Once, When We Were Young

“See? There’s no way this isn’t fun.”

Even as his teasing left me flushed, my gaze kept drifting to the corners of his mouth. Of late they curved into a smile far more readily than they used to.

Was he always someone who smiled this readily?

Just as he’d claimed, he truly did look to be enjoying himself.

I hate to admit it, but I think I’ve been much the same of late.

And no wonder. Living as ‘Gloria,’ there were moments when I took a real pleasure in doing the things I’d never once been free to do before. Each time some word or deed that ‘Marienne’ could never have gotten away with slipped out of me before I knew it, I felt a flutter of alarm, and, deep down, a quiet exhilaration. In casting off the constraints and the studied propriety that had bound me all my life, I felt a freedom I had never known.

Still — that side of me can hardly have been a seemly thing in a noblewoman.

Why this man should see me for exactly what I was, with no conditions attached, was something I could never quite work out.

“It’s a marvel to me sometimes. How did you come up with something to back Count Meier into a corner, right there on the spot? That notion of taking funds from the other landowners in exchange for building them stations — I’ll be honest, it took me a little by surprise.”
“It wasn’t something I thought up on the spot. If Count Meier had refused to bend and kept naming so high a price, we’d never have carried the negotiation through. It was only one of several fallback plans I’d been holding in mind for just such a case.”

Though of course I’d never imagined it would become the very thing that backed Count Meier into a corner.

“Herman.”

I put it to him carefully. His eyes still held that look of quiet satisfaction.

“Didn’t it strike you that I was overstepping? When it comes down to it, the enterprise rights were never mine to begin with, and to your eyes it might well have looked as though I’d forgotten my place.”
“What are you talking about. Not in the slightest.”

His answer came back quicker than any before it.

“Thanks to you, the upper hand at the table swung over to our side. And what’s more, there’s no one who throws himself into this enterprise as hard as you do.”

Herman Ernst was endlessly accepting toward anyone he had once taken as his own. Everything I’d seen of his conduct these past months bore it out.

All I’ve really done is slip in deep among Herman’s people, cloaked in the name of Gloria.

Perhaps that was why even his unstinting praise felt as though it weren’t wholly mine to keep. He was plainly voicing his gratitude, his pride in me, and to receive it all under the name of ‘Gloria’ was no welcome thing at all.

I looked away from that trusting gaze and drew a line between us, meaning it as a plea for him to stop opening his heart to me.

“You may not think so, but others might well speak ill of me for it.”
“Let them, then. As much as they like.”

He tossed it back at me, as if to ask what trouble there could possibly be in that.

“I don’t care in the least what people who mean nothing to my life prattle on about.”

Nothing could have been firmer. Herman, who paid the eyes of others no mind at all, seemed a wonder to me, and I envied him for it.

Perhaps Herman is the one who has it right.

Was it because I had always cut myself to fit the eyes of others? Every so often, when Herman’s way of seeing the world quietly surfaced, it startled me all over again.

That’s a part of him I think I’d rather like to take after.

As I gazed at him like someone who’d stumbled onto a truth she’d never known, he misread the look on my face entirely; certain he’d caught himself in some mistake, he set his expression and corrected what he’d just said.

“Ah — is that not how it’s said? Whoever’s speaking ill of you, I’ll go and set them straight. Bring them here. Where are they.”

His words sent me recoiling, and I put a few steps between us.

“Wherever did you learn to say such a thing?”
“Wasn’t this what you were after?”
“Of course not!”
“Then, if you weren’t asking me to take your part, why were you staring at me so intently?”

Herman closed the little distance that had opened between us and leaned in with a low “Hm?” I turned my face away in a hurry, escaping his gaze.

“It’s only…”
“Only?”
“I was only thinking that I envy you a little.”

The words I’d kept penned in my heart spilled out before I knew it. Since when had I grown candid enough to speak my mind without adding or subtracting a thing? And in front of Herman Ernst, of all people.

Casting my eyes around, I changed the subject as smoothly as I could manage.

“Were you always so self-assured, so brimming with confidence? Or was there some particular turning point…”

I’d thought it a plausible pivot; it was a total failure. I hadn’t the faintest idea what I was babbling about, either. My head was a hopeless snarl, like a ball of yarn a cat had batted every which way.

Herman let out a light snort, as though he’d never heard such an odd question.

“Well, I’ve been this way since I was a child, I think.”
“Since you were a child?”
“Mm. It’s my mother’s doing, most likely.”

Then his face took on the look of a man turning over some distant past, and he murmured low.

“My mother was always one to be content with little things. She gave thanks for everything, and thought well of whatever came her way.”

As he called his mother to mind, his face turned boundlessly gentle, though whether that was the sunset staining his brow, I couldn’t have said.

“She liked tending her garden far better than showing her face at society functions. And she was forever saying, as though it were a habit, that the seat of a duchess didn’t quite suit her.”

As I listened quietly, I called to mind the late Duchess as I had once seen her.

