A King's Ransom (70 page)

Richard followed his gesture, his eyes lingering on that royal lion fluttering in the wind. “I agree,” he said. “It is just a beginning, though, and we cannot forget that.” Then he smiled. “But the worst is over now, and I thank God for that.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

MARCH 1194

Nottingham Castle, England

R
ichard’s lashes flickered as he slowly became aware of his surroundings. Wherever he was, it was frigid, dark, and windowless, lit only by a small oil lamp. His head was throbbing and he tasted blood in his mouth. He had another merciful moment of hazy confusion, and then he remembered. This was an underground dungeon in the Louvre, the French king’s Paris stronghold.

He’d fought them, to no avail, for he was greatly outnumbered. Pinning him down, they had fastened heavy shackles on his ankles and manacled his wrists, tethering the chains to a wall hook. Even then, he’d continued to resist until his head had slammed into the rough concrete floor. As the memories of that chaotic, frantic struggle came flooding back, he attempted to sit up, but his head was spinning again. He was finding it difficult to get enough air into his lungs and he was sickened by the stench. God alone knew how many prisoners had been entombed here, the confined space stinking of urine, feces, sweat, and fear. As the full horror of his new reality sank in, he tried to stave off panic, but he felt as if the walls were closing in on him.

It was then that he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock, and the darkness was pierced by a dazzling blaze of torchlight. Just as it had happened at Trifels, the Bishop of Beauvais was standing there, laughing down at him. But this time there was no hope of reprieve, no ransom to be paid.

“I wanted to reassure you that Philippe will not be putting you to death, Richard. Oh, he thought about it. But I convinced him this way was better. Whenever he has a bad day, he need only remind himself that you’re having a far worse one.” The bishop grinned. “I think he liked that idea. Whenever I’m in Paris, I certainly intend to stop by to see how you’re doing.”

He paused deliberately. “Nothing to say, Lionheart? Well, you listen whilst I talk, then. On the way over here, I was thinking of all that you’ll never experience again. You’ll never see the sky again or feel the sun on your face. You’ll never mount a stallion again—or a woman. You’ll not hear the sound of the wind or rain or the music you like so much. No more songs to write, no more battles to fight. The only voice you’ll hear will be your own. As the years go by, you’ll be forgotten—even by your friends. And when you finally do die, you’ll die unshriven of your sins, so you’ll burn for aye in Hell.”

“Then I’ll see you there, you craven son of a poxed whore!” Richard lunged to the end of his chain, calling the other man a cankered, maggot-ridden swine, a contemptible coward, a godless renegade, a gutless milksop, and a treacherous viper, impressing the guards with his raging, embittered invective. Beauvais merely laughed.

Gesturing to the oil lamp, he said, “Take that with us, for he’ll not be needing it.” He halted at the door, just as he’d done at Trifels. “We’ll feed you enough to keep you alive. I daresay you could survive for years; other prisoners have. But you might be one of the luckier ones, Lionheart. Mayhap you’ll go mad down here in the dark.”

With the loss of all light, Richard was blind, utterly alone in this icy, suffocating blackness. Overwhelmed by despair, he cried out, but no one could hear him, not even God. He was buried alive. He yanked desperately at his chains until his wrists were cut and bleeding, until hands gripped his shoulders and a voice entreated him to be still.

He jerked upright, his heart pounding, pulse racing, so shaken that he did not at once recognize his surroundings. He was in an unfamiliar bedchamber, but it
was
a bedchamber. Weak with relief, he sank back against the pillow. A young woman was cowering in the far corner of the bed, her eyes wide, blood trickling down her cheek. His new squire, Robert, was standing, frozen, several feet away, but Arne was leaning over him, saying soothingly that it was a dream, just a bad dream.

Richard knew that by now. The dream had been so real, though, that he could still feel the heavy manacles clamping his wrists; he thought he could even smell the foulness of that accursed oubliette. He closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply until his brain communicated to his body that he was at Nottingham Castle, not in a Paris dungeon. When he opened them again, Arne was still there, this time holding out a cup of wine. Richard drained it in several swallows and, without needing to be told, Arne produced a flagon and refilled it to the brim. As their eyes met, the same thought was in both their minds—the nights at Speyer and Worms when the boy had awakened screaming, sure that he was about to be burned with a red-hot poker.

Arne had opened the bed hangings when responding to Richard’s nightmare. Now he closed them again, but left a space so that the bed would not be cocooned in darkness, for after his own struggles with night terrors, he’d craved light. He then withdrew to his own bed on the opposite side of the chamber, giving Robert a shove when he still stood there gaping.

Richard drank again, more slowly this time, watching the glowing embers as the fire in the hearth burned low. Glancing over at the girl, he pointed to the bloodied scratch under her eye. “Did I do that?”

She nodded. “You were thrashing about like a trapped eel and when you flung out your arm, your ring caught me here.” She’d slid over beside him again, showing that she’d not retreated to the end of the bed from fear, simply to get out of range. When he offered the rest of the wine, she took it eagerly and drank with obvious pleasure. He could see now that her cheek was swollen, too, but she seemed quite unfazed by it. He supposed that since bruises were an occupational hazard, she did not consider unintentional ones worth bothering about, especially when she was likely to be well compensated for them.

She leaned over to set the cup down in the floor rushes, and then propped herself up on an elbow, saying chattily, “That must have been an awful dream, my lord. I have never had one myself, at least not one that I remembered come morning. But my late husband, may God assoil him, suffered dreadfully from bad dreams. He’d often awaken me, yelling and flailing about like one possessed. He even sleepwalked sometimes. Do you ever do that, my lord?”

