Love-in-a-Mist Page 6

  We wound our way through the canyons of things. Papers gave way to trunks, and trunks to furniture, and furniture back to papers and books. “The Master is a great collector,” Bessie said at one point, proudly, as we had turn sideways to get past a particularly bowed stack. “Why, he has entire estates sent to him to go through.”

  “It is remarkable,” I said, nudging Mr. Dart gently. He swayed a little; even in the dim light he seemed very pale.

  “The stairs are here, sorr,” Bessie said at last, turning around a stack of what seemed to be years’ worth of New Salons and revealing a beautiful wooden staircase all the more resplendent for having nothing on it whatsoever, not even a carpet runner. I took a deep, relieved breath and immediately started coughing from the dust.

  “I’ll show you to rooms and call on Walter. He’s got a deft hand with clothes, he does. We’ve not many servants in the house, not like in the old days, but you’ll not find our hospitality lacking.”

  “I shouldn’t imagine so,” I replied politely, wondering mightily. The old days were probably the glorious final years of Astandalas, when money and magic had both been abundant. At least for the upper classes.

  We reached an upper hall, wooden-panelled with woven tapestries adorning the walls, parqueted wood flooring partially covered by a long deep-red carpet that ran the length of the hall.

  The stair arrived near one end without any form of a landing, simply an arched opening leading to the hall. A suit of armour of a particularly impractical style, all spikes and golden inlay, stood just to one side of the arch. As I glanced around, noting that doors stood at regular intervals all down each side, I saw another suit of armour, even more extravagantly bedecked with protuberances and spikes, standing at the far end in an embrasure matching our own.

  Bessie led us to the left. “The guest rooms are all along the southern wing, to catch the sun. Here we are, miss, let me just ring the bell so Hettie—she’s the upstairs maid—can come assist you.”

  We waited awkwardly in the hall while Bessie escorted Jullanar Maebh inside. There was no opportunity to talk, and nothing much to say besides comments on the peculiarities of the house, which was hardly polite or politic when we didn’t know who might be in earshot. Thankfully we were not left long before Bessie reappeared and directed us down the hall to a series of three rooms in a row.

  “The Master’s nephew is in here,” she said, pointing to one on the right, “and his friend on that side. The Master’s niece and her friend are back up by your cousin, sorr, and Mr. and Madam Veitch are in their room in the south wing. Here you are. I’ll ring for Walter to come with the clean clothes while you’re having your baths. We have the new copper boilers, so there’s a plenty of hot water, never you fear, and well stoked they are with the Master’s relations in residence.”

  Sweeter words have rarely been spoken! It wasn’t until I was standing beside a fire—lit, and wasn’t that an impressive efficiency?—untying my cravat and trying to peel off my coat, that I realized I had yet to find out the Master’s real name or standing.

  Chapter Six

  There are few things in this life quite so wonderful as sinking into a deep, old-fashioned bath, the water steaming hot, with all the soaps and unguents one could wish for, and warmed towels and clean clothes awaiting. I bathed with these delicious amenities, determined that I did not need to avail myself of the shaving equipment helpfully laid out on the table next to the mirror in the room (I may have dark hair and fair skin, but a beard does not give me shadow until the second day), and enveloped myself in a quilted dressing-gown I discovered next to the towels.

  The clothes laid out for me in the dressing-room next to the bath were all clean and strongly scented of lavender. Bessie—for all that I had spent barely ten minutes with the woman—had clearly sized me up and determined the clothes I needed could come out of storage.

  I sneezed a few times as I shook them out, admiring the quality of the silk-wool blend of the upper garments, the silk stockings, and the supple linen of the shirt and drawers. The undergarments were ivory, with foamy lace at the cuffs, while the coat and knee-breeches alike were of the deep, rich blue-green I suspected was called teal, after the duck, and extravagantly embroidered with what seemed to be Voonran-style floral designs in silver and silk threads. The waistcoat, in a lighter shade of teal, was even more thickly encrusted with threads and what seemed to be sequins and glass gems to catch the light.

