Read Home From The Sea: The Elemental Masters, Book Seven for Free Online

something.
    “I expect that’s the constable. Don’t go to the village till market day,” he decreed, and she agreed, even though she was somewhat disappointed. “If you go too soon, all you’ll hear is likely worthless. If you wait till market day, he’ll have shown his true colors, and you’ll get a better notion of what the man is. Never fear; anything I hear, I’ll sing back to you.”
    So that was what she did, heading off no earlier than usual, with her father’s admonition to get a few pigeons for a pie rather than a hare or the salmon she’d fancied. “You won’t know if the salmon or hare you’re sold has been poached,” Daffyd pointed out as he headed out to fish. “I’ll go on the river myself today to get one, and better believe I’ll be minding the boundaries.”
    She didn’t ask him how he could be sure of getting a salmon without straying into the landlord’s waters; he would, and that wasthat. She was also quite certain he would fish only where there were witnesses to exactly where he was. Her da was the clever one.
    The first thing that she noticed as she neared the village was that it was
quieter
than usual. There was still the murmur of talk from the market, but it sounded subdued. She tensed, without really thinking about it. The murmuring sounded like the talk of people who are afraid of being overheard.
    Once she got there, it was obvious why. There was the constable, in the glory of his dark blue uniform with its brass buttons and buckles, truncheon at his belt, helmet on his head, surveying all of them from a slightly elevated spot on the church steps. He stood out like a red apple in white snow. He didn’t belong, he looked it, and he looked as if he knew that.
    He might have been a pleasant man; there was no way of telling, for his expression was stony. And the glances being cast at him were heated and full of resentment. People weren’t talking around him, and their conversations over goods in the stalls were in low murmurs meant to be kept from his ears.
    What in heaven’s name did he think he was accomplishing, standing up there like some sort of sentry? Did he think that he was preventing theft or trouble? Or was he trying to cow everyone?
    She went first to the post office, ostensibly to get some flannel to patch her petticoat, for the cloth-merchant from Criccieth wasn’t in evidence today. As she had expected, it was packed full, and away from the ears of the constable, the talk was as heated as the glances had been.
    “… and he orders me,
orders
me, mind you, that I’m to clean his cottage!” sputtered Mrs. Fychan, who lived next door to Violet Cottage. “I asked him what right he had to order me about, and he says, all high and mighty, ‘By order of the Crown.’ I gave him a right piece of my mind, let me tell you.” She was actually red-faced with indignation, as the others gave her every bit of their attention. Her heavy eyebrows were going up and down, up and down with agitation. “I told him, ‘The Crown got no right to order a good woman to let her childern starve and be left alone just so you can be waited on. Yougot some sort of paper saying you can order me about?’ Well, of course he hadn’t. So I said to him, I said, ‘You go find yourself a charwoman and you hire her at a decent wage, and we’ll be having no more of this nonsense. I won’t be your char and I won’t be treated like your sarvant.’” She snorted, and heads bobbed in agreement. “Then I marched back into
my
house and let him see I had better things to do than tend to His High and Holy self.”
    “Well, I expect you heard what Sawyl Cale was told he was to do: fix that chimbley for no pay,” said someone in the crush. It sounded like one of the little boys.
    “Aye but I heard he fixed it good!” said the postmaster, with a titter. “Heard it from Sawyl himself, I did!”
    “So, what happened?” asked Bythell’s wife, from behind him. “You never did tell me the