Thomas said, and felt foolish for she had never said the same to him.

  Jeanette looked at the glowing horizon that was tangled by the leaves of the forest. 'Will your king believe me?' she asked him.

  'How can he not?'

  'Do I look like a countess?'

  She looked ragged, poor and beautiful. 'You speak like a countess,' Thomas said, 'and the King's clerks will make enquiries of the Earl of Northampton.' He did not know if that was true, but he wanted to encourage her.

  Jeanette sat with her head bowed. 'Do you know what the Duke told me? That my mother was a Jewess!' She looked up at him, expecting him to share her indignation.

  Thomas frowned. 'I've never met a Jew,' he said.

  Jeanette almost exploded. 'You think I have? You need to meet the devil to know he is bad? A pig to discover he stinks?' She began to weep. 'I don't know what to do.'

  'We shall go to the King,' Thomas said, and next morning he walked north and, after a few heartbeats, Jeanette followed him. She had tried to clean her dress, though it was so filthy that all she could manage was to brush the twigs and leaf mould from the velvet. She coiled her hair and pinned it with slivers of wood.

  'What kind of man is the King?' she asked Thomas.

  'They say he's a good man.'

  'Who says?'

  'Everyone. He's straightforward.'

  'He's still English,' Jeanette said softly, and Thomas pretended not to hear. 'Is he kind?' she asked him.

  'No one says he's cruel,' Thomas said, then held up a hand to silence Jeanette.

  He had seen horsemen in mail.

  Thomas had often found it strange that when the monks and scriveners made their books they painted warfare as gaudy. Their squirrel-hair brushes showed men in brightly coloured surcoats or jupons, and their horses in brilliantly patterned trappers. Yet for most of the time war was grey until the arrows bit, when it became shot through with red. Grey was the colour of a mail coat, and Thomas was seeing grey among the green leaves. He did not know if they were Frenchmen or Englishmen, but he feared both. The French were his enemy, but so were the English until they were convinced that he was English too, and convinced, moreover, that he was not a deserter from their army.

  More horsemen came from the distant trees and these men were carrying bows, so they had to be English. Still Thomas hesitated, reluctant to face the problems of persuading his own side that he was not a deserter. Beyond the horsemen, hidden by the trees, a building must have been set on fire for smoke began to thicken above the summer leaves. The horsemen were looking towards Thomas and Jeanette, but the pair were hidden by a bank of gorse and after a while, satisfied that no enemy threatened, the troops turned and rode eastwards.

  Thomas waited till they were out of sight, then led Jeanette across the open land, into the trees and out to where a farm burned. The flames were pale in the bright sun. No one was in sight. There was just a farm blazing and a dog lying next to a duck pond that was surrounded by feathers. The dog was whimpering and Jeanette cried out for it had been stabbed in the belly. Thomas stooped beside the beast, stroked its head and fondled its ears and the dying dog licked his hand and tried to wag its tail and Thomas rammed his knife deep into its heart so that it died swiftly.

  'It would not have lived,' he told Jeanette. She said nothing, just stared at the burning thatch and rafters. Thomas pulled out the knife and patted the dog's head. 'Go to St Guinefort,' he said, cleaning the blade. 'I always wanted a dog when I was a child,' he told Jeanette, 'but my father couldn't abide them.'

  'Why?'

  'Because he was strange.' He sheathed the knife and stood. A track, imprinted with hoofmarks, led north from the farm, and they followed it cautiously between hedges thick with cornflowers, ox-eye and dogwood. They were in a country of small fields, high banks, sudden woods and lumpy hills, a country for ambush, but they saw no one until, from the top of a low hill, they glimpsed a squat stone church tower in a valley and then the unburned roofs of a village and after that the soldiers. There were hundreds of them camped in the fields beyond the cottages, and more in the village itself. Some large tents had been raised close to the church and they had the banners of nobles planted by their entrances.

  Thomas still hesitated, reluctant to finish these good days with Jeanette, yet he knew there was no choice and so, bow on his shoulder, he took her down to the village. Men saw them coming and a dozen archers, led by a burly man in a mail hauberk, came to meet them.

  'What the hell are you?' was the burly man's first question. His archers grinned wolfishly at the sight of Jeanette's ragged dress. 'You're either a bleeding priest who stole a bow,' the man went on, 'or an archer who filched a priest's robe.'

  'I'm English,' Thomas said.

  The big man seemed unimpressed. 'Serving who?'

  'I was with Will Skeat in Brittany,' Thomas said.

  'Brittany!' The big man frowned, not certain whether or not to believe Thomas.

  'Tell them I'm a countess,' Jeanette urged Thomas in French.

  'What's she saying?'

  'Nothing,' Thomas said.

  'So what are
you doing here?' the big man asked.

