by Angus Donald
We were about to join Mastin on the gibbet.
‘Give me another shaft, Cass,’ Robin said below me. His voice was thick and low. ‘And get the horses up here, right now.’
‘Robin – we have no time,’ I said.
My lord ignored me. Once more he wrestled back the cord on that huge weapon. I saw his eyeballs bulging with the effort, standing forward in his purple face. I snatched a glance at the gate. Horsemen were pouring out of it, heading for us – twenty, thirty heavily armed men, mailed knights looking to kill us, and they were not fifty yards away. A trumpet sounded again.
Robin loosed.
The arrow rose, fell and hit Mastin in the centre of his chest, plunging up to the goose feathers in his bloody torso. One last scream echoed across the space between us, a lower, softer cry. A farewell.
I leaped down to the ground, landing heavily. Robin pulled me to my feet. ‘Alan?’ he said. ‘Alan – tell me.’
I nodded. Cass was a yard away with the horses. ‘He’s dead,’ I said. ‘Mastin is gone. That last arrow flew true. Now, can we please get out of here?’
We buried the other five archers that same afternoon in the graveyard beside the church at Cassingham and the village priest said the prayers over their bodies. We had narrowly avoided the enemy horsemen and had half-killed our mounts getting back to the manor – but we were safe now. We said the words for Mastin in the churchyard too, although God knew where or even if the French would bury him. When the sun went down on that terrible day, we built a huge fire a mile or so away from the manor. We drank everything we could lay our hands on – ale, wine, cider, mead – we drank it all and sang songs and told stories about Mastin and the men who had died. Cass drank with us, and every man and woman of Cassingham, regardless of rank, imbibed until they could no longer stand. The night is dim in my memory, naturally, but I do remember most clearly a conversation I had before I became senseless from the ale.
I was sitting by the roaring fire, a flagon between my knees, and Robin was beside me with an open cask of red. Many of the Cassingham folk lay sprawled on the ground, snoring like pigs. I could not sleep, I could not get the image out of my head of Mastin’s half-peeled body hanging there by his arms.
‘Everybody is dead,’ I said, looking owlishly at Robin, my vision blurred by drink and tears. ‘Will Scarlet is dead, Owain is dead, King Richard is dead – God rest him; my lovely Goody is dead, Hanno is dead, Tuck is dead, Kit is dead, even Little John is dead… and now Mastin. All gone. All no more than rotting flesh.’
‘It’s me and you now, Alan,’ said my lord, taking a sip of his wine. The Earl of Locksley did not usually drink to excess but that evening his face was flushed and his eyes glittered in the firelight. ‘We are the last men standing.’
‘And the way he died – and the others. I can’t imagine the agony. I could not stand it … I know I could not. We had no choice but to do what we did.’
‘We had no choice,’ said Robin. ‘Were it me there on the gibbet – or you – we would want the same, yes?’
‘I want to kill him – I want to slice his head from his shoulders. Watch the light die in his eyes. Piss on his body.’
‘The White Count?’ said my lord.
‘He cannot be allowed to live. It is our duty to kill him.’
Cass came staggering out of the woods into the circle of light. I saw him adjusting his under-belt and the ties of his hose, having difficulty due to the amount of drink he had taken on board, and behind him at the edge of the firelight I glimpsed the slim figure of Sarah, smiling to herself and picking leaf-litter out of her long blonde hair as she sat next to the manor’s passed-out steward.
‘What are you two talking about?’ Cass said, plonking himself between us and reaching for Robin’s wine cup.
‘Revenge,’ said Robin. ‘On the White Count.’
‘I’m for it,’ said Cass. ‘I want to kill some Frenchmen. A lot of Frenchmen. I want to kill until I can’t raise my arm any longer. I want to kill him most of all. Let us gather all the men we can – recruit some more if necessary – and go after him. Better: let’s go back to Dover when things have quieted down, sneak into his tent and cut his lily-white throat. Or better yet, kidnap the bastard and bring him back here. He can see how he likes having his skin sliced off.’
Robin said nothing.
