The Privilege of the Sword (2 page)

I nodded.

“Davey and I were like that. Friends. Good friends, together against the world. We made up games, and protected each other. But people grow up, don’t they? You can’t stay a child forever. When my parents chose a husband for me, we were—he was—well, Davey just didn’t understand that things must change.”

“He hated Papa, didn’t he?”

“He was only a boy; what did he know? Charles was a neighbor, not some stranger. My parents trusted him and knew he’d take good care of me. Of course I shed a few tears; I was a young girl, afraid to leave my home for the first time. My brother, though—well, he simply could not understand that, in the end, one has a duty to one’s family. He never did, and he never will.”

She was going to ruin that cloth, but I didn’t want to stop her flow of words. A lot had happened in our family that no one had ever explained to me.

“And now it’s the same thing all over again!” she cried, ripping the hem without seeing it. “Just when we thought things were about to get better, he went and made them worse, much worse, to please himself and hurt the rest of us. Just the same as now.”

She started stabbing at the kerchief with her needle. “How?” I breathed, hoping to still her hands, hoping to keep the words coming. “How is it the same?”

“The duchess,” my mother said, her lips tight. She wasn’t even seeing me, I could tell; her eyes were on an invisible past when everything had gone wrong before I was born. “Our grandmother, the noble Duchess Tremontaine. Who didn’t even come to my wedding; she still wasn’t speaking to our mother. But she invited my brother to the city, to stay with her at Tremontaine House. It was his big chance—our big chance—to reconcile with her, to make something of himself. And what did he do? He ran away.”

“Where?”

“To University.” She bit a thread in half. “Right there in the city, right under the duchess’s very nose. Mother was beside herself. Gregory had just been born, and I had to leave him here all alone with your father and the servants to go and tend to her. You know what she was like.” I nodded; Grandmother Campion had been terrifying. “Next we heard, he’d run away from University as well, gone to live in some city slum. We were sure he was dead. But he wasn’t dead. He was bringing more shame on us by carrying on with a notorious swordsman. It all came out when the duchess found him. I suppose he amused her, because a few years later she died, naming him her heir! Mother wrote him a long letter, and sent him some things, but he never replied.”

“Go and see him,” I urged her poetically. “Who knows but that he may yet relent, and remember the days of his youth, when you were the best of friends?”

“Katherine Samantha.” She looked away from the past, and directly at me. “You have not been listening to what I’ve been telling you. It’s you he wishes to see.”

“Me! But—but—Why?”

She shook her head. “Oh, it’s too ridiculous even to contemplate.”

“Mother.” I took both her hands in mine. “You cannot say that and expect me to go on counting silver as if nothing had happened. It is impossible. What does he want to see me about?”

“He says he wants to make a swordsman of you.”

I laughed—well, I snorted, actually. If I’d had anything in my mouth, it would have flown across the room. That sort of laugh.

“Just so,” she said. “You go live with him and study the sword, and in return he’ll not only drop the lawsuits, he’ll pay off all our debts, and—well, he’s prepared to be very generous.”

I began to see, or thought I did. “He wants me to come to the city. To Tremontaine House,” I breathed. “To make our fortune.”

She said, “Of course, the thing is impossible.”

“But Mother,” I said, “what about my duty to my family?”

chapter
II

Y
OU HAVE NO USE FOR GIRLS.
Y
OU TOLD ME SO YOURSELF
.”

In a fine room in the Mad Duke Tremontaine’s house, a fat and messy young woman sprawled on a velvet chaise longue, one hand buried in a bowl of summer strawberries. Across the room, the Mad Duke examined the back of his chimneypiece for cracks. “Utter incompetents,” he grumbled. “They wouldn’t know wood-bore from a tick on their dog’s ass.”

She stuck to the subject. “Neither would girls.”

“I
do
have no use for girls. Not that way; not with ones I’m related to, anyway.” He popped out of the fireplace to leer briefly, but getting no response went back and continued, “You should be grateful. Or, as the only respectable female of my acquaintance, you are the one I would have to impose upon to escort my niece to dances and things when she gets here.”

The homely woman, whose name was Flavia, but whom everyone thought of as That Ugly Girl of the Duke’s, put a large berry in her mouth, wiped her fingers on the velvet of the chaise and talked around it. “Any titled lady whose husband owes you money would be delighted to take your niece in hand, if only to show you how it’s done properly and try to instill some gratitude in you.” She licked juice off her lips. “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you: why do you talk so much, when half of what you say is utter crap?”

“To keep you on your toes,” he answered promptly. “How would you like it if everything I said suddenly started making sense? It would only confuse you.”

Unfolding his long body from the guts of the fireplace, the duke thrust his ruffled cuffs under his fat friend’s nose for inspection. “Would you say these are dirty?”

“
Dirty
is not the word I would use.” She stared at the lace. “That implies that somewhere under the carbon there exists white linen in its original state. But I think an alchemical transformation has been effected here.”

“At last!” He lunged for the bellpull. “I shall have to document it.” His fingers left black smudges on the embroidered fabric. “You will be amazed to learn that I, too, have read Fayerweather. You have, as usual, completely bollixed his concept of Original State: it has nothing to do with alchemy.”

“Did I quote Fayerweather?”

