The matter seemed straightforward, he thought. If the constable and his posse failed to apprehend the thieves at Stiller’s Ford, then Gilan might need to join the pursuit. But that seemed unlikely.
Arald smiled at the watchman standing to attention before his desk. “Thanks, Richard. I imagine you’ll want to join the posse and get after these men?”
Richard allowed himself a faint smile in return. “I would, my lord. I’ve known old Ambrose all my life. But I don’t know the turnoff to the back trail they’ll be taking. I’ll stay behind in case I’m needed in the village.”
Arald pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Not a bad idea at that,” he said. With the other members of the watch absent, along with a further five able-bodied villagers in the posse, an opportunist might well take the chance to cause mischief in the village. “Very well, Richard. We won’t keep you any longer.”
The watchman gave a short bow of his head in salute, turned and left the room, accompanied by the still-annoyed clerk. As the door closed behind them, Arald looked once more at a sheet of notes on the desk in front of him.
“Well, I think that just about finishes our business, Gilan,” he said. “You’ll join us for dinner? My wife would be delighted to hear the latest gossip from Whitby Fief.”
Gilan hesitated. Strictly speaking, he should have expected to dine with the Baron on his first night at Redmont. But Jenny’s invitation had driven any thought of protocol from his mind. He realized that Arald was grinning at him.
“Got a better offer, perhaps?” the Baron said slyly.
Gilan felt himself flushing. “Um . . . well, sir . . . as a matter of fact, Jenny had asked me to—”
The Baron held up a hand to silence him. He knew Jenny, of course. She had been a ward in his castle and had been an apprentice to Master Chubb, his chef. She was every bit as good at her craft as Chubb was. And in addition, she was blond and vivacious and pretty. In the Baron’s eyes, that constituted a much better offer than dinner with himself and his wife. For a moment, he felt a little old.
“Say no more,” he said magnanimously. “We’ll have plenty of opportunities to dine together while you’re here.”
“Thank you, my lord,” said Gilan. “We’ll definitely do it another night. In fact, perhaps I could invite you and Lady Sandra to be my guests at Jenny’s restaurant later in the week?”
Arald beamed with pleasure at the thought. Chubb was a master chef, without doubt, but Jenny brought an array of imaginative and adventurous new ideas to her cooking and the prospect of a meal cooked by her was too tempting to refuse. Besides, Lady Sandra would enjoy an opportunity to get out of the castle for an evening. Gilan, for his part, knew the presence of such exalted guests in her restaurant would do Jenny’s business no harm.
“Later in the week then,” Arald said. Then he couldn’t help smiling. “And enjoy your evening.”
“Thank you, my lord,” said Gilan, rising to leave.
As he turned toward the door, Arald added in an undertone, “And the dinner as well.”
5
TOMAS LEANED AROUND THE DOORJAMB INTO THE KITCHEN. The large window facing onto the village high road would allow any passerby to see him and his men if they went farther into the room. He gestured to Jenny. “Pull that curtain.”
She eased past him and pulled the curtain across, cutting off the view of the street. Satisfied that he couldn’t be seen, Tomas moved into the kitchen and prowled around, looking in containers, opening and shutting drawers. Nuttal and Mound entered with him, but they contented themselves by sitting on the straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table.
Tomas’s eye fell on the plum tart, which Jenny had set to cool on the sill of the side window. “What’s this then?”
“It’s a plum tart,” she told him.
There was a dangerous tone in her voice that should have told him to keep his hands off, but Tomas was used to ignoring such warnings. He seized the pie dish and brought it to the kitchen table. Setting it down, he drew his dagger, cut a large, uneven chunk out of the pie and crammed it in his mouth. He chewed for a few seconds, then a look of distaste came over his face and he allowed a large, half-chewed mouthful to spill out of his mouth onto the kitchen table. He tossed the rest of the slice beside it.
“Not sweet enough,” he exclaimed angrily. “Should be sweeter than that.”
Jenny’s eyes narrowed. It was one thing to break into her home and hold her captive. But such oafish criticism of her cooking took things to a new level of enmity. “The filling is made from plums,” she said. “They’re supposed to be tart. That’s what plums taste like.”
