Master of War (30 page)

‘Thank you, Master Blackstone,’ he said, but hesitated as he led Blackstone down the corridor. ‘We have all heard of your bravery, my lord, and that you are here under the protection of this family, but there are some things that they will not discuss with you, and it is for someone base, like myself, to explain these in a crude manner.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Blackstone said.

‘They have prepared a table in the great hall. There’s food and wine. And…’

‘And?’

‘I would remind you not to pick your teeth with a knife or wipe your mouth on your sleeve, they’ll give you a napkin for that.’ Marcel increased his pace, his suggestions tumbling quickly as they got closer to the great hall where once again he hesitated.

‘And, Master Blackstone, don’t spit, belch or fart.’

Blackstone waited outside the huge doors as Marcel stepped through and announced his presence. He was ushered inside. There was a blazing fire in the hearth, big enough for ten men to stand shoulder to shoulder, with logs stacked to one side and bushels of kindling at the other. Fresh reeds covered the floor and there was the scent of lavender drifting into the room from the flames. There were neither dogs nor their master in sight; instead Countess Blanche de Harcourt and Christiana stood waiting for him in the middle of the room. Behind them was a long trestle table covered in linen and laid with platters of cut meats with small silver bowls filled with salt and sauces. Three or four servants stood against the wall, strategically placed for their stations at the table.

Blackstone quickly calculated the size of the room. It was similar to Lord Marldon’s, but this one seemed to offer more warmth. De Harcourt could probably have fitted a hundred or more men in this hall, with no man’s shoulder touching another’s. The vaulted ceiling towered sixty feet above Blackstone, with arched timber trusses and woven tapestries hanging from cast-iron bars. Light streamed in from the half-wall of leaded win­dows with stone sills big enough for a grown man to sit in and covered in brightly coloured cushions. De Harcourt had employed painters to decorate the walls in whitewash, with an earth-coloured border rising two feet above the stone floor. One wall looked as though it were a massive window looking out through the painted branches of a flowering tree in a flower-filled meadow. It was the kind of decoration that was, perhaps, under the control of the countess, who now stood before him.

‘My lord and husband is with his friend Guy de Ruymont, and so Christiana and I thought this an opportune moment to introduce you to certain…’ she hesitated, searching for the right word, ‘customs, when we are gathered to dine here.’

Christiana smiled at him and move forward in an attempt to ease his awkwardness.

‘Thomas, my lady and I are going to explain how best to behave when in the company of honoured guests.’

Blackstone bristled. ‘I doubt someone like me is ever going to share a table with
honoured
guests. What would I be? A figure for discussion? A curiosity to see how my callused hands daintily put pieces of meat into my mouth?’

Christiana blushed with embarrassment and Blackstone immedi­ately regretted his words, which confirmed his lack of good manners and coarseness of character. Blanche de Harcourt showed no such sign of intemperance.

‘Your wounds are healing, Thomas. Are you being well looked after?’ she said, ignoring his unpleasantness.

‘I am, my lady, thank you,’ Blackstone said, immediately humbled by her kindness, knowing her good manners were like the paint covering the walls, a smothering of what lay beneath.

She moved closer to him, making him even more uncertain of what to do next. He bowed – and kept his head down.

‘Thomas,’ she said more gently than he deserved, ‘lift up your head.’

He averted his eyes, but she reached out her hand and turned his chin so that she could examine his face more carefully. The Englishman towered over her, but he remembered her fierceness when he’d first seen her at Noyelles, wearing a breastplate of armour and gripping a sword she had been prepared to wield. Women like her confused him.

‘It’s still an ugly wound, the skin looks inflamed, but I suspect the scar will be a good one. Better than I expected.’

‘I owe that to Christiana’s skill, my lady.’

‘So you do, and much else. She’s been your constant companion at her own request, and with my permission.’

Blackstone sensed an opening, a moment when she might allow him some leeway.

‘I won’t be kept here forever, will I, countess? I wonder why you’re taking so much trouble to teach me courtly manners. I have no interest in poetry or dance, and I eat when I am hungry, as quickly and as simply as I can. I’m never going to be admitted to your high table, am I?’

