Daughter of Mystery (18 page)

The young man reddened and left the room without a word. Barbara stepped back from the center of Fulpi’s attention, watching to see what might be needed. Margerit’s mouth was set in grim determination. Her aunt had taken up a shawl from the back of the sofa and draped it around her shoulders, looking from one figure to another in confusion. Margerit’s fingers twined in the fringe, hardening into fists.

With Nikule’s departure, her uncle turned to her and said in a conciliatory tone, “We won’t speak of this. No harm was done. It was a misunderstanding.”

Maisetra Sovitre began a sharp reply but Margerit uncharacteristically gestured her into silence, announcing, “I will not continue to live under this roof.”

“Don’t be a silly child,” her uncle began. “You can’t—”

“In the future, I will be living at Fonten Street. Aunt Sovitre will live with me as companion and guardian.”

Her aunt was startled but Barbara could see her mind working in calculation. She quickly lent her support to the plan: “Mauriz, you can see how impossible this has become. The two of them…you could hardly put your own son out on the street. It will be simpler this way.”

He tried a voice of authority once more. “It’s impossible. A girl like you, living alone, without the protection of a man…”

“Clearly a man’s protection is not sufficient,” Margerit answered steadily. “I will live there under my own roof, with my own household, with my own protection. Or I will find myself explaining to all of Chalanz why I find it necessary to keep an armin at my side at every moment, even in my guardian’s parlor.”

Barbara was tempted to step a pace closer to her and scowl at him, playing the part, but that would be beyond the line. She remained still.

Maistir Fulpi was clearly shaken. He ventured, “Margerit, think of your reputation. What will people think—what will they say?”

“Perhaps you should think of an explanation,” Margerit said coldly. “Otherwise the truth might occur to them.”

Barbara knew it for a gamble. Margerit had far more to lose by the truth than Nikule or her uncle did. But he nodded slowly at last and said, “I’ll send word that they should prepare to expect you tomorrow. Your things can—”

“Today,” Margerit insisted. “Aunt Sovitre can arrange for my belongings tomorrow. Send a message that I will be there by supper tonight and have them send my carriage.”

He looked one more time between his niece and sister-in-law as if he saw all his hopes for the future crashing to the ground. Then he stepped back as Margerit swept past him and out the door. Barbara kept close on her heels up the stairs, hearing the beginnings of a heated discussion behind them. When the door to Margerit’s room closed behind them, Barbara recalled her first day in the house and braced herself for hysterics. But when Margerit turned toward her, her eyes were shining not with tears but with triumph.

“He lost. He gambled and lost and he gave me the key to the door.”

She wasn’t certain whether that meant her cousin or her uncle. The triumph was almost as unsettling as the tears she had dreaded. “Maisetra, your uncle is right in one thing: people will think it very odd for you to leave his roof. They’ll need to be told something.”

Margerit frowned. “Tell them…I don’t know, tell them I didn’t see the point in leaving the staff idle.”

Barbara began to shake her head, but then a thought came to her. “Tell them you plan to hold a ball of your own, in your own house. It will only make sense for you to spend most of your time there for the preparations. Some might not believe it, but it’s a plausible excuse.” She could see the idea take hold. “There would only be one real problem,” she added.

Margerit’s face had started to brighten but the frown returned. “What?”

“You’d need to actually hold a ball.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Margerit

When Margerit woke the next morning, it was the first moment when she truly realized and utterly believed in the legacy she had received. As Maitelen drew the curtains open, the morning sun streamed through a series of windows reaching above her head. She stretched out across a bed that could have held five people comfortably and yet failed to dominate the room. A tray at her bedside held a pot of chocolate prepared the moment she’d been seen to stir sleepily. There was an almost palpable sense throughout the house of expectancy, of people waiting only to know what she wanted for it to be done. Luxury tempted her to enjoy the moment to the fullest, but long ago she’d taken to heart that you must begin as you meant to go on. And to go on she needed to convince everyone that this had been a sensible decision, that coming here wasn’t just the whim of a willful child.

