The Forest Queen Read online

  “They wanted to kill him,” Little Jane said. “I wanted to kill him myself, or at least, part of me did.” She touched the sleeping Anna’s head. “But he’s your kin, Silvie. I thought . . . you should decide.”

  I walked up to John, the lord of Loughsley, the sheriff. The bully, the rapist, the murderer, who managed to think himself virtuous because there was one sin he’d never let himself commit. I remembered all the nights at Loughsley that he stood by my bed, radiating his longing to touch me, and how that longing had poisoned my dreams. I remembered his voice, its sinuous calmness, above us in the oubliette. I remembered how he left us there to die.

  He had raped Little Jane. He had stolen her family from her, her place in the village. He had made her want to die, had taken a part of her soul that it took months in the forest, months of work and rest and hunting and building and freedom, and the birth of Anna Robin, for her to begin to restore in herself. I remembered every day, every bit of suffering, that went into the redemption my friend had found.

  For some reason I remembered the hart on the day of the Hunt Ball, how he had let it suffer to ingratiate himself with our prince. I remembered how he had hit us, the day I met Bird. I remembered my brother at eight years old, crushing blackbird chicks under his boots.

  I faced each of those memories. When the face of my brother before me made me wish to show him mercy, I kept facing each memory of his cruelty, his violence, and I did not let myself forget.

  “The oubliette,” I said. “You said you wanted to keep me there so that the world would forget me. So that only you would remember.”

  His face grew pale.

  “No one deserves to die in such a way, in such a place,” I said. “Almost no one.”

  The blackbird chicks. The wounded stag. The legions of people John had taxed past bearing, had bullied, had tortured. Little Jane hanging from the Wedding-Ring Bridge.

  The crowd stood around us, waiting, watching.

  We should put him down there, I thought,and forget him.

  “Little Jane,” I said.

  She was before me in a moment, her head high, her glare as fierce as Bird’s. There wasn’t a trace of fear in her eyes as she looked at John.

  “I told him I wanted to kill him,” I said, “and I do. But I don’t think I can want it as much as you do.”

  I took one step back from my brother and gestured for my friend to take my place.

  “Her, Silvie?” he hissed, low words just meant for my ears. “Silvie, she doesn’t matter . . .”

  I tightened my grip. “She matters.”

  Little Jane moved toward him, her own garter-knife raised in her hand. “Don’t I, just,” she said. She was looking at John, but for a moment our eyes met over his shoulder, and I remembered our meeting at the bridge, our first night in the forest, every night since. The night of Anna Robin’s birth.

  “We all of us matter,” Little Jane said. “Even you.” She put the knife to his throat, but didn’t press; she dragged it down, slowly, to his panting belly. “I’ve a baby from you, you know. A daughter.”

  “I have a baby?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “Little Jane does. You’ve no right even to know about her baby, unless she says so. You’ve no right even to know her name.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Silvie, a nameless bastard—” His words cut off in a ragged cry.

  Little Jane lowered her knife.

  “I don’t want him to die,” she said in response to my questioning look. “I just want him to know. And I want him to live to remember it, the way I have. The way you have.”

  We did. We neither of us feared him anymore, but I knew we would always remember.

  “We’ll put it to a vote,” I said. “It’s the only just thing.”

  I knew I was right even before I saw the sudden rising fear in John’s eyes; but I admit I savored seeing it nonetheless.

  At the front of the circle of torches, I saw Bird nod.

  In the end, we put it to a vote, and the people chose to put John in the old Woodshire Jail. He wouldn’t be alone there, either; for the one or two prisoners whom Simon and Stutely had believed really were too cruel to mix among free society were still there. They’d be apt company for John, at least, I thought.

  Several of the rogues bore John away. I think he was screaming, beneath his gag, but the sound was too muffled to know for sure.

