Opportunities, as I say.
Chapter 37
Two days later I received another letter.
My beloved son-by-law,
I would be overjoyed to see you, but times are delicate. On Queensday afternoon my wife will be out with her friends, and I think that would be the best and perhaps only time for us to meet. I bear you no ill will for the marital difficulties between you and my daughter, but I fear her mother feels differently. It would go badly for us both if she knew I was receiving you in our house. Come to me two hours after noon on Queensday and we will talk and drink brandy together like gentlemen, and I will offer you what counsel I can, but for the love of the Many-Headed God, do not tell my daughter of our meeting, should you happen to speak to her.
With my greatest regards,
Your sasura
I folded the letter, and nodded with satisfaction.
Then I unfolded it and read it again, and reread it, and I frowned.
Do not tell my daughter of our meeting, should you happen to speak to her.
If we were completely estranged, as he was supposed to think we were, why the fuck would I happen to speak to her? Ailsa was convinced her parents thought she was just a courtier, but I had to wonder. She had to have won her knighthood somehow, after all, and that wasn’t something that usually happened to the daughters of immigrant Alarian merchants, however much money their fathers had managed to make in Dannsburg. My sasura was a very shrewd man indeed, for all that he tried to hide it behind whiskers and brandy fumes, and I wondered if perhaps he suspected more about her life than he let on. It honestly wouldn’t have surprised me.
In Dannsburg everyone is watched, and perhaps none so much as the Queen’s Men themselves. As I have written, everyone who matters knows one when they see one. I had been very publicly knighted not so long ago myself, and I doubted that Sasura had failed to hear of that. For all his pretence of being a wealthy retired merchant, tired and sleepy in his study with a glass of brandy always at his elbow, I thought the old pirate probably had a fair idea of which way the wind was blowing in Dannsburg in those days.
Which was precisely why I wanted to speak to him, of course. Ailsa’s father was a wise man, a man I respected, and more importantly than that, he was a connected one.
I was depending on it, the same way I was depending on Lady Lan Yetrov honouring her unspoken debt to me. I was reasonably sure that she would, to be fair – at least to an extent – but Ailsa’s father was a different matter. I held an uncharacteristic affection towards him, but I knew that if the dice fell bad in the future his loyalty would be first and foremost to his wife and daughter. How could it be otherwise? Sasura was a family man, and I could respect that.
He wouldn’t be the man I thought him if he didn’t put his own daughter first, but then I wasn’t actually going against Ailsa in this. I just wasn’t involving her in it. That was a different thing, to my mind, but we would see if Sasura saw it the same way. I knew he didn’t involve his family in his own business dealings, to the extent that even Ailsa at least pretended to believe he had never been anything other than an honest merchant, but I supposed we would see about that. Whether she truly believed it was another matter, of course, but on the carriage ride home from that first brandy afternoon in his study I thought I had seen a tiny glimpse of a wounded little girl in her face when I had mentioned her father’s past.
Wounded childhood was something I understood all too well, and I remember how I had wanted to take her in my arms in the back of that carriage, drunk as I had been at the time.
I hadn’t dared.
Fool, fucking fool.
She would probably have stabbed me if I had tried it, but I had seen the need in her eyes, nonetheless. Not for romance, no, but for simple human comfort. Somehow that had been so much sadder. Sometimes we all just need a little comfort, and are denied it by circumstance and the harshness of the worlds we build around us.
The Queen’s Men denied us everything.
Hearts of steel, that was what Vogel wanted. Stone lionesses and iron tigers. There was no place for feelings in the Queen’s Men. I’m not what you’d call a caring man, I have to allow. I haven’t got that bit, after all, and perhaps that was what they saw in me in the first place. All the same, there came a point where you just . . . I don’t know.
I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, quite how to phrase it.
I mean, I don’t care about people I don’t know. I never have done, and I’ve written of that before. Except . . . except sometimes I do. Take Beast, as an example. I had cared about him, and I have given him a job when he asked me for one.
But then I could see that Beast was useful. Would I have cared about someone who wasn’t?
I really didn’t know.
Was that the kind of man I was, one who would take in someone useful and overlook another who at first glance might appear not to be? Again, I honestly didn’t know. I had cared about the Lady Lan Yetrov, I supposed, and I hadn’t known her, but I’d had reason enough to hate her husband. But then a good part of why I had hated him had to do with how he treated her, and she had been no one I knew. I could tie my
