Charlotte de Sauve's Ledger

No one at court knew Charlotte kept accounts of her own kind, separate from the household ledgers her steward managed. She kept hers in her head, updated after every assignment the queen mother never named outright but always made unmistakably clear.

Entry, the Vidame de Chartres. Cost: nothing worth recording. Pleasant enough company, entirely unremarkable feeling on my part. Objective achieved within six weeks. Filed and closed.

Entry, M. de Cossé. Cost: an evening's true boredom, easily endured. A man who mistook my attention for something rarer than it was. No lasting complication.

Most entries read like these: a man managed, information extracted, the queen mother's purposes served, Charlotte's own feelings entirely uninvolved in the transaction. She had learned early that this was the easy version of her work, and she had assumed, in her first years of service, that it was the only version there was.

Entry, Henri of Navarre. Cost: considerably more than anticipated. His wit outpaces most men who've tried to flatter me at this court, and I find myself, on several occasions now, forgetting for entire minutes at a time that I am here to manage him rather than to enjoy him. This entry remains open. I do not know yet what it will finally cost, only that the earlier entries never required this much honesty from me even in private.

She had not expected Navarre to complicate the ledger. Most assignments arrived pre-costed, in her own estimation, before she'd even begun. She could generally tell within an evening whether a man would matter to her or simply pass through her books as another closed line. Navarre had not announced himself as an exception. He had simply, across several conversations, made her laugh in a register she couldn't perform convincingly even when she tried, which told her, more clearly than any deliberate feeling could have, that something in this particular entry had gotten away from her careful accounting.

Marginal note, undated. The question I keep returning to is not whether this work is worth doing. I settled that years ago, and I still believe I chose the most survivable use of the little the court allowed a woman in my position to choose from. The question is what the ledger itself has done to me. How many real feelings have I logged, managed, and closed as though they were merely another line of business, until I'm no longer certain, encountering an actual feeling, whether I recognize it as such or simply reach for the ledger out of habit.

She never resolved that marginal note, in all her years at court. She kept the ledger anyway, entry after entry, because the alternative, abandoning the one skill that had ever purchased her any security at all, was no alternative a woman in her position was seriously permitted to consider. She closed the book each night the way she always had, uncertain, more nights than she'd have admitted to anyone, whether the woman doing the closing and the woman doing the feeling were still, in any meaningful sense, the same person.