Stargazy Pie

by Victoria Goddard

  “What about your inheritance?” Mr. Dart asked.

  I had to laugh, and gestured grandly at the square. “My inheritance? I have what I have from my father. The three chests from my mother will be easy enough to go through.”

  “You should be the squire of Arguty Manor.”

  “And not having gone to Inveragory for Law, and not having taken Rhetoric at Morrowlea, I’m hardly going to be able to argue my uncle out of it, nor do I have the money to hire anyone else. Perhaps I will go to Nên Corovel and give my services to the Lady, and that will be that. I can tell her about Miss Shipston while I’m about it.”

  “Will you not inherit anything from your stepfather?” Violet asked cautiously.

  I glanced at Mrs. Buchance, who had tears streaking down her face. I tried to speak as temperately as possible. “No, it’s going to my sisters. He said there’d be a small competence, but I’m not expecting anything much. We talked about it. I kept my father’s name, and I keep my father’s patrimony.”

  “But that would be enough,” Violet said, and when I looked at her in genuine confusion she added, “to go to Inveragory, if you wanted, for another degree.”

  “How? I could pay my living, possibly, but hardly tuition on top of it.”

  Mrs. Etaris said gently, “They do offer scholarships for second-degree students, Mr. Greenwing.”

  “And if I were Violet and had come First at Morrowlea, then they’d probably give me one. Since I failed—”

  “I didn’t come First,” Violet interrupted.

  I stared at her, and for a moment thought she meant—and then realized. I sank down on the ladder again. “You don’t mean they gave it to Lark, after all that? They couldn’t have. They couldn’t have.”

  Violet took a deep breath. “No, Jemis. They gave it to you.”

  “Weren’t you there for the graduation ceremony?” Mr. Dart asked. “I thought that was why your first letters were so late.”

  I thought of the disastrous viva voce examinations. How I’d spent the next several days in the hospital wing, and how Hal and Marcan and Tover had packed up my belongings for me and smuggled me out against the fury and fervour of the rest of the students. I glanced at Violet. “No. Things were so bad after Lark’s … I was so sick … I ruined my degree. Dominus Nidry ripped my final paper in half. I never even presented it. I failed.”

  Coming off an unwitting wireweed addiction. Heartbroken in so many different ways. Bruised physically and emotionally and mentally by my fellow students.

  An utter failure, with only Hal proven to stand behind me, when it came down to it.

  Violet spoke with great precision. “At the graduation ceremony the Chancellor of Morrowlea stated that your courage to argue for the truth against the strongest personal and public disinclinations was what the university at its best stood for, and that you exemplified not only excellence of scholarship and academic achievement but the far greater excellence of character that it takes to stand against lies and calumny, no matter the consequences.”

  I stared at her. She smiled sadly, apologetically, wistfully. It took me a moment to think why she was so apologetic: and then I thought of her high words, her angry defense of Lark, her attacking me. She was a superb actress: though whether she was acting now, or had been acting before when she attacked me, I had no idea.

  She added, “They must have sent your degree astray, if you haven’t gotten it.”

  “They probably sent it to your uncle,” Mr. Dart said. “That’s where anything misdirected to Greenwing would go.”

  I sank down until I was finally sitting properly. To my deep shame now I was crying. I couldn’t look at anyone. Thought of the coolly elegant Chancellor of Morrowlea, an expert in the nature of lightning, the founder of the radical movement from her own time as a student there. I covered my face with my hands. “She can’t have. She can’t have. I failed.”

  “Jemis, she did. I’m not making this up. You came First in the year at Morrowlea. You can go wherever you like.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to control myself. “I’m sorry. I thought I failed. I was sure I failed. The way they looked at me …”

  “They were looking at their own failure,” Violet said, and the words hung there for a long moment. Then she added: “I was. We all were. The only one who didn’t was Hal. He stood with you. But you stood up first.”

  I started to shake, somewhere between sobs and laughter and sneezes.

