Part 1
The gladness came first.
It arrived before memory did, before months of training could step between her face and her heart: a small, bright leap under her ribs, the way a dog lifts its head at a familiar step on the gravel before it remembers being kicked.
Sylvie.
For one heartbeat, Lilianna forgot she was a peeress under the photographers' lamps.
She was four, in a nursery, and a girl with dark plaits was breaking a biscuit exactly in half and letting her choose.
Then, she was seven, and there was a pony.
The pony's name was Parliament, because her father thought it funny: the pony was fat, grey and impossible to move. Sylvie fell off Parliament eleven times one summer and laughed every time, flat on her back in the paddock with her arms flung wide, while Lilianna stood over her with a practice sword, too serious even then to see what was funny about the ground.
Then, she was nine, and there were the messages.
For eight years, they had written to each other on their first mirror phones, bypassing maids and household servants. Secrets. Grievances. Images of governesses with enormous noses. And once, after a month of the Chopin going badly, when Lilianna had begun to suspect the sheet music a boy had given her was a joke at her expense, Sylvie replied with a message that said only:
You will get it. You always get things. I will practise with you.
And she came, day after day. She sat on the music-room window seat with her knees drawn up, and when Lilianna, after three years of daily practice, finally played the Ballade through without stopping, Sylvie cried with joy.
Then came the bad nights.
The winter she turned seventeen, the house came apart around her piece by piece, and every piece was numbered.
That was what she could never put down. Not the debts, enormous as they were. Not the bailiff's men, who were courteous and kept their hats on indoors. The numbers. Every chair, clock, candlestick and portrait wore a small white tag with a number in blue ink, and the numbers were gathered into an inventory that lay on the drawing-room window seat.
By the second week of February, the drawing room had no chairs at all.
So they sat on the floor.
Sylvie came at two in the morning. Nine times? Ten?
During the first such visit, the last maid not yet given notice let her in through the kitchen. She had crossed the park in the dark with a flask of cocoa wrapped in her own scarf, the only way she could think of to keep it hot. She sat on the bare boards without taking off her coat, poured two cups, held Lilianna in a comforting embrace, and offered her a room at her own family's house.
On that night, she had checked the inventory for the piano when Lilianna did not have the heart to.
Sylvie ran a finger down all three hundred and eleven lines by candlelight, looked up and said, "It isn't here." That was when Lilianna finally cried. On other nights Sylvie brought money disguised as gifts for special occasions.
Of all the girls who had danced at her sixteenth birthday, Sylvie was the only one who came.
The rest of the memories arrived half a second later.
They did not cancel the gladness. That was the worst of it. They simply sat down beside it, the way Sylvie used to sit down on that floor.
Some of those nights, she had come straight from him.
From Hugo's townhouse.
Hugo had courted Lilianna with flowers, enchanting sonnets and an understanding between the families—the kind never written down, and therefore never broken, only quietly withdrawn. Only months before the insolvency, he swore forever. Within a fortnight of it, his letters stopped.
That summer, Lilianna learned where Sylvie had been before some of those visits: out on secret dates with Hugo. And on all those nights, Lilianna had wondered aloud to Sylvie why Hugo no longer wrote.
Sylvie had said nothing.
Hugo had been pleasant, handsome and irreplaceable in the heart of a young lady first introduced to the world of romance. But his loss was survivable; that wound would have healed.
The wound that never closed was Sylvie. Lilianna had never been able to decide what her friend had been.
If Sylvie had been false, Lilianna could have hated her, and hatred would have been a kind of rest. If she had been true, there would have been nothing to forgive. But the cocoa had been real, and the scarf, and all those nights of companionship during her darkest hours. So had her dates with Hugo. Kindness and betrayal had run through the same girl on the same nights, both entirely genuine, and Lilianna had never understood how it could have worked so seamlessly for Sylvie.
After the discovery, Sylvie apologised profusely. At first, she explained, she had merely gone to Hugo to persuade him to come with her and comfort Lilianna together, as it was the time his love was most needed. Then, somehow, as Sylvie told it, she had been overcome by a weakness she claimed all young women shared: the inability to say no to Hugo's advances. His eyes, she said, had simply been impossible to resist.
Hugo, for his part, had sent a note saying he hoped Lilianna would be happy for them.
Then there was the part that only made her tired.
Sylvie promptly broke it off with Hugo within a week of the discovery. She had hoped Lilianna would overlook her mishap in light of all the memories they had shared. Then, within the same year, she had gone up to university and out of Lilianna's life.
