The Deadliest Sin Read Online Free Page B

a fuller. He was a good, kind man, apparently, but, as our army approached,
he insisted that she should leave with her mother and two brothers. He was to remain to look after the town with the rest of the militia, so she said when I got to speak with her later. She and her
mother and brothers took a heavy purse of coin, and set off on their way.
    But God had set His face against her.
    ‘Friend, you are feeling out of sorts,’ said Nicholas. ‘Wait, let another tell his story, and take some ale and a rest.’
    ‘I am fine,’ Janyn snapped. He wiped a hand over his face, remembering, and his voice grew softer as he looked about him at the expectant faces. ‘It is a hard story,
though.’
    ‘We have heard such tales before. The men lusted after her, and—’
    ‘You think to tell my story for me?’ Janyn snarled.
    ‘No, I—’
    ‘Listen and you may learn something new about men,’ Janyn stated.
    He could see her again in his mind’s eye as he spoke. A lovely girl, she was. Slim and perfect as a birch. In her life, he knew, she was raised to wealth. There was
nothing unwholesome about her. Nothing spoiled, unlike the devastated country they had marched through. Janyn had seen war in all its forms, but to walk about a country in which every farm had been
burned, all the stored crops stolen or ravaged, all the cattle driven off or slain – to walk about that ravaged landscape hurt his soul. He felt as though he was taking part in the systematic
rape of the country.
    She was just one of the countless thousands who had lost all. Both brothers and her mother had been killed by marauding bands of English, and it was a miracle she wasn’t found and raped
and killed in her turn, but by keeping to the night hours and hiding during the day, by degrees she made it to Calais. Not that she was any safer when she reached it.
    The girl was found by King Edward’s men just outside the city. Like so many, she had been cast out of Calais when the English appeared. Many had been thrown from the gates as soon as it
was realised that the English were coming to lay siege. No spare mouths would be allowed to remain inside the walls. Those who were refugees from the surrounding countryside were evicted, sometimes
forcibly, so that the stores would last longer for the garrison and people of the town. This was no time for the kind-hearted support of those less fortunate; rather, it was a time to callously
guard one’s own security. And food must be kept for those who came from the city or those who could guard it. She was neither; she was a foreigner.
    She had been flung from the gates, her money and little pack of meagre belongings stolen from her. She would soon be dead, so why leave her with goods to enrich the English? Better to keep them
in the town. Too scared and tired even to weep, she took to whatever cover she could find out beside the road. But there was no protection out there, between the lines of English invaders and the
city walls. Not a tree, not a bush. The weather was dreadful, and soon she was shivering with the cold and damp, petrified of what would happen when the English caught her. She had heard much of
their brutality.
    As the first English hobilars appeared, she was found and taken away, out of bowshot of the town’s walls, to be held with other prisoners. She expected there would be little sympathy for
her and her companions. The English could not afford to waste good food on her and her like. She would be fortunate if she was only raped and killed quickly. Others endured days or weeks of
torture.
    But Janyn saw her, and he felt a little flare of compassion. He had been marching for miles, and the last thing on his mind as he approached the town was a woman. All he wanted was a chance to
sit down under canvas and pull off his sodden boots – but the sight of her touched something in his heart, a sense of tenderness. It was the same, he saw, when he looked into the faces of
Bill and Walter. They