“Exactly.”
Gavriella took a deep breath, trying to still her anxiety, as she turned to look at the enormous vault and its contents.
“We must be able to feed them,” she said. “I was not expecting to feed an army, Lukas.”
“I know,” he said. “Do what you can. I’ll discuss the situation with the commander when the army arrives. It is the dead of winter, so we cannot harvest anything further.”
Winter hunger was always a serious threat, one always taken seriously and especially now with the arrival of an unexpected army. “I will see what we can spare,” she said. “Did the missive say what time they would be arriving?”
Lukas shook his head. “Nay, but I would plan on feeding them the evening meal.”
Gavriella nodded in resignation. As Lukas headed off to prepare for the incoming army, she returned to the turnips, piled up in two large heaps – the bad ones and the good ones.
She pointed to the pile of rotting ones.
“You heard the man,” she said to the servants. “Lukas said we have an incoming army to feed. We shall have to go through every single turnip and cut away the rotted parts and try to salvage the remaining good. We shall need more help for this. Iva, go into the kitchens and find anyone who can help us. We’ll need baskets to haul up the vegetables to the kitchen yard. Tell the cook we must make a stew to feed two thousand men, so we’ll need the massive iron pot she uses for boiling hide. It needs to be cleaned and put over the fire in the yard. Hurry, now – there is no time to waste.”
Iva, a tiny old woman who moved swiftly, took off running. That left Gavriella with the remaining servant, a woman she had known all her life. She sighed heavily.
“That leaves you and me, Meli,” she said. “Get a knife and let’s start going through these turnips. Cut the mold off completely and save what is left, even if it is just a tiny piece. Every little bit will help.”
Meli, round-cheeked and dedicated, went to work alongside Gavriella, who picked up the knife that Iva had left behind and began cutting out the rot on one turnip at a time. She threw herself into it, as she threw herself into everything these days because it took her mind off the situation at Falstone.
The realities of what her life had become.
The truth was that it had all started last year with that horrible abduction she tried so hard not to think about. But the situation had only gotten worse since her returned from London. Her flight from London had been a confusing, disorienting thing because it had happened so quickly. One moment, she was there and in the next, she was heading home. She did not regret her fight with Aurelia, however. In fact, she really didn’t regret anything, not even the visit to Gomorrah, because she wouldn’t have met Andreas otherwise.
The man who was on her mind every moment of every day.
She was still overcome by memories of the evening she left. Though she’d initially believed that the separation between them had been for the best, increasingly, she was overcome with remorse and longing. Being unable to get word to him had haunted her. All she could think about was Andreas sitting in that tavern, waiting for a woman who would never come. She wondered how long he had waited before he realized that.
She wondered just how much he hated her now.
Being made out to be a liar had been bad enough but, in the end, the inability to tell Andreas exactly why she hadn’t been able to meet him was even worse. Had she known what would have happened on the afternoon she returned to The Asher, then perhaps she would have conducted herself differently.
Perhaps she would have been more obedient and more apologetic to her Aunt Drucilla. She had relived it over and over in her mind a thousand times, but every time she came to the part where Aurelia accused her of wrongdoing, she knew she would have fought back. She couldn’t have stopped herself. Something about Aurelia brought out the fighter in her.
But that fight had cost her everything.
She had to explain the fight when she had returned home, showing up on her father’s doorstep and telling the man that she had been sent home in shame. She knew, at some point, that her father and aunt would speak and that her father would eventually find out just why she had been sent home, so it wouldn’t do any good to lie to the man.
Therefore, she tried not to.
She’d told him, quite frankly, that Aurelia was a vile girl who had forced her to go to a guild called Gomorrah. She told her father of all the horrible things she saw there and how Aurelia and Camilla let strange men kiss them and fondle them. She proceeded to tell her father that she had been trying to get out of the place and became lost when a nice man helped her to find the exit. The man, she explained, had been very proper and polite with her, so much so that she accompanied the man the next day to see entertainment.
Her aunt had taken exception to that.
It was the truth and Gavriella stood behind it. Of course, there was much more to it than her simple explanation, but her father wasn’t going to ask for details and she wasn’t going to tell. At this point, she controlled the narrative of the situation and she was going to leave it at that. If her aunt, at any point in the future, decided to make an issue out of it, Gavriella would deal with it at the appropriate time.
But the truth was that her father had been extremely displeased to see her returned to Falstone Castle. He hadn’t expected to see her anytime soon and he hadn’t really cared why she had come home, only that she had. It was clear that he didn’t want her there and it had made for an awkward few weeks after her arrival.
Merek de Leia had never been an overly affectionate man and his standoffish behavior towards her hadn’t been anything unusual. Gavriella quickly resumed her routine at the castle, resuming her duties as chatelaine and taking over other duties such as becoming more involved in meal preparation and any number of smaller tasks that she had always passed off on the cook.
At that point, she was looking for something to occupy her time.
Anything to make her feel useful.
Now that she had returned, she didn’t want to think about what she’d left behind in London.
It was so strange, really. She had hated London at first, grieved because of why her father had sent her there, but Andreas had quickly changed her mind. The time spent with him had been something that had changed her outlook on life. It had changed her life. Then she’d come home again, home to the terrible memories of the child that she had given birth to on that stormy morning in April.
It was as if she had never left.
Her child, a son, had been born after just a few hours of labor. Truth be told, it hadn’t been all that difficult to push the baby out, into the waiting hands of two servants and the cook. Her father wouldn’t even call for the physic, nor would he call for a midwife because he didn’t want anyone to know his daughter was pregnant. Even though the village of Deadwater knew about the attack, that was all they knew.
No one knew about the resulting baby.
In fact, the only people who really knew of the pregnancy were Gavriella’s maids and the cook, women she had known her entire life and women who are very protective over her. The little boy was born healthy, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Gavriella was able to hold him and nurse him for a couple of weeks until her father insisted that the child be sent to the foundling home at Edenside.
The permanent reminder of her shame had to be removed.