“Hmm.” Brilliana looked at her speculatively. “Kara, if it pleases you, be so good as to ask someone to summon our coach. I’ll help our lady here to make a dignified exit. My lady, there are a few names you must be presented to before taking your leave—to fail would be to give offense—but there’ll be another reception the day after tomorrow; there is no need to converse at length with your peers tonight if you are tired. I’m sure we can spend the time between now and then getting to know our new mistress better.” She smiled at Miriam. “A last glass of wine, my lady?”

Wait Training

Wait Training

Light.

Miriam blinked and twitched into vague wakefulness from a dream of painful desire and frustrated eroticism. Someone sighed and moved against her back, and she jerked away, suddenly remembering where she was with a fit of panic: Wearing a nightdress? In a huge cold bed? What is going on?

She rolled over and came up against heavy drapes. Turning around, she saw Kara asleep in the huge four-poster bed behind her, face a composed picture of tranquillity. Miriam cringed, racking her brain. What did I get up to last night? she wondered, aghast. Then she looked past Kara and saw another sleeping body—and an empty bottle of wine. Opening the curtain and looking on the floor, she saw three glasses and a second bottle, lying on its side, empty. She vaguely remembered talking in the cavernous stone aircraft hangar that passed for a countess’s bedroom. It had been freezing cold in the drafty stone pile, and Kara had suggested they continue talking in the four-poster bed, which filled the room like a small pavilion. Miriam looked closer and saw that Kara was still wearing her full underdress. And Brilliana hadn’t even removed her stays.

A slumber party, she figured. She hadn’t been in one of those since college. Poor kids. I took them away from their disco and they just couldn’t call it a night. Kara was only seventeen—and Brilliana an old maid of twenty-two. She felt relieved—and a bit sorry for them.

This would never do. She slipped out of the bed and shivered in the freezing cold air. I’m adrift, she thought. Turning, she looked back. The bed was as big as her entire room, back home. I need to get my perspective back.

Acutely aware of her bare feet on the heat-sucking stone flags, she tiptoed across to the curtain that concealed the door to the toilet. There were no modern conveniences here, just a pot full of dry leaves, and a latrine with a ten-foot drop over the curtain wall. What you saw was what you got—without servants to help. Living conditions in the big city, even for nobility, were distinctly primitive.