Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.
12 January 1019
Former’s Guild House, Mont-Havre
Dear Armand,
First, thank you for your delightful hospitality these past weeks. Having spent a number of festal seasons living in camp in Malague, surrounded by snow and mud, I am all the more appreciative of spending them warm, well fed, and in the bosom of your loving family. My only wish is to be able to participate in snowball fights in a less, ah, stationary manner. I am glad that your daughters are still small, or I fear I should have been a casualty of war.
Please, convey my thanks and pleasure to your good wife—I pray I may be half so lucky one day.
You will think me strange, but I have been keeping my ear to the ground regarding our M. Sabot. Why do I care? I’m not sure; I suppose my service to His Lordship has caused me to be horribly nosy. But M. Sabot worries me. I do not understand why he came to us in his old guise; and why he has not resumed his real name. Being known to be the Comte de L— would not grant him any power or restore his family lands, not at this date; but it is no longer a death sentence; and there are many like him who have taken up their old selves once again.
But I get ahead of myself. I have determined that M. Sabot is at present living under the name of Depillage, and posing as a Provençese gentleman of means but recently come to Armorica. What he intends by this imposture I do not know, but I now think I understand why you were unable to catch any word of him during the war. I am certain that when the war began he rattled off to Provençe, to what end I know not what; and now he has returned as someone else.
There is no doubt of his identity as the Comte de L—; Madame Truc knew him in Provençe and then as M. Sabot, and her testimony is to certainly to be trusted. But I am equally certain that she has misjudged his character. A man might flee the Troubles under an assumed name in order to save his own life; but he might also take an assumed name for many other purposes. And when he is seen to take up yet another identity that is inconsistent with both his birth and his nom de guerre, well. One doesn’t know the reason, but one has one’s doubts.
Our M. Depillage is indeed a man of means, and spends and entertains freely; but whence comes these means? His family estate was seized; and he must surely have spent the whatever funds he managed to bring with him to Mont-Havre all those years ago.
No, I think he is working for someone, and that it is to a purpose; and that purpose might not be good for things as they are here in Armorica.
My informant tells me that he has been much in the halls of the Grand Parlement; and further that he has also been seen visiting the Provençese embassy (for we have such a thing at last), though he is by no means part of their official staff.
I am forced to conclude that he is a spy of some stripe; though for whom, who can say? It would be natural to guess that he works for the Deuxième Republique de Provençe; but does he?
Were I able to mix with my previous crowd, I would soon know the names of those he’s visiting, and would likely even have some notion of the topics of discussion. I do not, nor am I sure how to acquire them.
Armorica is not my home, Armand; I do hope to return to Cumbria one day. But it is your home, and it has grown dear to me after all my time here. I don’t want to see it broken.
Your suspicious cousin,
Jack
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Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash
Zymurgia House 