scrap of truth in it. Life is dull for a soldier in peacetime, and at times over the next few months I envied Robin and his questing in the southern lands. I took my lord’s advice about his men too, and rode them hard: patrols daily and regular arms training in the courtyard of the middle bailey, organized by Thomas. I even hanged a man — a thief who stole from his mates and whom nobody liked much anyway. I could not watch the execution, but I heard the man jeered into his grave by his fellow soldiers. I also kept the men busy at work on the surrounding lands.
As Constable of Chateau-Gaillard I was responsible for the manor of Andeli, which had once belonged to Archbishop Walter of Coutances. But the lands thereabouts had been much ravaged by the rough tides of war sweeping over them the past five years. And so I set my men to building bridges, occasionally borrowing a few skilled craftsmen from the walls of the castle itself — which was nearing completion — and to repairing barns and cottages that had been burned or ruined by the enemy, or in some cases by Mercadier’s foraging routiers. This work had several benefits: firstly it kept the soldiers busy and fit during that rain-swept autumn and winter, although we did stop work for a week in December when the land was blanketed by the first falls of snow; secondly our improvements increased the value of the manor, and so pleased King Richard. Lastly it made me feel more comfortable in myself, as I felt I was making some amends to the destruction that my fellow warriors had wrought on the land, and that God was looking down on my actions with approval. I was busy myself, and while I missed Goody and took pains to write to her regularly, having charge of a great castle meant that I had no leisure to mourn the postponement of our marriage. After a tolerably hard winter, when spring finally came I had the men out in the fields with the local villeins, helping to sow the seed for the new season’s crops.
The King came and went with a small group of his closest household knights — and on each visit he brought with him a fevered sense of urgency, as if there were never enough hours to accomplish all that he had a mind to do; he did not come as often as I would have liked, for he had much business in Rouen but also found time to journey further south and visit his lands in Maine and Anjou. But whenever he visited, I found my heart lifted by his good cheer and boundless energy.
I saw almost nothing of Mercadier, who was based permanently in the south, except for one brief visit in March, when we observed chilly civilities at dinner and avoided each other as much as possible. William the Marshal and his men came to Chateau-Gaillard twice, and I had a suspicion that he was checking to see that all was well. But if he was overseeing me, he must have been satisfied that I was undertaking my role competently and there was no immediate cause for alarm.
The truce was largely observed all the way through until the early summer of the Year of Our Lord eleven hundred and ninety-eight — but if there was no actual warfare there was no let-up in the political battle. The Marshal told me that the King had persuaded the Count of Boulogne to join his side, which meant that we were even more strengthened in the north; and wily old Geoffrey of the Perche finally came back into the fold, among other barons that held land on Philip’s borders.
But the French King was playing the same diplomatic game: he made an alliance with Philip of Swabia, a German magnate, in which they both swore an oath to aid each other in war against Richard, and, in Aquitaine, he managed by means of a vast bribe to seduce Viscount Aimar of Limoges, Richard’s unruly vassal, to his side.
This news, delivered to me by the Marshal, filled me with concern for Robin who would have passed through the turncoat’s lands. Now that Aimar had revealed himself as an enemy of our King, I was concerned that Robin might be captured and held for ransom. But a week later I received a much travel-stained letter from the Earl of Locksley himself, informing me that he had met Robert de Boron and talked long into the night with him and that he was safely in Montpellier, in the County of Toulouse, Richard’s new southern ally, and staying at Reuben’s sumptuous house in the centre of that ancient and most civilized city.
Robin was careful in his letter not to openly mention the Grail — he called it ‘the bowl’, a reference to our last conversation before his departure from Chateau-Gaillard — but he said that he had learned much about the origins of ‘the bowl’ and had encouraging news about its whereabouts, and also the whereabouts of ‘a masterful old friend of ours from our time in Paris’.
