Lady of Sherwood Read online

  Jemma might have been closer, but Marcus reached her first. He pulled her against his chest. She wrapped her arms around him and clung with all her strength, sobbing silently into his collarbone at the open vee of his shirt.

  “What’s this then?” he murmured. “What’s this about?”

  “Lady Sabine has found another suitor for her daughter,” Jemma answered quietly. “A Sir Guy of Gisborne.”

  “I don’t want him,” Robin said, her words muffled against him. “I don’t love him.”

  Marcus ran a hand over her strong shoulders. “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to marry him.” She leaned back and allowed Marcus to sweep his thumbs across her cheekbones. “I love you. I’ve loved you since we were children.”

  “I know.”

  “All of Lockesly knows,” Jemma added. “It’s as sweet a love story ever told. If you enjoy love stories, that is.”

  Robin giggled, going easily when Marcus tugged lightly on her hand. He settled back in his chair, and she arranged herself in his lap, legs draped sideways over his own. Jemma chased the cat off the only other seat in the cottage. She sat across from them with a wide smile.

  “It still doesn’t look as comfortable as it did when we were younger,” she added at Robin’s inquisitive look.

  “That’s because we both weren’t supposed to grow like weeds,” Marcus said.

  “I can’t help it Papa was tall.” Robin settled further into his warmth. He gave off a lovely amount of heat for such a lean and lanky body.

  “He was. He was a good man, too.” Jemma played with a curled bit of wood shaving. “Like your da was, Marcus.”

  “Aye, he tried.” He hooked his chin over Robin’s shoulder. “He tried to do right by me.”

  “Can’t help the place we’re born into in this world,” Jemma said gently, eyes flicking between the pair of them. “All we can do is make the best of it.”

  Robin scrubbed at the side of her nose with a sigh. “I know.”

  Marcus straightened abruptly. He would have risen except for the ungainly squawk Robin let out at being unexpectedly jostled. “Speaking of best… Stand for a moment, love. I’ve got something for you. You, too,” he added with a nod to Jemma as Robin let him up. “If you want to see it.”

  “The carvings on my quarterstaff?” She brightened considerably.

  “If you want to see them. They’re about halfway done.” He rooted through his rucksack for a moment, and then stood tall again when he had something clenched in his fist. “Now. I’m a grown man—a tradesman—and I’ll spend my earnings on whatever catches my fancy.”

  “Marcus,” Robin whispered as her cheeks warmed.

  “I can’t get you a ring yet.” Marcus took one of her hands in his and turned it palm up. His thumb rubbed soothingly across her calluses and scars. “But I saw this and thought of you. I wanted to give you something to remind you of what we’ve shared for years.” He dropped whatever it was secretively into her hand and curled her fingers around it. “What we’ll share for many more to come.”

  Robin barely breathed as she uncovered her gift. It was a silver locket on a chain, the front tastefully engraved with a pattern of leaves. She ran her fingertips over it, and then unclasped it. Inside was a small lock of dark hair.

  “I love you, Robin of Lockesly,” he murmured. “And I always will.”

  “Will—will you?” She held up the locket, turning her back after he took it.

  Marcus put it on her and ghosted a kiss over the knob at the top of her spine. She tucked it beneath her dress so it would lay against her skin, over her heart.

  “Marcus? I’d like to wait until you’re done with all of them,” Jemma said after a moment.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes,” Robin said, smiling at her two greatest friends standing together. “She doesn’t like all her endings spoiled, even if she does like a good surprise.”

  “It’s time we took our leave, too.”

  “It’s fine,” Marcus said, coming back across the cottage to her. “You’ll come back tomorrow?”

  “If we can.” Jemma evidently refused to wilt under the combined efforts of Robin’s pout and Marcus’s boyish hopefulness. “But we can’t unless we get back now.”

  Robin huffed. “All right.” She smiled sweetly as Marcus kissed her forehead.

  “Quiet feet and long shadows, loves,” he said, seeing them to the door.

  They slipped away into the night as easily as they’d appeared out of it to begin with.

