The Lady of the Castle (The Marie Series Book 2) Read online

  Marga pointed to the rug with her chin. “I don’t think the stain will come out.”

  Marie nodded dejectedly. Just then, her handmaid walked up the stairs. “Oh, Ischi, could you please take the rug from next to my bed to the washhouse? I got sick and soiled it.”

  Ischi rolled up the rug and carried it out. As soon as she had left the room, two young maids entered, filling the washtub with fresh water and arranging linen towels. They greeted their mistress with a shy smile and left as silently as they had come, but Marie could hear them chattering excitedly on the stairs. The two of them were ecstatic to be able to work in the castle, but Marga’s tyrannical rule was so intimidating, they didn’t dare lift their head and look at the mistress of the castle. Marie had wanted to get to know the girls better in order to find out which of them would be suitable as Ischi’s successor, but she was too preoccupied with other worries at the moment. After washing herself, since Ischi was busy, she picked out her own clothes and dressed without help. Though she still felt slightly ill when she left her chamber to go to the kitchen, she hoped she’d feel better after eating something. But when she saw the breakfast porridge, her stomach turned again, and she pushed the bowl away without having tried a spoonful.

  The cook gave her mistress an offended look. But Marie didn’t pay her any attention and hurried out of the room, just as Marga entered the kitchen through the opposite door, whispering to the cook that the mistress had enjoyed too much wine the night before.

  Surprised, the cook shook her head. “Frau Marie drunk? I can’t imagine that. She never used to care much for wine.”

  “Now that her husband is gone, she needs the wine to sweeten up her lonely nights.”

  “It is not seemly to talk about the mistress in such a way,” the cook scolded the housekeeper.

  Marga laughed and waved dismissively. “I know what I know.” With these words she disappeared, leaving the cook feeling conflicted. So far, the plump woman had held her mistress in the highest esteem, but now she remembered all of the housekeeper’s past comments and started to have doubts.

  In the meantime, Marie had gone into the chamber where Michel usually received his subordinates’ reports. Sitting down at the heavy walnut table, she looked through the small pile of documents containing unprocessed market and tax lists, queries, and tables of goods ordered but not yet received from merchants. Rheinsobern was a well-managed domain, and so there was little for her to do. Marie dealt with everything as best as she could and forgot about her nausea for a while.

  But when she put down quill and ink, her nausea returned with double the force, and Marie ran to the privy just in time. When the retching finally eased, she longed to sit in a softly cushioned chair with a warm blanket around her shoulders, drinking soothing tea. But most of all she wanted someone to wipe her sweaty brow with a gentle hand, consoling her in her misery.

  Aside from Michel, there was only one person with whom she felt comfortable and secure, and that was Hiltrud. Marie considered sending a messenger to call her friend to the castle. But she dreaded the thought of taking to her sickbed in the cold, drafty castle, and she longed for the cozy warmth of Hiltrud’s farmhouse. Still a little unsteady on her feet, she returned to her chamber and rinsed her mouth.

  She was about to give the order to hitch up a carriage, when she realized with relief that she was slowly starting to feel better. Excited about the prospect of Hiltrud’s healing teas, she pulled on her riding habit and went down to the stables.

  “Kunz, saddle Bunny for me!” she called out to the first servant she saw. The skinny man hurried into the stable and returned a few minutes later with the mare. Bunny excitedly tossed her head, greeting Marie with a snort and a nudge. The past week had been rainy, so Marie hadn’t been riding as usual, and her horse seemed eager to get outside. As soon as Marie was in the saddle, Bunny pulled on the reins and wheeled around.

  When Marie finally rode through the wide arch of the castle gate and saw the city lying below, her queasiness had passed, replaced with a ravenous hunger that nearly made her turn back. But the prospect of a hearty snack at the goat farm caused her to ride on. She spurred Bunny so her hooves drummed a rapid staccato on the cobblestones, and the good burghers stuck their heads out of doors and windows in surprise, wondering why the castellan’s wife was in such a hurry.

  Hiltrud was feeding her pigs when Marie came riding up, only reining in her horse at the very last moment. “What’s up with you? Have you had a message from Michel?”

