The Mistress Of Normandy (32 page)

“At present,” the king continued, “I must concern myself with preserving my armor from rusting in this accursed rain.” He squinted through the mist. “The circumstances of my birth do not entitle me to empty vanity. I would have it said that Henry Fifth earned the right to rule.” He stared at her thoughtfully. “Are you having doubts about the French nobles?”

Her eyes hardened. She glanced down at her iron-bound wrists. “Not about the rightness of their cause, Your Grace. Only about their arrogance.” She paused, recalling the French armed parties that rushed in from time to time to harry the English army. The disorganized
écorcheurs
did little harm. Had they but adequate leadership, the invaders would now be but a bloodstain seeping into the chalky terrain of Picardy.

She tossed the thought aside and said, “The French nobles doubtless consider your army unworthy of a fight.”

“Your countrymen will be happily mistaken in treating my campaign so lightly.”

She agreed. As would the bickering lords if they but knew the skill and determination of the intrepid English king.

Turning the subject, she asked, “Your Grace, how can you still doubt my husband? Was he not the man who spared you and your brothers by denouncing the Lollard plot to murder you?”

“Henry Scrope served me well, too. Yet he turned on me.”

And was executed for it, she recalled with a shiver. “But Scrope was a weakling seduced by promises of wealth, of higher station, greater influence—”

“Your husband,” Henry snapped, suddenly angry, “was seduced by a more powerful force than that. The young fool loves you, Baroness. And you are loyal to France.”

“I am devoted to peace, Your Grace, be it from the leopard or the lily. I am bound to defend my husband’s honor.”

“As I am bound to punish a traitor, if traitor he be.”

* * *

“Monjoie! À St. Denis!”
The lethal French battle cry rang through the woods, startling the English army and halting their plodding pace.

“Enemy knights!” bellowed a soldier, running through the ranks. “They’re riding down from the garrison at Corbie.”

Rodney reined in his team. Chains dragging, Lianna pulled herself up, standing on tiptoe to see the bridge. Beside her, young Johnny, son of Sir John Cornwall, scrambled for a view.

“At last,” the lad breathed. “The French show their colors.” The azure and gold of the French lilies joined the sanguine oriflamme of St. Denis in a dance upon the wind, high above the gleaming helms of the French knights. “Cowards!” the boy shrieked. “White-livered bastards!” He turned to Lianna. “Quick, my lady, what is the French for bastard?”

“Just hush up and watch. You might learn something.”

Johnny, who regarded her with a mixture of awe and admiration, rested his chin on the side of the cart.

The archers formed up and loosed their arrows, but the knights ranged too close and the arrows flew over the heads of the oncoming French. During the skirmish, Lianna discovered in herself a deep well of fear. She was afraid for the English, afraid for her husband and son, and afraid for herself should the French prevail and find a woman among the enemy.

One archer, trying desperately to draw his longbow, met death beneath the iron-shod hooves of a war-horse. More horses, mired to the hocks in mud, reared and charged unimpeded into the English ranks.
“Nom de Dieu,”
said Lianna, sickened by the bowmen’s screams of agony, “they ought to avail themselves of a chevaux-de-frise.”

Johnny looked at her curiously. “What mean you?”

“My uncle of Burgundy saw the Sultan Bayard use the tactic at the Battle of Nicopolis. His archers planted a fence of sharp stakes to stop the cavalry advance.” She pressed her cheek to the side of the tumbril and wondered why the lives of English bowmen mattered to her. All life, she mused, thinking of Rand, of Aimery, was precious.

“We’re finished,” Johnny said in a hollow tone.

She noticed a stir among the French knights across the river. To her astonishment, one fell, his neck skewered by an arrow that had penetrated the gorget of his armor. Two others flopped from their destriers and floundered in the mud.

Confused, she sought the source of the assault of arrows. The English archers could not have felled those three; the range and angle were all wrong.

“Hail Mary,” breathed Rodney. “The French are being harried by archers on their own side of the river.” Movement, as insubstantial as shadows, rippled through the distant woods.

A fourth knight fell. Plagued by more phantom arrows, his comrades retreated to the garrison. By the end of the skirmish several Frenchman had been taken prisoner by the English.

Lianna frowned. “But who...?”

A crackle of laughter grated above the shouts of soldiers and the screams of horses. A vivid stream of profanity, stunningly familiar, followed the laughter and then faded.