  * * *

  “Why did they come, all those people?” I asked as we walked back through the forest. The endless time in the oubliette had left me weak, and I leaned on Little Jane for support. Bird limped along on her other side, and she helped him walk, too. Looking at us, anyone would think she had always been the rescuer; and at that moment, I felt that she had.

  A wet smell of old smoke tamped down by rain hung in the air. We had crossed the edge of the fire’s destruction, and burned trees creaked around us. Damp ashes stuck to the soles of our shoes, kicked up around the hems of our cloaks.

  “They love you, Silvie,” Little Jane said. “The money and supplies you set loose on the river that night fed the whole kingdom. John said you died, and that made you a martyr. I never believed it, though, Silvie. Never. When Scarlet brought back your hair . . .” She shivered. “I feel my life tied to yours now, ever since you saved me, and more since Anna Robin was born. You saved the people, too, and so their lives are tied to yours. John and the king’s taxes had them on the edge of oblivion, and you saved them all. Just like you saved me.”

  I shook my head. We’d pulled Little Jane off the bridge and brought her to the forest, but she had made the choice to live, to go on, every day after that. “We only gave them back what should never have been taken away. And how did they know, anyway, that I had anything to do with it?”

  “You’d be surprised how quickly a ballad can spread through a city, a forest, a country, if its story is good enough,” said Alana Dale. She winked at me. “And if it’s well sung.”

  She hummed a few bars, and began to sing. Little Jane, to my surprise, sang with her; just ahead of us, so did Mae Tuck.

  Come listen to me, you who wish to be free,

  If you love a good tale to hear,

  And I will tell you of the Forest Queen

  Who lives in wild Woodshire . . .

  The words were Alana’s, of course, but it was an old tune, used in innumerable ballads.

  Bird began to hum along. Mae Tuck’s strong alto voice, and Jane’s softer one, rose with Alana’s and echoed through the trees around us.

  The song grew louder, much louder than three or four voices . . .

  All around us, the people of Esting were singing, too. I couldn’t see them through the burned yet still-standing trees. But I could hear them, their rushing, rising harmony, singing the words of Alana’s ballad as if they’d known them all their lives.

  “I told you they’d always tell your story,” Bird whispered in my ear.

  I shook my head, unutterably humbled, and grateful, and proud.

  And the song went on.

  Epilogue

  A burned forest is reborn in flowers.

  Where once the leaves and needles of ancient oaks and pine trees shadowed the ground, suddenly sunlight has room to stream down, to stroke its gold fingers across the scorched earth. Ashes melt into and feed the soil. Underground, seeds uncurl, life in the wake of death. Shoots push fragile into the air, aiming for sky. Some will blossom and fade by the summer’s end; some will become trees, great elder rulers of the forest, and in two hundred years they will still offer shade and shelter.

  The day I married Bird, flowers covered the world.

  It was Midsummer Day. Three-year-old Anna Robin embodied her role as flower girl absolutely: a frothy circle of meadowsweet crowned her hair, cornflowers and asters were pinned to her white linen dress, and she carried a wicker basket of wild rose petals that was half as tall as she was. Showing signs of her mother’s strength already, she wielded the huge basket with determination and threw pe
tals in the face of anyone who crossed her path, shrieking with glee.

  Little Jane watched her with gentle amusement from her place by my side on the Wedding-Ring Bridge. With a bouquet of dahlias and a crown to match her daughter’s in her hair, she made a beautiful maid of honor. Even Scarlet and Much were in attendance: the owls often roosted in the covered bridge during summer. Today Alana’s music, and everyone’s merry laughter, had shaken them out of their daytime sleep, and they glared at us from the shadows of the rafters. Seraph had found her perch with Bird’s mother. She sat erect on the huntmistress’s shoulder, and both of them watched us with a fierce, sharp, and undeniable pride.

  Mae Tuck held a bouquet of her own instead of a prayer book as she presided over the ceremony—​although she had to hold it in one arm when Anna Robin tugged at her skirt, asking to be held. The toddler beamed at us as the Mae spoke of holy days, of turning points in the wheel of the year.

