Her companion—indeed, the whole long table—knows.
“But did she truly use saffron?” asks Mistress Fenton, more tipsy than she realizes. “For it seems to me a very great expense for a house that has just suffered such a blow. Why, there were Tremontaine funds sunk into the Everfair, weren’t there? The ship that foundered in the open seas and lost all hands in a storm?”
The doomed expedition to the Garay port, whose overconfident navigators had assured their own demise nearly a year previous, had been promoted and backed by Greenglass Imports. Master Greenglass, a prudent epicure, had invested in sufficient insurance to cover his losses. So he does not allow the implication that he convinced a noble family to participate in his ill-conceived scheme to spoil his dinner.
The golden hares are set before them, carved by the servants with a flourish, and served on fresh ceramic plates.
“It is saffron!” proclaims Master Greenglass over the sound of Fenton encouraging Mistress Fenton to speak more quietly. “I’ll bet my cellar on it! By the Horned God, this must be enough saffron to dye the hair of twenty noblewomen. All over, if you know what I mean.”
Kaab, passing behind him, does not know what he means. Rafe chokes on his chocolate.
“Well, taste that, dear. That isn’t turmeric.”
“I suppose not. And did you try those dumplings? What is that inside? Some kind of cheese?”
“I can’t say that I know . . . and I’m afraid to find out, quite honestly!”
At the other end of the table, Mistress Fenton stares dreamily down at the remains of her ant-egg tamale.
“I dare say the whole Hill will be jealous when they hear of this. A true banquet from the chocolate lands! Oh, how happy I am that you brought me, Thelonious. And that you sold them all that saffron! Will it be very hard to get more?”
“Yes, it was quite clever of me,” says Fenton with a pointed look at his son. “But I had a good man on hand to handle the negotiations.”
The young Fenton raises his eyes to the ceiling, as if to pray for divine intervention.
The glow of success has finally descended upon the Balams, watching the contented jostling among their Local guests. No hares have been dropped, and quite a few have been picked clean. Ixsaabim turns to her young and handsome husband.
“Dearest, I think we should see what that woman wants.”
She does not have to specify which woman.
Chuleb rubs his chin. “Fenton tells me there are rumors. You remember the ship last year? The Everfair?”
“The one their navigators took so far off course it sank within miles of the Garay coast and they didn’t even realize it?”
“Many families lost their fortunes. And Fenton suggested Tremontaine might be one of them.”
Saabim looks thoughtful. “That might be true, but the nobles here aren’t like those at home. They can’t be stripped of their positions for dishonorable actions. They all have debts, but so long as they keep their land no one seems to care. She’ll have influence, my morning star. And influence is always valuable.”
“She is very clever,” he says. “And she likes to pretend that she isn’t. It is a combination that worries me.”
“Well, so am I clever, and so are you. So is Kaab for that matter, though she’s impetuous enough that you can’t always notice. I understand that this saffron woman might wish to use us for some political end, my precious flower, but we have our own tools at our disposal.”
“True,” says her husband. Kaab has vanished from the table—probably gone back to the kitchens.
“And the situation at home is too unstable. If the Tullan . . .” She can’t finish. He puts a discreet hand on her stomach, where the baby has just started to show.
“I’ll write her,” he says. “I’ll tell her to come here to us. She won’t like it, but if she’s serious, she will. I’ll tell her to call three days hence.”
Saabim squeezes her husband’s hand beneath the table and gives him a quick, hard kiss. She looks around to see if anyone noticed and smiles, satisfied.
Someone in a modest headdress of shimmering feathers standing in the shadow of the kitchen hallway, within hearing distance of the head of the Balam table, did notice. And she smiles.
“Three days hence,” says the spy under her breath, and walks back for more chocolate.
* * *
The spring storm spat rain like a drunk at a spittoon—wet and heavy and none too accurate. The river had swamped Riverside’s inadequate levee again. Tess could hear the water gurgling through the streets two blocks over, the drunks cursing, the drunks laughing. It was nearly morning. This weather might have held Ben up. She wouldn’t imagine anything worse happening to him, not until she had to.
