“The chevalier may be that wealthy, but he is not that generous.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The transition from the carriage into the Palais was tricky. Sarah stepped out first, mask held to her face, and as her foot touched the ground her thin, lanky, short black hair became thick, curled, and bound in wire, and her chalky white neck and shoulders assumed a dark, burnished hue. Bill came next, and then the others, and as each touched the ground he or she became a Bantu noble.
Obadiah Dogsbody came last, holding his mask and a bundle of their weapons. The others stood around the door at his exit to camouflage what he held in his arms, and as he touched the smooth stones of the ground, the bundle became a fat white cat.
“Miaow,” purred the weapons.
They left the paper blinds pulled down.
Bill led the way, ignoring the footmen other than to hand the real prince’s visiting card to a man at the door.
“His Serene Highness,” the man announced to a crowd of indifferent ball attendees, “Kimoni Machogu, Prince of Shreveport. Her Serene Highness, Princess Jwahir Machogu…”
Bill kept moving.
A minute or two later, as the five of them drifted across a marble floor beneath a mural that ridiculously showed the Chevalier of New Orleans, Gaspard Le Moyne, defeating both Count Galvéz of New Spain and King Andy Jackson in a single battle, Bill became himself again.
He knew when it happened because his companions abruptly became themselves as well. He felt an itch to drag his hat out from where it was folded inside his waistcoat, but he knew it was too battered to make an appearance in this company, and with a twinge of misgiving he left it stowed away and kept the little mask over his face.
When the spell ended, Sarah’s shoulders slumped. How much spellcasting did she have left in her?
Bill’s pistols were inaccessible, wrapped in a bundle of his coat with the party’s other weapons. Obadiah carried the bundle, and as he noted the illusions on the party’s faces falling away, Bill turned to look at Obadiah, and was amused to see that he still appeared to be carrying a fat white cat. “Miaow,” said the bundle of pistols, tomahawk, lariat, and so on.
So that bit of gramarye, unfortunately, she would have to continue. And, for the moment, the hair-and-pearls lodestone spell.
At least Bill was wearing his own sword.
Bill looked for the seneschal. He knew René du Plessis by sight, though they had never met—he was always about town on his master’s business, public, private and, if any of the rumors was true, very private, indeed, for du Plessis was the most trusted servant of a man who kept many secrets.
Including, Bill hoped, a certain letter.
But in the thick crush of people in which Bill found himself now, he could see no faces. Once through the great front doors, Bill and the others had entered a swirling pool of New Orleans aristocracy. Most would be frenchies and Spaniards, though the scummy whirlpool of New Orleans threw up enough rough and tumble entrepreneurs, smugglers and gamblers and bawdy house owners and much, much worse, that there would be the occasional Anglo, Yonkerman, Memphite, Gullah, Texian, or whatnot.
Not that Bill could tell one from the other. They wouldn’t stop moving, and their faces hid behind demonic masks.
The light fell about him like blinding diamonds, the punch bowls squatted on their long tables calling Bill’s name, and the grotesque faces streamed tauntingly about him. Bill moved from one ballroom to the other following Cathy’s indications; she held the hairball guide discreetly in hands folded on her stomach.
How much time did they have before the Prince of Shreveport wiggled out of his bonds and escaped?
They needed to find du Plessis, get the letter, and leave. If they separated, they ran the risk of not being able to find each other again. Once they had found the letter, they had no escape plan. Bill hoped they could simply walk out, but it might not turn out to be that simple.
He looked closely at the hair and jawline of the woman walking next to him to be certain she was Catherine Filmer, and took her arm in his.
“I seen him,” Cal whispered. “Dark-skinned feller with a hard face, like you said, Bill, o’er there talkin’ to the banjer picker. That him?”
Bill looked, and there stood du Plessis, conveying instructions from a sheet of paper to a quartet of Igbo minstrels, who respectfully held their banjo, guitar, bass fiddle, and lapharp still while they listened.
“That’s him.” Bill released Cathy’s arm. “Follow me, and look natural.”
