“Won’t this expose the ghost?”
“The journals Eff writes for spend most of their time shut down by the Imperial Police. It’ll be months before the article comes out, and by then he’ll be safely back in his own country. Whew I’m exhausted! I’m going to lie down and have a rest. In this supposedly haunted room, we should be safe from any intruders, but I’m locking the door just in case. Why don’t you have a sleep too? That brandy should make you nice and relaxed.”
“Yes, mother!” She grinned, tossed back the rest of the glass and lay down.
I spread my cloak over her.
“Shine, how do you feel about your real mother?” she asked, as I was drifting off.
“Aurora? I don’t feel much at all. Sometimes I’m annoyed at her. If only she’d made some financial arrangements for me.”
“Is that all?” Klea sounded shocked.
“It’s impossible for me to feel very much. She was gone before I knew her. I’m curious about her. I’d like to know what sort of person she was. But I hardly think of her. Sometimes when I was younger I was upset that she left me. But Eff used to say she’d have come back if she could. Eff thinks she’s gone. Dead, I mean. I think so too. It’s Eff who’s my mother, Klea.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Klea. She let out a sigh and was quiet and I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was dusk and the house was all a-bustle. The mages must have returned from the hunt.
I dragged myself out of bed and slipped quickly into clean clothes. Klea slept on—the sleep of the exhausted, or rather the sleep of one who had consumed half a bottle of brandy. I wondered again what must be in that letter, and it occurred to me how I might find out for myself. There was a lead Klea had suggested, but which we had forgotten about in all the excitement.
Taking care not to be seen leaving my ‘haunted’ room, since that might mean that I too would need to be exorcised, I slipped down the hall and climbed up the winding staircase into the servant’s quarters in the attic. What if the letter had never been in Toy’s possession, but had been given to her maid for safekeeping as Klea had suggested?
As I’d hoped, all the servants were away, running around after the returning mages, leaving the servant’s quarters deserted. Having helped with the organising, I had a good idea which room Lady Chatoyant’s maid was lodged in. I crept up to her door and, emboldened by the silence of the attic, opened it without listening first.
Hagen Stellason was sitting on the small bed, with only his trousers on; his feet and chest were bare. Nice hard body, I thought, before it occurred to me what he must be doing there. A bit of delight in the afternoon as the old saying goes. I’d seen him flirting with Chatoyant’s maid on a number of occasions.
We stared at one another.
He smiled, and I felt the outrage rise in me.
“You ride rat!” I said, before I thought not to.
He shrugged.
“It’s Blessing time,” he said. “And Drusa is a lovely woman. And keener than some.”
That last slighting remark bought me back to myself.
“True,” I snapped, and managed to shrug in what I hoped was an uncaring fashion, before slamming the door and striding away with very firm steps. Nothing to show the dark disappointed feeling in the bottom of my stomach. I felt miserable for some time after, all through the bustle of getting ready for dinner, which included a battle of Imperial proportions between Hilly, Tane, and Thomas in the kitchen, and an awkward conversation with the unfortunate maid servant who’d discovered the ghost in my room.
The poor woman, who seemed to be the first cause of the battle between Tane and Hilly, was sitting in the corner of the busy kitchen, pale, covered with Holy amulets and being fed garlic soup by Hilly to protect her from being permanently haunted.
“It was horrible, horrible,” she kept saying. “A dead thing under your bed. All horrible and white and pale. Oh, Marm Shine, I fear for you. ’Tis some ill-omen, for sure.” She and a couple of the other servants pressed Holy amulets into my hand. I thanked them for their kindly thoughts and tucked them into my body shaper, where they stuck into me uncomfortably. It was nice of them to care.
I spent most of that night sitting in Lucient’s room, watching him play cards with Great-Uncle Nate and some of the retainer mages. He hated cards, but had decided that this was better protection against Blazeann and Chatoyant than me. It seemed to work. Both women stuck their heads in at the door and went away quickly.
Out on the lawn, Scintillant had organised a game of blind man’s bluff which seemed to end very early with everyone disappearing into the bushes. The only excitement occurred when Great Uncle Five wandered into the midst of it and spilled his bucket of river sludge. He called Scintillant an over-sexed rotifer, which had a certain ring to it.
The boredom of watching cards (I mean honestly, who wants to watch when they can do?) gave me time to think over the scene with Hagen. It occurred to me that he’d been in the perfect position to search Chatoyant’s maid’s room (and indeed her person) for things she might be keeping safe for her mistress. Was I misremembering, or had one of his hands been hidden under the bedclothes—a hand that could have been holding, for instance, a letter? Since Lucient didn’t need me, I excused myself quite early in the evening and went off and searched the room Hagen shared with Great Uncle Nate’s valet. To no avail, of course. If Hagen had the letter, he must be carrying it on his person.
When I looked in at Eff’s room to check on Shadow, he and she were deep in argument over whether adopting ghost inventions meant we had to adopt their mindset.
“Your Empire needs to open itself more to outsiders,” the ghost insisted.
“Not at the price of outside interference in our polity,” came back Eff.
There was no chance of getting a word in edgeways, so I left them to it.
Hilly had told me my own room should be safe for me now, as long as I kept the amulets with me. I still had to step over the bread and bowl of water to get in through the door, but the candles had burned down to their stubs, so there was no chance of my setting myself alight in a thoughtless movement. Klea was gone, leaving only a tumbled bedspread behind. No doubt she was off stalking Chatoyant.
Lucky me. I had the evening free to spend time checking that my accounts were in order—a suitably anticlimactic finish to another tiresome Blessing Festival. Now all I had to look forward to was the inevitable interview with Lord Impi. He always stayed home from the hunt on the last day of the festival and looked over my books, querying every expenditure, complaining that we were wasting too much money on frivolous items such as wages and fence building and suggesting that if only I’d try harder, I could get a better price for our mangel-wurzels. Or mangel-wurzels for a better price. It never seemed to matter if I was buying or selling.
AS I WAS dressing in a workmanlike outfit next morning, trying to find a nice balance between practical and fit for an audience with a nobleman, Klea came in the window. She was calmer than she had been the previous morning, but her news was no better. I put a quilt round her shoulders and rubbed her back. Through chattering teeth she told me that Lady Chatoyant had once again spent the night awake, drinking Nightowl and pleasuring and playing cards with a couple of young village men.