Chapter Text
The letter arrives on a grey morning, clutched in black-clad hands.
The valet comes to fetch him, though by the time he descends the spiralling staircase to the entrance hall, his mother is already there. He catches a glimpse of the figure at the door - a man one might mistake for a raven, a pillar black as pitch. The kind of black that devours light, like a blot of spilled ink. Robes, boots, hat with a rim that covers his eyes and the kind of anonymous, forgettable face convenient for messengers.
But the footman must recognise the Cainhurst red of their sigil, for he reaches past Ludwig’s brother and hands the letter to his mother instead. The parchment is crisp and thick, sealed in ruby wax. Strange, he thinks as he watches the exchange, for a member of the Church to be so familiar with Cainhurst traditions.
Wordlessly, the messenger bows and disappears into the morning mist.
Ludwig declines to take breakfast with them, appearing only later, in time to watch his mother break the ruby wax of the seal. Her hands, tremulous and sheathed in black silk, unfold the expensive-looking parchment. As she reads, he tries and fails to discern some expression from beneath her mourning veil. He glances at his brother. Ludwig himself hasn’t worn black in months; not since they entered half-mourning. But he does not fail to see how his sibling’s mouth twists in disapproval every time he straightens the white cuffs of his sleeves, or idly touches the silver buttons of his cobalt vest. He alone in the sprawling manor is dressed in something other than what is fit for a corpse.
The silence, familiar but never comfortable, stretches on, offering nothing. His attention wanders, past the divan where his brother is seated and to the bay windows, overlooking the lake behind the manor. News from Yharnam, he muses, or some other crisis beyond their reach? Stories had come by way of the servants and hired help - slowly at first, until the trickle became a steady stream. Rumours swirling around the conditions in factories, in workhouses, in the streets. The flight of the merchant class from the city, fleeing with their coin and their goods. Disease come up by every well and ripping through every tenement. Impossible to tell how much of it was true, of course: between the half-fictions of servants and the aristocracy, both riddled with paranoid fear of low society and city dweller’s filth. He’s almost tempted to see for himself. But he hasn’t ridden as far as Yharnam in years, and there could be no worse time than now. So he chases the thought from his mind and sinks deeper into the plush divan.
“From the Healing Church,” his mother says after a moment, more to herself than her sons. Ludwig wonders if he hasn’t misheard. The name means nothing to him.
Once, his sister had read such missives to them à voix haute. Her favourites had been letters from their father, written in the common tongue. Eager to indulge her, Ludwig and his brother would listen to the pleasant hum of her voice as it tumbled in delight, describing whatever faraway things their father had seen: mountain ranges that touched the heavens; fields of golden wheat like deserts that rolled into infinity; sheer cliffs, bathed in freezing rain, that seemed to drop off the edge of the world. Unbound by duty or obligation, they had once thrilled Ludwig - these things he might see when he finished his studies and came of age. He, the second son of a displaced Cainhurst family, in which even firstborn sons are held in such low regard. The letters had thrilled his sister even more.
Only now, years later, had he come to understand how utterly unattainable they must have seemed to her then, except in words. She, only daughter, once bound by duty to carry on the legitimacy of their mother’s Cainhurst lineage. Caged in their estate, its brooding hills and hidden lake, fog strewn across it like muslin over glass.
Wind rattles at the windows, pulling him back to the parlour’s sullen silence. When at last she is finished reading, his mother hands the letter to his brother, who skims it quickly and scowls with the practiced disdain of a solicitor. What his brother lacks in his father’s stature, he makes up for in his mother’s distrust for the wider world.
When Ludwig takes the letter at last he sees the seal is not that of the Church - not Yharnam’s Church, Crown-affiliated, with its dusty-voiced bishops in their hideous hoods and silken livery. Instead it depicts two figures presiding over a chalice. Some offshoot? he wonders. There was no mistaking the garb of the messenger who bore the letter.
He has to read it twice before he understands the proposition. The black ink curls invitingly across the surface.
- rare and previously unknown artefacts of great and wondrous origins which, scholars and representatives of the Healing Church do assure, collectors of discerning taste will no doubt find of great interest and value -
“Charlatans?” he asks, handing the unfolded letter back to his mother. Only Byrgenwerth had ever broken through the sealed tombs mentioned in the letter’s tidy, cursive hand. Only Byrgenwerth had the resources for armed expeditions into such places. He’d done it himself, once, more out of curiosity than obligation - accompanied a gaggle of prospectors and scholars into the damp blackness in search of artefacts, a torch in hand and a sword strapped to his back. Do not touch anything, they had implored him. He was a graduate too, he’d wanted to reply; all pride and young insolence. But his sparring skills greatly outweighed his knowledge of pre-Pthumerian civilisation. So he’d shut his mouth, grudgingly, and dutifully played his role as hired help. They’d not seen so much as a rat in the tunnels, and the air had been so unbearably thick with rot - and the scholars so unbearably arrogant - that he’d not offered his services again.
But the letter does not mention Byrgenwerth. Nor does this Healing Church seem to be a historical society, auctioning off middling relics pried from old ruins.
“Heretics,” his brother intones, his rheumy eyes unfocused.
- and we seek to guarantee patrons that it is the Healing Church’s utmost wish to see such artefacts in the hands of discerning collectors who might, in the future, seek the Church’s expertise in the terrible and risky task of unearthing these priceless objects from the cold earth and bringing them to light. Indeed the cost of such endeavours -
“And shameless besides,” he adds.
His mother looks at them with ill-concealed disgust. Then she dismisses them in the same breath as she calls for tea, adjusting the back veil over her face. Her nose and chin are silhouetted against the cloth like white snowcaps pressing through the clouds.
His brother leaves the room like a spectre, forlorn and forgotten. Ludwig lingers, looking from his mother to the letter. He knows the signs, generally - indications of the melancholy that overtakes her, or the gauzy look in her eyes after too much laudanum. The way she stares, as if in rapture, at the empty seat beside her; or traces, quivering, every loop of lace at the hem of her sleeves. Something in her wavers, like movement from below the calm stillness of the lake, rising to disturb the surface.
“Ludovic.” Her mouth always slips into the old Cainhurst tongue during these episodes, while her mind slides out of time. “Où est ta soeur?”
* * *
The invitations that followed must have been a surprise, he expects, to his mother’s acquaintances. Her seclusion had lasted a great deal longer than the prescribed period. Even Ludwig had come to silently accept she would simply never emerge from mourning again. That she would remain, shut up in here, waited on by her adult sons and their skeletal retinue of staff, cut off from the world until time took her. Then they would bury her in the irony of eternal black, as if she were mourning her own passing.
Instead, driven as if by some invisible hand, she had responded favourably to the Church’s offer by dusk. Over the next few days he watches her hunched over his father’s old writing desk, furiously penning letters to acquaintances on the Church’s proposition: the artefacts to be displayed and acquired, the potential for worthwhile patronage - perhaps a wing in their chapel might be named after some generous donor - and a few vague hints at breakthroughs and discoveries, for those who were so intellectually inclined.
