The Death of Robin Hood (8 page)

In the event, I spent a full week kicking my heels in the merchant’s house in Queen’s Hythe – my host was absent on business in Bordeaux, I was told, but, as Robin’s honoured representative, a chamber had been prepared for me and my every comfort was, if not anticipated, then swiftly fulfilled by the dozens of richly dressed servants in the house. After three days I sent a page to the Tower with a message for Fitzwalter, reminding him that with every passing day, it was likely the garrison of Rochester was being further weakened. Good men were dying while we did nothing. The return message a full day later, while filled with flowery phrases and flattery, did nothing more than to urge me to have patience.

During that time, I fretted and twitched and paced the courtyard of the house, and in the lonely evenings I made myself free of the extensive cellar of my host. The debauched spirit of London seemed to have contaminated me as well. And I began to understand it a little better. London had no King, an unnatural and enervating state of affairs. The barons of the Army of God had some temporal power but everyone knew they were not a legitimate authority – and if they were to lose this contest with the King, London would be punished for their sins. The rich merchants would be fined or imprisoned; the poor might well be subjected to the horrors of the sack of the city, if John’s mercenaries were let loose: all the
rape, pillage and wanton mayhem that that catastrophe would entail. No wonder so many had been driven to debauchery. I drank deeply, too, to fill the empty hours before bedtime.

However, I did have one valuable meeting towards the end of that week, with a cousin of Robin’s, a fat cleric called Henry Odo.

Henry lived in the Priory of St Mary’s just across the bridge in Southwark, although he seemed to spend most of his days in London, chatting, eating and drinking with his many friends and acquaintances. He was an effusive fellow, a little quick with a compliment, but Robin relied upon him. And there was no better man if you wanted the latest gossip.

How he knew I was in the city, I never discovered, but that was part of his mystery. One afternoon as I was tending to my horse, giving it a thorough rubdown and singing to it softly, I found him at my elbow.

‘Sir Alan,’ he said, ‘what a great joy to see you again.’

I did not know the man very well but as I was somewhat starved for company in Cass’s absence, I greeted him with enthusiasm. I invited him to take supper with me.

Over the evening meal – it was a feast, in truth, for the servants seemed to take great pleasure in providing fine fare and plenty of it – Henry entertained me with scurrilous tales of the doings of the rebel barons in the Tower. The lily-pale French ambassador had whipped a servant to death over some small mistake, Henry told me, and no one knew quite whether he should be censured or the incident overlooked since it was his own man he had killed. That did not surprise me, having seen what he did to a kitten for giving him a tiny scratch. What did surprise me was the news that Fitzwalter had no fewer than three beautiful mistresses and a pretty little Moorish catamite. If that were true, I wondered how he had the time to do anything but rut. No wonder he looked so exhausted.

Henry asked after my lord and the state of the siege at Rochester; when I
had told him all I knew, which was precious little, he asked if I would be returning to my lord’s side in the near future.

‘I will if I can ever get Fitzwalter to stir himself,’ I said grumpily.

‘Perhaps you might be kind enough to give Robin a message from me,’ Henry said. ‘My people in York tell me a force is being raised by the King’s loyal men in the north to attack and seize the castles of all the rebel barons and knights in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Many of them are here in London and their lands are weakly defended. Tell him that no moves have yet been made but that Kirkton Castle was on a list of targets for the King’s wrath.’

My blood ran cold.

‘Is Westbury on that list?’

‘I could not swear to it either way. I have not seen the list. Although, I understand that you have recently built a tower, is that so?’

He really did know everything. I nodded.

‘Then I think it would be safe to assume Westbury will be numbered among the other illegal fortifications. Unlicensed castellation is one of the transgressions that the King is particularly keen to stamp out.’

‘I will deliver your message to Robin,’ I said, ‘but will you do me the same kindness and get a message to my household in Nottinghamshire?’

‘Of course, Sir Alan,’ said this excellent fellow, ‘with the greatest of pleasure.’

‘Tell my son Robert, and my steward Baldwin, to take all the wealth they can lay their hands on, all the livestock and manor people, and decamp to Robin’s castle in Yorkshire. And to go as soon as they can.’

