By the time he got to Number 30, Little Henswell Street, Drumknott was slightly out of breath from walking fast in the cold. He stood exhaling clouds and looking at the old brass door handle in the shape of a sheep's head. It was brightly polished and the door freshly painted, as was the sign: Arthur Drumknott and Son, Clothiers. For some years it had really just been Son, but Tobias said it would be foolish to change a name customers knew, and no doubt he was right. His Lordship said the same thing, more or less: people want tomorrow to be the same as today.
Drumknott knocked, and Tobias's voice called "Who's there?" from behind a shuttered upstairs window.
"It's Rufus."
A minute later, after the clunk and rattle of several heavy locks, Tobias opened the door with a smile. "Come in, come in. Sorry about that. You wouldn't believe the times we've had foreigners knocking on Octeday, not knowing the shop would be closed."
Drumknott followed him back through the dim space crowded with fabric bolts and smelling of wool, dyes, cedar, and the beeswax that kept the floors and countertops gleaming. As a boy he'd sat here every day after school, fetching and carrying for his father and doing his lessons when there was a lag. At eleven he'd won his apprenticeship to the Clerks' Guild and been pleased to go, but breathing the shop air always felt like stepping back into childhood. Like pulling the bedclothes high and drowsing in comfortable darkness, knowing he could pop his head out again before he stifled.
As he climbed the stairs behind Tobias, the smell changed to roasting pork and turf smoke, which his sister-in-law Jane thought was more homely than coal. "It's good to see you, Rufus," she said, flushed pink from bending over the oven's open door to baste the joint. The kitchen was almost hot. Drumknott stretched his hands out over the stove and tried to rub away the chill of the palace and the streets. "It's been far too long." She kissed his cheek and gave him a cup of tea.
"It has, I know." In theory he had Octedays free, and a half-day Sunday, but it didn't feel right taking so much when His Lordship was always working. "Paperwork's like baling a boat, you daren't stop or you'll drown. And there's been a lot to catch up on after the . . . recent incident."
A look passed like a clacks message between Jane and Tobias, who was hanging Drumknott's cloak on a peg by the door. "How are you?" Tobias asked, eyeing up Drumknott's left side. "We got your note but I wasn't sure how much of 'not badly hurt' to believe."
"I'm perfectly fine, I promise. It turns out the Watch have an . . . a very good doctor. My arm's still a trifle stiff, that's all."
Another message flashed in the secret code of married people. Drumknott was used to deciphering His Lordship's moods and expressions, but he hadn't the skill for this. He ignored them and sat down at the table next to Hugh, who was so lost in a book that he'd barely looked up when Drumknott came in. "What are you reading?"
Eyes fixed to the page, Hugh tilted the book, showing a familiar faded green cover with a water stain at the bottom. It had been Drumknott's once, part of an auction lot that his father had bought cheap after Phinazee's Secondhand Books went bankrupt. When he'd begged his parents for more books, he hadn't expected a random trunkful, most of which turned out to be things like Your Horoscope For the Year of the Dyspeptic Ocelot and Tempting Turnips!: 800 Recipes to Suit the Modest Budget. But he'd loved The Mysterious Agatean World, even though the book had been written in the last century and was more than a touch fanciful. All that folderol about the Agateans inventing fireworks, for instance, when everyone knew Ankh-Morpork had always had fireworks. And it said the first Agatean Emperor had been a dragon . . . come to think of it, that was a lot more believable now than it had seemed in his boyhood.
"What's your favourite part?" he asked.
"The empress discovering that silk comes from caterpillars," Hugh answered without even stopping to think. "When I grow up I'm going to sneak into the empire and steal all the caterpillars I can find. Then I'll come home and get rich."
The true Ankh-Morpork spirit. Drumknott hoped that in ten years he wouldn't be explaining to His Lordship how Hugh had managed to start a war with the most powerful country on the Disc.
