Thurby’s own interview had been short and sweet. He might be an old romantic inside, but he had a bluff exterior and rather believed he had dominated the detectives. Unless they had been humoring him. Odd pair, hard to get a handle on. Realizers. M. Lestrade was a middle-aged woman in brown trousers and dog-checked tunic with a short cape and a definite air of the mannish—she had wavered once or twice even to Thurby Fitzhugh’s eyes and ears. Click was a sharp young whippersnapper in dark blue trousers and a turtleneck blue tunic knit with gold clocks, plainclothes resembling a uniform.
It was always part of Thurby’s plan to retire early of a matchmaking evening, on the excuse of some nonexistent infirmity of age (he was forty-nine by the calendar and perceived himself as possessing the body and face of a man half a dozen years younger), and leave the young people to sit up as long as they liked, pairing off as they chose without the worry of an awkward odd old man out. Last night he had taken a nightcap upstairs to his own apartment and scribbled for an hour on a little romance he was working up after Walpole, and been asleep in his four-poster by midnight. Saw nothing, heard nothing. Yes, eventually he might consider furnishing Lestrade and Click with his own personal knowledge and impressions of his guests, why he had chose this particular group and what matings he expected to come of it—but for the present he rather thought Bow Street could make do with public records and their own observations. Until further notice he intended to abide by the confidence due the ancient laws of hospitality. After all, eight innocent guests to one presumed guilty. Not that he knew anything incriminating about any of them. His servants? Confidentiality due there, too, but he wouldn’t mind letting a magistrate read the characters he rewrote for them annually. He’d have to check with Portent and M. Jones first, of course, to keep everything aboveboard, but he doubted they’d object. He always gave ’em their copies in unsealed envelopes before boxing his copies in the safe with his will.
This whole bloody interview business seemed trivial beside the fact that one of his guests was dead. Never happened before, not even by natural causes, let alone this. Felt almost like the pollies were making a game out of it. And what was that candlestick on the table? Lestrade asked, pointing to it without naming it. Good gad, woman, one of my antique silver candle branches engraved with the family crest. Dented, too. Gadfrey, some of his house parties had gone a bit dissolute in past, but he’d never had trouble with damage to family heirlooms before now. ... What, the murder weapon? Good God!
Not until he understood that, had he seen the blood on it, the few hairs sticking in the clot around the dent. Well, maybe their game was necessary after all.
The pollies wanted the ones still waiting to be questioned kept separate from the ones they had already done with. Young Click got pretty highhanded about it, called it regular procedure and the Department would back them up. All right, M. Lestrade finally conceded, Portent could serve both groups if he kept all his communications strictly on the service level.
So when Thurby left his library he repaired perforce to the larger den, where so far M. Weaver sat alone, sipping what he thought at first was a snifter filled alarmingly full of brandy. She explained it was diluted with a good eight parts water. He’d expected her to be less on edge after her time with the detectives. Dismals setting in strong, of course, but the pressure off. He’d been ready to suggest tea or coffee, a little stimulant; but, feeling the tension throb around her, he approved spirits.
She had put on realizers’ finery: bright colors and bold, woven patterns—her reds and oranges and greens flickered at him—but he saw them covered with an outer layer of heavyish black chiffon. There might be a bit of the fancier in every realizer, as that poet fellow Dantzik said. Or did Thurby Fitzhugh perceive realizers’ moods even more tangibly than fabrics? He tended to be pretty standardly accurate with fabrics, on account of the factory.
“Anything we can…ah…get you, M. Weaver?” he asked. “Little snack? Game of cards? Backgammon?”
She looked at him. Brown eyes, one of the first things he’d noticed about her, after her neatness, brisk carriage, efficient manner. Now all of that was a little fuzzy but the eyes, and they were reddened around the brown irises. “Squire,” she said, in a steadier voice than when she’d told him how much water was in her brandy, “what did you see on that table?”
