The Death of Robin Hood (20 page)

‘Was that Matilda Giffard?’ I said, interrupting Robert’s chattering. ‘I could almost swear I just saw that bitch leaving the hall. Surely I am mistaken.’

‘Ah, yes, Tilda. She lives here; she is a useful member of the household. And I would ask you not to use that vile barrack-room term about her in my presence.’

I could only stare at my son.

‘You left
me in charge of the manor while you were away, Father. And, as temporary lord of Westbury, I made that decision. She is one of us now.’

Robert’s eyes were burning bright with defiance. But I saw no fear in them.

‘I left very clear instructions—’ I began.

‘Sir, if I might explain.’ Baldwin was standing beside me wringing his hands and hopping gently from one foot to the other as if he needed to relieve himself.

I glared at him. ‘Explain then,’ I said.

‘It was shortly after you left,’ the old man said, ‘and the young master was taken ill. A fever and a bad one, he was delirious for several days—’

‘What? Why was I not told?’

‘Clearly it wasn’t fatal,’ said Robert, trying for a smile.

‘We did not know how to get a message to you,’ said Baldwin. ‘I was at my wits’ end when Mistress Giffard came to the gates and claimed she could cure the boy. You had said she was not to be admitted, but I feared the boy would die. He was so pale and weak. When the fever struck he was raving like a madman, seeing demons and devils. I did not know what to do. She swore by the Virgin that she would not harm him, but only heal and, and …’

‘She cured me, Father. She brewed herbs and made me drink the concoction. Disgusting it was too. She stayed with me day and night, nursed me until the fever broke. She wiped the night sweats from my skin and cleared away my filth when I soiled myself. She saved my life. I know she did. I felt myself going towards God, towards a great and powerful light, and she brought me back to earth. The very least I could do, when I was fully recovered, was to offer her a place as a maidservant in our household.’

‘She is our enemy, Robert, surely you can understand this.’ I was close to boiling over but just managed to keep my temper. ‘She sought to harm you.’

‘If she
wished me harm, she could easily have killed me when I was in the grip of the fever. I drank up whatever she gave me; if she’s an enemy, why am I alive?’

I had no answer to that. ‘She should leave here at once,’ I said.

‘I offered her shelter, Father. She had no one else. I gave her my word that she should have a place here with us for as long as she wishes. You would not make me break my word, surely you would not do that, Father?’

‘I don’t trust her,’ I said, my resolve weakening.

‘But I do,’ said Robert. ‘And you will be gone again, very soon, back to the war, and I will be the master of Westbury once more. If you send her away, I will only invite her to return. I made a promise to her, Father. I mean to keep it. After all, I owe her my life.’

‘You better make sure she stays out of my way while I am here. Keep her out of my sight, you hear me. And I will not eat or drink anything, anything at all that she has touched – let us be absolutely clear about that!’

Both Robert and Baldwin were beaming at me now.

And there it was. I was no longer master in my own house. I was living with a woman who had once been and who perhaps still was a dangerous foe, and I had not the strength of will to expel her from my home.

Two
days later I left for Kirkton. I was not exactly driven out of Westbury by Tilda’s presence – indeed I did not set eyes on her again after that glimpse in the hall on the first day – but I could not help but feel uneasy about her occupying the same space as me and every morsel of food I had eaten, even after seeing Baldwin and Robert eating from the same dish, had tasted like dry ashes in my mouth.

Before I left, I went to see Boot, Robert’s huge dark-skinned servant, whom I had charged with my son’s protection in my absence. I found him in the cattle sheds, overseeing the difficult birth of a calf. He was cradling the head of the mother cow in his thick arms when I arrived and singing sweetly and quietly in her wide twitching ear. Before too long, leaning against a beam at the back of the shed, I was privileged to watch the miracle of life. A healthy newborn calf emerged from her rear end in a great slippery rush of blood and fluid. Boot took a handful of straw and began to clean the filth from the little beast but he was soon butted out the way as the mother staggered to her feet to lick her newborn clean.

I had
a present for Boot, a man who loved music as much as I did. It was the vielle that Robin had procured for me in Corfe Castle. I had been teaching Boot to play over the course of the past year, when I could spare the time, sharing my instrument for the practice sessions. Now he would have his own. He was delighted. He plucked a few notes and praised its tone.

