THE SHERIFF
Dame Alice of Flechedor, Barnwell, and Roecourt, high sheriff of Nottingham, was in her forty-second summer, tall and straight as an ash tree, firm of step and clear of eye. Those clear eyes were piercing grey, and looked out from either side of the bridge of a gracefully aquiline nose, beneath a high, broad forehead somewhat creased with responsibility. Her lips were full, her chin strong, her cheeks more gaunt than usual in ladies of the upper classes. Her hair was grizzled but still lustrous, and she wore it almost as short as a man’s, so that when loosened it scarcely covered her shoulders. For the past three years, no one but herself and a few favored dames in waiting had seen it flowing loose. She kept it beneath a wimple, though strands frequently strayed. She troubled her penetrating mind with cleanliness but not with fashion.
Being pure-blood Norman, she was called proud by those to whom “proud” was inseparable from “Norman.” These were largely folk to whom “proud” was a word of evil odor. To Dame Alice de Flechedor, it was a good word, smacking of strength and high resolve.
The sheriffship of Nottingham was hereditary in the Flechedor line. As its last, childless scion, Dame Alice had installed her beloved husband, Sir Roger of Doncaster, also sometimes called Roger the Red for the color of his hair, as her vice-sheriff. Three years ago, Robin Hood and his ruffians— poachers and murderers all—had capped their bloody rescue of the infamous William Stutely by tearing down the gallows from its scaffold in Nottingham town square, casting it up again in a little glade within the bounds of Sherwood forest, and hanging the vice-sheriff from it.
Dame Alice had vowed she would have vengeance, which in such a case would be no more than due justice under the Law.
A few poached deer she and her husband could have overlooked. The king, having many royal forests, came seldom to Sherwood. Had the outlaws rested content to live off the land, doing no harm to folk who still lived within the jurisdiction and protection of the Law, they might have been tolerated as something resembling informal foresters, paid in kind rather than coin. But the armed robberies could not be overlooked, committed as they were with much gratuitous rough play and humiliation upon loyal, peaceable subjects of the king, whose only crimes were to possess wealth and to travel the Great North Road or some common right of way through woodland and royal forest.
And William Stutely was neither mere poacher nor even common robber. From the first, he had been among those who fled the courts of the Law into outlawry for the most heinous crime of all. A false steward, caught embezzling funds and goods, he had slain his master and slipped away into the greenwood, to find welcome with one who would have welcomed Judas himself into his band of “merry men,” on no other grounds than that the Iscariot was shunned by honest folk and hunted by the authorities. And it was for this William Stutely that Robin Hood’s band had caused riot and massacre in the streets, and murdered Roger of Doncaster, vice-sheriff of Nottingham!
Rather than depute another man, Dame Alice had decided to exercise the hereditary office in her own person—and a pox on those who called it unwomanly! She caused a new gallows to be erected within the strong walls of Nottingham castle itself. In accordance with the ancient Ango-Saxon usages of the land, that outlaws’ lives were forfeit to anyone at any time, she would hang them speedily when caught, before they could wriggle away through appeals and pardons, as too many did nowadays.
A week after her husband’s burial, she had led a posse of workers and soldiers into Sherwood forest to tear down the stolen gallows. As the first man raised his ax, a clothyard arrow thudded into the wood of the upright before him. Other arrows followed. None landed in human flesh, but the outlaw archers who shot them proved impossible to capture, so Dame Alice led her soldiers in retreat—the workers were routed already—and left the gallows before further massacre could be done.
Within the greenwood, the rogues were cannier than foxes, with countless hidden lairs and dens. All the outlaws she and her men had caught to hang inside the castle were two, surprised away from their woods and comrades, one recklessly raiding a dovecot later in the same year of Sir Roger’s death, the other drinking in a tavern the second winter. The silly common folk sung no tales of them, at least that reached her ears. Both of them were hanged within hours of being taken, and at night. Doubtless thanks to her speed, there had been no rescue attempts.
There had been reprisals: two sheriff’s men and two royal foresters—the latter pair loyal ones who knew Sherwood well— found from time to time hanging on the gallows in the greenwood. The first was William a Trent, killed by an arrow in Barnsdale, left behind in the general retreat, and obviously returned to her, in some double mockery of courtliness and death, for burial in hallowed ground. The second was Freeborn Forster, who clearly died by hanging.
