Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01] (40 page)

“Do I believe it was worth it?” Marian sighed. “Had you asked it of me yesterday,
before
Will Scarlet, I would have said it depended on how much she cared for the man. But now I can no longer judge. I am myself as publicly despoiled as Eleanor. It doesn’t matter that Will Scarlet never attempted intimacy ... they will condemn me anyway. They will whisper about me, spread rumors about me, take delight in exaggerating the stories, until they will have it given out that every outlaw in Sherwood Forest had the chance to lift my skirts.” She looked at him unflinchingly. “That is what they will say. I must be prepared for it.”

She was fierce, and proud, even in the tattered dishabille that underscored the brutal truth of what she said. And in that fierceness, that pride, that dishabille, he considered her more beautiful than the woman he had met upon the dais of Huntington Castle.

His head ached. His eyes felt hot. “What will you do?” he asked. “Have you other family?”

She shrugged. “There are other FitzWalters, but only distantly related. My father’s brothers died without issue. And my brother when he was sixteen ... my father leaves no one to carry on the name.” Her face was in stark, brittle profile as she watched the rutted road. “I am in wardship to the Crown. Before this, I have no doubt the king might have wed me to whomever asked for me. Now, I have no value.” Her lopsided smile was bittersweet. “Eleanor made her choice, and now she suffers for it. I made no choice at all, but the result is the same.” Marian raised her head and looked directly at him. The challenge was implicit. “Tell me again, Sir Robert, that a woman need not concern herself with such masculine things as pride.”

He did not tell her so. She deserved the truth.

William deLacey.
The name was inside his head. He wondered somewhat erratically if delirium had overtaken him at last, that he would think of the sheriff appropos of nothing.

And then he realized it was appropos of
something:
Locksley knew with perfect conviction that the sheriff would still take her, regardless of the stories.

Men had done less for despoiled women before. A man such as deLacey, looking at this woman, would do much more.

William deLacey swept the amber-dyed mantle around his shoulders and pinned it impatiently with a massive brooch of Celtic knotwork set with golden cairngorm. Though different in weight and style from the Huntington heraldic brooch, it served to remind him even more forcefully of Robert of Locksley’s unanticipated and wholly undesirable aid in rescuing Marian. That Archaumbault had failed made deLacey all the angrier; he had fully expected to be credited with the rescue in his guise as Sheriff of Nottingham. It was, after all, his job.

He stabbed the tang through wool, then strode purposefully out of the chamber into a smudgy corridor, glowering at the woman ineffectively sweeping the floor just outside his door. Another time he might have chastised her for poor work; just now, he had other things on his mind.

DeLacey had counted on the rescue. More than anything the rescue of a woman by a man made that man more attractive to the woman, and he had anticipated Marian’s gratitude in full measure, expecting it to aid his quest to secure her hand. But now it was Robert of Locksley she would thank for winning her back from Scarlet. The knowledge made deLacey grit his teeth so hard his jaw ached.

The overly familiar voice was strident, cutting through his surly thoughts like a scythe. “Where are you going?”

He swung around, coldly furious. “I told you to remain in your chambers. I put you there myself.”

Eleanor glared back as she came down the corridor. “You can hardly expect me to remain mewed up for days on end.”

“Of course not,” he returned silkily. “I value my hawks more highly than you, and would not discompose them with your company in the mews.”

It stopped her dead in her tracks, gaping at him most unattractively. Little helped her expression, he felt, but this one assuredly worsened it. Color suffused her sallow face. “Where are you going?”

“It is no concern of yours, Eleanor.”

“It is that FitzWalter girl?”

He arched one brow consideringly. “Perhaps I should have the surgeon examine your ears.”

Now her face was chalky. “She’s no better than I am, now—yet you treat me like a scullery wench!”

“You conduct yourself as someone akin to that station.”

Her hands clutched impotently at her kirtle, wadding up the wool until her knuckles shone white. “I came to ask you if you intended to bring her here at once.”

He eyed her. “I fail to see why that is any concern of yours. You have made your place—now bide in it!”

“And how many times have you done it?” Eleanor cried. “You and every other man, tumbling a woman whenever you feel like it! Why is it acceptable for you, but not for me?”

“A woman’s value resides in her chastity, and her ability to produce legitimate heirs,” he returned coldly. “One illicit bedding destroys that chastity—
and
her value—and a man prefers to know with complete certainty if the child she carries is his. It is somewhat disconcerting to learn the required heir was got by another man.”

“Ah,” she returned, in a tone akin to his own, “that must be why you never sired a son—you were afraid it might not be yours.”

