Essex Dogs: A Novel

by Dan Jones

Genres: Medieval; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling historian makes his historical fiction debut with an explosive novel set during the Hundred Years' War.

July 1346. Ten men land on the beaches of Normandy. They call themselves the Essex Dogs: an unruly platoon of archers and men-at-arms led by a battle-scarred captain whose best days are behind him. The fight for the throne of the largest kingdom in Western Europe has begun.
 
Heading ever deeper into enemy territory toward Crécy, this band of brothers knows they are off to fight a battle that will forge nations, and shape the very fabric of human lives. But first they must survive a bloody war in which rules are abandoned and chivalry itself is slaughtered.
 
Rooted in historical accuracy and told through an unforgettable cast, Essex Dogs delivers the stark reality of medieval war on the ground – and shines a light on the fighters and ordinary people caught in the storm.

Release date: February 14, 2023

Publisher: Viking

Print pages: 460

Sample

1

This is to let you know that on 12 July we landed safely at a port in Normandy called La Hougue, near Barfleur . . . many men at arms at once landed . . . On a number of occasions our handful of men defeated large numbers of the enemy . . .

Letter from the chancellor of St Paul’s to friends in London

‘Christ’s bones, wake up!’

‘Loveday’ FitzTalbot jerked his head up. Father had dug him in the ribs with a sharp elbow. Despite the cold saltwater spray that whipped his face, the rocking of the landing craft had lulled him into a moment of sleep.

He had dreamed he was at home.

But now his eyes were open again, he saw that he was not. They were still here. Out at sea. As far from home as they had ever been. Getting further from it every second.

There were ten of them crammed into the little pinnace: himself at the steerboard, Millstone, Scotsman and Pismire further forwards, the priest they called Father beside him at the stern and the archers Tebbe, Romford and Thorp in between them.

Two more archers, Welsh brothers who had been added to the company on the eve of their departure from Portsmouth aboard the cog Saintmarie, were pulling the oars.

Loveday scanned the horizon. Normandy. France. As far as he could recall, only he and the Scot had ever been out of English waters. And neither of them knew the coast that loomed half a mile distant, darkest grey in the dawn. What was more, their orders aboard the Saintmarie, handed down from Sir Robert le Straunge, were troublingly vague. They had only, Sir Robert had said, to storm up the beach and cut the hairy bollocks off any Frenchman who stood in their way.

When Loveday had asked what Sir Robert – and the great lords and the king above him – knew as to how many Frenchmen might be minding the beach, with crossbows cocked and lances couched and their bollocks unsevered and hoping to keep them so, Sir Robert had waved airily at him and told him there would be plenty enough to make good sport. He said he had this directly from the Marshal of the Army, Lord Warwick, who had it from King Edward himself.

Noble men. Knightly men. Men who knew best.

If I had wanted good sport, thought Loveday, I would have stayed home in Essex, playing dice in the inn near Colchester and paying a penny to lay my head of a night between the thighs of Gilda, the alewife’s girl.

But he had held his peace with Sir Robert. The man was a fool, but he was the fool who had recruited them for this campaign. Who would pay their wages for the next forty days. The Dogs hired their sword- and bow-arms to anyone who paid – in any sort of activity where brute force and sharp steel were needed. That summer the business was war. Sir Robert’s recruiting agents had promised he was a man who paid on time, and who did not interfere too much. Long experience told Loveday other paymasters were not so easy-going.

So here was he: forty-three summers old, still fit and strong, but grey at his temples, with fat settling around his middle and age creeping into his bones. And here was his company: the Essex Dogs, men called them. Some of them being from Essex. All of them having sharp teeth. Packed into a tiny pinnace, heading towards a French beach at dawn.

The king’s great invasion of France – a thousand ships and fifteen thousand fighting men aboard them – was starting.

The Essex Dogs were at the front of it. And Loveday had one wish. The same as every time.

To come home with everyone alive and paid.

