RODGER PONDERS LIFE'S MYSTERIES

Complicated. That's what life was, and the older one got, the more complicated life became.

Rodger of Gisborne had learned a new word. It seemed to fit so many things. No wonder the grown-ups used that word so much.

He stood inside the shelter of Gisborne Hall's snug stable, and brushed his pony's shedding winter coat until the hair flew in clouds around him. Huge flakes of snow swirled outside the barn doors, covering the muddy ground with a pristine blanket of white. It was early spring. Rodger had planned an afternoon ride across Locksley's fields. Months of heavy snowfall had kept him penned inside the house for far too long. After several promising days of warm weather and puddles, it was suddenly snowing again. He sighed and turned back to the task at hand. No ride today, just a thorough grooming.

"How you treat your horse while on the ground is just as important as what you do when you're riding him," Reggie had taught him. "Don't just ride him. Spend time with him. Muck out his stall, brush him down. Talk to him. He'll learn the sound of your voice, and learn to trust you."

Starlight was his new mount. His brother had inherited round-bellied, short-legged Prancer, contentedly munching hay in the next stall.

"A black one," he had asked Father, when it became obvious that he was rapidly outgrowing Prancer. "A shiny black pony, with a white star on his forehead. I'll call him Starlight."

Glorious dreams of this coveted new pony had filled his thoughts night and day for weeks, months, but the dream had come to a crashing end when he was punished for disobeying his father by meddling with his sword and breaking his mother's vases. The next day his father had packed him off to the orphanage, over the protestations of his mother, to spend a week with Little John.

"You need to learn some appreciation for what you have," came the reprimand, "and stop grasping for things you can't have."

Father was always saying things like that, and sometimes his lectures made sense, after he'd had time to mull them over.

The orphans ate their simple meals from communal wooden bowls, and slept three and four to a bed. In spacious Gisborne Hall, he didn't even have to share a room, let alone a bed, with his younger brother. He had a room all to himself. It did not take him long to realize how good he had it at home. The lesson was learned. Dreadfully homesick, and with eyes newly opened and a heart filled with shame and disappointment with himself, he had returned to his parents.

Father had taken him out to the stable almost as soon as he got there. To his shock, instead of more punishment, a new pony waited for him.

Complicated. Perhaps that word applied to his father as well.

Starlight was everything he'd dreamed of. Father said he was half-Arabian, like the high-spirited and tough and swift little desert horses the Saracens rode. It showed in the pony's wide-set, intelligent eyes, his small ears and delicate muzzle, his light, springing step and proud bearing.

Now if he could just have a falcon, a trained falcon that would perch on his gauntleted arm as he rode his beautiful pony through Locksley. No, through Nottingham, then more people could see. But when he had asked Father, his father had only smiled and shook his head no.

"A hunting falcon is not a toy, Rodger."

He knew that! Why did Father say such things? Sometimes the things he said made no sense!

"Why, Mother?"

"You're too young, Rodger. You'll understand when you're older."

That was always the answer to his questions, it seemed. When he walked into a room, and the conversations ceased when he asked what they were talking about, the answer was always some variation on "it's complicated", followed by "you'll understand when you're older."

When you're older. How much older? There was so much that he wanted to understand now! For instance, why had he always called Robin his uncle, and Marian his aunt, when Father was not actually Robin's brother? This revelation, still new, had stunned him. His father and Robin looked nothing alike, so he supposed he should have guessed, but Eleanor's parents had always been Uncle and Aunt to him.

And Uncle Archer, who traveled from London, and other faraway places that Rodger longed to visit, was actually Father's brother, and Uncle Robin's brother. But how could that be? Robin's father and his father's mother hadn't been married to each other, so how could they have Archer? Complicated, and something he soon learned little boys weren't encouraged to inquire too deeply about.

He had a younger brother, Richard, who was five, and now he had a baby sister, too, Ghislaine, who was named after their long-dead grandmother. She wasn't very interesting. All she did was sleep and cry and make nasty smells, and he could never understand why Richard was so taken with her, why he wanted to hold her and sing to her and play with her by the hour.

"Be good to your sister, Rodger," Father said. "Don't ever take her for granted, or be unkind to her. You may never have another."

Father had once had a sister, Isabella. Aunt Isabella, he supposed. She was another mystery. She was dead, and no one spoke much about her. Father would not say how she died, only that it was long ago, before he and Mother married. His aunt's grave, her simple stone cross, was on the hillside overlooking the village, beside the graves of his grandmother Ghislaine and grandfather Rodger, for whom he was named. His grandparents, he knew, had died long ago in a fire when his father was young.

And Uncle Robin's parents were dead, too. He'd heard that Robin's father wasn't actually dead for twenty years, but showed up alive, and then he died for real. Very strange. And he had something to do with Father and Uncle Robin's friendship.

