The railcar swayed and clacked. It was just like a nice room on wheels, there were chairs and sofas, rugs with flowers and vines, and a table where they’d had lunch, and where she sat with picture books and coloring books and did her lessons with Dame Emelina. There were ten more cars in the train, including the one with the little beds that folded down, which she liked.
“Will Heuradys and Yolande be there when we get to Lady Tiphaine’s manor?”
“Yes, they will; and their father, and their mother.”
“Oh, good,” Órlaith said.
She could feel her father’s deep chuckle through his tunic—he was wearing shirt and jerkin and breeks and a T-tunic, the way people did up here, rather than a kilt the way he did down in the Mackenzie lands.
“Indeed, and it’s good for you to have some your own age to play with.”
“They’re nice, but they’re not my age. Well, Heuradys isn’t. She’s older.”
“Not so much.”
“Two whole years older,” she said. “And don’t say it isn’t important. It is, and Heuradys thinks so too.”
He laughed, his beard tickling her neck. “To be sure, darlin’ girl, that’s the third of a lifetime, isn’t it? I was forgetting.”
“I like their Mom, though. Tell me a story. Tell me how you snuck into Boise and opened the gate!”
“I and some others. Well, if you must, though you’ve heard it before.”
“I want to know all the stories! I need to hear it a lot so I’ll remember all the parts. You have the best stories, anyway.”
“It’s my life, darlin’ girl, but I suspect it’s your story the now.”
She wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but she settled back to hear his voice.
“There we were, sitting outside Boise, and no way of getting through the walls. Well, now, if you can’t go through, you must go around; but there’s no way around a city wall, for the wall itself goes around. And if you can’t go through, and you can’t go around, you must go over or under. Men holding a wall watch for you to try over—so, we thought, what about under? Now, Fred’s father—”
• • •
Rudi set Órlaith down and sent her to Dame Emelina as the whine of the locomotive’s gearing died, more conspicuous by its absence for a moment. Mathilda’s lady-in-waiting and tirewoman appeared as if by magic to tidy her up as the train coasted into the village of St. Athena—theoretically named for a virgin martyr who’d died in Thrace about seventeen hundred years ago, though Rudi had his doubts; the other train of the Royal party was already there, having put on a sprint, and the two-score of the High King’s Archers were already double-timing over to line up before he got down and stand in ranks with their longbows in their arms. Through the window he heard Edain say:
“Now, let’s show these haughty northern lords that we know how to . . . Talyn, for Lugh of the Long Hand’s own sake, try to look like you didn’t spend the afternoon muckin’ out a byre, man!”
Mathilda yawned a little as she checked that her habit was tidy and let the tirewoman redo her braids and put them up under the broad-brimmed hat and scarf.
“How are you feeling, my love?” he said.
“Worn out, but no worse.” She crossed herself and made a gesture of steepling her hands. “But thanking God and the Virgin that the morning sickness is over,” she said; she was pious, but not sanctimonious. “Though why they call it morning sickness . . .”
“A wishful hope, perhaps,” he said, making the sign of the Horns.
He was thankful to the Mother as Brigid, she Who watched over childbirth, and as Matti’s blue-mantled patron too that her births had all been—relatively—easy, with no complications. Hopefully this one would be too, and he had reason to so hope . . . but no certainty.
Dame Emelina had the children in hand; literally, with a hand to each. He gave her a friendly nod. She had dark freckles across skin a few shades lighter, handsome full features and keen black eyes; she’d been Órlaith’s wet-nurse, having lost her own babe about the time Mathilda was brought to bed, but she’d also been a scholar of sorts before her husband—a belted knight and an Associate, but the third-son-of-a-second-son variety—was killed at the Horse Heaven Hills.
Between her own good birth and years of being Órlaith’s wet-nurse it had been possible to appoint her to the governess position without offending any of the great houses in the old Protectorate who’d have schemed to get the job for protégés or daughters unlikely to do it with half her skill or devotion. They’d put out that Matti was deeply attached to her, which was simply true. Sandra had arranged the whole thing to start with, and that triple-play was like her.
“There will probably be a chorus of children and a bouquet,” he said.
“I’ll bear up,” Mathilda said as she took his arm. “Let’s not disappoint the audience.”
