Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] (6 page)

“Robin is even now on his way to France.” Bleakness flickered in her eyes as her arm went slack in his grip. “The king sent for him.”

DeLacey released her. The earl knew. Locksley knew.
Marian
knew. How many others?

Prince John? He was in Brittany, visiting his nephew, Arthur.

The king was dying, and
John was with Arthur.

“My God,” the sheriff murmured. “John will have him killed.”

“
Robin?
”

“No . . . no, of course not. Locksley has nothing to do with this.” DeLacey scowled at her, then tempered it into casual concern as his thoughts worked it out. “You became a ward of the Crown on the death of your father.”

“I was,” she said guardedly. “The king released me of that.”

“And pardoned murder, thievery, rape, and other such activities as might earn a man a hanging.” His smile now was cold. “If John becomes king, as he is certain to do, he may have other ideas. Pardons may be revoked. Unmarried daughters of dead knights may have their lands—and the disposition of their
hands—
claimed by the Crown.”

Color flared in her face again. “And will that be your advice to the new sovereign?”

“That shall be for the ears
of
the new sovereign, whomever he may be” deLacey answered smoothly. “But my advice to you is to consider that your circumstances may be about to change.”

Before she could speak again—if indeed she meant to—he turned once more to his horse. This time he permitted the boy to offer him a proper leg up, and swept his cloak across the saddle as he settled and slid his right foot into the stirrup. The reins were supple in his gloved hands.

William deLacey smiled, inclined his head to her with all lordly courtesy, and rode out of Huntington Castle. There was much to do, far more than had been on his plate an hour before. Knowledge of Richard’s imminent death altered everything. The world would be unmade, then remade in another king’s image.

He had told the earl nothing of his thoughts, his preferences. But he knew very well his only chance to retain his office and power was to support Prince John. Arthur of Brittany was a boy; he would be surrounded by ambitious women, and Bretons who had neither love for nor understanding of England. But John, John was eminently preferable. The Count of Mortain and the High Sheriff of Nottingham had already established a rapport.

Now was the time to solidify it.

 

Marian offered the earl’s steward nothing but courtesy—yet seasoned it with consistency. She would see the earl, she said. Repeatedly. To offer him comfort.

Ralph’s expression suggested that her presence would offer no such thing to the earl, though he said nothing of it. Merely explained the earl was ill and could receive no visitors.

“He has received the sheriff,” she countered calmly.

“Lady, I do apologize, but I fear—”

She interrupted. “You fear nothing save your master’s displeasure. And indeed he shall be displeased when he sees me. But admit me, and I vow by the time I leave, the earl’s displeasure will be mitigated.”

Ralph’s suspicion led him out of courtesy into demand. “How?”

Joan, bearing the bundle of things Marian had ordered brought for the earl’s pleasure, blurted a shocked exclamation that a fellow servant would so far overstep his duties as to question her mistress.

“Convey my request to the earl,” Marian repeated. “Tell him I am aware of the king’s illness, and what it means to my circumstances as well as his own . . .” She paused. “And those of his son.”

Something flickered in Ralph’s eyes. After a moment he briefly inclined his head and directed them to wait. Still clad in cloaks, still bearing as yet unaccepted gifts, Marian and Joan waited.

“Will he see you?” Joan murmured.

“Oh, yes.”

“How can you be certain, Lady Marian?”

“He is ill. He needs an heir.”

Joan whispered it. “But—my lord of Locksley has repudiated his father.”

“All things change when a king dies.”

“
All
things, my lady?”

Marian felt the pinch of grief. “When old King Henry died ten years ago, my father yet lived. But the new king, the warrior-prince who dedicated himself to regaining Jerusalem, summoned knights to serve him. And my father died for it.”

“But that was Holy Crusade, my lady!”

“Of course it was. But my father died nonetheless.” Marian brushed a strand of hair from her face. “And now the warrior-king is dying, and a new king shall have the ordering of the realm, the ordering of our lives. And I cannot promise you anything of those lives shall remain as they are.”

Ralph was back. “The earl will see you.”

