Who: Ezra Abernathy and OPEN (to the Merry Men types etc) What: Meeting up with the gang and planning some shenanigans. Where: Sherwood Forest, outside of Nottingham, Mercia. When: A few days before the Ball at Camelot Warnings: There will probably be swearing
Differences between the rich and the poor could be stark in some Kingdoms. Mercia could certainly include itself in that list. Taxes were too high to allow the poor to live within their means and were likely to stay that way while King John the Usurper remained on the throne. He had every intention of keeping them downtrodden. The noble houses tended to turn a blind eye, powerless to really stop it from happening. That much had been made painfully obvious the first time one of them had tried to speak out. The Sheriff and his men arrived the very next day with, it seemed, every charge they could think to throw at them. Theft, smuggling, perversion, high treason. If you could name it, it was probably imposed upon them. The entire family were stripped of their titles, the adults thrust into jail to await sentencing. Many of them had been executed. It worked well as a deterrent to the other nobles and all dissenting voices were silenced overnight, or at least they learned to keep quiet.
If you didn’t include the threat of imprisonment and execution if you spoke out against the King, Ezra Abernathy had been lucky to be born into a noble household. He wouldn’t have survived otherwise, at least not past childhood. He had been stricken with some kind of disease early on and the recovery had been long and arduous. Even now he would struggle to perform some tasks that others took for granted. He would never go to fight in the Crusade that King Richard had left for. Were it not for the relative safety that money and titles had granted them, his family would have had to make a terrible decision about how much they could support him. He could have just accepted that privilege and carried on living however he wanted, employing servants to do anything that was too taxing for him and just ignore the plight of others, but it wasn’t only the rich children that could be ravaged by disease. He’d seen people left to die at the roadside because they couldn’t be useful anymore due to illness or injury. The world wasn’t kind to the people who couldn’t pay their way through it.
Just because he could choose to ignore it, didn’t mean that Lord Abernathy ever would. Even if it was quite obvious that the King and his enforcers didn’t agree with that line of thinking. They were just another obstacle to get around. Along with the servants that he didn’t particularly want but had been foisted on him all the same. They were supposed to help him in his day to day life in case climbing a set of stairs became too onerous a task or some such. He’d become quite adept at slipping out of their grasp, especially evading the cook who seemed intent on knowing his whereabouts at all times.
Today was no different. After breakfast he had agreed to go into Nottingham to purchase new attire. The Sheriff had personally invited him to dinner in order to meet his cousin. Probably another attempt to get him to marry into the sheriff's family to give the man better standing in the court. And there was the Ball to think about. Having made arrangements for the carriage to take him along with his usual accompaniment of staff he had slipped out early through a side door, saddled a horse and rode off. His destination; Sherwood Forest. There were people living in there as outlaws who were willing to make a difference. Whenever he could, Ezra would lend his help, even if that just meant providing some food.
In this instance he was hoping to convince them to attend a Ball with him. Not particularly their usual scene. When the vegetation along the path grew thicker he eventually gave up riding and dismounted. He switched the reins to a lead rope and tied his mare to a tree he recognised, leaving her with a feed bag. As he began picking his way through the undergrowth he muttered a prayer to himself that they hadn't broken camp and moved. It would take far too long to find them if they had.