Begin at the Beginning
“Your purse!”
“What?”
“Your purse, now!” said the stubbled chin man with a rough homemade spear in his hand. His two fellow thugs had equally crude spears. And there were two behind. In broad daylight on the Main.
I looked behind me and saw that Hal, my sixty-three-year-old guard in his blue tunic and Mr. Grims, my even older, almost Chamberlin, in a black, badly cut, suit, were facing two more armed men.
“I don’t have a purse,” I said truthfully. “I have a few coins.”
“Then your bracelets and rings, lady.”
“Do you know who I am?” I said trying to look taller.
“Doesn’t matter who you are. Unless you want to feel the tip of this spear…”
I began to fumble with the clasp on my golden bracelet. An heirloom, worn by my grandmother and her grandmother back a few hundred years at least. Of no great value except to the ladies of the House of Crant.
“It’s stuck.”
“Break it.”
I looked down at my bracelet and tried to work the clasp. Not fast enough. I felt a crash against the side of my head.
“Break it I said.” The thief raised the butt end of his spear to club me again. I hit him as hard as I could on the side of his head with the metal pommel end of my umbrella. I think I hurt him. I hope I did, but as he staggered back, I knew he couldn’t try to hit me again.
I heard a shout. My assailant was suddenly spearless and a large, tawny, man with what looked like a walking stick was rounding on his supporters. The walking stick crunched on the spear hand of the first and then broke the shaft of the spear of the second. In an instant, a knife appeared in the man’s left hand.
“Go.” was all he said. The five thugs, three now unarmed, began to run into the park. Hal blew his hunting horn and looked as if he was about to give chase.
“No Hal. The Watch will find them.” I said quietly.
“I should pursue my Lady.”
“No. You blew your horn. That’s all that is needed.” I turned to my rescuer. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure my Lady.”
I looked, remembered my training, and looked again. This man was not from Crant. For one thing, he was dressed in soft, amber, chamois leather. He wore well-made boots and had a sheath at his hip. No one in Crant carried a knife. There was no need to be armed and hadn’t been for hundreds of years. The outfit was the least of it: the man had flowing light brown hair to the middle of his back.
“I am in your debt, sir. Might I know your name?” Best to be formal at times like this, or at least that is how I was brought up.
“Jack Trime, my lady. Of the Chilcotin.”
“Then, thank you, Jack Trime.” Formality was working and my heart had stopped racing.
Trime looked about thirty and, despite his long hair, was clean-shaven with what, in the romances I read, would have been described as a set, square, jaw and high flaring cheekbones. Even the requisite “grey-blue” eyes.
I suspect he was good-looking looking but, to be honest, I was really not aware of his looks. I was too shaken and I simply mouthed the formula I knew from a hundred state occasions, “The Chilcotin Mr. Trime. You are a long way from home?”
“600 miles from the North, my Lady,” he said as if a twenty-five-day horseback journey was routine. And he seemed to know who I was.
“Can you walk with me Mr. Trime? I am sure my father will wish to thank you. It isn’t far.” He nodded and we fell into step up the Main. He told me about his ride down to the Coast along the overgrown railway tracks and trails which passed through the Merkin River canyons.….We did not speak of the thieves.
But I should start at the beginning as my tutors had always taught me to.
Oret
Indeed, you should my Princess. Indeed, you should.
And you should start with me. Oret. Who whelped you.
It was a hard birth. You were big, your mother small and I was there to cut and pull and bring the bloody mess of a Princess of Crant into the world because, Lord knows, none of the Duke’s physicians had the slightest idea of birth.
You lived. I did that. And I very nearly killed your mother but that didn’t matter all that much. Four hours of gently pulling you out. Yes, I used the forceps. The big tongs which left you the wee scar on the lower edge of your chin. I put my weight into I can tell you. We were well past the stage where your mother could push. It was main force and hope baby’s head didn’t pop out all on its own. Head and then twist the shoulders and there you were. Bloody and smiling and annoyed. No need for a slap on the bum. You were yelling long before I managed to let your legs squirt out.
A girl. I checked twice. You were supposed to have been a boy. A real heir. And now there was not a chance your poor mother would ever have another baby. You nearly killed her and there was every chance another baby, if it could be conceived, would finish the job.
So, to start at the beginning, you were it. The solitary hope of Crant. A girl and likely a witch. I birthed you.
