Farewell, My Unlovely
I wrote a few short tales disposing of unloved characters as a result of jokey banter with some lovely friends on a lovely forum. I thought I'd put them here a) because they'll be stored in case my computer blows up and b) because I'd run minimum risk of anyone finding or reading them.
However, A WORD OF WARNING if anyone does stumble upon them - as you can see from my icon, I'm a Gizzy girl, so Bobbin does come in for a bit of stick in the Bobbin Hood stories...
This takes place after episode 10 but before the trip to York in episode 11. Guy is beautiful (of course) but a bit slow on the uptake. Kate is - well - Kate. Bobbin has, alas, put on a bit of weight and lost rather a lot of hair…
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Something was tickling Kate’s nose. She’d awoken to this not unpleasant feeling after a wonderful dream in which the handsome Sir Guy had tossed his luxuriant locks and at last consented to show her his sword … except this time, it wasn’t the sharp, shiny one fashioned by Ecgswill the Smith.
For a brief second, she turned on her side and stretched her scrawny arms, holding on to that thought, but the sensation of something trying to work its way up her nasal passage became bothersome. She was forced to open her eyes, steeling herself to the possibility that her first sight of the day would be Bobbin’s face, relaxed in sleep and resembling a collapsed lardy cake.
Tentatively, Kate explored the area between her nose and lip then swore, uncharacteristically quietly, under her breath. Yet again, the bloody forest rodents had chewed through the fasteners of her fetching forehead plait (best cat gut, but coming as rather a surprise to the cat in question.) This was a disaster - the whole camp, including the beautiful, chiselled featured Sir Guy, would soon awaken and discover that the plait, cunningly fashioned from the tail hair of Cedric the Pedlar’s packhorse, was not in fact her own, although its likeness to her straw-like tresses was uncanny.
Stumbling to her feet, she took herself off to in order to rectify the situation and thought longingly of the days when she had been content with her mouse brown colouring. It was a casual, but cruel remark to the effect that it was not so much mouse brown as mouse droppings, that had prompted her to lie for hours at a time with her hair in the piss vat that Filbert the Fuller used to bleach wool. It wasn’t so hard, as long as those people generously donating their offerings to Filbert gave her the chance to get her head out first.
The lightening process took only a matter of days. Kate was delighted with the results until her fringe fell off, forcing her to wear a rather jaunty cap even through the hottest summer that Nottingham had experienced within living memory. This couldn’t go on and the hair wouldn’t grow back, hence her lurking round the arse end of Cedric’s horse whenever he visited Ye Olde Half Paynted Potte Shoppe owned by her family.
After a brief sigh at the thought of the Potte Shoppe, Kate restrung the plait and made her way back to the dishevelled dump currently posing as the Outlaw Camp. By the time that the scabby unwashed outlaws and the vision of gorgeousness that was Sir Guy had risen, she was once again sporting the most unflattering hairstyle ever mistakenly adopted by a woman who, frankly, needed all the help she could get. Another day in Sherwood loomed, lightened only by the possibility that Sir Guy, finally driven to distraction by her timely reminders about his having deprived her of her brother, would stop her lips with a fierce and penetrating kiss…
‘Ah, breakfast!’ Much broke into her reverie. After stretching and, she fervently hoped, washing at least his hands, he began clattering the instruments which would spell the doom of yet another squirrel. Kate glared at him with distaste, the expression she now reserved for all the outlaws except the one who wasn’t really an outlaw at all.
He’d come back with Bobbin, who had pushed him from the path of Much’s arrow and prevented Kate from pinning him to the ground with a sword. Gisborne! The evil, cruel, black hearted Gisborne. The man who had killed her brother. The man who had wrenched apart her family. The man who had ordered her flogged… The man who provoked in her the strangest of feelings.
‘Not bein’ funny, Kate, but are you all right?’ It was Allan, the least intolerable of this Sherwood rabble. ‘Only, you’ve gone a bloody funny colour and my old mum used to say if the wind changes while you’ve got that expression on your face, you’ll be stuck with it for…’ Allan broke off, as the realisation dawned that, at some point, the wind had indeed changed for Kate and that the colour of her face was the least of her worries.
‘Of course I am,’ she snapped. ‘Or I’m as all right as anyone would be who’s been told to accept that the man who killed her brother is now one of us.’
Allan knew that look only too well; it made her a dead ringer for a constipated rat and boded ill for the eardrums of anyone within screeching range. He held up his hands in a gesture of supplication and muttering that he was needed urgently elsewhere, backed away with unseemly speed.
Kate’s gaze travelled to the evil, cruel, black hearted man who had killed her brother. He’d risen and was in the process of stretching limbs stiffened by another uncomfortable night sleeping on the uneven ground. Legs that went on forever, thighs hardened by hours in the saddle, strong arms toned by lengthy sword practice, his muscular chest leading from the long column of his throat to the flat planes of his abdomen…
‘Are you all right, Kate?’ Lord, this time she faced the soft, dough-like features of Bobbin, and briefly wondered if she should offer to make a plait for him, so that he’d no longer have to comb his hair forward in quite such a silly way. ‘You look like you might be sickening for a fever or some such.’
