by John Wilcox
“Yes, of course. I will do whatever you want.”
A shaft of winter sunlight came through the kitchen window and Gladwin noticed the dust particles dancing upwards in it. It also caught the back of Marie’s head and illuminated the few strands that had escaped from her severe hair style, giving her head a golden halo effect and enhancing her loveliness. The Welshman regarded her with awe for, despite her youth, she had seemed to take on a transcendent kind of beauty, an ethereal, timeless grace.
He nodded slowly. “Of course,” he repeated. “I will do whatever you wish.”
“Good. Now Will, if Chauvin is right that Henri will be freed tomorrow – and I pray that he is right – that means that we only have this afternoon. So we must go back to the field again then. Keep wearing these garments and I will call for you in about two hours. Make some excuse to your comrade – but do not tell him about the aeroplane. Chauvin wishes this to be a secret for the moment.”
“Very well.”
They kissed quickly and Gladwin returned to the cellar, where Proctor was sitting morosely on his newly-made bed. “What was all that about, then?” he enquired.
“Nothing much. I am… ah… helping her with the accounts for the farm. I promised to give her a hand this afternoon, too.”
Proctor shot him a keen, feral look. “You’re having it off with her, aren’t you? You dirty bastard.”
The accusation stung Gladwin – not least because of its accuracy. “Don’t talk rubbish, Proctor. You don’t know what you’re talking about. The poor woman has got a lot to put up with at the moment. The Gestapo are probably knocking her husband about at this very minute. She’s got two British airmen in her cellar, which is in itself enough to get her shot if we are discovered, and she’s trying to keep a farm running. And all you can think about is sex. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Proctor grunted and looked away. But he seemed unconvinced.
“Look here,” Gladwin went on. “We’re probably going to have to travel eight hundred miles or so together across occupied France. I don’t like you and you don’t like me. But we’ve got to stick together and support each other, because if we don’t we will be completely buggered. So a truce – right?”
He put out his hand and, slowly, Proctor took it. “Right, Taff. A truce.” But he avoided Gladwin’s eye.
Shortly after the two men had finished their lunch of bread and cheese brought to them by Josephine, Marie lifted the trapdoor and called softly down to Gladwin. He rose and surreptitiously took his greatcoat before he climbed the stone steps but Proctor noticed. “Doing the books in the woods, then, Taff?” he enquired. Gladwin pretended not to hear.
*
Gladwin had left his crutch behind and was gratified to find that he could walk with only a slight limp, leaning perhaps a little heavily on Marie. They made their way through the trees once again and Gladwin was delighted to breath in the cold, clear air of the late February afternoon. The sky contained puffball clouds and a winter bird was calling as they neared the site where he had first been discovered by Henri. It should have been a happy stroll on a fine day, but Gladwin was apprehensive. Marie was clearly set on taking him somehow to this other time and place – although why did they have to return to this sodden field, with its strange rumblings? He said nothing, but Marie sensed his worry.
She snuggled up to him as they sat down in the little clearing opposite the rutted field. “Have no concern, Will,” she said. “I am with you. Did you bring the nock?”
“The what?” He presumed that she was referring to the little object he had found in the field but it was the first time she had given it a name. He had no idea what it meant.
“The little horn thing.”
Gladwin nodded glumly and produced it. She pushed it into his hand, closed his fingers around it and closed her hand around his. They sat together, the warmth of their bodies penetrating through their outer garments. Once again Gladwin began to feel drowsy, but this time there was no slipping into a few moments of sleep. He sat there, conscious of her nearness and anxious that whatever gift she might have should easily be transposed to him. He tried to clear his mind, to leave it empty and available, like a blank canvas waiting for the first brush stroke. For a moment, he felt that the old soreness in his thighs and buttocks was returning but then that receded and he was only conscious of the encroaching cold. He rubbed the horn gently between his fingers and experienced for a moment a certain soreness between the first two fingers and the thumb but that too seemed to fade away almost as soon as it had arrived.
They sat together for perhaps ten minutes before Gladwin stirred. “I am sorry, Marie,” he said, sitting upright. “But nothing is happening. Whatever it is you want me to do or wherever you want to take me – it just isn’t happening, my love.”
She put her hand to her mouth and regarded him without speaking for a moment. Then she said, “ah Will. I am so sorry. It is not meant to be, then. Quelle dommage.”
He cupped her face between his hands and regarded her intently. “Now, my love. I think it is time for you to tell me what this is all about. First of all, what is this place called and what is that memorial, or whatever it is, there.”
“Very well.” She nodded across the field to where, in the distance, some housetops could be glimpsed between the trees. “You know, Will, that the little village where we live is called Tramecourt?”
He nodded.
“Well, that other village, across there through the trees, is called Azincourt.” She pronounced it, of course, in the French way, as ‘Azencour’.
“What?” He frowned. “Azen… ah – Agincourt. The great battle. Are you saying that this is the field where the battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415?”
