King's Man

by Angus Donald

  Osric is fully occupied in this season; he will oversee the sheep shearing, and the sorting of the fleeces, and inspect the meadows after the hay has been cut. Indeed, we all have our allotted tasks to perform, myself included. But, although there is so much to do, I have set myself an extra task: I have decided to watch Osric from the shadows, quietly and constantly, using all the old, stealthy skills that Hanno taught me long ago. I aim to catch him at some misdeed and expose him as a villain to my daughter-in-law Marie. Then, only then, will I be free of him. I cannot sleep at night for worrying – indeed I have not slept so much as a wink for many nights now. I am still certain he is trying to murder me, but I have no proof, and proof will be needed to show Marie that she has married a monster.

  It is surely a mercy that I have survived this long. Now it is time to act. So I will watch Osric, and watch well. I know that his malice is not a figment of my imagination. The other evening, about a week ago, I saw him adding a pinch of white powder to my bowl of soup as it stood on the sideboard – a slow poison, no doubt, of the type I had heard of on my travels in the East. Marie brings me supper in my chamber these days, as I work long after nightfall on these pages by beeswax candlelight – an extravagance, I know, but I feel a terrible urgency upon me. I have a premonition of my own death, and I wish to finish my tale before some evil befalls me.

  I was fortunate to catch Osric in the act of poisoning my soup. I had been summoned by a groom to look at a sick horse in the stables and was returning through the hall to my chamber when I saw the mole-like fellow adding his infernal white powder to the bowl. I challenged him, of course, immediately, loudly, and the rascal had the nerve to claim that it was merely salt that he was adding to my evening meal to add savour to the broth. It was a lie, of course, I could see it in his blushing face – since when does a busy bailiff concern himself with flavouring of his master’s food? I poured the bowl away without tasting it, and gave orders to the servants that Osric must not be allowed near any dish that is destined for my table.

  And yet, a part of me wishes that I had not challenged him so openly and accused him so angrily of wishing to poison me. I showed my hand to him, and it has put him on his guard. I have been watching him for a fortnight now, following him on horseback at a distance when he goes out to the fields or into the village of Westbury, watching him by day, all day, from a stool placed in a spot of shade outside the front of the hall. Sometimes I try to surprise him by appearing suddenly when he is out of plain sight, in an outbuilding, perhaps. And he often appears guiltily startled when I pop out from behind a door like a rabbit from its hole. But I have not caught him in any obvious crime yet. Indeed, most of the time he acts as innocently as a lamb, going about his business as if he did not have a care in the world. That is surely a mark of the man’s devilish cunning.

  Each night, I pray to Almighty God that He may hold off Osric’s malice for a little longer, and that He grant me time to finish this manuscript, to complete my tale of Robert of Locksley, of Little John, of Marie-Anne, Goody, Tuck, Hanno, good King Richard and myself – for there is, I fear, only a little allotted time left for me on this Earth, and much, much more to tell.

  The rain emptied from a bruise-black sky, dropping in waterfall sheets that hammered the face of the river and bounced off the dark wooden boards of our sailing barge in a continuous series of tiny explosions. We were damp and miserable, Hanno, myself and four young English Cistercian monks, crowded under a sodden canvas awning in the prow of the long boat, hooded or cowled and glumly watching the dank wooded hills of Germany slide past on the far slopes of the riverbanks hour after dismal hour.

  The abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge, as befitted their superior rank, were ensconced in the square wooden cabin in the stern of the boat. It was drier in there, protected from the rain and river spray, but it smelled very strongly of rotting fish. As I was the leader of this company, I could perhaps have insisted on joining the abbots in their fishy box, but I found their Latin conversations schoolmasterly and tedious, and to be honest, I preferred to be at the front of the craft with Hanno. At least there I could see whatever was coming round the next bend. I had not forgotten the disastrous attack by river pirates in London; here, many hundreds of miles from home, halfway up the River Main in northern Bavaria, I felt that anything could happen.

