Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [59]
“What will happen to us?” Melisande asked.
“I don’t know,” Hook admitted, but nor did he care much. He was going to war in a company he had come to love, and he had Melisande, whom he loved, though he wondered if she would leave him now she was back in her own country. “You’re going home,” he said, wanting her to deny it.
For a long time she said nothing, just gazed at the trees and beach and marsh. “Maman was home,” she said finally. “I do not know where home is now.”
“With me,” Hook said awkwardly.
“Home is where you feel safe,” Melisande said. Her eyes were gray as the heron that glided above the shingle to land in the low ground beyond. Pages were kneeling on the Heron’s deck where they scoured the men-at-arms’ plate armor. Each piece was scrubbed with sand and vinegar to burnish the steel to a rustless shine, then wiped with lanolin. Peter Goddington ordered a pot of beeswax opened and the archers smeared woolen cloths with the wax and rubbed it into their bowstaves.
“Was your mother cruel to you?” Hook asked Melisande as he waxed the huge bow.
“Cruel?” she seemed puzzled. “Why would she be cruel?”
“Some mothers are,” Hook said, thinking of his grandmother.
“She was lovely,” Melisande said.
“My father was cruel,” he said.
“Then you must not be,” Melisande said. She frowned, evidently thinking.
“What?”
She shrugged. “When I went to the nunnery? Before?” She stopped.
“Go on,” Hook said.
“My father? He called me to him. I was thirteen? Perhaps fourteen?” She had lowered her voice. “He made me take off all my clothes,” she stared at Hook as she spoke, “and I stood there for him, nue. He walked around me and he said no man could have me.” She paused. “I thought he was going to…”
“But he didn’t?”
“No,” she said quickly. “He stroked my épaule,” she hesitated, finding the English word, “shoulder. He was, how do you say? Frissonnant?” she held out her hands and shook them.
“Shivering?” Hook suggested.
She nodded abruptly. “Then he sent me away to the nuns. I begged him not to. I said I hated the sisters, but he said I must pray for him. That was my duty, to work hard and to pray for him.”
“And did you?”
“Every day,” she said, “and I prayed he would come for me, but he never did.”
The sun was sinking when Sir John returned to the Heron. There was still no sign of any French soldiers on the shore, but the trees beyond the beach could have hidden an army. Smoke rose from the hill to the east of the cove, evidence that someone was on that height, but who or how many was impossible to say. Sir John clambered aboard and walked around the deck, sometimes thrusting a finger at a man-at-arms or archer. He pointed at Hook. “You,” he said, then walked on. “Everyone I pointed to,” he turned and shouted, “will be going ashore with me. We go tonight! After dark. The rest of you? Be ready at dawn. If we’re still alive you’ll join us. And those of you going ashore? Armor! Weapons! We’re not going to dance with the bastards! We’re going to kill them!”
That night there was a three-quarters moon silvering the sea. The shadows on land were black and stark as Hook dressed for war. He had his long boots, leather breeches, a leather jerkin, a mail coat, and a helmet. He wore his archer’s horn bracer on his left forearm, not so much to protect his arm against the string’s lash because the mail would do that, but rather to stop the string fraying on the armor’s links. He had a short sword hanging from his belt, a poleax slung on his back, and a linen arrow bag at his right side with the feathers of twenty-four arrows poking from the opening. Five men-at-arms and twelve archers