Memory of Morning (30 page)

After the ceremony it was decided that it was best not to mention performing this traditional temple rite to the Gray Women, not knowing if it clashed with their secretive beliefs. It gave those of us who'd worked with her, and respected her, some comfort. I gave a donation of beeswax candles to Light Her Way for a month, and the staff made a donation to a nursing school in her name. It was all we could do, along with returning to our work at Mercy Home.

Except I gave notice that I would be leaving sooner than I had originally planned. Mostly it was because I wanted to escape Loudon. Partially, it was my lawyer's recommendation.

The annoyance came about because the Imperial College of Surgeons found out about my emergency aid station and protested that this was a violation of the surgeons' certification only allowing me to practice on naval bases and charity homes. Rather than accept a sanction, I protested the College's assertion, and lawyers had become involved. Sigh.

It had been agreed, reluctantly on the College's part, that the medical procedures I, a lowly woman, had performed that night had been under the sanction of my duties as a naval surgeon, since the military had been involved in quelling the riot.

I was so very tired of everything to do with the narrow-minded, blinded-by-history, and tradition-bound bureaucracy and society of Loudon, here in the heart of the Ang Empire. Maybe the town did need burning down. Only the wrong side had felt the flames.

I was packed and ready to take my dog and leave as soon as one last ceremony was attended. Back home to lovely radical Avan, on to the safety of Cliff House, Mother's peaceful cottage on Welis, or to practical, hard-working Seyemouth, I didn't care. Somewhere, anywhere, but Loudon.

I was seated with a large crowd in the viewing area before the high altar of the great temple, nowhere close to the chapel where we'd sung out Mistress Reed. A thin border of beadwork had been added around the neckline of my primrose dress to show my fresh status. All the rest of my family were similarly and correctly bedecked.

Today's occasion was solemn, very formal, but also the culmination of the participants' deepest hopes and dreams. This was the formal Induction ceremony for new-made and promoted nobles. The head of the College of Heralds stood amidst a gaggle of assistants, officiating, all in their jewel-bright velvets and funny hats. The Dowager Empress sat on a throne at the top of the altar steps, overseeing the ceremony. Lian Eagle, Lord West stood at her side.

Lord North was not among the nobles present. I rather missed seeing him, in all his sharp-featured, sharp-tongued haughtiness. I'd gotten used to his presence, I suppose.

My uncle, aunt, and father had been among the first to kneel before the Herald and accept the documents and marks of rank, as the ceremony started with the least and moved on to greater and greater heights of social ranking. The pleasure and thrill of my family's triumph had long faded to boredom for me. I was struggling to fight off melancholy. And for some reason, sitting here in view of the Dowager, a memory kept nagging at me from the night of the riot.

What I couldn't get out of my head was a story Lord North told me as we walked behind Cleric Moor's stretcher, with a marine escort, back toward Mercy Home.

"I am sorry I had to kill the cinder," he said. "Those poor folk deserve the best care we can give them."

"I'm sorry for it, too," I answered. "But at that moment, you had no choice."

"I know I didn't. He was armed and murderous."

"And you didn't know what he was at the time."

"It makes me - sad - whenever I see one. When I was young..."

A pensive silence surrounded us for a while. I wanted to ask, but waited.

"I was betrothed to a very nice girl when I was young. We liked each other very much, so neither of us minded that ours was a political match. But when she was nineteen, the year we were to be married, she contracted Red Fever. The vaccination didn't work on her, though it did on her brothers. They were immune from the plague."

"It doesn't take in about thirty percent of the population," I said. "But the vaccination usually lessens the plague's effects on those it doesn't completely protect."

"Not her. She had no protection at all, poor thing."

Since dealing with the cinder had roused this memory in him, I guessed, "She did not die, but she did not survive, either."

He nodded. "A cinder. One of the quiet, peaceful ones."

"I am sorry." And I did blame myself, a little, even if the vaccine helped far more than it failed.

"She is well looked after. Her governess claims she responds to the colors and scents of flowers, but I think that is hopeful delusion. She is as still in a garden as she is everywhere else."

"You visit her, then."

"I used to. I also used to hope she'd wake up and be herself one day. We all did - her family, mine, all the doctors and caretakers. At first..." He hesitated, and gave me a hard look. I read in his eyes that he didn't want to say more, but decided I should know. "At first her parents wanted me to marry her anyway. Her mind was gone, but she was a healthy woman otherwise."

I gasped. Why was he confiding something so personally heartbreaking to me? Because in the dark, after a battle, words that need taking out and saying can be safely entrusted to comrades?

"They needed grandchildren, you see," he went on. "It wasn't selfish on their part, not exactly. The family is in danger of dying out. The heads of families do what they must for the generations of the name."

I couldn't hide how appalled I was. I touched his arm. "Yes, but it was cruel. To you as much as to her. You said she has brothers to carry on the name."

"I agree it was cruel. I refused, for her sake as well as mine. Then her elder brother died in the war. Her younger brother's lover died in childbirth. More pressure was put on me to wed my poor cinder girl. Quite a rift developed between my family and hers... the sort of thing that used to lead to clan feuds in the old days. Eventually her mother came to her senses and apologized. She is rather ashamed of herself over the whole affair, because she's not a bad woman. She's still ruthless about her family, but at least she won't let her daughter be raped for the sake of grandchildren. Although, perhaps other people's..."

