The Privilege of the Sword (32 page)

“My dear.” Lord Ferris unpeeled his gloves from his hands and held them to the fire. “Please tell your uncle that this descends well below the annoying to the merely pathetic. If Tremontaine has a quarrel with me, let him say so himself, and not send a girl to do his business for him.”

“It’s not his quarrel. It’s on behalf of someone else.” Ferris tilted his head inquiringly. I did not like looking at him, knowing what he’d done. I found it hard to speak the crime out loud or say her name. “A friend of mine. You forced her. Against her will.”

“You know nothing about it.” But he didn’t sound so smooth now.

“I know that honor has been violated. I know you did it, and that it has gone unpunished. On behalf of Artemisia Fitz-Levi, I demand satisfaction. I challenge you to combat in the place and time of your choosing, with what champion you will, until honor is washed clean with blood.”

Ferris laughed, and I hated him. “The girl is not without family. She has a father. She has a brother. If honor has been violated, as you so quaintly put it, it is their business, indeed their duty, to call challenge on me.”

“But it isn’t their honor, sir. It’s hers.”

He went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “And have they come after me with swordsmen? They have not. Indeed, I hope to be married soon. So you just run along.”

I was so angry I wanted to cry. I swallowed my tears. “It’s hers. Her honor, not theirs.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” Lord Ferris said. “It is not the duke’s business to interfere in this. Whatever strange notions he holds about women—and if your situation is an example of them, I hope you will not take it as an insult when I say that they are very strange indeed—” He lifted a hand against my interruption. “Stop just a moment and think. You’re an intelligent girl. I mean you no harm. Why should I? Your uncle, the Duke Tremontaine, is a dreamer and a lunatic. His treatment of you should tell you that, if nothing else. My dear, I know you’re in a difficult situation. A poor relation, he’s got you where he wants you, and no fault of yours….” I let the insults go by. A good swordsman doesn’t pay attention to words in a fight. Lord Ferris turned his head to look me full in the face with his one good eye. “But I am here to tell you that if you persist in this, you’ll only make fools of the lot of us.”

“The challenge stands,” I told him. “Artemisia’s the only one who can call it off now, and I bet she won’t. You could, I suppose, try going down on your knees and begging her forgiveness. I’m not sure it would work, but you could try. Otherwise, name the time and the place, and look to your honor and your sword.”

He said, “How quaintly old-fashioned. No, my dear, it is you who will withdraw the challenge. There will be no time and no place, and we will not speak of this again.” He did not wait for my answer, simply pulled on his gloves and opened the door to the little room, saying with the practiced heartiness of someone who is always telling people what to do, “Now, you are going to walk out of this building and back to Riverside and tell your uncle what I said. And there will be no more of this nonsense.”

The sun was very bright. I walked stiffly across the expanse of Justice Place, not looking behind me. It was my guide who caught up to me.

“You didn’t kill him,” he accused. “I was sure you were gonna kill him.”

I said, “I wish I had.”

L
ORD
F
ERRIS STROLLED WITHOUT HASTE TO WHERE
a knot of noblemen awaited carriages to take them home to a hot dinner. “Trouble, Tony?” Philibert Davenant asked. “I heard there was something like a challenge.”

“Something like.” Ferris smiled. “Only a joke, that’s all. Just more madness from poor Tremontaine.”

His friends nodded. In recent years few of them had not been touched by some slight or folly of the duke’s.

“Someone should do something,” grumbled old Karleigh, and Ferris said, “Perhaps someone should.”

I
TOOK
K
EVIN DOWN TO THE KITCHENS WITH ME TO
see whether anyone would feed him or give him a real job. If he ever learned to shut up, I thought he’d make a good guard or footman or something.

“Bread and cheese,” the undercook told me, “that’s all you’re getting at this hour, with a host of starving scholars coming tonight that always expect the best, with hardly any warning, and woe betide us if they don’t get it, too! He’s more particular about his scholars than about his ladies and gentlemen.”

At the other end of the long kitchen table, behind a stack of cabbages, beets and half-plucked fowl, someone made a choking noise. It was Marcus, coughing on a crumb from a large meat pie, or possibly his bowl of soup. I grabbed his soup bowl and offered it to Kevin.

“Hey!” Marcus protested.

“You don’t need it.”

“I do need it. I’m growing. I need my strength. Arthur Ghent says so, and he’s got five brothers, he should know.”

He was growing, it was true. “Marcus,” I asked, “what about you? Do you have any brothers?”

“All thinking men are my brothers,” Marcus said loftily.

Kevin lowered the soup bowl from his face for a moment. “I ain’t your brother, pal.”

“You can say that again.” Marcus examined him. “Where’d you pick this one up?”

“Same place as you,” Kevin cheeked him, and called him a name.

