Chapter 1
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Plumgarden Manor was beautiful in the winter. The building's old façade--once a striking shade of purple, now faded by time and weather to a desaturated maroon--contrasted with the bleakness of the landscape to offer a bubble of warmth against the bleached-bone snow.
At this time of year, night fell quickly, and as it did the gas lights inside the manor would be turned on to glow golden inside their glass bells, and the shutters would be pulled halfway down on all the windows facing the street. In the evenings, Plumgarden Manor looked like a sleepy animal curled up on the downy blanket of snow.
Inside the three-story house, the atmosphere was subdued but warm. Perhaps there was not as much bustle as other households during the Saintdays of Winter, but straight-backed servants rushed to finish preparations for the first dinner of the six-day spanning holiday.
There would be no guests this year, and even Lord Ghess' children from his first marriage were at the age where it pleased them to make their own arrangements, so Lord and Lady Ghess would be joined only by their young son, who was five years old and excited about dessert more than anything.
The first day was the Feast of Saint Lyria, so an array of fruit would be served at the end in her honor. For the average household, this meant fruit canned in the summer or fall, a variety of jams and jellies and succades. For a household as well off as that of the Ghess family, it meant fresh fruit imported from the archipelago or bought from the Imperial Greenhouses. Still a treat in winter, no matter how much one was willing to spend.
Lady Ghess had been flitting through the household all day, watching preparations with a keen eye but a light hand. No great disaster needed averted, save for some mundane domestic ones: one of the kitchen cats knocked over a bowl of freshly peeled vegetables, some hasty maid broke a glass ornament as she was dusting; Lady Ghess was in such holiday spirits that she did not even scold anyone that day.
Since the first and last days of the six were the truly important ones, most households gave their servants leave for three days in the middle. Plumgarden Manor was no different, and since most staff had families in town, nearly half would leave the next morning. The last minute arrangements were important, therefore, to make certain the remaining servants would not be overly strained by the workload.
The steward of the house, Mr. Waushko, had a more sedate approach to the holiday preparations. A man of venerable age and vast experience, he was a deft hand at keeping things on track. The kitchens finished cooking for the masters, and after the main dining room was served, it would be the servants' turn to feast. With Lord Ghess' blessings, Mr. Waushko had prepared envelopes of money to give out holiday bonuses if everything kept on track.
As the dusk of late afternoon settled into pitch-black winter evening, and all the work that needed done was finished, the work was set aside and the household changed into their holiday best.
Lady Ghess turned up in a dark blue velvet dress, with the underlayer a pink satin striped with black which frothed out in ruffles at her wrists, neck and hems. The bodice wasn't her usual tightly cinched one, instead favoring a scholarwoman's cut with a high waistline. This effect was rounded off with her hair in a lopsided up-do letting curls cascade along one side of her head, and a prim dark blue ribbon band.
She had dressed her son, the young master Cem Ghess, in a boy's suit the same color scheme as her own dress. It had become fashionable to dress young noble boys in increasingly precocious ways, so instead of shorts he wore full length slacks, which gave him an adorably grown-up quality in spite of his innate air of mischief.
The last to show up was Lord Ghess. He was dressed in somber blacks and grays, matching the streaks of white at his temples, which had newly appeared this year and made him look more dashing for it. He accessorized with flashes of gold: wire-rim glasses perched halfway down his nose, cufflinks and buttons, an elaborate pin with the symbol of a local church on his breast.
Lady Ghess, having finished fussing over her son, turned to flatter her husband next.
"Darling, you're dressed too well for us!"
Lord Ghess gave Lady Ghess a warm smile as she brushed invisible dust off his arm.
"Goodness, but who could possibly match you?" he said in turn, taking her chin between his fingers the way he often did before kissing her.
Propriety was such that he did not kiss her at that moment, but the atmosphere was warm and happy nonetheless.
"I'm hungry," little Cem Ghess piped up. This even startled a laugh out of the servants, never mind Lord and Lady Ghess.
Still, they took the hint and sat down. Lord Ghess took his seat at the head of the table, his wife on one side and son on the other. This being only a small family gathering with no guests, Mr. Waushko the steward and Cem's nanny Miri were also allowed to dine with them despite being servants.
The food was arranged across the surface of table in an enticing spread. Not just the tureen of soup for the first course, but meat roasts soaked in flavorful juices stood surrounded by smaller side-dishes like coquette princesses ringed by ladies in waiting. Sauces of varying stripes arrayed like soldiers in their pourers. The bread baskets were laden with seed-crusted rolls and sliced loaves still steaming, and though the desserts were still being kept cool in the kitchen, there were generous bowls of fruit lounging temptingly in the middle of table, adding an air of decadence with their gem-like shine under the gaslights. Lustrous plums, red and yellow apples, pears, sour cherries, quinces, even a handful of walnuts which had been permitted the company of the fruit by privilege of long acquaintance in the same culinary circles.
If this was more food than the occupants of the dining room could consume, that was fine, as the servants would happily take anything left over for their own meal, and back to their own families when they left the next day.
In other words, the atmosphere was pleasant and cheerful. True, the past year had had its difficulties, but they endured, and now they reaped the rewards of a life that was overall quite well lived in their opinion. The soup was just being served into plates, creamy and steaming and smelling divinely, when the final member of the family made her way down the stairs.
Nobody heard the drag of heavy frayed fabric against the ground. Even the steps down the hall, pronounced against the floorboards, went disregarded. When the doors were pushed open slowly, however, the loud squeal of the hinges cut through the air like a cold scalpel dragged down the spine.
Everyone froze: Lady Ghess with her hands still curled demurely in her lap, Cem Ghess holding a spoon in his chubby fist even though his plate hadn't been filled yet, Lord Ghess stiff and straight in his chair.
It was not merely the shock that did it; their bodies were stuck in place and the power to move was beyond them. They could yet scarcely blink, but they could make no sound.
"Ah, what lovely smells," sighed the newly arrived dinner guest.
Neither the Ghesses nor their servants--posted along the wall and standing more still than even their training demanded--moved an inch. The newcomer took no notice of this.
"But you didn't set out a plate for me?" A sardonic sigh. "Such ill manners, I would never countenance it."
The grinding drag of chair legs against the carpet as the chair was pulled out. The clink of crockery. Though nobody could turn to look, out of the corner of their eyes they could see the only person at the table who could fill her plate.
Lady Ghess, if she could move, would have been shaking hard enough for her limbs to fall apart. She heard the brazen slurping of soup, and was sitting right across and seeing the shameless way the interloper piled food onto her plate. The meat drabbed heavy splatters of juice across the white tablecloth as it was carelessly taken from the serving tray; a pitcher of sauce was upended and drenched the dish of perfectly roasted and glazed vegetables next to it.
But the one eating had no care at all for anything but gorging herself. She gnawed the meat straight on the bone, slopped vegetable purées onto her plate, and took her spoon to every dish on the table.
Little Cem, already hungry before sitting down for this meal, could not turn his head to watch directly, but he heard and smelled and envied so powerfully, that fat tears began streaming down his face even if his expression was still frozen in the anticipatory joy he'd been caught in at the beginning of the feast.
They remained trapped in this vulgar spectacle of self-indulgence for hours; that was how long a feast of this size took, after all. By the end, every fruit had been picked up and nibbled at least a bit, and nothing remained untouched, even if it was not all consumed.
When the cruel feaster judged that she had eaten her fill, she looked to the great astral clock on the far wall, more decorative piece than functional and always running either too slow or too fast. It was around midnight by then, so she finally rose from the table, pushing back her chair with a satisfied sound.
"What a good meal," she said, patting her belly. "Truly an honor to Saint Lyria."
And then she turned and walked slowly, her steps even and measured. She slipped through the door, walked down the long hall, and up the stairs again. In the distance, on the third floor, a door slammed shut.
The spell unraveled, and as one, all in the dining room collapsed out of their stiff postures.
Cem Ghess began immediately to wail, and Lady Ghess knocked down her chair as she rushed to take him into her arms. It was not only that she rushed, but her body was fatigued and stiff after being immobile for so long, so she fell to the floor with her son a miserable heap in her lap. Still, she rocked and coaxed and spoke softly to her son while the nanny stood up and stared vacantly, able to move but apparently dumbfounded by this situation.
Lord Ghess, freed to do as he willed as well, chose to become blotchy-red in complexion, his expression turning hideous with impotent rage.
It was the steward who tottered to his feet and began taking charge of the situation. He instructed the servants to clean the tables and bring new food to the smaller dining room, with all due haste. After four or five hours, a ravenous hunger had set in, and no doubt the masters' mood was only made worse by it.
But the servants sent with haste returned from the kitchens just as quickly, pale and terrified.
"It's gone bad!" a braver maid reported. "All the food in the house has gone bad!"
The steward was struck dumb for a moment. He looked over the disarrayed table, where the food scraps left behind, even not touched, were in the process of turning soft and and moldy with unnatural speed.
The food in the kitchens was the same: soups turned sour in their pots, vegetables turned black, meat turned unspeakable colors. Even all the milk had curdled. Servants went to the larders, where the food was similarly in the process of decomposing. Even the bundles of dry herbs turned dry and dusty, and later they would discover all the wine in the cellars had even turned to vinegar.
Lady Ghess heard all these reports steadily as different servants ran in to tell the steward of what they'd discovered. In her arms, Cem Ghess had finally calmed down, going from hysterical sobs to small, quiet hiccups, but now Lady Ghess had tears springing to her eyes.
"I hate her!" Lady Ghess wailed so suddenly, that Cem Ghess nearly fell out of her lap with his flinch. Everyone else in the dining room recoiled similarly. "I hate her, I hate her so much!"
"Quiet," Lord Ghess hissed, rubbing his forehead as a violent headache mounted. "Don't speak of it, Remie, keep quiet."
"I hate her!" Lady Ghess sobbed once again, rebellious.
How could she not? How could all of them not hate that beast as well?
But even if Lady Ghess was willing to face Lord Ghess' displeasure, the rest of them didn't. They said nothing.
The Feastday of Saint Lyria thus ended on a tone completely alien to how it had begun. The bonuses the steward had planned to give out were repurposed, money taken out of the envelopes to spend on some hasty food supplies for the household.
Lord and Lady Ghess returned to their drawing room. No raised voices could be heard beyond the closed door, but when they broke for the night to return to their respective bedrooms, both their expressions were unhappy.
The steward, Mr. Waushko, spent an entire night cleaning up this mess, and the next day had a heart episode for which Lord Ghess' personal doctor had to prescribe medication. A lot of sedatives were prescribed all around that day, and Lady Ghess spent the next day slumped in the parlor, uncharacteristically inelegant in her mannerisms. Lord Ghess shut himself away in his study for the rest of the day, and while it was his habit to spend his time in that room from dawn to dusk, this time there was an air of sulking in this gesture. The servants kept their heads down, unwilling to act unorganized even as the steward lay ailing in bed.
On the third feast of the Saintdays of Winter, Mr. Waushko penned a long letter to his grand-niece. Though the mail service was also on holiday, he sent it directly by the Ghess family's personal courier.
Mr. Waushko was old and had no energy to continue in this household, but neither could he simply leave it without a care. He would call his grand-niece to help.
Chapter 2
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The Waushko family never held any title, and never held on to any of its fortune continuously for more than three generations, but what they lacked in affluence, they always made up for in the variety of their individual pursuits.
The current patriarch of the family was known to be not only a patron of the arts, but also to indulge himself in its many forms; he painted (poorly), he sketched (finely), he sculpted (to mixed reviews), he embroidered (perplexingly), and he had even penned a novel which was more praised for its belletristic style than its plot, characters, length or consistency.
His wife was renown as a singer in her youth, as the author of a highly-regarded nature treatise on ornithology in her middle age, and as the grand dame of the opera scene in her old age. She did not sing anymore, but she wrote scathing and highly entertaining reviews in a low-brow newspaper that was starting to turn up in the hands of the well-heeled more and more often.
The three Waushko children of the couple were each spread out among an array of mismatched activities: the eldest had taken to the seas and become a storied merchant, though the value lay more in the novelties he brought back than in the trades he made. The middle daughter had gotten herself entangled in the cut-throat world of chemical sciences, and had eschewed marriage in favor of becoming a medical researcher and, secretly, a perfumer whose patron founded much of her research.
The youngest became diplomatic envoy to Dasserin, one of the archipelago nations, and had returned after eight years of silence with a foreign wife and a little daughter.
This daughter, educated in five languages and three types of etiquette, was serious and candid as a child, and had grown into Amaris Waushko.
So, to the observations of many, the main trade of the Waushko family was to become jacks in all of them. However, in a family of polymaths and eccentrics, Mr. Waushko the steward and his grand-niece Amaris had the distinction of aspiring to quite humble careers. Mr. Waushko took the job of steward to the Ghess family since the first (and late) Lady Ghess married into the family.
Amaris Waushko, on the other hand, started her career as dormitory superintendent to a mixed-gender boarding school where a firm hand was what maintained the fine line between dispiriting the upper-middle-class sprogs whose parents spent more money on creature comforts than education, and the preponderance of sex scandals which were expected to come out of a school which insisted on throwing teenagers together regardless of propriety.
Being a victim of her own success, Amaris recently found herself released from her position (with all the highest recommendations, naturally!), only for her job to be handed over to the dour-faced daughter of one of the school administrators. Amaris wished her luck, even though she did not sincerely believe the woman would have much of it going forward, and quietly departed the school.
Now, for the Feastday of Saint Errilin (third of the Saintdays of Winter), Amaris was sitting comfortably in her room in a boarding house, where she ate sweet porridge topped with dry fruit and flipped through the latest pages of the weekly periodical that she followed almost exclusively for gossip about her own relatives. One of her cousins brought a donkey to a greenhouse picnic recently. Uproarious shenanigans ensued, if one could believe the etched illustration of the donkey kicking a man so hard his wig flew right off.
Such were the times, that one had to look to the yellow rags for good reviews on opera, and to the socialite papers for slapstick.
Even eating slowly, Amaris finished her bowl of porridge rather quickly--the Feastday of Saint Errilin was for celebrating the bounties of the field, so things made out of a variety of grains were eaten on this day. Amaris had her fill of little bread rolls with seeds, and she still had some dry fruit left from the first day of the holidays, when she vastly overestimated her love of raisins.
She was just popping down to the kitchens to return her bowl when she ran into the landlady, and the woman handed her a letter that 'came special'.
"Call back the mailboy," Amaris said as she plucked this letter out of the landlady's hand. "I have a belt in my room I must use to beat him."
The landlady's eyes goggled at this violent declaration. "...What? Why?" she asked.
"It is what I do to anyone who opens my letters," Amaris said bluntly. "Don't you agree it's what such people deserve?"
Sure enough, the envelope's flap showed that the little bit of wax keeping it closed had been pried open. Naturally, Amaris knew it was not the mailboy who did it, and even if he had, Amaris would not have taken such measures. The landlady was the one who indulged in such nosy habits, under the pretext that she was 'protecting this establishment against scandal'. She assumed any letter the women living here received had to be from a lover, yet the name of the sender on this letter was clearly Waushko, so how could she possibly not know it was from one of Amaris' relatives?
The landlady fell into stunned silence as Amaris looked at her coldly.
"Maybe the wax just wasn't applied well, forgive the boy," the landlady mumbled with rising embarrassment. This was the first time Amaris received a letter here, and so the landlady could not have known that Amaris was the kind of young lady who could bite.
Perhaps the other tenants could be bullied and suppressed, but the Waushko family was known widely enough that the landlady didn't dare stiffen her spine too much.
Amaris, however, already lost interest in the confrontation. Her temper tended to flare suddenly and subside just as quickly. She'd inherited her mother's frivolous spirit, but also her father's heavy brow, so she often looked angrier than she really felt for long after the feelings themselves had passed.
So, still frowning, Amaris returned to her room, leaving the landlady anticipating some kind of retribution that Amaris was too lazy to even think up.
Back in her room, Amaris read the letter from her father's uncle and found herself offered a job.
Amaris arrived to the city of Claypot with only a single suitcase.
It was said of Claypot that it gained that name back when it was a village with 'ten households, all of which owned a single clay pot between them'. Naturally, the village's prosperity rose since then, so today it was one of the larger cities along the Sweepfields River, a sprawling river port nestled right at the fork where the river split off into four to irrigate the Sweepfields breadbasket, before pouring into the Aching Sea.
Amaris didn't hire a carriage straight from the train station, as she didn't quite like the greedy glint in the eyes of the drivers there. She picked a random street and walked far enough from the station that she found less conspicuous carriages, obviously catering more to locals.
Still, when she flagged down a carriage and told the driver she was going to Miller's Row, she could see the way his eyebrows climbed up appreciatively. He gave her a second look, gaze pinned to the silver buttons on her coat, finer than the wooden ones more common among servants.
"Miller's Row, eh?" the driver repeated slowly. "Any house in particular?"
"Plumgarden Manor."
The driver's eyebrows lowered again.
"Ah, I see. Got a special job there?" he asked, and Amaris recognized a particular lurid interest that was a fair reflection of her own.
In fact, she did get offered a job there, but she had the feeling he meant something very particular by those words. They spent the rest of the ride in fraught and increasingly frustrated small talk, as they tried to pump one another for gossip while neither was willing to relent. Amaris tipped him double at the end of the ride, and he gave a cheerful goodbye as he drove off his carriage at full speed.
Amaris was familiar with her grand-uncle Errett Waushko from many family gatherings. When she'd been young, Uncle Errett struck her as quiet and serious, but if she sat obediently nearby, he would ask her how old she was and what she was studying, then pat her head and give her milk candies. They were the good milk candies, the ones so sweet and lush that they stuck her teeth together, and not the hard, stale ones that other old people tended to carry in their pockets.
Once she started growing up a bit more, questions about her studies became more detailed, and when Uncle Errett was especially pleased, he would tell her anecdotes from his and his brother's childhood (his brother being her grandfather, the current patriarch, Master Waushko of Wrengust Mansion).
Uncle Errett wasn't as boisterous as other members of the family, maintaining an air of dignity and humbleness even when he wasn't acting in his role as steward. Amaris always liked that about him, because it reminded her of her maternal grandmother, who was a bit like that too: never liking the center of attention, but always puttering around in the background.
Now, though…
Quickly after arriving at Plumgarden Manor, Amaris was taken to see her uncle in his room. He wasn't quite bedbound, but he was dressed in a housegown in the middle of the day, and propped up in an armchair by the window. The maid who showed Amaris in both walked and talked softly, and asked Uncle Errett if there was anything she could bring him.
Uncle Errett just shook his head. His complexion was ghastly. He was worrying a handkerchief in one hand.
Amaris poured tea for the both of them, and when Uncle Errett brought the cup to his lips, his hand had a slight tremor she couldn't recall ever seeing in her steady uncle even as he advanced in age.
"I have had an unfortunate collapse," Uncle Errett explained vaguely, after the initial small talk was over with. "The doctor has informed me I am ill-suited to continue in my position, and should retire somewhere quiet and comfortable in my old age."
Amaris tried not to snort. 'Unfortunate collapse' seemed a terribly understated way to describe what sounded like a catastrophic blow to his health. Uncle Errett, though not always energetic, had always been robust. Even after he began working as a steward in Plumgarden Manor and stopped attending quite as many family gatherings, the few times he appeared, he always looked resilient for his age. Good health tended to run in the Waushko family.
Now, his complexion was papery; pale, soft skin sagging in more wrinkles than ever. The skin around his eyes was bruise-black, and every liver spot on the back of his hands stuck out more.
"Uncle," Amaris said, "you know they say sea air is very fortifying. Have you considered Dasserin? Grandmama is getting lonely in her old age anyway, I'm sure she'd put you up in the sidehouse if I asked."
Uncle Errett smiled.
"Naturally, I would not even be able to go in winter," he said. "And even though there is nobody else I would entrust this position to, I would also not leave you to struggle in learning alone. We have time, I am sure, to help set you up properly."
Amaris agreed.
Uncle Errett did not mention what the trouble in Plumgarden Manor was, nor what had led to his unfortunately 'collapse', but then again, she could read between the lines. This was a situation in which nobody would say it directly, so she would have to learn it herself. Very well, very well. She liked a good mystery. It was like gossip you had to uncover the hard way.
Chapter 3
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Though it was Uncle Errett who called her, it would not be his decision alone whether she would be hired. First Lady Ghess and then Lord Ghess would interview her, before making the decision. This would start a probationary period during which Uncle Errett would show her the ropes, and at the end of this period, if all parties agreed, she would be put down in the house records as the Ledger Maid of Plumgarden Manor.
It was a curious choice. Technically a ledger maid was the same position within a noble household as a steward, but ordinarily a steward was always preferred when the master of the house was male. Old widows and unwed ladies tended to be the ones who had ledger maids. Alternately, aristocratic houses experiencing some sort of period of disgrace tended to have ledger maids instead of stewards, for the simple reasons that stewards would not apply for the position.
Since Lord Ghess was still alive, Amaris had to assume there was some manner of covert disgrace scaring any potential applicants away from the position of steward. Certainly whatever was going on in Plumgarden Manor was not yet so egregious that the carriage drivers of Claypot dared gossip about.
Amaris had packed her nicest cotton suit for the interview: dark blue, somber yet elegant, paired with a starched white shirt. She would have preferred to pair it with one of the nicer shirts she had, the ones with Dasserine embroidery around the sleeves, but she knew when to pull out the stuffy old maiden style instead.
She'd only ever interviewed for a position a couple of times before the Waushko name landed her that job at the boarding school. She suspected the Waushko name would also do most of the heavy lifting this time around, too.
There were yet laws concerning when wedded women were allowed to work for wages, but the unmarried set were almost always employed. Though there was much ink spilled complaining that allowing unwed women to work 'promoted spinsterhood as a career more than any other trade', men didn't seem to have a wit to say about the considerable dowries some women accumulated by working diligently from adolescence until wedding day.
In fact, if anything, men tended to turn up their noses at those poor girls who had only hope chests and their family's remittance as dowry, preferring a woman with a bank account above all. If Amaris was asked, she would opine that it was men making spinsterhood more appealing, but alas, nobody asked, and if they did, they did not enjoy experiencing Amaris' opinions on the subject.
But anyway, if married women worked, they were only allowed to do so on their husbands' behalves or to their husbands' benefits.
Therefore, Lady Ghess.
Lady Ghess was still a relatively young woman--not the first Lady Ghess this particular Lord Ghess had been married to, from what Amaris gathered. She had a charming heart-shaped face and softly curled brown-blond hair pinned up at the back of her head and spilling over her shoulders. She waited for Amaris in the sunroom, which even in winter had a brightness to it, amplified by the blinding whiteness of the snow outside.
She would have looked even more lovely in the sunlight, Amaris suspected. Lady Ghess' beauty was a springtime type, and she must have known that, because she dressed in a lovely bright green dress.
Amaris, by contrast, looked quite handsome in winter. Her hair was pitch black, a truly Dasserine trait she inherited from her mother. She teased her hair into careful whorls at her temples, as was the fashion among new money and artists. There was always a tackiness to Waushko women's fashion that they embraced as inside joke, and to the outside it might have seemed like self-effacement.
When Amaris walked into the sunroom, Lady Ghess put aside the book she'd been reading and smiled to Amaris.
"Ah, you must be Mr. Waushko's niece," Lady Ghess said. "You are much younger than I imagined."
"I'm much older than I look, My Lady," Amaris replied with a short, matter-of-fact bow. "But I'm his grand-niece, actually."
"Ah." Lady Ghess smiled. "Working for your dowry?"
"Oh, no. Career woman throughout."
Lady Ghess hummed. It was hard to say if this answer pleased her. In truth, Amaris had not made up her mind on the marriage front, and was saving up a dowry just in case. But while men reacted to the phrase 'career woman' like it signified some kind of frigid, ugly beast, there was a certain type of married woman who looked upon the unwed lot as some kind of unfair competition, as if not marrying was the scheme of vixens without scruples to sink their claws into as many men as possible.
Well, Amaris could work around such prejudices if she had to, and if it meant giving off the air of being both sexless and ambitionless (in the sense that Lady Ghess could only conceive of marriage as the sole object of ambition a woman could truly have), it was not hard for her to do.
Several questions proceeded regarding Amaris' experience. Naturally, at the dormitory, Amaris had more servants answering to her than there were in Plumgarden Manor; cooks, laundresses, maids and sundry to serve over a hundred young masters and nearly a hundred young ladies: the numbers could not compare to the servant count of some city-locked manor that nowadays served only a single family.
But naturally, the manor house's servants were a more tight knit group than the staff at the dormitory. Some even served the manor lifelong, entire family lineages still occupying the same positions generation after generation, same as when Plumgarden Manor's grounds extended far into the distance.
Amaris answered every question and additionally provided some anecdotes of incidents she had dealt with as superintendent. She took a self-deprecating tone, as if mentioning her own quick thinking was incidental and not at all a demonstration of skill. Lady Ghess smiled in a way that showed she understood and also approved of this attitude.
After the interview with Lady Ghess passed, the less harrowing interview with Lord Ghess proceeded.
Amaris estimated that Lord Ghess was a less tricky obstacle than Lady Ghess, though she could see by his face that he thought himself the greater authority. He could have been twice Lady Ghess' age if one were to judge by the white at his temples, but in fact his face was still somewhat youthful, so there might not have been that steep of a difference.
Lord Ghess paced his study with hands folded behind his back. He had a pince-nez that he took off and wiped, as if unused with the weight of it. Amaris guessed he put it on to create a certain look. His suit was a scholarly brown that day, and he wore a brass pin of the Ghess family crest on his lapel. The buttons on his suit were polished peridots, the same green shade as his eyes. His mustache was well-groomed, but also streaked with white.
Amaris was shown to a seat in front of Lord Ghess' desk, and she sat there as the interview began. But when Lord Ghess began pacing, she lightly sprang to her feet and followed him around the room, going in circles three or four tiomes until he momentarily paused in front of a glass cabinet.
There was a painting hanging on the wall over the short cabinet, of a smiling young woman with cascading honey-blond hair over a shoulder and a basket of kittens in her arms. Amaris recognized her, after a careful look, as Remie Ghess--much younger.
But Lord Ghess did not look at the painting, and instead began his pacing again; perhaps it helped him think, though the questions he asked Amaris so far were the same generic ones Lady Ghess had asked at the beginning of her own interview. When Amaris said she was a career woman this time, Lord Ghess nodded as if he understood everything clearly. Suspecting that his preconceptions were to her advantage anyway, Amaris let them all lay.
As Lord Ghess paced the length and breadth of the room, it gave Amaris a panning view of Lord Ghess' more peculiar interests. Naturally, he had all the same trappings of a noble gentleman--the fancy tobacco case on his desk, the elegantly-carved gameboard meant for display more than being played, a stuffed pheasant on the wall--but among all these ordinary objects, there were more telling items: a stack of books on exorcisms on the side table next to an armchair, the incense censer in a corner, the black strip of cloth hung at the corner of the door and embroidered with protective glyphs.
As Amaris trailed after Lord Ghess, she happened to peer into one of the many glass cabinets covering the walls of Lord Ghess' office, and was startled to recognize the peculiar assemblage of items inside. A dark green feather from a certain type of bird, a shell encrusted in jagged, shiny crystals, a handful of cowries on a string, the bark of some tree inscribed with words, and a waterlogged journal. Amaris could almost guess the exact book Lord Ghess would have relied upon to gather this mix of items. The practices of Dasserine exorcists had been a subject of some academic interest on the mainland about a generation back, and it thus produced some amusing little tracts regarding the 'metaphysical practices of the Dasserine shamans'. The Dasserine themselves would have been surprised to learn that they had shamans.
Lord Ghess noticed the subject of Amaris' attention, and she could spot the moment he recalled she was half Dasserine, because he grew momentarily flustered.
"Mere lurid curiosity, naturally," Lord Ghess said, waving a hand dismissively.
Naturally; a gentleman of the peninsula could not be expected to either respect or give credence to the suspect natural sciences of another nation. Amaris would have been offended, except she knew that one could not approach metaphysics as a science, and the harder one tried, the fewer results they obtained. One had to approach metaphysics frivolously to achieve anything concrete.
"Naturally," Amaris responded lightly. "One would not be able to use mere instruments to exorcise anything supernatural, anyway. It's well known that the tools are the least important element of an exorcism."
"It is something repeated in all the literature on the subject, yes," Lord Ghess mumbled his agreement, obviously unhappy about the fact, before clearing his throat. "Never mind all that, let us return to more current concerns."
The interview progressed from there as expected. Amaris made herself blandly agreeable, and Lord Ghess found such an attitude wildly to his liking. He gave the final approval for her hiring.
*
That evening, Amaris was shown to the suite where she would live in. It was in the servants' wing, and thus, despite being a suite, it was rather tight, more like two rooms with the wall torn down to create a bedroom with its own front room. The bedroom was made smaller by a number of wardrobes and chests of drawers, but the front room, doubling as parlor and dining room and office space for whichever notable servant was deemed worthy of occupying it, was more cozy. A table with four chairs, an armchair and a loveseat filled up the space. There was even a double window, looking out over the gardener's shack. There was no writing desk, but Amaris would make do.
Soon after settling in and unloading her baggage--the little she had brought, because the rest was going to be mailed to her once she sent word to the boarding house--Amaris was called by one of the servants to dine with her uncle. It was early, but Uncle Errett was still confined to his room for rest.
When Amaris arrived to Uncle Errett's rooms, she was treated to a light dinner, which was her preference anyway, and they both ate sedately. The soup was creamy, and the accompanying breadrolls were simple and still steaming fresh from the oven. At the end of the meal, Uncle Errett took out a set of papers.
"The Masters have seen fit to hire you for now," Uncle Errett informed her wearily.
Though she trusted her uncle to have her best interest at heart, and she did not expect to see any extraordinary point in the employment contract, she still read through it thoroughly.
Amaris always checked her name in paperwork first. Back in Dasserin, due to strict orthographic standards in bureaucracy, her name had been rendered as Amaris Vashko. After she'd arrived to the peninsula, on the contrary, her first name was sometimes rendered as Amarie. The name Amaris existed here, but was used as a male one, so upon learning she was female, some people helpfully altered it for her. One particular bureaucrat had once handed her off papers with the name Amarie Vashko, causing three weeks of chasing up corrections--separately for first name and surname, of course.
After looking through the papers, Amaris walked over to the secretary desk in the corner and found a pen. Both copies of the paper already had Lord Ghess' own signature.
As Amaris' pen was poised over the signature line, she gave one last look to Uncle Errett.
"Anything I should know before I commit?" she asked.
Uncle Errett, propped up bonelessly in his armchair, remained silent for a while. His eyelids sank tiredly closed, and Amaris could see the flutter of eye movement, as if he was deep in thought. Finally, Uncle Errett opened his eyes again, almost like dragging himself awake.
"You'll figure it out," he said at length. "Smart girl, you'll figure it out."
It seemed Uncle Errett was terribly exhausted.
Amaris signed.
Chapter 4
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The contract signed and her employment thus begun, Amaris' responsibility, at this early point, was only to listen and learn; she had no real authority in the house.
As Uncle Errett could not carry through his responsibilities as steward at this time, one of the senior servants, Mr. Prechtel, was given the task of showing Amaris around Plumgarden Manor and educating her on her expected role as ledger maid.
The house itself was old, built back in the days when Claypot truly had its one clay pot, and Plumgarden was a real manor, in more than just name. In the ups and downs of Claypot's fortunes, Plumgarden had actually passed through the hands of three different families. It was first built by the Yope family, before destitution forced them to surrender the house to the up and coming Tascque family.
The last Tascque inheritor of Plumgarden had been Lord Ghess' first wife, Eleny Tascque. Though as her father's only child, she had the right to pass on the family name to her children, she'd taken the politic decision to accept her husband's surname. Some second cousins of Eleny's still carried on the Tascque family line, but Plumgarden was now the Ghess family's inheritance, especially since Eleny Tascque died of a wasting disease some years past.
The second--and current--Lady Ghess had only been in her position for two years. Mr. Prechtel told much of the family history, but did not mention current Lady Ghess' maiden surname, which one could only conclude was either a common or embarrassing one. Amaris put her bet on Remie Ghess having been a commoner, based on Mr. Prechtel's detached indifference.
But although only married for two years, in fact Lady Ghess had been slowly changing servants for five, ever since the birth of her son in this very household cemented her place. The son she bore was out of wedlock, but these days, legitimizing a son after marriage was not really as scandalous as it would have been in the past.
Convolutions in inheritance laws made this an acceptable social tactic for some generations now, and that was not even counting the number of men who preferred to see if a child would grow up looking like themselves before they legitimized their sprog. This practice even seeped to the archipelago quite a bit, to the point that Amaris heard people had been shocked when her father married her mother before Amaris' birth instead of some years after.
Mr. Prechtel explained the situation of the Ghess family in dry biographical detail as he took Amaris up and down the manor house's stairs. Three levels stacked on top of each other, as well as a basement level and the attic. The attic was merely old storage. Mr. Prechtel told Amaris she could select any furniture she lacked from there, so Amaris took ownership of a compact traveler's desk, just small enough to fit on the table in her new front room. Another servant promptly offered to move it for her.
Mr. Prechtel was neither too young nor quite old enough to be described as old. He was a plain and sensible man, impeccable in dress and groomed as cleanly as possible. He would have been a good fit for steward, and he had worked for this family since the first Lady Ghess' marriage, though he primarily served Lord Ghess.
When questioned why he was not the one to take the position of steward, however, there was a crack in Mr. Prechtel's polite mien--a little sardonic smile at the corner of his lips.
"Ambition too great is only so much kindling in uncertain times," he said, quoting the words of a famous politician.
"What's so uncertain? The household seems prosperous enough," Amaris said.
Mr. Prechtel's face contorted with regret for a flash, before smoothing out again into casualness; as if he'd revealed too much.
"It's only that, seeing how the last man was reduced due to this position, I have come to care more for my health than my career," he explained at length.
Amaris made a note to value her own health as well in the future, if this was the atmosphere in the Ghess family house.
They proceeded on with the tour. Mr. Prechtel wanted to familiarize her with the kitchens next. As they took the main staircase, at the first landing they came across a little boy crouched on the stairs.
"Young Master Cem," Mr. Prechtel greeted.
The boy jumped to his feet, looking up at Mr. Prechtel. He had a charming head full of blond curls, a few shades lighter than his mother's, and big green eyes. Some chubby red cheeks could complete the image of the perfect little angelic boy, but his face was pale instead.
"Young Master, where is your nanny?" Mr. Prechtel asked.
Cem Ghess' lower lip wobbled.
"I don't know," the child said in a faint voice. His gaze moved towards Amaris and he peered at her with a sticky fear, his expression drawn into some instinctive plea for comfort.
Though Amaris had in fact spent more time with the adolescent set, she was not unfamiliar with comforting young children either, so she very gently extended her hand, keeping her fingers loosed and relaxed: she might have been offering a handshake, or to take Cem's hand but she let him lead on that choice.
