Three Great English Victories: A 3-book Collection of Harlequin, 1356 and Azincourt

He made her a little doll from straw. ‘We used to hang thirteen of these above the altar,’ he told her, ‘one for Christ and one each for the Apostles.’ He picked some cornflowers and gave them to Eleanor, who threaded them into her hair. It was very fair hair, like sunlit gold.

They talked incessantly and one day Thomas asked her again about the lance and this time Eleanor nodded.

‘I lied to you,’ she said, ‘because he did have it, but it was stolen.’

‘Who stole it?’

She touched her face. ‘The man who took his eye.’

‘A man called Vexille?’

She nodded solemnly. ‘I think so. But it wasn’t here, it was in Evecque. That’s his real home. He got the Caen house when he married.’

‘Tell me about the Vexilles,’ Thomas urged her.

‘I know nothing of them,’ Eleanor said, and he believed her.

They were sitting by a stream where two swans floated and a heron stalked frogs in a reedbed. Thomas had talked earlier of walking away from Caen to find the English army and his words must have been weighing on Eleanor’s mind for she frowned at him.

‘Will you really go?’

‘I don’t know.’ He wanted to be with the army, for that was where he belonged, though he did not know how he was to find it, nor how he was to survive in a countryside where the English had made themselves hated, but he also wanted to stay. He wanted to learn more about the Vexilles and only Sir Guillaume could satisfy that hunger. And, day by day, he wanted to be with Eleanor. There was a calm gentleness in her that Jeanette had never possessed, a gentleness that made him treat her with tenderness for fear that otherwise he would break her. He never tired of watching her long face with its slightly hollow cheeks and bony nose and big eyes. She was embarrassed by his scrutiny, but did not tell him to stop.

‘Sir Guillaume,’ she told him, ‘tells me I look like my mother, but I don’t remember her very well.’

Sir Guillaume came back to Caen with a dozen men-at-arms whom he had hired in northern Alençon. He would lead them to war, he said, along with the half-dozen of his men who had survived the fall of Caen. His leg was still sore, but he could walk without crutches and on the day of his return he summarily ordered Thomas to go with him to the church of St Jean. Eleanor, working in the kitchen, joined them as they left the house and Sir Guillaume did not forbid her to come.

Folk bowed as Sir Guillaume passed and many sought his assurance that the English were truly gone.

‘They are marching towards Paris,’ he would answer, ‘and our king will trap them and kill them.’

‘You think so?’ Thomas asked after one such assurance.

‘I pray so,’ Sir Guillaume growled. ‘That’s what the King is for, isn’t it? To protect his people? And God knows, we need protection. I’m told that if you climb that tower,’ he nodded towards the church of St Jean that was their destination, ‘you can see the smoke from the towns your army has burned. They are conducting a chevauchée.’

‘Chevauchée?’ Eleanor asked.

Her father sighed. ‘A chevauchée, child, is when you march in a great line through your enemy’s country and you burn, destroy and break everything in your path. The object of such barbarity is to force your enemy to come out from his fortresses and fight, and I think our king will oblige the English.’

‘And the English bows,’ Thomas said, ‘will cut his army down like hay.’

Sir Guillaume looked angry at that, but then shrugged. ‘A marching army gets worn down,’ he said. ‘The horses go lame, the boots wear out and the arrows run out. And you haven’t seen the might of France, boy. For every knight of yours we have six. You can shoot your arrows till your bows break, but we’ll still have enough men left to kill you.’ He fished in a pouch hanging at his belt and gave some small coins to the beggars at the churchyard gate, which lay close to the new grave where the five hundred corpses had been buried. It was now a mound of raw earth dotted with dandelions and it stank, for when the English had dug the grave they had struck water not far beneath the surface and so the pit was too shallow and the earth covering was too thin to contain the corruption the grave concealed.

Eleanor clapped a hand to her mouth, then hurried up the steps into the church where the archers had auctioned the town’s wives and daughters. The priests had thrice exorcized the church with prayers and holy water, but it still had a sad air, for the statues were broken and the windows shattered. Sir Guillaume genuflected towards the main altar, then led Thomas and Eleanor up a side aisle where a painting on the lime-washed wall showed St John escaping from the cauldron of boiling oil that the Emperor Domitian had prepared for him. The saint was shown as an ethereal form, half smoke and half man, floating away in the air while the Roman soldiers looked on in perplexity.

Sir Guillaume approached a side altar where he dropped to his knees beside a great black flagstone and Thomas, to his surprise, saw that the Frenchman was weeping from his one eye. ‘I brought you here,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘to teach you a lesson about your family.’

Thomas did not contradict him. He did not know that he was a Vexille, but the yale on the silver badge suggested he was.

