Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  From the lady of the house herself, however, and in spite of my obvious progress, I got only criticism.

  “How many times do I have to tell you, child?” said Madame Nahreem at dinner on the fourth day. “The tone rises at the end of the sentence, like a question. To stay flat is very rude.”

  “I thought I was doing,” I said, trying not to show my resentment and—once more—failing.

  “Not enough,” said Dahria cheerfully. “You have to sing it.”

  “I’ll never get any of this,” I muttered.

  “Not with that attitude,” said Madame Nahreem.

  “It’s not about attitude!” I shot back. “You expect the impossible. I cannot master half a dozen different skills in under a week, and it is unreasonable of you to expect me to, so kindly refrain from insinuating that this is somehow my failure!”

  I did not shout. I was composed and measured in my delivery, and I was surprised to find, at the end of my speech, that Madame Nahreem held my eyes for a moment, then smiled.

  “At last,” she said.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “That was the first time you sounded like an Istilian lady.”

  I looked from her to Dahria in bemusement.

  “She’s right,” Dahria agreed. “You even did the inflection right.”

  I stared at her.

  “And not a moment too soon,” said Willinghouse. “You need to go to Elitus tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow?” I exclaimed. “I can’t.”

  “The Grappoli ambassador returns to his home country next week,” said Willinghouse, “and it is essential that you see who he is most intimate with. It’s now or never.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “First you should see if your attacker is a member.” Willinghouse went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “We don’t even know for sure who frequents the place. Very hush-hush. But a former colleague who was invited as a guest once suggested there was an office containing a ledger of the members’ names. It’s kept away from the more social areas, so reaching it may prove tricky, but if you can get a look at the complete list—”

  “I said, I’m not ready!” I repeated.

  “You are,” said Madame Nahreem. I gaped at her. “We could practice for weeks, months, and you would improve, but I think we have achieved enough to maintain the illusion for a short period.”

  She held my eyes for a moment—it was as close to praise as she was likely to get—and then turned to Willinghouse.

  “How short?” he said. “The situation is bound to be fluid. I can’t say how long she will need.”

  “An hour if no one present knows much about Istilia,” said Madame Nahreem. “Less if anyone does.”

  Willinghouse looked unhappy.

  “Perhaps if she’s quick—,” he began, but Madame Nahreem cut him off.

  “Any attempt at speed will destroy the illusion utterly. Miss Sutonga needs to take her time without risking overexposure.”

  “Oh goody,” said Dahria. “A paradox.”

  “Then we should postpone,” said Willinghouse, ignoring her. “But…” He reached beneath his chair and produced a newspaper. “Grandmamma generally prohibits reading at the table, but I believe today she will make an exception.” He glanced at Madame Nahreem as he unfolded the paper—the Bar-Selehm Standard—and pushed it to where we could see the headline.

  REFUGEE CRISIS DEEPENS.

  “Five boats came last week,” he said as we read. “Twelve so far this week. Those are just the ones which made it. Wreckage and bodies wash up on the northeast coast daily. Dozens. Mostly women and children because the men are already dead or conscripted by the drug cartels to fight.”

  More sandals stuffed with whatever weedy flowers they could scrape together on the oily riverbank.…

  “There’s also this,” he added, pushing the top paper aside to reveal another beneath it whose block capitals were bigger, more strident than anything in the Standard. Its headline was simpler.

  SEND THEM BACK!

  “The sentiment expressed by the Clarion has a lot of support in the government,” said Willinghouse wearily. “There’s talk of a naval blockade. The opposition will try to derail it, of course, but we don’t have the votes in the house. Even in our own ranks there are some who will argue that we should put Bar-Selehm’s needs before meddling in foreign affairs, especially in the light of our nonintervention treaty with the Grappoli, and Richter’s Heritage people are getting more vocal by the day.”

  “But the more the Grappoli expand across northern Feldesland…,” I began.

  “The more refugees will risk everything to get out, yes,” he said. “I don’t know if we can prevent those machine gun plans from reaching Grappoli manufacturers or not—it may already be too late—but it’s clear that they have agents here at home who are going to continue to aid them. We must find out who those people are and stop them.”

  I considered him, then looked at Madame Nahreem. As I did so, I thought of the mask, and in place of the grief and anger I had felt rising within me, there was only a serene and mysterious confidence.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “Madame Nahreem is right. I’m ready.”

  The table fell silent, and everyone looked at me, mildly taken aback by the forcefulness, the finality of my decision. It was, I dare say, aristocratic.

  * * *

  I INSISTED ON ONE visit to my sister’s family before I adopted my new guise, and though Madame Nahreem said that she found my “sentimentality” annoying, she admired the hauteur with which I stated that I had made my decision, and left it at that.

  It was a hot day, and I could smell the Drowning’s stagnant sourness long before I reached it. Rahvey and her girls met me outside the sprawling shanty itself, and we sat by the river on an overgrown pier where the village girls drew water. The hippo pod which sometimes ventured down here had moved upstream for now and could be seen sunning themselves pink on the bank amidst reeds where ospreys soared. I thought again of the abandoned sandals down by the harbor and gave my sister five shillings. She thanked me with a tight little nod, spirited them into her simplified sari, and looked at the water.

