“It’s unnatural and effeminate.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sarah followed Thalanes back under Andrew Jackson’s death-cage as the sun sank; Calvin followed her in turn. She felt like a banjo string wound to the point of snapping, and yet she knew that she would be wound tighter still before she could relax.
The Lazars were as much as a day behind her, though no more than two. It added to her tension that, away from the Mississippi and its gigantic ley, she could no longer see her walking-corpse pursuers.
Would a day be enough to find William Lee? New Orleans was a large city, one of the largest in the empire. Sarah stumbled through a vast carnival, and all the inhabitants were in costume and putting on a show.
She had tried, from the keelboat, to exercise her Second Sight to find Lee. After all, Thalanes didn’t really know her limitations, and she had been able to find the Lazars. She had seen endless swarms of people, but she had no idea how to distinguish William Lee.
If she had something that belonged to Lee, or, better still, a physical piece of him, it would be easy to devise a spell that would lead her to the man, or reveal him. That was Newton’s Law of Contagion. And if she had something that looked like him as well, or maybe something that looked like a finding device, then she’d get the benefit of the theoretical magician’s Law of Sympathy, too.
If.
But the beastfolk claimed they could lead her to someone who knew Lee. And failing that, Father Chigozie Ukwu had already promised to take her to his brother.
The monk slowed his pace to walk with Sarah. “Before we meet Grungle and Picaw again, I would like to tell you another story.”
“Can’t wait,” Cal said from behind.
“You’ll like it,” Thalanes told him over his shoulder. “It’s from the Poor Richard Sermons, and I remember the moral.”
“You know as I like a good moral.”
“Is there something in particular on your mind?” Sarah asked the monk.
He shrugged. “I want to impart a thought before we rejoin our beastkind friends, who wish to offer their help and who say they are emissaries of the Heron King.”
“You don’t believe ’em?” Cal asked.
“I believe them.” Thalanes cleared his throat and began. “The burgomaster and aldermen of a small town west of Chicago were meeting in council one day to discuss the draining of the local swamp, when a stranger appeared and offered to drain it for them. He was long of face and limb and would not identify himself, however he was pressed, other than to say that he was the Heron King, which the gentlemen found strange, as he was dressed in rags.”
“You sound like you’ve memorized this,” Sarah said.
“This one I know reasonably well.” Thalanes nodded. “‘What price will you ask of us for this feat of engineering?’ the burgomaster asked the Heron King.
“‘A very modest price, indeed,’ the Heron King replied. ‘I only ask your permission to dry out your land, and then I will do it, not for any reward from you, but for the amusement of seeing how you enjoy my gift. And I will accomplish no feat of engineering, for I am not an engineer, nor do I employ any. I shall dry out your land by magic.’”
“That’s a lot of gramarye,” Sarah noted.
Thalanes shook his head. “I don’t think it’s gramarye at all, not as you and I understand it. ‘Very well,’ laughed the burgomaster and all the aldermen. ‘You have our permission to dry out our land.’ The Heron King bowed and disappeared. The council then had a good laugh and they all went home and told their wives and children about the mad beggar who had promised to dry up their swamp. The wives and children all laughed, too, and then they all went to bed.
“In the morning they awoke to find that not only had their swamp been drained, but the moisture had been parched out of all the land for twenty miles around the town. The wells had dried up, the plants had died and the arable fields had been reduced to dust.
“The Heron King, still dressed in rags, stood in the square, and the town gathered around him. First the townspeople objected to what he had done, then they yelled in anger, and finally they pleaded, abasing themselves on the ground and weeping, for him to restore their land to what it had been.
“The Heron King listened to it all silently, a curious smile on his lips, and when every last person of the town had dried his throat begging and reddened his eyes with tears, and the whole crowd had fallen silent again, he finally spoke.
“‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for the amusement.’ And then he was gone.”
“What’s the moral?” Sarah felt troubled.
“Poor Richard says: be very careful what you wish for, and beware consequences that you do not intend.”
