Romancing Robin Hood Read online

  Daisy knew Grace appreciated that she never advised her to find a bloke, settle down, and live ‘happily ever after,’ and she was equally grateful Grace had never once suggested anything similar to her. Now she had Marcus, however, Daisy had begun to want the same contentment for her friend, and had to bite her tongue whenever they spoke on the phone; something that happened less and less these days.

  Grace emails were getting shorter too. The long paragraphs detailing the woes of teaching students with an ever-decreasing intelligence had blunted down to, ‘You ok? I’m good. Writing sparse. See you soon. Bye G x’

  The book. That in itself was a problem. Grace’s publishers and colleagues, Daisy knew, were expecting an academic tome. A textbook for future medievalists to ponder over in the university libraries of the world. And, in time, that was exactly what they were going to get, but not yet, for Grace had confided to Daisy that this wasn’t the only thing she was working on, and her textbook was coming a poor third place to work and the other book she couldn’t seem to stop herself from writing.

  ‘Why,’ Grace had forcefully expounded on their last meeting, ‘should I slog my guts out writing a book only a handful of bored students and obsessive freaks like myself will ever pick up, let alone read?’

  As a result, Grace was writing a novel, ‘A semi-factual novel,’ she’d said, ‘a story which will tell any student what they need to know about the Folville family and their criminal activities – which bear a tremendous resemblance to the stories of a certain famous literary outlaw! – and hopefully promote interest in the subject for those who aren’t that into history without boring them to death.’

  It sounded like a good idea to Daisy, but she also knew, as Grace did, that it was precisely the sort of book academics frowned upon, and she was worried about Grace’s determination to finish it. Daisy thought it would be more sensible to concentrate on one manuscript at a time, and get the dry epic that everyone was expecting out of the way first. Perhaps it would have been completed by now if Grace could focus on one project at a time, rather than it currently being a year in the preparation without a final result in sight. Daisy suspected Grace’s boss had no idea what she was really up to. After all, she was using the same lifetime of research for both manuscripts. She also had an underlying suspicion that subconsciously Grace didn’t want to finish either the textbook or the novel; that her friend was afraid to finish them. After all, what would she fill her hours with once they were done?

  Daisy’s mobile began to play a tinny version of Nellie the Elephant. She hastily plopped a small black guinea pig, which she’d temporarily called Charcoal, into a run with his numerous friends, and fished her phone from her dungarees pocket.

  ‘Hi, Marcus.’

  ‘Hi, honey, you OK?’

  ‘Just delivering the tribe to their outside quarters, then I’m off to face the horror that is dress shopping.’

  Her future husband laughed, ‘You’ll be fine. You’re just a bit rusty, that’s all.’

  ‘Rusty! I haven’t owned a dress since I went to parties as a small child. Thirty-odd years ago!’

  ‘I don’t understand why you don’t go with Grace at the weekend. It would be easier together wouldn’t it?’

  Daisy sighed, ‘I’d love to go with her, but I’ll never get her away from her work more than once this month, and I’ve yet to arrange a date for her to buy a bridesmaid outfit.’

  ‘Well, good luck, babe. I’m off to rob some bulls of their manhood.’

  Daisy giggled. ‘Have fun. Oh, why did you call by the way?’

  ‘Just wanted to hear your voice, nothing else.’

  ‘Oh, cute – ta!’

  ‘Idiot! Enjoy shopping.’

  As she clicked her battered blue mobile shut and slid it back into her working clothes, Daisy thought of Grace again. Perhaps she should accidentally invite loads of single men to the wedding to tempt her friend with. The trouble was, unless they wore Lincoln Green, and carried a bow and quiver of arrows, Daisy very much doubted whether Grace would even notice they were there.

  Chapter Three

  Mathilda thought she was used to darkness, but the dim candlelight of the comfortable small room she shared at home with her brothers was nothing like this. The sheer density of this darkness seemed to envelop her, physically gliding over Mathilda’s clammy goose-pimpled skin. This was an extreme blackness that coated her, making her breathless, as if it was stealthfully compressing her lungs and squeezing the life from her.

