1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [105]
That assumed that they succeeded in their task at all, of course. After weeks of being stymied, Mademann was no longer confident of that. Eleven days from now, they might be on their way back to the continent with the forgeries in their luggage, having accomplished nothing. All they'd leave behind for the constabulary to investigate would be a double homicide with no apparent motive.
Robbery perhaps. Mademann considered that, for a moment. If they also plundered the tavern, suspicion might fall on the local fishermen.
But . . . No. Keep it simple, stupid. They themselves would inevitably be the principal suspects, since they'd stayed here long enough that many people had seen them. In the unlikely event their escape vessel was intercepted, it would be best if there were no evidence on board.
Which, now that he thought about it, meant that they'd have to jettison all the forgeries too, in a weighted sack of some kind.
He'd have to see to that himself. If he raised it with Locquifier, the man would have a fit. We cannot fail Michel and Antoine!
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