CHAPTER XI

A Midnight Battle

Night had fallen over Calais on New Year’s Eve, cold, gloomy, threatening; and around a blazing fire in an upper chamber of the great tower flanking the Boulogne Gate were gathered a group of stalwart young Englishmen in full armour, whose silver spurs told that they had already attained the rank of esquires, though they were not yet “dubbed knights.”

“Marry, these Frenchmen will have such a regale this night as they little expect,” said a tall youth, rubbing his sinewy hands gleefully. “We English are hospitable folk, and care not how many guests come to taste our New Year’s cheer; but methinks these gallants will find it somewhat hard for their French teeth!”

“They are minded, doubtless,” laughed another, “to break their fast in Calais town on the New Year morn; and so indeed they shall—as prisoners!”

“Under whose banner fight we to-night, brother Hugo?” asked a slim, handsome lad of his neighbour, whose comely face was a singularly exact copy of his own.

“Under the pennon of Sir Walter de Manny,” replied his double, “a good and gentle knight, who is ever to be found where hard blows are going. Under such a one we may well hope to win spurs of gold. Methinks we have been esquires long enough—ha, brother Alured?”

The speakers were no other than the twin-brothers, Alured and Hugo de Claremont, who were greatly altered since they had sat at meat with Sir Yvon du Guesclin, years before.

Still retaining their wonderful likeness to each other, the dainty boy-pages had grown into tall and stalwart cavaliers, who had proved their courage in many a hard fray. On the field of Crecy they had been made esquires; and they now hoped, young as they were, to win knighthood in the coming fight.

“Would that the fray could begin at once!” cried Alured, impatiently, “ere our honoured uncle hath time to damp us with one of his wonted homilies against over-boldness! Methinks it would fit him better to urge us on than to warn us back.”

In fact, their good uncle, Sir Simon Harcourt, was never weary of warning his hot-blooded nephews against rashly running into danger—which was very kind of him, considering that their death would have made him one of the richest landed proprietors in England. But, by some unlucky chance, the good knight’s admonitions were always given in such a way as to irritate the fiery youths into perilling their lives more recklessly than ever.

“Now, I bethink me, Claremont,” broke in one of his comrades—“I say not ‘Alured’ or ‘Hugo,’ for never can I tell to which of the two I speak——”

A general laugh greeted the jest (such as it was) in which the twins good-humouredly joined.

“I say, then,” resumed the speaker, “that it is full time for the fulfilment of the prophecy concerning you twain, which was to come to pass in a year and a day.”

“A prophecy?” echoed three or four voices at once.

“Marry, even so—and a rare one,” laughed Alured de Claremont. “I thank thee, Beauchamp, for reminding me of it, for in sooth I had forgotten it myself. This is the tale, comrades, if ye care to hear it—

“Just a year agone to-day, my uncle rode out hence with a part of his train (among whom were my brother and I) to see if the Frenchmen were stirring, and if there were any sign of their coming against us from St. Omer. All day we rode on without seeing aught—for the whole country-side was wasted till it lay utterly desolate—neither house nor barn, neither man nor beast.

“At last, just as the sun was going down, two men came toward us, the one habited like a grey friar, the other in the dress of a lay brother of the order; and the moment we caught sight of the monk’s face, we all knew him at once (for, in truth, he is not one to be lightly forgotten) for that same Brother Michael whom men call the Pilgrim of God, and whom we had seen long since at Dinan, where he saved from the boiling cauldron one doomed to die.

“Our uncle rode forward to greet him, and ask for news; and while they spake together, Hugo and I noted that this lay brother who was with him had the look of a simpleton, and was, belike, some crazy fellow whom the good monk had taken to him for charity’s sake. So we began to make our sport with him, asking him jestingly of this and that; but he looked on us right gravely and sadly, as if such game liked him not, and then he spake to us in rhyme, like any masquer in the show of St. George and the Dragon. How ran the words, Hugo?”

And his brother repeated the following lines—

“Give ear, ye twain who mock at me, And heed the words I say; For every word shall come to pass Within a year and a day.

“One night ye two together shall go To hunt on a waste wild moor; And out of twain shall one come back, And his hands shall not be pure.

“His hands shall not be pure, I wot, But stained with ruddy smear, With ruddy smear of good red blood That is not the blood of deer!”

A chilling silence followed the gloomy prediction, every word of which all the listeners (reckless jesters as they were) firmly believed. At last Beauchamp said—

“And this befell, say’st thou, just a year agone to-day? Then must the bode be fulfilled ere to-morrow’s sunset! Now, God forbid it should mean that one of ye twain must die in to-night’s battle!”

