Chapter Forty-One Polly
A Crafter she didn’t recognize answered the door of her family home.
She was dressed in typical maid attire, her bun ribboned, blouse broached at the throat, apron around her skirt, and her eyes averted.
“I’d hoped to call on Mr. and Mrs. Prescott,” she said to the woman.
“And who should I say is calling?”
A moment of hesitation, and then, since there was no avoiding it, “Their daughter.”
She was let in to the sitting room immediately thereafter, and Polly assumed that the Crafter maid must indeed be newly employed. Their previous maid would have known not to let her over the stoop.
It wasn’t the grandest home, and certainly not the most affluent parish for an Artisan family to live in, but her mother’s jewelry shop was across the street, and their father would never be accepted in a more prestigious part of the Trench, so Polly’s parents remained in this same lane, where Polly had grown up before she’d been made a Scribbler.
The same hearth, the same mantel with its same candelabra. The same portraits and paintings on the walls. The same books and piano and tea cart. She sighed wistfully.
Her father, Reginald Prescott, entered and closed the doors behind him, lips tight. “Polly,” he said by way of greeting.
He was a proud man, or perhaps a defensive one.
After all, he was a black Craftsman from the brink.
The Artisans whispered that he’d swindled a marriage from a perfectly respectful Cutter woman and sullied her good reputation.
He lived each day clamoring to maintain propriety, the appearance of perfection, to bridge this unbridgeable gap.
Having a daughter denounced by the House? No, that would not do.
“Your mother will remain upstairs. She does not wish to see you,” he said. He did not take the seat beside her or gesture for Polly to resume hers, and so the two stood awkwardly across from each other, a tea cart between them.
Polly nodded, felt acid in her throat.
You’ll need to work harder than the rest of them, he used to tell her over and over. Twice as hard as any other apprentice, to be accepted.
But she’d been sent right out into the brink anyway, to the very worst pockets. This had been the first betrayal to her family name, this disappointment, and there had been nothing but treachery since.
“We said it very explicitly, Polly,” Reginald said now. He’d once gone by Reggie. “We told you not to return here. Your mother’s business is not a stone’s throw away. How does it make her look, to have you at our door?”
His face was cleanly shaved, his hair cut neatly.
If you looked hard enough, you could still see the scar over his right eyebrow—some scuffle from his scum adolescence.
Polly had asked him about that scar once.
He’d only smiled and tugged at her hair ribbons.
It’s nothing you will ever need to worry about, he’d said. How wrong he’d been.
“I don’t mean to embarrass her,” Polly said stiffly.
“Embarrass her?” he said, exasperation getting the better of his temper. “I think we are well past that, Polly. We heard you were boarding in Morland, frequenting the gambling dens.” He looked at her like she was a stain on the carpet. “I hope you haven’t come here to ask for money.”
Polly shook her head, swallowed bile. She was horrified to find that tears were threatening to spill over the rims of her eyes.
She blinked them back. Once, she and her father had sat in this room until well after midnight, locked in a never-ending chess game, candles burning down to their stubs before Reginald had finally knocked over his own king, pride beaming from him.
A formidable player, he’d said, shaking her hand.
Far too formidable for your poor old dad.
Now they stood apart with tight chests, that same chessboard still by the window.
“No,” she said, and she tried to keep her voice free of fury. It would not serve. “I only—I’ve been offered an opportunity for work.”
Polly had thought this would be the best way to approach her father. It was the only thing she could think of that might make him consider helping her. The only thing he would care about now.
His eyebrows drew together. “A Scribbler’s remit?”
“Yes,” she said. “At the Morland archives. They have a position in the translations department.” It was as close to the truth as she would get.
Reginald took several moments to respond, as though calculating. “You were denounced,” he said. “The House stripped you of your fellowship.”
“They did,” she nodded. She had to word it carefully. “But they would reinstate it, I am told, if I was to offer them a skill not easily found elsewhere.”
At this, Reginald’s expression darkened. He looked away and muttered something beneath his breath.
“They need someone to translate Verian Script,” she said. “And I’d hoped that you could provide me with—”
“Please, Polly. Stop this,” her father said now, turning away from her.
He shook his head, as though there’d never been a worse fate than having a daughter such as her.
“You know, we received a heinous scribble the other day. Quite indescribable. From the House of Lords, of all places.” He addressed the mantel, unable to look at her.
Polly’s stomach fell away.
“They were asking for your whereabouts,” he continued, his voice wretched, shoulders drooping. “It implored us to provide any information we could, as a matter of urgency. Somehow, I doubt that has anything to do with them wanting to reinstate your fellowship.”
A tear fell free, and Polly wiped it away. “Father—”
“So why don’t you tell me, daughter, just what trouble you’re in now.” He sounded dangerously close to tears.
