“Thank you, Herr Meissner. I truly appreciate your concern. May you talk of your investigation, though? It seems very interesting.”
Speaking quickly, to head off the interruption that Miss Ambersleigh had ready in the slips, Cabal said, “I really cannot speak of the investigation, Lady Ninuka. You understand, of course. It could prove damaging to any findings if they were to be publicised prematurely.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t tell a soul,” she replied, the very picture of innocent propriety, although the way she laid her hand upon her décolletage as she spoke could just as easily have been due to coquettishness as to expressiveness. “I am the very epitome of discretion.”
“Herr Meissner has made it quite clear that he cannot discuss such things, my dear,” persisted Miss Ambersleigh. In her mind, subjects suitable for civilised discussion frolicked happily in a great green pasture of loveliness surrounded by a ha-ha filled with spikes and acid, beyond which lay the Frightful. Violent death and suicide were very much a part of this congregation of the unspeakable, and for every word spoken on such subjects an angel shed a tear, or a fairy died, or a bunny was blinded. Miss Ambersleigh, who was fond of angels, fairies, and bunnies (despite having met only the latter), was therefore very keen to confine her conversation to the lovely pasture.
Lady Ninuka was not. “Well, there must be some aspect you can explain to me,” she said to Cabal. “Your methods, your strategy for getting to the bottom of all this?”
He was flattered that she thought there was any strategy involved in the investigation at all, given that the only solid piece of evidence was an injury sustained during a murder attempt. If real police officers relied on such methods, precious few would ever draw their pensions.
“My lady, you make too much of my humble abilities. I am no detective; I am merely an instrument of the state attempting, in my poor way, to help the captain find the truth.”
“Can’t you see that he doesn’t want to talk about it, Orfilia? Come, now! Let us speak of happier things.”
Cabal was beginning to find that Miss Ambersleigh’s shrill interjections grated on his nerves. If he had been himself, he would have said as much, but Gerhard Meissner — or at least his rendition of Gerhard Meissner — was a more patient man. His true mind flickered on his face for a second, but he brought it under control with a steely flex of his will.
It seemed that Ninuka shared his opinion, though, as the very next moment she said, “Oh, for pity’s sake, Miss Ambersleigh! Can’t you see that every time the poor man tries to say something you tell him that we don’t wish to hear it? Of course he’s keeping quiet. He’s being polite!”
Miss Ambersleigh was momentarily speechless. Only for a moment, though. “Well!” she said. “Well, I never!” Which was probably true.
She rose to her feet and, speaking in short bursts coloured with repressed emotion, said, “I see my company is not appreciated here. I’m very sorry. I shall take myself away. Herr Meissner.” Cabal, who had also risen to his feet, nodded, and muttered in a fair impersonation of an embarrassed man. Miss Ambersleigh turned to Ninuka. “My lady.” And then, like a schooner swept along on winds of decorum, she walked quickly to the other side of the salon and sat alone.
Cabal sat down again. “That’s even more embarrassing,” he said to Lady Ninuka. “I thought she was going to leave, but she’s just sitting there watching us.”
Lady Ninuka didn’t even deign to look, settling back in her chair. “She has no choice. She’s not just my companion; she’s my chaperone. My father hired her to keep an eye on me.” She looked at Cabal over her teacup as she took a sip. “She’s very conscientious.”
Abruptly, and with the sensation of being the last one in the theatre to get the joke, Cabal realised that Lady Ninuka was not so much interested in the progress of the investigation as in the investigator.
The French Fancy turned to ashes in his mouth. The last thing he needed was some new complication in his life, a life that was already built almost entirely of complications. Quite apart from the necromancy, the assumed identity, the mysterious disappearance, the attempted murder, and the Mirkarvian noble after his neck, he now had another Mirkarvian noble after one or more other parts of his anatomy.
