Chapter 259: Meera Joins The Dinner [2]

Esther spat out her water.

The water went everywhere.

Across Esther’s plate, across the tablecloth, across the silver of her knife and fork, in a fine spray that caught the candlelight like a handful of thrown glass. A servant by the wall flinched. Another took half a step forward and then, wisely, stopped.

For a moment, no one at the table moved.

Five faces were turned toward the far end of it. Five expressions, and not one of them was the expression of a person who had expected to hear what they had just heard.

Meera sat in the middle of all of it with her gloved hands folded beneath her chin, smiling.

Hermione moved first.

She snatched her napkin from her lap, leaned across, and pressed it to Esther’s mouth and chin with a briskness that was only a little too rough, as though wiping her sister’s face fast enough might also wipe away the last five seconds.

“I’m sorry,” Esther managed, muffled beneath the linen. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t…it went down the wrong—”

Her face had gone red to the tips of her ears.

She looked past Hermione’s hand at Ulrich, wide-eyed and mortified, and there was such abject apology in her expression that on any other evening he would have told her it did not matter.

He did not tell her.

He was not looking at her.

Ulrich sat with his knife and fork laid down on either side of his plate and his crimson eyes fixed on the far end of the table, and the look he was giving Meera was the one he had given Edmar and Grover in the corridor.

Meera met it with perfect serenity.

At Ulrich’s right, Airam had not moved at all.

Her black eyes rested on Meera with an expression that was not shock. It was too still for shock. It was the look she had worn in the doorway of the dining hall when she first saw who was seated there, but darker now, and colder, and without the courtesy that had kept it hidden through the soup.

Then, slowly, Airam turned her head.

She looked at Ulrich.

She did not say anything. She simply looked at him, and waited, almost threatening him to deny it with a stare.

Ulrich did not deny it.

He did not confirm it either. He said nothing at all. His gaze had not left Meera, and the muscle along his jaw had gone tight, and that was the only answer Airam received.

Her eyes narrowed by the width of a hair.

Below her, Ceres had frozen with her mouth hanging open.

She had asked the question. She had asked it too loudly and too fast and with her fists clenched on the tablecloth, and she had braced herself for some answer, a merchant, an envoy, a distant cousin, anything.

Not that.

Her green eye had gone very round. Her lips parted and stayed parted in shock.

Meera looked from face to face down the length of the table.

Then she raised one eyebrow.

“Oh,” she said.

She touched a gloved finger to her lips as if a thought had only just occurred to her, and giggled.

“Oh, forgive me. How dreadfully that came out. I meant, of course, his mistress of secrets.” She spread her hands. “The one who visits often to discuss matters of great importance. The Count and I are partners, you understand. Very important partners. We discuss a great many things, and our partnership is going to become very fruitful indeed.”

She picked up her wine glass.

“Very fruitful.”

Ulrich’s stare did not soften in the slightest.

She caught herself up with the flimsiest excuse ever. There was no one around who was buying it; if anything, it made their relationship even more suspicious.

“Do these discussions,” Hermione said, “always end late at night?”

Every head at the table turned.

Hermione had straightened in her chair. The napkin still hung from her hand, damp, forgotten. Her ruby eyes were fixed on Meera with a suspicion so pointed that it might have drawn blood.

She remembered.

She remembered perfectly well, just a month ago.

She had watched this woman come out of Ulrich’s room in nothing but a nightgown.

Esther had seen it too, but Esther, being the innocent girl she was, did not connect to the sounds that had come through the wall the night before.

Hermione obviously wasn’t that naive.

She had known then, with a hot and confused certainty that she had never been able to put anywhere, that Meera and Ulrich had slept in the same bed. She had put it away as one of the many things about Ulrich that she did not understand and did not wish to.

But a woman who shared his bed once and left was one thing.

A mistress was something else.

A mistress had a title. A mistress had a place. A mistress came back, and sat at the far end of the table across from him, and called herself his partner, and was going to be very fruitful, and that made her more important than a noblewoman who had once spent a night at the Estate.

More important, and, Hermione thought, watching that serene and smiling face, potentially far more dangerous.

Meera looked at her.

She looked at the flush spreading up Hermione’s neck and the death-grip on the napkin and the ruby eyes that would not look away, and the smile on her face changed, warmed, took on the particular fondness of a cat that has found a very brave mouse.

She found her, in fact, very adorable.