‘What do you think?’ I asked him. ‘Could we do it?’
He shrugged. ‘As much fun as that sounds, there is an old saying,’ he said. ‘“When a man sets out on the path of revenge, he should first dig two graves.”’
Cass looked downcast. I felt the ale swimming through my veins. ‘You used to be very keen on revenge, as I recall, my lord. Now I see you’ve changed your tune.’
‘Maybe I’ve seen the error of my ways,’ he shrugged. ‘I can no longer see the gain in it. We kill some of theirs, they kill some of ours and so it goes on. Dig two graves.’
‘Mastin was our friend!’ I said, raw anger stirring in my belly. ‘We owe it to him.’
‘Mastin is dead.’ Robin’s voice was hard and flat. ‘We killed him this very morning.’ I could tell my lord was nearly as angry as I. ‘Mastin does not care one way or another – he is just happy to be dead and not still lingering on in indescribable pain. You told me what he thought of revenge after the Penshurst men were mutilated: “Won’t bring them back”. Was that not what he said?’
I had told him that – and forgotten it.
‘Look into your heart, Alan. Look for the truth. You seek revenge to make yourself feel whole again – it’s not for Mastin, it’s for you. You feel bad because we killed one of our own. But revenge won’t bring him back. And I will not lead men into danger and most likely get more of them killed – or, God forbid, captured – just so you can feel better about having the blood of a comrade on your hands.’
He took his wine cup out of Cass’s hand and swallowed the last few drops.
‘But you two can do whatever you like,’ he said. ‘I am leaving anyway. I’ve been summoned by the King and I must ride north in the morning.’
‘What?’ I said. This was the first I’d heard of it. ‘You can’t leave now – after what has passed. You can’t leave!’
‘Too tired to argue with you, Alan. We are both drunk. We’ll talk tomorrow.’
And he rolled over and went to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-three
I went with him, of course, leaving at dawn, leather-tongued, guts churning, my whole head coming apart like a badly made helmet, and not just as far as Goudhurst to collect our men, the spare horses and the loot we had gathered. We rode all that ghastly day and the next. And it took me until we were near Windsor on the second day to get any sense out of him.
‘The King is finally moving against the French,’ Robin said tersely, when we stopped in a small patch of woodland near Chertsey, a few miles south of Windsor, to camp for the night. ‘He summoned me a week hence but I was … I was enjoying myself, damn it. I was having fun. I did not want to leave the Weald and go back to being a lickspittle courtier, a nodder who is ignored or insulted at the King’s will. Well, since Mastin, the pleasure is all gone. And I cannot ignore the King’s summons for ever and remain in his good graces. So that is what we are doing. We are going to hold the King’s hand while he dredges up the courage to confront the invaders.’
‘I feel bad about leaving Cass alone to carry on the fight in Kent,’ I said.
‘He’s hardly alone – he has four hundred men at his command, including some of my best archers,’ Robin said. ‘He knows how to wage this kind of war as well as you and I do – and he knows the ground a good deal better than both of us. Cass will be fine. He will run the French ragged, you’ll see. And he’ll be more cautious, too, after what has happened. There is your revenge, Alan – there won’t be a Frenchman south of the Thames who won’t have nightmares about what the fabled Willikin of the Weald and his men might do to them. More importantly, they will tie down large numbers of enemy t
roops just guarding the supply routes to London. While Cass torments them here, the French will be considerably weakened when we face them with the King’s army.’
‘You think the King will really fight?’ I asked.
