Chapter Text
When Adora Belle finally agreed to marry him, it rather took Moist off his stride.
“What, really?” he said, halfway through shaving in the mirror. “Now?”
Behind him in the bedroom Adora Belle called back, “You did ask, didn’t you, Slick?”
“Well, yes,” Moist said, standing in the bedroom door with shaving cream on half his face. “I didn’t think you’d say yes!”
Adora Belle stared at him for a long moment and Moist threw up his hands.
“I didn’t mean it like that and you know it. I’ve asked a dozen times! I got fireworks once. There was a moonlit gondola ride in Quirm! I released a flock of doves, if you’ll recall.”
“Oh yes, well, that’s just like a man, isn’t it,” she said briskly, folding clothes into her overnight bag.
“Excuse me, those were your proposals,” he said, cursing as he haphazardly finished his shave.
She turned to look at him, hands crossed across her chest. “You did it like that because that’s how you like it.” She flapped a hand. “Bells, whistles, a flock of flying rats getting turned loose. One of them messed in your drink, if you recall. This just suits me fine.”
Moist gaped. “I’d like to point out that I also asked you in several instances just like this one. I asked you when we were on our way to the greengrocers last month. You just smirked at me.”
“Ah, yes, those times I was just letting you dangle.” She flashed a smile at him. “Anyway, I saw a dress I rather liked the other day, and my poor mother is in a state over us living in sin, and even that’s lost the entertainment value.”
“So…you’ll marry me, then?” he said hopefully.
“Oh, yes. Have you got the ring on you? Only, I’m about to be late for my train out to Two Shirts, so I can’t dawdle.”
“Er, yes,” he said, and dug the small, exquisitely expensive ring box out of his sock drawer and tossed it to her. She plucked it out of the air and popped it open with mild curiosity. Not exactly the sweeping spectacle he’d imagined, but then Spike was wearing a wonderfully fitted dress and the morning sunlight spilling in gave her an almost ethereal quality, like the Goddess of Quietly Tolerant Women made flesh.
“Classy,” she said finally. “I’ll wear it then, I suppose.”
“Thank you,” Moist said, deadpan. “Business transacted?”
She rolled her eyes and swayed over to him, giving him a kiss that went on for some time, and ended with her swatting his hands away and laughing as she straightened his (now disheveled) collar.
“Right then, I’ve got to go. I’ll be back in two days, Mister, and you’d better be here for dinner. There’s some other things we’ll need to discuss.”
“Er, flowers? Fripperies?”
She smirked at him and pulled her bag onto her shoulder. “Yes, that. Among…other things.”
**
In the end, the subsequent discussion was less like a proposal and more like the opening of negotiations.
“Right, so, that’s the long and short of it,” Adora Belle said in the parlor two nights later. She looked at him expectantly and sighed when all he did was gawp. She topped up her glass of wine. “In your own time, then.”
Moist had, indeed, expected to be confronted with place settings for the reception (admittedly, he should have known better) or at least a minor discourse on how two people so devoted to their odd-hour jobs would successfully be married to one another. This was. Well. Not what he had expected, not at all.
“So…you’d like to have a, a lady companion,” Moist said, after he remembered to snap his mouth shut. “As well as be married to me?”
“Yes,” Spike said simply. She got up and crossed to the bar. “Here, I’ll pour you a brandy. You look as if you need it.”
“Er, yes. Please. A double. Or, no, double a double. Just bring over the bottle, will you?”
She did. He drank. A lonely neuron fired.
“So have you got someone - “
“Oh yes, Penny,” Adora said brightly. “We go back a long time. Longer than you and I, come to think of it.”
“And you hadn’t thought to mention this previously?”
She frowned at him. “Well, look here, Slick. I wasn’t entirely sure you weren’t going to bolt off in the middle of the night after having some sort of nervous breakdown over pulling down a government salary and paying bills with genuine checks. And, to be frank, we never discussed it being - exclusive.”
“I suppose we didn’t,” Moist said. He cleared his throat. “And…Penny, was it?”
“Penelope Herring,” Spike said, “She grew up one street over from me.”
“Right, right, Penny - she’s alright with this arrangement?”
Spike flipped open a silver cigarette case and inserted one into a elegant black holder. Out of habit, Moist leaned across to light it for her.
She inhaled deeply. “Oh, certainly. She doesn’t mind. She doesn’t really understand it, her tastes being a bit more narrow than mine.” She smiled at him fondly.
