Emily leant out, caught her breath in surprise, and opened the door as quickly as she could. The hand that helped her down was that of Giles Scavian.
‘Miss Marshwic,’ he said, ‘I had hoped to speak to you before you left.’
She almost told him then and there how she had gone in search of him, but it would not have been seemly. She confined herself to, ‘Mr Scavian, you seem well recovered from your ordeal.’
‘To be touched by the King’s fires is something not lightly undertaken.’ He looked about him awkwardly. There were a few lines on his face that she thought had not been there when they last spoke. ‘Miss Marshwic, I. . . in truth I found our talk together refreshing. You are quite unlike other ladies I have met here.’ He stopped then, colouring slightly. ‘I did not quite mean to . . . I hope you understand me.’
‘I do,’ she said, very conscious of Alice eavesdropping close behind her. ‘I enjoyed our conversation, Mr Scavian – very much so.’
His face lit up. ‘Miss Marshwic, I . . . I suppose you head now for your family home.’
‘Grammaine, yes. You are welcome to visit us there at any time. It would be good to have guests, especially one as eminent as a wizard of the King.’
Behind his eyes, something dropped, locking her out. ‘Alas, I . . . go to the war tomorrow. The King bestows no gifts idly, but would see them used. I just wanted . . . In truth I wanted to say goodbye. I would that we had met before, Miss Marshwic.’ He bit his lip. ‘May I take some message, or do some favour for you? Have you friends or relatives at the fighting?’
‘Where do you travel?’
‘The Levant front. The swamp country.’
Without thinking, Emily took his hand in hers and held it there, hot and dry from the King’s fire. ‘My brother Rodric serves there. Please see that he is safe. He is very young.’
‘I shall do all I can.’
‘And I have a brother-in-law, Lieutenant Tubal Salander. Perhaps he can help you there when you arrive. It will all be unfamiliar to you.’
‘It will,’ he agreed. ‘I had never thought there would be war during my lifetime. I had not looked for it, in truth.’
‘Will you do a third favour for me?’ she asked.
‘Only name it, Miss Marshwic.’
‘Will you keep yourself safe, Mr Scavian?’
He gave a little laugh at that. ‘I must needs do my duty but, beyond that, I shall protect myself as best I can – for you, since you ask it.’
‘Please do.’ She saw that the path away from Deerlings was clear now for them to travel, and he saw it too.
‘I wish you the very best of journeys,’ he said. Then, just as she turned to go: ‘Miss Marshwic?’
She looked back, and saw he had held out one hand. Briefly, a light flared up in the palm: a dancing, flickering ball of ghostly flame that lit up his face for her. He smiled uncertainly. ‘The gifts of the King are for more than just war.’ With his other hand he took her wrist, gently pulled it towards him, then decanted some of the pale fire onto her own palm.
She gasped in shock, but there was only the faintest heat from it, and the flame skittered between her fingers, and danced there for long moments before it died. ‘Beautiful,’ she said in awe, and his shy smile grew. ‘We shall see you at Grammaine some day, Mr Scavian.’
‘It shall not be my fault if you do not.’ He helped her back into her seat and gave a courteous nod to Alice.
Looking through the back window of the buggy, she saw that he remained standing there before Deerlings House, looking after them until she could not see him, and perhaps longer.
8
From that moment in time, events fell into place without me asking them to. As though I have been moved like a piece on a chessboard, from square to square until the moving led me here. Looking back, it seems like the pulling of a trigger on a musket: that terrible pause while the arc-lock spins, which stretches for an eternity in the mind, and yet one knows that the powder must catch and the gun will fire. The inevitable can barely be stayed, and never stopped.
She would liked to have seen Northway’s face when it was announced, ‘A Miss Marshwic to see you.’ That would have helped what was about to come.
As she entered his office, the first thing she saw was that damnable smile, cold and sardonic. His head was cocked a little on one side and his hands clasped before him on his desktop, amongst the ledgers and stacks of parchments.
