“Am I that transparent?” he said, with an odd sideways glance at me; the yellow eye was merely mocking, but the blue eye looked worried and anxious.
“I do know you. And I believe a lady is supposed to receive her gentlemen callers in the afternoon.” I made a very small production out of looking at the clock, and was half alarmed, half delighted when he blushed and bit his lip and looked away.
“Yes, well, no one can suspect me of having designs on your virtue. And I did want to ask you something, but . . . I wanted to find out if you would see me.”
“I’ve forgiven you worse things,” I said.
His face stayed still, but his hands flinched a little. “Yes, I suppose you have.”
“What did you want to ask me?”
“It’s about Vincent.”
“Vincent?”
“Vincent Demabrien. You remember?”
“Lord Ivo’s catamite.”
“Yes.” Unlike Isaac, he didn’t balk at the word.
“What about him?”
“Lord Ivo is disinclined to let him associate with undesirables such as myself.”
“And?”
“He won’t want to offend you, not now.”
That was elliptical, but I thought I saw the light. “You want me to invite Vincent Demabrien here?”
“Would you?”
“Stephen is not going to marry Zelda Polydoria.”
“No, of course not.” "Won’t this look like, er, collusion between Vincent and me?”
“Will it? Does it matter if it does? The gossip is flowing thick and fast in all directions anyway. Will one more crosscurrent matter? And you’re welcome to tell Stephen it’s all my fault.”
“I’d tell him that anyway. Is this Vincent Demabrien so important to you?”
There was a pause. He’d looked away from me, down at his hands, at the tattoos and garnet rings. When he looked up again, his face was calm and rather remote. “Since I came to the Mirador, ” he said, “which was when I was sixteen, I have seen no one whom I knew in my childhood. Most of them are dead. Finding Vincent again . . . I don’t know. It’s like getting a chance to talk with the dead. I don’t suppose that makes any sense, but I will be damned if I let a two-centime pantomime vulture like Ivo Polydorius get in my way.”
I sighed—and let him hear it—and capitulated. “What do you want me to do, invite him to tea?”
“Dinner would be better,” Felix said. He gave me one of his blazing smiles, the sort that made even people who knew better forget to distrust him. “My afternoons are so busy.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“You are a saint,” he said. “Shall I light candles for you?”
“No thanks.” There was another pause, a longer one, and then I said, “Did Gideon really leave you?”
He’d seen it coming; he didn’t flinch. “Yes,” he said. “I do not think he will be coming back.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I brought it on myself,” he said, with a kind of half-shrug. After a moment, he got his chin up and met my gaze, his left eye glowing like a jewel, his right eye dim and grieving. “Could you change what you are, Tabby, if you wanted to?”
“No,” I said.
I knew what he meant.
Chapter 12
Mehitabel
Over breakfast, I wrote a formal letter requesting the honor of Vincent Demabrien’s company for dinner on any night in the coming week that he should find convenient. I kept the wording ambiguous, so that, while the letter was addressed to Messire Demabrien, the request might be read as being addressed either to him or to Lord Ivo. Not so much as the faintest hint of Felix Harrowgate got into my careful phrases. I left the letter with Lenore to be delivered and took myself off to the Empyrean.
Semper was waiting for me at the Empyrean’s side door, shifting from foot to foot like a child anticipating a present. But it was his letter, which he pressed into my hands as furtively as if it were appointing an assignation. “I’ll be sure Lord Philip gets it,” I said, and we went backstage together.
Isaac was waiting in my dressing room. I was shocked that he was skipping court, and then I saw the red, swollen welts on his hands.
“What happened to you?” I said as I closed the door.
He didn’t answer me. I didn’t think he’d even heard me. The words came pouring out of him in a torrent, a babbled account of some argument he’d seen between Felix and Mildmay on Vendredy. I sat down while he was talking and began redoing my hair for Edith. When he was done, he all but wailed:“But what does it mean?”
That Felix is an idiot. “You must know he picks fights.”
“I mean, what were they fighting about?”
“What did Felix tell you?”
“Nothing. He insisted on talking about opera, and then we . . . I mean, until he left.”
“Ah,” I said, and let the silence hold until I saw him start fidgeting in the mirror. Then I turned. “What happened to your hands?”
He startled, then recovered and said, “Oh, I made a mistake with a spell,” with a fine show of carelessness and followed it up quickly with, “Why did Messire Thraxios leave?”
“I would imagine because he got fed up with Felix fucking you.”
It was worth it a thousandfold for the way he jerked back and actually hit his head on the wall, even though he pulled himself up and said, “You forget yourself, Maselle Cressida,” with all the menace he could bring to bear.
It was, of course, considerable. I smiled at him sweetly and turned back to the mirror. And said nothing.
“Tell me about Vincent Demabrien.”