Or possibly not. While he knew he was presentable enough, his vanity was not physical, and he had never noticed women swooning in his path before. Perhaps she was just one of those strange souls who derived a sordid, vicarious excitement from crime and death. The sort of young woman he had observed attending public executions, while he himself had been there to spread bribes and so secure the cadaver as fresh experimental material. He found this thought a great relief. The idea that she might derive some perverse pleasure from tales of vile crime and ugly death, rather than something more amatory involving him, was deeply reassuring. It was one less complication to worry about, and for that he was very grateful.
For her part, Lady Ninuka was disappointed when Herr Meissner’s eyes widened with surprise when she finally dropped a hint broad enough for the insensitive nincompoop to detect, but then he seemed to relax and she knew that they had an understanding. She wasn’t sure what she found attractive about him; physically he was good enough, if not extraordinary. She thought it might be those eyes — those blue-grey, intelligent eyes, behind which an earnest if unenterprising mind whirled with whatever it was that civil servants found to dwell upon. Yet he had defied expectations by going around exploring in the middle of the night and, when attacked, had defended himself successfully. There was more to Herr Meissner than met the eye, and Lady Orfilia Ninuka intended to split him open like an oyster and so discover what lay within.
And so with the lines drawn, albeit on entirely different battlefields, the conversation continued.
“Is it true that somebody tried to kill you last night?” she asked, eyes wide and expectant.
Cabal winced inwardly. He knew it had probably been a vain hope that at least some facts of the case would remain confidential, especially after the general fussing over him that morning, but that hadn’t stopped him from hoping.
“Where did you hear that?”
“On a ship, with only a few people aboard? If I hadn’t heard about it, that would have been the marvel. So it is true, then?”
“Yes,” admitted Cabal, sensing that to squirm any further would be pointless as well as undignified, and told her the story excepting the detail of the assailant’s wounded wrist.
Lady Ninuka hung on his every word, and Cabal interpreted this as an unhealthy appetite for the lurid. At least, he did at first, but as the tale wound to its conclusion it occurred to him that the last person who had shown such a close interest in his little adventure — Captain Schten excluded, as it was his job to be interested — was Cacon. On that occasion, Cabal had been quick to suspect the irksome little man of being an agent of some hue. What, he wondered, was rationally preventing him from suspecting the same of Orfilia Ninuka? Nothing. Neither her sex nor her title precluded her in the slightest. Then again, he had only the most vague grounds to suspect Cacon, so was fearing the same of Ninuka merely rational caution or the shallows of paranoia?
Paranoia is an occupational hazard common amongst necromancers. When it is, in fact, true that the whole world is out to get you, one has to set the hurdle of unreasonable fears that much higher. Generally, necromancers discover quite early in their careers — at least, the ones that manage to last past “quite early in their careers” do — that all threats, no matter how nebulous, should be acted upon. In populated areas this is patently impractical, as every single person who comes within a mile of a necromancer may mean him harm. Thus, they move away from cities and towns and even villages, and set up on barren mountaintops, or reclaimed chthonic subterranean redoubts, or, as in Cabal’s case, a nice three-storey townhouse moved, by methods that do not concern us here, from the middle of a respectable suburban terrace and placed, front garden and backyard intact, on a grassy hillside miles from anyone. There he was
pleased to conduct experiments that would have made Victor Frankenstein wrinkle his nose, safely away from prying eyes, and there he dearly wished he were now, feet up in front of an open fire, drinking tea and reading the Principia Necromantica. That he was doing none of these things, apart from drinking tea, distressed him. The realisation that his own sense of nurtured and measured paranoia was now so sensitive as to be useless distressed him, too.
He came to the end of his narrative and reached for the teapot. Lady Ninuka was positively aflutter.
“You brave man,” she said, her face full of hero worship. She leaned forward as she spoke, and Cabal was again struck by how very cleverly her wardrobe was cut. In this case, a short jacket offset the modish neckline of the dress to create an overall effect of virginal sensuality. He had no idea where he stood with her; their relative positions were entirely at her whim. It was all very confusing for a man who was much happier at a dissection slab than at a soirée.
