Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01] (48 page)

Tuck rose as deLacey opened the door. Much diminished in spirit and posture, he made his way to the door and into the corridor.

DeLacey dropped a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Light a candle for me.” He watched the monk depart, then shut the door decisively and crossed back to his wine. He drank the cup dry, then contemplated the wan daylight outside the solar. Absently he said, “Easier than I thought. Praise God for fools such as he.” And sketched a cross in the air.

Robin toiled his way back up the stairs to the upper floor, lingered irresolutely at the open door leading into his borrowed room, then went in search of Marian. He meant to take his leave, though he felt little like it because of the aftereffects of the fever, but he saw no sense in staying on. It was difficult for both of them now, because he had made it that way with his candor.

He had not intended to be so frank, to tell her, even obliquely, what she could do to a man. But it was the simple truth: she was a Celtic Helen with every bit of the beauty and power the tales ascribed to the Queen of Sparta. That she was unaware of her effect merely made it more compelling. He did not know how he could have ignored it on the dais at Huntington Castle, so attuned to her was he now, except to acknowledge two things: then, he had been a willing victim of his own defiance of nature, his personal rejection of desire in mind and body; now, he was most assuredly an unwilling victim of his longing to be free of that same rejection, to express both physically and emotionally his need of a woman.

Richard would laugh. Richard would offer—himself.
Deep in Robin’s belly self-contempt writhed.

He found Marian in a small chamber not far from his own, digging through a chest. The door was ajar; he stood in the opening and watched as she dragged clothing forth. A tunic and hosen, dull and faded with time. She held up the tunic, shook it free of dust, then sat back onto her heels and crumpled it in her lap.

“No,” she said softly. “Hugh was younger, and smaller.”

He knew then what she did. “There is no need,” he told her. “What I am wearing will do.”

Startled, she twitched, then stared at him wide-eyed. Lost in the past, he saw; was he so like her dead brother?

Marian smiled faintly and shook her head. “I thought nothing of it, until only moments ago. But I know how I felt when I was free of the dirt and mud... I thought perhaps you might like to bathe, and put on fresh clothing.” She held up the faded tunic. “You are taller than Hugh. Unless—” Her face brightened. “Yes! There are my father’s things...” She bundled the tunic and hosen back into the trunk, then rose and shook out her skirts. “He was taller and broader, but better too large than too small. Here—come this way.”

“Marian—” But she was by him, closer than she had ever been, if only briefly. “Marian—” He turned and followed, meaning merely to say her nay, then ask for a horse instead. But she was ahead of him already and opening a door that screeched on rusted hinges. Marian went in and left him in the corridor.

He followed. The chamber was larger than his own, taking up a corner of the hall. The bed was enormous, curtained by blue-dyed fabric; three chests sat against walls. “Here,” she said. “He would never begrudge you this.”

He stopped just inside. “What of you? If these are all you have of him—”

“I have memories,” she said firmly. “Those you cannot take—but clothing does not do well when packed away in the dark.” She knelt, undid the hasp, pushed open the lid. “Finest chainsil,” she said, pulling forth the creamy linen sherte, “and tunic, and hosen. You have boots and wrappings.”

“Yes,” he answered gravely. “Marian—I only want a horse.”

It was blunter than he intended. She gripped the edge of the trunk, a pile of cloth in her lap, and stared at him fiercely. Her expression he found infinitely appealing: desperately proud, with an underlying hint of exasperation. “If you please, I have been chatelaine of Ravenskeep since my mother died. My brother and father are dead—will you at least allow me to carry out the duties of a host as they are meant to be?”

Robin sighed. “I only meant—”

“I know.” She nodded. “I know.”

She did not, he knew. She couldn’t.

She rose, shutting the trunk lid. In her hands were sherte, tunic, and hosen. “This is not Huntington Castle.”

It nearly struck him dumb. “By God, Marian—I was a prisoner of the Turks!” For him, it was enough; he hoped it was for her. He had not meant to show so much of himself.

