Uncle Croft
From THE MERIDIAN EVENING POST, Thursday, Parliamentary Report
The Lower House sat until past midnight upon the admissions question. A Member sitting in the Vance interest asked the Minister whether a foreign boy educated at the Crown’s expense would sign the Crown’s years, or go home with the Crown’s teaching in his pocket. The Minister replied that the matter was under consideration. Asked when consideration might conclude, the Minister replied that he could not say. The Headmistress of the Royal College was not available for comment, and has not been available for comment for some years.
They came out of the station into the fog and the noise of the city. Croft stopped dead on the step and turned round.
“Does everybody have a place for the night?”
“I am going home,” said Penny.
“Same for me,” said Clara, in the polite voice she had been using all afternoon.
Croft looked at Leon.
“I will make some arrangements, sir.”
“Arrangements?”
“Yes, sir.”
“At seven in the evening? In Meridian?” Croft said it gently.
Then he turned to Lucian. His face was hopeful, but it was also, unfortunately, awkward about it.
There were four hotels in this city where a man of Lucian’s profession slept for nothing; the Alliance paid the bills and never asked about them. He had used two of them already, under two other names, and he could hardly say so. So he said nothing, and Croft misread the silence entirely.
“Right.” Croft put his hat on. “That settles it. I am stopping at my uncle’s. Uncle Croft. The house is in the Queen’s District, and it is a good deal bigger than his family needs. He can certainly find room for two more.”
“Mr. Croft.”
“Cab!”
Croft was off the step and into the road, hand up, before anybody could stop him.
The girls were met. A chauffeur came out of the crowd for Clara, and another waited further down for Penny. Both cars were long and quiet, the colour of good boots.
“Goodbye, Mr. Grey,” said Penny.
“Goodbye, Miss Holloway.”
“Do not forget the third thing.”
“I shall not.”
She looked at him a moment longer than was comfortable. Then somebody put her carpet bag into the motor car and she was gone.
The three men got a public cab. It was a motor-cab, and Leon stopped dead in front of it; there was no horse.
“Get in, lad.”
“Yes, sir.”
There were amber plates set along the running gear, four of them in brass housings with little grilles over them. Leon stared at those all the way in, and for most of the way to the Queen’s District.
Croft took the seat in front, beside the driver. Then he turned round to talk to them, putting himself at an angle no man of his build should have attempted.
“Settling in all right, you two?”
“Yes, sir,” said Leon.
“Good. Good.” Croft was, unmistakably, pleased. “My uncle made it big, you know. The only one in the family who ever did. He sat the civil service papers at twenty-two and went straight into Internal Affairs. He has been there ever since. Thirty-eight years.”
Lucian put one mind on Croft while the other eight went to work. Internal Affairs was the ministry that held the Watch, the registry of licensed mages, the border offices, and the department that read other people’s letters.
Thirty-eight years, said one mind.
Nobody lasts thirty-eight years in that building by being nobody, said another.
And we are going to his house for supper, said a third. Because a stranger on a train felt sorry for us.
“He wrote my referral, you know,” Croft was saying. “For the interview. I would not be sitting in this cab otherwise. They do not read a letter from a man with no title in front of his name.”
“That was good of him,” said Leon.
“It was.” Croft nodded several times. “He is a decent man. Busy. Very busy. But decent.”
The cab turned out of the traffic and went up a long road with trees down one side.
“Now. Leon.” Croft turned round further. “You need to know how the College works before Monday. Nobody is going to tell you, and they will be very cross when you do not know.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You go in at fifteen. You come out when you like. And what you are worth for the rest of your life depends on which door you come out of.” Croft held up a finger. “Leave at Circle 3 and you are a bronze graduate. Five years of Crown service. That is the common one. That is what most of them take.”
“Five years!” said Leon.
“Stay on. Reach Circle 4 and you are a silver. Ten years.” A second finger. “Circle 5, gold, twenty years.” A third. “Circle 6 and you are a diamond. They will have fifty years of your life. And you will hand them over gladly, because a diamond of this College can ask for any post in the kingdom.”
Leon did the arithmetic out loud.
“Fifty years, sir?”
“Fifty.”
“So a diamond who graduates at forty is not his own man until he is ninety.”
“That is one way of putting it,” said Croft. “Nobody puts it that way.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Outside, the trees went past.
There it is, said one of Lucian’s minds.
The Alliance had wanted that answer for twenty years: how does one kingdom keep three times the archmages of anybody else? It was not talent, and it was not even the Wells, though the Wells helped.
Ashfox does not train mages; it buys them in advance, with an education. The higher a man climbs, the longer the kingdom owns him, and every one of them signs. They queue up to sign; a boy of fifteen cannot understand what fifty years is.
