by Peter McLean
“I’m not sure that you do,” she said, and I sighed and sat down again.
“How’s that then?”
“My family are Alarian, obviously. They are very wealthy and very traditional.”
“Is that why they didn’t come to the wedding?” I asked her.
“No, they didn’t come to the wedding because I didn’t tell them about the wedding, but now that I am back in Dannsburg they have of course heard that I’ve brought a husband back with me, and so now you must be presented to them. I’m sorry about this, Tomas, truly I am, but manners demand it.”
I looked at her, at her big dark eyes and the thick, glossy black hair that framed her flawlessly powdered face. She looked every inch the Alarian princess, and I couldn’t imagine I was remotely what her parents would have wanted in a son-by-law. I sighed.
“They’re going to fucking hate me, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
* * *
The invitation had been for two days’ time, and Ailsa had spent those days drilling me like a raw recruit on the basics of Alarian manners. I had a feeling she wasn’t looking forward to this afternoon’s visit any more than I was, but now we were finally in the carriage on our way to her parents’ house and she was still lecturing me.
We had left Billy behind with his tutor, of course, so it was just the two of us and a pair of footmen sitting up top with the carriage driver, and three guards on horseback. Apparently it would go ill enough that Ailsa had married a man who wasn’t Alarian, never mind that she had also adopted a son with him. Telling them about Billy was going to have to wait for fairer weather.
“Now remember, they call me Chandari and you’re to do the same in their hearing,” she said yet again as the carriage rolled down a broad avenue. “They never did accept that I took a western name when I came of age. And be respectful, Tomas, especially to my mother. In Alarian households the wife is always in charge.”
I looked sideways at Ailsa and smiled. That piece of news hadn’t surprised me one little bit the first three times she had told me, either.
“I know,” I said.
“All you need to say to her after ‘hello’ is ‘yes, Madame Shapoor,’” she went on. “My father may speak to you, but Mother will be furious with me that I didn’t marry an Alarian man, and even more furious that she wasn’t invited to the wedding that she wouldn’t have approved of, nonsensical as that sounds. And remember, they have absolutely no idea what I do and it has to stay that way. I’m just a courtier, as far as they know.”
“I know,” I said again. “We’ve been over and over this. Just tell me what your father does and I’m sure I can find some sort of common ground with him. You never did tell me that.”
“What? Oh, he’s retired, they both are. I’m a good deal older than I look, don’t forget, and my parents are not young. Before that he was a merchant trader, with a fleet of ships that sailed the tea route from Alaria. He found it better for business to base himself here in Dannsburg, where I was born. Tomas, you will be respectful, won’t you?”
I looked at her again, sitting there on the bench beside me and twisting her elegant silk shawl in her hands. It came to me then that this terrible and murderous Queen’s Man who was prepared to face torture with no possible avenue of escape, this lioness of stone and iron, was actually nervous about seeing her own parents.
“Yes, of course I will,” I said, and put a hand on hers for a moment.
I had only meant it to be reassuring, but to my surprise she gripped my hand and gave me a smile that actually looked genuine.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why their approval still matters to me, but it does. This is . . . important to me, Tomas.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”
THIRTY
The house was old, but very grand for all that. Ivy crawled elegantly over the front of the building and the windows were still in the old style, with small leaded diamonds of glass. The high wall around the property looked strong and well maintained, and liveried guards met our carriage at the gates.
It seemed to me that all the rich folk of Dannsburg spent a good deal on their personal security despite the almost constant presence of the City Guard, and I found myself wondering why that was.
Ailsa took a deep breath as the carriage drew up outside an imposing front door of heavy black oak. The door opened and a gray-haired man I took to be the steward came down the steps. He waited with his hands clasped in front of him while our footman opened the carriage door and handed Ailsa down. I followed and watched our guards being firmly directed toward the stables along with our carriage driver.
Ailsa smiled.
“Masha, you haven’t changed a bit,” she said.
“Nor you, Miss Shapoor,” the elderly steward replied. “You never do.”
“Well, I’m Madame Piety now, so that’s a change,” Ailsa said. “This is my husband, Father Tomas Piety.”
I nodded to the steward, who gave me a very precise bow. I recognized it from Ailsa’s teaching over the last couple of days. That was the bow to be used when unsure of another’s station, apparently, and I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.
“Masha is my parents’ steward, and he was my tutor when I was a young girl in this house,” Ailsa said. “He helped to make me the woman I am today.”
“Then I owe you my most sincere thanks,” I said, and that got a slight smile from the old fellow at least.
He led us into the house, where footmen were waiting in the hall, but no one had trays of wine or strange food for us today. One of them opened a door, and we were shown into a large drawing room. An elderly Alarian couple who I could only assume were Ailsa’s parents stood waiting for us in the middle of a huge, richly colored carpet. Both were very formally dressed, as were we.
“Mother, Father,” Ailsa said, dropping them a low curtsey. “May I present my husband, Father Tomas Piety of Ellinburg.”