"Hello, Young Master Cem. I'm Amaris Waushko. Did you mother tell you about the changes in staff?" she asked lightly.
"Oh, you're the niece," the child mumbled.
Cem, as expected, took her hand. He held it tightly, the way he might have his nanny's hand. One servant was as good as any other at this age, and though Mr. Prechtel did not seem enthused by this over-familiarity on Amaris' part, neither did he look inclined to saying much about it.
They walked down the stairs, slowly to accommodate Cem's very serious but somewhat slow stride. By the time they reached the ground floor, they did not need to find the nanny, because the nanny found them.
"Miri's here," Cem announced, as if that defended him against the fact he'd lost her in the first place.
"Young Master, what did your mother say about wandering off alone?" the young nanny scolded. She looked flustered, and waved Amaris off almost aggressively as she grabbed Cem's hand instead.
"But--" Cem began.
"Thank you for your help, Mr. Prechtel," Miri said a bit loudly. "We'll be on our way."
She didn't quite manhandle Cem as she pulled him along, but there was something aggressive in her posture that had the little boy wilting anyway.
"Miri is a cousin of Lady Ghess," Mr. Prechtel explained, just as Amaris wondered at the liberties this nanny was taking in her treatment of a young master of the house.
"Ah."
Mr. Prechtel saw that Amaris understood, and so, he said no more.
They continued on to the kitchens, where Amaris met the head cook, Mrs. Limley, wielding a wooden spoon like a scepter as she oversaw the cooking. She seemed uncommonly frazzled for a head cook, a position which in Amaris' experience tended to attract women with the same temperament as navy ship captains, but perhaps the kitchens were merely unusually busy that day. It certainly seemed like everyone was working at a frantic clip.
Mr. Prechtel did not let his tour linger in the kitchens overly much, and ushered Amaris to the basement next. Here was where the supplies of any manor usually were, in the cold stone earth: the larder, the pantries, the wine cellar.
It was not guarded, precisely, but there was a chatelaine's office set up here as well. Plumgarden Manor was not grand enough to justify having a chatelaine these days, but it was old enough that it would have been seen as much grander when it was first built, and had a chatelaine accordingly. Once, this might have been a position of respect, as the servant entrusted to oversee the accounts and supplies of the manor. But in the centuries since, the role of chatelaine was split between the ledger maid, who was allowed to leave the basement, and the key maid, who was not.
Mr. Prechtel introduced the young key maid as Wylla Moss. Over the servant's uniform, she wore a thick woolen coat in a speckled color pattern as if whatever grandmother had knit it also used up any spare yarn they had sitting around. Far from letting the dank surroundings dampen her spirits, Wylla Moss had a free smile and dimples to match. If she was pale because she rarely saw the sun or because she was a natural redhead, it hardly seemed to matter. When she saw Mr. Prechtel and Amaris, she pushed a pair of heavy spectacles up her nose and then gave a polite bow--after which she had to push her spectacles back in place.
"Ought I hand over the books?" Wylla asked Mr. Prechtel.
"No need to leave them out of your hands," Mr. Prechtel said, "but make certain Ms. Waushko understands what she is working with."
Then he turned to Amaris, and gave her a polite nod. "This concludes our tour. Please find me with any questions."
Mr. Prechtel made his exit as officiously as he did anything else, and Amaris was left alone with Wylla.
"Well," Wylla said, and pulled her woolen coat tighter around herself, "best you see what it's like down here."
She picked up a ring of keys and and turned to lead Amaris through a double-wide door, leading her down a gently downward sloping hallway. She pointed out the doors to the larder on one side, and the doors to the wine cellar on the other.
There was a sour smell on the air, not explained by the cold or dampness of this level. When Wylla led Amaris into the larder, it was to a cavernous room, set with rows and rows of shelves--mostly empty.
Amaris looked around, bewildered to see only a few sacks and crates with staple goods, enough to perhaps feel the household up to the end of the week. She looked to Wylla, who was scratching her cheek awkwardly.
"Just before holidays, there was a slight problem with all the preservation enchantments on the lower level," Wylla said slowly, her eyes flitting across the shelves. "Everything went bad all at once, and we've just been trying to purchase supplies day to day until prices go down a bit."
Amaris was familiar with preservation enchantments, and so was absolutely baffled how any failure could lead to a completely empty larder. Usually, when they failed--which did happen, if they were not maintained or renewed faithfully--they just stopped being as effective. She'd never heard of such a failure making everything go bad. What about the dry stuff, like grain? How quickly could things have gone bad for nobody to notice beforehand and fix it?
Amaris must have been projecting her disbelief very strongly, because Wylla coughed in her hand awkwardly.
"It was very quick," Wylla said.
"How quick is very quick?"
"Instant, really."
"That can't have been caused by a simple failure of the enchantments, then. It had to be some outside factor."
Wylla made an interesting sound in the back of her throat, a kind of 'you don't say?', and held Amaris' gaze as she put her hands in her pockets.
"Well, I can't really say," Wylla spoke eventually, in a tone that actually relayed quite a lot.
Amaris nodded to herself, then asked to see the wine cellars next. What she learned next was that they might as well redub that room as the vinegar cellar. Another headache fallen on Amaris’ head.
Chapter 5
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
On the second day, Mr. Prechtel had inevitable duties to return to, so he allowed Amaris to take the initiative of learning the house layout and routines on her own. Not having to keep up with Mr. Prechtel's crisp and unforgiving pace, Amaris returned to the parts of the house that seemed to pass by a bit too blazingly fast on the first day.
She lingered along the portrait gallery the way she would at a museum, to the same effect. Nearly all the portraits there were of past Tascque generations. Even some Yopes turned up in the older paintings. Naturally the Ghess family would not simply throw out these portraits--not out of any dedication to historical preservation, but mostly because to a one, they were the works of skilled masters, and would likely fetch a fair sum if the Ghess family found themselves in dire financial straits.
Amaris found her way to the most recent portraits. The last generation of Tascques must have been Lady Ghess' parents. There was no Eleny in any of the portraits, only Lord and Lady Tascque, judging by the years engraved on the portrait plaques.
After that, a generational skip to the current Ghess family, the newest portrait in vivid paints undimmed by time nor dust. Lord Ghess and Remie Ghess, with a small toddler in her lap. To one side, there were matched sibling portraits of a pubescent boy and a little girl, both with Lord Ghess' distinctive green eyes. The children from the first marriage.
No Eleny Ghess née Tascque, however. Did this point to some deeper intrigue, or just mundane pettiness on the second wife's part?
Amaris had a fairly low profile in the house in these early days. Whatever respect she warranted was only extended to her as Mr. Waushko's niece. In any other case, there might have been some resentment for an outsider being brought as ledger maid instead of a steward being appointed, save that it didn't seem like much of anyone wanted the position. Uncle Errett barely seemed to want to hold on to it, even if he were hale.
In fact, with the new year approaching, there was a small but noticeable wave of resignations. This was usually the period when temporary help was hired, because the servants of longer standing took their leaves around the Saintdays of Winter. Someone demonstrating their value during a seasonal position might even find themselves kept on staff permanently, but if not, it was a good opportunity to leave a workplace quickly and have another job to tide them over until they could find a new permanent job.
The servants who left Plumgarden Manor did so quickly, so Amaris could not press them for gossip. The servants interviewed for new positions, however, were somewhat looser with their tongues. Clustered in twos or threes in the gallery outside the steward's office, they whispered among themselves about the house being haunted, or the first Lady Ghess being still alive and kept as a prisoner in the attic, or Lord Ghess actually having another mistress and planning to kill the current Lady Ghess.There were stories that he had killed the first Lady Ghess, that the current Lady Ghess had killed the late Lady Ghess, that the late Lady Ghess had actually committed suicide, and so on, and so forth, ever-spiraling conspiracies and I-heard-saids, each story less likely than the previous.
Knowing that most of what they said was nonsense, Amaris still sat under the staircase just outside the gallery and listened to them talk with great and borderline unseemly interest. Then, when it seemed they had nothing particularly juicy to say anymore, she walked up the stairs and invited them into the study for the interview.
The ones who seemed adequate were passed on to Mr. Prechtel for final approval, or to Uncle Errett if he was feeling energetic enough. Nobody seemed to want to nitpick Amaris' choices, which Amaris thought was odd considering how new she was to the job and how ripe for criticism that normally would have made her. She'd never had such obedient superiors before, and it was eerie.
Lord Ghess had duties which took him outside the house regularly. Though he was meant to be free at home until after the new year, if some fellow with a better name than him said 'bark', Lord Ghess would wag his tail to boot. And so, when called by an out-of-town friend to join a party of well-heeled men of a certain age on some two-week mission of debauchery, how could Lord Ghess refuse?
Lady Ghess said he was gone on a 'hunting trip', and Amaris adopted this verbiage without dispute, even if she suspected the hunt was not for actual game.
The atmosphere in the house did subtly change with Lord Ghess' departure. It was not any more relaxed or tense, but instead perhaps more focused. There was only one master at home to cater to now, instead of two. Everything would be arranged to Lady Ghess' liking.
The gossip wasn't any more interesting in Lord Ghess' absence. Amaris knew because she listened keenly, and by then knew everyone with a loose tongue in the house. Amaris was a consummate listener. She could find anything interesting. It was a skill she had developed in the midst of impressionable adolescents, but adults weren't any less flattered by the clear-eyed, warm glow of Amaris' attention.
Amaris found that the nexus of the rumor mill in Plumgarden Manor was in the kitchens, so she lingered there any time she found a pretense to. The head cook, Mrs. Limley, was high-strung, with a tendency to smack or yell, but if Amaris was around, she tended to temper herself a little. This made Amaris particularly popular with the young staff usually on the receiving end of the cook's rampages, so they also supplied Amaris with plenty of pretexts if only to have her linger in the kitchens longer.
Mrs. Limley made it very clear: she did not like gossip. She said it loud and clear to all the staff, and scolded them when they were too slow or when they whispered amongst themselves. Amaris was afraid this meant Mrs. Limley was willing to chase out even a ledger maid for getting on her nerves, but when Amaris was listening most intently to some tidbit or story, Mrs. Limley also tended to be nearby, arms crossed, rolling pin in hand, looking away but with her head cocked and her bonnet pushed away from her ears.
The biggest chatterboxes in the kitchen were Erdie and Arra, neither looking a day over fourteen, usually relegated to the corner where they peeled vegetables day in and day out. If Amaris sat nearby, the two spewed an endless stream of observations they had picked up from other people.
"Lord Ghess is off at Lord Legrette's hunting lodge, so Lady Ghess will be in a mood when he gets back," Erdie was saying today with a very serious look on his face. Arra was nodding along officiously. "Lady Ghess never gets invited by Lord Legrette, even though the old Lady Ghess always did."
Arra hissed, and Erdie broke off with a flinch. They both looked around nervously, saw Amaris, avoided her eyes. The sudden fright sparked between the two like static, and they moved their hands hastily as if to discharge it.
"Lord Legrette is snooty, that's why he doesn't invite Lady Ghess," Arra added hastily. "He just doesn't think the new--he just doesn't think Lady Ghess is high society enough for his parties."
"It's not a party, it's a hunting trip," Erdie put in. He nervously rubbed his nose, leaving a streak of mud on his face, and then rubbed his hand against his pantleg, cleaning it belatedly. He quickly snatched up the next vegetable to peel just as Mrs. Limley turned around and pinned him and Arra with a glare.
"Usually it's men who get invited on hunting trips, just to get away from their wives," Amaris added generously, and walked past them right where her path would break Mrs. Limley's line of sight to the two children. This belayed the head cook's anger for the moment.
Amaris slipped away to the other corner of the kitchen where Mertie worked.
Mertie used to be head cook in the days of the first Lady Ghess. She'd been demoted and taken a pay cut when she was replaced with Remie Ghess' choice for head cook, but she stayed on staff.
Mertie was a large woman, and with a presence to match. She baked like a fiend. Her knuckles bore down on dough with the full weight of her whole body, and Amaris watched her work from the other side of the table, watched the deliberate lines of practiced motion that Mertie's whole body went through.
"Don't listen to everything they say," Mertie told Amaris. By which she meant that Amaris should come to her for the good gossip instead. "Lady Ghess hates Lord Legrette with a passion. If she'd been invited, she would have had to figure out some way of avoiding it."
If Mertie bore any resentment for the changes in the household, she didn't show it. She just did her job. She had a resonant voice, but she didn't need to order anyone around anymore, she just baked and baked and baked.
Maybe she would have wanted to leave the household as well, but her husband Ornost also worked for Plumgarden Manor, as a gardener. Even if she moved elsewhere, because she was married, her husband would have been the one receiving her wages.
And a lot of people in Plumgarden wanted Mertie to stay, though maybe not as much as they wanted her husband to leave. Ornost was drunk most of the time, and his shifts in gardening ended up with him sleeping under some shrub, usually. He argued stupidly but with great tenacity against anyone who said a word to him. Sometimes he snuck into the kitchens and stole food not meant for servants. Mrs. Limley would beat him with a broom handle when that happened, and later Mertie would turn up with blackened swollen eyes. Mertie's husband would have received sound beatings from a lot more people in the household if not for Mertie.
"Does Lady Ghess not like to leave the house?" Amaris asked.
"Oh, whether she leaves or she stays, it never seems to matter much."
Mertie left the dough to rise, covered it with a kitchen towel, and then knuckled her lower back as she stretched.
"Nothing's gone right these past couple of years," Mertie muttered with a shake of the head. "Just one thing after another."
But she didn't say what those things were, or whether she counted her own demotion as one of the things which went wrong.
Chapter 6
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
One afternoon, as Amaris sat in the chatelaine's office going over the ledgers, she pointed to a line of expenses. Someone had been paid for 'services rendered' some time last summer. No other details mentioned what those services were, but Amaris was familiar with the name from the society gossip rags--it was an infamous exorcist often employed by the rich and haunted.
Wylla looked at that line in the ledger with a stone-still face, as if she was not looking at anything unusual.
"As you look through these accounts, you may find, at times, that discretion is more warranted than unnecessary detail," she said, with a lift of her eyebrow that was meant to convey some added subtext. She sounded very much like Mr. Prechtel as she did so. Amaris found that sentence to be nothing but subtext, in fact, because it offered no information to decode anything.
The absence of all traces of Eleny Ghess from the household became telling unto itself. Ghost hauntings were often resolved by starving a ghost of all mention or attention. What did it mean, then, that even after the exorcist had come and gone, nobody even dared to say the late Lady Ghess' name?
But as Amaris went through the rest of the ledgers, two more entries with the vague 'services rendered' tag followed, one in fall and one at the beginning of winter.
A truly bad haunting might warrant an exorcist. But three? It couldn't just be a ghost. Even a poltergeist would have been ousted by one exorcist alone.
A revenant, then?
Amaris had no personal experience with revenants, though she heard things here or there, and one of her once removed uncles had been an amateur exorcist in his youth.
The story that came to Amaris' mind, then, was from the archipelago.
The island of Amaris' birth was a sprawling, mountainous one. A single town had risen on the coastline, brought to prosperity by the port which offered shelter roughly halfway between more important destination. The town was lively and densely-populated, but out in the mountains, the homesteads were spread out to lonely distances, or clustered in cozy villages wherever the gound was flat enough that enough houses fit together.
As foreigners streamed in, they brought in a new fashion. The peninsular tourists liked to take ponies on daytrips up to the mountains--not very high up the mountain, but just far enough up a slope to see the view over the trees.
A small industry sprouted overnight of locals offering pony rides. The locals used donkeys, but not knowing that a pony was the name of a specific type of horse, still called these pony rides. They vied for foreign tourists and charged ridiculous prices while promising 'never before seen' views, and the peninsular tourists paid their equivalent of pocket change, so neither side were unhappy by the arrangement at first.
Later, the practice would be so widespread that the island was oversaturated with pony ride operators viciously vying for each other. Most fell off eventually, when the money stopped being as good, but others persisted, so the practice never died out completely, becoming a steady source of income for at least two centuries.
The problem arose when one of the pony ride operators died of old age and then returned as a revenant to continue providing rides. It took some time to notice one of the operators was actually dead, but once people did, it did not go over well.
The revenant, perhaps because the undead had no such needs, did not charge for his pony rides. This made him widely preferable even to those who weren't lured in by sheer novelty. The foreign tourists, despite being uniformly more wealthy than the locals, had become more protective of their money with each successive year, and argued over every coin like it was food taken from their own child's mouth. Naturally they would prefer the man offering his services for free, and even scold the other operators for not being equally generous.
The living pony ride operators threw fits. The local authorities were perfectly willing to bring in exorcists to solve the problem, but the revenant turned out to be a good lure for tourists overall, so they pawned off the problem for a while.
Some locals were also fond of the revenant. He was the ghost of an old man who'd been trotting his donkey up and down the mountain for seventy years, from the time he was barely adolescent to the day he died. He couldn't have had any family left, or else he’d be haunting them directly, but he had a smile and a cheerful greeting for every person he passed, so he'd been well-known and beloved in the region.
So either out of fondness or contrariness, some people even set up a shrine for the revenant and burned incense to keep his spirit fed and reinforce the haunting.
This situation dragged on for some years; it'd started before Amaris was born, but she was maybe six or seven when the affair drew to a conclusion. It was all the adults discussed for weeks.
It went like this: some anthropologist from the mainland, specializing in spirituality, had come to study the phenomenon of the pony ride revenant. The anthropologist seized the opportunity to receive a pony ride from the revenant, and spent the entire time asking questions and scribbling the answers in his notebook. He made a comical sight for the other pony ride operators passing him on the path.
So the anthropologist and the revenant went up the mountain in the morning, and returned before sunset. Then, the journey done, the anthropologist reached into his money pouch. Even before this scholar came along, people often tried to pay the revenant: small sums, large sums, jewelry, trinkets, even rocks. The revenant would look at the proffered payment, then his face would sink in disappointment and he would shake his head.
This time, what the anthropologist pulled out was a stack of promissory notes, the type of which had been used as currency on the island over a century ago.
The revenant looked at this money, and burst into tears. He accepted the promissory notes and said, 'This will pay for Mama's treatment!' and then faded away, never to haunt the living world again.
The anthropologist was stumped. He had not intended this outcome, given his shocked reaction, but the locals were outraged. He had interfered and sent away the revenant, and so by evening, the anthropologist found himself ousted from his inn and forced onto a ferry to the peninsula. If he'd been planning on voyaging to other islands in the archipelago for his studies, he was firmly discouraged from these plans.
The incident had stirred the intelligentsia of Dasserin to debate whether revenants could be considered as part of cultural heritage, and therefore, whether the anthropologist could be said to have committed an offense under the Cultural Protection Act. This was a moot point, since the anthropologist was long gone by then, but ah, what about next time something like this happened?
As far as Amaris knew, the debate was still ongoing.
Anyway, if there was a revenant in Plumgarden Manor, would Amaris not have met it already?
She mulled over this question for a while, but she did not know enough about revenants to be sure.
"Wylla," Amaris asked as she got to the end of the ledger, "am I to reserve money for future unspecified services rendered?"
Wylla looked at Amaris over her glasses. "If you would be so wise," Wylla answered.
Amaris made a note of it.
"I can't help but notice the flux in staffing," Amaris also remarked, carefully neutral.
"Oh? If you are asking for the reasons people have left in such numbers, the answer is standard," Wylla said, snapping her own ledger closed. The next two words she pronounced flatly, like the dry annotations she made in standard black ink: "'Personal reasons'."
"More a question of why anyone stays, at this point," Amaris snorted.
"Oh, that's fairly standard too. If we're still here, it's because we've asked ourselves 'where would I go?' and come up with absolutely wretched answers to that question." Wylla took off her glasses and temporized by wiping them with a corner of her woolly coat. "I was raised by the Ghess family in this household, as live-in staff."
Amaris was familiar with the notion: taking in an orphan, giving them room and board in exchange for service. It made sense that someone like Wylla would end up the key maid, then. She had no family, no outside connections, no resources, and was tied so thoroughly to Plumgarden Manor that this household might as well be the entire world to her. She was a resource, placed down here in the cellars with the rest of the supplies. Wylla’s strongest tether to the outside world was the daily paper that she read one day later after Lord Ghess, and even then, it was mostly for the sports pages, from what Amaris noticed.
Though, if she was raised in this household, that brought up a different detail. Wylla was a full adult, perhaps in her late twenties.
"Taken in by the Tascque family, then?" Amaris asked lightly.
Wylla put her glasses back on to give Amaris a piercing look, steady and full of meaning.
"Yes," she said, and whether this was far away enough from mentioning the former Lady Ghess, or whether Wylla was breaking the interdiction willingly, it was at least a clear-cut answer.
"Alright, so why won't the masters leave, then?" Amaris asked.
"Leave Plumgarden Manor?" Wylla put her hand to her chest dramatically, as if the notion was beyond consideration.
Amaris supposed the house was too storied to be abandoned like that.
After the unification under the Boreal Empire, Claypot modernized rapidly, and adopted the urban layouts more common in the northwest, where cities were tightly corralled within walls and grew under the shadows of mage towers. In the southeast, where grainlords allied with gentle field spirits and the wilderness was more tame, it wasn't uncommon for manor grounds to be sprawling and for noble households to derive their power from either merchant or mercenary pursuits. Before the unification under the Boreal Empire, it was rare for the southeast to have any significantly powerful mage lineages.
But the Boreal Empire favored a certain uniformity in all its major cities. Claypot's sprawling riverfront was centralized to one major port, and as it grew from town to city proper under the Laetitian Dynasty, the aristocracy's once-sprawling lands were sacrificed in exchange for relevancy. Manor grounds were sold off to create new neighborhoods from whole cloth.
Claypot's most significant old residences were the cores of their own major neighborhoods nowadays, shining dots on any map of the city, and the families who could brag of living within these landmarks had an inevitably important role in the city's social milieu. Would the Ghess family be as significant currently if their home was not Plumgarden Manor? It was a question not worth even asking.
These days, there was even a mage tower in Claypot. It was, in fact, the last bastion of relevancy for the Tascque family: Merilin Tascque was appointed as Claypot's Tower Mage.
"Though, one does suppose," Wylla continued, "that the masters could become fond of a summer home, or winter near the sea, without giving up their claim to Plumgarden Manor."
"One does suppose that, yes," Amaris agreed cautiously. Had they tried that already?
"Why, I do recall the last time the masters went for an extended vacation," Wylla continued remarking idly. "Plumgarden Manor was so nice and quiet while they were gone. So serene."
"It was a nice vacation, I take it?"
"No," Wylla drawled slowly. "Lord Ghess had a sprained ankle when he returned, and Lady Ghess looked as though she hadn't slept for the entire three months they were gone. Bad luck, they said. You know how it goes."
Amaris didn't, but she was starting to get the picture.
"I'm starting to wonder about what that donkey was, now," she muttered to herself, much to Wylla's bewilderment.
*
As Lord Ghess was gone, Amaris made sure his study was still kept dusted and tidy. One day, as she inspected the room to make sure it remained to the expected standard of cleanliness, she walked up to the desk and picked up one of the books stacked on his desk.
This was the autobiography of an emperor's personal exorcist. Amaris hadn't known emperors required such people in their employ, but if the foreword was to be believed, imperial palaces were just chock-full of all kinds of ghosts and summoned monstrosities just waiting to sink their teeth into the unaware and innocent.
As Amaris skimmed through an account of finding a whole nest of poltergeists (they nested? They nested?!), Mr. Prechtel wandered into the study and, noticing Amaris, wandered closer with an inquiring eyebrow.
When Lord Ghess departed, he brought along only a couple of his body servants, and left Mr. Prechtel under the pretense of offering Amaris support in her duties. Amaris would have appreciated the gesture more if it did not have the faint whiff of Lord Ghess not entirely trusting Amaris' abilities, but she could not argue that Mr. Prechtel did not have a canny understanding of the household. She still did not find it explicable that he was not steward. It was clear Lord Ghess both trusted him and had faith in his competence.
"Ought these books be put away?" Amaris asked, snapping the book in her hand closed and gesturing to the stack. They were all on such subjects: exorcism, ghosts, hauntings. By their titles, they treated the subjects in an approachable, general manner.
"It is best to leave them," Mr. Prechtel opined. "Whenever something dire happens, it suits Lord Ghess' mood to feel as though he is making genuine efforts towards finding a solution."
Amaris placed the book back onto the stack and walked over to the nearby bookcase, where additional texts on the same subject were also crammed on top of more typical books for a nobleman's study. These ones had a more scientific flavor to their titles, though they apparently were not paged through as often.
"Those ones, he will not miss," Mr. Prechtel remarked as he followed Amaris' gaze. "However, even though it is within your purview to borrow books from the master's study, I would encourage that you return them before his return."
Amaris gave Mr. Prechtel a dry little smile, and picked up a book on the subject of ghost taxonomy.
Chapter 7
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Plumgarden Manor had not hosted any guests in the six weeks since Amaris arrived. She could not say whether this was usual for the household.
While Lord Ghess was away on his 'hunting trip', however, a guest did come.
By this point, Amaris was fully adjusted to her position as ledger maid, and had learned most of the household's quirks. She worked to order the kitchens, she settled supply purchases and she sorted out the servants, especially those who had newly been hired.
Having previously been responsible for a far bigger staff back at the dormitory, she found the running of Plumgarden Manor quaint, almost cozy by comparison.
She'd once had to figure out where to stable and take care of a gargantuan bird one of the students brought along to school and refused to be separated from. The bird was twice the height of a man and ate almost exclusively meat, and she had had to figure out food and lodgings for the creature on practically no budget until they could badger some extra charges out of the student's equally eccentric father.
Compared to that, the worst Amaris had dealt with so far was that there hadn't been enough pheasant for dinner one evening. Mrs. Limley discovered the shortage too late and proceeded to serve a tidy little mental breakdown until Amaris came down to the kitchens and laid down the law. It was disturbing to see someone usually so self-possessed as Mrs. Limley crying hysterically over such a mundane sort of problem--surely this had happened before and it was not such a drama? Yet, nobody in the kitchen said a word about it.
Food stores were the biggest concern for Amaris so far. The larders were still not full again. A lot of the food had been purchased when the prices were more advantageous, and plenty more had even been gifted. For example, the man Lord Ghess was visiting now was a grain lord from the Sweepfields, and had gifted generous amounts of flour in the past, which now required replacement.
Amaris had no intention of buying everything at once, but neither could she leave the larders too empty. Moderate, week-long amounts and seasonal fare was going to have to tide them over, and until then, Amaris hired a ritualist who came highly recommended by her uncle to ward the larders against any future incidents.
So things felt as though they were reaching a good equilibrium for Amaris when this guest made their arrival at Plumgarden Manor.
"The mother-in-law," Mr. Prechtel dryly informed Amaris when he spotted the carriage at the gates through a first floor window. "Have a care."
Amaris, in fact, would have preferred not to have to care about Mrs. Arrowan, especially when the woman walked through the door, took a look around the foyer, and snorted with a great deal of contempt.
Mrs. Enga Arrowan was Remie Ghess' mother, but Amaris would have guessed so anyway, on account of the fact that she looked like Lady Ghess but with two decades' worth of make-up encrusted on her face. On Mrs. Arrowan, the slight melancholy tilt of Remie Ghess' mouth instead pulled into a perpetually dissatisfied moue.
"This household is run worse and worse each time I come here," Mrs. Arrowan declared.
Lady Ghess was still at the top of the stairs, not quite close enough for a greeting unless she shouted, but close enough to overhear the complaint plainly--which was likely intended.
Amaris was already down in the foyer, having rushed to make sure she was there to greet the old woman. She was not entirely doing so out of dutifulness. It was simply tantalizing to learn more about Lady Ghess' background.
"Is that so?" Amaris asked with a grave look on her face. "My goodness." She took out her little notebook and pencil which she usually used for quick calculations, and poised herself as if ready to make a list. "That is completely unacceptable. Please let me know every single thing you've observed, madam. I cannot let this pass."
Mrs. Arrowan looked at Amaris as if she had grown another head. Naturally, she was not expecting this kind of backtalk. And certainly she could not have named her complaints, because she had scarcely set foot in the house, and so, how could she know how much better or worse it was being run?
Instead of answering the question, Mrs. Arrowan turned to look at her daughter.
"Who is this?" Mrs. Arrowan demanded.
"The new ledger maid," Lady Ghess replied.
Mrs. Arrowan recoiled almost comically at this, and this time looked Amaris up and down with visible disapproval.
Amaris glanced at Lady Ghess for some kind of cue--did Lady Ghess prefer her mother be dealt with by someone else, or did she hope for nobody to rattle the old battleax? But Lady Ghess looked serene and innocent of all thought.
"If you were replacing that old bag of bones Waushko, you should at least have gotten another fossil like him," Mrs. Arrowan scolded. She gestured sharply at Amaris. "What's this then?"
"That's his niece," Lady Ghess replied dryly.
"Uncle Old Bag of Bones is under the weather," Amaris quipped as well.
Mrs. Arrowan showed not a wit of repentance for her rudeness, and Lady Ghess apparently reached her limit of what she allowed, because she gave Amaris an imperious little hand gesture.
Amaris retreated into bland politeness promptly. She had gotten far too used with bantering with the students and forgotten how buttoned up this new position would require her to be.
So Amaris navigated the thin ice she was treading on with great delicacy next. She showed Mrs. Arrowan and Lady Ghess to one of the nicer salons, and meanwhile instructed a maid to quickly prepare some tea and snacks. Mrs. Arrowan was, at best, not actively incensed by the show of hospitality. She ordered Amaris to fetch her grandson, and even though this was not Amaris' job, she went to fetch.
Miri the nanny was sitting and embroidering while Young Master Cem was quietly--and maybe a bit dejectedly--playing with wooden horses on the floor of the playroom. When Miri was informed of Mrs. Arrowan's arrival, she grabbed Cem by the arm and hurried him to the next room over, digging out a nice suit out of the wardrobe and throwing it at Cem's maid to get him dressed.
Amaris had trailed after Miri to make sure she hurried down to meet the old woman as quickly as possible, and personally didn't see any reason Cem should change out of the already appropriate suit he was wearing, but something in Miri's self-assured manner made Amaris hesitate to confront her about this.
When Amaris returned to the salon to inform Mrs. Arrowan that Miri would be bringing Cem Ghess down as soon as possible, Mrs. Arrowan's face pulled into a displeased sneer.
Amaris was braced to be scolded for issues beyond her control, and was already bravely straightening her spine to endure any criticism, but Mrs. Arrowan turned to Lady Ghess instead.
"Have you not found Miri a husband yet?" Mrs. Arrowan demanded.
"Miri's fortunes don't depend solely on me," Lady Ghess replied mildly. Tea had been served, and she sipped from her cup with great elegance, albeit with a white-knuckled grip on the cup.
"How hard is it to find a man," Mrs. Arrowan grumbled.
Amaris made her escape, though she lingered in the hallway long enough to see Miri and Cem trudging along. Cem's head was bowed, and his stance projected a general lack of enthusiasm over being made to meet his grandmother. Oh well, Amaris thought, just out of general 'better him than me' principle.
After the salon door was shut, Amaris made sure servants were on call and headed to Uncle Errett's room.
Uncle Errett was looking better by the day, and in fact was energetic enough that he had partially returned to his duties. He still wilted about halfway through the day no matter how light his workload, but Amaris carried on quite well with his instruction.
"The mother-in-law is here," Amaris informed him as she dropped in on him.
Uncle Errett raised his head from his letter-writing, and his brows pulled into an expression of dismay.
"That Arrowan woman?" he asked. When Amaris nodded, he sighed and sank back into his armchair. "Alas, I am too exhausted to meet her, but I am sure you will handle everything well."
Amaris knew damn well what playing hooky looked like. Still, she didn't say anything; she didn't want Mrs. Arrowan to push her grand-uncle into another heart attack.
"You ought to prepare a guest room," Uncle Errett further suggested. "When Lord Ghess isn't around, that woman likes to linger." His tone at the end sounded more like he spoke about a bad smell than a person.
Of course, Uncle Errett did not jump up and try to take over the task as he might have otherwise; a sudden case of indisposition, Amaris assumed generously. But it was a relatively easy task to arrange guest quarters. She had them prepared before they were even asked for. She even checked with one of the older servants if it was up to Mrs. Arrowan's previous specifications, because Amaris was entirely certain such a person had very exacting demands.
When Lady Ghess summoned Amaris and told her to arrange quarters, Amaris smoothly informed her it was already done.
Mrs. Arrowan did not look impressed, and in fact her expression indicated Amaris had just barely scraped up to her standards.
Lady Ghess looked harrowed. Cem Ghess was sitting like an afterthought on one end of a sofa, his head still hanging low; the adults may have even forgotten he was there. Miri the nanny, her chin tilted up proudly, sat there like she was also a guest, and sipped her tea with a lack of concern that indicated she was the only one in the room not being actively persecuted by Mrs. Arrowan.
Well, Amaris was only too glad to leave the room again. Nosiness could only take her so far.
It was not that Amaris thought things would go smoothly, but she at least assumed her imagination was good enough to encompass the full catalog of potential failure points this visit could have.
She didn't know what to make of it when she was woken in the middle of the night by a frightened maid insisting there was an emergency but not being able to describe what the emergency was. Amaris pulled on a house gown with a burgeoning and morbid curiosity overtaking any sense of fear.
Amaris followed the maid to the second floor, and dread rose when she realized they were heading towards Mrs. Arrowan's guest room. The first thing she heard were dull thuds coming from the other side of the room, like someone erratically hitting the door from the inside, but as Amaris approached, the muffled screeching and crying became louder.
There were five servants gathered there, mutely staring at the door. Mrs. Arrowan had to be throwing her whole body against the door, gibbering incomprehensible words and sobbing, yet they all watched as plaster dust flew off the walls around the doorway with each impact, and did nothing.
"What are you doing? Break down the door!" Amaris yelled at them, exasperated.
"She won't step back from the door," one tall servant with a heavy hammer in his hands said, at a loss. "If we hit it, we could hurt her!"
"Break the hinges, then!" Amaris grit out.
The thought apparently hadn't occurred to the man, but his face lit up in sudden comprehension, and he nearly fell over himself to obey.
If they had more time, they would have eased out the screws and taken the hinges off that way. As it was, the man just hammered the hinges with repeated blows of the hammer until the metal--already old and delicate--was broken off the wood.
As the first hinge fell off, Mrs. Arrowan's shrieks became louder; the upper part of the door yawned open as she pushed her body against it. With escape close at hand, Mrs. Arrowan's desperation only grew sharper.
The door was finally broken off its hinges completely, and Mrs. Arrowan fell out in a disheveled heap on the floor. She was wearing a crumpled nightgown, and her hair, which had been braided for the night, was a bushy mess standing at ends around her head.
Far from the composed assassin Mrs. Arrowan looked like during the day, now she seemed aged thirty years, wide eyes roving around like there was danger all around. At least she had stopped shrieking.
One of the servants was helping her up when Lady Ghess appeared.
Lady Ghess, though also in a house gown and freshly roused from sleep, looked like a marginally more composed picture of her mother; but her face was pale and frightened, like an echo of the older woman's features.
