Harry catches himself before he says I’m sorry again. He can’t think of anything else to say.
‘It’s very tiring,’ Alys says, her soft words barely audible over the crackling of the fire. ‘There is an old well in the gardens of Arundel Castle. I was fascinated by it as a child. My ladies’ maids warned me it was terribly dangerous and I was absolutely never to go near it, so of course I ran to it every chance I could. If you prise up the boards and toss a rock down it, it’s so deep you don’t even hear the stone hit the bottom. Everything you throw into it just vanishes into the darkness.’ She folds her hands in her lap, staring at them. ‘That’s what loving you is like.’
‘I’ll try—’ Harry starts.
Alys shakes her head. ‘Don’t. Just don’t. We both know you’re off to France as soon as the King snaps his fingers.’ She gets up, smoothing the skirts of her pale green wool dress. ‘Bury your ghosts, Harry, by the time you return. He would hate you like this.’ She looks at him then, as she departs for her bedchamber. ‘It means they’ve won.’
The muster to war comes barely a month later, in May 1338. Harry tells Alys and the children he loves them, and that he’s sorry, and he has to go. Alys hugs him, her small hands digging painfully into his back, and all she says is, ‘Fight.’ Harry knows she’s not talking about the French.
The army assembles at Dover in June. They cross the Channel in a motley collection of cogs and other commandeered merchant ships organised by Arundel. Harry looks for the Halygast in the flotilla of cogs, but it turns out one boat does in fact look much like another to his untrained eye and he can’t pick her out, if indeed she’s part of the fleet.
They arrive in Antwerp in July. It’s their designated base for the coming war. Antwerp is a flat, tidy trading town and it takes less than a week for the English army to turn the surrounding fields into a mud pit. By the middle of August, there isn’t a blade of grass for miles. We are locusts, Harry thinks.
The politics of allegiances drag onwards. The army sits idle. The knights grow bored, and the younger ones start making raids into France, chasing glory, attacking small castles, trying to provoke Philip into action.
Because that’s the rub: for all his threats and ultimatums, his strategically placed fleet, the King of France does not actually go to war. He doesn’t even invade Gascony, the main holding of the Duchy of Aquitaine in the southwest. He just waits and watches as King Edward and twelve hundred of his best men spend England’s gold sitting in Flanders through September, arguing with potential allies. It’s an amazing non-tactic. Philip of Valois is either a dithering fool or the greatest military strategist of his age, and nobody in the English camp is quite sure which.
Harry is bored too, but it’s an acceptable kind of bored. The boredom of a military camp is different from the boredom of a home. Sooner or later an earl will come and tell them to break camp and march, or to prepare for attack. The fact that Harry has nothing to do but train and stay ready is not his fault.
He trains all the time now.
He’s very aware of the things that are his fault: his all but abandonment of Dartington and his family. He thinks of his son, of how little Iain risks growing up as Harry did, with no memories of his father. With him dead in a foreign field before the boy can walk.
Harry knows Alys is right. He’s been holding onto this hurt for too long. He knew Iain a mere eighteen months, and four years later he still can’t let him go. He promises himself he’ll finish this campaign and then hang up his sword. He’ll be a father, and a husband. He’ll cut the first sheaf of wheat at the harvest again, a duty he’s missed the past few years, cutting down lives in the North.
He wants to feel warm inside again. He just doesn’t remember how.
He’ll try, though. After this campaign. There’s something about setting foot in Iain’s birth country that he thinks will finally allow him to heal.
He starts going on the knights’ raids into France as the summer draws to a close. At first it’s just to keep an eye on the young knights, the hot-headed ones who had stayed south for the Scottish campaigns and missed out, as they put it, on all the fun.
And then some of Montagu’s men get involved, Sir Guy d’Audley and Sir Thomas Howland, and Harry goes because he knows these men, he saw the slaughter they were capable of in Galloway, and he wants to make sure their knightly raids don’t turn into rape and murder sprees.
The young knights idolise Sir Guy and Sir Thomas: important men, friends with Montagu, Earl of Salisbury. Harry, on the other hand, is a stuffy rural knight who won some tournaments once. They call him ‘Auntie Harry’ when he makes them ransom a local lord rather than killing him; when he demands they don’t touch the women. They’re just foreigners, the young knights say. It’s not like they matter.
Chivalry doesn’t exist on the battlefield, Harry decides. It’s something invented afterwards, in the war they describe in letters home. Met with an unfortunate accident is code for slain while unarmed and begging by an opposing knight. Succumbed to grief after her lord’s passing usually means raped and left for dead. Unfortunately the written word is stronger than memory, so the myth of glorious knighthood lingers onwards in the minds of boys and patient wives. Otherwise no mother would let her
