Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01] (32 page)

The sheriff said nothing as he walked, paying no attention to the soldier who paced abreast. He waited until he had reached the dais, climbed it, then sat down in his great chair. Like a cat, deLacey stretched, then gestured briefly with a single finger.

“My lord.” The veteran soldier inclined his head slightly. “I am resolved once morning comes that we shall locate this Scarlet very soon—”

“Morning?” deLacey inquired, cutting off the preamble with delicate precision. “Then you have not found them.”

Archaumbault hesitated only an instant, then continued steadfastly. “Not as yet, my lord, but—”

“Evening has fallen, yet Will Scarlet still roams free with the Lady Marian?”

Archaumbault, comprehending his lord’s mood at last, had the grace to blanch. Then he fell silent.

“Ah.” DeLacey nodded. “I see you understand.”

Archaumbault tried again. “In the morning we will return again to the forest—”

“And discover—what?” The sheriff leaned forward intently. “Do tell me, Archaumbault ... what exactly will you discover?”

“My lord, the outlaw—”

“And the Lady Marian?”

“—and the lady, yes, of course... the Lady Marian—”

Delacey’s voice whip-cracked. “In what
state,
Archaumbault?”

Archaumbault drew in a deep breath. “As to the lady’s state, we will of course take every precaution to protect her—”

DeLacey clutched the arms of the chair. “From what, Archaumbault? What is there
left
to protect the lady from? By morning, every outlaw in Sherwood may well have been beneath her skirts!”

It echoed in the hall. Archaumbault opened his mouth, shut it, then made the attempt. “Lord Sheriff, if our prayers are answered—”

“I’ve never known a man yet who was held from pleasure by
prayers.”

Archaumbault’s voice was low. “No, my lord.”

I doubt Archaumbault himself was ever held from pleasure by a woman’s prayers.
Delacey sat back again. He assessed his castellan.
He has no imagination, which makes him a poor conniver, but a better soldier, withal, And I still need him.
“She is special to me, Archaumbault. Her father, Sir Hugh, and I were very good friends.” He arched one brow. “Do you know what it is like to live with the knowledge that because you failed your duty, a beautiful young woman’s life has been destroyed?”

The skin of Archaumbault’s face was pulled taut over bones. “If they don’t kill her—”

“She will likely kill herself.”

Archaumbault crossed himself. “God forbid such a sin, my lord—”

“Yes, yes.” Delacey waved a dismissive hand. “God forbid, indeed ... nonetheless, there is an alternative.”

Archaumbault considered it, then nodded. “The Church, my lord.”

“Indeed. But if she turns to the Church...” He chewed thoughtfully at his lip, letting the sentence die.
If she turns to the Church, her lands go with her.
DeLacey smiled grimly. “If she turned to the Church, she gives up that which is most precious to a woman like Lady Marian. Freedom, Archaumbault.” He exuded sincerity. “No. That would be travesty. I think it is for me to care for the daughter of my dearest friend in the moment of greatest need.” He smiled warmly. “Find her, Archaumbault, and bring her here to me. No matter what she may say, bring her here to me.”

“My lord, she may wish first—”

“She will be understandably devastated, Archaumbault, as a lady of gentle birth has every right to be. Certainly my daughter has suffered from a similar happenstance.” DeLacey smiled sadly. “I have had some experience with this unfortunate circumstance. Bring her here, Archaumbault ... I will tend her welfare as her father would desire it.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The sheriff waved his hand. The soldier bowed briefly, then turned and departed the hall, mail glittering.

DeLacey slumped back again.
“Here,”
he repeated softly, “where I can impress upon her the magnitude of disgrace that befalls a despoiled woman.” He rubbed thoughtfully at his lip. “And then comfort her most tenderly in the nadir of her pain.”

 

Marian had, by the simple act of asking an innocent question, conjured memory again. Locksley found himself unexpectedly vulnerable, trapped in recollection.

“Forgive me,” she blurted, clearly alarmed by his withdrawal, the rigidity of the features he had trained to ward his soul. “If I said something wrong... I didn’t mean... I’m sorry—” She broke it off at last, letting the silence be loud between them.

She had not meant it. She was sorry. And he knew it. But it was fresh all over again, reawakened here in England: the sun, the heat, the sand; and the stink of newly spilled blood undiscerning of its origins in Saracen flesh or Christian.

Or even in his own.

The shame and guilt were renewed. It was all he could do not to shout. “I did not see Jerusalem.”

Her face was pale beneath dirt and welts and bruises. “It is private,” she managed tightly.

