Daughter of Mystery (3 page)

Unexpectedly, he laughed out loud. “Well that, I suppose, accounts for your strange enthusiasm for Latin conversation! You’re a odd child, but I suppose it hasn’t done you any harm.”

Margerit floundered in confusion but was saved from making a stammering reply by Barbara’s return. She offered a tray with two glasses to the baron first. He waved it over to her before taking his own glass. He swirled the very small amount of the liquid around in the glass and frowned up at his armin but said nothing.

Barbara asked softly, “May I speak?” At the baron’s consent she continued, “Maistir Fulpi is waiting outside. He asked me to inquire when the young lady might be able to return to her other guests.”

Having delivered this not-quite-a-question, she took her place once more, two steps to the baron’s side, staring at nothing and watching everything.

“Well I suppose I must give you back, my dear,” the baron said, handing her up from the sofa but remaining seated. “Perhaps we shall see more of each other soon.”

Margerit’s head was spinning but she seemed required to do no more than smile and bob yet another curtsy as she left the room.

Uncle Mauriz was, indeed, waiting just at the other side of the doors. He questioned her mercilessly as he escorted her back up to the ballroom: What had the baron said? What had he wanted? Why had he come to Chalanz so early? What had he offered? Would he use his influence to see her well launched in society?

“We talked about…I don’t know. Unimportant things.” She weathered his scorn, knowing answers would only lead to more pointed questions. When she thought on it, the conversation had been very odd. Her uncle would pick it to pieces, looking for meaning, for usefulness. Instead he berated her for her unworldliness. What was the point in having ties to such an important man if you didn’t make proper use of him?

But the avowed purpose of the night was dancing and so when they reached the crowded hall she could escape him by doing her duty. It felt more and more like a duty as the night wore on. Did other women really enjoy this? The endless stream of insincere pleasantries, the touch of hands in the dance figures—all either clammy and sweating or hot and lingering. She kept trying to imagine marriage to any of the young men presented as eligible and felt nothing but a faint panic. And Aunt Bertrut was determined that the ball be a success, so there was no release until dawn began lightening the sky.

Chapter Four

Barbara

The hesitant tapping on the door had Barbara not merely awake but on her feet and slamming the door open before she even remembered what she feared. The previous evening’s excursion had not ended well. After the girl had left, the baron had sat quietly cradling his glass of brandy for long enough that Barbara began weighing whether she was being punished with a test of patience. Or perhaps there had been some disturbing topic in the conversation she’d missed that must be pondered immediately. At last he broke the silence. “Barbara, find one of the servants who knows this place. Have my carriage taken to some discreet back door and then have my footmen come here to me. I think I shall need to be carried out and I don’t care to become a spectacle for all the town.”

She had arranged it all, then returned to hover over him as he was bundled out through a deliveryman’s door to the carriage and then from carriage to bed. It had been late indeed when she had been free to seek her own sleep. And now, on being woken, her first thought was of further disaster.

The housemaid who had tapped on the door stepped back quickly with her eyes wide. “The…the fencing master is here. Mefro Charsintek sent me up to fetch you.”

Barbara took a deep breath and rubbed at her eyes. “Damn.” Ordinarily she would have woken at dawn. “Tell him I’ll be down in—” She made a quick calculation, balancing the man’s reputation for short temper with the need to look somewhat presentable. “—ten minutes.” She was there in five by virtue of tying her long tawny hair back in an uncombed mass and forgoing a neckcloth.

He was waiting for her in the grand hall, a room currently bare except for several lumps of muslin-draped furniture in one corner. The curtains had been pulled open all along the south side of the room to spill light across the floorboards. The fencing master was a wiry Italian, just barely taller than she was herself. She preferred Perret, her teacher back in Rotenek, not least for the fact that his reach and height more closely matched those of her likely opponents. But he was a man of established reputation and could hardly be expected to abandon his school to follow one pupil into the country, no matter how generous her patron.

