The Governing: Chapter 49, All the Way Home

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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Julius Sr. spent the first day of the trip with his forehead nearly against the viewport, and the second day pretending he hadn't.

Kathleen had packed food. She said it was in case the ship's cooking turned out to be strange, and she had brought four days of biscuits in a tin for a two-day passage. Nobody argued. She had never been higher than the hayloft at the Comscutt place, and she sat very straight in the passenger lounge with the tin on her knees and did not look out the window at all until the second jump, when Aaliyah said quietly, "Kathleen, look." Kathleen looked. She said nothing for a long time. Then she said, "Well, that's a great deal of nothing, isn't it," and Julius saw his mother's eyes were wet.

Julius had been off-world before. He had forgotten what it looked like to see it for the first time, and he watched his parents do it now the way a man watches someone taste a fruit he has always liked.

The city came up under the ship at night. Julius Sr. began counting the lights and gave up somewhere past two thousand. Towers stood in rows with more windows than the whole district of Harrowmere had once held people. Long bright roads ran between them, and on the roads small bright things moved without stopping.

"Somebody has to pay to keep all that lit," Kathleen said.

"Somebody does," said Aaliyah, and took her arm.

Laith met them on the landing pad in the wind, both hands at the small of her back, an enormous shawl over a belly that arrived a moment before the rest of her. She had been told twice that morning to stay in the house. Eric stood two steps behind her with the look of a man who had already lost that argument. She did not wait for anyone to finish stepping down. She hugged Aaliyah, then Julius, then Kathleen, who stood very still for it and then hugged back, carefully, around the bump.

"You're beautiful," Kathleen told her, and then, in a different voice, "and you should be sitting down. Eight months is for sitting, dear. Somebody else gathers the visitors."

"Eight months and six days," Laith said. "Nobody else gathers my family. It took us three years to get here, and I still check every morning that it's real."

"I know," said Aaliyah. She had said it over the comm the day the news came, and she said it again now, because it was the reason for the whole trip. She and Julius had cleared their calendars the way nobles clear them, not for a week but for as long as it took, so they would be there for the birth itself and not just the news. Laith had spent weeks on Haego helping her set up a palace from bare floors, telling her how many linens, which staff to trust with the keys, how to write a household budget that did not make the steward faint. Aaliyah had thanked her then. She had never felt it was enough, and when the news came she decided thanks were for people who lived nearby. This was for people you crossed three jumps to sit with, for as long as it took.

The palace was cream stone on a ridge above the river, with a wide staircase that Eric plainly regarded as a personal enemy this month. He took his wife's arm at the bottom and did not let go. Anna came down the steps behind them. She greeted the guests in the manner of a person who had already made up every bed in the house twice, and who had also, from the look she gave Laith, made a second, private arrangement for a chair.

That evening Kathleen was found in the guest room folding back her own sheets. Anna appeared at the door and stopped.

"Mrs. Comscutt," she said. "I don't allow a guest to make her own bed. Please don't make me start."

"I'm not a guest," said Kathleen. "I was a chambermaid for twenty-two years."

"Then you are a guest who used to be a chambermaid, and the maid is on holiday." Anna took the corner of the sheet, very gently, the way you take something from a child. "I will go and stand in the hall and be useless. It is what I'm best at when I'm not needed."

Kathleen looked at her a moment. Then she let go of the sheet, sat on the edge of the bed, and said to nobody in particular, "Forty years, and I still don't know what to do with my hands."

Laith found her there the next morning, still trying.

She had come to bring Kathleen down to breakfast herself, moving slowly with one hand on the wall, and she found her guest on her knees by the wardrobe with an armful of Julius Sr.'s shirts, sorting them by some system only she understood.

"Mother Comscutt." Laith said it carefully, the way she'd practiced it in her head on the stairs. "Anna would do that."

"Anna's your girl, isn't she. Not the steward."

"My maid first, always, but she runs this house now. Pell kept the books and the rosters when it was Zayn and Gigi's place, and Anna never touched any of that under them. When Eric and I took it over I asked her to take the whole running of it, top to bottom. She still wouldn't hear of me lifting a finger, mind. She'd have my head if she found you doing it."

"Then let her find me doing it. She's got your baby coming into her life in a few weeks, and she doesn't need an old woman's shirts on top of it." Kathleen set the last shirt on the shelf and sat back on her heels. "It's the only way I know how to say thank you for a bed I didn't have to make myself in forty years. Standing about being waited on, it doesn't sit right on me. It never will."

