by Angus Donald
‘Do you think we can hold it?’
Robin made a see-sawing movement with his right hand. ‘It depends how determined they are. It depends how determined we are. We will work all night trying to repair it as best we can. But you need to rest.’
My lord got up and walked towards the door.
‘Robin,’ I said, just as he reached it. My lord turned and looked enquiringly at me.
‘Thank you for getting me out.’
Robin raised an eyebrow. ‘You promised me once long ago that you would be faithful to me until death. You don’t get out of your oath that easily.’
Then he ducked out of the door and was gone.
I tried to sleep in that narrow cot in the keep but my body was paining me. My left leg was a mass of bruising from ankle to knee and it throbbed agonisingly. My torn hands were aflame, or so it seemed. My arms and back felt as if they had been beaten with axe handles. I had a deep, angry cut on my forehead. But it was my mind that was in the greatest torment. I could not understand why Tilda had not come to see me. She must have heard I had been trapped under the rubble of the breach for a day – we were all hugger-mugger in our remaining part of the castle and news travelled like lightning – what lover would not come to their beloved and ask after his health after such an ordeal?
I could not understand it. Finally, an hour or so after dusk I rose from my cot, pulled on a clean pair of hose and a tunic that Robin had provided and hobbled into the inner bailey. There were a mass of men, some fifty or sixty at least, by the tumbled stones of the gatehouse, and the shrill ringing of many carpenters’ hammers. I could see Robin had spoken truly – they were using the night to repair the thirty-foot-wide hole in our defences with wooden barricades and by hastily replacing the shattered blocks of masonry and fixing them in place with fresh mortar and heavy baulks of wood.
I watched them for a while, thinking of my nightmarish day in the tunnel, and grateful once again to Robin and the two Cornish lads for digging me free. Then I caught sight of one of Sir Joscelyn’s men-at-arms lugging a great oak beam over to the breach. I stopped him and asked if he knew where Lady Matilda Giffard was to be found and he told me that father and daughter had taken up residence in a hut on the north side of the inner bailey – it was quieter in there than in the keep, he said, and the lady could have a little more privacy.
I thanked him and walked to the north side of the bailey. There was a row of simple wooden huts against the battlements there, which I knew had been used as storerooms of grain and oil in the days when we had need of such places. Now the castle was down to the last scrapings of the barrels, what tiny quantities of food as we possessed were kept under lock and key in the keep.
I could see a glimmer of light leaking through the crack under the door from the hut at the end of the row, and I could hear the faint murmur of voices. There were no windows and no way of looking in to check that this was the Giffards’ abode.
I knocked on the door. The voices inside ceased immediately.
I knocked again.
‘Who is it?’ It was Tilda’s voice.
‘It is me, Alan. Can I come in?’
‘This is not a good time, Alan.’ She sounded scared, terrified even. ‘I am washing myself. Be a dear and come back in an hour.’
Something was not right. Why was she lying to me? There was a man in there with her. I had definitely heard at least one male voice. Was he holding her at knife point? Did he at this very moment have a blade to her soft white throat?
I kept my voice steady. ‘Very well, my love. It’s nothing important. I will return in an hour or two. Enjoy your bath.’
Then I sprinted back to the keep to fetch my sword.
The second time I approached the hut was at a dead run. I wanted the maximum amount of surprise to give me the advantage in dealing with whatever was occurring inside. My bruised body protested but I hit the door of the hut at full speed, my shoulder smashing into the frail wood and bursting it off its hinges. But I bounced up from the wreckage of the door, Fidelity in my fist, cocked above my head to strike … and stopped, struck dumb with amazement.
At a little table in the middle of the hut, on a cheerful yellow linen cloth, a feast was spread – half a loaf of good white bread, most of a leg of ham, a boiled capon encased in jelly, even a game pie of some kind and a few wrinkled apples and a bowl of nuts. Around the table, their mouths full, their faces shiny with grease, hot guilt in their eyes, sat Sir Joscelyn Giffard, Tilda Giffard and Sir Benedict Malet.
