Mrs. Claus and the Viking Ship by Laura Strickland

Author:Laura Strickland [Strickland, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Medieval, Fantasy, Marriage of Convenience, Family Life/Oriented
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2014-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

“Your people worry about you,” Nels said uneasily. “You never laugh anymore. There was a time, Claus, when your laughter filled your hall every night. They say you are sickening for something.”

Claus made no reply. The two men walked side by side through deep snow, pulling a sledge piled high with greenery: spruce boughs, holly, and even some mistletoe Claus had found. In just three nights they would celebrate Yule—Claus’s favorite time of year—with songs and feasting.

And the giving of gifts. For his wife he had a beautiful amber pendant from the far shores of the Baltic, the most precious thing he could find.

“I am not sickening,” he told Nels. “Have you ever seen a man in better health?”

“You put a good face on it, ja, but me, I wonder.” Nels’ kind face wrinkled. “You do not eat as you used to. Nor drink. Even your mead cup stands neglected.”

“There will be plenty of drinking at Yule,” Claus assured his friend. “We will coax the sun back to us then.”

Nels snorted and shot his friend a close look. “Me, I know what ails you. It is that wife of yours.”

Claus paused abruptly, and the sledge slid to a halt. Beneath a bright blue sky the dazzling air felt so cold it stung his whiskers.

“I do not know what to do about her,” he admitted, voicing to his friend all the doubt in his heart. “I have treated her gently. No gift seems to turn her mind. Ah—she loves the hund, ja—any fool can see that.”

But it did not make her love him. What would he not give for Tinnie to look at him, even once, the way she looked at Frost? But he began to despair she ever would.

Holding her in his arms last night after he made love to her, he had even considered setting her free, releasing her from their bargain. But his heart would not let him do that, either.

“Not once in all these weeks has she reached for me,” he added bitterly. Ja, sometimes she curled up against his broad back in the bed, but he knew full well that was just at the bidding of the cold.

Nels shrugged. “You cannot say I did not warn you. It is as my old mother used to say: You can persuade love, but you cannot command it.”

“I have tried to persuade. Many gifts have I given. I do not know what she wants.”

“Ask her.”

“Eh?” Startled, Claus met Nels’s gaze.

“You have tried everything else. Just ask her what she wants.”

****

“Missus?”

Claus stood in the doorway of the tiny stone chapel, blocking the bright sunlight. The place, built in a spot of great beauty high above the fjord, always felt cold to him. He did not know how his wife could kneel here for hours, praying. But there she was now before the little altar she had made.

He noted gratefully that she wore the cloak he had given her. The fur should keep out the worst of the chill. And Frost, at her side, made a pretty picture of them both until he came to greet Claus happily.

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