The Half-Hanged Man Read online

  THE HALF-HANGED MAN

  David Pilling

  Copyright © 2012 David Pilling

  All rights reserved.

  DEDICATION

  I dedicate this book to my parents, along with Scrap, Alice and Midge. They know who they are…

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE: THE WOLF OF BURGUNDY

  9

  BOOK TWO: THE RAVEN OF TOLEDO

  127

  BOOK THREE: THE BULL OF NAJÉRA

  230

  “When the King of France was informed in what manner these freebooting troops overran and pillaged his kingdom, he was much enraged.” – The Chronicle of Jean Froissart

  PART ONE: THE WOLF OF BURGUNDY

  Eastcheap, London, 1395

  Three smilers with knives hidden under their cloaks lured Jean Froissart down an alley with promises of cheap whores at the end of it, and there beat and robbed him.

  When he woke, groaning at the pain coursing through his battered body, it was to find they had taken his purse, boots of Spanish leather, hat and jewelled dagger. To cap all, they had also pissed on him, ruining his fine doublet of Italian silk.

  At least, he reflected as he picked himself up, they had left him his vellum, quills and ink. Clutching these to his chest, he limped disconsolately down the muddy street until he found a tavern. A rusting ploughshare hung from a pole above the doorway, and the sound of music and the stench of stale beer drifted from inside. Froissart would not normally deign to set foot in such a rough-looking place, but he needed something to calm his shattered nerves.

  Inside a rabble of musicians were clustered by the fire, playing something crude but merry on pipes and zithers. There were a few other customers scattered about the rough benches, but none of them even glanced up from their mugs as he limped inside.

  He spent the last few pennies the robbers left him on ale and a hunk of hard black bread, and sat down in a corner to listen to the music and wait for the smell of urine on his clothes to fade away.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, risking a mouthful of the unpleasant ale and dabbing carefully at his tender eye.

  A shadow fell across him. “May I join you?” asked a man’s voice, husky and growling as though he had something stuck in his throat. Froissart looked up and ran his eye over a stocky figure with a seamed, weather-beaten face and streaks of grey in his thinning, slicked-back hair. He wore an old brigandine, much worn and stained, cracked boots, and a falchion at his hip.

  Despite his obvious poverty, the man seemed to consider himself something of a fop. He wore a greasy red scarf tied at a jaunty angle about his neck and a gold stud in his right ear. Chunky rings made of some cheap imitation gold adorned the index and ring fingers of both hands. He also sported an impressive set of greying whiskers, neatly trimmed and oiled.

  Froissart was an expert at identifying military men. He judged this one to be an ex-mercenary, who had probably spent his best years marching and plundering in the sunny climes of mainland Europe, but was now down on his luck.

  He sighed. The man was grinning at him, showing thick yellow teeth, and was clearly there to stay.

  “Please,” he replied, gesturing at the stool next to his.

  “I know you,” the man said in the same throaty tone as he sat down and twisted off a piece of bread without asking, “I saw you in Aquitaine and Aragon, though we never spoke. You are Jean Froissart, the scribbler. What are you doing in England?”

  Froissart suppressed his anger at being called a scribbler, and studied his new companion more closely. “Forgive me, but I don’t recognise you,” he said carefully, “tell me your name, and perhaps I will tell you something about me.”

  “Absolument. My name is Thomas Page, known in the days of my glory as the Half-Hanged Man, or the Wolf of Burgundy.”

  Froissart hooted derisively, startling the drinkers in the next stall. “Oh, but that is ridiculous!” he exclaimed, “the Wolf died at Najéra, everyone knows that.”

  “It is the truth, and I can prove it.”

  He pulled aside the crimson scarf. His neck underneath was sinewy and none too clean, and disfigured by a faded but still visible burn mark that ran all the way round, bisecting his throat.

  Froissart was still not convinced. “So you boast a scar on your neck, just like the Half-Hanged Man,” he said scornfully, “but that doesn’t prove anything. You could be some rogue who survived the gallows and thought he could trade off a dead man’s name.”

