The Wanton Road E-Book

J. C. Harvey

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Fiskardo's War
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 814

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

When widowed, grieving war hero Jack Fiskardo arrives in the London of 1639, a veteran not just of conflict but also of tragedy, his only wish is to make a different life for himself and his sons. But in an England on the verge of civil war, a soldier's past cannot be so easily forgotten. As the country pulls itself apart, Carlo Fantom, Jack's first and deadliest foe, makes a chilling reappearance - but so does the headstrong and resourceful Pris Holland, a woman with her own connection to Jack. Escaping who he was may be impossible, but in this new war, where even the oldest loyalties are compromised and there are hidden dangers around every corner, a future with those he loves is going to mean Jack risking everything he has...

Leseprobe

THEWANTONROAD

J. C. Harvey is the fiction pen-name for Jacky Colliss Harvey. After studying English at Cambridge, and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Jacky worked in museum publishing for twenty years, first at the National Portrait Gallery and then at the Royal Collection Trust, where she set up the Trust’s first commercial publishing programme. The extraordinary history of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and of seventeenth-century Europe has been an obsession of hers for as long as she can remember, and was the inspiration behind the story of Jack Fiskardo’s adventures, which begins with The Silver Wolf, continues with The Dead Men and ends here with The Wanton Road.

THEWANTONROAD

J. C. Harvey

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Jacky Colliss Harvey, 2025

The moral right of Jacky Colliss Harvey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 348 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 350 8

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This one is for Lydia and Rich.

Contents

Author’s Note

Map of Europe

Cast of Characters

PROLOGUE: London 1620

PART I: St-Étienne-des-Champs, Picardy, 1637

Chapter One: What Is a Man to Do?

Chapter Two: Pistol Down, Hands Up

Chapter Three: The Death of Felipe Ortez

Chapter Four: The Problem of the Puta

Chapter Five: Home Again, Home Again

Chapter Six: The Prodigal Daughter

Chapter Seven: St Martin’s Lane

Chapter Eight: A Good Face for Bad Weather

Chapter Nine: On London Bridge

Chapter Ten: The Wooden O

Chapter Eleven: Varney

Chapter Twelve: How it Begins

PART II: Oxford 1642

Chapter One: The More the Merrier

Chapter Two: When the Time Is Come

Chapter Three: Supper with Colonel Ancrum

Chapter Four: Small World

Chapter Five: Otsford

Chapter Six: Scaresome Men

Chapter Seven: Well Now, Sir. Well Now, Madam

Chapter Eight: What Would St Paul Say?

Chapter Nine: The Return of Molly Tubb

Chapter Ten: Runaway Down

Chapter Eleven: Shoot!

PART III: London 1645

Chapter One: Brotherhood

Chapter Two: Not One Loss, But Another

Chapter Three: Bad as Bad Can Be

Chapter Four: Never Ever

Chapter Five: Green Dragon Court

Chapter Six: A Proposition

Chapter Seven: A Change of Plan

Chapter Eight: The Tiger

Chapter Nine: Memento Mori

Chapter Ten: My Lady Wyncanton

Chapter Eleven: Holland’s Leaguer

Chapter Twelve: Leave Everything Behind

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

THERE ARE TIMES when history makes a writer’s life easy. There are many more when it doesn’t (why couldn’t so-and-so be in this place when it would be so handy to the plot to have them there; why couldn’t this have happened when I want it to, not when it did; why was this marvellously evocative phrase not in use a hundred years earlier?), but sometimes the gods of history and of fiction sit down together and get along. Such is the case with the winding-down of the Thirty Years War in Europe, and the ignition of the Civil War in England, in 1642, and the many, many men of war who moved from one to play a part in the other.

So, gentle reader – and thank you so much for still being there, for completing this marathon through the first half of the seventeenth century with me – we come to the third book in the Fiskardo’s War trilogy. And by now Jack Fiskardo’s war is not only the one he fought in Germany, and the one between him and his sworn enemy Carlo Fantom, but also the one taking place in his own heart and head.

I always knew that I would bring Jack to England, to fight in the English Civil War; I always knew that his faithful troop of discoverers would join him; that I would make him the owner of Varney; and that, before any of this, he would lose his patient and loving helpmeet, Mirelle. And I always knew, in that evil writerly way, that I would present him with challenges that could not be solved by cunning or daring or strength of arm – such as caring for a child who has none of those resources to call upon, and never will.

But I also always knew that I would match him with a heroine who has wholly unexpected abilities of her own, who could be every bit as potent, within her female world, as Jack is within his. I knew this character’s name, I knew her background was privileged but lawless, that she came from within London’s underworld; I knew her spirit was indomitably confident and unquenchably selfish and venal, yet that this was going to be what ensured her survival, and the survival of (almost) all those she would come to love. And I knew that her appearance would need to be unforgettable and unmistakable. I knew there would be gowns. And then I came across the history of Bess Holland and Holland’s Leaguer, and of Crossbones cemetery, and thus history became ‘story’, at a stroke.

And of course I knew that there would have to be a final reckoning for Jack with Carlo Fantom. The historical Carlo Fantom also came across from Germany to fight in the English Civil War – for both sides as it turned out – but for him, as for the ‘Carlo Fantom’ of The Wanton Road, it would be the last such war in which he, or Jack Fiskardo, would play a part.

And with that, read on…

THEWANTONROAD

Cast of Characters

PROLOGUE

At Crossbones graveyard, London, 1620

Bess Holland, proprietress of the infamous ‘Holland’s Leaguer’ brothel in Southwark

Abigail Skinner, her maid

Miguel Domingo, Bess Holland’s coachman, waterman and bodyguard, a native of Capo Verde

Walter Spikenard, an old soldier, now Bess Holland’s doorman

PART I

In the village of St-Étienne-des-Champs, Picardy, 1637

Jack Fiskardo, notorious discoverer, one-time captain of a troop of military scouts known as ‘The Dead Men’, newly widowed Mirelle, his late wife

