Guardian

by A. J. Hartley

  “You’ll what?”

  “I’ll serve the tea,” I said.

  She was a small woman, probably fifty, but wrinkled and lined from the sun so that she could pass for half as much again. She frowned now and cocked her head in the Lani way.

  “That’s not your place, miss, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “It is today,” I said, trying to sound sure of my authority.

  “Perhaps if I consult with Madame—” she began, but I was already pulling the maid’s smock over my head.

  “I take full responsibility for the decision,” I said, amazed by how much I managed to sound like Dahria. “Just set up the tray, and I’ll take it.”

  I used the poor reflection in the steel of the oven door as a mirror, adjusting the maid’s white cap as the cook made the tea, muttering to herself in wordless, musical phrases of displeasure. When she was ready with the stacked china saucers and teacups, the little jug of milk and plate of lemon slices, the nested teaspoons, the sugar tongs in their dish, and everything arranged immaculately on the silver tray like the crown jewels, I took it up and considered her doubtful face.

  “How do I look?” I asked.

  Her frown deepened, as if something was profoundly wrong with the world but she could not say exactly what, and replied with an uncertain shrug, “Like a maid.”

  “Perfect,” I said, and stepped toward the door, the items on the tray rattling like teeth and coins. I dared not look back, and moved through the swinging doors with studied care. A satchel of tools and a hod of bricks, I could manage without breaking stride, but this study in the fragile niceties of elegant society left me moving at a snail’s pace, sure that I was about to drop everything in a shower of fractured porcelain and scalding tea.

  One of the men with the shotguns was standing outside the door to the withdrawing room where I had once taken refuge from a hyena. He became quickly attentive as I appeared, but lost interest immediately, chewing his lower lip and glancing away as if my very presence annoyed him. I tried to apear polite—I could not manage apologetic, even as a parlor maid—and hovered at the door, registering the grumble of male voices inside. When he just stood there, I shot him the smallest of expectant looks, and, with a sigh, he rapped gently on the door.

  There was a sudden silence within while I stood waiting, and then the door popped open, and there was Willinghouse, looking red-faced and impatient, his eyes sliding from the gunman to me and widening slightly.

  “Tea, sir,” I said, eyes lowered, partly playing the politeness that came with the role, partly just avoiding his stuttering amazement as I slid past him.

  I might not have been on close terms with the staff of the Willinghouse estate, but I had met plenty of servants in the past, particularly Lani servants. The one thing they always said was that servitude was the surest way to be invisible that humanity could manage. Unless you messed up, of course, in which case you became suddenly and glaringly conspicuous.

  So don’t, I told myself, taking my time as I crossed the embroidered rug and setting the tray down on a side table. The other gunman was in the room, but once the door closed again, his eyes slid away from me and back to the two politicians. I might as well have been a ghost.

  The prime minister was perhaps a virile fifty, a little thicker about the waist than Willinghouse and lacking the younger man’s spontaneous catlike energy. As I arranged the cups and saucers with deliberate slowness, the conversation recommenced. I risked a glance at the speakers just in time to find Willinghouse’s bright green eyes watching me with something like apprehension; the sickle-shaped scar on his cheek stood out cool and pale in contrast to the heat in the rest of his face. I wasn’t sure how much of that had been occasioned by my appearance.

  Most astonishing, however, was the presence of the two other men in the room, one standing against the wall like a guard or a secretary, the other sitting with Willinghouse and Tavestock like an equal. They were both black.

  They were young, too, no older than Willinghouse, who was in his late twenties and wore dark formal suits like the politicians, though the shirts beneath them were, instead of the white and cream, vivid oranges and reds blurring together as if dyed in cold water. They both had neat mustaches but were otherwise clean shaven, and the seated man wore spectacles. The studious, intent air they gave him could not mask his youthful energy, and when he saw the tea tray, he gave me a smile so grateful and genuine that I faltered, unsure how to react.

  “Look, Willinghouse,” said the prime minister, picking up the thought where it had been left, “it won’t wash. My party won’t stand for it.”

  “If you won’t retract the racial identity provisions, I have to demand it,” Willinghouse answered, sitting.

  “You are not in a position to demand anything,” said Tavestock.

  “Frankly, Prime Minister, neither are you.”

  “I think you forget whose party is in power,” said Tavestock with hauteur. “Mine.”

  “For the moment,” Willinghouse answered. “And only by the slimmest of margins, which will almost certainly collapse in less than three months. You won’t survive the election. You know it, sir. I am offering you an alliance that would circumvent that eventuality, but if you will not meet my terms—”

  “Then I lose, and you get Richter,” snapped Tavestock. “Hardly an ideal solution for either of us.”

  “No,” said Willinghouse. “That is true. Then let us begin again.”

  I was pouring the first cup of tea, but it was all I could do to keep my eyes on the thin porcelain, the situation was so remarkable.

  Willinghouse was brokering a deal with the Nationals to contain Richter! It was extraordinary, and for a moment, I imagined how Sureyna would react when I told her. No wonder they were meeting away from prying eyes. But who were the Mahweni, who, thus far, had not spoken at all?