I bowed low to her father, as she had taught me, and lower still to her mother. Her father returned my bow, a short movement that I recognized as the bow appropriate for the respect due to a junior family member. Ailsa had told me it would be a good sign if he did that, so that pleased me.
Her mother didn’t move or so much as acknowledge me, and I had been warned that that would not be a good thing.
“A pleasure to meet you at last, Tomas,” Mr. Shapoor said.
He had some seventy or more years to him, I thought. He wore his longish white hair pulled back from his brow in a severe topknot, and he sported a magnificent white beard with a curling mustache that covered half his face. He was dressed in the Dannsburg style, in a fine doublet and coat not unlike my own.
Madame Shapoor was younger, perhaps sixty or so, and dressed in a flowing gown of loose red and gold silk cut in the Alarian style. She was a handsome woman, but her expression was stern and her stare hostile.
“The honor is mine, Mr. Shapoor,” I assured him, reciting the lines that Ailsa had given me. “Madame Shapoor, I can only apologize that it has taken so long for us to meet.”
She ignored me completely.
“Chandari,” she said, her voice accented and sharp. “Who is this white man whom I do not know?”
“As I say, Mother, this is Tomas. My husband.”
Madame Shapoor sniffed and turned her back. She stood looking out a window, her shoulders stiff with indignation.
“Your mother is offended that we received no invitation to your wedding, Chandari,” her father said.
So was he, I could tell, but she was obviously the boss of him and that meant he got to blame her for the general atmosphere in the room.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” Ailsa said. “We met in Ellinburg, and we married there. You know how the roads are. Messengers are waylaid, and letters go astray.”
&nbs
p; Both those things were true, of course, although totally irrelevant. That wasn’t my affair, though, and she could tell them what she liked so long as we both sang the same song.
“I know,” he said at last. “I know you would never disrespect your family like that on purpose.”
He knew very little about his own daughter, to my mind, but that wasn’t my affair either.
“Thank you, Papa,” Ailsa said.
Mr. Shapoor’s bearded face split open in a wide smile.
“We’ll say no more about it, then,” he said. “Come, come, I wish to know my new son-by-law. Come into my study, Tomas, and we will talk like gentlemen while my wife and daughter clear the air between them.”
I realized he didn’t want to be in the middle of that any more than I did, and I found myself warming to him already.
“My thanks,” I said. “I would like that very much, Father-by-law.”
Ailsa gave me an approving nod, but there was an appeal in her eyes that said please don’t fuck this up. I followed her father out of the drawing room and into the hall, where a footman closed the door behind us.
“Custom dictates that I should offer you tea,” Mr. Shapoor said as we walked across the hall to his study, “but it is after noon and already I feel I know you better than that.”
Another footman opened the study door for us, and Mr. Shapoor dismissed him before he could follow us in. Once we were inside and alone together he turned and grinned at me.
“Brandy,” he said. “You look to me like a man who enjoys brandy.”
“That I do,” I confessed, and his smile widened.
“So do I,” he said. “Sit, sit. Be comfortable in my house, Tomas.”
The carpet in the room was so fine I felt I shouldn’t be walking on it with my boots on but he was, so I supposed it didn’t matter. I took a chair and watched him open a finely carved cupboard that contained glasses and a good number of bottles. He poured for us both, and then took a chair opposite me rather than the one behind his large and imposing desk. Again, I took that as a good sign.
We drank together, and that in itself is often the first step toward building a trust. The brandy was excellent, and I told him so.
“I enjoy brandy,” he said. “My wife does not approve, so I drink in my study where she does not have to see what I do and be offended by it. That is often the way, isn’t it?”
I allowed that it was, but I knew he was feeling me out all the same. He wanted to assure himself that I was fit to be married to his daughter; of course he did. I understood that, and I respected it.
“We must be mindful of our wives’ feelings in these things,” I ventured.
“Always,” he said, and changed the subject. “You are a priest, I understand. Tell me, Tomas, how does a priest make his way in this world?”
How can you afford to keep my daughter? That was what he was asking me. Ailsa had drilled me well over the last couple of days, and to my mind she knew her father a good deal better than he knew her.
“I am a priest, as you say, ordained while I was on campaign with the army. Before that I was a successful businessman in Ellinburg, and I remain so today. You were a merchant trader yourself, so Chandari tells me?”
He laughed.
“Oh, come,” he said. “I thank you, but you call her Ailsa and I know that. Her mother will appreciate that gesture, but you do not need to pretend with me. Ailsa is the name she has chosen, and I must get used to it.”
“As you will, Father-by-law.”
“You have the right of it, though,” he said. “I ran ships and I traded tea, and other things. I know business. Tell me of your business.”
His eyes narrowed slightly as he looked at me, and I wondered if we might be working our way around the edges of something here.
“I own a number of businesses in Ellinburg,” I told him, picking my words carefully. “Various interests that bring in a substantial income. I own inns and taverns and gaming houses, and I have an interest in a number of . . . vassal businesses, as you might say, such as factories and tanneries and forges. Those I don’t own, as such, but they pay me a consideration for protection and respect.”
