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Your silence has its intended effect. Lord Royce is unnerved and dissatisfied and does not know quite what to think. He looks back at the house and furrows his brow. As you step on to the road, he cries out that the lower born races should know their place: to live beneath the heel of the higher born. Perhaps he hoped to get a rise out of you and thereby incriminate you---for while fights among commoners are of no consequence, the law has ever favored those of noble blood when it is drawn---but your blood, the like waters you tend, is cold. You walk away, your mind already moving on to other matters.
When you arrive home, you find Gordon pacing nervously in front of your house. He runs to you the moment he sees you, and begins speaking so quickly and disjointedly that you can barely understand him. You fear, at first, that it is something concerning Mabel again, for you are at least able to make out the mention of the fruit he took from the lord's grove. However, it seems the matter lies with the peasants responsible for maintaining the grove and gathering its fruit during harvest.
The Wescott family are among the half-dozen or so farmers in these parts who possess their own land. Farming is not a popular occupation so close to the coast but the Wescotts have been successful at it for generations, partly by the miserliness and ruthless frugality of their forefathers. Only recently have their fortunes taken a turn for the worse. The last two years saw poor harvests. Two lean years can be endured, of course, but not when the lord has military ambitions. Taxes were raised and when the Wescotts had sold all they could and found themselves still short, they put up part of their land to borrow the silver and accepted some duties--keeping the grove among them--to make up the rest. Now that the lord has returned and the harvest this year seems good, they had expected to recover. Then, at the end of the last season, the eldest son of the house was injured by a horse and lost his wits. The patriarch and his wife have five other children, three daughters and two boys, but these are hardly the equal of the eldest, who could do the work of three men, and upon whose responsible shoulders the family had placed all their hopes.
All this you learned from your uncle, who knows the patriarch as a recent patron of the tavern he used to frequent, spending the little coin his family has left on the strongest drink he can afford. Mrs. Wescott has somehow or another discovered the theft of the fruit and is apparently pressuring Gordon to pay them off for their silence. Gordon can ask the money of his father, but fears telling him.
You tell Gordon to:
>Pay them off. They must be desperate to have to resort to blackmail, the shame of which will keep them quiet.
>Bring the matter before the reeve and before the lord himself if necessary. You put your trust in the law.
>Go and confront Mabel, the source of all this trouble. She should be the one to answer, not Gordon.