  “Mr. Greenwing has had a trying day,” said Mrs. Etaris to no one in particular.

  Mrs. Buchance spoke hesitantly. “Mr. Greenwing … if you want to go to Inveragory, or Nên Corovel, or, or, wherever, you may of course. But don’t think … you said Mr. Buchance spoke to you about his will?”

  I scrubbed my face and sat up to try to compose myself. Mr. Dart passed me a handkerchief, one of his own; it smelled like violets, but not in a sneeze-inducing kind of way. I swallowed painfully. “When he came last winter. We spoke about what I was planning on doing after graduation. At the time I was … was courting someone, and expected to be going to her family afterwards. That was before the examinations, of course.”

  There was another pause. Violet said, “Did Lark tell you about her family?”

  “No, but I told her about mine,” I said tiredly. “That was what started the whole thing. It always does, as you’ve probably gathered.” I glanced briefly at Mrs. Etaris and Mrs. Buchance. “She wrote a rhetorical piece against my father. I couldn’t stomach it.”

  “The final papers are free to be read by the other students as well as the faculty,” Violet explained, to my gratitude. “Most of the time no one bothers, or they only have easy questions at the oral examinations. Usually there aren’t any serious challenges except from a couple of the professors, and people read their paper and that’s it. Jemis challenged Lark on hers as being intellectually trite and morally bankrupt and wholly unworthy of a Morrowlea student. Which it was. He couldn’t say it was personal slander … but he didn’t need to. It wasn’t a very nice atmosphere, in the end.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Buchance faintly.

  “This was the young woman who was giving you drugs against your knowledge?” Mrs. Etaris said, and when I looked up at her in shock she actually smiled. “My dear, you have had a most difficult time. Now, I don’t know about what Mrs. Buchance thinks about matters, but you’ve missed the autumn entrance for Inveragory, and it seems to me there are some mysteries still to be cleared up in Ragnor Bella.”

  “But your reputations—”

  “Mr. Greenwing, I had more people come into my store—and buy things!—yesterday than I had most of the rest of the month.Sir Vorel compelled my husband to lay false charges against my former assistant, out of pure bigotry against a quite lovely young man, and both of them know very well that if they try anything of the sort again I will make public allegations against them both. Dame Talgarth buys no books from me as it is; Sir Hamish sent me a letter by one of his marketers saying that he was delighted I had hired you; and I am no serf of the Baron’s. As for Mrs. Buchance … let her say her piece.”

  “You didn’t see Mr. Buchance’s will, did you?” she asked.

  I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. “No. He was going to revise it on his return to Ragnor Bella, he said. That was why he was telling me about his plans.”

  “He was sounding you out.”

  “I know,” I replied tiredly. “He wanted me to adopt his name and take over his business. But I couldn’t—my father—”

  “He understood,” she said gently, reaching forward to take my hands, which she gripped tightly while staring earnestly at me. “Please don’t think you need to leave because of what people are saying.”

  “Oh,” I said, my voice breaking.

  “Come on,” Mr. Dart said, “there’s a cult afoot! I need you to help me find out what’s going on. Not to mention what on earth I’m going to do about my arm.”

  I stared at them. My face felt ho
t and stretched, my throat tight and sore, my eyes sandy. “But—”

  “I think you should go to bed,” Violet said briskly. “We can’t do much more tonight, can we? We’ll have to see what Mr. Dart finds out at this dinner party tomorrow.”

  “But …”

  “Come now,” Mrs. Etaris said. “Make no decisions in haste. Things will look different in the morning once you’ve slept. And don’t worry, I shall make certain my husband’s thoughts do not turn to you when considering the silvered cow. Or the stolen books from Dominus Gleason.”

  I tried to speak lightly. “Or the fire at Mr. Shipston’s.”

