Chapter 253 Death of the Marquis of Holmesford
POV: Alteroni | Parliament chambers, then emergency session
The Marquis of Holmesford has been dying for three weeks, which is the specific length of time that an eight-hundred-year-old vampire takes to die when the dying is of natural causes rather than violence, and natural causes in a vampire of that age means the specific process of a body that has simply accumulated too much time to continue, the cellular architecture of something that has been maintained past its tolerance for maintenance.
He held his Parliament seat for three centuries. This is not a figure of speech. He was present at the founding of the institution's modern form, he participated in the drafting of the original Parliamentary charter in 1712, and he has been in the same chair in the same chamber since then, which is a continuity that the institution has organized itself around in specific ways, his preferences and positions having become part of the architecture of how Parliament functions rather than simply one member's contribution to it.
He dies on a Tuesday morning, which is the day I have been expecting since last week when the attending healer told me the timeline was days rather than weeks, and the news reaches me at seven fifteen through the Parliamentary notification system that processes this category of event, the formal notification of a member's death and the provisional vacancy schedule that attaches to it.
The vacancy is the first of the six. This is the specific significance of Holmesford's death that extends beyond the personal, which is that it opens the succession process that the summit agreement mandated and which has been sitting in the institution's near future since the agreement was signed, a known event approaching at a known rate that everyone has been preparing for without appearing to prepare for.
Three candidates emerge within twenty-four hours, which is faster than I anticipated and which tells me that the preparation has been more organized than the appearance suggested.
Lady Ashford is the first and the one I expected, nine hundred years old, neutral in the specific way that very ancient vampires are neutral, which is that they have seen too many positions proven wrong to commit to any of them with the certainty that commitment requires, and her candidacy represents the institutional continuity position, the argument that Parliament requires experienced Ancient members to function with the stability it requires.
Renwick Ravenscroft is the second, and Ravenscroft is Mordaunt's former ally, which is the specific quality of a candidacy that tells you what it is before you investigate it further, the traditionalist position wearing the face of a candidate who has spent three months being carefully distant from Mordaunt's name while maintaining the positions that Mordaunt's faction has always held, and whose emergence at this specific moment is the faction's answer to the question of whether it survived the blackmail release.
The third candidate is the one I arranged, which I will not describe as arranged because the specific mechanism was recommendation and support rather than arrangement in the technical sense, and the candidate is Evander Cross, who is one hundred and forty-seven years old, which is young by Parliamentary standards, young enough that his candidacy requires a procedural question to be answered before his campaign can formally proceed, which is whether Parliament's membership rules require Ancient status or merely vampire status of sufficient age, and the rules say sufficient age without specifying what sufficient means, which is the gap that Evander's candidacy is built to occupy.
The emergency session to address the vacancy and the succession procedure is called for the following week, and the agenda has the specific quality of an agenda that is going to require much longer than the time allocated for it, because the question of whether Evander's candidacy is procedurally valid is not a question about Evander specifically, it is a question about whether the reformed Parliament that the summit mandated will be a Parliament with different faces holding the same positions or a Parliament that is actually different, and that question is the one that the next six succession votes are going to answer one way or the other.
I sit in my Parliamentary office at the end of the day in which Holmesford died and I think about three centuries of one man in one chair and what that specific continuity produces in an institution, which is the specific calculus of whether continuity is a form of stability or a form of inertia, and I think about the vote in one month and the five remaining vacancies behind it.
The outcome of the vote determines Parliament's future. This is not an overstatement. Reform or retrenchment, the six seats as a genuine reshaping of the institution's membership or as a replacement of exposed faces with different faces holding identical positions, the difference between those two outcomes is the difference between the summit agreement meaning something and the summit agreement being a piece of paper that bought time for the institution to reconstitute itself.
I have one month.