The Iron Castle

by Angus Donald

  ‘Why is he doing it, d’ye know, Sir Alan? You know him best of all. What’s cunning old Robin Locksley up to this time, eh?’

  ‘He says he’s tired of sleeping in the woods. He’s getting old, he says. He wants to retire to his lands in Yorkshire and live in peace.’

  ‘Hmmf,’ said the Marshal. ‘He’s barely a stripling. He’s not even forty. I hope he hasn’t gone soft. We need him; we’ll need all our good men in Normandy before long, you mark my words, Alan.’

  Just then we were joined by two men. One was a neighbour of Robin’s, a stiff-necked baron called Roger de Lacy, who held Pontefract Castle for the King, and of whom I had always been slightly in awe. He was short, square, with fierce dark eyes, and his manner was habitually brusque, bordering on rude. De Lacy had a reputation as a fearsome fighter, a man with contempt for any weakness in others and himself, but he was said to be as true as Damascus steel once he had given his oath.

  ‘Pembroke,’ he said, with a curt nod at the Marshal. Then: ‘Dale – didn’t bother to dress up for the occasion, I see.’

  I wrenched up a smile but made no reply.

  The other man was a tall, smiling, open-faced stranger, clearly a knight by his garb and manner, but with a gentleness and humour shining from his eyes that seemed oddly unwarlike. He was accompanied by a girl. Not just a girl, in fact, but a vision of such beauty that I had difficulty paying full attention to the stranger’s name and rank, when the Marshal introduced him.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I stammered. ‘What name did you say?’

  She was about eighteen or nineteen, I judged, with skin so pure and white it seemed like the palest duck-egg blue, glossy sable hair under a snow-white headdress, a heart-shaped face, wide mouth, small nose and happy blue-grey eyes.

  ‘Are you deaf, Alan – what ails you?’ said the Marshal. ‘Here is Sir Joscelyn Giffard, lord of Avranches in Normandy, and his daughter the lady Matilda.’

  ‘Everyone calls me Tilda,’ said the girl, in a low, smoky voice, and when she smiled I felt a delicious rush of blood through my veins. She reminded me of Goody – her colouring was entirely different, Goody had been peach-pink and golden whereas this lady was swan white and midnight dark, but there was a calm joy in her perfect face that put me in mind of my beloved. I tore my gaze from her and, my head reeling like a drunkard’s, I bowed to Sir Joscelyn and bid him a stammering welcome to Nottinghamshire.

  A blast of trumpet saved me from having to make conversation with these men. A young and spritely bishop entered the hall bearing a tiny golden casket on a plump purple cushion. Many of the more pious assembled knights fell to their knees as the bishop and his burden passed – for that bright little box housed a sacred relic, a toe-bone from the body of the blessed forerunner of Our Lord Jesus Christ, John the Baptist himself – but I remained standing when the holy man went by, as did William the Marshal. I had had some experience of so-called relics in recent years and, as a consequence, I was no longer so swift to afford them all deep reverence.

  The bishop stopped beside the kneeling form of Robin and the seated form of the King and stood between them. There was a second trumpet blast – ordering silence in the hall – and John spoke, his voice rusty, harsh, almost a frog’s croak.

  ‘Good. Right. Everybody quiet. Let’s begin.’ The King glanced down at his right hand where I could see he held a scrap of parchment. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Are you willing, Robert Odo, son of William, Lord of Edwinstowe, to become my man?’ The King squinted down at his hand. ‘Do you choose to do so with a pure heart in the sight of God and in the absence of all deceit, falsehood and malice?’

  ‘I am willing,’ said Robin clearly.

  King John tucked the parchment under his thigh and placed his two hands over my lord’s, and holding Robin almost captive for a moment, he looked at him and said, ‘Then from this moment forth you are my sworn man.’

  And he released his grip.

  The bishop spoke then: ‘This homage that has been made in the sight of God and Man, and in the presence of this holy relic, can never be unmade. Thanks be to God.’ Then he said, ‘Are you now willing to swear fealty to your sovereign lord for the lands and titles of the Earl of Locksley?’

