Gift to Peter Fulk of Winchelsea, in compensation for a ship of his, which the king for certain causes lately caused to be sunk in the port of Calais . . .
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1345–8
Calais castle was freezing. The Captain paused on the tight spiral staircase that led up to the war room. His heavy breath misted. He leaned on the stone wall beside the wide edge of the triangular steps and adjusted the leather straps on his leg. A gust of salt air blew through an arrow slit and stung the tight, raw skin on his face. He blinked hard and peered out at the sea.
Three or four deserted ships listed at anchor in the harbour. Fog hung over the Risbank. He saw nothing beyond.
A few turns below him, the city’s governor, Jean de Vienne, was also labouring up the stairs. ‘Cannon are quiet today, Jean,’ the Captain called down. ‘Perhaps the king’s giving up for Lent.’
The older man was breathing too hard to respond. The cold and damp in the castle irritated his gout. The Captain could tell he was in pain. ‘Keep going,’ Vienne barked.
The Captain shrugged. He gripped his stick and carried on hobbling up the stairs. At the top, he mopped his forehead with his sleeve and brought his breathing under control once more. Then he knocked briefly on the thick iron-studded oak door. He let himself into the room where the council was waiting.
About a dozen of them were already there. The group split evenly between military men and merchants. On one side of the table, to the right of Vienne’s place at the head, sat the castle’s commander, Jean du Fosseux, a dour, efficient soldier.
With him was a loud-mouthed, rather stupid knight born and raised in Calais, named Enguerrand de Beaulo. Sir Arnoul d’Audrehem was with them too, his face thin and drawn, and a large chunk of hair still missing where he had been hit by the pirate on the little boat that had floated into the harbour nearly three months ago.
The Captain raised a hand to greet them all. Then he took a seat at the other end of the long table, alongside the men with whom he and Marant did most of their business.
Calais’ burghers: the traders and moneymen who wielded the real power in the city.
At the centre of this group of merchants sat Eustache de Saint-Pierre: ancient and still acute, despite being stoop-shouldered, part-deaf and short of sight, with a weak arm and mouth slack from an apoplexy. Several places away was Jean d’Aire, almost as elderly and almost as rich as Eustache, the papery skin of his hands covered in liver spots and large tufts of hair protruding from his nose.
Two middle-aged cousins – Jacques and Pierre de Wissant – separated the old men. A few lesser merchants made up their number. Saint-Pierre acknowledged the Captain as he swung himself into a chair and propped his stick up against the table beside him. The rest ignored him. He knew that his scarred face was hard for people to look at. He also knew that merchants resented pirates.
They remind them too much of themselves.
The talk around the table quietened as Vienne shuffled into the room, sat down in his high-backed wooden chair, removed his shoes gingerly and put his feet on a cushioned stool. He nodded around each face at the table, taking stock of who was there. He pushed away a sheaf of parchment sheets that had been placed in front of him for his inspection and turned to Fosseux and de Beaulo.
With a single, terse word – ‘defences?’ – he invited them to begin.
Fosseux gave an efficient description of circumstances that had not changed for many weeks. Despite the length of the bombardment, the English trebuchets and cannon had done no more than superficial damage to the walls and towers, and there was no shortage of stone still available for repairs. The gates remained secure and in good condition. The moats remained deep and full of water. The channel at the mouth of the Risbank could still be navigated by supply ships – here he glanced at the Captain – if they chose their moment well. There was an ample supply of bows and crossbows, while the large fixed catapults and springalds above each of the gatehouses were in good working order. There was saltpetre and coal for making gunpowder in the castle cellars, and it was possible that the city blacksmiths, tasked with casting cannon for the defenders to use, would soon have a model that worked.
The problem was manpower. The dysentery that had spread among the men of the garrison seemed now to be under control, but there had been serious losses. Also, dozens of men had lost fingers or toes to the cold lately, and more than one had died from the shock of amputation. ‘By God’s grace we have enough men to defend ourselves against ordinary bombardment, assuming Philippe comes to relieve us by Easter,’ he concluded. ‘But should we need to defend any more serious attack, or if Philippe does not—’
But before he could offer his thoughts on the likelihood of the French king arriving at such a date, de Beaulo interjected and began his customary speech about the natural bravery of the men of Calais, and their worth being twice that of ordinary Frenchmen.
