by Angus Donald
I stumbled from the room and down the stair with Marie-Anne’s words ringing in my ears. Yes, I thought, yes. I touched Fidelity’s hilt at my waist. Revenge. The Prioress must pay with her life for her crimes.
I found Anna quite easily. She was in the infirmary. But there was no need for me to take my vengeance. She lay lifeless on the slab on which she had saved Robin’s life with her knowledge and skill, a half-drunk cup of dark wine beside her. On the stone beside her head, a shaky hand had written in chalk in good, clear Latin these words: ‘If not together in life, my love …’
After the white-hot fury and an ocean of tears came a dull and awful calm. Marie-Anne and I were sitting in the garden a day later, holding hands, joined in grief. Neither of us had slept. An untouched plate of bread and cheese sat before us on the table. The silence was an echoing void between us, but as grey and heavy as lead.
‘I cannot understand why Anna would do all this,’ I said. ‘Why would she first bring Robin back from the grave and then try to kill us all? She must have run mad. There can be no reason behind this.’
I did not really expect Marie-Anne to speak. And for a long, long while she did not.
‘It is not madness – there is a twisted sense to it if you care to look out through her eyes,’ she said finally.
I said nothing; merely stared at her.
‘I made her swear that she would do everything she could to save Robin. I told her that if she refused, Hugh and I would use all our power to destroy her and her house, but that if she succeeded I would sing her praises across Christendom and endow the Priory with a fortune. She made an oath to me on her honour that she would heal Robin, if she could, of his wound. I forced her to. She kept that oath. But once she had done that …’
Fresh tears welled in Marie-Anne’s eyes.
‘She saw Tilda, Robin and me as the architects of her misery,’ I said dully. ‘How she must have hated us – all of us. Robin told her about Tilda and Benedict Malet. In her rage, Anna cast off the one person she had perhaps ever truly loved. Tilda. She blamed Robin for that loss. Yet, I believe, she must also have hoped one day to take Tilda back. Instead, Tilda came into my household. We came to love each other – and that was the coin that tipped the scales for Anna. When she saw that Tilda was truly mine, that she was happy and with child, that she would never return to her arms, our fate was sealed.’
‘I pushed Tilda on to you,’ said Marie-Anne. ‘I sent her to Westbury to be your woman. In a way, God forgive me, this is all my own fault.’
‘There is enough guilt for all of us to share,’ I said.
The next day, Marie-Anne, Hugh, Sir Thomas and I buried Robin in the deer park of Kirklees Priory, under a spreading oak tree exactly where his last arrow had found its mark. Hugh made a long and rambling speech over his grave, praising his bravery and lauding his martial achievements, listing the engagements where he had fought, including the battle of Lincoln – which, to me, seemed a little crass. No mention was made of Miles or his death. Perhaps I ought to have made a stirring eulogy for my friend, for my comrade, for my lord, but I found at his graveside that I had nothing much to add to Hugh’s testament. We had fought together, Robin and I, we had shared victory and defeat, joy and suffering, times of hunger and plenty – and now he was gone and I remained here on this foul earth. I found that I had said all I had to say to Robin in the long years that we were together, in the arguments, in the jests, in the moments when we were joyful or face to face with death. As I looked down into the square earthen pit that held his shroud-wrapped body, I merely said: ‘Goodbye, my lord. Sleep well.’
We buried Tilda, and the unborn child inside her womb, in the churchyard surrounded by the sisters of the Order who had gone before her. She lay not far from Anna’s grave – but I insisted they should not lie side by side. She belonged to me in the end. Not to her. I could find no tears that day – I was dry from a lifetime of weeping. But I covered her body with cut flowers and as the first shovelfuls of earth thumped down on her a wave of scent was released – a last memory of my love.
Thomas asked if I wanted him to burn the Priory to the ground to punish Anna’s fellow nuns and make such a pyre that would be seen for miles around to mark the deaths of our loved ones. But I said no. Hugh would have been enraged. The new Earl of Locksley planned to endow the Priory with some of Robin’s stolen silver, extend it, and perhaps even build a brother house for monks to serve God. Hugh wanted masses said for Robin’s soul – that would have made my old friend laugh, although I devoutly hoped it might be enough to bring him to Heaven.
