Chapter 7: A Convenient Fever

# A Convenient Fever

Her father’s boots had left wet prints all the way up the stair.

Mira was standing at the top of it with a candle, because the outer door had opened twice in the night and the second time she had got up. The prints were dark on the stone and drying pale at the edges, with grit in them, and the frost on his shoulders had begun to melt and run.

“Papa.”

He stopped two steps below her, which put his face level with hers, and he looked at the candle instead of at her.

“You’re up,” he said.

“I’m up.”

“Go back to bed.”

“You’ve been walking the gallery,” she said. “I heard you at it an hour ago, and I heard you before that.”

He came up the last two steps and she stood aside to let him in. He went to the fire, which was down to embers, and held his hands out over it as though there were more in it than there was.

“Word came from the north,” he said. “Night before last. The Dowager wrote it herself.”

Mira set the candle on the table where she could see his face by it and sat down on the edge of the bed with her feet flat to the floor and her hands folded, because if she had stayed standing she would have found something to do with them.

“She’s agreed,” she said.

“She has. The terms will be drawn up in the north and her man will bring them south. She says she won’t wait on the weather.” He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the mantel. “There’ll be an envoy. Two days, three.”

“And Ada.”

He was quiet a moment. “There’s still no word.”

“There will be no word,” Mira said. “Not to us.”

Her father turned his head. “You sound sure of it.”

She had given her sister a purse and a horse and had stood at the garden gate while the horse boy put his hand under Ada’s elbow, and she said now, “I know what she’s like when she’s decided something.”

“Yes.” He let his breath out. “So do I.”

He straightened, and then he said, all in one piece, as though he had practiced it on the stair, “The contract with Auberon’s father will have to be broken. There’s no way to do it that isn’t an insult, so I’ll send a man with gifts and a letter that says nothing at all, and they’ll take it the way they take it.”

Relief went through her so hard that she had to look down and count the boards between her feet. In the other life Auberon had been her husband, and the knife had come out of a direction she never turned her head for. Now a man would ride out with a box and a letter, and that would be the end of it.

“Does his father know yet?”

“Nobody knows yet.”

“And what does my uncle say I am?”

Her father’s jaw moved. “He says you’re willing.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No,” he said. “He did.”

The fire popped. She waited.

He said, “He asked me for you. In the room with the fire and the wine, with the door shut, he asked me. And I gave him my word. That’s all of it. That’s what your father did.”

“You didn’t ask him for anything.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s part of the point.”

“Mira.” He turned around. “Ask me the question.”

She had known it since he said the Dowager’s name. She had known it on the stair, from the shape of his shoulders, and she had been stalling for the extra minute of not knowing.

“Am I to take Ada’s place?”

He did not answer.

“I’d rather you said it,” she said.

“I know you would.” He put his hand over his eyes and took it away. “Yes. Your uncle has written north that there’s a second daughter in this house. The envoy is coming to look at the terms. And you’re to be married before the roads close, because if the roads close first—“

“Then Hask sits at Brenmoor till spring — Hask, who burned Dunmoor in the autumn and will burn the next town the same way — and every man in the street remembers that we promised the north a bride and then found something else to do.”

He looked at her.

“When does the envoy come?”

“Thursday. Friday at the latest.”

“Then he’ll be lodged in the east wing.”

“What does that matter?”

“Whoever pours his wine will be asked what I’m like.” She held the candle steady. “I’d like the answers dull. Put Enid in the east wing while he’s here — she has a face nobody remembers and she hears everything.”

He looked at her for a moment. “All right.”

“You should hate me for this,” he said, at the door.

“Tomorrow I’ll be angry with you and you can have all of it. Tonight I want to sleep.” She got up and took the candle to the door with him. “Does Aunt Meret know?”

“Your aunt believes—“ He stopped.

“I know what my aunt believes. She believes a girl ran off with a horse boy and the rest of us are to be quiet about it.” Mira held the candle steady. “She doesn’t know about this.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell her. Not you.”

He nodded. At the door he said, “He—“ and then nothing, and then, “Good night,” and the door shut on it, and she stood in the dark and listened to his boots go down.

After he had gone she sat on the bed with her hands in her lap and went through it in order, the way she went through the account books when the sums would not come.

