Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01]

by Lady of the Forest

She knew of no one else, no one at all. Men came home from Crusade nearly every day now, but she knew none of them. No more than I know Locksley ... but at least I can ask—Marian bit her lip. No harm in asking, is there?

  She stared hard at the empty dais. Irritation flickered minutely. Marian sought and rekindled it, aware of guilty relief; it was far simpler to be annoyed than to dwell on flagging self-confidence. No doubt he holds back merely to make an impressive entrance.

  Robert of Locksley, heir to vast wealth, an ancient title, and his father’s brand-new castle, sat very quietly on the edge of the chair, holding himself perfectly still. If he didn’t move, if he did not so much as twitch, the chair wouldn’t break.

  And neither will I.

  Through the studded oak door, carefully closed and latched for privacy, noise crept into awareness: echoes muted by wood, by stone, by distance; warped by perceptions, by interpretations shaped of circumstances now lodged in the past, yet oddly still part of his present. He wondered in a detached, negligent way if the selfsame echoes would also shape his future. He heard so many, now. Even those that were not real.

  Shoulders and neck were set stiffly, unyielding to quiet protests of aching muscle and tendon. He sat with meticulous precision on the edge of the heavy chair, banishing the tremors of too-taut sinews, allowing himself no slackening of knotted muscles, no tranquility of his spirit. Listening to the noise.

  A lute, clear and sweet, notes interspersed with women’s laughter, and girlish giggles. Lute and women, he thought distantly, were requirements of one another, if only to fulfill the fashion of Romance as dictated by a queen: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard’s indomitable mother.

  Richard. He closed his eyes. Hands, splayed slackly across bunched thighs, flexed spasmodically, then doubled into fists, scraping nails against hosen fabric. A tremor shook his rigidity, then died. He sealed his traitorous eyes with all the strength he could muster. If I refuse to hear—

  But the lute-song and the laughter beyond the door transmuted themselves without effort. The noise now was screaming—

  —the boom of stone on stone, hurled against Christendom’s walls ... the shrieks of a man dying, disembowled by the splinter from a trebuchet stone ... the swearing and the praying, so often one and the same, making no difference at all to the Crusaders who knew only they served God as well as king, and perhaps their own ambitions—

  And the Lionheart’s lusty laughter, no more inhibited by decorum than his appetites by rank.

  For the thousandth time, Marian let her fingers examine the seating of narrow silver fillet over the linen coif and sheer veil covering her head and hair, and the double-tied embroidered girdle binding her waist and hips. Huntington’s great hall was filled with a significant portion of England’s nobility, men and women of great Saxon houses, and those of the newer Norman regime who had replaced the English tongue with French, so that the earl’s hall was replete with bilinguality. Marian, too, spoke both languages, as one was required; the other, older language, shaped by Norse invaders, was considered impolitic where business was conducted. Peasants spoke it primarily, while those desiring to rise resorted to English only among themselves, or when ordering villeins about.

  Even the lute-player sang in French, though Marian supposed it was required. French was the language of legend and love, according to the Dowager Queen Eleanor’s dictates, and troubadours who reveled in the traditions of the storied Courts of Love inevitably sang of both, relegating the more ordinary day-to-day concerns to the reality they attempted to obscure.

  She was distantly aware of the music, but was no more interested in it than she was in the conversation between four old beldams clustered before her. They spoke of nothing but the earl’s wealth, his influence, his unflagging support of King Richard, who would doubtless reward such loyalty, once his release from Henry was procured, and thereby render the earl yet more powerful and wealthy. Marian found such talk tedious; she was interested in the earl’s son, not in the earl himself. She disliked even more her own consciousness that the heir to one of England’s most preeminent barons would most likely find her question disrespectful and impudent.

  He will brush it off like a passing impertinence, then have me dismissed before the nobility of England. Marian shut her eyes, hearing lute-song and conversation. Give me the courage to ask. It isn’t so very much.

