Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘A dance,’ she said hollowly.
‘I suppose our social calendar has been a little vacant,’ said Mary weakly. She and Emily exchanged glances of equal weariness. ‘I fear it will be somewhat weighted in favour
of us ladies.’
‘No, you don’t understand,’ insisted Alice. She grabbed the note back from Emily. ‘By royal decree, you see.
Royal
decree.’
Emily started, ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean—’
‘But it does. Look, there’s the seal and everything!’ Alice said. ‘It’s the King. The King is coming to Deerlings House!’
‘I can’t imagine why he would do such a thing,’ Mary said uncertainly, ‘with the war to occupy his time.’
‘If I might speak,’ Soldier Belchere said, ‘it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. The King feels greatly for the privations besetting his subjects. He considers it
his duty to travel the country and restore the morale of his people.’ She reeled these words off like a speech learned by heart. ‘So he may be at Deerlings. Who can say?’
Alice had forgotten her dislike of the messenger. ‘The King! The King, Em! And he won’t be alone. There will be lords and knights and officers and soldiers and . . .
men
!’
‘Alice!’ Emily said, with an embarrassed glance at the grinning Belchere, but her sister was too transported to hear her.
‘I will require a new gown, of course,’ Alice declared.
‘We cannot afford new gowns,’ Mary objected. ‘You will have to trust to your own skills, and work with one of your old dresses.’
‘But we must have new gowns, all three. We cannot turn up at Deerlings looking like urchins!’ Alice declared, as though this was a matter beyond argument. ‘Mary, we will be
before royalty! We cannot turn up in three-year-old fashions, patched and stitched as best we can.’
Mary looked to Emily for moral support, but her sister was already frowning thoughtfully.
‘If you are to have a new gown,’ she said slowly, ‘you must not spend another penny between now and the ball.’
‘Yes, of course!’ Alice agreed readily.
‘And I shall do the same, for I think this time you are right, and we will definitely need new gowns.’ Emily felt an echo of Alice’s excitement rising inside her. The King
himself coming so near – or even the faintest chance of it. She would be a fool not to grasp the opportunity.
‘Thank you for the message, Soldier Belchere,’ she remembered. ‘Please, take some refreshment before you go, and I’m sure Poldry here can find a coin for you.’
After the messenger’s departure, Mary cornered her, looking betrayed. ‘Where will this money come from, Emily?’
‘We will have to save and scrape.’ Emily found it hard to meet her sister’s eyes. ‘In this, though, Alice is right. The honour of our family is at stake: we must put on a
good show, or no show at all.’
Mary’s lips moved, and Emily knew that she had been about to argue the case for the latter, but seen it for a lost cause.
‘The honour of our family will not feed us,’ she complained softly. ‘It will not repair the roof, or pay for medicine if Francis falls ill. Or will you have me go to our
tenants and tell them their rents have gone up because Alice must go to meet the King.
That
is the honour of our family, Emily: looking after those who depend on us – and those whom
we depend on. And now, with so many missing husbands and sons, will this idle pleasure of yours and Alice’s take food from their mouths?’
‘We have always managed,’ Emily tried weakly.
‘Yes, because
I
have always sat with the books and planned where each penny must go. And now I must go back to them and find some magical store of money, or find what essentials
are not so essential after all, just so that we may go dancing.’ And she stormed off without giving Emily a chance to answer.
*
Mary had spent several days closeted with the accounts, moving beads on her abacus and imaginary money in her head, before finally naming a sum that could be sacrificed to the
dressmaker’s. The price for this had been her own polite refusal of the invitation. She had never been one for dancing, she said, and she did not want to either leave Francis or travel with
him. Emily and Alice had exchanged guilty looks and shuffled their feet slightly. With her husband gone, and all the burdens and stresses of Grammaine on her shoulders, Mary had become a master at
hiding her true griefs. It was impossible to know how she felt as she made her announcement in a businesslike tone and packed them off with funds to Chalcaster.
