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THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR
THE
HUNDRED
YEARS
WAR
Revised Edition
Robin Neillands
London and New York

First published 1990
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
First published in paperback 1991
Revised edition first published 2001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.
© 1990, 2001 Robin Neillands
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-41611-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-72435-6 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-26130-9 (Hbk)
ISBN 0-415-26131-7 (Pbk)
This book is for my daughters
Alexandra and Claire, and for
Marc and Richard Tronson
CONTENTS
Illustrations ix
Prologue xi
Acknowledgements xvii
1 The Angevin Empire 1152–1223 1

2 The homage of Aquitaine 1154–1327 15
3 Preparations for war 1328–32 33
4 Arms and armies 1332–40 52
5 First encounters 1330–46 68
6 Crécy and Calais 1346–7 93
7 The Black Prince and the Black Death 1348–56 109
8 The fall and rise of France 1356–80 151
9 Trouble in two kingdoms 1380–1407 173
10 Riots and rebellions 1400–13 189
11 The road to Agincourt 1413–15 199
12 Agincourt to Troyes 1415–22 222
13 Bedford, Burgundy, and the King of Bourges 1422–9 236
14 The Maid of Orléans 1429–31 252
15 The Congress of Arras 1431–5 266
16 The end of the struggle:
Normandy and Aquitaine 1435–53 273
Epilogue 289
Appendix 1: The armies of the Hundred Years War
1337–1453 292
Bibliography 301
Index 305
vii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Dynasties of England and France 1196–1377

Dynasties of England and France 1377–1477
Figure
Plan of a bastide 24
Maps
1 Northern England 41
2 France in 1337 45
3 Crécy and Normandy 94
4 Poitiers 124
5 Aquitaine in 1360 152
6 Agincourt 206
7 Burgundian territory 244
8 The Loire Valley 256
Plates
1 Effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine at the Abbey of
Fontevraud, Anjou. 133
2 Effigy of Henry II of England at the Abbey of
3 Effigy of Richard Coeur de Lion at the Abbey of
4 Viewing tower standing on the site of Edward III’s
mill at Crécy and giving a view of the battlefield. 136
5 Monument to the blind King of Bohemia at Crécy. 137
ix
ILLUSTRATIONS
6 The walls and towers of Carcassonne which

withstood the Black Prince in 1355. 138
7 Tomb of Philippe the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Dijon. 139
8 ‘The noblest prospect in England’, Warwick Castle,
home of the Neville family. 140
9 The late 14th century castle at Bodiam in the Rother
Valley, Sussex, built to support the garrisons of
the Cinque Port towns. 141
10 The castle at Josselin, Brittany. 142
11 The castle at Arques-la-Bataille, passed by Henry V
on his march to Agincourt, October 1415. 143
12 The battlefield of Agincourt from the English
second position and grave pits. 144
13 Memorial stone at Agincourt. 145
14 The church at Montereau. 146
15 The sword of John the Fearless preserved in the
church at Montereau. 147
16 The great keep of Beaugency, Loire. 148
17 Statue of Saint Joan, Beaugency, Loire. 149
x
PROLOGUE
About this Book
For every author, whatever his or her chosen subject area, every
book begins with an idea. This idea can manifest itself in various
ways but for historians it is probably—or arguably—fair to say
that the motivation is either a desire to explain an old story in a
new way, or to dispute previous claims made by other
historians, or to update a standard work on the basis of fresh
research…or a dozen other reasons, including simple curiosity.
In my case, the idea of writing a book on the War came to me
in stages, ranging from watching Olivier’s splendid film version
of Henry V sometime in the 1940’s, finding scenes from the text
missing from the film when I saw the play in the 1950’s and the
later discovery, sometime in the 1960’s, that the French version
of the War varied considerably from the English version and
mentioned battles and victories of which I had never heard.
Then came numerous visits to the battlefields of Crecy, Poitiers
and Agincourt and the dawning fact that, clearly, there were
aspects of the battles, and the campaigns leading up to the
battles, that needed further explanation and exploration before
I could fully understand them.
There was also the matter of context, the fact that the Wars—
and I follow Colonel Burne’s theory that there were at least two
‘Wars’ between 1337 and 1453, each with their separate
motivations—have to be seen in the context of their times. And
so the interest grew until it seemed that the only way I could get
the topic out of my mind was to write a book about it, one which
aimed to fill in the gaps and stitch the story together in a clear
and logical way. Hence this book, a popular narrative history of
xi
PROLOGUE
the Hundred Years War, aimed at the general reader but useful,
I hope, to those intending to study the War more closely.
If I had hoped that would be the end of the matter I was
mistaken. My interest in the War continued and, as I write, I am
studying the matter in some depth at the University under the
guidance of Dr Anne Curry whose knowledge of the War is
profound and whose books are both essential reading for anyone
interested in discovering what really went on and are very
enjoyable to read.
The Hundred Years War is an endlessly fascinating subject
with plenty of specialised areas open to investigation and a great
many unsolved problems, largely because reliable accounts of
the various battles are either hard to come by or contradictory.
We do not know, for example, exactly what formation was
adopted by the English archers at Agincourt. The main
eyewitness, a priest in Henry V’s Army, claims that he watched
the battle on horseback from the baggage park, which places
him about half a mile from the action, but gives no indication
whether the archers were massed on the wings or placed in
knots among the men-at-arms. It also raises a query as to why a
priest was clearly getting ready to make a run for it if the battle
went wrong, when he should have been up front with the troops,
hearing belated confessions and preparing to give unction to the
dying. It may seem a trivial point, but one would still like to
know.
The construction of the rival armies over the period of the
Wars is just one specialised area but it is an important one and,
for that reason, I have included in this new edition an appendix
on the armies which will, I hope, explore this matter in some
depth and provide the reader with a good grasp of how the
armies were raised, equipped, organised, trained and paid.
Professor Christopher Allmand’s book, The Hundred Years War,
Engand and France at War, 1300–1450, is full of information on
the armies of the period and well worth study.
The picture is not constant however. The War saw the end of
the feudal levy and the widespread introduction of professional
armies, where the soldiers were raised by indenture and paid
for their service. Siege equipment came in, with the introduction
of heavy cannon. By the last decade of the War, lighter field
artillery had arrived and—with the belated introduction of some
xii
PROLOGUE
sensible tactics on the part of the French—brought an end to the

dominance of the English archer and the start a long slow but
inexorable decline in the role of the armoured knight. From then
on artillery—ultimo ratio Regis, the Last Argument of Kings—
would increasingly dominate the European battlefields.
Then there is the matter of political motivation—what the
aims of the War were and how they changed according to
circumstances. The problem, again, is that written accounts are
scanty or do not provide a clear answer so the historian is left
with speculation, reaching a view from such statements as exist
and, a more reliable source, the actions taken at the time. For
example, when Henry V invaded France in 1415, was he trying
to ‘busy idle minds with foreign quarrels’, as Shakespeare
alleges in the second part of Henry IV, or make a bid for a final
settlement of the Bretigny terms agreed by his grandfather with
John II of France in 1360 or revive the old Plantagenet claim to
the crown of France?
Perhaps all three motivations were present in 1415 but by 1419
evidence suggests that Henry would have settled for the secure
possession of an enlarged Aquitaine, with the addition of
Normandy and Harfleur, as reward for his victory at Agincourt.
His policy of placing garrisons in the captured towns and castles
and making territorial grants in Normandy to his followers
indicates, according to some historians, that this time the English
intended to stay and that the former strategy of mounted
campaigns, the chevauchée, so popular up to 1380, had been
abandoned. Henry’s ambitions might have stopped there, had
not the murder of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, brought
the Burgundians into the English camp and opened up further
possibilities in the direction of the French Crown—whose
current owner was intermittently mad.
There is also the matter of England’s allies. A later war leader,
Winston Churchill, is on record as saying that there is only one
thing worse than fighting a war with allies and that is fighting
a war without them. This is a sentiment that the Black Prince
and Henry V’s brother, John, Duke of Bedford and Regent in
France for Henry VI, would surely have endorsed As we shall
see, the Black Prince’s decision, in 1368, to tax his Gascon
subjects in order to pay for his campaign in Spain was an
obvious mistake. The Gascons were already dissatisfied with
xiii
PROLOGUE
the cost of maintaining the Ducal Court in Bordeaux,

exasperated with the Prince’s continual interference with their
customs and way of life and in no mood to endure financial
penalties because of the Prince’s renewed ambition for military
glory. Hence, the appeal to Charles V in Paris and, hence, the
renewal of the War.
From these edited highlights it will be clear why the Hundred
Years War is so fascinating. As a story it has every ingredient;
action, colour, intrigue, betrayal, patriotism, love, hatred, a
wonderful list of characters, a constantly changing scenario as
the fortune of war sways from one side to the other, all the
elements found in an engrossing novel or family saga with the
added advantage that it happens to be true.
To get to the truth—or a reasonable approximation of the
truth, given the lack of sound evidence—is one of the problems
facing students of the War and those who have only a vague
idea of its purpose; a problem compounded by the fact that the
War has become surrounded by myths. It is a myth, for example,
that the English were always victorious. To match the well-
known English victories at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt and
Verneuil—though few people have even heard of Verneuil—the
French can muster Bauge, Orleans, Formigny and, of course,
Castillon in 1453 which put an end to Plantagenet ambitions of
any kind.
In spite of Shakespeare’s endorsement in the opening scene of
Henry V, it is a myth that the so-called Salic Law barred the
English claim to the throne of France. That reason was not even
advanced until the 1380’s when the War had being going on for
half a century and played no real part in the quarrel.
Shakespeare is not always accurate about the War or the
participants. At the start of the famous Agincourt speech, for
example, he had the King chiding the Earl of Westmoreland,
‘my cousin Westmoreland’ for wishing for ‘but one ten thousand
of those men in England that do no work today’ but the Earl of
Westmoreland was not at Agincourt; he was a Neville and at his
post guarding the Scottish border. Another absentee referred to
by the Bard is John, Duke of Bedford. He was the King’s
Lieutenant in England in 1415, so why the soldiers should
remember him ‘in their flowing cups’ at an Agincourt reunion is
hard to understand…and so on.
xiv
PROLOGUE
But I must not be too hard on William Shakespeare; without

him this book might not have been written. I am grateful to him
for setting me on this enjoyable and enduring voyage of
discovery which has now lasted over 50 years and still has no
end in sight and, however flawed his history, his assessment of
King Harry seems close to reality.
The story of the Hundred Years War is complex and will not
end with this book. The book will, I hope, provide readers with
a starting point for further study either in books, or in the towns
and countryside of England and France, where so many relics of
the War still remain in the shape of castles and fortified towns.
In England, the medieval past lives still in towns like Sandwich
and Southampton, in the Cinque Ports of Rye and Winchelsea,
in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral where the Black Prince lies
in his armoured glory and in Westminster Abbey where so
many of the warring English monarchs, including Edward III
and Henry V, lie buried. The Tower of London and the new
Royal Armouries in Leeds are two ideal places to examine the
weaponry of the War, each with glittering displays of armour
for horse and man.
In France, the mausoleum of the French Kings at St Denis,
north of Paris, was despoiled at the Revolution but the effigy of
Bertrand du Guesclin is there and, if it is any likeness, Bertrand
was indeed incredibly ugly. Fortunately, France is rich in other
relics of the War so visit Dinan in Brittany, a medieval gem,
stand on the ridge at Crecy or visit the small but excellent
museum at Agincourt, near Hesdin in Picardy, where the
battlefield is still much as it was in 1415. Find the battlefield of
Poitiers—which is not all that easy to do—and work out how
and why the French attacked as they did in 1356, or go on to
Lussac les Chateaux and examine the spot where old Sir John
Chandos died fighting on New Year’s Day in 1370. The
Dordogne valley was a frontier in the Hundred Years War and
is still heavily endowed with castles and walled ‘bastides’, as is
the much-disputed Agenais. The bonus here is that these are
beautiful parts of France, perfect for a visit with history in mind
and this book to hand.
But, essentially, the Hundred Years War lives on in the
imagination. When you visit these places you should, as
Shakespeare puts it in his Prologue to Henry V, ‘on your
xv
PROLOGUE
imaginary forces work’. Try and imagine those thundering

squadrons of glittering knights, coursing about the battlefield.
See with your mind’s eye, those silent troops of English archers,
waiting implacably to stop the foe in his tracks and build up a
pile of dead before their line. People the walls of castles with
defenders and cloak the city walls with banners and blazonry.
Imagine the weight of armour on a hot summer’s day. Consider,
when you cannot follow the map, just how difficult it must have
been in the Middle Ages to even find the enemy in a land empty
of signposts and willing informants. A generous dose of
imagination will help bring the past back to life and inspire you
to continue your own search into the causes and events of the
Hundred Years War.
xvi
CHAPTER 1
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

