The plaque she pointed to didn’t look no different from the others. Mehitabel read it out loud:
HERE LIES AMARYLLIS CORDELIA
17 PRAIRIAL 14.1.3 - 11 FLORÉAL 14.6.2
Her waking over,
may her sleep be dreamless.
“Who was she?”
“Fuck,” I said. “I dunno. I mean, I know about one Amaryllis Cordelia, but she can’t be here.”
“Why not?”
“Not in the dynastic line, though that ain’t from lack of trying. ”
“What do you mean? Who was she?”
“Let’s sit down,” I said and started toward the row of freestanding tombs behind us. “D’you mind?”
“All right,” she said, and sat with me on the nearest tomb. “Now talk. Who was Amaryllis Cordelia?”
“Gloria Aestia with guts.”
“Felix is right,” Mehitabel said. “You do talk in riddles.”
Powers, how many people was he saying that to? “Sorry,” I said. “But it ain’t a riddle. She was born into a cadet branch, and she wanted to be queen.”
“She didn’t make it, though.”
“Nope. Bad timing.”
She laughed.
“It’s true,” I said. “Too young to marry Laurence and too old to marry Charles. She got married off to an Emarthius before Charles was old enough to care about girls.”
“So what makes her like Gloria Aestia?”
“She seduced them both.”
“She what?”
“Her husband—poor bastard, I can’t think of his name—got some political appointment when Laurence was in his seventh septad, and—”
“Don’t give me that septad nonsense,” she said.
“Sorry. Laurence was older than forty-two and younger than, um, forty-nine. Charles was about sixteen, and the lady herself was, say, thirty.”
“All right. I’ve got that now. Go on.”
“She went after Laurence first, but he wouldn’t do her no good. He’d had lovers since he hit his second septad, if you believe the stories, and he knew how to keep ’em where he wanted ’em. So she gave up on him and went after Charles.”
“Well? What happened?”
“Ain’t clear,” I said. “Laurence died when Charles had two septads and four, um . . . eighteen. Maybe it was murder. Maybe Amaryllis Emarthia had a hand in it. Seems like Charles didn’t, since they let him on the throne. But he hadn’t reached his third septad yet, and everybody knew he was missing some of the top cards from his deck. Laurence had been careful about the way he set the regency up—and maybe that was Amaryllis’s fault, too. So by the time Charles came of age, his advisors had most of the power, and that’s where the Puppet Kings came from.”
“What about Amaryllis?”
“Her and her husband got the boot—not officially because of Laurence being murdered, but you know how that is. I don’t think they ever came back.”
“But here she is,” Mehitabel said.
“If that’s her.”
“We have a historian. Let’s ask.” She called down to the other end of the crypt, “Antony!”
“Mehitabel!” I said in a hiss.
“What? Afraid I’ll wake someone?”
“You only think you’re joking. And people didn’t get buried down here along of being nice to widows and orphans, you know.”
“Sorry. I think it was mostly bravado. This place gives me the horrors.”
Lord Antony reached us. “You bellowed?” he said disapprovingly.
“Mildmay just told me a very interesting story about a woman named Amaryllis Cordelia who shouldn’t be in here. Is that her plaque?” She pointed.
Lord Antony turned and read the plaque and said, “How very peculiar.”
“Is it her?”
“The dates are right, and I’ve never come across another Amaryllis in that generation of Cordelii, but not only shouldn’t Amaryllis Cordelia be here, she can’t be. That is to say, she isn’t.”
“Pray continue,” Mehitabel said and gave me a sidelong smile.
“My mother is an Emarthia, a very cadet branch, but she was a favorite of old Lord Rodney’s. She spent several summers at Diggory Chase, and took me along two or three times. When I was twelve, I spent the summer doing rubbings in their graveyard—including one of the tombstone of Amaryllis Cordelia Emarthia.”
We looked at each other.
“The inscription is the same,” Lord Antony said. “I remember the motto. But someone here apparently didn’t like thinking of her as an Emarthia.”
“Charles?” I said.