She had told her sister a lie in the summer. She had told her that she wanted Aldric Voss for herself, that she would take him and be glad of him and that Ada should not stand in her way. It had been a lie cut exactly to Ada’s shape, because Ada would not have gone otherwise.

The second thing she had kept in her own mouth: that with Ada gone there might be no marriage at all, and her father might get the duke to do the thing he had not had the stomach for since the spring, which was to fight. She had told herself in the summer that she did not want a war. What she had wanted was for her uncle to stop paying. She had told herself those were the same thing.

She had been wrong about which one he would rather do.

When she was fourteen she’d had a fever the physicians came for twice and then stopped coming for. When it broke she was carrying something around in her head that she had never told a living person. She didn’t call it a dream, because she had woken into the same room she’d left, with the hump of the blanket over her feet in exactly the right place, and dreams did not leave the blanket right. She called it nothing at all.

In it, Ada had gone north.

Mira went over it now as she had a hundred times. Ada in a hall she did not recognize, in gray, hands folded, being spoken to by people she was afraid of and not letting it show on her face. And Voss never touched her. Not that first year, not in all the years, and there were many of them. At the end of them Ada had put gold in her mouth and died of it in a shut room.

And Mira herself: a room she did not know, a knife she had not seen coming, her own hand pressed to her side and the blood coming up hot through her fingers, and the whole time a name she kept saying, which was Auberon — her husband in that life, and not a name she would have chosen for anything.

She had decided, somewhere in the middle of being fourteen and frightened, that she would not walk down that road. She had put her sister on a horse to take the north out of the picture, and she had counted on her father, and it had all been correct, every step of it, and here she was at the bottom of the same stair.

She laughed once, sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark. It came out wrong and she stopped it.

Then she got up and poured water into the basin and washed her face, and sat with the cloth in her hands until it went cold.

At first light she went down to the well-yard to see whether her legs still worked, and she took the long way round through the stable to the north gate, and four of her uncle’s women went with her.

She noticed them at the horse trough. The broad one had a shawl pinned at the throat and shoes meant for standing in. The tall one kept half a length behind, and when Mira stopped to look at a bay gelding’s off foreleg, the tall one stopped too, and looked at the gelding’s off foreleg.

Mira walked on to the gate and put her hand on the bar and looked out at the road, which was white and hard and ran away north between the hedges, and the broad woman came up and stood a little to her side and not in her way.

“Am I to be watched?” Mira said.

“We’re to keep you company, my lady.”

“Company.”

“The duke said company.”

Mira looked at the road a while longer. She had worked it out at the trough already: what a horse was worth, and how far the first market town was, and that she would have to sleep beside the road to reach it. Bram was gone with Ada. Everyone she could have sent was gone, or had been paid by her uncle longer than she had been alive.

“Company, then,” she said, and turned back.

She went up to her room and stood at the window until the frost went off the glass. She had a list of reasons to refuse, and they were good ones, and not one of them would put a single man in the field at Brenmoor, and the whole town had knelt in the road outside the gate. Whatever her uncle was — and she had a fair idea of what her uncle was — he had got out of the winter with twenty thousand households intact, and it had cost him nothing but his brother’s daughters, and he had worked that arithmetic out before anyone else in the house had woken up.

If she was going to be spent, she would rather be spent on purpose than by accident. She turned the thought over, found it sound, and found she still wanted to be sick.

Then she put on her second-best wool and went down to breakfast.

Nurse Enid came up at noon with her hands still red from the washing and did not bother to sit down.

“They’ve put your brother in the room over the buttery,” she said. “The one with the lock on the outside.”

“Which room?” Mira said, though she knew, and asked it to have something to say.

“You know which room.”

Mira did. It was where the duke’s steward kept the ledgers he wasn’t using, and it had a window the size of a plate, and there was a man on the door now, one of Rolf’s.

“What did he do?”

“Stood up at table with the steward and half a dozen of the household in the hall,” Enid said, “and said the duke had buried one girl of his brother’s already and meant to pay the north with the rest, and said it twice. The duke told him to sit down. He didn’t.”

“And?”

“The duke struck him across the mouth. He went down on one knee and got up and said it again.” Enid wiped her hands on the sides of her skirt. “Then they took him. They’re to keep him there till he’s sorry.”

“What did he say when they took him?”

“He said he wasn’t.”

Mira stood at the window with her back to the room. She kept coming back to the steward, who had been standing right there, and who would one day be asked to keep the duke’s accounts and the duke’s secrets, and who had watched his lord knock a boy down for saying a true thing in front of him.