“What about Vincent Demabrien?” I’d finished with my hair, but I stayed where I was. I liked him better in the mirror. It was tempting and all too easy to imagine him trapped there, furious but unable to cause mischief.
“Is his relationship with Felix common knowledge?”
“What relationship?”
A pause, a single beat, and he said, “Felix came to talk to you last night.”
I went cold.
“And this morning you sent a letter to Messire Demabrien. Are the two events entirely and innocently unconnected, Maselle Cressida?”
He was smirking at me, damn him.
“Withholding information from me isn’t a good idea,” he said. “Lying to me would be an even worse one. I expect a sending from Major Goliath tonight, and it would be simplicity itself for me to tell him that Lieutenant Bellamy needs a reminder of what happens to the disobedient. He won’t even ask me what you’ve done.”
I hated him. I hated him and there was nothing I could do about it. And I couldn’t be sure he hadn’t already seen my letter. I didn’t think it likely, but I knew all too well how quickly and easily a servant could be suborned if one’s pockets were deep.
I said, “Felix asked me to write to Messire Demabrien.”
“Yes,” said Isaac. “Why?”
If he was watching either Felix or me that closely, he would find out anyway. “I’ve invited them both to dinner tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he said again. “Why?
Beneath the vanity-top, where he couldn’t see even in reflection, I dug my nails into my palms. I could fence another round or two, but we both knew he’d get the truth out of me, and I didn’t feel like providing his morning’s entertainment. Not when I couldn’t think of a single plausible lie. Not when he was so casually ready to punish Hallam.
“Lord Ivo is being difficult. That’s all Felix told me.”
“And you accepted that with all complaisance?” he asked, eyebrows rising.
“Felix and I are friends,” I said mildly, “difficult though that concept may be for you to grasp.”
He missed the implied insult, which was safer, though less satisfying. “Well, I shall expect a full report,” he said and finally got up to leave.
“Of course, lieutenant,” I murmured dutifully. Surely I could think of some good
strong lies before I saw him again.
There was someone watching rehearsal that afternoon.
I only became aware of him gradually—he was well back in the darkness of the pit—but a play feels different with an audience, and I spotted him near the end, while Drin was trying vainly to tempt me into forgetting Semper and ignoring all the other murders he’d committed. “All for you,” the villain keeps saying in that scene, until the claustrophobia of obsession hangs over the stage like a pall.
But there was our audience, a slumped figure near the north-east set of double doors. Probably one of Semper’s friends, I thought, and put my mind to the serious business of poisoning Drin.
Afterward, when I went out to check my pigeonhole, there he was, a heavy-built boy of eighteen or so, dark and unremarkable except for his nose, which had not been reset as well as Mildmay’s. It leaned crookedly askew, as if it were looking for a wall to prop it up; he must’ve snored like a thunderstorm.
He was standing in the stage-lobby, looking uncertain and a little frightened, but when he saw me his face smoothed out. Very like Mildmay, only not as good at it.
“Excuse me, miss,” the boy said, “I need to talk to Gordeny Fisher.” Lower City accent so thick you could slice it, but perfectly polite.
I gave him a hard stare, up and down. He stood his ground, though he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I can tell her you’re here, if you’ll give me your name, but I can’t make her talk to you.”
“Would you?” And he seemed sincerely grateful. “My name’s Danny Charlock.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, but I shot the bolt behind me when I closed the door. I didn’t like the idea of Danny Charlock wandering around backstage with no one watching.
I found Gordeny in her dressing room, in the last throes of a final fitting for her dual role as the murderer’s lover and the heroine’s sister (affianced to the murderer and therefore the second to go—the lover hangs on until nearly the end). I waited until Corinna and Mrs. Damascus, the Empyrean’s dresser, had finished extracting Gordeny from the pins and cleared themselves away, and then said, as Gordeny slid her dress off the hanger: “There’s a young man in the stage-lobby who wants to talk to you. He says his name is Danny Charlock.”
I’d picked the moment because I had a good view of her face, and the results were interesting. Her face went quite mask-like, and a little gray. Danny Charlock, as I’d expected, was not her best beau. The first words she found were obscenities, and her Lower City accent, which she’d been striving dutifully to shake, was back in full flood. “Fuck. That motherfucker and his stupid, shitty, gotta-know-everything-you-do head. Help me with these fucking buttons, Tabby, please?”
I helped her, and made her wait while I repinned her hair. “Look, either he’ll have gone away—and it doesn’t seem like you’re very interested in talking to him—or he’ll still be there. I shot the bolt.”
“Did you? Good.”
“Are you scared of him? Cat and Toad will come with you if you want.”
She snorted in profound contempt. “The day I’m afraid of Danny Charlock is the day they can bury me for being too lily-livered to live. Thanks, Tabby, but I can handle Danny.”