Father and Uncle Robin had been the best of friends for as long as he could remember, but he'd learned, to his astonishment, that it hadn't always been that way. One night he'd overheard Reggie and a few of the other stable hands and workers, talking about Father and Robin and Aunt Marian. Father had once loved Marian, they said, and he and Robin had fought over her, and hated and tried to kill each other.

Kill each other? Impossible! And fighting over Aunt Marian? But Father loved Mother, didn't he? Hadn't he always loved Mother? And he would never hurt Uncle Robin. They fought with swords, but it was all in fun. They bruised each other once in a while, but never more than that, and never on purpose.

And what had Father done, and who was this "devil of a Sheriff" his father had worked for? Surely not Sir William, who had been Sheriff of Nottingham for many years. He was no devil. Everyone loved him. He was a kind man and generous to the poor.

Was something that Father did, in his past, the reason why some people didn't like him? When the family went to Nottingham, more than a few people made a wide path around Father when they saw him coming. They would glance sidelong at him with anxious, unfriendly, even hostile faces. He'd seen that, and it hurt.

Why did people not like Father? Did he scare people for some reason? True, Father was tall, and very strong, and almost always he dressed in black, and he didn't smile or laugh much except at home.

When he thought about it, it was true. Father didn't smile much, except when he looked at Mother, and he seldom laughed. When he did, he looked so different he hardly seemed like the same person.

Father had laughed last night, and Rodger was still trying to figure out exactly why.

Mother had let him crawl into bed beside her and Father once, when he woke up from a nightmare too frightened to go back to sleep alone in his room.

"You come in whenever you're scared, Rodger, and we'll be here for you, darling," Mother had whispered to him as he drifted off to sleep, securely nestled between them in their wide bed.

Well, another nightmare had awakened him during the night, and he'd run from his bed and into the hallway. Opening his parent's bedroom door, he'd been surprised at first to see a candle lit on the bedside table, but even more surprised to see that his parents were not asleep. No, but in a strange position under the thick covers. Father was lying on top of Mother, and her bare arms were around his equally bare shoulders.

He'd had only a second to stand, blinking in the candlelight, and wonder what it meant, before Father had leapt from under the bedcovers with a yell, grabbed his arm, and propelled him from their bedroom. He'd pushed him back into his own room and slammed the door behind him.

Only in hindsight did he realize that his father had been, in fact, completely naked. Did he always sleep naked? And Mother? He couldn't remember them being naked when he'd slept in their bed before. It was an odd idea, funny, yes, quite funny. He might have laughed if Father hadn't been so furious, muttering words under his breath that he was sure Mother had told him never to say.

After a moment he had gone to his door and opened it slightly, only to hear his parent's muffled laughter from the other side of the hallway.

Why was Father so angry one minute, and laughing the next? He wished he knew. Another mystery, and a complicated one.

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Prancer, finished with his hay, nickered at him from the next stall. Rodger laid down the brush and went to the little dappled grey pony, who bumped his head against Rodger's chest and nuzzled his hands in the familiar way he'd always done when he was looking for a treat. Rodger felt his heart swell with a strange pang he had never felt before.

Betrayal is the worse crime a man can commit, he'd heard his father say. Betrayal.

"What does betrayal mean?" he'd asked Allan a Dale.

Allan had looked at him rather oddly for some reason, almost as if he were embarrassed, and for a moment Rodger wondered if he'd said one of those bad words that Father sometimes used when he thought Mother couldn't hear him.

"It means to turn your back on your friends."

He smoothed Prancer's thick white forelock of hair out of his eyes, the eyes that were now sunken with age. Were those words meant for him? He hadn't paid the elderly pony much attention since he'd gotten his new one. Starlight was everything that plodding old Prancer wasn't. He was young and beautiful and graceful, and he ran swifter than the wind.

But Prancer had been more than a mount for him since the day Reggie had first settled him on the little pony's broad back. He'd been a friend, too. A warm, comforting friend, who hadn't minded Rodger's early, clumsy attempts at horsemanship—the needless tugs on his bridle, the too hard kicks in his ribs. The gentle old pony had never once trod on his toes, or failed to stop and wait for him to climb back on when he fell off. He'd patiently endured the hot tears down his neck when Rodger, crushed by Father's anger or Eleanor's teasing, buried his face in Prancer's mane and cried until he could cry no more.

He'd loved Prancer, but this new pony had taken his place and now occupied all his time. Did Prancer understand, or did he see it as a betrayal every time he rode out of the stable on Starlight? Would every move forward from now on, every new thing gained, mean a painful letting go of something else, the sacrifice of someone once loved?

As Prancer continued to search his hands and then his pockets, he put his arms around the pony's neck, and hugged him hard.

"I'm sorry, Prancer. I'm sorry I haven't paid attention to you. I will from now on, I promise."

He pulled the carrot, which he had brought for Starlight, from his pocket, and watched with a tender smile as Prancer crunched it down. But his eyes were troubled, and his heart ached with this new sadness and the bitter chill of loss.