Years later, when Lilianna finally told her the story, Aunt Clara had said she should get over it. It was not a betrayal but a weakness of Sylvie's character, and a weakness should be treated not as a vice but as a bonus. After all, a person with no weakness had no lever through which influence could be exerted.
Lilianna had tried to get over it, but she just could not bring herself to.
In the end, the friendship was spoiled, and with it the last remnant of her childhood—the last, at least, besides Philip.
All of the memories went through her in less than a stride. When her foot came down on the wet stone, she saw the rest of the picture.
Sylvie stood beyond the railings, a little apart from where the press line had been, in a grey wool coat with her old college scarf at her throat. Sleet on her shoulders, sleet in her hair, no umbrella.
Of course she came, Lilianna thought. Her father was a peer, after all.
Sylvie's face was still the colour of paper. The colour of little white tags.
Her gloved hand had started to lift, and stopped halfway, fingers not quite open.
Lilianna reached for the smile.
She did it on purpose. She had spent months in a mirrored room watching it being built: Aunt Clara's public smile, the warmth of a great lady pleased to see the people and equally pleased to see any of them. Warm enough to photograph. Nothing behind it.
She raised her hand to shoulder height. Opened her fingers once. Closed them.
It was the wave a duchess gives a crowd. Two photographers who had not yet turned fully towards Clara swung back and caught it. The young Duchess acknowledges the public on the night of her introduction. It would look very well in the morning.
Beyond the railings, Sylvie's hand went back to her side.
She looked like someone who had been told something she already knew and had only been waiting, politely, to hear it said. She inclined her head once and then blended into the rest of the crowd.
Now she had shut the door on the one friend who had come when no one else did, with two fingers and a smile that was not hers.
Her heart had not even changed its pace. She was becoming Aunt Clara.
That frightened her more than anything.
And all of it—the raised hand, the fingers—had been her final parting with a childhood that she could never go back to.
No more grief. No more regret.
Part 2
Aunt Clara did not take her arm.
She had climbed down from the landaulet and crossed the last ten feet of stone herself: the aunt coming to the duchess, precedence observed for anyone taking notes. But she did not reach out. A steadying hand in public would be in every paper by breakfast—the young Duchess, visibly overcome, is steadied by her aunt—and Clara had brought eight motorcars, with a lit landaulet at their head, to the Peers' Court to project power, not weakness.
She stopped at a correct distance and inclined her head. An inch. Perhaps a fraction more.
"Your Grace," Clara said, in a voice pitched for the railings.
"Aunt Clara."
They walked to the car side by side, not touching.
"Laugh, darling," Clara murmured, moving her lips no more than a smile required. "At anything. They can't hear us. The Duke of Nernwick is behind you with his mouth still open, and I want him to see you enjoying yourself."
Lilianna laughed, warm and natural, a young woman delighted by her aunt's wit. The photographers' lamps went off like a string of small white guns.
The laugh was a lie. It was also, she thought, a good one.
The landaulet's crimson leather glowed under four small mana-lamps set into the coachwork, framing the two women like a painting of themselves. Outriders wheeled into place on either flank, and the column went out through the western arch two abreast, the phoenix on every door throwing back the lamplight like new coins.
Along the embankment the Themris ran black and swollen with sleet, the lamps of Kingsworth Bridge trembling in long columns on the water. On the far side of the bridge, where no camera could follow, Clara lifted two gloved fingers without looking round.
The hood rose on its mana-springs with a soft sigh and closed over them. Three lamps went out. The fourth dimmed to a reading glow.
The stage was struck.
Clara did not turn cold. She turned a degree cooler, the way a room does when someone opens a door elsewhere in the house. She drew off one glove finger by finger and reached into the hamper at her feet.
"You haven't eaten since half past five this morning," she said. "Don't deny it. Pell telephones me."
Lilianna had not known Pell telephoned anybody.
Clara poured from a silver flask into a silver cup and held it out. Chocolate, the good kind, thick enough to stand a spoon in and still steaming.
Lilianna took it in both hands and found she could not drink.
Somewhere on the other side of the Themris lived a woman who had once carried cocoa across a dark park at two in the morning, wrapped in her own scarf.
Something warm, at the end of a horrible day.
The kindness in the silver cup was real. Lilianna was almost certain of it. Clara had sat by her hospital bed all night after Merchant's Row. Clara had paid off a million Avalondian dollars of debt when everyone else shied away. And the kindness was also, plainly, part of the evening's arrangements, placed as carefully as the outriders.
