The Mirador (18 page)

“Okay,” Hugo said, like he wasn’t sure it was.

“I’ll clear off,” I said and got up. “Thanks, Hugo.”

“Good night, Mildmay,” Hugo said, and I heard him bolt the door after he’d closed it.

“Boo,” I said under my breath at the door and went off home.

Corinna’s eye for fashion was second to none; I left the Velvet Tears that evening certain at least that I was as close to beautiful as I would ever get. She had chosen a severe dress in green-black silk and dressed my hair in the stark lines of the Amadée—both utterly inappropriate to an actress of known immorality and all the more satisfying for that.

The guards at Chevalgate had clearly been told to expect me, and there was a page waiting, a skinny brown child like a sparrow, to guide me to the Lord Protector’s private apartments. I followed him through the Mirador as a swan-daughter, tall and grave and pale. Well, sallow, but it would have to do.

The page knocked at the door for me and did not bow himself away until it was answered, by a stout middle-aged man in livery. The butler, assuming the Lord Protector had such a thing.

He showed me into a small sitting room, less lavishly appointed than I had expected; the furniture was well cared for and clearly valuable, but not yet beyond the borders of “old” into “antique.” Lord Stephen rose from the depths of a wingback chair to bow over my hand in a way that the court gallants would have considered hopelessly old-fashioned—a good match for his conservative tailoring and the soberly symmetrical curls of his powdered and pigtailed hair.

There was a portrait over the mantel, a slender bronze-skinned woman, very young, with large, dark eyes and smoky-black hair; she was wearing a pale blue dress that suited her far better than the massive crimson and gold court gown of the formal portrait. Gambling that Lord Stephen would be unimpressed by small talk, I asked, “Is that a portrait of your wife, my lord?”

He glanced up at it, as if it had become part of the furniture for him. “Yes. It was painted before our marriage.”

Now there, I thought irritably, is a gnomic utterance. Was it a fact? A judgment? A regret? He seemed himself to feel that he hadn’t quite said enough, for he added, “It’s the only picture of her that does her justice.” He paused, thinking, and added, “She was very pretty, but not . . . not robust.”

“She couldn’t stand up to yards of stiffened brocade,” I suggested, and his dark, blocky face was transfigured by a sudden smile. All those soirées, all those mornings in court, and I’d never seen him smile before.

“That’s a very good way of putting it. She was like a princess in a fairy tale, but not . . .”

“Did you love her?” I said, deliberately provocative. I wanted to know what I could get away with.

He didn’t take offense, seeming to consider the question a perfectly reasonable one. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, really. I doted on her, and I enjoyed the role of protector—ha! Didn’t mean the pun. Sorry. I love her memory, but I’m not sure I’d love
her
now.” His mouth quirked. “Easy to love a memory.”

I thought, without at all wanting to, of Mildmay and the torch he was still carrying for Ginevra, and I was grateful that the manservant—butler or whatever he was—reappeared just then to announce dinner. I accepted Lord Stephen’s arm to proceed into the dining room. Swan-daughter.

Lord Stephen held the chair for me, which I found more disconcerting than anything else. Actresses didn’t rate that sort of courtesy from lords, regardless of anyone’s intentions toward anyone else. And I didn’t know what his intentions were.

Two young men, also in livery, served the soup, and I decided the imaginary Vulpes breathing down my neck could just go twiddle his thumbs in the corner for a minute. I had my own priorities to deal with, and the first had to be getting a handle on what Lord Stephen wanted.

I tried a feint toward the theater, but realized, horrified, several minutes later, that he had me doing all the talking. That wouldn’t do. Well, he seemed to favor plain-speaking. I’d have to try again. “It was very kind of you to invite me, my lord,” I began, but he cut me off with another of his barking laughs.

“Nothing of the sort. I’m putting the wind up Philip and Vicky.”

“I’m sorry, my lord?”

“Beg pardon,” he said, waving a roll in a sort of negligent apology. “My sister Victoria and Philip Lemerius. I’m sure you know I’m supposed to be getting married again.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Well then,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I still don’t—”

“No, it’s my fault. Shannon and Vicky are always on at me about it. But this is simple enough, really. Vicky and Philip are driving themselves mad looking for eligible girls.”