If Aunt Bertrut had surprised her with the strength of her support, LeFevre had done the same with the depth of his disapproval. Thinking on it, Bertrut’s enthusiasm made sense. She’d always chafed at her neither-this-nor-that place in Uncle Fulpi’s household. Overseeing this household was the closest she could expect to being mistress of her own. Her usual air of detachment had evaporated the moment they walked through the doors and she’d spent the remainder of the evening establishing a working relationship with the upper staff.

But LeFevre, having obeyed her announcement to the letter in preparing the house for her, had whisked her immediately to his office for a raking down that rivaled the worst Uncle Fulpi had ever delivered. She had withstood it in silence, sure of her decision but unsure how to defend it. It was Barbara, standing behind her, seething at the tirade, who told him in one pithy sentence what Nikule had tried. At that, LeFevre fell silent for a long moment then sighed, “I see.” And though he never questioned the move again, Margerit was determined to convince him that a separate household made its own sense.

It was at his urging, before a week went by, that she had reached a truce—if not a reconciliation—with her uncle. The Fulpis were her first guests in her own home. Though the air was strained, they too kept the pretense that all was well between them. Aunt Bertrut had the management of her invitations now but Aunt Honurat was asked to escort her regularly. Nikule was not included in the truce. Word was that he was off visiting friends in the north. Gossip, it seemed, had been averted.

* * *

In that first week, Margerit nearly forgot the public excuse given out for the move until Aunt Bertrut raised it over breakfast. “You need to set a date. I was thinking perhaps in mid-September. That would give us plenty of time and the calendar isn’t as crowded.”

“No, that’s much too late,” Margerit replied.

“Too late for what?”

It wasn’t time yet to mention the university. Not until her place there was secure. But the term would be starting by the date she’d named. Another excuse was needed. “Barbara says everyone important returns to Rotenek in time for the Feast of Saint Mauriz.” He was the city’s patron. It was more than enough reason to travel earlier. “I’ll need time to get settled before that—to find my feet. I’d rather have the ball in early August and have plenty of time.”

“Completely impossible,” Bertrut answered with no room for argument. “You can’t plan a ball in only two weeks. That would be barely time to send out invitations.”

“What about three? I don’t want to spend all summer working at it. You know I don’t care much for balls.”

Her aunt considered the matter. “Three is possible, with help. But remember, this is supposed to be why you left your uncle’s roof. Show a proper enthusiasm to the world.”

Margerit had thought the days would drag but she hadn’t accounted for everything she had to learn. Aunt Bertrut was willing to let her forgo all but the most important parties in favor of the preparations but she wasn’t willing to let her slip out of her new household responsibilities. There were meals to approve, refurbishment to oversee, minor invitations to issue, correspondence to take up. LeFevre began to introduce her in earnest to the complexities of managing her holdings. “I need to go to Rotenek to prepare a few matters,” he pointed out. “Draw up your own responses to everything that comes in while I’m gone. I’ll still need to approve your replies, so you needn’t be concerned about making too great a mistake.” She knew enough to be flattered by the offer.

And then there were the more practical preparations for her move. A stiff and sharp-tongued woman from the city was hired to instruct her in how not to appear a hopeless provincial. It wasn’t entirely outside of possibility that she might be invited to be presented at court. In any event one must be familiar with the complicated web of forces at play that could entangle the naïve or unwary. A dancing master was brought in, despite her protests that she knew all the popular dances well enough for the purpose.

“You know the dances popular in Chalanz,” he said dismissively. “Half of them haven’t been danced in Rotenek for years.”

And because dancing could not be taught to a single pupil, she invited Sofi and other friends to join her, and even Barbara was regularly drafted to make up the sets.

It was Barbara who filled out the remainder of her time by piling the library table with books that she said every university student would know.

“Your Latin is excellent but your Greek…has not seen the same attention.”

