Her mood darkened. “You shouldn’t have bothered. He’s playing games with me—he has no intention of telling me anything useful.” An irrational resentment rose in her. This was her history, her family, not something for Margerit and LeFevre to discuss behind her back. Nothing was left to her of privacy.
“Be fair,” Margerit said. “He can’t be direct. I think he would if he could.”
Barbara pressed her lips together tightly. Easy for you to say. She laid the book on the table and opened the section LeFevre had marked.
Concerning the laws of debt and the inheritance of debt.
“What use is that? I already know—”
“Just read it. Knowledge is power, as they say.”
“Is that an order?” It came out more stiffly than she’d intended. She sighed. “As you wish.”
Margerit shot her a stricken glance and closed the book. “Don’t. Don’t do that ‘as you wish’ thing. Not when it’s just us.”
“As you wish,” Barbara said, quirking up a corner of her mouth in a smile. She set the book aside by her usual chair. “I’ll look through it tomorrow when you have visitors. There are, after all, obscure philosophers to hunt down.”
* * *
The text would have been fascinating if she were studying it for its own sake. It was in the archaic language of the code set down by Domric—or at least that was known under his name. There were several layers of commentary and summary interleaved with the original tract, with the occasional peculiar precedent to liven up the mix.
A man’s debt cannot be denied by any person, whether man, woman or child, who has claim as of right to his property as income, for those who have right to the benefit cannot be free of the responsibility. However no claim of liability for debt can be brought to court in the abstract. Repayment is due only when the sum or property has been identified, specified and sued for, and judgment has been awarded in court. If a person falls from the status of being due the benefit, he cannot be sued for the debt.
For a legal tract, it seemed a remarkably coherent summary and Barbara was unsurprised to see a note in the margin identifying it as the work of Rodulfus. What followed was considerably more dense.
A wife is liable for her husband’s debts in all times and places, for those debts contracted after the betrothal, or after the marriage if no betrothal announcement is made. If a woman is betrothed to a man who then contracts a debt but the wedding does not take place, she is not liable for the debt, except for debt concerning his wedding clothes if it was she who broke the engagement. If a man dies with debts, his widow may be sued for payment until the day she remarries, but on that day she is free of his debts forever if no suit has yet been raised and laid at that time.
A man’s son or daughter may be sued for his debts whether they were contracted before the birth or after, until that child stands separate from his purse. This is a child who stands separate from his purse: any child who has attained the age of majority, for no man is obliged to maintain an adult child by law; any daughter who is wed, save that her dowry may be sued for until she attains majority; any son when he takes holy orders or a daughter when she takes the veil.
She returned to the earlier passage: Repayment is due only when the specific sum or property has been identified, specified and sued for. That answered the immediate concern—she was safe from the debt because she had no property they could specify. A case could not even be raised against her in court so long as she owned nothing. But was this what LeFevre wanted her to understand? Was that why the baron had done what he did? To protect her from her father’s creditors?
It made a strange kind of sense if the debt were all that mattered. If she had no possessions under law—being a possession herself—there would be nothing to sue for. But with both her parents dead, she had no claim under law to any man’s purse. Would it truly have been worth anyone’s time to sue her for whatever gifts and trinkets the baron might have given her? To be sure, it could have been vastly annoying to spend twenty years answering in court for claims on every dress or necklace. And perhaps it really was as simple as that. The baron had disliked petty annoyances and interference. If it had made his life simpler and smoother to keep her in the status in which she came to him, perhaps that was all the reason he had needed. And as for the concealment of her name—that too could have been simply to avoid the attention of the buzzards. Or even perhaps some sense of shame to tie an ancient and honorable name—for he’d said as much that it was—to what he’d made of her.
If the hints had been meant to satisfy her, they had utterly failed. Barbara sighed and scanned down the remainder of the clauses. They began with the obvious and trailed off into the bizarre.
A minor child is not entitled to contract debts without permission and therefore his debts are his father’s debts. A minor child who is an orphan is not entitled to contract debts for he has no father to stand surety for him and he has no claim by right on the purse of his guardians. He is entitled to promise what he holds in inheritance but if his guardians forbid the contract it may not be collected until he comes of age. If a minor daughter marries, her debts are her husband’s from then on, as for any married woman, unless her husband has yet to come of age and then it is determined by the marriage contract. Any child born to a man’s wife may be sued for his debts, just as any child born to his wife has a claim on his purse unless it be that another man acknowledges the child and the debtor denies the child. And if it happens that another man acknowledges the child and the mother’s husband does not deny him, that is a child of two debts, for just as two purses have been opened to him, so he may be sued for either man’s debts. If a woman lives from her own purse and has a child without having a husband, then her child may be sued for her debts. But if such a woman still lives from her father’s purse, though she be of age, then her child is a child of her father’s purse, both for right and for liability, unless he disown both her and the child before it is baptized.
Barbara read through to the bitter end without receiving any further enlightenment. She was still lingering over the precise forms of suit and countersuit in court when Margerit came in after the last guest had left and the last tea tray had been carted away.
