The E-Rank Husband

Chapter Two: The Card He Gave Back

Wyatt was fourteen when he found a way out of the Lowside lying in a gutter, and he gave it back.

It was raining that night, the cold, slanting kind that soaked straight through a coat. He had Elsie on his back because her shoes had split, and a cut over one eye from the bottle their father threw at the door when Wyatt carried her out of the flat. They had nowhere to go, so they went where E-rank children always went, to the steps of the Rank Office, where the lights stayed on all night and the guards were too bored to move you along.

The card was lying face up in the gutter outside, gold under the streetlamp. A-rank. Wyatt picked it up and stood there with rain running off his chin, understanding exactly what he was holding. That card could buy them food. It could get Elsie seen by a real doctor for the cough she'd had since winter. It could open the door of any building in Highmoor, and nobody would ask the boy holding it where he'd come from.

The name on it was Winifred Whitcombe.

He walked it back to her. It took two hours to cross the city with Elsie asleep on his shoulders, and when the guard at the Whitcombe gates tried to chase him off, Wyatt refused to hand the card to anyone but its owner. The old woman came down herself in a dressing gown. She turned the card over in her fingers and looked at him for a long time.

"You could have used this," she said.

"It isn't mine."

She took them both in that night. Wyatt got a servant's job in the kitchens and a bed in the staff quarters. Elsie got a doctor, new shoes and a place at a proper school, the kind E-rank children only ever saw from the outside. For years that was all it was, and Wyatt would have been grateful for it the rest of his life.

Five years ago, Winifred called him into her study after midnight and locked the door.

"Nobody in this family knows what I'm about to tell you," she said. "After tonight, you will."

She was Rank Zero. The founders of Highmoor had created the seat to keep the Seven Houses honest, one person whose name nobody knew, who could raise or strip any rank in the city with a single sealed order. The Houses feared it because they could never find it. Winifred had held it for years, hiding inside one of the very families it was meant to watch.

"I've watched you since the night you brought my card back," she said. "I want you to have it."

He laughed at first. Then he saw her face and stopped.

"There are two conditions," she said. "You'll keep living as an E-rank. You'll eat in the kitchen and take the orders and the insults, so you never forget what a rank does to a person. The day you forget that, you're no better than the people you're meant to stop."

"And the second?"

"You'll marry Verity." She raised a hand before he could argue. "This family will use her the moment I'm gone. I need someone inside it who will always stand between her and the rest of them."

Verity had married the servant because her grandmother asked her to. She told him so on their wedding night, sitting on the far edge of a bed neither of them wanted to share, polite and cold and honest. Somewhere along the way, that changed. Wyatt couldn't have named the day. He only knew that she started waiting up for him, then started standing beside him at dinners where nobody else would, and one night she reached across the dark and took his hand as if she'd been doing it for years.

Now Winifred lay upstairs in a coma under Dr. Ashe's care, and with the old woman silent, Humphrey Whitcombe ran the House.

The news broke before dawn. Wyatt watched it on the small screen in the kitchen while the cooks whispered around him. The Council of Seven Houses had met in emergency session, and the head of House Varley had stood in the chamber and demanded that Rank Zero be unmasked.

"No hidden seat should be allowed to punish a Varley heir over a servant," he said, and the chamber applauded.

Wyatt switched the screen off and went back to slicing bread. His hands were steady. They had to be.

At breakfast he stood against the dining room wall where the servants stood. The whole family was there, aunts and cousins and Verity at her father's left, pale from a night at her grandmother's bedside. Humphrey waited until everyone had been served. Then he set down his cup.

"House Varley is prepared to forgive last night," he said. "On one condition. Verity will end her marriage to the servant and marry Peregrine Varley before the end of the month."

Nobody spoke. One of the cousins smiled into her toast.

Verity stood up. "No."

"This isn't a request."

"Then you'll have to drag me to the wedding," she said, loud enough for every person at the table to hear. "I have a husband. Grandmother chose him, and so did I."

Humphrey didn't raise his voice. He looked past her at Wyatt and lifted two fingers, and the house guards came off the wall.

They took Wyatt by the arms and marched him through the hall, past the portraits and the staring staff, and out through the front gates. One of them shoved him hard enough that he went down on the wet pavement. The gates closed behind him. Through the bars he could see Verity at the dining room window, her father's hand clamped around her wrist.

He could have ended it right there. One message, one sealed order, and Humphrey Whitcombe would be E-rank by lunch. But the Varleys were hunting for Zero now, and the first person they would look at was the servant who had been humiliated minutes before the order came.

Wyatt got up and walked to the Lowside.

The flat was one room above a laundry, the only thing in Highmoor he paid for himself. Humphrey had refused to keep a servant's sister under his roof after the wedding, so Wyatt kept the flat for Elsie, a door that would always be hers. He climbed the stairs two at a time, already reaching for his key.

He didn't need it. The door was standing open.

Elsie's school bag lay on the floor where it had been dropped, its strap torn, her books spilled across the boards. The room was silent. On the table, squared neatly in the middle as if someone wanted to be sure he saw it, lay a single stamped document.

ELSIE LOWRY, it read across the top. PROXY CONTRACT.

Every E-rank family in the Lowside knew those two words. None of them ever said them out loud.