A thought struck him and he looked up.
‘Why were you coming out anyway? You knew I’d be away till dusk.’
‘Oh! There’s a meeting in the town tonight. Something about the French. Mum sent me to let you know, so you don’t miss it. She said it was important.’
‘Christ!’ Thomas said bitterly. ‘How am I supposed to get back for that and clear this carrion at the same time? God, some days, I swear …’
‘You could hobble the horses or tie their reins together. I can fetch Jamison and Wilbur and Christian. I can bury the bodies with them as well, while you go to the meeting.’
Thomas looked at his son, seeing how much a man he’d become in the last year. He smiled despite his irritation, feeling pride enough to banish the black clouds overhead.
‘Right, you do that. If you see anyone else on horseback, run like the devil is after you, all right? If the baron’s men come looking for their lost mates, I don’t want you caught. Is that clear?’
‘’Course it is.’ Rowan still looked a little pale after what he had witnessed, but he was determined not to wilt in front of
his father. He watched while Thomas gathered the leather wrap for his bow and loped off along the road to the town.
The rain fell harder, battering down as Rowan stood there on the exposed hill. The droplets seemed to roar across the open land and he looked around unhappily, realizing he was alone with half a dozen dead men. He began to gather in the horses, trying not to look at the pale, staring faces slowly sinking into the bracken as it bent under their weight.
The hall smelled of damp wool, the air thick with it. In more normal times, it was the trading place for dozens of landowners. There, they brought sacks of oily fleeces to be judged and teased apart by experts from London and Paris before prices were set each shearing season. The bleating sheep were God’s gift to farmers, the wool they produced as valuable as meat, and there was even cheese from ewe’s milk, though that last was only popular in parts of the French south. The last flurry of orders had been completed a month before, at the beginning of summer. Perhaps because they had gold in their pockets, the men who had come were in bullish mood, their anger and dismay clear. In the twilight, they had dragged wooden benches into place that usually had their purpose making enclosures for the sales. The discussion was already loud when Thomas entered quietly at the back, a fresh shirt feeling stiff and itchy over the day’s sweat.
He knew every man there, though some better than others. The one who called himself Baron Strange was addressing the rest as Thomas murmured a greeting to a neighbour and accepted a seat near the front. He felt the baron’s gaze on him as he settled himself, but Thomas merely sat and listened for a time, gauging the temper of the room. He could feel fresh sweat starting on his skin at the growing heat in the
wool hall. There were as many bodies packed in there as on a market day and he shifted uncomfortably. He hated the press of men and always had. It was one of the joys of his life that he could walk free and alone in the hills of his own land.
‘If anyone has better information, let them come forward with it,’ the baron was saying.
Thomas raised his head, feeling the man’s gaze leave him. Baron Strange had oiled his hair again, he noted, making a black slick of shining curls to frame a face weathered by sun and wind. The baron looked the part, at least, whether his claim to nobility was real or not. Thomas could see the hump of muscle on the man’s neck and right shoulder shift as he gestured, the legacy of decades wielding a heavy sword. Baron Strange was not weak of body and his arrogance was clear enough. Even so, Thomas had always sensed the man was a cracked bell, ringing a note that felt false. If they lived through the crisis, he vowed to pay for a search of the archives in London. He’d heard there was talk of founding a college of arms there, with all the family records brought to one place from around the entire country. It would be costly, but Thomas wanted to know if Strange was bluffing better men or really had a claim to his title. It gave Strange influence in their gathering of expatriates and explained why the baron stood to address the group, and why they listened to him.
‘In normal times,’ Strange went on, ‘I employ a few men to pass information to me in exchange for a little coin. They’ve all fallen silent in Anjou. The last I heard was that the French king himself was riding through the Loire valley. We’ve all seen the evicted families come through Maine! Now these black-coat English clerks are in every town hereabouts, telling us to pack up and move. I tell you, we’ve been bought and sold by our own lords.’
A
ripple of unrest went around the hall and the baron held up his palms to quell it.
