SHORT FIC - AD 1185: The Pleasure of a Peasant's Revel - PRE-SERIES
Title: 1185 AD - The Pleasure of a Peasant's Revel
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: 2,065
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Marian, Robin, Robin/Marian, OCs.
Spoilers/Warnings: 100% pre-series speculation. No spoilers for the show.
Summary: As teenagers, Robin and Marian attend two very different parties, finding happiness in a third, of their own making.
A/N: Another entirely stand-alone excerpt from a far longer fic I wrote (posted entirely at fanfiction.net) trying to mend the deadly outcome of Season Two.
*Again, please note, in this universe Marian has/had an older brother Clem, a knight who has died in one of Richard's many pre-Crusade wars.
Disclaimer: No one can truly own the legend of Robin Hood, but BBC/Tiger Aspect seem to hold rights to this particular iteration.
Category: Action/Adventure, Drama, Romance; Short Fic (1,001-5k words)
1185 AD - The Pleasure of a Peasant's Revel
Night. Robin and Marian are in their teens.
Swooping, birds-eye view: large bonfires light the shireside, blazing into the dark night as though a giant has smashed holes in the landscape, deep into the earth’s burning molten core. In contrast, sedate torches line a path to Knighton Hall. Nobles for many leagues have come to attend Edward, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s party, held the same night as the serf’s pagan revels (the bonfires are theirs).
It is not quite fully autumnal, but the night is a bit chill. Ash dances in the flame’s smoke. The feel of the night is portentous; the wind stirs invigorating goosebumps of the unknown.
At the Hall, Marian has been released from further welcoming guests, and she is found in the kitchens, checking on the night’s feast. Her dress is rather ornate, and keeps getting in the way of the necessary bustle of activity around her.
"Gwyn! Gwyn!" she shouts over the din, trying to get the attention of Knighton’s chatelaine, from whom she needs something.
Even in the chaos and jostle around her, Marian feels immediately when the waist seam of her gown rips roughly open. In the rush and press of activity, someone has stepped on her hem and caused the damage.
Her gown is ruined, the expensive, delicate fabric shredding in her hands; irreparable. Flush with outrage, she wheels to confront the oaf of a servant who has spoilt it.
But behind her, trying to stealthily navigate the narrow space between her and the kitchen wall is no servant, but a somewhat cowed Robin of Locksley, himself in an interesting state of undress. Still gangly from his coming-on-quickly height, but more comfortable in his skin of late, he is more than half out of his oversherte and other party finery, revealing the rough plainness of peasant’s clothes below. He was obviously trying to shed the less-familiar-to-him costume of nobility whilst also making for the kitchen door to leave. His departure from the party’s earliest moments seems to have gone as he planned--largely unobserved, at least by his father, the Earl.
For a moment surprise dampens Marian’s anger. Robin’s eyebrows pull into an apology, even as he sloughs off the last of his outer garments. Her surprise passed, she begins to fume on a slow simmer.
"Come with?" he encouraged her in the same tone as that of an apology he was not sure she would accept.
"You only ask me because I’ve caught you out!" she accused, not sure how to react to him. His quick eyes seemed to register four emotions at once: remorse for getting caught, fear of getting caught by someone more important, and twinkling excitement over the adventure. Perhaps also a desperate dread to be away from the Hall and its party. She did not know which signal to give precedence.
He went on as though she had not spoken, asking curiously, "Do you know where Jeremy keeps his trousers?"
Jeremy? Their groom? "His what?" And what was this expression now? Mischief? Delight? She could hardly keep up.
"Well, you can’t very well come like that."
Come? With him?
A more deliberate bustle erupted from the main house. Someone important was coming toward the kitchens. Servants began to part and make way.
Robin grabbed her hand. She tried to snatch it back, but he lunged forward into the fray and toward the door, and her feet betrayed her. She ran.
Finally, free to give her attention to Marian, Gwyn turned just in time to see the firelight glance off the backs of the two no-longer-children as they raced out the door. She sighed, and found herself wishing she, too, could run away to join the peasants’ revels.