With his companions trailing behind, Bill glided across the floor, evading would-be dancers as gracefully as he could. As du Plessis turned to leave the room, Bill swooped upon him and caught his bicep. “Stay calm, suh, and you’ll not be hurt.” Du Plessis let himself be guided from the room.
“You’re making a serious mistake,” he told Bill, but his face was pleasant.
Outside the room, Bill found himself again in one of the wide halls that made up the skeleton of the building. Guests chattered away gaily, scintillating glasses of punch in their free hands. Punch probably spiked with rum, and somewhere in the palace there would be good whisky. Barrels of Elijah Pepper’s finest.
Bill forced his mind back to his task.
“Where’s a quiet place where we may speak undisturbed, suh?” he asked the seneschal.
“Upstairs,” du Plessis said immediately, and Bill turned to maneuver the smaller man toward a staircase—
but stopped.
Du Plessis wasn’t resisting at all, and Bill hadn’t so much as brandished a weapon.
“I’m hungry,” he growled. And thirsty. “Take me to the kitchens first.”
As the two of them walked, Bill forced du Plessis into a chat. Bill had no natural small talk to make, so he forced his face into a frivolous smile and asked du Plessis question after question about the endless parade of martyrs’ portraits that decorated all the walls; du Plessis obliged.
“And that one?”
“St. Edward the Martyr, stabbed in the back at the order of his stepmother.”
“And this gruesome fellow?”
“St. Bartholomew, skinned alive by the wild men of Armenia. That cloak is his own skin.”
“And her?”
“St. Anne Hutchinson, nailed to a cross by the Haudenosaunee for her preaching.”
As they walked, Bill noted a couple of grand staircases moving up, but once they had passed out of the front of the Palais with its complex of ballrooms and into servants’ territory, the halls and staircases (including a staircase that climbed up from right inside the main kitchen) became narrower. The saints disappeared, too, in favor of simple dark wood panelling.
“A quiet pantry,” Bill muttered, “and look cheerful.” A glance over his shoulder and a quick count told him that the right number of white-clad partygoers was following him.
He hoped all the right faces were lurking under the Venetian masks.
Du Plessis indicated a long hall off the main kitchen—servants rattled in and out and a master chef stood at the center of a storm of underlings, howling, tasting, and throwing rejected food, sparing only a glance for the outsiders passing through their midst—and at the end Bill found a small room full of linens and china.
“These are the second-best settings,” the Creole said. “They won’t be used tonight, so no one should have any business to bring them in here, unless some servant girl wants to get a footman alone for a few minutes.”
“I’ll take the risk.” Bill shepherded in his companions before grabbing a taper from a sconce in the hall and shutting the door. They all fit, but only standing. Instantly the cat illusion disappeared and Bill saw the butts of his pistols protruding from the folds of his red coat.
Sarah sucked in air, as if she’d been holding her breath.
“The rest of you, please stay here,” he directed, and then he set his own Venetian mask on a linen shelf, drawing one of his long pistols. “You, du Plessis, are going to help me.” Bill cocked his pistol and pressed it against the Creole’s cheek.
Du Plessis threw his hands up, palms forward, on either side of his head. He looked slightly comical. “O Lord,” he said, slowly, and almost as if it were a joke, “is there no help for the widow’s son?”
Bill frowned at the pantomime. “Hell’s Bells, man,” he said, “let us leave our mothers out of this affair.”
“That might have worked on me,” Sarah told the prisoner, “only you Freemasons don’t admit girls, do you?”
The Creole nodded. “Tell me what you want.”
“Years ago, a Frenchman named Bayard Prideux wrote the chevalier a letter. I want to see it.” As Bill made the demand, he realized it might be ridiculous. The chevalier must have voluminous correspondence, and the idea that this servant would know the location of one particular letter was absurd. “His private correspondence files.”
“I know the letter,” the Creole said modestly, “though I haven’t read it. It’s in the chevalier’s study, upstairs. I can take you all directly to it.”
This was all wrong. Du Plessis was cooperating much too easily.
Hell if it wasn’t a trap. “How far away?”
