Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] (7 page)

She would not be Eleanor deLacey, forced to wed Gisbourne because she had conceived, and she would not make Robin into Gisbourne, forced to marry because
she
had conceived. Will Scarlet’s notorious abduction of her from Nottingham Fair had quite ruined her reputation, and with no children conceived and carried to term, there was no need of marriage. In a world where women had no choice in their disposition unless they be queens, and then rarely, it was her only freedom: to tell the man she loved she would not marry him.

“No,” she told his father. “He knows nothing of this.”

“Then I will do you this kindness,” the old man said hoarsely. “I will grant here and now, within this chamber and of this moment only, that he loves you as you say, and has asked you to marry him. And so I ask in return, granting these things: why then would he leave you?” He paused, honing the edge. “Or has he already left you, and this merely a shabby attempt to salve your pride?”

A wave descended upon her. Marian was cold, cold
and
hot, all at once, and so angry so abruptly that she trembled with it. After a long moment, and with pronounced precision, she said, “If you wish an heir, my lord, I suggest you find a kinder question to ask.”

“Of you?”

“Of him. He is
your
son, my lord . . . make no assumptions concerning what shapes his actions, lest you shape in him an answer you cannot bear.”

After a tense moment, the earl assayed a slight—and infinitely brief—smile. “Well said. Perhaps there is a measure of cleverness in you after all.”

“I might thank you for that,” she replied coolly, “were I to respect the source.”

Sallow face mottling again with angry color, he waved a curt hand. “Get out.”

Marian held her ground. This time she employed a tone that mimicked his own, when he declared how a thing should be. “I have given you the key. Use it wisely. There will be no impediment from me as you seek the lock it fits, but neither will I refuse him should he ask me again to marry.”

“Get
out—
”

As he descended again into coughing, this time she went.

DeLacey had ample opportunity to work his way through the myriad mazes of personal possibilities and political probabilities on the ride back to Nottingham. By the time he made his way through the tangled skeins of city streets, clattered his way into the castle bailey, and leaped down from the saddle to toss reins at a hurrying horseboy, he knew what he would do. And thus he did it as soon as he reached his private solar, stripping gloves from his hands and dumping cloak onto the floor. A servant had followed to divest him of such accoutrements, to clean the floor of smears and clumps left by muddy boots, but the sheriff merely waved him out again. Let the gloves, cloak, and brooch lie scattered on the floor. Other matters were of far greater import than the tidiness of his dwelling.

If he would
keep
that dwelling.

He found ink, a quill, and parchment, gathering them together with sealing wax, sand, and signet. He sat down heavily into the weighty chair, yanked it forward one-handed with a screech of wood on stone as he dragged parchment before him, and hastily uncapped the ink. For a moment he stared into space, retrieving the form of the letter he had composed in his head. Then he began to write swiftly and steadily, commiting himself, pausing only to reink the quill when it sputtered and scratched its way into indecipherability.

‘Good my lord,’
he began, adding flourishes, titles, and appropriate salutations in thick, uneven letters,
‘it grieves me to hear of such dire news as the grave illness of your gracious brother, our lord king. May God grant he recovers. But if you will in turn be so gracious as to pardon the need for plain speech in this unhappy time, permit me to remind you of the thoughts and hopes we have shared in the past.’

He paused, considering phrasing again. Then dipped the quill in the inkpot and continued.

Enough, deLacey reflected. John was no fool, nor politically naive. He would know the sheriff worked to save his office, to align himself now with the man he judged most likely to hold England. But he would also know the sheriff recalled those former discussions in infinite—and potentially dangerous—detail, and a shared passion for opportunity best able to serve personal interests.

John would need powerful allies in England. He had years before angered many wealthy barons who, at one time, conspired to keep him from claiming England for his own while the Lionheart dwelled in his German prison. The man called
Softsword
and
Lackland
needed certainties and assurances that other men supported him, now that the throne could come to be contested. Sheriffs were not earls and dukes and counts, but they were nonetheless the abiding power within the individual shires.

“Money,” deLacey murmured. “It comes to coin. Taxes collected, taxes delivered. A realm is governed by the coin that is spent, not merely a king’s whim and wishes.”

Such taxes as those due for accounting at the preliminary session and to be followed by another at Michaelmas, sitting below in his dungeon.

Smiling grimly, deLacey signed his name. Then dropped the quill and rose from his chair to pace the chamber, considering again potential repercussions of the course he had set.

“Time,” he muttered. “John is in Brittany, with Arthur . . . will he yet be there to receive my message? Or will he depart for France? For England.”

