Kemp: The Castle in the Marsh

By Jonathan Lunn

Dirt, blood and iron: an unputdownable medieval epic for fans for M.K. Hume and Matt Harffy.

France, 1351-2: Kemp and his men are captured in a skirmish near Calais, and subsequently imprisoned in a French castle. All attempts at escape are punished with death.

Then Sir Hugues de Beauconray comes to Kemp with an offer: escort a Dominican friar on a quest to steal a mysterious book from an abbey in Scotland. Fail, and ten of Kemp’s friends will be hanged.

In the hotly-disputed border country, Kemp will need all his skills as a swordsman and archer if he is to return to France and rescue his comrades. But more importantly, survive...

A masterful historical thriller, full of nail-biting action and detailed historical research, perfect for fans of David Gilman, Bernard Cornwell and Giles Kristian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo Adventure
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788636742

Jonathan Lunn

Born in London a very long time ago, Jonathan Lunn claims to have literary antecedents, being descended from the man who introduced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the Reichenbach Falls. To relax he goes for long strolls in the British countryside, an activity which over the years has resulted in him getting lost (multiple times), breaking a rib, failing to overcome his fear of heights atop dizzying precipices, fleeing herds of stampeding cattle, providing a feast for blood-sucking parasites, being shot at by hooligans with air-rifles, and finding himself trapped by rising floodwaters. He lives in Bristol where he writes full time.

Book preview

For Ellie

‘An archer named John of Doncaster was captured and imprisoned in the castle of Guînes…’

The Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker

Prologue

‘Now! Quickly, quickly! Make haste!’ As the last grain of sand in the hourglass fell through the neck into the lower half, Sir Hugues de Beauconray signalled to the blacksmith. Using a pair of tongs, the smith lifted the stone crucible out of the hottest part of the furnace. He carried it across to a table, lowering it onto a slate, and Beauconray peered at the contents.

Glancing over his shoulder, Lord Baudouin de Balinghem laughed bitterly. ‘I congratulate you, Sir Hugues. After years of study and months of experimentation, you have finally succeeded in turning lead into shit.’

‘I do not understand it, my lord.’ Beauconray’s face looked demonic in the glow from the furnace thanks to the mass of hideous burn scars on one side, a souvenir from a previous experiment that had gone horribly wrong. ‘This time I was certain it must work.’

‘Why will you not accept the truth? Lead is lead and gold is gold. You cannot turn the one into the other.’

‘You might as well say iron is iron and steel is steel. Yet iron can be turned into steel. I tell you, my lord, it can be done.’

‘You still believe that? After so many failures?’

‘Every experiment I try that does not reveal the secret of chrysopoeia takes me closer to the one that will. It is simply a matter of patience and being methodical. I warrant you will not mock so when I have discovered the secret.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that you would be a wealthy man if you had not wasted so much money in your futile experiments?’

‘Such is all alchemy means to you? The secret of turning lead into gold?’

‘Is that not your purpose?’

‘The man who unlocks the secret of turning lead into gold unlocks the secrets of the universe. Find the philosophers’ stone and you have discovered the secret of the Fifth Essence, the very stuff of which Heaven is made! Discover that and you discover the secret of restoring everything in Creation to the pure state it existed in before the Fall of Man.’

‘Restore it, or destroy it perhaps,’ growled Balinghem. ‘’Twas nibbling at the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge that got Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden in the first place; you’ll not restore us to paradise by compounding their error. And now you’ve diverted my blacksmith quite long enough, Sir Hugues. My palfrey has thrown a shoe and I’d be grateful if he could see to it; if, that is, you feel you can spare him for such mundane purposes.’

‘I will return to my books,’ said Beauconray. ‘Evidently there is some factor I am missing: some ingredient I’ve omitted, or a step of the process I am neglecting.’

Beauconray crossed the bustling bailey of the castle of Guînes. It was a summer’s day glorious enough to gladden men’s hearts and help them forget – if only for a short while – that scarce three years earlier, God had sent a foul Pestilence that had given Death licence to lay his bony fingers upon a third part of humanity. A swineherd emptied food slops into a trough in the pigsty, a huntsman tossed meat to the dogs in the kennels, a gardener tended the herbs and roots growing in the kitchen garden, and a baker carried a fresh loaf of wastel from the bakehouse to the great hall. All four of them had lost loved ones in those grim days, but life went on, and the gardener at least might console himself that he owed his present position to that same Pestilence, for it had carried off his predecessor.