Signore Donati had the primary virtue that he was willing to take a female student when the better-known Chauten had refused her entrance to his academy. Barbara had needed only five minutes to convince him that she was no fashionable dilettante, playing at learning a few passes with her skirts kilted up. Keeping him waiting was not the way to maintain that evaluation.

“I do beg your pardon, Signore. It was a late evening. The baron had a ball to attend—” She yawned, adding support to the explanation.

“Balls will always be late at night. You must be sharp in the morning nonetheless. Sleep some other time than during your lessons. Now begin.”

They moved briskly from drills to sparring to theory. If it came to bright blades in dark alleys, Barbara had few doubts of her ability to keep the baron safe. He had seen to that in his choice of her first teacher. But to be a duelist was to be an actor on the courtly stage and there were no end of nuances to learn.

Donati surprised her with the sudden question, “Do you dance?”

She continued moving through the figure pondering the intent of the question.

“You go to balls; do you dance?” He saluted to signal a break in the action.

Barbara shook her head. “I go to balls in my office. Dancing is for the guests.” There had, of course, been dancing lessons in the past. There were very few arts of gentle living that she hadn’t been given a taste of at some point. But there had never been any occasion to put the knowledge to regular use.

“You should dance. Dancing, fighting, it is the same. You think too much on how you move, what you do.” It was the same criticism Perret made regularly. “Thinking, moving, they should work like two horses in harness. You must be able to carry on while disputing philosophy or reciting poetry or making love. It’s better to learn this while dancing—safer.”

Barbara’s lips thinned in annoyance.
And who would dance with me?
But aloud she said only, “I will consider it.”

She had begun the lesson nearly exhausted but in the end the exercise substituted for the lost hours of sleep. The desire to seek her bed again had faded by the time she’d washed and changed afterward.

The baron’s valet, quizzed in the kitchen over a late breakfast of bread and tea, allowed that his master was awake, if not yet up. That would be sufficient for arranging the duties of the day. Barbara tapped on the door and entered on a faint assent. At first she thought she must have imagined his response and that he still slept, but then his eyes opened and turned in her direction.

“Pray pardon for disturbing you. May I speak?”

“You usually do in the end.” His voice was thin and querulous. Barbara waited silently. “Yes, yes, what is it?”

“I thought I might take the bay mare out for some exercise this afternoon…unless you’ll have need of me.”

“Do I look like I plan to go gallivanting about the town? No, do as you please until the afternoon. I may not get up until supper, so there’s no sense in you kicking your heels here.”

Barbara hesitated. When he became snappish it meant he was feeling truly unwell. “Perhaps you’d like me to read to you?”

“No, be off with you. I only need to rest and I can do that by myself. But if you see Ponivin, make sure that he’s sent that letter off to Maistir LeFevre.”

Does he mean to increase the girl’s dowry after all?
But no, LeFevre had already planned to follow them to Chalanz. This was just the baron’s impatience at work. “I’ll see to it.”

The butler, of course, had sent the letter days before and was more than a little piqued at the suggestion he might need a reminder. “For it isn’t as if he could be here any sooner. And with a storm coming it may well be later.”

But the storm—if it existed anywhere other than the butler’s arthritic joints—was nowhere to be seen at the moment and the crisp air was perfect for shaking the fidgets out of the mare.

* * *

The town of Chalanz filled the circle of land where the Esikon River bent westward and spilled out onto the opposite bank across a bridge said to have been built in Roman times. To the right of the bridge, on the site of the old Axian Palace, stretched a long grassy park dotted with ruined walls and mysterious hollows. It was there that the energetic and the fashionable paraded on horseback or in carriages or even on foot, along pathways interlacing the riverside, thickly planted with flowers and hedges.

