Azincourt

They never had. Hook’s father had been kicked to death in the yearly football match and no one had ever discovered who had killed him, though everyone knew it must have been the Perrills. The ball had been kicked into the rushes beyond the manor orchard and a dozen men had chased after it, but only eleven came out. The new Lord Slayton had laughed at the idea of calling the death murder. ‘If you hanged a man for killing in a game of football,’ he had said, ‘then you’ll hang half England!’

Hook’s father had been a shepherd. He left a pregnant widow and two sons, and the widow died within two months of her husband’s death as she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She died on the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which was Nick Hook’s thirteenth birthday, and his grandmother said the coincidence proved that Nick was cursed. She tried to lift the curse with her own magic. She stabbed him with an arrow, driving the point deep into his thigh, then told him to kill a deer with the arrow and the curse would go away. Hook had poached one of Lord Slayton’s hinds, killing it with the bloodstained arrow, but the curse had remained. The Perrills lived and the feud went on. A fine apple tree in the garden of Hook’s grandmother had died, and she insisted it had been old mother Perrill who had blighted the fruit. ‘The Perrills always have been putrid turd-sucking bastards,’ his grandmother said. She put the evil eye on Tom Perrill and on his younger brother, Robert, but old mother Perrill must have used a counter-spell because neither fell ill. The two goats that Hook kept on the common disappeared, and the village reckoned it had to be wolves, but Hook knew it was the Perrills. He killed their cow in revenge, but it was not the same as killing them. ‘It’s your job to kill them,’ his grandmother insisted to Nick, but he had never found the opportunity. ‘May the devil make you spit shit,’ she cursed him, ‘and then take you to hell.’ She threw him from her home when he was sixteen. ‘Go and starve, you bastard,’ she snarled. She was going mad by then and there was no arguing with her, so Nick Hook left home and might well have starved except that was the year he came first in the six villages’ competition, putting arrow after arrow into the distant mark.

Lord Slayton made Nick a forester, which meant he had to keep his lordship’s table heavy with venison. ‘Better you kill them legally,’ Lord Slayton had remarked, ‘than be hanged for poaching.’

Now, on Saint Winebald’s Day, just before Christmas, Nick Hook watched his arrow fly towards Tom Perrill.

It would kill, he knew it.

The arrow flew true, dipping slightly between the high, frost-bright hedges. Tom Perrill had no idea it was coming. Nick Hook smiled.

Then the arrow fluttered.

A fledging had come loose, its glue and binding must have given way and the arrow veered leftwards to slice down the horse’s flank and lodge in its shoulder. The horse whinnied, reared and lunged forward, jerking the great elm trunk loose from the frozen ruts.

Tom Perrill turned and stared up at the high wood, then understood a second arrow could follow the first and so turned again and ran after the horse.

Nick Hook had failed again. He was cursed.

Lord Slayton slumped in his chair. He was in his forties, a bitter man who had been crippled at Shrewsbury by a sword thrust in the spine and so would never fight another battle. He stared sourly at Nick Hook. ‘Where were you on Saint Winebald’s Day?’

‘When was that, my lord?’ Hook asked with apparent innocence.

‘Bastard,’ Lord Slayton spat, and the steward struck Hook from behind with the bone handle of a horsewhip.

‘Don’t know which day that was, my lord,’ Hook said stubbornly.

‘Two days ago,’ Sir Martin said. He was Lord Slayton’s brother-in-law and priest to the manor and village. He was no more a knight than Hook was, but Lord Slayton insisted he was called ‘Sir’ Martin in recognition of his high birth.

‘Oh!’ Hook pretended a sudden enlightenment. ‘I was coppicing the ash under Beggar’s Hill, my lord.’

‘Liar,’ Lord Slayton said flatly. William Snoball, steward and chief archer to his lordship, struck Hook again, slashing the whip’s butt hard across the back of the forester’s skull. Blood trickled down Hook’s scalp.

‘On my honour, lord,’ Hook lied earnestly.

‘The honour of the Hook family,’ Lord Slayton said drily before looking at Hook’s younger brother, Michael, who was seventeen. ‘Where were you?’

‘I was thatching the church porch, my lord,’ Michael said.

‘He was,’ Sir Martin confirmed. The priest, lanky and gangling in his stained black robe, bestowed a grimace that was supposed to be a smile on Nick Hook’s younger brother. Everyone liked Michael. Even the Perrills seemed to exempt him from the hatred they felt for the rest of the Hook tribe. Michael was fair while his brother was dark, and his disposition was sunny while Nick Hook was saturnine.