He took one great stride toward her, lifting a hand to strike, but a call from behind prevented him from following through.

“My lord?” It was Walter, Gisbourne’s assistant. “There is some commotion in the bailey.”

DeLacey turned on him. “Of course there is,” he snarled, “I’ve had my horse ordered readied at once.”

“No, my lord—I mean, yes, my lord ... but this is more.”

“More? What is ‘more,’ Walter?”

The mousy little man twisted his hands together. “I don’t know.”

“And so I am duly enlightened,” deLacey said with acid irony. “Never mind. I’ll see to it myself.” He paused a moment, arrested by a new thought. “Walter,” he said more cordially, but with precisely modulated words, “do investigate the offers we have had for my remaining daughter’s hand. Pay particular attention to any that have come from men who live
very
far away.”

“You can’t!” she cried.

“My lord?” Walter asked.

“If there
are
any,” deLacey snapped. “At this juncture, any fool will do.”

“You
can’t!”
Eleanor shouted.

The sheriff ignored her, as was his habit. He had been doing it a very long time. If he could indeed find an accomodating man, he wouldn’t be required to do it ever again. That knowledge comforted him greatly.

 

Marian did not like the look of Robin. He was wan and haggard, with a pinched tightness around his eyes. He moved with the careful stiffness she had seen in old men.

Should I ask him again how he fares?
She knew the answer too well.
No. He will lie. Or speak of something else.

She watched him sparingly, relying on sidelong glances. She had known men like him before, if not to this extreme, who would not at all appreciate the scrutiny of a woman concerned with his welfare. She had done what she could on their journey out of Sherwood, asking to rest so often he undoubtedly believed her a weak woman. Or maybe only footsore; and she was, a little, so that was not a false assumption. But she didn’t feel weak. She was hungry and thirsty and stiff from the aftermath of the capture, but decidedly not weak. The walk along the road, toes digging into cool earth, she found exhilarating. It made her feel free as she had not felt in a year.

But she said nothing of the freedom, because he undoubtedly shared none of it. She had been ill herself. The glitter in his hazel eyes told her the truth of it: the fever had settled in. It would have to run its course.

Marian skirted a pile of manure left by a passing horse.
He will be a fool, of course, and say he must go back once Ravenskeep is reached. He will say his task is done, and he would have no more dishonor brought to me by staying. And if I let him go he will likely fall down five paces from my door, and someone will come back to fetch me, and he will have to be brought inside to sleep in the bed I would have given him anyway.
Marian sighed.
Why are men so stubborn?

The silence between them was heavy. Then Robin broke it by asking a question she had not been asked for years. “I don’t recall your brother. What happened to him?”

There was no reason he should recall her brother. Though Sir Hugh FitzWalter was a knight with all accompanying honor, his class—and his children—ranked considerably lower than an earl and his son. “It was more than ten years ago, so most people have forgotten.” Her kirtle had fallen from the girdle. Marian hiked up folds again, tucking them away so she might walk freely once more. The question from him struck her as odd. She had not expected him to care much about her family, nor to initiate a pointless conversation designed merely to pass the time. That was her habit, especially when self-conscious. “He drowned in the millpond.” She stepped on a stone and winced. “It was only three weeks after our mother died. Losing both so close together nearly killed my father. He swore then he would go on Crusade to win back God’s favor.”

Robin glanced at her sharply. “What of you? There was a daughter to look after.”

Marian sobered, remembering. She had been trapped for days on end in anguish with no one to turn to, because her father had shut himself away in private quarters to mourn his wife and son, but she couldn’t tell Robin that. “I had Matilda, my nursemaid—” She broke off abruptly. “I’d nearly forgotten! She is still at Nottingham—I’ll have to send an escort to bring her home.”

He waited patiently, then turned to the topic again. “You were telling me about your brother’s death, and the aftermath.”

She nodded after a moment, recalling the emotions. “My father spent as much time with me as he could, afterwards. I had always been a solitary child ... I missed them both, of course, but Hugh had reached the age where a small sister was an encumbrance, so it was not so difficult to accustom myself to being alone.”

That was mostly the truth; eventually, as in everything, she had adjusted, finding her own way through grief. She still missed them both, but the pain was now indistinct, nothing more than a remnant of the anguish that had swallowed a ten-year-old’s world.

He walked in silence a moment. “I was a solitary child, also.”

“I know that.” She smiled at him impishly. “It became quite clear one Christmas Eve.”

He colored, which surprised her. He did not seem the kind of man to be embarrassed or caught off-guard. “Will you judge me by that forever?”