Mr. Shapoor laughed then, and drained his brandy.
“Oh, Tomas, oh my son-by-law,” he said. “You do not know me yet, I realize, but I am no fool. How do you think a simple Alarian merchant makes this much money, in Dannsburg? Not by being a fool he doesn’t, oh no. Let us speak plainly to one another, as two businessmen should. I was a pirate and a smuggler, and you are a gangster. Those are the hard facts of it. Neither of our wives will ever own to those things, but they are true nonetheless.”
He laughed again and refilled my glass. Perhaps Ailsa didn’t know her father half so well as she thought she did, after all.
“That’s about the lay of things, aye,” I said.
Mr. Shapoor leaned forward to touch his glass to mine in a gesture of camaraderie.
“Welcome to the family,” he said.
* * *
* * *
I spent quite some time with Ailsa’s father that afternoon, drinking his brandy and swapping stories of business and bloodshed. He told me tales of piracy on the high seas, many of them obviously grown very tall in the telling. He told me of smuggling poppy resin in the holds of tea ships coming west, and of brandy in those same ships on their return journeys to Alaria.
He was the sort of man I wished my own da had been, and I think we found a closeness that day. We could hear occasional shouting coming from the drawing room, even with two closed doors and the width of the large hall between us, but we both pretended that we couldn’t. That was between Ailsa and her mother, to my mind, and it seemed that her father thought the same.
Sometime after we had finished the first bottle he told me to call him Sasura. That was an Alarian word, and from what Ailsa had told me it was like calling someone Da, but when it was your wife’s father and not your own. It was sort of their way of saying father-by-law but more intimate than that, more like you were actually part of the family by blood and not just by marriage. Ailsa had told me that yesterday, but she had said it was highly unlikely that I would ever be invited to address her father that way. I felt honored that he had allowed me to do so, and so soon.
“Tell me something, Sasura,” I asked him, when the conversation had turned away from business and moved on to the realities of living life in the capital city, “why is it that the wealthy of Dannsburg seem so concerned with security when there are City Guard everywhere? Every house I’ve been to has strong walls around it and household guards on the gates. Ours is no different, but I’ve seen virtually no crime since I’ve been in the city. What is everyone so scared of?”
Mr. Shapoor smiled and shook his head.
“It is not crime that we fear,” he said, lowering his voice even though we were in his own study in his own house. “Dannsburg is like a barrel of powder, just waiting for a spark to set it off. Everyone informs on everyone else, and everyone is watched. Everyone waits for the day that the City Guard come for them, or may the Many-Headed God prevent it, the Queen’s Men themselves.”
I thought of Ailsa, in the other room being yelled at by her mother, but I put that thought aside.
“The people seem happy enough,” I said. “Compared to how folk are in Ellinburg, they do, anyway.”
“Of course they do; they never know who is watching,” he said, and now he leaned so close I could feel his mustache tickling my ear as he whispered to me, as though fearful of his own footmen overhearing his words through the closed door. “The queen herself led a full military triumph through the city when victory in the south was announced, and the cheers all but reached heaven itself. Everyone rejoiced in the streets, and do you know why? There were agents of the crown spread throughout the crowd to lead those cheers, and Queen’s Men to note the names of any who did no
t join in. In Dannsburg, you show respect to the crown. You show your love for the queen publicly and loudly and often, or you disappear and are never seen again.”
THIRTY-ONE
I had to allow I was somewhat drunk when we finally left Ailsa’s parents’ house. It was early evening by then and I had spent the whole afternoon with her father in his study. By Our Lady, that old pirate could drink.
We had originally been supposed to be staying for dinner, but it seemed that negotiations between Ailsa and her mother had broken down sometime around when Sasura and me were halfway through the second bottle. Shortly after that a footman had tapped discreetly on the study door and informed me that my lady wife was awaiting me with the carriage. I left my new father-by-law smiling sleepily to himself in a chair by the hearth in his study and allowed Masha to show me to my carriage. My mother-by-law didn’t come out of the drawing room to bid me farewell, and I was quite grateful for that.
I stumbled across the lawn and let Masha help me haul myself up into the carriage.
The look on Ailsa’s face was indescribable.
“You are drunk!” she hissed at me as the carriage started to move.
“Aye,” I had to allow, “perhaps I am, but I was very respectful and I didn’t fuck it up. About two hours ago he welcomed me to the family, and told me to call him Sasura.”
Ailsa blinked at me in surprise.
“Really? Don’t lie to me about this, Tomas, I mean it.”
“Truly,” I said, and grinned at her. “Your old da can fucking drink, though.”
Ailsa put a hand to her brow and drew a breath, and I had a feeling she was fighting the urge to stab me.
“I’m sure he can,” she said, after a moment. “And my mother can fucking shout. It was a disaster, Tomas. She will never forgive me for this.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Ailsa never swore, and I confess it threw me for a moment.
“Your da took to me well enough, so there’s that,” I said at last. “Maybe he can talk her round.”