I glanced nervously at my followers. Herr Hartmann was shouting, and I didn’t want them disturbed by his crudely expressed heresies.
“My friend has sunk too much ale,” I said with a forced grin, “pay no heed to what he says.”
If any of them were offended or frightened, they didn’t show it. The archers were cheerful, rough-hewn types from Warwickshire and the Marches, the groom a quietly polite northerner, and the cook a fat little Gascon who spoke little English and communicated largely via obscene gestures.
“The seeds Hus planted in Bohemia are ready to flower, my friend,” bawled Herr Hartmann, “their roots shall spread and choke every damned priest between Prague and Constantinople!”
He stopped, and looked around guiltily. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “my tongue wags too freely when I am in drink.”
“Much too freely,” I replied, “that sort of talk will have the papal inquisitors after us.”
I spoke harshly, but only for the benefit of my followers. Secretly I was intrigued by his talk of unrest in Bohemia. My own heretical views of the church were still intact, though I took care never to reveal them. The priests clustered around King Henry like flies, and any English soldier suspected of heresy would soon found himself chained to a stake, pleading for mercy while the stench of his burned flesh rose to the heavens.
Abashed, and possibly a little frightened at what he had said, my companion remained quiet for the remainder of the journey. I was content to ride beside him in silence, enjoy the balmy spring weather and mull over questions to ask him in private.
I broke out in a light sweat when the highest turret of La Tour Sombre appeared over the trees to the east. The black pennon with the silver fish was gone - Sir Roland had ordered it torn down after we slaughtered the Baron and his men - yet an air of evil still seemed to hang over the place.
More of the castle gradually became visible through gaps in the trees. The road narrowed to a dirt track that wound through the edge of the woods to the fair open parkland beyond.
Squatting on its rise in the middle of the open country, just as I remembered, was the castle.
Herr Hartmann broke his silence. “Christ save us,” he breathed, making the sign of the cross on his armoured chest, “I never thought to see this dung-hole again.”
I shaded my eyes to get a better look at my new property. The drawbridge was still down, as we had left it, and the teeth of the portcullis raised. No helmets glinted on the battlements. The place appeared to be empty.
“How can you live there?” asked Herr Hartmann, “after everything we saw and suffered inside its walls?”
“By remoulding it,” I replied, “to begin with, La Tour Sombre shall have a new name. An English name for an English lord.”
“What name?”
I gazed at the single tower thrusting into the sky like an upright crimson lance. The castle was made of dark red sandstone, red as the blood its insane previous owner had spilled so freely.
“Red Keep,” I said.
26.
I spent the next few days exploring the barony . My purpose was to let the serfs and tenants see their new lord, and to inspect the damage wrought by months of war.
It was just as bad as I feared. There were seven villages on the map, and all but two were utterly ruined. I rode sadly through empty settlements, where deer cropped at the grass in the deserted cemeteries and marketplaces and fled at my approach. With no-one to bury them, the bodies of murdered peasants lay rotting in the streets where they had fallen, cut down by English and French blades.
Herr Hartmann rode me with on these expeditions. I took three archers as a guard. Two were left to guard Red Keep and help the groom and the cook make the place habitable again.
None of the old Baron’s household remained. We found the castle abandoned, though there were signs of recent life: the kitchens, buttery and wine cellar had all been ransacked, leaving just a few loaves and smelly cheeses.
The corpses of the Baron and his followers had also vanished, thankfully, and I could only guess that local peasants or brigands had raided the castle after we left. I never discovered what they did with the Baron’s remains, nor enquired too closely either. It mattered only that his presence was gone from the castle, along with his foul spirit.
At last, near the eastern borders of my land, we found a village that had escaped the ruin of war. I could have shouted for joy when I saw the smoke of cooking fires rising over the hills, and spied a few men working in the fields. It was the time of spring planting, and here at least was some some good land that hadn’t been burned or left fallow.
I had the Devil’s own job to persuade the villagers to speak with me, or even venture out of their miserable little cottages. They saw me armed to the teeth, with four soldiers at my back, and naturally assumed the worst. To them, the presence of armed men on horses spelled nothing but death and disaster.
“Expect small welcome here,” said Herr Hartmann as we guided our horses down the single muddy street, “these people are frightened. I’ve seen it before, many times. The innocent always suffer most in time of war.”
He gestured at the rows of firmly barred doors and fastened shutters. “They will be huddled inside like so many mice, praying for us to go away.”
I sighed, and goaded my horse towards the rough stone cross that stood in what passed for the village square.
“Listen to me,” I shouted in French, standing up in my stirrups, “my name is Sir John Page. I am the new lord of Rougemont-sur-Seine. Your old lord, the Baron, is dead. He was an evil man. I promise to treat you better than he did, and to protect you.”
My words went unanswered. Herr Hartmann gave me a nod of encouragement, so I tried again.
“I have taken up residence in the castle. Any one of you is welcome to come and speak with me. No harm will come to you. Do you hear me? No harm!”
Still no response. The doors and shutters remained closed. Somewhere a dog barked, and was swiftly silenced.
“God save King Henry,” I said moodily, giving my reins a shake.