The answers come almost immediately, and within days great sections of the house that had not been inhabited since his father’s passing are prepared for the evening - furniture rearranged, draperies changed, the great hall aired out. The manor, dark and closed in on itself like a body curled up to die, is stretched out again by the servants, breathing and writhing in all its byzantine convolution and splendour. Mahogany and cherry-wood pulse with light under stained-glass arches. Crown mouldings, knotted with arabesques of ivy and lilies, are revealed by the new chandeliers that cascade from the heavens, leaking cut crystal like stars fallen away. Mosaics of bright ceramic and veined marble spiral underfoot, and the finest silver gleams like white gold in the evening glow, every expensive paraffin candle and gas lamplight put to lavish and ill-considered use. Ludwig, for his part, is almost tempted to wear black, if only not to look like part of the decor.
From the foyer he watches the carriages pull up under the cloak of dusk, horses’ mouths steaming like dragons belching smoke. The lords have gold embossed on their stagecoach doors, glittering in the twilight: emblems of ivy and laurel held in the talons of mockingbirds and merlins; crosses floating unmoored above mountains crowned with eyes; openmouthed lions and horses carved in polished wood and lacquered against the elements. Only the Church’s wheelhouses are black - like great barrels of pitch, groaning in protest as they grind to a halt beneath the porte-cochère. He watches the inky stream of bodies emerge and thinks of the letter, its neat little hand, its cloying tone of supplication.
- that we might discuss such a position in the presence of her Ladyship. We hope such an agreement would be beneficial to both parties, and doubtless to the greater good of Yharnam, though we do not expect her Ladyship’s esteemed company to need reminding of how the good of some benefits the good of all; and the Church, in its infancy, humbly wishes to serve the Crown and her people. We vow to demonstrate as much in the company of her Ladyship’s guests and will reassure them of the Church’s worthwhile cause and hope, by the grace of the gods, it may be worthy of their patronage.
Please accept, your Ladyship, the Church’s sincerest gratitude, and I sign on our behalf with the pleasure of being your most obliged and most humble servant -
They pour through the warmly-lit entrance hall - aristocrats and politicians, members of the peerage, moneymen and gentry of leisure, shapeless masses of grey and brown and black, hidden in their greatcoats. A twinge of surprise when he notices some of the lords still wear powdered wigs, half a century out of fashion already. Their wives follow, displayed like mantles covered in valuable trinkets, fortunes draped in gold and cloth on their bodies as if to say look, look at what we have amassed. He’s not seen his mother in anything but black crepe for so long now that these fanciful layers of silk and taffeta look garish by comparison. Their hair is up and bound tightly, so tightly he wants to look away. An unknowable practice, the fabrication of their own suffering.
But he nods and clasps hands anyway, disdain shuffled under practised stoicism. It’s the best he can do. He hears his brother stumble over his words, as if it’s been an age since he’s spoken to anyone else.
It has, Ludwig thinks, as he gives another curt bow. For years, every mourner who arrived at their doors with perfumed sympathies and withered flowers was greeted with coldness and suspicion. Each well-wisher carried something threatening in their strangeness - something untrustworthy, brimming with the potential for betrayal. Grief made his mother colder but more fragile in turn, chewed through her like silk left to moths; his brother became bitter and empty, a husk of a man. Ludwig, watching his mother descend into her episodes with increasing severity, had simply retreated from the world; a wan attempt to salvage a family tree that seemed intent on losing all its leaves. Quietly, he'd shuffled away ambitions and expectations and became a ghost in his own home. An isolation, brought on by endless mourning. A sentence spoken and a sentence served. The manor, a cell. A slow death of useless objects.
Until the crisp white parchment in black-clad hands, sealed in red.
* * *
Many of the Church members he greets are young, much younger than he expects. Hollow-eyed but with unlined faces, streaks of grey indicative of long nights instead of long years. He thinks he recognises some from Byrgenwerth, though perhaps he’s only unwittingly conjuring the familiar. Academics who ought to be in the throes of their research, eyes hooded and weighed down by knowledge, stooped at his door instead. Thrown their lot in with an organisation he still doesn’t quite understand. He recognises the prospectors by their slate-coloured collars, but by their swagger, too - tall men, young and broad-backed. The kind he would have sought out at Byrgenwerth to spar with, drink with. Melt furtively away into the night with.
His mother still cuts an impressive figure despite all the black, sharp-edged and regal in her sombre way. As they arrive, he is surprised to see the members of the Church bypass his brother and greet her first, in the Cainhurst custom. My Lady, they murmur, muted bows of deference, but no flourish. Those few families of Cainhurst descent do the same out of habit, albeit grudgingly - the Grandmesnils, whom he spies arriving in a carriage devoid of Cainhurst heraldry; or the strutting Le Roux, whose sons still bear the eponymous flame-kissed hair of their ancestors. It had not taken long for their family to weave alliances with a few great houses. Novelties attract attention, and his father had moved in all the right circles to assure their respectability, even without a title.
His mother used to rage, Ludwig remembers, when they were young. Choice words for the unwelcome who trampled over her traditions, until his father would come, easy and respectable in his demeanour, and beg pardon, assuring their accosted guest they could address his wife with the same regard with which they addressed him. She would scowl and he would laugh - warm and soft, like tobacco-velvet, despite his severe brow. But he would always demur, in the end. It didn’t matter that her ancestors had left Cainhurst hundreds of years ago. His mother would have a Cainhurst household or nothing, and in Cainhurst, only women carried hereditary legitimacy.
But in the quiet landscape beyond Yharnam, they were scarce more than landed gentry with a queer-sounding name and a modest estate. They could shed their symbols, and their blood - but not their names. The Crown, as it happened, had no qualms with Cainhurst gentry fighting for it and paying its taxes. But it would never grant them peerage in return.
Ludwig shakes another hand, hoping his smile doesn’t look as strained as it feels. None of it matters anymore. Not now. Not with his sister gone, and their lineage at an end.
A few of the scholars - or clergy, he’s still unsure - stop and examine the Cainhurst tapestries displayed in the great hall, murmuring excitedly to each other. Spanning almost the entire room, the set of heavy wool textiles depict Cainhurst’s first conquest of the Crown’s territories, before alliances unravelled and the kingdom was again rebuked, and dissolved into a shadow of its former glory. His brother had begged his mother to take them down before the guests arrived. It’s an insult to the Crown, he’d pleaded. They will never take us seriously.
They never have, Ludwig would say. But only to himself. He quite enjoys the workmanship.
A woman in a gown the colour of ash shrugs off her coat and takes his hand, drawing his attention away. She has the sort of face that looks as if it’s been weathered by kindness, and she’s glancing from him to the wall. Politely, he waits for some remark on the tapestries, something sly and patriotic disguised by an indulgent tone. After a moment, he realises she’s looking at the portrait of his father displayed below, muted ochre and black against the rich azure of his vest like the sea in sunlit splendour.
“Oh,” she begins, tone thick as treacle, as if she were speaking to a child. “How you look like your father.”
She means it as a compliment, of course. One more prosaic note in the hymn of polite conversation. Ludwig doesn’t need to be told - the portrait bears the same cascade of dark curls, neatly arranged over the same broad shoulders. The same ponderous brow over his father’s eyes, blue-black as the night, like two clever bits of coal. Wide open when they’d found him after the accident, head split open by a rock like a mollusk, spilling its soft insides. A Chevalier, an expert rider, thrown from his horse, easy as that. Nothing to be done, the medic had said, and made sympathetic sounds. Something snuffed out in Ludwig, drowned. It was a year before he could ride comfortably again, without the nausea of grief bouncing in his throat at a steady trot.
