The sleet pelted down with an extraordinary violence, rattling on the charred sail and drumming on the deck, and Thomas thought it would last forever, but it stopped as suddenly as it had begun and all on board the Pentecost stared astern, waiting for the next fire bolt to climb from the Saint-Esprit's deck, but when the flame finally seared into the sky it was a long way off, much too far away for its light to illuminate the Pentecost and Villeroy grunted. 'They reckoned we'd turn back west in that squall,' he said with amusement, 'but they were being too clever for their own good.' The Saint-Esprit had tried to head off thePentecost, thinking Villerov would put his ship straight downwind again, but the pursuers had made the wrong guess and they were now a long way to the north and west of their quarry.
More fire arrows burned in the dark, but now they were being shot in all directions in hope that the small light of one would glint a dull reflection from the Pentecost's hull, but Villerov's ship was drawing ever farther away, pulled by the remnants of her scorched sail. If it had not been for the squall, Thomas thought. they would surely have been overhauled and captured, and he wondered whether the hand of God was somehow sheltering him because he possessed the book of the Grail. Then guilt assailed him; the guilt of doubting the Grail's existence: of wasting Lord Outhwaite's money instead of spending it on the pursuit of the Grail; then the greater guilt and pity of Eleanor and Father Hobbe's wasteful deaths, and so he dropped to his knees on the deck and stared up at the one-armed crucifix. Forgive me, Lord. he prayed, forgive me.
'Sails cost money,' Villeroy said.
'You shall have a new sail, Pierre,' Sir Guillaume promised.
'And let's pray that what's left of this one will get us somewhere.' Villeroy said sourly. Off to the north a last fire arrow etched red across the black, and then there was no more light, just the endless dark of a broken sea in which the Pentecost survived under her tattered sail.
Dawn found them in a mist and with a fitful breeze that fluttered a sail so weakened that Villeroy and Yvette doubled it on itself so that the wind would have more than charred holes to blow upon, and when they reset it the Pentecost limped south and west and everyone on board thanked God for the mist because it hid them from the pirates that haunted the gulf between Normandy and Brittany. Villeroy was not sure where they were, though he was certain enough that the Norman coast was to the east and that all the land in that direction was in fealty to the Count of Coutances and so they held on south and west with Yvette perched in the bows to keep a lookout for the frequent reefs. 'They breed rocks, these waters,' Villeroy grumbled.
'Then go into deeper water,' Sir Guillaume suggested.
The big man spat overboard. 'Deeper water breeds English pirates out of the isles.'
They pushed on south, the wind dying and the sea calming. It was still cold, but there was no more sleet and, when a feeble sun began to burn off the shredding mists, Thomas sat beside Mordecai in the bow. 'I have a question for you,' he said.
'My father told me never to get on board a ship,' Mordecai responded. His long face was pale and his beard, which he usually brushed so carefully, was tangled. He was shivering despite a makeshift cloak of sheepskins. 'Did you know,' he went on, that Flemish sailors claim that you can calm a storm by throwing a Jew overboard?'
'Do they really?'
'So I'm told,' Mordecai said, 'and if I was on board a Flemish ship I might welcome drowning as an alternative to this existence. What is that?'
Thomas had unwrapped the book that his father had bequeathed him. 'My question,' he said, ignoring Mordecai's question, 'is who is Hachaliah.'
'Hachaliah?' Mordecai repeated the name, then shook his head. 'Do you think the Flemings carry Jews aboard their ships as a precaution? It would seem a sensible, if cruel, thing to do. Why die when a Jew can die?'
Thomas opened the book to the first page of Hebrew script where Brother Germain had deciphered the name Hachaliah. 'There,' he said, giving the book to the doctor, 'Hachaliah.'
Mordecai peered at the page. 'Grandson of Hachaliah,' he translated aloud, 'and son of the Tirshatha. Of course! It's a confusion about Jonah and the great fish.'
'Hachaliah is?' Thomas asked, staring at the page of strange script.
'No, dear boy!' Mordecai said. 'The superstition about Jews and storms is a confusion about Jonah, a mere ignorant confusion.' He looked back at the page. 'Are you the son of the Tirshatha?'
'I'm the bastard son of a priest,' Thomas said. 'And did your father write this?'
