‘We have some business to conclude before we celebrate my nuptials,’ said Robin in a voice as cold as hoar frost. He looked straight at Hugh. I noticed that John and Tuck were standing right next to Robin’s older brother, as close as gaolers. ‘What business is that?’ asked Hugh lightly.
‘I know it was you, Hugh,’ said Robin, his voice grating. ‘At first it was just a suspicion, and I dismissed it. I said to myself: my own brother would not betray me, never. My own flesh and blood? A man whom I have helped, saved, loved . . . The traitor cannot be him.’ He paused, fixing his gaze on his brother, waiting for him to speak. Hugh said nothing, but the blood was slowly leaving his face. ‘But then, at Linden Lea, I was deceived, by you, about the strength of their numbers. The Flemings, you told me, could not possibly be there for at least a week.’
‘I made a mistake,’ Hugh said. ‘Intelligence is never exact. My sources said—’
Robin cut him off: ‘The size of Murdac’s force was nearly double what we had supposed. The mangonel . . .’ Robin appeared perfectly calm, but he had to stop and take a breath. ‘We were not luring Murdac into a deadly trap, he was luring us. Sir Ralph knew what we had planned from the very beginning . . . because you had told him.’
Hugh was frantically shaking his head. ‘It wasn’t me, Robin, I swear. It must have been another—’
‘I know it was you. Don’t insult me further by pretending it was not. Just admit the truth. For once, Hugh, just admit the truth.’
‘I swear . . . I swear in the name of Our Saviour Jesus Christ—’
‘Enough!’ Robin’s voice cracked across the small room. He pulled a bench out from the wall and, putting his arm around Hugh, he led him to the seat and sat him down, taking the place next to him. ‘Hugh,’ he said, his voice weary and kindly, like a parent talking to a recalcitrant child. ‘You are my brother, I love you, but I know it was you. Just tell me why you did it and I swear I will not harm you. I swear it on all that I hold dear.’
‘But Robin—’ Hugh began, and his voice had a whining edge. Robin shushed him with a finger to his lips.
‘Just tell me why you did it, that’s all, and I will not harm you. Just tell me why. Please. Please, Hugh. Was I not kind to you, did I not help you when you were down, raise you up—’
Suddenly Hugh sat up straight; he threw off Robin’s embracing arm. ‘I am the elder brother,’ he cried. ‘
I
am. First William, then me, then you. That’s how the order goes. That is how God had ordained it. And look at you now, my little brother, an Earl, with the friendship of the King.’ His voice had a sneering tone. ‘I remember you when you were still shitting in your napkin and suckling at the wet nurse’s teat. And now . . . and now . . .’ Words seemed to fail Hugh. ‘You have everything and I have nothing. No home, no money, no woman, no children. I am a lackey, a servant . . . to you!’
‘When did Murdac first approach you?’ asked Robin in a quiet voice. The whole room was spellbound by Hugh’s words. The man dropped his balding head into his hands. Robin said nothing. The silence stretched longer and longer, became thin, unbearable . . .
‘You don’t understand,’ said Hugh forcefully, lifting his head with a jerk. ‘I did it for you, to save your soul. Your immortal soul is in terrible danger with this foul witchcraft that you practise, this pagan devil worship. You think it is mere pageantry - but you are wrong, you are so wrong. It is an abomination. You are damning your soul to Hell for eternity with these filthy practices. And you are encouraging others, simple country folk, to throw away their chance of Salvation. They said, Murdac said, that the Church would receive you with joy, that Christ would receive you. They would cleanse you of all sin before your death and guarantee you immortal life. In Heaven, in the company of saints. I wanted that for you! I wanted you to be saved.’
‘How did Murdac approach you? When?’ asked Robin quietly.
‘You don’t understand.’ Hugh was nearly shouting by now. ‘You don’t understand: I approached him. Somebody had to stop you. After you humiliated His Grace the Bishop of Hereford, a great man of God, and slaughtered his holy men, I knew you were in danger of damnation. I had to act. I had to. And they promised me that you would be saved; that after your capture you would receive the blessing of Holy Mother Church and your soul would be for ever in Christ’s keeping.’ Hugh was suddenly sobbing. ‘In Christ’s keeping,’ he repeated.
