by Angus Donald
‘My dear Sir Alan,’ he said, smiling at me like a long-lost brother, ‘I am so pleased that you could honour us with your presence. I was beginning to feel you were avoiding me. We are neighbours, you know, and I have been reliably informed that you have been in residence these past few months and yet never a friendly visit? A lesser man might be offended. Surely now we are on the same side we can put that little unpleasantness some years ago behind us.’
‘You mean the little unpleasantness when you kidnapped my son Robert and held him in chains – that little unpleasantness?’
‘Did I hurt the boy? Not one hair of his head. I’m sure it made a man of him. And here he is – the man himself. Robert, my dear fellow, how you have grown.’
My son looked at him the way one might regard a rearing snake about to strike.
‘Or did you mean the little unpleasantness when your armed men broke into my home and pulled down my tower?’ I asked.
‘Pish-posh, my dear Sir Alan – all water under the bridge. At least I did not burn your hall to the ground. I gave my men strict instructions to harm nobody and to touch nothing but the tower. It was an illegal fortification, as you well know, and I had my orders from the King.’
He extended a hand towards me. ‘Come now, let us forget the troublesome past and be friends. There is no need for us to be at daggers drawn over ancient history.’
And there wasn’t. I found when I looked into my heart that I had no burning hatred for the man. I doubted we would ever be friends – but for the indignities that Robert had suffered, I had taken my revenge on Benedict Malet, spilling his guts in the courtyard of this very castle as he hanged by the neck – and there seemed no reason to nurture a powerful enemy such as the sheriff right on my doorstep. In those golden spring days, my love for Tilda made me want to see the good in all men.
I grasped his outstretched hand.
‘Good man, I knew there would be no hard feelings. Now, have you met Ranulf, Earl of Chester,’ he said, guiding me over to a short-legged but barrel-chested man with a vast red beard who looked utterly exhausted.
‘My lord,’ I bowed. ‘I had understood you were investing Mountsorrel – you have abandoned the siege?’
‘Had to, Sir Alan,’ said the man in a deep voice. ‘That swine Quincy persuaded Louis to come north in numbers. About half his total forces in England, or so I hear. So we had to retreat here for safety. But you mark my words, Sir Alan, I will recover Mountsorrel one day, even if it kills me to do so. And no man can stop me.’
‘Sir Alan,’ said a voice behind me and I turned to see a tall, very thin man with sparse but scrupulously clean white hair and a neatly cropped white beard. The skin seemed to hang off his bones as if it had previously belonged to another far larger man. And it took me half a dozen heartbeats before I recognised William d’Aubigny, our captain during the siege at Rochester and fellow captive at Corfe Castle.
‘My lord,’ I said, scrabbling to think of something to say, ‘I am happy to see you have been released at last.’
‘Very little gets past your eagle eye, Sir Alan,’ said d’Aubigny, smiling. ‘Yes, I paid the ransom and did homage to the boy’ – he jerked his head at the far end of the hall where King Henry was sitting sipping a hot drink in an ornate X-shaped chair with the Marshal, in full mail and with a helmet under one arm, standing tall and glowering by his side – ‘and I have been born anew, like our Saviour, but this time I am on the side of the angels.’
I was about to congratulate him and welcome him to our ranks, when the Marshal’s booming voice echoed across the room.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen – time presses. Some of you have been here a day or two, some of you have just arrived. None of you should get too comfortable – we ride to Newark Castle tomorrow at dawn. The French, under the command of Thomas, Comte du Perche, and with a considerable force from London, have left Mountsorrel and are making north-west, heading for Lincoln. They are in the Soar Valley, ravaging the lands around Belvoir Castle.’
‘Of course they are, the bastards,’ said d’Aubigny beside me. ‘That will be Fitzwalter’s work. He always was a vengeful devil.’ I remembered belatedly that these were d’Aubigny’s lands and Belvoir his family’s castle. I wondered if Fitzwalter were truly taking revenge on d’Aubigny’s defection to the royalist cause, which seemed unduly petty, or if he was just laying waste to anything in his path.