Vienne cut him off and turned to the merchants.
The ancient Eustache de Saint-Pierre nominated one of the Wissant cousins to speak for them. Pierre de Wissant began. He itemised salt pork, bacon and cheese supplies, the dwindling numbers of live chickens, cattle and sheep, and the ratio of preserved mackerel to salmon. He forecast grain prices for the spring. He referred to familiar debates about the need to balance further reduction of the city’s hungry population with the need to retain skilled craftsmen and churchmen to attend the daily needs of the garrison. His subtext throughout was mild reproof to the military leadership, who did not seem to realise that it was the merchants who were keeping the city in a state to defend itself.
The Captain had now heard all of this many times on many other days, and knew there was little he could contribute.
His role was simple: he represented Marant’s gang inside Calais’ walls.
The pirates’ importance to the city’s survival gave the Captain a seat at the council table. But the negotiation and deal-making he undertook on Marant’s behalf was all done elsewhere. In squalid taverns. At the docks. In the private apartments of men like Eustache de Saint-Pierre. He appeared in this high castle room only as a reminder to the war council of the real nature of the fight they affected to direct.
The war room was one of the few in the castle allowed sufficient firewood rations to warm it. As the merchant spoke, the Captain began to feel comfortable, and then a little drowsy. His mind wandered. He began thinking about the peculiar boy in the cells who had arrived in Calais covered in blood, with two of Marant’s pirates dead at his feet. And the Scot who had once been one of his crew. Who had only been on that boat, and not in the sea with his throat slit, because of what the boy had done. Who was almost recovered now from the serious injury he had suffered and was becoming increasingly irate about his imprisonment.
Marant had ruled that he and the boy were safe from retribution. The pirate was unsentimental about his men. Dogwater and Gombert had failed in their job, and in the pirate’s view, they deserved to die. But Vienne’s men, who now guarded the Scot in the castle dungeons, were frightened of him. They did not even like to take him his meals, since he was given to raging and breaking things when he saw them. They were too afraid even to let him out of his cell to exercise in one of the castle’s damp enclosed yards.
It was a shame. The Scot had been one of his best men, once. He could use him again now. The boy, though, had something about him too. He looked harmless. But how harmless was a young man who had killed two pirates single-handedly?
The Captain’s attention drifted back to the war room. The other Wissant cousin was talking about the regulation of silver circulation within the city and the need to avoid a crisis of coin. All at the table looked bored.
Wissant petered out.
Vienne looked around. ‘Thank you all,’ he said. ‘May God continue to protect us, at least until the king realises that it is his job. Does anyone have anything to raise before we go about our business?’
The Captain raised his hand. ‘I should like to address the matter of two men in the cells. The men who arrived on the small boat—’
Vienne cut him off. ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I know what you want. The answer is no. Spies, most likely. They stay in the cells. After what they did to your master’s men, I can’t see why I should do anything else, save hanging them.’
The Captain ignored the word ‘master’, though he noticed that it irked him. He looked around the room to see if Vienne’s was the general feeling. Most of the men at the table avoided his eye. Either because they did not wish to take a side in an argument in which they had no stake, or because they simply did not care.
‘So be it,’ he said. ‘It’s just . . . ’ He tailed off deliberately. ‘I suppose honour and virtue are suspended in these extreme times.’
The Captain did not direct this remark to Sir Arnoul. But he counted down in his head the moments until the knight took his bait. Sir Arnoul’s own recovery from his injuries had been slower than Scotsman’s, and he still stumbled and slurred a little when he spoke. But the Captain knew there were instincts inside him that he would be unable to contain.
