Loose Purse Strings

The room they had shut me up in again was as shabby and desolate as ever. The strange part was that only once I had been left completely alone did I finally have the presence of mind to piece together what had happened.

Earlier there’d been no room in my head to think — but what on earth is going on here?

How in the world had a man come back alive, when they had gone to the trouble of holding a funeral for him?

That I hadn’t recognized my twin’s husband, Duke Ernst, at a glance was no great surprise; he had changed enormously in the five years since I last saw him. It was more than the bolder, heavier cast of his features. A kind of weight hung about him now, as though it had always been his by nature, and all of it made Herman feel like a stranger to me.

Just as Herman had said of himself, he was less a courteous gentleman than a stiff, unbending soldier. His plain, blunt way of speaking, without a trace of drawing-room polish, was like a bullet fired dead straight at its mark.

Maybe that was why…

I couldn’t argue back.

Herman Ernst had warned that, if my claim proved true, my own House Seymour would bear a grave share of the blame as well. And there was no denying that his anger was just and warranted.

Why had I ever imagined he would help me so readily?

The one and only way out of this. Had the thought that flashed into my head the instant I saw the man’s face been nothing but a naïve delusion?

Knock, knock. Just then a rap came at the door from outside.

“My lady, it’s Tess. Hoillun is with me — may we come in?”

I straightened my back and gave them leave to enter.

The butler and the head housekeeper came in with their arms full. Hoillun carried a length of rope that looked sturdy even at a glance; Tess, a small sack and a bundle of newspapers.

“What is all this, now…?”

Ignoring my mutter, they went straight to the window that opened onto the terrace. Then they set about winding the stout rope around the terrace door handles, lashing them tight.

“What in the world are you doing?”

“The master ordered us to guard against every possible accident and to cut off any danger at its source. Forgive us, my lady.”

Hoillun answered courteously, even as he cinched the rope down hard.

“Honestly — why did you have to go and do a thing like that?”

Finished helping Hoillun, Tess set the bundle of newspapers on the table in front of me as she spoke. Then she moved about the room, gathering up every object that looked even faintly sharp.

“Have you any idea how frightened I was, my lady? Thanks to you, I’ve lost years off what little life I have left.”

I offered my feeble excuse to the backs of their busily working heads.

“It isn’t what you think. I wasn’t trying to die.”

Tess and Hoillun murmured that they understood, but distractedly; they didn’t really seem to believe me. Still, I wanted to give them a sincere apology, so I pressed on.

“I mean it. For frightening you both, I am truly sorry.”

At that, Tess stopped where she stood and looked at me. She seemed startled at first, but her face quickly hardened into something cold.

“As if it’s any great matter that the likes of us got a fright. There’s no need for you to go apologizing. It’s not as though you were ever one for that sort of thing.”

“Tess.”

Hoillun tried hastily to check her, but it was no use.

“But truly, my lady. Our young master — no, the master — on the one day he was finally coming home, of all days, surely you could have held yourself together.”

Tess said it with a deep sigh. For some reason her eyes held a reproach.

“All I wanted was for you to welcome the master warmly, my lady. He’s come home after five whole years. He even put off his triumphal ceremony just to lay eyes on you, and…”

That Herman had postponed his triumphal ceremony out of a single-minded wish to see his wife was news to me. What troubled me was that Tess seemed even more incredulous about it than I was.

“Of course I know it was terribly hard on you too, my lady, with the master gone. But he’s come back alive now, hasn’t he. So you must gather yourself as soon as you can and be the pillar he can lean on.”

It was honest, upright counsel. Its only flaw was that the ‘real Gloria’ who ought to have been hearing it wasn’t here to receive it.

“You’re the master’s only family now, my lady.”

Family.

I turned the awkward, uncomfortable word over and over in my mind. There had been a time when I, too, had believed it the most precious thing in all the world.

The twin who had stolen my place, and the fool of a husband she led about by the nose.

And the parents who would not believe their own daughter, and the servants who could not recognize me.

Honestly, I no longer had any real grasp of what I was even supposed to feel toward them. Bitterness and hatred would well up, and then, once they had ebbed a little, nothing remained but an endless emptiness.

…

I quietly lowered my head. Tess’s counsel was so guileless, so heartfelt, that there was no digging in to insist, ‘I am not Gloria.’

What on earth had Gloria been thinking, to betray the sincere hearts of so many people?

“That’s enough, Tess. My lady must be tired. Let’s take our leave now.”

Hoillun laid both hands on Tess’s shoulders and gently steered her out; as she went, Tess told me to call if I needed anything.

Still wearing that angry look on her face, of course.

Before he pulled the door shut, Hoillun gave me a gentle smile. That warm smile only left me more unsettled.