"What happened?" Lady Ghess demanded.
Mrs. Arrowan was unable to tell, and the servants didn't fully understand. They looked to the gaping doorway sans door with trepidation, perhaps fearing they would be sent in to investigate.
Amaris looked into the room, past Mrs. Arrowan, but there did not seem to be anything in there. No sound, no sight, only a single table lamp showing a glimpse of an unremarkable room.
"Was there anything inside?" Amaris asked, voice firm, but people just shook their heads, and Mrs. Arrowan let out a long, plaintive moan, so it was clear nobody was going to answer.
So Amaris grabbed the hammer from the servant's hand--he was so surprised that his grip was limp, and he simply let her take it--and rushed inside the guest room.
She looked around the room carefully.
Yet, as she looked around, there was no sign of any disturbance. The bed sheets were pulled back at a corner as if someone had just daintily stepped out of bed. The lamp on the nearby table was lit and burned steadily. The half-lit room was filled with quiet, well-behaved shadows, and no trace of anybody else but Mrs. Arrowan inside.
Amaris emerged again to snap orders to the servants: to prepare a new guest room, and call Doctor Duhane, the Ghess family physician.
Mrs. Arrowan was shaking and pale and silent, a complete opposite to how she had been the day before. She was led away quietly.
Lady Ghess followed her mother with soothing words in a gentle voice, but just as they were about to turn the corner down the corridor, she looked back just once, to Amaris. There was a flash of guilt, of uncertainty, or maybe trepidation. But only a flash, before she disappeared around the corner.
Chapter 8
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Mrs. Arrowan left the next morning, taking her luggage as well. Her visit turned out much shorter than she'd planned, given the discrepancy between her stay and the size of the luggage. All just as well, in Amaris' opinion.
Uncle Errett was well-informed about the incident, but fell into discontented silence all day. Amaris asked and prodded, but he merely sat in his armchair and stared out the window, looking as wan and sickly as in the first few days when Amaris arrived.
Amaris had to go to Lord Ghess' office to retrieve some funds from the safe the next day. She took along Mr. Prechtel, just so her honesty could not be impugned.
After retrieving the money, Amaris glanced over Lord Ghess' bookshelves. It was a casual enough gesture, but Mr. Prechtel noticed, and slanted a sardonic little smile at her.
"If you are to further your education," he said, "I could name the volumes with the most reliable information."
"I would prefer there was someone to discuss these things with plainly," Amaris replied.
"Try it, and you will only receive orders to never speak of it again," Mr. Prechtel advised.
Amaris sighed. "Private education it shall have to be, then."
Mr. Prechtel named a few titles: 'The Exorcist's Manual', 'Visitations and Encounters', 'The Gravetender's Guidebook'--all sounding as the most basic texts of this field to Amaris, though admittedly she did not know enough to be able to tell.
Actually, 'The Gravetender's Guidebook'--wasn't that the booklet that destitute old ladies sold out of baskets at graveyards? Amaris had been at two funerals in her whole life, and had come away with three copies of the text.
She'd leafed through it a few times during the more boring intervals of one funeral, and mostly so she could prominently demonstrate that she already had one, thank you very much.
If that was the level of insight Lord Ghess' books on the occult provided, Amaris could do just as well on her own, but she picked up a couple of Mr. Prechtel's recommendations anyway.
As the new year approached, Lord Ghess returned home. In his company were a couple of his peers he either could not shake off or else genuinely enjoyed the company of--it was always a bit hard to tell with the well-to-do lot whether any of them actually liked one another. New year was when the aristocracy both threw parties and visited one another to attend each other's parties, so this was quite the busy social season for Claypot's elite.
In spite of this, Lord and Lady Ghess held no event of their own, instead taking themselves and their guests to attend the party of another one of Claypot's prominent families. They would be gone for a few days, and had packed trunks of clothing and taken five servants altogether.
Amaris quite enjoyed the quiet of new year around the house. The masters were gone out, save for the Young Master Cem, whose orders were attainably accomplished at this age.
Miri the nanny became somewhat bolder in Lord and Lady Ghess' absence, which Amaris now undersood as the privilege of her being Remie Ghess' cousin, but Amaris managed to cut off her toes before she stepped over the line by reminding her she was still one of the help. After all, it was all well and good to be backed by Mrs. Arrowan, but Mrs. Arrowan also showed no indication that she intended to step foot in this house again, and Miri could hardly go to the old woman and whine about it.
Perhaps sensing that Mrs. Arrowan would be a long time before coming back, Miri refrained from acting too arrogant with the other servants for now. Amaris had observed a certain habit Miri had of ordering some of the maids to watch Cem 'only for a minute' and wandering off. If it was someone like Linden, Lady Ghess' personal maid, Miri would even do it in front of Lady Ghess' face.
Amaris had witnessed the exchange before, with Linden looking to Lady Ghess first for confirmation, and only taking the boy if Lady Ghess signaled her approval. For maids lower in the pecking order, however, they usually had no recourse to refuse unless Amaris herself stepped in.
"If you find yourself unable to rise to the requirements of your position," Amaris told Miri after witnessing this nonsense one too many times, "then I am inclined to believe your reputation in society will be too poor for marriage to anyone who is not too senile to notice."
Miri was so stricken and horrified by the notion, that Amaris was certain she'd attained a lifelong enemy that very moment. Still, as resentful as Miri was, she stopped foisting Cem on other servants quite so frequently.
Amaris rather regretted it, after the fact. It seemed Cem was not particularly glad to be in Miri's company so much more frequently. It was hard to tell which of them was more put out by the other's constant presence. Amaris had a wager going with herself on who would complain first once Lord and Lady Ghess returned: would it be Miri or Cem to pull at Lady Ghess' skirt and whine?
*
In the absence of Lord and Lady Ghess, Plumgarden Manor was quiet. Amaris sorted out the budget and put aside some small sum for the servants to celebrate--a kind of apology for not receiving bonuses that year--and even this celebration was informal and intimate.
Uncle Errett emerged from his rooms, in fine enough humor and lively enough health that he managed to make it down the stairs himself. He sat at the head of the table where he sat each new year's celebration as steward, and Amaris did not begrudge him this at all, and in fact felt more relieved than anything.
On Uncle Errett's either sides were Amaris, who diligently watered down his wine, and Wylla, who passed him the lightest, healthiest dishes in carefully considered quantities.
Mrs. Limley had done more of the cooking than usual this time around, proud of her braided bread and her sauce-drenched chicken and her delightful moussaka. Indeed, she was unimpeachable as a cook, and perhaps everyone, including herself, would have been more happy if she maintained that role. She drank glass after glass of rich red wine, and her face flushed red as a result. She toasted and laughed uproariously, infectiously, all night long. Mertie was sat next to Mrs. Limley and kept Mrs. Limley from falling out of her seat whenever she was laughing too hard.
Though Linden, Lady Ghess' favored personal maid, was not there, having been taken along with Lady Ghess, the two other personal maids, Rowena and Vernay, were present. Mr. Prechtel sat at the other end of the table from Errett Waushko, along with most of the younger male servants. The outside servants occupied their own table in the servants' kitchen, rowdily drinking more than their fair share and gracing the rest of the household with their singing talents.
Even Miri the nanny was there for once, her expression pinched as she ate and refused drink. She spoke sparingly to Wylla, and avoided looking at Amaris as if the latter was a pox upon the eyeballs. Cem Ghess was asleep with one of the younger maids sleeping nearby, and for once Amaris said nothing about it.
When midnight approached, they crowded in the foyer to watch the grandfather clock turn over to midnight, and clinked glasses when it did. Then, at ten minutes past midnight, most of them went to bed. There would still be work in the morning, because there was always work in the morning.
Amaris helped Uncle Errett up the stairs and into bed, and walked the house a final time to the sounds of its occupants settling down.
The house which felt so warm and bright earlier was different in the cold midnight of winter. The snows had mostly melted, leaving behind muddy, frozen mess, but the light pouring through the windows still had a white quality to it: the city's gas streetlamps reflecting against the bright white canopy of thick clouds overhead.
Did ghosts like nights like this, Amaris wondered? Would she get to see the secret occupant of Plumgarden Manor?
Yet, Amaris made it all the way to her rooms without being disturbed. Perhaps the ghost had followed the Ghesses to their party.
Chapter 9
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The day before the masters returned, Amaris had a halfday off, which she used to visit one of Claypot's older graveyards. If there was a place anyone from the upper crust of Claypot would be buried, surely it would be here. Mausoleums lined up in eerie imitation of the houses on Miller's Row. A kind of Dead Miller's Row, Amaris supposed.
The rich families of Claypot were far removed from their origins as millers and merchants and river pirates by this point, but that was where they'd begun. While the grain lords of the lower lands grew the grains, their counterparts upriver were the ones who milled and ferried the grain here and there, making profits off it. Claypot sat prettily at the crossroads where all the deals were struck, and so their fingers greased every coin passing from the riverlands of the peninsula up towards the continent. If the Boreal Empire had a breadbasket, then its handle was Claypot.
The graveyard was quiet on this day. Most people preferred to not begin the year with a funeral, and since it was so cold at this time of year anyway, they tended to delay a couple of days unless the body had lain dead for far too long.
Patchy, filthy snow still lingered in shaded places. Everything was persistently wet, and the stone paths of the graveyard were damp with foot trails. It smelled like the plant rot of early spring thaw, before anything had the opportunity to grow.
There was only one funeral in progress in the whole graveyard, and about half a dozen people were clustered in tight around a grave as a ritualist quietly ministered. Predictably, there was an old woman with a basket, not part of the funeral but roaming in close like a stray cat looking to filch something from a fishmonger. The funeral attendees ignored her with great aplomb, and they were gathered in so close, shoulder to shoulder and with their heads bowed together, that the old woman couldn't find anywhere to squeeze in.
Amaris stopped at a crossroads in the graveyard's paths, scanning the noticeboard encased in a glass cabinet right by the night watchman's post. There was a map of the graveyard, old and yellowed and frayed around the edges. The notices for scheduled funerals were pinned one over the other, this month's schedule not even posted yet.
The old woman spotted Amaris soon enough, and appeared at her side with a speed that belied her age.
"D'you need help finding something, sweetness?" the old lady asked with sugary concern.
"Oh, maybe, maybe," Amaris said.
Amaris found a copy of 'The Gravetender's Guidebook' thrust into her hand with lightning speed, and responded in kind by reaching into her pocket and taking out a shiny silver coin. The pallid winter sunlight caught on the image of a lark surrounded by a wreath on one side, and an elegant '10' engraved on the other.
The old woman's eyes lit up as she accepted the coin--of course she would be excited to receive a ten-lark, when the little booklets she sold usually went for a tiny copper five-minnow.
"Oh, but I don't think I have enough change to break this down," the old woman said apologetically. "How's about I make up the rest in flowers?"
She tilted her basket towards Amaris. There were bundles of wilting little bouquets in her basket, which Amaris had to assume came from some florist shop's garbage.
"It's alright," Amaris said, "I was actually hoping you'd help me with some questions I have."
Now the old woman seemed even more interested; these old graveyard biddies loved gossip almost as much as they loved money.
The old woman's name was Trizzy Sacks, and every day she woke up to go 'merchanting', as she called it. Amaris had an approximate understanding of what that meant. She had seen the dour-faced widows and spinsters who ran petty errands and rifled through garbage to make ends meet.
Now Trizzy was latched onto Amaris' arm as they walked through the graveyard, looking to all casual observers as a young woman and her elderly grandmother headed to visit some grave.
"If you're here most days, you must remember some notable funerals," Amaris said once she managed to get a word in-between Trizzy's chatter.
"Sure I do, memory like a church ledger, me," Trizzy agreed easily.
"Do you know where Lady Ghess--that is, Lord Ghess' first wife--was buried?"
Trizzy hemmed and hawwed a bit, claiming to be thinking it over. She was thinking it over so intensely, in fact, that Amaris suspected she would have to reach for another ten-lark coin to jog the old woman's memory, but eventually Trizzy recalled something.
"I have a friend who walks the east side of the graveyard," Trizzy explained, by which Amaris understood the two old ladies had drawn out their own territories where they could harass mourners without getting in each other's way. "She ought to know, since a lot of the expensive set got spaces there."
Amaris agreed to be taken to this eastern side of the graveyard. They took one of the more well-paved paths, laid with pale brickwork and hedged in nicely with rose bushes.
Despite being ostensibly the nicer part of the graveyard, the pickings here were much poorer; a finite number of rich families in Claypot, and therefore rarer funerals. While Trizzy Sacks had a solid heft to her, a heavy step and wide shoulders, the old woman they encountered in this part of the graveyard was tall and skinny like a scarecrow, and wore a faded blue jacket the way a scarecrow might have as well. Her clothing was less worn-threadbare, had once been of better quality, but that only made it more obvious that it was old and well-mended. Trizzy Sacks may have never had a better lot than her current one, but this other woman had fallen from just slightly better fortunes into her current station in life.
"That's Rorine, my good friend Rorine," Trizzy said.
Rorine came over with her own basket, which was overfilled with flowers, much prettier and more lively than the ones in Trizzy's basket. She offered a lovely little bouquet to Amaris, dark blue flowers with sprigs of little white ones like shining dewdrops.
"Flowers for your loved one's grave?" Rorine asked in a gentle voice. Trizzy sounded rough in her speech, but Rorine spoke like a well-behaved maiden even in her advanced age.
When Amaris dutifully handed a ten-lark to this woman as well, her rheumy eyes widened in surprise. She brought the silver coin right up to her face to stare at it closely for a few seconds before pocketing it.
"Where's the first Ghess woman's grave?" Trizzy asked Rorine as the coin disappeared from sight. "Do you know it? That story about the--"
"Right, Lady Ghess, she was the sick one, died some years back." Rorine made an impatient gesture. "What was it, two? Three years ago maybe? But you know," and here she dropped her voice and glanced at Amaris sidelong, "that son Lord Ghess had with the younger Lady Ghess is already four years old, isn't he now?"
Amaris dropped her voice and imparted, in the same tone, "Five, actually."
Trizzy and Rorine made a identical "hah!" interjections, and that little sound was laden with all the contempt they had for this situation.
"Lady Ghess the elder--rather, she was Young Lady Tascque back before she got married--was interred alongside her brother," Rorine explained. "She had an older brother who died some years before her, you see."
Trizzy made a gesture to ward off bad luck. "Also a sickly one, poor sod! A root of sickness in that whole branch of the Tascque family."
"It's because of their grandfather who was a warlock."
"No, he wasn't!"
"Swear on all the saints, he was! It was known all around town back in the day!" Rorine raised her hand to the heavens to swear, and her expression was also dead serious.
"Was he?" Trizzy now accepting this fact more easily, leaned in with hungry curiosity.
But Rorine now shrugged.
"If he'd been, they'd probably have arrested him," Rorine only said in the end. "So who's to really know for sure?"
"Yes, but where is Lady Ghess buried?" Amaris asked, somewhat bewildered by this tangent.
As they headed down the path lined neatly with mausoleums, Trizzy on one arm and Rorine on the other, Amaris wanted to know more about this warlock grandfather. Unfortunately, this proved a dead end quite quickly. Rorine couldn't name a single deed of magic old Lord Tascque might have committed. The accusation of being a warlock seemed to have sprung up mostly because the man had an imposing height and connections abroad.
This was not the first time Amaris had encountered such an attitude, unfortunately, as it seemed most people on the peninsula were chomping at the bit to accuse anyone with slightly poor social skills or being a warlock, or anyone with a case of mild astigmatism of giving them the evil eye. Rorine talked around it, perhaps because she gleaned that Amaris was from Dasserin, but Lord Tascque's reputation might have had something to do with his business dealings in the archipelago as well.
Ah well, Amaris figured she would have seen something interesting in Plumgarden Manor already if a warlock had ever inhabited the place.
The mausoleum where Lady Ghess (the first one) was interred was bricked up. This was perhaps not for the benefit of her brother who shared these lodgings, because the brick wall now replacing the door also had a slick black 'X' marking it in tar.
"Oh, look at that, she's haunting, now, is she?" Trizzy remarked with a gloating meanness.
"They came last year, a whole bunch of ritualists," Rorine said. "They bricked her up, they chanted, they burnt some smelly stuff. Don't know if that solved it, because they came a few more times after that."
"If you ask me," Trizzy sniffed, "that's what you get for moving your mistress in before the wife's even dead."
Rorine made a dismissive gesture. "Well--who ever says anything to the folks living in the mansions? Anyway, nobody'd seen old Lady Ghess in years by the point they actually had a funeral for her. I hear most people actually thought she was dead already, and Lord Ghess just buried her in the back of the house."
Amaris thought maybe Lord Ghess did do just that. There was a small Tascque family graveyard in the back of the property, which she'd seen when she was given a tour. It would have made more sense if Eleny Ghess had been buried there, but maybe even if she had been, once the haunting started, removing her body from the premises would have been the first thing any exorcist worth his salt suggested.
"Doesn't seem to me Lord Ghess liked his first wife as much as his second," Amaris remarked innocently.
Rorine and Trizzy snorted, and then launched into a detailed recounting of all the gossip they'd heard about that couple. Rorine seemed more well-connected than Trizzy, but Trizzy's tongue was more vicious.
Vilmor Ghess was the only descendant of the Ghess family and had thus inherited all of their debts, but also all of their attained favors. The Ghess ancestral home was sold off a generation ago, but Vilmor Ghess used an old agreement between the Ghess and Tascque family in order to wed Eleny Tascque and attain ownership of Plumgarden Manor through marriage.
If there were issues in the relationship, it was doubtful they'd started right away. The couple was well-matched and seemed to actively enjoy each other's company at first, where the average aristocratic marriage demanded no more than begrudging tolerance.
They had two children together, a boy and a girl, who were precious and talented children doted upon by their parents.
If there was a turning point, it was about eight years into the marriage, during a ball Lady Ghess was attending with her family. She lost strength in her legs and fell as she tried to climb some stairs. It was not a very long fall--barely three steps up, and somebody behind her caught her--but it was very public, and a doctor was called. She might as well have been marked for death in that moment: her brother's degenerative disease had begun with such episodes of weakness as well.
It was very sad, and so became the subject for gossip at just about every gathering, especially since Lady Ghess gradually stopped attending social events. Her friends still visited her in her own home, but Rorine back then was a nanny to one of Claypot's noble families, and from this position overheard enough gossip from her mistress to conclude that these visits were less out of sympathy for Lady Ghess and more out of some lurid fascination with the gradual breakdown of Lady Ghess' body.
Lord Ghess began turning away visitors more and more as the Lady’s illness progressed, until none could visit Lady Ghess anymore. He also began to attend public events once again, sometimes with his children, often alone.
Well, not alone always; a young lady had become attached to him in this period. Remie Arrowan had been popular at that time as the daughter and muse of a renown painter. People did enjoy gawking at her wherever she went, because her appearance was easily recognizable from reproductions. Her father had immortalized her girlhood and adolescence in quaint portraits: 'The Piano Lesson', 'Reading By The Window', 'First Stroll of Spring', 'Dear Remie', 'Basketful of Kittens', and so on.
Amaris recognized the names of at least a few of those paintings, now that she thought about it. She had even seen reproductions many times, because once the colored etching process of reproducing images had reached the archipelago, these images were among the default ones to show the color range that could be obtained. Amaris' own grandmother hung up reproductions of 'The Piano Lesson' and 'First Stroll of Spring' in her front room.
It was just that Amaris did not immediately recognize Remie Ghess from those reproductions. The girl pictured was a golden, ethereal figure integrated into images that had the blurred and indistinct quality of a warm memory. In 'The Piano Lesson', she was seen only from the back, hands poised over the keys, golden tresses falling over her back. The piano room was a patchwork of shadows and sunlight. In 'First Stroll of Spring', the pictured young girl was as slim as the fruit tree she was standing next to, eyes downcast as she smiled shyly in a falling rain of flower petals.
That girl was less a person and more an ideal, someone's perfect daughter to set upon a shelf like a priceless decoration. Even if Amaris now recognized the downcast eyelashes and maidenly tilt of the head in Remie Ghess' body language, she still would not have guessed they were the same person.
In the end, most of the gossip Amaris extracted from Trizzy and Rorine had less to do with Lady Ghess, whose one public flaw was the disease which killed her, and more just general complaints about Claypot's elevated class.
Amaris found out that Rorine was not just a nanny, but also former wetnurse to all five of the Meylune family's children back in the day. The children eventually grew up and, after their parents perished in a carriage accident suddenly, engaged in a contentious five-way lawsuit over inheritance which squandered all the family riches in the end. Rorine's pension for her decades of service perished in this crossfire as well; the lawsuits now continued not because there was anything to fight over anymore, but because all sides had simply sunk too much money in this endeavor.
After she determined she had heard just about anything useful she was going to hear, Amaris reached deeply into her pocket and took out a fifty-ram note for each of the women. If Trizzy or Rorine looked slightly less beaten down by life, Amaris would not have given away all this money, which was the sum total of what she'd taken out for the day, but after looking at their calloused hands and frayed hems, she estimated this money would improve their lives greatly for at least a week.
So, with that, Amaris returned to Plumgarden Manor by evening, and decided to enjoy the rest of her time off with a hot bath and reading in bed.
Chapter 10
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The masters returned from their new year's engagement in high spirits.
Cem Ghess, who had not been taken along, spent the expected day of arrival lingering in the staircase whenever he managed to slip away from Miri the nanny. When he saw his parents pass through the front door, he trampled down the stairs and he threw himself into his mother's arms before she even had the opportunity to take her snow bonnet off.
But Lord and Lady Ghess were indulgent, and happy to see their son, so they passed him from each other's embrace with smiles on their faces as they took turns removing their winter coats--or at least having the servants remove the coats for them.
At the beginning of this new year, therefore, the spirits were high in the household. There was not a single word in the household of the incident with Mrs. Arrowan, and Amaris was there when Lady Ghess mentioned to her husband that perhaps Mrs. Arrowan would visit again in the spring. Amaris did not make a face at this news, though it was a close thing. Truly Mrs. Arrowan had to be a terror, if she was this undeterred even by ghosts. Amaris could see where Lady Ghess' own resilience against the preternatural must have come for.
For now, however, there was a different project which would consume the household. With winter on its last legs, Lady Ghess wanted some part of the garden replanted in the spring. Just before the thaws began, Amaris walked the grounds with Lady Ghess and the manor's head gardener to see first hand what Lady Ghess wanted done.
Plumgarden Manor's grounds had once been sprawling, stretching out and up to the foot of distant hills now covered in buildings. Much of Miller's Row and the expensive mansions built on it had once been Plumgarden Manor's environs, before Claypot grew to its current size and the city built itself up brick by brick.
Nowadays, Plumgarden Manor was no longer a manor ground. It was merely a mansion with an unusually large green space. While the neighboring mansions were fenced in so close together that one could hardly squeeze in a path leading to the gardens in the back, Plumgarden had a nice long walkway in the front, manicured hedges along the sides, and a garden taking up three mansions' worth of plots around the back.
The area Lady Ghess wanted redone the most was tucked next to a gazebo. A series of tall manicured hedges surrounded the space, providing some privacy, and the only entry into this area was by taking a stone bridge across a decorative pond. The pond was not very large or deep, being spread over a sinuous curve, and the bridge was more like a stone arch elevated just over the water, but Amaris imagined it looked quite nice when the weather was warmer. At this time of year, the water was muggy with half-melted ice.
"The hedges keep everything shaded in summer, so there wasn't any point planting something here if it wasn't going to get enough sun," the gardener explained, as he walked around the space. "Called this the reading alcove."
"We'll pull out all the hedges," Lady Ghess said.
The gardener looked like he wanted to say something--opened his mouth, closed it again. He looked around and scratched his temple, deep in thought.
"Really? But Lord Ghess says we've not got enough shade in the garden anyways, and--"
"There's a gazebo, how much shade could we need?" Lady Ghess interrupted with a smile but an otherwise terse tone.
The gardener was a little stumped by this question. "It's just, well, you had us pull the trellises last fall and we ain't got enough foliage to keep things cool in the summer now. Maybe if--"
"Order some trees," Lady Ghess decreed with a dismissive wave of the hand. She started turning away, but stopped and added, "Not fruit trees, though. Get the red decorative type from Lorrolangue."
"Don't think they really grow in climate this wet--" the gardener began.
"Or some larches from Skimonok," Lady Ghess interrupted again. "I'm sure you'll find something suitable."
The gardener made some begrudging mouth noises of acquiescence as Lady Ghess stormed off, her mood visibly low.
Amaris didn't follow, because she was supposed to plan things out with the gardener anyway. She had an inkling of what was going on, though.
"The first Lady Ghess spent her time reading in the gazebo, did she?" Amaris asked, pointing to the surroundings.
"Oh, the young mistress did, at that," the gardener replied. Then, he flinched, and gave Amaris an embarrassed look. "Ought not mention, oughtn't," he added hastily.
"No harm, Lady Ghess didn't overhear," Amaris said.
But the gardener still grimaced and shook his head. "The lady's porcelain cracked this morning, I hear."
That was true, and in fact, that was one of the first things Amaris was called to deal with that morning.
The second Lady Ghess' dowry had included a set of beautiful heirloom crockery painted by her paternal grandmother. The set was usually displayed in a cabinet in the salon, but that morning, the maid in charge of dusting it discovered the entire set was spiderwebbed with cracks, clustered so densely that the ivory hue of the ceramic had been rendered grey. The maid ran to Amaris to report before even unlocking the cabinet because she wanted no blame for the damage. So it fell to Amaris to report this to Lady Ghess bright and early.
Lady Ghess accepted this report with a calm that Amaris found ominous, and then changed the subject to her plans for the garden.
"S'why she wants this work done," the gardener said grimly, and refused to elaborate any more.
Later, Amaris went back inside and relayed the timeline that the gardener gave her to Lady Ghess. Lady Ghess, sitting in the sunroom, did not even raise her eyes from the embroidery hoop in her lap.
"I've thought about it, and the gazebo should be demolished as well," Lady Ghess said airily.
"I'll hire some carpenters to have it done soon," Amaris replied. She did not ask why.
Late winter was still a miserably cold and wet time in this part of the peninsula. Claypot was positioned such that it was too far north to benefit from the warm ocean breezes that kept the rest of the peninsula balmy, and it was also too far south of the Fangtops for the mountain range to block the cold winds coming from the Sea of Trials like it did for the rest of the continent.
Amaris found herself having to spend an unfortunate amount of time outdoors to oversee the garden overhaul. Lady Ghess gave some general criteria and a list of things she wanted destroyed, but as for arranging things, she expected Amaris to do a suitable job on her own.
Having no confidence that she understood Lady Ghess' aesthetics all that well, Amaris asked Linden, Lady Ghess’ personal maid, for her opinion a few times. Linden had served Lady Ghess for so long that she'd been there to see Remie Ghess grow into her preferences first hand.
It only happened about three times, but Amaris found that she enjoyed walking through the dismal, overturned garden with Linden and figuring out things step by step. In the long, circuitous walks over wooden boards and around mounds of earth, they even spoke of personal things with a camaraderie that came naturally to both of them.
It was how Amaris found out Linden was actually her work name. This was considered an old and fussy tradition nowadays, but some servants, especially those who came from outside a household or worked for multiple families on a part-time basis, still used worknames different from their real names. Amaris had no room to judge, considering she still went by 'Vashko' whenever she was in Dasserin.
If she peeked into the payroll ledger, she could see Linden's name written in her own hand: the elaborate symbols that stood for each syllable of her name.
Linden’s family arrived to Claypot long before her birth, so her speech and manner were indistinguishable from any other lifelong Claypotter, but she did have that steppelander look about her, a pale face set with contrasting dark features: black brows, black hair, black eyes.
Being forced by family circumstances to work since a young age, Linden elected for the kind of job available to girls from poor families: she hired on to a slightly more well-off neighbor as a portress and housekeeper. As social climbing went, this was only half a step up, but she worked for Remie Ghess since her maiden days as Remie Arrowan, back when she’d first left her family home to work for her dowry or else obtain a husband by any means.
When Remie Arrowan became Lady Remie Ghess, it would not have been out of line for her to get a new personal maid, but she brought Linden up in the world with her, and made her her personal maid. Linden, by extension, used her good fortune and new salary to fund dowries for two younger sisters, and education for her older brother. Her loyalty to Lady Ghess was of a distinctly personal kind. While Lady Ghess had two additional lady’s maids besides Linden, there was no doubt of the pecking order among them.
Lord Ghess had his own personal servants too, of course. He trusted and relied on Mr. Prechtel, but Amaris doubted he could even name the others. As long as his shoes stayed shined, he scarcely seemed to feel the need to know who was doing the shining, and in fact, since Amaris began working, two of Lord Ghess' body servants had come and gone with nary a remark from Lord Ghess himself.
Were Linden to ever depart, Amaris was sure it would feel mildly apocalyptic to Lady Ghess at the very least, and to whatever poor soul would have to fill Linden's shoes.
But as for Linden herself, what inclination to leave did she even have? The only reason for someone in her position would have been marriage to someone outside the household, but Linden herself proved indifferent to the prospect. She sank the entirety of her efforts into this position, and after working herself raw for her sisters' dowries, she had no desire to repeat the process for herself. Her brother now had a thriving merchant trade, and responsibility for the family's well-being passed to him. Linden now looked forward to saving for her retirement, should she outlive Lady Ghess. She did not expect any personal loyalty from anyone else in the Ghess family, it seemed.
If Amaris wondered before why Linden hadn't been made ledger maid instead, the answer became self-evident: just like Mr. Prechtel, she preferred to remain in a position she could perform confidently at this time when the household was in turmoil.
"It sounds like you'd be muscling in on my job immediately if that ghost ever gets exorcised," Amaris muttered with no real rancor.
Linden smiled, cold and serene. "Of course," she said. "Things will be very different in this household if Eleny Ghess is ever successfully removed, or even if she calms down a bit."
This was the first time anyone in the household ever directly mentioned the previous occupant on purpose and without wincing about it, and Amaris' shock must have been visible, because Linden huffed a little laugh.
"Do you think we would be out here risking broken legs if not for the revenant?" Linden asked quite reasonably. They'd stopped on a wooden walkway over churned earth where the hedges once stood. "It is what they do. Lady Ghess strikes against what Eleny Ghess loved, and then Eleny Ghess does the same. The war is between them, so to a degree, the rest of us are safe. But they would not hesitate to go through us if it meant striking their opponent, so in reality, none of us are safe." Linden shrugged tightly.
"I thought we weren't meant to talk about it, though?" Amaris pointed out.
"Because if we don't, the ghost will lose strength?" Linden said mockingly. "We have been past that point for a very long time. Mention her or don't, it will not make any difference to a revenant. That we don't talk of it is for Lady Ghess' sake. Naturally, you cannot force me to make a mention of it anywhere within her earshot."
Amaris took a look over her shoulder towards the house, and the almost dizzying distance they'd walked away from it. Late afternoon was turning to evening, and some of the lights were turned on; one of those bright windows no doubt marked Lady Ghess' presence, far away and behind walls, where she would not hear word of her rival.
Amaris could believe that Linden didn’t mention the revenant for Lady Ghess’ sake, but she also suspected the rest of the household was doing it for their own sake--it didn’t do to court punishment, after all. Amaris herself hesitated to bring it up when in this atmosphere of palpable fear.
"Alright, well, I won't deny, it would be a relief not to be the intended subject of a haunting," Amaris said, "but then what about Mrs. Arrowan?"
Linden gave a long, deep sigh.
"You've met the woman," Linden said flatly.
"But a rancid personality alone doesn't cause a personal attack from a ghost, does it?" Amaris replied.
"Mrs. Arrowan is..." Linden shook her head, then sighed again. "She comes up with many schemes because she believes Lady Ghess is not acting quickly enough to have her son supplant the eldest as the heir."
"She said something," Amaris surmised. "Something the ghost didn't like."
"There are many subtle ways to persuade a man. Mrs. Arrowan, however, is not as light-handed as Lady Ghess, and overconfident in her methods." Linden's lip curled up in disdain. "Impatient, too."
Amaris could only imagine what kind of schemes Mrs. Arrowan might have had or might have spoken aloud where the ghost of Eleny Ghess might have heard. It was Eleny Ghess' eldest son, after all, who was Lord Ghess' heir currently. If he was removed, that would clear the way for Cem Ghess, and there were only a limited number of ways to remove a man's heir.
Linden, apparently not wanting to let Amaris dwell on which methods were subtle enough that Remie Ghess would employ, made a dismissive gesture and moved the conversation along:
"Mrs. Arrowan never took the haunting seriously before," she said, "since nothing so grave ever happened in her presence. I do not expect her to take it seriously even now, given her temperament and resistance to common sense."
This was the meanest thing Amaris had ever heard Linden say about anyone, and though their acquaintance was not very long, she suspected Linden did not speak like this about people in general. But then, Linden had to have been dealing with Mrs. Arrowan longer than anyone in the household save for Lady Ghess, so if anything, Amaris admired her restraint.
"White peonies," Linden said suddenly.
"Ah--? hm?"
"White peonies along this side," Linden said, gesturing to the churned up mud along one side of the path. "Lady Ghess has a particular fondness for them."
Amaris took out the piece of paper mapping out the garden plans and scribbled down a note.
"We'll need some perennial blooms in this area as well, then," Amaris muttered to herself. Something not white, so the peonies stand out?"
"Quite so," Linden agreed.
They spoke only of the garden for the rest of the day.
Chapter 11
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
While Amaris was the one having to trudge through the mud, order cuttings and instruct the gardeners, Lady Ghess attended to her own duties as well. The spring season would be coming up soon. Lady Ghess had to order herself some new fashion for any upcoming social events, and the helpful fashion boutiques of Claypot, ever aware of the fact, sent many catalogues for Lady Ghess to have her pick.
Amaris had to talk to Lady Ghess about some issue or another--probably about the garden work again, it was constantly about the garden lately--so she arrived to the sunroom to find Lady Ghess and Miri the nanny both with catalogues on their laps.
Cem Ghess had no interest in the catalogues, but he was running around with a ribbon taken from one of the fabric samples, going around and around the sofa his mother sat on while fluttering the ribbon through the air. Few people could forbid Cem anything in this household, but Lady Ghess was the one who permitted him the most.
"The colors this season don't suit me," Miri the nanny was sighing over her own catalogue. "Why can't we get more continental fashions? In Erridh, they're wearing dark colors this season."
"We are not in Erridh," Lady Ghess responded. "If you want to attract a husband in Claypot, you must at least appear to know what is fashionable in Claypot."
"Well, you haven't found me anyone suitable in Claypot," Miri grumbled. "Maybe we need to extend outwards."
"There are plenty of suitable grooms for you in Claypot," Lady Ghess remained unmoved. "You could marry Doctor Duhane, and it would be an excellent match for you. If you remain this picky, you'll end up an old maid."
