The Black Prince, page 8
his belly twisted inside, loosened, he had to run for the jakes, but too late, and le diarrhée noire spatters and stains the hem of his red cotehardie. He limped home, his bowels clenching, and called for his manservant to ready a wash-bowl, for he had immerded his legs and wanted to wash, and then remembered that his manservant was dead and his other servants all fled away or dead or who knows what. He called for Jean, but he was not there. So, awkwardly, he fetched a washing bowl, but there was no more rainwater in the tub, since they used it all for the meal, so he had to go out and bring in water himself – like a child or a woman – from the river. He lifted his bright red clothing above his waist and scrubbed his legs with wet straw. Then he dipped the shitten hem of the cotehardie in the water and tried to get most of the foul stuff out. Then the diarrhée came on him again, and he got to his jakes just in time and squirted a thin stream down onto the street.
He was exhausted. He slept. He slept and woke more thirsty than he had ever been before, and he had no energy to go to the river, what did it matter anyway, so he drank from the muddy water in his pot, and fell asleep again.
where was Jean?
pains in his bowels woke him, and it was dark. There was a nasty squelchy coating on his thighs where he had disgraced himself. He tried to stand, but instead collapsed on the wooden boards. So thirsty he thought he would die of thirst, and reaching for the copper bowl his hand flapped and he spilled half of it, but managed to get more inside him. Then he crept like a worm over the floor board, and when a large splinter went into the skin just above his naked knee he barely felt it, the whole of his inner belly was on fire so badly, and then the loosening of his bowels and a stink so foul it made him weep with shame and disgust. He woke again, and his whole body was in a paroxysm of thirst the inside of his mouth and throat felt scarred over and dry as the sands of summer and his head hurt, and his bowels opened again and a liquid fire fell from them and there was a body in the room with him which was his body or another body he was too confused to know the difference but thin as a skeleton thin as a scarecrow and it rasped like a crow with a woman’s voice msieur msieur msieur msieur msieur msieur msieur and he tried to lift himself, but the fluid part of his soul had all crusted and scabbed over, and all moisture had fallen through his torso and out his arse and there was a savage thousand-pin-prick glimmer in his chest that spread down his arm and then and the thirst was and the skeleton woman was wrapped in a kirtle of nightskyblack and came to lay on his spine every single knobble and contour of the vertebrae visible through his drumskin skin and msieur msieur msieur msieur msieur msieur msieur reached round on its neck long as a cockerel’s and its mouth closed over his mouth
Newsreel (6)
PHILIP: FRENCH ARMY 200,000 STRONG
Relief of Calais: Latest Reports
the king of France has made the decision to go with his entire host to Calais, to raise the siege, sensing that his people inside were dreadfully constrained, and he had heard how access from the sea had been cut off from them, which meant that the town was in danger of being lost. And with him were the duke of Normandy his eldest son, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of Bourbon, the count of Foix, my lord Louis of Savoy, Sir Jean de Hainault, the count of Armagnac, the count of Forez, the count of Valentinois, and so many counts and barons that it would be a marvel to recount
Il sont sourds.
Je vous embrasse.
Le Coeur de Coeur est à vous.
