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Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults...
(William Shakespeare)
A twelve-year old Marian is laughing as Robin manages to fall into the river yet again, after just having successfully gotten up. He is covered in mud from the bottom of it, screaming and cursing, words that most people would agree that a young lady such as Marian should never, ever hear. But no one is here to scold them for the mud and the language and the innocence of children. She remembers this day, when she’s older and receives her first kiss from the very same boy who was grumbling about how she pushed him for months afterwards.
It’s like watching an execution the day he leaves. Gut-clenching guilt, mainly for punching him and yelling at him when he told her of his decision. Shaking hands. The tightness in her throat, as if she’s the one with a noose around her neck. And the final determination, as she watches him walk out her door, when she decides to live on in spite of it.
A few years later, Marian is shielding her eyes from the sun, just as a flock of birds startle the galloping horse she’s riding and in a fit of pure fright, it throws her off. She lands on the ground, barely breaking the fall with her hands and then the sun is directly in front of her eyes, along with stars and oddly-shaped birds. When they’re finally gone, she sees kind, but worried eyes and mutters for a second Robin, but the black-haired stranger answers in the negative and carries her safely back home.
His name is Guy of Gisborne, and the few times she catches him in an unguarded moment of happiness, his smile is one of the softest she’s ever seen. It almost makes up for his position, she thinks, if only he would keep smiling, instead of listening to the words of a madman. And even if the new Sheriff makes her want to check under her bed for monsters, the moonlight shines with an ethereal glow in her garden, and Marian knows that she can handle this. She doesn’t need Robin. And she needs him least of all when he finally returns.
She should be thankful and filled with joy, she knows, because there’s change coming. It seems like her Robin, the merrymaking boy covered in mud, has finally grown up. But it doesn’t change the fact that he left and abandoned her, Locksley, Nottingham, England, for five years.
No man is without fault, she thinks, and fights not to claw at her neck in order to rip off the non-existing rope, as she watches another starving, but innocent farmer getting hanged.