Marian smiled at Joan and gave her the second basket even as a page appeared to gather up their cloaks. “I should not be long.”

The day dawned befogged, but promised yet to be sunny, lacking the clouds and drizzling rain of the previous days. Robin felt an unexpected lift in his spirits—until he recalled why he and Mercardier were on this road.

Dulled again into an abrupt and pernicious sense of futility, he watered his horse, then hastily saddled it and mounted, settling the cloak around his shoulders and pinning it haphazardly into place even as he urged the gray to move. Mercardier already waited on the edge of the road a few paces from the small clearing they had inhabited for the night, wreathed in layers of thinning fog. Robin, annoyed by the pinch of guilt—he felt rather as if his father waited for him—expected to be reprimanded for tardiness, but he found Mercardier distracted, at pains to identify a rider coming their way.

Fog yet obscured him. The slap-and-dig of galloping hooves into wet track became more apparent as the rider neared, as did his haste and the raspy, rhythmic breathing of his mount. At last the fog thinned and peeled away, stirred to recoiling by the motion of horse and rider, so that Robin and the captain caught their first glimpse of the man who rode so swiftly.

His quartered crimson tabard, flapping in the wind of his passage, was mud-spattered, soiled with his mount’s lather and froth. It was not until he was nearly on them that his badge came into hazy view and was thus identified: the triple leopards of England.

“No,” Robin murmured. And inwardly:
It is come.

Mercardier spurred his horse into the center of the road into a pocket of fog, shouting at the rider to stop in the king’s name. The rider, wind-ruffled and red-cheeked from the efforts of his gallop, pulled up sharply. His expression was grim, tense, focused on his task. His sliding, muddy-legged mount fretted at its bit, grinding steel in massive teeth as it fought for footing.

“Gerard!” Mercardier blurted.

The messenger, focusing now on the man who stopped him, blurted a startled and heartfelt oath in French. He reined in his blowing horse with unthinking expertise. “Captain—”

Mercardier cut him off. “What news?”

As fog stirred and thinned about them, as equine exhalations set spumes of steam into the air. Gerard’s gaze flicked to Robin, who read the answer in the messenger’s expression. “
Le roi,
” Gerard said breathlessly. “
Morte.
”

Robin shut his eyes. But closed lids did nothing to shield him from the truth, the piercing anguish of acknowledgment.

Richard Plantagenet. Coeur de Lion. Richard, King of the English. Malik Ric, as the Saracens called him.

Not Richard.

Not the warrior who had knighted him at Acre after they took the city, who brought him into his inner circle of counselors and boon companions, who ransomed him from the Turks before even his father could.

The Saracens would say,
what is written is written.
But he could not countenance such loss. Could not comprehend what such absence would mean to the world.

The world that was, in one moment, utterly unmade.

Mercardier, with startling alacrity, heaved himself out of the saddle and fell to his knees in the muddy, fog-laden road. With no grace, merely a surfeit of grief, of seemingly incongruous piety, he bowed his head and crossed himself, then began to murmur a prayer in hoarse-voiced French.

Robin’s eyes, painfully dry because nothing in his youth had permitted tears, locked on to those of the messenger. His sluggish mind told him he knew this man, that this man knew him. And Gerard, acknowledging it, wore the face of bitter acceptance.

“We are sent,” Gerard said in his accented English; he, too, was a man of Aquitaine, of Eleanor and Richard, duchess and titular duke. “Many of us, so many of us, to carry word. To London. To France. To Brittany. To all the great houses, the great men of England.”

“My father,” Robin murmured blankly.

Gerard’s expression acknowledged that. He knew Sir Robert of Locksley. Knew who and what his father was. “My lord,” he said. “The king is dead. It is my duty to carry word.”

Mercardier, done with prayers, surged so quickly to his feet that his horse shied back, prevented from leaving the road only by dint of a mailed hand clenched upon his rein.

“Who?” his ruined voice scraped. “Who was named? Prince John, or Arthur of Brittany?”

Gerard’s face was pale and taut. “Both.”

