Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  She was checking the fire, and straightened with her face composed, if ruddy from the heat. “A letter addressed to you was left on the counter during the course of the day on Wednesday. I had been intending to speak to you about it, for of course there are numerous unpleasant reasons someone might send you anonymous mail—”

  “Yes, I’ve received some. Hal and I have been burning them.”

  “There are always a few, alas. I do apologize: you were missing, and I forgot to mention anything about it to Mr. Lingham, who must have presumed it should go with your other post.”

  “He brought it with a letter from Morrowlea saying they’re coming to look at the dragon, and one from Inveragory offering me a place.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Greenwing.”

  I set up the till, stacking the coins inside much more precisely than was required. Mrs. Etaris left me for a moment to do the little things that made the space cozier and more inviting: fluffing cushions on the chairs near the wood stove, running a dust cloth over the shelves, straightening the rug on the floor, evening out a row of books that had tilted. I fussed at the counter and waited forlornly for something to happen that would take my mind off the cold hollow core of my existence.

  “Have you eaten anything today, Mr. Greenwing?”

  I picked up my coffee. “No, thank you, ma’am. I left Dart Hall early.”

  “Running six miles before breakfast is admirable but not a substitute for eating, Mr. Greenwing, and you do not need to lose any more weight. Go and fetch something from the bakery, then you can mind the shop this morning, if you’d like.”

  This was the downside of a maternal figure, I supposed, but I had found it easier to obey Mrs. Etaris on such matters than stand up to her. I wasn’t hungry in the least, but I did want to ask Mr. Inglesides what he’d heard about my mysterious absence.

  The bakery was full of the second wave of customers, children on their first break from the kingschool and those of the town’s professional class who began their work at the leisurely hours of 9:30 or 10:00. Ragnor Bella was a small town in a barony with a much smaller population than once upon a time, but there was still a branch of the Imperial Bank of Scholarship and Trade, even if it only boasted three employees, and there were the usual complement of lawyers, physicians, independent scholars, and clergy.

  I waited patiently while Mr. Inglesides’ assistant, Polly, dealt with a gaggle of children, and while Mr. Inglesides himself chatted with Father Rigby, two men in legal gowns whose names I didn’t know, and Dominus Gleason, professor emeritus of magic.

  When this last came in I faded back as best I could against the shelves of confitures and jams on the side wall of the bakery. Alas, it was not a large store, and when the children cleared out not a noisy one, and my sneezes sounded forth clearly as a trumpet.

  “Excuse me,” I said in resignation as all four men turned to look at me. Mr. Inglesides, who had winked at me earlier and not addressed me, winked again.

  I would have bowed to Mr. Inglesides out of respect for his person, and to Father Rigby out of respect for his office, and to the lawyers as a salute to their positions and possible future relevance, but I intensely disliked Dominus Gleason and would have preferred not to give him the time of day.

  My mother had dinned into me that courtesy was a far greater thing than pride. After the past month of acquaintance with my grandmother I knew more of why that had been so vital a lesson. The Marchioness was proud beyond sanity, and had never reconciled with her daughter after a break whose cause I did not know.

  A flicker of memory came shooting across my mind about Hal’s Aunt Honoria’s list of eligible brides, and that mine would be the same as his except that as heir to an imperial marquisate rather than a dukedom I could perhaps look as far down the social scale as regional—i.e., provincial—nobility.

  The second son of an impoverished county baronet would not have been on any such list for my mother in Astandalan days.

  All this flashed through my mind in the space between sneezing and excusing myself and then I realized it was the next hand in the game of Poacher that was life, and I smiled and said, “Mr. Inglesides. Gentlemen,” and bowed once to them all.

  “Mr. Greenwing,” Mr. Inglesides replied, his smile warm, genuinely welcoming, and ever-so-slightly malicious. He’s heard something, I thought immediately, and was pleased my guess had been correct.

  “Lord St-Noire,” said Dominus Gleason a bare moment later, at his most unctuous.

