Chapter 9
Books, most of them from her own Spinner Press, filled Adelina’s bedroom, despite her mother’s best efforts to keep it uncluttered by forbidding any furniture resembling bookshelves.
Instead Adelina improvised wherever she could. The great wardrobe held scholarly treatises, and the little drawers meant for underwear were filled with notebooks and journals. Books lined the windowsills, being natural shelves, and they gathered dust frequently, since the servants found them troublesome to take care of. Indeed, the whole room presented a maze of obstacles to the servants, from the desk whose order must be preserved at all costs, to the garments whose pockets were stuffed with notes yet to be sorted and directed to the proper place, to the layer of books, her shadow wife, that accompanied her to bed each night.
She did not concern herself much with clothes. She embraced the idea of a Scholar’s robes, actually, adapting them to a more Merchantly presentation that created fewer difficulties around large machinery (like presses) as well as being easier to clean. She had also added a neat little belt of pockets, each with paper or pencil or other writing implements, and a handy dictionary of trading terms, and a penknife, and other useful appurtenances. She had always hoped to set some sort of style, in her secret dreams, but this one had never caught on.
Her windows faced west, over the garden that was her grandfather’s pride and joy, and which Emiliana kept up for the sake of appearances more than anything else. The only people making much use of the gardens, actually, were the servants. The windows were curtained with fresh silk in the Nettlepurse colors, an expensive and impractical luxury which Emiliana offset by donating the green and vermillion silk to the poor each season.
The carpet underfoot was an indulgence, a present from her seventeenth birthday, the same year the picture of her on the wall was painted. The silk carpet, imported from the Rose Kingdom, was woven in deep purples and blues and greens. Everyone that saw it coveted it, but very few had ever seen it.
Bella alone appreciated rather than envied. Lying on Adelina’s bed on her belly, form draped to touch the floor, she loved to pet the thick carpet like a cat, running her fingers along the soft piles of thread.
“It’s colored like the inside of your mind,” she told Adelina.
Adelina, three weeks into the wonder of this new relationship at the time, still had trouble sometimes addressing her lover, for all the awe that choked her. At that moment, she’d had one of those odd, doubled moments that had plagued her ever since she’d become a writer, as though she were hovering somewhere a few feet behind herself, watching the room, narrating it as things happened.
Bella Kanto, premier Gladiator of Tabat, turned to her lover, and said, It’s colored like the inside of your mind. Reaching forward, she laced her fingers through Adelina’s hair and pulled her forward for a long kiss.
It was simultaneously delightful, this internal narration of the current of her life, and irritating, like a song’s refrain that couldn’t be chased out of her head and kept popping up at odd moments.
“What do you mean?” she murmured against Bella’s lips, coaxing further compliment out of her lover.
Bella eased away. A smile danced on her lips as she regarded Adelina, almost as though she could read the other’s mind like a book, the book about Bella that Adelina was writing … her mind slid suddenly into an avalanche of realization, of possibility. She sorted through some of the implications, all the while waiting for Bella to elaborate.
“There are shells like this,” Bella said finally. “On the outside like any other shell—no imputing your appearance, only saying that you are a woman, like any other woman—but when you crack them open, there are colors inside that you see nowhere else, blues and greens mingled, shading into and out of each other. That is what your mind is like, Adelina. There is no one in the world that thinks like you.”
It swept her breath away, to have Bella Kanto saying such a thing to her, gazing into her eyes, their fingers intertwined, just as their bodies had so recently been, just as they would be again soon, judging from the look in Bella’s eyes and the way the pad of her thumb was smoothing itself back and forth, back and forth, against the tender skin of Adelina’s inner wrist, just where the pulse beat, quickening at the touch so Bella smiled and brought the wrist to her lips, letting the pulse flutter against them in a kiss that made Adelina want to melt, to become a pool of blue and purple and green desire surrounding Bella Kanto, containing and possessing her.
But no one can possess Bella Kanto. That was what she had been forced to realize, and part of coming to terms with that realization was knowing that it was that very quality that made one want to possess her. Bella was her own person, always would be, and moments of attention from her remained more enticing than devotion from anyone else.
