“What you mean is that Milton, being of that blood, is an unparalleled rake.” Fleur stared at the wall behind the desk as the words were drawn out of her.
Perhaps the songbirds outside the window had returned; their chirped songs could be heard coming through it. Perhaps the high voice that joined them was a child, scampering around on the streets.
Then the low sigh of the house’s wise man joined them.
“After all, he is Milton, a man who trades with the nobility. Surely it’s so, is it not? And I’m a mere girl.”
“… I would not go that far, but…”
“It’s fine. I know it myself. My feet aren’t on the ground. It feels like if I were to jump from the windowsill there, I could just fly away,” Fleur said, narrowing her eyes at the bright sunlight that shone down onto the courtyard garden.
Olar opened his mouth to speak, but in the end, he swallowed his words. His old master had been Fleur’s former husband. And he’d seen every detail of how she had been wedded to the man. Fleur knew that Olar felt more agony over the union than she had.
There was probably a degree of atonement in the way he had come to her aid when the Bolan house had fallen, leaving her on the verge of wandering the road alone. And so even when this poor daughter of fallen nobility found herself stricken with something that couldn’t really be called love, he still felt it would be cruel to make her just throw it away.
That was probably it.
It was just a guess, of course, but she doubted it was far from the mark – and might well have been exactly right.
Fleur returned her gaze to the room and smiled selfconsciously. “But business is business. People change when profit is involved. Isn’t that right?” It was one of the things Olar had taught her.
The grizzled old merchant nodded regretfully but nonetheless firmly.
“Anyway, you can’t put any trust in what someone says with their mouth. That’s–”
“The mark of a true merchant, milady.”
He skillfully completed her thought, and she managed to give him a natural-looking smile.
The kindly old merchant was obviously relieved to see this, which meant that her own course of action was clear.
Fleur quietly cleared her throat and straightened up. The desk was full of things she needed to memorize.
“I’ll do it. I’ll do it, all right? So would you kindly leave me to it?”
Olar took a moment to think this over, then took his leave of her with exaggerated politeness.
Fleur continued to face the door after it was closed, smiling in spite of herself.
They were both so kind to her. She knew she had to make sure their trust wasn’t misplaced and to protect them.
Fleur scratched her nose lightly, shrugging her shoulders in amusement at her own ambition. She then picked the quill pen up and turned to the material on the desk with renewed seriousness.
Trusting a man’s word that upon their parting he would return in three days was the stuff of silly poetry and had no place in the real world, and Fleur was well aware that trading did not always proceed according to plan.
On the evening of the fourth day, when a message arrived from Milton saying that there had been a delay and he would be unable to return for a time, Fleur was not particularly disappointed. If anything, the news seemed to affect Olar more.
And it was not as though she was sitting in her room basking in sunbeams as she waited for him. The days were very busy.
The Jones Company, which had introduced her to Milton, contacted her to inquire about the purchase of hay, and for a week she was a frequent visitor to the portside trading company.
In the morning and evenings she received impromptu lessons from Olar about clothing, on subjects like knitted woolen fabrics and woven linens. However, be the components animal or vegetable in origin, or even something she had never heard of originating in some far-off land, it was doubtful whether what she learned of them then and there would last two days.
After all, in the case of something like wool, the places where they were born differed from where they were raised, as did the locations of shearing and dyeing. And there was the matter of the towns where spinning and weaving guilds did their work, to say nothing of fulling or milling. There was no room for her to remember which goods then sold most easily at which towns.
Even if she could memorize everything Olar knew off the top of his head, Fleur herself doubted it was really sinking in.
She even talked about her struggles with one of the traders she saw on her trips to the trading company – surprisingly, the same man who’d tried to underpay her before.
The man – whose name was Hans – smiled as he sympathized with her. “It was the same for me.”
“Really?” Fleur couldn’t help saying out of pure surprise.
“Of course. There’s so much to remember, and trying to pack it all into my head, it felt like I was going to forget my own name,” said Hans, the same man who’d tried to renege on his promised price after Fleur had hauled stinking herring up and musty, dusty hay down.
Fleur felt shocked out of her own skin.
“But you’ve got nothing to complain about given that fine tutor of yours. Us apprentices get nothing but the strap or the rolling pin if we’re unlucky enough to work for a baker.”
“Olar… er, I mean, that ‘fine tutor’ said the same thing. I was so sure he was making it up!” Fleur laughed, which made Hans roll up his shirtsleeves and bare his arms.
“This is from when I was whipped. I was learning to write, using shells on slate, and I’d gotten white all the way up to my elbow. The dust was beat clean off me.” Next he pointed to a spot on his left arm where hair no longer naturally grew. “And here’s where I burned myself with a candle trying to keep awake late one night.”
He spoke of the memories as though they were pleasant ones, but even those who seemed like they were born knowing everything about the world had suffered and toiled to gain that wisdom. Fleur could understand, then, why he might have looked down on her or regarded her with a certain amount of derision. It must have been irritating to anyone who had worked so hard when someone like Fleur demanded to be treated as a peer, despite not having earned the right.