Edouard, ‘Ned’, his oldest son

James, ‘Demi-Cuit’, his newborn

Robert, landlord of the Écu de France, Jack Fiskardo’s brother-in-law

Cou-Cou, Robert’s wife

Madame Bertin and Georges Artaud, neighbours

Père Hubert, the village priest

M’sieu, Jack Fiskardo’s horse

In Paris, at the Palais-Cardinal

Armand du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu

Achille de la Tour, the Cardinal’s confidential agent

In a wood outside the town of Breda

Zoltan, the Dead Men’s one-time lieutenant

The Dead Men: Th or, Ulrik, Luka, Jens and Per

Rupert, Count Palatine, later Prince Rupert of the Rhine

Fritzi, a dog

In the village of Teteringen, also outside Breda

The besieging army of Frederick Henry of Holland

Mr and Mrs Tobor Martlin of Haarlem

Floris, their horse

Within the town of Breda itself

Felipe Ortez, a clerk within the London office of the Spanish ambassador

Francis Hooley, his servant

Pris Holland, his mistress

Sister Albertine and the nuns of Breda’s Beguinage

Carlo Fantom, ‘Charles the Ghost’, Croat mercenary and onetime assassin, Jack Fiskardo’s sworn enemy

In the town of Haarlem, on the Dutch coast

Ava Franka, a businesswoman

Mungo Sant, a Scottish mariner, captain of the Guid Marie

In London

Aaron Holland, adoptive brother to Pris Holland

Greville Holland, Aaron’s uncle, head of the Holland crime family

Mary Frith, Bess Holland’s companion

Mr Sullivan, proprietor of Sullivan’s tobacco shop

Sir Theodore de Mayerne, Physician Royal

Jemima, his maid

Sir Antony Wyncanton, MP, Pris Holland’s admirer

Molly Tubb, Pris Holland’s maid

Madame Oliphant, Pris Holland’s dressmaker

Cornelius Vanderhoof of Amsterdam, Jack Fiskardo’s oldest friend

Rafe Endicott, bookseller

Belinda, ‘Belle’, his wife

Mr and Mrs Butter, Belle’s parents

Mr William Watts, a churchman, friend of Rafe Endicott

Lodowick Alembert, leading man at the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell

Ingram Skinner, head of the Skinner crime family, rivals to the Hollands

Ezra and Asa, Ingram’s sons

Dilly and Flo, the Skinners’ whores

Tucker Turnbull, a Skinner ‘bangster’, now well past his best

Mr Barlow, captain of the Sapphire

Abel Plumstead, a carrier and wagoner

Master Barnaby, ‘Bug’, a homeless urchin

Josh Arden, one-time pirate, now caretaker of the Dunqerqer tavern on the River Lea

Dash, the Endicotts’ dog

Boy, Prince Rupert’s dog

Helen of Troy, Bess Holland’s cat

PART TWO

In and around the city of Oxford, 1642

Peter Topham, steward at Varney, an ancient manor house Harriet Mayhew, housekeeper at Varney

Master Abram, Toby Dearlove, Old Henty, Lily – the household at Varney

Sir Joseph Astley, Major-General of the King’s Foot in the army of King Charles I

George Digby, counsellor to King Charles I, rival to Prince Rupert of the Rhine

Joseph Cantley, captain of dragoons in the army of King Charles I

The Gemini, Kazimir and Konstantin – Latvian freebooters, also members of the Dead Men

Cicely, upstairs maid at Oxford’s Spotted Cow tavern

Mr Unthank, proprietor of Unthanks’ dressmakers

Miss Suzanne, his assistant

Colonel Ancrum, a Scot, Jack Fiskardo’s one-time colonel in the wars in Germany, now of Upper Aston Hall, Buckinghamshire

Dorothea, his wife

The Reverend and Mrs Henry Gage, neighbours of the Ancrums

The army of the Earl of Essex, commander-in-chief of Parliament’s troops

Ocker and Todd, Jack Fiskardo’s dogs

Annie, a horse

At the Battle of Roundway Down, outside Devizes, 13 July 1643

The army of Sir William Waller, commander of Parliament’s forces in the west

The army of Sir Ralph Hopton, commander of King Charles’s forces in the west

Maurice, Prince Palatine, younger brother of Prince Rupert

PART THREE

Following the defeat of the army of King Charles I at the Battle of Naseby, 14 June 1645

Jenkin Holland, Greville’s younger brother, usually to be found in Amsterdam

Will (‘God’s-Will-Be-Done’) Franklin, Antony Wyncanton’s lawyer

Lucius Symond, friend of Joseph Cantley and now a prisoner in Tothill Fields, Westminster

Oliver Cromwell, commander of Parliament’s ‘New Model Army’

Snowdrop, a bear

PROLOGUE

London, 1620

Crossbones

‘… these single women were forbidden the rights of the Church, so long as they continued that sinful life… therefore there was a plot of ground, called the single woman’s churchyard, appointed for them, far from the parish church.’

John Stow, Survey of London

EVEN DEAD, YOU don’t want to end up here.

Ask any man what this place is, he’ll tell you it’s the burying ground for St Saviour’s, ain’t it? And if he’s a native of Southwark, look at you askance for not knowing that in the first place. The burying ground for St Saviour’s, he’ll say, in a manner that leaves unspoken (but not unheard) the What’s it to you?, because they are a tribe within a tribe, the people of Southwark, as those at the bottom of any such great place as London tend to be, and suspicious of strangers, as well as being most perversely proud.

Not that this is the proper burying ground, you understand. It’s not that round St Saviour’s itself, where you might already lie in company with such worthy souls as old John Gower the rhymester, or that mad lad Will Kemp, or even Will Shakespeare’s little brother Eddie, and thus be as respectable as, in Southwark, you are ever like to be. No, this – this acre of wasteland, humpy and unmown, dotted with those lozenges of naked earth – this is St Saviour’s other burying place. This is where they bring the outcasts, the nameless, the friendless, the penniless. Those who lived in sin, died in misery, and are buried here in shame. That’s what a man will tell you.

But ask any woman you might find hereabouts – this woman, maybe, sat here in the yard of the George, just up the road from the boneyard itself, one of the three huddled together here this February morning, warming their hands round cups of buttered ale – and she’ll tell you something different. She’ll give this place a name, for a start. She’ll call it Crossbones.

Why is it called that?

Because it always has been, that’s why.

But who is buried there?

The women.

What women?

(It might take a moment for her to answer. Who are you, after all? But give her time.)

The women of the Southwark stews. Them, and their little ’uns what never grew up, or what died of being born, or whose poor mothers died with them inside. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of hundreds. All buried here.

