The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (3 page)

I blushed beetroot red and mumbled something about being delighted, if time and my duties permitted, then I turned to William the Marshal and asked him in a gruff voice for news of the war on the continent. With one part of my mind, I wondered what it would be like to touch Tilda’s pitch-black hair, to run my fingers through it. Would it be coarse? What would it smell like? I had to wrench my mind back to what the Marshal was saying.

The Lusignans were stirring up rebellion in Poitou and Aquitaine, the Marshal said – and the other men huddled in to listen, too – but it was nothing serious, a little looting and livestock theft, no more; and King Philip had his envious eyes on Normandy, as usual, although in this seasoned warrior’s opinion the treaty signed recently at Le Goulet, a solemn compact between the kings of England and France, ought to restrain him for some months to come.

‘There is not all that much going on just at the moment,’ sighed the Marshal. ‘Even Duke Arthur of Brittany has dropped his claim to the Angevin lands. Philip made him do so – in the name of peace between England and France.’

‘There seems to be a terrible danger of a long-lasting peace breaking out,’ said Robin, to much knightly guffawing. I stole a glance at Tilda, and from under her long dark lashes she caught my eye and smiled shyly. I blushed again, looked away, and resolved to restrict my thoughts to proper masculine affairs.

‘There can be no real peace until Philip is defeated,’ said de Lacy, thrusting out his chin. ‘While he can still field a force of two thousand knights, and twice as many men-at-arms, Normandy will not be safe. And God help the man who doesn’t understand that. Philip must be crushed. Utterly destroyed.’

Sir Joscelyn coughed. ‘It might well be possible to have peace, if the King were to agree to hand over a small part of Normandy to the French. The Vexin, perhaps, some of the eastern castles…’

‘Nonsense!’ De Lacy’s interruption was an axe blade cutting through Giffard’s words. ‘The King must hold his patrimony, every part of it. It was given to him by God, and it is his sacred duty to guard it for his heirs and successors. Every castle, every town, every yard of land. If he shows the slightest weakness, he will lose the whole damn lot in double quick time.’

I kept my eyes on Robin’s face as the talk of war and peace, of alliances and shifting loyalties rolled over me. There was something a little strange about my lord’s demeanour this evening. On the surface he seemed perfectly happy, now reconciled with his King, no longer an outlaw, and once again restored to the title of Earl of Locksley – even if he had three years of service yet before he could fully come into his lands. He should have been contented, joyous even; this was his day and, indeed, he appeared happy. He was witty, irreverent; he seemed serenely in command of his life. Yet I knew in my heart he was furious. I had known him half my lifetime then, and I could tell, if nobody else in that bellowing throng could, that he was boiling with a suppressed and very violent rage.

After perhaps an hour, Robin took me by the elbow. ‘Let us take some air,’ he said. We disengaged ourselves from the gathering and walked out of the hall into the middle bailey. Robin looked up at the night sky, scattered with uncaring stars and lit by a low silver moon.

I waited in silence for him to speak.

‘He did not set his seal on this,’ said Robin finally, lifting the rolled parchment that he was holding. ‘My rights, my obligations, the extent of my lands – it’s all here in an elegant clerkly hand in beautiful Latin. But it means nothing without his seal. It’s just a scrap of animal skin with no force in law.’

‘I’m sure he’ll set his seal on it when your three years are up,’ I said.

‘Are you? I wish I were.’

I said nothing.

‘I do not see what else I could have done,’ Robin said. There was an oddly plaintive tone to his voice that I did not much like. ‘Surely Marie-Anne and the boys must have a home?’

There was no ready answer to this, so I remained mute.

‘Are you sure you will not come with me to Normandy?’ he said after some little time had passed.

‘I cannot,’ I said. ‘Truly, I cannot. Westbury is greatly impoverished; I have sorely neglected it of late. And little Robert has been motherless since Goody died. I must raise him and the fortunes of Westbury together. I am sorry, my lord.’

‘A shame. I could have done with a good man at my side, one of my own people,’ said Robin. ‘Someone I can actually trust,’ he added with a sideways smile.