At the prow of the boat, the thick-necked stonemason Gilbert ‘Millstone’ Attecliffe was spewing into the sea. Seasickness, rather than apprehension, thought Loveday, for Millstone had little fear in him – too little, at times. He had known Millstone seven years. Seven years since the heavy-handed, softly spoken Kentishman had cracked the skull of a foreman on the floor of Rochester Cathedral to settle a dispute about the construction of the new spire, and quit masonry for freebooting and fighting.

In that time he had never known Millstone use an intemperate word; nor had he ever seen him take a backward step – an attitude that scared Loveday sometimes.

But this was the least of his worries now. As the Welshmen hauled the oars and Loveday tried to position the bow of the landing craft to ride the tide in to the beach, he could feel a strong current was pulling them hard north, towards the highest point on the bluff.

If I were organizing the defence, that’s where I’d put the crossbowmen.

Loveday called to his men to keep their heads low and their eyes on the shore. At the same time, he tried to read the waves breaking ahead, that he might sense when the water would be shallow enough for them to leap overboard, and drag the pinnace up the sands. In the half-dozen other landing craft that were struggling nearby with the same current, he guessed other captains were wondering the same thing.

Loveday’s mouth was dry.

He looked behind him, back to the pregnant hulk of the Saintmarie and the scores of other cogs that had thrown down their anchors around it. In their bellies, horses kept tethered for two days and nights would now be stamping and snorting. Knights and men-at-arms turning on their straw mattresses. Archers and infantry lying cold and aching on the damp deck.

Loveday pulled the stopper from his leather canteen and took a long tug of ale. It was heavily spiced and already close to spoiling. He belched and tasted sage. He passed the canteen to Father and, summoning more courage than he felt he possessed, he shouted to the Dogs the war cry he had heard from the Spaniard he met drinking a campaign’s pay away in London many years before, a swarthy man who had fought the Saracens and bore a long scar from his hairline to chin to prove it.

‘Desperta ferro!’

Awake, iron!

Scarcely had the words left his mouth than a volley of crossbow bolts sheared the air. A bonfire went up on the bluff to their right. And Loveday heard the cries of Frenchmen above them. Then they appeared – perhaps two companies, maybe more, waving crossbows and hooting. One was baring his arse in their direction, in the Scottish style.

Now the boat was barely a hundred feet from the sands. Loveday roared to the Welshmen to pull for their lives.

The bigger of the two nodded, muttering something in his own language, and they bent their backs. The boat lurched in the water, then sprang forwards like a mastiff unleashed.

As his crew scrambled for iron helms and leather caps, to his left Loveday heard sharp yells of fear and distress. The nearest craft to them had run into a rock, hidden somewhere below the surface. The company – a mixture of men-at-arms and archers – was leaping into the water. He saw a dozen men dive from the boat, which sank like a porpoise diving for squid. Only four surfaced – all archers, who beat the water with their arms, thrashing for the shore. The rest, Loveday guessed, had never learned to swim, or else had been pinned to the seabed by the weight of their packs and armour.

As that craft and its crew foundered, a volley of huge stones came flying down from the clifftop. Millstone yelled from the prow: ‘Catapults!’ Before the word was out of his mouth, the Dogs saw one of the archers struggling in the water hit directly by a lump of stone the size of an anvil. His skull collapsed. The seawater around him turned dark.

More crossbow shot flew across them – two bolts cracked into the side of the pinnace and another fizzed so close to Loveday’s nose that he felt the air move. He tried to calm his breath. Remind himself he had been under bombardment before and lived. But even in the cold, he could feel sweat trickling down his spine.

In front of him, Tebbe, Romford and Thorp were trying to stand and nock arrows to shoot back. Loveday bellowed at them to stay low. Tebbe ducked down again, and the Scot leapt back, putting his giant hands on Romford and Thorp’s shoulders and forcing them prone.

Still the Welshmen at the oars pulled and pulled, and then, at last, the boat rose high on a breaking wave and fell with a thump on to hard sand. The impact half winded Loveday, but he heard Pismire shouting from the bow, screaming at the Dogs to get out and drag the boat up the beach.

