by Terry Jones
Tom regarded his squire with some affection, and then said: ‘John? Do you always tell the truth?’
‘I do, my lord!’ replied John instantly.
‘I know you do,’ said Tom. ‘And in this place that is a problem.’
‘But surely it’s right to tell the truth?’
‘What if my Lord Bernabò or – more likely – one of his torturers quizzes you about where I’ve gone and what I’m up to? You would tell him the truth – you would have no choice.’
John thought for a bit and then said slowly: ‘In that case, Sir Thomas, it would be best for me not to know.’
‘But if you say you don’t know, they won’t believe you. They will never believe that I haven’t told you where I was going.’
John was silent, waiting for his master to continue.
‘I am going to Ferrara to claim a ransom that has suddenly come available.’
‘Really?’ asked Squire John.
‘So if you are asked where I have gone,’ continued Tom patiently, ‘it will be no lie to say that is what I told you.’
Squire John nodded. It amazed him how Sir Thomas seemed to think of every eventuality. But then suddenly the image of his lady-love blotted out all else from his mind’s eye.
‘Can’t I just say goodbye to the Lady Beatrice?’
‘No! You must never go near her again! Not if you value your life.’
‘Can’t I just send her a note to tell her . . . I don’t know . . . that I’ll wait for her forever or something?’
‘John . . . the duke’s wife and his favourite mistress are both watching your every movement. For the moment you are useful to them alive, but they will not hesitate to dispose of you as soon as they want to. All we can do is play along with them until we can find a way out – and that means not doing anything more to inflame their anger against you.’
‘Sir Thomas?’ Squire John was looking down at his shoes, as he stood in the filth of the dungeon floor.
‘Yes, John?’
‘May I ask you something?’
‘You may,’ said Tom.
‘I don’t mean to be impertinent . . . Sir Thomas . . . but I was wondering . . . I mean talking about my Lady Beatrice . . . I was wondering that you don’t have a lady . . . at least I’ve never heard you mention her name . . .’
Squire John looked up anxiously to see if he had offended his master. But Tom was staring into the darkness, as if he were searching for a memory there . . . as if he expected to see some image from his past step out of that dungeon blackness to greet him with open arms and smiling face.
‘My lady?’ murmured Tom. ‘My lady is . . . I don’t know where she is . . . that is . . . I don’t know where they are. There were two ladies I served . . . I loved them both . . . both . . .’
Squire John waited . . . but that appeared to be all that Tom was going to say on the matter.
‘Time’s up!’ said an oddly falsetto voice, and instead of a precious memory, it was the jailer who stepped out of the shadows. He was the most unlikely jailer. He was as pleasant looking an individual as you could possibly find, elegantly dressed in particoloured hose and a pink tunic. He seemed to bear no affinity with the heavy and gloomy dungeons through which he passed.
The jailer smiled affably at Tom. ‘I’m afraid it’s time to go. Sorry and all that, but I’m under orders not to let anyone speak to the prisoner. I was only doing you a favour because I love England.’
‘You love England?’ said Tom in amazement.
‘Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it? Most Italians hate the English – they call them “devils incarnate”. After all, they infest our country and burn our farms and kill our people and steal from us and destroy our crops and vines and nowhere is safe from them – not a cottage, not a village. And yet I once went to England and it was very nice. I stayed with a family named Philipot. They were very nice.’
A silence descended on the dungeon. No one quite knew what to say. In the end Tom held his hand out to John. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘Uh uh!’ said the jailer. ‘No touching!’
Tom shrugged and with a last glance at his squire, he retraced his steps towards the stone stairway that led back up to the world of the living.