And she’ll give you a look, as she sips from her cup. That wrinkled mouth, those shadowed eyes… when you chose her to speak to, you did so because compared to the other two (one so humped she’s almost doubled over; the other freakishly tall even sitting down, and with a strip of leather tied over her eyes) she seemed younger, she seemed almost comely, and now you see how wrong you were. Something to her, to all three of them, ringing that warning note: These are not as you.

And then she gives you the look, the look that dares you. Judge me not, the look says. This is our ground, not yours. Crossbones.

*

Old Bess Holland (and don’t you ever let her hear you call her that), but Old Bess Holland all the same, she could walk here from her place, the notorious Holland’s Leaguer, but will she? Will I my arse, says Bess. You don’t work hard as Bess has done these many years, you don’t get rich as Bess has done to inflict upon your petticoats the mud of Southwark’s streets, and you don’t get as old and canny as Bess Holland counts herself to be to chance yourself to some lurking plague-rat bastard Skinner for no good reason, neither.

So when Bess Holland leaves Holland’s Leaguer, which is the finest bawdy-house London has ever seen, when she has its literal drawbridge lowered over its actual moat, when she processes through its gardens (noted for the arts of flirtation and arousal practised within their shady groves, although admittedly, not when the weather is as bitter raw as this), first there’s the getting of her ready, which can take two hours or more; then there’s the fanfare to warn all her girls to tumble out of bed and run to the stairs (Bess keeps a trumpeter on her staff – she does, truly), and then when Bess herself appears at her bedroom door, the cheering and applause. Abigail, Bess Holland’s maid, is never sure how much of it is genuine, but cheering and applause, nonetheless. Then there’s the processing outside, past old Spikenard, Bess’s doorman, still as hefty as in his days trailing a pike, and out to Bess’s carriage, waiting there at the garden gate. Then there’s the bowing and the handing of her up into her carriage by that handsome young buck Miguel Domingo (coachman, waterman, bodyguard, all rolled into one) and only then does the journey proper begin; and only then can Abi let out her breath.

Don’t huff so, you creature, Bess Holland says. All these years, ain’t I taught you better manners than that?

All these years. Bess set up Holland’s Leaguer the same year Old Queen Lizzie died and King James of Scotland came down to the English throne. ‘Elizabeth was King, now James is Queen’ was the joke in Southwark, har-har-har, when the first rumours of the man began to run about (and how Bess rubbed her hands together when they did!), but His Majesty King James is ageing now himself, and the years have not been kind. First he lost his proper heir, Prince Henry; then there came this hellish war in Germany that sent his daughter and her German husband scurrying from their thrones in Bohemia into exile in The Hague; and then the remaining son, Charles – God save us, the ninny, what poor watery shot was it engendered him? In his prime, Old King James, masqued up like Arlecchino with only his beard and that perpetually wet-lipped mouth of his left visible, would sit in the garden at Holland’s Leaguer, whinnying with delight as the mimics, the molly-boys, waited on him dressed in nothing but vine leaves, and so Scots-drunk he’d topple right off his seat and lie there on the grass all happy and helpless, but his boy Charles? What a mullypuff. What a suck-egg. A pompous kill-joy of a suck-egg, what is more. The Hollands – Bess, and her unholy trinity of brothers, Cosmo, Greville and Jenkin – are already planning for times that may be nothing like as free and easy as those they’ve come to know, and there’s been many a recent family council at Greville’s house in leafy Rotherhithe, plotting how to buttress the family’s interest in taverns and brothels and theatres with all those other bits of business that go on wholly out of sight. Ships that fly black sails, that appear at the mouth of the Thames only as daylight fades; rowboats (such as Miguel Domingo’s) that creep out to meet them in darkness, and return with barrels of brandy and casks of Dutch gin; parcels of lace so thick and luxuriant it wheezes if you squeeze it; the commonplace of cinnamon and nutmegs; even (nowadays) the most radical of tracts and pamphlets, ending their journey bound face to face with such perpetual favourites as Araminta in the Nunnery or Nights of the Emperor Tiberius. Basically, anything (or even anyone) you want to bring to or carry from London-town, with no-one knowing of the doing of it, it’s the Hollands you require. All of which is most exciting stuff to listen to, at Greville’s chamber’s inner door, while minding Cosmo’s young’un, little Aaron, who is already such a devil-cub you can’t take your eye off him for a minute; and all of which is (in Abi’s opinion) a far safer and warmer way to spend a Sunday than a goose-chase such as this – trundling along Bankside and past the Bear Garden and Winchester Palace and the evil old Clink and then bossing and fighting a way through the traffic coming off London Bridge – Lord! It’s like being tossed about at sea! – and then right down Borough High Street and past the George and oh, thank the saints, we’ve arrived. Surreptitiously, under her cloak, Abigail draws a cross upon her bony bosom. Above them Miguel Domingo gets down from the coachman’s seat, and the carriage rises on its straps. Abigail lets down the slide, Miguel’s face appears (oooh, it still gives Abi such a start, to see an African as close to her as that!), and the door to the carriage is swept open.

‘Out my way, you kipper,’ says Bess, standing up. A nose-tingling waft of Hungary water, creamy with neroli oil, fills the carriage. Now the susurration of silks: silk chambray for the winter petticoats, silk brocatelle for the gown (textured like flock, and in that oh-so-fashionable colour known as dead Spaniard), silk velvet for the cloak and hood, chinchilla for the muff. Sheeny kid, the gloves and boots. Lace, lace, everywhere.

And pieces, to pad out the hair, and belladonna for the eyes, a wash of dew-and-white-ceruse for the face, mouse-skin for the eyebrows and a patch, to hide the scar that horrid chancre left upon Bess’s forehead, long ago. It’s such a playful disease, the pox. God knows what goes on underneath the silks these days – what ulcers, what yellowings, what wastings-away – but the Bess Holland that Bess Holland presents to the outside world is so richly, lushly fine she could walk unchallenged into Whitehall Palace.

Abi, in her wool fustian, the same brown-black as ink, gets down behind Bess and starts lamenting at once. ‘Oh milady, ’tis so cold! Oh, that wind! ’Tis Arctic!’ Bess, striding away, ignores her.