Your mother was never quite the same. For all the drugs and all the care, she was not the same. You had torn something essential. Now she retreated. From your father, from her duties and, most of all, from you. You had hurt her as she had never been hurt before.
So, I arranged the wet nurse and the baby nurses and all the things needed to ensure that your mother saw you as little as possible.
That was my job and my hidey hole. Because I was not in the Duke’s House at Crant to whelp Princesses. My job was sludge. You were just another complication.
You are lucky to be alive. I did that. Most of us are, I suppose, lucky to be alive.
Now you are going to write. You liked writing as a little girl. In the end, however many thousands of words you write, this book will be all about the great secret of sludge.
Which is why I am here.
To keep it secret.
I am Oret.
------------
A Day in Crant
We all know how this is going to end. At least I do because I face facts.
Fact, I am twenty-two years old, a bit pretty and, more important to how this ends, the only daughter of Prince Ignatius, the Sovereign of Crant.
Fact, there are two border fiefs to Crant, Twix and Castor, each of which is ruled by an old, single, friend of my father.
Fact, I lack a brother.
Fact, by long and very, very well-established tradition, no unmarried woman can succeed as the most Revered Sovereign Prince of Crant.
It hardly takes a logician to conclude the interests of Crant, and my own, require my marriage to one of the other of my father’s old friends, the Elector of Twix or the Duke of Castor. Both of whom are, at present, without wives.
We are, I’m afraid, rather minor nobility. Crant is not a great deal more than a market town with its castle, well our castle, and a Cathedral and a small college. Attached to this is the Principality with half a dozen small, quite attractive, grey stone villages working towards becoming towns, and several hundred square miles of black soil farmland and, to my own delight, the Black Forest of Crant stretching back to the Coastal Mountains. In all my father rules over eighty thousand souls. Castor and Twix are much the same divided by the arms of the Merkin River.
On paper, paper which I have been forced to read and parse and analyze by a series of ever crankier tutors, we own Crant by leave of the Arch Duke Farn of the Duchy of the Middle Water. The current Arch Duke of Farn has never been to Crant, nor the prior Arch Duke nor the Arch Duke before that. It is, I gather, a long journey up the Sound and across the rivers and it has not occurred to an Arch Duke to take ship for at least two hundred years. Of course, the Arch Duke owes allegiance to the King Emperor who lives across the mountains on the plains and has never, in his many incarnations, so far as the histories record, ever been ocean side those mountains.
As a matter of practical fact, we own Crant because, a little over 3200 years ago (we think), an ancestor named Crant, built a farming village by the Middle Water on a set of hills beside the banks of the south arm of the Merkin and prospered. And he, and his son, and his son and so on, never, ever, sold any land. They had tenants.
The Arch Duke, who was neither grand nor actually a duke all that time ago, was a practical man and, finding the great-grandson of the first Crant had set himself up as a Prince, decided this was just fine and so the Principality was recognized.
All of which, as I write, is a matter of extremely boring constitutional history. Of all the subjects my tutors taught, the constitution was most likely, after economics, to put me to sleep.
I did not mind law, in fact, when I turned fourteen, I began to preside as a magistrate in the petty offences Court. First with Grims, my father’s, well mine really, steward, there to guide me through the evidence and the law and, later, on my own. My father ruled lightly, as had his father, and the petty offences Court saw errant bicycles, apple theft, dogs unlicensed and, once in a while, Jinks or Jabber arrested for public nuisance.
“Mr. Jinks,” I said from my chair behind a carved maple desk on the dais at the front of the walnut-panelled Court, “Could you not have found a more suitable place to relieve yourself?”
Jinks, an old lag with a craggy face and florid nose and rather a nice man, blushed scarlet and looked to his feet, “No, my lady.”
“You spent the night in jail did you, Mr. Jinks?” I asked as Grims had taught me.
“Yes, my lady.”
“Did you have breakfast before Court?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Then, Mr. Jinks, you have suffered enough. You are released, again, on your own recognizance. And, Mr. Jinks…”
“Yes, my lady,” said Jinks relieved that he would not have to spend another night in the none too comfortable cells nor, more to the point, eat another jail breakfast.
“Mr. Jinks, we are at the point where, should you disgrace yourself again, we will have to consider a term of exile.”