Chapter 4
Milan 1385
As Tom rode up to the great gates of Milan, he reflected once again on how nothing was at all the way he’d imagined it would be when he was young. He’d always imagined himself dressed as a knight in brightly coloured coat armour, emblazoned with his own coat of arms, a plumed helmet on his head and a vivid shield on his wrist, displaying the same arms. And yet here he was, riding out in a battered old brown jerkin that bore the marks of his mail coat and nothing else . . . no chevronels braced, or bend sinister . . . no unicorn passant, or wolf salient . . . just a brown jacket with a black cloak over his shoulders. He hadn’t even chosen himself a coat of arms yet. It seemed that irrelevant.
His horse’s harness was serviceable but not decorated. And he didn’t carry a shield. Only the sword at his side indicated a man-at-arms – although not necessarily a knight.
Another thing that was not at all the way he’d always imagined it was the weather. As a youth, he’d always imagined the future in sunshine, with a clear blue sky above. Today, despite the fact that it was already May, it was cold. The sky was dreary and there was a fine mist of damp – you couldn’t even call it rain really – but it drifted down from the clouds making everything wet and somehow unheroic. The day was as drab as Tom felt. But then this wasn’t the future – this was now.
The gatekeeper was examining the papers that had been provided for Tom by the Lady Regina della Scala.
‘What’s your business in Ferrera?’ demanded the gatekeeper.
‘Oh, it’s a debt I have to collect,’ said Tom.
‘Usual thing,’ grunted the gatekeeper, and handed the papers back. ‘Avoid the Lodi road, there are reports of bandits,’ he muttered, and Tom was through the gate and heading away from the court of Bernabò Visconti at last.
But instead of feeling relieved of the burden of the Visconti serpent that had been coiled around his heart and spirit for so many months, he felt more ensnared by it than ever.
What of Squire John? The Visconti ladies said they would release him as soon as Tom returned. But would they? In his heart of hearts Tom felt he knew that the Visconti would never suffer an insult to their pride to go unpunished; for an insult is how they would regard the love of a humble squire like John for one of the daughters of the great Bernabò.
Bernabò looked after all his children with the zeal and care of a doting father. It was quite a feat, when you considered the malignance of his own character, and even more so when you considered that he had no less than thirty children.
He certainly looked after them, but he looked after them to his own advantage. In Bernabò’s view, the marriage of every child was a business opportunity: his sons would be married off to the daughters of the wealthy, who would bring with them handsome dowries to swell the Visconti coffers, while his daughters – offered complete with lavish portions of the Visconti wealth – would be married only into the royal households of Europe, thereby extending the influence of the Visconti name. In this way, for example, he had seen his daughter Violante married off to one of the sons of the king of England.
In Bernabò’s eyes, his daughter Bernada’s sin was not a moral failing, it was far graver than that: it was bad for his business. In dallying with a courtier of low rank, she had been squandering whatever marriage potential she might have had. To put it plainly, she had been consorting with someone who was of no political or economic advantage to her father. Her fate was a warning to all the other twenty-nine children.
So would Regina della Scala and Donnina de’ Porri really let Squire John out of his prison? Would they be content with simply giving him a ticking off? Tom had to believe it for his squire’s sake, but it was an act of faith.
Then there was his own situation.
Wasn’t that was just as bad as Squire John’s? Here he was travelling to the court of Pavia to spy on its lord, Gian Galeazzo Visconti – a man whose father had been not only as ruthless as his brother Bernabò but even more scheming. If his son followed in his father’s footsteps, what chance did Tom have of concealing the true purpose of his visit? Surely the eagle eyes of Gian Galeazzo would be watching him, and his mind (which was far more truly devious than Tom’s could ever hope to be) would be weighing up the deceits that Tom would be forced to employ.
And to tell the truth, Tom was really no better than Squire John when it came to deception. He had learned to employ it to survive but it did not come naturally, and a deceiver who does not truly enjoy the art of deception will, one day or another, be caught out.
One false step, one contradictory story, and Tom knew he would find himself under torture in the dungeons of Pavia, unable to rescue his squire from the dungeons of Milan. Tom knew that for the next month he would be treading a tightrope over an invisible pit of hell. The stench of the dungeons, of course, never rose up as far as the refined and lavishly furnished public rooms of the court.
