“But my brother?” said Midge. Clearly, it had been simple enough as a matter of life and death; but now her conflict of loyalties must return in force. “My brother and all my friends?”
“God’s mercy!” cried the sheriff. “I can see that you have free pardon, for your husband’s sake and your own seeming innocence of blood guilt—but I cannot nor will not extend pardon to my own husband’s murderers, every one!”
Much grumbled, “Nor we wouldn’t want it, neither.”
“But Roecourt lies far enough from Sherwood and Barnsdale,” Dame Alice went on, more calmly. “And I suppose I can allow it, manor and lands, as a place of truce and sanctuary, should your brother or old friends brave the journey to visit you there. So long as you do not abuse the privilege!”
“No more than three at any one time,” the lady Marian agreed. “And no longer than three days in a month, and never for purposes of conspiracy. Well, Midge? Could you live as a lady under those conditions?”
“I can try,” said Midge.
Dame Marian kissed her forehead, and Friar Tuck murmured, “Pax omnium.”
Denis fell on one knee to Dame Alice. “My lady —”
“I am your liege lord, Squire Denis,” the sheriff replied. “There is your lady. But one further condition!” She rounded on Robin Hood. “Down with this bloody, thrice-cursed gallows, and never let it be raised again!”
“By neither of us,” Hood capitulated. “Nay, let us have no more gallows to mar our greenwoods’ beauty. But down as well with your gallows behind the castle wall, Madame Sheriff, and back to honest hangings in public square and outside the town gates.”
“I make no promise. But I will consider it—when I find this gallows down and lying in broken pieces.”
Robin Hood slapped his thigh and laughed. “Well, come on, then, Much and John—aye, and you too, Will Scarlet, lend thy strength and soil thy dainty hands a little, and we’ll soon have it into seasoned firelogs for roasting my fine, horned beasts!”
In the noise of four strong outlaws setting about a good work, the high sheriff of Nottingham led bride and bridegroom safe from Sherwood. The lady Marian and her chaplain accompanied them to the edge of the Tanner’s field, where Dame Marian kissed Midge’s forehead a second time, and Friar Tuck, lifting his plump hand in a general blessing, repeated: “Pax vobiscum. Et pax totii mundi.”
EPILOGUE
There was a new sheriff in Nottingham, a new prioress in Little Kirkly, and an old outlaw chief in the greenwood.
Dame Alice de Flechedor was the new prioress, and the new sheriff was no direct kin to her, for her line would die with herself, and the sheriffship of Nottingham was no longer hereditary. As for the old outlaw, almost a quarter of a century ago Robin Hood had made his own peace with the king, for himself with his captains, lieutenants, and all the rest of his band who desired pardon, and been made a royal yeoman; but after a year of spending his threepence a day as though it had been his former booty of many hundred pounds in a good summer, he had grown weary of settled life, begged a week’s leave to visit an old greenwood chapel of his, and simply remained in his former haunts for the next twenty-two years, with John, Scarlet, and a regrouped band of former companions and new ones.
But age stole slowly upon them all at last; and one dawn Robin, feeling a throb in his head and excess of humors in his stretched veins, announced he would go to Little Kirkly hospital to be let blood.
“Madame Prioress has little cause to love you, Robin,” said Will Scarlet. “Let our own Nick Barber do it.”
“Nay, Madame Prioress is my own close kinswoman,” Robin replied with a laugh.
“When was she ever kinswoman of yours?” Scarlet demanded.
“Closer to me than mother’s sister’s daughter,” the leader told him. “A blood tie we discovered long ago. I’ll have no rough barber leeching me today. I’ll have the nun’s gentle hand and none other.”
This caused a quarrel with Scarlet, so in the end Robin took no companion save Little John. John, who secretly shared Scarlet’s misgivings, diverted his master along the way with quick shooting wagers—this leaf and that acorn and yonder toadstool for targets—as had always, from their earliest association, been their pastime on journeys. Today John hoped the sport might use up some of Robin’s excess humors and convince him he was as hale and strong as ever. It seemed to be succeeding passably, until they came to the bridge over the last stream in their path before they reached Little Kirkly.
