knight taking advantage of the truce to visit Paris, that knowledge seemed to blacken my name even further. Despite the fact that I had never tried to hide my identity, I heard the word ‘spy’ whispered more than once by the men-at-arms. Somebody, it seemed, had informed on me to the Provost’s office, and suggested that I was not only a murderer, who had quarrelled with Master Fulk and then killed him in rage, but that I was also an agent of King Richard’s, bent on causing any amount of murder, mischief and mayhem in Paris.
The charges were clearly absurd, and would have been laughable, save for the fact that I was now being bundled through an iron-bound door into a small chamber packed almost to its dripping ceiling with the human scum of Paris.
Mercifully, my hands had been freed, and I sprawled on the floor of that tiny cell on to a carpet of legs. I was immediately kicked and stamped on by dozens of feet, shod and bare, for the gaol, which was no more than six foot wide by eight foot long, contained eighteen men in various stages of degradation. They were seated on the stone floor hip-high in noisome ooze with their backs around the slime-covered walls while their outstretched legs filled the entire space in the middle. The stench was indescribable. There was no place for me to sit and, after having been kicked and pummelled to my knees, then to my feet, I found myself crouching in the middle of that tiny box, unable to stand fully upright as the ceiling was a mere five feet from the floor. I have been in beds that were bigger than that prison and the reek and squalor of the place would have made an ordure-eating scavenger-pig swoon.
Within an hour or two my back was aching from standing in such a stooped position. By the time that the light from a tiny barred window high on the wall was fading — and I calculated that I had been there for six or seven hours — I was in agony, the muscles of my legs and back burning. And I knew that if I was going to survive my incarceration in that stinking hell, I’d have to find a space to sit, and to do so in that rock coffin, I was going to have to behave like a beast — a ferocious creature of the wild.
I am not proud of what I did next — and although I have killed many men in my long life, the man who lost his life that evening in that cramped and stinking pit is one of the souls that haunts my conscience most regularly. I picked a small man, for the ease of it, a thin and sickly one — may God have mercy on me — and hauled him bodily out of his place by the wall and clubbed him down with my fists. He saw me coming for him and, knowing the likely outcome, he fought like a madman, scratching and trying to bite me, kicking wildly with his feet. I steeled my mind and battered him unmercifully, punching at his head and body, cracking his ribs and breaking his nose and jaw, until he was down and, as he lay moaning, bleeding in the six inches of slurry on the floor, the other men in the cell finished the job and kicked and stamped him until he lay silent and still in the muck. The other prisoners did not say a word to me about the fight; a few eyed me indifferently, but each was sunk too deep in his own personal Hell for fellow human feeling. A few had pulled their legs in to give us room during my fight, or to avoid being stamped upon, but no one suggested that I was not within my rights to tear that little man apart and take his place, most gratefully, God forgive me, against the slime-streaked wall.
The battered corpse lay in the centre of the floor, with other men casually resting their legs upon it, all through that long and terrible night. During the last few minutes of daylight, while I could still see their gaunt, bearded faces, I tried to make some conversation with the men whose shoulders were squeezed next to mine, but one of them, the man to my left, was seriously ill, coughing violently from time to time and expelling a wad of bloody mucus with each hacking retch. I knew he was not long for this world. The man on my right, a big-boned man, now as thin as a broomstick, seemed to be more than a little crazed. I asked him how long he had been in that cell and he asked me in return what month it was: when I told him it was September, he laughed wildly and shockingly loudly, then said: ‘March, I came here in March. In spring when all the world was fresh and new! Ha- ha!’
He was a thief, the big crazy man, a house-breaker called Michael, and I told him that I too had followed the path of a cutpurse in my youth. We talked a while during that long, long night, though my throat was badly parched, and for most of the time he made some sense. He told me of the laws and customs of that God-forgotten cell, such as they were: and my soul was chilled by their simple brutality. Every man was for himself, the strong would live and the weak would die — Devil take the hindmost. Every few days the guards would come and call out a name, and that man would then be taken out, briefly tried by a judge and then hanged. Nobody ever returned after their name had been called, nor were they ever heard from again. At dawn, it seemed, we could expect the guards to bring sustenance. ‘There is not much of it, and you must fight for every drop and morsel, as there will be no more until the same time next day,’ Michael warned me.