  I considered the group of children there smilingly, and realized that one of the girls—the one holding the infant Kalla—was a stranger to me. Even for a Lani girl, she was shy, and she kept her eyes down to the baby even when I asked her name. In fact, she didn’t respond at all till Rahvey reached over and tugged at her filthy sleeve.

  “She’s deaf,” my sister explained. “Born that way. Can’t hear or speak.”

  I smiled at the little girl, who must have been about seven or eight, and raised my hand in greeting. The girl, whose face was splashed with mud, considered my gesture then repeated it warily.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Aab,” said Rahvey. “Aab Samir. You remember Mrs. Samir? Works at the laundry with me. Her husband is sick and she’s staying home with him. I said I’d keep an eye on the girl. She’s no trouble. Actually, she’s not much of anything. Not very bright. She tries to play with my girls, but she’s always behind, always left out when the rules change.” Rahvey shrugged, but her lips were pursed grimly. “You have to watch her because she doesn’t hear if someone shouts that they’ve seen a snake or a crocodile. She’s not allowed out if there are hyenas about.” She shook her head. “What she’ll do when she grows up I just don’t know. If she gets to grow up. It’s impossible to explain anything to her, and she can’t leave the Drowning. But Mrs. Samir is no spring chicken, and what the girl would do if she had to fend for herself…” She shook her head again and broke off, shooting me a bleak, knowing smile.

  “Life, eh, sister mine?” she said. “It’s no place to be poor.”

  The remark stayed in my head, humming like an old temple bell, as I made my circuitous way back to Willinghouse’s town home, and Madame Nahreem’s remarks about unlearning my own body came back to me. We of the Drowning and the streets wore our pa
st, our place in the world, like a cloak we could not shed. It muffled us, shaped us, weighed us down. It stuck to our arms, tangled around our feet, and laced itself into our hair till it became a second skin, all we had been defining what we were, what we might be. To shake it off, to become someone else as I had to now, demanded a kind of surgery, a splitting open of the skin, a bitter, bloody birthing in which the new self pushed its way out of the old and lay gasping between life and death on the midwife’s floor.

  I was not sure it could be done.

  CHAPTER

  12

  THE NEWSPAPERS, WHICH HAD so decried the cluttering of Bar-Selehm’s harbor with homeless and unskilled immigrants, were now reporting that the Grappoli advance had temporarily slowed, though no one had any good explanation as to why. Conditions in the northern part of the continent were, they said “difficult,” an understatement offered to explain why their stories contained little more than rumor and conjecture. More interesting to me was a discreet announcement in the society pages. It revealed the arrival of one Lady Ki Misrai, a princess from Istilia, who was touring the region before returning home to a marriage arranged between her family and that of an Antrioan landowner of excellent pedigree and considerable wealth. The visit was, said the paper, strictly recreational. The invitation to attend Elitus had arrived at the post office box Willinghouse had quietly established for that purpose almost immediately.

  “You will be staying at the Royal Palace Hotel,” said Madame Nahreem.

  I should have expected as much, but the name of the place clearly registered in my face.

  “You must not show yourself intimated or impressed by anything,” said Madame Nahreem. “Take everything in stride. Remember the mask.”

  She did not wish me good luck.

  I rode in Willinghouse’s carriage back to the city accompanied by Namud, who was to be my escort for the evening. A lady would never attend a venue such as Elitus unaccompanied. But Namud was no mere chaperone. He was also my bodyguard, and while he would have to turn in the ostentatious pistol he wore at his side to the doorman when we arrived, he had, he assured me, other weapons concealed about his person that he intended to keep.

  I liked Namud. He was perhaps thirty, quiet, and, I felt, gentle, in spite of his physical strength. He said very little, but there was a wry amusement that sometimes surfaced in his face, like a dolphin breaching unexpectedly. The dolphin dived quickly, as if showing itself would violate Namud’s private sense of decorum, and when it did, the waters of formality would close so completely over the top that it became hard to believe you had actually glimpsed that glistening playfulness only moments before.

  We left the carriage on the corner of Deerfeld Avenue, waiting in the cool shade of a chapel with my luggage, till we were collected by a cab and driven to the Royal Palace. It was important that no one there connect us to Willinghouse. I asked Namud if there was any chance of his being recognized.

  “I rarely venture into the city, my lady,” he said, quite poised. “But even if I did, I am told that one Lani servant looks much like another.”

  With the faintest flicker of a smile, the dolphin vanished once more.

  I wore a demure veil over a long black dress and elbow-length gloves, which was supposed to be suitable Istilian travel wear for a lady, but was uncomfortably hot and restrictive. I did not speak to the check-in clerk, allowing Namud to confirm my reservation and orchestrate the army of uniformed bellhops who would ferry my luggage to my room, while I stood in a little globe of silence like an ominous statue under dust sheeting.

