The Death of Robin Hood (21 page)

I felt uncomfortable. I had promised Thomas that I would not speak of it to Robin but I was sure his departure was a result of the threat he perceived from the Templars. Evidently I had not convinced him that Robin would not betray him. I desperately wanted to speak of this to Robin but was bound to painful silence.

We busied ourselves with training the new men over the next few days. But Robin grew increasingly concerned over Thomas’s absence.

‘I do not greatly mind if he has taken a few days’ leave from my service on some errand – though it would have been only right, and courteous for that matter, to ask my permission,’ he said to me at the end of a long, exhausting day trying to teach the new cavalry to wheel in formation and mostly failing. ‘But I need him back with us now. I had thought to knight Miles and present myself to the King next week with three fully armed knights in my retinue: now I shall arrive at the muster with only one. Do you think he is playing the dice again? At York or Nottingham or somewhere? I know he has a penchant for it.’

I could say nothing to aid Robin’s speculation. And in the end, inevitably, his worry turned to anger. He sent a message to Makeney, to Thomas’s wife Mary, saying that he expected Sir Thomas Blood to present himself at Kirkton for duty within three days or he might consider himself dismissed from the Earl of Locksley’s service, in which case, he and all his adherents should vacate the Derbyshire manor forthwith.

It was past the time for us to leave for Tonbridge Castle in Kent to rejoin the King. So I returned to Westbury, to make my own preparations, a
few days before Robin and his raw troops were to make their departure. Of course, the first person I saw when I walked into the hall that evening was Tilda. She was sitting on a bench by the far wall, with a candle beside her and a needle and thread in her hands, mending a pair of old hose that must have belonged to Robert.

She did not see me, intent as she was on her work, and as I walked towards her I was struck by how much her looks had improved. Good food, regular bathing and a roof over her head had done wonders for her. She was no longer the starving, battered beggar woman who had come to my hall seeking forgiveness. Her unbound hair was as glossy as a raven’s wing in the candlelight and it fell forward in a graceful sable curtain over her creamy cheek; her pink tongue was poking from the side of her mouth as she made the tiny stitches in the seam of the fabric and it made her look as if she were about twelve years old.

Baldwin came rushing over as I advanced on Tilda, as close as an old man ever comes to running, intercepting me before I could reach the woman – I think he suspected that I would try to harm her – and he said loudly, too loudly, ‘Ah, Sir Alan, welcome home! I have a letter for you, which arrived while you were at Kirkton.’

He thrust a parchment scroll into my hands. As I looked at it, I could see from the corner of my eye my steward making frantic gestures at Tilda, silently trying to shoo her away, out of my sight. Without looking up, I said, ‘Leave her be, Baldwin. I would not disturb a woman at her work.’ I turned my back on the pair of them and went over to the firelight by the hearth to read the letter.

It was from Paris.

I blinked back a tear or two at the news that the Seigneur was dead. He had been a fine man. But I knew my cousin Roland would fill his place as the new lord of Alle with strength and grace. His warning about the White Count set me thinking: that oddly dressed Frenchman, the bastard all in white that I had met in the
Tower last year, had he not been named Thomas, Comte du Perche? I was fairly sure he had. And I could easily believe that a fellow who snapped a kitten’s leg because it scratched him had the soul of a beast. I could easily believe that he flayed his enemies, too. Very well, I would try to stay out of his way. On the other hand, if I did encounter him, since he was now, as a follower of Prince Louis, my sworn enemy, I might just slaughter him on the spot.

Yet all thoughts of dead uncles and vicious French noblemen were pushed from my mind over the next few days, for I was busy with my own preparations. And on the last golden day of April, I left Westbury in Robert’s care and rode south again to war.

The
King’s muster at Tonbridge was less than impressive. The castle that guards the north bank of the River Medway there – about twenty miles upstream from Rochester – was a decent-sized moated fortress, with a yellow stone gatehouse and tower overlooking the bridge, an old round Norman keep atop a motte, and a high curtain wall. But the royal army gathered in response to the King’s command were too few to strike much fear into the enemy’s heart. Scarcely five hundred knights answered the King’s call, for news of the imminent arrival of the French had forced many barons to reconsider their allegiances and despite the King’s successful
chevauchée
and the havoc he had wreaked in the north, the rebels were still full of spirit.

Indeed, in some respects the poor showing at Tonbridge was a result of the King’s success in ejecting the rebellious barons from their fortified manors and castles. Many of the men with small or weak fortifications had done the same as I had at Westbury and had removed themselves and their goods and livestock from the path of the King’s ravaging mercenaries and found a stronger refuge. Some of the northernmost barons had simply retreated to Scotland, where
they had been made welcome by the young King Alexander. As Robert had pointed out, I was lucky Westbury had been overlooked and that I had only suffered the loss of my tower, for many abandoned fortifications had been either utterly destroyed (slighted, as military men called it) or left intact but garrisoned by the King’s men and held against their rightful owners. This was the cause of the depletion of the King’s army – for even though only a handful of knights, mercenaries or trusted men-at-arms had been left in each manor or castle that the King had captured, so many places had been taken that his forces were spread thinly across the land.

