The Perfect Sinner

The squire closed his mouth and kept it closed.

‘He helped put the King on the throne,’ said the priest mildly.

‘He did that,’ I agreed, because what else could one say?

That thought was still in my mind a few days later, once we had swapped the Michel for horseback and were plodding south. Thinking of the far past, at my age, makes the present much more painful. I could ride for hours back then because I was so much lighter in my saddle and my joints had youth’s oil in them, but there was much I didn’t know in those days. I didn’t know how to scan the landscape ahead, to measure the dangers of the blind places which might hide who knows what. I didn’t have the voice of command which could still make even the toughest trooper do what I said without a moment’s question.

There was quite a crew of us by this time. The two Italians, di Mari and di Provan, would have little to do with me and I didn’t mind one bit. They weren’t my kind of men. They talked to each other in their own babble. Di Provan had a high-pitched mocking laugh which made me wince, with a carry to it shrill enough to tell any brigands we were coming a mile away. Occasionally, if they wanted something, they would refer to the squire, but they seemed to find me barbarous, unfashionable, useful as some sort of bodyguard, but no more. The squire asked me, rather anxiously, if he should explain that I was not only the leader of the party but also its designated chief spokesman. I got a certain amount of wry pleasure from letting them dig the hole of misunderstanding ever deeper. They were Genoese, these men, and a bit full of themselves, and they had two of their own crossbowmen with them. Now, I’ve seen a lot of men killed by crossbows and mostly they were the men who were holding them, not their targets.

I watched it close up sixteen years ago at Poitiers when we were creeping up on them through the woods. It was dreadful standing still while we waited because I had splits in my feet at that time, the awful itch that is best dealt with by keeping moving. Either that or taking off your boots to have a good rub though that never lasts long. Elizabeth cured it for me after years of torment with an oil of hers, and I remember her sitting on the floor of our bedroom in my house of Pool as she worked it in to my toes, looking up at me all the while, making the shape of little kisses with her lips, and when she had done, she spread the rest of the oil over both of us and we rubbed it in with the skin of our bodies. Anyway, back at Poitiers, trying to take my mind off my feet, I watched one of their crossbowmen at work and understood what a dreadful business it was, winding that string back up after each shot. He didn’t see us until we were well clear of the wood, and before he got off one shot, Gwynn put two arrows into him. It was always like that with crossbows. They pack a punch but they don’t always get to punch twice.

In an ambush you get one chance and that’s it. If you haven’t dealt with it by the time you count to five, the chances are you’re dead. On this journey the safety of these Genoese, of William and of the squire, depended entirely on my Welsh archers who now went ahead and behind, ready to chase away any band of hopeful brigands who might not be familiar with my standard and might imagine we were some sort of easy pickings. Of course we took the Dutch way, as they call it, down towards the Rhine as we’d been ordered. The French lay to the south west and France was barred to us by the war. We’d need more than a half-dozen archers to see the French army off. A few more anyway.

We had left the comfort of Bruges well behind, leaving the town after a Mass for travellers to which I had obliged William to add a personal mass for my own list of souls. The Italians had chafed at that but I ignored them and now we were all ambling through dull, open country. It was nothing like campaigning. The December rain was surprisingly warm and I knew we would sleep the night in one of Ghent’s fine inns.

In a dream prompted by the talk of the old days which seemed to please the squire so much, I was back in my youth, twenty years old and on my first long cross-country journey. The royal summons had come in the summer of the year 1327 and it was the single most exciting moment of my life until then. I was entirely delighted, not so much at the prospect of fighting Robert Bruce’s Scots, though ignorance invested even that with glamour, but more with the relief of getting away from the draughts of Walwayns Castle. My father’s ancient fortress stood by the corner of Wales where one coast faces the Atlantic and the other turns eastward to confront England. Even in summer, a cold wind straight off the endless sea blew through the stone walls as if they were chain mail and my father’s increasingly mad rages threatened all our lives.

