Chapter Twenty-one
Hanno led the way, holding up a single horn lantern with a stub of candle in it. The yellow walls of the tunnel seemed even more grotesque than before, with weird faces seeming to leer out at me from the walls, mocking my ambitions: going into the castle on a mission of murder was far more daunting than coming out of it to freedom and safety.
It was close on midnight, and although I had not slept since the day before last, I was not tired. In fact I was burning with an excited rage that seemed to banish all my fears. I knew that, if things went wrong, I would have only a small chance of survival – but, for the opportunity to kill Sir Ralph Murdac, to take revenge for so many hurts and insults at his hands, and to do an invaluable service for my King, it seemed a risk worth taking. I was young then, and adventure and risk had a certain appeal merely for their own sake.
There were also a number of things to my advantage. I knew the castle, and the members of the garrison there knew my face, but possibly not my true allegiance. With so many folk changing sides in the contest between King Richard and Prince John, I was fairly sure that if I was stopped by suspicious guards and questioned, I could convince them that I was back on Prince John’s side. And my presence in the castle would seem to be proof of that. Both Hanno and myself were also wearing the black surcoats with the red chevrons of Murdac’s men – taken from prisoners captured in the battle for the outer bailey – with our swords belted over the top. And so I felt confident that any man-at-arms seeing me – a familiar face, inside the castle, wearing Sir Ralph’s livery – would likely consider me friend rather than foe.
The main problem would come when we emerged at the mouth of the ale-shaft; I did not know whether the old buttery had been discovered as my method of escape. After all, five months ago a condemned prisoner had disappeared in the middle of the night, killing three men, stealing a large quantity of silver and leaving a bloody wolf’s head in his prison cell – what would the garrison have made of it? Would they have searched for a secret tunnel, or remembered how the ale had previously been delivered to the castle? Would they have put it down to witchcraft? Did they believe I had magicked my way out of there? Or would they have assumed that I made my escape by more ordinary means, bribing a guard with a bag of silver and slipping quietly over the castle walls? I had no way of knowing.
I was fairly sure that Sir Ralph Murdac would not be familiar with the lower reaches of the castle: it was an area frequented by servants, cooks, butlers and so on. Not by knights, and certainly not by the Constable himself. I was staking my life that the old buttery and the ale-shaft were as we had left them – staking Hanno’s life too.
I had initially meant to go on this mission alone, but Hanno had insisted on accompanying me. ‘You get lost in those tunnels – ha-ha – and in the bottom of the castle too!’ Hanno was jovial as ever and seemed totally unconcerned about the danger when we talked quietly in the main room of The Trip to Jerusalem tavern – now deserted, for the brewer and his young family had wisely fled when the castle had been encircled by King Richard’s troops. Hanno was supposed to be seeing me off on the mission, but instead he said: ‘Best I come with you to keep you out of trouble; maybe teach you something.’ And I did not protest too much. I was very glad to have him by my side.
When we approached the final steps of the tunnel, and reached the chamber directly below the shaft that led up to the buttery, we killed the horn lantern and stood absolutely still, listening for sounds of danger from above. Nothing. Not a sound.
I stretched out my hand in the darkness and made contact with the rope. The same rope that Robin, Hanno and I had climbed down five months ago. It seemed incredible but, apparently, the buttery and this secret way into the castle were still quite unknown to the defenders.
I climbed up the rope into the dark shaft. My arm muscles were soon protesting; though I carried no shield, I was weighed down by my mail coat and sword, and by the heavy back-sack that I wore. But very shortly I sensed a space around me, and groping quickly with my left hand, I found the lip of the housing. Then Hanno was there, lighting the lantern, and I was using his big key to unlock the low, wide door that led to the old buttery.
So far, so good. The buttery, as far as I could tell, was the same as it had been five months ago.
A clatter, an appalling din of wooden noise as a small ale cask fell to the floor with a crash, toppling from a pile of larger ones. Then there was a high-pitched squeal of rage and something dark moved very fast in the corner of the buttery. My heart seemed to explode and I had my naked sword in my hand before I knew what was happening.
Hanno and I stood frozen in silence. There were no further sounds. Then Hanno laughed quietly. ‘It is just a rat,’ he whispered. ‘But he gives you a good fright, yes?’
I said nothing, but re-sheathed my sword, cursing my jumpiness. And a few moments later Hanno and I were walking confidently along the corridor outside the buttery in the bowels of the upper bailey, in the very heart of Murdac’s stronghold.
At this hour the interior of the castle was largely still – there would have been sentries on the ramparts, and groups of menat-arms bunched together in the towers on the walls, and in the guardhouses and barracks in the middle bailey, but this part of the castle was eerily quiet. Hanno and I passed only one person as we made our way towards the great tower and Ralph Murdac’s chamber: a servant carrying a tray of wine cups. The surly devil ignored us, brushing past in an irritable manner. It seemed that our surcoats gave us the invisibility we craved.
We passed a guard room at the base of the great tower, and as we walked past, I could not help glancing through the door. My eyes just had time to take in the homely scene: two or three men-at-arms in red-and-black surcoats playing dice at a table in the centre of the room by the light of a single candle, and a dozen soldiers snoring in cots around the edges of the chamber. We walked past without inviting any comment; indeed, without even being noticed. My nerves began to ease: we were going to succeed! God willing, we were going to make it all the way to Murdac’s chamber – where Sir Ralph was no doubt slumbering peacefully – without a single challenge.
The chamber of the Constable of Nottingham Castle was on the western side of the great tower, on the second floor. I had not been there since that fateful day in September the year before when I had been summoned by Murdac and told that I was to accompany the silver wagon train from Tickhill back to Nottingham. Hanno and I arrived there, walking normally along the stone corridors and pretending to converse with each other in low tones, like any two men-at-arms on a midnight errand from their captain, or just stretching their legs after a long stint of sentry duty.
We stopped just short of the chamber, hearing the sound of pacing feet, and after a cautious peep around the bend, Hanno whispered in my ear that there was only one man doing duty before the door. My German friend reached down and pulled the misericorde from my boot: ‘Do it quick and quiet,’ he said into my ear, putting the weapon in my hand. ‘No noise, no fussing.’ I nodded, my heart hammering. It was time once again for cold-blooded murder. I peeked round the corner, too, and took a look at my victim. Like the sentry outside Kirkton Castle a year and a half ago, the man-at-arms outside Murdac’s door was young. But this time, when I looked into my soul, I found I had no qualms about taking his life – it was necessary, I said to myself, and that was all that really mattered.
