Master John looked solemn. “I would not send you out alone,” he said, running his thumb gently along the edge of his knife. “The roads are dangerous and plagued with bandits. You might be attacked long before you reach the Trent.”
He snapped his fingers, and a hooded figure slid noiselessly out of the shadows.
“Who’s this?” demanded Hugh, who had assumed they were alone.
“One of my people,” Master John replied. “He was in a sad way when I acquired him. Friendless and penniless. His name is Brother Stephen. He was once a monk at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire, just a few miles from d'Eyvill’s manor of Kilburn.”
Hugh took his hand away from his dagger. “So he knows the lay of the land,” he said, looking the hooded man up and down. Stephen was short and thickset, and little of his face was visible under the hood.
“Just so, but he can’t tell us much. The abbot at Byland cut his tongue out for blasphemy. Knowing him as I do, there were probably a few more sins to add to that account. I get him to write everything down.”
Hugh snorted.“What use is a mutilated and defrocked monk?”
“There is much more to Brother Stephen. I suspect he only joined the brothers at Byland because the secular world had become too hot for him. He hasn’t told me much else about his past. I let him keep his secrets. He has served me well and faithfully for several years now.”
Master John beckoned at the ex-monk, who stepped forward and pushed back his hood. His hands, Hugh noticed, were white and delicate as a nun’s.
Hugh expected the face underneath to be a scarred monument to a misspent life. He was mistaken. Brother Stephen’s features were mild and sheeplike, and there was a gentle docility in his large brown eyes that befitted a former man of the church. He kept his tonsure severely clipped. Only the long Irish knife stuck into a wool-lined leather scabbard at his hip gave any sign of a darker nature.
“Still a devout, I see,” remarked Hugh. “How does he reconcile his profession with his faith? Murder people and then pray over the bodies?”
Brother Stephen’s moonlike face split into a grin. He threw his head back and uttered a dry hacking cough.
“I’ve never heard him laugh before,” said Master John. “I think you two shall make good companions.”
He gave one of his wintry smiles. “This is fortunate, since tomorrow you go north. Together.”
9.
The Isle of Axholme, North Lincolnshire
A band of ragged horsemen rode like ghosts across a fog-bound moor. They moved slowly. The fens of Axholme were treacherous, and one false step could see man and horse vanish into a bog. Cold and weariness clawed at them. Hunger gnawed at their bellies.
Sir John d'Eyvill rode at their head. These men were all that remained of his company. The rest had died at Chesterfield and the bloody rout that followed.
In spite of his losses, and the wreck of the rebel cause, d'Eyvill refused to despair. Defeat only fuelled his fires. He hunched low in the saddle, ignoring the wind that howled across the dreary fen and the rain lashing at his mud-spattered cloak. His mind groped for answers.
The riders had just crossed the River Idle, which cut off the Isle of Axholme from the mainland. Axholme was roughly eighteen miles long and six wide, bordered by the River Don to the north and west and the Trent to the east. The rebels were headed east, towards d'Eyvill’s damp timber stronghold at Owston Ferry.
“I don’t relish the thought of another winter in this hell-hole,” muttered a familiar voice, “or in Sherwood.”
D’Eyvill glanced at his younger brother. Robert d'Eyvill was taller than him, lithe and darkly handsome save for the hooked nose both men had inherited from their Norman forebears.
“We survived here well enough,” d'Eyvill replied brusquely. “Even if many of our followers did not. More will die before this war is over.”
Robert stared at him in disbelief. “The war is over,” he said. “All we can do is sue for peace.”
His brother sneered. “One defeat, and your spirits are broken. We were not the only ones to escape from Chesterfield. Our friends still hold strongholds up and down the country. Our kinsmen are still in arms inside Sherwood and other places. Simon the Younger is gathering troops in France. One defeat means nothing.”
D'Eyvill meant what he said. With Earl Ferrers gone, bound in chains and carried off to Windsor, the Disinherited would look to him for leadership. He welcomed the chance to prove himself a better man than Ferrers, but couldn’t deny his lack of experience. His talent was for destructive raids, swift ambushes and the seizure of castles, not pitched battles. A warrior since his youth, d’Eyvill had only fought in one battle, and lost.
Since Chesterfield, he had racked his brains for some way of restoring the fortunes of the Disinherited. To begin with, he needed to restore morale. He had no patience with his brother’s defeatism.
Robert was blind to his brother’s mood. “We made our peace with Edward before, not so very far from here,” he said. “The terms were honourable.”
“Yes, and Edward broke his oath!” d'Eyvill snapped. “Only a fool would trust the Leopard. He has broken his word time and again.”
In his heart d'Eyvill knew the truth was more complicated. Both parties had broken the agreement reached when Edward met with the rebels at Bycarr’s Dyke, a few miles east of the River Idle. D'Eyvill and his followers had only downed swords for a few weeks before snatching them up again.
“There can be no peace,” he said, “until King Henry agrees to govern by the ancient laws of the kingdom.”
