Vaughn slipped around the back of the stage. He needed a breather. A moment of clarity before he and his muddy cousins took to the festival’s paths again. Here there was a cool breeze from the pond. Here he was completely hidden from the rest of the festival.
Something caught his eye. From his vantage point, he could see straight into the Grotto Stage.
What in the hell was Johnny doing in the otherwise empty stage? He never came down here. He’d never even bothered to show up for one of his own fiancée’s performances. So what was he doing there now?
And what was he doing wrapped in the arms and legs of somebody who was clearly not Sammie?
Vaughn took a slow step forward. The girl came into view for the first time.
It was the gypsy. The young blond who, not two hours ago, told Sammie that her life was going to change. She questioned whether Sammie’s love was really her true love.
At the time it had seemed like a fortune that would work for almost anyone. But now he knew different. The gypsy had been right about everything.
The marathon kiss came to an end. The gypsy walked back to Gypsy Way without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Johnny turned.
His eyes went wide. All color drained from his face.
Vaughn turned his back on his former friend. “You fucking son of a bitch,” he thought to himself as he rejoined his fellow beggars. “I’ll break your neck for breaking her heart.”
<>
Johnny took a deep breath.
The shaking wasn’t going away. God damn it! He had to stop it. He had to calm down. He had to do it now. If she found out...
He couldn’t let her know anything was wrong. He couldn’t let her suspect…
He leaned on the empty stocks and watched her from afar. His timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Sammie and her playwright had just reached the Poet’s Stage. Sammie… his Goddess… with eyes shining like diamonds in the sunlight. She was so happy, being wooed by her Shakespeare.
Johnny had missed her flirtations. He had missed however close she had come to kissing another man.
Did he have a right to be jealous of that anymore?
He was an ass. That’s all there was to it. He was an ass for betraying such a beautiful, sweet, innocent creature. He hated himself through and through. He hated himself to the depths of his black, rotten soul. Nobody else could hate him more than he hated himself right now.
No. That wasn’t true. There was one person who did. As long as Vaughn didn’t kick his ass when Sammie was around... Johnny would gladly take any beating that Vaughn doled out, just as long as Sammie didn’t find out.
He took another deep breath. It was steadier, if only slightly. It was time.
All he had to do was keep it together for the next ten minutes.
“My Lady Halloway!”
She turned towards him. Her face was so full of innocence. So full of happiness to see him. “My Lord High Sheriff,” she said sweetly as she curtsied.
He swallowed a lump in his throat. “By what meaning do I find thee thus, my Lady?” he asked too critically.
“I hold no ill meaning, my Lord High Sheriff,” she said as the ever haughty Lady Anne. “Master Shakespeare pens a new play and merely seekest to ask me of mine opinion on his most glorious words.” She smiled at him with sweet expectancy. Anne may have been strong headed and an open flirt, but Sammie was so innocent.
God, let her stay that way.
Johnny ignored Shakespeare, who watched the scene with great interest. Most likely the bard imagined ways to demonize the Lord High Sheriff in a poem he would recite to the public later today.
“I have heard me some most heinous rumors of thy actions this day, my Lady Halloway.” Johnny showed little of the love he’d shown to his dear betrothed when they’d parted less than an hour ago. He grabbed her, too hard he realized, and eased his grip. “Ever dost thou seek to lay shame upon my good name. No better art thou than the gutter-pox’d whores haunting the alleyways of London Town. Little choice have I now. Thou shalt meet the pond, my Lady.”
He spouted his lines too fast. Sammie would know that something was wrong. She’d question him as soon as they were alone. He had to pull himself together. He shook off the ravages of a guilty mind and pulled her away, though with a gentle grip.
“My Lord High Sheriff,” Sammie’s Anne complained as she was pulled away.
“We shalt see us if a sound dunking shalt cleanse thy virtue clean once again.”
He pulled her through as many paths as he could. He let as many people as possible see the disgraced betrothed of the High Lord Sheriff. To the tourists, it would look like Johnny was leading her to their destination harshly. But he had cleared his mind of everything but how hard he held her, which wasn’t tightly, and his walking speed, which wasn’t fast.