“Why not?” cried Hugo, recklessly. “How can a man die better, since die he must? Let who will die or live, England shall win the day! Fill yet another cup of Gascon wine, comrades (one thing, at least, in which France hath the better of us), and let us drink to the fortune of England!”

The rest answered the pledge, but less heartily than usual; for this sudden burst of wild gaiety from that quiet and sober lad seemed to them all an even more sinister omen than had he been silent and dejected; and Beauchamp whispered gloomily to his next neighbour that Hugo must surely be “fey” (doomed).

The same confident assurance of victory in the coming fray filled the hearts of the sturdy English archers and men-at-arms in the guard-room below.

“Let ’em come if they will, these braggart Frenchmen!” cried Harry Woodstall, of Winchester. “They are great at boasting, but big words break no bones. If they have a mind to taste our English steel once more, e’en let ’em, though methinks they had a bellyful on’t on Crecy Field—hey, Dickon?”

“By’r lady, thou say’st sooth, Hal. Ha, lads! I pity such of ye as were not there, for ’twas a right goodly fray! The French had archers, too, forsooth; a scum of Genoa rogues with arbalests (cross-bows) who thought, beshrew their hearts! to match us, and came on with a leap and a fell cry, as if to scare us like children with their clamour. Aha! then we let them see how the grey goose-wing can fly! Ye would have thought it snowed, lads, so thick flew our shafts among ’em. Down went Genoa bowman and French man-at-arms, down went belted knight and haughty noble, before the lusty cloth-yard shafts of Old England. When the broil was over, there lay dead on the French side thrice the number of our whole array, all told; and scarce a foot-archer of us all but had two or three prisoners, insomuch that we were in some sort constrained to kill such as were not worth ransoming, not knowing what else to do with them. I myself took a gay-plumed popinjay of Provence, be-ringed and be-jewelled like any court-lady, whose ransom kept my gipsire (purse) full for many a day.”

“And thy mouth too, I’ll be sworn, Dickon Greenleaf,” chuckled Mat Bowyer, of Kendal. “Trust thee for knowing where good cheer is to be had, whether to eat or to drink!”

“I were in luck, truly, were my mouth ever as full of good cheer as thine of foolish chatter, Mat Bowyer,” retorted Nottingham Dick; and this sledge-hammer wit drew a general laugh from the audience, to whose capacity it was just suited.

“Long live our bold King Ned!” shouted Woodstall, “and may he ever have some good war in hand!”

A score of deep voices hoarsely echoed this humane toast.

“Amen!” said Mat Bowyer; “he is the king for a bold fellow to thrive under.”

“Ay, marry is he!” cried Dickon Greenleaf, heartily. “There is but one thing about him that likes me not; methinks a king of England should speak good plain English in place of yon mincing French, which is fitter for a magpie’s mouth than a man’s.”

“What? what?” broke in several voices at once. “Rule thy tongue better, Dickon, lest it breed thee pain. Know’st thou not that it is treason to say aught against the king’s grace?”

“I care not,” said the bold archer, sturdily; “I bear an English tongue, that dares speak the truth before King Edward himself—God bless him!—and it is no treason, I trow, to wish that his grace had the luck to be able to speak his mind in honest English, like ourselves.”

“And were I to say, ‘Hang me up yon malapert knave for speaking ill of his betters,’ would that be English enow for thee?” asked a deep voice behind.

Dickon turned with a start, and saw (or thought he saw) through a loop-hole just over his head, a face, the sight of which seemed to turn him to stone, and all his comrades likewise.

As it vanished, the spell was broken, and Greenleaf and half a dozen more flew through the doorway, and up three or four steps of the winding stone stair beyond. Then they stopped short in utter bewilderment, for no one was there!

“Get ye to your prayers, lads, one and all of ye!” said Dickon, solemnly, as he crossed himself with a trembling hand, “for the foul fiend himself hath been among us in the likeness of our king!”

It was drawing toward midnight, when a long line of shadowy horsemen came gliding silently as spectres (for every hoof was muffled) over the wide waste of bare moor between Calais and St. Omer; and ever and anon a faint gleam of steel, breaking the tomb-like blackness of the gloomy winter night, showed that these ghostly riders were all armed to the teeth.

“Little dream these English hogs of the New Year pageant that we have in store for them!” muttered a stalwart figure in the front rank, no other than Alain de St. Yvon, the eldest of Bertrand du Guesclin’s swaggering cousins, who were now knights of renown, and formed part of the train with which Sir Geoffroi de Chargny, the French commandant of St. Omer, was hastening to seize (as he hoped) the great fortress, for the betrayal of which he had covenanted with a deeper traitor than himself.