Marcus shoved back his bench. He rose towering above the scrawny Kevin. “Give me my soup back.”

“Make me.”

It looked as if he would, too. I could not believe it. “We are not starting a brawl in this kitchen!” I hissed at them both.

Marcus shrugged and drew back. “Have you checked your pockets, Katie? I would if I were you.”

Kevin put down his soup and raised his hands. “I never did! You think I’m stupid or what? Not with the duke’s own, never, I swear.”

“Oh, honestly!” I huffed. “He was helping me, Marcus, to keep me from getting lost, that’s all.” I didn’t like lying to him, even indirectly. But I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about the challenge to Lord Ferris, not even Marcus. It was Artemisia’s secret.

“I’m sure he was. But what do you think he does for a living, when he’s not helping you cross the street?”

I stared hard at my friend. He reminded me of a farm dog when someone’s on his territory. “I can guess,” I said. “But it’s none of my business.”

“You think he’s only a pickpocket? Not likely. Guess again.”

“It’s none of my business,” I repeated doggedly. “And it’s not very polite to talk about him in front of him like that, as if he weren’t really there.”

“Yeah,” Kevin jeered. “Where was you raised, fella, in a ditch?”

Marcus grabbed his collar. “Out,” he said. “Now.”

“You kids are
all
outta here, right now!” The senior cook descended on us like the wrath of the storm god. “You think this is a schoolyard, or what? Out—or do I need to call Master Osborne?” Master Osborne was the steward. He had a lot of time for Marcus, who made his life so much easier by explaining what the duke really wanted, but you wouldn’t want to risk getting on his bad side. Master Osborne was the one who decided how often your sheets got changed and how much firewood was in your room. “There’s work going on here; someone’s gonna chop you up instead of an onion, you don’t yield space this minute!”

While Marcus was busy placating the cooks and I was busy avoiding him, Kevin disappeared with the soup bowl and a handful of beets.

S
O THAT WAS WHY
M
ARCUS STILL WASN’T SPEAKING
to me. I didn’t have much to say to him, either. Around the duke and his people, Marcus was always very poised and subtle; I’d never seen him downright rude before. To be fair, he’d lived in this house a long time, and he wasn’t going to learn manners from my uncle. But I saw no reason for him to be so mean to some poor starving Riverside kid. He’d been edgy ever since my fight at the Rogues’ Ball. Had he guessed that I was keeping secrets from him? If he was my friend he would ask me himself, not take it out on a boy I was trying to help, wouldn’t he?

I don’t know how long this would have gone on if Lucius Perry hadn’t made one of his regular visits to the Riverside house.

I got out of the way just in time. One of the servants was guiding him down the hall to my uncle’s bedroom, and I was coming the other way, and I realized that meeting Perry here after the events of the Rogues’ Ball would be more awkward than I could bear. So I grabbed the nearest doorknob and ducked inside, which was not very swordsmanly of me, but swordsmanship is not made for awkward social situations.

I turned, and there was Marcus, sitting at his shesh board, wrapped in a quilted silk robe. “You should knock first,” he said snarkily. “Where were you raised, anyhow?”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I babbled, “but it’s him and I forgot to tell you but I know who he is now!”

He put the piece he was holding carefully down on the board. “How intriguing.”

“I’m going to kill you,” I snapped. “I know how, and all.”

“One blow, straight to the heart…if I have to hear it one more time, I’m going to kill
myself,
don’t bother. Who’s in the hallway?”

I inclined my head toward the duke’s bedroom.

“Alcuin?”

I couldn’t resist a smile. “Lucius Perry.”

“Who the hell is Lucius Perry?”

I told him.

Before I had even finished, Marcus was dressing to go out. “Rope,” he said. “This time, we’re going to get over that wall.”

“What on earth for? We already know who he is.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I thought you were worried about your friend and him.”

“It turns out he’s her
cousin,
that’s all, I already told you. What he does with his spare time is his own business.”

“Or ours.”

“Or the duke’s,” I said primly, remembering my uncle’s admonitions.

“It’s the duke’s business only if we want it to be. But we don’t. What do you bet His Lordship doesn’t even know about that little house?”

“So what? It’s just a regular house, Marcus. If we were going to follow Lucius Perry to Glinley’s House of You-Know-What, that would be something.”

“Next time,” Marcus said, pulling on his boots, almost breathless with excitement. “Oh, Katie, can’t you see it? Your Perry is a nobleman who lives all these different lives, and nobody knows about all of them, not even Tremontaine. We’re the only ones; we’ll be the only ones who’ll have all the pieces.”

“I don’t want to hurt him,” I cautioned. After what I’d witnessed in the kitchen, I wasn’t sure I knew Marcus as well as I thought. “I mean, if you were thinking of extortion or something….”

“Don’t be silly.” Marcus pulled his boots snug. “I just want to know. Don’t you?”