Chapter 3: A Name Worthless at Court

The Vesper Gardens were the place where the young nobility of Myraval went to see themselves not working.

They sprawled along the western bank in a series of terraces, hedged with yew and strung with iron lanterns, and on a Thursday afternoon in late winter they held, by Lady Isolde Veyne's careful count, forty-one persons of rank, seventeen of whom were worth speaking to and three of whom were worth fearing. Isolde kept such counts the way other girls kept diaries. She was Evangeline's oldest friend: a small, sharp-featured young woman with copper-brown braids and a talent for knowing what everyone in a room wanted before they did. Her family had served the DeNovas for four generations, in roles that were never quite servile and never quite equal, and Evangeline had long since stopped asking which of the two Isolde's smile was meant to conceal.

"Corinne Pembry is here," Isolde said, as the carriage turned in at the iron gate. "With her brother. And Lord Tavish's son, who looks like he's swallowed a lemon."

"He always looks like that."

"Yes, but today it suits him." Isolde glanced out the window. "Your new coachman is very quiet."

"Is he?" Evangeline did not turn her head. "I hadn't noticed him."

this was true, and it was precisely the problem. She had spent the entire drive from Vareth Hall trying not to notice him, which required an expenditure of attention that no one who truly did not notice a servant would have needed. It was absurd. He had said nothing. He had done nothing. He had handed her up into the carriage with a hand like warm stone, eyes lowered, and shut the door with the care of a man who understood that doors were instruments of power. And yet through the whole length of the road, through the lanes and across the bridge and along the river, she had been aware of his back, broad and straight beneath the grey wool, and of the reins moving steady and unhurried in his gloved hands.

aware, she thought. Like being aware of a draught.

She disliked it immensely.

The carriage halted. The new coachman, Albrecht, the steward had said, came round to open the door and lowered the step, and she descended with the unhurried grace she had been drilled in since the age of five. Her skirts whispered. The late sun lay along the terraces in long amber bars. And twenty paces away, under a bare cherry tree, the Pembry party turned as one to look.

Corinne Pembry was pretty in a pink, pillowy way, with a laugh like a dropped tray of glasses. Her brother Rafe was tall and sallow and bored. Lord Tavish's son, Julian, did indeed look as though he had swallowed a lemon. They came forward in a rustle of silk, and the greetings were exchanged, and the weather was discussed, and the Marchioness of Hale's near-disaster at the fountain was recalled with delighted horror.

"Your poor father," said Corinne, "to be so shamed by a coachman."

"The coachman has been replaced," said Evangeline.

"Has he? Oh, how marvellous. And is this the replacement?" Corinne's eyes slid past her shoulder, found Stephen standing at the horses' heads with his gaze fixed on a point somewhere over the roof of the carriage, and widened. "Oh. Oh. But I know him."

Evangeline felt the small cold drop in her stomach that came before a thing she would regret.

"Do you?"

"Of course. Rafe, tell her. The one from the Red Quarter. Mother had that dreadful business with the Alder Street house last spring, the one with the..." she lowered her voice into a stage whisper, delighted. "The woman. Albrecht. The one who entertained half the customs house. He's hers. The bastard. Everyone says the Emperor's own cousin, once, but of course that's only the sort of thing one says."

Rafe Pembry laughed, a short, dry sound. Julian Tavish looked at Stephen with open curiosity, the way one examines an animal that has been taught to do a trick.

Evangeline did not look round. She did not need to. She knew, with the strange certainty that sometimes came over her in rooms full of people, exactly how he was standing: very still, shoulders level, hands relaxed on the bridles, as though nothing had been said at all.

it was the stillness that did it.

It was a kind of defiance, and she had been raised to punish defiance wherever she found it, quietly, thoroughly, and in front of an audience.

"Is that true?" she said, turning at last.

Stephen's eyes came down from the roofline and met hers. They were hazel, she saw now, with a ring of gold at the centre, steady and very calm. The calm was the insult. "My lady?"

"Your mother. Is it true that she keeps a house on Alder Street?"

A beat. Wind stirred the bare branches.

"She has rented rooms in that district, my lady."

"To whom?"

"To anyone who could pay."

Corinne gave a muffled shriek of laughter behind her fan. Rafe grinned. And Evangeline, with the whole bright terrace watching and a pulse beating oddly in her throat, heard herself say, in a tone as light and cool as the surface of a frozen pond:

"How charming. And your father? Or is that a question your mother can't answer in a single sentence?"

The silence that followed was very small, and very complete.

Isolde's breath caught, a tiny sound. Even Rafe had stopped smiling. Somewhere beyond the yew hedge, a lute was playing, absurdly, a pretty and mindless air.

Stephen did not move.

He did not flush. He did not flinch. Something happened behind his eyes instead, a door closing, quiet and precise, the sound of a latch dropping into place. He bowed, low and correct, the bow of a man who knew exactly what was expected of him and had decided to give it, exactly, and no more.

"I have no father that I know of, my lady," he said. "I've been told it's a common affliction among those born in beds."

For a heartbeat, no one breathed.

Then Corinne, who had not understood, laughed again. Rafe, who had, did not. And Evangeline felt her face go hot, and then cold, and understood that she had been answered, with perfect courtesy, in a language she had not known he spoke.

"Your insolence," she said, and her voice was not as steady as she wished, "will be reported to my father.“As you wish, my lady.”You'll be flogged."

"If the Duke wills it."

"Then see that you wait with the horses," she snapped, "and keep your eyes where servants' eyes belong."

"Yes, my lady."

He turned back to the greys. His shoulders had not changed. His hands, when he laid them on the mare's neck, were steady.

And that was the thing Evangeline would remember, long after the afternoon's laughter had faded and Corinne had stopped retelling the story, and the lanterns of the Vesper Gardens had been lit one by one against the dusk. The hands. She had noticed them only because she was angry, and because she had wanted, savagely, to find some flaw in him, some tremor, some crack through which to pour her contempt.

They were steady. But the left one, the one pressed against the mare's flank where no one could see, had closed, very slowly, on a handful of the horse's mane, and was gripping it so hard that the knuckles had gone pale beneath the skin.

He is not unmoved, she thought. He is only very, very good at not showing it.

She should have been satisfied. instead she turned towards the gardens with her friends and her smile and her chin lifted, and felt, between her shoulder blades, the cold weight of a gaze that did not leave her.

he would remember every word. She did not know how she knew it. but she knew, as one knows the shape of a winter storm in the stillness before it breaks, that what she had said in the Vesper Gardens, lightly, carelessly, for the pleasure of a pink girl's laughter, had not been spoken into air.

it had been spoken into stone. And stone, she would one day learn, forgets nothing.