  Marie shook her head. “No, unfortunately not. I just felt like visiting you. I was terribly sick this morning and had hoped for one of your healing teas, but now I just want to eat.” As she spoke, she was staring so hungrily at the scraps Hiltrud was feeding the hogs, she seemed about to eat them herself.

  “You look famished! Come in.” Hiltrud emptied the rest of the scraps into the trough, washed her hands at the well, and led Marie into her kitchen. There she cut her a few slices of bread and put sliced sausage, ham, and cheese on the table, as well as a pot of her special rosehip jam.

  Marie wolfed it all down. When the wooden plate in front of her was clean to the last crumb, she peered longingly at the pantry door.

  Hiltrud noticed her glance and tilted her head in surprise. “Would you like some more? Don’t be shy.”

  Brushing her hand over her stomach, Marie realized she’d recently put on weight. Naturally, she wasn’t quite as lean as she used to be, but so far she’d kept her good figure as well as her youthful looks. She didn’t really want to risk ruining that. But the hole in her stomach wasn’t filled yet, so she asked for a bit more. Hiltrud nodded a little mischievously and disappeared into her pantry, returning with a slice of bread she’d spread generously with butter and jam and topped with a slice of ham as thick as her finger. Marie gobbled it down with obvious pleasure.

  “That was good!” she said when she’d finally finished everything.

  Hiltrud walked around her, brushing her friend’s face with her hand. “Have you had such cases of ravenous appetite before?”

  “Not really,” Marie replied, “and I hope it won’t happen again any time soon, or I’ll be as round as a barrel when Michel comes home.”

  “You said you were sick when you got up?”

  Marie nodded vigorously. “You have no idea! I didn’t even make it out of bed.”

  “When was your last monthly bleeding?”

  “Why do you ask?” Marie raised her head in surprise, but tried to remember. “It’s been a while. I think Michel was still here. I was never very regular, I assume because of the potions I took to prevent pregnancy back when we wandered together. I’m afraid those herbal brews made me infertile.”

  Grinning, Hiltrud emphatically shook her head. “On the contrary, everything suggests you may be with child.”

  “Nonsense!” Marie gave a bitter laugh and looked ready to burst into tears; then she took a deep breath. “Could it be?”

  “It’s not impossible.” Hiltrud pulled Marie into her arms. “I really wish it for you, my little Marie.”

  Marie’s eyes sparkled. “That would be so wonderful! I’ll write to Michel immediately and send a messenger on horseback.”

  “If I were you, I’d wait until you’re absolutely certain. You don’t want to give him false hopes and then disappoint him.”

  “No, I mustn’t do that!” Marie sighed and listened to her body, hearing nothing but her own heart and clinging desperately to a glimmer of hope. “Tell me, Hiltrud, when will I know for sure?”

  “Just be patient. You’ll feel the baby in a few weeks’ time. And now I’ll make us a good tea, because you must be thirsty.” Hiltrud left the kitchen to fetch water from the well, and when she returned, she gestured at Bunny. “You shouldn’t be riding as wildly as before, or better, not at all. Since you’ve been waiting for a child for ten years, you shouldn’t take a
ny risks.”

  “Oh, I won’t, don’t worry!” Hugging Hiltrud despite the large kettle she was carrying, Marie stared at her friend wide-eyed. “If you’re right, then today is the happiest day of my life!”

  Hiltrud struggled out of Marie’s embrace with a smile and placed the kettle on a trivet. “Then let’s make sure it stays that way.”

  When Marie returned to the castle late that afternoon, she was beaming with joy. Marga, who came to her room at the usual hour to report the day’s events in the household, couldn’t help noticing her good mood. But she found her mistress strangely distracted.

  After discussing necessary items with Marie, she hurried into the kitchen. “The mistress would like her supper now,” she told the cook. “Frau Marie is in extremely high spirits. I think the goat farmer was generous with her wine.”

  8.

