When the men of Calais realised King Edward wasn’t going to leave that winter . . . they sent five hundred people out of the city through the English lines . . .
True Chronicles of Jean le Bel
It was nearly Christmas when her chance came. By then, Squelette was ready.
She certainly looked ready. She was painfully thin. Her cheeks were sunk and her knees and ankles wider than the leg bones between. Her breasts were gone. Her hipbones stuck out like little shelves. Her hair was falling out and her teeth and fingernails were loose.
She was always hungry and always cold.
Living off the land had become much harder as autumn turned to winter. The nights were freezing, and the bushes and ground were bare of food to forage. She had abandoned her crossbow when she ran out of bolts. She could not stand in the streams to fish without shivering so hard she scared the fish away.
She chewed bark and roots on the days when she found nothing else to eat. She took clothes and blankets from the homes of the dead.
By day and by night she had started coming closer and closer to the English camp. Several times she had come right up to its perimeter fence, to catch a glimpse of campfires blazing on the marsh.
But she had so little strength that she could not contemplate adding to the scars on her arm. A knight or archer – even a merchant – would have overpowered her with ease.
She thought more and more about killing for food.
Then, one day, it happened.
The roads away from Villeneuve started filling with women. Not only women. Children and older people too. But mostly women. They spoke hard northern French and carried pathetic bundles of possessions and little parcels of food. They were thin and weak. Not as thin and weak as she was, but not far from it.
They could only have been from Calais.
Squelette did not have to think about it for long. The city, like her, must be starving. The garrison had ordered those who could not fight to leave. Had sent them out to meet their fate.
Squelette guessed correctly what that fate would be.
The refugees were escorted by groups of English archers and men-at-arms to a point where painted warning signs and piles of stones by the roadside marked a mile from the siege town’s perimeter. Then they were told to be on their way.
Some, delirious at being freed from the besieged city, made off along the road at a run. They jangled handfuls of coins and whooped as they ran.
But more of them shrank back, refusing to go any further. Unwilling to leave the escort. Some of them sat down, cross-legged, on the road, even when the archers in the escort pushed and kicked them, swearing and spitting.
Squelette knew what they feared. She had seen it happen already. She had seen who roamed the road beyond.
And she knew what she wanted to do.
She waited until several groups of refugees were escorted along at once, then she slipped into the road among them. No one paid her any notice.
The refugees came to the mile point and began arguing among themselves. Squelette left them and trudged on, as though resigned to her fate.
She went further than she thought she would need to. But not much further.
A pair of Flemings overtook her on horseback. They went a little way beyond her, then turned their horses to block the road. One of them dismounted. He spoke to her in broken French.
He asked her where she was going. She told him she did not know. He asked her where her husband was. She told him he was dead.
The Fleming was a flabby man, with a bald round head and eyes too close together. He spoke slowly and stupidly. He blinked a lot. He told her she must come and work for him. She told him she did not want to. She refused twice more. He became angry, and he hit her.
She fell. She was so weak it required no pretence. She hoped he was too stupid to search her.
He was.
The man bundled her over the back of his horse, tied her so she would not fall, and remounted. His partner threw a blanket over her so she could not be seen, or identified easily as a person.
They took her into the siege town called Villeneuve, talking in Flemish as they rode. They thought she was unconscious, or they did not think she understood Flemish, or they did not care.
Their names were Nicclaes and Jakke. They spoke about how they had recently returned to the English camp, summoned to help run a brothel. They discussed her potential as a new slave of that place.
They concluded she would probably not last long in the job before a man killed her or she starved or caught a disease or she fell pregnant and died from the potion they used to kill the child.
They spoke about where they would bury her when she did die, and agreed that if the ground grew any harder, they would just throw her body in a ditch.
Then they stopped riding and untied her, and the man who had hit her picked her up and took her into a warm building and threw her on a sack in a tiny room that smelled of sweat and seed and sorrow. They tossed her some stale bread and a cup of ale.
She heard their master berating them for choosing her – a dirty scrawny bitch with no tits and hair like a boy. But she was not thrown out. And no one came to touch her or beat her that night.
So she ate and drank in silence and slept until she was kicked awake the next morning by the master, and told she was now a whore and if she tried to run she would be caught and beaten, and if she tried to run again she would be murdered.
She said she understood. She pretended to cry. She pretended to be afraid of the master’s birch, and cowered in the corner so the master would feel powerful.
It was all exactly as she thought it would be.
It was better than she thought it would be.
The master’s wiry chin hair and round shoulders and meaty arms were just as she remembered.
It was the giant woman from the road.
The woman told her to go and wash in the yard. She said she would find her new clothes. She said she would feed her for several days before she was fit to work. She said she would deduct the cost from the money men would pay to use her. Squelette made her eyes wide and tried to look frightened and she kept her tears going until the woman went away.
Then she felt around the room until she found a crack between the boards of the floor. She unbound the knife from her thigh and hid it. She went and washed as she had been commanded.
She came back and put on the dress the woman had left her and ate the food that she had left her. Then she sat on the sack and strained her ears and listened to everything she could hear.
She learned that the woman’s name was Hircent. That she ran the brothel with the Flemings Jakke and Nicclaes.
She learned that in three days it would be Christmas, and the King and Queen of England would be holding a Christmas court, and that this would be a very busy time in the brothel. She imagined that this was the time she would be set to work.
On Christmas Day.
She remembered the last Christmas she had spent in Valognes. With her family. In their home. Before the war came and took everything away.
Now Christmas was coming again.