‘I do not suggest King Henry has knowledge of this. There are men high in his court who could broker a deal, who could arrange treason without the king’s knowledge.’ The noise grew to a clamour and the baron raised his voice over them. ‘Well, what else would you call it but treason, when English landowners have their property stolen out from under them? I bought the rights to my holding in good faith, gentlemen. I pay my tithe to the king’s men each year. Half of you here were soldiers with the good sense to use your bounties to buy land and sheep. Our land, gentlemen! Will you meekly hand your deeds to some poxed French soldier? Land and property you have sweated and bled for a hundred times over?’
A roar of anger was the response and Thomas looked thoughtfully around him. Strange knew the right strings to pull, but the truth was a little more complex. It was King Henry who truly owned the land, from the smallest hamlet in England and Wales, to half of France. His earls and barons administered vast reaches, collecting tithes and taxes in return for providing the king with soldiers. The truth might sit like a stone in the throats of all the men there, but when the bluster was stripped away, they were all tenants of the king.
Thomas rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling weary. He played no part in the politics of Maine, preferring to spend his time on his holding and returning to town only for the markets and supplies. He’d heard about the clerks infesting every market town with their warnings and threats of eviction. Like the others, Thomas felt a slow-burning anger at lords who had apparently betrayed him while he worked for his family. He’d heard the rumours from Anjou weeks before, but it seemed they’d all been confirmed.
‘They
could be here by Christmas, gentlemen,’ Baron Strange said as the noise began to ease. ‘If it’s true that the price of this truce was Anjou and Maine, we’ll be joining the evicted families on the road by the end of the year.’ He cracked his knuckles viciously, as if he wished for a throat to hold and crush between his hands. ‘Either we walk away from everything we have built here, or we defend it. I will tell you all, in this place, I
will
defend my land. I have …’
He had to stop as a bellow of agreement came from the farmers and landowners on the benches.
‘I have sixty-eight family men working my fields: old soldiers who will stand with me. I can add another two dozen horsemen and I have the coin to send for more from English Normandy. If you pool your gold with mine, it may be we can hire men-at-arms to come south and stand with us.’
That idea brought a hush to the crowd, as they considered giving up their hard-earned gold for a cause that might already be lost.
Thomas rose to his feet and Baron Strange frowned at him.
‘You’ll speak, Woodchurch? I thought you held yourself apart from the rest of us?’
‘I have a holding, baron, same as you. It’s my right to speak.’
He wondered how the baron would react when he discovered he had six fewer men-at-arms than he thought. Not for the first time, Thomas regretted his action earlier that day.
With ill grace, Strange gestured stiffly and Thomas stepped forward and turned to face them. For all his love of solitude, he had come to know the English, Welsh and Scots in that hall and more than a few called a greeting or a welcome.
‘Thank you,’ Thomas said. ‘Now then. I’ve heard more
rumours in the last week than in the year before it and I need to know the solid truth of them. If the French are pushing north this year, where is our army to smack their heads and send them home? This talk of a truce is just wind. Why isn’t York here, or Somerset, or Suffolk? We have three high-ranking nobles in France who can send men into a battle line and I don’t see hide nor hair of any of them. Have we sent messengers into Normandy? Anyone?’
‘I have,’ Strange replied for them. His mouth twisted in irritation at the memory. ‘I’ve heard nothing from the Duke of York, no word at all. They’ve abandoned us to fend for ourselves.’
He would have gone on, but Thomas spoke again, his deep, slow voice rolling over the group. He’d already made his decision. It galled him to support the baron, but there was no choice, not for him. Everything he had was in his land. If he abandoned his holding, he and his family would be reduced to begging on the streets of Portsmouth or London.
‘I’ll send my girls back to England, while we take a measure of the trouble to come. I suggest you all do the same, if you have family there still. Even if you don’t, you have funds enough to put them up in inns, in Normandy or England. We can’t stay clear-headed with women to protect.’
‘You’ll join me then?’ Baron Strange asked. ‘You’ll put aside our differences and stand with me?’
