And then, it seemed, the reading was over. In the milling confusion of the exodus, Barbara stuck to her as if they had been harnessed together. There was a delay at the carriages for Uncle Fulpi, who had stayed to make further arrangements. Then a brief argument when he returned to find the new armin ensconced inseparably at her side in the smaller chaise. She had hoped for a respite at least until they returned home, but he joined her for the ride, first shouting, then cold and cutting and at last retreating into a stony silence. It took no dissembling, when they arrived, to plead a headache and retreat for her room. Barbara mounted a rear-guard action against her aunts’ sudden solicitude as they pursued her with insistent offers of tea and cold compresses. She answered Barbara’s continual questioning looks with a steadfast shake of the head until she finally was able to close the door behind them and turn the key in the lock. Released at last from the need for control, Margerit sat on the edge of her bed, her hands still clenched in her lap. Abruptly she began crying in deep tearing gasps.
It took some time for the storm to abate. She became aware of Barbara once more when she ventured, “Maisetra, should I call someone?”
“No!” She hadn’t meant to be so forceful. She saw Barbara stiffen into her waiting pose as if rebuked. When her voice again could resolve itself into words, she said, “He was so angry. So angry. I’m frightened. What will he do?”
“Estefen?” Barbara inquired crisply.
Margerit looked up at her in confusion. “Uncle Fulpi. I’ve never defied him like that before. I never…he was so angry.” His shouting in the carriage still rang in her ears. “I’ve never…I don’t know how I could…and even so I failed.” That was what filled her with despair: that she had risked all to defy him and won nothing from it.
Barbara took a tentative step forward. “May I speak?”
Margerit was startled. She had been talking mostly to herself. When she said nothing, Barbara repeated, “May I speak?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Barbara knelt down at the bedside, but it seemed more an intimate gesture than a servile one. “You were magnificent. You were like Penthesilia on the plains of Troy. Defeat is not dishonor. And I will never forget what you tried to do for me. What you offered to give up.”
Margerit blinked at her. She followed the sense of the words but not their meaning. But the silence had been broken and Barbara pressed further. “Let me see your hand.” She touched the back of her fist and Margerit finally unclenched it and stared at her palm where she had grasped the sword. The cut was the barest scratch; it had long since stopped bleeding. She felt like a small child about to be scolded for rough play as Barbara found a small cloth on the dresser, moistened it from the water pitcher and carefully cleaned off the smear of blood. “Do you want me to bind it up?”
Margerit looked down at her hand and shook her head. “No, then someone would ask questions. It was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t know what else to try. You looked so wild.”
Barbara flushed deeply. “Forgive me, Maisetra.”
“No, you had every right to be angry. It’s outrageous. I don’t know what he was thinking. He…he told me the story, how you came to him.” She felt embarrassed now, to have been told something so private. “Why should you be punished for your father’s debts? He could have raised you as a daughter, not as a…a servant.”
Barbara pressed her lips tightly together and Margerit couldn’t tell what she was withholding, whether contradiction or assent. She must have had the same questions through the years. But all she said was, “Shall I have them bring you tea now?”
Margerit managed a weak smile. “It’s the remedy for everything, isn’t it?”
Chapter Ten
Barbara
What an odd homecoming, that the first protection she lent was against Margerit’s own family. Was the uncle truly that much of an ogre? She had seen his tirade in the carriage but both that and Margerit’s response could be blamed on the strangeness of the day. It seemed too soon to test Margerit’s fragile calm so she applied all her diplomatic skills to fending off the lurking aunts who accompanied the housemaid bringing up the tea tray. But when the rituals of pouring and sipping had been accomplished, she moved on to more practical concerns. “May I speak?”
Margerit frowned at her. “You don’t need to ask like that.”
Uncertainly, Barbara explained, “The baron preferred that I—”
“I’m not the baron,” Margerit said briskly, “and if I have to approve every word out of your mouth, it will drive me mad.”
