An hour, perhaps. To Thomas, tied on the floor of a windowless room, it might have been a week. Then footsteps, and the door dragging open.
[Sorry to keep you, Thomas.] (his elder brother)
Leonardo’s brother comes in with an attendant of his own, and the attendant is carrying a cudgel. Thomas has never in his life been near violence. He stares at the thing and his mind arrives, immediately, at what it is for.
The heir watches him get there and smiles slightly.
[Exactly what you are thinking. If you will not answer, I beat you with it.] (B)
He says it the way another man might mention the weather. Thomas tries to beg and the gag turns it into noise.
[Ah. You cannot speak like that. Take it off him.] (B)
The attendant kneels to unfasten it and speaks under his breath, close to Thomas’s ear.
[Talk quickly. It is in your own interest. The young master is not soft, the way Lord Leonardo is.] (Attendant)
The moment his mouth is free, Thomas uses it badly.
[Forgive me, young master! I know nothing! I am hiding nothing!] (T)
The heir does not bother to answer that. He turns to his attendant instead.
[There. You see how it works? The lie goes straight into his face.] (B)
[Quite so, sir. That such a man should have been serving Lord Leonardo…… it is pitiful.] (Attendant)
Thomas looks at the floor, which proves their point for them.
[Your mouth lies and your face tells the truth. So. There is someone. Some devil who got hold of Leonardo and changed the man entirely.] (B)
The voice comes down at him along the ground. Thomas is frightened enough to answer the question he was not asked.
[No! Lady Sherry is not that sort of——] (T)
[……Sherry.] (B)
The word sits in the room. Thomas shuts his mouth far too late.
The heir crouches to put himself at Thomas’s eye level, which is somehow worse than being stood over.
[Everything about her. Who is she, and where is she from?] (B)
[Forgive me——! I beg you, young master——!] (T)
[You still do not understand your position. If you will not talk, I shall make you want to talk.] (B)
He says the rest almost kindly. A blow from the cudgel will do a great deal of damage; left untreated it may kill; and a high nobleman who strikes a servant down for insolence has committed no crime. Is this how Thomas wants his life to end?
Neither of them is bluffing. That is the thing Thomas finally understands — not the cudgel, but the two faces above it, which are entirely serious.
[Have mercy——! Young master, please——!] (T)
[Mercy is for men who answer. Who is she, Thomas.] (B)
Two seconds is all the deliberation he manages.
‘If I say it they will take her from him, and it will break his heart. If I do not say it, I may not leave this room.’
He talks.
[Lady Sherry is…… a person Lord Leonardo is close to.] (T)
[I know that much. Which house is she from?] (B)
[She is……not a nobleman’s daughter. She is a girl of the city.] (T)
The heir’s temple jumps.
[A commoner. Why is my brother close with a commoner?] (B)
The force in it frightens the rest out of Thomas in a rush — that Leonardo saw her working in a bakery while walking through town, that he was taken with how lovely she was, that he spoke to her, and that they have been lovers since.
[Lovers.] (B) [And you stood and watched.] (B)
[I—— that is……] (T)
The honest answer is that he was happy for his master. He can see what saying it would cost. The other attendant has not moved, except to shift his grip on the cudgel.
[What is the point of giving a man an attendant at all? Your function is to keep people of low birth away from him. And you describe your own dereliction to the family you serve as though it were a story.] (B)
[Never, young master! I have taken care that no suspicious person should come near——] (T)
[You have not. An unknown commoner girl, near the son of a ducal house.] (B)
[Lady Sherry is not suspicious in the least——!] (T)
[Why does a commoner girl have an honorific from you?] (B)
Thomas has no answer ready, because the question has never occurred to him.
[You are a nobleman. Have you no pride in your own rank?] (B)
The estimate the heir had of him, already low, finishes falling.
In this country the class system is absolute, and it holds because the line is visible: the nobility govern, the commons are governed, and a commoner does not stand above a nobleman. Blur it and the whole arrangement comes apart, which is why nobody blurs it. A Linden servant bowing his head to a bakery girl is not a small lapse of manners. It is the thing the system exists to prevent, happening inside the heir’s own house.
[But…… she is the woman Lord Leonardo loves.] (T)
[And what of it? However much they love each other, a commoner cannot be a nobleman’s wife. Her rank does not move. Yours does not move. You are a nobleman humbling yourself to a commoner, and that stays true whatever either of you feels about it.] (B)
He looks at Thomas the way a man looks at something that has got into the house.
[Neither of you can see that this is abnormal. Seduced, the pair of you, by a woman of low birth. It is pitiful.] (B)
Thomas starts to speak. The other attendant knocks the cudgel against his palm, and Thomas does not finish.
[Her appearance. Where she lives. Where she works. All of it.] (B)
[What…… do you intend to do with it?] (T)
[What do you intend to do with it?] (B) [I am the next head of this house. Do you imagine a servant may put himself in the way of what I do?] (B)
[……Forgive me.] (T) [But if something happens to Lady Sherry — to that woman — Lord Leonardo will grieve.] (T)
[Then he will grieve. Nothing matters more than House Linden, and certainly not my fool of a brother’s feelings. I have no time for your games.] (B)
[Does the young master not care for his own brother at all!?] (T)
[That you can still say a thing like that, here, is remarkable.] (B) [Worry about yourself instead.] (B)
[……What do you mean?] (T)
[Do you truly not know?] (B)
He straightens up.
[A servant who betrays the house he serves does not simply carry on in his position.] (B)
[But I am Lord Leonardo’s attendant——] (T)
[Who serves my brother is my mother’s decision.] (B) [Do you imagine that woman will leave a traitor in place? Dismissal goes without saying. For the betrayal itself — a hundred strokes, or the ruin of your family. She will do that much.] (B)
[——My family!? What have they——] (T)
[That is what the nobility is. One man’s error touches his house, so one is careful. Every nobleman alive knows it.] (B) [Have you spent so long with a commoner that you have forgotten?] (B)
That lands where the cudgel would have.
Thomas sees his parents’ faces. He remembers how pleased they were when he was chosen — attendant to the son of a ducal house, their son — and what they told him when they sent him away. Serve with your whole heart. Never betray them. He had heard it as one instruction about one man.
It was two. Leonardo, and the house.
He gave everything to the first and never once thought about the second, and there is a word for that, and it is the word the heir has been using. He abandoned his loyalty somewhere along the way and never noticed the moment. A servant like that deserves whatever comes. And a nobleman’s error reaches his family, which is the most ordinary fact in the world, and he had forgotten it while doing the thing that would trigger it.
[Young master!] (T) [The fault is mine, all of it! I beg you — have mercy on my family!] (T)
[That is for my mother to decide.] (B)
He says it without interest, and goes, and the colour drains out of Thomas’s face.
