The head maid's name was Orreth, and she had been managing the Wadee household's domestic staff for nineteen years with the comprehensive, impersonal efficiency of a woman who has long since resolved the question of whether she likes people in favor of the more practically useful question of whether they are performing their function.
She was at the linens press when Selfi found her.
Selfi had been waiting for the right moment for three days — waiting for the particular combination of Orreth alone, Orreth occupied with something that occupied her hands but not her full attention, and Orreth in the short stretch of the afternoon that was, historically, the window in which she was most likely to give a conversation the space it needed.
She had arrived with the folded sheets she had been asked to return to the press, which gave her a reason to be there that was not the real reason.
"Orreth."
The head maid looked up.
"The sheets from the upper east corridor," Selfi said, setting them on the shelf.
"Good." Orreth noted it with the quick efficiency that was the fundamental mode of her existence and returned to the inventory she was conducting.
Selfi stood for a moment.
"I wanted to ask," she said, "about the reassignment."
Orreth did not look up.
"Which reassignment?"
"Mine." Selfi kept her voice even. She had practiced this — the tone that was not complaint, not challenge, only inquiry, the tone that gave Orreth the least reason to close down the conversation before it had been had. "Back to the former consort's attendance."
Orreth set her inventory pen down.
She turned and looked at Selfi with the expression she used when she was deciding something — not about the question, about the person asking it.
"The Duke requested it," she said.
"I know. I'm asking—" Selfi stopped. Rearranged. "Why me specifically. There are other attendants who are—"
"Who are what?" Not a question. A prompt.
"More — suited. To the position. Given—" she stopped again.
"Given," Orreth said, and her voice had taken on the specific flatness it got when she was making a point she had made before and did not enjoy making again, "that you have more experience with the former consort's household requirements than anyone currently on staff except Sera. Your eight years of service in this household, including three years specifically in the former consort's attendance, make you the most qualified candidate for this reassignment." A pause. "This is not a complicated question, Selfi."
Selfi looked at the linens on the shelf.
"He's a traitor," she whsipered.
"He's the Duke's consort," Orreth spoke sternly, and her voice had the quality of a door closing, cleanly and completely. "Under the Duke's authority and by the king's explicit instruction. That is his current status. His previous designation was a household matter and is no longer operative. Like others, you too shall respect him." She picked up her pen. "Is there anything else?"
Selfi looked at her for a moment.
"No," she said.
"Then the sheets in the south corridor need turning. Today, if possible."
Selfi left.
— — —
She was not satisfied.
This was the persistent condition of her life in the Wadee household, and had been for eight years — a fundamental insufficiency that lived in the space between what she had and what she wanted, between where she was and where some part of her had always believed she should be.
She was twenty-two years old.
She had been twenty-two years old for three months, which meant she was at the age that she had told herself, since she was fourteen, would be the age by which things would have changed. At fourteen, twenty-two had seemed like a reasonable deadline for the world to arrange itself into the configuration she required. At twenty-two, she was finding the deadline harder to extend than she had expected.
The configuration she required had, at its center, Gorgina Wadee.
She had been in love with the Duke — she used this word for it even though it was more complicated than the word suggested and less dignified than love was supposed to be — since her second year in the household, when she had been sixteen and Gorgina had been twenty-six and had walked through the main hall in the blue military coat that she sometimes wore for estate business, the one with the silver buttons and the severe, straight cut that required a particular combination of height and bearing to carry, and Gorgina had been carrying it with the absolute, unself-conscious authority of someone who has never had to consider whether they are impressive, they simply are.
Selfi had stopped walking.
She had stood in the main hall doorway and looked and felt something happen in her chest that was inconvenient and specific and entirely unwelcome and which had, in the six years since, shown no sign of diminishing.
She was not a romantic person, generally. She was practical, ambitious in the particular domestic way, oriented toward outcomes rather than feelings. She had entered service at fourteen with clear goals: advancement through competence, security through position, the specific independence that came from being indispensable to a powerful household. She had not planned on feelings.
The feelings, characteristically, had not asked her permission.
