Part 1: The New Help
In the first week of March five separate and unrelated disasters befell your family. They all occurred at your grand ducal estate in the foothills of the Alps above the capital and only city in your tiny enclave of the Grand Duchy of Lichtenbourg, and each time they involved 'the help'.
The first event and the one which seemed to precipitate a further avalanche of bad-luck was when the steward, a dangerous and imposing man who up until now had bullied both the rest of the staff and the ducal family itself, broke a priceless Qing vase which had been in your family for generations. Despite protesting his innocence, his guilt was clear - and your mother, a similarly dangerous and imposing individual herself, was forced to terminate his employment, although he was provided with a very cold reference.
The disasters continued. The next day your gardener, usually so studiously careful with his maintenance of the grounds, was found to have cut off the heads of your father the Duke's favourite Juliet roses. His sympathy with the pro-independence rebels in your South American colony of Mirandia had always been common knowledge and he had once been heard to muttered certain treasonous remarks under his breath after he was scolded by your father for some less-than-stellar topiary work on the grand driveway's flamingos. And so the gardener was given his marching orders.
The next event affected you personally, but it was less a disaster and more a stroke of good fortune. French has never been your best subject, and in an attempt to remove your thick Lichtenbourger accent and replace it with the proper Académie française pronunciation, your parents had hired a tutor. But one day he missed your scheduled lesson and was discovered wandering the grounds, dead-drunk. You'd never much enjoyed his boring lessons, the miasma of old tobacco and musk floating around him and his readiness to slap your hands with the riding crop he inexplicably carried with him everywhere, and so you don't shed any tears when he, too, was sent on his way.
The subsequent disaster was the most dramatic and public by far - but thankfully the final one. The New Spring Ball. The cook, usually so fastidious in his selection of local ingredients, served foie gras well-past its use-by date. The resultant widespread gastro-intestinal distress and your parents' calamitous social embarrassment led to his swift termination.
Your mother the Duchess was livid by this stage and with her usual imperiousness she declared that since all the disasters have centred around male members of staff they would be replaced with women. Your father, with his readiness to acquiesce to your mother's opinions and an equally keen appreciation for feminine excellence, was not at all averse to the idea.
But it seemed that the usual supply of staff has dried up - an unheard-of situation - with only a single applicant for each vacant position. But as Fortune would have it the applicants were all women and all proved to have not only superb references but also impressive skills, although they did perhaps lack the sophistication your mother would have preferred.
Take the tall fiery-haired woman named Pyrrha who applied for the position of steward, for example. She was graceful and impeccably dressed and exuded, with her shock of red hair and her tall physique and her imposing but beautiful features, the aura of one with whom no nonsense would be tolerated. But during her interview, while she was enthusiastically explaining her philosophy of leadership to your mother, the bright technicolour inking of a tattoo slipped from beneath one elegantly laced cuff.
The gardener, too - Maki was her name - a slim, tanned girl of Japanese ancestry with dark eyes and the hint of dark roots in her short platinum-white hair - she was a diamond, but certainly a rough one. Her language gave - how did your mother put it? - certain suspicions of a habitual saltiness just barely kept under check. But she greatly impressed your father with her excellent topiary skills - her test flamingo was, he said, the very model of the national bird's nobility and grace - and, since plants are famously inured to rough sailor-talk, she would, your father decided, do very well indeed.
Now, the new head chef, Chloe! Her test souffle, that notorious dish which has been the nemesis of cooks for hundreds of years, proved utterly delicious and her risotto was creamy and exquisite. You and your father were given the job of sample her food - your mother having always been more concerned with how impressive the dishes the kitchen produced looked than how they tasted - and it put everything the previous chef cooked to shame. But the chef herself! Blonde and pretty and overgenerously voluptuous in the hips, derrière and bust, she proved to be also rather - well, 'hands-on' in her managerial style, especially with the young, attractive, male wait-staff. Her green eyes, large and liquid, were especially coquettish and as she left the interview she winked at you!
"Better not mention that to your mother," your father said with a sly wink of his own. But you both agreed that Chloe was a most excellent choice for the job.
Lastly, your new tutor. Lydia. The tallest and most mature of the new staff, of indefinite age - surely the less-gentle side of forty? - but with a timeless elegant beauty (pale skin, blue eyes, copper-auburn hair and exquisitely long legs), highlighted rather than hidden by her bookish half-rim glasses and her dark pants-suit. Your mother very much approved of her, as well - no doubt she saw reflected in Lydia a strength and intellectualism not unlike her own. Also, Mdm. Lydia's French - like her German and English and Latin and Greek and Romansk - proved to be parfait.