‘The enemy have made their move,’ the Marshal was saying. ‘They have divided their forces. Half remain in the south-east – and that is William of Cassingham’s parish, and I have no doubt he will keep them busy down there. But the other half is heading for Lincoln to support Gilbert de Gant in his siege there. They mean to finally take Lincoln Castle. We mean to stop them. We muster at Newark – every man we can spare from other duties – and we shall attack from there with our entire strength. We shall trap them between the men of the castle they are besieging and our own forces, and crush them like …’
‘A walnut between two stones,’ said both d’Aubigny and I at exactly the same moment.
‘Aye,’ d’Aubigny said to me in an undertone, ‘that’s what we said at Rochester – and we both know how well that turned out!’
‘This is it, Alan,’ said Robin when the Marshal had finished and a royal priest had prayed over us for an interminably long time. I found I was staring at his chest, where someone had sewn a small white cross. ‘Lincoln. This is where we will win the war.’ He saw where I was looking and I could have sworn I saw him blush.
‘Did you not know?’ he said. ‘The Pope has declared that those of us who fight for the King are holy pilgrims. If we die in this cause we go straight to Heaven. It’s just like that little jaunt we made to the Holy Land with King Richard all those years ago. Our bloodletting is sanctioned by God. You better get yourself one of these, too.’ He tapped the cross with a finger. ‘You don’t want to miss out on a swift voyage from Lincolnshire to paradise, do you?’
I smiled at him. ‘Do you think they will let you in to Heaven?’
‘Of course they will. When I get to the gates, I’ll just slip old Saint Peter a fat purse and that’ll be that. Come to think of it, I’m sure he must owe me a favour or two, as I’ve sent him so many fine, holy clients over the years.’
I laughed, despite his appalling blasphemy.
‘Seriously, Alan, I do need to talk to you about Lincoln. Were you paying attention when Pembroke spoke the name of the leader of the French?’
I had indeed marked the name: Thomas, Comte du Perche. The White Count.
‘Du Perche is the Marshal’s first cousin, did you know that? And Pembroke has let it be known privately that he would prefer him to be spared in the battle, if at all possible, and gently taken prisoner. I disagree. If we win, I do not think this young count should be allowed to live a long and happy life, do you hear me? Don’t let him surrender. I won’t have him ransomed and returning home to France a poorer but wiser man. I want him bleeding in the gutter. I want him screaming in agony. I want him to be raw, bloody meat. For Mastin. Yes?’
‘What was that you said about revenge in Kent, my lord? Dig two graves? Or did I misunderstand you?’
Robin frowned. ‘We are not taking revenge, Alan, that would be petty, irresponsible, childish even. What we are going to do is remove one of our lord King’s worst enemies – an invader of our land who also happens to be the pale-arsed French bastard who thought he could get away with peeling my friend’s skin from his living body. That is a completely different matter. Surely you understand.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It will absolutely be my pleasure – to kill an avowed enemy of my young King, I mean.’
‘There is more, Alan, if you could stop sniggering for just one moment.’
I had not been sniggering, I had been expressing my mirth in a manly fashion. But I stopped and what he said next drove all thoughts of merriment from my head.
‘I’ve just heard from Henry in London that Fitzwalter has taken
his best knights with him up north. My cousin informs me that Miles will surely be at Lincoln among our enemies. He’s taken to calling himself Lord Kirkton these days, by the way. Apparently, Louis has ennobled him. I suppose I should be grateful that he has not claimed the title of Earl of Locksley. And Sir Thomas Blood will be there, too.’
Chapter Thirty-one
We mustered at Newark Castle – a very decent force of some four hundred knights, thrice that number of ordinary men-at-arms, and a large contingent of two hundred and fifty crossbowmen under the bellicose Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches. Robin added his force of fifty bowmen to the good bishop’s division, under the command of his son Hugh, and my lord and I led a little more than a hundred mounted men-at-arms under the Marshal’s banner. We knew we would still probably be outnumbered but, if we could persuade the men inside Lincoln Castle to join the battle at an appropriate moment, I was confident we had a good chance of victory. The stone in our shoe was the presence of Thomas and Miles inside the enemy camp. I dreaded having to face either man in battle and Robin and I spent much time over the following nights discussing exactly how we might get a message to them to beg them to come over to our side.
