When Menders found him, Polzen said the cow had suffered a breech calving and was being left to “take her chance”. When Menders insisted the animal be put out of her misery, Polzen said a bullet wasn’t going to be wasted on her.
It had ended with Menders shooting the suffering cow himself and avoiding the Polzen place afterwards. A few years ago he had offered to purchase the farm, but Polzen refused. Drab, dreary, badly kept with neglected animals, that farm was the stuff of nightmares to Katrin. No wonder Varnia had looked away from Menders.
“Go on now,” Menders said, gesturing gently for Varnia to leave the kitchen. The tall young woman walked away rapidly, her face averted.
***
From Menders’ Journal:
The complications of this summer have me anxious to get away on our journey. Though there is now a tense silence between Cook and Varnia, it is far from a peace. Thankfully Franz has now removed Borsen’s splint, replacing it with a soft, stiffened bandage to support his injured finger.
I am never at ease with any injury to my children, but this incident has me shaken. Seeing how easily Borsen can be severely hurt is unnerving, for more reasons than one. Being a young man, he has been exploring his freedom. That includes going out on his own, mounted on his pony or his gentle little farlin, Sweetheart. Unfortunately, now we know a fall from either could be catastrophic, considering Borsen’s fragile bones.
Borsen has decided to continue riding – and I have to applaud his courage though I quail at the thought. He is an excellent horseman but has no desire to deal with difficult animals, always choosing gentle and obedient mounts. That will be some protection for him. Still, when one rides, it is not a matter of if you fall, but when you fall. It is inevitable. The worst fall I ever had was from a gentle, old horse that was standing stock still. I hadn’t double checked the saddle girth, which was not properly buckled. I wasn’t alert, the horse was practically asleep – and suddenly the girth failed, the saddle slid and I fell off onto a fence, breaking my collarbone and acquiring a terrific black eye and concussion that kept me in bed for a week.
For something like that to happen to my boy and the possible repercussions – I can’t even countenance that. Not now that he’s left the starving, abused waif he once was far behind him.
Seeing him now – small but strong, muscular, graceful, to say nothing of courageous beyond anything I would have expected from a soul so crushed for so long – the idea that something as unlikely as horseplay with a woman of nearly fifty would snap his finger in two makes me shudder.
Yet he doesn’t. He laughed about it even as he stood there with his finger bent where it shouldn’t be. Just as Katrin tried to joke about her badly broken arm two years back and how Hemmett made his amputated toe into a comic prop, claiming to no longer be able to count to twenty. My brave children – each one of them now less than whole, less than perfect – as the Prophecy fortells.
No. I will not entertain that Thrun Prophecy, not even here in the privacy of my journal. My dear children will choose their own paths. Hemmett and Borsen are free to go whichever way they will. Katrin, of course, is limited by her rank, but there may be alternatives to that in the course of time. I know I have done the right thing by keeping them ignorant of the great Prophecy, of the three children who will change the fate of Eirdon. Prophecies have a way of becoming self-fulfilling if people know about and believe in them.
And now there is another child in need standing at my door – Varnia. Angry, damaged, distant, difficult. I would like to send her to Gladdas’ school, where her considerable intelligence and drive could be trained in a direction other than domestic work. This would open great opportunities for such a strong and driven young woman – but if it was even suggested that she leave here, thus leaving Borsen, I know she would react viciously. She might even go back to that farm of her father’s.
So what to do for this difficult one? I keep looking for an opportunity, a window, where I could reach beyond that bristling carapace. Eiren tries, with gentle kindness, but gets nowhere. Katrin is friendly but Varnia remains distant. Borsen is the only person who ever sees her as she truly is – and that is not enough. Her wounds are deep and they have not healed. She’s grown armor over them, while they fester underneath.
Enough for tonight.
***
Cook looked around the kitchen again, though she knew her particular spoon was nowhere to be found. She’d searched every drawer, cupboard, cabinet and pantry. It had been in its usual place the night before, lying in solitary splendor on the butcher block. In the morning, it had been gone.
