by Angus Donald
‘Miles, get back to the castle now. Alert Lord Fitzwalter – tell him … tell him that the bridge is under attack by several hundred of the King’s men and that we will hold as long as we can. But it cannot be for long. Tell him to come with all speed.’
‘But I want to fight. If you send me away, I’ll miss everything—’
‘For once, Miles, just do as you are bloody well told!’ My lord did not raise his voice above a murmur but there was a whip-crack in his tone that sent his younger son scurrying for the wooden stair.
‘Now, Alan, let’s see about discouraging these Flemish fellows, shall we?’
Chapter Two
I fear, my dear Prior, that I have begun my tale in the wrong place. My mind is not what it was, I am old and I become easily confused these days, and my tales of blood and glory stray from their proper paths. I crave your indulgence for I must tell you of what occurred some weeks before the battle at Rochester Castle, else it will make no sense to you or to anyone who might read of my deeds and those of my comrades in the years to come.
As you well know, my dear Anthony, I have spent many hours in the past few days studying the Bible, and I find much comfort there. Robin would have scoffed at my new-found piety in the face of death but it is not salvation I seek – that I leave in the hands of a merciful God – but wisdom. There is much to be found in the holy book. I am reading Ecclesiastes and that wise old man wrote, if I have managed to untangle the Latin correctly, that there is a time for everything, a season for every activity under Heaven; there is a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal …
I was healing that August of the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and fifteen, a little slowly but surely, from a painful wound to the waist I had taken in a short, bloody fight on the walls of London that June. England, too, it seemed, was slowly healing after the struggle between the rebellious barons and the King. After Runnymede, I had dared to hope that all would be well in the kingdom for the rest of my life. That peace would reign in the land and folk would be left to sow and reap, to live, love and raise children.
A vain hope, it must now appear, but honestly held.
It was also the time to uproot, or at least to cut the barley, rye, oats and wheat that had grown tall and bright in the fields around and about my manor of Westbury in Nottinghamshire. That summer was a blazing, golden joy, long days of sunshine with only the occasional growling of a distant thunderstorm to remind us that the Heavenly Kingdom was not, in truth, at hand. All the menfolk of Westbury – my tenants from the village, the manor servants and the few freemen, old soldiers for the most part – were in their strips of field, backs bent and sickles in hand, as they lopped the nodding heads of grain from the stalks before the women following gathered them in bundles and stacked them to dry. All the local children came behind their parents, collecting the kernels of grain that spilled from the flashing blades and tucking them safely in their pouches before the wheeling flocks of birds could settle and gorge. The little ones made a game of their labours as often as not, chasing each other and shrieking with mirth. It would be a bountiful harvest, all were agreed, and if the weather continued to favour us there would be no fear of hunger or hardship till the following spring at least.
I confess I was not labouring in the fields with the other men. I was nursing my wound by drowsing in the strong afternoon sunshine, slumped on a comfortable bench outside my hall in the courtyard of Westbury, a jug of ale at my elbow, my belly full of venison stew and a blissful contentment suffusing my frame, when I heard the trumpet sound. I jerked upright fully awake – for while England might appear to be at peace, I still kept a pair of sentries day and night on the roof of the squat stone tower in the courtyard, which was the manor’s highest point and its last refuge in war, and their duty it was to warn of the approach of strangers.
Standing, straightening my clothing, brushing at a patch of drool on my tunic and vaguely looking around for my sword – it was hanging on the wall in my bedchamber, I remembered – I heard the sentry call down to me from the tower.
‘A woman, sir, all alone. No horse, nor baggage. Looks like a beggarly type wanting a free meal.’
My elderly steward Baldwin, who with his unmarried sister Alice ran the daily business of the manor, was by my shoulder. He lifted an eyebrow. ‘Sir Alan?’ he said.
‘Let her in, Baldwin,’ I said, still filled with a glowing benevolence for the world. ‘If she needs a meal, give her a good one and whatever scraps of meat and bread we can spare for her journeying and then send her on her way.’