“Was it worth the time?”
“I’m not sure I learned anything I care to know,” she answered. She read aloud, for Margerit, the passages that showed her free from suit, but her thoughts about the baron’s motives she kept to herself.
* * *
Her shadows had broken the rules, but she had been careless. She knew to watch for the man at the Pont Ruip in the mornings but she hadn’t looked for him coming back at dusk from one of LeFevre’s errands in the driving wind and rain of an incoming storm. And with her mind set on dry clothes and the warmth of a fire she’d been slow to take note when he fell in twenty paces or so behind as she climbed the gentle arch of the span. It was a carelessness she wouldn’t have allowed herself if she’d been on duty.
At a sense of wrongness she paused and glanced back. He halted, echoing her own movement and barely visible in the flickering light from the lampposts. Her fingers played at the hilt of her sword, not in threat but in contemplation of the choices. The man’s presence annoyed her, but a fight and the consequences it would bring would be vastly more annoying. He had made no overt threat and she hadn’t the excuse of Margerit’s presence to justify more precipitous action. And the warmth of Tiporsel House beckoned. She sent one last dagger-look and continued toward the northern abutment. The next two men were standing idly but purposefully in the middle of the pavement before her. Her heart dropped and she glanced back the way she had come, drawing her blade at the ready. From the corner of her eye she could see several passersby scatter. The first man was advancing slowly. There were only seconds to escape the trap. This was no time to play one of Perret’s waiting games. She took their measure in an instant as if she were in the practice salle. She could fight her way past on the northern end—not one of them carried m
ore than a knife, that she’d seen—but it would mean bloodshed and at least one death. Better to dodge back the way she’d come, where there was only one attacker to avoid, and lose them in the twisting alleys of the southern bank. She moved, not wide around to the far side of the road as he expected, but leaping up onto the parapet and running that precarious path, with a feint to throw him off balance as she passed and then a leap down to the cobbles again.
She didn’t see the fourth man until his club caught her in the side with an explosion of pain. Her blade went skittering into the darkness and she rolled aside just in time to miss the second blow. Without counting the cost to her ribs she grabbed the weapon and sent her attacker sprawling over her and past with a sickening thud. She scrambled to a crouch. Two to her left and home beyond them; one looming to her right with a glinting blade in his hand and the uncertain darkness of the south bank alleys behind him. She chose the better odds, despite the knife, and with all the strength she could summon, drove her shoulder into his belly. Pain licked across the side of her head but she was past and he was down.
Her body protested the thought of a long chase but there were other escapes. She dodged down the water-steps at the southern end of the parapet to the landing below where the rivermen docked. On a night like this there was sure to be someone waiting for a fare for a quick trip downstream. She tumbled into the first boat she saw untied and barked an order. “Tiporsel House, as quick as you can!” Upstream would be slower, but once they were in the middle of the current she’d be safe.
He worked his oars with a will and as they passed under the arch of the bridge, she could see her attackers peering over the side and heard curses. Let them curse. The boatman was staring at her strangely. The rain felt warm across her cheek and when she touched it she could see a dark stain even by the wan light of the boat’s lantern. “Footpads,” she said by way of explanation but her head suddenly felt light. “You know the Tiporsel landing? The marble steps just after the bend?” She pointed ahead where her goal was a pale smudge against the river’s darkness and gasped at the movement’s consequences. He rowed and the steps loomed closer as she gritted her teeth to avoid crying out. “That’s the one.” She contemplated the current impossibility of fetching the coins for the fare out of her breeches pocket. “Come by in the morning, you’ll be well paid.”
But he hung off from the small stone wharf, working the oars to keep even with it a few feet away. “And what business do you have at Tiporsel House?” he asked gruffly. “It’s worth my license to dock there without leave.”
Barbara had no will to argue the point. She knew she must look rather a ruffian herself at the moment. She judged the distance and the current and suddenly dove over the side into the dark waters. Swimming would have been out of the question but her hand reached out to grasp one of the heavy iron rings, heedless of the cost to her ribs, and she felt her way around to the slick stone steps as the boatman let his craft slip downstream once more.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Margerit
What she enjoyed most, so far, from Aunt Bertrut’s betrothal was a new opportunity for socializing that fell between the routine of a dinner at home with only her aunt for company and the rigors of an evening out in society. Margerit had found herself missing the Fulpi family dinners in Chalanz, formal though they may have been. She didn’t mind not having the position to host elaborate events but she did wish on occasion that the rules of society made allowance for a quiet evening with a few friends—something more than the rituals of afternoon visiting.
She wished even more that Barbara’s strict propriety would allow her to join them at the long empty table. Hadn’t she said that she’d shared the baron’s table on occasion when they were informal at home? But the farthest she would unbend was on those rare occasions when Aunt Bertrut went out alone and Barbara would consent to share a supper sent in to the library while they studied.
But Uncle-to-be Pertinek had fallen into the habit of dining at Tiporsel House on any evening when they stayed in, always accompanied by one of his cousins for form’s sake. It brought a sense of family back into her life. He was witty and well-read and seemed genuinely interested in her studies. It was easy to see why Aunt Bertrut thought they would suit.