Barbara cantered the mare twice up and down the outermost road where such speed was allowed, up to the broad parade ground where the local militia was practicing, then back to the park gate. After that she reined back to a more sedate walk along a middling path that meandered back and forth among the scattered trees, now drawing near the riverbank, now falling back to touch the carriageway. On previous days she hadn’t paid much attention to the other park-goers as individuals, noting them only to stay out of their way. But now, as she neared one of the walking paths, she recognized the girl from the evening before. The baron’s goddaughter had left little impression the night before. She’d seen a hundred girls in their first season. They all looked much the same and none of them fell within the scope of her duties. But here in the open air she looked different. What was it the girl had said?
I know I’m not pretty but the dress is and that helps.
It wasn’t true, though. The gown had been a hindrance if anything, drowning her heart-shaped face in a sea of lace and ruffles. The deep blue of her pelisse suited her coloring far better than a debutante’s pastels and the chill air of the park had left roses in her cheeks and teased a few chestnut-colored curls out to escape from her bonnet. In the moment that Barbara noticed her, she glanced up and their eyes met across the grassy span. The girl leaned toward the older woman at her side and said something rapidly. Then just as Barbara would have turned away, she beckoned, hesitantly at first and then more surely.

Curious, Barbara dismounted and led the mare across the strip of lawn separating the two graveled paths. “How may I serve you, Maisetra?” she asked with a carefully calculated bow.

“I was wondering…that is, I thought it would be proper to call on my godfather. But my aunt,” she laid a hand gently on the other woman’s arm, “thought that perhaps he wasn’t receiving visitors, since he hasn’t sent cards around.”

Barbara acknowledged the other woman with a briefer bow. She hardly looked old enough to be Margerit’s aunt. A timid-looking, willowy creature, but dressed in elegant style, not the edge of fashion that spoke of the brute force of money, rather one that stemmed from a foundation of taste and a trained eye.

“But I thought perhaps you would know what would be best,” Margerit continued. “And so I could know to leave him in peace, if that’s what he wants. But then perhaps he doesn’t expect me to stand on ceremony and would be insulted if he hears nothing.” Her words trailed off with a trace of a frown.

“I think the baron would be very glad to see you,” Barbara began. “Not today—he’s resting today—but soon.”

Margerit’s frown deepened. “I hope he isn’t unwell.”

Barbara drew a breath to answer and unexpectedly felt it catch in her throat. “He’s dying,” she blurted, then drew another more ragged breath trying to regain control. It was the first time she had admitted it even to herself.

“Oh!” said Margerit.

The older woman nervously interjected, “Then we shouldn’t disturb him. I told you, Margerit, you aren’t to be a bother to him.”

“No!” Barbara protested, then hurriedly softened her words. “That is, I know he would be pleased to see you. As the poet says,
In the autumn of a man’s life, the days grow short—
”

“
—and the leaves fall suddenly
,” Margerit finished. Her face brightened with sudden pleasure. “So you know Pertulif? I’ve never liked his melancholy works, but do you know his
Song of the Mountain
?”

Barbara seized on the distraction to keep her voice from breaking and nodded. “Pertulif was born near Saveze, you know. His mountains are old friends of mine.”

“Margerit, this is unseemly!” her aunt said sharply. So…not quite as timid as she seemed.

Barbara looked away, trying to become invisible, as Margerit blushed at the admonition. The mare felt her tension and began tossing its head. She took the excuse. “The horse is still fresh—I shouldn’t keep it standing.” She mounted without waiting for leave. She owed no obedience to strangers. But she turned back at the last and urged, “Do come to see him. Tomorrow.” At Margerit’s promise, she pushed the mare into a trot, leaving them behind.

The path blurred in and out. She blinked rapidly, trusting the mare not to run anyone down. He was dying. Surely she’d known it since last summer—long before that unlucky duel had chased them from Rotenek. And wasn’t it lucky instead? Here he could spend his remaining days quietly, without demanding relatives, scheming courtiers and needy supplicants. She would miss him. No, that was too weak. The solid foundation of her world would be ripped away. He had promised—little throwaway promises accumulating over the years—that when he was gone she would be her own woman. That he would see her established in the world. And more than that, there would be a name. A name to give to her parents and to take for her own if she chose. But outside those things lay a gray curtain. She had never given thought to what lay beyond and now it frightened her. A prayer formed on her lips that he be granted many more years but it felt selfish to give voice to it.