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Warlord(137)

By:Angus Donald


I wanted to watch the Master suffer and die.





Chapter Twenty-six



King Richard and his household knights returned to Château-Gaillard in August, as the Locksley and Westbury men were helping the local peasants to bring in the wheat harvest, and he came bearing a letter from Goody. After I had greeted the King in a suitable fashion and installed him and his followers in his quarters in the keep, I took the letter to my own lodgings – I had taken over Robin’s chamber in the north tower of the inner bailey – and greedily devoured the precious missive.

While my betrothed was now a full-grown woman of twenty years in the full bloom of her looks, her handwriting, I fear, was still that of a young girl; and her command of Latin was at best rudimentary. But the warmth of the love and the urgency of her ardour that seemed to spill from these parchment pages made these trifling failings recede into insignificance. She missed me – she wrote – she longed to be married and to hold me in her arms; she ached to give herself fully to me and to bear my children. When would I come back to her? Surely I had served the King long enough and the time had come for me to return to her side. She noted the extreme honour that the King did her by offering to give her away, and she fully acknowledged the wonderful generosity of his dowry, but all of that was less important to her mind than the fact that we must be married – and soon. The letter finished with these words: ‘Come to me, my love, come and take me to our marriage bed. The wretched creature has not been seen nor heard of in these parts for a year or more, and I will not let fear of her malediction ruin our lives and our happiness. I would rather live a single year as your loving wife than a lifetime without you. Come to me, my darling, and make me whole.’

Her letter aroused a chorus of fierce emotions in my heart and, if I am honest, my loins, and I promised myself that I would not let another twelve-month go by without taking my beautiful Goody to wife.

A week later Robin returned to the castle, face burnt by southern suns, his frame lean from hard travel, his demeanour wearily cheerful. He had come most recently, he told me, from Paris where under cover of the truce he had been visiting friends and taking a measure of the French capital for Richard.

‘War is upon us, Alan,’ he said, ‘this truce will not last another month.’ He was wolfing down a plate of cold pork and barley bread in my comfortable chambers in the north tower, which I noted gloomily, I would now have to relinquish to him. ‘Paris is full of armed men, French knights, militiamen, foreign crossbowmen, mercenaries – King Philip has no intention, it is clear, of sticking to the agreement to suspend hostilities until next year. Philip is fully armed and ready for battle; the question is, where will he strike?’

That question was answered within the week. We had news that our staunch ally Baldwin of Flanders had attacked in the north again, and had swept down into Artois and was besieging St Omer. King Richard delivered the news to his senior knights and barons at the daily council – and by the over-pleased tone he used to convey the information, I knew that it was part of a deep plan that he had hatched privately with Baldwin. Their strategy was reasonably simple to divine: Baldwin would come down from Flanders and Philip was then supposed to rush north to confront him, at which point Richard would attack from the west and trap Philip between his army and Baldwin’s and crush it utterly. But, once again, Philip showed that he was no fool – he could smell a trap as well as the next man. When Baldwin came down from the north, Philip ignored his advance, in effect, sacrificing the beautiful town of St Omer to fire and rapine. Instead he sent his mighty army west, towards us, pouring his full strength over the border at Gisors and on into Normandy.

Philip was on our doorstep again.

Uncharacteristically, Richard was taken by surprise by the speed of the French advance. His troops were scattered across the duchy, and when King Philip came roaring into his domain, heading due west directly for Château-Gaillard, the Lionheart could do nothing but retreat before him. For ten days we fought a desperate rearguard action, skirmishing hard against the French knights as they burned and pillaged through the lands that my men and I had spent the last year working so hard to repair. Robin had resumed command of the Locksley men, and while I was his senior lieutenant, I now rode out mainly with my ten-strong, red-clad Westbury troop. It was heartbreaking to see the destruction caused by the French as they ravaged the lands between Gisors and Château-Gaillard – orchards torched, churches looted, livestock slaughtered and left to rot – but we took our revenge when and where we could.