We got an equally cold response at the next village, though again I was cheered by the sight of the land being ploughed and sown.
“Take heart,” said Herr Hartmann as we rode slowly back to the castle, “the people might get used to you, in time. Don’t forget you are not only a foreigner but an Englishman, the natural enemy of their race. Peasants are a silly lot, ignorant as sheep and full of superstition. They probably think Englishmen are devils, sent from Hell to ravage and destroy their country.”
“We’re supposed to have tails,” I replied, “didn’t you know that? Somehow the Scots got hold of the idea that all Englishmen have tails. For aught I know, the story may have spread to France.”
The archers overheard me, and laughed when I lifted my rump from the saddle. “See?” I said to Herr Hartmann, “I am tail-less. Or else my mother snipped it off when I was born.”
“Clear proof,” the German remarked soberly, “that you are bastard-born indeed, and no true Englishman.”
Our good humour lasted all the way back to Red Keep, where the cook had managed to scrape together some kind of feast. Rye bread and salt pork, mostly, the last of our rations washed down with the only two casks of wine left in the cellar.
The food was plain, and the wine far too sweet, but we made the best of it. I took my seat at high table in the cavernous hall, and filled my cup.
“Friends,” I declared, “I ask you to drink in honour of Thomas Page, the Wolf of Burgundy. May he find peace.”
My handful of followers, who sat together at one of the benches below the salt, obediently raised their cups in a toast.
“Thomas Page,” we chorused, “the Wolf of Burgundy!”
That night we all slept on the floor of the hall. As the lord, I should have lain in the Baron’s old bedchamber on the top floor of the tower, but I couldn’t face sleeping in his bed. It would still smell of him, his putrid and decayed flesh
, and the no less rotten odour of his soul.
Red Keep was full of ghosts that needed to be exorcised before I could think of the place as home, or hope to rest easy at night. In the following days my followers discovered some gruesome remnants of its recent history: a couple of broken skulls lying among the overgrown weeds in the ditch, and other scattered bits of bone and vertebrae.
“Bury them all together in the woods,” I ordered the archers who found them, “and set up a wooden cross over the grave.”
That was the nearest to a Christian grave I could provide for the wretches who had died there, tortured to death on the orders of a diseased madman.
They were almost the last, but not the worst, of Red Keep’s grisly secrets. On the second floor of the tower, while rummaging through a battered old chest, I discovered a skeletal hand.
It was a pathetically tiny, claw-like object, and can only have belonged to a child. Revolted to my stomach, I ordered it taken into the woods and buried, this time with no marker. Some things are best forgotten.
While I laboured to mend and cleanse the barony, King Henry’s star continued to wax. Alarmed by the loss of Normandy, the French rushed to make terms with him, and he spent most of the summer locked in negotiations with this faction and that faction, demanding much and conceding little.
Had they united against him, the French might yet have thrown his little army off French soil. For a brief time, this threatened to happen. The streets of Paris seethed with unrest, and the Duke of Burgundy was persuaded to open talks with his deadly rivals, the Duke of Orléans and the Count of Armagnac.
These high and mighty nobles had been sworn enemies for years, ever since the Duke of Orléan’s father, Louis, was assassinated by the Burgundians. Entwined in their feud was the Dauphin, who favoured the Armagnac faction, and his mother, Queen Isabeau. She was rumoured to have bedded one or other of the dukes, or possibly all of them together, and repeatedly made a cuckold of her insane husband, King Charles. He, poor man, spiralled ever deeper into the pit of madness, and spent most of his days strapped down a table, screeching that he was made of glass.
Against the cool intellect and indomitable will of Henry of England, this band of quarrelsome, incestuous idiots had no answer. Throughout that summer he skilfully played one off against the other, all the while calculating the best terms for himself. The crown of France was still his goal, though he might have been content with Normandy and the restoration of all the lands ceded to his ancestor, King Edward, in the Treaty of Bretigny.
By this he stood to gain huge chunks of southern France, including Poitou and Guienne. Along with the duchy of Normandy and the crown of England, Henry would become one of the most powerful men in Christendom, on a par if not greater than the Holy Roman Emperor. Faced with this terrifying prospect, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians put away their knives and made an effort to overcome their mutual hatred.
Meanwhile France slid into ruin. The war had devastated much of Normandy, and the English-held towns were isolated outposts, surrounded by a hostile countryside. Bands of outlaws and partisans and dispossessed peasants roamed the land, robbing and murdering at will.
Royal government had all but collapsed in other areas of France, where supporters of the Armagnacs and Burgundians fought each other for temporary control of some patch of land. As Herr Hartmann said, it was the common people who suffered most. The sky was black with the smoke of burning towns, and the roads littered with slain innocents, like so many broken birds fallen from the sky.
In such a violent, unstable realm, with the threat of renewed war constantly on the horizon, every landowner needed plenty of money and swords about him if he wished to defend his own.
I had very little of either, and stood in the greatest danger. My lordship was uncomfortably poised near the border of Normandy and France, and had already suffered at the hands of roving bands of freeriders and common thieves. I could only pray that Henry would patch up some kind of a truce with the French, and that a lasting peace would ensue.
