Sir Guy of Gisborne's Diary

Entry 9

Morning

My back pain - the result of a week of shovelling shit for the sheriff as payback for not successfully purchasing Cornwall for him - mercifully eased last week, though I still had to take care when mounting my horse, or the kitchen wenches.

However, whenever I was in the sheriff's presence, I feigned agony, hobbling and wincing so that he wouldn't bother me of an evening when all I wanted to do was collapse on my bed and sleep. I was doing such a good job of it that, unfortunately, when I moaned in so-called pain at the last Council of Nobles meeting, the sheriff suggested he send for Pitts to attend me. I waved him away saying that I could bear the pain. I did not want that excuse for a doctor touching my humors, thank you very much.

Anyway, enough of that and on to recent happenings.

Catastrophe! Marian has told me that she is going to become a nun. And it's my fault.

I rescued a swooning abbess - the Abbess of Rufford - and brought her into the castle so she could be under our protection. She said outlaws attacked her. The sheriff blamed Hood and his men. I didn't believe Hood would stoop so low, but was happy, of course, that he got the blame. All was going swimmingly, until Marian dropped that Greek fire on me.

I waylaid her after she had left the abbess. I said I thought we were friends, that in time she might consider marrying me. She said that perhaps she was not the marrying kind. I tried to remain calm but inside my stomach was a butter churn and an out-of-control butter churn at that. No, I thought. You can't be a nun. You can't wear one of those ugly habits. You are meant to wear cheeky mustard-colour cardigans and those skirt/trouser things. But that was that. Marian was going to become a bride of Christ and I was going to go back to my room and cry buckets.

Worse. Once I got back to my room, I remembered the other reason why I hate nuns' habits so much.

Many years ago, my family were invited to a party where everyone was supposed to dress up. My father chose the theme of religion. Isabella, my obnoxious sister, dressed as an angel and I as a nun (some mix up at the tailors, or so I was told). I stamped and shouted and refused to wear the costume, but my father said he would thrash me if I didn't and that was that. Isabella laughed so much when she saw me in it that she wet her undergarments. That, I must admit, had me smirking. She'd ridiculed me so often over my wetting the bed of a night, that it was good to get one back at her.

Oh, the embarrassment of wet bed sheets.

My mother, bless her kindly soul, used to wash and dry my sheets out the back of the house, where no one could see. My father had no such compassion and whenever he got his hands on my wet sheets, he would hang them unwashed on the lines near to the village green for all to see. I think he thought he could humiliate me into not wetting the bed any more. Of course, I was mortified. When he had gone to attend to his chores, I would run over to the sheets and pull them from the line. Once, I was in such a hurry to do this, that I got tangled up in one of the sheets and ended up with it wrapped around my head.

'Oh, look,' one of the village children said, 'a ghost that wees from his eyeballs.'

The shame of it.

That night, determined never to suffer such humiliation again, I came up with a plan. After mother had tucked me in, I moved my pillow and covers onto the floor. Removing my hose and undergarments, I lay with my top half covered by a blanket and my bottom half uncovered. There was a loose floorboard by my bed, which I pulled up, and then I laid face down, my little man hanging down into the roof space. I can't begin to tell you how uncomfortable it was to sleep like that, but it did the trick. My wet slip-ups ended up under the floorboard and my bed was dry every morning. This went on for weeks. My mother praised me to the rafters.

Six weeks after my 'miraculous dry spell' the living room ceiling caved in. Wet rot, the master carpenter declared. Rats or mice most likely judging by the awful smell the rotting timbers were giving off.

'Did you ever hear rats scurrying about under your floorboards?' my father asked.

'Yes,' I said.

'Why didn't you tell us?'

'Because I thought you might kill them and I've never had a pet.'

I was moved to a new bedchamber while repairs were undertaken to the ceiling and floorboards. Funnily enough, I never wet the bed again. I was twelve summers old.

Evening

Two marvellous things happened this afternoon.

The Abbess of Rufford turned out to be a common thief. She stole all the tax monies hidden in the castle chapel. No laughing matter, I'll admit. But you should have seen the sheriff's face, positively puce with rage. Better still, it meant that Marian would no longer be a nun. Halle-fucking-lujah, Praise the Lord and Amen to that.