  She smiled. “Well, I think it’s quite reasonable to put it about that you were the one to go in to rescue Miss Shipston, don’t you? Let us put something delightful into the mouths of the gossips for once.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The last time I saw my stepfather was just after the first day of spring in my final year at Morrowlea.

  Mr. Buchance had come, as was his wont, on his way back from Highthwaite in Chare, where his partner managed more and more of their business affairs as Mr. Buchance’s new family grew. He had taken me out for lunch at the Morrowlea Arms in the little village down the hill from the university, a place usually off-limits to students.

  We’d had the usual awkward conversation, him asking me stiff questions about my studies and me asking him equally stiff questions about his business, his second wife, and my sisters, until we came to the dessert and he sighed, pushed away his custard, and said: “Jemis, what are we going to do with you?”

  I looked at him.

  He looked very serious. “I’ll see you won’t starve. I can keep on with the allowance until you decide what to do. It’s just that—”

  “I understand, sir,” I said, and I did. My mother’s money had disappeared into the task of keeping us alive after the news had come of my father’s disgrace and death, and given the Fall of Astandalas in the middle of this, even after my father had come home alive and claiming the disgrace was a mistake, there was no Empire to claim an Army pension from, and no money to contest the slander, if slander it was when all we had were the two sets of official documents, one cataloguing the extent of my father’s treachery—and the other his heroism. I’d believed his story of the mistakes involved; few others had.

  I had already received my inheritance. Three boxes full of my mother’s belongings. My surname, and all the rumours and gleeful expectations of those who were waiting for me to turn out even worse than my notorious father and poor deluded bigamous mother, whose own family had disowned her so completely that when I had written to my grandmother to tell her of my mother’s death the only reply was My daughter has been dead these five years since.

  Mr. Buchance had told me before I went to university that if I wanted to take over his business and be a wealthy man through mercantile trade I would have to adopt his name. It was Charese law that a business could only pass father to son without being bought for the full price, and though that was not the law in Fiellan, despite his emigration he remained a Charese merchant through and through.

  I might have accepted a formal adoption by Mr. Buchance, if my father hadn’t come home.

  “I understand,” I said again. “I’ll be one-and-twenty this month—time for me to be making my own way in the world. You will pass on my love to my sisters?”

  “Of course,” replied Mr. Buchance, and we talked about Lauren and Sela and Zangora and Elinor and the quick growth of Lamissa until it was time to leave, and I knew without him ever saying it how desperately he wanted a son to take over his business and carry on his name and do all the things I was so stubbornly and unsuccessfully trying to do for another man.

  As I walked back up the hill towards the university Lark met me. She’d been working in the carpentry sheds and was dressed in something I couldn’t remember, apart from the dramatic sun hat she was wearing against the spring sun, and how very beautiful she was.

  The memory was jewel-like, one of the most exquisitely preserved moments of my life, as sharp-edged as when I opened the door of Mr. Buchance’s house, one winter’s afternoon, aged fourteen and a half, and found standing on the step my dead father.

  The clear spring afternoon light, her smiling up at me from under the wide brim of her hat, kissing my frowns away. The way that my worries and frustrations and guilt dissolved and floated away with the smoke rings she blew from her ivory pipe, how she laughed merrily when I sneezed, how that didn’t break the spell.

  Every step we took up the hill made me feel better. How lucky I was, I remembered thinking, to have found love so searing and beautiful and true as this. Why worry about the future, when I had Lark, who loved to plan and organize and arrange and always had such glorious ideas.

  It didn’t matter that we’d obeyed all the university’s rules, had never spoken of our families or ranks or fortunes or even where we were from, that we wore the uniform robes and participated in all the work that built the university, from the stool Lark had made in the carpentry shop to the work cataloguing the library that I had been doing that morning—that didn’t matter, not at all in the light of the smile she gave me.

  Our life together stretched ahead, as shining as the splendid city of knowledge raising its golden battlements above us, as unshadowed as the day, as glorious as the swift flight of a falcon piercing the sky from right to left as we walked, as magnificent as the high white clouds building against the blue.

