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too bright to look at. He closed his eyes again. “I think my leg's broken,” he said. “Send for the surgeon and strip Urgan's harness.” Someone put something beneath his head—a saddle blanket by the smell—and he could hear the clatter and grunting as they tried to undo the girths of his heavy war saddle and pull it from beneath the dead animal. How odd to be smelling things again. The blanket, the filthy mud, the charred scent of the tree, all laced through the cold air. Then he heard—a snort. He opened his eyes. Urgan was twitching all over like a slaughtered pig, then thrashing wildly. In a panic the horse scrambled up, spilling the saddle and its lashed-on equipment to the ground with a crash. He turned his head to watch as they ran to catch the bucking destrier's bridle and at the same time avoid his vicious hooves.
    “Well, who would have thought it,” said Aimery the squire. “As good as new and as mean as ever. But look here—every place that metal touched his coat, there's a big singe mark.”
    Two miracles, Lord, thought Gilbert as he looked up to the dreary gray sky from the jolting cart where he had been piled with the other injured. Surely, I'm meant to see Margaret again.
    KING EDWARD THE THIRD rode out with his advisers to assess the damage. Animals lay dead along the route of march. The littleband on horseback stopped to watch as drovers freed a dead ox from his yoke. The army had lost so many draft horses it was no longer mobile. Twelve hundred cavalry mounts were dead. The human toll of the storm was visible everywhere, as the living gathered up the dead. Soldiers and stable hands, smiths and wheel- wrights, all those with leather helmets or no helmets at all had been mortally injured. The heralds rode up, reciting the first list of the nobles killed.“So many, so many,” said the King. The cold wind blew at his cloak and ruffled his long beard. It had gray in it, the first his advisers had noticed. “It is the will of God,” he said. “I will accept the request of the Pope to negotiate a treaty of peace.”
    On May Day, not far from Chartres, the French clerics and ambassadors met the English warlords to negotiate. Together, delegates of the French and English parties carried the treaty to be signed by the Dauphin in Paris. The gates of the city were thrown open; all the bells were ringing, and the streets hung with tapestry. But King Edward was not there to see the celebration. The crown of France having slipped from his grasp, the King of England rode at full speed with his four sons to the nearest channel port, leaving the Duke of Lancaster to lead the troops back to Calais.

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    T HE UPPER WINDOW OF THE LITTLE house on the crowded alley called St. Katherine's Street was open, and Mother Hilde was leaning out of it watering the marigolds in her window box. She was looking even rounder and more cheerful than I saw her last, for spring brings babies, and babies make prosperity for Mother Hilde, who is the cleverest midwife in the whole of London, if not the entire realm. Her sleeves were rolled up, and as she poured the water onto the green leaves and around the roots, I could hear her humming and talking, and though I couldn't make it out, I knew it was for the plants. Mother Hilde talks to cabbages, too, and they are always grand and big, and her roses and beans always prosper like burgesses.
    “Why, it's Margaret!” she said, looking down at the street when I called. “And the girls, too! Go right in—the door's unlatched, but Malachi's in back. Don't make a sound. He's got a new process he's been working on for days.”
    How like the old days, I thought, when Brother Malachi was always sure that next week, next month, next year, the secret of the Philosopher's Stone would be his. There was a time, when I was a poor girl fresh from the country, that I lived with them and was Mother Hilde's apprentice in midwifery, though it isn't respectable to mention these days