“It was not a great victory.” He speaks with a low-toned fury. “It was a shambles. It was a mess. We didn’t have the weaponry we needed, we didn’t have the equipment for the army. We couldn’t even feed them. The men lay without cover or tents in mud and they died in their hundreds from disease. We should have marched on Paris as we agreed. Instead we wasted English lives on a city of no value that we will never be able to keep, so that he could say that he had won a city and come home.”

“Hush,” I say. “At least you’re home safe. At least he wasn’t ill.”

“He had no idea what to do, he had no idea what should be done. He does not know how to time a march, how to allow an army time to move, to prepare to rest. He doesn’t even know enough to give orders. He says one thing and then another and then flies into a fury because nobody understands him. He orders the horses to charge in one direction and the archers in another and then he sends after them to bring them back and blames them for the mistake. And when it was falling apart around us—the men sickening, the French holding firm—he could not see that we were in trouble. He did not care that the men were in danger. He would declare that war was costly and that he was not afraid of a gamble. He has no idea of the value of life. He has no idea of the value of anything.”

I want to interrupt him; but he will not be silenced.

“When we finally won, it was a massacre. Two thousand townsmen and women and their children trailed out of the town past him as he sat high on his horse, in his Italian armor. They went out in the wind and rain with nothing, not even a bag of food. He swore that they must walk all the way to the French lines at Abbeville; but they lay down and died on the road as his troops looted their homes. He is a killer, Kateryn, he is a merciless killer.

“And now it is over he calls it a great victory; has no idea that it was a mess. Howard’s army was on the brink of mutiny. Boulogne will never be held. It is all vanity, a vain conquest. He has no idea that it isn’t a great victory. He knows only what he wants to know. He believes only what he wants to think. He hears only what he orders. Nobody tells him the truth and he would not know it if it were spelled out for him in the blood of his victims.”

“He’s king,” I say simply. “Isn’t it always like this for kings?”