“Has he been given anything to eat?”

“He’s not hungry, he says.”

“Take him bread anyway and tell him it’s from the kitchen and not from me, and tell him to keep his mouth shut until the envoy has come and gone.” She turned. “And tell him I know what he said.”

Enid looked at her.

“He’ll not keep quiet,” the old woman said.

“No,” Mira said. “But tell him I said it.”

She did not go to the room over the buttery. She stood in the passage where she could see the door at the end of it and the man sitting on the stool beside it, and she went back up and washed her hands for the second time that day, and afterward she could not have said what she had been doing it for.

That afternoon she went to her aunt.

The room smelled of the thing Meret had been drinking for her head nine days running, sweet and dusty, and there was a fire in it too big for the day. She was propped up with the curtains half shut and a shawl round her shoulders and her hair not done.

“I’m to be married in the north,” Mira said. “On Ada’s contract. In her place.”

She had spent a day and a night working out how to say it, and it came out as flat as that.

Her aunt looked at her for a long moment. “I know,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Since the night the riders came.” Meret turned her cup a quarter turn on the tray. “I am ill in a bed, Mira, not deaf. There were men in the yard at an hour when men are not in the yard, and my husband has not come up those stairs since.” She drank. “I said nothing because there was nothing to say that would have made it better, and because saying it out loud would have meant going down and saying it to him.”

Mira stood with her hands folded.

“Are you going to cry?” her aunt said.

“No.”

“Good. Neither am I.” Meret set the cup down. “Send me the lists when they’re made. I’ll tell you which of them is wrong.”

The envoy came on the Friday, in the gray of the morning, four riders and a cart and the roads hard enough to ring under the hooves.

Mira watched from the window in the long gallery. There was a thin, dry man in a gray coat with a satchel strapped across his chest and gloves that were too good for the rest of him. He got down slowly, the way a man with a bad hip gets down, and he looked at the house the way she looked at a horse she was thinking of buying. Then Osric came out onto the step with his collar turned up, and there were bows, and the whole party went in.

That evening her father came to her room before supper and shut the door behind him, which he only did when he meant to say something he had to work up to, and she put down her sewing.

“Was it very bad?” she said.

“It was very easy,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”

He sat down heavily. “Your uncle gave him wine, and did not say it until the third round of it, and then he said it: that his brother’s eldest girl had been taken with a slow fever in the autumn, that the physicians would not answer for her, and that there was a second girl in the house, better taught and better looking than the first. He said it into his cup. Then he waited.”

“And the man was angry?”

“Not in the least. He asked whether the second girl was promised anywhere else.”

Mira’s hands were folded on the sewing.

“And my uncle said?”

“That you were promised nowhere. That the promise to Auberon’s father had never been made — that was the phrase he used, and he used it to a stranger without putting his cup down.”

“Then it’s done,” she said. “One less thing.”

“It’s not a thing, Mira, it’s a man’s son—“

“It’s done,” she said, “and I’m not going to spend the winter being sorry about it in advance. What did the secretary say to the fever?”

He looked up.

“He asked who the physician was,” her father said slowly. “And your uncle gave him a name in the town, and the man wrote it down. That’s all. Then he said he would send north that night, and he did — he had a rider out before the gate shut, and the man rode past the envoy’s own horses to do it.”

“And Enid?”

“Your woman was in and out of the east wing all evening with the linen.” Her father’s mouth twitched. “She says the secretary asked the physician’s name three times, and what the eldest girl had been like, and whether the household was fond of you.”

“What did she tell him?”

“That you were quiet and kept your own accounts and had never been ill a day in your life.”

Mira turned that over. “Then he’ll write me down as dull.”

“He’ll write you down as something.”

She picked up her sewing again. She had never been healthier in her life than she was that winter, and somewhere on a road north of them a letter was going to the Dowager describing Ada as a sick girl.

“I’ll want to know what’s in those terms,” she said.

“Naturally you will.”

“In detail. Not the version for the hall.”

Her father got up to go. At the door he said, “You’re not afraid.”

“I’m afraid of the physician’s name,” she said. “He’s in the town. Anyone can walk up to his door and ask him what he was paid to say.”

Her father stood a moment with his hand on the latch, and then he said, “I’ll see to it,” and went out, and she heard him stop halfway down the passage and come back a step before he went on.

