by Thea Devine
It wasn't over. The danger was still there.
Venable lived. As he wended his way the next morning toward St. George Street, where the agency was located, he saw the card pockets all around, all refilled with Venable's message of resurrection. He saw people taking them, reading them reverently, almost as if those cards were their daily scripture.
It wasn't over. Someone was going to take over. Someone was going to come forward with the same message, the same ideology, and his followers would organize and swell in numbers and . ..
How the hell was Lujan going to deal with that if he got Venable's seat?
Never mind that now. He mounted the wide stone steps at the elegant address of the Streatham Agency and tried the door.
Locked. Strange.
He peered in the frosted glass window of the door, but that was useless; he couldn't see anything. Odd that a business would be closed at this hour of the day. He rang the bell, and banged on the door, feeling conspicuous as hell on this busy street.
It took a while, but finally a very starchy and disapproving middle-aged woman answered the summons.
"Yes?"
"The Streatham Agency? Miss Burnham?"
She looked at him as if he were a lunatic. "Who? What? There's no agency here, no Miss Burnham. You have the wrong address."
She slammed the door, and he didn't feel inclined to pursue it further.
But how was it possible? Angilee wasn't crazy—she had been quite definite that she had hired Mrs. Geddes through that agency. And Angilee just wasn't someone who'd make a mistake about an address.
And yet she had, and now he'd have to track it down.
But as he waited for Zabel Rosslyn in the lobby of Claridge's, he felt on firmer ground: the place was like a parlor in someone's home, with sofas, comfortable chairs, tables, a fireplace, a grand piano, a thick oriental carpet, and wonderful molding on the walls, ceilings and fireplace surround.
Just the place to discuss the legitimacy of a marriage.
But Zabel was strangely late. He couldn't find the bellboy he'd sent to summon Zabel anywhere. People came and went the way they did in hotels, and he was starting to feel extremely uncomfortable to the point where he finally went to the desk.
"Zabel Rosslyn? I sent the bellboy ..."
"Let me check for you, sir." The desk clerk rifled through the register and checked the key slots. "Are you certain, sir?"
"What do you mean?"
"There's no one by that name registered ... not now, not anytime in the last six months."
A rabbit hole.
Filled with secrets and lies.
He felt the strength of the power of the mysterious they—the Sacred Seven—all around him.
They were watching; they had got Rosslyn out of the way. They had closed down the agency somehow. They knew what he was up to.
They were waiting for him.
He was ready for them. He felt the fury of the righteous. Venable was not going to win. He would bring him down, he would destroy him, destroy all of them, and all of it whatever and wherever it existed.
He knew this much—the locus was the Bullhead. That was the thing. And viscerally he knew it, and he knew he had to go back there. Better by daylight.
It was such an unprepossessing house by daylight—just a big half-timbered country house of sun-softened stone sitting in a well-tended park of emerald lawns dotted with bushes and beds of flowers. It could have been any man's home, his home; it was so like Waybury in some respects, it was frightening.
Frightening that home and life as the common man knew it could be so corrupted, and transmogrified into something so venal, so prurient, so obscene.
He tethered his mount in a copse of bushes near the road. So much easier to skulk on foot, but no one even seemed to be around.
It made him queasy, how quiet things were, as if danger were hovering high above him like fog, or simmering deep underground.
The air felt oppressive. He felt as if he were walking into a nightmare. As if they were waiting. As if they had always known
he would eventually come back there.
He moved closer to the house, crouching low, and under the view out the windows. Fake windows in nonexistent public rooms. Someone was watching. That was the word. Someone was always watching, and he couldn't take the chance someone wasn't watching now.
Whose perverted pornographic vision was this place anyway? Who had bought and fitted out this house of prostitution and debauchery?
Try for the front door, or that secret basement entrance through which Angilee and he had escaped? No time for that now. There were probably a dozen secret ins and outs to the Bullhead, but a frontal assault seemed more efficient.
And it was too quiet. He hated how quiet it was.
They were waiting ... he could feel it, taste it... the sin, the sex, the danger, the rage—he flattened himself against the front wall and moved slowly toward the door.
He had to know. He just had to know.
Up the front steps to the burnished front door. So quiet. So deadly. His heart pounding. His life on the line . ..
He reached for the brass doorknob. Touched and retracted his hand as if it had burned him. Grasped it again and turned it. Pushed his way in.
Darkness. No gaslight. Just the north light pouring in through the door. Enough so that he could see—
The place was empty.
Wholly empty. Not a stick of furniture. Not a curtain, a carpet, a chair, a wall. Just a big empty blank space in front of him. As if the house had been gutted.
As if nothing had ever been there at all.
Chapter nineteen
The reception was held at Gorsenor House, a gala event only slightly less glittering than the Queen's Ball, which had inaugurated the Season.
Everyone was there; everyone wanted to be seen, and hopefully to be mentioned in the morning papers as among those feting that minor royal from that small European country that was such a friend of Her Majesty's.
