During the week, I continue work as Martha’s runner. By Friday, it becomes abundantly clear that she is not intending to file whatever paperwork still needs to get done to certify me as a senior clerk, if such paperwork ever existed at all. So I quietly take matters into my own hands. I wait until Martha and the senior clerks have gone home for the day, grab my bookbag and a notepad, and head up to Prince Edgar’s office.
Since I will be working closer with him, I have made a conscious effort to alter my appearance. The last thing I want is for one of the royal family to see us side-by-side and remark upon the similarity, or for Edgar to realize how much I resemble Mom. First, I have taken to wearing glasses. I am nearsighted anyway, so they serve an additional purpose of clearing my vision, but more importantly, they reshape the overall appearance of my face. Second, I have taken to parting my hair down the middle, allowing one half of my bangs to fall normally and pinning the other half away from my face. The style exposes my widow’s peak, but the asymmetry will draw attention away from my features.
When I knock at Edgar’s door, there is no response for a while. This does not surprise me. Edgar has been operating at incredibly strange hours as of late—not beginning work until noon at the very earliest, requesting records late into the night such that his schedule overlaps even with Prince Ezra’s, and most annoyingly of all, not being awake or ready when we do arrive with files. I glance at the palace guard standing watch by the door. He raises an eyebrow, then makes a quick gesture like tipping a bottle into his mouth. I nod in understanding, then knock again, louder.
“Your Highness!” I call. “This is Miss Odric from the records department. I am here to replace Mr. Pym.”
When even that does not get a response, the guard cracks open the door and peers inside. “Your Highness?” he says. “Miss Odric is here.”
I do not hear the response. The guard must hear or see something to indicate acknowledgement, as he withdraws from the door and tells me to enter. As I step inside, I cannot help but remark how filthy Edgar’s office is. He has transformed the normally handsome study into a drunkard’s pigsty. Crumpled balls of paper litter the brocade carpet. The navy blue curtains have been pulled down to block out the sunlight. A half-eaten platter of lunch sits awkwardly on a chair, while a jacket and umbrella lay forlornly upon the table. I trip on a single discarded shoe, and upon glaring at Edgar, who is slumped over his desk, I see that he is sock-footed and has kicked his second shoe into the unlit fireplace.
I bite my tongue to prevent the grimace from showing upon my face. “Your Highness,” I say as I lower myself into a curtsy.
“Mmshhffbb,” Prince Edgar mumbles. With the greatest effort, he wipes his eyes with his hand and starts to sit up, only rising far enough to look at me over the rim of his whiskey glass. “Fuckin’ finally. Martha come to her senses?”
“No,” I respond. “I came here on my own. But I do intend to start work, Your Highness, even without clearance from Martha.”
“Ha! I knew I liked you. Kids nowadays, none of you have any fuckin’... audacity. Alla you’se rule followers, all the time, whatever happened to good old fashioned rebellion and…mmmsssshhhzzz…”
His voice grows gradually quieter and less intelligible as he speaks, until suddenly his head nods back down to the desk and I realize he has fallen asleep again.
“Your Highness?” I ask.
This wakes him for just a moment, as he gives me a thumbs up without raising his head. So I venture on another question.
“Your Highness, it seems as if you are writing a letter, but the mailroom has closed for the day. If you give me your permission, I can seal and send it on your behalf.”
Another half-hearted thumbs up. A loud snore informs me that he is well and truly out of it now. Tentatively, I walk up to him and poke him on the shoulder. No response. “What a useless drunk,” I mutter. At least now I know that my last life’s intermittent alcoholic episodes, for which Master Odric frequently chastised me and which often resulted in me falling asleep at my desk just like Edgar has now, can be blamed on both sides of the family, not just my mother.
Mostly importantly, though, is that Edgar has given me his permission, although I hope he will not be upset when he does not remember it. In any case, I do not intend on betraying him yet. For now, I intend to actually help. Whether or not he wakes up and remembers any of this conversation, I want him to see that I am invaluable to him.
Cleaning his office is the work of a housekeeper, but from the looks of it, Edgar has not let them inside for a very long time. At least a week or two, judging by the advanced stages of mold accruing in the waste bin and a newspaper from two Wednesdays ago. To confirm, I ask the guard posted outside. His name is Matthias and he is extremely helpful.
“His Highness has refused all maids from touching his office, even to clean it,” says Matthias. “Not to mention his secretaries. They’ve been just about twiddling their thumbs all week, since he refuses to let them transcribe anything he writes, even the most basic of forms.”
“Have any other members of the Royal Family come to visit him?” I ask.
