Chapter Text
Grantaire knocked on the door to the servant’s entrance and shifted his satchel under his arm. A moment later the door was opened by a thin harassed-looking scullery maid with long dark hair pulled neatly under her cap.
She looked him up and down. “Are you the new valet?”
“Yes.” Grantaire put his bag down and offered his hand. “My name’s Gr—“
“Oh, thank God,” she interrupted, picking up his bag with one hand and pulling him in with the other. She was surprisingly strong for such a small girl. “Only Mr. Samson’s been having a fit.” She led him into a narrow hallway, talking in a lowered voice. “Tom, one of our footmen up and walked out last night and Liza has the flu and all. He was thinking about sending me upstairs. Can you imagine? He’d’ve rather died first.” She led him through a small, bright kitchen and into the servants' hall where the rest of the staff were sitting doing mending or polishing silver.
An older man, obviously the butler stood up when he saw him. “You are Mr. Grantaire I presume?” Grantaire nodded. “Well, I’ll take you up to His Lordship in a moment, but before I do, I assume Eponine told you that we’ve lost a footman and a maid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I hate to presume, but we may need you to act as second footman until a new one can be come by.”
“That’s no problem at all, Mr. Samson,” Grantaire said with a smile. He didn’t mind helping out his first day, and anything was better than living on the streets.
“Thank you,” he said, folding his newspaper and beckoning Grantaire up the stairs. “I’ll take you to meet His Lordship then.”
Upstairs, Samson had Grantaire wait in the great hall while he went into the morning room. “The new valet, my lady.” Grantaire heard him say, his voice muffled through the wood. A moment later he was back again, directing Grantaire through the door.
Lady Enjolras sat on a low couch in a black dress with a dark green bodice. She must have been about fifty, but she had a thin delicate face lined with curls that was still quite lovely. She smiled a little stiffly when she saw him. “Your reference please,” she said, holding out her hand for them. Grantaire passed over his letter and shifted nervously as she read it. “I see that you worked for the Montparnasses for five years?”
“That’s right, my lady. I started out as a hallboy, then a footman, and finally a valet after their other one left.”
“And why did you leave their service?”
“They were moving to India, my lady.”
“And?” she asked, not unkindly.
“And I didn’t fancy the weather, my lady,” he said.
He thought he saw the ghost of a smile, and was pleased that he hadn’t told her the truth, that young Lord Montparnasse was nothing but trouble and that Grantaire had thought he’d better get out before the police got in.
“Well, everything seems in order,” she said, “of course we’ll have to see if Lord Enjolras is pleased with you. I don’t know what’s keeping him.” She broke off as another door started to open. “Ah, here he is now.”
An angel walked into the room, a man who looked to be no more than eighteen and who could have been a Greek statue who some god breathed into life. He had curling blond hair, just slightly too long to be proper and his face was somewhat flushed as though he had just been outside in a brisk wind. The only thing that belied his status as Greek god was the fact that he was sifting through a pile of letters as he walked. It took every ounce of Grantaire’s training not to gape. He had expected Lord Enjolras to be an older, graying man with a dour expression not this vision of loveliness.
Lady Enjolras cleared her throat. “Julian?”
“Yes, Good morning, mother,” he said, not looking up from his letters.
“Julian. Your new valet has arrived,” she said sternly.
He looked up and saw Grantaire standing by the door. His face broke into a smile and he walked forward so that he was standing directly in front of him. “Oh, good. What’s your name?”
Grantaire had the vague notion that Enjolras’ eyes were the precise color of a storming sea before Samson cleared his throat behind him, and he realized that he still hadn’t answered the question. “G-Grantaire, Your Lordship,” he said.
“Great. I’ll be changing for dinner then. I’m sure Samson will show you where my room is.” He sat down next to his mother and returned his attention to his letters. Grantaire didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed, but did find that he could breathe more easily.
“You may go, Grantaire,” Lady Enjolras said, and Grantaire reluctantly left the room.
“That’s Enjolras?” he whispered to Samson when they were back in the corridor.
Samson frowned. “Lord Enjolras, Grantaire, and yes, that was His Lordship.”
“But he’s so—“
“It is not up to you to determine what Lord Enjolras is. It is up to you to serve him. Now, please go and put your things in your room and then I have some silver for you to polish.”
When Grantaire had put his bag into his closet of a room, he returned to the servant’s hall where Samson had laid out a table full of silver for him to polish. Eponine, who was on her knees scrubbing the floor, grinned at him. “First day and already demoted to footman, huh?”
“Temporarily,” he said, sitting down and pulling an elaborate silver candlestick towards him. “His Lordship he’s—“ He trailed off, rubbing polish into the silver and trying to think of a word to describe just what Enjolras was.
Eponine beat him to it. “Young isn’t he?” She moved one of the chairs to clean under it and lowered her voice. “He’s only twenty-one. Been at school till recently, but His Lordship, young Lord Enjolras’ father up and died and Lord Enjolras had to do his duty by his mother and come back to manage the estate. Move over.” Grantaire shifted his chair and she dipped her cloth in the bucket and started on the floor again. “Rumor has it though that he didn’t want to come back. He was involved with some sort of student organization planning on fixing it for the lower class or something.” She sighed and sat back on her knees. “Like that’ll ever happen.”
