Once through the portals, we entered the crowded, narrow streets of Vendôme, bustling with traders and ringing with the cries of its citizens. Apart from the occasional jovial curse as we forced our horses through the throng, we were almost ignored. The people seemed to have no fear of us, which I found rather odd, given that we came from a mighty and victorious army that was camped less than a mile away. Ahead of us, I could see the tall spire of the Abbey Church of the Holy Trinity – seat of Cardinal Heribert – and beyond, half a mile to the south of the abbey, the stone walls of the castle, glowering over the town from a prominence at its most southerly point. Shortly we clattered across a second wooden bridge and found ourselves riding beside the walls of the abbey itself.
I called, ‘God be with you, sir,’ to Aymeric de St Maur, who was at the head of the column, and he turned in the saddle and raised a friendly hand in salute. I had told him that, rather than accompanying the embassy to the castle where the negotiations were to take place with Lord Bouchard, Count of Vendôme, I would be heading straight for the abbey. And a few moments later, Hanno, Thomas and I were dismounted and pounding the big brass bell outside the porter’s lodge of that venerable religious house.
I gave my name to the hosteller, whose duty it was to welcome guests to the abbey, mentioning briefly that I had been acquainted with Brother Dominic. He greeted me with joy, embracing me and thanking me for saving the old monk’s life. Evidently the poor fellow had been in communication with the abbey while his feet had been healing. Then I had to deliver the sad news that Brother Dominic was dead – murdered by unknown hands – and I told the hosteller that I needed to speak to the Cardinal, hinting perhaps just a little dishonestly that it concerned Dominic’s death. I felt guilty about that, but reasoned that if I told the Cardinal my true reason for wanting to speak to him, and he had something to hide, I might well find myself escorted out of the abbey, never to be admitted again. Needs must when the Devil drives.
The hosteller sent a novice scurrying away to relay my information to the Cardinal’s secretary and to see if I might be granted an audience. In the meantime, our horses were taken away and stabled, and Hanno, Thomas and I were ushered into the refectory, offered cold spring water and rye bread with butter, and asked to wait.
After a while, the hosteller returned and told me that His Grace would see me, but only for a few moments as he had been summoned to the castle to take part in the negotiations for the surrender of Vendôme to King Richard. I nearly kicked myself – I had made a silly mistake. Of course the Cardinal would be required to receive the embassy! But I quickly stammered out my gratitude that I might be permitted a few moments of the prelate’s time before he departed for the castle.
Leaving Hanno and Thomas in the refectory, I followed the hosteller across a large well-swept courtyard to the Cardinal’s palace, a huge stone building on three storeys that, after the abbey church, was the largest structure in the vicinity. Once inside, I was swiftly shown into the presence of the great man himself.
Cardinal Heribert was enormous – perhaps the fattest man I have ever seen, a mountain of flesh with a baby’s head on top, dusted with light brown hair. I knew that he must be at least fifty, but he had the face of a man half that age. Had it not been for his huge, wobbling bulk, he could almost have been a young fellow of my own generation. When I was shown into his private chamber on the second floor, he was seated in a vast chair by a bay window, wrapped in a scarlet robe but bareheaded, clutching a big goblet of wine in one hand, while stroking a fluffy, white-haired lapdog with the other. I was announced, I bowed, and then went forward to kiss the hand, and the enormous jewelled golden ring squeezed on to his pudgy middle finger, that was extended towards me; it smelled of damp dog.
‘God’s peace be upon you, my son,’ said the Cardinal in a kindly tone. He had a surprisingly high voice for such a large man, and he wheezed slightly when he spoke – but his beady bright blue eyes, sunk deeply in the flesh of his face, glittered with a feverish, cruel intelligence.
‘Thank you, Your Grace, for seeing me,’ I said, releasing his massive, doughy hand and standing straight and tall in front of him. I was wearing my finest clothes – a dark blue tunic, scarlet hose, and soft black kidskin slippers – my jaw-length blond hair had been washed the previous day, and well-combed before dawn, I had been shaved by Thomas and I carried no weapons save for a small eating knife in a sheath at my waist.
