Lady of Sherwood

by Jennifer Roberson

  “Roll casks aside,” he said sharply. “Unstopper the wine, unstack the hay, uproot the hearthstones. If there be wooden planking, tear it out. If there be a fire laid, put it out and stir amongst the ashes. Open every chest, every basket. Let no place large enough to hold a man be overlooked.” He glanced briefly sideways in each direction, then jerked his hand in command.

  Two of the soldiers rode their horses up the hall steps toward the open door. Marian, crying out in startled outrage, leaped after each of them. She caught the reins of one, but released it immediately, hissing in pain; she had used her wounded hand. Now the men and their mounts were inside the hall, while others jumped down from their saddles and set about following orders.

  DeLacey, still mounted, leaned forward in his saddle and rested the palms of his hands one atop the other over the high pommel, stretching mail-weighted shoulders as he smiled. “Good day to you, Lady Marian.”

  Her face was white as she cradled the aching hand. “They will find nothing.”

  “So be it.”

  “They will destory my hall and my possessions for nothing.”

  “So be it.”

  “This is no more than childish revenge!”

  “Untrue,” he said calmly, rejoicing at her anger. “This is a duty I was given by my sovereign.”

  “Sovereign?”

  From the sleeve of the mail shirt he pulled a folded parchment. With great deliberation he unfolded it, smoothed it, displayed it to her. “A letter,” he said, “from Prince John, Count of Mortain, who has claimed the crown as sole heir of his late royal brother.”

  In angry disbelief she asked, “A letter ordering you to destroy my hall?”

  “Authority,” he answered, “to do whatever is in my power to secure the realm for John.”

  “Oh, of course!” she said. “This hall provides a true threat to Prince John!”

  “Indeed,” he said silkily. “It has harbored criminals.”

  “They were pardoned.”

  “But I have unpardoned them.”

  “You cannot! You haven’t the authority!”

  He waved the sheet of parchment.

  She shook her head, coldly certain. “Revoking King Richard’s pardon is not yours to do. That is for the new king to do, should he wish to.”

  “He does. Or will. When I have explained why it is so vital that these men be arrested, imprisoned, and tried for their crimes.”

  “Prince John was stealing that money for himself, and you know it!”

  “But now Prince John is king, and I daresay he would prefer to blame them for stealing it instead. Which they did do, if for supposedly honorable reasons. Of course, Prince John is unlikely to view it that way.” DeLacey carefully refolded the parchment and returned it to his sleeve. “You see, I do understand why they found it so important to delay the royal messenger with word of Richard’s death. How better to give themselves time to plan an escape?”

  Marian glared. “They delayed no messenger! And if they had planned it, why would they have been here when you came the other day?”

  “To misdirect. And it was cleverly done,” he admitted. “Of course, had I brought a troop with me that day, I could be hunting pheasant today instead of men.”

  A crashing sound emanated from the hall. Marian winced, spun around, then swung back, stiffly desperate, to deLacey. “Stop this! Stop them!”

  He smiled sweetly. “Have Robin Hood and the others come out of hiding.”

  “They are not in hiding!”

  “Where are they?”

  “Not here.”

  He raised his brows. “No?”

  Another crash sounded, plus Joan’s angry shout. Marian gritted her teeth. “No.”

  “Then the search shall continue.”

  “If my father knew what you were ordering—”

  He overrode her. “If your father knew his only surviving child was living with a man outside of the marriage bonds . . .” DeLacey shook his head sadly. “How can the poor man rest in his grave?” He paused. “But then, he hasn’t a grave, has he? He rotted on the sands of the Holy Land.”

  “My God,” she gasped. “Have you no shame?”

  “Have you? I offered honorable marriage—”

  “That was a sham! Tuck isn’t a priest; that ceremony would have been false.”

  “I offered you honorable marriage before that,” he reminded her. “You refused me.”

  “And this is your revenge!”