“If you give me no reason to alter my opinion, undoubtedly I will.” Marian was astonished by her own temerity; two days before she had hardly been able to speak to the man, so sensitive was she to his privacy and rank. It was easier now to speak because what she had experienced in Sherwood Forest altered the rules of behavior. She was no longer governed by them. That gave her an uncommon freedom of speech and released her from constraint. “But I believe you have given me reason to alter my opinion. What you did to win me free of Will Scarlet is much appreciated, though that means little enough.”

He grimaced. “I did very little. It was you—”

“Does that matter?” she interrupted. “You don’t strike me as a man much shaped by what others think of you, least of all a woman. I know there are men who would be at some pains to concoct a story more favorable to themselves, but you aren’t one of them.”

“Am I not?” he asked mildly.

“No.”

“Then perhaps you might tell my father that I am not now and never have been a hero. I was a soldier, nothing more ... I did as my king required. I saved no lives—I
took
them.” His gaze was unflinching as he turned his head to her. “That does not make a man a hero. It makes a man a killer.”

 

As William deLacey swung on his heel and strode rapidly down the corridor, his daughter went back into her chamber. It was a small, square masonry room of little warmth or comfort, boasting no more than a bed and two chests, and a single candle rack. Eleanor didn’t like it there.

She thudded the studded door closed and walked to her bed, where she sat down and stared hard into the distance, thinking rapidly.

Since Eleanor could remember, she and her father had baited one another like a pair of mongrel dogs circling a prized bone, preferring the ritual to actual consumption, but the tenor of the game now had changed significantly. There were times he had been thoughtlessly cruel, or specifically brutal in response to deliberate provocation—she knew how to provoke, because she had learned it from him—but she could not recall a time when he had sounded so serious.

Eleanor understood the threat. He
would
marry her off. And no doubt he would purposely seek out the most unpresentable man in a significantly inhospitable portion of England—if he was generous it would be England, rather than backward Scotland or barbaric Wales—just to punish her.

“She’s the reason,” Eleanor murmured. “She is the root of it.”

Thus the enemy was identified: Marian FitzWalter.

The horrible rage quieted; intellect prevailed. The game would not be won if she gave in to sheer emotion, because her father would view it as weakness. To defeat her father she would have to be her father, depending on wit and insight to overcome his decision; to shape her immediate future so she could shape that which would follow upon its heels.

Women had no power. Women had no
value;
he had made that clear. Therefore she would have to think as a man, plan as a man, and execute as a man.

She needed a man to do it.

“Who?” Eleanor asked, unheeding of the silence.

Surely there was someone. Someone she could buy. She had little coin to spare, no jewels to speak of, and until this was settled her physical charms were suspect because of public discovery; the rape claim might remove the taint of wantonness, but it wouldn’t erase the fact. Now everyone knew what most may have suspected: the Sheriff of Nottingham’s daughter was no longer a virgin.

“My choice,” she said through clenched teeth, thinking of the men. “They all have been my choice.”

Now the choice had been taken from her.

“Who?” she repeated. “Where is there a man as hungry as I for revenge, who will accept satisfaction in place of coin or gem?”

No one she could think of. Men hated her father, but few if any would be willing to cross him.

Eleanor sighed and pressed both hands against her face, massaging her skin, her fingertips searching for the telltale first hint of lines in the flesh near her eyes, her bony nose, her downturned, sullen mouth. She was getting older. Soon it would show.

How much
—
?
Eleanor slid off the bed and moved purposefully to one of the chests. Deftly she unlatched the hasp and flipped it back, then lifted the lid. Her groping hand found the mirror her father had mentioned.

She knelt there on the floor, cradling the mirror in both hands as she raised it high enough. The light in the chamber was wan, casting sallow illumination. It yellowed her face, dulled her hair, threw shadows beneath her eyes.

Hastily she slapped at her cheeks, attempting to bring the blush of roses to flesh that proved reluctant. She needed paint, but her father forbade it; only rarely did she test him by smudging precious kohl onto her eyelids, or rubbing carmine on her lips.

She was not and never had been a beautiful woman. Nor would she ever be.

Eleanor bit into her lip as her face crumpled into despair. Tears swelled, spilled, rolled down her cheeks, dripping to stain the dull gray fabric of her kirtle. She hugged the mirror to her breast and wished it could lie; or that she could believe the men who praised her as beautiful, when all they wanted was for her to spread her legs. “ ‘Fairest Eleanor,’ ” she choked, recalling the minstrel’s practiced flattery.