  'I got cut off from my troop in Brittany,' Thomas said weakly. He could hardly tell the truth — that he was a fugitive from justice — but he had no other tale prepared. 'I just walked.'

  It was a lame explanation and the big man treated it with the scorn it deserved. 'What you mean, lad,' he said, 'is that you're a bloody deserter.'

  'I'd hardly come here if I was, would I?' Thomas asked defiantly.

  'You'd hardly come here from Brittany if you just got lost!' the man pointed out. He spat. 'You'll have to go to Scoresby, let him decide what you are.'

  'Scoresby?' Thomas asked.

  'You've heard of him?' the big man asked belligerently.

  Thomas had heard of Walter Scoresby who, like Skeat, was a man who led his own band of men-at-arms and archers, but Scoresby did not have Skeat's good reputation. He was said to be a dark-humoured man, but he was evidently to decide Thomas's fate, for the archers closed around him and walked the pair towards the village. 'She your woman?' one of them asked Thomas.

  'She's the Countess of Armorica,' Thomas said.

  'And I'm the bloody Earl of London,' the archer retorted.

  Jeanette clung to Thomas's arm, terrified of the unfriendly faces. Thomas was equally unhappy. When things had been at their worst in Brittany, when the hellequin were grumbling and it was cold, wet and miserable, Skeat liked to say 'be happy you're not with Scoresby' and now, it seemed, Thomas was.

  'We hang deserters,' the big man said with relish. Thomas noted that the archers, like all the troops he could see in the village, wore the red cross of St George on their tunics. A great crowd of them were gathered in a pasture that lay between the small village church and a Cistercian monastery or priory that had somehow escaped destruction, for the white-robed monks were assisting a priest who said Mass for the soldiers. 'Is it Sunday?' Thomas asked one of the archers.

  'Tuesday,' the man said, taking off his hat in honour of the sacraments, 'St James's day.'

  They waited at the pasture's edge, close to the village church where a row of new graves suggested that some villagers had died when the army came, but most had probably fled south or west. One or two remained. An old man, bent double from work and with a white beard that almost reached the ground, mumbled along with the distant priest while a small boy, perhaps six or seven years old, tried to draw an English bow to the amusement of its owner.

  The Mass ended and the mail-clad men climbed from their knees and walked towards the tents and houses. One of the archers from Thomas's escort had gone into the dispersing crowd and he now reappeared with a group of men. One stood out because he was taller than the others and had a new coat of mail that had been polished so it seemed to shine. He had long boots, a green cloak and a gold-hilted sword with a scabbard wrapped in red cloth. The finery seemed at odds with the man's face, which was pinched and gloomy. He was bald, but had a forked beard, which he had twisted into plaits. 'That's Scoresby,' one of the archers muttered and Thomas had no need to guess which of the approaching soldiers he meant.

  Scoresby stopped a few paces away and the big archer who had arrested Thomas smirked. 'A deserter,' he announced proudly, 'says he walked here from Brittany.'

  Scoresby gave Thomas a hard glance and Jeanette a much longer look. Her ragged dress revealed a length of thigh and a ripped neckline and Scoresby clearly wanted to see more. Like Will Skeat he had begun his military life as an archer and had risen by dint of shrewdness, and Thomas guessed there was not much mercy in his soul's mix.

  Scoresby shrugged. 'If he's a deserter,' he said, 'then hang the bastard.' He smiled. 'But we'll keep his woman.'

  'I'm not a deserter,' Thomas said, 'and the woman is the Countess of Armorica, who is related to the Count of Blois, nephew to the King of France.'

  Most of the archers jeered at this outrageous claim, but Scoresby was a cautious man and he was aware of a small crowd that had gathered at the churchyard's edge. Two priests and some men-at-arms wearing noblemen's escutcheons were among the spectators, and Thomas's confidence had put just enough doubt in Scoresby's mind. He frowned at Jeanette, seeing a girl who looked at first glance like a peasant, but despite her tanned face she was undoubtedly beautiful and the remnants of her dress suggested she had once known elegance.

  'She's who?' Scoresby demanded.

  'I told you who she was,' Thomas said belligerently, 'and I will tell you more. Her son has been stolen from her, and her son is a ward of our king's. She has come for His Majesty's help.' Thomas hastily told Jeanette what he had said and, to his relief, she nodded her agreement.

  Scoresby gazed at Jeanette and something about her increased his doubt. 'Why are you with her?' he asked Thomas.

  'I rescued her,' Thomas said.

  'He says,' a voice spoke in French from the crowd and Thomas could not see the speaker, who was evidently surrounded by men-at-arms, all wearing a green and white livery. 'He says that he rescued you, madame, is that true?'

  'Yes,' Jeanette said. She frowned, unable to see who was questioning her.