  “A rogue? Me?” The other man looked shocked, and placed his palms flat against his chest. “Those who lured you into the alley were rogues. I saw them rob you, but did nothing. Better one man suffers than two, eh?”

  Froissart had had enough, and decided to call the man’s bluff.

  “If you know me, then you will know that I have travelled all across Europe,” he said pompously, “seeking tales of chivalry for my Great Chronicle of England, France, Spain and Adjoining Countries. Volume IV is incomplete, and I came to England to finish it.”

  “Alas, England is failed,” he went on, “your King Richard is a fop who prefers to mince about in Oriental dress rather than follow the example of his illustrious father and grandsire, and win glory in foreign wars. Your nobles are likewise much degenerated from their ancestors, and since crossing the Channel I have heard nothing to rival the deeds of Lancaster, Manny or Chandos, God rest them. I don’t relish the thought of ending my life’s work on such an inglorious note.”

  He drew a quill from the sheaf and pointed the nib at his companion. “If you are who you claim to be, then your tale is worth recording. Prove the claim to my satisfaction, and there will be money in it for you. You look like you need it. Do we have a bargain?”

  The older man’s hands curled into fists – heavy, powerful fists, scarred and callused like a soldier’s – and Froissart braced himself for his second beating of the day.

  It didn’t come. “I admit I have no money,” the man said, “and riches have flowed through these hands like water. Save this.”

  He drew a small ring from the purse hanging at his belt. The ring was plain gold, genuine and much less ostentatious than the cheap fakeries adorning his fingers. His irreverent manner fell away as he stared at the ring in his palm, and his leathery face crumpled like an old bloodhound’s.

  “None shall have this,” he said bleakly.

  “Do we have a bargain?” Froissart repeated. He pulled out a fresh sheaf of vellum and sat with his quill poised expectantly.

  “Yes,” the other replied, recovering his bounce as he hurriedly tucked the ring back into his purse, “yes, of course.”

  “My story, then,” he said, resting his elbows on the table and reaching for the jug of ale, “from the beginning.”

  So he began to speak, and Froissart began to write.

  1.

  I was born in the village of Deep Walden, Warwickshire, in the year 1346, which was the year of old King Edward’s great victory over the French at Crécy.

  The Wolf, they used to call me, and I first acquired the nickname from the midwives who witnessed me claw my way out of my mother’s belly. She, poor woman, lived just long enough to see me baptised, and died a few hours after the ceremony. Her body now lies in the quiet churchyard at Deep Walden, marked by a plain stone cross. As a boy I often resorted there, and sat for a while next to the grave, feeling her comforting presence around me.

  I have no other happy memories of my early youth. Deep Walden was a shit-hole, a few miserable longhouses and huts in the middle of the Warwickshire countryside, populated by dreary peasants. They were not bondsmen, for the Great Plague had slightly loosened the age-old chains that bound commoners to the land, but still ignorant, stupid and dull. I had an older broth
er, Ralph, and from childhood we were determined to be quit of the place.

  We were unlikely brothers. Ralph was a lanky dark-haired youth, while I was short and stocky, with pale yellow hair, and lacked his volatile temper. Neither of us was handsome, and his moon-shaped face was badly marked by a childhood pox. It was often whispered in my village that we were the fruit of separate wombs, though never in our father’s hearing.

  Our father, Gilbert Page, was a tanner, and his method of child-rearing consisted of curses and hard blows. Perhaps he did not mean it unkindly, for that was how his father raised him, and no doubt his father, stretching back to antiquity. Still, when years later I heard that he had died, choking on his own vomit after a heavy night’s drinking, I toasted the splendid news.

  Neither of us wished to follow in our father’s trade, for a life spent knee-deep in piss and dog shit scraping fur from animal skins is not the heady stuff of youthful dreams. When I was fifteen and Ralph seventeen, big and bold enough to stand up to the old bully, we told him so. Predictably, he flew into a rage and threw us out. That was the last I saw of him.

