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Chapter XVII
Katy had been Lord Bothermore's PA for nearly six months. It was a fabulous lifestyle: opera, ballet, grand balls, glamorous parties, cruises down the Djel, sunbathing on his yacht in the Circle Sea, safaris in Howondaland… and she hated it. Almost as much as Lord Bothermore did himself.
Firstly, it wasn't a job. Oh, she kept his diary and answered his mail, but that hardly justified her salary. She wasn't his personal assistant she was his pretty addition.
Not that he tried to push his attentions on her –unlike his horrible son Rupert- as he wasn't interested in her in that way, though he didn't seem to mind if other people thought he was. Of course, she loved the opera and the ballet –when she was able to ignore Lord Bothermore snoring beside her in the box. And she even sometimes enjoyed some of the society events so grovelling reported in Tittler –owner, Lord Bothermore- and she liked good food and dancing and… the real problem was that she despised her employer with every fibre of her being.
He was an ignorant, arrogant, selfish, greedy, slovenly, ugly, uncultured bully who hated people. Not just the "common, gods-fearing, average people-in-the-street" whom he claimed to represent, but people in general. He had all the empathy of a fly, so presumably felt very much at home in Ankh-Morpork at the moment as his chums were everywhere. Actually, she found it difficult to think of anything he actually liked. He gave the impression of being a bon vivant and, on account of his size, everyone assumed he loved food and wine. But actually he only drank wine for show, and then only sipped at it. As for food, he did consume huge quantities of that, but it was essentially the slurry he'd been fed at boarding-school, and he seemed to derive little joy from it.
Everything about him was false, not just his teeth. He bought fine wines from Genua and Quirm, but only because they were expensive, as he seldom drank anything other than water and tea. He dined out at the swankiest restaurants, but he barely touched the food – preferring to have boiled beef and carrots when he got home instead. As far as she could see the only things he took pleasure in were: humiliating people, killing defenceless animals and boiled sweets, and the ones he liked were anything but sweet. His preferred brand came from a tiny Hubward place called Alba and were reputedly made by pictsies. Out of curiosity she had once tried one of these Sewer Plumes and had spat it out after one suck. It was so sour that she thought her face was going to collapse in on itself. It was like eating bile, and Katy couldn't think of a more appropriate symbol for her employer.
Lord Bothermore knew he was almost universally hated –for all his myriad faults, he wasn't stupid- and it didn't seem to bother him in the least. Rupert, on the other hand, genuinely didn't seem to understand why people found him so distasteful.
From a distance she could see, or used to be able to see, that he could be considered handsome. She had never liked quiffs, but that apart, his features were, objectively, not unattractive. She thought he was too thin and his shoulders were too narrow, but she could see how some girls might be drawn to him. Until they met him.
His sense of entitlement was quite astonishing. His every whim had to be satisfied immediately else he would fly into a petulant, toddler-rage and thcream and thcream until nanny came to sooth him. So, when Katy rejected his attentions he got in a huff of such gigantic proportions that he went to his father demanding that he force her to yield to him, or sack her. Surprisingly –or perhaps not- Lord Bothermore decided that he rather preferred Katy to his own son. Rupert had sulked for a month.
And then he had emerged with renewed purpose and vigour: he would woo her! Now, Katy had previously worked for Tittler so she had seen many immature, over-privileged young men ineptly try to win the hand of a fair maid, but Rupert's efforts really took the teacake. First, there was his poetry. She had tried to illustrate his in-efforts to her friend Susan with a poem of her own:
Roses are red; violets are blue,
This poem doesn't rhyme,
And what's more it doesn't even scan properly, or at all.
Perhaps because Susan was a teacher she had sworn she would kill him and, given that she was Death's granddaughter, this was no idle threat.
Then he had tried song, but a terrible lyric is hardly going to be improved by being set to music by someone who has no sense of rhythm, can't play an instrument and is tone deaf. But actually even the most beautiful tune ever created would not have moved her. What Rupert seemed unable to grasp was that the most unattractive thing about him was his personality, or lack of one. There was literally nothing he could promise her that would make her despise him less. He could shower her in jewels and dress her in gold, but her bedroom door would remain locked. At least she was allowed to lock her door, unlike the maids.
It was bad enough in the city; Bothermore Towers was run on fear: servants were routinely mocked and often beaten. But it was worse in the country. At Bothermore Hall they were daily degraded and frequently whipped. Meanwhile Lord Bothermore himself shot birds, whose wings had been clipped, with a crossbow or rode around on a horse while a pack of dogs tore a fox to pieces. She couldn't remember precisely but she was fairly sure that in Doctor Jansdottir's Definitive List of Words; With Appropriate Explanations, this had not been the definition of "hunting".
Susan had been amazed that she could bear it, but the reason was simple enough: her father was dead, her mother was poorly, she had two younger sisters, there weren't that many occupations that were open to girls and she couldn't support them all on a teacher's salary.
She had first become friends with Susan when they had both been teachers at Martia David-Blane Academy for Young Ladies. Katy had taught "Spelling and Grammar" while Susan had taught "Counting". Men were allowed to teach "Language and Literature" and "Mathematics" to young ladies, but young ladies weren't allowed to do so themselves. If Susan had been surprised that Katy could put up with being Lord Bothermore's PA; Katy had been astonished that Susan could stand being a teacher. She was far and away the most intelligent person Katy had ever met and had a personality so forceful that it could bend iron bars; she really ought to have been queen of somewhere. Of course she was but she was currently in hiding, having been overthrown by her wicked uncle in a palace coup. Her lover, Prince von Zummthink was being held in the dungeons of the Royal Palace even now and…
She had asked Susan early in their friendship why she liked teaching and Susan had replied, simply: "Because I'm good at it." This was certainly true. Susan could take the worst achieving, most ill-disciplined class and turn it into a well-behaved collection of excellent students, in one lesson. She somehow managed to convey her love of learning to them by sheer will. Of course, it helped that she could terrify them with a look and so didn't need to beat them. But then she could have done that to most of the people on the Disc.