  'Tell us who you are,' the unseen man demanded.

  'I am Jeanette, dowager Countess of Armorica.'

  'Your husband was who?' The voice suggested a young man, but a very confident young man.

  Jeanette bridled at the tone of the question, but answered it. 'Henri Chenier, Comte d'Armorique.

  'And why are you here, madame?'

  'Because Charles of Blois has kidnapped my child!' Jeanette answered angrily. 'A child who was placed under the protection of the King of England.'

  The young man said nothing for a while. Some in the crowd were edging nervously away from the liveried men-at-arms who surrounded him, and Scoresby was looking apprehensive. 'Who placed him under that protection?' he eventually asked.

  'William Bohun,' Jeanette said, 'Earl of Northampton.'

  'I believe her,' the voice said, and the men-at-arms stepped aside so that Thomas and Jeanette could see the speaker, who proved to be scarce more than a boy. Indeed, Thomas doubted he had even begun to shave, though he was surely full grown for he was tall — taller even than Thomas — and had only stayed hidden because his men-at-arms had been wearing green and white plumes in their helmets. The young man was fair-haired, had a face slightly burned by the sun, was dressed in a green cloak, plain breeches and a linen shirt, and nothing except his height explained why men were suddenly kneeling on the grass. 'Down,' Scoresby hissed at Thomas who, perplexed, went on one knee. Now only Jeanette, the boy and his escort of eight tall men-at-arms were standing.

  The boy looked at Thomas. 'Did you really walk here from Brittany?' he asked in English, though, like many noblemen, his English was touched with a French accent.

  'We both did, sire,' Thomas said in French.

  'Why?' he demanded harshly.

  'To seek the protection of the King of England,' Thomas said, 'who is the guardian of my lady's son, who has been treacherously taken prisoner by England's enemies.'

  The boy looked at Jeanette with much the same wolfish appreciation that Scoresby had shown. He might not shave, but he knew a beautiful woman when he saw one. He smiled. 'You are most welcome, madame,' he said. 'I knew of your husband's reputation, I admired him, and I regret that I will never have a chance to meet him in combat.' He bowed to Jeanette, then untied his cloak and walked to her. He placed the green cape over her shoulders to cover the torn dress. 'I shall ensure, madame,' he said, 'that you are treated with the courtesy your rank demands and will vow to keep whatever promises England made on your son's behalf.' He bowed again.

  Jeanette, astonished and pleased by the young man's manner, put the question that Thomas had been wanting answered. 'Who are you, my lord?' she asked, offering a curtsey.

  'I am Edward of Woodstock, madame,' he said, offering her his arm.

  It meant nothing to Jeanette, but it astonished Thomas. 'He is the King's eldest son,' he whispered to her.

  She dropped to one knee, but the smooth-cheeked
boy raised her and walked her towards the priory. He was Edward of Woodstock, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall and Prince of Wales. And the wheel of fate had once again spun Jeanette high.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  The wheel seemed indifferent towards Thomas. He was left alone, abandoned. Jeanette walked away on the Prince's arm and did not so much as glance back at Thomas. He heard her laugh. He watched her. He had nursed her, fed her, carried her and loved her, and now, without a thought, she had discarded him. No one else was interested in him. Scoresby and his men, cheated of a hanging, had gone to the village, and Thomas wondered just what he was supposed to do.

  'Goddamn,' he said aloud. He felt conspicuously foolish in his tattered robe. 'Goddamn,' he said again. Anger, thick as the black humour that could make a man sick, rose in him, but what he could do? He was a fool in a ragged robe and the Prince was the son of a king.

  The Prince had taken Jeanette to the low grassy ridge where the big tents stood in a colourful row. Each tent had a flagpole, and the tallest flew the quartered banner of the Prince of Wales, which showed the golden lions of England on the two red quarters and golden fleur-de-lis on the two blue. The fleur-de-lis were there to show the King's claim to the French throne while the whole flag, which was that of England's king, was crossed with a white-toothed bar to show that this was the banner of the King's eldest son. Thomas was tempted to follow Jeanette, to demand the Prince's help, but then one of the lower banners, the one furthest away from him, caught the small warm wind and sluggishly lifted its folds. He stared at it.

  The banner had a blue field and was slashed diagonally with a white band. Three rampant yellow lions were emblazoned on either side of the bar, which was decorated with three red stars that had green centres. It was a flag Thomas knew well, but he scarcely dared believe that he was seeing it here in Normandy, for the arms were those of William Bohun, Earl of Northampton. Northampton was the King's deputy in Brittany, yet his flag was unmistakable and Thomas walked towards it, fearing that the wind-rippled flag would turn out to be a different coat of arms, similar to the Earl's, but not the same.