Chapter 5: The Prime Minister's Terms

The Prime Minister's study was the tidiest room I had ever stood in.

Ledgers stood on the shelves in order of height.

Three pens lay on the desk, parallel, an inch apart.

A clock ticked on the mantel.

Bertrand sat down behind the desk and didn't offer me a chair.

I took one anyway.

He looked at the chair, then at me, and made a small mark on a sheet of paper.

"Did you just write that down?"

"I write everything down, Miss Pellow."

He opened a drawer and took out a single folded page.

"Quarter past five, on the morning of the presentation," he read.

"A young woman in a blue wrapper, hair down, left the still room by the servants' stair."

"At six, His Highness the Crown Prince left by the same door."

He folded the page again along its crease.

My face went hot from my collar to my hair.

I made myself keep looking at him.

"Who wrote that?"

"A guard on the servants' stair."

"And what do you want me to say about it?"

"Nothing."

He lined the page up with the edge of the desk.

"I'm not asking you to explain. I don't care where you sleep before you're my wife."

I stared at him.

"You don't care."

"I care about the price," he said. "That's a different thing."

He pulled a ledger off the shelf behind him without looking, opened it to a ribbon and turned it around to face me.

"Your father lent this crown three hundred thousand for the border war," he said. "At twenty in the hundred."

"I know what he lent."

"Then you know that's sixty thousand crowns a year in interest. More than the navy costs."

He tapped the page once.

"I pay it every quarter day, and it never touches the principal."

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