"And whose fault is it that I'm withering away in the time it's taking you to find me a husband?" Miri whinged. Then, suddenly looking more offended, "And I don't want to marry Doctor Duhane! I want to marry a nobleman too, not just a workman! Auntie told you so many times! Why can't you just find me someone just as good as you got?"
Lady Ghess closed the catalogue in her hands with a snap.
The sudden thud of it resonated up into the glass domes ceiling of the sunroom. Cem Ghess, who'd taken a moment from running wild to inspect a sluggish bug on the window frame, looked towards his mother with wide, surprised eyes. Linden and Amaris stood as still as pillars, becoming part of the architecture.
In the cold white stillness of the room, Miri seemed to recall she was not only Lady Ghess' cousin, but technically her employee as well, and fell silent at all. Incapable of apologizing, she only ceased her offending behavior, the sole concession her pride allowed.
"I've marked the ones I want," Lady Ghess said, passing her catalogue to Amaris. "If my cousin has no use for the dresses in it, don't trouble yourself with ordering anything for her."
Amaris took the catalogue, and then watched as Miri hastily jotted down marks on the pages of her own catalogue.
Overall, this was still what counted as a peaceful day in Plumgarden Manor.
A month after the new year, the cold of winter broke over the back of warm winds rolling in from the ocean. The days turned longer and brighter, and the last snowfall turned to cheerfully trickling water.
Uncle Errett was feeling quite a lot better on his new medicine, and though he complained about the awful bitter powders he had to choke down daily (quietly and only to Amaris as so maintain his poise in front of the rest of the household), it was clear the prescribed treatment did him plenty of good.
He became so lively, that as the weather turned warm, he began accompanying Amaris on her duties from dusk to dawn. He had let her muddle through the first couple of months, and though Amaris caught the essentials from other servants or from Lady Ghess, Uncle Errett had quite a few more details and tricks he felt he ought to pass on to her, and some corrections to how Amaris did things.
Three months had already passed since her arrival, and Uncle Errett was looking to arrange his departure. He would be returning to the Waushko family home to decide his next living arrangements, but for now he only had to slowly begin the process of packing and sending his heavier luggage ahead.
His current difficulty was that the arrangements were somewhat expensive when one did them through a reputable moving company.
Uncle Errett had always been paid a good salary, but like most stewards, plenty of his salary ended up reinvested in his lifestyle: fine custom clothing to look his best on the job, finely crafted jewelry appropriate to his station, not to mention the fact that Uncle Errett had purchased many of the pieces of furniture in his suite with the goal of taking these things into his retirement. The rest of his salary was usually sent to an investment fund meant to pay out dividends in his old age. He would begin drawing on this money once he was settled in his new home and made arrangements with the local bank.
Still, his monthly salary was hefty enough to cover the one-time expense of moving, wasn't it? So he went to Lord Ghess to draw his final three months' worth of salary, and then came back to his rooms quietly furious.
Amaris was sorting through some of Uncle Errett's bric-a-bracs because he told her to take anything that caught her eye, so she was there when her uncle returned to his rooms with anger straining his limbs. His hands shook worse than she had ever seen them shake since he started his new treatment.
"I am to have medical expenses deducted," Uncle Errett reported, "and so I have been told to be grateful that the costs did not exceed my paycheck."
"They won't pay you for the month?" Amaris asked, dumbfounded.
"They will not pay me for the last three months," Uncle Errett said, his hands clasped behind his back to stop their shaking. "Having a steward and a ledger maid on payroll at the same time has been a strain, I am told."
What strain! Amaris was only paid half-salary until she was deemed fully trained, and even after that, her salary as ledger maid would only be two thirds of what a steward would be making. And Uncle Errett was not getting paid at all? What utter horseshit, Amaris did not say out loud, but certainly projected with the face she was making.
After a long, leaden silence, Uncle Errett finally shook his head, his stiff back relaxing.
"I bid this experience not color your own relationship with our employers," Uncle Errett said. He always turned formal and proper the more heightened his emotional state, and Amaris thought that was a good instinct. She, herself, just wanted to knock over things.
Still, what could be done about this? A sum total of not much. Uncle Errett was popular enough in the household that the other servants might protest and make a fuss. Lord Ghess could not fire everyone, after all. But Uncle Errett was also tired, and his heart episode left him weakened. After so many of the staff left and were replaced while he lay in his sickbed, it was unclear if there were even enough people to make a big enough fuss.
And anyway, Amaris suspected there really wasn't enough money to pay him. Lady Ghess' garden project had taken on a life of its own. She ordered new cuts and saplings, and planned to rip out the old Tascque graveyard by the autumn to expand the garden's overhaul.
Amaris kept a close enough track of the household ledgers to figure out some things. While the Ghess family was not poor, their wealth was largely illiquid. The incoming money was drawn from regular payouts of various businesses and endeavors: the plum orchards they owned outside Claypot, a series of distilleries, rent on rich farmland they owned on the Sweepfields river, and a small but profitable gambling house in the capital. The income they received was more regular from some of these businesses than others: the gambling house, for example, was more prompt in ceding payments than the farmers whose livelihoods depended largely on how good the weather was each year.
What Lord and Lady Ghess didn't spend on maintaining Plumgarden Manor and their expensive lifestyle, they spent on paying various staff. They came out of the recent year at a slight deficit, but the issue wasn't that they couldn't cover their expenses, but that the timeline on which they received incoming money was not always at their convenience. They had a good enough reputation in Claypot that a few delays would not raise eyebrows, because Lord Ghess always paid every bill eventually. This was so for just about every aristocratic family in Claypot, and had been the order of business for generations. Everyone seemed willing to wait on the rich to pay their bills, even if it took years.
So, unwilling to do nothing at all, Amaris didn't feel she was overstepping when she went to Lady Ghess and quietly asked if it was true Uncle Errett would not even receive his three-months' pay.
"It's only that, the arrangements to leave are so expensive," Amaris told Lady Ghess sadly. "I'd put my own money to help Uncle Errett, but he absolutely refuses. Perhaps I could give your ladyship the money, and you can give it to Uncle instead, saying it's from you?"
Lady Ghess was sitting in her sunroom, novel forgotten in her lap and her brows kitting together in frightful jagged lines the more she listened to Amaris.
"And it was Lord Ghess who told Mr. Waushko this?" she asked, her voice cold.
"Uncle would not have believed it from anyone else," Amaris said somberly.
Lady Ghess got up and stormed past Amaris and out of the sunroom. She climbed the stairs to the first floor at a businesslike clip, and found Lord Ghess in his study. She did not slam the door closed, but she closed it behind her nonetheless.
Whatever was said in the study that day between Lord and Lady Ghess, by evening Lady Ghess had come to hand over Uncle Errett's pay personally.
"And of course," Lady Ghess told him, "you need not concern yourself with the cost of your treatment. Doctor Duhane is generously compensated."
She smiled so sweetly that Uncle Errett met her generosity with effusive thanks and praise in turn. After she left, he stuffed the envelope into his breast pocket and shook his head, with only Amaris to witness it.
"I don't know how you swung this one, but I hope it's a sign you're well-suited to this position," Uncle Errett said.
"Best leave before they start owing you for another month," Amaris replied with a rueful smile.
Amaris found herself in the habit of reading a little before bed these days.
She read 'The Gravetender's Guidebook' first, and found it only generally instructive and not particularly useful. It reiterated some common knowledge about ghosts and apparitions, along with some religious pablum--'he who hurts the spirit of another hurts the spirit of the world', that kind of thing. The last ten pages were stuffed with variations on 'The Prayer To Rest', probably just to give the booklet more heft.
After that, she picked through some of the volumes borrowed from Lord Ghess' study, but returned them before she could fully comprehend their contents. She suddenly felt much less judgmental of Lord Ghess for letting those particular texts collect dust on his bookshelves, because Amaris did not find it particularly useful to read in-depth about the chemical composition of ectoplasm, or the hypothetical summoning array geometry that would be necessary to summon a ghost from one location to another (something she discovered halfway through the treatise was entirely theoretical, since nobody had proven it could be done).
Bored and thus far having not had a personal encounter with the revenant, Amaris found all these books less than useful.
She moved on to mystery novels about ghosts. There was a robust genre that revolved around helping a ghost solve their own murder and take revenge on the living, and plenty such volumes were stashed away in the dustier corners of Plumgarden Manor's main library.
Reading through, Amaris couldn't say she learned much about ghosts, but it did occur to her to wonder about the specific grievances Eleny Ghess might have had. If she knew, she was sure she might have been able to predict whatever disruption the revenant would cause next.
Unfortunately, Amaris was also starting to suspect that the revenant would only depart if Remie Ghess did so first--and permanently--from the household. This was looking like an unlikely prospect, especially since Remie Ghess seemed more intent on perpetuating new grievances instead.
In this period, Remie Ghess also began disposing of some items from around the house; nothing significant, really, but Amaris could glean that they must have been objects of some significance to the former Lady Ghess: a stately old mirror, a keepsake box, the furniture from a less-used salon.
The items which caught Amaris' eye, however, were the paintings.
One was the portrait of Remie Ghess from Lord Ghess' office, the one in which she was young and delightedly carrying a basket of kittens. Thinking about it, it was clear now to Amaris that this was a portrait painted by Remie Ghess' father. Agyyr Arrowan, said the hand-scrawled artist signature on the back of the canvas.
Another painting, a landscape of a house framed by wind-swept willows, was in a similar style, though lacking any human figures.
Lady Ghess ordered Amaris to have the paintings carefully packed, but she did not order them sent away quite yet. She had Amaris put them away in the luggage room off the entrance foyer. Amaris did so, even though she thought there were plenty of more suitable places to store paintings.
That evening, Lady Ghess announced over dinner that Mrs. Arrowan would be coming for a visit soon.
Lord Ghess' cheek twitched with politely restrained dislike. It was clear he wanted to refuse, but Lady Ghess spoke softly, with kittenish charm, and was so gentle, that a direct refusal would have seemed excessively harsh in this atmosphere. She reeled through a few vague excuses about her mother growing older, not having much time left, and some logical arguments about getting the family visit out of the way before the social season started.
Lord Ghess could not get a word in edgewise and was obviously annoyed to be outmaneuvered like this, but unable to get a handle on the conversation.
"It's just been so long since she's seen Cem," Lady Ghess said eventually, as she ended her monologue.
Cem Ghess, sitting at the table as well, looked up from his plate with a scrunched-up expression of revulsion.
"But I don't wanna see grandma," he whined.
"Shush," Miri the nanny said, pinching Cem's thigh under the table. It was angled out of view of Lord and Lady Ghess, but Amaris saw the movement of Miri's arm clearly.
Cem let out a long shriek, sharp and piercing and completely understandable considering Miri had just screwed his flesh with her awful bony fingers, but it was so sudden, that everyone flinched in their seats. Lord Ghess spilled his spoonful of soup in his lap, and slammed his hand down on the table in warning, making all the cutlery rattle, and Cem's shriek cut off in shock.
"Prepare a guest room for her, then," Lord Ghess said with cold outrage. "Cem ought to learn to respect his elders."
"I'll teach him better, my lord," Miri said humbly.
"Have you not been doing it, so far?" Amaris asked.
Miri turned her head towards Amaris, who was standing calmly by the soup tureen. She'd popped in from the kitchen entrance to survey the dinner table to make sure everything was in order, as was expected from the help. Miri, who was not only the nanny, but also family, had the privilege of sitting for dinner with the masters on any day of the year, but Amaris was the one whose job it was to remind her she was also the help on most of those days, as well.
"You'd best do a better job than you have been so far," Lord Ghess said before Miri could retort in any way to Amaris. "Miss Waushko can easily find your replacement, considering how many would like your position."
The entire table fell into tense silence. Lord Ghess, having established his credentials as patriarch to his own satisfaction, even if to nobody else's, was the most relaxed of the lot.
Miri the nanny gave Amaris a boiling glare, while Lady Ghess turned to Cem to fuss over him and scold him ineffectually.
Amaris just walked off to the kitchens, already afflicted by a mother-in-law of a headache long before Mrs. Arrowan even got here.
Chapter 12
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
"Oh," Uncle Errett said, halting Amaris halfway out the door with a single curious exclamation. "You should take this, I suppose."
He'd been sorting through some final box of vital paperwork. Most of it was his own, but some pertained to Plumgarden Manor, so he was sat at his desk with a magnifying glass, going over everything. The magnifying glass was the last valiant stand against bifocals of a man too vain to tolerate the things; most of the day, he'd borrowed Amaris' much sharper eyesight, but it was getting late and Amaris had her own things to tend to.
From the depths of a thick notebook stuffed with loose papers, he took out a key. Why a key was thrown together with the paperwork was the first thing Amaris asked.
Uncle Errett looked awkward at the question.
"I was asked to stash it somewhere out of sight and out of mind," he confessed. "Just take it."
"What room is it for?" Amaris asked.
"...Just take it."
Amaris' curiosity was piqued by his avoidance--how could it not be, when avoidance indicated one singular thing in this household?--so she took the key.
Back in her room, Amaris compared the key to the ones she kept on her keyring. As ledger maid, she had keys to all the important places, but this was apparently not one of the everyday keys, because it didn't match any of the commonly-used ones.
The head of this key was wrought into the shape of two roses entwining on a trellis. Something about its appearance was vaguely familiar.
The next day, Amaris went to the chatelaine office and had Wylla take out the key box that contained all the keys of the house. Because much of Plumgarden Manor was built in stages, and then renovated piecemeal, one could tell what area of the house a key belonged to based on its style. When Amaris compared, the key from Uncle Errett matched the aesthetics of the third floor rooms.
The third floor had four suites of bedrooms which weren't in current use. Mr. Prechtel called those 'the old bedrooms' when he gave her the tour. This key was clearly of a set with the others. Each key in the box had a different number of roses decorating the handle: one, three and four roses respectively. The one from Uncle Errett had two roses.
"When was the third floor last in use?" Amaris asked Wylla.
"Ah, well..." Wylla pushed her glasses up higher on the bridge of her nose, hard enough that the frames dug against her skin. "A few years? Not since..." She gave a long look to the key box. "Most of the suites there haven't been used since the Tascque days, except for one that Lord Ghess had opened up to serve as a sickroom. But even that one was closed up almost three years ago."
And there it was, the only one subject in the household warranted this kind of shame-faced avoidance, so this was how Amaris learned Eleny Ghess was banished to the unused third floor as her disease became terminal.
There was an element of morbidity to Amaris' curiosity, but she couldn't help it after all the books she read on the subject of hauntings simply bored her to death. This was the first real, understandable touchstone Amaris had for the revenant she had not even seen in this house.
When Amaris' pocketwatch began making its grinding alarm sounds at ten minutes to eleven, Amaris' eyes fluttered open instantly. She reached over to her nightstand and stopped its alarm. All the books indicated that ghosts appeared more reliably at night, but revenants were more common during the day; Amaris was simply using the cover of night because most in the household would be asleep, and not in the position to judge her for skulking around.
She pulled on her house gown and slippers, and took along a lamp.
The third floor was still and quiet. Once, perhaps the suites had been used by some former masters of the household, or maybe for honored guests, but Amaris gleaned that Plumgarden Manor hadn't hosted many guests since the revenant troubles started.
Amaris found the room corresponding to the key, slid it into the lock, and turned it with all the requisite arm strength a long-unused lock needed to get going. It screeched in protest, but it gave way.
When she cracked open the door, she found the room bright even without the aid of her lamp. There were no curtains or drapes at the wide, tall windows, and so the moonlight poured in unobstructed. It all felt quite wild, quite uncivilized to someone who had spent the past few months forced by job description to obsess over whether the curtains were pulled over the windows to an exactingly proper degree.
The furniture in the room was sparse: not even a rug in sight. The floors were dusty wood, and everything was covered by white sheets.
Amaris imagined she would be rifling through drawers and bookshelves looking for clues of what had happened in this room or traces of its former occupant. But the sitting room of this suite was remarkably bare. By the lumps of the sheet-covered furniture, she identified a table, a sofa missing its matching armchairs, a stack of chairs along the wall, a single cabinet. No lady's desk, as one might expect in the sitting room of a lady of the house.
The bedroom door was closed. Amaris walked across the dust-covered floors expecting more of the same, but when she walked into the bedroom, there was a different kind of bareness to it.
It smelled like a sickroom, the same kind of astringent pinch of medicine to the nostrils that Amaris had gotten inured to from Uncle Errett's rooms. There were no sheets on the furniture. There was a wardrobe, a chair next to the bed, the nightstands and... the bed.
Through the hanging canopy, Amaris could see rumpled sheets. A mattress concave at the middle like a cradle for the body that never left. The sweat-scent of long sickness, the smell of mildew. The windows here were also bare of curtains, and the gauzy canopy of the bed was sun-bleached. The moon stopped short of the mattress, but reflected off the stark white walls to give everything a glow.
A sound; labored breathing. A long, too-long, too-difficult wheeze in. A pause at the end of the inhale. An equally long, uneven exhale with a rattle at the end. Amaris was sure breathing wasn't meant to take eternal seconds like that.
Amaris didn't think it was a good idea to approach, but her feet carried her without considering her opinion. She walked until she was next to the bed.
Eleny Ghess had to have been a beautiful woman in life. She had the bone structure of someone whose ancestors spent generations in a row marrying for looks. And the bones jutted out through gaunt flesh, revealing the elegant shape of her skull through paper-thin cheekbones and brows. Black hair plastered to her forehead in disarray; her eye color was indistinguishable in the dark, even the whites of her eyes blotted out. Her complexion was an unnatural yellow, well past sickly in appearance.
The face turned towards Amaris, moving so slowly it took her the entire interminable length of a hitching inhale. When Eleny Ghess grabbed Amaris' hand, however, the grip was strong. The fingers were neither cold nor warm, lukewarm like something unliving in the way a rock or a puddle wasn't alive.
"Why, is this not the ledger maid?" Eleny Ghess asked, her voice rough as if long-unused, but thunderously loud in the stillness of the room.
"Yes," Amaris said, her mouth numb as it formed the words. "Amaris Waushko."
Eleny Ghess rose from her bed in a single liquid motion: one second she laid flat, the next she was upright, as easy as her breathing wasn't.
"Who is master of the house?" Eleny Ghess asked.
Amaris felt trepidation that she might get the answer wrong, but didn't feel she had much room to squirm free, either. Eleny Ghess still held her hand.
"Lord Vilmor Ghess," she answered.
"And who is mistress of the house?"
"Lady... Ghess."
Eleny Ghess' lips curled up in a blood-curdling smile.
"Come with me," she said as gently as if addressing a child.
Amaris felt she hadn't much choice. She let Eleny Ghess take her by the hand and gently lead her out of the bedroom, down from the third floor, climbing all the stairs down to the foyer.
Amaris would have been afraid of someone being awake, or being wakened by the noise, and coming to find Amaris hand in hand with a revenant. That couldn't possibly look good on a job resume, could it? But as they walked through the cloying darkness of Plumgarden Manor, it felt like nobody outside the circle of Amaris' lamp could possibly ever wake up again. She felt trapped in the ghost’s bubble of unlife, separate from the daylight world of the living.
In the foyer, Eleny opened the door of the luggage storage, and pointed to the paintings packed up and ready to be taken away.
"I haven't touched those yet," Eleny explained. "Do you understand why?"
"No," Amaris said out of an excess of honesty.
This didn't seem to annoy Eleny, however. In the lamplight, she looked far less sickly. Pale and thin, but not gaunt. She wore a threadbare old house gown, perhaps too ragged for a lady of her station, but remarkably realistic in its details. Her hand holding Amaris' was still lukewarm.
"He loves that portrait of her more than he loves her," Eleny explained. "It's a splinter in her heart, so I leave it there. She also loves the paintings more than she loves him, but it wouldn't hurt him as much to know that. It would only insult him."
She smiled at Amaris then, incongruously normal and friendly, downright pleased to have shared this information. Amaris couldn’t say she wasn’t frightened, but she was just as much compelled by the sharp, ruthless whims keeping Eleny Ghess tethered to this household. Had she been like this when she was alive? Surely not. Surely a person had to go through something specific to become like this.
"Do you understand now?" she asked.
"I... think I do."
"So, who do you think is mistress of the house."
"You."
"Why?"
"Because you have the means to rule the house more than the rest."
This time, the smile was wider.
"Good. You do understand."
Amaris expected a more impressive departure, perhaps for Eleny Ghess to disappear in-between blinks. But Eleny only turned around and walked to the stairs again, in the shuffling, dragging steps of an invalid.
Amaris stood stuck in place for a long time, listening to the slow, aching climb up the stairs, all the way up to the third floor. As she was gradually left alone, her body began shaking, either belated fear or because of the sweat cooling down her back into icy slickness.
Chapter 13
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The next morning, as Amaris walked into the kitchens, the atmosphere was so strange, that she almost had the irrational thought that everyone knew what she'd been up to the might before. She walked through the door, and the usual clamor of voices in the kitchen was reduced to hushed exchanges no louder than the clinks and clangs of pots and pans.
However, Amaris had learned one thing from being a dormitory superintendent, and that was to not incriminate herself too soon. She'd gotten one too many anxious adolescents confessing to things she never even suspected to fall into the same trap.
"What's wrong?" she asked, surveying the kitchen staff.
Sure enough, the way some people ducked their heads and avoided looking at her, something had to have happened.
Looking around, other than the awkward quietude, Amaris did note one absence.
"Where's Mertie?" Amaris asked Mrs. Limley. This would have been the first person she sidled up to for information, and so the absence was especially glaring.
"She's just cooling off a bit," Mrs. Limley answered stiffly. "Down in the basement."
Cooling off in the basement? Had Mertie turned into a shank of meat overnight? Amaris headed down to the basement, and stopped by the chatelaine office first.
Wylla was looking just uncomfortable enough that it was clear she knew a bit more about what was doing on. In a voice low enough not to carry, she explained that while Mertie was in the kitchens early to make the bread, her husband was just staggering in on his way to sleep off a night of drink.
He was not supposed to pass through the kitchens, but he did anyway, and apparently found something so objectionable about Mertie's presence there doing the same job she did on every day of the year, that he pulled her hair and slapped her several times.
The only other staff there at the time were some of the younger kitchen maids, because the bread making always started earlier than anything, so after Ornost went off to bed, Mertie stayed and made the bread with a face full of tears. When Mrs. Limley walked into the kitchens, the sight of Mertie had already rendered the air thick with shame and embarrassment, so all she could do was send Mertie off and have someone else take up her duties.
"So she went to the basement?" Amaris asked.
"Well... Ornost is probably still sleeping in their room," Wylla pointed out.
Amaris gave a resounding scoff at this. "Just tell me where she is."
Wylla indicated the door of a side pantry, meant for less cold-sensitive food. The shelves along the walls reached up to the ceiling, but they were dismally empty still the farther up they went. At the bottom of the room, Mertie sat on a stepping stool, hunched miserably over her own knees and facing the wall. Her seat was much too small for her, and nearly got lost in her uniform's skirts.
Amaris walked over and offered Mertie a clean handkerchief before she said anything.
Mertie turned her head to look at the handkerchief, revealing red cheeks, puffy eyes--the miserable wobble of her lips. The handkerchief in her own hands was wet and tortured into a mess, so she accepted the one from Amaris.
"It wasn't always so bad," Mertie said, as if in response to Amaris.
Amaris hadn't said anything, but she could see how Mertie might have wanted to skip over a few standard lines she'd get every time something like this happened. 'Why did you marry that guy?' or 'why haven't you asked the masters to sponsor a divorce?', or whatever else they usually said to her.
"Wasn't it?" Amaris asked blandly.
"It--" Mertie hiccupped and stared into her lap, picking at the handkerchief's edges. After a few seconds, she rallied, "It was better during the old Lady Ghess. I was her favorite cook, you know. He knew he wouldn't g-get away with bothering me."
So the demotion from head cook might not have been as crushing as the demotion from being a favorite of the household's mistress, was what Amaris thought.
"You'd think--" Mertie continued, looking outraged, "that he'd remember who was haunting this house. Everybody tells him, but he forgets when he's too drunk."
"I think," Amaris said, "the dead aren't to be relied upon anyway."
Mertie's shoulders slumped as if this was a criticism delivered to her, and not to the ghost of Lady Ghess. Still, Amaris couldn't think of anything else she had to say in this situation. She despised the generic comforting lies one usually said to the battered. She couldn't force herself to say any of them even if doing otherwise made her look heartless and uncaring.
"You should rest," Amaris said. "Everything feels better after rest." It was what Amaris' grandmother always told her after a crying fit. It was what all the Dasserine grannies usually said to cheer up those younger than them. Amaris hadn't appreciated it enough as a child, but she predicted turning into the kind of old lady who said it often.
Mertie didn't appreciate it now, either, because she shook her head.
"Nonsense," Amaris said. "Come along."
She coaxed Mertie out of the pantry and back to the chatelaine office. There, she had Wylla bring out the key box and she selected the key for one of the unused servants' rooms.
"This is the one at the end of the hallway. Nobody will pass by it by accident," Amaris told Mertie. "You can go lie down there now, and then move your things after Ornost gets booted to work."
When Amaris pushed the key into her hand, she stared at it blankly, uncomprehendingly.
"But... I can't sleep in a different room than my husband," Mertie protested.
"Certainly you can. It's an order. Ornost has lost the privilege because of drunkenness on the job, so this is punishment. He doesn't get a say unless he chooses a caning instead."
Mertie's mouth hung open at this, but her hand curled around the key with all the strength in her fingers, and she pressed it close to her heart like she was afraid it would get stolen.
Amaris had Mertie settled first, and then went by the kitchens to raise their spirits as well by taking out of their hands any moral responsibility for the situation. The whole day, the mood remained strange in the house, so Amaris thought she might as well continue on the same track.
This time, when she went up to the third floor, it was still late afternoon. The sun slanted through the windows at orange angles, bringing out every single mote of dust on the air to the degree that Amaris was more bothered by the itchiness of her nose than any ghostly presence.
The sitting room of the suite was the same, but the bedroom, devoid of revenant, was even more bare. There was no canopy; there was not even a mattress. There was the skeletal remains of a bed’s wooden frame. The nightstands had a stack of yellowed little booklets there, but when Amaris blew off the dust and leafed through them, she discovered they were prayer booklets.
"'He who hurts another hurts the body of the world'," Amaris recited under her breath. The Saint's Entreaty. Next was the Prayer for Rest. "'Before departing, set the house to rights and all grievances to grave.' Well, we know this one doesn't work, now, don't we?" Amaris muttered.
She flipped to the next prayer, and found it bookmarked by a scrap of paper. The writing was a wretched cursive, but Amaris had experience puzzling out terrible handwriting, so she gave it a try.
It was a prescription for 'bassyndoyen extract, one tea-spoon nightly', made out to Eleny Ghess by some Doctor Wellspring.
Was that it? A single medicine to treat a degenerative illness? Amaris flipped the paper over, as if expecting more. The other side was blank, save for the ink bleeding through. After seeing Uncle Errett filled to his ears with prescriptions for a dozen different powders, teas, concoctions and decoctions, she had a hard time believing this was Eleny Ghess' comprehensive treatment plan.
Yet, none of the other prayer booklets had any other prescriptions.
The day after next, Errett Waushko finally finished all his preparations. The Waushko family sent along two burly lads to help Uncle Errett with his luggage, these being two of (grand-)Uncle Erret's nephews and therefore also Amaris' uncles. Amaris and the Waushko uncles only knew each other by sight, and thus nodded in greeting to each other, but did not otherwise chit-chat.
Uncle Errett kept thinking of household minutia to mention to Amaris, like 'make sure to inventory the larders each season' or 'don't forget to account for vermin extermination in the kitchens separately', but Amaris just nodded vigorously and told him to write it all in a letter after he reached the Waushko family home.
It was late morning when Uncle Errett finally deemed that he had tied all loose ends. The oldest servants gathered in front of the house to see him off, some even looking misty-eyed. One of the cooks was outright sobbing while Uncle Errett patted her arm awkwardly.
"There there, I'm sure Amaris will perform wonderfully. You won't even miss me," Uncle Errett assured them.
In the back, one of the newer maids whispered to another, "Who's Amaris? Ain't her name Amarie?" She was swiftly elbowed in response.
With all due theatrics finished, Uncle Errett took a last glance at the house, looking nostalgic but not particularly sad.
"It hasn't been the same since Young Mistress Tascque's days, anyway," he muttered so quietly that only Amaris might have heard. He sounded like he was trying to assure himself.
And after that, the Waushko nephews lifted his luggage into the carriage they'd brought, helped Uncle Errett onto it as well, and they departed. It felt anticlimactic to Amaris, but then, what else had she expected? After decades of service to this household, at least Uncle Errett had a more significant send-off than Amaris had had when the school fired her; she'd had to pack her bags and leave before the crack of dawn without telling anyone else on staff she was even leaving.
Chapter 14
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
By the time it was spring proper, the garden finally looked less like a warzone. Neat patches of freshly-sprouted green growth were starting to replace the yawning chasms of before.
Amaris spent much of that time on mud management duty: carefully watching so that it wouldn't be tracked in, dispatching servants to deal with the mud that was, inevitably, dragged in, making sure there were areas mud could be scraped off, changing her own boots three times a day if necessary. It was messy work but strangely satisfying. Had she been meant for a soldier's life, she would have relished sitting in a general's saddle. As it were, she pitted herself against natural forces of entropy and mud-tracking instead. After a while, keeping things clean settled into routine.
It was during the third week of the garden's ongoing overhaul that Mrs. Arrowan showed up for her visit.
If Amaris expected Mrs. Arrowan to have been somewhat humbled by her previous experience, she would have proven herself a fool. So Amaris was not, in fact, surprised when Mrs. Arrowan walked yet again into Plumgarden Manor as if she were an ill-tempered landlady dropping in on the tenants she most preferred to torment.
Perhaps it was only the quelling presence of Lord Ghess, but Mrs. Arrowan did not verbalize her disdain for Plumgarden Manor quite as much this time around. She was greeted by Lady Ghess, Cem and Miri once again, but Lord Ghess joined them this time as well.
"You're looking well, Vilmor!" Mrs. Arrowan declared once she clapped eyes on Lord Ghess. She didn't sound cloyingly sweet, but compared to her previous tone, she might as well have. There was something overly familiar in her words.
"Calling me by name? How modern," was Lord Ghess' response. Mrs. Arrowan acted like he hadn't said a thing, but it was 'Your Lordship' from that point on.
They were led to the same salon as last time, the door left wide open.
This time Amaris was not banished out of the room, but she had little purpose to be there anyway, so she lingered the corridor just outside in case of any urgent need for her. The servants who brought in tea stood straight-backed by the doorway in case they were needed; Lord Ghess, after perfunctorily drinking a single cup of tea and exchanging empty small talk, made his goodbyes to his mother-in-law, citing work he had to return to.
Amaris nodded in greeting to Lord Ghess as he walked at an uncharacteristically brisk pace away. He disappeared in the direction of his smoking room, which put paid to the notion of this mysterious 'work' which urgently called to him.
Even listening from afar, and missing every third word, Amaris could hear something in the quality of the conversation shifting after Lord Ghess' departure, like the gilt was stripped off. The voices didn't quite turn shrill, but there was less pretense to politeness now, and that made Mrs. Arrowan's voice louder.
Lady Ghess said something Amaris couldn't quite make out; her voice, usually so even and confident when talking to servants, dipped and murmured and hitched back up unevenly.
"You made such a fuss before about the paintings, now you want to get rid of them?" Mrs. Arrowan's voice rang.
After that, Cem and Miri were sent out of the salon, and so were the servants. Only Linden remained, always by Lady Ghess' side. The doors of the salon slammed closed.
One of the maids stood by the door with a look of moon-faced curiosity.
"Miss Waushko, ought we maybe stay in case we're called?" she asked in a whisper.
Amaris was also terribly curious, but unfortunately, this was too blatantly eavesdropping.
From inside, Lady Ghess' voice rose high enough to be heard through the door: '--and I told you I'm not giving you more money, so take it or leave it!'.
"Absolutely not, that's what the bell is for," Amaris scolded the maid and chased her off to the kitchens to return the tea tray.
After that, Amaris left as well to tend to her own work.
The discussion between Lady Ghess and Mrs. Arrowan didn't last long, but at the end of it, when Lady Ghess emerged, she ordered to have the two paintings by Agyyr Arrowan packed up with Mrs. Arrowan's luggage, to take when she left.
The weather took a turn for the gorgeous that day, so the garden beckoned. It was still in the incipient stage of growth where everything was still more twig than leaf, so there wasn't much to see, but the Ghess family was delighted with the warming weather, and eager to get outdoors. The paths, at least, were finished and clean of mud.
All seemed exceedingly serene when out of earshot of Mrs. Arrowan, so Amaris didn't expect to have any big hassle until Lady Ghess' next whim--whichever Lady Ghess happened to have a whim first.
Amaris was, therefore, especially dismayed when a maid came running and yelling, “Young Master Cem fell in the pond!”
Amaris had them call the Ghess family doctor promptly, sending the carriage driver directly to Doctor Duhane's residence. Meanwhile, the maids were send off to gather the largest, fluffiest towels in the residence and to stoke the fire in Lady Ghess' rooms, because it was the one that ran hottest in the house.
Winter was barely passed, and so regardless of sunlight, water was still ice-cold at this time of the year. Filling the pond with fish had obviously been a mistake, with a curious child in the house.
After she finished snapping off the orders, Amaris picked up her skirts and made an undignified but speedy dash up the stairs, in the wake of the burly man carrying Cem like a nervous server trying to walk fast but not spill a tray full of wine glasses. She caught up at the threshold of Lady Ghess' rooms.
Cem was so pale his lips were blue, and he was completely insensate. He wasn't even shivering, but his eyes were open and staring blankly, his expression slack with shock.
"Is he breathing?" Amaris asked sharply. The gardener's assistant, who was also drenched, was the one carrying Cem. He looked startled and gaped without answering the question, obviously at loose ends just from being allowed into the house.
When Rowena and Vernay--both Lady Ghess' personal maids--took Cem from his arms, the gardener's assistant looked visibly relieved, and melted back in the nervous flock of seven or eight trailing servants. Amaris waved them away from the threshold of Lady Ghess' rooms and closed the door behind her.
Rowena and Vernay acted promptly, more confident in their motions, even if their expressions were uncertain: they stripped Cem of the wet clothes quickly, swaddled him in fluffy towels, and began drying him, Vernay rubbing feeling back into his limbs while Rowena vigorously worked on drying his hair.
Under their ministrations, Cem began shivering, and the blue tint receded from his skin.
Amaris took out blankets and towels from the well-arrayed wardrobe, hanging a few on the grill in front of the fireplace, and then threw some more wood on the fire to stoke it hotter.
Lady Ghess arrived partway through this process, clearly hysterical. She banged in through the door, followed just a step behind by Linden, who waved away the gathered servants in the hallway and closed the door once again.
"Where is he?" Lady Ghess yelled as she stormed in, looking ready to elbow her way through the maids trying to help her son.
Amaris, not being remotely polite about it, grabbed Lady Ghess by the shoulders and pulled her back bodily.
