The problem with being someone's ears was that ears collected everything.
Selfi had not intended to be in the south wing corridor.
She had been going to the linen store — the south wing linen store specifically, which was the only place in the household where the good winter blankets were kept and which Orreth had sent her to retrieve two of for the guest rooms that were being prepared in anticipation of Lady Elowen's visiting niece. This was the entirety of her legitimate business in the south wing on a Wednesday afternoon.
She had not planned to witness anything.
She had been at the south wing's main corridor junction when she heard the terrace door hit the wall — the specific sound of something being thrown open by someone moving too fast to manage a handle — and then the voices, and then the silence, and then more voices.
She had stood very still.
She had listened.
The problem — and she would spend the better part of the next day understanding how comprehensively it was a problem — was that she had not heard the beginning. She had not heard the library window, the running, the stairs. She had arrived at the south wing corridor junction after Gerffron was already on the terrace, which meant the first thing she heard was the sound of someone being struck, followed by a woman's sharp intake of breath, followed by a man's voice saying things that were — from the corridor, through a closed terrace door, at the distance of someone who was not supposed to be listening — not entirely clear.
What she heard: a slap. A woman's startled sound. A man's voice, rough and emotional, saying don't.
What she did not hear was the context. Two lives were saved that day. The forty minutes of conversation. The reason.
She stood in the corridor for a long moment.
She told herself she should go in.
She did not go in.
She turned and walked back to the main corridor with the two blankets in her arms and the specific, hot, uncomfortable feeling of someone who has half a piece of information and is doing the thing that people with half a piece of information should not do, which is form a complete picture from it.
The head maid was in the ironing room.
Her name, officially, was Mistress Orreth — though she went by Orreth exclusively, having long ago concluded that Mistress was a title for women who were uncertain about their authority, and she had no such uncertainty. She was ironing the household's formal tablecloths with the precision of someone for whom ironing was a meditative practice, moving the iron in the same pattern each time, producing the same result each time, finding in the repetition the specific satisfaction of a perfectionist who has found a task that meets her standards.
Selfi entered.
Orreth did not look up.
"The blankets are on the hall chair." Selfi said.
"Good."
A pause.
"Orreth." Selfi's voice had a quality to it — not quite uncertainty, not quite confidence, the specific register of someone who has decided to say something and is in the process of realizing, too late, that the decision may have been premature.
Orreth set the iron on its rest.
She turned.
She looked at Selfi with the eyes of a woman who has been managing household staff for fifteen years and can read the register of a sentence's first word with the accuracy of someone who has heard every possible version of what comes next.
"Out with it," she said.
Selfi told her what she had heard.
She told it accurately — she was not a liar, had never been a liar, which was one of the qualities that had made her useful to the household and which was also, in this particular instance, not as useful as it might sound, because accurate reporting of incomplete information is a different kind of problem than lying.
She told Orreth about the sound of the slap. She told her about the man's voice — emotional, rough, saying don't. She told her about the pregnant maid.
Orreth listened without interrupting.
When Selfi finished, Orreth was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said: "Which maid?"
"I didn't see her face. I heard her voice. Young. Maybe Wren — the new one, the one from the East Village."
Orreth's expression did something complicated.
"And the consort struck her?"
"I heard a slap," Selfi said. "And then his voice."
"And you did not go in?"
"I—" Selfi stopped. The discomfort that had been sitting in her chest since the south wing corridor intensified. "No."
Orreth looked at her for a long, specific moment that contained an assessment that Selfi could feel being conducted.
"All right," Orreth said. "I'll look into it."
Selfi left.
She walked back to the main wing with the feeling that had been building since the corridor and which she was, now, in the honest corner of herself, beginning to be able to name.
She had wanted it to be true.
She had wanted Gerffron to have done something wrong.
Not because she was a cruel person — she was not cruel, had never been cruel, had in fact spent eight years in the Wadee household conducting herself with the specific correctness of someone who understands that a reputation is the only currency available to a person without inherited status.
But she had wanted it because he was — improbably, inconveniently, against every expectation she had formed in the past three years — not the person she had needed him to be.
He was not the traitor. He was not the careless, ineffective consort who failed to appreciate what he had been given. He was not the man who had stumbled through his position without deserving it. He was — she had been building this understanding for weeks, against her own resistance — someone entirely different, and the entirely different person was the reason Gorgina had started looking at the library door with the expression she had not previously worn for anything or anyone connected to the household's east wing.
Selfi's feelings about Gorgina were the fixed axis around which the rest of her interior world turned.
She had loved Gorgina since she was sixteen years old.
She remembered the day with the specific, preserved clarity of the memories that change you — the blue coat, the silver buttons, the way the Duke had moved through the main hall with the absolute, unself-conscious authority of someone who has never had to consider whether they are impressive. Selfi had stopped walking. She had looked. She had felt something happen in her chest that was inconvenient and specific and entirely unwelcome.
Six years later, it was no less inconvenient and no less specific.
She had tried, once, to say something. She cringed at the memory even now — the inadequate gesture, the two seconds of look that had ended it, the quiet and absolute communication of a woman for whom the attempt was not something she was prepared to acknowledge as having occurred.
She had been moved back to general household staff.
She had continued.
Orreth had found her originally — not in the household but in the city, at the establishment Orreth had managed before the Duke had appointed her head maid. The establishment was not one that appeared in polite conversation. It had been a place where women ended up when the other options had closed, where the currency was dignity and the exchange rate was never in the women's favour. Orreth had run it with a certain hard-edged protectiveness that was not kindness but was the closest thing to it available in those circumstances.
Selfi had been seventeen.
She had been there for three months when Orreth had told her, with the flat directness that was her defining quality: "I'm going into service at the Wadee estate. I can take two girls who are willing to work correctly and keep their mouths shut. You are one of the two."
Selfi had packed what she had.
She had never looked back.
The Wadee household had given her wages and respectability and the specific dignity of work that was compensated rather than extracted. It had given her eight years of building herself into someone she did not have to be ashamed of.
And it had given her proximity to Gorgina Wadee, which was — she was honest enough to admit this in the privacy of her own chest — the reason she had stayed past the point where a girl with her abilities could have found advancement elsewhere.
If she had been Gorgina's consort, she thought — not for the first time, with the helpless, slightly masochistic quality of a thought that has been thought enough times to have worn a groove — she would have done everything differently. She would have worshipped the ground the Duke walked on. She would have learned every preference, every small requirement, every private habit and need. She would have been — she caught herself — she would have been exactly the thing she was criticizing Gerffron for not being.
She stopped walking.
She stood in the main corridor and looked at the wall.
She thought; I told Orreth something I wasn't certain of. I told her because I wanted it to be true. And if it isn't true then I have—
She thought about the pregnant maid.
She thought about Gerffron on the south wing terrace.
She started walking again, faster.
She had a very bad feeling about the next twenty-four hours.