“And my mother says a travelling bard’s job was hard back before the Change,” he said. “Always putting on a show. At least nobody gave her a second glance when she was driving her wagon around the Willamette between performances!”
He’d sent instructions for minimal ceremony, and he knew the Grand Constable shared his sentiments on that sort of thing most exactly. Her Châtelaine . . . not necessarily so much, but she would do her best.
A cheer went up as they descended from the train; varlets were bustling about, unloading gear down to Órlaith’s pony, and Maccon in a basket—quite a substantial one, for the young beast had huge ears and paws already. A bright eye and pulsing black nose were visible through the wicker, wiggling with the desire to get out and smell and taste and acquire new admirers. This was an informal visit—up here in the Protectorate he generally used the full fig of a Crown visitation only on nobles he didn’t trust, that being a polite way to use up resources they might otherwise put to mischief. They couldn’t even complain, since it was an honor.
D’Ath was there, leaning on a stick, and Lady Delia with a lacy parasol protecting her creamy skin. Rigobert de Stafford was too, his bowl-cut blond hair and short dense beard showing a little more nearly invisible gray as he doffed his chaperon hat. So was his current partner, Sir Julio Alvarez de Soto, a slim handsome swarthy man in his thirties, quiet and dangerous-looking in dark country-gentry clothes that contrasted with Rigobert’s peacock fashionability of blue velvet, black satin and crimson linings on the sleeves of his houppelande. He still had the lean erect broad-shouldered build to carry it off, though, and Rudi hadn’t the slightest doubt that when he didn’t he’d switch to something more appropriate.
That’s six years they’ve been together, since the tag end of the war, so perhaps Rigobert is settling down in middle-age.
He hoped so; he liked the Baron of Forest Grove, both as a man and a valuable servant of the Crown, and had sensed a loneliness under his good humor and active social life.
Lord Maugis de Grimmond, Baron of Tucannon, was there too, and his wife Lady Helissent, and their son Aleaume, now a likely-looking lad of twelve just home for a holiday from page service in Walla Walla to Lord Maugis’ overlord Count Felipe.
And taking after his mother, save for that rusty-nail hair—which is to the good because Maugis is, frankly, a homely man. It’s also a very good thing they haven’t far to come from Grimmond-on-the-Wold, which keeps this all looking completely casual and social, which it is, only not totally.
Mathilda made a gesture—hand palm-down and then turned up, which was Associate court etiquette for don’t kneel. The noblemen and women responded with deep sweeping bows and curtsies respectively, except for the Grand Constable who bowed as well. The assembled commons behind the gentlefolk knelt anyway, several hundred of them in their best Sunday-go-to-Church outfits, splashes of embroidery on hems and necks, bright printed wimples for the women. The village priest signed the air.
“Rise, my friends,” Rudi said; they did, and cheered, waving straw hats and holding up children to see.
Pleasant to be popular; and to be sure, they get a
party at their baron’s expense out of it, he thought.
Yearling steers and pigs were roasting over open pits in the town square, filling the air with a pleasant savor as cooks basted them with paintbrush-sized brushes on the end of long sticks, and trestle tables had been set up with wheels of cheese and bowls and dishes of each household’s prize contribution, and barrels were waiting in the shade along with tall baskets of new loaves. Another carried the lutes and hauteboys, drums and accordion that would provide music for the dancing later.
He and Mathilda extended their hands for the kiss of homage. The Grand Constable was limping and using her stick as she came forward.
“How is the leg, Tiph?” Mathilda asked.
“Healing, but damned slowly,” d’Ath said. “He shouldn’t have been able to touch me. I was careless.”
“He was twenty-five and you’re forty-six!” Lady Delia said sharply. “You’re not getting those awful lettres de cachet from Sandra anymore, you don’t have to do this.”
A small chilly reminiscent smile from Tiphaine: “The bearer has done what has been done by my authority, and for the good of the State. Sandra always absolutely loved writing those. That was back before she got religion, of course.”