I was too shocked to speak. I had not seen food like this for months. I had not even dreamed of food like this for weeks. I actually scrubbed at my eyes in case I was seeing phantom victuals. But no, they were as real as I was.
‘What? How? What is this?’ I could barely form words.
Sir Joscelyn had slipped from his stool and was pushing the door back into its shattered frame.
‘Sit down, Sir Alan, and have a bite to eat.’
I looked at Sir Benedict Malet, his fat, glossy cheeks quivering with fear.
‘You,’ I hissed. ‘You dirty thief!’
‘Alan, sit down and eat something!’ Sir Joscelyn was behind me, trying to usher me on to a stool.
‘Get away from me,’ I snarled at him. I pointed my finger at Benedict. ‘Lord de Lacy will know of this. How long have you been stealing the food of honest fighting men to fill your greedy belly? Since the first day of the siege? Since you took over the stewardship of the stores? How many men have died of hunger so that you could gorge yourselves? I will see you hanged, you cur!’
‘Alan,’ Tilda spoke to me in her sweet, smoky voice. ‘There is no need to get in a sweat about this. It is just a little food. Nothing more. We’re entitled to eat.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That was the contract with the men. That was understood. We all suffered equally. We all hungered equally. Poor Niels was hanged because his hunger led him to conspire with the French. But this is a far worse betrayal.’
I stepped to the table and seizing the corners of the table cloth, I bundled the whole spread into one bulky parcel.
‘De Lacy shall see this!’ I said, and tugged the door open.
As I strode out, I heard Tilda calling after me. I stopped, turned and my beloved stood there before me in the light from the doorway, tears in her eyes. She was achingly beautiful.
‘You cannot do this to me, Alan,’ she said. ‘You told me you loved me, and I believed you. I shared my body with you.’
I stared at her, unable to think.
‘If you tell de Lacy, my father will almost certainly be hanged; Bennie will be hanged for sure. And I too will die with my head in a noose. Is that what you want?’
I was a statue. Frozen. I could not even contemplate my love slowly strangling to death at the end of a rope. But this crime was so foul, so contemptible …
‘Please, Alan. If you love me, let this go. Let us forget that this ever happened. Come back inside and we can explain it to you. If you love me, come back inside.’
I could feel my heart being torn in two.
I turned my back on her and began to walk away, the heavy bundle swinging in my fist.
‘Alan, Alan, you will not tell de Lacy, will you?’
I turned back to look at her, but I could not meet her eyes.
‘I will not tell. For you. I will stay silent.’
‘Alan, promise me, promise me you will not tell a soul about this matter.’
I said nothing more and walked away.
I gave that damned bundle to Father de la Motte who was in charge of the infirmary, a low wooden building on the far side of the inner bailey crammed with sick and injured men. I merely muttered, ‘For the wounded’, as I handed it over. His eyes widened when he looked inside but I told him nothing of the food’s provenance. When he pressed me, I shrugged and said, ‘Call it a gift from God.’
Father de la Motte looked into my face, his piercing eyes probing my soul. ‘Are you quite well, my son?’ he s
aid. ‘Would you like to sit quietly for a while?’
‘I am tired, Father, that is all,’ I said. ‘I am so very tired.’
The priest insisted I have a cup of hot horse-meat broth before I left and he thanked me for the gift of the food and did not ask any more questions. I drank my broth, dull-eyed, close to tears, almost grieving, and then went back to my cot in the keep, lay down in my clothes and slept like a rock until morning.
The bombardment woke me a little after dawn. The flat cracking of stone on stone that I had heard so often in the past few months that it had become like a refrain, the music of the Iron Castle. My body had stiffened during the night and it was only with a good deal of difficulty that I managed to dress myself in my full mail and dented helmet, strap on Fidelity, mace and misericorde, and loop a borrowed shield over my shoulder. I felt like an old man, not a brisk young fellow who was not yet thirty. As I had told Father de la Motte, I was tired, deep-in-the-bone tired. Years of war and suffering had extracted their fee from my mind and body. The wounds taken, the comrades lost. The disappointments, the tragedy and the pity of it all. I missed Kit and his breezy cheerfulness more than ever that cold March morning and reflected that if he had not always got everything absolutely right in his duties as a squire, he had been an excellent companion and a fine young man. He should not be dead. I vowed I would fight that day for him, for his memory, and take some measure of revenge on the enemy who had cut him down.
