She wrenched her hands, trying to get them apart. They were tied too snugly. Her knees and ankles were flexed and tied. Wherever he was taking her, she had no choice but to go along.
“Water her now and again,” hummed Zebulon. “Now and again.”
13: The Duchess Alicia’s Daughter
Lord Solven, Earl of Ruckward, was in a fury. Even in a man known for irritability, his present rage was extraordinary. It had to do, everyone knew, with the Lady Lyndafal, Countess Ruckward, who had put the new baby on her shoulder, walked down from Ruckward House to the shore, and gone out sailing with the child as she had often done in all weathers with her older daughter. This time, however, she had disappeared and had quite possibly drowned.
There were those who had seen her go and thought it foolish of her, just days from childbed as she was. Still, she habitually sailed around the bay, or across to Seapasture, the nearest of the Randor Isles, a lovely parklike place with grassy banks grazed by shaggy, long-horned sweet-breathed cattle. No one wondered at her doing it, for she did it all the time, and since the baby had come, she had taken the baby, too, saying the baby liked it, and it was true the baby stopped crying the moment her basket went in the boat, seeming to rejoice in the rocking motion and the chuckle of the water. So, Lady Lyndafal and the baby went out sailing, and the little white sail went back and forth and back and forth, and then away behind the island, and then out and back behind the island again until nobody watched it anymore and besides, why should they?
Come along dusk, people began to wonder who’d seen her last, and then come dark and they began to worry that nobody had seen her for hours, and then come deep dark and people began to shout and start running about, even before the Earl knew of it and fell to cursing and threatening. Hadn’t he put all his men into boats, hunting her? Hadn’t he screamed down the heavens, looking for her? Him, who hadn’t looked at her twice in the months before the child was born?
Well, indeed he had. He sent a boat out to scour Seapasture Island for her, which was not so easy as one might think, for it was dark with no moon and a veil of wispy cloud hiding even the stars, and at the first scrape of a hull on the beach, the shaggy cows that pastured there gathered around and demanded to be given something good, their noses pushing wetly and their long horns clacking, immovable as rocks. Cows and dark together brought the endeavor to naught but effort wasted and more screaming threats from the Earl.
On the morrow, they tried again and were able to confirm that she was not on Seapasture Island. So they went on to Little Swamp Island, the next island in the chain, though it was impossible to search the island thoroughly, full of trees as it was, trunks growing out of the water and dropping stems down from their branches to make the whole an impenetrable tangle. After sailing around it and shouting until everyone was hoarse, they decided she wasn’t there, either. The third island out was much too far out for her to have sailed before she vanished, so it was obvious she couldn’t be there. By evening, the search was given up.
How tragic, cried those who enjoyed conjecture. How tragic there’d been a waterspout, or a wind gust, or the baby had fallen in, or she’d tipped the boat over trying to save the baby, or she’d gone in for a swim (though she’d never been known to do any such thing) and the boat had sailed off without her. How tragic, said the sentimentalists, that it had happened just when the Earl had announced his intention of taking her on a wonderful trip down to that marvelous resort on the Plains of Bliggen.
No matter what the intentions had been, they’d been blown off the parapet and into the moat, and here was Earl Solven in a temper that couldn’t be dealt with, not by anybody sane at any rate. It was to the tune and tempo of such turmoil that the people of Ruckward passed the first day and second night after the Countess’s disappearance.