  Locksley twitched as someone called out his name. Blind eyes snapped open. He fought his way to the surface, groping for comprehension. Surely the voice was one he knew ... But the latch, quickly lifted, became the sound of a trebuchet crank as they readied to loft the stone—

  —hurtling through the dry, dust-swathed air, crashing into the wall, pulping the flesh caught beneath—

  Wood boomed on stone: a door against a wall. Wood, not stone on stone, or flesh, or bone, nor men to die from its force.

  The voice: inflections of impatience, awkwardness, austere authority wary of preemption by concerns that could not be known, and dared not be questioned. “Robert—” More quietly now, but with no less pointed query, “will you keep my guests waiting all night?”

  With effort Locksley roused and recalled himself from Holy Crusade to the war of wills now fought more subtly within the halls of his father’s castle. He rose, aware of deep-seated fatigue, and back-palmed the dampness on his brow beneath a shock of pale hair. Physically he was sound. The journey home had allowed him time to recover most of his former vigor, as well as the weight he’d lost. But what his father desired was nothing he wanted to do. Better to stop it now, to refuse quietly and politely, before the travesty went forward.

  He turned, summoning courtesy, intending to say it plainly, so as to offer no room for misinterpretation. His father stood poised before the door. Beyond it milled the multitudes of English nobility, of whom Richard I, called Lionheart, was sovereign.

  Self-control slipped into place, schooled to expected courtesy. “Forgive me.” He kept his tone very civil. “Had you asked, I would have told you not to bother. With—that.” A hand gestured briefly, eloquently, indicating the world beyond the door. “I would sooner go to bed.”

  The earl nearly gaped at his unexpectedly recalcitrant heir. Then astonishment altered into autocracy, reshaping eyes, nostrils, jaw. Clearly the refusal, however politely couched, was not to be borne, nor could its understated plea be acknowledged. “By God—you will come out. At once. Everyone was invited. Everyone has come. Everyone is expecting—”

  The residue of memories overlaying the present thinned, tore, then faded. Locksley had learned to adopt a quiet intransigence others viewed as self-confidence, though he himself knew better. Stubbornness, perhaps. Defiance, more like.

  He kept his tone soft, but firm. The fleeting plea was banished. “It is none of my concern what everyone expects. You gave them leave to expect it without consulting me.”

  The earl closed the door with the force of damaged authority and a desire to mend it at once. “By God, Robert, I am your father. It is for me to plan what I will plan, with or without consultation.” And then the thunderous expression faded. The earl crossed the shadowy chamber to clap both hands on his son’s arms. “Ah Robert, let this go. Why must we argue now, and about such a trivial matter? I thought you dead—and yet here you stand before me, full-fleshed and larger than life....” Blue eyes shone; the smile was a mixture of wonder and intense pleasure. “By God, all those prayers answered at last ...”

  Locksley gritted teeth. When his jaw protested he relaxed the tension with effort. Let him have it, he told himself. Let him have this moment. For all I know it was the strength of his prayers.

  “Come now, Robert—you must admit your return is worthy of celebration! The Earl of Huntington’s only son back from Crusade with King Richard himself? I want them to know, Robert! By God, I want them to know!”

  “They know,” his son replied quietly. “You have seen to that.”

  “And do you blame me? Do you?” Bluffness dismissed, the earl now
was intent, albeit underscored by parental impatience. “I believed my son dead. I was told my son was dead, killed at the Lionheart’s side ... and yet a year and a half later that son comes to my castle, close-mouthed and dry-eyed, saying little of such things save the stories lied. ‘Not dead,’ he says. ‘Captured by the Saracens’ ...” The earl’s blue eyes filled. “By God, Robert!—no father alive could resist a celebration.”

  Very quietly, with infinite respect no less distinct for its resoluteness, Locksley suggested, “Had you consulted me—”

  “Back to that, are we?” The earl scrubbed his clean-shaven, furrowed face with both hands, mussing clipped white hair, then gripped the top of the nearest chair and shut his hands upon it, leaning toward his son to emphasize his declaration. In muted light, crease-couched blue eyes were now nearly black. “Two years on Crusade may have grown the boy to manhood, but I am still the father. You will do as I say.”

