The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  Every day, we practised with our swords, often cutting the innocent vegetation. This allowed Fra Peter to discourse on how to cut or thrust, and then to further discourse on how to clean and sharpen.

  You might have thought that, as a professional man-at-arms, I’d have resented this.

  Perhaps Fiore and I aren’t so different. When Boucicault dropped me in the road, I learned a bitter lesson.

  I wasn’t anywhere near as good as I thought I was.

  Messieurs, Sir Jesus had the right of it – those of us who live by the sword will die by the sword. To us, the only thing more dangerous than our enemies is our own complacency.

  I wasn’t too far gone to learn. I was twenty-one, and I’d just started to grow.

  Calais. A fine town, growing every year. By the saviour, it is still growing. I reckon the town fathers don’t want King Richard to renew the war: they make their profit from being England’s door into France.

  I thought it was the end of our journey, but after a meeting with a papal officer, we took ship for England.

  I was overjoyed.

  We landed twice, but our little ship carried us up out of the chop of the Channel and all the way to London. We landed across the river because of some trouble – I can’t remember what it was. Our horses came up out of the hold, and it was a day before they were anything like recovered. Fra Peter went ahead to the priory at Clerkenwell, and Juan and I stayed with the horses.

  When they were alert and well fed, we rode them over the bridge, and I had the immense pleasure of wearing my donat’s coat into London.

  Juan was the perfect companion – happy to be pleased. We rode west through the streets, and I showed him the tower, the churches, the Cheaping, the goldsmiths.

  I was enthusiastic about my city, and yet I was all too aware that it was small next to Paris and dirty next to Avignon.

  My sister was no longer at Clerkenwell, but had moved to the sister’s convent in the country. Despite that, our arrival at Clerkenwell had a sort of homecoming air to it, and we were welcomed by the prior in person and fed in the great hall. I felt as if I was a member of this great order.

  The hall and barracks were packed. The order had been recruiting for the crusade, and they had twenty donats, mostly veteran men-at-arms. It made me proud to be one of them.

  We stayed a week. There was nothing for Juan and I to do except watch the more attractive scullery maids, exercise in the yard and swagger about the streets of London, which we did with the attentiveness and belligerence of young men. London had had a generation of swaggering young men, fresh from victories in France and Flanders, and we were tolerated or ignored.

  The beer was good.

  By the third day, I was torn between conflicting desires, the strangest of which was to leave before something – some nameless fear – came to pass. I think I feared arrest. It is hard to say.

  But I had nightmares two nights, and I dreamed of the Plague – I think it was the first time, but scarcely the last.

  I woke the fourth morning, in the quiet certainty that I had to go and see my uncle. It is difficult to explain even now – I feared and hated him, and meant him harm, yet I had to visit.

  I rose, walked down to the Thames and swam, and helped two boys from the Priory to water horses. Then I went back to my cell and washed and put on clean clothes. I left my war horse and my donat’s coat, and I walked, dressed like a modestly prosperous apprentice or journeyman, through the streets to my uncle’s house, wearing dull colours and a hood.

  As I neared it, my heart beat harder and harder, and my breathing grew shallower. I was afraid.

  The door was shut, which it should never have been on a day of work.

  I stood looking at it for a while.

  I knocked, and there was no answer.

  I was . . . relieved.

  I walked up the conduit to Nan’s house. I had been told never to visit her again, but on the other hand, she had probably been my closest friend.

  The shield of the Order was a powerful one. I couldn’t imagine being shown the door by an Alderman of London. Not if he wanted to be buried in a church.

  I didn’t call at the shop door, but went to the garden wall, as I had used to when we were courting. I think that I hoped she would lean out from her window – I know I looked at it.

  Suddenly she appeared.

  I think my heart stopped.

  She was not the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen – not after France – but beauty is a wonderful thing, and when you decide on beauty, it never fades. Nan was . . . herself. And my heart soared to see her.