“Yes.” It was all
he
could manage.

Marian nodded stiffly, eyes fixed hard on the ground, and made her way in silence two steps past him to the rude bed he had fashioned from leaves and boughs. It was horribly uncomfortable, even for all his effort, but he sensed she would lie on it to punish herself for her tactlessness.

She had every right to ask, and he every right not to answer.

Marian lay down once again, making no effort to be comfortable. He watched her a moment, knowing he had hurt her without knowing why; knowing also she deserved more than to see his private pain, but he had nothing else to give, save the truth of experience, and that was most painful of all.

She lay on her back, very still, eyes closed. He doubted she would sleep. He knew he would not.

He turned away and sought his own place nearby, sitting down at the base of a tree with his back against the trunk. Two paces separated their bodies. Much more than that their minds.

She should know.
But he could not tell her.

Above all
she
should know, yet to tell her the whole of it would give her unbearable pain.
Tell her only a part.
But he shied away from that, aware of his own pain, that he himself could not bear.
Who do you protect? Marian-or yourself?

Conscience spoke again.
“Someone should be told

Someone
had
been told. But Richard now lay in a dungeon—or did they treat him better than that, knowing him for a king?

He looked again at FitzWalter’s daughter lying stiffly on the ground, ill-cushioned by his attempt to make her comfortable. The father’s voice was loud in the battered chamber of his skull.
And please to tell her, I pray you, how very much I love her.

“Robin.” Her voice was soft. “I have a right to know.”

Robin.
Like his mother. But Marian FitzWalter was not and never could be anything like his mother.

Nor was it his mother he wanted, looking across the two short paces to the woman in the darkness with moonlight’s wealth upon her face.

Arousal, unknown so long, locked away where it could not invite abuse, was painfully abrupt. The intensity made him breathless. “No—” She would misunderstand, of course, thinking he denied her; and he did, in his own way, though for a far different reason from the refusal to tell her the truth of her father’s death. He denied her on both counts, in speech and in carnal congress, or even the contemplation, because to allow himself the freedom to consider the repercussions of either would result in complete loss of self-control: emotionally, physically, spiritually.

No, he told himself, and beat at desire with words, though none of them aloud. Self-contempt warred with self-hatred, conquering a traitorous body too long denied release, too weak to insist upon it when faced with determination honed by the enemy.

Locksley gritted his teeth. What would the father say to know the man in whose place he died desired to lie with his daughter?

What would Richard say?

Will Scarlet lay flat on his back, staring up at the leaf-screened night sky. Through the latticework of limbs he saw the stars, the moon, and his future.
Meggie,
he mourned,
’tisn’t what we wanted. ’Tisn’t what we planned.

But there was nothing for it. Too much had simply
happened
to change his life forever. He was what he had been made by those who thought themselves better, but the time for change had come, albeit harshly and painfully. No more was he compliant. No more was he respectful in the face of unfair treatment. It was
his
turn now to shape what he would be.

Thief,
he said in silence, seeing how it felt.

Emptiness answered him.

Not what he had wanted. Not what he had planned. The worm of shame was painful, eating its way into his spirit.

He drew in a heavy breath and blew it out again, hearing it hiss through swollen lips. His head felt packed and thick, his front teeth loose, and his offended nose enormous.

Sudden tears at the back of his throat made it hard to swallow.
I wish you were here, my Meggie. By God, I wish you were.

But Meggie was gone forever.

Marian drew in a trembling breath, suppressing the desire to shout at Robert of Locksley. He was not the only one who grieved, who knew the pain and confusion of loss and sudden change.
I shouldn’t be any with him.
Yet another part asked,
Why not?

Evenly, she repeated, “I have the right to know.”

“He’s dead,” Locksley said roughly. “Is that not enough?”

It was, but she continued anyway because she had to know. Because she wanted to make him speak, to share with her the knowledge that drove him so mercilessly. “You said he died in your place.”

Colorlessly, “Yes.”

“That the Saracens had caught you.”

“Yes. So I said.”

Marian shut her eyes tightly, aware she walked the precipice of her own design. “Men say things...
people
say things, dependent upon their own vision of what is right. Even if what they recall is different from the truth.” She hoped it was enough, without being too much.

His first words divulged he understood her completely, even her intent. Even the suggestion, couched in subtlety. “I failed him. He died.”

No more than that. No extended excuses, no pleas for understanding, no cry for forgiveness from the dead man’s daughter.

Five simple words. Because of the first three, her father was dead.

She expected the pain to renew itself, the intensity of grief to overpower her.