  ‘I am willing,’ said Robin, and he placed his right hand softly on the little golden box on its rich, velvet cushion. ‘I swear, by my faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ, that I will from this moment forward be faithful to my lord and sovereign King John and that I will never cause him harm and will observe my homage to him against all enemies of my lord in good faith and without deceit.’

  Robin lifted his hand and, knowing what I did about my lord’s larcenous nature, I half-expected the little golden box to have disappeared into his palm, but it was still there, gleaming on that purple cushion.

  To his credit, John also seemed to play his part in a true and honest manner. He raised Robin to his feet and they exchanged the ritual kiss of peace. The trumpets flared again. John said loudly, ‘Fare you well, my true and trusty Earl of Locksley!’ Then he handed Robin a roll of thick parchment, very softly patted him on the cheek and whispered something into my lord’s ear. Robin bowed low in one graceful, fluid movement and backed away from his new master.

  Amid much slapping of his back and many a shouted word of encouragement, Robin made his way through the crowds of knights and nobles and, still clutching the roll of parchment, he came over to our group, to Sir Joscelyn, his daughter Matilda, Roger de Lacy, William the Marshal and myself.

  I congratulated my friend, as did the Marshal, and Robin smiled ruefully, humbly and said little. De Lacy said, ‘That’s an end to all your damned Sherwood nonsense, Locksley. You are the King’s man now and you’d best not forget it.’ Robin smiled and inclined his head in agreement. Then Sir Joscelyn gripped him by the right hand and pumped it firmly.

  ‘The King is fortunate indeed to have a good man such as you as his vassal,’ he said, beaming at Robin. Tilda, I noticed, kissed my lord softly on his cheek and asked after Marie-Anne and his children. Robin answered her briefly but with great kindness and courtesy. I asked Tilda if she knew Marie-Anne well – a silly question, given that she had just asked after her health, but for some reason I wanted her to give me her attention. She said that she did and that they had been together in Queen Eleanor’s court in Poitiers for some time the year before. I asked a few questions about the court, again just for the pleasure of hearing her speak and having her lovely eyes fixed on mine, and then she surprised me.

  ‘Your name is well spoken of there, Sir Alan,’ she said. ‘Some of the Queen’s ladies are avid for music and your name has been mentioned as one of our finest trouvères – perhaps you will play something for me one day. Or better yet, perhaps you will even write one of your famous cansos about me! Something terribly scandalous – I hope.’ She poked the tip of her pink tongue out of the corner of her mouth an instant after she said this, to show that she was not completely in earnest. It was the most enchanting thing I’d seen for an age. And I found myself shocked and aroused at the same time. A canso was a song, usually about love, about adulterous love, between a knight and a lady. By God, by all the saints, the minx was actually flirting with me – and Goody not yet a full year in her grave.

  I blushed beetroot red and mumbled something about being delighted, if time and my duties permitted, then I turned to William the Marshal and asked him in a gruff voice for news of the war on the continent. With one part of my mind, I wondered what it would be like to touch Tilda’s pitch-black hair, to run my fingers through it. Would it be coarse? What would it smell like? I had to wrench my mind back to what the Marshal was saying.

  The Lusignans were stirring up rebellion in Poitou and Aquitaine, the Marshal said – and the other men huddled in to listen, too – but it was nothing serious, a little looting and livestock theft, no more; and King Philip had his envious eyes on Normandy, as usual, although in this seasoned warrior’s opinion the treaty signed recently at Le G
oulet, a solemn compact between the kings of England and France, ought to restrain him for some months to come.

  ‘There is not all that much going on just at the moment,’ sighed the Marshal. ‘Even Duke Arthur of Brittany has dropped his claim to the Angevin lands. Philip made him do so – in the name of peace between England and France.’

  ‘There seems to be a terrible danger of a long-lasting peace breaking out,’ said Robin, to much knightly guffawing. I stole a glance at Tilda, and from under her long dark lashes she caught my eye and smiled shyly. I blushed again, looked away, and resolved to restrict my thoughts to proper masculine affairs.

