The Death of Robin Hood (16 page)

Old Brother Roger stepped forward with a platter of honey cakes, almond tarts and candied fruits – he had spent the whole of the night in the kitchens and his face this day was green with exhaustion. Nevertheless, he proudly held out the tray holding his delicate works and in a tiny, whispering voice invited the King to taste one.

‘Not just now,’ said the King, slapping his gloved hands together and looking around the faces of the assembled monks. ‘We have a fine dinner being prepared for us at Clipstone and I would like to speak to Sir Alan Dale – Brother Alan, that is – without delay. We must be away within the hour.’

‘He is waiting in the chapter house, Sire,’ said Lord Westbury, indicating the way with an outstretched arm. ‘He is infirm, alas, and cannot stand for very long.’

I saw Brother Roger’s face fall – the fruits of his long night’s labour scorned. And, to my amazement, the King noticed it too. He stopped mid-stride and turned back to the elderly monk and his heavily laden tray.

‘On second thought, I think perhaps I will try just one,’ said the King. ‘They do look most extraordinarily tempting.’ He reached out and seized a honey cake, taking a large bite. As the King made muffled noises to express his delight at the cake, he was ushered through the courtyard towards the chapter house. I heard a beaming Brother Roger whisper, ‘Most extraordinarily tempting’ to himself over and over again.

Inside the chapter house, Lord Westbury had his grandfather by the elbow and was helping him to kneel in the presence of the King. Henry affably waved him to stand, indeed to sit on the stone bench that ran all around the four sides of the room. When Brother Alan was seated, the King plumped down beside him, with Lord Westbury on Brother Alan’s other flank, and asked after his health.

‘I am
as well as can be expected, Sire, at my age,’ said Brother Alan, smiling at his King. ‘At more than three score years and ten, I have no complaints and I am well looked after here – although it is but a poor House.’ I swear on my soul the ancient monk caught my eye and actually winked at me. ‘Yes, a very poor House of God and sadly without a great and generous lord to support it.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Henry drily. He knew when he was being softened up for a request for funds.

‘Well, you are no doubt wondering why I have come to see you. And I hope I will not take up too much of your time, but Lord Westbury here tells me you are the man who can tell me about this Robin Hood character – he remembers the stories you told him when he was a child. I have encountered songs and tales about this fellow all across England – and at my courts of law no less than five impudent felons have claimed to be the man himself – two in Leicestershire, one in Yorkshire, one in Derbyshire, even one in Kent. My question to you, good brother, is this: who is this Robin Hood fellow and why does every common wife murderer and horse thief from Dover to Durham claim with such pride to be him?’

Brother Alan made an odd grunting noise and his body rocked back and forward on the bench. I wondered if he were having some sort of fit, if the exertions of this happy day had proved too much. Then I realised that he was laughing.

‘You find this amusing?’ said the King in a voice that seemed to suggest that a man who laughed at him would very soon regret it.

‘No, Sire, not … amusing,’ wheezed Brother Alan. ‘But it is passing strange, as I hope you will admit. Because, Sire, you have already met him – the true Robin Hood. You met the man himself long ago, thirty years ago – when you were but a slip of a boy.’

The
mercy of a quick death? King John’s verdict
was
a mercy, in a way. I would not have my feet and hands hacked off and be forced to spend the rest of my days as a beggar man, whining for scraps of bread from passers-by, frightening children with the ugliness of my deformity, unable even to wipe the filth from my own body.

I looked at Robin. He was staring mutely at the King. His eyes were the colour of wet slate. And even I who knew him well was shocked by the cool intensity of hatred in his stare. That man is marked for death, I thought. Robin will surely kill him. Then I realised how absurd that notion was. However hard he glared at the King, Robin could not destroy him. In a few moments, my lord and I would be kicking our last at the end of a rope. We could only hope that our sons would take our revenge for us.

Oblivious to Robin, the King was smirking like a child who has been promised a sweetmeat, delighted by his own duplicity. Then I saw that Savary de Mauléon, that grizzled Poitevin lord, was moving towards him, pushing through the bright silks of the courtiers, his face grim as a Nottinghamshire midwinter.