The edge of Sherwood. A peasant’s bonfire less than a mile from Knighton Hall. Plain folk dance and drink and spin stories and music into the night. If anyone there recognizes Robin and Marian for the young nobles they are, no one says a word. They are somewhat off in their own world, anyway.
Marian is wearing a pair of Jeremy the groom’s breeches, and what is left of the bodice of her ornate and striking gown, the ragged edge of the frayed skirt torn mostly away by her hands (and, okay, also Robin’s). If it were not night, her attire would surely be raising more than a few eyebrows.
Though she has agreed to this change of costume, and though she is having a far better time than she ever would have had at the Knighton Hall feast, Marian is trying very hard by turns to be grown-up and embody her perception of "ladylike", and generally failing because Robin continues to tweak her into losing her composure, whether on purpose, or just by being himself.
They are sitting close, but they each look off into the night, or at the celebrating peasants as they talk, not making much eye contact.
"They say you have run wild since your mother’s death, you know," Marian said, meaning be conversational.
"Is that what they say?"
She could not tell if he sounded concerned.
"They say you would rather be a King’s forester in Sherwood than the proper son of an Earl." She was trying to talk like an adult. Like someone attempting to counsel him on his actions. The way to which she was often spoken. "They say you disappear without so much as a by-your-leave for whole days--a week--at a time." (In fact, she had been quite jealous when she had heard this.)
"I begin to think this is a particular friend of yours, this ‘they’ of whom you speak so highly."
This is not how she wanted to be: prim, insufferable, at odds with her own self, and with him. So much for her recent (and expensive, her father had said) instruction in being more ladylike. She turned to him, saying nothing else, but putting the full power of her gaze on Robin.
Examining him, she thought him slight, at times gawky, but less so out here, in the open, away from his Earl father and the nobility and the requirements it made of one.
She wondered if she thought him handsome. She could not decide. It was dark. He was, she settled on, as always, interesting.
"I understand your short temper with me," he offered, as if to make peace. "After all, I took you away from your own party--though I hadn’t set out to."
"My party? What do you mean?"
"Tonight. In the Hall. Our fathers will announce our betrothal." Now it was his turn to look at her and try to gauge her response.
Her mind spun as though she had been struck. She attempted to put on a believable attitude of casual indifference. Robin certainly seemed to be wearing one. The dress, she thought. The expensive dress. It all makes sense. "My father," she confessed, "does not much find time to talk to me of late." Then quickly she followed up with a question, her mind as usual leaping to suspicion. "Is that why you brought me here, along with you? To ask--" It was a laugh, really, the idea of gaining her permission. Her father had not even told her of this deal brokered on her future. It was abundantly obvious her feelings mattered not at all.
"No," said Robin, fully sincere, turning on his elbow from where he was propped on the ground. "Sir Edward, my lord high sheriff, and my Earl father have not thought to ask my opinion of their match. Only, and I didn’t know I’d have the chance to do so tonight," he began to hold her gaze in a very decided stare. "I wished to say to you that I would not make you do something that you would not wish to do."
The stare ended, and he looked away again, out into the night. "Anyway, you would not see me very much, I’m sure," he said, playfully teasing, "I do not doubt I will continue as ‘they’ say, disappearing for days at a time without taking the proper leave of people." Humor played about the corners of his mouth and eyes. "I see no reason why betrothal or eventual marriage should alter that."
Conversation lulled as Marian watched a couple in the shadows whose dance had turned into something more. Something for closed doors and soft tones.
So, was this the boy, then, the someday man she must hang her future on? Robin of Locksley? Next Earl of Huntingdon? Oh, yes, of course her father would like that title. And the current Earl would no doubt like the proximity to her father the Sheriff. But to not even tell her? She sighed.
"No," she disagreed with the lighthearted turn Robin’s speech had taken. "You will change, Robin. People always do. People grow up. And when they do, they never keep their promises."
He sat up to his knees; she had his full attention now. "Like Clem, your brother, you mean?" he asked, ever too perceptive for her liking. "What did he promise you before he went to join the Lionheart?"
"That is not important." Of course it had been important, she contradicted herself internally. "Only, you will change, Robin. Soon you will learn firsthand about politics, and power, and the wide world will call to you, and you will go to see it, or stay and grow sour at the loss of it."
