Each man is silent for a moment, trying to imagine the comments they’ll have to endure when next they appear at the butts.

‘We need to get away,’ Richard goes on. ‘Somewhere we can put in the hours without the garrison troops turning up every few minutes to show us how it’s done.’

‘Not back in the boat again?’ This is from Hugh.

‘No,’ Richard says. ‘I’ll see if we can’t volunteer to garrison the fort at Sangatte. On the higher ground over there.’ He gestures westwards, back towards the sea. ‘Nothing’s going to happen here, anyway. Not until the Earl gets back. No one will miss us.’

10

THE NEXT MORNING the same men who’d watched them erect their camp the day before watch them break it again. While Walter goes in search of the carters and their ox to first take a barrel of ale to the ordinaries at the Seaward Gate, then to carry their gear up to Sangatte, Geoffrey takes Thomas and Katherine to buy more supplies, including arrows from the fletcher.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Katherine asks him as he loads her arms with three sheaves in their linen bags.

‘We’ll spend every moment in the butts,’ Geoffrey supposes, passing the fletcher a large handful of coins, ‘until the Earl of Warwick returns, and then, when he does, we’ll be the best archers in his affinity.’

Richard has bought a horse, ‘with money borrowed from a Genoese banker’ according to Walter, and he leads them out of the camp with his cap low, hunched in his travelling cloak. Cows graze in the waterlogged furlongs, low-bellied pigs rootle along the baulks, and the wind from off the sea presses cold wet cloth to cold wet flesh.

After half a mile or so, the road passes through a complex of earthworks where sluice gates corral a river and send it under a stone bridge and around the walls of another forbidding stone fort.

‘Newnham Bridge,’ Walter says. ‘See them sluice gates? If the French come, the garrison can close them in a moment and flood the whole Pale.’

‘Why would they do that?’ one of the Johns asks.

‘So the fuckers can’t get their bombards and whatnot up to the walls,’ Walter says, jerking his head back towards Calais. ‘Whoever controls the sluice gates controls Calais, see, and whoever controls Calais, well . . . that’s a question, isn’t it?’

There is a sizeable Watch on the bridge: more men in the Earl of Warwick’s red livery coat with that white badge on their chests. Each carries a bill except the sergeant, who carries a pollaxe like Thomas’s, and he steps out from under a slate awning to greet Richard.

‘May God send you to prosper, sir,’ he says, touching the rim of his sallet. ‘Mind telling me where you’re bound?’