Exile, to one of the islands was the harshest sentence which the petty offences Court could impose. The islands were not unpleasant but they were deserted and lonely rocks off the Coast with a few scraggly trees and a bit of scrub. Two weeks alone in the crude shelter and porridge you cooked yourself three meals a day was not fun. You got a bag of oatmeal and barrel of water and a pot. I knew because my father, before I sat on my own on the Court, required me to spend a night in jail and three days on one of the islands.
“Yes, my lady. Won’t happen again, my lady,” He actually tugged on the wisp of hair on his nearly bald forehead.
“See that it doesn’t. Dismissed.”
It was my last case of the day and I changed from the long black robe a judge was required to wear. I shared an office with Penny Wisekoff who presided over the Family Court but her Court was not in session today.
I always walked from the Courthouse to the Castle unless it was pouring rain or, rarely, when there was snow. My father was not one for protocol except when strictly needed, and, as I walked our people would nod a bow or barely bend a knee in my direction. When I rode my bicycle I was officially invisible, it was only when I was mounted on Gertie or Huckster that what father called our people’s “feudal yearnings” would show themselves with full bows and deep curtseys.
It was finally, after the long, dark, wet winter, April and, for once, sunny. The sun bounced off the snow on the Coastals and the copper of the Cathedral steeple glinted where the old blue-green patina had worn away.
I walked alone. Mr. Grims and Hal, my guard, walked a few paces behind. Hal was nearly as old as Mr. Grims and carried his well-worn wooden spear with no air of menace. For generations, the Princes and Princesses of Crant had never had cause to worry about a threat from their people.
Hal was there because, well, to be a Princess somehow required a guard. Mr. Grims was there because he, more than my father, more than my tutors, more than my ladies in waiting, was Crant itself. In a larger Court, and if I was a boy, he would have been the Chamberlin of my own Court waiting for my father’s death to be promoted to become the Chamberlin of the Princely Court. In Crant, he was a bit of a dog’s body helping himself to three meals a day from the Castle’s kitchens and a grace and favour apartment beneath the east wing's eaves.
There was, so far as was known, and I had enquired, no Mrs. Grims. There was a young cousin who sometimes accompanied Mr. Grims to, no doubt, learn the odd ropes of his trade. This cousin, named Odo, lived in a hutch under the eaves of the stables along with half a dozen other promising young men of little family employed by my father.
The Courthouse was across from the sandstone Customs House and just up the embankment from the harbour. These were the only substantial buildings by the calm ocean.
From the Courthouse to the Castle was no more than a mile up a steadily sloping hill along which ran the main shopping street of Crant called, unimaginatively, The Main. At the Courthouse end were the hardware merchants and weapons shops. A few rather unfortunate drinking houses, a brothel or two to ease the unbearable urges of sailors, two gambling houses and curio shops selling the gleanings of sailors. Pawn shops too. The side streets were shabby but the shops facing the Main kept up appearances despite, at this end of town, being wood and stucco rather than the dressed sandstone, brick and granite closer to the castle.
The Main itself was paved with flat grey stones bounded by granite curbs and wide sidewalks. There was enough room on the sidewalk for broad-leaf trees, mainly chestnuts and maples which were just coming into spring leaf, the pale light green of the buds unfurling into the wind as it blew off the ocean.
Halfway up The Main, about three hundred feet above sea level, was the Circle with a park fronting on either side of The Main. This was a plateau which gave me a couple of hundred yards to catch my breath from the quite steep climb from the harbour. On one end of the park was the Government Building where the officials, the bane of my father’s existence, performed their miracles in a wonderfully symmetrical grey granite stone building three stories high with two grand wings, with little copper domes echoing the great, green copper dome of the centre block.
Across the Park was the Cathedral, designed by the same architect who had built the Government Building. Here the symmetry was vertical rather than horizontal and the stone a lightish yellow sandstone. Block on block had been stacked, nearly a thousand years before, into a building which seemed entirely constructed to tether the deep green patina of its copper steeple securely to the Earth.
Next to the Cathedral were the three buildings housing our College. At this end of the Main a double row of plane trees shaded the wide sidewalk. In the middle of the Park the Main split and flared outward around a fountain which a King Emperor had, in abstentia, given the town nearly five hundred years before. Around the perimeter of both sides of the park, more plane trees grew in rows offset twenty feet from the sidewalk.
