The King’s Assassin (12 page)

‘Alan, may I speak with you?’ said Marie-Anne that last night. We had finished our awkward supper, Robin had retired to bed and I was sitting by the hall fire with a cup of wine by my boot thinking how pleasant it would be to return to my own hearth.

The Countess of Locksley pulled up a stool and sat down next to me. She lifted an iron poker from the stand and poked at the logs ablaze in the hearth, causing a shower of sparks to rise and new flames to dance merrily. In the firelight, she looked even more beautiful than in the glare of day.

‘I have never thanked you for Damme,’ she said. ‘For warding Miles during the fighting, and bringing him home to me safely.’

I grunted a less than gracious reply.

‘As a father, Alan, you know what anguish can come even from contemplating the death of a loved one, a husband or child. How would you feel, for instance, if in a few years’ time Robin was to take your Robert off to war and return without him?’

Her shaft struck home. Even at the thought of such a distant tragedy, my blood ran cold. I squirmed on my stool. I could see where she was leading me.

‘Your father is dead, Alan, and your mother, too – may God keep their immortal souls – and I have often wondered if the reason you are so careless of your own life is because you believe there is no one who would mourn you if you fell. Is that the case? Is that why you are so brave?’

‘I have never thought about it. I just do what is required of me, I do my duty to my lord as best I can. It is certainly not bravery…’

‘I think it is, so does Robin. You must know that we both care for you very much – in all the years we have known you, you and Robert have become as much a part of our family as Hugh and Miles. You must know that we love you. You must know that we would be heartbroken if you were to perish. Do you know it? Do you?’

I mumbled some form of assent. I knew it. I could not deny it. I loved them too.

‘And this is why, Alan, you must give up this foolish plan to murder the King. Even if you succeed you will bring war, death and destruction down on all of us who love you: myself, Robin, Miles and Hugh – and especially your Robert … If you fail you will die miserably in the worst kind of pain, but I expect you would risk that. But know this: if you fail, the King will also have his vengeance on all of us.’

I had to get away from her and her softly spoken good sense. I could feel my resolve to undertake this killing weakening, melting like a candle too close to the fire.

I lurched to my feet and bid my lady good night. As I stumbled away from the hearth, I found that my cheeks were damp with tears.

On my return to Westbury the next day, I applied myself to a host of different tasks that demanded my attention. I bought a large quantity of new animal stock in the market at Nottingham – horses, cattle, pigs and sheep – to replace those appropriated from me by Sheriff Marc, I consulted with Baldwin about some repairs and new buildings to be constructed in the compound, and busied myself over the next few days setting the manor in order.

In late June, the weather turned foul and Westbury was lashed for several days with a series of prodigious thunderstorms. I kept to the hall, mostly, poring with Baldwin over the manor accounts and looking for ways to make the prize money I had gained in Damme go as far as possible. I seemed to have spent a good deal of it already and the bad weather was threatening to ruin the harvest – something I dreaded more than anything else. For even a man such as myself, a knight with lands and livestock, the threat of hunger was very real, and one bad harvest could have me tightening my belt. For the common people of Westbury it could mean death by starvation, although I would not allow that to happen while I still had any means at all. This was why the sheriff’s outrageous demands for tax-money hurt even the King’s wealthier subjects: we all had hundreds of hungry mouths to feed apart from our own families. That is not to say that we landowners would feed our starving peasants purely out of Christian charity: the tenants who worked our lands were the ones who made our living possible, their rents and services kept us. A dead villein harvests no barley, as the saying went. We needed them alive and well and working our lands.

I was standing in the hall doorway one evening and looking out over the sheets of grey rain as they pounded my lands and battered the crops, when I heard a cry from the sentry above the gatehouse and saw two of my men-at-arms hurrying forward to swing open the double gates of the compound. To my utter astonishment, a slight bedraggled figure on a magnificent destrier cantered through the opening gates, and slipped, almost fell, from the horse’s back.

It was Robert.