Or at least—until now.
She should take a lover; it was long past time for her to do something like that—had it actually been two years since she’d scratched that particular itch?—but that took time and effort.
Bella had turned out to be so much more tractable as a character than in real life. Sometimes Adelina delighted in making her do things that the real Bella never would have done, things wildly romantic and much more dramatic than Bella, who was pragmatic to the core, would have ever undertaken.
That was the other thing about Bella that was endearing. There was a sense about her that she held the Bella identity up as a mask, interposed between herself and everyone else—and that might have been intolerable or uncanny—but at the same time she was laughing with you at the absurdity of it all, at the larger-than-life qualities about herself, a quiet “I know, right?” whispered in your ear, and your ear alone.
Pragmatic or not, Bella could make you feel like you were her special friend, someone worthy of all that grandeur and heroism and pageantry.
Which is what makes being cast out all the harder, when she does it.
The nightmare that visited Adelina the most involved her mother, Emiliana, discovering the over a decade-long deception Adelina had practiced in the form of the title Merchant Scholar.
Emiliana had been reluctant to let her only child move from the path of full Merchant, but Adelina had promised she could fulfill the roles of both Merchant and Scholar well. She had loved history in school, and she wanted to research and write about Tabat, she’d said, shrewdly adding that she could begin with their own family—when was the last time they’d had anyone write them up, for instance?
But she’d founded Spinner Press in secret, at first just to publish her instructional pamphlets, because she’d loved sharing the tidbits of Tabatian history she gathered in her studies. Later, she’d started publishing penny-wides and started writing them about Bella.
Truth be told, by now she should have been called Scholar Publisher, if not simply Publisher, but Emiliana considered Publishers, who made most of their money off the penny-wides and newssheets, disgraceful scandalmongers. Spinner Press, whose owner was never seen or interviewed, was now one of the largest in the city, and Adelina secretly ran it from the narrow office at their building where she wrote her histories.
As far as her mother knew, Adelina made enough income to continue her scholarly work by turning it to Spinner Press’s advantage, advising them on what manuscripts to buy and how to edit and present them.
In truth, the line of “Adelina’s books” was only a small effort, a quarterly series of monographs, each examining a specific aspect of the city and its history. She hoped that someday they could be collected and annotated into a definitive overall history, the sort of work people mentioned as a matter of course, like Sweetgrasstle’s History of the Sorcerer Wars or Feathercup’s Rise of the Pot and Kettle King. Only a few people had tried to document the city, and no one in her century had tried to account for the recent changes, those of the last century, such as the rise in power of the Moon Temples, or commerce opening with the Rose Kingdom. There were so many interesting things about Tabat, and the most interesting thing was how they were all connected down to the smallest details, such as the orange paper that marked the cheapest grade of publication, so distinct to this city.
She did do histories, from time to time, with the graceful, clear prose that had always come easily to her. From the history of the Nettlepurses, she went on to a monograph on the significance of the cockades associated with each House (a fashion now fallen out of favor with the elections). Currently, she was working on a history of the early expeditions, the ones which had been sent out into utterly unknown lands by the first and second Dukes, in the spare time she had far too little of.
It ate at her that she could have done more with those histories, delved deeper, gotten to the heart of things, if only she’d had the time and passion to give them. She was, she freely admitted (although not to her mother), a second-rate historian at best, relying on sensational stories to carry her when she could.
But she was an excellent Publisher.
Her Secretary knew the secret and constantly urged Adelina to make the change of title public. Serafina yearned to be the head Secretary, over all the others at the Press. Only a wage three times what she would have normally commanded reconciled her to the office beside Adelina’s, where she went over much of the Press’s paperwork while pretending to correct historical manuscripts that were never published.
In the nightmare, Adelina and her mother were walking along Spray Road in the late Summer, when heat shrouded Tabat and the nights were shortest. They were always en route to some school performance of Adelina’s that she’d forgotten about, and that she was unprepared for. She’d be trying to compose her missing manuscript in her head.