  The Royal Palace had been fitted with a steam-driven elevator that took the form of a small, square sitting room, beautifully furnished and upholstered with plush red fabric and gold cord. I took my place on a padded bench, turned slightly sideways, legs together and hands clasped at my waist, glad that the veil concealed my panic as the attendant closed the gated door and adjusted the ropes that controlled the engine below. There was a distant hiss, a whir, and a clank, and the room rose smoothly and steadily up. I kept my hands locked tightly together and held my breath till we reached the fifth floor and slowed.

  I inclined my head to the attendant, all the thanks a lady in my position was expected to bestow, and followed the solicitous bellhop to what would be my room for the night. In fact, it wasn’t so much a room as a suite: a luxurious bedchamber, a separate bathroom with running water, an opulent sitting room and a private bar, which would be staffed at my request. Namud had an adjoining room. It was all extraordinary.

  I had only an hour to enjoy it, however, before I had to change, and this I could not do alone, since I would be going out in one of the complex Istilian saris which I had seen only in their simple, impoverished, and it had to be said, more convenient forms in the Drowning. After forty minutes reveling in my solitude, there was a knock at the door and Namud showed Dahria in.

  “My, my,” she exclaimed. “We have moved up in the world! And not by climbing like a bush baby with its tail on fire.”

  “Did it have to be you?” I asked, secretly pleased to see her.

  “Josiah wants to keep this within the family. So I get to be your maid for a while. Imagine my delight.”

  “I wish you were coming with me tonight,” I confessed.

  She looked momentarily surprised, then shook her head.

  “You’ll do better without me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I know who you really are and that would make you self-conscious, like you’re pretending. Success depends on you believing your own lie. Better that there’s no one there to remind you of the truth.”

  It could have been a half joke at my expense, but it wasn’t. She was sincere, thoughtful even, and when I held her gaze, she looked away, as if the remark had meant something more than the words alone suggested.

  More masks, I thought, more playing until it becomes true, and your new self outgrows your old.

  “Notes from my dear brother,” she said, producing a fold of paper. “There’s little on the club’s layout—because he doesn’t know much, though that has never prevented him from writing a detailed report. It’s a government thing.”

  I glanced at it. There was a carefully lined diagram containing almost no detail, but conveying one salient point.

  “The office with the membership list is on the top floor?” I said.

  “And probably not accessible from inside the building,” said Dahria. “You may have to climb in through a courtyard window. Well within your steeplejack abilities, I’m sure.”

  “So when he said I was the only one he could send because I was the one he trusted…” I began.

  “That was a lie, yes,” said Dahria. “Sorry. He does that.”

  “I see,” I said simply, and left it at that.

  Elitus was a members-only club. It was also all white and all male. Unless you were employed in its service sector or brought in for entertainment value, there would be no way for a woman to cross its threshold, particularly if you were black or Lani. I expressed my furious bafflement to Dahria, but she just shrugged.

  “You’re not a society lady,” she said, “so you don’t understand, but I actually see the appeal.”

  I stared at her.

  “Of what?”

  “A club where I could be with people like me,” she said. “Women’s clubs are not as common as men’s, not as politically powerful, but if you’d grown up among only your own kind, been sent to an all girl’s school, and been shuffled into the women-only drawing room whenever the meal was over, you might see that a lot of women don’t actually want to have to deal with men who, for the most part, they neither understand nor like. Even their romantic entanglements are largely scripted and occasional affairs. I seriously doubt that any husband and wife are as close as are two old acquaintances of the same sex who do not have to hide their thoughts for fear of violating what might be considered genteel. My dear steeplejack, this may come as a surprise to one raised as scandalous
ly as you, but Bar-Selehm is full of married men and women who want nothing more than to retreat into the company of those with whom they grew up.”

  “White people,” I said, shaking my head in bewilderment.

  “I wish you wouldn’t take that disagreeable tone,” she said. “It is extremely tiresome. And stop fiddling with your veil.”

  “It’s in the way. I can’t see properly.”

  “Leave it. An Istilian lady rarely removes her veil in mixed company.”

  I scowled. However much Dahria wanted to characterize the clubbable world of the city as a kind of hankering after childhood simplicities uncomplicated by the opposite sex, there was no denying that many of the agreements, deals, policy changes, and alliances that were at the heart of the city’s economic and political life were cobbled together in the private rooms of those exclusive clubs. Elitus was a prime example, and its exclusivity had a tang of secrecy about it. While certain aristocrats, high-ranking politicians, diplomats, financiers, and industrialists were known, or assumed, to be members, there was no precise list of who was allowed in and who wasn’t, nor—and this was more troubling—was there a clear sense of what went on within the club itself. I had prepared to behave as an Istilian lady, but what exactly I was going into, I had no idea.

  Half an hour later Namud, a square suitcase in one hand, presented my card at the ornate but discreet door on Rethmina Avenue, turned in his pistol with his coat, and led me into I knew not what.

  The entrance was deceptively ordinary—a flight of stone steps up to a black lacquered door indistinguishable from half a dozen others on the same block. The building was four stories aboveground and a basement, so that it looked to all the world like a well-appointed town house with ground floor rooms for entertaining and servants’ quarters below. It was not until I had made my way along an elegant hall that I realized the walls dividing this house from those on either side had been knocked through. Elitus wasn’t on the block between numbers 22 and 34. It was the block.