Then, as if lifted by the hand of the Lord, Loveday was up, grabbing his sword and heaving himself over the side of the pinnace, into the saltwater, losing his breath for a second time as the cold hit him and his clothes became heavy. Freezing wool clinging to his thighs. His leather overshirt like a coat of mail. But he found his feet, and started bawling orders. Millstone and Scot were behind the pinnace, pushing from the stern as the three archers dragged at the bow – all five of them heaving in unison, dropping to the shallows as each new wave of bolts and stones rained down from the clifftop above.

Fifty yards, away at the foot of the steepest part of the bluff, lay the overturned and rotting shell of an old fishing boat, its broken ribs glistening like a whale carcass.

‘Cover – get to the wreck!’ Loveday shouted to Pismire and Father. The three of them bolted up the beach, their heads hunkered low into their shoulders. The priest’s rough grey cassock was soaked and dragged in the sand as he ran. They slid behind the stinking planks of the dead boat and lay on the sand, panting. They were so tight now to the bluff that the missiles from above were flying over their heads and the other boats making the same landing.

Loveday turned on to his elbows. He took a moment to wipe seawater from his stinging eyes. He spat out blood, and ran his tongue around his mouth, feeling for his teeth. They were all there. He reckoned he must have bitten his cheek.

He returned his focus to the beach.

Despite his earlier misgivings, he saw the current had dragged them so far along the sands that they had ended up with the shortest run to cover once they landed. The three archers, helped by Millstone and the Scot, had beached the pinnace and were sheltered behind it, waiting to time their run to the cliffside. The Welshmen were behind a small outcrop of rocks a short distance away. Loveday nodded at the taller, blond one, whose name was Lyntyn.

The nod was returned.

One by one, Millstone, Scot, Tebbe, Romford and Thorp all scampered – half running, half crawling, apewise – from the pinnace to the wreck. Loveday checked them all in. The mantra he had learned from their old leader, the man they had called the Captain, had stuck with him: Bury your dead. Leave no living man behind.

The Dogs were all there. They spat and cursed and checked themselves for damage. Loveday watched a man-at-arms from some other company running up the beach. He was hit with two bolts – one in his side and another through his neck. Blood spurted and the man fell to his knees, eyes wide and disbelieving, before a third bolt from some sharp shot above them flew into his face through his right cheek. He fell sideways, lay on the sand and did not get up.

‘Christ spare his soul,’ said Tebbe, tall and spare, the lankiest of the three English archers, who wore his hair long at the neck, woven in a tight plait that reached his mid-back.

‘Christ will know his own,’ said Father. He swigged deeply from Loveday’s flask, which he had carried from the landing craft. He craned his neck and looked towards the top of the cliff, where the crossbows and catapults were embedded. Took another swig. Wiped his mouth with his hand.

‘Let’s get up there and kill those fucking Frenchmen.’

They lay on their fronts and surveyed the land’s lie. Loveday scrambled next to Millstone, Pismire and the Scot, his three most experienced men.

Pismire pointed out a steep path cut into the bluff, a hundred paces from the wreck. ‘The way up’s there,’ he said, pointing to the clifftop.

Not for the first time, Loveday was grateful for Pismire’s sharp eye amid the frenzy of a fight. He nodded. ‘Aye. How shall we play this?’

‘Keep it simple,’ said Pismire. ‘We creep behind them, cut their throats, and stick their crossbows up their arses, stirrup-end first.’

Loveday looked at the other two. The Scot nodded. Millstone shrugged. On the other side of him, Father was jabbing his dagger into the dirty sand in excitement.

From the beach came a thunderous crash. Another torrent of rocks hurled from the clifftop hit a boat being hauled out of the surf, scattering the archers dragging it. One lad, no more than fifteen summers on him, had his leg shattered. He collapsed, screeching. White blades of bone poked through his pink flesh. The lad writhed and cursed. His fellows hid behind their half-beached boat and trembled.