  “Today marks the beginning of a new season,” she said, “for the earth, and for you. The warmth of summer, the harvest in autumn, the restful stillness of winter, and the resurrection of spring bring blessings for the earth and all who walk upon it. So may you bring blessings to each other, through all the seasons of your lives.”

  Bird clasped my waist and pulled me close. I drank in his kiss like a tree drinks in sunlight.

  I heard a whistle from the crowd below—​Will Stutely, surely—​and we parted, laughing.

  I tossed my armful of lilies over the balustrade and the river caught it. The white bundle danced on the water, the flowers scattering with each ripple and wave.

  My hands free, I grasped Bird on my right side and Little Jane on my left, and we ran off the bridge and into the welcoming crowd.

  Author’s Note

  Come listen to me, you gallants so free,

  All you that love mirth for to hear,

  And I will you tell of a bold outlaw,

  That lived in Nottinghamshire.

  —​“Robin Hood and Allen a Dale”

  English and Scottish Popular Ballads,

  ed. Francis James Child, 1888

  Most historians these days will tell you that Robin Hood never existed. Even when he was generally believed to have lived at one point or another, it was hard for anyone to agree on who he was, or even what century he lived in. The fact that he was a “he” was pretty much the only constant. However, just as Silvie comes to care about the liberation of her community more than her own life, knowing the ideals behind Robin Hood lore is more important than knowing whether such a person really walked through Sherwood Forest. The radical rejection of an unjust system, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, is an inspiring notion regardless of historical veracity.

  Alana Dale is the only character in this book who is based on a real person: Julie d’Aubigny, “La Maupin.” La Maupin was an opera star and swordswoman in seventeenth-century France, as famous for her many duels and her love affairs with both men and women as for her beautiful voice. She really did join a nunnery under false pretenses, to free her imprisoned lover—​an adventure that involved bodysnatching, arson, and a sentence to death by fire. Alana’s songs, “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” in Chapter 15 and a slightly altered “Robin Hood and Allen a Dale” at the book’s end, are real folk ballads.

  Loughsley Abbey is real, too, or at least, it’s based on Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, Ireland. The lordly “big house” set between a rockface and a river, complete with a sophisticated-for-its-time running-water system and beautiful walled gardens, is one of Ireland’s most famous buildings for good reason (although its real-life owners seem to have been at least a little kinder to the people around them than the Loughsleys were).

  Since there are female versions of Allen a Dale (Alana), the Saracen (Ghazia), Friar Tuck (Mae Tuck), and Little John (Little Jane), as well as Robin, in this book, it might seem strange that there’s no male Maid Marian here. In my research, I was surprised to learn that Maid Marian is absent from the earliest known recordings of the Robin Hood ballads. When she does first appear, it’s as a personification of the Virgin Mary, or of pagan May Day festivities; she did not become Robin’s love interest until Victorian times. In some early stories, Robin Hood was himself a “Marian,” a follower of Mary. I wanted to bring back that veneration of the divine feminine in my own retelling.

  I had my first baby while writing The Forest Queen, and I received wise and compassionate care from the midwives in Ireland’s public health-care system, as well as from COPE Galway’s Waterside House. Mae Tuck is all the women who guided me so kindly and expertly through the earthshaking transition to motherhood. I am so grateful to them, and also to two old friends who work in the field: Emma Dorsey, who helped me find information on midwifery, birth control, and abortion in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and Katherin Hudkins, a postpartum doula who crossed an ocean to bring her support to my family. The word Mae is applied to holy women in several religious traditions, including the Mae chee in Thai Buddhism and the Mãe-de-santo in Umbanda, and I borrow it here with heartfelt respect.

  The Forest Queen is dedicated to my baby. I love you beyond the measure of any words.

  Take the key from behind your grandmother’s portrait. I am certain your father still keeps it in the foyer—no one will have touched it in years, I hope. But you, darling, will be able to find the key.