She did not move her gaze from his face. ‘I doubt you ever will. No.’

‘Then why play this game, my lady?’

‘Because one day, if you live long enough, you might be asked to sit at a nobleman’s table, and when that happens I do not want them knowing that you were in our care and remained in your half-civilized state. The shame would be ours, not yours.’

Blackstone knew that, had the same proposal been put to his once sworn lord, Sir Gilbert Killbere, he’d have turned on his heel and left these trumped-up lords who were more concerned with table manners than with loyalty to their King.

But something stopped him. Sir Gilbert’s words, once uttered at the invasion beach when an inexperienced Blackstone had boasted of his skills with his war bow echoed from the past.
You’re a free man; behave like one
,
Killbere had berated him. No matter how good the men around him had been, the knight had told him that they stood in his father’s shadow.
You’re better than they are. Start thinking and behaving like him
.
Blackstone had learnt the ways of battle and if the de Harcourt family saw him as little more than an efficient and brutal killer, then so be it. He owned his dignity and he would not let them get the better of him, even if they
had
helped save his life. All he had to do was keep his wits about him and he would soon walk away from this place – and take the girl with him.

Blackstone bowed his head, only slightly this time. ‘My lady, I would prefer the shame was mine alone, for being such a worthless pupil.’

Her eyes widened. ‘My word, Thomas, you learn quickly,’ she said and turned to Christiana, who made no attempt to hide her smile at his cleverness. ‘Let us show our guest to the table.’

Over the following days more of de Harcourt’s friends arrived to celebrate Christmas. Some of the Norman lords brought their wives, two did not. They were all unknown to him until he was tutored by the Countess’s servant Marcel. Blackstone made a point of remembering their names and their coats of arms. Louis de Vitry, Jacques Brienne, Henri Livay, Bernard Aubriet. Every one of them was still at war with England, each had answered King Philip’s call, and all of them had now gathered at the castle of one of the most loyal French families. Jean de Harcourt’s father, killed at Crécy, lay dead in the family crypt, honoured by the King of France and remembered by the court. So, Blackstone wondered as he watched these men return with their bloodied spoils from the day’s hunt, why were they gathering here when he was living under the same roof? Who was in the most danger, he or the Frenchman who sheltered him?

The weather turned colder, blustering winds came and went, as indecisive as Blackstone’s feelings about the presence of so many nobles. There were some who were similar in age to de Harcourt himself; others had ten years or more on him. These older men must, Blackstone thought, have more influence on events than those who were younger. Blackstone kept himself in the training yard out of sight, left alone by Jean de Harcourt, who now spent his time with his guests. When they didn’t hunt they stayed in the library behind closed doors. It seemed to be less of a festive celebration than a council of powerful lords. If the women did not join their men riding out to hunt they gathered in Blanche’s rooms or were entertained in the great hall by minstrels, summoned by de Harcourt from Paris to entertain his guests and to pass on the news or gossip gleaned from the capital.

Lord de Graville, grey twists in his beard, sat hunched in his cloak. His page and squire, in charge of two pack horses loaded with their lord’s personal weapons and gifts, were smoothly practised at their duties. They knew the castle, asked no directions, and ordered de Harcourt’s servants and grooms with an ease borne of long-standing superiority. De Graville was a voice of authority in Normandy, as was the man who rode through the gates with him that day – the Lord de Mainemares – whose face seemed to be set in a permanent scowl, even when greeted by de Harcourt. The men embraced and kissed, and it was obvious that the guests were trusted friends and both believed in the divine will of God. Blackstone would see them go to pray in the chapel three times a day, more on a holy day. Blackstone knew these devout nobles were about the same age as Sir Godfrey, the renegade of the de Harcourt family.

Each nobleman’s arrival would be marked by another feast with music, and so it went on over the course of a week. Christiana spoke with more candour than Marcel ever could, and warned him that these Normans swore allegiance to those who would benefit them the most.

‘You sound bitter,’ he told her as they watched another group arrive.

‘My father is an impoverished knight. He holds no land and serves his lord in the west, and his allegiance was to the King of France. These men who come here can be bought. He could not.’