At this point, his reverie was interrupted by a drop of water that had trickled somehow inside his hood and now suddenly made its way down his back. Tom shivered and tried to concentrate his mind on the journey ahead.
Pavia was an easy day’s ride from Milan, but Tom had set out on the Ferrera road into order to give the impression that that was where he was going. He had planned to curve down south when he reached the river Adda, but now the gatekeeper’s warning meant he would have to make an even wider sweep, adding a few hours to his journey.
On a bright sunny day that would have been no great hardship, but in this miserable, dripping day of mist and wet, every hour on horseback was like a day in purgatory . . . or an hour in the dank dungeons of the Visconti.
Tom wrapped his cloak around himself and pulled the hood over his head, trying to blot out as much of the irksome world as possible. At least the steam that rose from his wet horse surrounded him in a comforting cocoon of horse smell and damp warmth. But otherwise it was a cheerless journey, and long.
Bucephalus, the horse, kept grunting in a most un-horse-like way. He appeared to be groaning, as if he too wished he were anywhere else. Tom’s mind seemed to be doing the same thing. It refused to stay in the tedium and discomfort of the here and now, and kept sneaking off back to another time and place.
Images kept rising in his mind’s eye: a river in full spate, the wind snagging up the waves as they slammed into the piers of a bridge . . . a bridge across a wide expanse of dangerous water . . . and on the other side of the river – a grim square-walled fortress . . .
The horse stumbled and Tom’s attention was dragged back to the uneven road. The rain was now falling in heavier droplets and running off his hood and down his face . . . he would need to find shelter.
But as Bucephalus regained his regular gait, Tom found himself jogged back again into his memories . . .
He saw a cart crossing a bridge . . . no! Now it was falling . . . the oxen stamping thin air . . . a cart loaded with great tree trunks falling slowly and below the cart he could now make out two figures: one a fat man in a blue surcoat, the other a giant with a moon-face . . . Anton the Giant . . . it had all happened so long ago . . . but for Tom it seemed so recent it could have happened this morning.
What had they been doing? Oh yes . . . Anton’s village, like so many French villages, had been devastated by the English soldiery who had been slashing and burning their way through France on their routine of terror, until the villagers had been forced to sleep in underground dens.
And the French nobility? Instead of protecting the poor village people, they had demanded their cut. If the villagers could afford to pay off the English soldiery, they said, they could afford to pay off their own aristocracy! It was only fair! And then the Church demanded its tenth . . . which is why Tom had been despatched with Anton the Giant to take a letter to the Pope begging him to waive the money due to the Church.
In Avignon – that grim fortress in which the Pope daily counted his treasure – Tom had realised that his mission was futile. Although he succeeded in putting the villagers’ request to the great pontiff, the great pontiff’s only response had been to call the guards.
Tom had rescued his best friend Alan (who was actually a girl by the name of Ann disguised as a boy). He had also rescued the beautiful Emilia de Valois, who was desperate to escape marrying her uncle, Jean de Craon, Archbishop of Reims.
Together the three of them had jumped from the top of the Pope’s palace into a sheet held by Anton the Giant and Sir John Hawkley. Chased by the palace guards, they had tried to escape across the bridge of Saint-Bénézet at Avignon, but halfway across, Tom, Ann and Emily had turned to watch in horror as Anton the Giant and Sir John Hawkley had been swept to their deaths by an out-of-control cart.
Tom blinked. The image of a house was looming out of the curtain of rain ahead of him. A canal ran alongside the building, and the rain was now pitting the surface of the water like the hoof prints of a million tiny water-borne horses galloping down its length into the increasing murk descending from the skies.
It took Tom a moment to realise that this was not in his mind’s eye: this was a real house that actually existed here and now. It was a real house that represented real warmth and real shelter and perhaps real food.
He dismounted and tied his horse to a post.