She’d asked the family and drawn a blank. But unless some enormous spoon-stealing rat had carried it off in the middle of the night, someone had taken it.
Cook sighed and poured herself a cup of tea, settling at the big kitchen table.
Her initial fear after Borsen’s finger was broken had ebbed when it became obvious that word wasn’t going to find its way back to the Palace. It had been a fairly baseless terror in the first place, but no-one in the service of the Royal Family in Mordania was entirely free of fear at any time. The Queen was weak and ineffectual while the Council that truly ran the country was corrupt and erratic.
However, the real threat came from the Queen’s oldest daughter, Princess Aidelia, first Heiress to the Throne of Mordania. She was now twenty-one years of age and had been wildly mentally unbalanced since birth. She reveled in cruelty and sadism – and had been known to intervene in the punishment of prisoners, demanding that they be tortured or executed in the cruelest manner. The stories were dark and twisted, best not dwelled upon.
Cook knew Menders had been openly defying the Queen’s commands for years and that Kaymar was one of her protected Courtiers and had her ear – but still, having injured two Royal children left her in a vulnerable position. That fear had led her to an inappropriate reaction to young Varnia’s rage. It had also led to these weeks of grudge holding and simmering resentment.
She suspected Varnia had made her particular spoon disappear. Part of her wanted to let it go without comment, but it was her most valuable kitchen tool. She cooked for one hundred people at times and you couldn’t do that stirring with a small wooden spoon!
Cook rinsed her empty cup and paused, looking out the window for a few moments. She had come to The Shadows with Menders and Princess Katrin and had weathered many difficulties and dramas with them. She’d treated both the baby Princess and twenty year old Menders as if they were her own children, even though Menders had been a famous assassin at the time, before the Queen had made him Katrin’s guardian.
They’d just weathered a terrible year, leading up to this summer, when a plot to remove the Queen and place Princess Aidelia on the Throne had posed a terrible threat to Katrin. Menders’ Men had caught many hired assassins trying to get close enough to burn the house or find a way into it. None of that had unnerved Cook as badly as Varnia Polzen’s fury over Borsen’s broken finger.
With sudden decision, Cook removed her apron and left the kitchen. A quick foray into the wing that housed most of the household staff produced nothing. Varnia was not in her room. It didn’t take long to discover she wasn’t in the house.
It was a quiet time of day, with breakfast over and preparations for supper complete. The midday meal was a matter of every man for himself – there were always pots of soup or stew simmering in The Shadows’ kitchen, bread and cold meats were available, leftover food abounded. Cook was free for a few hours.
She slipped out the Rose Garden door at the end of the Men’s Wing and looked around.
At first she saw no sign of Varnia. Then Cook realized what she had had assumed was one of Menders’ cultivated rose bushes in bloom was actually glimpses of the young woman’s deep red dress. Varnia was sitting on a secluded bench, almost completely obscured by foliage.
Cook walked forward slowly, wanting to gauge Varnia’s mood before speaking to her. Then she stopped short.
Varnia
was weeping – not as a young woman would normally cry, easily and freely, but fiercely, her fists clenched against her eyes, her jaw moving as she ground her teeth. She was trembling, each sob making her entire body shudder. The sounds she made were muffled but terrible, the moans of an animal dying slowly in a trap.
Cook retreated immediately, closing the Rose Garden door silently behind her. She cogitated for a moment, then made a beeline to Menders’ office. The door was welcomingly ajar and she popped her head around it.
“I’d like to take out the pony trap for a few hours, my dear,” Cook said as Menders looked up from paperwork on his desk. “I have time to go for a gossip round – with you leaving so soon, there won’t be so many times I’ll be able to manage while you’re gone.”
“Of course,” Menders answered, rising immediately. “I could use a walk, so I’ll give you a hand.”
