“It is necessary,” Raoul de Gaucourt said harshly.
“Is it?” Sir John asked.
“We must be humiliated so that the rest of France knows what fate waits for them if they resist your king,” de Gaucourt said. He gave a wan smile then cast an appraising eye over the English army that waited to watch his humiliating walk to the king’s throne. “Though I doubt your king has the power to frighten France any more,” he went on. “You call this a victory, Sir John?” he asked, beckoning at the battered walls he had defended so bravely. Sir John did not answer. Instead he lifted the noose to place it about de Gaucourt’s head, but the Frenchman took it from him. “Allow me,” he said, and put the rope about his own neck.
The other Frenchmen had ropes placed about their necks, and then Sir John, satisfied, pulled himself back into Lucifer’s saddle. He nodded to de Gaucourt, then spurred his horse along the path made between the watching English soldiers.
The Frenchmen walked the path in silence. Some, the merchants, were old men, while others, mostly soldiers, were young and strong. They were the knights and burgesses, the men who had defied the King of England, and the nooses about their necks proclaimed that their lives were now at Henry’s mercy. They climbed the hillside, then knelt humbly before the throne canopied in cloth of gold. Henry gazed at them a long time. The wind lifted the silk banners and drifted smoke from the city’s ruins. The assembled English nobles waited, expecting the king to announce the death sentence on the kneeling men. “I am the rightful king of this realm,” Henry said, “and your resistance was treason.”
A look of pain showed briefly on de Gaucourt’s face. He ignored the accusation of treason and instead held out a thick bunch of heavy keys. “The keys of Harfleur, sire,” he said, “which are yours.”
The king did not take the offered keys. “Your defiance,” he said sternly, “was contrary to man’s law and to God’s law.” Some of the older merchants were shaking in fear and one had tears running down his face. “But God,” Henry went on loftily, “is merciful.” He lifted the keys at last, “and we shall be merciful. Your lives are not forfeit.”
A cheer sounded from the English army when the cross of Saint George was hoisted over the town. Next day Henry of England walked barefoot to the church of Saint Martin to give thanks to God for a victory, yet many who watched his humble pilgrimage reckoned that his triumph was a virtual defeat. He had wasted so much time before Harfleur’s walls and the sickness had torn his army apart, and the campaign season was almost over.
The English army moved inside the walls. They burned their encampment and dragged catapults and cannon through the ruined gate. Sir John’s men quartered themselves in a row of houses, taverns, and warehouses beside the wall-enclosed harbor where Hook found space in the attic of a tavern called Le Paon. “Le paon is a bird,” Melisande had explained, “with a big tail!” She had spread her arms wide.
“No bird’s got a tail that big!” Hook said.
“Le paon does,” she insisted.
“Must be a French bird then,” Hook said, “not an English one.”
Harfleur was now English. The cross of Saint George flew from the ruined stump of Saint Martin’s tower, and the people of the city, who had suffered so much, were now given more suffering.
They were expelled. The city, the king declared, would be resettled by English people, just as Calais had been, and to make room for those new inhabitants over two thousand men, women, and children were driven from the city. The sick were taken in carts, the rest walked, and two hundred mounted Englishmen guarded the sad column’s progress along the north bank of the Seine. The English soldiers were there to protect the refugees from their own countrymen who would otherwise have robbed and raped. Men-at-arms led the procession and archers flanked it.
Hook was one of the archers. He had been reunited with his black gelding, Raker, who was fretful and needed constant curbing. Hook’s surcoat was washed clean, though the red cross of Saint George had faded to a dull pink. Beneath the surcoat he wore a coat of good mail that he had taken from a French corpse and an aventail that Sir John had given him, and over the aventail’s hood he now had a bascinet that was another gift from a corpse. The bascinet was a helmet with a wide brim designed to deflect a downward blade, though like other archers Hook had hacked off the brim on the right side to make a space for his bow’s cord when he drew it to the full. His sword hung at his side, his cased bow was slung across his shoulder, while his arrow bag hung from the saddle’s cantle. To his right, beyond the refugees, the narrowing river rippled sun-bright, while to the left were meadows stripped of livestock by English forage parties and, beyond those pastures, gentle wooded hills still heavy in their full summer leaf. Melisande had stayed in Harfleur, but Father Christopher had insisted on accompanying the refugees. He was mounted on Sir John’s great destrier, Lucifer. Sir John wanted the horse exercised, and Father Christopher was happy to oblige. “You shouldn’t have come, father,” Hook told him.
“You’re a doctor of medicine now, Hook?”
“You’re supposed to rest, father.”
“There’ll be rest enough in heaven,” Father Christopher said happily. He was still pale, but he was eating again. He was wearing a priest’s robe, something he had done more frequently since his recovery. “I learned something during that illness,” the priest said in apparent seriousness.
“Aye? What was that?”
“In heaven, Hook, there will be no shitting.”
Hook laughed. “But will there be women, father?”
“In abundance, young Hook, but what if they’re all good women?”
“You mean the bad ones will all be in the devil’s cellar, father?”
“That is a worry,” Father Christopher said with a smile, “but I trust God to make suitable arrangements.” He grinned, happy to be alive and riding under a September sun beside a hedge thick with blackberries. A corncrake’s grating cry echoed from the hills. Just after dawn, when the protesting refugees had been forced out of Harfleur, a stag had appeared on the Rouen road resplendent in his new antlers. Hook had taken it as a good omen, but Father Christopher, looking up at the dark branches of a dead elm tree, now found a gloomy one. “The swallows are gathering early,” he said.
“A bad winter then,” Hook said.
“It means summer’s end, Hook, and with it go our hopes. Like those swallows, we will disappear.”
“Back to England?”
“And to disappointment,” the priest said sadly. “The king has debts to pay, and he can’t pay them. If he had carried home a victory then it wouldn’t matter.”
“We won, father,” Hook said, “we captured Harfleur.”
“We used a pack of wolfhounds to kill a hare,” Father Christopher said, “and out there,” he nodded eastward, “there’s a much larger pack of hounds gathering.”
Some of that larger pack appeared at midday. The front of the long column of refugees had stopped in some meadows beside the river and now the tail of the column crowded in behind them. What had checked their progress was a band of enemy horsemen who barred the road where it led through the gate of a walled town. The townsfolk watched from the walls. The enemy had a single banner, a great white flag on which a red and double-headed eagle spread its long talons. The French men-at-arms were dressed for battle, their polished armor gleaming beneath bright surcoats, but few wore helmets and those who did had their visors raised, a clear sign that they expected no fighting. Hook guessed there were a hundred enemy and they were here under an arranged truce to receive the refugees, who were to be taken to Rouen in a fleet of barges that was moored on the river’s northern bank. “Dear God,” Father Christopher said, staring at the eagle banner, which lifted and fell in the wind that drove ripples across the river. “That’s the marshal,” Father Christopher explained, making the sign of the cross.