My heart quietened, I took a deep breath and moved fast, without hesitation. Two quick and silent steps, as he was turned away from me, and I grabbed his nose and mouth with my left hand and slotted the misericorde hard and neatly into the back of his brain with my right. It was as easy as sliding a well-greased bolt on a cellar door. The blade glided home, the man kicked once and collapsed into my arms, a dead weight. That was it; there was nothing more to it.
Silently, Hanno was by my side. ‘Perfect,’ he said. And I was very pleased.
I passed the sagging corpse into Hanno’s arms, cleaned my misericorde on the dead man’s surcoat, slid the weapon back into my boot, drew my sword, took a deep breath and burst through the door of Murdac’s chamber, with Hanno hard on my heels, dragging the limp body of the sentry behind me.
After the gloom of the corridor, Murdac’s room was shockingly bright, lit as it was by two large candle trees. It was a comfortable chamber, spacious and warm, with costly furs scattered over the polished wooden floor, and a fire burning merrily in a large fireplace built into the outside wall. In the centre of the room was a large table, and seated at the table, his glorious long sword drawn on the surface before him, was Rix.
The tall man picked up the sword, and I could not help admiring its blue pommel jewel glinting at me in the candlelight, and the elegance of the long slim lines of the blade. I was entranced by the weapon, and my eye caressed it, even as Rix pushed back his chair, stood to his full height and said in French: ‘Ah, you are here at last. Sir Ralph has been half-expecting an assassin. And how fortunate that it should be you! We have some unfinished business between us, I believe.’
I nodded but said nothing to the tall man. Instead my eyes roamed the room, seeking out the target of our deadly intentions, the Constable.
A sumptuous four-poster bed stood against the far wall of the chamber with the thick curtains drawn. And, as I looked at it, a dark and tousled head poked out from between the drapes, blinking wildly, like a mouse coming out of its hole. It was Ralph Murdac, and his expression when he saw me was one of equally mingled fear and surprise.
‘You!’ he said incredulously. ‘You, of all people! Alan Dale – the traitor, the thief, the gutter-born rat who wants to be a knight. That it should be you who has come for me, sword in hand, in the dead of night – I can scarce believe it. Kill him, Rix; kill him now! Slice the nasty jumped-up little peasant into pieces.’
Rix stepped away from the table and, at Murdac’s command, he saluted me with his beautiful sword, holding the hilt to his brow for a moment, before sweeping it into the first position of the serious swordsman: en garde!
‘Get over to Murdac,’ I muttered over my shoulder to Hanno, without taking my eyes off Rix. ‘Grab him; hold him fast; keep him out of the fight. I’ll handle this one alone – I made a vow to St Michael to cut down this long streak of shit, and I mean to honour it.’
I felt Hanno move away from me in the direction of the big bed and I took a step towards Rix. With no preliminaries at all, I swung my blade as hard and as fast as I could at his head. His sword leapt upwards and he parried my blow with a clang of steel. But I was already swiping low, aiming to sink my sword into his calf muscle. Miraculously, his long blade was there before mine, once again blocking my strike with ease. I lunged with all my speed at his chest; he nonchalantly flicked my blade out of the target area and it slid past his left arm into space.
Then he attacked: a feint at my body, then another, followed by a lightning strike at my throat. By God, he was fast; much faster than me. By sheer luck I managed to avoid being spitted on his sword, sweeping my own blade up just in time. I deflected his lunge into the air above my left shoulder and counterattacked, against his right, hoping for a score on his sword-arm that would slow his terrifying speed. But, once again, he swept my blow away almost contemptuously.
I could hear muffled thumps and yelps coming from the four-poster bed, but I dared not look away from Rix, even for a moment. I thrust again at his chest, and he swatted me away. I hacked low; he merely stepped back. Then he attacked once more, striking left and right, high and low, his weapon a lethal silver blur, and it was all I could do to keep his sword point out of my flesh. It occurred to me then, in a blinding moment of clarity, that I was going to lose this fight. He was the better swordsman; there was absolutely no doubt about it. I was giving ground slowly, making nothing of the fight; merely blocking, parrying, dodging and ducking. I was outclassed, overmatched – I was going to be cut to pieces.
We fought on almost in silence, the only sound the clang and clash of our blades, and the panting of my breath. As Rix stepped away momentarily and began to circle round to my right, I caught a glimpse of the four-poster. And saw my German friend, calmly sitting on the edge of the bed, the curtains drawn back, his arm curled around Ralph Murdac’s tousled little head, as one might carry a ball, his long knife at the Constable’s throat. Murdac was very pale, his crisp blue eyes under Hanno’s muscular arm were enlarged with fear, and a trickle of blood was leaking from his mouth. Hanno was frowning at me; he looked almost comically disappointed. But holding Murdac as he was, he could not easily release him and come to my aid against Rix. I could expect no help from that quarter.
I jerked my attention back to the fight just in time: Rix’s sword came lancing towards my eye and I parried and slashed at him wildly. He blocked and riposted, and I hacked again at his head with all the savagery in my soul. He merely ducked the blow. He was perfectly balanced, and as cool as a river trout. I, meanwhile, was red-faced and panting with exertion. I aimed another tremendous hack at his shoulder, which he blocked. His counter-stroke, a lunge at my heart, nearly skewered me, but I jumped backwards in the nick of time. My left foot landed on a fine bearskin rug, the rug skidded on the polished floor, and before I knew it I had landed painfully on my arse, and my sword was skittering and bouncing away across the shiny wooden floor to my right.
Rix stood over me. He smiled coldly, saluted me once again, and lifted his sword over his head. I was scrambling on my knees before him, staring up in shock and fear as his beautiful sword rose in the air, my hand reaching desperately for the bottom of my left leg …
My fumbling hand found the misericorde. The triangular blade slipped loose from its boot-sheath and I brought it up and struck like an angry viper, slamming it down in a hammer blow straight through Rix’s soft kidskin shoe, nailing his left foot securely to the wooden floor.
He screamed – he screamed one word, loud enough to wake the dead: ‘Miloooooooo!’
But I did not listen; I was scuttling away after my sword. I collected the weapon, regained my feet and, while Rix tried to turn right towards me, his long limbs tangled because of his pinioned foot, I stepped in to him, swung back and chopped the blade down hard into the angle between his neck and his left shoulder, giving it all my strength, and cutting a foot deep into his chest cavity. For a shaved moment, I caught a glimpse of grey flabby lungs deep in his gasping purple torso before the blood welled and filled his chest.
