“A woman’s weapon?”
“Your tongue,” he said; with Robin, it would have been irony. With this man, it was fact as he saw it. “Tell me your dispute.”
“You are the sheriff’s man.” She weighted her tone with contempt. “It serves no purpose.”
“I am the king’s man. And it serves every purpose.”
Marian studied him, marking the hardness in dark eyes, the granite of his face. He was, she thought, immense of commitment and immovable in flesh, a dangerous enemy. She found herself very glad he and Robin had fought on the same side.
“My war,” she said, “is with William deLacey. Taxes are the excuse. But he has shaped that excuse into a weapon—a sword, if you will, for which he has no respect—and holds it to my throat.”
“Tell me, madame.”
But before she could speak again, deLacey himself came into the hall. He had put off his fine clothing and wore serviceable mail, spurs, and carried a sword. He was taller than Mercardier but considerably slighter when judged against the mercenary’s bulk. Abruptly whimsical, she decided deLacey was a dagger, thin-bladed and honed to a sharpness that would cut into viscera before anyone knew. Mercardier was the very weapon he carried: a massive, heavy broadsword designed not to puncture, not to slice, but to batter flesh into pulp and to shatter all the bones.
“Ah, I see you have met,” the sheriff said lightly. “Perhaps Mercardier might acquaint you with the expectations of a kingdom requiring taxes of every individual.” The light in his brown eyes was pronounced. “In fact, why not inspect the tax rolls yourself, Marian? I shall have Gisbourne escort you before he departs with me; Mercardier shall stand guard, of course, so I need not fear any attempt on your part to add your name unlawfully.” He smiled, tugging on a glove. “In the meantime, my duty lies elsewhere.”
Marian gritted her teeth against a furious shout as he walked from the hall. And then she became excruciatingly aware of Mercardier’s examination of her expression.
Looking at him warily, she wondered if he measured her the way he measured a man before he killed him: with contempt for the puny opponent.
“Place no trust in that offer,” she advised with some heat. “If he gives me the means to examine the rolls, then be certain he has had them altered.”
Mercardier said nothing.
“You know neither of us,” she accused, “to believe without question that he is right and I am wrong.”
“What I believe, I believe. Right or wrong does not matter, madame. I am to escort the tax shipment, not enforce its collection.” With a slight inclination of his head, he added, “Let us go down, madame.”
She said it reflexively. “Down?”
“To the dungeon, madame. The sheriff has locked in the king’s taxes, and locked out those who might otherwise wish to steal them.”
Marian, who had herself once been locked in deLacey’s dungeon, was not pleased to visit it again. But she would offer no hint of that displeasure before this man. “Down,” she agreed.
Twenty-Two
Huntington was closeted with Alnwick, Hereford, and Essex when his son came into the chamber. At first blush he was pleased that he would be able to present Robert to the men again; and then he saw him clearly, and was appalled.
“My God, Robert! Have you been wallowing with the pigs?”
Robert stopped short just inside the door, taking note of the chamber’s inhabitants. A certain fixed and determined expression abruptly faded into the still implacability the earl found so infuriating.
“Forgive me, my lords,” Robert said with careful courtesy. “The past day and night have proven somewhat—discomfiting.”
“I should say so!” Huntington snapped. “How dare you present yourself before these men in such a state!”
Geoffrey de Mandeville observed mildly, “He may have good reason.”
“He does,” Robert affirmed with a trace of irony, and glanced appreciation at Essex. “Nevertheless, forgive me—”
“Have a bath poured,” Huntington commanded, interrupting. “And I believe there is appropriate clothing here as well.”
There was, of course: Robert had left most of it behind when he departed Huntington Castle for Ravenskeep. But the earl would not speak so specifically; such things were best kept private.
“My lords,” Robert said with a slight but correct bow, and took himself away.
“Forgive me,” Bohun said lightly when he was gone, “but you might have asked him why he was in such a state.”
