Page 84 of The Truth of Our Past: Unframed Art MM Romance

House Hurrell was gone.

No one could say where. All the people of Aldeburke knew was that one scorching August afternoon, Lady Hurrell had ordered the family’s clothing and Rache Pavot’s jewels packed up and loaded into carriages, with enough supplies for several weeks’ travel. By first light the next morning, they were gone, destination known only to themselves.

Given that they had been thoroughly disgraced, barred from entering the capital, and stripped of all property, Sir Miche of Harnost wouldn’t have thought they had anywhere to go.

But gone they were, and after he had searched the house and bullied the higher-ranking servants a bit, he had shrugged to himself philosophically and dashed off letters to Rem in Tresingale and Darri in Segoile, to investigate the matter further.

As far as Miche was concerned, it was license to loot the entire estate.

“All of the princess’s things,” he had said, waving the packet of signed orders at the butler, whose name he ignored. “And Lady Pavot’s. Show me where they are, there’s a good fellow.”

“Of…course,” said the butler, and over the course of two days very slowly produced a number of objects that might plausibly have belonged to Lady Pavot, beginning with a few items from her bedchamber—as Op hele had said, it had mostly been stripped—and a number of small things that might have belonged to Ophele when she was a young child.

Miche would never have thought of searching for such things: dolls, children’s books, a stuffed rabbit, and a pretty dollhouse that looked to have been collecting dust in an attic for quite some time. But it was easy to imagine Rache and a little Ophele crouched together on the floor, laying an imaginary supper on the table of the dollhouse. And Rem and Ophele would be having a baby of their own sooner or later, wouldn’t they?

“Pack all these things up,” he told a nearby footman. “Carefully. Where’s that damned butler?”

The butler had become conspicuously difficult to find, and Miche was getting impatient with it. It seemed that some of the bad habits of the Hurrells had rubbed off on the servants, who were polite but notably unhelpful: they didn’t know where the butler was, they didn’t know where the princess’s chambers were, they had all just arrived at the estate themselves, so sorry.

All of this felt very familiar, after the last visit to Aldeburke. Miche took up a discreet position in the kitchen, nodded to Azelma, to whom he had already offered Ophele’s greetings, and waited. Everyone had to eat sometime.

“Jerry,” he said jovially, when the butler finally skulked through the door, well after breakfast. Catching the smaller man by the collar, he propelled him back up the stairs, none too gently. “Just the man I want to see. No one seems to know where the princess’s room is, it’s been infuriating.”

“I am Germain, sir knight,” the butler said, trying for some dignity. “I am quite busy, I’m afraid…”

“I understand.” Miche clapped a hand on his shoulder, offered his most winning smile, and squeezed. “I’m quite busy myself, Jerry. The princess’s chambers. Where are they?”

For whatever reason, Jerry was very reluctant to give them up. He balked. He stalled. He took Miche to two rooms that were very obviously guest rooms, lacking any objects whatsoever that might have belonged to a young lady. It seemed such a stupid, petty thing to be so obstructive over, Miche was more perplexed than angry .

“Have you gotten lost again?” he asked sharply, as they moved down a narrow set of corridors that were plainly meant for the use of servants. At this point, he wouldn’t have been surprised if there were four men waiting at the end of the hall with daggers.

“No, sir knight,” Jerry said. His little mustache was twitching with agitation. “This was her room.”

He pushed the door open and stepped aside. It looked like a servant’s room. A servant no one much liked. Small, bare, with a dingy pallet bed, a battered wardrobe, one wooden chair, and a single stingy window, from which issued a pronounced draft.

“I am a very charming, clever, and handsome man.” Miche caught the butler by the shirtfront and lifted him to his toes. “But I have never been patient. You are telling me this was the princess’s room?”

“Yes!” The butler exclaimed, twisting his head back as if he thought Miche’s snapping teeth would go next for his jugular. “Forgive me, it was the lady’s orders, I swear it by the stars!”

Miche didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it. But he was also a man who remembered details, and suddenly he recalled those ragged, pathetic dresses Ophele had been wearing when they arrived in Aldeburke. There was a half-dozen more just like them in the wardrobe. Under the bed he found even more damning evidence: stacks of books, most of which were well beyond a servant’s level of literacy.

Ripping the flimsy bed out of the way, Miche flung it at the opposite wall, ignoring the startled shriek as Jerry dodged. Tucked in the furthest corner under the bed was a basket of what might have once been bread and a wedge of very, very moldy cheese, wrapped tightly in oilcloth to keep the vermin out. The sort of food a hungry person might hide away, in case of future need.

The butler let out a sound of disgust, covering his nose against the stench.

“You are telling me,” Miche repeated dangerously, so angry that he thought he might just kill this fellow after all, “that the child of Lady Pavot, the daughter of the Emperor was kept here?”

