Chapter Twenty Seven

That night, Mira woke suddenly for no discernable reason until she saw a dark figure cross the room at the foot of her bed. It moved towards the window, which had been open to let in a little breeze overnight, and shut the frame just in time for distant thunder to roll through the quiet night. A few seconds later, lightning raced across the sky and illuminated the figure standing in her room with blue-tinged light.

It was Colvin.

“Did I wake you, miss?” he asked softly and came over to her bedside to light the lamp there. The electric light warmed the planes of his face, creating a little pocket of brightness in the otherwise dark room. His hair was down and he was wearing a silk twill dressing gown in ivory and pewter with a quilted red satin collar. It took an effort to drag her gaze back up to his face and recall that these feelings she had weren’t for him. Their relationship was intimate by necessity, but they weren’t lovers. “I heard the storm and came upstairs to close the windows.”

“Mn, that’s fine,” Mira’s voice broke on a yawn. She rolled over on her side to face him. “Have you slept yet?”

Colvin shook his head. “I don’t sleep very often or very long,” he explained. “It’s a side effect of my magic.”

She thought about that. Magical reserves were hard to quantify in any society she’d lived in. Sometimes, when a person was very strong, their mana would start to colonize certain bodily systems and they stopped needing to eat or sleep. It was a rare condition and not especially comfortable.

It felt a little embarrassing, but actually Colvin’s presence in her room didn’t bother her even though she generally did not like people hanging around while she slept. In this, he reminded her once again of her greatest lost love.

Adra used to linger whenever she slept too, but in his case it was because he was born without the need for sleep. He wasn’t human and never had been, even if he made himself human-shaped sometimes. He’d found her mortal need to spend a large part of every day in a voluntary coma deeply unnerving and thought it left her too vulnerable for him to let her do it unsupervised. She’d run into plenty of romantic lead types who did the same over the course of her life, but Adra was the only one who’d ever seemed to have a real reason for doing it.

“My condolences,” Mira said. Adra hadn’t suffered any from not being able to sleep, but Colvin wasn’t Adra. She’d keep reminding herself of that until it stuck. Of all the echoes that accompanied her through life and death, he had never been one of them and she knew she shouldn’t get her hopes up now.

“I’ve always been like this,” Colvin told her as he stood. “I don’t suffer from it. Rest well. The storm will pass quickly.”

Mira’s eyes were already dragging shut as he walked away from her bed. She must have fallen asleep very quickly, because she never even heard the door open or shut when he left.

000

In retrospect, they probably should have given Cook more notice before inviting the Lord Warden of the Central Corridor to the house–even for a casual family breakfast.

When Mira descended the stairs that morning, she found the sideboard groaning under the combined weight of chafing dishes full of smoked whitefish, curried eggs, cured meats, game, devilled kidneys, and both bacon and sausage. That wasn’t even the end of it, there were plates of cut fruit on the table within reach of every diner and a tureen of porridge flecked with dried fruit that had been rehydrated in sweet herbal tea and decorated with edible flowers as a centerpiece. There were even cups of yogurt dotted with lemon curd placed at each place setting.

“…do we usually eat like this at the keep?” Mira asked Vesper, who was selecting a newspaper from the selection laid out on a corner table, as she squinted at the bounty laid before them. Even with the staff’s help, they’d all be eating leftovers for days.

Vesper glanced over and cocked her head. “Madame keeps Town habits at table,” she said, which Mira interpreted to mean ‘yes.’ “Papa generally eats in the barracks, though. I’ll send Miss Park to have a quiet word with Cook and tell her that our usual menu will suffice in the future with a few extras for a man of Papa’s stature.”

As though summoned, Delia appeared in the dining room entrance, “Lord Bertram Coventry has arrived, miss.”

Standing behind her was an older man, perhaps in his mid to late fifties, with short silvery blonde hair worn brushed back from his face and a well-trimmed mustache and beard. He wore a single-breasted sack suit in a pale gray, which might have looked baggy on anyone else but Lord Bertram was a full head taller than Vesper with broad shoulders and a powerful knight’s build that would make Colvin’s slim-fitting suits look like a sausage casing. It was his tired, but kind-looking sea-foam eyes and the look in them when they landed on Mira that opened the last floodgates of Violet’s memories.

She steadied herself against the back of the nearest chair and let the wave crash through her. Just like when she’d met Nanny, a huge portion of Violet’s history slotted into place.

Mira knew from Vesper that they’d all grown up somewhat isolated from one another, but she’d assumed that meant Violet was mainly raised by her nanny and that Vesper had been raised by their father.

The oldest memory she could clearly recall was looking at the man in front of her through the wide slats of–of a crib located in her father’s office. There was more in that vein; of being small and cradled against a broad shoulder as he paced and dictated correspondence to his secretary. She even unlocked more memories of a six year old Vesper, still pokerfaced even at that age, looking over the edge of Violet’s bassinet to let the baby grab her fingertip.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

If Bertram Coventry had married his third wife in hopes of getting a caretaker for his existing children, Violet’s memories told Mira that was not what happened. In fact, Violet’s stepmother only appeared once or twice in her earliest memories. If Violet got sick, the face at her bedside was either Nanny or her father. If she got a bad mark from her tutor, then it was her father that she had to explain herself to.

The Third Madam Coventry was a distant figure holding first a swaddled baby and then a wiggly toddler in those early memories; a stranger who Violet was occasionally obliged to call ‘mother.’