Eustace de Vesci, with eyebrows arched, inquired with amusement, “Is he consorting with outlaws again?”
A sharp retort rose to Huntington’s lips, but he suppressed it. Instead, he rose, gathered the robe more closely about his frail body, made his apologies and excused himself from their company. There were questions to be asked of his son, but he would not do it before them.
By the time he reached the bathing chamber down near the kitchens, the earl was out of breath. He was somewhat mollified to learn that Robert had indeed ordered a bath, and was waiting with every appearance of resigned patience as the servants filled the cask. He sat framed within the deep sill of a splayed window, one foot on the floor while the other, bent knee hitched up and wedged against the embrasure, waggled idly. Fair hair was haloed white against the sun-drenched glass. As he saw his father enter, he crossed his arms, leaned more heavily against the dressed stone, and raised both eyebrows beneath a tousled lock of untidy hair.
Huntington took his lead from de Vesci. “Are you consorting with outlaws again?”
Robert’s mouth twitched. “Not intentionally.”
“How unintentionally?”
“As any man does,” he answered. “He is robbed.”
“You were robbed?”
“And taken captive.”
The earl sat down abruptly upon a bench as the servants moved in and out with buckets. “Do you mean that corpulent monk told the truth?”
“Tuck.” Robert smiled briefly, as if imagining the tableau.
“He came to me and said you were taken, that the outlaws wanted money.”
“And so I was, and so they did.”
“But—I refused.” The earl felt tightness in his chest and rubbed idly at it through the clothing. “I disbelieved him.”
“Ah.”
Huntington did not care for the noncommittal tone in his son’s voice. “Do you blame me for that?”
“How can I? I did not know you had refused until this moment.”
“And now you are here.”
“Yes.”
“So a ransom was not necessary.”
“No.”
Huntington shifted uneasily. It was simpler to discuss such things with Robert when he was angry, not so cool, self-controlled, and inwardly amused. “How did you get free?”
“On my own. It was not required that a king ransom me.”
Huntington took that as insult and attack because he had not immediately paid the Saracens the ransom to free his son from captivity six years before. But only because King Richard had paid it first. “Robert—”
“I am well,” he said, as if that was the question his father intended to ask.
It was not, and the earl chafed beneath the mild sting of guilt and implied rebuke. “If you would present yourself to powerful men as my heir and a man who may be trusted with vital information, you would do best to comport yourself accordingly. This includes appearing before noblemen as one of them, not clad as some workman’s apprentice!”
“They seemed disinclined to take my appearance as insult.”
“But it is insult regardless, Robert. You are not a peasant. You are not a yeoman. You most certainly are not an outlaw—”
“No?”
Robert was amused, and at his father’s expense. Huntington glared. “We are speaking of your future as an earl.”
“I think we are speaking of your pride as an earl.”
He was astonished. It struck him that hi
s son obviously felt he was very much in control of the situation. The earl found this not only annoying, but disturbing. “How dare you speak to me so?”
“To make you recall that I hold my own opinions. And that they may not always be in accordance with yours.” Steam from heated water rose between them. “I am not William or Henry, my lord father, to answer your every whim without thought, to be you even if I wear a different face. I am the disobedient son, the youngest and unimportant son, the one you so disliked you left me—praise God and Allah!—to my mother. Had my brothers lived, we would not be having this conversation.” The tone was infinitely casual. “But they are dead, my lord, and I am after all the only son you have. Now you must listen.”
“I ‘must’ do nothing!”
“You may choose not to hear me, you may dismiss me, you may believe me a fool, but you must listen.”
“I have heard nothing of any value!”
Robert tilted his head slightly, as if listening to an inner voice. “Then perhaps I am not fit to be your heir.”
