Warlord(60)

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The next morning, after a cold night under the stars, we found ourselves on the arrow-straight Roman road that led through the border county known as the Vexin and into Paris. We were not the only travellers on the road, and we soon fell in with a gang of rowdy, joyful English students, a little younger than me, who were heading for the great University of Paris to study under a renowned teacher: Master Fulk du Petit-Pont. The students’ leader, Matthew of Oxford, was slightly older than the others; he was a dark-haired fellow, too mocking and worldly wise for my tastes, but a clever man, and he had been to Paris before; indeed, it seemed that he had studied at several places in Europe: Modena, Montpellier, and even in Rome. I never warmed to Matthew, there was something about him, a kind of shiftiness, that made me distrust him instinctively, but he was a fund of information about our destination, and he was certainly a diverting companion. He and his four fellow students were much given to pranks and japes, to jesting with each other in Latin, and to drinking. I liked them: and their sober clerical robes and high spirits put me in mind of my father’s youth in Paris. Had he been anything like one of these carefree tonsured youths? I imagined so.

As the bells were ringing out for Vespers, we drew rein, my party of three and the five young students, at the gates of the enormous Priory of St Martin-des-Champs. To the south, less than a quarter of a mile away, I could see the tops of the larger churches and houses of Paris under a smear of smoke from the cooking fires of a multitude.

The hosteller of the Priory was summoned and he showed us where we could stable our animals, and the location of the dormitory. After a very fast wash in the horse trough in the yard in front of the church, we joined the monks of St Martin’s, who were streaming out of church after the evening service, for supper in the refectory. It was simple fare but in generous portions – a rich bean stew, loaves of barley bread and a hard yellow cheese. The monks also supplied several earthenware jugs of wine to wash the meal down. I was tired and a little out of sorts – the riddle of the ‘man you cannot refuse’ was preying on my mind – and I wanted to be away from other folk, no matter how congenial. And so, after supper, I left Hanno and Thomas with the students – passing around a big glass wine cup called a henap and calling ‘Wassail! Drink hail!’ before every draught in the old English manner – and went to scale the bell tower of the priory church.

It was very nearly full dark on that warm summer night by the time I reached the top of the tower and found a little shelf that served as a seat for the lookout. I could see for miles in each direction. To the south was Paris and, while I knew that it held as many as sixty thousand souls, I was still surprised by its size and its strange beauty when I saw it first that night – the watch fires in the streets, and as-yet-uncovered family hearths, and candlelight leaking from a thousand windows, where earnest young clerics were hard at their books after supper. It looked like a carpet of stars, spread out before me, or a vast field of burning embers.

Somewhere in that sprawling mass of humanity was the answer to the mystery that tormented me. Half of my heart told me that Robin could not truly be the ‘man you cannot refuse’, and the other half told me I was fooling myself because I cared for him. I knew that Robin had some feeling for me, too: he had saved my life on several occasions, at very great risk of his own – and therefore he could not be the man who had sent those knights of the blue cross to kill me. Yet the evidence against Robin was there; and had been there all along. Had I been so blinded by my affection for my lord that I had failed to see it?

I fell to my knees in that high bell tower, bowed my head and prayed to St Michael, that Robin might not prove to be the man responsible for my father’s death, and that my old friend would not be revealed to me as my secret enemy. I would find the truth in Paris, I vowed, and I swore a holy oath to St Michael, alone, in the darkness above the edge of Paris, that I would not leave that city until I had found out the truth. I am certain the saint heard me, for having so sworn, I felt eased in mind and spirit and descended the tower with a much lightened heart to seek out my bed. And for the first time in weeks, I slept like a newborn.


For me, Paris shall always be associated with the acrid smell of masonry dust and the shrill ringing of metal chisels on hard stone, for the city that we rode into early the next morning seemed to be one huge builder’s compound. The chink-chink-chink of tools cutting into limestone blocks began shortly after dawn, drifting on the cool air from the new headquarters of the Knights Templar that the Order was building a quarter of a mile to the east of the Priory of St Martin, in the broad fields there outside the city.