Ink Before Breakfast
Delilah
The Continental Chronicle knew where the Crown Princess had been at twenty to seven on Tuesday evening, and only three parties in Eldoria should have known it: the Princess, her Guard, and me.
I read the article twice on the tram up the government ridge. My glasses fogged with harbor damp. My coffee went cold in its paper cup. PRINCESS’S SECRET HOSPITAL VISIT, said the headline, and under it, in smaller letters, Henri Boucher. Six paragraphs. The children’s ward at Saint-Jude Hospital. The side door on Chapel Lane. The forty minutes she stayed. And then, in the very last line, the sentence that turned my stomach over:
No cameras. She insisted.
Those were my words.
I had written them on Tuesday night in green ink, in the leather daybook my mother gave me when I was twenty-one and new to the Household. I had written them because Rory had sat on the floor of that ward with a six-year-old boy and let him draw a ship on the back of her hand with a felt pen, and when the hospital director asked for a photograph, she had said no so gently that he thanked her for it. I wanted to remember that. I wanted someone, someday, to know she was like that when nobody was watching.
Then I had locked the daybook in my desk and gone home.
At the Citadel gate, the sentry held my badge under his lamp longer than he needed to. In the east wing, the night porter said good morning without looking at me. By the time I reached the Princess’s corridor, the back of my neck was hot, and I was walking faster than a private secretary should ever walk.
My office sits at the end of the east corridor, behind an anteroom I share with the press office. The anteroom door was open. My office door was open.
Someone was sitting in my chair.
He was too big for it. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was that my desk drawers stood open in a neat descending staircase, top to bottom, and my daybook lay in the center of the blotter with a pen laid across it like a bar across a door. The third was my copper kettle. It sat on the windowsill, where it had never once sat in six years.
“You moved my kettle,” I said.
He looked up. His eyes were gray-blue, the color of Saint Jude Sound in February. His hair was cropped close and the shade of wet sand. His nose had been broken at least twice and set by someone in a hurry. He wore the charcoal suit of the Sovereign Guard with no tie, his sleeves pushed to the elbow, and his forearms were dusted with freckles, which seemed deeply unfair on a man built like a cathedral door.
I knew him the way everyone in the Household knew him. Everett Hayes. Second-in-command of the Sovereign Guard. The Commander’s right hand. The junior footmen called him the Hound’s Hound, but never in any room he might walk into.
“It was on your files,” he said. “It leaks.”
“It does not leak.”
He held up a sheet of paper between two fingers. The minutes of the Naval Defense Committee, with a pale brown ring in the middle of the second paragraph.
“It leaks, Miss Finch.”
“That is a coffee ring. From Tuesday. From the Minister of Ports, who drinks out of anything he can find.” I set my bag down on the visitor’s chair, because the other chair was occupied by a decade of Guard training and two hundred pounds of insolence. “What are you doing at my desk?”
“Waiting for you.”
“In the dark?”
“I like the dark. It’s quiet.” He tapped the newspaper folded beside the daybook. Boucher’s article lay face up. Someone had underlined the last line in red. “You’ve read it.”
“Twice.”
“Then you know why I’m here.”
I did. I simply didn’t want to say it in front of him, because saying it would make it real, and I had spent six years making sure nothing unpleasant became real in Rory’s life until I had first given it a name, a file number, and a plan.
“You think I sold her to the Chronicle,” I said.
“I think someone did.” He lifted the pen off the daybook and set it aside. “Your card opened this office at ten past eleven on Tuesday night. Where were you?”
“At home. On Nettle Street. Reading.”
“Alone?”
“With a history of the Siege of 1842 and a very bad bottle of wine.”
“Anyone who can confirm it?”
“My neighbor’s cat sat on my windowsill for an hour. He’s orange. He doesn’t talk to the Guard.”
The corner of his mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place where a smile would go if he were the kind of man who allowed himself one before breakfast.
“Did you read my daybook?” I asked.
“Every page from Tuesday back to March.”