“And if you do not want to serve?” said Leon.
“Then you do not go past Circle 3. You do not use the College’s name. And you spend your life mending wards for grocers.” Croft said it without any weight at all. “I mend them myself.” He turned round further. “Though I got to Circle 4 at a small private college. They do not ask for your years, and nobody asks for you afterwards.”
The cab went on.
“There is a fourth way,” he said, after a bit. “You can stay. Take a post, do your own work in their rooms, with their materials. They pay you in contribution points, and you spend the points on more of the same. The way you earn them is your job. Get a student of your own up to silver or higher and you are paid proportionately.”
“Is that what you are going for, sir?”
“That,” said Croft, “is what I am going for.”
Then the cab slowed, and then it stopped. The driver leaned out of his window, looked up the road, and sat back.
“We shall be a while, gentlemen.”
Ahead of them the road was shut, and two mounted men in grey stood across it. Behind them came carriages, four of them, black, with outriders front and back. A standard went past on a short pole, and Leon put his head out of the window to see it.
“Veldran,” said the driver.
“In Meridian?” said Leon.
“In Meridian.” The driver backed the cab out of the line and took them up a side street. “A student, they say. Come to sit the entrance on Monday with everybody else’s sons. Four carriages and nine horses to bring one boy to school.”
“Nine?” asked Croft.
“I counted them on Tuesday as well.”
The side street was narrow and badly lit, but the driver took it at the same speed as the main road.
“They have opened the College to them. First time since anybody’s grandfather.” He did not turn round. “My brother’s boy sat those papers. Placed, too. Signed his five years. Now he is up at the fever hospital, and there he stops until he is twenty-five, whether he cares for it or not.”
“Yes,” said Croft.
“So you tell me, sir. That one back there takes the teaching, and the rooms my rates paid for. And on the day he is finished, does he sign his five years?”
Nobody in the cab said anything.
“No,” said the driver. “He goes home.”
Lucian was given, for the price of a fare, the answer that four ministries were writing to each other about this month.
“Not every one of them travels in that fashion,” he said.
The driver’s eyes came up to the mirror.
“Sir?”
“Four carriages is a statement. A man who wants to be seen takes nine horses. A family that does not need to be seen takes a motor car and one driver. You have carried a dozen of them this month without knowing it.”
“I would know it.”
“You would not.” Lucian said it without any edge in it. “We came down from Ostley this afternoon in a third class carriage. There was a girl on the seat opposite who gave her name as Clara and nothing after it. Vance, as it happens. One of the three houses that put their names to the founding charter of this kingdom.”
The cab went quiet. Leon looked at the window, then at Croft, then, slowly, at Lucian.
“That was a princess?”
“Not a princess,” said Croft. “A Vance.”
“What is the difference, sir?”
“About seven hundred years and no crown,” said Croft. “Nothing else worth mentioning.”
That was three sentences more than the job required, said one of Lucian’s minds.
He is a cab driver, said another.
They all are, said a third, until one of them is not.
While one mind stayed on Croft, the other eight opened the mission file. First, Lara Allard, of the Allards, who had been putting mages into that College since before the kingdom had a parliament. Diamond graduate at sixty-one, one of the youngest the College ever turned out. After that, nothing at all.
She asked for a coastal appointment in the north-east, and served twenty years of her fifty there, doing quiet work in a quiet place. She wrote nothing, she joined nothing, and she took no side in the war, or in anything else.
She lived those twenty years with a man, in his hometown. He had been Circle 2, then Circle 3, and at seventy-six he began trying for Circle 4, which no man of that Circle attempts at that age. An apprentice mage, Circles 1 to 3, has no more than a hundred years of lifespan. The attempt damaged him, and he died at eighty.
Three months later, Lara Allard advanced to Circle 7.
Then she came back to Meridian, and within the year she was headmistress of the Royal College of Ashfox. Lucian had turned that over a great many times.
Nobody knows how many Circle 7 mages there are. Every nation knows its own, then guesses at everybody else’s, and the guessing is most of what the intelligence services do. A mage of the seventh Circle is the backbone of a nation; wars are planned around where one of them is standing.
And this one had spent eighty years being nobody. That was the part that would not sit still. She had never taken a post that mattered, and she published nothing until she was old. She had never quarrelled with anybody, never been seen at court, never sat for a photograph. In eighty years she had not once done anything that told the world what she wanted.
Every service on the continent kept a file on her. Lucian had read three, and they agreed on the dates and on nothing else. The Veldrans had her down as a recluse; the Alliance had her down as a Crown asset.