  Age had dog-eared the edges, but the tone was well-known. It was one to be obeyed, one to be feared, presaging punishment.

  But that had been in boyhood. Save for the scratchiness the tone was unchanged, and so was the expectation of instant obedience, but the son who heard it was not the same individual.

  Something odd and indefinable moved in the son’s eyes. Had the earl been as adept at judging his own flesh and blood as he was at judging most people, he would have seen the brief interplay between duty and desire, the pale glint of desperation quickly banished and replaced by grim comprehension.

  To the earl, his son was a hero returned from battle and captivity, companion to the king. Above all, his son was his son. That superseded all other knowledge, all other judgments. But Robert of Locksley now was far more than an earl’s son, and, by his own lights, far less than a free man.

  The earl’s belligerence faded as he gazed at his silent son, and the tight-clenched line of his jaw weakened until the flesh sagged minutely. The arch of the proud nose, stripped of youthful padding, pierced the air more keenly. He was, unexpectedly, an old man. The Earl of Huntington had always been strong and vigorous. Yet now the muted tone was rough-textured and unsteady, thickened by emotion. “By God, Robert, let me be proud of you,” he begged. “Let me show you off to those who will deal with you when I am in the tomb.”

  Locksley’s belly clenched. He had recalled, while on Crusade, all of the earl’s strength of will, his inflexibility, his autocratic authority. Never had there been softness; better yet, a softening, in memories or daydreams. Yet his father, now, was old.

  I am all he has left ... unless one counts this castle. The thought was answered by a flicker of self-reproach, that he could be cynical in the face of his father’s pride. I perhaps do him an injustice—what immortality does a father have, save for begetting sons? And I am his only son ... I am more costly than most.

  Inwardly he surrendered, releasing the intransigence which was as newborn to himself, who had always been dutiful, as it was frustrating to his father. It was not worth the battle. He had fought too many already. Let his father win this one: In captivity Locksley had become adept at not caring. Caring too much hurt.

  The son acquiesced. The earl, seeing that, smiled in relief, then triumph, then complacent satisfaction.

  Sighing, Locksley pulled wide the door. Beyond milled the multitude, telling stories of his captivity, his heroism, his valor. Making up what they could not know, to be certain of their reception in the eyes of those who knew no more, but would not admit to less.

  The son, seeing that, cursed himself for a fool.

  Two

  Marian pressed damp palms against her kirtle. Locksley was here at last and she was after all no different from the others despite her high-flown ideas. She was as curious and fascinated as everyone else.

  It galled her, because she had desired him to be—counted on him to be—no more than merely a boy come home from playing at war. That sort of person she could approach without feeling so obviously self-serving.

  She swallowed the lump of increasing nervousness. Other women lost fathers. I have no more right than they have to ask this man a question.

  But no less right, either.

  He stood before them all, poised upon the dais. Her instinctive, unexpected response was unspoken, but loud inside her mind: He is much changed. The boy, having gone to war, had returned from it a man. She wondered if anyone else saw him as she did, sensing what she felt, or if they were utterly blind. How could they miss it? They have only to look at him!

  And they looked, even as she did, but saw what they wanted to see: the Earl of Huntington’s heir returned from the dead; a live man in place of a corpse, wearing rich Norman garments instead of dull linen shroud and flesh in place of the steel of a dead Englishman’s sword taken back from a Saracen thief.

  He had gone on Crusade with the Lionheart as so many of them had, forsaking in the hot pride of youth his noble father’s attempt to buy back his service by paying honorable scutage. It was a thing done often enough among high houses and unremarked upon, and he was his father’s only son, heir to an important title and vast fortune. Fortunately, though King Richard needed men, he needed money more, and in place of flesh he would accept shield-tax.

  The earl had tried to pay. His son had other ideas.

  Marian nodded. He is much changed.

  Robert of Locksley stood on the low stone dais next to his father, beneath the heavy dark beams bedecked with green-and-gold Huntington colors. Torches from wall cressets and tripod dais stands behind both men did little to illuminate their faces, painting only heads and shoulders. From a distance, all Marian saw clearly as she looked at the earl’s son was the blazing spill of white-blond hair worn much too long for fashion. He had always been fair, she recalled, pale as an Easter lily except for his hazel eyes.

