XXVIII. Night & Isabella
Awhile, Thomas lay in bed and thought about the latest riddle.
Another Janet for your bed,
short-lived the love,
though steep the climb
to voice it.
He could only interpret that one way, but wrestled with the notion that if he said nothing, then none of it would happen. “Short-lived” did not sound encouraging. Just before he fell asleep, he realized that doing nothing about it would ensure the “steep climb,” and so he drifted off on the horns of a dilemma.
He awoke fully sometime in the night, as he often did, and walked out into the Great Hall barefoot in his long shirt and braes. The retainers had kept the low fire burning, though the misty evening brought only a mild chill. He wandered out to the privies on the south corner to relieve himself. The moon played among the tree branches. The torches were all doused and the royal demesne beyond the court was pitch black. The fog created unnatural shapes between the buildings. If Yvag knights were still coming through various rings as John and the Waits maintained, then they had moved to the north end of Sherwood. He listened awhile to the normal though no less strange sounds of an English wood at night without mixing in the entry and departure of the Yvags.
Returning to the interior of the hall, he spied Lady Isabella sitting in one of the chairs near the high hearth. She wore a dark green gown, and her golden hair was no longer plaited, but bound up in a snood off the back of her head. Tempting as it was to pretend he hadn’t seen her, he was sure she had seen him and would conclude that he’d actively avoided her. Instead, he came over, dragged another of the chairs around, and sat opposite her before the fire.
“Missing your home?” he asked.
She drilled him with a look as if he were insane. “On the contrary, I find excuses to stay away. I regret that my husband has knowledge of my need to appear in Retford. He’s particularly good at interfering when he wants to. With any luck, however, he will be somewhere else, seeking his pleasure as usual.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that. Finally, he said, “Your son travels with you.”
“Adam,” she said. “He is a forester in his own right. You know that, surely. Planning to take my place one day, the foolish boy.”
“You don’t advise that he remain in service with the Keepers?”
“It’s not that.”
He nodded slowly. Your husband, he thought. For someone who was not present, his lordship seemed to wield much influence. He did say, “I notice you do not acknowledge your son in your retinue.”
“Oh, that is by Adam’s request. He wishes no favored treatment and I have obliged him, although he will inherit the position whether he receives such treatment or not.”
“For him a conundrum. I see. He can’t earn the position because it’s already his.”
She asked, “Why does he call you ‘Woodwose’?”
“What?”
“Little John. At least a half dozen times in my hearing he’s called you that.”
“It’s his little jest,” he answered. He couldn’t immediately come up with a reasonable explanation. There was no basis for thinking Isabella Birkin would not react tempestuously if he showed her what John’s Woodwose looked like. She was too perceptive, too analytical, as her question itself proved. He looked nothing like anyone’s notion of a woodwose, while John dispensed it like a name he’d used for years, which was in fact the case. Still, he tried to shape some kind of defense. “I lived alone in Barnsdale. A beehive hut in the woods. I’d withdrawn from, well, all of this, and I had no visitors save John and—”
“Still, it’s an odd sobriquet for someone who isn’t hoary and ancient with a beard to his knees. I grant you, somebody unskilled has hacked at your hair and beard recently. Even so, woodwose hardly describes someone as young and prepossessing as you.” He blushed, speechless at her forwardness. She seemed not to expect a response. “There’s so much about you that appears contradictory if not simply false. You look like no hermit I’ve ever encountered, and Sneinton has plenty of them to offer for comparison.”
He struggled for a suitable reply. Again, she gave him no opportunity.
“You live in a hut in Barnsdale, a wood often rife with outlaws, yet you are not an outlaw. I know all the outlaws in Sherwood and Barnsdale and they know me. They know to fear me. So then how is it I’ve hunted any number of them through Barnsdale Wood, and never once encountered you or your beehive hut? A monk’s hut, that would be? I should remember if I’d seen its like, and that, again, rings false to me.”
He wondered what she would say if he told her that she had once met him in the woods there, hairy and grizzled and wearing only rags, the remains of his clothing from Fontevraud; nor could he tell her how he’d built his hut in three days with some of those same outlaws bringing him stones just so they could watch him do it. It was wedged deeply in the wood and off every path, glamoured to blend into the forest when he was present so that she’d have had to run right into it to find it. Of course right now it would be standing visible and obvious, a tight heap of stones, and if she saw it her response, as he imagined it, would be to insist that she’d passed that very spot a hundred times and there had been no hut there. His living a hermit’s existence only truly worked if no one encountered him.
“All right, then,” she said. “How is it both Hodde and John know you, who are not an outlaw?”
He tried to make it as simple as possible. “We crossed paths is all.”
She waved his answer away. “Tell me then about Robert Hodde, whose name might be your very own patronymic. And who by happenstance came to you as he was dying and now lies dead in your secret hermitage.” She leaned forward. “Was he your father?”
