I left him to it and went back down to the stables, and had my coachman drive me to Ailsa’s street and wait across the road from her gates. I could have ridden, of course, but something about turning up ahorse instead of in a carriage always made me feel conspicuous in her moneyed neighbourhood. I really was becoming a Dannsburg gentleman, I realised, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t ever want to lose sight of where I had come from, but I was also a Queen’s Man and there were certain standards to be upheld.
I remembered Sabine, inciting a riot with her long, filthy iron-grey hair hanging loose and wild around her face, and I wondered about that. The Queen’s Men have no uniform or insignia, and perhaps they have no prescribed look either. Perhaps we present whatever false face is required at the time, and adapt and move on.
Sister Deceit.
I looked at Ailsa’s house, and shook my head. Ailsa wasn’t Sabine, I knew that, but did I really want to take this to her? I knew I had to take it to someone, and I would far rather speak to Ailsa than Vogel any day of the week. Either way, this was a thing the house of law needed to know.
I thumped on the roof to tell the coachman to proceed once more, and he drove his team of four to the gates of Ailsa’s residence. One of the gate guards came over to the side window with his hand on the hilt of his sword. He was young, and I didn’t recognise him.
‘Help you?’ he asked.
I looked around for Brandt, but he wasn’t there that day.
‘Let me in,’ I said. ‘I’m her husband.’
‘And I’m the fucking king of Skania,’ he said, giving Oliver and Emil the hard eye at the backboard of the carriage where there should have been liveried footmen.
I may have had the carriage, I may have had the clothes, but I still sounded like a commoner from the Stink and there was nothing to be done about that. My accent was so strongly Ellinburg that no one in the capital would ever truly mistake me for a noble, and I found myself tiring of the reactions that brought.
‘Her parlour is the second door on the left off the hall, where she sits and works at her embroidery hoop,’ I said. ‘Her bedroom is on the third floor at the end of the corridor. It has lilac-painted walls and a big mirror on the washstand. She keeps her underthings in the third drawer of the armoire, and she sleeps naked.’
I was making that last bit up, of course, having not the faintest idea what, if anything, my lady wife wore to bed or where she kept her smallclothes, but then of course he wouldn’t know either. The rest of it was true enough, although I had only set foot in her bedroom once and that only to talk. It had the desired effect, though, and a hot blush crawled up the young guard’s face. Ailsa was an extremely attractive woman, after all, and I couldn’t think he had failed to notice that.
‘I can’t just—’ he started, but I cut him off with a look.
‘I’m her husband,’ I said again. ‘What more do you want to know, how she likes to fuck?’
He went crimson. I glared at him until he stepped back and nodded sharply to the men on the gates, and a moment later my carriage swept into the grassy expanse before the house.
I stepped down and marched to the front door as two of her men hurried to catch up with me. I went in without knocking.
‘Sir!’ the startled footman in the hall said, but I pushed past him and into the drawing room without a word.
‘Tomas, what a pleasant surprise,’ Ailsa exclaimed, and sharply waved the footman away. ‘He’s my husband, for the gods’ sakes. Leave us alone.’
The door closed, and she gave me the most extraordinary look.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I need to speak to you.’
‘Yes, yes, evidently,’ Ailsa said. ‘Whatever is it, Tomas, that causes you to barge in here unannounced in the middle of the afternoon?’
So I told her. I told her about the princess and about Billy, and about our visit to the palace. I told her what they had said to each other, and most of all I told her what Billy had told me in the carriage on our way back to the Bountiful Harvest.
‘Gods be good,’ Ailsa said, when I was done.
She surprised me by pouring herself a brandy, which she hardly ever did. She offered me one too, and I accepted it gratefully.
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I think she frightened the piss out of him, and Billy isn’t one to get the fear easily.’
‘No, no, he isn’t,’ Ailsa mused as she sipped her brandy and stared into the fire. ‘Billy is more likely to give people the fear than to suffer from it.’
That, I had to allow, was the goddess’ honest truth.
‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ I confessed. ‘I just thought the house of law should know.’
‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ Ailsa said, and she smiled at me.
That was the special smile, the one I thought only I ever saw. That was the real Ailsa, Ailsa the barmaid. My Ailsa. That was Chandari Shapoor smiling at me, my sasura’s daughter, not Ailsa the Queen’s Man. Not Sister Deceit. That was the woman I had fallen in love with, the woman I had married. I smiled back, and sipped my brandy.
‘Well, there it is,’ I said. ‘So long as we keep her on her medication I suppose all will be well. I’m worried about Billy, though, and what he said about him and Mina.’
‘It sounds like he can control it,’ Ailsa said. ‘He’s a remarkably strong young man, Tomas, given what he has been through. I think he takes after his adoptive father, there.’
She met my eyes, and
