A League of Ladies (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 5)

by Ashley Zacharias

  “The assassin will be indicted, tried, and convicted. Adjudication into slavery is an appropriate penalty for that degree of vandalism. That’s critical because of the precedents that my lawyers found. There have been four cases where adjudications have been applied retroactively to the time of the crime. It was done before because that had implications for families that were fighting over the slave’s inheritance. The arcane details of those cases don’t matter. All that matters is that retroactive enslavement is possible. My lawyers are certain that they can get a similar judgment against this assassin. The judge will seize on any chance to set this right. The assassin will be enslaved retroactively and you know what that means.”

  Irene felt light-headed. “It means that I didn’t attack a person two nights ago. I attacked a slave.”

  “Exactly. He was property. He didn’t know it. Nobody in the world knew that he was going to be declared to have been property on the night that he came into our manor. But the law doesn’t care who knew that. It only cares about what his status was under the current judgment.”

  “If I don’t get crucified because he was a slave when he tried to attack you, he will be.”

  “As soon as he is declared a slave retroactively he’ll be nailed to the courthouse wall. Property doesn’t get a trial. When he confessed to vandalism, he had no idea that he was condemning himself to crucifixion.”

  “What will happen to me?”

  “For cutting a piece of property to ribbons with a straight razor? Nothing. Sir Drake is going to be a little disappointed when the judgment is handed down against his assassin.”

  “He’s going to keep coming after me.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that. We’re going to take care of him. When the assassin confessed, he admitted that Sir Drake paid him fifty thousand plaqs to kill both of us. He told the sheriff where to find records of the financial transaction.”

  “So you’re going to put Drake on trial for conspiracy to commit murder?”

  “No. A knight tried to assassinate a lord. We’re all too angry to wait for a trial. I’m tabling an edict of attainder in the Assembly tomorrow. There’s no question that it will be passed unanimously and signed by the Governor within twenty-four hours. Drake will be stripped of his title and all his property. Then both he and his wife will be seized, taken to the prison yard and beheaded on Sunday at noon.”

  “Lady Drake, too? Maybe she didn’t know what he was doing. She might be innocent.”

  “I’m not going to leave a loose end. She stood to share in the benefits of Drake’s plotting. She can share in the consequences.”

  Irene had never before seen her husband as such a formidable man. “Will you do me one favor?” she asked.

  “Anything.”

  “Before Lady Drake is taken to the block, would you tell her that you found Geoffrey. Tell her that he is on a cruise in the Eastern Sea and that he couldn’t get back in time to say goodbye. Tell her that you spoke to him by radio and that he wanted her to know that he loves her.”

  “You want me to lie to a woman who is on her way to her beheading?”

  “Yes. She’s a mother.”

  “You have a forgiving heart. I will tell her your lie.”

  * * *

  Irene poured the tea, and then sat on the sofa. “Thank you so much for coming.” It was a weird thing for a pleasure slave to invite a half-dozen ladies to a manor for tea. It may well have been the first time in history that such a thing had been done. But Irene had been a pioneer in so many ways. This was hardly her most exceptional example of breaking with convention.

  “Thank you for inviting us,” Linda said.

  “I must confess,” Kaitlin said, “that I never know quite what to expect from you, but it’s always something amazing. I quite look forward to hearing about your latest adventure.”

  Irene laughed. “Most of my so-called adventures are nothing but an attempt to survive another day.”

  “Survive, you do,” Victoria said.

  Irene was pleased that Victoria Sumner had accepted her invitation after she had bailed out of the sex class on the way to the kennels. But it seemed that their mutual friend, Felicity, had convinced her to give Irene another chance.

  “Is it true that you bested a trained assassin in a knife fight in your husband’s bedroom?”

  Irene gestured to her hair and bowed her head. It had been shaved in a dozen patches where wounds to her scalp had been stitched closed. Her head looked like she was suffering from the mange and black stitches were still visible through the eighth inch stubble that had begun to grow back.

  “I didn’t survive unscathed,” she said. “I owe it to my thick skull that he didn’t manage to sink his knife into my brain. It was a desperate and harrowing fight. The only reason that the assassin fared worse was that I managed to turn off the lights before he reached me. In the dark, luck counts as much as skill and I’ve often been a lucky woman in the past year.”

  The women looked at Irene with wide eyes. Though they had all heard the story second- and third-hand, seeing the half-healed wounds and hearing it directly from Irene’s lips made it real.

  “I’m so happy that you didn’t fare worse,” Linda said.

  Irene shrugged. “I would have suffered far worse if my husband’s lawyers had been any less clever. For two days, I lay in the hospital expecting to be taken away and nailed to the courthouse wall. I was saved from crucifixion only by an amazing legal fiction.”

  Her closest friends, Linda, Felicity, and Kaitlin’s faces grew pale.

  “Crucifixion?” Linda said. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m a slave.” Irene gestured to the golden collar that she was again wearing around her neck. Not permanently now, it was now held on with hidden latches and could be removed whenever she wished. “I attacked a person. That is automatic crucifixion.” That part of the story had not been reported in the newspapers. The editors didn’t want any slave hearing that there was any hope that a violent slave might be escape an agonizing death.