“It was nothing, really.” He had meant it as a statement; there is nothing intrinsically brave about fighting for your life. It was only after he had said it that he realised how heroically modest it sounded, and the fact that he had said it without affectation had inadvertently served only to compound the effect.
“Of course it was,” said Ninuka. “In such a situation, I should have been frozen with fear. You are so much more capable than I, Herr Meissner.”
Cabal briefly considered telling her that it would have been the slipstream freezing her, but that snapped a vision of her dangling by one hand in Meissner’s dreadful silk gown — which looked a lot better on her — and then there was the detail of the gown falling open. The surface effect of these thoughts was to make the opening of the sentence he was about to make dribble to an untidy halt and leave him gawping, as if he had just remembered something important.
“Have you remembered something important?” she asked.
He felt vaguely ashamed, as if she’d read his mind. “No. No, I was just … reliving the events of last night. It was — ”
“Exciting?”
“Traumatic, I was going to say, but exciting? Yes, it was that, I suppose.”
Lady Ninuka leaned back in her chair and regarded him. She didn’t quite fling herself around in abandon and pant animalistically, but a sense of flinging and panting still pervaded her far more conservative posture and attitude. In fact, to an uninvolved bystander she would have seemed the very model of decorum and respectability. Cabal wasn’t sure how she was doing it, but he was sure she was doing something. This was an entirely new field of human endeavour for which he had no familiarity and no understanding.
He did, however, have the distinct impression that he was enjoying it. It made him feel warm and important in a way that had never especially occurred or seemed pertinent to him before. He was just going to explain, in the most roundabout and circumspect way, that he had actually been very brave and it had actually been very exciting, when Leonie Barrow appeared at his elbow and said, “Lady Ninuka! How delightful!”
She sat down with them without being invited, and started talking about the theatre in Krenz. Considering that he’d been doing most of the talking until then, Lady Ninuka seemed unaccountably put off her stride. She smiled politely but barely responded to the new subject of conversation at all, and the polite smile quickly became forced, as if masking some other emotion that was trying to rear its head. Finally, she feigned surprise at the time, made her apologies, and left the salon with the wretched Miss Ambersleigh scurrying along in her wake.
As soon as she had gone, Leonie stopped her monologue and smiled, broadly and not without some malevolence.
“What,” said Cabal, somewhat testily, “is going on? What was all that about?”
“Did she ask you about what happened last night?”
“Yes, but she’s hardly the first one to do that.”
“Ah, but did she ask any questions, or just listen very closely?”
“She just listened. What are you getting at?”
“Did she congratulate you on how you handled things?”
Cabal nodded, still confused.
“Did she lean forward a lot? Like this?” She demonstrated, and Cabal had to admit that it was a good impersonation. “Did she touch you lightly on the knee at any point? No? Well, she was certainly working up to it.”
Cabal looked at her, his bafflement lifting. “A witch?” he said, lowering his voice. It wasn’t too surprising, now he stopped to consider it. The upper classes were the embodiment of discretion, and he had certainly heard of members of the nobility who dabbled in practises that would get a commoner drowned in the village pond by her neighbours. “She’s a witch? She needed some sort of direct contact to cast a spell? But why me? What was she after?”
He noticed that Miss Barrow’s shoulders were shuddering with the effort of holding in her laughter. This did nothing to improve his mood.
When she managed to damp down her hilarity a little, she said, “For a clever man, you can be such an idiot. She’s no witch. Not the way you mean it, anyway.” She leaned forwards and gestured him closer. “She was seducing you, you blockhead,” she whispered, and then sat back, unable to contain her laughter anymore.
“She was …” Cabal wasn’t at all sure he’d heard correctly. He had rationally discounted that possibility, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he? “She was what?”
Miss Barrows brought herself rapidly back under control, sobering up with a deep breath. “You heard me. And it’s excellent.”
CHAPTER 10
in which the light of truth is encircled by darkness
Science and mathematics are wonderful things. They cut like an arc light of truth through the cobwebbed depths of supposition, superstition, instinct, and guile. For the scientific mind, it can sometimes become too easy to ignore these thin, insubstantial threads as irrelevant, but this can be a serious mistake.
