Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [78]
“The real work?” Hook asked.
“We’re going to make a mine, lad. We’re going to dig deep.”
The rain ended at dawn. A chill wind came from the west and the rain slid away across France and the sun fought against cloud as the enemy gunners hammered the newly made sow with gun-stones that wasted their power on the thick log parapet. Hook and his archers slept, sheltering under the crude cabins they had made from tree boughs, earth, and ferns. When Hook woke he found Melisande scrubbing his mail coat with sand and vinegar. “Rouille,” she said in explanation.
“Rust?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You can polish my coat, darling,” Will of the Dale said as he crawled from his shelter.
“Do your own, William,” Melisande said. “I cleaned Tom’s, though.”
“Well done,” Hook said. All the archers were worried about Thomas Scarlet whose customary cheerfulness had been buried with his twin brother. Scarlet scowled these days, or else sat by himself, brooding. “All he wants,” Hook said quietly, “is to meet your father again.”
“Then Thomas will die,” Melisande said bleakly.
“He loves you,” Hook said.
“My father?”
“He let you live. He let you stay with me.”
“He let you live too,” she said, almost resentfully.
“I know.”
She paused. Her gray eyes watched Harfleur, which was ringed with gunsmoke like a sea fog shrouding a cliff. Hook put his wet boots to dry beside the campfire. The burning wood spat and shot sparks. It was willow, and willow always protested against burning. “He loved my mother, I think,” Melisande said wistfully.
“Did he?”
“She was beautiful,” Melisande said, “and she loved him. She said he was so beautiful too. A beautiful man.”
“Handsome,” Hook allowed.
“Beautiful,” Melisande insisted.
“When you met him in the trees,” Hook asked, “did you want him to take you away?”
She gave an abrupt shake of her head. “No,” she said, “I think he is a bad angel. And I think he is in my head like the saint is in yours,” she turned to look at him, “and I wish he would go away.”
“You think about him? Is that it?”
“I always wanted him to love me,” she said harshly, and started scouring the mail again.
“As he loved your mother?”
“No! Non!” She was angry, and for a while she said nothing, then relented. “Life is hard, Nicholas, you know that. It is work and work and work and worry where the food will come from and it is more work, and a lord, any lord, can stop all that. They can wave their hand and there is no more work, no more worry, just facile.”
“Easy?”
“And I wanted that.”
“Tell him you want that.”
“He is beautiful,” Melisande said, “but he is not kind. I know that. And I love you. Je t’aime.” She said the last words decidedly, without apparent affection, but Hook was struck dumb by them. He watched archers bringing firewood to the camp. Melisande grimaced with the effort of scrubbing the sand on the mail coat. “You know of Sir Robert Knolles?” she asked suddenly.
“Of course I do,” Hook said. Every archer knew of Sir Robert, who had died rich not many years before.
“He was an archer once,” Melisande said.
“That’s how he started,” Hook agreed, wondering how Melisande knew of the legendary Sir Robert.
“And he became a knight,” Melisande said, “he led armies! And now Sir John has made you a ventenar.”
“A ventenar isn’t a knight,” Hook said, smiling.
“But Sir Robert was a ventenar once!” Melisande said fiercely, “and then he became a centenar, and then a man-at-arms, and after that a knight! Alice told me. And if he could do it, why not you?”
That vision was