  The sailing barge – a flat-bottomed craft, eighty foot long, twenty foot wide, with one mast and a huge square rusty-red sail – was owned by a man named Adam. A stout, fair-haired Londoner with the clear blue eyes of a Norseman, Adam had been trading on these rivers for ten years or more – he also happened to be Perkin’s uncle. My red-haired waterman friend had recovered from the pirate attack on the Thames and, far from blaming me for the knocks he had taken during the kidnapping of little Hugh, he seemed to feel a sense of guilt that my party had been attacked while we were in his charge, on board his skiff. Complimenting him on his fighting skill, I had made him a gift of an old short sword; now, in these dangerous, foreigner-filled lands, he had taken to wearing it all the time.

  Perkin was out of sight to me at the moment, in the stern behind the abbots’ cabin, manning the rudder and steering the barge on a tack that would take us to a bend in the river. There, with the minimum of fuss, Adam and he would put the rudder across, then the boom would swing and the red sail would flap and crack briefly, and we would find ourselves on a course that would sweep us diagonally across to the other side of the river. Thus, in an endless series of elongated zigzags, we had made our way up the great rivers of Germany. When the wind was dead against us, Perkin and Adam, occasionally aided by the young monks, would pole the craft along in the shallower water by the banks. And when necessary Hanno and myself would join the monks at the six long pinewood sweeps that we carried on board, using our muscles to row us slowly upstream, deeper into the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, deeper into the lair of our King’s enemies.

  Perkin had arranged for me to hire Adam for the journey, although the silver I paid him was not mine but from the private treasure chest of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. The Queen had also given me a goodly quantity of coin to pay the tolls on the rivers, and to cover sundry expenses on the long journey. She had been understandably cool with me when I met her at Westminster Palace not two hours after the end of Robin’s inquisition. The Queen was very fond of Robin, and news of my betrayal had evidently reached her. But she did not mention the inquisition at all, and I was in no state to speak rationally of it, so we confined our discussion to the hazards of the journey and the difficulties I might face in finding her son. The meeting had been brief; when we were done, she handed me a fat purse and advised me to collect my two abbots and their entourage of monks and leave as swiftly as possible for Germany. That suited me, for I had no desire to linger in England: the word ‘Judas!’ was still ringing in my ears and I was haunted by the image of the two rotting bird-quarried heads atop the gatehouse in Kirkton, which I felt had cursed our departure only a few weeks ago. I tried not to think about Robin, or of his fiery fate at the hands of the Templars. Thus, in the grey light before dawn, the very next day after the inquisition, my company and I glided slowly down the Thames in Adam’s big sailing barge, The Crow, heading out to the sea to begin our quest to find King Richard.

  Adam was a sturdy man, honest and not given to much emotion or boasting, but he knew the rivers of Europe, he said, as well as any living Englishman. We were in good hands, Perkin assured me; his uncle was a master sailor, a waterman of the first rank, and the ship was as robust as the man. The Crow was not, however, a handsome craft, and neither was it a comfortable berth. Our travelling conditions had worsened two days ago in Frankfurt when the hull was filled to deck-level and higher with logs of cut hardwood timber, leaving even less room for a passel of damp, irritable passengers. It was the third cargo we had carried so far: Adam had insisted that if he was to take us and his beloved vessel up the German rivers, he must be allowed to trade as well; his was, after all, a working boa
t. I was not unhappy about this, for trade gave us an ostensible reason to be travelling so far from home; and I did not want to broadcast our true intent. There were many powerful folk in the lands we were to travel through who might wish our mission to fail.

  Adam looked set to make a healthy sum on this journey: he had loaded hundreds of sacks of tightly packed, untreated wool at a wharf below the Tower of London and carried them, in a rough and very unpleasant two-day crossing of the North Sea, to the Low Countries. At Utrecht, while the two abbots and I paid a courtesy visit to Bishop Baldwin van Holland at his grand palace in the city, Adam remained at the docks and arranged for the barge to be unloaded and loaded once more to the gunnels, this time with fat bales of good Flemish finished cloth.

