He regarded the exhausted Gisburne for a moment, looked as if he was about to say something more, then seemed to dismiss it. Sighing deeply, he stared at the bottle in his hand.
“You know, I think I may save this a little longer. To toast your safe return.” And with that, he returned it carefully to his bag. Gisburne, by now too drowsy to appreciate the gesture, simply felt relief. He had already been plied with copious quantities of the good wine that Prince John had liberated from Longchamp. The fire in his blood from the assault on the Tower was now fully burnt out, and in its wake had left exhaustion. Now, with the heat from the furnace, his eyelids were drooping.
“We can’t let this occasion pass without wetting our whistles in some way, however...” said Llewellyn, diving between a pair of barrels. “I know I have some wine here. The good stuff, mind...”
There was a clatter. And a clink. After a moment of huffing and grunting, Llewellyn emerged again, a cobweb caught in his hair, a cylindrical earthenware bottle in his hands. He pulled the stopper, sniffed at the open top, and gave a growl of satisfaction. “Burgundy’s finest,” he said, and turned to his guest with a beaming smile.
But Guy of Gisburne was already asleep.
VII
Dover – 20 November, 1191
THE RECEPTION AT Dover was as icy as the weather.
There had been no fresh snow that morning, but so cold was the air that the fall of past days sat everywhere in stubborn refusal to relinquish its numbing grip. A freezing wind blew from the sea – not gusting, not giving any hint of respite, but a constant blast – hurling the tang of the sea at his face. Even before it came into view he could taste its salt on his lips, already feel, in his mind, the queasy heaving of the ship that was to carry him across its leaden, foam-streaked swell the following morning. He wondered if the ship would even set sail in such weather. Brow furrowed in concern, he shuddered, urged his steaming horse on, and tried not to acknowledge the part of him that hoped it would not.
Then there was the castle itself. Glimpsed tantalisingly between the leafless, skeletal trees as his horse – crow-black against the white, snorting plumes of fog – had plodded the final few miles towards the coast, it at last loomed upon the misty horizon in all its monstrous permanance. Great, grey turrets thrust upward from the hill on which it sat. A stone fist clenched towards the continent. The gatehouse of England. As if on cue at Gisburne’s creeping approach, the sun broke free of its prison of slate-coloured cloud and beamed down upon the awesome expanse of those forbidding walls. The great gates clanked and groaned. His horse whinnied and tossed its head as they parted, the cold eyes of the guards staring down from the castle’s towers. “Easy, Nyght,” muttered Gisburne, and gave him a reassuring pat. But he knew the animal was merely reflecting his own unease.
The vast stronghold commanding the clifftops had been Henry II’s most ambitious project – at its centre, a square keep against which even the Conqueror’s paled, surrounded by concentric walls and enormous ditches, with a succession of elaborately guarded gates and towers. It had benefited from the lastest wisdom in castle design, and Henry had spared no expense. It was said he built it, in part, out of guilty conscience, to welcome noble pilgrims who came to visit the tomb of Thomas Becket – Archbishop of Canterbury and England’s newest saint, whose death Henry had, perhaps unwittingly, brought about – and had fitted it out with all manner of luxuries, including running water and sanitation. But none who set eyes upon it could fail to consider the warning note it sounded. This would have tested the ingenuity of Llewellyn to its limit – perhaps, even, was beyond it. Although its doors were flung open to Gisburne, and he able to ride freely in, this approach in the crisp light of that cold November morning somehow seemed infinitely more daunting than the nocturnal assault upon the White Tower.
