The Traitor's Daughter by April Munday Read Free Book Online Page B

healthy man. His only concerns were to prove his own and his king’s
honour and to gain as much wealth as he could from tournaments and soldiering.
He had certainly gained wealth from tournaments, but honour had proved more
elusive.
    With his brother’s death everything had changed and
being a soldier was no longer the simple path to glory and wealth it had once
seemed to be. Now it was more of a burden and he had regretted not staying with
Edward in France.
    Even today, he had not been able to go into battle
solely for the fight. He had first to fulfil his promise to Alais. Later, when
he had understood the nature of the battle he was fighting, he had seen there
would be no glory in it for anyone.
    He had fought the Scots for Edward and he knew what a
battle was like, but this had not been a battle. He had quickly discovered that
he was not fighting experienced or trained soldiers and that the French had not
expected to meet resistance of any kind, let alone the skilled resistance that
he had offered. It had not been difficult for him to rally the burgesses and
townspeople once he had demonstrated that the French could be beaten. Once the
initial panic was over, he had sent out men to gather up those who had managed
to escape, but as they began to push the French back towards their boats he had
been horrified by what he had seen. The French had not come to conquer or even
to return to France with the spoils of war, but they had come to kill and to
maim and to destroy and to spread fear. The streets were littered with dead
bodies – men, children, women, animals. Warehouses had been torched and wool
burned and wine casks destroyed, spilling their contents into the river. He
could have forgiven it if he had known that some of the spoils of war had gone
back to France to be consumed there, but it appeared that everything had been
destroyed where it was. The English looters were the only thieves here. Hugh
had left that problem for the burgesses to resolve themselves, for the looters
were their own people.
    To Hugh, this had been a cowardly raid, not simply
because it had been carried out in the expectation that there would be little
or no opposition, but because it targeted the weak and defenceless. He had
killed women and children in the past when it had been unavoidable, but he had
never gone out of his way to kill them and he had always done so with a heavy
heart. There was no glory to be had in fighting the defenceless. What did it
prove if he was stronger than a woman or a child?
    Once he had fulfilled his promise to Alais and found her
mother, he had set about repelling the French. Once that had been accomplished,
well into the night, he had taken care of his other obligation to Matthew and
his daughter. He had found Marion in her own home.  The broken and bloody body
of her husband Piers lay over that of their firstborn. A staff lay beside him
where it had fallen from his hands. Marion lay against the wall, her skirts
torn and ripped. She had been raped, many times by the look of it. She was
alive and he guessed that Piers’ murderers had been interrupted before they
could kill her, but she had lost all sense and stared vacantly across the room
at her dead husband. Hugh had covered the bodies with Piers’ own cloak. Then he
had put Marion onto the bed to wait until it would be light enough to make his
way back to Hill. He could not tell whether she had slept or not, but he had
stayed awake with his sword in his hand in case the looters should come during
the darkness. And all the while he had kept the face of Lady Alais at the front
of his thoughts. It was her smiling face that he saw, the brief smile he had
seen when he held her hand in farewell.
    And now he had come back with nothing but bad news for
her and she had taken it calmly and then turned to serve others. This was just
such a woman that a man should have to come home to after a battle. He thought
of his own wife, pale and sickly, always putting her own