Kemp Read online

  More than half the French remained standing, but their ranks were broken and they fled for safety, their unprotected backs turned to the English lances. After seeing several of his companions spitted on French lances only a few hours earlier, Kemp was pleased to see the enemy getting a taste of their own medicine.

  Warwick and Northampton did not take part in the charge. Warwick surveyed the surrounding countryside, as if the whole thing was a trap, and a body of French horsemen might ride into view at any moment. But if it was a trap, it had been sprung too late. He galloped over to the archers. He saw Kemp, and recognition flickered in his eyes – it had been Warwick, in his capacity as Sheriff of Warwick and Leicester, who granted Kemp his pardon – but he did not acknowledge him. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’

  The archers needed no second bidding. Dropping their bows, they rushed forward in an unruly mob, drawing swords and war-hammers as they charged across the grass in the wake of the men-at-arms, whooping with blood-lust, all signs of exhaustion gone.

  Some of the French had realised the futility of flight in such open country, and were trying to make a stand. A few clutched swords or spears, but most were armed with sickles, scythes and flails; deadly enough weapons, if one knew how to use them.

  Kemp had his broadsword in his hand, a souvenir of the second time he had met Warwick, saving the earl’s life on the road from Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue. The sword had belonged to the second man Kemp killed, a nobleman who had been trying to capture the earl. He swept it back over his shoulder, measuring the rapidly diminishing distance between himself and a Frenchman who stood ready to receive his charge with the wickedly curved blade of a scythe.

  Kemp swung, all the strength of his broad shoulders behind the blow. The peasant raised his scythe, chopping at Kemp’s head, but he mistimed the stroke. Kemp’s blade sheared neatly through the wooden handle, the scythe’s blade flying off, the sword slashing the man’s throat open, filling the air with an angry crimson spray.

  Then Kemp was past, still running, but slowing, readying himself for a second stroke as he charged at a man with a sword. The man tried to parry. Kemp knocked his sword aside with his own blade, and flicked a booted foot into the man’s crotch. As the man doubled up, Kemp brought his blade down on the back of the man’s head, and for the second time that day he stained the grass with a splash of crimson. Without realising it, Kemp screamed, exultant at his own ability to take life with impunity. He slashed left and right, carving down the French levies like a peasant mowing down hay. All around him his friends fought equally savagely; even Perkin Inglewood, only a few months earlier the timid son of a franklin, cut down the enemy remorselessly, his face twisted into a mask of hate.

  ‘This one’s for Hal!’ Kemp chopped, slicing through flesh and muscle. ‘This one’s for Pip!’ He slashed open a man’s stomach. ‘And this one’s for Jankin!’ He thrust, burying the tip of his sword in a third man’s belly.

  He heard a sound behind him, and whirled in time to see another French peasant fall at his feet, a forester’s axe flying from his hand, the side of his chest slashed wide open to reveal the ribs beneath. ‘And that one’s for a wooden-headed lubber who hasn’t sense enough to watch his own back!’ growled Preston, although his broad grin belied the condemnation in his tone. ‘You’re learning fast, boy, but no one lives for ever.’

  Kemp was filled with chagrin. He and Preston looked about, but the nearest remaining Frenchmen were over half a mile away and running hard, a troop of English men-at-arms hot on their heels to guarantee they would not get far.

  He glanced at the mangled bodies strewn everywhere. A wounded man tried to crawl away, but Brewster finished him off with a sword-thrust in the back.

  In less than five minutes they had butchered the best part of a thousand men.

  In a way, it had all been over too quickly. Kemp’s blood still raged like fire in his veins yet there was no one left to kill. Then exhaustion caught up with him and he flopped to the ground, panting hard. He thought of the Frenchman who would have slain him in the moment of victory if Preston had not been there. The memory filled him with a terror more unmanning than any fear he had known in the wait before a battle. His stomach lurched and he found himself trembling.

  Preston took his costrel from his belt, pulled out the stopper and took a deep draught before offering it to Kemp. Kemp gulped back the water and wiped his lips with his sleeve.