‘Oh milady, must we do this? Must we?’ Abi gathers her cloak about her. It’s a good thick cloak, but Abi’s shivers come not from the icy air, nor the wet chill of the ground, but from the sense of being so exposed out here, at the mercy of every passing thing, be it keening disembodied spirits wafting about in that colourless sky or an all too embodied Ingram Skinner, or his boys Ezra and Asa, or their hireling gangs of clubbers and cutters. God knows, Miguel is a handy man to have about, but it is such a wasteland, this – haunted, unholy – a place where nothing but bad could befall you. Where ghosts seem to thicken the very air, and even as she thinks it, Abi seems to see, there at the edge of the ground, three smoke-like figures – one unnaturally tall (if they be human, to begin with), one bent double and one who might almost be blowing a kiss… She shakes her head, to deny them purchase in her thoughts; but even as she darts another glance at them the figures are gone, blown away by the knife-edged wind, less to them even than the flutter of that tattered ribbon, pressed into the earth. Or there: that pair of women’s shoes, laid neatly side by side, all faded by the weather. Ghost shoes. Beside them, a wee cross of sticks, with a child’s bonnet tied to it. Every place you set your foot in Crossbones, you’re walking on the dead. Although the cold does at least keep down the lurking sewage-stink of putrefaction. When the Thames rises, in the lowest parts of Crossbones graveyard, your footsteps fill; when the river floods, graves pool with water even as they’re being dug, that grey-blue London clay slumping into the rising seepage like rotting flesh detaching itself from bones. It has always seemed to Abi that some great, sad, relentless power lives under Crossbones, slowly pulling all that are put to rest here into its implacable embrace. If she stands here long enough, she fears to feel it pulling at her too.

She’s falling behind. Bess, ahead of her, has turned, waiting for her to come up. ‘What,’ Bess calls back, ‘you’d give Dainty Jane your word and break it, would you?’

Well, no. Even if the woman do be dead. Especially now she do be dead, truth be told. Sweet-faced as she was (and she was! Oh, she was!), no-one crossed Dainty Jane. If she could lay her hand on you and melt a cramp, fade a toothache, open your palm in hers and read it like a book, what else might she do, if you should sour her piss? Dainty Jane was a moon-girl, a Roma. No-one wants to get the wrong side of one of them.

‘I promised her. First Valentine’s after her passing. I’ll be there, I said. I’ll be at your graveside, girl. Just as you ask. And soon as she heard me give my word, she closed her eyes and was gone. Never saw so quiet a death. You have them flowers?’

Abi has, a great bunch of ’em, under her cloak. But it’s February, so the flowers are all waxed silk, hand-brushed with colour – peonies and roses, irises and lilies, with paper stems and leaves, and all tied with a stiff-wired ribbon. Abi can’t believe the cost of ’em. And all to moulder away out here.

‘Now where’s that place we put her?’ Bess asks, looking about.

‘There,’ says Abi.

Where Abi points is Crossbones’ only landmark: its yew tree. Or what was its yew tree. No churchyard is complete without a yew, but this being Crossbones, and unconsecrated ground, its yew was chopped down lifetimes ago to make good English longbows. The tree’s roots, however, seemed to draw unnatural sustenance from this dreadful ground, so the tree grew anew – crabbed and hollowed and curved over its stump. Just to look at it makes Abi’s skin grow goose-flesh. It’s like the tree’s grown carnivore, feasting on all of them sodden cadavers below. But that was where Dainty Jane wished to be laid, so that is where she—

‘The devil in hell is that?’ Bess demands.

There’s something lying at the centre of the yew, within the hollow of the stump. All wrapped up like a pasty, cloth tucked in at either end.

‘Oh, I don’t like it!’ wails Abi, at once. ‘I’m not looking!’

‘Abigail Skinner, how did your family ever produce such a mouse as you?’

Bess goes forward on her own. She bends over, hips a-creak, backbone protesting.

There is some point within the bend when she knows exactly what that parcel will contain, just from the size of it, the shape. ‘It’s a baby,’ says Bess. There’s every modulation in her tone – pragmatism (such things be), pity (that such things be), anger (that such things be) and then Bess’s own habitual way of drawing a cover, at once, over anything you might call feeling, weakness, hurt. Her hand reaches the little bundle. Abi behind her is wailing, ‘Is it perished? For sure it’s perished of the cold!’

‘No,’ says Bess. ‘No, Christ, it’s warm as a new-laid egg.’ She straightens up, holding the bundle in the crook of one arm, lifts the cloth laid over what she thinks to be its head. Peers down.

The bud of a mouth, bright pink and pouting. Such well-marked brows too, for such a baby-thing. The tiny miracle of every single extravagant eyelash, swept over the plump cheeks, and then the eyes open and gaze straight up at her. Under the cloth, the child is naked. Kicking feet, soft fat arms reaching up. Cord dried up and gone, infant umbilicus a-wink in the round of the belly. No piddler. Little cleft. And green-eyed. Green as holly.

‘She’s bonny!’ says Bess. She cups the infant’s head. There’s some few faint curls of hair, slick to the scalp. Darkish. Reddish. Dark amber, polished cherrywood. She holds the baby toward Abi, for her to see. ‘Look at that!’

‘Oh!’ says Abi. She’s a hand laid to her heart. ‘Oh, the weeny worm! Oh, the duckling! Bless!’

The baby kicks and wriggles. Abi offers it a fingertip. Which is grappled onto at once and brought to the pouting mouth. ‘Oh, she’s hungry!’ Abi exclaims, delightedly. ‘Are you hungered, pipkin? We must find you some brekker! We need to find her some milk, milady! Yes, ducky, we must, we will!’

The baby kicks and squirms. Bess leans forward. There, on the fat little neck, a mark as if a moth had settled on the child, shaken the powder from its wings, a mark like a crescent moon.

‘Abi,’ says Bess, ‘when did we bury Dainty Jane?’ Something’s prompting her, Start counting backwards. ‘When was it we brought her here? When did we lay her to rest?’

‘It was May-time,’ comes the answer, in a coo down to the baby, ‘May-time, wriggler! Nice and warm! May-time, milady. Sure of it. All them bushes in the garden was in bloom.’ She looks up. ‘Why?’

January, December, November… all through this last foul winter, back and back. Back to the autumn, back further yet. August, July, June… No, impossible. No, ridiculous. Unwanted infants crop up all over Southwark. Abandoned on the steps of St Saviour’s. Left on the foreshore for the herring gulls to deal with, the next high tide.

Even so…

‘Abi,’ says Bess. ‘It was nine months ago we brought Jane here. It was nine months to the day.’

PART I

St-Étienne-des-Champs, Picardy, 1637

CHAPTER ONE

What Is a Man to Do?