The next day, too, I stayed shut up in the room as before.

Where am I even supposed to begin setting this right?

I reached out and picked up the teacup on the table. I had no intention of drinking the tea, long since gone cold, but restlessness kept me lifting the cup and setting it down again.

It was just then that the newspapers Tess had left behind caught my eye. With no real thought, I picked one up. I had only meant to kill the tedious hours somehow, but the moment I unfolded it, there he was again: that wretched Herman Ernst.

The Hero’s Return: Herman Ernst Answers

The black-and-white photograph of Herman spread across the front page of the Imperial Times was larger than my two palms together. Perhaps because it lacked color, his almost unreal looks stood out in even sharper relief.

Beneath it ran a piece in the usual interview format. Most of it was questions about life on the deserted island, which Herman answered in fair detail.

Q: So then, what was the hardest part of life on the deserted island?

Of everything there, that was the question that caught and held my attention above the rest.

A: The despair, most of all — the fear that I might never return home as long as I lived. Not one of my fleet let it show in front of the others, but once a mood of hopelessness settles over a unit, there’s no missing it. That sort of thing you feel on your skin.

Q: And yet you never gave up on coming home, right to the very end. What was it that let you hold on?

A: Because there were families waiting for my men. I felt it always — the responsibility of bringing them safely home to those families.

Q: Just as you say, the families of the First Naval Fleet’s soldiers are gathering in the capital to meet their sons, their brothers, their husbands. And yet we hear you’ve chosen to postpone the triumphal ceremony for a time. Is there a reason?

I read on to Herman’s answer as if spellbound.

A: It’s simple. I, too, wanted to return first of all to the family that had been waiting for me.

For a long while I couldn’t tear my eyes from that line or so of text. That short answer laid bare just how keenly Herman had longed to be reunited with his family.

Somehow I felt a strange kinship with him. We had both put family above all else, and we had both been betrayed by that very family.

Just then the words Tess had spoken the day before came back to me.

“What the master longs for is nothing grand. A single word — ‘You’ve made it home safe’ — that’s all it would have been.”

He was a man who had turned the tide of the Central Continent War by severing the enemy’s supply lines; a man who, even with his ship wrecked, had brought every last one of his men home alive. Welcoming him gladly as a husband was certainly beyond me. But treating him as the hero who had saved the nation? That much, at least, I felt I could do.

First I need to sit down and talk with Herman Ernst face to face. Nothing gets resolved by staying shut up in this room.

“It’s me, my lady.”

Around then Tess came into the room. She set the meal down mechanically, drew back the curtains, then smoothed out the bedding.

Before she could leave, I finally spoke the words I had been turning over and hesitating on all the while.

“Tess.”

Tess stopped and turned back to me.

“I’d like you to ask His Excellency whether he might take dinner with me tomorrow evening.”

Bewildered, Tess asked back, “I beg your pardon?”

I gathered up the small parcel I had tucked deep in a drawer and stepped toward her.

I’d been saving it just in case.

This was the emergency money my mother had pressed on me before she left, without my father’s knowledge. It amounted to nearly my whole fortune, and some part of me did wonder whether I wasn’t spending it a shade too freely, but…

“He’s a man who suffered a long time and has only just come home. So I’d like to give him at least one proper, formal dinner.”

Almost before she knew it, Tess had taken the heavy parcel. She looked for all the world as if she’d been struck on the back of the head.

— Flip, flip.

“This one, she saw fit to blow through too.”

There was no mercy in the way his hand flicked irritably through the pages. Herman pressed his thumb to the bridge of his brow and ground his back teeth.

“And this one — gone the same way.”

As he looked over House Ernst’s financial reports, the same helpless dread he had known on that deserted island seemed to well up in him all over again.

“And this one — mortgaged away, the whole of it…”

He stared at the seizure stamps struck across one document after another, then flung the papers down.

While he had been off risking his life at war, every one of the family’s enterprises had fallen into the hands of the collateral branch. And that was hardly the worst of it. His private holdings, the villa and the mines and all the rest, had long since been confiscated by the state.

He had been asking himself how on earth anyone could squander so vast a fortune so completely.

The enemy wasn’t outside. It was within.

The enemy within, ‘Gloria Ernst,’ had poured out the family fortune like water for five straight years.

The business rights had been stripped away and the assets signed over, so not a single coin of income was coming in; and still, across all five of those years, his wife’s spending had not slackened in the least.

Auctions, parties, luxuries, revelry. Even gambling.

The more he read of his wife’s excesses, the more the heat gathered behind his eyes.

She must have gone mad.

And the moment the thought formed, Herman seized on one crucial fact.

Ah — that’s right.

They had, after all, told him his wife had genuinely gone mad.