"Marian! Wake up! Lady Marian!" My eyes snapped open. The room was dark; my candle had burned out. There was someone, a man, a man's hand on my shoulder, and he was shaking me, calling out in a voice I recognized.
Robin Hood had returned.
"You have gone mad. Coming here once was not enough, now you risk your life again? What are you playing at?" If I had been able to see him, I would not have been able to retrain myself from strangling him.
"I wasn't seen. I thought what worried you was not so much my presence in the castle as it was the public knowledge of my presence in the castle." He was kneeling down, I thought, as his voice came from lower down to my left.
"You could, perhaps, give me notice of when you're going to stop by on these visits so I don't scream when a stranger comes into my bedroom in the middle of the night. That would be best, I think." There was no mistaking my tone, for all he couldn't see my face.
"Indeed. Sending you secret messages in the middle of the day when you are watched as closely as you are would not seem in the least bit suspicious." His tone was no less cutting than my own. "You're right again, it seems."
"It's a gift that I have," I said. "What possessed you to come back here, anyway? I had thought you would give it a few more days to settle down before you came back to the Sheriff's territory."
"And that's what the Sheriff thinks as well. Which is why he's him and I'm me. As to what brought me here, Tuck gave me a stern talking to today. He agrees with you about what happened last night."
"Yes, I know. I spoke to him this morning. You were inside the castle walls today?"
"I never left. I needed to see what kind of reaction the Sheriff would have so I could know how to defend ourselves."
"Tuck convinced you to come talk to me? That seems unlikely, since he agrees with me."
"What he—you—said made sense, though I know it had to be done. I came to apologize for the danger I put you in. For all that I needed to meet you, I should have given you warning. Had you not acted as skillfully as you did, you could have been killed, and then everything would be weakened. I want to assure you that I will take no more undue risks with your life and Elizabeth's. My own life I will continue to put in danger, but then I'm not in such a perilous position as you. I'm sorry."
I found the words were they were lodged in my chest.
"You saw me with the Sheriff today." It was not a question.
"I did. At least he is unconcerned with you. That's for the best. But be careful. He's not a fool, and if he starts to suspect you, you'll be in very real danger."
"And Guisborne—does he confide in the Sheriff much?"
Hood's voice went cold. "I doubt it. They may be on the same side of the law, but that doesn't mean they like each other. Why?" he sounded as if he already knew what I was going to say.
"Guisborne may have his doubts about me. I've caught him watching me several times, but I don't know if he's suspicious or not. He may just not have dismissed me as easily as the Sheriff did."
"No. He's not the sort." Hood's voice was icy, and I remembered what Prince John and the Sheriff had said about him. Guisborne lived on Locksley land in the Locksley manor, and Hood himself was deposed. And they had mentioned his father as well. I made a note to ask Tuck in the morning.
"Do you think I'm in trouble?" I asked, hoping that Hood would not get lost in his anger before we could finish our conversation.
"Undoubtedly. But no more than any of us are in. Don't give them any reason to watch you more closely. And don't assume the Sheriff is indifferent because you don't see him watching you. If I were you, I'd make no more unaccompanied trips into the market."
I felt the walls closing in around me. I had felt trapped when I thought only Guillaume was watching me. Now I had to continue to plan this with no less than three people who might be taking a great interest in my activities.
"Damn." I said softly.
"What?"
"What?"
"Damn?" Had he been any other man, he would have been chuckling. "I don't believe I expected to hear that kind of language from you. Where did you learn it?"
"I did talk to my peasants when I was at home. My hostler Martin was not very concerned with the purity of language." Too late, I realized that I was wasting time joking with him. He was in extreme danger here, for all his apparent ease. I couldn't afford to like him too much. "Can't we talk about something productive? Elizabeth, perhaps?"
"Yes, the next order of business," now I felt the edge of the bed creak as he sat down next to me, but not touching. This is highly improper, Marianne.
"And you said you have a plan, yes? Is that what you've come to tell me?"
"Yes. But what I'm going to tell you now is only the part you will be playing in this, not the complete plan. That way, if you are caught—"
I was outraged, "Do you honestly imagine that I would go to all this trouble to betray you? That I am a…an espionne, a spy, for the Prince?" Had there been an ounce of light in the room, I would have stood up and strode about the room angrily. As it was, I clenched my fists and waited for his answer, resisting the urge to feel where his face was and strike him a blow across the cheek.