As Emily climbed down from the buggy in the market square, she spotted a blind man begging there. He sat with his back to a wall, holding out a cap with a stolid, grim
patience. He had a long coat wrapped about him, but within it, his shirt was a soldier’s issue. A leather band covered up his eyes.
‘Poldry, a coin.’
The old servant took out their purse, lighter than Emily would have liked, and found a penny for the man.
Alice tutted. ‘Emily, if we are to present ourselves to the King . . .’
‘You do not even know that he will come to Deerlings,’ Emily hissed at her, scandalized, for the girl had spoken quite loud enough for the beggar to hear her. ‘And this man is
here now. He has fought for his country.’
‘And will you give away our funds to every supplicant until we have nothing?’ Alice retorted.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Emily told her. ‘Why must you always exaggerate . . . ?’ But, even as she said it, her eyes were roving the square. There were fewer market
stalls than she remembered and, of those she saw, even fewer had the wares she might have expected. Little food, she noticed, and many vendors seemed to have simply brought in a jumbled haul of
possessions in the hope that someone might desperately need old shoes, grimy clothes or battered furniture. And plenty of people in Chalcaster seemed suddenly to have lost all idea of what they
really needed or wanted, instead staring at the detritus of other people’s lives as though it was impossible to know what preparation the future might require. They were mostly women, those
who tried to sell, as well as those who picked over it all and did not buy. Women and old men, and in amongst them were the veterans.
These were the worst examples, she knew: men who would not die and could not be returned to the fighting. The new hospitals were ruthless in sending men back to the war, if they could serve in
any way at all. Here were men who could not march, who could not hold a gun, who could not see the enemy. They passed through the thinning crowd with their awkward, arrhythmic gaits, each man
moving to a different drummer. Alice’s expression was one of nervous revulsion. Mary would probably have been frightened if she were here, seeing in these men her husband or her brother.
Emily herself was surprised to find that they made her angry. She seemed to have been angry a great deal recently, in a way that her tutors would once have beaten out of her. It was not becoming,
they would have said.
But it is what I am becoming.
These men were the victims of the Denlanders. They were husbands and fathers and sons whose only crime had been to love their country
and their king. They had gone to the war to defend all they held dear, and the war machine of the Denlanders had ground them up and spat them back, ruined them for all time with its guns and its
knives.
She found the thought came close to overwhelming her, and she clutched at the side of the buggy for support, her knuckles turning white with the effort.
‘I know,’ Alice agreed, misreading her reaction. ‘Why doesn’t Northway do something about all this? If these men are in need of help, he could deal with it. Isn’t
that what he’s
for
? Why have them all out in plain sight?’
Emily knew she should reproach Alice over that, but the girl had dangled some attractive bait before her. Why wasn’t Mr Northway providing aid to the veterans? The obvious answer was that
it would cost money, and he surely coveted every penny the Crown gifted him with, and squirrelled as much of it away for his own use as he could. And so these brave, damaged men must hobble and
beg. It was easy to look at them now and see his leering face condemning them.
And he was culpable, surely . . . but Emily found the thought ringing hollow for all that. Mr Northway was wicked but he was not the war.
Her eye was drawn then to the Mayor-Governor’s offices, which dominated one side of the market square. Another two of his soldiers were posted at the door, and they had guns now in place
of the glaives. She had been hearing stories of how harshly they dealt with many petitioners.
She weighed her purse – light enough, given the tight hold Mary had kept on the family accounts. ‘Alice, why don’t you go and commence negotiations with Mrs Shevarler,’
she suggested, with a nod towards the dressmaker’s.
‘Please tell me you are not going to exhaust any more of our funds this way,’ Alice said crossly. ‘Mary will be furious.’
‘Mary says that the honour of our family is about looking after those that depend on us,’ Emily pointed out. She was not at all sure that Mary would quite see things her way, but she
got the words out smoothly enough. ‘And it will only be a little.’ The words rang hollow as she looked across the market square.