‘If I may, good Sir Jean.’ Sir Arnoul spoke to the governor in a courtly French, hoping to flatter Vienne with his elevated diction. ‘The boy saved my life. He acted with great perspicacity and no little disregard for the safety of his own person. His fellow, meanwhile, had earlier rescued me from my own imprisonment. It seems a cruel fate for his reward in this to be the ignominy of his own cell. Upon my honour, as a knight, I cannot . . . ’
Jean de Vienne endured this speech with more patience than he had shown de Beaulo. He flexed his gouty feet on their cushioned stool and chose his words carefully.
‘With respect to your dignity and your honour, Sir Arnoul, I thank you for your words,’ he said. ‘But for the sake of public order if nothing else, I cannot have men loose in this city who speak no word of French, who appeared here from the English camp in scandalous circumstances and who have already killed two men in cold blood.’
The Captain interjected. ‘Hardly cold blood. Those men were rogue elements within our friend Marant’s crew. Marant has disavowed them. He condemns their actions. And I can teach him French.’
‘Rogue elements? Marant’s crew is nothing but rogue elements.’
The Captain raised his palms and said no more. But Sir Arnoul tried again. ‘The boy, at least. I would be willing to stake my own honour . . . ’
Vienne sighed, impatient. ‘The boy, then. Since we need every pair of hands. But not the Scot. I have heard he is a danger to himself and everyone around. Indeed, we ought . . . ’
But before he could say more, somewhere outside the war room came a boom, followed by an awful wrenching sound like the felling of a tree.
Around the table, men leapt up.
‘God’s liver—’
The dull-eyed de Beaulo was closest to the door. He scrambled out of it, half tripping on his own feet and hurrying down the stairwell.
Moments later, he rushed back in. His eyes were wide. His jowls wobbled a little. Words seemed to stick in his mouth as he tried to relay what he had seen.
‘Speak, damn you,’ said Vienne, hobbling towards him.
‘The sea,’ de Beaulo exclaimed. ‘It’s on fire!’
They hurried as best they could from the castle out to the city walls, making their way up to the walkway at the top of the ramparts. Ugly clouds of black smoke blew. The men coughed and spluttered through it. They made their way to the walls above the Lantern Gate, which stood nearest the mouth of the city’s harbour. As the smoke began to clear, the Captain realised what de Beaulo had meant.
A fierce, dry heat was blowing off the sea as though it were a breeze from the Indies. It came from the direction of a large merchant ship in the water below them, burning as it sank. The ship was on its side, the mast pointed towards Calais in accusation. It groaned like a speared whale. Flames licked from those parts of the hull that still sat above the waterline. But most of the smoke was coming from a slick of oil or pitch that had spilled out all around it, and was being carried slowly towards the harbour’s pier by the tide. The vessel had not been in the harbour earlier that morning. But the Captain could guess what had happened to it.
Jean d’Aire’s eyes were clouded by milky discs, pale blue like blackbird eggs. The elderly merchant tugged the Captain’s sleeve. ‘What’s happening?’
‘The English have sunk a ship,’ said the Captain. He sniffed the air. It reeked. ‘That’s why there has been no cannon fire today. They’ve packed all their cannon powder in that ship, lit it and left God and the wind to do the rest.’
D’Aire snorted. ‘Or the skipper was pissed as a porpoise. I know the English. Can’t drink, but won’t do anything else. In any case, there’s one less ship out there to bother your friend Marant on his supply runs.’
Eustache de Saint-Pierre, standing close by, laughed bitterly. ‘Or one to bother them every day from now on.’
The Captain nodded. Saint-Pierre was right. Whoever had sunk the ship had done a fine job. They had steered it into position in the channel, broken open the pitch barrels, lit a fuse to the powder that blew a hole in the hull and got off the ship before it all started to burn. Presumably they swam to the Risbank, in strong tides and seas cold enough to kill a weak man of shock.
The danger they had endured was impressive. And their mission had succeeded. The wrecked ship would lie just below the water surface at the centre of the harbour channel, making it impassable to all but the very best sailors.
Marant’s job had just become harder. Which meant that the Captain’s job had become harder too. But harder was not necessarily bad.
