Isabel bit her lip. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I should not judge – but I do because Thomas is my brother!’ She moved around him to Thomas and gave him a fierce hug. ‘I am sorry for what I said – of course we will both help you all we can.’
Thomas knew that even if she was sorry, it was what she thought, but he did not hold it against her. ‘We are always friends,’ he said ruefully, ‘even when we fight and disagree.’
‘Do not do anything rash, promise me.’
‘I shall try to keep body and soul together for at least a while longer,’ he answered, feeling burdened and unsettled even while he tried to smile, and kissed her cheek, continuing to restore the balance between them. If they saw matters differently, it was always from a perspective of family love.
‘Do not worry, sister,’ Otto said, patting her back. ‘I shall look out for him.’
‘Well, do not get yourself killed either! Sometimes I wish I had never had brothers at all, only sisters.’ She looked at themseverely. ‘You swore me to silence, but our mother has a right to know.’
‘Tell her if you will,’ Thomas said. ‘But let it go no further than that.’
12
At sea off the Flemish coast, June 1340
Standing beside the King on the deck of theThomasfacing the might of the French fleet, Thomas flexed his shoulders and opened and closed his hands, preparing for battle. Some men were fidgeting and jittery with excitement and fear. Some prayed on their knees and said their rosaries. Others busied themselves with their equipment or made boastful jests. And some kept their thoughts sealed in silence.
Despite moving to loosen his muscles, Thomas was calm and focused. There was going to be a battle, a hard one they could not afford to lose. Many said the odds were stacked against them, but Thomas only saw challenges to overcome. His own response before and during combat was one of heightened clarity and awareness and was a reason for his position as an elite knight of the royal household. When his mind was this focused, there was no room to pick at the sore spot of his clandestine marriage to Jeanette. Everything but now could wait.
Beside him, Otto too was still and absorbed. They had fought side by side for so many years that there was nothing to say and nothing to polish for it had all been perfected on the practice field.
The English banners rippled in the wind, the lilies of France quartered with the lions of England, streaming out. The sun was behind them, bright and high in the summer sky and to their advantage, since the hordes of crossbowmen lining the decks of the French ships would be squinting into the light when they shot at the English.
The sky was as clear as fine blue cloth. Gentle whitecaps scudded the waves driven by a good breeze from the northwest, which was exactly what the English needed for their approach. The King looked up at the sun and the moment of waiting strung out like a thin silver wire. Lined up in three rows, the French ships barred the entrance to the harbour of Sluys with the foremost row comprised of the largest galleys and cogs with extra planks nailed to the sides to increase the height and prevent easy boarding. The ships were chained together to form a floating barrier to prevent the English from breaking through and looked formidable. Edward’s former flagship theChristopher, which had been captured in a raid by the French some months ago, had pride of place in the front ranks. Edward regarded the sight as an incentive, a challenge, and an insult.
‘Well,’ he said to Thomas, ‘what say you, Master Holland?’
Thomas smiled. ‘I say, sire, that they are like a shoal of fish and that we shall soon for the expenditure of a little effort have netted a very fine catch.’
Edward’s lips twitched. ‘I believe that is a clear assessment. Let every man do his best and look to his post. Master Crabbe.’
The King signalled to his ship’s master. John Crabbe was a redoubtable, leather-faced warrior in his mid-sixties but still hale and vigorous. He had a long life of piracy behind him and had fought with the Scots against the King in the past, but Edward had persuaded him to change his allegiance, and Crabbe, intent on a secure future for himself, had entered Edward’s service.
A broad-chested yeoman raised an ivory oliphant to his lips and blew the approach. The sound of the horn blared out across the waves and was taken up by the other ships. The anchors rose dripping from the sea, and the English ships sailed in majesty out of the sun towards the might of the much larger French navy.
As their formation neared the French lines, Thomas drew his sword in a silver shiver. The royal vessel was equipped with fighting men and archers in the castles atop prow and stern. Either side they were flanked by ships composed mostly of bowmen, supplied with vast quantities of arrows. The French favoured the use of the crossbow – an instrument to be feared, but the numerical advantage of missiles and range was with the swifter English bows. Thomas had often watched his own Northamptonshire archers at their training – had even joined them at practice. English bows could loose ten arrows in the time it took to load and shoot two from a crossbow. And the French arbalesters would be shooting sun-blind.
The breeze was steady but gentle, and Crabbe and the other ship masters constantly shouted orders to adjust position. The great square sails came up and down along the line, and sometimes anchors were deployed to keep the English ships in formation. As the distance closed between the two sides, Thomas could hear the French trumpets and horns blaring out, not so much to accompany attack as to signal their own positioning. The chained ships at the front of the line were fouling each other’s advance, and the high seaboards made them unwieldy and slow to manoeuvre.
At a signal from the King, their own trumpets blared the attack, and the soldiers roared threats and battle cries, adding to the cacophony.
‘The French are mad,’ Otto said. ‘Why didn’t they make for open water and then carve in among us? They have twice our number, but they have hamstrung themselves.’
‘They have an experienced commander but I suspect they’ve overruled him because he is Genoese, not French. Good advantage for us though.’ Thomas grinned wolfishly.
Steadily, surely, the French sailed within range of the English longbows. Thomas signalled to the archers clustered in their wooden fighting castles fore and aft to string their bows, and strung his own of Spanish yew, as did Otto, the King and other knights, for every arrow at this opening stage before the ships closed together would count. Samson, one of Thomas’s archers from the Holland manor at Broughton, gave him a gap-toothed smile as he handed over a sheaf of twenty arrows, bodkin-pointed and fletched with goose feathers.
As the ships closed across the water, the shout went up to nock the arrows in the bowstring. Then, ‘Draw!’
Thomas pulled back until his arm was level with his right ear and his vambraced left arm extended straight. All along the English front line of vessels, throngs of archers performed the same task. Closer . . . closer, the summer sea ploughed by a hundred and fifty keels.
‘Loose!’
Thomas released all the pent-up tension from his arm into the blazing midsummer sky and was already setting the next arrow to the nock as thousands of razored tips sped in a vicious hornet-storm towards the leading French ships. Nock, draw, loose; nock, draw, loose. The arrows plummeted in a brutal hail upon the tightly packed French who had no chance of manoeuvring out of the way. So thick was the arrow storm, so close the ships, that the missiles diving from the sky could not miss. The built-up sides of the French vessels were no defence, and neither were the crossbowmen, hampered in their shooting by the sun’s glare and the deadly hail. Some of the bigger French vessels possessed stone throwers, but they had to be operated by crews who were taking cover, and their aim was inaccurate.
Thomas rapidly shot his twenty arrows, and then another twenty. As they drew closer to the French ships the archers began directing their aim at specific soldiers rather than shooting high. However, they were wary themselves now, because they were within range of the crossbows, and not every French archer had fallen. Yet still their assault continued until they were within thirty yards of the French front line. Then it was time to discard the longbow, draw weapons and prepare the grapnels for boarding.