I loved to sit beside the fountain watching the marble nymphs and what looked a little like porpoises beneath the spray. From time to time there was an eruption which shot a jet of water fifty feet in the air and splashed you if you sat too close. Today, on the other side of the fountain there were some lovely girls enjoying the sun. Fifteen or sixteen, they were dressed in simple, flattering, tunics and the leggings I had grown up in. I thought I recognized one of them. And, of course, not too far away, were three boys, a bit older, wondering how they could find a reason to chat to the girls.
A Princess is, of course, at the disposal of her people and in a moment, I walked over to the boys.
“Gentlemen.”
Now the bows were very deep indeed.
“My lady,” the boys chorused.
“I think I would like to sit with the young ladies over by the fountain. Will you join me?” The wonderful thing about being a Princess in a very small country is that everyone knows you even if you don’t know them. As it happened, I didn’t know any of the boys but I did know Verity Moss who was by far the prettiest of the girls, quite pale with jet black, thick, curly hair. “I’ll need one of your names.”
“Yes, my lady,” they chorused again.
“Richard, if it pleases your ladyship,” said the tallest and most forward of the boys.
Off we went. I took the lead knowing that I could count upon the girls to curtsy low and show off the happy fact the bodices of their tunics would spill a little open as they did.
“Verity!” I exclaimed as I held out my hand to lift her.
“My lady,” she said with a wonderful smile and rich, dark green eyes.
“And who are your friends?”
Verity quickly introduced her companions to me, and I introduced Richard and he introduced his companions and, if the fountain and the day and the park all do their work, in a few years there will be a very beautiful green-eyed baby whose hand the Princess’s silver will cross.
Grims, well trained as always, saw I was tiring of the delights of the fountain and slipped in beside me. “Luncheon my lady. Your father does not like to begin late.”
“Quite right, Grims.” I turned to my new friends, “I must leave you. But the Young Peoples’ Ball is only a fortnight away and I shall make sure you are all invited if you are not already.” And yes, I had remembered their names, first and last. Memory is a learned art and hours were spent in the nursery with trays of objects and lists. Not that the names were hard. After all, to be generous, there are only about eighty thousand of us in Crant and, while I did not know all the boys and girls, I had met at least half their parents and most of their grandparents. Fine old Crant names.
Bows and curtseys and we resumed our walk. The castle side of the park disclosed shops which catered to people who might, possibly, be called on to be received at Court. Pretty dresses abounded. A discreet corsetiere, hairdressers, two more brothels of a rather more refined sort for the more expensive relief of unbearable urges, a bow and gun shop for hunters willing to risk the randomness of our gun powder, a few houses in which, so I hear, strong drink and excellent wine are dispensed to the gentry, leather goods shops and, of course, shoe stores. Three.
The Main on the Castle side of the park had been planned by my great, great, great, great grandmother, Elspeth, who had grown up, according to family legend, two thousand miles to the south in the Free City of San Franco. She hated the rainy dark winters of Crant and insisted on enlivening the Main with broad sidewalks, high, gas lighted, windows and wide arcades which shot out from the shop fronts and kept the rain off. Better still, she nagged my great, great grandfather to face the street fronts with a very pale, grey marble which, over several hundred years, had faded to a milky white and lost its sharp corners. The trim and window frames were painted black and the hardware brass was shone daily.
At the Castle end of the Main, up another couple of hundred feet, there were also three coffee houses where the afternoon life of Crant occurred. By far the largest, Franz’s, had overlooked the Castle Park for centuries. It sat in a scallop cut from the corner where the Main intersected Castle Drive and the outdoor white metal tables were sheltered from the wind and, largely, covered from the rain.
When I was small, the current Franz, made a little ceremony of presenting me with my first, blackberry, gelato. I was five and the icy cool of the gelato on a steaming hot August day, was simply the best thing I had ever tasted. Tempting as it was to have a quick espresso I was running late and simply waved at Franz standing beside his huge brass espresso machine in the window. He bowed and smiled.
Now I walked, quickly, to the Castle. I did not run. Well, I could not run as I was in heels and a fairly tight skirt. Crant ladies and ladies coming to town from the country took care in their public dress. Always dresses or skirts, good stockings, beautiful wool coats and umbrellas with wood or wrapped leather handles. Pretty shoes in spring and summer, leather boots with a bit of style for all but the most awful winter days.