But she couldn’t tell him. “I need grandfather’s cypher,” she said. “Please.”
“For what?” he asked. “What have you promised them, Polly?”
“Verian Script,” she said. “That’s all.”
“No honorable lord of the House would be bothered with it,” Reginald countered, spitting the words between his teeth. “Stewards. Utter nonsense.”
Polly fought back a sob.
“I should never have let your grandfather fill your head with it,” he continued on, pacing, agitated.
“If the House is looking for you, and you are going around talking about Verian Script, I can only assume you’ve ruffled one too many feathers.
They think you a heretic, is that it? Do they think you a sympathizer? ”
She struggled to breathe evenly.
“I want you to leave,” he said. “For good this time, Polly. Before I do something I cannot undo.”
Polly balled her hands. “I can’t leave without the cypher. I’m sorry.”
“It is not here,” he seethed, his lips curling back. “Do you truly think I would want any of that rubbish in my house?”
As she’d feared. “Did you burn it then?” she asked, there was an edge of new hurt in it. Her grandfather might have been eccentric, but those texts were his most prized possessions, and he’d been a good man.
Reginald closed his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “Lord, but I should have. Couldn’t bring myself to in the end.”
Watery hope trickled in. “So you donated it?” she asked. “To the Morland archives?”
He scoffed. “That hovel?” he said cuttingly. “Absolutely not. They didn’t get a thing. Everything was given to the library here in Lavnonshire.”
Polly frowned. But The Stewards’ Testament had been filched from Morland. That’s what the Colsons and Theo had said; that it had been donated after her grandfather had died.
It didn’t matter now. If the cypher was in the Lavnonshire library, then it was free for the taking. It was a better outcome than she’d imagined.
“I don’t want to hear of you walking about society,” her father was saying now, rubbing his forehead. “Your mother—I don’t think she can bear any further disgrace.”
Polly nodded. “Tell her for me… that I’m sorry—”
“Oh, a sorrier child I cannot imagine,” Reginald agreed. His eyes swept over her moth-eaten clothing, at least four decades out of trend. “You had it all before you,” he said, and Polly wasn’t sure if he were speaking to her or to himself. “Everything that I never did. And you squandered it.”
The last time Polly had sat here, her father had used the same words, only then, she’d been cowed and shaking.
Now, she stood tall. She still felt the shame, but she didn’t let it curl her spine.
If she was to disgrace her parents anyway, then best to not disgrace herself, too.
She would do what she thought was right.
“I went where the House told me to go,” she said.
Her voice was soft, but sure. “Without question. I gave them the information they sought, at great personal cost.” And at the cost of others.
So many others. “And all I asked for was safety. A modest remit in a place that wouldn’t be razed by the Lords’ Army,” Polly’s lungs swelled.
“They took that information, and in return they stripped me of my fellowship.” Tears sprang up in her eyes. “I was loyal to the House.”
“You were a Union sympathizer!” he volleyed, and then he went to the bookshelf and opened a drawer there.
He pulled out sheets of parchment in his fists and slammed them down on the tea cart, bouncing the cups on their saucers, the milk overturning.
“Three letters in the first week!” he spat, rage overspilling.
“Hand-scribed, if you can believe it! All of them sent personally to our door.”
Polly saw the crude quill work. The too-big letters. The first word on each was her name. The last was Otto’s.
I still can’t bring myself to believe it… Tell me it’s not true, Pol… I only want to know that you are safe, and I’ll write no more…
Reginald measured each of his breaths, reuniting with some severed part of his early days, his fists balling as though he might swing on someone.
“Some Crafter kid,” he said. A voice he’d shed long ago came up his windpipe, foaming and seething.
“Some piece of brink scum, sending notes by fuckin’ hand to my daughter. To my house!”
You ought to know I loved you, though I was too much a coward to say it… I love you still, even though I shouldn’t…
Tears fell free, coursing down Polly’s cheeks. Damn it, but she was shaking after all.
“Do not stand there and preach about your loyalties!” her father said.
“What of your loyalty to me? To your mother? Do you have any idea the deals that were made to instate you as an Artisan in the first place?” He sent the letters and sugar cubes and milk flying.
He stormed across the room, trying to leash that part of him that was born in the brink, that he’d buried long ago.
And did he hate that part so much that he couldn’t bear his own daughter loving a Craftsman?
Polly picked up each letter, one by one, crumpled now and soiled with milk. She did not give her father the courtesy of a goodbye. She did not apologize to him like she had the last time, bawling and begging as her father shoved her over the threshold.
This time, she walked out with her chin lifted against the weight of three millstones. She pulled along behind her every terrible choice she’d ever made. There was no freeing herself from them. She could only persevere.
She thought, as she closed the door to her family home, that she heard a keening—the first wretched sounds of a man breaking.