The Leopards of Normandy: Duke: Leopards of Normandy 2

by David Churchill

  14

  The castle at Vaudreuil was little more than a stone keep atop a defensive mound, with a wooden stockade at the bottom enclosing a flat area on which stood stables, barns containing supplies for both men and animals, a smithy, a well and a vegetable garden. It had been a bitter experience for William Montgomery riding into it, for it was all too reminiscent of his father’s castle before it had been put to the torch by a troop of men from the Norman militia, leaving nothing but a blackened, burned-out shell. Three of de Gacé’s men rode alongside him, there both to protect him and also to dissuade him from changing his mind and backing out of the assassination.

  None of them wore any colours to signify their allegiance, nor did they give their true identities. Instead they told the guards at the gate that they were pilgrims, on the road to Chartres to pay homage to the sancta camisa, the robe worn by the Virgin Mary herself when she gave birth to Christ. No one thought twice about four tough-looking military types undertaking such a journey: with all the blood on their hands, soldiers had more need than most for the absolution from sin that a pilgrimage could provide.

  They ate in the great hall, keeping well clear of the ducal party and sitting among the everyday inhabitants of the castle and any other passing travellers who had found hospitality there. Montgomery barely touched his bowl of thick, meaty stew, and only nibbled at the bread that came with it. His thoughts were all directed towards the high table, where Duke William sat with Osbern Herfastsson at his right hand. William had grown tremendously since Montgomery had last seen him. How old is he now? he wondered. Thirteen? Fourteen? Either way, I bloody hope he doesn’t wake up while I’m in there. I’m not fighting him if I can avoid it. Herfastsson was a big man, but from the way he moved and the fact that he sometimes had to lean across the table to hear what the men near him were saying, Montgomery could see that time was catching up with him.

  ‘He’s old and slow and weak,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘I can do this, I know I can.’

  His words were overheard by one of de Gacé’s men. ‘Have you ever done anything like it before, boy?’ he asked.

  ‘You mean . . . ?’ Montgomery glanced around, not wanting to say the words out loud. The man just looked at him, biding his time. ‘Well . . . no, no I haven’t,’ he finally admitted. ‘But I’m sure I can.’

  ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ the man said. ‘But it’s not easy, specially the first time. Not easy at all.’

  Those words lodged in Montgomery’s mind through the rest of dinner and then as he and the other men in the great hall bedded down for the night. As he lay awake waiting for everyone else to fall asleep, he tried to empty his mind of the voices of doubt and fear that were slowly creeping into it. He felt slightly nauseous. He needed to piss. He couldn’t slow his heart, which was now beating so hard and so quickly that he felt as though the whole hall must be echoing to its drumming. He remembered what his swordmaster used to say, back in the days when his family was rich enough to hire such a man: ‘Relax, breathe deeply, rid your mind of any distractions and concentrate only on the matter in hand.’

  He waited until all the shuffling and farting and yawning of men settling down to sleep had subsided, then waited again until the fire that warmed the hall had burned down almost to its embers. Then, very slowly, he got to his feet, wrapping his cloak around his shoulders to hide the lower part of his face, and started to tiptoe between the slumbering bodies of men and dogs strewn among the rushes. A few times he accidentally brushed against one of the huddled figures, and on one heart-stopping occasion a man mumbled, ‘What, what?’ only to fall straight back to sleep as Montgomery went on his way.

  He came to the deep shadow in the wall indicating the arch at the foot of the stairs to the first floor. The torches that had earlier illuminated the winding stone stairway had all gone out, and Montgomery had to climb up in the pitch black, feeling his way with his outstretched fingers. His shoulders brushed against the walls and he had to bow his head to avoid knocking it on the low ceiling. He felt cramped, hemmed in and weighed down by the immense weight of the stone all around him, and something close to panic started to set in as the stairs went on and on without him ever seeming to reach the top.

  And then the tips of his fingers on his right hand, which had been brushing against raw stone, suddenly had nothing beneath them but air, and he realised that he’d reached the archway that led to the ducal bedchamber.

