by Dan Davis
She spurred off to ride beside her brother, who threw me a look. For a moment, I was reminded of him looking at me that way many years before, when he was a small boy after I scolded him for his wandering attention.
“But I was thinking about being a knight,” the young Jocelyn would protest, as if the content of a daydream was relevant.
I had failed them both. When they were children and since they had come to me, penniless and desperate. All I had needed to do was find each of them a good match. Both had plenty of promise for any prospective knight or young lady. But I was poor and friendless through my own lack of grace. And I had been lonely and I had welcomed their company. I had never truly wanted them to leave. I had been selfish. Taking them into outlawry with me was a new low for them as it was for me.
I had to make it right, somehow. I urged my horse beside theirs.
“And what are you two talking about?” I said, grinning, certain they had been cursing my name.
“I am not convinced that our destination is the right one,” Jocelyn mumbled.
“Yes,” I said. “I know. But you know why we must go.”
“Because,” Emma said. “You are almost entirely without friends.”
“Correct,” I said. “It is curious, is it not, that if the archbishop had not previously forced me to Kent then I would have no where to go at all. It is most fortuitous.”
“Fortuitous?” Emma said. “That your liege lord wishes you dead?”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “You call me friendless but I know one man who will welcome us.”
“You hope,” Jocelyn said.
“I do,” I said. “I might even pray for it.”
From the corner of my eye I watched them both smile, just a little.
“But the truth is,” I said. “I would go south no matter what. Whether I had the fortune to know Cassingham or not. My only hope now is for a pardon from the king. From the regent. When I have made war on the French. I will have a great victory and then no man can deny me my place as a faithful lord and knight.”
Jocelyn sighed and nodded. “But I swear,” he said. “Sometimes your arrogance borders on madness.”
Never a truer word spoken.
***
It felt like a long ride. I could not wait to get stuck in against the French. I did not declare myself anywhere that we went and I stayed out of the towns. Emma, who rarely rode and almost never travelled, was exhausted from the start. She never complained. Not to me, anyway. Jocelyn was giving up a lot to throw in with me. But he strove to be a good knight who did his duty by his lord. And, I suspected, he had his heart set on returning to Marian who awaited us in the Weald.
But I worried that Swein chafed at fleeing south again.
“This will be the last time,” I said to him one night, sitting out under the stars. “I will make things right and when we go back north, we shall destroy William. Together.”
“Yes, good.” Swein poked at the fire with a long, blackened stick. He did not seem pleased at my promise. “I understand.”
“Do you no longer wish to attack Sherwood?” I asked. “Has your heart gone out of vengeance?”
“No,” Swein said, looking up at me. “Those men will pay for what they did. But I have missed my fellows in the Weald. You are not an archer, my lord. You wouldn’t understand. Just chatting with others who know their business as well as you do, or even better.”
“I can’t shoot a bow,” I said. “But my trade is the horse and the lance. My passion is the sword and the shield. I know well enough what you mean. I am pleased you found good company. I pray we find them well.”
“They’ll be alright, Sir Richard,” Swein said, with the certain confidence of the young.
Of course, he was quite right.
Cassingham and his band of archers had kept up their attacks on the supply lines of the French.
He had set up winter quarters in a hall in a village deep in a wooded part of the Weald. One of the many manor houses that some lord had abandoned in flight from the French. We had found our way to him, village by village, as if they were stepping-stones through a river. Cassingham’s men had built defences and stocked stores inside, enough for hundreds of hungry mouths through the coming winter.
We arrived late one morning in November and were welcomed like old friends. It was all rather heart warming. Marian and Eva stood together in the cold, Marian with a huge smile on her face. Eva scowled at me.
William of Cassingham rushed to meet us and welcome us into his hall.
“I apologise for bringing more mouths to feed, William,” I said.
“We have had plenty of food from the French,” Cassingham said, grasping my arm. “And even if we were starving, I would feed you, Sir Richard, from my own plate in order to have you fighting with us. Come inside, let us eat. You must tell me what is happening beyond London. We hear little.”
Later we were seated, full of food and halfway drunk on stolen French wine.
We were crammed against each other at the top table.
Cassingham sat opposite me, with Emma seated on his right, then Jocelyn opposite Marian and Anselm. On my side sat Marian, and then beyond her Swein and Eva sat at the far end, not speaking.
Marian seemed to have grown ever more beautiful since I last saw her and many eyes, it seemed, were drawn to her as well as to Emma.
Whereas I was very aware of Eva at the far end. I wanted to speak to her but it was difficult to do so at the best of times.
“That was a fine thing to say when we arrived, was it not?” Swein whispered to me, leaning over Marian like the bumpkin that he was.
“Cassingham is only a country squire,” I said in a low voice as I pushed Swein out of Marian’s face. “But he has more of the true knight in him than many a rich lord, I assure you.”
Swein’s eyes shone as he looked over the rim of his cup at Cassingham. Marian’s did the same and I wondered what I had missed while I was away. I glanced at Eva who sat with her arms folded across her wonderful bosom. Jocelyn stared at Marian like a drowning man stares at a rope.
