Archive of Our Own

Mr Fusspot, chairman of the Royal Bank and boggle-eyed lapdog, decided the most considerate thing to do in this moment would be licking Vetinari’s calves. 

Tears came suddenly and took him by surprise. Had anyone but Drumknott been in the room, he would have asked them to leave, but Drumknott demanded nothing, offered nothing unbidden and, if anything, made the room quieter than it would be if he were not there. 

So Vetinari cried and kissed his dog and asked to borrow a traveling cloak. One of the advantages of knowing an actor who looks just like you is that, if you change your clothes, no one can be quite sure it was really you they saw on the street. Of course he didn’t have to bother about that, but this wasn’t a journey he should make invisibly. That wouldn’t be right. 

In addition to working as a stoker, he enjoyed riding on trains, staring out the window and falling asleep more often than he would ever admit. 

As endless cabbage fields rolled by he thought about what he should say. What do you tell the woman who raised you on her last day in the world? 

He remembered how his aunt had picked him up after he had wandered out of the woods at the edge of Genua, eight years old, mosquito bites covered in mud, and asked if he could be a witch. She had said “Havelock, I think if you decide to do something, I don’t think anyone will be able to stop you.”

He remembered how, at the Wool Guild school in Brindisi, he’d been convinced he was going to be punished when he was discovered hurting himself with a carding comb because he thought it wasn’t fair to exist without pain when so much of the world was in agony. The groundskeeper had said “What are we going to do about him?” and the cook had said “Who are we going to report this to?” So, naturally he’d been convinced that he was going to be kicked out of school, publicly pilloried and then locked in a hospital. But he’d just been made to promise not to do it again and sent back to class. 

When Lady Roberta Meserole had discovered the injury, Havelock had expected her to be angry. He expected a lecture on how he should work toward making things better and not ever allow himself to be caught up in despair. That was the way of witches. Witches didn’t tell you not to worry about big things just because you were eight. He could have dealt with that. Her fussing over him and asking him to explain how he felt and why he had decided to do that was, by contrast, suffocating. He realized now how important that was. Lady Roberta had always countered his tendency to deny himself, to crowd his soft and ordinary humanity out of the way with work and ideals. 

She gave him space to feel his emotions and that had kept him who he was.

She was an incredible person. The stage manager of coups and revolutions, she had changed the fate of nations. She avoided credit and blame like Death and all of his friends avoided the passage of time. 

He didn’t have to say anything, Vetinari realized. Anything he had to say, she already knew. He just had to be there. 

He had known it was going to be soon. Dying in hospitals was becoming as commonplace as not-dying in hospitals.  

As the train pulled in to the Pseudopolis Terminus it began to rain. On the platform he saw someone in a familiar pink sweater. Friends intercept friends’ correspondence. 

As he walked down the aisle of the train he thought a few people noticed that the silver death’s head of his walking stick had been swapped out with a brass knob. After all he wasn’t pretending to be Charlie, he was merely incognito. 

Lady Margolotta put up an umbrella and Vetinari stepped underneath it. “Thank you,” he said. 

She squeezed his hand. “Do you think zey  vill let you stay overnight at ze hospital?”

Vetinari sniffed. “They can really push people around in a republic. It’s fairly alarming.”

“It’s vut she vanted.”

“I know, I know.”

-

Meanwhile, in Scoone Avenue, Sybil Vimes had covered the kitchen table in her old drawing things. Many of these were falling apart, especially the charcoal sticks and damp-riddled sketchbooks.

“What are you doing?” her husband asked. 

“Havelock’s aunt is dying.”

“Roberta? He didn’t tell me that.”

“Maybe if you checked in with him more often, or were home when he comes over he would tell you these things.”

“She wanted me to be Patrician... back... when I was in the past.”

“You thought about it.”

“Of course I thought about it.” Sam was getting annoyed with the way the world seemed to move around him without telling him what was happening. 

Sam had actually gone to tea with Lady Meserole and Vetinari in Pseudopolis. She’d offered him some kind of champagne with the alcohol removed and he wondered just how much Havelock wrote in his letters. She lived in the kind of small but extremely expensive house that was found in the center of large cities. The whole building seemed to be covered in lilac cloth and shed cat fur. 