“Pity our good cousin, Ugly Bertrand, were not here to-night,” said the second brother, Raoul, with a coarse sneer; “he would have a better chance to win the knightly spurs that he still lacks, than by scuffling with hired spearmen in the Breton forests.”

“And if he _did_ get his nose chopped off, or his eye knocked out by a chance blow in the _melée_,” added Huon, the youngest, “it could scarce make him uglier than he is!”

“Young sirs,” broke in a deep, mellow voice just behind them, “it is ill done to speak scorn of the absent, or to vaunt when the work is but begun. Trust me, ere this night is over, ye may all have more cause to pray than to jest.”

None of the young knights made any answer to the rebuke, fiercely as they all chafed under it, for the speaker was Sir Eustace de Ribeaumont, the best knight in all France at that day.

They were now nearing the entrance of the narrow stone causeway that then formed, on that side, the only approach to Calais. Here it behoved them to ride slowly and warily; for on either side stretched, for several miles, a black and horrible morass, half swamp and half quicksand, in the fathomless depths of which death lay lurking to devour any ill-fated wretch who might fall, or be thrust, off the firm road above.

Just ere they reached this perilous isthmus, Sir Eustace halted to advise the detaching of a strong force to hold the bridge of Neuillet in their rear, and thus secure a line of retreat if anything went wrong. From any other man, the fiery De Chargny, in his overweening confidence of success, would have laughed this cautious counsel to scorn; but the advice of such a captain as De Ribeaumont was not to be slighted, and he unwillingly agreed.

The dismal swamp was safely passed, and, just on the stroke of midnight, they halted at last before the Boulogne Gate of Calais, and saw above them the dim outline of the great tower, dark and silent as a tomb. Above or below there was neither sign nor sound of life, and the gate was still fast shut.

“Yon loitering Lombard is in no haste to open to us,” growled De Chargny. “Were he half as cold as I am he would make better speed.”

“No doubt he is making sure that the crowns are in full tale, and that no light one hath slipped in by chance,” sneered Sir Pepin de Werre. “These Lombards are ever careful folk with money.”

“Patience, fair sirs,” said De Ribeaumont; “it is not yet midnight. Hark! there sounds the first stroke even now.”

Slowly and solemnly the twelve strokes of midnight boomed through the ghostly stillness, like the knell of those who were about to die. Hardly had the last toll echoed through the silent town, when there came a clang and a rattle as the gate was flung open, and, with a deafening shout of “Manny to the rescue!” a mass of armed men burst from the gloomy archway with the rush of a mighty wave right into the midst of the startled French!

Then began a fight such as the oldest warrior there had never seen. In the depth of the cold black gloom, with death hungering for them on either side of the narrow path on which they fought, the contending hosts closed and battled. To and fro swayed the fight like a stormy sea, “each man,” in the grim words of the old chronicler, “doing such work as he might in the darkness”—friend often striking friend instead of foe, and death coming blindly, no one knew whence or how.

Brave Harry Woodstall, whose stout steel cap and harder skull availed nothing against the thunderbolt blow that cut him down, never knew that he had got his death from the noblest sword in France, that of Eustace de Ribeaumont. Poor young Beauchamp, who had hoped to win fame and knightly spurs by measuring himself with De Chargny, gained his wish and his death-wound with it. By the hand of Sir John Chandos, “the flower of England’s chivalry,” fell gay young Pepin de Werre, laughing as he died. Sturdy Mat Bowyer was smitten through bone and brain by Alain de St. Yvon, but the next moment his slayer fell dead beside him, crushed by the terrible mace of Walter de Manny; and as Raoul sprang forward to avenge his brother, Sir Peter Audley cut him down.

At the same instant Hugo de Claremont, who had come hand-to-hand with the third brother, Huon (little dreaming that the foe who faced him so stoutly was the blithe guest with whom he had once sat at meat in Motte-Brun Castle), was beaten to his knees, and would in a moment more have been crushed to death by the trampling feet around him, had not his brother Alured and two stout men-at-arms dragged him out by main force.

In truth, the peril of the sword was the least of all the dangers that the combatants braved that night. More than one brave knight on either side was trampled to death in the press; and many a gallant youth who had come into the fray that night with bright eye and bounding heart, eager to win fame and honour, was hurled headlong over the edge of the causeway into the deadly quagmire below, to sink inch by inch in its foul black slime and perish miserably, unaided and unknown.