  ‘There can be no real peace until Philip is defeated,’ said de Lacy, thrusting out his chin. ‘While he can still field a force of two thousand knights, and twice as many men-at-arms, Normandy will not be safe. And God help the man who doesn’t understand that. Philip must be crushed. Utterly destroyed.’

  Sir Joscelyn coughed. ‘It might well be possible to have peace, if the King were to agree to hand over a small part of Normandy to the French. The Vexin, perhaps, some of the eastern castles…’

  ‘Nonsense!’ De Lacy’s interruption was an axe blade cutting through Giffard’s words. ‘The King must hold his patrimony, every part of it. It was given to him by God, and it is his sacred duty to guard it for his heirs and successors. Every castle, every town, every yard of land. If he shows the slightest weakness, he will lose the whole damn lot in double quick time.’

  I kept my eyes on Robin’s face as the talk of war and peace, of alliances and shifting loyalties rolled over me. There was something a little strange about my lord’s demeanour this evening. On the surface he seemed perfectly happy, now reconciled with his King, no longer an outlaw, and once again restored to the title of Earl of Locksley – even if he had three years of service yet before he could fully come into his lands. He should have been contented, joyous even; this was his day and, indeed, he appeared happy. He was witty, irreverent; he seemed serenely in command of his life. Yet I knew in my heart he was furious. I had known him half my lifetime then, and I could tell, if nobody else in that bellowing throng could, that he was boiling with a suppressed and very violent rage.

  After perhaps an hour, Robin took me by the elbow. ‘Let us take some air,’ he said. We disengaged ourselves from the gathering and walked out of the hall into the middle bailey. Robin looked up at the night sky, scattered with uncaring stars and lit by a low silver moon.

  I waited in silence for him to speak.

  ‘He did not set his seal on this,’ said Robin finally, lifting the rolled parchment that he was holding. ‘My rights, my obligations, the extent of my lands – it’s all here in an elegant clerkly hand in beautiful Latin. But it means nothing without his seal. It’s just a scrap of animal skin with no force in law.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll set his seal on it when your three years are up,’ I said.

  ‘Are you? I wish I were.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘I do not see what else I could have done,’ Robin said. There was an oddly plaintive tone to his voice that I did not much like. ‘Surely Marie-Anne and the boys must have a home?’

  There was no ready answer to this, so I remained mute.

  ‘Are you sure you will not come with me to Normandy?’ he said after some little time had passed.

  ‘I cannot,’ I said. ‘Truly, I cannot. Westbury is greatly impoverished; I have sorely neglected it of late. And little Robert has been motherless since Goody died. I must raise him and the fortunes of Westbury together. I am sorry, my lord.’

  ‘A shame. I could have done with a good man at my side, one of my own people,’ said Robin. ‘Someone I can actually trust,’ he added with a sideways smile.

  ‘What did the King whisper after you had made the oath?’ I asked, not expecting that he would tell me.

  He didn’t, for a long time.

  ‘It was nothing,’ he said, finally. ‘Nothing at all important.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  Robin looked at me, and I could see the silver sheen of his strange grey eyes in the darkness: ‘He said four words, Alan. Only four – but I think I will be hearing them in my head for the rest of my life.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “There’s a good boy.”’

  Chapter Two

  The harvest was bad that summer in Nottinghamshire. Towards the end of August, when the wheat was just beginning to turn gold in the fields, angry violet clouds massed like demon armies, came charging forward and dumped an ocean over Westbury. The harvest died in the fields, trampled flat by a deluge that would have sunk the Ark. For two solid weeks the pouring Heavens battered the standing corn. I stood in the doorway of the hall day after day, under the steady gush of the eves, and looked out over the grey sheets dancing across the Westbury fields. After the second week, a break in the clouds briefly raised our spirits – perhaps, I said hopefully to my steward Baldwin, with a few dry days we might be able to salvage some of the barley and the oat crops, which were due to be brought after the wheat. But the next afternoon the clouds returned, the waterfall resumed.

