Luzie interrupted him long enough to agree to his suggestion. It was only a few blocks more. “But Easter was early this year. Do you think the weather’s broken at last?”
“Not likely, maisetra. The river doesn’t smell like it should.” He looked over his shoulder as he pulled out into the center of the current. “Rain here doesn’t matter. Floodtide comes from higher up. They’ll have to throw the bucket at Saint Nikule soon, mark my words.”
The weather was the safest conversation anywhere in Rotenek at the moment. Everyone waited like racers at the line, listening for the sound of the flood bell at the Nikuleplaiz. That held true whether one left or stayed.
Mefro Alteburk met her at the door to take her coat and the music case. A heavenly scent beckoned toward the kitchen and she asked the housekeeper, “Have the lodgers dined yet?”
“Maisetras Halz and Lammez have eaten and left already,” Alteburk answered. “And Maisetra Ponek told me she’s dining from home. But Maisetra Mazzies waited on you.”
Even with her stomach calling, Luzie went upstairs to change first. It was no time of year to let damp clothing give her chill and a fever. Floodtide meant the risk of river fever, whether the waters rose or not.
Her nose hadn’t deceived her; Mefro Chisillic had made potenez. The rich aroma of duck and garlic and lentils brought back a flood of childhood memories. “Oh Silli, how did you know exactly what I’d be wanting today?” she said. Nostalgia brought the childish nickname easily to her lips.
“Because my bones say there’s a storm brewing,” Chisillic answered. “And you always did like potenez when it’s wet outside. You know what they say, ducks like rain and rain likes ducks.”
Silli could always take her back to her carefree girlhood when her only worry had been whether Papa thought she had practiced enough for the next concert. The cook was her only everyday reminder of those days. She had scarcely been married a year when Papa had stopped performing and her parents had left Rotenek for Iuten to live with her brother Gauterd. Gauterd’s wife ruled her own kitchen and had no need of Mefro Chisillic’s services. And so Silli had stayed on in Rotenek and joined the Valorin household. Her loyalty had been a rock after Henirik died.
Luzie shook off the memory. Twice in one afternoon he’d crept into her thoughts. She lifted a spoonful of the thick soup to her lips and teased, “I’m not sure there’s enough for two.”
“You won’t think to be taking Maisetra Iustin’s share,” the cook scolded, reclaiming her spoon.
Silli claimed the familiarity of treating all the lodgers as if they were her mistress’s daughters—even Issibet Ponek who had been sewing costumes for the opera since Luzie herself was a girl.
“Send Gerta to fetch her down then. I’m famished.”
They acted out the trappings of a family—it was better than constantly being reminded that she’d turned Henirik’s family home into a boarding house. Those had been desperate months after his death. Bills from the physicians and thaumaturgists had stolen all their savings. Iohen and Rikke had been too young to leave her time to earn a living even had there been work available. She’d been too numb to know where to turn.
Issibet Ponek, out of her own need, had been the first to gently suggest the idea of lodgers. Once Luzie had agreed, word of mouth and a certain sympathy had done the rest. It was all very respectable. She took in no opera dancers or acrobats. Just good, steady women of sound reputation. And if their work around the theaters meant odd schedules and quirks, they put up with her music at all hours in return.
But it wasn’t a family. Her family were all far off in Iuten and she barely saw them once in two years, except when Gauterd picked up or delivered the boys for school. The lodgers might gather in the parlor, on evenings when their lives intersected, talking and sewing and listening to her play. But there was always a certain distance. In time, they would all drift out of her life. Even Issibet had talked of retiring to the country some year soon.
Her family were distant, her neighbors had become customers, and in place of friends she had paying boarders. Luzie did her best to pretend it was enough.
“Do you think floodtide’s come at last?” Iustin asked as Chisillic served out the potenez, echoing the question on everyone’s lips. She waved out the window where the rain was now falling in sheets.
