by Angus Donald
The object of her affections? Osric. Her distant cousin, my rotund bailiff, has brought joy to her heart after several fumbling weeks of a courtship, which was often almost too painful for an old man to watch. Finally, she consented to his ponderous advances, and now she has moved into the small guest hall on the far side of the courtyard, where he and his sons reside, and talks of a marriage in the spring. I am glad for her but I cannot say I understand why she loves him: he is an ugly plodder, a painstaking dullard, in whom the last ember of youth has long been extinguished. He is one of the last people on earth I would choose to spend my remaining years with; while she, only five years younger than him, still has the waist and wits of a saucy young maiden. But love him she does. What can it be that has aroused her ardour?
‘He is a good man, Alan, and that is why I have chosen to wed him. He is steady, honest and caring, and he will never leave me,’ Marie told me with a smug smile, ‘and I want you love him, too. He has saved Westbury with his hard work; you must try to think of him as another son.’
That, I think, is unlikely. But, for Marie’s sake, I will try to behave a little more warmly towards him.
Christmas is approaching: the season of feasts and frivolity. We have slaughtered most of the pigs and great round hams, sides of bacon and long strings of plump sausages hang from an iron ring, drying and smoking above the fire in the centre of the hall. We have more than enough firewood for the winter; Osric and his sons spent a week clearing dead timber from the copse by the stream and hauling it with ox teams to the hall. The buttery is stacked with barrels of good wine from Aquitaine, and Marie has been baking huge game pies and fat pastries out on the big oven in the courtyard. We had the first snowfall last week and more is coming: perhaps strangely, I am looking forward to a really good snowstorm, to being snug in my hall with a roaring fire and plenty to eat and drink.
There is one dark cloud on my horizon: Osric has reported to me that Dickon, my elderly swineherd, has been stealing from me. Apparently, a few weeks after the sows have farrowed, he quite often takes one of the piglets away from its mother and either sells it for meat or, if it is old enough, fattens it himself for his pot. He always claims that the mother pig has rolled on her offspring while asleep and that the piglet has died, and as my sows can have anywhere between eight and sixteen piglets in a litter, nobody has noticed the crime until now. Dickon, that one-armed old fool, was drunkenly boasting of it in the ale house, and Osric overheard him. Now Osric wants to raise a jury of twelve men from the village and have Dickon tried for his crimes at the next manor court, just before Christmas. I am troubled about this: is a piglet here or there so much to worry about? I have not missed them in the past and I still have many breeding pigs, and as much pork meat as I require, and more. Marie says there is a principle at stake here, that I am too soft with the villeins, and it is my fault that I let Westbury decline so much in the years before Osric arrived. As lord of the manor, she says, the villeins should fear and respect me, how else will they refrain from robbing me blind and laughing up their sleeves? Osric says that, as Dickon has over the years laid his one good hand on chattels of mine worth more than a shilling, I could have him prosecuted for a felony: if found guilty, the penalty for old Dickon would then be death by hanging. I sometimes wonder to myself what Robin would do in these circumstances. Would he have a man hanged for a piglet? In the old Sherwood days, to even touch Robin’s money chest was a death sentence. The manor court is to be held two weeks from now: I must think on this some more before then.
I do find it touching, if utterly bewildering, to watch Marie and Osric together: she so happy and girlish; he a great blundering mole-faced booby. Under my brows, I observe their tender glances, the way they fondle each other’s hands and arms, discreetly, whenever possible. It reminds me of my own first true love, of the first time I felt that breathtaking, swooping feeling, the hollow-ness in my chest in the presence of my beloved, the soaring joy at her smile, and the physical ache at her absence. I think, foolish old man that I am, that I’m in truth a little jealous of their happiness.
When I talk of my own first love, I do not, of course, mean with Reuben’s daughter Ruth, God rest her soul. I knew her only for a few days, in extraordinary, appalling circumstances, and if I felt any long-lasting emotions over her death, the uppermost one was guilt. I had liked her, admired her beauty and, wanting to play-act the chivalrous knight, promised to guard her life with my own. I broke my promise. In the months that followed I felt a huge pressing sense of guilt at her death, like a lead cope around my shoulders - and a wheeling flock of unanswerable questions circled inside my head: what if I had been quicker with my sword? Should I have fled the bailey of York Castle when I did? Would it have been more honourable to have stayed and died with her? I felt a little spike of hatred, too - for Robin. I fully believed that he could have saved her had he chosen to, though it would probably have meant abandoning Reuben to his doom.
