Yet he knew it was a bargain he would not be permitted. That he and Matilda and Edward would meet their ends together, crushed by the soulless malice and uncaring brutality of sea and wind, and deep within him bitter protest reproached the God who had decreed that they should.
The cog shuddered and twitched, heaving in the torment of overstrained timbers and rigging, and Sir George looked up as the ship’s mate shouted something. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew it was a question, and he shook himself like a sodden dog, struggling to make his mind function. For all his ignorance of the sea, he had found himself doomed to command of the ship when a falling spar killed the captain. In fact, he’d done little more than agree with the mate’s suggestions, lending his authority to the support of a man who might—might!—know enough to keep them alive a few hours more. But the mate had needed that support, needed someone else to assume the ultimate responsibility, and that was Sir George’s job. To assume responsibility. No, to acknowledge the responsibility which was already his. And so he made himself look as if he were carefully considering whatever it was the mate wanted to do this time, then nodded vigorously.
The mate nodded back, then bellowed orders at his exhausted, battered handful of surviving sailors. Wind howl and sea thunder thrashed the words into meaningless fragments so far as Sir George could tell, but two or three men began clawing their way across the deck to obey whatever the mate had decreed, and Sir George turned his face back to the sea’s tortured millrace. It didn’t really matter what the mate did, he thought. At worst, a mistake would cost them a few hours of life they might otherwise have clung to; at best, a brilliant maneuver might buy them an hour or two they might not otherwise have had. In the end, the result would be the same.
He’d had such hopes, made so many plans. A hard man, Sir George Wincaster, and a determined one. A peer of the realm, a young man who had caught his monarch’s favor at the siege of Berwick at the age of twenty-two, who’d been made a knight by Edward III’s own hand the next year on the field of Halidon Hill. A man who’d served with distinction at the Battle of Sluys eight years later—although, he thought with an edge of mordant humor even now, if I’d learned a bit more then of ships, I might have been wise enough to stay home this time!—and slogged through the bitterly disappointing French campaign of 1340. And a man who had returned with a fortune from Henry of Denby’s campaign in Gascony five years later.
And a bloody lot of good it’s done me in the end, he thought bitterly, remembering his gleaming plans. At thirty-five, he was at the height of his prowess, a hard-bitten, professional master of the soldier’s trade. A knight, yes, but one who knew the reality of war, not the minstrels’ tales of romance and chivalry. A man who fought to win . . . and understood the enormous changes England and her lethal longbows were about to introduce into the continental princes’ understanding of the art of war.
And one who knew there were fortunes to be made, lands and power to be won, in the service of his King against Philip of France. Despite the disappointments of 1340, last year had proved Edward III his grandfather’s grandson, a welcome relief after the weakness and self-indulgence of his father. Longshanks would have approved of the King, Sir George thought now. He started slow, but now that Denby’s shown the way and he’s chosen to beard Philip alone, the lions of England will make the French howl!
Perhaps they would, and certainly Edward’s claim to the throne of France was better than Philip VI’s, but Sir George Wincaster would not win the additional renown—or the added wealth and power he had planned to pass to his son—at his King’s side. Not now. For he and all the troops under his command would find another fate, and no one would ever know where and when they actually perished.