Harlequin

by Bernard Cornwell

  'Madame!'

  'Don't madame me!' Jeanette thumped the table, almost upsetting the flask of ink. 'So what has passed between you and the Duke's men of business?'

  Belas sighed. He put the cap on the ink flask, laid down the quill and rubbed his thin cheeks. 'I have always,' he said, 'looked after the legal matters of this family. It is my duty, madame, and sometimes I must do things that I would rather not, but such things are also a part of my duty.' He half smiled. 'You are in debt, madame. You could rescue your finances easily enough by marrying a man of substance, but you seem reluctant to follow that course and so I see nothing but ruin in your future. Ruin. You wish some advice? Sell this house and you will have money enough to live for two or three years, and in that time the Duke will surely drive the English from Brittany and you and your son will be restored to Plabennec'

  Jeanette flinched. 'You think the devils will be defeated that easily?' She heard hoofs in the street and saw that Skeat's men were returning to her courtyard. They were laughing as they rode. They did not look like men who would be defeated soon; indeed, she feared they were unbeatable for they had a blithe confidence that galled her.

  'I think, madame,' Belas said, 'that you must make up your mind what you are. Are you Louis Halevy's daughter? Or Henri Chenier's widow? Are you a merchant or an aristocrat? If you are a merchant, madame, then marry here and be content. If you are an aristocrat then raise what money you can and go to the Duke and find yourself a new husband with a title.'

  Jeanette considered the advice impertinent, but did not bridle. 'How much would we make on this house?' she asked instead.

  'I shall enquire, madame,' Belas said. He knew the answer already, and knew that Jeanette would hate it, for a house in a town occupied by an enemy would fetch only a fraction of its proper value. So now was not the time to give Jeanette that news. Better, the lawyer thought, to wait until she was truly desperate, then he could buy the house and its ruined farms for a pittance.

  'Is there a bridge across the stream at Plabennec?' he asked, drawing the parchment towards him.

  'Forget the petition,' Jeanette said.

  'If you wish, madame.'

  'I shall think about your advice, Belas.'

  'You will not regret it,' he said earnestly. She was lost, he thought, lost and defeated. He would take her house and farms, the Duke would claim Plabennec and she would be left with nothing. Which was what she deserved, for she was a stubborn and proud creature who had risen far above her proper station. 'I am always,' Belas said humbly, 'at your ladyship's service.' From adversity, he thought, a clever man could always profit, and Jeanette was ripe for plucking. Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.

  Jeanette did not know what to do. She was loath to sell the house for she feared it would fetch a low price, but nor did she know how else she could raise money. Would Duke Charles welcome her? He had never shown any sign of it, not since he had opposed her marriage to his nephew, but perhaps he had softened since then? Perhaps he would protect her? She decided she would pray for guidance; so she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, crossed the yard, ignoring the newly returned soldiers, and went into St Renan's church. There was a statue of the virgin there, sadly shorn of her gilded halo, which had been ripped away by the English, and Jeanette often prayed to the image of Christ's mother, whom she believed had a special care for all women in trouble.

  She thought at first that the dimly lit church was empty. Then she saw an English bow propped against a pillar and an archer kneeling at the altar. It was the good-looking man, the one who wore his hair in a long pigtail bound with bowcord. It was, she thought, an irritating sign of vanity. Most of the English wore their hair cropped, but a few grew it extravagantly long and they were the ones who seemed most flamboyantly confident. She wished he would leave the church; then she was intrigued by his abandoned bow and so she picked it up and was astonished by its weight. The string hung loose and she wondered how much strength would be needed to bend the bow and hook the string's free loop on the empty horn tip. She pressed one end of the bow on the stone floor, trying to bend it, and just then an arrow span across the flagstones to lodge against her foot.

  'If you can string the bow,' Thomas said, still on his knees at the altar, 'you can have a free shot.'

  Jeanette was too proud to be seen to fail and too angry not to try, though she attempted to disguise her effort which barely flexed the black yew stave. She kicked the arrow away. 'My husband was killed by one of these bows,' she said bitterly.

  'I've often wondered,' Thomas said, 'why you Bretons or the French don't learn to shoot them. Start your son at seven or eight years, madame, and in ten years he'll be lethal.'

  'He'll fight as a knight, like his father.'

  Thomas laughed. 'We kill knights. They haven't made an armour strong enough to resist an English arrow.'