  The look on her face was priceless. She looked at me as a man, judged me worthy of a second look and gave the slightest smile, not really flirtatious but a firm acknowledgement of me, my upright carriage and my muscles (women look at these things even when they don’t think they do) and then – remember, I had a hood and she couldn’t see my hair – something gave me away. Her eyes became fuller and deeper and her regard solidified, then she leaped to her feet, leaned out the widow, shouted, ‘William!’ and vanished.

  I could hear her running down the twisting chimney stairs.

  The garden gate flew open and there was her mother, who grinned.

  An excellent sign.

  ‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ cackled her mother. ‘William Gold, you haven’t been hanged. How fares it with thee?’ And she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek.

  I confess that I found the phrase ‘haven’t been hanged’ a little too close to the bone, but I laughed, and then Nan slammed into me. She’d added flesh since fourteen, and she was hardly light – her hug was as hard as a man’s – but despite some gains, I picked her up and twirled her around her father’s garden.

  ‘Stop that, William! I weigh ten stone, now, and you’ll hurt your back.’ She laughed. ‘I’m an old married lady with two daughters.’

  Her mother put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come into the kitchen and tell us your adventures,’ she said.

  So I did.

  An hour on, with two cups of candian wine in me, I met Nan’s da, who came in wearing enough finery to be abroad in Avignon or Paris – wool hose in his guild’s colours, and a jupon with a long velvet gown over it, all trimmed in fur. For July in England, it was a bit much, and he started stripping off before he noticed me.

  ‘William Gold?’ he asked, and before I could fear his reaction, he was pumping my hand. ‘We heard you was at Poitiers with the Prince,’ he said.

  They had?

  ‘Your sister wrote to us,’ Nan said, eyes cast down but smiling widely. ‘And again last autumn, to say you’d paid her way to be a full sister. That’s how we knew you were. . .’ she looked up. ‘Prosperous.’

  ‘A sister of the Order!’ the Alderman said. ‘You must bathe in gold, young William. How fare ye? Are you . . . a scholar?’

  I laughed. ‘I’m a soldier, master. I serve a knight of the Order, myself. I’m a lay brother.’ I shrugged. ‘The ladies have already heard all my stories.’

  Which is to say, I’d left out the horror, the love-making and the dirt, and told the war stories in which I seemed a hero rather than those in which I seemed a fool. Like most young men at home after war.

  Master Richard rose and embraced me. ‘Be free of my house,’ he said graciously. ‘Not that my wife and daughter haven’t made you so already, I have no doubt.’

  I asked what I’d waited all that time to ask. ‘How . . . is my uncle?’

  Master Richard made a face like a man whose drunk bad milk. ‘He still has his mark, and he does some business,’ Master Richard said. ‘Your aunt died.’

  Nan’s mother spat. ‘He killed her.’

  Nan looked away.

  Master Richard spread his hands. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said softly.

  I heard other news – how Tom Courtney was a full member of the guild, one of the youngest ever; how my sister and two other sisters had come during an outbreak of the Plag
ue and were held to have worked miracles, and how Nan’s husband, a mercer, had fought at Winchelsea when the French came, and now was an enthusiastic member of the London bands – the militia.

  ‘He’ll be home in a day,’ Nan said. ‘I pray you like him.’

  I smiled at all of them. ‘I’m sure that I will,’ I said.

  They invited me to sup and I bowed. ‘I have a friend,’ I said. ‘My fellow donat, a Spanish gentleman. I would esteem it a favour if I might bring him.

  That was easily done. There’s no merchant in London who doesn’t like having a Spanish aristocrat at his table.

  Before returning to the priory, I walked up the hill to the abbey. There was Brother Bartholomew, who gave me a great embrace, and, to my shock, there was ‘monk’ John, last seen on a battlefield. He, too, gave me an embrace.

  We looked at each other warily.

  He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t the life for me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’m meant for God, neither, but the food’s good.’ His eyes were far away. ‘I’m not . . . it wasn’t . . .’ he met my gaze and his was troubled. ‘You know what a life it was.’

  I laughed – not a laugh of fun, but a laugh that understood. ‘John, I’m a lay brother of the Order of Saint John.’