Lunch went as it always did: he ate rather too much, listened to the family news, and said, when asked, that he was healthy, sleeping well, not overworked, and that he'd heard absolutely nothing about whether His Lordship ever intended to lower the (extremely small) tariff on Lancre wool. After the figgy dowdy and a few more of those coded looks between Tobias and Jane, Hugh was chivvied off to finish his sums for school. Jane made another pot of tea, while Tobias rested his hands thoughtfully on his belly, which had been growing prosperously year by year and now made a convenient shelf.
"All right," Drumknott said. "What is it?"
Tobias grinned, looking suddenly twelve years old and eager to help his little brother find the sugar eggs on Soul Cake Tuesday. "The shop's doing well, so well that we want to open another one. A posh one. Everybody's doing well, and they want to look it. There's money in good fabrics. Fine wools, velvet, silk. Especially silk. We've been talking about it, that's why Hugh's got silkworms on the brain."
"I'm pleased for you."
"To expand, though," Tobias said, stirring sugar and milk into his tea, "I'd need help. A man I could trust."
Drumknott began to think he'd had this conversation before.
"Dad always wanted to bring you into the business," Tobias continued. "But there wasn't enough money in it, not then."
"But -"
"Day you went off to 'prentice, he cried. Only time I ever saw him crying, except when Mum died." He reached for Jane's hand and held it.
Drumknott looked at their faces, full of love and goodwill, and felt like a creature somewhat lower on the chain of being than a silkworm. "I don't know anything about cloth. Only what I learnt as a little boy, and I've forgotten half that."
"I know cloth, and I'll teach you. But what I need's what you know already. Figuring, of course--dunno where I'd be without you doing the tax form every year. And you've got those palace manners. Nothing pries open a fat wallet like a compliment or two, nice and poetic in a posh accent. And you know Klatchian. If I could send letters to Klatchian merchants, make my deals direct with them instead of those cheating bastards of ship owners, I'd get better silks and cheaper too."
Tobias had worked out his future even more thoroughly than Lord Vetinari had. And like His Lordship, Tobias had thought of almost everything. "I'm happy in my job," Drumknott said.
Tobias and Jane exchanged another covert look. This one Drumknott could read by its effects; Tobias shrugged and Jane undertook the next part of the deliberation. "You'd be your own man, not taking orders. Not somebody's clerk."
His own man. Flattering rich merchants' wives and daughters so they'd pay to be the gaudiest creatures at this year's guild dinner. Minding his own business, narrowing his world to shop walls and ledger entries, becoming a tiny, replaceable gear in Ankh-Morpork's clockwork. Knowing nothing of the city, nothing of His Lordship except what everyone knew.
Why would he ever want to be his own man when he could be Lord Vetinari's?
"- a real future," Jane was saying. "Something to build on. You'll be thinking of marriage before long, I expect, and you can't keep a wife in a room at the palace."
"I've no wish to marry."
"You will someday," Tobias said, smiling at Jane and obviously wishing his brother the same happiness. He was as generous and as blinkered as an opera enthusiast who's sure that what his friends really want for Hogswatch is season tickets.
Drumknott said, "I'm grateful to you both," and wished he'd phrased it differently when he saw their delighted faces. "I'm sorry I can't accept. It's a good plan, Tobias. Good enough to wait a few years until Hugh's of an age to help." Always end on cheerful news when possible, he thought, and added, "By the way, most Klatchian merchants can read Morporkian. You don't need me to write letters."
Tobias shook his head, and Jane said, "How can you serve that man after what he did to you?"
"What?"
"And your shoulder still pains you, anyone can -"
"Do you think -? It wasn't him! The Times worked it all out, didn't you see?"
"Oh, I saw what the Times worked out, all right." Tobias crossed his arms, frowning. "A pair of foreign killers, both dead before anybody could ask questions, and some fellow from Pseudopolis who just happens to look like his nibs's long-lost twin. All in the pay of the gods know who. And the whole business testified to by the only eyewitness, Vetinari's dog. I've heard likelier stories when Jane used to read fairy tales to our Hugh."