1152–1223
There is many a man that crieth for war, that wot little to what
war amounteth. War at the beginning hath so great an entry
that everyone might enter and lightly find war, but what shall
happen thereafter, it is not light to know.
Chaucer, The Melibee
On the wet, windy evening of 24 October 1415, Henry V, King of

England, lay with his power in the little hamlet of Maisoncelles,
50 miles south of Calais, on the muddy plain of Picardy. For the
past week, King Henry had been leading his army on a series of
forced marches along and across the river Somme, attempting
to get ahead of vastly superior French forces and reach the
elusive safety of the Calais Pale, but as dusk fell on that short
autumn day, Henry knew that all their efforts had been futile. A
large French army now lay across their path, sprawling over the
drenched fields ahead, between the villages of Agincourt and
Tramecourt, an army that grew by the hour as fresh contingents
came cantering in, armoured warriors hastening to the battle,
each arrival greeted with cries of welcome by those already in
position, adding their numbers to a host which already
outnumbered Henry’s weary army by six to one.
On the morrow, the Feast Day of the Saints Crispin and
Crispianus, there would be a battle and the outcome of that
battle should decide, once and for all, the outcome of the long
struggle that had racked the rival kingdoms for the past seventy-
five years. If the French won, the war between Plantagenet and
Valois would certainly be over and the English power finally
expelled from France, but if the English prevailed against all the
odds, as they had done before in these same parts of France,
then the struggle would certainly continue. Well, they would
soon know. The private soldiers at Agincourt, French or English,
gave little thought to the strategic outcome of the struggle. Just
to survive this battle and come safely home would seem victory
1
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE 1152–1223
enough. King Henry, who had inherited this quarrel with his
crown, had other preoccupations to while away the waiting.
We are told that King Henry went about the army that night,
encouraging his soldiers, and if this is correct, and it probably is,
then he must have walked forward through his silent sentries
and seen the flaring bonfires of the French camp lighting up the
dark woods ahead. Henry had ordered his men to rest and keep
silent, threatening noisy archers with the loss of an ear and
bellicose knights with the forfeiture of horse and armour, but
the French, less disciplined anyway, were under no such
prohibition. Henry could hear their singing, their cries of
welcome to fresh arrivals, noting those who rode their horses
forward in the dark to shout threats and defiance at the silent
English camp, and wonder how many more men would join the
enemy host before the break of day made the coming battle
inevitable. If Henry could have avoided this battle, he would
have done so, for on it depended the future of his house. Even
if he survived as a captive, his grasp on the English throne
would not survive defeat. Only victory would be enough, but
was victory possible? Henry had sent envoys across the lines for
a truce, ‘to avoid the effusion of much Christian blood’, but the
French had put too high a price on his submission and the
negotiations were swiftly broken off. Fortunately, there were
other, more positive considerations: numbers were not
everything. To the medieval mind, God was the arbiter of all
things and if He put His power on the side of the ragged English
army, all the chivalry of France could not prevail against it. That
was Henry’s firm belief and, as another great comfort, was not
God himself an Englishman? After all the English victories in
this war so far, many men now thought so.
His reconnaissance complete, Henry made his way back
through the village, past the knots of men sharpening swords
and arrowheads to where the commanders waited for his orders.
There would certainly be a great battle and in it his army would
surely fight as well and as stubbornly as they had before
hereabouts, both for his great-grandfather, Edward III, and his
great-uncle, Edward, Black Prince of Wales. In this and in God,
King Henry put his faith; no king could ask for better allies.
* * *
2
This is the story of a war, a war that lasted for 116 years, the
longest war in history and therefore known as La Guerre de Cent
Ans, The Hundred Years War. Although the war had already
been rumbling on for seventy-eight years by the time this story
opens, to begin a book about the Hundred Years War on the eve
of Agincourt in 1415, is actually quite logical. The outcome of
that battle is too well known to make concealment possible, even
in the interests of drama, but had King Henry lost, then the
Hundred Years War would certainly have been much shorter
and lacked that central position in Anglo-French affairs which it
came to occupy for so long—at least as far as the French are
concerned. Even today, the French regard the Hundred Years
War as a far more significant part of their national history than
do the English. Perhaps this is because the war was largely
fought in their territory and much of the physical evidence, in
castles and walled towns, still stands as a daily reminder of that
far-off conflict. Perhaps it is because that war began, or
confirmed, the 600 years of open enmity which only ended
politically with the Entente Cordiale, and which fuels that
Anglophobia which slumbers on today, never too far beneath
the surface of French life.
The Hundred Years War was subject to many truces, stops
and starts, but the Battle of Agincourt was a turning point.
Although it did not seem so at the time, Agincourt marked a
reversal in English fortunes, though it introduced a new, bright
star to the conflict and ensured that the war, instead of
sputtering out in the uneasy truce which had already lasted for
two decades by 1415, must be fought to a final and decisive
conclusion. War has its own dynamic, and the renewal of the
conflict brought another century of grief and hardship to the
nobility and common people of England and France, a misery
which continued after the war itself had ended. Agincourt made
it clear to the French that until the English were totally defeated,
both militarily and in political terms, irreversibly and beyond
any shadow of doubt, they simply would not go away. After
Agincourt, and in spite of Henry V’s later successes, there was
no question of compromise or treaty or any settlement short of
the fact that the English must retire to England and leave France
to the French. After Agincourt, that and that alone was the
ultimate French aim, although the war was followed in France
3
by further feuding among the nobility, and the eventual

extirpation of the House of Burgundy. The consequences of the
war on the defeated English were to be even more far-reaching.
The end of the war in France ushered in rebellion and
disaffection in England, leading to the Wars of the Roses and
the final downfall of the Plantagenet dynasty on Bosworth Field.
The victories of Henry V, however crushing, were entirely
hollow, and signalled only a brief flaring of glory before the
final fading of the Plantagenet House, which had ruled all
England and much of France since the twelfth century.
If the end of the war at Castillon in 1453 is commonly agreed
and the turning point at Agincourt at least arguable, it is less
easy to be certain how and when the Hundred Years War began.
The prime causes of the war are now generally agreed to have
been quarrels attaching to the fealty of Aquitaine, but historians
have suggested a number of starting dates when the fuel of this
long-smouldering conflagration was first laid down. It is
possible to trace the origins of the war back to the collapse of the
Angevin Empire under King John, or further back still to the
Norman Conquest of England. Both are perfectly plausible
starting points, but a more likely one is the marriage of Henry II
of England with Eleanor of Aquitaine, which gave the King of
England a power exceeding that of his feudal overlord, the King
of France. From that point the divisions between the royal
houses of France and England began to widen into an
unbridgeable gulf. At the beginning, this was a quarrel between
cousins, and few quarrels are ever as bitter as those within
families. Outside observers, most notably the popes, could see
the inevitable outcome of this situation and strove to resolve it.
They urged peace and attempted to resolve the kings’ constant
differences by treaty and, where possible by marriage. But these
were warlike times and war itself, for all its misery, was very
popular with the ruling classes. War was the trade and the
justification for the power and privileges of the nobility, the only
class which really counted. There was no other voice raised that
anyone would listen to, and this remained so even when the
war was well under way.
Jean Froissart, the chronicler of the first half of the Hundred
Years War, gave as his purpose: ‘To encourage all valorous
hearts and to show them honourable examples…the real object
4
of this history is to relate the great enterprises and deeds of

arms achieved in these wars.’ In other words, he presented the
conflict partly in the form of a history, but mainly to encourage
his contemporaries to follow the noble profession of arms.
Jean Froissart lived close to the events he describes and is the
principal source for the first half of the struggle. He was born in
1337 in the city of Valenciennes and came to England in the
train of Queen Philippa of Hainault, wife to Edward III. He
began to write his history of the French wars when he was 20,
and he travelled widely for the time, attending the Scottish court
of King David II, appearing in the Black Prince’s entourage at
Bordeaux in 1366 and being present at the wedding of Lionel,
Duke of Clarence, in Milan two years later. His accounts tend to
favour his native Hainaulters and in particular that valorous
knight, Sir Walter Manny. Froissart continued his chronicles of
France, England and Spain until about 1400, and died at Cimay,
probably in 1410. Froissart’s history tells of a romantic,
chivalrous age of gallant knights and beautiful ladies, but war,
even in the Age of Chivalry, was not always like that.
The war ran on through a period of profound transition, from
stark feudalism to the outlines of recognizably modern times, a
transition in which the war itself was a catalyst, as all wars tend
to be. Constant change underlines the circumstances of this
conflict, for the war reached out to affect every aspect of life in
France and England and, to a greater and lesser extent, in Spain
and Flanders, in Burgundy, Scotland and Wales. It is, as we
shall see, a complicated tale and, as is the case with all
complicated tales, it is as well to begin at the beginning.
Two precise dates offer the best starting points for this story
of the Hundred Years War. The first is Christmas Day 1066,
when William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, was crowned
King of England in Westminster and so gained a title and
territory sufficient to match that of the King of France, who was
his liege lord for his Duchy of Normandy. This date is
significant, because it gave the kings of England a foothold on
either side of the Channel. The second date is Pentecost
(Whitsuntide) 1152, when Henry Plantagenet married Eleanor
of Aquitaine, lately divorced from Louis VII of France, the liege
lord for Henry’s lands in Normandy and Anjou. This marriage
to Eleanor gave Henry, in the right of his wife, lands that
5
occupied much of west and central France. In addition, Henry

was already heir to Stephen, King of England. When King
Stephen died in October 1154, Henry became a king in his own
right, ruler of lands that now stretched from the Scottish border
to the Pyrénées and, in wealth and power, a monarch that
outmatched Louis, his liege lord for the Duchy of Aquitaine and
his other lands in France. Aquitaine, in particular, became the
bone of contention between the two royal houses. The marriage
of Henry and Eleanor attached Aquitaine firmly to the English
crown, but Aquitaine was still a fief of the King of France, and
to hold it and his other lands in France, the King of England
must pay homage to the King of France.
Aquitaine, or Guyenne, or Guinne or Gascony—four names
for one of the finest regions of France—was once a Roman
province: Aquitania, the land of waters, rich, fertile, a land of
wine and wealth and gaiety. When Henry II married Eleanor it
comprised Poitou, Saintonge, Périgord (the modern Dordogne),
Quercy, the Rouergue (the modern Aveyron) and much of the
Landes reaching south from Bordeaux, the principal port, to the
city of Bayonne, on the edge of the Basque country. This area
was important geographically and rich economically, for the
wine trade of Bordeaux matched the wool trade of England as a
source of hard currency, and the King of England controlled
both, plus the largest force of mailed knights in Christendom.
The only cloud on the horizon was that Aquitaine was
indisputably a fief of the kingdom of France. This became, and
remained for centuries, the root cause of disputes between the
two kingdoms and eventually the cause of the war.
* * *
It seem fair to date the origins of the Hundred Years War to

