The Queen's Necklace

by Teresa Edgerton

  “By the stone generated by the fire, by the water that burns, by the salt that transforms all things out of their own nature, I do give myself, my flesh, my bones, my soul, my spirit, unreservedly, in the sure knowledge that as I give so I shall receive in tenfold measure.”

  “By the stone generated by the fire, by the water that burns, by the salt that transforms all things out of their own nature, I do give myself, my flesh, my bones, my soul, my spirit, unreservedly, in the sure knowledge that as I give so I shall receive in tenfold measure.”

  “I offer myself as a vessel for the mysteries.”

  “I offer myself as a vessel for the mysteries.”

  There was a long silence, broken at last when Sir Bastian reappeared and offered her a copper bowl to sip from. “Drink deeply, Lilliana. You will find this draught far sweeter than the two before.”

  It was sweet, and when Lili had drained the last drop, it left her with an intense thirst for more.

  “I permit myself to be impregnated with the seed of things not yet seen or contemplated,” intoned the man in the mask. “I die a thousand deaths and I am reborn to live a thousand lives.”

  “I permit myself to be impregnated with the seed of things not yet seen or contemplated.” Something was growing inside of Lili, something so great, so immense, it threatened to split her apart from her breastbone to the base of her spine. She felt suddenly weak and giddy, but she continued to force out the words. “I die a thousand deaths and I am reborn to live a thousand lives.”

  “Your bridegroom comes to claim you, Lilliana,” said a soft voice, and before her astonished eyes, a dark hole was ripped in the cosmos and something reached out and drew her through the gap.

  She stood at the apex of a whirling world, watching stars and planets dance in the void. Suns exploded, shooting sparks like fireworks in the night. Chaos spun in the heavens like a pinwheel. Lili had neither the power nor the will to resist. She surrendered herself utterly to the mysteries.

  Eaudaimanté, high in the southern mountains, was a tiny walled city on the shores of a beautiful sky-blue lake, almost unknown to history. Had she not possessed an equable climate, and a pretty little marketplace with pointed arches, an ancient hot spring of proven virtue, she might have remained equally unknown to the fashionable world. As it was, she enjoyed a certain reputation. The sick and the weary, the old and the jaded, were accustomed to visit her winter and summer, to drink her bitter magnetic waters, to soak in her steaming baths, and to sample her other (exceedingly sedate) pleasures.

  Placid—dignified—matronly—all this she certainly was, but she was a fashionable matron, addicted to dress, gossip, and slow promenades in the afternoon. As such, she had more than her share of mantua-makers, jewelers, perfumers, and makers of other luxury goods. From the moment any visitor entered through her southern gate—passing between the twin towers and under the painted arms of the city—it was plain to be seen that her crooked streets were lined with shops selling pastry, snuff, gold braid, lace, and silk stockings.

  But she had her darker side as well. With the invalids came the medical men—many of them highly questionable. In a single neighborhood there were over two dozen barbers, empirics, midwives, corn-cutters, bone-setters, and urinarians. Outside the baths, quacks hawked their patent nostrums—good for everything from wind in the blood, to flying gout, moon pall, gravel, and rising lights. Inside the lecture halls, more scientific practitioners spoke wisely of “insensible perspiration,” and “imperfectly concocted humors.” And in tiny shops throughout the town, apothecaries prescribed such recognized remedies as snail-shells, soap, snakeroot, brandy, mint-water, and spittle.

  If those who suffered from disease or ennui attracted the medical men—qualified and otherwise—rich old widows and their gullible sons and daughters attracted confidence men of another sort. With excellent manners, easy address, and a velvet coat, one might go far in Eaudaimanté.

  In fact, the shadier sorts almost invariably went so far as the north end of town, where, in a certain tall house, a certain old lady with a formidable reputation was known to buy information—

  24

  Eaudaimanté, Montagne-du-Soliel (Near the Mountfalcon Border)

  17 Pluviôse, 6038

  It was a narrow house, six stories high, squeezed in among other houses on a short cul-de-sac ending in a graveyard. Like all the other houses on the street, this one presented a forbidding face to the world: the windows shuttered, the dark wood of the front door banded in iron, the thirteen steps leading up to that door high and steep.