And he was down.
I tugged my sword loose from the shattered bones and meat of his thorax, and only just in time. There was movement from the far side of the room, a curtain was torn back – it was the heavy curtain that covered the entrance to Murdac’s privy – and out of that dank passageway stumped the ogre, Perkin’s killer, Adam’s assassin, walking on one good leg and one wooden one. The half-man whom I had believed I had stamped to death in the list in the outer bailey five months ago was resurrected. Milo was doing up his broad belt, and staring about him with bovine stupidity.
Time is a strange beast: some moments seem to last for ever, yet others go by in a flash. I felt as if I had been fighting Rix for hours, but I realized later that it can have been no longer than a hundred heartbeats or so, just the time it had taken for Milo – who was on the seat of ease in the privy – to finish his business, wipe himself, drop his tunic and do up his belt, and come to see what all the clang and clatter was about in Murdac’s chamber.
Milo saw me standing over the bloody dead body of his friend, blinked, scowled, gave a feral shout – and charged. And though his left leg, above the knee, had been replaced with a strappedon leather cup attached to the stump of his thigh, and a stout bar of wood to walk on, he moved at a pretty decent lick. I knelt quickly beside the tall swordsman’s gory corpse and picked up his lovely weapon with my left hand; then I stood to meet the ogre’s hobbling charge, a sword in each fist.
In the three heartbeats before he reached me, I had time to notice that he still bore the marks from our battle in the lists on his face. He had but one good eye; small and piggish, and glaring with bottomless rage, and his hairless head was a crumpled mass of scar tissue from the battering my boots had given him, all yellow and shiny and furrowed, with barely any recognizable features at all. A flashing image of Nur came into my head: and indeed they would have made a pretty pair. His head was like a ball of beeswax that has melted after being placed to warm too near the fire. He looked even more monstrous than he had before our battle. Yet I was amazed that he lived at all, for I had been sure that I had stamped his vital spark to extinction – but live he did, and now he sought revenge.
When Milo was a mere yard from me, I twisted to my right out of his path like the Saracen dancers I had seen in Outremer, twirling in a complete circle, fast, and hacking down hard on his outstretched left arm with Rix’s gorgeous sword. The blade sliced clean through the thick knotted muscle and solid bone just below his elbow, cutting away his forearm with a single blow and leaving him, roaring with pain, the blood jetting from the stump. But I wasted no time in gloating at his injury; instead, continuing my twisting manoeuvre, I found myself behind him and cut down with a smooth sweep into the slab of solid muscle of his right thigh using the plain old sword in my right hand. There was not enough power in my strike to cut through that knotted limb, but he did fall to his knees squealing with pain.
I took his remaining hand then: a neat downward blow with Rix’s incomparable sword slicing all the way through like a hot blade through butter, sending his pudgy, ham-like fist thumping to the floor. He was a dead man then, of course: both arms useless and unable to rise on his one wounded leg. And I stood before Milo, between his half-kneeling, blood-drenched massive body and the long heap of his friend, and looked at him for a moment or two, remembering the wrestling match in the list, and the crunching explosion of his boot in my ribs in Germany, and the sight of the torn bodies of Perkin and Adam as we found them on the bank of River Main. He stared back at me with his one mad eye. There was nothing to say, and so I held my tongue: I merely gave him a merciful end, thrusting with both swords simultaneously into his huge breast, the two long blades plunging deeply into the chest cavity, driving towards his engorged ogre’s heart.
‘Not so bad,’ said Hanno from the bed, where he was still holding Ralph Murdac securely around the neck. ‘But very far from perfect. I think the tall, skinny one is going kill you, for sure. You are sloppy, too confident and your attacks are obvious. You must practise, Alan. Practise more. You must try to do better in future.’
I stood there between the corpses of the two men I had just killed, and nodded my head in agreement. Hanno was right, I had not deserved to win the fight against Rix. It was all very well being able to dispatch a half-trained man-at-arms in a mad battlefield mêlée, but faced with a serious swordsman such as Rix I had very nearly lost my life.
‘Shall I do this one for you?’ said Hanno, jerking his chin down towards Ralph Murdac’s terrified little face. ‘Show you the proper way?’
I shook my head. ‘Just tie his arms and bring him out here on the floor. I want him for myself.’
While Hanno bound Sir Ralph Murdac with his belt and a strip torn off the bed-sheet, tying the man’s elbows behind his back and his wrists to his feet so that he was in a permanent kneeling position, I moved the heavy table up against the door, blocking it. Milo’s roars must have roused some of the garrison, I reckoned, and it would not be long before someone came to investigate. The big table, heavy as it was, would not hold Murdac’s men back for long, but it might give us an extra moment or two to escape. And we were not planning to leave by the door anyway.
I shoved the plain old sword back in my scabbard and came over to where Murdac was kneeling, with Rix’s magnificent, gore-smirched blade in my hand.
Murdac could not take his eyes off the sword. When I held it low before me, he seemed fascinated with it, watching the red blood drip slowly from the tip on to his wooden floor.
‘Stretch out your neck,’ I said. ‘It will make it cleaner, and quicker for you.’ And I lifted the long blade, holding it cocked in two hands above my right shoulder like a professional executioner.
Murdac turned his face up towards me, his pale cheeks stained with tears. ‘Please, Alan,’ he said. ‘Please, do not kill me, I am begging you.’ And the tears rolled down his handsome cheeks, and dripped from his perfect little chin.
‘You deserve it many times over,’ I said, and I had to harden my heart, because the sight of his small quaking, sobbing body was weakening my resolve.
‘Please, Alan. By all that is holy, spare me. Spare my life. I will go away, I will leave England and never return. I have money, you know …’
‘We do not have time for this nonsense,’ said Hanno. ‘Strike, Alan, and let us be on our way.’
I moved my arm back another inch, and Murdac shouted: ‘Wait! Wait – if you kill me Alan D’Alle – which I know is your true name – if you kill me, you will never know the secret of your father’s death.’
I rocked back on my heels, as if I had been struck a blow. ‘What secret?’ I managed to stammer out. ‘What is this secret?’ I lifted the sword higher.
Just then there was a loud hammering at the door of the chamber, and the sound of rough soldiers’ voices.
‘Alan, we have no time. Strike!’ said Hanno.