1152, but before that date is finally adopted, we must
understand how this marriage came about and even before that
we must dispose of that other element commonly remembered
about this struggle, the so-called Salic Law. In the opening
scenes of Shakespeare’s Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury
makes an effective, if confusing, recital of French objections to
Henry’s title under the Salic Law, but it is necessary to make
clear that the Salic Law—‘no woman can succeed to the throne
6
of France or pass on the Succession to her male heirs’—had no

place among the original objections of the French to Plantagenet
claims to the French crown.
However, it must also be said that after Philippe V of France
was crowned King in 1317, having displaced the daughter of his
predecessor, Louis X, he persuaded an assembly of lords and
clerics to declare that his accession was lawful because ‘a woman
cannot succeed to the Kingdom of France’. This single incident
was the only precedent barring a woman from the throne, and
the Salic Law was not even invoked by the French until many
years after the war began. The biggest objections to female
inheritance were first that a woman could not lead the national
host in battle, and second that she might marry a man to whom
her lords took exception. However, there was also a precedent
against the rule of a woman in England. In 1135 the barons of
England had rejected the dying wishes of King Henry I and
passed over his daughter Matilda to offer the throne to Stephen,
brother of the Count of Blois. All historians, French and English,
now concede that the real cause of the Hundred Years War was
not Edward III’s claim to the French throne and French
objections under the Salic Law, but the question of Aquitaine,
added to the fact that the King of England resented being subject
to the King of France for any part of his domains. The feudal
requirements of this condition led to constant quarrels over the
fealty due by the English King for the Duchy of Aquitaine, and
what form that fealty should take.
However, we run ahead of ourselves. Let us begin at the
beginning, and to explain the beginning we must go beyond the
marriage of Henry and Eleanor, and briefly back to the days of
William the Conqueror.
* * *
William I, King of England, Duke of Normandy, called by some

the Bastard and by others the Conqueror, died in 1087, leaving
three sturdy sons: Robert, William Rufus and Henry. On his
deathbed, King William decided that his lands should be divided.
His duchy, which he had inherited from his ancestors, would go,
as was considered proper, to his eldest son, Robert. On the other
hand, England, which he had conquered by force of arms and
7
whose crown he was granted by election, was his to give where

he pleased, so it went to his second son, William Rufus, and
William, who ‘feared God little and Man not at all’, was duly
elected to the English throne by the Witenagemot, the Anglo-
Saxon assembly of higher clerics and laymen which formally
elected the King. The last son, Prince Henry, was given a large
sum of money to purchase a fief where he could. Problems began
in 1100 when William Rufus was killed by an arrow while hunting
in the New Forest. War then broke out between Duke Robert and
Henry over their rights to the English throne. Henry won the war
and was elected King. Then, after defeating his brother Robert at
Tinchebrai in 1106, he united his father’s lands and became Duke
of Normandy, annexing the duchy to the English Crown. Duke
Robert was imprisoned in Cardiff Castle, where he remained a
prisoner for the rest of his life. The claim of his line died out when
his heir, William Clito, died of blood poisoning, leaving Henry I
as the sole heir to all the Conqueror’s wide domains. These
domains included the kingdom of Scotland, over which William
the Conqueror had claimed suzerainty. Six years after Hastings,
William had led an army into Scotland to defeat Malcolm
Canmore, who had married Margaret, sister of the Saxon claimant
to the English throne, Edgar Atheling. William defeated Malcolm
in battle and forced him to do homage, accepting William and his
heirs as his suzerains for their kingdom of Scotland, an event
which future English rulers would use as a precedent for
meddling in Scottish affairs.
Henry I, called Beauclerc, was one of England’s great
monarchs, but like his brothers he, too, had his share of bad
luck. He suffered the loss of his heir in 1120, when his only son,
another William, was drowned off Barfleur in the wreck of the
White Ship. Henry I had one other child, his daughter Matilda,
who had been married while young to the German Emperor.
The Emperor had since died, leaving her childless, and in 1120
Henry I decided that the widow Matilda must marry again and
that her child—for she must have a child—would then rule
England and Normandy after his death. The search duly began
for a husband and the choice eventually settled on Geoffrey the
Handsome, Count of Anjou and Maine.
Count Geoffrey was a great feudatory of France. He had
inherited Anjou from his father and Maine from his mother, and
8
he also held the lordship of Touraine from his rival, the Count
of Blois. Anjou, Maine and Touraine occupy much of France
north of the Loire and south of Normandy, so by this marriage
Henry was gaining for his heirs a secure and fertile block of
territory, and a useful buffer for their ancient lands in
Normandy. On the personal side, Count Geoffrey was said to be
cheerful and agreeable, a good soldier and a man of spirit. He
proved this last point soon after the marriage. Geoffrey was just
15, ten years younger than Matilda, and for the son of a count to
marry the daughter of a king was a great advance in status, but
within a month he had returned Matilda to her father, saying
that she was proud, arrogant and unbiddable, no fit wife for the
Count of Anjou.
This blunt rejection of his illustrious bride caused a great
scandal. All her long life Matlida resented the decline in status
that followed the death of her first husband, the Emperor. Her
pride and arrogance made her as many enemies in England as
her courage ensured the stubborn loyalty of her supporters, but
in this case her temper was quickly curbed. The marriage breach
was healed and she returned to Count Geoffrey’s court at Le
Mans. Their first child, called Henry after his grandfather, was
born in 1133, the heir to great riches, a noble name, and a curious
ancestry.
* * *
Count Geoffrey, that amiable lord, was, like most of his class, a
great lover of the chase, and to improve the ground cover he
was in the habit of carrying slips of broom about in his cap or
helmet, which he would plant in any likely place. In French and
Latin broom is genet, and so it is as ‘Plant-a-genet’, or
Plantagenet, or Broom-Planter that Count Geoffrey’s line is best
known to history, although to their contemporaries the
Plantagenet Counts were said to have a darker side.
The story goes that sometime in the distant past, there lived
in Angers a Count of Anjou, who rode off alone on a journey
and returned after many months, bringing with him a beautiful
lady. They eventually married and had four children, two boys
and two girls, and for some years they lived in Anjou in great
tranquillity, until two things about the Countess began to worry
her lord and his household knights.
9
First, it seemed strange that she had no relatives, a condition

unusual in an age when those who wanted to retain and expand
their ancestral lands frequently married their closest cousins.
This Lady of Anjou received no visitors and never mentioned
her family. More curious still was the fact that she seemed very
reluctant to attend the church services which took up some part
of every day and at least one whole day each week. On those
occasions when she did attend Mass, she was always careful to
leave—taking her children with her—before the three tinkles of
the bell announced the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the turning
of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.
Eventually this disrespectful habit caused talk, and in an effort
to make the lady conform to the customs of his court, the Count
decided on drastic action.
He instructed two of his largest and most loyal knights to
follow his lady into church and keep her there until the end of
the service at all costs, by standing on the hem of her cloak. This
was a dreadful mistake, for when the bell sounded and the lady
found herself trapped, she screamed, tore herself loose, seized
two of her children, and—horror of horrors!—took flight,
soaring out of the window and vanishing away across the Loire.
At the subsequent enquiry, it transpired that the Lady of Anjou
was Melusine, the Devil’s own daughter and—or so the story
went—from her two remaining children all the Plantagenet
counts, dukes and kings were directly descended. This story of
the Devil’s Brood and the vile blood circulating in the veins of
the Plantagenets, was widely known in the twelfth century and
often given as the cause of their outbursts of kingly rage. One of
these rages led to the death of the saintly archbishop, Thomas à
Becket.
* * *
When Henry I of England died in 1135, the English—or rather

Norman—lords promptly broke the oath they had sworn to elect
his daughter Matilda and offered the crown instead to his nephew
Stephen of Blois, son of the Conqueror’s daughter Adela, after
which Count Geoffrey invaded Normandy on behalf of his wife
and swiftly conquered it. Young Henry was then just 2, and his
mother, Matilda, was very unpopular with all her peoples. Count
10
Geoffrey was naturally most concerned with who ruled in

Normandy, which lay just to the north of his ancestral lands;
having established his rule there, he showed no interest at all in
the affairs of England. He took no part in the war of succession
which raged there between his wife Matilda and her supporters
on behalf of their son, Henry, and King Stephen. This was a long
drawn-out civil war, lasting twenty years, which brought such
great misery to the people that a monk of the time wrote feelingly,
‘It seems Christ and his Saints slept.’ Finally, worn out with the
war, his heir dead, in 1153 Stephen concluded a treaty with the
young Henry Plantagenet, willing him the throne of England after
his death. King Stephen went to his grave in 1154 and Henry II
and his new wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, were crowned at
Westminster in December of that year.
* * *
The reign of Henry II is of interest to students of the Hundred

Years War because, quite apart from the acquisition of
Aquitaine, it also saw more feudal links forged between two
other parties to that later, longer conflict: the kingdom of
Scotland and the County—later Duchy—of Brittany.
William the Conqueror had forged the first of these links with
Scotland in the years after the Conquest, when he forced the
submission of Malcolm Canmore. During Henry II’s reign,
William the Lion, King of Scotland, was captured in battle near
Alnwick, and he too did homage to Henry as one of the
conditions for his release. This homage greatly irritated the
people of Scotland, but the Kings of Scotland had large estates
in England and never let the fact of homage for their lands—
which they performed fairly regularly—prevent them or their
people swarming across the Cheviot Hills to ravage the north of
England whenever they saw an opportunity, or when the
knight-service of England was campaigning abroad.
Henry II had a brother, Geoffrey, whom their father, Count
Geoffrey the Handsome had enfeoffed with Anjou and Maine,
thinking all England and Normandy a large enough inheritance
for his eldest son, Prince Henry. Civil war between the brothers
led to Geoffrey losing both his counties, and granting him
possession of three castles on the Loire proved insufficient
11
consolation. In 1153 the Bretons of Lower Brittany, the County

of Nantes, offered Geoffrey their allegiance if he could stamp
out the perpetual anarchy that plagued their lives, and with
Henry’s aid Geoffrey swiftly overran the county. By so doing,
Henry acquired not only the homage of Geoffrey for the County
of Nantes, but also that of Conan, Duke of Upper Brittany, who
had his capital in Rennes. Both counts did homage to Henry as
Duke of Normandy, and did so with the consent of their mutual
suzerain, the King of France, effectively making Brittany a fief of
the Duke of Normandy. This homage was to give the English
King a useful claim to Brittany in the turbulent years ahead.
* * *
At this point it might be as well to clarify a few medieval terms.