Color ebbed in her face. “I’m sorry.”

“I am.” He took the things from her hands. “Have the bath drawn, then,” he told her, “but no servant to wash my back. I’ll do it myself.”

Mutely she nodded and went by him into the corridor, calling quietly for Joan.

Robin stood there wondering how he could find the words to say a proper farewell. He had no gift with soft language, for he spoke too little; most of the women he had known hadn’t wanted him to speak at all save with his body, which had done its duty by them with eloquence enough. The ladies of his rank he had addressed sparingly, preferring his own company to the exuberance of feasts and celebratory dances, knowing what they portended for an unwed man of his station. He had never been a lecher or a man for dallying; what little charm he might once have possessed was burned out in the Holy Land, and its cinder drowned in blood.

The day was dying, muted by the wind.
“Insh’Allah,
he murmured, thinking it nearly time for the muezzin to call evening prayer.

Then, “No—this is
England
—” and realized with a start he was still a prisoner; that Richard’s ransoming of him may have bought his body free, but only part of his mind.

Trembling, he gripped the clothing tightly, wanting to rend it to shreds. “Let me be free of it—let me be
free
of it!” And in English, very plainly, “There is no God but God—”

Wind was a wolf in Ravenskeep, howling across the hills with a shrill, keening fury. Sim and Hal came into the hall littered with straw and leaves, eyes teary from gritty dust, and told Marian they had seen to securing the horses and the stable buildings, the chicken house, and the rest of the livestock, though the sheep were out on the meadow: Tam and Stephen, they said, were seeing to the sheep. It was a bad storm coming; couldn’t she hear its noise?

Indeed she could. It whined about the timber roof and lunged through open shutters to flour the hall with rush motes and pungent dust. Marian sighed and nodded, then gathered up the household servants and set them to closing and latching the shutters. Even shut up, the hall was hardly wind-tight, but there were things they could do to prevent accidents and damage. She doled out extra candles to ward off the early, unnatural dark, and cautioned the servants against leaving them lighted in places the wind might reach. With a timber and plaster upper storey, they dared not risk fire.

“Lady Marian?” It was Joan, come to speak of their guest. “He’s asleep after his bath—all wrung out from the fever—but his shutter’s undone. Even if he sleeps through the storm, he’ll have half of Nottinghamshire in his room before dawn. Shall I go in and close it?”

“No.” Marian cast a glance around the hall to see that all was in order. “No—I’ll go. See to the kitchen, Joan.” She gathered up her skirts and climbed the stairs to the second storey, fighting down once again the familiar nervousness when she thought of facing Robin.
This must stop,
she told herself.
You are behaving as a lackwit.

And it had gotten worse, not better, since he had confused her with his candor, making her think of things she had never thought of at all, save when a drunken, vulgar Prince John had made lewd comments at Huntington. Initially she had been hesitant merely because of Robin’s rank: In Sherwood things had been much different, allowing her to see him in a new light, until he had alarmed her with his unexpected frankness.

Marian paused outside his door, listened for sound that would mark him awake, then slowly and quietly opened it. She found him as Joan had said: sleeping very soundly, with the wind blowing into the room. It snagged and threw off the coverlet tossed across his legs and stripped the hair from his face.

She crossed the chamber at once, peeled the shutters off the wall, and set the bar into place. The wind rattled it stubbornly, trying to break the seal.

Marian meant to leave... but she stopped to look at him, to mark the slackness of his face that but an hour or so before had been tight and pale and old, far older than his years.

Any man, he had said, would want her in his bed. But he was not any man.

Humiliation stung her; not that he wouldn’t want her, but that she could think of it. Quickly Marian left the room, shut the door behind her, and went down the stairs to the hall with a word to Joan that she desired privacy; she would go to the oratory to spend time alone with her prayers.

“In this storm?” Joan asked, amazed.

Marian smiled a little. “You know I’ve always liked storms.”