Robin was quiet for a long time. He pretended to be busy feeding his horse a handful of oats, and then stroking its nose, and I was on the point of asking the question a second time when he said, ‘I think John truly would like to be a good King – he would be so happy to be seen as another Lionheart. But he never will be – the tyrant is too strong in him. He wants to rule unopposed: he wants to be a strong King more than a good King. By choosing power over virtue, he achieves neither. He has no true strength because he believes every man will betray him and so makes sure he betrays them first. Which means no man trusts him and every man looks only to his own advantage. This, in turn, fulfils the King’s deeply held belief that none of his sworn men is truly trustworthy. The glue that holds a kingdom together – by which I mean the sacred oaths that a King takes from his barons – is dissolved. He believes power comes only from money, from having the silver to pay his fighting men. I used to think the same once. I was wrong – power and strength come from men’s loyalty. My strength has come from the fidelity that you have given me, Alan. The forged-iron loyalty I have been fortunate enough to receive from you, from Little John, from Tuck, from Mastin, from all of you. I know you thought me foolish to give away so much of the money we took this summer – although you were kind enough not to call me a fool. But what you don’t understand is that the money means nothing. We have enough wealth, you and I, in our lands, in our sons. A few pennies more means – what? Better wine with dinner? A more expensive destrier?’
I said nothing. I was touched that he thought my loyalty iron-forged. And I did not want to spoil the mood by quibbling over a few pennies, although the coffers of Westbury were woefully light. I was glad I had remained silent, for Robin rarely spoke at such length about his innermost thoughts. And he had not yet finished.
‘I spent that money lavishly on those Wealden folk – and you know what I got in return? Loyalty. They did not betray us, although they easily could have. Money freely given, without the smack of charity or the guise of payment for services rendered, warms everybody’s heart. Money given to the deserving doesn’t make you poorer; it makes you richer. Jesus Christ knew that – it is one of his teachings that I am happy to embrace. King John doesn’t understand it. He pays money to his Flemings and demands fidelity. And they give it, but only up to the exact penny he has paid them. His barons – some of them – would give him good service if he allowed them to. But he puts his trust in cash money, in paid duty, and scorns the loyalty of honest men. That will be his downfall. If you take away John’s money, he is nothing, he would have nothing left. If you take away his money, he is in effect dead. If you took away mine, I would still be me and I would still have you. You said to me on the first day we met that you would be loyal to me until death. You have been. And that, my dear Alan, is worth more to me than all the coin in this world.’
I was feeling a little embarrassed by Robin’s words; my face had flushed as red as a holly berry. We did not normally speak of our bond. I think it was only to stop this unseemly flow of affection from my lord that I said, ‘You still haven’t answered the question. Will John fight the French?’
Robin laughed. ‘If he doesn’t he will lose his crown. So I would say that he must. Or, at least, that he must get some poor misguided fools to fight the French for him. And I would wager that we can guess who those poor misguided fools will be. Us. But a better question is – can he win? And that I cannot answer.’
The next day, as we rode north towards Windsor, we received news. A rider from London, one of cousin Henry’s couriers, managed to find us. The news was good. The siege of Windsor had been lifted. King John had come west with a strong force of knights but like a coward had avoided a pitched battle outside Windsor. Instead he had circled north and headed off into Essex, burning all the lands in his path and slaying any suspected of having sided with the rebels. I recalled that Miles and Thomas had ravaged the lands north of London earlier in the year and wondered what the peasants of Essex, whose lands had been twice pillaged in a year, would say to Robin’s dismissal of the value of cold hard cash.
I said the King had behaved in a characteristically spineless fashion; but Robin pointed out that his action in avoiding battle and moving north had achieved his objective – liberating Windsor – without the grave risk of a pitched battle, as the French forces surrounding the royal castle had abandoned their long, fruitless siege. They were at this moment riding north in the King’s charred wake, hoping to provoke a confrontation and perhaps defeat John in battle, capture him and end this war at a stroke.
Henry’s man also gave us news of Dover: the siege fighting had intensified since our cavalry raid in the summer. Prince Louis himself had paid a visit in late July to urge on the French besiegers to greater efforts; and King Alexander of Scotland had marched from his homeland to Dover – almost entirely unmolested by King John’s troops. Eustace de Vesci, Alexander’s brother-in-law and one of the senior rebel leaders, had been killed by a stray crossbow bolt at a skirmish at Barnard’s Castle in County Durham. But, by and large, the young King of the Scots had made it all the way to the south coast of England as if he were making a pleasant jaunt for a swim at the beach. And once Alexander got to Dover, he had paid homage to Prince Louis as one King to another. A most significant act, Robin assured me.
