The King of England . . . had shut off and enclosed the town of Calais with such a great siege, both by land and by sea, so that supplies were in no way able to be taken to those who were in the said town . . . For which they lived in great despair and misery . . .
Les Grandes Chroniques de France
After the English built the fort on the Risbank, a silence fell over Calais. Romford noticed the sound dying before he realised the food had all but disappeared.
Although the harbour was now closed even to fishing boats, and the Lantern Gate and Water Gate were permanently barred, he and the Captain still made their rounds of houses and hiding places every day, Romford shifting stock around and the older man continuing his whispered meetings and negotiations with the city’s burghers. Day by day, Romford felt the energy of the citizens in the streets drift away. As though something was evaporating under the sun.
In the spring the days had followed a rhythm, with people queuing in the early morning to collect their rations of grain, fish, ale and meat, guards rotating their positions on the walls and towers with the tolling of the church bells, and all hands hurrying to the docks when a new ship came in. Yet as Whitsun approached, and the days grew hot and sticky, the city fell into a sullen torpor.
Every week, rations were cut. Strict measures were put in place by Calais’ governor, the stern, gout-lame Jean de Vienne, to control prices. Floggings and hand-loppings were threatened for profiteering, though Romford doubted whether the governor would really be willing to ruin any limb that might one day be needed to defend the city’s walls.
All the same, though prices stayed stable, every week there was less to buy. First, the fish vanished: a fate Romford thought strange and cruel whenever he listened to the distant waves beat the shores outside Calais’ walls. Then the stored vegetables ran out. Finally, even bread became scarce.
One of the merchants the Captain knew, an elderly man called Jean d’Aire with milk-blue, half-blind eyes, had a cold cellar beneath a house just off the market square, where, in the winter, he had kept barrels of the autumn’s fruit. The last few of these still held a few shrivelled, sour apples covered in coarse sawdust. Whenever Romford was sent down to Jean d’Aire’s house to move other crates around, the Captain told him to bring up a handful, and insisted that they both eat as much as they could bear. The foul taste made Romford gag. But the Captain would not let him refuse. ‘You ignore me, lad, then your gums will turn to mush and your teeth will drop,’ he said.
He was right. Soon Romford started to see people in the streets with symptoms of the mouth-rot the Captain had described. They dragged themselves listlessly, their lips curled away from their gums, teeth blackening in livid, puffy beds of flesh, and rashes of angry purple spots covering their arms. So Romford kept choking down the nasty brown pungent balls of tree-flesh whenever he was told to, swallowing them, pips and stalk and skin.
As time went by, he understood that he was lucky to have anything at all.
In the afternoon of a hot day in the late spring, the Captain sent Romford to fetch water from the well sunk in the corner of the empty marketplace. Romford’s belly gnawed. Besides rotten apples, all he had eaten for many days was hard strips of cured and salted meat, and even these were becoming hard to find. Tough strands of flesh stuck in his teeth, and the salt that cured them dried his mouth, making his head ache and turning his piss brown. He had not shit for a week.
The heat trapped in the marketplace was stifling and Romford felt dizzy. The silent crowd waiting their turn around the well squinted and shuffled in the sun. Everyone was suffering in much the same way.
After he had waited almost an hour for his turn at the well, the Captain came to wait with him. The older man was thin and drawn and his skin rawer than ever, but he seemed unbothered by the discomfort. His eyes flashed around the crowd, as though he were reading in them the state of the whole city. He nodded greeting to Romford. ‘Feeling the pinch?’ he asked.
When Romford nodded, the Captain leaned on his stick and surveyed the hot, dusty square.
‘You’ll get used to the hunger soon enough,’ he said. He scratched the symbol of the tailed cross in the dirt at their feet. ‘You might even come to like it.’
‘How long do you think we’ll last?’ Romford asked.
The Captain shaded his eyes and looked towards the sun, sinking in a sky streaked with pink and orange. Then at the castle turrets, whose shadows were creeping long over the city.
Somewhere far away, a cannon roared.
‘Our friend Governor Vienne is stubborn,’ he said. ‘My guess is he’ll throw more people out before he even begins to contemplate giving up. He truly believes King Philippe is coming to save us. It’ll take a good deal of proof to assure him that he’s not.’
‘Will he throw us out?’ Romford’s stomach cramped as he spoke.
‘Us?’ The Captain laughed. ‘It would be a great failure on my part if he did.’
Romford made no reply. He looked towards the front of the line at the well, which had stopped moving.
Raised voices were coming from ahead. A woman with a puckered mouth and greying hair pulled back on top of her head was accusing a man in front of her of taking water before his turn. The man was shrilly denying her charge. She pushed him, and he pushed her back. Her pail of water spilled, and she flew into a rage.
Around them, others began shouting. A stocky sunburned man pushed the quarrelling pair aside so he could take a turn at the well, and he was in turn yanked and dragged by others.