This bridge was a single plank, mossgrown yet sturdy. They had crossed it often, Little John in one leap, his master in two. But today Robin halted at sight of the bridge. “Look there!” he whispered. “John, look there!”
Little John looked, and saw only the plank, the stream, and the greenwood all around.
“Yonder old woman,” Robin went on. “Yonder old woman in black rags, kneeling there on the bridge. Why does she kneel there, John? Why does she block our way?”
Little John could only shake his grizzled head.
Robin stepped forth to the bridge, set one foot on it, and began to speak; but stopped and stood mute a moment, as if listening. When he spoke at last his question was, “What, old woman? Why kneel there cursing Robin Hood?”
Little John came forward and laid his right hand on his master’s shoulder.
Robin started, shook himself, and rubbed his head. “Nay, she’s gone. Some phantom, perhaps. I thought ... for a few heartbeats I thought she looked like Madame Sheriff, you remember? That day she came disguised to beat us at our own game, her face as deep within her cowl as the face of Death himself.”
“She’ll be almost as old now in truth,” John replied, “as she played at being then. Nay, master, here was naught but a warning, if thou’lt take it.”
“No warning, John, no warning. A mere waking dream. A bubble of the air. Nay, Madame Prioress will do me no hurt, not now, not at this season of our lives. Christ! How black the water looks today. Sure, there will be rain by evening.”
To John’s eyes the water ran clear and bright as ever on a sunny day. Fearing that his old friend’s eyes were clouded, maybe from that same excess of humors, he followed him silently across the bridge, and so they came to Little Kirkly Priory.
Dame Portress, a pretty lay sister half Robin’s age, let them in. John she led to the visitors’ garden, below the guesthouse, and left him there while she brought Robin Hood on into the office of Madame Prioress, at whose instruction she went to carry bread, cheese, and ale for the companion’s refreshment. So the two ancient enemies sat alone together in the little room.
When she had heard his errand, Dame Alice rested her hands on the arms of her chair and asked, “How is it that Sir Giant trusts his beloved master to me for letting blood? And Scathlock called Scarlet—you have him still with you in the greenwood, do you not?”
“Aye, madame. Robin, Scarlet, and Little John. Though Much the miller’s son liked the king’s service well enough to turn royal forester for good.”
“And your minstrel with his gentle fair bride win welcome from Lancaster to London for their songs of you, it is said.”
“That they do.” He chuckled. “Aye, that they do. Welcome and good silver coin, more than twenty pounds a year sometimes. Which is the sum I bring you today for your leechcraft, good Madame Prioress.” He dropped it to the desk top between them, where it lay, grossly excessive for a single blood-letting.
She let it lie, neither untying the leathern pouch nor prodding it with her finger. “Stolen money.”
He shrugged. “Aye, but the coins are guiltless in themselves, and the robber’s guilt can be purged, I think, with a few Masses?”
“Perhaps. We can but have them sung, we cannot ourselves weigh their worth. So this is why your faithful captains trust you to come here to me for my late-learned leechcraft? Because you will pay so dearly for the same?”
“Marry, madame, I told them we were near akin!” He laughed again, while she smiled at his jest.
>
“Kindred in the lineage of Adam and Eve?”
“Closer kindred than that, Madame Prioress. Cousins by virtue of our ancient feud. You on your side of the king’s law, I on mine, but both bending it to our own purposes, playing with it as with swords and longbows to circle round each other’s throats.”
“Aye,” she said, musing through the memories. “And well and truly, between us, did we destroy the knight my brave Squire Denis would have become.”
“But not the scholar Midge swears he made at Oxenford for two whole years,” Robin Hood answered with a chuckle. “Nor the kind and brave and tender and, from time to time when needs must, even shrewd husband and father and master he has made for you in Roecourt Manor all these years.”
“Aye,” Dame Alice observed wryly, “once the nightmares stopped.”
But Robin Hood went on as if he had not heard. “Five children in all has Squire Denis given our Midge—three gentle daughters and a pair of gentle sons mothered by our miller’s brat turned lady of the manor! And loved by all the countryside, she and he. Even as much, perhaps, as bold Robin Hood!”
