“Her mother’s cousin! Who would have thought it?” Amiz exclaimed in response to Verunik’s whispered question.
Cheristien shrugged. “It’s the cousin more often than you might think. Usually they hush it up and pretend to a long-standing arrangement and all you ever know is that a wedding date is set.”
That could have been my story, Margerit thought.
Cheristien continued, “The only reason it’s a scandal is because he’d been refused so publicly. His only family legacy is his army commission. They thought she could do better.”
“But she’d fallen in love?” Verunik asked eagerly. Verunik hungered for others to have the romantic adventures she was ill-suited for.
Margerit had wondered the same thing, but Cheristien made a scornful noise. “Hardly! I don’t think she’d given him a thought. But she was stupid and now she’s stuck with him.”
Margerit ventured to ask, “How was she stupid?” The others turned to her as if deciding whether to consider her inside or outside the circle.
Amiz was the one who answered. “It was his sister. Anywhere else, Mari wouldn’t have gone out unprotected. They were in negotiations with Mesner Pelnik and everyone was being very careful of her good name. But Lenze invited her over to meet a new dressmaker—sent her own carriage and everything. It was pure carelessness that she went out with just her maid. And then, when she got there, Lenze wasn’t there but Simun was. No need even for an abduction—Mari’d been there alone with him for six hours by the time they went searching for her.”
“Alone?” Margerit asked. “But there was her maid and the servants…”
Cheristien laughed scornfully. “Surely you don’t think they count!”
“But an armin would have counted?”
Antuniet commented for the first time after standing aloof from the gossip. “An armin would have gotten her out of there the moment Lenze failed to greet her.”
“Never trust a man’s sister,” Amiz said with a laugh.
Margerit saw a strange look pass between Barbara and Antuniet. Not only did Barbara know everyone in Rotenek, she had all manner of unknown history with each of them.
Amiz lowered her voice and said, “They say Pelnik’s sent his duelist to make the challenge.”
“To Simun?” Margerit asked, trying to sort out all the names.
“No, silly! To Mari’s father! For making him look a fool. It’ll only be to the touch, for the sake of his good name.”
Margerit gave up on making sense of it all. Perhaps she’d ask Barbara about it later, but for now there were decisions to make. Whether to follow Alessandro for a grounding in the humanists or to plunge directly into Mihailin’s lectures covering the modern philosophers. And further, whether to follow the standard course of study at all or to take full advantage of being officially invisible and follow her own whims. The university was a banquet in the grandest style and at the moment she had barely tasted the soup. There would be more than enough time to sort out her dining partners when that first hunger had been appeased.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Barbara
When they entered the East Gate, Barbara felt a deep tension drain from her body. Which was strange, she thought, for Rotenek presented more hazards and more difficulties than Chalanz ever could. But here she knew who she was, where she stood and what needed to be done.
The first week was over-full of renewing contacts and negotiating new relationships. Matters that had been long established and assumed under the late baron were changed now. There was assistance to be hired. She needed to review all the servants carefully. The temptations and penalties for betrayal were different now. It was even possible that some might consider that their deepest loyalties passed with the title and not with the household. Even familiar surroundings were changed: she had silently abandoned her old room for a smaller one up under the eaves. There was no lack of space on the main floor but she no longer felt comfortable occupying one of the family rooms. It had never truly been hers, only lent for her use. But Rotenek itself—that was hers and it was home.
In planning Margerit’s protection, Barbara had foreseen the conventional rituals of society and the more practical hazards of the university district. But her own venture into the scholar’s life had been a solitary matter and she found she hadn’t considered that for Margerit the two worlds would collide. Antuniet Chazillen’s presence among the coterie of girl scholars had been unsettling.
There was no question that Antuniet knew who Margerit was. She gave at least the pretense of polite indifference for now. Whatever her brother might have told her, she was not choosing to be Margerit’s open enemy. But Barbara was not yet ready to embrace the truce. She raised the issue as the carriage returned them to Tiporsel. “Maisetra, the name Chazillen should mean something to you.”
Margerit looked at her curiously. “There have been so many introductions! I’ll learn all the names in time.”
Barbara nodded to acknowledge the truth of it. “It’s the surname of the new Baron Saveze—Mesnera Antuniet is his sister.” She watched the implications sink in.
Margerit frowned a little. “She was perfectly nice. I rather liked her. Do you really think she’ll cause trouble?”
“Just remember what Maisetra Waldimen said: never trust a sister. Family will always come before friendship.” She was disturbed by the faintly mulish look that came over Margerit’s face. It wasn’t time to push the matter. She would put a word in Marken’s ear.
* * *
LeFevre suggested the next stop on Margerit’s grand tour of Rotenek society. “You must go to the opera,” he said at the end of one morning’s review of accounts. “Everyone goes to the opera. You have a box, you know.”
Maisetra Bertrut was clearly far more excited by the prospect than Margerit. While her aunt went into raptures over the prospect of seeing all of society and the music and the fine gowns and perhaps even a glimpse of the princess, Margerit suppressed a look of boredom. Barbara sighed inwardly. Margerit was impatient to move forward with her studies, but this wouldn’t do. The mask of a debutante was still important. Maistir Fulpi planned to stay into the new year and would be working tirelessly to promote a good match. If he thought it necessary, he’d drag her back to Chalanz. She must at least pretend to play the game.