  The style was something from well before the Fall. I was grateful for a term’s acting in a play set at the Astandalan court in the earliest days of the Emperor Artorin, when this was fashionable among the Alinorel nobility, as it meant I knew how to put it on. Though this was the real thing, not the facsimiles we had struggled to create as our costumes in the Sartorial Arts classes. The complexity and fineness of the embroidery said as much.

  First the linen shirt and drawers. Then the breeches, which had silver buttons at the knee. The buttons were carved with what looked like thistles as the crest. Then the waistcoat, which was longer than the current style, coming down below my waist. It had a long line of buttons along the front matching the ones on the knee-breeches. I did them up carefully, noting how well they were polished. There was a faint thrum of energy around them which I took to be a spell, perhaps, keeping away the tarnish. I’d have to ask Hal to check there wasn’t any sort of adverse enchantment on them.

  Over the waistcoat went the long fitted coat, which flared out below my waist so the hem went to my knee. It was not meant to be worn closed, as were the coats I was used to, but instead had wide embroidered panels at the cuffs and along the full length of the lapels, with more embroidery swirling up the back from the bottom hem.

  It also had a long range of fine silver buttons, larger and more dramatic than the ones on the waistcoat, the central thistles this time set with what looked like carved amethysts and peridots. The sleeves were close-cut until the wide cuffs, which were worn folded back, so the lace at the wrists fell half over the backs of my hands. There was a jabot of yet more lace to fall halfway down the waistcoat, and a cravat, which I tied in a complex Waterfall in honour of the great Beau of the Kingsbury Court in those days, whom the Emperor had once complimented on the nicety of his dress.

  I should have been wearing buckled shoes, but it was indoors—and with the wind still rattling the windowpanes, I was hardly intending to go back outside—so the embroidered silk slippers were not entirely impractical. These matched the outfit, in the same dark teal of the coat and breeches, with silver buttons and even more complex silver-thread embroidery. As a sop to practicality they had leather soles, a little stiff with disuse but by no means uncomfortable.

  Thus garbed, I brushed out my hair and plaited it back, tying it with the black ribbon I’d put on this morning, and regarded myself in the oval dressing-room mirror. It, too, was old, with wavering glass and a bronze frame, but showed me well enough.

  I needed only a horsehair periwig to be a perfect example of a country gentleman of my father’s generation, come to court to make my leg to the Emperor; the clothes were not of sufficient quality to suggest the Emperor would do more than nod at me from his throne. Court costume for an Imperial title would be another order above this again, and in a style utterly dissimilar, drawn from Zuni formal garb and not Alinorel styles. From all accounts the Astandalan court had relished its distinctions. The only time I had seen high court finery outside of a painting was in the vision of Hal’s double on the faery islet.

  I was hardly going to meet the Last Emperor, and it seemed more than a little overdressed for a country house, not to mention twenty-odd years (and the Interim) out of date, but it was what my accidental host had decided on, and I would wear it as best I could. I straightened the jabot to fall more centrally and looked around the rooms given to me.

  Apart from the bath and alcove acting as a dressing room, I had been allocated a small but generously furnished bedchamber. A fourposter bed—presumably a fashion in this part of Lind—hung with soft red curtains took up an alcove between two windows, tightly closed against the wind still shrieking past them though a few draughts made the curtains inside the room sway.

  A fire burned in the grate opposite the bed, with a chaise longue and a comfortable-looking wingback chair, both upholstered in crimson brocade, set beside it, each with an accompanying side table in polished walnut. A wooden desk and chair sat below one window, with a brace of lit beeswax candles on it. The desk had no drawers, but a quick investigation of a small wooden box next to the candlesticks determined it held blank paper, a quill and ink pot, and some red sealing wax. A small bookcase beside the bed was half-filled with tomes mostly running towards scandalous Ystharian novels of Imperial days and a handful of tracts on agriculture, along with one on Legends of the Linder Mountains, which looked intriguing.

