The Death of Robin Hood (45 page)

‘My lord …’

‘Alan, if you love me, you will do this,’ he said and I saw that his mouth was trembling with pain as he spoke.

I got up and moved closer to him. I sat down and positioned his body so that his head and shoulders were resting across my lap. With my right hand, I pulled the slim blade from my left sleeve. The black metal seemed to glint evilly in the flickering light of the candles. I looked down at Robin; he was smiling, his lean face relaxed.

‘Be quick,’ he said, ‘strike hard. And, if there is one, I shall greet you in the next life with my grateful thanks.’

I placed the tip of the blade in the hollow between his neck and his collarbone. One hard shove and the long blade would slide deep into his chest and pierce his heart, stopping it and killing him instantly.

‘Ready?’ I said.

‘Do it,’ he said.

‘What in the name of God is going on here? Father, have you run mad? Put down that disgusting knife, this instant.’

Both Robin and I jumped at these words and I saw my son Robert, dressed only in his long flapping chemise, advancing on us with a candle in one hand and the righteous wrath of God written across his face.

‘Were you seriously about to kill him? I cannot believe you sometimes!’

‘Robert,’ I said, trying to be stern, trying to ignore the blooming relief in my heart. ‘This is not for you to see. This is a private matter. Go back to bed. Now.’

‘And let
you cut his throat? I don’t think so.’

‘It’s all right, Robert,’ said my lord feebly. ‘I asked him—’

‘You be quiet – you’ve caused quite enough trouble already!’ said this skinny sixteen-year-old boy to the Earl of Locksley.

Robert fixed me with his iron glare: ‘We don’t have to kill him, Father. We can heal him. At least, I believe Tilda can heal him. She’s done it before; she told me about it last year and it has only now come back to me. A knight had a deep stomach wound from a sword and after Tilda’s ministrations, the fellow was walking again six months later. We have to get Robin to Westbury and as quick as possible. Come on, Father, look lively – help me wake the house.’

It
took us two nights and a day to get Robin to Westbury. Two nights and a day of jolting hell for my lord, who even carried in a donkey cart suffered all the torments of the damned as the vehicle bounced and bucked over the ruts in the roads. He took to stuffing a blanket into his mouth to muffle the sound of his screams, and I rode alongside him, my own guts burning with pity at his condition. At least twice I wondered if this journey were a terrible mistake, if we were piling agony upon agony on my lord and that the swift mercy of the misericorde might not have been the kinder option. But we were committed. My son Robert had committed us.

At Westbury, Tilda took one look at Robin, made him drink something powerful for the pain, and gave the rest of us a bare hour to wash and eat and saddle fresh horses before we set out on the road again heading north.

‘I cannot possibly help him here, Alan,’ she said. ‘For a start I don’t have the herbs, the salves, the
chirurgia
’s sharp blades and the cat-gut. I must put my hands inside his body to sew up the wound. I barely know what to do, even if I had all the right tools and medicines
here. I have done this only once before, you know. I might easily kill him. There is only one person that I know who has the slightest chance of saving his life – and that is Anna, Prioress of Kirklees. And you know how things stand between us.’

‘She will treat Robin if I tell her to, and she will use all her powers to heal him,’ I said. ‘If she gainsays me, if I get so much as a peep of protest out of her, I will cut her throat and burn her precious Priory down around her ears.’

And so we took the road again, this time with Robin mercifully asleep but as shadowy as a corpse. Hugh rode on ahead to Kirkton – he had the news of Miles’s death to deliver to his mother, and the body of his brother, too, wrapped in a canvas shroud and bound to the back of a mule. In the moments when I was not consumed with fear for Robin, I writhed at the thought of what Marie-Anne would say to me about causing the death of her son.

Whatever she had to say to me, I would deserve.

Marie-Anne met us at Kirklees Priory, white-faced and seemingly much smaller in stature, shrunken by her grief. But she was all briskness when it came to Robin, supervising the Priory servants and our men-at-arms, having Robin carried into the infirmary on the ground floor and laying him on a long stone table, swathed in blankets. I tried to tell her how sorry I was about Robin – and about Miles. But she merely said: ‘I cannot talk to you now, Alan. There will be a time for that later.’