Mathilda winced. Baron Tucannon looked up briefly as if considering the weather, unconsciously disassociating himself from the display of high-level dirty linen, while his son looked bewildered at the byplay and his wife carefully blank-faced. Rigobert simply laughed. Delia cleared her throat and went on:
“And you shouldn’t be fighting duels at your age anyway! I spent far too much time sending you off to the wars; now that you’re home I expect you to live for a while.”
Her eyes flashed; she was in her thirties herself, and one of the most beautiful women Rudi had ever seen in a sweetly curved way, with translucent eyes the color of camas flowers in a cloud-shaded mountain meadow and hair of iridescent black, glimpsed in braids beneath her tall headdress. She had a reputation as an arbiter of fashion, which she showed now by the elegant variation on what she had christened afternoon dress. August in the Palouse was hot to people used to the Willamette. Lady Delia’s red linen shift came to a daring two inches above her ankles, trimmed with a ruching of darker red and a scatter of pink ribbon roses. It was sleeveless and the light silk half-dress over it was a pale pink that took the warm tone below. From the waist to the knee it descended in long thin daggers of cloth, each neatly bordered with cream and crimson. The sort-of-sleeves were also dags of the translucent silk, dangling to her elbows and more thickly embroidered. Her wimple was more of the pink silk, held in place by a light ribbon braid in graduated pinks and reds, cascading down her back.
Rudi caught Helissent and Mathilda’s tire-women both eyeing it intently, clearly memorizing details for later. Lady d’Ath’s irritated answer brought him back from contemplation of feminine frivolities, though he’d always found Delia’s skills in that regard seriously impressive.
“I’m alive and getting older, and he isn’t, like that uncle of his I killed back in the old days,” d’Ath pointed out. “And he challenged me, not vice versa.”
“And forbye, for that very reason if he were alive, he’d be in very bad trouble,” Rudi said grimly.
“I’m Grand Constable, for what it’s worth these days,” d’Ath said. “That’s a Protectorate appointment, covering the Association, not one by the High King. You couldn’t have touched him, legally.”
“I could,” Matti said flatly. “I’m Lady Protector. And I would.”
There were two carriages drawn up with the d’Ath arms on the doors; sable, a delta Or over a V argent. They managed to disengage themselves, after the inevitable bouquet and chorus of children, singing quite nicely under the direction of a young and nervous priest, and after a sharp glare from the Baroness of Ath and a quiet word from Delia dissuaded the bailiff of the estate from proceeding from an introduction to a plan for a tour of the newly installed and state-of-the-art dam, well, hydraulic ram, windmill and solar-heated waterworks that he obviously had his heart set upon.
Rudi grinned to himself. He’d just received an anguished howl in the form of a petition from some Corvallan manufacturers complaining that workshops in Portland and Walla Walla had stolen the thermosiphon design. He’d replied politely, pointing out that the Faculty Senate had refused to include a patent law in the Great Charter and that they might want to take it up with them . . .
Tiphaine grumbled as she levered herself up into one of the coaches, and the High King’s Archers deployed their bicycles; there were a dozen men-at-arms on coursers and mounted archers on quarter-horses, their look of grim efficiency marking them as much as the d’Ath arms, and smaller detachments from the menies of the other nobles. Rudi sympathized with the injured Grand Constable as he handed Mathilda up and seated himself; he would vastly have preferred riding horseback, after days of sitting in a train. There had been times he was tempted to go walk the treadmill with the horses, not being a man used to inactivity. Órlaith was on her Butterball, to the unspeakable envy of all the other noble children.
The whole settlement was on the south-facing slope of a declivity in the hills. The carriages jounced across the stone-paved central square with its church, tavern, smithy and workshops, school, bakery, bathhouse-laundry. There was rather more than the average, since this was to be the home-manor of the whole estate, and had a railway to boot. A long low building with large windows was a weaving-shed, where households with a loom could use it and store their yarn and gear without cluttering up the house; behind the whole ensemble was the tall skeletal shape of the village windmill on the ridgetop, its three airfoil-shaped vanes rotating with majestic deliberation.