The heat climbed from my neck to my face. “That is private.”
“Not since this morning.”
“It is a personal record. My mother kept one for thirty years. It has nothing in it but meetings and menus and the things the Princess—” I stopped. “It’s private.”
“It has the time she left the ward,” he said. “It has the side door. It has the felt-pen ship on her hand, which wasn’t in the article, so thank you for that small mercy. And it has No cameras. She insisted. Word for word, Miss Finch. Same order. Same full stop.”
“Then your Guard read it.”
“My Guard doesn’t read daybooks. My Guard logs movements.” He took a small black notebook from his jacket and opened it. “Eighteen-forty, side entrance, Chapel Lane. Nineteen-twenty, departure. Principal in good spirits. Two officers in the corridor. Commander inside the door.” He closed it. “Nowhere does it say she insisted.”
I sat down on the edge of the visitor’s chair, on top of my own bag, which was undignified, but my knees had decided for me.
“How long have I got?” I asked.
“For what?”
“Before you take my badge.”
He considered me. It was an unnerving thing, being considered by Everett Hayes. He did not look at people. He measured them, the way a carpenter looks at a doorway and knows, without a tape, that the cupboard will not fit.
“The Solstice Gala is in ten days,” he said. “The Princess will be in a ballroom with eight hundred guests, an open terrace, two foreign delegations, and Ambassador Fabian Cross. If her schedule can walk out of this office to a newspaper, it can walk out of this office to a man with a rifle. The Boss wants the leak closed before the Gala.”
The Boss. Everyone knew whom he meant. The Commander was not a man people called by his rank in private. They called him the Boss, or the Hound of the Citadel, or, in my case, that wall in a suit who stands three paces behind Rory and never blinks.
“Until then,” Everett said, “I’m your shadow.”
“My what?”
“Wherever you go. Meetings. Lunch. The tram.”
“The ladies’ washroom?”
“I’ll wait outside.” He leaned back. My chair creaked in protest. “I’m very patient.”
“You are very large,” I said, “and you are sitting in my chair.”
He stood. It took a while. He came around the desk and stopped a careful distance from me, close enough that I caught the smell of him, gun oil and soap and the cold air of the parade ground, and far enough that I could have walked away. I noticed the distance. I was annoyed that I noticed it.
“Sit,” he said. “It’s your office.”
“How generous.”
The anteroom door banged. A voice sang out, “Del! Have you seen the Chronicle? Boucher has finally lost his—oh.”
Crispin Ashdown stopped in my doorway with a pastry in one hand and his tie in the other, as if he had been in the middle of deciding which of them to put on. He was the deputy press secretary, thirty-one, with fair hair that fell in his eyes no matter how often he pushed it back, and he was the only person in the Household who could make Lord Wrenfield laugh. He wore a red visitor’s tag clipped to his lapel instead of a proper badge.
“Commander Hayes,” he said. “Is she under arrest? Can I have her office? It has the window.”
“Nobody is under arrest,” Everett said.
“Yet,” I said.
Crispin looked from me to Everett to the open drawers. His cheerful face folded into sympathy. “Oh, Del. They don’t think it was you? That’s absurd. You’d sooner set yourself on fire than embarrass her.” He pointed the pastry at Everett. “She once made me rewrite a press release eleven times because I used the word delighted. She said the Princess is never delighted. She is pleased. That’s the woman you’re dealing with.”
“Noted,” Everett said.
“Still no badge?” I asked Crispin, because I needed something ordinary to hold on to.
He flicked the red tag. “The Chamberlain’s office takes a month to print a new one. I’m a visitor in my own life.” He winked at me. “Chin up. I’ll tell the press office the Chronicle is fishing. Boucher fishes in every pond.” And he was gone, humming, toward his side of the anteroom.
Everett watched the door for a moment after it closed.
“Who else has a key to this anteroom?” he asked.
“Crispin. Me. The Chamberlain’s office. The cleaners. You, apparently.”
