Robyn and the Hoodettes (28 page)

Robyn did as she was told and sat, although Maudlin remained
on her side of the room. That blasted jackdaw sat on her shoulder
again. Like a second head, it was.

Another tray of fresh bread and warm cider came in, via a
non-speaking peasant. At least there was an upside to this; plenty
of food and drink. The bird flew towards her with a scroll in its
claws. The paper dropped onto the table and threatened to roll off.
Robyn caught it with one hand. The other held a chunk of bread and
she wasn’t letting go of that.

“
What’s this?”

“
Our contract,” Maudlin said.

“
Sorry?”

Ellen interrupted, “Open it, have a look.”

“
That’s enough, Ellen dear. Roger needs you in the bailey . . .
for a construction project.”

Ellen threw herself on Robyn and hugged the breath from
her. “I’ll miss you so much.” Then she fled.

A heavy wax seal prevented the parchment from opening easily.
Probably for the best if she were entrusting it to the talons of a
little crow. Such a pretty seal too, in deep burgundy
wax.

“
Is this your coat of arms, wheat growing on a
mountain?”

Maudlin made a soft chuckle. “You’re like Ellen, ‘whose
stamp is this seal?’ she said. Yes, it’s mine. And it’s not a
mountain, it’s a chevron. It represents a woman at the head of the
family. Do you like it?”

“
Very pretty,” Robyn frowned as she wedged her thumb under
the wax, which splintered into shards.

“
As you know, Marion and I have been having some interesting
conversations,” Maudlin said.

The sound of his name seeped cold fear through Robyn’s bones.
“What has he told you?”

“
Everything,” Maudlin said with a shrug. The jackdaw, flew
back to her master and rested on her shoulder. She fed it lumps of
. . . something that moved a little.

Maudlin kept her tone light during the conversation, as if
they were having a friendly chat, but Robyn’s suspicions were high.
This was yet another interrogation.

“
I know why you resorted to becoming an outlaw. It wasn’t
the right thing to do, of course, but it was understandable. Your
resilience is commendable, although you’ll not survive winter with
no shelter. Oh, don’t look so sad, of course we took the carriage
back.

“
That Marion. He is resourceful, clever, strong. Yes.” Maudlin
coughed into her closed hand. “Strong lad. He gets that from being
a blacksmith no doubt. Naturally, I have use for a man with skills
like that, and he . . . well, it turns out that even a peasant
values his life in this world before meeting his maker in the
next.”

“
Wh-what’s he doing?” Trying to steady her shaking hands,
Robyn opened the scroll onto the table, positioning her tankard to
hold it flat.

“
He’s re-building the tower keep you burned down.”

“
We never burned anything,” Robyn bit back anything further
as she turned to see far too much merriment in Maudlin’s eyes. But
seriously, the woman was going to add arson to her list of crimes?
That was going too far. “Roger set fire to the tower in Littleton,
and the rest of Loxley. I have no idea who set fire to the tower
here in Sheffield, but Marion and I were already on the ground when
we saw smoke. It wasn’t us.”

“
Ah, but you see, I have far too many witnesses who say it was.
And I also have Marion’s confession.”

Red mist covered Robyn’s eyes. It couldn’t be true. It made
no sense!

“
Like I said, Marion has told me everything. He’s smart and he
values his neck. If you value yours, you’ll sign your confession.
Then you’ll keep your neck attached to your shoulders until The
Lord sees fit to call you.”

The scroll was her confession? As Robyn untraveled it, she
pretended to read. There were so many little markings all over it,
in neat, narrow lines. A whole great block of writing with no empty
spaces where her eyes could take a break.

It went on forever as she kept unrolling it into her lap.
Then she nudged her chair further back and kept on unravelling. The
thing could have landed on the floor if she let it go. There were
sections where Maudlin had joined two pieces of parchment together
with bees’ wax to add a further extension to the litany of crimes.
Not that Robyn could read any of it, but if this were her
confession, she’d committed enough for seven outlaws.

At last she unfurled the final section, where she saw a series
of lines, one of which had a different kind of writing on
it.

The raven landed on the table, a quill in her hand. Dare she
reach for it?

Maudlin spoke. “Every misdemeanour and treasonous act is on
your confession. All of which, as you can clearly see, is
corroborated by Marion’s signature. You add yours, then I shall add
mine.”

That was Marion’s name there? The two M’s, like the symbol
she’d seen stamped on the helmet he’d made. The helmet he’d wanted
to take on the Crusades.

“
We have plenty of time, please read through the confession to
show you understand the gravity of the offences you’ve
committed.”

“
Read through it? But I
–” Robyn pulled herself up in the nick of time.
She couldn’t possibly read the confession to know whether there was
a grain of truth in it or not. If Marion had
truly
told Maudlin everything about her,
then Maudlin would know by now that she couldn’t read.

A ray of hope shone through, like the first sunshine after the
darkest winter. Maudlin didn’t know Robyn couldn’t read.

Which meant Marion couldn’t have told her
everything.

Had Marion told her anything at all?

Had she been bluffing the whole time?

Emboldened, Robyn pressed her point. She rolled the parchment
back into a scroll and stood up.

“
You have not signed it.”

Ro
byn
couldn’t read writing, but she was pretty good with faces. There
was a tightness in Maudlin’s expression that hadn’t been there a
moment ago. A tiny shift in power to Robyn’s favour.

Pushing home her advantage, Robyn said, “You’ve been telling
me Marion has told you everything about me?”

If anything, Maudlin’s face squeezed tighter, as if she
were holding things in. “Of course.”

“
Absolutely everything?”

“
Everything! I’m warning you, if you don’t sign that before the
Earl of Derby gets here, you’ll hang.”

