Michael Jecks - The Templar, the Queen and Her Lover

‘Do you remember me, my son?’ Père Pierre Clergue asked as he stepped quietly into the room. ‘Our friends are anxious that our plans appear to have gone astray.’

Roger Mortimer kept a smile on his face as he walked quickly along the cobbles. He had to be cautious, aware always that any eyes with black suspicion in them might belong to his enemy’s men. There were so many who’d be prepared to slay him and carry his body back to Despenser for a reward — and he had no doubt that the reward would be large. Despenser hated him enough to share his wealth with any man who destroyed him.

The King, too, was keen to see him dead. It was terrible, that. The man whom he had served devotedly all his life was now seeking to have him killed. All because of the poison that evil whelp Despenser was pissing in his ear the whole time. Mortimer had made it very clear that he wanted to remove Despenser, but that was no more than common necessity. The thieving bastard was ruining the country with his avarice and ruthlessness. Trouble was, just as before with Piers damned Gaveston, the King was blind. He was in love, and nothing his lover did could be wrong in his eyes.

And therein lay the problem. If only the King would pick suitable advisers. He always selected the pretty men, the ones with the ready charm — for him — and the same love of high fashion and clothing. A man who was merely obedient and honourable didn’t rank nearly so highly in the King’s esteem.

What was truly insulting was the King’s love of play-acting and peasants. He would much prefer to join a group of churls laying a hedge than get involved in a good boar hunt. He had been known to go swimming, in God’s name, when his knights were off after venison. What sort of example was that?

There was a figure in a doorway, and Mortimer turned his head just a little, so that as he passed he could still see it from the corner of his eye, but there was no movement to show that the man left his shelter to follow him. No, he was still secure.

His conversation with de Bouden had been fruitful. It was good to know that the Queen herself was as keen to see him as he was to meet her. How they might manage it was a different matter, of course. It was hard to see what they could do, with so many about the palace. Perhaps they could simply stick to using de Bouden as a go-between? Mortimer was not very keen to do so, since de Bouden had been put in his place by the King. In the past he had been in the Queen’s household, but now he had been reinstated by others, and that made his motives suspect in Mortimer’s eye. You didn’t stay alive in this environment without being very cautious indeed.

There was a step behind him that appeared to be hurrying. Mortimer slowed his own pace, and the pattering of boots also slowed. He stopped to tie a lace, and the steps stopped too.

‘Shite,’ he muttered. Very well. He must remove another obstacle. Without glancing round, he set off again, back towards the palace grounds. He knew where he could go safely.

With Paul’s footsteps echoing behind him, he marched quickly to the palace gate, then inside. There were extensive stables and guard quarters over to the left, and he made for them, opening a door and peering inside. A ladder was leaning up against the hayloft in there, and he shinned up it quickly. There was a window for ventilation at the farther end. He went to it and peered down. It was a long way to fall. Instead he darted back to the ladder inside, pulled it up, carried it through to the window and waited.

As he had hoped, soon he heard steps in the chamber below. Smiling, he thrust the ladder through the window, careless of the noise. The man below began to run about the place, as Mortimer let the ladder out, and carefully clambered onto the upper rungs.

At the bottom, he looked at the thick wall that encircled this little orchard and smiled to himself before sauntering away towards the rooms he was renting.

After all, even a man hunting him for a bounty would find it hard to persuade the hard-faced guards installed here by his son Geoffrey to let them past. There were advantages to having money.

Palm Sunday 19

Next morning, Jean woke with a sore back and a stinging hand. The fight had used muscles which were not accustomed to hard effort, and they were all complaining in unison.

It took him some moments to remember where he was when he opened his eyes. The curving ceiling of the undercroft spread overhead, while the barrels on his right were entirely out of place in any bedchamber he had ever used. The wall on his left was strange, too. He was more used to the sight of lathes and plaster in recent weeks. Even at the Château Gaillard, the guard rooms were all thin-walled. The castle itself might be built of strong rock, but not the outlying servants’ quarters.

Then he remembered the previous night, the assault by le Vieux, the mad, panicked flight along the corridors and passages until he reached this undercroft, miraculously avoiding all the people on the way. He looked about him again now as he clambered to his feet. It was cool down here, but not so cold as the nights on the mountainsides all those years ago when he had been a peasant and met his first traveller.

Oh, to be in the mountains again. It had seemed such a hard life in those days, but at least then he had been able to rely on himself, without having to worry about politics or the lies of anyone else threatening his life. He should have stayed there, but the lure of money tempted him away into the service of the Comte. His father had heard about the possibilities of largesse , and he’d persuaded his sons to join him, all making the long, arduous journey with the Comte’s men up to the far north, where the weather was cooler, and the land terribly flat. And there they had fought alongside the Comte to defend French lands against the rebels.

The bastards were infernally lucky. No one looking at them would have thought that they could have survived. After all, they faced the might of Christendom’s most powerful king, with the massed arms of the best equipped cavalry in the world. And what were they? Merely peasants. Fullers, weavers, butchers, all men with filth under their fingernails. Untrained rabble. That’s what the men in the French host were told. Robert Comte d’Artois himself came along to tell everyone that the battle was already won, before a French horse had so much as trotted in the general direction of Courtrai.

Even now Jean wasn’t entirely sure what the fight was all about. He’d heard that those Flemings were rebelling, but he didn’t know what they were rebelling about. Still, they’d bottled up the French garrison in the town, and now the men of Ypres, of Bruges and God alone knew where else were all lined up in front of the walls.

His father had been to other battles, and he laughed when he saw their position. ‘Look at them! The fools have the town’s walls behind them to their right and rear, and the river blocks their escape to the north! They couldn’t have picked a worse position if they’d tried!’

It was true. Jean and Bernard had looked at the enemy and could see, even they, untrained and unblooded, that the land gave all the advantage to the French cavalry. Oh, there were a couple of obstacles, two small streams, and some other minor distractions — rocks and such — but for all that, the knights should be able to form up in no time, and once they did they’d be able to thunder at the gallop towards the Flemings, and no man, none, could face that. Jean’s father told them, and he’d been in plenty of battles: ‘When you have a mounted man-at-arms riding at you, you can’t defeat him. You can dodge and try to run away, but if he wants you, he’ll prick you with his lance. You can’t save yourself on the flat. On this sort of field they’ll have no chance at all.’