Ash: A Secret History (133 page)

I think William thinks this manuscript comes from Hedingham Castle.

I think he thinks Vaughan stole it.

He didn’t see Vaughan Davies after the war because Vaughan vanished in 1940.

I’m not kidding, Pierce. He vanished. William was shot down over the Channel that summer, and spent considerable time in hospital. He still has burn-scars, you can see them. By the time he was invalided out, the house at Sible Hedingham was deserted. There were the usual rumours for the time of Vaughan having been a German spy, but all William could find out was that his brother had left for London.

Being wartime, the police investigations were a bit scanty. Now it’s sixty years later, the trail’s cold.

William says he always assumed his brother was caught in the Blitz, killed in the bombing, his body blown up or burned so as to be facially unidentifiable. He had no hesitation in saying this to me in just those words. Gruesome. Maybe it’s being a surgeon.

William Davies is selling the Sible Hedingham house because he’s going into sheltered accommodation. He must be in his eighties, now. He’s very sharp. When he says there’s no mystery over his brother’s death, I want to believe him.

No – what I _want_ is to go back to the office and pretend that none of this is happening. I’ve always loved academic publishing, but what I want now is for there to be more distance between me and history. All this is uncomfortably close, somehow.

What you’re finding on the Mediterranean seabed – Pierce if this manuscript _is_ something we need, I don’t know what I’ll do. Take my annual holiday, fly to the Florida Keys, and pretend that none of it is happening! It’s too much.

No.

As your editor – as a friend – I’ll be here. I know you can’t do the translation instantly, I know you’re busy examining the new site, but can you at least give me some idea of whether this is a valuable document or not, before the end of the day?

– Anna

  Message: #270 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Ash/Visigoths

Date:    05/12/00 at 10.59 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

Good God, even as separate files, they’re taking *for ever* to download! I’m using Isobel’s other notebook while they’re coming in; and I’m looking at the first page at this moment –

One thing I can tell you immediately. If these images have scanned in correctly, this document is by the same hand that wrote ‘Fraxinus’.

Anna, I KNOW this handwriting – I can read it as fast as I can read my own! I know all the tricks of phraseology and contractions and spelling. I should do, I’ve been studying and translating this hand for the last eight years!

And if that’s the case –

This *has* to be a continuation of ‘Fraxinus’.

‘Fraxinus me fecit’ is quite definitely Ash’s autobiography. Either written or (more likely, given her illiteracy) dictated by her.

If Vaughan Davies had access to *this* document, why doesn’t he mention it in his second edition of the Ash chronicles?! All right, he didn’t have ‘Fraxinus’, but even this – the little I’ve read so far – it’s plainly and evidently Ash; why didn’t he *publish*!

Encrypt the rest and send it; I don’t care _how_ long it takes to scan or download!

– Pierce

  Message: #277 (Anna Longman)

Subject: Sible Hedingham ms

Date:    10/12/00 at 11.20 p.m.

From:    Ngrant@

Anna –

It *carries on* from ‘Fraxinus’ – is a missing part of the document – a *continuation* – covers autumn of 1476!!! But I don’t know how MUCH it covers!!!

Evidently one or more pages are missing at the start – perhaps torn away over the intervening five hundred years – BUT, I don’t think we’re missing more than a few hours of 15/11/1476!!

From the internal textual evidence, these events MUST belong in the same 24-hour period as Ash’s first entry into Dijon! Or at least no later than the following day. Given the correspondence between details of dress and weather in the ‘Fraxinus’ ms, this HAS to be a bare few hours after Ash’s interview with Charles of Burgundy, and is therefore 15 November 1476.

I don’t think there can be anything missing except some initial call to arms!

Was there anything written on the binding and could that be scanned?

Later:

Here is 1st part, quick & dirty, tidy up later. Been at this for five days straight. Can’t *believe* what we have here!

– Pierce

PART ELEVEN

15 November–16 November AD 1476

Under the Penitence
¹

I

[…] command group on Dijon’s walls.
²

“What the fuck is she
doing?
” Robert Anselm shrieked above the noise. “I thought you said she was waiting for us to sell her a gate!”

“Maybe she’s trying to concentrate our minds!”

Ash is conscious, in the back of her thoughts, of the heavy protection of steel on head and hands; of the thin layers of mail and wool and linen that are all that cover her limbs. The desire for Milanese harness is strong enough for her to taste.

“Fucking hell! All that talk, and we can lose this city
right now
—”

She forced herself to stand upright on the parapet, and stare out between the merlons
³
at the empty ground – covered suddenly, now, in running figures.

A horde of men running forward towards Dijon’s north-west walls, planting screens, kneeling to shoot – Carthaginian archers, behind mantlets,
⁴
with wicked black recurve bows. The
thwick!
of arrow-heads against stone tightened her belly. A crackle of arquebus fire sounded all along the parapet, Angelotti’s and Ludmilla’s voices raised in shrill orders; and the rapid, repetitive thrum of longbows went up into the air: sweating archers bellowing foul-mouthed congratulations at each other.