"Put him in front of the fire!" Amaris barked an order, while she gripped Lady Ghess by the arms and held her in place.
The maids rushed to obey, one pulling a cover and some pillows from the bed and another rushing to wrap Cem in one of the dry towels Amaris had stacked by the fireplace.
Cem was sniffling and hiccoughing now, his little body shaking in a way that was even breaking Amaris' heart a little.
With Cem swaddled in warm, dry fabric, Amaris released Lady Ghess, and she rushed to scoop him into her arms. She sat sprawled in front of the fireplace on the floor, cradling her son and rubbing his back, all poise and pretense abandoned. In fact, Linden had to rush and push her skirts away from the fire, because Lady Ghess disregarded everything and everyone around her.
Rocking back and forth with her son in her arms, Lady Ghess' frayed nerves seemed to settle. Cem was still shivering, but not as much as before, only trembling like a newborn chick. He sniffled and hid his face in the crook of his mother's neck, so only the spiky locks of his drying hair could be seen over her shoulder. The maids busied themselves with warming towels, filling up a hot water bottle, and carefully tucking a blanket around both Cem and Lady Ghess.
This was the fragile calm that was settled over the room when Mrs. Arrowan came staggering in, trailed by Miri the nanny. The old woman was wide-eyed and her expression was unnaturally stiff. The concerned grandmother look did not come easily to her, Amaris guessed.
"What's happened? Why was nobody watching Cem?" were the first words out of Mrs. Arrowan's mouth.
Lady Ghess' expression twisted into something ugly--something terribly angry.
"Yes, where was Miri?" Amaris asked, before Lady Ghess could say something she'd regret to her mother.
Miri the nanny was, in fact, lending her arm to support Mrs. Arrowan, who was winded after what must have been a relatively fast pace for her up the stairs. Miri's eyes darted guiltily from Amaris to Lady Ghess, before settling on Mrs. Arrowan again. Obviously seeing only one protector for herself in this mess, Miri huddled closer to Mrs. Arrowan.
"She was attending to me," Mrs. Arrowan said with her chin tilted up, "so naturally, the servants should have been watching Cem more closely. How can you keep such incompetent people in your house?"
"How indeed," Amaris said curtly. "You're fired."
The room went completely quiet for a few confused moments. Linden was poised and cold, but Rowena and Vernay looked at Amaris uncertainly, their eyes wide and uncertain. But Amaris was looking at Miri with cold contempt.
"You heard Mrs. Arrowan," Amaris said, "we can't keep such incompetent people on staff."
Miri glanced at Mrs. Arrowan, but she wasn't as panicked as a servant being dismissed ought to be. Clearly she believed being a favored niece to Mrs. Arrowan was something which she could leverage so strongly that she might be kept on regardless of her blunders.
Amaris, on some level, feared this might be true, and that she overextended her authority by meddling into family affairs. But she also knew something else: Lady Ghess was angry right now. Whatever decision she made when filled with righteous maternal fury, she would have to stand by once she calmed down.
"Go pack your bags--" Amaris began.
"What nonsense is this?" Mrs. Arrowan interrupted. "Of course Miri won't leave."
"Madam, she will leave or I will have her forcefully carried out," Amaris forged on. "She was hired for the sole purpose of caring for Young Master Cem, and she failed so disastrously he almost died. I will not wait until the next time so that she might succeed in killing him."
Amaris didn’t really think Cem was anywhere close to death, as the pond was not that deep, and not even that cold. But a bit of exaggeration would pass unchallenged at this juncture.
Mrs. Arrowan's lip peeled back in a sneer.
"Are you stupid?" Mrs. Arrowan snapped. "I told you, she was attending to me. She can't be blamed for respecting her elders."
"Then she can become your nanny, now that she is free of employ," Amaris retorted. "You can't possibly believe your need to have a gossip session with your niece is more important than your grandson's life."
"Miri is a good girl--"
Amaris raised her voice to speak over Mrs. Arrowan: "Furthermore, madam, you should be more concerned for yourself." When Mrs. Arrowan fell into stunned silence, she continued, "If I were you, I'd pray to all the saints my daughter forgives me for endangering her own child's life. Do not think anyone in this household will ever forget you almost helped in killing Young Master Cem, even if you browbeat your daughter into making me apologize for how I spoke to you."
Mrs. Arrowan's face turned furiously red, and her expression twisted into something uglier yet. But then, finally recalling her daughter, she looked over at Lady Ghess.
"Are you going to let her speak to me like this?" Mrs. Arrowan asked in a warning tone of voice.
"Shut up," Lady Ghess hissed.
"Excuse you--?"
"Shut up, Mother!" This time the words were louder, percussive against the frozen silence of all the servants around them. "She's right, this is your fault! It's your fault! You told me to marry into this wretched household, and now these things happen all the time!"
Lady Ghess' voice grew ragged as she spoke, terseness breaking into some kind of relief as she found a villain to blame. She shook her head, scoffed.
"Take Miri and go," Lady Ghess gritted out.
"I'm not going anywhere, you stupid little girl--" Mrs. Arrowan began. Miri was still clutching her arm, and hunkered into Mrs. Arrowan's shadow, fearful but helpless.
"Then you shall pardon me for removing you," Amaris said, and raised her arm to push Mrs. Arrowan bodily.
Mrs. Arrowan was not a very large woman. Despite Amaris sardonically thinking of her as old, she was middle-aged and still in the flower of health. But Amaris could take on a very intimidating posture when necessary, and the standard for coarse behavior was much looser in Dasserin than on the peninsula, so she had no psychological block about taking actions that the delicate ladies of Claypot would find appalling.
When Amaris shoved Mrs. Arrowan, she staggered back, pulling Miri along with her. To be manhandled like this was more of a shock than actually painful, and even if Mrs. Arrowan eventually planted her feet and refused to budge, this was after Amaris had pushed her past the threshold of Lady Ghess' rooms and had pulled the door closed behind her.
Mrs. Arrowan continued to bluster the entire time as Amaris ordered a few manservants to escort her to the foyer and have a carriage made ready.
Amaris took along several servants to Mrs. Arrowan's guest room, where she oversaw the packing of Mrs. Arrowan's luggage. Miri's things were also being packed for her, though Amaris expressed less interest in how the former nanny's things were thrown together so long as they were sent off with her.
Lady Ghess left her rooms only once, to waylay Amaris in the hallway.
"Make sure the paintings are also sent along with Mother," she instructed.
"...Are you certain, my lady?" Amaris asked, giving Lady Ghess a very blunt look.
Lady Ghess' lips twisted, but she nodded. Amaris didn't understand, and didn't think she had to, but she double-checked that the paintings were packed away with the rest of Mrs. Arrowan's luggage.
Lord Ghess was holed up in his office when the entire thing went down. By the time someone informed him of the ruckus, he had no interest in Mrs. Arrowan's side of things, only concern for his son. He went to Lady Ghess' room to sit with Cem--who'd been bundled up like a caterpillar in a chrysalis--where they waited together for the doctor to arrive.
Mrs. Arrowan's carriage had not hauled off yet when the doctor arrived, a harrowed young man with too-large glasses, too-large suit jacket, too-large carpetbag of instruments, like a disheveled beetle from a children's storybook illustration.
The young Doctor Duhane was momentarily stalled in the foyer by Mrs. Arrowan, who was stomping mad and making a good impression of a woman in the middle of a hysterical episode, but he was swiftly redirected by Amaris to the real patient.
"We will not call anything short of a hearse for that one," Amaris said regarding Mrs. Arrowan, just loudly enough to be heard by Mrs. Arrowan. This set off another stomping, teeth-gnashing, ranting fit. Nobody gave it any regard except Miri, who was sitting on the bottom doorsteps of the grant staircase with large, wet eyes, much too reliant on her aunt's regard to look away from this spectacle.
When the carriage was finally pulled around, loaded with luggage and ready to leave, the only reason Mrs. Arrowan wasn't thrown out was because she proceeded to stomp and pretend she was the one storming out instead, taking Miri along only out of pure familial concern and not because Miri had gotten herself sacked and nobody else would be willing to offer a ride.
The house seemed to settle after that, silence falling uneasily and tinged with a jittery quality.
Chapter 15
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
"I feel like I ought to render my apologies to you," Amaris said ruefully, as she poured the tea for Doctor Duhane and then pushed the tray of snacks closer to him.
Doctor Duhane, looking too frazzled to argue against basic hospitality, took a sip of the tea and then grabbed one of the little finger sandwiches from the tray.
"You needn't apologize for an accident, Miss Waushko. If anything, I appreciate any person who keeps their head in an emergency."
"Certainly, this must be the biggest mess you've seen since you started working for the Ghess family. Ah, or did you start with the Tascques?" Amaris corrected herself quickly. "All that is before my time, pardon my mistake."
"No, no, it's no mistake. I am a recent hire to the household. I have no idea who the Tascques had before, but Doctor Wellspring was with the Ghess family since Lord Ghess was but a boy. He was my mentor, so when he retired, he passed on quite a few high-value patients to me. It was a good start for my practice."
"How kind of him," Amaris remarked lightly. She poured herself some tea as well.
Doctor Duhane had seen to Young Master Cem and confirmed he suffered from little more than shock and some shivers, but under Lord and Lady Ghess' insistent concern, he'd also prescribed Cem some fortifying tonics and bed rest. The entire consultation lasted for a tenser and more extended time than it would have if the patient's parents were not titled nobility, but at least after it was order Amaris could whisk Doctor Duhane away under the pretense of hospitality.
She took him to one of the smaller salons just off the foyer and served him some hot tea and pastries, letting the man decompress after the harrowing ordeal of dealing with the Ghesses, and Doctor Duhane proved terribly grateful for the entire thing, engaging in small talk and answering every question Amaris put to him with little regard for discretion. It was delightful how chatty this bespectacled bachelor turned as long as he believed he was being dotingly hosted.
Amaris intended to take full advantage of this, so, at some point, she patted her forehead as if suddenly recalling something.
"Oh! Since you're here," she said, "I did have a question maybe you can answer! Why would anyone be prescribed bassyndoyen extract?"
"Ah? Miss Waushko, your great-uncle may be old, but he's still quite spry and clear-headed, there's no need for that yet, is there?" Doctor Duhane replied, looking bemused.
"...What?"
"Were you not asking for him? Ah, pardon." Doctor Waushko gave an awkward shake of the head, retreating into didactic professionalism to gloss over his awkwardness: "Bassyndoyen extract is prescribed to elderly patients, usually afflicted with senility. It's a sedative, and it can help if the patient is otherwise combative. But taking it for too long can make poison build up in the liver. Awful way to go."
Doctor Duhane pressed his lips together and gave a helpless shrug. "Sometimes families become over-reliant on it and it can lead to the patient being drugged into stupor. I don't like it, personally, but it can be a necessity in some cases."
"Does it affect breathing?" Amaris asked.
"Breathing? No, it has nothing to do with it. It causes a kind of depressive state. Sleepiness, fatigue, lack of motivation."
"I see."
"Does that solve some mystery for you?" Doctor Duhane asked. "Though if your uncle is not the one you mean it for, I can't imagine who else."
"Oh, it was used for murder in a novel I've been reading. I thought maybe the doctor character was a murderer, but I'm thinking perhaps the writer is a quack instead."
Doctor Duhane gave a startled laugh at this, but then hummed to himself.
"You know, I see these kinds of mistakes in popular fiction constantly--" he began, as Amaris nodded along.
Later, Amaris she went to Eleny Ghess' room, and she held out the prescription to the empty air.
"Just so you know," Amaris began, and before she could continue, she felt the paper being snatched from her hand, and disappear into the aether.
Amaris was beginning to understand why this job had led to Uncle Errett's heart episode, if this was the kind of thing he had to deal with regularly since Eleny Ghess' haunting had started. Still, she was hardly cowed at this point.
First order of business was hiring a new nanny for Cem Ghess. Amaris had a ready candidate she knew was available straight away, at least for a short time.
She left the next morning early, long before the masters of the house made their way to breakfast. By lunch, she had finished the errand she set off to do and returned with two elderly women in tow--certainly at that age where one might retire, though not unusual to be working as servants in more old-fashioned households.
Rorine Ophrey and Trizzy Sacks were dressed in new, ready-made dress suits which fit almost well on them, their hands and faces scrubbed clean and and their hair bundled in conservative knots at the back of their heads.
Rorine was introduced as Cem's new nanny, on the strength of her previous employ to a family of similar if not more prestigious standing as the Ghesses, and Trizzy was slipped into the kitchens where she became the picture of a humble and hard-working woman to a degree that her behavior bordered on parody.
But Amaris had another reason to bring Trizzy along, that had less to do with charity and more with the fact that there was an opening she wanted to fill.
Mertie still had a separate servant's room all to herself, but lately, Ornost began talking his way into sleeping there overnight, even if he wasn't allowed to, technically. Amaris had to hear it from Erdie and Arra, who didn't know enough to be discreet about such things yet and still thrummed with the outrage of youth at anything they perceived as unfair.
Amaris had to ponder what to do about this situation, because it often happened late in the evening, and she couldn't crack down on Ornost without making a huge to-do about all the other servants who had the habit of slipping into each other's rooms under the cover of darkness.
So, she decided to assign Mertie a roommate. Someone already from the household wouldn't do, because nobody had the spine or the inclination to get between Mertie and Ornost.
Trizzy was perfect for that: a spicy old battleax who had no real obligations to anyone else in the household and who'd been brought in by the ledger maid personally. Amaris made it very clear to Trizzy that she did not care for Ornost and Trizzy did not have to care for him either, and she trusted the old woman to never make things easy on Ornost ever.
Anyway, Ornost had different concerns around that time. Though the garden work was meant to have finished, Amaris couldn't just not do nothing about the incident with Cem Ghess. She ordered the pond drained, and pulled the head gardener aside to decide on a different water feature. Artisanal fountains were quite popular in the northwest, what about those? Artificial streams, maybe? A few birdbaths, nice and shallow.
By the time Lady Ghess could tear herself away from her son's side to opine as well, Amaris and the head gardener already had a few options for her to look at.
At that point, however, Lady Ghess indicated she wanted all of the gardening staff interrogated. Cem Ghess insisted that he'd been pushed, and naturally, they could not simply ignore such a thing, even if, left unsaid between the lines was the terrible assurance that they did already know who or what was responsible for the pushing.
The gardening staff was terribly nervous about it, however. The head gardener, his three assistants including Ornost, his apprentice, and a half dozen other outside workers were all brought in one by one to the empty steward's office, where Lady Ghess and Amaris questioned them thoroughly.
Naturally, nothing came from it. None of them were guilty of anything, and their whereabouts were easy to account for--even Ornost where he was sleeping off a hangover in the Tascque graveyard because his regular bush had been uprooted and replaced.
But Ornost took exception to even being implied as suspected, and perhaps even greater offense at being forced to do garden work once again following this pond business, so he became increasingly vocal about his complaints, cussing out the other gardeners constantly, and even saying a few unkind things about Cem Ghess.
Amaris dearly hoped and waited for Ornost to do it within her earshot even once, even from afar. But Ornost, in spite of his belligerence, his drunkenness and his stupidity, was still saved somewhat by his paranoia, and never said anything actionable where his perceived betters could hear him. The outdoor staff grew miserable listening to him, and Mertie grew quieter, and Amaris grew frustrated.
It was a knot that Amaris found hard to untangle without hurting Mertie. Would Lady Ghess, who spent so much of her time breaking everything her predecessor loved, look upon Mertie, who was once one of Eleny's favorites, and have the sympathy to help her against Ornost?
Amaris did not believe so unless Ornost was proven to be so objectionable as to force Lady Ghess' hand. So Amaris waited for the right opportunity, knowing she had a tenacity which far exceeded some old drunkard's.
With spring came the next holidays: the Three-Day Feast of Saint Abdau, the days when it was said the bear-saint emerged from hibernation.
This was a less involved affair that the Feastdays of Winter, but this time they would have guests: Lord Ghess' children from his first marriage were due to return home for a visit. He would, also, be hosting some family friends of long standing.
Amaris arranged for all spring cleaning to be finished and guest rooms to be arranged. The Ghess children's rooms were also cleaned up and prepared for their arrival. Amaris had yet to meet this set of young masters, and so hoped to make a good impression.
The kitchens were naturally busy, so Mrs. Limley's temper was constantly frayed. There was more yelling than Amaris would have liked, and so she dropped in frequently. At least this allowed her to witness that Trizzy Sacks was getting on great in her new role. She was energetic for her age, and when she rolled up her sleeves, she revealed cords of muscles that could only have come from years of hard labor. She worked elbow to elbow with Mertie, and the two put their heads together frequently to talk as they worked. Just as frequently, they shared the same nasally, snickering laughter.
Mertie's husband was increasingly annoyed by this new-found camaraderie, and walked around thunderously, pacing around the stables and the carriage port, drinking more heavily and sneering more obnoxiously. He was still not allowed into Mertie's room, especially now that she had a roommate who was unrelated to either of them. Before, he might have snuck in after dark anyway, but Trizzy was a shrill and unwelcoming host.
Ornost found a new target for his vulgar rants in Trizzy, but if he thought this was going to discourage his wife from being friends with Trizzy, this rather had the opposite effect. Mertie seemed glued to Trizzy's side, and Trizzy was sociable enough that she always seemed to have a group of bosom buddies surrounding her as well, so while Ornost might have blustered his way past Trizzy, he often couldn't get close enough to attempt it anyway, stuck outside the battlements of other servants' shoulders.
Amaris tried to warn Trizzy this would only provoke the drunken idiot that Mertie was tied to in matrimony, but Trizzy took it in stride.
"When dogs try biting me, I kick 'em," was Trizzy's response.
One night, a few weeks into Trizzy's tenure, Ornost came banging on the door in a rage, finally willing to resort to violence and finding enough liquid courage to embolden him to it. It did not work out how he hoped, however. Amaris knew this because she was woken up at three in the morning and brought over to the servants' wing to find Mertie's husband sitting there on the floor, weeping uncontrollably and holding his hand, which had been by all accounts crushed in the door by Trizzy.
Amaris was only inclined to call a doctor because the hand looked so swollen and purple and disgusting already that she preferred not to look at or think of it. She did not bother Doctor Duhane, but had Ornost sent to one of the better doctors in town, and pulled money for his treatment from her own personal savings so as to not have to explain any of this as part of the household budget.
Mertie looked pale and frightened that night, likely thinking that proportionate retribution would be visited upon her for what her husband suffered. Trizzy did not understand that. Trizzy was an old widow, but her husband had been, by her own description, a skinny, soft-spoken and cheese-spined man who'd never even have thought of raising a hand to her. So Trizzy just crowed mockingly about what she'd done to Ornost.
Amaris resigned herself to dealing with the fallout of that situation one day at a time. In the meantime, she relegated Mertie's husband to sleeping in the stables, and disallowed him from entering the house without explicit permission. Ornost was, of course, a huge bitch about it, and decided the solution to all his problems was to drink even harder.
By contrast to all these happenings, Rorine was proving to be an impeccably-behaved nanny. There was a quiet, grandmotherly warmth about her that seemed to settle Cem Ghess.
The little boy was occasionally anxious and prone to shrieking fits that Amaris wasn't sure he'd ever done before Miri's departure, but Rorine had the patience of a saint, and could spot a temper tantrum even before it occurred to Cem to throw one. She would deftly take him aside to some room, have him face the least-stimulating wall in that room, and take him through some word-games and exercises that Amaris presumed helped.
Even Lady Ghess was pleased: Cem Ghess had become a sweet child, and frequently presented her with drawings or little art projects that as gifts. Rorine was the one to discover how much drawing helped settle Cem down, and since she was educated in the arts, she began teaching him simple techniques.
Lady Ghess was always pleased to tears to receive these little gifts, and Amaris was also pleased to tears by how good Rorine was at sucking up to the masters.
Chapter 16
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
On the eve of the Three-Day Feast, the elder Ghess children returned home.
This was Amaris' first time meeting Eleny Ghess' children, and despite Amaris suspecting that Lord and Lady Ghess did not care what impression the elder children would have of her, she did still hope to make a good one.
Abder and Idina Ghess arrived in the same carriage. Abder was the first to emerge, a serious-faced youth of about seventeen, looking most of the way to being a grown man already. He was tall and slim, looking very much like Eleny Ghess in both appearance and mannerisms.
He extended a hand to help his sister off the carriage next. Idina Ghess was not much younger than her brother, and her looks favored her father more, even though both she and Abder had his green eyes.
Both of them were dressed in neat, presentable suits in dark colors, like they were visiting some elderly, ascetic aunt instead of their family home. Still, Amaris greeted them with all due respect, inclining her head to them as young masters of the house.
Abder nodded his acknowledgment with the restrained manner of a young nobleman, and Amaris had the thought that he had to have learned that from Eleny Ghess, because she had never seen Lord Ghess move like that. Idina was more alert in her mannerisms, but talked even less than her brother.
Amaris would describe her impression of the Ghess children as 'on guard'. She had them shown to their rooms and made sure their luggage was carried upstairs without incident, but this gesture was met with detached gratitude, if not direct mistrust.
A second guest who arrived right after the Ghess children on the Feast's eve was Rukha Dunbrav Lekhar. This one was a more surprising arrival; Lady Ghess hadn't warned Amaris, but Amaris remembered seeing this name and title in one of the ledgers, corresponding to one of those vague 'services rendered' entries.
Hailing from the steppelands, to the northwest, though probably not as far west as Linden's family, the Lekhar wore a typical black kaftan, long sleeves trailing low to the ground as their arms emerged from slits along the inner elbow seams. The Lekhar was inscrutably gendered--Amaris would have guessed male, but if there was a jut in their throat it was hidden under a second chin. They were also cheerful and free-spirited in their demeanor, almost insensitively so given what they were called for.
Lady Ghess only ordered Amaris to make sure the Lekhar could work without interruption. It had to go without saying why an exorcist was called upon just before an important holiday, but Rukha Dunbrav Lekhar was willing to say quite a bit.
"They also called me when the manifestations first started," the Lekhar explained as they sat in the foyer nibbling on pastries. "A right mess from the start, I told them they should have taken more extreme measures from the start. But they didn’t want disruptions to the household, because people would talk. Oh well! People had a lot more to talk about after that!"
"I'm surprised you didn't advise them to move," Amaris said, pouring tea for the Lekhar.
"Ha!" was the Lekhar's response to this. They took a sip of tea, and more quietly said again, "Ha."
Eventually, with so little prodding that Amaris worried at the Lekhar's sense of discretion, the whole story came out.
After calling the Lekhar and receiving an answer they disliked, Lord and Lady Ghess then called upon some more petty exorcists to try to deal with the haunting, and from these individuals received advice that might have helped for a less powerful specter, but that only managed to stoke the flames of Eleny Ghess' anger.
"It's like a strong breeze, you see," the Lekhar explained. "It can gutter out the flame of a candle, but make a campfire rise higher. Their rug was on fire and they called in people with fans."
By the time the Lekhar was called back to go through with their originally proposed plan, there wasn't really anything that could be done other than some temporary measures that might suppress the revenant for a set period of time.
"They didn't believe me when I told them that this haunting was now a permanent condition," the Lekhar explained. "They insisted they were just going to sell the house, but they wanted me to suppress the haunting for long enough to fool some poor buyer. I said, well, go on vacation first and see how that works out for you."
"Oh no." Amaris pulled a face, looking dramatically awed. "You're saying she followed them on vacation?"
"Made them miserable, from what I heard told," the Lekhar nodded gravely.
Lord and Lady Ghess retired to the seaside for a few weeks, and in that interval, they had had to dodge bricks coming off the holiday house's facade and narrowly missing their heads. Lady Ghess got food poisoning, and Lord Ghess got a sprain. They barely slept because the windows were always rattling, and they scarcely enjoyed the beach because the waves turned high and vicious even when the winds were still.
"I told them," the Lekhar continued gravely, "that it would likely be worse away from this house. It has charms against hauntings, did you know that? You don't often see that kind of touch to houses this far south. It’s likely the reason the revenant hasn’t run them out of the house already."
"I heard some old Tascque was a warlock," Amaris imparted.
"I don't know what that means!" the Lekhar laughed. "They call me a warlock too, but hardly anyone can explain to me what a warlock is."
Amaris was fairly sure 'warlock' was coded language for 'much too foreign by Claypot’s standards', both in the Lekhar's and the old Tascque grandfather's cases.
The Lekhar finished their snacks and proceeded to go about their business. They had a carpetbag filled with the implements of their trade, and Amaris glimpsed candles, mirrors and hourglasses inside, but the Lekhar took out only a small booklet.
"We'll skip the theatrics since there's no audience," the Lekhar said with a wink.
Then they went into Eleny Ghess room, and whatever they did, it didn't take long. They emerged again later.
"Well, we’re running low on the number of times that’ll work, but it should keep the deceased quiet until after the holidays," the Lekhar assured. "Lady Ghess said you'd handle payment?"
Amaris handled payment.
Later in the day, she went to Eleny Ghess' room again. The sunlight was faded into more night than twilight, and the bedroom was cast in gloomy shadows, but there was no trace of Eleny Ghess. Amaris started feeling somewhat bad about the entire thing.
Still, Amaris tried to assure herself it was one less thing to be concerned about over the holidays.
The feastdays started well enough. Amaris made sure there were no major disasters, at least. Remie Ghess did an uncharacteristically small amount of hovering, such that Amaris took rein of the kitchens easily and had everything ready and on track by noon.
The family gathered in the largest salon, where they occupied the two sofas at opposite sides of the room: Lord and Lady Ghess on one side, Abder and Idina Ghess on the other, with Cem circulating the room with all the vivacity of a child at holidays.
Remie Ghess spent her day doting upon Cem Ghess, who was, under his mother's attention, especially well-behaved. He was dressed in a neat black suit to match his father, and Remie Ghess had even gotten a little silver collar chain for him.
Lord Ghess was naturally pleased with this youngest son of his, but Amaris suspected that was because Cem was too young to have developed a relationship as emotionally fraught as the eldest two yet.
And Abder Ghess, for all that he was a stark reminder of the first wife still haunting these halls, was a well-behaved young master, quiet and polite. He was named for Saint Abdau, and so there was no question of his family not inviting him home for his own nameday feast (what would others say if that happened?), but he made an effort to impose as little as possible. He dressed in a suit with purple and silver pinstripes, wearing a silver pin with his school's coat of arms at his collar. His hair was a loose tousle of black waves framing his face, not cut as short as schools usually demanded. It gave him the air of a daydreaming poet.
He sat alongside Idina Ghess, who was happy to chatter about her adventures at school. She was dressed in deep maroon, a shade too dark for being so young, but her dress had a youthful, fashionable cut: gathered up skirts tied with ribbons, revealing her shins and stocking embroidered with butterflies.
Unless directly addressed, neither of the Ghess elder children talked to either father or stepmother. They talked amongst themselves, sharing news of mutual friends or picking up stories the other had obviously heard a previous installment of. It was a subtle barrier, but noticeable to anyone who paid attention.
Cem Ghess, when he squirmed out of the affectionate iron grasp of his mother, would shyly approach his older siblings, and he was not rebuffed, even if these siblings acted more like visiting cousins.
"Next year I'm getting a real grown-up tutor!" Cem proudly announced to Abder. "Mama says I'm big enough, and school is too low-class."
"Congratulations," Abder said very seriously, before turning to his sister: "I think your next trimester starts sooner than mine, doesn't it?"
"Oh yes, but there's really nothing going on in the first week, so I think I'll just stay at Uncle's," Idina replied, patting her hair and adjusting her hair ribbon with a bored air. "I don't even know why they have a different schedule if they're not doing anything other than wasting our time."
"Perhaps it is to test who is willing to be truant," Abder replied quite pointedly.
Soon after that, the family was called to the dining room for the food to be served. Etiquette pushed them closer together at the table. Lord Ghess occupied the head of the table, with his eldest children on one side and his wife and youngest on the other. They remained quiet as the appetizers were served, but after the soup course was ladled into their plates, Remie Ghess seemed to find her voice.
"Will you be returning to school right away?" Remie asked, obviously meaning right after the feastdays ended. The trimester break was two weeks long.
"I have made arrangements with Belvodi Tascque's law firm for a clerical position, so this would require me to stay in the city," Abder replied. He meant, of course, he would still be in Claypot, but he was required closer to the law office and, implicitly, he would not be staying at Plumgarden Manor.
"Barely visit, and even when you do, you can hardly wait to run off to your uncle again," Remie tutted, high-handed for no real reason Amaris could discern.
Abder acted as if he had not heard anything.
Amaris was stationed discreetly at the back of the dining room, ready to attend to the family at a moment's notice, but this also afforded her a prime position to observe this rolling rockslide of the family atmosphere in motion.
Lord Ghess made a few off-handed paternalistic comments towards his children, but remained mostly silent as Remie took over the conversation. The elder Ghess children responded as little as possible, instead making frosty small talk to the air and not really addressing anyone else.
After dinner, the family returned to the parlor for a digestif. They retook their previous positions on opposite sides of the room as a maid poured bright green liquid into their small glasses. Cem was given a sweet pine syrup instead, in a slightly larger glass. For his part, Cem was just happy to have a glass he could clink, so after toasting his parents, he padded to the the other side of the parlor and also clinked with his half-siblings.
"Abder, dear, you're looking a little pale," Remie remarked suddenly, loudly, drawing every eye in the room to him.
Amaris noticed, then, that Abder was sitting a bit stiffly, blinking a bit too much. It couldn't be said he'd lost his composure yet, but there was something about him that didn't look good.
"I must have eaten something bad," Abder said with an idle flick of his hand.
"How could you have? We've all eaten the same things!" Remie argued.
"Did we, now?" Abder muttered to himself. "But I don't actually feel that bad, my stomach is just a bit off."
With that, he drank down the digestif in one quick shot. The next moment, he rose to his feet, but swayed and crumpled back down. Remie shouted in worry.
"I thought the alcohol would settle down my digestion, but I'm afraid it just made it worse," Abder said ruefully, as Idina fussed over him, patting his face.
"Should we call the doctor, do you think?" Remie asked, turning to Lord Ghess.
"Over getting light-headed from a drink?" Idina scoffed more loudly. "Then doctors would be spending every holiday going to and fro. You know Abder is a light-weight, just let him sleep it off."
"Yes, let him sleep it off," Lord Ghess agreed. He looked uncomfortable, and somewhat inconvenienced to have his holidays disrupted by some medical emergency.
Idina walked Abder off, but once in the hallway, Amaris had Mr. Prechtel help Abder up the stairs and to his room to lie down.
"What delicate stock these children of yours are," Remie Ghess was saying just before Idina returned to the salon, making the girl halt in her steps just outside the doorway. "Cem didn't even get sick after he fell in ice cold water, but Abder can't get through his own nameday without having a lie-down. It's that Tascque congenital weakness."
Lord Ghess replied with something too low to hear, but certainly not a reprimand.
Idina did not return to the salon, but twisted on her heel and proceeded up the stairs. She passed Amaris in a huff, and caught up with her brother and Mr. Prechtel instead.
Amaris returned to the salon and quietly took her post once again. Without Idina and Abder around, the atmosphere in the family had relaxed once again, and returned to a carefully-maintained air of harmony. Remie Ghess made sure of it.
The air in the house that night was oppressive, but not because of any of the living occupants.
In the end, no doctor was called for Abder. By the account of the body servant Amaris assigned to look after Abder's health that night, he slept leadenly, completely unstirred. Meanwhile, some strange tension in the house made the fine hairs on the back of everyone's necks prickle.
Whatever the Lekhar had done to suppress the ghost of Eleny Ghess was effective, but it was also strictly limited in its effectiveness. Amaris sent an uneasy message to the Lekhar that evening, describing the situation and asking whether anything ought be done.
The Lekhar wrote a missive back, a hurried scrawl as they filled a whole page with metanatural theory and explained that Eleny Ghess' illness was too closely tied to her reason for unrest, and thus any reminder of it resonated strongly to strengthen her. The letter concluded with only a single sentence saying nothing further could be done. Amaris sighed and saved the letter to re-read later, when she might absorb the notions the Lekhar described without the anxiety of skimming through it to see what the solution was.
Amaris was thus left to merely allow the situation to proceed as it was. Perhaps Remie Ghess could flatter herself that Eleny was only angry about being foiled, and perhaps her children could interpret this as protectiveness on their behalf.
But only Eleny Ghess understood the depths of her own suffering. And now, was she meant to inhabit these walls and simply witness her own dear son going through the same?
How could she not be angry?
How could everyone in the house not feel her despair, like the creeping cold of winter, sinking all the way to their marrow?
She did not need to say anything, even if social convention allowed her to. They knew. They all knew.
Amaris sat up all night, her feet cold even in her slippers, as she felt the hairs on her arms stand on end. The dread washed over her in waves, gripping her as firmly as that night when she visited Eleny Ghess' room.
She saw, now, how easily one could reach the point of parading all manner of exorcists through the house, even if to no effect.
Chapter 17
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
On the third feastday, Abder and Idina departed, citing family obligations towards their Tascque relatives. Remie opined that young Abder was hastening to a doctor. Lord Ghess said nothing.
The day after the feastdays ended, Mertie's husband Ornost was found drowned, face-down in the shin-high water that remained in the decorative pond after it was drained. Though not deep enough to drown a small child anymore, it was enough to end a drunkard's life, particularly in the face-down position.
Even though the death of Ornost was no great loss--and indeed, considering his habits, no great surprise either--Amaris had to undergo the headache of calling the constabulary, who in turn called the town morgue.
The constabulary sent an acne-pocked young man to shakily jot down the facts of the case: inveterate drunk face-down in the water. Deemed accidental death.
The morgue sent a wagon for the body to be loaded into, and the wagon driver reflexively gave Amaris a pamphlet about pauper funerals 'for the widow's perusal'.
"We'll be paying an undertaker, thank you," Amaris replied dryly.
"You sure? It's no bother, we burn 'em in batches, so it's a free service," the morgue worker insisted.
Amaris happened to know the reason it was a free service was because dead man's ashes sold at a premium on certain markets, so paupers were worth more dead than they ever were alive, but she refrained from making any comments. Perhaps Mertie would prefer her husband to be tossed onto the bonfire like so much trash; who was Amaris to judge?
So Amaris kept the pamphlet, which advertised the respectful disposal of earthly remains by way of 'clean and cleansing fire'; the words 'very hygienic' were appended above the description, looking like a latter addition.
She went to pass on the pamphlet to Mertie, who was in the kitchens at that time, kneading dough with a sad face but very dry eyes.
"Mertie," Amaris asked as she put the pamphlet up on a kitchen shelf for Mertie to recover later, when her hands weren't full, "what kind of person was Eleny Ghess?"
"A quiet one," Mertie said after a moment's thought. "Proper and such. Just a lady, you know?"
"Hasn't been very ladylike since she died, has she?" Amaris raised an eyebrow.
But Mertie just shook her head. "Oh, but ma'am... You can't blame her for everything what goes wrong in this household. We always do, but sometimes it really is just us, you know?"