We rode away from Kirklees together, Hugh and Marie-Anne, Sir Thomas and me, and a handful of men-at-arms, but soon enough we all went our separate ways. Thomas, with many protestations of fidelity to the new Earl and of friendship to me, took the road south-west into Derbyshire and his manor of Makeney. Marie-Anne, still pink-eyed from weeping, with her straight-backed son Hugh and all the Locksley men-at-arms left me and took the road east to Kirkton. And, all alone, I rode south, to Westbury, where Robert and Boot and my own people awaited my return.
I say that I rode alone – but I am not sure if that is strictly true. I may have been dozing in the saddle, or my wits may just have been addled from too much grief and too little sleep. For all of a sudden, I found myself riding in a large company of folk. I could hear the creak of their saddles, the clop of horses’ hooves, the low murmur of conversation, a chuckle or two. I looked to my right and there was Robin, a younger, more handsome Robin, laughing carelessly at some crude jest made by the big man beside him. For beyond him was Little John, massively alive, his fat blond plaits swinging by his ugly red face. I looked behind and there was Father Tuck, beaming at me with his round ruddy face, and my murderous old Bavarian friend Hanno, and there was Mastin, and Owain, and Claes, and Kit, and Will Scarlet, a mere stripling still sunburned from the Holy Land, and all of them, all of the good men I had ridden with down the long years. I looked to my left and there was my dead wife Goody, smiling at me from her perfect sunny face, and beyond her was Tilda, laughing at my confusion, and on the edge of the group even the hideous face of poor Nur, half-obscured under a black hood.
I looked back at Robin, who was looking over at me now grey-eyed and sombre.
‘Why did you leave me, my lord?’ I said.
‘I didn’t leave you,’ he said. ‘I will never leave you. None of us will.’
Epilogue
The King was weeping unashamedly as Brother Alan came to the end of his tale. As was I. He mopped at his streaming cheeks and said: ‘It is strange, I know, that I should be so moved by the demise of a man who contrived my father’s death and who robbed him of all his worldly wealth – and yet I cannot but feel diminished by his passing.’
‘Robin did kill your father, Sire,’ said Brother Alan, ‘there can be no denying that – but he did it to ensure that you ascended the throne. If he had not done what he did, then who can say how the war might have ended? Prince Louis might well have triumphed had the crown not passed to you. England might even now be suffering the yoke of a French King, had Robin Hood not played his murderous part.’
The King looked thoughtful. ‘You make a fine point, Brother,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, I do not think that I wish for this tale of regicide to be broadcast to the world. I have seen you noting down this narrative, Prior Anthony – do I take it that you wish to make a romance, a bound book of these tales?’
‘Yes, Sire,’ I said.
‘I cannot allow it,’ the King said, getting to his feet. ‘You will surrender to me all the parchments, all the notes, that you have made of this matter, and any others that pertain to Brother Alan’s life. I shall hold them securely.’
‘But, Sire,’ I said miserably, ‘this has been a long labour, the work of many, many hours – besides, it is Brother Alan’s testament, a final record of his existence.’
‘You will be compensated,’ said the King. ‘I will give you a pair of manors in Yorkshire to suppo
rt this House and the good works of the monks here. Furthermore I give you my word that I shall not destroy these stories – I shall safeguard them and I shall leave it to my heirs to decide if they should ever be allowed to see the light of day. It may be that when I am dead – many years from now, God willing – these tales shall be told once more. But I cannot permit them to circulate while I rule this land.’
He turned to Brother Alan, who had just managed shakily to get to his feet when the King did. ‘I thank you for your courage in my service, Brother. And I honour you for the eventful life you have lived but I must ask you not to speak again of these sad matters concerning the King, my father, to anyone else – on pain of death.’
