Gilda sat in a sumptuous waiting-chamber deep in Government House, and awaited the pleasure of her captain. A pile of day-old correspondence sat half-read beside her on the rest of the couch the bat-hen had claimed for herself. A slight rumble of argument leaked out through the cracks of the conference room the notables had locked themselves inside. The conference room the arguments were raging within was a palatial space whose glittering finery put even Gilda's over-decorated foyer to shame, to judge from the little she'd seen of that richly appointed chamber before the ponies had slammed the doors on their attendants and gotten down to the business of yelling at each other.

Gilda's reading material consisted mostly, of course, of Captain Shield's correspondence. They'd not been keeping on top of the captain's mail, between Gilda's absences and Gleaming Shield's distracted princess-minding, and Gilda was trying to catch up on matters. The Fifth Territorial had not yet gotten the paperwork associated with Gleaming's detachment, and the sergeant major, writing for the major himself, had sent several rather stuffy notes complaining of the absence of 'Lieutenant Shield'. The next time Gilda was able to trap the sergeant-major into a private conversation, she'd have to remind him of the consequences of taking bribes, and the necessity for playing cloudball that came with it. He almost acted as if he had a moral leg to stand on.

Personal correspondence from the captain's family… a begging-letter from some social club of hers, all the way from Canterlot. Ah! A response from one of Gleaming Shield's magically-inclined fellow-alumni, about the George situation. Gilda quickly scanned it for details, and set it aside in the priority pile, which had consisted up to that point of nothing but a reminder from the barracks-master that their personal effects would have to be removed by the end of next week. Gilda rather suspected that their trunks and bags would have already been pillaged by the Manehattan regiment which had taken over the Fifth's old barracks, if it weren't for the high-end thaumic locks the captain had set on all their goods.

Gilda would have to make time for moving their stuff into the room they were currently sharing in the back servants' quarters in the royal suites. Even though there was barely enough room for them both when they shared the bed; maybe she could hang their trunks and baggage in a net over the bed? There certainly wasn't any floor space for the trunks.

Gilda was looking forward to finding new quarters. Gleaming Shield snored. And kicked.

The bronze-colored earth pony who was sitting in the waiting-room across from Gilda snorted around his pen, distracting Gilda from thoughts of her nightly torment, trapped in a bed with a sleep-boxing officer. Prince-major Blueblood had deposited his own bat-hen in the waiting room when he'd gotten sucked into this meeting with Princess Cadance and the Governor-General and company.

Bat-stallion? Gilda had only ever heard ponies refer to bat-mares, actually. She suspected 'bat-stallion' was bad Ponish. Despite having grown up speaking the pony-spawned lingua equina, Gilda occasionally still tripped over these odd little pony-centric issues with the language. Griffish was extinct, of course, although they said that Hidalgic was a lineal descendant of that long-forgotten language. Nogriff had ever written down a word of old Griffish, which was a big part of why it died out in favor of Ponish and its endless waves of written material, driven by every moon-rise eastward like the tides.

Almost nogriff still spoke Griffish when King Grover had ordered its preservation, and sent his scholars to hunt down the remnants of their native language, to preserve it for the pride of future generations. A glossary of vocabulary, two volumes of sayings and creation-myths rendered phonetically in Ponish letters, and a little biography of that little old hen they'd found who still remembered the words of her ancestors.

Gilda had paged through that impenetrable book of Aunt Gertrude's, mouthing the alien words, trying to follow the linguistic technicalities.

She'd never been any good at foreign languages. Even one as allegedly familial as her own ancestral language.

Now here was an important bit of writing, from the Provost Marshal's office. They weren't technically seconded to the MPs anymore, but the Provost Marshal had looped Gilda's captain in on the results of the interrogations of the pony gangsters and their cart-theft ring. Chop Shop had disappeared ahead of the raids, but they'd chased her vigorously. She'd only gotten away at the last moment, slipping away from a pier in an outlying fishing village on the far side of Sandstone. This was a copied report from the coast guard cutter that had failed to intercept Chop Shop's boat. Pirates, was it? She'd disappeared on some black-sailed ship, smugglers or corsairs, the coasties thought. The corsairs out of the Gizzard had been getting more and more bold, they complained, taking two ships in the last six weeks, one just outside of Horseshoe Bay at the beginning of January.

