“Madame Parr was kind enough to send me a ticket for Edith Pelpheria. Ivo hates the theater, and he said I ought to find my own company for the performance. He didn’t say I couldn’t go with you.”
“Marvelous!” Felix said, and I felt everything inside me curdle and go brown. “Mildmay and I will be delighted to share our box, won’t we, Mildmay?”
“Sure,” I said. Felix shot me a glare, and I said, “I mean, it’s nice that you can come, Mr. Demabrien.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Demabrien said. He wasn’t fooled a bit.
“I’ve got to change,” Felix said. “Can you two entertain each other for twenty minutes?”
“You mean thirty,” I said. “Or forty.”
“Mildmay leaves me no discretion,” Felix said to Mr. Demabrien, laughing. “But I will be as quick as I can.” And he vanished into his bedroom.
I could feel Mr. Demabrien looking at me, and I didn’t much like it. I would have gone into my bedroom and shut the door, except that would have pissed Felix off, and it was such a relief to have him in a good mood again that I couldn’t do it. So I stood there and looked at the floor and hoped Felix would be quick. And Mr. Demabrien was nice enough not to say nothing until Felix came out and it didn’t matter anymore.
Felix had the charm running full bore that evening. Him and Mr. Demabrien talked about all sorts of things over dinner, and he left me alone, which was about all I was asking for. They talked about poetry and philosophy, about magic some, too. They skirted around their childhood a little, enough for me to pick up that they knew each other because they’d been managed by the same pimp, the Lorenzo that Felix had told me about once. There was that mystery cleared up, and I never had thought Mr. Demabrien could’ve been a kept-thief. I sat and listened and minded my manners and wished I could’ve joined the conversation.
We left for the theater in plenty of time. Felix liked watching the crowds before the play started, and he only liked being late for things when it was on purpose. In the fiacre, him and Mr. Demabrien talked about the Empyrean. Mr. Demabrien had been to plays once or twice before he took up with Lord Ivo, but he’d never sat in a box before. Felix got to explaining the system, where he hired the box by the indiction but got tickets for each play separately, mostly through Mehitabel. The Empyrean’s main revenue was in the hire of the box anyway. It didn’t matter to them so much whether Felix came to see the plays.
At the Empyrean, things were like they always were, with the ushers getting all round-eyed and nervous at Felix and Felix pretending like he didn’t notice. I thought sometimes he came to the theater as much for that as for the plays. He liked people making a fuss about him, and the people at the Empyrean didn’t have no secret plans or nasty traps they were waiting for him to fall into. They were just all excited that he was Felix Harrowgate and he tipped like it was going out of style.
We got up to the box, and Felix and Mr. Demabrien took the front chairs. I sat behind Felix and to the side, with about as good a view of the stage as anybody could want. They could have squeezed three chairs across the front of the box—Felix had offered to once—but I liked being back a ways, where I was harder to see and there was a fighting chance people wouldn’t notice me at all. Especially tonight. I’d never figured out, and I’d never liked to ask her, whether Mehitabel could see into Felix’s box from the stage. If she didn’t see I was here, so much the better.
Felix said to Mr. Demabrien, “How many of the people in the boxes do you recognize?”
“The fat lord in the box closest to the stage is Lord Humphrey Bercromius, and I know I’ve seen some of the others before, but I don’t know their names. Ivo doesn’t go around introducing me to people.”
“Well, if you’re going to stay in the Mirador, you need to know who these people are. And Ivo doesn’t show any signs of leaving.”
“No. I don’t know what his plans are.”
“Here. The man sitting next to Lord Humphrey is Winston Valerius, his son-in-law. You won’t see Charlotte Bercromia Valeria around—she’s dying of consumption somewhere south of St. Millefleur—but Dinah Valeria was one of the girls presented to Stephen last Mercredy. The woman in the box with them is Humphrey’s other daughter, Susannah. She’s the mistress of Alder Sophronius, and has been for years and years. If his mad wife ever dies, they’ll most likely be married the day after the funeral. You might have heard of the wife, actually. She was a Polydoria before the marriage, but I can’t remember which branch of the house she belongs to. Claudine is her name.”
“No, I have heard no talk of Cousin Claudine, but it seems unlikely somehow that I should.”
“Oh, they still told the most hair-raising stories about her when I first came to the Mirador. She tried to kill Alder three times before he had her locked up in the Dower House at Singsby.”
“That sounds like one of Ivo’s cousins, all right.”
“Now, in the first box to the left of Humphrey and Winston, the excessively well-bejeweled lady is Sabrina Anastasia. She was . . .”
I quit listening. Felix hated Sabrina Anastasia—I never had figured out why—and I’d heard his version of how she’d come to catch Lord Matthew Anastasius too many times already. She was one of maybe a double-septad people in the Mirador who’d managed to marry up instead of just getting a flashie protector, and what I thought was, more power to her. And her and Lord Matthew seemed happy together, which was more than you could say for a lot of flashie marriages. Or anybody else’s marriages, come to that.