There was only one person on the estate that Ophele had trusted. Miche went straight back to the kitchen .

“I’d like a word with you,” he said to Azelma, who was up to her elbows in dough and flour. The old woman glanced at him with no surprise at all.

“I suppose you would,” she agreed, scraping the dough off her fingers. “Lettie, come finish these buns. You can give me a hand in the herb garden, young man. They’ll be withering for the winter soon enough, and you need a pound of dry seasoning for a quarter pound of fresh, my stars…”

Silently, Miche waited as she washed her hands and then headed up the back stairs and out to the herb garden in front of the kitchens, the plants laid out in careful, decorative patterns to please any guests who might roll by in their carriages. He was not much in the mood to be toyed with, especially by an old lady who—as he now recalled—had never once given him a straight answer about anything. There was a great deal Azelma had neglected to tell him at their last meeting.

“You never answered her letters,” he said as she stooped beside some fragrant grey-green shrub and began stripping its leaves. “You’re the only person she ever wrote to.”

“I never got any letters,” she said, in a tone that indicated he should have already guessed this. “But even if I had, I guess I wouldn’t have answered. The lady would only have sent my letters if it served her, somehow.”

“So it was Lady Hurrell,” Miche said. “Not the lord?”

“Most of the time.” Azelma gave him a sharp glance, nothing at all like the grumbling, good-natured woman who had brandished a ladle at him last spring. “What do you want to know? Seems to me that you don’t need to be prying into Her Highness’s business if you’re only here to steal the silver.”

“His Grace will want to know. Needs to know.” There was a sick, sinking feeling in his stomach. He needed to know, but he didn’t want to hear it. Miche suddenly remembered how Ophele did not expect to be treated kindly.

“Ah, well, if it’s His Grace that wants to know,” she said tartly. “Fetch me some of that tarragon, I didn’t bring you out here to idle about with your hands waggling in the wind. You’ve already seen her room, haven’t you? You need me to say it? Lady Hurrell blamed that child for everything that went wrong for House Hurrell. Taught her that it was her fault, and she had to make up for it.”

Mechanically, Miche crouched beside the plant she had pointed out. He had never seen a tarragon bush.

“Tell me all of it,” he said.

She told him. He hardly noticed what he was harvesting; he might have plucked up whole nettle bushes and never felt the sting as he listened. Working in the kitchen as she did, Azelma hadn’t seen much of it herself. But she had heard enough. Small things, at first: the maids coming back with a full meal tray, saying Her Highness had been sent to bed without supper. Days at a time when the princess was not seen at all, having been locked in her room as punishment for some infraction. Such things made everyone nervous, especially when Lady Hurrell began ordering them to discipline the little girl; wasn’t such rough handling blasphemous? She was a child of the stars, after all, daughter of the Emperor.

But then Leise and Nenot had become her maids, and they hadn’t seemed troubled by anything the lady asked them to do.

“I was worried,” Azelma admitted. “After a while folk stopped saying princess and started saying bastard. And she was such a skittish little thing, I could barely get two words out and she’d be off like a shot.”

“They called her a bastard?” Miche echoed. “The servants did?”

“Not all of them, but those as wanted Lady Hurrell’s favor knew what she liked to hear.” Azelma’s wrinkled lips pressed tight together. “That was how it was until Her Highness was…oh, ten or eleven, I’m not sure. She and Lisabe had quarreled, as girls do, and Lisabe came up to the house dripping wet from the stream. Well, you would’ve thought the princess had tried to drown her. Lord Hurrell made such a to-do, the poor creature didn’t dare poke her nose in the house for three days. His lordship finally turned the whole estate out to look for her.”

The frills of her white cap quivered with outrage.

“He said she was missing. Pah! Hiding! I don’t know who it was that found her, but I tell you, I was looking. I might’ve just marched out the gate and down the road if I had found her. But it wasn’t me. By the time they called us back, it was already over. One of the house girls said later there’d been such a hullabaloo in the parlor, and she scarpered again. She always was quick. They were still turning the house upside down at midnight, looking for her. ”

There was an almost spiteful satisfaction in her voice, but it faded as she sank down onto a nearby rock, fanning her face.

“She was hiding in my room, as it turned out,” she went on. “I don’t know how she got there. Wouldn’t have guessed she knew where it was. But she was under my bed and covered in sick. Lord Hurrell struck her.” Azelma tapped her temple, a single, illustrative gesture. “She didn’t know anything, when I found her.”

“That’s a hanging offense.” Miche’s tongue felt strangely wooden. “He laid hands on a child of the stars? He made her bleed? And no one said anything? The whole household should be flogged for it, why did no one speak?”

