The Ashby Deception

"Vincent," she said. "You have come at last. Pour me a glass of water." It came out thin and dry, and her arm was already out — it had been out a while, long enough for the shoulder to ache in its socket. The hand at the end of it was bones in a sack of skin, the back spotted brown where the window light fell across it. He stepped back. "Mother." He said it pleasantly. "I am the youngest Chancellor this kingdom has ever had. How does it suit me?" She turned her face on the pillow and looked at him. Purple. Not a purple any woman could buy — the deep flat shade that came with an office, and a chain at the collar, and on the breast a beast worked in silver thread, wings spread, tail curled, the stitching so fine the thing seemed to be moving under the cloth. The cap set perfectly straight. The boots new. "Purple," she said. "The King has raised you." "He has raised me. There is no one above me now but him." "Then your uncle Nicholas—" "Uncle Nicholas is in a cell." She got her elbow under her. The room tipped, held, and her breath came out with a sound in it. She listened past the door for the house — no chair scraping, no girl coming up the stairs with a basin. For weeks the house had made no sound near her at all. The last woman who brought her bread had stopped coming, and she had never learned whether the woman had been sent away, or was dead, or was merely somewhere else in that great house, eating. "Say it again," she said. "He is in a cell." Vincent smoothed one glove with the other. "I put the ledgers in his own study. Your brother keeps everything; he cannot throw out a receipt. It took me one evening to put them in among his own papers, and after that they were his — his hand, his seal, his table. Two of your family's clerks swore to them in open court. They swore very well." She had not had a letter in a long while. She had gone hungry in a house with a kitchen the size of a chapel. She had lain in this bed and counted a great many things, and the worst of what she had counted was that she had been afraid to count. "You went into his study," she said. "I did." "To take his name off the door." "To take the door." He smiled at nothing in particular. "There is more of it. Your eldest brother was at Karrow this spring, with the army, when the crown prince was killed." Her hand closed on the edge of the mattress. "The city is howling for somebody's head over it," he said. "This morning the King gave me men and told me to take the Sayer house before noon. With the ledgers he was agreeable. Without them he would have wanted an inquiry, and an inquiry takes a season, and a season is a long time for a man to be looked at closely." He lifted one shoulder. "One thing follows another." "Why?" The word came out with no weight behind it at all, and she was glad of that much. She had meant to ask it in fury. It came out like a question about the weather. "Why ruin him? He carried you up those stairs himself. He sat you at his own table when the whole city was laughing at a—" "The crown prince was mine." She stopped. "Not your brother's. Not the war's. Mine." He turned a little, as if showing her the fit of the coat. "There is a prince of the King's blood who believes the crown is owed to him. The Sayers would not stand for him. The crown prince would not either. So the crown prince had to go, and when the King's men went looking for the officer who ought to have kept a prince alive, there was a Sayer standing nearest — in command, where a Sayer is always standing." He smoothed the glove again. "The prince went. The Sayers can go with him. And here we are." She stared at him. "You killed a prince of the blood," she said, "so that nobody could tell you what to do." "I killed a prince of the blood because I was tired of being told what to do by people who had done nothing except pick me up out of a road." He touched the chain at his collar. "Everything I have, I have earned. Not one Sayer gave me any part of it." "I picked you up out of a road." "You picked up a child in a clean shirt." "I put my own hands under you." Her voice cracked and went on anyway. "I gave you the name you are wearing." He straightened his cuff before he answered. "Ashby," he said. "It is a good name. It was not yours to give and it was never mine to have, and the Dowager gave me the place that went with it. She had it all worked out before ever you set foot in this house. She had been arranging this family for fifty years, and you were one more thing put where it would be useful. I was never a beggar. My father is—" The door opened. Two people came in. She knew him before the light had got round him. Twenty years in the ground, and he came through a door at a walk, and above the collar the years had not touched him at all: he was the young man who had gone off to Karrow with his hair cropped short. He looked at the bed the way a man looks at something he has stepped in, and then he looked away from it, and he said nothing. The woman spoke for both of them. She was past forty and she had been kept well — round cheeks, good cloth, a figure that had never missed a meal. She came forward two steps, made a curtsy, low and correct, and held it a beat longer than she needed to. "My lady." She straightened. "I have wanted to stand in front of you for a great many years." "Who are you?" "Marianne Wren." She said the name as though it ought to mean something. "I got him out. At Karrow. There was a surgeon who owed my father money, and after that there was a cart, and after that there was a great deal of patience." She put her hand through Julian's arm. "We have lived quietly. We never