  The call that Boxley, Robertsbridge and I paid on Bishop Baldwin was the first of many visits to grand princes of the Church in the Germanic realms, and while I did not have any particular liking for these two venerable abbots in my charge, I could see the wisdom of dispatching such respected churchmen to seek out King Richard’s whereabouts. As the sailing barge worked its slow way up the River Rhine, we stopped at Cologne, Koblenz and Mainz, and many smaller towns, each time finding shelter with the local abbot, or bishop or archbishop, and each time, as well as receiving the lavish hospitality due to high-ranking English clergymen, we gained a little news of the local region – and sometimes of King Richard.

  The four monks who had been brought along as servants and secretaries to the abbots, as well as providing much-needed muscle power, fully proved their worth in the gathering of intelligence about our sovereign. For while the more important prelates sometimes proved reluctant to discuss rumours concerning the whereabouts of our captive King, the monks were untroubled by such discretion as they mingled in the refectory, the wash-house and the dormitory, swapping gossip with the other low-ranking clergy. In this manner they were able to pick up invaluable scraps of information.

  It was as we made our way upriver from Cologne, a strong northerly wind directly at our back propelling the clumsy barge with an unusual and welcome celerity, that one of the monks, a keen young man named Damian, had reported excitedly that he had learned the King’s whereabouts. Two clerks in the cathedral’s cloister had told him that Richard was being held at Duke Leopold’s castle of Dürnstein in Austria. While it was encouraging to have news of Richard, any news at all, my spirits nevertheless sank a little at this. Hanno said that Dürnstein was a very long way south, on the mighty Danube River near Vienna. To get there would mean leaving Adam and Perkin and The Crow in northern Bavaria, crossing a vast wooded and mountainous wilderness on horseback until we reached the Danube, then hiring a ship to carry us downriver to the castle. It was a daunting thought; even the rough discomfort of the English sailing barge seemed preferable to launching ourselves into the vast unknown.

  I had another reason to feel uneasy: while I had been exploring the streets of Cologne, loitering by the busy wharves to watch the traders unload their exotic merchandise by the wide shimmering expanse of the Rhine, I had the strange notion that I was being followed. When I stopped briefly to pray at the old cathedral, at the shrine for the relics of the Three Kings who first adored the baby Jesus, I was certain that I could feel unfriendly eyes watching me from among the throng of pilgrims. At one point, walking alone down a darkened alleyway near the marketplace, I felt the presence of enemies at my back so strongly that I whirled around and drew my sword: but, of course, there was no one there and I felt a fool. I scanned the faces in the streets of Cologne for someone familiar, and often found features that resembled folk that I knew in England, or had met on my travels out East. But always, when I looked again more closely I realized that these were not people I had ever known before. Once I saw a pair of men, half-hidden in a crowd – one very tall, one shorter but immensely strong – and something stirred in my memory. When I looked again, they were gone.

  My own enquiries among the local knights for news of King Richard had met with no success. I did, however, gather some cheering tidings from home. A German knight whom I encountered in the palace of the Archbishop of Cologne, and who spoke the most barbarous French, told me that all England was buzzing like a beehive over the news that a famous nobleman, a notorious heretic and worshipper of the Devil, had escaped from the custody of the Knights of the Temple in London. This knight, a pious dullard with a scarred pork-pink slab of a face and a sombre black surcoat, told me that six days ago one Lord Robert Otto had used his demonic powers to slip his iron fetters at the stroke of midnight, fleeing in the company of a ferocious blond giant who wielded an enormous axe. He had then disappeared into thin air, some said flying on a dragon’s back, evading his just punishment for heresy at the hands of the Templars.

  My mood was lifted by this news, even if it came to me in such a garbled form. But my pleasure at Robin’s escape was soon dampened. The fugitive nobleman, this Lord Otto, I was told, had since been excommunicated by the Holy Church and, at the prompting of Prince John, the shire courts had declared the escaped lord an outlaw in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. The Prince’s vassal – one Rolf Meurtach, according to the German knight – had immediately marched north with an army of more than a thousand men loyal to the Prince. Finding Lord Otto’s castle abandoned, Rolf had burnt it to the ground. The Lord Otto was now on the run, in fear of his life, hiding in the haunted forest of Sherwood – a place of witches and demons and wild men – where the fearless Lord Rolf would no doubt run him to earth and bring him to a place of execution forthwith.