Luzie smiled up at the cook. “Thank you, Silli.” She always felt guilty to see her serving. There should be a real parlor maid, not just Gerta who kept the front rooms in order and helped all the women dress, and Mag who scrubbed pots and kept the fires, and Mefro Alteburk who kept them all in order and hired out the rest of the work. It wasn’t right to have Silli wait on the table. It wasn’t fair.
She returned to Iustin’s question. “I hope so. The riverman who rowed me down from Fizeir’s this afternoon was doubtful, though. They always know before anyone else. Do you have a floodtide invitation you’re waiting on?”
Iustin nodded. “I’ll be spending the summer season with the Chaluks. They asked Maistir Ion-Pazit to oversee the entertainments at Falinz and I’m to bring my violin to play in whatever entertainments he comes up with. Filip is all out of sorts because he knows they won’t stand for his usual compositions. But they aren’t waiting on the river. We leave next week, high water or no.”
So it was Filip now, Luzie thought. She only said, “That will give me a few days to make your room up for the boys. The term is already over, but they have to wait on Gauterd to bring them.” Luzie frowned. “Have you met my brother? You share an instrument, but…” No need to remind Iustin that Rotenek’s fraternity of musicians had not exactly welcomed her. Only the patronage of the Vicomtesse de Cherdillac had finally opened the concert halls to her.
Iustin shook her head and turned the subject back to the boys. “Iohen must be getting tall by now. I remember last summer he was almost to your shoulder. And Rikke won’t be far behind. They grow so fast!”
And so much of that growing happened out of her sight, Luzie thought with regret. She wondered if it were truly worth the cost to send them away to school—both in money and to her heart. But Henirik had made her promise. It was the academy he’d attended in his youth, and one of the best. Even more important than the studies were the friendships they made there that would serve them in good stead later.
* * *
Plans, it seemed, were made to be overturned. Two days later, the carriage that arrived just after luncheon was not Mari Orlin being delivered early for her lesson. It was a dusty traveling coach, disgorging two laughing boys and an assortment of trunks.
Rikke ran to her arms, shouting, “Mama! Mama!” while Iohen held to his fourteen-year-old dignity.
“What’s all this?” she asked after kissing Iohen’s forehead where the auburn curls had grown long and fallen across his eyes. “Your Uncle Gauterd was supposed to bring you next week!”
“The Perkumais offered to bring us home,” Iohen said, with the air of a rehearsed speech.
“Because Efrans asked Hennik to spend the summer with him,” the younger boy burst in. The interruption earned him a scowl from his brother.
Luzie’s mind spun. The Perkumais! Such an opportunity, but…
One of the grooms who had been unloading the trunks into the front hall pulled an envelope from his pocket and offered it to her, saying, “It’s true, Maisetra Valorin. Mesnera Perkumai asked me to give you this.”
She acknowledged the man with a nod and fumbled in her reticule for a few coins to offer as a gratuity. “We’ll discuss this later,” she told the boys. “Now come on in. We need to figure out where to put you.”
Iustin was only a little dismayed at the early invasion. “Of course I can pack up my things to make room. I’m sure I can find someone to take me in until we leave for Falinz.”
“Are you sure?” Luzie was doubtful. The weeks at the end of the season left every household in an uproar, even those who remained in Rotenek. “It’s only a few days. Maybe Maisetra Ponek…”
But that wouldn’t do. Issibet was always jealous of her privacy and she paid extra to keep it. Charluz and Elinur were already crowded in the room they shared. On impulse she offered, “You can just share my bed. I don’t mind. Better than packing twice in a week.” And that was settled.
There was still the other matter. Hours later, Luzie weighed and considered and lay restless through half the night, not only for the unaccustomed presence of Iustin in the bed beside her, but running sums over and over again. The Perkumais’ invitation to Iohen for a summer visit was an honor—an opportunity—but it was a burden as well.
When she broke the news to Iohen, she thought at first to spare him that calculation. “I haven’t seen you since I traveled to Iuten at Christmastide. I don’t want to lose a moment of my summer with you,” she began.