Lady Meserole’s hair was grey with a few remaining dark strands, which was the way Havelock’s hair was going, unfairly slowly. She greeted both of them with a hug, which came as a surprise. 

Once inside, Havelock laced his fingers between Sam’s and occasionally leaned against his shoulder and there were no questions from Roberta, who had probably known longer than Havelock. Sam thought of his own mother and realized he would never know what she would think about him marrying Lady Ramkin and loving “that Assassin lad with the rats.” Havelock had been Patrician for six years when Sam’s mum died, but he was still “that Assassin lad with the rats.”

“We need to do something for him,” Sam said.

“Yes, I know, my dear,” Sybil said.

-

“It vill be strange,” Margolotta said as she and Vetinari rode the the elevator up to the third floor of the Brazeneck Hospital. 

“I walk with Death everyday, Margot.”

“Yes, but you’ve always had Bobbi. It vill feel like she’s still zair. Then you vill remember zat she’s not.”

Lord Vetinari looked down at their clasped hands. “Who will hold your hand when I am gone?”

“Someone. Zere’s alvays someone.”

Love enough to break a heart. The line came into Vetinari’s head as he stepped out of the elevator. It meant all kinds of love, and Time enough to hold a child didn’t have to be your own child, of course not. 

The corridor was mostly empty, which seemed wrong. It should have been full of relatives and friends and colleagues and past lovers and witches. This was Bobbi. The whole world should have been trying to stand around her deathbed but she had only told Havelock. Outside of the door of her room a janitor was mopping the floor. 

“Good afternoon,” he said.

The janitor looked up, “You’re the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, aren’t you?”

Vetinari nodded.

“Bet your hospital doesn’t have elevators.”

“To be honest with you, some of the stairwells in the Lady Sybil Free Hospital don’t actually go anywhere.”

“They had elevators put in to keep the chickens out.” 

 “These wouldn’t be the 70-foot chickens, would they?”

“Your aunt’s been telling everyone all about you and your guild system,” the janitor said, changing the subject. 

“I have no advice for bargaining with 70-foot chickens. You might want to ask the Postmaster, that’s his kind of thing.”

A nurse let Margolotta and Vetinari into Roberta’s room. She was sitting up in bed and wide awake. 

Vetinari frowned at this. “You’ve been refusing pain medication.” 

“Other people need it more than I do,” she said, a witch to the end.

“This is a hospital, Bobbi,” Havelock said. She had been Bobbi when he was very small and thought that Bobbi was a name for all aunts, just like Lorens Vetinari’s forename was ‘Dada.’

“You’re looking well,” Roberta said, and it was true. Havelock, though in a severe and thoughtful mood, looked in better health than he had in years. “It is good to not worry about...” her voice was becoming more strained and Havelock stepped forward to take away her pain. There was less of it then he expected. He spun it and balanced it over his shoulder. Having only briefly worked with wool, he thought of it like winding wool around a spindle. 

“Thank you,” Roberta said. 

“Who’s taking the cats?” 

“Rosie.”

Her absence hung in the air, unspoken. Had he made a mistake? Or had Rosie already been here? This wasn’t a place and time where it was up to Havelock to decide who knew what. He glanced at Margolotta. The vampire shrugged.

“My little boy,” Havelock pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed as his aunt said this,    and inclined his head as she stroked his hair “all that I ask of you is that you remember who you are and what you believe in. Keep paying attention. Keep doing better.” She pronounced this like a benediction. 

“For someone zat sees so much evil in ze vorld, your nephew sails by a true compass.  He vas raised vell.”

Vetinari and Margolotta sat up with the old woman all night. Eventually she fell asleep and as day broke she stopped breathing. 

Lady Meserole was a practical woman. The Igors would take what was useful and what was left would be cremated and placed in a crypt in Genua. Everyone was buried above ground in Genua because the city was below sea level and the river often burst its banks. There would be a funeral. 

Margolotta asked Havelock if he would wear deuil blanc like a Quirmian queen. Grief sat heavy on his chest, soft and cold. His head ached and he realized how long it had been since he’d drank water. He knew he would have trouble focusing on work the next few weeks. 

When he got back to his office there was a charcoal drawing on the desk of a man with a dog and a woman with a cat. He recognized his aunt’s dress as the one she had been wearing the night of Lord Winder’s death. It was signed “With deepest sympathy and love, Sybil & Sam Vimes.”