  If Robin had thought Sir Guy of Gisborne’s visit was a singular event, she was sorely mistaken. He returned dutifully day after day. Even when she surmised he would attend Sunday worship at his own church, he appeared at the manor gate to escort her to Lockesly’s small, sturdy house of God. She did, however, refuse to allow him to touch her beyond what was expected of a gentleman.

  She kept a firm hold on her tongue and her temper. The effort such an act required wasn’t unnoticed by a majority of the household.

  “Peace, Robin,” Jemma murmured as she wove pieces of Robin’s hair into yet another intricate braid.

  “He’s not leaving.” She worried her robe at the knees with one hand and clutched her locket in the other. “He’s not leaving. What if…” She trailed off, turning in her chair enough to look up at Jemma’s face. “I don’t love him.”

  “I know you don’t. We all know you don’t.” Jemma’s strong hands cradled her face with such tenderness that it made Robin want to weep. “That lanky little boy from our childhood grew up into a beautiful young man who knew enough to hang onto the love he had for his best friend through the years. Everyone in Lockesly knows the only one who has ever caught your heart was Marcus. Straight and true as your arrow flies, so is your love for that boy.”

  Robin buried her face in Jemma’s belly with a sob. “She’s going to make me marry him. It’s the only reason he’s still here.”

  “Shhh, lovey,” she whispered, stroking her fingers through Robin’s hair. “We’ll get through this. We always do.”

  ***

  Much later, after most of the manor had retired for the evening and the guests were herded either to the door or to their loaned chambers, Sabine sent one of her personal servants to fetch her daughter.

  “Alone,” Sabine’s maid corrected when Robin reached for Jemma’s hand.

  “O-of course.” Robin smoothed nonexistent wrinkles from the front of her gown.

  “I’ll have your bed ready for your return,” Jemma said smoothly.

  Robin turned away and padded barefoot down the hallway. The door was slightly ajar, and she pushed it open.

  “Come here, Rhiannon.” Sabine beckoned from where she sat regally on her bed.

  Robin shuffled toward her mother, flinching as the maid shut the door with a resounding thump.

  “Look at you,” Sabine said quietly. She rose to her feet, and cupped her daughter’s cheek. “You’re so pretty. So strong.” She smiled gently. “So much stronger than I was at your age.”

  Her belly flipped uncomfortably. “Mother?”

  “Sir Guy is… different,” Sabine continued. “Certainly different from the village boys, but I think you’ll learn to grow fond of him, at the very least.”

  Robin sucked in a hard breath and shoved it out just as harshly in an effort to remind herself to continue breathing. Her mother seemed oblivious to her discomfort.

  Sabine rested a hand against the stone wall and looked around the room. “Our parents want us to do better than they did, and as a parent, there’s nothing I want more than for my daughter to do better than I have. Which is why I think marriage to Sir Guy is a good match for a mere maid of Lockesly.”

  Uneasy quiet descended until Robin loosened her tongue from the roof of her mouth to croak, “Marriage?”

  “Of course. Why else did you think such a man as Sir Guy had taken an interest in us?” Sabine crossed to her daughter and took Robin’s shaking hands in her own. �
�It will be difficult at first, but you’ll take to being a wife. A mother, too, I would imagine.” She smiled widely. “We’ve planned a summer wedding.”

  Robin slid her fingers free. “Planned? You’ve planned my wedding?”

  “It’s been arranged for months now.” She pushed a strand of Robin’s hair away from her face. “He fell in love with you through your letters.”

  Once, when she was much younger, Robin had fallen out of a tree near the edge of the field she did her archery practice in. It was unexpected. When the branch had broken beneath her weight, she’d felt as though the bottom had dropped out of the world. Landing hadn’t been much better, lying there on her back and looking at the cloudless blue sky while her lungs struggled to remember how to work.

  She felt much the same way now, mouth hanging open as she stared at her mother in disbelief. “I never—I never wrote any such letters.”

  “Of course not. I needed you to be a proper lady, not one who could potentially embarrass her future husband on an archery field.”