There was more hammering on the door, and a man shouted: ‘Sir Ralph, Sir Ralph, is all well with you in there? Constable, are you unharmed?’
‘What is the secret? Tell me now or die.’
‘It concerns your father’s time in Paris. I know the name of the man who ordered his death.’
‘You ordered his death. I know this to be true.’
‘It is true that I ordered him hanged, but I received orders from someone, a very powerful man, a man you cannot refuse. He told me to accomplish your father’s death. Swear before Almighty God and on the Holy Virgin that you will spare me – and I will tell you his name.’
‘Constable – Sir Ralph, are you there? Are you all right?’ the man-at-arms outside the door demanded.
‘Tell them that all is well in here or I will kill you now, I swear that before Almighty God.’
‘All is well,’ shouted Murdac immediately. ‘There is no cause for alarm. Go back to bed!’
The hammering stopped. I saw that Hanno was uncoiling a long thin rope that he had taken from his back-sack – and for a second I wondered if it would be long enough, and strong enough for what I had in mind. We needed a hundred and fifty foot of very strong rope for my plan to succeed. I shrugged off my own back-sack and kicked it over to Hanno.
‘Who is in there with you, Sir Ralph?’ shouted the man from beyond the door.
‘I am with my friends. Go away and cease troubling me with your impudence!’ Murdac sounded convincing. Pleased with his performance, he was nodding and smiling at me in an eager manner.
I swung my hands down in a short hard arc – and smashed the silver pommel of the sword into Murdac’s temple. He gave a soft sigh and flopped to the floor.
‘We are taking him with us,’ I told Hanno. And to his credit, my doughty German friend merely nodded, shrugged and moved off towards the privy, carrying the bundles of rope in his arms.
* * *
There are some experiences that are almost too unpleasant to recall, and so I will only briefly tell of the passage down the exit chute of Murdac’s privy. After I had recovered my misericorde – it took a deal of strength to prise if from Rix’s foot bones and the grip of the polished wooden floor – we dropped the unconscious Ralph Murdac down the chute first, after tying him securely to the end of Hanno’s rope and lowering him none too gently through the shit-rimmed hole to a shoulder of sandstone rock thirty feet below. Then, reluctantly, we followed him down.
Our boots sunk deep in crusted ordure, we paused on that foul shoulder a moment before dropping Murdac before us once again, then climbing down the slippery hundred foot or so of sheer cliff to the ground – mercifully, without being seen by the sentries on the castle’s western battlements – all the while trying to make minimal contact with the evil-smelling, slimy sandstone cliff wall. My mind, however, on that noisome descent was split between two equally pressing questions: would the men-at-arms in the castle break into Murdac’s chamber and cut the rope that held us? And what had Murdac meant when he said, ‘I received orders from someone, a very powerful man, a man you cannot refuse.’
Praise be to God: they did not cut the rope, and we reached the ground in safety. All three of us were well befouled, though, by the time we had made it to the bottom. And as we hurried away from the black bulk of the castle, circling round the fish pond and heading north-west towards the King’s pavilion in the deer park with Murdac slung like a sack of turnips over Hanno’s shoulder, I wondered whether it might not be better to bathe and change our clothing before presenting our trussed prize to Richard. But, as it turned out, we were given no choice in the matter. We were stopped by a couple of sentries in the park and shown directly, stinking, into the King’s presence.
Though it must have been nearly three o’clock in the morning, our sovereign was still awake, poring over his plans for the next day’s artillery assault which were set up on a trestle table in the centre of the pavilion. The King shouted for wine, and hot water and towels, and we made a hasty toilet in front of our sovereign lord as he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction and looked down at the bound and helpless Sir Ralph Murdac trussed up like a pedlar’s package in front of him.
‘Well done, Blondel – oh, that was bravely done!’ said the King. ‘You have saved me time, effort, and the lives of many good men by your actions tonight, and I salute you. I won’t forget this, Alan. I am in your debt once more.’
But while the King was fizzing and crackling with energy, after the first cup of wine my eyelids began to droop – it had been a long and exhausting night’s work. And I wanted some peace to ponder Murdac’s cryptic words again. I had tried, briefly, to interrogate him as we made our way across the park to the King’s tent, but groggy and bouncing uncomfortably on Hanno’s broad shoulder, he had remained sullenly silent. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow I would ask him again about the man who he claimed had ordered my father’s death – and if he still remained stubborn … well, there were less gentlemanly methods that I would not be too shy to employ. I might well ask Sir Aymeric de St Maur for a few suggestions about the persuasive use of hot irons.
I took my leave of the King – he was elated and chatting nineteen to the dozen with his tired-looking household knights, and with the sergeants who had been charged with keeping Sir Ralph Murdac secured – and went to find Thomas, who was curled up in a mound of straw, sleeping peacefully among the King’s horses. I woke him and gave him my weapons and armour, including Rix’s beautiful sword, to care for: they were still encrusted with gore from the fight in Murdac’s chamber and worse from our escape down the cliff. Then I rolled myself in an old cloak, and lay down next to Hanno in the warm straw. As I drifted off into a deep, satisfied sleep, my last thoughts were: had Murdac been lying? Had he spun me a tale about my father solely to save his neck? It was entirely possible, I thought. But I would surely find out the next day. Tomorrow.
And then Dame Sleep pulled me down into her vast comforting bosom.
I awoke in broad daylight, to the distant sound of snarling saws and ringing hammers. Hanno was snoring gently beside me, and I lay for a few moments in my cosy straw bed and looked up at the blue sky above. It seemed so empty and clean: untroubled by the bloody affairs of men. It was a perfect spring day: I knew I had performed great deeds the night before, and my King had acknowledged them, and now my enemies were dead, or captured, while I was whole. Life was very good, I mused. And then my thoughts turned to Goody, as they often did first thing in the morning. We would be betrothed soon and she would be wholly mine, and that notion gave me a wonderful feeling of warmth and joy.
I noticed that the hammering and sawing had stopped and idly thought about getting to my feet, but there seemed to be no hurry. I was unlikely to be called upon to fight today after my efforts of the night before – there would be negotiations between the heralds and whomever was now in command of the castle – and if they broke down, Richard would begin the long, slow process of bombarding the castle into submission. I might not be called upon for weeks and I felt I deserved a long, lazy rest. In a little while, I thought, I will rise, wash, seize a bite of bread and a mouthful of ale and pay Ralph Murdac a visit to see if I can get any sense from him about my father’s death.
