by Guy Antibes
“I do.”
“Choster doesn’t have to see it.”
“Meaning you don’t want him to see a gun,” Sara said. “He will eventually. These things are just too powerful not to be standard issue to soldiers. Dr. Hedge and I have talked all about the potential, Klark.”
“I guess you’re right. Tell him at the appropriate time. You know you are the first person to have used a gun in real action.”
“And what you’re not telling me is that I’m the first person to have killed someone. I suppose Rester Silver has achieved a bit of immortality.” Sara didn’t want the immortality any more than Rester would have, but the gun had saved her life. “Thank you for being truthful to me about the man. I will use him. How do I send out a letter?”
“Choster is your best bet. You might want to get well acquainted with him. I have to leave since we continue to search for West.”
“A kiss for all your help,” Sara said and quickly kissed Klark on the lips.
“Any time, Countess, any time.” Klark grinned and jumped into the driver’s seat and waved as the carriage left the courtyard and clattered down the lane.
Choster came out of the house and joined Sara. “I’ll secure the gate, if you please, Countess.
“I’m Sara, Choster. I know you’re a soldier by trade…”
“By background, Sara. I’ve not been a soldier since I’ve been in the employ of the Duke.”
Sara gulped. Suddenly Choster seemed more sinister, knowing that he wasn’t taken directly from the ranks and installed as her butler.
“I will rely on you for information. I’m also interested in improving my fighting skills. I nearly got myself killed in a swordfight and have stitches at my hip as evidence.” She neglected to tell him about the scars on the top of her head and on her forearm. “Willa Waters, the housekeeper also will train with me.” Sara looked around her. There were no windows looking into the courtyard from surrounding dwellings except for the house to which they were attached. “We can train out here if the weather permits?”
“Yes, miss.” He followed her eyes to the windows. “Don’t worry about the occupants of the main house.”
Sara felt a bit of relief. But then as she thought of it, she didn’t think the Duke did things by half. If he wanted her safe, she’d be safe and although she now lived in obscurity in the country’s capital that suited her just fine while her body and her nerves recovered from her latest battle with the Red Swallows.
~
A week later, Grianna looked at the new slateboard. “I can’t remember anything we had on the other one. So what are these pages on the hooks?”
“We have the organization intact and so now we are filling in the blanks. Just like what we were planning to do. Please read our notes to see what you can add,” Sara said. Willa had helped a great deal. If there was anything that needed doing from writing Sara’s ideas down to being a sounding board, Willa did it.
Grianna added a few good thoughts, but Sara could see her excitement had waned ever since West had invaded her home. “Do you want us to get everything ready for review? Then we can get your approval to move forward.”
“Perhaps that would work a bit better. I think I’ve added all I can at this point. Yes, I think you can carry on without me. I’d like Banna Thresher to see this as well.”
Sara laughed. “Of course. She has the experience we need to get the details right. I’ve got to go to the University Library again to examine the layout of the University for the siting of the Women’s College.” It was about time to find out where this Countess title came from.
“What about the timing, Sara?”
“I think our outline has expanded the scope of the proposal. I’m sure we are improving it. I’d say another six weeks, anyway.”
“Very well. If you want me to come for a review, I’d like to be in on it, but these details are beyond me. I’ll admit it. That’s why I asked for Miss Thresher’s help in the first place.”
Sara rose as Grianna stood and made ready to leave. “Choster? Lady Grianna is ready to leave.”
He returned to Sara after she had been blindfolded and left the courtyard. “I am sure she peeks,” he said.
“It reminds her that we are living here in secret.” She shrugged and then went to the window of the study, looking at the sun strike the crushed stone of the courtyard. “Is it warm enough for a little training outside?”
“Indeed, Sara. Training is best done outside, in my opinion.”
“Then in this case I will trust it. I’ll change into the training clothes you provided Willa and me.”
A few minutes later, Sara walked out into the sunshine. She had to admit that the sun felt good on her face. Willa and Sara waited while Choster removed horse droppings from the gravel.
“There. A proper training area. Now what do you want to do first?”
“Exercises,” Willa said. “We’ve not done anything since we left her ladyship’s house.” Willa looked at Sara.
That brought a smile to Choster’s face. “Very good. Show me what you do.”
The women went through the limbering exercises that Sara had been shown by Wells, nearly a year ago, at the Brightlings mines.
“Good, good. Let me add two or three. Please don’t be upset with me, but you must run to develop good lungs so you won’t tire.”
“I did tire when I fought the other man. I crossed my knife and sword above my head and when the man slashed downward with my sword, my wrists were damaged.”
“Damaged?” Choster said.
“They lost most of their strength and went numb. A day or two later they were fine.”
He nodded. “Shock. It can still happen to experienced fighters. Some strengthening work will help. I will bring some weights so you can build up the muscles of your wrists, arms and hands.”
Willa eyed Choster. “I don’t want my hands to look like a common laborer’s.” She gave him a squint.
“Your choice, a live laborer or a dead lady.” He laughed. “Women don’t develop rough hands from the strengthening exercises. At least the ones I’ve trained. A few calluses in certain parts of your hand, but that comes from good work. If you gain them, be proud.”
