by Angus Donald
‘… but in short, you are alive because of the way your organs are arranged — that is it!’ Reuben’s dark face was lit by a grin. And I could not but be warmed by his smile and comforted by his presence at my bedside.
‘I thank you,’ I said, smiling wanly back at him, ‘and I give thanks to God for your miraculous healing powers.’
And I meant it, but while I was grateful to Reuben and his skill, I knew in my heart that I had been saved by God, and that St Michael, the warrior archangel to whom I often prayed, must also have had a hand in my deliverance.
It was then three weeks since the fight in the chapel, and I had spent all that time recovering from my wound in the small cell in the Hotel-Dieu. A rib had been smashed by Eustace’s strike, my lung had been punctured, and I had lost a lot of blood — but, by the grace of God, the assistance of St Michael and, of course, my undeniably skilled physician friend, I was still alive.
I was not, however, in very good shape. I was as weak as a crippled baby mouse, and it still hurt very much even to breathe — but worst of all was the soul-crushing guilt.
I recalled the moment when Hanno was killed over and over again in my head. It was entirely my fault that he was dead: I had foolishly led him into extreme danger and he had not survived it. And, only a little less troubling than the passing of my friend, when Reuben’s drugs allowed me some shallow sleep, I saw the faces of all the men who had died as a result of my quest to clear my father’s name: Owain the Bowman, Father Jean of Verneuil and those other scores of Locksley men who died on that castle’s walls and in that gore-steeped stable; Brother Dominic, Cardinal Heribert, Master Fulk; the nameless man in the Grand Chastelet gaol, whom I killed with my empty hands just so as to have some-where to sit — even the Knights of Our Lady that I cut down in the rainstorm, who for all their violence believed they were serving the Mother of God.
These shades crowded around my sickbed in the small hours of the night, and silently scolded me for my pride. Sometimes Sir Eustace de la Falaise appeared too, with his lance-dagger projecting from his fist, and he would plunge it into Hanno’s ghostly chest again and again. And I would awake, covered in sweat, my pounding heart threatening to tear my chest apart. These dead men would be alive today had I not been so determined to seek revenge.
The Master — or Brother Michel or the ‘man you cannot refuse’ or Trois Pouces or whatever name he was now travelling under — had fled Paris with Sir Eustace and a handful of the Knights of Our Lady. No one knew where he had gone to, but a safe wager was that he had found refuge with his gangs of bandits in the lawless woods south of Paris. The Master, once the strong right hand of the second most powerful man in Paris, had become a hors-la-loi, an outlaw. But I felt no satisfaction; indeed, I felt like a hapless hunter who had been thrashing blindly in the undergrowth seeking a hare, and who had stumbled upon an angry wild boar, been brutally savaged for his temerity, and then had allowed the beast to escape unharmed.
Robin had visited me daily with news and titbits of Parisian food that he felt sure would restore my strength: delicate pastries, sticky sweetmeats and expensive wines. Many of them I could not eat, for Reuben’s drugs killed my appetite along with my pain, and so I passed them on to the elderly monk who brought me gruel and water and washed my body and changed the bedding. Robin was staying as a guest of Bishop de Sully in the episcopal palace — while the old man himself preferred to remain in the Abbey of St Victor and nurse his ailing health. I gathered that Robin had pressured the Bishop into caring for me, and into providing him with accommodation. I would receive the finest care in the Hotel-Dieu, while I recovered from my wound, I was made to understand, and Robin would remain silent about fact that de Sully’s trusted amanuensis had been a murderous gang-master, and that the building of the cathedral of Notre-Dame had been funded by blood money stolen from innocent travellers.
Reluctantly, and only after a certain amount of undignified pleading for the truth on my part, Robin confessed that he had known about the activities of the Master, and the identity of Brother Michel, for more than a decade. Indeed, while Robin had been an outlaw in Sherwood, robbing churchmen and thumbing his nose at the law, the Master had been, to a certain extent, his counterpart in France. They had met face to face three times, twice in Paris and once in London, and had agreed a pact of sorts that included the stipulation that neither would attack or harm the other — or any of the other’s lieutenants.
