“Please!” she said eagerly, and Granny put down her mug and got up from her chair.
She returned with an enormous leather-bound book, and opened it at the place they had left off.
This book was an extensive compendium of the medical knowledge — especially herbs — of at least ten generations of Grannies. The binding had been cunningly made so that pages could be inserted anywhere, and when something new was learned about a plant, the information could easily be added. Each entry had a dried specimen, a decent drawing of the living plant and everything that had been learned about it, even if all that anyone had left was a notation saying “sheep fodder.”
“I didn’t remember that,” Granny mused, her finger on a line that said that “the root of Sheep Sorrely, when roasted and ground, can be used to make a tasty hot beverage.” “This is as useful for me as it is for you. I don’t believe I have looked this closely at the book in years.”
But something had been nagging at the back of Bella’s mind ever since the discussion of the Woodsman, and finally, it solidified into an actual thought. “Duke Sebastian,” she said aloud. “You said no one had seen him since he came of age — ”
Granny closed the book. “Not quite true,” she admitted, “but close enough. No one outside the Court, at any rate.”
Bella waited, hands folded in her lap, eyes fixed on Granny expectantly. Granny laughed. “I know that look! Your turn to brew the tea. There should be just enough time to tell the tale before you must be getting back.”
Bella was more than willing to brew the tea in exchange for what promised to be more than mere Court gossip.
When she returned with the two mugs full, both sweetened with a touch of honey, Granny had built up the fire again. The two of them put up their feet and Granny took an appreciative sip of her mug. “Well,” she said, “not much of this will be in the broadsheets. Sebastian may be a Duke, but he is not one of the truly wealthy ones.”
Bella settled into the chair and nodded. Wealth was as important as rank in the city, and a blindingly rich commoner, like the Master of the Goldsmiths Guild, was more important to the gossips and often within Court circles than a Duke of modest means and little or no political ambition.
“Sebastian’s mother died when he was very young. His father, the Old Duke, was gray-haired when Sebastian was born, so it was no surprise when he died when Sebastian was sixteen. Sebastian inherited these woods and lands enough to support him comfortably, but not so much that it excited anyone’s greed.” Granny chuckled. “So I was told.”
Bella wondered who had told her. Granny was hardly the simple Herb Woman she pretended to be, but from the way she was talking now, it seemed as if she had some contact with people within the King’s Court.
Or — Well, perhaps not. Her sources could simply be the King’s servants, who probably knew as much about what was going on as their masters.
“At any rate, failing a Guardian or Protector being named in his father’s will, he was left to the care of the King and was brought up at Court until he was eighteen.” Granny took another drink of tea. “I’m told he was pleasant enough to look at and pleasant enough as a person, but neither he nor his inheritance set any hearts on fire. Then when he turned eighteen, he came into his own and moved onto his estate, but for the first few months, until he was about nineteen, he continued to turn up all the time at Court. Daily, sometimes.”
“Daily?” That surprised her.
“Redbuck Manor is not that far from here,” Granny pointed out. “I would see him ride by on the road down there two and three times a week. Then something happened. He stopped going into the city every day. I stopped seeing him ride by, stopped hearing the horns of his hunting party in the woods. He withdrew, and no one knew why. And that was about five years ago.”
Granny waited. Bella’s mind raced.
“He hadn’t any sweetheart, so it couldn’t be that. He hadn’t any close relatives left to shock him by dying, so it couldn’t be that. It wasn’t some accident or other?”
Granny shook her head. “I’d have been called. Not accident, nor illness. In fact, I can think of only one thing that would cause someone to shut himself up on a lonely estate like that.”
Bella waited.
Granny paused portentously. “A curse.”
BELLA CONSIDERED THAT. “IT’S POSSIBLE, OF COURSE,” she agreed. “But this is one of Godmother Elena’s Kingdoms. If someone had been cursed, wouldn’t she do something about it?”
“Should she?” Granny countered. “He’s not at all important. And not everyone gets happy stories.”
Bella gave her a mock scowl. “Really, that’s cruel of you, Granny. And I don’t know — I don’t know anything about the business of being a Godmother. But you have said that it’s not a good thing to have curses floating about at random. They tend to be like tarred brushes — everything they get near ends up with black, sticky marks on them.”
“So you were paying attention that afternoon. Good.” Granny put her empty mug down; Bella just then realized she had been clutching hers, and set it down, as well. “It’s possible that it’s a very complicated curse, and she still hasn’t worked out how to lift it. I wasn’t telling the whole truth about Sebastian being shut up inside the walks of his own Manor. He does come out, rarely, and only for those social events he really cannot avoid. He’s still eligible and handsome, and yet he stays on the outskirts of society and is quite isolated. It’s quite the mystery.”