He laughed at that, which at least covered his inability to defend himself. Every point she made poked a hole in the desperate façade he would have erected. It was as if he were hiding behind a tapestry that she methodically set about unweaving. Soon enough there would be nothing remaining of his small lies and obfuscations. They only worked in limited circumstances that allowed him an exit. Isabella Birkin had been paying close attention to everything he said and everything everyone else had said, and having gathered all the bits of misdirection, she could see they made no sense; they hadn’t been designed to, not on her larger tapestry. Too late he understood that she was interrogating him. Thus far she’d left him squirming, but he’d engaged her. Steep the climb . . .
“Hodde is no relative of mine, I assure you.”
“And yet, upon arriving in Nottingham you first sought out a relative of his, a tanner. You also told members of the Waits that Hodde the Tanner was your uncle. Why?” she asked.
“It was expedient, far easier than explaining how I was carrying out a dead man’s request to deliver his takings—”
“His stolen takings.”
“—to his family. And I’d given my word before I knew what he would ask of me. I wasn’t going to renege on that.”
“So is ‘Hoode’ even your true name?”
“My true name.” He made a pained smile at that wording.
“Yes.”
He almost said it then, opened his mouth with “Thomas” on his breath, but then stopped. What was it that kept him from uttering it? That Sir Richard had known the name “from the ballads,” which suggested that it hadn’t faded as it should have done. Also the power and control the elven invested in names; look how Nicnevin had taken him over through the use of his full name. Just then it seemed to him that the knowledge of his name could only prove treacherous for the one who knew it, as well as for him. John didn’t know it. The only person she could learn it from was Sir Richard atte Lee, who seemed to be long gone or a victim of these nocturnal events. “Let us just agree to leave it at Robyn. You can add Goodfellow to that for all I care.”
That provoked a rare smile from her.
“All right . . . Robyn. You exhibit so much knowledge of these creatures. Explain to me the difference between the demons slain here and in Chandler’s Lane and what happened with Passelewe. Why were their deaths so different?”
“Passelewe was a skinwalker. A lich. It means—”
“His skin walking around but not Passelewe on the inside.”
“It sounds as if you didn’t need to ask.”
She continued, “And you have made it difficult for these creatures to lay hands on these things they call dights, these spinners, which are how someone becomes a skinwalker.”
“Yes. That’s right.” He did not add that he believed one of them was intended for her.
“How difficult?”
“They can search everywhere here and will find nothing.” He explained, “Three such devices were being brought south for some purpose, carried by a prelate. I can’t tell you why they simply didn’t bring three more, unless there is something unique to these three, something I wouldn’t know how to find out. Or perhaps they are difficult to make. But the elven demons aren’t used to interference from us. They have acted on the belief that a simple accident has occurred, from which they can easily recover. And in truth it began as a simple accident.”
“So then, how do we know who are the inhabited men and women? How do we know, for instance, that King Henry isn’t one of them?”
Thomas glanced down at his bare feet. Reciting, he muttered: “Never kings, but always kingdoms.”
“What is that?” she asked.
“It’s from another riddle. Spoken a long time ago.”
“And you were the speaker of this one, too?”
“It was one who was called Thomas the Rhymer.”
“Oh, I’ve heard that name in songs.”
And so, he thought, how right he’d been once more not to admit it as his own.
“If I read that bit of riddle right,” said Isabella, “these creatures work in the shadows then, behind the throne, influencers and manipulators. Someone like Peter des Roches, for instance.”
“Who is Peter des Roches?”
“The Bishop of Winchester?” Surprised that he didn’t know the name.
“Yes,” he replied, “exactly like him.” Exactly like you as well, unfortunately, he thought.
His agreement seemed to trouble her. Carefully as though edging along the question, she asked, “How can you recognize when someone has been taken over in this way?”
“You can’t, always. Sheriff Passelewe was passing undetected until he made the mistake of grabbing on to me. I can . . . hear them sometimes, hear the strangeness of their thoughts. But I’ve also seen an Yvag wake up inside its lich. Seen the sudden cruel intelligence behind its eyes, the way it . . . leered. Once in a human body, the creatures seem to brim with lust as if they’ve never known the physicality, the pleasures of the flesh, before.”
He thought of his own father ogling every woman at Cardden’s Christes Maesse, and Forbes the Miller investigating his new form after a dight had emptied and replaced him.
“‘Pleasures of the flesh.’ I think you describe my husband perfectly, Master Hoode,” stated Isabella Birkin.
“But has he not always been thus?” he asked. “So was I told.”
“Always flirtatious, interested and willing to say so? Oh, yes. However, less than a year ago the shape of his perfidy changed. He changed.”
“How so?”
“I know the very moment. Robert back from visiting Doncaster and at least one courtesan I knew he kept in that town. He always evaded my questions—I long ago grew used to the betrayals—but that day he behaved like someone I’d never met. The look of such an unquenchable appetite. He made overtures about our coupling, absurd in their depravity. We two were years down the road of being well quit of each other physically. We occupied the manor and barely shared in the raising of our son. For all of that, he was absolutely astonished by my rejection. It was as if no one ever rejected such opportunities.”