Chapter 5
The Road to Pavia 1385
A girl came to the door with feathers in her hair and a cross smile on her face.
‘How on earth can you look cross and be smiling at the same time?’ wondered Tom. But before he could come up with an answer, the girl had said:
‘You’re soaked to the skin.’ She said it in a way that indicated annoyance and yet at the same time sympathy. ‘You’d better come in.’
The cross-yet-smiling girl showed Tom into a simple room. A faint suggestion of a fire was smouldering in the grate, and a pot hung hopefully over it – as if there were the slightest chance of any heat reaching up that far.
Tom dropped his bag, and stood there, a pool of water forming at his feet.
The girl leaned against the wall and looked at him with that same expression on her face . . . or rather now she looked half-amused by the sight of Tom and yet irritated by his presence. Tom simply could not work her out. So he just stood there, dripping.
‘You’d better take your clothes off,’ said the girl. ‘You can dry them by the fire.’
Tom looked at the sorry excuse for a fire that lay, gasping its last, in the cold sepulchre of the fireplace. The girl followed his gaze and stared at the ailing fire too. She frowned and the furrows across her brow made her look momentarily old. Yet, as soon as she stopped frowning, the youth returned to her face and she looked almost beautiful, thought Tom.
And so they both stood there looking from the sick fire to each other and back again, as if the absurdity of the suggestion that you could dry anything there – let alone cook something – had wiped their minds blank.
At last, the girl stood up and walked across to the fireplace. She bent down and took a stick from the small pile and placed it very carefully and gently on the embers, as if she were laying a penny on a dead man’s eyes.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Are you going to stand around and catch a fever?’
‘No,’ mumbled Tom. ‘Where shall I hang my clothes?’
‘Give them to me,’ said the girl.
And so Sir Thomas English took off his wet cloak, in the house of a girl whose name he did not know, and handed it to her. Then he took off his sodden doublet and his wet hose and finally he removed his outer breeches and handed them over to the girl, who scowled in an amused and friendly way.
She hung his clothes from iron hooks around the fireplace and then she prodded the stick with her toe. It almost burst into flame, but then died immediately, as if the ef
fort were too much for a patient who was so far gone.
The girl suddenly looked round at Tom defiantly.
‘We have to be careful with our wood!’ she said, as if he had just accused her of unforgivable and flagrant niggardliness. ‘The duke makes us pay for every stick. His officers come and poke their stinking noses into our woodshed. He would make us pay for the blood in our veins, if he could get at it.’
Tom stood there in his under breeches. ‘Perhaps you have a blanket?’ he suggested helpfully.
But the girl didn’t answer. She turned away and put another stick on the fire . . . then another . . . then another . . . then she turned back to Tom.
‘I expect you can burn your fire all day and never think twice about it?’ It was an accusation, and she narrowed his eyes as she waited for his defence.
‘Why should you think that?’ asked Tom.
The girl got up from the fire, and strode across to a chest. She unlocked it and pulled out a worn old blanket, then she came across to Tom and began to drape the blanket across his naked shoulders.
‘It’s obvious,’ she said.
‘What’s obvious?’ asked Tom, as he gratefully wrapped the blanket around himself.
‘You,’ she said.
Tom pulled a stool up beside the fire – yes! You could actually start calling it a fire now, thought Tom. It had crossed that indefinable threshold where non-combustibility and flammability meet. The non-fire had become a fire . . . like life and death . . . it’s such a thin line that separates them, thought Tom.
‘Why am I so obvious?’ he asked. ‘What is so obvious about me?’
‘It’s obvious you’re used to good things,’ she replied. ‘You should have seen your face when you first saw our fire. You went like this . . .’
And the girl put on an expression of eagerness and expectancy that suddenly turned into total dismay. Tom couldn’t help laughing. But the girl scowled before she smiled.
‘And then another thing,’ she said. ‘You took off your hose like this . . .’