“You become something of a minstrel yourself, Master Robert.”
“Aye, in half a century and more a man has time to think a few pretty thoughts of his own.”
Well,” she said with a deep sigh, rising but still leaving his bag of money where it lay, “the time is hard upon us to pay our debts to earth and prepare our souls for Heaven’s bliss. So come on, wild old fox, and take the leeching for which you came to me.”
She led him, not to the nuns’ little hospital, but to an upper room in the guesthouse, empty at present of other guests, for Little Kirkly lay far from any main road. From the window they could look down into the garden where Little John waited. Robin hailed him, laughing and waving reassurances, then sat on a bench and rolled up his right sleeve.
Dame Alice kindled a small fire and set the chafing-dish over it to heat while she went for her blood-irons and bowl to catch the blood. When she returned, the water was sufficiently warm. She brought the chafing-dish to where he sat and bathed the crook of his arm so as to swell the veins still further and make the bad blood less sluggish to drain.
“What of William Stutely?” she asked.
“Dead. Dead and buried these six years past. And Ragnild Greenleaf heading a band of her own somewhere near Charnwood, when last I heard.”
“And Dame Marian with her chaplain Tuck? What of them?”
“God’s Mother knows. Translated into Heaven, for anything I can say. It was a tender parting, with neither recrimination nor rancor on either hand, but my sweet Maid Marian has glided from my side like a mist, I know not whither, and her good friar with her.”
“Leaving you with two old captains, one of them lingering behind in the greenwood today, and me here with myself.”
The old outlaw grinned. “There was a time, madame, when you were the sheriff’s wife, so to say, and Maid Marian not yet come to live with me in greenwood for a few sweet seasons, that you came very near to being my own courtly lady by all the minstrels’ rules. Have you still that gold ring I sent you once, eh?”
“Reclaimed long ago, that year you spent in the king’s household, by some merchant who claimed it as his own. If I was thy courtly dame, Master Robert of the Hood, you paid me poor homage when you hanged my good husband Sir Roger of Doncaster there within the king’s forest.”
“Aye,” he agreed, yet with something like half a chuckle. “Aye, that was hardly just, but my lads had their mettle up, and when once the bloodlust is fully roused ... And I too, I confess, I did nothing to hold them off. Yes, I did my penance well for that day’s work, so soon as I had Father Tuck to shrive me. Barefoot from south Sherwood to north Barnsdale he had me walk, though he did not care how long I took about it.”
“I made my oath on my husband’s bier, Robert of the Hood, that I would pay you back for his death.”
“Aye, Madame Sheriff, and long and truly you tried!” He laughed and slapped his leg with his left hand. “By Christ’s good cross, even my winning the king’s friendship scarcely stopped you! But we grow old, Madame Prioress, and, as you say, age is the season to put away old enmities and prepare our souls for Heaven’s bliss.”
“As I have begun to do, burying myself here in a modest nunnery. Good faith, Master Hood, I thought never to see thee again! Now,” she went on, taking away the chafing-dish, “your sword. You ought to have left it in the gatehouse; but since Dame Portress let you wear it this far, we will use it now in place of wand or rod.”
He drew it and set its point to the floor. Quietly, deliberately, she folded the fingers of his right hand around its pommel. The rod—in this case the sword—served to support the patient’s arm and give him something to grip until the vein bulged out still further from the inner arm. He had been bled before and knew the process. When she put the bowl into his own left hand, he held it steady to catch the flow of bad blood.
She unwrapped her blood-irons from their silken cloth and, more tenderly than any barber, leech, or herbwoman had ever done it to him before, laid them to his vein. And, with a quick, hard stab, drove them deep. The thick dark blood spurted forth, he working his hand the while to help it come, and catching it neatly in the bowl.
But bright thin blood came with it, and seeing this he stopped flexing his hand and glanced up at the prioress.
“Nay,” she said. “The bad humors have gone very deep. This bowl must be filled to the rim before they are bled out.”
It filled very rapidly to the rim. She plucked it away from his hand, emptied the chafing-dish of water, and put it in turn into his left hand beneath the flow of blood.
