‘Ahhh, that’s better,’ he said, thrusting out his cup to be refilled. ‘Alan, you are a gifted host, a man who knows when to be silent and merely pour the wine. I can feel life returning to my frozen limbs.’ He peered at me closely. ‘How is your music these days? Are you composing?’
I didn’t have the chance to answer, for he continued: ‘I hear things about you, Alan, in my travels about the world. Good things, mostly. I even heard someone attempting one of your tensos the other day, the one about the debate between King Arthur and the field mouse.’ He hummed a snatch of my music. ‘The fool made a complete hash of it, of course, and I had to show him how it should be done. But it is good that people are performing your works. I’m proud of you, Alan. You make a tired old man very happy.’
‘You are not so old, Bernard. Come, tell me your news. What brings you here?’
‘Bad news, Alan. Very bad. The worst kind. I have been dispatched by my royal lady, by Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, may she live another thousand years, with an invitation for your master and mistress to join her at Westminster. Sent out into this freezing wasteland to seek you out, with scant thought for the chill it must cause in my old bones. But I’d better deliver my message to the great man himself. Where is the noble Earl of Locksley?’ He looked about the hall in a comical manner, one hand shading his eyes, as if Robin might be hiding like a cutpurse in some dark corner.
‘He’s gone hunting today. He’ll be back soon. What is this terrible news, then?’ I said impatiently.
‘You’ll find out in good time. Doubtless His Lordship will tell you it all. But I will keep it till he returns. Give me some more wine, I beg you.’
And, infuriatingly, he refused to say another word on the subject until Robin returned an hour later, wet, happy and tired, with a brace of young fallow deer draped over his saddle as the grey winter day slid imperceptibly into the darkness of true night.
When Robin had washed and restored himself with wine and food, he summoned Bernard to his carved oak chair at the end of the hall to hear the news.
‘I come from Queen Eleanor, esteemed mother of our good King Richard,’ my old music teacher began, ‘with news of the worst, the gravest kind, my lord.’
Robin nodded and made an impatient circling motion with his wrist and hand, urging the French trouvere to get to the point.
‘Calamity has struck,’ went on Bernard, clutching at his brow, ‘disaster is upon us,’ he said, and then he paused.
‘Yes, yes, calamity, disaster, news of the worst kind. I understand. Get on with it, man,’ Robin said with uncharacteristic shortness.
Bernard allowed himself to savour one more moment of drama, testing the patience of my master to the utmost before he said: ‘Richard has been taken. Our noble King is in chains. He has been captured by evil men while he was making his way home to England.’ Another pause. And I could see that Robin was now extremely annoyed.
‘Who has him? By whom has he been captured?’ asked Robin coldly, his face a mask. He was fingering his sword hilt and, I reckoned, was only three heartbeats away from freeing Bernard from the burden of his own head.
‘By Duke Leopold of Austria! He is now languishing in chains at the mercy of his mortal enemy. In deepest, darkest Germany!’
It was appalling news. Disastrous. And I could forgive Bernard for making the most of its delivery. Peace and prosperity in England depended on Richard being alive. His acknowledged heir, his little nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was a mere child of five, and the whole kingdom knew that his brother Prince John had his eye on the throne. If Richard were to be killed in Germany, England could well erupt into civil war with some of the barons supporting the legitimate heir, despite his extreme youth, and others making the practical decision to follow John, who was more likely to win a contest of military strength. Bloody chaos would follow: there were still grandfathers alive who could remember the dark days of the Anarchy, when King Stephen and the Empress Matilda vied for mastery of the country. It was a time of famine and fear, with marauding bands of soldiers roaming the land, burning cottages and crops, stealing stored food, raping maids and generally despoiling the territories of their enemies.
‘This is going to be very, very costly,’ said Robin.
I was deep in thoughts of the carnage of civil war, and it took me a few moments to grasp his meaning. And then it dawned. Richard was too valuable a captive to be killed out of hand, no matter how much Duke Leopold hated him. His royal person was worth a king’s ransom. And England would have to pay it.
