The Mirador (36 page)

“What sorts of reasons?” Simon asked before I could say anything, though I ain’t sure what I would’ve said.

“Oh, well,” Mr. Tuillery shifted from foot to foot, “I imagine your lordship would know more about that sort of thing than I do.”

“I thought as much,” Simon said.

“So how do we figure out who this guy was?” I said.

“He was a servant somebody wanted buried in Laceshroud who didn’t have access to a plot,” Mr. Tuillery said. He spread his hands in a sort of shrug, like that was the best he could do. He was looking nervous again, but this time I didn’t think it was about me or Simon. And then I thought about the sort of person who would want or need to break into Laceshroud to bury a body, and I could see his point.

“Thanks, Mr. Tuillery,” I said, letting him off the hook, and he sagged a little with relief. “So, my friend not being a resurrectionist, what would she want with this guy?”

“Is your friend perhaps a necromancer?”

“Jenny? Not hardly. Is there any way to find out if a necromancer might’ve hired her?”

“We don’t have anything to do with the necromancers,” Mr. Tuillery said. That was a lie, and we both knew it, but I also knew what he meant. The resurrectionists ain’t crazy. They try hard not to know anything more about the necromancers than what bits of corpse they’ll pay most for.

“There are other ways to find out,” Simon said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to Mr. Tuillery or me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Tuillery, you been a lot of help.”

“You’re welcome,” he said.

At the gates, Mr. Tuillery refused to let us take him back to Ruthven. “My sister lives in Gilgamesh,” he said, “and I haven’t seen her in a long time.” I thought he was lying, but I couldn’t say so, and the last we saw of him he was walking south along the fence of Laceshroud, almost trotting, like he was afraid we’d call him back.

It was Cinquième; Jean-Soleil brooded like the wrath of God over a rehearsal of
Edith Pelpheria
, then asked me to come talk to him in his office.

I knew he wasn’t firing me, so I settled myself and gave him a brightly inquiring look, an ingenue’s look.

Jean-Soleil sank into his own chair and said, “I’m wondering if you’d do me a favor, Belle.”

“What kind of favor?” I said.

“It’s the new boy. Bartholmew’s replacement.”

I remembered he had told me not to worry about the second principal. “What about him?”

“It’s like this. I expect you know there’s a boy’s choir over in Shatterglass?”

“I’ve heard it mentioned, I think. The prior of St. Kemplegate runs it, doesn’t he?”

“Exactly. It’s a school as well, the idea being that the boys St. Kemplegate trains will go on to the Academy, or go to Ervenzia to sing opera, or something like that, and make their entrée into the polite world.”

“Right. So?”

“It doesn’t work all the time, now does it? There are boys who don’t want to go on, which happens with any kind of training, ” and I knew he was thinking of his own children, none of whom showed the slightest desire to follow in his footsteps, “and there are boys who don’t have the money to go on. And then there are the boys whose voices lose their beauty when they become men.”

“Which is why the Ervenze practice castration.”

“Well, yes. I don’t think St. Kemplegate has gotten that desperate yet. And by the time their voices change, most of their boys have been trained in some other musical instrument, or have found an aptitude for something else, or the like.”

“But not all of them?”

“No,” Jean-Soleil said, his mobile, habitually cheerful face for once still and rather sad. “Not all of them.” He shook it off and went on. “I don’t believe the prior actually likes me very much, but he recognizes that the Empyrean and the Cockatrice are places where boys like that can go. We have an arrangement of mutual convenience. When I need a young actor, I send a letter to the prior, and if he’s got some boy he thinks will suit, he sends him over. Jermyn does the same. Mostly they don’t stay more than a season before some other thing opens up that’s more to their liking, but they’re always grateful, and they’re always perfectly adequate for second principal.”

“So you sent a letter to the prior, and he’s sending a boy over.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Jean-Soleil chewed on the ends of his mustache for a moment. It was a terrible habit—he said it drove his wife to distraction—but he could never seem to break himself of it. “This boy’s situation is a bit different.”