Abruptly he sat down again and drew up fresh parchment, sharpening, then reinking the quill. Twice he copied over his initial letter, changing nothing, then sanded, folded, and sealed all three sheets as individual letters.

Best to send word to multiple places in hopes of reaching Prince John sooner rather than later.

 

They had left behind Huntington Castle and were nearly to the Nottingham road when Marian reined in sharply. Joan, less handy with a horse, rode a little beyond, then laboriously turned her mount back.

“Lady Marian? Lady?”

Marian sat slack in the saddle, reins gripped in gloved, numb hands. “What have I done?”

“Lady?”

She pressed reins and hands hard against her face, speaking into leather-clad palms. “What have I
done?
”

“Lady—” Joan wrestled with the horse, who wanted to be heading home again. “What
have
you done, then?”

Marian’s horse, undirected, wandered to the edge of the track and began idly to graze.

Oh, God. Oh, God.
She shut her eyes tightly. “Oh, God.”

Joan was now clearly alarmed. “Lady Marian!”

She had thought it through. Worked it through. Knew the course, had selected the course, was certain of her choice. But now, in the light of day, with all the words said to the earl, she knew also the edges of panic crowding into her mind.

“No,” she said, catching her breath. “His decision.
His
decision. Not mine. Not mine.” She released a gust of breath. “Not mine.”

“Lady.”

“I merely give him the chance, the choice.” She nodded. “Yes. It must be so. Let it be
his
choice. He will make it. One way or another.” She looked at Joan. “I have given him the freedom to make that choice, with no obligation attached.”

Joan was mystified, but she held her tongue.

“It must be so,” Marian repeated. “He will stay, or he will go. But the choice will be his, without obstruction or distraction.”

“Lady Marian,” Joan ventured. “Whose choice about what?”

“Staying,” she said. “Or going. As it should be. It isn’t mine to make. He should have opportunity to reconsider that he will be an earl, with attendant power and great holdings, responsibilities. Obligations to the name.”

Realization dawned in Joan’s broad face. “Lady,” she said, “Oh, Lady Marian—he does love you!”

Marian laughed breathlessly. “I know it, Joan. I do know it. But he must have a
choice,
do you see? He must have the choice presented to him again.” She gathered up slack reins, took control of the horse, who sullenly gave up ripping chunks of mud-rooted grass from the ground to be turned back onto the road. Marian punctured the air with a forefinger. “He has not thought
truly
about what will happen when his father dies. He does not know, has no conception. He has never lost a father, to know how it feels.” She prodded her horse into motion with determined heels. “I do know, Joan. And I have made the proper choice.”

Joan let her stolid horse fall in beside Marian’s better mount. “Are you certain, lady?”

“Oh, yes.” The moments of panic had passed. Her course was clear again, and her doubts disciplined. She took a deep breath, held it, then released it on a gust of relief. “Yes.”

 

Robin’s horse was fresh. The messenger’s mount was nearly blown, would require rest soon, and water, before Gerard was on his way again as swiftly as before. Therefore Robin did not doubt he could reach his destination first.

But not Nottingham. Not Huntington.

Ravenskeep. To warn the others. Then it would not matter whom the messenger told, or in what order.

Mentally, Robin revisited his companions, contemplating transgressions that would merit punishment. Alan of the Dales would hang for tupping the sheriff’s daughter. Robin knew Eleanor had been the instigator, but perception was all. Alan had been accused, arrested, and thrown into Huntington Castle’s dungeon, intended to stand trial for forcing deLacey’s daughter; upon which verdict, no doubt, he would have been hanged with all expediency. The minstrel escaped that fate only because Sir Robert of Locksley, of his own volition and for his own reasons, bribed the dungeon guards to release him.

Will Scarlet, once called Scathlocke, had murdered several Normans. It mattered little to such men as the sheriff, or Prince John—whose men they had been—that the Normans had raped and killed Scarlet’s wife. Will and his wife were Saxons, poor and powerless peasants. Scathlocke/ Scarlet would hang as much for that as for abducting Marian from the Nottingham Fair. And Little John, by wholly unfortunate circumstance, had been implicated in the abduction. He, too, would hang.

Much would not. Much had killed no one, abducted no one, raped no one. But he
had
picked the sheriff’s pocket and would, according to law, forfeit a hand.