From the moment of his arrival, the contempt in which Gisburne was held could not have been more obvious. The castle’s Constable, Matthew de Clere, managed the opulent royal residence on behalf of the monarch. With Richard far away in the Holy Land, however, de Clere was its undisputed master, and lived like a king. He was also, Gisburne knew, an ally of Longchamp. Of de Clere, or any other welcoming face – beyond a haughty, sour-faced steward, and the sullen youth who led Nyght to the stables – there was no sign. At the feast, which commenced that morning in the castle’s guest hall, and to which he was immediately and peremptorily ushered, he had been seated about as far from the noble castellan as decorum would permit – at the extreme end of one of the two rows of benches flanking the long, black-beamed walls. This placed Gisburne with his back so close to the doorway that another few inches would have had him sitting outside the chamber altogether. He felt only half arrived – had not, in fact, even been given time to change his clothes. He mused upon this as he was subjected to a lengthy and unnecessary wait within the hall – still dishevelled, sweaty and damp. A roaring, crackling fire blazed in the huge arched fireplace half way up the hall – but he was too far away to benefit from its heat, and merely shivered in the persistent, icy draught that was sucked in past the curtain that barely covered the doorway. This blew at his back with such unyielding vigour that the white tablecloth flapped about his knees and the flames on the iron candelabrum at his right shoulder leapt and guttered with every gust.
It was the position at formal table that Gisburne’s father would have referred to as “one up from the dogs”. Though the old man never said as much, Gisburne had a strong sense that his father – a knight of faultless record and high principles but precious few means, and entirely deficient in the art of flattery – had endured the position on many occasions.
It soon became clear, however, that his father’s assessment had been an exaggeration. The dogs had by far the better deal. Whilst Gisburne froze in the unrelenting draught – and half way up the hall, a young knight, far too decorous to complain, suffered the opposite fate, roasting to a beetroot red just inches from the huge, arched fireplace – de Clere’s hounds were left free to caper on the freshly strewn rushes covering the wooden floor. They gradually identified the most comfortable distance from the source of heat, padded in circles a few times and then lounged there as de Clere, on the high table at the head of the hall, tossed them some of the choicest cuts of meat from the platter in front of him. Gisburne, who had yet to be served – who was destined by his position to be last, and would therefore eat less well than any creature in the room, including the fleas in the rush matting and any opportunistic mice – swore that de Clere caught his eye as he did so.
Providing a sufficient number of servants to tend to every visitor’s needs, however humble they may be, was considered the sign of a good host. It appeared that de Clere, deep in smug communion with an elite core of sycophantic guests for most of the evening, was not greatly concerned with the fate of those at the margins of his hospitality – or, if he was, had instructed his servants to deliberately withold it from Gisburne. On the table’s end, by Gisburne’s right elbow, the dish of grimy water in which he had washed his hands prior to dining still sat, perhaps intentionally overlooked.
To his left sat an aged, rank-smelling cove who avoided eye contact as if his life depended on it, and whose size suggested he had never let a crumb of food get past him his entire life. He was styled a knight, but Gisburne noted no scars upon him, and if there had once been even a ghost of decent physical condition, it had long since been engulfed in layers of fat. “There are two kinds of men who lack scars,” Gilbert de Gaillon had once said. “Those who never fight, and those who afford their enemy no opportunity to do so.” Gisburne had taken the point – and perhaps even this one had had his day once. But his apparent need to assert superiority over the lowest in the room – along with his general corpulence – suggested otherwise. It was some time before Gisburne realised that the odd rasping sound he could could hear, even over the echoing hubbub of the chamber, was his neighbour’s laboured breathing. The only other thing to pass between them that day was when the knig
ht, through great effort, rocked his enormous bulk to one side and broke copious wind.
As Gisburne toyed with the dregs of the soup – stone cold, by the time it came his way – and waited for whatever gristle was left of the mutton, he distracted himself by listening to the scarlet-clad musician seated in the corner opposite, who plucked with affected seriousness on a stringed instrument. A single musician, Gisburne noted – and tallow candles, and wine that was certainly not Longchamp’s good stuff – but the most lavish burgundy and gold wall hangings that the king’s fortress could provide. Behind the high table hung a great banner bearing the three royal lions, and either side of it tapestries depicting lively, stylised scenes of hunting – an activity about which Henry had been fanatical. De Clere obviously enjoyed luxury, as long as it wasn’t at his own expense. The music plinked away against the rasp-rasp of his neighbour, the pop of the fire and the hum of the two dozen or so guests – a string of interminable French tunes that went nowhere, doubtless the latest thing from the court of King Philip. On the whole, Gisburne felt peasants understood music better.