“Who would we tell?” she asked acidly. “The Emperor? He’d never bothered with her before. Everyone on this estate swore an oath, sir knight. To keep our silence even unto death, lest we be exiled forever to the void between the stars.”

Miche looked down at his hands. He had accidentally torn one lemony-smelling shrub in half.

“I’m not excusing myself,” Azelma added, softer. “I should’ve done something sooner. But I expect if I’d tried contacting her father, I’d’ve been sent out the door that very moment, and done no good for me or her. And I think it gave them a fright. I didn’t tell them I had her, you see. They must have had a nasty few days, wondering if she’d gotten into a closet somewhere and died. The great bullies,” she flared. “A grown man, hitting a little girl. He might have killed her; she was wandering in her wits for days.”

There were so many kinds of cruelty in the world. Miche had seen more than his share, doled it out himself when it was necessary, and done his best to anesthetize himself to the rest. But the thought that even as he had been protecting Remin from the Emperor’s relentless cruelties, the Emperor’s daughter had been enduring a separate set of miseries almost made him laugh. Some cosmic balancing of scales? Rache Pavot’s daughter, paying for the crimes of her parents.

But Miche wasn’t like Juste, to seek rational explanations for the things people did, or look for comfort in the mysteries of the stars.

“I’m going to take everything,” he said finally. “Everything she’d want. You’d know best. Tell me which is which. ”

He took the library. Not just the books. The whole library, chairs, lamps, tables, sofas, shelves, he swept it clean. Everything Azelma said the princess had liked, he took. Everything Rache Pavot had touched, he took. Vases. Paintings. The armchair where Rache had used to sit with her little daughter, reading together before the fire. Ophele’s cradle and other baby things, hidden in an attic. He turned the manor upside down, worked every servant in the place from sunup to sundown, packed every wagon in the carriage house full and emptied the stables of horses to pull them.

Every night, he set his men to watch all those precious items and then found his bed in one of the dozens of guest rooms, all of them finer by far than the princess’s miserable closet. He never had to wait long. In a few minutes, one of the maids would come tapping on the door, and Miche let her undress him and touch him and then lost himself in her sweet female flesh. Everyone had their own ways to seek oblivion.

He also made time to seek out Nenot and Leise, who had been trying very hard not to be noticed.

“You can leave. Now,” he told them, right there in the middle of the kitchen with half the servants watching. The two women were cold-eyed and hard-mouthed, and looked to him like they would have liked having a princess under their thumbs. “If you are wise, you’ll go somewhere far away.”

They packed before the eyes of all the other servants. A dozen people saw them leaving, walking out the gates of Aldeburke with valises in their hands and enough food to reach the nearest town, three days away.

They would never reach it. At nightfall, Miche slipped out to find their camp beside the road, killed them both, and buried them a short distance into the forest.

He did not expect anyone to protest. The penalty for laying violent hands on a child of the stars was death. But he also would not for the world cause trouble for Remin or any upset to Ophele, so he washed up in a stream afterward and was back at the manor before dawn, with only a couple of his own men the wiser. The security at Aldeburke had always been terribly lax.

In all that huge manor, Miche only left a few guest bedrooms untouched. He ransacked the office, but left the ledgers more or less in order. Ophele’s new steward would arrive soon and deserved better than to sleep on floorboards. But he put the fear of himself, Remin, and the wrath of the divine into the servants that week. His recommendation, the second he got back to Tresingale, was going to be to fire every single one of them. All of them had watched. Only one of them had done something about it.

“We have need of a cook, in Tresingale,” he said to Azelma, as they stood together in the kitchen and supervised the packing of the cookware. “Whatever you’re being paid, I guarantee we can pay more.”

“I followed Lady Pavot here,” Azelma said after a moment, and reached for her set of ladles over the stove. “I’ll follow Her Highness, too.”

* * *

“There’s still no sign of him?” Ophele asked Sir Edemir in the storehouse office, trying not to sound too worried.

“It is still early yet, my lady,” said Sir Edemir, reassuring. “There will be a signal when he’s about two days away, a column of green smoke. You can see it for fifty miles on a clear day. But the hunters say there’s been snow to the north, and everyone will travel slower in bad weather.”

“It has been so cold…” She trailed off. An autumn storm had come and gone over the last few days, leaving a persistent chill behind, so cold that she was wearing her cloak from Aldeburke again. How much colder Remin and his men must be, high in the mountains near the Spur.

Ophele had tracked the progress of their journey. Every day, she looked at her own maps, following the trail Remin had explained to her, guessing how far they might have gone. It was not good for her; sometimes it made her physically nauseous to imagine what they might find, all those dangerous miles away, and the only thing worse would be if they found nothing at all.

“We have all been colder, my lady,” Edemir said, and sat down at the table beside her. “For much longer, and with much less hope of remedy. Rem knows how to take care of himself, never doubt it.”