I spoke to my solid friend Tuck on our return to Bradfield, at length and in private. Or as private as one can be in a castle packed with four hundred men all busily preparing for a long campaign.
‘He’s a deeply practical man,’ Tuck said to me after I had told him the story and revealed my feelings of shame, guilt and anger. We were sitting side by side on a great wooden coffer in the gloomy north-east corner of St Nicholas’s church. ‘And there is not much room in his heart for sentimentality. He sees that something needs to be done and he does it, regardless of the cost to himself or anyone else. As we both know well, he can be utterly ruthless.’
There were a handful of archers standing near the font while the priest, an innocuous but slightly silly man named Simon, blessed their bows with holy water before our departure for war, but the men were out of earshot. ‘And you must ask yourself, Alan - honestly - what would have been achieved by saving the girl?’ the monk said. I looked at Tuck, in confusion. Surely saving the girl, or any human life, was a noble end in itself?
‘I mean, if you take the longer view,’ he said. He had the good grace to drop his eyes, but he struggled on despite his evident feelings of shame: ‘By saving Reuben, Robin preserved this army. Without Reuben’s Jewish friends in Lincoln, who have since lent us a dragon’s hoard of silver, we would not be able to leave for France next month to join in the Great Pilgrimage to save the Holy Land. If he had saved the girl, but lost Reuben, well, without wages our soldiers here would slip away back to their homes, or take to the forests as footpads, and the army would have disintegrated; Robin would have disappointed King Richard, disobeyed him in truth. He would be out of favour; he might even have been outlawed again for dereliction of duty. No, as you have described it, with so many enemies about him, and so little time, he was bound to save Reuben ...’
I glared stonily at the floor. Tuck remained quiet for a while and then he said: ‘Remember that, even when we can’t see it or understand it, Almighty God always has a plan, Alan. Perhaps this poor girl had to die so that Robin might lead his men to recapture holy Jerusalem for the True Faith.’
I could see the point Tuck was making, although I did not want to acknowledge it; and I still felt a knot of anger in my gut at the seemingly easy way Robin had made up his mind to sacrifice the girl.
‘Tell me honestly, Tuck,’ I said at last, ‘will Ruth be received by Our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven. Surely she was an innocent soul?’
Tuck sighed, a long low exhalation like the last breath of a dying man; then he looked up at me, his kindly, nut-brown gaze meeting mine. ‘I fear not,’ he said finally. ‘She was a Jew and, as Our Lord has taught us, the only way to find a place in Heaven is through His grace.’ I looked away from Tuck, tears pricking my eyes, and found I was staring at a great painting of Christ on the Cross on the church wall, a beautiful image of the Saviour suffering and dying for our sins. I was grateful that Tuck had not lied to me. Then, to my surprise, he went on: ‘But God is ineffable and all merciful, Alan, and his forgiveness is boundless. In Hi
s wisdom, He may perhaps see fit to take her to His bosom.’
I was comforted by his words. Christ preached love - and how could he fail to show His love to one who was so clearly an innocent, slaughtered by fiends possessed by the Devil.
We rode out of Kirkton on the last day of April, heading for Southampton to take ship to Normandy. Robin rode at the front of a long double line of horsemen, a hundred and two men strong, each clad in newly burnished chainmail and square-topped, riveted steel helmet, and armed with big kite-shaped shield, a sword and a twelve-foot lance. Beside Robin rode Sir James de Brus, the cavalry commander, scowling as usual and grumbling to himself as he twisted in the saddle and surveyed the ranks of our mounted men-at-arms. Behind the cavalry came the archers, one hundred and eighty-five men carrying long bowstaves, full arrow bags and short swords, laughing and joking but walking briskly in the spring sunshine. They were Owain’s pride and joy, men selected by him for their strength and skill with a war bow, who as the grizzled Welsh captain boasted, ‘could put a bodkin point between a man’s eyes at a hundred paces, and another in his belly before he fell to the ground’.
