The Serpent Amongst the Lilies

by Paul Doherty

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

An investigation into the mysterious woman known as Jeanne of Arc... The turbulent times of the 15th century are perfectly captured in Paul Doherty's gripping mystery, The Serpent Amongst the Lilies. Perfect for fans of Ellis Peters and Susanna Gregory. At the behest of his master, Bishop Henry Beaufort, former criminal Matthew Jankyn is set among the followers of Jeanne d'Arc (the lilies). Charged with discovering whether Jeanne is really a saint, Jankyn must work out how best to ensure that the French war against the British can be foiled. But in spite of his lawless background, Jankyn comes to like Jeanne and to resent being pitted against her. But does Jeanne somehow know more about Jankyn's intentions than she is letting on, and what secrets is she keeping from him? What readers are saying about Paul Doherty: 'The plot and mystery slowly unfolds with unexpected twists and turns before finally being unravelled. An enthralling tale by Doherty at his best' '[You] lose yourself in the story' ' Five stars '

Release date: June 6, 2013

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 183

Sample

They always said I would hang, finish my life at the end of a rope swinging from some scaffold. Perhaps even the Elms in London. Dancing there, black-faced, eyes staring, my corpse given up to the crows. They were wrong. Some of those who prophesied my fate died just as violently on the battlefield, their sleek, soft flesh shattered by lance, mace or sword. Or, because of their treasonable conspiracies, on a scaffold set up in some market-town while the peasants and burgesses stood round and laughed to see such great ones brought low. But not Jankyn.

I, Matthew Jankyn, Lord of the Manor of Newport in Shropshire, with its granges, fields, meadows, fisheries, carp-ponds, stews, now lie in my great four-poster bed between silk sheets. I tell my story to this little whey-faced clerk who writes it down. I know the mouldy bastard does not like me and he certainly does not like the story I tell, but who cares what he thinks? I have never liked priests with their pious, white faces, fat bellies and stumbling ways. I’ve always said that once you have met one you have met the lot. I can see from the little bastard’s eyes how he does not like that. If he is not careful, I will pick up my stick and beat him on the knuckles. After all, why should he complain? I have given him a living, haven’t I? He has access to my table, my pantry, my buttery and, above all, my beautiful sack and burgundy. I still drink deep draughts despite what the doctor said with all his physics, horoscopes and mutterings. I hate priests. Doctors come a good second. They thrive on human pain, charge high fees and do nothing. If I had my way, I would hang the lot alongside lawyers. I know they, too, are waiting for me to die.

Yet here I am, Matthew Jankyn, professional soldier, knight, war-hero, but only I know the truth. Jankyn is a coward who has survived on his wits. I am now ninety years of age but I still ask for a young, lissome girl to warm my sheets at night. During the days I spend most of my time ignoring the doctor’s predictions and the priest’s admonitions by drinking sack until I fall into a drunken stupor, for, as I say, who cares? I have seen the world. I have seen the stars and planets wheel above this vale of tears. Now they say I am at death’s door but what do they know? If I go, who cares? Matilda, my only true love, she surely would plead for me with the good Christ, for I have done terrible wrong? However, I have also tried, in my own way, to do some good. I am always kind to my neighbour, even though I may try to seduce his wife. I have drunk too much but I have never stopped anyone else drinking. I look after my peasants, though I chase their daughters. I have hurt no man, unless attacked. But I babble on. You don’t want to listen to this, but to my past stirring times! I suppose, as you get older, your mind wanders back to youthful days. Now, brain-sick, I think of the days when my uncaked blood in all its channels flowed like wine from a new bottle. And the memories? Birds scuffling in the bushes. A gust of birds across golden harvest fields. Swallows skimming across the haze of the lake and green soft rushes talking to the wind which lulls them to sleep.

Yet you are not interested in these memories, but in the terrors! Satan saying his matins at midnight. Towns, palaces, houses roaring red to heaven. Men in glittering armour, all iron and lightning, as they stride through cobbled streets drenched with blood to drain their loins on some young maiden’s. Savage pursuits through barbaric forests, meshes of branch and root. Cold days, the grass heavy with water, on the wild moors of France and England. I have seen battlefields with the flesh piled high as in a butcher’s store, steaming and glistening under a drenching sun. Fields sodden with blood. Whole armies facing each other like caged panthers, the devil stoking their eyes with hate, prepared to kill and hack each other. Oh yes, I have seen such days.

