Maid Marian (13 page)

Safe at last in a hidden place, I sank in wonder onto the bed. Robin Hood, I noticed, checked first the windows, then the door, making sure that none could see inside nor enter by any means but brute force.

“There, Lady Marian,” he said in a hushed voice. “Now you may feel safe.”

“Ah, Robin Hood,” I said, “pray, do not call me a lady any longer. For if I did nothing else this morning, I most certainly discarded my nobility and do not expect to ever reclaim it.”

His face looked odd for a moment, as if he feared having injured me in spiriting me away from the castle, and so I smiled to reassure him. He smiled too, rapidly, as he did all things, his features changing with the speed of a child’s.

“Very well, Maid Marian, I will address you as lady no more. But as a fair exchange, you too must drop the Hood from Robin and call me solely by my Christian name.”

“Is it true then, that Robin is your Christian name?” I asked, surprised. “I would have thought you had changed it when you first became an outlawed man.”

“Well, ’tis true, I changed it somewhat. My Christian name is Robert, truly, but ’tis not so far from Robin in sound.”

“Robin, then, you shall always be.”

“Perhaps,” he said with a spark in his eye, “now that Robin has Marian to himself and alone, she might allow him to sit beside her, there on the bed?”

“And do what, pray tell?” I laughed, though I did not feel at all steady.

“Ah, she might receive a kiss or two.”

I bolted from my seat on the blankets. “As payment for this morning’s rescue?” Fire leapt high in my lungs, constricting my throat. “Nay, Robin Hood, I’ll not be selling favors at any price, neither now nor ever.” My legs were sick with palsy, horrified to think that the happy flight of the morning might have carried me into the vulture’s nest. I thought of Hugh, of the sneer on his face as he pushed me down into the snow, and my heart itched with distrust. What had I done, to place myself in this brigand’s care? Could I not see that one knave was much like another?

But Robin showed no competing anger. Rather, he lowered his voice as if he spoke to some wild thing, a frightened dog or newborn colt, and moved himself gently away from the bed to a seat near the fire. “Very well, Marian, very well. I’ll not thrust my caresses upon you. But one day, I think you may ask me to renew my offers and then, perhaps, you shall be rebuffed.”

He knelt before the fireplace to poke distractedly at the burning logs, his mind wrapped deep in his secret thoughts. I stood as I was, shaking badly, for our interaction had touched upon some deep-rooted fear, and I sought to soothe and suppress the feeling. My heart quivered like a dying wren and my legs seemed to sink beneath me. I stepped to the bed and lay myself there, tucked my face in the depths of my wing, and gave way to silent tears of panic. The bed was soft, the room was warm, and before my eyes had grown raw from crying, they’d dropped to closing, and I was asleep.

When I awoke the light was dim, and Robin stood at the window casement, peering out through a chink in the shutter. He heard me move and turned.

“Ah, you’re awake then. I wondered how long you might sleep there.”

I sat upright and felt for my kerchief, sensing that it had slipped badly askew. “I did not mean to sleep at all. Has it been long?”

He shrugged in answer and came away from the window. I realized then that an afternoon trapped in a confined room must be agony to one as active as he. He seemed, however, to have managed well enough.

“I think a good rest was merited after what passed for you this morning. And as we seem to be quite safe here, ’tis as good a place as any to take it. No one has passed our door in search of you, and when soldiers came into the yard below I heard the innkeeper say he had none but married ladies here.”

“And that made them go?”

“Aye,” he said. “You’ll find, I’m sure, that royal guards do not tend to look beyond the surface of things. They rarely question and never pry, so a good disguise is a safe place to hide.”

He said nothing of our previous quarrel, which pleased me, though it did hang in the air like the smell of rot. I’d no wish to raise the dark points of my past when my future seemed so dim and uncertain. Instead I rose and straightened my new skirts, then knelt at the fire to light a taper, for I wished to work with my needle now and required more than fading light.

