Write to the King’s cousin, Margaret, countess of Kent, stating that . . . the King desired that she should send John, her son . . . to the King’s assistance . . .
Calendar of the French Roll, 20 Edward III
One morning in late October, Romford crouched on his haunches in the sandy soil beside his favourite cannon, took a gulp of ale from his flask and wafted his hand to clear the smoke around him. Autumn had arrived. Above him, a band of cloud was scudding in from the sea, and a few fat spots of rain were falling. The drops hissed when they landed on the hot belly of the gun. Romford sensed more rain coming. He shifted his powder bucket under the little canvas tent the engineers had made for him to keep his kit dry. He pulled his thick green-and-white cloak around his shoulders for warmth. Then he peered through the thinning smoke and considered Calais’ huge walls, one hundred or so paces in the distance.
The walls were a mess. Romford could trace his marks all over the masonry. His firing spot was on the edge of an island in the marsh that men called the ‘sablon’, where a company of bowmen, a battery of trebuchets and several other cannon took aim at Calais, protected on their flanks with palisades. The island was directly opposite a round corner tower joining Calais’ south wall to its west. The curved stonework of that tower was a mass of dents and pockmarks and abrasions. At its top, several pieces of crenellation were missing, and at one point, around halfway up the tower, a whole chunk of stone had fallen out; it now lay, broken in three pieces, on the thin strip of ground between the tower’s base and the outer of the city’s two sea-fed moats. The garrison inside Calais had hung sacks of straw over the sides of the walls, to try to soften the impact of trebuchet shot and the cannons’ barrage of heavy metal balls and bolts. Romford didn’t mind. He enjoyed destroying the sacks. His last shot had hit one directly, making the straw burst in a puff of dust and dried stalks and dazed insects, already weak and half-dead from the cold.
Romford had now been manning King Edward’s guns for twenty days without a break. He had worked so hard that the lines of his palms and fingers were stained black. His arms ached from the effort of adjusting the heavy iron gun’s aim and his fingertips were burned hard at the pads. He had set fire more than once to his hair, so that clumps of it were missing and its colour was no longer blond but a grimy brown, thick and stiff with soot. His ears roared and whined constantly, even when he slept.
Yet for all that, Romford felt a thrill each morning as he left the Wolvenhuis to go to his station. It was troubling him more and more to be in the brothel. Almost every week, Sir Hugh Hastings or one of his men-at-arms would arrive with a new woman for Hircent to assign a cell and compel to work. They varied greatly in age, appearance and the tongues they spoke. Some were Flemish, experienced whores who had sought out the English army at Villeneuve to find work. Others, though, were scared and miserable prisoners captured during raids on the towns around Villeneuve. Hircent treated these women with great cruelty and contempt. Besides her wicked goedendag, she had cut herself a thin birch, with which she would beat the backs of their legs for the smallest misdeeds.
Their cries kept Romford awake at night.
So each time he touched flame to the firing hole of the cannon, setting it to bellow and flash, it seemed to him that for once it was good to be here, and not in his current, uneasy home.
Since the cannon was now cool and the heavy rain had not yet arrived, Romford started loading another shot. He paid special attention to the task of scraping out residue and burned powder from the gun’s throat. This was the dirtiest, smelliest part of the job, and it left his hands filthy and oily. But it was also vital. Just after Michaelmas, Romford had seen a gunner lose a hand and half the flesh of his cheek when a dirty hand-cannon blew up as it fired. The man’s injuries were so terrible that Romford was not sure if he was lucky or unlucky to have lived. But seeing the accident had sharpened his own focus on keeping his weapons clean. Now, as he prepared the gun to fire, he found himself lost completely in the task, so that he stood up with a start when a hand tapped him on the shoulder and a voice said: ‘Why are you doing that?’
Romford wiped his face and looked at the boy who was standing beside him. He had never seen him before, but he could tell that he was of noble blood. He looked about the same age as Romford – somewhere between his fifteenth and seventeenth summer. But he was straight-backed and clean, and he wore neatly tailored clothes and soft calfskin boots, with a gleaming sword at his side, which looked as though it had seldom been used. He had a long, rather thin face, with high cheekbones and a tapering nose, and wore his hair swept back from his face. His eyes were the palest blue. He had no hint of a beard, and his skin seemed impossibly smooth.