I remained there, watching the white fluffy clouds chasing each other over the vast blue heavens until, finally, a full bladder forced me to rise, brush the straw from my clothes, and seek out a latrine. As I made my way over to the big ditch that had been dug as a midden on the edge of the King’s encampment, I noticed that there were very few people about the place. And those that were in the park seemed to be making their way over to the east. Something was going on in the northern part of the outer bailey, I guessed, and for the first time that morning my curiosity stirred.
When I got back to the horse lines, Thomas was there and he had brought with him a bowl of hot water for me to wash in, and a clean linen chemise. I shook Hanno awake and, as soon as he had completed his morning ritual of yawning, farting, spitting and cursing foully in German, the three of us set off eastwards to see what we could see.
It was a hanging – or, to be more accurate, several hangings. An enormous gibbet had been erected to the north of the castle, well out of crossbow range from the battlements. And two black figures were already dangling from the crossbar as Hanno, Thomas and I hurried towards them, slowed by the crowd that had gathered to watch this gruesome spectacle. To my right, I could see that the battlements of the middle bailey were thick with heads as the defenders of the castle came out in their hundreds to watch the executions of their comrades – for I could see by their dress that the two men swinging from the gibbet were both Murdac’s men; most likely ones we had captured in the fight for the outer bailey the previous day.
As we approached the gibbet, a cold hand gripped my heart. I saw a third prisoner being set on a horse cart under the half-filled gallows, with his hands tied behind his back and a noose around his neck. A priest was gabbling inaudible words of prayer for the condemned man’s soul and the victim had his eyes tightly shut. A signal from a knight, standing by, and a whip lashed down on the cart horse’s rump and, as the beast started forward, the cart was pulled away from under the man’s legs and he dropped a foot or so, the noose tightening around his neck, strangling him slowly to death.
The hanged man’s feet were still kicking wildly, as if he were indulging in a particularly joyful dance, when the cart was wheeled back into position for the next victim. This one was a small man, dressed entirely in expensive black, though rather bedraggled and with, I noticed, his left shoulder wedged high against his neck. It was Sir Ralph Murdac.
My stomach lurched; I was still fifty yards from the gibbet, with a throng of men-at-arms and townspeople from Nottingham between me and the gallows; nonetheless, I shouted out to the knight in command of the hangings as loud as I could.
‘Stop, stop. Hold there, sir. He is my prisoner!’ I yelled desperately, trying to force my way through the crush of bodies.
Murdac was on the tail of the cart by now, the priest was already halfway through his prayers. And I was stopped by a burly man-at-arms, part of a ring of Richard’s men who were keeping the crowds back from the gallows.
‘Wait, wait,’ I shouted. ‘That is Sir Ralph Murdac!’
‘We know who he is, lad,’ said the man-at-arms, barring my way with shield and spear; by his accent I could tell that he was a local man. ‘And no one deserves death more richly than he,’ the big man continued. ‘He dies on the King’s personal orders.’
Murdac, eyes red with weeping, the noose already around his neck, noticed my face in the crowd. He opened his mouth to say something, and just as he was about to speak, the whip cracked down on the horse’s rump, the cart lurched forward, and Murdac was left dangling from his neck in space, his face reddening and bulging, slowly choking to death. His bright blue eyes were on mine, pleading, and I honestly tried to go forward, but the big man-at-arms shoved me roughly back, cursing my eagerness. As I watched helplessly, my eyes fixed on his purpling face, Murdac was slowly strangled by the rough hempen rope. His feet kicked and wriggled, his tongue protruded, impossibly huge in that small face, his bladder and bowels released themselves, and I was transported back ten years or more to an old oak tree in a small village, now destroyed, but which had been only a few short miles away from where I stood now. There, ten years before, as a small and frightened boy, I had watched my father hanged – on the orders of this very man now thrashing away his life before me.
I stood still for a long while and watched Murdac slowly die: it was fitting, I told myself.
And as I watched, I offered up a prayer for the soul of my father.
* * *
I took no further part in the siege that day. Hanno, Thomas and I found ourselves a cosy tavern in the English part of Nottingham town and drank ale until it was almost coming out of our ears. Meanwhile, King Richard’s stone-throwing machines smashed at the defenders’ walls from a small hill to the north of the castle, and our drinking was punctuated by the sound of smashing masonry. The ale seemed to have little effect on me, I felt merely numb. I spoke little to Hanno, and he had the sense to be quiet and order a continual stream of pots of ale from the alewife, with whom he had already struck up a great friendship. After a pot or two, Thomas disappeared on his own business. I did not even ask him where he was bound. I was thinking of my father, of his kindness to me, of the music that as a family we had made together, and of his death … mostly about his awful death.
Robin joined us for a while, informed by Thomas of our whereabouts, I supposed, and he congratulated me on the success of my mission the night before. We raised a mug of ale to Murdac’s slow, painful death, but in truth I could take no joy from it. Strangely, Robin seemed to understand my flat, empty feeling at my enemy’s demise.
‘Revenge,’ he said, fixing me with his silver eyes, which seemed to be glowing more brightly than ever in the haze of ale, ‘is a duty. It is not a pleasure. We take vengeance because we owe it to those who have been wronged. But, in itself, it is not something that can make us whole. We take revenge because we must pay our debts to the dead – and so that people will fear to do us, and those we love, a wrong. But we should not look to it as a balm to the soul.’
But I was in no mood to discuss his peculiar philosophies and Robin, sensing my mood, soon made his excuses and, after quietly ordering Hanno to see that I came to no harm, left me to my ale jug.
The next day, under a flag of truce, two knights emerged from the battered castle, and on their knees before a stern King Richard began the negotiations for the surrender of Nottingham Castle.
I was in the King’s pavilion, still feeling out of sorts with the world, when they arrived. Richard was just explaining to me – I will not say apologizing; kings do not admit it when they are wrong – why it was necessary for Murdac to be publicly hanged.
‘They must know that I am serious,’ Richard said. ‘They must understand that if they do not surrender the castle to me now, when I eventually take it I will slaughter every last mother’s son inside its walls.’
Evidently, as usual, King Richard’s brutal tactics had worked. A delegation from the castle was here, and surrender was in the air. The two knights who came to parley with him were William de Wenneval, the deputy constable of the castle who had assumed command after Murdac’s sudden disappearance – and Sir Nicholas de Scras.