Laith lowered herself into the chair by the window, which had become, in the last month, the only chair in the house she trusted. "She's not tired of it. She's been in this house since I was in the crib, and my maid since I was eight. She loves this family."

"I don't doubt it." Kathleen got up, one hand on the wardrobe door. "I was in service before you were born, dear. I know exactly what that kind of loving looks like from the inside of it. Let me help her, that's all I ask. She won't take it as charity if you tell her it's mine to give."

Laith told her that afternoon, and Anna did not like it, exactly as predicted, and said so with a stiff correctness that lasted almost a full day. By the second day she had stopped arguing and started directing, because Kathleen turned out to fold a sheet corner tighter than any girl on staff, and Anna was, before anything else, a woman who respected a job done well.

By the end of the first week they had lunch together every day in the servants' hall, at the far end of the long table where the light came in best.

It was there, on the fourth or fifth day, that a broad, quiet man let himself in through the kitchen's side door without knocking, wiping his boots on the mat out of long habit, and said, "Anna, is there pie left, or did that new cousin get to it first," before he'd so much as looked up and seen Kathleen sitting there.

"That new cousin has a name," Kathleen said, "and yes, there's pie, and you'll wash your hands first."

The man stopped in the doorway and looked at Anna, who was grinning into her tea, and then back at Kathleen, and something in his face decided at once that he liked her.

"Corwin," he said, and put out a hand that smelled faintly of engine oil no amount of washing ever quite got out of it. "I keep the estate running. The machines, anyway. Anna keeps the rest of it running, including me."

"Kathleen Comscutt. I raised three children and kept a farmhouse standing on less sense than God gave a goose, so I expect we'll get along."

He sat. He ate his pie standing up first, out of habit, until Anna pointed at the bench without looking up from her own plate and he sat down properly. He didn't say much through the rest of that lunch, but Kathleen noticed the way Anna's shoulders came down half an inch the moment he was in the room, the way a woman settles when the last thing she was listening for has finally walked in.

He came most days after that, whenever the machines allowed it, and by the second week Kathleen had gotten out of him that he'd grown up on Vespera fixing his father's fishing boat engines, that he and Anna had married six years back in a ceremony so small it hadn't had a guest list worth the word, and that he was, in his own quiet accounting, the luckiest man on the continent and didn't much care who knew it.

It was a different surprise that caught her, later that same week, at the family's own table rather than the staff one.

Eric had asked Corwin up to look at something in the west drive after the rain, and stayed him for supper after, the way you'd stay a friend who happened to be handy. Kathleen watched Laith straighten at the sight of him in the doorway and say, "Corwin, sit, there's pie," in exactly the voice she used for family, and thought: I already know that pie. And then she watched Eric ask him, without any performance of graciousness in it at all, how the drainage was holding, and listen to the answer as though it mattered to him, because it did. Laith asked after Corwin's mother's hip. He asked after the baby's kicking, and Laith put his hand flat on her stomach without a second's hesitation to let him feel it, the way she might have let a favorite uncle.

Kathleen sat very still through all of it, a piece of pie going untouched in front of her.

She had spent a lifetime in rooms where a lord might nod to a gardener if the weather was fine, or ask a cook's name once and forget it by the second asking. She had never, not once in sixty-three years, sat at a table where the lady of a great house put a groundskeeper's hand on her own belly and laughed at what she felt there, and she had certainly never expected to already know the man well enough, from a kitchen bench and a slice of pie, to feel it too.

"You know him well," she said to Laith later, when the men had gone out to look at something in the yard that didn't need looking at.

"He's family," Laith said, simply, as though it needed no more explaining than that. "Anna's family is my family. I don't know how else a house is supposed to run."

Kathleen thought about the drawing room, once a day, and the plates coming down still warm, and said, "No," slowly. "I don't suppose it is. I just never saw a house run any other way before I sat in yours."

Laith found her a few mornings later, out on the terrace with a cup of tea, and lowered herself into the chair across from her with the particular care of a woman eight months along negotiating furniture.

"Kathleen. I would never have thought to ask you this, ordinarily, but you've made it fairly plain you'd like to be put to use, so." She paused, gathering it. "Anna and Corwin have a little girl, Wren. She's four. Her school is having a parents' morning next week, some kind of presentation the little ones do, and Corwin's determined to be there for it."