A moment passed with him trying to let the spark in her words die before it reached the tinder box, and he said, "I do not think you know me as well as you might," though it was not a denial. "I do not like promises," he said, as if to excuse Clem whatever his transgression. "To keep one is often complicated."
"Ah, so you let your Earl-father make them for you, then? I see the wide world has come over you faster than I had expected." She got up on her own knees, and they were facing one another, kneeling.
They seemed set to potentially bait one another all night, but in one moment, Robin turned the tide. "How can I stop what he does? How am I to put an end to his plotting and planning? He believes he builds the foundation of a bright future for us. And certainly," this was not apologetic now, "I would not mind a betrothal to you, Marian, if you would not mind one to me. Have we not been friends ever? Were you not there when I strung my first bow? When I nocked my first arrow?"
She agreed he spoke the truth. But this news was fresh to her, she needed to think, to somehow temper it with the feeling of free will (however false). "And as our fathers grow ever-older, should the day come when this betrothal sits ill with either one of us, for whatever reason--?"
He finished her thought, "we release the other from it. We find our own bright future, as it finds us."
"Yes," she said, feeling almost giddy with power, with a connection to another human being who seemed to understand the bleakness of life as a pawn in parental schemes, and she reached for his hand, which he took, though not in a shake as was offered. "I accept."
He held her offered hand in both of his. "Let us kiss, then, fairest Marian of Knighton," he let himself spiral into grandiose speech, "one-day Countess Huntingdon, Mistress of Locksley village and its manor. Let us kiss to seal nothing. Let us kiss because it is today, and you are here and I am here, and that peasant over there is far in his cups, and that one there long asleep, and let us kiss because your Lord father and mine would not like it, and because if it is nice, anytime we see a bonfire we might think of it again, and someday perhaps we shall kiss again for no reason at all, other than this: we need no one’s by-your-leave."
And so they did. It was a bit fumbling at its start, perhaps. Marian certainly had no experience with such a thing, but it was clumsy in an endearing way, and by the time the kiss ended, they had assuredly gotten the hang of it.
A/N: You may enjoy AD 1186: The Nottingham May Faire, which takes place following this.
Author: Nettlestone Nell
Word Count: 2,065
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Marian, Robin, Robin/Marian, OCs.
Spoilers/Warnings: 100% pre-series speculation. No spoilers for the show.
Summary: As teenagers, Robin and Marian attend two very different parties, finding happiness in a third, of their own making.
A/N: Another entirely stand-alone excerpt from a far longer fic I wrote (posted entirely at fanfiction.net) trying to mend the deadly outcome of Season Two.
*Again, please note, in this universe Marian has/had an older brother Clem, a knight who has died in one of Richard's many pre-Crusade wars.
Disclaimer: No one can truly own the legend of Robin Hood, but BBC/Tiger Aspect seem to hold rights to this particular iteration.
Category: Action/Adventure, Drama, Romance; Short Fic (1,001-5k words)
1185 AD - The Pleasure of a Peasant's Revel
Night. Robin and Marian are in their teens.
Swooping, birds-eye view: large bonfires light the shireside, blazing into the dark night as though a giant has smashed holes in the landscape, deep into the earth’s burning molten core. In contrast, sedate torches line a path to Knighton Hall. Nobles for many leagues have come to attend Edward, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s party, held the same night as the serf’s pagan revels (the bonfires are theirs).
It is not quite fully autumnal, but the night is a bit chill. Ash dances in the flame’s smoke. The feel of the night is portentous; the wind stirs invigorating goosebumps of the unknown.
At the Hall, Marian has been released from further welcoming guests, and she is found in the kitchens, checking on the night’s feast. Her dress is rather ornate, and keeps getting in the way of the necessary bustle of activity around her.
"Gwyn! Gwyn!" she shouts over the din, trying to get the attention of Knighton’s chatelaine, from whom she needs something.
Even in the chaos and jostle around her, Marian feels immediately when the waist seam of her gown rips roughly open. In the rush and press of activity, someone has stepped on her hem and caused the damage.
Her gown is ruined, the expensive, delicate fabric shredding in her hands; irreparable. Flush with outrage, she wheels to confront the oaf of a servant who has spoilt it.
