by Emma Newman
Max nodded. At least he wasn’t trying to climb out of a window, as had happened on a few occasions during his career. He didn’t expect anything like that from someone so prominent in the city, however. Even though he had more to lose, Mr Iris undoubtedly had more arrogance.
Mrs Iris came down the stairs, smiling at him all the way, as if he were a tradesman waiting to be paid who didn’t have the manners to wait in the servants’ wing. She paused next to a mirror at the foot of the stairs, checked the position of her necklace, and then adjusted one of the irises in the vase.
“Have you been offered refreshments?”
“No, but I’m not in need of any.”
“I do apologise; I imagine poor Jones was caught off balance by your arrival. Ah, I think that’s my husband now.”
Mr Iris arrived at the top of the stairs, dressed in white tie, adjusting a cufflink. “Good evening, Mr Arbiter,” he said as he came down the stairs. “How may I help you?”
Max was about to launch into his arrest, but as he’d waited, he’d considered his next move more carefully. Someone so high-profile would have the favour of his Patroon, and he needed to be able to present irrefutable evidence to push for a harsher punishment than might be given in the event of doubt.
“Mr Iris, I need you to show me your arms.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Take off your tailcoat and roll up your sleeves.”
He noted how the man’s lips paled.
“What is the meaning of this?” Mrs Iris asked.
“If you do not cooperate, I shall be forced to take you into custody,” Max said.
“Do it, George!” she said. “There must have been a silly mistake. There’s nothing wrong with your arms! Are you looking for a birthmark? He doesn’t have any!”
“Anna-Marie,” Iris hissed. “Do be quiet, woman!” He shrugged off his tailcoat, gave it to his wife, and then undid the left-hand cufflink to roll up the sleeve of his shirt. He held out his arm, turning it to show the underside, and looked at Max. “There, nothing to see.”
“And the other one.”
“This is so humiliating,” Mrs Iris whispered. “Can’t we at least do this in the drawing room, Mr Arbiter?”
“No.”
Mr Iris fumbled with the other cufflink, either stalling or too nervous to remove it quickly, but eventually he pulled the sleeve up, his face now very pale.
A lurid purple scar ran from his wrist, up his forearm, and stopped near his elbow. It had been stitched, judging from the marks either side of it, and it matched the location mentioned in Lord Iron’s file. As Max suspected, no Charms of the Fae could perfectly heal a wound made by Lord Iron’s blade.
“See! Nothing at all!” Mrs Iris said, rather shrill. “Now can we please be left alone. We’re going to be late.”
Mr Iris stared at Max, seeing that the glamour hadn’t worked on the Arbiter. He closed his eyes, a sheen of sweat covering his brow. Slowly, he let the sleeve drop and replaced the cufflink.
“George Reticulata-Iris, in accordance with the Split Worlds Treaty and with the sanction of the Sorcerer Guardian of the Kingdom of Wessex, I’m taking you into custody.”
“But whatever for?” Mrs Iris shrieked. “There was nothing on his arm!”
Mr Iris took the tailcoat from her and shrugged it on, tugging the ends of his sleeves into place. “Now, don’t make a fuss,” he said to his wife. “Tell the Lavandulas I’ve been called to help the Arbiter with his enquiries and regrettably, we won’t be able to attend this evening.” Seeing the tears in her eyes, he held up a finger. “Now, now. No silliness. Go and send the note. I will be back as soon as I can.”
She hurried off, bursting into tears once she was out of sight, as Mr Iris smoothed his waistcoat and checked his cravat in the mirror. Satisfied that he looked presentable, he turned to Max. “Well then, Mr Arbiter. Time to go, I believe.”
22
Tom watched Cathy stare out of the window into the mists. She looked shaken and occasionally tearful, but was quieter than he’d expected.
“Don’t you want to know what I’ve arrested her for?”
Cathy looked at him. “Does it matter?”
What an odd response. “She’s the one behind those awful pamphlets. I thought it was you.”
Cathy smirked. “That’s why you were investigating it? To get one over on me?”
How did she do that? How did she make him furious with so few words? “Blast it all, Cat, you really are insufferable. I wanted to get it squared away before the Patroons came after you. They were getting close when I found Rainer.”
“Incredible, the things men do to protect women,” she muttered. “I’m sure it wasn’t all altruistic.”
“Why are you being like this? You must have seen one of those disgusting things. They were being read by young ladies, Cat.”
“I did see one of them, yes,” Cathy said, fiery again. “And I thought it was bloody brilliant. There’s nothing disgusting about educating a woman about her own body.”
“It wasn’t just biology, as if that weren’t distasteful enough!”
“Oh, Tom! You’re such a bloody prude. That pamphlet was empowering. Girls get married off without having a clue about what’s going to happen to them. If I hadn’t gone to university, I’d have been the same. Mother didn’t tell me a thing—she just drugged me and shoved me in a carriage! Girls have the right to be informed!”
“It was seditious material.”
“Seditious? Bollocks!”