I wondered if Miles was right to side with Lord Fitzwalter against the King. He was not the only son to take a different side to his father: even staunch William the Marshal, King John’s most trusted Englishman, had his son John in the enemy camp. Then I wondered what Miles and Thomas were doing just then in London. Drinking and chasing wenches, if I knew Miles; and Thomas was probably throwing the knucklebones. But was he winning – or losing?

There had been no reply to Robin’s ultimatum to the manor of Makeney – the messenger reported the holding abandoned, the hearth ashes cold, the hall empty. Clearly Thomas had decided to make a clean break with Robin. But it grieved me deeply that my old friend was no longer with us. I had known him, raggedy Welsh boy, squire and knight, and trusted him, for more than twenty years. I missed him and knew that I’d miss him even more when the trumpets sounded for battle.

There was one piece of good news. Robin’s squire William of Cassingham was at the Tonbridge muster and had brought with him two dozen veteran bowmen from his family lands in the south of the county. These were tough men from the Weald, many of them former poachers by the gnarled look of them, and all well versed with the bow and in moving silently and swiftly through the thick forests of their native lands. Oddly, Cass appeared entirely indifferent to
our change of allegiance: when I asked how he felt about serving the King, he merely shrugged and said something similar to Thomas’s comment that Robin’s enemies were his enemies. ‘Truth be told, sir,’ he went on, ‘I will like killing Frenchmen every bit as much as I liked killing Flemings. They’re all dirty foreigners to me.’

Cass’s father had indeed died, as the squire had predicted in his letter to me, and the young fellow was now master of a sprawling holding, much of it almost impenetrable woodland, a dozen miles north of Hastings. He was a landed man of equal consequence to me now and in command of a formidable company of bowmen, yet it was a mark of his breeding that he continued to treat me with a pleasing deference as his superior. I did at least have the distinction of having been knighted by King Richard, as well as being the Earl of Locksley’s second-in-command.

The addition of Cass’s forces to Robin’s men made our lord one of the more powerful barons in the King’s retinue and should have given him a good deal more weight among the council, the handful of senior knights and lords that the King was supposed to confide in. In truth though, the King trusted no one but his Flemish captains – those whose loyalty was commanded by royal silver.

Savary de Mauléon had been badly wounded in a skirmish with the London rebels in April and was recovering at Waltham Abbey. William the Marshal was on the Welsh marches striving to contain the inhabitants of that wild region who, like the Scots, had naturally sided with the rebels against the crown. So the King should have been leaning on Robin, taking his counsel from the Earl of Locksley, now that he was once again within the fold, but John continued to treat my lord with a contemptuous indifference. Robin responded with a coolness of his own, combined with a determined punctiliousness about obeying orders. He reported to the King every morning just after first light and asked for that day’s royal commands. His duties mostly involved sending out parties to
forage across Kent and Sussex for grain and livestock. In fact, he was asked to do very little by the King and I knew Robin was making work for his men to prevent them from being idle – scouting south into the woods of the Weald, discovering its pathways, passages and rare clearings; he was also occasionally sending a few men to the outskirts of London, twenty miles north, to keep an eye on rebel movements. He wanted his troops busy and familiar with the terrain of this southern land. And yet there was no sense of urgency. We were all marking time until the King should reveal his will. I took it upon myself during these days to pay a swift visit to Boxley Abbey and retrieve my arms and armour from my friend the abbot. On my return to Robin, the comforting weight of Fidelity at my side did much for my spirits.

The last time I had been at Tonbridge, I was a wretched prisoner of war with a broken leg, wheeled into a leaky barn in the castle courtyard on a donkey cart under guard with the rest of the men from Rochester. It gave me great pleasure to be a free man able to wander the outer bailey at my leisure, sword at my side, and to explore the sprawling walled town beyond and the lush green countryside around. My leg was completely healed and gave me no more than a twinge at the end of a day’s walking.

Robin had found us quarters not far outside the town and to the north and east in a customs house named Hadlow Stair, beside the Medway. It was a large, three-storied hall with a red-tiled roof and timbers a foot or more thick, built on a slight rise of land above the marshy river valley, looking south across the forested hills and valleys of the Weald of Kent. There was a wharf below the house, a platform of stout planks a few feet above the river, and the cargo boats that plied up and down to Rochester and even to the German Sea beyond were expected to stop and pay river taxes to the bailiff who resided in the hall. When Tonbridge Castle fell to the King, the bailiff, a vassal of Gilbert de Clare, the lord of Tonbridge, had decamped with his master, leaving this comfortable hall
vacant. On their arrival in Tonbridge, Cass’s bowmen had quickly discovered it, reported to their lord, and Robin had declared it perfect for his needs.