Another snort from the bat-mare as he scribbled at his - whatever that was. He had his own big pile of paper beside him, and was writing awkwardly in his chair, a book propped up and acting as a writing-surface, while he bent his neck painfully with pen in his teeth.

Gilda never could figure how ponies did that without getting drool all over their work.

"Hey, Sergeant, what do you call yourself? Bat-mare sounds wrong when you've got a willy," Gilda asked, bedeviled by her lamentable curiosity.

The stallion spat his pen out, and looked up with an offended gleam in his eyes. "Not sergeant, for one, Miss."

"The Territorials say I'm not a Miss, I'm a corporal," Gilda said in turn. She looked at the stripes on his neatly-turned-out bespoke uniform. "Your tailor seems to disagree with you on the subject of rank, and the EUP manual on non-commissioned officers would seem to concur. Aren't majors' servants sergeants by default?"

"I am not a major's servant! I am a gentlepony's gentlecolt. Vulgarly described by the ill-bred as..." he shuddered, grimacing slightly. "Maneservants."

"Maneservants are a civilian thing, ain't they?" Gilda asked, her gutter-accent thickening in reaction to the prince-major's servant's plumy vowels. "We're army issue now, whatever we did outside of th' service. I'm a bat-hen. A dog-robber, they call us, don't they? That'd make you a bat-stallion."

"They might call you that, but that is certainly not what they call me. A bat-stallion, indeed. Sounds like a male thestral. I am a valet militant, my dear. And I am very busy, I have a messenger coming for this order. Good day." The 'valet militant' picked up his pen, and went back to his scribbling.

Gilda packed away her captain's correspondence into her panniers, and got up to see what Sergeant Stuffy was writing.

His eyes got large as he saw she was approaching. He hurriedly finished whatever it was he was composing, and Gilda only got a brief glimpse of perfectly formed copperplate cursive before the valet folded up his last page and hid what he'd been working on.

"I say, these are sensitive matters! A gentlecolt does not read others' correspondence!"

"How the hay do you deal with your major's business if you can't read his letters for him?" Gilda demanded.

"You are your gentlepony, Corporal. A proper body-servant has no independent existence aside from their primary. Their selves, their talents, their marks are all in service to their gentlepony. You are an extension of your gentlepony."

"First I've ever heard of such a thing. Seems a bit much. So you're saying anything I do is my captain's fault, are you?"

"Well of course not. Your failures and faults are your own, of course. Properly speaking, nopony should ever notice your existence at all, young - what is your name, Corporal?"

"Gilda, Sergeant. I notice you haven't given me yours. Is that not considered rude?"

"Well, well, that's very true. But I don't have a name. A good valet does not. They put away their pony name, and they disappear into their gentlepony's service."

"Then why did you ask me for mine? And how do people ask for you, if you don't have a name?"

"Well, well. They call me Jeeves, when they need to direct my attention to this or that."

"Jeeves… doesn't sound like a pony name. But it is a name!"

"I like to think of it as a sort of title. As I am, after all, a-"

"Gentlepony's gentlecolt."

"Precisely! You catch on. What agency did the Twinkles hire you from? You seem rather raw."

"I was kidnapped by the captain ma'am when she was an ensign ma'am."

"Well, they certainly didn't train you pro- what was that? I've never heard of a Kid Nap agency."

"Kidnapped. Shang tied. Bound by law. Fished out of the North Celestial after they ran me to water. I am war booty, Sergeant Jeeves."

"Well, that's a novel method of recruitment, I will give young Shield that. Hrm. Hrm!"

"What are you staring at?"

"I'm trying to see the suture or the scarring where they extracted the bone you must have had inserted through your beak."

"You're thinking of the southern Diamond Dogs. While I've met a few, almost none of them do the ritual scarring thing anymore, Sergeant Jeeves."

"Just Jeeves! It is, after all, a title. Well, well. Exactly what you'd expect of a Twinkle, and one serving in the colonial service, at that! A barbaric breed, the House of Twinkle!"

Gleaming Shield, whose mother was a knight baronet, had told Gilda that her family had been lesser nobility since the third Celestial Era. That made them five hundred years ennobled. Gilda wasn't quite sure if she was obliged to be offended on her captain's behalf.

