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the love of our Lord Jesus Christ help them in their distress! Be generous and receive Christ’s blessing! Every coin will help our wounded heroes!’
    ‘He’s a fraud,’ Thomas said dismissively. ‘Just a rogue making some money.’
    They moved on northwards. The Hellequin had to avoid towns because any place that had a wall inevitably had a score of men capable of shooting a crossbow, and Thomas wanted to finish his journey without losing a man to some squalid skirmish. He had tended to the eastward because he was more likely to find Englishmen in that direction, and he found a score of them in a village dominated by a high-towered church. That church was the only stone building; the rest were all made of timber, plaster, and thatch. There was a smithy with a furnace built in the back yard beneath a scorched oak tree, and a tavern surrounded by a huddle of small cottages, and when Thomas first glimpsed the village amidst the vineyards he had also seen a crowd of horses being watered in the small stream that flowed beside the impressive church. There were more than fifty horses, which suggested at least twenty men, and he had presumed the horses must belong to Frenchmen, but then he had seen the flag of Saint George, its red cross bold against the white field, leaning against the tavern wall. He had led his men down the hill and into the small square where men-at-arms leaped up in alarm. ‘We’re English!’ Thomas called.
    ‘Jesus,’ a tall man said in relief as he ducked under the tavern’s lintel. He wore a jupon showing a golden lion rampant against a background of fleurs-de-lys on a blue field. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
    ‘Sir Thomas Hookton,’ Thomas said. He rarely used the honorific ‘sir’, but he had been knighted by the Earl of Northampton and it was useful sometimes.
    ‘Benjamin Rymer,’ the tall man said. ‘We serve the Earl of Warwick.’
    ‘You’re with the army?’ Thomas asked in hope.
    ‘We’re looking for the bloody army,’ Rymer said, then explained that he and his conroi of men had been aboard a ship that had sailed from Southampton, but had become separated from the fleet that had been carrying the rest of the earl’s reinforcements to Gascony. ‘The wind blew up and the bloody shipmaster panicked and we ended up in Spain,’ he said, ‘and it took the bastard two months to make repairs and get us to Bordeaux.’ He looked at Thomas’s men. ‘It’s a relief to be with some archers again. Ours were on another ship. Do you know where the prince’s army is?’
    ‘No idea at all,’ Thomas said.
    ‘The blind leading the blind,’ Rymer said. ‘And there’s no ale here, so no end to bad news.’
    ‘Is there wine?’
    ‘They say so. Tastes like cat piss to me. Did you come from Bordeaux?’
    Thomas shook his head. ‘We’re from a garrison east of Gascony,’ he said.
    ‘So you know the damn country?’
    ‘Some of it. It’s big.’
    ‘So where do we go?’
    ‘North,’ Thomas said. ‘The last rumour I heard said the army was at Tours.’
    ‘Wherever the hell Tours is.’
    ‘It’s to the north,’ Thomas said, and slid out of the saddle. ‘Rest the horses,’ he called to his men. ‘Walk them! Let them drink! We’re moving again in an hour.’
    Rymer and his troop travelled with Thomas’s men, and Thomas wondered how the man had survived so far because he expressed surprise when Thomas sent scouts ahead. ‘Is it that dangerous?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s always dangerous,’ Thomas said. ‘This is France.’
    Yet no enemy disturbed them. Once in a while Thomas saw a castle and led his column on a wide detour to avoid trouble, but the garrisons made no attempt to challenge or even identify the mounted soldiers. ‘They’ve probably sent most of their men north,’ Thomas told Rymer, ‘and just left a handful to hold the battlements.’
    ‘Pray God we’re not too late for any battle!’
    ‘Pray to Saint George there isn’t a battle,’ Thomas said.
    ‘We have to beat them!’ Rymer said cheerfully, and Thomas thought of Crécy, of blood in the grass and of the weeping in the night after battle. He said nothing, and his thoughts wandered to Saint Junien. He sensed they must be nearing the abbey where the saint was entombed, though that was merely a suspicion that could have been inspired by hope rather than by reality. Yet the country was changing, the hills were smaller and more rounded, the rivers wider and slower, the leaves were turning