So, amid clashing steel and streaming blood, shouts, groans, yells, curses, the moans of dying men, and the shrieks of those who were perishing in the horrible pit below, came in that New Year morn. A strange celebration, in truth, of the blessed season of “peace on earth and good-will towards men”! but in an age when ceaseless bloodshed was held the only occupation worthy of Christian men, and when Christian kings sang praise to God for the destruction of thousands of their fellow-men by sword and fire and famine, that midnight butchery was “a very goodly and gentle passage of arms”!

All at once a sheet of flame leaped up through the blackness from the beacon-tower; and beneath its blood-red glare every feature of that wild scene started into terrible distinctness—the dark towers and battlements of the grim old fortress, the anxious watchers that crowded them, the dim expanse of sea behind, the whirl of furious faces and struggling arms and flashing weapons that filled the causeway, the black morass on either side, and the wild waste of dreary moor beyond all—a picture which no one who saw it ever forgot.

The light revealed that the battle was going against France; for though the French fought as bravely as men could do, all their valour was rendered vain by the complete surprise, the suddenness and fury of the attack, the superiority of prepared men to unprepared ones, and the narrowness of the causeway, which made their greater numbers not only useless, but harmful. Already they were beginning to recoil: but their stern leader, De Chargny, furious at being thus tricked and baffled, fought like a tiger, and, aided by the terrible arm of Eustace de Ribeaumont, still bore up the war.

Just as the beacon flamed up, Sir Eustace, while hacking his way through that living jungle like a woodman slashing down brushwood, suddenly came face to face with a tall man in plain armour, whose prowess had already made him remarked alike by friend and foe, though he bore neither badge nor blazon.

“To me, Sir Eustace!” cried the stranger; “I would fain try my strength with thine.”

“I know thee not,” replied Sir Eustace, “but all such guests are welcome to De Ribeaumont. Come on, and let God send the victory as He will.”

Without another word the two closed, and for some moments thrust and parry, stroke and guard, followed each other as thunder follows lightning. At last the French sword fell like a thunderbolt on the stranger’s crest, beating him down on his knee; but ere Sir Eustace could second his blow, the other sprang lightly up once more.

“St. Denis! thou art a good knight!” cried the French hero, with all the chivalrous admiration of one brave man for another. “Wilt thou yield thee to my mercy?”

“‘Yield’ is a word that I know not,” said the unknown, simply; and to it they went again like giants.

But a rush of fighting men parted them, and the stranger, reeling beneath another tremendous blow, would have been thrust off the causeway to die in the foul morass below, had not a strong arm upheld him, while a gruff voice said in his ear—

“Hold up, your worship, and to it again; yon Frenchman is a good blade, but you will match him yet.”

“Thanks for thy timely aid, my brave lad of England,” said the knight. “But for thee, I had been fairly sped. By what name shall I remember thee?”

“Dickon Greenleaf of Nottingham, an’ it like your worship.”

“I will not forget it,” said the unknown, with a low laugh, which thrilled the stout archer’s nerves so unpleasantly that he instinctively made the sign of the cross.

Just then the too familiar war cry of “St. George for England!” broke out behind the combatants, and told the dismayed French that they were completely hemmed in. The master-mind that guided every turn of that night’s wild work had not forgotten the Neuillet Bridge, and the English force sent to seize it had, after a fight as fierce as that on the causeway itself, effected its purpose, thus cutting off the retreat of De Chargny’s men, who, already weary and out of heart, now gave way altogether.

“Yield, noble Sir Eustace! The toils are around thee and thine,” cried the unknown, who had just come hand-to-hand with De Ribeaumont for the third time. “Thou hast done thy devoir this night as never man did yet, and it is no shame to a good knight to yield when escape is none.”

“Thou say’st sooth,” said the gallant Frenchman, with a faint sigh, “and I shame me not to yield to one like thee. I render me true prisoner, rescue or no rescue, and therewith give I thee my sword.”

“Not so,” cried the unknown, gently putting back the offered weapon. “Sin and shame were it, I trow, to deprive so good a knight of the sword that none else can wield so well. Keep thy good blade, noble sir, and may’st thou draw it on many a more fortunate field than this!”

So chivalrous a compliment, from a foe of such prowess, well-nigh consoled the brave Frenchman for his defeat; but none the less was he eager to learn who this warrior could be, who had not only matched his hitherto invincible sword, but had mastered it too. On that point, however, he was not left long in doubt, for, as his captor led him in through the gate, the light from within fell right on the latter’s now unhelmeted face, and Sir Eustace started to see that his nameless conqueror was no other than King Edward himself!