There was a good deal of sense in what he said, and though Ornery fretted over her shipboard position, the gardener assured her the Hags would set it right. It wouldn’t make sense for men to lose their positions because of some emergency measure. Once everything was back to normal, it would be fixed.
It was weariness as much as anything else that made Ornery agree. They wrote their letters, one to Ornery’s captain, one to Ornery’s sister, and one from Mouche to Madame, then they went out through the dusk into a Timmy house where they curled up on Timmy mats under Timmy blankets. Ornery fell asleep while it was still light outside, though Mouche stayed longer awake, feeling with delicate fingertips the swollen flesh of his face and wondering what was to happen to him now.
In the cities and towns of Newholme, things went from greasy glasses and burned biscuits to filthy streets and food rotting in the fields before some kind of order began to emerge, or, if not order, at least a more amenable disorder. A kind of controlled chaos, as the Hags put it. A godawful mess, according to the Men of Business. Priority was given to food and fuel. Necessary things were getting done. Unnecessary ones, uncritical ones, were long delayed and might, in fact, not get done at all.
The Consort Houses held only staff and boy-children too young to work. There were no supernumeraries to be found anywhere on the streets, and it had even begun to dawn on a good many people that had the Timmys not been so ubiquitous all those generations, likely there would have been no such things as supernumes. The new order required a new economic basis, of course. The Timmys had worked without pay, though they had been provided with housing, clothing, and food. The new workers took up more space, ate more food and required more fabric for clothing, and some of them even demanded wages. The CMOB struggled with these matters while trying to pretend that things had always been this way.
At House Genevois, Madame sent a message to a certain one and awaited a visitation in her parlor, and when he arrived, she tried not to breathe as she told him his wards, his proteges, the Dutter boys, had been pressed into service.
“Who by?” He grunted.
“By Mistress Mantelby,” she replied, keeping her voice carefully neutral.
The man across from her shook. For a moment she thought his spasms came from illness or distress, but then she realized he was laughing.
“Monstrous Marool has them? Oh, does she? What a joke! Oh, that’s a rare one, that is. Well, Madame, all our agreements stand. I won’t hold you responsible for their being pressed into service, not even if they come back in worse condition than when they left.”
“You are kind,” said Madame, with the least possible deference in her nod.
“Not at all,” he said, departing. She sat for several moments after he left, breathing through her mouth, hearing his final words resonate, realizing at last that he had meant them literally. He was not at all kind. He would be incapable of kindness.
At the port outside Sendoph, a tall, blue-skinned protocol officer arrived on the Questioner’s advance cutter to spend half an officious hour with the Men of Business and a day with the Hags, most of it in inspection of the Mantelby mansion. Mouche and Ornery were trimming lawn edges in the garden when they saw the blue one stalk through. The two had taken the gardener’s advice and made themselves useful but inconspicuous, though Mouche did not believe for a moment that this strategy would save him from Bane’s malice. The head gardener told them Bane had been installed as Mistress Mantelby’s toy boy, and Dyre, too, had been taken up to the main house to enjoy himself.
“You’d think they were kin of hers, the way they act,” the old man whispered over the evening meal. “Oh, I hear things, I do. All the servants up there at the house, they’re talking about it. She’s shameless, that one. She’ll cosset him, or them, until they think they shit pure gold. She’ll take them to bed with her, and she’ll give them stuff to make them feel like lords of creation, and they’ll play round games. Then one day they’ll wake up in shackles in her playroom. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times … “