“Why here?” a man called out.

“Because Sir Roger knows what he’s doing,” Smithson said, sounding anything but certain, “and if you’ve got sweethearts here,” he went on with a leer, “make certain the little darlings come with you.” He began thrusting his meaty hips backward and forward. “Don’t want our sweethearts left in the streets to be humped by half the French army, do we?”

Next morning, as he did each morning, Hook gazed north across the Aisne to the low wooded hills where the beleaguered garrison hoped to see a Burgundian relief force. None came. The great gun-stones whirred across the ashes of the burned houses and bit into the crumbling wall to start up their clouds of dust that settled on the river to drift seaward like pale gray stains on the water. Hook rose early every morning, before it was light, and went to the cathedral where he knelt and prayed. He had been warned not to walk the streets by himself, but the people of Soissons left him alone, perhaps scared of his height and size, or perhaps because they knew he was the one archer who prayed regularly and so tolerated him. He had abandoned praying to Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian because he reckoned they cared more about the townsfolk, their own folk, and so he prayed instead to the mother of Christ because his own mother had been called Mary and he begged the blessed Virgin for forgiveness because of the girl who had died in London. On one such morning a priest knelt beside him. Hook ignored the man.

“You’re the Englishman who prays,” the priest said in English, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. Hook said nothing. “They wonder why you pray,” the priest went on, jerking his head to indicate the women who knelt before other statues and altars.

Hook’s instinct was to go on ignoring the man, but the priest had a friendly face and a kindly voice. “I’m just praying,” he said, sounding surly.

“Are you praying for yourself?”

“Yes,” Hook admitted. He prayed so that God would forgive him and lift the curse that he was certain blighted his life.

“Then ask something for someone else,” the priest suggested gently. “God listens to those prayers more readily, I think, and if you pray for someone else then He will grant your own request too.” He smiled, stood, and lightly touched Hook’s shoulder. “And pray to our saints, Crispin and Crispinian. I think they are less busy than the blessed Virgin. God watch over you, Englishman.”

The priest walked away and Hook decided to take his advice and pray again to the two local saints and so he went to an altar beneath a painting of the two martyrs and there he prayed for the soul of Sarah, whose life he had failed to save in London. He stared up at the painting as he prayed. The two saints stood in a green field scattered with golden stars on a hill high above a white-walled city. They looked gravely and a little sadly toward Hook. They did not look like shoemakers. They were dressed in white robes and Crispin carried a shepherd’s crook while Crispinian held a wicker tray of apples and pears. Their names were painted beneath each man and Hook, though he could not read, could tell which saint was which because one name was longer than the other. Crispinian looked much the friendlier man. He had a rounder face and blue eyes and a half-smile of great kindliness, while Saint Crispin appeared much sterner and was half turned away, as though he had no time for an onlooker and was about to walk down the hill and into the city, and so Hook fell into the habit of praying to Crispinian each morning, though he always acknowledged Crispin too. He dropped two pennies in the jar each time he prayed.

“To look at you,” John Wilkinson said one evening, “I wouldn’t take you for a man of prayer.”

“I wasn’t,” Hook said, “till now.”

“Frightened for your soul?” the old archer asked.

Hook hesitated. He was binding arrow fledging with the silk stolen from the cathedral’s altar frontal. “I heard a voice,” he blurted out suddenly.

“A voice?” Wilkinson asked. Hook said nothing. “God’s voice?” the older man asked.

“It was in London,” Hook said.

He felt foolish for his admission, but Wilkinson took it seriously. He stared at Hook for a long time, then nodded abruptly. “You’re a lucky man, Nicholas Hook.”

“I am?”

“If God spoke to you then He must have a purpose for you. That means you might survive this siege.”

“If it was God who spoke to me,” Hook said, embarrassed.

“Why shouldn’t He? He needs to speak to people, on account that the church don’t listen to Him.”

“It doesn’t?”

Wilkinson spat. “The church is about money, lad, money. Priests are supposed to be shepherds, aren’t they? They’re meant to be looking after the flock, but they’re all in the manor hall stuffing their faces with pastries, so the sheep have to look after themselves.” He pointed an arrow at Hook. “And if the French break into the town, Hook, don’t go to Saint Anthony the Lesser! Go to the castle.”

“Sir Roger…” Hook began.

“Wants us dead!” Wilkinson said angrily.

“Why would he want that?”

“Because he’s got no money and a heap of debt, boy, so the man with the biggest purse can buy him. And because he’s not a real Englishman. His family came to England with the Normans and he hates you and me because we’re Saxons. And because he’s crammed to the throat with Norman shit, that’s why. You go to the castle, lad! That’s what you do.”

The next few nights were dark, and the waning moon was a sliver like a cutthroat’s blade. The Sire de Bournonville feared a night attack and ordered dogs to be tethered out in the wasteland where the houses had been burned. If the dogs barked, he said, the warning bell on the western gate was to be rung, and the dogs did bark and the bell was rung, but no Frenchmen assaulted the breach. Instead, as the dawn mist shimmered above the river, the besiegers catapulted the dogs’ corpses into the town. The animals had been gelded and had their throats cut as a warning of the fate that awaited the defiant garrison.

The feast of Saint Abdus passed, and no relief force arrived, and then Saint Possidius’s feast came and went, and next day was the feast of the seven holy virgins, and Hook prayed to each one, and in the next dawn he sent a plea to Saint Dunstan, the Englishman, on his feast day, and the day after that to Saint Ethelbert, who had been a king of England, and all the time he also prayed to Crispinian and to Crispin, begging their protection, and on the very next day, on the feast of Saint Hospitius, he received his answer.

When the French, who had been praying to Saint Denis, attacked Soissons.

The first Hook knew of the assault was the sound of the city’s church bells clanging in frantic haste and jangling disorder. It was dark and he was momentarily confused. He slept on straw at the back of John Wilkinson’s workshop and he woke to the glare of flames leaping high as the old man threw wood on the brazier to provide light. “Don’t lie there like a pregnant sow, boy,” Wilkinson said, “they’re here.”

“Mary, mother of God.” Hook felt the surge of panic like icy water seething through his body.

“I’ve an inkling she don’t care one way or the other,” Wilkinson said. He was pulling on a mail coat, struggling to get the heavy links over his head. “There’s an arrow bag by the door,” he went on, his voice now muffled by the coat, “full of straight ones. Left it for you. Go, boy, kill some bastards.”

“What about you?” Hook asked. He was tugging on his boots, new boots made by a skilled cobbler of Soissons.

“I’ll catch up with you! String your bow, son, and go!”

Hook buckled his sword belt, strung his bow, snatched his arrow bag, then took the second bag from beside the door and ran into the tavern yard. He could hear shouting and screams, but where they came from he could not tell. Archers were pouring into the yard and he instinctively followed them toward the new defenses behind the breach. The church bells were hammering the night sky with jangling noise. Dogs barked and howled.