Loveday took a deep breath. He gripped Pismire by the arm and spoke to him clearly.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We do it. But let’s see what’s up there first. Go with Scotsman. Take Tebbe and Thorp. See how many are there. If you can make them hop a little, do it. But if not, send one man back and call for support. Then wait for the rest of us.’

Pismire nodded assent. Loveday looked around the company. Made a calculation. ‘Take Father, too.’

Father took one last swig of Loveday’s flask and tossed it back. He grinned, all brown teeth and bloodlust.

Pismire raised an eyebrow to Loveday. He had trusted Father, once. In recent years his faith had waned. He looked at the old priest. ‘You gawp like the hell-mouth,’ he said.

‘To mind you of your sins,’ said Father.

Tebbe and Thorp checked their arrow bags. The youngest archer, Romford, tugged Loveday’s sleeve. ‘I’ll go too,’ he said.

‘You stay here, boy,’ Loveday told him. ‘I need you. The French may come at us down the beach. We need at least one bowman for cover.’

Romford pouted, peevish. But he did not complain.

On the beach, the lad with the shattered leg was still screaming.

Loveday turned away from the sound and nodded at Pismire. ‘Godspeed,’ he said. ‘And be sure you all come back. Remember what the Captain—’

Pismire rolled his eyes. He did not care to be reminded of the Captain any more than he cared to look after Father. ‘Let’s go,’ he said to Scotsman, Father, Tebbe and Thorp. The five men waited for a gap in the barrage from the clifftop; then they set out at a low sprint along the foot of the bluff towards the little path.

Loveday, Millstone and Romford watched them go. Loveday ran his hand over his head, squeezing water out of his thin, straggly hair. He did the same for his beard. He looked over to the rocks where the Welshmen had been taking cover.

The brothers were no longer anywhere to be seen.

---

Pismire led the group up the steep path. They crawled on their bellies like snakes, using the cover of the long grass. For Pismire, it was easy to stay concealed. Short, compact and wiry, with dark hair cropped close to his head, he was the smallest of the Dogs, having barely grown in height since his twelfth nameday.

The children in the village had given him his nickname after their word for the tiny, biting ants which used to plague them when they played in the long fields on saints’ days. In temper and size he was just like the tiny creatures: you would scarcely notice him – until he sunk his sharp jaws into you.

They neared the top of the path. It became clear that Pismire’s guess was right. The sandy, scrubby track had carried them around to the top of the bluff. They stayed low. But by raising their heads a little, they were able to survey the land as it stretched out all around them.

Yet when they took it all in, they found it hard to believe what they saw. Pismire had been sure from the barrage of missiles and bolts which the first wave of landing craft had suffered that there would be a large encampment of defenders wearing King Philippe of France’s livery of bright blue and gold fleurs-de-lis: knights couching their lances, men-at-arms brandishing swords and ranks of crossbowmen positioned to shoot down whoever was foolish enough to do as they had and pop their heads above the rise.

But mostly what they spied was empty fields. The only defenders visible were the company at the high point, some three hundred paces to their right, who were operating three small catapults and a score of crossbows. They were lightly armoured: not one of them wearing thick metal plate. They were dressed almost exactly like the Dogs: in coats of hardwearing cloth or leather padded with horsehair, and, here and there, a few pieces of mail. A couple of crossbowmen wore simple, open-faced helmets.

They had the advantage of position, realized Pismire. But there were barely two dozen of them, all poorly prepared to fight at anything but long range.

Pismire looked at the Scot. The Scot looked back at him. They had fought together long enough to know that they were thinking the same thing.

‘Let’s make them dance,’ said the Scot. They glanced behind them. Father was giggling to himself and thrusting his hips into the coarse sand of the pathway. Tebbe and Thorp were awaiting instructions.

