Her Ladyship Has Collapsed

The Dural bread was crisp on the outside and yet chewy and soft within, and the filling made from Dural was salty and rich at once, so that she could eat and eat and never tire of it. The result was beyond anything she had expected.

“You are to share how this Dural bread is made with the women of the village, and think out a way of making it in quantity. Chief, settle on a site for a village workshop where the Dural bread is to be made, and let Builder know of it. How many women are there in the village altogether who are able to work?”

Dong-hui meant to leave the bread-making entirely in the women’s hands. They needed a steady means of earning money of their own, and in the village of Morta, overflowing with widows, they needed it all the more.

“A little over a hundred.”
“I believe I heard that the people of Morta number some eight hundred. And of those, only a hundred or so women can work?”

The number was smaller than she had thought. She had supposed there would be at least two hundred, and she could not hide her puzzlement. Reading the lord’s face, the chief folded both hands respectfully together and went on with the answer.

“Most of them are old, my lady, and among the younger women there are a good many who have taken ill. Those healthy enough to work will be a hundred or thereabouts at most.”

Hope hunched his shoulders right up, as though it were somehow his own doing that the villagers were sick. It left a sting in Dong-hui’s heart.

“I shall find a physician for the sick and send one out here before long. Butler?”
“Yes! My lady, shall I look into whether there is a physician we might bring from a neighboring estate?”

A hint was all he needed now. Handsome caught her meaning at once and answered, and Dong-hui grinned at him as though she liked him the better for it and stuck her thumb up.

“There it is! Butler Handsome is the best. You know just what I am going to say before I say it, do you not?”

Praised in front of the whole company, Handsome broke into a soppy grin, pleased with himself, then hurriedly got his face back in order.

“Bakey?”
“Yes, my lady!”

Ever since her own bread was chosen, Bakey had felt she was walking on air, and she wore a look half out of her wits.

“The prize will be handed to you through the butler. It is no great sum, but I hope it will be of help. And see that a prize goes to those who made the breads that reached the last round as well. You have all worked so very hard.”
“Th-thank you!”

Bakey had already heard through the chief that her ladyship would give a prize to whoever’s Dural bread was chosen best, and now she was so glad she might have flown up into the sky.

From the others standing outside in their disappointment a cheer went up too. They would not get as much as the winner, but it would be a great help to their housekeeping all the same. At the news that the others were to have a prize as well, Bakey’s face brightened a good deal too.

“Where is Kevin’s dad?”

On so glad a day, with the whole village celebrating together, her husband was nowhere to be seen. Dong-hui had asked because she wondered whether he had been called away with the logging team, but Bakey answered with a desolate look.

“He took ill last winter and left this world before me.”

Oh no.

Dong-hui remembered how the chief of Morta and the chief of Enol had boasted, when they came to Grace Castle, that their villages had no end of widows.

“I am sorry.”

At the lord’s apology, coming out of nowhere, Bakey did not know what to say and only worked her mouth open and shut. She wanted to say that it was all right, and yet a lord who had failed to look after her estate properly could not honestly be called blameless in it. Nor could she say such a thing to the lord’s face.

While Bakey floundered about, unable to find anything to say, Dong-hui went on.

“Bakey, you are to be the factory manager of the new Dural bread factory we shall build.”
“A factory?”

Bakey could make nothing of either: not what a factory was, nor what a factory manager was on top of it.

“The particulars I shall pass on to you bit by bit from here on. When the chief next comes up to Grace Castle, come along with one person you can trust. And of course you may bring Kevin too.”
“T-to Grace Castle?”

Startled, stammering, Bakey looked from the chief to the lord and back again. The chief looked a little startled as well, but soon smiled contentedly and nodded.

“There will be a great deal to do. Who knows — perhaps it will be Bakey who does most of all to bring this village back to life?”

Dong-hui beamed at her.

On the road back to the castle, their business in the village of Morta roughly finished, Dong-hui shut her eyes against a heavy headache and leaned her head on the carriage wall. Before long a fever came up in her, and there was not a place on her that did not ache.

She must have gone down properly with the aches and fever of sheer exhaustion. Now that she had grown somewhat used to things, the tension had gone out of her.

“My lady, is something the matter?”

For someone coming away from a village where nothing but good things had happened, the lord’s face was not altogether bright. Handsome studied her ladyship’s color closely, worry in his face. Somehow it looked a little flushed.

“I must be tired. I shall sleep a while. Wake me when we arrive.”
“Yes! Rest easy, my lady.”

