Marian sighed. “The world is not a song, Alan.”
“The world is,” he rebutted. “And ’tis my task to find the words and music for it.”
“Alan. She stopped him as he reached the door, touching his arm briefly. “Alan, there are things such as beliefs, convictions—and people—worth the risk.”
His infectious grin was wide and warm. “And ballads,” he said, too brightly,“well worth the making and singing despite royal resprisal.”
There was—nothingness. No thought, no feeling, no impetus to react. Merely nothingness, as if the words had no bearing on his life. And yet Robin knew they should. Knew once perhaps they had, and might yet again. Someday.
But for now: nothing. And no appetite as he sat at table, attempting to eat what she had presented him.
Marian sat on the other side of the table. “I am sorry.”
She had said that several times during the past three days. Sorry the king was dying. Sorry for his worry. Sorry the king was dead, and for his grief. Sorry now that his father was ill.
But am I? he wondered.
“I’ve ordered a horse for you.” Marian’s brief smile was slight. “Charlemagne, unless you believe him too taxed by his adventures of yesterday.”
“No,” he murmured, and wondered if he referred to his horse’s condition or denied his father’s illness.
“Perhaps I should have told you yesterday, when you first came home. But you were so muddy and tired, and when I saw the bruises . . .” She let the implication stand proxy for the words.
For five years his life had been what he had made it since breaking with the earl. Peace such as he had never anticipated, living at Ravenskeep with frequent trips to Locksley to oversee his holdings. A quiet life livened only by such things as a fox amidst the henhouse, a wolf stalking the lambs, the festivals of spring and Nottingham’s fairs, occasional intercourse with taverns, though never with tavern bawds. After the perils and brutalities of the Crusade, after cruel captivity, after seeing his king won free from his own kind of captivity in a foreign king’s court, Robin had welcomed the quietude others might name tedium.
Now Richard was dead, John would likely be king, the sheriff would come hunting outlaws—and his father was ill.
“One moment,” he said.
“One moment?” she echoed.
“One moment, and the world is never the same.” He stood up then over the remains of his breakfast, pushing the bench away from the heavy trestle table set in the center of the modest hall. She rose as well, rounding the table to set his tunic aright. “If for nothing else, I should see if Gerard has arrived at last.”
It baffled her. “Gerard?”
“Tell the others,” he said, fixed on the task. “Tell them to go now. I will ride straight to Huntington by the Nottingham road—it is faster, and I may be able to delay the sheriff should he have heard the news and set out—but the others had best take themselves into Sherwood at once, then make their way to Locksley.” His tone and manner were briskly casual, yet clearly in command; his mind worked swiftly, envisioning potential problems and creating resolutions. “By now such things as pardons may bear no weight until a new king is named, and he will hardly concern himself immediately with what Nottingham’s sheriff does.”
She understood him then. He saw the shift of color in her face from milk-and-roses to corpse-candle white, the puckering of her brow; felt the tension in her hands as they rested on his chest.
“I trust you,” he said. “And so do they.”
Marian nodded mutely. Robin kissed her, and left her.
The earl felt he should be angry. Possibly even outraged. The woman dared to meddle in his life, dared to suggest an agreement made between them, as if she were an equal; dared to promise it was solely within her purview to deliver the son to his father, or to lure him away forever from title, heritage, legacy. Even from blood, and power.
But the earl was not angry. Offended, yes, entirely so—but not outraged. He recognized realities and the necessities of life, those within his own life as well as in hers. Robert had inexplicably chosen to estrange himself from his father and everything the earl represented. For all Huntington believed his son a fool to do so, a romantic idealist shaped too much by his mother’s soft hand and softer mind, he knew there was a measure of himself in the boy. Were they not similar in the tenacious stubbornness that made forgiveness of one another impossible, Robert perhaps would have come back years before.
Perhaps. And yet forgiveness was not possible. But cooperation, given the right circumstances, indisputably was.
Huntington considered the facts. His son loved an unsuitable woman. The earl had himself wed an unsuitable woman—in temperament, though not in wealth and blood—but he had had the good sense not to love her. He understood the value of such comportment, the power won from self-control. His son never had.
“All of them dead,” he said aloud, recalling other sons. “All of them save for Robert. The last—and the least.”
But all he had. Now.
There was a measure of compensation, a degree of relief, and an inchoate sense of righteousness: the woman Robert bedded out of wedlock could not conceive. There were no bastards of her, nor would be. But there might be grandchildren yet, and a grandson more suited than his recalcitrant father to hold the title, to command the wealth, the lands, the castle. It required merely that Robert be made to see his duty, to marry a suitable woman capable of giving him children. Sons, preferably.
But to convince or perhaps seduce Robert to such duties required careful voyaging. No enticement had served to keep the earl’s son with him, and Huntington doubted that any offered since, had any been offered, would have retrieved his heir.
