Chapter 3

Coffee

It was on the morning two days after the formal introduction that Sion Arden called at the Crowell manor again. Society's custom held that a fiancé might come and go from the house on days not formally appointed, provided he sent a note ahead, and for the first time he found himself grateful for that custom. In the note he had written that he wished to walk in the garden with the lady, but it was less the garden he wished to see than the people who passed through it.

The drawing room, from its high ceiling and long windows to the ancestors in their gilded frames, was no different from two days before, except that today there was neither duke nor duchess, and once the butler Claude had withdrawn with word that the lady would be down shortly, Sion was alone.

He did not sit, but stood by the window. Below, he could see the stable roof, the laundry chimney, and the back door the servants used. At this hour three people were passing through it: a kitchen maid carrying a market basket, a boy laden with firewood, and a middle-aged woman with a laundry basket tucked under her arm. Sion noted their faces and movements in his notebook. If six men had died, then on each of those six occasions someone had carried something out of this house.

"Sir Knight! I heard you take coffee!"

The voice behind him was far too bright for this drawing room.

He turned to find a maid standing in the doorway, a silver tray balanced in her hands. Her brown hair hung in two braids, and her apron strings were tied in a large bow at the small of her back. She was the maid who had followed the lady in on the day of the introduction, though he had not had the chance to learn her name then.

"Mr. Claude told me to bring you tea, Sir, but you said you take coffee instead of tea, didn't you? Only everyone in this house drinks nothing but tea, so there's no coffee at all. So I turned out the whole top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, you see? And there was a bag of beans a southern merchant left behind last year! I ground them myself!"

The maid said all of this in a single breath and held up the tray with a proud face. Thick steam curled from the spout of the silver pot. Sion had never asked for coffee. He had merely said he was fine when Claude offered tea. Somewhere along the stairs and corridors of the manor, that refusal had evidently turned into a wish for coffee.

That this was what happened when a knight of common birth declined tea in a noble house, he learned for the first time today.

"...Thank you."

"Hehe, not at all. You're my lady's fiancé, after all. Sit, sit!"

The maid trotted with the tray toward the low table before the sofa. And the tip of her shoe caught precisely on the turned-up corner of the thick carpet laid before it.

Time seemed to slow ever so slightly; the maid's body pitched forward, the tray left her hands, and the silver pot made a half turn in the air. With a knight's reflexes, Sion took one step and succeeded in catching the falling maid by the elbow, but he had no hand left to catch the pot.

Dark brown coffee poured over the left thigh of his royal knight's uniform.

It was hot, but Sion made no sound; he only clenched his teeth ever so slightly.

"Aaaah! Sir Knight! I'm sorry! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"

The moment she pulled her arm free, the maid untied her apron and began dabbing at Sion's thigh. The more she dabbed, the wider the stain spread; the silver tray rolled across the carpet and under the sofa, and a teacup fell from the corner of the table and broke off its handle.

"It's hot, isn't it? It's hot! Oh no, this is your knight's uniform, isn't it? It's expensive, isn't it? Can I pay it back out of my wages? How many months' worth?"

"It's fine."

"It's not fine! Your face has gone all red!"

"...It's fine."

Sion caught the maid's wrist to stop the dabbing. He knew himself that his sentences were getting shorter; it was an old weakness of his that they always did when he was flustered. Even crossing blades with a criminal, they had never grown this short.

On the landing at the end of the corridor, Adelaide Crowell heard it: the sound of a silver tray rolling, the sound of a teacup breaking, and Bibi's voice. She had been hearing the sounds Bibi made when she spilled something since Bibi first tied on an apron at about twelve, so she did not need to open the drawing room door to know what the scene was.

Instead of going down the stairs, she paused for a moment behind the banister. Through the gap of the open drawing room door she could see the knight's profile. He was flushed to the tips of his ears and holding Bibi by the wrist, but in contrast to that red face, his other hand was already checking the notebook at his belt, to see whether it had got wet with coffee.

A man who sees to his notebook before his clothes.

Which means there's something worth having in that notebook.

Adel gathered her skirts and descended the stairs. In front of the drawing room door she quickened her steps a little and made her breath a little short, so as to look like a lady who had heard the commotion and come running in alarm.

"B-Bibi...! What happened?"

"My lady! I, I spilled coffee on the Sir Knight...!"

Bibi turned with a face on the verge of tears. Sion Arden released Bibi's wrist and straightened. He laid a hand over his coffee-soaked thigh as if to hide it, then, apparently realizing that this looked even more ridiculous, lowered it again.

"My lady. It's nothing."

"It doesn't look like nothing..."

Adel looked at the stain spreading over his uniform. From the left thigh to the knee, about the size of two palms. The knights' uniform was dark navy wool. Coffee, once it soaks into wool, does not come out easily.

"I-if you go to the laundry... there's cold water. If you rinse it right away, the stain won't set as badly. I'll have Claude show you..."

"I'll do it! I'll take him! I'm the one who spilled it!"

