King's Man (10 page)

‘By Duke Leopold of Austria! He is now languishing in chains at the mercy of his mortal enemy. In deepest, darkest Germany!’

It
was
appalling news. Disastrous. And I could forgive Bernard for making the most of its delivery. Peace and prosperity in England depended on Richard being alive. His acknowledged heir, his little nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was a mere child of five, and the whole kingdom knew that his brother Prince John had his eye on the throne. If Richard were to be killed in Germany, England could well erupt into civil war with some of the barons supporting the legitimate heir, despite his extreme youth, and others making the practical decision to follow John, who was more likely to win a contest of military strength. Bloody chaos would follow: there were still grandfathers alive who could remember the dark days of the Anarchy, when King Stephen and the Empress Matilda vied for mastery of the country. It was a time of famine and fear, with marauding bands of soldiers roaming the land, burning cottages and crops, stealing stored food, raping maids and generally despoiling the territories of their enemies.

‘This is going to be very, very costly,’ said Robin.

I was deep in thoughts of the carnage of civil war, and it took me a few moments to grasp his meaning. And then it dawned. Richard was too valuable a captive to be killed out of hand, no matter how much Duke Leopold hated him. His royal person was worth a king’s ransom. And England would have to pay it.

‘Queen Eleanor commands your presence: she wishes you and the lady Marie-Anne to attend her at Westminster as soon
as possible,’ said Bernard, in the measured tones of a diplomat, far removed from his excited rendering of the fateful news about King Richard.

‘She wants to discuss what’s to be done, no doubt,’ said Robin. ‘All right, we’ll come to Westminster. Yes, we need to make plans. We leave tomorrow at dawn.’

The next day, as a pale blue light washed over the hills to the east and rolled back the night, our company rode out of the great gate at Kirkton and took the road east towards Sheffield. As I trotted out of the portal, I looked back and saw the first pink fingers of daylight catching the pair of lumpen shapes on long poles either side of the gatehouse: the severed heads of two men-at-arms, impaled on long spears – former Murdac men who had turned deserter.

The men had stolen a few items, including a small bag of coins, and had dropped silently over the walls and headed south in the middle of the night on foot, presumably hoping to become outlaws or possibly rejoin Sir Ralph at Nottingham. When the theft and their disappearance had been noticed in the morning, Hanno was dispatched with half a dozen mounted archers to track them down and bring them home to face Robin’s justice. The shaven-headed Bavarian had taken no more than half a day to catch them, trapping them in a wood near Chesterfield, and he reappeared that evening with two bodies slung over a couple of packhorses. One deserter had died in the mêlée; he was the lucky one. The other man Robin had hanged until he was partially dead, and then flogged with metal-tipped whips – the remaining former Murdac men-at-arms being detailed to perform the punishment – and finally, with his skin hanging off him in
bloody strips, and the blood puddling around his feet, he was beheaded in front of a jeering crowd in the centre of the bailey. The heads of both deserters were then stuck on spears and mounted either side of the main gate as a terrible warning to anyone else who might think of betraying Robin.

As I looked back at the gruesome display, I shivered slightly, and not just from the cold of dawn. Their faces had been pecked by carrion crows over the past few weeks until they were barely recognizable as men at all. And yet they seemed to be silently cursing us, hating us, casting an evil spell over our departure from Kirkton.

Four days later, the city of London lay before us, a dirty smudge of smoke on the southern horizon. I fancied I could already smell the stink of twenty thousand busy folk all crammed into a few square miles. But, mercifully, we were not planning to enter its maze of twisting streets and cramped dirty houses amid the deafening babble of its thronging crowds. Instead, we turned off Watling Street, the great Roman artery that had taken us all the way from Coventry to the north-western edge of the capital city, and rode south through the sleepy hamlet of Charing, and past green fields and orchards along the side of the slow-rolling River Thames to a rich Benedictine abbey, inhabited by sixty learned monks, overshadowed by the high bulk of Westminster Hall, the huge palace of the kings of England.

