Chapter One
Come on, you wee bugger. Just a little bit closer.
Marian held her breath and stared down the thin length of her arrow at the bushy red tail flicking around the base of a tree no more than thirty yards ahead. The white tip waved in a mockery of a flag of surrender, but the little beast remained stubbornly protected by the thick trunk of the rowan. She licked her lips in anticipation, willing the sly fox to put just an inch of its tender hindquarter a little farther to the right…
“Lady Marian!”
A deep female voice thundered through the trees, the sound reverberating down the shaft of Marian’s arrow. The bushy tail vanished, her vulpine prey becoming no more than a blurry red streak as it bolted across the forest floor and vanished into the brush.
“Argh!” Marian dropped her bow, arrow still nocked in a pathetic refusal to fully acknowledge the lost opportunity. Her finger itched, the indentation in the pad a reminder of how long she’d been holding that shot, how patiently she’d been waiting for her prey to make itself vulnerable. All ruined now.
She ground her teeth, sending a dull, throbbing pain through her jaw. “This is unacceptable.”
“Lady Marian, there you are!”
Sticks snapped under the steady, heavy gait of someone who had no business traipsing around the woods when there was hunting going on. Even if she hadn’t recognized the voice, she would have recognized those footsteps. Loud, confident, and completely oblivious to anyone else’s need for silence.
“Damn your eyes, Ermentrude, what is it now? The little blighter’s gotten away, so this had better be good.”
Ermentrude came to an abrupt stop, muddy brown eyes darkening as her ruddy face flushed an even darker shade of red. “Damn my eyes, is it? Well that’s a fine how do you do. And haven’t I come all this way down here to fetch you when by all rights you were supposed to meet me in the gardens more than an hour ago?” She huffed, cheeks bloating with the force of the expelled air. “Damn my eyes, indeed.”
Blast and drat. Is it that late already? What time was that meeting? Noon?
Marian pulled the arrow from her bow, tapping it impatiently against her thigh. “Ermentrude, I must remind you again about your tone, to say nothing of your volume. You’ve just cost me my prey—a fox that I have no doubt you’ll be complaining about come the morrow when you find your garden has once again been made into a series of food cubbies for our local red tails.”
Any other servant would have backed down, bowed her head and apologized immediately. Of course, any other servant wouldn’t have spoken to the lady of the house in that manner to begin with.
Ermentrude crossed her chubby arms as best she could, her coarse brown gardening vest crumpling under the duress. Her eyes narrowed until they looked like wizened almonds. “It’s not my garden, Lady Marian. It’s your garden. A garden in which we were supposed to meet to discuss progress as per arrangements you agreed with yesterday.” She shook her head, her fraying straw hat threatening to fly off somewhere to die a respectable and long-deferred death.
She’s got you there. You did agree to the meeting, and you are the one who missed it. The proper thing to do is apologize.
“And I was on my way to the meeting when I spotted the fox and remembered what you were saying yesterday—I believe in the same conversation that the meeting was mentioned.” Marian jabbed a finger at the other woman. “You said the foxes were tearing up the garden, and there was nothing to be done about getting rid of them on your end and so I needed to do something about it.”
“I said you should have something done about it. And by that, I meant delegate that task to someone else so that you could see to the work already on your schedule.” Ermentrude solidified her stance, planting her feet firmly shoulder width apart as if expecting the confrontation to grow physical.#p#分页标题#e#
It was a laughable thought. If only she knew how laughable.
“I do not like to delegate work that I am more than capable of taking care of myself.” Marian removed her arrow and replaced the unused ammunition in the quiver at her back. “That is not how my parents raised me.”
Ermentrude anchored her hands on her ample hips. “You have no problem delegating all the work in the fields. Is that the way your parents raised you?”
A lump rose in Marian’s throat, stopping up anything she might have said. An image of her parents rose in her mind, her mother who was no more than a hundred pounds soaking wet and her father who wasn’t much taller than Marian had been at sixteen. When she remembered them, they were in the fields, kneeling in the dirt, elbows deep in seeds, weeds, or fertilizer. So many of her memories placed them there. It was where they’d been their happiest. Where they’d belonged. Where they’d wanted her to belong.