The Captain of Venice

by Christian Cameron

Genres: International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

The final instalment in the Chivalry series from a master of historical fiction.

The Chivalry series follows young William Gold, who runs away from London to follow the Black Prince, from the killing fields of France, through life as a routier and criminal, and to redemption with the Knights of Saint John, further disillusion and an eventual career as a professional soldier and knight. Rich in the details of life in the High Middle Ages, the series also deals with modern issues about the role of violence in society, rules of conflict and war, and the price that people pay for using violence.

'One of the finest historical fiction writers in the world' BEN KANE

'The master of historical fiction' SUNDAY TIMES

'A storyteller at the height of his powers' HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY

Release date: May 14, 2026

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 320

Sample

‘We have our passports at last?’ Sir William Gold was a tall figure, imposing even without armour, easily six feet and perhaps more in his red footed hose and a fine, red, French-style cote-hardie over a brilliant red and black check jupon. His hair was still copper, although the copper was browner than it had once been and there was grey at his temples, and he was clean shaven – a sharp contrast to most of the Englishmen and Flemmings in the tavern.

It was early morning; Salim, his body servant, and Giorgos, his trumpeter, had laced him into his tight-fitting clothes, and even as he stood in the great bay window of the tavern, Salim handed his long sword with the belt wrapped around it to John le Blake, his squire, who belted it on.

Geoffrey Chaucer sat close by in a long black gown, heavy with a hundred pleats to show its worth, belted with a somewhat worn plaque belt that, with its accompanying baselard, lent a warrior touch to an otherwise academic costume. Chaucer had a matching black hood over his shoulder and a small black skull cap on his head, and he was toying with a steaming cup of hippocras.

‘I have my passports,’ Chaucer said. ‘I can leave whenever I like. I’m only staying to hear your stories.’

‘You seek to flatter me,’ Gold said.

‘All these years and you don’t yet know me,’ Chaucer said with a small smile.

Gold’s answering smile was broader. ‘Oh, Chaucer. I know that any compliment you pay me will have a scorpion’s sting in the tail.’ His smile widened to a grin. ‘But I’m pleased to hear you enjoy my stories, sting or no.’

Chaucer laughed. ‘For pure chivalric fiction, you have no equal. When you describe war, I think perhaps we live in an age of heroes, and I expect Giron le Courtois to ride past and Joseph of Arimathea to share my wine cup and perhaps spin me a chanson.’

There were heavy footsteps on the stair that led up the centre of the big inn. The Hainaulter, Froissart, came cautiously around the corner from the stairway, looking like a man who had slept badly.

A pretty and very decisive young woman appeared from the kitchen. ‘Master Froissart,’ she said. ‘What would be your pleasure this morning? And a sele of the day to you, Sir William, and to you, Master Chaucer.’

Chaucer nodded. Sir William, now girt with his sword and testing the swing of it at his hip, turned, and bowed, a full reverence as if the innkeeper’s daughter were a great lady. ‘I give you good morning, mademoiselle, and the blessings of the lord be with you,’ he said.

She blushed.

‘William,’ Chaucer said. He had just barely raised one eyebrow.

‘Shall we go hear the hours?’ Sir William asked.

Chaucer rose. ‘I’m sure this is good for my soul,’ he said. ‘Froissart?’

‘I am with you, I am with you.’ He smiled at the innkeeper’s daughter. ‘Aemile, could I have a cup of hippocras to speed me to mass?’

Chaucer handed him his own cup, a lovely piece of Bohemian glass. ‘Drink mine. William waits for no man.’

It was Sir William’s turn to raise an eyebrow. But he turned to his squire. ‘Thanks, John. Is the company ready?’

John peered into the yard, where John the Turk very obviously had Sir William’s small escort standing by their freshly curried horses. ‘Yes, Sir William.’

Chaucer winced. ‘Somehow, I have become part of your escort,’ he said to Sir William, who shook his head.

‘Never in life, Geoffrey,’ he said. He went out, taking his gloves from John le Blake, and passed into the yard.

John the Turk was an ageless, wrinkled steppe nomad; the winds of a two continents had robbed his face of any smooth skin and left a visage that could terrify children. Close beside him stood the slightly hunched figure of Beppo, whose status – scout, spy, guide, and sometimes man-at-arms – was as nebulous as his command of English.