The Creole shrugged. “Two minutes’ walk.”
“What we waitin’ for?” Cal asked. He had let his mask drop, showing a look of consternation on his face, like a man who felt intense belly-pain. Bill patted him on his shoulder.
Still, even a mousetrap was baited with real cheese.
Bill forced the engine of his brain to grind over the thought that just outside the door and down a short hall, underlings to the chevalier’s master chef were liberally pouring sherry into soups and sauces.
Bill could go alone.
“Your Majesty,” he asked, “I have another plan. Could you render me invisible again, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and this fellow as well? I’ll need him as a guide, but I think the two of us alone can retrieve the letter as easily as all of us together, and at less risk. I fear trouble. I ask in the full awareness that we have already called upon your resources in a profligate manner today.”
She nodded, after a little hesitation.
“Do I ask too much, ma’am?”
“I reckon that ain’t a problem,” she said. “Only I have a different idea, something that’d be a little easier for me, and probably ought to do the trick.”
Bill nodded his acquiescence and shoved the Creole toward Obadiah and Cal. “Gag him and tie his wrists. I am in your hands, Your Majesty.”
“Forgive me.” Sarah plucked a long hair from Bill’s mustache and one from the Creole’s head and she picked up two soup spoons from one of the shelves.
Bill rubbed his face.
“Pewter,” she said, and she looked at her own reflection in the back of one spoon. “Good thing these’re the second-best settings.” Then she wrapped Bill’s plucked mustachio around one spoon and the Creole’s hair around the other.
“These are impressive preparations,” Bill said.
“Good components means the spell is less…costly…for me,” she explained. “Also, it will be easier if you swap wigs with the prisoner. I’m going to make you two trade faces, and being able to leave out the wigs’ll be a small mercy.”
The others gagged and bound du Plessis in the meanwhile, and he exchanged perruques with the seneschal. Then for good measure he extracted his lucky hat from inside his waistcoat, cramming it down over the little man’s head. The hat was too big, like a man’s hat on a child’s head.
Sarah rubbed the Bill-hair-spoon against Bill’s cheek and tucked it into the seneschal’s pocket and then repeated the operation the other way around. Bill acquiesced with all the grace he could muster.
Finally, she mumbled some hic, haec, hoc Latin, and suddenly Bill was looking at himself, bound and gagged, under his own hat brim.
“Your Majesty,” he said. “I beg you to stay here. I’ll take this man upstairs and retrieve the letter, then meet you here again. If he’s telling the truth, I should be back directly, so if I’m not, it may be necessary to flee.”
She nodded; she understood. Did she, too, fear a trap? “Be careful, Sir William,” she said. “I’ll keep up your illusion until I see you again. Your life’s much more important to me than the letter.”
His queen called him Sir William. Bill almost forgot to hear the voices of the whisky calling. Bill grabbed his second pistol from the bundle, refreshed the firing pans of both guns, and stuck one in his belt.
“Move,” he said, prodding the other man out into the hall.
Now du Plessis walked slower, and Bill guessed at the direction of the other man’s thoughts. If this was a trap, the seneschal would try to lead Bill into it. Bill pressed his gun firmly into the Creole’s ribs. “If you run, suh, I’ll shoot you.”
In the kitchen, du Plessis turned to head back toward the light and movement of the ball, but Bill forced him by main strength straight across, past the maelstrom of cooks fussing over exotic dishes and up the narrow servants’ stairs on the other side. This time, no doubt due to the gun in Bill’s hand, they spared a little more attention, but they all quickly saw their master’s chief servant in charge and went back about their tasks.
“I can’t believe the basilisk etouffé is genuine, suh,” Bill joked to du Plessis as they climbed to the second story. “The chevalier may be that wealthy, but he is not that generous.” The shorter man glared at him.
Two stories up (the second story was quiet, and its narrow halls suggested servants’ sleeping quarters and maybe storerooms), du Plessis turned to a large doorway that led out of the dark servants’ wing and back into the golden-lit, saint-plastered main portion of the Palais.
Bill reined his prisoner in.