‘Jesus, baron, I was going to ask you to stand with me,’ Thomas replied, a smile quirking the corners of his mouth. The men in the room laughed and the baron flushed. ‘Either way, I won’t give up my farm, I’ll tell you that much. I’ll add my gold to yours to hire soldiers, but we’ll need a veteran officer or two as well. Better still would be to get a battle-seasoned lord to lend his name to our little rebellion.’
The
word stole away some of the humour in the room. Thomas looked around at them all, seeing solid farmers with rough, red hands from work.
‘That’s all it will be, if the French army comes hammering on our doors. Oh, I’ve seen Englishmen rout larger French forces. I’ve seen the backs of a few French soldiers running away from me in my time.’ He paused for a ripple of laughter to die down. ‘But we can’t hold the land with what we have. All we can do is make them pay a price for it.’
‘What?’ Baron Strange demanded incredulously. ‘You’d talk defeat before the fighting’s even begun?’
‘I talk as I see it,’ Thomas said with a shrug. ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ll still stand and send my arrows into them when they come. I’ll fight, even if I’m on my own. I don’t have any choices left but one, not the way I see it. But you know, I was an archer before I was a farmer – and an English archer at that. We don’t run just because the odds are against us.’ He paused in thought. ‘It might be that if we hold them, if we knock them back, the English lords will
have
to support us. I know one man who’ll tell me straight if we have a chance, if there’ll be help from the north. He has the ear of the king himself and he’ll tell us what we need to know.’
‘Who is it?’ Strange asked. He was accustomed to being the one with connections, or at least the claim of them. To hear Thomas Woodchurch talk of friends in high places was strangely unsettling to him.
‘You won’t know the name, baron, and he wouldn’t like me to use it. He and I fought side by side years ago. He’ll tell me true, for the debt he owes me.’
‘Keep your secrets then, Woodchurch. You’ll bring me news if you hear from him?’
‘I will. Give me a month at most. If I can’t reach him by
then, it’s because he doesn’t want to be reached and we’re on our own.’
Baron Strange chewed at his lower lip while he listened. He didn’t like Thomas Woodchurch, not even a little. There was something in the way the man smiled whenever he heard his title that irked the baron like a cold key down his back. Yet he knew the man’s word was good.
‘I’ll send letters to those I know as well,’ the baron replied. ‘Any of you with friends in the army should do the same. We’ll come back here one month from today and we’ll know by then where we stand.’
Thomas felt a hand clap him on the shoulder and he looked round into the face of old Bernard, one of the few men there that he’d have called a friend.
‘Will you join us in a drop, lad? I’m awful dry after all the talking and it weren’t even me doing it.’
Thomas smiled wryly. He liked the old archer, though there was a good chance a few pints of ale would mean sitting through the Agincourt story once again. Thomas would have preferred to walk the eight miles to his home, but he paused before refusing. Most of the men would be wetting their throats before heading out. Thomas knew he might be asking them to fight for him before the end of the year or the following spring. It wouldn’t hurt to hear what they had to say.
‘I’ll come, Bern,’ he said.
The old man’s pleasure at his response went some way to ease the darkness plaguing Thomas’s spirits.
‘I should hope so, lad. You need to let them see you now. These boys need a leader and that Strange is not the man for it, not as I see it. A title don’t give him the right, though there’s some as think it does. No, lad. They need an archer,
with a sense of the land. Share a pint or three with me and I’ll tell thee what I have in mind.’
Thomas let himself be carried along in the group heading to the inn. He sent a silent prayer that Derry Brewer could be found quickly – and that he would answer an old friend.
In the howling darkness Derry Brewer sat and waited, needing to know if it was a trap. He was convinced only an owl could have seen him move by then, but he still resisted the urge to wipe rain from his eyes. Though his sight blurred, he remained perfectly still, just blinking slowly as the heavens opened and drenched him. He wore a dark cloak of waxed linen, but he’d discovered it leaked and the rivulets running inside were freezing. He’d been in that spot for hours, with his back and knees growing slowly more painful.