He offered her his arm as they went down the broad stone steps to the oval drive, then sauntered toward the stable. Halfway there, Cook stopped short.
“I don’t have a thing to give Demon,” she said. “Poor boy, he’ll be disappointed.”
Menders laughed and stepped over to a lanar tree drooping with ripe fruit. He plucked several of the golden ovals and returned to Cook, putting them into her hands.
“We couldn’t let him be disappointed,” he smiled.
At the stable, Cook went right to Demon’s stall while Menders took out one of the ponies and hitched it to a little tublike, two wheeled cart. Demon snaked his long neck over his stall door, greedily eying the lanar fruit.
“Who’s a good boy?” Cook asked delightedly as he made odd murmuring noises and nibbled at the fruit with his sharp, doglike teeth. She scratched between his lop ears while slipping one fruit into her pocket for the pony. Demon noticed and shook his head protestingly.
“Greedy grumps!” Cook scolded him. “You have all these! Begrudging one for the poor pony who’s to do all the work today while you laze around here in the cool. For shame!”
Demon took his cue and quirked his head quizzically, making his eyes large and innocent. Cook could hear Menders snickering to himself as he finished harnessing the pony. Demon had his tricks and a bad habit of kicking and biting, as well as the intelligence to know how to devil people. He certainly deserved his name but he had never so much as snapped at her. She felt no fear of him and was sure that was why he never misbehaved to her. Menders didn’t fear him either, but he and Demon were like two rough young men, always thumping and teasing each other.
“All right then, you can have some more when I get back,” she promised while Demon put his head on her shoulder and batted his eyelashes at her winningly. “I have to get moving now and find out what’s troubling the other difficult creature living here with us.” She ignored his mutterings as she walked away.
Menders helped her into the trap, handed her the reins and then watched as she drove briskly away down the drive.
***
Menders rose from his desk and prowled across his study, his jaw clenched. He was obviously struggling to control his temper.
He stared out the window for some time before he turned toward Cook. His anger had ebbed, sadness and pity taking its place.
“I had no idea,” he said to Cook. She nodded agreement silently, swallowing hard.
“I assumed that there had been abuse, of course,” Menders continued. “It’s a given, considering her behavior and defensiveness. And those half-brothers of hers…”
Cook nodded again, trying not to picture the loutish, primitive young men.
“How long ago did her mother die?” Menders asked.
“Mistress Hertzoff says when Varnia was ten years old,” Cook answered. “She’s been doing all the woman’s work on that farm ever since, until she came here when we took Borsen in.”
Menders perched on the edge of his desk, drawing in a deep breath.
“I know Polzen is callous to his livestock and it’s obvious he is to his children as well,” he said in a low voice. “But to let a sick little boy ‘take his chance’ rather than send round here for Franz? Leave a young girl to care for a child sick to death? I had no idea there was a small child on that farm.”
“The boy’s birth carried off the mother. Varnia raised him. And from the day he died as she tried to nurse him, she’s never said a word to anyone about him.” Cook dabbed at her sore, red eyes with her handkerchief. It had been a tearful afternoon.
Menders was silent, letting his mind sort the information Cook had brought home from her “gossip round” – a tour of the village and a couple of estate houses, where she knew the citizens, cooks and housekeepers. It was an excellent way to keep tabs on the happenings in the area. The ladies who ran the households knew everyone and formed a network as complex in miniature as Menders’ own far-reaching web of contacts, spies and informants.
Unfortunately, clan or neighborhood loyalties and a sense of minding one’s own business led to silence at the wrong times – but Cook could jolly just about anything out of anyone.
“Now we know why she’s so attached to Borsen,” Cook said softly. “That’s what I was coming to. She’s acting like a mad girl because she can’t bear the idea of being parted from him. You must take her with you.”
Menders raised his eyebrows, nodding thoughtfully.
“If she’ll come,” he mused.
Cook snorted and stood up.