Tuck was undoubtedly safe from hanging, or from having a hand chopped off, but his vocation was now tainted. He would never see the priesthood, would never serve God in any capacity beyond his limited purview, set forever apart from cathedral or abbey, apart from his order. Additionally, William deLacey would undoubtedly invent a fitting punishment for a man who thwarted the sheriff’s plan to marry Marian.

And if such transgressions were not enough, all of them, at Robin’s devising and behest, had stolen money from the Lord High Sheriff, bidden by Prince John to redirect the tax shipment intended to help pay King Richard’s ransom to John himself, in Lincoln. The party of soldiers guarding the shipment had been foully murdered. But the sons and heirs of powerful earls, the beautiful heiress-daughters of honorable knights killed on Holy Crusade, would have transgressions overlooked.

Such men as peasants and outcast monks, charming minstrels and simpleton pickpockets would not enjoy the same privilege.

Robin, who had ordered no one killed and had been present during the robbery, knew William deLacey himself had murdered his own guard. But there was no proof. Even his word as the son of the Earl of Huntington was suspect: he had distanced himself from his noble father to reside with an unwed woman and a pack of pardoned outlaws. Perception, again, was all.

The wind of his passage whipped Robin’s cloak over his back, tugging at the heavy silver brooch pinning his right shoulder. His clothing was liberally daubed with mud. Already one eye had suffered its share of clogging insult; he scrubbed an arm across the side of his face to rid himself of the worst of the mud. He tasted it now, gritting in his teeth. Eyes watering, he leaned to spit—and saw the trunk of a tree fallen across the track.

“
Ya Allah—
” The horse gathered himself powerfully, leaped the trunk and the shattered spears of broken limbs. Robin, half blinded but well versed in horsemanship since childhood, rode the effort well enough for a man taken unawares. It was only as the rope came singing up from the ground into thrumming tautness that he recognized the trap. Retreating from Arabic into stolid Anglo-Saxon English, he cursed the men who had set it.

He was taller than they had planned for. The rope, instead of cutting into his throat, caught him across chest and shoulders. It canted him awkwardly and abruptly backward in the saddle, tangling cloak and hair. Stripped instantly from the saddle as if he weighed no more than a dandelion stalk, Robin was unhappily aware of air, of the horse running out from under him; that the cloak now blinded him utterly—and that his landing was going to hurt.

He came down flat and hard onto muddy track and tree. A limb dug hungrily into his back, another jabbed into one shoulder. Then his skull and tree trunk collided with an audible thud.

Stunned and completely bereft of breath, he lay sprawled slackly, seeing darkness and sparks of light. His lungs labored but offered no air. He was aware of vagueness, of senselessness teasing at the edges of consciousness, and panic. He could not
breathe—

—and then he felt hands upon him, cruel and ruthless hands, and knew he could do nothing to prevent them from commiting whatever indignity they wished to commit.

In this case, the hands worked swiftly and neatly. His purse was cut away, the brooch jerked from his cloak, his sword and knife appropriated. The hands had no care for him beyond what he offered; the tugging at his hips when they pulled the sword from its sheath was not gentle. By the time he had air in his lungs again, by the time he could do more than lie sprawled helplessly and inelegantly across the ground with his head against the tree, gulping wool-barriered air through the cloak wound around his head, the hands were gone.

He heard shouting: something about his horse.
Charlemagne—?
Robin assayed sight again, and freedom, by dragging the enfolding cloak away from his face and shoulders, and discovered as he levered himself hastily up on one elbow that the thieves had not departed. He froze, tantalized by the view of the tip of his own sword drifting perilously near his throat.

He wheezed then as lungs spasmed at last into normal activity. He felt the prick of blade, the cut, the trickle of blood. He raised one hand a matter of inches, wanting to block the blade, but realized the folly in that instantly as a second prick of honed steel drew additional blood.

Men surrounded him. All carried longbows, though the foremost among them gripped Robin’s sword. Two of them spilled out the contents of his purse into ready hands, anticipating coin; a third tossed the heavy silver brooch into the air repeatedly as if estimating its weight and worth.

He
knew
these men.

And now that he was unwrapped from the cloak, they knew him.

Adam Bell smiled broadly. “Locksley,” he said in surprise, then broke into laughter. “Well met!”

The others came closer. William of Cloudisley, with his mane of brown hair; Clym of the Clough, sandy-haired, a squint in one blue eye; even Wat One-Hand, who had, from muttered complaints of recalcitrant horses, lost the gray entirely.

Robin stared up at Adam Bell. Now that he could breathe again, he could also speak. But he would offer them nothing of fear, of hesitance. Only casual courage; it would do more to annoy them. “The sword, if you please?”