The Outlaws of Sherwood (14 page)

“Flesh is weak,” agreed the friar. “But within my limitations, I try to be a good friar. How may I serve you?”

Robin found that Alan's story sounded pretty silly without Alan's young enthusiasm to give it colour; but Alan had been left, not without violent protest, at Greentree, for Will and Robin had both felt that the friar should be spared the boy's single-mindedness. “I think
we
might be spared his single-mindedness,” said Will, aside, to Robin. “Melodrama makes admirable ballads, and I have sung a few myself, but it's a little wearying in a companion.”

“A young man has come to us,” Robin said, more tentatively than he wished, “with a tale of his Saxon sweetheart's fate to be married to a Norman lord she fears and despises. He wishes us to steal her back for him; and if we do so, we need a cleric to marry them.”

“A curiously romantic undertaking,” said the friar mildly, “for an outlaw band pragmatically dedicated—as I understand—to a more judicious distribution of wealth than the Normans find necessary toward a conquered race. Or perhaps this is a particular Norman lord?”

“Roger of St Clair,” said Will.

“I see,” said the friar, and fell silent. “Very well,” he said at last. “I know tales of Roger of St Clair that, if only half of them are half true, prove that he is no fit husband for a lady, Saxon or Norman. And if half the tales of Robin Hood are half true, it is perhaps not a bad thing that I thus align myself with you. But I would ask—”

“We will bring the pair to you here,” Will interrupted. “You need not fear showing your face to the heavy-browed Roger.”

“It is not the weight of his brows I wish to avoid confronting,” replied the friar. “But I was going to ask that you not tell me what else may be happening while Roger's attention is caught by the thieving of his bride.”

Will laughed, but the others were silent, and there was a scowl on Much's face.

“I would also ask,” said Friar Tuck, “since you remind me, that you endeavour not to be followed when you bring me the happy couple.”

“I would not be here to ask favours of you, Friar Tuck, were we not able to avoid being followed,” said Robin sharply; but the friar merely smiled.

“You comfort me,” he said.

“Then we will be on our way,” said Robin, and jumped up, suddenly angry that he had enjoyed the friar's food, and had lain on the greensward drinking the friar's cider. He set the near-empty jug down with a thump.

The friar and the others rose more slowly, though Much's face was still unfriendly, and Marian looked sardonic. “As you have a long walk—I guess—before you, I will not press you to stay,” said the friar, “though there is little cider left to tempt you besides. But go not away in anger, Robin Hood; I am perhaps more of a coward than your other folk; and if this is true, then you should be glad to elude the crisis that could force me to take permanent refuge with you. And for the rest, if you have no doubts about what you do, then you are less of a man than I think you.”

“Cleverly phrased,” said Robin.

The friar looked at him. “Perhaps you should come again, when you are at leisure, and we will discuss it further.”

“So long as I am not followed.”

“My visitors, when there are any, are a contradictory assemblage; I draw the line only at a guest leading a bloody-visaged Norman to my very door-step. But yes, I should say you should come to me unpursued by those who seek the price on your head, because I am an old man and lazy as well as a coward, and I will not see the trap till it springs shut around you. And it would curtail our conversation as well.” He paused. “Truce?”

“Truce,” answered Robin. “It is perhaps chancy for my immortal soul to be in conflict with a churchman.”

The friar laughed. “It is. Believe it.”

“We believe it that thus you have lived to such an age and girth,” said Will; and so they parted on good terms. As they passed through the oaken gateway, Robin paused and looked back. The friar was looking after them; one dog had its head raised and was looking too, but the others lay flat and motionless, like mossy brown stones cast surprisingly far from the stream that ran at the foot of the knoll. “I will send you a man named Jocelin,” called Robin. “He was once a carpenter, and he frets, sometimes, at living in trees. He will weep for joy over your cottage.”