‘Our selves are ships launched forth for heaven; our tears must be the sea.’

William Worship, The Christians Mourning Garment

WHAT IS A man to do, after his wife has died?

He might sit beside her, holding her hand to his lips; he might sit there all night, in fact, bowing his forehead to hers as it chills, as her fingers stiffen. He might watch her face as dawn creeps its way into the room where she lies, on the bed that was theirs – the bed where they made the child that has now killed her. A boy, they told him, another son. He might note – vaguely, as if this is being thought by some other man entirely – how her face has relaxed, how the rigidity of pain has gone from her jaw, how one eye is that little bit more closed than the other. He might lift his head, and see how the window of the room is bright with sun, and flinch to find in his head the words the first day without her. And know – with a sensation like the iron on a plumb-line rattling through his soul, and finding no bottom anywhere – that all the days now will be without her, endlessly so.

There are birds singing in the garden, rustlings in the roof above his head, but not a single human sound from the rooms below, nor a voice from the street outside. News travels fast in a village as small as St-Étienne-des-Champs; bad news travels fastest of all. By now Robert will have tied black cloth to the door of the inn for his sister; they will be covering the mirrors; emptying anything with water in it, drawing the lid across the well. The soul, apparently, has an irresistible fascination with bright surfaces, will trail endlessly from one reflection to the next, dragging itself across them, and it cannot get to heaven with wet feet. Not even a soul as unsullied as Mirelle’s.

Sunlight moves across the bed and spills onto the floor. He thinks how Mirelle’s hens will be gathering at the back door; how the cat will be circling the kitchen, waiting for her to slip it some small treat; how M’sieu, out in his paddock, will be poking his mighty head over the fence. He looks down at her hands again, remembering how it was, watching her fold linens, as if the cloth flew to anticipate her bidding; how carrots rose from the earth at her touch; how she could knead dough, patch and darn with her head turned and her conversation somewhere else entirely. The cleverness in those hands, the knowing – where does it all go? How can it cease? Doesn’t this have to be a mistake?

The pallor of her fingernails, no pink left in them at all; the way the sides of her fingers are hollowing, like those of an old, old woman, even as he turns her hands back and forth in his (that are so scarred, so ugly, and with so much blood on them to boot – how could she have loved him?). Somewhere in that dull, pained place within his head, that place that is like the spot on a forge where the hammer keeps hitting over and over again, somewhere in there it is as if he believes there must be an alternative to this, and if only he can find it, he can stop this in its tracks. Otherwise he feels nothing; nothing at all. He is inanimate, floating, but not at the surface – no, he is suspended, with fathoms above him, and fathoms beneath him still to go.

On her finger, the ring with the pale blue stone, the ring he gave her after their first night together, when odds were he would never see her again. He had to convince her to take it, to ward off the stares of the censorious, should stares there be; but she wore it every day since and now she will wear it for ever. Even in heaven, she will be his. Even up there, they will know she loved him.

Everything I love, I lose.

A scratching at the door. It opens by an inch or two, and Madame Bertin’s face appears in the gap, eyes downcast. ‘Monsieur Jacques,’ she says, ‘Monsieur Jacques, I have to make her ready. Please, Monsieur. You can sit with her again when I am done.’

Robert is waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, holding a bottle of calvados.

Robert sits him on the window-seat in the parlour and leaves him with a brimming glass; goes back to the small group gathered round the fire. Cou-Cou is there, in the oak armchair, Ned circled in her arms, his head on her shoulder. When he sees Jack, his son twists his face away. He thinks of calling Ned to him, but no; what you want, when you’re young as Ned, when the truly quite intriguing prospect of a sibling has ended only in this, all this adult panic and despair, is the softness of a woman’s body to burrow your head into, even a woman as unmaternal as Cou-Cou. ‘She is one of those,’ Mirelle had once said of her sister-in-law, ‘who will only have children if their hands are never sticky.’ Christ, his wife is everywhere. This is the cushion she re-covered when she saw how fond he was of sitting here. That is her honeysuckle, tapping on the window. There the votive plaque to Saint Céline she brought back from Laon and set up on the mantelpiece – Why this saint? he had asked and Mirelle replied, ‘Because she was a wife, and she was happy.’

He thinks Saint Céline’s husband was the happy one. Was.

They are talking of Mirelle, over there, by the fire – her goodness, her kindness, her light hand as a cook; how she could pick up a hen and have it go broody at once; encourage a leaf to sprout out of anything. Robert has his head bowed; Georges Artaud’s arm about his shoulders. He thinks how he has always been a stranger here, he from his terroir of battles and tumult and gold; and how she had stood like a good hostess between him and this world of neighbours and chickens; introducing him to it and it to him. He thinks of all the secret things a man knows about his wife – her naked derrière, walking away from him across their bedroom in the morning, imprinted with the wrinkles of the sheet; how she coiled her hair under her cap (one half twisted one way, the other, the other; ‘for balance,’ she had said); how she would sit the purring cat up on her lap, fold Minou’s front paws and say she was having Minou pray for the souls of the mice; her exclamations of mock-horror changing Ned’s napkin when he was still little enough to need them (‘Oh, mon Dieu! It is the lava of a volcano!’). He thinks how she loved rainbows, would stop whatever she was doing, scoop Ned up into her arms and rush outside to see – ‘Regarde! Ah, c’est beau!’ There should be a rainbow up there for her now. Is there?

There is not. Nothing but heedless blue. Only now above his head he hears the sound of muffled voices, and then the noise of wooden clogs ascending the back stairs and the group by the fireplace falls silent, grows still.

Madame Bertin reappears, a bundle of sheets in her arms, folded to hide the blood. He gets to his feet. ‘No, Monsieur Jacques,’ Madame Bertin says, ‘give them a moment more,’ and he understands the carpenter is up there with Mirelle, the carpenter and the coffin and the nails.

‘No,’ he says. At the note in his voice, Robert stands. Madame Bertin gives Robert a look of helpless entreaty – this is le capitaine, what are we to do?

‘No, I will do it, I will move her.’

No man touches his wife but him.

No-one argues with her widower either.

They carry the coffin downstairs and set it up in the back parlour. There she lies, on her bed of bran; a rosary wound about her wrists. Madame Bertin had tucked Mirelle’s scissors in beside her too. ‘It is the done thing, Monsieur Jacques. For those who are lost in childbed.’ Why? he had wondered, then worked it out – so that the soul of the mother might cut the cord, and her child might live.