I walked out through the pouring rain to greet my son with my brain bubbling with questions: what was he doing back at Westbury? It had been less than a month since I sent him off to Pembroke Castle to begin his training as a squire – why had he returned so soon? Had disaster befallen him? Where had he got such a fine horse?

I managed to curb my curiosity until I had the boy inside the hall, stripped of his sodden clothes, wrapped in warm blankets by the hearth fire and sipping on a cup of hot, spiced wine and munching a honey-cake. But something was clearly very wrong. All the while that Baldwin and I were ministering to his comfort and health, bearing away his dripping tunic and hose, swathing him in fresh dry coverings, Robert did not speak; worse, he did not respond to my cheery prattle about the foulness of the weather. Neither did he look me in the eye at any time. He showed few signs of life at all except when Baldwin tried to remove his damp braies, the linen undershorts that guarded his modesty, and then he snarled at my steward – a kindly old man who had cared for him since he was a baby – and slapped his hand away with something akin to ferocity.

Finally, with Robert cocooned in blankets and when the hot wine had put some colour back into his pale cheeks, I asked him what was amiss.

‘I did not care for Pembroke,’ he said sullenly. ‘There are beastly people there. I want to stay here at Westbury – with you, Father – I want to stay at home.’

‘Tell me, what happened?’

Robert said nothing, he sat there sipping his wine and staring blankly into the flames. I asked him again, feeling my own anger beginning to stir.

Once more, my question was met by silence.

‘Tell me at least where you got the horse.’

‘I did not want to go to Pembroke,’ Robert said. ‘I told you so from the beginning; I did not want to go and you sent me anyway. This is all your fault.’

‘The horse, Robert; who does it belong to?’

He shrugged. ‘I had to get out of there. It was there, already saddled and bridled in the stables, so … I took it.’

‘You
stole
a destrier from the Earl of Pembroke? You robbed your
host
?’

Robert again relapsed into silence. And realising I was likely to get no more out of him that night, I sent him to bed.

I stayed up late thinking. Part of me was intensely proud of my son. He had ridden across the country, hundreds of miles alone on a strange and powerful beast through lands populated by enemies, brigands, rapacious men of all kinds, and made it home all the way from Wales safely. Part of me was appalled at what he had done. I had asked England’s most renowned warrior William the Marshal to take my son into his household as a favour and to train him as a squire and ultimately make him a knight, and he had repaid the Earl of Pembroke’s kindness with the theft of a valuable animal and desertion from his post. I did not know what had happened to Robert but, whatever it was, it could not have been so bad as to warrant this disgraceful display of churlish behaviour.

The next day I beat Robert.

It tore my heart to do it but I beat him hard on the bare buttocks in my solar with an ash rod no thicker than my finger, and I was pleased to see that he tried his hardest not to show the pain. When it was over I felt a great wave of shame and disgust at my actions – who was I to punish a boy for thievery? – but I knew I had fulfilled my duty as a father. However, when I told Robert he had to return to Pembroke with the horse, he absolutely refused. He defied me with his face blazing.

‘I would rather die than return to Pembroke,’ he said, his face blotched with tears. ‘I will cut my own throat before I ever set foot in that foul place again.’

And like a weakling, I gave in to his threat.

I sent the war horse back myself with a pair of Westbury men-at-arms, and a message to the Earl of Pembroke containing a humble apology for my son’s behaviour. Robert stayed out of my way for several days, but within a week things had assumed a more normal state of affairs and harmony was restored between us.

Although Robert never gave me a full account of what had happened at Pembroke, as he relaxed into life at home, I did gather scraps of information about his experience there. He had not got on well with the other boys there – they had teased and taunted him for his fantastical tales of unicorns, phoenixes and other legendary creatures, and mocked his lack of skill as a warrior. Well, they were boys. And it seemed that the man responsible for training the squires, a Templar knight called Brother Geoffrey, who was also the Marshal’s almoner, had been a hard task-master. It was evident that he had not been as kindly as he might have been to Robert – for the boy could barely speak his name without grimacing. This Brother Geoffrey, I guessed, had not been satisfied with Robert’s efforts and had singled him out for punishment on several occasions, forcing him to labour harder and longer than the other boys. This was hardly surprising – the Templars had high standards, they were after all the finest warriors in Christendom, and I knew that their training routines were famously gruelling. Moreover, it was, in a way, my fault. I had been neglectful of Robert’s military education – he was eleven, and in a few years he might be expected to fight in battle, and I had scarcely prepared him for that trial.