  “But you were only defending your husband against being murdered. You saved his life.”

  “That doesn’t matter. There is absolutely no defense for a slave attacking a person. The only reason that I’m alive and pouring tea now instead of a corpse nailed to the wall is that clever lawyers managed to have the would-be assassin enslaved retroactively so that, under the law, I didn’t attack a person but a piece of property.”

  “That’s not fair. You should be given a reward for your heroism instead of threatened with crucifixion.”

  “The sheriff was going to give me a reward. He was going to have me sedated before I was nailed to the wall and then strangled as soon as I was hanging. My reward was to be unconscious for the whole procedure. No other slave would have been given such tender consideration.”

  “Good lord,” Victoria said.

  “That’s related to why I invited you here this afternoon. I wanted to talk to you about treating pleasure slaves fairly. Few slaves are crucified, but almost all are killed before their time. The normal fate for a pleasure slave is to be used until she is no longer fit for pleasure auctions. Then she is sold on the labor market, is assigned work that is too dangerous and difficult for hired employees, and is worked to death within a short time. Pleasure slaves never live to see their fiftieth birthday. Most of them die in misery in their early forties. That doesn’t have to be. My husband is soon going to table an edict in the Assembly that will allow most pleasure slaves to buy themselves out of slavery when they are sent to the labor market. I’d like you to help me convince your husbands and other lords to vote in favor of that edict.”

  “Why would we help pleasure slaves?” Lady Wright asked. “They devote their lives to taking our husbands away from us.” She was someone that Irene did not know well, but was the wife of one of the most powerful lords in the Assembly and would be an invaluable ally.

  “Not by choice,” Irene said. “Women are forced into slavery
against their will. Either they are born into it, or they are adjudicated when they are convicted of a criminal act, or they are pressed into slavery by bankruptcy. Their only choice is to service their owners or suffer crucifixion. That’s no choice at all.”

  “So you want us to show mercy to criminals and ne’er-do-wells?”

  “Let me tell you about some of the ne’er-do-wells that I’ve met.” Irene spent the next twenty minutes telling her guests about women who had been inveigled into bankruptcy by unscrupulous slavers, women who had been enslaved for minor crimes committed when they were only sixteen years old, and daughters of minor aristocrats who had been enslaved on trumped-up charges when they tried to flee from their engagements with powerful aristocrats. “The wives and daughters of lords are not at risk, but any other beautiful young woman in this city may be enslaved almost at will. I’m not trying to stop slavery, I’m only trying to commute it from a death sentence to life of relative freedom beginning in middle age.”

  “How would that work?” Felicity asked.

  Irene explained the details of the edict that would establish trust funds for all slaves and the small fees that would accumulate in that trust. Fees that would never grow large enough to allow a slave to purchase herself on the pleasure market but would allow her to buy herself on the labor market.

  There were a few questions. She was able to answer all of them to her guests’ satisfaction.

  “I think this all sounds reasonable,” Victoria said, “but I’d rather see the entire institution of slavery abolished. It’s something that men created so it’s up to us women to do away with.”

  There was general agreement with that sentiment and a couple of ladies made statements in support of Victoria’s proposition.

  “That’s a different issue,” Irene said. “If you want to start a movement to abolish slavery, then I would certainly support you in any way that I can.”

  “Even though you volunteered for slavery, yourself?” Lady Wright asked.

  Irene smiled wryly. “That was a foolish whim. I did that only because I didn’t see any other way to get my husband’s attention. It worked eventually but I’ve since learned much more effective ways for a lady to get all the attention that she needs. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have had to enslave myself. I would have saved myself considerable pain and my body would bear far fewer scars.”

  “You mean by pleasing your husband sexually. By competing with pleasure slaves at their own game”

  “That’s a big part of it. Sure. Why else do you think our husbands visit their kennels? It’s not for the sparkling conversation. Most pleasure slaves come from common stock. You can be sure that, apart from the sex, our husbands find our company more interesting than their slaves’. If we want to succeed in reducing the importance of slaves or even abolishing them altogether, we have to start by admitting that our husbands need sex. If they don’t get it from their wives, they’ll look elsewhere. Personally, I want to be the woman in my husband’s bed.”

  “Even if he demands perverted, depraved sex from you, night and day?”

  “I think you’ll find that the vast majority of men aren’t as depraved as you imagine. Not if you have a reasonably broad definition of normal sex. Most men want simple, straightforward pleasure in a reasonably limited variety of forms. And I want the same thing. Good sex is a win for both husband and wife. And if your husband is determined to do something that you don’t want to do, then you might be secretly relieved that he goes out to the kennel instead of coming to your bed and forcing the issue.”

  Some of the women smiled coyly; others looked frankly disbelieving.

  “There’s one point that we get wrong. I’ve been working with a couple of professors who are studying the early development of our tradition of pleasure slaves. Like you, I always assumed that it was developed by gentlemen. In fact, the tradition was developed by their wives during the Foundation War. Gentlemen were coming back from the war expecting daily sex. There was no birth control and ladies had little appetite for being constantly pregnant. The solution was to allow their husbands access to sterilized slaves. Until modern times, pleasure slaves were routinely sterilized. Vestiges of the tradition of wives supplying slaves for their husbands remain today. You’ve all had to arrange for pleasure slaves to be loaned for your husbands’ entertainments. That isn’t new, it’s the way it was set up in the beginning.”