Shadows scudding across my soul. Generals, whores, courtesans, young girls in Venus’ clothing with soft flesh and perfumed skin. Silken sheets and the most expensive, fragrant, tasty wines cooling in iced waters. The blast of trumpets with bedecked blazons, the sound of drum and pipe as men prepare to kill each other, still wake me after the chimes of midnight. I lie and remember, the peasant’s hovel, the turreted hall, the sharp blade shearing, shattering the bone and sinking deep into sleek, soft flesh. I feel hungry and recall the banquets with all varieties of meat and minstrelsy in the swept, tapestried, voluptuous halls of power. Yet I cannot forget the hedgerows, rank and rich, where I have hidden while men better than I have tried to kill me; going through towns littered with refuse, stinking of every stale odour under the sun; or, half slain by sleet and snow, crossing valleys and high hills which peer over forests of heavy oaks, birds singing on their bleak branches, crooning themselves to sleep under a dying sun.

Images. They come and go and dash like flying shadows across my brain. At night they all come back and when I am dead I will join them, for sleep, as the philosopher says, is but the image of death. I just wish I could impose some order.

The young girl with her young, proud breasts hand-cupped, and above her some horrid weapon swinging savagely down to split us both. Arrows shooting through the shimmering air, and the ghastly fear of ghoulish ghosts who, when I am alone here, come back tripping up the broad-beamed oak staircase to stand, a silent array, an army, a phalanx, round my bed.

Matilda never comes but Beaufort is there. Cardinal, politician, banker, saint or arch-devil, I never knew. He is always there with his olive skin, angel mouth and devil eyes. Dressed in purple and scarlet with white gloves. One of his hands always fingering the beautiful, jewel-encrusted pectoral cross on his chest. He looks at me reproachfully, wondering why I am lying here when I should be in France. Beaufort, illegitimate son of John of Gaunt, with his pretensions to the throne and ambitions to become Pope. A clever, saturnine man who could have outwitted Reynard the fox. Cunning, devious, brilliant, charming, cruel, gentle, hard and vicious. Every time I see the beautiful bastard, I think of France. It was not like it is now, a great nation under formidable kings. Oh no, in my youth France was England’s battleground and a playground for Henry V, my noble, vicious hawk of a king and his quarrelsome arrogant generals; Talbot; Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick; Montague, Earl of Salisbury. Above all, John, Duke of Bedford, silver-haired, caring, courteous and determined to bring half of France under the orbit of an infant king who was more sane when he was a child than when he was a man. But I prattle on. Let me explain.

I was born in Shropshire, raised here, went to Oxford and became a scholar learning grammar, rhetoric, theology, philosophy, studying the masters, Abelard, Bernard, Aristotle and Plato. There, I fell from grace, linked to the Whyte Harte, the cause which espoused poor, dead Richard II who was deposed by Henry, Duke of Lancaster, in 1399. Richard was imprisoned in Pontefract but his cause stirred men up. The Whyte Harte, Richard’s personal emblem, was used by traitors, evil men like Sir John Oldcastle. God, how I hated him! Because of him, the cause was betrayed, Matilda went mad and I spent years in Beaufort’s service who used me as a spy to track down the truth as well as find Oldcastle. I did both and had the satisfaction of seeing Oldcastle’s body explode lashed to a barrel in Smithfield, watching the flames eat his fat, rotting corpse and shatter his evil, plotting brain. Beaufort then sent me to France where I fought for Henry V, victor of Agincourt, shatterer of armies and conquerer of France. God, how Henry loved killing. He swept round Normandy, burning, pillaging and, with his troops, taking anything which moved, and burning what they could not. Grand lads and grand generals. They have gone to their just deserts. I will probably meet them all in hell.

You see, Henry V came to the throne in 1413, fourteen years after his father had snatched the English throne from Richard. However, that didn’t bother our young Henry, the noble lord. He smashed his enemies at home and, taking the title King of France, led his armies across the Channel and began the great adventure in the autumn of 1415. I was with his army, by compulsion of course, having never volunteered for anything in my life. I always accepted the proverb that ‘he who volunteers never lives to pay-day’. Yet I was at Agincourt when our bowmen sent clouds of flying death into the French chivalry, decimating them. King Henry used that victory to march on Paris and the real war began. France could not resist. Its king, Charles VI, was imbecilic, insane, drooling in his dirty chambers and worrying about what to do while his wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, collected her menagerie around her. Not only of animals but anyone who fell low enough to become her lover. The blessed offspring of this precious pair, the Dauphin Charles, was no better. Knock-kneed and with a shambling gait, thin-faced, long-nosed, a mouth which always hung open (with the liquids from both mouth and nose staining the front of his jerkin). He was not exactly the sort of prince to stimulate interest or loyalty from those who followed him.

At the time, France was not so much alive but a great, rotting corpse, its only life being the maggots which ate away at it. The maggots were two great armies. The Armagnacs under the Dauphin and the Burgundians under their powerful Duke John. They fought each other with a savagery which even astonished the English and refused to unite against the threat posed by Henry and his wandering, marauding armies. In 1418, the Burgundians and Armagnacs agreed to a meeting on the Bridge of Montereau which spanned the river Yonne. Burgundy was prepared to make his peace, kneeling at the feet of the Dauphin and the other Armagnac generals, but the Dauphin gave a sign and the Duke was hacked to death. Because of his death, the English armies managed to conquer most of northern France, for the powerful Burgundian faction joined Henry. They declared eternal war on the Dauphin, accepting Henry’s claim to be crowned in Paris and proclaimed as King of France.

