A Play of Treachery (6 page)

“Ah,” said Joliffe. In the autumn, when he had last been in London, the open talk had been over who among the lords might be chosen, and why, and which way loyalties most strongly lay in the on-going struggle between Winchester and Gloucester, uncle and nephew, for highest power in England’s government. If Cauvet had it right, compromise must have finally twisted around to settle on York as after all the only lord acceptable to both sides. Or should that be “all sides,” Joliffe wondered, knowing something of how many sides were rivaling against each other in the matter.

Was the duke of York their final choice
because
he was indeed too young and inexperienced, and everyone had hope of swaying him their particular way?

And how much of all that did York himself understand?

On the raised rear of the ship someone shouted a string of words that seemed to be English but made no sense to Joliffe. They made sense to others, though, because sailors all over the ship burst into movement.

“What is it?” Cauvet shouted in English to no one and anyone. “Have we been seen?”

“No,” a sailor shouted back, hurrying to do something with a nearby rope. “Squall coming.”

“
Merde
,” Cauvet muttered. “I’d better pass word along to my lord to keep below deck and be ready.”

Not asking Joliffe to go with him, he disappeared through a doorway the other side of the stairs.

Since Joliffe had not been alone in sleeping on deck last night, he had supposed there was not space inside or below for everyone, and now that looked true enough as the men left on deck crowded out of the hurrying sailors’ way and into what shelter they could. Deciding everyone knew more about squalls at sea than he did, Joliffe joined two other men in crowding under the open-stepped stairway near him. He had to crouch down on his heels to fit and doubted the open stairs would give much shelter, but they were better than no shelter at all, and he was glad to be able to brace himself against the ship’s heave and tilt as first the wind hit and then the rain pelted down.

From walking England’s roads, he was used enough to being wet, and he had been growing used to the ship’s lift and dip and sway, but now, suddenly, it was tilting and plunging and heaving, and for the first moments he was starkly afraid. But fear was of no use, would make no difference nor do him any good, and he let it go; instead gave himself up to the ship and the storm and found delight in the wildness of it.

But being only a squall, it soon passed, and a squat, covered brazier was brought out on deck and a coal fire made in it, for passengers and sailors to gather around to warm and dry themselves a little. That gave Joliffe chance to strike up talk with others of the bishop’s household beside Cauvet. Some were more ready to talk with him than others but no one was particularly unfriendly, and shortly showed willing not only to laugh at Joliffe’s French but help him to better it, not simply then but on through the day.

With the good ear and practiced memory that came with being a player, and much of the French he had once known beginning to come back to him, Joliffe was soon doing better than he let show. As Master Fowler had said, a seeming of ignorance was good cover for learning things if men thought he could not understand. Not that he heard or overheard anything among the bishop’s men that was anyone’s secret. Their talk was mostly of being home, but there was also half-angered wishing the English council would hurry with naming a governor for Normandy and get him and a new army to France
immédiatement,
and that told Joliffe that what Cauvet had said about the duke of York was not openly known yet.

Then why had Cauvet seen fit to tell
him
about it? It could be Cauvet simply had a loose tongue—not a desirable thing in a bishop’s secretary. Or—had he been testing to see if Joliffe knew more than he might rightly be expected to know?

If the latter was the way of it, Joliffe trusted his true ignorance had been convincing, while making note he should sharpen his skill at seeming ignorant, on the chance he would have more use for it should he ever, in time to come, indeed learn things he “should not.”

After all, he had to suppose that was why he was being sent to the late duke of Bedford’s spymaster—to learn how to learn things others meant to keep hidden.

B
esides the bishop’s men, Joliffe took what chances came to talk to the sailors, who were mostly English and as willing as most men to talk freely about what they knew best. By late the next day when they came in sight of the walls and harbor of Honfleur, having met neither storm nor enemies along the way, he knew more than he had about ships, including that they did not have front and rear; they had prow and stern, with amidships between. All the ropes—the rigging—had their particular names, too. He had not got so far as learning those or the differences among the guns set along the ship’s sides, but he knew starboard from larboard, which some of the sailors seemed to think was a grand accomplishment.