“
The Earl of Derby isn’t here.” The balance of power tilted
her way. “I don’t think he’s coming at all. I think you’ve been
lying to me, not just today, but the whole time.”

As if carved from stone, Maudlin’s face gave nothing away.
Which, considering how soft and kind she’d been in the previous
days, told Robyn plenty.

“
If Marion truly told you everything . . .” Robyn found
herself enjoying this as she stepped closer to the fire burning
warmly in the hearth. “He would have told you that I can’t
read.”

That marble face of Maudlin’s cracked. Not much, but enough to
give the game away.

Warming to the topic, Robyn made her confession. “I always
wanted to read. I thought it would be a good thing to know. So I
used to pretend I could. But the problem with pretending is that I
became so good at it, people thought I could read, so the few men
and women in the village who could also read, never bothered to
teach me because they thought I was there already. If I’d been
honest from the start,” her shoulders slumped at the memory, “They
would have taught me. Properly.”

“
Or they were pretending as well,” Maudlin said.

“
Oh! Hadn’t thought of that! Either way, Marion
can
read, and I
can’t
. And if you’d been telling the truth, instead of
pretending, you would have known that. You might have found a way
to get me to work for you. Or to confess to whatever’s in this . .
. confessional.” With that, she tossed the scroll into the
fire.

Maudlin cursed. It was a word Robyn hadn’t heard before,
but it sounded filthy. The woman grabbed for the scroll but the
bees’ wax fuelled the burn,

Teasing the woman
a little, Robyn said, “Marion is a wonderful
person. If you’d listened to him, you know he’s very fond of making
plans and thinking things through. You should have had a proper
plan yourself, then this wouldn’t have happened.”

Maudlin tilted her head. The bird did the same thing. “Then
you are no further use to me.” She straightened her head, as did
the bird. “Guards!”

From behind a tapestry–
honestly, Robyn should check them out more, they
made amazing hiding places–two guards appeared, each grabbing one
of Robyn’s arms and holding her captive.

Maudlin’s eyes glistened with hatred. “Prepare the
gallows!”

Icy horror zipped through Robyn. She hadn’t planned for this
to happen.

“
Your beloved Marion is right. Always have a backup plan,”
Maudlin said with a steely glare.

***

Hands bound behind her back, Robyn stumbled as the hangman
lead her up the steps to the gallows. Nerves–and her hands not
being where they should be–tipped her off balance, making her
stumbled against the step.

Judging by the curves under the thick tunic, the hangman
was probably a woman. Thanks to the Crusades, so many women were
doing the jobs men used to do. The woman wore a hood over her face
with a slit in the fabric to see through, to keep her identity
secret. She was so tall too, almost as tall as–wait a
minute!

Before Robyn could get another look at the woman’s eyes,
the hangwoman nudged her in the back. Robyn staggered forward until
she stood underneath that noose. Roger must have known she’d be the
one swinging, because he and whoever else was helping him had built
the gallows super fast. And he was standing nearby with his group
of henchmen and women, watching on with a smile on his
face.

At least they’d given them all a solid thumping in their last
encounter. That made Robyn feel marginally better.

Another masked helper brought out a three-legged stool for
Robyn to stand on. Nice touch. It looked like a milking stool, the
kind Mother Eleanor used when she milked Bella.

Fear churned her stomach. This was far too real now. She
hoped and prayed to past and future saints that her mother was
somewhere away from a window, somewhere where she wouldn’t see any
of this.

Robyn gulped, trying to think her way clear. Any plan at
all now would be welcome, but her mind remained desperately blank.
She wasn’t going to die, she didn’t want to.

She couldn’t!

“
Any last words?” Maudlin said as she stroked Rook, resting on
her forearm. The little crow’s eyes were shiny black beads amongst
the glossy feathers.

For a moment, nothing came to mind. Hardly surprising given
how fast her heart whacked against her ribs, her palms perspired
and her brain virtually spun inside her head.

No words came.

She couldn’t think of a plan, and her body had shut down so
she couldn’t even put up a last-ditch fight.

“
Wait,” she suddenly thought of something. “The Earl of Derby
has to be here.”

“
Did I not tell you?” Maudlin said with a calculated smile. “He
sent his apologies. Terribly busy hanging more traitors in
Nottingham.”

Guilt and fear twisted her gut. More traitors? “Like
who?”

“
Nobody you need concern yourself with,” Maudlin said as she
turned to address the crowd milling about them. “We have before us
a traitor to the King! She will be hanged, not merely for her
terrible deeds, but to serve as a warming to all that treason and
theft of property will never be tolerated.”

“
Oh sure, you can steal from us but we can’t take it back, we
have to come here and beg for scraps from the table!”

The crowd murmured.

Maudlin yelled, “Quiet!”

The crowd shut up.

Robyn didn’t care.
“At least I got a hot bath out of it!”

The crowd laughed.

Emboldened by their response, Robyn said, “What’s more, I
think your hangman could use one, he stinks!”

The crowd roared with laughter. The hangwoman–Robyn was sure
it was a woman–sniffed the armpits of her tunic. The crowd laughed
even more.

“
Shut up, the lot of you!” Maudlin cried out. The jackdaw
flapped to keep her balance. “One more peep and I’ll hang the lot
of you!”

“
Then who’ll do all your work?” Robyn grew reckless. It had
to be the insane fear of imminent death making her behave like
this. “You hardly do any work at all! All you do is eat all the
food and take hot baths!”

Not exactly true, but at this stage of the game it didn’t
matter.

Sure enough, the crowd laughed again. People began throwing
rotten turnips and mouldy bread, not at Robyn but
Maudlin.