by Sue Wilson
He caressed the weapon with begrudging admiration. "I've seen my share of these, confiscated from outlaws braving the gates of Nottingham on some fool's errand. In fact, I have quite a collection; their owners seem to have little use for them in the dungeon. This one, it appears, was not made for a man, but for someone of smaller stature." He held the bow beside her and looked meaningfully at the similarity of Thea's height to that of the bow. "For you, I'll wager. And by someone who knew you well. Someone who marked his workmanship with the Locksley cross."
He held the bow out to her. "I'm curious, Thea. Can you use it, or is it merely a memento, some keepsake from your outlaw lover?"
She snatched it from his hand.
An expression of genuine surprise settled across the Sheriff's features. So, he had not expected such a vehement-and uninformative-response.
He cleared his throat and reached for another item, a man's shirt, and brandished the handful of sun-bleached linen at her. "Found among your things, but clearly no woman's garment. Let me answer another of my own questions." His voice dropped to an acid-tongued whisper. "You are no virgin. Moreover, I'd wager my office and this sheriffdom that there is some connection between you and the forest, some connection you've taken great pains to conceal."
"I've concealed nothing," she claimed, and yet her eyes, tear-limned, spoke another truth. She looked at her husband's shirt, crumpled like a rag in the Sheriff's hand, and cursed him for his ignorance, for his gall, for his utter stupidity. If he would but see-
"You keep a man's shirt among your things and tell me it is not the clothing of some woodsman lover, perhaps the very one whose hands crafted your bow with such careful attention to detail? Tell me, Thea, is that why you have never married? Have you given your heart to a thief? Does he visit you, stealing away from the forest by night, when he feels it is safe?"
The Sheriff crossed the room and tossed the shirt on the table in disgust. "Or maybe he just sends for you when he has need of you, when one of his men has an arrow in his belly-an arrow from the castle forge."
Mutely, she shook her head. If he had stumbled across even the smallest point of truth, it was so inexorably woven up with conjecture and supposition, with fear and petty jealousy as to be inextricable. She was not about to confess to the whole of it, and refused to enlighten him about any small part.
"You needn't tell me, Thea. Sooner or later-next month, next week, maybe even tonight-he'll come to your cottage and find you gone, and when he does-" Nottingham leaned close to her and whispered, "When he does, he will come here. Somehow, I do not believe your bandit prince will take kindly to my having stolen his woman."
The Sheriff put his hand under Thea's chin and lifted her face to his. "You are a very desirable creature," he murmured. "I trust he will want you back."
"You are mad with delusions."
"Am I?"
He slid his fingers up the soft planes of her cheeks and, with his thumbs, wiped the line of tears gathering in her lower lashes. He removed the silver circlet from her head and pulled the silken veil away, letting it flutter soundlessly to the floor.
"Yes," he breathed. "Much better."
Reaching behind her, he drew a thick, mahogany braid across her shoulder and separated the strands, his long fingers combing through the silken curls that spilled to her hips.
Thea stood motionless, unable to speak, unprepared for the onslaught of sensation she experienced. She was certain the man was insane-or she was; there was no other explanation for the unspeakable desire that coursed through her, lightning-quick, when terror should have reigned. She never knew where she drew the strength or resolve to push him away.
"Yes," she said, a harsh, uneven breath punctuating her indictment. "You are mad. Quite mad."
The Sheriff seemed taken aback, unaccustomed to the rejection he had been forced to endure this evening. He frowned, then dropped his hands from the tangle of her hair, and stepped away. "As you wish," he said simply. "It is not you that I want anyway. Robin Hood and the men of Sherwood would be a far more satisfying prize. And in that, you are merely a means to an end."
The rage that had lain coiled within her for days mixed suddenly with the confused torment she felt at his touch, and a torrent of feelings unleashed themselves. Thea slammed her hand against the goblet, sending the red liquid spraying across the Sheriff's face and tunic. She would have thrown herself at him, clawed the look of superiority from his eyes, but he roared, "Guard!" and she froze in her tracks.