Dorothea Ernst.

In the society of her day she was regarded as something apart. Caring little for the social round, the Duchess shut herself away on the ducal lands and spent her hours with her family.

There was, of course, no end of people hoping to forge even the slenderest connection with a Dorothea like that, and yet even they, to the last, said the very same thing.

“A good soul, but a little peculiar.”
“Quite. There’s no doubting she’s kind and mild by nature, but now and then you do wonder why she takes it quite so far.”
“How to put it… less the lady of a great house than a nun out of some convent, really.”

The Duchess tended her own garden and raised medicinal herbs, and was said to take a great interest in farming methods and herbal lore. That knowledge she spread among the farmers and common folk of the Ernst domain, they said, forever pushing the science behind it further. And so, by all accounts, the Ernst domain brought in the highest grain yields in the whole Empire, year after year. Some of that owed to the Ernst lands being vastly broader than any other domain, to be sure, but the yield per ten ares was said to run far higher than other farmland’s besides, so the region served as an agricultural heartland to the fullest.

Something else came to light only after her death: she had, they said, a great passion for charitable works besides. There was no place her hand had failed to reach, from the parish orphanages within the Ernst domain to the orphanages of the capital, and she founded and ran schools so that child laborers might have their chance at learning.

She was certainly not, like other noblewomen, the sort to set store by how things looked to others.

“Oh — this comes to me all of a sudden, but that charity exhibition the Duchess held, years ago. It was a deeply memorable occasion for me. And a fine chance, besides, to see the works of common-born painters.”

As a rule, the charity exhibitions noblewomen hosted degenerated into gaudy little society salons, all for show. The one the late Duchess Ernst opened, by contrast, was, as I recall it, a true occasion that held to its purpose and kept its eyes fixed on charity.

“You came to one of my mother’s exhibitions as well?”

Though the memory was older still by years, Herman seemed to hold it as clearly as if it were yesterday, and he asked as though learning the fact for the first time.

In that instant I realized I had spoken far too much from Marienne’s own vantage, and clamped my mouth shut.

“It was a charity exhibition for noblewomen, so the three of you — mother and both daughters — might well have attended together.”
“…”
“No — no. And yet I never once heard any mention of you afterward. By way of thanks, my mother used to send a small gift to every noblewoman who’d graced the affair. She left the drawing-up of that list to me, so I remember it plainly.”
“…”
“Was your name on that list, I wonder. As I recall it, to House Seymour we sent only two gifts in all, the Marchioness’s among them—”
“He—Herman.”
“Hm?”
“That sorbet shop over there. Doesn’t it look absolutely delicious?”

I pointed hastily at the sorbet shop near the park.

Just as Herman said, only my mother and I had gone to that charity exhibition. Gloria had flatly declared that every gathering the late Duchess Ernst hosted was stuffy and dull to the core, and that attending one was a sheer waste of time.

At my abrupt insistence Herman knit his brows a touch, then gave an easy nod, as much as to say fine, let’s.

“I like strawberry. When it comes to dessert, I prefer something tart over something sweet.”
“That works out well. I like sweet things.”
“And how does that work out well?”
“Because we can each buy a different flavor and share.”

His meaning didn’t come to me all at once.

Surely he doesn’t mean for the two of us to share the sorbet we’ve each been eating, off those tiny spoons?

Too late, I saw the conversation I’d swerved so hastily had only veered somewhere worse. Herman had already fixed his eyes on the sorbet shop.

In the end we ordered as he wished, a different flavor each, and before long the clerk handed us our little cups of sorbet.

“It’s rather good.”

Herman said it, spooning up his sorbet with the little spoon. His mouth was plainly professing satisfaction, yet his eyes had sunk deep into some feeling I couldn’t name.

I suppose it’s been such a long while since he last spoke to anyone of the late Duchess.

Loss was loss, no matter how much time had passed.

Even in so brief a telling of the late Duchess, Herman’s love and reverence for her shone through, so his reaction was easy enough to understand.

“I miss her too.”

At that, Herman’s ash-grey eyes turned to me.

“The late Duchess, I mean. She was such a fine woman.”
“You’re right. Neither my mother nor my father was the sort who ought to have gone the way they did.”

As though a nightmarish time long past had risen up before him, a deep shadow fell across Herman’s face. The disaster in which the ducal couple, in the capital on business, were engulfed by fire at their townhouse was, even now, one of those great calamities people still spoke of from time to time.

Somehow I found myself wanting to comfort him. For some reason I had no wish to look at that face gone hard and stiff as stone. Even if it left me a little abashed to admit it, I far preferred the way he’d been snorting with laughter a moment before.

“It was a grievous accident. I’m truly sorry.”
“Thank you. But there’s no need to wear such a worried face.”

Herman gave a faint smile and went on.

“Seeing as I’ve had my revenge, in my own way.”
“…Revenge?”

At words that came from nowhere and led nowhere, I couldn’t help but ask.