The Grass King’s Concubine (5 page)

She did not have a husband. Not yet, anyway. But she did not say that. Her uncle was never at his most approachable in the mornings. She added a spoonful of plum preserves to her plate and said, “It’ll be interesting to meet new people.”

Nurse had been left behind in the country. A smart lady’s maid had been engaged to attend to Aude now. She was thin and sour-mouthed; she tugged at Aude’s hair when she combed it out on the first night, and she sniffed at the plain wool gown her new charge wore. “She looks,” Aude
said to the governess, who had been allowed to come, “like a lemon. An old one that Cook had lost at the back of the larder.”

“Hush,” the governess said. “She’s probably very kind.”

Aude doubted that. Her new maid—her name was Ketty, but Aude could never think of her that way—continued to pull her hair and lace her garments too tight, and she never, ever smiled, not even when the most fashionable modiste in all the city came to measure Aude for her new wardrobe. There was a dancing master, too, and a lady of uncertain age and origin who gave instruction in the holding of fans and the placing of flowers. It was amusing for perhaps the first two weeks, but Aude soon tired of the new activities. “There’s no point to them,” she complained to the governess.

“It’s what’s expected of a lady.” The governess shook her head. “Your husband wants an accomplished woman as a wife.”

Back at home, there had always been books to take refuge in. But the library in the smart new house was little more than a pretty room. Its neatly made shelves held a scattering of recent bestsellers, a set of respectable religious books, the last two or three issues of the fashionable (and acceptable) journals, a handful of educational works, and little else. “I can’t manage with just these,” Aude wailed to her uncle.

“It won’t do to get a reputation as bookish,” her uncle said. But he permitted her to take the carriage the short distance to the bookseller who traded alongside the other upper-class Silver City shops, so long as the sour-lemon maid accompanied her. She could have walked there in the time it took to harness the horses, but her uncle would not hear of that. In the Silver City, it seemed, there were times and places for walking, and the public streets were not included among them. At first the shops, with their well-washed plate-glass windows and polish-scented interiors, intrigued her. It was a novelty to choose the fabrics and styles of her gowns, to try on pretty hats and scarves, to toy
with charming trifles like fans and card cases and reticules. But the pleasure did not last long, and she could not bring herself to need more and more trinkets. The young women she met at parties seemed happy enough to talk of nothing but fashion. Aude could not be. She had hoped, in the early days, that she would find friends who shared her interest in reading and study, in exploration and land management. But if any of these other girls cared for such things, they did not mention it at social gatherings. The talk was always of this style or that trend. Books were valued only if fashionable. Scholarship was not mentioned at all. Once or twice, in the early days, Aude made the mistake of mentioning a work of geography or history. The smiles half-hidden behind fans taught her not to speak of such things again.

The men who called on her uncle spoke of more interesting things—trade routes and regulations, innovations in techniques for weaving, travel, and the politics of the empire. But while she was permitted to listen, her uncle frowned if she looked as though she might speak. A woman of the Silver City, it seemed, thought of nothing but how she looked until she wed and of gossip and children thereafter. She learned to smile at morning callers and to hold her tongue about her own interests.

At least her uncle allowed her to send for such books as she wanted from the library at home, and, when they had no company, he let her look over the ledgers from the family holdings. “They’ll be yours, by and by, and they’ll do better if you understand them.”

At the end of her second month in the Silver City, she was woken once again by her dream. Long thin fingers snatched at her, dug into her flesh, pinched and tugged and pulled at her, cold as winter iron. Her lungs felt clogged, her eyes thick with grit and dust. She awoke slick with sweat and coughing, nose and mouth full of a thick, yeasty smell. Outside, an unseasonal wind yammered at her window, thumping at the heavy shutters. She lay awake for a long time, staring into the dark.

There were priests in the Silver City, as there were
everywhere else. She had attended a number of ceremonies at the fashionable New Temple, where the ladies and gentlemen of the court gathered to show off their finery and watch each other for mockable foibles. It was not fashionable to be religious or even to appear to be so. She discovered that the first time she mentioned something she had read in
The Shorter Book of Marcellan
. Her interlocutor raised a fan and tittered. Only the old and the odd attended temple functions, save at the largest festivals, and even then the highest born held private celebrations in gardens or great halls. It was fashionable to be shallow and silly and pointless.

On the other hand, a temple was one of the few places a young woman might go alone—or, rather, accompanied only by a maid—without incurring sanction in the Silver City. The New Temple was preferred by most of her new acquaintances, but Aude preferred a smaller one that stood on the east edge of the royal park. She was expected to take her carriage to the park gate, but from there it was a pretty walk, and a quiet one, curving away from the fashionable aisles. With Ketty at her side, she took to visiting it once or twice a week, lighting incense to the carved statues of the gods or studying the murals that depicted their residences. They did not look much like the descriptions in Marcellan’s books. The gods wore the garb of the previous century, dwelled in mansions more like the regent’s huge ugly residence than the courtyards and arcades of the books. Of her shining place.

The priest who tended this temple was young, watching her with hooded eyes as she bowed to the statues. He did not know the origins of the paintings, when she asked him. “I suppose one of my predecessors chose the artist, Mademoiselle.”

“I don’t think…” Aude said, and stopped. In the Silver City, it might be unwise to speak even to a priest of such matters. She bit her lip. “According to Marcellan, the gods live differently from us.”

