by Anna Burke
“I . . .” Terror stole her voice. “I wasn’t.”
“And yet Cedric says you were. With a commoner.” He spat the last word.
“Cedric must be mistaken.” The name reverberated in her skull. Cedric. Robyn’s Cedric? If so, had he recognized the outlaw?
“I’ve been too lax with you. Until the wedding, you’ll be staying under my roof, locked in your room if need be. I will not have you vanishing like your friend Willa on the eve of your wedding.”
Robyn, she thought, wishing she could call her back with her mind. “Yes, father,” she said as meekly as she could. The more she fought him, the more his suspicions would deepen. “Might I say goodnight to Emmeline at least and tell her this joyous news?”
Her father had never directed the look he now wore at her before, but she recognized it: it was the look he reserved for those he hanged.
“Do you take me for a fool?” He closed his hand roughly on her arm. “I will have one of my men escort you home, where he will remain until I return. We will talk then.”
Home. Home to the house she’d ransacked earlier that night. She curtsied as best she could while still in her father’s grip and prayed.
• • •
Marian sat by the cold fireplace in her father’s receiving room. The guard, a man named Hob, hadn’t let her retreat to the shelter of her bedroom where she might at least have changed out of her gown. He sat across from her with a puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t identify what manner of creature lashed its tail in the undergrowth before him. She wished she had a tail to lash, or claws, or a boar’s great raking tusks. Anything to help her break past him. Hob, however, stood a full head taller than she, and he was almost as broad through the shoulders as a steer. He could probably stop her from fleeing with one finger. The housekeeper glowered at Marian as she brought Hob a mug of ale. No doubt they’d disrupted her plans for the rest of the evening, but Marian didn’t feel a shred of pity.
She needed a story. What reason, however, could she give for leaving the city in the company of any man, let alone a man beneath her station? Nothing that wouldn’t soil her reputation as well as her ruined gown. She’d have to continue to deny it. Cedric, she’d say, was mistaken.
She glanced at Hob. If only he’d been one of her father’s dumber thugs. Hob, however, was reliably intelligent. His puzzled look deepened into a frown as he caught her gaze. She thought he wanted to ask her a question, but he held his tongue. She wished he’d speak. The silence turned the waiting into agony.
I fell asleep in a broom closet, she told herself. I’ll say it must have been another girl. Keeping the lie simple might save her. What, she wondered, would Robyn do? Or Willa? She dug her nails into her palms. They would both fight their way out. Robyn had killed a forester rather than be taken captive, and Willa had faked her own death and run away in her brother’s clothing. Marian didn’t know how to fight like that. She’d never wanted to know. “Words and tears are woman’s weapons,” her father had said, once. She didn’t remember the context, but she recalled the dismissive tone of his voice. Now even words had failed her. Nothing she told Hob would convince him to leave her unguarded.
Footsteps on the stairs and the sound of the door swinging open struck her mind dumb. Fear keened at the edges of her hearing like an evil wind, and she pressed her back into the chair as her father strode down the hallway. Hob stood as the sheriff entered, followed by an unfamiliar young man with a bad case of acne. Marian remained where she sat. Her father glowered down at her.
“Explain,” he said.
Fear had dried her mouth and her tongue rasped against her lips like an autumn leaf. “I don’t understand,” she managed eventually.
“Where were you tonight?”
“I told you. I fell asleep. Too much wine.” She stuttered over the words.
“Liar.”
She jumped at his shout. Veins pulsed in his forehead. Never, not once in her entire life, had she seen him this angry.
“You will tell me even if I have to beat it out of you.”
“Father!”
“I have done everything for you. Everything.” His voice dropped from a shout to a malevolent whisper on the last word. “Do you think the viscount will want to marry you when he finds out you’ve been rolling in the mud with pigs like a common whore?”
“I haven’t. I—”
“You will not contradict me. Cedric, you saw my daughter?”
The pock-faced man—Cedric—looked between the sheriff and Marian, and she pleaded with her eyes for him to lie.