“Late at night?” Meera said. “Oh, yes. Very often. You see, my dear, it is at night that we are most active. The ideas come more freely once the sun is down. Something about the dark, I suppose. One feels less constrained.” She sipped her wine. “And the Count, I must say, is by far the more active of the two of us. He has a great deal of energy for a man who spends his days behind a desk. Some nights I can barely keep pace.”

Hermione’s face went scarlet.

Scarlet, from her collar to her hairline, so fast and so completely that Esther beside her actually leaned away.

Ulrich cut across it before anything else could be said.

“Our discussion has ended,” he said. “Lady Meera will be leaving after dinner.”

Hermione seized on it like a rope.

“Of course she will!” She said, with a harrumph that came out rather louder than she intended, and folded her arms across her chest.

“Oh, it is quite all right,” Meera said pleasantly. “There is no need to hurry on my account. I have already concluded my discussion with the Count. In a private room. Earlier this afternoon.” She smiled at Hermione. “It was very thorough.”

Hermione, who had only just begun to recover her color, lost it all again in the other direction.

She turned her head very slowly and looked at Ulrich.

And the expression on her face was one he had never seen there before, a look of pure, scandalised betrayal, as though a statue she had believed to be marble had turned out to be made of something considerably less dignified.

A pervert, Hermione thought. He was a pervert. Beneath all that ice and all those orders and that blank, bored, unreadable face, Ulrich was a pervert!

In the afternoon. In the afternoon, when the sun was still up, and they were taking lessons floors below?!

Ulrich frowned at her.

Little did he know how Hermione’s image of him had changed quite a bit.

“What kind of discussions?” Airam said.

It was the first thing she had said since the soup.

She had turned her attention back to the far end of the table, and there was nothing of Hermione’s flustered heat in her. Thankfully, she wasn’t aware of what Hermione was aware of.

Meera’s smile did not change.

“Matters of importance, Lady Airam. Matters that cannot be discussed with children.”

Airam’s gaze darkened.

“I am not a child.”

“You are,” Meera said, quite kindly. “And you should be resting, rather than glaring at guests. I am told you have tutors in the morning, you should be preparing already for the next lessons, my dear.”

Airam’s gaze darkened by several shades.

“She is not that much younger than you!” Hermione burst out before Airam could reply with something that could not be taken back. “Neither of us is! You cannot be more than—what, twenty? Twenty-two? That is hardly—”

“Old enough,” Meera said.

She set her glass down.

“Old enough for the Count’s trust, Lady Hermione. And old enough for everything else he gives me.”

And she smiled.

It was a small smile, and a very sly and meaningful one, especially aimed at Hermione since she knew about them.

Hermione turned red for the third time in as many minutes and appeared to give up on ever being any other color.

Esther frowned.

She had been quiet since the water, sitting very small in her chair with her napkin bunched in her lap and her eyes going back and forth between the adults like someone watching a game whose rules had not been explained to her. Now her brow furrowed, and she looked down the table at Meera with honest curiosity.

“What does Lord Ulrich give you?”

“Nothing!” Hermione’s hand shot out and closed over Esther’s wrist. “Nothing, Esther. She means nothing, and you do not want to know, and neither do I, so stop asking.”

“But you asked—”

“I did not!”

Ulrich closed his eyes for a moment.

He opened them again in time to see Ceres.

Ceres had said nothing since her one shouted question. She had sat through all of it, the mistress and the correction and the night discussions and the private room and the everything else, with her mouth slowly closing and her green eye moving from face to face, and now her gaze had come to rest on Meera again.

Not on her face but lower.

On the foam-blue edge of the bodice, and the very considerable amount of Meera that was contained above it, and the way that considerable amount rose and fell when she laughed, and how it had drawn the eye of every servant who had come within three paces of the table.

Ceres looked at it for a long moment.

Then she looked down.

At her own chest. At the flat, modest front of the simple green dress, beneath which there was, at fourteen, very little to speak of at all.

Her shoulders dropped.

“I want to grow up quickly,” she said, quietly, to her plate.

Ulrich winced hearing that mutter right in his ear.

He did not know how the conversation had arrived at this point. He had begun the evening with a clear intention to say nothing and give nothing, and he had held to it, and somehow the dinner had still ended up here, at a fourteen-year-old half-Elf staring mournfully at her own bodice because of a pirate’s décolletage.

He was fairly certain none of this had been in the novel.

At his right, Airam had heard her.

She glanced at Ceres. She glanced at Meera. And then, with no expression on her face whatsoever, Airam lowered her black eyes to her own chest, considered it for a moment, and frowned.