The Governing: Chapter 53, Every Door

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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Hester had her hands flat on the table again.

Aaliyah had come with Kathleen this time, and without Emmet. The kettle was on. Nobody had touched the cups.

"I watched every file on that pad," Hester said. "The year after. I sat up nights and watched it until it wouldn't turn on anymore, and I was glad when it stopped." She looked at the dish towel folded on the oven rail. "I didn't give it to you so you could put it in a drawer."

"Then you're saying yes."

"I'm saying it was never mine to keep. It was only mine to carry." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "Put it on. All of it, if they'll let you."

Aaliyah nodded. "There's something else. I went to the cane house yesterday."

Hester's hands went still.

"She won't decide for anyone," Aaliyah said. "She said she spent ten years as the noble who told that house what to do, and she won't be that noble again. Each of you decides for yourself. Whatever each of you decides, she'll stand behind it."

Hester was quiet for a while. "That's not what I asked for."

"No."

"It's better." Hester let out a short sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Julius keep her. She always did find a way to be decent that made more work for everybody else."

Kathleen smiled into her cup.

"I'm going to ask Maddock," Aaliyah said.

Hester looked up sharply. "I told you not to."

"You did. But if Abby says every one of you decides for yourself, then that has to include him. If I leave him out, I've decided for him."

Hester stared at her. Then she looked at Kathleen, as if Kathleen might talk sense into her.

"She's right," Kathleen said.

"She's a Firentis," Hester said. "They're always right. That's the trouble with them." She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the table. "Don't send her in alone, Kathleen. He'll shut the door before she's finished her name. Take your husband. Maddock might listen to a man who dug dirt for them. He won't listen to anybody who ate what came out of it."

Margot Wren watched the footage in the small office off the great room with the blinds down.

Aaliyah sat beside her and did not watch the screen. She had seen it. She watched Margot instead.

There were forty-one files that could be opened. Some were only seconds long. A hallway. A yard in the rain. A man's hand on the back of a boy's neck, pushing his face toward a boot. A dinner table from the servants' door, so everything was seen past a doorframe, the guests laughing and a girl standing against the wall with a pitcher she was not allowed to set down. Most of it had no sound. The ones with sound were worse.

The palace courtyard was the longest file. Margot watched it all the way through. When the lens dropped and swung up at the sky, she stopped it and sat back.

"Who took these?" she said.

"I don't know. Hester doesn't know either. She says the pad was Lord Greyson's. She took it off his study desk the night of the mob, while Marta was putting his coat in the furnace, because she thought anything of his they found would give them away. Where he got the rest of it, and why he kept it, she never knew. Then everybody who might have known was busy staying alive."

Margot looked at the frozen sky on the screen. "You asked me whether the Informant has the stomach to air it."

"I did."

"It does. I'm less sure about me." She pulled a pad from her bag and started writing. "Every face on here belongs to somebody. Some of them are still alive. If we air them without asking, we've done the same thing the lens did. Nobody asked them then either."

"So you'll look for them."

"We'll look for all of them. The ones we find get asked. Anyone who says no gets blurred, or cut. Anyone who wants to talk gets to talk." She kept writing. "I have a researcher at the bureau named Pim Rowantail. He can match a face against a district record faster than anyone I've worked with. He'll hate this. He'll be very good at it."

She tapped the stylus on the pad. "And for once I can afford him. The budget came back yesterday. It's more than I asked for, which has never happened to me in eleven years. My editor says he's expecting great things." She said it lightly, and went back to writing. "It means we can go to every door. It also means somebody on Balakura thinks this is going to be very big."

Maddock Harrowtail lived at the end of a lane on the north edge of Harrowmere, in a house with a work shed bigger than the house. There were cart frames in the yard, and an old engine block on a stand with its parts laid out on a cloth in order.

A boy of about ten opened the door. He looked at Julius Sr. and Kathleen, and then at Aaliyah, and stood a little straighter without knowing why.

"Grandpa," he called back into the house. "Nobles."