  “You’ve arranged my marriage,” Robin said in a voice she didn’t recognize as hers. “You—why—I don’t love him!” It was the only thing she could think to say.

  Sabine rubbed her thumb across Robin’s cheekbone. “Love isn’t a requirement for marriage.”

  She jerked away, putting a few feet of space between the two of them. “But you loved Papa, and he loved you. He told me so all the time. He’d loved you since he was old enough to know what it felt like.”

  “And look where it got me,” her mother snapped, straightening her shoulders and drawing herself up to her full height. Sabine didn’t have maybe an inch or two over Robin, but she used it to her advantage. “Marrying for love.” She snorted. “A manor in constant need of repair, the bare bones number of servants required for such a house, and farm fields that aren’t worth the dirt that’s in them. That’s what I got when I married for love, and when Robert died, I swore to myself I wouldn’t see my only child, my daughter, fall into the same trap I did.”

  Silence, thick and heady, fell once more as Robin gathered her scattered wits. Her eyes narrowed, and she spat, “A trap? Papa’s love for you was a trap?” She tapped her chest. “What am I to you, then? An inconvenience? A chess piece? God knows I have never been the daughter you thought you should have, but at least I thought I would make you proud in some way.”

  “You yet may.” Sabine threaded her fingers together. “Your wedding to Sir Guy is set for your birthday. That is how you will be the daughter I deserve.”

  Robin clenched her fists at her side, vibrating from head to foot with both nerves and anger. “If I refuse? If I stand before God and deny him at the altar as my husband?”

  Sabine shrugged, the delicate lift of her shoulder at odds with her cold words. “Then Jemma goes to the auction block. You’ve no power to free her as you are now, and I can guarantee, before God Himself, should you defy my wishes and make a mockery of both me and Sir Guy in front of the village, she’ll be sold to the highest bidder, and I’ll not care what she’ll be bought for.”

  Incensed, Robin held her voice low and steady through sheer force of will when all she wanted to do was scream. “She is a person. She is a woman, just like you and me. She is not a—a thing to be sold at market.”

  “She is a servant, Rhiannon,” Sabine said. “She is below you in every way, and she is my property to do with as I please. She is the abandoned child of a slave woman, and that is all she will ever be. If she is very, very lucky, she will live to grow old.”

  Robin looked at the cold stones beneath her bare feet, swallowing repeatedly. After she’d blinked back tears and cleared as much of the thickness from her throat as possible, she lifted her chin and stared at her mother. “Why are you doing this to us?”

  Sabine lowered herself slowly, almost carefully, onto the side of her bed. “Other than I am your mother and I care for you deeply?” She sighed, and patted the quilt next to her, a silent invitation.

  Toes curled, Robin stayed rigidly where she stood.

  Color flooded Sabine’s cheeks. “It is past time for you to grow up and leave this ridiculous obsession with boys’ things behind. You are a young lady, and you will begin to act like it. That includes making a prosperous marriage, one which I have arranged for you, as I should have done years ago.” Her chest heaved, and she visibly reined herself in. “You are not an archer, Rhiannon. You are a lady, and by God, you will begin to act it. Starting with this.”

  Uneasy silence descended. Robin gripped the skirt of her gown with white knuckles. Doing something she’d never done before, she bowed to the Lady of Lockesly.

  “As you wish, my lady,” Robin said quietly, but steadily. “I am, after all, your humble servant.” She glanced at her mother’s stricken expression, turned on her heel, and walked from the room.

  ***

  Once she was sure the door to her mother’s chamber was securely shut, Robin sprinted down the hallway to her own room. She barreled through the heavy oak door, badly startling Jemma from where she stood by the washbasin.

  “Robin?”

  Her breath wouldn’t come. There was air enough in the room, but it felt as though she wasn’t getting any in her chest. She placed a shaky hand over her breastbone, looking with wide-eyed horror at Jemma.

  “Robin?” Jemma took a hesitant step toward her.

  Robin gaped, still struggling to breathe. Her knees gave out, dumping her on the floor. She wrapped her arms around her midsection, shoulders curled inward, and sobbed so hard she nearly gagged.