Handsome had barely finished speaking before Dong-hui let her head fall against the carriage wall. He took up the blanket kept ready inside at once and laid it over her ladyship, then propped a soft cushion behind her head.

The road was unpaved, and every time the carriage jolted her head knocked against the wall. Anyone else would have woken; her ladyship slept on soundly, her eyes shut tight.

“She really must have been tired.”

Asleep and breathing softly, her ladyship looked scarcely different from his own little sister, who spent her days waiting for nothing but the day he came home. Pity settled into Handsome’s eyes as he looked at the lord. He hesitated a moment, then took out one more blanket and covered her ladyship’s knees.

He had dropped off himself for a moment, and woke to an odd feeling that all of this had happened before. Her ladyship was asleep still, but somehow the feel of her was not what it had been.

“My lady?”

Handsome called to Chloe tentatively. She did not so much as stir. A chill ran up his spine, and he sprang up and laid his palm against the lord’s forehead.

“A fever!”

Her forehead was burning up. Handsome threw the carriage window open in his haste and looked out. Mercifully, Grace Castle stood in sight not far off.

He shouted for Red Bear, who was riding escort on the carriage. Something in the butler’s voice was wrong, and Red Bear brought his horse in tight alongside.

“What is it.”
“Her ladyship has collapsed. Ride to the castle and let them know ahead of us! And send knights to fetch a doctor!”

Handsome’s voice shook with the urgency of it.

Startled, Red Bear bent down and looked into the carriage through the open window. At the sight of the lord lying collapsed his eyes twisted into something savage, and he rode straight for the rear of the carriage.

The knights were strung tight already by the extraordinary force coming off their commander, and the instant his order came down they put their horses to the gallop in several directions at once. Red Bear watched them go, five ways in all, then drove his own horse forward again. A moment later the running carriage began to gather speed.

“Hyah!”

The sound of the coachman urging the horses on carried back to them.

Handsome shut the window against the cold wind and gathered the lord into his arms like a child. Her whole body was burning up.

“My lady. Sob, sob.”

He had been serving her ladyship closer than anyone, and had not so much as noticed the state his mistress’s body was in; the guilt of it closed his throat. If he were dismissed for it here and now, he would have nothing to say for himself.

Delma, who had come out in good spirits to meet her ladyship, saw that it was Red Bear and not the lord walking at the head of them, and felt that something had gone wrong. The foreboding of it turned her fingertips cold.

Behind Red Bear the knights were coming on quickly, closed in a ring around somebody. When Red Bear came near, Delma made out Handsome in the middle of them, holding Chloe limp in his arms.

No.

Delma’s breath jammed in her throat and everything went black before her eyes.

“My lady!”

Rolled up in the blanket like a child, Chloe looked far too small and frail in Handsome’s arms. It felt as though the world were coming down.

The lord was carried straight up to her bedchamber. Scrooge came running the moment he heard and went ashen at the sight of Chloe lying there.

“Hu-hu-huuuk, my lady. You have been driving yourself far too hard all this while, I am sure of it,” Delma sobbed.

She looked at her ladyship, her face flushed red with the heat of the fever, and the tears ran down in great drops.

“True enough. Looking at all she has got done in this time, by rights she should have taken to her bed long before now.”

Pity showed in Scrooge’s eyes too as he looked at Chloe.

“My lady has truly done far too much.”

As far as Delma knew, her ladyship had never been a person of any great physical strength. She could barely keep her own body together, and the sight of her going out to inspect the estate and running here and there for the sake of the estate’s residents would have been unimaginable in the old days. Her strength had not changed a whit while the work she did had multiplied several times over, so it was only natural that her body should give way under it.

“When will the doctor arrive? Her fever will not come down.”

Delma shifted from foot to foot and stared out of the window. She had wiped her ladyship down again and again and laid a wet cloth on her forehead, but she did not think the fever would come down without a doctor to see to her.

A doctor arrived only late that night. The knight had pressed so hard that there was even one doctor who had been loaded straight onto a horse in the middle of a meal and brought exactly as they were. Knights had gone out at the same time to the several places where a doctor was said to be, and by the next morning the number of doctors who had reached Grace Castle came to five in all.

The news that the lord had collapsed spread through the household staff of Grace Castle in no time at all.

“Her ladyship will be all right, won’t she?”
“She hasn’t caught the illness the mistress died of, has she?”
“Hey! Don’t say things like that!”
“It’s only because I’m worried.”
“All the same, don’t say it. It’s frightening.”

Two maids in the corridor near the lord’s room broke off their cleaning with their eyes brimming. The pair of them hovered a long while in front of her ladyship’s door before going away with the tips of their noses red.