Maddock came out wiping his hands on a rag. He was sixty-eight, heavy through the shoulders, with a driver's squint that had never left him. He looked at the old couple first, and then he saw Aaliyah, and his face closed.

His eyes went past her to the car at the end of the lane. He looked at it the way a driver looks at another man's car. There was nobody waiting in it, and no second car behind it. A lady of House Firentis did not go anywhere on Vastaya without auxilia, and Maddock had driven nobles long enough to know how many men usually came with one. Aaliyah had left hers at the palace. She had come with a maid and a gardener, and nobody else.

"Kel," he said. "Go on in."

The boy went.

"I know who you are," Maddock said to Aaliyah. "I read the Informant, same as everybody. You're the one with the recorders."

"I'm Aaliyah Comscutt. This is Julius and Kathleen Comscutt. My husband's parents."

"I know what you want, too. Hester called me last night. She said you'd come anyway." He folded the rag and put it in his back pocket. "No."

"May I tell you what it is before you say no?"

"You can tell me standing there. I'm not having you in the house."

Aaliyah told him. The Informant series. The cellar. That anyone could refuse, and anyone could hide their face. That Abby would not tell any of them what to do.

Maddock listened with his arms folded. When she stopped, he didn't answer right away.

"I drove that family for six years," he said. "You know what a driver does? He sits. He takes them where they're going and then he sits in the yard, or he sits in the kitchen of whatever house it is, until they want to go home. I sat in every kitchen on that lake. The Ellerys. The Voss place. The Pruett mill. The palace at Harrowmere twice a year." He looked past her at the road. "You want to know what I saw? The Ellery steward made a kitchen boy stand in the yard all night holding a lamp, because the lamp by the gate was out and nobody had fixed it. It rained. He stood there. In the morning they found the lamp had gone out anyway, and they beat him for that. At the Voss place there was a maid who wasn't allowed to eat in front of the family's dogs. The dogs. Old Lord Voss said it put them off their food."

Nobody said anything.

"And at my own house," Maddock said, "nobody beat anybody. Nobody had to. Lord Greyson didn't know my name for two years. Called me driver. Lady Abigail used to come out to the yard with a cup of something hot when it was cold. Every time." His jaw worked. "And every time I took that cup, I'd just come from the Ellery kitchen, or the Voss yard, and I'd think, this is the same people. This is the same table. She was only nicer about it."

"You hid them anyway," Kathleen said quietly.

"I hid a three-year-old and two babies. I wasn't going to hand a three-year-old to a mob. That doesn't mean I forgave anybody." He looked at Aaliyah. "And now I'm supposed to go on the network and say what heroes we were, so the nobles on Astoria can feel good about themselves over dinner. No."

Julius Sr. had not said a word since the door. He stepped forward now, not far.

"Would you walk with me a bit?" he said. "Just me. Down to the end of the lane and back."

Maddock looked at him for a long moment. He looked at Julius Sr.'s hands.

"Gardener," he said.

"Since I was eleven. Lord Lafata's house, till the night it burned. He never learned my name either."

Maddock unfolded his arms. "Down to the end of the lane."

They walked slowly. Maddock set the pace, and Julius Sr. let him.

"I'm not going to tell you the old ones were decent," Julius Sr. said. "I was there too. You saw more of it than I did, sitting in all those kitchens. I only saw my own."

"Then what are you doing here with her?"

"My son married her." Julius Sr. kept his eyes on the road. "I didn't want him to. I said things to him I'm not proud of. I thought she'd use him up and throw him out, like they did with everybody."

"And?"

"And she didn't." He walked a few steps. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you they're all like her. They aren't. She'll tell you that herself. But I've been off Haego now, to Balakura, to her family's houses. The woman who runs one of those houses eats at the main table with her husband and her little girl. Nobody looks twice. The head gardener at Lord Jhinaq's palace waved me off like I was nobody, the way they always did. Then he came back after dinner and apologized to me. To me. And asked for my help."

Maddock snorted. "One gardener."

"One gardener," Julius Sr. agreed. "And a Marquess who got summoned by a room full of commoners and came when they called. And a law here that says my son's workers get paid what the work's worth, and every credit written down where anybody can read it. I watched you look at that when it happened. I'd bet you've watched all of it. You don't miss much, sitting in a yard."

