Villiam believed that his appetite was nothing but a physical symptom of his greatness. He needed more because he required more, because he deserved more, because he was more. Food was not the only thing that he could not get enough of. He needed company at every moment of the day. His team of servants was trained to be placid and witty. Villiam was not the kind of lord to care much about female beauty. The servant girls all cut their blond hair short and wore caps. No, Villiam wanted to be entertained, cajoled, mystified. He often had visitors to the manor, people from as far as Iskria and Torqix, who did magic tricks like pulling quail out of jewelry boxes or smoking intoxicating herbs and exhaling apparitions, or so they said. Villiam’s favorite daily activity was to watch people do impressions of him. This was a requirement of the servants, to fill any moment of idleness, and so they practiced as they cooked and cleaned, working continuously to come up with language and gestures, the best new joke about Villiam’s character and physical countenance. It was not that Villiam enjoyed humiliation, but that he enjoyed the humiliation of others. Father Barnabas supported him unquestioningly, did impressions, sang songs, told stories, anything to make Villiam laugh or cry. And Villiam did cry. He was not a stony lord. He was sensitive, so much so that a sad tale could throw the whole estate under the shadow of Villiam’s sorrow. Everyone would work tirelessly to cheer him up. When Villiam suffered from fear or insecurity, the priest summoned nuns from the convent at the top of the hill to demonstrate miracles.
Villiam’s days had a casual discipline to them. He woke in time for lunch—a feast—then played games all afternoon, barely disturbed by an occasional meeting with Erno or Klarek. In the evenings, he was bathed and dressed for dinner. He liked to look good. Yesterday he had taken a tour of the grounds by carriage. Father Barnabas came along so they could have a private chat about the state of the village. Villiam was fond of the priest. Father Barnabas had a room at the manor and stayed there most nights. The two men often gossiped about what the priest had heard in his Saturday confessional. Yesterday, on the carriage excursion, Father Barnabas had said that the families of those slain by the Easter bandits were refusing to work in the fields until the next Sabbath. Luka, the horseman, could hear them over the clomp of the hooves.
‘Let them grieve, I think,’ the priest advised.
‘One day is enough,’ Villiam said. ‘Tell them tomorrow to get back to work.’
The priest nodded. ‘And how is your son today?’ he asked. ‘I saw him walking through the pasture this afternoon. Is he still feeling restless?’
‘Restless and rude,’ Villiam yawned. ‘Jacob is very boring.’
Villiam wasn’t very fond of Jacob. The boy was unwilling to be wowed by his father’s eccentricities. He called his father ‘a spoiled brat’ and refused to visit with any girls that Villiam invited from nearby provinces to entertain the boy. Villiam was also a little frightened of Jacob. He was larger and stronger than Villiam. They couldn’t have been more different. Jacob liked hunting, was built more like a servant than a lord. His mother worshipped him, and Villiam resented that. Dibra was not like her husband. She was perfectly content to spend her days riding her horse with Luka. Her quarters were on the opposite side of the manor from Villiam’s. Husband and wife met once a day for lunch and barely spoke to one another. Villiam had a general distaste for the female voice. All the singers who traveled from afar to perform for Villiam were male.
‘Do the trick with your eyes again, Klarek,’ Villiam had requested one last time that evening, the words drowsy with wine. The carriage tour had tired him out.
Villiam had fallen asleep and dreamt of Klarek’s mouth forming words that floated like puffs of smoke across the fire, lips dripping of wine and melted suet. He woke up in the morning to Jacob’s servant, Lispeth, poking him in the shoulder, her finger digging into the thin flesh covering his scapula. He felt it and went back to sleep. But she kept pressing, and the pressure sent a pain through a nerve down to Villiam’s foot and up to his head, and he rose with a cry and an immediate request for suet dumplings.
‘What have you brought me and why am I awake?’
‘Something horrible has happened, my lord.’
‘What, no more suet? Go get some and wake me later.’
‘No, not that. Please, come down and see.’
The girl was crying, which Villiam found moving.
‘You’re crying, poor girl.’
‘Yes.’