  Walk to the end of the hall and open the cellar door. It has no lock; do not fear closing it behind you. Go inside.

  Be careful when you walk down the stairs; the wood is weak and treacherous. Bring a candle. The cellar is very dark.

  At the bottom of the stairs, turn left. An old writing desk lurks there in the shadows. Push it aside. No doubt you’ve grown up a good strong girl and won’t need help.

  Look: there is a door in the wall.

  You won’t see a keyhole, but run a finger over the place where one would be. I know no daughter of mine will mind the dust.

  Twist the key into the keyhole. You might need to worry it a little.

  There, darling. You’ve found it. Use it well.

  ✷

  My mother was wrong about one thing: the cellar door did have a lock. Stepmother had locked me inside enough times for me to know.

  She was right about everything else. I was plenty strong enough to push aside the writing desk; I only cursed myself for never having done so before.

  Of course, I’d thought Mother’s workshop was long since destroyed. I’d seen the fire myself.

  Besides, that desk had been my dearest friend. The first time Stepmother locked me in the cellar, a forgotten stack of brown and brittle paper in its top drawer and a cracked quill and green ink bottle underneath provided me with hours of amusement. I drew improbable flying machines and mechanized carriages; I drew scandalous, shoulder-baring gowns with so many flounces and so much lace that their creation would have exhausted a dozen of the Steps’ best seamstresses.

  Not that Stepmother hired seamstresses anymore. I provided her with much cheaper, if less cheerful, labor. I sewed all of their dresses, though my fingers were not small or nimble enough for the microscopic stitching she and my stepsisters required. I took care not to show how much I preferred fetching water and chopping wood to sewing. Stepmother considered “hard labor” the most punishing of my chores, so she assigned it often.

  I never told her how those chores offered me precious, rare glimpses into my memories of Mother. I could see her face, covered in a subtle powdering of soot, laughing at my disapproving father as she carried an armload of wood or a sloshing pail of water down to the cellar. Until recently, those memories, and a few of her smallest inventions, were all I had of her.

  I needed to hide her machines from Stepmother, of course: the whirling contraption that dusted cupboards for me, the suction seals that kept mice out of the drawers, the turn-crank in one closet that polished shoes. Mother had taught me enough to keep her machines in repair. When she was alive, she’d dreamed of my
going to Esting City for a real apprenticeship, as she herself had always longed to do. But Father would never hear of it.

  Anyway, neither of them was able to help decide my future anymore. Now that they were gone, all I knew was that I could not abandon their house to the Steps.

  I digress. Father always told me not to worry over things that can’t be helped, but I never took his instructions to heart.

  He died on New Year’s Eve, the year I was ten. I wept noisily over the dispatch letter that announced his death, smearing tears onto the sleeves of what I didn’t know would be my last new dress for years. Stepmother stood silent behind me.

  He had taken his new wife, with her two mewling, puny daughters, only a few months earlier. I’d tried to befriend Piety and Chastity at first, to beguile them into joining me for a horseback ride, a walk, or even a simple game of boules on the lawn.

  I tried talking about books with them too. They responded with glazed expressions and derisive giggles, and when I finally had the chance to look at the beautiful collection of leather-bound books Stepmother had bought them, I found the pages ripped out, and replaced with magazines and catalogs.

  Then I knew for sure we’d never understand each other.

  After Father died, the Steps grew so much worse. Within a day of his death, they ousted me from my lifelong bedroom, and I was too stunned with grief to argue. My room was next to my stepsisters’, and Stepmother said they needed the additional boudoir space. She liked everyone to think that she would never grant her daughters any excess, but in private she spoiled them as if they were the Heir’s famously beloved horses.

  On the night after she dismissed our housekeeper, she told me to wash the supper dishes. Then—the only time I’ve done it—I did rebel. I screamed at her like a child, like the child I still was. My position in the family was all I had left to tie me to my parents’ love. Though I’d felt it slipping away, until that moment I had chosen denial.