Both genuine. Just like with Sylvie.
She drank. It was very good.
"All of it," Clara said, without looking up from her glove. Then she did look up. "You were magnificent." That, at least, was said to Lilianna and not to the railings. "His Imperial Highness was very pleased with the clause, by the way."
Lilianna looked at her over the rim of the cup. "Which clause?"
"There is only one clause, my darling. In a fortnight nobody will remember the rest of the Bill."
"It sounded sensible," Lilianna said. Then, too tired to arrange her face and too honest to pretend: "I only read the first paragraph properly. Most of the second. Something about a register. And officers."
"It is sensible. It's a frame." Clara folded the glove in her lap. "The regulations are the picture, and regulations are painted by a minister. And ministers"—a small, pleasant shrug—"come and go. Which is why His Highness says a Princedom's veto over cabinet posts is the only guarantee the regulations get written by sensible men."
Lilianna nodded slowly. She knew what a veto was. She had not yet worked out what it meant for a clause whose practical rules were still unwritten, and she just realised that she ought to.
She let it go. She would read the clause properly tonight, with a pencil.
"Mr. Ballantry says the Institute holds its examinations in April," she said instead, "and again in October. If I began on the first papers now, alongside my finance courses, I think I could sit them in the spring—"
"Plenty of time for examinations, darling."
It was said very pleasantly, the way one closes a door on leaving a room: softly, without looking back, and completely.
"The Herald will want an interview," Clara went on. "Wear the green. Say nothing about the Yorgorian, nothing about the clause, and a great deal about your regiment. Have the Redwoods said anything to you?"
It slipped in between one sentence and the next, as lightly as asking about an umbrella.
"And don't let them photograph you from the left in that hat—"
And Lilianna's mind was back in the white drawing room.
The first week of December. Snow at the tall windows. Aunt Margaret had sent the maid away and poured the tea herself.
Margaret talked about the weather, Lilianna's regiment and the dreadful price of gas. Then, without changing her voice at all, she began to describe a situation.
Not a proposal. Though it certainly sounded like one.
A hypothetical situation, in the third person and the conditional.
"Suppose," Margaret said, stirring her tea, "that a young man of good family were attached to someone. Deeply. And suppose the attachment were not the kind that could be broken. Not by his family, not by circumstance, not by argument. Suppose, too, that the lady in question could not bear children."
"A wife in such a household," Margaret continued, "would find her position entirely secure. Her children would be the sole heirs of the house, and nobody would ever question them. And her husband's affections would be…" The smallest pause. "Shared."
Nobody said Philip's name. Nobody said Natalia's. Nobody said you. Ten months into Clara's lessons, Lilianna understood every word, and understood too that she was being granted the dignity of not having to say so aloud.
"I suppose some ladies might find that arrangement acceptable," she said.
Then, with a steadiness that surprised her at the time and still surprised her now: "I would count myself among them."
She had meant it. That was what she remembered most clearly—not the room or the snow, but discovering that she meant it. After the bailiffs, the numbered chairs and Sylvie's betrayal, a secure and comfortable marriage to her childhood hero looked like the perfect fairytale ending, marred only by a minor, survivable blemish.
Then Lilianna asked the only question that mattered to her.
"But would he be happy? Would he accept such an arrangement if he genuinely loved the woman he is attached to?" It came out smaller than she intended. "I could bear a great many things, Aunt Margaret. I don't think I could bear being the reason he was unhappy. Or having him come to hate me for it."
Margaret looked at her for a long moment. Then she put down her cup.
"Then I must tell you the truth," she said, "because you have been honest with me, and you deserve the same." Her voice did not soften. It simply stopped performing. "The difficulty is not Miss Natalia, my dear. It has never been her. It is Philip."
Lilianna waited.
"He is the most loyal creature I have ever produced. Loyalty in him does not divide. When he gives himself to something, he does not keep a portion back for later, the way the rest of us do—a little for the family, a little for the nation, a little for ourselves, just in case. He gives the whole." Margaret looked into the fire. "It is the best thing about him. It is also precisely why he cannot be moved. Which is, unfortunately, why the lady would have to stay."
After that, they talked about the price of gas again.
Afterwards came a question that had bothered her ever since.
Had she been refused, or recruited?
She had never asked the question aloud, not to Clara, not to anyone.
Everyone she had ever trusted had kept faith with her exactly as long as it was cheap. Her father's friends. The girls from her sixteenth birthday. Hugo.