‘What did the King whisper after you had made the oath?’ I asked, not expecting that he would tell me.

He didn’t, for a long time.

‘It was nothing,’ he said, finally. ‘Nothing at all important.’

‘What did he say?’

Robin looked at me, and I could see the silver sheen of his strange grey eyes in the darkness: ‘He said four words, Alan. Only four – but I think I will be hearing them in my head for the rest of my life.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, “There’s a good boy.”’

The harvest was bad that summer in Nottinghamshire. Towards the end of August, when the wheat was just beginning to turn gold in the fields, angry violet clouds massed like demon armies, came charging forward and dumped an ocean over Westbury. The harvest died in the fields, trampled flat by a deluge that would have sunk the Ark. For two solid weeks the pouring Heavens battered the standing corn. I stood in the doorway of the hall day after day, under the steady gush of the eves, and looked out over the grey sheets dancing across the Westbury fields. After the second week, a break in the clouds briefly raised our spirits – perhaps, I said hopefully to my steward Baldwin, with a few dry days we might be able to salvage some of the barley and the oat crops, which were due to be brought after the wheat. But the next afternoon the clouds returned, the waterfall resumed.

I gathered the villagers of Westbury into my hall in early September, more than a hundred dripping folk and, as the lightning cracked across the slate-grey sky and the rain pounded my sodden thatch, I told them all that they need not fear starvation, come wintertime. We would build large brick ovens and dry some of the grain, I told them, and that way we might salvage something of the summer’s bounty. We had some stores of wheat, barley and oats from the previous year, not much admittedly, and most of it needed for seed, but we would eat it rather than starve, and I was prepared to spend my own silver on more seed grain from other parts of the realm, or from Normandy or the Low Countries. There was nothing to fear, I told my people.

But there was.

In the autumn a murrain broke out among my flocks, rotting their feet and blistering their mouths, and more than half of the sheep of Westbury died within two weeks. Four of our milk cows went down too, their mouths creamy with froth.

A herd of fallow deer broke through the fences of the bean and pea fields in late September and ate or destroyed much of that harvest before they could be chased away by the local children. And the fruit crop from my orchards was meagre that season – no catastrophe here, it just happened, as it sometimes does, that the apples and pears were thin on the branches, small and hard. A bad year.

Each of these setbacks would have been endurable in itself but the cumulative effect was disastrous. The local people muttered that God was punishing Westbury.

If God were indeed punishing Westbury, He was also punishing the rest of Christendom. For when I tried to purchase grain to fill the barns and tide us over through the winter months, I found that harvests had failed all over the country and across the seas, too. The price of wheat – in an ordinary season four shillings a quarter – doubled, then trebled; the price of barley and rye, too. Oats were three and half times their previous value. A hen, which might be worth a half-penny in ordinary times, was now two pence or even three – if you could find a man willing to sell. I bought as much food as I could – but a fire the year before had destroyed my hoard of silver and necessitated the complete rebuilding of Westbury, and despite Robin’s generous help, the cost had been very high. I now knew for certain there was not enough grain in my barns to feed everyone in Westbury until the first crops of the next summer could be brought in. Without grain the people would starve.

My knightly neighbours thought me a fool to spend my own precious coin on the Westbury peasants. I had a duty to protect them in war, certainly, but not to fill their lazy bellies. They told me I should allow God to decide whether they lived or died. But that has never been my way – perhaps I am a fool, perhaps it is the result of my own peasant upbringing. For I had known hunger as a child; my two sisters had died of it. I could not sit snug in my hall while my hollow-bellied villagers died.

So I spent what little money I had on sacks of grain shipped from the Low Countries and the village baker and I organised a distribution of loaves to every household in the village once a week. Every Sunday after church, the manor servants served out a hot meal in the courtyard to all who wished it. Simple fare: a soup, perhaps a very thin stew of root vegetables, and bread, if we had it. I hunted as much as I could on my lands – deer, boar, hares, even wood pigeon – and turned a blind eye to local poachers trying to fill the family pot. But the game soon became scarce, killed by the villagers or by my own hounds or just wisely moving away to safer, more remote corners of the Sherwood wilderness.