The Captain watched this with an expression somewhere between boredom and amusement. Then he left Romford and walked forward, taking slow measured paces marked out with his stick.
‘Hold your peace,’ he shouted to the tussling townsfolk.
‘Mind your own affairs, cripple.’
The Captain spun on his left leg and spotted the middle-aged man who had called out to him from the crowd.
‘My affairs?’ said the Captain, in a quiet voice.
Romford felt uneasy.
‘Yeah, your own—’
The Captain flipped his stick and swung it, handle end first, at the man’s ankle. He stopped it a hair’s breadth from the knobbly bone.
The man looked down in surprise, shocked by the speed of the Captain’s movement. As he did, the Captain whipped the stick up and tapped him sharply on the chin. It was not a hard blow, but the surprise of it made the man sit down on his arse in the dirt.
Everyone around the well stopped shoving and stood, watching, in silence.
‘My affairs are the same as yours,’ said the Captain. ‘We are all working to keep this city from falling.’ He looked about the whole crowd. ‘We are fighting the English. Not each other. Stay calm. Endure the dearth as Christ did in the desert. And when this is over, we will be rewarded.’
He nodded. ‘Come on,’ he said to Romford. ‘We’ll draw water elsewhere.’
He moved off calmly towards the road leading out of the hot square, back towards the Beehive inn. Romford followed him. The brooding hostility of the starving townsfolk hung in the air. But no one followed them, nor called after them.
‘How will they be rewarded?’ whispered Romford, when he was sure they were out of earshot.
‘They won’t,’ said the Captain. ‘But it does no good to tell them that.’
His face was set hard. Romford’s belly cramped again. By the time he drew water from the city’s other main well, the deep hole by the Snail Tower, the sun had fully set.
Although the Captain said no more that day of what had happened at the well, or what was happening to the city as it slipped into starvation, the memory bothered Romford. And when he fell asleep that night on his hot, scratchy mattress, alive with bugs, he dreamed of men turning another man above a fire. Impaled on a spit thrust through his mouth and arsehole.
As the man roasted, those around the fire sliced strips off his thighs and buttocks with their knives and dropped the hot slivers of meat into their mouths.
Then the faces of the men warped and changed until they were all familiar. They were the Essex Dogs. Almost all the comrades he had arrived on that beach in Normandy with so long ago were there. Loveday and Millstone. Tebbe, Thorp, Darys and Lyntyn. Scotsman and Pismire. The Captain, his leg grown back and his face handsome and tanned, was turning the spit.
The man they were roasting was the fat, piggy-eyed Sir Robert le Straunge.
Romford shrank to the back of the group, not wanting to eat Sir Robert’s meat, though he was so terribly hungry that his whole body was wracked with pain. Seeing him retreat, each of the men called to him in turn, speaking with their mouths full, spraying out half-chewed morsels of flesh and a mist of grease.
Then they were joined by other faces Romford knew: the Earls of Northampton and Warwick. Sir John Chandos and Sir Hugh Hastings. Hircent, Margie and Flora. Louis, Jacky and the prince.
‘Eat,’ they all said.
‘I’m not hungry,’ pleaded Romford.
Pismire had cracked open Sir Robert’s skull and was scooping warm globs of brain on to bread.
‘Eat, you prick,’ he said. ‘Or did I die for fucking nothing?’ Pismire rolled his eyes and nudged Scotsman. ‘Every time you think this cunt has livened up, he lets you down,’ he said.
Romford felt a flash of anger so strong it woke him up. He was panting in the dark, his whole body drenched in sweat.
He slicked his wet hair back and wiped the sweat off his damp body, feeling his ribs pressing hard against his shrunken skin. He shifted in bed and tried to shake the last of the dream away.
Something caught his eye.
Father was sitting at the end of his mattress, trying to reattach a part of his rotten, broken jaw.
‘He’s right,’ said Father, clicking the bone finally into place.
His hand snapped down to the floor and he grabbed something. Romford heard a loud screech. Father lifted up a thin rat by its pink tail. The rat thrashed about, trying to scratch and bite Father. Father hit it hard against the floor, stunned it, then bit its head off.
He crunched bone and spat out fur. His left arm came out of its shoulder socket and he pushed it back in.
He tossed the rest of the rat to Romford.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That’ll keep you going.’
Romford scrambled back on his straw mattress, terrified at Father’s appearance. He knew he had eaten no Host. Father drummed his splintered fingers impatiently.
‘Leave me alone,’ said Romford. ‘I’d rather starve.’
‘No you fucking wouldn’t,’ said Father. ‘Being dead is no fun, I can tell you.’
He cackled. Romford gave the rat back to him. Father shrugged and took another bite. Romford closed his eyes tight and waited for Father to go away, as he had when the Host had summoned him.
But when he awoke and sat up in his bed at dawn, Father was still there. He was rocking back and forth and muttering to himself. There was rat blood smeared all round both of their mouths.