A murmur of thanks is all he manages before he pulls himself away. What can he say? I do resemble him, and it’s all the more striking because he is dead, and I am not.
* * *
He’s tempted to spend the night drifting alongside his mother, a spectral guard, if only to let her take the brunt of the conversation, and to keep an eye on her humours. But when he finds her she’s deep in debate with a sour-mouthed lord from the south, their voices edged with the kind of pinpricks indicative of a political exchange. She’d been a hard woman once, proud and full of scorn. The deaths of her kin had bent her back and bowed her head, not the years. But she seems now to be steady enough, so Ludwig leaves her be.
The visitors number enough for the gathering to feel neither intimate nor overwhelming. Relieved, he allows himself to roam, floating in and out of conversations, never staying long enough to be drawn in. Some acquaintances still offer condolences, repetitively, years later; he tries to be gracious about it and suspects he isn’t. A flock of peers ask him when he’ll be done at Byrgenwerth. Politely he reminds them he graduated years ago, and lets them pepper him with absurd questions on the history of philosophy and rhetoric. He’d like to slip out, tend to the horses stabled for the evening, as if there weren’t already several grooms working on the estate. But he knows what’s expected of him, has never fought against it. So he dutifully recites the foundational texts on the philosophy of ascension for the lords, letting himself be tickled by their gleeful surprise at his cleverness. A mountain of a man who can read! The barons and dukes and counts of the surrounding countryside, as far as he can tell, have never been known for their acumen. Suits him fine. Let them think he’s a halfwit with a good sword hand. They’re less inclined to bother him for very long.
As the Church members file through the foyer, footmen are summoned to help them haul in the artefacts, packed in crates of pressed wood, stuffed with straw and lambswool and nailed haphazardly shut. Groaning under their weight, he almost moves to help them. Like the cove, he remembers, and stops short.
The memory, when it comes, is always cold. The sea churning, withdrawing, churning again. Tidal pools, their own tiny kingdoms, trampled by leather and hubris. He’d been nearly done with Byrgenwerth when he’d found himself on that beach. Hadn’t forayed back into the tombs, or done anything of note since. He’d owed them nothing. Later, when his mother asked him why he’d bothered, he’d dismissed it as a sort of noblesse oblige: helping ferry the crates to and from the cove, loading the carriages with devices and implements brought from Byrgenwerth to the little seaside village. He’d still been curious, then - about the world beyond the manor, tangible things far removed from the classics and rhetoric he’d swallowed and regurgitated at the academy. The things his father had seen, wonders enclosed in his generous letters.
That, and no one else on the expedition had managed to calm the horses. The scholars spooked them. So did the village and its sickly, muck-eyed inhabitants. He’d never known such a panic to be on the beasts, and was glad when the last handful of scholars chose to remain a little longer while he was dismissed inland with the rest of the hired help, riding at the front of the procession back to Byrgenwerth and still stinking of things churned up by the sea.
He recoils from the memory, as pungent as it is vivid, even after all this time. But he’d been out of Byrgenwerth only a few years, hadn’t he? Why did it then feel like the slow crawl of a lifetime, a divine punishment to sit here in stillness and watch the lakeside creep closer and closer to the manor?
The desire to flee the evening is suddenly overwhelming. The thought of another stranger choking through half-formed condolences makes him ill.
To distract himself, he watches the somber-robed figures of the Church arrange the artefacts for viewing. Great stone vases are lifted from crates and placed carefully upright, while polished silver goblets are unwrapped to display their strange inlay of patterns and flowing motifs. Another Church member orchestrates their movements, gloved hands darting like trapped blackbirds, gesturing to the tables centred in the foyer. Little pieces of parchment are placed next to each object, detailing where they were unearthed, and what historical importance they might hold. An exquisitely wrought dagger is laid next to a gruesome sculpture of a severed hand, though upon closer inspection he can’t be sure the stuff it’s made from is truly clay and not old, mummified flesh. A crumbling, moth-eaten piece of vellum with indecipherable symbols is placed next to what looks to be the fragment of a cuirass, shaped like a ribcage and encrusted with semiprecious stones, like bleached rock covered in glittering barnacles.
Pthumeru, he reads. Isz. Loran. Names he knows, vaguely, part history and part myth, great civilisations crumbled and buried by time or cataclysm, come to naught. What were these things worth to their long-dead makers? A handful of pearls catches his eye, glimmering with milky opalescence, laid out on a square of oleander-black velvet. Next to them, a cracked silver bell that he picks up to examine, resisting the urge to ring it - out of curiosity or spite for the whole endeavour, he couldn’t say. No prices are fixed; only an invitation to discuss such matters with the Church’s representatives, prospectors and historians alike. He imagines one of the lords, fancying himself a collector, eager to bring home some cursed relic to display in an exercise of vanity - only to have the thing bring down calamity on his household.
“Careful,” a mild voice says from behind him. “The bells are said to summon hungry spirits.”
Ludwig turns. The Byrgenwerth colours startle him, years later and so jarringly out of place.
“I’m sure the dead already roam these halls,” he replies, then winces. It sounds much more macabre out loud, considering the circumstances. He puts the bell down and extends a hand to introduce himself.
The scholar, who’d been noting something in a little leather-bound book, slips it back into the folds of their robes and takes Ludwig’s hand. Their wry expression tells him exactly what they think of ghosts and haunted bells.
“Caryll Saint-Eulalia.”
Ludwig doesn’t recognise the name, and it doesn’t sound native to Yharnam. Nor does the scholar look it, with their warm, umber complexion and tightly cropped black curls. They cut an elegant figure, dark robes open to reveal a well-tailored vest. Over their shoulders, a stole and hood decorated with the colourful patterns indicative of scholastic achievements.
“Byrgenwerth? Or the Church?”
“Neither,” they answer. Then they smile chastely, glancing down at themselves. “Well, Byrgenwerth, for appearance’s sake. But I consult with the Church on historical matters.”
Ludwig imagines the term historical matters to be very broad and very loose in this case. “Not one of the anatomists, then?”
A brief but agreeable chuckle. “Heavens, no. I can barely stand the sight of blood. I try not to be present until that part of the research is done.” They interlace their hands. “I am a linguist. Your mother speaks the old Cainhurst tongue very well, if I may say so.”
“My own is a little underused,” Ludwig admits, feeling somewhat put off. He clears his throat, steels himself to play the courteous host. “Is that your specialisation?”
Dark eyes peer at him from behind silver spectacles. “Oh no. I’m currently assembling a lexicon of pictograms, transcribed from the logos of the Great Ones.”
Ludwig blinks politely. Caryll seems not to notice. “Their sounds and songs, discourses and litanies,” they continue. “I capture them in a form humans can - well, perhaps not understand, but at least conceptualise.” They wave one elegant hand. “After all, what’s the point of serving a god if you don’t know what it wants?”
