It was a strange journey.
Thomas could feel the nervousness in the land. Towns kept their gates closed. Villagers hid when they saw horsemen coming; they either fled to nearby woods or, if taken by surprise, sheltered in their churches. Harvesters dropped their sickles and ran. Twice the Hellequin found cows lowing in pain because they needed to be milked after their owners had fled. Thomas’s archers, nearly all of them countrymen, milked the animals instead.
The weather was uncertain. It did not rain, yet it always seemed about to rain. The clouds were low and the incessant north wind unseasonably cold. Thomas led thirty-four men-at-arms, which, except for those left to guard Castillon d’Arbizon, was every man fit enough to travel, and each of those men had two horses, and some had three or four. They had squires and servants and women who, like Thomas’s sixty-four archers, were all mounted, and horses inevitably cast shoes or went lame, and each incident took time to remedy.
There was little news, and what there was could not be trusted. On the third day of the journey they heard church bells clanging. It was too noisy and discordant to be the tolling for a funeral and so Thomas left his men hidden safe in a wood and rode with Robbie to discover what caused the commotion. They found a village large enough to boast two churches, and both were ringing their bells, while in the market square a Franciscan friar in a stained robe was standing on the steps of a stone cross proclaiming a great French victory. ‘Our king,’ the friar shouted, ‘is rightly called Jean le Bon! He is indeed Jean the Good! John the Triumphant! He has scattered his enemies, taken noble prisoners, and filled the graves with Englishmen!’ He saw Robbie and Thomas and, assuming them to be French, pointed at them. ‘Here are the heroes! The men who have given us victory!’
The crowd, which seemed more curious than jubilant, turned to look at the two horsemen.
‘I wasn’t at the battle,’ Thomas called, ‘do you know where it was fought?’
‘To the north!’ the friar declared vaguely. ‘And it was a great victory! The King of England is slain!’
‘The King of England!’
‘Glory be to God,’ the friar said. ‘I saw it myself! I saw the pride of England slaughtered by Frenchmen!’
‘The last I heard,’ Thomas said to Robbie, ‘the king was still in England.’
‘Or fighting Scotland,’ Robbie said bitterly.
‘There’s a truce, Robbie, a truce.’
‘The Lord of Douglas doesn’t recognise a truce,’ Robbie said bleakly. ‘That’s why I’m here, because I told him I couldn’t fight against the English.’
‘You can now. You’re bound by no oaths.’
‘By gratitude, then?’ Robbie asked. Thomas gave a brief smile, but said nothing. He was watching a small boy, probably no older than Hugh, who was annoying an equally small girl by trying to lift her skirts with a nuthook. The boy saw Thomas’s gaze and pretended to be interested in what the friar was saying. ‘You think he’s right?’ Robbie asked. ‘There’s been a battle?’
‘No, it’s rumour.’
The friar was now haranguing the crowd to donate coins to two younger men, both in friar’s robes, who were carrying small barrels about the crowd. ‘Our brave men have suffered wounds!’ the friar shouted. ‘They have suffered for France! For the love of our Lord Jesus Christ help them in their distress! Be generous and receive Christ’s blessing! Every coin will help our wounded heroes!’
‘He’s a fraud,’ Thomas said dismissively. ‘Just a rogue making some money.’
They moved on northwards. The Hellequin had to avoid towns because any place that had a wall inevitably had a score of men capable of shooting a crossbow, and Thomas wanted to finish his journey without losing a man to some squalid skirmish. He had tended to the eastward because he was more likely to find Englishmen in that direction, and he found a score of them in a village dominated by a high-towered church. That church was the only stone building; the rest were all made of timber, plaster, and thatch. There was a smithy with a furnace built in the back yard beneath a scorched oak tree, and a tavern surrounded by a huddle of small cottages, and when Thomas first glimpsed the village amidst the vineyards he had also seen a crowd of horses being watered in the small stream that flowed beside the impressive church. There were more than fifty horses, which suggested at least twenty men, and he had presumed the horses must belong to Frenchmen, but then he had seen the flag of Saint George, its red cross bold against the white field, leaning against the tavern wall. He had led his men down the hill and into the small square where men-at-arms leaped up in alarm. ‘We’re English!’ Thomas called.
‘Jesus,’ a tall man said in relief as he ducked under the tavern’s lintel. He wore a jupon showing a golden lion rampant against a background of fleurs-de-lys on a blue field. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Sir Thomas Hookton,’ Thomas said. He rarely used the honorific ‘sir’, but he had been knighted by the Earl of Northampton and it was useful sometimes.
‘Benjamin Rymer,’ the tall man said. ‘We serve the Earl of Warwick.’
‘You’re with the army?’ Thomas asked in hope.
‘We’re looking for the bloody army,’ Rymer said, then explained that he and his conroi of men had been aboard a ship that had sailed from Southampton, but had become separated from the fleet that had been carrying the rest of the earl’s reinforcements to Gascony. ‘The wind blew up and the bloody shipmaster panicked and we ended up in Spain,’ he said, ‘and it took the bastard two months to make repairs and get us to Bordeaux.’ He looked at Thomas’s men. ‘It’s a relief to be with some archers again. Ours were on another ship. Do you know where the prince’s army is?’
‘No idea at all,’ Thomas said.
‘The blind leading the blind,’ Rymer said. ‘And there’s no ale here, so no end to bad news.’
‘Is there wine?’
‘They say so. Tastes like cat piss to me. Did you come from Bordeaux?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘We’re from a garrison east of Gascony,’ he said.
‘So you know the damn country?’
‘Some of it. It’s big.’
‘So where do we go?’
‘North,’ Thomas said. ‘The last rumour I heard said the army was at Tours.’
‘Wherever the hell Tours is.’
‘It’s to the north,’ Thomas said, and slid out of the saddle. ‘Rest the horses,’ he called to his men. ‘Walk them! Let them drink! We’re moving again in an hour.’
Rymer and his troop travelled with Thomas’s men, and Thomas wondered how the man had survived so far because he expressed surprise when Thomas sent scouts ahead. ‘Is it that dangerous?’ he asked.
‘It’s always dangerous,’ Thomas said. ‘This is France.’
Yet no enemy disturbed them. Once in a while Thomas saw a castle and led his column on a wide detour to avoid trouble, but the garrisons made no attempt to challenge or even identify the mounted soldiers. ‘They’ve probably sent most of their men north,’ Thomas told Rymer, ‘and just left a handful to hold the battlements.’
‘Pray God we’re not too late for any battle!’
‘Pray to Saint George there isn’t a battle,’ Thomas said.
‘We have to beat them!’ Rymer said cheerfully, and Thomas thought of Crecy, of blood in the grass and of the weeping in the night after battle. He said nothing, and his thoughts wandered to Saint Junien. He sensed they must be nearing the abbey where the saint was entombed, though that was merely a suspicion that could have been inspired by hope rather than by reality. Yet the country was changing, the hills were smaller and more rounded, the rivers wider and slower, the leaves were turning faster. Whenever he found a village or a traveller, he asked for directions, but usually folk only knew how to reach the next village or perhaps a town that Thomas had never heard of, and so he just kept going north.
‘You’re trying to reach Poitiers?’ the Sire Roland asked him on the sixth day.
‘I’m told the prince might be there,’ Thomas said, but as it had been Sir Henri who suggested that, and as Sir Henri knew no more than Thomas, it was at best a vague destination.
‘Or are you going there because it’s near Nouaille?’ Roland asked.
‘Nouaille?’
‘That’s where the blessed Junien rests.’
‘You’ve been there?’
