The Queen's Necklace (25 page)

As it developed, nobody's appetite was unduly taxed. Tea consisted of a very strong orange-flavored brandy—which the “Hereditary Duchess” served out in china teacups the size of walnut shells—and a plate of broken biscuits sprinkled with colored sugar. Yet looking back later, Luke would be firmly convinced that he had never spent a more enjoyable meal in his life. At the king's urging, the lady was encouraged to tell something of her “long and arduous journey from the Outer Planets.”

Such adventures Luke had never before heard or imagined. She told of pirates lurking in the white ice caverns of the mountains of the moon; of the long, unrequited love of the Roc for the Phoenix, the passion that had moved him to appear at her funeral pyre with his brilliant feathers all stained black; of narrow escapes, thrilling rescues, and harrowing perils, which would have turned the hair of a less courageous damsel white with terror. These were, Luke believed, not the product of a deranged mind but of a remarkably ready facility of invention—for there could be no doubt that much of her story was concocted on the spot.

Similarly inspired, he tried by his comments and questions to match her for cleverness. At length, he found himself pleasantly weary, as though he had spent the entire afternoon at intense mental and physical activity. Weary or not, he was still so stimulated that he might have continued in the same way for hours.

Eventually, however, he became aware of the time, and bethought himself somewhat guiltily of Lord Polyphant, who must be wondering what had become of him.

“I am afraid I must tear myself away,” he said, as the lady concluded a particularly breathless narrative.

“Yes, it is growing late,” answered the King, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. Lucius felt a pang, wondering if he had selfishly encouraged the old man to over-exert himself. “Perhaps, my dear, you will escort our visitor out?”

“As you wish, Your Majesty,” said the lady. She rose to her feet, pinned on her hat, and accepted the support of Luke's arm.

As they followed the crooked staircase down to the floor below, Luke felt as though he were leaving behind a rarefied world, one made up wholly of fancy and delight, and in leaving that world he was descending into a realm of grosser elements. The idea that he might never return there deeply oppressed him.

He shot a sidelong glance at his companion. She, too, seemed suddenly subdued, transformed all in an instant from the lunar princess to a perfectly ordinary, if still very attractive, young woman: older, sadder, and wiser than the delicate, whimsical creature she had been only moments before.

But who was she? Luke felt an urgent need to know. He had given his own name but had yet to learn hers. Perhaps she really
was
the king's granddaughter—the recent product of some past indiscretion—living with him, like the Princess Marjote and his legitimate grandchildren, at the asylum.

Certainly, when she spoke it was with all a granddaughter's respectful affection. “I must thank you for keeping His Majesty so well amused. It has been a long time since he last enjoyed himself quite so thoroughly.” She gave a deep sigh. “Of course, the Crown Princess is very good. She sits with him often, and so do many of his old friends. But he is always so acutely aware of—of how much it grieves them to see him so sadly changed, that I can't help thinking their visits cause him quite as much pain as pleasure.”

This lucid, sensitive analysis convinced Luke of one thing at least: whoever she was, she was not one of the inmates. “The truth is, I would like to call again. But would it be advisable?”

“Because you are so nearly connected with the King of Winterscar?” She considered carefully. “If King Izaiah were in full command of himself and affairs of state, I doubt a friendship would be permitted. But as things are—I think you may visit whenever you choose.”

By now, they had reached the ground floor. Lucius looked around him with a dull eye, searching for the ambassador. The enchanted interlude was over, stale reality was about to engulf him. A voice called out his name, and he spun around. He saw Lord Catts and Lord Polyphant moving his way, and he raised a hand to acknowledge them.

But when he turned back to bid the lady good day, Luke discovered that she was already gone, had somehow slipped away without a word of farewell. And he was still staring, with a puzzled frown, at the place he had seen her last, when the ambassador and Lord Catts finally came up to him.

“Perhaps one of you gentlemen can tell me the name of that extraordinary young woman who was with me just now?”