  The space on the first floor was subdivided into separate rooms by wooden walls, with a narrow passage running between them. De Gacé had told Montgomery that the chamber he wanted was at the end of the passage on the right-hand side, and here at least there was some faint illumination, enough to show him the way, provided by the guttering flame from a candle in a sconce on the wall. He tried to keep his hand from shaking as he lifted the handle that operated the latch and slowly opened the door.

  The hinges creaked.

  Montgomery stopped dead, not daring even to breathe as he waited for a reaction. But all he could hear was the snuffling sound of an old man’s sleep.

  ‘There are two beds in the chamber,’ de Gacé had said. ‘A low, simple one nearer the door and a big, heavy, decorated one beyond it. Osbern sleeps in the smaller bed. William sleeps in the bigger one. Kill Osbern, but don’t you dare harm a hair on the duke’s head. I want him alive and well. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Yes, I get it,’ Montgomery had replied, and as his eyes adjusted to the dim reddish light from a smouldering brazier on the far side of the room, he saw that everything was exactly as de Gacé had said. There in front of him, so close that he could almost reach out and touch it, was the bed containing Osbern Herfastsson, and beyond it the shadowy bulk of a bed befitting a Norman duke.

  Now that he was in the room, Montgomery wasn’t too worried about disturbing William. If the duke was anything like Montgomery and his brothers, he slept so deeply the hounds of hell couldn’t wake him. Even so, he wanted to make the killing as quick and quiet as possible.

  ‘Don’t mess about,’ one of de Gacé’s men had told him as they were riding to Vaudreuil. ‘Put your left hand against the old man’s mouth, palm over his lips, fingers tight against his nose. Clamp down hard and press your fingers tight so he can’t breathe and can’t make a sound. Then you take the knife in your right hand and cut his throat, one slice, left to right, deep as you can go.’

  ‘One slice, yes . . .’ Montgomery had said, feeling unnerved by the thought.

  ‘Keep your other hand on his mouth till he stops struggling,’ the man had continued, ‘then drop the knife and get out, nice and easy. If you panic, or try to go too fast, you’ll start tripping over yourself, and you don’t want to be falling downstairs and breaking your neck, do you?’

  ‘Er . . . no . . . no I don’t.’

  ‘Right, so get out and make your way to the gatehouse. We’ll be waiting there with horses ready to go.’

  ‘What about the sentries at the gate?’

  ‘We’ll deal with them. And don’t you worry about us doing our job. It’s not the first time for any of us.’

  The act of killing had sounded bad enough just listening to the man’s description. But now that Montgomery was here, standing over Osbern Herfastsson, the idea of killing a defenceless man as he slept, without a fight or even an argument to get his temper up, was more than he could handle.

  He stood for what seemed like an age, trying to make himself do the deed. Twice he gripped his dagger in his right hand and reached his left towards Osbern, but then withdrew it before it touched the old man’s bristly face. He remained there, paralysed and uncertain, not knowing what to do. He couldn’t just go back to the hall as if nothing had happened. He knew de Gacé would never let him get away with that. But equally he couldn’t—

  ‘Papa!’

  Montgomery was jolted from his endlessly spinning thoug
hts by the sound of William’s voice.

  ‘Papa, is that you?’

  Now what do I do? Montgomery thought desperately, offering up a silent prayer that the duke was talking in his sleep.

  He waited. Nothing happened. William was sleeping. Montgomery was safe. But he couldn’t wait any longer. Before he had the chance to stop himself, he reached down and slammed the palm of his hand against Osbern’s mouth.

  He hadn’t really thought about what Osbern would do at that point. He’d been too busy trying to cope with the idea of cutting the steward’s throat, like a slaughterman killing a pig.

  The old man writhed convulsively. He arched his back, kicked his legs and waved his arms, trying to knock Montgomery’s hand away. The attempt almost succeeded too, for Osbern was still surprisingly powerful. But Montgomery kept his grip on the steward’s mouth and nose, even as he felt Osbern’s jaw working up and down as he gasped for air, trying to bite the hand that was suffocating him.