It inevitably brought to mind the songs so beloved of Richard. He shuddered at the thought – though perhaps that also had something to do with the gale at the back of his neck. Richard – a prolific composer of songs – had a fine voice, and knew it (Gisburne pictured his doting mother, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, applauding Richard’s boyhood efforts heartily whilst the subtler talents of his brother, John, went utterly unnoticed). He had himself heard Richard sing on many occasions, and had found it instantly captivating. By the fifth or sixth verse, however, interest began to wane. By the twentieth, he was ready to cut his own throat.
De Clere himself cut a superficially impressive figure. He was tall, broad shouldered – every inch what was expected of a knight. Some, apparently, considered him handsome. Yet, to Gisburne’s eyes, his forehead was somehow too high, his teeth too gappy, his lips too moist and petulant to warrant such praise. Scrutinising his face now, Gisburne was reminded of dough that had swollen rather ludicrously beyond its required size, his eyes two currants stranded in its midst. His wife Richeut (in a bizarre moment, Gisburne had thought she was being referred to as “Richard”) was her lord’s opposite, with mean, pinched features and an expression he supposed was meant as a smile, but which looked like someone had just farted in her face.
She also looked oddly familiar, in ways that troubled him. It was not until part way through the evening – when Gisburne overheard an initially baffling reference to Longchamp, and was moved to picture Richeut with a beard – that he realised Matthew de Clere’s wife was William Longchamp’s sister.
John had been at pains to distance himself from the arrangements for Gisburne’s stay here, ensuring that the introduction had been made through an untraceable – and deniable – chain of intermediaries. But de Clere clearly had his suspicions. He must also have been stung by the events of the past months – the growing hatred and ultimate ejection of Longchamp, who secured this place for him, but whose patronage had turned to poison. Then there was the utterly humiliating episode of his brother-in-law’s bungled escape from England after his rout in London. The tale of the weasel Longchamp being caught in a dress – looking, by all accounts, like a bad approximation of a cheap Parisan whore, and rumbled by the misguided gropings of a randy sailor – had given the whole of England occasion to guffaw. Longchamp had been let go, to slink back to Normandy – blown on his way by gales of laughter, no doubt. After such universal ridicule, what further – or worse – punishment could possibly be inflicted? England was glad to be rid of him – but it was likely to keep the good folk of the realm clutching their sides for weeks to come. And it had happened in Dover. Assuming de Clere’s wife had not been born with that peevish expression (although Gisburne was certain she had) it was not difficult to imagine how she might have acquired it, nor de Clere himself.
Gisburne was startled out of his reverie by a dish of mutton, which arrived at his left hand with an unceremonious thud. Or rather, it arrived at his neighbour’s right. As this gentleman was clearly senior in both years and status – to the extent that talking to the shabby knight at the end of the table was either beyond his aged capabilities, or beneath him – it was Gisburne’s duty to serve him from the dish placed between them. Since the man was the size of a barn and had shown nothing the entire evening but the back of his oily head, Gisburne decided he could go hang. He hacked away whatever morsels the already well-picked bone had to offer – occasionally imagining his knife blade plunging into his neighbour’s blubbery flesh – and fought the childish urge to make furious, obscene gestures behind Sir Fatarse’s idiotic head.
It was at that moment, as Gisburne had accepted his complete invisibility and abandoned all pretense at etiquette, that de Clere addressed him from the far end of the hall. Or so it seemed. He had for some time been deep in conversation with the esteemed personage to his left, a large man with a face like a ham and an unpleasantly self-important expression. Dressed, Gisburne thought, somewhat in the manner of a Flemish bureaucrat, an absurdly overstated gold chain hanging beneath the folds of his wobbling, porcine neck. Gisburne had no idea who this man actually was – had not, in fact, been granted the courtesy of an introduction to any of his fellow guests – nor had he been party to the conversation that prompted de Clere’s unexpected comment. Their host had, without warning, raised his voice to the extent that all present could not fail to overhear him, and, gesturing limply in Gisburne’s direction with the point of his eating knife, had said: “Our guest at the far end of the table was squire to Gilbert de Gaillon, I believe...”