The look that she shot his way was murderous. Bobbin, like Allan, knew when disappearance was the best option, and did so with indecent haste, leaving Kate to her musings. She observed the way the black knight stood, proud and straight, his beautiful blue eyes rimmed by those long, dark lashes showing just a trace of disdain as he surveyed his surroundings. The breeze ruffled his raven locks and made her forget Matthew, the weaselly brother whom she’d never cared for overmuch until Sir Guy was waving him around on the point of his sword - the sharp, shiny one, fashioned by Ecgswill the Smith.
Sir Guy’s heart-stoppingly beautiful gaze came to rest upon her and not for the first time did she wish that she’d developed a bosom that could be heaved. When he had first arrived, he had told her that she didn’t need to like him, as he certainly didn’t like her and he had definitely not shown any signs of changing his opinion. He never sat near her, barely looked at her and never spoke to her, even after she reminded him for the hundredth time that he’d killed her brother. He would merely fix her with a look of utter contempt and then move away.
Kate possessed few skills, beyond plaiting, chopping wood to stoke the Potte Shoppe kiln and mangling earthenware into shapes the village priest frequently condemned as being too obscene for display. Flirtation and coquetry had never been her strong points, although that didn’t seem to matter overmuch to a sundry collection of forest misfits who’d been without feminine company for far too long. However, a more sophisticated approach than the fact that she wore a frock would be required to attract the attention of the magnificence that was Sir Guy. How she dreamt of being rescued by this brave knight, clutched tightly to his manly chest, her fingers tangled in his silken hair…
‘Yes, I’m quite all right!’ she shrieked at Tuck, who was staring anxiously at her and whom, she feared, looked about to launch into one of his interminable homilies.
‘Are you quite sure, my child?’ he asked. His tone was concerned and fatherly, the one he adopted when remembering that he was a monk rather than a walking advertisement for The One Known as Bobbin Hood. It was wasted on Kate: with a screech that stunned a passing pigeon into plummeting groundwards and providing Much with a welcome new raw material to practise his culinary skills upon, she wheeled round and stalked off deeper into the forest.
Imperilment! That was the answer. She had an uncanny knack of getting herself either imprisoned or imperilled and she would use this raw talent to force a rescue from Sir Guy! She saw him a little distance away and cursed her ill luck: he’d obviously been bathing in the river, as he was clad only in those tight trousers that moulded themselves so well to the contours of his thighs and buttocks, and the soft, billowing shirt, unlaced now and revealing a goodly part of that chest she admired so much. Droplets of water fell gently from the soft curls of his hair and the tips of his lashes, his lids half closed against the sapphire of his eyes.
With a squeal that would have done the village’s prize porker proud, she hitched up her skirts and thundered towards the unfortunate knight, who with lightning reflexes caught and stopped her forward motion towards the river’s edge and a thorough soaking.
‘Whatever’s wrong, Kate?’ his velvet voice caressed her ears as she held herself as tightly to him as it was possible to do and still breathe. Her mouth opened but no sound issued as no connection had been made with her brain; she wished fervently that she’d thought this through before hurling herself at him. Guy, however, interpreted her lack of anything plausible to say as terror, and continued to murmur softly in an effort to calm her down, while gently stroking her hair and musing how much it reminded him of Richie.
‘A wild hog!’ she finally gasped. ‘It was as big as a pony - I thought it was going to trample me, or gore me with its terrible fangs!’
Guy uncharitably thought that on hearing her porcine shriek, the creature was possibly intent on mating with her, but just managed to stop himself saying it out loud. ‘Wait here,’ he commanded, ‘and I’ll look to see if it’s still there. I’m surprised I didn’t hear it myself…’
She clung on more tightly; what she could feel through that thin shirt was causing her a great deal of excitement and she wasn’t going to give it up without a fight. ‘I’m so glad that you were here, Sir Guy,’ she breathed huskily.
‘I always come here to bathe,’ he replied. ‘The outlaws might be content to stink, but I am not.’ With that gesture she had grown to love, he tossed back his raven hair. ‘Come, we’ll go back to the camp - I think that the hog’s long gone, more’s the pity, though I expect that Much would still have made it taste like something that’s been left in the sun too long.’
They walked back in a silence that, though not companionable, was at least not hostile. She paid particular attention to her ablutions that night and when Sir Guy asked his customary and plaintive question of where he was to sleep, was highly disappointed that he failed to react to her response of ‘Here! Here!’ even though she’d said it very loudly and pulled back her covers and everything.
After a few days, Guy was beginning to think that Much had to be the most incompetent hunter in the known world; Sherwood was alive with rampaging wild boar, yet all he ever succeeded in capturing were sad, mangy little squirrels and the occasional half-dead-already rat. No matter in which part of the river he chose to bathe, Kate would suddenly dart from the undergrowth screeching about her imminent threat of death from one of the wretched hogs, which always proved to be as elusive as Prince John’s promises. Why, if he didn’t know that she hated him so much for killing her brother - yes, he did remember - he’d have said that she was deliberately stalking him. God’s teeth, there were times when the woman’s talons almost ripped holes in his shirt! He lived in constant dread that the wild boar would attack one day before he’d managed to dress and then she’d draw blood for certain.