  Now kill him! Stab the old bastard and kill him! The thought was like a clarion call in Montgomery’s mind . . . but how? Osbern’s neck wasn’t exposed. The clear expanse of defenceless white skin that he’d been expecting simply wasn’t there, and he couldn’t seem to work his dagger between Osbern’s heaving chest and his chin. The old man’s clenched hands had found their range too and were pounding away at Montgomery’s shoulders, and even his ears, so it was all he could do to keep his grip and stop himself crying out in pain.

  The struggle carried on in silence, like the mime show of an evil clown. And still Montgomery hadn’t inflicted so much as a scratch on Osbern’s throat.

  Well, to hell with that. The kicking of Osbern’s legs had sent his blankets flying off the bed, uncovering his body. His nightshirt had ridden up, revealing his wrinkled old balls and shrivelled penis. One more convulsive kick sent the material even higher, and now Montgomery could see his stomach.

  He needed no second invitation. He drove his dagger deep into Osbern’s guts, stabbing him again and again until his belly had disappeared beneath a slick dark coating of blood.

  Osbern’s hands reached down, desperately trying to protect his torn body, and that left his neck exposed. Montgomery didn’t slice across it as he had been told; he simply drove the point of his blade into the side of Osbern’s neck, just below the corner of his jaw.

  As he withdrew the blade, a sudden eruption of blood burst from Osbern’s neck, covering Montgomery’s arms almost up to his shoulders and even sending a fine shower of droplets across his face. The steward’s body slumped into the absolute stillness of death and Montgomery stepped back in shock at the sheer horror of what had just happened. His fingers lost their grip on his knife, which fell with a clatter to the floor, and he had to press a gory hand against his own mouth to stop himself from throwing up, though the taste of Osbern’s blood on his tongue only made his retching worse.

  Damn it! Damn this blood! he cursed. Why did no one tell me that a man held so much blood?

  15

  William could no longer remember his father’s face when he was awake. But in his dreams he saw him, or a man he knew to be him, and the sight gave him comfort until the point in the dream when his father went away. And then it was always the same. The part of his mind that could think, even as he slept, would fight to stay in the dream and try with all its might to keep Papa in sight.

  He had been trying to stop his father from leaving when the clattering noise, coming from somewhere outside his head, intruded on the dissolving tatters of his dream. He fought to stay asleep, but a deeper, more powerful instinct denied him the escape of oblivion. He could sense danger close at hand, and he woke, propping himself on his elbows, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and looking around the room.

  It took him a moment or two to find his bearings and focus on the scene playing out before him in the half-light. A man whose face he thought he recognised was standing by Osbern’s bed. There was a knife in his hand, and a dark, glossy liquid that gleamed wherever it caught the flickering glow from the brazier was pooled at his feet, spattered across his body and face and splashed over the wall behind the bed.

  With what seemed like aching slowness, William’s mind made sense of what his eyes were seeing. The man was one of the Montgomery brothers – his namesake, William – and . . . No, it can’t be! It’s not possible! . . . Osbern was lying still, covered in the black oil, which William now saw was blood. Montgomery had killed him.

  He opened his mouth to shout for help, but no sound came out of it. The shock of what he was seeing seemed to have gripped him by the throat so that he could hardly breathe.

  Montgomery seemed to be as dazed as William. He was looking around as if he could not see properly. He caught William’s eye, and for an instant the two of them were trapped by one another’s stares, neither able to act.

  And then the spell broke and suddenly William was leaping from the bed, screaming, ‘No! No! No!’ and rushing towards Osbern’s broken body.

  Montgomery lifted his knife and pointed it at the onrushing boy. He might have killed him too, for William wasn’t going to stop and would have run straight on to the blade.

  But Montgomery did not even try to hold his ground.