“Catherine, I simply cannot bear it when you talk like a common mundane. You’re the Duchess of Londinium, for goodness’ sake! Why must you cling to their way of speech? It’s such a crude affectation.”
She was stunned into silence. He savoured it.
“How was that material seditious?”
“It encouraged young women to question the wisdom of accepting their natural place in Society. It contained information on birth control! Encouraging unnatural behaviour threatens the peace and stability of Society.”
“Unnatural behaviour? Is that what you call a woman having the right to choose when to—”
“I am not going to have an argument with you about this. I simply cannot bear any more of it.”
“More? We’ve never talked about it.” She peered at him. “Did Lucy read one of those pamphlets?”
He looked out of the other window.
“Shit! That’s why you’re so upset about it! How dare your wife be educated, eh?”
“Be quiet!”
“Did she start to ask difficult questions? Not so keen to just accept it all without complaint?”
“Cat, I’m warning you—”
“Is it harder to keep her happy now she knows what—”
“God damn it, Catherine, she knew it all already!” He tried not to blush at the memory of the night he’d found the pamphlet. “They do things differently in the colonies,” he added.
“No wonder they want to declare independence,” Cathy said. “They must think we’re a bunch of backward idiots!”
He frowned at her. “Independence?”
Cathy pressed her lips together. Under the pressure of his stare, she sighed. “The Princess of Rajkot delivered a message to our household when I was…indisposed. They’ve declared independence from Albion. Rajkot is no more. It’s Gujarat now.”
Tom closed his mouth, realising it had dropped open. “And did she mention the American colonies?”
Cathy nodded. “According to Morgan. But it’s all secondhand information.” She waved a hand, trying to fool him into thinking it was unimportant. “Anyway, that’s for Will to worry about.”
He raised an eyebrow at her bluff. “Happy to pass it on to your husband when it suits you, eh?”
She blushed at that. “Shut up.”
Tom made a mental note to raise the issue with the Duke. And his wife, for that matter. Though whether Lucy would tell him of any plans within her family to break away from Alb
ion’s rule was another matter entirely. Surely they wouldn’t have married their daughter into a prominent Albion family if they planned to break away.
“How did you find her?” he asked after a while.
Cat, still guarded, had the wherewithal to look innocent. “Who?”
“I’m not a complete buffoon, Cat. We hear nothing of Miss Rainer for years and then, mere weeks after you became Duchess, I find her at the centre of a network distributing dangerous material that bears an uncanny resemblance to some of the opinions you’ve expressed to me. She says she’s been acting alone but someone is funding her. It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Where are we going?” she said, evading the question with one of her own.
“The Tower. She’s in one of the cells there.”
Her pained expression touched something in him too. It had been hard putting his former governess into that cold stone room and locking the door. She’d been nothing but kind to him as a child.
“She hasn’t been mistreated,” he said. “I’m not a monster, Cat.”
“But we both know you’re prepared to do terrible things when you have to.”
“Bringing you home was far from terrible! You shouldn’t have run away in the first place!”
Cathy glared at him but didn’t talk back. Was she learning restraint at last? “What will happen to her?”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether she cooperates. I have to root out the funding, Cat. I have to. If I leave any loose ends it’s my and the Duke’s necks on the line. She was operating from a London printer. It’s on our patch.”
Cathy closed her eyes and sighed. “Sod it. Look, I’m behind it all. You’ll only Truth Charm her, or worse, and I’d rather she not be put through anything more awful than she has been already.”
The knot of tension that had been at the centre of his back for days started to ease. “I knew it. Good, at least you’ve been decent enough to own up.”
“I accept all responsibility. I put her up to it, and I funded all of it too. So there’s no need to do anything to her, all right?”
He could see how desperate she was to protect her. “Cat, I have to exile her.”
“Why? I did it! I wrote the bloody thing!”
“I have to demonstrate that I’ve identified the culprit and taken action should the Patroons catch up. She’s not a member of the Great Families, she’s not Agency staff…they could do anything they want with her. I’m going to exile her to keep her safe. And you safe too.”
“Me?”
“She’s not good for you, Cat. She encourages you, I’m sure. And I can’t risk the connection between the two of you being uncovered. If the Patroons traced her, got hold of her, forced her to talk…it would be all they need to attack you.”
She stuck her chin out. “Let those bastards try.”
He tutted at her childish stubbornness. “You have no idea….At least you have me to protect you from yourself in this. And don’t bother trying to think a way around this, Cat, I’ve already filed my report and judgement with the Tower. I left your name out of it.”
“Then why bother to come and get me?!”
“Because I needed to know if you were behind it. And I thought you would want a chance to say goodbye.” Her brow crinkled as the attack she was about to launch was quashed by the thought of being given one last meeting with Rainer. “It could have been a lot worse for her if someone else had found out,” he said. “What were you thinking?”
“I wanted the women in Society to know what they should. No one else was going to tell them.”
“It’s one thing to educate, it’s another to incite. Cat, you told them that most women in mundane England choose who they’re going to marry and when to have children. Why do that?”
“Because it’s the truth!”