“Not that I know of. His Majesty sent the palace doctor to check on the prince, worrying that he’s having a psychotic break. But that was a week ago. Nothing’s changed much since.”
If I did not know better, I would also write off his behavior as a brief mental health crisis. It very well might be a part of it, but it is not the entire cause. As I clean, I keep my pen in my pocket and take notes. He has been eating all of his meals here. The kitchen staff have done their best to rotate dishes in and out, but his most recent meal, the half-eaten lunch, has not been taken away or refreshed even though it is well past dinnertime. He does not appear to have left the office except to the adjacent washroom and possibly back to his bedroom to sleep, though I find a couple of gray hairs on the couch that suggest he has slept here at least once. The raincoat and umbrella tell me that he possibly went out earlier this week when it was raining, though to where, I have no idea. The calendar on his desk does not mention a planned outing.
Curiously, it seems that Edgar has also been hiding things. The dust on the bookshelves is curiously displaced, and when I investigate, I find that he has tucked several receipts between the pages of a book. They are from earlier this week, wrinkled on the edges from water damage, and are only cash purchases. Jewelry, flowers, chocolates. The delivery address is a little house on Lavendel Road, intended for one Miss Imogen Rossach.
“I see. You’re a sentimental drunk, too,” I remark, before tucking the receipt back in its hiding place and heading back out to speak with Matthias.
Strangely, Matthias doesn’t recall a visit to the market. “It couldn’t be during this week,” he muses. “You and the secretaries were running in and out all day, each day. He wouldn’t have time to slip out, and I don’t recall seeing him.”
“Perhaps during the evening,” I suggest.
But Matthias just shakes his head. “Don’t know. In either case, he’d have a guard with him. And it should be on the schedule if it was. It has to be last week.”
Matthias is wrong, but I keep that conclusion to myself. Edgar’s escapade had to have been this week—it only rained Monday and Tuesday. And if having a guard with him would have put the outing on the schedule, then Edgar must have gone alone. I will need to ask how he left his office without being noticed. Though the coarse spool of rope hastily stowed beneath the couch, as well as the tiny scraps of frayed hemp caught on the windowsill, give me a fairly good idea.
Once the rest of his office is decently tidy, I move on to his desk. Unlike most of the royal family, who prefer to leave the typing to their secretaries, Edgar has his own typewriter. This is not a new development; apparently, he has long preferred to type letters and decrees on his own, leaving his secretaries to handle only the rote memos and standardized forms. At least, usually. Currently, he is typing up some sort of law prohibiting crown-licensed wizards from the use of arcane-combustion firearms (whatever the hell those are) because of liability concerns. Overseeing the arcane church is Edgar’s usual job, the type of work I would normally be in charge of. But this work has clearly been pushed to the side in favor of his ultimate obsession: writing love letters to my mother.
Almost every piece of paper on the desk is a love letter, an unfinished draft of a love letter, or the torn-up remnant of a love letter. All handwritten. All dated within the past couple of weeks. There must be dozens, possibly hundreds of them. Few of them are comprehensible; Edgar’s writing often spirals into illegible chicken scratch or illustrative ramblings that might be metaphors, but are more likely just delusion. But in between his scrawling, I snatch brief moments of lucidity.
—I’m sorry, Imogen. They have been burning my letters. They have been stealing Ellie’s gifts and pocketing all of your money—
—Words cannot begin to express, nor can they heal, what I have accused you of, but believe me when I tell you that I swear I didn’t know. I should never have written those horrid things. I should have written more often. I should have visited. I should have checked that everything was being done properly. If I had—
—our daughter. She doesn’t deserve this, Imogen. I understand that you may wish to turn your back on me, and you have every right to, but I just want to meet her. Please at least write back. I want to get to know her. I want to make up for all this lost time, even though I know I never can, but I beg you to at least give me the chance—
—and I’m sorry, I can’t say it enough, I’m SORRY—
—if you do not write back I will kill myself promptly. I would rather burn in the fires of hell than marry that disgusting woman. Fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK—
—I’m sorry. Please write back.—
—they have been lying to me and lying to you and they have probably killed you and Ellie and dumped the bodies somewhere and they won’t tell me, they won’t tell me anything, you could be dead and I wouldn’t know, they are burning every single record to make it seem like you never existed, someone has been in my office and is taking my letters, they are trying to convince me that you never existed, they are going to start poisoning me until I forget you, please please please please help me—
—Please write back.—
—If I could turn back time, I would do it. I would give it all up. We could have made a life without money; other people have done it; we could have sailed away to some other country where no one knows us, and built that house by the lake—
—I made a terrible mistake. I’m all alone. Please write back.—
—I love you, Imogen. I love you, Elizabeth.—
—Please write back.—