‘I can only spare you a few minutes, my son, but I did wish to thank you personally for saving the life of our dear Brother Dominic – may he rest in Heaven. He was a good man called to God before his time. Do you have any knowledge of who it might have been who murdered him?’
‘Your Grace, I must confess that I do not, although I have my suspicions … But I must admit that it is not truly the matter of Brother Dominic’s death that brings me to you today. My name is—’
‘I know who you are,’ the Cardinal interrupted me; his voice had lost its kindly tone and cracked like a rotten branch breaking under a weight of winter snow. ‘And I know what you want. You are Sir Alan Dale – trouvère, former outlaw and liegeman of the Earl of Locksley. I know who your father was, too – that accursed thief Henri d’Alle – and I did not believe even for a moment that you came here to console me for the loss of one elderly monk.’
He glared at me, wheezing slightly in his passion, his tiny blue eyes like chips of smashed glass.
‘Let us speak plainly now, Sir Alan,’ he said, clearly trying to master himself. ‘I know the true reason why you are here today. You have it, do you not? You have that wondrous object that your father stole from me. You have it – and you wish to sell it back to me and make your fortune, that’s your grubby little design, is it not, you thief-spawned wretch? Tell me now, do not waste any more of my time, what is your price?’
I was stunned by the Cardinal’s words, and utterly bemused by his angry tone. I had to haul my jaw shut to stop myself looking like a straw-chewing yokel.
‘No, Your Grace,’ I stammered. ‘I swear to you, you are quite wrong. I do not wish to sell you anything. I have nothing to sell – nothing; I come to you seeking only information about my father.’
The Cardinal cocked his baby’s head on one side and examined me. For a long moment he remained silent and then he said: ‘Nothing to sell? Nothing?’ He peered at me for a while longer, his glass-chip eyes running up and down the length of my body. ‘Then you truly do not have it? You do not possess the – object.’
I shook my head.
‘I believe you, by Christ’s wounds, I honestly do—’ The Cardinal sounded as if he had surprised himself. ‘You might be the greatest liar in Christendom, and I the greatest fool, but I believe you. You really do not have it, do you?’
‘I do not know what this object is to which you refer.’ I was thinking: another candlestick? Whoever described a candlestick, even a golden one, as wondrous?
‘It leaves a mark, a special mark on all those who possess it – and you have no sign of that, none at all. But tell me: why should I indulge you in this? Why should I help you? You – the son of a man who stole from me; the son of a God-damned thief? I should have you whipped and thrown out of here this instant!’
I straightened my shoulders and locked eyes with him; a rougher edge entered my voice. ‘I believe my father was falsely accused. He is dead now – murdered in England these ten years past – and I believe that he was killed on the orders of the real thief. He is a powerful man, this true thief – a “man you cannot refuse”.
‘You ask why you should help me: I will tell you. If I am able to discover the identity of the true thief – and I shall in time – then I may be able to return to you this “wondrous” object of which you speak, whatever it is. Is that not a reason why you should aid me?’
The door of the chamber opened and a monk came into the room, a secretary of some kind. ‘Your Grace,’ he said, ‘Your Grace, it is time. We must be away.’
The Cardinal ig
nored the interruption completely and continued to stare at me. ‘Yes, I see that,’ he said. ‘Yes, you have given me good reason. I cannot think what you might seek to gain by coming here, were you a liar. Very well, I will make you a bargain. I will tell you everything that I know about your father this evening after Vespers when I return from greeting the King’s embassy at the castle – and for your part you will do a service for me in return. Are we agreed?’
‘Your Grace,’ said the monk by the door, ‘we really must make haste …’
‘What is it that you wish for me to do?’ I said. I could not imagine what this fat, old, immensely wealthy and powerful prelate could possibly want from me.
‘I want you to sing for me,’ he said, his tiny blue eyes in that oddly young face twinkling in the sunlight from the window – and suddenly I could imagine what he must have looked like as a boy, a naughty young boy. ‘Will you do that, Sir Alan? I have heard that you – like your father – have an exquisite voice. “The finest trouvère at King Richard’s court,” I heard you called the other day. Sing for me and I shall tell you all I know. Do we have a bargain?’