“Understand very clearly, suh,” he said, “that at this moment you look like me just as much as I look like you. If anything goes wrong, I will simply shoot you dead and walk away, and none of your fellow-servants will be any the wiser for a good long time. You hold your life in your own hands, and much more precariously than you hold mine.”
The seneschal nodded, eyes downcast, and then he led Bill down a long hall to a closed door. Gloomy-faced saints stared down at him from the walls (Bill only recognized Robert Rogers, the famed white devil Wobomagonda, rangy and sharp-eyed and leaning on a notched walking stick), and the hall was otherwise empty.
“Where are the guards?”
The Creole nodded twice to indicate direction, once at each door adjacent to the one by which they stood, up and down the hall.
“Any particular signal?” Bill stared into the other man’s eyes. He felt he was staring into his own eyes, underneath the brim of his own hat, which was unnerving, but he kept his snarl tight and angry.
Du Plessis shook his head no. Bill took a deep breath, then pulled open the door, dragging his prisoner inside.
Behind the door was a spacious office. After the parade of the sanctified Bill had endured, he was relieved to find the walls of this room bare, other than doors leading to adjoining rooms right and left. A modest table stood in one corner of the room and bookshelves in another, and near the shuttered windows squatted a solid wood desk bearing writing implements and paper.
“The chevalier is a more modest and practical man than I’d imagined, suh,” Bill whispered to his prisoner. “Unless…this is your office, isn’t it, and not his at all?”
The Creole nodded and Bill snorted a short, suppressed laugh. “Where’s the letter?”
Du Plessis nodded at the desk and then, when Bill had maneuvered him behind it, touched one drawer with his knee. Bill opened the drawer and found a single sheet of paper, folded and yellowed with age, on top of a stack of ledgers. He tucked his pistol into his belt, took the letter and unfolded it for a quick look.
French. Of course it was in French.
Dammit.
“Arrêtez-vous!” barked a harsh voice.
Bill started to raise his hands before he remembered that as they saw him, he was the seneschal. With a forced calm, he looked up and saw a squad of soldiers filing in through each of the three doors to the room. They were the chevalier’s men, in blue and gold, and half of them held up pistols but the other half held knives—knives that, if Bill was not mistaken, looked to be made of silver.
Not only had it been a trap, but the chevalier had known Sarah was a magician. He almost shook his head in appreciation, but had the presence of mind to look to the bottom of the letter, where at least he could read the large signature: Bayard Prideux, in a frilly hand.
Bill tucked the letter inside his waistcoat.
Silver, he suddenly thought…magic…
Bill took a step back into the corner of the room, dragging du Plessis with him. The spoon in his pocket felt conspicuous and heavy. If those daggers got too close to him, his disguise might suddenly fall away, and at fifteen or twenty to one, he didn’t like his odds.
He needed to get out the door, fast.
The soldiers lowered their weapons and relaxed, a strong contrast to the tension Bill felt in his own limbs. One of them was talking to him, some kind of sergeant, by the extra gold on his uniform, and Bill concentrated to listen. “Voulez-vous homina homina avec le frou frou prisonnier wah wah doo wop au chevalier?”
Bill’s heart sank; that had been a question. If he ran, he might surprise these gendarmes and slip through them, but he’d never get out of the Palais alive. Worse, they’d raise the alarm and his queen would be trapped. As would Cathy.
But what else could he do?
De Plessis, beside him, fidgeted.
“Monsieur?” the sergeant prompted him.
“Oui,” Bill said decisively, growling to disguise his voice.
Then he drew his pistol and clubbed du Plessis on the back of the skull. The Creole collapsed. Bill stepped over his body and made for the exit, not looking back and navigating to pass through a cluster of soldiers armed with pistols, rather than silver knives.
He was across the room, marching resolutely, the gendarmes he passed nodding informal salutes.
He was out and into the hall. He patted his waistcoat and heard the reassuring crinkle of paper. He hoped the letter was genuine. He hoped Bayard had told him the truth, and the letter identified the other man who had participated in the murder of Kyres Elytharias, the ozer man whom Bayard had so feared.
