Lady of Sherwood Read online

  “Lady Marian,” Joan said soothingly, “they always eat your cooking without complaint. And, after all, no one told them you were to cook.” The woman cast a quelling glance at the other servants as they giggled behind their aprons. “I made certain of it.”

  “But they prefer Cook’s cooking.” Marian grimaced ruefully. “I prefer Cook’s cooking. But that is no excuse. Not when one has promised.” Her slow-blooming, evocative smile suggested imminent repercussions. “Therefore, I shall have to go and fetch them all home. Like children. Which men—some men—mimic with surpassing regularity.” She scowled at the table laden with cooling, congealing food. “Even men who are knights, former Crusaders, and heirs of powerful earls, and should certainly know better.”

  “But how will you find them?” Joan inquired, hiding a smile. “One tavern in all of Nottingham?”

  Marian considered that a foolish question. “A red-haired giant, an overplump friar, a simpleton boy, a perpetually scowling peasant, and an earl’s son?” She paused for irony. “Together?”

  “Ah.” Joan nodded solemnly; everyone in Nottingham knew that particular ill-matched grouping.

  With a final sulfurous glare at the table, Marian stalked out of the hall, out of the door—and into a very large man.

  She staggered back even as he caught and steadied her with a huge hand. “John—?” she began, readying chastisement, but knew better even as she said it. None of them was here. Not even Robin, who had promised.

  In torchlight she saw the glint of steel, the dull shine of worn leather rubbed smooth by time and hard usage. She realized then he was not so tall as Little John—likely no man in England was—but immensely wide through the shoulders. Leather and mail added bulk.

  Marian could not help the thought as she looked into the flame-painted face, saw its unshaven scruff and the hard, pitted flesh beneath.

  This is a cruel man. But she dismissed it as premonition, and urgency superseded it. “What is wrong?”

  He blinked dark eyes and released her arm with alacrity, as if suddenly acknowledging their differences in gender and rank. Had he expected insipid pleasantries prior to the meat of the matter? He should know better; his masked expression hid nothing of an edged intensity, a brittle facade of self-control. And Marian, who had lived with the same herself, had fostered it in herself, recognized it at once.

  Her mother, dead. Her father, dead. Her brother, dead. She understood loss. Now there was no one left to lose.

  Except Robin.

  “Who is it?” she blurted, abruptly certain, and as abruptly frightened. “Who is dead?”

  Taken aback by her vehemence, he murmured something in harsh-voiced French. Marian heard Le roi—and the abrupt catch of his breath, a brief curse. He began again. In English. “Sir Robert of Locksley.”

  She shivered again, this time from the ice in her blood. Not Robin. Not dead. Not the only one left in and of her life. And who was this man to bring her word?

  The accented voice was a rough growl. “He is summoned. To France. At once.”

  Summoned. Summoned. Not dead.

  It gave her the strength to speak steadily, to stand with strength again. “Who summons him?”

  The face was implacable. “Le roi.”

  “The king,” she murmured, baffled. “The king summons him?”

  “To France. At once.”

  The moment of panic and shock had passed. This time, this time, there was no word of death, of one more loss, of another body to be brought home. She could manage pleasantries now, and simple conversation.

  “He is not here.” Marian gestured to the open door behind her. “Will you come into the warmth of the hall? Will you sit at table with me?” She smiled wryly; there was enough food for a king’s army—though she thought this man and Little John might account for half the table.

  “Non.” And again, in English. “No. Where is he?”

  “Nottingham,” she answered; annoyance rekindled. “Though he should be here by now. He is late coming home—”

  He cut her off curtly. “Then I will go there.”

  “Wait” She caught his arm as he turned, gripped hard, though she doubted he could feel it through hauberk, mail, leather, gambeson, and the fierce knotting of rigid muscle. “What is it? What has happened? Why does the king want Robin?”

  Something moved in the dark, hard eyes. “To be there.”