  “My party’s faithful have no interest in female suffrage,” said the prime minister. “And appointing black members of Parliament is out of the question. These are both Brevard party hobbyhorses! I will be accused of selling out all the National party represents. They’ll have my head at the next available opportunity.”

  Black MPs and votes for women! I could barely pour straight, so astonishing was what I had just heard.

  “Richter is coming for you, no matter what you do,” Willinghouse retorted. “He’s been pushing for greater ties with the Grappoli instead of improving relationships with the blacks and colored of the city for as long as he’s been in Parliament! And he has friends in your own party, Ben, you know he does. Archibald Mandel, for one.”

  “Mandel is no longer a member of this government,” said the prime minister.

  “He’ll be back,” said Willinghouse knowingly. “Investment in Grappoli munitions factories won’t keep him out of Parliament for long, not with the way things are going. Is that who you want in your corner? A man who profits from the weapons the Grappoli will one day use against us?”

  “I may not have a choice.”

  “You can add friends from our side of the aisle to make up for those you have lost on the right.”

  “There are principles at stake here, Willinghouse,” said Tavestock, drawing himself up ramrod straight.

  “Maintaining a power base isn’t a principle,” snapped Willinghouse. “This is your chance to be on the right side of history! You think even your own party will regret giving women the vote in a year or two?”

  “If the voting booths start stinking of essence of bergamot and lavender, I won’t have a year or two.”

  “I think you’re wrong. Half the city’s population are women. You don’t think that even those silent white ladies whose husbands vote National party don’t secretly desire to join them? They may not be chaining themselves to the Parliament railings, as some of our more ardent sisters have done, but don’t assume they don’t yearn to show their political might.”

  Willinghouse was warming to his theme, drifting into what Dahria called his
Rising Backbencher voice: a fuller, more modulated, more public sound than was strictly necessary for a private conversation.

  “Yet when they get the right to enter those voting booths,” said Tavestock sharply, “those secret voting booths, whom do you think they’ll be voting for? My colleagues, the people their husbands stand behind? Or will their soft and gentle women’s hearts lean more to emotional arguments about the poor and underrepresented made by your good self? And since you mention white women, let me add that I notice you aren’t limiting the suffrage issue to them. You want black and colored women voting too! Yes, Willinghouse, I see your strategy. You think that if women get the vote they’ll follow not the Nationals but the Brevard party in precisely the same way that you know that if we legalize blacks running for Parliament, they will stand for your party, not mine, and energize their people. You make it sound like your campaign is selfless and altruistic, but it’s not, and we both know it. Black MPs and women voters will secure a Brevard party landslide, and you insult me not to admit the fact.” He turned his head quickly, his face full of passion, to stare at me. “Could I have my tea, please? I feel like I’ve been waiting a half hour.”

  I flushed, having been caught staring. I wanted to say something about not wishing to interrupt, but I knew my place was to hide my face in shame and mutter an apology. And, of course, to pour his bloody tea.

  I did so and might have fled the room thereafter, my cheeks burning, but the seated black man spoke, and I found that I could not move. His voice was gentle, unassuming, and unpretentious, his Feldish crisp and minimally accented, but it was the calm, amused deliberation of it that was so arresting. It spoke not just of intelligence, but of thoughtfulness. And power. Not the hectoring power of a speaker like Norton Richter, a bully on a platform, but the power of ocean waves that do not need to roar and crash to gradually erode the cliff side.

  “Let me say, Prime Minister,” he said, “that you persist in seeing the matter as one over which you have a choice. But this is not the case. Not in the long run. Justice will come to Bar-Selehm. Perhaps not this year or next, but it will come. The black people of this land will govern themselves. Women will make their own decisions, and if you do not give them the vote, they will take it.”

  Tavestock gave him a disbelieving look.

  “A women’s revolution? I think you will wait a long time before you see that,” he said, shooting Willinghouse a grin.

  “Perhaps so,” said the black man. “But it will come. And when it does, the women and the blacks and the Lani such as your young servant here, and everyone else your government has oppressed, ignored, stolen from, and told that they were not real people with all the rights bestowed upon white men, will stand shoulder to shoulder against you. The only question is whether the future that comes after that will have a place for you in it. Some of my black brethren would see you all burn, and with good reason. I offer you peace through the sharing of power and resources among all our people. You turn such an offer down at your considerable peril.”

  It was a remarkable speech. I had never heard anything quite like it before and stood openmouthed. Even Tavestock seemed caught off guard, and he sat there, blinking like a newborn in the sun. At last he shifted in his seat as if the room had suddenly become uncomfortably warm and said, “Then it seems there is much to discuss.”

  The black man’s reference to “your young servant here” had acknowledged me. The speech had been given to everyone in the room, as if we all shared equal stakes, but now that it was done, I seemed to be merely loitering. Willinghouse fixed me with a pointed stare and, reluctantly, I left the room.

  How utterly maddening.

  I went back first to the kitchen, then to my room, changed, paced, and went to see Dahria. She had dressed for company, but I suspected she had wasted her time and told her so.