  ‘Are you all right, lad?’ asked Preston.

  Kemp nodded. ‘I always seem to get like this after a battle… it’ll pass…’

  ‘Until the next time,’ said Preston. ‘It never gets any easier.’

  The Earl of Warwick rode by, congratulating the archers. They were too exhausted to do more than nod in acknowledgement but the earl rode on regardless, finally reining in opposite Preston. Kemp struggled to rise, but the earl motioned for him to remain where he lay. ‘Rest easy, boy. You’ve earned it.’

  Seeing the earl reminded Kemp of his sword, and he picked it up again, wiping the blood from its blade with a rag before slotting it back into its scabbard.

  ‘Aye,’ Warwick said thoughtfully. ‘A nobleman’s sword, and you wield it nobly.’

  Kemp felt sudden bitterness well up within him. ‘There’s nothing noble about what happened here today, my lord,’ he muttered, gesturing at the bodies around them.

  He realised he had overstepped the mark as soon as the words passed his lips, but to his surprise Warwick smiled. ‘That’s the problem with you churls,’ he remarked blithely. ‘You’re far too sensitive for the business of war.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, my lord,’ growled Preston. ‘We’ll soon cure him of that.’

  Warwick laughed. ‘Aye, serjeant, that we will.’ He chucked his horse’s reins, and rode back to where Northampton waited.

  Holland rejoined his men. He had discarded his lance, presumably broken in two, and was now wiping blood from the blade of his sword. He reined in amongst them. ‘Time for breakfast,’ he said simply.

  The next day the king marched north with his army, and a week later they came before the walls of Calais.

  * * *

  ‘You heard what happened at Caen?’ asked Sir Amerigo de Pavia. He was a small, dark-haired man with large, moist eyes bulging from a round face. A Lombard by birth, he had gone to sea as a youth and had drifted on the tides of life guided only by luck and his own opportunism. Those tides had eventually made him captain of one of the Genoese mercenary galleys in the service of Valois. Now he was one of the many Italian mercenaries who found themselves trapped in Calais with the French.

  The governor of Calais, Jean de Vienne, did not turn to face de Pavia, but continued to watch the French build their siege lines from his vantage point on the battlements of the town walls.

  ‘The townsfolk slaughtered,’ de Pavia continued, ‘women raped, houses looted and put to the torch. They say the streets ran red with blood. At least if we surrender, we will be treated honourably.’

  ‘Caen was taken by swift assault,’ pointed out de Vienne. ‘If King Edward thought Calais could be taken as easily, he would have attacked already.’ He gestured to where the English were erecting palisades and digging trenches across the dykes and causeways that ran through the marsh surrounding the town on the landward side. ‘Instead he settles down to besiege us. These walls are stouter than those of Caen, and will not fall so easily.’

  ‘Then he will starve us out. How long will the supplies in this town last? One month? Two? And then we go hungry. Not just you and I, my friend, nor your garrison, nor my troops, but the townsfolk. The innocents, Jean. The women, the children, the old men. They will starve too.’

  ‘Naturally I will expel the “useless mouths”, Sir Amerigo,’ said de Vienne. It was almost standard practice in siege warfare for the defenders to throw out all those who would use up vital supplies without actively contributing to the defence. If the besiegers refused to let them out through their lines, then they would be forced to
live in the no man’s land between town walls and besiegers’ lines, lashed by wind and rain, surviving only on scraps tossed to them by those defenders or besiegers who took pity on them. ‘It will not be an order I shall relish giving, but my first duty must be to my king. He has entrusted me with the safe-keeping of this town, and I will not betray that trust. King Philip will come to rescue us.’

  ‘How?’ demanded de Pavia. ‘You have heard the news: your King Philip was routed at Crécy by the English, his army massacred. There is no one to rescue us, Jean.’

  ‘His son the Duke of Normandy will save us,’ said de Vienne. ‘Duke Jean is in Gascony at the moment, but he will ride north to relieve us with his army as soon as he learns we are besieged.’

  ‘And how long will that be? What if he does not hear that we are besieged in time?’