Robert grinned. “And our seized manors are restored, and our debts to the Jews wiped out. Don’t be high-minded, John, it doesn’t suit you. We all have personal stakes in this war.”
“I never denied it,” retorted d’Eyvill. “We fight for the sake of our realm and our family. Where is the dishonour in that?”
D'Eyvill could sense more cynical remarks leaping to his brother’s lips. He forestalled them by pricking his horse into a canter.
His rough timber castle at Owston Ferry lay near to the village of the same name, a mess of poor cotter’s huts and farmsteads built on dry land rising from the marsh. D'Eyvill and his men rode past the village on their way to the castle.
The castle had been torn down in ancient wars, during the time of d’Eyvill’s great-grandsire. He had repaired the decaying keep and stockade, cleared out the overgrown ditches and installed a permanent garrison. D’Eyvill was a poor knight and lacked the means to build in stone. Instead he made a fortress out of these dank fenlands, where no sane enemy would come looking for him except in overwhelming force.
The sentries on the walls saw their lord approaching. A horn blew on the rampart, and the gates creaked inwards to admit him and his men to the bailey.
“We lost,” he grunted to his steward when the man hurried out to greet him. “Arrange hot food, wine and bedding for my men. I could sleep for a week.”
The steward bowed and ran back into the hall. Wincing at his bruises and saddle sores, d'Eyvill clambered off his horse and tossed the reins to a groom.
He could feel the stares of his men as he trudged towards the hall. They expected answers, leadership and reassurance. D’Eyville was too exhausted to give them anything. It was all he could to remain upright.
This is the taste of defeat.
The castle offered rough comfort, and the only private chamber lay behind a scrap of curtain at one end of the damp, smoke-filled hall. It was furnished with a bed, an old chest and a cracked washbasin. After sinking a cup of lukewarm wine, d’Eyvill retired and sank gratefully onto the straw-stuffed mattress without bothering to undress.
His troubled mind would allow him no rest. The knight dreamed of a tournament, armed riders slashing at each other, bright blood gushing from their splintered helms and hacked limbs. Another knight rode against him, wearing a helm in the shape of a snarling lion’s head. D'Eyvill was smitten by the lion’s foul breath and hurled backwards of
f his horse.
He fell through space and time and landed on a stricken field, littered with corpses, swept by a terrible storm that threatened to tear the skies to rags. This was the vale of Evesham, where Earl Montfort met his death.
“I was not here!” d'Eyvill shouted into the deep. “He ordered me to stay in the north!”
Lightning crackled overhead. A sword appeared in his hands. The blade and hilt were greasy with blood. His surcoat bore a rearing white lion against a red field. The Montfort arms.
A knight came riding at him, helmed and hauberked, his lance lowered for the kill. The lance pierced his chest, stabbed through mail and leather, and the bloody tip thrust out of his back.
“Thank God,” d’Eyvill said in another man’s voice, and died.
When the battle was done, his enemies mocked and mutilated his body. They severed his head and paraded it on a spear. His testicles were chopped off and hung either side of his nose. His mutilated trunk was sneaked off the battlefield by local monks and buried under the altar of Evesham Abbey.
D'Eyvill cried out as the blades cut into his flesh.
“God! God! God! Preserve me from this shame!”
God made no answer. He was made to watch as the poor, the weak, the sick and the helpless made a saint of him. Pilgrims flocked to his tomb. Wild stories rippled across England of the miracles that occurred to those who prayed for his soul. He saw the kingdom slide into ruin and civil war, lit by the fires of burning towns.
His eyes snapped open. The chamber was dark, and the sky outside the narrow slit window had faded to purple. Disturbed, d'Eyvill rolled off his bed and knelt in prayer. He prayed for himself, for Earl Montfort, for the souls of all his friends who had died in battle.
That evening, he took supper in the hall with his knights. They ate in silence. He was lost in gloomy thoughts, and his mood infected everyone else.
“For God’s sake, let us have some music,” cried Robert. “Gilbert, sing for us. Something cheerful, none of your dirges.”
Gilbert the minstrel shuffled nervously into the tawny light of the fire. He was in middle age, with fair curling locks tumbling to his shoulders, left eye missing from its socket. He wore a tunic of dyed red wool and clasped a mandolin tight to his bony chest.
He cleared his throat. “Perhaps a romance, milod?” he ventured, gently strumming a chord. “There are some fine ballads coming out of France these days.”
“Christ, no,” Robert said firmly. “I don’t want any dirty French airs about shepherdesses and their paramours. Give us something martial. Fit to warm the hearts of poor soldiers on cold nights.”
“Poor is right,” remarked his cousin Jocelin, morosely stirring his bowl of lukewarm eel stew. “I shall never see my lands again. All gone, taken to feed the avarice of other men.”
Gilbert was silent for a moment. He started to pluck out a melody and sing in a deep, throaty baritone.
“The good Earl of Warenne, who has so much riches and property, and has skill in war, he came to conquer his enemies, but now he has nothing to do…”
The mood in the hall lifted a little. Every man present knew this song. It had been composed in better days, when the King was a prisoner and Simon de Montfort ruled supreme in England. A few knights smiled wearily and beat out the rhythm with the hilts of their eating knives.