‘You’re going to the bloody King?’ he screamed when the summons came. ‘I’m the King round here. Have I said you could go? Have I? You’d leave me with the goblins, would you? The goblins speak to me, you know. I could tell you what they think of you. You’re no better than I am. You just think you are.’

The Scots gathering to invade our northern borders could not be more dangerous than him. He was a normal man one moment and murderous the next. You needed eyes in the back of your head when he was like that. From the earliest moment I could remember, I had vowed to stick to reason and predictability in my own life and watched anxiously for signs in me that his blood might show.

Outside events got me out of there. Even in far Walwayns, miles from everywhere, out there on the very edge of the kingdom, we knew it was a year of divided loyalties, and the Scots had chosen a good moment to threaten invasion when attention was elsewhere.

Called to arms. A blast of trumpets rang through those words. However mad he was, my father couldn’t safely keep me there against the royal summons, so off I went, equipped as best I could manage, with the captain of the castle guard and his three best men, all of us pleased to be away from the mad rage of Walwayns. I pretended to command them and they indulged me by pretending to listen. We made our way across the country, accumulating others as we went, all experienced men-at-arms except me, and I was agog to hear their tales. The journey up to Durham took ten days, enough time to get used to my horse, my borrowed saddle and the heft of my grandfather’s old sword, but not nearly time enough to sort through the complex loyalties and mixed feelings of that band of fighters. By the time we reached the army’s gathering place in the north, a land I knew nothing of, I at least understood where the majority opinion lay.

The throne was effectively empty. The country lay somewhere between two kings. No one regretted the end of the second Edward, a vicious, corrupted waste of time who had entirely deserved his comeuppance. His wife Isabella was right to come back from France and kick him and his favourites out, that was the majority opinion. She was not so right, most men thought, to flaunt her lover in the way she did, and that lover, Roger Mortimer, they all agreed, was a most dangerous man. The pity of the country was that the second Edward had proved such a poor shadow of the first Edward, his brave father. All hope now lay in the new young king, the third to bear that name and the whispered slogan of the times was ‘third time lucky’. The signs were good. Physically he took after his grandfather, not his father, and people said he had the kingly manner.

The question everyone asked was, would Mortimer ever let him rule?

Our journey reached its destination one evening on a hilltop where a large patrol challenged us and then ushered us down into a valley so full of armed men that I could not understand what my eyes were telling me. They looked like a swarm of bees, jostling for position for their tents and their cooking fires. I had rarely seen more than fifty men in one place, and here were fifty fifties and ten times that again. All we lacked was an enemy. We moved down into that valley and found a place and slipped into the ranks. It was decided that we belonged in Montague’s troop, though as we were not part of his official retinue we had to fend for ourselves as far as food went, which was a hungry business. For days that stretched out into weeks, we patrolled those hills with absolutely no idea where the Scots were. I had time to set my old chain mail to rights and get something like an edge put on my sword, though it wavered in and out as you looked along it and would just as easily have sawn wood as sliced flesh. The Earl of Lancaster, the old Earl that is, was in command, and he was a fine man, but on my fourth day there, I saw young Edward, the new king, for the first time, and there was an even finer man. He was five years younger than me, but he was already bigger.

Those Scots had us looking like fools from the very first. They were light on their feet. They brought no baggage trains like we did. Each man carried a little bag of oatmeal, I heard, which they would mix into a paste and cook on a stone. We drank wine which the carts brought and they drank water which the rivers brought. How could we catch them? Rivers go faster than carts. We followed them, slogging through the thick country while they danced ahead in their own natural element, taunting us with smoke from the villages they burnt. I craned for another glimpse of the King and, as our numbers thinned, the footmen left trailing and lost as we who had horses did our best to keep going, I saw more and more of him. It got worse and then it got still worse again. Our rations grew shorter and shorter, our horses were going lame, and then the biting flies of summer were driven away by even worse downpours of driving rain. Rain gets into armour and rusts it and rubs your skin raw if you’re stuck in that armour all day and all night. Mine had been made for someone else long ago and it fitted only where it touched.