With a curious flash of insight, Huntington admitted that just as no enticement existed that might induce him to repudiate his title and the honors of it—certainly not a woman!—there was every possibility, difficult as it was to comprehend, that Robert believed his stance equally valid. A man committed to principles in place of political realities was unpredictable in the ordering of convictions, the disposition of his commitments. Such a man could never be properly used as a weapon in the war, because he refused duty, rejected responsibility, in the name of selfishness.
Gripping a goblet in trembling fingers, the earl mused thoughtfully, “But a man may make a principle of political reality and thereby control another, should he be clever.” And very, very careful.
He considered it thoroughly, swathed in bed linens and coverlets against the pernicious chill that had invaded aging bones. And when Ralph came to him and announced his son had arrived, Huntington, with an uncommon thrill of anticipation, acknowledged the unsuitable woman had provided precisely the opportunity she had promised.
Now was the time to seize it.
But what had she said? “. . . make no assumptions concerning what shapes his actions, lest you shape in him an answer you cannot bear.”
Huntington was not a fool. He accepted advice from even the crudest of sources, if in his judgment that source provided the answer.
‘I have given you the key,’ the woman had said. ‘Use it wisely.’
And so he would.
“Have him in,” he told Ralph. “Send my son to me.”
In the gloom of a dying day, Brother Tuck was plainly startled as he pushed from knees to feet. “But I cannot,” he blurted. “I am not a priest.”
Marian drew breath, measured it out again as if she fed forty hens with but a handful of grain. “I do not mean it as confession.”
“Then—what?”
Now that he asked her, now that she was required to explain it, to put words to the emotions that had brought her to the oratory, Marian was mute.
“Lady.”
She had told him a thousand times to call her by her name. But Tuck was devotedly circumspect in all matters.
Marian sat down upon one of the small benches Will Scarlet had made. The oratory had been used only rarely pri
or to the arrival of Robin and the others, but Tuck had made of it a place reflecting the purpose for which it had been built.
She shook her head. Then bowed it. She intended neither prayer nor supplication, merely expressed the inability to choose the proper words. And Tuck, at last, understood.
He sat down on the bench beside her, and listened.
She told him everything. And then spoke of her fear.
“I did it,” she said, “because it needed doing. I cannot claim him; Robin isn’t mine. He is himself, belonging to no one. It is his will, his choice, his future at stake.” She drew in a trembling breath. “But he has gone to Huntington, and I have had time to think again, to consider what I have done. To know now I was a fool.”
“Lady—”
“I am afraid, Tuck. For myself.” She felt the prickle of shame. “I am not a good woman.”
“ ‘Good’ is defined by many things,” he declared with such certainty that she nearly gaped at him. “It is,” he insisted. “And only God can judge whether our ‘goodness’ is”—he smiled—“good enough.”
“But how can I be considered ‘good’ when I want nothing more than for Robin to reject his father outright and come back to me?”
“Regret is natural,” Tuck said. “But your intent was to give Robin the opportunity to choose. Were you a ‘bad’ woman—however you wish to define it—you would never have gone to the earl in the first place.”
Marian scowled. “I was a fool to do it.”
“We test ourselves,” he said gently, “with everything we do. All those choices we devise for ourselves, and the choices we make.”
“This is my test, then?”
“One of them,” he agreed.
“And if I am afraid of this test?”
Tuck’s expression was solemn. “You should be.”
She had not expected that of him, but rather comfort and sympathy. Startled, she stared into the sincere brown eyes.
“There is always fear in any undertaking that includes risk.” Tuck explained. “And surely this does. Have you not given his father the means to win him back?”
Marian thought about it. “I told him I would not interfere. It is Robin’s decision. But his father may win him back.”
“But that will not be your doing.”
The tone was bitter. “No?”
“There is some difference,” Tuck said, “between a woman who leaves the door unlatched, and the woman who orders her husband out that door.”
Marian frowned.
“I am not blind,” he said. “Nor deaf. Nor am I dead.”
She gazed at him in some perplexion; none of the men she counted as friends was making sense this morning.
Tuck’s face reddened. “A religous vocation does not necessarily make a man ignorant of . . .” He struggled with it a moment. “Of compassion.” His expression suggested that was not the word he intended to use, but nothing else was forthcoming.
Ah. “No,” she said, smiling.
“It is risk,” he agreed, seemingly relieved he need not explain himself more fully with regard to what he did and did not understand of men and women. “But even pledging oneself to God invites a measure of risk.” Tuck leaned toward her, speaking in a confiding whisper. “The devil, you know.”
“The devil?”
“But give him the opportunity, and he shall mislead.” Tuck nodded once. “That is risk.”
“The devil,” she said dryly, “may be but a babe compared to the earl.”
Tuck recoiled. “Never say so!”
Marian sighed. She should have known better than to say such to a monk, trained from the day he took his vows to be a literalist. She thanked him briefly and rose, feeling no more content than when she had entered, but before she could leave the oratory, he called her name.
Her name. Not her title.
Marian turned back, hand on the latch of the narrow wooden door.
“The choice he makes,” Tuck said, “will be his own. He has had two decades with his father, and five years with you. But he is not his father’s son, and he is not his woman’s puppet. You have said it: he is himself. Whatever decision he makes will be born of his own heart.”