Tomas shook his head vehemently. “It’s a tart. It should be sweet,” he said. “What would you know about it?”
“It is a tart, and that’s what it should be . . . tart!” She searched for another word, realizing how ridiculous the repetition sounded, but couldn’t find one. “Just the way it is!” she added, her cheeks beginning to burn with anger. Gilan loved her plum tart, she knew. And he particularly loved that she didn’t make it too sweet, but let the natural flavor of the plums come through. What would this buffoon know? How dare he criticize her cooking!
Tomas eyed the angry young woman before him. Pretty girls shouldn’t argue with their betters, he thought. And he was convinced that he was her better, for the simple reason that he was male. She needed to be taught a lesson. Needed to be brought down a peg or two. He swept the tray and the tart off the table with the back of his hand, sending it rattling to the floor. The tart broke into several pieces and he stamped his foot on the two larger ones, mashing them into the floorboards.
“Oy!” said Mound, half rising from his chair, and angry at his leader’s self-centered behavior. “I wouldn’t have minded a piece of that!”
Tomas included him in his glare. “It was no good,” he said. “Needed sugar.”
Nuttal, ever anxious in the face of any sort of altercation, rose and moved away from the table.
“You numbskull!” Jenny flared at Tomas, her eyes flashing from the ruined tart—Gilan’s tart, she thought—to his face. This . . . thing . . . had ruined Gilan’s tart. Suddenly, she hated him with all the passion she could muster. “When Gil—”
She was about to say “When Gilan gets here, he’ll make you pay for that!” but stopped herself in time. She mustn’t give them any warning that the young Ranger was due to arrive in less than an hour.
Tomas leaned forward, his brow creased with a thoughtful frown. She had been about to say something and then she had stopped herself, he thought. In his experience, when people did that, they knew something that they didn’t want him to know. “Go on,” he said. “When . . . what?”
Jenny shook her head, dropping her eyes from his gaze. “Nothing,” she said, trying to sound casual. “It’s nothing important.”
“Then you can tell me what it is,” he said in a silky voice, moving closer to her.
“It was nothing,” she insisted. But before she could back away, he reached out and grabbed her forearm in both his hands. He gripped hard, then, with a sudden movement, he twisted one hand to the right and the other to the left, still maintaining his hold. The effect on her flesh where his two hands met, suddenly twisted hard in opposing directions, was agonizing. A burning pain shot up her arm and she screamed. Tomas released the pressure and the pain eased.
“Leave her be,” Mound said. He had resumed his seat, but now he stood again, confronting Tomas across the table. He wasn’t totally against torture if it could provide useful information. But he felt Tomas enjoyed it too much. The bearded thief glared at him, his hands still loosely circled around Jenny’s arm.
“Back off, Mound! Don’t be soft! There’s something she isn’t telling us and I plan to know what it is.”
“All the same . . . ,” Mound said, and made an ineffectual gesture toward Tomas’s hands, still gripping her forearm, ready to inflict more pain at any second. But he couldn’t find a valid argument to stop Tomas, and his
voice trailed off. A cruel smile twisted Tomas’s lips and he tightened his hold on Jenny’s arm again.
“Now, miss, you were going to tell me . . .”
Jenny set her teeth, glaring in fury at him, determined that, no matter how bad the pain might be, she would tell him nothing. She felt his hands tighten again, then Nuttal interrupted.
“What’s this then?”
They all looked at him. He had been prowling the kitchen, examining implements and her pots and pans, when his gaze fell on the note she had propped up on the dresser. He picked it up and peered at it more closely. He couldn’t read, but he recognized the oakleaf letterhead at the top of the page.
He tapped it now with his forefinger. “That’s a Ranger’s mark, that is,” he said. He proffered the sheet to Mound, who was the only one among them who could read. “What’s it say?”
Tomas released Jenny’s arm and moved to look over Mound’s shoulder as the big man slowly read the note, his lips moving as he silently sounded out the words. Then he read aloud.
