Part III
1
In the morning Nicholas was called to another audience.
‘I am a busy man,’ said La Valette. ‘I have four hundred knights under my command, Spanish soldiers, citizen militia, there is Holy War to prosecute, and yet for some reason I continually find myself speaking with a single young English commoner and volunteer. Is this a right use of my time?’
It was always hard to know whether La Valette’s sense of humour was very dry, or he had none at all.
‘You spoke foul language, I hear. In Turkish captivity.’
Nicholas bowed his head. ‘I am sorry for it, Sire.’
‘Are you? Are you indeed?’ He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘It is between you and your conscience how you pollute your tongue. But for the morale that you have given the city with that juvenile insult, the courage you have put in their hearts, even the coarse laughter you have provided for these earth-born peasants — here is a gift.’
A servant came forward holding a complete steel breastplate. Nicholas was speechless.
The servant placed the breastplate on Nicholas’s chest and he held it there while the fellow laced it top and sides to the backplate. It was very comfortably wadded with felt and leather. Hot, for sure. You’d keep out of the sun if you could. But not heavy, not really. Beautifully balanced fore and aft.
‘German,’ said La Valette. ‘Belonged to a young novice who died of a fever last year. It will not stop a musket ball at short range, naturally, but even that will be slowed. Which might make the difference between a wound and a mortal wound. Otherwise it will save you from many a cut and thrust. You have no helmet?’
He shook his head.
‘Well, there are none to spare. But there will be. When knights and soldiers being to die, you will have a helmet of your own.’
‘And Hodge?’
‘Hodge?’
‘My companion.’
‘Of course not. He may wear a leather breastplate if he finds it. Fine armour hardly befits the lowborn, any more than fine manners or high duties.’
‘He has a noble heart.’
‘Perhaps.’ La Valette’s eyes were steely. ‘Now assemble the rest of your possessions, your valued Hodge, and be ready at Galley Creek within the hour. You are crossing to Elmo this morning. The fight is about to begin, and you will be worthy.’
Nicholas ran back to the house in the Street of the Bakers and Maddalena was there, and Hodge ready with his pack.
She looked admiringly at his gleaming breastplate.
‘You go over to Elmo?’
‘Yes,’ he said hurriedly, bundling up his cinquedea and wallet in his blanket roll.
‘The guns of the Turks will fire on us soon.’
He turned and looked at her. ‘I know. I can hardly bear — How will I know … you are alive?’
Hodge stood and mumbled, ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’
She smiled.
‘No, truly, I must know. How will I know that a cannonball has not-’
‘By pigeon? No, you will not. I cannot go up on the walls nor parade about on the parapets of San Angelo waving to you.’
He seized her thin shoulders and almost shook her, his grip so tight and his eyes burning so ardent that her heart burned within her likewise, though she did all she could to keep her smile cool and composed. ‘My father …’ she said, glancing over her shoulder.
He let her go. ‘I must know.’
The flame in his blue eyes was so devouring, so beautiful.
‘Each evening …’ she said slowly. She thought. ‘There is a low wall above Kalkara Creek, by the ditch over by San Angelo. You can see Elmo from there, so you can see there from Elmo. When I was younger, before I wore the veil, I used to go down there with Mateo and Tito and they’d catch little fish, and I’d beg them to put them back in the water. Sometimes I will go back there, at sunset. Not every day. But sometimes at sunset, look for me there.’
‘In your blue dress?’
‘It is my only dress,’ she said a trifle haughtily.
‘You promise?’
She kissed him swiftly. ‘You should go now.’
He pulled her to him, her father in the house or no, and kissed her deeply. They kissed for too long, and she pushed him away. He grabbed his blanket roll and looked once more at her and said, ‘At sunset. Be there.’
‘Go!’
As she watched him down the street and round the corner, Hodge stepping out from the shade to meet him, she smiled at the thought of his last kiss, the feel of him, and touched her fingers to her lips.
Captain Miranda stood at the head of his troop of thirty tercios, and among the thirty or so more knights with Stanley and Smith, Nicholas recognised the talkative Chevalier Lanfreducci of the Italian Langue, and the young Chevalier Bridier de la Gordcamp of France, no more than twenty years of age.
They greeted him and Hodge with nods.
‘The Turkish cannon will soon be roaring at Birgu,’ joked Lanfreducci as they boarded the boat for the half-mile crossing. ‘For pity’s sake, let us flee to Elmo and save our tender skins!’
In the boat across, Bridier de la Gordcamp looked hard at Nicholas. He was a gentle-looking knight, almost girlish, with waving fair hair and blue eyes, and a voice so soft and low that one had to strain to hear him. Stanley had said that he was one of the holiest and most innocent-souled of all the brothers, and kept vigil entire nights long in the conventual church, his knees upon the cold flagstones, sword upturned in the shape of a cross clasped before him, eyes fixed on the great crucifix over the altar. He would pray for the salvation of his soul, and for Christendom, and for all the generations of his noble forebears who had fought Moors and Saracens at Tours and Antioch and Jerusalem, and who had died for the faith at Jerusalem and Acre and at the Horns of Hattin, in the lost Judaean wilderness. It was Bridier’s deepest prayer that he be worthy of his ancestors.
Now the young knight said quietly to Nicholas, fixing him with his innocent blue eyes, ‘You were the one who insulted the Pasha to his face?’
Nicholas looked uncomfortable. The Chevalier de la Gordcamp was no earthy peasant, to find such obscenities humorous. ‘I am sorry for it.’
Bridier said nothing, but gazed out to sea, the wind flicking his fair locks across his face. Then he looked back and said a most uncommon thing. He said, ‘All will be forgiven us, I think, in what is to come.’
Nicholas frowned. It seemed strange theology.
Bridier saw his frown, and said, ‘You remember the woman in the Gospels who had committed adultery. Our Saviour said, Though her sins are many, yet they are forgiven her. For she loved much.’ He looked out to sea again, and smiled a strange smile. ‘Almost as if it does not matter what we love. As long as we love much.’
The Commander of the fort was Luigi Broglia, another Italian. Lanfreducci and he greeted each other like blood brothers.
A great lover of pageantry, with a round smiling face and equally round belly, Broglia looked to Nicholas more like a cook than a commander. In the parade ground, a small band blew trumpets, banged martial drums and waved banners to herald their arrival.
‘What does Broglia think this is,’ growled Smith, ‘the carnival of Venice?’
They were each given tiny, cell-like quarters off the parade ground, truly monastic cells, and then shown the fort.
St Elmo was built of cheap limestone blocks on a star-pattern, and consisted of the small inner parade ground, a chapel, barrack rooms, some stores, and a single narrow keep as part of the western wall. There were no cellars or subterranean tunnels, no sally ports in the walls from which to burst out on attackers unexpectedly, or clear and burn the ditches of any infill.