  Unable to see the floor, Mathilda presumed, as she pressed her naked foot against it and damp oozed between her toes, that the suspiciously soft surface she was sat on was moss, which in a room neglected for years had been allowed it to form a cushion on the stone floor. It was a theory backed up by the smell of mould and general filthiness which hung in the air.

  Trying not to think about how long she was going to be left in this windowless cell, Mathilda stretched out her arms and bravely felt for the extent of the walls, hoping she wasn’t about to touch something other than cold stone. The child’s voice that lingered at the back of her mind, even though she was a woman of nineteen, was telling her – screaming at her – that there might be bodies in here, still clapped in irons, abandoned and rotting. Mathilda battled the voice down; knowing it that would do her no good at all. Her father had always congratulated Mathilda on her level headedness, and now it was being put to the test. She was determined not to let him down now.

  Placing the very tips of her fingers against the wall behind her, she felt her way around. It was wet. Trickles of water had found a way in from somewhere, giving the walls the same slimy covering as the floor. Mathilda traced the outline of the rough stone wall, keeping her feet exactly where they were. In seconds her fingers came to a corner, and twisting at the waist, she managed to plot her prison from one side of the heavy wooden door to the other, without doing more than extending the span of her arms.

  Mathilda decided the room could be no more than five feet square, although it must be about six foot tall. Her own five-foot frame had stumbled down a step when she’d been pushed into the cell, and her head was at least a foot clear of the ceiling. The bleak eerie silence was eating away at her determination to be brave, and the cold brought her suppressed fear to the fore. Suddenly the shivering Mathilda had stoically ignored overtook her, and there was nothing she could do but let it invade her small slim body.

  Wrapping her thin arms around her chest, she pulled up her hood, hugged her grey woollen surcoat tighter about her shoulders, and sent an unspoken prayer of thanks up to Our Lady for the fact that her legs were covered.

  She’d been helping her two brothers, Matthew and Oswin, to catch fish in the deeper water beyond the second of Twyford’s fords when the men had come. Mathilda had been wearing an old pair of Matthew’s hose, although no stockings or shoes. She thought of her warm footwear, discarded earlier with such merry abandon. A forgotten, neglected pile on the river bank; thrown haphazardly beneath a tree in her eagerness to get them off and join the boys in their work. It was one of the only tasks their father gave them that could have been considered fun.

  Mathilda closed her eyes, angry as the tears she’d forbidden herself to shed defied her stubborn will and came anyway. With them came weariness. It consumed her, forcing her to sink onto the rotten floor. Water dripped into her long, lank red hair. The tussle of capture had loosened its neatly woven plait, and now it hung awkwardly, half in and half out of its bindings, like a badly strapped sheaf of strawberry corn.

  She tried not to start blaming her father, but it was difficult not to. Why hadn’t he told her he’d borrowed money from the Folvilles? It was an insane thing to do. Only the most desperate … Mathilda stopped her thoughts in their tracks. They were disloyal and pointless.

  They’d been relatively well-off when Mathilda was younger. They’d owned four horses, a few chickens, a cow, and a field for planting their own vegetables and a small amount of wheat. There was also the p
ottery shed and kiln where her father made his tableware and cooking pots, and a little orchard which backed onto the two-roomed house. Slowly, over the past few years, it had almost all been sold off. Only the workhouse, orchard, one horse and cart, and a single strip of the field remained.

  Now she thought about it, Mathilda realised that they had been that desperate; she’d simply been so busy making the best of things that she hadn’t had time to think about it. Since her mother had died four years ago, and the disastrous crop failure a few harvests back, combined with the decline in the demand for locally made pottery as ceramic tableware from Wales, the south, and even France flooded the markets, life had become steadily more difficult. Her father hadn’t been able to compete, and each time he travelled the ten miles to the market at Leicester he seemed to come home more dejected than the time before, and with more and more unsold stock.