Once again, I heard Brother Alan making that strange grunting noise. And I realised with horror that he was laughing in the King’s face.
Finally, the old man calmed himself. ‘I have told my tale, Sire,’ he said, a little breathlessly. ‘And I shall not tell it again. But not for fear of death – that holds no terrors for me now. I shall remain silent because my tale is told. I have no more stories to weave, no great deeds to relate. I have told the truth, all of it, and it has been set free from the cage of my mind and released into the world – and I know, too, that whatever great men, even noble kings, might desire, the truth cannot be locked away for ever. The truth finds a way of emerging, sooner or later, like a seedling blindly pushing up from beneath the soil and bursting joyously out into the sunlight.’
Brother Alan died the very day after the visit of King Henry, slipping away quietly in his sleep while I sat beside him and read to him by candlelight. He did not seem the slightest bit perturbed that the King’s servants had collected and borne away a great mass of parchments that contained his stories – perhaps because he knew that I had ordered the monks of the scriptorium to make several copies of each chapter as he had been relating them to me. I have also had copies made, with his permission, of other wonderful tales penned by Brother Alan himself before he came to Newstead. I am confident that I have the chronicles of his whole life and all the adventures that he had with his lord of Locksley safely set down in ink on parchment. And while I know that it must be a sin to disobey the King, God’s anointed ruler on Earth, I also know that I could not allow this extraordinary account to rot in the cellars of some dank royal stronghold. I will not allow the copies to be read – I do not wish to bring down the wrath of our sovereign – but I could not be at peace if I did not know that they were among the secret treasures of the Priory.
We buried Brother Alan in the churchyard of Newstead and sang a doleful mass for his soul. It was a miserable day, grey, with a thin, sour rain that fell without ceasing on the assembled monks. I had asked Brother Alan if he wished to be buried at Westbury, next to his son Robert, taken by God many years ago by the bloody flux. But he said no. He said he wished to be close to the copies of the parchments we had both laboured on for so long, the tale of his life and the truth of his service to his lord.
‘My body will be dust and I pray that my soul will be with God,’ he said, ‘but in another fashion I may live on, with Robin, with my lord, in those written pages. My ghost will surely ward them until they see the light again.’
Then he laughed one final time before he slept.
When Brother Alan was finally in the earth, when the service had been sung and all our tears were dried away, I ordered another mass to be celebrated – a mass for a man long dead, for a thief and murderer, for a man who poisoned a King and made off with his treasury. A mass for the man who people once called Robin Hood.
The End
Historical Note
It is often claimed that England hasn’t been invaded since 1066. I have heard it asserted, loudly and proudly, usually in pubs, up and down the country all my life. I think it was even taught to me in history at school. But it’s not true; not even a little bit. During the Hundred Years War the French made dozens of successful raids on the Channel ports. Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne during the Wars of the Roses, landed with an army of Flemings and Irishmen in Lancashire in 1487. Then there was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when a foreign but, crucially, Protestant ruler invaded England at the head of a Dutch army and deposed the ruling Catholic monarch James II. He was crowned William III and ruled for thirteen years.
As well as these incursions, there was the little-known French invasion of 1216, which I have described reasonably faithfully in this novel. Prince Louis, eldest son of King Philip of France, had a weak claim to the throne through his wife, Blanche of Castile, who was King John’s niece. The Pope, who was in dispute with the English monarch, initially gave his blessing to the attempted coup against John and the takeover of England by France – but he changed his tune when John did homage for England to him in 1213, giving the Papacy ultimate lordship of the country. However, that did not halt Louis’s ambitions and, with the tacit support of his royal father but now with opposition from the Pope, he began preparations for a full-scale invasion.
