Jingo

mean?”
    “A discussion.”
    Lady Sybil sighed. “Oh, very well. It’s up to you, Sam. You know that.”
    “There are…associated matters,” said Lord Vetinari, when the door closed behind her.
    “No!”
    “Perhaps you should hear them.”
    “No! You’ve done this to me before! We’ve got the Watch set up, we’ve almost got the numbers, the widows and orphans fund is so big the men are queueing up for the dangerous beats, and the dartboard we’ve got is nearly new! You can’t bribe me into accepting this time! There is nothing we want!”
    “Stoneface Vimes was a much-maligned man, I’ve always thought,” said Vetinari.
    “I’m not accepting—What?” Vimes skidded in mid-anger.
    “I’ve always thought that, too,” said Carrot loyally.
    Vetinari stood up and went to stand by the window, looking down at Broad Way with his hands behind his back.
    “The thought occurs that this might be time for…reconsideration of certain ancient assumptions,” said Vetinari.
    The meaning enveloped Vimes like a chilly mist.
    “You’re offering to change history?” he said. “Is that it? Rewrite the—”
    “Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being reexamined and reevaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands. The Chairman of the Guild of Historians is in full agreement with me, I know, that the pivotal role of your ancestor in the city’s history is ripe for fresh…analysis.”
    “Discussed it with him, have you?” said Vimes.
    “ Not yet .”
    Vimes opened and shut his mouth a few times. The Patrician went back to his desk and picked up a sheet of paper.
    “And, of course, other details would have to be taken care of…” he said.
    “Such as?” Vimes croaked.
    “The Vimes coat of arms would be resurrected, of course. It would have to be. I know Lady Sybil was extremely upset when she found you weren’t entitled to one. And a coronet, I believe, with knobs on—”
    “You can take that coronet with the knobs on and—”
    “—which I hope you will wear on formal occasions, such as, for example, the unveiling of the statue which has for so long disgraced the city by its absence.”
    For once, Vimes managed to get ahead of the conversation.
    “Old Stoneface again?” he said. “That part of it, is it? A statue to old Stoneface?”
    “Well done,” said Lord Vetinari. “Not of you, obviously. Putting up a statue to someone who tried to stop a war is not very, um, statuesque. Of course, if you had butchered five hundred of your own men out of arrogant carelessness, we’d be melting the bronze already. No. I was thinking of the first Vimes who tried to make a future and merely made history. I thought perhaps somewhere in Peach Pie Street—”
    They watched one another like cats, like poker players.
    “Top of Broad Way,” Vimes said hoarsely. “Right in front of the palace.”
    The Patrician glanced out of the window. “Agreed. I shall enjoy looking at it.”
    “And right up close to the wall. Out of the wind.”
    “Certainly.”
    Vimes looked nonplussed for a moment. “We lost people—”
    “Seventeen, caught in skirmishes of one sort or another,” said Lord Vetinari.
    “I want—”
    “Financial arrangements will be made for widows and dependants.”
    Vimes gave up.
    “Well done, sir!” said Carrot.
    The new duke rubbed his chin.
    “But that means I’ll have to be married to a duchess,” he said. “That’s a big fat word, duchess . And Sybil’s never been very interested in that sort of thing.”
    “I bow to your knowledge of the female psyche,” said Vetinari. “I saw her face just now. No doubt when she next takes tea with her friends, who I believe include the Duchess of Quirm and Lady Selachii, she will be entirely unmoved and not faintly smug in any way.”
    Vimes hesitated. Sybil was an amazingly levelheaded woman, of course, and this sort of thing…She’d left it entirely up to him, hadn’t she?…This sort of thing wouldn’t…Well, of course she wouldn’t, she…Of course she would, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t swank, she’d just be very comfortable knowing that they knew that she knew that they knew…
    “All right,” he said, “but, look, I thought only a king could make someone a duke. It’s not like all these knights and barons, that’s just, well, political, but something like a duke