Black Heart Chapter Eleven

For a little while after Malicia woke following the fight that could be thinly veiled as either chastisement or training she wondered if Jack had simply made up the mention of the lady Ravensworth's pregnancy. It did not take long to conclude that he hadn't, though. The position of head butler left him in a position to be more aware of the private matters of the elder Ravensworths, and while there were a number of petty things that she would not put past the man?

The fact of the matter was that he had intended the revelation to hurt. It would have hurt, if Malicia's focus was on earning parental love and approval. With that being the case, there was no point to it being a lie, temporary and fleeting. A lie about the older woman being pregnant was going to be easily proven false, after all, if months passed and her belly remained trim and narrow. At that point, there was no reason to place any faith at all in Jack's words, making the sense of satisfaction he might experience equally fleeting as he would never be able to get the response he wanted again afterwards.

Sure enough, a close look revealed that the lady's midsection was beginning to swell outward over the following weeks.

... Malicia wasn't certain how she was supposed to feel about that. Oh, she knew how she would feel if she had come into this situation with, and maintained, the hope of being acknowledged as a daughter of the family and not just a peasant girl that had been picked up and given a name because it was convenient. Perhaps, even with emotions removed from the situation, she should still feel that way. Upset. Vaguely offended. Desperate to prove herself, to show that there was no need for the Ravensworths to have another child.

But.

... That wasn't the case. Malicia had come into this arrangement with a clearer head than that, could count the scant few times that she had actually spoken with either of the Ravensworth parents outside of the strictly required 'Hello, how are you, I am doing well, have a lovely day' formulaic polite social conversations where nothing was really said on one hand. It wasn't as though she had seen them casually chatting with their own children that often either, but Malicia was well aware of the fact that the sort of warm parenting that she had seen from the outside would not be found here either.

Better to focus on the future, on establishing herself in the academy and building a foundation for the life afterward. With or without the surname playing a factor.

With that being said, Madame Ravensworth was ever more certainly pregnant. That came with certain changes and preparations around the household, to make ready for the presence of an infant. Jack the head butler had much less time available to focus on the younger generation in the wake of that advancing pregnancy, which left Adrian somewhat sullen as engagements with monsters were replaced with melee against the guards utilizing blunted training weapons or weighted sticks instead of live steel. This left less room for injury, so naturally there was less requirement for Malicia to be close at hand through the training as well... any bruises or scrapes could be brought to her afterward.

She wasn't sure that she liked how it put her at arms length from the training engagements, but she supposed that it was nice to not have Jack effectively constantly looming over her shoulders to see if she was getting more physical than was seemly for  healer. To be honest, she was finding herself with more free time between lessons and little enough to fill that time with... a situation that was annoying enough on its own, to be pushed to the side and disregarded for the duration, even without the accentuating edge of a fear of being replaced to poison the thoughts she might have while left to her own devices.

Rather more importantly, the lady Ravensworth was experiencing a not particularly uncommon form of jitters with her pregnancy. It must have bothered her that neither of the sons of her blood had been suited to keep up the Academy tradition of one being a healer, because she seemed to have fixated on, well, fixing that. If not before she had become pregnant, then certainly once she had and it had begun to be clear that the child was likely to be healthily brought to term even without the many health tonics and specialty assistants that the Ravensworth coffers could afford.

There was no actual, generally available way to determine what a child's Class would be before it was born, though people liked to believe that there were some methods to predict such things, and those who were willing to buy into the belief would go quite a way to excuse the inaccuracies in their predictions as they pointed to the times when they did guess correctly. If there was someone who got it right every time? They either didn't advertise it at all, or they were a royal secret of some kind.

Similarly, there was no real way to weight the odds of a child being born to one class or another. If there was, then it was purely up to things that happened to the parents before a child was conceived, or their heritage changing the odds in little ways that couldn't really be counted upon. But nobody really liked to hear that, that there was nothing to be done except wait and see what their child's Class was and that they would have to deal with it regardless.

People wanted to be able to play a role in things, to have an effect on the result, however small or tenuous. They wanted to know that they could do something, and that there would be at least a very small chance of it changing the results rather than none at all.