Bibi shot her hand up. Sion wore a hesitant look for a moment. Adel knew exactly what that hesitation was. A maid leading a royal knight to the servants' laundry was unheard of in a noble house. And for an investigator, it was an opportunity like no other.

"...If you would."

Sion said it briefly.

The laundry to which Sion was shown lay in the half-basement at the far west end of the manor. All the way down the servants' stairs, the maid chattered without pause. Letting her prattle wash past him, Sion took in with his eyes, one by one, the number of steps, the branches of the corridors, and the nameplates hung on each door. Kitchen, pantry, head maid's room, silver room, and laundry.

"My lady doesn't sleep well at night, you know. Because she reads. The room at the end of the second floor of the east wing is my lady's study, and the light there's often on till dawn. Even when I bring her warm milk, she leaves half of it."

"Is that so."

"And my lady truly hates balls. She doesn't want to go to the House Lambert ball next week either, but Her Grace says she absolutely must. It's a chance to look for a match for Lady Céline, and if my lady stays away, people will start talking again."

Sion's steps slowed ever so slightly.

"Her Grace insists on sending the lady to the ball."

"Yes! Her Grace cares terribly about appearances, you see. Every time those things happened, she sent the biggest funeral wreath, too. All six times. Last time she sent a whole cartload of lilies to the Bertel family, and they say it blocked the cathedral entrance."

The maid giggled, but Sion did not laugh along. A stepmother who sent the largest funeral flowers every time her stepdaughter's fiancé died: still unable to decide whether to read that as appearances or as something else, he stepped down from the last stair.

At the basin of cold water in the laundry, the maid made as if to roll up the trouser leg of his uniform, and only when Sion raised a hand to stop her did she realize what she had been about to do and turn scarlet. In the end Sion changed into a pair of servant's trousers behind a screen in the corner of the laundry, and the maid soaked his uniform in cold water and worked it with her hands, without soap. Only after several rinses in cold water did the coffee stain come out, and barely half of it at that.

Meanwhile, through a gap in the screen, Sion looked at what hung on the laundry walls. The maids' aprons, irons, and a chart for sorting the washing hung there, and beside the door was posted the weekly duty roster. Names and days were written on it densely, but it was too far away to make out the letters.

"Sir Knight, my name's Bibi. It's Beatrice, but everyone calls me Bibi. I'm truly sorry about today. I'll take the scolding from my lady. But you mustn't hate my lady for it, Sir!"

"I have no reason to hate the lady."

"Then that's all right!"

Bibi wrung out the wet uniform tightly and held it up. Sion looked at the stain and swallowed a sigh. His purpose in coming to this house today had been to watch the people passing through the garden. Instead of the garden, he had seen the laundry; he had seen the servants' stairs and corridors; and he had heard, from a talkative maid, the story of the stepmother's funeral wreaths. For the price of one pot of coffee, it was not bad.

In the end, the walk in the garden was cut to half an hour. Walking the boxwood maze with a duke's daughter while dressed in servant's trousers under a knight's tunic went beyond the limits of the dignity Sion could bear.

The lady did not laugh, even seeing him dressed so. She only kept her eyes lowered and watched the boxwood leaves as she walked, and only around the third corner did Sion realize that this was the gait of someone trying not to laugh. Her shoulders were trembling ever so slightly.

"My lady."

"Y-yes?"

"You may laugh."

"Ah, n-no. I wouldn't..."

The lady covered her mouth with the back of her hand. Sion said nothing more. It was the first time he had encountered a suspect holding back laughter, and he did not know in which column of his notebook to write it.

When they reached the exit of the maze, the lady stopped. Her head was still bowed.

"Um, Sir Arden."

"Please, go on."

"At Sir Noah's funeral... one of his relations came. A man in a grey frock coat. I heard he'd come from the south, but there was red mud on his shoes. There's... no earth like that in Lumière, is there? Except at the canal works to the south."

Sion looked down at the lady. All the while she spoke, she never once raised her head. Her voice was small, and its ends trembled.

"I don't really know what it means. It's just... you asked so much about Sir Noah, so I thought it might be of some use."

"...I see."

"Yes."

The lady bowed her head in farewell and turned back toward the manor. Bibi was waving from the front steps. The hem of the lady's navy gown whispered over the gravel as she walked away.

In the carriage on the way back, Fen Howard took one look at Sion's servant's trousers and laughed loud enough to be heard on the coachman's box. Sion waited until the laughter had entirely subsided, then opened his notebook.

The duchess, funeral wreaths six times, the largest. Insists on the ball. End room, second floor, east wing, lit until dawn. Duty roster by the laundry door, check next time. And the grey frock coat at the funeral, red mud.

He stopped his pen at the last line and looked down for a long while at his own handwriting.

The lady remembered that man precisely. Down to the color of his frock coat and the earth on his shoes. The lady who, by all accounts, had not raised her head the entire funeral.

And how did the daughter of a northern ducal house know that the red earth came from the canal works to the south?

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