The Privilege of the Sword (25 page)

“Not now,” he said. “Maybe at night would be more…”

“Discreet?”

“Just so.”

We noted the house, and started back downhill.

“That was fun,” said Marcus, brushing whitewash off his knees. “Now are you going to tell me why we did it?”

“Marcus…do you remember that day, my first day on the Hill when you found me all lost and took me back home? I’d gone to see a girl I met at the duke’s party, a girl my age who was there on a dare or something. When I went to visit her,
that man
was there, sitting in her day room. He said something nasty about Tremontaine House, I remember now.”

“Did he? What a nerve. He’s been coming there since last year, at least. And I don’t see signs of him finding it especially nasty.”

“Perhaps we ought to warn her. If he’s a relative, or he’s even courting her…don’t you think she’d need to know he’s doing this?”

“Living in a house near the Hill? It’s not an outrage, that.”

“First of all, we aren’t sure he lives here, he’s just got a key. Second, you know that’s not what I meant. If I were betrothed to someone who worked at Glinley’s, I’d want to know it!”

He said, “Oh, I’m sure it won’t come to that. Your uncle’s weird, but he’s not that weird.” I ignored this. “Is your friend betrothed to him?”

“She’s
something
to him, or he wouldn’t have been with her that day. Maybe he’s her brother, I don’t know. But I think it’s important. You’re sure,” I demanded, “about Glinley’s?”

“Oh, yes.”

“But are you sure about what he does there? Maybe he just does—other business.”

“There is no other business at Glinley’s.” Marcus was smug. “I’m sure.”

“But why would he work there if he didn’t have to?”

“Maybe he does have to. Or maybe he’s just bored,” Marcus said airily, sounding more like the duke than ever, “and too lazy to relieve it any other way.”

“Lazy? You think that’s lazy?”

“Of course. Or he would take the trouble to learn something new. As we have. Everyone already knows how to copulate.”

We had to be quiet while some people passed us: other servants, carrying baskets and looking harried.

“Well, why would he go all the way down to Riverside to do it?” I persisted.

“Glinley’s,” Marcus explained importantly, “is a very particular establishment. It is expensive, and caters to specialized tastes.”

I did not know what he meant, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Then I’m surprised the duke doesn’t live there,” I said tartly.

“He doesn’t need to. He’s part owner. Our man was bringing him his share of the take.”

I drew breath hissing in between my teeth. “That’s disgusting.” We were passing into the part of the city with all the lovely shops in it. “Marcus,” I said suddenly, “do you have any money on you?”

“A little. Why?”

“Could we go in somewhere and eat cakes? And drink chocolate?”

“We could.”

“Well, I want to.”

He said, “People are going to take you for an actress.”

I looked down at my legs, encased in breeches and high boots. “As long as they let actresses drink chocolate, I don’t mind.”

We found a place called the Blue Parrot where they served us excellent cakes. When we’d eaten and drunk all we could afford, we went to the Ramble by the river and watched children running races with hobbyhorses. Then we were hungry again, and bought gingerbread with some coins I found in the bottom of my jacket pocket. We watched a trained dog jump through hoops, and heard a fiddler playing “Maiden’s Fancy,” and whistled it all the way home.

The duke met us on the stairs of the Riverside house. He looked sober and displeased. “Do you have any idea what time it is? No, I suppose you were off courting murder and mayhem, and couldn’t be bothered to wonder whether any was occurring at home.”

“We went out for gingerbread.” I offered him the bag. He took a piece and ate it.

“Well, I’ve been calling all over for you,” he said, licking powdered cinnamon off his fingers. “I can’t find my—” For the first time, he looked fully at Marcus. “Why is there dirt on your knees?”

Marcus looked down. “I dropped my money. When we were buying the gingerbread. I had to pick it up.”

“Oh? And did Lady Katherine drop hers, too?”

My own breeches had a smear of whitewash from the wall we’d climbed, plus mud from where I fell. “I was helping.”

“Nice try.” The duke was smiling with the pleasure undoing a knotty problem gave him. “But a couple more questions, asked of you independently, and your whole story would unravel. You see—” he crouched down so he wasn’t towering over us—“it’s not street dirt, for one thing; it’s whitewash and garden mud. Your palms are scratched. And this is Robertson gingerbread, with the cinnamon, and that is not sold on the street.”

I felt at once very annoyed, and thrilled with the sort of challenge that a good swordfight gave me. “Some boys knocked us down and ran off.”

Amused, the duke’s eyes glowed green deep behind his crinkled features. “The gingerbread bag was closed at the time? And where did they push you down?”

“On the West Bank,” Marcus said, “by the river.”

The duke unfolded himself back up to his full height. “It is very annoying, I know,” he drawled, “to have to account for all your time to someone older than you are. Very annoying. But I take care to be an annoying person.”

“I give you my word,” I said earnestly, as I had heard my brothers do when they’d been caught out, “we didn’t do anything—”

“Gingerbread,” Marcus overrode me coolly. “Katie told you.”

Tremontaine’s hand flashed out and gripped his shoulder. The sudden movement had sent my hand to my swordhilt; I admired my friend’s ability not to flinch. “Marcus,” he said, “I had a visitor this afternoon. You offered to fetch him a chair, and then you disappeared.”

“He didn’t want the chair. If you heard me asking, you heard what he said back.”

“Katherine, please take your hand from your sword. It’s a bad habit to get into; it makes people think you’re about to start a fight.”

I saw Marcus press his lips against the sharp grip on his shoulder. But I took my hand from my hilt; I did, indeed, know better than that.

“Do you know this man’s name?”

“No,” I said, and the duke lessened his grip on Marcus and turned to me.

“Then why did you follow him?”

I looked at Marcus; Marcus looked at me.