  Father Rigby looked blank, but he always looked blank when he saw me. The two lawyers exchanged glances. One said delicately, “Mr. Greenwing?” and the other, even more delicately, like a sigh made speech, “Lord St-Noire?”

  I looked at Mr. Inglesides, giving him tacit permission to make the introductions, which was quite against the rules. I did not, however, wish to be indebted to Dominus Gleason for so much as an introduction, and I remained unconvinced that Father Rigby remembered who I was between one encounter and the next.

  Mr. Inglesides blinked twice, slowly, and then his face smoothed into his professional courtesy. With as much punctiliousness as the Etiquette Master at Morrowlea could have wished he said, “Mr. Greenwing, may I present Mr. Morres and Mr. Tey? Mr. Greenwing, the Viscount St-Noire, gentlemen.”

  Mr. Tey was the one who’d spoken like a sigh. His voice matched his appearance: he was tall, willowy, delicate, dark-skinned, and fussily dressed at an expense I wondered he could afford. He was perhaps in his late twenties. Family money, I deduced, though of course it equally well have been crime.

  Mr. Morres was older, middle thirties I guessed. He was average in all respects—build, features, skin tone, hair—except for his eyes, which were a sharp blue that put me in mind immediately of Mrs. Henny the Post’s. He’s the one to watch, I thought, smiling, as he said, and Mr. Tey sighed, “How do you do.” Their expressions suggested that the many irregularities of this introduction were not lost on them.

  “Good morning,” I replied with the closest to pleasant neutrality I could manage with a head cold. Dominus Gleason watched me steadily, with a tiny smirk and a delighted gleam in his eyes. I did not like to think I had done something to please him so excessively.

  Father Rigby harrumphed, but said nothing when I glanced enquiringly at him. Finally Mr. Morres said, as delicately as he’d initially commented on my name, “Mr. Tey and I have been sent from the chancery court in Kingsford. We’ve been asked to assist with certain cases at the Winterturn Assizes here, including, I believe, one making official the inheritance claims for the Imperial Marquisate of Noirell.”

  I stifled a sudden wild hope that I was not, after all, going to be eligible for the title. Between the dragon and my grandmother I feared I had very little choice. I smiled politely again. “I expect I shall be seeing you again on that matter, then, sirs.”

  Mr. Morres took off his spectacles and examined their lenses against the light, and put them on again, and I thought, very clearly: he is here for another reason, too.

  It needn’t necessarily have anything to do with me, but too many other things had, this past month, for the hope that it didn’t to be anything more than a mild, wistful, wish.

  “I’ve just been telling our visitors about your exploits with the dragon,” Mr. Inglesides said chattily, and once again attentions sharpened behind deliberately vague expressions.

  Dominus Gleason was still delighted, as if I were his excelling student or pet; Father Rigby was good-natured and blank, a flicker of dismay or distress rippling the blankness only momentarily; Mr. Tey showed well-bred amusement; and Mr. Morres’s face was vapidly curious and his thoughts well-hidden.

  I laughed self-deprecatingly as if slaying dragons were a common and minor feat (far better than being treated—or still worse, demanding to be treated—as a conquering hero). “I’ve had a letter from Morrowlea. Several Scholars are coming to examine the carcass.”

  “Morrowlea?” Mr. Morres murmured. “The carcass?” Mr. Tey
said faintly. Dominus Gleason’s smirk narrowed into a frown, then widened again to a yet-more-self-satisfied smirk. Father Rigby sighed. “Poor creature.”

  “It tried to eat my uncle,” I pointed out a little snippily, and was abruptly fed up with all the games and jockeying. Mr. Morres made me uneasy. Not in the way that Dominus Gleason’s predatory and possessive air did, but uneasy at the danger he represented. I could like and trust him, but.

  But: the Indrillines, the Knockermen, the cult, my uncle, and the Yellem constabulary were almost certainly involved somehow in the arrival of these two lawyers. I could not afford to be so profligate with my trust as I had been till now. Someone had paid Myrta the Hand’s gang to abduct my sister, and that was without adding in the complications my father brought with him.