“Jest ’cause it turns out that the Heron King is real don’t mean that every story e’er told about him is true,” Cal pointed out.
“The Heron King is real, all right,” Thalanes said. “The people of Cahokia have never been able to think any different, no matter how much he might sound like a figure of folklore elsewhere in the empire. And most stories, Calvin, have some basis in fact.”
“If you know so much about the Heron King,” Sarah said testily, “then who are Simon Sword and Peter Plowshare? What does it mean that Peter Plowshare is dead?”
Thalanes sighed. “I’m puzzled, myself. I had always understood that Peter Plowshare and Simon Sword were different titles of the same person, the Heron King. That’s how the names are used in Cahokia. I thought they all meant the same thing.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m not so sure.”
Grungle and Picaw loitered beyond the gates to the Place d’Armes. As she approached, they both bowed, which made her feel conspicuous, since everyone else on the street seemed determined to ignore her presence.
“Why are you concerned to hide your faces?” she asked them. “This city is so full of different kinds of folk, it’s hard to imagine anyone would care what you look like.”
“Yeah,” Cal added, “I saw a snout-faced feller jest over there who must a been a beastman. Didn’t nobody look at him cross-eyed.”
“Thou art almost certainly right, Your Majesty,” Grungle answered, “but we feel it is safer to stay concealed. Just in case.”
Sarah smiled. “I agree completely. Which is why you must not bow to me or address me as Your Majesty. At least, not in the open.” Had she gone too far? Could she give orders to the beastkind? Probably not. Thalanes had placed himself under her command, had told her she was his queen, but Picaw and Grungle served the Heron King.
But after a moment’s silence, both the beastfolk nodded their agreement.
“Please take us to the person you mentioned,” Sarah added. “I believe you called her Filmer.”
The Quarter was busier now. Sarah tried to take the additional traffic in stride, keeping the same casual distance between herself and Thalanes as she had before, but Calvin evidently had no concern to look nonchalant—he closed up the distance behind her until she could hear the faint puff of his breath and the padding sound of his moccasins.
God bless poor Calvin, he still thought he was in love with her.
The beastkind quickly led Sarah and her companions to a plasterwork-and-iron public house whose signboard identified it as Grissot’s.
A row of horses hitched to rings set in iron posts impeded access to the public house’s boardwalk, and as she struggled to squeeze between two of the animals behind the diminutive Father Thalanes, she heard the insistent bum-ditty, bum-ditty of banjo frailing.
The beastkind hesitated at the door, and Sarah waved to stand them down. “Filmer lives here?”
“Lives and works,” Picaw said.
“We’ll come find you afterward,” Sarah said to the beastfolk.
She almost asked them to wait outside, but in fact she didn’t want them to stick around. They felt strongly that she should accompany them to their mysterious and legendary and apparently very whimsical lord the Heron King. She had other things to do—family business to attend to—first, and in any case, having just found herself to be a queen, she was in no hurry to be anyone’s vassal.
All in all, she thought she’d be just as happy if the beastkind disappeared.
The inside of Grissot’s was all dark wood, dancing, smoke, and sweat. Sarah almost laughed to see how incongruous both Calvin and Thalanes looked in the drinking crowd, but she probably looked even stranger. Like a patient from some Harvites’ hospital, she thought, with her eye patch. Like a refugee from a war. Like a beggar.
Like the witch she really was.
The men dangled hesitantly just inside the door, so Sarah pushed past them, slipping around a paunchy, purple-robed Memphite who swayed in a close dance grip with a golden-skinned Creole girl. She stepped up to the bar beside a tall woman with long brown hair. The woman watched Sarah with cool blue eyes as she tried to get the hunchbacked bartender’s attention.
“Excuse me,” she said, and then again, louder, “excuse me!”
The barkeep shuffled over, a fumble-footed mushroom of flesh. “Aye, me lass, have ye got a thirst on ye? And what’ll it be, then?” You didn’t see many Irish in Nashville, but of course, this close to Texia, it stood to reason there’d be plenty. They let anyone at all into Texia. “The beer’s passable, but then, a lot of things go down all right, once you’re willing to drink vomit.”