"You can't think that His Lordship -"
"I bloody well can. The Times indeed. Do you know who that William de Worde is? Him who runs it? He's Lord de Worde's son. He's a toff just like Vetinari, and they all stick together."
Even if Drumknott could tell him what His Lordship had surmised about Lord de Worde, he knew the truth didn't have a chance. Against gossip, things-everyone-knew, and the commonest of common sense, it stood like an Omnian missionary in the Mended Drum: not for very long. "You must see it's ridiculous. Seventy thousand dollars in the saddlebags, when His Lordship's a rich man in his own right? And if he wanted to steal from the city, he could do it without ever leaving the palace. Just like Lord Snapcase did, and Winder, and all the other ones who wanted to loot instead of build."
There was a pause. Thought seemed to pull hidden cords and levers behind Tobias's placid face. He sighed and stared down at the table. "I'm not a fool, Rufus. I saw that for myself. I know what he did wasn't on account of money."
"Why, then? Do you imagine he had a sudden whim to flee the city he's given his whole life to?"
"Well . . . " Tobias said, still not looking at him.
Jane, however, met his gaze determinedly. "There might have been a . . . a quarrel."
"A quarrel? Between His Lordship and me?" Faced with this tidal wave of absurdity, Drumknott tried to retreat up the hill of reason.
"He's used to having his own way, Vetinari is." Tobias's face was red, his voice reluctant. "Not a man to like hearing no."
"But . . . " Absurdity crested and broke over him. It was more than absurd, it was lurid, like those cheap Quirmian novels that pretended not to be pornography. What a scenario: the tyrant's ruthless lust, the innocent victim stabbed for refusing. "How can you think such a thing?"
"There are stories. How he made the Seamstresses' Guild start letting in the what-d'ye-call-ems -"
Tailor boys, Drumknott thought, and didn't say a word.
"- letting men in, anyway -" Jane shushed him and he lowered his voice. "They say he goes to that so-called club on his nights off -"
What nights off?
"- and it's always the young ones he picks, two or three at once sometimes, and he doesn't even pay because he says they owe him. And there you are under his nose all day, hardly more than a lad, and--well, I'll speak plain, Rufus--anybody can see that you think he hung the stars and taught the Turtle how to fly. So maybe I'm not so ridiculous to fear he might try and take advantage." He patted Drumknott's forearm and said gently, "No shame to you if he did."
"Tobias -"
"Maybe he was sorry afterwards. Those servants saw him crying over you, saying how sorry he was. But you can't trust a man like that. He doesn't deserve your loyalty."
There ought to be a word, Drumknott thought, for this moment when you're overwhelmed with love for someone whom, simultaneously and no less overwhelmingly, you want to hit on the head with a truncheon. "Tobias. Jane." He realised he was rubbing at his left shoulder and made himself stop. "I'm sorry you've feared for me. But you're wrong. His Lordship has never done anything to harm me. He wouldn't."
Tobias pushed his mug scrapingly across the tabletop and slumped back in his chair. His mouth had curled up around what Drumknott knew were a lot of unsaid words. It was Jane who eventually spoke. "Of course, Rufus." She gave him a long and oddly motherly look, the sort Hugh probably got when he prattled about sailing to the Agatean Empire to steal silkworms. "Well. Did you hear that the Huckinses are having another baby? She seems pleased enough, though they have got five already. And Eileen Roal's daughter wants to join the Watch, would you credit it?"
After that, the afternoon creaked along, inadequately oiled by gossip and mulled wine. Just before dark Drumknott walked back to Old Snead Avenue to get a cab. A heavy sleet was falling, slicking the cobblestones and forming pinheads of ice on his cloak, and all the cabmen seemed to have gone home. He should have left early himself, but Tobias and Jane might have thought he was offended, and that would've given the whole business too much weight.