William the Marshal had insisted we come at Lincoln from the north because, if we followed the direct road in from the south as we had last time, we would be attacking from the lower town, and trying to fight up the very steep hill inside the city and then through the wall that divided it, in order to reach the castle in the upper town. We must break in via the north gate, the Marshal decreed. So the royal army followed the banks of the River Trent north from Newark, with some of the heavy baggage being transported on barges, before swinging east when well north of Lincoln. In the afternoon of the nineteenth day of May, on the sixth day of Whitsun week, we camped outside Stow, about eight miles to the north-west of Lincoln, the army spilling over the fields and copses, cooking themselves hearty meals – perhaps for the last time – and punishing the ale vats and wine barrels to drown their fears.
I left Robin at Stow when the sun was still two hand-breadths above the western horizon, dressed in a brown, hooded monk’s robe and without arms or armour, save for the misericorde strapped out of sight on my left wrist and a long oak staff. I was going into Lincoln incognito – and my bowels were gripped with the familiar icy fingers of impending mortal danger.
Robin had joked hilariously that due to my sparse locks, I barely needed a tonsure to complete my disguise as a mendicant. But though I might be thinning a little on top, Robin shaved an area on my crown clean anyway with a few swipes of the razor.
I did not plan to do any preaching, although I liked to think my Latin was good enough and I was sufficiently familiar with the Gospels to pass at a pinch. I only meant to use my disguise to get inside the walls of Lincoln. My biggest fear was that someone would recognise me as Sir Alan Dale, the valiant knight of Westbury – and with the White Count present in the town, I knew capture and exposure as a spy would mean the same awful fate that Mastin had faced. Having tied my horse to a bush in a stand of beech a mile outside the city, I smeared my face with dust and pulled my hood forward, then joined a stream of travellers hurrying along the northern road to get inside before nightfall.
The sun was a red ball just touching the treetops over my right shoulder as I approached the gate, and the weight of traffic took the edge off my fears – chapmen on foot with enormous packs holding their various wares, wagons laden with grain and wine, mules in long trains with towering bales of raw wool from the northern pasturelands strapped to their backs – for their numbers shielded me from the gaze of the French men-at-arms standing beside the open iron-bound doors.
I passed through without difficulty, keeping my hood well forward and only looking up discreetly to take note of the strength of that bastion and the number of men on its walls. It was a dispiriting sight: the gate was a powerful limestone box with three arched tunnels set into it, the middle one big enough to admit two wagons side by side, the two flanking entrances barely more than man-sized. I could see scores of men-at-arms lounging against the parapet atop the gatehouse, alert and looking out over the road to the north, some watching the passing throngs below, all in good mail and many armed with crossbows. Dozens more soldiers were on the town walls that stretched east and west either side. Inside the gate were barracks and stables, and stacked spears and piles of shields, and two taverns, one on either side of the main road, doing a roaring trade with the off-duty soldiery. It would be no easy task to take this grim portal by storm, I thought, and wondered if the Marshal had blundered in insisting that this was the place to force our entry. By my reckoning, the enemy could in a few short moments muster some two or three hundred men-at-arms for the north gate’s defence.
But that was not my concern that day. My task was to avoid capture and an unthinkably horrible death and find my friends. I allowed the throng to sweep me into the upper town, noting that the high walls of the castle looked a little battered – but with the royal standard still flying proudly from the top of a round tower set into the north wall. Nicola de la Haye remained staunch in her defence, I saw with a spark of pride. Up ahead and to my left, over the tops of the houses, I could see the soaring, intricate stonework of the cathedral – its two small square towers, with corner spires, marking the entrance to the House of God, and behind them a larger square tower, where the transept crossed the nave. To my right, in the rubble of a once-grand house, I saw a gang of men-at-arms around a mangonel. A knight in a black surcoat barked an order in French: the men loosed the ropes, the mangonel arm swung up, thudding against the padded cross bar, and a huge boulder flew at the castle walls, soaring up in a long arc to crack against the round tower bearing the King’s standard. Under the impact, a slice of yellow stone the size of my hall door slid from the walls and tumbled into the deep ditch below. And I saw just how crumbled and pitted the wall was in this northern section. The men-at-arms around the siege engine gave a cheer and started hauling on the ropes to bring the catapult bowl back to the ground for another shot.