“We need time,” I said to Herr Hartmann, “time to win over the tenants on my land, to rebuild the villages, to plough and plant the burned fields anew. Then, and only then, will this estate start to make any kind of profit.”
“That will take at least a year,” he replied frankly, “everything depends on the harvest. If God is merciful, there will be enough food to sustain everyone over the winter. If not...”
He spoke some unpalatable truths. I had barely enough money left to pay my followers for the next three months, and none at all to feed the villagers if the harvest failed. All I could do was wait, and pray for peace and good weather.
I was anxious to keep up with events in the wider world. To that end I sometimes despatched my groom, Ralf, to Rouen or Paris to fetch back the latest news. He was a soft-spoken Cumbrian with impeccable manners whom I suspected had once served in a noble household, possibly as a scribe, though he claimed to be illiterate.
Whether or not he could read and write, he knew how to digest information. Throughout the spring and into the summer he rode back and forth from Red Keep, bringing me word of the latest in the treaty negotiations, along with bits of scandal and vicious gossip. Most of the latter concerned Queen Isabeau, who seemed determined to cling onto power by opening her legs to every Frenchman of noble blood.
This was mere street gossip, of course, and for all I know the queen may have been as pure and chaste as a cloistered nun. What it showed was the depth of the hatred the Paris mob had for her, and her rumoured bedmate, the Count of Armagnac.
The debauchery of the French court, the seething violence in the streets of Paris, and the delicately poised negotiations at Rouen: it all seemed a world away from the quiet woods and fields of Rougemont-sur-Seine. The countryside was not so very different from Kingshook, though the weather was balmier, and at times I longed for the overcast skies and gentle rains of Sussex. My little household survived by hunting in the woods, which were full to bursting with game, and fishing in the well-stocked rivers.
My efforts to win over the villagers met with little success. They continued to regard their new English lord with deep suspicion, and refused to come anywhere near the castle. I still had hopes of bridging the gulf between us. If nothing else, I could offer them shelter if they needed it, and protection if their homes were attacked.
Then, in midsummer, all my hopes were smashed by the arrival of the Bastard of Thian.
27.
The Bastard, Your Majesty may recall, had been one of the commanders of the French garrison at Rouen. During the siege he had taken special pleasure in beheading and flaying captured English soldiers, and hanging their mutilated bodies from the walls to taunt the rest of us.
After the city fell, King Henry severely punished some of the French commanders for their cruelty, executing some and sending others to captivity in England. The Bastard, however, was able to buy or talk his way out of trouble, and walked free while the heads of his comrades were impaled on pikes.
Since then he had roamed the French countryside with as many followers as he could attract to his banner, burning and looting and slaying at will. He claimed to act on behalf of his lord, the Duke of Burgundy, but in truth he attacked English and French alike.
This mad dog was naturally drawn to easy prey, and my ill-defended lands made a perfect target. With no scouts or watchtowers, I was caught totally unprepared.
I was in the smithy at Red Keep one morning in late September, whetting the edge of my sword on a grindstone, when a trumpet screeched on the roof of the tower.
“Banners to the south!” roared the archer who kept watch on the roof, “I see horsemen on the road. They come this way!”
I dropped the grindstone and ran across the yard into the base of the tower. The spiral stair was four storeys high, yet I galloped up them in less than a minute, hotly pursued by Herr Hartmann, Ralf and the rest of the archers. My cook, Pepin, was making venison stew in the kitchen, and it took m
ore than the prospect of imminent danger to tear him away from his pots and pans.
“There,” said the man on watch when I stumbled onto the roof.
His hand shook as he pointed to the south. I saw a trail of dust rapidly moving in the direction of Red Keep. They were less than two miles away, and a long row of bright pennons and banners could be seen through the haze.
“Raise the drawbridge,” I ordered, “lower the portcullis and man the rampart above the gate. We will make a show of strength.”
“Never fear,” I added, trying to sound confident, “it could be an envoy from King Henry. The roads are unsafe, so it makes sense to travel with an armed escort.”
“The roads are indeed unsafe,” remarked Herr Hartmann as the archers clattered back down the stair, “thanks to men such as those riding towards us. They are brigands, John. Count on it.”
As usual, his pessimism was both unwelcome and well-founded. While two of the archers frantically turned the windlass to raise the drawbridge, I raced down to the armoury to fetch my bascinet and quilted jack.
Herr Hartmann was already in his plate and mail, and waited for me on the walkway above the gate. Chains rattled and clanked in the room below as the teeth of the portcullis sank to the ground.
The German leaned his steel elbows on the parapet. “I knew this castle would prove the death of me,” he said casually, “one way or another.”
I looked at the field south of the castle, and my heart withered and died inside me.
Riders poured out of the woods. I counted heads as they spread out with impressive haste and discipline.
“Eighty-two,” I murmured, “light horse, mostly, with a few men-at-arms at their head. Not just a pack of brigands, then.”
“No,” Herr Hartmann admitted, “a company of routiers, I would say. Well-led and organised. None of their banners show the arms of England or France. Look at that standard. Do you recognise it?”
The Wolf Cub Page 21