The Crippled Angel Page 34

  “Margaret,” Neville finished, looking at her across Mary’s broken body, “believe me that I would give anything to choose you, that I love you with all my heart, but that…”

  Margaret’s shoulders shuddered, and she raised a shaking hand to her mouth. Her face was horrified, her eyes shimmering with tears.

  She stood, stumbling a little, and walked about the bed to fall to her knees before her husband. “Tom,” she whispered, “you cannot choose me because of something that I did. I know that. Oh, sweet Jesu, forgive me…forgive me…”

  “Sweet Meg, you are not to blame.” Neville stroked her face tenderly. “Even without that hesitancy I cannot choose you. Remember the curse? I must hand my soul to a whore, a prostitute, who I love unreservedly. You may be many things, my dear, but you are no whore.”

  He dropped his hand from Margaret’s hand, and sighed. “Dear Christ, what am I to do? What?”

  There was a very long silence as the three women contemplated the unthinkable. Thomas’ soul would revert to the angels, and mankind would be doomed.

  Joan lowered her head, fighting off bleak despair. All she’d gone through would be for nothing. France would be lost along with mankind’s freedom.

  Neville looked at their faces, then took a deep breath, hating that he was now about to give them unsubstantiated hope. “But…there may be a third way. A wise man once told me that in every seemingly two-way-only decision, there is always a shadowy third path. A third choice. If I can find that third choice, then perhaps I can keep mankind from an eternal enslavement to the angels.”

  “And that third path…?” Catherine said.

  “I do not know,” Neville said softly. “I cannot see it, nor even comprehend it.”

  Everyone fell quiet again, lost in their own thoughts. Mary’s breath continued to draw in and out, rasping in her dry throat. Eventually Catherine looked at her.

  “Why did Archangel Michael hate Mary so much he had to try to kill her?” she said. “How could she thwart his will?”

  Now everyone looked at Mary.

  “Is she…” Margaret said, almost afraid to say the words. “Is she the third path? The third choice?”

  Neville blinked, frowning. “Mary? Nay, for I cannot see how. I must give my soul, with unhesitating love, to a prostitute. Mary? Nay, never Mary.”

  Margaret’s head sank back to its resting place on Neville’s lap. “Not Mary,” she whispered, and could not find the jealousy within her to be secretly glad.

  Everyone had forgotten Owen Tudor’s presence. He sat on his stool by the door, staring incredulously at the group of people across the chamber from him.

  XIV

  Sunday 1st September 1381

  The men of both armies rested, but they hardly slept. Partly this was due to the need to prepare armour, horses and weapons for the morrow, partly it was due to pre-battle tension, and partly it was due to the heavy rain which fell during the middle part of the night.

  Bolingbroke, awake and standing under the overhang of his tent when the downpour began, smiled with deep satisfaction. Prayers were well and good, but they’d had nothing to do with this unseasonal deluge. Then he sighed, his shoulders sagging, exhaustion hitting home. The fatigue caused through the use of his powers, combined with the efforts of the eight-day march, was too great to allow him to stay awake any longer to savour his pre-battle triumph.

  For the moment, Bolingbroke must to bed.

  Both armies had risen, eaten, and armoured and weaponed themselves by dawn. A half hour after dawn, they had moved into their respective positions at each end of the strip of land. To the north, the wider end, Philip had ordered his twenty-five thousand in three lines. In a last-minute addition to his original plan for a mounted charge, Philip had ordered most of his armoured knights and men-at-arms to dismount. The field was mud—the weight of horse and rider would bog everyone down. So need necessitated that the proud French walk rather than ride into battle.

  But Philip was not unduly worried. The same conditions existed for the English as well—their mounted men would be worse than useless. So all the French had to contend with were the English longbowmen…and once Philip’s twenty-five thousand reached them they could be easily dispatched.

  To the south Bolingbroke had arranged his six thousand in a single line—he had no men for any succeeding lines, nor for a rear-guard to prevent any attack from the south.

  It was a risk-all situation, but he’d no choice. With only six thousand, Bolingbroke couldn’t afford a single luxury.

  In this single line Bolingbroke had alternated units of men-at-arms and archers, the units of archers each being formed into wedges, their narrow ends at the front of the line. In that manner, Bolingbroke hoped to negate the worst of the onslaught of the French army’s superior numbers.

  If ever they reached the English…

  By six the two armies were in position.

  By seven no one had moved.

  By eight no one had moved.

  Nine and ten of the clock passed without any movement save for the fluttering of banners and the occasional catcalls across the twelve hundred yards that separated the two armies.

  By eleven Bolingbroke had endured enough. He gave the signal for the English army to advance.

  They had slept a little, one by one, and at dawn ate the breakfast sent in by the cooks. Then Margaret, Catherine and Joan, gently refusing the offers of aid from some of Mary’s other ladies who had come with the dawn, washed Mary’s unconscious form as best they could without doing her more damage, and gently changed the linens beneath her.

  Then they sat, unspeaking, their eyes on Mary. Waiting.

  Just before noon both Margaret and Catherine gasped, staring at each other.

