The Marriage Test Read Free

“Wouldn’t even let us set eyes on her. We had to spread a bit of coin about the village to learn she existed at all.”
    Neither of the devoted knights broached the question uppermost in their minds: What would happen if Lord Griffin decided the cook was all Axel and Greeve had said and insisted on having her? Trading anxious glances, they forced themselves to set such worries aside. It was enough that they’d managed to lighten his grim mood and turn his thoughts from the
impossible
—escaping the marriage the king had just commanded he make—to the merely
difficult
—wrenching a fine cook from a canny abbess’s hands.
    They and the dozen other men who had accompanied the Count of Grandaise to court and then farther north to this isolated enclave of females held their breaths as he turned and straightened to his full six-plus feet of height. They braced, expecting a blast, but he merely looked them over and demanded:
    “Which of you has the worst-looking cloak?”
     
    The ragged folk gathered at the rear gate of the convent jealously guarded their places in the line waiting for the distribution of alms. Nobody fed the poor like the Convent of the Brides of Virtue. There was no keeping back of the choicer morsels and reusing them for stew or pottage or broth and sops. The bread given out was not coarse “alms bread,” but cuttings from the same soft, white flour loaves the sisters gave their guests. Sometimes the sisters set up tables in the rear yard and invited the poor and hungry to sit, and even mended their ragged garments for them as they ate. It was charity at its finest. And the poor and wretched, some of whom had been waiting since sunrise for a taste of a rare meat-day alms, were both hungry and contentious.
    Thus, when a tall man in a ragged cloak appeared among them and strode straight toward the gate, they were incensed and demanded he wait at the back of the crowd. A few of the more intrepid souls grabbed his cloak as they insisted he wait his turn at the back. Some he shook off physically; others he pierced with a glare so fierce that they released him and skittered back to the safety of their fellows. By the time he reached the gate, opposition to his assumption had dwindled to shocked murmurs and shaken fists.
    Griffin, Comte de Grandaise, walked boldly through the thick wooden gate, which, as it happened, stood ajar. But once inside he faded back against the stone wall and slid along it to a notch that offered at least partial concealment. From there he was able to survey the yard and orient himself.
    Nearby, a gaggle of young girls and habit-clad sisters were struggling to settle planks across wooden braces to form makeshift tables. A pair of old men shuffled back and forth, carrying well-used benches out of what appeared to be a chapter dining hall. Periodically, some of the sisters would be called urgently back inside … leaving the young girls to chatter excitedly about their visitors and about the tasks they’d been assigned in the upcoming distribution.
    The working parts of the convent were arrayed in a row along the outer wall, ringing the rear yard; the well, the cow byre, the stables, the shed, and the dovecote and chicken roost. Nearby was a stake-and-twine fence set atop a low wall of chiseled stone blocks. He edged closer and peered over it at well-tended rows of kitchen herbs. There was a surprising range of specimens: chervil, dill, lemongrass, mint, chives, onions, sage, leeks, rosemary, parsley, thyme, basil, summer savory … all grouped according to tastes … pungents, tarts, and savories. It was heartening.
Someone
here had a sense of culinary order.
    He made his way around the herb garden wall. Pausing again behind a stack of old birch baskets and poultry ricks, he spotted the kitchens, identifiable by the plumes of smoke drifting out of sturdy-looking stone stacks that reached well past the roof. He watched the sisters and maids coming and going until an elderly sister