“Different how?”

“Well,” said Jean-Soleil. “Er.”

“What? He’s got two heads?”

“No. He’s the bastard of Lord Philip Lemerius.”

“God
damn
,” I said, because Jean-Soleil seemed to want some astonishment. “I didn’t think that Lord Philip had any baseborn get.” From what Antony had told me about his father, Lord Philip wasn’t the sort of man even to admit he had animal instincts, much less act on them.

“Only the one,” Jean-Soleil said, “and to do him justice, he seems to have tried to do his best by the boy. He got him into St. Kemplegate, after all.”

“That was kind of him.”

“Yes, and from what the prior says, it was working out splendidly. The boy was radiantly happy, had a marvelous voice, worked hard, was charming, and all the rest of it. And then his voice changed, and his singing voice was gone. The prior says he has a perfectly nice and utterly mediocre baritone.”

“Oh dear,” I said.

“Yes,” Jean-Soleil said. “Apparently he’s been moping around St. Kemplegate for most of an indiction. I don’t know that the prior really believes Semper will be happy here, but he can’t think of anything else to try.”

“And what do you want from me?”

“He’s coming tonight, and I want to give him a chance to get used to the theater before we pitchfork him in among the wolves. Would you take him to see
Mardette
? Corinna and Jabez decided they could use a run-through, you know. Answer his questions, hold his hand, be gracious and reassuring, and all that?”

“Of course,” I said. There wasn’t anything else I could say.

Semper Philipson did not look like a Lemerius. They were dark, with brilliant eyes. He was tall, not as tall as Felix— almost no one was—but two or three inches taller than Mildmay. His hair was brown, his eyes hazel, his complexion, like mine, rather sallow. His beauty was in his bones. If he took after his mother, I could see why Lord Philip had lost his head.

Semper was younger even than I had expected—just barely seventeen—and shy and nervous. I thought he was also unhappy, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about himself. I occupied the time before the play by telling him about the Empyrean and the troupe and about acting. He listened attentively and politely, but I couldn’t hazard a guess whether any of it pleased or excited him, which made it a relief when the curtain went up on
The Misadventures of Mardette
.

They’d opened the same day we hired Gordeny, so this was the theatrical equivalent of oiling the machinery to keep it in good working order. Considering the frenetic pace of the thing, I could see why you’d want to. The play was stylized nonsense. Mardette (Corinna) climbs into her trousers to escape from the importunities of a rich, ugly suitor (Jabez), only to fall madly in love with a handsome young man (Levry), who, thinking she is a boy, keeps trying to get her interested in her ugly suitor, who, it turns out, is a moll and only wants to marry Mardette because he needs an heir. Naturally, he’s even more importunate, in an inept, grotesque, and comical way, toward Mardette-as-boy than he was toward Mardette-as-girl. And, of course, the handsome young man has been madly in love with Mardette for months, and he finally tells her so, trying to get her, in her persona as a boy, to leave him alone. She dares him into asking Mardette to marry him the next time he sees her, races back into her dress, and the play ends happily. Except of course for the ugly, molly suitor, who is left out in the cold.

It was vulgar and hysterically funny, except that every time Mardette repulsed her ugly suitor, I heard Mildmay saying,
Got a taste for freaks?
and every time she came up with a new ploy to captivate the handsome young man, I saw myself going calculatedly through Corinna’s treasure trove, looking for a dress that would turn Stephen’s head. By the end of the play I hated both Mardette and myself and wanted nothing more than to shut myself in my dressing room and break something.

But the boy was there beside me, looking worried. “Did you not like the play, Madame Parr?”

“Please call me Mehitabel,” I said. “Or Tabby, if you’d rather. The play was fine. Did
you
like it?” It registered on me as I asked that his face had changed, that the inward, shuttered look was gone and the hazel eyes were full of light.