“What has happened with the siege?” I asked Cassingham who sat opposite.
“The French have abandoned Dover for the winter. The French brought down the gate, beyond the barbican, and they stormed the breach soon after you left for the north. Every attack they made was thrown back. The defenders made a timber wall inside the destroyed section of wall and there they fought back assault after assault. The fall rains came in late October and the French, dispirited, signed a truce. They would lift the siege and attack no more for three months and the garrison promised to not attack them in the same period. The French have now disbursed into the castles they took in the summer and also into London, which still celebrated Louis as king of England.”
“I am astonished that the people yet support Louis,” I said. “I will never understand those merchants of London.”
“But the heart is going out of the Lords and merchants of London who supported Louis in the summer,” Cassingham said.
“Why do you say the fight is going out of the rebel barons?” I asked. “How can you know, stuck down here? In this lovely wood.”
Cassingham laughed. “It is not all of them. But the barons were at war with King John. It was King John that took their wealth and their lands and did as he pleased. Already, many are cooling their support for Prince Louis, who is granting lands as king of England to his own French lords. Already, so they say, many of the prominent men of London are sending word to King Henry and to the regents William Marshal and the Archbishop of York.”
“But who says?” I asked. “You are living in the middle of a woodland, William, how on earth do you know what the barons of London are thinking?”
He grinned at my ignorance. “A handful of their servants have come to us. They are proud Englishmen and women. Many in London suppose that their lords might as well be French as English, so long as their rights are respected and their profits continue.
Which is a fair argument for a merchant in London. But many here have been wronged and it is our duty to see them right.”
Marian beside me stared, enchanted, at Cassingham. “If ours were a just world, you would be lord of these lands after you throw the French back into the sea.”
She tossed her hair back over her shoulder, exposing her neck.
Cassingham blushed. “My lady, you are too kind. But I am far too lowly to hope for so much.”
“Anselm will put in a good word for you with his father, won’t you Anselm,” I shouted down the table.
“Yes, Sir Richard, I will indeed,” the lad said, speaking with absurd slowness and at far too great a volume yet still not entirely disguising the slurring.
“Jocelyn, do not allow your squire any further wine and punish him tomorrow.”
“Oh, I will indeed, Sir Richard,” Jocelyn said, mimicking Anselm. He clouted him round the head.
“Even though the lad cannot handle his wine, I am honoured to have him fight with us,” Cassingham said. “It makes the men proud. They feel they are fighting on the side of right.”
“It makes me proud too,” I said. “When I was a boy, his father was at the peak of his fame in the tournaments. They say he bested five hundred knights across Christendom. Can you imagine such a thing? We would charge about the courtyard, legs astride a stick, shouting, I am William the Marshal, no, I am William the Marshal.”
Jocelyn laughed. “As did we, twenty years later, in the Holy Land. Truly.”
“What makes him such a great knight?” Swein asked, turning abruptly to me. “My lord, if you don’t mind me asking? Sorry, my lady.” He elbowed a boiled turnip into her lap and she swatted him away, laughing at his eagerness and ineptitude.
When she turned away, I noted how lovely and soft her neck looked. I could almost smell the blood beneath her skin.
“William the Marshal?” I said. “He won, first and foremost. He would never have been more than a minor son of a minor lord, had he not won his riches at tournaments. Then he went to serve the old King Henry and he served him with absolute loyalty, even in the final days when all the king’s sons rebelled. Did you know the Marshal unhorsed King Richard the Lionheart? Only man who ever did. Of course, he was just Prince Richard back then but still. He could have killed Richard, had he wanted, but instead William Marshal killed his horse, just to prove the point. But then he served Richard with complete faithfulness. Then came King John.”
“Who treated him appallingly,” Anselm said, loudly.
“Give him more bread, Jocelyn and shut him up. And King John mistrusted the Marshal and treated him badly as Anselm says. And again, the man does his duty and puts the king and the kingdom first before himself.”
“That is not to say he has not feathered his own nest every step of the way,” Jocelyn said to Cassingham. “He has played the games of power as skilfully as he ever did in the tournament.”
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“But how did he win so much?” Swein said. “Was he a big man in his youth?”
“Not especially,” I said. “I have heard it said that he claims only to have a hard head. His single greatest talent, his one God-given ability that sets him above all others is that he can take a blow from the mightiest arm and yet stay on his feet and keep fighting.”
“An ability that is rare for a man,” Emma said. “Yet present in all women.” I laughed, as did Marian but the others looked disturbed. “I am speaking poetically,” Emma explained to Cassingham.
“Ah,” he said.
Jocelyn took up the tales of the Marshal. “After winning a tourney in Normandy once, the blacksmith had to lay his head on his anvil and hammer his helm back into shape just so he could remove it from his head.”
We traded stories about the Marshal while his fifth-born son lay slumped and snoring on the table. The meal had lasted until nightfall. More and more, I turned to Marian’s lovely neck beside me. She smelled wonderful and the wine had thinned her blood and caused the skin of her face and neck to become flushed with a fetching pink hue.
