The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (51 page)

Whereupon Genevieve’s mother launched into a general description of the joys of the marriage-bed, with particular attention to how pleasant it could be for the bride, especially if the groom was experienced.

“At least we know Lord Theron is experienced,” Genevieve observed with unbecoming asperity.

“My love!” Lady Randall raised a shocked hand to her throat. “I hope you’ve not been listening to backstairs gossip.”

“He told me himself, when he proposed. I said I didn’t mind. And I don’t. It’s not that.” Her color rose. “I rather liked that.”

“Ah,” said her mother doubtfully. “Then what has occurred to distress you?”

Genevieve lowered her eyes to the damp cambric balled in her hands. “Well. He behaved . . .
oddly,
Mama. Not at all as he did before we were betrothed.”

Lady Randall shrugged. “My love, all men behave oddly between the betrothal and the wedding. And he’s been ill, remember? You must not make too much of it.”

“No, Mama. But when he left us so suddenly that time he took sick, he acted so strangely. And his letters . . .” She picked at the handkerchief.

Lady Randall studied her daughter’s face, dry now and fast returning to its usual charming color. “To be frank with you,” Lady Randall said, “his family has a great reputation for . . . eccentricity. His father’s life was very irregular, and his grandfather lived very much out of the world. Luckily, the Tremontaine men have always shown great good sense in their choice of wives. Why, the last duchess—the current duchess’s great-aunt—was only a Tremontaine by marriage. Her husband’s—indisposition—allowed her the entire guidance of his land and fortune.”

She waited hopefully while Genevieve took this in, with all its implications. The expressive features passed from bewilderment to comprehension to dismay. “Mama!” The blue eyes were very wide. “I don’t want to be married to a madman!”

Lady Randall realized she’d made a tactical error. “I never said a word about madness,” she said severely. “I only said he might be eccentric. And there’s nothing eccentric about his being over-eager—it’s a tribute to your beauty, my love. You ought to be flattered. Why, there are married women who have to turn to other lovers for that kind of passion. Think how lucky you are, to be gaining both position and pleasure in one man.” She gave her daughter’s unquiet hands a dismissive pat. “Better? Good. The seamstress will be here soon with your bride-gown. Run up to your room now, and bathe your eyes. They’re a little swollen.”

Like the good daughter she was, Genevieve obeyed, leaving the handkerchief balled up on the sofa behind her. When Lady Randall opened it, it fell into shreds. She shook her head. Bridal nerves, she thought. He probably put his hand on her breast. These Campions are sadly flighty. It is to be hoped he doesn’t make her too unhappy.

book IV

SPRING

chapter I

SPRING CAME TO THE CITY. THE DAYS WERE GROWING longer. The snow had melted from all but the darkest and most stubborn of corners. Crocuses sprang from muddy crevices and, in back gardens, tender leaves began tentatively to unfurl. Fellowship examinations loomed, turning students’ attention to their studies. Basil St Cloud cut the number of his lectures from four a week to two, and released his students from their archival burrowing.

“This is all wonderfully useful,” he told them, turning over the latest batch of offerings. “I haven’t the words to thank you.”

“There’s no need to thank us,” said Lindley. “It’s our duty.”

“Besides, we’ve learned a lot,” Blake said.

“And sneezed a lot,” Vandeleur added.

“And disturbed the ancestral homes of countless spiders,” Fremont went on.

“And mice,” Godwin finished, not to be left out.

St Cloud laughed. “Well, you can leave them in peace now. I’ve come to a point where I need to go down there myself. It’s no reflection on your abilities, my friends: there are rooms students can’t get into, even with a magister’s permission. You’ve done well.”

Vandeleur, who had not enjoyed the Archives, insisted that they celebrate their deliverance from spiders and dust in a blow-out at the Spotted Cow. “Just think,” he said. “Out of University, sewing-girls by the dozen, and the best music in the city. Come on. It’s spring.”

Lindley, predictably, declined. And Godwin was expected at home. So it was just Vandeleur, Blake, and Fremont, and a high time they had of it, spending their last coppers on salmon and roast potatoes and good wine like men of taste, and dancing with all the prettiest girls. At least Vandeleur and Fremont danced. Justis spent most of the evening in earnest conversation with a brown-haired milliner’s apprentice. She was country-bred, plump as a partridge in all the right places, with eyes as bright as a running brook and a sweet, soft laugh. Before the night was out, she’d told him all about her parsimonious mistress, who made her apprentices buy their own wood or sit sewing in the cold, and her mother in Swinton, and all her brothers and sisters, working back home to keep the farm. They danced twice and when they parted, she’d kissed him sweetly on the mouth. Justis was in love.

After that night, the inner circle of St Cloud’s followers began to drift apart, and Henry Fremont found himself very much at a loose end. He went to lectures and he haunted the Nest, where he did his best to keep up Historians’ Corner with Godwin and a few other students who fancied themselves as academic radicals. But he still had plenty of free time left over in which to worry.

The Northerner’s visit had frightened Henry badly. In the lonely deeps of the night, he fretted over past crimes: his and the Northerners’, actual and possible. What if the Companions of the King really were plotting to bring back the monarchy? What if Lindley, despite his oath, had told them of the meeting in the grove? What if Finn had not killed himself after all, but been a bloody sacrifice to their precious Land? What if, by some mischance, they discovered Henry’s role in this series of imprisonments and betrayals?