Robin had been aware that the Master had ordered my father’s death — although he insisted that he did not know why. In fact, part of the reason why he had taken me into his care when I was a penniless thief on the run from the Sheriff, was because he had known and liked my father and felt pity for his orphaned son. But when I had discovered that Sir Ralph Murdac had merely been following the instructions of the ‘man you cannot refuse’, Robin had become concerned. He realized that I would not rest until I had discovered the identity of the Master and attempted my revenge.
Robin’s fear was that the Master would snuff me out as easily as a man extinguishes a bedside candle, if he suspected that I was even the smallest threat to him. And so Robin had tried to shield me, and had sent a message to Paris that I was not to be touched, and he had at the same time tried to dissuade me from pursuing my enquiries. When it was clear, after the attack by the Knights of Our Lady at Freteval, that the Master planned to ignore their long-standing pact and eliminate me anyway, and when I deserted Robin’s men and the relative safety of the army and began to make my way to Paris, Robin summoned Reuben from Montpellier and dispatched him to follow me and to act as my protective shadow. When Robin heard from Reuben, who knew Paris well, that I had been slung in the notorious Grand Chastelet gaol, there to rot for the rest of my life, my lord had sent Little John to Paris with orders, if necessary, to recruit men and break me out of the gaol as soon as possible: Robin knew that that the longer a man remained inside the Grand Chastelet — and it would have been a matter of days rather than weeks — the less chance he had of ever emerging from that filth-lapped stone coffin.
Robin had indeed watched over me like a mother hen.
On the morning of his arrival in Paris, Little John had gone directly to the Rue St-Denis, discovered from the d’Alles that I had set off for the Abbey of St Victor that morning but had not returned, as promised, for dinner at noon. Knowing of the Master’s connection with Bishop de Sully, and suspecting that he too might be at St Victor’s, Little John had ridden as swiftly as possible to the Abbey with the Seigneur, Roland and Thomas. Once there, he had hurriedly colluded with Reuben, who was inside the Bishop’s quarters, and they had effected my rescue in that dramatic, if destructive, manner.
‘Tell me, Alan,’ said Robin, munching idly on a fig that he had brought for my delectation that day. ‘If I had told you from the beginning that the Master had ordered your father’s death, would you have left him alone?’
‘If I knew then what the cost in lives would be, I think so… I hope so,’ I said.
‘Truly?’ my master asked, swallowing his fig.
‘Truly?’ I thought for a moment, then sighed. ‘No. In truth, at some point, I would have come here and tried to bring him to justice in any way that I could.’
‘So I was right to keep this knowledge from you,’ said Robin.
‘You used to extol vengeance as a virtue, as a man’s duty,’ I said, thinking of one of my first encounters with Robin, a musical evening with Marie-Anne.
‘Only when it is public.’
‘What?’
‘Vengeance only has meaning if it is a public act. If someone wrongs you, and everyone knows that they have wronged you, you must take revenge or people will think the less of you. You will lose your honour in their eyes and will soon come to be thought of as a weakling, a man of no account. Then you are finished. But if some-body wrongs you in private, secretly, away from other men’s eyes — revenge is pointless. You may take vengeance in an attempt to make yourself feel better, although tha
t is not much of a balm, in my experience, but in truth revenge serves no real purpose unless everybody around you understands the circumstances under which it is taken. What I’m saying is that vengeance taken in private is an indulgence. In fact, seeking revenge on a man like Brother Michel for something he did in the greatest secrecy ten years ago, and in the knowledge that he has no plans to do you any further harm, is plain idiocy. Actually, it is closer to suicide. Look at you, lying there with a hole in your chest, and poor, faithful Hanno cold in his grave. What have you achieved by pursuing your manly revenge on him?’
I said nothing. My chest throbbed. He was right. And perhaps oddly, I no longer felt the burning urge for vengeance against the Master. Hanno was dead, I was alive, barely, and the Master was gone. I had not the strength for revenge: this time I would let it lie.