Only immense self-control—and the desire not to punish him in front of servants—prevented the earl from stalking across the chamber to strike his son. It was this very attitude, this unflagging and unsubtle intransigence, that had so appalled and infuriated him when Robert was a child. Then it had been a simple matter to beat the boy into submission, or banish him from his sight for weeks on end, but the child was now a man, and was, as he had noted, the only son Huntington had. The line ended with Robert.
Unless the seed in his loins produced a suitable grandson.
The earl rose. “When you are presentable again, come to me and the others. We must speak of important matters.”
“Indeed we must,” Robert agreed, “though our topics may differ.”
Huntington waved away a drifting wisp of steam. “There is only one topic of which to speak, Robert, and that is the future of England and the role you shall play in it, whether as my heir or the sire of my heir.”
Robert slid down from the sill and began abruptly to strip off disheveled clothing. “Then perhaps our topics are the same after all.”
Huntington had no wish to see again the permanent welts carved into the flesh of his son’s back; only peasants and felons were whipped. He departed at once.
Marian followed Gisbourne down the staircase into the dungeon. The dimness she found oppressive and overfamiliar; she recalled with unsettling clarity how she had once before inhabited the sheriff’s dungeon, left in a damp pit of a cell with a scattering of straw, a lone malodorous bucket, and rats for company. She suppressed a shudder as she descended, but could not persuade her face to assume an expression other than stark distaste.
Behind her was Mercardier, chopping his steps so as not to overtake her. She was aware of sounds despite the lack of speech: Gisbourne’s keys clinking, iron against iron; the echo and scrape of footsteps; the faint metallic song of Mercardier’s weaponry and fittings. In the distance, she heard moaning.
“How many are down here?” she asked; the sheriff’s steward should know.
Gisbourne reached the bottom of the staircase and moved aside, shrugging. “Thirty-six.”
“Thirty-six! Charged with what crimes?”
“Poaching, mostly,” he answered as she stepped beyond him. “But cutpurses and murderers, too.”
“What do you do with them? You cannot just leave them here!”
“Most often,” he said, “we execute them. Or, with poachers, chop off a hand. Punishment, and lesson.”
“And what shall they do then but poach again?” she demanded. “In God’s name, Gisbourne, how would you live if you lacked a hand?”
Mercardier joined them, and Gisbourne ignored her. He led them to a cell even as Marian skirted the iron-grated pit, and unlocked the heavy, studded door. He eased it open, then moved aside so Marian might enter.
It struck her then that he need only shut the door, lock it, and she was imprisoned again, made helpless by the sheriff. But she dared not show nervousness to Gisbourne, who would no doubt enjoy it. Marian moved past him into the cell, and saw the chests and caskets of varying sizes and shapes stacked against the walls.
It astounded her, that so much money could be gathered from rich and poor alike in the name of a king’s taxes. When so many of the latter needed it to live, and often turned to poaching in order to eat.
Gisbourne joined her in the cell, opening leather scroll cases. Mercardier stood in the doorway, blocking it.
She waited as the first parchment was removed from its case. Gisbourne unrolled and spread it on the table, weighting the top corners, then motioned for her to inspect it.
Marian looked at the parchment, then at the scroll cases stacked along with the chests of coin. In this cell was contained a portion of the power that allowed a realm to function, the names of every resident of the entire shire. This was Nottinghamshire, and England as well, bordered by the confines of a small, dank cell.
“The sheriff is waiting,” Gisbourne said. “I leave you with Mercardier; and do recall there are guards.”
Marian’s mouth twisted. “You consider me a thief?”
“Perhaps not yet,” he answered, “but you are certainly a whore. And whores cannot be trusted to behave honorably.”
It took her breath away, that such hatred could be so blatant. Dislike, contempt, resentment: all, she had encountered. But she had also in these last days encountered a malicious violence aimed specifically at her in the destruction of her property, and now Gisbourne wielded words without a pretense to courtesy or prevarication, without implication, merely stated the ugly and unadorned truth as he saw it.
