“Shut your mouth, priest!”
He reached forward and lifted the scrolls Ness had laid on the table before him: the documents needed to legally take ownership of the Hospitaller’s manor.
“My lands” – Richard tore the documents in half – “remain” – he ripped them again – “mine! Your sheriff of Yorkshire and Nottingham can witness that!”
Sir Richard leaned forward all of a sudden and grabbed hold of the abbot’s robes, pulling him halfway across the table, so their faces almost touched. The big knight took the torn papers and shoved them into the face of the clergyman, grinning in satisfaction.
“And these scrolls – you can shove these up your arse!”
He pushed the abbot backwards onto his chair, but the wine had taken its toll and the churchman lost his balance, chair and torn scrolls skittering wildly, as he sprawled on the floor, his face white in shock.
Sir Henry de Faucumberg sat and enjoyed the show. He raised an eyebrow and smiled a wry farewell to Sir Richard as the Hospitaller and his sergeant stormed from the room, fists clenched.
For a while Abbot Ness simply lay on the floor: humiliated, frightened and embarrassed. Then, he began to wonder.
“Where?” he asked, almost to himself, as he grasped the arm of his chair and dragged himself into it. “Where did he get that money?”
The sheriff refilled his wine cup and waved his hand dismissively. “What does it matter? At least you have your money back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
For a while, things in the greenwood became quiet again, as the weather worsened and December began with thick, heavy snows, stopping all but the most determined traveller from passing through the outlaws’ domain.
With the weather so bad, there was little chance of the law either hunting for them or stumbling upon their camp by chance. The bailiffs and foresters in the closest towns and villages had more pressing things to attend to than a wild-goose chase in an icy forest populated by dangerous wolf’s heads.
So, Will Scarlet had led them through the frozen forest to a new campsite, previously chosen by the now dead Adam Gurdon. There were a couple of good-sized caves to store their small supplies of food and drink, or shelter in for a while if the weather got really bad, and thick trees all around against which they erected sturdy lean-tos, covered in thick hides stolen from merchants. The trees here around here were mainly yew, with juniper and holly bushes also in thick clumps. So, unlike most of the trees familiar to the outlaws, such as the oak, beech, hazel or ash, they retained much of their foliage and provided excellent shelter even in the winter, dispersing the tell-tale smoke from campfires and forming a thick protective canopy against the snow, wind and freezing December rains.
Robin wondered if the evergreen trees and bushes in this part of the forest had been planted by a previous sheriff, to provide winter cover for the animals the king loved to hunt.
The outlaws had enough food and ale to survive, with plenty of money to buy more if they could find it in the local villages. Of the money left over from their raid on John de Bray’s manor house, Robin kept most of it in the common fund, and split ten pounds fairly between the men, who used some of it to buy decent winter clothes and blankets.
Despite the cold, then, the small band of outlaws was comfortable. They spent the days training, and hunting the meagre game they managed to find. The nights were occupied by drinking ale round warm fires, laughing and telling tales, singing and playing dice. Some night’s small groups would head off to one of the larger towns to visit the inns and brothels.
Robin was glad of this, otherwise the atmosphere around the camp could have become severely strained when Matilda joined them and began to share his bed each night. As it was, he knew some of the men muttered amongst themselves, asking why Robin should be allowed his woman around the camp when none of them had such a luxury.
As a result, Robin made sure Matilda was pushed hard during combat training. He had to show the men she was a useful member of their group, not a passenger.
Thankfully, the girl was a quick learner, and made up for her lack of strength with speed and enthusiasm. She could not pull the great longbows the men used – that took literally years of practice to build the strength required – but her accuracy with a smaller-sized hunting bow was such that the other outlaws appreciated her skill. She also learned how to use a smaller quarterstaff and the short sword Robin gave her well enough.
Matilda was no killing machine, like Will or Little John or Robin himself, and she was untried in battle, but she pushed herself to show everyone she was no giggling little girl just hanging around to share a bed with their young leader.
“Ow! In the name of Christ, lass!” Will yelped as her quarterstaff deftly deflected his, before she brought it up and cracked it against his chin. “That was sore!”
The men howled with laughter as Matilda held the tip of her staff threateningly at Scarlet’s face. “That’s what you get for under-estimating me,” she smiled.
The gruff outlaw stooped to retrieve his dropped quarterstaff, his eyes remaining warily fixed on Matilda’s weapon. “Aye, I won’t be doing that again,” he muttered irritably, but his eyes glittered with good humour.
Little John nudged Robin as they watched the sparring. “Your girl’s fitted in well enough. I was worried she might not be much use – it wouldn’t take a lot for Matt Groves to start complaining and maybe turn the men sour against her.”
Robin nodded affectionately. “Aye. She can also cook a tastier rabbit stew than Tuck, which has helped keep even Matt happy enough.”
During this time, Robin was genuinely happy. Like all the outlaws, he had a deep resentment of the system that had made him a social outcast – a wolf’s head. But the camaraderie of his small group and the companionship of the girl he had loved since he was a boy made the onset of winter seem more pleasant than he would have expected.
