9

The royal Marshal Roland Montfort was happy.

He was not in this humor often, and he knew the sentiment was always fleeting. But an attractive woman sometimes made him feel this way.

“I told you I had something to show you,” she said when she and Roland were safely off into the forest.

Her name was Emma, and she was a freedman’s daughter—her family made charcoal for the smiths and royal chamberlains of New Forest. Her hair was tied up just so and her homespun mended and her goatskin boots newly sewn with yellow thread, all more than enough to make her look like a morsel in the eyes of the royal marshal. Her fingernails were enduringly grimed with hardwood soot, but Roland thought her a beauty, and he had an eye for women.

She kept her hand in his, leading him onward. She had reported that she had seen something, and so she had, far out in the woods during the long summer twilight.

It was a hare caught in the nearly invisible loop of a poacher’s snare. The long-eared creature struggled in the lingering light, kicking hard enough to break his neck if he kept struggling, nearly a man’s height off the ground, plunging away in terror as the two human beings approached.

“You said you wanted me to watch and listen,” said Emma. She spoke the Norman tongue, but her New Forest accent made the familiar words sound like a new language. “For signs of poaching,” she added. “And for other things, as well.”

Roland watched as a pair of wings felt the seam of air just above the greenwood, a night bird on its first hunt of the early twilight. Roland did not envy the predator, required to kill to stifle hunger. What lord prince of the forest, Roland wondered, did the white-feathered owl serve? Nagged by his conscience, Roland had been unable to shake free of the memory of the dying poacher.

It was a joyless recollection indeed. Roland believed that God allowed a lawman to kill a wide number of criminals in the pursuit of his duty, but that Heaven’s Lord grew displeased if the number became too great.

The Montfort family was a long line of careful men—chandlers to lords and kings, chamberlains and advisers of judgment. Roland’s background contrasted starkly with the vainglorious Tirel clan, men who would chop off a head with more facility than they could use the one God had given them. Roland would do anything to embarrass and deplete the Tirel family—and to keep their kind far from the king.

Emma kept her hand in Roland’s and gave a sound like a purr, resting her head against his shoulder. The English criminal was a fearless wight, Roland would grant him that. It took nerve to set a snare so close to the king’s lodge. This was an old snare, set days ago, the hare half dead from terror and starvation. The animal was bleeding between the ears where an owl had injured him moments before. How the long-eared creature had survived so long without becoming some owl’s or raven’s dinner was testimony to his good luck. Roland used a hunting dagger to saw at the sinew of the trap.

When the hare was released he fell to the ground. Roland had to laugh. The creature believed he was dead! The animal lay, convinced that this muted, forest dusk was the color of eternity. The marshal clapped his hands once, and the jack hare was off, bounding crazily, pausing midair, and then vanishing, only to reappear far off, frozen in flight.

“He’ll tell all the other hares,” said Emma with a laugh, “what an adventure he’s had.”

“Is that what you English believe?” asked Roland.

“Believe about what?”

“Do you think that woodland animals speak to each other?” His question was serious—he had no idea what the English thought about anything, aside from always overestimating the power of their own flesh to withstand the ax.

“He’s going to tell his hare bride how kind the royal marshal is,” she said, “how handsomely he smiles, and how his eyes sparkle.”

This was rank flirtation, purest flattery, but Roland did not mind.

“Why aren’t the local yeomen,” asked Roland, “as pleasant as their women?”

“There are women enough,” said Emma, “who would lie with you just to stick a knife between your ribs.”

If Roland had a characteristic that won him any affection, it was that women—smart, quick-eyed women—sometimes found him agreeable company. But the love life of the royal court was complicated, and it was difficult to woo, seduce, and take pleasure in a creature like Emma under the king’s roof.

The royal court on procession from one hunting lodge to another across the woodlands of England was a festival of drunkenness and feasting. Once it arrived at a hunting lodge, it filled the location with wine-loving, dice-playing clerks and pitcher bearers, dispensers of the larder and masters of one office or another. The king’s retinue included dressers to arrange the royal clothing, scribes to write up his instructions, and even a dwarf named Frocin who recited ballads and amused the king and his companions with witless hilarity.