‘Sire,’ he
said quietly in French. ‘You cannot do this. You cannot hang all these knights out of hand, rebels though they undoubtedly are.’

‘Why the hell not?’ said the King in the same language.

‘I should speak to you now of decency, of fairness and the Church-blessed code of Christian chivalry, but I will not waste my breath,’ said the grey-bearded baron.

The King scowled at him. For a moment I thought he would order him struck down, hanged with the rest of us. Then John smiled. ‘My trusty Mauléon – what a fellow you are for plain speaking. But that is why I keep you at my side. Flatterers are a penny a dozen.’ He flicked a careless hand at the throng of gaudily dressed courtiers around him. They tittered obligingly. ‘Tell me, then, my blunt but loyal liege man, tell me why I may not hang these dogs.’

‘Sire, I mean no disrespect. I vowed to serve you and I must serve you to the best of my abilities. And I counsel you, for the good of your own cause, not to murder these men. We have won this battle, yes. But this war is not over. I do not think it will be over very soon. There are many barons such as these who have not yet come to your side.’

‘I’ll hang them too,’ croaked the King.

‘Sire, if you do, Fitzwalter and his rebel friends will surely hang any of our men who find themselves in his hands. It will become a war without quarter given to any knight on either side. Will the barons who are wavering flock to your standard if they know that to be taken in battle means certain death? I think not. In this game of chivalry that we play, a move that may prove fatal is to be avoided at all costs. If you hang these men, few barons will join you. Maybe none. How then shall we find the numbers to crush this foul rebellion?’

‘But I
want
to hang them. I want to hang them all.’ The King’s tone had turned querulous – a child again, now denied his promised sweetmeat.
I felt a flicker of hope in my heart. We had a champion with the ear of the King.

‘Sire, if you hang these men, you will lose this war – it is as simple as that. If you show royal mercy, if you show the gracious mercy that you once showed to me, men who have previously been in opposition to you will come, beg your forgiveness, renew their fealty in the sure knowledge that you will show a similar mercy to them. Think again, my King, I beg you.’

He was a good man Savary de Mauléon, and a wise soul. He had not appealed to John’s good nature – he knew the King did not possess one. He couched his argument in terms of victory or defeat for John’s cause. And the argument was won.

‘Oh, you spoil all my little pleasures, Mauléon, but I know you are a true fellow with our best interests at heart. And I would have more men like you at my side.’ The King turned to the crowd of condemned knights – almost all of whom had been able to follow the conversation.

‘You deserve to hang, every one of you. But my heart has been softened by my noble Poitevin friend here. I have decided to reprieve you. Yet none of you shall be allowed to trouble me again. You will remain in my dungeons until such a time as I see fit, where you may contemplate the folly of your evil deeds against your King.’

He beckoned over a captain of his guard. ‘Take half of these scum to Corfe; half are to come with me north to Nottingham. Now get them all out of my sight.’

Nottingham, I thought. Let us be taken to Nottingham. For even chained in the dark, fetid depths of that royal stronghold, I would be close to Robert and Westbury and many old friends. And who knew? Perhaps something might be managed in the way of an escape or a sly bribe to be let free. My heart was lighter than it had been for days. O God, I prayed earnestly, of your infinite mercy, let them take us to Nottingham.

God was
deaf that day. They sent Robin, Sir Thomas and myself to Corfe Castle. First south-west to Tonbridge, which had recently surrendered to the King, then, skirting around south and keeping a healthy distance from rebel-held London, to Windsor. Finally, by slow stages to Silbury, Salisbury and Milton Abbas, and at last Corfe Castle. Those who were able to walked; I was afforded the luxury of a jouncing donkey-cart and it seemed that every rut and bump on the road in that two-hundred-mile journey sent a shrill scream up the whole length of my leg. It was the beginning of December when we set out and I seem to recall that the rain fell every single day. Although I do not remember much more about that hellish journey.

They fed us foully, I believe, just enough old bread, ale and plain oat pottage to allow the captives to march – a straggling line of wet and raggedy men, hacking, coughing, staggering, splashing through the mud, prodded ever onwards by the spears of the Flemish mercenaries, a far cry from the proud knights who had held Rochester in defiance of the might of the King. I spent most of the journey asleep or in some pain-filled fevered place outside my head. But Robin and Thomas marched alongside the cart every step of the way – that I do recall – and made sure I received my full share when the meagre rations were doled out.