“
Both?
” Robin demanded, shocked out of sorrow into politics and the necessity of understanding the implications.

“The king wishes—” Gerard broke it off, began again. “The late king wished the strongest to inherit.”

He understood at once. He knew Richard better than most, and understood.

So did the mercenary. They stared at one another, tense and grim, knowing what the king had done and what it meant.

“I am for France,” Mercardier declared abruptly, turning to his horse.

Of course he was. Richard was there. Richard must yet be served.

“Where?” the captain asked, swinging a leg across the broad rump of his mount.

“They will take him to Fontevrault Abbey,” Gerard answered. “To be entombed at his father’s feet.”

Robin grimaced. Fontevrault was in Angers, in Richard’s French domains. England lost even the body of her king, as it had lost his father’s before him.

As Mercardier settled into the saddle and gathered reins, he nodded once, decisively. “Then that is where I shall go.” His gaze was grim as he looked at Robin. “And you?” He paused, and the tone acquired an undertone of contempt. “The king now has no need of his matched boys.”

Wincing inwardly—Mercardier wielded words as well as his sword—but permitting none of it to show, Robin looked at Gerard. “Where are you bound?”

“To Huntington. To Nottingham.”

To the earl, and the sheriff. Neither of whom would permit such news to paralyze mind or body, nor halt the plans they would plot.

“Go elsewhere,” Robin suggested. “I will carry the word to my father, and to the sheriff.”

But Gerard was experienced in such things as might affect the governance of a realm in the wake of a monarch’s death. His face was oddly calm as he shook his head. “It is my task. A service for my lord king.”

There was no service Sir Robert of Locksley might offer a dead king. But there yet remained living companions, and the woman he loved. He said no word to the mercenary who now lacked a master, to the late king’s courier. He simply wheeled his horse upon the track and set it to full gallop, cloak rippling in the wind, and ignored Mercardier’s curses as the mud flew up behind.

 

Just outside the earl’s bedchamber door, Marian inhaled a deep and steadying breath. Ralph had at long last taken her cloak, so that she faced the earl in dry and decent clothing. Hastily she smoothed back from her face the tendrils of hair loosened from twin braids, tucking them beneath gauzy coif and narrow fillet. There was no complaint to be made of her bearing and apparel, but she did not doubt the earl would find something.

Ralph knocked briefly, then unlatched and opened the door. His face was expressionless as he allowed her into the chamber, redolent of the sickbed and the cloying scent of beeswax candles only the rich and powerful could afford.

Just inside, before comment might be made—and to be certain of self-control—she dipped into a deep and respectful curtsey. The door behind her thumped closed as she rose from the floor, and Marian realized she was to face the earl quite alone.

She invoked whatever strength might be had from such powers as God, her will, and her conscience, then looked up on a spurt of self-confidence to meet unfriendly eyes.

Huntington’s body was a narrow bundle beneath heaped covers of rich cloth and a quilt of pelts, propped up by layers of pillows. She had not seen him to speak to in several years; he was older, whiter of hair and thinner of flesh. The aging face with its bony prow of nose was pale save for mirrored spots of color burning high in withered cheeks. She could not be certain if it was born of fever or fury, for the look he cast upon her in no way mimicked courtesy.

Marian folded her hands against the doubled girdle of her kirtle and drew another steadying breath. She brought her battle to Huntington’s field, where he knew the terrain far better than she. She dared not give him even a single blow that she could not blunt or turn with one of equal measure. “I came,” she said plainly, “against your express wishes. To see if indeed you were ill.”

Huntington did not reply, though his eyes blazed at her.

“You
would
lie,” she said, discounting his affronted expression, “if you believed it might profit you.”

Huntington said nothing.

“And a father might send a lie to his son in hopes the son would come.”

The earl stirred then, a brief, angry spasm beneath bedclothes and pelts. His voice was raw from coughing. “I sent neither lie nor truth to my son. The king sent a messenger; I in turn sent him.”

She picked her way carefully, but steadily, avoiding pitfalls with meticulous attention. “As it is true, it may be argued a sick man
should
send word to his son.”