'Yes.'
'For you?'
Thomas nodded. 'I think so.'
'Then you are the son of the Tirshatha and the grand-son of Hachaliah,' Mordecai said, then smiled. 'Ah! Of course! Nehemiah. My memory is almost as bad as poor Skeat's, eh? Fancy forgetting that Hachaliah was the father of Nehemiah.'
Thomas was still none the wiser. 'Nehemiah?'
'And he was the Tirshatha, of course he was. Extra-ordinary, isn't it, how we Jews prosper in foreign states and then they tire of us and we get blamed for every little accident. Then time passes and we are restored to our offices. The Tirshatha, Thomas, was the Governor of Judaea under the Persians. Nehemiah was the Tirshatha, not the King, of course, just Governor for a time under the rule of Artaxerxes.' Mordecai's erudition was impressive, but hardly enlightening. Why would Father Ralph identify himself with Nehemiah who must have lived hundreds of years before Christ, before the Grail? The only answer that Thomas could conjure up was the usual one of his father's madness. Mordecai was turning the parchment pages and winced when one cracked. 'How people do yearn,' he said, 'for miracles.' He prodded a page with a finger stained by all the medicines he had pounded and stirred. ' "A golden cup in the Lord's hand that made all the earth drunk", now what on earth does that mean?'
'He's talking about the Grail,' Thomas said.
'I had understood that, Thomas,' Mordecai chided him gently, 'but those words were not written about the Grail. It refers to Babylon. Part of the lamentations of Jeremiah.' He turned another page. 'People like mystery. They want nothing explained, because when things are explained then there is no hope left. I have seen folk dying and known there is nothing to be done, and I am asked to go because the priest will soon arrive with his dish covered by a cloth, and everyone prays for a miracle. It never happens. And the person dies and I get blamed, not God or the priest, but I!' He let the book fall on his lap where the pages stirred in the small wind. 'These are just stories of the Grail, and some odd scriptures that might refer to it. A book, really, of meditations.' He frowned. 'Did your father truly believe the Grail existed?'
Thomas was about to give a vigorous affirmative, but paused, remembering. For much of the time his father had been a wry, amused and clever man, but there had been other times when he had been a wild, shrieking creature, struggling with God and desperate to make sense of the sacred mysteries. 'I think,' Thomas said carefully, 'that he did believe in the Grail.'
'Of course he did,' Mordecai said suddenly, 'how stupid of me! Of course your father believed in the Grail because he believed that he possessed it!'
'He did?' Thomas asked. He was utterly confused now.
'Nehemiah was more than the Tirshatha of Judaea,' the doctor said, 'he was cupbearer to Artaxerxes. He says so at the beginning of his writings. "I was the King's cupbearer." There.' He pointed to a line of Hebrew script. ' "I was the King's cupbearer." Your father's words, Thomas, taken from Nehemiah's story.'
Thomas stared at the writing and knew that Mordecai was right. That was his father's testimony. He had been cupbearer to the greatest King of all, to God Himself, to Christ, and the phrase confirmed Thomas's dreams. Father Ralph had been the cupbearer. He had possessed the Grail. It did exist. Thomas shivered.
'I think' – Mordecai spoke gently – 'that your father believed he possessed the Grail, but it seems unlikely.'
'Unlikely!' Thomas protested.
'I am merely a Jew,' Mordecai said blandly, 'so what can I know of the saviour of mankind?
And there are those who say_ I should not even speak of such things, but so far as I understand Jesus was not rich. Am I right?'
'He was poor,' Thomas said.
'So I am right, he was not a rich man, and at the end of his life he attends a seder.'
'A seder?'
'The Passover feast. Thomas. And at the seder he eats bread and drinks wine, and the Grail, tell me if I am wrong, was either the bread dish or the wine goblet, yes?'
'Yes.'
'Yes,' Mordecai echoed and glanced off to his left where a small fishing boat rode the broken swell. There had been no sign of the Saint-Esprit all morning, and none of the smaller boats they passed showed any interest in the Pentecesr. 'Yet if Jesus was poor,' Mordecai said, 'what kind of seder dish would he use? One made of gold? One ringed with jewels? Or a piece of common pottery?'