But behind her, trying to stealthily navigate the narrow space between her and the kitchen wall is no servant, but a somewhat cowed Robin of Locksley, himself in an interesting state of undress. Still gangly from his coming-on-quickly height, but more comfortable in his skin of late, he is more than half out of his oversherte and other party finery, revealing the rough plainness of peasant’s clothes below. He was obviously trying to shed the less-familiar-to-him costume of nobility whilst also making for the kitchen door to leave. His departure from the party’s earliest moments seems to have gone as he planned--largely unobserved, at least by his father, the Earl.
For a moment surprise dampens Marian’s anger. Robin’s eyebrows pull into an apology, even as he sloughs off the last of his outer garments. Her surprise passed, she begins to fume on a slow simmer.
"Come with?" he encouraged her in the same tone as that of an apology he was not sure she would accept.
"You only ask me because I’ve caught you out!" she accused, not sure how to react to him. His quick eyes seemed to register four emotions at once: remorse for getting caught, fear of getting caught by someone more important, and twinkling excitement over the adventure. Perhaps also a desperate dread to be away from the Hall and its party. She did not know which signal to give precedence.
He went on as though she had not spoken, asking curiously, "Do you know where Jeremy keeps his trousers?"
Jeremy? Their groom? "His what?" And what was this expression now? Mischief? Delight? She could hardly keep up.
"Well, you can’t very well come like that."
Come? With him?
A more deliberate bustle erupted from the main house. Someone important was coming toward the kitchens. Servants began to part and make way.
Robin grabbed her hand. She tried to snatch it back, but he lunged forward into the fray and toward the door, and her feet betrayed her. She ran.
Finally, free to give her attention to Marian, Gwyn turned just in time to see the firelight glance off the backs of the two no-longer-children as they raced out the door. She sighed, and found herself wishing she, too, could run away to join the peasants’ revels.
The edge of Sherwood. A peasant’s bonfire less than a mile from Knighton Hall. Plain folk dance and drink and spin stories and music into the night. If anyone there recognizes Robin and Marian for the young nobles they are, no one says a word. They are somewhat off in their own world, anyway.
Marian is wearing a pair of Jeremy the groom’s breeches, and what is left of the bodice of her ornate and striking gown, the ragged edge of the frayed skirt torn mostly away by her hands (and, okay, also Robin’s). If it were not night, her attire would surely be raising more than a few eyebrows.
Though she has agreed to this change of costume, and though she is having a far better time than she ever would have had at the Knighton Hall feast, Marian is trying very hard by turns to be grown-up and embody her perception of "ladylike", and generally failing because Robin continues to tweak her into losing her composure, whether on purpose, or just by being himself.
They are sitting close, but they each look off into the night, or at the celebrating peasants as they talk, not making much eye contact.
"They say you have run wild since your mother’s death, you know," Marian said, meaning be conversational.
"Is that what they say?"
She could not tell if he sounded concerned.
"They say you would rather be a King’s forester in Sherwood than the proper son of an Earl." She was trying to talk like an adult. Like someone attempting to counsel him on his actions. The way to which she was often spoken. "They say you disappear without so much as a by-your-leave for whole days--a week--at a time." (In fact, she had been quite jealous when she had heard this.)
"I begin to think this is a particular friend of yours, this ‘they’ of whom you speak so highly."
This is not how she wanted to be: prim, insufferable, at odds with her own self, and with him. So much for her recent (and expensive, her father had said) instruction in being more ladylike. She turned to him, saying nothing else, but putting the full power of her gaze on Robin.
Examining him, she thought him slight, at times gawky, but less so out here, in the open, away from his Earl father and the nobility and the requirements it made of one.
She wondered if she thought him handsome. She could not decide. It was dark. He was, she settled on, as always, interesting.
"I understand your short temper with me," he offered, as if to make peace. "After all, I took you away from your own party--though I hadn’t set out to."
"My party? What do you mean?"
"Tonight. In the Hall. Our fathers will announce our betrothal." Now it was his turn to look at her and try to gauge her response.