I determined that I would remedy my mistake and, ten days after Robert’s return to Westbury, I introduced him to his new sword-master.

Sir Thomas Blood was Robin’s man, sworn to his service. But he was also an old and trusted comrade of mine. At one time he had been my squire – and he had proved superlative in that role: quietly competent, caring for my war gear and anticipating my needs like the very best of servants. He was an extraordinary man, to my mind: brave as a lion and a talented warrior with sword, dagger and lance. Indeed, he had even invented a kind of unarmed combat, a set of throws and strikes, locks and holds, that made him almost as dangerous without weapons as he was with a blade in his hands. Robert could scarcely have a better mentor to teach him how to be the perfect squire and from whom to learn the deadly arts of the knight.

Sir Thomas was not, however, without his flaws. He had agreed to take a temporary leave of absence from Robin’s service (with my lord’s blessing) and come to live with me at Westbury not only out of friendship but also for the promise of a stipend in silver every month. This was not because he was a greedy man, in love with lucre for its own sake, but because he had a weakness for gaming and had been rather unwise. He loved to play knucklebones, the various games of chance that were ruled by the rolling of dice, and he would play whenever he got the opportunity with whomsoever would wager with him. And he seemed to lose all moderation when in the grip of his passion for the ‘bones’, as he called them; I had known him to wager as much as a hundred marks on a single throw. Thomas had had a long streak of bad luck with the dice since his return to England – so much so that he had been forced to pledge money that he did not have. Ashamed of his foolishness, rather than going to Robin to humbly ask for the money, he had borrowed from the brothers of the Temple in London, some of the richest men in England, who were always ready to extend credit to impecunious knights. He hoped to use the silver that I would pay him for tutoring Robert to make good these Templar loans.

Robert seemed wary of Sir Thomas when I brought them together and told my son that his military education would now be in the dark-haired knight’s hands. He eyed Sir Thomas suspiciously, almost fearfully, and Thomas made no effort at all to ingratiate himself with the boy. He told him brusquely to arm himself and show him in the courtyard what he had mastered so far.

Robert’s first lesson was far from gentle. Within moments my son was on his back in the dust of the courtyard, with Thomas standing over him coldly ordering him to get back on his feet. I began to feel the creep of misgiving. Robert was a sensitive boy – was this dour fighting man the right person to form him?

My misgivings increased a few days later. I had given Thomas a fat purse of silver on his arrival, at his request – he said he wished to make the first payment to the Templars – but the next night, a Saturday, he disappeared, and when he was absent at Mass in the village church on Sunday morning, I truly began to worry.

I asked Baldwin if he knew where Thomas had gone and he said he had last been seen heading for Nottingham, where he intended to pay over his stipend to the Templars’ representatives in the town.

I found Thomas without too much difficulty in a filthy tavern at the base of the castle. He did not notice me at first as I came to stand beside him and three ill-looking fellows who were crouched over a square, high-sided tray, the dice rattling merrily inside its wooden walls. The leather purse that I had given him the day before was flaccid and empty beside him, and three silver pennies sat in a tiny stack before his place. Thomas threw the bones and immediately blasphemed in a surprisingly fluent and extravagant manner for someone normally so taciturn. His cackling neighbour, a balding rascal in a dirty scarlet tunic, leaned over and scooped up the little pile of silver in the blink of an eye.

Thomas was still cursing, a foul cascade of the filthiest language I had heard in an age, when he looked up and recognised me.

‘Sir Alan,’ he said, ‘for the love of God, can you give me an advance on next month’s wages? I beg you.’ His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep and there was a pitiful wheedling tone in his voice that I did not care for at all.