There had been a little moonlight before the storm clouds boiled angrily above his head and the first fat drops pattered on the leaves. He’d seen that the land around the farmhouse had been cleared and laid out by a careful hand. The house looked normal enough at first glance, but the bushes and lane were planted so there was just one clear path to the door – a path a pair of archers could cover against an army. Derry smiled to himself, remembering different times, different places. He had spotted the pile of lumber left out in the open. It was in just the right place to use it as a barricade and then fall back to the main house. Thomas Woodchurch was a careful man, just as Derry was. Being careful and taking time had saved both their lives more than once.
The rain was easing, but the wind still moaned through the trees, filling the air with leaves that spun and danced like wet coins. Still he waited, reduced to a bright point of awareness in a shivering body. In the cottage, he noted which
rooms showed moving shadows and tried to guess how many people he might expect inside.
Without warning, a sudden sense of illness touched him, making his stomach clench and his testicles creep. He’d heard nothing, seen nothing, but in the darkness Derry realized he’d taken the
only
spot that gave him a good view of the front door and the main rooms of the cottage. His heart began to race in his chest and he wondered if he could run after so long in a crouch. He cursed himself in silence, thinking as fast as he ever had. He edged his hand to the heavy seax knife at his waist, the hilt slick under his grasping fingers. In the wind and rain, he knew no one could hear him taking a long, slow breath. His pride made him pitch his voice at a normal tone, trusting his instincts.
‘How long will you wait out here with me?’ Derry said loudly.
He was certain he’d guessed right, but he still almost jumped out of his skin when someone laughed softly behind him. Derry tensed to move, either to run or throw himself in that direction.
‘I’ve been wondering the same thing, Derry,’ Thomas said. ‘It’s damned cold and there’s food and ale in the house. If you’ve finished playing your games now, why don’t you come in?’
Derry swore to himself.
‘There’s a few men in France who’d love to know where I am tonight,’ he said. He stood, his knees and hips protesting. ‘I had to know you hadn’t joined them.’
‘If I had, you’d be eating an arrow by now,’ Thomas said. ‘I had to know you were alone, for the same reasons. I have a few enemies myself, Derry.’
‘Good men like us always do,’ Derry replied. Though he knew by then where Thomas was standing, it was still hard to make him out in the darkness.
‘I’m not a good man, Brewer. And I
know
you’re not. Peace, old son. Come down and break bread with me. I’ll tell you what I’m after.’
Thomas crunched through the dead leaves and clapped Derry on the shoulder walking past him towards the house.
‘How did you know I was there?’ Thomas called over his shoulder.
‘I remembered how you liked to hunt,’ Derry said, following him. ‘How did you get so close without me hearing you?’
He heard his old friend chuckle in the gloom.
‘As you say, I’m a hunter, Derry. Stags or men, it’s all the same.’
‘No, truly. How did you do it?’
The two men walked together across the open yard, passing the stack of lumber as they approached the house.
‘I used the wind for cover, but there’s a bit more to it than that. If you have twenty years, I’ll teach you.’
As they reached the door, the light from the lamplit windows let Derry see his friend’s face for the first time. He watched as Thomas gave a low whistle out into the dark yard.
‘Someone else?’ Derry asked.
‘My son, Rowan,’ Thomas replied, smiling as he saw the irritation in Derry’s face. ‘This is my land, Derry – and his. You can’t creep up on me here and not have me know it.’
‘You mustn’t sleep much then,’ Derry muttered.
As he spoke, a tall young man appeared out of the wind and rain, wearing a cloak similar to Derry’s own. Without a word, Rowan took his father’s bow and quiver. The weapons were better wrapped and protected than the men who owned them.
‘Rub them down well with oil and check the shafts for warp,’ Thomas called as his son turned and walked away. He got a grunt in return, which made him smile.
‘You’re looking well,’ Derry said, meaning it. ‘Being a farmer has put a little meat on your bones.’
‘I’m well enough. Now come in out of the rain. I have a proposition for you.’
The farmhouse kitchen was blessedly warm, with a small fire burning in the grate. Derry removed his waxed cloak before it made a puddle on the stone floor, dipping his head respectfully to the stern-looking woman sitting at the table. She ignored him as she took a cloth and removed a black iron kettle from where it hung over the flames.
