The Iron Castle (Outlaw Chronicles) (2 page)

‘It was wonderful when I was a youngster,’ he said. ‘I was truly happy – living free of all constraints, doing whatever I wished, whenever I wished to do it. The danger was a tonic to my soul. I danced each day on the edge of a sword blade – and adored every moment. But, now … now, I miss my wife and my children. I think about Marie-Anne and Hugh and Miles far away in France. I want to see their faces and hold them. I want to watch Hugh and Miles grow tall. I want to live at Kirkton – all of us together. I want the quiet life, Alan, the dull life of the good man; I want to husband the Locksley lands, see the sheep sheared in spring and the crops brought in in summer; I want to bring justice and peace to the people who live there, and sleep safe in a warm bed at night. I don’t want to be constantly in fear that I will wake looking up at the killing end of a spear-shaft, surrounded by the Sheriff’s men. I don’t want to end my days on a gibbet, rough hemp around my neck, slowly choking out my last breaths in front of a jeering crowd. I want…’ He huffed out a breath, lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders. ‘I want, I want, I want – by God, I sound like a whining brat. My apologies, Alan. I must be getting old.’

That was exactly my interpretation, too. Robin, by my calculation, had now seen thirty-six summers – a goodly age, and one at which a man has one eye fondly on his wild, adventurous youth and the other on the loom of his dotage. I understood my lord’s impulse. I was ten years younger than Robin, but I too felt the lure of domesticity and secretly hoped that my years of battle, bloodshed, constant fear and mortal danger were behind me.

‘William is going to fix it,’ Robin said. ‘My brother is well with King John, it appears. He has spoken to Bardolf, who seems a decent man – for a damned sheriff – and although I must pay an enormous bribe and bring myself to kneel and do homage to King John, I will eventually be allowed to take up my lands and titles again in Yorkshire, and Marie-Anne and the boys can finally come home.’

‘Eventually?’

‘Yes, eventually. John, for all his many faults, is not a total imbecile. He wants me to serve him faithfully in France for three years – he has even drawn up a charter to this effect – and then I will be allowed to retire to the Locksley lands. He’s also giving me the lands in Normandy that Richard promised – do you remember? – as a sweetener. It’s a good arrangement for both of us. Three more years of fighting, then home with Marie-Anne and the boys. Don’t look at me like that, Alan; while John might not be, let us say, the most palatable fellow, he is still our rightful King.’

I breathed in a mouthful of wine, coughed, spluttered and mopped my brick-red face with a linen napkin.

‘Not the most
palatable
fellow? Our rightful King? Are you quite well?’

Robin looked annoyed. ‘Don’t climb up on your high horse, Alan. What am I supposed to do? Spend the rest of my days living alone like a hunted beast in the wild? Staying outside the law because John behaves like a petty tyrant from time to time? He’s the anointed King of England, sovereign over us all, he’s entitled to be a little high-handed. And I can change him. I can. If I’m at his side, I can curb his excesses, guide him, help him be a better man, a better King…’

I said exactly nothing. I cautiously took another sip of my wine.

Robin frowned. ‘Damn you, Alan, I am doing this whether you approve of my actions or not. The King wants me to raise a mercenary force in Normandy, nothing too unwieldy, two hundred men-at-arms or so, some archers and cavalry, too. The money is very good, and…’ Robin cleared his throat and smiled slyly. ‘Well, I wondered whether you would care to climb down from that lofty horse and agree to serve for pay on a hired mount on the continent. Good wages for a knight: John is paying six shillings a day; there would be the usual spoils, too. It might be fun…’

This was a most generous offer from Robin. I held the manor of Westbury from him, as the Earl of Locksley, and I was, in truth, obliged by custom to serve him as a knight for forty days a year, if he called upon me to do so. But Robin had never asked me to fulfil this obligation and, although I had served him in many a campaign and fought many a bloody battle under his banner, it was always out of love and loyalty rather than duty.

‘By your leave, sir, I will remain here at Westbury,’ I said formally. ‘The manor is in poor condition and urgently needs my attention, as does baby Robert. But, more than that, I believe my fighting days are behind me at last. I’ve had enough of pain and bloodshed, enough of foul food and festering wounds, of good men dying for bad reasons. I would be a lord of the land from now on.’

