The archers at the front of the English column shot back. Their six-foot longbows dragged their ends in the water, so they had to hold them at an unfamiliar angle, and the river bottom beneath their feet was slippery, but they did their best.

Crossbow bolts could penetrate armour plate at close range, but none of the English was wearing any serious armour anyway. Apart from their helmets, they had little protection from the deadly hail.

Ralph would have turned and run if he could. However, behind him ten thousand men and half as many horses were pressing forward, and would have trampled him and drowned him if he had tried to go back. He had no alternative but to lower his head to Griff’s neck and urge him on.

The survivors among the leading English archers at last reached shallow water and began to deploy their longbows more effectively. They shot in a trajectory, over the top of the pavises. Once they got started, English bowmen could shoot twelve arrows a minute. The shafts were made of wood – usually ash – but they had steel tips, and when they fell like rain they were terrifying. Suddenly the shooting from the enemy side lessened. Some of the shields fell. The Genoese were driven back, and the English began to reach the foreshore.

As soon as the archers got their feet on solid ground they dispersed left and right, leaving the shore clear for the knights, who charged out of the shallows at the enemy lines. Ralph, still wading across the river, had seen enough battles to know what the French tactics should be at this point: they needed to hold their line and let the crossbowmen continue to slaughter the English on the beach and in the water. But the chivalric code would not permit the French nobility to hide behind low-born archers, and they broke the line to ride forth and engage with the English knights – thereby throwing away much of the benefit of their position. Ralph felt a glimmer of hope.

The Genoese fell back, and the beach was a melee. Ralph’s heart pounded with fear and excitement. The French still had the advantage of charging downhill, and they were fully armoured: they slaughtered Hugh Despenser’s men wholesale. The vanguard of the charge splashed into the shallows, cutting down the men still in the water.

Earl Roland’s archers reached the edge just ahead of Ralph and Alan. Those who survived gained the shore and divided. Ralph felt that the English were doomed, and he was sure to die, but there was nowhere to go except forward, and suddenly he was charging, head down by Griff’s neck, sword in the air, straight at the French line. He ducked a scything sword and reached dry ground. He struck uselessly at a steel helmet, then Griff cannoned into another horse. The French horse was larger but younger, and it stumbled, throwing its rider to the mud. Ralph whirled Griff around, went back and prepared to charge again.

His sword was of limited use against plate armour, but he was a big man on a spirited horse, and his best hope was to knock enemy soldiers off their mounts. He charged again. At this point in a battle he felt no rear. Instead, he was possessed by an exhilarating rage that drove him to kill as many of the enemy as he could. When battle was joined, time stood still, and he fought from moment to moment. Later, when the action came to an end, if he was still alive, he would be astonished to see that the sun was setting and a whole day had gone by. Now he rode at the enemy again and again, dodging their swords, thrusting where he saw an opportunity; never slowing his pace, for that was fatal.

At some point – it might have been after a few minutes or a few hours – he realized, with incredulity, that the English were no longer being slaughtered. In fact, they seemed to be winning ground and gaining hope. He detached himself from the melee and paused, panting, to take stock.

The beach was carpeted with corpses, but there were as many French as English, and Ralph realized the folly of the French charge. As soon as the knights on both sides engaged, the Genoese crossbowmen had stopped firing, for fear of hitting their own side, so the enemy had no longer been able to pick off the English in the water like ducks on a pond. Ever since then the English had streamed out of the estuary in their hordes, all following the same orders, archers spreading left and right, knights and infantrymen pushing relentlessly forward, so that the French were inundated by sheer weight of numbers. Glancing back at the water, Ralph saw that the tide was now rising again, so those English still in the river were desperate to get out, regardless of the fate that might await them on the beach.

As he was catching his breath, the French lost their nerve. Forced off the beach, chased up the hill, overwhelmed by the army stampeding out of the rising water, they began to retreat. The English pressed forward, hardly able to believe their luck; and, as so often happened, it took remarkably little time for retreat to turn into flight, with every man for himself.

Ralph looked back over the estuary. The baggage train was in midstream, horses and oxen pulling the heavy carts across the ford, lashed by drivers frantic to beat the tide. There was scrappy fighting on the far bank, now. The vanguard of King Philippe’s army must have arrived and engaged a few stragglers, and Ralph thought he recognized, in the sunlight, the colours of the Bohemian light cavalry. But they were too late.

He slumped in his saddle, suddenly weak with relief. The battle was over. Incredibly, against all expectations, the English had slipped out of the French trap.

For today, they were safe.

48

Caris and Mair arrived in the vicinity of Abbeville on 25 August, and were dismayed to find the French army already there. Tens of thousands of foot soldiers and archers were camped in the fields around the town. On the road they heard, not just regional French accents, but the tongues of places farther afield: Flanders, Bohemia, Italy, Savoy, Majorca.

The French and their allies were chasing King Edward of England and his army – as were Caris and Mair. Caris wondered how she and Mair could ever get ahead in the race.

When they passed through the gates and entered the town, late in the afternoon, the streets were crowded with French noblemen. Caris had never seen such a display of costly clothing, fine weapons, magnificent horses and new shoes, not even in London. It seemed as if the entire aristocracy of France was here. The innkeepers, bakers, street entertainers and prostitutes of the town were working non-stop to fulfil the needs of their guests. Every tavern was full of counts and every house had knights sleeping on the floor.

The abbey of St Peter was on the list of religious houses where Caris and Mair had planned to take shelter. But even if they had still been dressed as nuns they would have had trouble getting into the guest quarters: the king of France was staying there, and his entourage took up all the available space. The two Kingsbridge nuns, disguised now as Christophe de Longchamp and Michel de Longchamp, were directed to the grand abbey church, where several hundred of the king’s squires, grooms and other attendants were bedding down at night on the cold stone floor of the nave. However, the marshal in charge told them there was no room, and they would have to sleep in the fields like everyone else of low station.

The north transept was a hospital for the wounded. On the way out, Caris paused to watch a surgeon sewing up a deep cut on the cheek of a groaning man-at-arms. The surgeon was quick and skilful, and when he had finished Caris said admiringly: “You did that very well.”

“Thank you,” he said. Glancing at her he added: “But how would you know, laddie?”

She knew because she had watched Matthew Barber at work many times, but she had to make up a story quickly, so she said: “Back in Longchamp, my father is surgeon to the sieur.”