  “Could I please have two cinnamon rolls and a Wardrider pastry, Mr. Inglesides?” I said, and, in a tone of voice that I feared was almost insolently indifferent, added to Mr. Tey: “I went to Morrowlea, sir.”

  “Of course,” Mr. Inglesides replied, while the two lawyers exchanged glances. I watched Mr. Tey move his hands delicately in the air as if batting away invisible motes of dust and revised my opinion of him. He, too, was hiding something.

  I nearly smiled at the thought. I was learning that almost everyone was.

  Mr. Inglesides set the pastries on the counter for me. I realized then that I’d left my money at the bookstore, but before I could say so the baker added, “I’ll put it on your account, Mr. Greenwing, and you can settle up with me later.”

  This was the first time that option had ever been offered to me, and I knew why. “Thank you,” I said, bowing again, and took my comestibles and my head cold back to the bookstore that was rapidly and disquietingly coming to feel like home.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Face Cards

  Mrs. Etaris stayed while I slowly and unenthusiastically ate the Wardrider pastry. The potato and onion filling was delicious, I knew at an intellectual level; at a physiological one I was disinterested to the point of nausea.

  She did not exactly hover, but every time I looked up to see if I could safely get rid of the rest of the pastry she was there with a comment about new books or a little piece of gossip.

  By such means I learned about the middle class of Ragnor Bella. I did not truly belong to it, with my title and my family, but in terms of wealth and status my mother and I had long since joined its numbers. Her second marriage to Mr. Buchance had added another dimension, for he was not only commoner-born, but foreign, and, over the years, increasingly wealthy. After my mother’s death he had married the nursemaid hired for my infant sisters, Mr. Inglesides’ sister and my putative stepmother.

  There were far too few customers this morning, I thought balefully, nibbling at the crust. Mrs. Etaris asked what area of study Mr. Dart had specialized in.

  “Late Astandalan military history,” I said, though his interest was catholic and his range extensive. “What about you, Mrs. Etaris?”

  She was petting the cat, who lay in feline ecstasy on the chair beside the stove. “At Galderon? Political philosophy.”

  That surprised me. I glanced involuntarily around the store. There were books on political philosophies, two shelves of them in fact, but they did not have the air of love I should have expected from such a longstanding interest. The romances in prose and verse took up much more of the store.

  “Interests do sometimes change, in much the same way as fortunes,” she said. “Thank you for the cinnamon roll.”

  I went back to the pastry and thought about the changing fortunes of barony families. The Darts were gentry, though untitled: Sir Hamish’s knighthood was for his painting, and he was, anyhow, a Greenwing on his mother’s side. Master Dart was the Squire, an arrangement older than the barony itself.

  Go back a thousand years, to the patchwork of universities and small fiefdoms before the coming of the Empire, and you would find the Ragnors, the Greenwings, the Woodhills, and the Kulfields—once a great family—listed in parish and post registers. Go back seven hundred and fifty years again, to the days when Tarazel was marching across the wilderness of Oriole to find knowledge and found learning in the form of the university of Tara, and the Darts of Dartington were there: and one of them was marching at her side.

  When the pastry was at last reduced to crumbs, by which time the town clock had struck numerous quarters (and there still hadn’t been any customers), Mrs. Etaris stirred. “Very well, Mr. Greenwing. I shall leave you to mind the store while I do some errands; my husband may have some news of you for me. I shall be back before lunch.”

  “Very good, Mrs. Etaris,” I replied, trying to sound cheerful and not succeeding. I did feel a little better for the food, less inclined to faintness of muscle, but the cold sludge and hollowness were, alas, merely cast in greater relief.

  I wondered, not for the first time, why she’d married her husband, who was (I supposed) reasonably handsome, but that couldn’t be it, surely, for her? Perhaps he had changed over time ... or she had ... or perhaps behind closed doors there was a joy that made up for the public dissonance he barely tried to hide.

  I would not, myself, like to spend my life married to someone I could not respect.