“He was completely in thrall to her, true enough,” Lord Antony said, “but I’ve never heard that he was particularly prone to melodramatic gestures.”
“But why is she here?” Mehitabel said.
“That’s just it,” Lord Antony said. “She isn’t here. She’s buried beside her husband at Diggory Chase.”
“Then what’s this?” I said.
He started pacing up and down, scowl black as a thundercloud. “Someone has erected a plaque to the memory of Amaryllis Cordelia—”
“No, they haven’t,” Mehitabel said. “It doesn’t say anything about her memory. It says, ‘Here lies Amaryllis Cordelia.’ ”
“It’s a copy of the Diggory Chase plaque,” Lord Antony said.
“Why?” Mehitabel said. “Why would you copy an Emarthius plaque when you patently want to deny her connection to the Emarthii?”
Lord Antony opened his mouth to answer her and then closed it. Then he did it again, like a guy trying to force a rusted lock.
“Look, I know this is stupid,” I said, “but what if it’s the other way ’round?”
“Riddles, my darling,” Mehitabel said.
“No, it ain’t. What if the Emarthius plaque is the copy?”
“But that makes even less sense,” Lord Antony said. “Why would the Cordelii put up a plaque for her before the Emarthii got one up, when she died at Diggory Chase?”
“Why would they put up a plaque for her at all?” Mehitabel said, and we ran aground again.
“Only people in this crypt,” I said, “are kings, their wives, and their children.”
“And grandsons,” Lord Antony said.
“Yeah, them too. But Amaryllis Cordelia wasn’t any of those things. Never mind who did it, why is she here?”
“Is it,” Mehitabel began, then stopped herself. “No, that’s hardly likely.”
“What?” Lord Antony said.
“I was just wondering if being the mother of a king would be enough. Could she be the next king’s mother?”
“Claudius,” I said.
“No,” Lord Antony said. “Claudius was born nearly a year after Amaryllis died, and I’m afraid there is no doubt he was the son of Jemima Cordelia. It’s a good idea, though.”
“So that ain’t it,” I said, “and since I always heard Charles was pretty stuck on Jemima—I mean, he wouldn’t’ve gone around putting plaques up, if this lady died after he got married, right?”
“That’s a solid piece of reasoning,” Lord Antony said, “and besides, Amaryllis Cordelia has a perfectly legitimate and presumably tenanted grave somewhere else. It really is most peculiar. ”
We were silent for a minute. Mehitabel was hugging herself, and Lord Antony was looking around nervously. I felt it, too, that sense that somebody I couldn’t see might be watching from the shadows. Our candles were burning low.
Then Mehitabel said briskly, “We can certainly ponder it elsewhere. Come on. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m overstaying my welcome.” She led the way to the door. Me and Lord Antony were glad to follow her.
I stopped to drag the door closed, which took some doing. Lord Antony waited for me. I hadn’t expected that from him. Looking at his face, sort of embarrassed and stubborn, I could see that he was trying to get past that we were both on Mehitabel’s string, trying to be a decent person.
I found myself saying, “If you need to come
back down here—I mean, if you want, m’lord, I’d be happy to, um, come with you.”
“Thank you,” Lord Antony said. “I appreciate that.” We both knew what he was talking about, and it didn’t have a thing in the world to do with the crypt of the Cordelii.
It was Huitième, and I couldn’t quite tell if Mehitabel and Lord Antony had other plans. So I said good night and went back down to the Palace. The looks I got in the Arcane were nasty, and a couple people made hex signs when they thought I wasn’t looking. That was almost funny. They were giving me lots of space. Elvire had probably put the word out that I claimed Vey Coruscant.
At the Palace, Tiny was watching a gal cheating two demi-beaux at dice. She saw me and the dice fell out of her hand, laying there on the floor like tiny corpses. I recognized her. She’d been one of Elvire’s girls four indictions back, but they must have figured she was better at sharping. I even remembered her name.
“Hey, Mirandy,” I said.
Her face was suddenly all eyes. She said, “Hey,” back, but I saw the way she covered her dice.