TIMING, TIMING
Ripeness Is All, say Experts
Timing of the harvest is important. Harvesting should not be too late because of the risk of grain shedding and not too early, because the unripe grains may be crushed during threshing. Grain shattering is a genuine problem. Cut only the heads with a sawtoothed sickle sackle suckle seckle section sexton sacking sick sick sick
RIPE IS AS RIPE DOES
Soon enough the ripe fruit drops into the hands of the patient
ISTE EDWARDUS superius nominatus, qui post conquæstum tertius, Post deceslum vero EDWARDI Regis Anglia Francia, Hoc quoque anno Angli obsiderunt villam de Calais. vero illustris Rex
cut off their access by sea, he had a great castle constructed from long timbers, and had it made so sturdy that it could not be damaged. He had it positioned on the seashore and equipped with espringals, bombards, crossbows and other instruments, and garrisoned within it sixty men-at-arms and two hundred archers to guard the harbour and port of
PHILIP RETREATS
The king of England considered that the French could not reach him or the town of Calais except through the dunes on the coast, or from higher up, where there were a great many ditches, bogs and marshes and places of soft ground and dirt and treacherous pathways and only one bridge over which one might pass, called the bridge of Nieuley. So the king drew all of his ships close to the dunes and furnished them with bombards, crossbowmen, archers and espringals such that the French army might not pass. And he had the earl of Derby establish a camp on the bridge of Nieuley with a great number of men-at-arms and archers, to prevent the French from getting through, unless they took the route through the marshes, which are impassable between the mount of Sangatte and the sea. On the other side of Calais there was a high tower from which twenty-two English archers defended the way through the dunes from the French, and they had fortified it very well, as they saw it, with double ditches. When the French were lodged on the mount of Sangatte, the commons noticed a tower there. The people of Tournai, numbering perhaps fifteen hundred men, advanced towards it eagerly. When those within saw them approaching, they fired at them, wounding some. Seeing this, the companions of Tournai were enraged and set to attacking this tower with gusto. But they were driven back, and many men were killed, and no matter how he might renew the assault there was no way through and so he withdrew. After the departure of the king of France, with his army, from the hill of Sangatte, the Calesians saw clearly that all hopes of succour were at an end; which occasioned them so much sorrow and distress, that the hardiest could scarcely support it. They entreated, therefore, most earnestly, the Lord John de Vienne, their governor, to mount upon the battlements, and make a sign that he wished to hold a parley.
PART 4. POITIERS
Newsreel (7)
NEW POET LAUREATE CROWNED IN ROME
Petrarchus declares himself ‘pleased as punchinella’
De Vita Solitaria available from both good bookstores now
THE HORSE NO FLATTERER. They say and truly it is said that noblemen learn but one skill truly, and that is riding their horse, for in all else that they do, book-learning or languages, politesse or playing at games, they are surrounded by sycophants who will praise them whether they do well or ill, but when they mount a horse they meet a creature that does not know how to flatter them, and will throw them off if they ride badly. And so it is they learn to ride well. There is a powerful moral to be taken from this truth, sir, madam.
Intentio vero nostra est manifestare in hoc libro de venatione solum ea, que sunt, sicut sunt, et ad artis certitudinem redigere, quorum nullus scientiam habuit hactenus neque artem.
HAWKING FOR PLEASURE AND PROFIT.
Falconry in six easy lessons.
Glorios Dieus, don totz bens ha creysensa; Meravilhar nos devo pas las gens.
Barmy army
Barmy army
Barmy army
We are Edward’s
barmy army
JOAN OF KENT
They said of her, from a young age, that there was a strange grace in her eyes, and they did not mean it entirely as a compliment. Even as a young girl, she understood that flattery might express kindness or else envy, hostility and even fear. Even when she was a child she understood that. She watched and they did not like the way she watched. You are beautiful, they said, and it did not move her. She had the camera’s eye, is the truth of it, and her gaze went where a modest girl, or a well-bred woman, ought not. It was a camera eye because it went into every chamber: inside huts and castles. Inside armours. Inside bodies and minds. As for actual camerae, for her own camera camerarum, at her father’s house she had a room of her own, and her own maidservant in a small room adjacent. She knew without having to be told that most people did not live this way.
In spring and summer she spent as much time as she could in the gardens. The empty skullcaps of the bluebells. The cabbage-folds and inward reds of roses. The dropsical purity of lilies or the long green tubing through which bindweed blows its effortless white trumpet. ‘A fair flower among the fair flowers,’ said her mother. She never saw her father. A party of girls visited for her eighth birthday, amongst them Eleanor and Anne and they both talked endlessly about how important their fathers were. Mother didn’t talk of what happened to her father, but she knew. The camera’s eye (she didn’t call it that back then, of course) gave her a series of vivid images, a man she did not recognise, in a loose chemise, with his beard tied up to leave his neck bare, and then a sword swinging through the yielding air. The sword changed colour, and it took her a long time to understand why the sword changed colour. It happened like this: the sword was a polished silver that shone for a moment so bright that Joan thought it might be a splinter of the same stuff out of which the sun was made. But then it passed through and came out blue-black and shedding little petals of purple-black, and there were many of these petals, so she then thought it was a limb or branch of some heavenly tree.