He hoped that René du Plessis was unconscious, or if not, that the gendarmes would leave the seneschal bound and gagged at least until Bill could get down to the pantry and tell Sarah she needed to extend her illusion.
His hat had stayed behind.
He hoped the sacrifice was worth it.
* * *
Cal reeled.
The chevalier’s seneschal had made the great sign of distress, had done it clearly and deliberately, and Cal had ignored it. Cal had already betrayed the trust his grandfather had put in him by inducting him into masonry and raising him, in a single night, to the degree of Master Mason. Cal had lain awake at nights watching the stars and reviewing in his mind the signs and tokens and passwords and due-guards, anxious not to forget them. The Elector had told him he could use them to call on fellow Masons for help.
And then a fellow Mason had called on Cal, and Cal had ignored him.
Even Sarah had recognized the sign of distress. And of course, she was right; she wasn’t a Mason, and she had no obligation to assist the man.
How had the seneschal known Cal was a Mason, though? Cal didn’t carry any visible sign, like the square and compass and letter G. Had his induction been published, somehow? Had word been carried to New Orleans?
No, that was ridiculous. Obviously, the fellow had needed help and had made the sign of distress in the hope that someone in the party would recognize it and come to his aid.
And Cal had let him down. Jerusalem, he didn’t think the Elector had made him a Mason to get him to work against Sarah, but he still felt bad.
“Mrs. Filmer,” he said, “I’m right glad we found your friend Bill.” He wanted to distract himself from his own thoughts about Freemasonry, but he also meant his words as a peacemaking gesture. Cathy’s presence made him uncomfortable, and she probably knew it.
“Why thank you, Calvin. I’m glad, too…mostly.” She laughed softly, a sound too feminine to be a chuckle and too mature to be a giggle. “He can be a handful. And I must admit that I didn’t expect to spend the evening standing in a closet. I’d much rather be outside dancing. Are you a dancer, Calvin?”
“Cal dances,” Sarah interjected. “He does a rain dance, the dance with death, the song and dance, and, on a rare occasion, if he really has to go and is holding it in, he can shake a leg in a truly impressive pee-pee dance.”
Cal was caught off guard and groped for a response, but nothing came to him. Obadiah laughed, and Cal balled his fists. Sarah might trust the Englishman, but Cal hadn’t forgotten that he’d once punched her in the face.
Without a warning knock, the door swung open. Everyone threw their masks back up, and Cal nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of René du Plessis, white powdered wig askew and pistols in his belt.
He grabbed for his tomahawk, but Obadiah caught his hand.
“Your Majesty,” du Plessis said to Sarah in the voice of William Lee, bowing slightly, “I have the letter.” Cal nodded a grudging thanks to the Englishman, who shrugged and nodded back.
Bill’s face again became his own. He produced a folded paper and gave it to Sarah, then handed his pistols to Obadiah, who tucked them back into the bundle of equipment.
“Thank you,” Sarah said.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you its contents,” Bill apologized, “as it is completely written in Frog, which was Bayard’s native ribbit, and in the deciphering of which I have no art. I suggest that we examine the letter when we have a little more leisure, and that now we make a straight line for our borrowed carriage. I fear our discovery is imminent, and I suggest you maintain the illusion on du Plessis as long as you can—it may buy us precious time.”
Sarah took the letter, her face a slab of stone, and tucked it inside her shirt. “Agreed.” She marched past Bill and into the hall, mask rising as she exited the closet, leaving Cal wondering about the pee-pee dance comment. Did he have grounds to be mad at her…or was she mad at him?
“If we’re detained, Your Majesty,” Cal heard Bill say as they passed back through the servants’ quarters, “your escape is our only priority.”
The ball continued as before while Cal followed Sarah and Bill back through the ballrooms toward the exit. The wait inside the china closet had felt eternal, but they had only been in the building an hour or so, and the evening was still young. He saw both Sarah’s and Bill’s heads shift and become unfamiliar, strangers’ heads on his friends’ bodies, and the bundle in Obadiah’s arms again became a fat, yawning feline.