  His own roar of laughter probably said more about us and our lives than any speech, but he hugged me more warmly than before.

  They took me to the old Abbott, who was no longer serving, but mostly sat in the cloister and read.

  For a long moment, I feared he wouldn’t know me.

  ‘I’m Will Gold, Father,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said. His hands, old as bones, came up and clasped mine. ‘God love us, child, you came back.’

  Dinner with Nan was a delight. We shared a cup of wine while Juan entertained her parents with stories of Spain.

  We met by chance in the passage by the stairs – me going to the jakes and she returning from the pantry. She leaned over and kissed me very hard, then shifted herself down the passage, as light on her feet as ever.

  Later, at the door, her mother bussed me on each cheek and said, ‘Now you come back when you are in London, but not so often that you make Nan see stars. You hear me, Will Gold? Your manners are pretty and your friend’s a gentleman born; see you act one, too. Do I have to speak more clearly, young man?’

  Nan sputtered. ‘Mother!’

  ‘Mother nothing, girl. I’m flesh and blood like you. I have eyes.’ She glared at us and then smiled. ‘Be off with you. I’ll go inside – for as long as it takes me to say a paternoster for you.’

  I kissed Nan – the sort of kiss that lingers between what might be considered friendship and what might be considered lechery. She smiled at the ground, twined her fingers with me briefly and went back inside.

  I decided I didn’t really want to meet her husband.

  Juan and I walked through the darkening streets to the priory. He looked at me in the light of some cressets and said, ‘They are good, worthy people.’

  I nodded, suddenly devastated to realize what I might have had.

  The way I tell this, it may seem to you that I was almost hanged for my misdeeds, and then I was rescued, and like the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus, my life of sin was over. But I tell you, gentles, my heart varied between black and white, hope and despair. If you have comitted sins – bad sins, not the venal ones the priests rant about – and you spend time with good people, whether people like Fra Peter or people like Nan’s mother, you have to look at yourself. These good people are mirrors, and unless you are a liar and a caitiff, you see. Every day I saw. Some days – many days, if I wasn’t given exercise and hard work, like a troublesome colt – I considered slinking away.

  Every day.

  Bah! Never mind. But I tell this like it was ordained, and the truth is that I was still unsure. Still ready to bolt.

  The next day I went to the Bardi factor in London and drew a little money. I bought the Abbott a pair of reading glasses – the Venetians made them. I’d seen them in France, and in Avignon everyone had them.

  I bought Nan a brooch of pearls. I walked to the gate at sunset and pinned it to a ribbon, which I hung on the latch. Then I knocked and walked away.

  Our last day in England, Juan and I rode the horses out to Southwark and prepared them for the ship, then I rented a hack and rode to the nunnery to visit my sister.

  As a donat, I was allowed to meet her in the parlour, and she was so happy to see me, so happy that, in her eyes, I’d turned to God, that mostly all she did was cry. And yet, to my delight, when her eyes were dry, I saw that she had become one of those tough-minded nuns who gets things done. We fell into each other’s arms. I have seldom sobbed tears while grinning like a loon, but there I was.

  She told me a few of her adventures – this brought on by my remembering Nan and her mother to her – and she grinned like a man.

  ‘Aye, the Plague, brother,’ she said. ‘My foe and Satan’s tool.’ She tossed her shoulders back. ‘I don’t understand the ways of men, and war, and yet, when I understand that there is Plague among the whores in Southwark, and my sisters and I pack to go to their aid, I feel something, and I wonder if it is the same thing you feel when you hear the trumpets.’

  Courage comes in a number of forms. Going to a place with Plague – of your own free will?

  But to gain a little benison in her eyes, I told her of the days when Sam and all my men had Plague, and Richard, too.

  ‘And you tended them?’ she asked.

  ‘What else could I do?’ I answered.

  She kissed me. ‘God loves you, William Gold.’ She grinned, and for a moment she had a little imp in the corner of her mouth, as she sometimes did when we were children. ‘And so do I. Listen, brother, you paid my bride price, and I can never repay you, but I pray for you each day. And I fear you need it. You live with war. It is all around you, and a man who stands on a dunghill gets shit on his feet.’