The severe-faced woman who called at their house, from time to time, was the Queen of England. She must curtsey when this lady came in the room. But she did not want to curtsey to the long face and its bad teeth, so she curtsied to the woman’s rich dress, laced in and out with thread-of-gold.
On her eighth birthday Joan got a new dress, in blue with silver carbuncles, and then another new dress when she was nine, in green with a pattern of white embroidered feathers. The King came to visit after that, with, it seemed to Joan, a thousand people in his retinue. He had a long beard that smelled bad, old food going rotten, something decaying. She could not avoid the stench when he embraced her. ‘How old my child?’ Near ten years, Majesty, she told him, and looked at him. It seemed normal to her to look at people this way, although it usually upset them. She didn’t know why. The King stared back, and then looked away. He turned to his queen. The camera’s eye gave her a glimpse of the King as a baby, a grotesque old bearded baby, suckling at the breasts of a woman, not the queen. Both the King and the woman were naked. Sometimes the camera’s eye showed her things she only partly understood. But this was rancid, she thought, though the camera’s eye gave her no smell or other ways of feeling the occasion. She didn’t like the image.
‘I want you to think of me,’ the King told her, without meeting her ten-year-old gaze, ‘as a father. As indeed I am, father to the whole nation.’
‘Your Majesty,’ she piped, and bobbed down and stood up. Everybody applauded. Later there was a big feast, and lots of dancing, and musicians traipsing through the kitchens and stealing food, and dogs yapping, and a great deal of jubilation. The torches smelled of old straw and bad things as they burnt, and the King kept stealing suspicious looks at her. She couldn’t help that, she thought to herself with a nine-year-old’s haughtiness. It was their problem, not hers.
Sometimes Ned visited, usually with his mother, twice, when he was a little older, on his own, with his own retinue. She got on well with him, because he was not thrown by her beauty, or her way of looking, or her pristine detachment. He was one of the few she met who, patently, liked that about her. Liked her. Of course he was good looking, but that was true of everyone she knew. Except for the ugly people, and there weren’t many of them. And the commoners, but they were neither beautiful nor ugly, since they were not really people. Sometimes her camera eye took her into a villein’s hut or the field or a man selling fish on the street or something, but she was rarely interested in any of that stuff, and without the focus of her attention the camera tended to drift away.
Once the King visited with two of his yeomen, Nicholas Langford and John Payn, which made Mother angry, though she hid it (but Joan could still tell). She didn’t know why it made her mother angry. Once she tried to tell her nurse about her camera eye. It wasn’t easy, since she lacked a name for the experience, and it translated poorly into words. The nurse said something about the perils of bewitchment, and then put her fist in her mouth and went red, and then took her fist out and said that begging her pardon witchery could never touch one so high born it must be a sign of divine grace, and then ran out of the room, leaving her embroidery on the floor. Joan told her younger brother, once, and he only laughed. She found herself wondering why she felt the need to tell anybody, and, after thought, decided she wouldn’t, actually.
There was never a thought of marrying Ned, of course: he was Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, and would marry a foreign princess, on account of diplomacy and war and so on. Not that she was unworthy of him, granddaughter of Edward I as she was. Mind you, it was daft to think of marrying Tom too. He was old: five and twenty, and she but twelve. Most of all he was below her. Simple as that. True, her father had lost everything when whatever happened to him, with the sword that went from silver to its shedding the black-red petals, had happened. And although Edward III had restored their family status and honour there was still a stigma, nebulous and noxious, attached to their reputation.