  Last time her father had travelled to the city, he’d returned early, a desolate figure, with a cartload of shards behind him. A thief had struck in the market place, and in their unthinking eagerness to apprehend the villain the bailiff’s men had run roughshod through the stalls, toppling her father’s table as they went, leaving him with only broken stock and an increasingly broken faith.

  ‘Our Lady,’ Mathilda muttered in the gloom, her voiced hushed in fear, ‘please deliver me from this place.’ Then, guilty at having asked for something so boldly from someone she’d willingly begun to neglect of late, Mathilda added, ‘I’m sorry, Our Lady, forgive me. I’m frightened, that’s all. Perhaps though, you could look after my brothers and my father.’

  Mathilda wasn’t even sure that any of them were still alive. The Folville family reputation made it more than possible that they’d all been killed.

  As soon as she’d been taken, lifted bodily from the water as if she was as light as air, Mathilda had been bundled into a covered wagon and moved to the manor at Ashby Folville. A large man had sat with her, shoving a filthy rag between her lips to fend off the thousands of questions she had, and tying her hands behind her back.

  The journey, although bumpy and bruising, was no longer than two miles, and soon Mathilda was untied and un-gagged and, having been thoroughly stared at from top to bottom by this impertinent man who seemed to have the ability to see through her clothes to the flesh beneath, was wordlessly bundled below stairs to her current lonely location. Her stomach growled at her, complaining at its emptiness. She felt cross with herself. How could she even consider food when her family was in danger?

  ‘Just as well I don’t want to eat,’ she told herself sternly, ‘as I probably won’t ever see food again.’ Then she collapsed to the ground, the terror and shock of the morning washing over her in a wave of misery.

  Does Mathilda seem miserable and scared enough? Grace wasn’t sure she’d laid the horror of the situation on thick enough. On the other hand, she didn’t want to drown her potential readers in suffering-related adjectives.

  No, on reflection it was fine; certainly good enough to leave and come back to on the next read through. She glanced at the clock at the corner of the computer screen. How the hell had it got to eight thirty already? Grace’s stomach rumbled, making her think of poor Mathilda in her solitary prison.

  Switching off her computer, Grace crammed all her notes into her bag so she could read over them at home, and headed out of her office. Walking down the Queen’s Road, which led from the university to her small home in Leicester’s Clarendon Park region, Grace decided it was way too hot, even at this time of the evening, to stand in the kitchen and attempt, and probably fail, to cook something edible, so she’d grab a takeaway.

  Grateful it wasn’t term time, so she didn’t have to endure the banter of the students who were also waiting for associated plastic boxes of Chinese food, Grace speedily walked home, and without bothering to transfer her chicken chow mein to another dish, grabbed a fork, kicked off her shoes, and settled herself down with her manuscript.

  The hall was foggy from a poorly-set fire, and it took Mathilda a few moments to take in her surroundings. The smoke stung her eyes, and even though the vast space was actually rather dark and dim, she blinked against the light, which was bright compared to the cell.

  Her arms and feet hadn’t been tied, but as a precaution against her potential escape the same surly man who’d deposited her in her prison earlier, dressed in the same dirty hose and capon, stood over her, his unusually tall frame giving off an unpleasant odour of sweat and fish.

  As the fishy aroma assaulted Mathilda’s nostrils, her mind flew to her brothers, and she opened her mouth to speak to the man sat at the table before her. The words never left her mouth though, as he raised his hand in a clear warning for her to remain silent.

  Mathilda stared at him. He was finely dressed in a peacock blue cloak, with a green and brown tunic and matching hose. There was braiding around his collar, but this was not a man of high birth, nor was he the local sheriff or bailiff. His birth status was obviously somewhere in between high nobility and public servant. Mathilda swallowed nervously, and lowered her gaze to the floor in a natural response to before her betters – even if ‘betters’ was entirely the wrong description in this case. This man had to be a Folville. Mathilda began to shake with increased fear as a million possibilities of what might happen to her flew around her head. None of them were pleasant.