After a while Robin stole another fig from the bowl and said: ‘Did you ever lay eyes on this wondrous object that was the cause of all this trouble, the relic that the Master stole from Heribert as a young man — this Grail thing?’
‘No, but I believe it was in the box on the altar in the chapel. And the Master took it with him when he fled.’
‘And do you think it is real?’ he said, cocking his head to one side, eyes bright and looking more than a little like his avian namesake.
‘I think the Master believes it to be real, and Sir Eustace and the Knights of Our Lady — it is real to them.’
‘What would a holy relic like that be worth, I wonder?’ Robin mused. Then he added: ‘I’ve read Christian of Troyes’s poem; he describes it as being made of pure fine gold and being adorned with many kinds of precious jewels. It should fetch a pretty decent amount at market, I would have thought.’
I looked at him; he had on his acquisitive expression, a glimmering flame of larceny behind his silver-bright eyes. And, for one reason or another, I badly wanted to dowse it.
‘If it is real, it is beyond price,’ I said. ‘A vessel that was used at the Last Supper and that also once held the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Men would die for it, kill others for it — it would be the most wondrous, valuable and powerful object in the world — but not something that could be bought or sold with mere money. On the other hand, if it isn’t real, it is no more than a golden bowl worth a few pounds — after looting the French King’s wagon train at Freteval, I’m sure you already have several better pieces.’
Robin caught my eye and, sensing my impatience with him, he dropped the subject. Instead, he pulled out a blood-spotted parchment letter, and waved it under my nose. ‘When Reuben was cutting you about, we found a money belt around your middle and a sealed pigskin pouch, and this letter inside. It is none of my business, I know — but I’m rather curious. Can you tell me what it is?’
I noted that Robin had been rummaging through my most personal possessions while I was unconscious. But the man had saved my life, and so I suppressed my irritation. In fact, I was happy to talk about a subject other than the Grail or the Master, so I explained to Robin how the Templars took a traveller’s money at one preceptory, and returned it at another, in another country, perhaps years later. Robin listened intently; he seemed fascinated by the process, and asked innumerable questions. I answered him as best I could, and when I had finished, Robin said: ‘And they charged you three shillings for this service? No wonder those God-struck bastards are so damned rich.’
Then he made a strange request: ‘Alan,’ he said, ‘might I ask a favour from you? Could I borrow this letter for a week or so? You will not be needing it until you return to England, and I would like to show it to a friend of mine. I swear I will not lose it.’
The days passed, the weather grew colder and before long it was November, and although the flesh of my chest was healing, I caught a dangerous chill that went straight into my lungs. Thomas and Reuben rarely left my bedside in those fever-racked weeks and Reuben admitted afterwards that I came closer to death in that sweat-drenched whirling nightmare of oozing bloody phlegm and racking coughs than I had done in the immediate aftermath of the stabbing. My dead visited me night and day, clustering around the bed but rarely speaking: merely looking at me imploringly. Men I had killed in battle years before and very nearly forgotten came to me then; they sat at the foot of my bed, their wounds fresh and bleeding: their quietness chided me. I screamed for their forgiveness; I begged them to leave me be; but they returned my fevered shouts with a vast, aching silence.
November became December and the Feast of Our Lord’s Nativity came and went without my being conscious of that holy celebration: Robin and Little John had been called away to attend King Richard, who was keeping Christmas at Rouen, but Reuben and Thomas remained with me, and I realized that I was receiving the attention that a prince of the Church would receive from the monks of the Hotel-Dieu; whatever Robin had said to Bishop de Sully had had a profound effect. I was all but pampered like a lapdog, brought fine foods and wrapped in costly furs; read to by the monks each day — mostly dull homilies and sermons, but I knew that they meant well — and with a brazier almost constantly burning in the small cell to keep the winter chill at bay.
The great man came to see me himself, one grey afternoon in January. I was standing beside my bed — the fevers had left me pathetically weak, but I forced myself to get out of the warm, comfortable cot each morning and stand by the window for as long as I could, staring out over the vast building yard of the cathedral of Notre-Dame. It was abandoned by the gangs of workmen in the very coldest season; the mortar could not be mixed and set properly when frost and ice ruled the night. That morning, it had snowed and the high roof, the buttresses and the canvas-covered sections of the scaffolding of the cathedral bore a crust of white that resembled a giant nun’s wimple.
