We walked our horses on for a while in silence. I had never really concerned myself with money – having been truly penniless as a young boy, my small fiefs seemed to me to generate an abundance of wealth. But then I was not an earl with a certain style to be kept up at the royal court, and the lord of several hundred men who needed to be fed and clothed, armed and encouraged, housed and horsed.
‘I am sorry for my shortness with you, Alan, and for my ill humour,’ said Robin unexpectedly. ‘I am bone weary – we all are – and this campaign against Philip seems as if it will never be decided.’
I looked at him in surprise: it was very unlike him to apologize to me, or to admit any weakness.
‘It is I who must beg your pardon, my lord,’ I said. ‘I have been absent from the fight for too long, but I shall try from here on to take up my share of your burdens.’
‘You are welcome to them, my friend,’ said Robin. He gave me a brilliant smile that almost belied his exhaustion.
We approached Château-Gaillard from the south-west, with the River Seine rolling slowly along on our left flank. After five days of talk with Robin’s troops about Richard’s extraordinary building endeavour as we trundled uneventfully across Normandy, I was eager as a schoolboy to see this ‘saucy’ castle. In truth, I was not disappointed.
The castle rose before us on the far side of a bend in the river with all the gravitas of a mountain – grey, massive and brooding over the landscape. Even unfinished it was a formidable presence, and as we drew nearer I could see hundreds, in fact, thousands of men swarming around the castle’s roots and scaling the half-built walls. An army of workmen, summoned from the four corners of Richard’s empire to unite with one purpose: to build this mighty fortress in the shortest possible time. We stopped at the far side of the bridge across the Seine that led to the castle, and gazed up in wonder at our King’s pride and joy. I heard the muttering and gasps of the workmen behind me, and unbidden, an image of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris flashed into my head: both that great church and this monumental stronghold were extraordinary structures, awe-inspiring, colossal and conjured up by the will of one man.
We crossed the bridge, our necks cricked back as we gazed upwards at the castle, and passing through a gatehouse on the other side of the Seine, where we were briefly challenged and then allowed to pass, we rode past a village for the workmen and their families that cowered under the huge bulk of stone above it, and took the narrow road in front of Château-Gaillard, between the castle and the Seine, that wound up to the main entrance.
Above us, atop sheer limestone cliffs, the inner bailey at the north end of the castle with its gigantic towering keep was already constructed and I could see bright banners flying from the battlements and the stick-like figures of men-at-arms standing guard a hundred yards above my head. The walls of the middle bailey were almost complete, but hundreds of men still laboured to construct the circular towers that punctuated its stout fortifications. As we rode up a steep track towards the main gate I saw that an extra layer of defence, an outer bailey, roughly triangular in shape with the beginnings of massive towers at each corner, was in the early stages of construction at the south end of the castle, joined by an arched passage above our heads but separate from the middle bailey. We rode through the narrow road between the middle and outer baileys and turned left to enter the castle through the main gate. The noise in that enclosed passageway was deafening, the shrill ringing of steel chisel on masonry, the shouts of overseers, the crack of raw stone splitting, and the dry stench of dust filling my nostrils – memories of Paris flooded my mind and I felt once again the ache of Hanno’s loss.
King Richard greeted us in his big, round audience room on the first floor of the mighty keep. He was in very high spirits, as usual, but I could see too that while he was animated, he was tired, and more than a few silver flecks were now plainly visible in his red-gold hair. He greeted Robin jovially, slapping him hard on the arm, and laughing hilariously, almost maniacally at some comment from my lord of Locksley, and then turned his feverish brightness on me and said: ‘Well, my good Blondel, you are here at long last – and what do you think of my one-year-old daughter?’
The world shimmied and seemed to rock beneath my feet. Had the King run mad? Surely he had no children. We would have heard about a royal daughter, for certain, long before she had survived a twelve-month.
A quiet voice murmured at my shoulder. ‘I believe His Royal Highness is referring to this castle, sir,’ said Thomas. ‘He only began its construction last summer – and so it is very nearly one year old.’