  We had it in mind to be soldiers, so took our meagre belongings and slogged on foot to Warwick, where we volunteered to join the town garrison. They were always keen on recruiting muscular young men who could take orders, and accepted us gladly.

  There I had my first proper training in the use of arms. Our father had taught us how to use a stave in a fight, but the use of real weapons and the suffocating weight of leather and chain mail were all new to me.

  “Get used to it quickly, boys,” the sergeant-at-arms, a pot-bellied sadist named Gurney, warned us, “because I mean to make you suffer.”

  He was as good as his word, and for the next few weeks I limped to bed every night with fresh bruises on my body. The exercise-yard beside the castle barracks was an arena of pain, where Gurney hammered into his raw recruits the basics of sword and dagger, shield and spear, glaive, halberd and war-hammer. He spared not those who were slow in the learning, and our comrades were frequently carried groaning to the sanatorium with broken limbs and heads.

  Ralph and I accepted Gurney’s hard knocks, having grown used to them from our father. Being big and strong and vicious, we did well enough to please him, and he saved the worst of his cruelties for others.

  The weeks turned into months, and then a year. We could have spent the greater part of our lives guarding the walls of peaceful Warwick: perhaps we would have married local girls, settled down and allowed our minds to go to rust, like a couple of unused swords, but the Bastard of Somerton found us.

  Edmund Dalrigge was his name. He claimed to be a knight, but we knew him as an esquire who held one manor a few miles north of Deep Walden. He was the bastard son of the late Lord Somerton of Somerton Hall, who had held five or six profitable manors scattered about Warwickshire and Suffolk.

  The Bastard found Ralph and I one night in the King’s Head on Warwick High Street, where we could be found most nights, dicing and drinking and womanising, the things that bored soldiers do. He swaggered over to our stall, where we were squabbling over dice.

  “Ale or wine?” he cried, slapping a pile of halfpennies on the table. I gaped up at him, my petty quarrel with Ralph quite forgotten.

  I saw a big, dangerous-looking youth with pale blonde hair and mismatched eyes, one blue, one grey. The corner of his mouth twitched, and stretched into an ingratiating smile that failed to reach his eyes.

  “Ale,” said Ralph, who cared little where his drinking money came from. The Bastard nodded and hailed a serving- boy to hurry over with three mugs of their finest. He did it in lordly style, snapping his fingers and raising his voice, and I remember feeling impressed by his arrogance.

  My brother and I greedily set to, and took little notice as the Bastard dragged up a stool and sat next to us. “Here’s to my new friends,” he said, raising his mug.

  “Thanks for the drink,” replied Ralph, wiping his foamy lips, “but you should know that we can’t pay you back, and I won’t hop into bed with you. Thomas might.”

  He winked at me, but the joke died when the Bastard drew his dagger and stuck it, quivering, into the table.

  “I require other services,” he said, quite calmly, “I need fighters, strong lads who can obey orders and not ask too many questions.”

  “Do you now?” said Ralph, bristling at the man’s arrogant tone. “And how did you come to choose us, and what sort of money are you talking?”

  The Bastard shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Everyone knows that soldiers drink here. For payment you will each receive twice your monthly wage in the garrison. Any trinkets you may pick up during the employment shall also be yours.”

  I exchanged glances with Ralph. “What do you want us to do?” I asked.

  “Later. First, I must know if you have friends in the garrison who might assist. Two is not sufficient.”

  “For twice their usual wage? All of them, I should think,” said Ralph.

  The Bastard smiled again, and I wished he wouldn’t, for it was the falsest expression I ever saw. “Just four more will do,” he said, “bring them here at this hour tomorrow. I shall be waiting for you.”

  He didn’t wait for our answer, but swaggered away through the usual mob of drunks that infested the taproom.

  “Well, what do you make of it?” Ralph asked me. Long experience had taught him that the family brain was firmly in my care, and he usually deferred to my judgment.

  I thought for a moment. “Let’s do as he says and meet him here with some of the boys. Hear him out. If he turns out to be as mad as he looks, well, no harm done.”

