The Death of Robin Hood (36 page)

He was right. What
was
I complaining about? While I carefully considered my next sally, my lord poured me a cup of wine, shoved it across the table and said, ‘Let us make a toast, my old friend – to new love!’

And so we drank.

‘Now, Alan,’ said my lord, ‘if your wits have not been completely addled by too many womanly caresses, shall we consider the future? King John is dead – yet our country is still at war. The French have thrust northwards in strength and I do not think we may rest easy until we have driven them all from England. And there is the new King to consider. He is in urgent need of our help, I would say – wouldn’t you?’

I swear that I had not even considered the succession. My mind filled with the image of a chubby boy in velvet and silk, sitting with his haughty mother and applauding with delight as three raggedy prisoners sang ‘My Joy Summons Me’ for him at Corfe Castle. I remembered him struggling to learn the fingering and bowing of a
canso
in his private chambers, watched by wolfish Flemings. I recalled his childish rages. Most of all I remembered his kindness, the generosity of his gifts when we were starving in the dungeon. Henry of Winchester. Or, as he must surely become, Henry, King of England, the third of that name.

I lifted my wine cup to Robin. ‘The King is dead,’ I said. ‘God save the King!’

Although
a blight had been lifted from our lives with the death of King John, there was still the matter of Robin’s son Miles and Sir Thomas Blood’s presence in the enemy camp to weigh down our souls. I had accused Robin of lying – or keeping information from me – and it occurred to me that I had been guilty of the same crime towards my lord. And so, as we rode south from Westbury a week later, heading for the coronation of young Henry at Gloucester, I decided that my duty to him and his family outweighed my oath to Thomas.

We had been summoned to Gloucester by William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. He, along with several other magnates, had been named in King John’s will as governors of England, and it seemed the old soldier had deemed it vital Henry be crowned as soon as possible. St Paul’s Cathedral in London was, of course, still in rebel hands, as was Westminster Abbey just outside the city, and who knew when, if ever, we might recapture the capital and be able to hold the ceremony in either of these venerable Houses of God. So Gloucester Cathedral it was to be – for this hallowed ground
had the distinct advantage of being in a part of the land that had remained staunchly royalist.

I had spent a blissful week with Tilda, much of it in the half-privacy of our chamber at the end of the hall. But our bond was stronger than the mere shackles of lust and it was with a wrenching of my heart that I’d bade her farewell at the end of October and ridden out with Robin, Robert, Boot and a hundred men-at-arms to add our strength to the young King’s forces.

Since that day at the feast in Lincoln, Robin had not asked me about Thomas. I was glad he had respected my vow, but it made it difficult to know how to approach the subject. I found the opportunity on the main road between Derby and Lichfield, when we all made camp for the night in the mostly intact hay barn of a burned-out manor.

The men had been well fed and were bedded down, and only Robin and I remained awake, sitting around the fire in a dry corner of the barn passing a mug of wine between us, a last drink before sleep.

Robin stretched and yawned and looked as if he were about to stand and seek his blanket roll, when I stopped him with these words: ‘My lord, as you know I made a vow to remain silent on the subject of Thomas and his flight to the rebels.’

‘I recall it very clearly,’ said Robin, looking at me inquisitively.

‘But it seems to me that I am doing both you and he a disservice by remaining silent.’

‘Speak, then,’ he said, settling down again and reaching out towards me, beckoning for the wine.

I passed it to him.

‘Do you remember the day when Aymeric de St Maur came to Corfe Castle during our incarceration there and asked to speak to you?’

‘I am not quite in my dotage yet, Alan, of course I can remember it.’

‘Well, you
told us the Master of the English Templars had ridden all the way from London only to give us some news of the war. Was that the truth?’

Robin just stared at me. ‘Spit it out, Alan.’

I looked around the barn at the sleeping bodies of our men. There was no one to overhear us.

‘Sir Thomas – and I for that matter – knew that it was not. You lied to us.’