She hadn’t been able to sleep. She had tried, but it was cold and the rain was a nasty bedfellow. Tess and Ben kept a nice little place, the second floor above a washerwoman. Clean enough to discourage most of the roaches, shutters tight enough to keep out most of the wind and rain. On summer days she liked it enough to feel grateful. Her folks, rest them, had lived worse.
She held the fat tallow candle closer to the page, careful not to drip any wax and ruin the job. Routine stuff—a letter of recommendation for a Riverside girl, a former housebreaker, now getting old for the business, who wanted work as a chambermaid in the Middle City. The family seal at the bottom was real enough, though obscure. The girl’s two years of loyal service, not so much. Tess sometimes had bigger jobs—credentials from foreign universities, arrest records—but this paid the bills. At least, it did with Ben’s help. He had regular customers, the kind of men who paid him well for his time and could be counted on when there wasn’t such a demand for good forgeries.
She wouldn’t worry. Damn it, but she wouldn’t.
Heavy steps up the stairs. Maybe his, if he were drunk, the bastard. The sound of a key fumbling in the lock. Definitely drunk. Or hurt? She ran to the door, had it open before she’d taken a full breath. If someone had wanted to kill her, she’d have been on the floor taking a bath in her own blood. You had to think about things like that in Riverside. But it was just Ben. He was drunk and grinning like clown. She frowned.
“What’s the matter, sweet Tessie? You ain’t happy to see me?”
“What happened? Did your father recover?”
Ben frowned and shrugged. “Naw. The old man’s rotting six feet—well, three feet, at least—under.”
Ben hadn’t exactly been a dutiful son (and his bastard of a father hadn’t deserved it), but this still seemed too callous for a man just returned from his father’s graveside.
“What the hell’s the smile for, then?”
Ben stepped into the room and locked the door behind them.
“Here,” he said, and pulled from his waistcoat an oval locket on a long chain of linked gold. It was of an antiquated style, a master’s workmanship. At a glance, not a forgery. At least, not a forgery that was passing off gilt for silver. She took the locket and opened it. She frowned.
“What is this, Ben?”
He was grinning again, leaning against the wall. “Our ticket out of here. The only good turn that son of a bitch ever did for me. We’re going to be rich, Tessie.”
Tess looked up at him, that baby face just a bit too beautiful to do him any good. He was grinning and humming to himself, an old song about going to the country. She looked back down at the locket, at the contents that meant nothing to her, and shivered. Ben’s father had been a murdering lowlife. He wouldn’t rest easy in his grave. And any gift he gave his son would be heavy with sin—the kind that came due.
Episode Three:
Heavenly Bodies
Joel Derfner
Had the Duke Tremontaine noticed the anxious care with which his wife chose her gown that morning—silk the color of pale irises trembling open at the break of dawn, lace as fine as spider webs gathered at the cuffs, the bodice almost as exquisite as the collarbone it was cut to reveal—and the equal care she devoted
to selecting the unutterably drab cloak with which she covered up all that silk and lace, it might, perhaps, have occurred to him to wonder exactly what impression she was trying to make, and why it was so vital that she do so. If he had seen her frown almost imperceptibly at the confusion her footman displayed when, rather than her own carriage, she bid him order an unmarked one from the hotelier in Napier Street, if he had overheard the strange address to which the driver was instructed to bear her, if he had observed the driver’s respectful assertion that he must have misunderstood and her subsequent denial of that assertion, he might have taken a moment to ask himself with what urgent aim, as the carriage wheels began to click and then to clatter over the cobblestones, she was leaving the ducal mansion.
Then again, he might not have. The duke had spent the better part of two decades not noticing things about his duchess, after all, and, unbeknownst to him, it had served him well.
Alas, that the good fortunes of men do not always remain so.
Someone was destroying Rafe’s room.
It was giving him a headache.