Pismire silently motioned them forwards, spotting a route between clumps of thorny bushes covered in tiny yellow flowers, which protected deep undulations in the clifftop. He sent the archers right, hugging the line of the cliff. Then he, the Scot and Father crept left, inland, to the path along which the Frenchmen had arrived; where the grass lay flattened from the tramp of feet and the drag of the trebuchets.

They hunkered in a hollow. Pismire watched Tebbe and Thorp slip into their own position. He paused a few moments, counting his breaths. Shrieks rose from the beach below – men’s cries sounding like angry gulls.

The lightest of rains had started to fall. After the scouring spray of the sea it felt warm and refreshing. The tiny droplets scattered the rising sun’s light, creating pinpricks of bright colour in the air.

Pismire waved to the archers. Then he watched in satisfaction as they began to shoot.

Tebbe and Thorp had grown up in villages on Foulness Island off the Essex coast, where mists and sea-raids and biting easterly winds bred men tough and where every boy grew up with a bow in his hand.

Now, protected by the landscape and their position, they were in their element. Turn by turn they stood, nocked, drew, sighted and shot – smoothly and at ghostly speed.

They aimed first for the men hauling the catapults. Tebbe shot first, and his arrow sailed a handspan high, whistling above the Frenchman’s head. But as he flattened himself Thorp was sighting, using Tebbe’s missed shot as a marker. He sent his first arrow straight into the man’s chest. The man flew backwards as though he had been kicked in the heart by a mule. He lay on the ground, his legs twitching helplessly.

Thorp ducked, and Tebbe stood, nocked and shot again. The French company were staring around them in panic, trying to locate the shooters’ position, but the Essexmen were too fast. Tebbe took a second catapult-operator, the arrow bursting his eyeball and burying itself deep inside his head.

Two down, thought Pismire. Now the dance begins.

By the time Thorp and Tebbe had taken their next two shots, missing twice before both hitting the same crossbowman in the thigh and gut, the French were in a frenzy. Their beachward barrage of bolts and stones had ceased and they were scrambling for cover.

One crossbowman took cover behind a trebuchet. Tebbe watched him load his bow, then waited patiently for him to peer around the wooden frame to line up a shot. In the brief moment that he steadied himself and aimed, Tebbe shot two arrows in quick succession. The second split the man’s breastbone, and he went down with a moan.

Thorp stood straight away and also shot twice. He took one Frenchman through the throat as the man flailed around looking for cover. The second arrow glanced off another crossbowman’s helmet.

The French were screaming at one another.

Pismire, the Scot and Father exchanged smiles.

Any moment now—

The first to break and run was a young crossbowman with lank hair and a few patches of downy fluff here and there on his cheeks. He hurtled away from the cliff-edge, throwing his weapon away in terror as he ran.

Pismire tapped the Scot on the shoulder.

The boy hurtled towards them. The huge Scotsman drew his legs beneath his body, crouched and coiled like a dog baiting a bear.

The boy never saw him coming. As he ran past, the Scot sprang, transferring all his weight through his right shoulder and into the boy’s ribs. He knocked him sideways, and in one clean motion, rose, turned the boy face down on the ground, knelt on his back, crooked his arm around the boy’s face and leaned back.

The boy’s neck snapped. His body jerked and flapped like a fish. The Scot stood up, no thought now for cover, and roared.

Three more Frenchman, also running from Tebbe and Thorp’s arrows, paused. They looked at the Scot, then at one another, then scattered in three directions, running pell-mell across the clifftop and trying to escape the vast bulk of the flame-haired monster before them.

Pismire leapt up and gave chase. He careered across the uneven sandy grassland, gaining steadily on a middle-aged man. The man half turned with a hand out to try and fend Pismire off, but Pismire jumped at him, wrestled him to the ground, pulled his dagger and stabbed the man four or five times in the chest. He stood, sucking for air, and looked around. The Scot was clubbing another Frenchman in the face with his fists.

Further off, Father had found the body of a crossbowman felled by an arrow through the stomach. He was bending the arrow backwards and forwards, and laughing maniacally at the man’s screams.