Leaving Poldry at the buggy, she set out, facing the impossible task of deciding who was in greatest need, and where her charity might benefit most. The more she looked, the more need there
seemed to be: injured soldiers who had marched out whole and come back only in part; thin, grimy women who had no living and nobody left to support them – and their children, all too often.
Emily slowed to a halt, feeling something harden inside her. She had so little to give: could she find even a penny for them all? And what would a penny buy them? She could feel a thought hovering
over her, waiting for its moment:
Surely they cannot all really be in need. Surely some are faking, are taking advantage of the kindness of others. And if some are, then why not most of them?
Or all?
Despite the evidence of her senses, how convenient it would be if she could adopt that thought: what a salve that would be for her conscience.
This must be how Mr Northway teaches himself to think.
All eyes, she was sure, were fixed upon her. The honour of her family was at stake. Closing her ears to Alice’s mutterings, she got her purse out and began distributing small coins almost
at random, passing down the row of stalls trying to distinguish, via some hitherto unguessed-at sense, the truly desperate from the merely needy. The pennies fell from her fingers into the cupped
hands, the bowls, the threadbare hats of her targets. She felt as if she was pouring them into a hole, into a bottomless darkness. Increasingly, she felt very much that Alice was right. She found
herself with that thought in her head, as she was brought up short before another man with a band of cloth covering his eyes. She felt as though she was waking from a dream, only to find herself
trapped in another one.
One more coin and then I go
, but something was staying her hand, some odd intuition. The man before her had a palm out hopefully, but there was something amiss about his posture, a
tension here that she could not account for.
‘Emily!’ Alice had finally reached the end of her fraying tether. ‘We’re here to be measured! You
promised
.’ And she was pushing forward, forcing Emily to
step back. The blind beggar’s head shifted sideways, that sightless gaze fixing on Alice.
Everything happened so rapidly that she barely registered the events as they unfolded, only pieced them together in retrospect. As Alice remonstrated with her, the beggar lurched up, barged into
her, then was off down a side street and away from the market. Alice let out a gasp of utter outrage, mouth open to deliver some acid comment, but then she let out a wail of dismay.
‘My purse!’
Emily had sometimes called her a thoughtless girl – and applied that label silently in her head far more often – but she herself did not stop to think at all. In an instant, her feet
took her in pursuit of the thief, leaving her mind to catch up. She was still getting past the thought,
He wasn’t really blind
, when the fugitive turned another corner ahead of her.
When she followed him round it, she had got as far as,
Thank God I wore good shoes!
Catching sight of him making another turn – his face a pale flash as he glanced over his shoulder
– Emily pushed herself onwards determinedly. She was full of indignation that this man should come to
her
town and steal from
her
sister. The very fact of it was a slight
against her family.
What is Mr Northway doing that he cannot keep order on the streets?
And then she had him: the last turn he had chosen was a blind alley, and she almost ran straight into him as he tried to make it out ahead of her. Abruptly she was standing between him and his
escape route. Only then did she finally reach the thought:
What if this wasn’t a good idea?
They were both breathing heavily: she was not used to running, and he was a thin-limbed, half-starved specimen of a man. The blindfold had been pushed back up his forehead, revealing wild
mad-looking eyes.
‘Get out of my way!’ he spat at her.
‘Give me my sister’s purse.’ The words had fallen into place during the chase. Now, confronting him, she was not at all sure they were wise, but they came out anyway.
He bared his teeth and, with an ugly jerking motion, he had a blade in his hand – just an old kitchen knife, marbled with rust. ‘Just leave it,’ he hissed. His voice quivered,
and she thought there were tears in his eyes. ‘Just get out of the way.’
‘You’re a deserter.’ Again, not the most diplomatic remark to level at a man with a knife, but her mind was still rattling after the chase. She was very aware that this was not
a part of town she had ever frequented.
‘What if I am?’ He made an abortive gesture towards her with the knife, perhaps hoping that she would leap back and give him enough space to slip by, but she seemed to be nailed to
the spot.