Part 17 (2/2)

Next morning, when the birds were calling from the oak branches where he had so nearly died, a tall man came into the room. The man was on crutches and his left thigh was swathed in bandages. He turned to look at Thomas and showed a face that was horribly scarred. A blade had cut him from the forehead to the jaw, taking the man's left eye in its savage chop. He had long yellow hair, very s.h.a.ggy and full, and Thomas guessed the man had been handsome once, though now he looked like a thing of nightmare.

'Mordecai,' the man growled, 'tells me you will live.'

'With G.o.d's help,' Thomas said.

'I doubt G.o.d's interested in you,' the man said sourly. He looked to be in his thirties and had the bowed legs of a horseman and the deep chest of a man who practises hard with weapons. He swung on the crutches to the window, where he sat on the sill. His beard was streaked with white where the blade had chopped into his jaw and his voice was uncommonly deep and harsh. 'But you might live with Mordecai's help. There isn't a physician to touch him in all Normandy, though Christ alone knows how he does it. He's been squinting at my p.i.s.s for a week now. I'm crippled, you Jewish halfwit, I tell him, not wounded in the bladder, but he just tells me to shut my mouth and squeeze out more drops. He'll start on you soon.' The man, who wore nothing except a long white s.h.i.+rt, contemplated Thomas moodily. 'I have a notion,' he growled, 'that you are the G.o.dforsaken b.a.s.t.a.r.d who put an arrow into my thigh. I remember seeing a son of a wh.o.r.e with long hair like yours, then I was. .h.i.t.'

'You're Sir Guillaume?'

'I am.'

'I meant to kill you,' Thomas said.

'So why shouldn't I kill you?' Sir Guillaume asked. 'You lie in my bed, drink my gruel and breathe my air. English b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Worse, you're a Vexille.'

Thomas turned his head to stare at the forbidding Sir Guillaume. He said nothing, for the last three words had mystified him.

'But I choose not to kill you,' Sir Guillaume said, 'because you saved my daughter from rape.'

'Your daughter?'

'Eleanor, you fool. She's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d daughter, of course,' Sir Guillaume said. 'Her mother was a servant to my father, but Eleanor is all I've got left and I'm fond of her. She says you were kind to her, which is why she cut you down and why you're lying in my bed. She always was overly sentimental.' He frowned. 'But I still have a mind to slice your d.a.m.ned throat.'

'For four years,' Thomas said, 'I have dreamed of slitting yours.'

Sir Guillaume's one eye gazed at him balefully. 'Of course you have. You're a Vexille.'

'I've never heard of the Vexilles,' Thomas said. 'My name is Thomas of Hookton.'

Thomas half expected Sir Guillaume to frown as he tried to remember Hookton, but his recognition of the name was instant.

'Hookton,' he said, 'Hookton. Good sweet Christ, Hookton.' He was silent for a few heartbeats. 'And of course you're a d.a.m.ned Vexille. You have their badge on your bow.'

'My bow?'

'You gave it to Eleanor to carry! She kept it.'

Thomas closed his eyes. There was pain in his neck and down his back and in his head. 'I think it was my father's badge,' he said, 'but I don't really know because he would never talk of his family. I know he hated his own father. I wasn't very fond of my own, but your men killed him and I swore to avenge him.'

Sir Guillaume turned to gaze out of the window. 'You have truly never heard of the Vexilles?'

'Never.'

'Then you are fortunate.' He stood. 'They are the devil's offspring, and you, I suspect, are one of their pups. I would kill you, boy, with as little conscience as if I stamped on a spider, but you were kind to my b.a.s.t.a.r.d daughter and for that I thank you.' He limped from the room.

Leaving Thomas in pain and utterly confused.

Thomas recovered in Sir Guillaume's garden, shaded from the sun by two quince trees under which he waited anxiously for Dr Mordecai's daily verdict on the colour, consistency, taste and smell of his urine. It did not seem to matter to the doctor that Thomas's grotesquely swollen neck was subsiding, nor that he could swallow bread and meat again. All that mattered was the state of his urine. There was, the doctor declared, no finer method of diagnosis. 'The urine betrays all. If it smells rank, or if it is dark, if it tastes of vinegar or should it be cloudy then it is time for vigorous doctoring. But good, pale, sweet-smelling urine like this is the worst news of all.'