This gave Amaris pause, and a few thoughts to mull over before Eleny Ghess' ghost was free to reappear.
The next few days were almost deceptively quiet in contrast. Lord Ghess called for his family solicitor to come over, and it was only by Remie's pleased air that Amaris guessed what issue of law Lord Ghess needed advice with.
Remie was especially doting with Cem Ghess, and it was not unusual to see Remie, Rorine and Cem in the garden, far away from the pond but happily strolling around the trellises full of blooming spring flowers. Remie often returned to the house with a crooked little flower crown on her head, and Cem beamed with pride under the attention.
Over the course of the week, Amaris developed the routine of going to the kitchens to check on Mertie, who perhaps didn't need to be checked in on so often, because being a widow seemed to have given her something of a glow.
But the gossip was still good, and Amaris appreciated the snacks pressed on her by Mertie. There was no real reason for gratitude, even if Amaris helped handle the funeral arrangements, but Mertie's mood seemed to pendulate between buoyant and weepy since her husband's death.
Trizzy was always by Mertie's side, but while she offered support, it was clear something was bothering her much more than even Mertie's bereavement.
"We all know why the solicitor's visiting so often, right?" one of the kitchen maids said in an undertone while stirring a literal pot, in addition to the metaphorical one.
"Oh, it was going to happen eventually," Mertie agreed without saying with what. "She was just waiting for her chance, wasn't she?"
"You think?" Trizzy asked, anxious as she peeled vegetables in a corner.
"Don't we all know it?" Mertie shrugged. "There's a reason those kids barely step foot in this house, isn't there? They know."
"How'd you think she finally done it?" the maid stirring the pot asked, her voice dropping even lower.
"Got someone disposable to do it," Amaris interjected.
The three other women all glanced at her, with varying levels of apprehension.
"Let's say, if I get asked to fire someone in the next while, we'll probably know why," Amaris shrugged.
The next day, she felt awful enough about the entire thing that she used her scant free time to ride into town and find the Tascque clerical office where Abder worked.
She brought flowers from Plumgarden Manor's gardens: lush spring blooms once planted by his mother, from forgotten corners where the garden had not been replanted yet.
Abder accepted the bouquet with a slanted smile.
"I hope you realize, I'm barely the Young Master of the Ghess family in name, much less in practical terms," he said. "You needn't cater to me."
"The Young Master, but not the heir?"
"Oh no, we both know I am not the heir anymore. Is that not what the condolence bouquet is for?"
So, Abder did know about the solicitor's visit.
One morning, after breakfast was served, Amaris found herself waylaid by Trizzy on the servant stairs.
"Miss Waushko," Trizzy spoke, her voice uncharacteristically shaky in the half-lit stairway, "I need to ask you a favor."
Amaris pulled Trizzy along into an empty room, and there, among the dusty furniture covered in white sheets, Trizzy seemed aged an additional decade.
"First of all, Miss Waushko, you know that this job is a great thing, a great thing that happened to me in my poor old age," Trizzy began.
"Oh good grief, what did you do?" Amaris blurted out.
"It wasn't my idea! It wasn't! How could I say no to the madam?" Trizzy wailed suddenly.
Amaris had a dog of a time getting the full story out of Trizzy, but when she did, the particulars of it were both unsurprising and unexpected.
Linden had apparently promised Trizzy that if she snuck some strange powder into Abder or Idina's food, Remie Ghess would ensure Mertie would be free of her awful husband. She also told Trizzy that she needn’t labor her conscience too much, because the powder was nothing truly dangerous or damaging.
Trizzy, ruthless old battleax that she was, figured out immediately that this was some kind of poison to make one of the young masters feel faint and frame them as pathologically unhealthy. She’d been in the household long enough to grasp the politics, and she had no real investment in which spoiled child of nobility would be Lord Ghess’ heir. She went through with it.
But Trizzy originally thought Remie would find some way of expelling Mertie's husband from the house alone, or sponsor her for a divorce, not actually kill the man. Even so, despite being shocked by Ornost’s death, she hadn't been all that broken up about it.
A couple of weeks down the road, however, Trizzy's conscience was stirred, if not by Mertie's clear ambivalence regarding her husband's death, then certainly by the thought that Remie Ghess might order Trizzy to be kicked out of the house to cover up the whole chain of events.
"Have you told anyone else about this?" Amaris asked.
"No!" Trizzy's eyes nearly popped out. "Are you going to tell anyone?"
"Not on my life."
They both sighed in relief.
Next came the worse question: "Does Mertie know?"
Trizzy quickly shook her head, then hesitated, seemed to think about it more carefully, before shaking her head again, but more sedately. Amaris took this to mean Mertie perhaps suspected, but with no evidence tying Trizzy to the drunk lout's death.
"Do I have to tell her?" Trizzy asked, her voice uncharacteristically faint.
"Absolutely not," Amaris replied instantly. "Not a word to Mertie, not a word to anyone else, don't even ask forgiveness to any saint you pray to. Do you even know if her husband was killed? Maybe he drowned his own damned self before anyone had the opportunity to kill him. Wouldn't it be embarrassing for you to say anything if that's the case?"
Trizzy's jaw fell open and hung for a few seconds before she picked it up again.
"Oh, Miss Waushko, you're right. Didn't even think of that," Trizzy said, full of admiration. "S'why you're ledger maid, probably. You think of all the things."
"I do think of all the things, don't I?" Amaris said, trying not to heave a sigh.
That evening, Amaris put away all the manuals about exorcism she'd been slogging through to no end, and instead began leafing through a low-brow pulp novel about the adventures of an exorcist. Whoever was writing about the adventures of Ifram Krayd, Terror of the Dead, had churned out twenty-two volumes prior to the slim book currently in Amaris' possession.
Amaris hadn't read any of the previous installments featuring Mr. Krayd, but she suspected that if she had, they would be similar in story beats down to the page count.
The adventure of Ifram Krayd in this particular installment of the series featured the restless spirit of a scorned ballerina haunting the dance halls where her previous sponsor had strangled her to death rather than have other men lay eyes on her. In a mockery of the very situation Amaris was not able to resolve, the ballerina returned as a revenant, disrupting the daily routines of the dance hall through acts of vandalism and personal harm.
Amaris had picked up this book on a whim, thinking that perhaps fiction would offer ideas where non-fiction failed to yield a solution. Unfortunately, Amaris was not as adventurous as Ifram Krayd in matters of exorcism, which was something she realized around ten pages into the scene detailing the romantic interlude Ifram shared with the ballerina revenant.
Skipping ahead to the more salient conversation, the ballerina bemoaned all the people she never managed to make suffer in life: the spiteful rivals, the jealous instructors. Ifram spent the rest of the book orchestrating the humiliating downfalls of all the people who'd once offended his revenant lady-friend, culminating in the crippling and lifelong imprisonment of her murderer. The last third of the book seemed a bit hastily penned and some of the coincidences strained belief, but Amaris could see this appealing to a certain set of readers, even if the plot's climax was not as lovingly-crafted as the sexual one.
Though, actually, now that Amaris thought about it, the primitive mindset of the novel might have had an answer codified into it anyway. A lot of the non-fictional narratives concerning revenants mentioned they tended to disappear once they achieved satisfaction of some urge or desire they had in life, but Amaris could not really get her head around the mechanics. Seeing it laid out in the novel, something occurred to Amaris.
In spite of the fact that Eleny Ghess had been most wronged in life by Lord Ghess, the brunt of her resentment seemed to be aimed towards Remie Ghess instead. In their game of moves and countermoves, they aimed at one another much more fiercely than they ever did at Lord Ghess, and the ones caught in the middle of these were the servants and children of the household, whose fates were dependent upon Plumgarden Manor but whose choices were limited to simply enduring every time they were caught in the crossfire.
But wasn't this just a distraction? Wasn't Remie the one targeted because she was the one most actively engaged in battle with Eleny? Wasn’t Remie effectively shielding Lord Ghess by constantly waging was against the revenant on both their behalfs?
Amaris could have enjoyed the chaos were it not her duty to maintain the smooth functioning of the household, but here she was and here she had to smooth things out. If being scrupulous did not work, she was ready to be devious instead.
So, an idea slowly began taking shape in her head.
Chapter 18
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The next upcoming holiday was the Feastday of Yorg Marlus, which only the most rich or privileged ever took off. Lord Ghess, Lady Ghess and Cem Ghess would all three join family friends for a three-day outing.
Rorine would not be taken along, as these particular family friends had nannies to spare. They were also closely acquainted with the old employers who'd squandered Rorine's pension, so to avoid even the passing discomfort of having to think about her dour fate, it was considered preferable for Rorine to stay back, no matter how pouty Cem became about it.
Amaris happily penciled in Rorine as having these days off while the masters were away, and then additionally arranged her own affairs to deal with some things outside the house.
One of the things was Rorine's wardrobe. Trizzy was in the kitchens, so her uniform was provided, but Rorine would sometimes have to join the masters on outings if they wanted to take Cem along here or there, so she would need to be dressed in modest but stylish clothing to uphold Plumgarden Manor's status.
Under the excuse of providing for Rorine's wardrobe, then, Amaris whisked the old woman out to Claypot's boutique street. They avoided the high-end stores, or those catering to a very youthful clientele, and stopped at a ready-made clothing shop catering mostly to well-off widows and spinsters of a certain age.
After securing three summer suits and three winter suits for Rorine, along with half a dozen separate pieces which could be mixed and matched at will, Amaris took Rorine to a little pastry shop with private booths.
"Alright, Miss Waushko," Rorine said after she delicately took a bite of her savory nut-crusted pastry, "what was it that you really want from me?"
"Scheming and plotting, Mrs. Ephry, scheming and plotting," Amaris said as she dug her spoon into her own sour citrus tart.
"Miss Waushko, you're ledger maid. What can't you do, that it requires underhanded means?"
"Find a mistress for Lord Ghess."
Rorine's lips pressed together at first, then, as the words sank in, she gave a bewildered look to Amaris. Her face proceeded through several contortions as she likely thought of words she could say in response to this, and then likely also made up clever replies Miss Waushko could give, and thus the entire argument played out only in Rorine's head as Amaris' mouth remained occupied with eating the tart.
Once Rorine reached some point of resignation, Amaris was eager to move on to discussing the other kind of tart, so she hoped to polish off her dessert first.
"Alright, well--" Rorine sighed in the end, "--I'll assume you have a good reason for it. What can I help with?"
"I assume you're a woman of some life experience," Amaris began.
Rorine didn't roll her eyes, but she made a face that effectively served the same function. "I have been known to have experienced one or two things, yes."
"Well... how can I find someone likely to catch Lord Ghess' eye?"
"Well, Miss Waushko, far be it from me to talk ill of an employer..."
"Oh, I've never heard you do so, ever!"
"...but it seems to me Lord Ghess is of a much more suggestible temperament than he himself realizes. He's not the kind of person to decide all by himself to step out on his wife, you see."
"Ah. He's just the kind of person to politely step out when someone else calls him over?"
"Precisely," Rorine nodded, gesturing with her spoon like a pleased tutor waving a ruler when a student gave a correct answer. "As long as you find a young lady of sufficient ambition--"
"And she must, to wit, be young," Amaris added as an aside.
"--it is enough for her to have the temperament and willingness to persuade Lord Ghess. Flatter his ego, please his pride, whatever means she knows to employ. He has proven already to be inclined towards a more facile relationship if his wife seems too difficult by comparison."
"What useful insight. Thank you greatly," Amaris said, scraping the last tangy crumbs off her plate.
They ordered plum juice and a salty snack to split after that, and spoke no more of Lord Ghess or his inclinations.
After this, Amaris sent Rorine back to the manor by the same coach they came with. It seemed only polite, since Amaris was younger and had more verve, and if she wanted to stay out a few more hours, she could very easily hire a cab to take her back later.
Amaris made it seem as though she had quite a few more errands to knock out, but in reality, she'd spotted some bookstores just down the street, and out of sheer morbid interest, she was going to see if they carried any other novels pertaining to Ifram Krayd.
The boutique street connected naturally to other streets dedicated to different businesses--it was how they came across the pastry shop, after all--and as Amaris walked its length, she glanced through the windows at all the different wares on display.
This was how she happened to peer through the display window of a haberdashery and see Miri the no-longer-nanny inside. Amaris did not quite do a double-take, but her attention did narrow in on a few notable details, such as the fact that Miri was on the shopgirls' side of the check-out counter, and by the way she was bent over to sew a ribbon onto a hat for a waiting customer, she was low enough in the pecking order that the other shopgirls shunted all the busywork to her.
Amaris retracted her gaze and casually walked off before Miri might spot her.
All in all, it wasn't a bad job. Plenty of girls from the countryside might have loved to be a shopgirl in one of Claypot's nicer haberdasheries. But it was a far cry from being a nanny in an elevated household, with a cousin willing to find a well-heeled husband. Miri was not going to be meeting many eligible bachelors while getting heckled by cranky middle-aged women demanding to see the newest ribbons in stock.
The Ghesses returned from their short holiday in high spirits, especially Cem, who had been told a tutor would be called for him soon. The family friends they'd visited had a recommendation, apparently.
Amaris was given the card of this tutor, Mr. Bailor, and obediently made arrangements. She called Mr. Bailor to the manor to discuss schedule, pay and anything else which might have made tutelage easier. He gave her a list of books and materials for Cem to have ready by the time the first lesson came about, and then snootily inspected the room where the tutoring might happen, complaining about dust and not enough lighting as if it would not have occurred to Amaris to have these issues solved by the time tutoring was due to start.
Remie Ghess, pleased that Cem would begin his education so early and so auspiciously, arranged to be free every day around the same time, eager to sit in and see her son absorb new knowledge.
"My Lady, that isn't usually done," Amaris pointed out. She did not want to be delicate on this point because she suspected Remie Ghess would be far more incensed if the tutor was offended and refused to come anymore. "Perhaps you can have Linden sit in, if there's any concern about the content of the lessons."
"I'll be just in the next room over," Remie insisted. "I'll be sitting perfectly quiet with my embroidery hoop. You'll see."
Amaris could not argue all that strongly against her own employer anyway, and the room chosen for tutoring was a small reading room, and did attach to the reading room next to it through a small service door. If Remie Ghess sat there, she would not intrude on the lessons at all, and the tutor might not know if she was there anyway.
"Did your mother ever sit in on your tutoring, My Lady?" Amaris asked, vaguely curious about where this notion came from.
Remie Ghess, who'd been bubbly with maternal pride the moment before, seemed to have a cloud pass over her expression, blocking out her smile as it passed.
"Maybe she ought have," was all Remie said. Then the sun broke through as she began speaking of Cem again, and double-checking if Amaris had ensured all his school material was accounted for.
So, for the next little while, this was what consumed the household.
Amaris, unlike Lady Ghess, did not have the temerity to breathe down the tutor's back, but the fact proved irrelevant since Remie was perfectly pleased to report what happened in every moment of the lessons.
At dinnertime, the conversation was taken over by Remie's recounting of the tutoring session, interspersed with her commentary and opinions. Her food was forgotten as she told Lord Ghess about how impressed the tutor was that Cem already knew how to read, and a little bit of writing, a fact she would repeat again the next three evenings before going into painstaking detail about the things Cem learned.
Lord Ghess, whose opinion was requested only perfunctorily on all these proceedings, was initially pleased, but quickly became bored by Remie's repeated accounts of the same sparse happenings. He nodded distractedly, with a distinctly bored air that Remie was uncharacteristically unobservant of.
By the fifth evening, Lord Ghess informed the household he would be dining with a friend. Remie was put out, but that meant she felt free to invite a friend over to tell her all about Cem's tutoring.
Amaris arranged both for Lord Ghess' outing and preparations for Lady Ghess' visitor that first evening, and nobody thought anything of it. The evening after that, Lord Ghess had dinner at home again, but by then Cem had had another tutoring lesson, and Remie found new fuel for the fire.
Amaris considered letting Lord Ghess steep in annoyance a bit more, but she did not want any conflict yet between the two, so she instead went through the box of calling cards that her uncle had kept during his time as steward, and she located all the restaurants in a certain neighborhood. Then, selecting the one she thought most promising, she went to Mr. Prechtel, as Lord Ghess' manservant, and suggested that Lord Ghess may want to dine out a few more days per week.
Mr. Prechtel accepted the calling card for the restaurant with a raised eyebrow, and then with a visible wash of relief; he did not want to deal with a master's ill-temper any more than anyone else in the household, especially when he would be doing so much more closely than other servants.
For the next part, Amaris would have liked to use some friends Miri might have made among the staff of Plumgarden Manor. Unfortunately, Miri had been fairly uniformly aloof and unpleasant to everyone else on staff, so she had to take a different tack.
Rukha Dunbrav Lekhar made a surprise return towards the end of the week, arriving while Cem (and by extension, Lady Ghess) was at his tutoring class.
Amaris invited the Lekhar into one of the salons meant for less prestigious guests, and kept them company as they waited for Lady Ghess to grace them with her presence. Partly Amaris stayed out of politeness, but mostly it was because Amaris wanted to find out why they were here again.
"Oh, Lady Ghess called me over," the Lekhar imparted without hesitation. "Something about this being a vital time in Young Master Cem's development, and not having interference?" The Lekhar gobbled down a whole pastry and swallowed before continuing, "I did warn her last time, though. This kind of thing is less effective the more I do it."
Of course; Lady Ghess thought Eleny Ghess was due for another tantrum, and she did not want this to scare off the tutor.
Granted, Remie Ghess was not incorrect. The other day, Mr. Bailor the tutor was walking down the stairs when he nearly took a tumble. Amaris happened to be waiting politely for him to pass before climbing the stairs herself, so she managed to catch him before he cracked his head on the banister.
This could very well have been just an ordinary stumble. People tripped all the time in plenty of places that weren't haunted. But the way Mr. Bailor looked over his shoulder, to the top of the stairs like he was looking for a culprit, made Amaris suspect Eleny Ghess may have had a head for mischief again.
"I think Lady Ghess might regret it if she relies on you now, only for your rituals to be ineffective sometime later when she might need it more," Amaris said, trying to emit sympathy.
"Oh my, you agree?" the Lekhar nodded, washing down their snack with a glass of chilled pomegranate juice. "It's not that I wouldn't do the ritual, you understand. It's a terrible hassle, but if needed, I could do it. This kind of thing pays very well, you know. But I do need to think of the best interests of my clients, you understand?"
Amaris and the Lekhar made agreeable sounds at one another for a while longer, and then, once the tutoring session was done and Lady Ghess came down to meet the Lekhar, both they and Amaris breezily explained the ritual had been done already, and the Lekhar received their usual payment. And in fact, the Lekhar did receive the usual payment, in exchange for keeping their big mouth shut about the fact that no ritual had, in fact, taken place at all. Amaris could not guess what the Lekhar might have assumed of her motives; for her part, she assumed the Lekhar would only be too happy to be paid for doing no work at all.
Lady Ghess did not question any of this, anyway, more wrapped up with her precious son's studies than anything else.
As for the other Lady Ghess, Amaris felt the cold-burning gaze of the dead peering into the back of her head for the rest of the day. Curiosity, maybe. Amaris hoped, at least.
"Just wait," Amaris muttered to the empty air. "You'll know when the moment comes."
Chapter 19
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Trizzy Sacks had the air of a very blunt, honest type of old gal, which was why Amaris was unsurprised that Trizzy was all for being part of a scheme, and confident about her ability to snooker some younger girl into participating in said scheme without her knowledge.
Amaris took Trizzy with her the next time she had an errand to run into town, under some flimsy excuse of wanting someone to help her with shopping for the servants' gifts. Claypot's founding day was approaching soon, and one of the traditions was to give employees, servants and workers some small tokens of appreciation.
Amaris was certain the servants would have preferred their end of year bonuses instead, but alas, fat envelopes filled with money would have been considered in bad taste for this particular occasion, even if Lady Ghess were to permit such a thing.
Miri the ex-nanny still worked at the haberdashery--Amaris made certain of it before sending Trizzy in. But Amaris did not go in herself, instead finding some other shop across the street where she could browse and glance through the haberdashery's window as well.
Amaris would have dearly wanted to be in Trizzy's pocket at that moment and hear everything going on, but she had to settle for merely watching as Trizzy sidled up to the counter and began chatting up Miri.
Since she could not hear, Amaris instead had a small pocket spyglass she'd swiped from Cem's tutoring props. It was barely a toy, not really able to see farther than across the street, but that was just as well, because across the street was exactly where Amaris was looking. She found a nice, out of the way space inside a bookstore, hunched in the shadow of some bookshelves as she peered through the bookstore's window, and then straight through the haberdashery's display window as well.
The bookstore clerk was giving her strange looks and clearing her throat awkwardly, but she did not seem to have the nerve to confront Amaris directly. Really, the bigger annoyance was that people passed through Amaris' line of sight once in a while, but the spyglass itself gave her a perfectly decent view of Miri.
Amaris could see the exact moment Miri's face went from polite and professional to twisting in some kind of dismayed recognition: that had to be when Trizzy dropped in the detail that she was part of Plumgarden Manor's staff.
The conversation continued, with Miri looking terse, and Trizzy oblivious. Slowly, the terse look on Miri's face grew speculative. Then Trizzy made some gesture, and Miri followed the direction she was pointing in. Amaris had to stuff her hat lower and lean in closer to the bookshelves, just to make sure Miri didn't happen to see her.
The bookstore clerk was loudly complaining to a patron about the strange behavior some people had in public.
After some time, Amaris left the bookstore to the sound of the clerk's rudely loud sigh of relief, and met Trizzy at the agreed-upon pastry shop. Trizzy was only too happy to gobble down a rum-flavored biscuit roll while she told Amaris all about the conversation she'd had with Miri.
"Anyway," Trizzy said at the end, "I could tell by the look in her eye, she liked the idea. It was in her head."
"Well, we'll see what she makes of it," Amaris said, tapping her finger against the tabletop as she anxiously calculated the timing of everything. If Miri didn't have sufficient initiative, she was just going to have to find someone else.
By late summer, the novelty of Cem's tutoring had worn off somewhat, and Remie Ghess began showing interest in other subjects of conversation, but Cem's tutor remained consistently pleased with the young boy, who apparently took to learning better than most boys his age or even older.
Lord Ghess, who'd begun going out for dinner with friends a few times a week, kept up the habit even after Remie Ghess stopped being quite as heavy-handed with praising Cem.
Eleny Ghess had made no real movement in nearly months, which could be attributed to the Lekhar's ritual, but could also have been her normal habit of laying dormant before rearing her head again.
Two feastdays passed without incident in the family. Amaris recalculated the household budget each time and saw the larders and the coffers refill slowly and adequately over time. For Lord Ghess' birthday in late spring, he'd been gifted enough wine to fill the cellars again, and then halved the cellars' volume by treating all his friends to drink. There was no ghostly mischief during Lord Ghess' birthday either.
Remie Ghess' own birthday was in the late summer. Lord Ghess had business in town, and so could not attend his wife on this occasion, but he provided her with a generous budget in order for her and Cem to vacation at the seaside, going to a popular resort that was all the rage with Claypot's socialites. Remie took along two of her married friends and their own children, and they indulged themselves in seaside fashions.
During Remie Ghess' birthday vacation, a painting made its reappearance in Lord Ghess' study. Amaris knew about it because Lord Ghess told her to have it hung in its usual place. Remie and Cem were both gone for a whole month, so the effects of the painting’s reappearance would not resound until some time later, but by that point, it would have slipped Amaris' mind anyway, as other things happened.
About a week or so into Remie's vacation, one of the housemaids came to Amaris with a sullen expression and told her she was requested in the foyer.
Amaris went down to the foyer to find Miri waiting there. Now no longer having to dress modestly as a nanny, Miri was clothed in more extravagant fashion, in a dandelion-yellow dress suit trimmed with black lace, and with a jaunty hat with a black feather unfurling in a spiral over her head.
Miri was fidgeting with lace summer gloves, but straightened up more confidently as she saw Amaris arrive.
"I am here to meet Lord Ghess," Miri declared.
Amaris sorely regretted the fact that her own scheming precluded her from throwing Miri out on her fashionably padded behind, but she did relish the flash of surprise when she had Miri walked over to the guest salon and set up with some chilled fruit juice and a light snack.
The servants of Plumgarden Manor were dismayed and confused by this order of events, but followed Amaris' instructions to the letter, suspecting something here was beyond their current knowledge and quietly priming themselves for some new gossip.
Sure enough, about fifteen minutes later, Mr. Prechtel arrived briskly to Plumgarden Manor. He had accompanied Lord Ghess out to town, visiting the offices of some particular business associates, and Amaris could infer it was while out on the town that Lord Ghess and Miri crossed paths.
When Mr. Prechtel inquired whether Miri had come by, there was a particular high-strung quality to it, and when Amaris pointed him to the guest salon, that tension grew slack again with his relief.
Of course, getting thrown out would have benefitted Miri as well, arguably more than being glibly accepted would have, but Amaris calculated that being initially hostile to Miri would not only have put the necks of the household staff on the chopping block, but would have inflated Miri's already over-developed sense of personal importance.
Would Lord Ghess have returned and soothed Miri generously for being wronged by his own employees? Undoubtedly. And Miri would have started her own domestic warfare at that very moment. Amaris hoped for things to progress more insidiously, which in this case meant more peacefully.
When Lord Ghess arrived, he had a frown on his face, perhaps only belatedly recalling the circumstances under which Miri departed the household. But he had not been present for that particular scene, and was not keyed into his son and wife's internal dramas so closely that he would have understood the significance even if he recalled it. Most likely, the only thing he had noticed over the past half year was that his annoying mother-in-law made no new appearances.
His expression smoothed out into an airy, pleased mien when he was led to the guest parlor, and he entered the room and closed the doors behind himself with his own hands, not even bothering to have the servants do it.
The click of the door lock marked the explosion of wild whispers among the staff.
Mr. Prechtel was cornered and assailed with questions, but all he would say was that Lord Ghess crossed paths with Miri while out in town and had invited her over to the house. He mentioned nothing additional, but even those who did not have Amaris' insight into the situation could speculate up and down many interesting avenues.
Lord Ghess and Miri were together in the guest parlor for nearly two hours, before emerging once again looking perfectly amiable. If their clothing had been in disarray or if there'd been some strange noises from the room, the gossip would be too base to even pass along. But Lord Ghess and Miri instead acted like the most polite acquaintances, and the bewilderment this provoked was surpassed by nothing at all.
Lord Ghess insisted on seeing Miri to the foyer, and then Mr. Prechtel was charged with putting Miri on a carriage to be sent home, while the rest of the household congregated in chatty groups trying to figure out what all this was about.
Amaris, with all the grim-faced professionalism of a steward and all the scheming prowess of a ledger maid, advised them all that Lady Ghess was best not informed of this.
Lady Ghess returned from her vacation with Cem in tow and the smell of the sea breeze still in her hair. She had acquired some resort fashions during her time away, and thus wore a loose cream linen suit, with wide skirt-trousers and a breezy white-and-blue striped blouse to match. She'd done something to her blond hair so it fell in tight curls like a halo around her head.
Cem was dressed in shorts and a shirt matching his mother's, and an oversized blue cravat was tied around his neck making him look more his age than the usual suits he was put into. As he'd been biddable on the way back, a large lollipop was crammed into his mouth, which he rotated with the severity of a tollgate operator cranking the gate lever.
With this return, Amaris' concern was mostly taken up by the unpacking. Other than the three trunks of clothing Lady Ghess had taken with her when she departed, she had brought back two additional ones to fit the new clothing she'd purchased. The wardrobe would overfill, so the unpacking process turned into reshuffling quite a bit of the lady's closet, a task that seven housemaids proceeded to tackle like grim adventurers off to slay a sartorial dragon.
The next few days were a flurry, as Lady Ghess settled herself and Cem back into the household, and then proceeded to arrange for Cem's tutoring to begin again.
About a week after Lady Ghess and Cem's return from vacation, just when Amaris thought the whole household had experienced an unprecedented succession of peaceful days, Lady Ghess went up to Lord Ghess' study to talk about some issue or another. Amaris had only just finished her own discussion with Lord Ghess, which concerned packing for an upcoming business trip, and she bowed out as Lady Ghess entered the study.
Amaris was barely a few steps down the corridor when she heard Lady Ghess' voice, pitched harsh and cold,
"What's this doing here?"
The next sound was the click of the study doors being closed, and then the utter noiselessness of Lord and Lady Ghess arguing. Amaris knew they had to be arguing, because when they spoke normally, their voices could still vaguely be discerned as coming through the door. Lady Ghess was not a yeller, but a hisser.
Things did not bode well for the household by the time Lady Ghess stepped out, either. There was not a hair out of place on her head, and yet she seemed very much as if all her feathers had been ruffled.
Lord Ghess, too, came down later to tersely order his carriage prepared, because he was leaving to have lunch in town. He proceeded to stay in town for the rest of the afternoon, and then have dinner outside the household as well.
Amaris had no convenient spies to send after Lord Ghess, but prodding the carriage boy confirmed that Lord Ghess had found more malleable female company in the form of Miri, who was only too glad to join him for all his meals and dote on him the way Lady Ghess didn't so much anymore.
The next morning, the atmosphere at breakfast was chilly.
Lord Ghess clutched onto the morning edition of his preferred newspaper with all the verve of a frontline infantryman holding fast to his shield as he saw the enemy's cavalry crest the horizon. Lady Ghess, emanating a disdain which blanketed the dining room like the first rolling cold front of winter, summarily ignored Lord Ghess in favor of making stilted small talk with Cem, who did not understand what was going on, but by sheer instinct knew to feel awkward about it.
Rorine was the only one sitting at the table with true serenity, and after a while, she managed to instill it to Cem as well just through quietly correcting his eating posture and praising him on holding his cutlery correctly.
Eventually, Cem grew both reassured and emboldened. Since the adults were not discussing anything, and thus there was empty air he could fill, he turned to his father.
"Papa, can I read the newspaper too?" Cem asked, looking wide eyed at Lord Ghess.
Lord Ghess faltered for a moment, taken completely off-guard by the question. But after a few beats, he gave a startled chuckle.
"Finish eating, first," Lord Ghess said.
Cem dutifully spooned his porridge into his mouth, finished off his toast with jam, and even ate the small pieces of fruit Rorine pushed into his plate. As he did so, Lord Ghess wordlessly pried away the back pages of the newspaper--the editorial and comedy section, which he rarely paid attention to--and passed them onto Cem.
The pages of the newspaper were comically large compared to Cem, and he had trouble holding them, the paper folding onto his head as he failed to keep them upright, but Rorine took the pages and folded them into smaller squared for his convenience.
Finally able to hold the papers, Cem looked at the pages with the same frown of concentration he had seen on his father's face, albeit translated comically to his childish features. Out of the corner of his eyes, Lord Ghess saw, and a smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
Even Lady Ghess, after spending most of the morning doing her best imitation of a volcano which belched out glaciers instead of lava, began looking mollified at her son's spectacle. Cem didn't understand the editorials, but he zeroed in on the political cartoons and, in lieu of understanding what they were conveying, he very seriously started reading out the words written on the caricatural characters in the cartoons. After sounding out the label of 'Grain Lords' on a fat, gold-festooned older gentleman strangling the humble 'Independent Cereal Farmers', Cem nodded to himself with a pensive look on his face, as if acknowledging how serious the issue of price-fixing for grain crops was. Even Amaris had to admire the fact that he sounded out a long word like ‘independent’ so well, however.
The rest of the day passed peacefully. Cem had no tutoring that day, but Lord Ghess, feeling uncommonly paternal, took him along to his study, where he asked the boy about his studies. Rorine went along to fill in the gaps where Cem couldn't understand the questions, and by all accounts, Lord Ghess was pleased by Cem's progress.
Amaris had dinner in her own room most evenings and in the kitchens regularly, while Rorine often ate alongside Cem, but that evening, both Amaris and Rorine happened to join the rest of the servants in the side kitchen for supper.
Clustered about a dozen to the old rickety table, they had the leftover desserts from dinner and fresh hot tea. It was getting around the time of year when summer was turning to autumn, and evenings were becoming cool once again.
"It's only going to cause trouble if His Lordship shows too much favor to the Young Master," someone sighed as Rorine shared the conversation between father and son.
"Didn't the Lekhar fix the haunting?" someone else asked.
"Fix it! Fix it! Nothing fixes a haunting until the ghost is gone!"
"Shh, don't mention her--"
"Oh, come off it, we're well beyond the point that ignoring her is going to help."
Amaris listened to the drumming discontent behind the servants' words. They were all tense and anxious here, braced for the next awful incident. Mertie's husband dying, despite being classed as an accident, was perceived by the servants as an escalation of their previous trouble, and Amaris could only feel responsible for the anxiousness provoked, even if she knew the true culprit.
Linden was eating supper with the rest of the servants as well that evening, and one of the older cooks gave her a cutting side-glance.
"What's Lady Ghess doing?" the cook asked, and it was understood from context she meant what she was doing about the ghost.
Linden gave a thin smile in return. "Wouldn't Miss Waushko know better than I? It's a household matter."
"Well, it wouldn't be a matter if it wasn't for your mistress wanting to be Lady Ghess," the cook replied. "So what's she doing about it?"
Linden, who until that point was minding her business, turned from aloof to sharp. She was brought into this household six or so years ago, and the cook was, if Amaris had to guess, a much older and more established presence in the house. There was a pecking order to these things.
"Is she not doing enough?" Linden asked, her voice deceptively mild. "Maybe the masters ought to go through with the plan to sell the house. That will surely solve the haunting."
The cook's expression turned ashen, and a pocket of silence fell in a circle, among everyone who was paying attention to the conversation. Selling the house would have meant uncertain employment for the lifelong servants who'd worked here since the Tascque days. A personal maid like Linden would be brought along, but cooks could be hired anywhere.
"Well," Amaris interjected with a thin smile, "it's not as if Lady Ghess wants this haunting any more than the rest of us do. And if anything, she wants it less."
Linden gave Amaris a tilt of the head in acknowledgment, before shifting her attention back to her meal.
Conversation resumed as Trizzy loudly changed the subject to the issue of pension bonds. She'd never had a job with a pension before, and she asked some clumsy questions about what to do with such unexpected financial security, and all her colleagues rushed in to give their expertise.
Amaris went off to snag a dessert tart. She passed by the table occupied by the outdoor servants as she did: the gardening staff consisted of solid men with thick arms to a one. Even Ornost had been strong-armed, despite the potbelly that all that drinking had given him. Amaris vaguely wondered which sturdy lad had drowned him in the dregs of the pond, but didn't speculate much. The garden staff was less dour on average with Ornost's removal, and they laughed and toasted one another like they were patronizing a pub instead of a noble manor's kitchen.
After finishing the repast, the servants all scattered to either rest or finish their duties. Rorine came up to Amaris, stopping her in the corridor.
"I ought to have thought twice before accepting a job in a haunted house," Rorine said with a rueful smile. "But now that I'm here, I barely want to leave. It's good work, for those who can bear all the other things."
"If a ghost is going to torment anyone," Amaris said, "I'll do my best to ensure it’s at least someone who has it coming."
