At dawn the next day, King Richard set about restoring order. He had a gibbet set up in the bailey of the castle and hanged three of Mercadier’s men that his household knights caught in the act of raping an old woman. And the message to all the troops was clear: that devilish playtime was over; the King’s army was being called to heel.
As ever, the sight of the hanged men put me in mind of my father’s death. And I gave thanks to God that Robin’s men had not been called upon to perform the executions. But an execution of a wholly different sort had taken place, which I only discovered when I returned to my tent later that evening accompanied by Thomas and Hanno.
Under a large blanket at the back of the tent, where he had been resting, and keeping the weight off his burnt feet, I found the skinny, blood-sodden corpse of Dominic.
His throat had been cut from ear to ear.
Chapter Eight
With Loches subdued, King Richard left a small garrison to repair the walls and drove south with the army into Aquitaine. After hearing of the bloody fate of Loches, castles now held by the foe in my lord’s vast southern dukedom opened their gates to us and threw themselves on Richard’s mercy: and, as ever, it delighted the King to be magnanimous in victory. The forces of Geoffrey of Rancon, Richard’s enemy in the south, and Philip’s ally, dissolved before us; some surrendered, were forgiven and renewed their allegiance to our King, others fled east into Burgundy. None could stand in the face of Richard’s righteous wrath – and the might of his castle-breakers.
We had buried Dominic in the monastery churchyard inside the walls of Loches before we left that sad citadel, and the old man lay next to some hundred or so of the French garrison who had died so bravely in its defence. As Hanno shovelled the earth over his shrouded body, and one of Richard’s priests mumbled prayers for his soul, I could feel a deep rage rising in my stomach. I felt almost certain that I knew who was responsible for the death of this good man – Mercadier. He could not have accomplished the deed himself, of course; we had all seen him heroically storming the breach with his men, and then less than heroically sacking and looting the castle. But I was sure that one of his routiers, one of his cut-throats who had not taken part in the assault, had done the deed to strike back at me for killing his red-headed man-at-arms.
There was nothing I could do. Nobody could remember seeing one of Mercadier’s men entering my tent while we were watching the battle. But then, encamped shoulder to shoulder with at least two thousand other souls in a vast township of woollen tents and roughly built shelters, and living on top of each other as we were, there was a constant stream of people – soldiers, squires, farriers, whores, pedlars – walking past my tent day and night, and nobody would notice one murderous routier among that throng.
I told Robin and he was characteristically uninterested.
‘That will teach you to annoy Mercadier,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘You should count yourself lucky that he didn’t decide to cut your throat at the same time.’
But despite his apparent callousness, I heard later from Little John that the Earl of Locksley had been to see Mercadier privately, taking John with him, and had told the mercenary captain quite bluntly that if any harm at all were to come to his friend Sir Alan of Westbury, he, Robin, would take it as an act of provocation and there would be very serious, painful and fatal consequences for Mercadier.
‘Give the black-souled bastard his due, he didn’t turn a hair when Robin threatened him,’ Little John told me. ‘And Robin can be very unsettling when he chooses to be. The man just smiled, cool as a trout, and said: “I hear you, my lord – young Westbury is your man, and is under your protection.” And he flatly denied having anything to do with the old priest’s murder.’
I was touched that Robin should take my side, but a little irritated too. Did he think I could not take care of myself? And, in our tent, I noticed that Hanno and Thomas also took turns to stay alert all through the next few nights – Robin was not the only one who seemed to believe that I needed protection.
Then word reached us that the King of France, Philip Augustus himself, was heading down towards us with an enormous army to confront Richard and to try and salvage something, after the fall of Loches, from the collapse of all his carefully wrought schemes in the south.
So we turned back north to meet him and, by the beginning of July, Richard and his entire force of knights, footmen, mercenaries and mighty castle-breakers, were camped outside the gates of Vendôme – and I must confess that I was well pleased. I felt that finally I might have the chance to arrange an audience with His Grace Cardinal Heribert of the Holy Trinity Abbey to ask about my father, the theft and his fateful visit to Paris two decades ago.