‘And Thangbrand? And Freya? And all those men and women cut down in the snow? You wanted to save their souls, too?’ said Robin, icily calm.
‘They were already damned; they were Godless outlaws, pagans, priest-murders—’
‘They were your friends,’ snapped Robin. He rose from the bench. His kindly demeanour was gone. ‘I’ve heard enough,’ he said in a voice empty as a tomb. He pulled Hugh to his feet. ‘Get out of my sight,’ he said, pushing him to the pantry door. ‘If I ever see you again, I swear I will kill you on sight. Now, get gone.’
Hugh stared at him through tear-blotched, empty eyes. Robin turned away, and I caught, just for a moment, a look of immense sadness on his face, before it hardened again into a cold mask. Then with his back to his brother, he snapped: ‘Get out!’ and Hugh turned, his body limp, defeated, as he made his way slowly towards the door.
We all pulled back to give him room; as if nobody wished to touch him. But then, to my left, there was a blur of motion, and John was past me in a whirlwind of muscle and anger. He took two steps, reached out with his great hands and wrapped them around Hugh’s long neck, just as Robin’s brother reached the door. Then he squeezed. Every ounce of strength in his huge body was concentrated on the double grip that entirely filled the space between Hugh’s chin and his shoulders. Nobody moved; we were all frozen in surprise. Hugh’s face began to swell and colour, cherry red and then purple, then grey blue. His own hands scrabbled at John’s great fists, scratching and trying to pull them away as they squeezed the breath of life out of him. Suddenly there was a hideous popping click, and Hugh’s head flopped to one side and, at the same time, we heard a great farting rush of fluid, and the buttery was filled with a rich meaty stench as his bowels emptied. Urine drizzled around his ankles, forming a yellow pool at his feet. John shook the body once, jiggling the unstrung head, and then dropped the carcass to the piss-soaked floor.
‘John . . . what have you done?’ asked Robin. His voice was weak, uncertain, quavering. He sounded like an old man. Still nobody moved. Then John bent over the body for a moment. He had a knife in his hand and I saw him prise open the dead man’s mouth, pull forth the limp tongue and make one swift cut. He released the lolling head and it fell back on to the stone floor with a dull clunk.
‘I gave him my word I would not harm him,’ said Robin. His voice had a disbelieving quality; he seemed appalled by John’s actions.
‘By God’s great swinging testicles, I did not,’ said John, tucking the scrap of red flesh into the pouch at his belt. ‘He needed to die, if any man ever did. And you would have given him forgiveness? You? He needed to die, if not for you, then for all those good men, your men, who died at Linden Lea. That is justice.’
Robin still seemed dazed by his brother’s death. He stared down at the body. For the first time since I had met him he seemed almost weak. ‘I’m an Earl now,’ he said slowly, ‘a companion of the King, a knight sworn to the Cross. I am no longer a common outlaw, a murderer. I have fought so long, so hard to get to this point . . . Does an Earl break his oath, murder his brother, mutilate men?’
‘In my experience, that’s exactly what Earls do,’ said John.
Historical Note
On Sunday September 13, 1189, Richard, Duke of Aquitaine, was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey to enormous popular acclaim. He immediately started preparing to embark for what later generations would call the Third Crusade. Henry II had left a decent sized treasury in England when he died, but Richard, his war-loving son, needed a lot more money for the glorious adventure he was planning to undertake.
Although he was now King of England, Richard’s heart always remained further south in his mother’s homeland of Aquitaine and, during his ten-year reign, he was to spend no more than ten months in his northern realm. Indeed, he seems to have considered England as a sort of enormous piggy bank, valuable only because of the money he could extract from it. To fund his crusade, however, Richard was not able to increase taxation upon the people of England: the Saladin Tithe, instituted by his father in 1187 to pay for a future expedition to recapture Jerusalem, had squeezed the country almost dry. So Richard decided to auction off all the titles, rights and positions that were within his gift - a perfectly normal kingly practice in the 12
th
century. Roger of Howden, a contemporary chronicler, wrote of Richard: ‘He put up for sale everything he had - offices, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, lands . . .’ Indeed Richard himself said, half-jokingly: ‘I would sell London, if I could find a buyer.’