  Robin had once been a soldier for his king. The question had merit despite the stranger’s blatant unwillingness to offer explanation. And she believed she knew the answer: the king always had need of more men, nearly as much as money. “To fight.”

  His mouth tightened. “To watch.”

  It baffled her utterly. “To watch what?”

  His teeth showed briefly in a grimace of anger, and grief. “To watch the king die.”

  Even as Marian’s hands flew to seal her mouth in shock, the gate behind the man was shoved open; Sim had, it seemed, been hailed after all, for there he was. Into the courtyard, laughing, singing, cursing—and, in one case, praying—spilled a red-haired giant, an overplump friar, a simpleton boy, a perpetually scowling peasant, an earl’s son.

  And also one other: a slender, graceful man of tumbled golden curls and bright blue eyes, cradling a lute-case. Tardiness and broken promise now claimed an explanation.

  “Alan,” she said in surprise; they had none of them seen Alan of the Dales for more than two years. And then she forgot all about the minstrel even as the big soldier turned toward the gate.

  “Robert of Locksley!” he roared.

  The accented thunder of a battlefield bellow shut off the laughing, singing, cursing—clearly a Nottingham tavern had been involved—at once. The revelers stopped dead in their tracks, staring. Marian saw Robin unhook an arm from around Tuck’s cowled neck and push through the others to stand before them even as they pulled themselves together, frivolity forgotten. She marked the sudden stiffening of his body, the shock in his face.

  Disbelief, emphatic and unfeigned. “Mercardier?”

  “In the name of the king,” Mercardier declared, bass to baritone, “you are to come to France.”

  “France!” That was Will Scarlet, truculent as usual, especially after too much ale. “What’s in France for us, then?”

  Marian pitched her voice over them all, and their murmurings. “Robin,” she said clearly. “You must go with him.”

  Robin looked from the soldier to Marian. What he saw in her face, in Mercardier’s, leached the color from his own.

  “Ya Allah,” he murmured, stunned, using an invocation she had believed banished in the years since his return. He began to stride toward them, no sign of drunkenness in his gait. “What has happened?”

  “A man’s pride,” Mercardier said harshly in his ruined voice. “He took no thought for his safety, nor for the wound after the arrow pierced him.”

  Robin’s expression was stark as his step faltered briefly, but something moved in his hazel eyes that spoke of undercurrents. “His safety, I believe, was your duty, Mercardier.”

  So, they knew each other. Well enough to dislike one another. But then, Robin had been the king’s favorite, and such men encountered much dislike by men lacking royal favor. Or men overzealous in their own royal service. Marian, standing so close to the king’s man, was aware of the tension that abruptly immobilized him. And the hostility that was so palpable she very nearly smelled it.

  She had experience with men who wished to fight simply because fighting did not require thinking, or an awareness of painful truth. “Stop this,” she said sharply, before it could begin. “The king is dying. You owe this time to him, not to your pride.”

  Pride. Which Mercardier’s words implied might cause the death of that king.

  Robert of Locksley, once a prisoner of the Infidel, had learned how to set aside such things as pride, as hostility, as personal preferences. He did so now. But Marian, who had learned to read him very well in five years, even such things as
level intonations and the set of fair eyebrows, saw the bitterness in his eyes as he strode directly past Mercardier and climbed the steps into the hall.

  Her hall. And his. As she had declared it so.

  Her king. And his. As God and Henry II had declared it so.

  The Lionheart, dying?

  No. Other men died. Weaker men died.

  To most of the men in his service, Richard Coeur de Lion was legend, not man. And legends did not die.

  “You will stay the night, of course,” she said to Mercardier; best to depart at first light, rather than sleeping on wet ground. “I will see to the arrangements.”

  “We go tonight.” The peremptory tone halted her. “We go now.”

  She felt stiff and cold, and powerless. “Is there so little time as that?”

  “Madame,” Mercardier said curtly, “even now he may be dead.”