‘I will send my swiftest rider in the morning,’ said Henry.

I was slightly relieved by his promise. The small garrison at Westbury was much depleted, as I had taken most of the men with me
to Rochester, and I knew that the few who remained would not be able to hold out for very long against a determined attack by the sheriff’s men. Robert would be much safer under the protection of Robin’s eldest son Hugh at Kirkton and the fifty seasoned men-at-arms he had there.

I went to bed that night almost sober and determined that I would confront Lord Fitzwalter in the morning and force him to ride to the relief of my friends. The sooner I could bring relief to Rochester, the sooner I could ride back to the north and protect my son. I would threaten Fitzwalter’s life if I absolutely had to. I would give him an ultimatum: ride or die. He must sally out to fight King John.

At Rochester.

There
was no need for dire threats, for when I attended Lord Fitzwalter at the Tower the next morning, the first thing he said to me was: ‘I have done it, Sir Alan, I have triumphed. I have persuaded the barons that we must support William d’Aubigny and the Earl of Locksley with all our strength.’

Having been running over in my mind all the things I was going to say to force him on this very course, I was much taken aback. But I smiled and congratulated Fitzwalter on his success.

‘When do we leave, sir?’ I said.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘St Crispin’s Day. We muster here at dawn. Seven hundred knights and mounted men-at-arms. A sizeable force, I hope you will agree.’

I did. If we had the element of surprise we could fall on King John’s army while it was engaged with the siege and if it could be combined with a massive sortie from the castle, and a slice of good luck, we could indeed crush King John, as d’Aubigny had so neatly put it, like a walnut between two stones.

A force of seven hundred knights and men-at-arms takes a good deal of organising. The horses require fodder and horseshoes, and farriers to
fit the shoes; the knights need their servants and baggage carts and mules loaded with piles of food and wine; there are mistresses too (and no doubt Moorish catamites) and their maids, and any number of other women – cooks, seamstresses, washerwomen, whores – for the lesser fighting men. And to my frustration there seemed to be no kind of urgency. Dawn, Fitzwalter had said, but by the time the Army of God had assembled it was nearly noon and by mid-afternoon the lumbering column had reached only as far as the dull, rough scrubland of the Black Heath southeast of the city, less than a third of the distance we had to travel. Here Fitzwalter decided to call a halt for the night, to my exquisite fury. And though I begged him to make a few more miles that day, he calmly told me the column had to stay together, for the forces of William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury, King John’s loyal half-brother, were lurking somewhere to the south, and the Army of God must not straggle for safety’s sake and therefore travel at the speed of the slowest ox-cart.

I was in a foul mood that night for another reason. I had received a message from Cass – his father was on the point of death and he begged to stay with him in his final days to be with him when he was gathered unto God, to bury him like a Christian, and to deal with certain affairs concerning the manor of Cassingham that Cass would inherit. If it had been another man, I might have suspected him of shirking but having seen him so confident in action I could not imagine that he was craven. So I was alone, among the crowds of the Army of God, the revelling barons and their shiny whores. I ate a solitary supper, wrapped myself in my cloak and went to sleep under a thorn tree in a short but drenching shower of rain.

We made better progress the next day, reaching the manor of Dartford and a crossing of the River Darent about three miles south of the Thames. We camped again that night and I brought myself to Fitzwalter’s tent at sundown, hoping once more to spur the commander
of the Army of God to greater speed. I had been away from Rochester for nearly two weeks and, for all I knew, the castle might have fallen and all my friends might be dead or captured. With the end of October in sight, winter and the close of the campaigning season was upon us. Already the road we travelled, Watling Street, built by those ancient engineers from Rome, was becoming hardly more than a boggy mire in the places where the big flat stones had been stolen, a serious obstacle for the awkward ox-carts, even the handcarts, to negotiate.

Fitzwalter’s tent was crowded with knights and barons, a dozen big men in mail and bright flowing cloaks. As I pushed in among them, I saw they were all surrounding and listening intently to a mud-splattered, rake-thin man in a raggedy, much-patched cloak, who seemed to be rather skittish in such exalted company.