  Jeanette shuddered. 'What are you praying for, Englishman?' she asked. 'Forgiveness?'

  Thomas smiled. 'I am giving thanks, madame, for the fact that we rode six days in enemy country and did not lose one man.' He climbed from his knees and pointed to a pretty silver box that sat on the altar. It was a reliquary and had a small crystal window that was rimmed with drops of coloured glass. Thomas had peered through the window and seen nothing more than a small black lump about the size of a man's thumb. 'What is it?' he asked.

  'The tongue of St Renan,' Jeanette said defiantly. 'It was stolen when you came to our town, but God was good and the thief died next day and the relic was recovered.'

  'God is indeed good,' Thomas said drily. 'And who was St Renan?'

  'He was a great preacher,' she said, 'who banished the nains and gorics from our farmlands. They still live in the wild places, but a prayer to St Renan will scare them away.'

  'Nains and gorics?' Thomas asked.

  'They are spirits,' she said, 'evil ones. They once haunted the whole land, and I pray daily to the saint that he will banish the hellequin as he drove out the nains. You know what the hellequin are?'

  'We are,' Thomas said proudly.

  She grimaced at his tone. 'The hellequin,' she said icily, 'are the dead who have no souls. The dead who were so wicked in life that the devil loves them too much to punish them in hell and so he gives them his horses and releases them on the living.' She hefted his black bow and pointed to the silver plate tacked to its belly. 'You even have the devil's picture on your bow.'

  'It's a yale,' Thomas said.

  'It is a devil,' she insisted, and threw the bow at him. Thomas caught it and, because he was too young to resist showing off, casually strung it. He made it appear effortless. 'You pray to St Renan,' he said, 'and I shall pray to St Guinefort. We shall see which saint is the stronger.'

  'Guinefort? I've not heard of her.'

  'Him,' Thomas corrected her, 'and he lived in the Lyonnaise.'

  'You pray to a French saint?' Jeanette asked, intrigued.

  'All the time,' Thomas said, touching the desiccated dog's paw that hung about his neck. He did not tell Jeanette anything more about the saint, who had been a favourite of his father's — who, in his better moments, would laugh at the story. Guinefort had been a dog and, so far as Thomas's father knew, the only animal ever to be canonized. The beast had saved a baby from a wolf, then been martyred by his owner, who thought the dog had eaten the baby when in truth he had hidden it beneath the cot. 'Pray to the blessed Guinefort!' had been Father Ralph's reaction to every domestic crisis, and Thomas had adopted the saint as his own. He sometimes wondered whether the saint was an efficient intercessor in heaven, though perhaps Guinefort's whining and barking were as effective as the pleas of any other saint, but Thomas was sure that few other folk used the dog as their representative to God and perhaps that meant he received special protection. Father Hobbe had been shocked to hear of a holy dog, but Thomas, though he shared his father's amusement, now genuinely thought of the animal as his guardian.

  Jeanette wanted to know more about the
blessed St Guinefort, but she did not want to encourage an intimacy with any of Skeat's men and so she forgot her curiosity and made her voice cold again. 'I have been wanting to see you,' she said, 'to tell you that your men and their women must not use the yard as a latrine. I see them from the window. It is disgusting! Maybe you behave like that in England, but this is Brittany. You can use the river.'

  Thomas nodded, but said nothing. Instead he carried his bow down the nave, which had one of its long sides obscured by fishing nets hung up for mending. He went to the church's western end, which was gloomily decorated by a painting of the doom. The righteous were vanishing into the rafters, while the condemned sinners were tumbling to a fiery hell cheered on by angels and saints. Thomas stopped in front of the painting.

  'Have you ever noticed,' he said, 'how the prettiest women are always falling down to hell and the ugly ones are going up to heaven?'

  Jeanette almost smiled for she had often wondered about that same question, but she bit her tongue and said nothing as Thomas walked back up the nave beside a painting of Christ walking on a sea that was grey and white-crested like the ocean off Brittany. A shoal of mackerel were poking their heads from the water to watch the miracle.

  'What you must understand, madame,' Thomas said, gazing up at the curious mackerel, 'is that our men do not like being unwelcome. You won't even let them use the kitchen. Why not? It's big enough, and they'd be glad of a place to dry their boots after a wet night's riding.'