“Don’t you doubt it for a minute,” she said. “He’s her heart’s blood. I saw it in her eyes when she was about to tear my throat out when I broke his finger. And really, my boy, shouldn’t that young creature have a chance to see the world, considering what her world has been? Why not let her stop working, as she’s done all her life, and go along with the other young ones?”
Menders smiled, feeling some relief from the thoughts flooding his mind since he had heard Cook’s terrible story about Varnia and her younger brother. He must take some action against the father, but that could wait for now. More importantly, he needed to speak with Eiren about adding another member to their traveling party at very nearly the last minute – and he needed to speak to Varnia.
“Won’t it be a problem for you, without a housekeeping supervisor here?” he asked as Cook prepared to return to her kitchen.
“Between myself and Miss Gladdas, I’m sure we can find someone to fill in,” she answered briskly, checking her face in the mirror to be sure all signs of tears were gone.
Menders almost laughed as she left the room. Cook and Gladdas Dalmanthea would make a formidable team. Good thing they had gotten along from the outset!
***
“I’d like a word with you,” Menders said kindly when he found Varnia sorting out the linen closet in the Men’s wing.
She looked up warily, her face pale. Realizing she was terrified that he was going to send her away from The Shadows, he sighed to himself. He continued quickly, to relieve her suffering.
“I would like to invite you to come along with us when we go abroad,” he smiled, taking a pile of linens from her as her grip loosened from shock.
Varnia’s defensiveness and ferocity were completely absent.
“Do you need me to care for Borsen?” she asked, her voice small and distant.
“No. His finger has healed well. We want you to come because you’re of an age with the others and we should have asked you before. I’m sorry we didn’t and I hope you can overlook that.”
“I never expected to be asked,” Varnia responded. “I’m the housekeeping supervisor, not family.”
“I would say that your caring so deeply for Borsen qualifies you as family. You also care about Katrin. Are you determined to find a way to argue? Don’t you want to come?”
“To see the world?” she said, her face suddenly lighting up. She looked as if she might even smile – and Menders realized he had never seen Varnia smile.
“Absolutely. If you’d like to attend classes with Katrin and Borsen, you may. Or you may discover t
hings on your own. You may see the world however you like.”
Varnia smiled and Menders didn’t need her to answer aloud.
***
Cook closed the Rose Garden door behind her. A quick look-round located Varnia sitting on what must be a favorite bench, the secluded one behind the rose bushes.
She made sure the young woman had the opportunity to see her coming so she wouldn’t startle, but Varnia was intent on something she was sewing. Cook would wager everything she had that it was a bit of lace being applied to the bodice of a new blouse.
Eiren had gone into action the moment Varnia accepted the offer to accompany the family on their journey to tour the Middle Continent and Artreya. Varnia sewed well and had some nice dresses in addition to her serviceable work clothing, but she had nothing up to the standard she would need for this journey. So Eiren bundled Varnia, Katrin and to her immense surprise, Cook onto the next train, with Menders, Kaymar and Ifor along for security. They had spent the next five days in Erdstrom, the large city some fifty miles north of The Shadows, outfitting Varnia and picking up supplies and odds and ends for her journey.
Varnia was speechless when ushered into the dress shop of a woman Kaymar privately referred to as Madame Intimidation. Cook noticed that Varnia was bedazzled by flounces and ruffles. She was impressed when Madame gently advised the girl away from having everything look like a pile of doilies.
“My dear, you are a distinguished young woman, tall, slender and striking,” she explained, taking Varnia’s arm and turning her toward a mirror. “Your style should always emphasize your elegance, your height and the long lines of your figure. These are your assets, along with your eyes and the angles of your face. If you put ruffles across your figure or up around your chin, you will lose those things. We will give you ruffles, but at your wrists, long graceful ruffles to show off your exquisite hands. The rest we’ll leave to the cut of your dresses.”
Love and Sacrifice: Book Two of the Prophecy Series Page 5