The Bastard Prince

by Patty Jansen

  “No, his son Adalbert. He distrusts us so much, he brings his own food and eats nothing provided by the palace.”

  It was true that Nellie had not seen him at the banquet.

  The sound of commotion came from the kitchen. A man was shouting, and a woman shouted back.

  “It seems someone is down here already,” Dora said.

  Like a good mother hen protecting her chicks, Dora protected anyone who worked in the kitchen. She turned to the door and went inside. Nellie followed her.

  Several guards had come in. They stood around Corrie, one of the kitchen hands.

  The woman’s face was all red, and she was shouting, “I have no idea what happened. I saw no one who doesn’t belong here.” And then she saw Dora, and she pleaded, “Please tell him to go away. We have done nothing and have nothing to do with with poison. We cook the food. We also eat the food ourselves.”

  “A man has been poisoned,” one of the guards said, his voice serious. “Your taster is hiding. If you’re so innocent, where is he?”

  “I don’t know. He also works in the yard sometimes, and he fixes things around the palace. He is an honest man. He tastes everything that passes the kitchen. We had some wine, which we all drank, but most of it never came down here.” Corrie was almost crying. “Why do you suspect him? No one else got sick, and Wim used to be one of you, didn’t he?”

  And yes, Wim used to work for the guards before he became injured and couldn’t work anymore.

  Dora went to stand between her and the guards. “If there is any problem, raise it with me. Stop intimidating my workers. We’re busy.”

  “The Regent upstairs demands answers.”

  “No, he demands his meals be cooked. You’re not to bother any of my people. I have served the Regent for many years and I have done so faithfully, I have cooked many of his meals, and the people here have served at his table many times. The people who work here are trustworthy, and I cannot imagine that they would have the stupidity to jeopardise their jobs by poisoning the Regent’s guests. I can imagine even less why any of them would want to hurt the family that feeds them. Now, get out of my kitchen before I set you to pluck and gut the chickens for tomorrow.”

  The guards, strong adult men with swords, retreated to the door. Yes, they wanted food. Yes, Dora was faithful. Such was her reputation that anyone else would have failed both in stopping the guards dragging off everyone from the kitchens for interrogations.

  They were about to leave when another guard came in with a triumphant whoop.

  “Look what I have here!”

  He pushed a man in front of him.

  Wim. Nellie met his eyes. They were filled with despair.

  A cold hand clamped around her heart. Did Wim know something?

  The guard laughed. “I found him hiding in the laundry.”

  Wim was shivering. He was a thin man, with one crooked leg and thinning grey hair and pale skin that was almost translucent in places. “Please, I’ve done nothing wrong. I tasted all the food we cooked here.”

  “But you didn’t taste the wine. Why not?”

  “I tasted all that was brought to the kitchen.”

  “But not the vats that were delivered upstairs.”

  “Nobody asked me to. The monks brought that wine. Why should anyone suspect it was poisoned?”

  “Well, if you are so sure, maybe you’d like to try it now,” another guard said. He set a flask on the table.

  Wim’s eyes widened.

  “This was the wine we found in Lord Verdonck’s room. We will see if it is as safe as you thought.”

  “No, please.”

  “Bring me a cup,” the guards said.

  Corrie could do nothing but to obey. The man took the cork out of the flask and poured the wine. In the utter, horrified silence, the glug-glug-glug of the wine sounded loud.

  Nellie wanted to stop him. Dora looked like she wanted to stop him, too, but in this case she couldn’t. Wim would have tasted all the wine had it come from anywhere except the monastery.

  The guard put the full cup in front of Wim.

  “Drink.”

  Wim shook his head.

  “Drink!” The guard pulled his sword out of its scabbard with zhing of metal on metal.

  Another guard pushed the cup into Wim’s hands.

  “No, no, please. Anything but that. I have a family!”

  “Drink.” The guard held the sword poised at Wim’s throat.

  Wim picked up the cup. Nellie wanted to rip it from his hands. What was the point of treating him like this?

  Wim took a sip and set the cup down. His face was pale and glistening with sweat. “It tastes fine to me.”

  “All of it,” the guard said.

  “Please.” Wim looked like he could faint any moment.

  “All of it,” the guard repeated.

  Wim picked up the cup again. He drank, slowly. The guard motioned for him to hurry.

  He finished the wine. By now, tears streamed down his face.

  The guard poured another cup and shoved it back towards Wim.

  Someone shouted from the door that more tea was needed upstairs. Corrie set about making it because what happened upstairs took priority.

  Wim drank the other cup, too.

  The guards watched him for a while. Nellie had to start peeling apples for making applesauce.

  Wim sat at the table, looking at his knees. He said a few times that he felt ill, but nothing else happened. Then he said he wanted to throw up.

  He tried to get up from the table, but stumbled over his own feet. He landed on hands and knees, and the guards dragged him out the back door where he vomited all over the steps. They made him clean it up with a bucket of freezing water. One of the guards left the kitchen to tell the Regent.

  Nellie needed to go upstairs, but when she came back down, Wim was still sitting at the table, looking at his knees, expecting to die.

  But dying of poisoning was a drawn-out affair.