"No, I doubt you would do anything of the sort," and he sounded soothing, in his own way, as if he knew how I had just been insulted and was attempting to get me to understand. "But it's very possible that something could go wrong. That's how it is, and if you do get caught, I don't want them to think that they have anything that needs extracting from you."
"Extracting?" I had no idea what he meant.
"Through torture, lady Marian." I sucked in a breath. He was right of course. If he told me no more than what I had to do, then I could anyone honestly that I knew nothing of the rest of the plan. But I could hardly believe that they would resort to torture, especially the torture of a Norman lady.
"Oh. I see."
We sat in silence for a few moments, and I controlled my breathing. You knew this going to be difficult, Marianne. You should stop panicking at every new development. It was easy in theory, but this was the most rebelling I'd ever done in my life, and I was unsure how to go about it. Hood was warning me, it was true, and I did appreciate knowing the danger before dashing headlong into the thick of things, but from the way my heart kept jumping, I thought I would be glad when all of this was over.
That is, if I was still alive when all this was over.
"Lady Marian?"
"You'd better tell me what it is you want from me. You shouldn't be here for too long, it's dangerous for you."
"Indeed," he said again, impassively. Damn this man, I thought in frustration, It would be easier to hold a conversation with a door.
"Or perhaps you prefer it if we sit in the dark and do absolutely nothing while you are surrounded by your enemies?" I said, letting my anger show. I'd had enough of these games that weren't games.
"All right. But I want to make sure you're absolutely certain of your part in this. I don't think I can come here again to explain it to you, yes?"
I rolled my eyes pointlessly. "Yes."
He leaned closer, and, breath lifting the hairs from my neck, he began to speak, spinning his plan into the night.
Robin Hood confused me. He had left an hour after he woke me up, but not before he had made me repeat every detail of the plan back to him three times to be sure I understood it. It wasn't hard. My part in this, though Hood swore it was crucial, was very small. It bothered me that that bothered me. Owing to the fact that I had been near point of panic when Hood spoke of torture, I should have been glad that I was not more instrumental to the plan. But instead, I felt cheated, and foolish for feeling so.
But more than those feelings, Hood absolutely confused me. I had only seen his face once, and it had been a handsome one, to be sure, but nothing worth a third glance, in my opinion. I had never let myself become intrigued by a man before. There had really been no point, after all, as my father would have told me who I could marry and who I could not. Any feelings or desires would have been damaging.
But I felt myself fascinated by Hood. And it worried me. I could not afford to let that happen, for it could easily give me away. As long as I remained impassive, I knew I could manipulate a situation. But I had never had to lie about any particularly strong feelings. Something so far outside my comfort zone scared me.
I had always looked at people objectively, and many times I had seen their flaws more easily than their virtues. I looked at people the way my father looked at people, the way Norman nobility saw the world and its population, entirely based on what they could do for me. I had been taught to be careful, be cautious, to work everything quietly and discreetly to tweak things in my favor. I had been taught to be pious and virtuous. But with a strange man beside me, I had felt neither pious nor virtuous. I had not felt the need to be discreet or cautious.
I'd heard about this feeling before in Mass, and from nurses and whispering maids. It was lust. Hood's closeness to me had stirred something in me that I had never felt before.
Foolish, I thought. You've only seen the man once, met him twice, and you were livid at him for most of that. He may be intelligent, but this is no time to be an idiot.
But I couldn't help it. Hood, and his confidence in me, made me burn with embarrassment and glee. And it wasn't just that, it was the life that he led, that seemed so impossible to me, and yet so tantalizingly close. I wanted that as well.
I flushed with shame. I really would have something to confess to Tuck tomorrow, although it would make him mightily uncomfortable. I wasn't supposed to act like this. It was wrong, I thought, to think of, or imagine, the lines of a man's body, the muscles straining against the skin, the hair curling around his ears, the sharp brilliance of his eyes. It was wrong to think of him in this way, me, an unmarried woman who was devoted to embroidery and prayer.
I was seventeen years old. In two months, I would be eighteen. It was near unthinkable that I was unmarried, and if it went on for much longer, I would find myself settling into this kind of life. Perhaps it was all right, then, if I was never to marry, to think about a man I barely knew this way. Perhaps it was all right to imagine what could have passed between us, had circumstances been different, had the world been different, had we been married. It was the first real flight of imagination I'd had in all my adult life, and it had me clinging my pillow as I drifted off to sleep, terrified that if I let it go, I would feel more alone than ever.