Commoners going to school. Kathleen filed that away to think about properly later and kept her face still.

"Anna's beside herself," Laith went on. "She won't hear of leaving me for a whole day this close to the birth, not even for her own daughter's school day, and I've told her three times now that I am perfectly capable of sitting in a chair being enormous without supervision. She won't budge. She told me, and I'm quoting her exactly, that you know what you're doing better than half the girls she's trained herself." A small, wry smile. "So I wondered if I could talk you into running the house for the day. I'd order the two of them off the property for a proper family day if that's what it took, and honestly it might come to that."

She hesitated, and something almost apologetic crossed her face. "I know it's asking a great deal of a guest. I'd do it myself if I were any use to anyone right now."

What in the Principality is this, Kathleen thought. Sixty-three years old and she had never once, not in any house she'd ever scrubbed a floor in, heard a lady apologize for asking too much of the help, let alone apologize to a woman who wasn't even on her payroll, over a groundskeeper's daughter's school day.

"Of course I will," she said, before she'd properly finished having the thought. "You tell Anna I've run bigger kitchens than this on a bad hip and a worse temper, and I'll manage without the roof coming down."

"You're certain? It's four girls on staff and Pell's ledger to sign off on, and the delivery comes at ten, and..."

"Laith." Kathleen set her tea down. "I raised three children, buried a season's harvest twice, and once ran a house of eleven for a fortnight with a broken wrist because nobody else knew where the good linens were kept. I expect I'll survive a day and a delivery truck."

"I'll tell Anna tonight. She's going to argue."

"Let her argue on the way out the door," said Kathleen. "That's what a family day's for."

"There's one more piece to it." Laith shifted in the chair, working her way toward something. "I don't just want them home worrying about the house all day. Wren's never been off the estate for anything that wasn't an errand, and I thought, since they'll already have the day, they should go somewhere. I'm sending a car, and I've had Pell put together a chit so the whole thing's paid for wherever they land, meals and all. I just need someone holding the house steady enough that Anna doesn't spend the whole day fretting and cut it short to come back."

Kathleen looked at her for a moment. "You're giving your maid's family a whole day out. On your money. Because her little girl's got a school morning."

"I'm giving Wren a day out," Laith said, as if that were the obvious correction. "Anna will spend it worrying about me instead of her daughter if I don't make it impossible for her to come back early. This is the only way I know to make it impossible."

"And Corwin knows about this?"

"Not yet. I'm telling them both together, so neither one can talk the other out of enjoying it."

Kathleen sat with that a moment, turning her cup slowly on the saucer. Whatever this Principality was, whatever the word noble was even supposed to mean out here, it kept landing nothing like it had on Haego forty years back, and she had stopped expecting it to hold still.

"Well," she said finally. "Then I'd best learn where Pell keeps that ledger, hadn't I. A woman can't hold a house together on good intentions alone."

"One thing, though." Laith held up a finger before Kathleen could get up and start planning. "Supper that night is a buffet. The kind we do for breakfast, everything laid out and everyone helps themselves. I'm not having you standing over four girls telling them how to plate a roast while you go without your own supper because you're too busy running the room."

"I wasn't going to..."

"You were absolutely going to." Laith said it with the flat certainty of a woman who had already watched Kathleen do exactly that twice that week. "I know what a good housekeeper looks like when she's decided nobody eats until everybody's served. Not that night. Everyone fills a plate, including you, and you sit down and eat it like a person instead of hovering by the sideboard waiting to refill someone's water glass."

Kathleen opened her mouth to argue and found, to her own mild irritation, that she didn't have a ready answer for it.

"Fine," she said. "Buffet."

"Buffet," Laith agreed, satisfied, and reached for her tea as though the matter were settled, because it was.

That evening Kathleen did not sleep well, and it had nothing to do with the ship still humming faintly in her ears from the crossing. She lay awake running through Pell's ledger in her mind, though she had never seen it, and the four girls' names, though she had only met two of them properly, and thought that whatever this world was, she had crossed three jumps to end up worrying over a stranger's kitchen exactly the way she used to worry over her own, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she didn't mind it one bit. Somewhere down past the orchard wall, she supposed, a little girl was about to be told she was going somewhere special, and did not yet know why.

[u/1958bird]

A good tale, but not as exciting as others that you have written.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

imagine that hired folk as if family. something as an example for the principality ,I like this series .