Rutger glanced down at the food she still clutched in her hands. “Go on and eat. I will leave you in peace.” He touched her cheek affectionately before leaving the room.
Odette nibbled her bread as she sat at the kitchen table. Cook came bustling in from the cellar carrying potatoes and carrots.
“Your uncle wants what is best for you,” Cook said in her usual grumbling tone of voice.
“Did you hear our conversation?”
“I may have heard some of it.” Her tone dared Odette to complain. “He has been so good, giving you everything a father might have given his own child. And then, when he should have made you see your duty was to marry, he never forced you, and you rejected every good and wealthy man he paraded in front of you. Well, it is not my place to criticize, but I have an opinion, I have. If Herr Menkels wants you to marry Mathis Papendorp, then I am sure it is the best thing for you, and if you were the dutiful niece you should be, you would not tell him no.”
Odette’s cheeks grew hotter the longer Cook talked.
“You are right.” Odette stood to her full height and smoothed her skirt. “It is not your place to criticize.” She gathered her food into a cloth and trudged up the stairs to her bedchamber on the third floor. But before she even reached her door, a coldness filled her insides.
If Cook had overheard their conversation, then she had heard what Rutger said about her poaching. Would Cook tell anyone her secret?
9
JORGEN HAD BEEN busy for days helping the gamekeeper set snares for the rabbits to control their numbers. It seemed a shame that some of the ones they had caught could not be shared with the poor, particularly the children Odette had been helping. He would suggest it to the margrave at their next meeting.
As he knelt to set the snare that was big enough to catch a hare but too small to harm a deer, he heard a rustling nearby, followed by the snort of a large animal.
He stood, moving as quietly as he could in the direction of the sounds. He could tell he was getting closer, as the labored breathing was getting louder.
He paused. If the large animal was human, he might be about to interrupt a young couple from Thornbeck doing things they could not get away with in town. But no. The blowing noise sounded like a deer in distress, and not a sound any human could make.
He stepped closer, entering a dense thicket of bushes and vines and small trees. Finally he saw it: a large hart lying on its side. He wasn’t moving, except for the heaving of his sides as he struggled to breathe. An arrow stuck out from his back haunch, with both dried and fresh blood around the wound. And the feathers on the arrow were white, just like the one he had found earlier.
Heat rose from his neck to his brow. Someone was poaching deer in Thornbeck Forest. This could well be the same poacher who stalked Jorgen’s father and then killed him.
The deer was dying. The kindest thing would be to dispatch him and put the poor creature out of its pain. He drew an arrow from his quiver and the bow from across his back and aimed for the spot behind its skull and from the angle that would kill the animal instantly. He released the arrow, and the hart’s heaving sides stilled.
Jorgen’s own breath was coming hard as he clenched his teeth and stared down at the poor dead deer and the arrow protruding from its flesh.
Who was poaching in Thornbeck Forest? If it was only an occasional deer to feed a man’s family, Jorgen might never catch him, but with as many deer as Jorgen suspected were missing, he must be selling the meat.
Anyone caught selling deer meat in the town center on market day or any butcher selling it from his shop would be arrested. This poacher was probably selling it secretly—which meant he was operating a black market.
But this could work in Jorgen’s favor, since the black-market selling would give him another way to find this poacher.
This was Jorgen’s chance to avenge his father’s death. No matter what Jorgen had to do, he would capture this poacher. And he would make sure the margrave did not let him off easy. However, he had a hunch that he needn’t worry about that. Lord Thornbeck would be inclined to punish this poacher to the full extent of the law.
Although Jorgen’s new job as forester was not well known inside the walls of the town of Thornbeck, he needed to make sure no one would recognize him today.
Jorgen donned a long dark-blue surcoat that reached to his ankles. The air was still moist and cool from the heavy rain of the early morning, so he would not appear quite so strange as he pulled the hood over his head to partially obscure his face.
He set out from his home in the forest. Once inside the city, he headed toward the town square. As it was Tuesday, the market would be underway, with sellers and buyers crowding the circular cobblestoned area. Even the rain earlier would not stop most of the sellers. But first he went inside a shop on Butcher’s Guild Strasse, the street where nearly every shop sold meat of various kinds.