“Some of the other apprentices seemed to be born clever, so I swore I wouldn’t lose to them, which led me to do such things. Even now I’m a bit proud of it. If you work hard, you can succeed. On the other hand…” Hans stopped in the middle of his fluent expounding and smiled self-consciously. “Sorry, I talk too much.”
He hardly needed to finish his statement.
If you work hard, you can succeed – but on the other hand, even a naturally clever child won’t get anywhere without hard work.
That confidence was what led merchants to make fun of nobles and kings and led directly to their peculiar strength.
They feared nothing. Fleur found herself asking if that meant they had nothing to lose, nothing they wanted to protect.
“We can’t hold a candle to monks,” said Hans after a moment of thought, letting a not-unimpressed expression flicker across his face. “Unlike them, we merchants are filled with worldly desires.”
“Even monks have the desire for their own salvation, or if not that, for the salvation of others, I should think.” The words that came from Fleur’s mouth as she looked at Hans were ones Olar often spoke, but now they were her words, spoken as someone who’d seen the monks receive tithes from the Bolan family with her very eyes.
Hans regarded her appraisingly, stroking his chin as he did so.
Until very recently, Fleur might well have found the gesture a rude, cold-blooded one. But now it just seemed to her like a charmingly merchant-like habit.
“You might be right. If so, perhaps we’re similar to those monks. Instead of a land without sickness or death, we work for a land without loss or bankruptcy,” he said, amused. “’Twould be paradise,” he added quietly to himself.
Merchants pursued profit a
bove all else, relentlessly, tirelessly, seeing only that – they regarded all others with suspicion and would betray even a faithful comrade in service to their avarice.
Everything was for profit. Always profit.
Titles like lord or king held no meaning for them. After all, to become a good merchant, one endured lashings and burnt one’s own flesh just to stay awake, while a king or lord was such merely by fortunate accident of birth.
“Might I ask you something?” Fleur said. They faced each other, and after all their conversation over the past several days, it seemed silly to hide her face. There just hadn’t been an obvious opportunity for her to remove her scarf, but she now did so.
She did not know if he would understand her gesture as the compromise that it was, but his expression as he said, “Please do,” was a gentle one.
“What is it that makes you work so hard?” Fleur felt she had an inkling, but she wanted to know for certain.
There might be any number of practical reasons, ones even a girl raised in a forest-rimmed manor could imagine. And yet Fleur asked because she thought he might give another sort of answer – a secret one, one that might validate her own secret hopes.
“Ha, that’s what you want to know?”
“I-is it such a strange thing?” She smiled an embarrassed smile, a gesture well practiced from so many banquets with gossipy aristocrats.
“Not at all… I understand the sentiment. I’ve wanted to ask my own master the same thing, truthfully. But at the moment I’m just one merchant in a vast ocean. Asking me why I work so hard to accomplish so little makes me feel rather embarrassed.”
So he had yet to gain anything to show for his effort.
Fleur mused that she would probably have remembered Hans’s face forever if this conversation had not come so soon after he’d so brazenly tried to beat down her selling price when she had dealt with his company. For all his avarice, he was awfully humble.
Merchants were a strange bunch.
“I was the fourth son of a poor farmer’s family, so I’m fortunate to even be alive. I left home with nowhere to go and nowhere to return to, and when this trading company brought me in, I had no choice but to cling to them. Although in honesty many apprentices did not make it.” Hans spoke with a measure of bashfulness, lightly scratching his nose in an effort to hide it. It was a boyish and charming gesture. Eyes used to scorning or mocking others were now tinged with a melancholy nostalgia.
“And yet if you want to know why I’ve endured it… there are many reasons, of course, though I don’t really know which one might be the truest one. Part of it was that this was the only path open to me. But… hmm…”
Despite being stymied by the bothersome question, Hans nonetheless seemed to be enjoying the conversation. He fell silent, looking off into the distance.
Fleur turned her gaze from his profile down to her own hands. She wore a smile on her face. Hans’s expression was a very familiar one to her. And his silent profile was all the confirmation that she needed of her supposition.
Fleur had had no special love for her husband, but there was one thing about him that she envied – the fact that he had a goal, which he would sacrifice absolutely anything for: pride, faith, friendship, even love. He was not a good man, but he had something that drove him to incredible achievements.
She wanted to see what it was that waited at the end of his vision, just once, and she desperately envied whatever it was that inspired such ecstasy in his eyes. Lately she had come to resent her terrible miser of a husband less and less.
When their ruin had become inevitable, he’d lost forever whatever it was he was looking at. When the house had finally and completely fallen, he hadn’t appeared terribly disturbed. Perhaps in his heart, the object of his desire had already been taken from him – whatever it was that was of such value it made enduring any misfortune or suffering worthwhile.