He said no more, leaving me wondering, then and now, what he meant. Then I noticed Lord Eagle bend down to share words with the seated Dowager, and the truth of the dangerous knowledge North had given me tumbled into place. My whole being twisted in a mutter of exquisite terror. By the All, why had North imparted what must be a state secret to me?

Perhaps because what was dangerous knowledge to me was merely his life to him. People talked about themselves to doctors. He hadn't named names, after all, but...

It was assumed the Imperial Princess had died of the plague. There had never been any official announcement, but...

Who would Lord North be betrothed to - a political match - but someone of the highest rank...?

Everyone knew the Dowager and Lord North did not like each other. Most speculation on why centered around the nobles of the northern islands chaffing for more autonomy, but what if it was more personal...?

I did not want to know this. I should not know this. For a panicked moment I was sure that the Dowager, or Lord Eagle, who was surely the cinder princess's father, were going to look at me and know that I knew their private business. I wanted to run away. What I managed to do was stay still, very, very still. I kept my head down or my gaze anywhere but on the Imperial couple at the top of the stairs. I tried not to think of anything at all. Eventually the ceremony was over and we were able to leave. Even in my bright yellow dress it wasn't hard to blend into the crowd. I made it out the temple's great gaping doors. I made it into the closed privacy of the Cliff carriage. I felt safe, free. There was a celebration waiting back at the rental palace, but I had already declined my place at the feast. I was leaving Loudon, as planned. Everyone knew I was leaving. I wasn't running away.

It was Dwie Kestrel who caught me, Apprehender that he was. He was waiting in the entry hall when I stepped into the house. Bell was standing beside him, with her arms crossed. She looked very, very angry.

Dwie's kind eyes focused on me the moment I entered. They were full of worry, even though he stood there as stiff and strong as steel. "I am sorry," he said, stepping up to take me by the arm. "My orders are to bring you, Dr. Megere Cliff, before High Judge Lord Goshawk to face questioning on a charge of sedition."

Chapter Forty-Two

You cannot refuse an Apprehender. Not even one who is almost a brother-in-law. At least he allowed me to change into more appropriate clothes before taking me to the Temple of Justice. Although Father, Mother, and Uncle Eadum wanted to come with me, they were not allowed to.

Dwie wouldn't tell me anything when I asked, so we traveled across the city in silence. I glared at him the whole way. Not so much because I blamed him for following orders, but because it was easier to concentrate on being furious at this indignity upon my person being performed by almost one of my own family than to let myself be afraid. As hard as I tried this method, I still couldn't keep out the occasional memory of hearing about sedition trials, and Lord Goshawk sending people away to prison islands.

What had I been accused of? Was it something to do with the College of Surgeons? Had Cleric Moor died and was I being blamed for it? I knew the mental speculation that grew wilder and wilder to be an exercise in utter nonsense. I regretted my vivid imagination.

I regretted it even more when I was brought into a large courtroom and the first thing I noticed was copies of my book on the table reserved for the Crown Questioner. Mother had been right. I stood in the doorway, stunned. Really frightened.

Professor Diamond, what have you done?

Come to think of it, what had I done?

This thought floated through my head and helped calm me down. I looked around, taking in the details of a room designed to impress and intimidate, to say
Justice is done here
with quantities of carved dark wood, marble statues, rows of seats going up the sides of the room like those in a surgery class room. There were no windows, but there was a skylight in the high dome overhead. There were many sconces of moss lights. Justice could not be found in darkness.

The apprehended one was meant to be looked down on, I suppose, like a cadaver being dissected. Various clerks and clerics stood by side doors and sat at small desks. A man and a woman in black robes sat at the prosecution table on the next level up from where they put me. Farther up, two men and a woman sat behind the High Bench, loomed over by a huge carved Seal of Justice on the wall behind them. Of course everyone in the room besides myself was dressed in black. My blue and cream dress spoke out loudly as a sign of not belonging, of wrongness, of presumed guilt. The color focused attention on me. Very effective symbolism.

The man seated in the center chair was higher than those on the other side of him. Which I supposed made this Lord Goshawk. He certainly had the beaky nose and stern expression of a raptor. So did Lord North, of course, but I'd gotten used to him. Goshawk was bald as an egg, which only made him look even more fierce.

I noticed that there was no one seated at the second table before the High Bench, the place where the apprehended's defenders should be. I took some cheer at the thought of several Cliff cousins in solicitors’ tabards banging on the doors of the chamber for admittance at any time now. My low podium was directly across from the high bench. This was the place where all gazes focused. No chair for me.

The man at the prosecutor's table stood and leveled a stern look at me. "State your name."

My mouth opened, but I managed to stop myself from automatically responding to his commanding tone. "Sir," I said instead. "We have not been introduced."

"You are in a court of justice. Answer what you are asked."

He was very good at being authoritative.

But I had served under the best captain in the navy, who was the All incarnate on the bridge of his ship. I knew how to take a public drubbing, and the hard side of a Copper tongue. If I showed any fear before this, this -
civilian
- I would disgrace myself , my family, the service, my profession, and probably any talent I had to dissemble as a creator of fiction. And this horrible meeting, for some reason, was about my fiction, after all. About the extension of myself that had spun itself into a book. I would not shame my book.

"I'm glad that's settled," the woman at the table said, and got a hard look from her colleague before he concentrated on me.

He picked up a book, and handed it to a clerk. The clerk brought it to me.

"What is the title of this book?"

"
Darnin Clover."

"
What is the name of the author printed on the cover?"

"Megere Cliff."

"
Are you the author of this book?"