“You were seen,” the duke said, “leaving the house after him.”

I shrugged. “We lost him in the city.”

“I’m going to ask you again. Why did you follow him?”

I drew in my breath, opened my mouth to ask him the questions only he could answer—and then I shut it again. He had plenty of his own secrets already. This one was ours. “For a test,” I said. “I’m learning to be a swordsman. This is part of it.”

“Did Master Drake assign you this test?”

“No.” I stared him in the eyes, telling him where I had learned it, and from whom.

The duke looked away. “Well, then,” he said. “If you lost him so easily, you’d better practice harder. Just not on my guests, that’s all.”

We started to turn away, but the duke’s voice stopped us, hard and serious. “Understand this, both of you, about people who come to this house. Their business is my business. Their secrets are my secrets. Stalk whom you like, but not my guests. Like just about everyone in the city but you, it seems, that man is not supposed to be here. It would go very ill for him if anyone outside this house learned of his presence here. Do you understand?”

Marcus looked down at the floor. “We’re sorry.” I nodded in agreement, looking penitent as a good niece should.

“Where’s the rest of that gingerbread?” my uncle asked.

We shared it out, and then went down to the kitchen together looking for more cake. The pastry cook was creating little icing flowers to decorate something. The duke appropriated the flowers and bore them and us off to the library, where we saw the sun down playing a complicated gambling game using them as tokens, joined by a couple of resident scholars. Winners got to eat their own sweets; Marcus occasionally was sent down for more plates of flowers to keep the game going. No one wanted any supper—instead, the scholars started quizzing each other on points so obscure that the joking guesses Marcus and I threw out were sometimes right. Candles were lit. The duke scrambled up and down ladders fetching volumes to adjudicate between them.

The night went on, the candles burned down and we sent for more, and the kitchen started sending up jellies and syllabubs, along with cakes decorated with the little flowers. The duke’s homely friend Flavia came in, looking for a book, but she refused to play. She picked a few flowers off the cakes, listened for a bit, and then said, “I didn’t know it was possible to get drunk on sugar, but I think you’ve managed it,” and went off grumbling. She may have been right, though. One moment I was screaming with laughter, and the next it was all I could do to keep from falling asleep on the window seat.

“The untroubled dreams of youth,” one scholar said, and the duke asked me, “Where did you learn so much about the Battle of Pommerey?” and Marcus said, “Bedtime, Katie.”

I felt faintly sick, and altogether happy. Before he shut the library door behind me, I got the chance to whisper to Marcus, “There’s something going on! He doesn’t want us to know. I’m going to find out—are you with me?”

“I’m with you,” he said softly, and shut the door.

chapter
IV

A
RTEMISIA
F
ITZ
-L
EVI HAD NOT YET BEEN ALONE
with her betrothed. She did not mind; it made everything they did together seem like a play, performed for an appreciative audience of ever-changing watchers. She was always well dressed and the sets were beautiful. Lord Ferris also was well dressed and knew his part to perfection. The Crescent Chancellor gallantly handed her into her carriage under the eyes of dinner or ball guests; he courteously escorted her and her mother to shops, and even to the theater, while other girls looked on in envy; he monopolized her at balls, and said very nice things about her where everyone could hear. She appeared at parties decked out in jewels that he had sent her, and he was always sure to tell her how well they became her. They were to be married in the spring, before people left town for their country estates. Sometimes Artemisia wished this engagement could go on forever.

More of her other friends had now been spoken for. They drank chocolate together, a very worldly-wise group of young ladies, casting knowing glances at the less fortunate and freely dispensing advice. Whatever their fortunes, though, Lady Artemisia knew, as did they all, that she had taken the prize. Ferris was rich and he was powerful; he was still fairly handsome, and clearly he adored her to distraction. When she was with him, she felt witty and beautiful, drunk on the same fevered wine she had known the night of the Halliday ball.

Tonight, though, she was conscious of a vague unease. Oh, the room glittered, the people glittered, and the jewels round her neck and on her fingers, all gifts of her betrothed or lent her by her mother against her inheritance. Nothing pleased her, though, not the rare sweets and drinks or the swirling patterns of costumed dancers…. It seemed to her that the envious looks were fewer, that the handsome young men looked only once at her, saw her as taken and did not look again, no matter how rich her jewels or how low-cut her gown. Lord Ferris had arrived late, pressed by business of the Council, and though he apologized handsomely and thenceforth never left her side, she found herself wishing he had never come at all.

She made him fetch and carry for her, changed her mind a dozen times about her shawl, her drinks, whether she would dance or no. It gave her less pleasure than she’d expected, knowing she could command one of the chief nobles of the city, the head of the Council of Lords. It changed nothing, really: they were still the same drinks, the same dances.

Lord Ferris kept his temper admirably. She knew he was doing it, and even that made her cross. For his part, he tried flirting with her, praising her, until finally he realized that only direct address would work. And so he took her aside and said, “My dear. Tell me what’s wrong. Has someone insulted you? Or injured you in any way?”

To her own amazement, Artemisia burst into tears.

“Dear me,” Ferris sighed. “It’s not your mother again, is it?”

She giggled through her tears. Her handkerchief was soaked; not surprising, since it was a tiny piece of paper-thin fabric surrounded by waves of useless lace. Lord Ferris handed her his: a reasonable linen square, lightly scented with something agreeable, some fine, expensive scent twined with something else she could not name. She held it to her nose, praying it was not getting too red. He reached a hand up to hers, as if he would take the kerchief from her, then he touched the tip of her nose, instead. The tip of her nose, and then her ear.

“It’s the waiting, isn’t it?” he murmured. “It’s hard on your nerves. I had thought best to give you time to enjoy your Season and enjoy lording it over the other girls…but there is too much of a good thing. Perhaps we might move up the date?”