The Mirador (61 page)

I said, “Yeah. I waited this long. I can go see Jenny’s necromancer and see if she’ll tell me anything. But you can’t put it off forever, right?”

“Yeah.” He heaved a sigh sounded like it came all the way up from his boots, and got up. “Thanks.”

“It’s okay.” And before I’d decided whether I was enough of a sissy to ask for some help, he reached down a hand, like it wasn’t no big deal. He didn’t say nothing about it, and I didn’t, neither.

He opened the secret door, then turned back all of a sudden and said, “Look, if you get something about, you know, about
that
, and you need to reach me, I got a message drop in Pennycup. The gaslights on Furnival that don’t work no more. Third from the corner of Antimony, river side of the street, the lily on the south side of the base is loose. Anything you put in there, I’ll get it quick. And Keeper don’t know a thing.”

“Yeah, that’s great. Soon as you tell me how I’m gonna get to Furnival Street without getting fucking lynched, I’m all over it.”

“Kethe’s cock, I’m trying to do you a favor here!” He sounded kind of raw, like it actually bothered him I was being a prick. Like he cared what I thought.

“Shit, I’m sorry.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Thanks. I’ll remember.”

“Okay.” And then he went back through the secret door and I went back to the suite. Where Felix wasn’t. And I thought about trying to get to bed, but there was just no fucking point, so I was still sitting up, playing Hermit’s Pleasure, when he came back around the ninth hour of the night. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, and his cravat was in the pocket of his coat.

“What are you doing up?”

“You didn’t say I had to go to bed.”

He gave me a look that was pure poison. He wasn’t drunk, and if he’d been doing phoenix, I couldn’t tell.

“Now I am telling you. Go to bed.”

He didn’t hit the obligation d’âme, but I knew he meant it.

At the door of my room, I stopped and looked at him. I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t think of no other way to show him I cared about him. “Where were you?”

It didn’t make him angry. He just said sadly, “Nowhere you want to know about,” and walked into his bedroom. He locked the door behind him, and there was nothing more me or anybody else could do. He’d put himself out of reach.

Tickets for
Edith Pelpheria
came before court.

“Two tickets,” Felix said, taking them out of their envelope. He was himself again, like last night hadn’t happened or something. “How kind of Mehitabel.”

“I don’t much want to go,” I said.

“Nonsense. It’s a great play, and you would be stupid to miss it.”

“Really, I—”

“Besides, committee meetings are one thing, but I can’t show myself to the adoring masses without you. And
I
want to see it.”

“Powers, Felix, I don’t—”

“Your absence would be remarkable and conspicuous—as mine would be, for that matter. We are noted patrons of the Empyrean. No one will eat you, Mildmay.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, because he would get what he wanted anyway. He always did.

“Excellent,” he said and tucked the tickets in his waistcoat pocket.

He must have decided, sometime when I wasn’t looking, that it was time for things to get back to normal. Today, he didn’t lose track of me after court, and so I had to go off to the Lesser Coricopat and another fucking Curia meeting. Everybody got so quiet when I walked in behind him that you’d’ve thought they’d fallen down a well. Fuck me sideways ’til I cry, I thought, but I put myself behind Felix’s chair and I stood there like I was a statue or something and pretended I couldn’t see the way Lady Agnes Bellarmyn and her cronies were looking at me. I didn’t watch the hocuses to either side of Felix sliding their chairs away sideways either.

And then Lord Giancarlo came in and gave me a nasty look under his bushy gray eyebrows same way he always did, and Felix leaned back and tilted his head toward me. I bent down, and he said, just loud enough for me to hear, “Don’t waste your time caring what these twits think about you.” Then he straightened up again, all attention and innocence for Lord Giancarlo, and I straightened up, too, and felt like every bone in my body was only half as heavy as it had been a minute ago. No matter how much I tried to keep myself from caring what Felix thought, and no matter what I might say to him about trusting him—and no matter how true that was—I couldn’t keep from feeling right now like the only thing that mattered was that Felix didn’t hate me, that he was on my side against the whole fucking Curia. If he’d asked me to fly around the room right then, I would’ve tried.

I didn’t pay no attention to the Curia meeting after that, except for noticing that Felix was on his best behavior, and even Lady Agnes couldn’t draw him. I saw Lord Giancarlo’s eyebrows noticing that, too, and I knew he was wondering what horrible thing that meant Felix had in store for him. But if Felix was plotting anything nasty for the Curia, he didn’t spring it on them before the end of the meeting, and he furthermore got us out of there before Lady Agnes could catch him.

We spent a while in the Archive of Thistles, and I was still feeling so happy I didn’t even mind being bored, and then we went back to the suite, and Vincent Demabrien was waiting for us—I mean, for Felix. The look he gave me said he’d’ve been happier if I’d been off drowning myself in the Sim or something.

“Vincent!” Felix said. “Good afternoon—well, evening I guess,” with a look at his pocket watch. “What can I do for you?”

“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.

The performance went off like a miracle, like that ideal performance you dream about but never, ever reach.