And if she were a spy, what had she been doing out by The City Under the Sea? Did her people find the taste of death in the water as objectionable as did the local selkies? Or could she have had some other reason for being there? A vague frisson of worry snaked out of the back corner of his mind, his gift trying to give him another clue to unlock the bundle of questions.
Black and white. Aga had said the mysterious woman with webbed hands wore black and white. That had been important. Duilio closed his eyes and concentrated, hoping to force a direct answer out of his gift. He took several slow breaths. Was it Oriana Paredes out on the river near The City Under the Sea?
His gift supplied nothing in response.
Duilio rubbed one hand across his face and groaned. Stupid. That was the wrong question. That event was in the past already, and his gift only looked forward. He reformulated his mental question and asked himself, Will I learn that Oriana Paredes was out on the river tonight near the rotting houses?
And then he knew. Sooner or later he was going to discover that Aga’s mysterious woman with webbed hands was, indeed, Oriana Paredes, companion to Lady Isabel Amaral.
Duilio suspected it was for this very night that his gift had called her to his attention that day as she stood in Isabel Amaral’s shadow. Tonight she had been seen in the river near The City Under the Sea. Surely she had some reason for that, some information that might be helpful to his investigation.
Black and white. Why was that important? His gift never answered the why of things, which was always the part he needed most. He sat back in his chair and sighed. In the morning he would visit the Amaral house and ask to speak with Miss Paredes.
No, I won’t. His gift told him she wouldn’t be there. She had left the Amaral household for good, which was damnably inconvenient for him.
Duilio got up and turned down the gaslight. If he wanted answers to his questions, he first had to find her.
CHAPTER 4
Oriana jolted awake when the milkman’s cart rattled through the alleyway. A momentary panic seized her, but she too quickly recalled why she had fallen asleep out of doors.
Lady Amaral had cast her out. When she told the woman that Isabel had been taken, Isabel’s mother claimed it was merely part of her daughter’s scheme to elope. Oriana hadn’t been able to tell her the truth; she’d barely gotten a chance to speak at all. Lady Amaral had just returned from a ball or party and was in a foul mood, so in the early hours of the morning she had the butler escort Oriana out of the house.
It had been too early and too dark to go anywhere, and Oriana had been too exhausted to search for a place to stay, in any case. After a dazed moment standing in the court behind the house, she recalled the stairwell that led to the house’s coal room. The two bags she’d left the previous evening were still there, so she’d curled up on the cold stone next to them and cried until sleep overtook her.
Oriana forced herself to sit up. The morning air was cold but bearable. Her black skirt was ripped. Her clothes were almost dry, although her shoes were still damp. Her forehead was tender, and her fingers found a small lump there. She checked her right palm, wrapped with strips torn from her apron. The narrow slash her rescuer had made when wrestling her dagger out of her hand had scabbed over, although one end began to bleed afresh when she removed her makeshift bandage.
She heard someone speaking then with the milkman up at the back door of the house—meaningless chatter, but it reminded her she wasn’t alone here. She grabbed the portmanteau she’d left there the evening before, dragged it to her side, and searched through the contents until she found another pair of mitts. Hiding her hands came first. She tugged the right one on over her scabbed palm, making sure that all of her webbing was covered.
She was donning the other when Carlos, the first footman, leaned over the rail that led down to the coal room stairs. “Miss Paredes? Are you still hiding down there?”
Oriana clutched both hands to her chest, her heart slamming against her ribs. She took a deep breath and rose unsteadily, grasping the rail with her left hand. “Yes, I’m here.”
He came a few steps down, not crowding her. “The dragon won’t be awake for hours, so Arenas won’t notice if I’m missing for a few minutes.” He held out a napkin-wrapped offering in one hand. “Were you serious about Isabel being grabbed?”
Oriana took the napkin. It held a croissant, a rare show of kindness from Carlos. She wasn’t starving yet, so she tucked it into the mouth of her portmanteau. “Thank you. Yes. I fear something terrible has happened.”
Carlos nodded. “Efisio’s driver came by here just a few minutes ago. He said he was supposed to pick up the two of you last night. They drove around and around but they never saw you.”
Of course the driver would have missed Isabel! “Has anyone told Lady Amaral that?”
“Wake the dragon?” Carlos laughed shortly. “Not after the way she treated you last night.”
It had been a terrible display of temper on Lady Amaral’s part. Oriana didn’t want to relive it again. “There was a coach at the end of the alley,” she told Carlos. “We thought it was Mr. Efisio’s. They took us. They drugged us and threw me into the river, but Isabel . . .” She shrugged, not wanting to lie outright.
Carlos nodded, his lips pursed. “I’ll be changing my bets, then.”
What did he mean by that? “Bets?”
“On whether they’ll get married or not,” Carlos clarified, brushing a croissant crumb off his black sleeve with white-gloved fingers.
Oriana felt a flare of anger. Carlos didn’t care about Isabel—or her. He just wanted to make certain he didn’t lose money on a bet.
“You can’t stay here,” Carlos added, glancing pointedly down at the two bags near her feet. “Arenas will find you for sure. Do you have somewhere to go?”
