Forbidden Forest (9 page)

“I owe you a debt, my lady,” said Osric, continuing to smile. “If ever you need a friend in the forest—”

The forest
.

Margaret was surprised at the thrill the words gave her. The woodland nearby was all royal demesne, and most town people thought of it as dangerous wilderness, to be avoided.

The butt end of a spear struck the side of a wine cart abruptly, and a voice ordered it to move on. Henry, chief deputy to the sheriff of Nottingham, strode through the crowd. With a quick bow, the juggler straightened his hood and disappeared through the thronged street.

No juggler under Heaven wanted an encounter with Henry the sheriff's man.

The chief deputy gave a cheerful bow to Margaret and wished her a good day, adding, “There are those like Osric who think there are wonders and powers in the greenwood—and then there are men like me.”

“Fat and without grace?” prompted Bridgit.

Chapter 16

I won't marry Sir Gilbert, Father.

Margaret could almost bring herself to say this.

Her father sat on a bench beside a thin fire, holding his hands out to the pale flames, having listened to his daughter's description of the violence against the juggler. He had devoured his portion of fish pie hungrily and exclaimed what an excellent dish it had been, down to the very crust. Hygd, the sole house servant, ate her share with thanks and worked now in the scullery, her slight figure passing back and forth, scrubbing and rearranging pots as though the entire house had to be set in perfect order for the forthcoming marriage to be blessed.

“Margaret, I wish you every happiness under Heaven,” said William Lea with a sigh.

He's a cruel man, she wanted to say.

“Knights become rough,” her father continued, as though he knew her thoughts. “They live to knock other knights down, in games or in war. His old injury pains him, and a hurt man has a short temper.” A horse had tumbled during a legendary tournament in Doncaster, and Sir Gilbert's leg had been broken so badly that now, ten years later, the knight walked with a decided limp. He had donated a life-size silver leg to Saint Alban's in thanks for Heaven's healing. “I know that Sir Gilbert has a sweeter nature in his heart, which a loving wife can discover.”

Margaret's two closest friends, Cecilia and Mary, had both been married during the past two years and had moved to large houses in the outlying countryside. Margaret missed the two of them, with their store of merry gossip and warm laughter. But she also felt that Heaven was weaving her closer and closer to the hour of her own marriage, and that this was both inevitable and proper.

She weighed what she should say and at last offered an opinion, with a laugh, as though she only half meant it. “Sir Gilbert looks at me the way Patch looks at a mouse.”

Patch was the mouser her father allowed to sleep in his bedchamber. The thick-furred tomcat grew fat on his prey and loved nothing so much as to corner a kitchen mouse and cuff it about for an hour or two, until the rodent was paralyzed.

“The wedding contract was signed all these many months ago,” said her father in that tone he used on customers, stewards of the great houses, even the sheriff in his castle, when he reminded them of an unpaid debt for saffron and cinnamon, or even the precious black pepper itself. Marriages were civil contracts—involving money, land, or other valuables—that were solemnly blessed at the church door on the wedding day.

“If I don't receive the wedding payment,” her father continued, “my shipload of nutmeg and ginger will sit in a warehouse until rats have eaten it all up.” Fighting in foreign lands had disrupted the trade routes, and pirates sacked what armies did not plunder. William's shelves were nearly bare, and there were new shadows in his cheeks. He spoke sometimes of going to the market in London, where rumor had it cloves sat in storage by the ton.

The spicer looked at his daughter with a gentle smile. “I know Sir Gilbert is a hard man.”

“He speaks in a honeyed voice when he wants to coax a smile from me.”

“What did I tell you—you'll win him to more Christian ways.”

Margaret had to turn away to hide her laugh. Her father always won every argument. From beggar to knight-bachelor, no man or woman could keep a surly tone with William Lea.

“Besides,” he said, “I have heard that Lionel Ogbert coaxes his master into being faster with his fists than he might otherwise choose to be.”

“I have heard the market was all laughter when Osric made an eel disappear.”

“I've made a fried eel disappear,” said Margaret's father, “with a cup of five-day ale.”

“An eel skin stuffed, I believe, and he hides it somewhere in a wink; you can't see him do it.”