  “Oh, now, Marian . . . you value yourself too high. I confess I did indeed wish to have you to wife, but once you had been compromised by outlaws in Sherwood Forest, marriage was no longer a possibility. No, this is not revenge. This is duty. This is done to secure the realm for King John.”

  Outraged squawking came from the direction of the henhouse. Marian glared at him through tears of fury. “They are not here.”

  “Where are they?”

  She shook her head.

  “Where?”

  She shook her head.

  DeLacey spurred his horse forward. She did not flinch, did not recoil, did not move out of the animal’s path. Most horses preferred not to trample people, but deLacey had intentionally ridden a trained warhorse. This mount would.

  “Where?”

  “Not here.”

  “Then where?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “A little precision, if you please. Where elsewhere?”

  There was another angry yell from Joan inside the hall.

  “Sherwood!” Marian cried. “And I suggest you take more men with you if you hope to come out of there alive. I daresay the Sheriff of Nottingham has a surfeit of enemies hiding in the shadows!”

  He urged his horse forward a single step. The gaping, foam-slicked mouth was perilously close to Marian’s face. “Where?” he asked again.

  Marian’s fist connected sharply and audibly with the warhorse’s muzzle.

  As the startled horse jerked his head straight up into the air she turned a shoulder and spun out of his way before he might employ snapping teeth or striking hoof. DeLacey swore and wrestled with the reins, trying to keep the stallion under control. From the corner of one eye he saw the vivid slash of crimson chemise and a glint of gold. She was out of harm’s way, and grimly satisfied at the havoc she had wreaked.

  One hand, trembling with anger, dropped to the hilt of his sword.

  Marian saw it. “Oh, do,” she said coldly. “And then explain to our new king how you construed his letter as the authority to kill a woman on the steps of her own hall.”

  With effort he reined the horse to a standstill. Soldiers were coming up from carnage, blood and feathers marring their tabards. “I made you a promise,” he said. “I make it again, this moment. I will have Robin Hood. I will have them all. And, if necessary, I will have you as well. And see that all of you hang.”

  “Get out,” she said. “Get out of my hall. Get out of my courtyard. Get off my lands.”

  “For now,” he agreed, icily angry. “But be certain that they will not always be your lands. In point of fact, I believe I shall ask for Ravenskeep as a boon of King John, in recognition of my service.” He jerked his head toward the men. “And I shall take immense pleasure in telling you to get off my lands.”

  The two mounted soldiers rode out of the hall. Marian glared at deLacey through a sheen of furious tears. “May you rot in hell.”

  “So be it,” he said easily. “But I am not there yet, and in the meantime I shall enjoy myself.”

  Before she could offer answer, he gestured dismissal to his troop. He wondered, as he rode out, if she might resort to throwing stones as well as striking his horse, and stiffened his spine against the anticipated onslaught. But no stones flew. Not even curses.

  As they rode down the lane toward the Nottingham road, he said one word: “Huntington.”

  The others likely were in Sherwood. But Robin Hood was not.

  Fifteen

  Robin swung up into Charlemagne�
�s saddle, gestured at the horseboy to release the rein, and spun the big horse in a tightly bunched circle that set the mount back on his haunches. Iron-shod hooves scraped and slid noisily on cobbles as Robin murmured a quick internal apology, and then he sank spurless heels into the horse’s ribs. With a startled grunt and burst of power that mimicked the trebuchets his rider had witnessed on Crusade, Charlemagne launched himself forward.

  Footing on slick cobbles was poor, but once free of the castle gates the dirt track began, and the wide hooves dug in deeply. Robin took a deeper seat in the saddle, let himself adjust to the horse’s natural rhythm, and bent over the gray neck. He had not asked so much of Charlemagne in months, but now he required it.

  He had no doubt that what his father had said of Marian was true. Even the earl would not lie outright about something so significant as Marian’s ability to have children when it was a simple matter to confirm it. Huntington might twist the truth for his own aims, but Robin did not doubt that the central issue was fact, not falsehood. It explained why Marian would go to the earl. It explained why the earl would so unexpectedly undertake a new campaign to win his son back and speak of the future. It explained why Marian would urge Robin to visit his father when they had not spoken for five years. It explained everything.