A soldier burst into the chamber.
Nottingham had assumed an icy and detached calm. He picked up the shirt he had discarded upon the table and, with an unhurried motion, wiped the wine from his face. "My surgeon is leaving," he said tonelessly, his eyes never leaving Thea's. He shoved the shirt into her hand and turned his back. "See to it she is escorted to her quarters."
The guard had already reached the door, Thea a pace in front of him, when the Sheriff called out. "The girl in the buttery-the red-haired, ample one. Bring her with you when you return."
Thea turned on her heel and continued through the door, not once looking back.
She carried the numbness with her to her chamber, ignoring the servants and soldiers that took note of her tears and disheveled hair and would make that the morning's gossip. How little they knew, and yet the fraction of their knowledge had been unbearably true.
I want you in my bed, he had said-and would have had her there, but for providence and his keener desire to have Robin of Locksley in his gaol.
She shut the door, welcoming darkness and silence, and untied the layers of tunic and kirtle and shift, leaving them on the floor where they fell. She slipped beneath the furs of her bed, unclothed, letting the feel of cool silk sheets and the man's shirt she held close blot the evening from her skin and mind. Brand's shirt. The tears came again, and she did nothing to stop them but bury her head in the folds of worn linen. The scent of her husband was gone; all that remained was the fruity aroma of spilled wine, leather, incense...and him.
CHAPTER TEN
Of all the damnable errors of judgment! The Sheriff spied the coppery glint among the rushes and kicked the goblet savagely across the room. It ricocheted off a candle stand and clattered to the floor, spinning with a grating metal sound that echoed off the chamber walls. The noise accentuated the turmoil he felt inside, and he struck the oaken table solidly with his closed fist.
Had he ever fared worse than with that awkward, blatant stab at seduction? Stay with me tonight. Was he mad? What answer could he have expected from the woman? He had offered no gesture of affection, no caress that she had not rebuffed, nor had she spared him any playful enticement or inviting glance of her own. Her every action, her every reaction, chilled him with staunch, unyielding refusal.
Why had he wasted his time on such paltry attempts to lure her when he could have taken her and be done with it? At least then he might have questioned her with a clearer head, with a mind for wringing the truth from her lips instead of thinking only of their sweet taste. He was appalled that he had set out with but two goals in mind-the feel of her body, bared, beneath him and the satisfaction of a confession-and she had given him only a faceful of bitter wine.
He propelled himself across the room and cleared the surface of a nearby chest with a broad sweep of his arm. Fiercely, he yanked open the top drawer, spilling its contents. Ledgers, pointed quills, stubs of sealing wax, and several ivory sheets of parchment landed amid the rushes. When at last his hands closed around the one object he sought, it was as if the touch alone calmed him. The vented fury of his storm vanished, leaving him shrouded in stillness, oblivious to the wreckage of the ruined evening that lay about him.
The journal was no more than stiffened leather, bound at the sides with braided fibers of hemp. He rested his forehead against its worn cover and inhaled the faint aroma of leather and the pungent mélange of herbs, wondering, not for the first time, why he had bothered with such flimsy circumstance as the bow and
man's shirt when the real piece of evidence lay between his hands.
Gisborne had brought him the journal, muttering about the woman's "suspicious scribbling."
"A peasant, Cousin?" Nottingham had said with a doubtful smirk. "Writing? Writing treason, do you suppose?" A hopeful guess; as he remembered, Gisborne had always failed at any tutelage toward literacy.
He opened the journal and smoothed back a page of brittle yellow parchment. He examined the compact script, poring over the pages for words he could recognize.
The entries were dated and bore a kind of geographical notation that described streams, fields, rock formations, or distance from unusual landmarks. What followed was written in a complex cipher he did not fully understand. Perhaps Thea had learned or developed a language peculiar to those knowledgeable about herbal medicine, as these entries appeared to be names of plants she had found at the above-mentioned locations, together with details about their stages of growth and amounts she had gathered. Occasionally, an herbal sprig had been plucked and left, pressed and drying, between the pages.
