Backtrack to Part 2
She looked more like her aunt every day, and Arnold wondered how no one else had noticed, even as he was grateful: a child fatherless through death received kindness, while a child fatherless through sin received only contempt, and Sarah did not deserve to be held in contempt; she suffered enough at the hands and tongues of the other children. So Arnold resolved to feel grateful: grateful that he and Gerold had looked alike enough to be brothers; grateful that Erma had lain with him not too long after Gerold’s death; grateful that the harvest had been poor and the winter, hard, so that all the children born then had been born early; and, most of all, grateful that Sarah had survived.
But as he watched Sarah trudge down the street on an errand, her eyes red and puffy from crying, his heart began to pain him; although Sarah looked so much like Linda, her heart was softer, so tender and easily hurt, and all Arnold wanted was to take her up into his arms as a father should and kiss away all her cares and tears, but he could not. To Sarah, he was only the Mayor, and though he may be a friend of her mother’s, there were no blood ties that bound them which would allow for such behavior.
There were already rumors of how he favored Sarah over all the other children in the town, though they all revolved around how it was part of his attempts at wooing Erma; they had been childhood sweethearts, and it had long been expected that they would marry. But that was before Gerold came to town, the youngest son of a local knight, looking to make his own fortune.
Arnold had never understood what Erma saw in Gerold. He was poor, landless, and tradeless. He had nothing to offer a woman aside from children… and yet Erma had chosen the traveller over the future mayor, much to everyone’s shock, especially Arnold’s. He had never quite recovered from it, even as he moved on and married Roza, even as he learned to be more than content with her, even as he looked forward to their first child, even as he began to forget what could have been between him and Erma. The old wound was always there, lightly cloaked in the back of his mind, to be revealed at the slightest touch of tragedy, and it had never ached more than when Roza, and the child within her, died.
The winter chills had been particularly malignant that year, lingering on well into the spring, almost into the summer, claiming the lives of many in the town, among them his Roza and their child. It had been another brutal winter chill that had claimed Linda all those years ago, and while Arnold had every reason to despise the illness, looking at the tear-reddened eyes of his daughter, he found that he could not. It was the winter chill that had killed Gerold long after the flowers had bloomed, and it was the grief shared between a widow and widower that lead Erma to lie with him; without the chill, there never would have been a girl named Sarah.
He could not bear that thought.
And so, even though it was improper, even though it would only strengthen the rumors of favoritism drifting about, Arnold watched Sarah run her errands, waited for her to finish, and went over to talk with her and walk her home.
“Good morning, Sarah,” Arnold said as he fell into step beside his daughter.
“Hello, Mayor,” replied Sarah, her voice hoarse and lacking its usual enthusiasm.
“I am sorry about Hund. I know you were very fond of him.”
Sarah’s face screwed up and her eyes glistened with moisture as the hands holding her basket clenched and twisted the handle until the knuckles had gone white. She came to a stop, took several deep breaths through her nose, the nostrils flaring each time, and said, her voice thick, “I am too.”
Arnold stopped with her, put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and asked, more than slightly puzzled, “What for?” He could barely make out Sarah’s reply from between her sobs before she dropped her basket in favor of clinging onto his leg and crying into it.
Arnold was at a loss for what to do—no one had ever cried on him in public before—but the townsfolk in the marketplace were beginning to stare, and so it was, with an acute awareness of all the eyes upon the two of them, that Arnold gently detached Sarah from his leg and offered her a handkerchief before picking up her basket and ushering her away, sending properly apologetic smiles to witnesses all the while and trying not to think of all the rumors that would arise.
Once they were well away from the marketplace and in a more quiet section of town, Arnold found a bench to seat both Sarah and himself upon and try to console her. “There, there,” he said, patting her back gingerly, continuing once her sniffling had mostly subsided. “While it’s true that Hund will never grow up—” The sniffles returned with a vengeance, and Arnold waited until they subsided again, rubbing Sarah’s back all the while. “—he was a great hound. The greatest, in fact. Even though he died doing so, Hund saved the Prince’s life, and that is something that will never be forgotten.”
Sarah looked up at Arnold, her brown eyes wet and wide. “Hund did what?”
“He saved the Prince,” Arnold repeated, meeting her gaze with a small, proud smile of his own. “If it hadn’t been for Hund, the Prince would have died from eating a poisoned piece of meat, and we never would have known that there was poison in it until it was too late.”
Sarah’s gaze became more intent. “So the prince didn’t kill Hund, even though he chewed through his rope?”
With that question, everything fell into place – why Sarah had thought the Prince had killed Hund, why she had wished him dead, why she had taken Hund’s death so hard – and Arnold felt immensely relieved; he and Erma had been worrying over a misunderstanding. “No!” he replied quickly. “Of course not.”
There was no need to tell Sarah that, in the process, Hund had completely ruined the dinner with how he had leapt onto the table, scattering food and drink all over the Prince’s attendants, before devouring the choicest pieces of the Prince’s dinner and then tackling his cousin into a mud puddle as she tried to flee. All things considered, it was a mercy that the meal had been poisoned and that Hund had perished, otherwise he would have been tasked with the unpleasant duty of putting Hund down, and Arnold was sure Sarah would have never forgiven him for it. But Hund was dead, he had saved the Prince, inadvertent as it may have been, and all that mattered was that Sarah now knew that the Prince had not killed Hund, and that her beloved dog had died a hero.
So why did she look more upset than before?
Before Arnold could ask, Sarah dropped off the bench and picked up her basket from where the Mayor had set it down. She pushed a strand of tear-matted brown hair out of her face, dried her tears and running nose with his handkerchief, and handed it back to him, nicely folded, as she said, her voice still thick from crying, “I need to go.”
Arnold looked down at the soggy handkerchief, not really sure where to put it, before looking up at her and asking, concerned, “Would you like me to come with you.”
Sarah shook her head, sending her pigtails whipping around before darting off in a direction not towards her house. A moment later, just before she turned the corner, she jerked to a halt, twisted back around, came to a stop in front of him, and muttered a quick “Thank you,” before darting off again in the same direction, leaving a rather bewildered Arnold on a bench still awkwardly holding an obviously used handkerchief.
Arnold did not have long to wonder where Sarah was headed to with such urgency for the messenger boy came running down a different street, shouting, “Mayor Arnold! I’ve been searching for you everywhere!” the moment he spied the Mayor, and all concerns about Sarah were swept away in lieu of the news that the cook who had poisoned the Prince’s meal had been apprehended, and that it was one of his own staff.
It was with this terrible news in mind that the Mayor rushed back to his mansion, as quickly as was proper, to assess the damage and convince the Prince (and more importantly, his advisors) that he was uninvolved in his cook’s actions and so should not be held responsible for them.
Onwards to Part 4
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