He also knew for a certainty that Bishop Louys was well-thought of by all his people here. Given that they had been in England longer than any of them had wanted to be, that no one thought their purposes there had gone well, and that now they were making a winter crossing of a rough sea, the fact that their displeasure did not spread to include the bishop spoke very well of him, Joliffe thought. There was no one could dislike a man as much as those who lived nearest with him.

On his own part, he had no other encounter with Bishop Louys, and after the household’s landing in Honfleur, he was treated as not much more than a piece of baggage, hurried off the ship along with the bishop’s traveling chests and loaded with them and most of the household men onto another ship, not so different from their English one but crewed by men familiar with the river they would be following to Rouen, Joliffe gathered.

Then they all waited.

From the talk around him as he sat on one of the traveling chests, Joliffe learned that Bishop Louys was gone to meet briefly with the captain of the Honfleur garrison and certain important citizens, to give them letters and greetings from King Henry and the royal council in England, and that in the usual way of things, the bishop would have celebrated Mass here in Honfleur, in thanksgiving for the safe crossing from England, but the river—the Seine, Joliffe heard it called—was as tidal as the Thames, and if the bishop left now, he would have the tide’s advantage to speed the beginning of his upriver journey. So the boatmen were ready, and when someone shouted the bishop was approaching, they began to loose ropes holding the ship to the quay.

Besides his accompanying dozen household men, six men-at-arms and a dozen archers came with the bishop along the quay, and boarded, and while the bishop took a seat on his traveling chair under a tilt amidship, they shifted about to find places out of the way as the last ropes were cast loose, freeing the boat to the current. Not until some sort of cooked cold meat, bread, and cheese were being handed out for supper did Joliffe make chance to say to one of the few Englishmen in the bishop’s household, with a twitch of his head toward the soldiers, “What’s that about, then?”

The man answered, not totally hiding he thought Joliffe was an idiot not to know it, “They’re our guard. These days the French are ramping and trampling in and out of Normandy like someone left a gate wide open. It’s why we’re going by way of the river instead of straighter across country. Safer.”

Just as coming to Honfleur instead of Calais had been thought to be safer, Joliffe thought.

He looked around him at the men-at-arms with swords and long daggers casual on hips, and the archers with their bows and quivers of arrows slung easily over shoulders or at hips. They were variously garbed in padded surcoats and canvas jacks, some with well-linked mail shirts, others with breastplates, all with other armor for arms or legs and a variety of helmets, some simply pot-shaped, others close-fitted, some even visored. What all their clothing had in common was obvious hard wear. What all their weapons shared was how well-kept they were. These were not some men pulled from their plows to serve their handful of duty-days for their lord and intent on going back to their plows at the end of it. These were men hired to the war; men who made war their livelihood and at ease with knowing there would surely come a time when they would have to kill. Or be killed.

Joliffe, watching them, started to find that
knowing
there was war in France was a different thing from being
in
the war in France, and he did not like the difference. Hopefully he was well away from any of the fighting. Even more, he hoped he would be able to stay that way.

 

 

Their first night upriver from Honfleur, with the river wide around them and the weather clear, they sailed all night. The next nights, when the river had drawn in between high, steep-sided hills, they spent ashore, behind the walls of fortified towns. Bishop Louys sent a messenger from both places, to let the council in Rouen know he was coming, and Joliffe, still speaking French haltingly but understanding more of what he heard than he let on, gathered that these overnight stops were as much for the bishop to learn what was happening across France and Normandy as for safety’s sake. Precisely what he learned, Joliffe did not know, but he saw no joy of homecoming lightening the bishop’s face from one day to the next.