The aristocracy was there. The Prince of Wales was there. The heiresses were there. The novices wearing the white leather roses were there. Kyger saw them all instantly in one sweeping glance as he entered the elegant marble-floored foyer just outside the ballroom.
But surely they wouldn't be soliciting here.
Nothing seemed impossible to him anymore if they could empty a whole house and disperse a small lifetime of lechery in the blink of an eye.
He watched for the hand signal; he looked for Irene. He spoke to acquaintances whose faces looked familiar but whose names he could not quite recall. He moved through the crowd feeling invisible among all the high-powered government officials, earls, dukes and diamond-encrusted duchesses milling around.
He did not see Zabel Rosslyn, when he fully expected to see him, and Wroth.
He drank champagne, he nibbled on hors d'oeuvres, he looked for Irene. He saw a dozen or more white-gowned girls with leather roses pinned in their hair, at their waists, on their bodices. He saw no sign of seven, at least any that were overt.
And he felt a great frustration, as he wandered through the crowd, that he was missing something. That there was something in the stripping and gutting of the Bullhead that was meant to be a message.
He listened in on conversations.
"... breaking in new staff is just impossible ..."
"... was hoping against hope that he would choose to go up to Oxford this term but—"
"... all the preparations for the jubilee—I don't know how I let myself agree to ..."
"... do you like what you see .. . ?"
He stopped short at that familiar question.
The speaker was a dark-haired girl dressed in white, her back to him, with a leather rose fastened at the break of satin buttons down her back.
Irene?
He moved closer, hearing the same solicitation Irene had made to him, almost as if they had all be given a script to follow. The same script. For the same gentlem
an. The same kind of gentleman who would always pay the price for the kind of submissive service these girls would be trained to give.
Subtly he moved around to see her face, and he was deeply disappointed to find it wasn't Irene. It was another quite beautiful and naive young thing already in the throes of the Tony Venable brand of sexual education.
And the gentleman to whom she was earnestly speaking shook off her detaining hand.
She didn't like that. Her expression turned vindictive for the merest breath of a second, and then she immediately turned to Kyger and smiled.
"Hello. I'm Alice."
"I'm Kyger." Now he was at a loss, and had to resort to the same lines from the same script. "Would you care for some refreshment?"
"Oh, yes," she murmured. "Champagne would be fine."
He got them each a flute, and they sipped, and he wondered just how to approach her to get the information he needed. "I see a lot of girls wearing that same white rose," he said at length.
She sent him a coquettish look. "Do you know why?"
"Should I?"
She smiled that Mona Lisa smile. "Don't you?"
"Say that I don't," he said carefully.
"It's nice to meet someone who doesn't, actually. They're all so jaded. They've sampled everyone, you know, and there's hardly anything you can offer them that they don't want perverted somehow. Do you understand?"
"I think so. But why don't you tell me more."
She looked around them and lowered her voice. "It's very seductive, but you have to understand that if you take the oath to get involved, you can't renege. Although, why anyone would want to...
"Anyway, the thing is, there are more of us than there are available men, so of course some of us won't marry this Season, and maybe not the next or the next. So the idea is, we can have all the benefits of a wife without the onerous duties of managing a house and servants, or dealing with unpleasant relatives, or bearing children.
"We who make the decision not to marry can have the best of that world anyway—our own homes, a monetary settlement, jewels, clothes, luxuries—all that without all the burden of being married.
"Which, after all, is merely a license, a ceremony and a notation in a church registry. For myself, I can't wait. I have a choice
from all the available men in London, married or single, instead of just one. The white rose assures them that I'm in the process of
being trained to perfectly service them. When I've completed my training to the satisfaction of my tutors, I'll be given a black
leather rose to signify I'm ready for all the gifts my lover-to-be is waiting to shower on me. *
"It's perfect, it's the best of both worlds. The most influential and wealthy men at my feet. Every advantage after I'm chosen ..." She looked at him as if daring him to say that any woman wouldn't want that. "A devoted man to whom I dedicate myself.. ."
He was appalled. She didn't know. She really didn't know just what perfection meant to those sadistic voluptuaries. They'd put her to work first; they'd bring her down so low she'd be grateful to be sold off to anyone who would pay for her. And she'd be offered only to those who desired a true, fully whipped-into-shape submissive.
"We take an oath, you know, when we first commit to honor our promise. To be loyal to the ideal of the white rose. To have faith in our instructors. Respect for ourselves. To trust in those who will be our patrons. Belief that this is the right course for us. And to accept whatever the future may bring ..."
Jesus. He knew that litany: it was Tony Venable's precepts, perverted into a hedonist's creed.
/ live.
His ideas, his ideology, his precepts would never die.
/ will return.
He'd never left. His body might be gone, but he'd never left. His presence was everywhere. His followers, his brethren, his legacy had made certain of it.
And he, Kyger, was wrestling air.
All he had was the corrupted precepts coming out of the ingenuous mouth of a beautiful young courtesan in training.