  The kaiser and the burgrave of Nuremberg described their skirmish as a great victory, but Michel considered it a catastrophe averted with a lot of luck. As it was, a large number of knights were either dead or would be unable to fight for a long time, and he himself had lost a third of his palatine foot soldiers. Timo’s fate, however, saddened him more than anything. An arrow had struck his sergeant in the leg, and as it had only been a slight injury, Timo hadn’t properly cared for it. After a few days, the wound had begun to fester and eventually became infected, so the army surgeon had to amputate his leg. Now the good old fellow sat in Nuremberg, drowning his sorrows in wine and mead. Meanwhile, the foot soldiers still fit for action were under the command of Sprüngli from Appenzell, while the kaiser had assigned Michel to join a group of knights who, under the command of Heribald von Seibelstorff, were meant to take action against the Hussites on their own.

  All summer and well into fall, the knights carried out raids deep into Bohemia, but instead of driving away plunderers, the men ravaged Hussite villages in the same way their enemies did. Seibelstorff and the other knights showed no mercy toward anyone getting in the way of their swords, slaughtering men and old women on the spot, and violating girls and young women before cutting their throats. In particular, Falko von Hettenheim and Gunter von Losen excelled at these cruelties, but Michel refused to touch a woman or kill anyone defenseless, even though his comrades mocked him for it.

  Their last expedition led them into a remote area where many border refugees had sought safe shelter, and the village they raided seemed much too large for a wooded mountainous area. Michel stood at the edge of the hamlet like a dark shadow while, not far from him, a girl about fifteen years old squirmed underneath Sir Falko, wishing him to hell with a face contorted with pain. Michel was itching to draw his sword and fulfill her wish. His companions’ conduct was bound to sow hatred in the hearts of the Bohemians and drive them right into the rebels’ arms. There were still towns and castles in this country that had resisted the Hussites so far, and Michel thought it would have made more sense to support these places rather than to burn down villages, slaughtering their inhabitants and sending children to the knights’ castles as serfs or selling them as slaves for pieces of gold to the Lombards recently arrived in Nuremberg.

  When Michel could no longer bear the girl’s screams, he rode his horse on a path up a wooded hill, her cries following him like a nightmare he couldn’t shake off. Ludwig, his new servant, or, as he was now allowed to say since becoming a knight, his squire, followed him, looking despondent. The bastard son of a minor knight and a bonded maid, the seventeen-year-old was overjoyed to serve Michel. In his dreams, Ludwig, whom everyone called Wiggo, already saw himself riding across a battlefield in gleaming armor, fighting noble knights on horseback. At the same time, he was annoyed at his master, who scorned the behavior of the other noble lords and wouldn’t let him take part in the pleasures the war was offering in such abundance.

  Wiggo was on the cusp of manhood and would have liked to feel a woman’s soft body beneath him, but his master had strictly forbidden him to take part in the assaults, otherwise threatening to dismiss him from his service. So far Wiggo had obeyed, but the yearning in his loins grew by the day, and he wracked his brain trying to figure out how to find satisfaction without losing Michel’s favor. As he followed his master up the hill, he hoped to lag behind so he could secretly look for a maid the others had spurned and finally prove his manhood. But Michel waved him over and pointed straight ahead. “There’s someone there.”

  About a hundred paces ahead, a man was crouching behind a tree, his shadow on the path’s pale gravel suggesting he was an armed scout. Michel spurred his horse on as if to ride past, so the man would assume he hadn’t been spotted. At the last moment, Michel wheeled his horse around and galloped toward the scout, reaching him just before he could disappear into a thicket impenetrable to horse and rider. Leaning out of the saddle, Michel grabbed the Bohemian and pulled him onto his horse. The man lost his mace in the process, but immediately reached for the knife on his belt. Michel noticed just in time and knocked him unconscious with his fist.

  Wiggo caught up with Michel and helped him tie up the prisoner. “If this isn’t a scout, I’ll never drink a drop of wine again,” he shouted eagerly.

  “At your age, you should be avoiding wine anyway.” Michel remembered his own youth, when he would get a sip of wine only on important feast days though the hills around Lake Constance were covered in vines. Even now he hardly ever drank too much, though the men he was riding with cared little for this kind of self-control, preferring to down any alcohol they could lay their hands on. In that village, the troops hadn’t found any wine, only a sour beer with a strange aftertaste. Michel had spat it out in disgust after his first sip, but his comrades hadn’t been as fussy, and when he returned to the village with his prisoner, not many of them could still be called sober.