“Oh yes,” he said. “If I join your troupe, will I get to meet them?”

“Them? Oh! Jabez and Levry and Corinna? You’ll be working with them.”

“Oh,” he said, in a sort of a gasp. “You mean . . . there isn’t . . .”

“Isn’t what?”

He twisted his hands together, looking unhappy again. “At St. Kemplegate, new boys were in one choir and the good singers were in another. And you didn’t get to be in the Astrophiel Choir unless you were even better than that. I thought maybe . . .”

“No, no, there’s only one troupe here. We couldn’t possibly afford more. Do you like comedy better than tragedy?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen a proper play before. ” And then he smiled, dazzlingly, and said, “But I want to find out.”

Felix hadn’t said nothing about me and Gideon having been gone. I wasn’t all that sure he’d noticed. He hadn’t been in the suite when we got back, and when he did come in, he was distracted and unhappy-looking, and he hadn’t said much all evening. And him and Gideon weren’t real good with each other, neither. I didn’t want to know what was going on in their bedroom when I slipped out and headed for the Altanueva, but I did kind of hope it was something, I don’t know, nice.

St. Holofernes was old and harmless and mostly forgotten. His special province was protection against the bites of mice and rats. Three guesses how
he
died. His shrine was in a back-hallway, and it was dark and dusty. Which was kind of sad, but also kind of a relief—if, you know, you wanted to meet somebody there and not have nobody know about it.

The secret door was in the back of the shrine. It looked like just decoration, an arch over the old, chipped-nosed statue of St. Holofernes, except that if you pushed down on the head of the mouse peeking out beside his left sandal, the arch would kind of shudder, and then if you gave it a good shove, it would swing open.

I got there about quarter-past, and Septimus was waiting for me, dressed in what would pass for livery if nobody was paying attention, and looking bored. He faked it pretty well, but it was the wrong idea, and I said so.

“What d’you mean?” He wasn’t bothering to sound like Keep—like Kolkhis. Which was just fucking fine with me.

“Think it through.” That wasn’t one of Keeper’s. My friend Zephyr had said it all the time. “You’re pretending to be somebody who’s s’posed to be in the Mirador. Why would you be
here
?”

He just frowned at me.

I rolled my eyes. “If you’re meeting here, it’s along of it being somebody you ain’t s’posed to talk to. And there’s lots of reasons that could be, but the one’ll make people leave you alone is if you’re waiting for a gal.”

“Waiting for a . . . oh!”

“Or a boy, if you go that way,” I said, to be fair.

“So you mean, I
should
look anxious.”

“At least like you want to see whoever you’re waiting for.”

“Right.” And he gave me a look that said as how that for sure wasn’t me.

No skin off my nose. I didn’t even know why I was bothering giving him advice. Except I hate seeing things done wrong.

After a moment, he said, “So you showed up this time. You must have something.”

“That might be putting it a little strong.” I told him about the Dogs and the resurrectionists. He asked me to repeat myself so often I figured he was doing it to piss me off. Or, you know, maybe I was mumbling to piss
him
off. Septimus Wilder was reminding me of a lot of the reasons I hadn’t liked myself the last indiction or so I was with Kolkhis.

Finally, he said, “So what you’re saying is, you ain’t learned nothing.”

“Pretty much.”

“Powers!” he said like what he really wanted to do was punch me. “And you hiked your high and mighty ass all the way over here to tell me all this fucking nothing because . . . ?”

“Didn’t want Kolkhis to think I was blowing her off,” I said and watched him trying to decide if I was being snarky or not.

“Yeah, well. S’pose if I got to be here
anyway
.”

“Now you’ve got something to tell her.” He didn’t wince, but he went sort of frog-faced for a second. Yeah, I hadn’t figured she’d change.

“I’ll be back when I got something,” I said. “Practice waiting for a gal.”

And, okay, I was being snarky. And I’ll even admit I hoped it would sting. But I wasn’t expecting him to go off like a firecracker.