Soul of the Fire (32 page)

“
It’s a lie that the Minister raped you. A filthy treasonous lie. You ever say such a thing again, and you’ll be made to suffer before you die.”

“
Yes sir,” she sobbed. “I’ll never lie again. I’m sorry. Please, forgive me? I’ll never lie again, I swear.”

“
You were putting it out there for the Minister, offering yourself. But the Minister is a better man than to have an affair with you—or anyone. He turned you down. He refused you.”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
Nothing improper happened. Got that? The Minister never did nothing improper with you, or anyone.”

“
Yes, sir.” She whined in a long sob, her head hanging.

Fitch pulled her handkerchief from her sleeve. He dabbed it at her eyes. He could tell in the dim light that her face paint, what with the throwing up and crying, was a shambles.

“
Stop crying, now. You’re making a mess of your face. You better go back to your room and fix yourself up before you go back to the feast.”

She sniffled, trying to stop the tears. “I can’t go back to the feast, now. My dress is spoiled. I can’t go back.”

“
You can, and you will. Fix your face and put on another dress. You’re going to go back. There will be someone watching, to see if you go back, to see if you got the message. If you ever slip again, you’ll be swallowing the steel of his sword.”

Her eyes widened with fright. “Who—”

“
That’s not important. It don’t matter none to you. The only thing that matters is that you got the message and understand what will happen if you ever again tell your filthy lies.”

She nodded. “I understand.”

“
Sir,” Fitch said. Her brow twitched. “I understand, sir!”

She pressed back against Morley. “I understand, sir. Yes, sir, I truly understand.”

“
Good,” Fitch said.

She glanced down at herself. Her lower lip trembled. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“
Please, sir, may I fix my dress?”

“
When I’m done talking.”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
You’ve been out for a walk. You didn’t talk to no one. Do you understand? No one. From now on, you just keep your mouth shut about the Minister, or when you open it the next time, you’ll find a sword going down your throat. Got all that?”

“
Yes, sir.”

“
All right, then.” Fitch gestured. “Go ahead and pull up your dress.”

Morley leered over her shoulder as she stuffed herself back in the dress. Fitch didn’t think covering herself with the dress, as low as it was, showed much less, but he surely enjoyed standing there watching her do it. He never thought he’d see such a thing. Especially an Ander woman doing such a thing.

The way she straightened with a gasp, Morley must have done something behind her, up under her dress. Fitch surely wanted to do something, too, but remembered Dalton Campbell.

Fitch grabbed Claudine Winthrop’s arm and pulled her ahead a couple of steps. “You be on your way, now.”

She snatched a quick glance at Morley, then looked back at Fitch. “Yes, sir. Thank you.” She dipped a hasty curtsy. “Thank you, sir.”

Without further word, she clutched her skirts in her fists, rushed down the steps, and ran off across the lawn into the night.

“
Why’d you send her off?” Morley asked. He put a hand on his hip. “We could have had a time with her. She’d of had to do anything we wanted. And after a look at what she had, I wanted.”

Fitch leaned toward his disgruntled friend. “Because Master Campbell never told us we could do anything like that, that’s why. We was helping Master Campbell, that’s all. No more.”

Morley made a sour face. “I guess.” He looked off toward the woodpile. “We still got a lot of drinking to do.”

Fitch thought about the look of fear on Claudine Winthrop’s face. He thought about her crying and sobbing. He knew Haken women cried, of course, but Fitch had never before even imagined an Ander woman crying. He didn’t know why not, but he never had.

The Minister was Ander, so Fitch guessed he couldn’t really do wrong. She must have asked for it with her low-cut dress and the way she acted toward him. Fitch had seen the way a lot of women acted toward him. Like they would rejoice if he had them.

He remembered Beata sitting on the floor crying. He thought about the look of misery on Beata’s face, up there, when the Minister threw her out after he’d finished with her.

Fitch thought about the way she’d clouted him.

It was all too much for him to figure out. Fitch wanted nothing more right then than to drink himself into a stupor.

“
You’re right. Let’s go have ourselves a drink. We’ve a lot to celebrate. Tonight, we became important men.”

With an arm over each other’s shoulders, they headed for their bottle.

“
Well, isn’t that something,” Teresa whispered.

Dalton followed her gaze to see Claudine Winthrop haltingly work her way among the roomful of milling people. She was wearing a dress he had seen before when he worked in the city, an older dress of modest design. It was not the dress she had worn earlier in the evening. He suspected that beneath the mask of rosy powder, her face was ashen. Mistrust would now color her vision.

People from the city of Fairfield, their eyes filled with wonder, gazed at their surroundings, trying to drink it all in so they might tell their friends every detail of their grand evening at the Minister of Culture’s estate. It was a high honor to be invited to the estate, and they wished to overlook no detail. Details were important when vaunting one’s self.

Patches of intricate marquetry flooring showed between each of the richly colored rare carpets placed at even intervals the length of the room. There was no missing the luxuriously thick feel underfoot. Dalton guessed that thousands of yards of the finest material had to have gone into the draperies swagged before the file of tall windows on each side of the room, all constructed with complex ornamental tracery to hold colored glass. Here and there a woman would, between thumb and finger, test the cloth’s high-count weave. The edges of the azure and golden-wheat-colored fabric were embellished with multicolored tassels as big as his fist. Men marveled at the fluted stone columns rising to hold the massive, cut-stone corbel along the length of the side walls at the base of the gathering hall’s barrel ceiling. A panoply of curved mahogany frames and panels, looking like the ends of elaborately cut voussoirs, overspread the arched barrel ceiling.