The rest of the men in the yard were obviously professional soldiers; their kit was neat, and if the armour was not mirror polished, neither was it brown. The particolour jupons worn by most men, in Sir William’s red and black, were stained, but clean enough; the maille was bright, and none of them had sold their swords or bows.

Gold took this in with a glance. He smiled at John the Turk and then looked back at the newest archer, a boy recruited at the tavern.

‘That was the best basinet you could find in this whole town? With six armourers and the whole collection of England’s castoffs in the citadel?’ He smiled when he said it, but his intention was obvious. He walked over to the boy, or very young man. ‘William?’ he said.

The boy didn’t want to meet his eye. ‘Which,’ he said. ‘Which they said—’

William glanced at John the Turk.

John shrugged. ‘I ordered a basinet made for him. It’s not ready yet. He’s wearing Davie’s spare.’

Gold nodded. ‘I should have known,’ he said. He looked carefully at the boy. A good heavy arming coat, well-fitted; long goatskin boots that fit like hose, all the way to the thigh; a heavy dagger almost as long as a sword; a heavy warbow, the wood nearly white; and a linen and leather arrow bag with spacers allowing for rapid drawing of the shafts.

‘How many shafts, young William?’ Gold asked.

‘Twenty-four,’ the young man said.

Gold nodded. ‘John, have the archers stow their arms and we’ll go to mass.’

John nodded. He clapped his hands together three times, and the whole parade dispersed. Every man knew what the captain liked; he didn’t care if a man talked, or made a comment, but he wanted them to move fast and he didn’t tolerate criminals.

John le Blake nodded. ‘Master Chaucer and his friend have preceded us,’ he said.

‘You mean, they didn’t await my good pleasure,’ Sir William said. ‘Listen, John. I know I’m a disappointment to you, but I’m not a great lord. Chaucer is an officer of the king’s household. He may wait on the king, but he won’t wait on me. He never has.’ Gold smiled at some reminiscence.

His half-dozen men-at-arms hadn’t worn their armour to their morning muster, and they stood by with their squires; a Breton, a couple of Englishmen as old as Gold himself, and two Italians. When the archers had returned, William nodded.

‘Mass, gentlemen.’

An hour later, Aemile – the innkeeper’s daughter – and two of her serving women had poured out small beer for every man sitting in the common room, and once again Sir William sat by the fire, his plain book of hours open before him.

‘I promised Master Froissart to tell of the Great Raid,’ he said. ‘And the horrors of Cesena.’ He sat back. ‘Almost every man here was with my company in Greece and was lucky enough to miss those events. But Benghi Birrigucci there, and Beppo – they’ll remember it all. So if you doubt my tale and you wish to hear it from another man, why, I imagine that Beppo can provide you with quite a story.’

The blond Italian knight roared with laughter. Beppo’s smile was demonic.

‘Perhaps Beppo could share a detail or two,’ he said. ‘But Beppo tends to fill in details.’ He took a short dagger from his belt and stropped it on his long riding boots.

Froissart drew back a bit.

Gold laughed. ‘There are no knights riding to errantry without Beppo in the background, picking up the prisoners, opening doors—’

‘Feeding donkeys,’ Beppo said in a lugubrious voice. ‘Paying off the laundresses.’

‘Spying,’ Gold said.

‘Maybe sometimes. Beppo is a poor man.’

‘You saved us at Chioggia,’ Gold said.

‘I long to hear of the Great Raid,’ Froissart said.

‘I don’t care a whit for your Great Raid,’ Chaucer said. ‘But I’d like to hear how you became the great Captain of Venice.’

‘Well,’ Sir William began. ‘The two are not entirely unrelated, as you will hear.’

In the spring of 1375, I was seriously considering leaving the life of arms. Nay, you smile, but I meant it. Things had changed, and some of those things were in my body. I took several wounds in Greece in ’74, and not the least was the wrench to my shoulder when I fell off the steps at Megara, if you recall that detail. But there was more to it than that, and despite your impatience, I’m going to explain, if only so Chaucer can mock me for cowardice later.

When I was fighting in Outremer – in Greece, I mean, or Roumania, as some call it – and even before, when I was serving the King of England in France, I had begun to think that I was a poor parent. When my wife Emile died, I lost my head for a bit, and by the time I recovered, two years had passed. My daughter Magdalene was old enough to wed, and with no mother to protect her, she needed someone to find her a husband. My son Richard had survived the plague, but he’d scarcely ever seen me; he’d had a series of wet-nurses right up to his first tutor and his first fighting master. My daughter Cressida, really Emile’s daughter by her first husband, was a very young lady-in-waiting to Maria Palaiologina, wife of that noble pirate Francesco Gattilusi. She was far away, although her presence on Lesvos gave me a determination to return there.