  Rumor had it there was a glassed-in garden behind, a conservatory where the lady of the house cultivated a remarkable collection of plants as exotic as they were poisonous. But, as visitors who had stayed in the house stoutly maintained that the Dowager Lady Krogan grew nothing more unusual than foxglove, cultivated nothing more dangerous than fly-agaric, it was possible that rumor lied.

  To this mansion of sinister reputation, one day, came Blaise Trefallon in a borrowed carriage. He appeared to be confident of gaining admittance, for he dismissed the driver before he even knocked.

  That confidence was justified. No sooner had he tapped on the door, no sooner had the servant who answered taken in his elegant figure, than he was ushered inside. Nor was he obliged to linger long in the entry hall. Within minutes of sending up his card, Blaise was escorted upstairs and into the dowager’s sitting room.

  Lady Krogan did not rise to meet him. Sitting up very straight in a high-backed chair without a cushion to support her, she presented a formidable picture in her black satin weeds. Though her white hair was thinning, and the body which housed her indomitable spirit had grown lean and enfeebled, Wilrowan’s grandmother remained an exceedingly handsome old woman. As her visitor entered the room she extended a very white—and still very smooth—blue-veined aristocratic hand in greeting.

  “Mr. Trefallon. You are very prompt in gratifying my request. Dare I hope you have come for an extended visit?”

  “An afternoon call only,” said Blaise, tucking his lace-edged tricorn under one arm, achieving a highly creditable bow. “I hope I have better manners than to foist myself on you as a house-guest, when no such invitation was mentioned in your letter.”

  Lady Krogan sniffed audibly. “My resources are not contemptible, young man, and my household sufficiently well managed. I am able to accommodate unexpected guests with very little trouble.”

  She waved him toward a chair to the left of her own, waited until he was seated before going on. “I believe I told you, once, that you might stay with me here whenever you chose.”

  “You were so gracious as to extend that invitation—two or three years ago.” Blaise hid a slight irritation behind his blandest and most polished manner. He had forgotten how like fencing it was to hold even the simplest conversation with this fierce old lady.

  “Now that you are here, perhaps you will tell me something of my grandson. He is a poor correspondent, as perhaps you know, and his letters to me are extremely sketchy.”

  Trefallon took out a delicate cambric handkerchief and carefully polished his jeweled eyeglass. Examining the result, apparently dissatisfied, he blew off an almost invisible speck of dust. There was something he was very much inclined to say, but a gentlemanly restraint urged him not to say it.

  At last, he cleared his throat. “I believe there is something we should establish at the outset. Three years ago, you asked if I might find it convenient to write to you here from time to time, in order to assure you of Will’s well-being. This trifling favor I was pleased to grant you, as I might have done the same for any female relation of any of my friends. However—” He abandoned his show of diffidence and looked her straight in the eye. “However, I must make it very clear to you, Lady Krogan, that I am not and never shall be one of your spies.”

  The dowager glared at him. “Spies, Mr. Trefallon? You seem to have mistaken me for somebody else. The days when I resided in the courts of power are lon
g past. That being so, what reason could I possibly have for the employment of spies?”

  “I beg your pardon if the term offends you.” Blaise suffered her displeasure with apparent composure. “But for all that, it is widely acknowledged that considering your family history, considering your patronage of half the shady characters on the continent, considering your—we will call them hobbies, for lack of a better word—it is hardly possible that you would live here unmolested, were it not for the fact that you possess information likely to prove damaging to half the royal houses in existence.”

  Lady Krogan smiled. Perhaps she appreciated the fact he could not be intimidated, or perhaps by doing so she meant to disarm him. He was not disarmed. She had been known, in her time, as a woman who used both her beauty and her wit as potent weapons—even at her advanced age, he suspected, they were still sharp enough to cut. “Mr. Trefallon, I will confide in you. I hope you are suitably flattered, because generally speaking I am not of a confiding disposition.”