“I’m looking for someone,” Sarah said, and the cool brown-haired woman returned her gaze to the dancers.
“Oh, aye?” the Irishman inquired blandly. “I can direct you to the nearest gendarme station, if you wish. Although if you’re thirsty and looking for someone, you’ve like enough come to the right place.”
Sarah didn’t know whether she was being taken advantage of, but she felt Thalanes and Calvin behind her now and their presence gave her confidence. “A beer, then.”
The hunchback uncovered a pitcher that stood cloth-shrouded in a row of its gape-mouthed brethren and poured beer into a pewter mug. “Who’re ye looking for, then, lass?” He squinted at Sarah out one eye. The gesture was likely accidental—especially, Sarah reminded herself, since her witchy eye was covered—but it still rubbed her the wrong way.
“Filmer.” Sarah quashed her irritation. “I’m looking for a woman named Filmer.” The tall woman raised her eyebrows slightly at the name. Sarah sipped the beer.
“Oh, aye?” The Irishman wore a curious look on his gargoyle face. “I’m not sure I know a Filmer. Why’re ye looking for her? She owe you money, does she?”
Sarah felt she was being played. “No. I don’t know Miss Filmer. I need her help finding a…a common acquaintance.”
“Who’s that, then?” the barkeep asked. “Is he the one owes you money? Maybe it’s someone I know. A lot of bad debts walk in here to wet their whistles, I can tell ye.”
Sarah looked briefly at Thalanes but got no indicators from the little monk. He seemed attentive. “I’m looking for a man named William Lee,” she said finally. “You might know him as Bad Bill.”
The elegant woman with long brown hair abruptly broke her cool silence. “Bill!”
“Are you Miss Filmer?” Sarah asked.
The tall woman flashed a wave of emotion and then visibly fought it down. “Mrs. Filmer. Who are you?”
“Sarah Carpenter,” Sarah slid smoothly into the practiced fib, and then she indicated her companions. “That’s my husband Calvin, and Father Thalanes.” She tried not to notice the look of delight on Calvin’s face. “I’m looking for William Lee, and I’ve been told you’re his friend.”
Mrs. Filmer’s façade of cool self-mastery had returned. “Are you a friend of William’s? I must tell you that he has never mentioned anyone named Sarah Carpenter. Your voice doesn’t sound Johnslander to me. Are you…” She hesitated. “Are you family?”
“Mrs. Filmer.” Thalanes stepped forward to the bar. “Is there somewhere more private we could speak?”
Calvin paid for the beer from the bishop’s funds and Mrs. Filmer led them upstairs into a parlor. There she took a thin vase of roses from a small table beside a door and brought it inside with them, shutting the door behind them and setting the vase on a windowsill.
“Please sit,” she said, gesturing to the room’s three upholstered sofas. “As long as we keep the flowers in here, no one will disturb us.” Sarah plunked herself down and Thalanes perched; Cal positioned himself standing in a corner, eyes wide open.
Cathy Filmer sat, composed and dignified. “Is Bill in trouble?”
Sarah’s heart sank. “You don’t know where he is, then, Mrs. Filmer?”
The taller woman shook her head. “Please call me Cathy. I used to see him…frequently.” Did she sound wistful? “He was taken about two weeks ago.”
Cal’s face was cool. “Do you mean he was your lover?”
“Who took him?” Thalanes interjected.
Cathy shook her head again. “It’s my regret that William and I have never been lovers,” she told Calvin gently. “As to the identity of his captors, he was taken by the chevalier’s men. The gendarmes.”
“Where did the gendarmes take him—do you know?” Sarah didn’t relish the thought of fighting the Chevalier of New Orleans to rescue William Lee.
“Can you tell us why he was taken?” Thalanes asked.
