Understand though he did, he couldn’t take time to think about it. Instead, he got on his horse and went back to the Marshal’s house, where he made a stiff-necked admission of his interest in Genevieve and a more or less accurate account of his meeting with the Prince. The Marshal yelled, ranted, threatened, while Aufors said he understood the Marshal’s feelings. The Marshal pronounced himself taken aback, confused, and angry. Aufors apologized again. The matter volleyed several times more, with ebbing impetus, after which the two of them ended up, as the Marshal had suggested the day before, having lunch together.
15: Bessany Blodden
He saidyou could marry her,” said the Marshal, over his soup. “If he didn’t care who married her, why was he thinking of doing it himself?”
“I can’t say, sir.”
“Whatever he was thinking, it doesn’t change what I think! I do care who marries her!”
Aufors took a deep breath. “The Prince said that in view of his permission, you would probably be kind enough not to object.”
The Marshal fumed. They’d gutted him! Usurped his prerogatives! If the Prince permitted it, that meant the Lord Paramount permitted it, and what the Lord Paramount permitted, the Marshal was not accustomed to question.
He snarled, “You’ll be going off to find her, then.”
“Yes, sir. I’m taking tonight’s packet down the Reusel.”
“You think she went to Langmarsh?”
Aufors did not intend that the Duchess be brought into the conversation. He equivocated. “Langmarsh is a good place to start looking.”
“I suppose. I suppose.” The Marshal buttered a bit of bread and chewed it, calming himself. “I don’t understand it. I confess that to you, Aufors. It’s just . . . like this business of being at court! The Lord Paramount asked me to come to court as a kind of balance to some of the new ministers. They seem to be a bit liberal, commonish, you know what I mean.”
“I myself am commonish, sir, so I suppose I do.”
“Didn’t mean it as a slur, Colonel. Simply meant it to express ideas that go against the covenants. Haven was set up as an aristocracy. Our covenants reflected our culture, either as it had once been or as we wished it to be. You other sorts were invited to come along, and the ones who chose to did come along, no slavery or coercion about it. So, now, a few generations later—”
Aufors interrupted, “Well, sir, it’s actually been around twelve hundred years or so. Given as few as three generations a century, that would still amount to thirty-six generations, scarcely a few.”
“The number doesn’t matter. The fact is the people agreed to live under an aristocracy. They agreed to do without high technology, so our culture could be preserved. Our women agreed to a certain role in that culture. Now some commons are agitating to share rights that belong to the nobility—or even the royals!—and the Lord Paramount doesn’t like it.”
Aufors accepted a plate of vegetables and rare beef and picked up knife and fork. “So you were invited to court as a counterbalance: a solid weight of aristocratic disapproval from one with a great reputation as a warrior.”
The Marshal cut a large bite of beef. “Pah, the kind of opposition these people could make doesn’t need a warrior. The least conflict, they’d run screaming. No, these are the kind who talk and talk and talk, scream and scream, march up and down with placards, but they do nothing.”
“What is it these ‘commonish’ people want, Lord Marshal?”
“I asked Prince Thumsort that! He says the men want to marry their daughters to whomever they choose. Well, no one interferes with their doing so now except one time in a hundred! Some particularly pretty girl may fit a baron’s idea of a proper upstairs maid, so her wedding gets delayed a few years and she has a child or two more than she’d thought of, but in the end she goes back to her lover, if he’s still about, richer than when she began. They want freedom to engage in whatever trade they like. Well, mostly they can and do, unless it removes them from traditional work. They want freedom to innovate, so the traditional work will be easier! Innovation leads to technology, we’ve told them that, over and over. Man gets tired digging ditches by hand, and he goes and invents a mechanical digger. Does he care that it’ll destroy our way of life? Not in the deepsea he doesn’t.