So far, it was a contest only with hunger and the weather, and I could stand up to that, but I needed more. I was desperate to test myself against an enemy, to know what it really was to stand up to another man in a real fight. It wasn’t that I wanted to spill another man’s blood, more that I needed to know how I would be. The strain of fearing that I might turn out a coward in the company of all these tough, quiet men was getting too much for me. I knew the rules of chivalry. I knew what was considered a fine way to fight and what was not. The Scottish knights had a brave reputation.

We found them in the end, mostly by luck. We crossed a river in a barren land and saw them on top of a hill ahead of us, in a well-prepared position with no way to attack except slowly and uphill into waiting steel, and we weren’t in a hurry to do that. Instead, we faced them for three days from our own side of the valley. They looked as though they grew from the landscape and belonged in it, in their rough cloth, while we, though the shine had long gone from our metal, seemed entirely out of place. I could not imagine what it would be like to attack them, to climb that hill and face those deadly men, but the moment of finding out was postponed. After the third night we woke to see the far hill was bare. They had slipped away.

I felt frustration but I also felt relief, a little song in my soul that my death had stepped a few paces back. Then our scouts returned and the word spread that the enemy had not gone far. They had found an even better protected hill and the stalemate set in all over again.

It was three days later that I met the King face to face and in the oddest manner. My wish had come partly true. I had experienced battle, but not in any ordered way, not in a way covered by the rules. My first taste of combat consisted of waking abruptly, confused as men rushed over my legs in the night, shouting ‘Raiders! To arms!’ Searching desperately in the dark for my sword, I found it with the scabbard all caught up in the tent ropes and got it out, cutting my other hand in the process, just in time to take a wild slash at a man who appeared out of the darkness in front of me with an axe. I missed him completely and that was just as well as he turned out to be one of ours. We beat them off, or they chose to leave – a bold party barely three hundred strong, who left mounds of our men behind them. The next night had us all wide awake and jumpy, peering into the mist fearing a repeat, but when day dawned, we found we were looking up at what seemed once again to be an empty hillside. Had they gone? As I looked, a band of our men rode up from behind me on horses.

‘Are you armed and ready?’ said the nearest. ‘If you are, come with us and let’s see what’s up there.’

I was about to question the man’s right to command me in that way when he half turned and I saw that he had every right. I had taken him for a full-grown man, because he was big but the face I now saw was younger than the body. My king, Edward, aged just fifteen, was a fine man and his face had a smile on it which would have inspired loyalty in a piece of solid rock. I climbed into my saddle to follow him, thrilled, repeating his words to myself so that I had them by heart, the first words my king spoke directly to me. Ten of us went carefully up that hill, all in plain armour with no surcoats, no crests. There were three riding ahead in case all was not what it seemed. I had spurred forward to join them, but was waved back to my proper place. They were hard men, those others, men you wouldn’t want to tangle with, and as I looked around, I saw that only Edward and myself did not yet fully fit that description, though it was plain from the look on his face and the way he held himself in the saddle that for him, it was only a matter of time.

What a strange sight we found at the top. We rode through a band of mist which had us staring hard again and drawing swords, then it dispersed as we reached the summit so that we seemed to climb up into a place all of itself, remote from anything else I knew, floating in its own world. For a moment I thought we were the only living beings present, but then I heard a groan and saw ahead of me a slumped body, lashed to the trunk of a tree.

‘See to him,’ said the man next to me.

‘Who is he?’

‘He’s one of ours, snatched on a raid. Look to him.’

At that stage of my life, I was no good at tending the wounded, scared to face the pain of others without the knowledge to ease it. This man hung from the ropes, naked, and his face was somewhere behind the blood which ran in crusted streaks down his body. Both his legs were splayed out at an angle which showed the bones were smashed, and he whimpered when I tried to support him while I cut him down.

