by Anna Butler
I put my whisky glass onto the desktop, taking infinite care to let it touch down featherlight when what I wanted to do was slam it until it broke to shards, all the better to convey how passionate I was about avoiding marriage. Instead of such paltry dramatics, though, I played with the ancient scarab ring Ned had given me until the sea urchin’s spines softened and melted away. It gave me comfort, smoothing a fingertip over the scarab’s carving. The hieroglyphs on the underside were hidden, but I knew what they said. And what they meant.
True of heart.
A maxim to live up to, if I could.
In the end, I aimed for a calm certainty. “No, you don’t have to explain to me the House’s need for heirs. I understand. I couldn’t fail to. The family looks to us for security and stability and a sense of continuity. But I won’t marry—not Sofia Winter, not any of the heiresses on your list, and certainly not out of dutiful obligation to stop my House members worrying about what will happen if I fall under an autocab. I don’t like most of them. I won’t make a sacrifice of that magnitude for them.”
I had been staring out of the window at the wind-tossed treetops while I spoke, and turned my gaze onto the old man. He was indeed an old man. Old and sick, frail with the mortality that was eating him up, lips blue and skin grey, face drawn with the failure of his heart written all over it. The stab of pity surprised me. He had been head of our House since long before I was born, and he bore the burden—and it was a burden—with a brisk, wholehearted dedication. The Stravaigor was notable even amongst the rest of the Houses for being, as my friend the Jongleur had once remarked, “a tricksy one”. He combined a cold ruthlessness with a fierce desire to protect and promote his House. If you doubt that, find a spiritualist medium and ask John.
“Would it be such a sacrifice?”
I had never sought this legacy, this burden of his. I doubted I had the fortitude to shoulder it. “Yes.”
He responded with a displeased grunt, but he probed no further. I suspected it would be snowing in Hell if he didn’t know about my inverted nature, as the dear medical people describe it. But he held his peace on that. He could have been carved out of the same granite as an Aegyptian pharaoh’s statue, for all the emotion showing on his face.
“And I will understand if you wish to revoke my position as First Heir.” I’ll admit to feeling hopeful he would. Freedom from House responsibilities beckoned with a smiling visage.
The displeased grunt was louder this time. “Don’t pretend to be a fool, Rafe. Whom could I appoint in your place?”
Freedom shrugged at me and, to my chagrin, turned her face away.
“Besides,” he went on, “I don’t want another heir. No matter how much you provoke me.”
Ah, well. It had been worth a try.
“I’m sorry to do that, but I can’t see my way to a change of heart. I’m not a marrying man, sir. Not even for appearances’ sake. You know, perhaps you should have had this conversation with John and secured the succession that way.”
That made him stare. For a moment I thought I’d pushed too far and too hard, and I could add an apoplexy to his dicky heart, but the bulging-eyed glare softened, and he barked out a short laugh. “What makes you think I didn’t?”
I gave him a look to indicate what I thought of that. “If you say so. To return to the issue of my own heir, I think I have a solution, but I need to consider how to bring it about—”
“Solution? What solution?”
“I have two sisters, sir.”
That livened him up. You’d think he’d stuck his hand inside an aether engine, he was so electrified. “Females! You can’t be serious in suggesting you make Emily or Eleanor your heir? A woman as head of a House!” His face turned a fetching shade of mulberry again. “Preposterous!”
The apoplexy raised its threatening head, and I spoke in haste to prevent him succumbing to it. “Your daughters may have sons.”
He froze with his mouth open, arrested on the brink of another outraged protest. He closed his mouth slowly, eyes narrowing.
“Emily’s future lies with the Plumassier, and her sons will strengthen that House. But Eleanor is another matter. Trust me. I will secure the House’s future, and secure our own bloodline.” I gentled my tone. “I won’t leave us to twist in the wind, sir. I’ll have an heir.”
Another long silence followed. At last, he sighed and nodded, resting his elbow on the desk and supporting his chin on his hand. “I await your proposals with interest. But don’t take too long. I have no time to spare.”