We admired it together for a few moments and spoke about some tunes we might try to play with two vielles and two voices.

Before I took my leave, I took him to task about Matilda Giffard.

‘I am very disappointed with you, Boot,’ I said sternly. ‘How could you let that woman into Westbury – you know as well as I do that she is no good.’

‘I thought so at first, sir,’ said the giant. He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice, the result of a sad operation performed by Moorish slavers, who had removed his testicles as a child. ‘When Baldwin took her into the house, I stopped her and spoke to her privately. I told her that if Robert died – whether it was by her hand or not – that I would tear her living head from her body. I believe it gave her some encouragement to do her utmost to heal him.’

When I first met him, Boot had been the executioner at Nottingham Castle and his method had been to snap the necks of the condemned prisoners with his bare hands, like so many chickens. I had no doubt Tilda had been ‘encouraged’ to do her best for Robert by the threat.

‘But I do not believe she means to harm him,’ Boot continued. ‘I think she is exactly what she seems, a poor woman who has nowhere else to go in the world and who merely seeks a roof over her head and a little company.’

‘You are to keep a very close watch on her, my friend,’ I said. ‘Very close. If she even looks as if she is a threat to Robert or anyone at all – you know what to do.’

Boot sighed. ‘I know, sir,’ he said. ‘I know very well what I must do.’

Remarkably, when
I arrived at Kirkton later that afternoon, my lord’s wife, the ever-beautiful Marie-Anne, echoed Boot’s appraisal of Tilda’s situation. I sat by the hearth with her and sipped on a mug of ale, while she sat spindle in hand, turning a vast mound of sheep’s wool into fine thread.

‘She had every reason to hate you, Alan,’ she said. ‘You killed her father; you killed her lover Benedict. And, indirectly, she was expelled from the Priory because of you. But I watched her carefully over several months when she was with us at Kirkton and I think she is a changed woman, contrite, humble, meek and just what she seems: a poor lost soul with no kin who will own her, and no home.’

‘What I don’t understand is why she wants to make my home hers,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of other comfortable homes in England that she could blight – why infest mine?’

‘You really can’t imagine why she would want to be in your household?’ said Marie-Anne with a womanly smile.

‘No, I cannot.’

‘You were once lovers, were you not?’

I stared at the woman, astonished. ‘You cannot be suggesting that she still has, uh, tender feelings for me?’

‘Is that so strange?’

I saw that Marie-Anne was perilously close to laughter. I didn’t like it at all.

‘It is different for women, Alan. We cannot just love where and when we like, we do not just spray our seed like men and skip merrily away along the road. For a few ecstatic moments you and Tilda were physically joined together, you were a part of her body, her being. There are few women who can forget that loving union, however brief and no matter what happens afterwards.’

‘This is utter nonsense,’ I said. ‘She tried to kill me.’

‘What’s nonsense?’ asked Robin, coming into the hall.

‘Your moon-crazed
wife suspects that Tilda is in love with me and that is why she has moved into my hall at Westbury.’

‘Absolute nonsense, I entirely agree with Alan. How absurd! Nobody could possibly love someone as pig-ugly as you, or as thoroughly dim-witted, mule-stubborn and utterly lacking in the proper gentlemanly graces. Nonsense indeed!’

I glared at Robin. Between his silly jests and Marie-Anne’s suppressed hilarity – she was making tiny hiccupping noises of mirth even now – I was beginning to regret paying them this visit.

‘Come now, Alan,’ said my lord, ‘she doesn’t have to be madly in love with you to enjoy a dry place to sleep at night, food in her belly, some companionship. She knows that you are her last chance in this life and that if she steps out of line, just once, it will be the end of her. I said something of that nature to her myself. She knows not to try to harm either you or Robert – on pain of death. Forgiveness, isn’t that what the Church preaches? Why don’t you show her a little Christian forgiveness. I really don’t think you have anything to fear.’