When I read these words, I felt a sudden chill, like a cold draught of air. I had not troubled myself with thoughts of the Master for many months. He had seemed phantom-like; a dream figure beyond the grasp of my waking mind. But Robin’s words kindled something inside me and I found myself clutching the parchment letter and suddenly trembling with a rage too long suppressed. My heart was thumping in my chest; my palms were damp. Thomas was with me at the time, we were going over a list of the castle’s stores together, but when he asked what ailed me, I could not tell him and merely said it must be the beginning of a summer ague.
When I retired to my chamber that night, I allowed my mind at long last to consider the continued existence of the ‘man you cannot refuse’. And I knew one thing for certain, as surely as I knew that Christ was my Saviour. I knew that, foolish indulgence or not, I wanted to have vengeance on the Master. I wanted him dead — for the sake of Hanno, and my poor hanged father Henry; for the kindly priest Jean of Verneuil, for pungent Master Fulk, even for the fat, old, music-mad Cardinal Heribert of Vendome.
I wanted to watch the Master suffer and die.
Chapter Twenty-six
King Richard and his household knights returned to Chateau-Gaillard in August, as the Locksley and Westbury men were helping the local peasants to bring in the wheat harvest, and he came bearing a letter from Goody. After I had greeted the King in a suitable fashion and installed him and his followers in his quarters in the keep, I took the letter to my own lodgings — I had taken over Robin’s chamber in the north tower of the inner bailey — and greedily devoured the precious missive.
While my betrothed was now a full-grown woman of twenty years in the full bloom of her looks, her handwriting, I fear, was still that of a young girl; and her command of Latin was at best rudimentary. But the warmth of the love and the urgency of her ardour that seemed to spill from these parchment pages made these trifling failings recede into insignificance. She missed me — she wrote — she longed to be married and to hold me in her arms; she ached to give herself fully to me and to bear my children. When would I come back to her? Surely I had served the King long enough and the time had come for me to return to her side. She noted the extreme honour that the King did her by offering to give her away, and she fully acknowledged the wonderful generosity of his dowry, but all of that was less important to her mind than the fact that we must be married — and soon. The letter finished with these words: ‘Come to me, my love, come and take me to our marriage bed. The wretched creature has not been seen nor heard of in these parts for a year or more, and I will not let fear of her malediction ruin our lives and our happiness. I would rather live a single year as your loving wife than a lifetime without you. Come to me, my darling, and make me whole.’
Her letter aroused a chorus of fierce emotions in my heart and, if I am honest, my loins, and I promised myself that I would not let another twelve-month go by without taking my beautiful Goody to wife.
A week later Robin returned to the castle, face burnt by southern suns, his frame lean from hard travel, his demeanour wearily cheerful. He had come most recently, he told me, from Paris where under cover of the truce he had been visiting friends and taking a measure of the French capital for Richard.
‘War is upon us, Alan,’ he said, ‘this truce will not last another month.’ He was wolfing down a plate of cold pork and barley bread in my comfortable chambers in the north tower, which I noted gloomily, I would now have to relinquish to him. ‘Paris is full of armed men, French knights, militiamen, foreign crossbowmen, mercenaries — King Philip has no intention, it is clear, of sticking to the agreement to suspend hostilities until next year. Philip is fully armed and ready for battle; the question is, where will he strike?’
That question was answered within the week. We had news that our staunch ally Baldwin of Flanders had attacked in the north again, and had swept down into Artois and was besieging St Omer. King Richard delivered the news to his senior knights and barons at the daily council — and by the over-pleased tone he used to convey the information, I knew that it was part of a deep plan that he had hatched privately with Baldwin. Their strategy was reasonably simple to divine: Baldwin would come down from Flanders and Philip was then supposed to rush north to confront him, at which point Richard would attack from the west and trap Philip between his army and Baldwin’s and crush it utterly. But, once again, Philip showed that he was no fool — he could smell a trap as well as the next man. When Baldwin came down from the north, Philip ignored his advance, in effect, sacrificing the beautiful town of St Omer to fire and rapine. Instead he sent his mighty army west, towards us, pouring his full strength over the
