Harry misses the harvest, but gets home in time for Michaelmas. Alys becomes pregnant. It’s awkward, and involves several more cringe-making conversations plus having to spill his seed into a glass vial, but it’s managed without Alys having to endure the act she has no interest in. Harry doesn’t ask the specifics after he hands over his part. The rest is women’s matters.
Alys takes to being pregnant with her usual fierce good spirit, though it’s clear to Harry in their private moments that she veers between terror and frustration at the changes in her body.
The Scottish truce falls apart on St Andrews Day, when a small force under Andrew de Moray kills the foolhardy young Earl of Atholl, an English ally. There is brave talk of a vengeance mission, but it’s too late – the great English army has long since disbanded.
Harry leaves again for war with Scotland in the spring. It’s 1336 now, the fourth year in a row Harry has ridden north to fight. It feels to him like the world is unravelling. Everything seemed simple after Halidon Hill. Scotland was solved; England relaxed into a summer of play and a winter of tournaments. France slumbered, content with its own problems.
And now, a scant few years later, France and England are at each other’s throats, and the French king is threatening a full-scale invasion of England from the North to support David II as Scotland’s king. The French fleet, mustered at Marseilles in the spring for Philip’s crusade, is in Normandy by summer, ready to leap across the Channel at any provocation.
That summer’s Scottish campaign is as bad as last summer’s. They ride and burn, ride and kill. The army rescues the widowed Countess of Atholl, de Beaumont’s daughter, besieged for a year by Andrew de Moray. Then they torch the East Coast of Scotland, destroying Aberdeen harbour and anywhere else that might give succour to a French fleet.
Harry returns in October 1336 to Dartington, to find he has a daughter named Joan, and so he and Alys try again. He watches Alys and Annie chatter, and Jed and Kit joke, and remembers a time when the laughter came from him, when he and Iain would bring merriment and roughhousing wherever they went.
Now he barely speaks. He just waits for the next summons to war.
Home doesn’t make sense to him any more, the way the campaign field does. At war, he always knows what he has to do. Break camp, march, fight, kill, pitch tents, take care of the horses, post sentries. Eat when you remember. Sleep when you can. Here, at Dartington, there is nothing of real importance to fill his days. He can’t go to the pond; there is no solace there. And God … Harry doesn’t want God’s contemplative silence any more. He wants orders.
When he thinks of tournaments now, they seem like nothing more than cruel jokes. It sickens him to think he was once proud of winning those charades.
Christmas approaches, and they travel to visit Arundel. The Earl seems noticeably older, his beard and temples peppered with grey. All Harry says as he sits down at dinner the first day is, ‘When are we going against France?’
‘Next summer,’ Richard says. ‘I’m up to Nottingham for a King’s Council as soon as the holidays are finished. It’s a council of war.’
Harry nods. Good. A nice long campaign. That’s what he needs. Then he looks up, and realises Arundel is staring at him.
‘You’re losing yourself,’ the Earl says.
‘I know,’ Harry replies. ‘I know.’ He just can’t find it in him to care.
With 1337 comes the elevation of Montagu to the status of Earl of Salisbury, and Rabbie to Earl of Suffolk. Harry isn’t even surprised by the reward given to evil men any more. Then in the late spring, Philip confiscates the Duchy of Aquitaine, King Edward’s last possession in France.
They don’t actually go to war until the following year. The King tries to create an alliance with Flanders, with members of his wife Philippa’s family. Nothing comes of it but wasted months and wasted money.
Early in 1338, Alys has a son, whom they name Iain, though he inherits Harry’s fair hair. Harry loves them all, Alys and little Joan and Iain in her arms, but in a distant way, as if there’s a fog between them and him. He can only take their company for a short time before he has to excuse himself and seek out the quiet of the solar, or take a long ride across the moors.
In March, the French fleet attacks and burns Portsmouth. Harry fidgets, waiting for the call to arms.
Alys reaches her limit over Easter, when Dartington emerges green and fresh into springtime, delighting in soft fields of bluebells and new lambs, yet Harry remains tangled in the winter of his memories. When she sits down one night by the fireplace in the solar, after the children are in bed, he can tell it’s the end. The only surprise is that she’s borne with him this long.
‘Harry,’ she begins.
‘I’m sorry,’ Harry says. He slumps onto her bridal chest, which rests at the bottom of the new oak bed.
Alys waves a hand. ‘I’m not interested in apologies, Harry. I think we’re past that,’ she says. Her voice is ineffably sad, and all Harry can think is how he’s failed her. How he’s failed everyone he’s loved. ‘I miss my friend. I thought …’ Her sentence trails off as she stares into the fire, its orange shadows dancing on her