There was yet another unpleasantness in store for me — there was no provision for our waste. The prisoners, I learned, merely voided themselves where they sat, and after holding my bladder for most of the night, shamefully but with a sense of guilty relief, I followed their example and released my water to join the slurry that washed around my legs.
In the dirty grey light of dawn, I saw that the man to my left — the cougher — had died in the night. I bundled his corpse into the centre of the cell without even thinking, and shifted my body to take advantage of the increase in space. I extended my long legs, and found them resting on the dead man’s head. They were comfortable, and half out of the lake of filth, and I left them there, propped up on the cadaver. It had taken me less than a day, I thought ruefully, to discover the true savagery of my soul, a pitiful few hours to sink lower than a wild animal.
Soon after dawn, the guards entered the cell — two of them, crouching under the low ceiling with drawn swords, kicking the men’s legs out of their path. One of them shouted behind him, through the opened door: ‘Two more for the river today,’ and a pair of ancient wretches in leather coifs and aprons came shambling into the cell to take the corpses away. Once the dead men had been cleared, and presumably dumped in the Seine, the two old men returned with big, rough wooden buckets slung over their shoulders on yokes — each bucket filled with a sloppy mixture of stale bread, watery soup and a little vinegary wine. As the guards retreated, we fell upon these four buckets like wolves upon newborn lambs; I got an elbow in the cheekbone, and returned it with a punch, but I got my head over a bucket and managed to scoop a handful of watery bread sops into my mouth, and a second and third one, too, before somebody hauled me by the shoulder away from the bucket and forced his head into the space that mine had so briefly occupied. I saw that it was the thief Michael, and allowed him to claim his share, as payment for taking the trouble to speak with me through the long night.
My thirst had only partially been assuaged by the time the buckets had been scraped clean. I retook my place against the wall, reflecting gloomily that if I did not get out of here soon I would not last long. On only a couple of mouthfuls of soggy bread a day, I would lose my strength in a few weeks. Then I would be the one to be plucked from the wall and beaten and kicked to death by a still-powerful newcomer.
The ancient yoke-men retrieved their empty wooden buckets an hour later, and all the prisoners settled down for the day. I dozed a little that morning myself, leaning against the wall, my buttocks and legs submerged in filth, and wondered what my friends were doing. Hanno and Thomas knew that I was in that stinking midden of death and I was certain that they would be striving to secure my release. There was still plenty of money at the Widow Barbette’s house, if some sort of surety was needed, and surely if approached by Brother Michel or Sir Aymeric de St Maur, or even by my squire Thomas, the Provost could be persuaded to set me free in exchange for a generous contribution to his private coffers.
At about noon, the door of the cell opened, and in the bright sunlight that flooded the dim cell, I could see the hulking shape of a man. He was tall and well-made with broad shoulders and a mane of dark hair, and he was not, as I had been, hurled down the steps by the gaolers to sprawl on to the floor of the cell; he descended slowly, cautiously, on short, muscular legs. The door slammed behind him, but in the light from the barred window I could see his face clearly for the first time: unshaven with brutish features, cunning eyes, and several whitish scars around the jaw.
‘That is Guillaume du Bois,’ Michael whispered in my ear. ‘I never thought they would take him alive: he is a bandit from the wild woods south of Paris, a killer, and the leader of a gang of cut-throats. He is a man to be feared.’
This Guillaume stood, so far as he was able, in the centre of the cell, his big head sunk on his shoulders and thrust forward, turning this way and that. He was scanning the faces in that dim place intently — he seemed to be looking for someone. His flat glaze slid over my face and moved on to Michael’s beside me — and I heard my comrade draw in a quick frightened breath — but the big man’s head carried on turning, as his questing continued. Then it stopped and his gaze returned along the line of faces against the wall — to me. He fixed his eyes on me and I stared straight back at him. I knew full well what was going to happen next.