Regardless, I spent the winter of ’74-’75 at the court of my lord of Savoy. It is a matter of some amusement to me, and perhaps I repeat it too often, but I hold a small barony on Cyprus from the king there; a hold in a fine town on Lesvos from Prince Francesco; and I hold a very small town and a manor house, Les Marches, from the Count of Savoy. I don’t hold anything from the King of England, so Amadeus of Savoy and Francesco of Lesvos are my ‘lords’. Amusing, for an Englishman, but then, that is the life of arms. I believe that Master Froissart’s first interest is in that fine knight, Sir John Hawkwood, and while Sir John remains an Englishman, he is, first and foremost, a Florentine – at least, these days.

But I have left my road, as I so often do.

In the spring of 1375, as the snow began to melt, and the mud deepened across Savoy, I had played with my children for an entire winter. I’d got to know every inch of my small estate at Les Marches, and I’d become something like friends with Geoffroi de Cicon, who was a Savoyard knight and the steward of my wife’s extensive Savoyard estates. It’s really no part of this narrative, but after a winter of sparring with Edouard, his lord and my stepson, and with him, I engaged his ‘nephew’, Oliver, as my own steward. Count Amadeus had just granted me a second small holding, at Rognan, and young Oliver, who was obviously De Cicon’s natural son, had his head for figures and for farm management.

At any rate, a winter of hunting, of dancing with my eldest daughter and squiring her to court and frowning at various young men, of fighting on horse and foot with my friend Richard Mussard, and sparring with words with my friend Sister Marie, who was now abbess of a small and fairly scholarly convent near Chambery – after such a winter, I imagined that I might leave the profession of arms unless summoned by one of my lords.

There were several flies in the honey of my winter. One was that I discovered that I spent far too much time thinking of a certain noblewoman of Piacenza. If you have listened for the last few nights, you know that she was the sister of Lord Fontana, who served in my company and died in my arms at the storming of Megara. To be quick, each time I sat in the frescoed scriptorium of Sister Maria’s convent, I thought of Donna Anna Fontana, and how much she would have enjoyed a winter spent with books and other women. It was a matter of some amusement to me – Master Chaucer might be amazed how often I amuse myself – that Donna Fontana had never given me the slightest hint of reciprocal interest. I wasn’t even sure that I liked her. I merely thought of her a great deal and through her, and Sister Maria, and my friend Janet, about the lives of women in peace and war. About their limited choices. About the deadly practice of childbearing. My new steward pointed out to me that more women died in childbirth than knights died in the count’s wars – a truly shocking figure.

I confess it. That winter, my thoughts were often turned to women. Sometimes, as I have said, in respect to their circumscribed lives; sometimes, as I am a lovesome mortal, I just fancied them. By late winter, I fancied most of them at court and thought that perhaps it was time I was away.

I also felt a little like a drone. It is one thing to imagine being a parent and another thing to be one. Safely far away in Outremer, storming a gate, I’d sworn an oath to be a better parent, and certes, a winter with young Richard had given us a better opinion of each other. But he didn’t need me every day. And Magdalene, my eldest, was fast friends with Sister Maria. I worried that she was going to spend her life reading books, and that led me back to considering the lives of women. I managed to want women to have freer lives and have more choice, while at the same time hoping my own daughter would make a rich marriage and get me some grandchildren.

Gentles, I am hardly the first Christian man to think one thing and do another.

So, in late March, I sat in Sister Maria’s solar. Magdalena was reading Aristotle in Latin, provided by Michael des Roches, his own translations from scrolls gained in Greece. He was in Rome, of course, as was Donna Fontana. Never mind.

‘She would be very happy here,’ Sister Maria said. ‘I think she would make a fine nun.’

‘Oh, I don’t think—’ I paused and tried to cover my outburst. ‘You mean my daughter.’

Sister Maria smiled her thoughtful smile. ‘Who did you imagine I meant, William?’

I suspect that Sister Maria knew I’d thought she meant Lady Fontana, who was very much in my thoughts at all times.