  The dowager reached out, pulled a tall embroidery stand up to her chair, took out a needle, and began to thread it. “I have led a long and a very interesting life. Do not felicitate me. An interesting life is not always to be envied. As a young girl, I had the misfortune to see a great many members of my family imprisoned or executed. Indeed, on my sixteenth birthday, I was arrested myself on charges so vague and mysterious I do not understand them even now. I spent the next two years in the vilest hole of a prison you can possibly imagine, awaiting my trial. But I happened—and this was entirely by chance—to know something that a certain powerful person wished to keep secret. Had I ever come to trial, I would have told what I knew. I could hardly do otherwise, being under oath. Because of this, I never did come to trial, and my arrest eventually became an embarrassment to those who had arranged it. When public opinion finally shifted, when the persecution of my family came to an end, I was the very first one to be released from prison. This entire experience, as you may imagine, taught me a valuable lesson: It is far better to know things, even if that knowledge should prove to be dangerous, than to live in ignorance.”

  The silver needle flickered in her hand. “You mentioned, a moment ago, my hobbies. I can assure you they do not include gratuitous interference in other people’s lives. Equally, I am determined that others shall not interfere in my life, nor in the lives of my children or grandchildren. So I prepare myself to discourage interference.” She smiled at him fiercely over her embroidery. “Let us just say—I do have my little ways of learning things, and I contrive to remain tolerably well informed for an elderly widow who spends ten months out of every year in an obscure watering place principally inhabited by fops and invalids!

  “But allowing that you are not to be regarded in the same light as some of my other sources of information—what then, Mr. Trefallon?”

  Blaise sat thoughtfully twirling his eyeglass at the end of its satin ribbon. “Lady Krogan, not even to oblige you, not even to set your mind at rest, would I ever tell you anything that Will said to me in confidence. And naturally I feel a very similar reluctance to speak to you of matters that Wilrowan has not even chosen to confide to me, his closest friend.”

  The silver needle ceased to move; Lady Krogan leaned forward in her chair. “Well, perhaps I can make it easier for you to ignore your—really quite admirable—scruples. What can you tell me about Wilobie Culpepper?”

  Trefallon dropped his eyeglass. “You know about Culpepper? But that—” Recovering swiftly from his surprise, he laughed and shook his head. “Lady Krogan, that is just nothing. It was a hoax of Will’s when we were students. He set out to establish a false identity, to see how many people he might fool. A great many people were fooled, but once he realized his joke had succeeded, he typically lost interest and very soon abandoned it.”

  “And what if I told you that Mr. Culpepper had been recalled from obscurity, that he is, at this time, quite active in and around the city of Hawkesbridge? What would you say to that, Mr. Trefallon?”

  Blaise took up his jeweled eyeglass, began to play with it again. “I would say that your information is better than my own. And that there is probably very little I could tell you about Will—or about Willie Culpepper—that you don’t know already.”

  Lady Krogan took up her needle and set several more stitches. “That is entirely likely. Yet I think the information I have may be seriously flawed, coming as it does from those not intimately acquainted with my grandson. I had hoped that you might help me to put a more accurate interpretation on things that I already know.”

  Abruptly, Blaise abandoned all attempts at concealment. They seemed, in any case, to be remarkably futile. “I’ve had an idea for a long time that there was something seriously amiss with Will. Some secret grief, some sickness or trouble—which makes him do reckless things, which makes him court his own destruction. But in the last few months I’ve seen him behave in a way that is far beyond anything I had ever seen before.”

  Rising from his seat, Trefallon began to pace the floor. “He attends but rarely to his duties at the Volary—how Dionee continues to tolerate this, I really don’t know—and he seems to spend at least twenty hours a day in the very worst company possible. Naturally, I fear for his health, since he rarely sleeps, but it’s much worse than that.”

  Lady Krogan tied off her thread in a knot, then picked up a pair of silver scissors and snipped it off. “In what way worse?”