I smiled; it pleased me that my fame as a musician had travelled so far, and I bowed deeply in acceptance.
Heribert, the Cardinal of Vendôme, left for the castle in an enormous chair suspended from two stout poles and carried by four brawny porters. The chair was surrounded by a gaggle of brown-clad monks and guarded by four yawning men-at-arms in the Cardinal’s livery. It was mid-morning when the procession bearing the great man left the abbey gates and began to make its way through the crowded streets of Vendôme, south to the castle. I returned to the big refectory to await the midday meal with Thomas and Hanno; I did not expect the Cardinal to return until after dark. After we had eaten, Hanno, Thomas and I changed into rough clothes and entertained the abbey folk with a demonstration of armed combat in the courtyard – a worthwhile practice for Hanno and myself, and a daily lesson for young Thomas. As the monks of Vendôme stood around in a circle and gawped at us delightedly, Hanno and I mock-fought with sword and dagger, mace and shield, until we dripped with sweat; and Thomas was made to perform a repetitive series of manoeuvres with sword and shield to burn the basic patterns of attack and defence into his very muscles. I had learnt this way myself, from an old Saxon warrior in Sherwood – and while I had hated it at the time, the old man had carved the lunges, blocks, strikes and parries of the swordsman into my soul. And when I am attacked with a blade, even to this day, even now that I am an old man myself, the block and counter-blow comes to me as naturally as my next breath.
However, the learning did not all flow in one direction. Thomas, although he was still a lad, and not yet come into his full strength, had devised a method of wrestling entirely by himself that, he claimed, cunningly used a bigger man’s strength against him. And so, in time, we put away the blades, bludgeons and shields, and Thomas instructed us in a few of his simpler moves: tripping an opponent over backwards; grappling him and throwing him over your hip; and a move to combat a man who attacks you from behind by leaning forward, head down, and pulling him over your right shoulder, a move that much resembles a man-at-arms taking his hauberk off after a day’s hard fighting.
We passed the afternoon in sport; then we washed in the abbey bath-house. I had resumed my outer finery, and was just settling down in a quiet part of the cloister with my vielle, tuning the strings of the instrument and preparing a few of my favourite verses for my recital for the Cardinal, when a great hubbub erupted from the courtyard. The cries grew louder – a wailing and shouting that almost certainly indicated extreme grief – and so I replaced my vielle in its velvet bag, slung it on my back and went to investigate.
The abbey courtyard was in total uproar – monks were running here and there, shouting their sorrow to the skies. The bell of the abbey-church was tolling a slow, dolorous beat; the senior monks had fallen to their knees on the beaten-earth floor of the courtyard and were praying aloud – and in the centre of that space was the Cardinal’s huge chair, with the Cardinal still enthroned within it. His little eyes were half-open, his head cocked to one side and lolling backwards, the front of his red robe was sheeted with wet blood and it was clear that the big man was dead. I walked towards the chair and its vast dead occupant, but when I got to within a yard or two, I felt a hand on my arm that stopped my progress and turned to see the anxious face of the hosteller at my shoulder.
‘Sir Alan,’ he said, ‘it is not seemly that you disturb His Grace.’
I looked at him, feeling as if I was in some kind of awful dream, and said: ‘I believe that he is well beyond disturbing now, Brother; I only wish to see how he died.’
The monk frowned: ‘I think that in the pain of our loss, perhaps inquisitive strangers should not be among us,’ he said. ‘We must wash our Cardinal, and bind up his wounds, and prepare his body for burial. I beg you to allow us to be alone with our grief.’ It was polite, I must admit, but I was being firmly asked to leave the abbey forthwith.
‘Before I go, can you tell me what happened to him?’
The monk seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then he said: ‘Cardinal Heribert was set upon by footpads in his own city. He was returning to the abbey from the castle after dinner and a gang of armed men, routiers, gutter scum, men of the lowest sort, attacked his procession. His men-at-arms were swiftly killed and the monks driven away by these vermin – may God strike them down!’ The hosteller paused and gulped; there were tears in his eyes – and I had no doubt that his grief was genuine.