“Differently now, certainly,” the priest said. “How could
Marcellan know how we live now? He could talk of the gods only in the terms he understood.”

“Then they change, as we do?” The frescoes in the New Temple showed deities in the images of modern fashion. It was one of the reasons she did not like it. At least the pictures here had some distance to them.

“Of course,” the priest said. “How could they not? As our knowledge, our skill, our society grows and develops, do we not grow ever closer to them, reflect them better?”

Aude was not sure about that. It did not ring true. Marcellan had written of shared knowledge, of exploration and learning for its own sake. The priest moved closer to her. “It takes a special soul to understand the gods.” He reached for her hand. “Like yours, Mademoiselle. You are sensitive to such things, I can tell.” He smelled of cologne and hair oil. He made to lift her hand to his lips. “Sensitive and beautiful.”

Aude pulled her hand away. “I…I have to go.”

Perhaps she was sensitive, to have seen the shining place. Sensitive, or overly imaginative. Whichever it was, she did not think that was what the priest meant. She hurried away, and she did not go back.

She had lived in the Silver City for almost a third of a year before her future husband troubled himself to call. Not that she noticed his neglect. Most of the time she forgot his existence altogether. He was a scrawny young man with rounded shoulders and an unhealthy sallow tint to his complexion. He sat in the parlor ignoring the cup of chocolate brought for him by a footman and talking to Aude’s uncle about desultory matters. Aude herself he paid no heed to at all, apart from the customary bow and a swift—and critical—raking with his eyes up and down her person. Aude did not like him. Neither did her uncle, if his muttered “Ignoramus” as the door closed behind the visitor was any guide. But he would not meet her eyes, and at dinner that evening he talked only of the advantages Aude would enjoy once she was married.

That was late summer. As the season turned into autumn, the houses around them began to fill as the nobility returned from their estates. A trickle of cards and envelopes began to arrive again, inviting her to promenades in the royal park or to concerts in private residences. Once more, she must smile to hide boredom, match her stride to the slow shuffle of the elite, answer foolish empty questions with equally foolish, empty answers.

She had thought that leaving her home in the country would be the first step on her voyage to finding her shining place. But the Silver City, for all the promise of its name, seemed farther than ever from that. It was bound on every front by rules and customs and expectations, each more constricting than the last. The only freedom came in the hours she still spent in the schoolroom. Colonel Saverell would not think much of her, allowing her world to be bound to social mores and books.

“I want to go home,” Aude mourned to the governess. “I want to have more things to
do
.” At home, there were tinctures and preserves to be made in the stillroom, planting to discuss and oversee, accounts to be studied, stock to be examined and admired. Here in the Silver City, ladies did not even work their own seat covers or hangings. Such work was contracted out to seamstresses hidden below the yellow fog in the Brass City.

Aude had brought Colonel Saverell’s books with her from the country, but after the first month or so, they collected dust on a shelf in her room, a short line of reproach and disappointment. There was no space in the Silver City for daydreams. There was no space for adventurers. Day by day, she bowed her head to that and felt herself shrink to fit the new boundaries. If her shining place beckoned her now, it would find her sadly wanting. No wonder it had turned, slowly, into a nightmare.

Two weeks before her eighteenth birthday, her uncle informed her that the governess was to be dismissed. “You’re old enough now not to need her. It’s time to concentrate on your social duties.”

Tears burned in her eyes; anger shook her with the force of a childhood tantrum. Without answering, she fled from the parlor to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Shaken, one of the colonel’s books fell from the shelf with a crash. A leaf of white paper floated from it, landing facedown on the rug. Words stared up at her.

Jehan Favre was a sensible man who knew his own limits. Or so he had always told himself. His family was minor gentry—little more than farmers, really—and long accustomed to cutting their cloth to their measure. His father’s interests began and ended with the local price of wheat and fodder, wine and mutton, goose fat and shoe leather. He had walked the bounds of his small estate once a quarter with grim determination, measuring hedges and testing boundary stones for solidity. During drier summers, he and his neighbors indulged in low-key bickering over the water use of the miller and of the largest lord. Crops and weather, poaching and the derelictions of laborers: these had been the topics dominating the family dinner table and the gossip in the inn on market day. The concerns of cities and courts had belonged to another world, the realm of mythical creatures called hierarchs and nobles and kings. An eldest son could expect to live his father’s life, tending herds and grain and guarding precious borders. A younger son might look to marry a local heiress or to dispense rural law in the local court, or, like Jehan, take up a junior commission in one of the lower-ranked regiments. Such men died far from home and were mourned months later when the news finally filtered through or, rarely,
they drifted home in later life to prop up inn counters and inhabit cramped garret rooms and get underfoot come harvest time. A good younger son made his own way and retired—if he must—at his own expense. The grooves of that pattern were worn so well that Jehan had sometimes wondered if they could carry a man through all of his life without him ever needing to think at all. From all over the lands ruled from the Silver City, thousands of younger sons made their way to barracks and ports to follow yet another set of age-hallowed traditions. He had done so himself, and he found it bearable, if not exhilarating. One did as was expected and that was that. He had served his first three years, from sixteen to eighteen, in the garrison town closest to his father’s holding, escorting judges and keeping the peace at markets and horse fairs. For the three years after that, he had been stationed on the border, watching dull tracts of hillside for nonexistent invaders and checking the safe-conducts of merchants and minor officials.