A Match for the el Maiens Ch. 16

"You must often have sat with Hanya in the hospital while he recovered from what the war dogs did to him. He was lying there a long time. He does not care for novels so you probably read him the newssheets: articles on trade and political arguments about the democratic rights of the poor. Then the two of you began corresponding with an highly political group: the cloth merchants who have family and trading connections right across the regions. Unlike myself, Hanya knew of your skill with the mathematics and when he was recovered he will have asked your opinion about returns on investments to make with the merchants.

"But you, my dear, have always understood that the merchants are not so interested in profits. They want to create a cross-regional network to manage better the distribution of employment with the ambition of ridding our country of all poverty, in whatever region. This is not something which can be achieved by the aristocracy. In spite of our professed responsibility to the peoples of our regions, we are mainly concerned to maintain our influence with our wealthier Knights and Dames. Some few of us are like el Gaiel van H'las and work hard for the prosperity of their own people, only inspiring the jealousy of others. Most of us are personally ambitious. Even if we are willing to take responsibility for all of our region's people seriously, we can only operate in the limits of our own region whereas what the merchants suggest is a network all across the country. Only they can manage this. They want the King to create a King's Council for Trade and Employment of which the members would be not aristocrats but merchants. Now you and Hanya are scheming to take this highly seditious proposal to the King and to the Privy Council. Well, my Lady?"

"It is so," she said. Her face had turned paper white, she looked at him with such fear in her wide eyes that he thought she might faint. He could not understand what had scared her so badly. He even looked behind him but there was nothing there but the empty doorway with a rack of broadswords by it. "What ... what does't think to it?" she asked in a trembling voice.

"It seems good," he said casually. He was really interested in what was scaring her so much. "Of course there will be trouble with some of the aristocracy over it, including Prianne and most especially van Sietter. That must be thought of. van Sietter will make serious trouble for us if you pursue this ambition but in itself of course the plan is good."

"And so," her face began to regain its colour, she swayed but took a deep breath and continued, "I may go? I may go with Hanya and the merchants to the Privy Council?" She leant pleadingly towards him with her full sweet el Jien mouth quivering so that he was almost distracted into thinking about kissing it. Her blue eyes were suddenly seductively beautiful: completely unveiled and crystal clear staring at him in desperate appeal.

Clair looked at her in utter astonishment. "'May'?" he repeated blankly. "You'll go whatever I say of it, will you not?"

They stared at each other.

"Holy damned Angels of Hell!" he cried angrily. He threw the coffee out of his bowl on the floor in a fit of temper. The droplets bounced on the floor and grounds scattered in the puddle of coffee. He looked at his bowl and then cast it angrily onto the top of the rack of broadswords. "You have believed that I would try to tell you whether you should or should not work with whoever it please me? As if you were my dog on a scent? Bloody Angel of Baya! and this is why there have been all these secretive meetings and bloody strange attempts to interest me in your work on the region. Anna, for sweet Angels' sake! You have never believed me if in my madness I threatened to imprison you here, have you? How could I do it, you would simply walk out the gates with the children. Ladda and Dar, Laran and Tarra, even bloody Tashka would support you! I cannot beat you to my will, starve you or threaten you to it. You would leave me if I tried, you are no el V'lair broodmare chained in Athagine. You have more power over me than I over you, you can stop my allowance if you are not minded to approve any thing I want to do! How am I to force you to work with, or not to work with, merchants?"

Her staring white statuesque face shivered.

"M-mights't break the marriage," she said in a thin desperate voice, "and ... and keep Hanya and Arkyll. Hanya is your son in duty bound, the Church Council would never call him my child. Arkyll is the heir. It is in our marriage settlement papers. Has't the absolute right to send me home to Iarve but to keep Arkyll here."

Clair's grey eyes were like ice. She suddenly felt what a fool she was to have told him. Just as he was about to agree she could do the work she was so passionately concerned in she had let slip this one thing that he could use against her.

Clair reached out and seized her arm in a grip so hard that she gave a squeal of pain. He stared into her face, his face as cold as winter, his eyes like icy flints. "Come with me," he ground out.

"No!" she cried. "Oh no!"

He began to pull on her arm. Arianna pulled back into the armoury. Clair was trying to drag her out the door but she was a big strong woman. She wrenched her arm from his fingers and backed into the armoury, sobbing with terror.

Clair looked at her then at his own hand, a flicker of puzzled anger at himself went quickly through him. He went to the door and shouted: "Tarra Larian! Come here!" in a terrible loud voice. The chief clerk came running through from the offices, Arianna heard his feet clattering down the corridor. "Fetch our marriage settlement!" Clair shouted. "Bring it here at once!"

"B-but Laran has it in the safe, my Lord."

"Then get him to take it out the safe!"

"But ... he is in a meeting with ..."

"Even if he is in a meeting with the Angel of Judgement, you will go in and tell him to open the safe and bring me my marriage settlement papers this minute!" Clair yelled. "I have thought!"

"Oh Clair!" she cried. "Oh Clair! do not break our marriage! Clair, I prithou. Do not take Arkyll and Hanya and send me away! I will do any thing, I will give up the work with the merchants, I will give up the mathematics, I will keep better house for you, oh any thing! I prithou, do not send me away from you back to Iarve!" Huge tears rolled from her blue eyes, she wrung her long fingers passionately together.

"Anna! What in Hell ...?" his head tilted back round towards her, his grey eyes frowning. "I have told you I will never break our marriage and I have said that Arkyll can go with you if you leave me. You have so little trust in me, why do you trust me so little? What am I asking! Of course you do not trust me, but Anna, who do you think I am? Am I truly a person who will insist that you do not do the work that you love? Am I likely to insist that you manage the household when you hate it and are bad at it and I like to do it myself? How could you imagine, from what you know of me, that I will try to tell you how to run or not to run your own life? I, who am dependent on you for my expensive habits of living?