There were no women in the King’s Army. Sara wondered if the Duke had his own force of women soldiers hidden somewhere.
They spent the rest of the afternoon running around the courtyard and exercising. Sara responded to the physical work, but Willa struggled to keep up. She admired her determination, but perhaps youth brought extra resilience.
When the sun didn’t shine, Choster rearranged the sitting room for training. It had high enough ceilings so that he couldn’t reach it with his longest sword. Sara found that Willa liked training inside better, perhaps because they didn’t have to run. Sara quite enjoyed running.
They settled into a routine. Mornings were dedicated to the proposal and afternoons consisted of exercise and training. Choster knew much more than Wells, the mining supervisor at the Brightlings mines, ever did. Sara felt more and more comfortable with a sword and with her knife, at least until her hip began to ache, which it did regularly at the end of their training sessions. She even became more resistant to the cold Parth weather.
One day practicing, Choster reared back to slash at her head. Sara crossed it like she had in her fight in Grianna’s Library when Choster slammed down into her defense. She let his sword slide a bit before she resisted as Choster had taught her. She looked up at his sword retreating and was distracted by a face in the window of the other house. It was Duke Northcross. When he realized that he was being observed, he let the curtain fall.
“Is that the Duke’s house?” Sara looked up at the window.
Choster followed her eyes. “Yes, it is. He hardly uses these houses. Most of the time he inhabits his apartment at the Interior Ministry.”
So he was her host. Sara let the thought slip so it wouldn’t affect her concentration. She fought on with Choster until her hip bega
n to tell her to stop. It didn’t bother her running, but if she stood on it for a long period it would.
“I’m going back inside for a bath. Willa, he’s all yours.” Sara went up to her room. The window of her bedroom faced to the rear, overlooking the garden of the main house. She looked for Northcross, but since winter still plagued Parth, the garden appeared uninhabited.
Feeling weary, she threw her boots into the closet, rather than placing them in order. One of them hit the back wall. She heard a hollow sound and went to the closet to investigate. She ran her hand along the wooden panel and didn’t find any catch, but by knocking she discovered one panel that had nothing behind it like the other panels. Along the outside of the closet, she found a break in the molding. She pressed it and it didn’t work. Then she pushed it again with all of her might and it indented.
She heard a click in the closet and the panel had opened a few inches. A secret passage! She pushed it open and crawled about three feet to another door cracked open inward. The passageway went through the walls of both houses. She clambered through an empty closet on the other side and found an unused room. White cloths covered all of the furniture of a bedroom. A secret door! She couldn’t help but smile. Would her brothers ever love to see this.
Sara heard faint voices and didn’t want to be caught snooping, so she went back into her room. She pushed on the molding again, hoping that the door would close. The resulting click gave her a deep feeling of relief. Knowing that the door opened into Duke Northcross’ world kept her from the nap.
~
She rose in the middle of the night and looked at the clock on the wall in the moonlight. Two o’clock in the morning. Duke Northcross would either be asleep or back inside the palace. She pressed on the molding with a lamp turned down low. The bedroom on the other side gave her the chills. She imagined ghosts but put that thought aside as she listened at the door for voices. She didn’t hear a thing.
She opened the door and stepped out into a hallway. Stillness coated the house. She crept further along until she came to an alcove and gasped. She quickly put her hand to her mouth.
Turning up the lamp, the alcove held a table and on the table was a very early painting of her mother as Sythea Goldagle of Goldfields. She had to have sat for it before she married Ben. A pair of golden candlesticks flanked the picture. To her it looked like a religious shrine. Did Duke Northcross still worship her mother? The memory of her mother? The proof confronted her.
He had loved Sythea. What could have possibly pulled him away from a woman about to bear his child? Unless… unless he didn’t know. Sara’s heart fell. Of course. Her mother had an extremely well defined sense of duty. The young Passcold had been called to serve his brother. If he didn’t know, her mother wouldn’t have told him. She would have distracted him from assisting his brother redefine the Kingdom of Parthy as the first king of a new dynasty.
The portrait began to waver. Sara rubbed tears out of her eyes. Here was a love story. One that had directly affected Sara. Did her mother’s marriage to Ben end any romantic notions Northcross might have had? Nineteen years later and Sara stood in her father’s house staring at the portrait. She heard a noise. It could be the Duke or a servant. She turned down the lamp and fled back the way she had come. She slipped into the door and pressed the molding. Her back pressed against the now-closed closet door letting the images of the Duke’s shrine run through her head.
She wished she could talk to the Duke, but their earlier meeting had ended in disaster. He couldn’t open up and Sara didn’t feel comfortable about visiting him with the purpose of finding out more about their relationship, but perhaps another session with Handy might answer her question.
~~~
Chapter Thirteen
Back to the Archives
Sara remembered someone told her that it never snowed in Parth. That someone should have told her driver that the snow that nearly went up the axles of the coach was a figment of his imagination. She looked across at Choster.
“You can find something to do?”