Quietly, she said, “Men die in war. My father knew that very well; he said it often enough, when I asked him if he’d come back.” She did not look at him but lay very still, staring dry-eyed at the sky. “He was a knight all my life. Each time he rode away—when I was old enough—I asked him to come back. He said if he could, he would.”

Locksley was mute.

“Men die,” she repeated. “I miss him, I mourn him—I would give anything to have him back again—but how can I blame myself because I wasn’t enough to make him stay behind?” She paused. “How can you blame yourself for being more fortunate than he? You lived, he died. Short of dealing the deathblow yourself, what can you blame yourself
for?”

His voice was rusty. “You are not a priest.”

“And therefore I cannot perform a formal absolution?” Were it not so poignant, Marian would have laughed. “But that is why you came. The sheriff didn’t send you—he wouldn’t; you’re a threat, and he’s embarrassed and humiliated by Eleanor’s behavior, which he believes cost him a match with the Earl of Huntington’s son.” It was obvious to her, every bit if it; it occurred to her, but only in passing, to wonder why it mattered, and why she cared so
much
that he be freed of self-contempt. “No, you came for another reason. You came to expunge your guilt, and to petition a different source, a far more appropriate source, for the absolution you require.” She drew in a steadying breath. “Were I not FitzWalter’s daughter, you would still be in Nottingham.”

A noisy silence. Then, “Don’t,” he said, by way of admission.

I have to make him see.
Marian was unrelenting. “I forgive you, Robert of Locksley. I absolve you of it. And I, not a priest, am the only one who can.”

When he made no answer, she looked at him. His face divulged nothing because it was hidden from her, pressed against upraised knees with hands splayed across his bowed head.

It hurt very badly to see it. “Don’t,” she whispered raggedly, echoing his own plea.

At last, he lifted his head. The mask had shattered utterly, betraying the inner turmoil, the boy behind the man, so vulnerable in his pain. “It—was bearable,” he said. “Bearable, because it had to be, because a man grows
accustomed
—he must, if he is to live.” His face was ravaged. “Death is death, no more; a body is nothing but that, meat rotting on the ground. Because if you think about it—if you allow it into your sleep ...” He drew in a deep breath. “It was bearable. It was
forgotten
, in the first days after my capture... I spared no thought for him, because all I could think of was me, the white-haired pet of the Lionheart—” he broke it off stiffly, thumping his head against the tree as shoulders slackened. “When I thought of it again, I could not
stop
thinking of it. He was more than a dead man. More than a body. More than a piece of meat rotting on the ground. He had given me a
task
—he had told me of his daughter, and his hopes for that daughter, and his plans for that daughter... don’t you see? He made me see the man, not the knight. He made me see
the father.
...”He shivered once, in the cold, still damp from his fight with the giant. “And I came back at last, came
home
—and there she was. Sir Hugh FitzWalter’s daughter, standing there before me,
breathing
there before me, not dead, but so
alive...
the last remnant of the man who died at Richard’s side, because I wasn’t in my place. Because I had failed my duty.”

Tears ran down her face as she bit into her lip.

“You are very like your father. You don’t know—you
can’t
know—what it was like... to see you standing before me, all ignorant of the message—to see you, and
not
see you, but to see him instead, that moment before they killed him.”

Marian shut her eyes.

It was entirely unexpected. “He said to tell you he loved you.”

Now she stared, uncomprehending.

“I couldn’t say it,” he declared. “I was meant to—I was charged to ... but—” He scraped his rigid hands through his hair. His spirit seemed very weary. “There has been much of late I have been unable to say. To my father, to the others—” He sighed. “To anyone at all.” “But mostly to yourself.”

He looked at her. His face was stark in the moonlight, white where it touched, black where it did not. Then he turned his head, shutting himself away, and she knew, without knowing why, he was building his wall again, bit by desperate bit, trying to ward away the accuracy of her vision.

Marian stared up at the stars, very certain of herself.
Then I’ll have to tear it down.

 

“It’s not right,” Little John’s disembodied voice announced from out of the darkness. Unlike Scarlet he did not feign sleep, but sat against a tree a pace or two away. Even in dim light, his huddled form loomed hugely.

Scarlet didn’t answer.
What else am I to do? Let Adam Bell and the others shoot me full of arrows?

“Not right,” Little John repeated. “I’m a shepherd, not a thief.”

Shame renewed itself. The knowledge made Scarlet angry, because while he tried to come to terms with a new and unlawful future fraught with hardship and danger, the giant remained stolidly convinced he was not involved. Peasant he might be, but as certain of his place as the sheriff was of his.

