The Queen's Necklace (23 page)

“Why, to tell you the truth, I believe I do,” answered Luke with a slight frown. “That is, I am not the sort of person who sees Imperialists lurking around every corner—”

“I had not thought so,” Raith murmured, “for a fear of Imperialist plots is a little too commonplace to strike your fancy.”

“—but I do believe there is a widespread, though largely unspoken, agreement among those in power to keep certain uncomfortable truths hidden from the lower orders—one that goes far beyond the falsification of historical records we discussed before.”

The coach went over a bump and began to rattle and jolt so violently, Lucius took a peek out the window to see what was happening. They were passing over one of the arched white bridges, and that appeared to be the cause of their rough ride.

When he settled back against the leather cushions, he found that Raith was still regarding him. Did he detect a flicker of concern in the Leveller's dark eyes?

“Mr. Guilian, I believe you have made it your personal crusade to
bring to light those uncomfortable truths that you mentioned just now.”

Luke bowed the affirmative.

“Why then, I hope you will satisfy yourself with that. If there should be, as I very much doubt, anything in the nature of a conspiracy to rescue the king at need, I beg you will not ready your cloak and dagger and seek to join in. I must remind you that King Izaiah's friends have had a considerable period of time in which to lay their plans—if plans have been laid at all.

“I daresay they would find your precipitous entry into their affairs disconcerting to say the least, and your engaging enthusiasm even more so.”

Luke's reception at the tall old house of brick and stucco which housed the Winterscar embassy was not exactly what he had come to expect. He was left kicking his heels for some little time in the chilly white marble entry hall, and even when he was admitted to the inner precincts, his welcome was not a warm one.

“I do not perfectly understand His Majesty's intentions,” said Lord Polyphant, with a puzzled and slightly petulant air. He was a fussy little gentleman of uncertain age, who, after a hasty introduction, had spent a good fifteen minutes examining Luke's credentials. “Have you come here, Mr. Guilian, to oversee my endeavors—or to eventually replace me?”

Luke had been standing at a broad bay window, gazing down on the busy street below, while the ambassador paced the floor in his ridiculously high-heeled shoes and perused Jarred's letter and the accompanying passport. The scene taking place under that window was appealing in its way: there was very little hurry, very little noise, just neatly dressed people going about their business in what seemed to be a quiet, methodical manner. Every so often, by way of contrast, a brightly painted coach or sedan-chair would pass by, giving a
momentary glimpse of a patched and painted face, or some incredible erection of hair and powder inside. Again for contrast, a lean figure would occasionally stalk by, a man in a stiff-brimmed black hat and long cloak, or a stern-faced woman in a black bonnet—there seemed to be quite a number of Levellers on the streets of Luden.

At the ambassador's extraordinary suggestion, Luke spun around. “Oversee or replace you? My dear Lord Polyphant, I can assure you: no such idea ever entered His Majesty's mind. He is very well pleased—that is, he's not actually confided in me, but I see no reason to suppose otherwise—he is very well pleased with the work you are doing here.”

The ambassador continued to gaze at him doubtfully.

“If you will look at the date,” Luke added helpfully, “you will see that the king wrote his letter almost a year ago. I've made a great many stops since leaving Winterscar, and my business here, I do assure you, is
entirely
my own.”

Somewhat mollified, Lord Polyphant took a seat facing Luke and motioned him to be seated on a lyre-back chair. He regarded his visitor with a more benevolent eye. “Then what may I do for you, Mr. Guilian, while you are here? If there is anything I can possibly do, you will find me your most obliged and obedient servant.” To emphasize the point, he took out an elegant little gold repoussé snuffbox with the mask of a lion embossed on the lid, and offered it to Luke.

Lucius helped himself to a generous pinch, inhaled, then drew out his clean pocket handkerchief and sneezed into it. “You can provide me with a roof over my head, at least for two or three days. I certainly don't intend to trespass on your hospitality any longer than that. What I would like—really, the only request I have to make—is for you or someone on your staff to assist me in finding some suitable lodgings.”