  All in all, it was a very pleasing room, and clearly denoted that the butler had agreed to my identity and status. The clothes I had been wearing were nowhere to be seen, which hopefully meant they were off being cleaned. I had nothing else, and though I was certainly more inclined to ringing for a cup of hot chocolate and sitting by the fire with the book of legends, I knew I should go down and greet my host and the other guests properly.

  Before I got drawn into an account of gryphons (gryphons! But we had encountered one, on that fairy islet between the palace-prison and the hunting lodge …), I set the book down next to the wingback chair and forced myself out the door with the plan of knocking on Mr. Dart’s door, or Hal’s, and inveigle them downstairs with me.

  Before I got two steps out, I saw another figure down the hall. She turned at the sound of my door closing, and took a few faltering steps towards me.

  “Jemis?”

  I blinked, an
d blinked again, but it was still a young woman I knew from Morrowlea. “Hope!” I said, and then bowed. “I bid you good afternoon.”

  “It is you,” she said, marvelling, and closed the distance between us. “Whatever are you doing here? And dressed in—what is that?”

  “Taking refuge from the storm without. This is what I was given to wear while my own clothes are cleaned, my baggage being nowhere nearby. And you?”

  She bit her lip and turned her head aside. “It was … difficult … at home. Anna—you remember Anna?—invited me to spend Winterturn with her, and then she and her brother were invited to her uncle’s and she wanted someone here besides her maid, as his friend is a bit of a warm one …” She blushed at the slang, which was decidedly moderate—but then Hope had always been rather prim.

  “I’m sure she’ll be glad for your company,” I said.

  “Are you here by yourself?”

  “No—my friend Mr. Dart, who was at Stoneybridge, and his cousin Miss Dart are with me, and Hal, too.”

  “Our Hal?” Hope said wonderingly, lifting her head then ducking it again, a blush darkening her cheeks.

  I considered her for a moment. Hope was darker-skinned than Violet, though not as dark as Hal (but no one was as dark as Hal), heavy-framed and partial to fluttering pastel-coloured clothes. She was currently wearing a pale pink round gown, in the Charese fashion. She would, I thought, like the style I had seen Ariadne nev Lingarel wearing, which would accentuate her generous curves. Her eyes were a beautiful dark brown, and I always thought of her as soft—soft-voiced, doe-eyed, gentle of temper, kind—which made her chosen field of study, geology, all the more interesting.

  Hal had always said that the natural philosophers needed to stick together against the students of literature and languages, to ground us. Since Marcan was a theologian and Hope’s roommate and friend Anna was doing something with the history of fashion, this left Hal and Hope together more often than not, laughing at our philosophical arguments and resolutely talking of practical science and pragmatic inventions.

  They had always gotten on very well, and I’d thought perhaps the feelings were developing into something warmer over the last year at Morrowlea. But they’d never publicly announced anything, and Hal—

  And Hal was looking for a bride who might love him and not just his title … but of course he was an Imperial Duke, and therefore had a List, supplied by his Aunt Honoria, of eligible ladies. He had shown me it, a month ago in the course of our lessons in noblesse oblige and etiquette, and I knew there were no Hopes on it.

  Two Prudences, one Grace, and one Charity, yes—we had marked them particularly, curious as to which might be the mysterious and only recently acknowledged Ironwood heiress, whose given name was a virtue, and who was, according to Hals’ Aunt Honoria, a most promising match—but no Hope.

  Hal had, I thought, been perhaps a little disappointed.

  Hope had gone to Morrowlea and was therefore of perfectly well-educated charm and deportment, and no one could criticize her alma mater.

  “Jemis?” Hope said, gently breaking into my thoughts.

  “Oh! I am woolgathering. My apologies. Yes, our Hal! Mr. Dart and I—he’s a friend of mine from childhood, from Ragnor Bella—were travelling back from meeting his cousin at Tara, and encountered Hal along the way. He came with us to see Marcan, and then we were going to part ways at the crossroads just above here, him to continue north into Ronderell and the rest of us across the pass into Fiellan, when our cart overturned and we were forced to seek shelter from the storm.”

  There. The truth … if decidedly not all the truth.