It was frustrating. Adam Bell and his two men were only paces away themselves, talking quietly in the darkness, but undoubtedly aware of the giant’s intransigence, which might, Scarlet felt, reflect poorly on his own intentions. Therefore he spoke for their benefit as much as for his own. “What is it to you, if you take for yourself what another has gained unfairly?”

Little John’s contempt was plain. “And if it was me, then? Would you steal the coin from me?”

Scarlet laughed mutely, ignoring the pain of his nose and battered face. “What man alive would dare to steal from you?”

Little John’s tone was sharp. “I’m not meaning that. What I mean is, what if the man you mean to steal from is no richer than you are? What if he’s a peasant owing taxes to the sheriff—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Scarlet cut in, disliking the giant’s direction. It made him think. It made him aware that although he had suffered, others might suffer yet from what he would do.

“It should,” Little John growled. “ ’Tis hard enough to scrape together the coin to pay the taxes, and then you want to be stealing it from us. Better to steal from the sheriff.”

Will Scarlet scoffed. “Who could manage that? You? Even
you’d
stand no chance against a crossbow.”

Little John broke in two the stick he held. “Then steal it from Norman lords.”

Adam Bell’s voice came clearly through the darkness. “Merchants are easier.”

“And Jews,” Cloudisley added.

Clym of the Clough laughed. “There are the priests, too.”

Little John sounded horrified. “You rob priests?”

“Why not?” Bell asked. “They steal from us, don’t they? They make themselves rich off of us.”

Scarlet felt at his nose. “Doesn’t matter, does it? We’ll be robbing no one tonight.”

The giant scrubbed his bearded face with two huge hands. “I’m a shepherd. I’ll go home to Hathersage. I’ll not be stealing a penny, come morning or no.”

“I
will,” Scarlet snapped, angry at himself for wishing he, like Little John, still had a life to lead. “Go home to your sheep. Go home to Hathersage. Prove yourself a better man, till the sheriff comes to fetch you. Then
you’ll
be the piece of meat hanging at the end of Nottingham’s rope instead of Will Scathlocke!”

The giant’s voice was low. “He said he’d speak for me.”

“Who—that peasant?” Scarlet laughed thickly. “D’ye think the high sheriff of Nottingham would listen to a peasant about
another
peasant—”

“He isn’t a peasant,” Little John declared. “If you’d taken the time to look and listen, you’d have seen it for yourself.”

“What, then... a lord?
A lord
will speak for you?”

“He’s not a Norman,” Little John said. “He’s English, like all of us ... who’s to say what he will or won’t do?”

“What he
won’t
do is speak for you,” Scarlet declared. “Why would he? English he may be, but if it’s true he’s a lord, then he’s in the lap of the Normans.”

The giant shook his head. “I’ll bide my time.”

How could he be so blindly trusting? “Stubborn fool,” Scarlet muttered. “Can’t you see the truth? Don’t you see what our lives are, now?”

“Better than this,” Little John declared. “By God, better than this. Maybe there’s nothing left for you, but there is yet for me.”

“Sheeρ.”
Scarlet freighted it with contempt, because he had to. He was aware of envy and emptiness, that Little John could yet be so secure in his future when his own had been destroyed.

“Sheep,” Little John agreed, unoffended by the contempt. “ ’Tis a safer lot than yours.”

Scarlet waved a hand, staving off desperation. “Agh, go to sleep. I weary of your chatter.”

The giant’s laughter rumbled. “Think I’m a fool, do you? Can’t see it, can you?” He laughed again, almost gleefully. “No one knows I’ve come. No one knows I’m here.” He looked pointedly at Scarlet. “No one’s hunting
me.
”

“Until tomorrow,” Scarlet retorted, grasping at rejoinders.

“Tomorrow I’m going home.”

“Are you, then?” Adam Bell’s tone was soft.
“After
you pay your fee.”

Little John was belligerent. “I’ll pay no ‘fee’ gotten off an honest man.”

Scarlet barked a laugh. “Then rob a dishonest one.”

The giant was unamused. “I go where I will and do as I will—”

“Aye,” Scarlet agreed. “Until the sheriff says differently.”

“Two days,” Adam Bell said. “In two days, we’ll know.”

“Know what?” Little John asked suspiciously.

“Whether you’ll be going home to your sheep, or staying here with us.”

“Staying with
you
—”

“Or with some other merry band of men living outside the law.” Bell’s tone was quiet, dry, but very sure. “I have means of finding out what’s on the sheriffs mind. In two days, we’ll know.”