  “Will’s principle failings have always been his love of danger and an almost insatiable sexual appetite. But as for any other vices: he has always practiced them in strictest moderation or not at all. Yet, in the fortnight before I quit Hawkesbridge, he would have gambled away a fortune had the luck not remained so remarkably even, and though I have known him from a boy I have never seen him consume such quantities of wine and spirits as he has recently. Moreover, he frequents opium dens and—and worse places besides. And what is particularly inexplicable, he’s been taking Nick Brakeburn with him, on these expeditions into the stews.” Blaise threw himself down in a chair by the fireplace. “Whatever anyone might say about Will, he has never been a—a corrupter of youth, or a despoiler of maidens, and so I consider his recent behavior completely unlike him.”

  In the act of measuring out a new length of silk thread, Lady Krogan paused. “I admit what you tell me is most disquieting. Well, Mr. Trefallon, is there anything more?”

  “Surely all this is more than enough. And the timing, of course, is so particularly bad. Because why would Will choose to behave so disgracefully, now of all times?”

  Lady Krogan leaned forward over her needlework. “You speak as though this were a time of particular significance.”

  “It is partly because Will has invited Lili to visit him; she is supposed to arrive in about a month. He is looking forward to her visit with such painful intensity—and yet at the same time dreading it—I have an idea he intends something more than an ordinary visit. But I ask you, what will Lili think—and say and do—when she arrives in Hawkesbridge only to find her young cousin absolutely wallowing in dissipation, and learns that Will is the one who is leading him astray?”

  “That is a problem indeed,” the Dowager admitted.

  “But there is more. And if you have not heard this already—though I expect you have—let me be the first to felicitate you.” Blaise stood up, made a quick bow, and resumed his seat. “It has recently been announced that the queen is in an interesting condition. And I simply don’t understand why Will should go out of his way to distress Dionee at a time like this!”

  The dowager sat frowning down at the emerging pattern on her embroidery frame. “And is my step-granddaughter distressed?”

  “She is distressed about something. I couldn’t positively say that Wilrowan is the cause. And while I understand that she might well grow faint and ill, on account of her condition, is it natural she should also be so nervous and ill-tempered?”

  The dowager shook her head. “Not so soo
n. No, not so soon.” One white hand strayed to the ambergris necklace at her throat. She passed the dark, rose-cut beads slowly between her fingers as she sat considering the facts for several minutes. “But putting aside our concern for Dionee, to what—if anything—do you ascribe Wilrowan’s remarkable behavior?”

  “I think that it has something to do with Lili. From things he has said, things he has let slip, I think Will has recently learned something that has—broken his heart, broken his spirit—” Trefallon shrugged. “I don’t know what it has done, but it has certainly changed him.”

  “Do you think that Lilliana has taken a lover?”

  “No.” Blaise shook his head emphatically. “And pardon me, Lady Krogan, but I think you are playing with me. I do not think that Lili has taken a lover—and neither do you. If that were the case and Will suspected it, Wilrowan would simply have called the fellow out—put a bullet through him, cut him to pieces—and that would be an end to it.”

  “But supposing,” said Wilrowan’s grandmother, “my grandson did not know, or was not certain, who Lili’s lover might be?”

  Trefallon shook his head again. “If he did not know, or was not certain, that would hardly prevent him from murdering half the young men of her acquaintance. As no such slaughter has occurred, I think we can safely acquit Lilliana of adultery.”

  “And yet you still think my grandson suffers from a broken heart?” the dowager persisted.

  “I do. It may be however, that he was wounded long ago, and this recent injury, whatever it is, has only started the bleeding again.”

  The old woman sat quietly over her work for several minutes, setting stitch after stitch, apparently deep in thought. “Well, Mr. Trefallon,” she said at last. “I think you are right. It has always seemed to me that Will does care for Lilliana, more than he admits, and that there was something or someone coming between them. Out of respect for his feelings, I thought it best not to inquire too closely, but it may be time to discard that policy.”