Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 01] by Lady of the Forest Page A

money.”
    “Yes, my lord.”
    John drank, slapped the cup down, and tugged irritably at the fit of his surcoat. “Anything else?”
    De Pisan gestured deprecatingly. “There is a man, my lord—a knight, though the rank was bought. Sir Guy of Gisbourne. He is the sheriffs seneschal.” De Pisan smiled slightly. “He requested most vigorously that I commend him to you.”
    “Did he?” John pursed his lips, gnawing absently at the bottom. “DeLacey’s seneschal ...” He slumped back in the chair. A smile curved his mouth. “Send him to me tomorrow.”
     
    Shadows lived indoors also. Locksley sought and stood in them, watching in some bemusement the celebrants come to praise him for a nonexistent valor because they wanted to please his father. They were different, all of them . . . so different from what he was. And yet once he had been them, each and every one of them, taking shape as his father wished, because the potter’s hand was sure. The clay christened Robert, later apportioned Locksley as a mark of his heritage, had been malleable as any, mere sludge upon the wheel—until Richard took up the newmade work and broke it into pieces. Perhaps it might have been mended, once, before Saladin shattered the fragments.
    Locksley shut his eyes. He wanted no part of this. He wanted no part of them.
    “Robert?”
    His eyes snapped open. Before him stood the sheriff, who was not, most emphatically, Richard Coeur de Lion.
    DeLacey’s manner was practiced elegance. “Forgive me if I intrude. But there is something we should discuss.”
    Locksley’s shoulders tightened. And so it begins.
    William deLacey smiled. “You are just home, I know, and doubtless needing time to reacquaint yourself with a way of life set aside for two years . . . but I am a man who believes in confronting a difficulty head-on.”
    Locksley didn’t smile. “The king could have used you at Acre.”
    The frown was infinitely fleeting, but the brief glint in deLacey’s eyes told Locksley the bolt had gone home, regardless of subtlety. Which therefore told him something of the sheriff. “Indeed, Robert—but if we all went on Crusade, what becomes of England?”
    “Indeed, Sheriff.” The edges were fraying. He could feel them fraying. “Pray, pose me the difficulty.”
    DeLacey’s brown eyes glinted with something akin to rueful amusement. “Plainly put, Robert: my youngest daughter is unmarried.”
    He might have laughed, once, saluting the sheriffs sally. But now he did not. “And so am I unmarried.”
    The sheriff smiled urbanely. “And now it lies in the open; no more subterfuge. I doubt obscurity is what you’d choose, given a say in the matter. And I do intend to give you a say in the matter—”
    “And my father.”
    “And your father.” Another man might have faltered, might have blustered, or fidgeted, or denied it. William deLacey did not. “Others will also present themselves, their lineage, their daughters. Certainly the dowry. But they will go first to the earl. I come to you.”
    A stray, unbidden thought crept into Locksley’s mind. I am light. Too light. There is no weight. “I took it off,” he said aloud. “No—they took it from me. There, in front—” He stopped. He stopped himself. The face staring back was not the Infidel’s. It belonged to an Englishman, an Anglicized Norman, or a Normanized Englishman. They all of them were so, people like deLacey, born and bred in England but adhering to Norman ways. And I serve a Norman king.
    William deLacey, staring. Then asking him the question: “Are you all right?”
    No, Locksley answered silently. Aloud, he said, “Of course,” offering nothing more. If one offered little, others would then have to take. That he could live with. With giving he could not. “Of course,” he repeated, for the sheriff’s benefit.
    DeLacey’s gaze was speculative. Then he inclined his head. “If you will excuse me, Robert.”
    It wasn’t a question. Thoughtfully, Locksley