Katy wasn't a particularly good teacher, but she too had a talent: she was very good at spinning a yarn. She had been good at making up stories since she was a little girl, which was probably why people seldom believed a word she said, even when she was telling the truth. On the other hand, it made her the perfect employee for Tittler a magazine which had never knowingly printed a single word of truth in its whole, admittedly short, existence. Her entire job had been to invent things about famous people and claim they were rumours. As long as they were vaguely believable, and slightly scandalous, no one seemed to mind: not her editor, not her readers and certainly not the celebrities themselves. And, crucially, it paid three times what a teacher earned.
She'd actually rather enjoyed it and would probably have continued to work there quite happily, but then she'd been offered a promotion. She really didn't think it had anything to do with ambition; it had simply been more money and more money made her more easily able to fulfil her responsibilities. But the greater rewards came at a price. She'd assumed that she'd be doing the same job for the gossip column in The Post as she'd been doing for Tittler –they were both owned by the same man, after all- and, to some extent she was, but there was a key difference: she now had to be nasty.
The famous people she wrote about in Tittler had rather liked her stories, some had even written to her, pretending the things she'd invented were actually true. But she'd been accusing them of having love-affairs with glamorous people and getting slightly tipsy at fabulous parties in exotic places. Now she was insinuating they were mentally unstable, adulterous alcoholics. Unsurprisingly, they weren't nearly as happy, but this was stated editorial policy. Everything was nasty about The Post and everyone who worked for it, from Kelvin Bridge (the editor) all the way down to Rupey Murddy (the post-boy). It was a horrible, horrible place to work; which was why she had grabbed the chance to become Lord Bothermore's PA, and that was almost worse. All of this explained, she hoped, why she had chosen to turn informer.
There were only two newspapers in Ankh-Morpork. Oh, people thought there were five, but as The Chronicle, The Tribune, The Post and The Banner more or less said exactly the same thing in, decreasingly, fewer and shorter words, it boiled down to Bothermore Press and The Times. She didn't always agree with what she read in The Times –or, more accurately, she didn't always like what she read in The Times- but she never agreed with anything she read in the others. She wouldn't believe The Post if it told her the world was flat. All the Bothermore papers just made stuff up and didn't mind admitting it. Of course they wouldn't admit it to their readers, but none of the reporters on any of them thought they were reporting anything, or that there was a single word of truth in what was printed under their bylines.
Now, The Times had been pointing this out for ages, but hardly anyone read The Times and, in any case, people believed in what they felt like believing, regardless of any so called facts. But then something changed. The Times started to report on stories that appeared in The Post days before they actually appeared in The Post and often days before The Post claimed they happened. It took a while for this to come to people's attention, but eventually The Times' policy of having little boys give it away on street corners started to pay-off. Some of The Post's less stupid readers began to wonder to each other if The Times being able to predict something The Post was going to say happened even before The Post said it happened might mean it didn't actually happen at all. Of course it is far easier to con someone than to convince them that they've been conned, but even the thickest of dimwits doesn't like being had.
Kelvin Bridge was furious, but Lord Bothermore was almost apoplectic. How dare people not believe him just because he was lying!? But what made them both madder still was that they couldn't understand where The Times was getting its information from. They knew about Selene, naturally, and were in awe of her ability to become part of the background when she chose, but they now had imps who could detect her presence and they always had several around when they were discussing "editorial policy". All the reporters were as venal as they were themselves but had nothing to gain by letting it be known that they were just making stuff up. They couldn't imagine where the leak was coming from. That it might be coming from Katy simply never occurred to them.
Miss. Hoppkins was a girl and therefore of no consequence, provided she was polite, pretty and dressed provocatively. She could no more be the source of the leak than she could become Patrician, and it was Vetinari that they all suspected was behind it. In fact behind everything. And they weren't far wrong. For her part, Katy was enjoying herself immensely. It was fun to watch a bunch of silly, nasty men chasing their tails, while the spy was right in front of them but she also felt she was performing a civic duty. Plus even her contact at The Times –Sacharissa Cripsplock- didn't know what was happening. They would meet for lunch once a week and pretend to be girlfriends –which by now they actually were- and at some point Katy would slip her an envelope. The story was that this was money and instructions from The Patrician, when actually it was "insider information" on Bothermore Press. She enjoyed being sly, secret and surreptitious even with Sacharissa, though she suspected Sacharissa was having a strange effect on the way she spoke.
It was all a great laugh, until the Omnians burned down The Times.
Of course Katy knew that the Omnians hadn't actually burned down The Times. The giveaway had been the headline in The Post: "OMNIANS BURN DOWN THE TIMES!" She had discovered during her time as one of "Bothermore's Bitches" that the most reliable guide to what was true was: the opposite of what The Post said it was. So far it hadn't failed her once. The main reason that Katy had decide to go over to the other side had been the constant drip of snide insinuations and nasty little lies about Omnians that appeared in The Post and all its sister papers. Now, with The Times gone she didn't know what she was going to do, but she knew she was going to do something. Whatever the risk.