The implications of that statement nibbled at the back of her mind but she let them be for the moment. “If I am to join this household, there are things I’ll need to collect from the baron’s—that is, from Fonten House. It’s your house now, of course.”
“It is? That mansion?”
Barbara stifled the laughter from her voice, but not from her eyes. “Maisetra, you’re rich now. Very rich. Fonten House is only the smallest part.”
Margerit looked frightened again. “How much—no, leave that for later. Yes, your clothes and belongings. And the housekeeper will need to find you a place in the servants’ rooms. I don’t know what needs to be done. What were the arrangements when you served my godfather?”
Barbara glanced around Margerit’s small chamber and compared it to the room she’d occupied in Fonten House. “It doesn’t matter. As you said, you are not the baron and this is not the baron’s house. I must follow the customs of this one.”
* * *
When Margerit was ready to face her aunts, and when the matter of her own presence in the house had been acknowledged by them as inevitable, Barbara placed herself in the care of the maid who returned for the tea things, to be taken downstairs to see what needed to be done. As it happened, LeFevre had foreseen the matter. When she descended to the understairs, a pair of familiar trunks were nearly blocking the passageway in from the back entrance.
Mefro Lozenek, the housekeeper, was a tall, forbidding woman of the sort who could keep a staff in line with only a glance. She looked Barbara up and down as if she were a street urchin applying to scrub pots. “We run a traditional household here,” she intoned briskly. “I’m in charge of all the female staff. Except, of course, for the kitchen help.” She made that omission sound as if it bordered on anarchy. “You will be assigned to share a bedroom based on your station. Meals are eaten here in the lower hall. As you won’t be serving at table, you will eat with the rest of us—no keeping a plate warm, no special meals from the kitchen. Seating at table is by rank too. There will be no gadding about. Unless you’re sent out on errands, you’re expected to stay indoors. Unless you’re attending on the family when they go to Mass, you go with the rest of us to Saint Mari-Mirikur. There is to be no skulking in private. Bedrooms are for sleeping and dressing, not for lazing around. At the times when Maisetra Margerit doesn’t require your presence, you will be given useful occupation.”
Barbara briefly contemplated taking the willow path for the moment and bending until matters could be cleared up later, but that would only put the burden on Margerit’s back. And protecting Margerit was now her first task. She drew herself up and looked the housekeeper in the eyes. “I respect your authority over the servants of this house, but I answer only to Maisetra Margerit. I take orders only from her. If she gives me leave, I will come and go as I choose. I will follow the rules of the household regarding bed and board but beyond that I do not answer to you.”
The housekeeper stared at her with her mouth open like a dead fish. She shut it with a snap then said, “We’ll see about that. You must excuse us, we’ve never had a duelist in service before.” She gave the word a peevish tone that made it clear she considered the very occupation an affectation. “And what, pray tell, is the rank and station of a duelist in relation to a parlormaid?”
Barbara’s stomach clenched. Did the woman not know how matters stood? Had the understairs gossip not reached that detail? Or was she ta
king petty revenge by making her say it aloud with all manner of others listening in? “Only a nobleman may keep a duelist,” she said carefully. “I serve the maisetra merely as armin, as her bodyguard. An armin may rank high or low, but since it matters here, you may count me among the least in the house.”
Mefro Lozenek frowned impatiently. “Don’t play games with me and tell me what I may do and may not do. Tell me plainly, what is your station?”
Barbara’s voice became flat and expressionless. “The late baron left me to Maisetra Margerit in his will. What do you think my station is? I am her possession.” She dared the woman to make mock over it.
There was a brief flash of triumph in the housekeeper’s eyes before she turned to rebuke a cluster of maids who had stopped their work to gawk. “Fetch Aggy and Luzza from the kitchen.” When the two girls were brought out, it was clear that their position entailed little higher than scrubbing pots and cleaning the stove. “Aggy, Luzza, this is the new girl Barbara. She will be sharing your room. One of you show her where to take her things.”
