The Betrayal of Father Tuck: An Outlaw Chronicles short story

Angus Donald was born in 1965 and educated at Marlborough College and Edinburgh University. He has worked as a fruit-picker in Greece, a waiter in New York and as an anthropologist studying magic and witchcraft in Indonesia. For twenty years, he was a journalist in Hong Kong, India, Afghanistan and London. He is married to Mary, with whom he has two children, and he now writes full time from home in Tonbridge, Kent.

Outlaw

Holy Warrior

King’s Man

Warlord

Short Stories

The Rise of Robin Hood

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-1-4055-2886-3

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Angus Donald 2013

Excerpt from
King’s Man
© Angus Donald 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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About the Author

Also by Angus Donald

Copyright

Begin Reading

Excerpt from
King’s Man

‘Childishness, that’s his problem. He’s irresponsible, immature and dangerously reckless.’ The speaker was William Odo, Lord of Edwinstowe, a tall thin man of about thirty years, lolling in a carved wooden chair at the high table of his own hall and digesting the noon-day meal. The man he was comparing to a child was his younger brother Robert, Earl of Locksley, and husband to Marie-Anne, his principal guest, who was seated in the place of honour beside him at the long table.

Marie-Anne looked down at the white linen tablecloth, now stained with meat juices and spills of rich sauces, and scattered with crumbs and the torn crusts of bread. She said nothing, but two pink spots of anger could be made out on her usually swan-white cheeks, and her clear blue eyes shot out twin bright beams of undiluted rage. She had been enduring the company of her tiresome brother-in-law in his castle of Edwinstowe, in the county of Nottingham, for the past three days and she told herself that if she heard one more casual insult from him about her husband, she would either begin screaming or smash something.

‘I believe my lord means that our Robin is refreshingly young at heart, my lady,’ said Father Tuck, the Countess of Locksley’s personal chaplain, from two places along at the table. He was a fat, red-faced, roundish man who would never see forty again, but a luminous strength and goodness seemed to shine from him. ‘Robin has a charmingly youthful
joie de vivre
, I have always thought. And he’s fond of a jest, from time to time, as many of us are.’

‘I meant exactly what I said,’ grated Lord Edwinstowe. ‘He’s like a child at play – galloping off on this so-called Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land with King Richard and his knights and leaving you here alone to fend for yourself. He’s been gone now for – what? – some thirty months, and who knows when he will return – if ever he does. He’s never been a particularly religious fellow and, all of a sudden, he has this overwhelming urge to rid Jerusalem of all unbelievers? It’s preposterous. He’s a family man now. He has responsibilities, a wife and a growing boy…’

Marie-Anne flipped a delicate Venetian wine glass – an exquisite piece of work, rare and costly – off the edge of the table with a twitch of her index finger. It shattered on the rush-strewn floor of the hall with a delightfully musical tinkle.

‘I’m so sorry, my lord,’ she murmured, ‘how clumsy of me.’

A servant was already at her feet picking up the delicate shards but Lord Edwinstowe did not even seem to have noticed.

‘Talking of the Great Pilgrimage,’ said Father Tuck, far too brightly, ‘I had a letter from young Alan Dale the other day. It was brought by courier, by sea and by land, all the way from the Holy Land. Took more than a year to get here, mind you. It describes a great battle in which the Christian knights thoroughly routed the Saracens at a place called Arsuf last summer. Alan and Robin both fought well, it seems, and they were not too much knocked about by the heathens…’

Marie-Anne closed her ears to Tuck’s diversionary prattle. She toyed with a silver-chased crystal jug about half full of wine, twisting it in her hands and watching the play of sunlight from the high windows through the transparent material reflecting off the blood-red liquid inside. She wondered if she dared to toss it across the hall.

It was not just the boorish company of her host that put her so on edge. She missed her husband like an ache in the heart. She was anxious for his safety, and equally anxious about his return. He had left so swiftly after they had been married that they had barely had a chance to settle down together before he had been swept off to the far side of the world with the King and his legions. Then there was Hugh, her son. Robin had left when the boy was no more than a babe in swaddling clothes, a mere two weeks after his birth, and now he was a boisterous lad who ran happily about Marie-Anne’s castle of Kirkton filling the air with his shrill joyous shouts. How she wanted to see his lovely little face, to hold his strong, squirming body in her arms. She had been parted from Hugh for only four days but she longed to see him again almost as much as she longed to be parted from her brother-in-law.

Marie-Anne pushed these ill-disciplined thoughts away and raised her eyes to the opposite wall of the wooden hall and the two flags that had been hung there in honour of the feast. Her own device, an elegant white hawk on a cheerful blue field, and Lord Edwinstowe’s stumpy white oak tree on a field of green. The tree’s leaves were outsized, huge stylisations of foliage, and six massive acorns were overlaid on them, making the whole image as clumsy and crude as the man himself.

‘… and Alan mentions a jolly canso that he wrote especially for King Richard and which, he says, was much applauded by the court. It really is most amusing. It is the story of a young knight who falls in love with his lord’s wife and who decides to disguise himself as a serving maid to gain access to his lady’s chamber—’

‘It sounds deeply immoral,’ interrupted Lord Edwinstowe. ‘I don’t understand this faddish new enthusiasm for adultery. I don’t understand why these trouvères are forever banging on about illicit liaisons. It is wanton mischief-making. Family loyalty, the duty to one’s flesh and blood, that is the most important thing in life; and that is founded on fidelity between man and woman. If Sarah were ever to indulge in that kind of silly flirtation, I’d cast her off like a pair of dirty hose. In my opinion, a married woman who encourages a lover is no better than a common whore.’

