Agincourt

  Bernard Cornwell

  Agincourt

  Agincourt

  is for my granddaughter,

  Esme Cornwell,

  with love.

  Agincourt is one of the most instantly and vividly visualized of all epic passages in English history…. It is a victory of the weak over the strong, of the common soldier over the mounted knight, of resolution over bombast…. It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.

  Sir John Keegan, The Face of Battle

  …there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is none end of their corpses: they stumble upon their corpses.

  Nahum 3.3

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas…

  Part One

  Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian

  One

  The River Aisne swirled slow through a wide valley edged…

  Two

  The first Hook knew of the assault was the sound…

  Three

  Even in summer the hall of Calais Castle was chilly.

  Part Two

  Normandy

  Four

  Nick Hook could scarce believe the world held so many…

  Five

  It seemed to Hook that he never stopped digging in…

  Six

  The sow shuddered each time a gun-stone struck its sloping…

  Seven

  “Wake up, Nick!” It was Thomas Evelgold bellowing at him.

  Eight

  “You won’t die here,” Saint Crispinian said.

  Part Three

  To the River of Swords

  Nine

  There were to be no heavy wagons taken on the…

  Ten

  There was not one ford across the Somme, but two,…

  Part Four

  Saint Crispin’s Day

  Eleven

  Dawn was cold and gray. A few spatters of rain…

  Twelve

  The gun fired, belching smoke above the left flank of…

  Thirteen

  The Sire de Lanferelle spat curses. A man at his…

  Epilogue

  It was a November day, sky-bright and cold, filled with…

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bernard Cornwell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Prologue

  On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder.

  It was a cold day. There had been a hard frost overnight and the midday sun had failed to melt the white from the grass. There was no wind so the whole world was pale, frozen and still when Hook saw Tom Perrill in the sunken lane that led from the high woods to the mill pastures.

  Nick Hook, nineteen years old, moved like a ghost. He was a forester and even on a day when the slightest footfall could sound like cracking ice he moved silently. Now he went upwind of the sunken lane where Perrill had one of Lord Slayton’s draft horses harnessed to the felled trunk of an elm. Perrill was dragging the tree to the mill so he could make new blades for the water wheel. He was alone and that was unusual because Tom Perrill rarely went far from home without his brother or some other companion, and Hook had never seen Tom Perrill this far from the village without his bow slung on his shoulder.

  Nick Hook stopped at the edge of the trees in a place where holly bushes hid him. He was one hundred paces from Perrill, who was cursing because the ruts in the lane had frozen hard and the great elm trunk kept catching on the jagged track and the horse was balking. Perrill had beaten the animal bloody, but the whipping had not helped and Perrill was just standing now, switch in hand, swearing at the unhappy beast.

  Hook took an arrow from the bag hanging at his side and checked that it was the one he wanted. It was a broadhead, deep-tanged, with a blade designed to cut through a deer’s body, an arrow made to slash open arteries so that the animal would bleed to death if Hook missed the heart, though he rarely did miss. At eighteen years old he had won the three counties’ match, beating older archers famed across half England, and at one hundred paces he never missed.

  He laid the arrow across the bowstave. He was watching Perrill because he did not need to look at the arrow or the bow. His left thumb trapped the arrow, and his right hand slightly stretched the cord so that it engaged in the small horn-reinforced nock at the arrow’s feathered end. He raised the stave, his eyes still on the miller’s eldest son.

  He hauled back the cord with no apparent effort though most men who were not archers could not have pulled the bowstring halfway. He drew the cord all the way to his right ear.

  Perrill had turned to stare across the mill pastures where the river was a winding streak of silver under the winter-bare willows. He was wearing boots, breeches, a jerkin, and a deerskin coat and he had no idea that his death was a few heartbeats away.

  Hook released. It was a smooth release, the hemp cord leaving his thumb and two fingers without so much as a tremor.