Impossible to post perpetual watch: she had too few men attempting to patrol too much ground. She had brought a second posse, large as the glade could accommodate, to tear down that cursed gallows. Again they were routed by arrows from unseen bows, this time killing Keneth de Vieuxbois; and when his body was recovered from the manmade tree of death, a piece of parchment was pinned to his breast, a leaf from the abbot of Whitethorn’s stolen breviary, with ink, colors, and gold leaf scraped from one side and the message printed in soot that if madame sheriff wanted a sure spot to find the bodies of her men, wherever killed, she would leave this gallows in its place.
She had left it, grudgingly, rather than risk more bloodshed in further attempts at removal. When next it bore its fruit, in the corpse of John Acherley, the pair who found him—yeoman and husbandman—snatched him down quickly and carried him away with many a cautious glance at the surrounding trees, as they themselves did not blush to report on delivering him to the castle.
That had been more than a year ago, in early spring. Since then, there had been no new deaths on either side. Perhaps the outlaws were in good humor thanks to their success in her great archery contest last summer. They were also reported to have gentlewomen among them now, not merely the inevitable ragtag camp followers. Maid—now Dame—Eleanor de Gracey, plucked from an arranged marriage in her father’s chapel near Blyth to be the bride of Hood’s new minstrel, much to the maiden’s pleasure if rumor for once spoke truth. And some mysterious Queen of the May who had appeared by Hood’s own side and was said to bear herself like the gentlest-born lady in all the land.
For whatever reasons, Hood’s men had been content for many months now with bloodless robberies and coarse but unmurderous buffooneries. As usual, they all but disappeared at the first snowfall into whatever lairs they used for wintering, and politely allowed royal foresters and honest hunting parties to eke out their own stores from the illicitly thinned herds of Sherwood and Barnsdale. Master Hood had begun his new year’s depredations last mid-Lent by disguising himself as a friar in order to waylay and rob two aging priests on their way from York to Canterbury. There followed separate attacks on a party of merchants from York and on the great bishop of Hereford. Grave indignities, but no bloodshed, accompanied all three incidents.
The two priests had been carrying five hundred marks of offerings donated in good faith, farthing, penny, and shilling, by folk who could not make the pilgrimage in their own persons. Naturally shy of any stranger, the consecrated clerics were prudent enough to tell the jaunty young friar who accosted them that they had already been robbed. For that prudence he mocked them shamefully, pulling them from their mules and making them kneel for an hour in the wood, praying for Heaven to send them money by miracle. Then, searching their saddlebags and persons by force, he appropriated nine-tenths of the sum they carried in trust, generously sending them away with fifty marks and one mule between them.
As for the merchants from York, Hood had insisted that they accept his hospitality for the night, and then charged them more exorbitantly than the sharpest innkeeper for board and bed, claiming that all the coin they carried was not enough and forcing them to sell him most of their trading stock at less than a quarter of its true value, to make up the difference. They had been reduced near to bankruptcy. If Master Hood did in fact rob the rich to pay the poor, as the common people loved to pretend though doubtless few of them had ever enjoyed much good of his stolen coin, then he himself helped to create many of the poor.
The bishop of Hereford had fared worst of all. They not only charged full three hundred pounds for wining and dining and bedding him overnight in Barnsdale greenwood, but they also threatened to behead him, then bound him to a tree where they forced him to sing their Lady Day Mass in a cold and mizzling rain, and afterwards made him join in their heathenish Spring dances.
Well, as to his grace of Hereford, as the bishop loved to be called, Dame Alice herself had little enough use for him other than the respect due his state and status. Could she have brought herself to speak lightly of any matter concerning the outlaws of Sherwood and Barnsdale, she might have been tempted to remark that that particular prince of the Church, when in good appetite, might indeed prove able to consume three hundred pounds’ worth of meat and drink in a single dinner; but that to behold him dance afterward must have been so rare and inspiring a morality that Hood ought to have returned his money in full as the mummer’s fee.