“If you are going to insist,” he said, burying his face as deeply into the tangle of bed linens and brown wool blanket as he could manage, “on entering my chamber in the middle of the night, by means of what blandishments do you suppose you might be prevailed upon to approach the task with slightly less vigor?”
“Develop a little talent for observation, pet.” Ah, the baritone voice meant the situation was as he’d feared. Rafe heard the sound of the curtains being flung open and squeezed his eyes shut tight; they were in no condition to be assaulted by the cold morning light. “The University bells rang fully two hours ago.”
“How barbaric. Have we been suddenly transported to Arkenvelt without my knowledge?”
“Oh, pigeon, do I have to do everything for you?”
Footsteps approached the bed. Rafe knew what was coming next, but moving quickly enough to prevent it would make his head hurt even worse. He therefore resigned himself to misery as he felt the bedclothes slip pitilessly off his naked body. He groaned and rolled onto his back, his arm flung over his eyes. “Besides,” said the invader, “I want sausages.”
“Joshua,” said Rafe with all the patience he could muster, “this is Liberty Hall. You are most welcome to procure yourself as many sausages as you like, and, having done so, to insert them with gusto into your—”
“I see you’re having one of those days again.” His dear friend’s voice was as smug as ever. “If you listened to my advice, you know, you’d have far fewer of them.”
“If I wanted a big brother I would have asked—”
“Yes, yes, you would have asked your father for one long ago. As well you should have.” A shuffle of foolscap pages. “‘On the Causes of Nature,’” said Joshua. “You couldn’t pick a drearier title for your book, pigeon?” This was unworthy of a reply. “My, you certainly have scratched these equations out savagely. I take it last night’s measurements were of no more use than the rest?”
Rafe groaned.
“That bad, was it?” The groan grew more fervent and finally trailed into silence. “What was his name?”
“Matthew,” said Rafe. Joshua was silent. “Anthony. Seth, Robert, Giles, the Horned God, your sister.”
“Which one?”
“The giggly one. How in the Seven Hells should I know what his name was, when neither one of us asked and neither one of us offered? And how, for that matter, could you suppose I give a whore’s left tooth about it in the first place, especially after all that port?”
“Well, you should give a whore’s left tooth about it.” Rafe could feel disapproval radiating from Joshua like heat from winter coals. “Go through every man in Riverside and half the dogs, Rafe, and I’ll raise a glass to you. But sooner or later, when it happens with the same man a second time—”
“On the day the river flows uphill. Through what perversity do you still refuse to believe me when I tell you I have sworn an oath that such a thing will never come to pass?”
“Sooner or later,” continued Joshua, as if Rafe had not spoken, “when it happens with the same man a second time, you won’t know what to do with yourself. You’re annoying enough as it is when you’re not infatuated.”
“I,” said Rafe with extreme politeness, “am not the one who is being annoying.” Joshua said nothing. “Aren’t you going to ask me how he was?”
“How was he?”
“Satisfactory.”
“Which college?”
This was enough to move Rafe to lift his arm from his face and open his eyes—in a squint, to be sure; there was, after all, only so much light the human body was designed to take in at this unfortunate hour. Through strands of hair so black it was almost blue, he saw his roommate standing over his bed far more judgmentally than was at all called for.
“You’ve gotten into the Fool’s Delight again, haven’t you?” said Rafe. “I’ve already had everybody in the other colleges worth having, and the few times I’ve been with anybody from Natural Science it’s made me long for the disastrous night you and I spent together lo these many years ago.”
“Good god. How awful for you.”
“You have no idea.” Rafe attempted to raise himself from the lumpy bed and had to close his eyes against the pain that blossomed in his head. “No, I’ve been going down to the docks for months. Do keep up.” He opened his eyes again and sat up much more carefully.
“Pigeon,” said Joshua, prim as new lace, “I gave up trying long ago. I can’t count that high. Now get up, put on your robe, and let’s go. Sausages. And chocolate. Then de Bertel.”
