Calais, Winter 1424
Calais, Winter
THE DAYS GET colder and wetter and the nights longer and darker.
Even Jacqueline is tired of waiting for the rest of our force when they finally sail into port in early November.
The water or the food or something disagrees with the duke’s humours, and he consults his physician Gilbert Kymer for the pain in his bowels.
His doctor is a great man of medicine; he says the duke must purge himself of his anger.
He is a man born under Mars; he is hot for war.
So he says, but the duke does not look hot for war. Some days, he can hardly sit on his horse but has to jump down and run to the nearest ditch to relieve himself. He takes a long time and comes back flushed and sweating. His wife is unsympathetic.
‘He has a fearful belly,’ she says unkindly. ‘Excess of black bile. Who knows? Not his doctor and not his astrologer. He was born under Libra – he cannot tolerate to be out of balance. I expect he’ll be well once we start.’
I take her compliments and her enquiries about his health to his physician. Jacqueline looks at me, her eyes narrowed. ‘Nell, you pretended it was a message from me? Wifely concern?’
‘My lady, it’s a little thing, and it pleases him. You would have sent to him if you had not been thinking so much about the march.’
She laughs shortly. ‘How many people does he need to fuss over him?’
I smile. ‘He’s a prince,’ I remind her. ‘He needs a court full of people fussing over him. I’ll do what I can.’
‘Yes, do,’ she says. ‘You remember the wifely things I can’t be bothered with.’
WE ARE TO march out to the town of Guisnes, a little distance from Calais, to try the temper of the men on the road, the strength of the horses, and the duke’s ability to manage and order so many men into one disciplined column, with no vulnerable gaps between one command and another.
They must learn to stay together, not hop over a wall, steal a fowl from a hencoop, open the door of someone’s kitchen, or assault someone’s daughter.
They have to eat only the provisions we carry.
If they start to wander, we will never get them one-hundred-and-thirty miles along the road to Mons.
If they start to plunder, they will bring Philip of Burgundy down on us, defending his people before we even reach Hainault.
‘Do we follow behind?’ I ask my lady as we mount up in the castle yard of Calais in a cold damp dawn.
‘I ride in the vanguard, at the front, of course,’ she says. ‘To see everything and to be seen.’
‘Isn’t it the most dangerous place?’
Jacqueline throws back her head and laughs.
As a countess coming into her country, she is dressed like a queen: a circlet of gold on her head, her hair spread out over her shoulders, a cloth of gold cape over a deep, rich purple gown, an inner cape lined with ermine. ‘You’ll be safe beside me,’ she says.
The duke, mounting his horse beside her, wearing a blue cape and crimson leather breeches, throws her a quick, irritated glance.
‘I feel very safe with my lord duke in command,’ I say tactfully.
‘We’ll ride side by side,’ she tells him cheerfully. ‘As equals.’
He does not reply, and finally, she notices his dark mood.
‘Are you well enough to ride?’ she asks. ‘I can go alone. Go to the jakes if you need and catch up later.’
‘You can’t go alone,’ he says crossly. ‘These are my men, paid by me and sworn to my cause. Of course I shall ride, though God knows the pain in my belly would put a lesser man in his bed.’
‘Well, thank God you’re not a lesser man.’ She laughs. ‘Because if you took to your bed, I’d have to leave you here, all alone in Calais!’ She clicks at her horse. ‘Get on!’ she says, as if she is encouraging them both – horse and husband – to hurry up.
It is flat fertile country beyond the coastal marshes, the fields laid to hay or grain, and all the cottages have little vegetable gardens around them and fruit trees against the walls. The meadows are turning dull grey, but the grazing cows are fat.
As we get closer to Guisnes, the country becomes more hilly and thickly wooded, and we climb one rounded hill after another, under wide rolling skies.
My lady and Duke Humphrey lead out the vanguard of our force: eight hundred horses followed by the commander of the campaign, Earl Marshal John de Mowbray, with the rest of the troops – two thousand men in a long, snaking march.
It is only a small town but walled and moated like all the towns in these contested lands.
Beside the stone walls of the town, like an inverted bowl, is a completely round island, rising from the town moat, with a tower on top like a stick of marchpane stuck in a pudding: the old motte-and-bailey castle.
We rattle over the drawbridge, and I look down at the deep moat – pure sweet water from an underground spring that never dries, not even in the hottest of summers. These are blessed lands; I can see why my lady wants them back in her keeping.
She is pleased with the march. The men have kept in their ranks, and the countryside is so rich that she can give them a good dinner as a reward.