FOOTNOTES

"The first rule of herbal first aid," said Tamsin, holding up a calendula blossom between two fingers like a conjuror about to produce a coin, "is that you must never tell the patient what you are doing until you have done it. The second rule is that you must never, under any circumstances, tell the patient that she is going to feel better, because patients who have been promised comfort become suspicious of their own pain."

Lila giggled before she could stop herself.

It was a tiny sound at first, a startled hiccup that she tried to swallow, and then it escaped again in a rush, and the Princess clapped both hands over her mouth with wide golden eyes. Tamsin kept her own face carefully serious and went on with the lesson, since she had learned in the Hollows that a laugh was a shy animal that fled if you looked at it directly. She laid the blossom on a clean square of linen and began to crush the petals gently with the back of a spoon.

It was a gray morning, three days after the breakfast in the Morning Room, and the Winter Garden had taken on the damp, secretive glow of a greenhouse in winter. A thin rain whispered on the panes. The orange trees stood in their tubs with their dark glossy leaves, and the fountain murmured behind its curtain of ferns. Tamsin had spread a pair of old blankets on the tiles beside the calendula bed and set out a tray with a clean bowl, a jar of lard, a pestle, and a collection of bandages made from strips torn from a petticoat that she had decided she could spare.

"This is the salve my grandmother makes for burns and scrapes," she said. "You warm the lard until it's soft, and you work the crushed petals into it, and then you let it cool in a jar. Nothing could be simpler, but it keeps for months and it heals a cut in half the time. Would you like to try the pestle?"

Lila took it as though it were a sacred object, and bent over the bowl with her tongue between her teeth. Her small fingers were steadier than they had been on the first day, and the faint violet shadows beneath her eyes seemed to have lightened. After a few minutes of silent, absorbed grinding, she looked up and said, with an air of grave inquiry, "Does it matter if I make it lumpy?"

"Not at all. Lumps are only evidence of enthusiasm."

"Mrs. Halloway says that lumps in gravy are evidence of a slovenly cook."

"Mrs. Halloway's opinion on gravy is probably well founded," Tamsin said. "I'm afraid my own is a matter of pure ignorance, since I have never cooked a gravy in my life that did not resemble tar. But I should point out that the Dominion is not governed by gravy, and a lumpy salve heals the burn just as well."

This time the laugh was real. It burst out of the Princess in a clear, helpless peal that rang up into the glass roof and echoed back, and her whole face lit with it, round and bright and astonished, like a window being thrown open on a spring morning. She laughed until she had to hold her sides, and then she collapsed backward onto the blanket with her feet in the air.

Tamsin sat very still with the spoon in her hand.

She had heard many kinds of laughter in the Hollows, the weary laughter of men over a pint at the end of a double shift, the cackle of women trading gossip at the washing-place, the shrieking delight of children racing through the shallows of the creek. She had never heard a sound quite like this one. It was not merely a happy noise. It was pitched somewhere between a chime and a bird's call, so bright and clear and unfamiliar that every leaf in the greenhouse seemed to stir. A trailing vine over the doorway uncurled a single tendril toward the girl, and a flowering orange tree in its tub shook loose a drift of white petals that spun down in the damp air like snow.

Tamsin looked up at the tree, and at the petals, and very deliberately did not look at anything else.

"You've a lovely laugh, Your Highness," she said carefully, when the last of the blossoms had settled. "You should use it more often."

"I didn't know I had one." The Princess sat up, pink-cheeked, with a petal caught in her hair. "Nobody ever asked me to."

…

The door at the far end of the Winter Garden opened without a sound, and the laughter stopped as though a hand had closed over it.

Tamsin knew who it was before she turned her head, because she saw the change in Lila's face first. The child's cheeks went pale, her shoulders drew together, and her fingers curled in the folds of her gray skirt. She looked like a tiny sentry who had been caught off her post.

Soren Aldridge came down the central path between the camellias, black-coated, bareheaded, and gloved. He moved slowly, with the self-contained precision of a man who had never in his life hurried toward anything. His face was composed in its usual lines, but there was something taut about the set of his jaw that she had not seen before, and his pale gold eyes went immediately to the tray on the blanket, the bowl, the crushed petals, and the golden-orange flower between her fingers.

"Your Grace," she said, and rose to her feet, shaking out her skirt. "We were in the middle of a lesson."

"So I observe." He stopped at the edge of the blanket. "May I ask what, precisely, the Princess is doing?"

"She is learning how to make a burn salve from pot marigold, with lard and a pestle." Tamsin held up the bowl. "It's an exercise in practical botany. I find that children remember a plant much better when they've used it to fix something."

"She is not to handle unregistered plants."

He said it quietly, without heat, but the words fell on the warm air like stones into a pond. Lila had risen to her feet, and her small face was set in an expression of such complete and obedient blankness that Tamsin felt a quick fierce flash of anger.

"She isn't handling unregistered plants," she said. "She's handling a calendula, Your Grace. It's a flower, not a felony."

Dorian, who had followed his master down the path at a respectful distance, made a strangled noise and turned it into a cough. The Duke's eyes did not leave her face.

"The Quarantine Provisions list a number of species of common garden flowers that are known to carry the contamination," he said evenly. "Calendula is among them. Your own training should have told you that."

"My training tells me that the list was drawn up in 1796 by a committee of three men, none of whom had ever been to the Hollows, and that the list includes foxglove, rosemary, and the common daisy. If the daisy is contaminated, Your Grace, then so are half the lawns in Highmark." She set the bowl carefully on the tray. "I'd be grateful to learn the mechanism by which a pot marigold transmits a disease to a child who crushes its petals with a spoon. I suspect you will find it hard to describe, because there isn't one."