  “It has begun,” Catherine said.

  From his place by the door, Owen Tudor rose and walked quietly up behind Catherine. Hesitant, he lifted his hands, then placed them on her shoulders, offering what support he could.

  He’d had time to do a great deal of thinking through the night.

  Slowly, for they had to lift their feet high through the thick, clinging mud, the English line advanced. Every fifty yards or so Bolingbroke ordered a rest, so that his heavily armoured men-at-arms could catch their breath. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable march through the mud towards the jeering French, Bolingbroke called a final halt some six hundred yards shy of the French lines…just short of the French army’s arrow range.

  But just within the range needed for the English longbowmen.

  The archers positioned stakes in the ground before them and then put arrow to bow, waiting.

  Bolingbroke waited, his eyes searching out Philip’s personal standard, then he gave the signal to shoot.

  Instantly some five thousand arrows were in the air. Ten seconds later, while the first volley was still in the air, the archers loosed a second volley.

  And so on, every ten seconds, for these men had been trained for years, and they could loose six arrows a minute.

  Philip had no choice but to order his men forward. Needing to stop the archers as quickly as he could, he risked sending some four hundred horsemen forward with the front ranks of his dismounted men.

  And so the French army attacked, straight into the narrowing funnel of the field.

  Mary woke, gasping as if in pain. Her eyes stared wide and terrified. “What am I doing here?” she gasped in her frightful hoarse voice. “Who has condemned me to this hell?”

  “You are with those who love you,” Neville said. “And see? Here is Joan, who you asked for.”

  Mary turned her head, staring wildly at Joan. “This is not your place either, Joan. Are you trapped with me in this terrible dream?”

  Joan leaned forward and rested her hand as gently as she could on a piece of Mary’s arm that appeared least shattered. “We are all trapped,” she said, a smile in her voice for Mary, “but I hope that we shall soon all be free.”

  Too late did Philip, striding for
ward in the second of his three lines, realise the enormity of his mistake, but by then it was too late to stop, and impossible to turn back. His lines were nine hundred yards wide, the length of the northern end of the strip of land, but as they marched towards the English they found themselves being forced into a narrower and narrower section of land.

  By the time the first ranks of the French were within twenty yards of the English, they had been crammed so tightly together that not a man of them could raise his arm to swing his weapon.

  Neither, with all the thousands of men marching inexorably at their backs, could they turn back.

  Instead, tens of thousands of arrows rained down on them every minute, plunging through armour with loud cracks. Those unlucky Frenchmen in the first ranks had two choices: attack, or panic.

  Most panicked.

  Men tried to turn and push their way back through the ranks of their comrades, or to push their way through to the sides of the field and a possible escape down the treacherous slopes of the wooded embankments. Their panic, as well as the constant rain of arrows from the sky, communicated itself to the entire French army, and soon the entire northern half of the land was covered both with panicking men seeking an escape, and with men trying to fight through the panic, mud and arrows to reach the English.

  Men died in their thousands.

  The arrows felled many of them, but just as deadly was the cramped conditions and the panic. As men fell wounded and dying, or had slipped in the mud because they’d been pushed or had slipped in their panic, the weight of their armour invariably brought down at least two other men.

  Once in the mud, and under the weight of both armour and panic, few could rise again.

  The arrows continued to rain down.

  Mary blinked, and some reason returned to her eyes. She turned her head towards Margaret as much as she could, her lips flickering in a smile. “Do you have any more of that lemon water, Margaret? I would have some.”

  Distressed that she hadn’t immediately thought of it herself, Margaret stood and reached for the beaker of lemon water (thankful that someone had previously had the forethought to refresh it this morning) and spooned a little of the liquid into Mary’s mouth.

  “If you wish,” Margaret said softly, “I can send Jocelyn to fetch some of Culpeper’s liquor.”

  “Ah, no need,” Mary said. “I have no pain. I am feeling quite well.” She tried to smile again, although her lips were so parched and cracked, and her tongue so swollen, that she only managed the barest of upward tilts to her lips. “It has been so long since I have been free from pain…”

  She accepted some more lemon water, then turned her head slightly in order to see Joan. “Do not fear, Maid. France will yet be saved.” She paused, drank a little more, then continued: “France’s mud is good for other things than growing plump onions.”

  Mary laughed a little, harsh and grating, then she quietened, looking to where Catherine sat. Owen Tudor still stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders.

  “Never fear, Catherine,” Mary whispered. “Love never dies, it simply moves elsewhere.”

  Then she closed her eyes again, and appeared to slip into a light doze rather than her previous insensible nothingness.

  The tiny English army took under thirty minutes to bring twenty-five thousand Frenchmen quite literally to their knees.

  At about eleven thirty, Bolingbroke gave the signal for his own men-at-arms to advance.

  They already had their orders: no quarter. So few themselves, the English could not afford to take prisoners for ransom. Instead, they drew knife and sword, and literally waded into the field of downed men struggling in the mud before them.

  No quarter given.