“I can’t hex ’em, darlin’,” I said. “That’s my big brother.”
“You again,” Tiny said before she could figure out what to do with that. “She said if you had balls enough to come back, I should let you go on in.” He stepped aside, and I made my own way to Elvire’s office.
“Sit down,” she said, and I sat and waited. She was quiet for a long time, just looking at me until my back started crawling, then said suddenly, “I’ll give you one chance to forget the whole thing.”
“Why?”
“All or nothing.”
I thought about it, and thought hard. Because her making that offer said as how she didn’t like what she found. And it said as how she thought she owed me one, and this was it. And that meant something. But it just didn’t mean enough.
“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t’ve asked,” I said.
“St. Anarthe preserve you from your own stupidity then,” she said. “The only person offering the information you want is Kolkhis of Britomart.”
Keeper.
“The only person?”
“For what you can pay.”
Fuck. “What does she want?”
Her smile was all knives.
“She wants to talk to you,” said Elvire.
Chapter 3
Mehitabel
My boarding house was called the Velvet Tears, and it catered mostly to working women who could claim respectability but weren’t actually respectable. No manufactory girls here—we were actresses and modistes’ assistants and probably, yes, at least a couple of the tenants sold more intimate skills, but they were quiet about it and didn’t bring their work home.
When I got back—very late Mardy night or very early Mercredy morning—I found Corinna waiting for me on the front stairs, and my heart sank.
The Empyrean didn’t perform two days in the ten of the decad, the Lower City’s week. Cinquième was sacred to the five principal gods of the Marathine pantheon, and Huitième was sacred to Jean-Soleil, who went out to Sauvage to visit his wife and children. So I’d had no qualms about accepting Antony’s invitation, assuming I could leave the Empyrean to its own devices.
But not only was Corinna waiting for me, she was also more than a little drunk. I turned from locking the front door behind me, and she said, “Tabby. Been waitin’ for you.”
Corinna was normally very conscientious about her elocution; that dark drawl was a bad sign. “I can see that,” I said. “What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” She laughed, and there was another bad sign, because it wasn’t her well-schooled genteel chuckle, either, but a raucous bark. I shushed her hastily, for the last thing we needed was the landlady to descend in her wrath like Tammerlion Ferox.
“Come on,” I said. “Upstairs.” I chivvied her gently into her own room, shut the door gratefully behind me, and watched as Corinna subsided in a slithering rustle of taffeta and grosgrain onto her bed, itself a narrow oasis amidst the racks and piles of costumes, which Corinna was repairing, remaking, and sometimes simply reinventing for the Empyrean. Some of them were part of the effects of the long-defunct Merveille Theater, which Jean-Soleil had bought at auction five years ago, and the rest were the spoils of Corinna’s trawling among the secondhand clothes shops of the Engmond’s Tor Cheaps. “Now cough it up, whatever it is.”
“I went over to the Empyrean after dinner,” she said, readily enough. “I’d left the mauve thread in Susan’s dressing room when I was repairing Pasiphaë’s funeral gown—you know.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And I found this.” She fished a crumpled twist of paper out of her bodice and waved it at me.
“Which is . . . ?”
Another raucous bark of laughter. “Bartholmew’s gone to the Cockatrice.”
I stared at her a moment. “That can’t be all.”
“He talked Susan into going with him.”
“He did what?”
“Susan’s gone,” Corinna said, half dolefully, half in unholy amusement. “Packed up her bags and left Jean-Soleil this little billet doux.”
Susan was stupid and tiresome and as an actress was about as talented as a tent pole, but her beauty and her voice and even the cold refinement of her manners had made her a tremendous draw. If she’d appeared before me at that moment, I would cheerfully have throttled her.
And I didn’t understand her. Susan had not liked me, rightly believing that I had designs on her status as lead tragedienne, but she had been sitting pretty here at the Empyrean—adulated and generously paid—and she had known it. What could have possessed her?
I asked Corinna, “So what did she say?”