Lianna collapsed in the cart, laughing and weeping with relief. “Jack,” she gasped. “’Twas him, I know it.” She lapsed into rapid, inarticulate French while Johnny and Rodney stared at her in confusion.

When she’d regained control, she considered telling Henry that Rand and his men had foiled the French attack. But York, not the king, visited her that evening. Edward considered her his own prisoner and doubtless meant to demand a ransom from Burgundy once they reached Calais. Rand, she decided, catching York’s vindictive glare, was safer in anonymity, at least until her husband’s innocence could be proven.

She pretended to ignore York; he pretended to ignore her. Johnny, bedazzled by the grand duke, told him of the Sultan Bayard’s chevaux-de-frise at the Battle of Nicopolis. York pointedly dismissed Burgundy’s heroism at that battle. Instead he cited the valor of the King’s father, Henry Bolingbroke, who had also fought in the war against the Turks.

King Henry did not come the next night, either, for he was busy instructing his archers to sharpen long poles. York, ever anxious to garner Henry’s favor, took full credit for the idea of the chevaux-de-frise.

* * *

“What day is it?” asked Rand, blinking at Batsford through a mist of predawn drizzle.

The priest yawned, flexed his legs, and frowned at his sodden boots. He thought a moment. “Friday, October the twenty-fifth. The Feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian.”

Rand sighed and rose wearily from his bedroll. A canopy of willows afforded little protection from the ceaseless rain. His flesh, encased for days beneath layers of rain and sweat-soaked clothing, was beginning to shrivel.

He roused the other men, and they formed a circle beneath the willow. While they ate a meager meal of biscuit and dried beef, Rand looked upon them with affection and pity.

Batsford, with his unique combination of piety and camaraderie, had acted as spiritual guide, urging the men onward when weariness, despair, and fear threatened to sap their will to forge ahead with the guerrilla attacks on the French army. Jack’s foul-mouthed commands took up where Batsford’s pious words left off. Simon, hardened by privation yet still a lad, cared for his lord’s armor as if the pieces were the crown jewels. Dylan, Piers, Peter, Neville, Godfrey, and Giles fought in a back-to-back unit that had become as lethal as a siege engine. Chiang, mysterious and silent, had joined the mismatched brotherhood. Midnight blasts from his cannonlike handgun had sobered forever many a drunken French soldier.

Lianna’s betrayal, provoked or not by the dauphin’s threats, had made outlaws of these simple, steadfast men. They’d be justified if they deserted. Rand would not blame them if they fled to English-held Harfleur to take ship to homes they’d not seen for nigh on two years.

Yet they stayed. They stayed and rode hard through forests and fens, doing what they could to plague the advancing French army. Like an ungainly shadow, that huge force loomed between King Henry and the fortified city of Calais.

“Henry’s army is but a mile east of us,” Rand said quietly. “We’ll see pitched battle today.”

Ten pairs of eyes fastened on him. “At last,” Jack breathed.

Rand took up a stick. “Here,” he said, pushing the end into the wet ground, “is Maisoncelles.” The name of the town tasted bitter in his mouth, for at Maisoncelles he’d nearly lost his child, his wife, his life. “To the north and west lies Agincourt. I saw its keep when I climbed to the top of yonder rise. The village to the east is called Tramecourt.” He etched more marks on the ground. “A valley lies here, with woods on either side. It surrounds the road to Calais.”

“The ideal battlefield,” Jack mused.

“Aye, but for whom?” asked Dylan. “Thirty thousand of France’s finest, or five thousand starving English?”

“I’m going to fight for Henry,” said Rand. “You are free to stay clear of battle if you so choose.”

“Stay clear?” snorted Jack. “I’ve ridden my goddamned tail off keeping up with this march. I’ve spent a hundred arrows a day playing cat-and-mouse with the French army. Think you I’d turn away now, my lord?”

The others vehemently agreed.

“But how can we join the fighting?” asked Simon. “When Piers sneaked into the English camp, he heard that the Duke of York is out for your blood. Edward holds you responsible for driving him away from Bois-Long.”

As he had for over a fortnight, Rand fought down a rising tide of bitterness. Piers had also learned that Henry had sent a scout to Bois-Long. The scout had not returned; perhaps Henry would never know that Gervais Mondragon, not Rand, had driven off the advance guard.

