The Privilege of the Sword (28 page)

L
ADY
A
RTEMISIA
F
ITZ
-L
EVI WAS AFRAID THAT HER
mask was slipping. Nervously she tugged at the ribbons that held it in back. If only she hadn’t had to sneak out without her maid’s help; Dorrie would have been able to pin it more tightly into her hair. Unlike every other party she’d ever been to, here there was no room to retire to with ladies’ maids standing by to mend tears and turn up stray locks of hair. She was on her own. “Don’t worry,” her escort breathed in her ear, “they’ll all think you are my ladybird, isn’t that the point? Put your head up, dearest, and laugh. Look like you’re having a good time, or they’ll know you’re not.”

“But I’m afraid it will come loose—”

“My dear.” Her intended ran his finger carefully along the place where the bottom of the mask ended and her cheek began. She felt a chill at the base of her spine: excitement, or fear, or that thing the older girls talked about? “If I see any sign of it coming loose, I will be the first to help you hide your face. Do you think I want the world to know my wife was at this affair? No, my little madcap puss,” and his arm was around her back now, holding her to him, his hand cradling her hip through the heavy layers of her skirt, “this will just be our little secret, our first adventure together. Isn’t that what you wanted?” and she had to say, “Yes, of course it is.”

The room was aswirl with people. It was like being in a pool of water, in a river that moved against her. Someone knocked into her and Artemisia gasped reflexively, “Oh! Excuse me!”

But her escort squeezed her waist and chuckled, “That’s no way to go about it. Not here, not with these types. The next time that happens, you jab out with your elbow and say, ‘Watch it, jackass!’”

She giggled nervously. “I can’t!”

“Yes you can…try it.” Without warning, he swung her around so she ran into a short man whose hands were full of pie. “Watch it, sister!” the man sputtered through a mouthful of pie, and she said, “Watch it, yourself,” and though she spoiled the effect by giggling, he told her she had done well.

A
BAND STRUCK UP IN ONE CORNER OF THE ROOM.
It was the kind of music you could hear in any Riverside tavern, fiddles and ratchety pipes and drums, and everyone loved it. The Riversiders and University students knew the tunes and the steps that went with them and threw themselves into the dance, right at home. The nobles, some dressed in rags and some in ball regalia, but all easily distinguished by their cleanliness, started casting about for likely looking girls to dance with. I was glad my clothes ensured that no one could take me for one. I passed behind, the dark duke’s bright shadow, as he drifted looking for amusement.

His eye was caught by a group of men dressed in brightly fluttering tatters. They had braided ribbons into their hair, twined them through the careful rents in their shirts and sleeves and breeches. Some had tied in little bells; you couldn’t hear them above the noise, but they looked nice.

“What ho!” one of them cried, roguishly, I guess, to the crowd. “We are the Companions of the King! Come join us in our devilish revelry!” They seemed to be trying to arrange people into a pyramid against the wall behind them. A red-haired man had a food-stained tablecloth laid out on the floor and was drawing on it with a burnt stick.

The duke moved towards them as if their colors were flame on a cold night. One spotted us and shouted, “Oh, joy! It’s darkest Night—”

“Or Nightmare,” said the redhead, “allied with Temptation. Just what we need to complete the tableau. Do join us, please, and we’ll make you immortal.”

“I am already immortal,” the duke said, a little thickly. “Have you discovered a new method?”

“Art, sir, art is the medium! As it ever was. Art renders immortality through the medium of allegory. Twin art with morality, and there is nothing to offend anyone, yet something for all tastes.”

We looked up at the artists’ tableau. It was a complicated twist of people arranged reaching for fruit, for wine, or for each other. “It doesn’t look very moral to me,” my uncle said.

“Exactly.”

“What my friend means, severe and beautiful one, is that in the interest of revealing virtue, we mask it in vice.”

“Didn’t Placid say that?” asked the other.

“No, I said it,” snapped the red-haired artist. “It is a grand concept. A masked ball of virtue, the obverse of roguery, disguised as the very thing it seeks to cast down.”

The duke actually smiled. “Very apt.” He gestured to the pyramid. “And this represents…?”

“Man’s heedless quest for Pleasure, of appetites temporal and carnal. See how in their striving each man treads upon the other? And how the Pleasures reach out mindlessly to tempt us?”

I certainly did. One of the Pleasures, a man all tucked up behind another one, untwisted his arm, encased in peacock blue silk, to wave it languidly at the duke. I had seen his sleek head before, and this time I knew where.

It was Artemisia’s friend, and the Mad Duke’s as well. I was dying to say something clever to my uncle about that particular beauty being one of the pleasures he’d already enjoyed—but if I hoped to find out more about the mysterious young man who visited nice young girls on the Hill and also worked at Glinley’s, I would have to be chary. I would discover his name tonight; that would be my quest, and if I was very lucky, my uncle would not know of it.

“So in the interest of illuminating virtue,” the artist was saying, “it is possible, indeed necessary, to show vice in all its manifestations. It will be a tremendous crowd-pleaser.”

“Right,” said the duke. “Well then, get out your sketchbooks and get started, because I want to be at the top, and I probably won’t last long.”

As he handed me his empty glass, I recalled my duty. “Oh, no. I really don’t think you should—”

“You are my swordsman, not my governess,” the duke said sternly. “If someone attacks me with anything sharp and pointed, you kill them. Otherwise, leave me alone.”

There was no use arguing with him. If he broke his leg, someone could probably set it.