  The arrow flew true. Hook tracked the gray feathers, watching as the steel-tipped tapered ash shaft sped toward Perrill’s heart. He had sharpened the wedge-shaped blade and knew it would slice through deerskin as if it were cobweb.

  Nick Hook hated the Perrill family, just as the Perrills hated the Hooks. The feud went back two generations, to when Tom Perrill’s grandfather had killed Hook’s grandfather in the village tavern by stabbing him through the eye with a poker. The old Lord Slayton had declared it a fair fight and refused to punish the miller, and ever since the Hooks had tried to get revenge.

  They never had. Hook’s father had been kicked to death in the yearly football match and no one had ever discovered who had killed him, though everyone knew it must have been the Perrills. The ball had been kicked into the rushes beyond the manor orchard and a dozen men had chased after it, but only eleven came out. The new Lord Slayton had laughed at the idea of calling the death murder. “If you hanged a man for killing in a game of football,” he had said, “then you’ll hang half England!”

  Hook’s father had been a shepherd. He left a pregnant widow and two sons, and the widow died within two months of her husband’s death as she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. She died on the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which was Nick Hook’s thirteenth birthday, and his grandmother said the coincidence proved that Nick was cursed. She tried to lift the curse with her own magic. She stabbed him with an arrow, driving the point deep into his thigh, then told him to kill a deer with the arrow and the curse would go away. Hook had poached one of Lord Slayton’s hinds, killing it with the bloodstained arrow, but the curse had remained. The Perrills lived and the feud went on. A fine apple tree in the garden of Hook’s grandmother had died, and she insisted it had been old mother Perrill who had blighted the fruit. “The Perrills always have been putrid turd-sucking bastards,” his grandmother said. She put the evil eye on Tom Perrill and on his younger brother, Robert, but old mother Perrill must have used a counter-spell because neither fell ill. The two goats that Hook kept on the common disappeared, and the village reckoned it had to be wolves, but Hook knew it was the Perrills. He killed their cow in revenge, but it was not the same as killing them. “It’s your job to kill them,” his grandmother insisted to Nick, but he had never found the opportunity. “May the devil make you spit shit,” she cursed him, “and then take you to hell.” She threw him from her home when he was sixteen. “Go and starve, you bastard,” she snarled. She was going mad by then and there was no arguing with her, so Nick Hook left home and might well have starved except that was the year he came first in t
he six villages’ competition, putting arrow after arrow into the distant mark.

  Lord Slayton made Nick a forester, which meant he had to keep his lordship’s table heavy with venison. “Better you kill them legally,” Lord Slayton had remarked, “than be hanged for poaching.”

  Now, on Saint Winebald’s Day, just before Christmas, Nick Hook watched his arrow fly toward Tom Perrill.

  It would kill, he knew it.

  The arrow flew true, dipping slightly between the high, frost-bright hedges. Tom Perrill had no idea it was coming. Nick Hook smiled.

  Then the arrow fluttered.

  A fledging had come loose, its glue and binding must have given way and the arrow veered leftward to slice down the horse’s flank and lodge in its shoulder. The horse whinnied, reared and lunged forward, jerking the great elm trunk loose from the frozen ruts.

  Tom Perrill turned and stared up at the high wood, then understood a second arrow could follow the first and so turned again and ran after the horse.

  Nick Hook had failed again. He was cursed.

  Lord Slayton slumped in his chair. He was in his forties, a bitter man who had been crippled at Shrewsbury by a sword thrust in the spine and so would never fight another battle. He stared sourly at Nick Hook. “Where were you on Saint Winebald’s Day?”

  “When was that, my lord?” Hook asked with apparent innocence.

  “Bastard,” Lord Slayton spat, and the steward struck Hook from behind with the bone handle of a horsewhip.

  “Don’t know which day that was, my lord,” Hook said stubbornly.

  “Two days ago,” Sir Martin said. He was Lord Slayton’s brother-in-law and priest to the manor and village. He was no more a knight than Hook was, but Lord Slayton insisted he was called “Sir” Martin in recognition of his high birth.

