Warlord (Outlaw 4) (38 page)

I have noticed that after battle or combat I have often felt a similar sensation – the sleeplessness, in particular, and the awful, blood-tinged dreams – but previously these feelings had gradually faded over several weeks, and I had regained my normal buoyant mood. Not this time. I was haunted by my experiences in France, by the deaths of Hanno and Owain, and by my own near escape from the yawning grave. Back at Westbury, I began to drink a little more each night, in an attempt to help me sleep, just another cup or two to begin with, and then whole flagons of good red wine – and another full one set by my bed, too.

It was to no avail.

It is true that after drinking deeply of the good wine that Baldwin purchased from the Aquitanian merchants, I would sometimes fall into a short sleep, but I would almost always awake past midnight, mouth dry as old leather, head beating and with a sour belly – unable to sleep again until dawn found me exhausted, sweaty and irritable.

I behaved badly in those months at Westbury, often snapping angrily at Tuck, Marie-Anne, Thomas, or even at my beloved Goody. I found myself bristling with rage and snarling at the slightest thing: a dropped cup or a door left open, a dog barking in the night. And I drank more and more wine to try to calm my nerves. Looking back on that time it is a wonder that my friends bore my company at all: I would not have been surprised if they had all decamped for Robin’s castle of Kirkton in Yorkshire and closed the gates in my face. When we all meet again in Heaven, as I am sure we will, I shall apologize to them and try to make amends. I could not explain it then: I did not understand it myself. I had faced danger and death many times before that episode in Paris. I was young, just turned twenty years, and my chest had healed to a thick pink scar – my wind was not good but it was slowly improving. But I could not shake the demons of memory that haunted my days and particularly my nights. And, although
I knew I was playing the boor, I could not fathom why. I still do not fully understand it.

But if my rude and angry behaviour were not enough, there were other dark forces at work to sour the air at Westbury that spring and summer. On the third or fourth day after my arrival, Tuck took me aside and explained why he and Marie-Anne had decided to move in with Goody and abandon Kirkton to Robin’s army of servants.

‘It is Nur, I am afraid,’ Tuck told me as we strolled through the long apple orchard, admiring the delicate blossoms that adorned the trees. ‘She has taken up residence in the old, deep woods over towards Alfreton, and she appears to be gathering followers to her; a sad crew made up of the mad and infirm, the dispossessed and rejected – all women, young and old.’

‘Has she bothered Goody in any way?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid Nur has been making something of a nuisance of herself in these parts recently. She sometimes visits Westbury by night, usually at full moon, and leaves dead, mutilated animals in strange contorted attitudes – baby shrews, rats, foxes, even cats, hanged or crucified – and blood-daubed messages outside the walls. The villagers are all terrified of her and whisper that she is a witch and servant of Satan – and I am certain that, while she is surely mortal, it truly is the Devil who drives her wicked actions!’

‘Has she hurt Goody?’ I repeated, a little shortly.

‘No-ooo, she has not,’ said Tuck slowly, his red face wrinkling with thought. ‘Goody says she is not frightened by that sort of nonsense – and has threatened to give Nur another thrashing if she ever encounters her again. But it must be wearing on her soul – having an enemy so close, and someone so filled with malice. Goody would not be human if she did not find that unsettling.’

I felt a pang of guilt then. For Nur was a monster of my own making; it was my failure, my inability to love her after she had been mutilated, that had turned her towards evil. And I was certain that she meant to do Goody harm, if ever she could.

‘Do not fret, Alan,’ said Tuck. ‘We have a dozen good men-at-arms at Westbury, and I have cleansed the hall and the courtyard buildings with holy water; we are safe from Nur’s evil – I only tell you so you will understand if Goody seems rather tense.’

I spoke to Goody about the threat from Nur, and she seemed to me to be quite calm: ‘I feel a kind of pity for Nur, rather than anything stronger,’ she said. ‘You loved her once but no longer, and she cannot let that go. I can understand that. It must be eating her up inside to know that, only a few miles away, I have you all to myself!’ She gave me her lovely smile, and brushed my cheek with her lips.

‘If you wish, I could raise a troop of men and we could scour those Alfreton woods, flush her out and drive her away,’ I said. ‘It would not be such a difficult task and perhaps we would be doing a kindness in expelling her from the area. If she were not close by, perhaps she would forget all about us and move ahead with her own life.’

