Above their heads there was a continuous muffled cacophony of footsteps, voices and raucous laughter. They were celebrating with a vengeance. Ralf thought about the mistakes he had made and how, when he got out of this pit, he would go about rectifying them. Groping in the darkness, he found the loaf they had lowered down earlier. ‘Help yourself to apples,’ his captors had said, laughing. He set his teeth in the coarse brown sawdust and thought of the soft, golden honey-bread that his aunt Maude would always bake on feast days. The thought of it brought moisture to his mouth and at least he was able to chew this current excuse for sustenance.

He swallowed hard then raised his head, suddenly attentive as the general noise subsided and the heavy trestle bench standing over the cellar trap was scraped to one side. He nudged his brother hard. Ivo woke with a start and a cry.

The bolt on the trap was drawn and the door flung back to reveal, by dingy rushlight, a rectangle of blackened ceiling-beam festooned with three coils of sausage and a bundle of besom twigs. These were almost immediately blotted out by the human shapes that bent over the entrance and peered down.

‘Safe and sound like I told you,’ declared the smug voice of the English soldier responsible for Ralf and Ivo’s capture and their current ignominious situation. ‘Snug as apples in a barrel.’ A snort of amusement followed.

‘Ralf, Ivo?’ Ironheart’s voice sounded as if his larynx were fashioned of rusty link mail. ‘I’ve come for you. God knows neither of you are worth the ransom but at least I know the duty owed to my blood.’

Duty! Ralf almost gagged as he heard the word. How often it had been rammed down his throat like a medicine to cure all ills. By God, he would show his father duty!

‘Sire?’ he said and, inching gingerly to his feet, looked up through the trap. ‘We were trying to reach you but these gutter sweepings took us for ransom and threw us down here.’

‘Less of the gutter sweepings!’ growled the soldier. ‘We could have left your butchered bodies in the forest for the foxes and ravens to eat.’

‘With your own for company!’ Ralf retorted, fists clenched. Then he took a deep breath and steadied himself. ‘Sire, you were right about the Earl of Leicester and young Henry. They’re not worth the spit of any man’s oath.’

Ivo struggled to rise and, even in the bad light, Ralf could see that his eyes were as round as candle cups. ‘But you said—Oooff!’ Ivo collapsed as Ralf’s elbow found his midriff.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ Ironheart demanded as a wooden ladder was slotted down through the trapdoor.

‘Belly gripes,’ Ralf said. ‘He’s been eating too many apples.’

Ivo groaned and retched. Ralf climbed gingerly up the ladder. His limbs felt like struts of rickety wood, and when his father stretched down his hand and pulled him out into the light he did not have to feign a grimace of pain. After the darkness of the apple cellar, the rushlit main room of the alehouse appeared as huge and bright as a palace, although the courtiers wore the appearance of reprobates and beggars. And his father was king of the beggars in his water-stained, shabby garments, grey hair showing wild wings of white and his flesh slack upon his gaunt bones.

Shock hit Ralf like a physical blow. Christ, he was looking at an old man, not the granite-hewed God of his childhood and adolescence.

‘I knew you’d come to your senses, whelp,’ Ironheart said with a disdainful curl of his upper lip. ‘Pity it took so long and cost so much.’

‘Yes, sire.’ Ralf stared at the floor while he recovered himself.

‘Don’t think you can pull the wool over my eyes. It’s no more in your nature to be meek than it is for a wolf to turn into a lap dog. Look at me!’

Ralf raised his head and stared his father in the eyes. Defiance flickered - there was nothing he could do to prevent it - but it brought a wintry smile to Ironheart’s lips.

‘That’s more like the truth. I know you’re not spineless. ’ Ironheart turned his regard upon Ivo, who had emerged unaided from the cellar. ‘If it had been your brother here, I could well have believed it.’ He seized Ivo by the scruff and dragged him forward into the light. ‘He’s always had curd for guts!’

Hunched and shivering, Ivo stood like an ox outside a slaughter pen and made no defence. There was a tightness in Ralf’s throat and rigors shook his jaw. He had never felt such hatred in his entire life but knew that it would transmute into an explosion of love and remorse if his father offered but one word or gesture of affection.

Hard-eyed, Ironheart said, ‘Go outside and wait for me. There are saddled horses and an escort waiting.’

The alewife, a smirk on her face, handed over two meagre peasant cloaks. The fine fur-lined ones in which the brothers had arrived had been put away against her daughter’s dowry.