‘Alan, we have been over this,’ Robin said quietly. Sometimes there are good reasons why I cannot tell you every tiny detail of my plans. Some things must remain secret. In the matter of the King, for example—’

‘You should have explained that to Thomas. He took it into his head that you meant to betray him to the Templars for the killing of Brother Geoffrey, the Templar who … who … interfered with Robert at Pembroke Castle.’

‘Why on earth would I do that? Thomas is one of mine. Or he was. Apart from the fact that I would never give up one of my own to an enemy, I thoroughly approved of his actions. No man deserved death more than that child-defiling turd-of-the-cloth. I would certainly have butchered him myself, if Thomas had not got there first. How could you even think I would betray him? Do you not know me at all, Alan?’

‘It was the boon; the favour that you promised the Templars at Runnymede. You promised you would kill a man, even a friend, if they asked. After you changed sides in the war – something he deeply disapproved of, by the way – Thomas was convinced you would do anything, even hand him over to the Templars for their punishment, if it suited your interests. That I’m sorry to say is why he ran.’

Robin was quiet for a while. He passed me the mug of wine and stirred the fire into life with a stick. The leaping flames made his face look even more gaunt and angular against the darkness. I could see he was thinking hard.

‘Thank you
for telling me that, Alan. I know you take your oaths very seriously,’ he said. ‘And I concede you may be right. Sometimes my habits of secrecy are my undoing – even you and I have fallen out over my reticence in the past.’

We shared a wry smile of remembrance. And, in that moment, although a hundred sleeping men lay around us in that barn, it felt as if we were entirely alone.

‘I will try to change my ways, Alan,’ my lord said very quietly, ‘and now I will tell you two secrets that I earnestly hope you will never reveal to anyone else. I give them to you as a sign of my faith and trust in you.’

Robin looked over his shoulder. I moved in closer towards him, setting down the mug of wine.

He leaned forward and said quietly: ‘The first secret is that I too suffered – interference, as you put it – at the hands of a man of the Church when I was a boy. It was at my father’s castle of Edwinstowe and I was a little younger than Robert is now. This man, this priest, was my tutor, placed in authority over me by my father to school me in Latin and mathematics, rhetoric and law. He beat me cruelly when I had not learned my lessons to his satisfaction, invoking the name of God as he wielded the rod. And, at night, he would come to my chamber, dress my bruises with goose fat … and his fingers would stray.’

Robin swallowed. It was clear that even decades later these memories were still extremely painful.

‘He pleasured himself on my body,’ he went on in a curiously dead voice, ‘and told me that if I spoke about this to anyone he would beat me again. He told me it was my fault these things happened because I was a temptation to his lust. I tried to tell my father but I could not bring myself to explain in detail the foulness of these night-time visits. My father merely told me not to be a cry-baby and, when he discovered that I had spoken out, Father Walter beat me more harshly than ever before. With every stroke of
his cane, this priest informed me that it was not he who was punishing me but God himself, for the sinfulness of my soul. He threatened me with the fires of Hell even as he fucked me. That experience put an end for ever to my faith in God and his son Jesus Christ. And, apart from dear old Father Tuck, I have never truly trusted a churchman since.’

Robin reached down for the wine mug and drained it.

‘One day, after months of this treatment in my own home, I began to think about ending myself. I had had enough. I planned to throw myself from the battlements. I even stood there one night, with the wind whistling around my bare legs, summoning the courage to jump. I never found the necessary courage. Instead, I found another way. I made a sacred vow that I would never die at my own hand, never, rather I would fight – fight with all my strength against this foul tyranny, against all tyranny. And so I made my plans. And one night, while his back was turned, I knocked Father Walter unconscious with a billet of firewood, gagged him with his own robe and tied him to his bed. I brought the fires of Earth to play on every part of his body, a foretaste of the very fires of Hell that he had used to threaten me; I thrust his crucifix, the image of his false God, far up his fundament; finally, when he was half-mad from the pain, I cut his throat from ear to ear.

‘I have never regretted what I did to that beast, never regretted a moment of his last torments. I would have done exactly the same to young Robert’s molester, given the chance. And that is why I would never have betrayed Thomas for killing that fiend.’