“I don’t know why he was taken.” Cathy’s voice cracked. As if to camouflage the slip in her self-control, she shifted her posture, crossing her ankles gracefully, folding her hands in her lap. “They don’t publish the banns when men are arrested. He was…is…a man who makes enemies. As far as what the gendarmes have done with him, the possibilities are all dire, and I fear for my friend Sir William. But you haven’t yet told me who you are, and why you seek him.”
“I’m an old friend of Sir William’s,” Thalanes said. “And he has a long acquaintance with Sarah’s family, is a friend of her parents. We’re here on family business.”
“We need to find him.” Sarah was a little annoyed that Thalanes kept cutting her off.
“Carpenter family business,” Cathy said, and she gave Sarah an appraising look. “Because Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, former commander of the Imperial House Light Dragoons, is a great friend to the Carpenter family. As are you, a Cetean monk.”
“Yes,” Cal blurted out.
“A servant of the emperor may know many families,” Thalanes said quietly.
“Yes, he may.” Cathy Filmer took a deep breath. “As I said, the possibilities are dire. The most common fate of anyone snatched by the gendarmes is a thorough beating. However, as I also said, I haven’t seen Bill in two weeks, which may be the longest I’ve gone without seeing him in nearly fifteen years. I doubt he was released.”
“What are the other possibilities?” Sarah asked.
Thalanes looked worried.
“Death is the next most common. Execution on the spot, or in a convenient dark alley, or in some cold basement of a gendarme station, or in a bayou. If you’re lucky—if we are lucky—then perhaps the gendarmes simply ran Bill out of town on a rail, though if that is the case, again, I’m surprised and disappointed not to have seen him return.”
“Is there any possibility he might simply be detained?” Thalanes pressed.
“It isn’t likely.” Cathy shook her head. “He’s not the sort of man to whom the chevalier would grant such niceties as a trial. The gendarmes would only hold him if the chevalier wished to torture William. Or, perhaps, if he had some use for him.”
“If he were in prison, would you know where?” Sarah might be able to use her Second Sight or her gramarye to better advantage if she had some idea where to start the search.
Cathy shrugged, a gesture that on her shoulders was refined and feminine. “The basement of any gendarme station,” she said, “or the Palais du Chevalier, or on the Pontchartrain, in the hulks.”
That limited the search, though Sarah didn’t know how to find any of those places. “Thank you. Do you have anything of William’s? Any…personal pledges, any clothing?”
Cathy shook her head. “I have nothing of his, I regret to say.” She paused in thought. “But I know where you can find something.”
* * *
St. Joan of Arc presided over the Perdido Street station, smiling benignly down from her image with a long sword in one hand and a fleur-de-lis in the other. Obadiah felt no particular warmth in his heart for members of the constabulary, not even now when the gendarmes of New Orleans were giving him his room and board, their boxy-headed hounds padding about among the cots looking for scraps.
St. Joan, though, was no constable. She was a woman, which was soothing, and, like Obadiah, she was from the Old World and a bit out of place. If the Maid of Orleans could be at home here, so could he.
Sitting in the corner of the spacious cot-furnished barracks, Obadiah ate the fish stew and brown bread given him by his gendarme hosts in slow, mechanical silence, ignoring the cigarette smoke and the plink! of brown spit hitting the bottoms of brass spittoons and the soldierly chatter. He gazed up at St. Joan and tried to think.
He had felt uncertain for a couple of weeks. He had been floating, he had been in love. Another reason he was pleased to look at the painting of St. Joan was that she reminded him of Sarah, a dangerous young woman. Obadiah knew very well that his feelings for Sarah had started in a magic spell.
His hexed love for her had disappeared when the spell had ended.
But then the real enchantment had taken place. To his astonishment, Obadiah had longed to be ensorcelled again. Being hexed had revealed to him a new world, an existence in which he could care about truth and beauty and love, and not just the satisfaction of his belly and his loins. Not a new world, but a world he had once lived in.
Obadiah wanted to feel that way again.
He clung stubbornly to the hope that Sarah might bring him to that world. He knew he was idealizing her, but he needed that ideal. He had tried to get closer to his employer, the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, in the hope that some combination of theology, commitment, service, and sanctification would give him the life he craved. But the Right Reverend Father was hell-bent on distancing Obadiah.
