Into The Fire (11 page)

Landis Bress ard, Monday, 24 February 2014

She stares at it a long time. Her lawyer is afraid of Landis Bressard. Nothing has been said, but Picaut knows the smell of terror. She knows, too, that he will lose any confrontation that comes to court.

She says, ‘Say you get to be mayor, on a ticket of Bressard-flavoured rationality. At what point do the people of Orléans realize they are led by a family that makes the mafia look like a boy band and who thinks that the only problem with Hitler’s vision of the Third Reich was that he just didn’t have quite enough
conviction
to carry it off? Or do we wait until you’re in the Elysée Palace and then all of France discovers it?’

‘Inès …’ He pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘I know we have our differences, but I’m not … that. Do you honestly think Christelle Vivier’s vision is better? Or that of the men behind her? Troy Cordier makes me look like a bleeding liberal, I promise you.’

Christelle Vivier of the
Front National
is Luc’s main opponent in the mayoral race and Troy Cordier is her campaign manager. In truth, it’s hard to imagine anyone being further to the right. The difference is that everyone knows what Troy is and Picaut is not sure even she knows what Luc really is, only that it’s not what she wants him to be.

Luc drops his hands. He shrinks before her. ‘Please, Inès. I won’t win without you. And I honestly believe we are better than the Front.’

She holds up Landis’s note, a barrier between them. ‘I’ll take this to Ducat. If he tells me it has no legal standing, I’ll call a press conference and read it aloud. Your campaign will die on its feet.’

Ducat is no friend to the Family. In the past, this has been one more bone of contention. These last months, it has been his one saving grace.

‘Even Ducat won’t find holes in this, I promise you.’ Luc’s gaze is warm, friendly, conciliatory. ‘Just stand by me and smile. Be my kingmaker. We ask nothing more.’

She shakes his proffered hand.

IT IS ALMOST
the solstice. A week has passed since the assault on Jargeau which saw the Maid fall from the walls and rise again, victorious. Tomas and Patrick Ogilvy break fast together by a small, hot fire in the heart of the Maid’s army.

Patrick Ogilvy says, ‘Claudine was a ward of the king. And her brother, too.’

‘Which king?’ This may be a foolish question, but Tomas is newly woken, and the greater part of his mind is on the landscape around him, on the lowering thorns on every side, on the dips and valleys that might hide scouts, on the reported presence of five thousand English men at arms in the land they’re about to ride through, and the likelihood of ambush sometime in the day.

In any case, even now, when someone says ‘king’ his mind goes to the English, warrior king, victor of Agincourt; Henry, fifth of the name, who may be dead, but was the king a man could fight for and not feel ashamed. That king would not have taken a whore as a ward, even if she wasn’t yet a whore.

Because Claudine, it transpires, is not only friendly with Jean-Pierre, the master gunner, she has spread her favours through the French army, at least before the Maid made such freedoms fewer. By happy chance, Patrick Ogilvy was one of her winter friends. It has taken many days of quiet, casual questions to get this far, but, this morning, on waking, he remembers her fondly. ‘She knew what a man liked. Cheerful, she was. Always grateful.’

Tomas rolls his eyes. ‘The French king took wards?’ It doesn’t sound likely. What king takes in other men’s children if he doesn’t have to? Most of them have enough of their own, by the time you take in the broods of legal offspring and the byblows.

‘Her father died on the field of Agincourt. Her mother …’ He frowns. ‘I forget what happened to her mother, but anyway, she was dead. Claudine and her brother had nobody. And so the king took them in. He was called Best Beloved as well as the Mad. Charles le Bien Aimé. Maybe he just liked children.’

This is not a path Tomas wishes to explore. He begins to pack away the remnants of the morning’s meal: oat bannocks, crisped black at the edges, and a duck egg, brought from Jargeau, that might not have been entirely fresh. His guts gripe mildly in its aftermath. ‘So, why did she end up servicing the men? Did she not have a place in the king’s household?’

‘Not for long. She was thrown out after the old king died. Her and Matthieu – that’s her brother—’

‘The one who was murdered.’

‘The one who spoke ill to the Maid and was struck down by God. Don’t roll your eyes at me, Tomas Rustbeard, even the priests name it a miracle. Anyway, Claudine and Matthieu were turned out on the street with no money, though the king had left them silver in his will. As she tells it, Matthieu spent the last five years growing more bitter. He swore he’d find a way to get the money they were owed.’

