Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(20)
And she really shouldn’t have said that. Coolness and control at all times, Bouda.
An angry flush bloomed above the salamander-printed neckerchief at Lord Whittam’s throat, and crept up his face. Gavar’s fists had clenched. These Jardine men and their touchpaper tempers.
‘I apologize unreservedly,’ she said, ducking her head and baring her neck submissively. ‘Forgive me.’
She gave it a few moments for her sincerity to sink in, then looked up and met Whittam’s eyes. Beside him, Gavar looked fit to throttle her, but to her great relief his father’s face was composed.
‘You apologize like a true politician, Bouda,’ he said, after a pause in which Bouda was quite sure she did not breathe at all. ‘Promptly and prettily. One day, you may find that’s not enough, but for now it will suffice. We will discuss this later, once we are sure that my youngest son’s words were not some jest in remarkably poor taste. Come, Gavar.’
He turned and Gavar trailed after him to Kyneston’s twinned seat in the centre of the first tier. It was directly opposite the carved majesty of the Chancellor’s Chair. The old joke ran that this gave the Jardines the shortest possible distance to walk to their preferred seat in the House.
Lord Whittam intended for Gavar to sit there one day. Bouda knew that her wealth made her an acceptable bride. But in their arrogance, it hadn’t occurred to the Jardines to wonder why Bouda herself might seek such a match.
She took a calming breath and made her way to the Appledurham estate seat at the centre of the second tier, right behind the Jardines. Its prominent position had been secured through hard work, not heritage. None of Bouda’s ancestors had been present the day the House of Light rose shimmering from the ashes of the royal Palace of Westminster.
No, Bouda’s family fortunes were of more recent date. A couple of centuries ago Harding Matravers, heir of an impecunious and obscure line, had decided to put his derided Skill for weatherwork to good use. He scandalized the genteel Equal society of the day by taking to the seas as captain of a cargo ship, only to sail back from the Indies an obscenely wealthy man. No one had raised a murmur when he did it again the very next season.
By the third year, half the great families of Britain were in his debt, and soon after a loan default meant the Matravers seat in the seventh tier had been traded for one far better situated, whose spendthrift lord had offered it as collateral.
Even after all this time, the taint of trade hung about the Matravers name. There was only one thing that would expunge it, Bouda thought.
Her glance darted down over the Jardine father and son, and lit on the angular shape of the Chancellor’s Chair. The shallow, high-backed seat was borne upon four carved lions. A shattered stone was lodged beneath it: the old coronation stone of the kings of England. Lycus the Regicide had broken it in two. This had been the throne of the Last King – the sole object spared in Cadmus’s incineration of Westminster Palace.
In the centuries since the Great Demonstration, no woman had ever sat there.
Bouda intended to be the first.
Reaching the seat where her father sprawled, fingers locked across his claret velvet waistcoat, Bouda bent and kissed his cheek, prodding him lightly in the stomach. Lord Lytchett tossed back his mane of ivory hair and hauled himself upright to make room for his darling girl. She slipped easily through the narrow space and into the heir’s chair on his left.
As Bouda sat, smoothing her dress, a thunderous sound echoed through the high chamber. It was the ceremonial mace, striking the outside of the thick oak doors. The doors opened only for those qualified by blood and Skill: lords, ladies and their heirs. Not even Silyen, for all his supposed gifts, would be able just to walk in here. But Cadmus had created a provision – one long overdue for reform, Bouda thought – for a dozen commoners to witness parliamentary proceedings.
‘Who seeks admittance?’ quavered ancient Hengist Occold, the Elder of the House, in a voice that didn’t seem loud enough to be heard on the other side.
‘The Commons of Great Britain most humbly seek admittance among its Equals,’ came the formal response, in a clear female voice.
The old man’s hands worked in the air with surprising deftness, and the doors swung inward to admit a group of people.
Outwardly, there was nothing to distinguish the twelve well-dressed newcomers from those who filled the chamber. But these were merely the OPs, the Observers of Parliament. Voteless. UnSkilled. Commoners. Not, Bouda thought, that you’d know it from the way that bitch Dawson, their Speaker, was decked out in the height of Shanghai fashion.
Rebecca Dawson, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, led her group to their allotted place: the back bench along the west side of the chamber. It was opposite the tiers of estate seats and behind the Chancellor’s Chair. She held herself perfectly upright, despite wearing towering Brazilian heels. The Speaker and Bodina could probably spend hours talking about shoes, Bouda thought. Shoes and abolition. Both equally pointless topics.
As the OPs settled themselves the air thrummed again, to trumpets heralding the Chancellor’s approach. The sound thrilled Bouda as much now as it had the very first time she’d heard it. The current, unworthy incumbent of that great office swept into the chamber, and with a final gesture from the Elder of the House, the doors closed.
Bathed in coruscating light that streamed through the south end window from the shimmering world beyond, the black-and-white figure of Winterbourne Zelston ascended the steps to the chair. He unclasped his heavy ermine and velvet robe and swept it into the waiting hands of the Child of the House, the youngest heir present.