“Heaven protect us all,” said William, “from men without mercy.”

“And cruel husbands,” offered his daughter.

Sir Gilbert had been married before, to a woman who bore him three infant daughters who each died shortly after birth. Lady Phillipa had died in a fall down Sir Gilbert's stairs some fifteen months before. In Nottingham only wealthy ladies, women of quality, generally married for love, and they were famous mostly in songs and poems. Margaret knew of no such blessed woman personally.

Matthew, the young man she had loved when she was thirteen, had left with local knights to perform duty as a squire in battles in Poitou, Aquitaine, and wherever else a young squire's skills were required. Fighting men were drawn to Jerusalem, where the Holy Cross was threatened by the Infidel, and from which few men-at-arms ever returned.

“I came to love your mother with my whole heart,” William was saying, and Margaret was sorry to cause her father's mind to travel this sad, worn path again. Her mother was a colorful, transparent memory. She was like a miracle in a church window, glass and brilliant hues not touchable, separate from this recent existence of meager firewood and patched linen. Her mother had died years ago, with a just-born infant son, who slept with his mother in the churchyard.

“If my husband strikes me, ever, even once,” said Margaret, “Bridgit and I shall come home immediately.”

“If he hits you—” William looked up from the fire, his eyes bright. “If he so much as pinches you in anger, Margaret, you come home to me, and I'll kick him down his big oak stairs.”

This was the side of her father the gentlefolk rarely saw when they stopped by the spicery to compliment him on the fragrance of his shop. Once, in the days when the house had many servants, he had ordered a carver out of the house for kicking a ewer, a lad who carried the basin for washing before meals. The carver had bent his knee in apology, and William had relented, but both the spicer and his daughter were what Bridgit called
styf:
unflinching and, given the right cause, strong.

William was laughing. “But Bridgit will be there before me, all the town knows. She'll break the head of any husband that does you harm.”

Chapter 17

“My lady, your husband will be a kind master, by my faith,” said Bridgit, brushing Margaret's hair that night. “Your dear father would not arrange a harsh marriage.”

Bridgit had a way of patronizing her superiors when they were out of earshot. For years Margaret's father had been “that poor, dear master William,” just as Father Joseph was “that dear, kind, squinty-eyed priest.”

“Sir Gilbert is a brute,” said Margaret. “But with a kind humor he is reluctant to show—don't you think?”

“Listen to the tongue in you,” said her attendant, brushing all the harder. “Marrying a rich knight, and all you think about is a juggler's bruises. I think dear Sir Gilbert wanted to have jugglers and such thrown out of the city before your wedding feast, so the town would be a happier place. No baron would have been more thoughtful. The poor man is trying to make you happy.”

Margaret saw a small portion of her face in her metal mirror. Her eyes were gray—the color most favored in romances, gray-eyed women awaiting their lovers in flowery bowers. She gave herself another glance and admitted that her eyes were not as gray as she could wish. They were bluish gray, or perhaps not in truth quite gray at all, but common blue, like any hayward's wife. She could slap pink into her cheeks, and keep a gloss in her hair with the help of Bridgit, but she did not know of any art that would change the color of her eyes.

“Do you think I am … well-favored?” Margaret asked.
When I am as naked as a needle in the bedchamber, will my husband eye me with pleasure?

“You are a spotless jewel, my lady,” Bridgit protested. “As fair as silver.”

Margaret asked for the letter, and her attendant brought it. Margaret had studied Latin with the prioress, a genteel, expensively dressed woman with a reputation for high knowledge. Most women did not read, and Margaret could not read very well, but she recognized the handwriting of the clerk of Saint Alban's. The scribe had no doubt earned a shiny penny writing out Sir Roger's letter to his bride-to-be.

The words were written in dark-brown walnut ink, and the knight's seal marked the bottom, scarred sharply with Sir Gilbert's signet ring. Margaret did not read the words just now—it was enough to have the letter nearby.

“Is it true that the juggler learned his tricks from Robin Hood?” asked Margaret as Bridgit held her fingers to the candlelight.