troubled you." "Never troubled—" "And we had a son." Marianne smiled. "You have raised him. There is not a woman in this kingdom who could have done it better, my lady, and I have thought so every year." The room went quiet. Somewhere below, a door banged, and a dog barked twice, and stopped. Vincent had not moved from where he stood. His hands were behind his back and his jaw was set, and he did not look at Marianne, and he did not look at the bed. "Vincent," Cordelia said. "Vincent is—" She could not finish it. "You are telling me the boy is yours." "He is Julian's only son." Marianne made the curtsy again, smaller. "Thank you, my lady. Truly." "Twenty years," Cordelia said. "Beg pardon?" "I have worn black for twenty years." She got her hand up. It shook. She pointed. "You let them cut your name into a stone, and I have knelt in that chapel twice a year with hothouse lilies, and I have kept your house, and I have counted your candles and your salt and your—" "My lady—" "And that." The hand swung to Vincent. "A by-blow got on a woman out of a cart, and I have spent my father's money and my brothers' credit to stand him where he stands—" Her breath went out of her and would not come back in. "He is not entitled. Do you hear me? Not to the name. Not to the house. Not to one—" Vincent's boot took her under the breastbone and drove her back across the bed, and the back of her head met the wall above the bedhead. She heard herself hit. After that there was blood in her mouth and she could not get her breath around it, and the room had gone white at the edges. "Vincent." Julian had not moved from the doorway. His voice was flat. "See your lady mother out. The King signed the order this morning — every Sayer is to be put out of the kingdom, and she is to go with them. See that she is ready to travel." He offered his arm to Marianne Wren. They went out. Neither of them shut the door. "Julian." Her throat was full. "You will die badly. Do you hear me? You have taken my whole life off me, and you will die badly, and I will not let you go. Not if I have to come back for it." Vincent had not gone with them. He lifted the lamp off the table by the door and emptied it along the foot of the bed, and then the second lamp, and the smell of the oil came up around her sharp and clean and almost kind. "He told you to see me out," she said. "He told me to see that you were ready to travel." He set the wick to the hangings. They went up faster than she would have believed — the flame running the cloth like water running downhill, the ceiling cloth curling and dropping in burning pieces, the noise of it much less than she had expected. The last thing she saw clearly was Vincent standing in the middle of the room with his hands at his sides, watching, as though he had been told to wait and see it finished. Then the wheel dropped into a rut and her head struck the panel of the door, once, hard, and the fire was gone. *** She came up with her eyes open and her mouth shut. She was sitting upright with a cushion at her back and a window at her elbow, and the world was going past it — houses, a cart, a boy running — all of it sliding by at the pace of a walking horse. Her hands lay in her lap. She turned them over, one and then the other. The nails were clean and whole. The knuckles were smooth. There was no blood at her wrist, and there had been, a moment before. Two girls sat on the seat opposite. Sylvie, hands folded, mouth a little open. Dora beside her with her chin up, listening to something outside. They were seventeen and eighteen years old. They had been seventeen and eighteen when she last looked at them; then they had grown old alongside her, year by year, and now they had not. She was Lady Cordelia Ashby. She had died at two-and-forty in the room at the top of the east wing, with the hangings coming down over her. She was two-and-twenty years old, she was in the Ashby carriage on a street she had not seen in twenty years, and the black she was wearing was four months old. Outside, a woman's voice said, "Oh, the poor little thing." Dora's head came round. It was quick, and it was aimed at the window, and Cordelia had spent twenty years learning what that quickness was worth and who paid for it. She sat with her hands in her lap and did the sum, and it came out the same whichever end of it she started from. The boy in the road would be six years old. She was two-and-twenty, four months a widow. The settlements had been signed a year ago, when she was one-and-twenty, and there had been a year of letters before that — a lawyer, her father walking the garden with a pipe, the Sayer name going onto Ashby paper. Six from two-and-twenty left sixteen. She had been fifteen when the child was got and sixteen when he was born, and no Sayer had put a name to anything then. Not a settlement. Not a letter. Six years old, and got before there was any bargain at all. The Ashbys had not found a beggar in the road for her to raise. They had put their own child down in the road, in a shirt somebody had mended carefully enough for a clever woman to notice the mending, and they had dressed the whole street up to look like Providence. Above her, through the boards, the coachman's voice started up. "My lady—" She could have said the rest of it for him. She had heard it before — this street, this carriage, the same flat patience in the man's voice — and it went: there is a child in the road, my lady. Ran out of the lane and went down in front of the near horse. Six years old or thereabouts. A beggar, by the look of his clothes. She said it under her breath, along with him, and every word of it was right.