The most valuable asset any man could have in the Middle Ages
was land, and a fief was originally a land-holding. A fief could
range in size from a small manor barely large enough to support
a single knight, to a whole province or even a kingdom, although
the fiefs we are concerned with here fall somewhere between
the two, being either counties or duchies.
The holder of a fief—a vassal—held his fief from a superior
lord or ‘suzerain’ by an act of homage, in which the terms for
the holding of the fief were sworn before God and their peers by
the lord and his vassal. Problems arose because the act of
homage was basically a personal one. A vassal had only one
sword, yet intermarriage and the granting of estates as dowries
for the support of daughters when made widows—or
dowagers—on their husband’s death caused the fiefs, or parts
of fiefs, to be split up or fall into the hands of other lords. After
a few marriages or a couple of generations a vassel might end
up more powerful than his lord, which made the vassalage a
nonsense. The early Plantagenet kings were more powerful than
the Kings of France and, as we have seen, Henry, Count of
Anjou, had to swear reluctant homage for Touraine to his equal,
the Count of Blois. Awkward though these situations were, the
real problem arose when a vassal held land from two or more
lords. If those lords went to war and summoned their vassals to
perform their knight-service for the fief in the field, which lord
should the vassal follow? Whoever he chose, he must inevitably
12
be a traitor, or ‘recreant’ to the other. Henry II was vassal to

Louis VII of France for his French possessions, yet he was
constantly at war with him in his role as king of England. Henry
II solved this dilemma, at least to his own satisfaction. He might,
with a clear conscience, wage war on the lands and subjects of
his liege lord, the King of France, but he would never attack his
person, and Henry followed this rule when attacking Toulouse
in 1153. Raymond of Toulouse appealed for aid to their mutual
liege lord and King Louis came with his mesnie, his household
knights, to help Count Raymond in the defence of the city. When
the news reached Henry that King Louis was within the walls of
the city, Henry lifted the siege and withdrew, rather than risk
any injury to the person of his liege lord. This was a chivalrous
act, and kept to the twelfth-century notions of honour, but in
time such gestures were to prove insufficient. The feudal
structure was inheritantly unstable, and the first Angevin
empire of Henry II was held together by Henry’s energy and
personality. When he was dead, his empire fell apart.
Even the Welsh chronicler, Gerald Cambrensis, who disliked
Henry intensely—mainly because the King had barred him from
a bishopric in Wales—acknowledged Henry’s abilities while
deploring his habits and his person: ‘short, fat, with cropped
red hair, never still, even when in Church, yet a man of energy
and justice, preferring peace to war, yet unremitting in the
exercise of his rights’. His rival, King Louis VII, was probably
rather too decent for his own good and saw no reasons for
conflict. ‘Your King’, he told the English chronicler, Walter Map,
‘has men, horses, gold, jewels, everything, while we in France
have only bread and wine and gaiety.’ King Louis could only
stem the Plantagenets, but he built up a bank of goodwill among
his subjects that his descendants would draw on later.
Henry had created an empire in the west, but it was already
crumbling at the time of his death. Count Geoffrey was dead,
Richard and John and Geoffrey’s son, Prince Arthur, were in
rebellion, and the Devil’s Brood were at each other’s throats,
tearing their inheritance apart while the King of France stood
ready to snap up the pieces.
Henry II died in 1189, and was replaced by his sons, Richard
Coeur de Lion (1189–99) and John (1199–1216), both lesser
monarchs in every way. The fortunes of France passed into the
13
capable hands of Philippe-Augustus (1180–1223), and then to

his successors, Louis VIII—the Fat—and Louis IX, St Louis.
Philippe-Augustus was a man of great sagacity, one destined to
be the Hammer of the Plantagenets. The struggle between
Philippe-Augustus and his heirs and the sons of Henry II has
been referred to as the ‘first’ Hundred Years War, and it led to
victory for the French at Bovines in 1214 and the eventual
expulsion of the Plantagenets from all their ancestral domains
in France—Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou—indeed all
France except some fragments of land along the coast of
Aquitaine. To retain even these, the King of England must do
homage to the King of France.
King John murdered his nephew Arthur and for that deed
alone he might even have lost the throne of England, as he had
already lost the vast Plantagenet inheritance in France. In the
event, his reign is marked by incessant quarrels with the English
barons, leading to civil war and the granting of Magna Carta in
1215, after which he continued to campaign against his subjects
and their French allies until his sudden death in 1216, when his
son Henry came to the throne and ruled, to no great effect, for
the next fifty-six years. During that time the differences between
England and France were submerged beneath more pressing
national issues, but the Plantagenets did not give up their claims
to their former territories in France, and for some unknown
reason the French monarchs did not move in on their few
remaining footholds and drive the Plantagenets from France
once and for all. They allowed them to stay on in Bordeaux and
Bayonne and the wine trade flourished between the ports of
western France and English towns like Bristol and Southampton.
National rivalries are often held in check by profitable
commerce, and the two nations might have become trading
partners had not one of Philippe-Augustus’s mightier
descendants, Louis IX, decided to restore to the King of England
some of his ancestral lands in France.
14
CHAPTER 2
THE HOMAGE OF
AQUITAINE
1154–1327
Between two valiant Kings there is always one weak in mind or
body. This has been so since Arthur, and most true it is.
Consider the gallant King Edward of whom I speak, for his
father, Edward II, was weak, unwise and cowardly, while his
grandfather, called the Good King Edward the First, was wise
and brave and fortunate in war.
Froissart, Chronicles
In the early days of their society, medieval man was ruled by