Could they really just walk out?
Cal wished he were holding his tomahawk.
The ballrooms made Cal feel like a poor, dumb hick. Light sprang from lamps and sconces on all the walls and glittered off gold, silver, and bronze everywhere. Huge paintings hung on all the walls in polished frames, and Cal had no idea who and what they were paintings of. Even the people shone with jewelry and fine cloth, and Calvin reckoned there wasn’t a person at the ball who wasn’t wearing more wealth on his or her body than Cal had handled in his entire life. Windows glared down at him, windows two stories tall, taller than any house on Calhoun Mountain and tall as most of the trees, shouting at Calvin that he was unwelcome.
Cal shook off his feeling of unease. Sarah needed him.
They passed beside the Igbo quartet leading a room full of New Orleans’s good and great in some sort of courtly jig. In a second ballroom, a hurdy-gurdy and pipes played a rousing tune that sounded almost, though not quite, Appalachee, and the Venetian-masked notables galloped a vigorous reel familiar enough that Cal could have joined in. The third ballroom they crossed swayed back and forth to the elegant triple-time rhythms of a small orchestra, and the dancers waltzed so scandalously close to each other that Cal blushed.
They reached the front door. Footmen were still welcoming in guests, announcing each to the attendees who drank and chatted in the front hallway.
This is it, Cal thought, we made it. Now they would just walk out the door and disappear into the night.
Only Sarah and Bill had stopped. They stood in a slightly awkward spot, impeding entrance to the hallway, which awkwardness was only made worse by Cal’s joining them. A footman hissed through a forced smile to urge them to move on.
“What is it?” Cal still felt stung, and he tried to keep that feeling out of his voice.
Sarah turned and walked back into the ballroom, Bill at her shoulder. Before he wheeled and followed in their wake Cal got a good look out the front door, across the courtyard, and past the gatehouse. Massed in front of the Palais were the Imperial House Light Dragoons, and Cal thought he saw the rotting brown coat of one of the Lazars.
Sarah led them back into the orchestra chamber, where the waltz had ended, a round of clapping was dying out, and the dancers were moving back to clear a large space in the center of the room. Without warning, Cal found himself standing at the edge of the clearing; he felt exposed. He looked back to see if they could retrace their steps, and saw Obadiah and Cathy crammed up behind him, with more guests packing the room behind, making inconspicuous retreat impossible.
He caught Sarah’s gaze (Sarah now wore the face of a blond-haired girl with a strong jaw and a German complexion); even through the illusion he could see she was tired. She pushed to try to get through the crowd, but the crowd pushed back, and she stopped.
Another round of applause started, louder this time, and Sarah joined in, turning with the rest of the crowd to face into the empty space. Cal followed her lead. They couldn’t break through this throng without being obvious, so best to fit in and lie low.
A man stood alone in the center of the room. He was tall and thin, with dark hair beginning to go gray, and his clothing looked like the ornate, dazzling original of which the gendarmes’ uniforms were pale copies—blue and gold, with the stylized three-pointed flower in the detail of it, and a very complicated necktie. He must be the chevalier.
The applause ended, but before the chevalier could speak, there was a commotion at the far entrance to the ballroom. Someone cried something in French, the crowd writhed and jostled and then coughed up a harsh-faced man in a blue and gold uniform.
René du Plessis, the chevalier’s seneschal, wigless, bald, and wearing his own face.
Jumpin’ Jerusalem.
Cal resisted an impulse to turn and slam his way through the crowd—even if he got through, the footmen and soldiers at the door would stop him cold. His best bet was to continue to play it cool and try to stay hidden. He looked at Sarah to confirm her illusion was still in place, and it was. She also stood still, watching the scene unfold.
Did her insides feel like a mass of seething worms, as Cal’s did?
The Creole bowed to his master, approached and whispered something; the chevalier’s face grew cold and hard. As they spoke, du Plessis turned, scanning the crowd.
Could he detect them? Might the seneschal have something that let him see through Sarah’s illusions? Might he recognize their clothes?
