21. What a Modern Patrician Needs
Isabella got up and walked around the room a little, a way to clear her head, to get the thoughts and memories tumbling inside sorted out. The Patrician stayed where he was, his gaze fixed on the envelope. It was thin, white and addressed to him in her handwriting. It had spent the last fifteen years between the pages of his journal in his secret library.
She was running a hand over the smooth surface of the oak side board when she said, "Commander Vimes is either very tactful or he didn't catch the big implausibility in what you told us."
Lord Vetinari picked up the envelope and turned it over in his hands. Isabella circled back to the sofa.
"You came too," she said. "You drove the carriage."
"Yes."
"You would have never done that. After taking precautions to prevent someone from finding a solid link between us, you wouldn't have exposed yourself like that."
He brushed his fingers over the letter's unbroken wax seal.
Isabella paced to the fireplace. The tall white candles on both ends of the mantle burned without flickering. There was no draft in the room. The windows were closed. She went to open one, half expected Klieg to drop down from above, and closed it again.
"Why did you expose yourself like that?" she asked.
Lord Vetinari set the envelope back on the table.
"I know you, Havelock. Guilt wouldn't be strong enough. Or your sense of decency and responsibility. You would have protected yourself first. Someone else could have gone on your behalf to be sure I was safe."
"Perhaps you underestimate my capacity for practising guilt, decency and responsibility."
"I don't think so."
He held a hand out to her and she looked at him questioningly before taking it and allowing him to pull her beside him onto the sofa. He handed her the letter.
"Please open it," he said.
She examined the seal. It was possible that it had been carefully peeled up and then melted again to reseal the letter, but she couldn't see any evidence of it. "Are you sure you want me to do this? You've held onto it this long."
He waved a hand and sat back against the arm of the sofa to get a direct view of her face.
There was the soft sound of the wax being broken and the peeling back of the paper's folds. The Patrician stroked his beard as he watched Isabella read. Her forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. She glanced up at him, then back at the paper.
"Do you know what it says?"
"I never opened it."
"Can you guess?"
Vetinari pursed his lips as if he was pondering a difficult question.
"You have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right," she said.
"Perhaps you could show it to me."
There was one short word scrawled in large letters in the center of the page.
Yes
He nodded and folded the letter again.
"What a devil you are, Havelock. I've always thought that."
He smiled.
"You told Commander Vimes the truth and he didn't believe you."
"It is always interesting to observe how his mind works. When he discovers that I've told a half truth, he assumes everything else was a lie. He must have a rather low opinion of me."
"Did you get it before or after the accident?"
"It was waiting for me when I got home that day. Such a quick answer was unexpected. I was quite sure if I offered you not only the Palace but the Ankh filled with liquid gold, you wouldn't give me an answer until you'd pondered all of the ramifications of being permanently attached to me." He waved the letter. "Obviously, you needed less time to decide than I thought."
"I assume you'd planned to wait?"
"A year or two, yes. Snapcase wasn't going to live forever. Especially after a well-meaning, anonymous citizen gave some of the more aggressive workingman's clubs of the Shades proof of what was intended for their home. The immediate danger to you would have passed while you studied for a time in Pseudopolis."
Frowning, Isabella plucked imaginary dust off her skirt. The Patrician creased the letter, smoothing the folds with his fingers.
"Surely you aren't surprised that your husband and I would have the same idea."
"I suppose I shouldn't be." She shrugged. "It's a very sad story, you know."
"Yes, though I've heard worse."
"I'm sure. Some men have lost women they actually loved."
The Patrician closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"I often forget what a real joy it is to talk to ladies," he sighed. "They do so love to fish."
"I'm not fishing."
"I'd like to remind you that some time ago, you said your husband did not marry you for your charms. There should be no reason for you to assume it would be different with me."
Isabella folded her arms.
"Unless," he said, "I am not the only one who was not being altogether honest about the past."
"I didn't think it mattered anymore, how things started."
"You're quite right. Why is usually the more interesting question." He looked at the letter again, though the contents obviously hadn't changed, then set it aside. "I think Lady Margolotta's riddle was amusing, but what all rulers want is hardly comparable to what a modern Patrician needs." He gestured toward Isabella. "A good civil engineer."
"You've managed all right without one."
"I would have managed better with. You will notice I never found one of sufficient quality to replace you."