custom. It was the custom for the king to ‘live off his own’,
meeting the costs of his court and kingdom from the revenues
and fees which feudal custom granted him. His lords held their
land by feudal right and fealty, and the custom that ‘no land
was without a lord’ was one of their firmest beliefs. Meanwhile,
at the bottom of the social ladder, even the simple freemen and
lowly villeins knew that ‘three times makes the custom’, while
all men laboured to transform customs into legal rights. In all
these areas, Henry II proved to be the greatest law-giver in
English history. It was Henry who translated rights and customs
into law. He replaced trial by combat with trial by jury, and in
a hundred ways paved the way for the end of feudalism, which
was built on nothing but custom and force and feudal rights.
Henry’s work was carried on with greater or lesser enthusiasm
by all his successors, but most notably by Edward I, during
whose reign we shall see the beginnings of the English
Parliament, one of the strengths and glories of the realm.
It is convenient to see change, once made, as something fixed
and irrevocable, but it did not happen like that in the Middle
Ages. Custom even varied from place to place, and a custom
commonly accepted in, say, Sussex, might be unheard of years
later in East Anglia, where many customs dated back to the
15
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
in yon great house.” She nodded toward the inner court, muttered a
good-night, and before Pedro could recover from his surprise
sufficiently to speak, swiftly crossed the patio and disappeared.
Pedro looked after her stupefied. He realized that a great gulf had
opened between them; that figuratively speaking, his foster-child
had left him forever. He looked like one who, holding a pet bird
loosely in his hand, had beheld it suddenly escape him, and soar
across a wide and bridgeless chasm. Would it dash itself into atoms
against the opposite cliffs, or perchance reach a safe haven? Such
was the essence of the thoughts for which Pedro framed no words.
“God is great,” he muttered at length, “and knows what He does;”
adding with a sort of heathen and dogged obstinacy, “but Pedro still
is here; Pedro does not forget niña!” He looked up as if to some
invisible auditor, crossed himself, then wearily threw himself upon his
pallet; but weary as he was, the strong young subject of his cares
was sunk in deep and dreamless sleep long before he closed his
eyes.
XIX.
Once within the court, Chinita paused and looked around her
cautiously. The doors of the lower rooms stood open, and she might
have entered any one of them unnoticed and found a shelter for the
night. But she was in no mood for solitude. Indeed it was hard for
her to check a certain wild impulse that seized her, as she saw a
faint glimmer of light which streamed through a slight opening of a
door on the upper corridor, and that urged her to rush at once into
the presence of Doña Isabel and claim recognition. To what
relationship, and to what rights, she did not ask herself; a positive
though undefined certainty that Doña Isabel herself would know,
and would be forced to yield her justice, possessed her.
Chinita was now a child neither in stature nor mind, but though so
young in years, had reached the first development of her powers
with the mingled precocity of the Indian and Spaniard, fostered by a
clime that seems the very elixir of passion. She had been maturing
rapidly in the last few months, and as she stood that night in the
faint starlight, the last trace of childhood seemed to drop visibly from
her. She folded her arms on her breast, and sighed deeply,—not for
sorrow, but as if she breathed a life that was new to her, and her
lungs were oppressed by the weight of a strange and too heavily
perfumed atmosphere.
In her absorption Chinita was unconscious that she was observed,
—but it chanced that Don Rafael Sanchez and his mother had just
left the Señora Doña Isabel, and were passing through the upper
corridor to their own apartments. The gallery was wide and they
were in the shadow, but a stray gleam of light touched the upturned
face of the girl and exhibited it in strong relief within the framing of
her waving hair. As they caught sight of it, they involuntarily paused
to look at her.
“I do not wonder,” whispered Feliz “that such a face is an accusing
conscience to Doña Isabel. There is a strange familiarity in every
feature; and what a spirit, too, she has,—one even to glory in strife!”
Don Rafael nodded. “There has always seemed to me something
in that child to mark her as the offspring of a dominant family,” he
said; “it is inevitable that she must break the lines an adverse Fate
has cast about her. Others such as she stretch out a hand to Vice; if
something better comes to her, who are we to hinder it?”
The brow of Doña Feliz contracted. “Ay, Rafael,” she murmured,
“what a change a few miserable years have wrought! Once I was a
sister to Doña Isabel, and now—”
“You are no traitress,” interposed Don Rafael, “and it is by
circumstance only that the change has come. Console yourself, dear
mother, and remember we are pledged. Though we seem false to
her mother, only so can we be true to Herlinda.”
He breathed the name so low that even Doña Feliz did not hear it;
she listened rather to the beating of the heart that seemed to repeat
without cessation the name of one so loved and lost. “How strange it
is, Rafael,” she said presently, “that I have such persistent, such
mocking dreams, which against my reason, against all precedent,
create in me the belief that all is not ended for Herlinda Garcia.”
Don Rafael looked at her musingly.
“There is a man called Juarez who has dreams such as yours,” he
said; “but they are of the freedom of a race, not of one woman
alone. But he is hardly able to work miracles. Yet, mother, this truly
is the time of prodigies; what think you this boy, the young American
that Doña Isabel brought hither, calls himself?”
“I have asked him,” she said, “but he did not understand me. Oh,
Rafael! my heart stood still when I saw him first; yet after all he is
not so very like—”
“Yet he has the same name, Mother. It may be but chance; those
Americans are half barbarians as we know,—they forget the saints,
and seek to glorify their great men by giving their children as
Christian names the surnames of those who have distinguished
themselves in battle or statesmanship. Sometimes, too, a mother
proud of the surname of her own family gives it to her son. It may
have been so with this man. When I gave him pen and paper, and
bade him write his name, it was thus: ‘Ashley Ward.’”
The name as spoken by Don Rafael was mispronounced, would
have been hardly recognizable in the ears of him who owned it; yet
to Doña Feliz it was like a trumpet blast. “Strange! strange! strange!”
she repeated again and again. “Can it be mere chance?”
“That we shall soon know,” said Don Rafael. “These Americans
blurt out their affairs to the first comer, expecting help from every
quarter. There is no rain that falls but that they fancy it is to water
their own field. Nay, mother,” as Doña Feliz made a movement
toward the stairway, “go not near the man to-night; he has fever,
and is in need of quiet. Old Selsa is with him, and he can need no
better care. He is safe to remain here many days; let him rest in
peace now. And do you, mother, try to sleep; you are weary and
worn.”
With the filial solicitude of a true Mexican, the man, already
middle-aged, took his mother’s hand fondly and led her to the door
of her own apartment. There she detained him long in low and
earnest conversation, and when on leaving her he looked down into
the court it was entirely deserted.
In glancing around her, Chinita’s eyes had caught no glimpse of
the figures above, perhaps because they had been diverted by a
faint glimmer of light at one angle of the courtyard; and
remembering that this came from the room to which the wounded
man had been carried, she darted swiftly and noiselessly toward it,
and in a moment had pushed the door sufficiently ajar to admit of
her entrance, and had passed in. She arrested her footsteps at the
foot of the narrow bed, which extended like a bier from the wall to
the centre of the room. There was not another article of furniture in
the apartment, except a chair upon which the sick man’s coat was
thrown; but Chinita’s eyes, accustomed to the vault-like and vacant
suites of square cells that made up the greater part of the vast
building, were struck with no sense of desolation. A slender jar of
water, and a number of earthen utensils of different forms and
shapes, containing medicaments and food, were gathered upon the
floor near the bed’s head; and on a deep window-ledge was placed a
sputtering tallow-candle, which had already half filled with grease
the clay sconce in which it was sunk.
As Chinita leaned over the foot of the bed and peered through her
unkempt locks at its occupant, he looked up with a start, and
presently said something in an appealing tone, which certainly
touched her more than the words, could she have understood them,
would have done. He had in fact exclaimed in English, with an
unmistakable American intonation, “Heavens, what a gypsy! and
what can she want here in this miserable jail they have left me in?”
She thought he had perhaps asked for water, so she gave him
some, which was not unacceptable,—though it irritated him that
after giving him the cup, she took up the candle and held it close to
his face while he drank. She was in the mood for new impressions
however rather than for kindness, and the sight of a strange face
pleased her. Burning with fever though he was, and tossing with all
the impatience natural to his condition, he could not but notice the
totally unaffected ease with which she made her inspection. He
might have been a curly-headed infant instead of a man, so utterly
unconcernedly did she look into his dark-blue eyes, and note the
broad white brow upon which his damp yellow hair clustered, even
touching lightly with her finger the firm white throat bared by the
opened collar sufficiently to expose the clumsily arranged dressings
on the wounded shoulder. Instantly, with a few deft movements, she
made them more comfortable, for which the young man thanked her
in a few of the very scanty words of Spanish at his command,—at
which she laughed, not ironically, but with a sort of nervous
irrelevance, thinking to herself the while, “He is beautiful—bless me,
yes! as beautiful as they say the murdered American was! Who
knows? this one may come from the same district! It must be but a
little place, his country,—there cannot be such a very great world
outside the mountains yonder; they touch heaven everywhere. Look
now, how white his arms are, and his brow, where the sun has not
touched it! and how red his cheeks! But that must be with the fever.”
And so half audibly she made her comments upon the wounded
stranger, seemingly entirely unconscious or regardless that there was
any mind or soul within this body she so frankly admired,—lifting his
unwounded arm sometimes, or turning his face into better view, as
she might have done parts of a mechanism that pleased her.
“Evidently she thinks me wooden,” he said with a gleam of humor
in his eyes. “As I am dumb to her, she believes me also senseless
and sightless. Thanks, for taking away that ill-smelling candle,” as
with the offending taper in her hand she passed to the other side of
the bed. Then she stopped and laughed, and he remembered that
he had seen the old woman who had been left in charge of him
arrange her sheepskins there and throw herself upon them. Until the
young girl had come, old Selsa’s snores had vexed him; since that he
had forgotten them, though now they became audible again. As
Chinita laughed, she placed the candle-stick upon the window-ledge
and looked around her, stretching herself and yawning. The hour
was late for her, the diversion caused by sight of the blond stranger
and the little service she had rendered him had relaxed the tension
of her mind, and she felt herself aweary; the shadows fell dark in
every corner of the room,—there was something grewsome in its
aspect even to Chinita’s accustomed eyes. It subdued her wild and
reckless mood, and she scanned the place narrowly for something
upon which she might lie. Presently the young man saw her glide
toward the sleeping nurse, and deftly, with a half mischievous, half
triumphant expression upon her face, draw out one of the sheepskin
mats upon which the old woman was lying, and taking it to the
opposite side of the bed arrange it to her liking upon the brick floor,
and sinking upon it softly and daintily as a cat might have done,
compose herself to sleep.
The candle on the window-sill sputtered and flickered; old Selsa
snored in her corner, seemingly undisturbed by the abstraction of a
part of her bed; the shadows in the apartment grew longer and
longer; the eyelids of the young girl closed, her regular breathing
parted her full lips. The young man had painfully raised himself upon
one arm, and assured himself of this. He himself was dropping off
into snatches of slumber which promised to become profound, when
suddenly with a start he found himself wide awake, and staring at a
draped figure which had noiselessly glided into his chamber. Save for
the candle it bore he would have thought it a visitant from another
world; but his first surprise over, he recognized it as that of a
woman. He was conscious that his heart beat wildly; his fever had
returned. Where had he seen this pale proud face, these classic
features, these dark penetrating eyes? For a moment again he felt
as if swinging between heaven and earth, between life and death.
Ah! yes, he comprehended,—he had been brought thither in some
swaying vehicle, and this woman had been beside him; she perhaps
had saved his life.
He murmured a word of thanks, but she did not notice it. “Señor,”
she said in a voice soft in courtesy, “I pray you forgive me that I had
for a little time forgotten my guest. I trust you lack for nothing? Ah!
what—alone?” and with a frown, she made a motion as if to awaken
the servant Selsa. He understood the gesture though not the words,
and stopped her by one as expressive.
“No, no!” he exclaimed. “I too shall sleep; and she is old. I would
not awaken her. See, if I need anything a touch of my hand will
rouse this girl,”—and the young man indicated by a turn of his head
and arm the recumbent figure which his visitor had not observed.
With some curiosity she moved to the opposite side of the bed,
and bending over lightly removed the fringe of the reboso which
shaded the face of the sleeper. Doña Isabel started, and a slight
exclamation escaped her lips as she turned hurriedly away,—as
hurriedly returning, and shading the candle with her hand, that its
light might not fall upon the eyes of the sleeper, she gazed upon the
young girl long and earnestly. Unmindful of herself, she suffered the
full glare of the candle to illuminate her own countenance; and as he
looked upon it, the young American thought it might serve as the
very model for the mask of tragedy. Nothing more pitiless, more
remorseless, more sombre than its expression could be imagined;
yet as she gazed, a flush of shame rose from neck to brow. Her eyes
clouded, her breath came with a quick gasp. She stood for a
moment clasping the rod at the foot of the bed with her white
nervous hand; she looked at the American fixedly, yet she seemed to
have no consciousness that she herself was seen; and presently,
with the slow movement of a somnambulist, so absorbing was her
thought, she turned to the door.
Ashley was watching her intently; suddenly her light was
extinguished, and she vanished as if dissolved in air. He was calm
enough to remember that she had spoken to him, to know that she
could be no phantom of his imagination, and to suppose that upon
stepping into the corridor she had extinguished her light, and sped
noiselessly along the wall to some other apartment; yet for a long
time a feeling of mystery oppressed him, and he could not sleep. A
vague consciousness of some strange influence near him kept him
feverish, with all his senses on the alert; yet he heard no movement
of the woman who crouched within the doorway, leaning against the
cold wall, and who during the long silent night passed in review the
strange events that had brought her—the Señora Isabel Garcia de
Garcia—to guard the slumbers of a foundling, the foster-child of a
man so low in station as the gate-keeper of her house.
XX.