  I remember him from that Christmas ... It gave her an unexpected spurt of renewed conviction. I will ask him ... surely he can’t begrudge me a single, simple question.

  Sir Guy of Gisbourne stared. With effort he shut his mouth, wiped the smear of perspiration from his upper lip, and bathed the dryness of his mouth with wine, too much wine, gulping all of it down until the cup was empty. He thrust the cup toward a passing servant-girl and saw how it trembled; he stilled it as best he could, daring the girl to indicate she saw his state. She did not. She merely poured him more wine, then took herself off.

  He stared again at the woman who had stolen his wits away. He could not stop looking at her. Who—? He did not finish the question even within his thoughts. It would serve no purpose.

  He had seen her arrive, attended by an aged maidservant now asleep on a bench by a wall. He had watched her make her way into the throng, exchanging greetings with few, keeping her own counsel. He had noted the fit and color of kirtle (a lustrous rich blue silk embroidered in silver at neckline and cuffs, bound slim at her waist by a beaded Norman girdle); the elegance of her posture; the glory of coif-shrouded hair; the richness of blue eyes—and, unexpectedly, the stubborn set of her delicate jaw as she gazed at the dais.

  Shaking, Gisbourne scrubbed a hand across his brow. He swallowed painfully, sucked a breath through constricted lungs, and tried to master himself. His thighs and belly bunched, aching with erection; he more than wanted the woman, he needed the woman.

  It had been months. There was an occasional serving-girl to ease him, but he found such women lacking and therefore the act as well. He wanted more, but knew not how to find it. Emptiness and frustration had become intimates of his spirit, leaving him with nothing but his obsessive attention to detail. His was the kind of temperament men like the sheriff treasured, because someone had to organize the administration of castle and shire. The sheriff of Nottingham dispensed justice. Sir Guy of Gisbourne, his seneschal, carried it out.

  He had never been overly ambitious, nor was he an acquisitive man. His mistress was duty; his master William deLacey. But now, he would forsake all other vows if it put her in his bed. Not the knightly code ... no chival
ry, in this.

  Self-contempt flagellated him. He was, after all, not a knight as a knight used to be reckoned—that is, before the reign of Richard the Lionheart, whose compulsive need to go on Crusade had moved him to begin the practice of selling knighthoods to anyone who could afford them, along with lands and titles.

  A knight is sworn to many things, among them courtesy. Gisbourne was not innately a discourteous or unkind man. He knew himself humorless, old for his age, consumed with conducting his life—and the life of Nottingham Castle—with an obsessive dedication that rendered him invaluable to deLacey, but annoying to others. They couldn’t see that what he did was needful in the ordering of their lives. They saw only that he was hard and uncompromising and incapable of reducing his personal standards to suit their whims.

  But when he looked at the woman he forgot all of that. He thought only of her body, of her beauty, and what it promised him.

  For Marian, the dais ceremony did not grow tedious. She watched fixedly as Robert of Locksley without hesitation accepted the welcome of each man and woman who came to the dais for presentation. His manner was quietly gracious but oddly restrained, as if he performed the ritual solely for the sake of his father. He was taller than the earl by half a head or more, which had not been the case when Marian had last seen him, two years before. Then he had been a youth with narrow shoulders and bony wrists. The shoulders now were broader; she could not predict the wrists.

  Memory warred with reality. More than a decade had passed. People changed. Children grew up. Women married and bore children, while men went to war. But she recalled the past so well she couldn’t reconcile it with the present. One night only, one kiss, one Christmas Eve. But he would never recall it, not as she did.

  From where she stood, buried in the throng, Marian could hear nothing of what was said. She saw the earl’s broad smile, the movement of his mouth, the clasping of hands and arms as each man came forward to pay his respects, presenting wives and blushing daughters. But the son didn’t smile. The son merely waited in watchful silence as each guest approached. He clasped arms if they insisted, murmured something back, but his mouth never curved. The eyes never lighted.