A fact of which I was all too aware, since his mortality spelled the end of my free and easy life. I couldn’t help but measure every breath he took.
CHAPTER THREE
He recovered enough equanimity to eat a sparse, ascetic luncheon with me. Gone were the rich dishes dripping with creamy sauces; we ate boiled chicken with rice. It was a little more palatable than chewing on the soles of my shoes, but only just.
Talk was as sparse as the meal. He asked about the coffeehouse, in the polite tones used to ask about the health of Great Aunt Ethel’s asthmatic pug when the very last thing one wanted was a report on the beast’s flatulence. I answered with a careful courtesy the equal of his. Anything rather than stir more controversy.
When we’d finished eating, Harper cleared our plates and brought me coffee. My father, though, was presented with a range of tinctures and decoctions prescribed by the apothecary. These he swallowed without complaint while Harper measured a mix of dried Chinese herbs the apothecary called mafeisan, and blended them into a small amount of tobacco before rolling them into a thin cigarette.
My father frowned when Harper handed it over. “I resent dozing away my afternoons.”
“Doctor’s orders.” I was brisk, rather than sympathetic.
During the day he tended to smoke the herbs to mute their effects somewhat. They dulled pain and relaxed him without fully sending him to sleep. At night, he took them either mixed with a glass of port or in his tea. Ingested, the mafeisan acted as a sedative, every bit as powerful as an opiate. He kicked against the necessity, but the man was dying. Anything to ease his passing was welcome.
I offered my pocket lucifer to light his cigarette. He nodded and returned to the issue of the Cartomancer’s invitation.
“So, the Cartomancer’s bal masqué. What costume will you choose?”
I’d already given that some thought. “Do you still have your Pope’s outfit?”
“I believe so. Harper will find it.”
“Thank you. I’ll keep it in reserve. Because on second thoughts, I’ll go as Cesare Borgia. The symbolism is fitting.”
He laughed so long I feared his heart wouldn’t take the strain. “If ever I wondered—and I did not—that assures me you are indeed my son.”
I said nothing to that. That I would never be the father of his grandson was the only other assurance I could offer him. I couldn’t see that going down well.
I found Nell in her suite of rooms—bedroom, bathroom, and a small sitting room—on the floor above our father’s. My own suite, seldom used, was across the hall from hers. She had flung wide the windows of the sitting room and was hanging out of one, puffing illicit smoke into the outside air to avoid being caught. She wasn’t improving the atmosphere. London in August, when it wasn’t raining, was all sultry heat and vapours thickened with the tarry smell of combusting aether from furnaces and autocar engines. I could understand her caution, however. Smoking was not deemed a ladylike occupation.
Along with First Heirhood, I had inherited two half-sisters. They were young; John had been more than a dozen years senior to Emily, the elder of the two. When the Stravaigor had narrated family history, he’d explained, “Your mother was never a secret from Madame Stravaigor, Rafe. My wife took some considerable time to placate.”
Which also explained why Madame had never offered me more than the coolest of greetings when we met.
Of my two half-sisters, Emily was the most dista
nt. She had married Harold Farrell, the First Heir to House Plumassier, two years earlier. We met at formal House events, our paths seldom crossing otherwise, and our conversations never matured beyond impersonal inquiries into each other’s health. She treated me with a reserved caution.
Nell was a different matter altogether. When I’d first been introduced to her—Miss Eleanor, as she was to me then—I’d thought her something of a man-eater-in-training, practicing her wiles on any passing male. I came to see, though, she was another outsider in the family, and merely testing the weapons she’d need to establish a place of her own. When I had returned from Aegypt to assume the First Heir mantle, she’d told me her mother had never understood her, our father seldom noticed her, and she didn’t mourn the older brother who had ignored her. “If you don’t interfere in my life too much, I’ll endure you. Otherwise…” Then she’d smiled the most impudent smile to convey the threat, her mouth tilting up and her eyes shining. I mimed consternation and alarm, to her delighted laughter, and within minutes we’d established a confederacy. We were fast friends within the month, despite the decade between our ages. Iconoclasts unite was our motto.