Still… Sammie’s breathing grew shorter. And louder.
<>
“Bloody hell, Johnny,” Sammie said breathlessly as they reached the break building. “If you don’t let up, I’ll have finger marks in my arm for a bleeding week.” Not to mention not getting her air back for just as long. It had been a very long, very quick, walk from the Poet’s Stage.
“Sorry, sweetheart.” He smiled sheepishly. “Sometimes it’s hard shutting off the Lord High Sheriff.”
To prove his point, he opened the door and threw her inside, slamming the door behind her.
What had gotten into him? Johnny arrested her every festival day from the start of June to the end of August. Never once had he gotten so deep into his act.
Whatever had gotten into him, she liked it.
Before the door had time to latch, it flew open again. Johnny pressed her against the wall beneath the staircase and slammed his lips into hers.
Where had this Johnny been all her life? This new, wildly reckless Johnny, who had one hand on her ass, slowly pulling her skirt up, while the other hand played with the stays of her corset? What had happened to flip the switch and turn this new Johnny on?
He finally pulled on her stays. Her corset fell open. Her newly bared skin erupted in goose bumps, and she shivered.
She wanted to lose herself in what was happening. But there were footsteps just on the other side of the thin wall.
“Johnny, we shouldn’t,” she whispered. She hated the words as they spilt from her mouth, and only half believed them as she ran her fingers through his hair.
“Why?” he asked. He had her skirt above her hips.
“We’ll get caught.”
“Do you care?” He nibbled on her neck.
No. She didn’t care. The building could have dissolved, exposing them to the rest of the festival, and it wouldn’t have mattered. She wrapped her legs around his waist.
She would bear the scratches on her back from the rough wooden wall, but she would bear them proudly.
Their bodies tightened together. Johnny laid a row of soft kisses along the ridge of her neck. Then he tore himself away from her and re-laced his breeches. Cruel, cruel man. “You should change. The trial and dunke is soon.” He kissed her on the forehead.
“And people say Lady Anne is a whore.” She shook down her skirt and drew her corset up over her chest. There was no point retying her stays. Johnny might just as well have stripped the darned thing from her.
“Where do you think I learned it from?” Johnny wrapped his hands around her face. His eyes were so serious. “I love you, Sammie. I hope you know that.”
“I love you, too,” she said softly.
He leaned closer to her, but before their lips could meet for one more kiss he turned and walked to the door. He winked at her, and opened the door and rejoined the festival.
“Damned flirt.” She turned and bounded up the stairs with more energy than she had since the day started. She couldn’t wait for the trial and dunke. She couldn’t wait for the water to cool the skin that Johnny had set ablaze.
This was turning out to be the best day.
Chapter 8
Every inch of green was camouflaged in a sea of rainbow colors. Two hundred people crammed themselves into the clearing that housed the pond on the far right of the grounds, elbowing each other for the best seats. The best views. Pockets of teens sitting on the pond’s shores threatened to push each other into the murky green water. Those arriving to the event late took spaces on the hills on all sides of the pond.
Or chose to sit there, out of view of most of the other tourists, so they could make out. Or, if any had made their way to the wide area of woods hidden by the broad stage… People could do almost anything they wanted back there if they were quiet enough.
But Sammie couldn’t see if anyone had snuck behind the stage. She was locked into the tiny cage on the first of three levels of the courtroom stage, squeezed tightly against the bars by the very same monk she had sent off in shame on the Village Green. In between spats with a young dandy of a Lordling squeezed into the back of the stage, the monk babbled incessantly about the shame Lady Anne must feel in the simple peasant gown she wore now.
Sammie ignored the monk’s blathering. He didn’t know that Anne preferred her lighter gown, the lack of the scratchy lace ruff and her tightly pinned hair. Finally the monk realized Anne wasn’t about to stoop to arguing with him, and he turned his full attention to the dandy with a lecture about the dangers and devilry of drink.