There were places she could go, but Oriana didn’t know if she’d be welcome in any of them. She could go to her master, Heriberto, but if she went to see him, he might order her back to the islands and she wouldn’t be able to pursue Isabel’s murderer. She could try one of the sereia who lived here in the Golden City, the exiles, but as they’d been banished by the very government she represented, they had no reason to help her. She doubted any of them would, not even her father. In any case, contact with the exiles was strictly forbidden by the ministry.
She raised her chin. “I’ll think of something,” she told Carlos.
He fished a slip of paper out of a pocket and passed it to her. “My grandmother’s sister rents rooms. Tell her you know me, and she’ll give you a good rate.”
The paper had an address on it, one down near the river. It wasn’t a good neighborhood, but she couldn’t afford a good neighborhood, not with what little she had stashed in her portmanteau. Oriana looked back up at Carlos. He was watching her, but had one eye on the house’s back door, she could tell. “Thank you, Carlos.”
His eyes focused on her, one corner of his lips twisting up into a smirk. “And if you can’t pay, I’m sure we can work something out.”
I should have known Carlos wasn’t acting out of kindness. A paid companion was considered above the household servants, but given her current circumstances, the footman might well think a dalliance with her within his reach now. She’d had some of Isabel’s suitors try their hand at seducing her before. It had been an easy matter to frown at them and shake her head, but she’d been under Isabel’s protection then. Now she had no one to guard her against unwanted advances. Still, while she might not like Carlos, she needed a place to stay, a place where they wouldn’t ask too many questions about a woman showing up in her bedraggled condition. She forced herself to smile at him. “We’ll see.”
Carlos spotted the butler come out looking for him then. He winked at her and jogged up the steps toward the back of the house, nose in the air as he went.
Oriana leaned back against the stairwell wal
l and covered her face with her hands. Why do things keep getting worse?
• • •
Duilio’s mother sat alone at the breakfast table. He stopped at the threshold and gazed at her, worried. She looked completely human and had human manners. She had excellent taste in clothing, always comported herself in a manner befitting a Portuguese lady, and had elegantly decorated the Ferreira home, managing to work in the occasional garish item brought back by her seafaring husband. None of the social set who knew her would have any reason to guess that she was a selkie.
At the moment, she stared toward the dining room’s west-facing window, her hands cupped in her lap. She absently rubbed the tips of her fingers with her other hand as if they ached. With her somber garb and desolate countenance, most would assume she mourned her husband’s death still. Duilio knew better.
She was pining for the sea.
He hated to see her this way. When he’d left the Golden City to travel abroad, she’d been vivacious and mischievous—a loving, attentive mother. She’d helped oversee the family’s business investments and kept firm control of the household. Now most days all she did was sit in the front parlor and gaze in the direction of the river. It seemed her spirit had slipped away from her body.
And, to some extent, that was his fault. If he’d stayed home, perhaps none of this would have come to pass. Perhaps he could have stopped . . .
His mother’s head turned as if she’d caught scent of him standing there. “Duilinho?”
He smiled. She persisted in calling him by his childhood pet name. He settled next to her at the table and covered her hand with his own. “I’m here.”
Her seal-brown eyes fixed on him, a rare moment of concentration. “Are you well?”
He must look tired after his sleepless night. Even as distracted as she was, she always worried for him. “I’m fine, Mother.”
Her eyes slipped back toward the window, and she turned that direction as if she heard the sea itself calling her.
Duilio pressed his lips together. It troubled him that she spent most of her days cooped up in the house. His father had been dead more than a year now. Duilio expected that his mother would prefer to remarry eventually. She was a lovely woman, even approaching fifty as she was. But her social reemergence must be put off until she was better.
One of the footmen brought him his regular breakfast, a large plate of eggs and chouriço along with a pot of coffee. Duilio waited until the man left before starting in on his food. Between bites, he told his mother of the bizarre information he’d gotten very early that morning. He wasn’t certain she was attending. Her coffee was almost untouched, and she’d eaten only half her croissant. Her preferred newspaper—the trade daily rather than the Gazette—lay unopened next to her elbow. He talked to her anyway, in the hope that she caught something of his words. He would hate for her to feel neglected.
“So I’m going to go see Joaquim,” he finished, “and ask if he can help me find her.”
His mother continued to stare at the window.
“Shall I bear your greetings, Mother?”
That caught her attention. She blinked and turned halfway toward him. “To Filho?”
Apparently she had been paying attention. Just as she addressed Duilio by his childhood name, she called Joaquim so also. Joaquim Tavares and his father shared a name, so Joaquim was simply Filho—“son”—to her. He set down his napkin. “Yes, Mother.”
Joaquim and his younger brother had lost their mother at an early age and had come to live with their cousins, the Ferreira family. They had stayed for the next eight years, until their father retired from his sea travels to take up boatbuilding. The younger son, Cristiano, had joined that business, but Joaquim had chosen to make his career in the police.
