Chapter Three

Marian knew that Robin and she had agreed that he would stay away for a few weeks, so that she could ground herself and get used to her new deception. But it had been only a week, and already a tight knot had formed in her throat for missing him, and she was never far from tears. Finally she had stopped throwing up intermittently, but Marian had seen many pregnancies and knew that the tiny bulge jutting out from her waist meant that she was at least three or four months pregnant. However the bulge was easily concealed beneath her voluminous novice's robes and she knew that no one other than Sister Kate knew about her pregnancy. Indeed only she and Sister Kate knew that she wasn't a real novice.

All Marian wanted was to be able to cast off her habit and replace it with a wedding veil and take up her seat as wife to the rightful Lord of Locksley, but she knew this was impossible for the time being. However there was a light on the horizon – the king's imminent return.

Marian spent her days praying in the church, tending to the nuns' garden and cleaning, as chores were something that all nuns had to do, for a life of luxury and comfort was unheard of within the abbey due to their religion. Sister Kate suggested that Marian might be finding the arduous tasks hard to adjust to being from a noble and might be feeling it a little, but Marian stopped her in her tracks by saying that she had endured more hardship than anyone would ever have thought of her, and she was far from idle. She even showed the mother superior the scars and calluses on her delicate hands from years of fighting as the Nightwatchman, although she neglected to mention where they came from. But something else niggled at the back of her mind. She was desperate to know the identity of Sister Kate's child, for she knew that the child could not be much older than Marian herself. She longed for a way to broach the subject, but their lives were so busy that their paths hardly crossed. It was not until Marian was helping Sister Margaret, the abbey's cook that she got the chance to speak about it.

"Sister Margaret,"

"Yes my child?"

"What know you of Sister Kate's child?"

Sister Margaret paused in the kneading of her bread and looked up, flour comically dotted on her forehead. Marian hovered uncomfortably, unsure if she had just revealed a great secret. Sister Margaret straightened up.

"Sister Kate's child?"

"Yes."

"You have spirit to ask such a thing; it is not spoken of as part of Sister Kate's sins prior to her induction as a novice."

Marian frowned. "She was raped. It was hardly a sin."

Sister Margaret chose not to remark on this. "She had a son."

A son. A man in Nottingham then. That halved the choices. Marian almost laughed at the absurdity.

"He would be, oh, hm, twenty-three? I'm counting in Yuletides, it's the only way I keep track of the years."

Marian nodded. The nuns lived very basically. So she was to find a twenty-three year old man. She did not know why she had latched on to this so desperately, possibly because she herself was pregnant and could not bear to part from this tiny life inside her. This life that was part of her and part of – no, she couldn't think his name, she missed him too much.

"Does anyone know his name? Or where he lives?"

Sister Margaret wiped her forehead, streaking more flour there. Marian fought back from reaching out with her sleeve and wiping it off.

"I'm not sure, but I think he was sent to a miller? Maybe they'd just lost a baby or something. Anyway, God rewarded their hard work for the Lord of Locksley by replacing their dead babe with a healthy, live one."
Marian gasped. "Locksley? The Lord of Locksley?"

Sister Margaret nodded. "Well not the current one, nor the one before that, but the one before that."

Marian's stomach fell out. So Robin would know this child. Boy. Man. So who was he?