One person in particular, though, frowned on Robin’s relationship with Matilda.
“Are you going to marry that girl, or not?” Friar Tuck demanded one morning as the pair sat eating a small breakfast of bread and cheese washed down with ale.
Robin was surprised. As far as he was concerned, he and Matilda were married. They had shared a bed. They had even shared simple vows with each other in private one night in the darkness. What else was needed?
“We are married, Tuck,” he replied, tearing into the end of his small dark loaf.
“Not in the eyes of the church, you’re not,” Tuck told him, disapprovingly. “Clandestine marriage is not recognised by Our Lord.”
Robin shrugged. Hardly anyone bothered with a church ceremony when they wed, why should he, an outlaw, care about it? Matilda was his wife as far as he was concerned.
The friar knew Robin loved the young girl. More than most men loved their partners, certainly. Still, he was a religious man, and he wanted Robin and Matilda to have their union properly blessed.
Robin didn’t really care, but he could see it was important to his friend, so he smiled at the friar and agreed to a formal ceremony.
Tuck grinned, his eyes gleaming happily, and the two men continued to eat their meal in companionable silence for a while.
“You know, Tuck…” Robin tailed off, not sure how to continue the conversation. Although he thought of Friar Tuck as a good friend, he never knew anything about the big clergyman. Not even his real name.
“Spit it out, lad!” Tuck demanded with a grin, knowing where this was going. The friar had expected this conversation ever since he had joined the outlaws, and was surprised it had taken so long for one of them to ask him about his past. It showed that they were all friends, who would put their lives on the line for each other, but would also allow one another their secrets.
“I don’t understand why you joined us,” Robin said, turning to look at the tonsured friar in puzzlement. “You had no need to, as far as I could see. Aye, we stole a lot of money from you and your friends, but…why would you jo
in us? We killed most of the guards, I doubt the abbot would expect you to have fought us all off and brought back his money, so. . ?” Robin shook his head, eyes fixed on Tuck, hoping for an answer without explicitly asking for it.
Robin wanted to know Tuck’s reasons for joining them because, like all of the other outlaws, he was curious. But Robin was also now the leader of the outlaw band, and Tuck’s willingness to join them seemed curious to him. He had to clear it up, in his own mind if nothing else.
Why would a reasonably well off friar join a band of outlaws?
“I wasn’t always a friar,” the cheerful Franciscan told him. Neither had he always been called Tuck, which was simply a nickname for the way he wore his grey robes.
“My real name is – was – Robert Stafford, and, as a young man, I was part of a travelling jongleur group.
“The group included a variety of performers and entertainments. We had the lot: minstrels and fools, acrobats, bear baiting, cock fighting, and my own particular skill: wrestling.”
There would be a large prize, dependant on the number of entrants, but generally around twenty shillings – more than a fortnight’s wages to most people – offered to the winner of the wrestling competition. The local men would pay a fee to join in, and the last man standing would walk away with the money.
“I would spend the day mingling with the locals,” Tuck set down his bread and moved his big, chubby fingers to and fro, mimicking a walking motion, “acting like one of them, and then I’d enter myself in the wrestling tournament.”
He wasn’t outlandishly tall, at a shade under six feet, or noticeably well muscled, being rather portly even back then. He was then, as now, a rather unassuming individual. He had no great charisma to draw people’s attention. So his appearance never put people off entering the competition.
“What the locals never knew was that I’m much stronger than I look, and I trained long and hard as a wrestler,” the friar went on, biting off a large chunk of cheese and swallowing some of his ale noisily. “I know how to use my body-weight, how to throw people, how to hurt them enough to stop them fighting back without damaging them. I was, generally, unbeatable, even with opponents much bigger than myself.”
In nine towns out of ten, Stafford won the wrestling, his jongleur group made a fat profit since they never had to pay the prize to the winner, and no one was any the wiser.
“I enjoyed the life.” Tuck smiled distantly. “It was easy enough – unless a town had some big hard bastard that managed to beat me – and I was well paid. I could eat and drink my fill after I’d taken care of business at each fair, and I never saw myself as a cheat. After all, if someone could beat me, they would win their twenty shillings: it was always paid out on the very few occasions it had happened.”
It was, he thought, a fair fight, one-on-one, whether the entrants knew he was a ringer or not. That was important to him, because he was, essentially, a good man, with a strong moral code. He didn’t like the idea of cheating people, so he frowned on some of the other members of his group, who used loaded dice, sleight of hand, and other unfair means of fleecing people out of their money.
For three years Robert Stafford travelled with his jongleur group, enjoying himself, until one afternoon, in the village of Elton, by the banks of the River Nene, he was discovered.
“It was inevitable, I suppose,” Tuck sighed, his wide shoulders slumping. “I’m surprised I managed to avoid detection for so long. In Elton, though, I was spotted by a man I’d beaten a few weeks before in King’s Ripton. The man realised what was going on and gathered a few of the locals together as my wrestling competition began.”
A while later, after Robert had won as usual – beating a giant, red-faced, bald man in the final round – he took himself off to the local alehouse. Supposedly, the landlady had just brewed a vat, but Stafford could tell by the liberal addition of herbs and honey this was no fresh brew.