The house was pretty full and getting fuller as I watched. The pit was already packed, and the doors to boxes kept opening and flashies kept coming in. I was braced for it before I heard the door to the Teverius box next to us open. Felix glanced over, and I saw his eyebrows go up. “Lord Stephen and Lord Shannon. Gracious.”
“Is that so odd?” Mr. Demabrien asked in an undertone. “I understood they were both fond of theater, and Lord Stephen is, er ...”
“Yes, but they don’t often come together. They don’t get along very well.”
“No?”
“They have almost nothing in common,” Felix said and went on to a piece of gossip about Lord Cecil Demellius that would probably have gotten him called out for slander if Lord Cecil had heard it. I was kind of surprised—Felix usually didn’t miss an opportunity to say nasty things about Lord Shannon—but glad of it, too.
Like they’d been waiting for Lord Stephen, it was only a minute or two later that the curtain went up. I started out telling myself that it wasn’t going to hurt me any to watch Mehitabel on the stage and I should just enjoy the play, and it was only when the curtain came down for the intermission that I realized I’d forgotten about five minutes in that I had anything to be unhappy about. And I was even more amazed to realize that I didn’t care, that I wasn’t unhappy, that watching Mehitabel on stage didn’t have a thing to do with how I felt about her otherwise.
After a while, Felix said, “They should have gotten rid of Susan Dravanya a year ago.”
“I always thought that was a terribly weak scene,” Mr. Demabrien said. “Reading it, it looks like a piece of nonsense.”
“It takes an actress to make you believe it,” Felix said. “She is magnificent. I was dreading the night-vigil scene, because I didn’t think she could pull it off, but . . .”
“You could hear her façade crack,” Mr. Demabrien said. “Great powers, I think I still have goose bumps.”
“I may have to go to the opening at the Cockatrice, just to laugh loudly at this scene,” Felix said and told Mr. Demabrien all about Madame Dravanya and the rivalry between Mr. Aubert and Mr. Jermyn. I sat and waited for the curtain to go up. I wanted to know the rest of the story.
Mehitabel
The performance went off like a miracle, like that ideal performance you dream about but never, ever reach.
Beforehand, when I was putting the finishing touches to my maquillage, there was a knock on the door and Penn the doorman’s voice, “Begging
your pardon, miss, but there’s all these flowers.” I got up and opened the door, and there was Penn, practically invisible behind a mound of tawny, golden, bronze, white chrysanthemums.
“Good God, Penn,” I said.
“I know, miss, but I couldn’t very well put ’em in your pigeonhole, now could I?”
“No, no, of course not. Here. This corner will do.”
“They set somebody back a gorgon or two,” Penn observed and returned to his door.
They certainly had; chrysanthemums were about the only things blooming this time of year, and that made them dear. I found the card tucked among the stalks; the message was a quote from Cyprus Askham, another of Asline Wren’s plays: “In her such perfection we behold, As would make any man turn saint.” The signature read, quite clearly, Shannon Teverius.
I must have sat there staring at those foolish, magnificent chrysanthemums for a good five minutes, until Mrs. Damascus came in to lace me into my costume. It wasn’t that I hadn’t received flowers before—there had been several bouquets already when I’d arrived at the Empyrean, most of them silk—it was that these flowers, this amazing gaudy panoply, came from a man who had no interest in getting me into bed. There were no strings, no coded messages. Just . . . chrysanthemums.
That was when I started to lift out of myself, the way I could do sometimes, for my very best performances. Out of myself, and into Edith Pelpheria, where I stayed for hours, only coming back slowly, by degrees. Jean-Soleil told me later we took eleven curtain calls; I could only have told you about the noise, the sea of faces, Shannon and Stephen standing together in one box and Felix and Mildmay standing together in the next with Vincent beside them. But I still felt like Edith Pelpheria’s ghost, and I drifted like a ghost from the stage to my dressing room, from my dressing room to the largest rehearsal room, where someone’s benevolence had provided champagne and canapés. It seemed like half of Mélusine was there, laughing and drinking and conversing raucously. After my first glass of champagne, I found Shannon to thank him for the flowers.
“I should have had them gilded,” he said.
“Don’t be silly. They’re beautiful, and they wouldn’t be nearly as fine if you’d smothered them with gold.” We were both a little drunk, and I knew better than to try to say anything serious. But I could see that he was pleased.
Semper was standing in the middle of a cluster of Shannon’s friends. I didn’t know if he was molly, but he was clearly being courted, and clearly enjoying being courted. Jean-Soleil and Drin were in another corner, singing something that was probably both abstruse and obscene, while Jabez and Levry were doing bits of the comic cross-talk from Clerkwell’s Artème and laughing uproariously. Corinna was holding court among her lordlings. Cat and Toad, lured down from their Firmament, were sitting on the rump-sprung settee, hand in hand like children. Gordeny Fisher . . . I looked around just in time to see Gordeny slipping silently out the door.