The weather remained gray but not so cold as it had been. Warm enough in his cloak, Joliffe kept well-occupied with watching the land and the many other boats on the river slide past. Sometimes Cauvet would join him at the railing and tell him things, such as that most of the barges and lesser boats to be seen were carrying supplies to the garrisons in the towns and castles along the river, and that the English presently held most crossing places along the Seine from Honfleur to somewhat above Paris. “Because we need to control the river, both to move supplies and as a barrier against the Armagnacs. Until lately, fortified bridges at walled towns kept them mostly, much of the time, south of the Seine and from our throats. What my lord of Bedford hoped was to make the Seine serve as the moat of Normandy.” Cauvet gave a grim half-laugh. “For a while, a few years ago, the hope was to make the Loire our ‘moat.’ If that could have been—if we could have shoved the Armagnacs beyond the Loire and kept them there—things would be far different now. But the French witch spoiled that six, almost seven, years ago, and the land south of the Seine, all the way to the Loire, it is desolate from being fought over so many times. They say it made the duke of Bedford weep to see it. Now we look to see the same all over again in Normandy. Thanks to god-cursed Burgundy opening the eastern ways to them, the Armagnacs are north of the Seine again, burning and killing across Normandy as they have not been able to do for years. The duke of Bedford must be writhing in his grave. He gave Normandy peace. The people had begun to have hope. Now Burgundy has ended all that, and if Burgundy ceases to play his waiting game of the past few months and sets his men to join openly with the Armagnacs in the field—” Cauvet shrugged his shoulders high and left the thought for Joliffe to finish, saying instead, “God and Christ and the saints willing, he’ll turn all his heed against Calais instead.”

He crossed himself. Joliffe copied the gesture, readily willing to invoke any and all help there might be.

The strange thing was how at peace the river seemed to be, whatever was passing in the world beyond its banks. Twice, Joliffe saw black smoke columning into the sky north of the river, telling that somewhere something large was burning. Once one of the men-at-arms barked a warning that brought all his fellows to their feet and the archers into a line along the north side of the boat, their bows at the ready. With everyone else, Joliffe stared where they were staring, up the steep slope of the winter-pale hillside above that stretch of the river to where a line of horsemen were black-shaped against the sky, a double-pointed pennon carried above them.

“Can you see whose they are?” someone of the bishop’s household asked.

The soldiers’ captain shook his head. “Can’t make out the arms. French, though, most likely.” He amended that. “Armagnacs. But anyway no trouble at this distance.” But neither he nor his men eased their watchfulness until, a while later, the riders swung away from the river and out of sight.

Joliffe carried away two thoughts from that. One was that rushing all your men to face an open foe on one side left your back to anyone waiting to come at you from the other way. The other was that he heartily wished England’s King Henry V had not taken up his great-grandfather’s claim to the French crown—or else that when France’s King Charles VI had been brought to grant the French crown should go not to his son, the Dauphin, but to King Henry as husband of King Charles’ daughter, the Dauphin had then died. The intent was to join the two kingdoms under a double crown. What neither king foresaw was that King Henry, still in the full flourish of his manhood, would die of disease something like a month and half before old, mad King Charles, leaving the crowns of France and England to King Henry’s infant son, King Charles’ grandson.

Only now, fourteen years later, was that child nearing an age to rule in his own right—a right opposed all these years by his disinherited uncle, the Dauphin, so that along with his double crown, young King Henry VI had inherited this war, begun seven years before he was born and showing less sign than ever of coming to an end.

Unless this new alliance between the Dauphin and the duke of Burgundy proved able to defeat and drive the English out. Which it surely would not.

Not while I’m in the middle of it anyway, I hope, Joliffe thought wryly.

But among other things he had learned in his player’s life was that the only moment possibly under his control at any time—and even then assuredly not always—was the moment in which he presently was. Plans and hopes could be made and had, but there was no certainty of what would come, not even from one moment to the next; and he stood gazing at the river’s swirl and flow, and at the—just now—peaceful-seeming countryside, and knew that he had been set into the swirl and flow of matters he did not much understand, with probably a great many unfamiliar and presently unseen dangers all too near. More all the time, he was wondering into just what Bishop Beaufort had sent him.