‘No,’ said Goody, ‘let the poor woman be. She has already been exiled from her home once – in Outremer. We can survive a few dead rats every full moon – perhaps she will grow bored with this dark game and find some other way to fill the emptiness of her life.’

And so I did nothing. And, in fact, at the next full moon there were no executed animal corpses strewn around Westbury, no foul messages scrawled in blood for all to see. And the next moon after that, too. I began to think that Nur had given up her attempt to scare us, and that she had perhaps gone away, or died of some fever, or just expired of plain starvation. I allowed myself to feel a little easier.

The months passed at Westbury, and the harvest was gathered in by the villeins and franklins of the village, under the efficient rule of Baldwin, my steward: it was a bountiful year, with soft rain to make the crops grow in April and May and then strong sunshine
to ripen the ears all through June and July. On the first day of August, at the feast of Lammas, when the tenants were duty bound to pay their rents, I took some pale satisfaction at seeing the grain barns being filled to the rafters with the produce of Westbury, and after Mass in the village church, in which a loaf made from that year’s harvest was consecrated by the priest, an owlish little man called Arnold, and given out with the wine at the Blessed Sacrament, I feasted my tenants with a roasted pig, two ewes, six dozen capons, innumerable puddings, and many barrels of fresh ale.

My squire Thomas spent hours by the ale barrels with the dozen or so Westbury men-at-arms, and became quite drunk, and not long after dusk, when a great bonfire was being lit, and the dancing was about to begin, Goody had to help him off to bed. The boy, I noticed, had changed in recent months: his voice had changed from the shrill treble of the year before and become deeper, though it still cracked and jumped from a high to a low register when he was excited. And he had grown too. He would never be a tall man, but he had added six inches to his stature since our time in Paris, and he undoubtedly would be a man before long.

A drum began to throb, and the wailing of a pipe pierced the twilight. When my tipsy squire had been put to bed – even in drink he was a grave and sensible youth, not given to giggling, singing, loud extravagant words or violence – Goody came and sat beside me. We shared a plate of roast pork with fresh wheat bread, and a large flagon of wine, and watched the villagers join hands in a circle and begin the intricate steps of the traditional Lammas dances. The night was warm and well lit by the bonfire that cast flickering light and shadow upon the circling dancers. It was a homely, peaceful scene, the red firelight, the wheeling dancers, a broad table, laden with good food: and yet there was something troubling my beloved, and I knew what it was. It had been a year and four months since we had become betrothed, and the
celebration of our bountiful harvest had bent her thoughts towards her own fecundity.

‘Hal’s daughter Sally is with child, or so they tell me,’ my lovely girl said, as if she were merely making idle conversation. But even then I knew her better than that. I merely grunted through a mouthful of half-chewed pork and waited for her next sortie.

Sparks crackled and leapt from the bonfire, the music skirled through the darkness and the drums thumped on. We watched the ring of dancers break apart and reform as the spokes of a wheel, their left hands joined in the centre, their faces flushed and smiling.

‘And Aggie the Miller’s wife has just had twins – two beautiful boys.’

‘What happy news,’ I said, in a carefully neutral tone.

The circle had formed again, but now a young man and a girl were dancing together, nimbly, in the centre of the ring. The love between the young couple was almost visible, and they moved like one creature, arms linked, toes pointed in perfect symmetry, eyes fixed on the other’s face.

‘And little Daisy Johnson is to be married next week,’ she said. ‘To William the Thatcher, of all people – he must be thirty years old if he’s a day! Twice her age!’

‘He’s a good man, a skilled craftsman, and a kind one. She will be well provided for in William’s house—’

Goody snapped: ‘The Devil take you, Alan Dale – why are you being so difficult about all this?’

‘You know why, my darling,’ I said calmly.

‘One mad, unhappy woman utters a stream of pure moon-addled gibberish, nothing but hateful, hurtful ranting, and you take that as a reason not to fulfil your lawful promise to marry me and give me babies! You are scared of her, Alan, aren’t you? You’re frightened. Admit it. You – the big, tough, fighting man – are scared of her silly threats.’