St. Joan of Arc gazed down on Obadiah. Come home, the saint said to him.
Come home to what? To England? There was nothing for him there. His father was dead, the cooperage long converted into cash money and spent—much of it, and he felt for the first time a small twinge of guilt, wasted on getting him into the academy, where he’d failed at the cannon and then run away from the pike. He had no siblings, and no affection for any of his cousins or, for that matter, for King George I of England.
There was Queen Caroline, of course.
And Peg.
Obadiah’s appetite was gone. He set his bowl on the floor for a snuffling hound.
England was the land of his youth, and Obadiah remembered it fondly as a green and innocent place, despite the ruins scattered across its landscape and the blood of lambs poured regularly across its standing stones. Innocent, that is, until Obadiah had come trudging up to Peg’s father’s door on leave from the Royal Military Academy, resplendent and proud in the polished boots and buttons of his uniform, to ask her father for permission to court Peg. He’d already had an understanding, he thought, with the cheerful young tailor’s daughter, but Obadiah had wanted to do things properly, and had told Peg so in one of the many letters he had written from the academy.
He remembered the doorstep clearly, the worn brown bricks of the building’s face, the warm spring air, and her father’s surprised eyes. “Why, sure, an’ I’d ’ave give it you,” the droop-faced old man had said, “you beink such a grand lad, even if your old dad be one of them Christ-chasers. Only she’s run off just the other day wiff another fellow. Still, I fink she’d ’ave you, if only you’d go an’ fight ’im for ’er.”
Obadiah had not chased Peg and fought for her. Instead, he’d gone to a brothel, a narrow, windowless building in the shadow of St. Mary-le-Bow, the first such visit of his life. He’d gone expecting to feel pain and guilt, wanting to feel them, wanting to make Peg feel them, too. Instead, he’d felt numb, but vaguely satisfied, as if he’d scratched an itch.
He’d stayed in the brothel three days, drunk the entire time.
Two weeks later he’d boarded a ship for the New World.
Maybe the time had arrived for him to come home. Not to Peg, of course. He hadn’t fought for Peg, and now she was long gone. If she was still alive, she was married somewhere in the Midlands, and had grandchildren by now.
But he could come home to Sarah. Obadiah looked up, met St. Joan’s gaze, and nodded solemnly.
He could still fight for Sarah.
* * *
The halls were lined with saints, depicted in paintings and sculptures and tile mosaics and even charcoal drawings. Ezekiel was a theologian and he recognized many of them, but there had always been too many saints to keep track of, and every time a council of bishops was convened to try to pare down the list, the princes of the church came away instead having added more.
At the brisk clip at which he followed du Plessis through the Palais, Ezekiel barely had enough time to register each image. He could only identify a few of the holy people, but he knew from their icons they were all saints, whether he even would have recognized each saint’s claim to beatification.
Du Plessis took them up wide marble stairs tropical with ferns and orchids and down a narrow side passage, ushering them into a salon furnished with sofas, a wide, gold-painted harpsichord, and a small counter in the corner with tumblers, a pitcher of ice, a bowl of cubed sugar, and multiple bottles of liquor.
“Please wait here,” du Plessis urged the Imperials, and then bowed his way back out the door, shutting it behind him.
Berkeley made a beeline for the alcohol. “Are you drinking, Parson?” he asked belligerently.
Ezekiel waved the question away with a distracted hand; he was examining the images on the walls. In the salon, too, the chevalier had decorated his walls with saints, and as Ezekiel perused the paintings with a little more leisure, he realized why he had failed to recognize so many of the images in the outer halls.
These weren’t just any saints, they were all French—the chevalier had turned the Palais into a home for the many and varied saints of New Orleans.