His tone, despite his weakness, was peremptory. “What word I send or do not send is my concern.”

“He is your son.”

“He lives elsewhere.”

“Many sons do.”

“Many sons do as their father wishes. If they hope to inherit.”

“Your son does not bind himself to that duty.”

“Fools and madmen,” he said, “turn their backs on duty.”

“And on titles and great estates?”

“By God,” he ground out, “you dare much—!” And lost the balance in a bout of harrowing coughing. His narrow shoulders jerked within the folds of his heavy robe.

“I dare it,” she said when he was done, giving him no latitude even in illness lest he use it against her, “because it matters to me what becomes of him.”

He drank water from a cup held in trembling hands, then rebutted her. “Because it matters to you that he should inherit an earldom.”

“Yes.”

He thumped the cup down on the bedside chest. “So that you might become his countess.”

“No.”

Contempt and disbelief were manifest.

“I have a manor,” she explained matter-of-factly. “I have lands. I have
myself.
I need no man to give me anything.”

“You come now to see if it is true that I ail, so you may judge for yourself if there is profit in it for you and how soon it might be yours.”

Marian shook her head.

The earl’s words were clipped. “You know the king is dying. You know also that his successor may not be so generous as to let you keep your lands. You may believe and declaim you need no one but yourself, but I daresay if Prince John or Arthur of Brittany scruple to claim your lands, to bestow upon some unwitting man your unwed and tainted hand, you would seek whatever rescue you believed my son could offer.”

From somewhere Marian dredged up a calm smile. “You believe I wish to marry him.”

He said nothing, believing it implicit. He would not waste time and voice on unnecessary confirmation.

“He has asked,” Marian said, “more times than I can count. And each and every time I have refused. What need, my lord? He loves me without benefit of wedlock. He lives with me without benefit of wedlock. My reputation, as you have observed repeatedly, was quite ruined five years ago . . .” She paused. “And there are no bastards requiring a marriage to gain legitimacy as your grandchildren.”

The earl’s tone was bitter. “You are a deceitful woman. You fancy yourself clever, I do not doubt, to say you do not want what you very badly need, but you are too young for cleverness, and of the wrong sex.”

With effort she governed her temper. “Would you say the latter,” she wondered acidly, “to Eleanor of Aquitaine?”

He pulled himself up against his pillows, glaring at her furiously. “You dare compare yourself to
her?
”

With edged and brittle honesty, Marian asked, “How could I, my lord? She had two husbands, while I have none. She had, they say, countless lovers—while I have but one. She bore eleven children, albeit few survived. While I, my lord of Huntington, am like to bear none.”

“None,” he echoed sharply.

“Three times in as many years,” she said simply, “I have miscarried. In two years I have not even conceived.”

It struck him into silence. He gazed upon her, rapt in her expression, in the rigidity of her posture. She saw him weigh out the words she said, the meanings of those words, the implications that some men might draw from those words. He knew now, she saw; was clever enough, had heard enough, to realize what she intended. And because he knew it and yet feared it could not be true, he said nothing, no word; made no exclamation, offered no sign of his opinion, lest he yet startle or drive her into the withdrawal of what he most wanted. He simply lay propped against his pillows, fever in eyes and cheeks, and waited to learn he had won the field with nary a battle begun.

Marian met those hostile eyes and did not waver from the course she had set herself in the endless, senseless hours of empty bed and sleepless night. “A man needs an heir, my lord. And his son an heir after him.”

Age-creased lips parted slightly. He took care to let his hands remain still upon the bedclothes, but she saw the minute trembling in the loose flesh of his throat. Disbelief. And burgeoning hope. “Does my son know this?”

So many times she had thought to tell Robin, to give him the truth of the miscarried children. But they had each of them been barely begun, and she not even aware of their presence in her body until the cramping and bleeding came upon her. Each time she had, with only Joan’s assistance, tended what needed tending, that he might be spared. Let him believe her barren; and for all she suspected that might indeed be true, after two years.