  And it explained nothing.

  Huntington himself had said it: Robin owed Marian the courtesy of holding her own opinion, of determining her role in his world. He did not own her; nor were they married, that he might, by law and custom, have the ordering of her life. He began to suspect now why she had refused him each and every time he had asked her to marry him; though not so highly ranked as he, Marian was nonetheless a knight’s daughter and privy to such things as legacies. She was an heiress in her own right. Children were vital to the continuation of names, of heritage, of titles, rank, privilege. She would not be blind to his own position, and the needs of an aging, ill earl who badly needed a son, any son, even one so poor as Robert of Locksley, who was utterly unlike the two dead sons the earl had treasured. Because nothing in this world was so vital as the certainties of inheritance. Certainly Richard’s deathbed follies pointed up the need for known heirs, and for clarity in the disposition of titles and holdings.

  He had broken with his father five years before, depending on his own Locksley holdings for income and security. He had made the decision not to be an earl’s son, to be no more than a simple knight and landowner without benefit of an earldom. But now his father offered it in abundance, offered a future so many others valued for its wealth and power. And Huntington was correct. Kings wore the crowns, sat upon the thrones, levied taxes to pay for the privilege of sovereignty, but it was the peerage of England, her wealthy nobles, who permitted the realm to survive. Without supporters among the majority of such men as the earls of Huntington, Hereford, Alnwick, and Essex, any king of England would find it difficult if not impossible to rule unopposed. And enough opposition could strip a man of the crown, possibly his head. There would always be a king of England—not even the barons would envision anything else—but that king had best not offend too many of his subjects without the support of others already assured.

  It had seemed simple enough, and he had posed it to his father: he would wed Marian, and be heir in truth again. Because Ralph had the right of it; it was possible the son might influence the father. But now the simple solution had collapsed. Marian could not have children, the earl would never accept her as his son’s wife because of it, and Robin, if he were to sire a legitimate heir to the earldom, would be required to marry another woman.

  Surely Marian knew that.

  Surely Marian had known that when she went to the earl.

  Certainly she had known that when she sent him to the earl.

  Robin admitted it as he rode: he had assumed there would be children. It had not occurred to him to wonder why none had been conceived, except to believe Marian, unwed and desiring no bastard, had sought the means to keep his seed from taking root, as he had heard of other women doing. Bearing children lay within a woman’s purview, was her responsibility; he knew nothing about it beyond the obvious: a man and a woman in carnal congress often produced children. He had simply assumed one day they would produce children.

  Now he knew they would not. As Marian had known, and had told his father.

  His father.

  Not him.

  And so he rode his favorite horse at a full gallop along the road to Nottingham and beyond to Ravenskeep, skirting Sherwood Forest, not knowing if he should be angry, dismayed, hurt, stunned, or grieving that she should tell the father and not the son; that she could not have children; that he would never be a father to a son or daughter; or even if he should and could surrender to all of the emotions, or to none of them.

  Perhaps he already had.

  Perhaps he would.

  Perhaps he never could.

  The sheriff’s men had followed orders. Holes were hacked in walls, planks pulled up, stones excavated, baskets sliced open, cupboards dismantled, larders emptied, furniture upended and broken. Nothing in the hall remained whole, except for such items as could not be easily destroyed. Marian stood in the middle of the aftermath, pressing her aching hand against her equally aching heart, and was aware of no impulse so strong as the one to weep.

  Everything. Destroyed.

  As she stood surrounded by the devastation wrought by a single man’s command, others began to come into the hall. Sim and Hal, to speak of chickens killed, eggs smashed, a henhouse destroyed. Stephen, to speak of a well urinated into. Matthew, to mention a foal who had been so terrified as to run into a fence and snap its neck. Plus Joan, Cook, and others to explain how food stores were now broken, scattered, or made inedible; how clothing was torn and stained beyond repair; how keepsakes had been smashed and plundered. William deLacey had not physically harmed her, had not so much as touched her hand, but he had ruthlessly violated every other part of her.

