“Of course I must go,” said Lady Verr, who was repeating the same operation. “I am not meant to only be your companion, my lady. I am your secretary, your counselor, and whatever else you need me to be.”
It was breathtakingly cold outside. It was a mercy that there was no sign of clouds on the horizon, but Ophele thought with renewed anxiety of Miche and his men, already miles away from the shelter of Tresingale. She and Lady Verr slipped and slid over the icy mud and paused first at Azelma’s cottage, so Ophele could repeat Sir Justenin’s instructions to cover her faceand wash her hands through the door, and Azelma could assure her that she felt perfectly fine.
“You needn’t fret, child, I will not die for lack of society,” she said tartly. “And what are you doing out in this weather? Get inside by a fire.”
The interview with Adelan—also through the door of his cottage—was disheartening. He himself was feverish, and had checked in on all the servants to find that Jaose had started coughing, and so had one of the laundresses. Sim, Peri, and one of the stable boys rounded out the tally. None of them felt so poorly that they could not fend for themselves, but Adelan apologized that most of the chores would go undone. The other stable boy was isolating himself in the tack room of the stable, which had an iron stove for the sake of the leather, and hoped he would be spared to take care of the horses.
Ophele was beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed.
“Oh, no, not you too,” she said, despairing, as Davi cracked open the door of the cottage he shared with Leonin, to reveal one shadowy eye. “Both of you?”
“Leonin is worse,” Davi said, and his voice didn’t sound too bad. “What are you doing out by yourself, my lady? Saving your presence, Lady Verr.”
“Everyone else is sick,” Ophele said, with a thrill of real fear. “I want to go see Genon and fetch medicine. And I must know who else is sick in town, and at the barracks, to make sure they are all looked after.”
What if the cooks got sick? What if people became too ill to fetch water for themselves, or food, when it was so cold? What if it snowed again, and everyone was too sick to clear the roads? How would they get food then? And firewood, the pageboys and the peasant boys had been doing much of the hauling from the huge piles seasoning about the town, but who would do it if they fell ill?
“I have to go,” she said, more to herself than Davi or Lady Verr. Her mouth set in a firm line. “Davi, are you very sick? Tell me the truth.”
“I am not,” he said, meeting her eyes squarely. “No fever, my lady, only a scratchy throat.”
“Please dress as warmly as you can,” she said, already planning ahead. If he became too sick to go out, then she would get Auber, or Tounot, or Jinmin. “We will be in the stable, it’s warmer there.”
He didn’t argue. Leonin would have, on the grounds of propriety and because Remin was likely to be very, very angry if he learned she had been gallivanting about town while there was a plague on, but Davi was practical to his bones.
“Perhaps everyone should get food once a day, and heat it over their own fires,” she said as she and Lady Verr shoved open the heavy barn door together, and hauled it shut again. “Soup and bread will do; we cannot afford for the cookhouse to get sick. Or Wen,” she added, her heart contracting with sudden fear. What would they do, if he did?
“We ought to see what herb stores Mr. Hengest has, my lady,” said Lady Verr. “It is tempting to give medicine to everyone at the first sniffle, but you would be surprised how quickly it goes.”
Ophele exhaled, a white cloud rolling upward.
“I wonder if ink will freeze in this weather,” she said.
The stable door opened behind them, and there was Davi, lanky and reassuring, wrapped up as thoroughly as Ophele herself and steady as a stone.
“Genon first, hey?” he asked, looking between the two women. And as they were gathering their horses and tack, Ophele found a parting piece of insolence from Miche in the second to the last stall: a certain golden Gevalle mare with gentleeyes, who stuck her nose over the door of her stall as if she had just been waiting for Ophele to find her.
Chapter 7 – The Council of the Well
Acoded message on a folded scrap of parchment, concealed in the hollow of a tree:
Do it this afternoon. Servants down to one maid, guard corps reduced and ill. Snowdrifts will cover an approach from the east. Southeast window will be open.
***
Mionet had not signed up for this.
To be a lady of Segoile was not at all the same as being a rustic noblewoman like her mother, and still less like the Duchess of Andelin. If Mionet’s maids had been ill, she would never have known it. She could barely have matched a name to a face. That was the whole point of uniforms and caps, after all; to make the maids look like each other.
There were some terribly fashionable households that matched their servants the way they matched their carriagehorses: footmen of like height, or Lady Hamel with her bevy of redheads, who looked so well in azure livery. Countess Vimont had begun the fashion with a retinue of willowy blondes, though cynical folk said it was only to divert her husband from her own bed.
Mionet would never have gone downstairs to look in on the servants herself, much less inquired after the nearby peasants. But neither she nor Davi tried to dissuade Duchess Andelin. In Tresingale, if His Grace was ill, the responsibility for the town rested on the shoulders of his eighteen-year-old wife.
“We must find out who is ill, first,” Duchess Andelin was saying as they made their precarious way down the hill to Eugene Street. “Does it always come on so suddenly? It seemed almost overnight.”
“No, not so’s I recall,” Davi said, grim and ungrammatical. He had yielded to Mionet’s hints and finally acquired a proper eyepatch from somewhere, but no one would ever mistake him for a gentleman. “Usually, folk started getting sick over a week or so, and everyone would be sick for a week, and then it’d trickle off and everyone was well again by January. Sometimes it carried off the wounded, but I’ve never heard of a healthy man dying of it. Gen makes a tonic that knocks out the worst of it. If you ask him nice, it might knock out the sick fellow in the meantime.”
Duchess Andelin gave him a sharp glance, but there was no doubt of his meaning. His Grace had been obviously getting sick for days, and Mionet couldn’t imagine how he had been persuaded to stay abed unless he was physically unable to get out of it.
