The Ill-Made Knight by Christian Cameron

he said in French.
    The Prince glanced at me, and the Earl looked up. I wanted to burst into tears. Now it would all come out, and I’d be a thief all over again, I thought.
    ‘You know my young Judas?’ asked the Earl.
    Boucicault raised his cup of wine to me. ‘This young squire and I had a passage of arms today, did we not?’ he said. ‘And I remember him from a tourney in London. The last time I was a prisoner of you English.’ Everyone laughed. God, I have hated that man in my time, but he spoke for me that day.
    The Earl smiled at me. ‘ Par dieu , young man. You fought in a tourney in London, and yet you are serving at my table?’
    Other men laughed and that was the end of it. I went back to the sideboard, carved a morsel of kidney and put it neatly on a platter for a younger man to carry, and suddenly Richard was there. He took me by the elbow and led me out into the darkness.
    Put a cup of wine in my hand.
    We sat on a bench.
    ‘Thief,’ he said, pleasantly enough.
    ‘Whoreson,’ I replied, raising my cup to his.
    Diccon came, and Geoffrey de Brantwood and Tom Amble and several other men I don’t remember – all boys, then. We ate a quick meal of cast-off beef, and drank good wine. The pages waited on us.
    ‘Why didn’t you say you was a de Vere?’ asked Diccon, fairly late in the meal.
    I’ve thought of a hundred hot answers and a dozen cold ones, then and since, but I did the boy’s thing, and it was the right thing. I shrugged and took another bite of beef.
    We took Romorantin, and our march route was clear, but we didn’t go far. Two days later we were before Tours. We wanted the bridges over the Loire, and the French wanted to hold the town, which was the biggest we’d tried yet. They got a garrison into it, led by their Marshal, Clermont, and the Count of Anjou.
    The Prince put Lord Burghersh in charge of the assault.
    It failed.
    I cooked. We had fresh, virgin countryside to despoil, and I made a soup of sausages and leeks and some poor woman’s carefully hoarded chicken broth. The soldiers gulped it down with fine wines from an abbey cellar.
    I was serving my third kettle of the stuff – I liked good copper kettles, still do for that matter. I had paused to loot three matching pots from the ruins of an inn that morning. I made up the soups, cutting vegetables straight into the pots, while the assault went up the walls. I moved my stolen three-legged stool around the fire to avoid the smoke and to have a good view of the attack. The Captal’s Gascons were brave, but the walls were high and the defenders were even more numerous than they had been at Romorantin. Burghersh was the Chancellor of England, and while he may have been a competent man-at-arms, he wasn’t loved like Oxford, Stafford or the Prince, and that love can get a man one more rung up the ladder, one more push forward onto the wall.
    At any rate, I was on my third big kettle of soup, and out of bread, when my cousin appeared out of the smoky, humid evening. He held out a wooden bowl and I filled it.
    He sat – on my stool. Well, he was a knight.
    He ate, I refilled his bowl, and he ate again. I found him the last – the very last – of the good French bread that Abelard had looted. He devoured it. I doubt he noticed that it was fine ground or white.
    ‘You made all this?’ he asked.
    ‘Not the bread,’ I admitted.
    He laughed, but then his face grew solemn. ‘You really are a cook,’ he said. ‘Lord Boucicault told me – privately – that you were taken in London as a thief.’
    ‘Yes,’ I admitted. I started an explanation, but he held up his hand.
    ‘No one here cares,’ he said. ‘Listen, my squire is being sent back to Bordeaux. He broke both legs falling off a ladder.’
    That’s falling off a siege ladder, friends.
    ‘I need a squire. And God has sent you to me.’ Sir Edward spoke of God as if they were personal friends. Perhaps they were – he was a fine knight.
    Abelard appeared out of the