The carriage turned left when it should have turned right.
I noticed this the moment we passed the ceremonial gates without slowing — the gates I had watched, on three separate occasions over the preceding year, swing open for visiting dignitaries with the grand deliberateness of an institution that understood the weight of its own symbolism.
We did not use those gates.
We continued along the eastern wall, turned into a service passage I had not previously known existed, and stopped before a door that smelled of cold stone and, faintly, of damp.
The footman opened the carriage door and extended his hand with the professional neutrality of a man who had been instructed not to comment on anything and intended to honour that instruction in full.
I looked at the door. Then at him. "Is there a reason," I said pleasantly, "that we have arrived at what appears to be the servants' entrance?"
"The east passage, Your Highness," he said, with the specific inflection of a man technically not calling it the servants' entrance while being fully aware that it was.
"The east passage," I repeated. "Which is used by whom, ordinarily?"
He shifted his weight with the almost imperceptible discomfort of a man who has been handed an unanswerable question by a person with rather more authority than he had been anticipating.
"Staff and deliveries, Your Highness. The main entrance requires considerable preparation for a formal arrival, and given the particular circumstances of the transition—"
"I see." I stepped down from the carriage. "The particular circumstances being that nobody has quite decided what category to put me in."
I stepped through the door without waiting for a response, because I had not especially expected one, and because standing in a courtyard debating the matter seemed a poor use of the occasion.
It occurred to me, as the passage closed around me, that I had spent twenty-two years entering households through servants' entrances by professional obligation and was now entering the palace through one by institutional confusion.
The distinction was, technically, a promotion. I filed this under things that were amusing in principle and irritating in practice, and followed the footman inside.
A steward was waiting at the far end — a man of late middle age with a folder of papers and the expression of someone who had been very thoroughly briefed and intended to deliver that briefing at efficient speed regardless of any obstacles the hour or the recipient might present.
"Your Highness." He inclined his head. "I am Mr. Holt, assigned to manage the household transition. If you will follow me, I shall show you to your apartments."
He turned and began walking without waiting for a response. I followed, because the alternative was standing alone in a damp passage, which seemed no improvement on the carriage.
"The east wing has been prepared," he said, moving with the pace of a man who considers dawdling a character deficiency.
"The household staff have been informed of the transition. The schedule for the coming fortnight has been compiled, and there are several documents requiring attention at your earliest convenience — by which I mean this afternoon, if Her Highness's schedule permits."
"Who compiled the schedule?" I asked.
He glanced back, reassessing me by a small but perceptible degree. "General Thornfield, Your Highness. He has been appointed your personal guard by the senior council, effective this morning."
He paused briefly on a landing. "The council has also arranged for three senior ladies to assist with the social requirements of the position, a legal adviser available from tomorrow, and a secretary beginning Thursday."
"And the general?" I said.
"Is already here, Your Highness."
The apartments were large, formally furnished, and arranged with the impersonality of rooms made ready rather than lived in — the fire laid, fresh flowers on the side table, a writing desk positioned by the window with the ink, paper, and implicit expectation that important correspondence would now originate here rather than be transcribed at someone else's direction.
I stood in the middle of it and looked at the ceiling, which was enthusiastically decorated with allegorical figures I could not immediately place.
This is where I live now, I thought. The thought declined, entirely, to become real.
I had been a governess until approximately eighteen hours ago. Three dresses of practical wool, boots requiring resoling, and a letter in Cowper's poems I had been meaning to address. I was now, by the authority of a dead king's sealed document, the sole legitimate heir to a throne, and the ceiling above me was apparently of the opinion that allegory was the appropriate response to this development.
Mr. Holt set his folder on the writing desk and proceeded through household operations, court schedule, and the formal requirements of the coming fortnight with the thoroughness of a man who considered incompleteness a personal failing.
I listened with the attentiveness I had developed across twenty-two years in the Lancaster household — the variety that gathered everything and gave nothing back — and thanked him with precise warmth when he finished.
He was preparing to leave when a knock arrived at the door. He opened it and introduced, with admirable brevity, General Damian Thornfield. Appointed personal guard by the senior council. Effective immediately.
Damian entered.
He looked exactly as he had looked every time I had encountered him at the Lancaster house — composed, unhurried, alert in the manner of a man whose alertness had long since stopped requiring effort. He also looked, I noted with some precision, as though this particular appointment surprised him rather less than the council's deliberations might suggest.
He was, further, the first person I had encountered since the palace square who was not wearing the expression of a man engaged in a rapid revision of prior assumptions. Every face since the will was read had carried some version of it — the court, the attendants, the council members summoned to receive me. A calculation in progress, an assessment being hastily reconstructed.
Damian simply looked at me as though I were there, which was, under the present circumstances, almost startlingly ordinary.
"I was consulted," he said, before I could ask. "On the appointment."
"Of course you were," I said.
He looked at me with the particular quality of attention that made one feel assessed rather than merely observed. "You seem unsurprised."
"I am a great many things at present," I said, folding my hands with the composure of a woman who had been practising composure since approximately the age of nine. "Unsurprised about you specifically does not register as significant."
"That is either a compliment or an assessment."
"It is an observation," I said. "I have not yet determined what it means."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth — the preliminary motion of a smile, too controlled to complete itself, but present enough to note. I was, I observed, already cataloguing things about him, which seemed rather early.
Mr. Holt excused himself with the efficient tact of a man who had identified the precise moment his presence was no longer useful, and the door closed.
Damian crossed to the side table and set a glass of water beside me — without being asked, without ceremony, the same gesture in the same manner as an evening some months ago outside the Lancaster house when the world had been an entirely different shape.
I recognised it. He knew I recognised it. Neither of us remarked upon it, which was, I thought, perhaps its own variety of remark.
"This," I said, holding up the schedule from the desk, "appears to be rather a great deal."
"The first week is the most concentrated," he said, settling into the chair by the window with the unobtrusive ease of a man taking up a position he intends to keep. "It becomes more manageable after."
"You have reviewed it." I looked at him steadily.
"I compiled it," he said.
"Of course you did." I returned to the schedule.
Outside, the palace went about its business with the indifferent efficiency of an institution that had outlasted rather a great many of its inhabitants and expected, with reasonable confidence, to outlast rather a great many more.
He was going to be rather useful, I thought — and was not entirely certain, examining this thought with the attention it probably deserved, that useful was quite the word I meant. But it was the available one, and there would be time enough for more precise vocabulary.