“Duty,” she said faintly, thinking of the earl.
“Duty,” Tuck agreed. “To his father. To you. And to himself.”
Marian said, “And to his king. His country.”
Tuck’s eyes were bleak. “His king is dead.”
Nine
The Earl of Huntington looked upon his son and was disgusted, though he let none of it show. Robert’s fair hair was untidy from the ride, tangled against his shoulders, and he wore clothing best left to peasants. There was nothing of elegance, of his station, about the sherte or crude hosen. The boots were terribly worn, and the tunic of plain brown wool displayed woody slubs in the weave that bespoke poor wool and a poorer hand at the loom.
His son had come home from Crusade in 1194 vastly changed by war, and by captivity. The fey, feckless boy had been transformed into a man who was wholly a stranger, and while the earl applauded self-control—he disliked frivolity and effusiveness—he felt there was a distinct difference between keeping one’s own counsel and turning oneself to stone. There had been times he feared for his son’s sanity; and, in fact, was convinced the Saracens had ruined him utterly. Robert had always been difficult to manage, but after Crusade he was impossible.
Now, still abed, the earl stirred in vague discontent as his son gazed upon him. Robert was yet a stranger. Five additional years, albeit spent in England, in peace, had wrought additional changes. Some measure of healing had occurred; Robert seemed less brittle than before, less unpredictable. His eyes were not so haunted, his face not so gaunt, his movements not so constricted by concern for what his captors might require of him, or punish. He was markedly self-contained and plainly no more enamored of being under the castle roof he detested than he had ever been, but clearly he had come with no thought for anything beyond his father’s health.
And that was a weapon the earl intended to use.
There was, Huntington noted in mild surprise—he had forgotten—the faint pale tracery of a scar curving along the underside of his son’s jaw. He had seen other scars once, the permanent whip-weals in his back, but had noted no others. Now, as he lay in bed and Robert stood beside it, the earl could mark such inconsequential details as white-blond lashes, the clean arch of eyebrows, the molding of nose and cheekbones that echoed his mother’s features; and also such things as the grimness of his mouth and tension in the jaw—and unfeigned startlement in hazel eyes as he realized that indeed his father was ill.
“Did you think it was a lie?” the earl rasped.
Robert’s face blanked itself. The honest reaction was gone, banished by a mask his father recognized. His tone was perfectly courteous, but utterly lacking in emotion. “My lord?”
“Do not prevaricate,” Huntington said testily. “I see it in your face. You believed it a ruse?”
He was so fair that even the faintest tinge of color gave away his emotions. But the mask remained intact.
The earl grunted. “We have not been comfortable together for many years, Robert. I will feign no confusion, beg no explanation. We are very different men.”
He considered that. Then relaxed the mask enough to reveal an ironic wariness. “So we are, my lord.”
“Oh, do sit down!” the earl snapped, and gestured peremptory direction.
Robert glanced around, found the indicated chair at a table, and dragged it over. After a momentary hesitation, he seated himself, though somewhat gingerly and without any of his habitual grace, as if he hurt. He was quite stiff, the earl noted, poised to depart the chair—and possibly the chamber—the instant he decided it was necessary.
“You will recall,” Huntington said, “that it was not I who asked you to come.”
Robert opened his mouth immediately. Reconsidered. Shut it, and held his silence.
“You have been most p
lain with regard to your feelings for me,” the earl said. “You have rejected my roof, my hopes, my heritage. You have made a life apart from the one I intended for you. In five years you have not come here once.” He looked steadily at his son. “And yet you come now because you fear I am dying.”
“No,” Robert said.
“Then why?”
It was apparently too much to ask: his son stood up abruptly. “Perhaps I should not have come.”
“That is not an answer,” Huntington pointed out. “Make a proper one, Robert. Tell me the truth.” He twitched a hand briefly in a suggestion of supplication. “Let it be your truth, if you will, and I shall listen; I have already said we are two different men. That should suggest I give you the latitude to be yourself, rather than what I would have you be.” He grimaced. “You have won that much of me.”
Color seeped into the face again. “She said you were ill.”
“And so I am.”
“She said I should come.”
“And so you have.”
“She said . . .” But he closed his mouth on it.
“She said a great deal,” the earl observed at last.
His son held his silence, though his eyes narrowed slightly.
He waits for me to attack the woman, so he may defend her. “Would you have come,” the father asked with devastating simplicity, “had she not suggested it?”
It was not a question the son had expected. He frowned slightly, briefly, turning over the words in his mind as if he sought a weapon within them. He found none. Now the pale brows knitted beneath tangled locks of windblown hair.
“Would you have come,” the earl repeated, “had she not suggested it?”
There was no bitterness in the eyes, no resentment in the expression, only fresh consideration as he revisited the inquiry. Robert was beginning to measure himself now instead of his father.
The earl followed up the advantage. “I have never sent for you. Not once. Not in five years. Nor did I send for you now.”
Color moved again in the face, staining flesh anew. The high cheekbones burned.
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