‘Are we under guard?’ Ralf asked huskily.

‘No,’ Ironheart said.

‘Then we are free to leave?’

‘Where would you go? Take to a nomad life on the tourney circuits for the price of a crust? Walk out on me now, Ralf, and you might as well be dead. I’ll not seek you out a second time. Why should I when I have a son at home and another whose loyalty I do not doubt?’

Ralf clenched his teeth and with a supreme effort prevented himself from either answering his father in the manner he deserved or storming out. He had learned all about cutting off his nose to spite his face. Taking the cloak from the woman, he swept it around his shoulders. The ragged hem hung drunkenly at knee level and the pin was fashioned out of a chicken bone. ‘I know where I stand, Father,’ he said, his voice quiet but filled with bitterness. ‘I hope to God that you do.’ And strode into the dark, rainy night to the waiting soldiers.

Chapter 23

The weekday market in Nottingham was almost as busy as London’s Cheapside, Joscelin thought as he threaded his way through the crowded butchers’ shambles of Flesher Gate and Blowbladder Lane and headed up the hill to the shops and booths that thronged along the road to St Mary’s Church and Hologate. Cheek by jowl, squashed together like herrings in a barrel, the stallholders cried aloud the merits of their wares or sat at their trade behind trestles cluttered with their tools.

At a haberdasher’s booth Joscelin purchased a small set of bridle bells, thereby fulfilling his promise to Robert. They jingled merrily on their leather strap as he stowed them in his pouch. He remembered Juhel’s dark eyes wistfully admiring such bright trinkets dangling from a trader’s stall in Paris. In those days, money had provided the luxuries of bread and firewood and the gauds had remained a dream. He thought about a gift for Linnet. The coins in his pouch were not part of Robert’s patrimony but his own property, courtesy of his prowess against Leicester’s men. Withholding a death blow and claiming a ransom instead was by far the most profitable way of conducting warfare and he had indeed made an excellent profit.

There were gold and silver merchants aplenty to offer him cunningly worked rings and brooches, earrings and pendants. He knew that Linnet possessed little jewellery but what he saw upon the stalls did not appeal to him. It was too common-place. Every woman of means had a round brooch with a secret message carved on the reverse - Amor vincit omnia or Vous et nul autre. He had bought Breaca one in cheap bronze when she first became pregnant, and the memory was still so poignant that he had to avert his eyes from the wares at that particular stall. One stallholder offered him a reliquary cross in which, amid a confection of silver and rock crystal, was set a sliver of bone from the blessed Virgin herself, or so he was assured. Shavings of pig bone from the cesspit in the merchant’s yard was the more likely source, Joscelin thought, and without difficulty declined the bargain.

What he did purchase finally was an exquisitely carved ivory comb and a mirror-case to match. The seller, Gamel, was a former mercenary who now made his living making such items as well as dice and trinkets for members of the garrison to which he had once belonged. A sword had sliced off his leg at the knee. He had survived the wound fever and now stumped around on a peg leg, ungainly but determined. Just now, the wooden limb was lying beside his bag of tools on the rushes of the Weekday alehouse as he thirstily accepted the piggin of ale that Joscelin had bought for him.

‘How’s the leg?’ Joscelin joined him at the cramped trestle. A pang of nostalgia ran through him as he absorbed the smoky, noisy atmosphere of the little alehouse. He had not known Gamel when the man had two sound legs but the wound had only been a few months old when he first met him sitting in the guardroom at the castle, carving a rattle for a retainer’s infant son.

‘Not bad, not bad. Mustn’t grumble or you’ll not bother to keep me in ale.’ Gamel wiped his mouth. ‘Mind you, I had a close escape last month. The landlord’s new hound took a fancy to chew up me old peg while I was resting here. Regular mess, he made of it - huge great teeth marks, you shoulda seen ’em.’

‘I’ve seen the dog,’ Joscelin said sympathetically. Chained in the yard was something that appeared to be a cross between a boar hound and a pony, and certainly looking more bite than bark.

‘You’ll not see it for much longer if I have me way,’ Gamel muttered and took another drink of ale. Then he looked at Joscelin sidelong. ‘We hear you’re a man of means now.’

Joscelin smiled and spread his free hand wide. ‘Who am I to deny rumours?’

Gamel ran his tongue round his teeth. ‘They’re fine, fair lands you’ve got yourself.’