‘As you say, sir.’
‘I’m going to my solar to take a little n— That is to say, I shall retire to my chamber for a while to study my scrolls.’
I left the glare of the sunshine and pushed past Baldwin into the gloom of the hall. I gave no more thought to the beggar woman, for as I entered my solar at the far end and lay down on the big, comfortable bed, I fell into a deep and delightful sleep.
I awoke in the pinkish twilight of the long summer evening, refreshed and still brimming with contentment, and lay for a while listening to the sounds of the servants clattering plates in the hall, no doubt preparing the evening meal. I could hear the voice of my fifteen-year-old son Robert but I could not quite make out his words over the noise of the hall servants. He seemed animated, though, unusually cheerful, and I wondered who he was talking to. And then I heard her voice.
I sat up abruptly and an icy chill puckered the skin of my forearms. I was out the door of the solar in an instant – and there she was. Seated at the big hall table a few feet from Robert, elbows on the board, deep in conversation.
‘Get away from her!’ I bawled, running towards my son and the beggar woman. They both started to their feet, shocked.
‘Robert, get away from that woman right now.’
‘Why, Father, we were—’
‘Get away. Come and stand behind me.’
My heart was racing, I could feel my face and neck hot with surging blood. I curled a protective arm around Robert. ‘Did she feed you anything? Robert – did she give you anything to eat or drink?’
‘Father, you are behaving in a very—’
‘Answer me. Did she give you anything to eat or touch your skin?’
‘Father …’ My son looked into my face and saw that I was in deadly earnest. ‘She gave me nothing. She did not touch me. We were waiting for you to wake before we ate. She will take supper with us tonight.’
‘She will not,’ I said. My right hand was groping wildly across my waist for my sword hilt but, of course, the blade was still hanging on the wall in the bedchamber. I looked at the woman, now smiling crookedly at me from the other side of the table.
‘Sir Alan,’ said Matilda Giffard in her wood-smoke-deepened voice, ‘what a joy it is to set eyes on you again.’
‘I cannot say the same,’ I said coldly.
I looked at her. Matilda Giffard, Tilda, as she was to me … a woman I had once – no, twice – thought I was in love with but who had proved herself as treacherous and cunning as a starving rat.
She had once been a great beauty – a woman to stop a man’s heart – but on this day, although her looks had not entirely deserted her, she cut a poor figure: she was thin as a twig and dressed in a raggedy black nun’s robe, greyed by the dust of the road. Her once swan-white face was decidedly grubby, she had the remains of a black eye, now faded to streaks of brown and yellow, and the lines on her brow beneath her midnight black hair and around her grey-blue eyes were cut deeper than I remembered.
‘My dear, you have nothing to fear from me, I swear it,’ said Tilda, smiling. Her familiar voice sent ripples running down my spine.
She stepped away from the table and came towards me. With difficulty, I managed not to take a step backwards, and pulled Robert tighter to my side.
‘I do not fear you,’ I said, lying once more.
‘That is as it should be. I
know that we had harsh words when we last met. And you cannot know how much I regret them—’
‘I do not fear you,’ I cut her off, ‘I merely ask that you leave my hall, my home and my lands immediately.’
‘I have wronged you; Robert, too. I freely admit it. But I come humbly to seek your forgiveness for my actions. I know you are a kind man—’
‘You shall not have it. You schemed to kill us. You used your wiles and my own loving foolishness to snare me. You betrayed me to my enemies. At every turn you have sought my destruction. Whatever it is that you say you require, you shall not have from my hand. I shall have no more dealings with you. Now, I must ask you to leave. This instant. Or I shall fetch my men and have you thrown from the ramparts.’
To my utter astonishment, Tilda fell to her knees in front of me. She clasped her hands before her in supplication and I swear that a succession of oily tears began to course down her dirty white cheeks.
‘Sir Alan, I beg you. It was so hard for me to come here. Forgive me. Dear God, I ask you in all humility. Show me mercy. Forgive me and grant me sanctuary. I have nowhere else to turn. In the name of the love you once professed, forgive me. I beg you.’
