The Precedent - a story for Patreon Patrons

[aldersprig]

Two lawyers and a judge bent over the paperwork,nearly-identical frowns on their faces.
Outside, in the waiting room, a red-haired manwaited with all appearance of patience. He was wearing a slim goldencollar beneath the open-necked shirt of his expensive suit and a much less slimring on his left ring finger.

“Is it legal?” the left-hand lawyer frowned.

read on...

Comments

Whew

[thnidu]

Interesting, and rather intimidating (as the women reflect).

I don't know what the reason is,* but there are an awful lot of missing spaces in this story. Rather than pick them all out separately, I'm going to insert a "#" (the proofreader's mark for SPACE) wherever one is needed. Come to think of it, then you can do a global replace.

* Looks like it may have been typed in, or gone through, some app or interface that substituted linefeeds for all the spaces at the end of a line (by some measure), then through some other that deleted all the linefeeds.

There are some other things; I'll pick out those lines in the usual way.

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Two lawyers and a judge bent over the paperwork,#nearly-identical frowns on their faces.  
Outside, in the waiting room, a red-haired man#waited with all appearance of patience.  He was wearing a slim golden#collar beneath the open-necked shirt of his expensive suit and a much less slim#ring on his left ring finger.
“Is it legal?” the left-hand lawyer frowned. 
• She bore a familiar resemblance
→ family resemblance (or) familial resemblance
to both of the other women in the room,#but her hair was a slightly darker shade of red and it was beginning to be#touched with white at the temples.
“She dotted every i and crossed every t,” the#second lawyer — younger,
• her suit slightly-better tailored — opined.
→ slightly better (no hyphen)
“She has#it signed by all the right people.”
“They have no children?” the judge checked.
“An infant son.” The older lawyer dismissed the#child with a flick of her fingers; the other two women nodded along.
• “And the other heirs to the estate…?”  The#judge was slipping
→ flipping
through the folder.  It was thick, stacked with paper#documents someone had gone to the trouble to have signed by a judge. Several#judges, all over the country.
“Lady Seneida was the only surviving child of#her mother, who was the only surviving child of her mother, who was the only#surviving female child of her mother.”  
• The older lawyer seemed#put-out by this string of ill luck.  
→ put out
“Most of them didn’t make it past#infancy.”
“Ah,” the judge leaned forward.  “You said#only surviving female child.  There was a male heir of the#great-grandmother?”
“Lived to be a hundred and seventeen, never#fathered a child.”  The lawyer’s shoulders were slumped by this point. “Their tree has been roughly and unkindly pruned by the Goddess, till it#leads down to this man and this baby boy.”
“Ah, but then the Goddess’ disfavor…!”
“Nothing you could point to in a court of law,”#the young lawyer put in.  “It’s been tried, in her mother’s time — they#wanted to dissolve their tiny barony — but they could find no wrong birth, no#evidence of actual disfavor in the childhood deaths, nothing.  Their#family is just extremely accident-prone.”
“Pity our Lady Seneida didn’t bother to give#birth to a daughter before becoming so unlucky,” the older lawyer muttered. “Now we’re faced with… with this.”
• “Well, “ the judge mused,
→ “Well,” the judge mused,
“the good news, such#as it is, is that we won’t get stuck with making precedent here.  Or#rather, we will, but it’s such a tiny sliver of precedent that by the time#someone needs to call on it, our grandchildren will be long dead.”  She#gestured broadly at the paperwork.  “Signed and sealed beforehand. Blessed by two priestesses and a priest for good measure. No living#lineal relatives going back past the great-grandmother’s time. Hrrm… but the man’s#mother?”
“An American slave, your honor, and, what’s#more, dead, with no daughters.”
“If I were the sort to muse on the Goddess’#ways, I’d say she might have gone quite a long distance to make a point. If she has,” the judge sighed, “I suppose we’ll hear about it soon#enough.”  She stared at the papers before her for another minute.  To#either side of her, the lawyers said nothing.
• FInally,
→ Finally
she picked up her pen.  “Tell the#boy he can have the estate and the title in regency for his son until he comes#of age.  Tell him to keep quiet and not make a fuss.  And Elona?” The judge’s eyes went to the older lawyer, who froze.  “Tell the boy#to be very careful when the marriage offers start coming in — and he’d#best not dare settle for anything but a wedding band for that child.”
She signed the paper.  “The Goddess and her Consort did not do all this work to be thwarted by the child not inheriting. If they want a Baron… we’d best be careful to give them one.”

Re: Whew

[aldersprig]

Patreon's interface is not the best, unless I want to put it in .txt and go from there, which strips out any format, of course.

Re: Whew

[thnidu]

Feh.