Apart from my private reasons for wanting to succeed in this task, I was very conscious of the fact that, as captain of the Locksley contingent, I was representing Robin. While I knew that King Richard had confidence in me as a soldier, I wanted to do well in this task for Robin, my liege lord, and for all the men of the Locksley lands. But I was more than a little concerned about being able to fulfil Richard’s instructions. He had spoken breezily of our galloping through King Philip’s battle lines, as if they were merely a cobweb to be brushed aside. I didn’t think it would be so easy. So, when we stopped at noon to rest the horses and snatch a bite to eat, I detailed Hanno and two mounted archers to ride several miles forward as scouts and bring back a report on the French dispositions.
As we approached the vicinity of Verneuil the mood in the column changed significantly. I put out more scouts to the east and south and we all rode in our full armour, with lances at the ready, swords loose in their scabbards and our eyes constantly searching the copses, woods and hedgerows for signs of horsemen. The flat land we rode through that afternoon, once so rich and well cultivated, now bore the harsh imprint of war. King Philip’s Frenchmen had been ravaging the farms and villages hereabouts with all the usual savagery of soldiers let loose to plunder and burn at will. It was a common tactic that allowed the occupying army to provision itself at no cost to its commanders and at the same time destroyed enemy lands and deprived the local lord of the bounty of his wheat and barley fields, his root crops, animals and orchards.
We rode through a battered, scorched landscape, the crops burnt down to charred stubble, the hamlets black and reeking, the bodies of slaughtered peasants – men, women and even children – lying unburied at the roadside, with the crows pecking greedily at their singed corpses. We did not stop to bury the dead like Christians, not wishing to delay our advance, though we could all feel the presence of unquiet spirits as we rode more or less in silence through those cinder-dusted, desecrated lands.
I was, however, sorely tempted to have the men stop and dig a decent grave for a young fair-haired peasant that we passed hanging by his neck from a walnut tree. There was something horribly familiar about the canted angle of his neck and the awful vulnerability of his dangling bare feet. I realized as I rode past that gently swaying corpse that it put me in mind of my father’s death, ten years before, in the little hamlet just outside Nottingham where I was born. My father Henry, my mother Ellen and my two younger sisters Aelfgifu and Coelwyn and I all scratched a living from a few strips of land in the fields on the edge of the village. Despite long days of hard labour, we were barely able to feed ourselves; but there had been an abundance of laughter and happiness in our small cottage, and much music and singing. My father had a wonderful voice, slow-rolling and sweet like a river of honey, and my fondest memories of that simple household were of my mother and father singing together, their voices intertwining, their melody lines looping and folding over each other in the smoky air of the low, one-room cottage like gold and silver threads in a fine castle tapestry. My father was the one who taught me to sing – and it was thanks to that skill that I first came to the attention of my master Robin Hood. Six years later, I was his personal trouvère – a ‘finder’ or composer of songs – and also his trusted lieutenant. In a way, I owed my extraordinary advancement from dirt-poor labourer to lord of war to my father’s love of music.
He had been a strange man, my father. I had been told that he was the second son of an obscure French knight, the Seigneur d’Alle and, as such, he had been destined for the Church. He had duly become a monk, a singer at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. But somehow he had been disgraced and forced to flee to England. Robin, who had known him then, had told me that some valuable objects had gone missing from the cathedral and my father had been accused of their theft – accusations that my father had strenuously denied. Nevertheless, he had been cast out of the Church and had had to make a living with his voice. As a masterless trouvère, he had travelled to England and wandered the country singing for his supper and a place to lay his head at the castles across the land, but tidings of his expulsion from Paris ran ahead of him and he could find no secure position; no lord was willing to take a thief into his household. Eventually, during his long wanderings he met my mother, Ellen – a lovely woman in her youth – and married her and submitted to the dull but stable life of a common man working the land. I remember him cheerfully saying to me once, when I was no more than five or six years old: ‘None of us knows what God has in store for him, Alan; we may not have fine-milled bread on the board or fur-trimmed silk on our backs, but we can wrap ourselves in love, and we can always fill our mouths with song.’