Lora of Two Worlds

Jonan Carey and his men hauled all four women off, no arguments entertained.

The seed-cracking idlers had been few at first. Now, with young ladies carried into the shire court, every seed-cracking soul in the market wanted a look at what a sheriff paddling young ladies’ backsides might be like — and the curious multiplied apace.

Odile’s very innards knotted themselves with regret:

Carey had taken not only her and her cousin but the two maids as well. There was no one left to carry word.

Done for. She would be locked away in that mansion her whole life through...

Dorothy stood leaning on her maid, stubborn to all appearance, her legs in truth so gone she could not have moved a step. A gently bred daughter of a great house, stripped of her shame in public like that — she had a mind to die of it.

Luckily the crowd’s whole attention had run to Odile and her cousin; nobody ringed Dorothy any longer.

The stalled foot-traffic found its feet again, and through the crowd the man she had put behind her came walking toward her. Through the blur of tears she saw him hold out his hand:

”These two dolls are for you — same as yours, from the dress-up doll shop.”

Dorothy took the brocade case and opened it without a spark in her. Two dolls lay inside — one with the curved smiling eyes, one with big eyes and long lashes — and two fat tears went plop, plop onto the dolls’ skirts.

”Tomorrow I leave for Augustburg.”

”You needn’t have told me.”

Felix stood vague, half-minded to walk away, half-feeling something unsaid. He drew the fan from his sleeve and laid it on the box in Dorothy’s hands:

”I owe you this. Whenever trouble finds you, bring it to me.”

Dorothy’s lips moved. Nothing came of them.

Those two had been husband and wife in the life before, and for her family’s sake he had gone to his death in the end. Leon, Lora — no one living knew what had passed in those two hearts in that former life; still less could anyone say how this ill-starred knot would run on in the present one.

The Dunbar house stood with Prince Ambrose — and if Ambrose meant to fight for the throne, that made them Leon’s political enemies.

Felix walked away without a backward glance. Somewhere underneath, he feared the tangle of the Dunbars — hold to them, and one day it could only set him in an impossible place.

Above their heads, all at once, a locust-pod split its seam. A few seeds dropped at Dorothy’s feet and Felix’s, rolled off into the cracks between the flagstones, and watched, open-eyed as it were, while the two of them walked their separate ways, slowly, each from the other.

Felix did not go to the shire court. He had laid down the sheriffship that very morning.

He knew well enough: the incoming sheriff would see Odile safely home to the Lord Regent’s mansion, smooth as if nothing had ever chanced.

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Supper done at the Princess’s mansion, Felix came by litter once more to the Baron of Charnwood’s residence.

”Cousin Felix — I thought you’d be drunk as Alvin and never make it over.”

”Our house runs to two brothers only — we can’t stack up against your six. Three cups to a man there, and it’s no wonder the eldest is under the table.” Felix came in smiling:

”Thank you for the wash-set gift boxes you sent over — my mother has tried them and likes them well. Only... Hugo made off with the pinwheel, so you’ll owe me another.”

Lora giggled: ”That’s a toy for little children. What would you be doing with one?”

The back-court gate was locked behind them, and the two of them, laughing as they went, entered a two-storied waterside tower. A few wines and dishes stood by the window; Leon and Roland stood over the side-table, studying something.

”What are you looking at?”

Two hemp sacks stood open on the table: one black — coal already coked; one with a metal sheen — cast-iron pigs.

”Highgarden’s first fruits are out — only today come up the grain canal to Lohenheim. The whole way ran through Highmarch and Weybrook country, and smooth as grease.”

Lora picked up a pig. They called the ingots ”iron cakes”; to her eye they were more like iron loaves. Highgarden’s practice: sort the ore, break it small, melt it down, burn off some of the dross — and out came cast iron.

Highgarden’s coal ran high in brimstone, and iron smelted over it came out the brittler for it — not Highgarden alone; all the Empire’s north was the same.

So the coal had to be coked first.

It wasn’t that the Empire had no coking craft — only that theirs was raw beyond bearing: open kiln-mouths with the blast blown in, foul past all patience, and the burning never wholly done.

All Lora had taught them was the one improvement — the closed kiln, sealed against the air, the coal baked inside it.

Highgarden’s coal lay shallow, easy to win, and good into the bargain. Beyond the kiln, everything else ran along their own old lines.

”Come — taste. Today’s dishes were cooked over coal. See what difference you find.” Leon had plainly tasted already.

Houses of the two capitals, when they feasted large, would let the kitchen burn coal — but smoking coal, raw coal; and an Empire that dotes on roasting... that sharp, sour relish of it, that one solid reek of smoke, was past eating.

The improved coke still carried a thread of smoke, but it stood not far short of the finest mark of the later ages.

”The roast mutton seems light on smoke...” Roland took a piece with great care, set down his knife, and said, ”Still not so good as charcoal, though.”

”Charcoal wins for roasting, of course. But trees grow slower than we burn them. Think of those towns we passed in the north country — war fires them down, and rebuilding hews down more trees still. Smelt your iron with charcoal, and where do all the trees come from?

The Empire, though, swims in coal. Fields of it I know of myself, more than one. Coal is cheap — we can smelt iron with it, fire glass with it, and set the Empire’s own folk against the winters that keep growing colder.

Where there’s wit, there’s bread — and clothing too. We’ll have them all.”

Lora’s words set Leon’s blood running. Charcoal climbed dearer year on year; every winter the drift-folk who starved or froze went past the government’s own counting.

He had taken it for heaven’s appointed doom, past bending — and here was Lora telling him that man’s resolve could beat the sky.

Lora tipped her face up at Leon and laughed:

”Isn’t it not yet the hour for my sixth cousin to stand? Coal burns hotter than charcoal, and holds it longer — you can win a higher heat with it, and iron of a better grade.

And with no great felling of timber, the digging and smelting we do in the hills — the gold, the silver, the copper, the iron — keeps itself the better hidden.”

That reason outweighed every other: no trees falling, no stranger’s guessing.

”And here — the fine salt Highgarden has made, by the three steps: dissolving, filtering, boiling.” Lora handed Felix a white-glazed jar from the table.

”Refined salt?”

The Empire already had its salt-works entire, and the five-step craft with them: gather the brine and evaporate it, sieve out the dross, store the brine, crystallize, shovel it out.

Out of it came white salt that led the world — coarse in the grain, true, but most of the dross gone, and the bitter edge off it too; nothing near so foul as the moderns imagine.

All Lora had added was this: once the water was in, one more pass of evaporation, and a finer grinding of the grain — and there it stood, fine salt, a pleasure to the eye.

Lora touched a fingertip to the salt, touched it to her tongue’s tip, tilted her head, and smiled:

”Baron of the Exchequer, my cousin — tell me... could I take my fine-salt craft, do you think, and win my way in as a licensed salt merchant under the Crown monopoly?”