“I have a key to everything.” He picked up my kettle from the windowsill and held it out to me. “Your principal rings at seven. She’ll want tea.”
I took the kettle. Our fingers did not touch. He made sure of that, the way he had made sure of the distance, and I was annoyed about that too.
“She won’t drink it,” I said. “She never does. She lets it go cold and then pretends she forgot.”
“I know.” He glanced at the ceiling, toward the Princess’s apartments on the floor above, and something crossed his face that I didn’t understand. “The Boss has a theory about that.”
“The Boss has a theory about her tea?”
“The Boss has a theory about everything she does.” He tucked away his black notebook. “Fill the kettle, Miss Finch. You’ve got ten days to prove you’re boring.”
I filled the kettle at the little basin in the corner. My hands were not quite steady. Behind me, I heard him close my desk drawers one by one, bottom to top, gently, the way you close doors in a house where someone is sleeping.
When I turned around, he was standing at the window with the newspaper in his hand, looking down at the underlined line.
“For what it’s worth,” he said without looking up, “whoever wrote she insisted loves her. You can hear it.”
“I wrote it.”
“I know.” He folded the paper. “That’s what bothers me. Either you’re the leak, or someone has been living inside your head at night.”
The bell from the floor above rang twice. Seven o’clock. Rory.
I picked up the tray. Everett opened the door and stepped back to let me through first, and then he followed, three paces behind my left shoulder, like a man who had been doing it all his life.
The Woman in the Daybook
Everett
The Crown Princess of Eldoria took one look at me and said, “Commander Hayes. Have you come to arrest my secretary, or to carry her files?”
“Whichever she allows, ma’am.”
“She will allow neither.” Princess Aurelia did not look up from the cabinet papers on her desk. Morning light came through the tall windows behind her and turned her chestnut hair to copper. “She once refused to let the Archbishop hold her umbrella. In a hailstorm.”
“It was a very small hailstorm,” Delilah said, and set the tea tray down at the Princess’s elbow.
The Boss stood where he always stood: three paces behind the Princess’s left shoulder, hands loose at his sides, eyes on the windows, the doors, the cup. I watched him watch the cup. Steam rose from it in a thin white thread. The Princess turned a page and did not touch it.
Four years I had served as his second, and I had never once seen the Boss look at a sniper position the way he looked at that cup of tea.
“Your Highness,” I said, “I’ll be with Miss Finch until the Gala. If you need her, you’ll get me too.”
Now the Princess looked up. Her eyes were a strange stormy color, violet in some lights and gray in others, and right now they were ice.
“Commander,” she said, in the cool drawl that made ministers forget their own names. “Delilah Finch has been beside me since I was six years old. Her mother taught us both to read in the west nursery. If there is a leak in my household, you will find it somewhere else. And if you hurt her while you look, you will answer to me.”
“He won’t hurt her, ma’am,” the Boss said.
It was the first thing he had said since I walked in. The Princess did not turn around. She didn’t need to. I saw the small change in her shoulders, the way a person relaxes when a door they were worried about is locked.
“Thank you, Commander,” she said, to the papers.
Delilah glanced at me. Behind her glasses, her brown eyes were sharp and tired and very, very angry. I had read four months of her handwriting before sunrise. I knew how she wrote the letter R when she was in a hurry and how she wrote it when she was sad. It felt like knowing something about a stranger that I had no right to know.
I didn’t like the feeling. I wrote it down anyway, in the part of my head where I keep things I don’t like.
The day was long, and she made sure I felt every hour of it.
At eight, she took a call from the Lord Chamberlain’s office about the Gala seating plan and moved a bishop away from a duchess with three sentences and no raised voice. At nine, she walked to the Treasury annex at a speed that suggested she hoped I would fall down the stairs. I did not fall down the stairs. At half past nine, she sat across a table from an under-secretary of the Treasury who wanted to cut the Princess’s charitable fund by a third.
He was a thin man with a thin smile, and he had a folder of numbers prepared by one of the Chancellor’s committees. He went through them slowly, the way men do when they think the woman across the table is decoration.