Surprised, mid-mouthful, the clamour of the table suddenly falling away, Gisburne looked up to see all eyes upon him – some in pity, others outright disdain. Richeut de Clere’s nose wrinkled up further than he thought possible. For a moment, he was unsure whether the comment was even meant to invite a response, but before his thoughts could cohere, de Clere’s whine filled the silence. “Let us hope that he is one day able to creep out from under that shadow.” There was laughter at this, then the thrum of chatter resumed as each member of the assembled company turned back to their neighbour, and their meat.
Gisburne continued to be ignored by most of the assembled company for the rest of the evening.
The one glimmer of light in this unrelenting gloom was Marian.
Seated close to the high table, on the same side as Gisburne, she had caught his eye briefly as the feast had been about to begin, and then had all but disappeared from view behind her fellow guests. In that moment, however, she had shot him a smile of such warmth that it hit him like a breath of summer air. All thought of winter was banished. Every trace of the hostility and meanness about him melted to nothing. The joy that rose up in response was total and unrestrained. Its power shocked him.
She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Her lips so finely curved, and so ready to laugh; her hazel eyes sparkling but also curiously sad; her gestures so disarmingly open, so honest. She was just so... alive. All the more so in this frigid and sterile company. Like a spring bloom in winter. He found himself actually thinking those words: like a spring bloom in winter... Gisburne did not regard himself as sentimental – far less a poet – yet here he was, somehow reduced to the moronic dribbling of a lovestruck adolescent. He had forgotten what this was like – had buried it deep in some part of him that was resigned to perpetual winter. Now it had sprung up, as fresh and green as ever it was, and he had fallen to his knees before it.
If John had meant this to present some sort of opportunity for Gisburne, however, the evening did not appear to be following the prince’s plan. Marian’s tantalising proximity – and unbearable distance – became a kind of torture. He would lean forward to catch a glimpse of her, as casually as he could, then someone else would lean in – reaching for a jug of wine, or turning to engage their neighbour – and obscure his view. Each man who did so, he wanted to kill. But he knew his anger a
rose partly because it so accurately reflected the one-sided nature of their relationship. She did not miss him, he was sure – did not yearn to catch a mere glimpse of him, had no inkling of the torment that she inspired. Yet he hungered for more, like a deluded beggar wishing soup from a stone. And he knew that if this were all he had – if it were this or nothing – he would accept it, and all the agony it entailed.
Why she affected him so, he could not understand. Others had lips as full, or eyes as bright, or cocked their heads in just that way. Many had more than hinted at a willingness to return affection. But, for all their beauty and charm, most had meant nothing to him. They were not her.
He had not seen her for over a year. Even then, it had been fleeting. That had been almost at the nadir of his fortunes, as he had been heading north to see his father for the last time. He had not seen the old man for six years – not since they had fallen out over Gilbert. But this time, Robert of Gisburne was dying. His lands had been seized and sold by Richard, his heart all but broken by the fate of his only son, whose quest to become a knight had ended in disgrace and failure, fatally tainted by the blackened reputation of Gilbert de Gaillon. Robert’s reaction to the affair all those years before had been harsh – and young Gisburne, by this time a man as well as a son, had not stood for it. He had hotly defended his old master – even castigated his father for allowing himself to believe the worst of his old friend. For reasons that were so trivial that Gisburne could now barely recall them, things had escalated, and taken an irrevocable turn. Gisburne sensed, even as it was happening, that both had struck deep into the others’ territory, doing violence to defences that had never before been challenged, and which afterwards could never be rebuilt. In retrospect, he understood the old man had only meant the best for his son, and in time both would come to feel the gnawing bitterness of regret. But by then, it was too late. He was then a world away, steeped in the blood of battle, fighting for pay under a foreign king.
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