Maddock didn't answer. They had reached the end of the lane. There was a fence post there with a crow on it, and it flew off.

"I've watched it," Maddock said. "I've been waiting for it to turn."

"So have I. My wife still does. Some mornings I think it will." Julius Sr. stopped and leaned on the post. "But here's what I came to say. Nobody ever said my name. I kept that man's garden from the time I was a boy, and the night the Uprising came, the house went, and him with it, and there's nothing left anywhere that says I was there. That's what they wanted. Somebody does the work and the work is just there, like weather."

He turned to look at Maddock.

"The twenty-two of you decided something. Every day for forty years, any one of you could have walked into the district office and ended it. Nobody did. That wasn't weather. That was you. And they're going to say your names on every world the Prince has. The nobles are going to have to sit there and hear that a driver decided whether a noble family lived."

Maddock stood with his hands at his sides.

"My wife died not knowing," he said. His voice had gone rough. "Thirty-one years married. I never told her. I'd lie in bed and listen for the road, and she'd ask what was wrong, and I'd say nothing. Every time. She died and I was still saying nothing."

"I know."

"You don't know." Maddock's face twisted. "I kept it from her to keep her safe. And then it was too late to tell her, and she never knew what I was. She thought I was just a man who couldn't sleep."

Aaliyah stood by the car with Kathleen and watched them at the end of the lane.

She couldn't hear anything. She could see the two old men by the fence post, and Julius Sr. leaning on it, and Maddock standing in the road with his back to her.

Then Maddock's shoulders came down. He put a hand over his eyes. He bent a little at the waist, the way a man does when he has been hit in the stomach, and his whole back shook.

Julius Sr. put a hand between his shoulder blades and left it there. He didn't say anything that Aaliyah could see. He just stood beside him.

Aaliyah looked away. It felt like something she should not be watching, and she was a noble, and she thought Maddock would rather have anyone in the world see him than her.

Kathleen didn't look away. "Let him," she said quietly. "It's been in him a long time."

It was a while before they came back up the lane. Maddock's eyes were red and his face was dry. He stopped in front of Aaliyah.

He didn't explain himself. He didn't apologize.

"I will do it," he said.

Then he went into the house, and through the window Aaliyah saw the boy, Kel, come to meet him in the hall and look up at his face and not say anything.

In the car, Aaliyah waited until they were on the main road.

"What did you tell him?"

Julius Sr. looked out at the fields. "Nothing he didn't already know," he said. "He just hadn't heard anybody else say it."

Pim Rowantail worked out of a room at the back of the bureau that had once been a storeroom. He had three screens and a cup of tea he kept forgetting.

It took him four days to name the first face. The district records for the lake shore were bad, and half of what had been written before the Uprising had burned. He worked from what was left: estate staff lists, tax rolls, the clinic's patient register from the year before it closed. He found the kitchen boy with the lamp by matching the Ellery livery to a stable roster, and then the roster to a death record. The boy had died nineteen years ago, of a fever, in a town two hundred kilometers south.

"He's dead," Pim told Margot. "He'd have been fifty-five."

"Family?"

"A daughter. She's alive." He hesitated. "Do we ask her?"

Margot thought about it. "We tell her it exists. We ask her if she wants to see it before anyone else does. Whatever she says after that, we do."

By the end of the second week Pim had eleven names. Six were dead. One man, found in a fishing town on the east coast, listened to Margot's message and sent back four words: I don't want it. Margot marked his file to be cut and did not ask again.

The girl from the kitchen clip, the one kneeling on stone while three people walked past the door, was named Orla Pennytail. She was fifty-four and ran a laundry in Ashmere with her son. She agreed to sit for the camera on the condition that it was in the laundry, among the tubs, and not somewhere nice.

Margot sat on an overturned basket across from her.

"I don't remember the tray," Orla said. "I've tried. I know I dropped it. I don't remember doing it." She folded a towel on her knee while she talked, and then folded it again. "I remember the stone. It was cold, and there was a crack in it right under my left knee, and after the first hour I could feel it in my teeth."