Coming up the street, a Unicorn-drawn carriage, the Duke’ device on its side, rumbling towards them. Adelina would know what was going to happen then. Dread settled around her, the sultry air making everything molasses slow …
… a Ducal messenger handing her a ribbon for her work as Publisher and with it the scroll changing her title, an event so rare that it would be cried aloud in the Halls of Justice when summarizing the day.
Moving with the dream’s slowness, Adelina would try to angle her body so her mother couldn’t see, trying to distract her and tilt the scroll away, but, inexorable as a fabled iceberg, Emiliana advanced, asked, and finally grasped the dimensions of the ruse that had been played on her all these years and then …
… her mother would frown, Adelina the size of a six-year-old, facing that icy fury, the slaps that had stung so, recoiling, sobbing, trying to get away from this thing that had been Emiliana and now was rage incarnate, screaming through the black void of her tight-lipped mouth …
She woke, flailing, sheets and blanket tangled, breathing hard and shivering, cold despite the thick wool blankets around her.
Some remnant of that terror made her flinch when Emiliana spoke from beside her in the hallway.
“Where are you going this morning?”
“To write in my office, as I do fourteen days of every fifteen,” Adelina said, surprised, as she pulled on her respectable greatcoat: economical thick blue wool with buttons embossed with caravels.
“You promised you would help me write up the candidates for the Merchants’ Party.”
“We had not specified a time for that, I thought.” Adelina wrapped her scarf around her neck and considered the mirror before adjusting its knot. “Could I not help you with it this evening, after dinner?”
Despite her courteous tone, her nerves jangled with possible confrontation. She had appointments this afternoon to speak with two Explorers interested in publishing their memoirs with Spinner. In the guise of checking their accuracy, she’d talk with them and size up whether the Press wanted to pursue them. But more than that, this morning held Mathu Reinart, yet again.
“Adelina, would you consider running for office?” Emiliana said. Her tone was mild. “Some minor role, perhaps, where you might represent our family.”
The notion appalled Adelina. It would cut into time needed for the Press, time already hard to come by. “Our family, or our interests? The notion doesn’t appeal to me.”
“A pity. You would be ideal. Perhaps you might consider it more fully and we can discuss it as we go through the candidate notes.”
“I will not change my mind,” Adelina said, pulling on her gloves, thin fur-lined blue leather with buttons matching the great coat, each round as a coin, reminding her that Emiliana had paid for them since, she observed, a Scholar’s wages couldn’t be that high.
“We’ll speak tonight,” Emiliana replied.
Adelina slipped out the door without speaking further.
“Shall I have a carriage brought round?” the footman said, blinking in reproach at her, even though he knew full well where she was going, and that she’d walk, rather than take a carriage and the long slanting way that it required.
Biting back a retort, she stalked down the pathway, full of irritation and agitated thoughts, feeling his eyes on her back.
She’d always known it would come to this eventually, from the day she’d started the Press with the profits of the penny-wides she’d been so good at writing under a pseudonym. Emiliana had been waiting for her to gain prestige through her scholarly work. That hadn’t happened and this was only the first salvo, signaling Emiliana’s loss of patience and her intention to make something of her daughter, whether that daughter liked it or not.
Snow drip from the overarching trees along the walk touched her hair. In the distance, the second morning bell sounded. She needed to hurry.
What to do, what to do, her footsteps said. What to do? Was there any way she could balance political life with running the Press? Currently they put out three penny-wides a week—including Bella Kanto’s adventures, the most popular penny-wide in the city—plus two memoirs, and the pamphlet series every purple month. She’d been planning to add a series of guides to the various political parties.
Balance that and all the juggling and talking and scheduling and work it required against the demands of politicking for position? The races would be hot and heavy. Emiliana would expect her to work hard at winning. Emiliana would expect her to win, particularly with Emiliana guiding her every step of the way.
No, Adelina would have to come clean and face the storm.
She glanced leftward as she hurried along the street. The canal fence’s fretwork divided the distant sea into tiles of blue. Maybe I could just take a ship and escape, start a new Press in the Southern Isles.
No. Emiliana would find her, no matter how far she went. Emiliana was like a force of nature.
Sooner or later, she will have to be reckoned with.