We were a large company, more than fifty souls in all, well mounted and guarded by a score of Robin’s men-at-arms and a dozen mounted archers. Robin, myself, Hanno and Tuck were in the vanguard, while Marie-Anne, Goody, little Hugh and
a couple of nursemaids trundled along in the centre of the column, shielded from the elements by a covered wagon. As well as a strong force of soldiers, Robin had also brought cooks and bakers, farriers, maids, serving men and all the staff he would need to support his dignity as an earl while he was a guest of Queen Eleanor.

It had taken us four days to ride from Kirkton to Westminster, staying overnight at the castles of friends and allies, our pace much slowed by the wagons, and I was glad to be at our destination. My horse, a well-schooled grey gelding that I called Ghost, who had been with me all the way to Outremer and back, had picked up a stone in his right forehoof outside St Alban’s, and though I had speedily removed it, he was still limping. Fearing that the frog of his hoof had been bruised, I longed for the shelter of a nice quiet stable where he could rest and I could take a proper look at the offending limb.

A little royal hospitality would have been most welcome too, and Queen Eleanor did not disappoint. When we had shed our damp, travel-stained clothes in the dormitory of the Abbey and changed into something more fitting for regal company, we were ushered across the road into the great high hall where we were received by the Queen herself. A feast had been prepared for us, and we gorged on baked swan, lamprey stew and roast boar, with sweet white bread, and refreshed ourselves with the delicious light red wine of Bordeaux, part of Eleanor’s ancestral fiefdom. When the meal was done and we had sluiced the grease from our hands, Robin, Tuck and I were ushered into a private chamber off the side of the hall overlooking the river, along with a couple of the other guests:
Walter de Coutances and Hugh de Puiset, two of King Richard’s most loyal supporters in England.

‘Good of you to come so swiftly, Robert,’ said the Queen in French, allowing Robin to stoop and kiss her heavily ringed hand. She had a wonderful voice, deep, rich and a little husky, that sent a delicious ripple down the spine of any man who heard her speak. ‘I know you have your own troubles at present.’

‘He is my King, Your Highness, in chains or out of them,’ replied Robin gravely in the same language. ‘He made me what I am, and I do not forget his kindness.’

Eleanor smiled at me. ‘And if I remember rightly, you are Alan Dale, my scapegrace
trouvère
Bernard’s old pupil. We met at Winchester, I recall, in rather dramatic circumstances.’ And she favoured me with a nod and twinkle from her bright brown eyes. I was struck once more by how beautiful Eleanor was; she must have been nearly seventy but she remained slim and lithe and her skin was as unlined as a girl’s. Her memory was still excellent, too. She was referring to a time three years ago when I had been publicly unmasked as an outlaw under her roof, a cuckoo in the nest, you might say, and had been unceremoniously slung into the deepest dungeon.

I merely bowed and mumbled: ‘Your Highness, I’m honoured that you remember me …’ and then trailed off, unsure whether or not it would be the proper thing to comment further on my former humiliation in Winchester.

Robin saved me from having to say more: ‘My lady, would you be kind enough to share with us the latest information that you possess about King Richard,’ he said.

‘Yes, you are right, Robin – to business. Walter, what do we
know so far?’ said the Queen, looking over at the short, rather dumpy middle-aged churchman standing to her left.

Walter de Coutances might not have seemed very impressive, and his speaking voice was the dull, inflectionless monotone of a dusty scholar, but he was said to be the cleverest man in England, and he was surely one of the most powerful. He had been a vice-chancellor under the old King Henry, and then had been made Archbishop of Rouen by him. When old Henry died, Walter had invested Richard as Duke of Normandy and had helped to crown him King of England three years ago. I knew him by sight, as he had accompanied Richard on the Great Pilgrimage, but he had been sent back to England from Sicily to act for the King at home in his absence, and we had never actually spoken to each other.

Walter cleared his throat. ‘The truth is that we do not know very much,’ he began. ‘We understand that Richard took ship from Outremer in October of last year and that, as most of Europe was closed to him, he attempted to travel in secret up to Saxony in eastern Germany, where he was sure of a friendly welcome from his brother-in-law Duke Henry. He landed, we think, somewhere to the east of Venice, near Aquileia on the Adriatic coast …’

As Walter continued in his dry voice, I reflected how unfortunate it was that Richard had made so many enemies among the powerful men of Europe while taking part in the Great Pilgrimage. As well as a falling out with King Philip of France and Duke Leopold of Austria, he had alienated Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold’s overlord and ruler of most of Italy, by making a treaty with Tancred of Sicily, a rich island that the Emperor coveted. With France and Italy barred
to him, Richard had little choice but to take the long eastern route home. And this apparently had been his downfall.