  Legends did not die. But men did.

  And kings.

  Two

  Marian found Robin upstairs in the bedroom they shared. She had half expected to discover him packing feverishly, a duty she planned to lift from him; and clearly he had begun, for one of the big chests was open and clothing spilled forth. But he was no longer digging through folded shertes, tunics, and hosen to select what he thought best to take. Instead, he stood very still near the foot of the bed, mimicking the wood of its testers.

  She stopped, noting the brittle tautness of his posture, and waited.

  When he saw her at last, when he could form the syllables of words and make sense out of incoherency, he said what she had at first believed: “He cannot die.”

  She waited.

  “Not Lionheart,” he added, as if she might not know to whom he referred. As if, by hearing the infamous sobriquet, Death might yet be startled away and the warrior-king defended.

  She did not say what was obvious: that the king would not have sent for him in such a way otherwise; that Mercardier would not have come himself in such haste and hostility. She said nothing at all, simply waited. There were times a man needed to understand a thing for himself before he permitted a woman entry into his grief. And this was indeed grief, plainly visible in the carnage of his face as he slowly admitted the truth.

  “One moment,” he said dazedly. “One moment, and all is changed.” He looked at her. This time he saw her. “One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.”

  Marian nodded mutely as tears welled into her eyes.

  “And we are made different,” he said bleakly. “On the instant. What we know, what we were, is banished by that instant, razed like a castle under siege, until nothing recognizable is left. The world is unmade.”

  His world had been made and unmade and made again many times, in war, in captivity, in its repercussions. But this was somehow different. She saw it in his face, in his eyes, in the sluggish quality of his voice, as if he were drugged out of pain but remained aware of it nonetheless, waiting for it to seize him once again.

  “One moment,” he said, “Richard is alive, and the world is whole, and full. The next . . .” He shook his head. Pale hair stirred against his shoulders. “The next I am summoned to France to see what is left of the man, if he be living yet. So I may witness the world turn itself inside out.”

  Marian drew a breath. “He wants you to leave at once. Tonight.”

  Robin nodded. “Mercardier is not a man to waste time.”

  “Nor should it be wasted,” she said, “when a king is dying.”

  He shut his eyes and flinched. Visibly.

  Marian did not know the king. She had met him, once, five years before, when he had come home briefly following his ransoming. When he had looked upon the woman who had won the heart of the man King Richard knew as soldier and confidant, who had gotten drunk with Coeur de Lion; the man who had sung with Coeur de Lion, who had killed with Coeur de Lion in the land of the Infidel, in the name of God. She did not know the king, but she did know the man who had done all those things with the king, and she was fully cognizant of the pain such bald honesty caused.

  To lance the wound, she said, “I have ordered Sim to saddle your horse.”

  “A single moment,” he said, “and nothing is the same.”

  Marian bent and retrieved a sherte from the floor. “I will do this,” she told him. “Go and eat what you can before that soldier sees to it you never eat again.”

  “Mercardier.” His voice was less drugged, more distinct. As was the dryness of irony. “Not a duty he would cherish, this. Fetching me?” His mouth twitched briefly, then stilled. “But he would see to it where another man might speak of failure, not wanting to set eyes on my face again.”

  Marian gathered up other clothing, began to place it on the bed so she might select what was needed. “What is he to the king?”

  “Captain of his mercenaries, bought men from Aquitaine. But more. They are brothers in many ways, Richard and his captain. More so than ever Geoffrey was, and certainly than John. They are very like in their taste for battle, in the ordering of war.”

  “And he hates you,” Marian said. “Why?”

  He was silent a long moment. “Because one day, at Richard’s insistence, I wrestled the king. And defeated him. Mercardier has never forgiven me.”

  She knew better. “There is more than that.”

  Robin sighed deeply. “Of course. There is always more.” He moved at last, to stop her from sorting his clothing. To touch her hand, to grip it, to pull her close. To set a stiff face into her hair as he embraced her. “One moment,” he said, “and the world is forever changed. But there is one constancy in my life that I will never allow to change. You.”