“Dear Jenny, I’d be delighted to have dinner with you this Thursday. I’ll come by your house around six in the evening. Looking forward to it already.” He looked up. “It’s signed ‘Gilan,’” he said.
Tomas allowed a string of curses to spill from his mouth. “Gilan!” he said.“He’s the one who comes here when the local Rangers are called away.”
Nuttal was frowning, not understanding. “But you said he wasn’t coming till next week.”
Tomas sneered as if he were talking to a simple child. “And that’s what I was told. That’s why we robbed the silversmith today!” He looked angrily at Jenny. “ This Gilan, he’s a friend of yours, is he?”
She tried to look as if the whole subject of Gilan was totally unimportant. She shrugged. “I just know him, that’s all. Sometimes he drops by.”
“And he’s ‘just dropping by,’ as you put it, tonight? At six o’clock!” Tomas shouted at her. “Were you going to mention this at all?”
Jenny said nothing. There was no answer she could make to that, other than Why should I? And if she said that, it would only serve to infuriate Tomas even further.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Nuttal interrupted. His eyes were flicking around the kitchen as if he expected Gilan to walk in the door at any moment. “We’d better make a run for it!”
“Don’t be an idiot!” Tomas turned his anger on the smaller man, much to Jenny’s relief. “We can’t leave now! It’s still broad daylight outside. We’ll be seen!” He turned back to Jenny. “I won’t forget this,” he told her ominously. He spat out a string of curses again, and Jenny flinched with the intensity of it all. “Let me think . . . ,” he muttered to himself. But it was Mound who came up with the answer.
“We do as we planned to do all along,” he said. “We wait till a few hours after dark and then we leave.”
“And wave good-bye to the Ranger as we go?” Tomas demanded sarcastically.
Mound met his gaze evenly, allowing the other man to see that he wasn’t cowed. Then he replied deliberately. “There are three of us. One of him.”
“But he’s a Ranger!” Nuttal’s voice rose to a near shriek and Mound shot him a disparaging look.
“That’s right. And he’s not expecting us to be here. He’s expecting to walk in and have dinner with his girlfriend here.”
Tomas was starting to nod as he saw where the big man was heading. “And when he does?”
“When he does, we’ll simply knock him on the head before he realizes what’s happening. Then everything’s back to normal,” Mound continued.
Knock him on the head. It sounded relatively harmless, Jenny thought. But she knew it was anything but. Mound confirmed it a few seconds later as Nuttal continued his whining protest.
“But he’s a Ranger!” he repeated frantically. The big man placed a hand on his shoulder and turned him so that their eyes met.
“Yes,” he agreed. “And two seconds after he walks in that door, he’ll be a dead Ranger.”
6
TIME DRAGGED. EACH MINUTE THAT PASSED SEEMED LIKE HALF an hour. Jenny had a water clock in her kitchen and she glanced at it constantly. The level seemed to remain unchanged for minutes at a time, and once, she rose to make sure that the water was dripping freely from the upper vessel into the lower.
It was barely a quarter past five and Gilan wasn’t due until six. Somehow, she thought, she had to prevent him from walking into the trap that Tomas and Mound would set for him. Skilled as Gilan was, he would have little chance of avoiding their ambush. She glanced at the door. The robbers had discussed their plan. Ten minutes before Gilan was due to arrive, they would place Jenny, bound and gagged, in a chair facing the door. Mound would stand beside the doorway while Tomas and Nuttal hid in the adjoining room. When Gilan opened the door, he would immediately see Jenny. His first instinct would be to rush forward to free her, and when he did, Mound would strike from his hiding place behind the open door. He had a heavy cudgel—hard wood studded with blunt iron spikes. One blow would crush Gilan’s skull, Jenny knew. Then Tomas and Nuttal would finish the job with their daggers.
In her mind’s eye, she could see Gilan facedown on the floor, blood seeping from his head, still and lifeless. Her eyes misted with tears and she shook her head to dispel the vision.