I set the last pin; she stood up, shook her skirts out carefully, and left. I badly wanted to hear her interview with the unfortunate Danny—for I didn’t doubt in the slightest that Gordeny could “handle” him—but the stage-lobby wasn’t convenient for eavesdropping, and Gordeny hadn’t seemed to want my support either. I thought, though, that what she had said was true; Danny didn’t frighten her. The question remaining, and looming large, was: what did?
I was still in Gordeny’s dressing room when she came back. Her color was heightened, and she had her hand on the door to slam it when she saw me. “You didn’t need to wait for me.”
“I wasn’t,” I lied with an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, I was standing here woolgathering. Everything all right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Everything’s fine. Danny won’t bother you again.”
I moved toward the door. Isaac hadn’t set me spying on Gordeny; it was time to leave her alone. “Danny didn’t bother me.”
“After Mildmay the Fox, I don’t suppose he would,” she said. I kept going, against a sudden desire to argue. And back in my own dressing room, staring at my reflection, I thought that the fact Mildmay had never frightened me was a sign either that I wasn’t very bright or that Mildmay had learned, somewhere along the way, to hide what he was from those who wouldn’t understand.
“You can’t solve that riddle, Tabby,” I said to my reflection and started taking down my hair. “Let it go.”
But I couldn’t dismiss Mildmay as easily as Gordeny had dismissed Danny Charlock. I reassembled the façade of a lady, feeling more and more like the grubby selfish little girl my father had reprimanded for making my baby brother cry. I shrugged into my coat and flung open the door, preparing to stalk back to the Mirador.
Gordeny was in the passage. We both started back with a yelp.
“Oh! I’m sorry, I was just going to knock.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I wanted, I mean . . . If I was rude about Danny Charlock, I’m sorry.”
“Not that I noticed.”
“You see, Danny and me were kids together—”
“Danny and I.”
“Right. Danny and I. We were kids together, and I thought he was coming to tell me Mom and Dad wanted me home. But he wasn’t.” She gave me one of her lovely smiles.
What I wanted to say was, Gordeny, just how stupid do you think I am? “Everything all right at home?”
“Oh, yes,” Gordeny said. “Danny just wanted to see me.”
Poor Danny, I thought. “I hope you told him to come watch you act. I should think he’d be very proud.”
She blushed and said, “Danny doesn’t like plays, so probably he won’t. But thanks!” And she slipped past me down the hall, gone in the darkness of the Empyrean like a fish into deep water.
Everywhere I looked in the Mirador, there were echoes of the Bastion; certain corners of the Mirador could make me think that I was back in the middle of the Grasslands of Kekropia, trapped again in that vast, windowless ant-hill-cum-tomb. I’d had nightmares for months after I finally escaped the Bastion, nightmares about being chased through its narrow halls by monsters made of dust, monsters made of sheets, monsters made of blood-stained wizards’ robes. And Juggernaut always ticking, the Bastion’s lifeless, unbeating heart.
On Vendredy, I’d taken advantage of my new status to make Stephen—who complied amiably, even if he found it funny— show me exactly how to reach my suite from both the Hall of the Chimeras and the Seawater Room, a small and elegant parlor that some long-dead hand had lovingly and painstakingly painted in shades of turquoise. I wondered if it had been some homesick wizard from the Imari, longing for water that was not the cruel Sim. The Seawater Room was easy to find from Chevalgate, so I could at last be free of the page boys’ bright-eyed curiosity.
“How do they do it?” I had asked Stephen in bed later that night.
“Who?”
“Your little noble boys from the sticks. How in the world do they find their way around?”
“They study it,” he said.
“You’re joking.”
“Not at all. I studied it as a child. So did Shannon and Vicky. And even so, the boys don’t know very much.”
“I thought they could go anywhere.”
“May, not can. They only deal with visitors.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“It’s not that difficult. Suppose you’re a visitor to the Mirador—I mean, suppose you’re an ordinary visitor.”
“All right, I’m supposing.”
“You go to the Hall of the Chimeras, right? Or the New Hall. Or you have an appointment in a specific room.”
“But surely people go other places.”
“Like where?”
“Good God, Stephen, I
don’t know. It just seems like . . .”
“No, not really. If somebody wants a place the pages don’t know, they take them to the Master of Pages. Sometimes it’s just a mistake.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“They end up discussing the matter in the Verpine—the visitor, not the page.”
“How draconian.”
“Saves headaches.” And then he had gone on to talk about some other headache, and the subject of the Mirador had been shelved. But I was proud, nevertheless, with a bloody-minded sort of defiance, to be able to reach my rooms from Chevalgate with no guide save myself, and it was in that savage mood that I came into my sitting room and found a letter propped on the mantelpiece. It was from Vincent Demabrien, accepting my invitation for the following evening.
Mildmay