  Heribald von Seibelstorff stared at the fettered Bohemian in confusion. “Where on earth did you get this fellow, Adler?”

  “Caught him in the forest. I suspect he’s a Hussite scout.”

  Heribald nodded grimly, then ordered a squire to pour a bucket of water over the Bohemian. When the man began to stir, he kicked him in the ribs.

  “Talk, lad, if you value your life. Where are you from and where is the rest of your heretic pack?”

  Though his hands were tied behind his back, the Hussite struggled to his feet and in answer spat into the knight’s face.

  Heribald staggered backward, wiping the spittle from his cheek and nose with his sleeve. “Kill him! But slowly!”

  Four horsemen grabbed the prisoner, tore off his clothes, and dragged him kicking and screaming to the tree in the village center. There, they hung him by his arms and started their bloody work. The Hussite gritted his teeth, but his will broke under the torture and soon his screams filled the village.

  Turning away, Michel was angry at himself for having handed the man over to Seibelstorff. It would have been more merciful to kill him on the spot. At the same time, he realized the Bohemian soldier most likely wasn’t the only one in the area.

  “We should send out some scouts,” he advised Seibelstorff. “It’s possible there’s a whole army waiting for us over the next hill.”

  Glancing at his men, who were watching the torturing of the Hussite with mixed feelings of anger and excitement, Seibelstorff shrugged uneasily. With thirty knights and fifty mounted squires and servants, they weren’t equipped for a major battle. He grimaced at Michel. “We should indeed look around. Adler, Hettenheim, Losen, take five horsemen with you and see where this road over there leads.”

  Falko von Hettenheim and Gunter von Losen weren’t exactly the men Michel had wished to accompany him. He looked around for Wiggo, but his squire was nowhere to be seen and he didn’t come when his name was called. Pinching his lips together to stop himself from uttering a very un-Christian curse, Michel mounted his bay and followed Falko von Hettenheim.

  9.

  The Czechs had been following the Ger
man knights for three days, but there hadn’t been enough of them to stop the raid on the village. While the Germans carried out their bloody rampage, the Czechs cowered in the forest, listening to the screams of their tortured compatriots and biting on sticks to stop themselves from shouting out with anger and hatred. One Czech had gotten closer to the village than the others, because his sister and her husband lived there and he hoped to somehow save them. But the Germans had captured him, too, and were now torturing him to death. Vyszo, the leader of the group, waved over one of his companions. “The Germans will pay for this. Run to our people, Przybislav, and bring them here. The rest of us will follow these pigs and leave signs indicating where they have gone.”

  Przybislav nodded. “I’ll be as fast as a falcon, Vyszo. In two days’ time at the latest, I’ll be back with enough brave men to send these mongrels to hell.”

  After giving the man an encouraging pat on the shoulder, Vyszo watched him disappear among the trees. Just then, one of the other men suddenly looked up. “I hear horsemen! They’re headed straight for us.”

  “Hide in the forest!” Vyszo shooed his men off the road, stopping in some high bushes to watch the imperial horsemen casually trotting along the path.

  If we don’t stop them, they’ll catch up with Przybislav and kill him, too, Vyszo thought, counting the horsemen. They were equally matched at eight men apiece, but the Germans were on horseback and better armed.

  “They’ll have to pass through a narrow gorge a little farther on. That’s our chance to surprise them.” Vyszo turned to his men. “Let’s set a trap and kill as many of them as we can. Przybislav has to get through and warn our people.” As the hoofbeats of the German horsemen echoed through the forest, the Hussites soundlessly moved among the ancient, moss-covered trunks. They reached the gorge first and with eager anticipation watched the Germans approach. There were two knights in full armor, another with somewhat lighter armor, and five servants wearing leather surcoats with metal plate reinforcements and simple helmets. Vyszo knew they were in for a deadly fight, but if Przybislav didn’t make it through, the Germans would raid more villages and massacre their inhabitants.