Conscious of how filthy and rank he was from his work, Romford now wiped his palms on the arse of his breeches and attempted a bow. The boy smiled and said something Romford could not make out.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Romford said, pointing to his ears. ‘The gun. I—’
‘Not at all,’ said the boy, a little louder. ‘I surprised you. I’m sorry. I only wanted to ask what you were doing. It looks . . . ’ He gazed intently at the weapon, as though trying to understand it. ‘It looks fascinating.’
Romford nodded. ‘It’s called a cannon, my lord. It’s like a longbow, or a crossbow, in a way. Or a—’
‘Jacky,’ said the boy. Romford was confused, and his face must have showed it, because the boy laughed in a friendly manner. ‘My name. It’s John, but people call me Jacky.’
Romford nodded. He decided he could not call the boy Jacky. So he continued to tell him about the gun. ‘It doesn’t shoot as true as a longbow. Not at all. Nor as far, nor as fast. But it makes a roar and a stink, which scares people, and the arrows it shoots – well, they’re not arrows. They’re more like . . . ’ He tried to think of something this young noble would understand. ‘Like a juggler’s balls, but of iron. They’re very dangerous if they hit you.’
He looked at Jacky to see if he understood. The boy was just staring at him, his light blue eyes as calm as a pool. For a moment Romford did not know what else to say, so they both stood there with their arms by their sides.
‘Would you like to see me shoot it?’ said Romford, after a few moments. ‘I could try and knock another bit off that tower.’
Jacky nodded. ‘That sounds fine, Master . . . ’ He cocked his head enquiringly.
‘ . . . Romford,’ said Romford, turning away as he felt his face flush beneath the dirt. He looked around for his powder bucket. ‘So the first thing we do is . . . ’
But he got no further, because at that moment another voice rang out from the direction of the trebuchets.
‘Joseph of Arimathea with his Grail full of bird piss, boys, are we besieging this city or fucking flirting with it? Get your thumbs out of your arseholes and start fucking it up or by God I’ll have you all digging the bastard ditch, so help me Jesus.’
Jacky squeezed Romford on the arm. ‘I expect you know of Lord Northampton.’
‘I do.’
‘He can be quite fierce, but he’s not bad once you really know him,’ said Jacky. ‘He and my cousin Eddie are showing me around the camp. I’ve just arrived. You can probably tell.’
He laughed his easy, friendly laugh once again. ‘I’d better go, before I get you in trouble. Maybe I’ll see you again some time, Master Romford.’
And with that he sauntered off along the sablon, smiling around him as though he found everything amusing, waving as he went, without looking round. Romford watched him catch up with Northampton, who looked as distracted and irritable as he had since the day they arrived at Villeneuve. He watched him pat his cousin Eddie affectionately on the back.
Eddie was the prince.
Jacky said something to him, apparently about Romford and the cannon. Though he tried not to stare, he felt the prince’s eyes light upon him and linger.
Although the prince’s attention was the thing he had craved for so long, now he had it, Romford felt more miserable than ever. He dared not return the gaze. He did not know if the prince recognised him, or was merely curious about what Jacky had told him. He knew he could never ask. He turned back to his cannon, feeling sick. The rain had finally come in from the sea and the breeze was swirling. But he managed one more shot at Calais’ corner tower. He read the wind direction perfectly, and the ball cracked another of its crenellations, knocking it inwards towards the tower’s roof.
As it fell, he thought he heard someone yell in pain. But with the ringing in his ears, it was becoming very hard to be sure.
After their meeting on the cannon island, Romford did not expect to see Jacky again. But he was wrong. Just two days later he was drying out his mud-caked boots by the oven at the back of the brothel when he heard a commotion from the front of the room, where Hircent sat to welcome guests to the premises, her chair placed carefully beside the doorway near a corner where her sharp-tipped goedendag Heartbreaker stood propped.
At first he thought it must be a client making trouble with one of the girls, or with Millstone and Scotsman, who were guarding the entrance that night. He thought he might have to bolt up the ladder and rouse Tebbe, Thorp and Loveday, who were already sleeping in the loft. But when he looked, he saw there was no trouble. Rather, Hircent had drawn herself up to her full height and was making a fuss of three young men, who had evidently surprised her with their visit.
One was Jacky. One was another young nobleman of around the same age. And the third was the prince.
The three lords were in boisterous mood. Their voices were loud and they bumped into one another and the furniture. Romford guessed they had been drinking for some hours, and were now rolling around the dark streets of Villeneuve looking for more entertainment.