  “Oh!” Hook pretended a sudden enlightenment. “I was coppicing the ash under Beggar’s Hill, my lord.”

  “Liar,” Lord Slayton said flatly. William Snoball, steward and chief archer to his lordship, struck Hook again, slashing the whip’s butt hard across the back of the forester’s skull. Blood trickled down Hook’s scalp.

  “On my honor, lord,” Hook lied earnestly.

  “The honor of the Hook family,” Lord Slayton said drily before looking at Hook’s younger brother, Michael, who was seventeen. “Where were you?”

  “I was thatching the church porch, my lord,” Michael said.

  “He was,” Sir Martin confirmed. The priest, lanky and gangling in his stained black robe, bestowed a grimace that was supposed to be a smile on Nick Hook’s younger brother. Everyone liked Michael. Even the Perrills seemed to exempt him from the hatred they felt for the rest of the Hook tribe. Michael was fair while his brother was dark, and his disposition was sunny while Nick Hook was saturnine.

  The Perrill brothers stood next to the Hook brothers. Thomas and Robert were tall, thin and loose-jointed with deep sunk eyes, long noses, and jutting chins. Their resemblance to Sir Martin the priest was unmistakable and the village, with the deference due to a gentry-born churchman, accepted the pretense that they were the miller’s sons while still treating them with respect. The Perrill family had unspoken privileges because everyone understood that the brothers could call on Sir Martin’s help whenever they felt threatened.

  And Tom Perrill had not just been threatened, he had almost been killed. The gray-fledged arrow had missed him by a hand’s breadth and that arrow now lay on the table in the manor hall. Lord Slayton pointed at the arrow and nodded to his steward who crossed to the table. “It’s not one of ours, my lord,” William Snoball said after examining the arrow.

  “The gray feathers, you mean?” Lord Slayton asked.

  “No one near here uses gray-goose,” Snoball said reluctantly, with a churlish glance at Nick Hook, “not for fledging. Not for anything!”

  Lord Slayton gazed at Nick Hook. He knew the truth. Everyone in the hall knew the truth, except perhaps Michael who was a trusting soul. “Whip him,” Sir Martin suggested.

  Hook stared at the tapestry hanging beneath the hall’s gallery. It showed a hunter thrusting a spear into a boar’s guts. A woman, wearing nothing but a wisp of translucent cloth, was watching the hunter, who was dressed in a loincloth and a helmet. The oak beams supporting the gallery had been turned black by a hundred years of smoke.

  “Whip him,” the priest said again, “or cut off his ears.”

  Hook lowered his eyes to look at Lord Slayton and wondered, for the thousandth time, whether he was looking at his own father. Hook had the strong-boned Slayton face, the same heavy forehead, the same wide mouth, the same black hair, and the same dark eyes. He had the same height, the same bodily strength that had been his lordship’s before the rebel sword had twisted in his back and forced him to use the leather-padded crutches leaning on his chair. His lordship returned the gaze, betraying nothing. “This feud will end,” he finally said, still staring at Hook. “You understand me? There will be no more killing.” He pointed at Hook. “If any of the Perrill family dies, Hook, then I will kill you and your brother. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And if a Hook dies,” his lordship turned his gaze on Tom Perrill, “then you and your brother will hang from the oak.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Perrill said.

  “Murder would need to be proven,” Sir Martin interjected. He spoke suddenly, his voice indignant. The gangling priest often seemed to be living in another world, his thoughts far away, then he would jerk his attention back to wherever he was and his words would blurt out as if catching up with lost time. “Proven,” he said again, “proven.”

  “No!” Lord Slayton contradicted his brother-in-law, and to emphasize it he slapped the wooden arm of his chair. “If any one of you four dies I’ll hang the rest of you! I don’t care! If one of you slips into the mill’s leet and drowns I’ll call it murder. You understand me? I will not have this feud one moment longer!”

  “There’ll be no murder, my lord,” Tom Perrill said humbly.

