...' He frowned, trying to find the word.
'A trebuchet?'
'No, no, a springald!' A springald was like a massive crossbow that shot a huge dart. Father Pascal stripped the last morsel off the bone. 'It is very slow and it broke once. But they mended it. It batters at the wall. Oh, and your friend is there,' he mumbled, his mouth full.
'My friend?'
'Skeat, is that the name? He's there with the doctor. He can talk now, and he walks. He is much better, yes? But he cannot recognize people, not unless they speak.'
'Unless they speak?' Thomas asked, puzzled.
'If he sees you,' the priest explained, 'he does not know you. Then you speak and he knows you.' He shrugged again. 'Strange, eh?' He drained his pot. 'So what will you do, monsieur?'
'What does Sir Guillaume want me to do?'
'He wants you close by in case he needs to escape, but he's written a letter to the King explaining what happened in the battle. I sent the letter to Paris. Sir Guillaume thinks the King may relent so he waits for an answer, but me? I think Sir Guillaume is like this goose. Plucked and cooked.'
'Did he say anything about his daughter?'
'His daughter?' Father Pascal was puzzled. 'Oh! The bastard daughter? He said you would kill whoever killed her.'
'I will, too.'
'And that he wants your help.'
'He can have it,' Thomas said, 'and we'll leave tomorrow.' He looked at Robbie. 'We're going back to war.'
'Who am I fighting for?'
Thomas grinned. 'Me.'
Thomas, Robbie and the priest left next morning. Thomas took a change of clothes, a full arrow bag, his bow, sword and mail coat and, wrapped in a piece of deerskin, his father's book that seemed like a heavy piece of baggage. In truth it was lighter than a sheaf of arrows, yet the duty its possession implied weighed on Thomas's conscience. He told himself he was merely riding to help Sir Guillaume, yet he knew he was continuing the quest for his father's secret.
Two of Sir Giles's tenants rode with them to bring back the mare that Father Pascal rode and the two stal- lions which Sir Giles had purchased from Thomas and Robbie.
'You don't want to take them on a boat,' Sir Giles said, 'horses and boats don't mix.'
'He paid us too much,' Robbie remarked as they rode away.
'He doesn't want his son-in-law to get it,' Thomas said. 'Besides, he's a generous man. He gave Mary Gooden another three pounds as well. For her dowry. He's a lucky man.'
Something in Thomas's tone caught Robbie's attention. —He is? You mean she's found a husband?'
'A nice fellow. A thatcher in Tolpuddle. They'll be wed next week.'
'Next week!' Robbie sounded aggrieved that his girl was marrying. It did not matter that he was abandoning her, it still cut his pride. 'But why would he marry her?' he asked after a while. 'Or doesn't he know she's pregnant?'
'He thinks the child is his,' Thomas said, keeping a straight face, 'and well it might be, I hear.'
'Jesus!' Robbie swore when that made sense, then he turned to look back along the road and he smiled, remembering the good times. 'He's a kind man,' he said of Sir Giles.
'A lonely one,' Thomas said. Sir Giles had not wanted them to leave, but accepted they could not stay.
Robbie sniffed the air. 'There's more snow coming.'
'Never!' It was a morning of gentle sunlight. Crocus and aconite were showing in sheltered spots and the hedgerows were noisy with chaffinches and robins. But Robbie had indeed smelt snow. As the day wore on, the skies became low and grey, the wind went into the east and hit their faces with a new bite and the snow followed. They found shelter in a verderer's house in the woods, crowding in with the man, his wife, five daughters and three sons. Two cows had a byre at one end of the house and four goats were tethered at the other. Father Pascal confided to Thomas that this was very like the house in which he had grown up, but he wondered if conventions in England were the same as in the Limousin. 'Conventions?' Thomas asked.
'In our house,' Father Pascal said, blushing, 'the women pissed with the cows and the men with the goats. I would not want to do the wrong thing.'
'It's the same here,' Thomas assured him.
Father Pascal had proved a good companion. He had a fine singing voice and once they had shared their food with the verderer and his family the priest sang some French songs. Afterwards, as the snow still fell and the smoke from the fire swirled thick under the thatch, he sat and talked with Thomas. He had been the village priest at Evecque and, when the Count of Coutances attacked, he had found refuge in the manor. 'But I do not like being cooped up,' he said, and so he had offered to carry Sir Guillaume's message to England. He had escaped from Evecque, he said, by first throwing his clothes across the moat and then swimming after them. 'It was cold,' he said, 'I have never been so cold! I told myself it is better to be cold than to be in hell, but I don't know. It was terrible.'
'What does Sir Guillaume want us to do?' Thomas asked him.
'He did not say. Perhaps, if the besiegers can be discouraged . . . ?' He shrugged. 'The winter is not a good time for a siege, I think. Inside Evecque they are comfortable, they are warm, they have the harvest stored, and the besiegers? They are wet and cold. If you can make them more uncomfortable, who knows? Perhaps they will abandon the siege?'
'And you? What will you do?'
'I have no work left at Evecque,' the priest said. Sir Guillaume had been declared a traitor and his goods pronounced forfeited so his serfs had been taken off to the Count of Coutances's estates, while his tenants, pillaged and raped by the besiegers, had mostly fled. 'So perhaps I go to Paris? I cannot go to the Bishop of Caen.'
'Why not?'
'Because he has sent men to help the Count of Coutances.' Father Pascal shook his head in sad wonder- ment. 'The bishop was impoverished by the English in the summer,'
he explained, 'so he needs money, land and goods, and he hopes to get some from Evecque. Greed is a great provoker of war.'
'Yet you're on Sir Guillaume's side?'
Father Pascal shrugged. 'He is a good man. But now? Now I must look to Paris for preferment. Or may_ be Dijon. I have a cousin there.'
They struggled east for the next two days, riding across the dead heaths of the New Forest, which lay under a soft whiteness. At night the small lights of the forest villages glittered hard in the cold. Thomas feared if they would reach Normandy too late to help Sir Guillaume, but that doubt was not reason enough to abandon the effort and so they struggled on. Their last few miles to Southampton were through a melting slush of mud and snow, and Thomas wondered how they were to reach Normandy, which was an enemy province. He doubted that any shipping would go there from Southampton because any English boat going close to the Normandy coast was liable to be snapped up by pirates. He knew plenty of boats would be going to Brittany, but that was a long walk from Caen. 'We go through the islands, of course,' Father Pascal said. They spent one night in a tavern and next morning found space on the Ursula, a cog bound for Guernsey and carrying barrels of salt pork, kegs of nails, barrel staves, iron ingots, pots packed in sawdust, bolts of wool, sheaves of arrows and three crates of cattle horns. It was also carrying a dozen bowmen who were travel-ling to the garrison of the castle which guarded the anchorage at St Peter Port. Come a had west wind, the Ursula's captain told them, and dozens of ships carrying wine from Gascony to England could be blown up-channel and St Peter Port was one of their last harbours of refuge. though the French sailors knew it too and in bad weather their ships would swarm off the island trying to pick up a prize or two. 'Does that mean they'll be waiting for us?' Thomas asked. The Isle of Wight was slipping astern and the ship was plunging into a winter-grey sea.
'Not waiting for us, they won't be, not us. They know the Ursula, they do,' the captain, a toothless man with