Tebbe and Thorp were continuing to shoot. Thorp sent one man skittering across the hilltop with an arrowhead planted in his buttocks. Tebbe lodged an arrow in another man’s spine, and watched, impressed, as he went down, his legs suddenly useless beneath him.

Pismire noticed too that arrows were flying at the Frenchmen from another direction. At the top of the path, the Welsh brothers who had rowed them to shore had reappeared. They stood side by side, silently loosing arrows at the French as they fled, impassive as if they were shooting ducks on a millpond.

Pismire sank to his haunches and allowed himself a smile. The archers could finish this job. He felt the heavy tramp of the Scot’s feet as the big man approached.

‘Five men against two dozen,’ said the Scot. ‘When did we ever have it this easy?’

Pismire nodded. ‘But where are the rest?’ he said.

The Scotsman shrugged. He had blood smeared on his face, and some of it was dripping, mixed pink with rainwater and sweat, from the tips of his ginger beard.

‘Maybe there is no rest,’ he said.

Leaving the archers and Father to their sport, the two men walked back to the top of the path that led up from the beach. As they looked across the sand, they saw Loveday, Millstone and Romford gathering driftwood for a fire.

Half a mile out to sea, the English flotilla was swelling: a huge, creaking mass of cogs, hulks, horse-transports and smaller vessels.

A rainbow of heraldic flags and pennons fluttered above them, brightening the flat grey of the morning sky. And from their direction, a galley pulled by twelve sets of oars was now sharking towards the shore, the royal arms of lions and fleurs-de-lis quartered fluttering above it.

The Dogs stood and watched it, breathing heavily, steam rising from their heads.

‘King Edward’s boat,’ said Pismire. ‘Our king has missed all the fun.’

2

When [the English fleet] was drawn up and anchored on the shore, the king came off his ship. But as his foot touched the ground, he stumbled and fell so heavily that the blood gushed from his nose . . . [He said:] ‘It’s a very good sign for me. It shows that this land is longing to embrace me.’

Chronicles of Jean Froissart

The Dogs made camp on the beach. Loveday watched his men work. The three English archers and the Scot were unloading the landing craft while Millstone and Father put up a makeshift windbreak of oilskins and oars. Once it was up, they sat in its lee, stretching their legs around a driftwood fire and trying to dry their sodden clothes. The silent Welshmen made their own fire a few yards away. The flames from both fires gave off a pleasant, salty smoke. It tickled the back of Loveday’s throat.

Settled for a moment, Loveday pulled from his pack the tiny figure he was carving from a piece of oxbone. It was a craft he’d learned as a child, and he liked to practise it for good fortune, and to keep up his blade skills. Over the years he had made hundreds of these figures. He usually gave them away.

He noticed the youngest archer, Romford, watching him work.

‘Who is it?’ Romford said.

Loveday smiled: the lad had a true archer’s eyesight. The carving was no bigger than his thumb, yet through the fire-smoke the boy had seen it was a figure.

‘It’s a saint,’ he said. ‘A woman. I think. Maybe St Martha.’

‘Who’s she?’

Loveday shrugged. ‘She did something for Christ. I can’t remember what. I just like to carve. It’s a habit.’

Romford nodded, as though he understood.

The tide was now a long way out. The receding waters exposed ridged sand and shallow pools, which gleamed like polished glass in the afternoon sun. Where men had fallen on their fight to take the beach, there were now dark patches. The bodies had been hauled away, feet first, to be blessed by priests and buried by their fellow soldiers. Loveday remembered the Dogs he had put in the ground over the years. ‘No-Arms’ Peter with his shock of white hair. Garvie. Wiseman the Jew.

And he remembered the one who had gone unburied. The Captain.

He shook the thoughts and the faces out of his mind. He knew the other Dogs considered it unlucky to speak of their dead. He turned his attention back to the beach.

