The Duke's trouble

The Duke of Hamshire was in a very troubled state. The Duke was from one of the old noble families. His nobility line was 7 generations long. His ancestor had been one of the people who were made nobility due to military service.

He never had any trouble since he became the governor of the hamshire city. He would take a part of the money from the other nobles every year and save it up. His father had told him that in the future if another Kingdom conquers Maepis or for some reason he had to run away from the country this money is the only thing that can be useful.

His grandfather had recieved a secret message that Bennet Kingdom was spending a huge amount of money on making new types of weapons. There was a possibility that some day Maepis might be conquered as it was the weakest Kingdom in the continent.

This made him realise that if he were left without a title he would not have anything left with him. Since that day he had started saving money. After his death he had his son continue it as well and now the Duke was also contributing to it.

It was not the money meant to be used by him anyway so he didn't care about storing the money just to appease his late grandfather.

But now the Duke was in a big problem. Lately his and the other nobles goods had been continuously stolen by the bandits. The Duke knew about the bandit problem but he didn't try to solve it because he would have to spend a lot of his men to remove the bandits from the area and he knew that it would make him weak for a bit.

After Jost met him 6 months back he already understood the problem they were facing. But he couldn't find anything about the bandits after sending his men to investigate. He thought the bandits have moved to a different area.

But two months back they had been recieving new attacks on their cargo. Previously the bandits wouldn't attack when they recognised the Duke's carriages to not antagonize him. But strangely the bandits had been allowing the normal merchants to move forward and attacking only the nobles carriages.

The Duke knew that the bandits always harassed the towns but never attacked the cities because they knew that the nobility could destroy them easily.

The Duke was sure that this was the work of a new group who was being arrogant. But he couldn't send his men because he knew from the reports that they had already killed other noblemen's soldiers when they were trying to defend the carriages.

If he did nothing though he would be looked down upon by the other nobles in his area as well as the whole Kingdom who would say he was scared of a few bandits.

He had to solve this problem. He found a way to do that. He sent his trusted deputy to meet with the various bandit groups already persent in the area to help him destroy this new group.

Hiring the bandits was not that costly for a noble so he decided to go through this method. But the problem was that is anyone found out about his involvement then he would become the embarrassment of the nobles for having used bandits to do his bidding. So he planned to do this as discreetly as possible.

What he didn't know was that as he and the other nobles were becoming poorer baron Mule was becoming richer by the day.

He would take all the goods sent by Ethan and sell them to the neighbouring city deputy governor of Greenville. This deputy governor was a good man to do business with.

After finding out that Mule had goods which came from unconventional way he created a network of middlemen to make his involvement impossible to investigate.

In exchange baron Mule sold him the goods at a good discount. Since he got the goods for free anyway this was a good way to help baron mule and Ethan earn money and at the same time make the city of Greenville rich.

In this process the city of Hamshire would lose a lot of money and in the long time might even cause problems for the people in the city.

The Duke knew that the problem needed to be solved fast. His daughter was going to be married next month. He wanted the problem to be solved by then because other city governors would be coming to hamshire for the wedding. If the problem was not solved by then the Dukes would get to know about the problem and he would have to face a huge embarrassment if the king had to send a royal constable to solve the problem.

Royal constables were the group with the biggest jurisdiction in the Kingdom when it comes to law enforcement. If any major problems were to occur a royal constable would be sent to take care of it.

Each royal constable had the authority to use all the forces of nobles in the place they were sent to solve the problem. For those reason nobles were not allowed to become royal constables with the exception of royals. 90% of the constables were from normal families and the remaining 10% were royals.

If a royal was to be selected as a royal constable in the area then all his misdeeds could be found and he could be removed from the position of governor.

He hoped such a day never came.