A few days before the carriage crash, young Lord Vetinari had spoken to a younger Isabella Capelli for the last time. They were in the small garden behind the Capelli House, not much more than a patch of grass surrounded by a privacy hedge and accessible only from the house. It was twilight, the sky a dirty yellow, which was also the colour of the snow that lay a foot deep on the ground. New flakes were falling. Bundled up against the cold, Vetinari and Isabella strolled up and down the lawn, tramping trails in the snow, speaking quietly. They were aware that her parents were watching.
"You've memorized the code?" he asked, the air steaming.
She nodded.
"And destroyed the key?"
"Yes."
He clasped his gloved fists behind his back. They reached one end of the garden, turned and began the march back.
"Once a month is sufficient for progress reports," he said.
"That won't be enough."
"You may increase them after things calm down here."
Isabella's hands were sunk inside a brown beaver fur muff. It matched her fur hat, which was so large she kept having to push it up from her eyes.
"Please don't do anything risky, your lordship," she said.
"I'm afraid it's too late for that."
"Please don't," she lowered her voice to a whisper, "inhume anyone." She had a disgusted look on her face.
They had talked one night at length about the Assassins Guild, where he was educated. Isabella insisted that the one profession she couldn't stand was assassin. She'd take a thief before an assassin. She'd take a cop. Or a lawyer. Even a politician. The conversation had greatly amused Vetinari.
"I have no plans in that direction, Miss Capelli," he said. "I made a promise and I will hold to it."
The hat slid over Isabella's eyes. She pushed it back up with her muff.
"Can I visit you when I come home on holiday?"
"There will be some sort of communal tea with your parents."
They reached a hedge and turned again. In the house, candles burned on the first floor. There was no sign of Isabella's parents peering out between the curtains, though they were there.
"I'm not interested in communal tea," said Isabella.
"When the danger from the Palace is past, perhaps we will come up with a plausible excuse to have you over on your own." He scratched his chin. It was clean shaven back then. "A mission of mercy to Wuffles, for instance. The poor thing misses you already."
"Only Wuffles?"
"And the servants. Mrs. Figgers asks about you every day. I do hope she stops."
A burst of cold wind eddied in the garden, causing Vetinari to turn up the collar of his black coat. Isabella blinked away the snowflakes the wind splattered in her eyes. When they reached a hedge, her hat slipped down again. Irritated, she pushed it back up.
"After I'm out of the city, do you think they'll really leave me alone?" she asked.
"I'm certain of it."
"Why?"
"I will see to it."
She shook her head. "You can't arrange everything, your lordship."
"Arrange, no. Influence, yes."
Isabella's fur hat slid over her eyes again. Before she could do anything about it, Vetinari grasped her by the muff and pulled her to the one private place in the garden, a bower where a few pine trees shielded a patch of ground from the windows. By then, her nose was blocking the hat from sliding further over her face. He kept a hold of the muff but didn't do anything about the hat. A minute passed.
"Your lordship."
He was smiling.
"Are you going to help me with my hat?"
She heard it then, a very slight sound from him.
"You're laughing at me, aren't you?"
"Not at all."
"This was my great Aunt Lucia's hat."
"If cranial size is any measure of intelligence, your great Aunt Lucia must have been a genius."
Isabella tried to shake the hat off her head in what she thought was a ladylike manner, but the effect was the hat sliding to the tip of her nose. It tickled some part of Vetinari's idiosyncratic sense of humour. He laughed openly.
"This isn't funny," she said.
"If I encounter a hide-less Uberwaldean beaver shivering with cold, I will direct him to Pseudopolis."
Isabella grinned. "I'll never marry you," she said. "You're horribly insensitive."
The beaver pelt over her eyes was an effective blind, and that was why the kiss took her by surprise. He'd never kissed her before. Those nights together at his house had been spent working or talking until Isabella fell asleep in a chair in front of the hearth with Wuffles on her lap.
He finally adjusted the hat. Isabella blinked up at him.
"That was a nasty trick."
"I don't believe I know any other kind." He straightened, serious again. "We've been hiding behind the pines long enough. Shall we?"
By the time they reached the back door of the house, he was saying, "…and nothing less than perfect grades will do. Work hard, Miss Capelli. When your skills have developed, you will go from valuable to irreplaceable."