“Ah. That sounds…”
“Fascinating? Indeed. Heretical? A little, though I suppose it depends whom you ask. I’m sure the Archbishop of Yharnam would prefer if he were the one translating the word of gods and not some foreign-born scholar. Unfortunately for him, faith is not a prerequisite. Only a linguist’s ear.” They tap the side of their head with one long finger.
Early in the evening, Ludwig had planned at length how to navigate his partial duties as host with the detachment of a monk sworn to silence. But the scholar’s tone is devoid of the gentry’s sycophantic blather. He is, he realises, admittedly curious, if not outright interested. Dimly he remembers what it was like to exchange with others for the pleasure of it, and not wraiths at his door disgorging condolences while refusing to meet his eyes.
“Seems somewhat more involved than simply consulting.”
Caryll’s shrug is deceptively graceful. “You might say the theory and methodology are not always in alignment. I also act as an intermediary between the Church and the scholars still at Byrgenwerth - those intrigued by the results of blood ministration and its overlap with the cultivation of insight.” Some of this rings faintly familiar to Ludwig, so he nods along. “I guarantee the safe passage of research between the two, while keeping the Byrgenwerth scholars safe from…” They hesitate. “Scandal.”
So there is a cleave between the Healing Church and Byrgenwerth after all. He’d suspected as much. He glances around the room. No other Church members wear the Byrgenwerth colours. Clever. Something to lend legitimacy to the whole enterprise - help it maintain its scientific veneer and prevent it from sliding into the territory of doctrine.
“You’re a graduate yourself, are you not?”
“Classics,” Ludwig says, momentarily surprised by his own embarrassment. “Nothing of practical application. But that was a few years ago.”
“Respectable,” Caryll says tactfully. Ludwig isn’t sure it is. Then they tilt their head and look at him appraisingly. “You should speak to Gehrman, or Magister Laurence. I’m quite sure the Church can find a better use for you.” A gloved hand passes over their mouth, like a warding sign. “Oh, Great Ones’ mercy, do try not to use the word Magister, won’t you? It’s been a bit of a sore point since Byrgenwerth stripped him of the title. I just can’t seem to shake it. Old habits, and the like."
Ludwig opens his mouth to reply when a small lady, swallowed by the enormity of her skirts, bustles between them, assaulting Caryll with questions about a silver chain on display among the artefacts.
“Beg pardon. A pleasure, sir.” The scholar smiles apologetically at Ludwig before following the woman, her innumerable ribbons and flounces bobbing excitedly alongside Caryll’s sleek robes.
Alone, Ludwig scans the room. Gehrman and Laurence. He’d recognised Gehrman’s name immediately, but it takes him a moment to find the man in the crowd. In the end it’s the rumpled hat that gives him away - Ludwig can’t remember ever seeing him without it - and the coat, patched and worn in too many places to blend in with the Church’s clean-cut garb. He still looks as if he sleeps too little and partakes too often in poppy. But Ludwig hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be young and arrogant and cut from marble. The fervour with which he’d observed the former Prospector, a kind of jealous need to prove himself once he learned of Gehrman’s skill in the sparring ring. Ludwig had almost felt sorry for him, hollow-cheeked and sinewy as a branch in winter - until the older man had him flat on his back with a blunted blade at his throat, asking if he wouldn’t like to try again. Ludwig had left Byrgenwerth renown for his swordplay, his grappling skills, the precision of his rifle even at a full gallop. A near-unsullied record - save for the dirt on his backside and the irreparable damage done to his pride. In his four years at the academy, he’d never once managed to best the tattered man.
To his surprise, the memory stirs something in him, quickens his breath and sends a pleasant little jolt of anticipation down the back of his neck. Under different circumstances, he’d have half a mind to challenge Gehrman, if only to see which one of them has lost their touch over the years. Haven’t I, he thinks, disgusted at the thought. When was the last time he’d ridden further than Byrgenwerth, or beyond the idyllic forest path of Hemwick? When had he last sparred, felt the pleasurable weight of a weapon in his hand? Had filth on his boots and the heady thrill of triumph in his chest? His fingers flex.
The thought makes him turn away, his mouth twisting with self-reproach. He won’t approach Gehrman - not like this, only a few years later and already a spectre of his former self. Next to him hovers the Cainhurst woman, unmistakable with her silver hair and impeccably-cut tailcoat, subtle from afar but spectacular up close, no doubt. She wears men’s clothes better than any man in the room. Vaguely he can picture her in some splendid confection fit for a boyar, at some ceremony-or-other from their Byrgenwerth days. Her hatred for it had seeped through her icy countenance like the spring thaw.
A freckled, moon-faced Church member hangs off her arm contentedly, while she herself stands as close to Gehrman as his own shadow. Ludwig struggles to conjure her name from memory, but can only recall the rumours that swirled around her when she came to Byrgenwerth: that she was the product of a failed attempt to forge an allegiance through marriage between Cainhurst nobility and some stiflingly devout minor nation-state to the east, explaining her strange accent and stranger exile in one fell swoop. The last time he’d seen her she’d been standing under a grey, salt-poisoned tree, watching him haul crates of implements down rotting wooden piers to the cove where the scholars were gathered. He’d asked, more out of boredom than curiosity, where she’d learned to ride. When she hadn’t answered, he’d asked instead what they had found down on the beach. Her silence had made his skin crawl.
The smell of moist decay comes flooding back with the memory, and Ludwig resolves then to approach neither of them. He will let his mother fawn over the Cainhurst woman.
Gehrman or Laurence, Caryll had told him. Truthfully, he is in the mood to speak to no one, and he has no idea who the latter is until he remembers the Church’s wax seal, garnet cracked over crisp parchment. Smooth, neat handwriting belying its sticky, entreating tone, theatrical and tawdry. The signature at the very bottom.
Vicar. Or the magister-turned-vicar, according to Caryll. He’s not even sure what that means. Who is the leader of this queer outfit? He peers around the room, unsure of what to look for. A wizened old scholar, perhaps, some relic from Byrgenwerth; or a figure dressed in bishop’s finery, silk collar edged with gold and a fanatic’s gleam in their eyes. But he’d greeted neither at the entrance, and no one in the room fulfils either of his scornful expectations. If the vicar speaks with the same supplicating tone as he writes, then Ludwig would rather not meet him at all.
Across the room, he catches his brother clumsily courting a lord’s young daughter, a pretty creature of ribbons and cloudy material, charming collarbones and marble neck exposed despite the cold. It’s embarrassing, to be sure, but he can’t blame him - they’ve been so long in mourning that even polite conversation feels like it must be learnt and mastered anew. As he watches the young lady delicately extract herself from his brother’s company, he can’t help the pity that makes him squirm, as if he’s tasted something tainted, though he himself has nothing to show for it. At Byrgenwerth he’d had suitors, some as dull as they were pretty, and others as interesting as they were plain. He thought he’d find one, settle on something halfway between the two if only to please his mother. But that was years ago. Before his father’s accident. Before his sister walked into the lake behind the estate, pockets lined with stones, and kept walking.
A swallow of something strong to choke down the remorse, before he plunges back into the honeycomb of conversation.