Then Robin Hood knew beyond all doubt.
Casting the second dish away, he stood. Already his brain felt giddy. The floorboards heaved beneath his feet, slick with water and blood. He raised his sword, and for a few labored heartbeats it seemed he might strike it down upon the prioress; but she stood unnmoving, the one steady thing in all that chamber. With a loud cry, he turned away from her, staggered to the window, and hung out over the sill.
Little John had sprung to his feet and stood in the garden, shouting up. But between master above and man below another form seemed to hang, half blotting out Little John from Robin’s sight, yet like a vision of smoke or gauze: the vice-sheriff they had hanged in Sherwood, noose around his neck and feet high off the ground, but eyes alive and sword in hand.
Crying out, “Red Roger! Roger of Doncaster!” Robin Hood leaned forth farther and swapped at the rope. He leaned too far. The phantom parted and vanished as he fell through it to the ground.
John rushed to him, bent over him, cradled him in his great arms. Dame Alice stood in the window and watched until the giant laid his master gently at length and closed the staring eyes.
Then she said, “No doubt you, and Scathlock, and others still alive share in the guilt for my husband’s murder. But for your master’s sake, because he claimed some kinship with me and because he made a brave end, I will let the matter rest with Robin Hood’s death. You may leave here freely with his body.”
“Did you hear his last words?” the giant demanded, glaring at her with a hatred beyond rage.
“I did not.” She met that glare coolly.
“I’d set torch to thy nunnery this hour, but he forbade me take revenge on any woman or widow.”
“Which is no more than reason. None of my ladies here had any part in Robin Hood’s death, save myself alone. Whereas all his men or most of them had part in Roger of Doncaster’s. But if that was thy master’s dying command, remember it well, for I have one more journey to make through the king’s forest of Sherwood and back.”
It was night when she came to the glade where once the stolen gallows-tree had borne its fruit.
Three pounds she had taken out of Robin Hood’s purse, to have Mass offerings for his soul. The remaining seventeen she scattered around the glade, for anyone to carry away who found them. N
ever before in her long life had she been so prodigal with material wealth. Studying her gnarled, high-veined hands in the moonlight, she muttered, “God’s truth, but I believe he knew. I believe he came to me with the knowledge in his heart that I must finish the thing at last.”
She stood, as nearly as she could remember, in the very spot where her husband and those others whom Hood’s men had captured must have stood before being swung up on the crosspiece. And she gave a thought to Denis FitzMaurice and his outlaw bride, still happy in Roecourt, setting aside what money they could for seeing their second son knighted and their three daughters dowered. The oldest son, by his own preference, would go for a priest. And one of the daughters would probably choose the cloister; but not, the prioress suspected, the dreamy young one who took most after her father. Dame Alice knew them middling well, having stood godmother to all five. Yes, they, at least, were beloved by the countryside, better than ever Master Robert of the Hood had been during his life, despite his own fond fancies.
They, at least, even in spite of their strange mismatching and the nightmares that had plagued them both for so many months, had had the decades of wedded happiness denied to Alice de Flechedor and Roger of Doncaster.
She uncorked the flask in which she had brought Hood’s blood, and emptied it out at her feet.
“Rest now, my love,” she whispered to the air above her. “And rest thou also, my hate,” to the blood soaking into the ground at her feet. “And God have mercy on us all.”
THE END
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Song of Robin Hood. Selected & edited by Anne Malcolmson; music arranged by Grace Castagnetta; designed & illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton. Houghton Mifflin, c1947.
Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol. III. First published 1888-89.
Holt, J. C. Robin Hood. London, N.Y., Thames and Hudson, c1982.
Stevenson, Jocelyn. Robin Hood: A High-Spirited Tale of Adventure starring Jim Henson’s Muppets. Illus. by Bruce McNally. Muppet Press/Random House, c1980. I append this title to show that the colorfully romantic Robin Hood mythos with which I grew up (as opposed to the sort of ashcan “realism” that seems to be taking over nowadays and is, in its own way, equally untrue to life) was still alive enough at least to provide the basis for popular parody, as late as 1980.
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