The Death of Robin Hood (25 page)

I dismissed the troop of spearmen, releasing them to wash off the sweat in the bathhouse, and went over to Robin. The men were gathered around the cart looking inside with expressions of disgust, horror and fear. As I forced my way through the crowd, I caught a waft of putrid odour that almost made me cough up my dinner. Inside the cart were two reddish-brown bodies, clearly dead and having been in that state for some days, for maggots writhed and glistened in the eye sockets. Keeping a hand over my mouth and nose, I examined the corpses: they were two of Cass’s new recruits, bowmen I thought, from up near Penshurst, although it was difficult to be certain. I fancied at first that they had been coated in blood, dipped in it, for the amount of gore could not possibly have come from their wounds alone. Then I realised that every inch of skin had been peeled from their bodies, slowly, carefully, perhaps over several hours, days even. I could not begin to imagine the expanse of pain that they had endured before they died.

I blundered
away from the cart and nearly crashed into Robin, who was standing beside me. ‘You Frank, and you Stephen, get these men decently buried, will you?’ he was saying. ‘Get them in the ground as quick as you like and find a priest to say the right words over them. But most importantly get them buried quickly, you understand?’

I felt a wash of nausea surge up from my belly into the back of my throat and I very nearly splashed it all over my old friend. But he put a hand on my shoulder and looked into my watering eyes with concern.

‘You know what this is?’ I said, when I could speak again. ‘You know what this foul act represents?’

Robin nodded. But I put it into words anyway: ‘It is revenge. For the beheadings, for the ambushes. Somebody is coming after us and he is very serious about taking his revenge on us, on all of us.’

‘I know, Alan,’ said Robin tiredly. ‘But I think it is worse than that: those two men would have talked. They would have done anything to stop the pain. Anything. They will have told whoever it is, the revenge-seeker, that we are here.’

I had the full story from Robin over a jug of ale, when my stomach could finally accept nourishment. The two men had been with us for no more than ten days and had slipped off one night to pay a visit to their sweethearts in the village of Hever. It seems they opened their mouths too wide in an inn there. They had been seized by the French and taken to Rochester Castle – now in the hands of Prince Louis’s men – and when the foul stripping work was done, and they had told everything they knew, they had been dumped on the road near Ashford and discovered by one of Cass’s patrols that morning.

‘The French know we are here, Alan,’ said Robin. ‘It can be only a matter of time before they come for us with all their forces. It is time for the second phase.’

‘Dispersal,’ I
said. ‘Which is a way of saying: every man for himself;
sauve qui peut
, as our foes would put it.’

‘Don’t be so gloomy, Alan. It’s not like that. And it’s not as if we expected to go undetected here for ever, is it? Cass and I have it all worked out. As you know very well – you’ve sat in on enough of our council gatherings.’

Our conversation was interrupted then by shouts from the palisade. ‘Alarm! Alarm! They’re coming! Knights are coming,’ a man on the walkway was shouting wildly and the courtyard of Cassingham became a kicked ant-hill, with men and women rushing everywhere, yelling in fear and anger, pushing other folk out of the way, snatching up weapons. Sheer bloody pandemonium.

It seemed the French had come to Cassingham.

Knights
did come to Cassingham that hot July afternoon. But they were not French. They were a quartet of Norman knights, some of the very few lords of the duchy who had remained in the service of King John after the fall of his continental possessions. Robin and Cass gave them wine in the hall, while I arranged for their horses to be cared for, then I joined them for the council of war.

Robin had not completely cut his ties with the King after the humiliating episode at Sandwich in May; he had, in fact, been sending John reports from time to time of his activities and his actions against the French. My lord was concerned lest the King should believe we had switched sides and rejoined the rebels; if the King thought us traitors, it could be lethal for Marie-Anne and Hugh at Kirkton – and for Robert.

As it happened, I knew one of the Norman knights who paid us a visit that afternoon: he was Hubert de Burgh, a proud hawk-like man who had been castellan of Falaise Castle before Normandy was lost. I had served under him there and while he could be rather stiff-necked and touchy about his honour, he was a good man at
heart. He had remained unwaveringly loyal to King John – despite the reservations he must have had – through disaster, defeat and civil war. I could not but feel a grudging respect for his constancy.