"Is that supposed to be insulting?" Gilda settled upon as a response. "The most savage and immoral griffons I know have always been of impeccable noble or royal descent. Mostly royal, the noble houses back home have largely been absorbed by the various cadet lines."

"Well, obviously, they are griffons! You are all barbarous by nature. The most humble of Canterlot shopkeepers are better-bred than your kings and dukes! Breeding isn't about blood, it's about company. How you keep it, how you learn to keep it, who you keep it with. The prince-major has several somewhat distant cousins in Saddle Arabia whose ancestors were sent into that barbaric land to civilize the Horse savages by the Princess. They did not Keep Up Standards, and they shamed the Platinum name. Their descendants are now no better than the rest of the Horse barbarians."

"You and your prince-major have been here in the Isles for a number of years now, haven't you?" Gilda asked, trying to keep the smirk off of her beak.

"Five years, yes. I struggle every day to Keep Up Standards. To keep the prince-major in the manner that scions of Platinum are accustomed. To keep my gentlepony…"

"Gentle?" Gilda asked, staring at the pony. For all of his snobbery and stiff upper muzzle, none of it seemed to reach Jeeves' eyes.

His eyes were a completely different story. Gilda didn't understand what she was seeing in those eyes.

Their conversation was interrupted by a rather scruffy griffon entering the waiting-chamber from the outer corridor. Gilda wondered how somegriff like that had gotten into Government House, and turned to confront the interloper, putting one talon on her service-blade's sheath.

"Hold on there, my hen. How did you get past the gate? This is a closed meeting," Gilda said, trying to channel her inner Corporal Gustav, or one of the other old birds.

"Ah, Miss Gayle," Jeeves interrupted Gilda's attempted confrontation. "My apologies, I am not quite ready for you. One moment please?" He was fumbling with a thick sheaf of papers, folding them into an waterproof tube. "Here, here. Please deliver this to our caterers, if you would. High priority! I know it will play hob with our schedules, but there are vital changes that must be made to our, hrm! club menu. We will have new ponies at the table."

"New… ponies?" asked the confused - messenger? The scruffy hen, whose name must have been Gayle, took Jeeves' missive in her talons, and scrambled to put it in one of her own panniers. "Has the… club meeting been delayed?"

"Oh, no, no - delivery still must be Sunday, as much before noon as can be arranged. Extremely important! The prince-major's polo club is very particular, you see."

"Polo club, right. You know I have no idea what you're talking about, right?" asked the new hen, shifting from one paw to the other, and staring at the equally baffled Gilda. "But I can tell them they can't delay anything. Sunday, before noon, right?"

"Exactly!"

"It'll be hard to add anything new on that schedule, Mr. Jeeves, you know that. The machine can't be started and stopped that easily. And we'll have to set type-"

Jeeves eyes had that look in them again, like he was looking at something infuriating, enraging. The scruffy little hen quailed under that hard look which was all the more intense for not involving a single muscle on the valet's very, very still muzzle.

"For-for- the menus, you know? We have this little press we use for to print the menus, right?" For some reason the messenger was staring now at Gilda, as if seeking permission or agreement on this point from the bat-hen.

Gilda shrugged, confused.

"Exactly. Make sure the menus are updated. And the cooks properly briefed as well, of course," Jeeves said, expansively.

"We'll do our best, Mr. Jeeves."

"Excellent! I knew I could rely upon your firm. So reliable! You know what it means to Keep Up Standards."

"Yessir, Mr. Jeeves. Gotta fly." And with that, the griffon ran out of the room like she was afraid that Gilda might eat her.

Gilda turned to the valet, who was now straightening his uniform, and avoiding Gilda's eyes.

"You use griffish catering?"

"Oh, really. Of course we do. Best food in the city. In the province, really. I would not do any other. The local Canterlotian-born and Manehattan-exile cooks are quite substandard. That firm knows how to deliver perfection."

"Last time I heard the prince-major talk about Trottingham cuisine, he had strong opinions."

"Well, of course. We do not serve Trottish cuisine at the table of a scion of Platinum. This firm provides proper Equestrian cuisine. They are, after all, professionals."

"It sounded more racial than cultural."

"We don't employ griffish hoofmares to serve the table, if that is what you mean. That is just another part of-"

"Keeping Up Standards?"

"Exactly, my dear. Now, if my ears do not deceive me, our principals' meeting seems to be at an end."

And so it was.

Author's Notes:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.