Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George [17]
“What are you saying?” King Gregor shook his head, confused. “You think Maude had something to do with this?”
“No-o, but …” Dr. Kelling scrubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know, Gregor. Perhaps I’m just tired.” He sighed heavily. “But Rose grows weaker by the day. I know you’ve tried separating the girls at night, but have you had them guarded, or followed, to see where they go?”
King Gregor’s shoulders slumped. “I want to trust my girls. I feel like their jailer as it is, locking them in at night. Has it come to that?”
“It has, if we are to make Rose well again,” Dr. Kelling said gently. “Tonight’s the third night since their last … disappearance or what-have-you. Separate rooms, and windows and doors firmly latched. Guards in the hallway.”
In silence they finished off a decanter of brandy and smoked a number of fine cigars. In the end, King Gregor sighed, stubbed out his last cigar, and nodded.
“Very well. The ambassadors have moved to their manors in the town now. That frees up all the bedrooms on the third floor. You’ll stay tonight in case the girls need you?” the king asked.
“Of course.”
Gardener
Galen sat on a large rock and knitted a pair of socks. Well, just one sock. He had already made the other the evening before, and was hoping to have this one done before the next day. The socks he had brought back from the war were so worn they had disintegrated when his aunt washed them, and he had spent the past few weeks trying to replace them.
Good-hearted Tante Liesel had offered to knit his new socks, but Galen had politely refused. The truth was, knitting was the only skill he had learned during the war that he enjoyed. There was something soothing about watching stitch after stitch pass across the needles, something meditative about the process. It also gave him a sense of pride to create something, as opposed to the destruction of shooting other men.
His cousin, Ulrike, was fascinated to see a man knitting. “Who would think that a man—and a soldier!—would do such a thing?” she marveled.
“Many soldiers do,” he told her. “There is no other way, on a battlefield, to get new socks or a warm scarf when winter sets in.”
“But all of my friends and I knitted endless socks and scarves. Hats and mittens, too,” Tante Liesel had protested. “We sent boxes of them to the army! Ulrike made nine stocking caps last winter. Didn’t you, liebchen?”
Galen shook his head. “I’m sorry, Tante. They went astray somewhere, or there were not enough to go around. I’ve never had a sock that wasn’t knit by my mother or myself.”
“Well,” his aunt had assured him, “Ulrike and I can keep you in socks and caps now.”
But Galen couldn’t sit idle. He had spent too many years knitting socks, or polishing weapons or building camps. So every day he slipped his needles and yarn into his satchel, along with the hearty lunch his aunt provided.
“What are you doing, boy?” Uncle Reiner came down the path to stand, frowning, before the rock on which Galen sat with his knitting.
The obvious answer was “knitting,” but Galen knew that his uncle would not find that answer amusing. “I’m waiting for Walter to bring the mulch for this bed,” Galen said, pointing with one sharp needle at the flower bed nearby. “I offered to help but he insisted on doing it himself.”
Walter Vogel had taken Galen in hand after his first day, training him in the use of the various garden tools and teaching him the names and natures of the plants that they cared for. There were nearly a dozen other gardeners under Reiner Orm, who variously regarded their work in the King’s Folly as an embarrassment or a privilege. Either way, they were not that friendly toward the newcomer. Many of them had sought work in the gardens to avoid going to war, and seeing someone they considered a mere boy who had fought while they pruned hedges made them uncomfortable. So Walter made