‘… as far as the eye can see, my lords. I do not exaggerate. I … I … I swear it on the Virgin. The road to Dover is humming with men, a dozen companies of at least a hundred footmen each, I saw. And horsemen, too. I saw some five
conrois
of fine knights pass my hiding place in a span of half a day, foreigners by their speech.’

‘And these had not yet reached Rochester?’ said a bull-necked knight, who tugged nervously at his blond beard.

‘The first troops were a dozen miles from the town, at the manor of Sidyingbourne, your lordship, yet they were spurring onwards in terrible haste.’

‘I think we have heard enough,’ said Fitzwalter. ‘My thanks, Guilliam, the cooks are by the horse lines, they will find you something to eat. Here!’ He tossed a small purse to the muddy wretch, who seized it in the air and slithered through the throng and out of the tent.

The man’s exit unleashed a storm of conversation, almost every knight talking at once, arguing with his neighbour.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, quiet, please,’ said Fitzwalter. And when a partial
hush had fallen: ‘It is quite clear what we must do. It seems the King has been significantly reinforced. We have no hope against these fresh forces combined with the men he already has at Rochester. We must return to London at once.’

The hullabaloo returned with greater force, each man now shouting his opinion.

I shoved my way through to Fitzwalter’s side. ‘You cannot do this, sir,’ I said, and felt my face flushing with anger. ‘You must not do this. The men at Rochester are counting on you coming. My lord of Locksley—’

‘You heard the wretched fellow, Sir Alan,’ he said, irritated. ‘Even if he is making more of the matter than he should, as spies will do, John has clearly been reinforced by perhaps as many as a thousand men. This is not the first report of this that I have heard. We have no chance against the King at Rochester.’

‘That is not so,’ I was shouting too by now. ‘We have surprise on our side. If we march all night and attack tomorrow, before they know we are there, we can drive them from the walls in utter confusion and—’

Every man in the tent was staring at me. Fitzwalter’s tired face was the colour of a peeled beetroot. ‘You forget yourself, sir. I am commander of this army. And I say that we must retreat in the face of superior numbers.’

‘I say we cannot leave the men in the castle to die!’ I think I may even have clutched at the collar of Fitzwalter’s mantel in my passion. ‘You must find the courage to go on, sir. A swift march, a dawn attack—’

‘You would do well not to question my courage, sir,’ said Fitzwalter, pulling his cloak free from my grasp. ‘I will hear no more of your wild talk. I command here. Not you. And I command you to quiet yourself and leave my tent this instant.’

‘Sir, those men in Rochester are my friends. Yours, too.’ I was trying to be reasonable, trying to find some lever that would move him. ‘They
are loyal men of the Army of God. And you gave your solemn word that—’

‘Get him out of here,’ Fitzwalter said to someone beyond my shoulder and before I knew what was happening, a powerful grip shackled my chest and my thighs. My feet left the ground and I was bundled like a bag of dirty laundry out of the tent by two huge knights.

Outside the flap, I picked myself up – a pair of guards levelled their spears at me, while the two knights who had ejected me growled a warning, hands on their hilts. A dozen biting phrases came to my lips. I wanted to haul out Fidelity and throw myself at all of them. But it would have been useless and I knew it. So I said nothing; did nothing. I stumbled away, sightless, on unsteady feet, with a black cloud of despair descending. My task had been to bring Fitzwalter and his army to the relief of Rochester Castle and the salvation of my friends. My friends who were now trapped inside with several thousand of King John’s men around their walls.

I had failed.

I
wept then in sorrow for myself and my friends as I wandered through the camp back to my horse. I leaned my head against its warm flank and the tears ran down my cheeks. I could not for the life of me think what to do. I could not move Fitzwalter, I could not force this army to march. I did not wish to return to London and my lonely lodgings. I had half a mind to ride for the north to be with my son Robert and guard him if the King’s men attacked Westbury or Kirkton. But it would have felt like desertion. I could not just go home. I have rarely felt so directionless – but the plain truth was that my lord, Miles, Thomas, Mastin, the Westbury men, William d’Aubigny and all the good knights in Rochester were counting on me to come to their aid with a relief force, and I had failed.