Azincourt

‘Go?’ she asked, frowning, not understanding him.

‘If you want, lass. You can go!’ He waved vaguely southwards and was rewarded with a scowl and a burst of incomprehensible French, which he took to mean that Melisande would stay with him. She did stay, and her presence was both a comfort and a worry. Hook was not sure if he could escape the French countryside, and if he did he could see no future. He prayed to Saint Crispinian, and hoped the martyr could help him once he reached England, if he reached England, but Saint Crispinian was silent.

Yet if Saint Crispinian said nothing, he did send Hook and Melisande a priest who was the curé of a parish close to the River Oise and the priest found the two fugitives sleeping under a fallen willow among a thick stand of alders, and he took them to his home where his woman fed them. Father Michel was embittered and morose, yet he took pity on them. He spoke some English that he had learned when he had been chaplain to a French lord who had held an English prisoner in his manor. That experience of being a chaplain had left Father Michel hating everyone in authority, whether it was king, bishop or lord, and that hatred was sufficient to let him help an English archer. ‘You will go to Calais,’ he told Hook.

‘I’m an outlaw, father.’

‘Outlaw?’ Eventually the priest understood, but dismissed the fear. ‘Proscrit, eh? But England is home. A large place, yes? You go home and you stay far from where you sinned. What was your sin?’

‘I hit a priest.’

Father Michel laughed and clapped Hook on the back. ‘That was well done! I hope it was a bishop?’

‘Just a priest.’

‘Next time hit a bishop, eh?’

Hook paid for his stay. He chopped firewood, cleared ditches and helped Father Michel rethatch a cow byre, while Melisande assisted the housekeeper to cook, wash and mend. ‘The villagers will not betray you,’ the priest assured Hook.

‘Why not, father?’

‘Because they fear me. I can send them to hell,’ the priest said grimly. He liked to talk with Hook as a way of improving his English and one day, as Hook trimmed the pear trees behind the house, he listened as Hook haltingly admitted to hearing voices. Father Michel crossed himself. ‘It could be the devil’s voice?’ he suggested.

‘That worries me,’ Hook admitted.

‘But I think not,’ Father Michel said gently. ‘You take a lot from that tree!’

‘This tree’s a mess, father. You should have cut her back last winter, but this won’t hurt her. You want some pears? You can’t let her grow wild. Trust me. Cut and cut! And when you think you’ve cut too much, cut the same amount again!’

‘Cut and cut, eh? If I have no pears next year I will know you are the devil’s man.’

‘It’s Saint Crispinian who talks to me,’ Hook said, lopping another branch.

‘But only if God lets him,’ the priest said and made the sign of the cross, ‘which means God talks to you. I am glad no saints talk to me.’

‘You’re glad?’

‘I think those who hear voices? Either they are saints themselves or they are for burning.’

‘I’m no saint,’ Hook said.

‘But God has chosen you. He makes very strange choices,’ Father Michel said, then laughed.

Père Michel also talked with Melisande and so Hook learned something about the girl. Her father was a lord, the priest said, a lord called le Seigneur d’Enfer, and her mother had been a servant girl. ‘So your Melisande is another nobleman’s bastard,’ Father Michel said, ‘born to trouble.’ Her noble father had arranged for Melisande to enter the nunnery in Soissons as a novice and to be a kitchen maid to the nuns. ‘That is how lords hide their sins,’ Father Michel explained bitterly, ‘by putting their bastards in prison.’

‘Prison?’

‘She did not want to be a nun. You know what her name is?’

‘Melisande.’

‘Melisande was a Queen of Jerusalem,’ Père Michel said, smiling. ‘And this Melisande loves you.’ Hook said nothing to that. ‘Take care of her,’ Père Michel said sternly on the day they left.