Nearby, a coterie of lords circle a few Church members and chatter excitedly about the brief iconoclast that had struck the Crown, years ago, like a lightning bolt. Ludwig sidles up behind one of them, half-interested. In a frenzy of proclaimed divine inspiration, the Crown had declared all depictions of the Great Ones heretical. Oedon is formless for a reason after all, cried the pamphlets that once littered the city streets. Hammers were taken to monuments, public and private alike; one lord claims he is personally acquainted with a member of the Royal Society of Antiquarians who nearly died defending an admittedly mediocre but terribly ancient sculpture. The purging of these works had ripped through the city like fire until the Archdeacon pleaded mercy for the income generated by outsiders who made the costly pilgrimage to Yharnam’s great ruins. And so, one of the Church members concludes, icon-breakers receded into history and the city was free to commission wretchedly lopsided depictions of the unknowable once again. Silk-stocking laughter follows from the nobles.
Byrgenwerth’s donation to the city’s monument restoration had been excessively generous, a laconic voice interjects. Like wind over still water, a wary ripple - part acknowledgement and part discomfort - pass through the black-garbed Church members. A few heads turn, followed by a low murmur, the acrid scent of a touchy subject in polite company. Ludwig shifts, ready to move on, when someone touches his sleeve.
In retrospect, he’d heard enough by then to know his flimsy assumptions had to be wrong. How could he have expected someone old and wizened, when so many of the Church members had been his contemporaries at Byrgenwerth? From where did he conjure a blunt, forceful fanatic, once he heard the whispers of a protege of Provost Willem, whose stable of young men were nothing if not consummate scholars? If anything, he’d settled on imagining someone striking - remarkable, unearthly. Some ancient, gilded mosaic of a prophet come to life.
Certainly not the small, prim man who stands before him now.
It is the first thing that strikes Ludwig, and will follow him like a ghost long after the evening is done. How someone so plain and unremarkable could be as blinding as an open flame.
Some lord’s bustling voice over the prattle of conversation, bumbling through an introduction. The founder, Ludwig hears, muffled as if through water. The vicar.
“Laurence,” the man says, clear as a chime. Ludwig only notes later that he fails to give a second name, or a title of any kind. He is too busy wondering at the colour of the man’s eyes, so grey they seem to have none. His hair is a curtain of auburn, warmed by the lamplight and loosely swept past his shoulders. The silver that creeps from the crown of his head past his temples seems less a sign of age and instead likens him to an unfinished canvas. The underpainting of a portrait, left undone.
Ludwig holds out a hand before his hesitancy descends into rudeness. “Ludwig,” he offers, before adding, “de la Mare.”
“Yes,” the vicar replies, as though he’s been asked a question. “We’ve met.”
Ludwig blanches, less at the other man’s certainty than the little spark of amusement that alights across his face, and Ludwig sees colour where before there was none.
It’s enough to trigger the memory: the sea, cold and grey and churning up the smell of salt. From the slope where he is perched Ludwig can see the Cainhurst woman, face hidden under the brim of her hat. Gehrman, hunched at the shoulders, hands filthy and blood streaked across his coat, thin strands of blond hair plastered to the hollows of his cheeks. Scholars with their leather boots, blotchy and white with salt stains blooming like mould. And the vicar - a little younger, he remembers; they all were - robes hiked up around his waist, wet at the hem where the tide pushes up the beach like an insistent child, cold hands grasping; sleeves drawn and tied above the elbow, heavy with water from the incessant spray. His mouth moves but no words come out; one knee digs into the heavy muck and his face is lined with the effort of helping another scholar pry something away from the fleshy mass sunken in the sand. His hands are stained, coated in something slimy and hideous. Someone in the background retches. Beneath the reek of turned fish, the glow of something dying - human, almost, but less musty - smelling of sea air instead of flesh rot. The memory swims and folds into itself in his mind like the tide.
But when he shakes the vicar’s gloved hand it is dry, and the man smells only of anise.
“Byrgenwerth,” Ludwig says, aware of how the company around them is being shut out of the exchange.
“For a time,” the other man answers cryptically. Then he smiles in a way that is at once impossibly polite and terribly insolent. “Anatomists were not part of the company you kept, if I recall.”
Ludwig realises he is still grasping the vicar’s hand, and lets go. “No,” he agrees, though part of him feels as though something’s slipped past him. An insult, he expects.
He shifts, trying not to give the impression he is looking down his nose at the vicar. The height difference makes it difficult. The inky black of the Church robes make the man look even smaller, though he alone wears a wool caplet and hood, soft and white as a clutch of doves. Where the hood loops over his shoulders, the fabric is trimmed with silk and embroidered with a simple motif in gold thread - a strange chimera of a scholar’s hood and liturgical mantle. It is the only thing that makes him stand out among the other Church members. Alongside the rest of the invited company, it looks absurdly modest.
Ludwig glances away to the densely packed room. “There are more of you than I expected.”
“There’s no glory in it, but the cause resonates with many.” The men hovering around them lean in, feeling the conversation open to them once more. The vicar gestures to the black-clad Church members, then looks back at the gentlemen indulgently. “The Church is always in need of good men,” he intones. "Scholars and apothecaries to distill and purify the formula; ministers and clergymen to help distribute it to the masses, and bring comfort to those still in doubt.” Ludwig sees it then, the way his plain features give way to a magnetism that seeps through his words and animates his gestures. “Brave prospectors - many from Byrgenwerth, of course - and their hired help to extract all manner of treasures from the tombs. Some, gentlemen, that you have no doubt come tonight to see for yourselves.” He pauses for effect and lowers his voice, a thread of impish delight in his regard for his small audience. “Some, as you can imagine, touched by the terrible hands of unholy things, monstrous things vanquished by our faithful proficient in the - forgive me, sirs, if I am too direct at such an hour - liquidation of threats.”
The gentlemen look at each other, chins bobbing with a mix of trepidation and the kind of illicit thrill only afforded to those who live in comfort.
Ludwig nearly laughs. “Liquidation of threats?”
The vicar’s grey eyes crease at the corners. “Sounds better to the public than mercenaries.” He stands back and smiles at Ludwig knowingly, as if they have just shared a private joke.
A saturnine lord to his left interjects then, and Ludwig feels a flush of relief when the vicar’s eyes are off him. The need to extract himself from the conversation is pressing, but not as pressing as the compulsion to examine the man openly. Below the white finery his black robes are tailored almost to the knee, Ludwig notes with interest, and his boots are high. The dress of someone who goes where the streets aren’t yet cobbled and the ground is thick with filth. Does he really have nothing more respectable to wear to woo potential patrons? Or is this part of the act as well? He imagines peeling away the artifice, rooting around for any indication of the man under this carefully curated act. He follows the conversation as if from afar, watching for signs - the zeal of a true believer, or the flippancy of a cynic.
“The Church is humbled by your patronage, my lord.”
With a jolt he realises he’s been pulled back into the discussion, and the men look at him expectantly.
Patronage, he thinks, staring at them dumbly as if the realisation were obvious. The vicar has merchant’s son written all over him: mediator, dealmaker, social-climber. The very embodiment of bourgeois audacity. There had been so few at Byrgenwerth - scholars, he found, made up for in brilliance what they lacked in charisma, and none of them could charm a viper. But this - Ludwig scowls. He wonders if Provost Willem understands what he’s released into the world.