  ‘He will hear. I shall send out messengers with the “useless mouths”, disguised as the old and infirm. Once past the English lines, they will ride to King Philip and tell him we are besieged.’ De Pavia gazed at the English troops massing beyond the walls. ‘They will need to be brave men, to undertake such a perilous enterprise.’

  De Vienne nodded.

  ‘Let me go,’ de Pavia suggested. ‘You know that you can trust me, that I will not let you down. I will get through to King Philip.’

  De Vienne smiled sadly. ‘You are a brave man, to volunteer for the task, Amerigo. But that is why I need you here in Calais, to lead your men and help me defend the town. I will send others, more expendable than yourself.’

  De Pavia wondered how else he could get out of the besieged town; for he was damned if he would still be there when Calais fell to the English and the common soldiers rampaged through the town, killing everyone they encountered. He would rather take his chances trying to slip through the enemy lines in disguise.

  De Pavia had stood with the Genoese mariners on the decks of the French ships at the battle of Sluys, and fought on while his companions died around him, the arrows of the English longbows inflicting ghastly wounds; but that had been for money. De Pavia was a mercenary, and he would endure any hardship for money. But not for Philip of Valois; the bastard wasn’t worth it.

  * * *

  De Vienne expelled over a thousand ‘useless mouths’ from within the walls of Calais, and King Edward, in magnanimous mood after his stunning victory at Crécy, not only allowed them past the English lines but also gave each one of them a hearty meal before sending them on their way.

  Then he settled down to the siege in earnest.

  He built a ring of siege works around the town, four hundred yards from the walls, just beyond the range of a crossbow. Then he built a second ring of defences on the other side of his camp, to protect it against any French army which might come to the beleaguered town’s relief. He sent letters to England, summoning a fleet of seven hundred ships to blockade the town from the sea, completing his stranglehold, which was currently imperfect: occasionally French supply ships would slip past the English blockade to revictual the garrison of Calais, increasing the town’s chances of holding out until Valois could raise an army to relieve it.

  English ships plied the narrow seas constantly, bringing food for King Edward’s army, for the English did not control enough of Calais’ hinterland for his troops to be able to live off the land; and bringing reinforcements from England. Nor did the reinforcements come from England alone. The ranks of the army were swelled with foot-soldiers sent by the King’s Flemish allies and German mercenaries, called ‘paucenars’ after the mail corselets they wore. By mid-autumn, over ten thousand men were camped in the marshes around Calais. It would take many months to starve out the town’s inhabitants, and they would be camped there well into the following year.

  It was rare for a campaign to continue through the winter. It did not make much difference to men like Kemp, who had been impressed for service for twelve months; but the men who had been raised under commissions of array were disgruntled that they had not been allowed to return to their farms in time for the harvest. Morale had not been helped by the fact that many of the army’s senior knights, having served their statutory forty days and more in the king’s service, had been allowed to return home. Many of the common soldiers deserted, slipping back to England on board the supply ships that plied continuously between the English camp before Calais and the ports of Orwell, Sandwich and Plymouth; but they were more than made up for by the fresh reinforcements from England. Morale might be low amongst the bored soldiers sitting before the walls of Calais, but back in England the victory at Crécy had caused an immense wave of public support at every level for the king’s war against Valois.

  Faced with the prospect of being encamped in the Calais marshes during the harsh months of winter, King Edward decided he needed something better than canvas tents to house himself and his army. And so he ordered that a new town be built from scratch to the west of Calais, and called it Villeneuve-la-Hardie.

  Villeneuve was made of wood. A fair-sized mansion, built of timber and brushwood thatch but well-appointed for all that, housed the king and his court. There were timber houses for the king’s senior officials and noblemen. A hospital was built for soldiers who contracted camp-fever or dysentery during their sojourn in the swamps, and of those there was no shortage. There were stables for the horses, farriers, tailors, tanners, armourers, bowyers and fletchers, as well as butchers’ shops and bakeries, haberdashers’ shops and stalls selling cloth. And thousands of cottages thatched with straw and brushwood housed the common soldiers. The town was carefully planned, all its roads radiating from a large market square at the centre, and the king appointed two regular market days each week to which the locals could bring their wares.