I was stunned by Robin’s tale, even though I had heard elements of it before from Little John, who had fled with Robin into Sherwood after that long-ago killing. My lord had never spoken to me of such an intimate and painful matter before – not once, not even when we were incarcerated together in Corfe. I recognised that night, too, how so much of Robin’s character had been forged by his youthful torments in Edwinstowe: his bottomless courage, his
implacable cruelty, his hatred of the Church and all her servants, the undying fires of rage hidden under his icy-cold exterior – I recalled that, long ago, Tuck had called him the cold-hot man for this very reason. His rebellious nature, I now grasped, came from the twin betrayals of his father, the representative of King who had failed to protect him as a child, and the predatory priest, the representative of Our Lord God Almighty who had used him so brutally and with such hypocrisy.

But Robin was not finished.

‘The second secret I shall tell you, my friend, is what Aymeric de St Maur asked of me. He did indeed come to claim his boon – as Thomas rightly guessed. But can you guess what he really asked? I should have thought it obvious, Alan, even to you.’

‘He asked you to kill the King,’ I said, wondering that I had not seen this truth in all its blinding clarity before.

‘Almost,’ said Robin. ‘This man of God, this high and mighty churchman, did not put it quite in such bald terms. He did not sully his tongue with talk of regicide. He merely asked me to do everything in my power to ensure that young Henry of Winchester was placed on the throne of England before the year was out. That was the boon he demanded. And that, my friend, I shall gladly do.’

On the twenty-eighth day of October in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and sixteen, lauded by the choir and cheered by crowds of commoners, Henry was crowned King of England by Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, in the soaring nave of Gloucester Cathedral. The nine-year-old boy had been knighted by William, Earl of Pembroke, now elected regent of England, and was then dressed in his ceremonial robes of red wool and black-and-white ermine, and acclaimed King by his loyal nobles: the Marshal and his nephew John; his half-uncle William, Earl of Salisbury; Ranulf, Earl of Chester; the Earl of Locksley; Aymeric de St
Maur and many more. The ceremony was attended by dozens of knights, myself included, Savary de Mauléon and a few of the better mercenaries that the Marshal had persuaded to remain after John’s demise.

Taking advantage of the truce at Dover, hawk-faced Hubert de Burgh had even brought himself right across the land to witness the happy occasion. I also glimpsed the scarred face and milky eye of my old enemy Philip Marc, the high sheriff of Nottinghamshire, among the throng. Most significant of all was the presence of the papal legate Guala Bicchieri, the Italian prelate I had last seen on the beach at Sandwich damning the French. The new pontiff, Pope Honorius III, had declared that Henry was indeed the lawful King of England and the upstart Prince Louis had been thoroughly excommunicated.

God was on our side.

The day after the coronation, I realised how little that meant. God Almighty might approve of our choice of King, but nearly two thirds of the barons of England did not – and the dire state of our situation was made clear at a meeting of King Henry’s council in the great hall of Gloucester Castle. Robin was summoned with all the other nobles and I went with him.

King Henry, clad in crimson velvet, with his new crown, a thin circlet of gold, glinting on his brow, sat stiffly at the end of the hall in a huge black oak throne, a seat far too big for him and which made him seem even more of a little boy. He said nothing throughout the meeting and remained admirably still – except to give me a discreet smile, when I caught his eye. The Marshal whispered a few words in his ear, the boy nodded and then the grizzled veteran began: ‘Gentlemen, to order, if you please.’

The Marshal was still an imposing figure for all his seventy years: wide-shouldered, grey-bearded, upright of carriage, and with a fierce eye – which he now ran over the assembled company.

‘Yesterday was a day of great rejoicing,’ he said. ‘And rightly so. We
have a new King and a new start, and I pray that all of our sorrows shall be forgotten in his new and no doubt glorious reign. But this is not the end of our troubles – it is the beginning. For now we must defend the King with all our might and return his rightful kingdom to him. And I suggest, gentlemen, that we now turn our minds to how this can be achieved. How can we rid this land of the enemy and return it to a state of lasting peace? My lord de Mauléon, I think you have the best grasp of it – tell us, if you will, how things stand.’