“I am no lord,” he says finally, with the right amount of apologetic undertone to placate the vultures still perched around them. He stops short of mentioning Cainhurst, or the family’s lack of peerage, if only to spare himself the disapproving tut-tutting from the lords who never miss the chance to lament how unfortunate he is to be descended from his ancestors. As if he had a choice in the matter.
“Ah.” The vicar’s tone is easy, a practiced hand at smoothing an awkward silence. “How should I address you, then?”
“Chevalier, if it please.” And if it does not, then you may not address me at all. It is the only title Cainhurst men are allowed under the Crown’s rule. “But I must now beg your indulgence, gentlemen. I am bound by my duties as host to mingle. My lords.” He bows to the men, then inclines his head. “Vicar.”
“Chevalier,” the vicar echoes. The word glitters in his mouth. “Please, do speak to my associates. There is much they would tell you of our ambitions.”
“Forgive me,” Ludwig says, with a half-hearted attempt at sincerity that borders on disdain, “but I’m afraid my lady mother is the one who is interested in the artefact trade.”
The vicar laughs quietly, his ordinary features blooming into something bright. “I would not bore you with talk of vases, sir. We have other propositions.” His smile cuts through the warm light. “You must miss the wider world, Chevalier. There is so much to be done.”
* * *
When at last the bell chimes for dinner, Ludwig helps direct the guests into the dining hall. Three long tables are laid out, polished teak and floral inlays covered in the family’s finest cloth. They are far too numerous to fit at a single one, and he sees his mother has made a point to seat Church members alongside their more distinguished guests. The scrape of chairs drowns out the sound of voices momentarily, though the conversation remains warm and lively. No decorum has been breached, it seems to Ludwig; no offence has been given, or grave misstep observed by any of the gentlefolk. There is no mistaking the Church’s skilful manoeuvring - this is not the first time they’ve had to curry favour with the evening’s company.
The tables are heaped as bountifully with food as they are with silver. He’s not seen such a rich spread in years - it seems every creature that roams the hills beyond their estate has been shot, skinned, seared, and stuffed in the most elaborate manner, with sweet figs and plums, or else buttered turnips and bitter fennel. Fish steam under crusts of crushed almonds, strewn across beds of perfumed rice. Porcelain dishes filled with nothing but salted butter, like soft, creamy mounds of flesh, pierced with the little bits of crystallised marsh salt that taste vaguely of kelp and violets. Wine of every shade, from opaque mulberry to sharp citrine, each decanted in crystal, fracturing and scattering the glow of open flame across those already seated.
The lavish waste makes his stomach turn, a heave between hunger and disgust. It’s no secret that folk go hungry in Yharnam. But it’s tolerably far from them that it feels almost surreal enough to ignore. He accepts a glass of white, the sweet yellow-green of cat’s eye.
At the head of the table his mother takes her customary seat, his brother placed to her left, where his father once sat. The seat to her right is empty. His sister’s, before. With a sharp sting he remembers how the candlelight shone across her glossy mass of dark curls, looping like the letters of the Church’s proposition.
- moved as we were to deepest sorrow to hear of the passing of your most beloved daughter, so little after the tragic death of your late husband, the Chevalier de la Mare; and though our chapel may still be but a humble refuge at this time do not doubt, your Ladyship, that it is nonetheless graced with good intentions, and our votive offerings burn bright and with utmost sincerity for the immortal souls of your dearest kin, may they find eternity in the blessed expanse between the sea and the sky -
Whatever else they traffic in, he muses, the Healing Church is well-informed. They must target their patrons carefully - certainly they couldn’t approach families wary of the heresy embedded in their logic, or tied too explicitly to Byrgenwerth and its leadership. Caryll had told him as much, and he suspects if they can ferry research between the two institutions, they must also have a larger web of informants, threading connections like vast spiders on which to prop up the Church’s operations.
His mother raises a hand and another bell chimes, prompting the hubbub to fade to a hush. Then she turns a few heads to her right, where the vicar is seated, and nods.
As the vicar stands to address the table, Ludwig finds himself wondering how deep the schism runs between pupil and former master. By all accounts Willem had been a genius once, a visionary before prestige and old age had made a conservative of what was left of him. No more than a symbol now, he’d overheard, resting on his laurels. Ludwig can imagine it easily enough - the frustration of the vicar and his associates, stifled by Willem’s complacency. Doomed, in the end, to have nothing come of a lifetime of work but their solemn portraits on the walls of Byrgenwerth. Perhaps later in the evening he’ll ask a Church member under the cover of idle exchange. He can’t remember the last time he looked forward to a conversation. Must be the wine, he decides.
The vicar’s voice pulls him back. It’s pleasant and carries easily across the dining hall, punctured occasionally by a measured gesture, and he has the benefit of neither looking nor speaking like a foreigner. Only when Ludwig listens closely in the quiet hush does he find it under the smooth, flat accent of a Yharnamite: something else, something rippling and melodious that hints at another way of hearing, another pattern of thinking. Consonants that reach to become vowels, reined in on the edge of the vicar’s lips. Ludwig has nothing against foreigners - as if he himself isn’t already marked by his ancestors - but he won’t pretend to let it evoke some false kinship between them.
The vicar thanks her ladyship and her household generously but without genuflection, though Ludwig doubts the nobles can hear the difference. Progress, the vicar is saying, should be beholden to no one - certainly not the whims of antiquated thinking. It cannot be stalled by the Crown, despite its benevolence; nor the Archbishop’s handwringing, or the decrepit men of ageing institutions - here he pauses, and some of the lords chuckle in their assumption he means to address Parliament. Ludwig expects he is thinking of Byrgenwerth. He lets the laughter subside before continuing in a confessorial tone that he, of all people, is the first to admit to the slow crawl of scholarship and that, as indebted as they are to Byrgenwerth - here he becomes playfully self-deprecating - the Church cannot and should not wait for their peers to review and debate every discovery, lest their bones turn to dust and the gods come collect their creaking souls.
He pauses while a ripple of guffaws and a murmur of appreciation echo around him. Ludwig recognises the look from earlier, as if the vicar shares a private joke with every soul in the room. The effect is remarkable. Ludwig squints unconsciously, as if scrutinising his own thoughts. What did I expect? How convenient that his followers can write whatever they wish to see on his unremarkable features, while he in turn may hymn whatever truth he needs with his relentlessly persuasive manner. Ruefully, Ludwig hopes the vicar is not preserved in portrait. This is a man whose likeness is meant to be seen in motion, not captured by stillness.
When the vicar resumes, the silence he commands is one of interest, not reverence or forced politeness. Men used to ceding their voices to no one are swayed by the rhythm of his words. Briefly, Ludwig finds himself wondering what it would mean to take power away from someone like that. To clamp his hand over the vicar’s clever little mouth. Metaphorically, certainly. But also literally. He allows himself a scowl that makes it halfway to a smile. He seems the kind of man who would bite.
* * *
There are more than a few toasts during the meal - necessary posturing for the Crown and gratitude, heaped without reserve, on the estate for their generosity. For a stretch the dinner is quite bearable. Ludwig has the fortune of being neither trapped by, nor the subject of, the surrounding deliberation. He spends a great deal of time nodding, mouth on the rim of his cup, and for the first time that evening he is lulled into some semblance of ease by the symphony of low voices and the chime of porcelain in the low light.