Out at sea, hundreds of little craft were ferrying back and forth between the sand and the cogs. Rowers heaved in the surf. They unloaded seasick troops – knights and men-at-arms, Welsh archers and northern spearmen, and crowds of ordinary footsoldiers – peasants carrying weapons of all sorts: short swords and daggers, mallets and clubs, axes and mowing scythes. On the horizon more large transports were coming into view. The whole of England seemed to be decamping to the long, muddy sands. Hour by hour the beach was filling up with curved longbows made of ash, hazel, elm and yew, crates of arrows and spare pieces of armour, long coils of rope and iron chain, barrels of grain, flour, pork, salt fish and ale. Hundreds of horses, released from their days at sea, whinnied and cantered around. Herdsmen and kitchen porters brought live beasts ashore for the royal and noble kitchens: inside wooden cages chickens cackled and geese honked. Pigs tried to flee the boys minding them, who swore and beat their hairy flanks with sticks.

Most of all though, the beach was filling up with men. Hundreds, thousands of men, with accents and dialects from every corner of England and Wales. Some dragged packs; others travelled empty-handed as though they had just left their village in search of a lost sheep. Some were fresh-faced and full of wonder at the unimaginable fact of setting foot in another kingdom. Far more wore the rough, hard-bitten expressions of travelling, brawling men. Men like the Dogs, who made their way in life with their fists, wits and weapons. Sometimes robbing, sometimes fighting kings’ wars.

Always looking for a job. Always spoiling for a fight.

‘They’re having a damn sight easier time landing than we did,’ said Pismire, following Loveday’s gaze around the beach, and prodding the fire’s glowing coals with a stick.

‘Ah, shut up – you enjoyed it,’ said the Scot, running his fingers through his hair and beard and teasing out little scabs of congealed filth.

Pismire grunted. ‘Maybe I did. I’m not bellyaching. In fact, if this is how it’s going to be, it’s fine with me,’ he said. ‘After tonight we’re getting paid to be here for thirty-eight more days. I’d rather spend them winning easy fights than hard ones.’ No one among the Dogs was more exact about counting down the days of a contract than Pismire.

Father leered. ‘The French fuckers don’t want to stand and fight. They’ve scuttled off to hide their coin and their daughters,’ he said. ‘Let them try. We’ll sniff them out.’ He put two fingers to his lips. Stuck his tongue out between them.

Loveday caught Millstone’s eye. Millstone shook his head and stared into the flames. He disliked this kind of talk. Loveday understood: he knew Father was becoming a menace. There was a time when the wayward priest had been one of their best men. Fifteen summers ago, when he had abandoned a parish ruined by famine and corrupt bishops, and taken to a life of ministering to the Essex Dogs and occasionally helping with their work, he had been tough, clever and alert. Recently though, age and ale had got into his heart and gnarled it. Now he often seemed dangerous to anyone around him, friends and enemies alike.

Yet he was one of them. And to Loveday, that mattered above all other things.

Feeling the mood tighten, Loveday changed the subject and spoke to the whole crew. ‘Anyway. At least we didn’t fall on our faces in the sand.’

Earlier in the day the Dogs had watched King Edward and his commanders go through their own beaching ritual. The galley that brought ashore the king and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, had been sleek and fast, rowed by thickset oarsmen in royal livery. But there had been a moment of farce when Edward tried to wade through the shallows on to the land he claimed.

A large breaker had swelled behind him, and the king had lost his footing in the shingle, falling in a heap. Royal knights had quickly hauled him up. The prince had stood back, as if amused. It had been the talk of the beach ever since.

‘Can you believe the silly fucker came up with a bloody nose?’ the Scot muttered. ‘Feels like an omen, you ask me.’

‘Thank Christ nobody did ask you,’ flashed Pismire. ‘Not in the king’s earshot, anyhow. I’d stay as far away from him as you can. He’ll take one look at your ginger beard and have you strung up.’

‘For what?’

‘For being a thick fucking dirty Scot who hasn’t washed his hair since William Wallace was alive, that’s what. ...