There was St. Samuel de Champlain, with his compass and his globe and his beaverskin hat. The first Governor of Acadia was more properly native to the northeast of the New World, but he had been a great explorer and ruler, and Ezekiel wasn’t surprised to see his painting here. St. Henri de Bienville, once the Bishop of New Orleans, held an allegorical crowned catfish in his lap. He was a truly indigenous saint, born in New Orleans after the founders of the city had split into the Le Moyne and de Bienville branches, one providing Louisiana with its chevaliers and the other furnishing its bishops. The theologian and ideologue St. Jean-Jacques Rousseau smiled out of his painting with the unblinking eyes of a fanatic, a short-barreled musket and his two most famous theological tracts, On Education and The Confessions, held out before him.
“The chevalier has an obsession.” Berkeley clinked the ice in his glass.
“He’s haunted,” Ezekiel said. “Haunted by God and all His saints.”
“It’s unnatural,” Berkeley objected, “and effeminate. A man takes what fate deals him, good or bad, and doesn’t whine to the dead for favors.”
“It’s beautiful,” Ezekiel disagreed, “even if all the saints he likes are Frenchmen.”
Ezekiel had spent time in New Orleans as a younger man, but he remembered this spot as exhausted, empty old plantation land, burned over by the Spanish under the command of Count Galvéz. In the opulent, unforgetting, spiritual, and obsessive quality of these chambers, the chevalier had captured the soul of the great city, never moving forward without one eye over its shoulder for the grandeur and travails of the past.
It was so different from his own upbringing, where the past was nothing, the doings of man still less, and what counted was the ineluctable will of God, as expressed in His world and in His word.
There was another aspect of this wall of the sanctified that struck a chord in Ezekiel’s heart. The many images of the saints were not only a memory of past godliness, they were a standing rebuke to death. In his icon, in his continuing blessing, each saint lived eternally.
As he turned from picture to picture to the other saints’ icons in the room, Ezekiel tried to imagine whose image he would find next. Each time, he more than half hoped to discover a painting of Lucy Winthrop, beautiful in a russet and orange dress, auburn hair crowned with a white lace cap over warm, lively blue eyes.
He never did.
At least he hadn’t found any portraits of St. Cetes, or of any other heretical Unsouled ‘saints,’ such as Richelieu the Crypto-Elf, serial traitor and machinator of the Serpentwars, or the hag Adela Podebradas, who had brought so much death to the children of Eve in Bohemia and the Palatinate with her obstinate rebellion against the combined wills of God and her husband.
“Blazes.” Berkeley drained his glass.
The door opened and Gaspard le Moyne, the Chevalier of New Orleans, strode through it. He was alone and armed, with a dueling sword in a glittering sheath and a brace of pistols in well-worn leather holsters. He recognized the chevalier from having seen him at the Imperial Court in Philadelphia, where most Electors of the empire made periodic appearances, but he doubted the chevalier would know him—he and Berkeley were both mere servants in the Emperor Thomas’s retinue, and his sole previous personal contact with the chevalier had been to bow deeply as the man walked past across the audience chamber of Horse Hall.
“My Lord Chevalier,” the emperor’s men said together. They doffed hats and bowed deeply.
The chevalier returned their greeting with a nod, closing the door. The chevalier was tall and thin. His hair, trimmed short and neat above his ears, was dark but beginning to go gray.
“You’re well-armed for a man at home, My Lord,” Captain Berkeley observed.
“My home is New Orleans,” the chevalier said with a hint of a French accent, and crossed the room to the countertop bar. He laid his pistols on the countertop where, Ezekiel couldn’t help noticing, they pointed at the chevalier’s guests. “Does that make you feel better?” He poured himself a drink.
Berkeley laughed. “I’m perfectly at ease, My Lord.” He deliberately sat down directly in the line of fire of the guns.
Ezekiel wasn’t sure where this mutual baiting was going, but he thought he should head it off. “Thank you for seeing us, My Lord.”
Slowly, deliberately, the chevalier pulled a long cigar from his pocket, bit off the ends and lit it with a Lucifer match struck on a button of his waistcoat. “What does Thomas want?”
