Will Davenport - The Perfect Sinner

I was brooding on that when the Michel took a wave right over the bow and staggered almost to a halt. He is a good ship and he’d been built just the way I wanted him. He can go further to windward than any other ship I know, but it was asking a lot to expect him to fight his way up-Channel in a down-Channel gale. I called him after my dear old horse, the first of my chargers, killed under me by a Frenchman’s sword in his throat, and in truth they behaved the same way, the ship and the horse. The first Michel was there with me through thick and thin just as long as I kept him properly fed and properly shod and didn’t ask him to charge straight into a low sun. He didn’t like it when blades came at him out of the glare. He carried me for six years in the King’s service, which is quite a record when you think how much of that time was spent at the exact places where two armies were colliding. We talked to each other a lot, Michel and I. The second Michel, the wooden one, felt the same way about the wind as the first one felt about the low sun. The weight of the water forced his head further and further off course and the big sail slatted and cracked. I had seen this one coming and braced myself on the backstay, but the King’s squire, face down on the deck, short and fat with his head in a bucket, hardly seemed to care about the distinction between air and water any more. He was already soaked through before the wave hit him, so that the flood only lifted and swelled his sodden woollen jerkin as it passed. The priest was braced against the weather rail as ever, glaring at the vague horizon as if he were hoping for a fight. It was the fourth day of our three-day passage up-Channel, and I only minded the delay because William wouldn’t perform the office of Mass in any kind of storm. It was one of his few orthodoxies. He said he had seen too many people vomit up the Host and that was definitely disrespectful and possibly blasphemous. I was standing behind the steersman, staring forwards beyond the port bow, to where the sea blurred into the low, cantering clouds. White-caps were whipping from the wave tops in the wind that came driving from behind him again as the bow swung back on course. We had seen no sign of the sun for many hours and, though there should be nothing ahead of us, who could tell for sure whether it was wind, rock or sandbank that broke and frothed the sea?

My sailing master caught my eye and jerked his head down towards the well-deck. Hawley was not known for his soft heart or his thoughtfulness for those who didn’t share his complete indifference to the discomforts of the sea, but he seemed to like the squire. They had made friends in Dartmouth before we sailed. Not many people ever managed to make friends with Hawley. He didn’t like to cheat his friends, which may have been why he chose to have so few. The young man was showing signs of movement, doing his best to get to his knees. I dropped down the ladder and stood beside him. ‘How are you?’ I asked, and he swung his head to one side and then the other as if he could not quite locate me.

I’m still breathing,’ he gasped, ‘at least when there’s air to be had. The rest of the time I’m drinking. Are we nearly there?’

‘Visibility’s bad. I can’t see land at the moment,’ I said, knowing a fuller answer might nip this brave attempt at recovery in the bud.

The squire made a huge effort and reared his head higher than it had been since dawn. The Channel never seemed this wide before,’ he said uncertainly. ‘How far is it?’

I could not evade a direct question. ‘We’re a little west of where we started, doing what we can against a north-east wind.’

The squire reached out for the rail and hauled himself unsteadily to his feet. I put out a hand to make sure of him as the next wave heaved the bow higher. He had been a plump man when he came aboard, but I realised that the past four days had already served to trim him down a bit. He was looking around him aghast.

‘West? That’s the wrong way. Will the storm sink us?’

‘Storm? No, it’s not really a storm.’ I had another look at the sky. The clouds ended in a dark line which was drawing nearer all the time. ‘It will blow itself out in a short while, then we’ll make our way back up-Channel. At least it keeps the galleys away.’

‘What galleys?’

‘The French galleys, the Castilians. Take your pick. No galleys are good news. We are at war, you know.’

He was doing well for a man who’d been so sick minutes before. Standing up does that for some people. His habitual interest was showing itself again. He had an eye for everything, did this young man. He looked up at the rigging and seemed to be trying to frame a question. ‘I think you had better dry yourself,’ I said. ‘Come into my quarters.’

It was relatively peaceful in the cabin and I was able to study the squire as he rubbed himself as dry as he could, the first chance I’d had since he had come on board at Dartmouth.

‘I know your face,’ I remarked. ‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

The squire nodded and managed to look both pleased and a little wary through his pallor. ‘First time was thirteen years ago,’ he said, ‘in France. That is, I was a nobody in the retinue of Prince Lionel and you were the great Lord Bryan with retained men of your own.’

I was even more impressed by his powers of recovery. The younger man showed resilience and that quality had always prompted my approval. ‘Thirteen years ago?’ I did the sums. 1359, the year my dearest Elizabeth died. ‘Rheims? You were at the siege?’

‘I didn’t get as far as Rheims. I was captured.’

‘How on earth did you manage that? There wasn’t a lot of fighting that year. Rethel, was that it? That little skirmish at the bridge? Were you captured there?’

‘No, no. Nothing so noble. You’ll remember how hungry we all were, surely?’

‘How could I not?’ Foul weather for week after week and the French had finally learnt their lesson. With his father, the King, a prisoner in England, Dauphin Charles changed the rules, decided taking the English on in battle was a mug’s game with only one outcome. Instead his French armies burnt the crops, laying the country bare so that we’d starve. It wasn’t glorious and it wasn’t at all chivalrous but it worked all too well. Starve was exactly what we did. Still, I suppose that after Crécy we could hardly claim the high ground on chivalry.

‘We were sent off to search for food,’ the squire explained. ‘Three of us, me and two Welsh archers. We walked into a farmyard and the barn was full of French. They thought I might be worth something. The other two got the knife.’

‘Who sent you off like that?’

The squire looked a little embarrassed and I wondered why, then I guessed.

‘It was me, was it? Did I send you?’

‘It’s all a long time ago,’ he said as if that made it less important. ‘And you also fixed my ransom.’

‘Did I now?’ I had fixed many, many ransoms. ‘How much were you worth?’

‘Sixteen pounds’ said the squire proudly, ‘and the King paid it.’

‘Sixteen pounds, eh? And how old were you then?’

‘Sixteen years.’

‘A pound a year.’ The man was twenty-nine now. I wasn’t sure he looked worth twenty-nine pounds, but someone thought he was if they had entrusted him with this mission. He wasn’t just a travelling companion. My instructions laid down that I must consult him over every aspect of the diplomatic negotiations once I got him to Genoa, though I was, in every other way, the leader.

‘That wasn’t it,’ I said with certainty. ‘That wasn’t what I remembered.’ I didn’t explain, didn’t say that grief had driven all other details out of that year, leaving only the black hole of tears which stood where Elizabeth had once been. ‘It was more recent than that.’