housekeeper, is beside herself with worry; she fears he will die as her husband did. She does not sleep, but sits beside Alan’s cot trying to feed him thin gruel and mopping at his forehead with a damp cloth. When he sleeps, she prays. She spends hours on her knees at the village church, beseeching the Virgin Mary to save her boy’s life, and wearying the ears of the Holy Trinity. But it seems to be doing no good. The boy is losing weight fast, he sweats and tosses the bedclothes off in his fever. He mumbles and shouts and thrashes his arms about — I fear he will soon be with God.
Father Gilbert, the priest of this parish, has recommended fasting and prayer to persuade the Almighty to save the life of the boy. I cannot object, I will gladly go without food if it will save my grandson; when I pray to Our Saviour, Lord Jesus Christ, I ask him to take my life instead of his. Marie says the sickness is a punishment. She says that my past sins, amassed in my days as an outlaw, are the cause of the boy’s suffering. Heaven’s revenge, she calls it. She may be right; certainly I have many a black stain on my soul from those days of robbery, killing and blasphemy, but I find it hard to believe that Our Merciful Father would kill a lively, innocent boy for the long- ago misdeeds of one tired old man.
If Alan does not soon begin to recover, I have decided that I will sacrifice more than my worthless old carcass. I will place my very soul in jeopardy. I will pay a visit to Brigid. She still lives, and not far away, though she is even older and more shrivelled than me these days. And even as I know her to be a witch and a woman of depraved and devilish practices, I know, too, her power, and I will go to her and beg her help. For Alan’s sake.
At Robin’s Caves, as my arm grew strong again and the marks of the wolf’s teeth faded to four pink glossy dimples, I saw less of Bernard than I had at Thangbrand’s; he was withdrawn after our adventure in the woods and he had begun to neglect his toilet and grow a scraggly, patchy beard. The iridescent cockerel was gone; he began to look more like the other outlaws and he spent much of his time drinking and making music alone in one of the many rock chambers that made up Robin’s sprawling hideout. The acoustics in his cave, he told me, were extraordinary; and certainly the music he made there had a booming, earthy quality all of its own. Robin’s Caves, men said, had been carved out of the bedrock by magical dwarfs, and they could close tight, according to legend, when the spirits of the woodland wished, leaving no sign that they had ever been there. In fact, they were merely very difficult to find, deep as they were in an uninhabited part of Sherwood, and I shall never reveal their whereabouts. I swore an oath never to tell and, although my lord Robin is dead, I shall not break my word to him.
The Caves were roomy, though; at a pinch, they could shelter a couple of hundred men. It was rare, of course, for there to be so many at the camp at one time. Robin sent out a constant stream of armed patrols, each twenty men strong and under the command of a trusted ‘captain’, to scout the surrounding area for enemy troops, and to lay ambushes for rich travellers. He did it, I think, to keep the men hard and busy and out of trouble; for if they were allowed to stay around the Caves, they tended to sit about drinking and gambling and would soon get into fights among themselves. Discipline, though, was as harsh as it had been at Thangbrand’s. The rules were simple: show respect to Robin and his officers; obey his orders without question; don’t steal from your comrades; and don’t even think of touching the chest of silver in the back of the cave that held Robin’s Share. If you transgressed, the penalty was a horrible death.
I was happy there. The men accepted me as Bernard’s assistant
Goody became a great favourite of the outlaws and their womenfolk. She was spoiled by almost everyone in the camp and she ran about the place making smart remarks to grizzled old warriors and being applauded for her wit and spirit. They had heard the story of her courage against the werewolf, as I heard the wildman Ralph being commonly called, and they loved her for it. And she was quite at home in their company, having grown up at Thangbrand’s. However, her clothes grew ragged and unkempt and face and hair soon became filthy. In that rough company, her new look fitted like a hand in a glove.
I mentioned the wildness of her appearance to Robin one day when we were out hunting and he nodded. ‘She needs a mother,’ he said. We had stalked a herd of deer that afternoon but they had been spooked by something and had galloped away; now we were walking slowly back to the top of a hill where we had left the horses. ‘I shall have to send her away somewhere. You too.’ He looked at me sideways. I was shocked. ‘Send me away? Why, sir?’ The prospect appalled me. I had settled in well to life in the Caves, I was happy there; I felt I had earned Robin’s trust, maybe even his friendship.
‘I can’t have you wasting your youth here with us,’ Robin went on. ‘Singing crude ballads for drunks every night. You’ve got much too much music in you for that, you know. Bernard has done a fine job in teaching you.’
‘But where will you send me?’ I asked.
‘Somewhere civilised,’ he said, and then he changed the subject.
‘You’re a fairly pious fellow, Alan, aren’t you?’ I knew he had seen me making my prayers before bed in the main cave every night. But he did not say it in a mocking way; he seemed genuinely interested.
‘I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is my saviour and the saviour of all mankind,’ I said. He grunted. ‘Do you not believe in Our Lord, sir?’ I asked, knowing the answer.
‘Used to,’ he said. ‘I used to believe with all my heart. But now I think that the Church stands between God and Man, and its shadow blocks out the light of God’s goodness. I think the way to God is not through the corrupt and prideful Church.’
He fell silent, thinking, and perhaps conserving his breath as we walked up that steep hill. Then, as we neared the top, he said: ‘It seems to me that God is everywhere, God is all around, God is this. .’ He swept his hand in a wide curve around him, indicating a swathe of woodland. It looked particularly beautiful that spring day. We had reached the top of the hill and we looked over a rolling stretch of lush greenery. Below us, twenty yards or so away, our horses were tied in the shade of a magnificent spreading hornbeam, bright green with new leaves. Below the tree, a purple carpet of bluebells, like a rippling sea that flowed away seemingly endlessly through the forest. It was a golden afternoon; a light wind rustled the new leaves, and a pair of larks swooped and played in the branches. Just as Robin spoke, a stag stepped out of the trees ahead of us. Its noble head was crowned with a huge set of spreading antlers; its liquid eyes surveyed us from beneath impossibly long eyelashes. We froze. Robin and I were alone, the hunt servants were still struggling up the hill out of sight behind us with our equipment. Robin had a strung bow in his hand and a linen bag full of arrows at his belt. But he didn’t move. The great red animal stared at us and we looked back in wonder. It was a perfect specimen, in its prime: head alert, mounted on a long proud neck, glossy muscular haunches and long clean legs ending in neat black hooves. It stood four- square, and shook its antlers in our direction as a challenge; every inch the king of the forest. I looked at Robin out of the side of my eye, expecting him to raise his bow. But he didn’t move. Eventually, after a final long regal look at us, the great deer trotted back out of sight into the woodland. And I found I had been holding my breath.
‘Was that beautiful creature not a fine example of God’s presence?’ asked Robin. ‘God made that animal, and there is much godliness in that splendid beast. I need no priest or bishop to tell me that.’ He was speaking the vilest heresy — I knew that none could come to Salvation without the Church, but part of me, a wicked corner of my soul, could not but agree with him.
There was one distressing note in my life at Robin’s Caves. It was the captive soldier that Robin had taken just before he had rescued us from the wolves. He was kept in a small wooden cage, a short way from the main cave, which was just high enough for him to stand and long enough for him to lie down straight. I stumbled upon him one day when I went out to stretch my legs. He was filthy, confined as he was and open to the weather, and near starving, too, as he was fed only slops that a pig would refuse. Everyone in Robin’s band just ignored him but I couldn’t get him out of my mind. His name was Piers, he told me, and, feeling sorry for him, I would steal food from the kitchens and bring it to him from time to time, and talk to him like a human being.