Ah.

So we have a child who was once a ward of the king; a boy who might have become confused about his station. A youth, coming to adulthood, consumed by the need for vengeance, and an escape from penury. And then one evening he encounters the Maid as she enters Chinon. He says something – we know not what – and in the morning, he is found floating face down in the river with a hole in the back of his skull.

Why did you die, Matthieu? Did you recognize her, this girl who pretends to come from Lorraine? Was she a ward too, another whose father had died at Agincourt, as yours did?

Did you threaten to undo her?

And if Matthieu recognized the Maid on a footbridge in the dark of a February evening, then his sister should be able to do so in the full daylight of high summer.

It’s a good morning, bright and sharp and clear, and the world is full of possibility. What Tomas Rustbeard needs now is to get to Bedford, the late king’s brother and now, by God’s grace, regent of France and England, and tell him what he knows.

His problem: Bedford is in Paris, which is to the north. The Maid is heading north and her army with her, which is all to the good, but five thousand Englishmen stand somewhere between here and there, bent on murder. The scouts have been out all night, searching. Tomas has counted three back in since he awoke. The fourth, who went north, is returning now.

He finishes packing his kit, not looking at where the man slides off his sweating horse and kneels for the Maid.

‘Hello …’ Ogilvy looks back across his right shoulder. ‘Is that a scout?’

‘Is it? You might be right, at that.’ Grimacing, Tomas pushes himself to his feet. ‘Get your boots on, Ogilvy. Ten to one says we’re going north to meet the English.’

‘I don’t have new boots. Not like some of us.’

‘That’s because you didn’t earn them.’

‘Earn them? For half a heartbeat spent kneeling in the dirt!’ And they descend to squabbling, because Tomas Rustbeard has new boots and a new mount and today, of all glorious days, is feeling decidedly happy with both.

The horse is a gift from the Maid; a bay gelding with exceptional paces taken from the stables of Jargeau and given to him for his services in helping her to dismount. She did notice him.

The boots are an essential component of his unfolding strategy. He ordered them himself from Ricard’s younger brother, Arnaud, who cut them to measure from dark, much-oiled bull’s hide, and tooled them around the top with a running imprint that is both the Fleur de Lys of France and the Cross of Lorraine, which the Maid has on the blade of her Crusader sword. Thus Tomas marks himself her man in a way that everyone will recognize. In six thousand men, nobody else has boots like this.

Six thousand is about the right number for the Maid’s army, because if the early scouts are right, then the English commanders, Talbot and Scales, fleeing north from Meung-sur-Loire with their defeated force of three thousand, at least one third of them bowmen, have at last met up with the unbeaten, Fastolf, who has been ordered south from Paris with a force of two thousand (one third likewise armed with bows), and the resulting five thousand thoroughly aggrieved English men at arms are disporting themselves somewhere across the route the Maid must take if she wants to get the French king – she calls him dauphin still, having not yet seen him crowned – to Rheims.

Tomas Rustbeard still needs to speak to Bedford, though, and needs to find a way to do it that will not destroy his standing with the French. The threads of his plan are elastic; he revises them on the hoof and on foot and sitting on wet, lichen-covered logs at dusk, watching the fires burn to white ash.

He is still revising them when a horn sounds, long and looping, and the shout after it, ‘Ready to ride!’

‘Did I not tell you? Ten to one?’ Tomas holds out his hand.

Patrick Ogilvy spits on it, laughing. ‘Fuck yourself, man. I didn’t take the bet. It was obvious.’ They laugh together, as they do a lot now, and everyone thinks they are cousins at the very least.

Tomas himself asked, once, ‘Was your father a bishop, by any chance?’ Ogilvy was drunk, but not that drunk, and it took several more jars to heal the affront, and a night spent listening to the tales of Ogilvy
père et fils
and their undying devotion, one for the other. Not a shared father, then. But close enough, and growing closer by the day.

The newly returned scout rides past, seeking food. Ogilvy shouts to him in passing. ‘How many?’

‘Half of the total. Over two thousand men. Fastolf has them marching.’