  I smiled at that, and the German knight looked at me strangely. Even if Robin had been hounded out of Kirkton by Ralph Murdac, he would be far from destitute in Sherwood. There were plenty of men there who would hide him, feed him, and fight to the death for him, if necessary. Sherwood was, as it had been for many years, the home of his heart, his spiritual sanctuary, his woodland fortress. He would be quite safe there.

  So Robin was an outlaw once again, I mused to myself, with no constraints of law, or even common morality upon him. That could be very bad news for his enemies; it could be doubly dangerous to anyone who he felt had betrayed him.

  But my master was far away in Sherwood and I needed to apply myself to the task at hand. So I thanked the knight, bade him farewell and concentrated on the most pressing question: Where was our King? Where in the vast wooded expanse of Europe was King Richard?

  We had expected Richard to be moved from prison to prison quite regularly by his captor, Leopold of Austria. For one thing the Duke had to support an enormous household and it is the custom for great men to move about their domains spreading the load of supporting their followers evenly about their lands; and where the Duke went, Richard would go. But it also made sense for Richard to be moved from time to time. He was worth a great deal of ransom money to anyone who held him, and so long as the King’s friends – or for that matter, his enemies – did not know where he was, they could not easily mount an attempt to snatch him. Not that we had rescue in mind – we would have needed a mighty army for that, not six clerics and two men-at-arms – we merely wanted to find him and begin the negotiations that would bring him safely home.

  If we could establish contact with Richard, then we could be sure that Queen Eleanor, and England itself, were part of the negotiations for his ransom. The danger was that his captors – Duke Leopold, or his master Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor – would sell Richard to King Philip of France. With Richard languishing in a French prison, perhaps being beaten and starved, Philip could demand that our King hand over a substantial part of his French dominions, perhaps the whole of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, maybe even Aquitaine itself. He would be at the mercy of his mortal enemy. And that was not the worst of it. King Philip might well come to an arrangement with Prince John. I could easily imagine Prince John agreeing to hand over Normandy and some of the other French territories in exchange for Richard’s discreet death and Philip’s support when the upstart John claimed the throne of England.
/>   If we could only make contact with Richard, then these dangers would recede, although not disappear entirely. We could make a compact with the Germans, and possibly save Richard’s life, by outbidding Philip and John for his living body.

  There was one factor in our favour: Henry VI proudly called himself the Holy Roman Emperor, heir to the Caesars. He liked to think of himself as the greatest nobleman in Christendom, the premier knight, a wise and beneficent ruler of millions of Christian souls. And yet, by capturing and holding a returning pilgrim from the Holy Land, he was breaking one of the fundamental laws that he had sworn to uphold. Although there was far too much cold hard cash at stake for him to simply let Richard go, he could be embarrassed into doing the right, honourable and Christian thing and releasing the King back to his own people, in return for a substantial reward – rather than delivering this hero of the holy war into the hands of his enemies. But everything depended on Richard’s whereabouts being generally known. If all the world knew where the famous King Richard was being held, and if senior English diplomats were in contact with him and engaged in public negotiations with the Germans to secure his freedom, it would be that much more difficult for Henry to make a discrete, lucrative, and from our point of view disastrous, deal with Philip of France or Prince John.

  Sixty miles upriver from Cologne, at the strongly fortified town of Koblenz, the enthusiastic Damian returned from a trip to the bath-house with more news of the King. A monk there had told him that in mid-February Richard had been moved to the citadel of Augsburg, in south-western Bavaria. As it was, by this time, early March, we felt we were closing in on our royal quarry. It was also heartening to know that, as we sailed southwards, Richard was being moved north by his captors, towards us.