‘As you wish, my friend,’ said Robin. ‘I will not force you. If you change your mind, there will always be a place for you in any force that I command. Just don’t go around speaking ill of our noble king. Apart from being most offensive to those of us who would be his loyal vassals, it’s treasonous. John is very alive to threats of treason. Royalty should be shown the proper respect.’ Robin grinned at me to show he was jesting, and I could do nothing but smile back.

I tried my hardest to show the proper respect to royalty, and to Robin, to the extent of donning my best clothes and attending this royal ceremony of homage at the great hall in Nottingham Castle that cold March evening. Yet in the peacock swirl of the nobility of all England, I felt very much like a drab nobody. I was not nobly born myself and had very little wealth in either lands or silver – my father Henry Dale had been a monk, then a musician, then a peasant farmer before his early death – and I earned my knighthood on the battlefield with King Richard. On that day in the great hall, I was conscious of the fact that my only good cloak had recently been torn on a nail, then mended by one of my elderly female servants. The stitches were crude and lumpy; they showed up like a stain, proclaiming: look, this gutter-born oaf cannot afford a new garment even for a royal occasion.

The mending of my cloak made me long once again for my sweet wife Goody, who had been killed in a terrible accident the year before. My lovely girl would have repaired it, quietly, efficiently and no one would have been the wiser. But it was not only for her needlework that I missed her. I had known her since we were both children; we had, in a way, grown up together, and I had loved her with all my heart – her loss was sometimes overwhelming. I still wept from time to time, alone in bed, when I suffered the lash of her memory.

‘I never thought I’d see the day Robert of Locksley would bend the knee to King John,’ said a deep voice at my shoulder, shaking me from my sad reverie. I turned to see a tall, gaunt form, with grizzled grey-white hair, muscular shoulders and big scarred hands. He was dressed richly, in silk and satin and velvet, as befitted one of England’s richest men, and yet on William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, the outfit looked absurd, like a broad-shouldered, hairy soldier got up in a woman’s dress for a fair-day lark. I felt that he’d have been much more comfortable in well-worn iron mail from top knot to toe, a garb I had seen him don on countless occasions on campaign.

‘Why is he doing it, d’ye know, Sir Alan? You know him best of all. What’s cunning old Robin Locksley up to this time, eh?’

‘He says he’s tired of sleeping in the woods. He’s getting old, he says. He wants to retire to his lands in Yorkshire and live in peace.’

‘Hmmf,’ said the Marshal. ‘He’s barely a stripling. He’s not even forty. I hope he hasn’t gone soft. We need him; we’ll need all our good men in Normandy before long, you mark my words, Alan.’

Just then we were joined by two men. One was a neighbour of Robin’s, a stiff-necked baron called Roger de Lacy, who held Pontefract Castle for the King, and of whom I had always been slightly in awe. He was short, square, with fierce dark eyes, and his manner was habitually brusque, bordering on rude. De Lacy had a reputation as a fearsome fighter, a man with contempt for any weakness in others and himself, but he was said to be as true as Damascus steel once he had given his oath.

‘Pembroke,’ he said, with a curt nod at the Marshal. Then: ‘Dale – didn’t bother to dress up for the occasion, I see.’

I wrenched up a smile but made no reply.

The other man was a tall, smiling, open-faced stranger, clearly a knight by his garb and manner, but with a gentleness and humour shining from his eyes that seemed oddly unwarlike. He was accompanied by a girl. Not just a girl, in fact, but a vision of such beauty that I had difficulty paying full attention to the stranger’s name and rank, when the Marshal introduced him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I stammered. ‘What name did you say?’

She was about eighteen or nineteen, I judged, with skin so pure and white it seemed like the palest duck-egg blue, glossy sable hair under a snow-white headdress, a heart-shaped face, wide mouth, small nose and happy blue-grey eyes.

‘Are you deaf, Alan – what ails you?’ said the Marshal. ‘Here is Sir Joscelyn Giffard, lord of Avranches in Normandy, and his daughter the lady Matilda.’

‘Everyone calls me Tilda,’ said the girl, in a low, smoky voice, and when she smiled I felt a delicious rush of blood through my veins. She reminded me of Goody – her colouring was entirely different, Goody had been peach-pink and golden whereas this lady was swan white and midnight dark, but there was a calm joy in her perfect face that put me in mind of my beloved. I tore my gaze from her and, my head reeling like a drunkard’s, I bowed to Sir Joscelyn and bid him a stammering welcome to Nottinghamshire.