I said, rather wittily I thought, that you might say that England now held two Kings – or three if you counted Alexander. Ha-ha!
‘It might be a little unwise to say that aloud – or at least it will be unwise in a day or two, when we have reached our destination,’ said Robin. I took his point.
It took us a week to find King John. We rode cautiously – Robin and myself and nearly thirty men-at-arms and mounted archers – through the wastelands of central England. It was only on that journey that it truly came home to me just what a long civil war meant to the ordinary folk of England. As we passed through Harrow and St Albans, Woburn and Northampton, I was brutally reminded what a chevauchée did to the face of the land. Whole districts were black and smoking. Ripe standing crops, half a year’s sustenance for a village, had been ruthlessly put to the torch. Homes, storehouses, byres and barns, even churches ablaze. Men, women – children too – dead and rotting by the side of the roads. It was not the first time I had seen such devastation – and I had played a full and shameful part in similar destructive expeditions. But the burned-out villages and scorched fields, the army of poor and destitute who swarmed at every roadside cross and in every churchyard, were very hard on my conscience in the middle of England at harvest time. Without their crops, the poor would surely starve to death before Christmas. Robin, of course, had a shiny penny for each man, woman and child who asked for alms – taken from the fast-dwindling store of coin that we had liberated from the French. But that would only last them a day or so.
When I gently chided him for his pointless generosity, he simply said I should trust him. Then he grinned and said that doubtless Our Lord would provide. It was an oddly religious thing for the Earl of Locksley to say: he’d always been against the Church and its teachings and I assumed he was mocking me for my faith.
On the twenty-first day of September, the feast day of St Matthew the Apostle, Robin and his band of men, raggedy from living rough for so long, sore from the long journey up from Kent, but still straight as spears in the saddle, rode into the courtyard of Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire. It was a crisp, windy day, with the first sniff of winter in the air. But I felt a sense of homecoming: Rockingham was only two days’ ride from Nottingham. This was very nearly our part of the world. As I passed under the arch of the stone gatehouse and looked up towards the keep, I saw the three lions of England, gold on red, fluttering proudly above the crenellations in the stiff breeze and, while I hated the man w
hose presence the royal banner proclaimed, the sight of it gladdened my heart.
My spirits soared higher a moment later. For the first person I saw when I looked around the courtyard was a tall slim young man stripped to his chemise and hose, with a sword in his hand. He was sparring with a huge dark-skinned fellow armed only with a cudgel, and it took me a moment to recognise my son Robert and his bodyguard Boot.
Then my heart sank into my boots. A woman, lithe, light of step, with long raven hair gathered under a white cap, came hurrying out of the hall at the side of the courtyard. She had a thick blue woollen tunic over her arm and was calling to my son: ‘Robert, oh Robert, you will catch your death out here, you thoughtless boy. Now, stop your silly play-fighting and put on your warm tunic, put it on this instant, for me. Please, Robert, for me – put on this tunic for your Tilda.’
Part Three
‘I remember him,’ said the King triumphantly. ‘But was his name not something else? Lexington, Locksmith – no, Locksley. Yes, he was calling himself the Earl of Locksley.’
‘The Earl of Locksley and Robin Hood are one and the same man,’ said Brother Alan. He had spent the past half-hour describing to the King the events at Corfe Castle when Henry was an eight-year-old boy.
‘I remember you and the music we made together. You were a fine teacher. And I remember him, too – he was a dashing fellow even in his rags, charming, I recall. Mother didn’t like him but he soon talked her round. Persuaded her to allow you to move up from the dungeon to the blue room in the east tower. So that was the famous Robin Hood!’
The King beamed at the assembled company – Lord Westbury, myself and Brother Alan, and a gaggle of awestruck monks, all sitting on the hard stone benches around the sides of the chapter house.
‘Well, I feel better about hanging the other ones now – damn imposters,’ said the King. ‘Tell me, Brother Alan, what became of the Earl of Locksley – the genuine Robin Hood – I take it he is no longer with us.’