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room in the inn, which meant her three friends were shivering out in the narrow hall or under the eaves.
    She leaned over; we were on a pallet of linen filled with new straw, and it smelled healthy and wholesome, as Anne did. She drank water from a pitcher and gave it to me: it had mint leaves in it and I remember that trick still. Her breasts were heavy, white against her brown arms, and the mere sight of them aroused me, despite my painful awareness that I had just broken my oath. In fact, my cheek hurt.
    I’ve known many a witty titbit exchanged between lovers at this point, the first sally of the morning so to speak; I’ve heard recriminations and I’ve heard love babble.
    She lay back, unworried by her nudity. ‘A girl does prefer a soldier to a priest,’ she said. She rubbed a hand over the muscle in my belly. ‘Do you know that Cardinal Talleyrand is dead?’
    Cardinal Talleyrand had been appointed the Cardinal Legate of the crusade. He was leading it, and he was paying for a great deal of it. He intended to be Pope, after all.
    Women are different from men in this way, I think. She was already flushed – I won’t go into details – but she intended to start our day as we’d ended the last, and yet she could talk church politics with me.
    I could see nothing but her lips, her nipples, the sharp line of her side where it met her hip.
    At some point another girl pounded on the wooden partition. ‘Stop your lechery and let us dress or we’ll all be beaten!’ she said.
    Anne responded by pushing her hips up into mine and making a little emphatic noise.
    ‘Marie had a customer, a papal courier,’ she said. ‘From the coronation at Rheims,’ she went on, her voice raising a little, speaking in the rhythm of our lovemaking.
    I’m sure we talked of other things. But I can’t remember them.
    See now, I’ve made Monsieur Froissart blush.
     
    Almost the first person I met outside the inn while I was still tying my points of my hose to my doublet, was Father Pierre Thomas, with Miles Stapleton.
    Miles waved. ‘Did you spend the night in the inn?’ he asked. Another boy might have said it with malice, but Miles was an innocent, and he looked at me without guile.
    Father Pierre winced.
    ‘I did,’ I said simply, having learned a variety of lessons from my time at the Hospital. ‘Father, do you know that Cardinal Talleyrand is dead?’
    I hated Talleyrand – well, I disliked him, but he was in some ways the power behind Father Pierre. Pierre Thomas came from Talleyrand’s home of Perigord, and had, it was said, been a peasant on his estates. And of course, he was the papal legate for the crusade. And the next Pope, or so we all guessed.
    It was one of the few times I’ve ever seen the man hesitate. Then his face took on its habitual look, his eyes calmed, and he nodded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But this is not the place to speak of it. We were walking to the river, but now I think we will go to the Hospital.’
    I had seldom seen Father Pierre agitated or walking more quickly than his determined, workman’s stride. But now he did, and when he reached the Hospital, he sent for the Baillie, the local commander, Sir Juan di Heredia, and his own staff. Miles Stapleton was there, and so was Father’s Pierre’s Latin secretary, a nun called Marie. About whom you will hear more of later. But she was an exceptional woman – she would have to be, to be the Latin secretary to the best mind the Church had produced since Aquinas. Lord Grey was also there.
    ‘Can the crusade survive this blow?’ Father Pierre asked.
    Di Heredia shrugged. ‘And be stronger for it, truly. The King of France was always a broken reed, and Perigord (that’s what they often called Talleyrand, after his title) would have used the crusade solely to further his own ambitions.’ Now, di Heredia knew what he was about when he spoke of furthering personal ambitions – he was the most ambitious man I’d ever met, with a finger in every