Prologue

Almost dawn, in February 1125.

Robin Archer knew that when he reached the end of his long vigil and night of reflection and prayer, he would be dubbed by his liege King Henry as Sir Robert of Oaklea.

Right now, though, he slightly shifted his weight from one knee to the other. It had been a long night and the cold sucked up from the stone flags was biting hungrily into his young bones. He steeled himself to control an involuntary shiver that threatened to shake loose every tooth in his head. He opened his eyes briefly, but closed them again as it was still quite dark within the closed and private stone chapel, with not even the welcome risen moon to provide any hint of a glow off the gilded and painted statue of The Blessed Virgin, now unseen in the gloom ahead of him.

His eyes had been closed for hours, engaged as he had been in his devotions to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in whose dedicated chapel he had kneeled away the dark lonely night. Not all his long night of knightly vigil had been spent in devotion, by prayers for wisdom and strength to the Virgin, but he used this opportunity to endeavour to confront his own secular demons too.

The beautiful Lady Elinor of Pitstone, had finally been excised from his constant thoughts, he firmly believed. He wanted to believe there was an end to that particular torment. The Lady was the love of his life. Of that he had no doubt at all but that thought was now pushed firmly into the past forever. She had been and always would be ‘his Lady’, but he had now been forced to accept that Elinor, the happily married Countess of large estates in Flanders and Picardy, was bound for life to her husband, the Count Gervaise, and thereby the Lady could never love a humble archer such as he, from a rude village in the West Midlands of the Old English Kingdom of Mercia. Not even an archer about to be knighted by her father, Henry the First, King of All England and Lord of the Duchy of Normandy, had the power to change what God had ordained for the beating heart of such a noble Lady.

But now it was but three years since he had first refused the knighthood offered by the King, on the day he had by the skill of his bow saved his Sovereign’s life. He was not yet a man then, an archer’s apprentice, and his father and master was but a year himself into life as a reluctant knight and shire reeve himself. Now Robin, as he was known by all his liegemen, was serving his knight’s nightlong vigil after a tough day of testing his worthiness as a potential knight, not only of the realm, but of Henry’s personal Order of Black Knights.

He supposed it must have been by reason that he had never served hitherto as a Knight’s Bound Esquire, that he had been tested so completely this past day, and rather painfully, in the arts of the sword, lance and horsemanship, in a private tourney staged for the Royal Court’s appreciative entertainment.

He had received the Summons to the Court on a parchment roll, tightly tied in scarlet silk and bearing the King’s Great Seal of two lions pressed into bright red beeswax, while he was competing in the archery contest at Great Minlow At The Marsh. The morose and strictly formal Herald of the King’s Household, who bore the King’s summons, was accompanied by a burly pair of Knights, and they had insisted he leave with them in haste, the Court sitting not five leagues distant. This time the journeyman archer and bow smith would not be given leave to decline the wishes of his Liege Majesty to knight him at last.