Her eyes darkened for a moment, but then she smiled again and continued her scrubbing. “Anyway, he brought a few of them to stay for a week after he came home. I thought old Samson was going to go crazy. There was one, wouldn’t let us call him sir or lord or anything. Flat out refused to answer if we did. He came in when I was lighting the fire and when I apologized for letting him see me, he wouldn’t hear of it. Said the only thing I should apologize for was calling him sir. Told me to call him Courfeyrac just like his friends did.” She twisted her rag over the bucket and laughed. “Crazy, the lot of them.”
Another maid came in and sat at the table, throwing her legs up on another chair. She was pretty and fair, and she smiled a twisted mischievous smile at Grantaire. “You must be the new valet.” She pulled a pin cushion from her apron pocket and began to stitch a cloth rose back onto one of Lady Enjolras’ hats. “You used to work for the Montparnasse’s right?”
Eponine knocked over her bucket and ran to get a mop.
“Yes, I worked for the family for five years.”
“Why’d’you leave then?” she asked.
Eponine paused her mopping and looked at him curiously.
“Well…” The bell rang from Enjolras’ room. “That story will have to wait for later. That will be His Lordship wanting dressing.”
“Ooh,” Irma cooed swinging her feet down. “I’d like to trade you for that job.”
“You’d better not let Mr. Samson hear you talking like that,” Eponine said.
“What? He’s pretty. Not like you Grantaire.” She dropped her sewing. “Oh, no. I’m sorry Grantaire. Mrs. Byrd always says I have a wicked tongue, but I just talk without thinking. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Grantaire forced a smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’m used to it.”
Upstairs, Enjolras moved reluctantly from the desk in the corner of his room to the mirror when Grantaire came in. “Will you remind me after dinner that I have a letter to send?”
“Yes, my lord.” Grantaire laid out his dinner jacket while Enjolras took off his tie.
“It really does waste time all this changing and dining.” Enjolras fumbled with his cufflinks and Grantaire steadied his arms and removed them for him. “I never had a valet at university, and I did just fine.” He looked up at Grantaire again. “Not that you have to worry about your job. I don’t approve of the whole thing all this ‘my lord-ing’ when you’re just as good as I am and there are people starving in the streets. Still, one cannot deny a man work for the sake of principle.”
Grantaire smiled and helped Enjolras into his dinner jacket.
“You probably think I’m horribly pretentious.”
“No, my lord.” Grantaire brushed some dust off Enjolras’ shoulder.
“I’ll tell you a secret. I didn’t even come up with that on my own. When father died, I was hell-bent on coming back here and telling Mother that if I had to run the place, I’d run it my way. Sans valet as it were and a lot of other staff too. But my friend Combeferre talked me down. He’s right. He’s always right.”
“I’m so sorry, my lord.”
Enjolras looked up from buttoning his sleeves. “For what?”
“Your father’s passing, my lord.”
“Oh,” Enjolras straightened his collar in the mirror. “Don’t be. I’m not.”
“My lord?”
“Oh, that’s not to say I wasn’t grateful or that I don’t regret his death. I do.” The hard marble set to his face loosened a bit. “Mother was a mess for weeks afterwards. It’s just that I barely knew him. He was away when I was very young, and when I was older I went away to boarding school and then to university. I know Samson better than I knew Father.” He glanced at the door. “No gong yet. What about you, Grantaire? What did your father do?”
“My father?” Grantaire folded Enjolras’ day clothes over his arm. “He was a tailor, my Lord.”
“A tailor.” Enjolras sat on the bed, clearly, Grantaire observed, without a thought for the wrinkles Grantaire had just smoothed out of his jacket. “And didn’t you want to be a tailor too?”
None of the Montparnasses had ever asked about what Grantaire wanted. Well, young Mr. Montparnasse might have, but only if he wanted something particularly vicious in return. “My father took up the boy next door as an apprentice. He didn’t want me.” Grantaire’s fist tightened on the shirt he had slung over his arm, and he mentally kicked himself. That would have to be ironed out before morning.
“Why didn’t he want you? Surely it would be better to have his son as successor.”
“You would think so, my Lord. And I fancied the job for a while. I was even good at parts of it. I could tell quality silk from inferior with my eyes closed, but well there’s a lot of measuring and calculating in tailoring isn’t there? And I could never get the hang of it. All those strings of numbers meant nothing to me. My father detested me because I was terrible at mathematics.” He realized suddenly that he had balled the shirt into his fist and that Enjolras’ eyes were looking at him with a softness unwarranted towards a valet. He forced a laugh. “It’s ridiculous isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so.” Enjolras’ voice was so soft that Grantaire barely heard him. He opened his mouth as though he would say something more, but the dinner gong rang.
Released, Grantaire fled to the servants’ hall, and even as Mrs. Byrd handed him a silver tureen, he couldn’t dispel the image of Enjolras sitting on his bed and looking at him like he cared.