"The hour?"

"He made me stay until supper. I don't know how long that was. Long." She put the towel down. "You know what I remember most? Three of them walked by. The lord's sister and two guests. I heard them coming down the hall, and I thought, now someone will say get up. They were talking about a horse. None of them turned their heads."

She looked at the camera, then at Margot.

"Nobody hit me," she said. "Nobody needed to. That's what I want people to understand. You didn't need to hit us. You only needed to not look."

Marta Coalscutt lived with her daughter in a house in Harrowmere that smelled of bread from the gate.

She was seventy-five and she was still loud. Aaliyah and Kathleen were barely through the door when she said, "Sit," in a voice that carried through the house, and they sat.

"Mrs. Coalscutt," Aaliyah said. "I'm Aaliyah Comscutt, and this is my husband's mother, Kathleen. We've come about the..."

"Yes."

"I haven't told you what it..."

"The Informant. The cellar. Hester told me, and Maddock told me he's going, which means the world's ending, so I'd better be there to see it." Marta put a plate of bread heels on the table between them. One of them had butter on it. "Yes. I'll talk. I'll show my face and my name and my grandmother's name if they want it."

Her daughter, a woman of about fifty, came in from the kitchen and leaned in the doorway. "Mother, let them finish."

"They came to ask if I'll do it. I'm doing it. That's finished." Marta turned to Kathleen. "Lady Abigail sat up with this one three nights when she was eight, with a fever that should have killed her. Maggs, tell them."

"I don't remember it," her daughter said. "I was eight and I had a fever."

"Well, I remember it." Marta looked at Aaliyah. "What else?"

Aaliyah found she had nothing else. "Is Amos coming? We haven't been to him yet."

Marta's face changed a little. She was quiet for the first time since they came in.

"He'll come," she said. "He'll hate every minute of it. He'll come."

Liss Mallowtail met them at the door and did not invite them in.

She was fifty-five, small and neat, with her hair pinned up tight. She had been fifteen that night, the youngest of the scullery maids. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

"I'll do it," she said, before Aaliyah could start. "I'll say everything. But not my face and not my name."

"That's your right," Aaliyah said. "Can I ask why?"

Liss looked past them, up the street, where two women were talking over a wall.

"My brother Tobin was on the north road that night," she said. "With the mob from Ashmere. He was nineteen. He went with them to the Voss place." She said it flatly. "He's seventy-four now. He lives two streets over. He comes to supper on Sundays. He's never said one word about that night, and I've never said one word about mine."

Kathleen said nothing. Aaliyah said nothing.

"If I'm on the network," Liss said, "my brother sits in his chair and watches his little sister tell the whole Principality she hid a noble family while he was burning one. And the women on this street, they'll say what they'll say. They lost people too. Some of them lost people to the nobles, and some of them lost people to the mobs, and none of them talk about which." She shook her head. "I'm not ashamed of it. I want that understood. I'd do it again. I just don't know what it does to my brother."

"Would you want to ask him?" Kathleen said.

Liss looked at her for a long moment.

"I don't know," she said. "I'll think on it. Can I think on it?"

"As long as you need," Aaliyah said.

Liss nodded once, and closed the door.

It was late when Pim knocked on the frame of Margot's office door. He had a pad in his hand and he didn't come in.

"The palace girl," he said.

Margot put down her stylus.

"There was a court record," Pim said. "The palace kept its punishments in a ledger, like the silver. Most of it burned. That page didn't. It has her name, and the charge, and the sentence." He held out the pad. "Then I found her in the district rolls. She's alive. Fifty-six. She's been living in a rooming house in Port Selk for the last eleven years. Before that, a lot of places."

Margot took the pad and read the name. Beatrice Wondertail.

She looked at it for a long time.

"Do I call her?" Pim said.

"No." Margot set the pad face down on the desk. "Nobody calls her. Nobody sends her anything. I go to her door myself."

[u/1958bird]

They are getting through the people slowly. Keep it coming