‘… he wanted to travel in secret,’ Walter droned on, ‘and so, unwisely as it turned out, the King dismissed all but a handful of his men, and travelled in disguise as a Templar knight, north from the Adriatic coast towards Saxony. He didn’t get very far. It seems he was betrayed, or discovered somehow in a, um, a brothel – I fear His Highness has little talent for acting the part of a lesser mortal – and taken by Duke Leopold’s men. At that point we lost track of him and as of now we have no idea where he is. Our spies have, however, intercepted a copy of a letter dated last month from the Emperor to King Philip of France boasting of Richard’s capture.’

Walter rummaged in a stack of documents on the table in front of him and pulled out a curled parchment. He then began to read:

‘Because our Imperial Majesty has no doubt that your Royal Highness will take pleasure in all those providences of God which exalt us and our Empire, we have thought it proper to inform you of what happened to Richard, King of England, the enemy of our Empire and the disturber of our Kingdom as he was crossing the seas on his way back to his dominions …’

The letter proceeded to recount what Walter had just told us about Richard’s journey and ended:

‘Our dearly beloved cousin Leopold, Duke of Austria, captured the king in a disreputable house near Vienna. He is now in our power. We know this news will bring you great happiness.’

‘I’ll wager it will!’ exclaimed Hugh de Puiset, a small, shrill, bouncy man, who seemed rather too excitable to be a bishop.
‘He must be the happiest man in Christendom! And you will note that there is no acknowledgement, no mention at all in the letter that the Germans are breaking the Truce of God that protects all Christian knights who fought in Outremer. We must complain to His Holiness the Pope at once: the person of a knight taking part in a holy pilgrimage, or returning from one, and all his lands and property are sacrosanct! This is an outrage! Both Emperor Henry and Duke Leopold must be excommunicated at once!’

I thought of the Templars’ threat to Robin, and wondered how much an Emperor would care about being excommunicated; if Robin, a mere earl, could safely ignore it, was it much of a sanction for a great European monarch?

‘Well, yes, of course,’ said Walter slowly. ‘Excommunication – certainly, we are already working on His Holiness to achieve that. But will that threat alone bring King Richard safely back to us? I very much doubt it.’

‘The real problem is Philip of France,’ said Robin. Everyone in the room stared at him. It seemed an odd thing to say. But Walter de Coutances was smiling and nodding at my master, who continued talking into the amazed silence: ‘Both Henry and Leopold need silver, some would say they need it very badly. But King Philip’s treasury is well stocked; what Philip wants is land. He wants Normandy – in truth, he wants all of King Richard’s possessions on that side of the Channel. And this is his best chance to get it. Philip may well attempt to buy Richard from the Germans and then force our King to give up his lands across the sea.’

There was a pause while we digested Robin’s words.

‘Richard would never willingly cede any of his patrimony.
Not a single acre. Never, not while he draws breath,’ said his mother stoutly.

‘And what of Prince John?’ asked Robin. ‘If Richard were dead, would
he
cede Normandy to Philip in exchange for the English crown?’

There was an uncomfortable silence, which no one appeared to want to break. John, too, was the son of Eleanor, and no one wished to offend her with a candid expression of their opinion of him.

‘Where is the Prince now, by the way?’ said Robin. He seemed to want to make a point of some sort.

The silence in that royal chamber was like a physical presence; an uncanny emptiness of noise. Finally, Archbishop Walter let out a long sigh and said: ‘He is in London at the moment, but we have information that he is making plans to pay a visit to Paris.’

‘Ah,’ said Robin.

Robin and Queen Eleanor and her counsellors met several times over the next few days, but feeling out of my depth surrounded by so many great and wise folk, and having little to contribute to the discussions, I begged Robin to excuse me from joining in their further deliberations. This left me kicking my heels in the echoing space of Westminster Hall, for Ghost was unable to put any weight on his lamed foot and I owned no other mount except an elderly mule, a pack animal unsuitable for riding. To counter my boredom, I set out to explore the area around Westminster – by boat.