Madame Bertin has dressed Mirelle in her finest – the quilted satin petticoat; the Haarlem linen cuffs, delicate as cobweb, which her husband had brought back for her from his most recent trip north; the necklace of opal beads Mirelle had declared too fine to wear but would hold up to the light, marvelling at the rainbows glimmering across them. Knowing his wife, he thinks Mirelle would have much preferred to be left in her ordinary kitchen gown and apron, but also that she would be far too polite to complain. In any case, this is no longer Mirelle. This is something doing its sad best to masquerade as her.

‘Shall we let Edouard see her now, Monsieur Jacques?’

He is coming to realize how different civilian death can be. On the battlefield they die, you live, simple as that, hurrah, but this – this is something else entirely. The only choices it presents you with are between the bad and the worse. How at a loss he finds himself in telling them apart. ‘If you think so, Madame.’

Madame Bertin lays a hand upon his arm. ‘It will comfort him. To see her at peace.’

Astoundingly, it does. He lifts Ned up, to peek over the side of the coffin, and Ned looks his fill, considers, and announces, ‘That’s not Maman.’

No, he answers, it’s not.

His son produces a deeply phlegmatic-sounding sigh. ‘She’s gone, isn’t she?’

A realist at five years old. Yes, Ned, he says. She is. But what does ‘gone’ mean when you’re five? Does it (for example) come leading along by the hand the word ‘forever’? Jack Fiskardo was twice his son’s age when he was orphaned, knew by then what death was, knew it all too well. Would it have made a difference to him, if he had been able to see his own mother in her coffin and at peace? Instead of as he found her, as she was left to be found, suspended from the ceiling like a huntsman’s trophy?

The five-year-old realist’s fingers consider stroking this-thingthat-isn’t Maman’s cheek, think better of it, return to the coffin’s edge. Ned turns his face up to his father. ‘Where’s the baby?’

The baby is in the kitchen, in the warmest spot by the fire. It is far too small for a cradle, so Cou-Cou emptied out Mirelle’s sewing box, padded it with hanks of wool and laid the child in there – if you can call this tiny, bright red, wrinkled scrap a child, with its eyes full of misery, wheezing for breath. The creased balloon of the stomach, the skin so thin you’d think you could see its organs; the butterfly flutter of the lungs. How can anything as fragile as this have killed her?

Ned kneels down beside this thing that is his brother. Extends a finger. Does stroke, this time, the skin of his brother’s forehead, furrowed like that of an ancient senator. The skin is the size a child is meant to be. His brother fits it not at all. ‘Was I like this?’ Ned asks, in a whisper. ‘When I was born?’

‘No. You were born kicking and screaming and waving your fists. So Maman said.’

‘But you weren’t there,’ Ned reminds him, seriously.

No, he was not. When Jack Fiskardo’s firstborn came into the world, his father was hundreds of miles away in Prague, and best not to enquire in too much detail why. Came back to Picardy almost on a whim, back to the Écu de France and to its landlord’s sister, opened the door to her chamber and walked in to find her standing there with an infant Ned cradled in her arms. The best and greatest surprise of his life. What, now, is he to make of that but? Is it a criticism? Or does it quietly contain the hope that maybe all babies start like this, that this trembling, wrinkled leveret might miraculously grow into its skin, become a proper baby brother, a changeling in reverse, instead of what it is now?

‘Ned, your mother never told a lie in her life. If that’s what she said, that’s what happened. That’s how you were.’

The baby shakes continuously, there in the box that looks destined to become its coffin too. As if with shock at finding itself here, but Cou-Cou maintains it is with cold. Hence the fireplace, hence the wool. When Mirelle’s belly began to round, they told Ned that her belly was rising so because a baby was like a new loaf, swelling and growing. Ned gives a sigh. His unasked question hangs above his head: If that’s how I was, why is this one like this?

‘Babies need cooking for nine months,’ his father tells him. ‘He only had seven.’

‘Why?’

‘It went wrong, Ned, that’s all. It just went wrong.’

He can still hear that scream from the garden. Out he had run, to find evidence of disaster everywhere – Mirelle’s basket dropped, flowers scattered all over the grass; Cou-Cou on her knees and his wife sprawled half on the path, half off it, her skirts dark with water and with blood. It just went wrong. No reason, no warning; the capriciousness of God. ‘This one, your brother – he was only half-cooked.’

He had raised Mirelle’s head and known at once how grave this was. The eye rolled sideways, her mouth, opening, closing, but no words emerging, and then that fiercest of clenchings of her hand upon his arm, the unshakeable grip that said, Help me. You must take charge. Everything has gone wrong but this is happening now. All he can recall, as warning, is that once or twice, as her belly grew, Mirelle had complained of dizziness when she rose from her chair.

His son’s small finger reaches out again. ‘Poor Demi-Cuit,’ says Ned.

It seems inevitable that Demi-Cuit will depart this world as rapidly as he had entered it, so the priest, Père Hubert, will come to the Écu to christen the child; then lead the cortège to the church to bury the mother. Père Hubert lets it be known that he will be doing this only in view of Mirelle’s goodness and her family’s great loss. He certainly won’t be doing it out of any consideration for her husband, that godless English, or half-English, or whatever the man is, who has never had any time for Père Hubert and made no secret of it, either.

Père Hubert arrives with his bottle of water and his little flask of oil; sets them up on a cloth on the table. Peers into the sewing box and seems pleased by what he sees.

Madame Bertin lifts Demi-Cuit out of the box, carefully, tenderly, carrying him on one hand, using the other to shield him. A spasm travels through the miniature body; as it does, Jack feels his heart contort. He has to lift his eyes away. Robert stands godfather, Cou-Cou, godmother. ‘And the name?’ Père Hubert asks.

The name. When Ned – Edouard – was born, Mirelle had named him after her and Robert’s father. This time around, the fact that a name will be needed seems to have escaped them all. ‘Perhaps another Jacques?’ Père Hubert suggests, offhandedly, seeming also to imply it will not be needed very long.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No, my son will have his own name. He will be James.’