Next came the baggage train, ten big wagons pulled by huge, slow-moving oxen, and loaded impossibly high with food, wine, ale, tents, clothing, horse gear and extra weapons. Four of the ox wagons carried only arrow shafts, in bundles of a dozen, piled high and lashed tight to each lumbering wooden vehicle. Last of all came the rear-guard, ninety-three leather-jacketed spearmen commanded by Little John, with sixteen-foot broad-headed weapons, sharp hand axes in their belts and their old-fashioned round shields slung on their backs. They were responsible for the safety of the baggage train, and for driving the herd of sheep that would feed us en route, and they had orders to move at their own pace rather than try to keep up with the main body of Robin’s men.
Our mood was high as a hunting falcon: we were setting off on a noble task, doing God’s work and with the prospect of adventure, glory, loot and loose women ahead of us, and the promise of Heaven for any who died in battle. There wasn’t a soldier among us who did not feel proud to be part of our company. Swept up in the excitement of our leave-taking, I had temporarily forgotten that I was angry with Robin; the shade of Ruth grew fainter and I rode behind him and Sir James with the glorious sense of a great and exciting journey begun.
Joy, though, was not universal. Beside me rode Reuben. He seemed to have aged ten years since the terrible days at York Castle, and if I am honest, though he was only in his middle thirties, he was beginning to look like an old man, his lean brown face cut with fresh deep lines of grief. Robin had persuaded him to join us on this great mission to the Holy Land as our treasurer and Robin’s personal physician, and Reuben, perhaps because he was too dispirited to argue, had consented to accompany us and look after the financial matters of Robin’s army, and to tend to my master’s health. He told me in a dull voice that now that his daughter was dead, he had nothing in England to hold him here, and he longed to see his desert homeland once more before he grew too old. He rarely spoke now, and when I looked over into his red-eyed face as we rode along that spring morning, I realised that once again he had been weeping, and I felt a twinge of my old guilt.
At Kirkton, we left behind us Goody, Marie-Anne and Robin’s newly born son and heir, Hugh. The Countess of Locksley had given birth two weeks before our departure; the labour had been long, a full day closeted in her chamber with Goody, a serving maid and the wise crone from the village, with only the odd stifled moan and request for more hot water making its way through to the hall. Robin, as was his habit when his raw emotions might expect to be engaged, had remained icily calm through out the experience, waiting hour after hour in the hall, reading a scroll of romances in a large ornately carved chair, almost a throne, and occasionally summoning me to sing to him or talk of inconsequential things. He ate and drank very little and did not move from his position in the chair until Goody threw open the door of the chamber and came running out, eyes sparkling, face clay-red, shouting: ‘It’s a boy, Robin, a healthy boy. Oh, come and see. Come and meet him. He is so beautiful.’
Robin’s son was a lusty child with light blue eyes and jet black hair and the squashed face of a monkey. To me, little Hugh did not look in the slightest bit beautiful and I was puzzled at first that the child should have this colouring: Robin had light brown hair and Marie had chestnut locks. But Goody explained the facts of nature to me, as we stood together over the cradle in Robin and Marie-Anne’s chamber a day or so later.
‘Oh Alan, you men know nothing about babies’ — this was from a twelve-year-old maiden - ‘some babies are just born with black hair. I was myself, or so my mother told me. And look at me now.’ She twirled in front of me, her Saxon-blonde hair, which had been tied in two braids either side of her pink cheeks, swinging as she moved.
I reached out and took a braid in my hand as it swung past me; it was the colour of spun gold but soft as feathers. Goody snatched it back. ‘I said “look” not “touch”.’ Suddenly she was all busy-ness. ‘Now Alan, I need you out of the way, we have to make the place properly clean for the baby,’ and she shooed me briskly out of the chamber like a middle-aged goodwife dealing with an unruly schoolboy.