“Yes, m’lord.”
“You are sure?”
He hesitated. She held her breath, hoping, but he nodded.
“And did you recognize who she was with?”
Panic strangled her breath. Please, she prayed. Please, Mother have mercy on Robyn, if not on me.
“He wore a hood, m’lord. I did not see his face.” Her flash of relief retreated as the man’s eyes darted away from hers and back to her father’s. “But—”
“Speak, lad.”
“I believe it was the archer. From the spring fair.”
Marian felt her stomach might heave up all the food and drink she’d consumed that night. Fury twisted her father’s features into something animal and alien.
“Very well. You may leave us. All of you.”
No, she almost begged Hob and Cedric. She didn’t know the man before her. Her father wouldn’t speak to her like this. Her father loved her. This man was deranged with wrath.
“It matters not.” His voice was the flat calm of ice before the thaw. “You will wed Linley, and if you bear the vermin’s bastard, you will tell the viscount it is his, do you understand me?” He gripped her shoulders and shook her, hard. “John means to make him an earl when he succeeds his brother. You will not disappoint me in this.”
“I didn’t,” she began, even as her mind screamed Robyn’s name, but he shook her again. She squeaked as she muffled a scream. “I would never lie with a man.” The words tumbled out of her before he could hurt her again. “I swear it, Father. I swear it on her grave.”
He froze. Tears leaked down her cheeks as she forced herself to stare up at him. She didn’t need to name her mother. They both knew who she’d meant. Rage and grief clashed behind his eyes. Abruptly his hands loosened. He looked down at them as if he didn’t recognize them, and she felt the skin begin to bruise where he’d held her.
“Marian,” he said in a choked voice.
She quaked before him, and the sound of her chattering teeth filled the air, the ghosts of words she wished she had the strength to scream into his face.
“Go,” he said, finally, stumbling back from her as if she’d struck him.
She fled. Her feet pounded up the stairs and she threw herself into her room and slammed the door, sliding down to sit with her back to it and her feet braced against the uneven slats as if she feared he might change his mind and batter it down. Bile rose in her throat. She clasped her hand over her mouth to keep it down, not wishing to remember the thing she’d seen wearing her father’s skin. Had the monster always been there? The trembling became violent, and she lowered her hands from her mouth to wrap them around herself, for fear her skeleton might shake itself apart.
Things she’d heard over the years came back to her. People feared her father. She’d always told herself it was his power and position that made people avert their gaze in the street. Respect and fear often wore the same cloak, and a sheriff could not be too well loved, or he would not be able to carry out his duties. Nottingham required a firm hand. Those who crossed him did not always deserve their fates, she knew, but strength required sacrifice.
And I have never crossed him until now.
The truth of it temporarily stilled the shaking. As a child she’d misbehaved, but since coming of age she hadn’t been under his roof long enough to garner more than his mildest displeasure. She’d concealed all acts of defiance, as would anyone, but
not because she feared her father. Not because she hated him.
“I don’t hate my father.”
She made herself say the words aloud and tasted them for truth. No. The man she’d seen downstairs was hateful, but she didn’t hate him. Instead, the turmoil in her chest solidified into the weight of betrayal.
“. . . if you bear the vermin’s bastard.”
That is what I am worth to him then, she realized, recounting his words. That is all he will ever see. A vessel for his bloodline. A measure of his pride. He’d find out just how much she was worth when he tried to open the chest that held her dowry. She wished she’d taken all of it: the cups, the golden ring, the pearls, and the silk. She listened to his feet mount the stairs. Any second now he would discover the wreckage of his study. She waited for his bellow of rage to rend the air, torn between dread and satisfaction at the prospect of thwarting him still further. There was nothing left for her to lose.