Barbara gave a silent sigh as the girl identified as Aggy gaped at her and started babbling, “Oh no, ma’am! I can’t, ma’am! They say she killed a man—we’ll be murdered in our beds for sure!” The one called Luzza added to the rising hysteria with, “My mum will have a fit. She’ll call me home if she hears I’m sharing a bed with…with…” Her vocabulary failed to rise to the occasion of what she believed the objection would be.
The housekeeper gave each of the girls a quick slap and said they’d do as they were told, but one of the footmen who had been loitering at the back of the room interjected, “You weren’t thinking to fit those two big trunks into Luz and Aggy’s room were you?”
Mefro Lozenek peered around the corner to examine the offending luggage and threw up her hands. “It can’t be done. There aren’t any free rooms and it would be beyond what is allowable to turn anyone else out for your sake.”
“Put her in my room,” came a voice. Barbara recognized Maitelen, the young woman who had brought up Margerit’s tea. Her clothing marked her as an upper parlor maid, well toward the top of the hierarchy. “Since Gaita took the end room with Ferlint, I’ve had it to myself. And there’s that odd corner behind the chimney where the trunks would fit. And I’m not afraid of being murdered in my bed. Come on,” she said to Barbara, heading for the stairs without waiting for the housekeeper to approve.
A few minutes later she surveyed the cramped but adequate space that Maitelen showed her as the trunks were stowed away. “It was kind of you to make the offer.”
Maitelen snorted. “Kindness don’t get you on in the world.”
Her speech habits betrayed her as a country girl, one step removed from the dairy and chickens. That she had climbed as high as she had, Barbara thought, was a tribute either to her shrewdness or to the unavailability of more refined servants in a town like Chalanz.
“Here’s the deal,” Maitelen continued. “Maisetra Margerit—she’ll be wanting her own lady’s maid now, not just making do with help from Gaita who knows how to dress and do hair on the side. And when she comes to choose someone, I want to be the one she thinks of. I don’t care if you’re a slave or the Queen of Sheba, suddenly you’re the one the young maisetra wants at her side. So you’re my new best friend.”
Barbara admired the girl’s honesty and straight talk. They would deal together well enough, she thought. And if she weren’t yet ready to provide an enthusiastic reference, then sharing a room would give her a basis for judgment.
When Maitelen had left, Barbara looked around the room. The width was barely enough for space to walk between the bedsteads on either side. At the far end from the door stood a low dresser and washstand on the left side. The right side was blocked by a wide brick chimney, passing through from the family rooms below to the roof above. Maitelen thought that made it a choice bedroom for it was never cold. But an architect who cared more about symmetry than practicality had positioned the room’s only window behind the brick column and it was in this slight hidden bay that her trunks had been deposited, in a space not useful for a third bed.
She went to sit on the edge of the nearer trunk where she could see out the window. Dusk was falling but she could make out the lines of a small paved yard and then a carriage house opening onto the lane behind. That was where she’d entered last time when delivering the baron’s invitation. She was startled by a tear that blurred her vision and threatened to fall. She tilted her head back and blinked until it retreated and could be denied. If it could be denied it didn’t need to be explained.
Through the walls she heard the chiming of the tall clock in the hall downstairs and jumped up. Best not to add further antagonism by being late to her first meal. Almost as an afterthought she unbuckled her swordbelt and laid the weapon inside the trunk she’d been sitting on.
* * *
With the ordeal of the first understairs dinner endured, her goal was to speak to Margerit again that evening—to know what to expect in the morning. Morning. Her lessons with Signore Donati. Would anyone have thought to send a message around to him? It was nothing that could be mended at the moment. Maybe once things had settled down. Did Margerit go out in the mornings? They had met that one afternoon in the park, but she had no idea what a well-born young lady’s daily schedule might be.