“Oui.”
“But what does this have to do with me, with us? I don’t understand.”
“You were here before my love, all those years ago,” Marie began “and then you landed right in the middle of this field when you fell from the plane.”
Will remembered the peculiar sensations he had experienced when he came to in the field, and then there were the eerie noises emanating from the nock...”Yes wait a minute… that burning in my loins. Of course! Most of the English archers had dysentery when they fought the battle. And that pounding I heard…”
Marie nodded, her eyes bright. “Yes, it was the French knights charging on their big horses. Jean was among them.”
“Jean! Who the hell is – or was – Jean?”
“He was my brother, then. Now, he is Henri, my husband.”
“What!”
She looked anxious again. “I am sorry, I know it seems very confusing. You see, in our previous lives we have different… what do you call it… identities, yes, in each existence. So Henri – he was then my brother, Henri, Comte de Pont de Vitrac – fought for the King at Agincourt and was captured.”
“Blimey! And me. Where do I fit in to all of this?”
“Ah, you were there, Will. You were a very fine archer who fought for your King Hal. You remember that the doctor examined you and said that your left arm was thicker than your right and that you stood slightly twisted? Well, that all came from those long years of pulling the bow and shooting the arrows.” She touched the horn tip. “This is an archer’s nock, the horn tip that fitted at the end of your bow and over which you would put the bow string. These things used to be turned up quite often by ploughs on this field. So you see,” she spoke sorrowfully now, “then, as now, you were a fighting man, killing other men.”
“Once a gunner, always a gunner, I suppose. But, did we meet then?” He heard himself ask the question and realised that there was now no note of disbelief in his voice. And yet, and yet…
“Yes, we met then. I recognised you, of course, as soon as I saw you that first morning in the cellar, for you had altered very little. But also your name had hardly changed. You were called Will, then, and not Bill but your name was spelled differently, like this: G, L, A, D, E, W,
Y, N, E. And you came from Wales, then, as, I think, you do now.”
“Yes. From Brecon. Well, blow me down. How did we meet…?” He stopped suddenly and gripped her shoulders. “Look Marie. You are not making this up, are you? Because I don’t remember any of this and I’m not sure I believe in – what is it, reincarnation?”
Her face saddened again. “No, I do not make this up, Will, and I am sad that you should think that. I am sorry that you could not find out for yourself by having a regression here. Then you would not have any doubts. That is why I tried so hard… because I have no proof.” Her voice tailed away again but then her eyes brightened. “But wait. Remember the burning feeling and the noise you heard when you landed. And look at your hands.” She curled back the fingers of his clenched right hand and ran her thumb over his palm and the inside joints of his first two fingers. “See, that is where you pulled the strings of your bow.”
Disbelievingly, Gladwin realised that the insides of his fingers were calloused in a way he had never seen before. He examined his left hand and saw that the skin of the palm and at the base of his thumb was worn as hard as canvas. His fingernails, which he kept meticulously clean, were now broken and blackened with soil and hard usage. In an involuntary gesture, he rubbed both his hands together and examined them again. The marks had receded and his hands had softened. He rubbed them again and this time the flesh had regained the pink softness of the grammar school teacher.
“Oh lord!” He put his head in his hands. “All right. You had better tell me the rest of the story. No, wait.” He gestured towards the white stone crucifix. “What’s that?”
“That is a memorial to the French who fell in the battle. It also marks the pits where the dead from the battle were buried. About two thousand Frenchmen were buried there. You only lost about two hundred men, I think. It is all so sad, no?”
“Very. No wonder I found this place spooky. All right. Now tell me how we met.”
“The first time?”
“Bloody hell! Have there been others?”
“Oh yes. But I will tell you of the first time – that was Azincourt, or just after it.” She settled herself more comfortably. “Jean, my elder brother, was in the second battle – that’s what they called the waves of attacking soldiers then – that advanced on the English lines. It was raining that day and, although we were many and you were few – some say the French numbered forty thousand and your invaders only about eight thousand – the knights on their horses in the first battle had difficulty in the mud and your arrows brought down so many. Jean advanced on foot and swung his broadsword valiantly against the English nobility.”
Entranced, Gladwin nodded. He could visualise the tall, proud de Vitrac bearing himself well on that day.
“But it was you who captured him. You left your barricade of wooden stakes behind which the archers sheltered and dodged beneath the swing of his sword and brought him down, with your dagger at his throat.”
“I did not kill him?”
Marie shook her head. She was enjoying the telling of a good story. “No. Perhaps you would have done but Jean, lying there weighed down by his heavy armour, yielded and gave you his favour.”
“His favour?”
“Yes. The green silk scarf that I had given him when he rode away to the war. He wore it on his helm. He gave it to you as a symbol of his surrender. He could not see clearly through the slit in his helmet and he thought you were a nobleman, you see.”
“Why? What difference would it make who the hell I was?”