CHAPTER NINE

Heretofore the Sherwood outlaws' battles had been small skirmishes, and fought mostly from the rear—and, as Marian had said, with surprisingly little bloodshed. Over the recent weeks they had developed rather a flair for detaining the heavy purses of certain people unwary enough to wander little-guarded near the forest of Sherwood. “Once I thought it was a crime that news travelled so badly through England,” said Much; “now I bless the Norman carelessness that cannot be bothered to warn its own folk. I will grow to love the race after all.”

But the assault on the Baron St Clair was a different thing. Never before had Robin's folk gone out seeking trouble on the trouble's own home ground; nor on such a scale. One of the reasons they had been able thus far to perform their purse-cutting so neatly was that they were careful to take on only the smaller, softer, and more foolish varieties of wealth. Roger of St Clair was none of these reassuring things.

“The decision's been made,” said Much.

“I am well aware of that,” said Robin. He added broodingly: “I could almost wish that Little John's scouting had been less successful. I still do not understand why a man like St Clair is not hiring a cathedral, and filling it with a hundred guests; it feels almost too good to be true that he prefers to skulk off to a small chapel in our forest, where we can so readily get at him.”

“You do not know him,” said Little John. “For this suits him exactly, to own the chapel as he owns his estate—as he thinks he is about to own his wife. In a cathedral there might be one or two folk looking at the cathedral instead of at the gripping fist of St Clair.”

“I believe you,” said Robin; “it merely seems to me odd. But we have too many uses for the money this adventure should bring us to ignore the opportunity.”

“You mean that the adventure
will
bring us,” said Will Scarlet.

“Money!” cried Much. “What about reuniting the young lovers?”

“Young lovers be hanged—as we hope not to be,” replied Robin. “We shall at least find out if our hiding-places are as good as they must be; a test of fire. After that day's work there will be Normans after us thick as witch-hunters after a poor old woman with a cast in one eye.”

“I like not your picture of our doughtiness,” said Will. “I can see out both my eyes.”

“Should we succeed,” said Much, “we'll have coin enough to bring twice as many as we are through the hardest winter England has ever seen.”

“Your grasp of the economics of weather is sadly feeble,” said Marian. “If it is that hard a winter, you will spend it in the cellars of Blackhill, and a tight fit it will be.”

Much grinned at her. “Ah, but the wine we could afford to drink while we waited for spring!”

There was a faint
twang
from where Alan had been playing his lute for a group of folk at a little distance. Alan-a-dale was still shy of the court, as he thought of them from his days of playing for lords: Robin and Much and Marian, Little John and Will Scarlet; but neither could he stay away from them far or long as the day he dreaded and prayed for came ever nearer. The result was that the “court” knew his music very well without having quite paid attention to it or having had it performed specially for them. His shyness was not soothed, either, by Robin's general noise-ban; any occasion when his muse was particularly present, his muse being a creature who loved volume, was sure to result in a curt order from his new leader to be quiet. It was also not lost upon him that Little John was no music-lover and grew frozen-faced in his vicinity.

But the relationship between Little John and Alan-a-dale was dubious at best. Little John had, finally, after low-spoken protest and some mulishness, agreed to arrange for a message to be delivered to the lady Marjorie.

“She must know to keep her courage up!” cried Alan, looking like a rabbit shouting at a lion. “You would not be so cruel as to deny her some token!”

“Wouldn't I?” said Little John. “I wonder about this fair maid of yours, who has so little courage as to bend to others' bidding so quickly, even to marrying a man she loathes.”

“You do not know her!” Alan cried, cheeks crimson with fury. “She is all gentleness, all sweetness, all softness!”

“I know the type,” murmured Marian, sotto voce, to Will. “She is going to find hauling her own water and mending her own stockings a fate past comprehension. And when her stockings wear out, and she has to wear coarse wool next to her skin, she will have blisters, and then she will weep.”

“She will have been weeping right along,” said Will, “from her first glimpse of Greentree.”