  Although the French peasantry did not on the whole care whether a Valois or a Plantagenet sat on the throne of France, at first they were wary of the English troops that had rampaged through Normandy and Picardy. But the king made it clear that the laws of his realm would be applied within Villeneuve to protect the local inhabitants, just as he intended that one day those laws would be applied throughout the kingdom of France under his rule. If his claim to the throne of France was just, then the French people were his subjects as much as the English, and entitled to his protection.

  And so the local peasantry brought their goods to the market of Villeneuve; tentatively at first, but with growing confidence when the English troops, while not perhaps treating the peasants with respect, at least showed a willingness to pay cash for their produce. With so many thousands of mouths to feed and the regular convoys of supplies that came either overland from Flanders or across the sea from England unable to meet the demand, a huge market begged to be tapped.

  Thus the French peasants quickly came to welcome the presence of the English, even if they were a rude and surly people. Not only food was required by the English. The soldiers had purses bulging with plundered coins, and nothing to spend them on. As surely as demand creates its own supply, soon the soldiers had their every need catered for, and before long new buildings began to spring up, taverns and stewhouses; buildings not contained in the original plans of the king’s carpenters, but which the king was nevertheless prepared to tolerate because he knew that if his brutal and licentious soldiery was unable to buy wine and women, it would take them.

  So the town of Villeneuve-la-Hardie prospered in the shadows of the walls of Calais, where the townsfolk were starving, until its close-packed buildings contained a population far larger than most provincial towns in France, and certainly bigger than any in England.

  And, when Villeneuve was nearing completion in November, King Edward sent for the ladies of the court.

  * * *

  ‘This is no way to win a war,’ grumbled Jarrom. ‘We should be concentrating on fighting, not women.’

  ‘Hark to Brother Elias here!’ snorted Brewster. ‘Do you want me to go to that brothel in Villeneuve and tell the fat-titted Flemish wench you spend so much time with to go back to Flanders?’
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  Kemp, Jarrom and Brewster were standing on the dunes overlooking the beach where the king’s ship had landed. Dressed in bright particoloured gowns of silk and velvet, the ladies of the court were disembarking.

  ‘Who’s yon fat sow?’ wondered Jarrom, as a plump, swarthy woman with dark hair lifted her skirts out of the spume which foamed between the hulls of the beached ships, wading up on to the shore.

  Brewster grinned. ‘That’s the queen. And I think calling her a fat sow might be counted treason.’

  The next woman to descend from the ship was much younger, perhaps little older than Kemp himself. She was dressed in a blue gown decorated with trimmings of silver tissue. Her hair was covered, as was the fashion for married women, and all that Kemp could really see was that she was petite and slender, yet somehow he knew that seen close to she would be a beautiful young woman.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, trying to inject both gruffness and disinterest into his voice.

  Brewster grinned. ‘Ah, but you’ve got a good eye for the ladies, Martin. That’s Joan of Kent, the Earl of Kent’s sister; and the woman behind her is her mother, the Dowager Countess Margaret. The bad news is, Joan’s already married.’

  Jarrom chuckled. ‘Twice, they say.’

  ‘Twice?’ Kemp asked incredulously.

  Brewster nodded. ‘Don’t mention her in Sir Thomas’s presence.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he was her first husband.’

  Kemp was astonished. The Sir Thomas Holland he knew was a ruthless warrior, dedicated to the service of the king. It had never occurred to him that Holland might have a wife. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How can she have married another man, while her first husband still lives?’

  ‘You mean to tell me you don’t know the story?’ asked Brewster. Kemp shook his head, and Brewster plucked a piece of dune-grass and studied it thoughtfully before continuing. ‘A few years ago, Holland fell in love with Joan of Kent; the fairest woman in England, they say… or maybe he fell in love with her dowry, for she’s one of the richest heiresses in England, and all. Either way, it seems the young lady was impressed by the brave knight’s courting, because she agreed to marry him.