“I graduated from the University quite some time ago. I have free entry into the library. I’ll pull out some plans of the University and grounds and look for probable sites. That’s the story you told Willa, right? Feel free to seek out Handy’s cave.” He laughed.
Choster provided her with yet another fact to confuse her image of the man. A University graduate and a soldier serving as her butler. They entered the library. The entrance pass, signed by the Dean of the university worked well. Choster only had to give him his name. It seemed that a Panny Choster did indeed study at the University. Panny? No wonder he just went by his last name—if this Panny Choster was him or a relative.
She followed the directions scribbled down on a piece of paper by the door monitor and soon became lost. She turned into a room of empty bookshelves and remembered that the sun splashed across the front of the library in the morning. If she totally lost her bearings at least she could navigate towards the entry side of the huge building.
“Sara!” She looked across the room to see Handy.
“I tried to find you on my own.” She handed over the directions when she finally reached him.
“These are totally wrong. You are currently about where this says my archives are.” He laughed. “However, I’m sure you are now better acquainted with the library. When it was first built, ninety percent of the rooms were just like this. Empty. Now more than half are full. Come with me.”
She recognized places she had been and now she thought she could find the Royal Genealogy Archives on her own.
“So you didn’t get enough startling revelations about yourself when we last met?” Handy said.
“I have a few questions and a few tidbits in exchange.”
Handy rubbed his hands. “Good. I like swaps. Go ahead and sit.” He rang a bell and ordered some tea.
“Do you know all that went on when West invaded Lady Grianna’s house?”
“Most of it. I’d love a first hand account.”
Sara gave him one and then added a special tidbit: “Did you know that your Cousin Renall has a shrine in his house to my mother?”
“He does?”
“I found a secret door to his house and along a hallway was an alcove. A table held a picture of my mother when she must have been Sythea Goldagle. It wasn’t just a picture but it had two golden candlesticks flanking it.”
“I’ve never been in either house, but I know about the secret door. That certainly sounds like a shrine to me. I would have never thought Renall had it in him. He must have been smitten.”
“I think that my mother never told him she was pregnant and let him go to help his brother set up his kingdom and then she had to find a new husband quickly. Were they betrothed?”
Handy shook his head. “No. A formal betrothal would have been recorded, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t have been an understanding. Rumors that I have been able to recover confirmed that both of the Passcold boys were smitten by your mother. Very good. Now what do you want of me?”
“Confirmation for one thing. And I think I’ve got all of the confirmation that I need.”
“You aren’t going to confront him are you? I wouldn’t recommend it. Renall has nerves and emotions of steel.”
“He’s bent a little lately, but I tried and it was very awkward. I think he knows.”
Handy leaned over and touched a tendril of Sara’s hair. “He’d be an idiot not to.”
“I just don’t understand why I don’t look like my brothers.” She brought up something that had been bothering her for the last week, but didn’t know if she wanted to hear the answer. She took a deep breath. “I’ve been told by Duke Goldfields and the King that I am the last of the Goldagles, but I have two younger brothers.”
“Who aren’t Goldagles,” Handy said pursing his lips and looking worried. “I didn’t want to bring it up in our last meeting because it didn’t appear that you knew. Are you sure that you want to
?”
Sara sat back. The tea came and she took some large gulps. “I know enough now that I can’t rest until I find out everything.”
“Your brothers are Featherwood’s sons, but not your mother’s. Do you ever remember seeing your mother pregnant?”
Sara searched her mind and didn’t. Her first memory of Seb was in her mother’s arms, but she never noticed her mother walking around with a child within her. She shook her head.
“The boys’ mother is unknown. They might have two different mothers, for all I know, but Ben Featherwood is listed as their natural father and Sythea Featherwood is listed as a step-mother. That won’t be enough to get them recognized as having noble blood. I’m sorry, Sara.”
Another missing piece. Ben had no hopes of retaining Brightlings legally if Sara decided to pursue her claim. The manor permitted females to inherit and she was the only candidate. Ben’s claim to Brightlings couldn’t even be supported by Sythea’s sons, since she didn’t have any. Sythea Goldagle gave birth to only one child, her.
Sara couldn’t recall her mother not treating Seb or Enos as anything but her boys. “I could give them Brightlings, though, couldn’t I?”
“You can do anything you want with it, except transfer ownership to a non-noble. You could just let them work the estate and one would be able to use the Squire title.”
“But a woman? Could I transfer it to a noble woman?”
Handy thought about it for a moment. “If one of the boys married a noble, then you could transfer it to his wife. If you found a noblewoman to act as a stewardess for your brothers, then she could own it for their benefit, but you can do the same yourself.” He shrugged. “Or you could convince the king to proclaim them noble or, for that matter, to allow you to change the conditions of the original deed which, I have found, has a copy that rests in my archives.
“I can, can’t I?” At this time, that would be her intent. She didn’t want to force her brothers—her stepbrothers—to marry into nobility, but that would be a problem for the future. Her mother would have her reasons for keeping the fact from her. Perhaps their planned trip to Parth when she’d be presented might have been the appropriate time—another unanswerable question. “Was the exchange worth it?” she said.
