tails flicking the flies away and sun warming their flanks. “I need a task,” she blurted finally, turning from the window and gripping the stone sill. “I cannot sit at my loom or walk through the pastures or ride to Locksley without thinking of—and I cannot sit idle in my room all day. Give me something to do, Father, please.”
Her father’s lips twitched, and he muttered, “You’re welcome to settle my accounts for me.”
Marian, however, was desperate enough to take him at his word. “Show me where you’re stuck and I’ll—”
“Marian,” her father interrupted, chuckling. “That was a joke. I suspect you’d have my accounts in order far more quickly than I, but it’s not proper.” He spoke the words with regret.
“Who would know?”
“Gisborne, for one.” Her father grimaced at her. “Sir Guy has called here twice asking for you. I told him you were indisposed. Eventually you’ll have to receive him, though, and if he asks after your days, what will you tell him?”
Marian felt like scowling. “Lie and say I spend all day embroidering daisies on handkerchiefs.”
Her father laughed, covering it up after half a second too late by pressing his knuckles to his lips. “And when he asks you to embroider him a token to wear on his sleeve? What will you do then, when the last thing you ever embroidered was that pillow there, which I had to rescue from the midden?”
Marian glanced at the chair in her father’s reading nook, which had on it a cushion she’d tried to decorate for him when she was eleven or twelve. The stitches looked like a child’s drawing of a chicken, and the tail feathers ended in an angry snarl of thread. She’d been trying to embroider a dove. She vividly remembered tearing at the knotted snarl of thread and then hurling it violently, pillow and all, onto the trash heap.
Her father’s eyes were still merry, but there was a sadness behind them, a weariness he couldn’t hide. “My dear, I can’t tell you how to spend your days. I can’t tell you what will fill your time, your heart, the void he’s left behind.”
Marian blinked, feeling the hot sting of tears behind her eyes. She so desperately wanted her father to tell her what to do, even if it was correcting the figures in his accounts. “What did you do when we lost Mother?” Marian had been so young when her mother died that she scarcely remembered her except for a misty impression of beauty and stately elegance and a reserve Marian could never hope to emulate.
Her father set his quill into its holder and leaned back in his chair again, closing his eyes. “That was different. You and Robin were lucky—you were born to be together, in love since you were children. Your mother and I—we met only a week before our marriage, you know. It was arranged by our parents. That’s not to say I didn’t love her,” he said quickly, seeing Marian’s face. “I did, terribly. But it took time. And we had a whole life together before she became ill, and then she was ill a long time. In some ways that makes it harder. But in others—I had time to say goodbye. Time to understand I would have to carry on without her.”
“But how?” Marian felt like hurling his account books through the heavy-paned window. She wanted to go to that chair, pick up that pillow, and start unpicking every uneven stitch of the chicken-dove. She wanted to shout at someone, anyone. She closed her eyes, trying not to let the pounding of her own heart frighten her.
Her father’s chair creaked, and she pictured him rising to his feet. “Oh, Marian. For me, that answer is easy. I had you.” She felt his hands wrap around hers, and the destructive urge in her fingertips eased.
Marian’s eyes filled and she leaned forward so her father could wrap his arms around her shoulders. They were almost of a height. She was unusually tall for a woman, taller than Robin himself. There’d been a period when they were children when she’d started to grow taller and he hadn’t, and she’d towered over him. He’d alternate between complaint and boast: crowing when he could outshoot or outrun her with his shorter limbs, then throwing tantrums when she could easily wrestle him to the ground hand-to-hand.
But she had come to resent it, this gangly height that so set her apart. She resented her own strength, the fact