Standing in the marshes of Guînes, five miles south of Calais, the castle was old: anyone who knew aught of how the layout of castles had changed could see at a glance it dated back to the days when a castle consisted of little more than a wooden tower built on a motte – an artificial mound of earth – over a bailey, surrounded by an earthwork rampart topped with a palisade. But that had been three centuries ago. Since then a curtain wall of stone with drum towers had replaced the palisade, while a circular stone keep now stood in place of the tower.

The River Hemmes had been dammed to flood the ditch surrounding the castle and create a moat far too wide for siege towers to be of use to any would-be attackers. In the passageway leading to the gatehouse, the peasants from Balinghem’s estates queued to pay their rent to their lord. The wealthier peasants paid in coin, which the bailiff counted into small sacks and placed in an iron-bound coffer, while a couple of men-at-arms kept a watchful eye on proceedings. The poorer tenants paid in kind and many of them clutched geese, chickens or rabbits.

The bailiff was arguing with a tearful tenant. He bowed as Beauconray passed. ‘What’s the trouble?’ demanded the steward.

‘The usual,’ said the bailiff.

‘We’ve had a bad quarter,’ said the tenant. Beauconray recognised him as the innkeeper who ran the Balinghem Arms. ‘We’ve had less custom since the Pestilence came. Only give me a week: I will go to a moneylender and borrow money to pay my rent, I promise!’

‘Now what use would that be?’ asked Beauconray. ‘Do you expect those who died of the Pestilence to be restored to life and resume coming to your inn? Those moneylenders charge ruinous interest rates; his lordship has no wish to see you flounder ever deeper in debt, like a beast that has strayed into a morass. We’ll come to an arrangement.’

The innkeeper bowed low. ‘God bless you, Sir Hugues.’

‘How old is your daughter now?’

The innkeeper blanched. ‘She’s only twelve.’

‘Twelve is old enough; his lordship likes them young. Have her report to the great hall next Monday; she can learn to be a serving girl.’

The innkeeper fell to his knees and clutched at the steward’s belt. ‘Please, Sir Hugues! Anything but that!’

‘Unhand me, you oaf!’ Beauconray placed the sole of one shoe against the innkeeper’s face and sent him sprawling in the mud. ‘If it isn’t his lordship, it will be some sweaty, scrofulous peasant lad. Which would you prefer? In any case, it’s that or we evict you and cast about for someone else to run the Balinghem Arms, someone who can make it turn a profit.’

Beauconray continued to the gatehouse: as steward of the castle, he enjoyed the privilege of an apartment on the upper floor. Another nobleman would have furnished it with a large four-poster bed. Beauconray was content with a small cot, which left more room for the workbenches where he carried out many of his experiments, for his astrolabe, and shelving stacked with piles of books written by the natural philosophers in whose footsteps he followed – Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zosimus of Panopolis, Theophilus, Roger Bacon, Geber, Thomas Aquinas and Ramon Llull – in the hope of one day being able to contribute some discoveries of his own that would add to mankind’s understanding of how God’s creation worked.

When Beauconray had finished writing up his notes, it was time to make some astrological observations. He headed up to the battlements of the gatehouse with the cross-staff he used to measure stars’ altitudes. Brightly painted in blue and yellow, wooden galleries called ‘hoardings’ covered the battlements, so in the event of a siege, the defenders could drop rocks or pour boiling water over anyone trying to climb up the wall, without exposing themselves to a hail of arrows from archers on the other side of the moat. Usually the castellan of a castle only ordered the construction of such hoardings when a siege was imminent; but the English had taken the town of Calais four years earlier, after an eleven-month siege, and with an English garrison only a few miles away through the marsh, Guînes had to be ready for an attack at any time. Occasionally the English ventured out of Calais, following the causeways through the marshes to plunder the farmland beyond for forage, but they could not breach the castle walls.

It was a clear night, perfect for making astrological observations, and a gibbous moon cast a silvery light on the marshes beyond the walls of St Léonard’s Abbey, a furlong to the north of the castle; the walled town of Guînes lay immediately to the south. Beauconray found the North Star at once, then turned to his left to find Sirius sinking over the horizon to the south-west.

Someone banged on the gate below.

‘Who’s there?’ called a sentry’s voice.

‘Brother Pierre Dubord.’

Beauconray crossed to the battlements, stepping through an opening into the hoarding overhanging the gate. A man had to watch his step in the hoarding: there were holes in the floor – called ‘murder holes’ – through which the defenders could hurl missiles; one false step and Beauconray would fall to his death. ‘Sentinel!’