“And what do you think either one of us could possibly have to learn from His Excrescence of the Swine?”
“Look, whether or not you’ve outstripped him in understanding as far as you’ve outstripped the rest of us—”
“Oh, much further.”
“—you don’t go to de Bertel’s lectures to learn; you go because if you miss any more of them you’ll offend the entire body of magisters so deeply they won’t even let you sit your exams, much less pass them, and you’ll never found your school.”
Rafe assumed the expression he had developed to madden his father, his lips pressed tightly to one side. Joshua sighed and pushed back his hair, the color of good beer. Oh gods, beer. Even the thought of it—
“Ah,” said Joshua. “Your I’m-unwilling-to-admit-you’re-right face. I’ll take one step more, then, and tell you not only to come to the lecture but also to keep your mouth shut while de Bertel is talking. After your performance last night you don’t need to push him any further.”
Oh dear. “What did I do last night?” Rafe’s forehead creased helplessly, though it was a pose; any actual effort to remember would be doomed to failure.
Joshua’s face was incredulous. “You can’t be serious.” He grinned. “I’m sorry to say, love, but you were in splendid fettle. He walked in just as you were reaching the climax of a woefully accurate impression of him. I sent Anselm over to stop you, but you bit him, so we left you be. Then, when you finally saw de Bertel, you called him a blind, mentally defective sloth who mistook shit for information and flung both at his students indiscriminately, which, you said, was an issue with most of the doctors at the University, but the problem with de Bertel was that his aim was so much more accurate with the shit.”
Rafe sighed mournfully. “If only I weren’t such a perceptive drunk.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But please don’t alienate him further, pigeon. You never know which way the Board of Governors is going to vote on the committee question.”
“Don’t be ridiculous; we’ve got weeks left before the vote, and with enough protests like last week’s they’ll have no choice but to vote it down.”
“Oh, in the same way that de Bertel had no choice but to change his mind and agree with you about the movement of the heavenly bodies once you showed him your calculations?” Rafe did not dignify this wi
th a response. “Come on, pigeon. Besides, I meant it about the sausages, so we’ll need time to stop by the Eagle. Cheer up; we can get extra and throw them at de Bertel.”
“How will we tell which is de Bertel and which the sausage?” With great effort and greater care, Rafe finally stepped out of bed, poured half a pitcher of cold water over his head, drank the rest, and toweled off with the edge of the bedsheet. He reached unsteadily for the robe hanging on the wall, black and clean enough for even the most respectable of scholars.
As he bent to dig for clean breeches, he felt Joshua’s hand on his arm. “Your revolutionary school is a splendid idea, pigeon. But you’ll need that doctor’s robe if you want to acquire any students. Be careful. You tend to ruin things for yourself.”
Rafe was silent for a moment and then nodded. “You needn’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
“Good.”
“Micah! Thad!” he called into the next room. By now Rafe was able to speak at a reasonable volume without fearing his head would split open. Sausages, too, would help. “You’d better hurry, or we’ll be lucky enough to miss de Bertel’s lecture entirely.”
* * *
Xamanek’s light, it was cold! If this was the spring, Kaab shuddered to think what the winters were like.
Are you ill, little bee? Her mother’s voice in her head gave no quarter, cold or no. Or have turkeys been coming in the night to peck at your head? Because otherwise I cannot think of a single reason you would consider doing again exactly what you did in Tultenco, heading into the worst part of town seeking out trouble. The voice was as melodious as the River Ulua flowing into the sea, which only made the criticism sting the more sharply. You have said you wish to work in the service. Why, then, are you risking everything on a whim? Make a mistake this time, and you will compel your father to choose between making your banishment permanent or calling you back home where you will be tossed out of the service for good.
It would not help to object. Even from the houses beneath the earth, Ixmoe’s spirit would have no patience with Kaab’s protestations that this city would not see her repeat the errors she had made across the sea.
Tremontaine Season 1 Saga Omnibus Page 10
