Once again stillness fell to the room. Stare blinked a few times, trying to comprehend fully what had just happened. Once again, for perhaps the tenth time now, Ventrua had come into the Elssmith manor that lay in the finer residential heart of Beinost, only to ask for her brother to essentially do the job of raising the Heysan Trading Estate back from the bankruptcy tht it had been left in. What that required was Vitruvion allowing Stare, his now accomplished steward after six months at the job, to work for Ventrua, and give all the accounting skills and resources that she had built up over the time. But Vitruvion would not budge. For him, and for Stare, the work needed was far too much, and would need a lot more than simple numberwork. It would need at least two weeks of accounting, then a further month of organisation and from that at least a year of intense negotiation and stress to get the business back to working order.
Something that neither Vitruvion nor Stare truly wanted to do. For one of their rare moments they had entirely agreed on the matter.
"Well," Vitruvion said, after a long many minutes of paper shuffling and pen scratching. After Ventrua had stormed out, Stare had simply just returned to the accounts. After all, they needed to be done. The week had actually been rather taxing on the household after Mrs Deerling, the excellent cook, had taken ill, and one of the gardeners had run off with a local butcher.
"What?" Stare grunted, her eyes boredly flickering over the book and sheets.
"I am saying, 'Well,'" Vitruvion replied, leaning over to where Ventrua had left the wine. Pausing, he took it to sniff the open top, then nodded and swigged the contents into his mouth, straight from the bottle. "As in, 'Well, that may have sorted that.'"
"You said I would initially look over the accounts for her?" Stare asked, feeling irritated then.
Vitruvion shrugged, in the most elegant manner possible as he leant back. "I can spare you for a single day, my dear. Just not for the year or so that she really wants you for."
"And you did not bother to ask me," she muttered, shifting aside a laundry list to find what had been bought by the maid at the supply store the previous day.
There was a pause. A single long silence that was filled with emptiness and a nagging feeling in her mind that Stare should look towards him. So she did. And saw that godly face looking back at hers, a single eyebrow arched over intense eyes. Suggestive. Obvious.
"Right, whatever," she grunted, looking back away, back to the book. "You never need to."
"Exactly," Vitruvion inclined his head, leaning back again. "Exactly."
