The Eastern Front(83)

Guillaume could be tiresome.


Stockholm

"I'm exhausted," said Baldur Norddahl, as soon as he sat down at the table. "How soon are we leaving? Ten days? I may not last."

Caroline Platzer spooned some pork dumplings into a bowl and handed it to him.

"Dumplings for breakfast?" he complained. "Again? It's no wonder I'm exhausted."

Caroline thought that was amusing, coming from a man who thought a proper breakfast centered around salted fish. She herself had found it hard to adjust to almost all aspects of Scandinavian cuisine, with the exception of pancakes covered in lingonberries. Those were delicious. The best that could be said of the rest of it was that mashed carrots were innocuous enough and meatballs were sometimes decent—if the spices were kept under control, which Swedes seemed to find it difficult to manage.

It was no wonder they'd gone a-viking back in the Dark Ages. Driven by indigestion, drawn by the promise of good English food.

Thankfully, it was almost over. Just another week and a half, and they'd be rid of the Mad Queen and her court full of dwarves.

Kristina looked up from her own bowl of dumplings. "Stop complaining! You think you're exhausted? You get to hide most of the time. Try being me."

The Swedish princess was in a cheerful mood, as she always was in the morning. Within two weeks of their arrival in Stockholm, they'd begun the practice of sharing breakfast in one of the smaller kitchens in the palace that Ulrik and Baldur had appropriated on the grounds that they needed their own Danish cuisine.

The Swedish officials who oversaw the running of the palace accepted that readily enough, even though so far as Caroline could tell the only difference between Swedish and Danish cooking was that the Danes used more cheese and sausages. Like Swedes, they doted on salted fish.

For breakfast. The Ring of Fire had a lot to answer for.

Perhaps the worst of it was that Caroline had had to learn to cook the damn stuff herself. These informal breakfasts also served them as impromptu gripe sessions, and it really wouldn't do to have servants overhearing the conversation.

Naturally, that meant the woman in the group had to do the cooking. The seventeenth century wasn't the bottomless pit of male chauvinism that Caroline would have supposed it to be, in those hard-to-remember days when she'd lived up-time. Assuming she'd ever thought about the seventeenth century at all, which so far as she could remember she'd had the good sense not to. Still, some attitudes were so ingrained that they just weren't worth fighting over, if the issue wasn't really that important.

So, she cooked and the men ate. She served them the food, too. On the plus side, they didn't think anything amiss when she sat down at the table to join them. Even more on the plus side, her willingness to cook minimized Baldur's periodic let-the-man-show-you-how-it's-done seizures. On those nightmarish occasions, Norddahl would show off his Norwegian skills at high cuisine.

That meant fish, of course. Salted fish. Smoked fish. Salted smoked fish. Spicy salted smoked fish.

Caroline's father had done the same thing—with hamburgers and steaks, though, not this godawful stuff—in outdoor summer barbecues. She could remember her mother saying on those occasions, "Men. They're still in the caves, you know."

She'd been wiser than she knew. Caroline felt a pang of loss.

"May I have some more dumplings, please?" asked Kristina.

"Just one." Caroline spooned the dumpling into the princess' outstretched bowl, then spooned two more into a bowl of her own and sat down. "Or you'll get fat."

"Ha!" jeered Kristina. With some reason. The eight-year-old girl seemed to have the metabolism of a furnace.

Leaving the food aside, and the unpleasantness of dealing with Kristina's mother, Caroline thought this trip had had a couple of positive effects on the princess. For one thing, without her usual down-time ladies in waiting to keep disorienting the kid and reinforcing her bad habits, Kristina was starting to develop some social graces.

Courtesy, first and foremost. Neither Caroline nor Ulrik—nor Baldur, certainly—treated the girl like she was the sunrise and the morning dew. Once Kristina had started absorbing the initial lessons, she'd quickly figured out that if she was polite to the servants of the palace they would in turn do favors for her. Like helping her hide from her mother and her mother's many obnoxious toadies.

More important, though, Caroline thought, was that the trip had produced a subtle but profound shift in Kristina's relationship with Ulrik. She'd grown closer to the Danish prince and had begun to rely upon him.

Trust was not something that came easily or readily to the Swedish princess. That had become apparent to Caroline early on in her relationship with the girl. At the time, she'd ascribed it simply to Kristina's innate character, but the experience of this trip had modified that assessment. Caroline could now easily understand how the girl's upbringing would have shaped her in that direction.