De Burgh was now the constable of Dover Castle, which, with Windsor, was one of the last major fortresses holding out against the French in the south-east. It soon became clear he intended to hold it for the King to the last man. It was in this cause that he and his three knights had made the perilous journey to Cassingham through French-held territory to seek us out.

‘The King is pleased with you, Locksley,’ said de Burgh. ‘He likes what you have been doing in these parts. And you, too, Cassingham. He boasts that no man-at-arms of Prince Louis’s is safe anywhere on the roads of Kent.’

Cass was red-faced with pride, beaming at Hubert de Burgh as if he were a favourite uncle. ‘We do try to do our duty, sir,’ the squire mumbled.

‘Well, you are doing that and more, William,’ said de Burgh. ‘The King even has a nickname for you: he calls you Willikin of the Weald. He asks why there are not more like you fighting the good fight in the other counties.’

Robin gave a snort of derision. I could tell what he was thinking: we were only behaving here as we had for years in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire, only then we had been outside the law.

‘It is on the King’s instructions that I come to you today,’ de Burgh continued. ‘As I’m sure you know, Dover has been beset by Louis’s men these past few weeks. We have been attacked repeatedly and until now have been able to hold them off, even to inflict significant damage. But our scouts tell us a new commander has been appointed, a fellow recently arrived from France, and he has vowed to take Dover and’ – here Hubert de Burgh paused significantly to make sure we were paying attention – ‘to eradicate all resistance to Prince Louis’s reign in southern England. This Comte du
Perche, as he is titled, is a rather odd fellow by all accounts. He has particularly boasted that he will sniff out any brigands and outlaws in the Weald and strip the living skin from their flesh to make an example of them.’

Thomas, Comte du Perche, the White Count, the Tanner, that pasty-faced cat-torturing bastard from the Tower. He had done that terrible thing to the two captured bowmen from Penshurst. And he was coming for us. Well, let him. I’d gladly face him with Fidelity in hand and briskly send him to Hell where he belonged.

‘The Comte du Perche has since tightened his grip around Dover,’ de Burgh was saying. ‘The siege is being pursued in earnest and his men are encamped around our walls. Yet they have neglected, thus far, to dig their own protective walls around the camp. This is why I come to you now. The King commands you – of course, I merely ask you, of your kindness – to attack the French in their lines around Dover. My men and I will guide you and accompany you in the assault, and I have left instructions in the castle for a powerful sortie to be made when our attack goes in. Between us, with your brave men attacking from the woods and my own folk coming over the walls, we can crush the enemy like … like …’

‘Like a walnut between two stones?’ I said helpfully.

‘Exactly,’ said Hubert de Burgh.

‘If the King commands it, we must certainly obey,’ said Cass fervently.

I saw Robin looking at him sideways. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Yes … well, this does seem like a good opportunity to bloody this new fellow’s nose. The Comte du Perche, you say. And he is threatening to cut the skin from all our bones. Yes, we’ll do it. I’d be more than happy to teach this particular Frenchman a lesson.’

We spent an hour or two discussing the attack on Dover, and then Robin insisted we make plans to break up the training camp and disperse
the men not coming with us to the coast. Hubert de Burgh had suggested that the attack on the Dover camp be a hit-and-run affair, undertaken by cavalry alone, with archers in support, of course. We had more than four hundred men under arms at that time but most were farming men and few were trained to fight on horseback.

We decided to take with us sixty trained cavalry and sixty of the best archers, which left just shy of three hundred fighting men of various levels of skill at arms at Cassingham. The young lord of the manor divided them in to ten groups of about thirty men –
conrois
, he jokingly called them, although they were men on foot armed with a motley collection of swords, spears, clubs and bows, rather than an elite squad of highly trained cavalry. Each of the ten groups was to be sent to a different part of the Weald and commanded by a man familiar with that part, and their task was simple: to kill any Frenchman they could lay their hands on. The manor of Cassingham would be returned to its condition as a sleepy backwater, with just a handful of men-at-arms, but it would act as a clearing house for news. The ten ‘
conrois
’ would report to the manor on a weekly basis and could be alerted to any threats in their areas, or summoned to form a small army if required, at Cass’s command.

Much to the young man’s chagrin, Robin insisted he not accompany the assault on the lines of Dover.

‘I want to kill Frenchmen,’ he said almost petulantly.

‘We cannot risk losing you,’ Robin said. ‘If this attack fails and we all fall, who would carry on the fight against the French? England needs you, William!’