The name – alien, yet close enough to his father’s to make no difference – is pronounced, with faint distaste. Water is dribbled onto the wrinkled forehead; the tiny limbs react. Then the oil. Demi-Cuit is laid back in his mother’s sewing box; his soul, if not his body, now secure and whole. Across the field the bell of St-Étienne-des-Champs begins to toll. Jack hears the carpenter returning, hears the man’s clogs out there on the kitchen floor. The coffin must be closed now. There will be the sound of nails and hammering. It must be carried to the bier. The bier must be wheeled to the church. They must enter the church, they must stand round the coffin. He must stand there, knowing Mirelle is in that box, not beside him. It feels endless. It seems impossible. It must be got through. This pain will never cease.

The bell is still being rung as they approach, six times for a woman (for a man it would have been twelve), and then, with the church full, they begin tolling it once for every year of her age. Jack counts them, he cannot help himself, all the way up to twenty-six, and it is as the echo of the twenty-sixth dies away, when there is no twenty-seventh and now never will be, that he feels himself begin to lose connection with everything about him – the villagers standing with bowed heads, and as they follow the coffin outside, the whispering of the trees, the half-stifled sobs, even the feel of Ned’s hand in his. Now it is the fact that this is coming to an end that is the worst thing in the world. He hears the earth spatter down upon the coffin – a handful from Robert, a handful from Cou-Cou – and in his head there is the image of something like a root-ball, thickly interwoven, and it is being torn asunder, ripped in two. Now it is his turn. They are all of them waiting. He lifts a handful of earth, and cannot do it. He cannot throw it into her grave. Instead he lets it dribble through his fingers and, as if his limbs were being moved by someone else entirely, walks away.

He walks around the church, away from everyone, into the shaded half of the churchyard, where the grass is left unscythed, where the dead have been lying long enough to have faded to almost nothing. This is where he was the first time he saw Mirelle, this is where he knelt, with his men around him; here at the mound that held Jean Fiskardo, here at his father’s grave.

You had better look after her, he tells his father, in his head. Will they know each other? Will you recognize her? The girl who waited on you, who was the last with whom you exchanged a living word?

Or almost the last. The last was of course the man sent to kill Jean Fiskardo, who poisoned him, who watched him die. Oh, the length of history, the chapters in this tale.

She’ll know you, for sure. All she’ll have to do is wait for a man who looks like me.

Ned has his mother’s eyes. Softly hazel; gentle of expression. Jean Fiskardo’s – icily pale, balefully glittering, they are his son’s alone.

‘Jacques?’

It’s Cou-Cou. Here she comes, holding her skirts away from the damp grass. She’s cup-size, is Cou-Cou, and even her sister-in-law’s funeral is an excuse to dress up, he sees, with a new way of arranging her hair on her forehead. ‘Jacques,’ she says again. For all the carefully arranged curls, there is a no-nonsense side to Cou-Cou. When she gives it expression, you see her father, Old Marin, in her: the peasant farmer with his gold hid up the chimney, under the floor; the man who never missed a bargain or a trick. There are no fists tighter; there are no souls plainer.

‘We all loved her,’ Cou-Cou says. ‘We have all lost her. We all have to learn to guide ourselves without her.’

It’s the first time he has ever heard Cou-Cou acknowledge Mirelle in such a way.

‘Your son needs you,’ she tells him. ‘Your sons. You cannot hide here.’

Back to the Écu. The neighbours have gathered outside: he hears their voices, the loudness of relief that mourners always have once a funeral is done. Robert is walking about with a jug; Madame Bertin, pink-cheeked, comes up to Jack, lays her head against his chest, squeezes his arm, walks unsteadily away. When he was in Germany, in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, a life lost would be celebrated with too much to drink then, as well. But Gustavus Adolphus, the king who ever hazarded himself too easily, he too is now numbered amongst the numberless, and his one-time captain, Jack Fiskardo – hard man, discoverer, stealer of fortunes and slayer of princes of the church – he is here, instead.

In the back parlour, where the coffin stood, there is food – waffles, cheeses, little cakes. He wonders how long it is since he ate. He thinks of going to see if Mirelle needs help in the kitchen, and then he remembers, and it is as if he has been speared.

He hears Ned in the garden, a gang of children with him, hears them asking his son about his new brother, hears Ned putting some too-eager questioner in his place. ‘No, you can’t see him,’ Ned is saying. His son’s tone is fierce. ‘You have to wait till he’s cooked.’

He wanders into the kitchen. Georges Artaud is there, Cou-Cou, Madame Bertin too, and the priest. The fire has been banked up, despite the warmth outside; the room is hot enough to make sweat prickle under Jack’s collar. There is a conversation under way: Madame Bertin, seated by the fire, has James once more in the crook of her arm, and is murmuring something to Cou-Cou about a wet-nurse, tomorrow, a wet-nurse; is dribbling sops from a spoon into the tiny open mouth. The spoonful dribbles out again.

‘Dommage,’ he hears the priest comment. ‘But a seven-month child. It is no doubt for the best.’ Père Hubert – you would almost call him jovial. His beard is trim, his eyes are eager; in public, and loudly, he likes to question his parishioners about their troubles, where plenty of others can hear. Despite being a dreadful shot, he likes to hunt as well, although Robert, having been out with him once (‘Never again,’ Robert had said), returned home convinced Père Hubert’s off-target aiming was deliberate; there was far too much enthusiasm for snatching the limping hare from the ground, pulling the fluttering bird up by its broken wing. His eyes have always put Jack in mind of a crab, ceaselessly sidling about. Now, those eyes have sidled up to him. ‘Ah! Fiskardo,’ Père Hubert exclaims, advancing. ‘Might we speak? The field?’

Georges Artaud attempts to interpose; Georges Artaud who knows le capitaine well enough to recognize the glacial chill in Jack’s eye: ‘Monsieur – Père Hubert, perhaps, if I might detain you a moment—’

Jack lifts his hand. ‘No, by all means, Monsieur Hubert. The field. Let us discuss.’

Out they go, into the empty parlour. He sees himself reflected in the window as they pass – unkempt, unshaven, as if he was coming back into camp; heart as black and hands as red, no doubt, as ever.

‘The field,’ Père Hubert is saying.

The field sits on the other side of the road. It is handkerchief-size, no more to it than a stand of chestnut trees. In the autumn Madame Bertin grinds the chestnuts to make flour; her hog roots for left-overs. By repute, at this time of year, village maidens take their lovers there, to lie beneath the trees in the darkness, breathing in the unmistakable scent of the flowers. ‘They smell like you,’ Mirelle had whispered once, as she and he lay hooked around each other, the smell of spunk wafting up from the sheets and in through the open window.