I did not think of Tilda and her little illicit feast at all.
When I emerged from the keep, mailed, armed and ready, it was close to mid-morning. Robin was at the breach with Roger de Lacy, both kneeling behind a fallen section of masonry. The barricades erected during the night had already been torn apart by Philip’s castle-breakers, like a giant fist smashing through a frail latticework of twigs. There were shreds of wood scattered all over the rubble and a ten-yard-wide hole still gaped in the defences of the inner bailey. But there was an air between these two men. A sense of quiet fury. Caused by something more than the destruction of our makeshift barricade.
‘You understand your orders, Locksley?’
‘Oh yes, they are quite clear,’ said my lord. Again there was something odd in his tone, a quiet hum of anger.
Roger de Lacy stared at him hard and then abruptly turned and marched away.
‘What is it, Robin?’ I said.
‘Hmm?’
I looked around me. I could see a hundred men-at-arms, maybe more, clustered in groups around the breach, taking shelter from the enemy missiles, which cracked and whined about the outer walls and on occasion sailed through the gap to crash thunderously against the keep.
‘What has happened?’
‘You look like something dragged up from the very depths of Hell,’ said Robin. ‘Sure you should be out of bed today?’
‘Tell me!’
Robin sighed. ‘There was a letter, from the King to de Lacy, dated November last year. Father de la Motte, Sir Joscelyn Giffard and I have only just seen it this morning at a meeting of the high council. This is strictly confidential, Alan. You must tell nobody. Give me your word you will not repeat any of this.’
‘What was in it?’
‘Give me your word you will remain silent about this.’
I gave it. Twice in a dozen hours I had been sworn to silence by those I loved.
‘The letter is quite clear,’ said Robin. ‘John is not coming. Perhaps he never truly intended to relieve us. Despite all his assurances to de Lacy, the King will not come to our aid.’
Chapter Thirty-three
I stared at Robin. ‘All this then has been in vain? How, how…’
‘The letter was lobbed over the walls last night, roped to a trebuchet ball. It is genuine. Captured from one of the King’s messengers, apparently, some months ago. I know John’s seal well enough to tell it is real. De Lacy does too. There is no doubt about it. But listen to me, Alan: no one in the castle must know – for now. My lord de Lacy has threatened death to anyone who speaks of this.’
‘What did it say?’
‘He orders de Lacy to hold out as long as he can and then do what he thinks best. It seems clear that, even back then, even before Christmas, he had no intention of coming to our rescue. He abandoned us to our doom three months ago.’
‘Do what he thinks best? De Lacy must do what he thinks best? Then surely there is no point in continuing the fight. We can make terms. Philip will accept our surrender, I am sure of it. He does not want to lose any more men. If de Lacy were to send out heralds—’
‘De Lacy is determined to fight to the end.’
‘What?’ I was utterly astounded. ‘For God’s sake, why?’
‘God knows. He says he has made a vow to hold the castle and swears he will hold it – come what may. His honour is at stake, he says. I say he’s a vainglorious, mutton-headed idiot.’
‘So we must all die for his honour?’
‘No.’
I looked at my lord. ‘What then?’
‘I’m working on that. Give me a little time and I will find a way to get us out of this place. I’m not going to die for a faithless King, nor for a bloody-minded baron with a death-wish – and neither are you, and neither are any more of my men, if I can possibly help it. Give me a day to get something in place. Can you do that, Alan? Can you hold this breach for a day, for me?’
I swallowed. ‘I’ll try, my lord.’
‘Hold this for one day, for one single day, Alan, and I promise you, I’ll get us out of here this very night.’