And there was one old Ashfox report, written by a man who had since retired. It said the Headmistress was the most dangerous person in Meridian, and it said he could not prove it. Then it said, rather bleakly, that he did not expect anybody ever would.
She was eighty years old, and a Circle 7 lives to three hundred. She had done in eighty years what the best men on the continent needed two centuries for, and she had done the last step of it in the three months after a funeral.
And she still owed the Crown thirty years.
They think that is a leash, said one mind.
They may be right, said another. Men have been held by less.
Nobody is ever held by paper, said a third, who has not agreed to be.
Second, the foreign admissions. For the first time in four hundred years, Ashfox had opened the College to students from abroad. Nobody had said why. Nobody had said whether the service years would apply to them either, which was the question every foreign ministry on the continent was asking its own people this month, and the reason Lucian was in a cab.
“Here we are,” said Croft.
The house was not large. It stood behind a low wall, on a road where every house stood behind a low wall, with eight windows at the front and a lamp over the door. And it was worth more than every building in the parish Leon was born in, combined.
“That is it?” said Leon, and then went red.
“That is it,” said Croft, who had not minded in the least. “The Queen’s District, lad. You do not buy the house. You buy the address.”
All civil servants are rich, thought Lucian. No matter which world.
Croft paid the cab, and Lucian watched him do it. A cloth purse, not a note case. Coins counted twice before they left his hand, and a fifth of a mark over for the driver, which was too much for a man who had been careful about the first four.
The fog had come down properly now as the temperature dropped, and along the road the lamps were going on, one after another. Croft stood on the step with his satchel and looked up at the door. Then he pulled the bell.
A maid answered it. She considered three men on a step, in the fog, with luggage, at seven in the evening.
“Mr. Barnaby,” she said.
“Evening, Sarah. Is he in?”
“He is at the Ministry, sir.”
“Ah.” Croft rocked back on his heels. “Mrs. Croft, then?”
“At the Pemberleys’, sir.”
“Ah,” said Croft again.
At the far end of the hall, a door opened, and a young man came out of it with a glass in his hand, perhaps twenty-five and very well turned out. He came down the hall at his leisure, then looked over the maid’s shoulder.
“Barnaby,” he said. “Good God. It really is you.”
“Evening, Gerald.”
“We had your letter.” Gerald’s eyes went to Leon’s boots. They stayed there a second longer than they needed to. Then they came up and did the same to Lucian’s suit. That took rather longer, because the suit was better than his own. “Mother read it out. And everybody said, well, he cannot mean he is bringing people.”
“There was nowhere else to put them at this hour.”
“No. No, I can see that.” Gerald leaned on the door frame. “It is only that the blue room has the painters in it. And the small room at the back has Aunt Meg. And the green room is Julia’s now, and Julia is not well.”
“Julia is not well?” asked Croft.
“She has a delicate constitution,” said Gerald. “Which you would know, if you came up more than once a year.”
The fog moved across the step, and somewhere down the road a horse went past, entirely unhurried. Gerald had got very interested in his glass.
“Well,” said Croft. “There is the old schoolroom.”
“The schoolroom is full of Father’s boxes.” Gerald looked at him. “There is the room over the stable.”
“Barnaby,” he said, kindly. “Would it not be easier all round if your friends took a hotel?”
And there it was.
Lucian had been watching the young man’s hands, which were soft. His shoes were new, and his face had looked pleased since the moment it came down the hall.
Nobody had insulted anybody. But Barnaby Croft, second in the kingdom, who had been talking about this house for forty minutes with his whole chest, had gone a colour that owed nothing to the cold. Lucian had been in three wars and two prisons. He had never found anything as unpleasant as a hallway.
“Of course,” he said.
Croft turned round. “Mr. Grey.”
“You have been more than kind. It is entirely my fault for accepting.” Lucian picked up his case. “The Cross Hotel keeps rooms for College men at the Ministry rate. I shall take the boy with me. There will be two of us on the register called Grey, which will confuse the clerk and amuse me.”
“Sir,” said Leon, who had followed about a third of that.
“I could not possibly,” said Croft.
“You are not doing anything. I am.” Lucian put his hat on. “Nine o’clock on Monday, Mr. Croft. In the Hall. I shall look for you.”
Croft opened his mouth.
“And Mr. Croft.”
“Yes?”
“You have a second rank in the entire kingdom.” Lucian said it pleasantly, and at a volume that carried perfectly well down a hall. “I should not be in any hurry about the room over the stable.”
Gerald’s face changed, very slightly.
The three of them stood in the fog for a moment longer. Then Croft said, “Right,” in a voice that was almost his own again, and came down the step after them.
Behind them, the door shut. The lamp over it went on burning into the fog.