Everything is a Choice

Chapter 20

Previously...

Come on, Robin, I berate myself. You’re just tired and not thinking straight.  You cannot hang on to Marian through Gisborne.  You have to let her go.  You have to let him go. And then I think of Guy crouching in front of me, his hand on my shoulder, his blue eyes boring into mine and wonder whether I am using Marian as an excuse.  She had said that Guy’s feelings for her were genuine.  So, does that mean his feelings for me are also genuine, or me for him?  Because there is no denying, my want had felt very real.

I reach the manor house door. This is the moment I’ve been dreading more than anything; stepping back into my home, knowing that Marian will never walk its floors, touch its contents or clutter it with her clothes, her hair ornaments, or our children.

Rowena steps up beside me. “It’s open,” she says, giving the door a gentle push.

Locksley Manor, where it had all begun. Where, one fateful day, I chose glory instead of Marian. And where had that glory led me? It had led me to a dead wife and a hankering for something abominable in the eyes of God and man. It had led me to Hell, that’s where.

Welcome home, Robin Hood.  

~

Chapter 20

“We’re quite alone, Robin.”

For a moment, I wonder what Rowena is implying, until I realise she simply means there is no one else in the house.

“The girl I saw, with the washing basket, coming out the door earlier?”

“That’s Elisabeth,” Rowena says. “A Locksley girl. She helps me keep house.”

Taking a deep breath, I step over the threshold and into my home.

Familiar smells fill my nose: wood-smoke from years of fires burned in the main hall’s great hearth, the fatty animal stink of tallow and the herbs mixed in with the rushes covering the outer hall floor; smells of my childhood, of a time I would give anything for to go back to so I might start again.  I push my fingers into an egg-sized knothole in the frame of the great oak door. When I was little, I could fit my whole hand in there.

I half expect Thornton to suddenly appear, saying, “Welcome back, sir,” a wide smile on his face. But Thornton, along with the rest of my house staff, is gone; either driven out by Prince John on his arrival in Nottingham, or by his own volition, realising that to stay and tend a house that has no master to pay him will mean ending up a pauper. Thornton was too prideful a man to ask for charity.

The door closes behind me, plunging the inner hallway into shadow. Rowena has left me alone with my sorrows. I was not wrong about her being astute.   

I lean my bow just inside the door along with my quiver and sword belt. Walking past pegs for cloaks, a wooden snow shovel and a pair of old boots I’m sure were there in my father’s day, I step into the main hall. All the shutters are open and sunlight is pouring into the room. The furnishings are much as I remember them, with some additional pieces that must be Guy’s and a bowl of flowers on the big oak table, denoting a woman’s touch.

I wait for the deluge of emotions to hit me. Nothing. I feel nothing but tired and empty.

A quick tour of the house proves Rowena correct: there is no one here. No women past childbearing years scrubbing the floors or scurrying back and forth with bed linen. No Magda banging pots and pans in the scullery and barking at Little Robert, who I guess will have dropped the ‘Little’ from his name by now, to stop hanging on her skirts and go play outside. On my way down the hill earlier, I noticed no stableboys mucking out the horses in our stables, which means no horses either.