‘This is my wife, Joan,’ Thomas said. ‘A sweet little rookery girl who took a risk once and married an archer.’ He smiled at her, though her own expression remained wary. ‘Joan, this is Derry Brewer. We used to be friends once.’
‘We still are, or I wouldn’t have risked my hide coming out here. You sent a message to John Gilpin at Calais and here I am, in the pouring rain.’
‘Why should we trust a man who sits out in the lane and watches us for hours?’ Joan said. Despite the years in France, her accent was all London, as if she’d left the slums of the capital just the day before.
‘All right, Joan, he’s just a cautious man,’ Thomas replied as Derry blinked and fidgeted under her stare. ‘He always was.’
She made a hard, snorting sound deep in her throat and set about pouring hot water into a dash of brandy in each cup. Derry noted that his measure was only half the size of her husband’s, though he thought better of mentioning it.
‘You can go to bed now, Joan, if you want,’ Thomas said. ‘There’s no one else out there; I’d have seen them.’
His wife frowned at her husband.
‘I don’t like to feel a prisoner in my own ’ome, Thomas Woodchurch. I’ll take the girls away tomorrow. When I come
back, I want this sorted out. I won’t be looking over my shoulder no longer, I just won’t do it. And you look after Rowan. He’s just a boy, for all his size.’
‘I’ll keep him safe, love. Don’t worry about that.’
Thomas kissed his wife on the cheek she offered him, though she still watched his guest with cold eyes.
When she had gone, Derry reached for the bottle of brandy and added another slosh to keep the cold out from his bones.
‘You married a bit of a dragon there, Tom,’ he said, settling himself in a chair. It was well made, he noticed, taking his weight without a creak. The whole kitchen had the mark of a loved place, a home. It brought a pang of sadness to Derry that he had nowhere like it of his own.
‘I’ll thank you to keep your opinions about my wife to yourself, Derry. We’ve other things to talk about and you’ll want to be on your way before sunrise.’
‘You’d turn me out? I had hoped for a meal and a bed. I’ve been on the road for a week to get here.’
‘All right,’ Thomas said grudgingly. ‘There’s a stew in that big pot. Horsemeat. As to whether you stay under my roof, maybe it depends on what you can tell me.’
Derry sipped the hot drink, feeling it put a little fire back into his veins.
‘Fair enough. So what was so important that you remembered your old friend? Gilpin nearly missed me, you know. I was at the docks on my way to England when he found me. It’s a good thing the man knows my pubs or I wouldn’t be here.’
Thomas looked at the man he had not seen for fourteen years. Time and worry had weathered Derry Brewer. Yet he still looked strong and fit, even with wet hair plastered to his head and stuck with red-gold leaves.
‘I heard you made good, Derry, over there in London.’
‘I do all right,’ Derry said warily. ‘What do you need?’
‘Nothing for me. I just want to know what will happen if the men of Maine fight, Derry. Will King Henry send men to stand with us, or are we on our own?’
Derry choked on his drink and coughed until he was red in the face.
‘There’s a French army camped in Anjou, Tom. When they move next spring, will you have your wife wave her broom at them?’
He looked into the grey eyes of his old friend and he sighed.
‘Look, I wish it could be another way, but Maine and Anjou were the price for the truce. You understand? It’s
done
, bought and sold. Your son won’t have to go to war before he can grow a decent beard, the way we had to. This is the price.’
‘It’s my land, Derry.
My
land that’s been given away without so much as a word to me.’
‘What’s that now? It’s
not
your bleeding land, Tom! King
Henry
owns this farm and sixty thousand like it. He owns this house
and
this cup I’m holding. It sounds to me like you’ve forgotten that. You pay your tithe each year, though. Did you think it was voluntary? King Henry and the church are the only ones who own land, or are you one of those who think it should all be shared out? Is that it? Are you a firebrand, Tom? An agitator? Seems having a farm has changed you.’
Thomas glared at the man he had once called a friend.