Chapter 6
Willa Grandar Quantum was the fifth one Sergeant Click called, therefore the first to join their host and M. Weaver in the large den, where M. Weaver put the question to her at once, brusque as a raw slab of Arcturian salt. “What did you see on that table, M.?”
“A flashlight,” Willa Quantum lied, very calmly. “A large flashlight heavy with batteries. Its glass was broken, one side dented, and there were several bloodstains on it.”
M. Weaver drew in her breath and took a long pull at her green Saurian brandy. “A flashlight?”
“A flashlight.” Actually Willa had seen a Lignum-w8 midilamp in oxanium and gold. The lampshade had been of Erathian lynx-eye crystals, and the base inlaid with shells from the shores of the Dembax Ocean on the far planet Quothos, whose triple moons caused so complex a pattern of tides.
Willa Quantum had shaped her imagination with science fiction, childishly reading the bad indiscriminately with the good. For a few years after her perceptions solidified with an early puberty, her peers and most of the adults she encountered had listened uncritically, it seemed, when she described the world around her. Then she had gone to Cambridge, where the children of governing-class realizers took their degrees in practical sciences alongside young fanciers studying comparative literature and advanced social graces, and she had learned what it was to be laughed at because her perceptions and the universe she imagined Out There Beyond Saturn were all askew and scientifically ludicrous for some reason or other that, not having a scientific mind, she could rarely understand. By then it had been too late to change her perception without psychiatric help. A few people could change their worlds at will; Nantice Serendip’s world still changed day by day like a little child’s’; but Willa could not. So from an enthusiastic talker she had turned into a silent listener, almost never telling anyone what she truly perceived, living in a world of marvels she feared to share lest some peculiarly beautiful object be laughed into insignificance as scientifically untenable.
She regretted having mentioned the damage and the bloodstains. In fact she had seen neither, but it was quite obvious that whatever sort of lighting device the space patrollers had on that table was the murder weapon, so she assumed there must be dents and blood. Most fanciers would see that much. Maybe even she would have seen them had the thing been turned at a different angle. So she had mentioned it as convincing detail. She should have remembered how M. Weaver had sat apart with M. Aelfric Standard in that Altairian portable conch-vine arbor, isolated together for most of yesterday evening. She should have guessed how M. Weaver might react to the reminder of his death. But then, why had the realizer invited that pang?
Sipping her Xantippean pine-sherry, Willa watched M. Weaver ask everyone the same question. M. Livingstone, the next one to join them, said, “Kerosene hurricane lamp,” and called for Scotch and water.
When the Countess DiMedici arrived and heard the question, she drew herself up and replied, “A golden candelabra of seven branches, one branch broken, and persons have died for hinting less to a DiMedici.”
“Balderdash,” said M. Livingstone, already on his second drink. “What did she hint, Princess? Just asking what you saw. Saw a hurricane lamp, myself.”
After that M. Weaver grew more circumspect, but nevertheless she found some way of putting the question to each new arrival.
“Ship’s lantern,” Captain Drake said predictably.
“A hobnail nightlight, cranberry-colored glass, like the one that used to be in my bedroom,” said Nantice Serendip. “The kind with a base to hold a vigil candle. And a high dome like a g
oose egg to slip over the top. But it was cracked!”
M. White said, “A single beeswax taper in a delicate abalone holder.” But, having lied herself, Willa suspected somehow that he was lying, too. She admired his style. His reported perception was much prettier and more original than her own bald fabrication.
She noticed that except for the Countess DiMedici’s one broken branch and Nantice’s crack in the glass, none of them had mentioned damage or blood. Perhaps they had sensed the realizer’s mood in time to be tactful. More and more, Willa regretted adding that detail.
“What about you, bosun?” Captain Drake asked the manservant, who had returned with a tray of tweenies and a fresh fizz-bottle. “What did you see on the table, eh?”
“Sir?” said the manservant. Willa saw him as a blue-skinned Eldarian with dainty antennae, of the mischievous alien race whose earliest visits to Terra had inspired the myth of elves. She said she saw him as an Asian in sober livery.