Her mind spun as though she had been struck. She attempted to put on a believable attitude of casual indifference. Robin certainly seemed to be wearing one. The dress, she thought. The expensive dress. It all makes sense. "My father," she confessed, "does not much find time to talk to me of late." Then quickly she followed up with a question, her mind as usual leaping to suspicion. "Is that why you brought me here, along with you? To ask--" It was a laugh, really, the idea of gaining her permission. Her father had not even told her of this deal brokered on her future. It was abundantly obvious her feelings mattered not at all.
"No," said Robin, fully sincere, turning on his elbow from where he was propped on the ground. "Sir Edward, my lord high sheriff, and my Earl father have not thought to ask my opinion of their match. Only, and I didn’t know I’d have the chance to do so tonight," he began to hold her gaze in a very decided stare. "I wished to say to you that I would not make you do something that you would not wish to do."
The stare ended, and he looked away again, out into the night. "Anyway, you would not see me very much, I’m sure," he said, playfully teasing, "I do not doubt I will continue as ‘they’ say, disappearing for days at a time without taking the proper leave of people." Humor played about the corners of his mouth and eyes. "I see no reason why betrothal or eventual marriage should alter that."
Conversation lulled as Marian watched a couple in the shadows whose dance had turned into something more. Something for closed doors and soft tones.
So, was this the boy, then, the someday man she must hang her future on? Robin of Locksley? Next Earl of Huntingdon? Oh, yes, of course her father would like that title. And the current Earl would no doubt like the proximity to her father the Sheriff. But to not even tell her? She sighed.
"No," she disagreed with the lighthearted turn Robin’s speech had taken. "You will change, Robin. People always do. People grow up. And when they do, they never keep their promises."
He sat up to his knees; she had his full attention now. "Like Clem, your brother, you mean?" he asked, ever too perceptive for her liking. "What did he promise you before he went to join the Lionheart?"
"That is not important." Of course it had been important, she contradicted herself internally. "Only, you will change, Robin. Soon you will learn firsthand about politics, and power, and the wide world will call to you, and you will go to see it, or stay and grow sour at the loss of it."
A moment passed with him trying to let the spark in her words die before it reached the tinder box, and he said, "I do not think you know me as well as you might," though it was not a denial. "I do not like promises," he said, as if to excuse Clem whatever his transgression. "To keep one is often complicated."
"Ah, so you let your Earl-father make them for you, then? I see the wide world has come over you faster than I had expected." She got up on her own knees, and they were facing one another, kneeling.
They seemed set to potentially bait one another all night, but in one moment, Robin turned the tide. "How can I stop what he does? How am I to put an end to his plotting and planning? He believes he builds the foundation of a bright future for us. And certainly," this was not apologetic now, "I would not mind a betrothal to you, Marian, if you would not mind one to me. Have we not been friends ever? Were you not there when I strung my first bow? When I nocked my first arrow?"
She agreed he spoke the truth. But this news was fresh to her, she needed to think, to somehow temper it with the feeling of free will (however false). "And as our fathers grow ever-older, should the day come when this betrothal sits ill with either one of us, for whatever reason--?"
He finished her thought, "we release the other from it. We find our own bright future, as it finds us."
"Yes," she said, feeling almost giddy with power, with a connection to another human being who seemed to understand the bleakness of life as a pawn in parental schemes, and she reached for his hand, which he took, though not in a shake as was offered. "I accept."
He held her offered hand in both of his. "Let us kiss, then, fairest Marian of Knighton," he let himself spiral into grandiose speech, "one-day Countess Huntingdon, Mistress of Locksley village and its manor. Let us kiss to seal nothing. Let us kiss because it is today, and you are here and I am here, and that peasant over there is far in his cups, and that one there long asleep, and let us kiss because your Lord father and mine would not like it, and because if it is nice, anytime we see a bonfire we might think of it again, and someday perhaps we shall kiss again for no reason at all, other than this: we need no one’s by-your-leave."
And so they did. It was a bit fumbling at its start, perhaps. Marian certainly had no experience with such a thing, but it was clumsy in an endearing way, and by the time the kiss ended, they had assuredly gotten the hang of it.
A/N: You may enjoy AD 1186: The Nottingham May Faire, which takes place following this.