"The mechanism is contact." His voice hardened. "It spreads from the plant to the person, and from the person to the next. That is the entire basis of the Acts, Miss Reed, and I do not intend to relitigate it in my sister's schoolroom."

"Then you will have to relitigate it with Dr. Hart, because she is the one who did the experiment. I'm happy to lend you the book." Tamsin took a step closer, feeling her pulse beat in her throat but not letting it reach her voice. "You examined me last week on the subject of fear, Your Grace, though you didn't call it that. You asked me about contagion and contamination and the dangers of touch. Would you like to know what I concluded?"

"I do not recall asking for your conclusions."

"Your fear," said Tamsin, "is a reading assignment you never finished."

For a moment no one in the Winter Garden moved. A drop of rain slid down a pane and fell, and the fountain murmured on behind its ferns. The tutor and the Duke stood on either side of the blanket, close enough that she could see the faint shadows beneath his eyes and the tiny muscle that jumped in his jaw. She had expected a blast of icy fury. She had prepared for dismissal, and had already begun to compose, in the back of her mind, a letter to Granny that would explain why the money had stopped.

He said nothing. He looked at her, and then at the bowl, and then at the small girl standing rigidly beside her. Something moved across his face, quick and complicated, as of a man glimpsing a figure in a mirror that he had not known was his own.

"We will continue this conversation at another time," he said at last, in a voice that was very nearly gentle, and turned, and walked away between the camellias.

The door closed behind him with a soft click.

…

Dorian lingered half a moment at the edge of the path, his lopsided smile tugging at one corner of his mouth, and mouthed something that looked remarkably like well done, then jogged off after his master. Tamsin stood in the quiet, letting her pulse settle, and discovered that her knees were not entirely steady. She sat down on the blanket with the bowl in her lap.

Lila crept over and sat beside her. For a time the child said nothing, only pulled at a loose thread on her cuff, and when she spoke, it was in a very small voice.

"He used to laugh," she said. "He did it all the time, before Mama went away."

Tamsin turned her head.

"I don't remember it very well, because I was only three. But there was a day in the Winter Garden, when the lilies were out, and he lifted me up in the air and spun around, and I remember him laughing so loudly that all the birds flew out of the trees." Lila's thumb rubbed the edge of the blanket. "After she died, he stopped. He doesn't do it anymore. Nurse says it's because he's a man of the state, and men of the state have a great many things on their minds. But I think it's because he's afraid that if he starts, he won't be able to stop."

A tight, ridiculous ache closed Tamsin's throat. She laid a hand on the girl's black hair and found that it was warm and soft, like the down of a young bird.

"I think," she said slowly, "that your brother is a person who has been taught to be careful for a very long time. It makes a person tired, and it makes him forget what he's being careful for."

"Will you remind him?"

"That is not my job, Your Highness."

"I think it might be," said Lila gravely, and took up the pestle again.

…

The afternoon brought a weak, rainy sunlight that slanted across the corridors of Vandermere Hall like pale tea. After the lesson was over and the Princess had gone to her music master, Tamsin made her way through the long galleries to the Archivist's office on the third floor, where Mr. Finch had left word that he would be pleased to give her a look at certain records pertaining to her employment.

She was not entirely sure why he had offered, and she was fairly certain that he had a reason. He met her at the door in a cloud of tobacco and old paper smell, with a smudge of ink on his nose and a cup of tea wobbling dangerously in one hand, and ushered her into a small, crowded room lined with filing cabinets. The window overlooked the river. A fire burned feebly in the grate, and in the middle of the floor stood a desk that seemed to be built entirely of paper.

"The personnel files of the household are kept here, my dear," said Finch, setting the teacup in a basket of correspondence. "Under the Imperial Records Act, any member of staff is entitled to examine her own. I find that very few of them know this, and fewer still ask. I'll leave you to your reading, and I'll be just next door if you need me. Please do mind the third drawer, since the runners stick."

He left her alone, with the door open a hand's breadth.

Tamsin found her file in the second cabinet, between a laundress named Reeves and a coachman named Rowe. It was a thin folder, tied with pink tape. Inside lay the letter of appointment that had come to Marrow Creek, a copy of her Ashby transcript, a note regarding her ash-ribbon registration, and a half-sheet of cream paper bearing a list of references. She read all of it twice, her mind noting the petty details, the dates, and the signatures.

On the second page, beneath the formal paragraph of recommendation, she saw something she had missed on the original. The letter had been sealed with plain white wax. This copy, the office duplicate, had been stamped in the corner with a small rectangular mark in black ink, a fraction of an inch high. It was a clerk's endorsement, the kind used to record the authority under which a document had been issued. The mark showed a stylized scale balanced on a pillar, with the initials H.S. beneath it.

She knew the device. It was printed at the head of every Chancellery decree in the Dominion.

The letter had not come from the Princess's household. It had not come from the Emperor, or from the Duke, or even from the Archive Board. It had been issued by the Chancellor, Harlan Sterling himself, who according to the notation had approved her appointment personally, by name, on the twenty-fourth of October. She counted back and realized that the date fell exactly four days before the postman had knocked on Granny Odell's door.

She turned the folder over in her hands, looking for some error in her reading. There was none. She closed it and returned it to the cabinet, slid the drawer shut, and stood for a long time with her fingertips resting on the cool metal, hearing the faint tick of the clock and the drip of the rain.

She had been chosen. Of all the scholars in the Dominion, of all the clever and polished and docile young women the Chancellery could have summoned from the better colleges, they had picked a Rootkin girl from a mining village that did not appear on most maps. They had paid her three times the usual salary. They had given her an unfriendly housekeeper and a gray cup and a nursery full of silverweed, and they had set her down in front of a child whose illness no doctor could cure.

Why, she thought, and the thought went through her like a cold wire, would the most powerful man in the Dominion personally choose a Hollow girl?