She seemed to be reading my mind. ‘I am promised to Robin,’ she said, ‘and my heart will always belong to him. But that doesn’t mean you and I can’t be good friends.’
I gave her a sickly smile. Hugh had been right the day of the great feast when he wept into his wine. Love could, quite often, mean pain for someone.
Chapter Thirteen
Although it loomed over the city like a great stone fist, Winchester Castle looked wonderful to me. I have never been quite so glad to see a symbol of Norman power in my life. I had grown up in and around Nottingham town but I had never been inside its castle — indeed, had I entered it, I’d have been terrified, as being inside that fortress meant facing torture and death for a thief such as me. But, as our mud-splattered, blue-nosed party approached Winchester on the Andover road, I realised how much I had changed in the year I had been with Robin’s band. I caught a first glimpse of the castle as we topped a small rise, and I merely thought: ‘Praise be to God: hot food, hot water to wash in, and a chance to put on some dry clothes.’
Then my eye was drawn to the soaring majesty of the city’s long cathedral, famous for housing the holy shrine of St Swithin, the saint who brings the rain — and I scowled. It had taken us more than a week to travel the two hundred or so miles from Robin’s Caves to Winchester, and it had hardly stopped raining since we set out. The roads had become quagmires, mere channels of mud through which the horses had picked their way with their hooves sucked down by the sludge at every step. Wherever possible we rode off the road, on the verges which were higher and less muddy, or on open fields. But it was easy to get lost and the Gascon men-at-arms were uncomfortable when we left the highway. So we splashed through mud for most of the way, stopping at manors and farms held by friends of Robin and Marie-Anne or at religious houses at night where the monks would give us a slim meal, a doubtful look and a cot in the dormitory to sleep in. Every morning, though, we awoke at grey dawn and rode out again into the ever-falling rain.
Marie-Anne, God bless her, had remained cheerful for the whole journey and while I was huddled in my cloak, cursing the rain that ran down my neck and shivering as the wind blew against my sodden hose, she told stories to Goody and described the wonderful time we would have at Winchester; the parties, the games, the mock ‘courts of love’, which Queen Eleanor had introduced from her native Aquitaine, in which poets and troubadours would compete by performing their love poetry. The songs were judged by Eleanor and her ladies-in-waiting and the winner awarded a kiss. Bernard pricked up his ears at the sound of this. He had been sullen and quiet for most of the journey, wrapped, like me, in damp woollen misery, but when Marie-Anne mentioned these ‘courts of love’ he seemed transformed and asked her endless questions. What sort of songs did the Queen like? How far could a musician go, politically, in the satirical sirvantes? Were her ladies-in-waiting pretty? When he had at last finished pestering her, he was a different man.
‘It seems we are going somewhere that is quite civilised,’ he said to me, almost cheerfully. ‘And now we will have some proper music. You’d better pull up your hose and start practising that fancy flute, Alan. You’ll be expected to perform at some point and I do not want you to disgrace me in front of the Queen.’ He smirked at me and began to sing; the song, one of his favourite cansos in French, was muffled by his soaking hood and almost completely drowned out by the hiss of the rain as it drove down into the mud around us.
We entered the city of Winchester through the north gate, and were briefly challenged by the guard but, when the Gascon captain shouted ‘Comptess Lock-ess-lee’, the big wooden barrier was swung open and we trotted through and into the busy streets of the city. The city seemed to be more crowded than Nottingham; the houses huddling closer together, the streets narrower, meaner. The other thing that struck me most forcibly after a week travelling in the countryside was the smell. The city reeked of a thousand foul odours: of shit and rotting meat, of decaying rubbish and human sweat. I covered my nose and mouth with my damp sleeve; and then just ahead of me a householder hurled a chamber-pot of piss from a window into the street. It narrowly missed the rump of Bernard’s horse and he turned and snarled at the woman in French and she hurriedly apologised and slammed her shutters. The contents of the chamber-pot joined the trickle of foul slurry that oozed down the centre of the street and we steered our horses to the side of the road to avoid that noisome stream, picking our way around piles of rotting refuse, dead dogs and filthy beggars, crouching in their rags in doorways and crying for alms. Rats scurried away from our horses’ hooves and I thought longingly of Sherwood and the wild, clean woodland.
We clattered over the drawbridge of the castle at about noon and into a great courtyard, where we were greeted by servants who took our horses and ushered us into the wing of the castle that housed Queen Eleanor and her retinue. I was shocked at the great size of the place; just the courtyard was three times the size of the hall at Thangbrand’s and many doorways led off from it to a maze of chambers and corridors, lesser halls and, of course, the great hall where Queen Eleanor would dine with the constable of the castle, and her nominal captor, Sir Ralph FitzStephen. In truth, Eleanor was not as confined as closely as she had been in previous years, when she had been totally cut off from the outside world, and denied any company save for her maid Amaria. In fact, at one time, Eleanor’s quarters had been so spartan that she and Amaria had had to share a bed. Now, although the King still kept her closely guarded for fear that she would encourage support for their son Duke Richard, with whom he was at war in France, she was permitted all the comforts that she was entitled to by her rank, including a sizable retinue.
However, the King was old and sick, and worn out by the years of constant warfare with his sons over their inheritances. When he died, and some whispered that it might be soon, Richard would become king and his beloved mother Eleanor would be an even more powerful woman. So Ralph FitzStephen stepped lightly around his royal prisoner and while she was not allowed to leave the castle, he turned a blind eye to the frequent messengers she dispatched to and received from France and Aquitaine.
Of course, I knew none of this at the time. I was in awe of the huge stone building that we had just entered and bewildered by the number of rooms that made up the royal apartments. Most people in England lived in one room, mother, father, children, and their livestock all in one small smoky space a few yards long; at Winchester there were more rooms than I had ever seen under one roof, with high ceilings and the walls hung with tapestries or painted with dramatic scenes of the chase or images from the Bible or pictures of the Virgin Mary. We were informed by the servants that the Queen was resting, but that the bathhouse would be ready in no time at all and that there were fresh clothes and food laid out in a chamber that had been set aside for Bernard and me. Goody had been swept up by the women of the household and taken away, and Marie-Anne had disappeared off to her own apartments, but we were all to meet up at dusk. So Bernard and I stripped off our sodden travelling clothes and made our way to the bath house. There, in great padded wooden tubs filled with steaming water, by the side of a roaring fire, we let the pains of the journey dissolve. It felt wonderfuclass="underline" servants in relays brought jugs of boiling water and topped up the bath, while another scrubbed my fast-thawing back. Bernard seemed to be burning with excitement despite his weariness; he was singing to himself almost constantly, clearly composing something, a love song, I believe, and muttering ‘No, no, no. . Ah, but how about. .’ I tried to listen to his new song but in no time I drifted off to sleep in the warm water.