Dalton lifted his pewter cup to his lips and took a sip of the finest Nareef Valley wine as he watched. At night, with all the candles and lamps lit, the place had a glow about it. It had taken discipline, when he first arrived, not to gape as did these people come out from the city.

He watched Claudine Winthrop move among the well-dressed guests, clasping a hand here, touching an elbow there, greeting people, smiling woodenly, answering questions with words Dalton couldn’t hear. As distressed as he knew she had to be, she had the resourcefulness to conduct herself with propriety. The wife of a wealthy businessman who had been elected burgess by merchants and grain dealers to represent them, she was not an unimportant member of the household in her own right. When at first people saw that her husband was old enough to be her grandfather, they usually expected she was no more than his entertainment; they were wrong.

Her husband, Edwin Winthrop, had started out as a farmer, raising sorgo—sweet sorghum grown widely in southern Anderith. Every penny he earned through the sale of the sorghum molasses he pressed was spent frugally and wisely. He went without, putting in abeyance everything from proper shelter and clothes, to the simple comforts of life, to a wife and family.

What money he saved eventually purchased livestock he foraged on sorghum left from pressing his molasses. Sale of fattened livestock bought more feeder stock, and equipment for stills so he could produce rum himself, rather than sell his molasses to distilleries. Profits from the rum he distilled from his molasses earned him enough to rent more farmland and purchase cattle, equipment and buildings for producing more rum, and eventually warehouses and wagons for transporting the goods he produced. Rum distilled by the Winthrop farms was sold from Renwold to Nicobarese, from just down the road in Fairfield all the way to Aydindril. By doing everything himself—or, more accurately, having his own hired workers do everything—from growing sorgo to pressing it to distilling it to delivering the rum, to raising cattle on the fodder of his leftover stocks of pressed sorghum to slaughtering the cattle and delivering the carcasses to butchers, Edwin Winthrop kept his costs low and made for himself a fortune.

Edwin Winthrop was a frugal man, honest, and well liked. Only after he was successful had he taken a wife. Claudine, the well-educated daughter of a grain dealer, had been in her mid-teens when she wed Edwin, well over a decade before.

Talented at overseeing her husband’s accounts and records, Claudine watched every penny as carefully as would her husband. She was his valuable right hand—much as Dalton served the Minister. With her help, his personal empire had doubled. Even in marriage, Edwin had chosen carefully and wisely. A man who never seemed to seek personal pleasure perhaps had at last allowed himself this much; Claudine was as attractive as she was diligent.

After Edwin’s fellow merchants had elected him burgess, Claudine became useful to him in legal matters, helping, behind the scenes, to write the trade laws he proposed. Dalton suspected she had a great deal to do with proposing them to her husband in the first place. When he was not available, Claudine discreetly argued those proposed laws on on his behalf. No one in the household thought of her as “entertainment.”

Except, perhaps, Bertrand Chanboor. But then, he viewed all women in that light. The attractive ones, anyway.

Dalton had in the past seen Claudine blushing, batting her eyelashes, and flashing Bertrand Chanboor her shy smile. The Minister believed demure women coquettish. Perhaps she innocently flirted with an important man, or perhaps she had wanted attention her husband couldn’t provide; she hadn’t, after all, any children. Perhaps she had cunningly thought to gain some favor from the Minister, and afterward discovered it wasn’t to be forthcoming.

Claudine Winthrop was nobody’s fool; she was intelligent and resourceful. How it had started—Dalton was not sure, Bertrand Chanboor denied touching her as he denied everything out of hand—had become irrelevant. With her seeking secret meetings with Director Linscott, matters had moved past polite negotiation of favors. Brute force was the only safe way to control her now.

Dalton gestured with his cup of wine toward Claudine. “Looks like you were wrong, Tess. Not everyone is going along with the fashion of wearing suggestive dresses. Or maybe Claudine is modest.”

“
No, it must be something else.” Teresa looked truly puzzled. “Sweetheart, I don’t think she was wearing that dress earlier. But why would she now be wearing something different? And an old dress it is.”

Dalton shrugged. “Let’s go find out, shall we? You do the asking. I don’t think it would be right coming from me.”

Teresa looked askance at him. She knew him well enough to know by his subtle reply that a scheme was afoot. She also knew enough to take his lead and play the part he had just assigned her. She smiled and hooked a hand over his offered arm. Claudine was not the only intelligent and resourceful woman in the household.

Claudine flinched when Teresa touched the back of her shoulder. She twitched a smile as she glanced up briefly.

“
Good evening, Teresa.” She dropped a half-curtsy to Dalton. “Mr. Campbell.”

Teresa, concern creasing her brow, leaned toward the woman. “Claudine, what’s wrong? You don’t look well. And your dress, why, I don’t recall you coming in wearing this.”

Claudine pulled at a lock of hair over her ear. “I’m fine. I … was just nervous about all the guests. Sometimes crowds get my stomach worked up. I went for a walk to get some air. In the dark, I guess I put my foot in a hole, or something. I fell.”

“
Dear spirits. Would you like to sit?” Dalton asked as he took the woman’s elbow, as if to hold her up. “Here, let me help you to a chair.”

She dug in her heels. “No. I’m fine. But thank you. I soiled my dress, and had to go change, that’s all. That’s why it’s not the same one. But I’m fine.”

She glanced at his sword as he pulled back. He had seen her looking at a lot of swords since she returned to the gathering hall… .