But at his crestfallen and rebellious look, she sent Rikke away and spoke to him as a man. “It’s one thing when you’re at school together. There’s a certain…equality between all the boys. But the Perkumais live a very different life than we do. It’s a life that requires the right clothes and the right…well, everything. I haven’t the money to set you up properly for a whole summer with Efrans Perkumai. And I don’t want you embarrassed to look like a poor cousin or a charity boy.”
She watched him turn red as he took in the implications of what she was saying.
“It’s not fair,” he said.
“No, it’s not fair, but it’s the way of the world. Be Efrans’ friend, but don’t try to be his equal. Not outside of school. Now let’s sit down and write a letter to thank him and explain that you don’t want to leave your poor Mama alone for the summer.”
He loosed one last dart. “We wouldn’t be poor if Papa were still here.”
She’d thought the same thing too many times for it to sting. “No, we wouldn’t, but the angels saw fit to take him and that isn’t for you to question. And we aren’t poor, we simply aren’t rich. If we were poor, we wouldn’t have this nice house to live in and you’d be prenticed out by now. So give your thanks to God for that.” Perhaps someday it would occur to him to give thanks to her as well.
Chapter Two
Barbara
June, 1823
Barbara guided her mare back onto the roadway and signaled the carriages to a halt. The crest of the Barony of Saveze gleamed, freshly painted on the door of the foremost carriage. Should she have substituted the arms of Turinz for this trip? It had seemed…premature, somehow. Receiving the title of Saveze had felt natural, comfortable. Claiming Turinz still left her uneasy. She sidled over to the open window where LeFevre’s round face peered out at the same sight that had led her to stop. Her business manager much preferred the comfort of the traveling coach. She glanced back to watch her cousin urge his own mount further from the road, picking his way through the edges of the piled earth that rimmed the massive ditch beyond. Brandel’s slight form had filled out under the combined forces of a year’s growth and an armin’s intensive training. He was not yet ready to fulfill the duties of bodyguard on his own. For all that his skill with a sword and pistol was growing, he was still too eager, too little circumspect. But the promise was there. His parents had sent him to Rotenek a boy, and in a few weeks she would return them a young man, with the shadow of a moustache on his lip and a voice that had settled to a pleasant baritone. She whistled sharply and he turned back. Brandel wasn’t on duty at the moment, but Tavit would take him to task later about never letting his guard down while traveling.
Tavit circled back on the road in front of the carriage, scanning the countryside to either side, though his eyes, too, were always drawn back to the earthworks. He was the very picture of a baroness’s armin, his lean body reflecting a taut alertness that was itself as much a protection over her as the sword at his side.
At the briefest of glances, Brandel and Tavit might have seemed brothers. Tavit’s build was slighter and more wiry and his black hair curled more tightly. A closer look noted the darker shade of his skin. The hardness around his mouth and eyes was a surer mark of his years than his smooth cheeks. Another man might have resented Brandel as a rival for his place at her side. Tavit had accepted him with the same taciturn forbearance as the other odd requirements of his position.
Here on the lonely highway to Turinz, Tavit’s sword might prove less useful in time of need than the musket in the coachman’s box. Barbara expected no threat more complex than robbers. Back in Rotenek there was the more delicate dance of honor and insult and reputation. In the city, the traditional parts of an armin’s training still had meaning and her duelist’s skills were as indispensible as LeFevre’s more staid talents.
According to LeFevre’s maps, they’d crossed into the borders of Turinz some hours past. These were her lands now, though only symbolically. It would be another half-day’s travel before they’d reach the title-lands she held by deed. Yet if her title as Countess Turinz were to mean anything but ceremony, the entire region fell under her concern.
LeFevre coughed softly to draw her attention and quirked a half smile at her with the ease of long acquaintance. “I don’t recall Langal mentioning anything about a canal. But during the time he held the mortgages of Turinz, it’s likely that nothing except the timeliness of the rents caught his interest.”
Barbara nodded and looked back at the torn earth. They’d find no answers here. She called up to the coachman to move on.