When I turned eighteen and returned from service, my mother, who is, to be fair, more than a bit eccentric but very correct, told me to put my hair up, tighten my corsets and to begin wearing dresses and high heels. As I had long, ample auburn hair, the first requirement of young ladyhood was not difficult. While I would have a hairdresser in before state occasions, I would usually have my maid braid and clip my hair during the day and tie it in a loose bun in the evenings.
Corsets were a fact of life for a girl of my breeding. I’d worn a training corset from the time I was twelve and, while Crant was not particularly interested in strangely tiny waists, I could lace down to a very respectable 19 inches for state occasions and other ordeals of discomfort. Day to day, I rather liked the sensation of being contained that a corset laced a little under 21 inches gave me. I’d done my service in a sporting corset. I was used to it.
It was sad to have to give up my tunic and leggings for a dress, hose and heels, but I was resigned. Better still, the long hems and the custom fittings meant I cut a quite attractive figure as I walked up the Main. I was never extreme about shoes. I was already five feet six, two inch heels made me the measure of any man I was likely to run into.
I liked full skirts, nipped waists and patterns; except, of course, when I didn’t, in which case my dress maker, Clem, despaired as to how she could achieve her accustomed elegance with only black wool or grey or rose silk to work with. I owned a lot of sheath dresses which scandalized the lovely old ladies of the Court. And for those an extra inch or two in the heel seemed right.
As a matter of economic duty, I made sure to purchase shoes, a bag, a dress or two, a hat and gloves every month. But Clem really made my clothes.
We made our way to the Family entrance to the Castle. The main gates were only used on State occasions and my return from a morning in Court didn’t quite count. In fact, except for the bi-yearly state visits of the Duke and the Elector, the main gate was only opened on my Father’s official Birthday, July 1. But our guards at the Family entrance snapped to attention as I approached and the footman held the door. My ladies-in-waiting, Clarisa and Elinor, were, well, waiting and I was bustled off to change for lunch.
The Castle itself is an old rambling sort of building. Mainly weathered granite with massive piers to hold up the beams. Its sole fortification is the nine-foot granite stone wall which surrounds the grounds. It, along with all the other buildings in Crant, looks a bit heavy because it is designed to make it through the regular small earthquakes and periodic huge shifts the entire Middle Sea experiences. We’ve learned a thing or two about how to build solidly and then decorate lightly.
The Family entrance itself opened into a gatehouse built into the wall. A flagstone path runs thirty yards to the side entrance of the Castle. This particular part was built by the same great, great grandmother who built the shops and is wonderfully light with floor-to-ceiling windows and a large courtyard. The wing is called Lady’s Gate and, delightfully, when I came of age, it became my private palace.
My rooms are to the rear, overlooking the Arbour Garden with its careful parterre gardens and the long, white pebbled, walk to the wall separating the outbuildings. Directly off the entrance is my State Dining Room to the right and a small living room to the left. There is the obligatory sweeping curved stairway into the main reception room but I never use it because it actually makes the journey to my apartments longer. The back stairs are more direct if less elegant.
“We’re a bit late, ma’am,” clucked Elinor, “I’ve had Renee run your bath.”
I shed my morning dress and embroidered petticoats as I headed towards my inner dressing room. My ladies in waiting dealt with my outward appearance, Renee, my lady’s maid, closed the door to my dressing room and, in an instant, the laces of my corset were slacked, my hose slipped off and my silk undergarments were somehow whisked away and my perfect peach bathrobe dropped on my shoulders.
“You’ll only have a moment my Lady,” said Renee as she closed the door. I walked to the tub. I knew I was rushed but I also knew that I would not be disturbed until I rang the crystal bell beside my bath. I lay back and looked at the wonderfully round and pink Graces painted on the surprisingly low ceiling over the tub.
Much as I would have loved to linger, duty awaited in its guise as “lunch”. Most days I had a salad and a little smoked salmon sent to my rooms. We are not a formal household and the only fixed item on the day’s rota is dinner which is where my father does what seems like half his business. Today, however, Sir Percival Sutter would be joining us to discuss our diplomacy. Being a diplomat and my father’s long-time minister of Foreign Affairs, Sir Percival just loved formality. Even a working lunch called for protocol.
I rang my bell and Renee had my bath towel heated and waiting as I stepped from the tub. Fresh underclothes, a rather tightly cinched white cotton embroidered corset and pretty white stockings. A little foundation and Renee just touched my cheeks with blush. Light eye shadow a hint of mascara and pale, coral, lipstick were all the colour I wanted for the afternoon. My ladies in waiting joined us and they helped me into my crinoline and then the lovely, full-skirted, balcony bodiced, pale ivory silk afternoon gown which swept down to my calves. A matched pair of ivory court shoes with a modest two-inch heel and I was ready.