  In a matter of days King Richard was dying, and dead; John had named himself king; the men she had grown to depend on and care for were banished for their safety; Robin was sent to his father; the Sheriff of Nottingham had come into her home and destroyed it utterly.

  One moment, as Robin had said, and the world was turned upside down.

  “Lady,” Joan said, “what shall we do?”

  Marian made no answer.

  “Lady Marian, what would you have us do?”

  “Do?” she echoed.

  “Aye, lady.”

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose we should sort through the broken bits to find anything that can be salvaged. You and the others may begin that.”

  Joan was plainly worried. “What about you, Lady Marian? What shall you do?”

  “I?” Marian felt the slow pulse of anger replacing the dullness of shock. Waves of stunned disbelief, like fog, were burned away by the heat of her kindling outrage. “I shall declare war on the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

  It shocked them. She sensed the stirring, heard indrawn breaths.

  Now the anger turned bitter cold, like morning frost upon metal. If any flesh touched hers, surely it would burn. “I expect none of you to do the same,” she explained calmly. “This is my task. This is my war.” Grimly, she smiled. “This is my Crusade.”

  “Lady Marian—”

  “You may begin,” she said, glancing from one shocked face to another. “Waste no time.”

  “Lady—”

  “Begin,” she said.

  This time they began, as she walked out of the hall.

  William deLacey relished the memory of the expression on her face as the mounted soldiers had ridden into her hall; as he displayed the letter. He had believed at one point that treating a woman so might leave him with a feeling of discomfort, distaste, of shame, but he realized with a sense of relief that he felt no such emotion about what had been done at Ravenskeep. At some point in his life, though he could not say when, he had come to despise Marian FitzWalter, and it dis
turbed him not in the least to cause her trouble. He could curse a man, fight a man, lift live steel against a man. He had no such recourse with a woman, even one he detested. Queens and their causes could be fought for or against on the battlefield, but women such as Marian were inviolate.

  Until now.

  She had defeated him five years before, had turned her back on his suit despite her father’s wishes, had repudiated him in the name of Robert of Locksley. Though he did not consider this revenge in the pure meaning of the word—he acted only in the name of King John—he did take pleasure in knowing that at last he could wage war. Could at last defeat her. Could feel no guilt in the face of simple, abiding dislike. Civilities were no longer needed. He could be honest. He could be plain. He could name her the enemy.

  And it would be delicious to make Ravenskeep his own.

  “Rider!” someone shouted, and deLacey shook himself out of his reverie.

  Indeed, rider, and coming at them in all haste. With equal measures of shock and pleasure, deLacey recognized the fair hair blown back, the determined set of handsome features, the fine gray horse he rode.

  How infinitely convenient, that Robert of Locksley should come to him.

  The sheriff snapped out a curt order, and was pleased when the men fell neatly and without hesitation into formation. Only a blind man would not understand the implied threat of a road blocked by armed soldiers. Locksley drew rein, easing his horse into a slow canter, and at last, as he halted, turned him sideways so as not to set the gray nose-to-nose with deLacey’s own mount. He was frowning, clearly irritated and impatient, echoing the tones the sheriff had heard in the earl.

  “Stand aside,” Locksley said. “Give me room to pass.”

  DeLacey smiled. “I think not.”

  “You have no cause to detain me.”

  “I am the sheriff. Do I need any?”

  “DeLacey—”

  “But of course I do have cause,” he went on smoothly. “A simple matter of a royal messenger stopped upon the road and kept from his duty. A simple matter of a merchant complaining of a horse stolen by a fair-haired outlaw; though I confess I’ve only just now come to understand your part in that. A simple matter of delay, and of haste, all so you and your outlaw friends might be warned before the new king can revoke the old king’s pardon.”