  Instead he croaked, ‘I’m sorry,’ in a desperate, broken voice, then turned on his heel and fled the room.

  William barely saw him go. He reached the bed and looked down in horror at Osbern’s half-naked corpse. The wounds to his stomach had torn his flesh asunder, and something that looked like a vile blood-covered worm had burst from his gut and was lying partly coiled on his pallid skin.

  The face that had always been so full of life, so reassuring a sight for William whenever he was in need of comfort or advice, was frozen in a contorted rictus of pain and terror.

  William was thirteen years old. This was the first time he had seen the corpse of a man killed in an act of frenzied violence, let alone that of a man he deeply loved. He wanted to be sick. He wanted to cry. He wanted to run – to Osbern, who else? – for protection. Or failing that to throw himself on the body and order it back to life. I’m the duke, he thought frantically. He has to do what I say!

  And then he realised that yes, he was the duke, and he remembered what Fitz had said, repeating Osbern’s own words: Never, ever show your enemies that you’re scared. He swore to himself that he would not let himself scream, or cry, or show any sign of weakness. He wouldn’t let anyone think he was beaten. He refused to give them that comfort.

  He took a deep breath, ignoring the stench now rising from Osbern’s punctured bowels, pulled himself together and ran from the room. And as he ran he did not scream, but shouted, as deeply as his voice would allow: ‘Guards! Guards!’

  There was no response. He ran down the stairs to the great hall, where sleeping bodies, huddled under their blankets like butterflies in their cocoons, were slowly stirring. ‘Get up, all of you! Osbern the Steward has been killed by William Montgomery! Catch him – catch him now!’

  But Montgomery had run too fast and his accomplices had done their work too well. By the time the castle’s inhabitants were awake and ready to hunt for him, he was long gone and two unsuspecting sentries were lying dead at the castle gate.

  De Gacé had no intention of being convicted for this murder any more than the others. He was his father’s son, and just as the archbishop would have done, he had planned for every eventuality. Ideally the Montgomery boy would have been killed while trying to murder Osbern, or after he had done so, thereby preventing him from squealing. If he had been taken alive – unlikely, for the urge to avenge Herfastsson would surely overpower whoever captured him – de Gacé had men ready to kill him as soon as possible.

  As it was, Montgomery had managed to escape the castle before anyone could lay a finger on him. Clearly the boy had discovered hidden resources that neither he nor de Gacé had known
existed. But it was of no account. Ralph had told his men to take Montgomery to a farmhouse a few leagues from the castle and wait there until they received word from him that the hunt for the killer had calmed down enough for them to complete their escape.

  Naturally, as the duke’s councillor and head of the Norman militia, de Gacé made his way to Vaudreuil to supervise the search for the killer and ensure that the duke was safe. At the castle he met Barnon of Glos, Osbern’s estate manager, who had come to collect his master’s body and begin the business of putting his affairs in order. Barnon was a man in his master’s image: tough, honest, decent, and not one to cross.

  ‘I’ve just had to take Osbern’s son into the castle chapel to see his dad’s body,’ he said to de Gacé when they met at Vaudreuil. ‘Poor lad, he was in bits. I’d like to get my hands on the bastard who did this. I brought a dozen of my best men with me just in case anyone finds him. And if they do, I’ll tell you this, my lord, there won’t be any need for a trial.’

  ‘The law must take its course,’ de Gacé said, testing the water.

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you? A man like Osbern Herfastsson murdered in cold blood in front of the duke, and you’d give William Montgomery the benefit of a trial?’

  ‘Well it’s my duty to maintain law and order on the duke’s behalf. It’s not an easy job, the way things are at the moment.’ He paused. ‘But of course I understand how devastated you are by this cowardly murder; we all are. Osbern Herfastsson served the House of Normandy for more years than most people have been alive. So I’ll make you this promise, Barnon . . . I have men all over the duchy searching for Montgomery. If they find him, I will give you the task of apprehending him. And if he happens to resist when you seize him, of course you will have to defend yourself . . . won’t you?’