“That really is a very pretty dress ma’am,” said Clarisa as she always did while she fussed to have it drape just so. For once she was right. I had left my hair loose but, in a few moments, Renee had piled it all up and pinned it for a slightly more finished look. Elinor held my mirror and I was amazed as always at both Renee’s skill and her speed.
“So then, Sir Percival,” I said as I walked from my dressing room into the corridor which connected my wing to the main part of the castle. Clarisa and Elinor fell in behind me although they would not be joining us for lunch. They performed, I suppose, the vestigial role of chaperones and left me at the white wood-paneled conservatory door.
Whether it is a formal lunch or a formal dinner, unless it is a State occasion, my father likes to take a glass of wine, standing, before we sit down. Today we gathered in the conservatory off the morning dining room. A grandmother or two back had planted orange and lemon and lime trees under the glass and our gardeners were very clever in keeping the old trees alive while replacing the dying with fresh specimens.
My father, in a quite elegant, but defiantly grey, tweed, suit, was stationed at the drinks table. “Well, my dear you are right on time…good girl.”
“Thank you, father,” I said as I curtsied. Not terribly low, more a habit than anything else; but, well, my father is the Prince of Crant and, even informally, my respect must be shown.
“Riesling?”
“Yes please,” I loved our Riesling. It came from our own vineyard and from time to time my own portrait had labeled a vintage. “Will Mother be joining us.” I asked thinking it was better to know.
“No. Not much interested in diplomacy. Never has been. She has Oret joining her for the afternoon,” My father could barely say Oret’s name without, quite literally, growling.
We were not entirely sure where Oret had come from but she had become a fixture in my mother’s life muttering about bad blood and the various bloody curses which had fallen on the House of Crant from the Days of Darkness. She could sit by the hour mesmerizing my mother with superstitious stories of the Fall and the punishment of Sludge. My father would not meet Oret, my mother could not imagine how she might save herself without the old woman’s wisdom and her cures. Occasionally, my mother would invite me to attend Oret’s afternoons. I tried to ensure that my duties called me away on those days.
“So just the three of us then father?”
“Not quite Ann, Lady Fetmore is joining us.”
“How nice,” I replied hoping to buy a moment or two to consider the unannounced invitation to the Duke of Castor’s striking daughter. Lucy Fetmore was in her very early thirties and, if I had had an older brother, would almost certainly have been my sister-in-law. She was a russet blonde who knew precisely how to make the most of her strong, rather pretty, features.
“So, it’s Castor then,” I had nothing to lose and there was really not much to choose between the Duke and the Elector.
My father laughed. “My dear Ann, you will be relieved to know that you are invited to lunch in your role as my heir rather than as my lovely, marriageable, daughter. I think we can certainly wait until next year or the year after before we need to get too concerned. No, Lady Fetmore is simply here to discuss a subject which you’ll need to master in the next few months.”
I had no time to express my relief. Sir Percival and Lady Fetmore were ushered into the room. Percival made a sweeping bow. So, sweeping you could sense his real disappointment that he was not wearing a feather festooned hat and sword to add dimension to his utmost, indeed abject, respect. Lady Fetmore curtsied to my father but not, of course to me as, while I was a Princess and she only a Lady, I was not yet a head of state.
“Riesling?” asked my father.
“Indeed, sir,” said Percival. He was erect, paper-thin man with silver hair and a clipped moustache. I have never seen him wearing anything but a faintly military dark suit and a cravat, which is to say a deep red patterned plume of silk ironed, but tied and poofed, at his neck.
“Lady Fetmore?”
“I think not your Highness. This is, I gather, a working lunch,” said Lady Fetmore, gay in a bright yellow afternoon dress, cut low in front and made slightly more demure by a sheer white scarf. Her mass of dirty blonde curls was held off her long and slightly freckled face with a band of bright yellow fabric exactly matching her dress. I could not help but notice that she was wearing pretty off-white court shoes with almost no heel but, standing next to my father barely two inches separated them in height. She managed a regal pose only to be undone when she smiled. The Lady gave way to the girl and her eyes glistened with sheer mischief. Nor could I fail to notice that the Sun had kissed her usually milky skin.