“Tell me, Robin, now that you have released me, are you fully prepared to take me on as one of your band in Sherwood Forest?” I asked it in the tone of a jest, but I had no jesting feelings at heart. A thought had surfaced like wood in water, scratching at the back of my mind. Perhaps he would want me to make love with him to earn my keep, exchanging favors for livelihood, the very bargain I’d just refused. I felt uneasy, and so I resolved to speak only of forest labors and to say nothing of sharing his bed—perhaps he would not think to make the request.

“I am indeed, for I thought there would be no other choice.”

“Nay, you’re right, there is no other.” I exhaled slowly, letting my worries flow out with my breath. “But I hope I can be of assistance to you and to your band when I am there.”

“I’ve no fears on that account. If you’re as handy with a needle as you appear, we shall have no end of work for you.”

I looked up and laughed, seeing then that he watched me as I stitched. Emma’s homespun gown was warm but it was also a hand too long, and I was raising up the hem with a thread I had pulled from my wedding gown.

“Skill with the needle may truly be the only talent of the noble lady. ’Tis no boast to say I can sew, but I am cheered to hear that it shall be of use.”

I stitched my hem while Robin watched, but when I took up the monk’s habit with the purpose of making it into a cloak, he began to pace the room. His circuit led him past the door, where he always paused to cock his ear, then to the window where he stopped to peer down into the yard, to see what passed. At last I spoke.

“Pray, stop that, Robin, you make me nervous. Come sit down here and tell me a tale to pass the time while I’m stitching. There’s not light enough to see the yard by this time, anyhow.”

He did as I asked and sat on a stool a good distance from the fire’s warmth, for perhaps his woodland habits had led him to prefer a slight chill over the hearth’s flame.

“But I know of no stories worth the telling,” he said as he sat, hands on his knees. “Unless you’d like to hear one of Friar Tuck’s tales of the thieving he did when he was a boy.”

“Nay, not that, I pray you. Tell me how you became an outlaw and began your life in Sherwood Forest.”

This made him quiet, and for a moment I feared I had saddened him. But then he spoke.

“I wasn’t raised an outlaw, you know. No one is. My parents thought I would live on in Locksley, where I was born, all my life just as they have. My da had scouted out cottage land for me before I was ten years old, so sure he was that I’d farm that land, same as he had. But I suppose I always had a wild streak, always loved to play the scalawag. And even as a young lad I could shoot the bow better than most.

“One year I had permission from our steward to visit the Nottingham fair and try my best at a shooting match they hold each year. So off I went, through the forest, whistling and singing at the fine weather, happy to have a good noonday meal packed in my knapsack.”

I watched him speak and tried to imagine the young Robin, boyish and beardless, on what was perhaps his first great journey. The thought made me smile, though I could not have explained why.

“I stopped for my meal by the side of a stream, but before I was done I heard loud voices, shouts in truth, coming from the woods a little way off. I stashed my bread and went to have a look, and in a clearing I saw a scene that gave me a vicious fright. A band of foresters, king’s men, had a man roped up, bound tight to a tree, and one of the foresters had his hunting knife drawn bare in his hand. He went up close to the bound man and snipped at his cheeks and ears with the knife, then put the blade to his throat.”

“You must have been frightened,” I said, not raising my eyes from my work.

“Aye, that I was, but not as frightened as a moment later when I looked closer at the bound man’s face. For I knew him. He was Wat o’ Locksley, a simple man of Locksley village who was oft in trouble with the steward for poaching in the king’s woods. He’d little sharpness of mind, did Wat, but he was a gentle soul and only poached to feed his young daughters. Wat had no land in Locksley and earned his bread with odd jobs and chores, but the year’d been slim, and I knew he’d found little in the way of work.

“Here, then, stood Wat, and soon enough I spied a bloody deer carcass. And so the tale was spread before me. Wat had been poaching on the king’s deer and was caught in the act by the king’s foresters, and now they meant to punish him for it.”