A cold rivulet of sweat trickled down Cal’s spine.
“Voilà!” du Plessis shouted, pointing at Cal, and then followed up with some more French.
The crowd exploded.
Jerusalem.
Well, he’d failed to help a fellow Mason when he’d been in trouble, but Cal would be damned before he’d fail to help Sarah. At least he could provide cover for the others to get away.
He turned and saw Obadiah at his shoulder (he knew him by the cat) and, gritting his teeth against the visual strangeness of what he was doing, Cal dropped his mask and shoved his hand into the feline’s chest. He planted his fingers in a mass of wood and steel and found his war axe. Pushing Obadiah back into the crowd, he yanked free the tomahawk and spun to face the chevalier.
Lord hates a man as won’t stand up for his friends.
“Oh Lord, is there no help for the widow’s son?” he cried.
And he charged.
* * *
Cal got nowhere.
Bill, standing next to the brave young Appalachee, watched him thrown to the ground in a shower of discarded Venetian masks. Gendarmes shoved guests aside at the entrances, struggling to get into the room, but it was the crowd itself, the assembled eminences of New Orleans, that grabbed Calvin.
Say what you will of New Orleans, but even its gentlefolk were hard as nails.
As was Cal, who thrashed with fists and feet and gave as good as he got.
Bill grabbed Sarah’s arm to whisper into her ear. “Run! Calvin’s distracting them!”
But even as he said it, he knew the crowd surging around them was too thick, and too many gendarmes pushed their way. Sarah regained her own face, eye patch and all, and Bill ducked, hoping the chevalier hadn’t seen his head protruding above the crowd.
Sarah mumbled something that included the word “serpentes” and flung her fingers at Cal where he wrestled on the floor. A black hairball landed on Calvin’s chest.
Cal, having regained his own features, was buried in a sudden avalanche of snakes. They were striped orange, white, and black, and they wound all about him about the hands and arms of those that fought him down.
“Serpientes!” a fat man shouted, and jumped away.
With many-pitched gasps and more than one shriek of surprise, the rest of the crowd dropped Calvin and took a startled step back.
“Emmenez-les!” shouted the chevalier. To hell with it, Bill thought, and he straightened his posture.
The cat was gone, and Obadiah held the bundle toward Bill, wrestling with his elbow against two bewigged Frenchmen in livery Bill didn’t recognize. It was a good thing the Englishman was burly.
Bill batted aside a bony man who tried to bite him and regretfully restrained a claw-flailing matron with his forearm on her chest, yanking both guns from Obadiah and spinning to meet the nearest gendarmes.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bill saw Cal standing up free of the tangle of snakes, tomahawk sweeping a wide space around him that the ballgoers hesitated to enter. Obadiah had a broadsword out, Cathy held two pistols, and Sarah gripped her staff like a club. They would not surrender without a fight, at least.
“Emmenez-les!” the chevalier yelled.
Bill clubbed down an overenthusiastic footman with the butt of one horse pistol. He was understanding more French, and felt a small surge of pride.
“Cet homme la, il a assassiné mon fils!” the chevalier cried.
Bill had been spotted. He tossed a short gendarme aside. At least the ambiguity of his employment situation had been resolved.
The dancers were flushing out of the way.
Half a dozen blue-and-gold uniforms advanced on Bill. Bill raised both pistols and pulled the hammers back.
“Arrêtez-vous!” shouted a voice Bill thought he recognized. He ignored it, bound and determined not to arrête anything until they pried his guns from his cold, dead fingers, but the gendarmes facing him stopped, looking startled and uncertain.
Bill risked a glance over his shoulder.
The chevalier stood in the center of a cleared piece of floor, even his seneschal having stepped away. Someone stood beside him in an elegant black suit, pressing a knife into the billowing cravat at the chevalier’s throat.
Someone Bill knew, though it took him a moment to realize it. An old man, with rouge on his cheeks, a thin mustache grease-penciled onto his upper lip, and a mad gleam in his eye.
Don Sandoval.
Hell’s Bells.