‘Why, Miss Marshwic, what a pleasant surprise – not to mention unexpected. Have I or the King done something to displease you? Nothing else seems able to lure you to my chambers lately.’
‘Mr Northway,’ she acknowledged, but all the words she had prepared while waiting had remained outside the room as she stepped in. She fought to recapture them in the sudden silence that followed.
‘Please sit, if you will, Miss Marshwic. I have pains in my neck and back enough, from sitting at this desk all day, without straining myself looking up at you.’
Grateful for this time to think, she took a seat across the desk from him, like an applicant for some menial position.
‘I was surprised to see you at Deerlings, Mr Northway,’ she said.
‘As the governor of Chalcaster, it would have been an unpardonable affront for them not to invite me,’ he said. ‘I daresay it was hoped that some pressing business would keep me away. Indeed, I regretted the venture as soon as I set out for the place. A man can take a dislike to being snubbed by so many all at once.’
‘You regret attending, then?’
He looked at her for longer than she was comfortable with, before he said, ‘As it happens, there were consolations.’
She broke eye contact and looked down at the wooden surface of the desk. Here it comes. Deep breath now. ‘Mr Northway, I fear I have been quite churlish towards you of late.’
‘If so, you are in good company,’ he replied wryly.
‘You did save my life, and that of my sister, and it is unfair of me to lose that fact amidst the . . . real reason that you were there.’
She did not look up, but there was an encouraging silence from him, and no further snide remarks.
‘And,’ she added, ‘you were the first man to offer to dance with me at Deerlings, before the King took my hand, after which I had to . . . to beat men away with a stick, is how my sister decorously put it. So perhaps our experiences at that house were not so different, all told.’
‘I don’t know. The King didn’t dance with me,’ he remarked, and she looked up sharply. His smile was still there, but perhaps it was less cold and impersonal than before.
‘You do not make this easy for me,’ she chided him.
‘I am not in the business of making things easy,’ he told her without apology. ‘And, besides, you are at your best when things are far from easy, Miss Marshwic. You are a fighter.’
She took the compliment, if it was one, uncertainly. ‘I asked you, that night, if you were offering a truce.’
‘I remember.’
‘I offer you one now. We have been enemies, and for good reason. No doubt we shall be again. For now, while both our lives are complicated by war, I will be civil and try not to hate you any more, if the same is offered in return.’
‘My, what a carefully worded treaty,’ he said. He had his pipe ready in one hand, but it remained unlit. ‘You hated me, truly?’
‘My family’s memory is long and clear.’
‘Ah, your family? So it was as a Marshwic that you hated me.’ He regarded the pipe intensely. ‘I never hated you, Miss Marshwic. And if I have not always been civil, it is because I feel you thrive on adversity. What would you crusade against, if not men like me?’ He smiled at her. ‘How unlike we are, you and I, but at the same time how much common ground there is.’
‘I do not see it,’ she said.
‘We question, Miss Marshwic, and we fight, and we are not prepared to accept the status quo. If you did, you would not pit yourself against me so frequently, and if I did, I w
ould be a petty crook and not a great one.’
‘You are a civic-minded villain,’ Emily observed. ‘You do your duty by the King well enough.’
‘And better than an honest man could,’ he agreed. ‘If they won, the Denlanders would take by force what I would steal. It is in my interest.’
‘You are a truthful villain.’
‘To you, always.’
‘Do you accept my truce?’
His composure cracked just for a second, and something hungry and hopeful looked out at her. She thought it made him grotesque, but then she thought it made him human.
‘Willingly gratefully,’ he confirmed. ‘And should you wonder if I’m keeping to it, you may check on me here at any time. After all, who else do you talk to as openly as this?’
It was only after she had left his office and walked out into the clear crisp sunlight that she realized he was right.
*
Her two sisters did not take kindly to Emily’s truce with Mr Northway.