“Ah.” She frowned. “It was a great dishonour to be captured by a man of – forgive me, mon cher – a peasant, a man of ignoble birth. It was usual for the nobles to capture each other and hold the captured man until a ransom was paid. But it was most unusual for a nobleman to be captured by a peasant. And that is who the archers were, of course, although I have been told that they earned sixpence a day at that time, compared with – what was it? – two shillings a year as ploughmen back home. At that battle there were less than a thousand English nobles and men at arms, the rest were you archers, about five or six thousand of them.”
Gladwin nodded absently. “Yes, I know. I taught the battle. So I captured Henri, eh. That might account for…” He stopped. “How do you know all this, Marie. You could not have been there, surely?”
“Jean told me. It was quite a – what do you say – traumatic experience for him.”
“Hmm. Must have been, being captured by a miserable, lower-class bloke like me.”
She shook her head. “No. No. You mustn’t be offended, Will. They were different times.”
“All right.” He smiled. “How did we meet, then?”
“Ah. That was lovely. I brought his ransom – we had to borrow money and sell part of our estate – to you in Calais so that he could be free. I was very young, about fifteen, and,” she smiled coyly at him, “quite pretty, I think. I had two of our servants from the farm with me but they were old and when some rough English men-at-arms stopped us, they beat my people and took away the ransom money. You found me crying in the doorway of an alehouse in Calais. I had followed the robbers there, but I could not enter, of course.”
“Blimey. Bit of a coincidence you found me, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but I did not know that it was you that I was looking for and you did not know, of course, that I was bringing the ransom.”
“So, what happened?”
“I told you that I had been robbed and that the villains were inside. You took me in and I pointed them out to you and you fought them and gave me back my money.”
Gladwin stifled a smile. “I sound a bit like Errol Flynn.”
Marie’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you were strong and handsome, Will. You fought them so well.”
“Good for jolly old me.”
She frowned again. “Ah, you are making fun of me. You don’t believe me.”
Full of contrition, he picked up her hand and kissed it. “No, no. I am not making fun, my love. It is just so… well, difficult to believe it all. You seem to remember everything as though it was yesterday but, dammit, we’re talking about nearly five hundred and fifty years ago. How could you possibly know all this?”
“I have total recall, Will. I am lucky because I have the gift. I remember all our lives together – or most of them, at least.”
“Strewth! How many are there? No.” He held out a restraining hand. “Don’t tell me. Finish this one first. What happened after that?”
“I was thanking you and asking where I might find the rendezvous point, where I was supposed to meet this archer and give him the ransom. I explained how difficult it had been to raise the money and that it was unchristian to sell a man’s life in this way. It was then that you accidentally pulled Jean’s silk scarf from your pocket and I began to cry because it was you who was selling my brother back to me.” She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “And then, mon cher, you agreed that it was not right to trade in a man’s life like that – and you gave the purse of gold back to me.”
“Blimey, I must have been daft… no, sorry, only joking. It sounds the right thing to do, I must say.”
“And so it was. We fell in love then and there.”
“So – did we marry?”
She shook her head and her eyes brimmed again. “No. It would not have been possible because you had to return to England with King Hal and I had to go back to our father and return the gold pieces. But you promised to come to me… and you did not. I waited so long, Will, but we did not meet again in that life.”
“But we did later… er… in other existences?”
“Oh yes. We have always loved each other, although not always in this way. Would you now like me to tell you – or will you laugh at me?”
He grinned, but his eyes were uneasy behind the smile. He felt he was slowly being drawn deep into some strange morass – and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. “No laughing, I promise. I do want to know.”
<
br /> She looked around. The light was still strong and they were now quite warm, crouched side by side in the clearing surrounded by bushes on three sides. “Very well. I think we have time.”
“The first time was after Agincourt, in the early fifteenth century. Then, later, we were brother and sister in the south of France, sometime, I think, in about 1650. We were Cathars, Will. Do you know of them?”
“Of course. The religious sect, strong in the south of France and going back a long way, I would have thought, to much earlier, even pre-medieval times, surely?”
“Oui. There was much persecution, but we survived you and I.”
“I don’t know much about the Cathars. What did they – sorry, we – believe in, then?”
“Ah.” She frowned and her face took on a schoolgirlish attitude of concentration as she grappled with the semantics. “I do not think I can say it well in English but I will try. We believed that the Devil as well as God had created the world, because God, being good, could not have allowed evil to live in His world if He alone had created all this.” She swung her hand around in an inclusive gesture. “En conséquence, life was a constant struggle against evil and we thought that all things matériel were evil. So we did not believe in marriage and… er… the appetites of the body, you see.”
“Golly.” Gladwin ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m glad I don’t remember it, then. What happened to us?”
Her face clouded over and he could see pain in her eyes. “Oh, it was a bad, bad time. I know that we were arrested and it was painful and I cannot remember clearly. I think it is because I do not wish to.”