“Shame, Tabby,” she said, drawing herself up and scowling at me unconvincingly. “To ins . . . insin . . .”
“Insinuate.”
“Yeah, that. That I’d read a letter addressed to Jean-Soleil.”
“In Susan’s handwriting. Of course you would. I’d do the same.”
“Unladylike, the pair of us,” Corinna said. “You want a drink?”
“No. And I don’t think you need any more, either. Come on. Why is Susan leaving?”
“Well, to hear her tell it, Adolphus Jermyn’s going to make her Queen of Tambrin.”
I didn’t recognize the allusion, and at the moment I didn’t care. “But what about Madeleine Scott?”
“Becoming Mrs. Jermyn.”
I honestly didn’t think I’d heard her correctly. “Becoming Mrs. Jermyn?”
“Oh yes. So naturally, Jermyn’s replacing her—can’t have Mrs. Jermyn treading the boards, you know—and it sounds like he promised Susan the sun, and moon, and two or three stars for good measure. She says he’s planning to revive Edith Pelpheria for her.”
“Oh you have got to be joking!”
“Nope. ’S what Susan says.” She considered a moment and added, “Silly bitch.”
“We knew that already,” I said, and we grinned at each other.
“But we’re fucked, Tabby,” Corinna said, suddenly and utterly serious. “I mean, what’re we gonna do without Susan?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
The worst part was that Corinna wasn’t wrong. The Empyrean’s reputation was built on Susan. I didn’t want to calculate what percentage of our take Susan was responsible for, but it was substantial, and with both her and Bartholmew gone, the troupe was crippled, cutting our income even further, possibly even to zero.
I knew how fast an acting troupe could go under. I knew what kind of mercy Jean-Soleil could expect from his creditors, too. What I didn’t know was what I’d do if the Empyrean was forced to close. When I first came to Mélusine, I’d taken shameless advantage of Felix’s generosity, made easier by the fact that he clearly thought nothing of it—merely looking at me blankly when I offered to reimburse him for the money drawn out of his stipend. Mildmay’d come to me later, and we’d settled accounts; he’d
said with a kind of fond resignation that Felix had no better head for money than he did for cards.
But I couldn’t do that again. Pride and conscience refused it, and I couldn’t tie myself more closely to Mildmay, not when I had no intention of giving him what he . . . wanted? Needed? It was hard to tell with him; he said so little about himself, and watched everything with the same stone-faced glower. And asking merely made him withdraw further.
One thing I knew. I didn’t love him.
Another thing I knew. He didn’t love me. Not when he was still so haunted by Ginevra that he could call me by her name and never even notice.
A relationship between us was a disaster waiting to happen, and I thought we had enough disasters already. I knew I hadn’t called him Hallam only because I had trained myself rigorously, viciously, never to say Hallam’s name out loud. Never.
And so Felix—an unlikely refuge if ever there was one—was off-limits. I certainly couldn’t go to the Cockatrice; the mere idea was enough to turn my stomach. And I was not going to become anyone’s light of love, living a parasitical, precarious existence and having always to mind my tongue. My stint in Klepsydra had taught me I needed acting to stay sane, and needed the theater to stay a person instead of merely a façade, a mask.
I needed the Empyrean.
I shook my head, coming out of a most unprofitable reverie with a start. The doomsaying would keep. “Come on, now,” I said to Corinna. “You’re going to hate yourself in the morning, you know. Let me get your buttons undone, and you can go to sleep.”
“But what are we gonna do?” she said, catching my wrist.
“We start by talking to Jean-Soleil,” I said. “And we can’t do that until tomorrow. Sleep, Corinna.”
She was drunk enough to be amenable. I undid her buttons, helped her out of dress and petticoats while she murmured bits of Bysshe’s address to sleep from Margot and Bysshe.
“I don’t care what cards he’s got in his hand,” I said finally, extinguishing the lamp. “I wouldn’t back Jermyn against Jean-Soleil if you offered me the best odds in the world.”
“Hope you’re right,” she said, already three-quarters asleep, and I slipped out into the hall with a tremendous sense of relief.