'Whatever he used,' Thomas said, 'God could transform.'
'Ah yes, of course, I was forgetting,' Mordecai said. He sounded disappointed, but then he smiled and gave Thomas the book. 'When we reach wherever we are going,' he said, 'I can write down translations of the Hebrew for you and I hope it helps.'
'Thomas!' Sir Guillaume bellowed from the stern. We need fresh arms to bail water!'
The caulking had not been finished and the Pentecost was taking water at an alarming rate and so Thomas vent down into the bilge and handed up the pails to Robbie who jettisoned the water over the side. Sir Guillaume had been pressing Villerov to go north and east again in an attempt to run past Caen and make Dunkirk, but Villerov was unhappy with his small sail and even more unhappy with the leaking hull. 'I have to put in somewhere soon,' he growled, 'and you have to buy me a sail.'
They dared not call into Normandy. It was well known throughout the province that Sir Guillaume had been declared a traitor and if the Pentecost was searched – and it was probable on this smuggling coast that she would be – then Sir Guillaume would be discovered. That left Brittany and Sir Guillaume was eager to make Saint-Malo or Saint-Brieuc, but Thomas protested from the bilge that he and Will Skeat would be considered enemies by the Breton authorities who, in those towns, held allegiance to Duke Charles who was struggling against the English-backed rebels who reckoned Duke Jean was& Brittany's true ruler. 'So where would you go?' Sir Guillaume demanded. 'England?'
'We'll never make England,' Villerov_ said unhappily, looking at his sail.
'The islands?' Thomas suggested, thinking of Guernsey or Jersey.
'The islands!' Sir Guillaume liked that idea.
This time it was Villerov who objected. 'Can't do it,' he said bluntly and explained that the Pentecost was a Guernsey boat and he had been one of the men who helped capture her. 'I take her into the isles,' he said, 'and they'll take her back and me with her.'
'For God's sake!' Sir Guillaume snarled. 'Then where do we go?'
'Can you make Treguier?' Will Skeat asked and everyone was so astonished he had spoken that for a few heartbeats no one responded.
'Treguier?' Villeroy asked after a while, then nodded. 'Like as not.' he said.
'Why Treguier?' Sir Guillaume demanded.
'It was in English hands last I heard,' Skeat said. 'Still is.' Villerov put in.
'And we've got friends there,' Skeat went on.
And enemies, Thomas thought. Treguier was not just the closest Breton port in English hands, but also the harbour closest to La Roche-Derrien where Sir Geoffrey Carr, the Scarecrow, had gone. And Thomas had told Brother Germain that he was headed for the same small town, and that would surely mean de Taillebourg would hear of it and follow. And perhaps Jeanette was there too, and suddenly, though Thomas had been saying for weeks that he would not go back, he desperately wanted to reach La Roche-Derrien.
For it was there in Brittany, he possessed friends, old lovers and enemies he wanted to kill.
Part Three
Brittany, spring 1347
The King’s Cupbearer
Jeanette Chenier, Comtesse d'Armorique, had lost her husband, her parents, her fortune, her house, her son and her royal lover, and all before she was twenty years old.
Her husband had been lost to an English arrow and had died in agony, weeping like a child.
Her parents had died of the bloody flux and their bedclothes had been burned before they were buried near the altar of St Renan's church. They had left Jeanette, their only remaining child, a small fortune in gold, a wine-shipping business and the great merchant's house on the river in La Roche-Derrien.
Jeanette had spent much of the fortune on equipping ships and men to fight the hated English who had killed her husband, but the English won and thus the fortune vanished.
Jeanette had begged help from Charles of Blois, Duke of Brittany and her dead husband's kinsman, and that was how she had lost her son. The three-year-old Charles, named for the duke, had been snatched from her. She was called a whore because she was a mer-chant's daughter and thus unworthy to be an aristocrat and Charles of Blois, to show Jeanette how much he despised her, had raped her. Her son, now the Count of Armorica, was being raised by one of Charles of Blois's loyal supporters to ensure that the boy's extensive lands stayed sworn to the house of Blois. So Jeanette, who had lost her fortune in the attempt to make Duke Charles the undisputed ruler of Brittany, learned a new hatred and found a new lover, Thomas of Hookton. She fled north with him to the English army in Normandy and there she had caught the eye of Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, and so Jeanette had abandoned Thomas. But then, fearing that the English would be crushed by the French in Picardy and that the victorious French would punish her for her choice of lover, she had fled again. She had been wrong about the battle, the English had won, but she could not go hack. Kings, and the sons of Kings, did not reward fickleness and so Jeanette Chenier, dowager Countess of Armorica, had gone back to La Roche-Derrien to find she had lost her house.