When Robin left me, I looked out through the U-shaped rubble lip of the breach at the shut gates of the middle bailey, a mere forty yards away, and the walls either side where hundreds of curious French heads were watching us from the battlements.
I looked behind me at the roof of the keep where I could see nearly a score of Robin’s archers and a dozen crossbowmen. I could even make out the shape of the twin arms of Old Thunderbolt, and Aaron bent by its side, fussing over something. Perhaps we might just be able to hold back the enemy for one day, I thought. Given a big slice of luck. I had no choice but to trust Robin. And I did. He would get us out of there tonight, I was sure of it. All I had to do was hold the breach.
For a day.
I squinted at the stone bridge that jutted out of the half-demolished gatehouse and spanned the deep ditch around the whole of the inner bailey. The bridge was narrow – only two yards wide – and the French would have to funnel their men across it before they could come at the hole in our walls.
It was a killing ground.
‘Father de la Motte tells me you made a gift to the wounded of a handsome parcel of viands,’ said de Lacy. I had not noticed his approach. He was standing behind me in full mail, sword at his hip, looking furious.
‘Would you care to tell me how you came about such a cornucopia?’
I looked him in the eye, thinking, You would kill me for your personal honour, would you? You would hold out to the last man in this doomed place to satisfy your lust for glory? But I actually said, ‘I cannot tell you, sir’ – quite truthfully. I could not tell him because I could not allow Tilda to be hanged for the crimes of her father and Benedict. Anyway, after the terrible news Robin had given me, I did not much feel like giving him the whole truth.
‘I found the food in one of the storehouses,’ I said, again truthfully. ‘And I brought it directly to Father de la Motte in the infirmary – did I do wrong?’
Before de Lacy could reply, I saw movement over his shoulder and said, ‘I think, sir, that we have more to worry about than a few crumbs of food. Look.’
The doors in the gatehouse in the middle bailey swung slowly inwards until they were wide open and through them I could see the flattish patch of ground outside it where the Useless Mouths had gathered and begged for readmission. Once again it was teeming with agitated folk – this time not starving supplicants but an enemy host. Hundreds of men-at-arms, perhaps half a thousand. Drawn up in
squares and columns outside the gates and disappearing from view down on the slope below the castle: foot soldiers with long spears, Genoese crossbowmen with their out-sized shields, conrois of knights bright in mail and coloured surcoats.
All the might of Philip’s army arrayed for war.
De Lacy told me I was to command a squad of thirty men-at-arms to hold the left side of the breach until I was relieved. Sir Joscelyn was to hold the right with a similar force and de Lacy would hold the middle with the largest squad of forty men. Not counting the bowmen, about two-thirds of the castle’s uninjured men were engaged in holding the breach – the remaining third, some fifty men in total, manned the battlements of the inner bailey and formed a reserve that could be brought in to plug gaps or relieve any section that required it.
There could be no thought of surrender, de Lacy told us all.
I gathered my Wolves on the left of the breach, keeping them in the shelter of the tumbled stones of the gatehouse and behind its remaining wall. While the castle-breakers were idle, there was no guarantee the French had not just paused in their bombardment in order to tempt us to line the open breach with our precious flesh and blood, whereupon they might resume their onslaught and smash their missiles through our ranks.
I looked to my right and saw Sir Joscelyn and his band of knights and men-at-arms. He refused to meet my eye. I wondered what the men he commanded would say if they knew that he and his accomplice Sir Benedict Malet had been quietly stealing and eating their food for months. They would rip him limb from limb – and rightly so. But I could say nothing without endangering the life of Tilda. I bit my tongue. Now that I looked at Sir Joscelyn I could see he was in better condition than the other men in his squad. And Benedict, too, who was acting as his second-in-command that day, had not lost a pound from his ample frame. How had I failed to notice this? In a garrison that was now, to a man, whip thin, faces gaunt, skin tight over bones, how had I not seen the glow of good health on these two men? There would be a reckoning, I told myself, but not on this day, not on this day of battle. To hold the breach, we needed every man – even greedy, thieving scoundrels.