  In fact, each time Nellie came back down, the guards looked increasingly bored. Wim had gone to sleep with his head resting on his folded arms on the table. He slept peacefully. He had no crippling stomach cramps, his insides did not turn to water, and his water did not turn to blood.

  He was drunk, not poisoned. There was nothing wrong with the wine. But now the guards had told everyone they’d found the culprit.

  They had picked Wim as an easy victim to blame. Much easier than figuring out what else was going on in the palace and upsetting the monks and potentially the church.

  By the Triune, now she was angry.

  Nellie returned to the hall, where many people had gotten nervous and gathered around the dais, and the Regent was trying to calm them down.

  “My room has been searched, too,” a man shouted.

  “My wife just drank the wine in our room,” another said. “I will hold you personally responsible if something happens to her.”

  Nellie collected plates, hoping that she could get most of the tableware to safety before a fight broke out.

  “Nellie?” said a man behind her.

  She turned around. It was Henrik.

  No, she didn’t want to talk to him. She seriously didn’t. She was too angry.

  “I heard the guards gave the kitchen a hard time,” he said when he had caught up with her. “Whoa, why the angry face?”

  “Wim didn’t do anything wrong. All the food we cook in the kitchen, he tastes. If it doesn’t come in through the kitchen, he can’t taste it. It’s unfair to frighten him and unfair to make him drink all that wine. He was so scared that he was crying. What if the wine had been poisoned? Would that have been his fault? How could he have tasted it if he never saw it?”

  “Whoa, whoa!” He held up his hands. “I’m not accusing Wim of anything.”

  “Your colleagues in the kitchen did. And then they made him drink two whole glasses of wine. Wim rarely drinks, so he threw up and now they say the wine was poisoned and it was his
fault. Problem solved.”

  “Please, Nellie—”

  “Have you not seen what’s going on right under your noses? Lord Verdonck is no friend of the church. He’s also Madame Sabine’s lover. The two were planning to leave last night, a situation I can’t imagine the Regent agrees with, so someone poisons him to stop it and gives Wim the blame.”

  And there was a dragon box in that story somewhere, but she wasn’t going to tell him about that. These people were all the same. Somehow, she had hoped he would be different, but he was not. He was just all shiny buttons and spiffy uniforms and total obedience to his boss, whoever that was. Why had she ever thought he was any more honourable than the other people working upstairs?

  “Nellie, we are not blaming Wim. But he is one of the people we need to investigate.”

  “Then investigate him without blaming him. And now, I’ve got work to do. If you want to make yourself useful, drag Wim off to his bed.”

  She turned around and strode down the stairs.

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  BUT AT THE BOTTOM of the stairs, another unpleasant surprise waited for her. She almost ran into someone who was coming the other way.

  A woman wearing a man’s coat with the hood pulled over her hair.

  “Oh, there you are.”

  Madame Sabine.

  Nellie’s heart jumped. What was she doing here? Was she looking for the dragon box? Did she know it was missing yet? By the Triune, did this mean that Madame Sabine had actually been to her room?

  “I went to look for you. Lord Verdonck made it through the night, but he is very ill and will take a long time to recover. We don’t feel he’s safe here, so we’re going to try to get him home. I need you to find him some remedies for stomach cramps so he can make the journey.”

  “Sure, I can bring him some tea of—”

  No, she couldn’t. She had given the last juniper berries to Els.

  “I . . . I’ll have to go to the markets, anyway.” Dora was sure to need something. “I’ll bring the tea as soon as I can.”

  “Thank you. I’m insanely worried. He means so much to me, and I trust you with this important task.”

  Oh, if she only knew.

  Maybe she suspected that Nellie had the box. One did never trust these nobles.

  Madame Sabine looked small and lonely walking up the stairs to her room. In the big hall, Nellie knew, her husband was still talking to many of the guests.

  Dora did, indeed, need someone to go to the markets. She’d run out of salt and needed saffron for the glazing of the pork legs she would cook tonight, as well as a few other things.

  Nellie offered to go.

  Dora nodded. “I’d send one of the kids, but if you want to go, be quick, because I need you.”

  So Nellie returned to her room, checked that the dragon box was still safe in the cupboard—which it was, and it didn’t look like anyone had been here—and donned her coat.

  Grey clouds chased each other over the roof of the city, and the wind that blew off the Saar delta bit into her skin. At the marketplace, stallholders stood huddled under the flapping covers, casting foul looks at the sky. The question was not whether it would stay dry but whether it would rain or snow.

  Many of the stalls selling exotic spices were gone, but one local man still came occasionally. Nellie was lucky that he had come to the markets today. He used a tiny set of scales to weigh out the precious threads of saffron and filled her cloth bag with salt.

  While he was doing this, he spoke about the weather. He lived in town where his wife ran the family’s shop.

  Nellie collected all her purchases into her carry satchel.

  Then she remembered something. “Juniper seeds.” She had almost forgotten. What would she have told Madame Sabine?

  “I’m very sorry, but we are completely out. If you come back next week, I may have some. A pretty young woman just bought all the ones I still had.”