Harder just means costlier.
The ramparts were growing busy. The noise and smoke had brought people hurrying up the walls.
The Captain had seen enough. Marant would find out about the harbour blockage before long and make his decisions accordingly. He would let the Captain know.
The Captain moved off against the flow of men and women, went back into the chilly, dingy castle and down the spiral stairs once more. He went all the way to the bottom of the central tower. To the dungeons.
The jailer on post at the entrance was bored and irritable at being stuck at his post. ‘What’s going on up there?’ he said. ‘It fucking stinks.’
The Captain ignored his question. ‘It smells no better down here,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to see the boy. Let me in.’
The jailer grumbled as he fitted the large key to the door. The Captain palmed him a silver denier. As usual, this shut him up.
The cells were humid and gloomy, set in a cramped corner of the castle’s underbelly, lit only by small grilled holes in the wall that allowed the air to move in and out.
Scotsman and the boy were kept in the two at the furthest end of the row. The Captain tapped his stick deliberately as he walked along the cells, to announce his arrival.
‘Fuck off,’ came Scotsman’s voice.
‘That’s nice.’ The Captain carried on walking at his deliberate pace. Tap, tap, tap.
‘You deaf?’
‘It’s funny,’ said the Captain as he came to a halt in front of the small barred door. ‘That’s how a lot of people seem to greet me these days.’
Scotsman stood up. He had been face down on the floor. Since recovering from his head injury, he had spent his days fighting invisible enemies in his cell to regain his natural strength. For hours on end he leapt and jumped, squatting down and pushing himself up off the floor, sweating and straining to increase his stamina and the strength of his body.
This, combined with the meagre rations fed to the prisoners, had given him a truly extraordinary physique. He was thinner than the Captain had ever known him. But it now looked as though his skin had melted over his muscles. His hair and beard were vastly long, so unkempt that his face was barely visible. But his eyes glimmered from the small gap between the two.
‘You’d fetch a hundred bezants in a Saracen slave market, you know.’
‘Fuck off,’ the Scot replied.
‘You already said that. And you know, it doesn’t matter how strong you get, you’ll never pull the walls down,’ said the Captain.
‘Aye, but when I get out of here, I’ll pull a few cunts’ arms off,’ said the Scot. ‘Or legs.’
The Captain smiled. ‘Sadly for you, today is not that day,’ he said. ‘Nor is tomorrow. Or the next day. You seem to have frightened our friends up in the castle.’
Scotsman turned his back on the Captain. He began squatting again, throwing himself to the floor, then leaping back in the air.
The Captain watched him. ‘Your friend, on the other hand . . . ’
Just for a moment, the Scot froze. Then he checked himself and carried on his exercises. ‘What about him?’ he grunted as he worked.
‘Governor de Vienne has graciously allowed him his freedom, to come and work for me. On condition he does not kill any more of my colleagues.’
Scotsman carried on leaping and pressing up and down. Steam rose from him and sweat coursed down his back. His hair stuck to his skin. He said nothing.
The Captain watched him carefully. ‘I can bring him by to say farewell to you, if you like.’
‘Fuck that,’ panted the Scot. ‘Every time I think I’ve got rid of that little prick, he always finds me again.’
The Captain smiled. Somehow, even with his back turned, Scotsman sensed it.
‘Grin all you fucking like, you faithless, turncoat bastard,’ he said. ‘Even you won’t handle that one.’
‘I think I will,’ said the Captain. ‘I handled you for a time.’
‘Aye. And then where did you go?’
‘Here and there,’ said the Captain. ‘And now, here.’ He tried once more. ‘Try to calm yourself. I can get you out. Out of here. You can help me a while. Then I’ll get you home.’
‘Home,’ said the Scot, ‘is all any cunt in this war talks about. The lot of them are fucking dreaming.’
‘Maybe you’re coming around to my way of thinking about the world.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘So be it,’ said the Captain. He tipped the jailer another silver denier as he walked out of the dungeons.