Page 41 of An Earl for the Archeress

“Apparently you do not,” she said, ignoring him.

“When he’s angered, he’s a right cruel bastard,” Will said. “Otherwise, no. The obnoxious jesting comes part and parcel with his annoyingly affable personality.”

Mariel sighed, resigning herself to travel along and watch what unfolded. It was clear he had a plot up his sleeve and was determined to keep her guessing. They veered northward on the main trail, heading toward Nottingham Castle in Lincolnshire. Robert passed around cheese and dried meat, and they ate in silence, listening to forest critters and birds begin to fill the air with scuttling and song. Hours passed, until the sky was bright with morning sun blinking through the tree canopy, low on the horizon.

Robert finally eased his horse off the path, into a thick patch of brambles. The horses negotiated the way slowly, carefully. The tree trunks were dense, and more than once Mariel felt her knees scrape against bark. At long last, they arrived at a natural clearing. The ground was covered in thick underbrush. Fallen trees were soft and decayed with moss and fungi consuming them. Robert dismounted, as did the others. Mariel took their lead and followed suit, landing upon the spongey ground.

“We’ll leave the horses here,” Robert said.

“You would boar hunt without your mount?” Mariel smirked, crossing her arms with satisfaction. “And don’t talk in circles around me. I know we search for William de Wendenal.”

Robert cracked another smile. “Am I to suspect that you actually believed we came hunting?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, giving him the eye roll he seemed to want.

The men chuckled.

“Elmer,” Robert said, the mood sobering. “You’re inexperienced at what we plan to do. And so, I want you to stand aside from the main action. I want to see how you react and instead, be a marksman for me.”

“I don’t wish to shoot anyone,” she said.

“And you won’t. We don’t aim to injure anything but William de Wendenal’s pride. I know he is en route to Nottingham, and when a complaint arrived at my gates last night, it was a prime opportunity to ambush him, one I couldn’t pass up.”

“How would you know?”

Robert looked at the others, a knowing look that indicated they had already been briefed. “Last night, as I readied for bed, Jonathan alerted me to a couple of beggars at the main gates. ’Twas a man seeking refuge for his wife who’s with child. He stated that Nottingham had happened upon his cottage yesterday evening and demanded quartering. He and his wife were relegated out of doors to their cowshed so that Nottingham and his party could sleep within. They were on a return journey to Nottingham Castle to meet with an important lord, I assume, the Sheriff of Ayr, who just departed northward yesterday morn. But when he went back to his cottage to beg some food for his wife, Nottingham’s men had already depleted a sennight’s worth of meat and watered ale, and demanded that he bring his woman to them for entertainment instead.”

Mariel inhaled as Robert’s face turned to chiseled stone. “A woman with child? A married woman?” Her eyes widened. What a horror.

Robert nodded once. “They fled instead, and the man feels certain they weren’t followed, for they said Nottingham was already in his cups, thanks to the flask at his hip. They’ll be rousing now and readying to depart, if they haven’t done so already.”

“Why did the peasants think to come to you for aid?”

Robert’s jaw was pumping just speaking of them. “These are my forests, not Nottingham’s, and those who live here swear fealty to me as their lord. They know my benevolence and know I would never turn them out to fend off the wild animals roaming the trees, if they come to me for help. Unfortunately, I have no authority to tell King Richard’s sheriff to vacate my land. But these are my people he has wronged. And if they can no longer feel safe in their home because of our good sheriff, William de Wendenal will answer for it.”

“To think, she walked all the way to your castle yestereve carrying a bairn, no less,” Mariel said, looking down. “What sort of man does that to a woman, no matter her station?” My faither would.

Robert lifted her chin with his fingertip and looked into her eyes. The humor ever-present on his face was replaced with steel. “It pleases me to see you so impassioned, Elmer. Come. I’ll show you where to stand and what to do.”

…

The men bundled their cloaks to their saddle packs and left their horses in the clearing. Robert led the way onto an overgrown deer path, back into the inky thickness of the towering trees. He continued to glance back. His men were light of foot on the twigs and underbrush, and more than once he couldn’t sense Mariel’s added presence. She was always there.

He shook his head. Like a phantom indeed. When he had met with the peasant and his wife the night before, his blood had boiled. He should be used to the desperate folk and their desperate stories by now. They shouldn’t affect him as deeply anymore. But they always caught him off guard. As if it wasn’t already selfish enough for the sheriff to evict them from their home for the night and consume all their food, even if it was his right to expect quartering when he needed it, it was another level of depravity entirely for the sheriff to demand a husband hand over his pregnant wife for his and his men’s pleasure.

He had noticed the shock on Mariel’s face when he’d told her. Good. So often, men and women were numb to the ways of the world. But Mariel was visibly distressed by it.

At long last, he held up a hand to halt.

“The cottage is just over yonder, over this incline,” he whispered.

“They’re still here,” Will said. “I can smell the fire smoke.”

John was already creeping to a tree growing out of an outcropping of rock covered in soft green lichen. He pulled up a mesh woven from twigs and leaves. Mariel’s eyes widened just as they had when Robert had motioned her to hide beneath a similar one. John pulled out hoods of dark green and tossed them to each man, then looked to Mariel and tossed her one as well. She snagged it out of the air.

“Your hair will show,” Robert said, lifting Mariel’s messy braid from being roused awake. “Can you fix it?”

“I should simply cut it,” Mariel said.