‘He is a hateful man,’ Alice declared, without hesitation. ‘How could you even want to speak with him after all he did to Father?’
Mary frowned, her steady gaze reminding Emily of their last conversation on this topic. ‘You know he tried to buy up Father’s debts. He would have taken Grammaine from us, if he could. We sold half the estate, just to keep the rest away from him. You know that.’
‘We are at war. There is a common enemy,’ Emily reminded them. ‘He does what he can – as do we. In wars, you have truces.’
‘I do not know what you think he is, but he has always been a wicked creature,’ Mary insisted with finality.
Alice went on, ‘Look at the way he dresses: he is a repulsive, shabby little thing. He’s horrible. I wouldn’t have him as a servant, and now you’re dancing with him and going to visit him as if he’s a real person.’
And all of it just brought home to Emily what Northway himself had said. Who else could she talk to about serious things? Who else was there who would not judge her words poorly?
Over that same winter, she went to see him four times. None of her visits was just an idle social call. Each time she went along as champion for some wronged party: a family going hungry, a widow without firewood, a woman accused of theft who had a family to support. She had clashed with him over similar matters before, and it had been a duel of hates, as she focused her dislike of the man into a crusading fury against his selfish and biased governance.
And now, when she came to him, she argued as fiercely as before, using ploy and counter-ploy as she chased him through the mansions of self-serving logic that he threw up to counter her. And yet whenever they matched wits, no matter how life-or-death the stakes were for those she spoke on behalf of, she felt as though she and Northway were playing a game. Sometimes she broke past his defences and forced some concession from him, and sometimes he led her down blind alley after blind alley, until she had exhausted her sophistry without winning him over. She was free to be frustrated, to be angry with him, to decry his manners and his morals. The knife of her hate was sheathed, though. He mocked her words and ridiculed her chosen causes, but she mocked him back.
She was a changed woman. Deerlings House had made sure of that. She had entered into a wider world, coming of age in some new way. Some nights, over the long, mild winter, she dreamt of the King, of dancing with his warm hand in her own, feeling the fierce fires of the sangreal dancing just beneath his skin. Other nights she was called before him, in all his majesty, not for idle music and entertainment, but to bare her breast to him, to take the searing brand of his touch against her flesh, feeling the soul-shaking jolt of his royal blood as it infused her. She would wake, twined in her bedsheets and drenched in perspiration, convinced that she would find a livid handprint stark against her skin; convinced that she had given herself into his service, that her fate and that of the King’s were now inextricably linked.
*
Then came the day when Emily and Alice rode the buggy into Chalcaster market, only to find the stalls abandoned save for some determined few packing up their wares with the air of women moving on to fresher pastures. By far the bulk of the people there were gathered about the Mayor-Governor’s noticeboard in the centre of the market square, and most of them strangely silent. Emily and Alice slipped amongst the gathering of tradeswomen, market-seller’s wives, town gentlewomen and a few old men and children, until they were close enough to read.
The crowd around them was murmuring, a slow whisper that built gradually into something quite different. The women, for they were almost all women, were reacting with a ripple of horror to the message just posted, a wave of bad news that would carry and carry until every household got to know if it.
‘What is it?’ Alice asked crossly, feeling herself jostled by the crowd. Emily squinted at the tacked-up paper, seeing first the royal seal at the base and only later the words themselves.
Most who stared at the proclamation had no letters, she guessed, and those who could read it had done so and fled, as though the madness contained in those words might be catching, It was catching, she realized, and it would take a terrible toll of all gathered there. Listening to the snippets of rumour and misinformation as the crowd tried to puzzle out what was writ there, she cleared her throat and held her hands up for quiet.
When she had enough of them waiting for her words, and with a heavy, sick feeling within, she read aloud what wiser heads had decreed.
‘BY ORDER of His Majesty, by the grace of God, Luthrian, King of Lascanne, fourth of that name, Lion of Denland, let the following proclamation be enacted in all towns, villages and hamlets of the Kingdom of Lascanne, this fifty fourth day of Winter, Year of the King Seventeen Eighty-Eight.
