Page 30

He went still, and I watched his face change in the lantern light.

"They're the same," he said.

"Yes."

"Then he couldn't have been there…”

“Exactly.”

He sat down on a crate with the paper in both hands. I let him sit, because I’d done much the same thing an hour earlier and felt no entitlement to his composure.

I hadn’t shown him the rest of it yet.

On the reverse of the dispatch, in the pinched hand of a clerk recording an instruction rather than an opinion, was a notation stating that the document had been withdrawn from the materials assembled for the proceedings against Lord William of Locksley and filed instead with ordinary garrison correspondence. There was a date for that instruction, and there was also, as the Crown's own procedure required, the name of the man who authorized it.

Edmund Fitzwalter.

My lieutenant turned the page over, found it, and went the color of the stone wall behind him.

"Christ."

"Keep your voice down."

"He buried it." He looked up at me, and I will give him this, he understood the size of it immediately. "Fitzwalter buried this?"

I took the paper back from him and held it to the lantern, and the clerk's small neat letters sat there being exactly what they were.

"He buried the evidence that would have cleared William of Locksley," I said. "Six years ago a man read an alibi sworn by six Crown soldiers, put it where no one would look for it, and eleven days later an innocent man was executed on a scaffold in Nottingham."

"Why?" My lieutenant's voice cracked on the word. "Sheriff, why would he"

"Power."

I thought of the Locksley holdings and their four thousand acres bordering the royal forest, and of a house with three centuries of loyalty behind it, the kind of name that makes a neighbor's ambition look small by standing next to it. I thought of a petition to seize and administer that estate, filed three days before the arrest, in that same elegant unhurried hand.

And I thought of a young woman who had been sixteen years old when all of it came down on her. A woman who had lost her father, her home, her name, and her place in the world inside eleven days. And she had spent six years since putting food into the hands of other people's children.

Robin was not the daughter of a traitor.

She had never been.

She was the surviving heir of a man the Crown had allowed Fitzwalter to murder with paperwork. Every arrow she had ever loosed at a Crown wagon had been the truest verdict any court in England ever reached.

I sent my lieutenant up for the garrison muster roll from that autumn, wanting the six soldiers' names confirmed against a second record before I carried any of it further. I went up myself for the trial transcript so the two could be compared side by side.

I was gone perhaps a quarter of an hour.

When I came back down the stairs with the transcript under my arm, the lantern was burning exactly where I had left it, and the dispatch was gone.

I stood very still at the bottom of the steps.

The bundle I had taken it from had been retied badly, by someone in a hurry who did not know how the archive clerks dressed a knot, and three crates along the wall sat not quite square with the floor marks beneath them.

My own notes, which I had left face down beside the lantern, were face up.

Someone had been in this room within minutes of my leaving it, which meant someone had known to come, which meant my investigation had stopped being mine.

Then I heard voices in the corridor above, coming toward the stairwell, and I stepped back into the dark behind the shelving and did not breathe.