  'Why should I have you English in my kitchen? So you can use that as a latrine as well?'

  Thomas turned and looked at her. 'You have no respect for us, madame, so why should we have respect for your house?'

  'Respect!' She mocked the word. 'How can I respect you? Everything that is precious to me was stolen. Stolen by you!'

  'By Sir Simon Jekyll,' Thomas said.

  'You or Sir Simon,' Jeanette asked, 'what is the difference?'

  Thomas picked up the arrow and dropped it into his bag. 'The difference, madame, is that once in a while I talk to God, while Sir Simon thinks he is God. I shall ask the lads to piss in the river, but I doubt they'll want to please you much.' He smiled at her, then was gone.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Spring was greening the land, giving a haze to the trees and filling the twisting laneways with bright flowers. New green moss grew on thatch, there was white stitchwort in the hedgerows, and kingfishers whipped between the new yellow leaves of the riverside sallows. Skeat's men were having to go further from La Roche-Derrien to find new plunder and their long rides took them dangerously close to Guingamp, which was Duke Charles's headquarters, though the town's garrison rarely came out to challenge the raiders. Guingamp lay to the south, while to the west was Lannion, a much smaller town with a far more belligerent garrison that was inspired by Sir Geoffrey de Pont Blanc, a knight who had sworn an oath that he would lead Skeat's raiders back to Lannion in chains. He announced that the Englishmen would be burned in Lannion's marketplace because they were heretics, the devil's men.

  Will Skeat was not worried by such a threat. 'I might lose a wink of sleep if the silly bastard had proper archers,' he told Tom, 'but he ain't, so he can blunder about as much as he likes. Is that his real name?'

  'Geoffrey of the White Bridge.'

  'Daft bastard. Is he Breton or French?'

  'I'm told he's French.'

  'Have to teach him a lesson then, won't we?'

  Sir Geoffrey proved an unwilling pupil. Will Skeat dragged his coat closer and closer to Lannion, burning houses within sight of its walls in an effort to lure Sir Geoffrey out into an ambush of archers, but Sir Geoffrey had seen what English arrows could do to mounted knights and so he refused to lead his men in a wild charge that would inevitably finish as a pile of screaming horses and bleeding men. He stalked Skeat instead, looking for some place where he could ambush the Englishmen, but Skeat was no more of a fool than Sir Geoffrey, and for three weeks the two war bands circled and skirted each other. Sir Geoffrey's presence slowed Skeat, but did not stop the destruction. The two forces clashed twice, and both times Sir Geoffrey threw his crossbowmen forward on foot, hoping they could finish off Skeat's archers, but both times the longer arrows won and Sir Geoffrey drew off without forcing a fight he knew he must lose. After the second inconclusive clash he even tried appealing to Will Skeat's honour. He rode forward, all alone, dressed in an armour as beautiful as Sir Simon Jekyll's, though Sir Geoffrey's helmet was an old-fashioned pot with perforated eye holes. His surcoat and his horse's trapper were dark blue on which white bridges were embroidered and the same device was blazoned on his shield. He carried a blue-painted lance from which he had hung a white scarf to show he came in peace. Skeat rode forward to meet him with Thomas as interpreter. Sir Geoffrey lifted off his helmet and pushed a hand through his sweat-flattened hair. He was a young fellow, golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a broad, good-humoured face, and Thomas felt he would probably have liked the man if he had not been an enemy. Sir Geoffrey smiled as the two Englishmen curbed their horses.

  it is a dull thing,' he said, 'to shoot arrows at each other's shadows. I suggest you bring your men-at-arms into the field's centre and meet us there on equal terms.'

  Thomas did not even bother to translate, for he knew what Skeat's answer would be. 'I have a better idea,' he said, 'you bring your men-at-arms and we'll bring our archers.'

  Sir Geoffrey looked puzzled. 'Do you command?' he asked Thomas. He had thought that the older and grizzled Skeat was the captain, but Skeat stayed silent.

  'He lost his tongue fighting the Scots,' Thomas said, 'so I speak for him.'

  'Then tell him I want an honourable fight,' Sir Geoffrey said spiritedly. 'Let me pit my horsemen against yours.' He smiled as if to suggest his suggestion was as reasonable as it was chivalrous as it was ridiculous.

  Thomas translated for Skeat, who twisted in his saddle and spat into the clover.