“No. You eviscerated him, and threw his carcass to the geese.”

The duke’s summons was answered by a stocky boy. Everything about him was middling: his height, weight, color and curl of hair, skin, ears, even his deportment, caught as it was in the middle between a boy’s awkwardness and a young man’s strength. His arms were a little long, but that was all.

“Isn’t he wonderful?” the duke asked fondly.

The Ugly Girl threw a strawberry at the boy, which he failed to catch; nor did he run after it to pick it up when it rolled into a corner. “Dear one,” she said to the duke, “you could surround yourself with much prettier company than those present.”

“I do,” he replied. “But they have a tendency to think too highly of themselves. So I get rid of them. Over and over and over and over,” he sighed. “Marcus,” he told the boy, “get me a clean shirt.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The duke pulled the one he was wearing over his head. “And have this one examined—the cuffs—for alchemical transformation.”

“Yes, my—” The boy’s face bent and broke into a laugh. “Do you mean it?”

The duke tilted his head to one side. “Hmm. Do I? I’m not sure. It was
her
idea.
Do
I mean it?”

The Ugly Girl rolled onto her back, gazing nearsightedly at the elaborate blur of the sculpted ceiling above her. “You never mean anything.”

When the boy had left the room, she said approvingly, “He’s got brains. It’s funny how you can always tell.”

“Like calling to like.” It was as close to a compliment as the duke ever came; she wisely ignored it. “Well, as you pointed out, I hardly chose him for his beauty.”

“I’m surprised you chose him at all. He lacks the aura of great wickedness, or great innocence. You like extremes.”

“I do.” The duke helped himself to the strawberries; they were his, after all. He ate them one at a time, in the manner of one who is not used to plenty.

Making sure that her fingers were well licked and dried, the Ugly Girl went to take a book from the pile on the mantelpiece. She sat by the window reading her treatise on mathematics, ignoring the duke as he received and donned his new shirt, received and interviewed an informant (who was not offered strawberries), received and made fun of a small but very ugly lamp meant as a bribe and finally went back to his fireplace excavations.

Then she lifted her head and announced, “I have thought of and discarded many conceivable reasons for you to have sent for your niece. It therefore remains that your reason is inconceivable.”

“To any but me, of course.”

She waited an appreciable amount of time before giving in and asking, “May one hear it?”

“I intend to make a swordsman of her.”

The Ugly Girl slammed the book shut. “That tears it. That is idiotic. Possibly the stupidest thing that I have ever heard you say.”

“Not at all.” The duke could appear quite elegant when he chose to. He did so now, lounging in his wide shirtsleeves against the ornate mantel. “I must have protection. Someone I can trust. Of course I have a lot of hired guards—but I am paying them. And I do not like the constant company of strangers.”

“You could hire handsome ones. They need not be strangers long.”

“I do not think,” drawled the duke at his most stickily aristocratic, “that that is very appealing. And yet—I must constantly be protected from the sudden sword-thrust, the irrevocable challenge. There are so many people around who imagine their lives would be miraculously improved by my removal. So: who better to fulfill the protective function than family?”

“Surely you have nephews?”

“Whole flotillas of them. So what?”

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion. “
So what,
indeed! Not content to find freaks, you must create them as well?”

The duke did not try, ever, to hide his contented smile. “I do not make the rules,” he said creamily. “This annoys me, and so I comfort myself by breaking them. She is my favorite sister’s—my only sister’s—youngest child. I shall ensure that she has a distinctive and useful trade to follow, should the family fortunes fail. Or should the Good Marriage that is every noble’s daughter’s ambition prove elusive or less than satisfactory. A distinctive and a useful trade…it is, alas, too late for her older brothers to learn anything, really. And, anyway, I think one sword in the family is enough, don’t you?”

“Crap,” she said. “Utter crap. You must really hate your sister a lot.”

I
HAD ALWAYS KNOWN
I
MUST GO TO THE CITY, BECAUSE
that is where one goes to make one’s fortune these days. Men go there to take their seat on the Council of Lords and meet influential people; girls go to make a brilliant match with a man of property and excellent family. We had scraped together the funds to send my eldest brother, but apart from writing the occasional letter complaining about the food, the streets, the weather and the people, Gregory didn’t seem to be doing much. I wasn’t surprised. Greg always lacked dash.

I, on the other hand, while not quite pretty, look very nice when I get dressed up, and neighbors at parties have been known to admire my dancing. I always remember the steps, and never tread on toes or bump into others. Before my uncle’s letter came, I had often tried to encourage my mother to send me to town to try my luck at finding a good match. But no matter how I begged and reasoned, it always ended with her saying, “Kitty, you’re too young,” which was ridiculous, since she was married herself at fifteen. If I explained that a dazzling City Season was completely different from one’s mother picking a convenient neighbor, she’d say, “Well, but what man would have you with your portion tied up in a lawsuit?”

“A very rich one, of course, who cares nothing for my sad estate! I will enchant him. He will love me for my winning ways. And for my connections. I’m very well connected, aren’t I? Your brother’s still a duke, even if he is mad and dissolute. That counts, you said.”

“But think how much more enchanting you will be when you have reached your full height, and gotten all willowy and elegant, dressed up in long gowns with real lace—”