Their arrival sent Hircent into something of a frenzy. The big woman rose from her chair and was bustling around arranging seats for her honoured guests to sit on. Romford realised why she was nervous. Although she now had a large number of women working under her, at that moment all of them were engaged, bar one: a squat, short-sighted young woman called Flora, whom Hircent mostly used as a maid. Hircent bellowed for Flora once the young lords were seated. The girl bumbled over with mugs of spiced wine. The prince snatched one, drank it in one draught. ‘More,’ he demanded. There was a hard edge to his voice. Hircent shooed Flora off to fetch a jug.
As she went, Jacky spotted Romford. He stood up and strode across the room to the back of the brothel. Romford pretended to concentrate on his boots. But Jacky grabbed his shoulder and gave him a friendly shake. He began talking loudly and enthusiastically. He was certainly drunk, but seemed as blithe and happy as he had when they first met.
‘Romford! It is Romford, isn’t it? The boy with the gun! Are you waiting too? Eddie’s friend Sir Hugh Hastings owns this house, I hear. Have you seen the madam?’ He nudged Romford playfully. ‘I shouldn’t want to tangle with her . . . inside or outside the bedroom!’
Romford squirmed. ‘I – er – no, my lord. I . . . I live here. At the moment. When I’m not . . . ’
Jacky laughed his tinkling laugh and his eyes widened. ‘Here? Why, that must be heaven! Tell me then, who’s the best of them?’ Without waiting for an answer, he called across the brothel to the prince. ‘Eddie! Eddie! Come and meet my friend Romford. This young man lives here in the whorehouse! Have you ever heard of such a thing? Come and meet him!’
The prince walked over, wobbling slightly. He looked at Romford as though he had never seen him before. Romford stood in his bare feet, holding a wet boot in each hand. His heart was pounding. He bowed. As he did, he remembered the smell of the prince’s neck when they had lain together in his bed the night before the battle at Crécy. He wondered if he really looked so different now. When he straightened up, the prince was no longer looking at him.
Jacky seemed not to notice Romford’s discomfort. He swilled wine around his mouth and looked about the brothel. ‘You know, Eddie,’ he said, now also ignoring Romford, ‘when I am Earl of Kent in my own right, I shall live in a whorehouse too.’ He giggled.
The prince looked lazily at him. ‘Growing up with your sister Joanie around, I thought we’d had that pleasure already. How many men is she married to at the moment? Willy Montagu? One-eyed Tommy Holand? I have seen her naked so many times, I suppose I ought to marry her too.’
For the first time since Romford had met him, Jacky looked a little wounded. He peered around the room again, and spotted the other nobleman, sulking near the door. ‘Hey! Louis! Kom hier, klootzak!’
Now the young Fleming joined them too. ‘Louis, this is Romford,’ said Jacky. ‘Romford, this is Louis.’ He grinned and raised his eyebrows. ‘He’s very grand. When I’m the Earl of Kent, he’s going to be the Count of Flanders.’ Then he whispered theatrically, ‘And he’s going to marry Eddie’s sister Izzy! What do you think of that?’
Both Louis and the prince looked annoyed by this remark. ‘We shall see about that,’ said the prince. ‘I think dear Louis here would rather marry his horse.’
Louis’ eyes flashed angrily. ‘I shall not marry your sister, Edward, because your fucking father killed mine on the battlefield, in case you had forgotten,’ he spat.
The prince sneered. ‘My fucking father had Jacky’s father’s head cut off, in case you had forgotten. I don’t see him sulking about it. Stop being such a baby.’
Now Jacky pouted too. The prince tossed his hair. For a few moments, the young men stood in a dour silence. Romford realised he was still holding his boots. He put them back on top of the oven. His guts were twisting.
Then, for the first time, the prince turned to Romford as though he knew him. ‘Do you have any powder, boy?’
Romford felt both crushed and elated at once. His legs were shaking. The prince looked irritably at him, awaiting an answer. Romford shook his head. The silence returned, more agonising than ever.
Then, mercifully, there came squeals and peals of coquettish laughter as a pair of girls called May and Morgan skipped out of their cells. They were two of Hircent’s Flemish recruits. As they came into the brothel’s main room, May wiped her mouth with her skirts. Morgan waddled out to the yard, where the wash buckets stood. Romford saw Hircent throw two incredulous and half-dressed archers out of the front door, aiming a boot at their backsides as they went.