‘They stole his ring,’ the hosteller blurted out, and I turned again to the gigantic corpse in the chair. I saw that the index finger, the damp, dog-smelling finger that had once borne a proud jewelled ring, had been roughly severed at the knuckle. I looked further up his body, and saw through the blood-crusted scarlet robe a dark hole, a stab wound a little to the left of his sternum, made by a dagger thrust directly into his heart.
Hanno was at my shoulder: he leaned forward to peer closely at the wound in the Cardinal’s chest. ‘It is perfect,’ he said. ‘It is the perfect kill – a single blow, exactly on target, resulting in instant death. Perfect!’
I gathered up my men, our horses and possessions, and we made our way as quickly as we could out of the city of Vendôme. The sun was touching the western horizon and I knew the town gates would be closed at dusk; but I had worse concerns than being locked inside the city for the night. As the three of us cantered through the gates, across the wooden bridge and on to the road leading north towards King Richard’s encampment, one thought was flapping around in my head like a panicked bird trapped in a bedchamber. Three clerics were dead; three innocent men of God had been murdered, and every time I tried to find out about my father, another man died. Somebody was trying to prevent me from learning any more about the life of Henri d’Alle – and that somebody was prepared to kill indiscriminately, even to kill those protected by Holy Mother Church, protected by God himself, to prevent me from finding out the truth.
Chapter Nine
There was no sign of Robin when I reached our camp. I found Little John with two of the Locksley farriers, helping the men to shoe a dozen of our company’s horses. I only heard about half of that conversation with John, for it was punctuated by ringing blows of a hammer on an anvil as the head farrier struggled to get his task done as quickly as possible. We were expecting to fight the French in the morning and Robin wanted his cavalry all to be well-shod for the coming encounter. The Earl of Locksley himself, I gathered through the clanging of red-hot iron and the hiss of burning hoof, was out scouting the enemy positions and would not be back in camp any time soon, and so I left Little John to his work and retired to my tent to think.
It seemed to me that Father Jean in Verneuil and Cardinal Heribert in Vendôme had both been killed by the same man, and in the same manner – a single dagger thrust to the heart. I was not sure about Brother Dominic – I still felt that it might be possible that he had be
en killed by Mercadier. And then it occurred to me that all three might have been Mercadier’s victims. But why? I could understand – though not, of course, forgive – the murder of Brother Dominic. That was a strike at me to pay me back for spoiling his vicious fun when I rescued the old monk from his tormentors; I could see that I might have injured Mercadier’s pride or his standing before his men by my actions and that he might wish to make a statement about his power. But why should he also want to kill a powerless small-town priest or a powerful cardinal? It made no sense.
As I lay on my pallet thinking hard, I found that there was something digging into my back. I fished around behind me in the blankets and pulled out a hunting horn. In the guttering light of a tallow candle, I examined its long, twisted shape, the sheen of the polished cow’s horn, and the elegant silver mouthpiece – it was the horn that Robin had given me on the march through the Perche, telling me to sound it if I needed any help while I was flushing out phantom ambushers. In my contemplative mood, I turned this object over in my hands. In a way, I thought, it symbolized Robin himself: elegant, even beautiful, a noble shape yet twisted, and dependent on silver to make it work.
I chuckled to myself: these were not thoughts that I would have been happy to articulate aloud to my lord himself. I hung the horn by its leather strap on the pommel of my saddle, which was on its stand beside the bed, and wrenched my mind back to the subject at hand.
Someone – presumably the ‘man you cannot refuse’ or one of his agents – had killed three men of God to prevent me from discovering any more about my father. And it had worked. I had found out little enough about his time in Notre-Dame and his expulsion from Paris. All that I had learned from Heribert was that whatever had been stolen had been ‘wondrous’ – a relic of some sort, perhaps, a drop of milk from the breast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a fragment of the True Cross, a hair from John the Baptist’s beard or some such treasure; whatever it was, it was certainly something that the Cardinal was very keen to have returned to him. It seemed clear that the candlesticks, however valuable, were not the real objects of the theft after all. The relic was – but why should a relic be so important that someone was prepared to kill three men of God to keep me ignorant?
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