If Lord Vetinari were like some previous Patricians, it wouldn't have been so risible. But His Lordship was as chaste as the heroine of a Quirmian novel, not as debauched as the villain. Perhaps that was why the rumours were so many and so scurrilous: like chameleons, they fed on air. In all these years, His Lordship had touched Drumknott once, and that was to shake his hand the day he was promoted to secretary. His Lordship seemed fond enough of him, true. There were little smiles, little jokes and confidences. But if His Lordship had ever wanted more than that, there had never been a hint. Even when they'd worked late, utterly alone in the sleeping palace, and Drumknott had wearily indulged a chameleon hope.
If His Lordship had ever wanted him . . . how could he have asked, being who he was, knowing it might be taken for an order? Perhaps Tobias's notion was so perfectly false that it reflected truth backwards, like a mirror.
How could Lord Vetinari ask anyone to his bed? No doubt there were people who hadn't waited to be asked, who'd asked His Lordship instead. But out of the throngs who might seduce him for favour, information, a plot, an assassination, whom could he ever dare to accept?
And so the greatest man on the Disc slept alone. He played Thud by clacks with someone in Uberwald and he walked in the palace gardens with his dog.
I never thought. I never thought of this. If it hadn't been so cold, Drumknott might have gone back to Tobias's house to thank him.
A few minutes later, a muffled guard let him through the palace gates. Hurrying across the courtyard, he saw, as he had expected, the lighted window of the Oblong Office. His Lordship was probably reading intelligence reports, which he liked to do on Octedays because he didn't have meetings to interrupt his thinking. That was as close as he got to resting: no meetings and the big, extra-difficult Octeday crossword. Sometimes he reminded Drumknott of those poor girls at the hemp manufactory who'd been kept chained to their stations until His Lordship found out and put a stop to it.
Drumknott slipped quietly past the closed door of the Oblong Office and into his own, hung up his cloak, and started brewing a pot of tea. The Oblong Office was terrible in weather like this. It was too big to heat even if His Lordship hadn't seemed to prefer keeping it and the other public rooms uncomfortable. From Ember to March, committee meetings became wonderfully brief and efficient.
When the tea was ready, he took the tray through the connecting door. His Lordship, a narrow line of darkness from his black skullcap to the black boots just visible under the edge of his black robe, stood looking out of the window. He was alone; he must have dismissed Reavish for the night. "Good evening, Drumknott," he said without turning around. He was, Drumknott saw, using his stick, which ordinarily he dispensed with unless he would be walking far.
"Good evening, sir. I've brought you some tea." He leaned over the snoring Wuffles to set the tray down.
"It is still your day off, you know."
"Yes, my lord."
"Well, thank you. Please have some yourself if you wish."
Drumknott fetched a second cup from his office and poured for them both, then, deciding His Lordship's words had been an invitation, joined him at the window. Snow had begun, fat flakes meandering lazily down. They were so pretty that it took an effort of mind to connect them with the several thousand poor people who'd died of cold this winter. Drumknott was, however, cheered to see an icicle forming on the bronze nose of Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes.
"How are your brother and his family?" Lord Vetinari asked. "Or did you go elsewhere today?"
The last was mere politeness; Drumknott was sure that if he hadn't gone to Tobias's house, His Lordship would have noticed, if only from the missing scent of turf smoke on his clothes. "They're well, sir, thank you." Since His Lordship seemed in a talking mood, he added, "My brother offered me a job."
"Indeed? It seems you are much in demand."
Drumknott realised he had perhaps overlooked something. "Er . . . was that by any chance your idea, sir?"
"Not at all. I have accepted your decision to remain with me. May I assume it is unaltered?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good." He smiled over the rim of the teacup. "I cannot see you as a shopkeeper." His long fingers cradled the cup, warming themselves, ignoring the handle and the rules of etiquette.
You feel the cold as much as anyone, Drumknott thought. But how you pretend otherwise. "Nor can I, my lord," he said, and smiled back.