The duke set one finely shod foot on the thigh of a crouching earth spirit and began his ascent. I’d climbed some trees in my time, and clearly so had he. But the trees didn’t usually shudder and giggle underfoot. The red-haired artist wasn’t really helping, rushing in and patting people who were falling out of pose back into place. He nearly got kicked in the teeth by a ticklish Temperance. A couple of the others began sketching madly. It looked like roiling clouds of form all over their paper, not like people at all, but I saw they were drawing a sort of map of the scene. I’d never seen anything like it, and I was so fascinated that I missed the downfall of the allegory. I heard my uncle shout, “
You!
You—” and then the voices became indecipherable, and it was all a mess of arms and legs and skirts and hair and ribbons and shrieks and laughter.

The duke crawled out from underneath the heaving throng. He pointed into it. “Kill him,” he said. “He bit me.”

“I don’t think I—”

“My lord, I beg your pardon.” A bright head with rosy cheeks emerged from the sprawl. “I mistook you for a most delicious fruit.”

“An easy mistake for anyone to make,” the duke said smoothly. “Do I know you?”

I knew him. It was the horrible Alcuin.

A
RTEMISIA HAD A STITCH IN HER SIDE.
S
HE REACHED
across the dancers for Lord Ferris, but his hand seemed to slip away from hers as if pulled by the awful music, the straining strings. A stranger with garlic breath had his arm around her waist, and she was close to tears. The dance was not one she knew. There were no steps, it was just leaping back and forth in time to the music, with your partner swinging you this way and that and handing you off to someone else at a signal, but she did not know what it was. All sorts of men had had their hands all over her, and it was too much, really too much, but every time Lord Ferris came in view he smiled brightly at her and said, “Enjoying yourself, sweetheart?” It was all that kept her from tearing herself out of the crowds and running for home…. The garlic went away and she smelt a familiar scent, looked up and realized it was Lord Ferris with his arms around her, and she leaned into his chest and whimpered up at him, “I’m thirsty.”

“Poor kitten,” he said. “Of course you are. What a treat you were there, a jewel ornamenting the arms of some of the roughest men in town.” He was holding her as close as some of them had, closer than he had ever held her before. But at least they were off the dance floor, headed for a quiet corner away from the worst of the brawl. “What shall I feed you now, my sweet pet, wine? Or maybe beer, in the spirit of the evening.”

“Water,” she said, “or a fruit coolant.”

But he went on as if she had not spoken, “I’m not sure she’s serving wine tonight; they’d guzzle it like rough ale, these types, and there would be chaos. But don’t worry; I’ve brought this.” He drew a flask from his jacket, and raised it to his lips. When he lowered it, a little moisture clung to them. “Taste?” he whispered.

“What?” Artemisia was baffled.

He leaned his face down to hers, so that his wet lips were nearly touching hers. “Put out your tongue,” he said, “and taste.”

No one knew where she was. No one here would care what he asked her to do. They were in a corner where no one could see them. Closing her eyes, she slowly put out her tongue and tasted burning brandy and the skin of his lips.

“Ah!” His sudden hot breath shot right into her lungs; she gasped and tried to pull back, but his arms were tight around her.

“Ah,” he said again, and his mouth was all over her, her lips, her chin, her ears, her neck, her chest where the gown was cut as low as she had dared.

“My wicked girl,” he said, “how I adore you.” Artemisia knew she should be pleased, but she was frightened. His hands were everywhere, too, rumpling her skirts, pushing at her bodice, pinning back her hands while he kissed her.

“Please,” she breathed, “I—”

“Oh, do you?” he growled. “Do you? Of course you do, of course you do, so do I—”

“No!”

She said it, she heard herself say it, but he did not seem to. He did not seem to hear anything except his own hot breath, which was terribly loud in her ear while he did things to her skirts until there was nothing at all between him and her, really nothing whatsoever, and although she wailed in distress it only seemed to make him hotter and he forced her up against the wall and rammed himself into her over and over and she had to stop thinking because there was nothing else to do until he let out a revolting noise and draped himself over her all sweaty and said, “Couldn’t wait, could you?”

She was shivering as if her whole body would shake to pieces.

“My dearest love,” he said, and pulled a lock of hair back from her cheek, “are you cold?”

“Please,” she said, “I want to go home.”

“Come home with me,” he murmured. “We’ve the whole night ahead of us.”

He wrapped his arms tight round her, and she tasted sick in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard and tried to match his tone, but her voice came out all squeaky. “How can you say that? How can you say that to me?”

“But why not, sweetheart?” Lord Ferris murmured in her hair.

“How dare you suggest that I—that I—”

“That you are the sort of young lady who would go off unchaperoned with a man to a strange place with no protection? That you’d allow him liberties with you there?” Something caught in her throat and she made a kind of barking noise. “Now, now,” he said, “don’t cry. Can’t you see I love you all the better for it, you wanton little sweet sweet slut?”

She was sobbing so hard she could scarcely breathe, and she heard herself making awful retching noises. She reached out blindly for someone, for something, but only his hands were there to catch hers, and “Oh, come on,” he said; “it’s not that bad. Stop howling like a kitchen maid. Maybe I was a little quick for your first time, but can you blame me? Overcome as I was by the rapture of your beauty—I’ve been overcome for weeks, now, and you damn well know it, you hot little piece. You lead me on, and then expect me to control myself? There, there, stop crying; I promise I’ll be good and slow and patient when we’re married. You’ll like it fine, you’ll see.”