Her Greek was barely passable, Barbara’s diplomacy notwithstanding. And though Aristotle was no longer considered the bedrock of philosophy, any lack there would be felt when she tackled more modern works. Sister Petrunel had been systematic with the classics and the humanists, but she had touched only lightly on the esoterics, and for philosophers of the last century she had cared not at all. Those could wait, but Barbara ruthlessly set her passages of Fortunatus to work out on her own.

“Do you know he was the foundation of the university in Rotenek?” she mentioned, by way of inducement. “The tutors he gathered around him began lecturing in the Plaiz Vezek to gain more students and those students attracted more teachers and it grew from there.”

That would have been an exciting time to live, Margerit thought. When seeds were being planted and new ways of thinking were being explored, both inspiring and dangerous. She added history to the list of subjects she might pursue, given time.

Before she knew it, Aunt Bertrut handed her a stack of invitations to sign and send and the final fittings for her new gown were scheduled.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Barbara

Moving back to Fonten House was like emerging from a cave into a riotous garden. Maistir Fulpi’s house had been cramped and narrow in many ways more than the physical. There, she had been an irritating anomaly among the staff; here, she was a familiar one. Here no one questioned her right to come or go, to act as she thought best to fulfill her duties, to enter any part of the house or to have access to her charge. And Margerit—she was the rose blooming in the center of the garden. It was a joy to watch her unfolding and reaching out to seize her destiny. Not the inheritance itself—that was the least of the matter—but what it made possible.

The moments she treasured most came on those evenings when Margerit stayed in and Maisetra Sovitre had gone off to sleep. The two of them would meet in the library to argue philosophy, digging through thick volumes for quotations and exegesis, debating competing translations. It was the one time Barbara allowed herself to forget the gulf that lay between them. Margerit’s mind jumped easily from thought to thought, making connections and finding parallels that would then take an hour to pin down and trace through in detail. Barbara worked more meticulously, pulling from her memory elaborate structures of logic and evidence.

“You should study law,” Margerit laughed accusingly after losing one particularly convoluted debate.

“I have. A little,” Barbara answered. It was a field where women students were less tolerated than philosophy but also one easier to study outside the lecture halls. “LeFevre suggested it at first. He said you never know when the deadliest attack may come from a lawyer.”

Indeed, LeFevre illustrated that point when he returned with the latest news from Rotenek. “Estefen’s latest challenge has failed.”

“I thought you said the court refused to hear him,” Margerit said.

“That was the challenge to the will itself. The greatest danger was that it would be heard and take years to settle. But it doesn’t require a charge or a judgment for him to demand an accounting. The baron’s strategy relied on the fiction that Estefen had, in effect, already been treating the title-estate as his own.” Among the three of them, “the baron” always and only meant the old man. “But that strategy left him open to a charge of mismanagement of the Saveze lands or even outright theft, strange as it might seem. The clerks went over every slip that Estefen signed over to the baron and matched them against the revenues of the property. His accusation that the estate was deliberately gutted found no footing.”

“Will he try
res patrum
do you think?” Barbara wondered.

“On what grounds?” LeFevre countered. “The title-lands were the only thing Marziel inherited from his brother. When he began investing, he was careful never to purchase any property that had been in the family within two generations back. I know, because there was a very pretty little orchard he had his eye on, but when we traced the title there had been a connection in his father’s day and he let it go.”

She could see Margerit struggling to follow the thread of the argument. “Why was it so important to him? He must have been making these plans since long before Estefen was grown. It couldn’t only have been to spite him.”

LeFevre shook his head. “That’s the baron’s business and on that my mouth is closed. But you needn’t worry about the law. There’s nothing left he can do except make noise.”

* * *

The weeks passed more swiftly than she would have predicted. As the day neared, preparations for the ball swallowed increasingly more of their lives. Barbara let most of it pass by. The aunts and LeFevre took command of it like a military campaign. Even many of the ordinary security preparations would be handled by the staff, just as they had been in the baron’s day. Margerit’s safety was her main concern—but in the end that encompassed all else.