It was like a dragon’s treasure cave: a glittering hoard. There were small barrels overflowing with silver pennies, iron-bound chests containing precious gems, small round sacks of coin piled in heaps, silver and gold plates and candlesticks, cups, knives, mazers, serving dishes, bright pieces of women’s jewellery, and all the moveable wealth of middle England scattered about the place on shelves, in wooden boxes and casks and even in mounds on the floor. As the candlelight was reflected, sparkling and bouncing off this incredible accumulation of booty, I sensed that even Robin was stunned to see so much wealth in one place.
But he did his best not to show it. Instead he busied himself pulling open his cloak and unwinding a series of confections of rope and cloth bags from around his waist. He hurled a couple at me and I caught them in the air. Unfolding them, I found that they were pairs of rough canvas bags attached to stout networks of rope. Hanno showed me how to wear them: he filled the two canvas bags with silver pennies then draped the heavy bags over his neck so that the chinking burdens hung from a kind of harness under his arms, gently nudging his ribs. Then he grabbed another pair of bags and began again.
‘Only coin, I think,’ said Robin. ‘Leave all the bulky stuff. And carry no more than you can comfortably run with, boys. Quickly now!’
And we fell to with a will, using our hands to shovel the bright discs of silver in glittering cascades into the bags and then hanging them around our necks and shoulders, festooning our bodies with a fortune. I could not resist a quiet laugh: if I were to die at this particular moment, I thought to myself, I would die a very rich man.
Robin passed me a wide leather belt upon which were hung six big leather pouches at equal distances. I strapped it around my waist and filled each pouch with golden coins: fat, greasy, glittering Bezants, the like of which I had not seen since my time in Outremer. I looked at the other two men: their eyes were bright with greed and the simple delight of seeing precious metal shining in the candlelight. And our joy was infectious.
Finally, Robin called a halt to our plundering: ‘No more,’ he said. ‘No more, or we will not be able to move.’
I was fingering a beautifully carved golden cross, studded with precious gems. ‘Alan, put that down and let’s be away from here,’ he ordered.
For a moment, I considered defying him, I wanted that cross; it was so beautiful, so fine — surely I had earned it for all the recent strains put on my loyalty to him? — such is the dark pull of treasure on a man’s soul that I gave Robin an evil glare, and considered shoving it in my boot top — and then I came to my senses and replaced the gorgeous cross on a nearby shelf. And reluctantly we left the treasury, Robin locking it carefully behind us.
We stepped over the two corpses, chinking slightly as we moved, each carrying in the region of sixty pounds of precious metal hung in dozens of bags slung from cords and ropes about our bodies. As we staggered our way down the corridor, once more in pitch darkness, I laid my hand on Hanno’s shoulder ahead of me, with Robin moving heavily behind me. We were carrying as much coin as we could, yet we had hardly made a dent on the contents of the treasury — at most we had taken one tenth of all the silver and gold there. I marvelled at how much wealth Prince John had accumulated in the past few months — despite Robin’s constant depredations on his wagon trains. John must easily be the wealthiest man in England by a long mile. As I thought about this, I missed my step and blundered into the back of Hanno, and the bags of coin at my chest banged into the ones slung at his back with a grinding squeak. ‘Be quiet!’ hissed Robin savagely. Mutely I accepted his rebuke.
More than anything I dreaded running into a party of menat-arms: under normal circumstances, with Robin and Hanno at my side, we would have been a match for any group of armed men — even a dozen of them. But encumbered as I was, with that dead weight of metal around my neck, shoulders, chest and waist, I would be as slow-moving in a fight as the ogre Milo; I was not sure I could defeat even one half-competent man-at-arms. And so I prayed that we would not be discovered as we proceeded as silently as we could down each corridor and passage, following Hanno’s unerring sense of direction in the dark.
Finally we stopped by a big door in the sandstone wall, Hanno lifted the rusty latch and we stumbled into a dusty room and quietly shut the door behind us. I heard Robin scraping away with a flint and steel until he had a glow, and then a small flame with which to light the candle inside the lantern. By that guttering light, I saw that the walls of the room were stacked with barrels of varying sizes, all thickly covered with cobwebs. Wine barrels, ale casks, huge tuns — dozens of them. I tapped one or two of them experimentally and found them to be empty. The cobwebs should have given me a clue: clearly this room had not been used in years. To be honest, I was sorely disappointed: I could have done with a drink — the excitement of the night and the effort of carrying all that weight of metal had made me thirsty.
Hanno beckoned me over to the far wall, where an old curtain was hanging from a rail. He pulled back the curtain to reveal another door, very wide and low — no more than five foot high — and like a conjuror at a county fair, he pulled a big iron key from his pouch, brandishing it in the dim light of Robin’s lantern. I was mystified, but followed Hanno when he unlocked the door, stooping to get through the low entrance and into a very small chamber beyond. Once Robin had joined us, Hanno solemnly locked the low door behind us, tucked away the key, and gestured with a flourish at a structure in the centre of that small space. It appeared to be some sort of well housing: a wide circular stone wall about knee height and six foot in diameter, above which stood a small crane arm, with a heavy-looking block-and-tackle pulley. A thick rope dangled from the crane arm, falling away into the darkness of the well.
I frowned: I knew that the castle had a deep well in the outer bailey near the new brewhouse, and huge cisterns for storing rainwater in the roof of the great tower in case of a siege, but I’d had no idea there was a well here, at what I judged to be the south-eastern side of the upper bailey. Surely we were too high up here for men to have found water by digging through the sandstone. I peered down into the shaft of the well but could see no more than ten feet down. And I could discern no flickering shine of reflection off a surface of water. Perhaps a dry well, then?
Robin came over to me, grinning happily: ‘What do you think, Alan — brilliant, isn’t it? Underneath that uncouth, ale-guzzling exterior, your man Hanno is a bona fide genius.’
I was very slow that day, I confess. And my puzzlement must have been obvious. Robin laughed: ‘Come on, Alan — you can work it out. What is that room out there?’ He indicated the low door we had just passed through.
‘It’s an old buttery,’ I said. ‘But it looks as if it has not been used for some time now.’ I was still none the wiser.
‘And what do butteries contain?’
‘Butts,’ I said stupidly. ‘Butts of ale and wine, and so on and so forth.’
‘And where do butts of ale come from?’
Suddenly I had it. ‘From a brewhouse. From the new brewhouse in the outer bailey,’ I said excitedly, my brain finally working at full speed. ‘But before that was built three years ago, they used to come from the old brewhouse outside the castle walls, which was next to The Trip to Jerusalem tavern. So this is not a well…’
Hanno came over to join us by the wide shaft. ‘That is the way that the ale is delivered to the castle in the old days. They make it in the brewhouse and put it into barrels and then they bring the barrels up this shaft so the men can be drinking it in the castle. But nobody uses it now. It is forgotten, I believe. Perfect, eh, Alan? A perfect way out.’
‘Shall we?’ said Robin with a smile, gesturing at the rope that hung down into the darkness.