The Perrill brothers stood next to the Hook brothers. Thomas and Robert were tall, thin and loose-jointed with deep sunk eyes, long noses and jutting chins. Their resemblance to Sir Martin the priest was unmistakable and the village, with the deference due to a gently-born churchman, accepted the pretence that they were the miller’s sons while still treating them with respect. The Perrill family had unspoken privileges because everyone understood that the brothers could call on Sir Martin’s help whenever they felt threatened.

And Tom Perrill had not just been threatened, he had almost been killed. The grey-fledged arrow had missed him by a hand’s breadth and that arrow now lay on the table in the manor hall. Lord Slayton pointed at the arrow and nodded to his steward who crossed to the table. ‘It’s not one of ours, my lord,’ William Snoball said after examining the arrow.

‘The grey feathers, you mean?’ Lord Slayton asked.

‘No one near here uses grey-goose,’ Snoball said reluctantly, with a churlish glance at Nick Hook, ‘not for fledging. Not for anything!’

Lord Slayton gazed at Nick Hook. He knew the truth. Everyone in the hall knew the truth, except perhaps Michael who was a trusting soul. ‘Whip him,’ Sir Martin suggested.

Hook stared at the tapestry hanging beneath the hall’s gallery. It showed a hunter thrusting a spear into a boar’s guts. A woman, wearing nothing but a wisp of translucent cloth, was watching the hunter, who was dressed in a loincloth and a helmet. The oak beams supporting the gallery had been turned black by a hundred years of smoke.

‘Whip him,’ the priest said again, ‘or cut off his ears.’

Hook lowered his eyes to look at Lord Slayton and wondered, for the thousandth time, whether he was looking at his own father. Hook had the strong-boned Slayton face, the same heavy forehead, the same wide mouth, the same black hair and the same dark eyes. He had the same height, the same bodily strength that had been his lordship’s before the rebel sword had twisted in his back and forced him to use the leather-padded crutches leaning on his chair. His lordship returned the gaze, betraying nothing. ‘This feud will end,’ he finally said, still staring at Hook. ‘You understand me? There will be no more killing.’ He pointed at Hook. ‘If any of the Perrill family dies, Hook, then I will kill you and your brother. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘And if a Hook dies,’ his lordship turned his gaze on Tom Perrill, ‘then you and your brother will hang from the oak.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Perrill said.

‘Murder would need to be proven,’ Sir Martin interjected. He spoke suddenly, his voice indignant. The gangling priest often seemed to be living in another world, his thoughts far away, then he would jerk his attention back to wherever he was and his words would blurt out as if catching up with lost time. ‘Proven,’ he said again, ‘proven.’

‘No!’ Lord Slayton contradicted his brother-in-law, and to emphasise it he slapped the wooden arm of his chair. ‘If any one of you four dies I’ll hang the rest of you! I don’t care! If one of you slips into the mill’s leet and drowns I’ll call it murder. You understand me? I will not have this feud one moment longer!’

‘There’ll be no murder, my lord,’ Tom Perrill said humbly.

Lord Slayton looked back to Hook, waiting for the same assurance, but Nick Hook said nothing. ‘A whipping will teach him obedience, my lord,’ Snoball suggested.

‘He’s been whipped!’ Lord Slayton said. ‘When was the last time, Hook?’

‘Last Michaelmas, my lord.’

‘And what did you learn from that?’

‘That Master Snoball’s arm is weakening, lord,’ Hook said.

A stifled snigger made Hook look upwards to see her ladyship was watching from the shadows of the gallery. She was childless. Her brother, the priest, whelped one bastard after another, while Lady Slayton was bitter and barren. Hook knew she had secretly visited his grandmother in search of a remedy, but for once the old woman’s sorcery had failed to produce a baby.

Snoball had growled angrily at Hook’s impudence, but Lord Slayton had betrayed his amusement with a sudden grin. ‘Out!’ he commanded now, ‘all of you! Get out, except for you, Hook. You stay.’

Lady Slayton watched as the men left the hall, then turned and vanished into whatever chamber lay beyond the gallery. Her husband stared at Nick Hook without speaking until, at last, he gestured at the grey-feathered arrow on the oak table. ‘Where did you get it, Hook?’

‘Never seen it before, my lord.’

‘You’re a liar, Hook. You’re a liar, a thief, a rogue and a bastard, and I’ve no doubt you’re a murderer too. Snoball’s right. I should whip you till your bones are bare. Or maybe I should just hang you. That would make the world a better place, a Hookless world.’

Hook said nothing. He just looked at Lord Slayton. A log cracked in the fire, showering sparks.

‘But you’re also the best goddamned archer I’ve ever seen,’ Lord Slayton went on grudgingly. ‘Give me the arrow.’

Hook fetched the grey-fledged arrow and gave it to his lordship. ‘The fledging came loose in flight?’ Lord Slayton asked.

‘Looks like it, my lord.’

‘You’re not an arrow-maker, are you, Hook?’