Hans, who spoke of the trials he had suffered a child, was another person chasing that thing.
“I can’t really explain it,” he said, returning to the present from his reverie. “But it’s a feeling of anticipation.”
“Anticipation,” Fleur repeated, which Hans smiled and shook his head at.
“Forget I said anything. I’m far too young to answer your question.”
If he’d refused to answer, treating her like a beggar he was turning away at his doorstep, she probably would have given him a malicious retort here. But he was honestly acknowledging the difficulty of answering the question.
Even knights these days could hardly brag of such honesty.
“It was a strange question. My apologies.”
Hans regarded her playfully out of the corner of his eye. “Not at all.”
It seemed they had become a little closer. And Fleur had received an answer worth more than mere words.
“Thank you,” she said.
They were honestly, modestly, and above all greedily running down that road.
After this short exchange, they turned to talk of bringing in another load of hay, but Fleur’s feelings toward doing so had completely changed.
Completely unaware that the hay had come from the former lands of the house of Bolan, Hans was very interested in learning which hay was best and who to talk to at which villages in order to ensure smooth trading. He was showing real courtesy, which Fleur had long since realized was because she was now in a position to help him profit.
But where once she would have found this courtesy for profit to be somehow ignoble and shabby, she realized the truth was a bit different. Merchants did not advance on the virtue that came easily to born philosophers and wise men. They endured whippings and beatings and still struggled onward.
And if someone happened to help them in their struggle – well, of course such a person should be treated with courtesy.
Fleur returned to the matter at hand. That day, as usual, she had hung around the trading company collecting gossip, exchanging information and jokes by turns, and returning home, making sure to cross the road that led from the edge of town to the port.
She met up with Milton, whose face was somehow cheerful despite his being unable to hide his exhaustion – but there was only one thing on her mind. She wanted to put forth every effort to maximize their profit, then split it, and not because she was simply thinking about how to buy tomorrow’s bread.
Milton had said he wanted to earn money to get back at the family that cast him out. But was that motivation enough to drive him to work himself to the bone and somehow force the pleasant smile he wore?
Milton, Fleur was certain, was the same as Hans. He was anticipating something.
He was anticipating something that awaited him at the end of his path of commerce.
If so–
Fleur stood before Milton, who looked so tired he seemed ready to fall into bed in that instant, and offered neither greeting nor encouragement.
Instead, she said, “About the clothing purchase.”
Surprised, Milton’s face slowly but steadily shifted to display a fearless smile.
They decided to hold a meeting at Fleur’s house.
Bertra was there, and she knew the house top to bottom, from the roof’s ridgepole to the mouse holes in the floorboards, so there was no worry their conversation would be eavesdropped upon. And on the other side of the wall, there was Olar.
Even without her scarf, Fleur was well protected.
“Talk has progressed to the request of a purchase representative for the company.”
“Have you talked to any of the companies you’re connected with about starting new business?”
“Yes. That’s why I had to show a big profit.”
“And that’s why you’re so late?”
Milton smiled tiredly at the question. “Yes. So I won’t be able to visit that house for a while. I’m not saying I forced the goods off on anyone, but I sold all the way down to the gardener’s apprentice, so unless someone suddenly gets fat, they won’t need more
clothing for a while.”
Milton had been carrying twenty pieces on his horse when he had set out. Even if they had been aprons, it was more than he could sell to every member of the household. There was no question he had worked hard.
But that only proved the depth of his sales ability. They would not be taking a loss on this deal.
“In that case, what you’re saying is that when next we go to sell clothes we’ve bought up, even in the worst case, even if you feel like you’re utterly desperate, we won’t lose money?”
Milton stroked his chin – more scratched than it had been a week ago – with his finger. It had some stubble on it now, which made him look dignified. “That’s right. Of course…”
There was a high squeaking cry, and a mouse ran along the rafters in the ceiling.
“Of course, I truly did feel desperate. If possible, I’d like to avoid that,” said Milton, looking not at Fleur but at the mouse.
With effort, Fleur avoided openly wondering what he meant by “that” and instead tried to deduce it. He probably had been just as desperate as he was suggesting and did not want to wind up running around like the mouse in the rafters.
“You’re quite worried over, aren’t you, Miss Fleur?”
“Huh?” she replied in spite of herself.
Olar had warned her ahead of time to keep her mouth shut when she failed to understand something and wait for whatever would be said next. When she betrayed her own lack of comprehension, he said, she opened herself up to be exploited.
So when Milton chuckled, she immediately decided he was chuckling at her. When Milton spoke the next moment, though, it was clear that was not the case.
“I had debt, you know.”
“Debt.” There was no question mark at the end of her reply.
The word had sunk into her ears even before she voiced her response.
“Yes. It was another company that first took notice of my talents, you see. But they took advantage of my position and used me terribly. But it’s the current company that lent me money for room and board. I suppose it’s good luck, but I can’t really thank them.”
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