The answer came eleven days later, and it was yes.

It came to her uncle first, of course, and then the house began to move. Mira heard it in the morning in the number of people on the stairs and the way the kitchen door was propped open with a brick in the cold, and by noon Enid had the whole of it from the under-steward’s girl: the Dowager had read the letter, said the girl’s health was the north’s concern now and not the south’s, and named no physician, and made no complaint. The terms were coming with the next party, and she wanted them sealed before the year turned. The wedding would be at Vauntholm.

Mira sat down on the chest at the foot of her bed and stayed there for a while.

Two days after that the bride-price came in through the east gate with a drum.

She went out to the top of the step to see it, because there was no point pretending she wasn’t interested. Chests, iron-banded, stacked on a wagon with the paint worn off the boards. Behind the wagon, twelve horses on lead, and four of those were young enough that she would have liked to break them herself. The coin was counted out on a table in the yard with the steward and two of the north men and the whole household standing round, and when the steward called the figure out there was a sound from the crowd that Mira had not heard before in that yard and did not care for.

Giles came out of the hall with the tally in his hand and stood at the top of the step where the whole yard could hear him. A margrave sending for the daughter of the lord of Vale had sent more than he needed to, he said; a duke sending for a king’s daughter would have sent one grade above it. The town, he said, would be talking about this for a year.

Mira thought: he’s telling me what I’m worth. And then, because he had turned his head a quarter inch to see whether she had heard him, she thought: no. He’s telling himself.

The dowries were next. Ada’s chests had been packed since the summer, and the names on the tally sheets were scraped off and written over, and her uncle’s household added a set of its own, and the whole of it went down onto the wagons together, hers and her sister’s both, so that by the end of the afternoon she was richer than either of them would have been alone, and nobody in that yard could have said which chest had been meant for which girl.

Her father came up that night with a strongbox.

The box was iron, and small enough to carry under one arm, and the lid sat true, and there was a key on a ribbon. He put the key in her hand and set the box down on the table between them and did not take his hand off the top of it for a moment.

“There’s more in the spring,” he said, “if the rents—“

“There won’t be more.”

“There might be.”

“Papa.”

“It was always going to be yours,” he said, and his voice was not steady, and he took his hand off the box and went out before she could make any answer to that at all.

She put the key in the little purse she wore under her shift, and she put her palm flat on the lid of the box where his hand had been, and she left it there until the iron had gone warm, and then she went down to supper.

The date was given out at the end of the meal, with the whole household standing.

The eighth of the twelfth month. No later than that, the duke said, because the road north was a three weeks’ road in good weather and he would not have a bride traveling it in the new year. A date would be got from the priests; the eighth was already good for both marrying and traveling, and he did not intend to wait on a better one.

Twelve days.

Around her the hall made the sound a hall makes when it is pleased and has been given something to do. Cedric was still in the room over the buttery and had been there the better part of three weeks and had not said he was sorry. Meret knew now, and had asked for the lists, and had already sent one of them back with two names struck out and a note in her bad hand that said neither of those women would steal so much as a spoon.

Mira went up before the rest and lit her own candle and sat down at the table with a sheet of paper and a pen.

Twelve days. She wrote it at the top and drew a line under it.

Then the people. Enid, who would come if she was asked and would be a nuisance to the north and worth it. A woman for her hair, one of her aunt’s, the one with the good hands and the loose tongue — no, not that one. Her father’s man Wat, who could count a chest and keep his mouth shut about it. A second man for the horses, because four of the twelve were young and she would want a hand on them she had picked herself.

She got to the sixth line and stopped, because she did not yet know who would fill it, and she wrote nothing and went on.

Then she turned the paper over and wrote, at the top of the clean side, keys, and sat looking at it.

She got up and opened the door and found Enid on the stair.

“Vauntholm,” Mira said. “The household there. How many keys has the man who keeps it?”

“Which man?”

“The steward. The one who keeps the accounts and the linen and the cellar and the women’s work.”

Enid thought about it. “A fair few.”

“How many is a fair few?”

“I couldn’t tell you, my lady.”

“Then find out,” Mira said. “Quietly. From someone who’s been north and come back, not from anyone who’s only heard of it.”

She went back in and shut the door and sat down, and drew a line under keys, and beneath it began again at the top with the days.