"I will alter our marriage settlement. I will set it out fairly that you have the legal right to share caring for Arkyll if you ever go. I cannot give you any written rights in Hanya's care because he is my lover's child not my child but surely you know enough of me to know that I would not part him from you after all he has suffered. Take the children, take the castle, take the whole bloody region from me if you wish it! What would I care for any of it if you broke our marriage and went back to Iarve?"

She stared at him, still wringing her long fingers together. She shook her head and sobbed desperately. He walked over to her and caught her hands, untwisted her fingers and held them in a gentle grip.

"There," he said in a rough voice but his fingers were gentle. "Now you can take the boys and go to Pava, or back to Iarve or to court. Not to B'dar's laboratory because if you take him to V'ta the el F'laras will try to kill Arkyll but wherever-else you wish. You can finally leave me. Go on, go."

He glared into her sobbing face, the blue eyes running with tears, the cheeks patched with red, her mouth bunched up and the tears rolling down her cheeks and her neck. She would not meet his eyes but she shook her head, letting her fingers lie easy in his. Then she stepped back from him, wiping her nose and eyes on her green woollen sleeve. He offered her his kerchief, she took it and blew her nose, loudly.

"Is that the only reason you have not broken our marriage?" he asked. "You have been afraid I would keep Arkyll from you? Will ... will you break our marriage now?"

"Arkyll loves you," she said in a rough voice blotched with tears. "I cannot take him from you. And ... ar't not so bad a match. Has't been patient with me while I have run the castle accounts very ill. I have been able to do my work on mathematics and with merchants and now says't will not stop me so why would I leave you? Prianne would not let me work with merchants. I cannot work with merchants if I am in the H'velst Mountains."

Clair's eyes remained half-hooded in a frown at this. He sighed and stood back from her. "How could you believe I would interfere in your work?" he asked. "You are as obstinate as a pig, Anna, how could I prevent you doing any work you wanted to do."

She shrugged then said: "Well, but men are like that," in a resentful tone of voice. "They think that women should cook and sew and play with the children. When I grew up, does't think any man encouraged me to sit at my desk in the library doing sums? No, they made me do sewing an hour a day. When they put me up to you for a match, did they say, she will be able to run the finance of your region so well that even the King's man for taxes will praise her? No, they made me embroider you a stupid shirt that you have never even worn."

Clair burst out laughing and raised a sardonic eyebrow. "And I am like that," he said in his warm husky voice. "In spite of the fact that I brought my ... my sister up a soldier, I have encouraged women to write and paint in the face of their families' disapproval, I sponsored Sevianne Inien in her studies at the King's University and I honour the friendship of women like Lady Veeda el Jien van Vail, Lady Hartha el Farin van P'shan and Lady Lallia el Farin. With all this, I am a man and it must be that I think you should manage the cooking and cleaning, although you do it so ill that there is always a tangle of problems to come home to if I have to be away."

"Has't never encouraged me to do other work than the housekeeping," she pointed out sulkily.

"Oho!" he said mockingly. "And it is you who have always shown me how interested you are in any other thing. It has taken you years to admit to me that you are a mathematical mind. Whenever I have come home, you have hidden in the kitchens or the dusting although I knew very well you were doing other work with Laran. It is true, Lady el Jien, that I have not come hunting among the torn quilts to drag you out and force you to admit to your real interests but tell it me, what would you not have done to me if I had tried? You have cut me about enough as it is with that sharp tongue of yours."

"Am I sharp-tongued?" her voice began to rise with temper, her breath came quicker and her full bosom heaved with insulted annoyance. He was delighted to see the colour go rising up her cheeks. He loved to provoke her out of the cold pale proud Lady of the high nobility she tried so hard to be.

"And sharp-witted," he said, "to my great pleasure. What a burden it would be to me, to have some stupid cow to wife who would only give me a 'Yes, my Lord', 'No, my Lord' and totter about between my bed and the kitchens."

She did not know what to say to that. It did not sound like much of a compliment but Clair evidently meant it for one.

"Anna," he went on, "I cannot nurse you in your work, I am not sufficiently intelligent in mathematics although perhaps I can help you with this work with the merchants. You are good at the economics but I am not sure you understand what political problems may be the consequence. But what interests me most is to meet the keen blade of your mind in a fair fight and I will tease you until you unsheathe it. That is what I love of you, that you are a match to my mind. Oh how bored I have been with the silly woman I thought I had married, skulking in the nursery and kitchen!"

She looked quickly at him and said: "Then have at you!" and flipped him in the face with his own kerchief like a glove.

Clair started back, his hand automatically going to the hand-guard of his rapier. Then he let out a ringing clear laugh. Arianna felt a sudden surge of pride, to have made him laugh.

Tarra came in and Clair turned regretfully to him, reaching for the enormous bundle of papers that set out all the details of their legal rights to each other's property and to each other and to their children.

"Angels!" he groaned. "Look at this nonsense! Why can they not just leave us to fight it out fairly!"

He grinned into Arianna's flushed tearstained face. She began to smile back at him and he watched the smile grow on her wide red mouth, irritably conscious of Tarra standing helpfully at his elbow. How much he wanted to simply kiss that wide red mouth as sweet as a bowl of cherries and settle things that way - but it would never be so sweet as the kiss she would give him if she knew she had a fair set of rights in the great mass of documents delineating their marriage settlements.