Discipline was harsh at Thangbrand’s, which I soon discovered was more military training camp than peaceful backwoods farmstead. There were no light beatings of the kind my father had given me to make me mend my wild ways. Instead, the penalties for any transgressions were savage. Several days after I arrived, one of the men-at-arms, a fellow called Ralph, got drunk and raped one of the servant girls. Thangbrand dragged the rapist before Hugh, who said he was going to make an example of him. He had him beaten bloody with quarterstaves by the other outlaws until he was barely conscious, then the poor man was castrated in an awful ceremony performed in front of the entire population - I vomited at the sight once again, to my shame. Naked, bleeding from the gory hole between his legs, and barely able to walk, he was driven out of Thangbrand’s settlement into the forest to starve or, more likely, be eaten alive by the wolves.
I was frightened, I admit - the man’s agonised screams visited my dreams for weeks afterwards - and I vowed to behave myself and not invite punishment. So I obeyed my betters and began to learn the skills of a gentleman’s son.
Wilfred, Thangbrand’s eldest son, was perhaps sixteen years old, a quiet, mild youth much given to daydreaming and reading romances. He was not unkind to me but it was clear that he found me irritating. I needed to be supervised, he felt, and this took him away from his stories about King Arthur and other tales of heroic feats in battle. Despite his lurid tastes in literature, he was not at all warlike himself, and I could see that he might have made a good priest, if circumstances had been different and his father had been a Norman knight rather than a Saxon nobody living in the wilderness. As it was, he was responsible for overseeing me at my chores: simple, dull everyday jobs, such as chopping wood for the hall’s great fire and bringing water to fill the household butts from a stream that ran half a mile away. I also fed the chickens, doves and pigs twice a day and swept the area of beaten earth in front of the hall on which we practised for war.
Guy, though two years younger than Wilfred, was far more bellicose: indeed, I have never come across two brothers who were less similar. Wilfred was quiet, dreamy, monk-ish; Guy was loud, self-regarding, warlike and, from the moment I arrived there, he treated me with absolute contempt. Guy wished more than anything to be a knight: his name was actually Wolfram, not Guy, but he had given himself the Norman name, to his father’s fury, because he believed it sounded more knightly. Everything he did reflected his desire to be a member of the Norman military class. His loathing of me, I believed, came from my peasant birth; his family, Thangbrand’s ancestors, he often told me, had been lords since the dark ages. Before the Romans, even. He was my superior, he constantly pointed out, in every way.
Guy thrashed me with his fists on my third day at Thangbrand’s. He attacked me from behind as I was filling a sack with wheat to take to the mill and knocked me senseless; then, slapping me back into this world, he told me, ludicrously, to stay out of his way. I did try to stay out of his way, as much as possible, but Guy and I were forced into proximity in Thangbrand’s yard every morning for battle practice and every afternoon for our lessons with Hugh.
In his youth, Thangbrand may have been a great warrior. Indeed, he was apparently known as Thangbrand the Widowmaker and he claimed that his grandfather had been one of Harold Godwinson’s housecarls. But little of his prowess remained now that he had seen nearly sixty summers. He taught us to use sword and shield in stiff, very simplistic, set manoeuvres. Punch forward with the shield, then hack down with the sword. Or, lunge with the sword, defend high against the counterstroke with the shield. He had us practise these dull, obvious moves for hours, me, Wilfred, Guy and William and a couple of the outlaw men-at-arms who had had little or no military training. All of us standing in line and stepping our way forward in unison across the yard, while Thangbrand clapped his hands and shouted one-and-two, one-and-two, in time with our strokes. At the end of our session he would pair us up - most often Will and Wilfred and Guy and me - and we would mimic single combat. In my case, this meant cowering behind my shield enduring a storm of fury as Guy battered mercilessly at my defences. I realised that Robin had been right. One kill did not make me a warrior.
In one way this training was useful: I didn’t learn much about fighting but I did discover how deeply angry Guy was. What Tuck would call a ‘hot man’. And the exercise strengthened my arms - and quite possibly my mind.