‘Perhaps it
has
changed me, at that. It’s
my
labour bringing in the fleeces, Derry. It’s me and my son out there in all weathers, keeping the lambs alive. I don’t work to fill a lord’s purse, I’ll tell you that. I work for my family and my holding, because a man must work or he isn’t a man at all. If you’d ever tried it, you wouldn’t mock me. You’d know I begrudge
every coin I pay in tithe, every damned year. Every coin that
I
earned. My
work
makes this my land, Derry. My choices and my skills. Christ, it’s not like this is some ancient Kent plot, with a lord’s family ruling for generations. This isn’t England, Derry! This is new land, with new people on it.’
Derry sipped from his cup, shaking his head at the other man’s anger.
‘There’s more at stake than a few hills, Tom. There’ll be no help coming, trust me on that. The best thing you can do is cart away everything you can carry and head north before the roads get too crowded. If that’s what you wanted to know, I’m doing you the courtesy of telling it to you straight.’
Thomas didn’t reply for a time, as he finished his drink and refilled both cups. He was more generous than his wife with the brandy and Derry watched with interest as he crumbled a little cinnamon into the cups before handing one back.
‘Then out of courtesy, Derry, I’ll tell you we’re going to fight,’ Thomas said. The words were not a boast. He spoke with quiet certainty, which was why Derry sat up straight, shrugging off tiredness and the effects of the brandy.
‘You’ll get yourself killed, then. There are two or three thousand Frenchmen coming here, Thomas Woodchurch. What do you have in Maine? A few dozen farmers and veterans? It will be a slaughter and they’ll
still
have your farm when it’s over. Listen to me now. This is
done
, understand? I couldn’t change it if my life depended on it. Yours does. You want to see your boy cut down by some French knight? How old is he? Seventeen, eighteen? Jesus. There are times when a man
has
to cut and run. I know you don’t like to be pushed, Tom. But we ran when that cavalry troop spotted us, didn’t we? Just three of us against fifty? We ran like fucking hares then and there was no shame in it because we lived and we fought
again. It’s the same thing here. Kings rule. The rest of us just get by and hope to survive it.’
‘Are you finished? Good. Now
you
listen, Derry. You’ve said there won’t be help coming and I’ve heard you. I’m telling you we’ll stand. This
is
my land and I don’t care if King Henry himself comes to order me off. I’d spit in his eye too. I’m not running this time.’
‘Then you’re
dead
,’ Derry snapped, ‘and God help you, because I can’t.’
Both men sat glaring at each other, no give in either of them. After a time, Derry drained his cup and went on.
‘If you fight, you’ll get your men killed. Worse, you’ll break the truce I’ve worked for, before the damn thing has even properly begun. Do you understand that, Tom? If that’s the way they’re talking, I need you to go to your friends and tell them what I’ve told you. Tell them to let this one go. Tell them it’s better to stay alive and start again than to throw it all away and end up another corpse in a ditch. There’s more riding on this than you know. If you ruin it for a few scrub farms, I’ll kill you myself.’
Thomas laughed, though there was no mirth in it.
‘You won’t. You owe me your life, Derry. You owe me more than your old-woman warnings.’
‘I’m
saving
your life by telling you to get out!’ Derry roared. ‘For once, why don’t you just
listen
, you stubborn sod?’
‘Our arrows had all gone, remember?’
‘Tom, please …’
‘You had a gash in your leg and you couldn’t run – and that French knight saw you in the long grass and turned back, do you remember?’
‘I remember,’ Derry said miserably.
‘And he didn’t see me, so I jumped up at him and pulled him down before he could cut off your head with his fine French sword. I took my little knife and I stuck it into his eye
slit, Derry, while you just stood and watched. Now that same man is sitting in my kitchen, on my land, and telling me he won’t help? I thought better of you, I really did. We stood together once and it
meant
something.’
‘The king can’t fight, Tom. He’s not his father and he can’t fight – or lead men who can. He’s like a child and it’s my neck if you ever say it was me who told you. When my king asked me to get him a truce, I did it. Because it was the right thing to do. Because otherwise we’d lose the whole of France anyway. I’m sorry, because I know you and it’s like a knife in me to sit in your kitchen and tell you it’s hopeless, but it is.’