The Prioress, a handsome, middle-aged woman with an aquiline nose and small, brightly burning black eyes, was the true master of the situation. She consulted with Tilda – their discourse was brief but perfectly amicable; workmanlike, you might say – then all the men were sent packing from the infirmary and Marie-Anne was recruited to tear up clean cloths, boil plenty of water and mop Robin’s sweat-drenched brow.

I went and sat outside in the Priory gardens, next to their famous herbarium, with Thomas and Hugh, and we shared a glum jug of ale and
a bite of bread and cheese while the three women laboured inside. Robert and Boot had been ordered to stay at Westbury, where they could attend to the gash in my son’s arm, mercifully not a serious wound. It was late May and the sky was clear and blue. None of us felt much like speaking. Hugh, who had been a rock of dependability all through the journey from Lincoln to Westbury – organising and looking after his men, making sure the road ahead was scouted for enemies as well as rough patches that would cause Robin pain as his cart traversed them – seemed to have sagged, crumbled even, now he had no further responsibilities. He looked like a scared young man on the point of tears. His only brother was dead and his father lay dying a dozen yards away, and there was nothing he could do to save him.

‘Do not fear, Hugh,’ I said. ‘I am sure the Prioress knows her trade. She has saved men from worse wounds than this one. All will be well, you’ll see.’

Hugh looked at me. I could see he wanted to believe me and yet he knew my words were false. Inside him the grief-stricken son fought with the experienced man of the world. The man won.

‘He has a deep stab wound to the lower belly; you and I both know what happens to a man with a wound like that. Have you, Sir Alan, personally, ever, even once, known a man to recover from such a wound?’

‘He is strong,’ I said, ‘and the Prioress is skilful. He will make it. I’m sure of it.’

Hugh said nothing. He picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of his tunic.

I could not seem to stop myself talking – a condition produced by my own anxiety. ‘You used to be a gambling man, Sir Thomas,’ I said. ‘What odds would you give our lord for a safe recovery? Evens, perhaps?’

Thomas looked at me as if I were an imbecile. I kicked his leg under the table and slid my eyes towards Hugh.

‘Oh,’ he
said. ‘I’d say better than evens on a full recovery. Yes, more like to get better than not, for sure.’

Hugh looked at the two of us, disgust plain in his eyes.

‘I am going to pray for him – in the chapel yonder. Come and find me if there is any change in his state.’

The air was somehow easier to breathe without Hugh. Thomas and I sipped our ale and said nothing to each other while the sun shone on our backs.

Finally, just for something to say, I said: ‘Do you trust the Prioress to do her best for Robin?’

Thomas tilted his head to one side. ‘Yes, I do. I know she was unwilling at first but Marie-Anne spoke to her and after that conversation she agreed at least to try. She values her reputation as a healer – and the reputation of Kirklees itself as a place where healing miracles can be worked – so yes, I think she will do her best. That does not mean I think Robin will live. Hugh was quite right: have you ever known a man survive a wound like that?’

I had not. Once again I wondered if I were not merely prolonging his agony.

After a good three hours, I saw Tilda coming across the grass towards us. She was drying her hands on her apron, but there were flecks of blood on her neck and lower jaw, which made her look as if she had just come from a desperate battle. Which, in truth, she had.

‘We have sewn him up, inside and out,’ she said. ‘And packed the wound with healing herbs, moss and spiderwebs and bound it tightly. He still lives but he has been in a deep slumber since we began. I cannot say if he will awaken or not.’

‘Can we see him?’ I said.

‘There is nothing to see: he is asleep, he breathes. Anna is sitting with him. You had best not take the chance of disturbing him. But Marie-Anne sent me to tell you that she would like to speak with you, if you are at liberty.’

I found
Marie-Anne behind the infirmary in the cloisters, a covered walkway around a square garden in which more of the herbs used for healing were grown. She was pacing slowly up one side of the space and I waited for her to reach me.

‘Walk with me, Alan, please. I cannot bear to sit still.’

We paced the long walkway on all four sides, slowly but with a steady, measured step. I did not think it my place to begin our conversation and so I said nothing as we walked side after side, around and around.

‘Tell me, Alan, of those final moments with Miles and Robin, tell me of the fight on the steep hill at Lincoln.’

