The Baron's Quest Read Online Free PDF

I had built outside my daughter’s chamber and the flower garden I planned. I had my Gardener design it for her twelfth birthday which will be coming up soon.”
    “Stop it,” he growled, knowing his friends liked to remind him he was the only one of the three of them without a castle. “I have commissioned work to be done at the manor house, and I’m expanding my orchard and rebuilding my mews.”
    “No matter how much money you throw around and how big your manor house becomes, it’s still never going to be a castle,” John reminded him.
    Nicholas knew exactly what to say to shut his friend up instantly. “John, I’ve heard talk on the coast that your castle is haunted.”
    “Haunted?” John raised his thick brows and laughed. “Since when? I haven’t heard anything of the sort.”
    “Oh, my mistake,” said Nicholas with an upraised finger in the air. “I think I am just confusing the fact that every baron of the Cinque Ports as well as the minstrels and bards, keep adding on to the humorous tales of you crying out in your sleep every night. The latest story is that your cries have been mistaken for the wails of a drunken ghost.”
    “Are you still having those bloody nightmares?” asked Conlin smiling as if he were amused. “Do tell us what’s been haunting you, my friend.”
    That shut John up, just like Nicholas knew it would. But now he needed to throw something in Conlin’s direction as well.
    “Sandwich, I hear you can command an army of men, but can’t control your own daughter,” added Nicholas. “Now she’s even got you planting gardens of flowers? That doesn’t sound like the hardened warrior I fought side by side with at the battle of Orewin Bridge, defeating the Welsh not that long ago.”
    “Nay, that’s not true, I have her quite under control. And I didn’t say I planted the garden of flowers, I said I planned it. My Gardener did the work.” Conlin’s mouth turned down into a frown. “My daughter is just missing her mother, I assume, and that is why she’s been so unruly. She still hasn’t accepted her death yet.”
    “It’s been two years for Crissakes,” said John. “Why don’t you remarry already?”
    “I’m going to. Soon.”
    “Right after John?” Nicholas looked at his friend’s face and almost laughed. Whenever he mentioned marriage, John looked like he’d seen a ghost. Nicholas wondered if that’s what had him screaming in his sleep to begin with. He looked back to his other friend now. “Egads, your own daughter will be married before you, Conlin.”
    “I wouldn’t talk about marriage, when you are probably the only baron in the entire country who has never been married,” Conlin replied. “At least the both of us have been married at one time or another. When are you going to have an heir?”
    “Aye, you’ll need an heir to someday inherit that humongous manor house of yours,” said John, and once again the subject was back to Nicholas with both the men laughing at him.
    “Look,” said Conlin, pointing a finger across the wharf. “Isn’t that the same girl we saw on the docks yesterday?”
    Sure enough, Nicholas saw the merchant’s daughter once again shadowing tradesmen up the piers, trying to hock her wares.
    “I knew she’d be back,” mumbled Nicholas under his breath.
    “You’d better collect the rent she owes you quickly.” John was insistent about this. “If you keep letting peasants walk all over you, you’ll never talk our king into building you a castle.”
    “She’s not a peasant, she’s the daughter of a wealthy merchant,” said Nicholas.
    “Wealthy? Hah!” laughed Conlin. “If she had money she wouldn’t be down on the docks harassing men who are going to offer her money to couple with them next.”
    “She just might take it, if she’s that desperate,” added John.
    Nicholas didn’t like the way his friends were talking, even if he knew that what they said was probably true. He didn’t know why it bothered