I was a little drunk. And I was suddenly tired of the stifling din. Other parts of the theater would be cool and quiet. I didn’t have to take Gordeny’s path any farther than the first cross-passage.
Of course I followed her. All my worst, Bastion-trained instincts came surging up, and I slid off my shoes and trailed along behind her with no more noise than a whisper of skirts, inaudible under the clatter of her heels. I tracked her through the maze of passages until she came out onto the stage. I stopped in the shadow of the flats, wondering what brought her here. I was almost expecting her to start declaiming the night-vigil scene to the empty pit. And if she had, I would’ve crept away again and left her to her dreams.
But she said, in a hard, peremptory voice, thick with the Lower City, “Well, Septimus? I got your message and I’m here. Where the fuck are you?”
“So you ain’t too lah-di-dah to talk to an old friend,” a voice said from the pit. It was a voice as Lower City as Gordeny’s own. Its owner vaulted up onto the stage, a thin, wiry boy with a mop of dark hair and dark, blazing eyes.
“Is that what you want?” Gordeny said. “To talk?”
“I guess I don’t rightly know what I want, Gordeny. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“I’m here,” she said, with a wide, mocking gesture.
“You and your airs,” the boy said.
“My airs are my own business. I got a job, Septimus. They’re paying me here, paying me to be an actress.”
“Don’t you miss me, Gordeny?”
“Maybe,” she said, with such indifference that the boy swung around to stare out at the empty auditorium.
“You’re such a bitch.”
“Powers, Septimus, am I trying to make you do anything? Am I telling you to get out while you can?”
“Not this time.”
“Yeah, well, I figured out just how fucking well that worked,” she said, and her own bitterness streaked her voice like copper showing through gold wash.
“Gordeny—”
She cut him off, her voice suddenly fierce. “If you’re drowning and you see a way to get out, are you gonna stay in the water just ’cause somebody else says you oughta be enjoying the swim?”
“It ain’t like that.”
“Maybe not for you. Maybe you got something in front of you better than what I was seeing. But I found what I want, and I ain’t giving it up. Not for you. Not for nobody.”
She meant it. That flat, intransigent voice didn’t even leave a loose thread to pull, a way to coax or cajole, to threaten or coerce. He could kill her, her tone said, but he couldn’t make her go back with him.
He was smart enough to hear it; his shoulders slumped. “Then I guess we got to say good-bye, huh?”
“I can’t see we’re going to do each other any good,” she said.
“Kethe’s cock, Gordeny, is that all you can think about? Getting ahead? What if I ain’t talking about ‘doing good’?”
“You?” She laughed, hard and brittle and cruel. “You know, I think we had this conversation already, only it was the other way ’round. ‘But I can learn stuff,’ ” and her mimickry of him was painfully good. “ ‘I can meet people, important people.’ ”
“Well, maybe I was wrong!”
The auditorium caught and echoed his shout, and they both flinched.
But after a moment, he went on, picking his words, struggling. “I been thinking. And I seen some stuff . . . I dunno, consequences, I guess. And I ain’t sure . . . I’m thinking maybe I should get out.”
Gordeny’s applause was slow and sarcastic and terribly audible. “What do you want me to do, Septimus? Reward you?”
He wheeled around and grabbed her hands. “Fuck it, don’t love mean anything to you?”
She got her hands back and stepped away, as neat and economical as a cat. It was all the answer she needed to give; I could see some of her expression, upset now and sorry, but not budging. And she didn’t love him. He would have given her the world right then, if he’d had it in his hands to give, but it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.
“I’m sorry, Septimus,” she said after a while.
“What fucking good is that?”
“None. But I can’t give you what you want.” She sighed, and her own shoulders sagged. “I think maybe you oughta leave.”
“Maybe I ought. You ain’t gonna change your mind, are you?”
“No.”
“Well, if you do, you know how to get ahold of me,” he said, and I admired him for trying to sound cheerful and nonchalant. He vaulted off the stage again and disappeared into the darkness.
“Good-bye, Septimus,” Gordeny said, standing alone in the light of the sconces that hadn’t been extinguished yet. She was still standing there, staring out sightlessly into the pit, when he’d had time to cross the distance from stage to auditorium doors three times over, and I slipped away, out of the flats and through the door into the Empyrean’s rabbit warren.
Drin’s voice said out of the darkness, scaring me half to death, “I was rig
ht.”
“God, Drin! Are you trying to give me a coronary?”
“I was right,” he said, taking no notice. “She’s in a pack.”
That was hardly the only interpretation of Gordeny’s conversation with Septimus Wilder. Trust Drin to choose the simplest and most damning. “Maybe. And even if she was, why, by the seven sacred names of God, does it matter?”
“Do you want the Empyrean to become a pack hangout?”
“I hardly think that’s likely.”
“She lied, Mehitabel!”
“Maybe. And if she did, judging by you she had good reason. ”
“She lied about her family, and the saints only know what else she might be lying about. Why do you suppose she’s really here?”