“Well, well,” said Lord Polyphant easily, now that friendly relations had been established. “We will arrange something.” He smiled
expansively. “And, of course, you are welcome to stay
here
just as long as you like.”

This was a handsome offer, but not one that Luke was inclined to accept, having no desire to subject himself to a tedious round of embassy teas, embassy balls, and embassy dinners. “In fact,” he said, determined to make his point and stick to it, “if you can't recommend any rooms yourself, I suppose I might ask Raith to advise me. He is bound to have some sort of suggestion to make; the man appears to know practically everything.”

This casual mention of Raith's name produced the most extraordinary response. The ambassador stiffened and his already prominent eyes bulged. “Raith—did you say Raith? Excuse me, Mr. Guilian, but are you by any chance referring to
the
Raith, Raith the Anti-demonist?”

“Unless there is more than one gentleman by that name professing to the same religion,” said Luke, affecting innocence, “I suppose I must be.” He had not expected such a vehement reaction, though he was not, for that reason, above thoroughly enjoying it. “Why do you ask?”

Lord Polyphant was beginning to huff and puff. “But this is extraordinary. You have only been in Luden a matter of hours, a matter of minutes almost. How did you manage to make so vastly unsuitable an acquaintance?”

At this, Luke frowned. While it had been amusing enough to shock the ambassador, he did not enjoy hearing his friend criticized. “I had the pleasure of meeting Raith during the voyage over. As to being an unsuitable acquaintance: he is school-master to the children of the Crown Princess, surely a most respectable occupation.”

“A respectable occupation—were that all!” Lord Polyphant said darkly. “But that is not the only work he is said to do for the Princess Marjote, and if you're to be staying with us here at the embassy—!”

But then, remembering that Luke would
not
be staying at the embassy for any appreciable time, he became a little calmer. “You
will know your own business best. But really, I'd not pursue that particular friendship, if I were you. The man is uncanny. All the mystery and intrigue in this boring little city tied up in the one man—it's simply too much.

“Besides,” he added, sliding the snuffbox back inside his waistcoat pocket, “the Levellers don't receive him. He's been defrocked, or excommunicated, or cast into outer darkness—whatever it is they do to punish their own kind. The charge, as I recall, was working hexes.” He shook his head ominously. “For all that, he seems to have some sort of hold over them, or they over him. Perhaps I shouldn't say so, since you and I are hardly acquainted, but if I were you, I would stay strictly away from the fellow.”

“Not at all. You can say anything you choose,” Luke answered frostily. It seemed to be his day for receiving unsolicited advise. Oddly enough, he found himself resenting Lord Polyphant's contribution as he had not resented Raith's. In any case, he had never been one to allow others to choose his friends for him, and he had no intention of beginning to do so now.

A
utumn breathed a last fluttering gasp in Luden, and winter came on with full force. Snow piled high on the redtiled roofs and in the red-brick streets; it dusted coaches, sledges, and sedan-chairs; it frosted the statues and the bare black branches of all the trees in the public parks and gardens.

Meanwhile, Luke had taken a comfortable set of furnished rooms in a three-story house with a stepped gable roof, overlooking a frozen canal. He hired a cook, a coachman, and a brisk young footman to assist Perys, and leaving this skeleton staff to unpack his things and put the house in order, he sallied forth to explore the city.

This kept him amused for a fortnight, and when the novelty wore off he was more than ready to settle down by a sea-coal fire, with his books, his papers, and a bottle of port wine.

He had picked up some mildewed histories in one of the bookshops. The pages were badly foxed, and the quaint old lettering difficult to read, but leafing through one of these volumes, he was immediately struck by the use of so many different type-faces, which appeared on the page in an entirely random fashion.

Staring raptly down at the book, he felt his pulse begin to race. Someone had told him, once, that varying letter shapes were sometimes
used to encrypt a cipher. Could the printer and the historian, working in concert, have concealed a series of secret messages inside this apparently innocent text? Of course there were several different types here, instead of just two, but perhaps—perhaps only two were used in the cryptogram itself? Perhaps the other letters, in the other types, ought to be regarded merely as blanks? Luke took a deep breath and released it slowly, certain he had hit on the most likely solution.

