unable to walk, who revealed nothing under questioning except that Nur and her coven, some forty females of varying ages from barely ambulant children to toothless hags, had left some days ago and headed north. The old crone seemed almost to welcome the knife, wielded efficiently by a Nottingham sergeant, that slit her throat and ended her miserable existence on this Earth.
It was a frustrating time. I had been out-fought by a woman with no deep knowledge of war nor the stratagems of battle, and made to look an utter fool. She eluded me, and left no trace. I sent messages north to Kirkton and Robin’s garrison there, but nothing had been seen or heard of the Hag of Hallamshire or her coven. We scoured the wilder parts of Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire by night and day, and found nothing. I was at a loss. After four fruitless weeks, I dismissed the conroi men back to Nottingham, and returned, shamefaced, to Westbury and Goody. Perhaps Nur had worked some kind of charm of concealment. Or maybe, more simply, after years of living wild without the comforts of civilized life, she was adept at moving through the countryside without disturbing a soul.
There was one great boon that my otherwise fruitless struggle with Nur had bestowed on me. That embarrassing contest with the witch had cured me of my malaise. I worked hard in that time; I slept little, but deeply, and drank hardly at all. Without knowing it or wishing it, the mutilated Saracen bitch had cured me of my melancholy, when no other remedy could.
Nevertheless, that summer saw the beginning of a long period in which I never truly managed to find ease. A time of nervous uncertainty, of general but constant fearfulness, a time that frayed the nerves and made everyone short-tempered and quick to anger: it was the season of the witch.
Country folk are superstitious. They always have been and always will be. So in Westbury, from the summer of the Year of Our Lord eleven hundred and ninety-six until the early spring of the next year every minor disaster was an attack of witchcraft, every accident must be black magic: if a cow gave birth to a stillborn calf, it was Nur’s malice; if a bucket of milk, left out too long in the warm sun went sour, it was her sorcery; a frail grandfather of four score years died suddenly in the village — Nur must have stolen his soul. Every misfortune, every setback — even those with patently obvious causes — was laid at her door; and folk whispered that it was in truth my fault for angering her. People spoke openly — though wisely not in my presence — of the curse that lay over Westbury, and wondered how it might be lifted. To make matters worse, the harvest was bad that year — Nur had clearly brought the rain clouds in August and a succession of heavy, pounding rainstorms to crush the standing wheat.
I asked Arnold, the local priest, to exorcize any evil spirits that inhabited the village and the manor, and the little man made a great show of bumbling about the place in his best robes with his servant holding a huge leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, mumbling prayers in bad Latin and splashing holy water about with enthusiasm. But the villagers refused to believe it had worked, and when a nervous girl claimed she had seen Nur and her witches riding broomsticks across the face of the full moon, nobody was inclined to disbelieve her.
We saw no sign of Nur at all in that period, but there was evidence from time to time that she had not forgotten us and that she had agents of her evil in the area. Not long after the meagre harvest, in late August, Goody found a figure made from plaited wheat straw in her bed in the newly rebuilt guest house; long black thorns had been stuck in the belly of the doll, and through its eyes. Goody was shaken and brought the horrible object to me, and I burnt it — and from then on Goody abandoned the guest house and slept in my chamber. Chastely, I hasten to add, with a long round pillow separating us in the big bed. Though I did on more than one occasion feel the stirrings of an almost overwhelming lust, watching her lovely sleeping face, or catching a glimpse of her white body as she dressed in the morning, I restrained myself. It was a small price to pay for the reassurance of having her under my watchful eye.
In October, we received a letter from Robin telling us that Thomas was impressing all in the army with his courage and prowess, that Little John had been ill with an ague but had now recovered, and that the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully had finally succumbed to the Crab that had been slowly eating his belly, and all Paris, all France, was in mourning for him.
Robin’s letter brought the events of my time in Paris back into my mind; it felt long ago and far away — as if those terrible occurrences had happened to another man, a stranger. I wondered idly where the Master was hiding, and whether he would surface now that his old spiritual lord was dead. But I could not bring myself to care overmuch; my time in Paris seemed like a bad dream, and one that I had no urge to recall. Hanno’s death was still a deep and painful wound, only lightly scabbed by time.
The months passed with a surprising swiftness. The Feast of the Nativity came and went, and in January I was forced to dole out grain from my store houses and open several casks of salted pork to distribute to the poorer villagers of Westbury in the harsh winter months, else they would have starved to death. But I received scant credit for my largesse. Even that cruel winter, with drifts of snow covering the iron-hard fields, was said by some to be the work of the black witch. And, of course, it was I who had rashly brought her wrath down upon our community.
Our spirits began to lift with the coming of spring, as they always did. And I began to feel restless. I thought of my friends in Normandy and began, for the first time in many, many months, to feel the pull of war.
I broached the subject with Goody after dinner one blustery March day while she was spinning wool sheared from our sheep into fine thread — a seemingly endless task — by the hearth in the centre of the hall.
‘Yes, we are rather stuck,’ she said. ‘We fear the curse too much to be married, and yet we cannot find that wretched woman either to make her lift it or, indeed, to kill her. And while she is out there somewhere, you fear that by going off to war, to do your duty as a knight to the King, you will leave me in danger. We are trapped by our fears.’
I looked at Goody with no little surprise. It was an intelligent, candid, merciless expression of our situation. And one that was absolutely true, of course.
‘So what should we do?’ I asked.
‘We must do what good men and women have always done when beset by fear. We face it, we walk up to it, nose to nose, and spit in its eye — and we do what must be done regardless of our fears. You must go to Normandy; I will pack up Westbury and go back to living with Marie-Anne in Kirkton until you return. And when you return victorious from the war, my dearest love, we shall be wed here, in our home, and to Hell with that foul bitch and all her works.’
I took her into my arms, and at that moment I loved her as much as I had ever done. It was a deep love, a love of the soul, not inspired merely by her beauty, although she was truly as lovely as the dawn, but by her courage and strength, her clear-eyed intelligence and certainty.
I departed from Westbury a month later, having spent the intervening weeks training half a dozen or so of the more adventurous local lads as men-at-arms. We had not the leisure for sophisticated teaching but by the time we left they could all wield a sword and shield with moderate competence, and hit a man-sized straw dummy with a lance in two out of three passes from the back of a galloping horse. In fact, I was pleased with my little troop. I left three of the older men-at-arms with Baldwin to help him in his duties about the manor, and the Countess of Locksley had agreed that she would send a strong party of bowmen to escort Goody to Yorkshire, when she was ready to move in with her friend at Robin’s castle. And so it was that I led ten fully equipped men-at-arms south with me that April — although the majority of the men had been farm boys the month before — and I must confess, for the first time in many, many months, my heart was light.
We took one of the ships that now regularly plied between Portsmouth and Barfleur supplying Richard’s army, and after a rough day’s passage, which was the first sea journey for most of my men, and an occasion for much grey-faced groaning and vomiting, we arrived on Norman soil. Almost the first person I saw on the quay at Barfleur was my lord of Locksley. He had been waiting for me.
Chapter Twenty-three
Robin seemed tired and thin, the skin stretched tightly over his cheekbones, but his grey eyes sparkled with pleasure as we clasped hands in greeting. He put his hands on his hips, looked me up and down and said: ‘Well met, Alan — you look like your old cheerful self again. I’m glad to have you back among us where you belong.’ And I felt the familiar glow of affection at seeing my lord.
Beyond Robin stood Little John, a blood and muck-stained bandage wrapped around half his face covering some cruel injury. ‘About bloody time, too,’ growled the big man. And then he spoiled the effect by grinning at me.
