Liam looked back at the low flint wall, the open ground beyond that decorated with cherry trees and the structure of Beaumont Palace itself; it was not unlike a cathedral, long and low with a vaulted roof of timbers. And, he noticed, no motte or other defensive earthworks around the place. Hardly the safe retreat of a ruler in times of trouble.
‘Oxford Castle,’ said Cabot, grabbing the horses’ reins and turning them slowly round. ‘I know it well. ’Tis a strong keep and the city itself very well protected by its wall. Good place for John.’ Cabot’s dry laugh sounded humourless. ‘That is, unless the people of the city have also turned against him.’
The late-afternoon sun peeked through scudding clouds as the cart rattled unchallenged under Oxford city’s main gatehouse into a marketplace thick with the activity of traders closing up for the day.
Liam sat on the seat beside Cabot, chuckling with undisguised pleasure at the sight and the smell of the place. Market stalls, no more than flat hand-drawn carts, were being loaded with the unsold flotsam of the day: rotten, broken heads of cabbage and snapped turnip roots. He saw a trader stacking the remaining skinned hares and rabbits head to toe, a baker collecting the last unsold stale loaves of bread, and, among all the traders packing up for the afternoon, he saw a wandering rabble of very old and very young beggars in dirty threadbare rags, pleading for the scraps too unfit to sell and destined for a pig’s trough.
‘’Tis a bad time for the poor,’ said Cabot.
Liam’s gleeful smile all of a sudden felt wrong. Poverty. Grinding poverty. He’d seen that before; beggars in Cork, of course. But that was for money. Money that would perhaps end up going towards a drink. But this … this was begging for the food that pigs would eat.
‘Aye,’ he said quietly.
Across the market, a thin veil of smoke hung, the collaboration of woodsmoke from a dozen outdoor pyres and the mist of warm breath from a thousand mouths in the cooling air. The air smelled overpoweringly of two things: woodsmoke and dung. Woodsmoke … Liam had noticed that every place and every thing seemed to smell of that. If there was one odour that would remind him of the twelfth century for the rest of his life, it would be that. And it mercifully covered up at least some of the cloying stench of festering faeces, a heady brew produced by animals and humans alike.
Cabot noticed him wrinkling his nose. ‘’Tis one of the reasons I choose a monk’s life, far away from the city.’ He nodded ahead of them. ‘Oxford Castle.’
It was approaching dusk now; the grey sky deepening to a midwinter’s blue. The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sun was gone, lost behind the city’s wall. Emerging through the low-hanging haze of smoke and mist ahead of them, Liam spotted the tall and square-sided Norman keep of Oxford Castle. Through high-up slitted windows, he glimpsed the amber glow cast from warming braziers and flickering torches.
Cabot steered the cart up a weaving cobblestone thoroughfare, narrowing in places where shanty-town huts and sheds encroached like scab tissue around a sore. Through open flaps of tattered cloth Liam caught the fleeting images of pale and curious faces lashing out: faces smudged with dirt, and gaunt from hunger. Eyes that stared without hope at the flickering of a tallow candle inside, eyes that glanced his way momentarily with only passing interest.
Liam’s hope of seeing green fields and fair maidens and chivalrous knights in gleaming armour and merry men skipping round maypoles and florid-cheeked buxom wenches laughing with simple peasant joy … now seemed rather naive.
This is grim.
The cart crossed over a wooden-slat bridge, over a muddy-coloured river that had frozen over at the edges. Ahead of them, a tall stone archway announced they’d arrived at Oxford Castle. Liam watched a gate guard approach the cart.
‘What business?’ He eyed Cabot’s Cistercian robes and added brother as an afterthought.
‘I seek an audience with His Lordship, the Earl of Cornwall and Gloucester.’
‘He has no time for a sermon.’
‘Tell him his old sword master is here. Cabot.’
The guard’s eyes narrowed as he studied Cabot in the fading light. ‘Stay here,’ he said, before turning away and calling out to one of the other guards to take the news inside.
‘Be hasty,’ said Cabot after him, ‘’tis cold out here and he will be angry when he finds ye have kept his old friend waiting.’
The guard looked sceptically at him. ‘Friend, eh?’ He walked around towards the rear of the cart as they waited. ‘What have ye in here?’
‘Visitors,’ said Cabot.
The guard lifted the canvas cover with the tip of his sword. ‘Ahhh … a strumpet for His Lordship, is it?’ A smile stretched across the leathered skin of his face as he reached a gloved hand out to touch her leg. ‘Ye are a pretty thing for a peasant girl, aren’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Liam, peering under the flap from the other end of the cart. He looked at Becks, and saw muscles tensing beneath her peasant’s gown. The last thing they needed was her twisting the head off one of John’s guards. ‘Becks,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t hurt him.’
‘Affirmative,’ she replied, a hint of resentment in her voice.
The guard laughed at that. ‘Hurt me, would you? Well now … this I would most like to see — ’
Raised voices came from beyond the archway, echoing off the stone walls inside — a commotion within. The guard retracted his hand and nodded politely at Becks. ‘Pity,’ he muttered, then pulled his head out from beneath the canvas.
‘What is it?’
The higher-pitched voice of a younger man. ‘He comes! He knows the monk!’
Cabot grinned like a wily fox at the guard captain. ‘There, what did I tell you?’
The captain stepped back from the cart and stood to attention as the clacking of approaching boots on cobblestones grew louder in the twilight. Presently the archway filled with the flickering glow of a blazing torch and Liam spotted the short squat silhouette of a man with long hair standing in the middle.
‘What in damnation is going on here?’ a voice barked angrily, echoing off the masonry. ‘Let him through!’
Cabot tweaked the reins and the cart rattled through the low archway and finally came to a rest inside the castle walls. The squat figure stood on the ground beside Cabot, a dark shape puffing pale blue clouds of breath.
‘Sebastien Cabot!’
‘Aye, Sire.’
‘Last I heard, you were abroad killing Turks!’
Cabot wheezed a laugh. ‘I tired of such things.’
A young squire holding the flickering torch hurried round the back of the cart and approached them. John’s face was finally illuminated by the dancing amber light. Liam could make out a slender effeminate face, decorated with a wispy beard and moustache that fluttered with each breath, and framed by fine, long, tawny hair. He was smiling warmly at Cabot. ‘Sebastien,’ he said, after looking up at the old man’s battle-scarred face a little longer than was polite, ‘I cannot tell you how good it is to see you again, my old friend.’
Cabot jumped down from the cart and John wasted no time in wrapping his arms round him.
‘’Tis good to see a friendly face,’ added John.
Cabot gingerly returned his embrace. ‘How is my student?’
John released him and stepped back. He shrugged. ‘I am still a clumsy fool. More likely to hack my own head off than another man’s.’ He glanced up at Liam. ‘So … you have a son now?’
‘No, he is not my son.’ He turned and looked at Liam. ‘He — he is here to …’ Cabot was searching for words.
‘What? Sebastien?’
‘Sire, I believe this lad and two more of his friends in the back may help in retrieving the item that has been lost.’
John sighed. ‘So you have heard of this, as well, eh?’
A long silence passed between both men, an unspoken understanding of the matter at hand.