There were similarly incomprehensible notes on remedies concocted, simples prepared and sold, and visits to villages for a multitude of reasons, all logged in detail as minute as the script. These last accounts, though heavily abbreviated and interspersed with the puzzling language of plants and medicine, were written in a more prosaic style he could follow.
Here was an account of the birth of one Sarah Fletcher of Papplewyck and another of Elred Smithson, who had summoned her to his home to cure his toothache. There was an elderly sister at Kirklees Abbey who'd needed a remedy for the pain of old bones, and a veritable plague of sore throats and runny noses in nearby Edwinstowe. The healer had tramped throughout villages of the shire on her errands of mercy, and it was impossible to ignore that she had made her name a household word in the King's domain of Sherwood Forest.
That alone, however, was not enough to indict her, no matter how Gisborne twisted the truth. But the rest?
The Sheriff thumbed through the inches-thick journal, drawn like iron to the lodestone of the woman's guilt. How often had he come here to this entry, hidden amid the routine happenings of an herb woman's life? How many times would he have to read the damnable words before he was convinced?
In a small, furiously written account, she'd recorded her response to a call thick in the heart of Sherwood. There was no further identification of site or date. Care or oversight? Nottingham wondered. No matter. It was there, in Thea's own hand.
Three men dead, with terse descriptions of their fatal wounds. A half dozen more surgeries. The very crime she had denied just hours ago.
That she had written the passage hurriedly and in a torrent of uncontrolled emotion was clear. Tears had bled the ink into watery smudges, and blood from her hand had smeared the upper right corner of the page, as if she were leaving physical testimony to the horror she had just witnessed.
The entry ended with every word the Sheriff needed to charge her. Overcome with grief and anger, she had directed a scathing passage at the outlaw himself:
"By the saints, Robin, you promised peace and honor and safety, which we needed most. But for every promise you made, we lost a life today. How can I continue? How can you ask me? You said it was for justice, for the love of our people, and I believed you. But now Thomas is gone. And Oswald. And Maisry is a widow before her time. Would that your love for us might find a way to make this all end."
The Sheriff closed the journal and rubbed it absently between the palms of his hands, turning it this way and that, unconsciously weighing the evidence. He had given her every opportunity to ease the burden of her guilt, had made it easy for her by offering her own account of the truth to embrace, and still she had clung to her own lies.
And if her deceit were not enough, there were Gisborne's own findings. The outlaw's very shirt, nestled intimately among her shifts. Her outlaw-crafted bow.
Thea was one with Locksley, to be sure. In practice. In sentiment. In strongest sentiment, if Gisborne were to be believed. If he could believe her own words.
The fury of the passage did nothing to assuage her guilt, for she had protected Locksley at every turn this evening. They were, in all probability, less words of condemnation than of exhaustion and relief that her lover's soul had not been parted from his skin. More's the pity.
Nottingham opened the book again. It was not the last of such entries, or the first. If he wanted, he could place the incidents in a more specific chronology by learning the dates of the entries immediately preceeding and following. He could then go to the scribe's accounts of the soldiers' encounters with the outlaws. The Sheriff was certain if he did so, Thea's entries would coincide with every bloody skirmish. It should be evidence enough to rekindle her memory.
Instead, he thumbed to the last entry in the journal where Thea had begun an account of his own surgery. The passage was incomplete, for she had been unable to record anything past the moment she had left her home-and the journal-behind. Still, what little there was showed as detailed and detached a summary as the one of Smithson's tooth pulling. Somehow, reading the facts about what she had done to him in such impersonal prose left the Sheriff with the disconcerting feeling that he was eavesdropping on his own life, and on her private response to him.
The procedure had been routine, without crisis, even ordinary, noted in the same obscure language she used elsewhere in her journal. The entry made about him was afforded no special place, nor written in any manner to distinguish him from those patients with runny noses. It certainly was not written with the passion of the secretive Sherwood surgeries.