Then she was seized with anger as she looked at the three men. Mound and Tomas were playing a game of dice on the kitchen table, bickering from time to time over the scores. Tomas was a particularly bad loser, she thought. Then anger slowly gave way to hatred as she watched the bearded man, listening to his boasting when he won a hand and his complaints and whining when he lost.
Mound was silent. He was actually the real danger man of the three, she thought. He was big and muscular. And he seemed a type who would remain calm in a crisis. Tomas was a self-centered bully and Nuttal was a sniveling coward. But Mound was the one to watch. If she could find a way to stop him, she would be well on the way to saving Gilan’s life.
And her own. She realized the fact with a jolt. Her own life was in just as much danger as Gilan’s. She had realized earlier that the three men would not leave her behind to tell where they had gone. Yet, somehow, she could face the thought of her own fate far more easily than Gilan’s.
Her gaze went back to Mound. Powerful. Brooding. Unflustered. How could she stop him? She knew she couldn’t wait much longer. Soon they would tie her up and place her in the chair opposite the door. She glanced at the clock, heard a minute plop! as a drop fell, spreading ripples across the surface of the water in the bottom cylinder, and glanced at the scale. It was nearly half past five.
She looked back at Mound. He was sitting closest to the oven, where the leg of lamb was sizzling quietly inside. For the first time in an hour, she became conscious of the mouthwatering smell of the roasting lamb. She looked at the kitchen bench beside the oven. Her heavy rolling pin, the one she had used to roll out the pastry for the ruined plum tart, was standing in its rack on the bench. A few centimeters beyond that was her array of knives, every one of them razor sharp. If she could get her hands on one of them, she thought, she could show these ruffians a thing or two. But she knew they would never let her get close to the knives. The rolling pin was another matter. That and the heavy iron skillet hanging from a hook on the wall. If she could just find some way to distract the robbers’ attention for a few seconds . . .
She thought nothing of the fact that she was prepared to take on three armed criminals with nothing more than a couple of kitchen utensils. Jenny’s protective instincts had been aroused. If she didn’t do something, Gilan would die.
She realized she could never live with that. Then, with another shock, she realized that she wouldn’t live with that.
Plop! Another drop of water. Another thirty seconds gone.
“Any sign of him?” Tomas asked, looking up from the desultory dice game. Nuttal moved to the kitchen window, pulled the curtain back a crack and peered
out at the darkening street.
“Nothing,” he said, letting the curtain fall again. Jenny held her breath, willing him to move away from the window over the kitchen bench. An idea had formed in her mind, but if they were all grouped close to the oven and the bench, her task would be more difficult. She let the breath go as Nuttal returned to his seat across the kitchen, sitting down and staring aimlessly into space.
Time to act, she thought.
“The lamb’s done,” she said. All three of them looked at her. She’d been silent for the past twenty minutes, and for a moment, none of them knew what she was talking about. She gestured to the oven.
“There’s a leg of lamb roasting. I should take it out or it’ll be burned and dried out.”
“What do we care about that?” said Nuttal in his whining voice.
Mound glared at him.“I care about it. I’m hungry and we’ll need food for the road. A roast leg of lamb would go very nicely, I reckon.”
“Oh,” said Nuttal, looking somewhat crestfallen. “Yeah. I suppose so.”
Jenny glanced at Tomas. “What do you say?” she asked. “If it doesn’t come out now, it’ll be ruined.” In fact, she knew the lamb could easily take another thirty minutes or so of slow roasting. But these three wouldn’t know that.
Tomas sneered at her. “Ruined like you ruined the plum tart?” he said. Then he waved a hand toward the oven. “Yeah. Go ahead if you want to.”
She rose, picked up a cloth and opened the oven door. The rich aroma of the lamb filled the room. There was a set of wooden tongs on the bench and she casually picked them up, holding them ready under her arm as she reached in, her hands protected from the heat by the kitchen cloth, and seized the iron roasting pan with the brown, sizzling leg of lamb in it.
Mound had turned to watch as she took the lamb from the oven. Fat sizzled and jumped off the leg and he unconsciously ran his tongue over his lips. He hadn’t eaten all day, he realized.
The Lost Stories Page 22