My family was a contented one, happy even; I might well have inherited the strips of land my father worked and been trudging behind a pair of plough oxen on them to this day, had it not been for my father’s untimely death. Before dawn one morning, as we slept — my mother, father, myself and my two sisters, all snugged up together on the big straw-stuffed mattress in our tiny hovel — half a dozen armed men burst through the door and dragged my father outside. There was no pretence of a trial; the sergeant in charge of the squad of men-at-arms merely announced that the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire had declared that my father was a thief and an outlaw. Then his men wrestled a rope around my father’s neck and summarily hanged him from the nearest oak tree.
I watched them do it, at the raw age of nine; restrained by a burly man-at-arms and trying not to cry as my father kicked and soiled himself and choked out his life before my terrified eyes. Perhaps I am weak, but I’ve never been able to watch a hanging since — even when the punishment is well deserved — without a sense of horror.
That act of unexpected violence destroyed our family. My mother lost the land that my father had ploughed and, to stave off destitution, she was forced to gather firewood each day and barter it to her neighbours for food or sell it to any that would buy; and few would. Why hand over a precious silver penny for sticks of timber when there was plenty of kindling to be had for free in the woodlands not three miles away? We slowly began to starve: my two sisters died of the bloody flux two years after my father’s death, a lack of nourishment making them too feeble to fight off the sickness when it struck. Faced with a stark choice, I became a thief; cutting the leather straps that secured the purses of rich men to their belts and making away with their money into the thick crowds of Nottingham market. I like to think that I was a good at it — I have always been lucky, all my long life. But, of course, one cannot rely on luck alone. I was thirteen when I was caught in the act of stealing a beef pie; the Sheriff would surely have lopped off my right hand if I hadn’t managed to escape. That was when I went to join Robin Hood’s band of men in the trackless depths of Sherwood Forest.
I never forgot that it was the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire — a black-hearted bastard named Sir Ralph Murdac — who had sent his men to hang my father. Even as a child I swore to be revenged on him. Years passed and I learned to fight like gentlefolk, a-horse with sword and lance, and joined King Richard on the Great Pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At the siege of Nottingham, on our return, I had the good fortune to capture the same Ralph Murdac, who was defying the King, and deliver him bound hand and foot to my royal master. I had meant to kill him, to cut his head off in the name of my father — and I would have done so gladly, but for one thing. As he knelt before me, bound, helpless, his neck stretched for my sword, he told me that if I killed him I would never discover the name of the man who was truly responsible for my father’s death. In the face of Death, Murdac claimed that he had been acting on the instructions of a very powerful man, a ‘man you cannot refuse’. If I spared him, he said, he would reveal the man’s name.
And so I spared him. But, as God willed it, he never told me the name of the man who had ordered Henry d’Alle to be destroyed. King Richard had hanged Murdac the next day, as a warning to the rebellious defenders of Nottingham Castle, before I could thoroughly question him.
I felt the weight of my father’s death — and the need to find the man who had ordered it — like a lead cope around my shoulders. But I was a blindfolded man groping in the dark: I had no idea who this powerful man — this ‘man you cannot refuse’ — could be, nor how I might discover his identity and, almost as important to me, to find out why he had reached out his long arm to extinguish my father’s existence. So, although I was in France on behalf of Robin, commanding his troops, I had chosen to be here because it brought me closer to the place of my father’s birth, and perhaps closer to solving the riddle of his death.
For the moment I pushed these thoughts of vengeance and powerful, shadowy enemies away, to concentrate on the task at hand. A scout rode up on a sweat-lathered horse and reported that the enemy lines were no more than three miles away. The sun was sinking low in the sky and we made our camp, quiet and fireless in a small copse in a fold of a shallow valley. Sentries set, and gnawing on a stick of dried mutton, I conferred with Hanno, Owain and the returned scouts.
‘The castle of Verneuil still defies Philip,’ began Hanno. ‘I see Richard’s lions flying above the tower.’
I nodded and swallowed a lump of roughly chewed mutton with difficulty. I found that my mouth was dry. ‘Earthworks?’ I said. ‘Siege engines?’
‘They dig earthworks, yes,’ said Hanno, scratching at his round shaven head. ‘But one, two trenches and a little wall to protect the diggers; they are not very far along. But I see four big siege engines, three trebuchets, I think, and a mangonel; also small stuff, balistes and onagers. The walls have taken some hurt, and the tower, too, but they are holding.’ Hanno paused and frowned. ‘But the siege does not feel very… lively, very quick. The Frenchmen are not working so hard, just waiting for the castle to fall. There is no discipline, no proper order. The men are taking their ease around their fires — drinking, gambling, sleeping. I do not think it will be difficult for us to break through.’
‘How many are they?’ I asked the Bavarian warrior.
‘King Philip is there; his fleur-de-lys flies over a big gold tent to the east of the castle. And many of his barons are with him, too, I think. So, perhaps two thousand knights and men-at-arms; crossbowmen, too — yes, two thousand men in all, maybe more.’
I blinked at him. ‘Two thousand?’
‘I think so,’ said Hanno. ‘But they will never expect us. We can get into the castle without much difficulty, if they will open the gate to us. After that…’ He shrugged.
I had been told that the besieged garrison of Verneuil numbered just over a hundred men, and I looked at my own little command, my puny war-band, wrapping themselves in their thick green cloaks and bedding down for the night around me, and thought to myself — ten to one. Not good. But I said nothing, trying to appear as if I had absolute confidence in the success of our mission.
‘Then we’d better kill as many Frenchmen as possible on the way in,’ I said, achieving a shaky nonchalance. ‘I think we will play this one straight as an arrow; we’ll go in early tomorrow morning, kill the picquets, ride hard, cut through the enemy lines and proceed directly up to the castle’s front gate. Hard and fast. Understood?’