  My brother agreed, and so we adjusted the smooth course of our lives.

  2.

  Somerton Hall just after midnight was an ominous black silhouette, its chimneys, roofs and battlements cutting jagged patterns in the lesser darkness of the sky. I had only seen it at a distance before, during the day, when it was a fair place to look at. Now, as I crept across the silent fields, stumbling occasionally as my scabbard caught against unseen rocks and bumps in the ground, it might have been a fortalice in the lowest circle of Hell.

  The Bastard was in front, clanking in full war-harness as he strode towards the gatehouse. Beside me were my brother and four comrades from the Warwick garrison whom we had persuaded to join the venture. They were Richard Kelleshull, Thomas Bacon, John Heym and James Russell. Record their names, for no-one else will.

  The Bastard’s plan, as he had explained when he met us again in the King’s Head, was simple. He wished to capture his brother, Henry, and Henry’s young wife, and force them to sign Somerton Hall over to him. Our job was to knock over any of Henry’s servants that tried to interfere.

  It was dangerous and unlawful, but we had the mindless courage of youth, and were over-excited after months of slowly rotting away in barracks. We also had little respect for the law, a cumbersome beast that only snaps up those too slow to run away.

  The Bastard halted suddenly and put down the lantern he was carrying. He knelt, fumbling with a flint, and eventually managed to light the oil-soaked rag inside the lantern.

  “Are you mad?” hissed Ralph. “We will be seen!”

  “I hope so,” the Bastard replied, standing up and swinging the lantern back and forth.

  We looked towards the house, and an answering light appeared in one of the slit windows above the gate.

  “That’s Elizabeth, one of my brother’s kitchen maids,” he explained, “I got the silly slut to agree to open the doors in exchange for a quick tumble and a shilling.”

  He dropped his lantern and set off at a lumbering sprint. We followed like obedient hounds, and my heart was thumping so hard I thought it might leap out of my mouth.

  The flame in the window vanished, only to re-appear inside the gateway as the double doors swung open. A slender female figure stood inside, holding a torch aloft, her face hidden by a scarf and cowl.

  We were just feet away from the doo
rway when an old man appeared, clad only in his night-shirt. A bunch of heavy keys dangled from his belt. He stared in dull confusion at Elizabeth, and at the open doors.

  Then the Bastard was on him, sword drawn. I didn’t see the blade enter his body, but heard an awful high-pitched scream as both men went down in a struggling heap. Another scream erupted from Elizabeth as the doorkeeper’s blood sprayed over her skirts. Richard Kelleshull, who was a giant of a man, lunged at her. She evaded his clumsy grasp, dropped her torch and ran, still screaming, towards the house.

  The doorkeeper was shrieking and writhing violently on the floor like a worm impaled on a hook, trying to keep his entrails from leaking out of the gash in his belly. Cursing, the Bastard drove his sword, already sticky with blood, through his victim’s throat.

  I had never seen a man killed before, and remembering feeling strangely indifferent. No excitement, no fear, just detached, as though it hadn’t really happened.

  “That stupid bitch will rouse the household!” shouted the Bastard, “follow me, and remember what I’m paying you for.”

  Beyond the gate was the courtyard, and the gabled roof and tall chimneys of the Great Hall were directly in front of us as we entered. Lights appeared at the upper windows as the shutters were unfastened and thrown open by the people inside, no doubt woken by all the noise.

  The Bastard charged up to the door to the hall and put his boot to it. The blackened timbers shuddered in their frame, but held firm.

  “Beat it down!” he ordered, and my brother and Richard, who both carried axes, rushed in and started hewing at the timbers.

  The Bastard had assured us that his brother had no soldiers on his payroll, only grooms, page boys and a few old serving-men, and so it appeared as men stumbled from the from the stables and outbuildings, rubbing sleep from their eyes. They were indeed menials, clutching pitchforks and rakes and the like, while we were kitted out like soldiers with swords, daggers and bucklers, bascinets and haubergeons.