Life for Guy settled into an uneasy pattern, though perpetually looking over his shoulder had given him a frightful neck ache, worsened by the frightful weather. It had now rained constantly, it seemed, for six weeks. Guy had hated the forest before; he loathed it with a terrifying passion now. Everything dripped water. Even the pathetic excuse for a fire that they’d managed to start succumbed through sheer misery and sat before them as a useless combination of old ash and sodden wood. Everything stank. Not just the usual aroma of the great unwashed which always seemed to hang around the camp and Little John in particular. Laid over it was the rank stench of wet and rotting wool and Guy had always hated sheep. His temper, never the easiest to control, was the only thing even approaching boiling point; Much’s disgusting squirrel stew - Sweet Christ, you would think the cretin’s capabilities would have improved with practise in such a limited repertoire - sat in a grey, congealed heap, lurking in one of Kate’s interestingly shaped pots on top of the defeatist fire.
And Kate! Oh, Lord, to be able to escape her! Did the woman’s mouth never stop moving? Why in sweet Jesu’s name did she always have to speak as though addressing people several miles away? Guy would have ventured away from the makeshift shelter of the camp but for fear of drowning in the rain and the bigger fear that she’d follow him and be once again at risk from the mysterious wild boar of Sherwood. She’d taken to flinging her arms round his neck, locking her legs round his waist and moving in what he would have interpreted as a very suggestive way in any one else. He shuddered at the memory. Still, on a positive note, at least the rain kept their enemies at bay - even the infamous Bobbin Hood wasn’t sufficient temptation for them to leave the Castle, with its fires and walls and…roof. It almost made Guy think back fondly to his time as the Troll’s whipping boy, but not quite.
The outlaws had become so accustomed to the rain that the morning on which they awoke to dry weather took them all by such surprise that it was a good hour before they registered it. Everything and everyone slowly steamed dry in the sunshine and all was briefly good with the world until Much cheerily began livening up the stew with some fungi that he’d found growing in Little John’s bed.
It was too much! Guy’s noble stomach, though empty and rumbling, rebelled at this and he quietly stole away while certain that Kate was belabouring Allan at full volume and so unable to see the direction he took. He walked quickly, listening all the while for wild boar or the thudding of feminine feet, but after a time relaxed and raised his chiselled features to the sun, revelling in its unfamiliar warmth. He slowed his pace, enjoying both the quiet and the solitude until he realised that he was a little too close to Locksley for comfort. With a sigh, he turned to go back and saw, to his horror, that where the river bank had been was now a sheer drop into a chasm with a raging torrent of water. If he’d turned the other way, his foot would have dropped into nothingness and he would have surely followed...
The screech could have dissolved teeth. Christ’s bones, Kate had found him! He saw her, face pinched in determination, skirts hoisted round her knees fleeing…nothing. Nothing that he could see anyway. However, he flung wide his arms with a resigned sigh, to halt her in her tracks…and missed. Appalled, he made a desperate grab as Kate, carried forward by the momentum, sailed over the side of the newly created Chasm of Locksley, descending, as she had lived, with no grace and an ear-crunching wail. For a brief moment, he’d thought that he’d managed to catch hold of her, but as he’d looked down, all he’d seen nestling in his long, elegant fingers was her less than fetching forehead plait.
It was all of her that they found; she had been one of theirs, so they gave it a decent burial. Tuck had not had to bury anyone for a long time, so made the most of it with a motivational speech about not falling into despair. Alas for his noble purpose, it simply motivated all within hearing distance to fall into a deep and untroubled sleep.
Guy felt … relieved. At least now he would be able to maintain his standard of hygiene above that of the piquant peasants without having to worry about being flattened or ripped to shreds. No longer would he have to endure strange gyrations, which he was now sure were deliberately intended to arouse him. He looked at his companions, struggling to find words that would convey a little sympathy.
‘I’ll miss her, you know,’ said Much, sadly.
‘You will?’ Guy quickly amended his inflection. ‘You will,’ he intoned gravely.
‘Do you remember how she used to have a little sing-song to herself as she chopped the trees down for our firewood?’ Much asked. ‘The squirrels for miles around used to drop like stones…She was such a help to me. In time, I’d hoped that…’ he trailed off, disconsolate.
'She certainly had a voice that carried,' Guy remarked diplomatically.
'It was quite a skill she had, the dropping squirrels thing,' Much went on. 'She always said that nobody could cook squirrel like I could.' He sniffed mournfully. 'Do you think,' he asked, 'that she and I...' he faltered and Guy felt the unfamiliar stirrings of compassion for this sad, deluded little man.
'Perhaps,' he rumbled, 'given time.'
He thought it best not to mention the boar.