I remember my first glimpse of Corfe Castle. We had been force-marched from Milton Abbas, continuing without a halt until long after nightfall in an attempt to reach the castle before the gates were shut for the night. But due to the deteriorating health of the captives – one knight died on his feet that day, just dropping lifeless to the ground as we marched – we did not reach Corfe in time and we collapsed in a small shabby manor about two miles north-west of the royal fortress. We were roughly awoken before dawn and forced to our feet, or in my case roughly slung back into my donkey cart, and were back on the road when the first grey streaks were lightening the east.

It was
a cold and misty morning in mid-December and as we came over the brow of a hill I saw Corfe. The castle was built in a gap between two long shoulders of down land that ran roughly east-west, on a smaller hill all of its own. As the sun rose over the eastern hills, turning the heavens a wonderful reddish pink, I saw that the land between the two downs was filled with a pure dense white mist that made the keep of Corfe and its high towers and walls appear as if they were built on an island surrounded by a sea of cloud. The battlements were adorned with flags, now unfurling in a breeze that still held a tang from the sea a couple of miles to the south. It looked a magical place; a romantic palace fit for Guinevere, Lancelot, Arthur and his knights, a noble setting for deeds of arms and tales of illicit love.

In truth, that day I saw little of the romance of the castle. But I may reliably inform you that the dungeons of Corfe were no better than an anteroom to Hell. A damp and stinking rectangular stone box a dozen yards beneath the soaring keep. Twelve men had died on the long march from Rochester, from exhaustion and the effects of their wounds, and of the score or so of men who lived to hear the iron-bound oak door slam shut on their freedom, many might well have wished the King had given them the mercy of a swift death. D’Aubigny was a shadow of his former self. He had taken the defeat at Rochester as a personal failure, a negation of his prowess as a man of arms, and while at least we had not all been hanged out of hand, he was a broken man, silent and prone to bouts of sudden anger and violence.

On our first day at Corfe, at dusk, when we were bedding down for the night on the cold floor, a young knight from Cheshire asked one of his companions, in a spirit of genuine enquiry, I believe, if he thought we could have done anything differently to win that siege. D’Aubigny hurled himself at the man and smashed him across the face with a brawny forearm, and once the man was down proceeded to batter away at him with his fists until a group of knights
summoned the will to pull him off. Few spoke to our erstwhile commander after that, or even went near him, and, as he chose not to speak to anyone either, he became an isolated figure. He sat alone in a corner of that foul stone box and brooded day after day, stirring only at dawn and dusk to jostle with the other men with spoon and bowl to get his share of food before slinking back to his corner to glower at us over his bowl and champ at his ration of swill.

Robin, Thomas and I naturally formed our own group on a patch of floor by the high, thickly barred window that was our only source of light. We ate communally, guarded our scant possessions and watched out for each other’s wellbeing – for prison can cruelly change even the noblest of men. When food is scarce, as I knew well, a fine upstanding knight can turn into a beast of prey, willing to kill his companion over a scrap of gristle.

The food was bad, yes, but also monotonous, vegetable pottage made with leeks, or sometimes just thin onion soup and coarse bread, a little watered ale, just enough to keep our immortal souls within the cage of our bodies. But this grim situation did not last for long. Praise God.

The chief turnkey was a tall, austere figure called Winkyn who inhabited a cubbyhole just outside the gaol door. On the second day after our incarceration, I saw him and one of the other gaolers, who looked almost identical to the chief, whispering together and pointing at our group beneath the window. Winkyn came striding across the floor, a heavy blackthorn cudgel in his fist, casually booting men out of his path. He stopped before Robin and glared down at him. ‘You, prisoner,’ he said. ‘Yes, you. What is your name?’

Robin, who had been carefully ignoring him up to this point, rose lithely to his feet. He turned his cool grey eyes on the man and said: ‘I am Robert, Earl of Locksley – when you address me, if you are a man with any claim to courtesy at all, you will call me “my lord”.’