The afternoon lessons were a pleasant surprise: I discovered that much of the language my father had attempted to beat into me had in fact taken root. When Hugh read out passages in Latin, I found myself half-understanding the text. When he spoke to us in French, too, I found it relatively easy to understand. And the words and phrases that I didn’t know, once Hugh had explained them in English, stuck with me. Hugh was pleased; the other boys were not. When Hugh’s back was turned, Guy would punch me hard on the arm, or knee me painfully in the thigh, and call me ‘teacher’s blondie bum-boy’ or ‘little yellow lick-spittle’.
William, the red-headed cousin, was a thief. He proudly told me that his nickname in his home in Yorkshire was ‘Scoff-lock’ or ‘Scarlock’ because of his skill breaking into houses and opening money chests. We all called him Will Scarlet, because of his flaming hair. His most irritating habit was to steal my food at dinner, quite blatantly: his darting hand snatching a piece of bread or meat as my head was turned and stuffing it into his mouth. I found this particularly annoying because of its absurdity - there was plenty of food to go around, and good food, too.
Indeed, we ate meat almost every day; as Thangbrand lived not by farming - although a few vegetables were grown in a plot behind the hall - but by poaching the forest. He traded meat - venison and wild boar, mainly - for grain with the nearest farmers, and occasionally he and his men would ambush travellers on the Great North Road and relieve them of their valuables and sometimes their lives. One third of the cash from these robberies was handed over to Hugh, as Robin’s representative. This tribute, sometimes called Robin’s Share, was stored in a great iron-bound coffer in the hall which was half full of silver pennies. Even to touch the chest was a death sentence. And, after witnessing the punishment meted out to Ralph the rapist, much as I loved to steal, I lost any inclination to help myself from it.
But Robin’s Share was not the only treasure in Thangbrand’s hall. Freya, Thangbrand’s enormous wife had one, too; their own private hoard of valuables hidden in their chamber.
As part of my daily duties, I would bring cups of warmed wine to Freya and Thangbrand before they went to sleep an hour or two after dusk. One night when I was bringing their nightcaps, I found the door was ajar and entered their solar silently without knocking. I did not mean to surprise them but the cups were full and I was concentrating on not spilling the hot wine and so I moved carefully and, as a result, quietly. As I entered the chamber I saw Freya on her knees in the corner of the room. There was a dark hole in the floor, which I had never seen before, from which the lid of a small metal box protruded. Freya had a rush-light in one hand and, in the other . . . God forgive me, but even forty years on I still feel a rush of unholy greed when I think of it . . . in the other hand was a huge oval-shaped jewel, a dark translucent red colour. It was an enormous ruby, a great gorgeous stone worth many hundreds of pounds, a baron’s ransom, maybe more - although I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew, with my thievish heart, was that I wanted it. Then things began to happen very fast. Freya saw me, gave a high pitched squeal and thrust the great jewel back into the box in the hole in the floor; and out of the darkness, like an avenging demon, sprang Thangbrand the Widowmaker, grasping a great dagger. His weight smashed me against the wall, cups and wine hurled into the air, and he held me there with the knife against my throat, his ageing, bloated face inches from mine. I could smell his foul breath and his eyes bored into me. I was moments from death, I could feel the cold steel pressing into the flesh of my neck; one swift lateral movement of his hand and I would be washing the beaten earth floor with my life’s blood.
‘What did you see?’ hissed Thangbrand. The stench of his rotting teeth filled my nostrils. His yellowed eyes searched my face. ‘Nothing,’ I squeaked. ‘Nothing, sir.’
‘You lie,’ he said, his blotched face working with rage. ‘You lie . . .’ There was a momentary increase in the pressure on my neck. Then, praise God, he pulled back his face a few inches, considering me, and then more calmly he said again: ‘You lie, but, as you are under Lord Robert’s protection, you shall live, for now . . .’ He released me and stepped back. We stared at each other for a few heartbeats. Freya was frozen on her knees in the corner. ‘Listen to me, boy,’ said Thangbrand, ‘listen to me if you want to live. You did see nothing, nothing at all. But if, by any chance, you were to talk to anybody about the nothing that you saw here tonight, Will, Wolfram, anybody at all, then I will slit your weasand from ear to ear while you sleep, drag you out into the forest for the wolves, and no one will say a word. Do you hear me?’
‘I will be silent, sir, I vow it,’ I said, trying to still my shaking limbs.