In other circumstances, Ezekiel might have thought the question admirably or refreshingly direct, but with the pistols pointed at him he did not feel either refreshed or inclined to admire. The chevalier’s familiarity toward his lord, Thomas Penn, also annoyed Ezekiel. “We’re on His Imperial Majesty’s errand, My Lord. However, the emperor didn’t send us to see you, or even specifically to New Orleans. We’re tracking a fugitive.”
The chevalier puffed contemplatively on his cigar. Had the chevalier relaxed at the information that Ezekiel had not specifically come to see him?
“Thank you for quartering my men,” Berkeley said to the chevalier. “I don’t know how long it will take us to search New Orleans.”
“It may take you some time.” The chevalier’s voice was cool. “New Orleans is a large, grand old lady, and she doesn’t always appreciate being searched.”
Berkeley laughed. “Then I hope we may rely upon your hospitality for a few days, while we find out what she has tucked underneath her petticoats.”
“Of course,” the chevalier agreed.
“Perhaps you might also be able to lend us some of your men to assist in our search,” Ezekiel suggested modestly.
The chevalier arched an eyebrow. “Tell me about your fugitive.”
Ezekiel and Captain Berkeley shared a glance, and Ezekiel floundered. He had come expecting basic assistance as a matter of courtesy extended from one Power to another, or from an Elector to his emperor, but he hadn’t anticipated being questioned.
What could he tell this man? How much could he trust him?
“She’s a girl. A young woman,” he finally said. Simple, true and innocuous.
The chevalier looked at him with amused eyes, nursing his cigar. “Thomas sent the House Light Dragoons to New Orleans to capture a little girl,” he said, drawing out the words for emphasis.
Ezekiel nodded.
“She must be quite a girl,” the chevalier said. “A Sufi assassin, perhaps. Or a troublesome reforming cleric. Some Philadelphian Queen Adela Podebradas, anxious to serve the emperor with a sanguinary Writ of Divorce.”
“She’s a pretender.” Captain Berkeley stood and Ezekiel was grateful. “Nothing more, and nothing of interest. We had other business in the Cotton League, so the emperor has tasked us with picking her up as well. It’s a minor matter, My Lord Chevalier, hardly worth raising to your attention, other than out of an abundance of courtesy and our need for a few more men.”
“We have a Warrant,” Ezekiel said. Penn’s warrant was irrelevant if the chevalier was already willing to cooperate, and powerless if the chevalier wasn’t.
The chevalier opened his mouth to speak but stopped as there was a knock at the door. René du Plessis pushed the door open and inserted his harsh face. “My Lord, His Grace is here to see you.”
The chevalier grabbed one of his pistols. An involuntary reaction? He stood impassive for long seconds, breathing through his flared nostrils, before answering.
“Please have His Grace escorted to this room.”
Du Plessis nodded and disappeared.
“Have you met the Bishop of New Orleans?” The chevalier released his grip on the pistol; Ezekiel couldn’t help noticing that he left the guns on the countertop.
They shook their heads that they had not.
“There is nothing so generous, so giving, and so full of grace as a dead saint,” the chevalier told them, “and nothing so inconvenient, so obstreperous, and so irritating as a live one.”
Berkeley laughed and downed his drink. Ezekiel held his tongue. After all, Bishop Ukwu was a secular priest, not a Martinite, and Ezekiel was hardly tasked with defending the dignity of all priests everywhere—indeed, there were more than a few priests that he would like to see hanged for heresy or insurrection…or both.
“Indeed, Bishop Ukwu is so obstinately righteous, I’ve taken the liberty of spreading rumors about him.” The chevalier chewed a deep puff of cigar smoke with a thoughtful expression.
“Rumors?” Ezekiel asked.
“That the bishop is a moneylender and a criminal. Easy enough to do, since former bishops plied those trades. And his son makes my task easier, by taking up the businesses his father won’t. It wouldn’t do to have people take the bishop too seriously, you see. And yet many of them do.”
The bishop entered with a strong stride. He was short and thin, with a lined brown face and shocking white hair, but authority radiated from his black robe, red sash, and skullcap.