Doña Isabel Garcia had been born within the walls of Tres
Hermanos, her father having been part owner of the estate, and her
mother the daughter of an impoverished gentleman of the
neighboring city of Guanapila. Doña Clarita had been a most
beautiful woman, whose attractions had been utilized to prop the
falling fortunes of her house by her marriage with the elderly but
kindly proprietor Don Ignacio Garcia.
At the time of her marriage, Clarita Rodriguez was very young,
and with the habits of submission universal among her
countrywomen would probably have taken kindly to her fate, never
doubting its justice, but that from her balcony she had one day seen
a young officer of the city troop ride by in all the magnificence of the
military uniform of the period. A dazzling vision of gold lace and
braid, clanking spurs and sabre, and of eyes and teeth and smile
more dazzling still, haunted her for weeks. Yet that might have
passed, but that the vision glided from the eye to the heart, when
on one luckless night, at the governor’s ball, Pancho Vallé was
introduced to her, and they twice were partners in that lover’s
delirium the slow and voluptuous danza. As they moved together in
the dreamy measure, a few low words were exchanged,—
commonplace perhaps but not harmless, and by one at least never
to be forgotten. Afterward an occasional missive penned in most
regular characters upon daintily tinted paper came to her hands
through some complaisant servant. But Don Ranulfo Rodriguez was
too jealous a guardian to suffer many such to escape him, and had
been far too wise in his generation to place it in his daughter’s
power to engage in such dangerous pastime as the production of
replies to unwelcome suitors. Like most other girls of her age and
position, Clarita had been strenuously prevented from learning to
write, and it is doubtful if she ever knew the exact import of Vallé’s
perfumed missives, although her heart doubtless guessed what her
eyes could not decipher.
Whether Vallé’s impassioned glances meant all they indicated or
not, certain it was that he had not ventured to declare himself to the
father as a suitor for the fair Clarita’s hand, when Don Ignacio Garcia
stepped in and literally carried away the prize. The courtship had
been short, the position of the groom unassailable. Clarita shed
some tears, but the delighted father declared they were for joy at
her good fortune; and they were indeed of so mixed a character—
baffled love, wounded pride, and an irrepressible sense of triumph at
her unexpected promotion—that she herself scarce cared to analyze
them. She danced with Vallé once again on the occasion of her
marriage; again a few words were spoken, and the passionate heart
of Clarita was pierced with a secret dart, which never ceased to
rankle.
Don Ignacio Garcia conducted her immediately to the hacienda,
where his jealous nature found no cause for suspicion; and there the
little Isabel was born; and on beholding the wealth of maternal
affection which the young wife lavished upon her child, the husband
forgot the indifference that had sometimes chafed him, and for a
few brief months imagined himself beloved. This egotistic delusion
was never dispelled, for at its height, upon the second anniversary
of their wedding day, when taking part in a bull-chase, Don Ignacio’s
horse swerved as he urged him to the side of the infuriated animal;
a moment’s hesitancy was fatal; the horse was ripped open by the
powerful horn of the bull, and plunging wildly, fell back upon his
luckless rider, whose neck was instantly broken. It was an accident
which it seemed incredible could have happened to a man so skilled
in horsemanship as was Don Ignacio. The spectators were for a
moment dumb with horror and surprise, then with groans and
shrieks rushed to the rescue, but only to lift a corpse. Doña Clarita
with a wild shriek had fainted as the horse plunged back, and upon
regaining her senses, threw herself in an agony of not unremorseful
grief upon the body of her husband. It was, however, of that violent
character which soon expends itself; and before the funeral
obsequies were well over, she began to look around the narrow
horizon of Tres Hermanos, and remember, if not rejoice, that she
was free to go beyond it.
Don Gregorio, the cousin of Clarita’s husband’s, though a mere
boy, had been brought up on the estate, and was competent to take
charge, and the administrador and clerks were trusty men; so there
was no absolute reason why the young widow should remain to
guard her interests and those of her child, and it seemed but natural
she should return to her father’s house, at least during the first
months of her sorrow. Thither indeed she went. She had dwelt there
before, a dependent child, to be disposed of at her father’s will; she
returned to it a rich widow, profuse of her favors but tenacious of
her rights, one of which all too soon proclaimed itself to be that of
choosing for herself a second husband. A month or two after her
arrival in the city, Don Pancho Vallé returned from some expedition
in which patriotism and personal gain were deftly combined, with
the halo of success added to his personal attractions, and was quick
to declare an unswerving devotion to the divinity at whose shrine he
had worshipped but doubtfully while it remained ungilded by the sun
of prosperity. Whether Clarita had learned to read or not, certain it is
that Don Pancho’s impassioned missives met with a response more
satisfactory than pen and ink alone could give, for immediately after
the expiration of the year due to the memory of Don Ignacio, she
became the wife of the gay soldier.
Don Pancho and his wife were both young, both equally delighted
in excitement and luxury; and within an incredibly short time the
ample resources which had seemed to them boundless were
perceptibly narrowed. To the taste for extravagant living, for
gorgeous apparel, for numerous and magnificent horses, shared by
them in common, were added a passionate love of gambling, and a
scarcely less expensive one for military enterprises of an
independent and half guerilla order, on the part of Don Pancho; and
thus a few years saw the wife’s fortune reduced to an encumbered
interest in the lands of Tres Hermanos.
Don Pancho in spite of numerous infidelities still retained his
influence over the heart and mind of Clarita; and one night in play
against Don Gregorio Garcia—who, like other caballeros, occasionally
engaged in a game or two for pastime—he staked the last acre of
her estate, knowing she would refuse him nothing, and lost. For a
moment he looked blank,—a most unwonted manifestation of
dismay in so practised a gambler,—then laughed and shook hands
with his fortunate opponent. There was a laughing group around
him, condoling with him banteringly, for Pancho Vallé had never
seemed to make any misfortune a serious matter, when a pistol-shot
was heard. For a moment no one realized what had happened; the
young officer stood in his gay uniform, smiling still, his gold-mounted
pistol in his hand, then fell heavily forward. The ball had passed
through his heart. His widow had the satisfaction of seeing by the
smile that remained on his handsome countenance that he had died
as joyously as he had lived; not a trace of care showed that aught
deeper than mere pique and caprice had moved him. “Angel of my
life!” she cried, when her first burst of grief was over, “thou wert
beginning to make my heart ache, for I had nothing more to give
thee!”
This was her only word of reproach, if reproach it might be called.
For love that woman would have yielded even her life, and never
have known the hollowness of her idol. Grief did the work that
ingratitude and neglect—nay absolute cruelty—would perhaps never
have effected, and in a few short months destroyed her life. As she
was dying she called her daughter to her. “Isabel,” she said, “thou
hast wealth, thy brother has nothing; swear to me by the Virgin and
thy patron saint, that thou wilt be as a mother to him, that thou wilt
refuse him nothing that thy hand can give! Money, money, money, is
what makes men happy!” That had been the creed her life’s
experience had taught her. For money her father had sold her; for
that the husband she adored had given her fair words and caresses.
“As thou wouldst have thy mother’s blessing, promise me that Leon
shall never appeal to thee in vain!”
Isabel Garcia was but a child, and the boy Leon but three years
younger; yet as she looked upon her dying mother she solemnly
promised to fill her place, to take upon herself the rôle of sacrifice,
which her religion taught her was that of motherhood. Poor Clarita!
little had she understood a mother’s highest duties,—to warn, to
guide, to plead with God for the beloved. The mere yielding of
material things,—to clothe herself in sackcloth, that the child might
be robed in purple, to walk barefoot that he might ride in state, to
hunger that he might be delicately fed,—she had pictured these
things to herself as the purest sacrifices, and surely the only ones to
appeal to the hearts of such men as she had known; and the young
Isabel entered upon her task with her mother’s precepts deeply
engraved upon her heart, her mind all uninstructed, awaiting the
iron finger of experience to write upon it its lessons.
After their mother’s death, the young brother and sister, mere
children both, went to live in the house of some elderly relatives,
who with generous though not always judicious kindness strove to
forget the faults of the father by ignoring them when they became
apparent in the boy. The uncle of Isabel, the Friar Francisco, became
their tutor, but taught them little beyond the breviary. What could a
woman need with more? As for Leon, he took more kindly to the
lasso and saddle, to the pistol and sword, than to the book or pen,—
and even while still a child in years, more passionately still to the
gaming table. Though his elders with a shake of the head
remembered his father’s fate, and sometimes pushed the boy half
laughingly away from the monté table, or of a Sunday afternoon
sent him out to the bull-ring for his diversion, where he was a mere
spectator, rather than to the cock-pit, where he became a
participant, yet the question did not present itself as one at all of
questionable morals: every one gambled on a feast day, or at a
social game among one’s friends. Perhaps of all those by whom he
was surrounded, no one felt any serious anxiety for Leon except the
young girl who with premature solicitude warned him of the evil,
even as she supplied the means to indulge his wayward tastes.
Leon was a brilliant rather than a handsome boy, promising to be
well grown; and his lithe, vigorous figure showed to good advantage
in his gay riding-suits, whether of sombre black cloth with silver
buttons set closely down the outer seam of the pantaloons and
adorning the short round jacket, or in loose chapareras of buckskin
bound by a scarlet sash and bedizened with leather fringes,—a
costume that perhaps served to betray the Indian strain in his blood,
which ordinarily was detected only by a slight prominence of the
cheek bones and a somewhat furtive expression in the soft dark
eyes. At unguarded moments, however, perhaps when he fancied
himself unobserved and was practising with his pistol or sabre, those
eyes could flash with concentrated fire, so that more than once
Isabel had been constrained to call out: “Leon, Leon, you frighten
me! You look like the great cat when he pounces upon a harmless
little bird and crushes it for the very joy of killing!”
Then Leon would laugh, and the soft, dreamy haze would rise
again over the eyes as he would turn upon her. “Ha!” he would say,
“you will never be a man, Isabel; you will never understand why I
love the sights and sounds that throw you poor women into fainting
fits and tears. Ha! Isabel, if I were you I’d not stay in this dull house
with a couple of old women to guard me, when you might go to the
hacienda and be free as air.”
“Nonsense,” Isabel would retort; “what could I do there other than
here? I could not turn herdsman or vaquero, nor even ride out to the
fields to see how the crops were flourishing, nor roam like an Indian
through the mountains.”
“But I would!” Leon would cry enthusiastically; and with his
longing ardor for the free life of a country gentleman, with its
barbaric luxury and wild sports, he thus first put into the young girl’s
mind the thought of favoring the suit which her cousin, Don Gregorio
Garcia, began to urge.
Don Gregorio had married young, soon after the death of Ignacio
Garcia whom he succeeded in the management of the estate of
which they had been joint owners; but his wife had died leaving him
without an heir, and the first grief assuaged, it was but natural after
the passage of years that the widower should weary of his
loneliness. There were many reasons why his thoughts should turn
to his distant cousin Isabel, for though she was many years younger
than himself, such disparity of age was not unusual; the marriage
would unite still more closely the family fortunes, and effectually
prevent the intrusion of any undesirable stranger; and above all,
Isabel was gracious and queenly and beautiful enough to charm the
heart even of an anchorite, and Don Gregorio was far from being
one. Indeed, in his very early years he had given indications of a
partiality for a far more adventurous career than he had finally, by
force of circumstances, been led to adopt. Thus he sympathized
somewhat with Leon’s restless activity, and quite honestly secured
the boy’s alliance,—no slight advantage in his siege of the heart of
Isabel.
This, perhaps more than the good-will of the rest of the family,
enabled Don Gregorio to approach so nearly to Isabel’s inmost
nature that he learned far more of the strength of purpose and
capability for passionate devotion possessed by the young untrained
girl than any other being had done, and for the first time in his life
knew a love far deeper and purer than any passion which mere
physical charms could awaken. Such a love appealed to Isabel. She
was perhaps constitutionally cold to sexual charms, but eminently
susceptible to the sympathetic attrition of an appreciative mind,
while her heart could translate far more readily the rational
outpourings of friendship than the wild rhapsodies of passion. Thus,
although Isabel would have shrunk from a man who in his ardor
would have demanded of her affection some sacrifice of the
unqualified devotion that she had vowed to her brother, she seemed
to find in Don Gregorio one who could understand and applaud the
exaggerated devotion to the ideal standard of filial and sisterly duty
which she had unconsciously erected upon the few utterly irrational
words of a weak and dying woman.
The first four years of Isabel’s married life passed uneventfully.
Leon was constantly near her, and was the life of the great house,
which despite the crowd of retainers that frequented it would
without him have proved but a dull dwelling for so young a matron,
with no illusions in regard to the staid and kindly husband, who was
rather a friend to be consulted and revered than a lover to be
adored,—for although Don Gregorio worshipped his beautiful young
wife, he was at once too mindful of his own dignity, and too wary of
startling Isabel’s passionless nature, to manifest or exact romantic
and exhaustive proofs of affection. He used sometimes to mutter to
himself: “‘The stronger the flame the sooner the wood is burnt;’
better that the substance of love should endure than be dissipated in
smoke!”
Don Gregorio was somewhat of a philosopher; and as such, as
soon as the glamour thrown over him by Leon’s brilliant but
inconsequent sallies of wit, and his daring and dashing manner, was
dimmed, and above all as soon as his unreasoning sympathy with
Isabel’s predispositions settled into a calm and sincere desire for her
certain happiness and welfare, he began to look with some suspicion
upon traits which had at first attracted him as the natural outcome
of an ardent and generous nature.
Friar Francisco had accompanied the young brother and sister to
the hacienda, partly to minister in the church, and partly as tutor to
Leon; but in the latter capacity he found little exercise for his talents.
Upon one pretext or another the boy at first evaded and later
absolutely refused study; but he joined so heartily in the labors as
well as pleasures of hacienda life,—he was so ready in resource, so
untiring in action, so companionable alike to all classes, that Nature
seemed to have fitted him absolutely for the position that he was