I was stung, and an angry retort sprang to my lips. But I managed
to swallow it, something that I had failed to do on several occasions in the past few months. Besides, Goody was right: when I looked into my heart, I realized that a part of me
was
frightened of Nur’s curse. When she had burst into our betrothal feast the year before, she had uttered these words: ‘
I curse you, Alan Dale, I curse you and your milky whore! Your sour-cream bride will die a year and a day after you take her to your marriage bed – and her first-born child shall die, too, in screaming agony
.’

The words had burned themselves into my brain: and if Goody did not fear the curse, I knew, deep in my unreasoning heart, that I did.

‘We have not heard from that poor crazed woman for months now: there has been no sign of her at all since you returned,’ Goody continued. ‘She has likely gone away or curled up in a hole and died – she cannot hurt us, my love. Her words of hate have no power over us. Let us be married, and soon. And then in a while Miles shall have a playmate! And you will have an heir, a little Alan. Would that not please you, my love?’

Goody spent most of her days at Westbury with Marie-Anne, and while a wet-nurse, a plump, plain village girl called Ada, tended to Miles’s basic needs, feeding him and changing his soiled napkins, the two gentlewomen, my betrothed and Robin’s wife, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time clucking and fussing over the baby, playing with him, cuddling him. I could not understand it – he was a fairly pleasant infant, to be sure, with the correct number of fingers, toes and the like. But he did not seem to do anything except feed or cry or sleep. I was bewildered by Miles’s ability to enthral the household females. Occasionally I would lean over his basket and examine him, to see if I could discover the source of his fascination, always without the slightest success.

Goody was staring at me expectantly: and I realized that I would have to come to some decision on this matter.

I cleared my throat to give me time to think.

While the threat of Goody’s death a year after the day of our marriage alarmed me, I realized that my girl might have a good point. We had neither seen nor heard anything from Nur in the three months that I had been at Westbury. As Goody said, it was entirely possible that the Hag of Hallamshire, as she was sometimes known in these parts, might well have abandoned her feud with us and gone away. I looked into Goody’s lovely pink-and-white face, and made my choice.

‘My love,’ I said, ‘you know that it is my deepest desire to wed you, to take you into my bed and to fill your belly with a child. God knows, it is not a lack of regard for you that has restrained me thus far. You are entirely right, my angel, until now I have gone in fear of the curse – but no longer. I will make this pact with you: if we have heard nothing from Nur by Christmas Day, if she is truly gone from our lives, we shall make our plans to marry next Easter, with all the pomp we can muster: a lavish event, attended by every great person of our acquaintance, that will set the whole county a-twitter. I will take you as my bride the first Sunday after Easter, and to my bed that night. Would that please you, my darling?’

Goody made no verbal reply, but she gave a secret smile, leaned into me, and kissed me deeply on the lips, her hot little pink tongue flickering into my mouth. Suddenly, it seemed to me that Easter was a lifetime away.

Robin came to stay with us at Westbury late that summer, a week or so after Lammas. He arrived with his dunderheaded squire Gilbert and a hundred men – many of whom were old comrades of mine – in a cloud of dust and shouts and laughter. My lord was in high spirits, bronzed by the French sun, and very happy to be able to spend a day or so with his wife and children before resuming the fight. I had given orders to Baldwin to set up the guest hall
the moment the message arrived about his visit, with a private solar at the eastern end that was to be entirely at their disposal for the length of his stay. And Robin’s men were housed in a scatter of huts and stables around the courtyard.

My lord had been raising troops in Yorkshire and Wales following the resumption of hostilities in Normandy between King Richard and King Philip, and he came bearing an invitation to me to rejoin the struggle at his side.

‘You’re getting fat, Alan,’ was Robin’s impolite and quite inaccurate observation. ‘You’d better get back into the saddle and bring your soft, bloated body south with me. A sharp bit of action would do you the world of good!’

It was then almost a year since I had been pierced by the lance-dagger, a year of very little activity on my part, and yet, perhaps strangely, I felt not the slightest urge to leave Westbury and take up arms again. In fact, I was still struggling unsuccessfully with my queer malaise at that time – I found it difficult to get out of bed in the morning and had to be chivvied into the daylight long after dawn by Goody or Marie-Anne. It was not helped by the fact that I was still unable to sleep well and, when I did, my dreams were filled with horror.