Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [24]
“Why here?” a man called out.
“Because Sir Roger knows what he’s doing,” Smithson said, sounding anything but certain, “and if you’ve got sweethearts here,” he went on with a leer, “make certain the little darlings come with you.” He began thrusting his meaty hips backward and forward. “Don’t want our sweethearts left in the streets to be humped by half the French army, do we?”
Next morning, as he did each morning, Hook gazed north across the Aisne to the low wooded hills where the beleaguered garrison hoped to see a Burgundian relief force. None came. The great gun-stones whirred across the ashes of the burned houses and bit into the crumbling wall to start up their clouds of dust that settled on the river to drift seaward like pale gray stains on the water. Hook rose early every morning, before it was light, and went to the cathedral where he knelt and prayed. He had been warned not to walk the streets by himself, but the people of Soissons left him alone, perhaps scared of his height and size, or perhaps because they knew he was the one archer who prayed regularly and so tolerated him. He had abandoned praying to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian because he reckoned they cared more about the townsfolk, their own folk, and so he prayed instead to the mother of Christ because his own mother had been called Mary and he begged the blessed Virgin for forgiveness because of the girl who had died in London. On one such morning a priest knelt beside him. Hook ignored the man.
“You’re the Englishman who prays,” the priest said in English, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. Hook said nothing. “They wonder why you pray,” the priest went on, jerking his head to indicate the women who knelt before other statues and altars.
Hook’s instinct was to go on ignoring the man, but the priest had a friendly face and a kindly voice. “I’m just praying,” he said, sounding surly.
“Are you praying for yourself?”
“Yes,” Hook admitted. He prayed so that God would forgive him and lift the curse that he was certain blighted his life.
“Then ask something for someone else,” the priest suggested gently. “God listens to those prayers more readily, I think, and if you pray for someone else then He will grant your own request too.” He smiled, stood, and lightly touched Hook’s shoulder. “And pray to our saints, Crispin and Crispinian. I think they are less busy than the blessed Virgin. God watch over you, Englishman.”
The priest walked away and Hook decided to take his advice and pray again to the two local saints and so he went to an altar beneath a painting of the two martyrs and there he prayed for the soul of Sarah, whose life he had failed to save in London. He stared up at the painting as he prayed. The two saints stood in a green field scattered with golden stars on a hill high above a white-walled city. They looked gravely and a little sadly toward Hook. They did not look like shoemakers. They were dressed in white robes and Crispin carried a shepherd’s crook while Crispinian held a wicker tray of apples and pears. Their names were painted beneath each man and Hook, though he could not read, could tell which saint was which because one name was longer than the other. Crispinian looked much the friendlier man. He had a rounder face and blue eyes and a half-smile of great kindliness, while Saint Crispin appeared much sterner and was half turned away, as though he had no time for an onlooker and was about to walk down the hill and into the city, and so Hook fell into the habit of praying to Crispinian each morning, though he always acknowledged Crispin too. He dropped two pennies in the jar each time he prayed.
“To look at you,” John Wilkinson said one evening, “I wouldn’t take you for a man of prayer.”
“I wasn’t,” Hook said, “till now.”
“Frightened for your soul?” the old archer asked.
Hook hesitated. He was binding arrow fledging with the silk stolen from the cathedral’s altar frontal. “I heard a voice,” he blurted out suddenly.
“A voice?” Wilkinson asked. Hook said nothing. “God’s voice?” the older man asked.
“It was