“But why?” he asked her as they dined together that evening, his animosity towards her erased by the realisation that in matters of social interplay he was as innocent as a babe in the woods. “What possible reason could she have to want to … you know. Why?”
“Why?” Miss Barrow paused in cutting a morsel from her Spanish omelette, her first victory in the search for something Mirkarvian chefs wouldn’t undercook. She was about to tell him, but then decided that she would be interested in learning a little more about this huge and unexpected area of Cabal’s ignorance. “Why do you think?”
“Well, she wants something.”
“Clearly,” she said, a little archly.
“But what? Money? Information? She’s not really a Senzan agent, is she?”
“Money? She’s an aristocrat who spends more on an everyday dress than you — Herr Meissner — would see in your monthly pay packet. I really don’t think she’s after your money. Information? Bloody hell, you see agents everywhere. I strongly doubt that she represents anybody’s interests other than her own. No, you’re putting far too much thought into this. It’s all much simpler. Our Lady Ninuka has a hobby. Whenever she sees a man who interests her in a certain way, she isn’t happy until that man has joined her for an evening of sport.” It was obvious from Cabal’s face that he was working down a list of possible sports. The slight expression of consternation indicated that he had arrived at cricket. Leonie decided to put him out of his misery. “She’s a bike. A tart. A slut. She’ll be buried in a Y-shaped coffin. A baggage. A hussy. She’s the good time that was had by all. A wanton floozy.” She looked closely at him, but he still seemed to be stuck on cricket. “A nymphomaniac.”
The use of a technical term shook him from his paralysis. Realisation flooded his face and a silent “Oh!” filled his mouth.
“Not that she is, of course. Well, maybe the last one, but all the other terms, the ugly ones, were invented by men. A man sleeps around, he’s just being a man. Not really very fair, is it? Do shut your mouth — you’ll catch flies sitting there like that.”
/> Cabal shut his mouth somewhat shamefacedly. He’d been prepared to consider almost any eventuality except the one that was evidently true. In his defence, it was a situation entirely alien to him. He could honestly say he’d never had an elegant and attractive woman of high breeding set her cap for him in this fashion. In fact, he’d never had any woman of any demeanour, appearance, or birth set her cap for him in this fashion. He was not unattractive, and his attention to detail extended to how he presented himself, so it was not at first glance so odd that he should be in such a situation. In the normal run of things, however, he kept himself fastidiously to himself and, furthermore, usually carried a faint scent of formaldehyde around with him, which had the effect of depressing any amorous intent by any woman with a working nose. The combination of his long absence from a laboratory, the stolen clothing, and the enforced socialising had conspired to place him neatly in the sights of Lady Ninuka, and he had not realised it for a second.
“So, let me see if I understand this. You’re saying that I was intended to be a diverting interval for her ladyship, to lighten a dull voyage? What’s the matter with her? Aren’t a death and an attempted murder enough to keep the woman amused?”
Leonie shook her head as she finished her omelette. “No, no. You don’t see the whole picture here at all. Yes, you were supposed to be a diverting interval, but note the indefinite article.”
Cabal frowned. “There was supposed to be somebody else?”
“Wrong again. There was somebody else. Nothing supposed about it.” She smiled, not altogether charitably. “Sorry, sweetheart, but you weren’t her first choice.”
Cabal fumed. “Just because you’re in a position that currently allows you the liberty of taunting me, you would be ill-advised to actually do so. Nor should you present a lot of half-formed conjecture as somehow significant, when it likely has no more importance than those missing candelabras at breakfast that — Oh.” He looked around and noticed that every table now carried one. Quickly dropping the subject, he said, “You are being obscure for no better reason than your own amusement, just like your magical appearance this afternoon when I was talking to her ladyship. You can be so very — ” He paused, a sudden thought filling him first with realisation, then dismay, and then anger. “You knew this was going to happen.”
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