Noblesse Oblige

Aurienne

Of the four hundred children brought into Swanstone over the course of the Platt’s Pox outbreak, the Haelan managed to pull three hundred out of danger. The remaining patients were in Ward 14, formerly the cafeteria, now converted into a ward with a hundred beds. In those beds lay the remaining patients, still in the throes of the brain fever, being kept alive by Haelan dedication and sheer obstinacy.

Emotional regulation was one of Aurienne’s fortes, but as the outbreak raged, her preferred strategies—suppression, compartmentalisation—lost their efficacy. During today’s shift in Ward 14, a little girl no older than four, scab crusted and delirious, clutched at Aurienne’s fingers and brought her to tears. Aurienne glanced about to check that no one was watching, knelt beside the girl’s bed, and pressed a hug into her wasted body.

She must carry on. Others needed her. She took a steadying breath—hlutoform and the sickly scent of sickness invaded her mouth—brushed away her tears, gave the girl’s hand a final press, and carried on to the next bed. Like a coward, she did not take note of the girl’s patient ID; she didn’t want to notice her absence if she was gone by the time her next shift rolled around.

Aurienne saw signs of fraying in others, too. Lorelei, the head of Paediatrics, was usually obnoxiously cheerful. Today she was hollow eyed and functioning by rote, and reporting to Xanthe with uncustomary dispassion. Xanthe herself, with whom Aurienne shared the shift, simmered with a low fury. She listened to Lorelei’s report as she worked a line of beds. The wrinkled skin at her jowls quivered with the clench of her jaw.

Xanthe was usually explosive. This seething rage troubled Aurienne more than an irritated outburst would have.

Their shift came to its end at seven o’clock in the evening.

“Come,” said Xanthe to Aurienne after they had completed their sanitation protocols. “Let’s get dinner and eat in my office.”

Aurienne and Xanthe made their way to the temporary cafeteria, now housed in a corridor. Aurienne dearly missed the fare at home—tangy salads, her mother’s chicken-stuffed briouates, rfissa fragrant with fenugreek—but seith was best regenerated with heavy, calorie-dense foods, and that was what Swanstone’s kitchens did best. Upon her tray she heaped butter-soaked mushroom pasties, fatty stew, cheeses, and cream tarts.

Xanthe’s office was a pleasant low-ceilinged room on the ground floor of Swanstone’s south end. In the daytime it was flooded with sun; in the nighttime it was lit by a wide hearth; at all times there was reliably a kettle singing within. Aurienne cleared a seat for herself on an ottoman partially interred beneath journals on tissue engineering, limb regeneration, and the treatment of end organ failure. Xanthe almost disappeared into the folds of an armchair, her tray upon her bony knees.

“There’s fuckery at work,” declared Xanthe.

She traded Aurienne a stack of letters for the journal on organ failure.

“What are these?” asked Aurienne.

“I asked colleagues around the Tīendoms to confirm whether any of them had received adequate funding for inoculation development. Four months into this outbreak—thousands of infected children across the Tīendoms—and no one has received anything of substance. Not us, not the universities, not any of the research groups. This in spite of multiple increasingly strident pleas.”

“I was prepared to blame incompetence, but I believe we’ve now moved on to cruelty,” said Aurienne. “I suppose it’s because the Pox is only affecting the most impoverished children—the ones not ‘worth’ putting money into?”

Xanthe aggressively bit a pickle. “You’d think that, with ten bloody kings and queens jostling for supremacy round here, there would be at least one for whom noblesse would oblige?”

“They aren’t French enough,” said Aurienne.

“That’s the problem. We ought to have let the French have their bloody Norman Conquest and be done with it. But no. We beat them back. And now, eight centuries later, here we are, with ten petty kingdoms, and ten clowns in charge, instead of a Noblesse-Obliging Frenchy.” Xanthe ate a piece of cheese and added, “We’d have better Brie, too.”

Aurienne flicked through the letters from Xanthe’s contacts. Each confirmed receipt of the most nominal sums in support of inoculation development.

“The northernmost Tīendoms are the ones with the lowest rates of the Pox—I suppose that explains their lack of interest,” said Aurienne, running through the numbers. “The Danelaw and Dyfed contributed something—not much, but something. Kent and Mercia are egregious. They’ve got some of the highest incidence rates of the Pox and have given the least to anyone.”

“Dumnonia, too,” said Xanthe. “Clowns. All clowns.”

“Clowns with a distinct lack of empathy.”

“They wouldn’t know empathy if it bit them on the cock.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Aurienne.

“Write a strongly worded letter to each clown,” said Xanthe. “I’ve got them ready.”

Xanthe wriggled out of her armchair and went to her desk. Beside her silver writing ball was yet another stack of letters. Mysteriously, she also pulled out a sealed test tube in which a clear liquid sloshed.

“Erm…what is that?” asked Aurienne.

“A special addition I’m going to include in the letters,” said Xanthe. “A sort of postscript.”

“A postscript? Labelled biohazard?”

“Yes.”

“Haelan Xanthe, you can’t.”

“Can’t I? Did you not see those children whose so-called lives we just spent three hours prolonging? And the monarchs throwing an insulting handful of thrymsas their way? And in the meantime, life in their castles goes on—masquerades, dances, banquets?”

“It’s awful—it’s wretched—but you can’t do this. You’d better sit on it.”

“I can’t sit on it,” said Xanthe, wiggling the tube. “I’ll get verrucas in my arsehole.”

“What?”

“Ignis papillomavirus,” said Xanthe, tapping the tube. “Don’t look at me like that. A few warts won’t kill anyone.”

“That’s—that’s an excruciatingly painful condition,” said Aurienne.

“So is the Pox.”

“Have you spoken to the other Heads about this?”

“Prendergast is a diplomat,” said Xanthe, with a dismissive swing of the fire-wart tube. “Sometimes I’m not certain what the difference is between diplomat and doormat. Three or four letters, but much the same thing. Abercorn is nothing but a fart.”

“He is not,” said Aurienne. (Abercorn was a highly respected endocrinologist.)

“In this case, he’s been just as effective as one.”

Aurienne didn’t often dare contradict Xanthe, but her mentor’s anger was leaking dangerously into vengefulness. She took the stack of letters from Xanthe and found that they were directed to kings and queens and variously addressed as Dear Feckless Idiot or Cretin or Absolute Invertebrate.

“Élodie is working on the inoculation,” said Aurienne. “There’s an end in sight. If you were to send these and infect everyone with warts—I know, I know; they aren’t lethal—there would be impacts on our Order.”

“We don’t owe allegiance to any of the clowns.”

“Right, but we are in the territory of the king of the Danelaw, who you’ve addressed as”—Aurienne checked the letter—“an anaemic, inbred, cowardly pig. He could make life difficult for us. He could expel us. You know how long it took us to develop our facilities at Swanstone.”

“I could soften it,” said Xanthe. “Could simply call him a pig.”

But she was, herself, softening. She took the letters from Aurienne’s hands. “It did make me feel better to write them.”

“I know.”

Xanthe’s mouth disappeared upon itself as she sucked at her gums. With a brisk gesture, she threw the letters into the fire. “I am two hundred years old, Aurienne. I think my patience is simply wearing thin.”

Aurienne watched Xanthe’s anger curl and burn in the hearth. She remembered the squeeze of the little girl’s hand, and thought of the monarchs in their castles, with their feasts and their dances and their precious children well isolated from the Pox, and part of her wished Xanthe had sent the letters, warts and all.