  “Please—Robin, you’re scaring me!” She crossed the room in a matter of moments and dropped to her knees beside the other girl. “Robin?”

  It took several long minutes for Robin to regain some manner of her composure. Her face was red and blotchy, cheeks streaked with tears as she stared wild-eyed at Jemma.

  “Robin?”

  She swallowed and scrubbed at her face. “I have to see Marcus. Right now.” She scrambled to her feet and began pulling clothes from her wardrobe. “I—we have to—we have to leave.” We. You and me and Marcus.

  “What is going on?” Jemma demanded. “You stop—stop, damn it, and tell me what is going on.”

  With a pair of woolen hose in one hand and a tunic in the other, Robin froze. She took a deep breath, and softly said, as though the words would shatter her, “I am to marry Sir Guy of Gisborne. On my birthday.” She forced herself to look Jemma in the eye, adding, “If I don’t, then she’ll sell you to the highest bidder, regardless of what they would want you for.”

  Jemma stiffened. “Well… then.”

  Robin sat heavily on her bed. When Jemma settled next to her, she leaned on her solid shoulder with a sniff. “What do we do, Jemma?”

  “We think.” She threaded her fingers soothingly through Robin’s hair. “We are a pair of intelligent ladies—though you read much better than I do—and we will find a solution to our problem. Ugly and unsettling as it is.”

  Robin took a steadying breath and sat up. She dried the lingering tears from her eyes, set her shoulders, and looked as though she were staring down the shaft of a drawn arrow at her practice target in the field. “She’ll never let us run. Neither will Gisborne.”

  “They’ll put a watch on you. Or put you under house arrest,” Jemma agreed.

  “A lady,” Robin murmured. “One who would be polite, respectful, and above all, chaste.” She stood, now wringing the tunic between both hands. “A man expects his woman to come to their wedding with her virtue intact. I cannot disgrace either my mother or Gisborne—she has said it herself—without consequence to you.” She smiled slowly, eyes gleaming with newfound hope. “But no one has mentioned what would become of the situation when faced with my own disgrace.”

  Jemma gaped. “You would do such a thing?”

  Robin fished her locket from beneath her dress and held it tightly in her fingers. “I love him, Jemma. I have loved him for years, and I long ag
o gave him my heart. If he has that, why should he not also have my body?”

  “You cannot take this back,” Jemma said. “Once you give him that part of you, you cannot take it back. Are you sure you wish to do this?”

  “I am sure.” Robin turned to her wardrobe again, searching for something suitable to wear. “And if they are desperate enough for this union despite my disgrace, then I will have at least given this part of myself to Marcus before Gisborne can take it from me by force.”

  Jemma stood. “Then let’s get you ready.”

  ***

  Marcus put down his knife and stretched the kinks from his back. Jemma’s quarterstaff lay on his table, and he ran his thumb over the finished carving. Vines and leaves twined around each other the length of the staff, except for a span in the middle where Jemma would grip it. He’d never met someone who could wield such a weapon like she, and he knew she’d fought hard to have such knowledge, secret though it was.

  A latch turned. He stood slowly, fingers curled around the handle of his knife. He relaxed when a familiar shadow slipped into the cottage, the door shutting securely behind her.

  “It’s past midnight, Robin,” he said. He packed away his woodcarving tools while she hung up her cloak, an odd accessory for such warm weather. When he looked up again, his mouth fell open.

  Robin stood on the other side of the table in nothing but her small clothes and chemise, hair lightly pinned at the base of her neck and already coming loose around her face.

  “I’ve three things to tell you,” she said softly. “First is that I love you, with all of my heart.” She reached up and let her hair fall in a cascade down her back. The pin made a soft but audible plink when she set it on the table. “The second is my mother has arranged my marriage to Sir Guy of Gisborne. If I fail to follow through with the wedding, then she’ll sell Jemma like common chattel.” She moved slowly with silent steps. He noted she was barefoot when she came to stand in front of him. “Thirdly, I’ve no love for Guy of Gisborne. Not as a potential husband, nor even as one of God’s creatures.”