“I…see,” Moist said. He thought about it for a long while, watching the logs in the fire crackle and snap. Spike worked her way through two more cigarettes.
He cleared his throat. “And so, you still - ah -“ He cringed inwardly. This sort of honesty and soul-baring was not at all his strong suit. She was the only one that could ever trip him up like this. “You still…love me, do you?”
Adora Belle rolled her eyes. She stood and crossed to him, sitting down in his lap easily. In his arms, she draped her own across his shoulders and tipped their foreheads together. She smelled of smoke and the light floral scent she dabbed on each morning.
“Silly man,” she said softly, in that private way women have, “Of course I do. For my sins.” For the first time that evening, she seemed uncertain. “You know, you’re welcome to make your own arrangements as well. Men only, of course, but we can hammer all that out later.”
He gripped her tightly. His eyebrows rose. “What makes you think I - “
“Oh please,” she said, laughing. “Those suits?”
“That is a terrible stereotype, you know,” he said, but he could feel a grin at the corners of his mouth.
“Not as terrible as that suit, Flash,” she said, but in a quiet, amused way that perked him up considerably.
“Will I get to meet her?” Moist asked, honestly curious, even as his hands strayed to the complicated fastenings of her very plain dress.
“Sure,” Spike said, not batting his hands away. She reached up, undoing the pins to let down her hair. It tickled Moist’s cheek when he leaned in to kiss her neck. “You’ll like her, I think. She’s a manager in the trunk, used to run a tower out on the line, but now she looks over the lads in the research and development office in town. Ah - that’s lovely,” she murmured as Moist pushed her dress off her shoulder with his lips and his teeth.
With a sudden sharp decrease in available blood supply, Moist thoughtlessly murmured, “You know, if you should ever - I mean, I’d be more than happy to join you ladies should you ever find you need-“
It wasn’t good for his ego, but at least Spike’s peal of laughter scared off an unlicensed thief skulking along their back garden.
*
The rules, once deliberated over and written in one of Moist’s favorite handwritings, were affixed to their bathroom mirror. It covered several topics, some of which hadn’t even occurred to Moist, and some which caused his ears to burn.
“Do you think that covers it? This list is going to horrify the maids,” Moist said.
“Yes, that’s fine for now, we’ll add to it if we need to. And, contrary to what you may believe about this city, the maids mostly are un-horrify-able. After all, they’re already employed by a notorious criminal and a mad smoking woman who are living in sin. Occasionally quite loud sin, if memory serves.” She was pinning up her hair as she spoke. Moist’s cheeks flushed. After she’d stopped laughing, Spike had been particularly enthusiastic last night.
“What are you doing today?” he asked, coming up behind her and settling his hands on her hips. She glanced at him in the mirror.
“Just some administrative things down at the main tower,” She said. “And I’ll tell Penny the good news.”
Moist arched an eyebrow at her. This new routine was surprisingly easy to settle into, but then, he’d gone from being hanged to being Postmaster with only a few minor crises and the need to wear a high collar for a few days.
“Will I be seeing you tonight, then?” he asked, pressing a kiss to her neck, inordinately pleased when he felt goosebumps rise up.
“Oh, of course,” she smiled at him. “Besides, I’m the boss, I can give her a two-hour lunch if I want to.”
*
And so, the time whipped by. Adora Belle had been right, Moist did like Penny. She was a small, blond slip of a girl that kept her messy spill of curls cut short and pinned under a page boy hat. Usually she wore trousers and a vest, but had a certain way that made it hard to mistake her for a man. And she looked at Spike like she’d hung the moon, which suited Moist just fine.
“Still no one to keep you busy on cold winter evenings?” Penny said to him one night. She was waiting for Spike to finish getting dressed and had joined him in the study for a brandy.
“I’ve had several attempts on my life in the past six months alone,” Moist said. “I’m very busy, thank you so ever much.”
Penny rolled her eyes. “You ask for it, you know.”
“You sound like my fiancee.”
“She’s a smart woman.”
“You know, my assassin’s guild rate is over a million now,” he added proudly. “I’m running a book on when they take me off the ledger, if you’re interested.”
She pursed her lips. “When are you rolling out the new tax system?”
“Should be in the paper on Monday morning.”
“Well, then I’d give it a couple of weeks after that, then. People will be lining up to give the assassins their money rather than Vetinari. Put me down for Grune 18th.” She tossed a few crumpled bills at him.
Moist opened a ledger and made a note. “Where are you and Spike off to this evening?”