“The table in there, me hearty,” Captain Drake repeated. “You’re a realizer. Let us know what it was the landlubbers saw and felt.”
The blue-skinned Eldarian dipped his knees in imitation of sea legs. “Compass and binnacle, of course, Cap’n.”
“Portent,” said Squire Fitzhugh, “serve the refreshments. We all know it’s a lighting device—”
A scream came from outside the den.
“Migod!” The squire started from his place beside M. Weaver on the quandahide couch.
“M. Garvey and M. Poe were remaining to be questioned, sir,” the Eldarian servant said a little too respectfully. “I should guess that’s M. Poe in the library with the legal representatives now.”
Another long scream.
“Yes, that’s Corwin Poe, all right,” M. Livingstone remarked. “Trust Poe. I say, no one else had that sort of trouble with the native constabulary, did they?”
“They are probably taking his prints,” said M. White. “Lord knows what he thinks they’re doing.”
“So simple a thing,” said M. Weaver. She shuddered slightly and swallowed more of her drink.
Squire Fitzhugh sat down again beside M. Weaver and touched her hand. “Well, well, we’ve all got a little ink on our fingertips, and not so much the worse for it.”
The Eldarian presented Willa his tray of tweenies. Shutting her mind to the screams, she selected a square of toasted Untibbean breadplant spread thick with the tiny eyes of Plutonian ice-fish, like a thousand miniature cat’s-eye marbles, more because she admired their shimmering beauty than because she felt like nibbling. Nantice Serendip and M. Weaver waved the tray away without taking anything. Captain Drake said something about choppy seas and he was eating a bite just to keep his grog company. Only the countess and M. White helped themselves with apparent appetite.
Willa kept watching M. Tertius White, wondering if he really had lied about his beeswax taper, and if it meant they were a matched pair, she and he. She hoped not, but what other man could the squire have meant for her? Surely not Captain Drake or M. Livingstone with his safaris and restless natives. She hoped not Corwin Poe—Angela was welcome to him if she wanted his moldering morbidities. And not poor M. Standard; M. Weaver had obviously been picked for him. That did seem to leave M. White for Willa Quantum. Twin stars? She looked at him once more, noting the crisp lines of his starship loungesuit, made of often-recycled Xantarean fleur-cloth, but clean and unscorched. Seeing the far-off look in his eyes: a spacer dreaming of new star systems to explore. Perhaps it might not be quite so bad…except that she still could not like him. Did he really dream of exploring? Or, rather, of conquering?
Well, probably no new matches at all would come of this houseparty. Not in the trail of its beginning.
Chapter 7
Corwin Davison Poe staggered into Squire Fitzhugh’s mahogany den on the arm of the faithful factotum so appropriately called Portent.
Never, without seeing it, would he have believed such a transformation could have been so quickly effected in the squire’s library: shelves concealed beneath black velvet draperies against which the sable robes of the inquisitors showed but vaguely, their white faces, hands, the folds of the falling cloth limned by what daylight still penetrated through the pane of curiously pocked crimson glass that had been thrown up to cover the circular window.
“They believe me guilty!” he announced with a hollow laugh, holding his hands up to the flickering firelight. “They believe me guilty, but I confessed nothing.”
“Nonsense, man,” said Livingstone. “Why should they single you out?”
“Or do they? Did they subject any others of you to their devilish devices?” Corwin glanced around at them, sitting comfortable if slightly nervous in their mourning. All were clad in mourning save White in his eternal Harlequin motley and the DiMedici woman in vermilion brocade. All without exception held their crystal glasses quite easily in right hand or left. “No, I see that they did not. Well, man, bind up my wounds before I besmear our host’s fine old plush upholstery.” Sinking carefully into the nearest vacant armchair, he presented his hands to Portent, fingertips out.
The manservant glanced at his master.
“Right, Portent, bandage ’em up,” said the squire.
“Ah!” Corwin experienced a minor surge of triumph. “You see it too, Squire?”
