A Fortunate Woman by Jennifer Lyndon

Author:Jennifer Lyndon [Lyndon, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Platypus Publishing
Published: 2017-12-14T07:00:00+00:00

Part III

-CH 16-

The visit to Saranedam for the solstice had been enjoyable. Nonetheless, we were pleased to be home again. I began work almost immediately on the woodrose vines. My main fields were finally ready for harvest in late summer. The vines were treated in much the same way as any other, only more aggressively. They required pruning far more often than torppine vines. The seeds were then gathered and sorted for quality, and deposited in the appropriate casks for the fermentation process. In addition to this, I had every flower and damaged leaf, as well as the overgrowth from the pruning, collected. These parts of the plant were then baked and deposited in an enormous vat to make woodrose tincture. If the seeds failed to produce a quality alcohol, I planned to fall back on using the tincture to fortify each bottle after production.

Lore had been correct in her assessment about the demand for my new woodrose enhanced berrywines and torppa. My traditional torppa was selling as well as usual, but no one wanted my berrywine unless they were from the new batch. For that reason, I opened all of the older stock I was storing, mixed in a safe level of the new batch of woodrose tincture, and began a secondary, or bottle fermentation process, by adding yeast and sugar to each bottle after the tincture was added. In this way, I created an exceptional sparkling rose’ berrywine. My entire stock, aside from the cases I withheld for personal consumption, sold out within weeks, and orders began arriving immediately to secure cases of the following production year.

Lia began to take an interest in the berrywine process after her experience with the woodrose tincture, though neither of us apparently wanted to use that potent potion again. She accompanied me to the fields and distilleries each day, with Astrid in tow, helping in every way she could think of, as I waded my way through the enormous demand I had inadvertently created. Of course, Lia believed I was a genius, and my plan all along had been to market my product, rather than to kill Lord Gere. At that point she was still ignorant of his demise.

During that period the social world reached its tentacles out to us with a vengeance, despite our remote location. We began receiving a deluge of invitations to various events we had no intention of attending. As a result, I was forced to spend the better part of the morning twice a week politely declining invitations when my attention was needed elsewhere. It was during one of these tedious mornings of office work that I heard a single horse’s hooves thundering up the entryway to Lauderdam. I continued my work for a few minutes, but then curiosity won out over work ethic, and I left my office to head down to the entry hall, intent on discovering who had gained entry past our gate guards.

When I walked outside, I found Countess Emmuska crumpled on the ground.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.