A blast of trumpet saved me from having to make conversation with these men. A young and spritely bishop entered the hall bearing a tiny golden casket on a plump purple cushion. Many of the more pious assembled knights fell to their knees as the bishop and his burden passed – for that bright little box housed a sacred relic, a toe-bone from the body of the blessed forerunner of Our Lord Jesus Christ, John the Baptist himself – but I remained standing when the holy man went by, as did William the Marshal. I had had some experience of so-called relics in recent years and, as a consequence, I was no longer so swift to afford them all deep reverence.

The bishop stopped beside the kneeling form of Robin and the seated form of the King and stood between them. There was a second trumpet blast – ordering silence in the hall – and John spoke, his voice rusty, harsh, almost a frog’s croak.

‘Good. Right. Everybody quiet. Let’s begin.’ The King glanced down at his right hand where I could see he held a scrap of parchment. He cleared his throat.

‘Are you willing, Robert Odo, son of William, Lord of Edwinstowe, to become my man?’ The King squinted down at his hand. ‘Do you choose to do so with a pure heart in the sight of God and in the absence of all deceit, falsehood and malice?’

‘I am willing,’ said Robin clearly.

King John tucked the parchment under his thigh and placed his two hands over my lord’s, and holding Robin almost captive for a moment, he looked at him and said, ‘Then from this moment forth you are my sworn man.’

And he released his grip.

The bishop spoke then: ‘This homage that has been made in the sight of God and Man, and in the presence of this holy relic, can never be unmade. Thanks be to God.’ Then he said, ‘Are you now willing to swear fealty to your sovereign lord for the lands and titles of the Earl of Locksley?’

‘I am willing,’ said Robin, and he placed his right hand softly on the little golden box on its rich, velvet cushion. ‘I swear, by my faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ, that I will from this moment forward be faithful to my lord and sovereign King John and that I will never cause him harm and will observe my homage to him against all enemies of my lord in good faith and without deceit.’

Robin lifted his hand and, knowing what I did about my lord’s larcenous nature, I half-expected the little golden box to have disappeared into his palm, but it was still there, gleaming on that purple cushion.

To his credit, John also seemed to play his part in a true and honest manner. He raised Robin to his feet and they exchanged the ritual kiss of peace. The trumpets flared again. John said loudly, ‘Fare you well, my true and trusty Earl of Locksley!’ Then he handed Robin a roll of thick parchment, very softly patted him on the cheek and whispered something into my lord’s ear. Robin bowed low in one graceful, fluid movement and backed away from his new master.

Amid much slapping of his back and many a shouted word of encouragement, Robin made his way through the crowds of knights and nobles and, still clutching the roll of parchment, he came over to our group, to Sir Joscelyn, his daughter Matilda, Roger de Lacy, William the Marshal and myself.

I congratulated my friend, as did the Marshal, and Robin smiled ruefully, humbly and said little. De Lacy said, ‘That’s an end to all your damned Sherwood nonsense, Locksley. You are the King’s man now and you’d best not forget it.’ Robin smiled and inclined his head in agreement. Then Sir Joscelyn gripped him by the right hand and pumped it firmly.

‘The King is fortunate indeed to have a good man such as you as his vassal,’ he said, beaming at Robin. Tilda, I noticed, kissed my lord softly on his cheek and asked after Marie-Anne and his children. Robin answered her briefly but with great kindness and courtesy. I asked Tilda if she knew Marie-Anne well – a silly question, given that she had just asked after her health, but for some reason I wanted her to give me her attention. She said that she did and that they had been together in Queen Eleanor’s court in Poitiers for some time the year before. I asked a few questions about the court, again just for the pleasure of hearing her speak and having her lovely eyes fixed on mine, and then she surprised me.

‘Your name is well spoken of there, Sir Alan,’ she said. ‘Some of the Queen’s ladies are avid for music and your name has been mentioned as one of our finest
trouvères
– perhaps you will play something for me one day. Or better yet, perhaps you will even write one of your famous
cansos
about me! Something terribly scandalous – I hope.’ She poked the tip of her pink tongue out of the corner of her mouth an instant after she said this, to show that she was not completely in earnest. It was the most enchanting thing I’d seen for an age. And I found myself shocked and aroused at the same time. A
canso
was a song, usually about love, about
adulterous
love, between a knight and a lady. By God, by all the saints, the minx was actually flirting with me – and Goody not yet a full year in her grave.