A strained silence descended, broken only by Tuck crunching hard into a crisp apple. He had tried, God knew, to steer the conversation into harmless waters. But the man was a boor, plain and simple. The apple, however, was delicious. Sarah, Lady Edwinstowe, a moon-faced, plump woman with watery blue eyes, smiled wanly at her husband but said nothing about being compared to a pair of soiled leggings. She farted quietly, not quite silently, and fed a sweetmeat to the half-asleep and very overweight toy dog nestled in her bountiful lap.

Marie-Anne noticed that a pair of servants were standing beside her, one holding a bowl, with a clean towel over his arm, the other offering to pour water over her hands so that she might clean them. The meal was clearly over.

Thank God we are going home tomorrow
, she thought, as she rinsed her hands in the stream of warm rose-scented water. They had done their duty by Robin’s appalling relatives, and with luck they would not have to bear the company of the odious Lord of Edwinstowe for many a month to come, perhaps for years.

***

A warm September sun smiled down on the party of travellers the next morning as they made their way through thick forest, heading north-west on the old cart track towards Sheffield. The Countess of Locksley and Father Tuck led the procession. Behind them came eight tough-looking men-at-arms clad in dark green cloaks over mail and two laden pack-ponies. At the tail of Tuck’s horse stepped two huge reddish-grey wolfhounds, savage-looking animals as big as bull calves, with low-slung square heads and powerful jaws.

‘He’s not a bad man,’ said Tuck, ‘just a little old-fashioned.’

‘He’s an arse,’ said Marie-Anne. ‘He’s a full-blown, dyed-in-the-wool, no-hope-of-Salvation arse. Thank God we’re quit of him, his bovine wife and his drafty castle. I cannot wait to be at Kirkton, to breathe the clean air of the Locksley Valley!’

Tuck smiled. ‘You are too hard on him. He means well, and he is Robin’s only surviving male relative – for the sake of the family, we must try to be civil to him, since you have no other living kin.’

‘You be civil to him, if you must, I can hardly bear to look at the man. You can be civil on my behalf,’ said the Countess of Locksley. ‘Now, enough of this dawdling, slug-a-bed pace – in the name of all that is holy, let us ride!’ And with that she drove her spurs in her horse’s sides. The startled animal leaped up the track at a full thundering gallop, with Marie-Anne whooping with pleasure astride its back. A gust of wind caught her flapping white linen headdress and blew the garment from her brow and away into the woods, allowing her long glossy chestnut hair to flow free behind her like the streaming pennant from a charging knight’s lance.

Belatedly, her priest and her eight bodyguards kicked their own horses into motion, and soon the entire convoy was pelting madly along the muddy track, their drumming hooves kicking up clods of mud, the riders ducking desperately under low branches, swerving around the many potholes, racing in reckless haste as if being chased by the Devil himself.

***

The travellers arrived at Kirkton Castle a little before noon the next day, having stayed overnight at the castle at Sheffield. Marie-Anne’s face flushed with joy, as she rode along the northern road above the Locksley Valley, at the sight of her home. She had been born in the castle and had spent almost all of her twenty-two years in this lush valley. She knew every fold of hillside, every stand of trees, every gentle curve of the River Locksley. As the party went, they were greeted many times by the men and women who worked the lands of the Locksley family; shepherds mostly, though a few of the strips of fields were under the plough for barley and oats, and Tuck was struck once again by the pleasure that these humble folk took in saluting their lady.

But Marie-Anne’s happy expression changed abruptly as they rode up the path from St Nicholas’s Church and towards the main gate set in the wooden palisade of the castle. From there, she could see Kirkton’s tall flagpole, above the square wooden keep. In the place where her blue flag with its white hawk normally flapped, a new emblem stirred in the breeze: a black pennant emblazoned with three blood-red chevrons. The Countess of Locksley booted her tired horse into a canter as she approached the gate, her face as tight as a fist and as pale as whey. The portal opened before her snorting horse and she reined in in the centre of the courtyard as her entourage clattered into the castle behind her.

‘Get that foul thing down, right now,’ Marie-Anne barked at the castle steward, the elderly servant who held her excited horse’s bridle, as she pointed with a trembling finger at the alien flag. ‘I want that filthy rag taken down, now!’ She was almost shouting at the old man.

‘But, my lady,’ quavered the steward, ‘we have with us a most distinguished guest…’

‘My lady,’ came a different voice, a lisping voice, speaking in good Norman French. ‘Welcome home.’ A short, dark, handsome man with girlishly full red lips stood in the doorway of the hall. He was dressed in costly black silks from shoulder to shanks, covered with a fur-trimmed black cloak secured at the neck by a thick gold chain.

Marie-Anne stared hard at this small man who was leaning casually against the doorpost of her hall, a cup of wine in his right hand, his left on the silver handle of his sword. He had an extraordinary air of assurance for an uninvited guest in another lord’s castle, almost as if he were the true master here, and not she, and he was smiling at her in a louche, familiar way, almost smirking, as if he had just risen from their shared matrimonial bed.

Marie-Anne stepped down from her horse, accepting the steward’s arm as she did so. Their faces came within inches as the Countess descended and she hissed violently into the old man’s ear. ‘That fellow yonder is never to be admitted to this castle again – under any circumstances. Do you understand?’