‘Sir Hugues?’

‘Let the friar in and show him up to my apartments.’

‘Yes, Sir Hugues.’

The whole gatehouse trembled at the sound of the iron-clad wooden beams of the portcullis grating against the masonry as the guards turned the windlass to raise it.

Beauconray was waiting for Dubord when he was shown into his apartments. A scrawny man with pale grey eyes set in a gaunt face covered with stubble, Dubord wore the white habit and black mantle of a Dominican friar. He bowed low to Beauconray. There was something in his gaze the steward found unsettling, a hint of a religious fanaticism which Beauconray did not share, but they had a common interest in alchemy.

As Dubord trod the paths of Europe spreading the word of God, he took every opportunity to converse with other natural philosophers as well as holy men, and if he found anyone selling a book touching upon alchemy, he would purchase it, knowing Beauconray would reimburse him the cost. Ever since the Great Pestilence had swept across Christendom, killing one person in three, Dubord had become convinced the Day of Doom was approaching, and he insisted that only by harnessing the power of the quintessence – the Fifth Essence from which Heaven was made – could mankind hope to defeat the Antichrist.

‘Can I offer you a cup of wine?’ Beauconray asked the friar absent-mindedly, filling a goblet from a jug.

‘I only drink water.’

‘As you will.’

‘I have momentous news, Sir Hugues. A week ago I met a scholar of theology, a Provençal, in Paris. By plying him with wine, I was able to persuade him to impart a great secret to me. Have you heard of Jehan de Roquetaillade?’

‘That crazed friar who thinks he can foretell the future? What of him?’

‘This Provençal I spoke to confided in me that Roquetaillade knows where the Key of Solomon lies.’

A thrill of excitement ran up Beauconray’s spine. Rumour had it the Key of Solomon held the secret of the philosophers’ stone. If he and Dubord could find it, they would crack the secrets of the universe. Dubord would have his weapon to defeat the Antichrist, and the name of Beauconray would be added to the list of celebrated natural philosophers.

‘Where can we find this Roquetaillade?’ asked Beauconray.

‘He is a prisoner in the papal gaol at Avignon,’ said Dubord. ‘I would gladly go to speak with him and see if I can persuade him to share his secret, but Avignon is two months’ journey away. Such a journey will need expenses.’

‘You shall have them.’ Beauconray took the bunch of keys from his belt and used one to unlock an iron-bound chest that he dragged from under his bed. Filling a purse with silver coins, he handed it to Dubord.

‘If you learn where the Key of Solomon is hidden, you come straight back here and tell me, is that understood?’

‘As God is my witness, Sir Hugues.’ Dubord crossed himself.

A terrible thought occurred to the steward. ‘What if this Provençal tells someone else where the Key can be found?’

‘He will tell no one.’

‘But how can you be sure? If you could prise the secret out of him, what is to say no one else will? That Castilian rascal Don Esteban Velasco seeks the Key also; he will stop at nothing to get his hands on it. If he speaks to this Provençal—’

‘Have no fear, Sir Hugues. The Provençal is dead.’

‘Dead?’ That seemed suspiciously convenient to Beauconray. ‘How so?’

‘It was not I that killed him,’ said Dubord. ‘God put the candlestick in my hand. I was only doing God’s work.’

It dawned on Beauconray that Dubord might not be entirely sane. He looked around the room to see what objects he might use as a weapon to defend himself from the friar, before the friar started using one against him. His first thought was to tell Balinghem what Dubord had said, so his lordship could see justice done. But if Dubord was executed for murder, who would travel to Avignon to speak to Roquetaillade? Beauconray could not go, his duties as Balinghem’s steward tied him to Guînes Castle. And in truth, Dubord had not acted as crazily as all that if he had indeed murdered the Provençal to stop Velasco learning anything from him. The Church taught that sometimes it was necessary to commit a small evil to prevent a greater one. Beauconray could imagine no greater evil than for the Key of Solomon to fall into the hands of a villain like Velasco, and when you looked at it that way, Dubord’s murder of the Provençal was a very small thing indeed.

‘We must pray,’ said Dubord. ‘Pray to the Lord for the successful completion of my quest to Avignon.’ The friar closed his eyes and as he continued, Beauconray realised he was quoting – or paraphrasing, at least – the Book of Revelation. ‘And I saw and behold there was a white horse and he that sat on him had a bow and a crown was given unto him and he went forth conquering and for to overcome. And when he opened the second seal I heard the second beast say: come and see. And there went out another horse that was red and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth and that they should slay one another. And there was given unto him a great sword. And when he opened the third seal I heard the third beast say: come and see. And I beheld and lo, a black horse: and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say: a measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley for a penny: and oil and wine see thou hurt not. And when he opened the fourth seal I heard the voice of the fourth beast say: come and see. And I looked and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed after him.’