She watched him go, aware of a cold and dreadful hole in the pit of her stomach, of a reaction so strong she felt physically ill. To be so hated . . . I have made two enemies, she thought with a cold clarity that astonished her. And one of them could destroy me.
Perhaps, in this cell, using parchment and pen in place of sword and knife, he already had.
“Begin, madame,” Mercardier said.
She turned back abruptly, lacking all grace; turned away from Gisbourne’s poison, from the too-watchful eyes of the mercenary, and began to inspect the tax rolls. Tears stung her eyes, but none of them fell.
William deLacey felt a welling up of anticipation almost sexual in nature as he rode into the cobbled bailey of Huntington Castle. He had disliked Robert of Locksley long and well for a number of reasons, but he found himself nearly as pleased to discommode Huntington himself. Earls were powerful men that sheriffs did well not to cross, but deLacey discovered within himself the appetite to kick fuel from Huntington’s fire with a well-aimed and malicious boot toe. Nottinghamshire was his to administer, and so it should be for a man of good Norman blood; he needed no English nobleman to undermine his authority with a word here and there, the brief but autocratic gesture from a hand, a haughty glance down the bony, prominent nose. DeLacey had proof. DeLacey had the authority. DeLacey had the honor-bound duty to arrest a man who stole horses from other men.
The Lionheart was dead. John was king, and John had given the Lord High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire the order to do as he saw fit to secure the shire for the good of John’s rule. Huntington had plotted against John before. DeLacey could not arrest the earl, but the son was his.
He reined in at the head of a small troop, but did not dismount at first. “Remember,” he told Gisbourne in a low but steady voice, “tell the earl precisely what happened. Explain to him the outrage of having your horse stolen by Robert of Locksley, a fellow knight—”
“It was an outrage!”
“—and how such dishonorable behavior betrays all the codes and oaths King Richard held so dear. Do not permit the earl to cut you off, nor dismiss you. You are my steward, a knight, a man of honor, a husband and a father, dedicated to the preservation of the laws of England as codified by Henry the Second, Richard’s own father, and you cannot permit such lawlessness to go unpunished. The law protect
s everyone equally, Gisbourne. If a man steals a horse—and in this instance, two horses—he must be punished for it.”
“I do understand, my lord.”
“Be certain of it, Gisbourne. No one shall stand in the way of our sworn duty.” DeLacey glanced at his men, bade them follow but offer no threat beyond their presence unless he ordered it, then jumped down from his horse and strode up the stairs to the archivolted door. A peremptory gesture brought Gisbourne to heel. Behind the steward came the eight mailed and helmed soldiers.
The sheriff did not wait on ceremony. He caught the first servant who came within reach, demanded to know where the earl and his son were, and was told with only the merest hesitation. Smiling grimly, he went directly to the indicated chamber, trailing mailed and armed authority in his wake.
Ralph, the earl’s steward, was in the corridor as deLacey arrived. Before the man could offer up the protest his shock delayed, the sheriff unlatched the door, shoved it open so widely and so firmly that it crashed against the wall, and marched straight in.
He stopped short even as the soldiers came in to flank him, because instead of one earl he confronted four.
William deLacey, silently, began to swear.
Gisbourne, not so silently, began his determined explanation of his misfortune and declaimed in loud, ringing tones the identity of the man who had stolen his horse.
In view of the exalted company bearing witness to this declamation, all the sheriff could do was think, Not now, Gisbourne.
Huntington, sitting stiffly in his high-backed chair, listened to the explanation and accusation without comment. There were no shocked gasps from him, no angry denials, no contempt. He merely listened, mouth crimped small and tight.
When Gisbourne was done, the earl looked directly at deLacey and said, “My son has been with me all this day.”
“No, my lord!” Gisbourne cried. “He stole my horse but a matter of hours ago!”
The silence was deafening. And into it came the slightest sound of metal on metal: eight soldiers stood flanking the sheriff, prepared to aid in the arrest of the Earl of Huntington’s son. And now he could not use them.
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