Travelling as part of an army is obviously a very different experience to journeying as a lone man, or as part of a small group, as I had been used to. We carried with us a sense of sprawling menace that nothing could dispel even in our own land. Shepherds would flee before us on the peaceful downs, and villagers would bar their doors and shutter their windows at our approach, even in the tranquil southern counties of England. It was not so long ago - grandfathers could clearly recall it - that, during the Anarchy of Stephen and Maud, gangs of armed men would roam the land, pillaging at will. And country folk have long memories.
But we did not despoil our own people; we had plenty of supplies, thanks to the loans of silver from Reuben’s friends, and each night when we made camp in a fallow field or common wood, we killed an animal or two and roasted the mutton and made merry. My music was in great demand. Almost every night, I would be called upon to sing and play for my supper, and I was glad to do so. I sang the old country songs, for the most part. Amusing peasant ditties about unfaithful husbands and angry wives, songs of the farmer and his beasts, or tales of great battles fought long ago by King Arthur and his knights. The cansos and sirvantes, the songs of courtly love and satirical poems that I used to sing in the halls of the nobility, were less popular with the rough soldiery. Occasionally, Robin would call his officers together and we would dine and make plans for the next few days or weeks, and at the end of our gatherings I would indulge my audience in a more sophisticated musical offering: there was one I was particularly proud of which I composed at that time. The song tells of a beautiful golden brooch, with a pin in the shape of a sword, worn by a noble lady. The brooch is in love with the domina whose breast he adorns — and guards from the touch of another lover - but of course there can never be true love between a jewel, however beautiful, and a great lady, the brooch can only ever serve his mistress, he can never possess her, but he is content with this role. Tragically, at the end of the canso, the brooch is cast away by the lady, who says she has grown tired of it, and the bright jewel rests in a deep, muddy ditch, remembering its love until Judgment Day.
You might think that my mood was particularly black when I wrote that song of talking jewellery and tragic love, but in truth, I was feeling very optimistic. My relations with Robin were more or less back to normal. I had decided to forgive him - I told myself that I must strive to be a loyal vassal and support all of his decisions, whether I agreed with them or not - and I was happy in the company with the other captains and vintenars, with the exception of James de Brus. But that was no problem: I was merely courteous and distant with the Scotsman, and he with me. And I had a new body servant, which made me feel very grand. William - the boy who had helped me steal the ruby from Sir Ralph Murdac - had been summoned from Nottingham Cas
tle. The loyal fellow had been regularly sending verbal reports on the activities of Murdac through some mysterious network of Robin’s spies and as a reward, as we marched past Nottingham on our way south, young William had joined us as my manservant. He was a diligent lad, quick-moving and eager to please, very intelligent, though with a slight stammer, and good at anticipating my requirements. He kept my applewood vielle and its horsehair bow, a much prized gift from my old musical mentor Bernard, in a highly polished state and he was always on hand to fetch and carry. He was a grave boy, though, only smiling rarely and never up to the high jinks that I indulged in when I was his age. But I liked him, and I was glad of his service.
The one cloud in my sky was that Tuck was not accompanying us on this great adventure. Partly as a result of William’s reports - Murdac had apparently repeated his offer of a hundred pounds of silver for Robin’s head - Robin had asked Tuck to remain at Kirkton Castle to watch over Marie-Anne and the baby with his two enormous, battle-trained wolfhounds Gog and Magog. These great beasts could tear the arm off a man as easily as I could tear the leg off a boiled capon, but they were as mild as the Baby Jesus around Tuck’s friends. Robin had also left a score of bowmen, ten cavalrymen and ten veteran spearmen as a garrison. It was not enough to hold the bailey of the castle but, if attacked, as I well knew from my experiences in York, they were a big enough force to hold the strong keep.
Instead of my friend, the jolly fighting monk, we were accompanied by Father Simon, the priest of St Nicholas’s Church in Kirkton - a man I did not particularly care for, who seemed to have been born without a chin; his mouth merged seamlessly into his neck, almost as if somebody had removed his lower jaw. Father Simon held brief prayers every morning before we marched, mumbled in bad Latin and incomprehensible to the men, and on Sundays he sang Holy Mass, out of tune, I may say, for the whole army. I got the distinct feeling that he did not like Robin much; in fact, I could sometimes imagine that he hated him, although like any sensible mortal who wished to remain on this earth a while longer, he feared my master and treated him with respect.