Chapter One

The breaking wheel rested atop a twenty-foot axle-pole at a crossroads, the corpse of a felon chained to the spokes, spreadeagled, as a warning to others and a feast for crows. Such sights were no more common in France than gibbets groaning under the weight of hanged men in England. A horseman reined in his stocky, flea-bitten grey rouncy and flicked back the cowl of his black mantle to reveal flint-blue eyes that had seen too much too soon in life, set in a young man’s face topped off with fair, close-cropped hair. His name was Martin Kemp, and he wondered what the dead man’s crime had been. Probably nothing Kemp had not done himself a dozen times since he had taken up arms for his king. He wondered if a similar fate awaited him somewhere down the road.

Sweating in his brigandine armour beneath a hot June sun, he gazed back across the gently rolling countryside he had just traversed. From St-Omer to Ardres, columns of smoke rose into a bright azure sky from three different villages, marking the route Sir John Beauchamp’s host had taken, if you could call three hundred men-at-arms and as many archers a host.

Some of Kemp’s comrades drove a herd of noisily lowing cattle up the road back to Calais. Like Kemp, they were broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, their thews strengthened by a lifetime of drawing the war bows they carried slung across their backs in greasy woollen bow-bags. Each man wore a leather bracer on his left wrist and carried a sheaf of two dozen arrows tucked under his belt at the back. The French called such men ‘les Goddams’ because blasphemy was never far from their lips. Most of them had come to France because they had been accused of some felony in England and had sought the sanctuary of the nearest church, choosing to abjure the realm rather than risk being found guilty by a court of law and put to death for their crime.

The beef would help to allay the hunger pangs of the English garrison at Calais. The English had not yet succeeded in extending the Pale of Calais – the land they controlled beyond the walls of the town – far enough to include any of the farmland beyond the marshes surrounding the port, and without reiving enemy territory for victuals, the garrison was entirely dependent on what food could be shipped from Dover. This was the third raid beyond the marshes that year. Behind the cattle came waggons piled high with booty plundered from churches and manor houses.

Kemp rode alongside a waggon. Jack Skipwith lay in the back, pressing a blood-soaked rag to a wound in his stomach. ‘How d’you fare?’ Kemp asked him in his Midlander accent.

‘Not well.’ Skipwith grimaced as the waggon jolted over another rut in the road.

‘Be of stout heart, Jack. Only ten more miles to Calais.’ Even as Kemp said it, he winced at how pathetic it sounded. At the rate the column retreated along the road, they would not reach Calais before sundown, and it was scarcely past noon now. Given the wound in his stomach and the plethora of blood running from it, it would be a miracle if Skipwith lived so long.

Beauchamp’s column was in retreat. For the first two days, the raid had gone well, but unlike previous raids where the French had proved themselves unwilling to come to grips with the English archers, this morning the Lord of Beaujeu’s men had launched an attack on Beauchamp’s rearguard. The English had adopted their usual tactics – men-at-arms in the middle, archers on the flanks – and they had driven the French off before they reached the English lines, but only for a couple of hours. A second attack by the French a few miles up the road had resulted in fierce hand-to-hand fighting before they were driven off, and Skipwith was not the only one wounded. Sitting on the waggon’s driving board, Adam Marshall had a bloody bandage wrapped around one thigh, while Rob Askerby rode with one arm in a sling.

Kemp heard distant shouts and the familiar ring of steel against steel coming from down the road. Glancing back down the column, he saw that a troop of horsemen wearing the Lord of Beaujeu’s blue-and-yellow livery had attacked the rearguard again.

Kemp called out the names of nine of his companions and ordered them to dismount and follow him. He had no particular authority over these men, but their serjeant had been summoned to speak with Beauchamp, and in his absence no one else seemed inclined to take charge. They seemed content to follow him, though it helped Kemp had not named Elias Jarrom, who would have feasted on dung before he took an order from Kemp. ‘The rest of you, keep these waggons moving!’

