‘Eoferwic?’ I asked.
‘There’s nowhere better,’ Robert said. ‘It lies far enough from the Marches and from the Danes to be in any danger, and it’s where my father is too.’
‘What about the?theling?’ I countered. ‘If the news coming out of the north is right, he’ll be marching sooner rather than later. When he does, his mind will be set on Eoferwic.’
‘Don’t forget he was ousted from there once before, and his entire army routed too. If he has any sense in him — if he’s learnt anything — he won’t want to suffer the same reversal twice. He has spent the months since then trying to convince the Northumbrian nobles to give him their support again. Now that he has it, he won’t want to squander it.’
‘Unless his overweening pride demands that he achieves what he failed to last year,’ I said. ‘He is that kind of man: determined and ambitious.’
Robert shrugged. ‘He can try as much as he likes but he will not succeed. He won’t take the city a second time. Its walls have been rebuilt, and with two castles now defending the riverbanks, any fleet or land army would be foolish to attempt an assault.’
I wasn’t convinced of that. I had lived long enough to know it was ever dangerous to underestimate an opponent, especially when it came to ambition and resourcefulness: two qualities I knew Eadgar did not lack.
‘You can’t assume that the?theling will abandon his journey simply because the road is difficult,’ I said. ‘He might be young but he is arrogant. He’d rather take the riskier route if the prize on offer is great enough. You haven’t met him, but I have, and I know.’
Indeed Eoferwic was a jewel to be prized: the greatest and most prosperous of all the towns in the north of the kingdom, second only to Lundene in the whole of England. With that in mind, it seemed to me unlikely that Eadgar would be deterred by the fact of the ditches having been dug a little deeper and the ramparts built another few feet higher. He had come close to succeeding before, and now that the king’s forces were spread even more thinly, the time was ripe for him to try again.
‘If you have somewhere better in mind, name it now,’ Robert said, clearly growing frustrated.
His tone took me aback, but I had nothing more to add or any other refuges to suggest. And so Eoferwic it would be. As a place where Beatrice might safely weather the storm to come, it was certainly no worse than Scrobbesburh. When last I was there the second castle was still being completed, under the eye of Guillaume fitz Osbern, no less. That was over a year ago: not since Wace, Eudo and I had given our oaths to Robert in the weeks following the great battle had I walked its streets. Only a month or so before that, we had been escorting his sister and their mother from Eoferwic to the safety of Lundene. Thus it was ironic that for the same reason, our paths now led us back there.
It is strange how sometimes we find our lives unfolding in circles, each step taking us not forward but merely around and around, until at last we end up where we began.
Eoferwic was where I had first sworn my allegiance to the Malet house and the banner of the black and gold. It was where this reputation I had unwittingly won for myself had been forged. If God were a poet and my life a song, then Eoferwic would be the refrain.
That night I slept better than I had done in some while. The wind was changing direction, turning to the east, and the air felt cooler, less stifling than it had been of late. I was long due some proper rest after days on campaign, bedding down on stony ground that dug into my back and my side. Indeed the first time I woke was when the tent-flap was pulled aside and I heard Robert’s voice telling me to wake.
Bleary-eyed, my mind still clouded with sleep, I raised myself from the blankets and crawled out. He and his conroi were already waiting. One of his knights carried the familiar black-and-gold banner, furled around the staff so as to attract less attention, while another carried a torch that hurt my eyes to look at.
‘I’m going to meet Beatrice,’ Robert said. ‘Join us by the town’s northern gates as soon as you can.’
He left some of his manservants to help us; I sent them to fetch our destriers and rounceys. Our saddlebags were already packed, and we had filled our wineskins the night before in readiness. While Snocca and Cnebba loaded them on to the sumpter ponies that we shared, the rest of us set about striking camp. The quicker we could be gone, the less attention we would draw. And the fewer people knew we were leaving, the fewer questions there would be.
We were tying our bedrolls to the ponies’ harnesses when Pons gave a shout. I turned quickly, thinking that something was wrong. Swearing violently, he dragged his foot out from one of the latrine pits; in the dark they weren’t easy to spot and he must have lost his footing. His shoe and the hem of his trews were soaked in piss.
‘Quiet!’ I told him as I buckled my sword-belt on to my waist. The last thing I wanted was too much noise. ‘Be more careful.’
He glared at me but thankfully after that he kept his curses quiet, muttering under his breath.
Mailed and mounted, we rode out. There was neither honour nor pride to be had in running from a battle, and even though I knew it was for the right reasons, still the thought made me feel uneasy, as if somehow I were a traitor to my countrymen. I tried to put it from my mind. My allegiance was to my lord and his kin, and to their protection; nothing else ought to matter.
By then a few men, probably woken by Pons’s curses, had emerged from their tents. They called to us, asking who we were and what we were doing about so early.
‘Ignore them,’ I muttered. ‘Don’t say a word to anyone.’
From the amount of baggage we carried they would soon realise that we weren’t headed out on any scouting expedition, and it was but a short leap from there for them to guess we were deserting. Even so, I preferred to let them work that out for themselves. By the time word got around the camp and made its way to Fitz Osbern that the son of Malet and his followers had gone, I hoped the town would be many miles behind us.
Robert was waiting for us at the town’s north gates when we reached them. Beatrice was with him, huddled in her cloak so that she seemed somehow smaller, her face pale in the moonlight. She would not meet my eyes. Her brother gave a nod to the sentries posted at the gate; I wondered how much he had paid them to let us through at this hour, and to hold their tongues too. The gates swung open with a great grinding noise, loud enough to wake the whole town. I winced at the sound as I took up position at the rear of the column alongside Pons and Serlo. In silence we filed through the gates under the watchful eyes of the sentries. Open country lay before us, the hills and woods lit dimly by the cloud-veiled moon. There was no sign yet of the approaching dawn.
Eudo and Wace weren’t to be found among Robert’s retinue. They and their knights had left the afternoon before, Robert having sent them back to his manor at Heia to help defend it against the Danes in case they landed in Suthfolc. Since the battle both had tried to avoid me whenever possible — as if they, like the Wolf and so many others, held me responsible for the deaths of their men — and at the very least I should have liked to wish them well before they went.
We had ridden perhaps a hundred paces along the track out of Scrobbesburh when behind us I heard the sounds of hooves and a man’s voice, calling out what sounded like my name. Over the jangle of harnesses and the wind rustling the stalks in the nearby wheatfields it was hard to make out, and at first I thought myself mistaken. But as I glanced at Serlo and Pons I saw that they had heard too. We hadn’t left anyone behind so far as I could tell, and so it couldn’t be a straggler. And apart perhaps from Byrhtwald, who had already fled the town, who knew that we were leaving?