Delilah let him finish. Then she took off her glasses, cleaned them on a square of gray silk, and put them back on.
“Page four,” she said. “You’ve counted the hospital program twice. Once under health and once under the Crown’s private giving. That’s eleven thousand crowns that don’t exist. Page seven, you’ve used last year’s harbor figures, which were revised in April after the storm. Page nine is simply wrong, and I think you know it’s wrong, because you put it at the back and hoped I would be tired by then.”
The under-secretary’s thin smile disappeared.
“I’m never tired,” Delilah said pleasantly. “Shall we start again from the top?”
I stood by the door with my hands folded in front of me and watched a grown man take his folder and leave the room forty minutes later with a budget that had shrunk by nothing at all.
In the corridor, she said, without looking at me, “Write that down in your little book.”
“Already did.”
“What did you write?”
“Subject is frightening.”
She made a sound that, in a less angry woman, might have been a laugh.
At noon she ate an apple at her desk and read a report on fuel duties while she did it.
At two, I asked her who had touched her badge in the last month. She stared at me as if I had asked who had touched her soul.
“Nobody touches my badge.”
“Think.”
She thought. She was honest about it, which I noted, because liars are usually fast. “The tram conductor, once, when it fell off my lanyard. Ines Albero in the protocol office, when I left it on her desk and she ran after me. Crispin, last week. He’d lost his and the press staff at the Pavilion wouldn’t let him in without one, so he borrowed mine for ten minutes to collect the press kits.” She frowned. “He brought it back. He brought me a pastry to say thank you.”
“What kind?”
“Almond.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“I like to know what people are paid in.”
At three, Crispin Ashdown came through the anteroom with a stack of press releases and a scarf around his neck, though the day was warm. He dropped a release on Delilah’s desk with a flourish. The Crown Princess is pleased to announce. When he leaned across to point at a line, I caught a smell from his scarf. Sweet. Smoky. Cloves.
Crispin didn’t smoke. I’d have bet my pension on that. He had the skin and the teeth of a man who drank green juice on purpose.
I wrote cloves in my book, and then I wrote probably nothing, and then I drew a line under both.
The Boss caught me in the east corridor at six, while Delilah was upstairs with the Princess.
“Well?” he said.
“She’s either the best liar I’ve ever met, or she didn’t do it.”
“Which?”
“Too early.” I paused. “She found eleven thousand imaginary crowns in a Treasury report in four minutes. If she wanted to sell the Princess, she wouldn’t use a newspaper. She’d use a spreadsheet, and we’d never catch her.”
The Boss turned the bezel of his watch one notch. Click. He did that when he was filing something. “The file you wrote this morning.”
“Preliminary.”
“It says her mother has hospital debts.”
“Forty thousand crowns. Heart surgery, eighteen months ago.” I heard my own voice go flat and didn’t like it. “It’s a motive, Boss. I had to write it.”
“I know.” He looked down the corridor toward the stairs, where the Princess’s rooms were. “Keep her close, Hayes. If someone is reading her head at night, they’ll know by now we’re looking. They’ll want to move before we do.”
“Understood.”
He started to go, then stopped.
“And Hayes. The Princess was right. Don’t hurt her.”
I looked at him. The Boss did not say things twice. He did not say things he did not mean, and he did not say things that were not orders.
“Is that an order?”
“It’s a fact,” he said, and walked away.
I walked her home at nine.
She told me she didn’t need walking. I told her she was getting walked. She told me she had walked home by herself for six years. I told her that for the next nine days, she had a shadow, and shadows didn’t take nights off.
“Do they take compliments?” she asked.
“From whom?”
“Nobody. I was curious.”
In June, the Eldorian sun doesn’t set until nearly ten. The Old Quarter was gold and blue, the cobbles still warm, the harbor smell coming up the steep streets in soft waves of salt and tar and frying fish. Washing hung between the houses.
