The Stonegate Sword

Chapter 17: The Alliance

Don and Crispin followed Wesley into the dining room to find the table set and Polly bustling about. "The ladies will be in presently," she said, as she set a steaming dish of mashed potatoes near a browned roast. "Perhaps, Master Crispin, you would be so good as to fetch one more chair from the hallway." Another servant was returning to the kitchen.

Crispin sprang forward and followed Polly out of the room. Wesley moved to the head of the table and remained standing behind the chair. He motioned Don to the chair to his right. Don imitated him. As they stood together for a long minute, Don was conscious of Wesley’s thoughtful gaze. The expression on his face was carefully neutral, but Don sensed that he was being sized up, weighed. But he could not tell if he was found wanting. The shirt on his right arm pulled up far enough to reveal part of a sword-scar. Don felt his host’s gaze take the scar and add it to the balance, along with the rest.

Crispin entered from the hall with a chair, just as Amber entered from the kitchen. Crispin almost ran into the table as he stared at her. With good reason. She had been attractive in Owl Hollow, when she had been able to wash her hair and put on clean clothes. But before, the striking beauty of Margaret overshadowed her. But here, with her own wardrobe and her own dressing table (and the eye of her mother, no doubt) she bloomed. A touch of blush on her cheeks only highlighted the flawless porcelain of her fair complexion. And the black hair accented the contrast still more. It was all Don could do not to gape like a simpleton, and Crispin was unable to help it. His expression was so comical that both Amber and her mother laughed merrily. Wesley did not seem noticeably amused, but he did glace at Don and managed a slight smile.

"Do be careful, Crispin," teased Mrs. Fletcher. "You are staring as if you’d never seen Amber before."

"I truly believe that I have not, Lady Fletcher," replied Crispin, putting the chair in its place with a flourish. But I am thunderstruck by her now!" He jumped forward to help Amber to her seat, across the table from the guests, and Don assisted the older woman to her place at the foot of the table.

The meal was pleasant, featuring delicious roast beef with horseradish and all the trimmings, followed by rhubarb pie and mint tea for dessert. As the dusk darkened the windows, Polly came in and lit candles, which put spots of fire in the highlights of the silver serving dishes. Mrs. Fletcher proved skilled at keeping a lively conversation going, and seemed particularly interested in Stonegate.

"They are a proud and fierce people," she commented, with a hint of sadness in her voice. "Once our two cities were close friends, but we have grown far apart over the years. They are suspicious of us, and we see almost no one from there except a few traders."

"I am not actually from Stonegate, you know," remarked Don. "My home is Goldstone, far to the north and west of here." At her urging, he told a little about his boyhood as the son of a loreman, and his isolation from the world. "I lived in Goldstone over twenty years, and Stonegate not even three. But it seems that in Goldstone I lived one year twenty times. In Stonegate the very world seemed different."

"How so?" asked Amber. "Did you like Stonegate so much, then, or was it because you met Rachel there?"

"Rachel has changed my life. So, even if nothing else had happened there, Stonegate would be unforgettable for me," slowly answered Don as he sipped his tea. "But my life before Stonegate was like a long hike through the woods, with everything shadowy and no step along the way very different from the one before or the one after. Then, suddenly, that life was followed by a view from a mountaintop. I saw possibilities that I had been blind to before. Rachel was the center of this new vision, of course."

"So, Donald, what are your plans?" asked Lady Fletcher. "It sounds like a wedding may be in your future."

"That would be my fondest dream. But there are problems. I am the one responsible for her capture, the death of her parents, and the capture of two of the other girls, for that matter. I am not welcome in Stonegate, and Rachel’s brother hates me. Not a promising beginning for a marriage."