“But what can it possibly achieve, other than making them unhappy? Don’t you see? The ones who might have been scared or reluctant to marry, for whatever reason, now know things have changed for other people but not for them, and it never will. Why tell them there’s another way when they can never benefit from it themselves?”
Cathy’s eyes shone with tears. “Because when I wrote it, I believed I could achieve that for them. I thought that if they knew it was possible for women to have more rights, they would start to push for it themselves. If daughters talked to fathers who loved them, furnished with the arguments and words from that pamphlet, maybe they could have started something quietly, a sea change from the bottom up, as I worked on change from the top down.” Tears broke free and she started to weep, openly. “But everything I’ve tried has failed. Short of burning it all down and starting over, I can’t see how anything is going to change.”
Tom reached across and took her hands. “God’s teeth, Cat, never say anything about burning everything down ever again. Never! You understand?” When she didn’t reply, he edged forwards, resting his head against hers, feeling her tears dripping onto his hands. “I don’t think you realise how many enemies you have. They tried to kill you, Cat!”
“They were just trying to scare me.”
“They had a modern pistol!”
“They could have used it, too. They just wanted to frighten me into shutting up.” She pulled back from him, freeing her hands to wipe at her cheeks. “All I did was voice an opinion, Tom! That’s all! And they shot at my bodyguard. Disproportionate is an understatement. Am I supposed to be quiet, to hide away, just because some twats have tried to bully me? I’ll show them! I’ll—”
“You’ll get yourself killed. Or worse. Silenced. The Patroons are already talking about you in worrying ways, Cat. Will and I can’t keep you safe forever if you insist upon being so difficult.”
“But how will things ever change if I don’t force them to?”
He sighed. “More people should study history. Don’t you remember any of your lessons with Miss Rainer? I heard the ones she gave you after I left were all about the suffragists and the suffragettes!”
“A lot of them were.”
“She couldn’t have taught you about them without the wider picture. There were other factors, Cat, other forces operating in the world. In Mundanus. The Nether is stagnant. It will never change because it is literally incapable of change.”
“No, you’re wrong! What about Gujarat? That’s the kind of change the Patroons will never admit is possible, but it’s already happened!”
“But that’s a world away from what you’re fighting for. They had genuine grievances. The Patroons here have done what all imperialists do—taken more than they’ve given back. There are no grievances at the heart of Albion. There are no reasons for the changes in Mundanus to have any impact upon us. England is as it ever was, stable. We’re not being oppressed, here or there.”
“The women in the Nether are!”
“No they’re not, Cat. They are cherished and protected. The vast majority are comfortable, cared for, and want for nothing. You forget that you’re an exception. You were corrupted at a very impressionable age and I know you’re very…vocal, but one or two voices amount to nothing. There are no economic factors or world wars to force men to see women differently here. Yes, the young men go off on the Grand Tour, but only the wealthiest of our families, not all. And the wealthiest are the ones most likely to toe the line with the Patroons because they want to keep what they have.” From the way she was staring at him, tears still rolling down her cheeks, he felt he was finally getting through to her at last. “Cat, I love you, but you are a complete idiot if you think you can bring about change in Society when it comes to the rights of women. Even your own husband, who’s a decent enough chap and has been incredibly lenient with you, knows this is true. Haven’t you noticed how he’s been stalling the Ladies’ Court? He’s been in meetings with the men of Londinium for hours and hours, every day, trying to hold everything together because of you.”
The carriage rolled through an archway and he saw the Tow
er come into view. It seemed to snap Cathy out of her shock. She wiped her face again, sniffing loudly.
“Will and I just want you to be safe,” Tom said. “And for you to accept things as they are. Like Lucy. She’s found a way to be happy. Can’t you find a way too?”
The carriage rolled to a stop. “I’d rather die than eat this shit and pretend it tastes good,” she said, and opened the door, jumping out before the footman had even lowered the step.
• • •
Max was glad that he’d had the foresight to ask Rupert to make a box in the Nether for him, just in case. It was good to be able to just thrust the door handle and pin into the Iris hallway wall and open a door straight into it.
As Rupert had instructed, when Max said “Light,” the entire ceiling glowed white, exposing the confines of a plain black box. There was nothing inside except a table and two chairs, cuffs attached to the top of the table. He locked Iris’s wrists in them and left without a word, using the same door handle but twisting in the opposite direction to exit into the office at Cambridge House.
He ate alone and went to bed, Kay having left, Amesbury back at his hostel and the gargoyle still sniffing about the park. At least it had the sense to stay hidden whenever anyone came close.
It returned in the small hours and curled up at the foot of the camp bed, waking Max. It was four in the morning. Good. The Iris would be tired and at his least alert.
“Are you going to beat him up?” the gargoyle asked as Max drank some coffee, wanting to be more alert than his prisoner.
“It wasn’t what I was planning to start with.”
“Because I am more than happy to do that for you.”
“I don’t want you anywhere near that man. You know why.”
The gargoyle nodded. “I found the bench.”
“Did it make you feel better?”
The gargoyle frowned at him. “You think I’m stupid, wanting to find it.”