* * *
It was one of those cozy dinners, on a rainy night that made her glad to have skipped the opera. An unusually long delay before the serving of the fish course was explained by the butler’s harried, “Maisetra, your presence is requested downstairs. Barbara…there’s been an accident.”
Her heart skipped a beat at the possible events that word might cover. Even as Aunt Bertrut was asking “What—?” she was up and making her excuses to the guests.
As she followed Ponivin quickly down the back stairs toward a noise not quite rising to uproar he reassured her, “She’s in no serious danger but I’ve sent for a surgeon.”
In the next few seconds a cascade of images passed through her mind. Thrown by a horse—no, there was no place she would have been going today that would be far enough to ride. The night was dark with the storm and windy—a carriage accident? Timbers blown down from a building?
Barbara was seated close by the hearth in the servants’ common room, soaking wet and hunched over to clutch her ribs while a splash of blood trickled out from under the cloth pressed to the side of her head by one of the grooms. As Margerit entered she struggled to rise but was held none too gently down in the chair.
Margerit flew to her side. “What happened? Where—?” She turned back to Ponivin. “You sent for a surgeon—who? Delecroix?”
“Not him,” Barbara said thickly. “Muller. He does for Perret when there are accidents at the academy. Army surgeon. Knows what to do with a scratch.”
“Scratch!” She knew Barbara was making light of it for her sake, but there was so much blood. “How bad is it?” She directed the question at the groom, figuring that would get her more truth.
“Hard to say, Maisetra. Scalp wounds always bleed like a stuck pig. But I didn’t see any bone, so—”
“Hold your tongue, man!” Ponivin ordered and he fell silent.
Margerit knelt where she could see Barbara’s face more clearly. “What happened? Who was it? That same man?”
She began to nod, then evidently thought better of moving her head. “Him and three or four of his friends.” She told the story in short, clipped fragments. “I had to jump and wade the last bit—that’s where all the water comes from.” Her jaw was clattering by the end of the speech.
And no one had thought to get her out of the wet clothes. Margerit began barking orders. Hot blankets. Build the fire. When she began unfastening Barbara’s coat the groom hastily handed over his position to the least squeamish of the kitchen maids as Ponivin shooed the male servants out of the room.
The sodden clothing had been replaced by blankets by the time the surgeon pushed his way through the crowd outside the door. He took in the scene at a glance and set to work. His first words to her were, “If you mean to swoon, get out now. If not, make yourself useful and bring me as much light as you can manage.”
He grilled Barbara on her injuries then pulled back the blankets to poke and prod the places she had been holding close. Margerit felt a flash of outraged modesty but Barbara seemed not to care. She looked so thin and fragile like this: near-naked and bereft of her usual driving energy.
“Not broken, but cracked perhaps,” Muller said. “Some sort of club? Well, cracked is likely. Now let’s see about sewing this up.”
Enough hands were required for the process that Margerit found herself holding the lamp, though she had to look away once he had begun. By the end, she suspected she was nearly as pale and shaking as Barbara was, though with less cause.
The surgeon took her aside as he washed his hands and tools afterward. “She guards for you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Not for the next couple of weeks, she doesn’t. The ribs should heal well enough if
she stays quiet but watch out that cut doesn’t fester. Heads are a bad business. Have someone sit up with her this first night. If she starts breathing oddly, try to wake her. Give her as much broth as she’ll take down—nothing solid until I’ve seen her again tomorrow. And give her a drop or two of this in each cup.” He handed her a small vial from his bag. “I’d say only if she needs it for the pain but her sort never admit to that, so just give it to her anyway. I’ll be back tomorrow sometime.”
“Wait,” Margerit asked as he gathered up his things. “What about…are there any charms, any mysteries that would help the healing?”
His face was tired when he answered her. “You’d probably know better than I would. They say a prayer to Benedict helps against the fever and I suppose it can’t hurt. I’ll put her in my prayers but I don’t deal in charms. I’ll stick to the work of my hands and leave that sort of thing to you.”
* * *
Barbara was too exhausted to protest when she was carried as a limp burden up to her room. While she was being made comfortable, Margerit sought out her aunt. The dinner guests were long since gone.
“I’m sorry for leaving you alone. Did Ponivin explain? It all got so busy I forgot to send word.”
“He told us something,” she answered. “But…Margerit, your dress!”
She looked down. No point in asking the housemaids to try to get those stains out. “Never mind, it’s only a dress. Aunt, I’m going to sit up over Barbara tonight—the surgeon suggested it. So don’t expect to see me in the morning.”
“Surely someone else could—”
“No,” she interrupted, “they can’t. This is my responsibility.”
Not alone, of course. Some unlucky girl would draw the lot of popping in every few hours to bring a fresh tray and make sure the fire was kept going. But Margerit claimed the right to sit at Barbara’s bedside and hold the cup for her to sip and talk softly while she tossed and moaned trying to find a less painful position to sleep.
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