Duilio might have selected that profession himself, had his own father not been set on his sons being gentlemen. He’d dutifully studied law at the university in Coimbra—an acceptable profession for a younger son—but then had proceeded to travel abroad for the next five years to work with various police agencies on the continent and in Great Britain. His father had not been pleased. But when his elder brother Alessio died, Duilio had been forced to return home to shoulder the responsibility of managing the family’s considerable investments . . . and to take care of his mother.
She brushed her hands along her skirts and picked up her newspaper, a rare show of energy. “Please tell Filho to come visit me.”
“I’ll ask him, Mother,” he promised.
“I wonder . . .” She laid down her paper and touched the smooth brown hair dressed in a simple knot at the nape of her neck.
Duilio hadn’t inherited that hair. He had his father’s, darker and with a tendency to curl. The only feature he’d inherited from his mother was her eyes. He wished he resembled her more, as Alessio had.
He waited for her to finish her sentence, but instead she stared down at her newspaper as if she had no idea what it was doing there. Sighing inwardly, Duilio rose and took his leave of her, kissing her cheek in farewell. Her maid, Felis, bustled past him, no doubt eager to get her mistress up and about her silent day. Duilio paused and watched the elderly woman fussing over his mother’s unmoving form.
His mother’s pelt was missing, stolen from the house three years before. In a feat of magic that Duilio’s intellect never could grasp, a selkie could remove his or her pelt and be left in human form. Half-human, Duilio couldn’t do that himself, but he’d seen it done many times. It still baffled him. And even in human form, that pelt remained part of the selkie, an eternal tie to the sea and her life there. Without her pelt, his mother couldn’t go back to the ocean she loved.
Duilio hadn’t been around at the time of the theft. If he had, he might have stopped it, but he’d been in London instead, studying the police force there. Alessio had written and mentioned a theft, but hadn’t told Duilio what was stolen, a gross oversight. He would have come back to hunt the thief himself if only he’d known. But Alessio and Father had thought they could find the thing without help. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case.
Then Alessio had died.
His death nearly a year and a half ago had been suspicious. He’d gotten involved in an argument over a lover and ended up dueling another gentleman in a clearing outside the city. Both parties had seen it was foolish and in the end both men deloped, firing their guns into the air. Yet somehow Alessio was shot through the heart. Duilio had talked to witnesses, and none had any idea from where that fatal shot had come. With no evidence to the contrary, the police had called it an accident.
Duilio wondered if that stray bullet was linked to Alessio’s hunt for their mother’s pelt. In his journals, Alessio had indicated he was close to a breakthrough right before his death. But he hadn’t recorded that breakthrough, whatever it was, leaving Duilio in the dark.
It turned out they actually knew who’d taken the pelt from the house: a footman hired only a month before. The man had pinched both the pelt and a strongbox from the desk in the library. When Alessio had located the footman’s apartment, the strongbox and the pelt were already gone. And they couldn’t question that false footman about it. He’d been strangled to death. That made it likely he’d merely been hired to find the pelt and steal it. Whoever hired him had probably killed him to keep him quiet.
Duilio’s father had continued the search for the pelt, but one damp night while out hunting, Alexandre Ferreira contracted a chill that all too quickly became pneumonia. He died before Duilio could make it home from Paris. In the intervening year, Duilio had reconstructed every last step his father and brother had taken in their searches, with no more success. His gift had proven singularly unhelpful in this particular quest.
The thief hadn’t destroyed the pelt; Duilio knew that much. His mother would have died if that were the case. No, it was secreted away somewhere, an item of indescribable magic. Without it she w
ould never be whole again. If she were to answer the call of the sea, she would be as vulnerable to the waters as any human. She fought that desire constantly.
After one rueful look at his mother, Duilio headed to the door to collect his things from the long mahogany table in the front entryway. He hadn’t found her missing pelt yet, but perhaps he could find one missing servant.
The butler, an elderly man who had served the Ferreira family his entire life, bustled up the hall in time to hand Duilio his gloves. “I’ve heard your sleep was disturbed last night, sir. I am so sorry . . .”
Duilio tugged on the kid-leather gloves and shook his head. “No need to worry, Cardenas,” he said reassuringly. “It was an important message, and I was awake anyway.”
“I’m concerned about security is all, sir.” The butler handed over Duilio’s top hat. “I don’t like strangers in my house.”
“I do understand, Cardenas. I’ll ask Erdano again not to send others from his harem here.” He hoped that would placate his ruffled butler. He didn’t want the man worrying himself into an early grave. “Is the young lady still in the house?”
Cardenas blushed. “Yes, sir. In Mr. Erdano’s room.”
Duilio managed not to grin at the man’s vexed tone. His long-suffering butler tended to consider Erdano and his women a nuisance. Their presence invariably disordered Cardenas’ well-run house- hold. “I’m certain she’ll leave soon enough.”
The butler’s spine was ramrod straight. “She’s not alone, sir.”
Ah, that explains the blush. Well, it meant João hadn’t spent the night out at the quay, but that was permissible as long as he had all the boats in sailing shape when they were needed. “Be patient, Cardenas. I believe this morning is João’s half day anyway,” Duilio lied, giving the butler an excuse not to throw out the boatman. “Now, I’m off to meet with Joaquim. I’ll likely be gone past luncheon, so don’t hold the meal for me.”
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