At the Palace, Lord Vetinari watched Isabella get up and go to the side board. The memory was still clear in his mind, and her face was basically the same as it was back then. It carried the same expressions. She moved the same. It was the reason for the mix up in pronouns. He couldn't bring himself to talk about the Miss Capelli he knew as she, when the Miss Capelli pouring herself a lemonade at the side board was in the room. Only a you made sense.
It wasn't quite lemonade. The yellowish-orange contents of the pitcher clogged at the spout and made a soft flatulent sound when it dropped in a clotted mass into her cup. She held it up to her nose. It smelled of fruit set out in the sun too long.
The Patrician joined her. "Leonard insisted you try his new fruit drink."
"Have you tried it?"
"Unfortunately."
Isabella shook the cup. The contents glooped. She set it aside.
"Please tell him I loved it."
The Patrician poured two glasses of water, and raised his like he was about to give a toast. "Ah," he said suddenly, "I nearly forgot."
From a fold of his robe he extricated a small gold wedding band. "I took the liberty of having it polished."
When he slipped it onto her finger, she stared at it for a long moment, then thanked him and moved to the window. She looked out over the rooftops of some of the guilds – the Assassins, Fools, Teachers – and beyond to the Merchants Guild house, where everything had started. Even without a public execution, the city had calmed since the vampire murderer had been caught. People simply assumed the Patrician had taken care of the situation. There was the assumption that scorpions in the Palace dungeon weren't picky about the species of victim thrown into their pit. Few people knew Klieg had left the city with Lady Margolotta.
Isabella was relieved to have her ring back, but it reminded her of what was to come.
"Would you like to hear a poem?" she said.
"If I must."
She frowned at her reflection in the window. Beside her, the Patrician looked out over the rooftops, a fist behind his back.
"I of course meant to say: Yes, I would be delighted to hear a poem."
She stayed silent. In the glass, he interpreted the look on her face.
"There is no need to fear tomorrow. I will be there to make sure the wizards do not do anything foolish." He paused. "More foolish than usual. And Death is quite a reasonable chap, I've heard."
"Death lies in our cots / in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets, / lives at full stretch and then suddenly blows, / blows sound unknown filling out the sheets / and there are beds sailing into a harbour / where Death is waiting, dressed as an admiral."
The Patrician sighed and held out his arms. As he hugged her, he was a bit surprised by the fact that a woman who had staked a vampire serial murderer while hovering many hundreds of feet above the city would be so frightened about meeting Death. Now and then, Vetinari had considered how interesting it would be to have Death for tea. Surely it would be an interesting conversation. Tomorrow would also be interesting, though other potentially more accurate words came to mind – enlightening, unfortunate, bittersweet. Tragic, maybe.
He gave her a last, encouraging squeeze and released her.
"Will you sleep tonight?"
She sighed and shook her head.
"Then perhaps you could do me a large favour and look at the latest report on the Dragon's Landing Redevelopment Site. I suspect the chief engineer is underestimating the amount of earth and stone one of our strapping Ankh-Morpork builders can move in a day. His estimate of time and labour costs seem suspiciously high."
There was a full minute of thoughtful silence.
"If he's estimating more than four years and two million dollars, he's cheating you," said Isabella.
The Patrician guided her toward the door. "I also have yet to see a convincing land use plan for the site."
"Office space."
"Of course, but at what density. That is the question."
"What kind of proposals have you received?"
They talked all the way to the Oblong Office, and at the suggestion of Isabella, they passed it and headed down to the Palace kitchens where they rummaged for bread, butter and cheese while discussing the pressing problems of land development. The Patrician put the kettle on.
"I fear you will need some sort of sedative when you see what the architects have come up with," he sighed.
"It has to be high density office space."
Isabella bit into a cheese sandwich and chewed, thoughts of Death sliding away under architectural schematics, something she could wrap her mind around. Something real.
"The future is in height, Havelock. Seven stories and up. The banks and guilds will be fighting for space on the upper floors – Can you imagine the view over the city? – It would be similar to what we have here, but no one else has it yet. We can give it to them. And then, here's the brilliant bit, we could tax vertically too. Look, if we…"
She dropped the sandwich and looked around for a napkin. The Patrician held up a pencil he'd spirited from somewhere in his robe and paid close attention to which hand she took it with. She started drawing on the kitchen table as she talked. Lord Vetinari listened and asked questions and made comments and every now and then, he smiled at her.
**Ok…only one more chapter, two if I give you the epilogue, which I'm still debating with myself about. It'll be up soon!**