“Queen of Heaven, who am I to know such things?” said Bridgit. When she was not trying to impress other servants with a court accent, Margaret's attendant used such mild blasphemies—
ma fay, Heuen-Queen
. Bridgit knew all the ballads of Robin Hood and claimed to have seen Little John's footprint on Hob Moor, “so big I went all weak.”

But since the marriage contract had been signed, Margaret had noticed a change in the way Bridgit spoke in private, trying out a new accent, her voice slightly more breathy and higher-pitched. A knight was not an earl, but he was a marriage prize nonetheless. William Lea's family had been worshipful burgesses in town for generations, but little more. Sir Gilbert's servants ate fresh bread every day, and Bridgit would join them. She was soon to be a servant in a fine house, and perhaps such servants did not find it proper to speak of outlaws.

At sixteen years of age, Margaret was somewhat old to be marrying such a wealthy man. Most men of name preferred young wives, who would offer more years of childbearing. Most other women were married before their fifteenth year, but William Lea had been patient, allowing Margaret herself to realize that Squire Matthew was lost in battle far away.

“Will you pray with me?” asked Margaret, after Bridgit had satisfied herself that her lady's fingernails were clean.

“As always, my lady,” said Bridgit.

“But tonight, I am asking a special boon from Heaven,” said Margaret.

“What, my lady?”

“A prayer that my husband might love me as well as he pretends to.”

“Heaven above us, my lady is frightened.” Bridgit laughed, and gave her charge's hand a nearly painful squeeze. “You aren't the first bride to wonder how the stallion feels to the mare.”

She added in a low, loving voice, with no trace of high accent, “All Nottingham knows I won't let him lay a hand on you.”

“
I am of good fame, and prayerful.
”

This was how Sir Gilbert's letter began.

Margaret sat alone in the candlelight, the pale ox-wax candle smoking and giving off the smell of old cooking fat. Bridgit bustled about the outer chamber, singing a song Margaret half recognized, about the cock between the sticks. It was the description of a child's sport, a trapped rooster suffering stones and thrown sticks until a lucky blow knocked it squawking to the ground. Margaret had no doubt of the song's other, more cheerfully lewd meaning. She smoothed the letter in her hand and parsed out the words.

“With mirth and minstrelsy, before the saints, and meats as you will, I will joy under Heaven with you my good wife.”

Margaret had much more to read, and knew it all by heart. But her eye crept back to “meats as you will,” the straightforward knight's speech forcing its way past the chaste pieties of the clerk.

It meant more than a happy table with veal and fowl of all sorts. It meant that he would celebrate with her the sitting-down and savoring of this nourishment. It could mean, she convinced herself, that he felt gentle happiness at the thought of her.

“Bridgit, what was Lady Phillipa like?” asked Margaret.

Bridgit came back into the chamber, arranging the pillows and removing a sachet of lavender that sweetened the bed during the day. Her father had been a huntsman, a skilled laborer who beat undergrowth and manned a lance when an aristocrat chose to go hunting. Sometimes Margaret caught Bridgit gazing out over the roofline to the forest as though wishing she had a duty that required a stout voice and a sharp hunting knife. “She was what she seemed, quiet and obedient.”

“Did she fall alone, or was someone with her?” asked Margaret.

“The servants say she could not sleep, losing the last little girl, after a week of labor.”

Margaret could not say the words that followed out loud, so she whispered them. “She took her own life?”

Bridgit put her hands on her hips. “Everyone knows what happened that night.”

Margaret had heard, often. But she needed to hear it yet again.

“She was at the head of the stairs, my lady,” said Bridgit, a deliberate weight to her words. “And a devil tripped her.”

Never, thought Margaret.
I'll not marry Sir Gilbert
.

Chapter 18

All executions, including hangings and wheelings, took place outside the city walls at a place called Lazarfield.

The great field of green grass had once been a dwelling place for poor folk too diseased to be allowed to dwell within the walls. Now a crowd of solemn people gathered, and Margaret joined Bridgit under the sunny sky. Bridgit wore a somber hood, and Margaret likewise—women covered their heads at such events, as though they were in church. Parishioners were expected to attend such executions; it was considered both a civic and religious duty.