Chapter 7: The Green-Eyed Heiress

The book had been thrown out with the rubbish.

He found it in the third week of March, beneath a pile of broken lamp-glass and curling kitchen paper in the cart that carried the household's refuse to the river. It was a slim volume in a cracked blue binding, its spine split, a corner chewed by mice, and it was entitled, in worn gilt, A Treatise on Tithes, Tolls, and the Lawful Detention of Debtors. Someone had meant to burn it. Someone had been interrupted.

Stephen turned it over in his hands for a long time.

Then he put it inside his coat, and hated how his heart lifted.

He could read. That was the secret he kept from every soul in the Duke's household. His mother had taught him, in the long afternoons when the Quarter was quiet and her customers were few, from a battered primer she had bought for a copper and a ballad, and later from the stolen pages of discarded ledgers and the backs of tavern bills. He had learned his letters at four, his sums at seven, and by twelve he was reading the notices pinned to the temple door, the court proclamations, and the small, precise, deadly print of contracts that other men signed with a cross because they could do nothing else.

Don't let them see that you read.

He was careful. He read only in the dark corner of the tack room, by the stub of a candle, with the door barred and the horses shifting softly in the stalls beyond. He read the way a starving man eats, carefully, greedily, in a hurry to be done and in terror of finishing. And for four nights, he forgot the midden, and Hobb, and the three hundred and eleven names he could not stop hearing. He read about the Statute of Debtors, which allowed a man to be held for arrears so long as the sum was demonstrably owed and the detention recorded before a magistrate. He read, in the margin of the oldest clause, the faded notation of some long-dead lawyer: and where no record is made, no detention is lawful.

He read it again. He read it a third time.

On the fifth day, in the thin gold light of early afternoon, he made the mistake of taking the book outside.

It was only a moment. The greys had been exercised and rubbed down; the Duke had gone to the city; the yard was empty and warm and smelled of hay. He sat on the edge of the water trough, with the sun on his neck and the book open on his knee, and let himself, for the length of one paragraph, forget where he was.

"What," said a voice above him, cool as a blade drawn from silk, "are you doing?"

He closed the book. It was too late, and he knew it.

Evangeline DeNova stood three paces away, in a riding habit of dark green with her auburn hair pulled loosely back and a whip tucked under one arm. The sun was behind her. She had come from the paddock gate, soundlessly, and she looked at him with an expression he could not read, not quite anger, not quite surprise, something folded and watchful beneath both.

He stood. "My lady."

"You were reading."

"I—"

" Don't lie." She held out her hand. "Give it to me."

He did not move.

"Give it," she said, softly, "to me."

Slowly, he laid the little blue book in her palm.

She turned it over. She read the title. And for one fleeting second, so brief he might have imagined it, something crossed her face, a flicker of unguarded curiosity, the look of a girl who loved books and had long ago been taught that curiosity was unbecoming. She opened it. Her eyes ran over the first page. He saw her lips move, very slightly, on the word Debtors.

Then she looked up, and the flicker was gone, and her face was a closed door.

"A treatise on law," she said. "On the detention of debtors. How very ambitious." She gave a small, cold, tinkling laugh. "And what do you imagine, Albrecht, that a coachman does with the law?"

"Nothing, my lady. It was in the rubbish."

"And you took it out. For what purpose? To improve yourself?"

"To read it."

"To read it." She let the words hang in the air like a dropped glove. "Do you hear yourself? You, a whore's son who can barely sign his own name, sitting in my father's yard with a law book on your knee like a gentleman at his club. Is that what you wish to be? A gentleman?"

"No, my lady."

"Then what?"

He should have lied. He knew it with every cautious instinct that had ever kept him fed. But something in her eyes, that cool, level green, as sharp and clear as a pane of glass, struck some stubborn thing in him that would not bend.

"Informed," he said.

For a heartbeat, she looked at him with something almost like astonishment.

Then her expression hardened, and she turned, and with a single, deliberate motion, she dropped the little blue book into the water trough.

It struck the surface with a soft, final plop. The cracked binding bobbed, darkened, and began to sink. Paper swelled. The gilt letters blurred into ruin.

"Servants," said Evangeline DeNova, "are not informed. They are instructed. If you wish to forget the difference, you may find yourself without a position, and then you may inform the gutters of the Red Quarter to your heart's content."

She turned. The green skirts swept the cobbles. And at the paddock gate she paused, without looking back, one gloved hand on the post.

"The writing in the margin," she said. "The note about the record. Who made it?"

He stared at her back.

"I don't know, my lady."

" Hm." A very small pause. And then she was gone, quick and straight and unhurried, her whip tapping at her boot as she went.

Stephen stood at the trough for a long time after she had left, watching the pale pages dissolve in the water.

He had not asked her how she had seen the margin. He had not asked how a girl who claimed to despise the law had read a single faded line of it in the space of a breath. He told himself it did not matter. He told himself a great many things, in the weeks that followed, about the green-eyed heiress who had destroyed his book and then, for no reason he could name, asked who had written in its margins.

Only one of them was true.

She had wanted to know.