When she had left La Roche-Derrien she had been deeply in debt and Monsieur Belas, a lawyer, had taken the house to pay those debts. Jeanette, on her return, possessed money enough to pay all she owed, for the Prince of Wales had been generous with jewels, but Belas would not move from the house. The law was on his side. Some of the English who occupied La Roche-Derrien showed sympathy for Jeanette, but they did not interfere with the decision of the court and it would not have mattered overmuch if they had, for everyone knew the English could not stay in the small town for long. Duke Charles was gathering a new army in Rennes and La Roche-Derrien was the most isolated and remote of all the English strongholds in Brittany, and when Duke Charles snapped up the town he would reward Monsieur Belas, his agent, and scorn Jeanette Chenier whom he called a whore because she was not nobly born.
So Jeanette, unable to claim back her house, found another, much smaller, close to La Roche-Derrien's southern gate and she confessed her sins to the priest at St Renan's church, who said she had been wicked beyond man's measure and perhaps beyond God's measure as well; the priest promised her absolution if she would sin with him and he hoisted up his robes and reached for her, then cried aloud as Jeanette kicked him. She continued to take mass at St Renan's, for it was her childhood church and her parents were buried beneath the painting of Christ emerging from the tomb with a golden light about His head, and the priest dared not refuse her the sacrament and dared not meet her eyes.
Jeanette had lost her servants when she fled north with Thomas, but she hired a fourteen-year-old girl to be her kitchen maid and the girl's idiot brother to draw water and collect firewood. The Prince's jewels, Jeanette reckoned, would last her a year and something would turn up by then. She was young, she was truly beautiful, she was filled with anger, her child was still a hostage and she was inspired by hatred. Some in the town feared she was mad because she was much thinner than when she had left La Roche-Derrien, but her hair was still raven-black, her skin as smooth as the rare silk that only the wealthiest could afford and her eyes were big and bright. Men came and begged her favours, but were told they could not speak to her again unless they
brought her the shrivelled heart of Belas the lawyer and the shrivelled prick of Charles of Blois. 'Bring them both to me in reliquaries,' she told them, 'but bring me my son alive.' Her anger repelled men and some of them spread the tale that she was moon-touched, perhaps a witch. The priest of St Renan's confided to the other clergy in the town that Jeanette had tried to tempt him and he spoke darkly of bringing in the Inquisition, but the English would not permit it for the King of England refused to let the torturers of God work their dark arts in his possessions. 'There's enough grumbling,' Dick Totesham, commander of the English garrison in La Roche-Derrien said, 'without bringing in damned friars to stir up trouble.'
Totesham and his garrison knew that Charles of Blois was raising an army that would attack La Roche-Derrien before marching on to besiege the other English strong-holds in Brittany, and so they worked hard to make the town's walls higher and to build new ramparts outside the old. Local farm labourers were whipped to the work. They were forced to push barrowloads of clay and rock, they drove timbers into the soil to make palisades and they dug ditches. They hated the English for forcing them to work without pay, but the English did not care for they had to defend themselves and Totesham pleaded with Westminster to send him more men and on the feast of St Felix, in the middle of January, a troop of Welsh archers landed at Treguier, which was the small harbour an hour and a half's walk upriver from La Roche-Derrien, but the garrison's only other reinforcements were a few knights and men-at-arms who were down on their luck and came to the small town in hope of plunder and prisoners. Some of those knights came from as far away as Flanders, lured by false rumours of the riches to be had in Brittany, and another six men-at-arms arrived from northern Eng-land, led by a malevolent, raw-faced man who carried a whip and a heavy load of grudges, and they were La Roche-Derrien's last reinforcements before the Pentecost came to the river.
The Grail Quest Books 1-3: Harlequin, Vagabond, Heretic Page 66