“I’ve got reservations at a new Agatean fusion place down in the Hamlet,” Penny said, running her fingers over the spines of the books on the shelves. “Speaking of, you should spend more time there. Business is really picking up. Lots of amenable young men about the place.” She grinned over her shoulder at him.
Moist laughed. “Honestly, you’re worse than someone’s mother. I am fully capable of making my own arrangements, should the need strike me.”
“You could at least get yourself a Tailor*,” Penny muttered.
*The brother organization to Ankh-Morpork’s Seamstress guild. Like their namesakes, their services often required patrons to take off their trousers, but most of the young men wouldn’t be able to tell inseam from bust** without a chart.
**Especially bust
“Well, if some interloping woman wasn’t absconding with my wife, I wouldn’t have so much time on my hands, would I?” he said, easily, and then stopped when he saw the look on her face. He frowned at her. “Why are you so concerned?”
Penny gave him an exasperated look. “As the top absconder on the premises, possibly I feel just a little bit guilty. I can only imagine you clasping your nightshirt to your chest and staring mournfully out windows while we’re out and about.”
Moist waved this away. “It’s fine. I’m drafting stamps tonight, and I have to go over the budgetary meeting notes from Malvolio.” He clapped his hands together brightly. “And then I shall spend the rest of the evening withering mournfully away of jealousy and loneliness.”
“He’ll probably have himself trapped up a chimney by the time I get home,” Spike said from the doorway, looking quite lovely in a long wool dress. “He’ll have a ball.”
“That was one time, and our butler was very understanding. Although, I admit, the bathtub still has got a bit of soot worked into the grout.” He dropped into the plush leather chair behind his desk and gave the pair a sunny smile.
“Now, off with you, I’ve decent and upstanding citizen things to do,” he said, waving a hand at them as Penny went to peck Spike on the cheek.
“Figuring out what they are, for starters,” Spike said, but she smiled and took Penny’s hand.
*
Across the city, a remarkably similar conversation was taking place in a room that technically did not exist.
The Patrician’s Palace was a sprawling network of corridors and old, dusty bedrooms, left over from days when the reigning tyrant often had more ensuite mistresses than brain cells and entertained in kind. Vetinari, however, lived in a handful of comparatively spartan rooms, letting the more ostentatious suites that that peppered the building like glittery pox go unlived in.*
*If Moist had given it much thought, he would have admired the character Vetinari cultivated: the hunched civil servant working dutifully away at a card table set in the shadow of a gold throne; the ascetic dining on bread and water in simple rooms in a palace otherwise resplendent in marble and gold**
**And if he had thought harder about it, he perhaps would have realized that the more predictable one’s appearance and habits were, the easier it was to disappear with the application of a temporary mustache and a lisp.
If you asked anyone in Ankh-Morpork how many floors the Patrician's Palace had, they would likely say “Sod off, wanker,” and try to steal your wallet. But, after you collected your teeth and dignity and taken a hard look at the building squatting over Ankh Morpork, it would be easy to identify four stories. And this may have been true, had it not been for the rather creative architecture and eye watering geometry employed by notorious inventor Bloody Stupid Johnson
The story went like this: the reigning tyrant, running low on places to store his ceremonial tights and coronets, had requested an extra few feet of storage be added to his bedroom closet. After six months of daily construction, several freak fires, and a rain of ferrets, Bloody Stupid Johnson had been compensated for his work with a trip to the Tanty for, among other things, cruel and unusual architecture and being a gods damned nuisance when the Patrician had had a long day.
The result of this labor of lunacy was a series of long vaulted rooms in what may have once been an attic, though the cunningly concealed door that led to it left the user with the uncomfortable feeling that they'd traversed a mobius strip. It sprawled above most of the Palace’s ambling halls, fitting into eaves that should not have rightly had enough space to offer. The Attic, as it came to be called, had the disquieting feeling that it was bigger on the inside. More than one clerk had wondered what would happen if one scaled the building and accessed the rooms from the outside. One or two had made the attempt, but couldn’t really be reached for comment given the rapid onset of nausea and conviction that they were about to fall off the surface of the planet.
The Attic sat empty for many years, one more forgotten quirk of B.S. Johnson’s resume, until Lord Vetinari came to power and had a mind to put all things to their best use. It was one long, wide corridor that followed the spine of the building, up with wing and down the other, with a few rooms walled off for offices and repositories. The ceilings seemed impossibly high for an ostensibly invisible space; ideally, light should have poured in the sweeping skylights, but this being Ankh Morpork, the windows were more often awash in the ever-present rain, with the odd pigeon carcass trapped against the glass for added effect. The walls were whitewashed and the floor tiled with slate, so conversations and footsteps had a tendency to echo, building up into a constant pleasant murmur of a great many people hard at work. And everywhere, down the long echoing halls, there were desks.