  “Oh, what a pity. I’ll have to go somewhere else.” Wait. A pretty young woman. What was the bet this was Els? “How long ago was this?”

  “This morning. Scarcely a moment before you came.”

  “Do you know the woman?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Which way did she go?”

  “She was very chatty and said she was going shopping.”

  The shops were in the adjacent quarter, but Nellie still needed juniper berries, and a deep sense of dread had come over her about what Els was up to, so she left the markets.

  Several shops in the commercial quarter sold herbs and all manner of dried groceries. The first shop she entered had also run out of juniper berries.

  The second shop was very busy, and Nellie didn’t want to wait long for her turn, because Dora was waiting for the salt, so she visited a third shop, which also had no berries left.

  What had the man at the markets again said about a young woman buying up all his stock?

  So she had to go back to the shop where it was busy, and just as she was going in, someone came out.

  “Oh, Nellie!”

  It was Els, dressed in a warm coat, with her hair done up in a bun. Nellie had never seen her like that. She looked like a normal citizen, not someone whose family was to go into the poor house. That coat was of decent quality, and she wore a scarf, too.

  “Out shopping?” Nellie asked.

  This was awkward. The sisters’ work at the palace didn’t usually start until later in the afternoon. It was perfectly fine for Els to go shopping, but something in the way Els had almost sounded shocked when seeing Nellie told her that Els had not expected to see her.

  “My mam asked me to buy a few groceries.” She was carrying a basket with the lid shut. “Well, I better be going.”

  “I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  “Yes, bye.”

  She skipped into the street, and Nellie almost entered the shop, but she turned around instead and waited on the porch, looking around the pillar that supported the corner of the alcove that held the shop’s door.

  What was the chance that Els had bought the last ones from this shop as well?

  Juniper berries could not only be used by women whose bleeding was late. They could be used to make poison.

  By the Triune.

  The street outside was quite long and straight, and the foul weather kept a lot of the people indoors. Nellie could see Els walking out of the town centre, with her flaxen blond bun bobbing on her head. For some reason she thought of Madame Sabine’s aversion to bonnets.

  Where was Els going?

  As far as Nellie knew, her family lived above a shop near the harbour, which was the other way. She wasn’t going to the palace either, or she would have turned right.

  Nellie followed her, keeping at a safe distance.

  Els continued down the street for a while before turning left into a narrow alley. This part of town had never been affected by the terrible fires. All the buildings were old, many made of wood, although some of those were now being rebuilt. Nellie was not terribly familiar with this area, but when she had lived with Mistress Johanna in the merchant quarter, before Johanna married prince Roald, this had been a quiet part of town where the workers lived. The houses were small and cheaply built.

  But these days a newer generation of people were moving in, people who were better off and who replaced the older wooden structures with bigger houses built from bricks.

  The street ended in a piece of empty land. With a bunch of sapling willow trees—now all without leaves—it looked like a park, until you noticed the broken and blackened walls poking out from between the dead grass. Yes, Nellie remembered that this area used to house a garden with pens that contained exotic animals. One of them was a large spotted cat that the owner, a dark-skinned man called Mustafa, would walk on a leash. It was bigger than an average dog and it walked soundlessly. Mustafa called it a leopard, and he would allow people to pet it.

  There was also an enormous green and red
bird with a curved beak, called a parrot, that screeched something terrible. It could speak, but the ship’s captain who had owned the bird had taught it a lot of bad language, which young men found extremely funny.

  Mustafa was forced to keep the animal at the back of the garden, but its swearing could still be heard in the street.

  Nellie wondered where Mustafa and his menagerie had gone. That no one had built on this land meant that he probably still owned it.

  Back then, this patch of land was on the edge where the marshy meadows joined the jumble of houses of the city. The land beyond had been too wet to build on. But the city council had recently dug another canal to drain the land.

  New buildings had been added on the far side, most for businesses: a carpentry and furniture maker, a coachmaker, and the building that stood next to the coachmaker’s yard was so new that it hadn’t even been finished. The door and windows had been installed, but the wood hadn’t yet been painted. This was where Els went.

  Nellie ducked behind the dilapidated remains of what used to be the entrance to the animal park, a little booth—now all rotting and falling apart—where Mustafa would sell tickets and refreshments.

  Els walked up to the warehouse’s double doors and knocked. A moment later, the door opened from the inside.

  A female voice said something, and Els disappeared inside, carrying her basket.

  Well, that was interesting, and annoying. What now?

  Nellie sped over the bridge across the canal, and up to the warehouse door, but the tiny windows on either side were too far off the ground for her to see through.

  A narrow alley ran past the right side of the building, in between it and a wall around the coachmaker’s yard. The sound of men’s voices drifted over the wall from the carpenters talking and laughing in the workshop.

  This alley was where the owners of the businesses took out their rubbish. A bin of sawdust and wood shavings stood ready to be collected by someone who kept chickens or ducks. With the other building as new as it looked, that side of the alley was still tidy and empty except for two empty bins. Despite the tidiness, the air smelled of rotting fruit.

  A window in the side was too high for Nellie to see through, but she dragged one of the empty bins underneath, turned it over and climbed up.