“Sir John Giffard, ought well to be named, who took scarcely a wound in war, and he was always forward, valiant and wise and active, and of great renown…”
“When he’s not humping pigs in the forest!” shouted Adam de Newmarket, to laughter from the men seated next to him. Giffard was known to be obsessed with hunting and the chase, to the exclusion of all else.
A roar greeted the next line. “And Sir John d'Eyvill, who never loved treason and guile, was in their company…”
D'Eyvill took no notice. He had heard The Song of the Barons many times before. It belonged to another age. Gilbert rambled on, praising the courage and virtue of all the Barons, rebel or royalist, who had fought in the recent wars. D'Eyvill winced at the final line, accompanied by a flourish on the mandolin.
“Right good men were the barons!”
Too many of those right good men had deserted Montfort when he needed them most. Now it fell to d'Eyvill, who knew himself inferior to the sainted Earl in every way, to redeem the cause.
How? D'Eyvill’s lands were mortgaged to the hilt; the only way he could raise men, buy horses and armour. He owed crippling debts to the Jews. Years of war had emptied his coffers.
His forefinger traced a meaningless pattern in a puddle of wine on the table. Unless he could find money, and quickly, all was over. D’Eyvill’s knights might say otherwise, puff up their courage with mead and old songs, but he refused to hide from reality. His mind worked out a simple equation.
I need money. There is none to be had, so I shall have to steal it. I am already an outlaw, so may as well act like one.
D’Eyvill had his answer. He would turn robber knight, and prop up his cause with stolen treasure.
10.
Windsor
The Queen of England relaxed in her bath and allowed the steaming hot water to expunge the stresses and strains of the day. The bath was a round wooden tub set in the middle of a room adjoining her bedchamber. She was seated on the plank inside it, with only her head wrapped in a white towel showing over the top.
Her maids finished rattling to and fro with the cans and pails. They whispered and giggled to each other as they trooped out, leaving their royal mistress in peace.
Peace was a luxury Eleanor of Provence seldom got to enjoy. Affairs of state whirled through her tired mind as she sat and soaked. At the age of forty-two, she was considerably younger than her royal husband, and shouldered many of his burdens.
She risked a glance at herself in the expensive mirror in one corner of the room. A mistake. Shorn of her cosmetics, Eleanor could no longer maintain the illusion of youth and beauty. Legions of crows' feet gathered at the corners of her eyes. Shallow cracks and fault lines skirted her mouth. Her face, though still slender and devoid of that middle-aged plumpness so common in aristocratic women, had a dry, unhealthy gauntness.
Eleanor sighed. She had just returned from accompanying the Duke of Brunswick to the camp at Kenilworth. The tiresome duke had insisted that his marriage to Eleanor’s kinswoman, sister of the Marquis of Montferrat, should take place in the King’s presence.
“Within sight and earshot of death,” she muttered.
The siege of Kenilworth Castle was well underway, and so far little been achieved. A lot of sound and fury and loss, young lives wasted against impregnable defences. Eleanor’s heart broke when she thought of the casualties; the broken bodies of young men, riddled with arrows or hacked up by cold blades. The screams and pleas for mercy as the army surgeons got to work, sawing off shattered limbs and cauterising the stumps with boiling pitch. Far more died inside the medical tents than on the battlefield. Eleanor did what she could for the few cripples who survived, gave them alms and food and clothing.
War, she considered, is butcher’s work.
Eleanor was fiercely proud of Edward, her eldest son, but could not share his enthusiasm for war. Apart from the human cost, it was ruinously expensive. The royal household was drowning in debt. Eleanor had virtually bankrupted herself to meet the cost of hiring mercenaries in the recent wars. She was indebted to Flemish and Gascon merchants, and had even appealed to the papacy for more funds.
She extended one long, pale arm and inspected it critically. “Shall I pawn my jewels?” Eleanor muttered to herself. “Shall I no longer be able to adorn myself, and hide the marks of age?”
What other choice was there? There were no cash cows left to milk. The Jews had been screwed out of every last penny. The foreign merchants refused to lend anymore. Most of the loyal barons were hopelessly in debt to the Jews, and levying a tax on the people might provoke another revolt.
The kingdom was being leeched and hack
ed to pieces by foolish men with swords. As she sloshed in her bath, Eleanor decided it was time for something new.
*
Bathed, rested, fed and watered, her skin thoroughly creamed and rouged, Eleanor felt almost young again. Cosmetics and silks were her armour. Without them she could not face the world.
She had no public audience in mind. It was late at night, and silence reigned over the vast complex of Windsor Palace. Accompanied by a young esquire and six trusted household knights, Eleanor made her way to the Curfew Tower at the western end of the palace. The Curfew Tower, along with the Devil’s Tower, was where the dungeons were kept. Unlike most dungeons, the one in the Curfew was well above ground level. Important prisoners were kept here.
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