He nodded slowly, seeing it all.
“I couldn’t understand it. So I spied on him when he thought he was alone. He was studying his own body, his hands in particular as if they’d only just grown there. As if he’d never beheld himself, when the truth is, there isn’t a mirror anywhere that Robert doesn’t love.”
The dights and their effect explained everything she’d witnessed.
“In that moment, I thought the devil had purchased his soul and replaced him with a demon.” She frowned. “The saddest part of it, altogether there was so little change. Mostly to do with his interest in governing, in the running of things. Before then, he would walk out of a room rather than endure such a discussion.”
He guessed the next part. “And suddenly he invested himself in matters political.”
“Yes,” she said. “And began meeting with men I didn’t know he knew, while still feeling up any chambermaid fool enough to be caught alone by him. If anything, his lust increased.”
“But not for you.”
“Oh, it would have included me had I acquiesced to his overtures. He has ridden too far down that road. He covets not me but my inherited position, which goes to Adam next, not him. And there is nothing he can do about it. He’s not the first, mind you—there was even a Nottingham sheriff named Philip Mark who tried to steal the title once.”
Thomas nodded, relieved for the moment. The Yvags had possession of her husband, so didn’t need her. Then doubt crept in. Maybe they’d assumed her husband would have all the influence, only to learn otherwise once they’d taken him over. One of those dights still might have been meant for her, or even for her son.
Isabella seemed to cast the entire matter aside. “Are you familiar with the writings of Gervase of Tilbury?”
“I am not.”
“A wise philosopher, I think. He refers to things that seem miraculous or marvelous. He calls them all inaudita, ‘things unheard of.’ Some of these, he tells us, are true miracles of God. The rest are natural phenomena. It’s his view that we simply haven’t encountered them before and so they seem unnatural to us.”
“I’m sure there’s a point here?”
“You’ve allowed us to refer to your Yvag as ‘demons.’ I say ‘allow’ because I can see at every instance how you bite back your objection to the word. Demons are too much in the realm of God and the Church for you, I think.”
“The Yvag are certainly no miracles of God, nor are they simply natural and misunderstood.”
“But they are inaudita to me, and to the Waits as well. Not to you, though.”
“Think you I’ve all your answers?”
“I wish to know what they are to you. You’ve said things that tell me you have been their captive.”
He considered. Onchu. Innes. Janet. He folded his hands calmly in his lap. “That whole story’s not for telling. They are and will always be my enemy.”
“Yes, of course. I perceive that. But what are they? Not demons.”
“They are the elven. In some places, faeries, fae, gruagach. Plenty more names. ‘Demons’ was what everyone in the Waits took them for, so I simply agreed.”
“I see,” she said. “You do that rather a lot.”
He lowered his head again to hide that he was laughing. Yes, he supposed he did do that a lot.
“It matters not what you call them,” he said, “they will come at us again as they did today and tonight and every night. They will try to infiltrate the retinue, mostly by replacing people, I imagine. That is, unless we give them the dights or they steal them back. My intention is to keep them away from their intended victims.” Starting with you.
“And you are the only one among us who knows where they are hidden.”
“I find it’s safer for us all if that’s the situation.”
She thought a moment. “You are their sworn enemy, yet they don’t seem to know you exist,” she said.
“They believe I’m dead. I let them be for a while. And I . . . retired.”
“You protected your wife above all else.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
She replied, “Now perhaps I understand ‘woodwose’ a little bit, I think.”
“If say you so.”
“I do say so.” She smiled. “Tomorrow, Will and I travel first to Rufford Abbey. Sehild informed me that a message was delivered some days ago. The abbot wishes to speak with me regarding the use of my foresters for some purpose. I imagine it will not take long, and the two of us will continue on from there to the forty-days court in Retford to give our testimony.”
“Testimony in what?”
“It regards a case of illegal pannage. A trio of men we arrested some weeks ago, nothing to do with this. It happens every year when the acorns drop.”
“Have to say I feel sorry for the poor fellows. They stand no chance against you.”
She seemed to find that comment amusing, but continued, “You asked about home, if I’m missing it. Laxton Hall is positioned such that I must needs visit it at some point in that journey to appease D’Everingham. Only, now, thanks to you, I go forewarned.”
“You must allow me to accompany you. You might be watchful, but I know the exact signs.” The riddle ran through his head again. Another Janet . . .
If he had only a short time, he needed to apply himself, however bold, however decidedly foolish. “Also, I have a request of you, milady,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I should like to spend every minute of the time until you depart tomorrow in your company.”
She looked at him, astonished. For once he’d taken her completely by surprise. “Oh,” she said. Then repeated it. “Oh,” again. Finally, she cleared her throat and gathered herself up. “I believe I assigned you that room, Master Hoode,” she said. He nodded to it. She took him by the hand, then walked barefoot across the wood planks without a look back. He followed her. They passed his chamber and all the others in which members of the Waits and Keepers slept, and descended silently to the chamber she’d given herself.