The Mercenary's Claim by Chula Stone

Author:Chula Stone [Stone, Chula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stormy Night Publications
Published: 2013-04-14T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

The summer months were passing all too quickly. Busy and active, Kirsten watched life on the manor grounds grow under her husband’s ambitious stewardship. He was everywhere, supervising everything, getting his hand in at every opportunity and seeming to thrive on early mornings in the fields and late nights in the public houses. She could only hope that he was indeed merely keeping up old contacts when he went on these outings. He certainly came home as eager for her charms as he had been from the first.

She asked Neslin about it one day when they were cleaning the deer Wern and Gustav had brought in for their supper. “You don’t think he has a woman in the village, do you?”

“Not my place to say,” Neslin chuckled. She was still stiff in her manner towards Kirsten, though both women had tried to put the unpleasant past behind them, after Kirsten had apologized to both Wern and Neslin. “But I can’t see what he could want in this village. Nobody of a female sort save Oma, the innkeeper’s mother.”

As if to herself, she continued, “There might be another thing that draws him. What takes a man to a public house? Can be the drink, but he’s plenty of that here, and better. Can be gaming, but the captain, or the master, as I should now say, he doesn’t go in much for wasting money he hasn’t got. Can be for the company of his own kind. That sounds more likely. Varin’s camp can’t be too far off. Might be he wants the sight of a friendly face or two. Faces with beards, that is. And the crowd. Gustav always was a one for the crowds. Loves to tell stories and laughs longest and loudest of all.”

Kirsten nodded. She could see that in him. Then she frowned. This Varin person was not the kind of man she wanted her fledgling nobleman husband to consort with. She had met him over the weeks and months she had resided here at Schoenfeld. Frena had met him before her departure and had been reserved in her judgments. Neslin of course had always been unstinting in her admiration, but Kirsten could not warm to him.

The man himself was one thing. What he represented was quite another indeed. She would have to ask Gustav about where he went and what he did there, though what she could do about it if she did not like the answers, she had no idea.

She was still puzzling over the problem after their simple supper of stewed venison and bread, followed by strawberries bathed in cream. Once Neslin and Wern had taken themselves off to the quarters that they used as often as not, since their children were well taken care of by Neslin’s mother and sister in their house in the village, Kirsten worked up the courage to begin her interrogation. “Are you going to the public house tonight?”

“I hadn’t thought to.”

“There’s not much moon, is there? Hard

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