Chapter Seven #2
Nicola simply nodded. She wanted off the subject of young barons should Kenton come up with the idea to use Tab somehow because of it.
Silently, she turned back to her palfrey and Kenton came up behind her, helping her to mount the horse.
Quite literally, he lifted her up and put her on it and she smiled politely to the man to thank him. Stone-faced Kenton smiled back.
The rest of their ride into Manchester was uneventful but before they entered the city proper, Kenton had his ten-man escort, including two knights, remove their tunics bearing Warwick’s colors.
He didn’t want to charge into town announcing who he was even though Manchester was mostly held for Henry.
Still, it was his directive and duty to secure the entire town for Henry’s cause but until he could do that, they had to tread carefully.
He didn’t want to get into a fight with Nicola and Tab in their midst.
By the time the party entered the city walls, the sun was starting to rise and people were leaving the big church at the conclusion of matins. The church of St. Mary was very old, having been built on the site of an even older church, and it had been packed with worshippers on this frozen morning.
As their group progressed into the heart of the city, they followed the flock of worshippers towards the street of the great market, as most people in Manchester, and in other great cities, usually did their shopping on Sundays after worship.
Soon enough, the big street with its many vendors opened up wide before them and the patterned protocol of market shopping was in full swing.
With the street in sight, Kenton called a halt to the party.
There was palatable excitement in the air, the bustle and hustle of a busy city around them, and Kenton moved their group off of the main road and up against a building that was both a residence and a seamstress according to the painted sign above the door.
Leaving two men-at-arms guarding the horses and the wagon, Kenton took Nicola, Tab, Wellesbourne, and the remaining eight soldiers to the street where farmers and merchants were doing their business for the day.
The very first vendor they went to was a sheep farmer.
The man had his sheep in a makeshift corral, great wooly beasts with spindly black legs.
Several of the ewes were pregnant, the farmer told Kenton, and Kenton had the man point them out.
Meanwhile, Tab wanted to pet the fuzzy animals, including three tiny lambs, and ducked under the corral railing, pursuing the sheep as they walked in a nervous bunch away from the boy.
Nicola alternately negotiated with the farmer and told Tab to get away from the sheep.
The boy was chasing them in circles around the corral, so much so that it looked like someone was stirring a great pot of sheep.
Still, he managed to catch one of the lambs and he hugged the beast happily.
Nicola was very good at bartering and Kenton stood out of her way as she deftly handled the farmer; as Babylon’s chatelaine, she was much better at negotiating good prices than he was.
Kenton wasn’t one to negotiate at all, which Nicola was to discover with the next merchant.
After they purchased six pregnant ewes, three ewes with lambs, and a ram from the sheep farmer, they moved on next to a man who had dozens of sacks of grain – oats, rye, barley, and wheat – and his stall was the most crowded.
It was somewhat of a frenzy with a dozen customers demanding service.
Unwilling to wait his turn amongst the throng of people, Kenton had Wellesbourne and the soldiers chase all of the customers away by flashing swords and balled fists, and then Kenton went to the merchant and put the tip of a dagger to the man’s throat and demanded the best deal for all of his sacks.
Exasperated, Nicola was forced to step in, remove the dagger from the man’s throat, and negotiate the price for every single sack of grain the man had.
They needed it badly and were willing to pay.
Fortunately, the farmer wasn’t one to hold a grudge against a man who held a blade to him and soon enough, the men-at-arms were loading the bags of grain onto the wagon.
The farmer, who had a great deal of land to the north of Manchester, had been very smart about storing his grain so it would not become wet or moist and grow mold during the winter months.
He’d kept it very dry, off the ground on pallets of wood and stone, and therefore he’d made it a valuable and quality crop. It was a good haul.
All told, Nicola had purchased twenty sacks of oats, eighteen sacks of barley, eleven sacks of rye, and twenty-three sacks of wheat.
She explained to Kenton as the wagon was loaded that mixing the wheat with the rye or oats would stretch out the supply.
She estimated that they could feed twelve hundred people for a couple of months on what they had, providing they were careful with rations.