Silence dragged on. No shout came from the hall. Instead, as the minutes passed, she heard a different sound: a careful measured tread on the boards beyond her door, and then the click and rattle of a lock being fastened. A lock to keep her here, in this prison of a room where once she’d slept with the wide, trusting eyes of a child secure in the knowledge of her father’s love. She had not realized she held room for further betrayal. The wood of the floorboards bit into her seat and thighs as she remained, motionless, as locked into her position as surely as the door. She wanted to beat her fists upon it. She wanted to scream at him to let her out—that he could not do this to her, that she was his only child, and that he could not hold her prisoner—but the thought of his glinting satisfaction stayed her.
• • •
She woke up in a haze of early sunlight with her hands raw and her throat rawer. Her resolve had not held in the end, and she’d flayed herself as she cursed him in the small hours of the morning. No one had come to silence her.
Very well.
She forced shrieking muscles to unclench as she stood to take an inventory of her possessions. She still wore the clothes from the banquet, but she had little else in her wardrobe. All of her traveling clothes were with Emmeline, for that was where she’d planned on returning after the feast, and all that remained was one old shift, a dressing gown, and a red cloak. None would serve her current purpose. A basket of embroidery lay on a side table, along with a dusty skein of wool. She eyed the needles. Perhaps they’d serve as a weapon in desperation. If I can get to the kitchen, I can take a knife. Finger combing her hair back into place, she knocked on her door. No one answered.
“Hello?” she called out.
Distant footsteps scurried toward her. Someone fumbled with a key until at last the door opened to reveal the housekeeper and Hob, wearing her father’s livery and a neutral expression.
“My lady,” said the housekeeper. Marian had never been so glad to see Eliza in her life. “Perhaps you’d like some breakfast? Some water to wash?” Eliza’s haughty demeanor had been replaced with nervous sympathy.
“No,” Marian said. “I’d like to see my father.”
“Oh.” The woman raised her hands to her face, then lowered them. “Very well. He’s . . . he’s in his study.”
The guard followed them down the hall. His heavier footfalls emphasized the mounting tension in the corridor, and Marian wondered what he would do if she made a run for it, veering toward the staircase instead of standing obediently outside the study door. Grab her probably, and then she’d never get a second chance. This was her only choice. She knocked.
Her father bade her enter in a calm, if chilly, voice. Inside, the study was unrecognizable from the mess she’d left it in. Everything once again lay in its place.
Everything except the small chest.
The monster in her father’s skin met her eyes. The housekeeper curtsied hastily and shut the door behind her, leaving Marian alone in the room with the man she’d come running to for help for most of her life.
She took shelter in insulted dignity and outrage. “I am to be locked up then?”
“That is generally what I do to thieves and traitors.”
“Pray tell me, how have I robbed you, Father?” She hid her shaking hands in her skirts.
“Three people knew about the key that unlocks this chest. One of them is in the ground. The other two are in this room.”
The chest drew her eyes. Play dumb, she told herself. “My dowry?”
“You are perhaps not aware that I kept a spare key in the event the first was lost. It is a well-made chest. I had no desire to break the lock, and it seems my foresight was . . . fortuitous.” He drew out the last word.
“I . . . I don’t understand.”
He picked up the key and slipped it into the lock. It turned with a click, and he lifted the lid with careful fingers. “I asked myself what kind of thief would overturn this room yet take so little. I can’t account for any losses besides this.”
“W-what?”
“Did you know your dowry contained twenty pounds in coin? You’re worth more, of course, with my estate behind you and no male heir, but coin is easily liquidated. The viscount will not be pleased.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t trust her tongue.
“Then I asked myself what kind of thief would take a bag of coin, a few papers, and leave the rest. There is silver aplenty in this room, and yet they took it from your dowry chest, almost as if they hoped I wouldn’t notice. Tell me, when you ran away with your outlaw, did you think I wouldn’t find you?”
She felt what blood remained in her face drain away. “I didn’t—”
“Do not lie to me.” Disgust twisted his mouth. She searched for the words that would get her out of this, the indignation that would redeem her, but nothing came. The sheriff of Nottingham had stood before hundreds of men and women like her. I know a liar when I see one, said his expression, and you cannot fool me, daughter.
