The proposal had been perfectly reasonable. I should like to record this, for my own satisfaction, before proceeding — not because the recording will change anything, but because I have found, over the past fortnight, that accuracy in one's own counsel is rather more sustaining than optimism about other people's.
The proposal had been straightforward, logistically sound, and considerably less expensive than the alternative currently on the table. It required no unusual resources, no complicated implementation, and no particular leap of imagination. It was, as proposals went, the sort of thing one expects a council to receive, consider briefly, and approve.
The council said it would require further examination.
I had submitted the proposal in writing three days prior. I had also attended the session in person, which I had not been required to do but had decided was worth doing — partly because I wanted to see their faces when they read it, and partly because twelve men are considerably less comfortable deferring a proposal when the person who wrote it is sitting at the head of their table watching them do it.
They deferred it regardless. With considerable grace, as it happened, which almost made it worse. Outright rejection one can argue with. Further examination simply sits there, being polite and final simultaneously, and offers no particular purchase for objection.
Lord Fenwick made the announcement with the grave courtesy of a man delivering disappointing news he found, on some level, satisfying. "Her Highness's proposal has considerable merit," he said — which is the sentence that precedes the word however in precisely the way that clouds precede rain. One can see it forming. One simply cannot stop it.
"However, given the complexity of the existing arrangements, the council feels that additional examination would be—"
"Prudent," I said.
Lord Fenwick paused. He had been about to say prudent himself, and I had taken it from him, and he was now experiencing the mild displeasure of a man who has had his own word used against him before he could deploy it. "Precisely so," he agreed, with the expression of a man recalculating the morning.
I looked down the table.
Lord Ashworth had said nothing throughout the session. He had arrived, sat, listened to my presentation, listened to the subsequent discussion, and contributed precisely nothing to either. Now he folded his hands on the table, nodded once when Fenwick confirmed the referral, and looked at his notes.
It was, I reflected, a masterclass in management. He had not opposed the proposal — he had simply ensured it would not be approved. No fingerprints. No objection on record. Simply a referral for further examination, carried by a council that had received the appropriate signal and responded to it in the appropriate way.
I thanked the chamber for their consideration, gathered my papers with the composure of a woman who had absolutely not spent three evenings in the palace library reading trade documentation, and walked out at a pace that suggested I was entirely untroubled by the outcome.
I was not untroubled. I was, if I am being accurate — which I prefer to be, even when accuracy is inconvenient — rather considerably troubled.
Not because of the proposal itself, which I remained confident was sound, and which would presumably receive its further examination and eventually be approved in some revised form that allowed the council to feel they had contributed to it. That was manageable.
What was less manageable was the accumulating arithmetic of it — three proposals, three deferrals, each one received with the grave courtesy of men who had already decided and were simply performing the deliberation for appearance's sake.
I was beginning to understand, in a way that was considerably less theoretical than it had been three weeks ago, what Damian had meant by survive them.
Damian was in the corridor.
"Walk with me," he said, without preamble, and turned toward the side gate before I had replied, which was not strictly a request and we both knew it.
I walked.
We left through the same passage I had arrived through on my first morning — cold stone, faint damp, the specific smell I was beginning to associate with departures that required discretion.
The city received us without particular interest. A queue at a bakery. Two boys disputing possession of something in the gutter. A woman with a basket who looked directly through me with the serene indifference of a person who had not read the notices.
I found this enormously refreshing. The city had absolutely no opinion about my proposal. It was not deferring it for further examination. It was simply being a city, getting on with its business, entirely indifferent to the proceedings of councils and queens alike, and I found the indifference considerably more bracing than anything the morning had otherwise offered.
"They referred it," I said, after we had walked half a street in silence.
"I know," Damian said.
"That is the third proposal in a fortnight."
"I know that too." He said it without sympathy and without the particular quality of brisk reassurance that men deploy when they wish to move past a difficult subject. He simply said it, and walked, and waited. I had noticed this quality — the waiting, specifically — from rather early in our acquaintance, and had been meaning to catalogue it properly when I had more time.
"I am aware," I said, "that councils resist new authorities as a matter of institutional habit. That it is not personal. That the appropriate response is patience and the gradual accumulation of leverage." I looked at the street ahead. "I am also aware that knowing this is not the same as finding it remotely tolerable."
He was quiet for a moment — not assembling a response, simply receiving what had actually been said rather than what had been technically said. I had noticed this quality early and had been cataloguing it since with some thoroughness.
"You were never meant to prove it to them," he said.
"Then what was I meant to do?"
"Survive them."
I considered this. It was not comforting. It was not meant to be. There is a difference between comfort and ground beneath one's feet, and he appeared to understand it without requiring it to be explained, which was, I thought, rather more useful than comfort would have been.
We walked back through the city. The silence on the return was different from the silence going out — less pressured, less careful, the kind that has been used and set down and is no longer carrying anything.
Somewhere along the second street I became aware that he had positioned himself between me and the road without ceremony or apparent decision, simply present at the angle most useful to be present at. His coat brushed mine once when the pavement narrowed. Neither of us remarked upon it.
I had spent twenty-two years in service to people who required managing. I knew what deliberate inconspicuousness looked like, and how completely it could be concealed from someone not looking for it.
He was doing it. He had, I suspected, been doing it rather longer than this particular walk.
Something had shifted on the way out. It had not shifted back on the way in, and I was not sufficiently collected to determine whether this was significant or simply the natural consequence of a difficult morning.
The palace gate came into view. He fell half a step behind me as the architecture of official life reassembled itself around us.
Tomorrow, I decided. I would examine all of this tomorrow. This was the same decision I had made yesterday, which suggested it was accumulating rather than resolving — but that, too, was a problem for tomorrow, and I had quite enough for today.