So I did – at length, in detail, emphasising that Robin had sheathed his sword as a gesture of reconciliation; that he had not wanted to threaten Miles, even when his son stood before him with a drawn blade.

Marie-Anne wept as I told the tale. She said: ‘He did not need his sword – he had you beside him. You have always been his sword. You are the swift sword that cut down my little boy.’

I did not know what to say. It was true. We walked on in silence.

‘I am being unfair to you, Alan, I know,’ she said at last. ‘But grief is unfair – to me, to you, to everyone who feels it. In a few moments, in a foolish quarrel over nothing very much, I lost both my son and my husband. And here you stand, hale and whole, having failed to protect my man, your lord, and having killed my son.’

She stopped walking and looked up at me with her tear-stained face: ‘I should hate you, Alan Dale – you have single-handedly destroyed my life. But … but I cannot.’

To my profound surprise, she reached out her arms and enfolded me in a tight hug. As I wrapped my arms around her, my own tears began to flow like a river.

From that moment onward Marie-Anne sat beside Robin day and night, holding his hand, occasionally spooning a little herb-infused water into his dry mouth and massaging his throat until he swallowed.
Anna and Tilda changed his bandages twice a day, carrying away long folds of linen stained with blood and bright yellow pus. I put my head round the door every few hours asking Marie-Anne if there was any change.

On the third day after the operation, Robin opened his eyes, looked at Marie-Anne, smiled briefly, then fell back into a deep slumber.

On the fifth day, when we had all but given up hope, he opened his eyes again. Marie-Anne gave a shriek of happiness and I, who happened to be passing the door of the infirmary, shot inside, to see Lady Locksley fervently kissing the forehead of the patient and murmuring endearments, while Robin looked around, trying, I would say, to work out where he was.

His eye fell on me, standing halfway across the room, grinning at him like a mountebank. ‘I’m alive,’ he said. ‘Unless we are all dead and this is your Christian Heaven.’

‘You’re alive, my love,’ said Marie-Anne, kissing him. ‘You are truly alive.’

‘Can you give me some wine, my mouth is horribly dry,’ said Robin.

‘No wine, no ale, I am afraid, my love, just water boiled up with herbs,’ said his wife. ‘The Prioress’s orders.’

‘Herb water, then. I take it I’m at Kirklees?’

‘Yes, lord, we brought you here after Lincoln,’ I said.

Marie-Anne helped him sip from an earthenware cup. Robin looked over at me when he had taken his medicinal drink; he smiled warmly and then his expression clouded over. ‘Miles is dead, isn’t he?’

I nodded and saw my lord’s face collapse in grief. His head sank back on the pillow and he closed his eyes.

‘You need to rest, my love,’ said Marie-Anne. ‘Rest and grow strong again.’

*  *  *

They moved
Robin up to one of the towers of the Priory for his convalescence, a small circular room overlooking the vast green parkland to the east. From the window, roe deer could be seen on occasion through the trees, and in the mornings the summer sun shone on the chair where Robin would sometimes sit for an hour or so. He grew stronger, week by week, the wound in his stomach drying and healing to a long pink scar. By early August he was able to walk a few steps – but he tired easily and often the hour a day I spent with him, playing chess or just talking quietly, seemed to utterly exhaust him.

We had news of the war in those long summer days. The victory at Lincoln had destroyed French power in the north of England. We had captured large numbers of enemy knights and killed a good deal more. Many of the fleeing troops had been ambushed by English peasants as they retreated south to London and few arrived at the capital alive. Young King Henry’s cause was triumphant all across the north and the west; only London and the south-east were held by the French prince, and Louis’s grip on them was tenuous. William the Marshal, we heard, was preparing to assault London and finally seize back the capital from the rebels who, since the capture of Lord Fitzwalter at Lincoln, had been lacking an effective leader.

Fitzwalter himself and many other rebel lords were being held in chains at Lincoln Castle. Many voices at court cried that he should be put to death for treason, but King Henry (or perhaps the Marshal) insisted on leniency for all former enemies to help to heal the wounds of the civil war. Thomas would receive a fat ransom for capturing Fitzwalter, when it could be arranged with the rebel lord’s remaining family, and the erstwhile captain-general of the Army of God would then be released from prison on condition that he took the cross and vowed to depart for the Holy Land on a pilgrimage.