It was a tired argument, one she was forced to listen to a couple of times a week. She turned.
Beyond the far end of the stage, the six members of the dunking crew unhooked the counterbalance at the end of the dunking chair from its anchor dug into the ground. On the top level of the stage, Johnny and one of his constables chatted with an overly eager gravedigger who constantly fiddled with his tape measure. Johnny kept the conversation going until the suspense in the audience had grown to a palpable level. Only then did the Lord High Sheriff bound to the bottom level of the stage and started his speech.
If only he could hurry it along today. If only he would pull one of these air stealing men from the cage. But of course he couldn’t. It was the Lord High Sheriff’s job to stir the audience into a frenzy, and then to swear them in as judge, jury, and executioner. It was the audience who decided who went into the water, and Johnny did such a good job whipping them into a frenzy that they never let a prisoner leave the stage dry.
The air in the cage grew hot. The pond, with all of its glorious green coolness, sat just far enough away to do her any good. But still Johnny prattled on.
“Practice with me, good people of Sherwood,” he shouted. “Once, twice, thrice!”
“Dunk them, dunk them, dunk them!” the audience yelled in unison. They were good.
Johnny thought so, too. “‘Tis well!” he said. “Bring forth the first prisoner.”
The constable threw open the cage door. Thank goodness it was the monk that was pulled out first. The space of two men opened up around Sammie.
“Thou shalt free me, thy corrupted cur,” the monk bellowed as the constable threw him into the chair. He barely landed before the dunkers swung the chair over the deepest part of the pond.
The monk’s mountainous stomach heaved in anger. “Release me, I say,” he yelled. “Or forever wilt thy eternal soul burn in the fiery pits of oblivion!”
Johnny ignored the monk and turned with a smile to the audience. His new jury. “This monk defieth the law of the land and doth preach the word of the Pope in against the word of our most just and pious Queen.”
Actors seated in the audience booed. The dunking crew and Johnny’s cohorts on stage booed. Sammie and the drunken dandy booed. The roaming snack vendors, selling pretzels and bags of roasted nuts from long poles, booed.
The boos spread from the actors to the tourists like a virus of wildfire. Whether or not they understood why a Catholic monk would be so evil, booing was just too much fun.
“What say ye, jury?” Johnny asked the audience. “Once, twice, thrice!”
“Dunk him, dunk him, dunk him!” the jury cried as one.
The monk hit the water with a splash that would turn the world’s best cannon ballers green with envy. The dunkers let him stew beneath the waves for a full thirty seconds before returning him to air.
“What doth thou say now, Sirrah?” Johnny asked, leaning casually against the stage’s second level. “Art thou cleansed of thy sins?”
The monk spewed forth a fountain of water from between his parched lips. “I shalt not renounce me the one true faith,” he sputtered.
Johnny turned back towards the audience and raised an eyebrow. “Jury?”
“Dunk him, dunk him, dunk him!”
The dunker left the monk below longer.
“Have thy something to say now, monk?” Johnny asked when the monk was brought up again.
The second dunking had turned the mighty monk into a child. He stuck his tongue out at the Lord High Sheriff.
It took every ounce of Johnny’s years of practice to keep from laughing. “Jury?” he managed to ask with a straight face.
A quick dunking later, the monk found himself back on stage. His torment was over. Three times in the water was the limit. He staggered to his feet and stood, dripping and seething, before Johnny.
“How doth thou feel now, Sirrah?” Johnny crossed his arms across his chest. “Shalt thou behave anon?”
The monk drew himself up to his full five foot self and stared up at the six foot one High Sheriff. “My Lord High Sheriff,” he said timidly. The water had extinguished his fire. “Dunkest me thou can, but my faith shalt never be so dissolved.” He stalked from the stage and huffed his way down the Dead Road. A moment later he disappeared back into the festival.
The dandy was next. His charges were not as serious as the monk’s. Apparently he’d disrupted the Queen’s revelries with his drunkenness. Johnny asked him the same questions he asked the monk. The man was incoherent, still under the influence of the drink.
