Maid Marian Read Free

woman who had given me my first answers.
    “My father?”
    “I do not know where he is buried, but wherever it is he has been there these many years. For goodness sake, don’t cry, child. It’s not as if you ever knew them, is it?”
    She strode on and left me there, a numb mass of flesh and bones. Here was the truth I had so longed for. I had no parents, would never see them, could never live in the same home with them. The glowing phantoms I’d so carefully built by piling my hopes and dreams together disappeared in a breath of wind, turned to dust, and vanished completely.
    It was then that I learned to mistrust my elders, to look for the meaning behind their words, to feel suspect of their smiles and caresses. For if one man might lie to me, as Apple Man so soundly had, why shouldn’t the others? If he could placate me with falsehoods, how could I trust the words of his fellows?
    And so, though I was little aware of it at the time, the first chills of disillusionment stole across my heart that day, leaving a child mixed with one part shrewdness and three parts youthful ignorance.

Chapter Two
    W HEN I WAS A CHILD, all the world seemed at my fingertips. The sky was vast, and I felt myself equally vast beneath it, taking into my heart every tree, stone, and stream within my eyesight. But as I grew my vision dimmed, and with it the expanse of the world closed in upon me. The sky fell lower, the trees stood taller, and rivers carried their flood away to greater seas I would never know.
    But even as the natural world closed in, the world that humans had constructed, of politics and nobility, stretched before me as an ever expanding field upon which I might learn to play. In my thirteenth year I began to see the myriad loops and twists that attach people to one another, and I was fascinated by them. My tutor could not tell me enough of kings and court and battles for land and fealty. This was my world, the world of my fathers, and I was just beginning to awaken to it.
    That year I was called to a Christmas court in London town, and I was delighted to see that Hugh had come there also. I had not seen him for several years, since he had been living across the channel in Anjou, the king’s native land, learning the arts of war and conquest. He had grown a great deal in this time, and the boy who had been just my height before soared above me by a head. Now his curls were blond no longer, but the very shade of chestnut bark, precisely arranged by a careful hand.
    He stood surrounded by a gang of young men and seemed absorbed in their jokes and jostling, so I took my place with the young ladies and did my best to enjoy their company. I had several longtime friends among them, girls who had told me things about life and love that Nurse seemed not to know. Red-haired Lady Cicely was my favorite, but I noticed that the other girls shunned her somewhat, so I also avoided her. I was a shy child in groups and gaggles and had no stomach to forge a friendship that might cause me to stand alone and be looked at. Much better to blend in quietly to the heart of the group and be an audience for the bolder ones.
    Lady Clarice was a great talker and told us many stories of her sisters’ romances, for she was the youngest of five girls and knew more than we of courtship and marriage contracts. Lady Betony resided in London town and as such was self-appointed mistress of style. She pointed out the most fashionable of the grown-up ladies and explained the importance of the handkerchief and powder box. She liked to praise the brightest and fairest, but she also had a sour tongue and was ruthless to those dressed in the handed-down elegance of their mother’s gowns.
    This kind of talk entertained us well until the sun broke one afternoon, and we dropped all talk for a romp in the snow fields. We stood on the edge of adulthood then, but we were still attracted to the pleasures of youth and were quick to forgo our attempts at sobriety. We