Aunt Clara's entire education rested on that observation. Your father thought the world operated on honour and loyalty. He died waiting for people to do the right thing. I'm teaching you that the only person you can rely on is yourself—and the people you've made it worth their while to support you.
Lilianna had believed her. So far, most of her experience had shown Clara to be right.
She had just one piece of evidence that Clara was not.
Philip Redwood did not even remember her. He had once handed a lonely little girl a sheet of Chopin at an autumn festival and forgotten it completely. Yet everything Margaret had said, and everything Lilianna had seen at the bicentennial, said he would not divide his loyalty for anything on offer. Not for a secure marriage. Not for five votes in the Upper House or a six-hundred-year-old name. Not even with his grandmother's blessing to keep his mistress besides.
The only person she had ever known who kept faith when it cost him, when dividing it would have cost him nothing at all.
That was exactly why she wanted him.
Yet he was keeping that faith with someone else. She could never have him to herself.
The quality that made him appealing was the lock on the door.
"Lilianna?"
Clara was watching her, the pearls at her throat glowing in the reading lamp.
"The Redwoods. Have they said anything?"
Lilianna lowered the cup and smiled. Not the public smile; something a degree more private, the smile of a tired niece at the end of a long day.
"Uncle Gerald said he was glad to see me introduced."
Clara held her eyes a moment longer than the answer deserved.
"Glad," she repeated, tasting the word. "How very Redwood." She turned back to the window.
Part 3
The papers reached Long Stones at twenty to ten in the Agency's evening relief car, wrapped in brown paper and tied with red tape: the Printed Paper Office's complete text, sent by mirror and reproduced locally.
Philip, unable to sit still since dinner, met the parcel in the hall.
"The Bill as it would stand if the new clause were agreed to," Lydia said, taking the parcel from the agent and turning towards the east study without breaking stride. "The Clerk read only the operative subsections, Master Philip. The print contains all of them."
"When did you arrange this?"
"During Grieve's speech."
Philip stopped.
While the Prime Minister of Yorgoria talked ore and seals, Philip had watched his plan for Yortinto die and come back as something else. He remembered Lydia rising once to pour water at the sideboard. He did not remember her using a telephone.
"By mirror," Lydia said, as if that explained everything, and went on down the passage.
Philip followed, and silently added it to everything else he had noticed that day.
A realization gradually formed in Philip's mind throughout the day.
Lydia was the most technically competent professional he had ever met, yet she was serving as a household governess.
Talent is certainly not in short supply in this household.
In the east study, the four volumes of statute still stood at the end of the long table, beside the builder's elevation with empty crossed out next to the seal chamber.
Natalia was already at the table, in something dark blue and plain, sitting very straight with her hands folded like a student who has been told there will be homework and has arrived early. The January Army List lay at her elbow. When he came in, she looked up, and the smile was small, immediate and entirely for him.
After last night's leopard silk, the plainness was a mercy. Philip strongly suspected it had been chosen for the preservation of what remained of his stamina. Lydia had, that very morning and within his hearing, informed Natalia with appalling directness that even the most enjoyable intimate activities became detrimental when indulged in every day without moderation.
Lydia untied the red tape and divided the print into three: the new clause for Philip, the regulation-making power for herself, the amended interpretation clause for Natalia.
Philip read.
(4) The Inspector-General, or any officer authorised by him in writing, may at all reasonable times, upon giving reasonable advance notice, enter and inspect a licensed Anchorage, and may take copies of its books and records.
There. Notice. Philip let out a breath. At least there would be a warning: time to have Lydia present, the records in order, Natalia somewhere else.
It was not much. It was something.
Then he noticed reasonable twice in one sentence. In his old line of work, a contract that needed the word twice was already expecting a fight.
He turned the page.
(8) In this section, "reasonable advance notice" means such notice as may be prescribed; and regulations under this section may prescribe circumstances in which notice need not be given.
He read it twice.
"Prescribed," he said aloud. "Prescribed by whom?"
Without a word, Natalia had already slid the amended interpretation clause across the polished wood, open at the right place, and gone back to her own reading as if she had done nothing more remarkable than pass the salt.
"Prescribed" means prescribed by regulations made by the Minister.
"The Minister" means such Minister of the Crown as Her Imperial Majesty may by Order in Council designate for the purposes of this Act.
Natalia had found the answer before he asked the question, and waited for him to ask it.
"The minister you said hasn't been appointed yet," he said to Lydia.