A black wave of men rose up from the earthworks in front of the Visigoth camp. At the same second, a whistling shrillness sounded. Ash glanced to her left: could not see past the tower to the north-west gate – but a sound of impacts and screaming rose over the clamour. She looked back – only a split second – and the ground below was covered with running men holding siege ladders and shields above their heads, some already falling under the steady fire from the battlements.

“Auxiliaries!” Robert Anselm bellowed in her ear. She heard him through the helmet’s muffling lining.

“What about
them?
” She leaned into the gap in the stonework, staring out and down. Along with the black tunic-wearing men with spears and hatchets, forty or fifty Europeans were running.

“Prisoners!” Anselm bellowed.

A glance told her he was right – captured townsfolk, Dijonnais taken some time this autumn and pressed into service, due now to die either on the walls, or by the hand of the Visigoth
nazirs
behind them. Abruptly she broke off from hearing messengers and giving orders, tapped Anselm’s breastplate, and pointed.

Anselm shoved his visor up, squinting, then bellowed a coarse laugh. “Tough fucking shit, Jos!”

In the wake of the auxiliary troops and condemned prisoners, men in blue livery with the Ship and Crescent Moon on it jogged forward, soaked hides over their shoulders, carrying ladders of their own. Ash found herself squinting, trying to see if she could spot Joscelyn van Mander’s personal banner, but in the confusion of flying rock-splinters, dirt, arquebus-smoke and distance, she couldn’t make it out.

“Here they come,” Ash began, steadily, trying to stop her voice shaking.

As the first of the men hit the edge of the moat below, throwing down more wood-faggots on the piles that almost filled it, she turned back to the parapet.

“Anselm! Get the billmen up on the walls,
now!
Ludmilla: move the archers back to give ’em room! Angelotti—”

Over the noise of men in mail and plate jogging up the steps to the parapet, and the archers determined to get off every last shaft, a great
crack
and
boom!
sounded to her left.
Main gate,
she realised.
Shit!

She turned away to look for Angelotti, failed to see him, and took a step towards the nearest mangonel. Two of the winch-crew squatted down behind the arrow-studded wooden screens, and, as Ash looked, Dickon Stour gave the wooden frame a solid whack with a hammer, straightened up, stepped back, and slapped the cup-shaft with an expression of satisfaction. “Okay? Try it now?”

“Where’s Captain Angelotti gone?” Ash bawled.

The lanky armourer, straw-coloured hair jutting out under the rim of his war-hat, shouted over his shoulder at her. “Down by—”

A stupendous explosion deafened her.

The parapet jumped under her feet; the air filled with screaming fragments of rock. Two merlons gaped, whitely; half the masonry to each side blown away; a crater gaping in the surface of the battlements.

Something vast glanced past her and on into the town below. Body shivering with shock, she realised first
I’m not hurt!
and then
Direct hit on the mangonel!

The wooden protective screens hung in flinders. A shattered tangle of wood and rope looked nothing like the frame and cup. One man rolled, screeching. In among the white splinters of wood in front of Ash, ragged joints of meat leaked wetly; and a leg hung, still inside a perfectly whole boot. Another man lay dead on the parapet. There was no sign of Dickon Stour. Only a red-splashed, jagged scar, dug six inches deep in the cracked flagstones.

Ash put her hand up and wiped hair out of her mouth. It was not her hair.

She spat, at the taste, ridding her mouth of a fragment of bone.

Within a fractured moment, a second trebuchet-missile hit, further down the wall: a lump of limestone half the size of a cart. She saw a mess of ropes and wood and men on their knees, on their backs, blown halfway down the steps. A boulder shattered into fragments, hurtling down into the no-man’s-land behind the walls.

The shrill whistling of clay pots trailing flames sounded overhead.

Ash winced, ducking down. Clay vessels hit, one after another, all down the length of the walls from her; spraying Greek Fire bright into the hoarding and lines of men. The
whoof!
of igniting flame made her shudder.

“ANSELM—!”

A shoulder barged her to one side. Overhead, her banner dipped, fell to a diagonal, and slowly moved away from her in the press of a crowd of men – archers and billmen all shoving past her, back away from the walls, pressing towards the steps.

“
HOLD!
” she bellowed, lung-crackingly loud.

A gaggle of Rochester’s billmen shoved her hard up between themselves and one damaged merlon: she has a momentary glimpse of yards of empty air, and men and ladders beneath. The nearness of the fall jolts her stomach.

Off towards the gate, she hears hook-guns firing, and their fortified ballistae shooting hard and fast, but the Carthaginians are in under their minimum range now—

“Fucking
stand!
” she screamed, and grabbed one man’s shoulder, another by the belt. Both pulled free. Over the helmets of the routing men, she saw her banner gradually come back upright, and towards her – and then fall.

Without hesitation, Ash ducked into the mêlée of running men, scooped up the pole, and raised the banner over her head. Awkward and unwieldy, it wavered. She heard Anselm’s voice, louder, at the steps, grabbing the bearer of the Lion standard and bellowing: “—
right
where you fucking are!” She saw his arm and sword blade go up.