  Marian, offering assuagement in the warmth of her body, the tightness of her arms wrapped around his neck, thought of how she had been certain, upon Mercardier’s arrival, that she had lost yet another she loved. And how in that moment the world had turned itself inside out.

  But in this moment, as they clung to one another, the world did not move at all. Time was theirs to rule.

  Too briefly, Marian reflected. But better one moment than none.

  William deLacey, Lord High Sheriff of Nottingham, had sentenced himself this day to his own dungeon. But he was in no danger of being executed or of remaining imprisoned; he inhabited the dungeon cell because it contained money.

  The chests of coin were of varying sizes, wood bound by brass, and locked. The sheriff had seen to it that only two men had keys: himself, and his seneschal, Sir Guy of Gisbourne. Who had, five years before, become more than merely steward of Nottingham Castle, but also the sheriff’s son-in-law, by marrying Eleanor, the last and least of deLacey’s daughters.

  Just this moment the sheriff was unconcerned with the chests, stacked into uneven columns against damp stone walls, and equally unconcerned with Gisbourne and Eleanor. His attention was wholly commanded by a large cloth he had unrolled from its oiled casing and spread upon the one piece of furniture in the cell: a crude oak table. The cloth itself was unprepossessing, neither of lustrous silk or fine-woven linen, but it represented everything of his shire that was vital to the realm, so that England, embodied by her sovereign, might thrive.

  The cloth was Nottinghamshire’s Exchequer, divided like a chessboard into painted squares. Parchment writs served as vouchers for expenses, and wooden tally pieces were placed into an area called the receipt, representative of tax payments made to the sheriff. Twice a year it was his responsibility to make an accurate accounting of his shire, and to carry that accounting—and all collected monies—to the Royal Exchequer via Lincoln to London. A preliminary session took place after Easter each year, and it was this session which concerned the sheriff now.

  At Michaelmas, in late September, he would be required to square up his account, to give a final summary of the expenses and profits of Nottinghamshire by indicating various squares on the Exchequer and explaining what had been done about money—coin spent, and coin coll
ected—in the king’s name. It was an exhaustive process, as every sheriff in England was required to attend the sessions. From this final accounting at Michaelmas the king himself was paid, campaigns were funded, the administration of all of England was underwritten, including the payment of sheriffs. Accounts were required to be accurate and absolute; and it was known by all the sheriffs that writs of expenditures, in the days of Holy Crusade, far too frequently outnumbered tally pieces. William deLacey, who would rather hang criminals than account for the king’s coin, detested Easter and Michaelmas.

  He heard the key scrape in the lock. Gisbourne. And so it was; and so Gisbourne let himself into the dungeon and imprisoned them both. For now the wealth of Nottinghamshire—pardon, the king’s wealth—was safe.

  DeLacey grunted and stepped away from the table. Gisbourne, a short, compact, dark man, bent and placed a stack of wooden tallies into the receipt.

  “And?” deLacey asked ominously.

  Grimly, Gisbourne took a packet of parchment from his purse. He untied it and began parceling out the writs into various squares representing cities, towns, villages, manors. No one in England was spared a share of taxes. But neither was England spared expenses.

  “And?” deLacey repeated.

  “There are more tallies to come,” Gisbourne said. “I have men out now going from village to village to collect the taxes as yet unpaid, but it will take time.”

  “I do not have a surfeit of time,” the sheriff reminded. “Tell the men to be ruthless. I must have a full accounting before the preliminary session.”

  Gisbourne’s mouth barely moved. “Yes, my lord.”

  “See to it.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The sheriff glared at the writs strewn across the Exchequer. “It would be much simpler if everyone simply paid the tax collectors on time. Then it would spare me the need to send soldiers to the villages, and spare the peasants the attentions of those soldiers.”