And then Henry would remember Finn lying in the snow, a marble statue inexplicably toppled and sprinkled with scarlet paint, and the knowledge that he had been responsible gnawed at him like a rat. The end of it was that he decided to find Justis Blake and tell him all about it.

Justis was not particularly pleased to be found. Being a practical man, he had quickly realized that he could not keep both himself and his lady-love in fuel and food on the few silvers his father allowed him each term. So he compounded with a paper-seller in Lassiter’s Row to set up a table in his shop for five coppers a week and became a public letter-writer.

And that was where Henry found him, solemnly taking dictation from an elderly lady in a red flannel shawl, who wanted to tell her son that she couldn’t attend the birth of his third child.

The old lady described the misery in her back and legs that kept her from walking the twenty leagues to Endersby and the poverty that kept her from buying a place on the coach; Justis scribbled and suggested deletions and emendations. Henry fidgeted among the stacks of paper and board. Finally, the letter was written to her satisfaction and sealed with wax, three coppers were counted out into Justis’s inky hand, and she was hobbling out in search of a post courier.

Henry folded his lanky frame into the client’s chair. Justis frowned. “Go away, Fremont. I’m working.”

Henry cocked his eye at the empty shop, the bored young man keeping it, and the window, fast darkening with dusk. “No, you’re not. There’s nobody here, and it’s going to be dark soon, and that boy is aching to put up the shutters and have his supper. There’s a little place around the corner with a nice smell coming out the door. Come talk to me, and I’ll buy you whatever’s making it. Come on, Justis. If you eat lightly, you can take what’s left to your sweetheart.”

Justis hemmed and Justis hawed, fearing that this unprecedented generosity was likely to come at a high price, but in the end, he went with Fremont, and listened to his story between bites of roast beef and dried pease porridge.

He’d been right. The price was high. Fremont’s description of his seduction by Galing and Tielman made his teeth itch, though he was unsure which of that self-righteous trio angered him the most. Fremont, he thought, who had sold his honor for a few silver coins and a chance to feel important. Galing and Tielman were just acting according to their stations. Fremont had chosen to betray his friends.

Which is what he told Fremont, once he came to a halt. Fremont, who rather thought he should be praised for his honesty, began to justify himself, and Blake said, “Don’t, Henry. Please. You did what you did for reasons that seemed good to you at the time. If they seemed good to you still, I doubt you’d be asking me for absolution. Well, I can’t give it to you. Of course you hold yourself responsible for Finn’s death. I do too.”

Furious, Fremont called Blake names and offered to fight him. Blake kept eating calmly, leaving him to sputter himself to a standstill. Finally, Fremont poked at his untouched roast beef, drained his pot of beer, sighed heavily, and said, “You’re right. I’m a worm, and I shit myself whenever I think what those Northern madmen might take it into their heads to do to me. What am I to do?”

“Land, Henry, I don’t know. It depends on what you want to accomplish. If you’re afraid of the Companions, you’d better slip out on a south-bound boat and go study foreign history at the University of Elysia. Personally, I think they’re all flash and no fight, but then, I haven’t gotten three of them thrown in jail. If you want to mend the harm you’ve done, you can’t. You can, however, warn Doctor St Cloud that the Council of Nobles isn’t as uninterested in University politics as he’d thought.”

Fremont went even paler than he already was. “I was only trying to help him,” he said. “I was trying to prove that he was innocent of any connection with the Companions. And I think I succeeded.”

“Then you won’t mind telling him about it,” said Blake serenely.

“What about Finn? I thought we’d agreed Doctor St Cloud wasn’t to be upset.”

Blake looked grim. “He doesn’t need to know about that right now. Just the bit about the Council.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Are you going to tell him or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Fremont miserably. “I need to think.”

“I don’t,” said Blake, rising. “I’m going to go tell him now. You can come with me or not, as you like.”

Henry wiped his mouth and rose with him. What else could he do? There was no telling what Blake would make of his story to St Cloud. And a man must make his own apologies, after all—it was only right.

Justis smiled as though he’d been watching the progress of Henry’s thoughts through a window in his head. “Good man,” he said, and the two students went out into the evening air.

The streets of the Middle City were always crowded at this time of night. Shop girls, apprentices and clerks, merchants in fur-lined cloaks, and whores in second-hand velvet jostled one another on the narrow walkways, heading toward home or supper. Carts splashed through the mud; carriages and chairs conveyed the rich to their evening’s entertainment. A curtained chair went by, carried by four stout men in brown livery: Lady Randall going to Riverside to take supper with her future in-laws.

It was full night, damply cold but without the sting of winter. At home, Justis thought, the willows would be blushing gold, the whitethorn buds would be swelling toward blossom, and the early lambs would be robbing his father’s men of their night’s sleep. Was farming a better life than learning? he wondered. It was certainly simpler, both practically and morally, and it produced something of undoubted worth. And it did not usually lead to fistfights and intrigues and corpses in the wood. Perhaps he should marry Marianne, take her out of this infernal city they both hated. His mother would like Marianne, he was sure.