Lord Polyphant and the Minister of Trade exchanged a significant glance; neither one seemed disposed to answer his question. At last, Lord Catts raised a perfumed handkerchief to his lips, rolled a bloodshot eye in Luke's direction. “But don't you know? That little
beauty, that delectable article of virtue, is none other than the notorious Tremeur Brouillard, the king's whore!”

Luke felt as though all the wind had been knocked out of him, as though all the blood had drained from his heart.

“That pretty child?” he managed at last. “The king's mistress, Lord Flinx's protegée—of whom one hears so many indecent stories?”

“But of course,” said Lord Catts, with an ugly leer. “Young in years but old in vice, or so the story goes. Did no one tell you? She is only
just
sixteen.”

“Yes,” said Luke, “I suppose that I did know.” He still felt dazed and bewildered, he was beginning to feel angry and ill. “But for all that, I was expecting a very—different style of female.”

Hawkesbridge, Mountfalcon—

1 Pluviôse, 6538

L
ord Lieutenant Marzden of the City Guard lived in a large house on the outskirts of town. Ten centuries ago, it had been the home of some country squire, a handsome manor house built of the native stone, with turrets and balconies, courtyards and gardens, all surrounded by lawns, reflecting pools, orchards, and fields. But in a thousand years the city had expanded outward many times, licking up miles upon miles of the surrounding countryside, grinding the tiny villages and settlements between her cannibal teeth and greedily digesting them. A thousand years of rain and wind and city grit and smoke had left their mark. Now the building was largely ruinous, and hemmed in close by slums and tenements.

Yet winter and summer the house presented a lively appearance. As soon as any visitor passed the massive gate studded with square-headed nails and entered the weed-infested courtyard, he found himself in what appeared to be an armed camp. Young red-coated guardsmen strode to and fro, talking, quarreling, boasting. From daybreak until sunset, the yard resounded with the clash of their swords—and sometimes into the night, as the bold young blades of the City Guard conducted their mock battles by torchlight.

But there was a second entrance, less well known, where those with confidential information could come and go unobserved. An anonymous gate, an empty yard, a long stone staircase winding up to the top of the house—in this way, Lord Marzden's spies could enter his inner sanctum by a secret door.

And in this way, on one particular morning, a certain shabby figure slipped quietly into the house and surprised Jack Marzden at work at his desk.

Glancing up from a roll of papers he had been studying for the last half hour, Marzden gave a violent start. Recovering, he set aside his work, rose from his chair, and offered the young man a firm handshake across the desk.

“I'll swear you look worse every time I see you,” he said with an amiable grin. The figure before him wore a dusty frieze coat of dubious antecedents, skin-tight trousers, a striped waistcoat, and a large shovel-brimmed hat, very much battered. “What is this fashion, young Blackheart? You resemble something—I hardly know what—something between a sweep and a grave-robber!”

“I'm pleased to hear it,” Wilrowan replied cheerfully, as he accepted a chair. “You can scarcely imagine how much time and effort goes into achieving precisely that effect.”

He tilted back the chair. “I have been putting my disreputable appearance to good use these last few days, in practically every tavern in the city. Investigating—a private matter with which I won't trouble you—and as I was passing by this place, I hit on the idea of paying you a visit.”

“That's good of you, Will, particularly as you can see how little I have to occupy me.” Marzden indicated, with a broad sweep of his hand, the mountain of papers piled on his desk. “But what's this I hear about you being arrested and cast like a common felon into Whitcomb Gaol? When I think of the nights my men and I chased you all through the city, only to have you elude us at last, I confess I
was vastly diverted to learn you had finally been laid by the heels—and after you've grown so old and respectable, too!”

The Lord Lieutenant enjoyed a good long laugh at Wilrowan's expense, which Will was obliged to tolerate, no matter how much the incident still rankled. Afterwards, Marzden urged him to tell the whole story, which Will was ready enough to do. He wanted information and had learned long ago that the best way to get it was to assume the pretense of candor himself. He gave a full account of the duel and of his enforced visit to Whitcomb Gaol, but he said nothing about the theft of the Mountfalcon Jewel. It had been decided, over Wilrowan's protests, that Marzden should not be trusted with a secret of this magnitude.