Softened by curiosity, he eventually glances over at the vicar, a few seats down and across the glittering table. He is leaning forward, curtain of auburn hair tucked behind both ears, listening and nodding along to an old widower’s endless tale. The old man’s moustache flaps like a hideous little bird caught in a strong wind, and the vicar could not get a word in if he tried - but it doesn’t matter. The angle of his head, his conspiratorial lean, the reassuring little smile at the corner of his eyes. It’s an impressive craft, Ludwig admits. To make anyone feel as if they are heard.
Abruptly, a pear-shaped man in a silk vest near the head of the table leans over to interrupt. Ludwig only catches snippets of it - something about an academic rivalry, he understands. Why, the lord rumbles, has the vicar yet to publish a riposte in such-and-such scholarly periodical? He must want to respond, surely, to the vicious attack on his methodologies by another Byrgenwerth scholar, a name Ludwig fails to catch over the din of conversation.
The vicar answers with an expression so self-effacing that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
“Simply that I have not had the time, my lord,” Ludwig hears him say, “not with the tireless work of the Church. And I believe our methods speak for themselves. I do not share my former colleagues’ convictions that answers are to be found in dreams, drug-induced hallucinations and the ramblings of sleep-addled minds.” He smiles disarmingly. “My research is a little more practical than all that.”
A hush falls over the surrounding seats, heads turning and tuning into the exchange with interest.
“What of the arguments on the practical achievability of ascension? The potential for mankind to surpass itself has always been the university’s driving question.” This from a reedy gentlemen whom Ludwig is sure did not attend said university.
“Dress it up as you like,” comes another voice, this one old and surly. “It remains a heresy.”
Further down, Ludwig catches Caryll’s gaze. The scholar spares him a knowing smile.
Across the table, the vicar holds up a hand. “We are not here to challenge beliefs,” he replies, his voice conciliatory, “or debate the rationality of man and the potential for ascension. We cannot achieve anything if half the population is condemned to die in their own filth. A city of sick men cannot build a great civilisation.”
“Yharnam is barely civilised,” a petulant voice interjects. Ludwig sees some Church members exchange glances laced with displeasure.
“Which is why the Church will help pull it into the modern age,” the vicar replies, looking as if he knows he must mollify both the gentlemen and his associates at once. “Invest in us, and we will build a Yharnam worthy of its ancestors. Return it to the glory of the ancient cities upon which it sleeps.”
“And the scholars who remain at Byrgenwerth?” This from the lord with the martial tone who’d started the conversation. “Will there be more of them joining you?”
Ludwig leans forward, curious despite himself.
“Once I’ve convinced them,” the vicar answers coolly. “In the meantime, we exchange letters. Healthy debate is the foundation of good scholarship, after all."
“If letters were enough to convince great men, Parliament would look vastly different.” A low chuckle, the wobbling of greasy chins.
“Of course,” the vicar concedes. “That is why any good theory is worthless without proof.” An expression that Ludwig can only describe as cheerful malice animates his features. “Have you ever seen a dissection, my lords?”
A few of them squirm.
“No? Then how do you know the heart that beats in your chest has four chambers? Or that the lungs branch to resemble a root system? Perhaps you were unaware of the little almond-shaped clusters at the base of your skull, which regulate how civilised your conduct in such a setting as this?”
He puts his fork down carefully, so it does not make a sound. Ludwig can hear the man beside him breathing heavily.
“You believe it because we - surgeons, scholars - have shown it, and proved it. This is no different. The patients who line the streets outside the chapel don’t ask about our letters, or our debates, or what we’ve found on the operating table - remarkable things, to be sure. But to them it matters not. To them, the only thing that matters is the feeling of when, at last, the cholera symptoms subside. When they see their loved ones breathe again as if above water, released from the throes of consumption. The reconstitution of the body by virtue of the new blood.” Here, something slips from the voluminous folds of his caplet, caught between two gloved fingers. A vial of blood. The hush is heavy.
Over the rim of his wine glass, Ludwig glances at the vicar’s companions down the table, seemingly unmoved by the exchange. The Cainhurst woman in particular is fixated on her plate, a strand of silver hair caught in the light. How often do they do this? Ludwig wonders. Gatherings and receptions, putting Church members and their esoteric research on display like a living cabinet of curiosities.
Carefully, as if it were the relic of a long-dead saint, the vicar passes the little vial of blood to the man next to him. The flacon is topped with silver, and at the right angle it could almost be a fanciful flask of a good Madeira wine, the same shade of ruby shot through with gold. It moves from hand to tremulous hand and down the table as the vicar continues speaking.
“When a medic saves a man’s wife in difficult childbirth, or cures an imbalance in the humours without needing to take a limb - do you ask him to convince you of the soundness behind his work, his theories? No, because the proof lives and breathes in front of you.”
It’s all a little facile, Ludwig thinks, watching from the corner of his eye as the vial makes its journey. The showmanship, the endless rhetorical devices. The vicar’s gaze is bright, amused. Smile thin and razor sharp. It is, admittedly, entertaining to watch someone speak to such men - the peerage, politicians, gentry and men of leisure - like children without making them aware of the insult.
He returns to his food, letting his attention wander. But as the conversation corkscrews in circles across the long table, he can’t help but be drawn to the halo of voices around the vicar. Surfacing from nearby conversations, he slips in and out with monosyllabic answers, as the other man is buoyed by eddies of calm sotto voce and gruff basso profundo. With a kind of spellbound curiosity Ludwig observes the subtleties of the performance - the cues that shift the vicar from somber scholar to bright-eyed believer to crossroads charlatan. He makes an argument sound like divertissement, reasoning like a generous revelation, as if only he could peer under the veil to show the secrets of the world. His face, his gestures, the lilt of his voice, arrayed like the ingredients of a spell cast. A man who could pry secrets from stone.
Ludwig would hate it, if it wasn’t almost a pleasure to watch. A wily Odysseus with the craft of nothing but his words, alone in this sea of small men with oversized mouths, devouring each other.
* * *
The headache catches up to him later, when the string ensemble begins to play. It’s the kind of pain he recognises - the kind that will move, lazily, over the next few hours across the expanse of his skull, hammering like an icon-breaker first where his jaw meets the base of his ears, before moving across his forehead and settling, finally, to sit behind his brow and make his eyes feel like two boils lanced by light.
But it hasn’t quite reached behind his ears yet, and so he remains standing at the edge of the great hall, tucked safely in a shadow. The ensemble is welding one waltz into another, ad infinitum, but the melodies are respectable rather than cloying, and he has never known well-watered aristocrats to refuse the salacious gossip exchanged on a ballroom floor. The hall, a pseudo-medieval indulgence of his mother built in the Cainhurst style, is too small to be a true ballroom. But bombast is a cultural relic, and in the evening light the mirrors glitter with their mercury fervour and the blue-veined marble looks wet as the sea. With a little wine, he can see how alluring the dull hallways of his youth must be.
A flash of white silk at his side, and the vicar is there. With a minute incline of his head he extends a hand, an easy little curve at the corner of his mouth, no trace of self-conscious reticence. Nothing but the grey expanse of his gaze narrowed to a point. To Ludwig.