 

Acre’s walls continued to fall, pounded to bits by hurled stones. He could hear the sound of it: stone after stone after stone smashing into the weakened wall, filling his head with noise
—

—and he was up, scrambling from bed, reaching for the sword that was no longer at his side, as stone after stone slammed into the wall.
“Insh’Allah,”
he blurted, then heard his breathing halt.

He stood in a gloomy chamber with the wind blowing in his face, and the crack of an unlatched shutter banging repeatedly against the wall.

Ravenskeep.

Relief dispersed his strength. Shaking, he collapsed onto the edge of the bed and sat there slumped and wracked, wiping the sweat from his face as his heart regained its rhythm. The shutter banged and banged, but he let it make its noise even as dust and debris blew into his chamber.

No blood on his hands—no severed limbs at his feet. Robin sighed heavily and scrubbed his face with both hands, trying to vanquish the sluggish aftereffects of a too-vivid dream. Slowly he got up and took the two paces that put him at the window; as the wind beat against his face, he stared out into the storm, tasting the metallic tang of lightning, the turgid dampness in the air.

“England,” he muttered, nodding, then closed and latched the shutters. He lurched back to the bed and collapsed across it again, knowing the bath had banished much of his soreness but as much of his strength.

He rolled over onto his back, staring fixedly at the roof. He meant to get up, to go out and down the stairs, to take his leave of the woman who so unsettled his soul. She would protest, of course, because of the storm, but it reflected his turmoil more eloquently than any words could do, and he saw no reason for wind to hinder his flight.

He shut his eyes.
I need to go
—But sleep had no more mercy than the Saracens did.

 

The hall at Ravenskeep had not originally contained the oratory, for it was older than Marian’s parents and had housed generations of FitzWalters, not all of them particularly desirous of a personal relationship with God. But Sir Hugh’s pious wife
was
desirous of such, and had asked for a private room to which she might retire for prayer and contemplation. Her husband had caused one to be built, placing it off the side of the hall nearest a small walled garden. It wasn’t a proper chapel, for it lacked an altar and a piscina for rinsing the chalice after Mass, but it was quiet and out of the way, offering peace to the individual who sought communion with God—or even with herself.

Sir Hugh had, for reasons of economy and haste, built the oratory adjoining the hall, but had not had a door put through. Therefore the only entrance to the oratory was the low wooden door from the walled garden, much like a postern gate; anyone desiring to use the chamber was required to go out of doors, into the garden, then into the oratory. In winter it had proved most inconvenient; Sir Hugh had promised to have a door knocked through to the hall, but his lady had died before it was accomplished and he had never been near the oratory again.

Marian had always liked the oratory. The small cozy nook of a chamber appealed to her desire for a place of her own. As a child she had imagined it a miniature hall where she presided as chatelaine. As she grew older she played less and less in the oratory, but occasionally found it a peaceful retreat, much as her mother did. When Lady Margaret died, followed closely by her son, Marian used the oratory for its intended purpose: a private place to pray. In the weeks immediately after their deaths, she had gone there many times to vent her grief and rage where only God could hear.

She left Joan, gathered cloak and shuttered lamp and went out into the storm, defying the insolent wind. Storms had never frightened her. Carefully she made her way around the corner of the hall, opened the gate to the walled garden, then unlatched and opened the low door into the chamber itself. The hinges were shrill in protest; like the main gate, they needed oiling.

Wind whipped down through the budded trees into the garden, stripping flowers of petals and leaves. Damp air issued forth from the oratory, snatched away by its angrier brother. Marian thrust the lamp inside, then ducked down into the room.

Lamplight whitened pale fieldstone, illuminating the dimness. Marian stripped off the cloak and draped it over a bench, then carried the lamp to the candle stubs set in chiseled hollows in the walls. Deftly she lighted each candle, then set the lamp on the floor near the wall separating the hall from the oratory. She breathed in rain-weighted air. There were no windows, splayed or otherwise; crude notches knocked into the rough fieldstone walls admitted air into the room. The stone was damp and cool, colored gray and cream and chalk.