“What was your name again?”

Her smile set free two deep dimples. She was called Eve, she told him, a popular name for women who made their living by bartering their bodies.

“Stop talking, Eve,” Richard said and rolled over on top of her. She wrapped her arms compliantly around his neck, adjusting her body to accommodate him, for she was skilled in all the ways of pleasuring a man and she’d discovered earlier that night that a king was no different from other men when it came to hungers of the flesh.

Richard got the physical release he needed and, for a time, he did not have to think at all. Afterward, his bedmate had fallen asleep almost at once, but he could not, despite being exhausted by the nightmare. Eventually, he gave up and rose from the bed. Crossing to the window, he pulled the shutters back, gazing up at a sky in which stars still glimmered. Dawn was at least an hour away. He grimaced, for it was going to be a long day—the start of the great council—and then began to pull clothing from a coffer. Robert continued to sleep, snoring softly, but Arne soon awakened, for he seemed to have a sixth sense, always on hand when he was needed. He insisted upon assisting Richard in dressing and then quickly did so himself.

Richard retrieved a small casket from another coffer and poured some coins into a leather pouch. Tossing it to Arne, he said, “Give her this when she awakens, lad, and then see that she gets safely back into town.”

Arne tucked the pouch into his belt. “I will, my lord.” His gaze drawn toward the girl in the bed, he said wistfully, “She is very pretty.”

Richard raised an eyebrow. “You want her?” He was turning to take more money from the casket when the boy hastily declined. “Why not?” He glanced over his shoulder, surprised by the refusal. “I daresay she’d fancy a polite lad like you over some of the men she takes into her bed.” When Arne continued to shake his head, Richard looked at the youth curiously, remembering that Morgan had said he was younger than they’d first thought. “How old are you, lad? Sixteen?”

“Come Michaelmas, sire.” Arne blushed when Richard asked if he’d been with a woman yet, but he was proud to say he had, for some of the king’s knights had gone to a German brothel to celebrate his impending release and Guillain had taken a brotherly interest in engaging a suitable girl for Arne’s first time. So he was no longer afflicted by the shyness that had kept him from losing his virginity in that Ragusa whorehouse, but the idea of sharing a woman with his king seemed somehow sacrilegious to him. Knowing Richard would have laughed at him had he confided that, he said instead, “May I ask you a question, sire?”

He lost his nerve then, fearing that he’d be unforgivably presumptuous. But when Richard urged him on, he braced himself and blurted out in one breathless sentence, “You could have any woman you wanted, my liege, so why do you choose to pay for one?” And to his vast relief, Richard looked amused.

Gesturing toward the young woman asleep in his bed, Richard said with a grin, “I wanted to swive her, Arne, not court her.” Leaning back against the edge of the trestle table, he decided to share a family story with the lad, for they’d developed an odd intimacy since being reunited at Speyer nine months ago, a bond begotten in the torture Arne had undergone for his sake and reinforced by dreams of French dungeons and burning flesh.

“When my brothers and I reached the age of thirteen or fourteen, our father declared that we were now going to be ‘thinking with our cocks,’ and gave us each a blunt talking-to. ‘If you plant a field, you have to harvest the crop,’ he said, telling us that we must look after any children we sired. He said he’d not blame us for ‘a wench ploughed and cropped,’ but we should stay away from virgins and other men’s wives, saying, ‘If you have an itch, get a whore to scratch it.’ He did not always practice what he preached; what man does? But it was good advice nonetheless, which I will eventually pass on to my own sons, and which I am now passing on to you, Arne.”

“I will bear it in mind, sire,” Arne promised, so solemnly that Richard laughed as he headed for the door. Arne was still shocked that he’d actually dared to ask the king about his whores, but it had been a source of bewilderment to him. He was happy that he had done so, for the king seemed in much better spirits now, and he hoped that the night’s bad dream would cast no shadow in the light of day.

But once Richard was alone in the stairwell, he came to a halt, all traces of amusement gone from his face. That nightmare was a familiar one, but he’d not had it since he’d left Germany and he’d not thought it would come back once he was freed. Why would it still haunt him like this, and after his triumph in taking Nottingham Castle? It made no sense to him. He did not mind that Arne knew about the dreams. The lad understood. But he did not want any others to see him like that, to see him so vulnerable.

Robert had been with him for only a few days. His uncle Hamelin had insisted he needed another squire and Richard had humored him. But just before the council began later that morning, he pulled Hamelin aside and said he no longer wanted the boy’s services. And from that day on, when he had an itch that needed scratching, he did not let the woman spend the night.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of the great council, Richard removed all but seven of the sheriffs from their posts and offered the offices for sale to the highest bidders. The men who’d paid for these shrievalties at the start of his reign, when he was raising funds for the crusade, were understandably not happy at having to buy them back. But Richard’s need for money was acute. It was, he thought morosely, like being caught between Scylla and Charybdis, having to repay the rest of the ransom in order to free the hostages at the same time that he faced an expensive campaign against that festering sore on the French throne. During his captivity, he’d been too concerned about regaining his freedom to dwell much upon the outrageous financial burden imposed upon his domains. Now the mere thought of that one hundred fifty thousand marks added fuel to the fire smoldering in the back of his brain, slow-burning but as impossible to quench as Greek fire. He did not understand why the Almighty had allowed Heinrich to prevail, even rewarding him for his treachery with Sicily. Why was Tancred the one to die and not Heinrich? He knew those were questions no good Christian should ask. Mortal men were taught to accept. God’s Will be done. But he did
not
understand.