As for Lianna... He tightened his grip on the stick. Chiang swore she’d acted out of fear for the baby and for Rand himself. Yet even were her motives so noble, she’d betrayed her husband. She should have consulted him, should have known he’d have found a way to defend the château and see to the safety of Aimery. But she’d acted alone, disdaining Rand’s abilities.

He stabbed the stick into the soft ground. “Once the fighting starts, we’ll attach ourselves to the left flank of Henry’s army.” He glanced at the ten mounts and the two big packhorses, cropping dispiritedly at clumps of salt grass. “What better way to prove our loyalty to the king?”

They finished their breakfast. Father Batsford offered prayers and heard confessions. Rand spoke quietly of the sins he’d committed, sins of pride, sins of foolishness.

Batsford waved his rosary in annoyance. “My lord, your ‘sins’ bore me. You were dubbed the Spotless by your fellows at Anjou. You’ve borne the title well.”

Rand shook his head. “Then why did I allow myself to be duped by a woman and branded a traitor by my king?”

“Is it a sin for a man to love, to trust?”

Rand shrugged. “It matters not. We’ll likely all be dead by evening.”

“An encouraging note on which to conclude,” said Batsford dryly. “Come, my lord. Arm yourself and we’ll be off.”

While the archers busied themselves with waxing bowstrings and notching arrows, Chiang prepared charges for his long handgun. Simon brought forth Rand’s armor. As the squire fastened the lacings, straps, and buckles of breastplate, faulds, and cuisses, Jack Cade sidled near. Grinning, he made a game of tossing his sharpened dagger at a nearby tree trunk. The dagger found its target with breathtaking precision.

“You’re well practiced,” Rand remarked.

“Aye, they took my fingers but not my aim.”

Rand winced at a sudden pinch of pressure on his arm. “Have a care, Simon,” he said. “You’ve made a tourniquet of my vambrace.”

Jack chuckled. “Such is the discomfort of one destined for glory. Remind me never to become a knight.”

“The arm piece used to fit,” said Simon.

“Our lord has grown,” Jack remarked, and went to retrieve his dagger.

Some hours later, encased in the armor Simon had so carefully protected in waxed cloth, Rand led his men forth. Their horses climbed a ridge that loomed some three hundred feet above the triangular valley he’d surveyed the day before.

Lifting his visor, he squinted through the mist. At first he saw only the distant forest. Then a metallic shimmer caught his eye. He realized that he was looking, not at a row of trees, but at three huge columns of heavily armed Frenchmen.

“God have mercy,” Jack said. “’Tis a forest of metal.”

Beyond the close-packed host, the French army rolled outward, like steel-draped hills, as far as the eye could see. Lances bristled in the gray morning sky, and ducal standards rode a rising wind. The French wore colors of eye-smarting beauty, as lethal and lovely as Rand’s French wife.

Cavalry, foot soldiers, and crossbowmen surrounded a menacing array of gunnery. Bitterly Rand wondered if some of the wheel-mounted arblasts, light cannon, and bombards had been supplied by Lianna.

What was she doing now? Shut up in her fortress and testing her guns? Holding Henry’s scout prisoner so the king would never learn the truth? Rand fueled his battle lust with the anger brought on by his thoughts.

A metallic rattle brought him swinging around. There stood Chiang with his bullets and powder, his exotic face drawn into an expression of deep sadness.

“Are we both thinking of Lianna?” he asked.

Chiang nodded.

“You served her nearly all your life. Yet now you side with her enemy.”

Chiang looked from side to side and spoke in a low voice. “My lord, blood ties are strong.”

Rand’s helm crashed against his gorget as he looked up. “What?”

The Chinaman tightened his fist around the barrel of his gun. “If I’m to shed my blood, let it be for my father, Henry Bolingbroke, and my half brother, Henry the Fifth.”

Shock barreled into Rand’s chest; he nearly stumbled.
“You’re Bolingbroke’s son?”

Chiang nodded. “When Bolingbroke was fighting the Turks, he lay with a Chinese slave, who bore him a son.”

“My God,” said Rand, “so that was why you were bound to help Bolingbroke seize the Crown from Richard Second.”

“Aye. I thought it time you knew, my lord.” Hefting his gun, Chiang walked away. In a daze of astonishment, Rand stared after King Henry’s brother.

Dylan distributed the last of the arrows to the archers. The little Welshman’s hands trembled as he worked.

“My lord,” asked Simon nervously, “is victory as impossible as it seems?”