Romancing Robin Hood Read Free Page B

beneath a tree in her eagerness to get them off and join the boys in their work. It was one of the only tasks their father gave them that could have been considered fun.
    Mathilda closed her eyes, angry as the tears she’d forbidden herself to shed defied her stubborn will and came anyway. With them came weariness. It consumed her, forcing her to sink onto the rotten floor. Water dripped into her long, lank red hair. The tussle of capture had loosened its neatly woven plait, and now it hung awkwardly, half in and half out of its bindings, like a badly strapped sheaf of strawberry corn.
    She tried not to start blaming her father, but it was difficult not to. Why hadn’t he told her he’d borrowed money from the Folvilles? It was an insane thing to do. Only the most desperate … Mathilda stopped her thoughts in their tracks. They were disloyal and pointless.
    They’d been relatively well-off when Mathilda was younger. They’d owned four horses, a few chickens, a cow, and a field for planting their own vegetables and a small amount of wheat. There was also the pottery shed and kiln where her father made his tableware and cooking pots, and a little orchard which backed onto the two-roomed house. Slowly, over the past few years, it had almost all been sold off. Only the workhouse, orchard, one horse and cart, and a single strip of the field remained.
    Now she thought about it, Mathilda realised that they had been that desperate; she’d simply been so busy making the best of things that she hadn’t had time to think about it. Since her mother had died four years ago, and the disastrous crop failure a few harvests back, combined with the decline in the demand for locally made pottery as ceramic tableware from Wales, the south, and even France flooded the markets, life had become steadily more difficult. Her father hadn’t been able to compete, and each time he travelled the ten miles to the market at Leicester he seemed to come home more dejected than the time before, and with more and more unsold stock.
    Last time her father had travelled to the city, he’d returned early, a desolate figure, with a cartload of shards behind him. A thief had struck in the market place, and in their unthinking eagerness to apprehend the villain the bailiff’s men had run roughshod through the stalls, toppling her father’s table as they went, leaving him with only broken stock and an increasingly broken faith.
    â€˜Our Lady,’ Mathilda muttered in the gloom, her voiced hushed in fear, ‘please deliver me from this place.’ Then, guilty at having asked for something so boldly from someone she’d willingly begun to neglect of late, Mathilda added, ‘I’m sorry, Our Lady, forgive me. I’m frightened, that’s all. Perhaps though, you could look after my brothers and my father.’
    Mathilda wasn’t even sure that any of them were still alive. The Folville family reputation made it more than possible that they’d all been killed.
    As soon as she’d been taken, lifted bodily from the water as if she was as light as air, Mathilda had been bundled into a covered wagon and moved to the manor at Ashby Folville. A large man had sat with her, shoving a filthy rag between her lips to fend off the thousands of questions she had, and tying her hands behind her back.
    The journey, although bumpy and bruising, was no longer than two miles, and soon Mathilda was untied and un-gagged and, having been thoroughly stared at from top to bottom by this impertinent man who seemed to have the ability to see through her clothes to the flesh beneath, was wordlessly bundled below stairs to her current lonely location. Her stomach growled at her, complaining at its emptiness. She felt cross with herself. How could she even consider food when her family was in danger?
    â€˜Just as well I don’t want to eat,’ she told herself sternly, ‘as I probably won’t ever see