Rorine nodded, almost to herself, and walked off sedately.
Chapter 20
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The next day, Lord Ghess bade his wife and son to get dressed, as he was taking them for an outing. Rorine naturally went along, the way she was meant to quietly join Cem anywhere.
So it was from Rorine that Amaris learned, in the evening, the real purpose of the outing.
"Lord Ghess had his heir changed at the lawyer's office," Rorine shared quietly as she came across Amaris on the stairs. "He had the solicitor send in the paperwork some time ago, and they just received the approval from the capital for the change."
"I see," was all Amaris said, but as Rorine looked into her eyes and saw that Amaris understood, she also nodded with satisfaction and ambled away to return to her nannying.
Though Amaris was only passingly familiar with the laws of title inheritance on the peninsula, this nugget of information touched on something that was so commonly known even Amaris was aware of it: a noble could only change his designated heir once if the previously designated one was still alive.
If they had any need of changing the heir again after using their one free chance, it would have to be through a petition sent to the Council of Peers requesting an adjustment to the title ledger. The Council of Peers, filled with fellow noblemen who were all scheming and petty to a one, were not guaranteed to agree to a change, and often voted against it out of some conservative revulsion towards letting anyone else have something they wanted.
If Lord Ghess made Cem Ghess his heir, then he had to have understood how definitive such a change was.
And how interesting, Amaris thought, that Lord Ghess did not make this choice in all this time that Remie Ghess lobbied for it, but he did it now instead, after he already found a new mistress. Was it guilt? Or perhaps a signal to the new mistress that he would not go through the same rigmarole twice?
Either way, Amaris felt the chill on the back of her neck after her conversation with Rorine--the feeling of cold eyes peering through a veil of icy rage.
Lord Ghess was not a man one imagined to look scared. He lived the kind of life which had trained him up to a sense of security only attainable to members of nobility. Even the haunting of his own home, with all the disruptions it had wrought, still only managed to perturb him to the level of a vermin infestation. It could just as well have been rats which emptied his larders instead of the lingering specter of a betrayed spouse, and his level of annoyance, Amaris was sure, would have been precisely the same.
So it was with all these things in mind, then, that Amaris noted how that morning, Lord Ghess looked rattled.
He called Amaris to his office discreetly, just after breakfast, and bade her that she get someone to 'take it away'. In this case, 'it' was the portrait of young Remie which hung in his study.
For all his fondness of the painting, it was very clear that Lord Ghess had not thought to be so fond of it as to protect it from harm.
Remie Ghess predicted this exact outcome, and now Amaris looked upon the results: the eyes of the young blond girl were burnt out of the canvas, great slashes tore across the figure's body, and splatters like seawater soiled the lower half. Horrific words that Amaris had not guessed to be in Eleny's vocabulary were scratched out along one corner of the painting.
Amaris showed the proper outrage and concern at this vandalism, and had a couple of servants called over quickly.
"It must be fixed, of course," Lord Ghess said, pale-faced and wringing his hands. "But I cannot have such an unsightly thing in the study in the meantime. Take it away somewhere, lock it up."
"I'll look into finding someone to restore the painting as quickly as possible, my lord," Amaris hastened to say.
However, she was also just careless enough not to mention to any of the servants that Lady Ghess was not to know about this incident, so when Lady Ghess crossed paths with the servants taking the painting away to the attic, they did not hide it from her.
Lady Ghess' expression scrunched up from its usual serene smoothness, all her work to avoid wrinkles gone in a single ruinous rictus of rage and disgust. She did not quite stomp all the way to Lord Ghess' office, but after the door closed behind her, there was yelling for the first time.
Amaris could not hear clearly what was being said, but a couple of maids with sharper hearing pretended to be dusting closer to the door, and that was how they learned later that Lady Ghess threatened to take all her paintings and her son, and leave the house entirely.
At that point, Lord Ghess raised his voice as well, and divorce was threatened. The yelling cut off once that bell was rung, and whatever they discussed after that was in much lower tones.
When the study doors opened again, it seemed like a storm front rolled out through the rest of the house, following in Lady Ghess' wake: static in the air, the rumble of thunder so low that it was felt only as a vibration in the chest. Lord and Lady Ghess had never fought like this: not the current set, and not when Lord Ghess had been married with his previous wife. It made the servants uneasy.
Divorce was not in the cards, of course. The Ghess family would have had to be either far more privileged or far more disgraced for that to become an option.
The household fell back into uneasy normalcy under the iron grip of Lady Ghess. An expert in restoration was sent the ruined painting, though only Lady Ghess was in correspondence with them, and so Amaris never learned what their opinion on the task was.
The Lekhar was called in again, but they had a look, clucked their tongue, and said there was nothing further they could do, all while stuffing down as many pastries as were offered to them and taking their usual payment without a single twinge of conscience.
Lady Ghess accepted this far quicker than Amaris expected, and returned her attention to the day-to-day of the household. She still doted upon Cem, whose tutoring continued, and who now also had an etiquette teacher. He did far worse in etiquette lessons than in his usual studies, but no worse than most boys six years of age.
Lady Ghess became less overbearing about supervising the tutoring as she began focusing on organizing the celebration soon to be held at Plumgarden Manor for the Feast of Saint Hemeg of the Harvest. The Ghess family had inherited hosting of this party from the Tascque family before them: each autumn, the privileged of Claypot always came to Plumgarden Manor to dance, feast, and broker new business deals for the next year.
Lord Ghess left the particulars of organizing to Lady Ghess and Amaris; as head of the household, that was his prerogative. He cared only for the networking opportunities the occasion provided, and not so much for whatever centerpiece would be on the table while he schmoozed with other well-heeled gentlemen.
Lord Ghess' most active concern nowadays was finding opportunities to melt away from the household at least a days a week. He took lunch and dinner out on the town, and once or twice a week, he wrote back home to say that he was visiting overnight at such-and-such friend.
Lady Ghess acquired something of a gleam in her eye during those weeks. Amaris would have called it 'feral', except it felt like the opposite: some fevered height of perfect, steady-handed civility that someone like Eleny Ghess might have been trained to emulate during her lifetime. Remie Ghess might have loved her husband or might have hated her husband, but whatever her feelings, in that period, it seemed very much to Amaris as though she intended to fix the problem of her husband soon enough.
And that was before Amaris was even sure she knew about Miri the mistress.
For the Feast of Saint Hemeg that year, Lady Ghess wore a dress made of a bronze-colored, sparkling textile for the outer layer, and oxide-green velvet for the bodice and sleeves. The hat she wore was wide-brimmed, decorated with pheasant feathers and waxy bundles of fake berries. Cem Ghess was dressed in a teal suit adorned with silver thread embroidery, and a little hat to match his mother, albeit with a single dyed-blue feather.
Lord Ghess, by contrast, looked more somber, in a black overcoat and black-and-copper pinstripe trousers. His accessories were also made of tasteful copper, and by this point in the year, his hair had gotten long enough to tie back in a short braid, adorned with a simple black ribbon.
This was a significant enough occasion in Claypot that Abder and Idina Ghess had also been invited to attend. Abder wore a subdued maroon suit fit for a young working law student more than the young master of the house, but Idina had shown up in a sprightly green and violet dress with its skirt layered like petals, and hairpins arrayed like a crown around her up-do instead of wearing a hat. The style was a bit immature for a girl her age, but doubtlessly eye-catching.
By this point, the rumor mill had ensured everyone knew of Abder and Idina being passed over as heirs in favor of Cem. Abder endured both mockery and pity with equal aplomb, while Idina pretended to be too cotton-brained to care.
For this occasion, Amaris herself was buttoned up in a plain black suit dress, though she wore a finer silk blouse and more silver accessories than servants were usually permitted. She made the rounds of the ball room, surveying for anything amiss.
This room was closed most days of the year, and had not been used since Amaris began her employ, so despite being dusted and mopped by so many servants that there hadn't been enough brooms, dusters and mops to go around, Amaris felt like she was still on the lookout for dust, glimpsed like a mortal enemy out of the corner of her eye. She might have stayed up late reading too many cheap novels, however, and she couldn't be sure this wasn't impacting her vision.
She certainly thought something must have gotten in her eye when she looked up from checking the appetizer table and saw, across the room, Miri the former nanny, in a dark green dress, looking like a vision--the prophetic, doom-spelling kind of vision.
Amaris had written the entire list of guests herself, and transcribed the final version for Mr. Prechtel to have and check at the door. So if Miri were on that list, Amaris was reasonably certain she would have been at least peripherally aware of the fact.
Then Amaris shifted her gaze to the person next to Miri, grasping for some explanation, and saw that it was Lady Ghess herself.
Lady! Ghess! Herself!
Despite buzzing inside with overwhelming curiosity, Amaris shifted her attention back to the party and to her duties pertaining to it. She was nearly afraid to breathe on the situation lest it fail to develop properly.
Across the room, Lord Ghess was standing surrounded by half a dozen aristocrats of the male persuasion and of venerable enough ages that more than half the hair between them was white.
With these pieces set on the board, Amaris drew close to the wall with a fixed, polite smile. One of the maids, in the process of cleaning a mess of crumbs from the appetizer tables, glanced up and saw Miri. Amaris knew she saw Miri, because the maid was looking right in the direction of that dark green dress with her jaw hanging open.
Amaris approached just enough to tap the maid on the shoulder and have her tighten the screws on her jaw hinge.
"Not a word to Lady Ghess--" Amaris declared gravely, "--unless she asks directly, of course."
The maid nodded, and went back about her business.
The wall of hoity-toity high society elders around Lord Ghess deterred Miri from approaching him, but Amaris had no such protection against the siege engine of Miri's smugness. The former-nanny-cum-homewrecker swanned towards the appetizer table with a flounce of her heavy skirts. Her hair was pinned up in strings of green pearls, and there was a pallid green pendant around her neck, the shade flattering to Lord Ghess' eye color and likely picked just for that reason.
"One supposes," Miri said, "that my dear cousin is at least still quite able to organize events. It must be quite a relief to have that off your plate."
Amaris had been called lazy in both more creative and less pretentious ways, so she wasn't giving Miri any points for that remark.
"Well, it's the difference between being the lady of the house and a mere servant," Amaris replied.
In the split second after she said that, Amaris realized it sounded like a slight against Miri, some vicious remark to remind her of her place. Amaris hadn't intended to do so, it was just reflexive cattiness. She couldn't help if her first instinct was to return every slap.
Miri's expression froze for a moment, because she gathered herself. She stood stiffly, with great dignity for her age, though the volume of her dress made her look more like a broody hen ruffling her feathers to seem more threatening.
Had Amaris overplayed her hand? Was Miri going to make a scene and be thrown out?
No. While holding aggressive eye contact with Amaris, Miri just tipped over a glass of wine from the serving platter on the table.
"Oh no, how clumsy," Miri drawled, both her voice and her expression completely flat. "Oh well, the servants will handle that."
And then she picked up a different glass of wine and swanned off again.
Amaris did indeed have to handle that. She waved over a maid, and together they had to quickly dab the spill and rearrange the table to hide the stain.
When Amaris finally had the time to look up and around the room again, Miri was hanging from Lord Ghess' arm. The dark green of her dress complemented the copper shades of his clothing much more nicely than Lady Ghess' much lighter tones.
Did Lady Ghess notice?
As every eye in the room furtively turned to Lady Ghess, the serene and polite smile she wore as she looked in the opposite direction of her husband was perfect within every degree, and her manner was poised.
Yes, everyone concluded. Lady Ghess noticed.
Chapter 21
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Amaris knew she was in trouble of some sort when Linden came to fetch her for Lady Ghess. Amaris had also seen the 'slink to the principal's office' type of body language enough times to know she was doing it herself just then, but, well, it seemed only appropriate for the long trudge to the sunroom. She had, in many ways, courted this trouble.
Lady Ghess was waiting in the sunroom when Amaris was marched in. Linden closed the doors behind them--a rarity, since the sunroom was where Lady Ghess went to make herself available--and Amaris tried not to feel too caged in.
"So, has my cousin been visiting often?" Lady Ghess asked.
"Just twice since she left the household's employ," Amaris answered promptly. "Once, at the party, as you know. The other time, she ran into Lord Ghess while out on the town and he invited her for a short visit."
Lady Ghess' face was as still as a deep pond in winter. Unfrozen, unmoving water--if one dipped their hand in it, they would lose fingers to frostbite regardless.
"A visit," Lady Ghess repeated with an faint, almost amiable smile.
"Brief visit in the middle of the day," Amaris specified. "I suspect Miri might have had less interest to come by, when your husband spends so much of his time outside the house nowadays."
"Ah, and are you well-informed on what Lord Ghess has been doing outside the house daily?" Lady Ghess bit out, the smile spreading a bit wider across her face.
"Going to restaurants," Amaris replied precisely.
Lady Ghess held Amaris' gaze for a long, silent interval. Amaris interpreted absolutely nothing in that gaze. She merely maintained eye contact with the same detachment one might hold towards a statue.
Eventually, Lady Ghess waved a hand, and Amaris was dismissed.
On the staircase, Amaris was waylaid by Mr. Prechtel, who gave her a flat, stern look as he said something generic about remembering who was the head of the household.
Amaris, standing two steps higher than Mr. Prechtel, reached down to adjust his slightly crooked cravat and smiled at him indulgently.
"Mr. Prechtel," she said, "before you say such things, you need to keep track of the fact that Lord Ghess also remembers who is lady of the house."
His brows knit together.
"Or do you suppose," Amaris continued, "that your loyalties should be as fickle as Lord Ghess' affections? That really only works out if his new flight of fancy is capable of supplanting the old one, hm?"
Mr. Prechtel's face smoothed out to politic neutrality again. There was a sound of footsteps coming up the stairs, light enough that the boards hardly squeaked; even and unhurried. The conversation was shelved smoothly, and Mr. Prechtel excused himself.
However, as Mr. Prechtel turned and saw that it was Linden coming up the stairs, his face did something that made it obvious he thought he'd excused himself too early. He nonetheless had to depart, coerced by social protocol.
Amaris beckoned Linden along, and they walked off the second floor landing towards the least-used salon, where they closed the door behind them.
"I've been sent to investigate the whole matter," Linden explained. "Correct my assumption if necessary, Miss Waushko, but you strike me as eager to tell me all manner of things."
Amaris didn't think she was eager, per se, but she was satisfied that the whole operation had reached the critical point where she'd get to see the dominos fall, and so she told Linden all about Miri save for Amaris' own part in provoking her. She even edited carefully around Trizzy's participation, implying instead that Miri happened to overhear some gossip from newer servants she'd never met.
Linden was not one to be fooled, but she had a knack for looking like she believed Amaris with all sincerity. She would no doubt investigate far beyond just what Amaris told her, but really, Amaris didn't think she'd done anything particularly incriminating anyway.
"Do keep me appraised of what you learn," Amaris requested at the end, with all the diligence of a ledger maid, who was supposed to know all about what was happening in the household.
"You will be adequately forewarned of anything important, Miss Waushko," Linden replied, with the cut-throat seriousness of a lady's right-hand schemer.
Amaris was obedient to the letter for the next few weeks. She spent a great deal of time in the kitchens, all the more to avoid having Lord or Lady Ghess give too much thought to her.
But from the kitchens, she was still in the perfect nexus of the household's happenings, the very wheel turning at the heart of the rumor mill, and so she remained appraised of everything in the household. Lady Ghess began relying on Linden more for things she would have once asked Amaris to handle. And Lord Ghess, grown suddenly paranoid for no reason anyone else might have understood, began relying on Mr. Prechtel more consistently than before.
Amaris was sure she was not the only one noticing the subtle alienation, because one day she dropped by the chatelaine office and Wylla showed her some lovely stationary with the Ghess family letterhead and informed her that this was the kind of paper her reference would be written on.
"I'll have a few drafts ready for Lady Ghess if she asks," Wylla proceeded to inform Amaris.
Amaris did not take this personally. It was Wylla's responsibility to draft the references for all servants leaving the household, after all. This was usually according to the steward or the ledger maid's instruction, but Amaris supposed she would not be allowed quite that much freedom.
"Now, Wylla," Amaris said, "you know very well Lady Ghess doesn't handle such tasks. Rather, who do you think is going to be telling you what to write in the reference?"
Wylla tapped the back end of her pen against her chin in thought for a few seconds, obviously mulling on the issue, though not really that long.
"Linden," she said.
"Really? But she hasn't been in the household nearly as long as Mr. Prechtel."
"Well, which horse wins the race depends on the jockey, too."
"Hadn't known you gambled!"
"I just read the sports pages in the paper. When would they have let me out of the basement long enough to actually see the races?"
"Mm, there's a notion. Do you think we could start a betting pool?"
"Miss Waushko, do you believe there isn't one already?"
"Wylla! And you haven't let me in on it?"
"Oh goodness, this is not the scolding everyone expected from you."
So, Amaris quietly started drafting her own employment resume, and then through Wylla placed her own wager in the betting pool. It was apparently a close call.
As autumn proceeded, Amaris oversaw the removal of the Tascque graveyard residents. Lady Ghess insisted to the Tascque family that they be removed, and so the Tascques reserved a whole row of mausoleums at Claypot’s graveyard. There was shockingly little disagreement about the move, as if the Tascques had all concluded that their dead predecessors certainly couldn't be entrusted to the Ghess family any longer.
The entire process was quite matter-of-fact, but the Plumgarden Manor gardening staff refused to be involved in it. Amaris went down to the river port and hired some loitering day laborers. She supplied the shovels and, because the five of the six men she hired were her countrymen, she also supplied some complimentary plum brandy. They supplied off-color work songs and impressive digging skills.
"Usually it's ditches," one of the laborers explained in a thick Dasserine accent that Amaris placed much farther south-east than where she herself had grown up. "It's a transferable skill, though." He slid through 'transferable' in an elegant roll of syllables, and fumbled the softer consonant in 'though'. Not a very recent arrival to the mainland, Amaris surmised of him.
There was a ring of poplars sectioning off the graveyard from the rest of the Plumgarden Manor grounds, and Amaris stood in their shadows watching the men at work. She didn't like just leaving them alone with the plum brandy lest the shovels give them any bad ideas, but mostly she just enjoyed the brisk breeze and the sunny autumn air.
At one point, Linden came up next to Amaris and stood as if supervising the work as well. Amaris said nothing about that part--Lady Ghess likely wanted to make sure every last knucklebone was packed up and shipped off--but Linden came with her own contribution.
"A ritualist is coming to disband the graveyard," Linden said.
"Oh, are they only coming for the graveyard?" Amaris asked mildly.
Linden shrugged her shoulders. "We shall see if anything else occurs."
Was that what was happening in a larger sense, then? Amaris had to wonder. When she was called in as a ledger maid, there were already candidates more qualified than her, but none of them wanted the job. Why, suddenly, now?
"And if something is going to occur, it's to be my problem?" Amaris asked sweetly.
"Naturally, as the ledger maid, it will fall to you," Linden agreed mildly. "It is regrettable. If it was Mister Waushko, he would have only had to last a few more years until he was fit for retirement. But instead, he brought you in, a niece at the very beginning of her career. Not a very sentimental man, your uncle."
Amaris, being Uncle Errett's grand-niece, had the benefit of knowing he brought her in because he trusted her pluck and ability. To an outsider, however, she could see how this might have seemed like a ruthless choice. Like she was some Dasserine sacrificial piece.
Ah, Amaris was familiar with the script. She was meant to be a tragic figure, like Valdo Norro, the opera singer.
Everyone knew this story: It was the first decade of the Laetitian Unification. The punitive measures which forced so many noble families to disown all children but direct heirs if they wanted to maintain their titles had been the worst for unwed daughters. Opera companies, whose singers were once considered barely half a step above streetwalkers who could also busk, were now welcoming in their ranks the newly unmarriageable and undoweried daughters of nobility.
It became fashionable to boast of having this or that lady with a conspicuous last name as part of one's opera company. The opera companies managed to gain some prestige by association. As for the formerly-noble daughters, the young ladies were unfit for hard labor but to a one had very thorough educations in art.
There was a boom in painters, embroiderers, musicians, poetesses, and, of course, singers. There was also a boom in courtesans and mistresses, but that didn't bear repeating in polite company, which all of a sudden opera houses had become.
One particularly delicate-boned noble woman obtained the leading lady role opposite a Dasserine young man named Valdo Norro who, up until then, had been quite the star of the stage in his own right. The new audience drawn in by the young lady was quite a bit more blue-blooded than the usual crowd, and raised a fuss about the coarseness of having the beautiful little pearl of nobility singing on the same stage as some coarse Dasserine rogue who would no doubt corrupt her.
Brawls broke out on this subject enough nights in a row that the staging of the opera was changed quite a few times to keep the two stars as far away from each other as their roles as lovers permitted. The final product of this effort was to simply put up a screen and project the shadow silhouettes of the two upon it, so that they were never truly present or touching one another during the show.
The aristocratic set were barely appeased, and the show maintained its audience through scandal alone. The young woman left the stage by next season, married one of her admirers, and never sang again. Her co-star, the Dasserine young man, would have wanted to continue singing, but was viciously beaten in his own dressing room before a show, and was henceforth forced off the stage.
But in the vivid collective memory of the public, their shadowed performance remained as a metaphor for young lovers struggling against the odds: a Megaine and Morainn romance, named for their characters.
Valdo Norro, by contrast, became a tragic tale about the perpetual Dasserine destiny to be used an discarded. If anyone from the peninsula was asked whatever became of Valdo Norro, they would assume he must have died in a ditch.
Likely, if Amaris asked Linden or Mr. Prechtel what they thought happened to Valdo Norro, they would have speculated he must have had the typical artist's death in poverty.
But to the Dasserine, Valdo Norro was known predominantly as Valdeno Dandanni--the stage name he used when he moved to the next city over and joined another opera troupe, his career continuing for another thirty years before he left to become a music teacher.
As for Amaris, well... Plumgarden Manor was never a destination of last resort for her. If she packed her trunks tomorrow and left, she would be leaving for her family's home just like Uncle Errett did, and Wrengust Mansion would have only open doors for her.
Chapter 22
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
Early winter was Cem Ghess' birthday. Presumably the other Ghess children had their own special occasions marked wherever they were now, but Young Master Cem was going to be celebrated in style.
Amaris undertook the task, of course, but everything felt almost perturbingly normal as she prepared for the celebration. Lady Ghess trusted her fully with details, and Linden and Mr. Prechtel minded their own responsibilities and did nothing to intrude on Amaris'. There were no pitying looks or speculative whispers.
Amaris might have almost concluded that everything was back to normal when she suddenly realized one day that they were all watching to see how Eleny Ghess was going to sabotage the occasion. Amaris had been nominated lightning rod for the revenant's wrath, and they were all wanting to see this all blow up in her face.
Naturally, Amaris was all too aware that there wasn't much she could do to fight a ghost bent on doing serious damage. Did Eleny Ghess care about the Tascque family graveyard being moved? Were they due for another ghostly tantrum?
Thinking about it, Amaris realized she had no real choices in this matter. It was time to grovel to the one person who held all the power in this household.
She purchased some nice candles and dug out one of the more handsome candle holders from the attick, stamped with a Tascque family crest on the bottom. At night, she took a lamp and went to Eleny Ghess' rooms.
In the antechamber, she set up what would have been a small, improvised family altar in Dasserin. It didn't take much: something to light, a small dish with fruit offerings, a picture of the one being reminisced. It was the thought that counted. Amaris had the candle, a slice of cake that Mertie confided the old Lady Ghess used to love, and a pressed flower she found between the pages of a book from the library. She didn't know who'd pressed the flower itself, but it was a bloom of hear-the-cuckoos, still clinging to some of its vibrant orange hue, and Amaris knew the garden used to have this exact flower in multitude before Remie Ghess ordered every last bush removed.
Amaris cleared the white sheet from a table and set down the offerings. She wasn't sure if Eleny Ghess would appreciate prayer, but Amaris mostly knew Dasserine ones, anyway. No 'he who hurts another hurts the body of the world', but instead 'carry, carry, carry the drowned, close the shutters and look to those who are still with you on your side of the locked door'.
The bedroom door opened with a click. The footsteps that followed were no lighter and no heavier than a living person's would be. Eleny Ghess dragged the ragged hems of her housegown like a queen would have dragged her cape across the ground, and she knelt next to Amaris like she was granting a petitioner her time.
Amaris let the candle burn.
Cem Ghess' birthday arrived bright and cold. There hadn't been any snows heavier than a light sprinkle yet, but a few days of drizzle and frost left the landscape barren and the ground covered with black ice.
To the rest of the household, Amaris' meticulous efforts to ensure Cem's birthday went off without a hitch might have seemed a bit desperate, overbearing in meticulousness. But that was all simply the burden of context: in reality, it was no less or more effort than she put into other events.
She ensured they had supplies for the menu Lady Ghess requested, and on top of that hired a nearby restaurant to provide food if anything went wrong in Plumgarden Manor's kitchens. She had the ballroom cleaned out, the guest rooms prepared, the gardens trimmed and raked and sectioned off. She had every pathway de-iced, salted, swept up and enchanted by a local ritualist against freezing. She discovered moth damage in the dress Lady Ghess prepared for the event, because she went over it with a magnifying glass just to be sure. That last part was maybe going a bit overboard, but Amaris actually had a mental list of all possible ways a revenant might sabotage the event. She also had a chandelier removed after she read in one of her pulp ghost novels what a ghost might do with one.
The list of guests attending the sixth birthday of Cem Ghess consisted of primarily friends of the family and business associates of Lord Ghess, which was to say everyone that the Ghesses considered part of the same elevated circle. Of the eighty or so invitees, three were even under the age of ten.
Cem Ghess, dressed in a precious green and brown winter suit, was brought out to strut about and receive congratulations at the beginning of dinner, before being ushered to the next room over, the spare dining room where he sat at a table with the other young heirs. Being just half a dozen in number, Amaris had Rorine and some of the maids keep an eye on them.
In the main ballroom, the guests were much more numerous and lively. Under the gleaming gas lights, they ate and drank and gossiped relentlessly in honor of the birthday boy. Lady Ghess sat dressed in autumnal oranges and browns, while across from her, Lord Ghess stood in a maroon suit that mismatched both the shades of his wife and his son's attires. Amaris and Mr. Prechtel shared a look when Lord Ghess first entered the dining room, and Amaris liked to believe it was on the subject of the exact same observation.
The evening proceeded. Amaris flitted between the ballroom and the children's dining room, patrolling like an anxious sheepdog. Everyone else kept their heads down and followed her orders to the letter, including Mr. Prechtel and Linden, who suddenly displayed no ambition at all.
For the staff, the entire evening was like an extended wait for something to go wrong, worsened as nothing proceeded to go wrong. Minor fumbles and accidents, yes, but no chandelier fell on anyone, and Amaris judged that it wasn't just because she had it removed beforehand. There was no ghostly hand at play anywhere.
"My, goodness me, they got their haunting under control, did they?" one of the guests remarked glibly and a bit too loud. They were hushed by the others.
Evening stretched into night and Cem Ghess was ushered to bed. The younger guests were similarly either sent home or escorted to their family’s assigned guest rooms, depending on their parents' plans. All the lights were turned on, including the ones in the garden, where some guests went to get some brisk night air and a smoke. Amaris had a series of heating braziers set up, to provide a temperature of a spring evening, rather than a freezing winter night. She also had the garden staff watching the braziers like hawks.
As stomachs filled and the air became hotter inside, more of the male guests congregated out in the garden. Fur coats draped over their backs, smoke and steam escaping their mouths, glasses clinking, low laughs, it was just as if the ballroom spilled outward in an indolent stretch towards fresh air.
Lady Ghess remained inside with the lady guests, retiring to a salon where they might indulge in gossip and kicking off uncomfortable shoes.
Amaris was in the long hallway between the salon and the cracked open garden doors when she heard the first discordant sound of distress. She'd stepped out and was halfway to finding the source of the shout while the guests were only just blinking in surprise and craning their necks, asking if anyone else heard something.
Amaris was sure she heard it, of course, because she was listening for it. A shaky female voice, pitched with distress but still low as if scared of help actually finding them.
When Amaris pushed past the velvet cord delineating the guest area and stepped out into the frozen grass, the outdoor guests followed like schools of curious fish. Past the braziers, into the darkness proper of the garden, frost snapped underfoot and the air was properly frigid, hurting the nose on its way in. A terrible place for a lovers' tryst, in Amaris' opinion.
So, it was to little surprise that she found Miri there, wrapped in a dark fur coat, her face starkly pale in contrast as she gripped Lord Ghess' hand. Lord Ghess himself was on the ground, clearly incapacitated.
"He slipped! He slipped on the ice!" Miri shakily imparted as she stared wide-eyed towards Amaris. "He hurt himself, please call a doctor!"
With the light at Amaris’ back, it was likely Miri didn't even see Amaris' face clearly or know who she was addressing.
"Quiet, you!" Lord Ghess was hissing between his teeth, the words pushed out alongside heavy, even breaths.
"This is not the time to act brave!" Miri replied, kneeling down and still holding his hand, though it was unclear if that was to comfort Lord Ghess or herself.
Amaris only needed one look around to see that Mr. Prechtel wasn't close, which meant he likely rushed off for a doctor already. She was delighted to realize, as the guests gathered behind her back and watched Miri act the doting, concerned lover, that this was Miri's attempt to stake a claim. After all, why would a man meet a woman in the dark, during a party she was not even invited to, unless she was his mistress? Perhaps she didn't think her appearance at the last party was sufficiently disambiguating.
Whatever Lord Ghess would have wanted, it was clear he was not in the position to decide. Someone brought a lamp, and the crowd gathered around him to help, but he refused to be lifted because his hip was in pure agony, and he snapped at people to call the doctor first.
Amaris called for some of the more burly garden staff to improvise a gurney and lift Lord Ghess regardless of his snapping. Sitting in the cold with a broken hip was not going to do him any good, and Doctor Duhane would not treat a patient in the garden, anyway.
Miri was jostled off to one side by the crowd no matter how much she wanted to keep holding Lord Ghess' hand. The guests followed in a cluster as Lord Ghess was taken indoors, though they stopped at the stairs as he was carried to his rooms.
Miri followed inside through the open garden doors, but she froze in place in the hallway as she looked on and saw Lady Ghess' figure by the stairs, like a vengeful sentinel.
Amaris remained quiet and watched as the two women stared at each other. The battle of wills between mistress and wife had been lost by the wife of the household previously. But Remie was no sickling trapped in her room, and Miri was no Remie, willing to step over corpses. After several beats of awkwardness, Miri looked away first, adjusted her coat, and walked back outside, presumably to slink out the back garden gate.
Mr. Prechtel himself arrived in a tizzy much later. He brought Doctor Duhane through the same back gate, though likely as he approached the house and saw the guests filing out, he would have figured out his secrecy was for nothing.
Doctor Duhane was ushered to Lord Ghess' rooms, where Lady Ghess was already waiting faithfully by his bedside.
Mr. Prechtel, uncharacteristically, was left lingering outside the door, waiting to be called in at Lady Ghess' beck, while Linden was inside, inseparable from her mistress.
Were they still keeping score? Amaris certainly was. Her points no longer mattered, so she was happy to observe the real contenders.
The household was kept awake by Lord Ghess' accident. Doctor Duhane called another one of his colleagues and some nurses after first seeing Lord Ghess' condition, and Amaris suspected that was not a good sign, especially when his colleague turned out to be an arcanist specializing in fractures.
The servants busied themselves by helping the guests along--either sending them off home, or to the guest rooms--and then cleaning up the worst of the mess. Even Amaris only went to bed in the early morning, snatched a few hours of sleep, and borderline overslept. The kitchen staff cooked and baked according to their own schedule, so they went on with things regardless, but Amaris got to see the wan, greasy face of Mr. Prechtel and knew he could not have slept one wink.
At least Mr. Prechtel had attended to the doctors and nurses who'd come to set Lord Ghess' hip right. Amaris walked into a salon to see them all save one nurse sitting around and having a generous breakfast together.
"It really is a very bad fracture," Doctor Duhane informed Amaris. "We've done everything we could for now, but really this is a job for a specialist, if he is to walk ever again. I've told Lady Ghess the Imperial Hospital has impressive facilities even for the gentry, but she insists Lord Ghess is to heal at home. Very well, I have recommended a list of nurses and the best doctor-arcanist of my acquaintance. Doctor Wellspring here will handle the case going forward."
Amaris turned to Doctor Wellspring. She was a short, thin, serious-faced woman, almost like the human embodiment of a dry straw. The robe of a medical mage was draped over the back of her chair, and her blouse's sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, giving her a busy air even as she ate.
"Doctor Wellspring," Amaris echoed, trying to place the name. It came to her--the name of the doctor on Eleny Ghess' prescription--right as Doctor Duhane seemed to grasp something in her tone, and waved his hand.
"No, no, not the same. His niece," he explained. "Just as competent a physician, though. She has been seeking private work, at any rate."
So was Doctor Duhane passing her work the way her uncle had once passed on work to Doctor Duhane? Amaris just smiled and didn't quibble.
She asked about any accommodations to be made for Lord Ghess, and received a thorough list of instructions, which she wrote down in her notebook.
Chapter 23
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
The household rearranged itself like a mattress dipping under the weight of Lord Ghess' injury. They were all pulled into the gravity of this event, and the doctor's instructions became the holy text around which everything was arranged.
Lord Ghess' antechamber was taken up by two nurses, as well as a medically-qualified ritualist. While his bone had been set, the enchantments required constant refreshing, and the healing could only somewhat be helped along. It would take months, according to Doctor Wellspring, during which Lord Ghess would be bedbound and mostly addled by medication.
Amaris only came face to face with Lord Ghess about three days into the household's new regime.
He was trying to look dignified, but that only went so far for a man in his nightshirt, laid out on his side with planks holding his lower body immobile. Glyphs inscribed in the wooden planks glowed a sickly green at every slight stir. Lord Ghess’ complexion was waxy, and his gaze was fogged up, eyes wandering unfocused around the room as he spoke.
He called Amaris to scold her about the frost in the garden, and to tell her to pack her bags, as her services were no longer needed.
Amaris nodded, said she understood, and went to Lord Ghess' study next.
In the study, Lady Ghess was the counterweight. Poised and calm, she sat at his desk and went through paperwork, trying to discern which tasks needed accomplished on Lord Ghess' behalf and which could be delayed. Mr. Prechtel stood at her shoulder, sharing in her seemingly endless pool of calm.
"Naturally, we should not distress Lord Ghess," Lady Ghess told Amaris after she gave her report. "It is best you do not appear before him, and bring any matters to me first. He is not in a state to decide much of anything, unfortunately."
In other words, Lord Ghess' voice was mere wind in this household. Mr. Prechtel looked especially well-behaved as he stood there. Linden was not present in Lord Ghess' study, but later she came down to the chatelaine office for the monthly inspection of the ledgers, a task Lady Ghess always insisted on doing personally until then.