I gave him water and did what I could to wash the blood from his eyes.

I’m Guy,’ I said. ‘Help is coming.’

He croaked something in reply but it sounded more like a curse than a name. Laying him on the ground, with no idea what else to do I saw that beyond him there were four more, each lashed to another of the twisted mountain oaks. Three of them looked dead, but the fourth was tugging hard at his bonds as he saw us coming. Then he heard our voices and knew we were English and calmed down.

I did all I could for my man, and as I cleaned him I realised the extent of his wounds was worse than I could ever have imagined. He stared at me with gratitude as I mopped away the blood, but my kerchief was soon so drenched that it could take no more. I was kneeling over him, calming him with a hand on his forehead, talking to him in his pain so that he would know he was not alone, when a hand came from behind me and roughly thrust me to one side. I overbalanced backwards and saw the man who had led the way up the hill. He was perhaps approaching thirty with sandy hair and small, reddened eyes, close together. For just a moment, I felt sharp relief that he had come to help me, then I saw the knife in his hand. He held the knife out so that the poor soul on the ground would see it and the injured man began to shake his head from side to side, trying to raise his arms to protect himself.

‘Don’t do…’ that, I was about to say, but before the word was out, the knife had slit his throat and the rest of his life was bubbling and spurting out into the grass.

‘Why did you do that?’ I said to the sandy-haired man, and he turned his head to look at me with a grin on his face.

‘To spare his pain.’ His voice was shriller than you would expect from a soldier.

‘If that was the reason, why did you show him the knife?’

‘Every man should have the chance to prepare himself for death.’

‘That wasn’t it. You enjoyed…’

The next thing I knew, his left hand was clutching my throat and the knife in his right hand was pricking the skin just above my eyelid.

He shot a quick look around, but there was nobody near us to see.

‘I am not bound by your rules,’ he said in a whispered hiss. ‘You will be dead in a second if I choose. I kill who I like, when I like. You have qualms. You’re a baby. You’re worthless. Learn to respect me, young man. I am a true soldier and I am worth a hundred of you.’ The knife dropped away out of my sight and I tensed my belly for its thrust, but a voice was calling. His other hand let go of my throat and he turned away.

‘You’re wanted,’ he said.

I was sickened by the sight and the sound and the smell of him, but I couldn’t help staring at his face in fascination. I had no idea that I had just met the man who was to be the bane of so many years of my life.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘The chief wants you.’

I thought he meant the King, but the man who was waving his arm for me was much older. I had seen him in the camp with everyone paying him their respects, but I did not know who he was. Clearly of high rank, he wore a blue cape over gilded chain mail. Everyone except the King deferred to him and I should have asked his name of someone the first time I saw him. Now, I had left it too late and it would have seemed absurd.

I ran to him and made an awkward bow.

‘The King wishes to stay behind here with his thoughts. You stay with him,’ he said in a deep and slightly slurred voice. ‘Escort him back down as soon as he is done,’ he added. ‘There is no danger. They are gone.’

They all went off down the hill taking the surviving soldier with them and there we were, just me and the young King in unimaginable proximity. He looked at me, shrugged and turned his attention to the rest of that trampled hilltop, wandering through what had been left behind, with me close behind him. The horror of the last few minutes was still in me, but there was now more pressing business. I felt extremely important and kept my hand on my sword hilt, enjoying fantasies of an unexpected ambush and me gloriously saving my sovereign from a murderous Scot or two. No more than two I hoped.

They had departed in a hurry. Dead cattle, partly butchered, lay in a row in the heather. Stewpots full of cooling water stood by them and further off were heaps of something I could not at first identify. The King knelt by one of these mounds and I stood back, studying him, expecting him to show signs of kingship, perhaps even of immortality. He got up, turned to me and held something out.

‘Shoes,’ he said in a baffled tone. ‘Shoes beyond number. Why have they left us their shoes?’