There was a good deal of mummery and show about the parley. The King pretended to be in a towering rage that his royal authority had been defied. The knights, on their knees, begged for his forgiveness, Sir William de Wenneval sticking to Murdac’s feeble story that they had not realized who was besieging them. The business did not take long to conclude: the King demanded that twelve noble hostages, including the two knights before him, should surrender themselves to him, throwing themselves on the King’s mercy, but he grudgingly conceded that the rest of the garrison – mostly common English men-at-arms and a few undistinguished knights, and the surviving Flemish crossbowmen, of course – would be at liberty to depart Nottingham for their homes without molestation.
As the two humiliated knights were leaving the pavilion to take the King’s offer back to the beleaguered castle, Sir Nicholas caught my eye and I went over to greet him.
‘It would seem, Alan, that you were right. You evidently backed the right man,’ said my friend sadly. He scrubbed at his short-cropped grey hair in frustration. ‘And it must be faced manfully that I rolled the dice – and lost!’
‘I am sure the King will be merciful,’ I said, although I was not sure at all: the five hanged prisoners of yesterday, especially Ralph Murdac, loomed large in my thoughts.
At noon, the twelve knights emerged from the castle. According to the agreement, they were all unarmed, wearing only the linen shift of a penitent and each with a hempen noose around his neck to demonstrate that the King had the right to hang him if he chose. While the rest of the garrison streamed away into Nottingham town, grateful for their lives, the twelve knights were herded by Richard’s jeering soldiers to the gallows in the outer bailey.
There were five corpses still hanging there like ripe fruit on a tree of death, including the body of Sir Ralph Murdac. The King, splendid in his finest armour and towering above them on horseback, looked sternly at the twelve men, his face a cold mask of royal justice.
‘You have defied your lawful King, and so committed treason – and for that the punishment must be death,’ Richard began. Then he continued: ‘But one of my most valiant knights, Sir Alan of Westbury, has pleaded for the life of one of your number.’
I was startled by my King’s words. I had pleaded with him, of course, but what did he mean by Sir Alan of Westbury? I was no knight. Did he think I was? Was he confused in the head by the battle?
‘After listening to the counsel of Sir Alan, my trusty and well-beloved knight,’ the King went on, his words having a strange emphasis on the work knight, ‘I have decided that one man, Sir Nicholas de Scras, shall receive a full pardon for his crimes against my person, and shall not, on this occasion, receive the penalty he so justly deserves.
I caught Sir Nicholas’s eye and he smiled ruefully at me, nodding his thanks, but with more than a little relief in his careworn face. I was thinking of the friendship he had shown me in Outremer, his tender nursing of me in Acre when I was sick, of the time he saved my life outside the Blue Boar tavern in Westminster, and the advice about Milo’s weak left leg that he had whispered to me before the wrestling match. He owed me nothing, by my reckoning.
The King was still speaking: ‘The rest of you’ – he paused for a long moment and then pointed at the eleven other linen-clad knights, penitent and pathetic – ‘shall also escape death today and shall be set free upon agreement of a suitable ransom from each of you.’
And the King smiled. There were cheers, and shouts of joy, and not only from the eleven knights who had cheated death. Hoods and helmets were thrown into the air and all of a sudden that grim place, in the shadow of five dangling bodies, took on the atmosphere of a holy day. Some people shouted: ‘God save the King!’ Others cheered the reprieved knights. A group of travelling musicians – not real trouvères but lowly market jongleurs – struck up a jaunty tune, and I saw people beginning to tap their feet. Before long there would be dancing. England had been racked by violence and uncertainty for too long. But now the King was back and, with the capture of Nottingham Castle, he was fully the master of his kingdom once more.
I walked over to King Richard’s horse. ‘Sire,’ I said, my heart beating fast, ‘I thank you for your clemency to my friend Sir Nicholas de Scras. But I must say one thing … I am no knight. I fear you are mistaken in that. I am merely a lowly captain under the Earl of Locksley.’
King Richard smiled down at me: ‘Not a knight, you say?’ His blue eyes were twinkling at me. ‘You think that I do not know that, Blondel? You are no knight, that is true, but you have shown more courage and resource and skill in battle than many a man of more illustrious parentage. You are not a knight at this hour – but by God’s legs you shall be before the hour is up. Get down on your knees!’
I goggled at my sovereign, my knees folded under me, and while the King dismounted, I stared at him, and watched while he beckoned over a household knight who handed him a package wrapped in black silk.
‘Give me your sword,’ said the King. He stood looming over me, tall and proud, the spring sunlight glinting off his red and gold hair. I fumbled with my plain sword hilt, but just then young Thomas ran forward out of the crowd and held out Rix’s beautiful blade. I noticed that my hard-working squire had somehow found the time to clean the blood and filth from it.
The King took the weapon from Thomas and admired it for a moment. ‘A fine blade, and worthy of you, Blondel,’ he said quietly. He looked at the word engraved in gold on the shining blade. It read ‘Fidelity’. The King nodded and said: ‘And a most fitting inscription!’ Then quickly, smoothly, he tapped me three times on the shoulders with the sword, and said: ‘In the name of Almighty God and St George, I make thee a knight. Arise, Sir Alan of Westbury.’
My heart was so full that I felt it must burst with joy. I climbed to my feet, and the King handed me Rix’s blade – my blade – and then he passed me the black silk package. A breath of wind caught the flimsy covering, blowing it back, and I saw that it contained a fine pair of ornate silver spurs – their value being, I guessed, about one pound. It did not now seem such a paltry sum.
‘Sir Alan of Westbury,’ the King said, and then stopped. ‘That is not right – Westbury is too small a fief for a man of your quality … but we shall attend to that presently. Sir Alan of Westbury, may you always serve God, protect the weak, and fulfil your knightly duties as well as you have served me.’
And he smiled at me again, and I had to blink away the hot tears that were filling my eyes, as my King remounted his horse and, quietly humming a snatch of ‘My Joy Summons Me’ under his breath, he rode away.
On a crisp, clear day in the first week of April, in a green field outside what remained of the burnt-out castle of Kirkton, I became betrothed to Godifa, daughter of Thangbrand of Sherwood. It was one of the happiest moments of my long life – even now, forty years later, the memory of that glorious day warms my old bones. Goody wore a simple gown in blue – the colour of purity – and a white veil. Her plain dress was adorned with a great ruby hanging from a golden chain around her neck. I had been persuaded by Marie-Anne to spend some silver on a new suit of clothes – hose, tunic, hat and mantle – all dyed a deep rich purple-red, and embroidered with wonderful spidery black needlework: I felt like a prince of the royal blood.