I spent the next few days helping Robin to organise his forces for battle. Hugh had recruited two score men-at-arms from the farms and villages around the Locksley Valley that he was training up as cavalry, and he had found a couple of dozen archers from somewhere – Sherwood probably, and men who had lived outside the law – to add to the dozen or so of men who had come back from Rochester with Mastin. In total, Robin commanded nearly a hundred and fifty fighting men, but despite his renewed allegiance to King John he was not about to strip Kirkton and take all of them away to war. When we joined the King at the muster in Tonbridge, he would take with him only thirty mounted archers under Mastin and a dozen cavalrymen, with myself, Sir Thomas and Miles to stiffen their ranks. The rest would be held in reserve at Kirkton, under Hugh’s command, in case the King or his sheriffs decided to try to make life difficult for Robin in Yorkshire.

That was
my lord’s plan. Miles, of course, had other ideas. The young man had returned to Kirkton not long after the fall of Rochester, choosing, correctly as it turned out, to take the risk of scaling the wall and swimming the Medway to escape the final and, as he saw it, inevitable catastrophe. He had walked all the way to London, where he gave news of the disaster at Rochester to Lord Fitzwalter and, by his account, was treated as something of a hero by the rebels in the capital. They fêted him and filled him with wine and kept him in debauched splendour for a couple of weeks before sending him back to Kirkton with their praises ringing in his young ears. All this back-stroking had made Miles more devoted to the rebel cause than ever before – and he was not shy about telling the world what he thought of his father’s recent renewal of allegiance to the King.

‘It is a gross betrayal of all that we have fought for these past few years,’ said Miles at the dinner table on the second night I was there. His sapphire eyes glittered with mischief. ‘It is tantamount to treachery,’ he went on loudly.

Robin, sitting across the table from him smiling faintly, looking as serene as a saint – as he often did when under pressure – chose to ignore the taunts and insults. But his eldest son Hugh did not.

‘Oh do shut up, Miles,’ he said. ‘We all know how you feel, you’ve told us often enough. Why don’t you give that flapping tongue of yours a rest.’

‘Let us not quarrel over the dinner table,’ said Marie-Anne.

‘Tell me, Alan, how do things stand at Westbury?’ said Robin.

‘Good idea! Let us ask our guest’s opinion. What do you think, Sir Alan, about the Earl of Locksley’s shameful behaviour? Would you say it was a move that was justified because it preserved our lord’s precious skin, not to mention his lands and titles? Or would you rather call it the action of a cowardly turncoat?’

I saw then that Miles was very drunk. But I also knew that Robin would
not stomach his insults for much longer. There would be blood spilled before long.

Hugh got up from his place at the far end of the table. He came and stood behind Miles’s stool, put a hard hand on his brother’s shoulder and spoke quietly into his ear. He spoke too low for most of the diners to catch, but I heard him.

‘If you cannot speak civilly at this table, then leave it,’ whispered Hugh, with unmistakable menace in his voice. ‘You will not speak to Father like that again in my presence. He will not raise his hand to you; he loves you too much. But I have absolutely no problem in bringing you to heel. This is your only warning.’

‘Oh, things are not too bad at Westbury,’ I said brightly to Robin. ‘Apart from the business of Tilda, everything is in good order. Baldwin, for all his many faults, is an excellent organiser and his sister Alice has everything in hand among the servants. She made the most wonderful milk pudding the other day—’

Miles’s voice cut through my prattle. ‘It seems my opinions and even my presence are not welcome here,’ he said, getting heavily to his feet. ‘So I will bid you all good night and farewell.’ And, swaying a little, he walked from the table towards the far end of the hall, where he made his bed.

The next morning Miles was gone. He had taken arms, armour and a horse from the stables and departed before the sun was up.

He took Sir Thomas Blood with him.

‘It is my fault,’ said Robin when the disappearances were noticed. ‘I have always been far too indulgent of him. You heard him last night, Alan, he as good as called me a coward to my face – and I did nothing. It is weakness, sheer feebleness of will. I have spoiled my own child, ruined him with a surfeit of kindness.’

‘He’s a wilful fellow, there’s no doubt of that,’ I said. ‘But he is also grown now and every youngster has to challenge his father, stand up to him at some point, in order to believe himself a man. Where d’you think he has gone?’

‘Oh London,
I suppose, back to his rebel friends and the delights of debauchery without consequence. What I don’t understand is why Sir Thomas went with him. He has always been the very model of loyalty to me. I cannot see why he would absent himself like this. Unless he felt he had to protect Miles on the journey south.’