Her secret and involuntary amusement at the bishop’s ruffled dignity had in no way hindered her attempts to redress the wrong done him, which were as long and diligent as her attempts to bring the ruffians to justice for the outrages committed on the priests and merchants. But for all her energy, the gallows of Notthingham castle had borne no fresh fruit from the greenwood.
At least bold Robin Hood had no specious pretext of revenge for any new loss to bedeck his stolen gibbet with honest lawkeepers. Nor, to give even the devil his due, had he offered any new threats of violence, save by the bishop of Hereford’s report. The priests had been outmaneuvered and mocked, the merchants overpowered and two of them bound for a time; but none of them had been wounded nor threatened, save by implication, with death. Moreover, if Hood rarely gave outright to the poor and lowly, he did seem to prefer leaving them in peace, as though scorning their humble pittances; and on certain occasions he had been known to ask his victims how much coin they carried, then search them and allow them to retain whatever sum they had named. Then, too, so far this year the outlaws had been most active in Barnsdale and northern Sherwood.
Had it been otherwise—had they continued as bloody as in former years, or even had they been reported oftener in the near vicinity of Nottingham town this spring, she would not have given young FitzMaurice leave to run her errand through the three miles of southern Sherwood to Little Kirkly convent. Dreamy, serious Denis, who had never been in trouble but twice in his life: for pilfering flowers as a page and for leaving a stable door unlatched in his first year of squirehood. She was aware that he regarded her not only as his liege lord, which was due and proper, but also as his ideal lady by the rules of courtly love, which she did not encourage.
But he had been so eager to prove his manhood—and twenty years was no infant age; veteran soldiers had fallen in battle younger, hardened outlaws been hanged with their beards still downy on their cheeks. And what danger should there have been for a messenger going afoot a short distance through southern Sherwood, without so much as horse or mule or donkey to tempt plunder, unarmed in proof of an innocent errand to the priory, on Sunday and the Eve of Saint John, when all Christians were doubly under protection of Holy Church and her Truce of God?
So when the letter was brought to Madame Sheriff—another scraped leaf from the abbot of Whitethorn’s book of hours, still tied round the shaft that had carried it from the forest into Piers the tanner’s field—she had good reason for her rage. Not even when she had learned how it was indeed Robin Hood who bore away the prize arrow she had designed to bait him into capture at her shooting match in Nottingham, not even when the outlaws had demanded that their stolen gallows be left standing within the king’s forest—not since the murder of Roger of Doncaster had anyone seen her in quite such a passion.
“My good esquire and messenger!” she cried, breaking the arrow in two and throwing it across the small garden, where she had been sitting with her two favorite ladies for a rare hour of leisure. “Wearing the white badge of peace!” And she crumpled the fine parchment and hurled it after the arrow. “To and from a holy nunnery on a holy day!” And she flung the oaken platter of refreshments in another direction, so that manchets of bread and bits of fruit besprinkled the garden. “They hold nothing sacred, these devils! They are worse than wolves in winter or ravaging boars! They fill the king’s forest with terror for every honest subject, and they respect neither God nor man!”
“They respect woman, my lady,” Dame Edith ventured to say.
“So they are said to boast. Should we have put our faith in that boast and sent one of our women through the woods in his place, to be ravished by the first vile rogue who took the fancy? Bring me back that letter!”
Dame Margery found it uncrumpling itself in the bed of thyme. Smoothing it as best she could, she carried it back to the sheriff, who scanned it once and twice again, anger straightening into firm, settled purpose on her brows and in the lines around her mouth.
“Very well,” Dame Alice de Flechedor said at length, “we will try Robin Hood’s boast concerning womankind. Jack the tanner’s son brought this from his father’s field?” she went on, turning to the maiden who had relayed it to the ladies’ enclosed garden. “Piers Tanner is a fair man with the bow, I think? I shall write my answer on another parchment and give Jack another arrow. Better than the one I broke,” she added with a wry smile. “Let his father shoot it back into the forest. Into the trunk of the largest tree at the forest’s edge. We will not be like these outlaws, who shoot their messages into field and town careless of anyone who may chance to be in the arrow’s path.”