  “There’ll be no sipping sherry while you play old Belrandian melodies on the pianoforte,” I said, slumping onto her bed. “Strictly a business meeting, and a secret one. The political landscape of the city is being reshaped down there, so naturally, our input is not desired.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” said Dahria. “I can’t imagine anything more tedious.”

  “Liar,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” she replied, scrutinizing her face in the wall mirror. “I forgot how much better you know my mind than I do myself.”

  “I’m just more honest about your feelings than you are.”

  She gave me a quick look, sucking in her breath, as if I had said something thrilling, but her eyes narrowed cautiously as they fastened on me.

  “What rot you talk,” she replied languidly. “My dear steeplejack, you can’t assume everyone cares about the things you do.”

  “I don’t,” I replied, feeling something of her excitement in the sudden flutter of my heart. “I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about you.”

  “Then let me rephrase the remark,” she replied, eyes returning critically to her reflection. “You cannot make people care about the things you do simply because you think they should.”

  Whatever strangeness had just passed between us—the momentary hesitancy, the probing for confidences—it had gone. Though I did not understand why, I found myself very slightly hurt, and when I spoke, there was an edge to my words.

  “One day you will find that pretending not to care because the people around you don’t still doesn’t make you one of them. It just makes you not really yourself.”

  She frowned. “When I have deciphered what that is supposed to mean, I will deliver a crushing riposte,” she said.

  “No doubt,” I said, rising impatiently and going to the window. An eagle was circling the trees that lined the drive, and the vervets were shrieking their alarms again, scampering into the most tangled branches, where they knew the bird would not follow. “There are two black men in the meeting,” I said, unable to contain my curiosity. “One of them speaks like … I don’t know. A leader. A politician.”

  Dahria made a face and shook her head.

  “Not whatshisname, the leader of the unassimilated tribes?”

  “No. This man is quite different. Very much an urban black.”

  “Some rabble-rousing youngblood, no doubt,” she said. “Morgessa is alive with them.”

  I shook my head again. I had heard the corner preachers and union leaders. This man was something different. I could feel it. But he was clearly not part of Dahria’s world, so I changed tack. “Seriously, though,” I said, turning back to her, “would you not vote if you had the option?”

  “Cast my lot with thousands of others over some petty rules of law and policy whose effects I will probably never see? Stand in line in the streets with all manner of people like a street girl selling star fruit from a barrow?”

  “You would,” I said.

  “I absolutely would not!”

  “You would, and you’d be mad not to.”

  “My dear steeplejack, you think like all people of your social rank: that politics matters, that it shapes your life and the lives of everyone around you.”

  “It does.”

  “It may shape your life, but it does not shape mine. You have—forgive my bluntness—nothing, and so you depend on law and policy to make life fair and just. I don’t need those things. I have money.”

  “All the more reason to use what power you have to aid those who don’t!”

  “I have no power, as you are fond of pointing out, and I don’t want it. I wish, above all things, to be left alone. Not by you,” she added hastily at the look on my face. The hurt had come back, if only for a second, but her remark dispelled it. “By the government! By tedious men who like the sounds of their own voices and wish to build their own pompous little empires with words and bills and elections.”

  “You confuse the process with the effect,” I said. “You don’t have to like politics to see that it does indeed shape your world—even if you do have money—and that of other people even more.�
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  “Perhaps,” she said. “But it is so very tiresome. See how even this short conversation has wearied me? I think I need a lie down.”

  “You are an insufferable old fraud,” I said.

  “Outrage!” she said, snatching up a decorative pillow and tossing it at me. “Insurrection by the masses!”

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  She considered me for a moment.

  “No,” she said, looking at me with unusual tenderness. “I suppose it isn’t. And if I thought my voting or otherwise showing interest in my brother’s world would make a difference, then maybe, maybe I—”

  A door banged shut downstairs. She broke off, startled out of whatever she had been about to say, and joined me at the window, where we watched Benjamin Tavestock and his two escorts as they marched down the steps toward their carriage.

  “I assume,” she remarked, “that we are witnessing what the politicians call an impasse.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  “WHAT IN THE NAME of all that’s holy were you doing playing parlor maid?” demanded Willinghouse.

  “You know perfectly well what I was doing,” I answered. “I wanted to know what was going on.”

  “So you risked exposing yourself to my political enemies.”

  “Josiah!” exclaimed Dahria with faux outrage. “Such language! If you talk further about ladies exposing themselves, I shall have to leave the room for the sake of propriety.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Willinghouse sputtered. “You know perfectly well—”

  “No one pays attention to servants,” I said. “Especially Lani servants. Everyone knows that. Your secrets are safe.”

  “These are delicate times,” said Willinghouse, still fulminating, despite Dahria’s amusement. “The slightest of matters might trigger the sort of calamity that could engulf the city.”

  “Did you make any headway?”

  “What?” he said, derailed.

  “With Tavestock,” I clarified. “Will you be making some kind of alliance—”

  “Don’t even breathe the possibility!” said Willinghouse. “It really would have been better if you had not heard any of it, and if you go telling your little reporter friend—”