The terror began. No wonder the French called us ‘Gondons’ or ‘Goddamns’. Years ago, I read a dialogue between France and Truth written by some moralist. (You know the type, men who like to keep comfortable and write theses about morality. It is easy for them. How can you be virtuous if you have never been tempted?) My scribe, this little mouse of a priest, is looking strangely at me so I think I should ignore such moral reflections and continue. The war the English have waged and still wage (claims France in this dialogue) is false, treacherous and damnable. But then again, the English are an accursed race, opposed to all good and all reason; ravening wolves; proud, arrogant, hypocrites, tricksters without any conscience; tyrants and persecutors of Christians, men who drink and gorge on human blood, with natures like birds of prey, people like wolves who live only by plunder. This was a Frenchman’s view of the English. Believe me, it is an understatement.

The English armies marched through France taking their banners up to the walls of Paris and on 1st September 1420, King Henry, Philip of Burgundy and Charles VI made a ceremonial entry into Paris. The banners flew and the trumpets brayed and shrieked, their crack stilling the roar of the crowd. The Te Deum was sung by priests and everyone came to hail Henry as Charles’ legitimate successor to the crown of France. Henry spent Christmas in the Louvre Palace being courted by poor Charles who, on many occasions, failed to recognise him. Charles’ overblown, blowsy queen, with her monkeys and dogs climbing over everything, dirtying them with their shit, cheerfully proclaimed to the world that her own son, the Dauphin, was, in fact, a bastard, the illegitimate issue of one of her many affairs. While Henry stayed in the Louvre, garbed in silk, eating swan, venison, boar, carp, salmon, and gulping down the best from France’s vineyards, the situation in Paris was horrific. The city rubbish-tips were filled with the bodies of little children who died looking for something to eat amongst the refuse. The people began to devour swill and filth even the lean-flanked pigs in the streets would not touch. Wolves came out of the eastern forests and swam the Seine to disinter and gnaw at the newly-buried corpses. Yet Henry and his commanders rode the streets of Paris, their proud heads held high like stags.

So Henry was proclaimed Charles VI’s heir and married the mad king’s daughter, Katherine, a small, winsome, black-haired, alabaster-skinned beauty. Henry proposed that the issue of the marriage would be king of England and France. He set to with gusto so that his bride’s cries and shrieks during love-making could often be heard throughout the palace. Henry had his way and little Katherine became pregnant. Henry, of course, was as romantic as he could be in the circumstances, openly apologising for spending most of his honeymoon besieging the city of Sens. Meanwhile, the poor Dauphin retreated to the city of Bourges and waited for God to give a sign. He did whilst Henry was in England. The King’s impulsive brother, Clarence, (who was a fierce young falcon of a boy and jealous of his brother), decided he, too, could win victories in France. On Easter Sunday, he was at dinner in Pont de l’Arche in Normandy (after he had returned from his usual pastime of raiding and ravishing beyond the Marne) when he heard a French army was in the vicinity. Clarence, refusing to wait for archers who were the spine and the arm of the English army, galloped off with over one thousand men-at-arms. He met the enemy, crossed a river and charged them uphill (like the idiot he was), forcing his horsemen over boggy ground. The Armagnacs sat there and watched in astonishment and then, led by a Scots force (who, as usual, were fighting for anyone who paid) under the Earl Buchan, counter-charged and beat the English back to the river. Clarence, easily seen by the royal colours wrapped round his chest and the coronet on his helmet, was pulled off his horse. He was beaten to death, his body stripped and tossed in a cart to be taken for the Dauphin to view. It was only rescued by the Earl of Salisbury who came up to save the survivors and take back Clarence’s battered corpse to England.

In June 1421, Henry landed in France and, eager to avenge his brother’s death, went on a wave of killing and slaughter. At one castle he stormed, he hanged all the Scots. Their French commander, whom Henry was also going to hang, protested that, as he had once fought for Henry, he was a comrade-at-arms and, according to the rules of chivalry, could not be executed. Henry grudgingly agreed but hanged him up in an iron, rusting cage from the castle wall! When he took the Armagnac castle of Rougement, he executed the entire garrison, demolishing the building and drowning the defenders. He crossed the Marne and marched on the city of Meaux, and, in the most rain-swept of autumns, brought up his cannon and began to mine and bombard the walls. The ground was waterlogged with rains and floods. A sharp frost set in and both English and French started dying like flies on a cold summer’s day. . .