Dancing. Of course. He cannot weasel his way out of polite conversation then.
Briefly he observes the crowd. The gaslight drinks of yellow and rose, turning silk into sour colours, while reds and greens are buoyed by the warmth of the lamps. Lace trims trace whorling clouds across the floor and jewels burn as if with laughter, a squall of gowns and coattails around him with no care but for themselves. He tries to find his mother’s eyes in the crowd of idlers, or seated at her favourite chaise. But she has vanished. Some men have retreated to the adjacent sitting room to smoke, he notices. His brother, certainly, unsociable creature, has left him purposefully to entertain the guests.
The vicar’s hand lingers, the matte black of his glove hungry for the light. Ludwig takes it.
They fall into the count easily enough - Ludwig hasn’t danced since he was a boy of ten, and even then his reticence hasn’t changed. But there are enough bodies alongside them, gliding like minnows across the watery marble floors that he feels hidden. One more swirl of black and midnight blue among many.
He lets his shoulder relax where the vicar’s hand rests lightly, without insistence, and presses his palm against the man’s back, into the question mark of his spine. He’s more pliable than Ludwig expected. When he breathes it seems to Ludwig that he breathes directly into his hand - back expanding like a tide washing in; and the exhale, the sigh at the end of a statement, the constriction of his waist, a downward spiral. Ludwig spreads his fingers across the man’s back, like an extra pair of ribs. His own eyes dart around the room, catching flashes of red against pale cheeks, gold trimmings and white gloves. Anything to keep his eyes from the vicar’s face - but he cannot help it, the way his gaze drifts treasonously to the other man’s mouth. He braces himself for a deluge of questions, prying and peeling back his beliefs like the rough skin of a fruit. He resolves to make his answers as curt as possible; his beliefs are his business, and he owes this man nothing.
Yet the vicar only smiles at him as they make another turn of the floor, a little obsequious curl of satisfaction that Ludwig takes as an insult. But this man is his guest, and he is cornered. If he does not speak the expectant air between them will cleave him in two.
“Your associates don’t seem very fond of dancing.”
The vicar’s gaze slides into the crowd, where Ludwig sighted Gehrman and the Cainhurst woman in a solitary corner, heads close together in discussion. A shift in the man’s back that feels like a sigh.
“They are not,” he admits, but his voice is light. “Gehrman thinks he is undeserving of earthly pleasures. His upbringing, I expect. And Maria is nothing if not a devoted ascetic.”
“Despite being born into nobility.”
The vicar cocks his head. “Do you know her family?”
“Of them,” Ludwig responds, then realises the vicar knew the answer before asking. Resentment creeps into his shoulders. He is not a slab of clay to be warmed and softened with idle exchange.
Inelegantly, he scrabbles for the upper hand. “You are not,” he says, grasping the vicar a little tighter to match the music’s insistent pull. “Nobility, I mean.”
A flash of mirth, like a fox that smiles with its teeth. The angle of the vicar’s face, the careful arrangement even of his fingers, spread across Ludwig’s shoulder. The ability to change, like water, his affect, his posture, the openness of his gaze. Nobles are careless, Ludwig knows - and even in their carelessness they are painfully stiff, stunted and unable to relate to anything outside their polished and lacquered existence. It was his own source of shame when he first arrived at Byrgenwerth. Before the world split open before him, ripe and malleable with possibility, and then sealed itself again.
No. The vicar’s deftness is indicative of something else. Nothing has made him more sure than the way his shoulders slide down his back when Ludwig steers him across the floor.
“But you do come from money,” he continues, ignoring his own breach of decorum. He feels as though he’s caught something nebulous in his grasp, a fistful of sylphlike substance as it tries to slip away.
But the vicar only gleams with amusement. “Very good,” he replies in a low voice. “What gave it away? The hands?”
The merchant’s mouth. But Ludwig has already strained etiquette to its limit, so he relents.
“The tilt of the chin.”
As if to acquiesce the vicar inclines his head up and back, and Ludwig thinks for a moment that despite all his fabrication, this pleasure might be something candid. He notices for the first time the fine workmanship of the man’s lace jabot, pinned at his neck with a simple ribbon and silver brooch. In the generous light he catches the elegant charcoal pattern of his vest beneath the open caplet, a subtle contrast to the coal black of his robes. Their rhythm slows, and he realises they are closer than need be for this cadence.
It’s only then that he notices the limp - the way the vicar had compensated, on brisk turns, his left side folding gently like a fan to breathe space into the right. At a slow rhythm the imbalance is barely perceptible anymore - except to Ludwig, who’d spent much of his life with the cadence of young men marbled with muscles from riding and the surefooted gait that came from a fencer’s lunge.
He’s a breath away from asking, curious he might manage to peel away a layer of the title and reveal a glimpse of a person beneath. But the vicar breaks the silence first.
“Do you always dance with a rapier at your hip?”
Ludwig looks down. He had, in truth, forgotten it was there. The swept hilt, thin and intricately plated in gold, bobs between them.
“It depends on how terribly my dancing offends,” he answers dryly, before clarifying: “It’s purely ceremonial.” He adjusts his position to create some distance between them. As his hand shifts across the vicar’s waist, he stops.
“Does a vicar always dance with a dagger in his cloak?”
The smile, when it comes, is demure. “Ceremonial.”
But it isn’t, Ludwig senses, because the robe is gathered thinly around the other man’s waist, and Ludwig can feel the heft of the sheath where it presses snugly into a belt.
“You’ve a target on your head,” he says bluntly, not bothering to frame the question.
He is granted a docile shrug in response, without any real acquiescence. “Progress stirs up all manner of ugly things in men. Resentment. Jealousy. Furious denial that things may not be the way they have grown so dependant on accepting.” The vicar looks at him thoughtfully. Ludwig is suddenly very aware of the lock of hair that has slipped from his neatly pinned curls and sways close to the vicar’s face.
“But I admit you’ve surprised me. Your questions are directed at me, not the Church.”
Ludwig does not miss the change in tone. “Are you not its leader?”
The vicar inclines his head, a careful little movement that both affirms and denies. “A facilitator. But a figurehead is useful to redirect the attention from those doing the more important work. A mouthpiece, if you will, to spread the good word and draw away any unwelcome ire.” His tone is mockingly secretive now. “I’m sure you can imagine - the greater the ire, the bigger the dagger I might need.”
Ludwig looks at the man, shrewd and bold as a magpie, and doubts he conceives of anyone else’s work as more important than his own. It occurs to him then that any mutual benefit the Church might negotiate with his mother’s estate is perhaps entirely different than whatever game the vicar seems so coyly delighted to play.
A facilitator. It’s insultingly banal. There is far too much of the Church’s power in his neatly arranged hands. Too much leverage in the distracting bow of his negotiator’s mouth. If there’s a target on his back, Ludwig thinks disdainfully, he placed it there himself. The man ought to have someone standing behind him.
You must miss the wider world, Chevalier. There is so much to be done.
Abruptly the music slows again, and something must change on Ludwig’s face because the vicar extracts himself, then - a deft little movement that lingers in Ludwig’s right palm - before he melts out of the room and into the flickering lights of the corridor, leaving Ludwig alone with the realisation of what he’s been asked to do.