‘Yes,’ he growled, ‘be silent, and be gone.’
I felt more respect for Thangbrand after that night. He might be a dull sword instructor but he was still a fearsome man despite his age. So I tried to put what I had seen from my mind. The next day it was as if nothing had ever happened and Thangbrand treated me with the same rough affection as he had previously.
Life rolled on, spring turned into summer, and in these months my routine changed little: a round of work, meals, lessons, sleep, work . . . It would have been quite pleasant were it not for the taunts and blows from Guy, and the behaviour of his irritating shadow Will. As I’ve said, there was absolutely no need for William to steal from my plate, but he continued to do it anyway; I suppose he thought it was a challenge of some kind. But watching Will’s chewing, bulging mouth, stuffed with my food, leering at me across the table, while he sat next to his protector Guy and dared me to say something, well, it didn’t make me feel challenged - just slightly ill.
I had to do something about it, though, if only for my honour’s sake. One day, palming a crust of bread, I inserted a sharp but rusty iron nail that I had found in the yard that morning, making sure it was completely hidden from view. Casually leaving the piece of bread on the edge of my plate nearest to Will, I turned away from the table to ask Thangbrand about something and when I turned back the little red-haired bastard was cursing and spitting blood. He’d bitten down hard on the nail and broken one of his teeth. Of course, he could say nothing about my part in the incident, and it stopped him filching from my plate, but it didn’t exactly make us friends.
I did make one friend at Thangbrand’s: the skinny little yellow-haired girl Godifa. I was trying to stay out of Guy’s way after a particularly dreary Latin lesson - Guy had no ear for the language at all and to make matters worse he was badly hung-over after drinking heavily the night before with the men-at-arms. As he stumbled and stuttered his way through a passage of the Bible, I could feel Hugh’s impatience growing. He loved the Word of God with all his heart and it offended him to hear it mangled so. Finally, he asked me to translate the passage correctly and I did so, fluently but with a growing realisation that this display of prowess would cost me dearly. Sure enough, once Hugh’s back was turned, Guy kneed me hard in the thigh, causing my leg to go numb. After the lesson, I’m ashamed to say, I fled to avoid the inevitable beating from Guy. He stood a good head taller than me and, as I had discovered many times before, I stood no chance against him in any kind of combat.
So I had left the farmstead - it was a beautiful, warm day - and gone into the woodland to lose myself in the calm of the great trees for a while, when I came across Godifa standing by a huge old oak tree and crying her little heart out. She had adopted a kitten, which had grown into a young and daring little beast, and it was stuck up the tree. As she sobbed, it peered down at us from a low branch, miaowing piteously. It took me a dozen heartbeats to scramble up the tree and stuff the cat into my tunic before swinging down and presenting it to Godifa with a little bow and a flourish. There was an instant transformation on her face - from rain to sunshine. Beaming and cuffing away her tears she grabbed my hand and kissed it before running away, skipping with happiness. I thought little of it but, for weeks afterwards, I began to notice her following me around as I did my chores. She was very shy and would not speak to me and, if I caught her eye and smiled at her, she would immediately blush and run away.
About six months after my arrival at Thangbrand’s, there was an evening feast: a saint’s day, I think, though I cannot remember which one. At great feasts, my duty was to go around the table with a huge ewer of water, pour it over the outstretched hands of the guests into a salver held by Will. Then Guy would offer a clean towel. When all the guests had washed, I would help the servants bringing food from the cookhouse: we had roast boar; great haunches of venison, of course; boiled capons; pigeon pie; pease pudding; cheese and fruit. Each guest had a trencher: a wide, flat platter of baked bread on which they would eat their meat; the bread soaking up the juices. Will and I circled the great table pouring wine, removing dishes when empty, bringing in more courses from the cookhouse. We took turns to snatch a few mouthfuls in a dark corner of the hall, whenever we could.
On this occasion, when everyone had fed to their hearts’ content, and we had removed all but the fruit and jugs of wine, a man I had not seen before walked to the end of the hall. He was holding a vielle, a beautifully polished wooden musical instrument with five strings, a big round belly and a tall, thin neck. Holding the vielle to his shoulder with his left hand, with a sweep of the horsehair bow in his right, he struck a single long, golden chord and gradually silence descended on the boisterous gathering.