“And what is the penalty for killing one of the king’s deer?” I asked, frowning, fretting over a tale that had ended years before. But it troubled me, for as he spoke, my mind, in the way of mental visions, laid the face of Annie’s father over that of Wat, and I shuddered to see him in such peril.

“Both eyes put out, finger and thumb cut from both hands, and then the man is left in the forest to bleed to death.” Robin’s voice was hard and he stared into the flames without seeing. “That’s the penalty.”

“For killing a deer! A man’s life, then, is deemed equal to that of a hart?”

“It is for the king, for those deer are his own pride and joy.”

“But the king has hunting grounds all over England!” I exclaimed, growing indignant. “And surely each one is stocked with more deer than there are men on this island. I have heard it said, in fact, that the king’s forests cover one-third of the country.”

“Indeed? I know only of Sherwood, Needwood, and Plompton, but those are grand forests and each hold thousands of deer, I’m certain.”

I fumed and blustered for a moment more, then recalled that he was telling a tale and begged him continue from where he had stopped.

“Ah, well, so there was Wat, set to lose his eyes and thumbs. I stood not forty feet off, and as all eyes were on this captive, no one had noticed me. I shook, watching them, but when I saw them seize his hand and press it up against the tree to hack away at his fingers, I stopped my shaking and brought out an arrow. I scarcely remember taking aim, but before I could blink an arrow of mine was stuck fast in the back of the man with the knife, and I was running off for my life.”

I lowered my needle, sensing in the silence that this one act was far more momentous than any I’d experienced. A cloud of unfathomable weight seemed to grow within the room, filling my lungs with something dank. Fear, I supposed it was, and regret.

“And ever since you’ve been an outlaw?” I couldn’t bear to raise my eyes.

“Aye, since that day that I killed a man in the employ of the king, I’ve been a wanted man. I hid out that night in the top of a tree, weeping and wailing like a baby when I realized I could never go home to Locksley again. When it was all dark I did slip back to loosen Wat, for the foresters had all run off after me and were scattered throughout the wood. The man I’d killed still lay where he fell, and I had to step over his corpse to untie Wat from the trunk of that oak.”

As he stared at his hands I considered what this had meant for him, a young lad, now estranged from his kin, his village, his every idea of himself. Beside his trials, my loss of nobility seemed small and paltry, and I resolved for the moment to give it less weight than I had so far.

I peered at him then through the candlelight, hoping to read in the hollows of his eyes some conclusion, some wisdom to be gained from his tale. But he seemed to have none. The story itself shook him greatly, and I, the observer, was left only with the poignant thought that it must be a burdensome thing to take a man’s life, and I should be grateful I had never yet done it.

T
HAT NIGHT WE LAY DOWN
to sleep on a shared bed, each wrapped in our cloaks, carefully placed on our own far sides. In spite of the fact that we did not touch, my breathing was ragged and would not settle, conscious that he slept just beside. ’Twas silly, I knew, for had I not recently passed a night in the same bed as Annie and her entire family, father and boys included? But I still lay there long awake, seeing nothing in the darkness, but holding my eyes open all the same.

One finger of moonlight entered our room through a break in the shutters, and by its light I saw Robin roll onto his back, saw the shape of his profile clearly in the milky light. Each eyelash, each hair was clear to me, and I felt my palms begin to sweat with some strange nervousness.

“Marian?” he whispered softly, unsure if I slept.

“Aye?”

“I—” He paused, licked his lower lip, then turned his face toward mine. “I won’t ask you for what you’re unwilling to give. There’s maids a-plenty in this land, willing maids, enough to keep a man most happy any day of the year. I’ve no need to force you, so do not be frightened. I could not bear to have you frightened of me.”

I made no reply, but as I pushed the breath from my lungs, I thought I released some of the fumes that poisoned my innards. I’d wronged him by recoiling before. His pride was too great to cause me harm, outlaw or no—this I now saw to my immense relief.