Kemp and the men he had named tied their horses to a gate leading into a field and made their way back down the lane between the hedgerow and the sides of the waggons, stripping the woollen bow-bags off their bow staves. When they were a furlong from the mêlée at the tail of the column, each man stopped to brace one of the nocks of his bow against the inside of a foot, so he could bend it sufficiently to loop one end of the string over the upper nock. Then they continued advancing back down the lane towards the fighting. Any one of them could shoot an arrow more than two hundred yards, but to make sure their arrows struck Frenchmen rather than Englishmen, they had to get closer.

When they were within fifty yards, Kemp stopped, took a bodkin-tipped arrow and nocked it to the string. The heavy steel head might not inflict a wound as grievous as that caused by a broadhead, but at close range a bodkin tip could punch through chain-mail, sometimes even plate if it struck at the right angle. There was no sense getting the nine men with him to line up: there was not enough room between the waggons, and this was no time for volley shooting. Kemp picked out his target, a knight who waved his broadsword as if directing the men around him, and drew the fletchings of his arrow to his ear before leaning into his bow stave, pushing it away from his body. Taking a deep breath, he loosed on the exhale, sending the clothyard shaft soughing through the air to its target. Lucas Shepherd and Jankin Plowman both loosed a moment later, and then the others were spreading out to wherever there was space to draw a bow between the waggons. They fired in their own time, as targets presented themselves.

French men-at-arms reeled in their saddles with arrows jutting from their torsos. Others wheeled their horses to flee, but more and more were riding up behind them, until the narrow lane was crowded with rearing mounts and mailed men thrusting spears and swinging swords and maces. Seeing the archers shooting at him from a short distance up the lane, a knight gestured for his men to follow him, and goaded his steed into the gap between the waggons and the hedgerow, trying to get at them. Nearer to the tail of the column than the others, Kemp nocked another arrow and waited until the knight was less than ten yards away before letting fly. At such close range, he could not miss: his arrow punched through the knight’s bascinet and the skull beneath. The knight tumbled from the saddle with blood running through the breathing holes in his visor. His horse reared up wildly as a serjeant-at-arms pushed past from behind, trying to ride Kemp down. The archer ducked between the wheels of the waggon to his left, rising up on the far side and scrambling over the sideboards to stand amongst the coffers full of plunder in the back, where he could meet anyone who charged him on horseback more or less face to face.

The serjeant who had tried to bowl him over a few heartbeats earlier had ridden past the waggon by now, only to be shot down by Shepherd and Plowman, but there were plenty more behind. Kemp shot them down as fast as he could nock and loose, until the horses of the men-at-arms riding up behind were stumbling over the corpses littering the road, and the riderless horses blocked the way. But no matter how many he shot down, more and more goaded their horses into the narrow space.

Kemp had only three arrows left now. It was time to give up the waggons and fall back, but the others had already been forced back. Another troop of men-at-arms poured into the lane through a gateway further up, cutting off any chance of escape for Kemp, Shepherd and Plowman. Shepherd turned to flee, and a horseman rode him down, skewering him through the back with the tip of a lance. Three more crowded the left side of the waggon Kemp stood on, slashing at him with their swords. Kemp moved to the right-hand side of the waggon, beyond the reach of their blades, but a French squire manoeuvred his steed between the back of the waggon and the sumpter horses drawing the waggon behind. As the squire goaded his horse up the other side of the waggon, Kemp slung his bow across his back by its bowstring and drew his broadsword from its scabbard. The squire leaped from his saddle to join Kemp in the back of the waggon, hacking at him. Kemp parried, kicking the squire in the crotch on the follow-through. As the squire doubled up with a shriek of agony, Kemp brought the pommel of his sword down against the back of his head, hard enough to feel his skull crack.

Kemp looked around, saw Plowman sinking behind another waggon with blood gouting from three separate wounds while a serjeant-at-arms pounded at him with a mace. Realising he was alone now and surrounded by the enemy, Kemp felt a wave of nausea wash over him. Suddenly one-and-twenty years of life did not seem nearly enough. On the other hand, if he could choose the manner of his death, he would have picked this, to be surrounded by his enemies and spitting defiance at them from the jaws of hell, fighting to the last and taking as many of them with him as he could.

Two men-at-arms who had lost their horses were trying to scramble over the waggon’s tailgate to get at him. Kemp split one’s skull with his broadsword and slammed a heel into the other’s face, pulping his nose. Both fell back out of sight. A serjeant-at-arms leaped from his horse to land in the back of the waggon. Kemp lunged the tip of his broadsword at the serjeant’s midriff before he had had a chance to regain his balance, a thrust which the serjeant was barely able