The result was a massive influx of cash and a major political reshuffle right across the country - Henry’s men were out and Richard’s were in. Of the twenty-seven men who had been sheriffs at the end of Henry’s reign, only five retained their office, and the new men paid handsomely for their appointments. One such casualty of Richard’s need for quick cash was Sir Ralph Murdac, the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and the Royal Forests (there was no such position of sheriff of Nottingham until the middle of the 15
th
century). He was removed from his position and replaced by Roger de Lacy in 1190. Ralph Murdac was a real man but, personal facts about 12
th
-century individuals being rather thin on the ground, I have invented almost everything else about him apart from his name. The same is true of other historical characters in my story, such as Ralph FitzStephen, the constable of Winchester; Robert of Thurnham, the loyal king’s man who held a castle in Kent; his brother Stephen, and Fulcold, Eleanor’s chamberlain.
Piers, the unfortunate sacrificial victim is, of course, an invention, but the way he died is based on archaeological evidence of Celtic human sacrifices, specifically that of the Lindow Man, a mummified corpse from the 1
st
century AD found in Cheshire in 1984. The Lindow Man, a high-status individual, quite possibly a druid, had been hit on the head, strangled and then had his throat cut as part of a pre-Christian ritual, before being thrown in a peat bog where the body was perfectly preserved for hundreds of years.
There is little evidence that paganism was widespread in 12
th
century England; indeed, most scholars now agree that the country was almost universally Christian. But I like to believe, perhaps fancifully, that there would have been pockets of people, in the wild inaccessible places, who still clung to the older gods, who still practised witchcraft and magic and who were fiercely resistant to the spiritual authority of the ubiquitous Church. To my mind, Robin Hood himself is an incarnation of a wild forest spirit; a manifestation of all that is non-urban, uncivilised and unchristian. And I think that part of his enduring appeal lies in that exciting ‘otherness’.
So was Robin Hood a real man? This is a tough question. Was there once an outlaw named Robert who hid in Sherwood Forest, or perhaps Barnsdale, during the high middle ages and made a name for himself by robbing travellers? Almost certainly. In fact, Robert being a common name, robbery being the last resort of many a starving peasant - and the choice of many an impecunious knight - there were probably several men who could fit that description. Perhaps dozens. Would we recognise any of these pretenders to the title as the Robin Hood of our modern legends, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, trading quips with his merry men while slapping a green-clad thigh? Almost certainly not.
In literature, Robin Hood first makes an appearance in a 1370s poem by William Langland, known as the ‘Vision of Piers Plowman’. In it, there is a lazy cleric who knows the popular stories of Robin Hood better than he knows his prayers. So we know that the soap-opera-style tales of Robin were a byword in the second half of the 14
th
century when Langland was writing his poem. But some scholars even claim to have traced the man himself. The first references to a possible Robin Hood figure occur in legal documents in the first half of the 13
th
century. In 1230, the sheriff of Yorkshire accounted for the goods he had seized from a fugitive called Robert Hood. Another Robert Hod of Burntoft, County Durham, is mentioned as owning property in a legal document of 1244. He subsequently lost his property, so could this man have become an outlaw? The issue is further confused because by the second half of the 13
th
century the names ‘Robinhood’ and ‘Robehod’ occur frequently in the court records of several northern counties. Were they real names, or a generic word for any highwayman, or aliases given by criminals hoping to borrow some glamour from the association with a famous outlaw? I don’t think we will ever know. But what we can assume is that Robin Hood, if he existed, operated during the beginning of 13
th
century or earlier. And I have chosen to set my stories at the end of the 12
th
century and start of the 13
th
century purely because the films and TV programmes that I watched when I was growing up set Robin’s exploits in this era.
Whether Robin was a real person, or the personification of a pagan woodland sprite, or a ‘brand name’ co-opted by boastful criminals, or an amalgamation of several outlaws, I still find the stories about him strangely gripping. I hope you do, too; and I hope you will enjoy the next book in the series,
Crusader
, published in 2010, which deals with Robin and Alan’s adventures on the long, dusty road to the Holy Land.