Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [156]
Melisande’s prayer took shape slowly. It had begun as an incoherent cry for help, but she forced herself to choose her words carefully as she prayed to the Virgin. Nick is a good man, she told the Mother of Christ, and a strong one, but he can be angry and sour, so help him now to be strong and alive. Let him live. That was the prayer, to let her man live.
“What do we do if the French come?” Matilda Cobbold asked.
“Run,” one of the other women said, and just then there was a roar from the hidden high ground beyond the skyline. They had heard the war-shout of Saint George, but the women were too far away to hear the saint’s name, only the great bellow of sound that told them something must be happening beyond the skyline.
“God help us,” Matilda said.
Melisande opened the sack that contained her worldly belongings. She wanted the jupon her father had sent her, but the sack also contained the ivory-stocked crossbow that Nick had given her almost three months before. She pulled it out.
“You’ll fight them on your own?” Matilda asked.
Melisande smiled, but found it hard to speak. She was so nervous, so frightened, knowing that what happened beyond the high horizon would decide her life’s course and that it was all beyond her control. She could only pray.
“Go up there, love,” Nell Candeler said, “and shoot some of the bastards.”
“It’s still cocked,” Melisande said in wonderment.
“What is?” Matilda asked.
“The bow,” Melisande said. “I never released it.” She stared at the crossbow, remembering the day Matt Scarlet had died, the day she had pointed the crossbow at her father. Ever since that day the bow had been cocked, its steel-shanked stave under the thick cord’s strain, and she had never noticed. She almost pulled the trigger, then impulsively thrust the bow back into her sack and pulled out the folded jupon. She stared at the bright cloth, half tempted to pull it over her head, but she suddenly knew she could not wear an enemy’s badge while Nick was fighting, and then another certainty overtook her, the knowledge that she would never see Nick again so long as she was tempted to wear her father’s jupon. It had to be thrown away. “I’m going to the river,” she said.
“You can piss here,” Nell Candeler said.
“I want to walk,” Melisande said, and she picked up her heavy sack and went south, away from the armies on the plateau and away from the baggage. She walked through the army’s sumpters that cropped the autumn grass, her feet soaked by the damp. She had an idea to throw the jupon into the Ternoise and watch it float downstream, but the River of Swords was too far away and so she settled for a stream that ran high and fast from the night’s rain. The stream flowed through the tangle of small fields and woods that lay just south of the village and she crouched on its bank where the leaves of the alders and willows had turned yellow and gold and there she dropped the sack, closed her eyes, and held the jupon in both hands as if it were an offering.
“Look after Nick,” she prayed, “let him live,” and with those words she threw her father’s jupon into the stream and watched it being carried fast away. The farther it went, she thought, the safer Nick would be.
Then the French gun fired, and that sound was loud enough to reverberate all through the valley behind the battlefield, loud enough to make Melisande turn and stare north.
To see Sir Martin, grinning and lanky, his gray hair slicked close against his narrow skull.
“Hello, little lady,” he said hungrily.
And there was no one for Melisande to ask for help.
She was alone.
A cloud of smoke rose above the horizon, marking the distant place where the gun had fired.
“All a-lonely,” Sir Martin said, “just you and me.” He made a gurgling sound that might have been laughter, hitched