I gave Goody a golden ring, engraved with both of our names, and she gave me one of the detachable sleeves from her blue dress as a token, and we both made a solemn oath, similar to the marriage vow but talking of the future: ‘I will take you to be my wife,’ I said to Goody, and smiled into her lovely violet eyes, and she too vowed that she would soon be mine.
Father Tuck bound our right hands together with a silken rope as a sign of our intention to marry, and then he held a solemn Mass to celebrate the event and to ask Almighty God to bless our lives together. Marie-Anne, as Goody’s guardian, was insistent that we do the correct thing, even though Goody had almost no property to speak of, and the Countess had me sign a document of betrothal that gave a formal status to the engagement.
It was a happy day: Robin had had the great hall of Kirkton swiftly rebuilt during the past month, and while the rest of the castle was still scarred by the fire that had destroyed it, at least we had somewhere to hold the betrothal feast. And Robin had determined that it should be a lavish affair with more than fifty honoured guests, friends of his and mine from across the country – and hundreds of people from the surrounding villages, and from all over Sherwood, were invited too to partake of the festivities in the open air. He ordered twenty oxen to be slaughtered and roasted for the village folk; and a dozen of the King’s venison appeared from somewhere, nobody liked to ask where, to be added to the tables set up in the fields around Kirkton that were already groaning with pigeon pies and lamprey stews, big bowls of sweet frumenty, whole round yellow cheeses and warm loaves of fresh bread, and fruit and puddings and leafy sallets. Ale was served by the tun, a constant stream of foaming flagons was relayed by Robin’s servants to the long tables set out on the grass, and fine wines too were freely poured for the chosen guests who were dining in the newly rebuilt hall.
I was much impressed by Robin’s generosity – but I also knew that he could well afford it. After the siege of Nottingham, the King had granted him a slew of lands and honours in Normandy and England that made him one of the most powerful men in both the Duchy and at home. He no longer needed the income that his frankincense trade had brought him; his loyalty to the King in the dark times of his imprisonment had paid a far richer dividend. And I could not complain either: the King had been as good as his word when he said that Westbury was too mean a fief for a man of my quality. I had been given Burford, Stroud and Edington – the manors that Prince John had granted me, and then stripped away when I was exposed as Robin’s spy. Richard also made me the lord of Clermont-sur-Andelle, a large and potentially very rich manor to the east of Rouen in Normandy. Sir Alan Dale now had sufficient lands, on either side of the English Channel, to support the dignity of his new rank.
To mark the occasion of my betrothal, Robin had presented me with a full suit of finest chain-mail armour: full mail leggings or chausses that would guard me from thigh to toe, a knee-length mail coat, split front and back for ease of riding, with full armoured sleeves and mittens, and a head-covering mail coif attached – it was a very costly gift, and one that would, he said, keep me a good deal safer in battle than my battered old hauberk. Marie-Anne gave me a horse: and not just any horse – a destrier, a warhorse, tall, fierce and jet-black and trained for battle. ‘He is called Shaitan,’ Marie-Anne told me when we admired him in the horse corral behind the castle, ‘which I believe is the Saracen word for the Devil. He is certainly full of sin.’ Then she looked at the stallion doubtfully. ‘You will be careful on him, Alan, won’t you? He looks as if he would like to eat you for breakfast, given half a chance.’
But I was barely listening: I was entranced by Shaitan – you might say I had already given him my soul. The dark horse looked at me with his tarry eyes, and I looked at him, and we seemed to come to some sort of understanding. ‘We will do great things together, Shaitan,’ I said, feeding him a dried apple from my pouch and extending my hand to stroke his long black nose. And he submitted to my caresses with only a slight baring of his big yellow teeth to show me that I should not presume too much on our new friendship. I looked beyond Shaitan’s long dark nose to Ghost, who was watching us from the far side of the corral. If horses can feel jealousy, then my grey gelding was green with it. ‘Never fear, Ghost, I have not forgotten you,’ I said to my faithful friend. And as I moved over towards him, I reached into my pouch and fished for a second apple.
As a gift, Thomas, my squire, had fashioned me a wood-and-leather scabbard for Rix’s beautiful sword: Fidelity. And Hanno had made a matching sheath for my misericorde, too, which would now hang on the right side of my belt. Little John’s gift to me, the big man told me gruffly, was the gift of Forgiveness. He had decided to overlook my rough-handling of his wounded arse cheek, ‘but, by Christ’s floppy foreskin, Alan, if you ever do anything like that again …’ he paused and poked me hard in the chest with a massive finger to make sure I grasped his point, ‘I will rip both of your legs off and beat you to death with them. I swear it on the holy sphincter of the Holy Spirit!’
I believe he meant it, too; although he was not in a condition to make good his threat just then. He was still recovering from the quarrel wound in his backside and could only walk stiffly, with the aid of a stout blackthorn staff. I regretted hurting him, and I was glad to be friends with him once more. And I was not the only one – Little John seemed to have struck up a friendly acquaintance with Roger of Chichester, and they were often seen chatting amiably together. A more unlikely pair, it would be difficult to imagine: the slim, elegant son of a nobleman, and the massive, muscled, limping former outlaw, with a face that looked as if a herd of cattle had danced on it all night. All they had in common, it seemed, was the yellow colour of their hair.
I had apologized to Roger for my rudeness to him that day in Wakefield Inn, and he had been most charming about the whole affair. In fact, I was beginning to like him, and I was glad that he’d been invited by Goody to the betrothal feast.
Beginning not long after noon, the feast was a long, slow business, with much talking and joking between the many courses. Bernard de Sezanne entertained us by performing his latest music and then amused many of the guests by playing parodies of songs that I had written but with new, salacious words that mocked my love life, and mine and Goody’s future together – in the bedchamber and out of it. I had to put up with this sort of ribaldry, despite my new rank as a knight, and while it was not very clever, the guests seemed to find it far more amusing than it truly was.
By the time Bernard had finished mocking me and making the most of his applause, it had grown dark. I rose to my feet, a silver wine cup in my hand: ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ I began, ‘I beg that you will all now join me in drinking a toast to my beautiful betrothed. A woman whose supreme loveliness shines …’
The door of the great hall flew open with a loud crash, and a dark figure – a woman clutching a huge round pot – strode into the hall. The figure let out a piercing shriek, a high, eerie howl of rage and fear and madness that stopped every heart in the hall for an instant. I sat down in surprise, as if my legs had been cut from beneath me. Everybody turned to the doorway to look and the Norman healer Elise, who was seated at one of the lower tables in the hall, screamed: ‘It is the Hag, the Hag of Hallamshire! God save us all!’ Then she clapped both hands over her mouth as if to stop any more sound emerging.