That would take them into late spring with good planning.
Kenton listened to her speak of measurements and stores with a great deal of interest. She was very knowledgeable on such things, which impressed him.
She had been well-schooled in the duties of a chatelaine and he quickly learned to defer to her in all things.
As the day began to dawn brighter and the market was in full swing, Kenton sent Wellesbourne and four additional soldiers back to guard the provisions wagon with all of that grain stored in it while he moved with Nicola and Tab through the market stalls.
Four men-at–arms trailed them, keeping an eye out for anything threatening, which was a good thing because Nicola seemed to have all of Kenton’s focus.
There could have been an entire army of Edward’s men behind him and he wouldn’t have noticed.
Having spent the majority of his time with Nicola fighting with her or being in some kind of argument with her one way or another, to find themselves in a peaceful and pleasant situation was rather disorienting but wholly wonderful.
Nicola had an adorable little habit of wrinkling her nose when speaking of something serious or distasteful, and she had just the slightest bit of a lisp that Teague had inherited, although his was much more pronounced.
Kenton found her lisp utterly charming. She was charming.
That belligerent, aggressive woman he had first come to know had a sweet side to her that was quite overwhelming.
But along with his admiration and his increasing interest, he couldn’t help the thoughts of Gaylord Thorne that filled his mind.
He recalled the first time he’d met Nicola, how she’d spoken of Gaylord taking his fists to her.
Then he looked at Tab, holding his mother’s hand, and thought of the young boy who had stolen a sword in order to protect his mother from his father; on any normal day with any normal people, such thoughts would not have distressed him.
Fathers being stabbed by their children weren’t particularly strange things in his world, a world of warfare and death.
But given that it had happened to Nicola, and to Tab, he felt some pity for them.
Odd, he wasn’t one given to pity, but he did know one thing – if Gaylord Thorne wasn’t dead by now, then knowing how the man treated his wife and sons, Kenton realized that he surely would have killed the man himself and would have felt absolutely no guilt about it.
Nicola and Tab and those two silly twins deserved all of the protection he could provide and all of the protection he wanted to give.
He wanted very much to give it.
A cold breeze was picking up as they made their way to a man who was selling dried peas and beans, great bushels of them, but they were detoured when Tab caught a whiff of something wonderful.
The lad let go of his mother’s hand and fled in the direction of the smell, which ended up being a baker who was baking tarts with eggs and cheese and herbs in them.
The tart crusts were made from rye because of the expensive nature of wheat during the winter months, but it created a wonderful savory dish that Tab begged for.
Kenton, the Keeper of the Purse, relented and bought two for the boy, who happily wolfed them down.
Then Kenton looked to the men behind him, his men-at-arms, and he could see that they were hungry, too.
Pursing his lips irritably, he ended up purchasing all of the tarts and the seven of them, including Nicola, stuffed themselves on the delicious pies.
Bellies full for the first time in days, they returned to the farmer with the bushels of dried peas and beans but they had to pass a smithy in order to get there.
Nicola, Kenton, and the men-at-arms saw nothing unusual or spectacular with the smithy but Tab did.
He saw small swords that the man had made, suspended from the roof of his stall.
He stopped to admire the swords as the others continued on but it didn’t take Nicola long to notice she was missing her child.
Quickly, she dashed back to take him by the hand and pull him along, but he dug his heels in.
“Mam!” he cried, pointing to the smaller blades hanging from the ceiling. “Look at the swords!”
Nicola didn’t even look. She was tugging at her son. “Come along, Tab,” she said firmly. “You must not delay our business. Sir Kenton will not be pleased.”
“Pleased about what?” Kenton asked, coming up behind them. “What is so interesting here?”
Tab didn’t hesitate; he pointed to the swords. “Those,” he said. “They… they are small for boys. Like me.”
Kenton’s lips twitched with a smile. He knew what the lad meant. He wanted a sword. Kenton pointed to the blades. “Those are called batons,” he told him. “They are not real swords. They are meant for training.”