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      Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

      Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2004

      Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007310326

      Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338801

      Version: 2018-04-20

      ‘The battle scenes, as always, are masterful; and the vignettes of everyday living, in times of extreme hardship, have the ring of simple truth’

       Sunday Telegraph

      HERETIC

      is for Dorothy Carroll,

      who knows why

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Praise

       Dedication

       Prologue: CALAIS, 1347

       Part One: THE DEVIL’S PLAYTHING

       The Count of …

       It had not …

       Thomas spent his …

       Thomas and his …

       In the name …

       Part Two: FUGITIVE

       It rained all …

       Thomas woke with …

       Sir Henri Courtois …

       Part Three: THE DARKNESS

       The search of …

       Sir Guillaume, the …

       It was on …

       Epilogue: THE GRAIL

       Historical Note

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by Bernard Cornwell

       About the Publisher

      PROLOGUE

       Calais, 1347

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      The road came from the southern hills and crossed the marshes by the sea. It was a bad road. A summer’s persistent rain had left it a strip of glutinous mud that baked hard when the sun came out, but it was the only road that led from the heights of Sangatte to the harbours of Calais and Gravelines. At Nieulay, a hamlet of no distinction whatever, it crossed the River Ham on a stone bridge. The Ham was scarcely worth the title of river. It was a slow stream that oozed through fever-ridden marshlands until it vanished among the coastal mudflats. It was so short that a man could wade from its source to the sea in little more than an hour, and it was so shallow that a man could cross it at low tide without getting his waist wet. It drained the swamps where reeds grew thick and herons hunted frogs among the marsh grass, and it was fed by a maze of smaller streams where the villagers from Nieulay and Hammes and Guîmes set their wicker eel traps.

      Nieulay and its stone bridge might have expected to slumber through history, except that the town of Calais lay just two miles to the north and, in the summer of 1347, an army of thirty thousand Englishmen was laying siege to the port and their encampment lay thick between the town’s formidable walls and the marshes. The road which came from the heights and crossed the Ham at Nieulay was the only route a French relief force might use and in the height of the summer, when the inhabitants of Calais were close to starvation, Philip of Valois, King of France, brought his army to Sangatte.

      Twenty thousand Frenchmen lined the heights, their banners thick in the wind blowing from the sea. The oriflamme was there, the sacred war pennant of France. It was a long flag with three pointed tails, a blood-red ripple of precious silk, and if the flag looked bright that was because it

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