Lion Hearts by DAN JONES is the unmissable conclusion to the ‘Essex Dogs’ trilogy. Read on for an extract …
ABOUT THE BOOK
1350
Three years on from the Siege of Calais:
The Black Death has wreaked havoc in Europe.
The Castilians are moving against England.
The Essex Dogs have scattered.
In Winchelsea, Loveday struggles to keep his tavern afloat in the aftermath of the Death. Nowadays, the only battles he fights are the ones within his own mind.
In Windsor, Romford thrives as a squire at King Edward III’s court, his days as an archer fading into memory. But when an unpaid debt threatens everything he’s built, Romford must call upon the lessons he learned all those years ago: be cunning. Be ruthless. Be quick.
With England still reeling from the Death and the Castilian threat on the rise, the kingdom’s future has never been more uncertain.
Each had reasons for leaving the Essex Dogs behind. But a life like that isn’t so easily forgotten.
And for these men the fighting isn’t over yet…
EXTRACT
‘What do you think?’ said Thorp, shielding his face against the sun and looking at Bordeaux. The city seemed to wobble in the heat, as the English ship named the Katherine sailed up the narrowing mouth of the River Garonne. ‘Could you swim from here?’
Thorp, a stocky, dark-haired archer, an Essexman about 35 summers in age, with strong shoulders and quick, cynical eyes, was standing on the raised platform men called a ‘castle’, which jutted out at the Katherine’s prow. Bordeaux was still a good way upriver, but the water through which the ship was cruising looked invitingly cool. Dragonflies flitted over its rippling surface. Silver fish snapped and flipped in the eddies.
The ship, a cog, was mostly used for ferrying wine from ports like this one, in the sweltering country of Gascony, across sea channels menaced in those days by Castilian pirates, to the cooler shores of England. Today, the first day of July, it travelled in the other direction, and in the ship’s belly were crates full of dresses, curtains, tapestries, bedspreads and treasure.
Besides the ship’s captain and his small crew of sailors, there were also two dozen fighting men aboard: mostly hard-bitten veterans of King Edward’s war against the French. One of those veterans was the man Thorp now addressed.
Gilbert ‘Millstone’ Attecliffe tugged a lock of his springy hair, which was running to grey here and there, and considered the matter.
Bordeaux was still nearly a mile away. Which was why Thorp had asked. Not many men could have contemplated such a feat of endurance. But Millstone was tough. For years, the two men had fought together in a war band known as the Essex Dogs. That crew was now broken up: some members dead, others missing, their leader, Loveday, retired. But Thorp and Millstone were keeping the spirit of the Dogs alive. Or trying to.
‘Swim it? Aye,’ said Millstone, still sizing up Bordeaux. ‘Just. Without my boots on. But when I got there, I’d be good for nothing.’ He crinkled his eyes. ‘You’d have to drag me up the dock, blowing out of my arse like a porpoise.’
Thorp chuckled. ‘Good fellow,’ he said.
Millstone returned the question, like a favour. ‘Reckon you could loose an arrow to hit the spire on the cathedral?’
‘No chance,’ Thorp said. He was a brilliant bowman: one of the best ever to hold a yew shaft. But to shoot an arrow a mile was undoable. ‘A few hundred paces closer, mind …’ He glanced at his mate. ‘You know as well as I do that I could pin a man’s pintle to his hand if he was pissing against the belltower.’
Thorp thumbed sweat out of his eyebrows and ran a hand through his hair, salt- and sweat-stiffened from the week at sea.
He took a swig from his ale flask, leaned over the edge of the ship’s castle and spat.
Then he recoiled in surprise.
A dead woman was staring up at him.
*
If Thorp had to guess, she was about 20. She hung below the water, face and belly up, her eyes wide open and her brown hair floating around her like riverweed. The rough shift she wore exposed her thighs and revealed dark purple welts around her groin. It looked like she had been beaten there with a switch. More dark lumps, the size of a hen’s egg, stood out around her neck.
‘Christ’s teeth!’ Thorp felt queasy, but tried not to show it. He nudged Millstone. ‘Look at that.’ The big stonemason nodded. He, too, noticed the black lumps.
‘Call Cosyngton,’ said Millstone.
Sir Stephen Cosyngton, the knight in charge of the expedition, was already clambering up the steps to the forecastle. Cosyngton had a bushy moustache, which trailed in barbels down the sides of his lips. He wore a sweat-soaked length of red silk on his head to stop the sun burning his bald patch.
‘What are you two staring at?’ he asked, brusque as always.
‘Dead girl,’ said Thorp. ‘Looks like she drowned.’
Cosyngton squinted into the water. ‘Drowned, my bollocks,’ he said. ‘Look at her armpits.’
