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His last recorded residence was a holding outside Alnwick, which is as far north as a man can go in this kingdom and still be in it.

I sent for Hugh.

"I want a man on the northern road inside two days. Quietly, out of livery, carrying nothing with my seal on it." I gave him the name on a scrap in my own hand. "He is to find out whether Osbert Crane is alive, where he lives, and whether he will talk. He is not to say who sent him."

Hugh read the name, and then he read the date beside it, and his jaw went tight.

"The Locksley case was closed six years ago, sir."

"Then it should not be difficult to explain the missing documents."

"Lord Fitzwalter will not appreciate this."

"I am not investigating Lord Fitzwalter's feelings."

He didn’t laugh, which told me how serious he had decided to be.

"Sheriff, I will do it, and I will do it well. But you should hear this from me rather than learn it the hard way." He leaned in. "He has people in this castle. Not one or two. The clerk in the muniment room is his wife's cousin. Two of the gate watch were hired on his recommendation. Something went out of the archive under the east tower the night before you rode out, and I’ve never been able to find out which of them did it. If you pull on this where anybody can see you, he will know by supper."

"I pulled on it in front of Peverel this morning, in his book, in ink."

Hugh closed his eyes briefly.

"Then he already knows," he said.

My own chambers were cold, and I hadn’t thought about that in twenty years.

I’d lived in those rooms for three years and never once found them empty, because a room is only empty by comparison and I had nothing to compare them to. Now I came in off the stairs and stood in a space with a bed nobody had built a wall of blankets in, and the whole of it felt like a cell somebody had furnished.

I got the coat and the belt off and hung the sword where it went. Then I made the mistake of lifting the shirt over my head, and her scent came up out of it and went straight through me. I sat down on the edge of my own bed holding a shirt like a boy.

Four days of lavender and pine and woodsmoke and that cabin, and underneath it the warmer thing that is only hers. I thought about the nest, and her father's green coverlet, and the way she had turned my collar up over the mark with that brisk practical little pat, as though she were sending a man out to the fields.

Somewhere northwest of me, thin as a thread and perfectly clear, she was content. She was sitting somewhere warm and she wasn’t afraid. The relief of knowing it was so large that I had to put my hand over my eyes for a moment.

I wondered whether she could feel me missing her. I decided, on the evidence of her, that she could and would never admit it.

I could’ve been back in Sherwood by midnight. I worked out the route while I was dressing again, which was how I knew I was not being sensible. But a man cannot keep a woman in a cabin forever, and Robin of Locksley wouldn’t be kept anywhere at all.

The only road out of this for either of us rans through a dead lord's name being cleared in front of the King's own council. Of course that road started in an archive and went north to Alnwick, and I had to be in Nottingham to walk it.

There was a knock. A servant with a folded card.

Lord Fitzwalter had requested the pleasure of the sheriff's company at a private supper, that evening, at his own table.

Christ’s nightgown, I thought.

He’d had it set it for two, in a small room with the shutters closed, and he was already seated when I came in.

"Sit. You’ll want the lamb, the kitchen has finally learned what to do with it." He poured for me and not for himself. "Tell me about the Locksley estate records."

Straight to it, then.

"Dry reading," I said.

"And yet you spent six hours with them."

"I spent six hours confirming that the case against William of Locksley was built by competent men, my lord. That has value. The Ghost of Sherwood is his daughter, she has chosen her targets along the old Locksley tenancies for three years. I have never once understood why a woman with a price on her head keeps robbing to feed villages she has no claim on." I shrugged. "The answer is in those boxes. If I am to catch her I must know what she thinks she is owed."