They were nice desks, carved and inlaid, often with rich leather blotters beneath stacks of paper and Clacks flimsies, and half eaten meals. For every small facet of the information tidal wave that Vetinari surfed, there was a desk. There were desks for foreign intelligence, domestic idiocy, and neighborly advice. There were desks for research on witches and orcs and gnomes and goblins. There was one very large desk for Threats Against the City (Internal) and its much smaller neighbor, Threats (External) alongside it. Threats (Wizards) was its own series of desks, covering subjects from The Dungeon Dimension, The High Energy Magick Building, and Professor Rincewind, who was a reliable lightning rod for any thing about to go magically tits up. Cipher Breaking was directly beside the Encryption desk, and a quiet rivalry meant there was now a rather inventive wall between the two that reached halfway to the ceiling, made mostly of old reports and one or two Klatchian take-away boxes. There were desks for the consideration of New Desks and there was a Watch desk (actually two desks abutting, one for Officers, one for Criminals, with some spillage between them when the distinction was challenging.). And the many and varied desks were peopled by Clerks.
Even at this hour of the night there was the constant buzz of voices and clip-clopping of footsteps as reports were received, interpreted, broken down, and summarized. In this room that didn’t exist, staffed by people who were likewise afflicted by an absence of reality, a thousand cogs turned rumor and gossip into intelligence, and eventually, into one of the thrice-daily briefings that Drumknot delivered to Lord Vetinari.
Certainly-Not-Head-Clerk-At-All-Just-A-Minor-Secretary Rufus Drumknot was sitting in his office, leafing through reports, and quietly doing his job. His office, one of the few sequestered rooms in the Attic, was a masterpiece of organization, awash in file racks, dossiers, and, all too often, half drunk cups of tarry black tea. Drumknot was the bottleneck through which the tides of information passed; he waded through the flotsam of reports and sorted the relevant from irrelevant, the truth from conjecture, and the odd from the normal. Once every fact had been wrangled into submission, he made his report to his Lordship, who could add together the price of fish scales in XXXX and the unseasonable snow in the Counterweight continent and divide that by the row that had happened at the last Beggars’ Guild meeting, and came out with - well, not the future, exactly. But enough of an understanding that Ankh-Morpork and the rest of Disc kept on ticking with the minimal amount of tocks.
Of course, it wasn’t always daring do and high spirits. Sometimes it was Clerk Maroon’s report on a the net haul of the cabbage fields Rimwards of Sto Helit following a sporadic smut epidemic. When Drumknot’s stomach growled, he realized he was reading the same chicken scratch line about mold life cycles for the fourth time and he pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing. There was still the ever-present hum from the Hall of Desks, but it was quieter now, and the huge skylights showed a navy blue sky outside. It must have been at least gone ten; the last time he’d looked up it had been daylight.
Without much enthusiasm, he glanced at the sandwich that some well-meaning underling had dropped of hours ago and lifted the bread with the tip of a pencil. Ah. Tunafish Tuesdays. Not his favorite Palace institution.
“Go home, Roof,” a boisterous voice called from his open office door. “Y’look as if you’re about to fall down where ya sit.”
The speaker was a large man with an oft-broken nose and a chipped front tooth; a single glance and one could easily label a Grade 5 Brawler; endeavour to not look at him in ‘a funny way.’
“Clerk Gable,” Drumknot said, rubbing at his forehead, “And I had wondered what could make this day better. I’m not through with my report yet, if you must know.”
“Ach, Rosie’s handwriting isn’t worth shite, and you don’t have tae include the ever-loving life cycle of the damned pest for his Lordship. Just say crop yields low; not due to some embuggarance of mankind and be done with it. The same thing happened six years or so back - he’ll probably want to lift some of the produce tax to Sto Helit for foreign aid reasons, wave the flag and all that.”
He flung himself down into the empty chair across from Drunknot’s desk. And that was the thing, first glance you saw the brawler, and that’s probably what you’d see for second, third, fourth, and so on, until Gable dropped the act and you realized that while the man could probably open beer bottles with his teeth, he could do it while discussing international trade and the complexities of the tariff situation in Klatch.
“Maroon,” Drumknot said, mouth pulling reluctantly at the corners.
“Wassat?”
“I think you meant Clerk Maroon. Not Rosie. I know you know he dislikes it when you do that.”
“He takes himself too seriously,” Gable said cracking his knuckles. He gave Drumknot a meaningful look, “Like some I could name. When’s the last time you went out on the town?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Drumknot said, shuffling papers.
“Alright then, when’s the last time you had a shag?”
Drumknot tipped over an inkwell and cursed, hating the blush that stained his cheeks. And that was the other thing about Gable, whose brashness and general size and build made him their go to agent anytime they needed to do surveillance on a football game. His approach to sex (and, Drumknot had to admit this, love and romance) was simple and straightforward: he took all comers. Well, that wasn’t exactly right. He was game for just about anyone he thought was halfway interesting, gender and species be damned. At the moment, Drumknot was fairly certain Gable was stepping out with a dwarf who was either old fashioned or male by the traditional chainmail and leather he’d worn the last time Drumknot had been dragged out to happy hour.
“Honestly Gable,” Drumknot muttered, hands flying to a hankie in his breast pocket, trying to stem the damage before it spread to his papers.
They had met some years previous, when Vetinari had calmly ignored all of Drumknot’s protestations and sent him to Gable to learn the basics of self defense.
Drumknot had hated Gable on sight, the huge, burly man reminding him of every bully that had ever pushed him into a puddle or called him names. The next few weeks of training had nearly cemented that simmering loathing until the last day Gable had offered Drumknot a hand up off the mats and said, without preamble,
“That’ll do I suppose, y’atleast won’t punch out your own lights in a back alley brawl. Hey, ya fancy a shag?”
Drumknot had flushed so badly he was surprised he didn’t smell his hair burning from the heat thrown off by his ears. He had staggered on the mats.
“I - I - I, er, what? What did you say?”
“A shag? You know,” and here Gable had made a few hand gestures that Drumknot still could not forget, “What, are ya not bent? You seemed the type.”
“Excuse me,” Drumknot had said, horrified and confused and suddenly rather worried that this meant he’d lose his position at the palace.
“Course, me, I likes ‘em all, yourself included, Roof, so no judgement, eh? But I’m supposing that’s a no then? Shame, you seem like you’d be fun. Can I set ya up with one of the girls?”
Drumknot had coughed. “It’s Rufus, and I actually prefer Drumknot. And...no. I am...bent,” he had said, flushing and rolling his eyes. “Just, uh, not interested.” He had blinked up at the mountain of a man, who had been sweaty from throwing Rufus around and grinning madly and giving not a single damn about what anyone might think of him. Drumknot’s heart had thawed at that, albeit with a quiet tinge of jealousy. “Thank you?”
And Gable had clapped him so hard on the back he’d nearly choked, and just like that, they were friends.
“I’m just sayin,” Gable said now, stretching back in the chair, “It’s not healthy. Go and get yer rocks off with someone, would you? Ya haven’t gotten any since that tit Bleeker, and he was a fucking arsehole.”
“There’s no way you can know that,” Drumknot sniffed, spinning away on his chair to file some papers. “And he wasn’t an arsehole, he just thought I was actually a secretary and couldn’t understand why I put in 20 hour work days.”
“He did accuse you of buggering the boss,” Gable pointed out mildly.
“Yes, thank you, I hadn’t forgotten.”
Gable tisked at him and shook his head. “Just go down to HubMor of some evening, would you? Let your hair down. Lots of those railway men end up at Brickwall, smudged with soot and showing off their coal shoveling arms.”
Drumknot had to admit that that did sound more tempting than room temperature fish sandwiches and an evening spent deciphering Maroon’s slapdash attempts at penmanship and spelling.
“Me and Gronin are heading down tonight, if you’re interested?” Gable asked, though his tone said he already knew the answer.
“Yes, being a third wheel on your date does sound lovely, but you see there’s this Klatchian torture technique that involves pliers, a caliper, and a small songbird that I’ve been meaning to try, so please make apologies for me to Gronin.”
Gable boomed with laughter and stood up, giving Drumknot just enough time to brace for the back patting that was coming. “God, y’can be such a right bitch, Roof, I love it. No one else believes me, but by gods, you’re funny when you’re vexed.”
“Perhaps no one else is as inspiring. Goodbye, Gable. Please make sure that at least some parts of HubMor are left standing in case the rest of us want to enjoy it some evening.”