The black-clad woman held the pot high, and I saw that it was painted white and decorated with stars and crescent moons and strange deformed animals and weird symbols in green and black. She screamed: ‘A betrothal gift!’ The pot, held up in the flickering torchlight, was then dashed to the ground with another shriek of unbearable, unearthly pain. It exploded on the rush-strewn packed-earth floor, and out of the wrecked shards, dozens of small black-winged creatures shot into the air, squeaking bundles of black fur and leathery skin that flapped past our heads, causing many folk to visibly pale and duck before them. And the bats were not the only living things to crawl from the smashed shards: half a dozen poisonous adders slithered out, making for the darkness at the edges of the hall; beetles, lizards and two rats were also liberated by the crashing pot, and these beasts scurried under the tables.
The woman – I could clearly see now that it was Nur – was emitting rhythmical eerie shrieks, like some hellish music that sent shivers running down all our spines. Every eye in the hall was on her, and this night she looked truly terrifying. Her face had been whitened with some kind of paste, but black circles had been painted under her eyes to give her even more of a skull-like look. Her mutilated, glistening nose had been reddened, and her cropped ears and grinning lipless mouth all added to the vision of horror.
Then she began to dance; capering and still screaming from time to time, gibbering and prancing madly in the shards of the broken pot, her rat-tail hair bobbing and swaying about her ruined face. We were all frozen to our benches, not a man could move. I could not drag my eyes away from the awful spectacle; it was as if I was deep in some devilish enchantment, and I was not alone. No one spoke a word, no one moved a muscle while Nur danced her mad dance and sang her awful music in the centre of Kirkton’s newly built hall.
We were spellbound.
Finally she let out one final eerie screech, and came to a halt in front of the high table where I was sitting with Goody at my side, with Robin and Marie-Anne and Little John and Tuck. Nur thrust out her hand at me and I saw with a shudder that it held a human thighbone: ‘I curse you, Alan Dale,’ said Nur, in a low voice bubbling with hatred. ‘I curse you and your milky whore!’ And she pointed the bone at Goody. I was frozen with shock and terror at this unholy visitation; I could not move my arms or my legs, I could only stare in horrified fascination at Nur’s snarling, ravaged white-daubed face, and listen to her hate-filled voice, and the poison that spewed from her lipless mouth: ‘Your sour-cream bride will die a year and a day after you take her to your marriage bed – and her first-born child shall die, too, in screaming agony. But your days, my love, my lover’ – Nur slurred these words in a hideously lascivious manner – ‘your days will be many, your life long, yet filled with humiliation and ultimately despair. You will lose your mind before you lose your life – that is my curse. For you promised yourself to me, and …’
‘No!’ A girl’s voice, low but vibrant with passion and loud enough to reach the edges of the hall. I turned my head, the muscles seeming to creak with the strain, and saw that it was Goody speaking. ‘No,’ she said again, more loudly this time. ‘You will not come into this hall, on the day of my betrothal, with your tricks and your jealousy and your malice. No!’
Goody stood. She was staring directly at Nur, her blue eyes crackling with anger. ‘Get you gone from here!’ said my lovely girl. And Nur seemed to be as surprised as the rest of us at Goody’s fiery courage. The woman in black lifted her thighbone, pointed it at Goody and began to speak. But my beautiful betrothed was faster than the witch. She grabbed Little John’s staff that was leaning beside her against the table, and smashed the thighbone from Nur’s hands. Then she launched herself over the table, seeming to almost fly through the air – directly at the woman in black.
Goody’s first blow with the blackthorn caught Nur around the side of the head, jolting it to one side with a splash of red droplets. ‘You f*cking bitch!’ said Goody, her voice beginning to rise. ‘He belongs to me.’ Her second blow smashed into Nur’s mouth, splintering teeth and dropping the appalled creature to the floor. ‘Listen carefully to this, bitch. He’s my man.’ The staff slammed down on to her shoulder. ‘And if you ever come near us again, bitch …’ Goody dealt Nur a double-handed lateral blow across the spine that landed with a sickening thump. ‘If you come near us once more, bitch, I will make you really suffer.’ A smash across the back of the neck sprawled Nur among the rushes.
The blood-streaked witch began to scramble towards the doorway, crawling awkwardly with one hand held protectively above her head.
Goody’s staff whistled down again, connecting with her forearm, and I heard the crack of bone. Still nobody else in the hall moved a muscle. Nobody else could move. We just goggled at the spectacle of a slight girl of no more than sixteen summers taking on the forces of the Devil single-handed and armed only with a stick.
‘And you, you bitch …’ Smash! ‘killed …’ Smash! ‘my …’ Smash! ‘kitten!’ Goody screamed the last word at the top of her lungs, and the heavy staff crashed down once more on Nur’s back. Goody saved her breath then, to concentrate on giving her enemy a beating she would not forget. The blows rained down with the rhythm of the threshing-room floor, thudding into her enemy’s skinny frame; and I could see that Nur’s ravaged face was by now mashed, torn and bloody, and one arm seemed to be broken. Finally the battered black-clad woman reached the door; scrabbling on hands and knees in front of the opening, and Goody screamed: ‘Get out, bitch!’ The staff pounded down once more on the crawling witch’s skinny rump. ‘And don’t come back!’ Again a massive blow to the buttocks. And Nur shot out of the hall and into the darkness – and was gone.
Finally the whole hall began to come back to life, people moving and talking, many crossing themselves, and nervous laughter broke out at the far end of the high table. Some folk began to cheer Goody, and from across the room, I caught the eye of my beloved, my brave and beautiful girl. Her face was white as bone, knotted and tense, and her thistle-blue eyes still shone with fury. But she locked eyes with me and, as I smiled at her, loving her, so very proud of her courage, I saw that the muscles in her jaw were beginning to relax, and the mad gleam was draining from her eyes. Then she smiled back at me, a look of love, more pure and powerful than anything on earth; and I knew that all would be well with us.
Little John leaned over to me and, in a voice that was filled with awe, he said: ‘Alan – little bit of advice: once you’re wed, do not ever do anything to upset that lass!’