“Somewhat on your fingers. Misdoubt I’d see it on m’ furniture if you put your hands down, but why take chances? Bind ’em up by all means, if it’ll make you more comfortable.”
“Comfort!” Corwin laughed again. “But I told them nothing.”
Portent went to fetch bandages.
“There is nothing on your hands,” said the Countess DiMedici, “unless it is ink.”
“Nothing?” he asked her a little plaintively.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” He turned to the one who perceived what the Standards judged reality. “M. Weaver, do you see nothing on my hands? Neither blood, nor bruised flesh, nor cracked and mangled nails?”
M. Weaver stared back at him for a moment from her couch on the far side of the chamber. “Not at this distance,” she said at last. “But whatever you see, I suppose that’s the important thing.”
He sighed and sat back, feeling some vindication, however insubstantial. Portent returned and began to bind each fingertip individually, from nail to middle knuckle. The manservant’s long digits were deft and gentle, but Corwin’s fingers still throbbed beneath the cool, smooth strips of white linen.
Tertius White rose and came to watch the operation. “Could it possibly be, M. Poe, that you perceived some device of torture where the rest of us saw none because you alone suffer a guilty conscience?”
“I told them nothing.” Corwin decided to meet unsympathy with surliness. “Why should I tell you anything?”
M. Weaver leaned forward. “This nothing you told them, M. Poe, did it include what you saw on the table? I’m only curious.”
“Oh, I had little reason to conceal that from them. On the polished oak table I saw, besides their own fearsome tools, a thick candle of black tallow, unlighted, set in a holder fashioned from a human skull.”
“A real skull?” the Harlequin who was White inquired ironically.
“That, I did not notice. It might have been ivory, or wax, or antique plastic.”
M. Weaver absently swirled her goblet, half filled with deep red wine. “How thick was the candle, M. Poe? How far burned down?”
He saw what she was about. Trying to divert his attention from the lingering pain. He was not ungrateful. “Sufficiently thick, and still sufficiently tall, for the grip of a hand. The minions of the Law requested me to demonstrate.” Like a fool, he had complied, even despite the atmosphere heavily charged with fear, the brazier aglow in one corner, the pulleys rigged in another ... He had hoped cooperation in a small matter might purchase him leniency.
Perhaps it had: only his hands had suffered, not his limbs. “My fingers were still whole at that moment.”
The manservant finished his work of mercy and perfected it by bringing a snifter of fine cognac. Holding it between the heels of his palms, Corwin sipped. “Poor Angela! Left alone to be interrogated the last of us all.”
“Poor Angela will get on very comfortably with them, I’m sure,” said the DiMedici woman.
No doubt she was right. If none of these others had perceived tools of torture, how much less would Angela Garvey? What mind, no matter how twisted, could suspect evil of her?
But if there were in fact no injury to his fingers save in his own perception, if the detectives had indeed merely been taking his prints with inked sponge and white plastic, what convolution in his own brain ... Madness? He shuddered and swallowed more cognac. “Still, one would have thought they’d question her first, as discoverer of the body.”
“I shouldn’t actually say she discovered it, poor child,” said Livingstone. “Found it, yes, but as I understand the business she had no idea of young M. Standard’s condition until M. Weaver arrived on the scene.” He glanced at the realizer in belated apology.
Seeming to shrink into herself, she replied dully, “They questioned us about that right away. On the terrace—the balcony. As they were wrapping him up to take him away.”
“On the poop deck,” Drake suggested. (If any of us are mad, thought Corwin, why not Drake, who feels a rolling sea beneath what it pleases him to style Fitzhugh’s yacht?)
“The verandah,” said Livingstone.
Squire Fitzhugh made no comment. His hospitality included allowing his guests to make whatever they wished of his abode. Some hosts objected when Corwin spoke of the thin, fatal crack he saw in every manor, or the thick miasmas that rose from most dungeons to grow patches of fungus on the plaster, frequently in the vicinity of his bed. (Yet he never complained of such things: he merely observed them and wondered upon what basis they rested in his hosts’ perceptions, or those of the servants.)
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 16
