The Evermays

The news about the summer wing reached Lady Tansy Levinn at half past nine in the morning, which she considered a personal insult, because it had reached the fish market by eight.

By eleven the tearoom was full.

It was her great-grandmother's room, in every way that counted. Kaitlyn Levinn had presided over it when it was a salon and the realm was a harder place, and Tansy had inherited it entire: the good chairs, arranged in the old conspiratorial crescent; the long window with its flattering light; the little writing desk nobody was ever invited to look inside; and the better information, which arrived by routes Tansy maintained the way other households maintained drains: invisibly, expensively, and with great attention to smell. The fashion for tea had come in with the new money, and Tansy had gone with it, because you could hold a cup of tea for an hour and never be drunk enough to miss anything. The wine came out only for occasions.

The summer wing was an occasion.

"Open," said Lady Crewe, who had gotten there first and claimed the chair by the window as spoils. "All of it. The staffing lists went to the steward last night. My cousin copies for the household office and her hand is still shaking."

"Garden parties," someone whispered, from the second circle of chairs, where the younger wives sat. "Guest apartments."

"Guests," said Tansy, and let the word sit there, gleaming, while she poured.

Because that was the true business, and every woman in the room knew it. The summer wing did not mean lawn games. The summer wing meant the household was growing again; and the household, the queen's strange little household, was the great unexplained fashion of the age.

They went through the current inventory the way their husbands went through dispatches. The luthier's orphan, taken in two winters back, who now had a tutor, a pony, and (this from Lady Crewe, delivered like a state secret) a standing order at the good bootmaker. The scarred ex-guard who kept the queen's garden gate and had been offered a pension twice and refused it twice, and was said to eat supper at the family table, above the salt. The widowed cook elevated so far past cook that the kitchens had needed a new cook, who would herself, the room agreed, be family within the year, because that was the pattern. That was always the pattern now.

"And the men," said the youngest wife, who was new to the crescent and did not yet know the etiquette. The room did not gasp, because the room had been discussing the men for years, but it turned toward her with the pleasant collective attention of a garden turning toward sun.

"The men," Tansy agreed, magnanimous. "Say what you're thinking, dear, we're none of us strangers here."

The men. There had been (the tearoom kept the count the way the Ewe kept its book) a series. Not mayflies. Everyone was very clear on that point, because half the women in the room had family lore of the mayflies, the pretty hopefuls of a bygone court who had circled the queen a season and vanished like their namesakes; the old song-books remembered one called Pell chiefly for the quality of his coats. Mayflies had lasted a summer. These men lasted. That was the whole scandal of them: they lasted, and then they left anyway, and the leaving never made sense the way leavings ought to.

The one the room called the Forge had stayed three years, longer than two royal treaties, and gone home in the end to a dying father's ironworks in the river country, released, it was said, with a wagon of gifts and the queen standing in the courtyard to see him off, which no one did for a mayfly. The one they called the Vow had been quietly discovered to be sworn to some order or obligation nobody ever untangled, and left for it, grave and sorry. And the one they called the Husband (the tearoom's favorite year, that year) had been discovered by the Chancellery, in the ordinary course of paperwork, to be already married to a woman in Karsh, and had been shipped home to his wife inside the week with a settlement of insulting generosity and an escort of the queen's coldest courtesy. The tearoom had dined on the Husband for a season. It dined on him a little now, warmly, as one revisits a good vintage.

"Some of them share her bed," the youngest wife said, half question.

"Some of them," Tansy said, "and some of them never do, and if you can tell me which were which from the leaving-gifts, you're a sharper woman than I am." She topped the girl's cup. "That's what you're missing, dear. It isn't appetite. Appetite we'd all understand; appetite has a schedule. She keeps them past every season a man like that has any right to. She sets them at her table. She learns their mothers' names. And then a forge burns low in the river country, or a vow comes due, or a wife turns up in Karsh. And off they go, every one, and Her Majesty stands in the courtyard and waves, and takes in nobody for a year, and then takes in someone new. As if she's looking for something in the low-lives of this kingdom, one nobody at a time, and hasn't found it."