Blackstone felt a shiver of uncertainty whenever she mentioned her father. The English had swept down the Cotentin peninsula and beaten French forces back at every turn and Sir Godfrey, his benefactor’s uncle, had been in the vanguard, pursuing and destroying those loyal to the French crown using Killbere and the mounted archers.

‘I still don’t know what’s happened to him,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping one of these lords can tell me.’ She touched his arm. ‘Be careful of that man, Thomas,’ she said fearfully, pointing out one of the nobles, a man no more than twenty or twenty-one years old.

‘Who is he?’

‘William de Fossat. He rode at the side of the Count of Alençon at Crécy.’ Her voice was tinged with dislike. ‘They slaughtered the Genoese bowmen so they could charge at your Prince.’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well – otherwise you might not be here today.’

‘They were helpless anyway. We’d killed so many of them it made no difference,’ he said, aware as soon as he’d spoken that his words were emotionless and matter-of-fact. The English were exhausted when Alençon made his charge, but they had stopped him anyway. And killed him. Blackstone watched de Fossat pull off his riding gloves and take Blanche de Harcourt’s outstretched hand, his lips hovering above her fair skin. His face reminded Blackstone of Jean de Harcourt’s falcon – a sharp, beaked nose and eyes that never settled. William de Fossat, she told him, had fallen foul of John, Duke of Normandy, the King’s son, and lost most of his estates.

‘He’s been known to commit murder,’ she added.

‘Soldiers die in battle.’

‘No. He killed his cousin for refusing to meet a challenge and then killed the man who made that challenge. Most of these men in their own way are dangerous, Thomas. Stay away from them.’

Blackstone had done his best to do just that. Whenever de Harcourt and the lords rode forth or returned he kept out of sight. He had become invisible to everyone except Christiana, who now spent more time with the other women, all revelling in the opportunity to gossip, since they so often lived alone in their husband’s manor houses or castles, with no other women of equal rank for company, save perhaps a daughter. It was an ideal time for Blackstone to take advantage of the men’s absence and the women’s gathering in order to use the library. The servants barely had time to notice him being there, but piles of warm ash in the fireplace told him that de Harcourt and the nobles were spending hours locked in the room.

The room was not large – big enough for a bolstered chair, stools and a table beneath the window. The fireplace dominated the room, candle holders the main source of light. There were rolled documents tied with ribbon, layered like firewood on shelves, and cut sheets of parchment, stitched and bound, laid like a stonemason’s dry wall. A woven rug covered the tiled floor instead of cut reeds. The room suggested a sanctuary for the lord of the manor.

On an age-polished slab of chestnut that served as a table was a rolled parchment. Blackstone made sure that there was no activity in the yard that might herald de Harcourt’s return, and then unfurled what turned out to be a crude, hand-drawn map of France, an uneven line sketched down one quarter of the country, splitting the kingdom. Blackstone traced his finger down from Paris and located Castle de Harcourt. There were dozens of marks made on the map, speckling the parchment – small red crosses, black dots and circles spread like the pox down from Normandy, across to Brittany and south into Bordeaux.

They were locations marking something of importance, and if Castle de Harcourt had been identified then perhaps, Blackstone thought, these were other castles scattered across the countryside. He worked out where the English army had landed and the route he must have taken as he fought his way across Normandy. There was no mark for Crécy, and he had no idea where it might lie. Only the cities of Caen, Rouen, Paris and Bordeaux were shown and in his mind’s eye he tried to imagine what lay beneath his fingertips. He had never seen a map like this before and his imagination took him like an eagle soaring across the route they had marched.

He rolled the map and went back to the shelves, running his fingers lightly over the parchments and bindings. How could one man read so many books? On a lower shelf he found sheets of drawings embellished with Latin text, bound with an illuminated cover showing a monk wielding a sword. Blackstone eased it from its resting place and moved to the window for better light, and to watch for de Harcourt’s return. As he turned each sheet he saw that the images were drawings showing the guard positions that Jean de Harcourt had taught him. It was a book on swordsmanship. Blackstone slipped the manuscript beneath his jacket. He had found a book that interested him.