It was funny how both Sir Edemir and Sir Justenin were such calm, placid men, and yet so different. Sir Justenin was unfailingly kind and gentle to her, and yet somehow she always felt there was something hidden under those dark, still waters. Sir Edemir was clear all the way to the bottom.

“But perhaps I can divert you in the meantime,” he added, producing a thick stack of books. “My mother was kind enough to advise me on reputable sources for sewing, and even sent a few of her own things to help you begin. Will these suit?”

“Oh—oh, yes, thank you,” Ophele said, flustered. Her interest in embroidery was at an all-time low. It only made her feel guiltier to see the pretty skeins of silk thread and needlebooks that Countess Trecht had so thoughtfully provided. Real Rendevan steel, by the look of them.

Something else that she could do badly.

“It is my pleasure, my lady,” Sir Edemir was saying warmly. “Though perhaps you will oblige me for a little while longer, and help with these orders? We’ll soon be closing the ferries for the winter, so we need to note anything we have not yet received…”

Ophele had thought, with the harvest in, that the hardest work of the year was over. But the same men who had broken their backs reaping the fields had immediately turned their attention to the forest, foraging vast quantities of mushrooms, berries, nuts, roots, and assorted tubers, which were then hulled, roasted, and otherwise preserved. Every day the hunters returned with boar, deer, elk, and bear, fattened and sweet from their diet of berries. All that meat had to be smoked, salted, or dried, and the smokers behind the cookhouse sent up such a constant reek that Ophele was already sick of smoked meat, and she hadn’t even had any yet. It was fortunate that they had cleared out so much warehouse space, for it was filling up again with all the provender required to feed a town for the winter.

That was where Sir Edemir and his secretaries came in. It was their task to inventory all that food and augment it with supplies from the Empire where necessary, issuing an explosion of final orders for the year. But it wasn’t just foodstuffs. Many of Remin’s knights were finally moving into their own homes, either in the barracks or in town, and Ophele loved to see all the requisitions for beds and wardrobes and washstands, simple comforts that Remin’s men had been denied for so long. Every time she came across one of these orders, she lingered over every detail, delighted to discover that Sir Justenin wanted a dozen bookshelves, while Sir Tounot had sent for a set of pigments from Capricia for his painting.

She was buried six deep in orders when the scholars appeared, and Sir Justenin had to clear his throat to make her look up .

“Oh. Sir Justenin,” she said, blinking to find herself surrounded by green robes. Her ink-stained fingers went anxiously to her dress as she began to rise, only to sink back down at a warning flick of Justenin’s eyes, pinning her in place as effectively as if he’d nailed her down.

“Your Grace,” he said, inclining his head. “May I present Master Hayas Forgess of the Tower of Scholars, and his journeymen?”

She felt a little trapped with four tall men looming over her, and surely they must be disappointed, as if they had been prepared for a queen and found themselves presented to a milkmaid. But she could not think of her own feelings. She was Remin’s duchess and must protect his dignity.

She must not blush.

She must not stammer.

“Hello,” she said. “Sir Justenin said you wished to speak to me?”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Master Forgess bowed his head. “On my own behalf, as it was my loud mouth that you heard. There’s a certain process for these things in the Tower, but I know the devils don’t care for it any more than a cow does. I will beg pardon for my words. I was hasty, and intemperate. On further examination, we found much merit in your proposals. But even if we didn’t, it would still be unforgivably rude. I beg you to forget it. I wish I had not spoken so.”

From the look on Sir Justenin’s face, she just bet he did. Was any of that true? She wished she could send everyone away so she could ask, but Leonin and Davi would never agree to go. And judging by the nervous glances the journeymen were shooting that way, she could just imagine the expression on Davi’s face. Even if he wasn’t actually mouthing the words die die die, the spirit was certainly there.

“I accept your apology,” she said, with all the dignity she could muster. “I hope the work is…useful.”

The journeymen relaxed. Master Forgess glared.

“Useful,” he said, and jerked his head when Sir Justenin leveled him with a cold stare. “Yes, my lady, thank you. You are very gracious.”

Everyone else fell all over themselves to agree. They bowed. They apologized again, complimenting her work for its thoroughness, its interesting construction, its novel ideas. And after a few more excruciating courtesies, Sir Justenin finally ushered them away, with Master Forgess all but chewing his own tongue. He looked as if he had wanted to say something else very badly.

It was only as they were shuffling out the door that Ophele realized what had been missing.

“Why did Master Torigne not come?” she wondered aloud, once the door shut behind them.

“He left, my lady,” replied Sir Leonin, and Ophele spun around to face him, her heart contracting.

“He left?”

“Yesterday. He went back to the capital,” Sir Leonin explained, and Ophele sank back into her chair as the weight of everything that meant descended on her shoulders.

* * *