The role of advisor was new and uncomfortable. The reflexes ingrained under the baron were to watch, to hold her tongue, to step in to smooth the way without ever criticizing the path. And so she waited for the right moment. In Rotenek they’d lost the habit of their bedtime conference to discuss the next day’s plans and needs. There had seemed to be more breathing space—less need to set a united front to the world. But now Barbara again tapped lightly on Margerit’s door in the last hours of the evening and slipped through without waiting for an answer.
Margerit’s eyes lit up as she entered. “I’m so glad you’ve come. I’ve missed this. Maitelen, you can go—I can finish myself.” The maid nodded and slipped out.
Barbara gestured vaguely to the house around them. “Is it everything you expected?”
Margerit picked up the brush that Maitelen had been wielding and resumed tending to her hair. “I don’t know—I hardly knew what to expect. I suppose I thought…well, this is more comfortable than what I thought. We rattled around so on Fonten Street. But Barbara—” She left the brush hanging for a moment and her eyes were shining again. “To be here at last! Just walking through the square it was like I could hear the echoes of Romazzo and Rodulfus lecturing from the steps before the Chasintalle was built. And all the students bustling around in their robes like…like bees in a hive! There’s so much to learn—so much to know.” She gave a little laugh.
Barbara bent to a sudden impulse and took the brush from her hand to draw it slowly through Margerit’s chestnut curls. She wished she could prolong the moment but there was business to be done. “When you’ve chosen the lectures you plan to attend we should look through the library and see whether
the baron had all the books you’ll want. I know something of what’s there of the older texts, but he didn’t collect the modern philosophers. You can fill in the gaps easily enough. There’s an entire street of bookshops off the Plaiz Vezek by the university.”
Margerit laughed again. “I asked Verunik what she planned for her reading and she just stared at me. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she might actually learn something. I’ll need to be more careful to keep my disguise!”
Barbara saw her opportunity and put the brush down. “Yes, you will.”
The serious tone made Margerit turn to look at her.
“Maisetra, may I suggest that you pretend more interest in,” she thought how to phrase it, “in the more conventional attractions of a Rotenek season. Go to the opera and enjoy it. Go to the suppers and balls and concerts and talk of something other than philosophy. Let your uncle believe you’re open to his ‘good match’ but you want to take your time. You have the excuse of it being your dancing season…but only if you dance! You need his complaisance. It’s still well over a year before you can think about defying him, if that’s what you choose.”
Margerit sighed. “You’re right, of course. The opera it is. After we go hunting for books!”
* * *
Barbara would not for the world have given up the duty of escorting Margerit on her expedition to Booksellers Lane in the heart of the university district but she gladly left it to Marken to take the late night duties at the opera house. The place held ghosts for her and she wasn’t yet ready to face them. And so it wasn’t until their return, when he tapped on her door to report in, that she heard the details of what had passed there.
“It seems,” he began, “the young Baron Saveze has been confused about whether the opera box went with the title or not.”
Barbara’s heart raced. I should have been there! But the time of their return argued against any serious encounter. “How much trouble did he cause?”
Marken waved his hand dismissively. “Wasn’t even there. Only the mother and sister and a few hangers-on. The old lady cut up all stiff but the house manager was there. Knew there’d be a face-off but not worth his trouble to interfere until the maisetra came to town. He set things clear quick enough but the old lady was mortified.”
Barbara could just imagine her expression. The late baron’s sister was most punctiliously correct in everything she did. She must not have known. “And the maisetra—was she upset?”
“Well now, that was a bit curious. It seems she knows the Chazillen girl and invited them to stay as her guests. You can imagine how Mesnera Chazillen took that! You could have froze a pond with her refusal.”
That was interesting, she thought, after dismissing him for the night. There was certainly no harm in Margerit being seen to be a peacemaker but it would complicate matters if she got too close to Estefen’s family. Fortunately the Chazillen matriarch was unlikely to forgive her brother’s unexpected heir. Froze a pond. Yes, she could well imagine the baron’s sister pulling together every ounce of pride and delivering a withering refusal from her lofty height.
Elsewhere in the house she could hear the creak of boards and the indistinct murmur of voices as the opera-goers settled in for the night. From her old room she could have told within inches where each person was moving. There were times when the attic felt like exile. The windows were narrow and looked only on the walls of the neighboring house, not the courtyard view she’d had before. She preferred being able to see the comings and goings. At moments like this she thought she would give anything to turn the clock back a year. Anything except knowing Margerit.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Margerit
Margerit tried sincerely to throw herself into Rotenek society. There was no rushing the start of the term and she was only beginning to feel the gulf between the foundations that Sister Petrunel had been able to give her and the structures—the walls, rooms and hallways—that the professors would take for granted in their lectures. But teasing out the players on the social stage was just as deep a puzzle.
In Chalanz, society wasn’t just the handful of noble families whose summer villas dotted the outskirts of town. Invitation to one of their balls might be an envied and sought-after prize, but the meat and bread of life was among the pillars of the town: old families, but untitled. The two worlds mingled rarely.