Somewhere, in one of the books he had collected since leaving Winterscar, he had the key to a famous version of the Bilateral Cipher. Luke opened the horsehide trunk and began tossing out books—until he found the one with the tattered blue cover. Laying both volumes open on a table by the fire, dredging up some blank sheets of paper, a pen, and some ink, he set eagerly to work. If the black-letter alphabet stood for “a” and the flourishing italic for “b”—

He was still busily deciphering, several days later, when the ambassador came by for an afternoon visit.

“My dear Mr. Guilian,
how
are you keeping yourself? I hope you are keeping yourself tolerably amused,” said Lord Polyphant as he lifted the curiously long tails of his coat and accepted a seat by the fire. “For I have seen you nowhere, my dear sir, and nobody seems to know you. I hope you've not been making an absolute
hermit
of yourself?”

“Nothing of the sort; I have been nearly everywhere.” Luke closed his books, made a pile of the scattered papers, and signaled Perys to bring in the tea-tray. “Everywhere that is, but in Polite Society. I have seen the university, and the Foundling Hospital, and there is an intriguing little coin shop by the Grand Canal—” The last sentence faded out unfinished, as it became evident the ambassador was not really listening.

“To each his own, Mr. Guilian,” said Lord Polyphant in a failing voice. For all his gentle air of boredom, his prominent blue eyes
were exploring the entire room, every nook and cranny, as though he were making an inventory of the furnishings and calculating their exact value.

“But I wonder if I might induce you to tear yourself away from these—peculiar amusements. I should tell you that your presence in Luden has aroused curiosity. People are beginning to wonder why you never accept their invitations.”

“I beg your pardon. It was not to engage in fashionable dissipations that I came to Luden. And really, I don't see why it should be anyone's business how I choose to amuse myself.”

The ambassador smiled seraphically, determined to maintain his good nature no matter what. “For all that, you really must show yourself. Luden is not like Tarnburgh, and Rijxland is not like Winterscar. It's positively not advisable to appear unsociable. I hope I needn't say more?”

“I'm not quite certain what you mean,” Luke said stubbornly. “However, it's certainly not my intention to appear antisocial or ill-natured.”

In any case, the process of deciphering was beginning to pall. While Luke's early efforts had been marked by a striking success and he had already uncovered a number of fragmentary sentences within the text, including some very famous names—two of the legendary founding fathers, and some early rulers of Rijxland and Herndyke—he had yet to come up with anything that made any real
sense
.

Going over to a desk by the window, Luke picked up a pile of cream-colored calling cards left behind by the various visitors to whom he had “not been at home” and brought them back to the table by the fire. “Perhaps you can advise me which of these visits I ought to return. Do I know these people? Did I meet them at the embassy? I can't for the life of me remember who any of them are.”

The ambassador sorted through the cards swiftly, then put them aside with a languid air. “The Hoodjs, the Helzts, the Boijmans, and
the Doux—you may visit any of these families, you should visit them all. The important thing is to be seen, which you
can
be in any of these houses.” He leaned a little forward in his chair. “But enough about that. The reason I came to see you was to extend an invitation of my own.”

He waited while Perys put out plates of currant buns and tiny iced pastries, then continued on as soon as the valet left the room. “I go, this afternoon, to Doctor Van Tulp's to meet with Lord Catts, the Minister of Trade. It has become quite fashionable to be seen there, you know, and I thought you might like to join me.”

Lucius hesitated. Doctor Van Tulp was the eponymous founder of the model madhouse. Though the doctor had been dead for more than eighty years, his name and somewhat eccentric fame lingered on. Luke was, quite naturally, wild to see the place. Indeed, he had considered going there long before this, but an innate delicacy held him back.

On the other hand, he would have liked to catch a glimpse of the great man whose published speeches and letters were so familiar to him, and who, in happier days, had excited so much of his admiration. It occurred to him, now, that King Izaiah, having already been subjected to so very much, could not possibly be harmed—and who knew but that he might not even benefit?—by the presence of one sympathetic and respectful observer, among so many others animated solely by vulgar curiosity.