What could she tell Wyland that he would believe? She had no idea this was an outgrowth of Venable's secret sins.
No idea there was any connection at all.
Except... who were these tutors .. . ?
"Who are the tutors?"
This time she hesitated. "Just... people who have our best interests at heart."
He wanted to ask how, but it seemed like a superfluous question. She had been so thoroughly inculcated she wouldn't understand. She really believed that she had chosen wisely and well to hand herself over to masters who would subvert her into a prostitute.
"Is this what you really want?"
She looked indignant. "Of course. Isn't it what you're looking for? The perfect woman, trained to be your perfect accompaniment. Someone outside your marriage and your life, who is trained to devote herself totally to you?"
"What man wouldn't," Kyger murmured.
"Exactly. It's even noble in a way."
"A calling," Kyger said.
"Maybe it is. Maybe only certain people are ... are meant to live like that."
"And you're one of them."
"I can't wait," she said. "Would you like to make an offer? We can ask, you know."
He knew that. Irene had said the same thing. "What would that entail?"
"You tell me, I confer with my tutors, we make a decision whether you can have me."
Oh, she was not as innocent as she seemed; polished to a high gloss, and counting every crown as she spoke to him.
But maybe this was the way to get at the Venable poison. Maybe ... maybe this was what he could take back to Wyland. He named a sum that made her eyes widen.
"Oh, my goodness," she breathed, awed.
"Talk to your mentors or whatever you call them," he said. "Meet me at noon tomorrow for lunch—at Claridge's. And I hope by then you've made your decision."
Something wasn't right, and he couldn't quite grasp it. All the way home to the town house he wrestled with it. Was it that sweet Alice was so forthcoming? Perhaps too forthcoming with all that information, every bit of information, in fact, that he needed, and not a thing he could present as proof?
Or was it that everyone at the reception was a potential customer, as it was at the garden party? And the solicitations were made early in the game so that each submissive in training could be expressly fashioned to the taste of the one who would own her?
God, that thought was worse than abhorrent, but there was no denying the thing was real. The girls were looking for patrons. Actively inviting them to make bids for them. It was all proscribed, it seemed to him. There was nothing there that hadn't gone on for years under Venable's direction.
It made him feel as if he was operating in some parallel world where everything was the mirror image of reality.
The rabbit hole.
The agency that didn't exist; the father who wasn't there; the brothel that had disappeared as if it had been wiped clean by the hand of God. The whoremonger who was dead still selling his whores to the wealthy and elite.
Why did he feel as if all of them were connected? He got back to the town house well after two in the morning, feeling strangely disquieted.
It was the Venable thing. It was as insidious and insubstantial as air. And yet it was there, and people were still breathing in his ideas and living for and on the promise of his dream. How did you destroy life-sustaining air? It was time to meet with Wyland. Before his lunch with the disingenuous Alice. He'd take Wyland with him, and that way he wouldn't have to coerce Alice to go to him with her story.
He would tell it, she could confirm it, and that should be enough proof for Wyland.
And he'd pay Alice the money anyway.
The house was preternaturally quiet. The door was open, and the lamps were lit low, in anticipation of his return. There were shadows everywhere, and it seemed to him that the damned house was too dark.
He didn't like dark house
s. He didn't like these foggy mysteries that surrounded him. He wanted an end to the mysteries, to Venable, to the sevens, to everything.
And there wasn't a servant around. Not a sound. He felt as though he ought to tiptoe up the steps. Instead, he poured himself a brandy on the way to his room.
He wanted his life back, and he had this mordant feeling he'd probably get nothing back in the end. And what he was doing in London when he should be with Angilee back at Waybury, he couldn't for the life of him understand right now. And that damned tight tux—he threw it on the bed. That conversation with Alice had been too disturbing; she really believed it, the whole unbelievable myth they'd sold her.
But who? Who was this procurer who had made up this fairy tale to beguile innocents so uncertain of their allure and their power they would give up every legal right for the opportunity to be a doormat and receptacle for some horny, wealthy aristocrat?
It gnawed at him as he lay propped against the headboard sipping his brandy. And the more he thought about it, the foggier everything became.
He knew this now: that there was a cabal, the Sacred Seven, whose leader they called the Ancestor, and that Tony Venable had been one of them. That he had been murdered, and the sign of seven had been cut into his chest.
And it bad been the sign of seven; there was no other explanation now that he knew the things he knew.
And the government, always wary, then became apprehensive that Venable's philosophy and ideology would catch such hold of the public imagination that he would be elevated to a place where the government could never recover from his influence.
Which was nearly happening.
Thus, they had arranged for the impartial, unknown investigator—him—to find the thing that would demolish the legend of Tony Venable in the public's eyes, so nothing could be traced back to them.
And even though he'd found it, he still hadn't moved three paces from where he had started three months ago. Venable was revered even more, his secret life would stay secret, his secret business would continue as a resource for the brethren, and the Bullhead would rise again, probably in some other stately home, with the same whores, the same masters, the same services.