The village was raw and new, the trees and plantings still small and struggling, but looked prosperous; the tile-roofed rammed-earth cottages of the peasants and craftsmen were on lanes lined with young trees, each in its rectangular fenced toft with sheds and gardens at the rear. Even the small dwellings of the cottar laborers had three rooms and a loft and an acre of allotment ground attached. A few excited peasant youngsters ran after them waving as they drove up the winding road to the manor between rows of fir saplings; Órlaith waved back with a broad smile, and various mothers and elder siblings dragged the youngsters back, often by one ear.
The manor sat on its own gentle south-facing slope some distance away, beyond the demesne farm complex with its squat circular grainaries and boxy wool-stores and a bit higher up for the view, behind a wall that enclosed its lawns and ambitious but rather tentative terraced gardens. The Great House and outbuildings were rammed earth too, the more expensive variety with some cement mixed in and covered in a warm cream stucco with just a hint of reddish gold. The composition was so charming that you took a minute to discern the dry moat disguised by a ha-ha and the fact that all the exterior windows were narrow and could be slammed closed in moments by steel shutters. It wasn’t a castle but it was definitely defensible against anything short of a formal attack with artillery, and while certainly big it was by no means excessive for a moderately prominent baron.
Just a wing on that thing in the Venetian style the Renfrews are building in Odell, Rudi thought. Though to be sure, Conrad is a Duke nowadays.
The roofs were bright unfaded red tile and fairly steeply pitched; most Palouse winters had more rain than snow, but you couldn’t count on it. It was newer even than the village, so new that there was still roofer’s scaffolding on the top of the four-story square tower at one corner. When they’d been shown to their quarters—which from the battered gray suit of plate on a stand in one corner he guessed were the Grand Constable’s ordinarily—there was still a faint damp scent of curing pisé de terre and plaster.
“This is lovely,” Mathilda said once their bags had been unpacked and the staff left.
She looked around the bedchamber’s expanse of smooth pale mosaic tile and the French doors opening onto balconies with their decorative wrought-iron balustrades overlooking t
he fountain, walkways and gardens in the courtyard below. Like many modern manor houses, it made up with interior inner-facing windows and glass doors for the light excluded by solid exterior walls. There was a big fireplace with a carved stone surround of owls and olive wreaths, swept and garnished with dried wildflowers for summer, but discreet bronze grill vents showed a central heating system.
“Handsome work,” Rudi agreed.
“Beautifully proportioned, and I love the coffered cypress-wood ceiling . . . I like that arched-passageway Romanesque style too . . . though the murals and the tapestries aren’t up yet, of course. It’ll be even prettier than the Montinore manor house back on Barony Ath. Delia has exquisite taste and she got to start from scratch with modern methods here.”
Órlaith came barreling through side by side with Yolande de Stafford, a dark-haired girl of her own age who resembled a younger version of her mother, and her elder sister Heuradys, who had a mop of dark-auburn curls and resembled neither of her parents. Maccon was at her heels skidding on the smooth floors in a rattle of claws and just ahead of the determined-looking Prince John, whose shorter legs were pumping to keep up with the older girls; Órlaith paused to give them both a hug while Yolande and Heuradys bobbed a preoccupied curtsy. Then she dashed on dragging her brother by one hand. Dame Emelina followed a moment later, with a half-apologetic glance, then went in pursuit with the folds of her riding habit swishing.
“If we could bottle that energy and commission the Guild Merchant to sell it, the Crown would have no financial problems at all, at all,” Rudi said.
“Right now I’ll settle for a nice long soak. That sunken tub looks attractive.”
“Not nearly as attractive as you, in it.”
“Why, whatever could you mean, good sir?” she said, batting her eyes and giving him a smoldering smile.
The hall of the manor was a little more finished, when they descended to dinner several hours later in formal garb, an hour before the summer sunset. The building itself was essentially an E-shape; the hall occupied most of the central arm with archways on either side filled with French doors, now open to the cooling evening breeze. Normally the whole household from baron to garden-boys and laundresses would dine in the hall; that was old Association custom, with the ceremonial golden salt cellar marking the transition from the gentry on the dais at the upper table to the commons below. Tonight it was a more intimate affair, since most of the staff and garrison had been given leave to join the celebrations in the village; at the upper table were the nobles, and the gentlefolk among their retainers, and Edain as commander of the High King’s Archers. He kept a pawky eye on the detail standing against the walls.
The Given Sacrifice Page 32
