“This is ditch water! I can’t abide food that tastes of nothing!” He yelled to the group of servants that was huddling by the doors to the ville’s kitchens. “Spices, damn you! Bring peppers, salt and chilies, and be quick about it!”
Mildred was sitting next to Ryan, and she whispered the single word “Schizophrenic” to him.
Ryan watched as Sharpe stood, throwing his napkin across the table, yelling out to the room in general that the food was shit. Fit to tar a boat but not fit to serve to guests. His face turned red, and a vein pulsed with rage.
“Lot of fuss about nothing,” J.B. whispered.
Doc smiled gently. “It seems rather like taking a toothpick to a mastodon,” he said.
White-aproned, sweating kitchen servants ran in, carrying bowls and jars, laying them on the table in a semicircle around the enraged baron, who attacked them with an unsettling ferocity, scattering spoonfuls of powder over his platter of mutton. Yellow powder and red powder. Speckled powder, gray and green. And red and green pastes, some with tiny seeds showing in their midst.
In considerably less than a minute, the food was almost totally obscured.
“There,” he said contentedly, sitting back at his place. “Now you can all help yourselves to give this dreck a passing, temporary resemblance to real food.” The condiments and spices were passed around, most of Ryan’s group helping themselves to some of them, though there was a deal of suspicious sniffing and dipping of fingers to taste what was in each container.
“Cumin,” Mildred said. “Tarragon.” She licked her lips after trying the light green paste, freckled with seeds. “Ah, that’s good hot chili. Sort I used to get sent to me by an aunt in Chimayo.” There was also a plain pepper mill that she used to sprinkle the minute black grains over the unappetizing meat. “Thanks, Baron Sharpe. It surely makes a difference.”
She whispered across to Dean, “Go easy on some of them, son. Specially the green chili. Make your lips and tongue feel like they’ve been blasted with molten glass.”
Ryan had also tried the chili, and he watched in stunned admiration as Baron Sharpe tucked into the equivalent of a couple of pounds of mixed spices, including a good quarter pint of the chili.
The brutally handsome face of the blond man was quickly streaming with sweat, pouring down his cheeks and dripping from his chin and from the tip of his nose. His complexion grew so flushed that Mildred muttered to Joaquin, sitting on her far side, that some tumblers of water would be a help for everyone.
Sharpe seized the jug as it was laid on the table and drained it in a single, gasping, gulping draft. “Better, well, better,” he panted. “More of it.”
Everyone ate in silence, uncomfortable at the baron’s unpredictable lack of mental balance.
Doc broke the munching stillness. “This proves what I always say.”
“What’s that?” Mildred asked.
“Food is killing the art of conversation.”
IT WAS CLOSE TO ELEVEN, and most of Ryan’s party had retired to their beds for the night. He and Krysty had opened the windows of their room, allowing cool damp air to blow away the mustiness. Now they were sitting together by the casement, content to be quiet in each other’s company.
There had been a piercing cry from out in the night a half hour earlier, but there had been nothing to be seen. Except for lights shining in what seemed to be the rear part of the building that housed Sharpe’s zoo.
The sharp knock on their door made both of them jump. Ryan stood and walked across the room, picking up the SIG-Sauer and cocking it.
“Who is it?”
“Morgan. Josh Morgan.”
“Yeah?” Ryan kept the door locked and double-bolted. “What do you want?”
“Got an old woman in the infirmary, asking to see you.”
“Why?”
“Can I come in, Ryan? Don’t want to shout this all around the ville.”
“You alone?”
“Sure.”
Holding the blaster in his left hand, Ryan slowly slid back the bolts and turned the ornate brass key. He opened the door a couple of inches, keeping his foot set against the bottom of it, seeing the tall bearded sec man standing anxiously outside. The flickering lights showed that the scars on his face from the stickies were already healing.