‘Beneath that stone,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘lies my wife and my two children. A boy and a girl. He was six, she was eight and their mother was twenty-five years old. The house here belonged to her father. He gave me his daughter as ransom for a boat I captured. It was mere piracy, not war, but I gained a good wife from it.’ The tears were flowing now and he closed his eye. Eleanor stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, while Thomas waited. ‘Do you know,’ Sir Guillaume asked after a while, ‘why we went to Hookton?’

‘We thought because the tide took you away from Poole.’

‘No, we went to Hookton on purpose. I was paid to go there by a man who called himself the Harlequin.’

‘Like hellequin?’ Thomas asked.

‘It is the same word, only he used the Italian form. A devil’s soul, laughing at God, and he even looked like you.’ Sir Guillaume crossed himself, then reached out to trace a finger down the edge of the stone. ‘We went to fetch a relic from the church. You knew that already, surely?’

Thomas nodded. ‘And I have sworn to get it back.’

Sir Guillaume seemed to sneer at that ambition. ‘I thought it was all foolishness, but in those days I thought all life was foolishness. Why would some miserable church in an insignificant English village have a precious relic? But the Harlequin insisted he was right, and when we took the village we found the relic.’

‘The lance of St George,’ Thomas said flatly.

‘The lance of St George,’ Sir Guillaume agreed. ‘I had a contract with the Harlequin. He paid me a little money, and the balance was kept by a monk in the abbey here. He was a monk that everyone trusted, a scholar, a fierce man who folk said would become a saint, but when we returned I found that Brother Martin had fled and he had taken the money with him. So I refused to give the lance to the Harlequin. Bring me nine hundred livres in good silver, I told him, and the lance is yours, but he would not pay. So I kept the lance. I kept it in Evecque and the months passed and I heard nothing and I thought the lance had been forgotten. Then, two years ago, in the spring, the Harlequin returned. He came with men-at-arms and he captured the manor. He slaughtered everyone – everyone – and took the lance.’

Thomas stared at the black flagstone. ‘You lived?’

‘Scarcely,’ Sir Guillaume said. He hauled up his black jacket and showed a terrible scar on his belly. ‘They gave me three wounds,’ he went on. ‘One to the head, one to the belly and one to the leg. They told me the one to the head was because I was a fool with no brains, the one in the guts was a reward for my greed and the one to the leg was so I would limp down to hell. Then they left me to watch the corpses of my wife and children while I died. But I lived, thanks to Mordecai.’ He stood, wincing as he put his weight onto his left leg. ‘I lived,’ he said grimly, ‘and I swore I would find the man who did that,’ he pointed at the flagstone, ‘and send his soul screaming into the pit. It took me a year to discover who he was, and you know how I did it? When he came to Evecque he had his men’s shields covered with black cloth, but I slashed the cloth of one with my sword and saw the yale. So I asked men about the yale. I asked them in Paris and Anjou, in Burgundy and the Dauphiné, and in the end I found my answer. And where did I find it? After asking the length and breadth of France I found it here, in Caen. A man here knew the badge. The Harlequin is a man called Vexille. I do not know his first name, I do not know his rank, I just know he is a devil called Vexille.’

‘So the Vexilles have the lance?’

‘They have. And the man who killed my family killed your father.’ Sir Guillaume looked ashamed for a brief instant. ‘I killed your mother. I think I did, anyway, but she attacked me and I was angry.’ He shrugged. ‘But I did not kill your father, and in killing your mother I did nothing more than you have done in Brittany.’

‘True,’ Thomas admitted. He looked into Sir Guillaume’s eye and could feel no hatred for his mother’s death. ‘So we share an enemy,’ Thomas said.

‘And that enemy,’ Sir Guillaume said, ‘is the devil.’

He said it grimly, then crossed himself. Thomas suddenly felt cold, for he had found his enemy, and his enemy was Lucifer.

That evening Mordecai rubbed a salve into Thomas’s neck. ‘It is almost healed, I think,’ he said, ‘and the pain will go, though perhaps a little will remain to remind you of how close you came to death.’ He sniffed the garden scents. ‘So Sir Guillaume told you the story of his wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are related to the man who killed his wife?’

‘I don’t know,’ Thomas said, ‘truly I don’t, but the yale suggests I am.’

‘And Sir Guillaume probably killed your mother, and the man who killed his wife killed your father, and Sir Simon Jekyll tried to kill you.’ Mordecai shook his head. ‘I nightly lament that I was not born a Christian. I could carry a weapon and join the sport.’ He handed Thomas a bottle. ‘Perform,’ he commanded, ‘and what, by the by, is a yale?’

‘A heraldic beast,’ Thomas explained.

The doctor sniffed. ‘God, in His infinite wisdom, made the fishes and the whales on the fifth day, and on the sixth he made the beasts of the land, and He looked at what He had done and saw that it was good. But not good enough for the heralds, who have to add wings, horns, tusks and claws to His inadequate work. Is that all you can do?’

‘For the moment.’

‘I’d get more juice from squeezing a walnut,’ he grumbled, and shuffled away.