a moment in which she had no control of herself. She might have done anything. She might have wept before him, begging for Rodric’s life as though he were facing direct execution. She might have lunged at Mr Northway and stabbed him to death with his own letter-opener.
But propriety reasserted itself neatly before she could do anything foolish, and she was left standing opposite him, holding her purse like a tiny shield before her, impotent and frustrated.
If I were a man, I would have struck him. That seemed the proper response. A true fighting hero of Lascanne would have no time for a worm like Northway. If the impulse had come to her a moment before, then perhaps she would even have acted upon it, but now she just stood, prim and proper, and he sat there and leered.
‘One day,’ she told him, knowing how weak the words sounded, ‘the King shall learn what a creature you are.’
‘He knows I am his servant,’ Mr Northway declared smoothly.
‘You are a thief and a villain, and I will cheer when they hang you.’ And the words were out, what she had thought – surely what everyone thought – about him, but that nobody ever dared say. For a moment the room had balanced in silence, and his face was utterly without emotion or expression, and she did not know what he might do next.
Then Mr Northway’s broad smile returned, as coldblooded as ever. ‘Why, Miss Marshwic,’ he observed, ‘always pleasant to know that I am in your thoughts.’
There were a dozen civilized apologies welling up inside her: the things she knew that society expected her to say to plaster over her breach of etiquette. She fought them down stubbornly.
For his part, he plainly had not expected them from her. ‘I am sure it makes this easier for you, to blame me and hate me for this. You have my permission to do so.’ He rose smoothly then, and made a short bow, never taking his eyes off her. ‘I think we are done here, Miss Marshwic. You know the way out, I believe.’
And now, days later, she could only watch Rodric ride away, and reflect on how she had tried and failed, and would never know whether she might have somehow won, had she bent more before the world.
The lamps of Sergeant Pallwide and his boys were finally lost in the night, in the fog, before she turned away from the door. Alice had gone long before, and Jenna had taken the baby upstairs, but Emily and Mary had stayed until all light – all hope – had gone. Soon afterwards, in the east, there arrived the faintest leaden grey that was the first grim herald of the dawn.
In the east and the north lay the Levant front, the swamps and dense forest that some small but vital stretch of the war was being fought through. There went Rodric and his fellows, to encounter the Denlanders, to fight a war the newspapers claimed was as good as won. With that thought, the words of Mr Northway came back to her. What did he know of it? Or was he just putting his knife into her, for her rudeness and her refusal to pretend he was anything other than her enemy?
‘I am sure Tubal will look after him,’ Emily said, her voice sounding hollow even to her own ears.
Mary sniffled. ‘My poor Tubal, he could never look after himself. I don’t think he would ever have got dressed or eaten a warm meal in his life without his mother and me to help him. I wish he would write more, Emily. It has been almost a season since his last letter.’
They went in at last, to a kitchen as cold as the night outside. Cook stoked up the fire and grumbled, because these days she had to fetch her own wood as often as not. Old Poldry sat at the table with folded hands and a mournful expression that set his moustache drooping. When he looked up, she saw a tear caught in the wrinkles beneath his eye.
‘Forgive me, ma’am,’ he said, rising stiffly. ‘I wish I could go with them, the young lads. I’d go in a moment, if they asked me.’
He had been a soldier in the last war, three decades ago, fighting overseas against the Imperial Hellics and their Grand Army. He had survived that, she reminded herself, and he looked back on it all quite fondly. Surely they were