In the first four days after Lord Ghess' accident, letters from well-wishers poured in endlessly. Amaris merely looked at the names of the senders before handing them off to Linden, who further sorted the letters according to Lady Ghess' interests.
Miri the mistress sent two letters per day. Linden's usually neutral face even cracked, showing her annoyance as Amaris passed the letters on.
"Lady Ghess will pen a response to her," Linden said on the fourth day.
"Does she require suggestions for verbiage?" Amaris asked.
Given the scouring glare Linden gave Amaris in return, there was probably already plenty of verbiage Lady Ghess and Linden had been saving up between the two of them.
Guests wanted to come and visit Lord Ghess as well, but he refused categorically, his pride more injured than his hip at the moment. In an imitation of social visits, Cem Ghess and Rorine would come daily to his room, the young boy worried and affectionate towards his father, while the father looked profoundly touched.
The older Ghess children sent only perfunctory well-wishes for Lord Ghess' health. The letters were brought to him, but he cursed out the unfilial wretches for not even offering to visit, and praised Cem as a good choice of heir. This, Amaris learned from Rorine, because Amaris herself was still not supposed to show her face or do anything that implied she still worked in the household as far as Lord Ghess was concerned.
After his fit of anger at his older children, the nurses gave Lord Ghess an extra dose of painkillers.
"Staying calm helps the healing process," the nurse explained to Amaris.
The nursing staff was, in fact, quite personable. They appeared to know every ailing aristocrat in Claypot by ailment and injury first, and by name second. Amaris curiously asked if they knew the nurses who’d attended to Eleny Ghess on her death bed, to which the nurses exchanged a look that spoke volumes.
They assured were not the same kind of religious hospice workers who'd once given palliative care to Eleny Ghess, and in fact, the nurses expressed contempt towards what they called 'the bedside vultures'.
No, these nurses were from the Imperial Hospital. They were both middle-aged professionals, used to providing the highest level of care to the aristocratic patients in the private wing. Lady Ghess was paying quite the premium for private care, the way she certainly hadn’t when getting care forthe previous Lady Ghess.
Amaris learned all these fascinating details when she invited the nurses for a light snack in the day room just across from Lord Ghess' suite. Between tea and delightful little pastries made by Mertie, Amaris asked the nurses about their routines and listened to their gripes.
"Had more difficult patients than Lord Ghess," one nurse said.
"Yes, and I could count them all out on one hand without using all my fingers," the second nurse said, showing a hand on which she was already missing her little finger.
Then they both fell quiet, sharing a look as if trying to ask one another whether they'd said too much.
"Oh, surely Lady Ghess wants Lord Ghess to be as calm as possible," Amaris said, and poured another cup of tea for them.
Amaris walked out through the garden. The last of the braziers and cordons were cleared up about a week after the party, and with winter marching on, the grounds of the manor remained desolate. The grass was still frozen, and cracked under her footsteps. The sound was almost pleasant. The ground was not especially slippery.
After finishing her inspection, she went back inside to greet the coming visitors at the door. Miri the mistress and Mrs. Arrowan arrived soonafter in a rented carriage, but with their chins set so high, one would think they arrived as part of an imperial procession.
Mrs. Arrowan gave Amaris a disdainful once-over at the door, and made a gesture as if she was generously deigning to allow Amaris the honor of escorting her. Miri, nearly swallowed by a fur coat that she certainly didn't own back when she worked in his household, walked with over-corrected posture, so her neck extended upwards comically.
In the sunroom, Lady Ghess was waiting for them. Tea was served, but not the kind Mrs. Arrowan liked, and no snacks besides. A hint that Lady Ghess did not intend this visit to be terribly long.
Mrs. Arrowan did not catch the hint. She grumbled about the tea selection as if it was a failing and not a slight. Besides her, Miri stood in her stiff imitation of poise.
After taking her sip of tea, Mrs. Arrowan placed the cup down with a clink.
"It's better if Miri moves in sooner rather than later," Mrs. Arrowan said.
The declaration was so brazen that Amaris let her jaw fall open. She was standing by the door, out of sight of Mrs. Arrowan or Miri, and she looked across the room to catch Linden's eye and see if they shared in the incredulity.
Linden, however, was standing by Lady Ghess' shoulder, and had girded herself for this battle with her most frosty and aloof expression. She merely looked at Mrs. Arrowan and Miri with distant disdain, and passed a heavy cream-paper envelope to Lady Ghess.
Lady Ghess took the envelope, and passed it to Miri in turn. Mrs. Arrowan snatched it out of Miri's hand near instantly, however, and rooted inside to see its contents.
"What's this?" Mrs. Arrowan asked imperiously. She took out a few sheets of good quality paper, written in elegant calligraphy, but Amaris couldn't quite see from this angle what was written on them.
"Miri's admission to a finishing school in Regrettine," Lady Ghess replied. "Very prestigious. They have a four year program for young ladies of marriageable age. Miri is a bit above the cut-off age, but the director is willing to make an exception."
Mrs. Arrowan frowned at the papers.
"Why would I need to go to a finishing school?" Miri demanded.
"Naturally, it's because you're too much of an embarrassment to find a man otherwise," Lady Ghess replied airily.
Amaris had never been to a finishing school, but she'd met enough teenage girls for whom the threat of one was similar to boys being threatened with military school. Strict rules, cold teachers, an exacting schedule, and high standards made for the stuff of horrors to most adolescents, and for a woman in her early twenties like Miri, it would all be compounded with a dose of humiliation, no doubt.
Mrs. Arrowan smacked the papers to the floor, huffing contemptuously.
"Don't be a nasty woman," Mrs. Arrowan scorned. "You couldn't keep that man under your thumb, and your cousin had to step in. You should be thankful it was someone in the family, and not some random harlot."
Linden passed a second envelope to Lady Ghess. Lady Ghess offered it to Mrs. Arrowan.
But Mrs. Arrowan just slapped it out of Lady Ghess' hand, sending it flying.
"Girl, don't test me," Mrs. Arrowan growled. "I don't care how many finishing schools you find, Miri's not going anywhere. Accept it."
"Actually, that was the paperwork for a sanatorium in the Dasserine Archipelago," Lady Ghess informed Mrs. Arrowan serenely. "I've been told it's a good place for ailing old folks to spend their final years. Quite comfortable. Extensive facilities."
Mrs. Arrowan grew suddenly silent. Amaris couldn't see the old woman's face, but from this angle, she fancied she could see every single fine hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
"What are you implying," Mrs. Arrowan hissed in a low voice. She was attempting to be threatening, but there was a waver of uncertainty to it. Miri was looking wide-eyed from Lady Ghess to Mrs. Arrowan, broadcasting her alarm much too obviously.
"I have four hefty servants prepared to drag you both out kicking and screaming," Lady Ghess said, her face cracking from its calm mask to reveal an exultant streak beneath. "But that's no way for a couple of dignified gentlewomen to act, don't you agree?"
Mrs. Arrowan picked up her tea cup again, leaning back in her seat like a very well-behaved gentlewoman indeed. Miri just looked at the floor, her chin going from angled towards the sky to pressing against her own collarbone.
"Remie, this is no way to speak to your mother," Mrs. Arrowan said in a voice that Amaris had only ever heard her use towards Lord Ghess before. "If you want to talk, we'll listen without you having to threaten like this. Let's discuss."
"The discussion already took place, Mother," Lady Ghess informed her. A smile now cracked across her face.
"Wait--" Miri said, bristling in fright.
"If you want to send Miri to a finishing school, that's fine, but who's going to believe I'm old enough to be sent to an old lady house?" Mrs. Arrowan continued.
"Wait, wait, I can't go to a finishing school--" Miri insisted again, more alarmed. Mrs. Arrowan put her hand on Miri's knee in a gesture to calm down, but when Miri grew more agitated, Amaris could clearly see the old woman give a vicious pinch instead.
"Remie," Mrs. Arrowan continued, "you don't want any fuss, is that it? You don't need to throw a tantrum--"
"I don't want to go to a finishing school!" Miri insisted again.
Lady Ghess looked to Amaris by the door. Amaris obediently opened the door. In actuality, six male servants entered the room, trailed by Mr. Prechtel, who must have been the one to explain their tasks to them.
Miri and Mrs. Arrowan craned their necks around to see the servants and grew instantly more frightened. Miri's reaction was mostly to start shaking limb from limb, letting herself be taken up by the arms and moved along gently.
Mrs. Arrowan, however, turned vicious hellcat quickly, jumping to her feet and throwing her teacup at the nearest servant. She was not nearly spry enough to get away, and the servants surrounded her and grabbed her arms much more firmly than Miri's, but she began screeching threats of reprisals if they dared touch her.
Amaris wasn't sure what Mrs. Arrowan was going on about. For one, they were already grabbed onto her quite firmly, and for another, her only means of reprisal would have been through Lady Ghess, who was currently glowing with a malicious glee that Amaris had never seen in her before. Amaris, who was hired to obey all her orders anyway, was thankful she hadn't done anything to invoke that side of Lady Ghess before.
"I will have them taken to their guest lodgings," Mr. Prechtel reported dryly. "Shall we leave them to rest for the remainder of the day and reflect on their decision?"
"Ask Miri in about a day or so, but Mother may take a bit longer to decide," Lady Ghess replied sweetly. Then she looked to Amaris. "As they are our guests, naturally they will be served only the best bread and water until they decide to leave."
"As you say, My Lady," Amaris inclined her head. As if she had any nerve to disobey at this point!
Chapter 24
Chapter by Whydah (Azzandra)
Chapter Text
True to Lady Ghess' prediction, Miri might have appreciated the comfortable room and the 'best bread and water', but it took approximately two meals for her to crack.
Lady Ghess already had a trunk with Miri’s necessities packed up, and by the next day, she was bundled into a carriage with two bodyguards and headed to Regrettine.
"Will this really help her find a husband?" Amaris muttered to Linden, as they watched Lady Ghess cheerfully wave goodbye to her cousin. After the carriage pulled away, Lady Ghess turned around and looked straight at Amaris.
"Naturally, even finishing school can't make Miri competent enough to find a husband on her own," Lady Ghess said to Amaris. "I will handle that matter myself. Four years is plenty of time."
Amaris quickly acquiesced.
In the meantime, Mrs. Arrowan proved a tougher nut to crack. Amaris ensured her meals were delivered meticulously three times a day. Plenty of spring-fresh water, and the kind of mouth-watering bread that Trizzy Sacks introduced to the household and that everyone couldn't get enough of.
Amaris always accompanied the maid who delivered the food, for no other reason than because Lady Ghess wanted her to ask Mrs. Arrowan each day if she agreed to the retirement home yet. Amaris asked the question, and Mrs. Arrowan just glared quietly in return.
When a week had passed and Mrs. Arrowan remained stubbornly silent, Amaris scrounged a pamphlet for a different retirement home, showing it to Lady Ghess.
"This one is rated a bit lower," Amaris explained.
Lady Ghess gave the pamphlet a look, then Amaris a questioning glance. Amaris produced another pamphlet, next. A rural retirement commune off to the northwest, about halfway across the continent. Then she laid out another pamphlet: volunteers for the rehabitation of a broken city all the way to the west, near Skimonok. Volunteers would be granted lifetime citizenship in exchange for at least a year of hard labor.
Lady Ghess' eyebrow rose as the increasingly worse options were fanned out in front of her.
"Actually," Lady Ghess said with amusement, "find me a few more of these. I'll select the ones I want showed to Mother."
Amaris did as requested, and spent the next few days scrounging up any information on destinations of last resort that she could find. There weren't always pamphlets, but they often ran ads in the newspapers requesting volunteers or offering terrible jobs in far-flung corners of the continent.
She asked Linden how Mrs. Arrowan would be persuaded to stay in any such place if she really wanted to slink back home, and that was when Linden informed her that Mrs. Arrowan's house was in fact owned by the Ghess family, and Lady Ghess had acted quickly to have it sold off. By now, the new owner already slotted it for demolishing. A pity, since it was a nice house, but they wanted to build their own on that plot of land. Certainly Mrs. Arrowan would get the message.
In the household, Mrs. Arrowan had stopped being a frightful beast the servants had to keep their heads down around, and had turned into a lurid source of entertainment. One maid reported how Mrs. Arrowan tried bribing her when she went to change the bedsheets. Another servant reported seeing Mrs. Arrowan fiddle at the window for a long time, as if trying to decide if she could jump out.
Three days after the story with the window, a couple of constables came knocking at the gate.
"We've had reports of a woman being unlawfully held prisoner," the one with more metal tidbits on his uniform collar informed Amaris.
"Oh, what woman?" Amaris asked, surprised. "If it's about Wylla in the basement, she's not actually a prisoner, she can walk out at any time."
"We'd prefer to talk to Lord Ghess regarding this issue," the constable replied with an opaque smile.
Amaris was delighted to hear this. She led the constables inside, and then, as she spotted Mr. Prechtel, she explained their presence and emphasized the constables would like to see Lord Ghess.
"I can take them to Lord Ghess right away," Mr. Prechtel said, nothing but agreeable. "Please follow, gentlemen."
He led them to the first floor, right to Lord Ghess' room.
In fact, the first few weeks after breaking his hips, Lord Ghess spent in a fog of sedation. Lady Ghess allowed Doctor Wellspring and all the nurses to be generous with the painkillers, and Lord Ghess offered no contest, and even promptly requested medicine at the slightest discomfort.
Now, however, he had healed past the initial worst stage after his operation, and was being weaned off the sedatives so that he could be alert for the physical recovery regimen. That, unfortunately, left him very cranky, in a sharp contrast to his agreeable temperament while the medication fog hung heavy. He certainly wasn't in the mood for guests.
Amaris couldn't exactly poke her head into his room, but she learned from Mr. Prechtel that the constables' questions, even when polite and delicately-phrased, irritated Lord Ghess to no end. Lord Ghess was unaware that his mother-in-law was even held prisoner in his house, so the notion sounded utterly absurd to him.
He told them where Mrs. Arrowan's usual guest room was, and Mr. Prechtel agreed to let them check it, because Mrs. Arrowan was not held in that room currently.
The constables also insisted on speaking with some of the servants. What they were perhaps unaware of was that while Mr. Prechtel took the constables to Lord Ghess' room, Amaris had run to the kitchens to tell everyone that their betting pools would be in danger if the constables discovered Mrs. Arrowan. By the time the constables came to harangue a few maids with questions, it was as if nobody even knew about Mrs. Arrowan's existence.
The constables departed having discovered absolutely nothing, the two of them twin monument to the standards of competency instilled in the local police force.
Amaris considered trying to find out which of the servants had ratted to the constabulary, but before she got to the bottom of anything, Mrs. Arrowan cracked, and haughtily informed Amaris that she accepted passage to the Dasserine retirement community. It was probably because from Mrs. Arrowan’s window, one could have a perfect view of the constables casually strolling away.
The departure of Mrs. Arrowan left Lady Ghess terribly pleased for at least a few days. This seemed to bring the mood of the whole household up to buoyant.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Lord Ghess was miserably eking out more hours of vivid, unmedicated consciousness during the day. He became profoundly dissatisfied with Doctor Wellspring, whose presence was both constant and unwelcome.
Amaris found out from swapping gossip with the nurses that Lord Ghess was supposed to be subject to a lot more physical therapy, but that any time they lowered his sedative dose for the purpose of beginning, he became cranky and unreasonable. He complained that the physical therapy was only meant to torment him, and insisted they let him heal more first. Under his insistence, they had to relent.
Doctor Wellspring tolerated the grumbling for a while, but eventually went to Lady Ghess and told her that if Lord Ghess did not do the physical therapy required, he would never recover full mobility.
Lady Ghess raised an eyebrow, then smiled serenely.
"Do what His Lordship orders," Lady Ghess said, her voice pitched sweetly.
Doctor Wellspring looked, for a fraction of a second, like she might have some professional qualms with that notion. Amaris, who was also in the study at the time, watched carefully to see which direction the coin would fall. But Doctor Wellspring just nodded and took her leave, apparently not willing to pit her own medical recommendation against Lady Ghess' wishes.
In fact, Lady Ghess had granted Doctor Wellspring a suite of rooms in the house. Amaris didn't quite understand why. Both doctors and ritualists generally made bank, and so, one would assume Doctor Wellspring's income would be doubled by going into such a doubled career. But Doctor Wellspring apparently recently lost the house she previously occupied, which Amaris could infer had been an inheritance from her uncle. How did one lose an entire house?
The answer came to Amaris by itself one afternoon, when Lady Ghess informed Amaris that a loan contract would be written out for Doctor Wellspring, as the Ghess household would be conferring her a sum of money to be paid back at a time in the future. In truth, this would not be the first servant of the household to request an emergency loan, even if it did not happen so often, so Amaris knew the general procedure.
However, when Amaris asked for how many months they would be withholding Doctor Wellspring’s pay, the answer was surprising.
"Not at all," Lady Ghess said. "She will be paid as established."
In other words, she would not even be paying back the loan.
"And--to make up the shortfall?" Amaris asked numbly, her mind veering off to the pragmatic matter of balancing the book. An on-call doctor present each day cost a staggering amount compared to a regular servant. Amaris wasn’t even paid that well, but on further calculation, she didn’t think Uncle Errett had even been paid as much monthly as Doctor Wellspring.
"Lord Ghess will not be in need of new tailored suits for this social season, and possibly not the next either," Lady Ghess indicated lightly.
So Amaris went down to the chatelaine office and wrote out the paperwork, and then wrote the appropriate entries in the appropriate ledgers, shifting money allocations from here to there, scrimping to make up the sum that would be loaned out without holding her breath that it would ever be returned.
"See, you think I'm the one who has the horse habit, but this is what a real racing addict looks like," Wylla said as she tapped Doctor Wellspring's name on the loan contract.
Amaris had only given the papers over to Wylla to proofread, and hadn't expected this piece of gossip.
"Is that so?" Amaris leaned forward, eyes wide, ears open.
"If anyone with a mean look and a wooden bat comes asking for Doctor Wellspring at the manor's gates, you'll know she hasn't paid her lenders back yet," Wylla continued, waggling her eyebrows.
This was indeed interesting to hear, and Amaris was apparently the last to hear about this tidbit. Both Linden and Mr. Prechtel had to have known, because Linden told the staff to hide the existence of any betting pools from Doctor Wellspring, and Mr. Prechtel outright ordered for the staff to stop betting on anything.
It seemed there was already a loop formed specifically for her to be out of, these days, so that likely didn't help.
As Lord Ghess was indisposed, Lady Ghess decided she would be the one to take over the business interests of the household. For all her qualities as lady of the house, however, Lady Ghess had never handled such things before, so even with Mr. Prechtel's help, it seemed she would have some obstacles in the way.
The Saintdays of Winter approached once again, and business would not be conducted over the holidays. Large gatherings were common for the aristocracy to wrap up loose ends before the holidays began properly.
Thus, Lady Ghess called over some of Lord Ghess' business partners for some standard end of the year dealings, which meant a dinner party. Ostensibly, these would be Lord Ghess’ friends, inasmuch as aristocrats maintained friendships and not just competitive acquaintence.
They sat at Lady Ghess’ table and are her food with cold, humorless smiles, making jokes amongst themselves. Lord Legrette was seated at the head of the table, opposite Lady Ghess, and every head at the table turned much more readily in his direction than in Lady Ghess’. Lady Ghess endured the whole thing with a thin, frozen smile that cut like a wire.
When it was time to turn the discussion at the table to business, it was by Lord Legrette’s casual flick of the hand and ponderous remarks that it happened. The man who owned just about every vinyard and winery up and down the Regrettine River stood on equal footing with any of the grain lords of the Sweepriver, and Lord Ghess had always found ways of ingratiating himself to this man: how could he not? Half the wines in his cellars had the Legrette family seat.
Lady Ghess had squeezed Mr. Prechtel of every last bit of information on the Ghess family business, and Amaris had seen her sit late into the night scrutinizing Lord Ghess’ papers. Now, Amaris stood at the far side of the room, curious to see if that knowledge was about to be put into practice.
And Lady Ghess did not jump right in. He let Lord Legrette expound on his opinions about next year’s weather for quite a while before there was a lull in the conversation where she could interject.
“Indeed,” Lady Ghess remarked, “with the weather so fine, it appears river traffic will be the more worrisome factor next year.”
The table felt awkwardly silent. She hadn’t said anything wrong, and in fact, from anyone else, that remark would have been perfectly appropriate, accepted and elaborated on as they discussed the imperial river toll system next.
But Lord Legrette’s lips pressed together, his expression ambiguous. Anything but approving, but resembling no real sentiment otherwise.
"Lady Ghess, we appreciate your enthusiasm," Lord Legrette said with the air of someone offering charity to a widow, "but it is best we discuss this with Lord Ghess."
"Lord Ghess is indisposed," Lady Ghess replied, matching the man's smile with equal condescension.
"My Lady, he's got a broken bone, not a terminal illness," the man laughed.
Lady Ghess leaned forward, fingers laced together.
"He is not a young man anymore," she explained, to every eye now turned towards her at the table. "The doctors are worried the sequelae from his accident may leave him in a permanently fragile state. Whatever relationship you fostered with him is likely precious to you. But if he is unable to withstand the work, you may want to reorient yourself."
"Lady Ghess, you talk about him like he's on death's door," Lord Legrette snorted. "Even if that is true, I would see it for myself."
Lady Ghess looked to Amaris, who was waiting by the door.
"Very well. Miss Waushko, go and tell Doctor Wellspring to get Lord Ghess upright and ready for company. He will have visitors as soon as he is decent. Permit Doctor Wellspring to up his painkiller dosage if necessary."
Amaris went as instructed. She found Doctor Wellspring and the nurses in the antechamber, and relayed Lady Ghess' instructions precisely. Doctor Wellspring gave a put-upon sigh.
She turned to one of the nurses.
"Half dose of bassyndoyen," Doctor Wellspring indicated. "Fast-absorption glyph."
The nurse picked up a tray and went inside Lord Ghess' bedroom.
"We'll have him upright by the time visitors get here," Doctor Wellspring informed Amaris with fully professional confidence.
Amaris matched it with a smile of her own, and went to inform Lady Ghess. Lady Ghess acknowledged with a nod before turning to the guests.
“Lord Legrette may come, and one more besides. Too many people may prove cumbersome in a sickroom.”
Vague distaste for the failures of health was no match for lurid curiosity, and so Lord Legrette had his pick of volunteers. He selected one of the more weasel-faced of the other lords at the table.
Lady Ghess took the visitors to Lord Ghess' room promptly.
Whatever the visit entailed, Amaris could vaguely guess. They returned to the dining room more subdued in their condescension. They granted Lady Ghess no respect, but begrudgingly, they did not verbalize their rejection of her out loud for the rest of the meal. It turned out they did not like Lord Ghess that much anyway.
Chapter Text
Lord Ghess continued slowly healing, but the lack of physical regimen started to take its toll. He could barely roll over in bed, and if aided he could stand upright, but taking actual steps was too painful for him to tolerate even attempting. He scolded both doctor and nurses for incompetence, and when he did, he was put back on sedatives for being combative. His painkiller dose could only be upped so much without endangering his life, but the sedatives at least kept him too quiet to complain of the pain even if he felt it.
At this time, Lord Ghess came up with a different complaint. He insisted not be left alone in the room at night.
"Where's Miri?" he demanded one evening, loud enough that Amaris could hear from the antechamber. "Call Miri over. Have her sleep here. I can't be alone."
When asked why, Lord Ghess stubbornly refused to explain to the doctor or nurses, but when Mr. Prechtel went in, once, Lord Ghess grabbed his sleeve and hissed an order to call over the Lekhar who'd 'handled things' before. To members of the household, a few things thus became self-evident, but the nurses and Doctor Wellspring sighed and shook their heads at this behavior. Doctor Wellspring’s patient notes now had a jotted observation about mental deterioration.
As the Saintdays of Winter were nearly upon them, Amaris found herself in the middle of arranging for the six-day feast, and with Lady Ghess breathing down her back, she could scarcely not be aware of the concerns. The last Saintdays had been an unmitigated disaster. Even the staff was tense and unusually jumpy.
"We shall have to arrange some kind of seating for Lord Ghess as well," Lady Ghess said one day, as she looked at the dining room judiciously.
"Ah, I don't know if that would be wise, My Lady," Amaris said, and Lady Ghess turned to her with a questioning glance. "I only mean, well--he's currently holding the entire attention of the unwanted houseguest all by himself. Would we want to draw her down here along with him?"
Amaris wondered if the interdiction against mentioning Eleny Ghess still stood, but it was a sign of how much things had shifted that Lady Ghess did not even seemed to find it remarkable.
Lady Ghess considered Amaris’ words, then smiled widely. Linden and Mr. Prechtel looked distinctly displeased with Amaris pleasing Lady Ghess, which was the bigger cue Amaris had that Lady Ghess was pleased. But regardless of how anyone felt about the situation, the casual attitude of Lady Ghess--as though the danger had passed already, like a stormcloud now long in the distance--was another signal to Amaris that her position as stand-in during the storm was redundant.
It was Linden who had the third floor suite cleaned and prepared for habitation. Amaris knew because Linden came to request the key for the suite, and Amaris had to give it up. On the other hand, it was Mr. Prechtel who arranged for Lord Ghess to be moved.
"It's winter, and the third floor is the warmest in the house," Mr. Prechtel explained to Lord Ghess. "It will ease bone pain."
In fact, Amaris was sure that any heat which rose to the third floor was quickly dispelled by how drafty it was up there, but it wasn't like her opinion was required. In some abstract sense, she began wondering if she was a participant in some cruel circus where Lord Ghess was sent as a sacrifice to be tormented by the revenant just so they would all escape unscathed.
Emotionally, however, she had never liked Lord Ghess all that much, and had in fact pointedly disliked him on several occasions, so she only had some high-minded moral protest to the entire thing that she never spoke out loud. Eleny Ghess had perhaps done even less to justify any suffering, and so suffering had been inflicted on her completely disconnected from any notion like morality or deserving.
Amaris walked into the kitchens after Lord Ghess was moved to the third floor, and found the entire staff filled with holiday cheer the likes of which she hadn't seen of them in the whole year she'd worked as ledger maid. There'd always been an air of dread to holiday preparations, which was now replaced with a manic-tinged relief.
To Amaris, this seemed a bit overly-optimistic. She still contracted a nearby restaurant in case anything happened to the food, and had created some contingency plans which she freely shared with Linden in case Amaris turned out indisposed. Everything else, she took in stride.
Whether Lord Ghess understood what his relocation meant was unclear. He might have been too sedated to realize which suite he was taken to, and at any rate, all four suites on the third floor looked the same.
The night before the first Feast, there was some commotion on the third floor. Lord Ghess had apparently rolled out of bed, and fractured his hip once again. Doctor Wellspring took charge of the matter and made impressive efforts to set his injury to rights, but she did not inform Lady Ghess until morning of the mishap.
Standing on the first floor stairs with Cem Ghess, both of them dressed in heavy teal brocades patterned with abstract flowers, Lady Ghess listened to Doctor Wellspring's report with the kind of poise and calm that any noble-bred lady would be proud of. She nodded in understanding as she was told that Lord Ghess might never walk properly again, and patted Doctor Wellspring's hand with sympathy.
"I am sure you are doing your best," Lady Ghess declared warmly. "If you and your staff cannot join us for the feast, I will have the best dishes sent to you all. Thank you for your hard work."
The Feast of Saint Lyria that year was a warm affair. With Lord Ghess unable to attend, the atmosphere was less formal. Lady Ghess called Rorine, Linden, Mr. Prechtel and Amaris to the table to join herself and Cem Ghess.
Though the servants invited to the table still maintained a certain level of deference, Cem Ghess took advantage of the looser rules to snatch up decorative tidbits from the table. He gorged himself on fruit before the first soup was even served, and snatched up bits of appetizers and side dishes with messy enthusiasm. Rorine wiped his chin and hands with infinite patience, while Lady Ghess only lightly told him to not eat too quickly. Neither seemed inclined to stop him from this childish behavior, however--his tutoring sessions had gone very well lately, and even in etiquette classes, Cem had begun to excel. His bouts of mischief were thus tolerated.
Naturally, dishes from every course served in the dining room were then also taken up to the third floor, to be served to Lord Ghess and the medical staff. At the end of the night, Cem was also taken upstairs to share dessert with his father, who anxiously insisted on being kept company for as long as possible. Cem seemed to think this was out of some paternal sentiment on Lord Ghess’ part, and he huffed up with pride at first.
Lady Ghess excused herself from the visit in order to check on the household. Cem Ghess and Rorine sat with Lord Ghess the longest, but Cem was still young and started drooping as soon as it got dark. Rorine took him to bed soon after.
When Lord Ghess became more insistent, the nurses served him his medicine. This calmed him considerably, though it did not put him to sleep completely.
The routine continued for the rest of the Saintdays. Lord Ghess became unusually clingy with his son, but Cem Ghess, once happy for any sort of attention, soon discovered his father was actually quite boring the more time they spent together, and lost interest quicker each day.
The Saintdays passed. The peaceful doldrums between the mid-winter holidays and the New Year ensued. No rumor of hauntings plagued Plumgarden Manor. There were no bonuses for the servants that year, but they all took home plenty of leftovers from the feasts.
It was during this peaceful lull that Amaris drafted her letter of resignation.
The day that Amaris was set to leave, the air was frosty, and the sky was steel-gray. But it wasn't snowing quite yet. Amaris stood in the courtyard, hand clenched on the collar of her coat, keeping it closed against the cold as her luggage was loaded onto the carriage and strapped in.
Though the rest of the household's staff had made their goodbyes earlier, the new steward made a point of seeing Amaris off personally.
Linden was now in too elevated of a position to keep using a work name. As steward, she was called by her proper surname, Miss Zhang, and the maid uniform was replaced by a crisp black dress suit and starched white shirt. Her hair was no longer in the same stern up-do she favored as a lady's maid, and though it was still pulled back from her face, the way it was left loose over her back now gave her a more youthful and energetic air.
That Amaris left the post of ledger maid and was so promptly replaced by another woman as steward was seen as a belated little jab from Lady Ghess, but Amaris herself didn't see it that way. It was only that Amaris had never been particularly favored, at least compared to Linden--or rather, Miss Zhang--who'd shown her loyalty in no doubt countless ways over the years.
Mr. Prechtel, though just missing the post of steward by the tips of his fingers, fell into the role of Lady Ghess' secretary instead. It was a natural fit, since Mr. Prechtel knew more of Lord Ghess' business than even Lord Ghess did, and now Lady Ghess needed to take over all those tasks. Perhaps more of a lateral move than a promotion in practice, but it gave Mr. Prechtel a prestige that being a mere body servant simply didn't have. Secretary simply looked more prestigious as a title.
He did not show up to the courtyard to see Amaris off, but when Amaris looked up to one of the first floor windows, she saw Mr. Prechtel looking down at her, and they inclined their heads at one another.
"Should you require any further references," Miss Zhang told Amaris, "please do write to me personally. I will ensure it."
This was as warm a send-off as Amaris could expect.
"Should you have further trouble with hauntings," Amaris said in turn, "do not call me. The first time around was a huge headache for me."
Miss Zhang actually huffed a little laugh at that, seemingly taken by surprise by it.
There were no hugs or effusive emotional displays, but when Amaris climbed onto the carriage, she gave one final look to Plumgarden Manor.
Against the grey sky, the manor looked like a resting animal, curled up and looking at the world through half-lidded, glowing eyes. Somewhere inside there was a ghost, and there were also people who now led their lives in spite of the ghost, and somewhere was also a man suffering in their stead, though only as a consequence of his own actions.
Amaris tried to think whether some kind of moral lesson could be derived from these events.
She concluded that probably not.
Notes:
Thank you to everyone who has been along for the ride! It's been fun having you along, and I appreciate every one of you who's been leaving comments week after week. I love you guys.
While this is the end of the main story, I do also have plans for some extra bits from other characters' POV. I just haven't gotten to work on them much because I started a new job that ended up being a lot more exhausting than my old one, but I've been adjusting, and I'm itching to write juuust a bit more stuff in this story setting.
Pages Navigation
WoonSocket on Chapter 1 Wed 30 Apr 2025 07:37PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 1 Thu 01 May 2025 06:46AM UTC
Comment Actions
Schnikeys on Chapter 1 Thu 02 Oct 2025 02:56PM UTC
Comment Actions
winteryKite on Chapter 2 Wed 30 Apr 2025 07:54PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 2 Thu 01 May 2025 06:47AM UTC
Comment Actions
CannedCoelacanth on Chapter 2 Wed 30 Apr 2025 07:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 2 Thu 01 May 2025 06:48AM UTC
Comment Actions
VincentUrsus on Chapter 2 Wed 30 Apr 2025 08:36PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 2 Thu 01 May 2025 06:48AM UTC
Comment Actions
WoonSocket on Chapter 2 Thu 01 May 2025 02:04AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 2 Thu 01 May 2025 06:49AM UTC
Comment Actions
AmberGimlet on Chapter 2 Sat 03 May 2025 02:07AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 2 Sat 03 May 2025 09:18AM UTC
Comment Actions
Schnikeys on Chapter 2 Thu 02 Oct 2025 03:07PM UTC
Comment Actions
VincentUrsus on Chapter 3 Thu 08 May 2025 12:12AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 3 Thu 08 May 2025 04:57AM UTC
Comment Actions
AmberGimlet on Chapter 3 Thu 08 May 2025 07:10PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 3 Thu 08 May 2025 07:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
Vashti (tvashti) on Chapter 3 Sun 11 May 2025 05:56AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 3 Sun 11 May 2025 09:33AM UTC
Comment Actions
WoonSocket on Chapter 3 Mon 12 May 2025 01:51AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 3 Mon 12 May 2025 02:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
WoonSocket on Chapter 4 Wed 14 May 2025 08:04PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 09:38AM UTC
Comment Actions
VincentUrsus on Chapter 4 Wed 14 May 2025 08:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 09:37AM UTC
Comment Actions
winteryKite on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 05:15AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 09:38AM UTC
Comment Actions
winteryKite on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 01:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 03:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
winteryKite on Chapter 4 Fri 16 May 2025 10:48AM UTC
Comment Actions
Vashti (tvashti) on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 02:19PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 4 Thu 15 May 2025 03:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
AmberGimlet on Chapter 4 Fri 16 May 2025 04:43AM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 4 Fri 16 May 2025 05:41AM UTC
Comment Actions
winteryKite on Chapter 5 Wed 21 May 2025 08:37PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 5 Thu 22 May 2025 08:25AM UTC
Comment Actions
winteryKite on Chapter 5 Fri 23 May 2025 03:28AM UTC
Comment Actions
VincentUrsus on Chapter 5 Wed 21 May 2025 09:55PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 5 Thu 22 May 2025 08:24AM UTC
Comment Actions
WoonSocket on Chapter 5 Wed 21 May 2025 10:19PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 5 Thu 22 May 2025 08:26AM UTC
Comment Actions
WoonSocket on Chapter 5 Thu 22 May 2025 01:43PM UTC
Comment Actions
Azzandra on Chapter 5 Thu 22 May 2025 02:37PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation