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Jessamine sighed deeply and started to pry her shoes off her feet. Once her toes were free, she looked up at Corvo as if he had just entered the room and smiled at him. “Corvo.”
Feeling the warmth of her smile radiate into the rest of drawing room, he nodded graciously and answered, “My Lady.”
She tutted once at his formal address, but she knew he was only being playful. After standing rigidly and silently all day, relaxing felt like his muscles melting into butter. His aches and tensions were eased even further by the soft cushions that dorned the couches, after she invited him to sit.
“You have been at my side all day, and yet I’ve never had a chance to talk to you.” She began adjusting the keys of her harp. Emily had been fiddling with them again – he could tell by the look on her face.
Corvo remembered the way Jessamine had tensed in the presence of the dignitaries, forcing her most diplomatic smile. Citizens of the Isles liked to imagine that the Empress could do whatever she wanted. She was better off than most, it was true, but he wasn’t sure there was worse punishment than listening to a man who’d monopolised the whale oil industry boast about how he was taking advantage of his workers and being unable to punch his teeth out.
She’d instated laws about this kind of thing – but nobody cared. The people who owned the major industries in the Empire could afford to bribe the Grand Guard, the City Watch, or whoever happened to watch over their laws, so there was no one to enforce the rules.
She’d entertained firing the whole Guard and starting from scratch to kill the corruption, but never seriously. There were few moves that would make her more hated by the people; Guardsmanship was the most common profession in the middle class, and where would that new workforce come from if not the very set of people she’d just purged?
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more comfort to you,” he apologised. He always wished he could do more, even just a gentle hand on her shoulder, but the whispers about their relationship were already far too loud and there wasn’t even any proof.
(Except Emily. Regents and dignitaries liked to oh-so-innocently ask where she got those lovely eyes, so brown.)
She shook her head and started to sift through her sheet music. “Your presence is always a comfort to me, my love.”
She chose a piece and positioned the manuscript on the music stand. As she began to pluck away at the strings from the edge of the L-shaped couch, he moved in behind her to unpin her hair from the spiral it was towered in. Once on a night like tonight, she had threatened to cut it all off rather than have it slicked and gelled and twisted one more morning. He knew she never would. She liked it too much when it fell around her shoulders and framed her face.
Maybe she could see how much he liked it, too.
Corvo combed his fingers through her hair as she played, and when it was arranged in perfect waves, he wrapped his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder. She smelled like she always smelled, of lavender and fresh laundry. Minutes passed like that, with the only interruption being Corvo reaching to turn the sheet music.
He might’ve heard a noise, but it felt more like a flutter of his heart. A gut feeling that something was close by, listening. He stilled Jessamine’s hands and tilted his ear towards the door.
He felt Jessamine’s breath perpendicular to his, listening just as keenly as him. After a moment of stillness, she took a deeper breath as if to speak, and Corvo only had time to feel a clutch of panic before she called to the intruder:
“Emily.”
Corvo blinked at her, and when he turned back to face the door, he saw his daughter in her nightclothes, clutching her hands in front of her. “Yes, mother?” she asked, eyes low.
He sat back against the couch, and Jessamine extended a hand to her. Lighting up, Emily smiled wide and bounded over to them. She climbed onto Corvo’s lap – not quite as graceful as he’d been trying to teach her, but he’d let her off.
She had always been good at moving around quietly, surprising the serving staff at inconvenient moments. When she was younger, she would use these powers of discretion to sneak into her mother’s bed at night. Now she used them to evade her governesses and teachers.
“Why don’t you wear your hair like this other times?” she asked, smoothing a lock of Jessamine’s hair between her fingers.
“It is not befitting of an Empress,” she said in her most regal voice, making her giggle.
Emily pulled her own hair in front of her face, going cross-eyed. “Is my hair wavy?”
“No, darling.”
“Then I have Daddy’s hair.”
Jessamine and Corvo glanced at each other. This wasn’t the first time they’d had a conversation like this, since her inquisitiveness had brought her to the knowledge that Corvo was her father. She had never told anyone – not even Mrs. Pilsen, her favourite doll – because she was thrilled to have secret knowledge that she could tell no one about.
Corvo found it very hard to lie to her. Half his height, but with her hands on her hips, eyebrows angled carefully downwards, and her most serious voice, she'd asked: “Corvo, are you my father?”
He didn’t stand a chance.
“Emily…” he said carefully, as she started to separate a piece of his hair into three strands for braiding.
“I know,” she pouted. “I have to say Corvo. But it’s just us. Why does it matter when it’s only us? It isn’t fair.”
“We’ve talked about this, Emily,” Jessamine said, although she sounded sympathetic. “Even when we’re alone, it’s good practice. Calling Corvo by his name in public will be easier if you do it in private, too. And it means that if you’re ever intruded on, no one will hear anything out of the ordinary.”
It had been interesting, watching Jessamine retrain her senses as she grew up. It was a long, painstaking process, one she took on alone, and he wasn’t sure if anyone but him had been with her enough to notice at all.
When she was young, she was taught by her father and her governesses to treat the serving staff as invisible. Them being noticed meant they weren’t doing their job correctly, and was a punishable offence. Over the centuries, assassins and spies had used this convenient invisibility to their advantage – as Royal Protector, it was Corvo’s job to notice everybody.
The first weeks he had been in Dunwall Tower, he had spent all the time he wasn’t guarding teenage Jessamine (not a full time job until it was time for her to ascend the throne) in the kitchens and the staff quarters. Some of the staff had been wary at first, but they’d quickly recognised him as a young man of the serving class.
Maybe he exaggerated his rough Karnacan accent some, talked more about his widowed seamstress mother than he normally would, but nothing about what he said and did was fake. Even though he learned their names and listened to the stories to be better at his job, the serving staff became his genuine friends.
Jessamine had once asked him why he was more comfortable with the serving staff than the Watch, who she considered closer to him in profession. After all, he had served on the Grand Serkonan Guard before he had come to Dunwall.
In his eyes, the City Watch were no different from the Guard back home – which was the problem. They were hardly more than thugs for hire, with how deep the corruption ran in the ranks. Corvo’s ‘liberated street rat’ look worked well on the serving staff, but less so on the officers, who were practically trained to search and push around and scapegoat people like him. It didn’t matter whether or not he was the best swordsman in the Isles; he had come from trash, and as far as they were concerned, that’s all he would ever be.
After the first attempt on Jessamine’s life when she was seventeen, three years before she would become Empress, everything in her demeanour said she was unshaken. She straightened her jacket, cleared her throat, and commanded the Watch to imprison her attacker to await trial. It wasn’t until much later that he started to notice the way she was observing things.
Her would-be assassin hadn’t got very close to her, because she had banked on being invisible – as soon as Corvo locked eyes with her and didn’t recognise her, she knew she was rumbled and panicked. He’d apprehended her easily, and she had surrendered and confessed her plan immediately.
But Jessamine hadn’t noticed her come in. And that scared her.
She couldn’t just wander into the kitchen and start a conversation like he could, but she would watch people as they came and went, memorise their faces and voices. She started to be aware of where everyone in the room was at all times, how many armed Guardsmen there were in the room. Once he even thought he saw her counting steps, making the rhythm of the officers’ patrols familiar to her.
Emily had often been chatty with the staff, much to the displeasure of her supervisors, but Corvo encouraged her. An awareness of her surroundings was vital for her to have, not to mention just plain people to talk to. Once or twice, Emily had come out with a phrase that she’d picked up from the maids, and her governess had demanded that someone be held responsible for poisoning the young Lady’s vocabulary.
Corvo had taken the blame, revelling in adopting almost a flippant tone, and he had watched her seethe. He was above her jurisdiction – he was under the direct employment of the Empress, and they both knew that this petty and pointless conflict would not reach her ears.
Emily, deciding she was on a winning streak with plaiting Corvo’s hair, got off his lap so that she could sit on the back of the sofa and style his hair like one of her dolls. While Jessamine plucked precisely and confidently at the strings of her harp, he combed his hands through the back of her hair and separated a section into four strands.
It had been a long time since he had done this, two and a half decades at least. A memory surfaced in his mind’s eye, of his sister stirring a pot that was more water than stew while he weaved her hair between his fingers. He’d done his best to imitate the deft movements of the fisherwomen down at the docks, working in a chain while they laughed and chatted on their break. One day, fed up of untangling the knots, Beatrici had found some pieces of rope and they used them to practice until they could get the braids neat and tight.
She’d twirled in the front room and he’d watched the braid swat around. She did her best approximation of curtsey, and welcomed her imaginary suitors into her magnificent abode. Their mother had smiled over her sewing machine as Corvo had pretended he was an aristocrat, snootily turning his nose up at her until he was begrudgingly forced to accept that she, with her beautiful hair and beautiful house, was a Lady of high esteem.
He wondered what Beatrici and his mother would say, if they could see him now. Being serenaded by her Imperial Majesty while sitting between her and the Princess, their daughter. Braiding hair in secret.
“Choose a song, my love,” Jessamine said, scattering his thoughts.
He hummed in thought, but didn't break the rhythm of his fingers in her hair. “I choose Emily’s song,” he decided.
Emily released his hair immediately and exclaimed, “I have a song?” She scrambled down from the back of the sofa and back onto Corvo’s lap, ducking under the hands which were still working Jessamine’s hair.
Her mother started to pluck away at the strings, not needing the sheet music for this one. As the tune started, he leaned out a little to see Emily’s face, and he saw recognition growing there. “Oh!” she said. “This is my song?”
She swayed to the music for a few moments, and then nestled into Corvo’s chest, near his heart. Coming to the end of the plait, he extracted the tie from the lonesome braid in front of his face, and wrapped it around the end of Jessamine’s hair. With his hands finally free, he closed one arm around Emily’s shoulder and the other linked up with it. She yawned, and he smiled.
She was growing fast. It seemed hardly any time at all since he had cradled her in this same drawing room as a baby. Jessamine had played this tune slower then, often backtracking and revising. He had never professed to understand music – the street performers in Karnaca often seemed to throw tunes together at the drop of a hat, but she had laboured over each note, positioning each like a maid preparing a dining hall.
The song had not been for Emily when she was writing it, but Corvo had taken her off the nurse’s hands that evening. He often stopped by the nursery before he retired to bed, and usually she was fine, but this week the usual nurse had been ill. The baby would not pause her screaming for anything; she didn’t need food or cleaning, and judging by her absolute abhorrence to being put down, she didn’t particularly want to rest.
“The young Lady has been distressed all night, and the last thing she needs is a man such as yourself intruding on her slumber,” Mrs. Shaw told him. Not wishing to be witnessed at her apparent failure to do her job, he supposed, although given how unruly and particular Emily was proving to be, he couldn’t have blamed her.
Corvo stood his ground and studied Emily, her little hands waving, grasping at nothing. He indicated to the matron to pass her to him. The trouble with aligning himself as a servant in the staff’s eyes was that he could not justly give orders, but he’d found that a lot could be achieved on suggestion alone.
Mrs. Shaw was reluctant, but she passed the baby on to him, and he rocked her. “Are you making your nurses’ night difficult, Lady Emily?” he asked her as she wailed. His voice was hushed under his breath - he didn't like to raise his voice much around people who weren't his family. This was between him and his daughter. “Hm? Are you making a fuss?”
Emily quieted to grunts and moans and looked up at him. Nurse Deana looked taken aback, to say the least. “We’ve been trying to get her to quiet down for near enough an hour, and you manage it in a couple of words. What kind of magic are you wielding?”
Corvo smiled, but Mrs. Shaw swatted at the nurse’s arm, taking the mention of magic very seriously. “You should get some sleep,” he suggested. “Lady Emily and I have got it from here.”
He had paced down the halls for a time, but although he had succeeded in stopping her crying, she still refused to sleep. Her wide eyes took everything in, and her inquisitive hands explored the buttons and seams of his shirt. After some wandering, he had heard Jessamine diagnosing notes on her harp and joined her in the drawing room.
He had sat in the same spot he sat now and watched Emily fall asleep between the sounds of her mother’s music and her father’s heartbeat. Once Emily grew out of crying the night away, they’d slowly stopped having to play the tune to her to get her to sleep. Now Corvo wondered if she’d continued listening for years, hoping to catch her lullaby on sleepless nights.
“Is she asleep?” Jessamine whispered, with the final note fading slowly into silence.
Corvo nodded and started to shift, wrapping his arms securely around her so that he could carry her back to bed. Like a baby. On the way to her bedroom, he crossed with Deana in the corridors and, seeing his charge, she silently accompanied him and opened Emily’s door.
He offered her a smile as thanks, and placed Emily down as softly as he could in the bed that was double her height in length. He brought her blankets around her and tucked Mrs. Pilsen into the crook of her arm. He kissed her forehead before she departed. Sweet dreams, he wished her. The bedroom door closed with a gentle click.