For a moment, they all leaned over the side of the castle and watched the round prow of the ship’s hull nudge the girl’s body, before she drifted along the Katherine’s steerboard side towards the stern and out of view.
Millstone pointed ahead. A forearm was bobbing above the surface, the hand grasping for some way out of the water, out of the unbelievable predicament of death. The flesh of the fingers was dark and mottled, the digits swollen like raw sausages.
‘No one’s been drowned,’ said Cosyngton. ‘Christ help us.’ He took a deep breath. ‘That’s the Death.’
*
As Millstone, Thorp and Cosyngton watched the bodies floating in the river, each man was thinking the same thing. For the past half year and more, rumours had been swirling in England of a deadly sickness that was spreading around the whole Earth, having passed from the Tartars of the east to the land of the Saracens and now to the Christians.
It had various names. The plague. The pest. The mortality. Or simply the Death. All referred to an ague that caused a person’s throat and privy parts to swell and blacken and rot, their breath to stink, their eyes and nostrils to bleed unstoppably and their piss to dry up. It killed almost everyone it touched.
Some men, like Thorp, doubted its existence, snorting that it was just a summer sickness; that talk of it being anything more was nonsense put about by fools, or else malicious talk by rich men hoping to scare the lesser sort into obedience.
But those who had seen it sweep through cities and countryside said that it spelt the end of the world. It looked, thought Millstone, as though they were about to find out.
Cosyngton had been deep in thought, the muscle at the side of his jaw pulsing. Eventually, he spoke. ‘Let’s get a lad up here to keep a count,’ he said. ‘So we know what we’re dealing with. You’ve a boy with you?’
‘Aye,’ said Thorp. He scanned the boat and whistled through his fingers. ‘Rigby!’ he shouted.
Rigby was his sister’s boy, half an orphan since the spring, when, after years of trying, his wastrel father drank himself dead. At that moment the lad was at the stern of the cog, making up lewd songs with a Castilian lute player – a friend of someone or other at court who had begged a ride home on the Katherine.
Many of the crew would have nothing to do with Garcias, hating all Castilians for the evils their pirates did to English shipping. But Rigby, in his simple way, did not care, and had been happily playing dice with the musician, who was also teaching him the filthiest Castilian curses he knew.
Hearing his uncle whistle, Rigby loped the length of the ship and up to the castle. ‘Essex Dogs, my lord,’ he said, rubbing his nose on his sleeve. ‘Ready for anything. Who do you want us to fight?’
Sir Stephen Cosyngton looked at him in surprise. ‘You could start by fighting the urge to be a fucking prick,’ he said. ‘Stand here and count how many dead are in the river.’
Rigby nodded enthusiastically. He took up a place on the castle, and stood there absent-mindedly scratching his arse.
*
As the Katherine continued upriver, Millstone watched Bordeaux emerge from the heat haze. It was huge – easily as big as London. Streets of one- and two-storey buildings sprawled around the spire of a new cathedral. High stone walls enclosed the city’s centre; a castle loomed in one corner.
Outside the walls, suburbs gave way to vineyards. The whole crew had been excited about arriving. Bordeaux was known for fine wine and even better bathhouses. But now, as word went around the ship of the dead folk in the river, Millstone felt the mood grow tense.
This was supposed to be a simple job. They were there as part of a bodyguard assembled by Cosyngton to serve Princess Joan: a young daughter of Edward III. As Cosyngton had explained when he had found Millstone drinking in a London tavern favoured by seasoned soldiers, the princess was going to Bordeaux to get married.
‘She’s marrying a Castilian,’ he had said. ‘Pedro. To make an alliance. We all know those donkey-fuckers have been raising hell on the high seas. This will bring them over to our side.’
Cosyngton explained that the princess was already in Bordeaux. His men would be going down to take over bodyguard duties, travelling on the ships carrying something he called her trousseau: dresses, tapestries and clothes.
‘We usually steal shit like this, we don’t protect it,’ Thorp had griped, when Millstone had told him about the job. But he soon changed his mind.
‘Few weeks babysitting, few weeks dipping our pintles in the bathhouses of Bordeaux?’ Thorp had said. ‘When you put it like that …’
So here they were. Two old soldiers, on an easy mission for once.
Yet now they had seen the dead woman in the water, Millstone began to think that – not for the first time – God might have other plans for the last of the Essex Dogs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Jones is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of many non-fiction books, including The Plantagenets, The Templars and Powers and Thrones. He is a renowned writer, broadcaster and journalist. He has presented dozens of TV shows, including the Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles, and writes and hosts the podcast This is History. His debut novel, Essex Dogs, is the first in a series following the fortunes of ordinary soldiers in the early years of the Hundred Years’ War. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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