“—and she believes her first loyalty is to her father, which is just as it should be, not to—to—me, who only loves her,” finished Alan, and his beautiful voice broke on a sob. Little John, sitting on the lopped-off trunk of an old tree, was still only half a hand's-width shorter than the standing Alan. He looked up under his dark straight brows at the pale boy trembling in his passion, and said nothing, but the set of his shoulders suggested that he was restraining himself. Alan put a long elegant hand over his face a moment, gave one last shudder, and took his hand down again; his eyes were suspiciously bright. “You
will
take a token to my lady,” he said fiercely.

Robin, Marian, Much, and Will watched with great interest as Little John won the struggle with himself not to stand up and loom over Alan, who did not take being loomed over well. He bent down, instead, picked up a branch at his feet the width of an ordinary man's forearm, perhaps the size of one of his wrists, and broke it in half. He looked musingly at the ragged edges of the wood rings thus revealed, as if he would tell Alan and his lady's fortune there. At last he said: “Very well, I will take your token.” He threw half the broken branch into the fire, where it crackled with sap; Alan half-turned and startled away, as if the fire were an enemy approaching him from behind. Little John added: “I will even try to deliver it.”

Alan whirled back to Little John again, and opened his mouth twice or thrice, but nothing came out. At last he seized his lute round from its strap across his back, and clutched it to his breast as if it were the token he wished given to his lady; or as if it were the lady herself and, having her, he need not bear Little John any longer. His breast heaving and his knuckles white against the frets of his instrument, he stalked off; they could hear him crashing through the undergrowth for several minutes. Robin sighed.

“He is making no more noise than a wounded boar,” said Marian. “Don't distress yourself.”

“I hope he takes care of that lute,” said Will. “It's a fine one, and 'twould be a waste to use it for kindling.”

“You push him hard,” said Robin to Little John.

“Would you risk this adventure—and our lives—on a silly boy's love-struck whim?” said Little John. “The girl will live with the waiting. If she's anything like her lover, she dreams of him every night and, dreaming, every night he rescues her. Upon waking she is sure that it is true.”

“What a lot you know about the dreams of romance,” said Will.

Little John gave him an inscrutable look and went on: “She does not need the doubtful proof of any token. But I will try, and she will get it if I can make it so. But I cannot say I like it.”

On the evening air came the muffled whine and
ting
of long running chords played with ill-suppressed fury.

“If he were to stay with us, he would have to learn to be pressed hard,” said Robin; “I do not understand why he thinks he would prefer such a life. I hope we may find some more suitable place for the two of them—soon, before, as you say, Marian, his lady wears too many holes in her stockings. I must acknowledge that the boy does his work and does not complain; and I have not spared his musician's hands.”

“It has happened that a lady could surprise you,” said Marian to the fire.

Robin smiled faintly. “Try to deliver the token as you can, my friend, but take no more risk than you wish or deem wise.”

“That I can promise,” said Little John.

“And meanwhile, he must stop that appalling noise,” said Robin, and got to his feet.

For a token, Alan-a-dale produced a bit of ribbon which, he said, the lady had once given him, and it broke his heart to give it up. (“Good,” said Little John. “Let us forget the whole matter.”) The token was handed over to a man, who gave it to a maid, who, heart fluttering in excitement, gave it to the lady; and then the sending was reversed, and a little silk purse was given to the maid to give to the man, who gave it to Little John, who tucked it away with a snort. But when the purse was laid in the surprised hand of Alan-a-dale, a smile so sunny and brilliant broke out on his face that those who had grown used to him in the last ten days looked at him in amazement and did not recognise him.

So the plan was laid, and the players appointed, each to a part; and Alan grew frantic—and absent-minded—with hope and fear. On the day before Roger of St Clair's wedding day, Alan contrived to free a rabbit from one of Much's snares instead of killing it, and the usually good-natured Much lost his temper. Food was always the first thing on all the outlaws' minds, and an extra rabbit in the stew would have been welcome the night before so hazardous an enterprise. But nothing could discomfit Alan now; he looked hazily at Much, pulled the little silken purse from a pocket (near his heart), kissed it, and walked away smiling.