  She put a hand on my arm – I’d started to hear her swear.

  ‘I live more in the world than most married women,’ she said. ‘I try to heal the sick, with God’s help, and I see the shit every day.’ She paused. ‘Need you go back to war, brother?’

  I had thought all these things, so I looked at the polished floor and said, ‘I’m a soldier, sister. I hope to be a knight.’

  She hugged me tight. ‘Go with God, then. Write to me sometimes, when you aren’t too busy.’

  I was the one who wept, then. To see her . . . solid. Not just solid in her faith, but with humour, toughness and understanding. And love. She was better than me.

  But it had all been for something. After I saw her, I think I saw myself differently. Again, it was no road to Damascus, but I think it was a road, and I could follow it to knighthood.

  England had two more surprises in store for me.

  Fra Peter was called to the tower to speak to the Chancellor of England – probably about the crusade – and Juan and I were left cooling our heels in Southwark for two additional days. Where ships called and where whores leaned out from inn balconies and called suggestions after you.

  ‘Hello, Red! You could be riding me in comfort on a feather bed before the bell rings?’ I remember that, because the lass was big enough to ride.

  They could make me blush. It wasn’t like France or Avignon. Whores in London have rights, and they are . . . English. At any rate, we tried hard not to commit various sins, although our attempts at abstinence were not cloistered, and we tempted ourselves constantly, all but patrolling the main thoroughfare. Ah, youth.

  At any rate, we stopped to drink in the King’s Head. It was full of royal household men coming back from a royal hunting trip and debating money matters. There were two dozen royal archers and some squires.

  I saw Sam Bibbo in the same moment he saw me.

  And over his shoulder I saw Geoffrey Chaucer.

  Chaucer was a royal squire, or like enough. He sneered at me from a distance, but I co
uld tell that he was interested to see me there, and eventually – the inn wasn’t that big – we came together. I was chatting to Bibbo.

  I smiled at Chaucer, showing all my teeth. He’d helped with my sister after all, so I was prepared to let bygones go by.

  He didn’t offer a hand. ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  ‘And away again,’ I allowed.

  He looked at Juan, who was a quick study and had picked up my hesitation.

  Juan bowed, gloved hand to his chest.

  Chaucer returned his bow. ‘Spanish?’ he asked.

  Juan smiled. ‘I am from Castile,’ he said.

  Chaucer smiled. ‘Ah, it is warmer there, signor. And the towns are beautiful and the people the most courteous in the world.’

  ‘You know Castile?’ Juan asked, delighted.

  ‘I know that water can be more precious than wine, there,’ Chaucer said. Then he turned back to me. ‘We heard you were dead,’ he said. ‘Betrayed to your death by Richard Musard.’

  I shrugged. The world of soldiers and arms isn’t that big.

  ‘Musard stabbed you in the back?’ he asked. ‘I’m surprised. I thought better of him. Even if you are a far cry from a gentil and perfect knight, you were his best comrade.’

  This man always spoke faster than I. He made my head spin, asked hard questions and danced away like a swordsman demonstrating his skills. I wasn’t sure myself what I thought of Richard’s betrayal, but in that moment I found that I wasn’t ready to be shot of him. I took a deep breath. I said. ‘Richard was a friend.’ I met Chaucer’s eyes. ‘There was a woman involved.’

  Chaucer barked his laugh. He had grown – he was no longer a wiry boy but a man. ‘A woman? Between you and Musard? By the saviour, monsieur, there was a time when I thought the two of you closer than men and women.’ He laughed his nasty courtier’s laugh, but then he looked at me and shook his head. ‘Your pardon, Gold. My mouth runs before me, sometimes.’

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ I said. ‘But par dieu, Master Chaucer, it is the first time I have ever heard you admit it.’

  Juan looked at me and then at Master Chaucer, as if gauging the likelihood of violence. I took a step back. ‘Never mind, Master Chaucer. Perhaps I have only myself to blame, at that. I’m going back to Avignon with Fra Peter.’