A man in a dirty, torn gambeson, the wool stuffing leaking from the seams, and whose face was covered in ugly boils, stopped me and asked for a blessing, and I nervously muttered a few words in Latin while making the sign of the cross before his carbuncle-stricken face. I asked him in return where I might find a Lord Kirkton.
‘English or French?’ he asked and before I could answer he said, ‘The Frenchies are mostly lodged over there beside the cathedral,’ indicating the magnificent bulk of the House of God. ‘English nobles are on this side of the road.’ He pointed west beyond the mangonel team down a partly demolished side street at the end of which I could make out a row of large houses hard up against the western town wall, each with a standard plunged into the earth before the door to identify its inhabitant.
‘We poor common men-at-arms are all down in the lower town with the rats and the filth and the whores. It’s always the same, eh, brother?’
I thanked him and, pulling my hood even further forward, made my way in the direction he had pointed, slipping past the mangonel team and down the side street. I turned right at the end and walked up the line of houses, stopping before the smallest one, at the very end of the line, about halfway along the town wall. It was not much bigger than a cottage, straw-roofed and misshapen, seeming to sag drunkenly at one end. The walls were desperately in need of a fresh coat of whitewash. Outside the square flap of uncured leather that made up the entrance, next to a mound of household waste, animal bones, broken crockery, bits of decaying vegetables, a spear had been planted butt-first into the earth and a limp blue rag attached just below the spear-tip. I reached out a hand and unfurled the greasy standard. It was the fierce image of a snarling wolf crudely painted in yellow. He might have been granted the grand-sounding title of Baron Kirkton, I thought, but his new French lord had not been over-generous with his silver.
I summoned my courage. ‘God’s blessing upon this house,’ I called
out loudly and pulled back the leather flap and went inside. The stench was so strong it made me gag: stale sweat, wood smoke, sour wine, male feet and the musty, spicy tang of wet wool that had mouldered before it dried. It was the smell of poverty.
A figure was lounging on the cot over by the far wall, propped on a mound of old clothes and sipping from a large leather flask. To my left I saw the dark outline of an open doorway to another room.
‘Go away, brother, I am resting. I am in no mood for another sermon about the terrible vice of drunkenness. I am not at all well today.’
I heard the heavy tramp of a man outside the doorway and stiffened. I had the terrible image in my head of me screaming from a gibbet while industrious torturers peeled the skin from my bones. But he passed by and I relaxed a little. I peered at the figure on the bed through the gloom. Lank blond hair slicked back with sweat over his high brow, he was glaring at me with pale blue, bloodshot eyes.
‘I said, get out, you old fool. Do you want me to take my boot to you. Out!’
‘Hello, Miles,’ I said, pulling my hood down. ‘If you are having a drink, d’you mind if I have one too? I could certainly use one.’
‘God’s blood, Alan Dale! What in the name of Hell are you doing here? And got up as a mystery-play monk, too.’
The young man swung his feet off the bed and stood up, a trifle unsteadily.
‘Yes, have a drink, have a bucketful, there is plenty of good French wine at least in this godforsaken shit-hole.’
He seized a cup from the table by the hearth and after giving it a cursory wipe with the sleeve of his dirty chemise, he poured a dark liquid into it from the flask in his right hand and thrust it at me.
‘Here’s to your health, old man,’ he said, throwing back his head and taking a giant gulping swig from the flask. I took a mouthful from my cup and felt the flow of warmth in my belly. I had never needed drink to bolster my courage before but I must admit I felt my fears beginning to recede as the wine did its work. I took another large swallow and put the cup back on the table.