Chapter 3

The news that had set the capital buzzing reached Endelden exactly two days after the event. During the lunch break at the factory, one woman came to her seat with flushed cheeks and a newspaper tucked under her arm. She turned to her closest friend beside her and made a point of raising her voice.

“Hey, did you buy today’s paper?”

“No! Peven borrowed my money yesterday. So I couldn’t.”

“Oh, I figured as much, so I bought it myself this morning!”

The woman with the newspaper said this with great satisfaction, and her friend’s face lit up at once. Pleased by that smile, the woman with the paper straightened her back and grinned. What she had tucked under her arm was nothing more than a cheap rag printed by a third-rate press, but in Endelden’s factory district it commanded a prestige rivaling any first-rate capital paper. For women who could rarely afford the theatre or even a street circus, nothing beat a newspaper for entertainment. Two coins bought you this worn sheet of print, and through it you could learn what was happening in the capital, and sometimes abroad. Whether or not it was true, the gossip was half the fun: some count no one had heard of keeping two mistresses, some baron getting swindled. The women devoured it all with delight.

“What’s in it today, I wonder? Last time it said an Aroten cruise ship passed by the coast near here!”

“Did you see the advertisements? The clothes they had, I couldn’t believe anything could be that beautiful! I’m curious what they’ll have today.”

The woman with the paper was surrounded in an instant. The women were chattering and passing the paper around when a gasp went up as they turned to the second page. One of them spotted the bold-printed headline and cried out:

“Duke Tetias is dead!”

A few of the women blinked. A duke was certainly a very grand personage, but what did some nobleman’s death have to do with them? Their faces said as much. But one woman, literate and originally from the capital, with a fair amount of secondhand knowledge about aristocratic society, lit up. She spoke with an expression far too eager for a death announcement:

“So a young, handsome man has become the new duke! Good heavens, look at this!”

Before she finished speaking, the others crowded around, jostling to see the paper. It didn’t matter if you couldn’t read. The others were falling over themselves to relay every word.

Most importantly, there was the large photograph printed on the page. A young man stood in the image, and behind him a tapestry bearing the Tetias ducal crest hung long and wide. Even in a blurry black-and-white print, anyone could see that the young man in the photograph was tall and strikingly handsome. The women looked him over with undisguised admiration.

“So this man is going to be the new duke?”

“Yes. That’s what it says. The new Duke Tetias.”

“A duke, and this young……”

The women murmured and stared at the photograph. The new Duke Tetias, twenty-four years old that year, stood taller than Hinri the factory delivery boy, and the fashionably cut gentleman’s suit he wore complemented his height perfectly, setting off his lean, elegant build.

“How can anyone be that handsome……”

“He’s a duke. Of course he’s extraordinary.”

“Right. Oh, did you know? Apparently nobles wash their faces with milk every day. That’s why their skin is so white!”

The women gasped. Milk was something they could only afford on very special occasions. And to wash your face with it! They were marveling with open mouths when a woman sitting quietly nearby, sipping thin soup, murmured almost to herself:

“That’s not quite right……”

It was less an interjection than a thought that slipped out unbidden, but every head turned toward the source of the new information. It was Lea Fell. The newcomer widely regarded as shy, quiet, and barely noticeable. The other women were on it immediately.

“Then what do they wash with?”

Caught off guard by the sudden attention, Lea gripped her spoon and released it, gripped it and released it again. She clearly had no desire for the interest her offhand remark had stirred. But the women pressed her, and she finally spoke.

“Well, clean water, of course……”

The answer was barely out before a chorus of disappointed sighs spread through the group. The woman who had insisted nobles washed with milk turned smug in the face of everyone’s letdown and fired back:

“Ha! Just plain water! Then why is their skin so white and soft? Look at the mayor’s wife! She’s a baron’s daughter, and her cheeks are pale and smooth as, well, as milk! People like that can’t possibly be washing with plain water like us! You can pretend to know things all you like, but really!”

The scorn landed, and Lea’s face went a little red. She bit her lip, and before the mockery could build further, she spoke.

“Nobles wash with clean water. But they use cosmetic soap, and something called fragrant oil.”

The specificity of her answer gave the women pause. It sounded plausible. Then one of them widened her eyes and asked:

“How do you know that?”

“Well……”

The confidence Lea had found in their confusion vanished at that question. She went quiet. A moment later she looked down at the floor with an expression that held regret, and grief, and something more complicated still. The women, finding that Lea couldn’t back up her claim about noble life, lost interest and turned back to the newspaper. The conversation had moved on from milk face-washing to brushing teeth with gold, but Lea didn’t say another word after that. She was the only one who knew exactly how nobles washed their faces and cleaned their teeth, and she said nothing. Knowing it brought her pain.

But unlike Lea, the residents of Endelden’s factory district harbored enormous curiosity, interest, and longing toward the upper classes, from the wealthy residents on the hill to the nobles of the capital. It wasn’t just the factory women. Ordinary residents too showed an intense fascination with people from a world they could never approach.

Even after the formal privileges of the aristocracy, taxation rights and military exemptions, had been abolished, titles still existed, and the gap in wealth still meant that people lived in entirely different worlds. So the residents knew nothing about those people, and knowing nothing, they talked about them endlessly.

Owen m’Tetias was, without question, the hottest topic in all that gossip about the high and mighty. The previous July, Duke Tetias had caught a summer cold at the worst possible time and never recovered. When he died, the public barely paused to mourn him before fixing their attention entirely on his only son and heir: Owen.

The young duke, barely past the age of grief, was the precious sole heir of the Tetias family, a house where children were rare. To put it plainly: unlike other noble families whose wealth was divided and distributed among many, Owen m’Tetias stood to inherit everything the ducal house possessed, all to himself, with no one to share it. So when Duke Tetias died young, Owen, barely past twenty, inherited not only the title but every last asset and authority the family held.

Young, handsome, and a duke on top of it all. What combination could possibly attract more attention? Noble ladies were already watching him closely, and the factory women were no different. Whenever Owen appeared in a newspaper, the women of Endelden pooled their coins to make sure someone got a copy, and they read every article about him aloud, again and again. Those who could afford it bought their own copy and cut out his photograph to keep. The pictures were cheap prints on cheap paper, ink bleeding at the edges, but even that couldn’t entirely erase the evidence of his beautiful posture, his striking figure, his handsome face. The women who could afford that luxury were envied by the rest.