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It had been a very peculiar few years. She’d expected a fairly quiet life, marrying a shopkeeper, and for a long time she’d had one. Doing the accounts, helping in the shop, cooking and housework in exchange for all the standard trappings of middle class respectability. Pseudopolis might be past it’s golden age, and the haberdashers was never a roaring success, but it was a home and a livelihood and provided all the hat ribbons a sensible and economical woman could ever want. Latterly the wine merchant’s bills had begun to cause problems, but she and Charlie had rattled along together well enough.
And then, that strange winter, her Charlie had gone missing. There’d been no note, no letters, no sign of him at all. She’d reported it to the Watch of course, but they’d done nothing except for asking some extremely leading questions about the financial state of the shop and those two charges of Charlie’s for drunk and disorderly conduct the previous year. Her responses had been sniffy. She hadn’t tried to contact them again.
Charlie had been missing for several weeks when the message arrived, by the clacks of all things. There had been mention of a kidnapping (though why anyone would think they could have afforded ransom with the shop barely turning a profit, and indeed why no demand had ever been made, continued to puzzle her), and new contacts, and a job offer, and suddenly she was selling up the shop and the draughty old house on Pike Street and moving herself and the children to Ankh Morpork, to go and join Charlie in the city.
It wasn’t until the startled reactions of her new neighbours that she realised that the handful of etchings she’d seen back in Pseudopolis had never done justice to just how much her Charlie looked like the Patrician. It wasn’t until she was summoned to the palace for a ‘quick chat’ with a clerk about the expectations of confidentiality which came with Charlie’s new role that she realised just how uncanny the resemblance really was. When they were called through to a second room, and then a third, and then the man was there, tall and severe despite his obvious reliance on his cane. When Charlie, at her side, stood straighter and looked at the man, the Patrician, with a level of focus she’d not seen from him since before the drink, and began to mirror his facial expressions. She had managed to stop herself from visibly shuddering, but the kindly way the little secretary offered her a cup of tea as he led her from the room made her think she had perhaps not hidden her reaction very well.
Life was better now. Ankh Morpork was a strange city, very different to Pseudopolis: a grand old lady and a thief and a bright young thing bursting with innovation all rolled into one. It wasn’t home, not yet anyway. But she had made friends here, and Charlie’s work with the palace paid more than well enough for a nice house in a nice part of town, and opportunities for the children, and new hats for every season should she want them, instead of just offcuts of ribbon. She tried not to think too much about Charlie’s palace work. The acting was much easier to discuss with her new friends anyway. But their rising social status meant that, from time to time, she would see the Patrician. He was unfailing polite every time, although always still frighteningly severe. She was learning to deal with the deeply disconcerting feeling of seeing the wrong expressions on her husband’s face from across a crowded ballroom. And the little secretary who seemed to accompany the Patrician everywhere was always very kind to her. In an odd way, he seemed to understand.