She has such a deeply complicated and multi-layered family structure, and he might not have remembered this one minuscule detail of a name sprinkled amongst the many, except that Stephen has a particular investment in memorising every last piece of lore he can extract about Gwenaëlle Baudin, once Vauquelin.
Lady Decima was my lord’s mistress, I don’t count it so much—
His head practically whips around, very unsubtle, and he takes a second about-take look at the departing lord before her hand drifts and presses his jaw back so he’s no longer distracted and tripping over his feet. With all of them masked, Stephen can’t see much of Roux across the room: there’s no lining the two of them side-by-side to compare the features, no chronicling the similarities as he’d done with the portrait in her foyer, no searching for her face in Marcellin Roux’s.
“Half?” he asks, his voice gone quieter. Orlesian court life was Dynasty out here. He can barely keep up sometimes.
no subject
Lady Decima was my lord’s mistress, I don’t count it so much—
His head practically whips around, very unsubtle, and he takes a second about-take look at the departing lord before her hand drifts and presses his jaw back so he’s no longer distracted and tripping over his feet. With all of them masked, Stephen can’t see much of Roux across the room: there’s no lining the two of them side-by-side to compare the features, no chronicling the similarities as he’d done with the portrait in her foyer, no searching for her face in Marcellin Roux’s.
“Half?” he asks, his voice gone quieter. Orlesian court life was Dynasty out here. He can barely keep up sometimes.