Hircent marched over to the young men, her face a picture of exaggerated bonhomie. She put an arm around May and Morgan as they now returned. She seemed oblivious to the uncomfortable mood that hung over the group.
‘These two young ladies will make you very welcome,’ she said. ‘And I have two more coming to you very soon.
‘Who would like . . . ?’ She left the question hanging.
‘Jacky and I will be first,’ said Louis. ‘I think Eddie will . . . ’ He broke into Flemish and spoke rapidly to Hircent. She looked puzzled at first, then nodded as though she understood. She looked at Romford.
The prince looked away. Louis smiled slyly.
‘As my lords please,’ said Hircent. May took Jacky’s hand. Morgan made a playful grab for Louis’ crotch. The four skipped off towards the girls’ cells.
This left Romford and the prince. Hircent beamed at them, her expression sickly and false. ‘Romford, perhaps you would sit with my lord for a time?’ She motioned to a pair of chairs that Flora had put together before the oven.
Hircent drew close to him. ‘Get rid of those fucking boots,’ she hissed. ‘And give him whatever he wants, or I’ll break your dirty little fingers.’
It slowly dawned on Romford what she meant. His heart thudded. Everything seemed slow and strange, as though he were trapped in a terrible dream. Numbly, he took his boots from the oven-top, handed them to Flora and sat down. Behind a curtain, he heard Jacky slap Morgan on her bony arse.
The prince sat beside him and fixed him with his dull, drunken eyes.
Romford cleared his throat. It was the first time he had been alone with the prince since the night before the battle at Crécy. But this was like being with a stranger. He remembered a little bird fluttering in the prince’s tent. He wanted to ask if the prince remembered it too. But he could not find the words. ‘Would my lord like more wine?’ he asked, instead. His voice was tight and small.
The prince kept staring at him. ‘No.’
‘Oh,’ said Romford.
The prince reached out a hand and gripped Romford’s leg hard, halfway up the thigh. Sweat beaded on Romford’s forehead. He had spent so long wanting nothing more than this touch. Now he felt only terror. He prayed Millstone would come in from outside, or that Tebbe or Thorp would come down the ladder from the loft.
From her seat at the front of the brothel, Hircent glared at him. She moved her hand momentarily to Heartbreaker.
The prince’s grip tightened on his leg. His hard fingers were making bruises. Romford noticed that he did not smell like he had done before. There was meat on his breath.
The prince nodded in the direction of one of the wooden cells. Romford shook his head slowly.
‘Yes,’ said the prince.
‘Please, my lord,’ said Romford. ‘I have to be at the sablon at first light tomorrow. The cannon . . . no one else fires it so well . . . ’ He was jabbering. ‘Why don’t we try and find some powder?’ he said in desperation. ‘There may be somewhere in the camp . . . ’
The prince shrugged. Romford realised that they both knew the truth: if there had been any powder to find in the camp, Romford would already have found it.
Across the room, Hircent gestured angrily with her head towards the cell. The prince released Romford’s leg and motioned for him to get up.
He stood up.
He walked across the room with the prince prodding him between his shoulder blades. The ringing in his ears from all the cannon roars grew very loud.
He hoped one last time that Millstone or Tebbe or Thorp or Scotsman or Loveday would come and save him.
But nobody came.
Romford pushed the greasy curtain aside and went into the little cell. The prince stood in front of him. His eyes bored into Romford’s. Romford held his gaze for as long as he could. ‘Do you . . . ’ he said. His voice stopped in his throat.
The prince shook his head.
Somewhere, in another cell, Romford could hear one of the girls choking.
He closed his eyes.
The prince hit him in the mouth. A heavy gold ring tore his lip. He hit the floor, gasping.
The prince kicked him and broke his nose.
The prince rolled him over, sat on top of him and banged his face into the floor.
Romford managed to catch half a breath. He held it. He tried to find the silent place inside him where he had retreated when ugly, horrible things had happened to him before. In London, before the war began. In Caen. At Crécy.
He tried to focus on the ringing in his ears when the prince started pulling off his filthy, soot-stained green-and-white shirt.
Later, when the three lords left the brothel, he stayed all night in the tiny cell like one of the girls, wondering whether the bleeding or his tears would dry up first. When he eventually slept, it was curled in a ball on a rough, scratchy straw sack.
The room was freezing cold.
His face and body ached.
The sack looked just like the ones he had blown to pieces with his cannon as they hung from the scarred walls of Calais.