Rotenek was different. The nobly-born and the merely moneyed intertwined on the landscape like roads and rivers. In Chalanz, Margerit found it easy to speak only to those she’d been introduced to because everyone knew everyone. In Rotenek, she was in constant fear of stepping across those solid but invisible fences that wove through every gathering. It was no faux pas to dance with a man of titled family, but heaven help you if you unwittingly addressed him as Maistir and not Mesner!
Cheristien and Amiz eased her path to some degree: the first because she moved easily among all ranks, the second because she did not. Amiz knew far better the delicate balance required of someone welcome only for the size and cleanliness of her bank account. She might not be out yet herself, but she’d watched both her older sisters tread that path and vicariously charted her own future plans within her advice. Margerit drank up every word. Aunt Bertrut was learning quickly but for the moment she was of little practical use except as vizeino, providing the chaperonage expected for any unmarried woman. Her connections—and they were few to begin with—were older women with no marriageable daughters. They neither held nor received invitations to the most sought-after events. And by the complex rules of hospitality Margerit couldn’t issue invitations in her own name to anyone she didn’t yet officially know or to anyone of higher rank to whom she had no ties.
Barbara knew everyone and all the rules, of course. Margerit found herself on more than one occasion staring across a crowded floor from her aunt’s side to the clusters of watchful armins, wishing that Barbara could be there instead: whispering names in her ear, explaining the braided threads of lineage, history and influence that would allow her to make sense of what passed before her eyes.
It was the feast of Saint Mauriz—coming hard on the heels of the start of the term—that gave her the opportunity. A house on the Vezenaf meant the cathedral also counted as her parish church and services there had become familiar. But Saint Mauriz was not only the patron of the cathedral and the district around it but, by extension, of all Rotenek. Like all else in the city, the celebration of mysteries was a complex intertwining of participants. Ordinarily the highest nobility—the prince and his family—attended private ceremonies, ruled by long established guilds and presided over by no priest less than a bishop. But the celebration for Mauriz overlaid the ordinary mystery of the Mass with the pomp of a Great Mystery, intertwined with the familiarity of a local festival, belonging to all whose residence fell within its ambit. And as that extended from the palace to the riverside townhouses, Prince Aukust would preside as the chief lay participant, the same as any mayor in his parish church.
So Margerit led Aunt Bertrut—for Uncle Fulpi declined to attend the mysteries, even for his own namesake, unless he saw some clear benefit—through the crowd of witnesses out in the plaiz to take the place guaranteed to them in the nave. Margerit had studied the general forms of the service in Bartholomeus, but his Lives and Mysteries dealt in generalities, and what was asked of the common worshippers was little more than the standard responses that she could have performed in her sleep. So she took the opportunity to quiz Barbara on the richly clothed nobles who took the lay parts of honor, welcoming the saint and listing through the markein that defined the ritual’s scope.
Barbara bent to whisper their names and give their stories. “There is the prince—Aukust Atilliet—there in the seat to the left of the altar by the choir.”
“In the blue?” Margerit asked, looking for the one who best fit her image of a prince.
“No, no, the older man. I don’t think you will have seen him before. He never goes out in public these da
ys. Not unless he must.”
Margerit peered at him as he rose to intone the invitatio. His thin gray hair draped limply over his high stiff collar and his eyes were sunken and hollow. But now that she looked again, Margerit saw command and determination in the set of his mouth and the way those deep eyes swept across the crowd. Later in the ceremony, as she recalled from her reading, he would also act in his role as prince, but now he spoke on behalf of the people of the district. To the far side of him sat a tall sturdily-built woman in a gown of that just-out-of-date style that marked it as formal court wear. The traces of a grand beauty still lingered in her dark arching brows and the dainty curve of her mouth, but the eyes below those brows darted back and forth as if she were ever mindful of an audience. “Is that his daughter?” Margerit whispered.
Barbara gave her an odd look. “That’s Her Grace the Princess Elisebet, his wife. Second wife. It’s true she’s younger than his daughter, Duchess Annek, but she isn’t here of course. She married an Austrian duke back in the middle of the French Wars. The alliance proved useless for the purpose at the time, but at least it saved her from being married off to one of the Corsican’s cousins.”
“Oh, of course.” Margerit thought back to her history books and did the calculations. “She would have been just a child.”
A shrug acknowledged the truth of it. “A daughter of royalty grows up quickly. Her brothers fell in the battle of Tarnzais. Prince Aukust knew he was facing surrender. The Austrian alliance was a last chance and there wasn’t time for a long courtship.”
They rose then to give the responses as they moved into the body of the ceremony and Margerit felt her heart swell as the spirit moved through her and swirled around the columns like vine tendrils in the sun. She recalled what Barbara had said in Mintun in the spring. Did others see the mysteries in drifts of transparent color and soundless music? The vision rose up like bright smoke above the altar and dissipated in the darkness of the arches above. She sighed amid the rustle of the crowd as they sat once more and her mind came back to picking out the unfamiliar faces surrounding the prince.
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