LeFevre’s manner rarely crossed the line to familiarity despite the long and tangled history between them. He had served the old baron since well before her birth and had stood a sympathetic watch over her childhood, when she had been something less than ward and more than servant in that household. And LeFevre had been the only person unsurprised when the baron’s last papers had been unsealed, revealing and claiming her as his bastard daughter.
But this journey had nothing to do with the late Marziel Lumbeirt, Baron Saveze. This was in pursuit of the legacy of her other father—her mother’s husband, Efrans Arpik, Count Turinz. The legal intricacies of debt and inheritance had given Arpik reason not to disown her. It had been a last stab at his rival. If Lumbeirt acknowledged her, then she would have been the bridge between Arpik’s creditors and Lumbeirt’s wealth. And then Arpik died, leaving the world in ignorance of the fate of his infant daughter—an ignorance that had continued until her twenty-first year severed all claims, both from the heritage of Arpik’s crippling debts and the rights to Lumbeirt’s fortune.
Barbara had considered herself well rid of Arpik’s inheritance, both debts and title. The deeds and the mortgage for the Turinz title-lands had come to rest at last in the hands of Maistir Langal, the notorious debt-broker. But he, having abandoned all hope of profitable return, had offered her those deeds for a pittance—and with it, a chance to lay claim to the title rather than let it revert to the crown.
It would have shown a want of tact to tour the property before the question of the title had been settled. Only slightly less tactful that she had drawn up the purchase contract so tightly before beginning on that process. Langal was not a man to be trusted beyond the ink and paper that bound him. The legal questions around the inheritance were delicate enough that she wanted the property solidly in hand before embarking on them. To claim the title, she had needed the consent of two parties: Anna Atillet, Princess of Alpennia, and the council of titled nobility and their heirs-default.
Princess Annek had been amused when the tangled history was laid before her. “You’ve inherited a superfluity of titles and a scarcity of wealth,” she had observed dryly. “In his enmity toward Saveze, he let the Turinz title slip away from the Arpik line entirely. What a legacy.”
“He never gave any thought to legacy,” Barbara had countered. “Arpik seemed to have taken no pains to get heirs of his own in all the time he was married to my mother.”
The council of nobles had been harder to convince on the matter of the title. Tomos Montein, Baron Mazuk, her new neighbor, had raised many questions and doub
ts about the propriety of it all, and started a whispering campaign that left many willing to let the matter slide for another year. The common sessions had nothing to say in the matter, of course, but there she found some allies who wanted the question settled after two decades of uncertainty.
The more she’d learned from her own contacts and LeFevre’s investigations, the more uneasy she felt about what she’d find in these lands. It had been twenty years since there had been a count in residence. Longer still since there had been one who had any care for the place and its people. Was she old-fashioned in thinking that sort of care still mattered?
It was still dizzying, when she thought of it, to have come in the space of five years from being the nameless orphan Barbara, legal property of Baron Saveze and willed with the rest of his disposable possessions to his nobody of a goddaughter, Margerit Sovitre. Dizzying to rise from there to the point of being granted not only Lumbeirt’s title but Arpik’s as well. That rise had made her a few enemies purely from envy, others from more personal motives. But she had emerged from those chaotic times with one thing she valued above both titles: Margerit Sovitre’s heart.
A wistful smile crossed Barbara’s face at the thought. Margerit would already be at Saveze for the summer, and the sooner she untangled this mess in Turinz the sooner she could join her. Her thoughts came back to the puzzle of the earthworks and the stagnant muddy ditch that lay between them.
They found answers to the puzzle in the village of Sain-Mihail, a mile farther down the road where the attractions of gossip and a comfortable inn kept them for the night. Mazuk’s surveyors had thought to cut corners. The first course they’d laid for the canal had been well within Mazuk’s lands, but last winter—just as she was beginning negotiations for Turinz—a violent shaking of the earth had sent a fall of boulders across its path. The easiest path around that obstacle lay just across the line in Turinz.
Mother of Souls: A novel of Alpennia Page 2