  So when Lark said, “Let us be rebels, Jemis my love. Tell me all about your family.”

  —Well. I did.

  ***

  When I woke the next morning it was to a silent house. I turned onto my back, looking at the canopy over my bed. The first three days in town I’d woken to shrill cries and to one or other little girl launching herself through the curtains to bounce me awake, my sisters still finding my presence at home exciting. The first day of work, being a special occasion, I’d found Sela, Lauren, and Elinor all piling up—Lamissa and Zangora were still too little to participate in the sororal ritual.

  This morning, though, they’d left me alone. I opened the curtains to see a dull grey morning, of the sort that made it nearly impossible to tell the time from the light. I felt much better, but still lay there languidly until morning necessities impelled me to the privy.

  Much nicer than the outhouse at the old house, I thought, remembering the cold trudge down the garden in the morning with the chamberpot. Mr. Buchance had spared no expense on the new house, putting in a cistern and pipes in the new fashion for running water both hot and cold. I ran a bath for myself, as hot as I could stand, and while I floated happily it occurred to me that it must be very late indeed and Mrs. Buchance had taken the girls to the holy-day service.

  I found a note from Mrs. Buchance in the kitchen, stating that they had indeed gone to church and would moreover be going to the Inglesides’ for lunch, and I was welcome to join them there if I didn’t have other plans with Mr. Dart and my friend from Morrowlea, and that Mrs. Etaris had sent along a book. I studied this note while eating lukewarm porridge from the pot at the back of the stove.

  Mrs. Buchance had gone to the local kingschool, and her handwriting was almost as elegant as Mrs. Etaris’. Once I moved the paper I realized the book from Mrs. Etaris was underneath it, and since I hadn’t brought anything else down with me to read, naturally I opened it.

  It was the book on Alinorel magic. I was still feeling a bit unwell, not inclined to reading solidly, so I flipped through it, reading a few sentences here and there. There were convoluted diagrams comparing the five primary Schools of Astandalan Magic and a discussion of the fourfold and threefold paths of traditional Alinorel magic, though nothing on the Dark Kings, as I saw when I checked the index out of curiosity.

  There was, however, an entry for Drugs, Magical Use of. See also: Wireweed.

  Under Wireweed all it said was: A kind of perennial legume native to the north Kilromby Islands. As a dr
ug, illegal in every country of Oriole and the New Reaches, and with good reason.

  Under Drugs, Magical Use of, however, were three pages of explanations for what, exactly, Lark had been doing to me.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I was reading this passage over for the fourth time when the doorbell rang. I nearly jumped out of my skin at the huge solemn clank, and spent a few moments trying not to choke on my last mouthful of coffee before I was able to go see who it was.

  “Good morning, Mr. Greenwing,” said Mr. Dart, with a bow. “Might I come in?”

  “With pleasure, Mr. Dart,” I replied, with a bow of my own.

  I shut the door behind him and he burst out laughing. “Oh, Jemis, what have we got ourselves into?”

  “Come have some coffee in the kitchen.”

  “Quite the house,” he said, following me down the hallway and gesturing at the wallpaper, which ran heavily to maroon. “Just needs a few more oil paintings to be properly starchy with the best of them.”

  “Don’t give Mrs. Buchance ideas. She thinks I need to improve my taste in frivolities.”

  “Like your hat?”

  My hat was lying on the table next to my book. I patted it. “My hat is the height of fashion, I’ll have you know.”

  “If you insist.” He flung himself into the seat next to where I’d been sitting. “Once you go to Inveragory, you can be first in the styles.”

  I stopped with my hand on the coffeepot. “The Emperor.”

  “What, hadn’t you thought through what coming First at Morrowlea meant?”

  “I had not,” I said. “I came home and fell asleep, and woke up half an hour ago.”

  “I always find myself thinking best in the bath.”

  “Have a bun, Mr. Dart. I was thinking about other things.”