  Hope gave me a puzzled look. “Cart?”

  It was my turn to flush. Damn my too-honest tongue. “It’s a rather complicated story …”

  She laughed. She had a nice laugh, too, like a cheerfully burbling stream. It countered Hal’s great whoops most nicely. “It always is, with you, Jemis! I’m so glad to see you much more the thing than this spring.”

  “You can imagine how happy I am to be much more the thing! Hope—ah—we are out of Morrowlea now—”

  “More’s the pity,” said she.

  I acknowledged this with a wry nod. I, too, had loved those halcyon days away from our surnames and all their baggage and requirements.

  Some of the poison of Lark’s actions had been drawn out of me by my sojourn in the Wood of Spiritual Refreshment. I no longer felt quite the bitter pang, recollecting Morrowlea, as had before been the case, when knowledge of what exactly Lark had been doing to me had cast a pall over all that had gone before.

  “And so?” Hope asked.

  I collected myself. “Ah yes—I was wondering about your surname?”

  Strangely, she blushed again and looked down. “It’s Stornaway.”

  “Miss Stornaway? A lovely name.”

  She curtsied promptly, the way we had been taught by the Etiquette Master. “And may I know yours, sir?”

  I bowed, with curlicues and heel-click, wishing again for my hat, and braced myself. “Jemis Greenwing, at your service.”

  Her reaction did not disappoint. Her large, expressive eyes went huge, and she uttered a soft gasp. “Greenwing? Truly? Oh, you poor thing!”

  “My father was no traitor,” I said stiffly. “And indeed, the reports of his death were a piece of the slander.”

  “Is—is the play true, then?”

  Having visited the edges of the Lady’s country, I could not now damn Jack Lindsary to hell, even rhetorically, though I could wish him to learn what grief he had given me and mine. I forced a smile. Hope was a close enough friend that I wanted to tell her more than the barest facts; though indeed, even the barest facts were complicated, too much so for an encounter in a hallway.

  “It has truth in it, I admit. My father did return home three years after Loe to find my mother remarried and his reputation in tatters. He then disappeared, we thought dead, but it turned out only last month that he had been captured by brigands and sold into the pirate galleys a slave. He was on the ship that was captured this summer.”

  “So he’s alive, then?”

  Hope and I had spoken more than once of our shared status of orphans. She would understand what it meant to have a parent thought dead return to life. I nodded, unable to say anything, though I was sure my crooked smile spoke volumes.

  Her eyes were huge with astonishment. “Oh, Jemis!” she said. “And that after this spring! What a year you’ve had!”

  And that wasn’t even the half of it.

  Hope went into her room on whatever errand had brought her up in the first place, and I knocked on the door next to mine, which turned out to be Mr. Dart’s.

  He burst out laughing when he saw me. “You’re the very model of an Artorian gentleman!” he cried. “Come in, come in, sir, and tell me all the news of the Astandalan court! What intrigues are afoot?”

  I followed him into a chamber not dissimilar from mine, albeit the colour scheme was blue instead of red, and he had two wingback chairs and no chaise longue. I sat down in one and flicked my vast lacy cuffs back. “While you, sir, are a very Tulip of the Hunt!”

  It was true: Jack Lindsary could hardly dress so ill, with all the fortune come from his famous play behind him. Mr. Dart wore breeches and a striped waistcoat in the Linder fashion, along with a swallow-tailed coat. So far, hardly to be accorded a second glance—until one noticed, as one could hardly avoid doing, the cut and the colours.

  The breeches were dark grey and the waistcoat lemon striped with white, and the coat a severe black that called attention to the extreme tightness of the cut and the padding in the shoulders, which would be unfortunate enough except that it was entirely unnecessary for Mr. Dart’s figure and thus looked even more bizarre. His white shirt had an extremely high starched collar, very much to the point; the corners were near to poking his eye out if he turned his head too quickly. His stone arm was held in a sling fashioned out of a lemon-yellow kerchief that matched the one in his breast pocket.

  “You look very smart,” I congratulated him.