“I would not—” she began, but her voice broke on the words and went high and brittle.
“Where is the money?”
“I don’t have it.” That, at least, was the truth. He seemed to guess it, for his brows lowered further over his eyes.
“You have shamed me, robbed me, and dishonored yourself, but you are still my daughter. You will do your duty if I have to lead you to Linley’s bed with your hands bound, do you understand? I will make up the loss, but I assure you I will also find the filth who has soiled you, and when I am through with him . . .” His face turned a dangerous shade of purple, and he pounded the desk, as if there were no words to describe the horror awaiting Robyn. “And you will obey, because if you do not I will tell your husband what you have done, and his displeasure will shadow you all of your life.” He took a deep breath and then softened his voice. “You may think me cruel, Marian, but I am your father. I want what is best for you.”
She saw that he believed his own words, and she saw that there was nothing she could say to convince him of her innocence. Only one path was left to her. Hating herself, she let the tears come and dropped to her knees. “Please, I’ll be good. Please don’t tell him. Please don’t let him hurt me, Father.”
His chair scraped the wood as he stood and rounded the desk to stand over her. It didn’t take much to make herself redouble her sobs and clutch at his boots, staining the dark leather with her tears. He let her weep, prostrate, for several moments before crouching down to lift her up. She blinked the tears away and let her shuddering breaths speak for her.
“Please,” she said when she could once again draw air. “I’ll marry him. I’ll be good. I’ll be good.”
“Of course you will.” He searched her face then pulled her to him, and she sobbed into his chest as he stroked her hair, full of self-loathing and the bitter satisfaction that her tears at least still had power, even if the shame of it cut her to the bone.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Robyn made her way down the road with her heart more whole than it had been
since Michael’s death. Her body still hummed from Marian’s touch, and the promise of more nights to come drove out the doubt that circled her mind’s borders. “Marian.” She said the name out loud to the darkness. It didn’t matter that she was the sheriff’s daughter. It didn’t matter that loving her was madness, suicide even, because holding her outweighed every possible consequence. Later, maybe, she would second-guess her heart’s direction. For now, she let herself walk with a lightness to match the forest deer.
A snatch of song from a cluster of revelers caught her ear. The tune seemed familiar somehow, and she hummed along until she realized where she’d heard it: Alanna. She paused. The singer’s voice bore all the hallmarks of intoxication. It bellowed off key and was punctuated with laughter from the man’s fellows, but the lyrics were clear enough. As she listened, she heard a glorified retelling of her own shooting at the spring fair, followed by her encounter with Gwyneth. The implication was not, however, that the two of them had fallen in love, but rather that this fictional Robyn had acted out of chivalry. No mention was made of Gwyneth’s rebuke. But, she heard to her horror, there was a line about the sheriff’s daughter. Surely Alanna wouldn’t have been foolish enough to put that into song. She waited for more, but the song changed into an older tune as if the singer were unaware of the difference in his subject matter. His audience didn’t seem to care, either, and they cheered him on.
Robyn quickened her pace. Nobody would recognize Robyn the fletcher, but if songs were being sung about Robyn the archer, then she needed to get out of the city and to a place where she could strangle Alanna out of sight of witnesses.
Did Marian know? Had the song penetrated the upper echelons of society, or had Alanna saved it for markets and villages? Somehow, she found that unlikely. Tension replaced the languor suffusing her body. Perhaps the sheriff wouldn’t put any store by the song. Or songs. How many had Alanna composed while Robyn wasn’t paying attention? Yes, the rich were often the subject of ballads, and many of those songs centered around love scandals, but Robyn knew the sheriff. The suggestion that his daughter might be engaged in any sort of relationship with a commoner would gall him. The song doesn’t say I’m a commoner, she reminded herself, although she hadn’t heard the entire thing. It also doesn’t say I’m an outlaw. Confirming the exact nature of the content would be the second thing she did once she found Alanna, after she’d satisfied the itching in her fingers.