Sir Thomas Kent, a mere knight, was simply her inferior, socially. But he was a mighty warrior, they said, and Ned always spoke of him as a noble fellow and a fine fighter. He had gone to war once, in Flanders, and was going to go again, in France, to fight alongside the Prince of Wales. He told these things to her, as his serving man stood haughtily behind him. As for Joan, well – Lady Saint-Omer and her serving maid Betty sat beside her, in an upstairs room at the house in Mons.
Well?
Well, they said.
She had come to Flanders two years before, on a fine ship with bright-coloured pennants and a sail white as a summer cloud against blue sky. She was one of the Queen’s party, along with the two young princesses. Joan stood on the deck and looked calmly over the scintillant grey between her and the diminishing land. Lady Saint-Omer was with her, and she gave vent to her own anxiety with repeated, slightly manic reassurances to her young charge. ‘Do not worry, my lady. It is but a short crossing. The captain assures me the conditions are perfect. Do not worry.’ Joan wasn’t the one who was worried. Her camera’s eye gave her swooping, bluemurky views of mudbanks under the crush of the water, brown and grey, bunched up against flat hillocks of stone shaggy with seaweed, and here and there the smoothed outline of a shipwreck, primped and adorned with spotty polyps and flatfish and weeds like a hundred great green tongues lolling in the half-light. But these sights did not disturb her. There was something delicious about it, really. A calmness. Noah steering his ark over bright flat waters, and all the animals within filled with joy. On this voyage, though, not all were joyous. William and Catherine Montague were belowdecks, moaning and puking, though the sea was flat as a table of green fields and the boat hardly rolled at all. It sailed briskly into a Flemish harbour before sundown. From there it was a coach trundling slowly inland until they came to Mons, or Monts, or Mounts, ironically titled whatever it was for the whole of Hainault was flat as Kent, and the mountain a mere hillock. They stayed in a nice house with three storeys, and Joan played with the children of the servants at running up and down until Lady Catherine stopped her. Everybody spoke French, almost – almost – like that spoken at home, except for the commoners, who spoke something else entirely which sounded in Joan’s ears like ach-ach and bar-bar and gibberish noises of that variety. She saw little of the Queen, who was often away; and although she played with her cousins sometimes the girls struck her as flighty and shallow.
Lady Saint-Omer asked her whether her menses were in flower yet, and she had to have the whole messy business explained to her. Then there was Lord Bernard of Albrecht, comically fat of body and with enormous whiskers that contained hairs of four distinct colours. It seemed Joan was to marry his son, and thereby cement a vital cornerstone in Uncle Edward’s plans to take his lawful possession of France, even though they weren’t in France at all. The adults talked about this and broke off when they thought she was listening; but it all made perfect sense to her. Sometimes her camera eye showed her the whole of Europe as if from a great height, a sprawl of rubbles and soil, fields nibbling at the flanks of the hairy forests, and a lace frill white all round the coastline like a dress hem. One day she was sitting in the garden at the back of the house, and the cook’s son came to chatter. Her stillness encouraged him, or to be more precise didn’t discourage his extraordinary boldness, and he chattered and chattered – it was probably, she thought to herself, because she was foreign to him. The English king had no chance in France, where he was looked upon as a petty duke from a cold and marginal land, the boy said. He had lost a hundred battles, and nobody wanted him as their lord, and he would soon be gone. Joan didn’t say anything; she only looked at him. He became panicky, gabbled that everybody hated the English, even in Hainault, they only did trade because they needed English wool for their weaving and clothmaking, and trade was ignoble and base. She inclined her head, and said nothing, so he said, oh yes he knew she thought him ignoble because he wasn’t a lord, but his father was a great chef and cook, renowned across northern Europe and anyway he was going to join the army and do great deeds, which was a greater honour than trade, and then he’d be a knight. Then, with a kind of desperation, he kissed her and put his hand up inside her skirt. Had she struggled, or resisted, or called out he would doubtless have pressed on; but she did nothing, and her impassivity spooked him and he ran off. When she saw him next he had been whipped, and the left side of his face was all swollen, and he skulked along the walls.
