The Green Dragon Inn #11 - The Last Chapter

[Rose]

Rose heaved a silent sigh of relief as Lilly spoke with their host. He seemed a bit too --- well, “interested” in looking the both of them over. ‘I should have brought Hamlin with me, insisted that he come,’ she thought to herself. Hamlin was her oldest brother – thirty years to her twenty-five. He’d begged off when she’d asked him to come, saying he and their father would be moving the sheep with their new lambs to another pasture.

‘You’re old enough to see about your business in Bywater,’ he’d told her. ‘Just keep to the main path as you go; the goodwives keep an eye on the road as well as their house and little ones. You’ll be safe enough.’

She sniffed at the remembered assurance. ‘Oh safe enough while my feet were treading down the path!’ she thought to her self. ‘But here I am, in the Dragon, my feet tucked under my chair. And I feel like I’m about to be pounced on.’

It would be rude she thought to talk just with Miz Greengage, leaving the two Chubb cousins with nothing but themselves to talk to. Rose screwed up her courage and turned a friendly face toward the two brothers. ‘Fatty, is it?’ she said to the thin lad on her right, then nodded to the one just beyond him. ‘And Gerdy, yes? How are you enjoying the Green Dragon? Or have you been here before?’ She thought it a safe enough pair of questions to ask. And as she finished speaking, she sat back in her chair, waiting politely for one of them to carry on with an answer.