The Mirador (62 page)

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 right.”

“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?”

“To be an actress, you idiot. Look—”

“Mehitabel, we have to tell Jean-Soleil.”

“No,” said Gordeny Fisher behind us. “I’ll tell him. But I want to tell Mr. Baillie something first.”

I moved out of the way.

“Now, Gordeny,” Drin said nervously.

“I’ve had about all of you I’m going to take,” she said. “I’m going to go to Jean-Soleil and tell him the truth. Which is that I know some people who ain’t all that nice. That’s
all
. I’m not a pack-rat and I’m not a hooker or a pusher or whatever the fuck it is you think I am. If he throws me out—”

"He won’t,” I said.

“
If
he throws me out, you win. But if he lets me stay, I want you to quit with the fishy looks at me—and the fishy looks at Semper, for that matter. Okay?”

I wished there were enough light for me to see Drin’s face; I was willing to bet he looked like he’d just swallowed a live frog, and I would have dearly loved to see that look on Drin Baillie’s face.

“Okay?”

Fundamentally, Drin was a coward. He mumbled agreement and fled.

“There,” said Gordeny with great satisfaction.

“I’m sorry I was spying,” I said.

“It don’t matter. Doesn’t. I mean, it’s not like there’s any big secret. I got an ex-boyfriend who’s into some nasty shit. He won’t bring it here. And it doesn’t
matter
.”

“Only to Drin,” I said.

That made her laugh, and we were able to start back toward the party.

“Don’t tell Jean-Soleil tonight,” I said. “He’ll be too drunk to pay attention. Catch him Neuvième. He gets back at ten on the dot. And, er . . .”

“I won’t say anything about Drin. I don’t figure he’s going to be a problem anymore.”

“No, you’ve fixed him. And Jean-Soleil will know anyway. It’s just unkind to make him admit it.” We’d reached the rehearsal room. I smiled at her. “Now go on in there and enjoy being Madame Fisher.”

She smiled back and dropped me a curtsy. “Madame Parr.”

We went into the light and babble together.

Mildmay went to bed as soon as we got back to the suite. He remembered his manners enough to say good night, but his eyes were inward-focused and exalted, and I wouldn’t have gotten any sense out of him if I’d tried.

He went into his little room and shut the door, and Vincent and I stood awkwardly staring at each other until I remembered my own manners and asked, “Will Ivo be expecting you back, or can you stay for a little?”

Vincent consulted his pocket watch. “Ivo said he wouldn’t wait up for me. If I stay an hour or so, he’ll have gone to bed and I shan’t have to deal with him at all.”

“And you can, er, trust him? Brandy?”

“Yes, please. And, yes. Ivo, in his way, is quite scrupulous. He doesn’t lie to me.”

I poured brandy, brought him a snifter, and we went to sit in the chairs by the hearth. “What
does
. . . no, I’m sorry. It’s no business of mine.”

“What does he do to me, you were going to ask?” He smiled, wry but real. “You never did have any tact.”

“Guilty as charged,” and I smiled back at him, wanting him to like me.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” he said, looking down into his brandy.

My eyebrows went up. “No?”

He gave me a sidelong quirk of a smile. “Not quite. Ivo isn’t a tarquin, you see.”

“Ivo . . .
isn’t
a tarquin?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Ivo,” Vincent said with great precision, “is a martyr.”

After a moment, I realized I was staring and looked hastily away.

“In the bedroom,” Vincent said, in that dry precise tone like a man dissecting his own heart, “I am Ivo’s tarquin. Out of the bedroom, I am Ivo’s catamite. Do you see?”

“You said he was jealous,” I said slowly.

“He is. Fearfully jealous. And he hates . . .” He swallowed brandy. “He hates himself for needing what he needs. And he hates me for giving him what he needs. But at the same time, it is
need
, and so he will not give me up. Because he can control me.”

“You’ve had a long time to think about this.”

“Oh, yes. And no one to talk to about it. Because even if I could trust anyone at Arborstell to listen and not betray me, none of them would understand. But you do, don’t you?” And his pale eyes caught me, like an iron spike through my chest.