apparently destined to fill in life. Yet though he was the prince of
rancheros, the life of the city sometimes seemed to possess an
irresistible attraction for him; and after months perhaps spent
among the employees of the hacienda, in riding with the vaqueros or
in penetrating the recesses of the mountain, even sleeping in the
huts of charcoal burners, or in caves with rovers of still more
doubtful reputation, he would suddenly weary of it all, and followed
by a servant or two ride gayly down to the city to see how the world
went there.
At first Don Gregorio had no idea how much those visits cost
Isabel; but as time went on, and rumors reached them of the boy’s
extravagant mode of life, Isabel became anxious and Don Gregorio
indignant. Some investigation showed that a troop of young
roysterers who called him captain were maintained in the mountains,
and that a thousand wild freaks which had mystified the neighboring
villages and haciendas might be traced to these mad spirits, among
whom Don Gregorio shrewdly conjectured might be found many of
the most daring young fellows, both of the higher and lower orders,
who had one by one mysteriously disappeared during the few
months preceding Leon’s eighteenth birthday.
Leon only laughed when taxed with his guerilla following, and
although as he managed it it was a somewhat costly amusement, it
was not an unusual or an altogether useless one in those days of
anarchy; for no one could say how soon the fortunes of war might
turn an enemy upon the land and stores of Tres Hermanos, and
even Don Gregorio was not displeased to find the most refractory of
his retainers placed in a position to defend rather than imperil the
interests of the estate. As to the escapades of city life he found them
less pardonable, for they consisted chiefly in mad devotion to the
gaming-table, which Leon was never content to leave until his
varying fortunes turned to disaster and his wild excitement was
quelled by the tardy reflection that his sister’s generosity would be
taxed in thousands to pay the folly of a night.
Before the age of twenty Leon Vallé had run the gamut of the
vices and extravagances peculiar to Mexican youths, and large as
the resources of Doña Isabel were, he had begun to encroach
seriously upon them; for true to her mother’s request, she had never
refused to supply his demands for money, though of late she had
begun to make remonstrances, which were received half
incredulously, half sullenly, as though he realized neither their justice
nor their necessity. Isabel was now a mother, her daughter Herlinda
having been born a year after her marriage, and their son Norberto,
the pride and hope of Don Gregorio, three years later; and naturally
the young mother longed to consider the interests of her children,
which so far as her own property was concerned seemed utterly
obliterated and overwhelmed by the mad extravagances of her
brother.
Strangely enough, Don Gregorio attempted no interference with
his wife’s disposal of her income, though it seemed not improbable
that at no distant day even the lands would be in jeopardy. Perhaps
he foresaw that as her means to gratify his insatiable demands
declined, so gradually Leon’s strange fascination over his sister
would cease; for inevitably his restless spirit would draw him afar to
find fresh fields for adventure, since in those days, when the great
struggle between Church and State was beginning and foreign
complications were forming, such a leader as he might prove to be
would find no lack of occasion for daring deeds and reckless
followers, nor scarcity of plunder with which to repay the latter.
Whatever were his thoughts, Don Gregorio guarded them well,
saying sometimes either to Leon himself, or to some friend who
expressed a half horrified conjecture as to where such absolute
madness must end, “See you not, ’t is foolish to squeeze the orange
until one tastes the bitterness of the rind?” He expected some
sudden and violent reaction in Isabel’s mind and conduct. But
though she began to show she realized and suffered, she bore the
strain put upon her with royal fortitude. Youth can hope through
such adverse circumstances, and it always seemed to her that one
who “meant so well” as Leon, must eventually turn from temptation
and begin a new and nobler career.
At last what appeared to Isabel the turning point in her brother’s
destiny was reached. He became violently enamored of the beautiful
daughter of a Spaniard, one Señor Fernandez, who of a family too
distinguished to be flattered by an alliance with a mere attaché of a
wealthy and powerful house, was so poor as to be willing to consider
it should a suitable provision be made to insure his daughter’s future
prosperity. The beautiful Dolores was herself favorably inclined
toward the gay cavalier, who most ardently pressed his suit,—the
more ardently perhaps that he was piqued and indignant that the
wary father utterly refused to consider the matter until Don Gregorio
or Doña Isabel herself should formally ask the hand of his daughter,
presenting at the same time unmistakable assurances of Leon’s
ability to fulfil the promises he recklessly poured forth.
That Leon had turned from his old evil courses seemed as months
passed on an absolute certainty. Not even the administrador himself
could be more utterly bound to the wheel of routine than he. To see
his changed life, his absolute repugnance even to the sports suitable
to his age, was almost piteous; his whole heart and mind seemed
set upon atonement for the folly of the past, and in preparation for a
life of toil and anxiety in the future. For in examining into her affairs,
Doña Isabel found that her income was largely overdrawn; Leon’s
extravagances, together with heavy losses incurred in the working of
the reduction-works, had so far crippled her resources that it was
only by stringent effort, and an appeal to Don Gregorio for aid, that
she was enabled so to rehabilitate the fortunes of Leon that he could
hope to win the prize which was to make or mar his future.
Doña Isabel was as happy as the impatient lover himself when she
could place in his hands the deeds of a small but productive estate,
famous for the growth of the maguey, from which the sale of pulque
and mescal promised a never failing revenue. The money had been
raised largely through concessions made by Don Gregorio, and was
to be repaid from the income of Isabel’s encumbered estate, so that
for some years at least it would be out of her power to render Leon
any further assistance. Don Gregorio shook his head gravely over the
whole matter; yet the fact that the young man was virtually thrown
upon the resources provided for him, which certainly without the
concentration of all his energies and tact would be altogether
insufficient for his maintenance, and also that he had great faith in
the energy of character which for the first time appeared diverted
into a legitimate channel, inclined him to believe that at last, urged
by necessity as well as love, Leon would redeem his past and settle
down into the reputable citizen and relative who was to justify and
repay the sister’s tireless and extraordinary devotion. “Or at least,”
he said to himself, “Isabel will be satisfied that no more can or
should be done; and it is worth a fortune to convince her of that.”
Strangely enough, though Isabel had addressed herself with a
frenzy of determination to the task of securing a competency for
Leon that might enable him to marry and enter upon a life which
was to relieve her of the constant drain upon her resources, both
material and mental, which for years had been sapping her
prosperity and peace, yet as she beheld him ride away toward the
town in which his inamorata dwelt to make the final arrangements
for his marriage, her heart sank within her; and instead of relief and
thankfulness, she felt a frightful pang of apprehension, she knew not
why, as if a prophetic voice warned her that her own hand had
opened the door to a chamber of horrors, through which the smiling
youth would pass and drag her as he went.
Isabel threw herself upon her husband’s breast in an agony which
he could not comprehend, but which he gently soothed, happy to
feel that to him she turned in the first moment of her abandonment,
—for indeed she felt that she who had given her substance, her
sympathy, her faith, all of which a sister’s life is capable, was indeed
abandoned, and all for a fresh young face, a word, a smile. Leon
was a changed man, but all her devotion had not worked the
miracle; another whose love could be as yet but a fancy had
accomplished what years of sacrifice from her had striven for in vain!
There was something of jealousy, but far more of the pain of
baffled aspiration in the thought, and through it all that dreadful
doubt, that sickening dread as to whether she had done well thus to
strip herself of the power to minister to him. It seemed, even
against her reason, impossible that Leon could be beyond the pale of
her bounty; she had been so accustomed to plan, to think, to plot
for him, that she could not grasp the thought that henceforth he was
to live without her, that she was to know him happy, joyous, at ease,
and she no longer be the immediate and ministering Providence
which made him so.
After the infant Carmen was born, the mother’s thoughts turned
into other channels. As she looked at this child, the thought for the
first time came to her, that some day it might be possible that her
children would inherit some material good from her. Their father was
a rich man, yet there was a pleasure in the thought that her
children, her daughters most especially, would be pleased by a
mother’s rich gifts, would perhaps from her receive the dower that
would make them welcome in the homes of the men they might
love. Isabel began to indulge in the maternal hopes and visions of
young motherhood, and to feel the security that a still hopeful mind
may acquire, after years of secret and harassing cares have passed.
The usual visits of ceremony had passed between the contracting
families; the Señor Fernandez had declared himself satisfied with the
generous provisions which had been made for the young couple; the
house was set in order, and an early day named for the wedding.
Some days of purest happiness followed the tearful anxiety with
which Dolores had awaited the negotiations that were to shape her
destiny. An earnest of the future came to her in the present of
jewels, with which Leon presaged the marriage gifts which he went
to the city of Mexico to choose,—for whether rich or poor, no
Mexican bridegroom would fail of a necklet of pearls, or a brooch
and earrings of brilliants for his bride; and with his luxurious tastes,
it was not to be supposed that Leon Vallé could fail to add to these
laces and silks and velvets, fit rather for a princess than for the
future wife of a country youth whose only capital was in house and
land. Isabel had just heard of these things, and had begun to excuse
in her heart these extravagances, which seemed so natural to a
youth in love, when a remembrance flashed upon her mind which
justified the apprehensions she had felt, and which it seemed
incredible should have escaped not only her own but also Don
Gregorio’s vigilance,—Leon had gone to Mexico in the days of the
feast of San Augustin.
Isabel was too jealous of her brother’s good name, too eager to
shield him from a breath of distrust, to mention the fears that
assailed her. She called herself irrational, faithless, unjust, yet she
could not rid herself of the dread which seemed to brood above her
like a cloud. And so passed the month of June, and July brought
Leon Vallé back again, and one glance at his haggard face and
bloodshot eyes revealed to Isabel that her fears were realized. He
told the tale in a few words and with a hollow laugh.
“You will have to go to Garcia for me now, Isabel,” he said. “Your
last venture has brought me the old luck, cursed bad luck. A plague
upon your money! I thought to double or treble it, and the last cent
is gone!”
“And the hacienda of San Lazaro?” queried Isabel, faintly.
“Would you believe it? Gone too! Aranda has had the devil’s own
luck. ’T was the last of the feast, Isabel. Thousands were changing
hands at every table. It seemed a cowardice not to try a stake for a
fortune that might be had for the asking. I was a fool, and hesitated
till it was too late. Had I only ventured at once! What think you
happened to Leoncio Alvarez? He played his hacienda against
Esparto’s, and lost. He had dared me not five minutes before to the
venture. The devil, what a chance I missed! His hacienda was three
times the size of San Lazaro! He bore its loss like a man. ‘What can
one do, friend?’ he cried to Esparto; ‘it has been thy luck to-day, ’t
will be mine when we next meet.’ Just then his brother Antonio came
up. ‘What luck, Leoncio?’ he said. ‘Cursed!’ he answered. ‘I have
played my hacienda against Esparto’s here, and lost it.’ Antonio
shrugged his shoulders and turned away. ‘Play mine and get it back,’
he suggested, and walked off to the next table. The cards were
dealt, and in three minutes Leoncio’s hacienda was his own again,
thrown like a ball from one hand to the other. It was glorious play!”
“But this has nothing to do with thee,” ventured Isabel.
“No,” muttered Leon, moodily; “when I ventured my hacienda and
lost, there was no Antonio to bid me play his and get it back.”
He looked at Isabel with an air of reproach. She had neither look
nor word of reproach for him, yet she felt that a mortal blow had
been dealt her. And Leon? He had laughed, though she knew that
the laugh was that of the mocking fiend Despair which possessed
him; and he had bade her go on his behalf to Garcia. She left him in
desperation. She knew how utterly fruitless such an appeal would
be.
It was fruitless. Don Gregorio asked with some scorn in his voice
whether Leon thought him as weak as she had been, or as much of
a madman as himself when he had dared the chances of the tables
at San Augustin. For him, Garcia, to furnish money to the oft-tried
scapegrace would be a folly that would merit the inevitable loss it
would bring. All of which, though true enough, Don Gregorio
repeated with unnecessary vehemence to Leon himself, with the
tone of irrepressible satisfaction with which he at last saw humiliated
the man who had for so long held such a resistless fascination over
his wife.
With wonderful self-restraint Leon replied not a word to the
cutting irony with which his brother-in-law referred to the mad
ambition and folly which had led to his losses, and with which
Gregorio excused himself from further assisting in the ruin of the
Garcia family,—reminding the gamester that though he had thrown
away the key to fortune which he had taken from his sister’s hand,
he had still youth, a sword, and a subtle mind, any one of which
should be able to provide him a living.
“That is true,” replied Leon, with a dangerous light in his half-
closed eyes. “Thanks for the reminder, my brother. What is the old
saying? ‘A hungry man discovers more than a thousand wise men.’”
They both laughed. It was not likely that Leon’s poverty would
ever reach the point of actual want. There at the hacienda was his
home when he cared for it; but as for money,—why as Don Gregorio
had said, the key to fortune was thrown away, and it seemed
unlikely the unfortunate loser would ever recover it.
Almost on the same day on which Leon Vallé had told his sister of
his fatal hardihood at the feast of San Augustin, there arrived, with
assurances of the profound respect of Señor Fernandez and his
daughter, the jewels and other rich gifts which Dolores had accepted
as the betrothed of Leon. With deep indignation that his
explanations and protestations had been rejected, but with a pride
which prevented the frantic remonstrances which rushed to his lips
from passing beyond them, Leon received these proofs of his
dismissal, which in a few days was rendered final by the news that
the beautiful Dolores had married a wealthier and perhaps even
more ardent suitor, whom the insolence and mockery of Fate had
provided in the person of the lucky winner of San Lazaro. Even Don
Gregorio felt his heart burn with the natural chagrin of family pride,
and Isabel would have turned with some sympathy toward the
brother of whom, unconsciously to herself, she could no longer make
a hero. Strangely enough, his aspect as a suppliant for her
husband’s bounty had disrobed him of the glamour through which
she had always beheld him. When she herself was powerless to