Fastolf, Knight of the Garter, a name to strike fear into the heart of all France. The mere whisper of his presence near a battlefield is supposed to make his enemies weep. The men of the Maid’s company do not seem to be weeping to Tomas; quite the reverse.

To the scout, Tomas shouts, ‘Do they know we’re here?’

‘They do now. We killed one of their scouts, but the other got away.’

‘Good. Good. Good.’ Patrick Ogilvy punches his palm with each word. ‘We’ll get a real fight. None of this standing back and letting the gunners have their day. Let’s go!’

The word rings round the camp and soon they are heading fast along the northern trail, faster and faster because if the English dig in across the way, and set their archers behind stakes as they did at Agincourt, then it’s over and the king – sorry, the
dauphin
– can crawl off to Spain or Scotland in penury, and everyone else can learn English and kneel for Bedford.

Except the Maid, of course, who will have to hide in a nunnery or die. Tomas has tried to imagine her in a nunnery, but his mind explodes every time. She would destroy them, given time, except that somebody, somewhere would betray her to Bedford and he is not a man given to mercy.

‘Halt!’

A messy, disordered halt, but necessary; if the scouts are right, the English are up ahead. The air is drenched in horse sweat and nerves. Men cross themselves and fidget with their blades. The priests at the front grow silent. Just as Henry did, the Maid brings a mass of priests with her on campaign. At first they were on foot. Now they are fewer, but those who are here are riding; this a horseback army, designed for speed.

The Maid is in a knot of knights. Tomas Rustbeard and Patrick Ogilvy are close because … well, they’re always close. Tomas might earn another horse for handing her down from her mount, after all.

An argument rages. The Maid doesn’t have command of this army; for propriety’s sake, leadership has been granted to d’Alençon, the king’s cousin, and the good duke is doing his best to issue orders. For her own sake, the Maid must not ride in the van, it’s too dangerous. Remember Agincourt. Remember the carnage and the risk. The English longbow can punch arrows through plate the way a farrier drives nails through a hoof. It’s just not
safe
.

Even her squire is arguing this; he has been ordered by the Duke of Orléans himself not to let his mistress ride at the front. She frowns, bites her lip, signals to him, Tomas Rustbeard, the man to whom she gave a horse. ‘Can you squire?’

There’s a challenge in her look, an invitation that makes his throat run dry. In his time as Bedford’s spy, he’s tried his hand at many things and found himself able. He makes a decent archer and a competent enough water engineer. He’s been a priest on occasion, and found facility as an apothecary, but he has never trained as a squire. He couldn’t hold a lance to save his life; at least, not in the tilting position. But it is possible that he could probably ride with one in his hand and pass it across to her at the right moment. He nods.

The Maid gestures to d’Aulon, who looks relieved and passes Tomas the lance. ‘We’re in the second row, behind La Hire and Poton de Xaintrailles.’

Jesu. Poton de Xaintrailles is one of the foremost knights of the tournament circuit. He makes his living riding the breadth of Europe, challenging men to fight. They say he lives to kill. Certainly, he’s not safe to be near.

‘My lady—’

She is already gone.

Thus does Tomas Rustbeard find himself in the midst of fifteen hundred mounted knights and their squires.

Somebody told him once that you could fit a hundred mounted knights to the acre. He doesn’t know if this is true, but he can believe there are fifteen acres of knights here, if not more, in all the colours and patterns of heraldry: or azure, sable and argent, bend and quarter and boars and goats and lions rampant and lions couchant – and lilies: everywhere the lilies of France.

They are a forest of brilliance, and him a russet smudge among them, his red hair and near-black boots his only distinguishing features.

The Maid is riding d’Alençon’s black-hearted grey-white courser. Xenophon. She has named it Xenophon. If that isn’t hubris, Tomas doesn’t know what is, but a fancy Greek name doesn’t keep it from being thoroughly dangerous. Out of choice, he wouldn’t go within spitting distance of its hind feet, but a squire must perforce ride at the quarters of his knight, close enough to pass the lance, and, in any case, he is curious to see how she handles herself.

She may have been a horse breaker (or buyer, or boy), but that doesn’t make her a knight. If Bertrand de Poulangy was right that her father taught her to ride – and who was her father? Is he another that died at Agincourt? Does Claudine know? – what else did he teach her?