They went in disguise. It was difficult to hide Hook’s stature, but Father Michel gave him a white penitent’s robe and a leper’s clapper, which was a piece of wood to which two others were attached by leather strips, and Melisande, also in a penitent’s robe and with her black hair chopped raggedly short, led him north and west. They were pilgrims, it appeared, seeking a cure for Hook’s disease. They lived off alms tossed by folk who did not want to go near Hook, who announced his contagious presence by rattling the clapper loudly. They still moved circumspectly, skirting the larger villages and making a wide detour to avoid the smear of smoke that marked the city of Amiens. They slept in the woods, or in cattle byres, or in haystacks, and the rain soaked them and the sun warmed them and one day, beside the River Canche, they became lovers. Melisande was silent afterwards, but she clung to Hook and he said a prayer of thanks to Saint Crispinian, who ignored him.

The next day they walked north, following a road that led across a wide field between two woods, and off to the west was a small castle half hidden by a stand of trees. They rested in the eastern woods close to a tumbledown forester’s cottage with a moss-thick thatch. Barley grew in the wide field, the ears rippling prettily under the breeze. Larks tumbled above them, their song another ripple, and both Hook and Melisande dozed in the late summer’s warmth.

‘What are you doing here?’ a harsh voice demanded. A horseman, dressed richly and with a hooded hawk on his wrist, was watching them from the wood’s edge.

Melisande knelt in submission and lowered her head. ‘I take my brother to Saint-Omer, lord,’ she said.

The horseman, who may or may not have been a lord, took note of Hook’s clapper and edged his horse away. ‘What do you seek there?’ he demanded.

‘The blessing of Saint Audomar, lord,’ Melisande said. Father Michel had told them Saint-Omer was near Calais, and that many folk sought cures from Saint Audomar’s shrine in the town. Father Michel had also said it was much safer to say they were travelling to Saint-Omer than to admit they were headed for the English enclave around Calais.

‘God give you a safe journey,’ the horseman said grudgingly and tossed a coin into the leaf mould.

‘Lord?’ Melisande asked.

The rider turned his horse back. ‘Yes?’

‘Where are we, lord? And how far to Saint-Omer?’

‘A very long day’s walk,’ the man said, gathering his reins, ‘and why would you care what this place is called? You won’t have heard of it.’

‘No, lord,’ Melisande said.

The man gazed at her for a heartbeat, then shrugged. ‘That castle?’ he said, nodding to the battlements showing above the western trees, ‘is called Azincourt. I hope your brother is cured.’ He gathered his reins and spurred his horse into the barley.

It was four more days before they reached the marshes about Calais. They moved cautiously, avoiding the French patrols that circled the English-held town. It was night when they reached the Nieulay bridge that led onto the causeway that approached the town. Sentries challenged them. ‘I’m English!’ Hook shouted and then, holding Melisande’s hand, stepped cautiously into the flare of torchlight illuminating the bridge’s gate.

‘Where are you from, lad?’ a grey-bearded man in a close-fitting helmet asked.

‘We’ve come from Soissons,’ Hook said.

‘You’ve come from …’ the man took a step forward to peer at Hook and his companion. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ. Come on through.’

So Hook stepped through the small gate built into the larger one, and thus he and Melisande crossed into England where he was an outlaw.

But Saint Crispinian had kept his word and Hook had come home.

Even in summer the hall of Calais Castle was chilly. The thick stone walls kept the warmth at bay and so a great fire crackled in the hearth, and in front of the stone fireplace was a wide rug on which two couches stood and six hounds slept. The rest of the room was stone-flagged. Swords were racked along one wall, and iron-tipped lances rested on trestles. Sparrows flitted among the beams. The shutters at the western end of the hall were open and Hook could hear the endless stirring of the sea.

The garrison commander and his elegant lady sat on one couch. Hook had been told their names, but the words had slithered through his head and so he did not know who they were. Six men-at-arms stood behind the couch, all watching Hook and Melisande with sceptical and hostile eyes, while a priest stood at the rug’s edge, looking down at the two fugitives who knelt on the stone flags. ‘I do not understand,’ the priest said in a nasally unpleasant voice, ‘why you left Lord Slayton’s service.’

‘Because I refused to kill a girl, father,’ Hook explained.

‘And Lord Slayton wished her dead?’