minister to him, he was no longer a prince claiming tribute, but the
undignified dependent whom she blushed to see lounging in sullen
idleness in her husband’s house. Yet as has been said, when word of
the marriage of Dolores Fernandez reached them, they would have
given him sympathy; but he had received the news first, and
collecting a half-dozen followers had mounted and ridden madly
away.
The horses they rode were Don Gregorio’s yet Leon had gone
without a word of excuse or farewell. Isabel had no opportunity to
tell him that she had no more money to give him; and in her distress
at supposing him penniless it was an immense relief to her to find
that he had retained in his possession the jewels that the father of
Dolores had returned to him. He would at least not be without
resource. But soon a strange tale reached her. The jewels torn from
their settings, the stones in fragments, the whole crushed into an
utterly worthless mass, so far as human strength and ingenuity
could accomplish it, had been found upon the pillow of the bride.
The husband was jealously frantic that her sanctuary had been
invaded; the bride was hysterically alarmed, yet flattered at this
proof of her lover’s passion; and the entire community were for days
on the qui vive for further developments in this drama of love.
But none came, and soon Leon Vallé’s name was heard of as one
of the guerillas of the Texan war, where he fought for—it was not to
be said under—Santa Anna; and ere many months his name rang
from one end of the republic to the other,—the synonym of gallant
daring, which in a less exciting time might have been called
ferocious bloodthirstiness.
Isabel quailed as she heard the wild tales told of him; but Don
Gregorio shrugged his shoulders and said, “Thank Heaven he turned
soldier rather than brigand!” The chief difference between the two in
those days was in name; but that meant much in sentiment.
XXI.
Leon Vallé had not parted from his sister in declared hostility, yet
months passed before she heard directly from him. But this was not
to be wondered at, as letters were necessarily sent by private
carriers, and it was not to be expected that in the adventurous
excitement of his life he should pause to send a mere salutation over
leagues of desolate country.
Meanwhile the prevailing anarchy of the time crept closer and
closer to the hacienda limits. Bandits gathered in the mountains and
ravaged the outlying villages, driving off flocks of sheep or herds of
cattle, lassoing the finest horses, and mocking the futile efforts of
the country people to guard their property. The name of one Juan
Planillos became a terror in every household; yet one by one the
younger men stole away to strengthen the number of his followers
and share the wild excitement of the bandit life, rather than to wait
patiently at home to be drafted into the ranks of some political
chieftain whose career raised little enthusiasm, and whose political
creed was as obscure as his origin. “The memory is confused,” says
an historian, “by the plans and pronunciamientos of that time. Men
changed ideas at each step, and defended to-day what they had
attacked yesterday. Parties triumphed and fell at every turn.” The
form of government was as changeable as a kaleidoscope, and only
the brigand and guerilla seemed immutable. Whatever the politics of
the day, their motto was plunder and rapine; and their deeds, so
brilliant, so unforeseeable, offered an irresistible attraction to the
restless spirits of that revolutionary epoch.
Though Doña Isabel Garcia, like all others, was imbued with the
military ardor of the time, the brilliant reputation that her brother
was winning in distant fields, though in harmony with her own
political opinions, horrified rather than dazzled her. She shuddered as
she heard his name mentioned in the same breath with that of the
remorseless Valdez, or the crafty and bloody Planillos; yet she was
glad to believe his incentive was patriotism rather than plunder, and
when at last a messenger from him reached her with the same old
cry for “Money! money! money!” she responded with a heaping
handful of gold,—all she had been able to accumulate in the few
months of his absence. Don Gregorio however, vexed by recent
losses and harassed by constant raids from the mountain brigands,
sent a refusal that was worded almost like a curse; and ashamed of
her brother, annoyed by and yet sympathizing with her husband,
Doña Isabel felt her heart sink like lead in her bosom, and for the
first time her superb health showed signs of yielding to the severe
mental strain to which she had been so long subjected.
June had come again; the rainy season would soon begin, and
Don Gregorio, suddenly thinking that the change would benefit his
wife, suggested that they should pass some months in the city. The
roads were threatened by highwaymen, yet Isabel was glad to go,
and even to incur the novelty of danger. Her travelling carriage was
luxurious, and with her little girls immediately under her own eye,
with an occasional glimpse of the four-year-old Norberto riding
proudly at his father’s side in the midst of the numerous escort of
picked men, she felt an exhilaration both of body and mind to which
she had long been a stranger.
The travelling was necessarily slow, for the roads were excessively
rough, and the party had at sunset of the first day scarcely left the
limits of the hacienda and entered the defile which led to the deeper
cañons of the mountains, wherein upon the morrow they anticipated
the necessity of exercising a double vigilance. Not a creature had
been seen for hours; the mountains with their straggling clumps of
cacti and blackened, stunted palms seemed absolutely bereft of
animal life, except when occasionally a lizard glided swiftly over a
rock, or a snake rustled through the dry and crackling herbage.
Caution seemed absurd in such a place where there was scarce a
cleft for concealment, yet the party drew nearer together, and the
men looked to their arms as the cliffs became closer on either side
and so precipitous that it seemed as though a goat could scarcely
have scaled them.
They had passed nearly the entire length of this cañon, and the
nervous tension that had held the whole party silent and upon the
alert was gradually yielding to the glimpse of more open country
which lay beyond, and on which they had planned to camp for the
night, when suddenly the whole country seemed alive with men.
They blocked the way, backward and forward; they hung from the
cliffs; they bounded from rock to rock, on foot and on horse, the
horses as agile as the men. Amid the tumult one man seemed
ubiquitous. All eyes followed him, yet not one caught sight of his
face; the striped jorongo thrown over shoulders and face formed an
impenetrable disguise, such as the noted guerilla chief of the
mountains was wont to wear. Suddenly there was a cry of “Planillos!
Planillos!” amid the confusion of angry voices, of curses, and the
clanking of sabres and echo of pistol-shots. Don Gregorio found
himself driven against the rocks, a sword-point at his throat, a pistol
pressed to his temple, his own smoking weapon in his hand.
Immediately the shouts ceased, and before the smoke which had
filled the gorge had cleared, the travellers found themselves alone,
with two or three dead men obstructing the road. Don Gregorio had
barely time to notice them, or the blank faces of his men staring
bewildered at one another, when a cry from Doña Isabel recalled
him to his senses, and he saw her rushing wildly from group to
group. In an instant he was at her side. “Norberto! where is
Norberto?” both demanded wildly, and some of the men who had
caught the name began to force their horses up the almost
inaccessible cliffs, and to gallop up or down the cañon in a confused
pursuit of the vanished enemy.
Don Gregorio alone retained his presence of mind; though night
was closing in and the horses were wearied by a day’s travel, not a
moment was lost in dispatching couriers to the city for armed police
and to the hacienda for fresh men and horses, and the return to Tres
Hermanos was immediately begun. Sometime during the morning
hours they were met by a party from the hacienda, and putting
himself at the head of his retainers Don Gregorio led them in search
of his son, while Doña Isabel in a state bordering upon distraction
proceeded to her desolated home.
Her first act was to send a courier to her brother. No one knew the
mountains as he did, and in her terrible plight she was certain he
would not fail her. But her haste was needless, for information
reached him from some other source, and within a few days he was
at the head of a party of valiant Garcias, who had hastened from far
and near to the rescue of their young kinsman.
In all the country round the abduction of Norberto Garcia was
called “the abduction by enchanters,”—so sudden had been the
attack, so complete the disappearance of the victim. Beyond the
immediate scene no trace remained of the act,—it seemed that the
very earth must have opened to swallow the perpetrators; and yet
day by day proofs of their existence were found in letters left upon
the very saddle crossed by the father, or upon the pillow wet with
the tears of the mother, demanding ransom which each day became
more exorbitant, accompanied by threats more and more ingenious
and horrible.
Such seizures, though rare, were by no means unprecedented,
and such threats had been proved to be only too likely to be fulfilled.
As days went by the agony of the parents became unbearable, and
Don Gregorio’s early resolution to spend a fortune in the pursuit and
punishment of the robbers rather than comply with their demands,
and thus lend encouragement to similar outrages, began to yield
before the imminent danger to the life of his son; and to Doña Isabel
it seemed a cruel mockery that her brother and the young Garcias
should urge him to further exertion and postponement of the
inevitable moment when he must accede to the imperious demands
of the outlaws.
The family were one evening discussing again the momentous and
constantly agitated question, when Doña Feliz appeared among
them with starting eyes and pallid cheeks, bidding Don Gregorio go
to his wife, from whose nerveless hand she had wrested a paper,
which Leon seized and opened as the excited woman held it toward
him. Don Gregorio turned back at his brother-in-law’s exclamation,
and beheld upon his outstretched hand a lock of soft brown hair,
evidently that of a child. It had been severed from the head by a
bloody knife. It was a mute threat, yet they understood it but too
well. Every man there sprang to his feet with a groan or an oath.
Such a threat they remembered had been sent to the parents the
very day before the infant Ranulfo Ortega had been found dead not
a hundred yards from his father’s door. Did this mean also that the
last demand for ransom had been made, and the patience of
Norberto’s abductors was exhausted?
Don Gregorio clasped his hands over his eyes, and reeled against
the wall. Leon sprang to his feet, pale to his lips, his eyes blazing.
Julian Garcia picked up the hair which had fallen from Leon’s hand;
the others stood grouped in horrified expectancy. Doña Feliz stood
for a moment looking at them with lofty courage and determination
upon her face.
“What,” she cried, “is this a time for hesitation? The money must
be paid, the child’s life saved. Vengeance can wait!” She spoke with
a fire that thrilled them, and though they spoke but of the ransom, it
was the word “vengeance” that rang in their ears, and steeled Don
Gregorio to the terrible task that awaited him.
That night the quaint hiding-places of the vast hacienda were
ransacked, and many a hoard of coin was extracted from the deep
corners of the walls, and the depths of half-ruinous wells. Doña
Isabel saw treasures of whose existence she had never heard
before, but had perhaps vaguely suspected; for through the long
years of anarchy the Garcias had become expert in secreting such
surplus wealth as they desired to keep within reach. Large as was
the sum brought to light, it barely sufficed to meet the demands of
the robbers; yet it was a question how such a weight of coin was to
be conveyed by one person to the spot indicated for the payment of
the ransom and delivery of the child,—for it had been urgently
insisted upon that but one man should go into the very stronghold of
the bandits.
At daybreak, having refused the offer of Leon Vallé to go in his
stead, Don Gregorio mounted his horse and set out on his mission.
He knew well the place appointed, for he had been in his youth an
adventurous mountaineer, and more than once had penetrated the
deep gorge into which, late in the afternoon, he descended, bearing
with him the gold and silver. As he entered the “Zahuan del Infierno”
he shuddered. Not ten days before he had passed through it,
followed by a dozen trusty followers, in search of his child, and had
discovered no trace of him; now he was alone, weighted with
treasure, sufficient sensibly to retard his movements and render him
a rich prize for the outlaws he had gone to meet. Once he fancied he
heard a step behind him; doubtless he was shadowed by those who
would take his life without a moment’s hesitation. Yet he pressed on,
obliged to leave his horse and proceed on foot, for at times the cliffs
were so close together that a man could barely force his way
between them.
Just as the last rays of daylight pierced the gloomy abyss, at a
sudden turn in the narrowest part of the gorge Don Gregorio saw
standing two armed men, placed in such a position that the head of
one overtopped that of the other, while the features of both were
shadowed though made the more forbidding by heavy black beards,
which it occurred to him later were probably false and worn for the
purpose of disguise. At the feet of the foremost was placed a child;
and though he restrained the cry that rose to his lips, the tortured
father recognized in him his son,—but so emaciated, so deathly pale,
with such wild, startled eyes, gazing like a hunted creature before
him, yet seeing nothing, that he could scarcely credit it was the
same beautiful, sensitive, highly-strung Norberto who had been
wrested from him but a short month before.
At the sight the father felt an almost irresistible impulse to
precipitate himself upon those fiends who thus dared to mock him;
but even had his hands been free to grasp the pistol in his belt, to
have done so would have been to bring upon himself certain death.
As it was he could but look with blind rage from the bags of coin he
carried to the brigands who stood like statues, the right hand of the
foremost laid upon the throat of the trembling boy. Even in that
desperate moment Don Gregorio noticed that the hand was whiter
and more slender than the hands of common men are wont to be;
the nails were well formed and well kept, though there was a bruise

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First published in paperback 1991

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1 The Angevin Empire 1152–1223 1

Dynasties of England and France 1196–1377

6 The walls and towers of Carcassonne which

sensible tactics on the part of the French—brought an end to the

the cost of maintaining the Ducal Court in Bordeaux,

But I must not be too hard on William Shakespeare; without

imaginary forces work’. Try and imagine those thundering

THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

On the wet, windy evening of 24 October 1415, Henry V, King of

by further feuding among the nobility, and the eventual

of this history is to relate the great enterprises and deeds of

occupied much of west and central France. In addition, Henry

It seem fair to date the origins of the Hundred Years War to

of France or pass on the Succession to her male heirs’—had no

William I, King of England, Duke of Normandy, called by some

whose crown he was granted by election, was his to give where

First, it seemed strange that she had no relatives, a condition

When Henry I of England died in 1135, the English—or rather

Geoffrey was naturally most concerned with who ruled in

The reign of Henry II is of interest to students of the Hundred

consolation. In 1153 the Bretons of Lower Brittany, the County

At this point it might be as well to clarify a few medieval terms.

be a traitor, or ‘recreant’ to the other. Henry II was vassal to

capable hands of Philippe-Augustus (1180–1223), and then to

In the early days of their society, medieval man was ruled by

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