Chapter 2: The Coachman’s Son

Stephen Albrecht walked to the DeNova estate in the dark, for a man who arrived on his first morning with the mud on his boots was a man already beginning to fail.

So he had cleaned them the night before, in the single room above the dyer's shop in the Red Quarter, with a rag and a thimblefull of lamp oil while his mother sat on the edge of the bed and pretended not to watch. The boots were not his. They belonged to a customer, a clerk of the customs house who had left in a hurry one winter morning and not returned for them. Mara Albrecht had never, not once in all the years of her trade asked a man to pay in anything but coin, but she had never turned away the things left behind either, and in a quarter where a pair of good boots might feed a family through a hard month, she had kept those for almost three years, for the day her son grew into them.

He had grown into them in the autumn. They fit as if they had been made for him.

'Your collar,' Mara said.

'It's fine.'

'Its crooked.' She rose, and he bent his head to let her fix it, although he had been taller than her since he was four teen. She smelled of lavender water and the cheap tallow of the candles and faintly of the plum brandy she allowed herself on feast days. Her fingers were quick and gentle at his throat. 'There. Now you look like someone's steward.'

'I'm to be a coachman.'

'A steward, a coachman, a Duke's favourite hound. You'll be the most respectable man in the house either way.' She patted his chest, once, just above the heart, and the casual tenderness of it nearly undid him. 'Don't meet their eyes too long. And don't let them see that you read.'

'Mother.'

'I know, I know,' Her smile was lopsided, wry, the one that made men forget their manners and their coin purses alike. 'But I've known great houses, Stephen. They like a servant who can be useful. They don't like a servant who can think.'

He was nineteen years old. He was a hand's breadth taller than every man in the Red Quarter, with a laborer's shoulders, and skin the deep, warm brown of strong tea, and raven-black hair he kept cropped close because it curled when it grew. His eyes were hazel, gold in the sun, green in shadow, and men who had means to jeer at the whore's son often found the words dying in their throats when those eyes settled on them. He had learned long ago that the best answer to an insult was silence, and silence, properly kept, made some people more afraid than any retort.

He had also learned to count the cost of every insult, and remember it.

The quarter had been generous with its insults. Whoreson. Bastard. Bed-born. The last one had been shouted at him by a baker's boy when he was seven, and he had gone home and asked his mother what it meant, and she had set down the bread she was kneading and said, very calmly, that it meant he had been born in a bed, which was more than could be said for most of the men who said it.

Then she had laughed. Then, quietly, she had wept, and he had learned that too.

'Go,' Mara said now, and kissed his forehead. 'Earn your wages. And come home on Sundays, and I'll make the lamb with the green sauce.'

'It's two hours' walk each way.'

'Then you'll be hungry when you get here. It'll taste better.'

He left her standing in the doorway with her shawl pulled tight, a small woman in a lit frame, waving. It was the last image of that morning he would remember clearly, and for years afterward he would return to it the way a man returns to a wound, to see whether it still hurt.

Varethe Hall rose out of the morning mist like something that never been built, only grown. The gatehouse was black stone, the gates themselves wrought iron worked into a pattern of wheat and vines, and beyond them, up a long avenue of bare lindens, the manor lay spread out over the hill with its three wings and its many chimneys and its hundred windows, all of them catching the pale sun and returning it with perfect indifference.

Stephen stopped at the gate and looked at it for a long moment.

He had seen the house before, from the road, as a child. Everyone in Myraval knew the DeNova estate. Its grain fed half the capital, its wine graced the Emperor's own table, and the Duke's name was spoken in the Red Quarter in the same tone as the weather, with resignation, and some fear.

He had never imagined walking in.

'Your're late,' said the gatekeeper.

'The sun isn't up.'

The man grunted, unmollified, and waved him through.

The old coachman was waiting in the stable yard, a stooped, white-bearded man with hands like knotted rope, who looked Stephen over with a slow, appraising squint. 'Albrecht.'

'Sir.'

'Don't sir me, boy. I'm a servant same as you.' Garrick's voice was dry as old leather. 'I told the steward you were the best I'd seen with a team in twenty years. DOn't make a liar of me.'

' I won't.'

'Hm. ' He jerked his chin at the stalls. ' Meet your charges.'

The horses were four greys, matched to the shade of a winter sky, and shifted nervously as Stephen came in. He did not reach for them. He stood at the stall door, hands loose at his sides, and let them smell him: leather, soap, the faint trace of lamp oil. He spoke in a low, even murmur, nonsense, a litany of the one his mother used to sing him, and after a while the nearest mare lowered her great head and breathed warm across his knuckles.

Garrick watched, and something in his face shifted.

'Someone taught you,' he said.

'A carter in the quarter. I used to mind his horses for bread.'

'Bread,' the old man's mouth twisted. 'Well. Here you'll get wages. And a bed over the tack room. And rules.' He held up a finger. 'One. You drive the Duke, his daughter, or their guests, and you never speak unless spoken to. Two. You don't go near the family wing unless sent. Three.' His voice dropped. 'You see nothing, hear nothing, and carry nothing that isn't in your hands. You understand me?'

Stephen thought of the carts he had passed on the road at four that morning, five of them, covered, heavy, wheels wrapped in sacking, heading out of the estate rather than in.

'Yes,' he said

'Good,' Garrick's eyes held his a second longer. 'Good lad.'

The steward came at noon, a thin man called Hobb with a smile that did not touch his eyes, and gave him a livery of dark grey wool with a small silver wheat-sheaf pinned at the coller, and a lecture on the dignity of service that lasted a quarter of an hour. Stephen listened with his hands folded. He had been lectured by better liars.

He did not see the heiress until the afternoon.

She crossed the courtyard on her father's arm, a long-limb girl in a gown the colour of deep forest, with a fall of auburn hair that moved like something alive and a profile so composed it might have been cut into a coin. The Duke was saying something, she was not listening. Her gaze passed across the stable yard, across the grooms and the cart and the new coachman standing at the horse's heads, with the unhurried, impersonal sweep of a woman looking over furniture.

It touched Stephen. It did not stop.

He felt it anyway, a small, absurd heat across the back of his neck, as though a candle had been drawn briefly past him. He told himself it was nothing. He was a servant, and servants were not looked at. That was the first rule of the house.

It did not occur to him, then, that he had been looking at her, for a moment longer than the rules allowed.