‘It is even more beautiful in the winter,’ said a voice behind me. And I turned slowly to see the Bishop, very gaunt but smiling, standing in the doorway of the cell. He was alone, but holding a large earthenware pot in his hands. I could see a ladle poking from the open top, and tendrils of steam, but it was the hot, fruity, spicy smell filling the room that allowed me to recognize the Bishop’s burden.
‘I have brought you some warmed wine — Doctor Reuben has recommended it; he says it will do you good, and it may quite possibly help me, as well. May I enter?’
It was a curiously humble speech from this most powerful churchman who was the master in this Hotel-Dieu, and therefore my host.
‘Please come in, Your Grace,’ I said. ‘Be welcome!’
With a good deal of effort, the Bishop put the pot on the table by the bed and fumbled two clay cups from a pouch at his waist. He served us both a steaming portion of the rich red liquid, clumsily, spilling some of the liquor and splashing his long white fingers. We both sat on the bed, and after a mumbled benediction from the Bishop, we drank to each other’s health. He was nervous, I saw, which surprised me, and very thin. He looked even more ill than the last time I had seen him. And he did not know how to speak to me. So I tried to make it easier on a sick old man.
‘Your Grace, I must thank you for your hospitality, and for the kindness your servants have shown me here in the Hotel-Dieu. I believe they have saved my life and I am most grateful to them — and to you.’
He regarded me with his pale, empty eyes over the rim of his steaming cup.
‘You are a good man, Alan Dale — I can tell that. As was your father, I recall. You may not think me such a good judge of character after, after…’ He tailed off; then rallied. ‘But I never wished any harm to come to you, or to your friend — Johannes. We buried him with dignity in the graveyard at St Victor’s, you know. The monks sang a Requiem Mass for him, and I pray that Almighty God has taken him to his bosom.’
I felt a jab of raw grief at his words. ‘We called him Hanno,’ I said, fighting back the burn of unmanly tears.
He nodded and we fell silent for a moment or two.
‘How much did you know,’ I finally asked, ‘about Brother Michel’s activities? Did y
ou know he possessed the Grail? Did you know about the gangs of cut-throats?
‘Those bandits? No, never in my wildest dreams,’ he said, sounding shocked that I should suggest it.
‘And the Grail?’ I persisted. ‘Did you know that Brother Michel possessed the Grail?’
He gave a long deep sigh. ‘The Grail, that God-damned, devilish Grail… yes, I knew he had something that he believed was the bowl that had once contained Christ’s blood. But that was later: your father was long gone by then. And when Michel came to me after his service in Spain — it must be fifteen years ago, now — he was the finest, the most hard-working and intelligent assistant that I have ever had. He was pious too, and humble. I found out much later that he thought he possessed the true Grail, but I was wholly convinced that it was a silly, harmless fancy.’
The Bishop rose and began to pace the small cell. ‘I think I must have known in my heart that he had stolen it from Heribert, and that your father was innocent; but I suppressed that thought. He had such youthful energy and enthusiasm and faith in my cathedral as a grand ideal. And then, later, when he began to find the resources, the money to continue the building work, when mine had run quite dry — well, I did not ask too many questions, I was aware that he was using the Grail in some way as a method of raising revenue. But for such a good cause, I did not want to discourage him. I thought he was displaying it to pilgrims, allowing rich, pious knights to drink from it for a fee, that sort of thing. I had no idea that he had constructed an entire secret order of killers and thieves, upon one old dish. I turned a blind eye, I admit it; I believed, as I still do, that the cathedral is a worthy cause and I confess I was prepared to condone a little relic-mongering to achieve that aim.’
The Bishop was standing now by the window, staring out at the snow-covered cathedral: ‘Look at it, Sir Alan — just imagine its splendour when completed! It is my life’s work; it is the fruit of a life dedicated to Almighty God. Is that magnificent monument to the Mother of Christ not worth a little mummery with an old bowl?’