“I heard the miller say that you ate a human heart once,” Emma was saying, “in Ely Green. Cut the pulsing organ right out of a rebel, and ate it on the spot.”

How could folk believe such a thing? Roland marveled. How would a respectable marshal even begin to go about eating such a still-trembling human heart? A large, bloody organ, as any hunter knew well, anyone who had field-dressed a stag?

That was the problem with the English—as soon as you started to like one of them, they said or did something that stopped you. “Is that what you believe, Emma?”

“You mean, it isn’t true?”

She was teasing, Roland thought. “Oh, yes,” he said, “and I bit the entire head off a hayward last May Day.”

Emma had the most enticing laugh. She was intrigued by her own good luck at catching the eye of the marshal, and was dazzled at her own daring at coupling with him—this would have been the third time in a fortnight. Roland had first come upon her as she planed the bark off a tree in Fulford Reach—a long, half-boggy meadow—curls of wood in her hair. She’d knife him as merrily as love him, Roland knew that. It was not a contradiction—women sometimes relished a dangerous partner, and at times men felt the same way.

A sound reached them through the forest—the sharp rhythm of horses’ hooves, three or four men on horses they must have picked up south of Winchester, mounts with plenty of vigor left, spurred on by their riders.

“King’s men approaching, approaching king’s men,” was the lodge guards’ singsong reassurance, the same stalwarts who secured the castles in Winchester and London, although far less sober here.

“Undermarshal Climenze,” cried a cheerful voice in the distance. “My lord, did you drink the Thames dry again?”

Dogs set up a round of barking, both the scent hounds and the running hounds giving welcoming voice to the men returning from London. A larger dog joined in barking, the fearsome Golias—Goliath—an animal whose continuing existence in the kingdom was an annoying mystery to Roland. The marshal knew that duty required him to return at once.

But he had reason to linger. The sound of distant merriment made the forest seem all the more alive with a bracing, challenging unfriendliness—leaves shifting, unseen wings hunting, and Emma’s willing, teasing companionship enticing him to stay in this perilous darkness.

And he would have stayed there—if only it were possible.

“Aren’t you going to give me a reward, then?” she was asking. “For showing you that New Forest poachers aren’t afraid, even this close to where the king sleeps at night?”

“You’ll meet me here tomorrow evening?”

She did not respond.

“Promise me,” he said.

“What if it rains?”

It would be pleasant to have a pretty smile waiting for him at night after a day in London’s hectic, duty-ridden court. With a smile and a measure of wine, even a marshal might feel he was very much like a human being, if not one graced by Heaven’s favor—he had killed too many men. A wife like Emma would be the surest route to a new life and certain happiness. She’d have a meager dowry, but the warmest embrace in Christendom.

But the king would not approve of such a match—he preferred his right-hand men to be undistracted by marriage. Roland owed much to King William. When Lord Marshal Bennett tumbled down the stone steps of the Thames embankment and drowned a few summers ago, Roland had worked hard at resuscitating the jolly old drunk, pummeling his master’s body, trying to pound it back to life. The effort had won the king’s approval, and he had awarded Roland the signet of office right there, the gold ring still warm from Bennett’s finger.

“I’ll send my sergeant Grestain, Emma,” he said, “to see you home safely.”

“My brothers would laugh me to shame,” she said, “if I showed up with a royal sergeant dogging my steps.” She put her arms around him.

Emma might well have a brother waiting behind this beech tree, or that towering elm, waiting to step out with a charcoal burner’s ax and split the royal marshal’s head.

She had three brothers, all heavily muscled and experienced at chopping and splitting. They could have the royal marshal turned to ash by morning, with no one the wiser.

“Besides,” said Emma, “upon my soul, Grestain makes me uneasy.”

“Follow the high road home, Emma,” he said. “Be careful.”

“Whatever do you care, Roland?” she asked in return. “What if Mad Jack springs out on me and cuts me to chops?”

Roland hurried alone, back toward the smoke and murmur of the lodge, feeling the possibility of English spite from behind every shadowy tree. Their women sometimes saw the lord marshal’s merit, but their men were cunning and resentful. A forest where trapper-thieves worked within bow shot of the lodge was no safe place for a king to ride.

He would warn King William again: stay in the lodge and let the cup bearers comfort you with drink.

But when did the king ever listen?