“Not that I cared much,” he grinned sheepishly. “After a few mugs of it, cheap at just a shilling per gallon, I could have been handed a jug of piss and swallowed it gladly.”
Robin laughed as the Franciscan took a long pull of his ale and belched in appreciation.
“I knew I’d had enough so I stumbled out the door and started making my way back to our camp. I remember weaving through a really dark part of the village, near the outskirts I think, then… I never knew what hit me,” he shook his head with a wince. “I was too drunk. I just realised, suddenly, that I was lying flat on my face, in the road, with blows raining down on me from all sides.”
Instinctively, he had curled himself into a ball to protect his head and stomach, too inebriated and bewildered to even think about trying to land a blow of his own.
“It went on for a long time,” he winced, his breakfast forgotten as he recalled the pain and fear of that night. “Or at least it seemed to; maybe it was only a few seconds, I don’t know. I was vaguely aware of voices shouting at one particular person to stop. It was the man from King’s Ripton they were shouting at. He was actually crying with rage as he battered the shit out of me.”
Eventually, the locals dragged him off, before they all had to face a murder charge, and the man, his fury almost spent, shrugged off the men holding him back.
“I finally managed to get it together enough to look up at him just as he spat in my face. He shouted at me, demanding to know if I remembered him.” The friar looked at Robin with a sad smile. “I didn’t even know what day of the week it was, never mind remember one face from the hundreds I’d seen that week. I couldn’t answer, couldn’t even shake my head, so I just stared at him as he screamed in my face about how I’d stolen his money in my rigged competition. Apparently he’d owed his lord the money and had been thrown out his house – along with his family – because I’d cheated it from him… He was about as pissed as me,” Tuck sighed.Even in his intoxicated, and severely beaten, state, Tuck knew his attacker’s logic was severely flawed, but he couldn’t say anything to refute the man’s tirade, so he simply closed his eyes and wished his rapidly purpling limbs and torso weren’t beginning to hurt so badly.
The attackers faded away into the night then, thankfully, dragging the man from King’s Ripton with them to stop him killing the prone wrestler, and Stafford passed out. Some of the minstrels, themselves returning to camp after a few ales, found their jovial wrestler unconscious on the road and carried him back to his pallet.
“When I woke in the morning my whole body ached terribly, but I was lucky,” the friar smiled and shook his tonsured head ruefully, picking up his loaf again and swallowing a mouthful. “No bones were broken and my thick skull was intact, although I’m sure a number of my ribs had been cracked. One of the minstrels brought me more of the local ale with henbane in it, which alleviated the pain a bit.”
The jongleur troupe moved on the next day, to Peterborough.
Stafford never wrestled for them again. He left them a few days later, when his bruises had healed somewhat and he was able to travel on his own again.
What the King’s Ripton man had said to him had hurt Stafford deeper than any of the physical blows he had received that night.
“I knew it was a foolish case he’d made against me,” the friar grunted. “The man had obviously frittered away all his money gambling, drinking and whatever else. I hadn’t forced him to enter the wrestling competition with the last of his wages, he made that choice himself. I was just a convenient scapegoat for his miserable weaknesses.”
Robert Stafford knew all this. He was no fool.
“Yet…there had been an element of truth to what the man had said,” the clergyman admitted miserably. “Men entered the wrestling competition for fun, expecting to be up against untrained, regular men like themselves. They felt they had a fair chance of winning the prize.
“Would they have entered the competition if they had known how skilled I was? No, most of them probably wouldn’t have done.”
Stafford had never looked at i
t from their side before, and he realised now, he had cheated all those men out of their very hard-earned money. “It hadn’t been a fair fight,” he muttered, “when I’d beaten all those countless farmers, labourers, peasants and yeomen in the towns and villages. Not really.”
No, no one had forced those men to enter the competition, but they had done so expecting a fair chance to win, and that had never been the case. How many of them had left their families without food to eat that night, or behind with their rent, because Stafford had tricked them out of their day’s wages?
“The thoughts tormented me,” he confessed to his young leader. “Aye, I enjoyed fighting, and winning… but I couldn’t handle the idea that I had cheated honest men.”
So he gathered his belongings, and the money he had saved over the past three years, and left the troupe.
His savings had been quite sizeable, and he was reasonably comfortable for a while. But his attempts to find suitable employment all failed – he was too used to an easy life, and couldn’t bring himself to do back breaking labour in a field all day for just a shilling and a meal. Without any skills other than fighting, his options for employment were limited.
He had decided, without much enthusiasm, to become a mercenary. His martial skills were not limited to wrestling: he had also been trained to use a quarterstaff and a sword, and it seemed to be the only way to support himself, using the only real talent he had.
“It wasn’t my ideal career,” Tuck said. “But I thought I might be hired to guard some sweet noblewoman on her travels or something like that. You know” – he looked at Robin, his eyes twinkling – “protecting a beautiful young maid from blood-thirsty outlaws like you lot. That was my hope anyway – I hadn’t taken vows of chastity at that point.”
Wolf's Head (The Forest Lord) Page 24