But when he came up for the third time and was set on the stage… He could walk without a wobble. He almost skipped as he dripped his way down the steps and up the Dead Road. The water had done a good job sobering him up.
“Hope thee that the water hath washed thy crimes away,” Johnny said as he climbed back to the top level. He glanced at Sammie, and threw her a wink.
Sammie smiled. It was almost her turn.
Something drew her attention away from the stage. Something white fluttered just in the boundaries of her vision.
A moth… A snow white moth with feather-like antenna… She’d never seen anything like it before. There was nothing overly special about it, save a stark, silver lightning bolt spanning the length of one wing. It looked as if half of the wing had been torn completely off, and then healed back in place.
It fluttered just beyond the bars of the cage. It looked like…
No. It wasn’t possible. A moth couldn’t make eye contact with a human.
“Lords and Ladies of Nottinghamshire,” Johnny said. The moth disappeared. “My heart doth splinter within the deep cavern of my chest to present to thee the next criminal.” The enthusiasm of the Lord High Sheriff had diminished to the point of nothingness. He stared listlessly at a crest on the back wall. “Dark days do arise when those closest to the Lord High Sheriff find their way to this stage.” He turned and aimed an accusatory finger at the cage. “Behold ye mine own betrothed, the Lady Anne Halloway!”
One would have thought, from the resounding boos echoing throughout the clearing, that Sammie’s Anne was a worse criminal than the monk had been. She was worse than a thief, a rapist, a murderer. Her crime hadn’t yet been announced, yet she was the most horrible person on earth.
The idea was bloody hilarious.
Though it was never a good thing to go against the Lord High Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood knew that. He understood it. And he did it anyways.
Now it was Sammie’s turn. Or rather Anne’s. She had gone against her Lord High Sheriff, but she would not go unpunished as the outlaw h
ad done. But neither would she go quietly to her watery fate. So far today, Lady Anne had been shockingly flirty. Now it was time for her to be shockingly hard headed.
It was time for Anne to be the person she was truly meant to be.
The constable threw the cage door open. Sammie laughed off his grip and marched herself across the stage and into the slippery chair. She dug her fingernails into the soft armrests as the dunkers swung her out over the pond. Then, and only then, did she look at Johnny.
Lady Anne… defiant until the very end.
“Lady Anne Halloway,” Johnny said, the hard face of the Lord High Sheriff twisting slightly with a smirk. “Thou art charged with provocativeness and the most basest lust. Methinks every man within the festival hath shared in thy wares. Do I speak me incorrectly?”
Johnny had been the only one to have shared her wares today. But if course he didn’t count towards these charges. But one man did. He sat across the pond from her, her poor forgotten blond tourist from the tomato throw. His missing friends from the leather shop had finally made their appearance.
Sammie threw her blond a wink. It wasn’t his fault that she was in the chair today. His face turned tomato red. Apparently he liked her dunking dress, with its low cut bodice, a lot better than her Court gown.
“By what crime do I find me in this most dreadful chair?” she asked the Lord High Sheriff innocently. “Be it so wrong for a gentle woman to seek her naught but harmless attention?”
Johnny sighed. “What choice have I?” he asked with a shrug of the shoulders. “What say ye, jury? Shalt ye send mine own betrothed to the depths of this briny deep?”
The audience didn’t even wait for their Lord High Sheriff to hit “thrice” before condemning her to the water.
The world fell away. She screamed. At the very last second she clamped her mouth shut.
If heaven existed anywhere on Earth, it had to be in the water. It was a nurse with nimble fingers, cooling her burning skin, easing the tightness of her lungs.
The chair moved upwards before it could come to the very bottom of its underwater journey. “Think thee fortunate I find me in a good humour, my Lady, that I seekest not to dunke thee for long,” the Lord High Sheriff Johnny said. It was a cleverly concocted explanation as to why she was kept under for so little time. In truth, the dunkers were under the strictest orders that Sammie could be left below for no longer than thirty seconds at a time.
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