I shared the meagre diet of the Westbury folk, as I felt it my duty to set an example, as did all the servants at Westbury and my half-dozen men-at-arms. But I made an exception for my son Robert, who was then a little more than a year old. He might have as much milk and bread as he wished, I told his nurse, and she seemed pleased, no doubt thinking that while her charge ate well, she would not go hungry.

But many did that long winter. The villeins butchered their oxen, horses and donkeys and ate them hooves, hides and all; the dogs and cats of Westbury mysteriously began to disappear, and no one enquired too closely after them. My own hunting hounds grew rake thin and ill-tempered and fought over bones already boiled white for their juices. Eventually, I sent them onward, gentling each animal, fondling its ears and slitting its throat with my own knife. Their carcasses went to make soup for the people of the village, and for two weeks we ate relatively well. But hunger was ever-present, hovering like a shadow or an evil spirit. I could see it in the eyes of my servants, and the folk I met in the lanes. I could smell its chalky bitterness on their breath. The villagers scoured the woods around and about for nuts and nettles and roots. Some boiled half-rotten acorns to make a bitter mush; others went so far as to strip bark from the trees and chew it. There were tales of cannibals loose in the forest who’d eat any travellers they came across.

In January the old and the very young began to die. They sickened, a racking cough settling on their lungs and refusing to depart, and then they quietly passed beyond this hungry world, perhaps, with God’s forgiveness, to a better place. Babies and old men, mostly. But others too. In early March I came across a young woman, thin as a yearling ash, her limbs but pale twigs, lying dead beside the road not two miles from my hearth. Her mouth had been stained green as a result of her attempt to eat her fill of grass and weeds like a beast of the field. A living baby lay in her cold arms and I gathered it up and took it to the village to find a foster mother for the poor starveling creature. But no one would take an extra mouth into their home and so I brought it to the manor, and with the help of Ada, one of my late wife’s maidservants, I tried to feed it warm sheep’s milk. It died a day afterwards, silently, and though I was no kin to the poor mite, I was heartbroken.

The spring came and, while the warmer weather lifted our spirits, our stocks of food were utterly exhausted – by then, even we privileged folk in the hall were eating nettle soup and bitter acorn bread, and drinking nothing but cold water – but with the April sunshine came a letter from Robin in Normandy.

It said simply, ‘Alan, stop trying to be a damned farmer and come and fight.’

With the letter came a fat purse of silver.

We must have made a poor impression as we disembarked at the quayside in the town of Barfleur on the afternoon of the first day of May in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and two – myself and my only accompanying man-at-arms, Kit, a bold freeman from Westbury, both of us thin, queasy and grey-looking from the rough sea journey. Indeed, I heard the sound of mocking laughter from the throats of several watching men as we led our horses down the gangplank and on to the stone jetty of the harbour – the beasts looking as ill and miserable as we did – and I straightened my spine and looked angrily to my left to see a crowd of rough-looking men-at-arms mounted and heavily armed and waiting beside the customs house. At the head of the group was a huge figure on an equally massive horse. He wore a short-sleeved iron hauberk that seemed too tight for his vast chest, and under a plain steel cap, dirty yellow hair tied in fat plaits framed a large battered red face. When I caught his eye, he bawled out, ‘Move along, you beggar-men, there are no alms for you here today! Move along! Knock at the church door yonder and you may get a few mouldy scraps to keep body and soul together. Ha-ha-ha! But only if you both get on your knees and offer to suck the priest’s cheesy cock!’

The men-at-arms behind him duly guffawed at his cudgel wit.

We did indeed look shabby. Under a patched and faded red cloak, my own hauberk hung loosely on me; my boots were scuffed; the shield slung over my back was sorely in need of repainting. My bay horse’s coat was dull and his eyes rolled with the remnants of his seasickness, and he skittered unhappily on the unmoving ground. I pointed his nose towards the group of men-at-arms and walked him slowly towards the blond giant. ‘It is true. We are hungry, you fat greasy capon. And, if you don’t mind your manners, I’ll eat you and your horse whole,’ I said. ‘Spurs, saddle, boots – and I’ll spit your cracked bones into the midden!’