I was utterly at a loss. I had seen Tilda merry, fearful, sad and scornful, even spitting bile-bitter hatred at me. But I’d never seen her like this. So … broken. So stripped of dignity. Pleading for my forgiveness on her knees. My heart twisted in pity.
‘Go back to Kirklees. Go back home to the Priory, woman, and do not trouble us again. You shall have food. An armed escort, if you want it. But you will not stay here.’
‘I cannot,’ she said. Tilda was sobbing without restraint. She buried her face in her hands and her words came out jerkily, muffled and odd sounding.
‘Expelled. The mother Prioress. Anna. She and I, we … She threw me out. I have nowhere to go. I have no place. I am lost.’
A weeping woman on her knees is a hard thing for a man to witness, particularly if she was once his lover. But I knew Tilda of old and, while her grief did seem genuine, I could not bring myself to trust her once again. I hardened my heart and called for help.
‘Baldwin,’ I said to my steward, who was hovering by the table with his mouth open in shock. ‘Fetch the lady a satchel of food, a flask of wine and a warm cloak, and escort her from the manor. If she will not go, get Hal and some of the men-at-arms to help you. Robert and I will be in my solar. Report to me when she is gone.’
I turned my back on the sobbing woman on her knees in the hall and, half-pushing Robert to force him along, I stalked back to my chamber.
Inside, with the door closed and my weight leaning securely against it, I felt my heart pounding as if I had run a mile in full armour.
‘I do think that was rather harsh, Father,’ said Robert.
I had thought I was rid of Tilda once and for all but life is never that simple. Baldwin reported that he had provided her with food and drink and a cloak and escorted her – she was meek as a lamb, he said – out of the main gate. He had stayed to watch her set out on the road towards Nottingham but after only a few hundred yards she had veered off the track headed towards the river and had collapsed down under a willow tree on the bank, a huddle of misery, still within a half-mile of my gates.
‘Do you wish me to send the men-at-arms to roust her?’ Baldwin asked.
‘No,’ I said. It was dark by then and to send a troop of mounted men to move along one tearful middle-aged woman seemed excessively cruel. ‘Let her sleep the night there in peace. Doubtless she will be gone in the morning.’
She wasn’t, of course.
The next morning, from the roof of my tower, I could clearly see her, a black shape under the willow tree, still as a stone. It crossed my mind to order out the men-at-arms then, and have them move her on with their spear butts, but I had not the heart for it. I contented myself with issuing stern orders to all the servants that Matilda Giffard must not be allowed to set so much as a toe within my walls again.
We were very busy over the next few days with the harvest and, while I cannot pretend that Tilda disappeared from my mind completely – she hovered constantly on the fringes of my thoughts like an unpaid debt – I did manage to banish her from my daily processes. I ignored her, in truth. She stayed by the willow tree day after day, moving very seldom, at least in daylight, troubling nobody as far as I could tell and slowly, almost imperceptibly, becoming absorbed into the landscape of Westbury.
Four days after the tearful scene in the hall, Robin arrived.
Chapter Three
My lord came apparelled for war and with two score mounted men-at-arms at his back. He was in high spirits, oddly, for the news he bore was almost all bad. Over a cup of wine in my hall, he informed me that the King had reneged on the promises given at Runnymede and that we were summoned once more to war by Lord Fitzwalter and the Army of God. I confess my heart sank at the news.
‘We knew it couldn’t last, Alan,’ said my lord. ‘When has King John ever kept a promise, let alone one extracted at the point of a sword?’
He made a good argument: John was one of the most duplicitous men I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, indeed the bitter hatred felt for him by the barons of England had much to do with his untrustworthiness, but my dreams of a peaceful existence had been scattered to the winds by Robin’s arrival.
‘I need you, Sir Alan,’ he said. ‘I need your sword once more. Will you come?’
I nodded dutifully. I could not in good conscience resist a call to arms from my lord: he had made me, raising me from a penniless thief to the prosperous knight I was today. He’d given me everything. I owed him my life and my lands.