  ‘I see you wish to ask questions,’ His voice was husky but soft, and without the harsh edge she’d been expecting, ‘and yet wisely, and with a politeness I certainly appreciate considering the events of the day, you are waiting for permission. You will get your opportunity, but first I will ask you some questions.’

  Mathilda kept her eyes firmly on the dusty floor, concentrating on her cold bare feet.

  ‘What is your name, child, and how old are you?’

  ‘Mathilda of Twyford. I’m nineteen, my Lord.’

  ‘You appear much younger.’ He looked harder into her face for a second before carrying on, ‘Tell me, Mathilda, do you know the stories of Robyn Hode?’

  Surprised by the question, Mathilda’s head snapped up and for a second she found herself gazing directly into her captor’s blue eyes. Is he one of the Folville brothers after all?

  There was a grunt of derision from the man Mathilda had come to think of as her jailer as the possible Folville had asked his question.

  Glaring over Mathilda’s shoulder, straight at her escort, he dismissed him, ‘I’m sure you must have parishioners to lead astray, Brother. I am sure I can attend to this girl alone.’

  The religious brother, the rector of Teigh? Surely the man who’d dragged her here wasn’t a man of the cloth? Mathilda had no time to speculate on this shocking revelation however, for the well-dressed man was repeating his question. ‘Do you know the stories of Robyn Hode, child?’

  ‘Why, yes, I do, my Lord.’

  Catching the gleam in his eyes, Mathilda remembered herself, and hastily lowered her gaze again, frightened of his reaction to her infraction of class rules.

  He seemed more amused than cross at her boldness, and Mathilda was sure she’d heard suppressed laughter in his voice as he continued, ‘Well, Mathilda, can you tell me what Hode does?’

  ‘He takes from rich people, sir, and helps those who he decides deserve it.’

  ‘Very good. That’s almost right. Although, if you listen to the balladeers carefully next time they are at the fair, you’ll notice that he takes from those who are cruel or greedy; they weren’t necessarily rich.’ The man stood and came closer to the girl. She was filthy from the cell, and her shoulders shook, but he reflected, possibly more with hunger and thirst than straightforward fear. Remarkable in one so young; especially a female. ‘You enjoy the stories?’

  ‘Yes my Lord, my mother used to sing them, and I’ve heard them at the fair.’

  ‘I like them too. I particularly like the bit when Robyn Hode takes a tax from those passing through Barnsdale, and how he punishes those who fail to discharge
their debts.’

  Bile rose in Mathilda’s throat; so all this was about money. She wondered how much her father owed this man.

  ‘Do you believe everyone should pay their debts, child?’

  She tried to say ‘Yes, my Lord,’ but the words died in her throat as Mathilda imagined her father thrown into a cell like the one she’d occupied, and her brothers, dead or hurt. The horrific pictures rapidly growing within her mind suddenly swam together in an incoherent blur, and her legs began to buckle …

  Grace closed the notebook as she shovelled the final forkful of noodles into her mouth, reluctantly putting her novel notes away and turning her laptop on. She’d put off checking her emails all day, and knew that if she left them until tomorrow the messages that had already started to queue for her attention would have reached insurmountable proportions.

  Scanning the list of forty-eight messages waiting in her inbox, she happily deleted twenty-one of them, all of which extolled the virtues of breast enlargements (Grace’s Rubenesque size 16 figure would never need them), and penile extensions (for heaven’s sake!). Then Grace skipped her eyes through the emails from her students, begging for deadline extensions for essays and projects that should have been handed in weeks before the summer break, along with their general gripes, groans, worries, and excuses.

  Next she opened one from Professor Davis, who informed her he’d passed on her details to Dr Franks at Nottingham. Then she’d had an email from Franks himself.

  Dear Dr Harper,

  Many thanks for agreeing to step in ‘cavalry-like’ as the external examiner for my student – especially at such short notice.