Page 115 of Stardust Child

“I understand.” Miche clapped a hand on his shoulder, offered his most winning smile, andsqueezed.“I’m quite busy myself, Jerry. The princess’s chambers. Where are they?”

For whatever reason, Jerry was very reluctant to give them up. He balked. He stalled. He took Miche to two rooms that were very obviously guest rooms, lacking any objects whatsoever that might have belonged to a young lady. It seemed such a stupid, petty thing to be so obstructive over, Miche was more perplexed than angry.

“Have you gotten lost again?” he asked sharply, as they moved down a narrow set of corridors that were plainly meant for the use of servants. At this point, he wouldn’t have been surprised if there were four men waiting at the end of the hall with daggers.

“No, sir knight,” Jerry said. His little mustache was twitching with agitation. “This was her room.”

He pushed the door open and stepped aside. It looked like a servant’s room. A servant no one much liked. Small, bare, with a dingy pallet bed, a battered wardrobe, one wooden chair, and a single stingy window, from which issued a pronounced draft.

“I am a very charming, clever, and handsome man.” Miche caught the butler by the shirtfront and lifted him to his toes. “But I have never beenpatient.You are telling me this was the princess’s room?”

“Yes!” The butler exclaimed, twisting his head back as if he thought Miche’s snapping teeth would go next for his jugular. “Forgive me, it was the lady’s orders, I swear it by the stars!”

Miche didn’t believe it. He didn’twantto believe it. But he was also a man who remembered details, and suddenly he recalled those ragged, pathetic dresses Ophele had been wearing when they arrived in Aldeburke. There was a half-dozen more just like them in the wardrobe. Under the bed he found even more damning evidence: stacks of books, most of which were well beyond a servant’s level of literacy.

Ripping the flimsy bed out of the way, Miche flung it at the opposite wall, ignoring the startled shriek as Jerry dodged. Tucked in the furthest corner under the bed was a basket of what might have once been bread and a wedge of very, very moldy cheese, wrapped tightly in oilcloth to keep the vermin out. The sort of food a hungry person might hide away, in case of future need.

The butler let out a sound of disgust, covering his nose against the stench.

“You are telling me,” Miche repeated dangerously, so angry that he thought he might just kill this fellow after all, “that the child of Lady Pavot, thedaughter of the Emperorwas kept here?”

There was only one person on the estate that Ophele had trusted. Miche went straight back to the kitchen.

“I’d like a word with you,” he said to Azelma, who was up to her elbows in dough and flour. The old woman glanced at him with no surprise at all.

“I suppose you would,” she agreed, scraping the dough off her fingers. “Lettie, come finish these buns. You can give me a hand in the herb garden, young man. They’ll be withering for the winter soon enough, and you need a pound of dry seasoning for a quarter pound of fresh, my stars…”

Silently, Miche waited as she washed her hands and then headed up the back stairs and out to the herb garden in front of the kitchens, the plants laid out in careful, decorative patterns to please any guests who might roll by in their carriages. He was not much in the mood to be toyed with, especially by an old lady who—as he now recalled—had never once given him a straight answer about anything. There was a great deal Azelma had neglected to tell him at their last meeting.

“You never answered her letters,” he said as she stooped beside some fragrant grey-green shrub and began stripping its leaves. “You’re the only person she ever wrote to.”

“I never got any letters,” she said, in a tone that indicated he should have already guessed this. “But even if I had, I guess I wouldn’t have answered. The lady would only have sent my letters if it served her, somehow.”

“So it was Lady Hurrell,” Miche said. “Not the lord?”

“Most of the time.” Azelma gave him a sharp glance, nothing at all like the grumbling, good-natured woman who had brandished a ladle at him last spring. “What do you want to know? Seems to me that you don’t need to be prying into Her Highness’s business if you’re only here to steal the silver.”

“His Grace will want to know. Needs to know.” There was a sick, sinking feeling in his stomach. He needed to know, but he didn’t want to hear it. Miche suddenly remembered how Ophele did not expect to be treated kindly.

“Ah, well, if it’sHis Gracethat wants to know,” she said tartly. “Fetch me some of that tarragon, I didn’t bring you out here to idle about with your hands waggling in the wind. You’ve already seen her room, haven’t you? You need me to say it? Lady Hurrell blamed that child for everythingthat went wrong for House Hurrell. Taught her that it was her fault, and she had to make up for it.”

Mechanically, Miche crouched beside the plant she had pointed out. He had never seen a tarragon bush.

“Tell me all of it,” he said.

She told him. He hardly noticed what he was harvesting; he might have plucked up whole nettle bushes and never felt the sting as he listened. Working in the kitchen as she did, Azelma hadn’t seen much of it herself. But she had heard enough. Small things, at first: the maids coming back with a full meal tray, saying Her Highness had been sent to bed without supper. Days at a time when the princess was not seen at all, having been locked in her room as punishment for some infraction. Such things made everyone nervous, especially when Lady Hurrell began ordering them to discipline the little girl; wasn’t such rough handling blasphemous? She was a child of the stars, after all, daughter of the Emperor.

But then Leise and Nenot had become her maids, and they hadn’t seemed troubled by anything the lady asked them to do.

“I was worried,” Azelma admitted. “After a while folk stopped sayingprincessand started sayingbastard.And she was such a skittish little thing, I could barely get two words out and she’d be off like a shot.”

“They called her a bastard?” Miche echoed. “The servants did?”

“Not all of them, but those as wanted Lady Hurrell’s favor knew what she liked to hear.” Azelma’s wrinkled lips pressed tight together. “That was how it was until Her Highness was…oh, ten or eleven, I’m not sure. She and Lisabe had quarreled, as girls do, and Lisabe came up to the house dripping wet from the stream. Well, you would’ve thought the princess had tried to drown her. Lord Hurrell made such a to-do, the poor creature didn’t dare poke her nose in the house for three days. His lordship finally turned the whole estate out to look for her.”

The frills of her white cap quivered with outrage.

“He said she was missing. Pah! Hiding! I don’t know who it was that found her, but I tell you, I was looking. I might’ve just marched out the gate and down the road if I had found her. But it wasn’t me. By the time they called us back, it was already over. One of the house girls said later there’d been such a hullabaloo in the parlor, and she scarpered again. She always was quick. They were still turning the house upside down at midnight, looking for her.”

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