  As soon as Mrs. Etaris left people started to come and go for books and belated copies of the New Salon and to consider me with narrowed eyes and smirking mouths and half-intended-to-be-heard comments. This was all very much as usual; only the subjects changed. The range included how long it had taken me to get home from university (occasionally); how appalling it was that I’d missed my stepfather’s funeral and the Midsomer Assizes (more frequent now with the reminder of the Winterturn Assizes coming up); the dragon (with disbelief, as if half the barony hadn’t witnessed its demise); my father (always); and now, also, my disappearance and the Yellem accusations, which someone had deliberately let slip.

  I sighed inwardly and smiled outwardly and wondered fleetingly from time to time what my father would have thought to see me, which was also as usual. When two giggling schoolgirls had finally taken their leave with their new novels and I looked up for the next customer to see him standing there, I was for a moment utterly confounded.

  He had drifted in unnoticed behind the schoolgirls and taken up a station in the corner by the cookbooks (and political philosophy), where he could warm himself at the fire and gently fondle the ears of the cat, an activity that I had learned could keep people in the store indefinitely. He must have been watching me at work for some time, I realized, and thought about those sidelong comments.

  I wanted to smile but the cold sludge of doubt leaped into my throat and strangled my greeting with horrified uncertainty.

  I had dreamed this too many times. Imagined speaking to him, man to man, too many times. Doubted that my life was anything like what he’d approve of and hoped fiercely and desperately that at least he’d approve of my efforts to live with honour and courage—oh, every livelong day.

  “Jemis.”

  “J-Jack.” I cleared my throat. “Were you looking for a book?”

  An idiotic question, for all that we stood in a bookstore. He stared at me, brow furrowed and mouth set, as it had not been in the split second I first looked at him.

  “Jemis.”

  I stared mutely, at his mouth, not his eyes. Eye. The doubt was there: that this was a dream, an illusion, a hallucination, a cheat. That standing before me was someone else wearing my father’s face and trying to step into his shoes, his place, his life.

  A distant rational part of my mind said that this was absurd, that of all people to choose a disgraced war hero with no money and a reputation as a traitor and a suicide made no sense. That voice was too distant to make any difference to the doubt or the hollow certainty that this bright dream would turn into betrayal with all the rest. I did not have good luck with those I loved.

  “Jemis,” he said a third time, and then, when I still stared at him, fighting with the heavy tentacles of doubt and fear and desire,
his voice burst out: “For the Lady’s sake, will you not say something?”

  The dragon had flung me into a table: that had been nothing. Nothing.

  But yet the doubt was there, suffocating, treacherous as a bog, as Lark, as the Magarran Strid.

  Something clattered. I looked at the counter dumbly, astonished to see that I had knocked over the pen-stand. I was trembling with emotion. My heart felt as if it were convulsing, my pulse throbbing, and the cold heavy serpent coiled in my gut and my breast and my mind.

  His face was pale, good eye brilliant, muscles working. Something broke there as I watched. The intensity slid away, a dullness rising in its place. His voice when he spoke next was flat, barely audible. “You thought I was a traitor.”

  “No!”

  The denial made it out past the stranglehold of doubt. It had all the fervour of truth, all the steadfastness of one of the rocks of my life. I had never believed the accusations, never even countenanced them.

  The expression on his face did not ease.

  I felt sick. I wished Mrs. Etaris had not made me eat the pastry.

  The reasonable part of my mind was screaming at the pain I was inflicting on my father, my father, my father.

  And like blood in the mouth, metallic and sickening, the doubts moved.

  “Then why?” he whispered, expression flattened with shock and hurt and grief and a thousand other emotions. “Did you not—Do you wish I had not come back?”

  I was drowning.

  I could barely think of anything but the heavy certainty that this was not true and that it was true. That it was my father, standing there while I rejected him out of fear that it was not him; that it was not him, and I would have to live through the next several years trying once again to persuade myself that he was dead.

  I tried. Again and again I tried to pull common decency out of my silence if I could not find anything else. I had not let the dragon kill my uncle, even though I hated my uncle and I thought then that he might have murdered my father—if I had saved his life how could I do this to someone who might be the person I loved best in all the world—might be, might be, might be—