They especially didn't like how expensive it was to potentially change a class for a child once they knew what it was. So when there was a need and a hope, it was often considered better to put smaller amounts of money towards gambles that probably didn't do anything at all. Purchase potions they didn't need and various magical trinkets that served no practical purpose so that they could drink them and sleep in a room full of humming nonsense gewgaws in the hope of giving birth to a wizard or wizardly-adjacent child. Or, perhaps, frequently visit the training grounds and listen to an instructor barking orders at sweating and collapsing cadets if they hoped for a child that embraced or at least approached some form of knighthood.

So, given that the Ravensworths were hoping for a healer child... still, which was something that would have stung quite a bit if Malicia had been banking on becoming the healer child that they wanted to uphold the tradition... and that the best healers were typically white mages or some description of priest, both of which were heavily related to the church? The mistress of the household rapidly came down with a sudden attack of religion.

The church had never played a significant role in the lives of the Ravensworth family, but with the mistress of the house's pregnancy developing, it became something akin to an unusual craving. There were frequent trips out to the church that usually only serviced the commoners of this region, with a special carriage designed specifically for the purpose that had more than enough room for all the family, tenuous part of it that Malicia might be.

The church was more than eager to accept the charitable donations offered by the Ravensworth family, and quick to ensure the mistress that sufficient shows of piety and faith to the Light would absolutely, most certainly result in a child blessed with the traits that she desired.

And oho, well done there. He had made it a matter that was judged by a vague and impersonal divine figure. Thus, if the lady Ravensworth poured money out into the church coffers in a river of gold and nothing happened, well, then it wasn't his fault at all. It was a matter of her devotion and offerings still being insufficient. In other words, if she impoverished herself hoping for a specific result and didn't achieve it, then it wasn't his fault for pushing her on and taking advantage of an expecting mother's hopes, it was her own for not doing enough to demonstrate her piety.

... Malicia found herself less than impressed with the grasping nature of this local priest, though it was clear that the master of the household was less taken in by the man's blatant manipulation. If the child was born a healer then Malicia supposed that he would leave things lie. If they were not, however, Malicia imagined that this priest might see some pressure and misfortune to follow in retaliation for gambling on his assurances and failing.

One thing that he consistently brought up, however, was the suggestion of a pilgrimage to one of the greater cathedrals in Central, where a higher official in the church could perform rites of sanctification and advise upon rituals that he once more assured her would be most efficacious.

Now, the orphanage that Malicia had grown up in had received some amount of church assistance to operate. But it was not solely a church-operated affair. They would occasionally provide gifts of money or food, as an open demonstration that they were good people that should be respected for their generosity. They weren't the only ones who made such donations, however, as they were joined in making themselves known as supporting the poor little orphans by nobles such as the Ravensworths, people who had grown up in the orphanage and wanted to help support it now that they were working, often as mercenaries or apprentices of some kind, or simply by wealthy commoners who wanted to make a statement that they were like unto the noble classes and the generous church officials.

Mostly, however, the orphanage was supported by small jobs performed by the orphans, running messages and fixing little things in exchange for pocket money and small amounts of food from townsfolk who lived nearby and who didn't make a big showing of it when they delivered supplies or money.

So while Malicia had been prepared to have some amount of respect for the church as an organization, it wasn't as much as it could have been if they had been the sole source of support for the orphanage and all its inhabitants. Her prior experience with them had said that they were probably decent enough people, of course, even if they wanted to be openly acknowledged for their generosity. People didn't do things for free, after all, and praise was an easy enough price to pay in exchange for charity and gifts. Even if they wanted it to be known and for everyone to respect that they were giving things away, to reinforce their social position and power... they were still giving them away to people in need of their money and food, so wasn't that fine in the end?

The recent encounters with the town priest and his eagerness to convince the lady Ravensworth to give the church ever more money, and to commit to a somewhat expensive pilgrimage so that they could give even more extensive donations to a more important church official? They cast something of a pall over her prior understanding of the church as an organization.

All the same, this was just one person. It was entirely possible that he was just a bad apple, quietly sent off to a somewhat distant and relatively isolated position where his covetous inclinations couldn't spoil the bunch.

With the preparations for a family pilgrimage towards the Central regions of the empire, Malicia supposed she would have the time to see for herself.