'The worst?' Thomas asked, alarmed.

'It means fewer fees for a physician, dear boy.'

The doctor had survived the sack of Caen by hiding in a neighbour's pig shed. 'They slaughtered the pigs, but missed the Jew. Mind you, they broke all my instruments, scattered my medicines, shattered all but three of my bottles and burned my house. Which is why I am forced to live here.' He shuddered, as though living in Sir Guillaume's mansion was a hards.h.i.+p. He smelled Thomas's urine and then, uncertain of his diagnosis, spilled a drop onto a finger and tasted it. 'Very fine,' he said, 'lamentably fine.' He poured the jar's contents onto a bed of lavender where bees were at work. 'So I lost everything,' he said, 'and this after we were a.s.sured by our great lords that the city would be safe!' Originally, the doctor had told Thomas, the leaders of the garrison had insisted on defending only the walled city and the castle, but they needed the help of the townsfolk to man the walls and those townsfolk had insisted that the Ile St Jean be defended, for that was where the city's wealth lay, and so, at the very last minute, the garrison had streamed across the bridge to disaster. 'Fools,' Mordecai said scornfully, 'fools in steel and glory. Fools.'

Thomas and Mordecai were sharing the house while Sir Guillaume visited his estate in Evecque, some thirty miles south of Caen, where he had gone to raise more men. 'He will fight on,' the doctor said, 'wounded leg or not.'

'What will he do with me?'

'Nothing,' the doctor said confidently. 'He likes you, despite all his bl.u.s.ter. You saved Eleanor, didn't you? He's always been fond of her. His wife wasn't, but he is.'

'What happened to his wife?'

'She died,' Mordecai said, 'she just died.'

Thomas could eat properly now and his strength returned fast so that he could walk about the Ile St Jean with Eleanor. The island looked as though a plague had struck, for over half the houses were empty and even those that were occupied were still blighted by the sack. Shutters were missing, doors splintered and the shops had no goods. Some country folk were selling beans, peas and cheeses from wagons, and small boys were offering fresh perch taken from the rivers, but they were still hungry days. They were also nervous days, for the city's survivors feared that the hated English might return and the island was still haunted by the sickly smell of the corpses in the two rivers where the gulls, rats and dogs grew fat.

Eleanor hated walking about the city, preferring to go south into the countryside where blue dragonflies flew above water lilies in the streams that twisted between fields of overripe rye, barley and wheat.

'I love harvest time,' she told Thomas. 'We used to go into the fields and help.' There would be little harvest this year, for there were no folk to cut the grain and so the corn buntings were stripping the heads and pigeons were squabbling over the leavings. 'There should be a feast at harvest's end,' Eleanor said wistfully.

'We had a feast too,' Thomas said, 'and we used to hang corn dollies in the church.'

'Corn dollies?'

He made her a little doll from straw. 'We used to hang thirteen of these above the altar,' he told her, 'one for Christ and one each for the Apostles.' He picked some cornflowers and gave them to Eleanor, who threaded them into her hair. It was very fair hair, like sunlit gold.

They talked incessantly and one day Thomas asked her again about the lance and this time Eleanor nodded.

'I lied to you,' she said, 'because he did have it, but it was stolen.'

'Who stole it?'

She touched her face. 'The man who took his eye.'

'A man called Vexille?'

She nodded solemnly. 'I think so. But it wasn't here, it was in Evecque. That's his real home. He got the Caen house when he married.'

'Tell me about the Vexilles,' Thomas urged her.

'I know nothing of them,' Eleanor said, and he believed her.

They were sitting by a stream where two swans floated and a heron stalked frogs in a reedbed. Thomas had talked earlier of walking away from Caen to find the English army and his words must have been weighing on Eleanor's mind for she frowned at him.

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