Cass reluctantly agreed and he and Robin summoned the men to give them their orders. I went off to find Mastin, who was to command the sixty archers, and found him in the graveyard of the little church of Cassingham in a small forest clearing half a mile from the walls of the manor. The big bald fellow was on his knees, beside
the mounded earth of the freshly dug graves of the two Penshurst bowmen, praying hard, with tears glistening on his heavily bearded cheeks.

I got down on my knees in the dirt beside him and joined him in prayer, asking God to receive their eternal souls in Heaven and to grant me the strength to take my vengeance on the White Count, who was the author of their final agonies.

‘They was a pair of useless buggers,’ said Mastin. ‘Couldn’t shoot a bow for shit. Never would bend their elbows properly. They talked a deal too much as well. Cheeky to me. I told them they were born to hang. And they were. But they didn’t deserve to die like that, inch by bloody inch. Peeled like a fucking apple.’

He sniffed, cuffed at his dripping nose and got to his feet.

I stood too and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘We’re going to have a chance to pay the French back for what they did,’ I said.

The burly archer nodded at the pair of graves. ‘Won’t bring them back, though, will it?’

Before we left, after breakfast at dawn the next morning, Robin took me aside. He seemed embarrassed and he was holding a linen-wrapped parcel.

‘I’ve been waiting for the right moment to give this to you,’ he said. ‘And this moment is not it, I’m afraid. But I’m giving it to you anyway. So …’

I looked in puzzlement at the long bundle in his hand. He made no move to give it to me. ‘I got Savary de Mauléon to find this for you,’ he said. ‘I wrote to him about it when we were leaving Corfe. Apparently, it was among the piles of loot taken after Rochester fell and Savary had to buy it off a Flemish knight who had claimed it. Cost him a pretty penny, he says. Anyway, here you are. Think of it as a saint’s day gift or a reward for long service, or a token of friendship or whatever you like …’

I took the bundle in my hand and unwrapped it eagerly. To my exquisite joy, inside was a lace-up leather bracer with long black steel scabbard
attached holding a slim steel cruciform blade. It was my misericorde. Tears formed under my eyelids as I felt the weight of it in my hands.

It seemed to whisper to me as I slipped it out of its sheath in all its black gleaming beauty. I looked up at Robin, groping for the words to thank him and tell him how much this slim weapon meant to me – and coming up empty.

‘Don’t go all womanish on me, Alan,’ said my lord. ‘I’m giving this to you for a very good reason.’

I nodded without understanding.

‘Be very clear on this: you do not under any circumstances want to be captured by this Comte du Perche; and I do not wish to fall into his hands either. So I charge you with this grave duty. Are you listening? I charge you, Sir Alan Dale, with administering my death. If I fall and you cannot get me away alive. I want you to use this blade on me. At the end of the game, I would rather die at your hand than any other. I will not be slowly torn apart, my living skin stripped piece by piece for a French fop’s amusement. Swear this to me. Give me your solemn word.’

So I swore that I would take my friend’s life if it was necessary, with the very gift he had just bestowed on me. I also privately swore that I’d take my own, if all else failed. I had no wish to be torn apart piece by piece either.

The French occupied Dover and the busy port, which was to the west of the great castle built by King Henry a generation past, a hundred feet below it and in its deep shadow. To the east and north of the castle, in a great sweeping curve that straddled the road heading to Sandwich, their thousand-odd fighting men were encamped. They lived in grubby white canvas tents, fine pavilions, turf-roofed wooden huts, or just huddled in cloaks in shallow scrapes in the ground under the double-sized crossbowmen’s shields known as pavises. It was not a tidy ground: campfires, portable ovens, stacks
of spears, piles of leather gear, saddles, tack and bales of hay and so on were placed wherever their owners wished in a joyous abandonment of good discipline. This encircling French army had made no headway at all against the massive walls, ditches and lines of fortification that protected one of the greatest fortresses in England. Yet they had little to fear from the local English knights. King John was hundreds of miles away, lying low in the West Country as Prince Louis’s men captured town after town and accepted the surrender of castle after castle. Apart from a few hundred men now cowering inside Dover Castle, and the lawless thieves skulking in the dank forests of the Weald, the whole of the south-east of England belonged to Prince Louis and his victorious French invaders. They had nothing to fear here.