I dared a smile, a wicked twinkle. “So you’re hoping to send them into an apoplexy by dining privately with an actress.”

“And I wanted to talk to you.”

For a moment, I’d thought I understood, but now he was talking a foreign language again. “To me?”

His eyes, gray and unfathomable and suddenly frightening, caught mine. “You seem interesting,” he said, and then the footmen came in to clear away the first course, and I couldn’t tell what he meant.

For someone who seemed so simple and direct, Lord Stephen was a nerve-wracking dinner partner. When the footmen had gone again, and I could ask, he pretended not to remember what he’d said, much less what he’d meant by it, and diverted the conversation into other channels: the theater again; my impressions of the court; what I, as a Kekropian, thought about the Bastion and its recent upheavals. I felt like I was walking on an imperfectly frozen pond, under whose thin skin of ice a hungry monster lurked. There was no way to tell from Lord Stephen’s manner what he knew or guessed or thought about my connections either to Felix or to the Bastion, but I was morally certain he was fishing for information about one or the other.

It was only after the footmen had wafted in and out one last time, leaving us with two snifters of brandy and a plate of sticky macaroons that I suspected were meant to appeal to my plebeian tastes, that Lord Stephen said, “You’re a patient woman, Madame Parr.”

“My lord?” I said.

“Shall we take the gloves off?”

“As your lordship wishes.” If he’d meant to catch me off guard, he shouldn’t have given me a whole dinner to get used to his conversational style.

“You’re not telling me everything,” he said, contemplating his brandy. “And that’s fine. No reason you should. But I asked you to dinner because I wanted to ask you about someone.”

“About whom, my lord?”

“Felix Harrowgate.”

“What about him?”

“Just tell me what you think of him.”

“Beautiful as daylight and knows it. Vain, self-centered, hot-tempered, and a born troublemaker.”

Lord Stephen said after a thoughtful pause, “You know, of course, how much I dislike him.”

“It’s hardly a secret.”

“No.” His gaze skewered me again. “I would rather you
didn’t
tell me what you think I want to hear.”

“I don’t know what you want.”

“I’ve gone about this all wrong,” he said sadly. “Madame Parr, I’m not trying to pry anybody’s secrets out of you. I just wanted the opinion of someone without quite so much . . .
baggage
.”

“What makes you think I don’t have baggage?”

“Well, you do, of course, but my impression was that it was more on the other side.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Nothing ever is.” He contemplated the brandy in his glass. “He worries me, you know.”

“Felix? But I thought you—”

I cut myself off, quite deliberately, as if I hadn’t meant to be tactless. It made him laugh.

“Hated each other? We do. But—Malkar Gennadion brought him to the Mirador the same year I became Lord Protector. I suspect now that the timing was deliberate. Certainly, there are a number of questions
someone
should have been asking that never got asked.”

“What do you mean?”

“Malkar Gennadion,” Stephen said with a grimace of distaste. “Brinvillier Strych. If we’d just been paying attention, he wouldn’t have been able to worm his way in, wouldn’t have been able to get close enough to destroy the Virtu. And my sister wouldn’t have had an affair with our grandmother’s murderer. ”

“Um,” I said, this time not faking uncertainty.

“Sorry,” Stephen said. “It rankles.”

“It must,” I agreed cautiously.

“Wasn’t my point.” He took a swallow of brandy. “It’s how Malkar always worked, you know. You started off on one thing, and somehow he’d get you going on something else. So you’d ask the question
he
wanted. And you wouldn’t ask all the other questions. Like what he
did
to Felix.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, lots of things,” Stephen said grimly. “But does he ever talk about him? About Malkar?”

“No, of course not.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Felix values his privacy far too highly to talk about anything that serious.”

Stephen snorted.

“No, it’s true,” I said. “Of all the things you know about Felix, how many of them really matter? To him, I mean?”

Lord Stephen’s expression grew blank and arrested. “Precious few,” he said, more to himself than to me.

When his eyes came back to me, something in them had changed, and I knew that the audience, for lack of a better word, was over.