Delilah walked fast. She always walked fast. I had already learned that. She walked as if every street was a corridor and every corridor led to something urgent.
“Why the Household?” I asked.
She looked at me sideways. “Is that an interrogation?”
“It’s conversation.”
“You don’t do conversation. You do questions with the corners rounded off.” But she answered. “My mother was the Princess’s tutor. I grew up in two little rooms under the west nursery. When Rory was six, she decided I was her sister. Nobody told her she couldn’t.” She lifted one shoulder. “When I finished my law degree, there was a job open. I didn’t apply. She simply informed the Lord Chamberlain that I was taking it.”
“Law degree.”
“Constitutional law. Don’t look surprised. It’s rude.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m adjusting my file.”
“What does your file say now?”
Subject is frightening. Subject is funny. Subject smells like ink and bergamot and walks like she’s late for a war.
“It says you eat apples for lunch,” I said.
We turned into a narrower street, steeper, darker, where the late sun didn’t reach. Nettle Street was two turns ahead.
Footsteps didn’t.
I had heard them three streets back. Soft soles. A steady pace that slowed when we slowed. At the corner of the fish market, I’d caught a reflection in a shop window: a man in a gray coat, too warm a coat for June, hands in his pockets, hat low.
He was forty meters behind us now. Thirty-five.
“Miss Finch,” I said quietly. “Keep walking. Don’t turn around.”
She didn’t turn around. I gave her credit for that later. Most people turn around.
“What is it?”
“Someone who likes the same streets we do.”
Ahead, on the left, a deep stone doorway under a carved lintel. An old ropemaker’s house, shut up for the night. I said, “I’m going to move you into that doorway. I’m going to stand in front of you. Is that all right?”
She looked at me. One second. Two.
“Yes,” she said.
I put my hand flat between her shoulder blades, just the palm, and steered her into the doorway, and turned so that my back was to the street and my body was between her and everything else in Eldoria.
The doorway was not deep enough for two people. It was barely deep enough for one. Her back met the old wooden door. My forearm was on the stone above her head. Her face was a few centimeters from my collarbone, and I could feel her breathing, fast and quiet, against my shirt.
I had stood this close to a hundred principals. Ministers. Duchesses. A foreign queen who smelled of mothballs. I had never once been aware of a principal’s mouth.
I was very aware of Delilah Finch’s mouth.
“Don’t move,” I murmured.
“I wasn’t planning to.” Her voice was barely a breath. “Is he there?”
I watched the street in the dark glass of the ropemaker’s window. The gray coat came around the corner. Slowed. Stopped. His head turned, slowly, up the street, down the street. Looking for a man and a woman who were walking fast.
Delilah’s fingers closed on the front of my jacket. Not pulling. Holding.
“Everett,” she whispered. It was the first time she’d used my name.
“I know.”
“Your heart is very loud.”
“It does that.”
“Does it do that for every doorway?”
I looked down at her. Her glasses had slipped a little. Her lips were parted. In the gold light that reached the doorway, I could see a small ink stain on the side of her middle finger, green, the color of her daybook.
“No,” I said.
Behind me, the footsteps started again. They passed the doorway. They did not stop. They faded down toward the harbor and the noise of the fish market and were gone.
I didn’t move for ten more seconds. Neither did she.
Then she let go of my jacket, carefully, one finger at a time, and I stepped back into the street, and the air between us was cold.
“Well,” she said. Her voice wasn’t steady. “That was educational.”
“He’s gone. Let’s get you inside.”
We walked the last two turns without talking. Nettle Street was a crooked row of tall, thin houses painted the colors of old boats, blue and yellow and peeling red. She pointed to a blue one. “Third floor.”
I looked up.
Her window was lit.
It was a soft light, a lamp light, moving a little, as if someone had picked up the lamp and was carrying it from one side of the room to the other.
Delilah stopped beside me. I felt her go very still.
“I didn’t leave a light on,” she said. “I never leave a light on.”
Up in the window, the light went out.