Now, that morning, Magdalena – with all the constancy of the adolescent – had refused to get up in time to ride her mule through the mud to the convent, and had to be cajoled and threatened with a bucket of ice water. She had referred to Sister Maria as ‘that old shrew’ and me as a ‘devil from hell’, which was a normal-enough start to a day with her. By evening we would again be the best of friends, but mornings were often difficult.

‘Would she, though? I don’t think she’d get up for prayers.’ I smiled, and Sister Maria laughed aloud.

‘Oh, my first few months in my first house were not so pleasant,’ she said. ‘Only my love of all those books got me out of my cell in time to avoid the wrath of our abbess, and she was a—’ Maria paused. ‘A deeply pious woman.’

‘Very kind,’ I said.

‘I don’t want to look in the mirror one day and find myself a pious hypocrite,’ she said. ‘I hated that woman, and now I understand her better. You think a company of lances is a lesson in leadership? Try aristocratic women. They’re above doing something, or they’re unwell, or they’re simply afraid to try a new thing.’

I nodded. ‘Like herding cats,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Their fathers and brothers train them to be helpless’ she said. ‘It’s hardly their fault. But I’ll win them over. I find a little sword and buckler can put more spirit in a woman than a hundred speeches.’

That made me smile, as one of my earliest memories of Sister Maria was watching her fence with Fiore – and hit him.

‘Good sister, if there’s anyone who can put heart in a regiment of women, it is you.’

‘Flatterer,’ she said. ‘Listen, leave me your Magdalena. If she wants the world and a husband, well, there are handsome young sprigs coming here to see their sisters every day. And if she doesn’t, only the count has more books than this little house. And Des Roches is going to make us a famous place to study the Greeks. If he keeps up, I’ll be having the sisters copy nothing but his Greek manuscripts. You know I have a Greek sister already?’

It turned out that a Greek nun from one of the Union of Churches conferences had joined her.

‘Her Greek is far above my own,’ Maria said humbly. ‘With her leading the process, we might become one of the foremost study centres in Europe.’

I remembered her on Camino in Spain. I was not at all surprised that she was turning a small convent into a centre of learning.

‘I don’t think Magdalena has a vocation,’ I said, with some hesitancy.

Maria nodded. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘There’s no harm in a well-educated laywoman.’

‘Good luck waking her in the morning,’ I said. And that evening, in front of the great open hearth of my ageing manor house, Magdalena agreed to go to Maria’s house and spend a year.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that my children didn’t need me. And it was the very next day that Sir John Hawkwood’s letter reached me from the south.

I had had a difficult time with Sir John in recent years. He had bitterly resented my ‘defection’, as he saw it, when I went to serve Nerio in Outremer in the spring of ’74. Again, if you’ve been listening, Nerio Acciaioli is one of my oldest friends, and also a fabulously rich man, the ‘natural’ son of Niccolo Acciaioli – possibly the wealthiest man in Italy when he died back in ’65. Nerio held most of the Isthmus of Corinth by right of inheritance and conquest, and was gradually widening his little realm, and I had led my company from Italy to Greece and left it there, with a handful of exceptions. Sir John had misliked my leaving, even though he’d told me I was free to go – some miscommunication that led to high words.

And then, in his usual way, he pretended that none of that had happened. In the autumn, he’d written me a flowery and polite letter, suggesting that he might have use for me in the spring, and yet, at the same time, noting that it was unlikely that the pope had any more money to pay us and that he didn’t need more lances. I’d answered with an equally polite, even chivalrous, response.

Spring, as I say, brought a new letter. The opening was just as formal, saluting me by all my titles. The content was different, however. In short, he offered me command of half of his force, with the title of ‘captain’, and a high stipend. I found it interesting – nay, remarkable – that he didn’t say exactly who we’d be serving or where, although he did suggest the possibility that we might take a contract with Venice. I will confess that I liked the sound of ‘captain’. I had been a captain in Outremer. I hadn’t altogether enjoyed being in command and making all the decisions.

But being a captain under Sir John sounded ideal. Especially if we were going to fight for Venice.

There was a small enclosure from Janet, which was a relief of itself because she had not written to me the autumn before, and because she and I were old friends and we had not parted on the best of terms.

Her note was brief. She enclosed a letter for her cousin, Count Amadeus, but her note to me said that she suspected Sir John was going to be an ‘independent’ or ‘free’ captain in the spring.

Dear Guillaume,

Sir John likes to use the language of chivalry, but I write to tell you that the pope has no more money to spend on this war. We are very likely to be on our own this summer, and you know what kind of war that can mean. If you come, see if you can find us some reliable lances, as we have a motley here.

I cannot decide whether I should ask you to stay away, because I don’t think this is your kind of war, or come and help us make it. Whichever you decide, I remain your

Devoted Friend,

Janet de Vaux

I confess that I didn’t much like the sound of that. The last time Sir John had led a ‘free company’, he’d ended up being defeated near Rome by the papal army. It hadn’t been his fault, but the fact remained that when I heard the term ‘free company’ my thoughts went to the trees full of hanged men-at-arms, some still in their leg armour.

I couldn’t decide.

But the very next day brought a letter from Fiore, complaining of poverty, and a long letter from Michael des Roches, my companion on Camino and a scholar of note. He was not in Rome, as Sister Maria had claimed. He was in Avignon, and he was going back to Rome via Savoy, and hoped to visit.

His letter had very little personal to it. He wanted to warn me against the pope’s brother, the Viscount Turenne, who had been a bad knight at Alexandria back in 1365, and like powerful men who have done bad things, seemed unable to face his own role. Turenne continued to tell lies, some of which injured me directly. As he was related to the King of France and was the pope’s brother, and I was a former cook’s boy, you can guess which of us was most likely to be believed.

Yes, Master Froissart. If you will listen to my tales, you will have to accept the humanity of some of the world’s ‘great men’.

Michael warned me that Turenne had been spreading lies about Pierre Thomas, the papal legate in the east, and about Count Amadeus, and about me. That was not the most interesting part. He saved the best for last in a long letter that so exhausted my fluency in Latin that I had to take it to Maria just to be sure I had the correct verb.

The last six paragraphs were about the pope, his legates, and the attempts to guarantee a treaty, or at least a truce, between England and France. I was aware, at the court of Amadeus of Savoy, that England was losing her war. It was difficult to believe, having grown to manhood on victory after victory, but men like Du Guesclin were beating us, and doing so every day. Most of the King of England’s possessions in Brittany and Poitou were gone; scarcely a week went by without news of the fall of another castle to the armies of France. John of Gaunt, who you may recall was not my favourite Plantagenet, but a decent soldier, nonetheless, was leading what we might call the ‘peace party’ in England.

All this, and the efforts of the French Duke of Burgundy, to make peace or at least a truce, were detailed in a manner that I passed to Richard Mussard for the count. But at the end, he also mentioned that from Avignon, he had news of the thousands of routiers and brigands, mostly former soldiers of England and France, who were losing their ‘work’ as the war wound down.

‘In Italiam venient sicut multitude barbarorum. They will come to Italy like a horde of barbarians,’ Des Roches had written. He delineated them as if they were tribes: ‘Gascons, English, and Bretons, and of the three, the Bretons the most fearsome.’ Somehow, in Latin, he made them sound like Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps.

In fact, I was to spend my next five years fighting Bretons in Italy. Des Roches was a prophet, or merely a good intelligencer. His predictions were accurate.

The last letter I received that spring was from Venice, from Carlo Zeno. We had served together several times; back in ’65 against Alexandria, and then more recently, in the Euxine or Black Sea against – well, I suppose we were against Genoa. You may recall that I lost my beautiful sword to a Mongol and lost more men to the plague than I’d ever lost in a fight. Zeno had escaped the plague and he wrote to predict, as he always did, that Genoa and Venice were about to go to war. He offered to negotiate with the Lion, that is, the government of Venice, for a condotta to hire my company in the East.

I was already being paid by Nerio. I didn’t need another contract, but it was a nice thought.

More immediately, he said that he thought that Florence, the richest city in Italy except possibly Venice, was preparing to defy the pope, who had been their ally for a long time.

That was news. A quick reminder: the papacy, whether based in Rome or Avignon, had been prosecuting a war against the Visconti of Milan for many years; a war that had consumed more money and probably more lives than the fighting between England and France. Now, in many ways, the pope is the richest lord in Christendom, not just because of his universal lordship but, as I have reminded you on other days, because he has direct access to the tithes of the faithful as cash that he can borrow against in the banks of Italy. War requires gold, and the pope, more than any other lord, can lay hands on gold.

But he was out of gold. And the Visconti – the richest lords in Italy and perhaps the most evil – were also out of gold.

And now Florence, the home of most of the banks – the home of the Acciaioli, for example – was considering leaving the papal side. I could guess what that would mean. I immediately passed that news to Count Amadeus.

