Chapter Text
John Gaius’s will reading started in fifteen minutes, and Harrow and Ianthe were stuck in traffic.
When they finally arrived, waved out of the vehicle with what could only be a sigh of relief from their increasingly flustered sounding chaffeur, they were greeted by a man Harrow could only assume was the butler, dressed in an incredibly ostentatious suit that she remembered all too well from her weeks staying at the company, gave them a disapproving look and directions into the sitting room. When Harrow swung open the door and they hurried into the room the Saints of Joy and Patience were sitting side by side, her hand stiffly resting on his leg, on one of several ostentatious velvet couches.
Stiffly, she perched on one on a terrifically gaudy armchair across from them, her arms stiffly held as though to stop them from touching the vaguely misshapen chair arms. Ianthe, predictably, takes one of the lounges, draping herself over it with a beatific smile.
The four of them waited in truly horrific silence for the rest of the guests to arrive. There was an absolutely garish array of guests, in Harrow’s opinion, from company officials to a few lone foreign dignitaries. At one point a group of thirteen arrive together, all dressed to the nines in a display of truly Nine Houses wealth, who ended up crowding around Augustine and Mercy, easily recognisable as the now-retired Saints. They do not all, Harrow thought, look entirely pleased to be here or to see each other, despite a pointed round of hugs and ‘how good to see you all’s.
Finally, everyone was there, and the reading could begin.
The first part is predictable; a divvying up of shares between his core three Lyctors, the other remaining Saints and, in what feels like a fever dream, Harrow and Ianthe. Moving on from there is a list of bonuses, for ‘beloved’ staff, for ‘close friends’, for a list of seemingly miscellaneous charities. And then - a truly ridiculously detailed list of bequeathments of personal objects to people. A collection of decorative weapons, his plants, signed ballet shoes, right down to specific items of cutlery. Harrow suspected that these were things he had said over the course of the day in fits of pique and of generosity in turn and someone had meticulously listed them down for him, to be added in later. It is, she thought, a very typical thing for Teacher to have done.
His house went to Mercy, with any unallocated belongings. She looked less than thrilled at this, her face scrunched up as though recognising that this was, boiled down to his essence, a request to sort through the Emperor’s ridiculous collections and hidden rooms.
The executor was still talking, discreetly slipping Gideon the First a letter and shaking hands with who Harrow recognised as Casspeia the First from the magazines she had pored over in childhood, her head bent over brilliantly lit and theatrically shot photos of the arch of a pointe shoe or the line of a leotard against someone’s arched back and curved arms until she could recreate the photoshoot from memory as she fell asleep.
Afterwards, there was a luncheon, served after lukewarm tea and assorted biscuits, of the type that Teacher might have served if he were here. Briefly Harrow wondered if he, too, had planned his funeral; perhaps not, as the Saint of Joy had once said of herself, jokingly or not, down to the minute, but parts of it. A quiet speech, delivered here rather than at the overcrowded funeral, or a turn of phrase from the executor which made Harrow wonder if he had written out the words himself. Somehow, she couldn’t picture it of him.
Delegation, maybe, dictation to a subordinate or to one of his Saints - his Fingers and Gestures for a reason, perhaps. She could imagine him speaking the words, his hands moving frantically through the air as an unknown figure wrote in one of the expensive fountain ink pens that haunted John’s desk without him ever picking one of them over the ballpoints he got from the corner store.
Nonetheless, the groups dissipated, people breaking off in twos or threes to make their way into the dining room for the supposed fare, and she abandoned Ianthe to polite conversation with nary a backward glance.. Across the room a woman in a delicate green dress and matching shawl, her brown curls falling down her back, caught her eye and waved with a smile, only looking away when her frame was wracked with coughs. As inconspicuously as she could, Harrow shuddered and hurried out of the room.
She had never liked John’s house, the grand corridors and decoratively plastered walls that seemed to close in the longer you stayed, and so she walked fast, letting her heels drag, against her instinct, through the carpet in an effort to muffle the clacking sound they made.
Harrow reached the end of the corridor, twisting her black dress nervously in between her fingers. The last room is opened slightly, it's contents visible from outside, and voices floated out.
From behind the door she saw the Saints of Patience and of Joy, his hand fisted in her hair as her shoulders shook with sobs.
“There, there, dear,” he said, not entirely unsympathetically, or at least not as heartlessly as Harrow would have expected from Augustine. “There’s always arson, if all else fails.”
“That bastard,” she replied, pulling away and winding her hair into a bun, “had too clean a death.”
“Too good at your job,” he rejoined with, adjusting the lapels of his jacket. “Hardly needed all that time studying when a hatchet would have sufficed.”
She shrugged, stepping back into the heels she’d left discarded, pulling the ankle straps tight and buckling them decisively. “Cris always said I was neat. I was worried he might have left that mess for me to clean up as well as this old place.”
In an ideal world, Harrow would have recorded this conversation, somehow. However, this world was far from ideal, and so instead of doing any of that the heel of the shoes Ianthe insisted she wear rather than boots caught on a furrow in the intimidatingly woven carpet and she crashed into the door, falling through the doorway.
She didn’t wait around to find out about how the Emperor’s First and Second Saints reacted to this, turning and sprinting back the way she’d come and into the house’s second wing.
Harrow, in the interim between living at the ballet company headquarters at the hotel had stayed, for a time, in Teacher’s guest room, where she had spent her time vacillating wildly between worship and irreverence towards the large sets of drawers that dominated the room, filled with his old dance gear and various memorabilia, abandoned to the dust. It’s still the only room she knew how to navigate to, through the hallways of the intimidatingly deceitful house and so she hurried, opening the wooden door with a decisive motion and awaiting her fate.
She perched on the unmade bed - John had never liked having a housekeeper in here, had left furniture to their own devices until it became a problem for him - worrying at the faded flower embroidery of the bedspread and taking in the room once more.
For a time, she had used the windowsill as a barre, painstakingly running through exercises until her hands cramped from holding on to the thin wood.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Mercy called, far too dramatically for the situation in Harrow’s opinion, her dress flaring behind her as she skidded to a stop.
Harrow, trying to avoid her instinctive wince at the cracked screech of Mercy’s heels, channeled Ianthe - a rare occurrence, and one that she hoped never to repeat - and raised an eyebrow, pushing all of her contempt into her words. “And why would I do that?”
Augustine spoke this time, pulling up behind Mercymorn at a more respectable post, looming behind her like a propped-up paper doll. “We’ll go,” he said. Harrow had never bothered learning any of his tells; Mercy she had always disliked too much to attempt to analyse and predict, but Augstine had simply bored her, his patterns too painstakingly and deliberately predictable for him to allow it to be noticeable when they weren’t. She regrets it now as he talks, slowly as if to a frightened child. “We’ll give you the company and fuck off to the countryside. You need never deal with us again.”
This is everything she had always wanted, enough to ease her burden and to atone for her sins. She pictured John’s office, its glass desk and leather roller chair, the scent of his cologne lingering too strongly in the surroundings.
“I won’t lie to the police for you,” she told them. It is an incredibly weak response; they were too good at this game for her to be anything other than painfully transparent.
“You don’t need to,” Mercy said haughtily, flicking her hair out of her face, dishevelled from the mad rush upstairs. “Just burn any evidence you might have thought you found and don’t give them anything beyond what’s required of you!! They’re not looking at us!!”
“We cleaned up fine,” said Augustine gloomily, but with a shadow at the corners of his mouth that belied that, “until you started poking about.”
They shook on it, signed the contract in John’s upstairs guest room. The Emperor Undying was dead, and his first and second Saints had gotten away with his murder.