We were joined at dinner by Sir Thomas Blood, Robin’s man and an old friend of mine too who had once served as my squire and had painstakingly trained my son Robert in the arts of the sword. He also was in high spirits and he proudly showed me his shield, which was freshly painted with a new blazon, the head of a buck with an arrow in its mouth. The buck and the arrow were in Robin’s honour – a reference to a time in his youth when he was a famous outlaw.
Robin had granted Sir Thomas the small manor of Makeney in Derbyshire, a richly deserved reward, for Thomas had been his loyal knight for many years now. He was also a newly married man, having taken a bride, a pretty girl from Westbury, in fact, called Mary, who had recently given birth to their first child, a dark, chubby, perpetually bawling boy. Clearly they needed their own home.
‘You will probably have learned this already, Alan,’ said Robin, ‘but Philip Marc is back, too. Despite what the charter decreed, John has returned him to the exalted post of High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests.’
This was news to me. ‘What happened to Eustace de Lowdham?’
‘Oh, he has graciously agreed to step aside and has accepted the role of deputy sheriff. The fool says he’s happy to have been relieved of the burden of high office.’
Philip Marc was my enemy. He was a French mercenary, fanatically loyal to the King, who had hounded me for taxes I did not owe and had even seized my son Robert for a while in an attempt to force me to pay. Lord de Lowdham was a weak-willed but amiable fellow who the rebel barons had induced to take the shrievalty after Runnymede. I was surprised King John had not had him permanently removed.
‘It gets worse,’ said Robin. ‘Sheriff Marc has a remit to destroy all unlicensed stone castles in Nottinghamshire and there are more than a few landholders hereabouts who are hastily pulling down their new walls to avoid exciting his ire.’
I looked out of the open door of the hall at the squat stone tower that I had built in the courtyard two years before. My keep, my refuge in time of trouble. I had been so proud to have raised it. It made me feel like a real knight, less of a gutter-born churl who had done suspiciously well for himself and was now aping his superiors.
I tore my eyes from it and said: ‘How are Marie-Anne and the boys?’
As well as Miles, Robin had an
other son, Hugh. They were as unalike as iron and silk. Hugh, the eldest, was a steady, sensible man, a little dull and priggish to my mind but a decent fighter and a fellow who once he had fixed his mind to something would never give up until it was accomplished. Miles was another man altogether: wild, pleasure-seeking, irresponsible – and loved by almost everybody who met him.
‘They are busy,’ said Robin. ‘Hugh is to be constable of Kirkton while I am away – he’s recruiting more men and strengthening the walls of the castle. Marie-Anne is laying in stores in case of a long siege. Though I hope it won’t come to that. You are welcome to send your household there if Philip Marc becomes overly oppressive.’
I thanked him distractedly. I was still thinking about the tower and wondering, given its relative insignificance compared with some of the greater fortifications in the county, whether it might escape the sheriff’s notice. ‘And Miles?’ I asked.
Robin said nothing for five whole heartbeats.
‘I cannot understand that boy,’ he said at last. ‘He has no regard for discipline at all. He tells me he is wedded to the rebel cause, to the great charter of liberties, that he is afire to teach the King and all his foreign mercenaries a bloody lesson – but when it comes to training with our men, organising our forces for battle, preparing, if you like, to teach that bloody lesson, he seems to have no interest.
‘He spends half the day abed. He is up half the night with the wine jug. Every week he is involved in some new scrape, usually involving too much drink and some unfortunate local girl. I tried confining him to the castle and he blithely ignored my orders and spent two days absent – God knows where. He came back, refusing to give an account of himself but with a badly cut lip and his best clothes torn and stained with blood. I took away his horse and his purse; he borrowed a mount from a farmer, robbed a travelling monk of two shillings and set out on his revels again. He is twenty years of age yet behaving like an unruly apprentice: always surly, disrespectful to Marie-Anne, downright rude to me. He is a thorn in my backside, to be honest.’