‘Queen Eleanor commands your presence: she wishes you and the lady Marie-Anne to attend her at Westminster as soon as possible,’ said Bernard, in the measured tones of a diplomat, far removed from his excited rendering of the fateful news about King Richard.
‘She wants to discuss what’s to be done, no doubt,’ said Robin. ‘All right, we’ll come to Westminster. Yes, we need to make plans. We leave tomorrow at dawn.’
The next day, as a pale blue light washed over the hills to the east and rolled back the night, our company rode out of the great gate at Kirkton and took the road east towards Sheffield. As I trotted out of the portal, I looked back and saw the first pink fingers of daylight catching the pair of lumpen shapes on long poles either side of the gatehouse: the severed heads of two men-at-arms, impaled on long spears — former Murdac men who had turned deserter.
The men had stolen a few items, including a small bag of coins, and had dropped silently over the walls and headed south in the middle of the night on foot, presumably hoping to become outlaws or possibly rejoin Sir Ralph at Nottingham. When the theft and their disappearance had been noticed in the morning, Hanno was dispatched with half a dozen mounted archers to track them down and bring them home to face Robin’s justice. The shaven- headed Bavarian had taken no more than half a day to catch them, trapping them in a wood near Chesterfield, and he reappeared that evening with two bodies slung over a couple of packhorses. One deserter had died in the melee; he was the lucky one. The other man Robin had hanged until he was partially dead, and then flogged with metal- tipped whips — the remaining former Murdac men-at-arms being detailed to perform the punishment — and finally, with his skin hanging off him in bloody strips, and the blood puddling around his feet, he was beheaded in front of a jeering crowd in the centre of the bailey. The heads of both deserters were then stuck on spears and mounted either side of the main gate as a terrible warning to anyone else who might think of betraying Robin.
As I looked back at the gruesome display, I shivered slightly, and not just from the cold of dawn. Their faces had been pecked by carrion crows over the past few weeks until they were barely recognizable as men at all. And yet they seemed to be silently cursing us, hating us, casting an evil spell over our departure from Kirkton.
Four days later, the city of London lay before us, a dirty smudge of smoke on the southern horizon. I fancied I could already smell the stink of twenty thousand busy folk all crammed into a few square miles. But, mercifully, we were not planning to enter its maze of twisting streets and cramped dirty houses amid the deafening babble of its thronging crowds. Instead, we turned off Watling Street, the great Roman artery that had taken us all the way from Coventry to the north-western edge of the capital city, and rode south through the sleepy hamlet of Charing, and past green fields and orchards along the side of the slow-rolling River Thames to a rich Benedictine abbey, inhabited by sixty learned monks, overshadowed by the high bulk of Westminster Hall, the huge palace of the kings of England.
We were a large company, more than fifty souls in all, well mounted and guarded by a score of Robin’s men- at-arms and a dozen mounted archers. Robin, myself, Hanno and Tuck were in the vanguard, while Marie-Anne, Goody, little Hugh and a couple of nursemaids trundled along in the centre of the column, shielded from the elements by a covered wagon. As well as a strong force of soldiers, Robin had also brought cooks and bakers, farriers, maids, serving men and all the staff he would need to support his dignity as an earl while he was a guest of Queen Eleanor.
It had taken us four days to ride from Kirkton to Westminster, staying overnight at the castles of friends and allies, our pace much slowed by the wagons, and I was glad to be at our destination. My horse, a well-schooled grey gelding that I called Ghost, who had been with me all the way to Outremer and back, had picked up a stone in his right forehoof outside St Alban’s, and though I had speedily removed it, he was still limping. Fearing that the frog of his hoof had been bruised, I longed for the shelter of a nice quiet stable where he could rest and I could take a proper look at the offending limb.
A little royal hospitality would have been most welcome too, and Queen Eleanor did not disappoint. When we