IN ORDER that the war against the regicides and republicans of Denland be concluded at its soonest eventuality so as to thereby release those subjects of Lascanne currently under arms, and;
IN ORDER that the rebellious nation of Denland be subdued forthwith, for which effort a sufficient and large number of soldiers is known to be required, to avoid the threat of further rebellion, and;
For the greater glory and furtherance of the policies of the Kingdom of Lascanne,
IT IS COMMANDED that a further draft of the people of Lascanne be enacted.
So that all households, be they town or country, that have more than one female resident between the ages of fifteen and fifty must, by the First Day of Spring in the Year of the King Seventeen Eighty-Nine, render up one such for the glorious service of her country, and, if it be thought fit, to be trained and outfitted as a soldier and put at the disposal of His Majesty’s Armies.’
Below was the seal and the signature of the King, but Emily hardly had eyes for them. Around her, a low moan of fear started up in one throat, and was taken up by the next, and the next. The working women, the wives, the mothers all around her, must feel just as she had done when first she read this. There was now a dreadful weight inside her, below her ribs. It pulled and dragged at her, choked her breath, hammered her heart. She felt ill, feverish. The sweat was chill on her face.
‘Oh, dear God, save us,’ she whispered, when she really meant, save me. This was fear, then. She had never really appreciated it before. She felt her legs buckle, and clutched at the shoulder of a tradesman’s wife, so that for a moment the two of them were supporting each other. She heard the first sniffles and sobs begin around her.
‘Emily?’ Alice demanded, and for a moment Emily thought she simply had not been listening, as was her wont. Then, heedless of the expressions of the crowd, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, don’t be foolish. It doesn’t mean us.’
Emily reached out and touched Alice’s chin, feeling suddenly very far away. ‘It does,’ she said.
‘No!’ Somewhere a woman started screaming: ‘They can’t make me!’ And it was echoed by others, at first few, then many – ordinary women thinking of their homes, of their businesses, of their children.
‘Everyone, Alice,’ Emi
ly confirmed shakily. ‘Every household. A draft of women.’ She could not get her breath to come evenly. Around them the crowd was coming apart: women running home, or running away. The world seemed to spin slowly, ponderously, around her, with the proclamation at its centre.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Alice said, but she had gone pale. ‘It can’t mean . . . It’s just a . . .’
Emily looked around her, seeing her heart mirrored in every face. Here a girl of Alice’s age was weeping into her mother’s apron. Here a woman clutched her children to her, face upturned towards the pale winter sky. A tradesman’s wife started backing away, her husband’s tools slung about her waist, her face slack at the thought of it. A young woman kept staring intently at the notice, one hand clenched at her waist as though a sabre already hung there.
Beyond the disintegrating crowd, Emily saw the open doorway of the town hall, and a shabbily dressed figure standing framed within it. Mr Northway stared out across this great morass of woe, and she could not say whether he saw her or not.
*
‘It must be me,’ she explained calmly. ‘There is no option, no other choice.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Mary protested, looking around the kitchen for support. Grammaine’s entire complement was there this evening: Emily’s sisters and the quartet of servants, all silently considering the news. On the kitchen table lay the papers delivered to each household so that a chosen new recruit could be nominated, named and her skills anatomized.
‘There has never been a draft of women,’ Mary continued. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’ In her arms baby Francis made a disgruntled sound as if in agreement. ‘It must be a mistake,’ she finished weakly. ‘They can’t really mean to send women to war.’
‘They must send someone,’ Emily said. ‘Who else, now, can they send?’
‘But they have sent men!’ Mary almost shouted. ‘They have sent the regular army, and then my Tubal, and a man from every other house, and then any man left who was not in his dotage or infancy. How can they call upon us now to send the women? It isn’t fair. We must not send anyone.’
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