She was hesitant to wander into the family areas of the house without permission. Maitelen had promised to let her know when Margerit went upstairs to change for bed; that would be the best time to ask questions. The enforced idleness was maddening. She had no books, no occupation, not even the relief of solitude as she didn’t care to flout too many rules on the first evening. It was almost a relief when one of the footmen—still liveried from serving at dinner—came to tell her the master wanted to see her in his office.
With Mefro Lozenek, she had chosen to draw a line from the beginning. Margerit’s uncle was a different matter. He might not technically command her, but he did command Margerit. Any trouble would rebound there. So she followed the footman up. With every path through the house, she picked up more bearings but she itched to explore it thoroughly—to know every turn and corner as well as she knew all the baron’s properties.
The man was sitting before the fire examining some papers on a side table. He didn’t react as she entered and bowed silently. The minutes stretched out. If he thought to rattle her he’d chosen the wrong tactic, Barbara thought as she settled into her watchful stance. The baron had been a master at that game.
A quarter of an hour passed before he pushed the papers aside and looked up. “The clothing will need to change.”
Barbara stole a moment to choose her response carefully. “I will, of course, dress as the maisetra commands me. But there are garments that can make my work easier or harder.”
“Do you seriously think that my niece requires an armin, much less a professional duelist?”
The question made it clear what he thought of the idea, but she answered as if it had been sincere. “If we were in Rotenek, there would be no question. Every year you hear a story of an heiress snatched and forced into marriage. Some of them may be complicit in their own abductions, of course, but not all. Two years ago there was a young woman from a good family—rich, but with enemies. She was affianced to a promising young man. The brigands who took her claimed they wanted money for her safe return but the rumor was that it was for revenge on her father. She escaped on her own but the whispers started. She swore she was untouched and yet the young man broke off their engagement. In the end, she hanged herself.” She paused to see if he believed her. “It’s possible that here in Chalanz a young unmarried heiress can come and go about town without fear of seducers and abductions. You are more familiar with this place than I am.”
She could tell that the image had hit home. The sardonic look had left his face and he leaned toward her. “You have begun to persuade me that Margerit should be guarded. You have yet to persuade me that I should
trust you to guard her. That…scene this afternoon.”
Barbara could feel the heat rising in her face. There was no answer she could give—that she would give. She had abased herself to Margerit; she would not do so to this man. “My honor lies in keeping your niece safe. But all I can promise is that I shall do what she commands.”
His frown deepened. “What she commands.”
She nodded ever so slightly, acknowledging the unspoken addendum: not what I command. Would it help to explain to him about Estefen? But not before she had warned Margerit. That felt too much like disloyalty.
He sighed. “We shall see. But for the moment, I’ll inform Margerit that she is not to leave the house unless you accompany her. You may go.”
Barbara noticed that the subject of her clothing had become unimportant.
As she opened the door to the hallway, she nearly collided with Margerit, hovering indecisively by the door.
“Is…is there a problem?” Margerit asked anxiously.
Barbara closed the door behind her. “No, I think we’ve come to an understanding for the moment. But Maisetra, I need to speak with you. There are,” she waved her hand vaguely, “matters to arrange.”
Margerit nodded vigorously. “Come to me in my room. I’ll send for you after I’ve spoken to my uncle.”
Chapter Eleven
Margerit
Dinner had, as always, been calm, dignified and formal. It gave her no reassurance that her defiance of the afternoon had been forgiven. Hiding in her room could only provide a temporary respite and she had long ago discovered that it was better to face her uncle immediately and take the consequences. Aunt Honurat could never steel herself to do so and would spend a month in slowly grinding anxiety rather than face ten minutes of her husband’s direct disapproval. Aunt Bertrut was free of any direct obligation to him and on those occasions when she found it unpleasant to live under his roof, she was quite content to visit friends about the countryside until the growing disorder in the household forced him to send his wife as an unacknowledged ambassadress to beg her return.
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