I felt Eva’s eyes upon me.
When it was late, she came and dragged Marian up from the table. I fell into Eva’s dark eyes but the women said it was time to retire. The ladies shared a bedchamber attached to the hall but when they were gone, I could think of little else but Marian’s neck and Eva’s magnificent bosom. I remembered her sweat and her linen wrap from the weeks before.
That first night, I slept in the hall but I knew I had to get away from people. There was too much temptation. I wanted blood, to taste it, to feel it in my mouth and in my guts and limbs.
“I must find somewhere to live,” I said to Cassingham. He himself occupied the bedchamber at the rear of his hall and, as far as could tell, he shared it with no one. “Somewhere away from anyone else.”
The village houses were fully occupied but two men offered to give theirs up for me as I was a knight and they were no more than freemen farmers. I declined, though I was touched by their generosity. Cassingham had clearly put them up to it so I stressed to him again that I wanted somewhere miles away from the village.
What I did not tell him was I wanted somewhere that I would be no danger. Far from Eva and from Marian and everyone else.
And I wanted somewhere private.
Somewhere that I could feed.
***
When Cassingham understood just how alone I wanted to be, he pointed me toward a cabin up on the side of a hill a few miles north from the village along the valley.
It was an abandoned oak cabin in an oak wood, in need of serious work. It had until a year or two been a hunting lodge and belonged to the lord who owned the wood. The lord had died and his heir had been so caught up in the war that he had never claimed it.
The wood was mostly oak but had a dense understorey of holly and coppiced hazel. Along the ground were straggly remains of blood-red crow’s foot, almost died back for winter and a thick carpet of bright green dog’s mercury. It was a working wood but empty of workers. The winding route up to the cabin was along a disused charcoal burners’ path.
The hazel and ash had clearly been used by the charcoal makers but still the oaks ruled the wood and acorns were everywhere underfoot. The local swineherds were about with their pigs who snuffled up and crunched acorns for miles around. The leaves were falling or fallen by the time I moved in, the architecture of the oaks revealed. Winter woods are stark, the lines and angles are skeletons bared to the bone, like the corpses of crucified men. The bones of the wood stood out like ruins.
My cabin was a sturdy place built from thick oak boards and beams, put together when the locally felled oaks were yet green. The single door faced south into the valley and through a cleft in the hills, I could see the sheep grazing the grass on the other side. The cleared area in front of the cabin let the sun warm my plank walls on the few warms days, causing sap to bleed down from joints and pegs and filled the air with the scent of life and summer, though the days were drawing in.
It was a steep valley, or as steep as it gets in the Weald. Out of the windows beside the door, I could look at the stream nearby that provided my water as it ran down the hill to the river flowing along the valley floor. Buzzards sometimes swooped along the length of the valley, often high up but also shooting low, hunting mainly at dusk. One dawn I watched a buzzard drinking from the stream, flicking the water up into its mouth and shaking water from its great dark feathers.
I would lay in bed and listen to the constant sound outside, through the walls and roof. Whether it was the rain or wind in the trees or the tickling of the stream, it was a never ending, reassuring humming of the work. At night, it would be the owls hooting in the branches high above. In the daytime, the blackbirds would flit between the holly and the ash, ever agitated, perhaps afraid of the coming winter. Always, over it all, were the rooks.
Rooks, birds of carrion and harbingers of death prefer elms, the taller the better, but a big group had made
their nests in an oak glade close to the cabin. Even at night, I would hear them in their nests cawing in the darkness, jostling and pecking, stretching their wings. Each pair bedded down together in their nests, safe from the madness of crow society for the span of the night. Whenever there was a high wind, I used fallen rooks nests for kindling.
Rooks have a thundery call, like the rough accent of the backwoods Sherwood folk or the voice of any man who hailed from north of the Humber. A rasping, raucous, leathery old cry halfway between a hoarse complaint and a throttle shout of greeting. It reminded me of the men swarming up on scaffolds when churches and castles are being built. Bawled conversations consisting of endless oaths and laughter. Rooks are the most sociable of birds and they like people’s company as much as they do their own. They were pleased that I had moved in.
Of course, this only confirmed my own darkness and unpopularity. Wealden folk, if they are proficient with a bow always shot rooks on sight. If not, they will go as far as sending boys up the trees to smash the eggs or throw down the chicks for the dogs to gobble up. I would not allow such practices for my rooks.
As the winter grew colder, the birds ate worms, pests and anything that crawled. Only at harvest time was it they prey upon farmer’s grain and it seemed unfair to punish them for taking a little of what they needed.
“They enjoy my company and I theirs,” I explained to Cassingham one time, who looked at me like I was mad beyond measure.
“But what about rook pie?” he asked, aghast.
“Any lad shooting my rooks can expect a hiding.”
Swein gleefully told me that the men called me rook master. No man was stupid enough to say such things to my face, no matter how drunk he was. Though I gladly took up their name of the Crow’s Nest for my woodland home. It was perfect and their name for it, created by them from fear and spite, made me care for the place even more.