  'He says,' Thomas said, 'that our archers will meet your men. A dozen of our archers against a score of your men-at-arms.'

  Sir Geoffrey shook his head sadly. 'You have no sense of sport, you English,' he said, then put his leather-lined pot back on his head and rode away. Thomas told Skeat what had passed between them.

  'Silly goddamn bastard,' Skeat said. 'What did he want? A tournament? Who does he think we are? The knights of the round bloody table? I don't know what happens to some folk. They put a sir in front of their names and their brains get addled. Fighting fair! Whoever heard of anything so daft? Fight fair and you lose. Bloody fool.'

  Sir Geoffrey of the White Bridge continued to haunt the hellequin, but Skeat gave him no chance for a fight. There was always a large band of archers watching the Frenchman's forces, and whenever the men from Lannion became too bold they were likely to have the goose-feathered arrows thumping into their horses. So Sir Geoffrey was reduced to a shadow, but he was an irritating and persistent shadow, following Skeat's men almost back to the gates of La Roche-Derrien.

  The trouble occurred the third time that he trailed Skeat and so came close to the town. Sir Simon Jekyll had heard of Sir Geoffrey and, warned by a sentinel on the highest church tower that Skeat's men were in sight, he led out a score of the garrison's men-at-arms to meet the hellequin. Skeat was just over a mile from the town and Sir Geoffrey, with fifty men-at-arms and as many mounted crossbowmen, was just another half-mile behind. The Frenchman had caused no great problems to Skeat and if Sir Geoffrey wanted to ride home to Lannion and claim that he had chased the hellequin back to their lair then Skeat was quite happy to give the Frenchman that satisfaction.

  Then Sir Simon came and it was all suddenly display and arrogance. The English lances went up, the helmet visors clanged shut and their horses were prancing. Sir Simon rode towards the French and Breton horsemen, bellowing a challenge. Will Skeat followed Sir Simon and advised him to let the bastards be, but the Yorkshireman was wasting his breath.

  Skeat's men-at-arms were at the front of t
he column, escorting the captured livestock and three wagons filled with plunder, while the rearguard was formed by sixty mounted archers. Those sixty men had just reached the big woods where the army had camped during the siege of La Roche-Derrien and, at a signal from Skeat, they split into two groups and rode into the trees either side of the road. They dismounted in the woods, tied their horses' reins to branches, then carried their bows to the edge of the trees. The road ran between the two groups, edged by wide grassy verges.

  Sir Simon wheeled his horse to confront Will Skeat. 'I want thirty of your men-at-arms, Skeat,' he demanded peremptorily.

  'You can want them,' Will Skeat said, 'but you'll not have them.'

  'Good Christ, man, I outrank you!' Sir Simon was incredulous at Skeat's refusal. 'I outrank you, Skeat! I'm not asking, you fool, I'm ordering.'

  Skeat looked up at the sky. 'Looks like rain, don't you think? And we could do with a drop. Fields are right dry and streams are low.'

  Sir Simon reached out and gripped Skeat's arm, forcing the older man to turn to him. 'He has fifty knights,' Sir Simon spoke of Sir Geoffrey de Pont Blanc, 'and I have twenty. Give me thirty men and I'll take him prisoner. Just give me twenty!' He was pleading, all arrogance gone, for this was a chance for Sir Simon to fight a proper skirmish, horseman against horseman, and the winner would have renown and the prize of captured men and horses.

  But Will Skeat knew everything about men, horses and renown. 'I'm not out here to play games,' he said, shaking his arm free, 'and you can order me till the cows sprout wings, but you'll not have a man of mine.'

  Sir Simon looked anguished, but then Sir Geoffrey de Pont Blanc decided the matter. He saw how his men-at-arms outnumbered the English horsemen and so he ordered thirty of his followers to ride back and join the crossbowmen. Now the two troops of horsemen were evenly matched and Sir Geoffrey rode forward on his big black stallion that was swathed in its blue and white trapper and had a boiled leather mask for face armour, a chanfron. Sir Simon rode to meet him in his new armour, but his horse had no padded trapper and no chanfron, and he wanted both, just as he wanted this fight. All winter he had endured the misery of a peasant's war, all muck and murder, and now the enemy was offering honour, glory and the chance to capture some fine horses, armour and good weapons. The two men saluted each other by dipping their lances, then exchanged names and compliments.