She wasn’t Emily’s equal for beauty but had ten times the character and intelligence. Bright as the proverbial button, Nell loved new challenges and interests. She was never still, always curious and eager, throwing her whole heart into whatever caught her imagination. Emily once said, sniffing, that Nell required a husband to keep her steady. I draw a veil over the ensuing hostilities. Enough to say that strong men quailed. I certainly did.
Nell’s greatest talent lay in painting, and she had dived in delight upon my small hoard of Aegyptian artefacts as inspiration for her watercolours. From there she jumped, like quicksilver, to a fascination with archaeology itself. Over a year later, it was still the focus of her enthusiasm, and she worked at it with passion and zeal.
I liked her, a great deal. I was touched when she allowed me to drop the formal “Eleanor” and call her Nell.
I coughed to alert her to my presence.
“Oh, I knew it was you. No one else bothers to come up here to talk to me. He always summons me downstairs.” Nell slid back into the room, holding her cigarillo at arm’s length to keep the smoke outside. She nodded to the window. “I’d rather that if he takes it into his head to see me, he doesn’t smell this on me. He wouldn’t be pleased.”
I eyed the cigarillo. “One of his?”
“Of course not!” She turned her head and took a final inhalation before stubbing the cigarillo out on the windowsill. “It’s one of yours. My maid filches them from your rooms when you aren’t looking. I can’t persuade her to buy me any—she says it isn’t proper for ladies to go into a tobacconist’s—but she doesn’t mind sneaking some out of your stash.”
“I can’t encourage felony even in the name of ladylike etiquette. I’ll buy you some next time I visit my tobacconist, if you like. He stocks milder tobaccos imported for a lady’s use. It’s becoming a fashionable fad, I hear.”
Nell rolled her eyes. “Don’t be so foully patronising.”
Unable to refute the charge, I made a handsome apology.
She accepted it with a regal little nod. “He doesn’t want me, does he? I’ll have to spray myself with cologne and suck peppermints first.” She added a rather gloomy, “I’ll be twenty-two next month, and he still treats me as if I were in short skirts and pinafores.”
“He’s taking a nap.”
“Good. I’m safe for a while.” She took a few steps into the room. In her white piqué skirt and pastel-shaded blouse, she could have been any young girl of her class in afternoon wear, as though fresh off the tennis court. This simple outfit probably cost a week’s takings at my coffeehouse. Levering off the top of a pretty Japanese lacquer pot, she secreted the cigarillo remains inside and returned the pot to its place atop the pile of thick, academic-looking texts that lived beside her easel. “Mind you, I’m so bored that keeping him amused for an hour sounds enticing. He makes me read to him, you know.”
“Novels? Poetry? Uplifting sermons?” After playing the gallant and handing her into one of the two deucedly small chairs she kept before the hearth, I squeezed myself into the other.
“Trade reports. Far more interesting than novels.” A Stravaigor to the core, that one. Then she sighed and cast a glance at the pile of books. “Shame he won’t let me read my own to him.”
I was close enough to displace the abused Japanese pot from its perch and pick up the top book of the pile. Rituals and Death in Ancient Aegypt, published by the Britannic Imperium Museum Press and with its author’s name stamped in gilded letters: E. F. Winter. Apart from it being one of Ned’s books, I wasn’t too surprised. Her nascent interest in Aegyptian art had blossomed, and she’d talked our father into allowing her to attend a series of lectures at the museum. I’d squired her there several times myself.
“It doesn’t interest him.”
“No, but it shouldn’t bother him that I’d like to learn more. He won’t let me do anything but go to a few lectures. Did you know I asked him if I could go with you to Aegypt last winter? Even if it were only a few weeks, it would be… be real. He wouldn’t even consider it.”