Two benches for the knights, a woven mat for the Round Table, the throne a rickety chair tied with rope to keep it together. Here she had been queen in the days of her childhood: Guinevere, Arthur’s lady, or Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom her father had met; later a proper chatelaine, much as her mother was, wed to the most chivalrous and handsome lord in all of England.

Marian smiled sadly. “So many lies,” she said. “Is that what childhood is?”

What then was adulthood but the perpetuation of a life built on bitter reality: childhood dreams were unreachable things that wasted a woman’s time.

She walked through the tiny chamber, trailing fingers along the rough stone. The last time she had come had been but a handful of days after receiving word her father was dead. She had been grief-stricken, enraged, bereft, trying to conjure the man in the place her mother believed was best for talking to God. Marian had cried and screamed and pleaded that the message be a lie, a mistake, that her father yet lived. But not long after that the sword of Sir Hugh FitzWalter—and a casket containing the dried remains of his heart—had been brought to Ravenskeep. Her dreams were abruptly ended.

She stopped walking. She sat down in the chair, holding her breath as old rope protested. But it held, and she sat very still while the creaking subsided. The keening of the windstorm was mournful as the
bean sidhe
which according to Irish folklore presages a death.

Marian drew up a knee and hooked her heel into the chair seat, hugging her leg. She pressed her chin upon her knee and stared into the wan candlelight.

She remembered very clearly when they had brought her brother home. They had tried to keep her apart from him, to make sure she saw nothing, but she
had
seen, all of it: the blanket-wrapped form that still dripped water, the pallid, dead flesh, the livid bruises on his face. From rocks, someone said; from the millwheel, said another. Sir Hugh FitzWalter’s son had drowned in the millpond, not found for three full days.

It was Much who had discovered him, the miller’s halfwit son who spoke but infrequently and with little sense to his words. No one questioned him. No one said anything. They just put Hugh into the mausoleum with his three weeks’ dead mother—and all the other deceased FitzWalters—and Marian never saw her brother again.

Outside there came a banging followed by a clatter. Marian, roused, left the rickety chair and went to the nearest notch that looked out into the courtyard. All she saw was premature night: an ash-gray, indigo darkness.

More clattering yet: shod hooves ringing on cobbles.

Loose horse? “—
no
—”she blurted sharply, turning toward the door, “—not in this—” She went out into the wailing, fighting imperious wind as it snatched the oratory door and slammed it against the wall. Marian struggled to shut it, but the pressure was too strong. She left it then, and shoved open the garden gate.

The storm was full upon her, buffeting her senses as she tried to remain upright. Hair whipped free of her hands, blotting out her view; she caught it again, twirled it deftly into a rope, then stuffed it down the back of her kirtle.

Debris rolled through the courtyard. She saw leaves, branches, a tree limb; a stool left out from milking; a starling caught in the pressure and slammed against the wall. Feathers shredded at once, spun away into the maelstrom.

Marian shielded her eyes with both hands. She was a fool to be outside, but she was sure she’d heard a horse. Sim had said they’d secured the stables, but if the storm had broken the gate there would be more than one mount loose.

There—it loomed ahead: the bay gelding loaned to Robin ... with Robin in the saddle. Pale hair whipped in the wind: a beacon in the darkness.

 

He woke up with a cry, dripping sweat. All around him the bodies cavorted, grinning maniacally. At the forefront was Hugh FitzWalter’s, keening its wild grief over Robin’s failure to keep him alive; his failure to carry the message to Marian.

“But I did!” he shouted. “I
did—”

The bodies fell together in an obscene intercourse, Saracen and Christian, man and woman, Richard and Blondel, who was Richard and himself—

“No,” Robin whispered.

The
bean sidhe’s
howling filled up the entire room, rattling the shutter latch. More bodies yet were fighting to enter the room, to join in the morris dance, the macabre dance of death.

FitzWalter fell to pieces. His head flew across the room and landed in Robin’s lap, spraying blood in a tumbling arc.