Gorgina Wadee was thirty-two years old and the Duke of Zenos and constitutionally incapable of perceiving Selfi as anything other than a competent component of her domestic staff, and Selfi had known this with complete clarity for six years and had found, across six years, that clarity was entirely ineffective as a treatment for the condition.
She had tried, once, to make a move.
This was the memory she carried with the most consistent discomfort — three years ago, when she had been assigned to Gorgina's personal attendance during a period when the Duke's usual attendant had been ill, and had had three days of unusual proximity to the woman, three days of the blue coat and the silver buttons and the particular quality of Gorgina's focused attention when she spoke to you about a task she needed done, the way she listened with her whole self—
On the third day, Selfi had overstepped.
Not dramatically. She had not been so foolish as to do something that could not be walked back from. Only — in the course of laying out the Duke's evening clothes, her hand had lingered on the sleeve of the coat. Had pressed, very briefly, into the fabric. And she had said something — she could not now recall exactly what, only that it had been three degrees softer than strictly functional, the kind of thing that was capable of being interpreted as more than professional if the receiving party chose to interpret it that way.
Gorgina had looked at her.
The look had lasted approximately two seconds.
It had been the most efficient destruction of an overture Selfi had ever experienced. Not unkind — Gorgina was not cruel in the personal way, did not take satisfaction from dismantling people — but absolute. The complete and expressionless communication of a woman for whom the thing being attempted was not a thing she was capable of acknowledging as having occurred, because acknowledging it would require her to interact with it, and she had no interest in interacting with it.
Selfi had returned to professional distance.
She had remained in professional distance.
She had been, subsequently, removed from Gorgina's personal attendance and returned to the general household staff, which was not an overt punishment — no one said anything, no one's manner changed toward her — but which was understood by Selfi with perfect clarity.
The attempt had cost her.
Not catastrophically. She was still in the household. She was still competent, still valued in the limited domestic way. But the particular proximity she had been permitted in those three days — the proximity that had felt, at the time, like the edge of a door that might conceivably open — was gone, and she had spent three years understanding that it was not coming back.
— — —
What she had not anticipated was Gerffron.
She had been present in the household during his early years as consort — had worked alongside the household staff that attended him, had observed him at close range with the professional attention that was second nature by then. She had not liked him. This was partly the snobbery of a household that had begun to regard him as beneath the Duke — a consort from a middling family with no particular distinction, too careful, too quiet, too watchful — and partly something she was not proud of in retrospect, which was the simple, ugly fact that he was the person who was permitted to be near Gorgina in ways that she was not.
He slept in the same wing. He attended the same breakfasts. He was present at the estate's social occasions not as staff but as consort, which meant he sat at the same table, which meant he existed in Gorgina's peripheral vision in a way that Selfi, for all her six years and all her competence, could never achieve without overstepping.
She had disliked him for this before she had much of an opinion about him as a person.
Then the Winter Ball had happened, and he had been designated a traitor, and the household's collective contempt had crystallized around him like a formation, and Selfi had been part of it — had participated in the general withdrawal of warmth with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has needed a sanctioned outlet for a feeling she had not been able to name.
She was not proud of this either.
Now he was back. Under the same roof, in the same household, with Gorgina visiting him in the library and asking after his health and overseeing his recovery with the specific focused attention that Selfi had spent six years cataloguing from the outside of the room.
And Selfi had been reassigned to his attendance.
It was intolerable.
It was not intolerable in the way of a genuine injustice — she knew, in the honest corner of herself that she didn't visit often because it tended to say inconvenient things, that she was not being harmed, only frustrated. It was intolerable in the way of a needle in a specific location — not destructive, only present, only persistent, only making itself felt every single time she entered the library with his tray and watched him sit in the reading chair that was three degrees too close to the chair Gorgina used.
— — —
On the night of the fifteenth day of her reassignment, Selfi lay in her narrow bed in the servants' quarters and conducted the ritual she had been conducting, with various degrees of guilt and enthusiasm, for approximately four years.
She thought about Gorgina.