  It was slow work, hot and tiring, but the English men-at-arms and several thousand of the archers slowly worked their way through the field, carefully walking over the dead and injured. They prised open helmets, tore off plate armour, slit throats, and removed any small articles of jewellery that they might easily carry.

  Over the field rose the frightful sound of thousands of Frenchmen crying for mercy. They begged and screamed, but to no avail.

  No quarter.

  Very gradually the noise lessened as knives rose and fell.

  For some time Bolingbroke sat his horse, his eyes moving carefully over the field before him.

  Finally they came to rest on one particular area, and he dismounted, signalling some five or six men-at-arms to follow him.

  Resplendent in his brilliant bejewelled white armour, a gold circlet enclosing a magnificent ruby about his helmet, Bolingbroke waded into the death with long, sure strides.

  He drew his sword.

  “Philip!” cried Catherine, starting from her stool.

  Tudor’s hands pushed her firmly, but gently, back down again. “You can do nothing, Catherine,” he said. He hesitated before continuing. “Nothing but keep a death watch. You can do him that honour.”

  Catherine turned her head away, staring at a distant wall. “I find myself heartily sick of death watches,” she said.

  “This is all but a dream,” Mary murmured. “Philip will be the better for his wakening. Do not despair, Catherine.”

  Philip had been caught like so many of his men. Several arrows had struck his armour, but none hard enough to penetrate. Instead, it was one of his own men who had felled him. Terrified, blind to reason, the knight had tried to push past Philip and escape through the back line. Instead, he’d brought both of them crashing to the mud.

  Now Philip lay, trapped both by the weight of his armour and the weight of the man atop him.

  The knight was dead now, for if Philip hadn’t slid his knife into the eye slot of the man’s helmet then his thrashing would surely have killed Philip.

  But Philip still couldn’t move. The dead man was atop him, too heavy to shift off (and both were surrounded by similar downed men in armour), and Philip was slowly being pushed deeper and deeper into the mud. Its cold fingers worked their way though the cracks in his armour, slowly filling the spaces with its weight. It was a slow death; eventually the liquefying mud would completely fill his helmet, and Philip would drown in its black embrace.

  The back of his neck was frozen where the mud clung.

  “This is the most foolish of deaths,” Philip whispered. “Catrine, forgive me…forgive me.”

  Then there came a screech of metal, and the weight of the dead knight atop him rolled away.

  Catherine lurched to her feet, screaming Philip’s name.

  Both Neville and Margaret also rose, distraught, and Tudor, whose hands Catherine had thrown off, now grabbed her to him, holding her tightly.

  “Catherine,” he whispered into her hair, “forgive me for not being able to help.”

  She began to sob, almost hysterical, choking on Philip’s name.

  Bolingbroke threw his sword aside and leaned down, his breath harsh inside his helmet, and wrapped his hands about the fastenings holding Philip’s helmet to his chest and back plates. He ripped the straps loose, then tore Philip’s helmet off and hurled it several yards away.

  Philip cried out, his arms moving weakly, not able to rise.

  Bolingbroke retrieved his sword.

  “You foolish bastard,” Bolingbroke said, his voice issuing harsh and heavy from under his helmet. “You thought to have bested me!”

  He raised his sword in both hands, bringing it high above his head.

  Philip stared at him, his eyes curiously calm in his muddied face. At his sides, his arms spasmed once and then were still.

  “France shall have you,” he whispered, “and everything you hold dear.”

  Bolingbroke brought the sword arcing down in a flash of steel and screaming air.

  “No,” Catherine cried, struggling in Tudor’s arms. “No!”

  “France shall have him,” said Mary, “and everything he holds dear.”

  Catherine’s body went stiff, then she whimpered, and slumped against Tudor’s body.
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  “He should have loved,” whispered Mary so quietly that none heard her, “for then he would not have lost.”

  Rich, hot blood splattered across Bolingbroke’s helmet. He drew in a deep breath, and tried to pull his sword from Philip’s spine where it had wedged after it had completed its journey through the man’s neck.

  It was stuck fast.

  Bolingbroke cursed, unsettled by Philip’s last words, and wrenched at the sword.

  It came free suddenly and, encased as he was in his own heavy armour, Bolingbroke toppled over backwards, landing in the liquefied muddied field with a tremendous splash.

  There was instant pandemonium as those men-at-arms close by rushed to his aid. Four of them managed to grab at his arms and shoulders and raise Bolingbroke to his knees, then two of them worked at the straps holding his helmet in place.

  There was a curious bubbling coming from within.

  “France has him,” Mary said, her expression one of all-consuming sadness.

  Desperate, the men cut through the straps with their knives, lifting the helmet off and tossing it aside.

  Underneath the helmet Bolingbroke’s head was entirely covered in thick, liquid mud which had seeped in with the force of his fall.

  He was choking on it.

  Hastily one of the men used the corner of a banner to wipe the mud free of Bolingbroke’s face and to clean out his mouth and nostrils.

  Bolingbroke tried to draw a deep breath, choked, made a wretched gargling cry, choked even more desperately, then leaned over, retching.

  Great gouts of viscous black mud vomited forth from his mouth.