‘Indeed,’ Jack says now. ‘The field. What of it?’

‘It was always Mirelle’s grandmother’s wish that the land should come to the church.’

‘Was it so?’

‘Certainly. It is well known. For masses, for her soul.’

‘Odd, then, that she should have left the field and everything in it to her grand-daughter.’

Because you discuss such worldly matters, such disposals with your wife when she is with child. You discuss them in the same spirit as you would cross your fingers: to speak about the thing means it won’t happen. Apparently, not so.

‘An oversight,’ Père Hubert assures him. The eyes tick left, tick right, as if checking there is no-one near to contradict him. ‘It was always understood that Mirelle would follow her grandmother’s wishes.’

‘You must be mistaken, Monsieur. Mirelle’s stated wish, to me, was that the field should go to our good neighbour, Madame Bertin.’

‘To Madame Bertin?’ Père Hubert is so unprepared for this that he falls back a step.

‘To Madame Bertin. She makes good use of those trees already. Whereas you, Monsieur, as is also well known, seek only to cut them down for timber. Which is not about to happen.’

You can see the calculations taking place, the claws a-nipnip-nip. ‘If it is a matter of money—’ Père Hubert begins.

There was, at one time, a deal of talk in St-Étienne-des-Champs, regarding Jack Fiskardo and his money. When he first came back here; when the entire village sought to make sense of him by whatever means it could. Was he a deserter? Had he committed some crime? Why did he keep going to Amsterdam? Far from the easiest journey to make, even on a horse the size of M’sieu, yet le capitaine is there regularly, two or three times a year. What did he do there? And where did he get the money for the gifts he brought back with him? Did he have a fortune? If he did, how much of a one?

Jack Fiskardo could buy St-Étienne outright; still be wealthy, even then. Mirelle had never asked, he had never explained. It was part of another life, in which he was another man entirely; one who, curiously enough, was also dead.

‘It is not, Monsieur. Bad guess.’ A smile. ‘Are we done?’

It seems they are not. Père Hubert has his hand upon Jack’s arm, is gripping the sleeve. ‘There is precedent!’ he hisses. ‘I will go to the courts, I will make a case—’

Jack’s bark of laughter stops Père Hubert short. Instead he brings his face closer to Jack’s, lifts himself up to do so. ‘You will regret this. Who are you, to decide what happens here? You are un vaurien, un scélérat—’

A scoundrel. A scoundrel and a rogue. You’re not supposed to behave like this as a civilian, he knows, but is he a civilian any longer? When she who civilized him is gone?

‘No,’ says Jack. ‘I am this scoundrel, Monsieur.’ And he puts out his hand, hooks Père Hubert with it, under the jaw, lifts him off his feet and puts him against the wall.

The eyes bulge. The hands come up, clawing at his. Jack tightens his grip. He feels the priest’s windpipe, the rings of gristle. Père Hubert’s heels kick the wall. ‘In the army,’ Jack begins, ‘in Germany, someone would have done this to you years ago.’ He holds up his other hand, tightens it finger by finger into a fist, the knuckles like a battlement. ‘I am very angry,’ he says. ‘I am angry with God. I cannot get at him, but I can get my hands on you. Perhaps that will help sate me.’

‘Capitaine!’

He turns his head. There is Georges Artaud, in the doorway, there is Robert; there is Cou-Cou; staring, open-mouthed, from behind Cou-Cou’s skirts, there is Ned.

‘Capitaine, please,’ says Georges, coming forward. ‘You are not your proper self. Think of Mirelle. Think of your children. Come away.’

Anger like this – you have to break it. Pain is the thing you break it with. He drives the fist into the wall, beside Père Hubert’s head. Opens the hand around the throat. Père Hubert drops to the floor. Cou-Cou rushes forward. Ned is gone.

*

Robert sits him down in the kitchen, makes him put his swollen knuckles in a bowl of milk. ‘We know you loved her,’ says Robert, ‘but you could have fooled anyone else.’

Georges Artaud summons Robert away. Jack hears them talking: ‘… a man such as Père Hubert,’ Georges is saying. ‘There will be trouble, perhaps for you as well. Maybe le capitaine could make one of those trips of his. A little time away?’

He goes up to their room – or at least, to the room that had been theirs. There is the bed, freshly made, no doubt by Madame Bertin. Bit by bit, he finds himself thinking, bit by bit, my wife is being taken away. He surveys the bed for a moment, then he falls upon it, as one might upon an enemy, tearing it apart – the bolster, the pillows, the counterpane, the sheets. The mattress underneath appears pristine – Madame Bertin must have turned it. So he lifts it up, throws it from the frame, and there, that’s where Mirelle is hiding, that’s where she waits for him, in that darkening stain on its underside – her blood, her pain, her courage.

He wants to get her body from the churchyard. He wants to hold it close, to keep her safe.

There is something on the floor, beneath the bed. He fishes it out.

It is one of her caps, a panelled coif, long since lost, long forgotten. Under the dust it is embroidered with lines of yellow ribbon, flowers of blue. Forget-me-nots. He rubs his thumb over the threads, then on impulse lifts the cap to his face and there she is – the scent of her, her hair, her skin, in the cap’s linen panels even the shape of her head, and he feels himself buckling as he breathes her in, bent over this tiny shred of her. He can hear the sounds he’s making – keening, keening, an animal in a snare – but they are in his head only. In this world, he is silent.

In the thin light of early dawn, so early that even the hedgerows are quiet, Jack Fiskardo lifts himself from the bivouac he had made on the bedroom floor, goes down the corridor and climbs the creaking ladder to the Écu’s attic. Goes to the chest at the far wall, and lifts from it his long boots and his soldier’s buff-coat with that grinning death’s head painted on the back. Brings out his sword, hangs it over his head. Finally, there at the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a screw of paper, the little silver pendant of an up-reared wolf, one that still bears a musket ball embedded in its breast. He never wanted it near him while he was here, never wanted it near any of them – not Robert, not Cou-Cou, Mirelle least of all. This was his curse, not theirs.

Holding boots and sword under his arm, he tiptoes along the corridor again, to Ned’s room. Looks down at his son’s face: the forehead dampish, the eyelids rippling with dreams, the eyelashes still spiky from their last watering with tears. Tucks in beside the boy his mother’s cap. Then he goes down to the kitchen. There lies the baby, in his mother’s sewing box, wheezing and spluttering.