“The rabbit strangles?” she asked, a little taken aback by the matter-of-fact way he described it all.
“Or breaks its neck. Either way, you have a rabbit, and you don’t have to hunt for it. Most poachers work that way. It’s easy enough for even a woman to do. That’s why I thought you were a poacher.” There was amusement in his voice. “Most of the women I catch poaching generally try to buy me off with favors.”
“And you let them?” She tried her best to keep any accusation out of her voice, but she couldn’t help the resentment that crept in.
“Depends on how hungry they look.” Now he turned to look at her. “This is my duty, you know. I am supposed to keep poachers from hunting the woods bare to preserve the game for the landowner. As it happened, you are a skinny enough wench I thought you might need the meat. I don’t take anything they aren’t perfectly willing to part with. The law allows me to whip them, toss them in Sebastian’s dungeon for a few weeks, turn them in to the Sheriff of the nearest city or use my own discretion. Depending on the Sheriff, they might get put in the stocks, thrown in gaol, get a branding on the face for rabbits or lose a hand for a deer.” He turned his attention back to the horse and the trail. “Generally I don’t actually catch the poacher, I only find the snares.”
She was shocked into silence by the litany of punishments. She’d had no idea…
“How often do you turn poachers in to the Sheriff?” she asked, finally.
“Never,” came the laconic reply. “It’s almost half a day’s ride to the city, and longer than that to walk, since I sure as hell would not be putting a poacher on a horse. It’s too much trouble. Sebastian’s dungeon is not an option. Easier to just to give them a couple stripes and scare them off, or use my — discretion.”
“I see.” She was torn. If the law was that harsh, shouldn’t it be changed? And how was he excused for taking advantage of women who were desperate and hungry enough to take the risk of poaching? But if the law presented a worse punishment, was he doing them a favor by allowing them to negotiate with the only thing they had to trade?
“Take this fellow — I know him by his knots. He’s been setting snares here for six years, and all I ever see are the snares.” He chuckled. “I have to admire him for his cleverness and stealth, even while I despise him for stealing from the landowner.”
Put that way… her thoughts were a tangle. Things had seemed so black-and-white before!
“It’s really no different from someone stealing a sheep, or robbing apples from an orchard,” Eric went on. “This forest belongs to someone. So do the things in it. If it were wilderness and unclaimed, that would be different, but it’s not. We even allow people to collect windfall wood, nuts, berries and mushrooms, and there are damn few landowners who will do that. There are places where the penalty for picking up a few sticks for your fire is the same as taking a hare.”
“Oh” was all she managed to say.
“Heh. Not so cut-and-dried anymore, is it?” he asked, turning to look at her again, a sardonic eyebrow raised. “I’m not a good man, Mademoiselle Beauchamps. I don’t pretend to be. But I don’t take a hot iron and press it into a man’s forehead because I find him with a dead rabbit.”
They continued on in silence for a while. Eric stopped several more times, bringing back handfuls of wire, and twice, a dead rabbit, which he stowed in a larger saddlebag. The mule behaved beautifully.
By now Bella was completely lost. If she hadn’t had their trail to follow back, she was sure she would never have been able to get out of the woods on her own. Finally, Eric looked up at the sun again and grunted. “Time to turn around,” he said. “We’ve covered a lot of ground, as much as I could have alone. You and that beast are both steady. If you promise not to try to go haring back to the city, you can ride out alone any day you like as long as you keep to the road. I don’t suppose you’d want to come out with me again.”
“Looking for snares?” she asked. “It was…interesting. I learned a great deal that I didn’t expect to.”
“Which is a polite way of saying no?” There was something underneath the irony. She couldn’t tell what it was.
“Which is a polite way of saying ‘when I get an astride saddle,’” she found herself saying. “I felt as if I was going to fall off more than once, and if you are going to cover rougher ground than this was, or at a faster pace, I don’t want to try and keep up on this thing.”
He turned to look at her with a face full of astonishment, and laughed. “Well, Mademoiselle Beauchamps, you do surprise me! I can see why Sebastian finds you interesting!”
Sebastian finds me interesting? “Isabella,” she corrected. “We are going to be thrown together for the next three months, so I do not see a point in being formal.”
“Isabella, then.” He looked up at the sky. “If we press on at a good pace, we should be well in time for supper.”
Sapphire fussed over her until she changed into one of the new gowns and allowed the Spirit Elemental to put her hair up. Eric had given the rabbits to one of the other Elementals with instructions to put them in the pantry, and she was already planning what to do with them.
When she went down to supper, both Eric and Sebastian were already there and already eating. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. Eric shrugged; Sebastian looked apologetic.
“I skipped dinner and Eric was as ravenous as a winter-starved bear,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t think you would mind.”