I looked down at my half-empty glass and wondered if I was going to be criticized when I had it refilled. Oh well. The scandal of a second glass of distinctly low-alcohol white wine at lunch, even a working lunch, would have to be borne with fortitude.
The three of them discussed the diplomatic world, a tiny place when you have only four courts close enough to have diplomatic relations. It really was just gossip and I had very little to add. Soon enough we went into lunch. By default, I was my father’s hostess and, gesturing to their chairs, I bade my guests be seated.
Our luncheon china is very old and very lovely. Simple white plates with a thin gold and black band on the edge and a tiny gold strip. Light, nearly translucent, they were, at least, three thousand years old. The crystal and silver were of the same vintage.
“Dear Ann, what absolutely beautiful china. Where ever did you have it made?” asked Lady Fetmore.
“We didn’t. It’s original.”
“What? It can’t be. Or if it is, the Crant museum’s director is going to be marching through that door any minute.”
“Oh, he’s tried. But the fact is that this china is actually mine by trust. It was my grandmother’s and her mother and so on. One of the gifts of the female line of Crant. You see, Lady Fetmore, we found it.”
“A few hundred years ago another grandmother – and aren’t there a lot of them – was wandering through a forest on an island off the coast and found the stone ruins of a pre-Darkness house. Something which happened regularly then and still does today. She poked around a bit and, legend has it, fell through what had been a ceiling. She dropped straight down and landed on a vast dining room table which promptly turned to dust under her fall. She could tell what it was because there were chairs carefully placed around it. She called up through the hole she’d made for a light and a gamesman ran off to get a torch.
Then she found it. Literally 40 full settings of this exquisite Limoges plus all the crystal and the silver and all manner of other beautiful table wear. Of course, the linens had crumbled. But my great, great grandmother was wise enough to bring vats of water down into the collapsed mansion’s dining room and she soaked the china for a year before packing it and bringing it to Crant.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky to have had such a clever great-great grandmother. All mine ever did was make fools out of themselves at the King-Emperor’s Court,” laughed Lady Fetmore.
We were having a simple, early Spring lunch. We started with thinly sliced smoked salmon on a bed of early lettuce, then consume, and a roasted breast of duck. Sir Percival was quite silent as he ate which was unusual for him. He dabbed his lips with his white linen napkin after each bite and made agreeable noises but said nothing. Lady Fetmore was more fun. She asked after all of our family and reported her own father, the Duke, had finally begun building in brick after countless centuries of the wooden buildings of the main towns of Castor burning to the ground every couple of hundred years. “He’s actually built a brick factory which I never thought I would live to see.”
My father, whose towns had been built of brick and stone for a thousand years and rarely burnt at all, allowed as how this was an excellent idea and how he’d be pleased to ship Crant bricks if required.
“Thank you, your Highness but I have the feeling what has been holding the various Dukes back is precisely the idea they would have to import the bricks.”
I had sat through these sorts of lunches for years, from the point where I was fourteen and it was clear that my mother was not going to be having more children.
It is not obvious how you educate a Princess who will reign and, I supposed, going to working lunches was part of the program. One thing I had learned is that no work at all was done until people had finished eating and the coffee, tea and brandy was poured. Our footman cleared and crumbed the table and my father ensured our privacy by saying, “That will be all Jenkins.” Which meant we would not see him again.
“So, Sir Percival, I gather you and Lady Fetmore have been plotting,” said my father with a smile.
“Not plotting, oh no, your Highness, Lady Fetmore would never plot,” Percival replied.
“I most certainly would Percival,” Lady Fetmore said with a tiny edge in her voice, “But not today. Today we need to plan, not plot.”
“Ah, you’ve come up with a solution,” said my father leaving me firmly in the dark. “Well, Sir Percival, you had best begin at the beginning. Ann will have to catch up.”
“Yes, your Highness,” and he turned his thin, pale, face in my direction and gave me the benefit of a tight-lipped smile over elderly, yellowed teeth. “We need secrecy your Highness.”
“That is hardly the beginning, Percival,” said Lady Fetmore cutting him off. “The fact is that we have some reason to believe that your Professor von Rittenberg may have gone some way towards the, well, the eradication or at least partial containment of” and here she leaned in nearly knocking over her water glass, “Sludge.”
Click for the next chapter: Sludge - A Diversion