And so, with the addition of these four unusual women to the staff, the memory of the disasters quickly faded and the future looked as bright as the endless blue mountain skies of the Duchy itself.
***
You're late for your first lesson with Lydia - lateness had never really been an issue with your old tutor, since he'd always been far later than you had been - and when you finally arrive Mdm. Lydia fixes you with her sharp blue eyes, sighs a sigh of disappointment which leaves you squirming in guilt - and then makes you write a thousand-word composition in French on the importance of punctuality for a future duke.
After you hand it to her, she sweeps a red pen from her blouse pocket and flicks it up and down over your work.
"Now really, your excellency - did your prior tutor teach you nothing? It appears as though you can barely conjugate any of the irregular verbs correctly. And your misuse of the passé composé!" Again that sigh. "However..." She lifts her blue eyes over her glasses and smiles, a sudden, brilliant smile that melts the frostiness of her eyes and makes your heart skip a beat, so pretty and unexpected is the sight. "Your style is not at all inelegant. We can work with this, no?" And then she is all business again and has you reciting, conjugating and declining up and down until you're perfect.
Under the new staff your home prospers as much as your French does. The grounds are impeccable, even if Maki the gardener is sometimes spotted smoking a cigar behind the tool-shed and on occasion heard under her breath to call dandelions which refuse to be pulled out 'm---f--ers' and branches just out of reach of pruning 'total ass--s'.
"Well, at least she's trying to be discrete," you father says.
But you're soon given reason to doubt this 'discretion' of Maki's. A few days later you're taking your afternoon constitutional in the mansion's expansive wisteria gardens. The sweet fragrance hangs thick in the air amid the shady trellises and your mind wanders to Lydia, to that elegant perfume which wafts from her whenever she leans over you to check your work. But your reverie is suddenly broken by a sharp and pungent scent that slits through the flowers' perfume like a knife, replacing your beautiful vision of Lydia with a horrible flashback to your tobacco-smoke-steeped previous tutor. You shudder and vaguely through your tearing eyes you discern the shape of Maki leaning against the little gardener's shed. Her face is shaded but a single red flicker deepens and then a cloud of smoke spills away from her. You receive it full in the face and start coughing.
"Oh," says Maki, her cigar in her fingers as she steps out of the shade. "It's you, 'your excellency'. Sorry."
The pause between her greeting and your title is a tenth of a heartbeat and punctuated by the replacement of her cigar in her mouth, and you feel deep disrespect lurking beneath it. But you have no time to get annoyed - Maki is suddenly sprinting at you, swift as a flickering shadow, a hunting knife appearing in her hand. She stabs it towards your face and you yelp in terror, but the blade passes half an inch from your ear.
Shocked, you watch as Maki fastidiously wipes the knife on her shorts then lifts her gaze to yours. Her dark eyes flicker to your feet and when you look down you stumble back in alarm. For lying on the grass, cut in half yet still buzzing malevolently, is a hawk-wasp - two inches long with a stinger half that again, the most infamous venomous insect in all of Lichtenbourg.
Maki chuckles behind her cigar. "My knife-work give you a bit of a scare, huh? Sorry. But it's better than getting stung by one of those bad-boys."
It definitely is. You remember the size your cousin's head swelled after he'd been stung by one at a garden party and you shudder.
Maki walks to you and plants a booted foot straight down on the hawk-wasp, silencing its buzzing forever. Then she stands there, looking you up and down.
She's taller than you, bronze-skinned where her shorts and top don't cover her skin, which is an awful lot of it, you think. And even through the lingering haze of cigar smoke you can smell the sharp saltiness of her perspiration.
Maki fixes you with her dark eyes. "Hey, since you owe me one for saving your ass, let's not be talking about my little smoko-break to mum and dad, right?"
You nod. Her strong animal scent is all you can think of and you don't even notice her disrespectful reference to your parents.
"Alright then!" She stretches her arms up and grunts and you notice as her top lifts up that not every part of her is tanned - in fact, her stomach, with its charming belly-button, is pale, the colour of snow on gold. "F-k!! It really is hot as balls today, ain't it?"
You're still looking when you feel her eyes on you and you look up to see her smirking.
"Heh. Caught you looking, little duke. Or is it dukeling?" She takes a drag of her cigar. "Maybe 'duckling' suits you better, since you're so f-king small and cute. What do you think?"
Maki leaves you no chance to reply, stubbing out her cigar against the shed and folding her knife closed. "Well, those m---f--king dandelions aren't going to dig themselves out, are they? Ciao."
And with that you're left staring at her as she walks away, whistling.
Small and cute? Duckling?