  “Today, we can control pregnancy so we are less keen about our husbands visiting their kennels. The tradition of pleasure slaves needs to be tweaked to fit better into modern times. The edict that I’m proposing will be a good first step. Maybe the final step will be complete abolition, or maybe not. That’s a discussion that I think that you ladies should have. If you believe that abolition would be best, then I’ll do what I can to help you get there. If you decide on smaller incremental changes, then I would help with that, too.”

  “You said that your proposed edict is the first step,” Kaitlin said. “What would be your second step?”

  “I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but I have three steps planned right now. If we can get the trusts set up, then that will change little except to give pleasure slaves the prospect of living productively after they are no longer of use to our husbands.

  “The second step will be an edict to declare that babies born to slaves are born free. It’s simply wrong that any baby is born into slavery. There are few born slaves, anyway. Those few are born on slave farms, which are horrific places that routinely murder both male newborns and homely female toddlers. An edict declaring that all babies are born free, even if they are born to slaves, will have little impact on the supply of slaves and will eliminate the truly evil practice of slave breeding. I can’t imagine that it will be hard to pass. Before modern contraceptives, when all slaves were sterilized, slave births were rare. The practice of breeding slaves is not traditional and should be eliminated immediately.”

  “And the third step?”

  “Slavers trick a great many beautiful young women into taking loans that they can’t pay back. They do this only because it is such a profitable business. They’ll lend a woman ten thousand plaqs, foreclose to take possession of her as a slave in payment, and then sell her for thirty thousand or more. They make a twenty thousand plaq profit for convincing a young woman to take a loan that she never wanted. That’s wrong. The court shouldn’t give the slave directly to the creditor. It should hand the slave to the auction house. After the sale, the creditor should be paid exactly what he is owed, no more. The remainder, after the auction house expenses and commission, should be put into the slave’s trust fund. That will let her buy herself out of slavery much more quickly. That would take the profit out of slaving. Sir Drake was a slaver and we would be better off with fewer gentlemen like him.”

  “He’s not a slaver any more,” Linda said.

  “He’s a headless slaver now,” Felicity added.

  The women around the parlor nodded in satisfaction. Nobody had much liked the Drakes.

  “That third step depends on your first edict passing,” Lady Wright said.

  “Yes.”

  “And your fourth step?” Lady Wright asked.

  “I don’t have a fourth step. So far, I think that these three steps are sufficient to make slavery better suit our modern needs. But if you can suggest more steps and want my support, I would be pleased to help however I can.”

  “Thank you for the tea,” Lady Wright said. “I’m going to take my leave now. But first, I’d like to make a couple of comments. First, I believe that your proposals are well reasoned and wise. I will discuss with my husband the edict that your husband is going to table in the Assembly. I believe that I can convince him to support your edict, and I will advise him to convince some of his friends to support it as well. Second, I would like to invite you back to tea before long and hope that you will present your case to some more of my friends, just as you have presented them today. If we’re not going to
abolish slavery completely, I would very much like to see a modernization of the traditions, both for the sake of the slaves and for our own sakes. Third,” she turned to address the other ladies in the room, “I propose that we consider forming a committee to meet regularly and discuss the long-term reformation of the tradition of slavery. Lady Fortson has given us an excellent start. I don’t want us to drop the ball.”

  There was enthusiastic assent from the other guests.

  The League of Ladies for the Reformation of Slavery was formed at that moment. Lady Wright was acclaimed the president and Irene was drafted as First Counselor.

  Almost unnoticed to anyone but Irene was that Lady Wright, wife of the most powerful lord in the Assembly, had called her Lady Fortson. From that moment on, the highborn always referred to her by that name.

  She no longer objected that she was only a slave.

  But she still wore her torc with the Slave Irene inscription on formal occasions.

  * * *

  “It passed. Only seventeen voted against it.” Lord Fortson shook his head. “I can’t believe that so many lords who were adamantly against your edict a month ago changed their minds. An organized league of wives is a fearsome force.”

  Irene laughed. “A force for the good, I assure you.”

  He frowned at her with theatrical exaggeration. “Corruption is a danger that can waylay any great political force.”

  “I’m sure that the Assembly can resist any evil that the League might try to perpetrate on them.”

  “There is no doubt that the Governor will proclaim the edict next week. When three quarters of the Assembly are in agreement, no governor will refuse to proclaim their edict promptly.”

  “Then it’s not too early to start working on the next edict.”

  James’ face fell. “Next edict? You never said anything about another edict. What’s this one?”

  “This is pretty simple. All babies should be born free, even the babies of slaves. It’s pretty obvious that no innocent little baby should be made a slave at birth. And it won’t make much difference overall. I bet not more than one slave in a hundred was born into slavery. Slave births are surprisingly uncommon. It will be an easy argument to make.”