Zeno, damn him, also mentioned that when he dined with Lord Pisani, his mentor, he had seen my ‘friend’ Donna Fontana, who had ‘mentioned my name’ and ‘wondered that I did not write to her’.

I read those words a dozen times. I’d thought she was in Rome, on a pilgrimage.

It probably seems foolish to you that I decided to return to the life or arms; to endanger my life and take on an enormous responsibility in a cause I didn’t trust, just because I might visit Venice.

I’m a foolish man. I have whims. I was bored.

As soon as I’d made my decision, I wrote to Des Roches, telling him that I’d be leaving for Italy on a certain date, if the passes were clear, and I wrote to Sir John, accepting his offer. Then, just after Easter, which fell at the end of March in 1375, and with the permission of my liege lord, the Green Count, I began recruiting. Remember, if you will; I no longer had L’Angars. He had found a knighthood and comfortable, if dangerous, retirement. Lapot, John the Turk, Christopher the Aethiope, and all my best men except Greg Fox, as well as those two angelic ingrates, the Birriguccis, and Beppo, and my trumpeter – all of them were in Greece, as garrisons for Nerio, serving under Lapot.

I had to start from scratch. Luckily, the near-end of the war in France left many men on the market.

Archers were hard to find. Men-at-arms were easy, although most of them were Gascons and of a type that the Count of Savoy didn’t tolerate travelling his roads. It was for that reason that I hired a pair of tailors chosen by my companion, Greg Fox, and we rode to the count’s borders to recruit. I wanted twenty lances. I might have had fifty, or four hundred – there were so many men available that I might have had an army, if I’d only had officers and discipline.

What I had was the Birrigucci brothers, Beppo, and Greg Fox. We formed a sort of tribunal, and we sat outside a big stone inn not so far from Lyon, with tables spread full of good things: armour, cloth, swords – and we spoke to every man. We tried not to take any obviously broken men or criminals; we looked at armour and weapons, at demeanour, listened to stories.

It was very disheartening. Froissart would prefer me to tell a tale of good men waiting for deeds of arms, but in fact, when I suggested that we were going to Italy and we’d probably be fighting Genoese paid professionals for Venice, many men simply rode away. Others asked what prospect there was of rich loot.

There were very few archers, and most of them were from commissions of array; country men who’d been pressed into service and now knew no life but that of routiers. I couldn’t be choosy, and I took them all. All, in this case, being eighteen archers – and most of them struggled to pull lighter bows than the archers I’d served with in the great retinues.

I had more to choose from with men-at-arms, and here, armour and horseflesh mattered. I could afford to clothe my lances, and I could, to some extent, re-armour men who’d lost theirs. But horses I could not supply, not on my meagre means. And, while I would not say that a well-kept horse is a guarantee of a good knight, I will say that I’ve never met a good knight who did not have a well-kept horse.

In the end, I had three Englishmen, all of whom had been petty captains of garrisons until recently, and seventeen Gascons, all of whom thought they were Percival and Lancelot together. Touchy, arrogant, violent – Gascons, in other words.

Because I wanted complete lances, I found each of them an armed squire, although their armament was very short by Italian standards. I assumed that, as we’d be fighting for Venice, I could buy them iron breastplates in Brescia or Verona.

So, ‘mustered’ to ride through Savoy, I had twenty ‘lances’ without pages. My ‘men-at-arms’ were mostly ill-armed; my ‘armed squires’ were mostly unarmed and on nags; and my archers were a rabble of discontented Englishmen, at least half of whom had seen the inside of a gaol and probably deserted in France. I also had a dozen women, mostly wives either permanent or temporary, with their own mules. Some captains dislike women; I find that men who bring women are, on the whole, more reliable, and the women provide a reserve of labour – laundry, sewing, cooking – that makes everything run better.

All in all, they were not unlike the hobilars I’d led in France in ’73. But unlike the garrison of Calais, they added a tradition of brigandage to a general sullenness.

Unlike my time as ‘captain’ of a convoy in France in ’73, I had Greg Fox, I had the Birriguccis, I had the resources of my Savoyard estates, and most of all, I had Beppo. Beppo had been a very bad man – hah. Perhaps he is still a very bad man. But Beppo could out-criminal almost any of them. He was imaginative and thorough, and he tended to warn me of any outbreaks of what I might term ‘unacceptable behaviour’.

When I mustered my little company, I provided each one of them with new clothes, surcoats, new boots. I didn’