She heard the sentence land wrong — too true, too near something — and the room heard it too, and there was a half-second where nobody's cup clicked.

The youngest wife, emboldened past her allowance, leaned in. "And before all of them? My mother says — before the dark years, when the King Consort was only a boatman's—"

"No," said Tansy.

Just that. She said it the way her great-grandmother had said it, without heat, without hurry, and the room stepped back from the word as one steps back from a rope on a dock. There were things the tearoom traded and things it did not, and the difference was the whole reason the palace had never once shut the tearoom down. The youngest wife went scarlet into her cup. She'd learn. They all learned, or they took up embroidery.

The vault in her had rules for this. Certain speculations were furniture; you could rearrange them all day. And one or two were not, and the not-furniture you did not touch, and Tansy had never once written down why. She reached for the wine after all, because it was an occasion, and repaired the moment the way her great-grandmother had taught her: with a better line.

"At any rate," she said, three glasses in and one candle down, "we must stop saying mayflies. It libels the mayflies. A mayfly knows its business — a season, and gone. These—" she turned her glass, and the light went through it, and the word arrived like a guest she'd been expecting — "these are Evermays, darlings. Soft, and pretty, and just faintly tragic. She's trying to make spring last forever."

The quiet went on a half-second too long. It was the truest thing said in that room in a decade, and every woman in it felt the truth go by without being able to name the animal, and then Lady Crewe said "Evermays" the way one bites a sweet in half, and the room erupted, and the word was born.

They spent a happy quarter hour breaking it in, like a new carriage. The gate-keeping guard was an Evermay, they decided, the founding specimen. The luthier's orphan was an Evermay by adoption. Could a woman be an Evermay? (The cook was ruled one, unanimously.) Was it Evermays or Evermai? (Lady Crewe, who had a little Primrascian, was overruled with cushions.) By the time the room rose to dress for supper the word had a grammar, a history, and three unauthorized verses of a song, which is everything a word needs to live forever.

Words like that don't walk. By supper it had reached the kitchens, gone down the hill with the laundry, and been traded across three fences. By the next market morning the Row had it — Tansy's own ribbon-woman used it to her face, with the special pride of a person handing you your own coin — and it rode out of the capital on the mail coaches thereafter, packed in with the season's other fever, the one the broadsheets had been feeding since midwinter: that the deathless queen kept taking these people in because she was looking for someone. That there was a destined one. A fated one. That the queen of Avenrose, who could have any crowned head on the continent by raising an eyebrow, was combing her own gutters and gardens for him — and that it could therefore, by the beautiful arithmetic of rumor, be anyone. The man mending your roof. The boy holding your horse.

Tansy did not believe in fated ones. She believed in information. But she had noticed, over years of keeping the count that the tearoom thought was idle, that the queen's takings-in had a rhythm to them, and the rhythm was not appetite, and was not charity, and the only word her professional soul could put to it was the one professionals used when a buyer kept returning to the same auction no matter what was on the block: looking.

She kept that in the desk nobody saw inside.

It was two evenings later, at the Gilded Ewe — because there are things a lady does herself or not at all — that she had the landlord bring the wager-book to the snug, and opened it past the settled pages (the summer-wing page had paid out that morning; some grandmother down the Row had taken the house for a small fortune on sooner than you think), and wrote, in the hand her great-grandmother had taught her, a fresh page:

THE QUEEN'S NEXT SPRING. Terms within.

She had not even reached the terms before the first bet went down. A wool factor from the new money, grinning like a man buying his own legend, staked a mini-castle — an actual deed, towers and all, somewhere out in the countryside — on before the four-hundredth Rising is out.

Tansy entered it in her best hand and thought: darling, whoever you are, I hope you lose it slowly.

But she did not think he would lose.