Not the composed, silver-buttoned public version — that one was available at any hour without the dark or the privacy or the particular loosening of inhibition that came with the late hour and the closed door. She thought about the version she had only glimpsed and had spent four years reconstructing from glimpses: the Gorgina behind the Duke, the one that existed in the moments before the composure was fully assembled or after it had, in some unguarded moment, briefly slipped.
The night of the assassination attempt — she had been in the corridor that night, had heard the sounds and been among the staff who had arrived at the cedar bedroom door in the aftermath. She had seen Gorgina, in the lamplight, with blood that was not hers on the sleeve of her robe and the absolute stillness of a woman who has acted and has not yet had occasion to reconsider the action.
She had looked, in that moment, like the person that Selfi had always suspected was inside the Duke.
Not the composed performance. The actual woman.
Selfi lay in the dark and thought about that woman and let herself, in the private and somewhat shameless way she had perfected over years of practice, want her completely.
She thought about what it would mean to be chosen by someone like that. Not as staff, not as a useful function, but as the specific person in the room that Gorgina Wadee, the Duke, the formidable and unreadable and absolute, had decided she wanted.
She had been wanting this for six years.
She was not getting better at not wanting it.
The thought moved through her with its usual specificity — the blue coat, the silver buttons, the two seconds of look that had ended her overture — and she let it come and followed it where it went, in the dark, with the door closed, in the only space in the Wadee household that was entirely hers.
Afterward, she lay in the ordinary quiet of the servants' wing and felt the ordinary compound of release and renewed frustration that was the inevitable aftermath of wanting something that had been clearly, definitively, non-negotiably denied.
She stared at the ceiling.
She thought about the library. About him sitting in the chair with his recovered body and his cautious, watchful eyes and his insufferably patient manner. About the way Gorgina had looked when she came down from her third library visit in a week last Thursday — not different on the surface, never different on the surface, but with the very slight quality of someone who has been doing something that has used a different set of muscles than usual, who carries the exertion somewhere in the way they move.
She thought about the fact that the former consort — the traitor, the man she had been reassigned to attend against her preference — was the reason for that quality.
She did not like this thought.
She turned it over with the honest thoroughness she brought to things she didn't like, because she had learned that the things you didn't look at were the things that eventually surprised you.
What she found, turning it over, was not what she expected.
She had assumed her feeling toward Gerffron Wadee was a simple thing — the clean, direct dislike of a person who occupies a position you wanted and who is now occupying an adjacent one that affects you. Simple resentment, with a past in which she had participated in his degradation that added the specific unease of complicity.
But what she found, underneath the resentment and the complicity, was something more unsettling.
She was watching him.
She had been watching him with the professional attentiveness that was her habit, and what she was seeing was not the man she had participated in dismissing. The man she was seeing in the library, in the garden through the window as she passed, in the small daily interactions of the tray and the cup and the unhurried, uncalculating way he said thank you when she brought his food —
He was not what she had decided he was.
This was inconvenient.
This was the kind of inconvenient that required, in the honest corner of herself, a renegotiation she was not ready to conduct.
She closed her eyes.
She would not conduct it tonight.
She was tired, and the household would start at the fifth bell, and the bread oven would announce itself through the kitchen yard in a few hours with the same indifferent reliability it announced itself every morning regardless of what the people inside the building were feeling.
Tomorrow she would bring his tray.
She would be competent and precise and entirely professional.
She would not look at him for longer than the task required.
She would absolutely not think about the way Gorgina had looked coming down the library stairs.
She lay in the dark and listened to the house settle around her — the old stones doing their nightly accounting, the wind finding the gaps in the west wall, the distant sound of someone on a late kitchen shift moving between the pantry and the scullery with the specific footfall of a person carrying something heavy.
She was in love with a woman who would never choose her and she was attending a man she didn't like who was, inconveniently, not the man she'd decided he was.
She was, in the specific and complicated way of young people who are in the middle of their lives before they understand it, entirely in over her head.
The fifth bell was three hours away.
She decided to sleep.
She didn't, for a while.
But eventually — the way that sleep eventually comes to people who are tired enough, regardless of what they are thinking about — she did.