“No one has seen or heard from Macquay since,” Will concluded. “And I must admit it begins to look as though something has happened to him. I hope it won't prevent me from horsewhipping the fellow, which is what I fully intend.”

“I am afraid you'll have to remain eternally frustrated in that respect. Rufus Macquay is dead and buried. He was killed in a quarrel at the Leviathan. There was some initial confusion about his identity, and it apparently took a day or two to clear that up, but it was certainly Macquay.”

Wilrowan scowled at him. “And may I venture to inquire why you never sent word to his friends at the palace?”

“I didn't know it myself until an hour ago. There has been a good deal to occupy me since I returned to Hawkesbridge, and I've only just this morning found time to read the reports.”

Marzden took a long-stemmed pipe out of a pocket in his coat, a leather bag out of a drawer in his desk, and proceeded to fill the bowl with a mixture of tobacco and mildly intoxicating herbs. Marzden was older than he looked, and it was but one of his many idiosyncrasies that he clung to the dress and the manners of a bygone era. He wore his thick chestnut hair loose over his shoulders and he
never appeared in public without his scarlet cloak, bucket-topped boots, and a wide soft-brimmed hat with crimson feathers, the very image of a dashing guardsman—forty years back. In private, he smoked an old-fashioned clay pipe. “In any case, Will, I would have thought you of all people already knew.”

“I? How should I know—unless you suspect me of murdering Macquay, which I can assure you I've not done. I most particularly wanted to speak to the man.”

Marzden stopped with the pipe halfway to his mouth. “Perhaps I've been indiscreet. Never mind. It was of no real importance.”

There was only the smallest of fires burning on the hearth, yet there was something in Marzden's glance that made Will feel suddenly hot and uncomfortable. “I think it must be of
some
importance. Pray disregard my feelings, Jack—if it
is
my feelings you fear to offend—and tell me exactly what you meant just now.”

“Very well,” said the Lord Lieutenant with a shrug. “And after all, on thinking a little further, I realize the circumstances were not so compromising.” He handed Will one of the reports and indicated a paragraph he thought might be of interest.

“
A young woman of respectable appearance
,” Will read out loud, “
who was recognized by one of the officers and did eventually admit to being one Lilliana Brakeburn-Bla—
”

The report fell from Will's nerveless fingers onto the desk. “Fire and Damnation! What was my wife doing in a filthy hole like the Leviathan?” His mind reeled with possibilities, none of them anything a man and a husband might be expected to stomach.

“What brought her there to begin with, I can't tell you,” said Marzden, rising from his desk and walking over to the fire. “But she seems to have been accompanied by Miss Allora Brakebum, and the two of them were apparently engaged in nursing one—”(with a pair of pewter pipe-tongs, he extracted a coal and held it to the bowl of his pipe) “—Sir Bastian Josslyn-Mather, through a bout of Black Bile Fever.”

Will racked his brain, tried to remember what Lili had said when they spoke together at Brakeburn. “She did say something about some devilish old fellow who had taken ill. Though she failed to mention the very small matter of a dead body. Perhaps she considered it beneath my notice—the gods only know
what
she thinks my life is here in Hawkesbridge.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “Of course, I know who to thank for all this. I don't care if all the old men in the city came down with the Fever simultaneously, Miss Allora Brakeburn had no business taking Lili into that sink of whores and footpads! If she were not a woman—and an interfering busybody of an
old
woman at that—I'd be tempted to blow a hole right through her wicked old heart!”

“Yes, very likely,” said Marzden, who had finally managed to light his pipe, and was filling the room with a faintly unpleasant smoke. Will himself had no use for hemp, nor did he care for the effect the weed produced in those of his friends who used it, but he was hardly in a position to say so.

Marzden returned to his seat behind the desk and continued to puff on his long-stemmed pipe. “One must naturally deplore the hidebound conventions which forbid a young, man like yourself from challenging a woman of sixty or seventy—but you expose Lilliana to your own company, Will, and that is very nearly as bad as anyone she might meet at the Leviathan!”