  I gathered the villagers of Westbury into my hall in early September, more than a hundred dripping folk and, as the lightning cracked across the slate-grey sky and the rain pounded my sodden thatch, I told them all that they need not fear starvation, come wintertime. We would build large brick ovens and dry some of the grain, I told them, and that way we might salvage something of the summer’s bounty. We had some stores of wheat, barley and oats from the previous year, not much admittedly, and most of it needed for seed, but we would eat it rather than starve, and I was prepared to spend my own silver on more seed grain from other parts of the realm, or from Normandy or the Low Countries. There was nothing to fear, I told my people.

  But there was.

  In the autumn a murrain broke out among my flocks, rotting their feet and blistering their mouths, and more than half of the sheep of Westbury died within two weeks. Four of our milk cows went down too, their mouths creamy with froth.

  A herd of fallow deer broke through the fences of the bean and pea fields in late September and ate or destroyed much of that harvest before they could be chased away by the local children. And the fruit crop from my orchards was meagre that season – no catastrophe here, it just happened, as it sometimes does, that the apples and pears were thin on the branches, small and hard. A bad year.

  Each of these setbacks would have been endurable in itself but the cumulative effect was disastrous. The local people muttered that God was punishing Westbury.

  If God were indeed punishing Westbury, He was also punishing the rest of Christendom. For when I tried to purchase grain to fill the barns and tide us over through the winter months, I found that harvests had failed all over the country and across the seas, too. The price of wheat – in an ordinary season four shillings a quarter – doubled, then trebled; the price of barley and rye, too. Oats were three and half times their previous value. A hen, which might be worth a half-penny in ordinary times, was now two pence or even three – if you could find a man willing to sell. I bought as much food as I could – but a fire the year before had destroyed my hoard of silver and necessitated the complete rebuilding of Westbury, and despite Robin’s generous help, the cost had been very high. I now knew for certain there was not enough grain in my barns to feed everyone in Westbury until the first crops of the next summer could be brought in. Without grain the people would starve.

  My knightly neighbours thought me a fool to spend my own precious coin on the Westbury peasants. I had a duty to protect them in war, certainly, but not to fill their lazy bellies. They told me I should allow God to decide whether they lived or died. But that has never been my way – perhaps I am a fool, perhaps it is the result of my own peasant upbringing. For I had known hunger as a child; my two sisters had died of it. I could not sit snug in my hall while my hollow-bellied villagers died.

  So I spent what little
money I had on sacks of grain shipped from the Low Countries and the village baker and I organised a distribution of loaves to every household in the village once a week. Every Sunday after church, the manor servants served out a hot meal in the courtyard to all who wished it. Simple fare: a soup, perhaps a very thin stew of root vegetables, and bread, if we had it. I hunted as much as I could on my lands – deer, boar, hares, even wood pigeon – and turned a blind eye to local poachers trying to fill the family pot. But the game soon became scarce, killed by the villagers or by my own hounds or just wisely moving away to safer, more remote corners of the Sherwood wilderness.

  I shared the meagre diet of the Westbury folk, as I felt it my duty to set an example, as did all the servants at Westbury and my half-dozen men-at-arms. But I made an exception for my son Robert, who was then a little more than a year old. He might have as much milk and bread as he wished, I told his nurse, and she seemed pleased, no doubt thinking that while her charge ate well, she would not go hungry.

  But many did that long winter. The villeins butchered their oxen, horses and donkeys and ate them hooves, hides and all; the dogs and cats of Westbury mysteriously began to disappear, and no one enquired too closely after them. My own hunting hounds grew rake thin and ill-tempered and fought over bones already boiled white for their juices. Eventually, I sent them onward, gentling each animal, fondling its ears and slitting its throat with my own knife. Their carcasses went to make soup for the people of the village, and for two weeks we ate relatively well. But hunger was ever-present, hovering like a shadow or an evil spirit. I could see it in the eyes of my servants, and the folk I met in the lanes. I could smell its chalky bitterness on their breath. The villagers scoured the woods around and about for nuts and nettles and roots. Some boiled half-rotten acorns to make a bitter mush; others went so far as to strip bark from the trees and chew it. There were tales of cannibals loose in the forest who’d eat any travellers they came across.