  Lord Slayton looked back to Hook, waiting for the same assurance, but Nick Hook said nothing. “A whipping will teach him obedience, my lord,” Snoball suggested.

  “He’s been whipped!” Lord Slayton said. “When was the last time, Hook?”

  “Last Michaelmas, my lord.”

  “And what did you learn from that?”

  “That Master Snoball’s arm is weakening, lord,” Hook said.

  A stifled snigger made Hook look upward to see her ladyship was watching from the shadows of the gallery. She was childless. Her brother, the priest, whelped one bastard after another, while Lady Slayton was bitter and barren. Hook knew she had secretly visited his grandmother in search of a remedy, but for once the old woman’s sorcery had failed to produce a baby.

  Snoball had growled angrily at Hook’s impudence, but Lord Slayton had betrayed his amusement with a sudden grin. “Out!” he commanded now, “all of you! Get out, except for you, Hook. You stay.”

  Lady Slayton watched as the men left the hall, then turned and vanished into whatever chamber lay beyond the gallery. Her husband stared at Nick Hook without speaking until, at last, he gestured at the gray-feathered arrow on the oak table. “Where did you get it, Hook?”

  “Never seen it before, my lord.”

  “You’re a liar, Hook. You’re a liar, a thief, a rogue, and a bastard, and I’ve no doubt you’re a murderer too. Snoball’s right. I should whip you till your bones are bare. Or maybe I should just hang you. That would make the world a better place, a Hookless world.”

  Hook said nothing. He just looked at Lord Slayton. A log cracked in the fire, showering sparks.

  “But you’re also the best goddamned archer I’ve ever seen,” Lord Slayton went on grudgingly. “Give me the arrow.”

  Hook fetched the gray-fledged arrow and gave it to his lordship. “The fledging came loose in flight?” Lord Slayton asked.

  “Looks like it, my lord.”

 
“You’re not an arrow-maker, are you, Hook?”

  “Well I make them, lord, but not as well as I should. I can’t get the shafts to taper properly.”

  “You need a good drawknife for that,” Lord Slayton said, tugging at the fledging. “So where did you get the arrow,” he asked, “from a poacher?”

  “I killed one last week, lord,” Hook said carefully.

  “You’re not supposed to kill them, Hook, you’re supposed to bring them to the manor court so I can kill them.”

  “Bastard had shot a hind in the Thrush Wood,” Hook explained, “and he ran away so I put a broadhead in his back and buried him up beyond Cassell’s Hill.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A vagabond, my lord. I reckon he was just wandering through, and he didn’t have anything on him except his bow.”

  “A bow and a bag filled with gray-fledged arrows,” his lordship said. “You’re lucky the horse didn’t die. I’d have hung you for that.”

  “Caesar was barely scratched, my lord,” Hook said dismissively, “nothing but a tear in his hide.”

  “And how would you know if you weren’t there?”

  “I hear things in the village, my lord,” Hook said.

  “I hear things too, Hook,” Lord Slayton said, “and you’re to leave the Perrills alone! You hear me? Leave them alone!”

  Hook did not believe in much, but he had somehow persuaded himself that the curse that lay on his life would be lifted if only he could kill the Perrills. He was not quite sure what the curse was, unless it was the uncomfortable suspicion that life must hold more than the manor offered. Yet when he thought of escaping Lord Slayton’s service he was assailed by a gloomy foreboding that some unseen and incomprehensible disaster awaited him. That was the tenuous shape of the curse and he did not know how to lift it other than by murder, but nevertheless he nodded obediently. “I hear you, my lord.”

  “You hear and you obey,” his lordship said. He tossed the arrow onto the fire where it lay for a moment, then burst into bright flame. A waste of a good broadhead, Hook thought. “Sir Martin doesn’t like you, Hook,” Lord Slayton said in a lower voice. He rolled his eyes upward and Hook understood that his lordship was asking whether his wife was still in the gallery. Hook gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. “You know why he hates you?” his lordship asked.