Orreth moved quickly.
This was one of the things that made her effective as a head maid — she did not deliberate when deliberation was unnecessary. She had been given information. The information, if accurate, constituted a problem. Problems in the Wadee household were addressed before they became larger problems. This was the fundamental operating principle of her professional existence and she applied it now with the same efficiency she applied everything.
She found Wren in the east servants' quarters.
The girl was sitting on her narrow bed with the specific stillness of someone who has recently been through something large and is in the aftermath of it — not calm, only empty, the emptiness of a vessel that has been entirely used and not yet refilled.
Orreth stood in the doorway.
"Wren." she said.
The girl looked up.
Orreth's eyes went to the girl's face — checking, automatically, with the practiced eye of someone who has seen many things, for the specific evidence of being struck. She found none. No redness. No swelling. Nothing that supported the account of a slap delivered in anger.
She noted this.
She also noted that the girl's expression, when she saw Orreth, was not the expression of someone who had just been assaulted. It was something more complicated. Something that had gratitude in it, somewhere underneath the exhaustion.
"I need to know something." Orreth said.
"Yes, Mistress Orreth."
"The consort. Were you in the south wing this afternoon?"
The girl's expression changed.
"Yes." she said. Carefully.
"Did he—" Orreth stopped. Chose. "Did you...did...something happen on the south terrace?"
Wren looked at her for a long moment.
"No." she said.
Orreth stood very still.
"I see," she said, in the specific tone of someone filing information rapidly and revising several things simultaneously.
"The consort...he...he hurt himself." Wren said. "His ankle. He ran the stairs, and I think—"
"I see." Orreth said again.
She turned.
She walked back to the main corridor.
The problem was that she had already told two people.
The first was the under-housekeeper, who had asked why she was moving quickly through the corridor and to whom she had given a sentence of explanation — the former consort, a pregnant maid, the south terrace — that was now loose in the household's information stream in the way that all loose sentences are: irretrievable.
The second was — she had stopped in the corridor outside the parlour where three senior household staff were having their afternoon tea and had told them, briefly, to watch for any further incidents involving the former consort and the household's female staff.
She stood in the main corridor and performed, rapidly, the arithmetic of damage.
It did not produce a comforting result.
The rumour had the specific, organic momentum of things that start as a sentence and become a story in the time it takes to cross a household. By the third bell of the afternoon, the story had acquired details that had not been in Selfi's account — embellishments that accumulated the way embellishments do when a story passes through multiple tellers, each one adding the small flourish that makes the telling more satisfying without the teller consciously noting they have added anything at all.
By the fourth bell, the version circulating in the kitchen held that the former consort had cornered the pregnant maid in the south wing and had struck her twice.
By the fifth bell, the version in the stables held that three maids had witnessed it.
The version did not reach Wren, who was still in the east servants' quarters.
The version did not reach Gerffron, who was still in the library.
The version reached Lady Elowen at the fifth bell, delivered by her personal attendant in the manner in which Lady Elowen always received household information — directly, accurately, without embellishment, because her attendant had been with her for twelve years and understood that Lady Elowen's preferences in information were identical to her preferences in everything else.
Lady Elowen set down her correspondence.
She stood up and picked up her cane.
She stood.
Orreth had, in the interim, made a decision.
She was not proud of the decision in retrospect. She had made it quickly, under pressure, with the specific tunnel vision that comes from trying to contain a problem that is already larger than the container available. She had told Wren, when she returned to the east servants' quarters, that it would be best if Wren requested a transfer to another household for the final months of her pregnancy — a quiet solution, an arranged solution, the kind of solution that preserved the surface of things at the cost of some accuracy in the record.
Wren had looked at her.
"I'm telling you nothing had happened, on the contrary..." she said again.
"I understand that," Orreth said. "However—"
"You're going to fire me, aren't you?" Wren said. Not with accusation. With the flat, unsurprised recognition of someone who has learned, from experience, that this is the way of things.
"A transfer—"
"It is firing with a different name."
Orreth did not have a response to this that she was entirely comfortable with.
She was preparing one anyway when the parlour door opened.
Lady Elowen walked in.
She took three steps into the room, assessed the arrangement — Orreth standing, Wren sitting, the expressions of both — and said, with the terrifying economy of a woman who has been reading rooms for sixty years:
"Nobody is going anywhere."
The parlour had never been so full.
Lady Elowen had, in the twenty minutes following her arrival, assembled the household's senior staff — Orreth, the under-housekeeper, the three who had been at afternoon tea, the stable master who had been brought in from outside when the rumour reached him and he had come to see what was being done about it — in the parlour with the specific, unignorable authority of a woman who does not request people's attendance.
Wren was in the corner, in a chair that Orreth had provided with the silent, slightly panicked efficiency of someone trying to demonstrate care retrospectively.
Gerffron had not been summoned.
He had been told to come.
The difference between being summoned and being told to come, in the Wadee household, was that being told to come meant someone had already decided the outcome.
He walked in on the ankle that he had not had tended and had been walking on for three hours, because going to the physician required explaining where the ankle had come from and he had not been ready, in the library, to have that conversation.
He took in the room.
He took in Lady Elowen.
He had a very clear, instantaneous understanding of what was happening.
Lady Elowen looked at him.
She had never liked him especially. He had known this from early in the marriage — had catalogued it in the way he catalogued everything about his environment, noted the specific quality of her regard for him which was not unkind but was never warm, which contained the assessment of a woman who had seen Gorgina's various disappointments and was calibrating where he fell on that spectrum. He was from the Cliff family. He was not especially manly by the household's standards. He had pulled a stunt that had cost the household considerably. He had spent a year in the east tower and emerged from it in a way she found less explainable than she would have liked.
She had come to see the thing he had apparently done.
"I'll keep this brief," she said, to the room at large, which meant she was addressing him.
"Please do." he said.
Several people looked at him.
Lady Elowen's expression did not change.
"It has been reported," she said, "that you struck a pregnant member of this household's staff this afternoon, in the south wing. This is—" she paused, choosing "—a serious matter. The staff of this household are under the protection of the Duke, and conduct that compromises their safety or dignity is not tolerated, regardless of the rank of the party responsible."
"I understand." Gerffron said.
"Good. Then you will kneel and admit the conduct."
The parlour was very quiet.
Gerffron looked at Lady Elowen.
Lady Elowen looked at Gerffron.
He went down to his knees, wordlessly.
He did it without expression and without the performance of martyrdom, in the clean, simple way of someone who has decided that the form of the thing is less important than what happens next.
The room breathed.
From her corner, Wren made a sound that was not quite words.
From the doorway, at that precise moment, came the sound of footsteps.
Not Lady Elowen's footsteps — he knew those.
Not Orreth's.
The room turned.
Gorgina Wadee stood in the parlour doorway.