'A remedy,' Mordecai said, staring helplessly at the cord, then at the floor. 'I was ever unpractical with matters like this. A hammer and nail, you think?'
'A staple.' Thomas suggested.
Jeanette's idiot servant boy was sent out with careful instructions and managed to find the staple that Mordecai asked Thomas to hammer into the floorboard, but Thomas held up his crooked right hand with its fingers bent like claws and said he could not do it, so Mordecai clumsily banged the staple in himself and then tightened the cord and tied it off so that it stretched taut from floor to ceiling. ''hat you must do,' he said, admiring his handiwork, 'is pluck it like a bowcord.'
'I can't,' Thomas said in panic, holding up his crooked hands again.
'What are you?' Mordecai asked.
'What am I?'
'Ignore the specious answers. I know you're an
Englishman and I assume you're a Christian, but what are you?'
'I was an archer,' Thomas said bitterly.
'And you still are,' Mordecai said harshly, 'and if you are not an archer then you are nothing. So pluck that cord! And keep on plucking it until your fingers can close on it. Practise. Practise. What else do you have to do with your time?'
So Thomas practised and after a week he could tighten two fingers opposite the thumb and make the cord reverberate like a harp string, and after another week he could bend the fingers of both hands about the cord and he plucked it so vigorously that it finally broke under the strain. His strength was coming back and the burns had healed to leave puckered welts where the poker had scored his skin, but the wounds in his memory did not heal. He would not talk of what had been done to him for he did not want to remember it, instead he practised plucking the cord until it snapped and then he learned to grip a quarterstaff and fought mock battles in the house yard with Robbie. And, as the days had lengthened out of winter, he went for walks beyond the town. There was a windmill on a slight hill that lay not far from the town's eastern gate and at first he could hardly manage the climb because his toes had been broken in the vice and his feet felt like unyielding lumps, but by the time April had filled the meadows with cowslips he was walking confidently. Will Skeat often went with him and though the older man never said much his company was easy. If he did talk it was to grumble about the weather or complain because the food was strange or, more likely, because he had heard nothing from the Earl of Northampton.
'You think we should write to his lordship again, Tom?'
'Maybe the first letter didn't reach him?'
'I never did like things written down,' Skeat said, 'it ain't natural. Can you write to him?'
'I can try,' Thomas said, but though he could pluck a bowcord and hold a quarterstaff or even a sword he could not manage the quill. He tried but his letters were scratchy and uncontrolled and in the end one of Tote- sham's clerks wrote the letter, though Totesham himself did not think the message would do any good.
'Charles of Blois will be here before we get any reinforcements,' he said. Totesham was awkward with Thomas, who had disobeyed him by riding to Roncelets, but Thomas's punishment had been far more than Tote- sham would have wanted and so he felt sorry for the archer. 'You want to carry_ the letter to the Earl?' he asked Thomas. Thomas knew he was being offered an escape, but he shook his head. 'I'll stay,' he said, and the letter was entrusted to a shipmaster who was sailing the next day. The letter was a futile gesture and Totesham knew it for his garrison was almost certainly doomed. Each day brought news of the reinforcements reaching Charles of Blois, and the enemy's raiding parties were now coming within sight of La Roche-Derrien's walls and harassing the forage parties that searched the countryside for any cattle, goats and sheep that could be driven back to the town to be slaughtered and salted down. Sir Guillaume enjoyed such foraging raids. Since losing Evecque he had become fatalistic and so savage that already the enemy had learned to be wary of the blue jupon with its three yellow hawks. Yet one evening, coming home from a long day that had yielded only two goats, he was grinning when he came to see Thomas. 'My enemy has joined Charles,' he said, 'the Count of Coutances, God damn his rotten soul. I killed one of his men this morning and I only wish it had been the Count himself.'
'Why's he here?' Thomas asked. 'He's not a Breton.'
'Philip of France is sending men to help his nephew,' Sir Guillaume said, 'so why won't the King of England send men to oppose him? He thinks Calais is more important?'
'Yes.'
'Calais,' Sir Guillaume said in disgust, 'is the arsehole of France.' He picked a shred of meat from between his teeth. 'And your friends were out riding today,' he went on.
'My friends?'
'The wasps.'
'Roncelets,' Thomas said.
'We fought half a dozen of the bastards in some benighted village,' Sir Guillaume said,
'and I put a lance clean through a black and yellow belly. He was cough-ing afterwards.'
'Coughing?'
'It's the wet weather, Thomas,' Sir Guillaume explained, 'it gives men a cough. So I left him alone, killed another of the bastards, then event back and cured his cough. I cut his head off.'
Robbie rode with Sir Guillaume and, like him, amassed coins taken from dead enemy patrols. though Robbie also rode in hope of meeting Guy Vexille. He knew that name now because Thomas had told him that it was Guy Vexille who had killed his brother just before the battle outside Durham and Robbie had gone to St Renan's church, put his hand on the altar's cross and sworn revenge. 'I shall kill Guy Vexille and de Taillebourg,' he vowed.
'They're mine,' Thomas insisted.
'Not if I get to them first,' Robbie promised.
Robbie had found himself a brown-eyed Breton girl called Oana who hated to leave his side and she came with him whenever he walked with Thomas. One day, as they set out for the windmill, she appeared with Thomas's big black bow.
'I can't use that!' Thomas said, frightened of it.
'Then what bloody use are you?' Robbie asked and he patiently encouraged Thomas to draw the bow and praised him as his strength returned. The three of them would take the bow to the windmill and Thomas would drive arrows into the wooden tower. The shots were feeble at first for he could scarcely pull the cord halfway and the more power he exerted the more treacherous his fingers seemed to be and the more wayward his aim, but by the time the swallows and swifts had magically reappeared above the town's roofs he could pull the cord all the way back to his ear and put an arrow through one of Oana's wooden bracelets at a hundred paces.
'You're cured,' Mordecai told him when Thomas told him that news.
'Thanks to you,' Thomas said, though he knew it was not only Mordecai, any more than it was the friendship of Will Skeat or of Sir Guillaume or of Robbie Douglas that had helped him recover. Bernard de Taillebourg had wounded Thomas, but those bloodless wounds of God had not just been to his body, but to his soul, and it was on a dark spring night when the lightning was flickering in the east that Jeanette had climbed to her attic. She had not left Thomas until the town's cockerels greeted the new dawn and if Mordecai understood why Thomas was smiling the next day he said nothing, but he noted that from that moment on Thomas's recovery was swift.
Thereafter Thomas and Jeanette talked every night. He told her of Charles and of the look on the boy's face when Thomas had mentioned his mother; Jeanette wanted to know everything about that look and she worried that it meant nothing and that her son had forgotten her, but eventually she believed Thomas when he said the boy had almost wept when he heard news of her. 'You told him I loved him?' she asked.
'Yes,' Thomas said, and Jeanette lay silent, tears in her eyes, and Thomas tried to reassure her, but she shook her head as if there was nothing Thomas could say that would console her. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
'You tried,' Jeanette said.
They wondered how the enemy had known Thomas was coming and Jeanette said that she was sure that Belas the lawyer had had a hand in it. 'I know he writes to Charles of Blois,' she said, 'and that horrid man, what did you call him? Epolurantail?'
'The Scarecrow.'
'Him,' Jeanette confirmed, 'l'zpoourantail. He talks to Belas.'
'The Scarecrow talks to Belas?' Thomas asked, surprised.
'He lives there now. He and his men live in the store-houses.' She paused. 'Why does he even stay in the