"Designated, Master Philip. None has been, as yet. The First Minister could advise Her Majesty to designate someone already in office. A new appointment to the cabinet, however, could be vetoed by any one of the five Princes."
"So the notice—the one protection in this clause I was counting on—"
"Would be required by the Act, if this wording passes. Its length and its exceptions would be set by that minister's regulations."
Word of the evening, Host.
The System appeared sitting cross-legged on top of the four volumes of statute, costumed as a chancery clerk and, as usual, inappropriately clothed: sleeve garters, a green eyeshade, and a waistcoat worn over nothing that could honestly be called a shirt, its lower buttons long since resigned. She held a quill like a cigarette.
"Prescribed." It means "later, by somebody else, when you're not looking."
She blew a smoke ring visible to Philip only.
It is like a software license, darling. Terms subject to change without notice.
Then, in a puff of smoke from nowhere, she was gone.
"Grieve asked for this," he said slowly. "At the Bar this afternoon. An officer who could enter 'without invitation or advance warning.' Then the government moved a clause with notice in it, and I thought they'd given him less than he asked for."
"Less on the face of the clause," Lydia said. "Their Lordships will vote for notice because notice protects their own cellars. The Minister could then make the exceptions broad enough to give the inspectors most of what the Prime Minister of Yorgoria wanted. Everyone goes home having won."
"Except the licensee," Natalia said quietly.
It was the first thing she had said since he came in.
"However, discretion cuts both ways," Lydia added. "A minister could prescribe six months' notice or twenty-four hours'—or none at all. This print does not tell us which we will get."
"Which way do you think it will cut?"
"That depends entirely upon who holds the scissors."
Philip sat back.
Every plan he had made that week had been built to satisfy a clerk. That afternoon the clause had made inspection routine. Tonight even the knock on the door turned out to be discretionary.
His problem, then, came down to two people: the minister who would write the rules, and the officer who would carry them through the door.
He turned back to the front of the clause, looking for the second.
(2) The Inspectorate shall be under the command of an officer styled the Inspector-General of Anchorages, who shall be appointed by Her Imperial Majesty by warrant under the Royal Sign Manual.
"The Empress appoints," he said.
"The Crown acts on advice," said Lydia. "The First Minister chooses. Her Majesty signs."
(3) A person shall not be appointed Inspector-General unless that person—
(a) holds a commission of general rank in any branch of Her Imperial Majesty's Forces;
(b) has experience in the investigation of offences or the enforcement of the law; and
(c) is neither a Lord of Parliament nor the son or daughter of a Lord of Parliament.
Despite everything, Philip felt a flicker of approval.
"That's almost progressive. They've written the peerage out of it."
Independent, Philip thought. Professional. It's what I'd want if I were designing it.
Then a rule from his old life surfaced. Job descriptions were not written to describe a job. They were written to describe a person.
He pulled his notebook towards him and uncapped his pen.
"How many generals does that list give us?"
"Sixty-eight on the active list," Natalia said at once. "Nineteen on half pay, according to the January Army List. This is a starting point, not the whole field."
He wrote 87.
"Experience in investigation or enforcement. Provost marshals. Colonial constabulary. Anyone who's run a court of inquiry—"
"Eleven of them," Natalia said. "On a generous reading of their recorded duties."
He crossed out 87 and wrote 11.
"And neither a peer nor the child of one."
He did not need her for that. Above the rank of colonel, the Avalondian officer corps was, as everyone knew and nobody said, a family business: younger sons of great houses, heirs waiting their turn. Strip them out of eleven, and—
He found he was holding the pen very still.
"That leaves a very small number of people."
"Three on these lists," said Natalia.
She paused.
"One is sixty-four and has applied to retire in March. One has commanded the constabularies of six crown colonies for nine years and has not set foot in the capital in five. Neither is legally excluded. Neither looks like an obvious choice for an immediate appointment here."
She stopped, remembering that she must not let her greater intelligence strain their rapport.
"The third," Lydia said, "put down various rebellions across the entire Empire, served to reinforce order back in Albecaster just a few months ago, and led the inquiry into the War Office bombing."
"Why does that sound so familiar?" Philip said reflexively, as though not knowing might keep it from being true.
"Because she just happened to be the first love of your life."
Then, Lydia looked at him with a professional smile.
Then the implication he had been holding at arm's length landed, and his face contorted with horror.
General Beatrice Dugu.
Then, the System's sarcastic voice echoed in his mind.
Ooh… that's one expensive bill for a bad romance. It's a small world at the top, eh?