‘And I’ll ask Father Richard to come here before dawn,’ Sir Reginald said, going back to his horse.
‘Father Richard?’
There was the creak of leather as Sir Reginald climbed back into the saddle. ‘He’s one of the Earl of Warwick’s chaplains. You’ll want to hear mass, won’t you?’
‘If there’s a fight, yes,’ Thomas said, then helped Sir Reginald find his stirrups. ‘What do you think will happen in the morning?’
Sir Reginald’s horse stamped on the track. The rider was a dark shadow against a dark sky. ‘I think we’ll surrender,’ Sir Reginald said bleakly. ‘God help me, but that’s what I think.’ He turned the horse and rode towards the hill.
‘You can see your way, Sir Reginald?’ Thomas called.
‘The horse can. One of us must have some sense.’ He clicked his tongue and the horse’s pace quickened.
It seemed the night would never end. Darkness was complete, and with it came the sense of doom that darkness brings. The river ran loud over the shallow ford. ‘You should try to sleep,’ Genevieve said, surprising Thomas. She had waded the ford to join him on the northern bank.
‘You too.’
‘I brought you this,’ she said.
Thomas held out his hand and felt the familiar heft of his bow. A yew bow, tall as a man, the stave thick in the centre and straight as an arrow. It felt smooth. ‘You waxed it?’ he asked.
‘Sam gave me the last of his wool fat.’
Thomas ran his hand up the stave. At its thick centre, where the arrow rested before the cord sent it on death’s mission, he could feel the little silver plate. It was incised with a yale holding a cup, the badge of the disgraced Vexille family, his family. Would God punish him for casting the Grail into the cold sea? ‘You must be frozen,’ he said.
‘I pulled up my skirts,’ she said, ‘and the ford isn’t deep.’ She sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder. For a time neither spoke, but just stared into the night. ‘So what happens tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘It’s today,’ Thomas said bleakly. ‘And it depends on the French. Either they accept the church’s terms or they decide they can do better by beating us. And if they do accept, we ride south.’ He did not tell her that his name was on a list of men who must be surrendered as hostages. ‘I want you to make certain the horses are saddled. Keane will help you. They have to be ready before dawn. And if you hear seven trumpet calls then we go. We go fast.’
He felt her head nod. ‘And if the trumpet doesn’t call?’ she asked.
‘Then the French will come to kill us.’
‘How many are there?’
Thomas shrugged. ‘Sir Reginald thinks they have about ten thousand men? No one really knows. Maybe more, maybe fewer. A lot.’
‘And we have?’
‘Two thousand archers and four thousand men-at-arms.’
Genevieve was silent and he supposed she was thinking about the disparity in numbers. ‘Bertille is praying,’ she said.
‘I suppose lots of people are praying.’
‘She’s kneeling by the cross,’ Genevieve said.
‘Cross?’
‘Beyond the cottage, at the crossroads, there’s a crucifix. She says she’ll stay all night and pray for her husband’s death. Do you think God listens to prayers like that?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think God is weary of us.’
‘Labrouillade won’t fight in the front rank,’ Thomas said. ‘He’ll make sure other men are in front of him. And if things go badly he’ll just surrender. He’s too rich to kill.’ He stroked her face, feeling the leather patch she wore across her injured eye. She was blind in that eye, and it had gone milky white. He told her it did not disfigure her and he believed that, but she did not. He hugged her close.
‘I wish you were too rich to kill,’ she said.
‘I am,’ Thomas said with a smile. ‘They could ransom me for a fortune, but they won’t.’
‘The cardinal?’
‘He doesn’t forgive or forget. He wants to burn me alive.’
Genevieve wanted to tell him to be careful, but that was as much a waste of words as Bertille’s prayers at the roadside cross. ‘What do you think will happen?’ she asked instead.
‘I think we’ll hear the trumpet sound seven times,’ Thomas said.
And then he would ride south as if all the fiends of hell were at his heels.
King Jean and his two sons knelt to receive the wafer that was Christ’s body. ‘
‘Amen,’ the king grunted.
Prince Charles, the dauphin, stood and went to a window. He pulled open a shutter. ‘It’s still dark,’ he said.
‘Not for long,’ the Earl of Douglas said, ‘I hear the first birds.’
‘Let me go back to the prince.’ Cardinal Talleyrand spoke from the room’s edge.
‘To what purpose?’ King Jean asked, annoyed that the cardinal had not called him ‘sire’ or ‘Your Majesty’.
‘To offer them a truce while the terms are clarified.’
‘The terms are clear,’ the king said, ‘and I am not inclined to accept them.’
‘You proposed the terms, sire,’ Talleyrand said respectfully.
‘And they accepted them too easily. That suggests they’re frightened. That they have cause to be frightened.’
‘With respect, sire,’ Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem intervened. He was fifty, wise in war, and wary of the archers in the enemy army. ‘Every day they linger on that hilltop, sire, weakens them. Every day increases their fear.’
‘They’re frightened and weak now,’ Jean de Clermont, the second marshal of the French army, said. ‘They’re sheep to be slaughtered.’ He sneered at his fellow marshal. ‘You’re just afraid of them.’
‘If we fight,’ d’Audrehem said, ‘you’ll be staring at my horse’s arse.’
‘Enough!’ King Jean snapped. Men feared his notorious temper and fell silent. The king frowned at a servant who carried a pile of jupons over his arm. ‘How many?’
‘Seventeen, sire.’
‘Give them to men in the Order of the Star.’ He turned and looked at the window where the faintest light showed in the east. The king already wore a jupon of blue cloth decorated with golden fleurs-de-lys, and the seventeen coats the servant carried were identical. If there was to be a battle then let the enemy be confused as to who was the king, and the men in the Order of the Star were among the greatest fighters of France. It was King Jean’s own order of chivalry, an answer to England’s Order of the Garter, and today the Knights of the Star would protect their monarch. ‘If the English are stupid enough to accept a few days more on the hilltop, so be it,’ he told Talleyrand.
‘So I may extend the truce?’ the cardinal asked.
‘See what they say,’ the king said and waved Talleyrand away. ‘If they beg for time,’ he told the men remaining in the room, ‘it means they’re scared.’
‘Scared men are easily beaten,’ Marshal Clermont observed.
‘Oh, we’ll beat them,’ King Jean said, and felt a flutter of nervousness about the decision he had made.
‘So we fight, sire?’ the Lord of Douglas asked. He was confused as to whether the king really meant to fight or extend the truce. All the men in the room had been awake half the night as armourers clad them in leather, mail and steel, and now the king was again flirting with the idea of a truce?