Louis assembled a large fleet and raised an army of knights, often the younger sons of French lords who were eager to claim new lands in England, and for a time he genuinely looked set to repeat the Conquest of 1066. However, John collected fighting ships from all the southern English ports, manned them, armed them and managed to keep Louis penned in the port of Calais for several weeks. As recounted in this book, a huge storm scattered the blockading ships and Louis was able to slip out and cross the Channel, landing on the Isle of Thanet on 21 May 1216. John did not contest his disembarkation and withdrew to Dover to seek reinforcements. Louis made his way to London, where he was proclaimed King of the English at St Paul’s Cathedral, although he was never crowned at Westminster Abbey because no suitable English bishop could be found to undertake the ceremony. However, many rebellious English nobles and young Alexander of Scotland did homage to him for their lands.
By June, after the capture of Winchester, Louis and the English rebels controlled as much as half of England. John retreated to the west where support for him was strongest and did his best to avoid pitched battles with the French forces. However, the invasion was fiercely resisted in one region and by one extraordinary individual, who is known to history as William of Cassingham (now called Kensham) or Willikin of the Weald. We don’t know much about William except that he was a young squire from Kent who raised a large guerrilla army of bowmen in the thickly forested Weald and savaged the French army of occupation, killing thousands of them and disrupting their supply lines. He successfully attacked the besieged castle of Dover and later trapped Prince Louis at Lewes, nearly capturing him. William was renowned for his barbaric practice of cutting off the heads of his enemies. He survived the war, was handsomely rewarded by Henry III for his valour and lived to a ripe old age before dying in 1257. Some authors have even suggested that his exploits provided a model for the early Robin Hood stories.
One of Prince Louis’s leading men was Thomas, Comte du Perche. He came over a couple of months after the initial invasion force, with the second wave of troops in the summer of 2016. He was at the siege of Dover and the next year he led an expedition north from London with Robert Fitzwalter, the English rebel leader, to relieve Mountsorrel Castle, which was being besieged by Ranulf, Earl of Chester. After chasing off Chester, both men and their retinues proceeded to Lincoln to try to subdue that castle, which was still being held by the doughty Nicola de la Haye.
It is unclear exactly how the battle of Lincoln unfolded, and some people doubt the existence of a rubble-blocked western gate in the medieval town walls, which I have Boot so heroically unblocking in this story. We do know that the royalist army, which comprised about four hundred knights, two hundred and fifty crossbowmen and many auxiliary troops, advanced from Stow, eight miles north-west of Lincoln, very early on the morning of 20 May 2017. The French and rebel forces came out to meet them in the fields to the west of the town but then, believing that they faced an army far superior in numbers (they didn’t: they m
iscounted the standards of the English nobles), Louis’s knights retreated back inside the town walls. The French plan was to hold the town’s defences and try to take the castle before the royal army could overwhelm them. Accordingly, they intensified their assault on the castle walls.
However, a strong force of men-at-arms and crossbowmen under Falkes de Breauté, a mercenary captain, charged directly into the castle through a gate on the western side and, suddenly popping up on the walls and delivering a lethal barrage of crossbow bolts, they successfully managed to fight off a determined French attack. Meanwhile, the Earl of Chester’s men were vigorously assaulting the north gate of the town. Having beaten off the French attack on the castle walls, Falkes de Breauté and his men then made a sortie into the town and caught the enemy between their surprise attack and the Earl of Chester’s men, who had by now stormed through the north gate. That is how one version of the battle goes. Another version is that Falkes and his men (or possibly Peter des Roches) unblocked a disused western gate in the town walls, clearing away the broken masonry to allow William the Marshal to charge in to the town from that direction.
I have shamelessly stolen Falkes’s valiant deeds and given them to Robin and his men, and I have also deliberately chosen to use the story about the unblocking of the western gate in the town, even though I think it unlikely to be a true version of events. When I visited Lincoln in the late summer of 2015, I spoke to several experts at the castle and no one could tell me where this blocked-up western town gate might have been. In fact, I suspect it may never have existed and has been confused by the chroniclers of the age with the western gate of the castle, which admitted Falkes de Breauté and his crossbowmen – but I believe my job is to make these stories as exciting as I possibly can and I wanted to add a little extra drama to the battle for Lincoln, so I hope I may be excused this blatant embroidering of the truth.
