“Well,” he said to Genevieve, when they had departed. “You did very well.”
“Colonel Leys was of great help, Father. I could not have managed without his help.”
“Good fellow, Leys. Pity he’s of such common stock. He could go far, otherwise.”
Which burst her bubble completely and set her sniveling to bed, or so said Delia.
“I am not sniveling!” Genevieve retorted from her dampened pillow. “I am merely very upset! Aufors was wonderful, he helped us immensely, and all Father said was pity he was common. Besides, getting through this dinner has been enough to cry over, if I like.”
“Why, Jenny?” Delia took the girl’s chin in her hand and looked into her eyes. “Are you falling in love with him?”
“Nonsense,” she said, jerking her head away. “I just think it’s a pity he can’t … be respected for what he does. He’s a very good, solid person.”
“I wouldn’t advise your falling in love with him. I think your father has set his eyes higher.”
Now Genevieve wept indeed. “If he’s thinking about my marrying the heir, I’ll die.”
Delia paled, then nodded slowly. “He watched you tonight. Delganor. I was up in the minstrels gallery, peeking. Whenever you weren’t looking, he was watching you.”
“I’drather die.”
“The look on his face wasn’t a lover’s look. Forgive my saying so, Jenny, but it was more the look a dog gives to his dinner. He’s nothing to set your heart thumping. Like a mourner at a feast.”
“It’s worse than that. There’s something . . . something creepy about him. Something aged and malignant and … I don’t know. Like the air down in the cellars at Langmarsh House, when we’ve been away for a while, that kind of musty deadness that takes you by the throat.”
“How old is he?”
“At first I thought middle-aged, then I thought really old, but if he’s thinking of getting an heir on a new wife, he can’t be … that old, can he?”
Delia stroked her charge’s hair, thinking of her own strong, virile John and wondering what it would be like to be so fairy-rose pretty and have all that youth and dewiness given to some nasty old fart who couldn’t even smile.
7: Aufors Leys
Aufors Leys was indeed of common stock, and he claimed that heritage proudly, even in a place like Havenor, where those barely tinged by aristocratic blood spent their lives trading on the stain. Aufors aspired to no such notice. He was a Langmarshian through and through, a younger son who had learned to outwit and eventually outfight a bullying older brother who resented everything about Aufors: his looks, his mind, his sturdy independence. This latter led Aufors to a soldier’s life, both as a way to escape a hateful sibling and as an honorable career for a man of small fortune. He acquitted himself well during small scuffles with the bandit tribes of Dania—in suppressions of intertribal frays in Uplands and in rounding up fanatical Frangians—rising to the rank of captain in the process.
Then had come the P’PoP rebellion, an uprising by the followers of a self-styled “People’s Prince of Potcher,” a charismatic agitator who claimed the present Lord Paramount and the lesser lords were far too old to relate to the present day, that they had outlived their usefulness to their people. The claim resonated well in the ears of the young, who were given to inflammatory rhetoric, which so infuriated the Duke he was impelled into military retaliation. Thereafter matters degenerated into random and sporadic acts of violence followed by increasingly cruel reprisals which spread beyond Potcher to involve the eastern counties of Barfezi.
The uprising might well have spread across the borders into neighboring provinces had not Captain Aufors Leys moved swiftly among towns and villages to negotiate firmly but gently any grievances, fancied or real, against Lome, Earl Vestik-Vanserdel, the legitimate Duke of Barfezi. Each hamlet had been promised a bit of this or a bite of that in return for renewing its oaths of loyalty to the Duke and Duchess, and this diplomatic coup had not escaped the notice of the Marshal, who promoted Aufors Leys to the rank of major.