“It’s been very kind of you, my lord,” I said, rising. He accepted the cue with something suspiciously like a smile, and escorted me to the door, where his butler, alerted by something I had missed, was waiting.

“This was fun,” Lord Stephen said as his butler opened the door. “Let’s do it again sometime soon.” When I looked up at him, I was more than a little alarmed to see that he wasn’t being ironic. He meant it.

By the time I got back to the suite, it was all crashing down on me again. There was nobody in the sitting room. I shut the door of my bedroom behind me like it was a magic door in a story that you couldn’t open without knowing the right word. I sat on my bed in the dark, staring at nothing, and just waited for time to pass. There wasn’t nothing else I could do.

After a while, there was a knock at the door. Felix came in without waiting for an answer. He was wearing his favorite mouse-colored dressing gown and had his hair tied with a faded piece of green ribbon. His eyes were clear again. He was back from wherever his head had been during dinner. Fuck, I thought.

“Mildmay, are you—” He stopped, called witchlights. “Why are you sitting here in the dark? What’s wrong?”

He sounded like he really cared. I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see how close I was to crying. “Nothing,” I said.

“Don’t give me that. You were upset earlier, too. Is it something I did?”

I thought of all the times he’d upset me and known it and been glad of it. “No,” I said. “It ain’t you.” I couldn’t think of how to put it, so I had to fall back on the way people said things like this in stories. “I’ve left Mehitabel.”

“Left?” he said. “Well, clearly you . . . wait. You mean
left
?”

I took a deep breath, like it would help somehow. “I told her I didn’t want to see her again.”

There was a long silence. I didn’t look at him. Finally, he said, “Why?”

“I had to,” I said. “Could you just leave me alone for a while?”

“If it’s what you want,” he said.

I couldn’t bear crying in front of him. I just nodded.

“All right.” He stopped in the doorway. “Would you . . . would you prefer to talk to Gideon?”

I was almost choking on the hard lump blocking my chest and throat. “No,” I said. “Just leave me alone.”

“All right,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper, and closed the door behind him.

And I sat there in the dark and rubbed the water out of my eyes as fast as it gathered and tried to figure out what was wrong with me anyway. I’d gone two indictions without asking Mehitabel how many other guys she had, so what the fuck had got into me that I went and asked her today?

I didn’t know. That was the bitchkitty and the Queen of Swords. I didn’t fucking know. Just that I hadn’t been able to keep it down no more, and it wasn’t even that I cared if she was sleeping with other guys—I ain’t so stupid I think sex has to mean anything, and most times it don’t—it was that she wouldn’t even give me a straight answer. Because I knew how careful she ran her life. She knew exactly how many guys there were, and how often she’d fucked each one of ’em, and what she’d said to them when she did. And that didn’t bother me, neither. What bothered me was, she didn’t want me to know that. She didn’t want me to know who she was. Not really. Not down where it counts.

And, I mean, I ain’t keen on letting people know my private stuff, but I don’t try to pretend to be anything I ain’t. That was what it was, I figured. Not that she hid things, and not that she lied. But that she didn’t trust me with herself.

I got my clothes off and lay down and wished I could fucking well stop crying. It was a good long while before I got to sleep, and when I did, I fell straight into this nightmare I’d been having on and off for, powers, I don’t know, half an indiction at least. In the dream, I’m going again with Cardenio to see Ginevra’s body in the morgue underneath the Fishmarket, the cade-skiffs’ guildhall, except when we reach the table, her body’s gone. I look at Cardenio and I see that he’s dead, all blue and bloodless and horrible. He tells me that somebody whose name I can’t quite hear has stolen Ginevra’s body, and I have to get it back or they’ll put me in her place. So I’m searching everywhere but I can’t find her, and every time I look back, Master Auberon, Cardenio’s master, is a little closer. He’s dead, too, and he’s holding a very sharp knife. And it was one of those dreams you get sometimes where you know you’re dreaming and you can feel where the real world is, but like the old joke says, you can’t get there from here. I didn’t shake myself free of it until I was actually falling out of bed, a thing that hadn’t happened to me since I’d reached my first septad. I sat there on the floor, my bad leg singing its old stupid song at me, and I laughed until I cried.