It should not matter, he thought. Christ! I should not care!
But he did. He told himself she was just a woman whose luck had run out, who did not have the sense to see salvation when it was extended to her, but his heart contracted bitterly around that thought. He wanted her, not in dungeon chains or dangling at the end of a hangman's noose, but here, by his side, curled against him, the light of the fire reflecting off her sun-tawnied skin.
With what enchantment had she plied him to want a thing so clearly dangerous? Was it a passing fancy? Some lust that had sprung up from the forced intimacy of her hands upon him, grown because he'd been prevented from sating it? After all, he had known lust, and well enough to remember how quickly it fled the moment he parted a woman's thighs.
He found no answer save that he ached for her-with the same misguided passion that Locksley yearned for honor. It was a longing no reason could touch or explain.
Nottingham paced to the fire and held the journal above its flames. To have her here, to keep her, he would give her this. No one need know. The forbidden knowledge in the journal, as well as the danger, were his alone, and if there were risk in keeping her secret, it was a risk he could face privately.
The scarlet streaks leapt up, scorching the leather. He felt the heat throb in his fingertips, and watched dispassionately as a thin plume of smoke sprouted from the pages, and still he could not release the book to the devouring fire.
A sharp rap rattled his door, and with a sudden reflexive jerk, he snatched the volume from the flames.
"Yes?" he snapped.
The door opened, and a gray shadow of a woman sidled in. Nottingham took in the uncombed carrot hair in its lopsided crown of a braid, large breasts straining against a tunic splotched with grease, and bare feet shuffling along the floor. The buttery girl flattened her back against the wall in a futile attempt to make herself less noticeable. Her eyes were downcast, her fingers fidgeted with her skirt, and she shifted her weight uneasily from one grimy foot to the other.
"Your pleasure, my lord," she managed, her voice small and shrill with fear. Dark-circled eyes glanced at him, then quickly fled his stare. So many of them would not look at him.
"My pleasure?" An abrupt laugh caught in his throat. He tried to imagine pleasure with this woman who still carried the smell of her work about her clothes and skin, whose hair f
ell in lank tendrils about her face. He imagined her roughened hands on him, around him, and the lips she licked nervously laid against his. He shuddered with an inward revulsion and waved her back.
"Get the hell out of here while I'm feeling charitable," he snarled, and dismissed her by turning his back on her bobbing curtsy.
He waited until the door shut behind her, then drew a heavy sigh of relief. Blessed privacy! He drew the book from behind his back. Torn by ambivalence, he could not destroy it any more than he could confront Thea with it. He considered the journal and the weighty evidence within, and slid it back into the drawer, then carried the flask of dinner wine to the hearth and pulled a chair close.
Stretching long legs in front of him, he inspected the reddened skin of his hand, curling his fingers under, feeling the skin burn with each movement. Thea would know which cooling salve would comfort him, and yet he swore to think no more of her.
He tipped the flagon of wine to his lips and drank deeply, but the burgundy liquid was no amnesiac. The thoughts he'd tried to drive away swirled around him. Thea and Sherwood-one as wild and untamed as the other. As careless of his commands and dictates. As devilishly enchanting.
The splendid, razor-sharp need he was so certain he'd banished returned, burning like a fiery, liquid pool in his belly, far hotter than singed skin, far more urgent. Unlike his burned hand, the Sheriff doubted it would heal itself in time.
He had failed at luring her with dinner and soft words and meaningless flirtation; that was masquerade to be employed with barons' daughters or bored ladies at court. Thea was too wary for his practiced ploys. She suspected every false word, every move with an impure motive.
The sound of her name in his mind tipped the cauldron of heat in his belly and spilled it through his loins and down the length of his thighs. He clawed at the chair arms until his knuckles whitened, willing his body not to respond to the thought of her, wishing she suffered but a fraction of the passion he felt.