“He never mentioned it.” Probably because he’d feared I’d plead Nell’s case. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I did think about it, but it was just before you and Mr Winter left, and… oh well, I didn’t know you quite as well then either. I wasn’t sure that you’d support me. I’d do it now, though.” Nell winced. “He was furious with me for even thinking about it.”
“He has a very traditional view of a woman’s role.”
“Really, Rafe, even Adam and Eve would think his views old-fashioned! He says it’s not ladylike to do archaeology.”
“Tell that to Mrs Flinders Petrie.”
Nell brightened visibly. She’d met Hilda Petrie at the Aegyptian Exploration Society. “I liked her! She’s very independent, and she does digs in her own right.” Her smile was saucy. “A role model that will make Papa quite… quite choleric, I should think.”
We shared a conspiratorial laugh.
“Bored?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. I do hate being in London after the end of the season. Everyone’s left for their country places, and there’s nothing to do. Things have come to a pretty poor pass when all I have to look forward to is reading to our father.” She made a gesture towards the abused windowsill. “My solace is to smoke myself lightheaded.”
Under normal circumstances, of course, Nell would join society’s exodus from London’s foul air and humidity at the end of the season and spend the summer months out of town at the country house in Nottinghamshire, or going from house party to house party. But the Stravaigor’s illness had come right as they were planning to leave, keeping the family in town. I would have stayed in any event, since London was jam-packed with excursionists who all needed coffee to recruit their strength after a hard morning’s sightseeing. Summer was our busiest time in the coffeehouse.
“Can’t you go and visit friends? Or your mother? She’s still in Paris, I believe.” I forbore to comment on the fact that her mother was living with her cousin, my old Abydos teammate, Raoul Archambault. Madame Stravaigor had separated from her husband after John’s death, and not even his ill health brought her back. All round, less ladylike behaviour than frequenting tobacconists’ shops. Who, though, could blame her? In her marital shoes, I’d rather live with old Archambault too. “Though I can’t imagine summer in Paris is an improvement on London.”
“It has better shops.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “True. I can’t say I will be able to lift your ennui, but I’m invited to the Cartomancer’s birthday ball at the end of next month. Will you allow me to escort you there?”
Nell had been lying back in her chair, feet resting on the brass fender, but at these words, she sat up straight. “We’re invited? But—” She stopped. Nodded. “Oh, I see. You�
�re invited, not all of us.”
My clever little sister.
“Yes, but I’d still like to escort you, if you wish to attend.”
“I used to see Arabella Lee a lot.”
I recognised the name. The Cartomancer’s youngest daughter—she was on my father’s list. I suspect, though, she was in the column he would describe as “extremely dubious prospects”, and I would classify as “not so much an outside chance as lost the jockey and scratched from the race.”
“But no longer? Has the Cartomancer’s displeasure affected you so much?”
“Oh, no. Well, yes, I’m not invited often these days, but that doesn’t have a great impact on Bella and me. We were never great friends, but she was a familiar face at the bigger events at Cartomancer House. She’s a little too wet. Offer her a cigarillo and she’d have the vapours, she’s so pious and goody-goody.” Nell’s sidelong glance was wicked. “I’m neither, as you know. I still see her at other people’s houses, and we do the pretty and pretend whatever is amiss between our fathers is no concern of ours. We’re ‘kiss the air but don’t really touch’ friends these days. Is the ball here in town?”
I allowed her the abrupt change in subject, wondering if the loss of Miss Lee’s closer acquaintance affected her more than she cared to admit. “Yes. He’s coming back for it and giving an early start to the little season. It will be a fancy dress ball.”
“How delightful. I would like to go, Rafe. Thank you. I like balls. Lots of interesting people to flirt with.”
Excellent. I’d make it my quest to discover if anyone sparked her interest in a way that could be to everyone’s mutual advantage. “Good. I’ll leave you to plan your costume. But for the love of Anubis, please don’t go as Cleopatra.”
“I’d rather fancied myself in an Aegyptian headdress.”