“Your Grace.” The chevalier bowed as deeply as the bar permitted him. He and Berkeley joined their host in his bow, and Ezekiel tried to feel and express sincere respect for the episcopal office and its holder. “How may I serve the diocese this evening? Would Your Grace enjoy a cigar?”
Bishop Ukwu looked pointedly at the two Imperial officers and then back to the chevalier. “I have come to discuss a matter with you, Gaspard. It is personal to you and you may prefer to dismiss your guests before we enter into the subject.”
Ezekiel felt stung by the omitted honorific and the offensive presumption of intimacy, but the chevalier smiled. “Why, Your Grace,” he said unctuously, “I can’t believe you could have a matter to discuss with me so arcane that it couldn’t be shared with these two servants of the Emperor Thomas.”
The bishop hesitated, looking a little surprised. “You would have me call you to repentance before these men?”
The chevalier nodded slowly, and leaned forward with his elbows on the countertop…putting his hands, Ezekiel noticed, very close to the pistols. “I would, Your Grace.”
He gulped a mouthful out of his cigar and blew an indistinct ring of blue smoke into the center of the room.
“As you wish.” The bishop’s hesitation fell away. He raised one hand with an admonishing finger and, to Ezekiel’s utter astonishment, began to yell. “Sinner! Wretch! Vile and corrupt man!” The intrinsically happy sound of his Igbo accent clashed strongly with the strident tones of his remonstrance.
“True,” interrupted the chevalier smoothly, “but let us get beyond the general shortcomings of the species and focus on the details of my personal errors.”
Berkeley looked amused.
“Your charm will avail you nothing, nor will your wealth and power! Fear God, who will call in your debt at the last day!”
“Yes,” agreed the chevalier, “and require interest payments until then.” Berkeley snorted a short laugh. “But can you please get to the point, Your Grace? I have business with these men.”
The bishop’s fury rose unabated in the face of the chevalier’s mockery. “You are a blackmailer! I have heard from one of your servants, and I know you are a thug, a criminal, a low extortionist!”
“Yes?” the chevalier asked. “Tell me more, Your Grace.”
Did he want the bishop to chastise him?
The bishop spun and advanced on Ezekiel, but his extended finger rotated away and continued to point at the chevalier. “Your master, Thomas Penn!” Ukwu snapped at Ezekiel. “The chevalier blackmails him for money, and accuses him of murder!”
“Is that so,” Captain Berkeley said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes!” the bishop snapped. “And our emperor, I am sad to say, does not behave in this matter like an innocent man!”
Ezekiel went weak in the knees and stomach. How could this Bishop know anything of Mad Hannah’s death? How could the chevalier know?
He looked over the bishop’s shoulder and saw that Berkeley was white as a sheet, with his mouth hanging open and his hands near his pistols. How did Berkeley know? Perhaps the emperor had taken the Captain of the Blues into his confidence. Ezekiel ground his teeth.
“What murder, Your Grace?” the chevalier asked coolly.
The bishop wheeled back again to face the object of his scolding. “Do not play games with me! You have accused the emperor of killing the Imperial Consort Elytharias! You blackmail the emperor, and he pays! The blood money you thus steal has built the very house we stand in, and you seek to buy your way out of the guilt by plastering images of God’s saints on its walls! Shame!”
Elytharias! Ezekiel felt dizzy. This was not about Mad Hannah, then, it was about her husband. But why would the chevalier think that Thomas had killed the former King of Cahokia? And the chevalier had no right to blackmail Thomas, no matter what Thomas might be guilty of. Thomas was the emperor! Though Thomas was guilty, and so was Ezekiel, at least of the blood of his sister, Mad Hannah.
But…Elytharias?
“Is that all?” the chevalier asked.
The bishop shook his head in sorrow. “I had thought to come here to urge you to repent. I had hoped you would lay aside your evil scheme. I see now that I shall have to take to the pulpit to further persuade you.”
“Please, Your Grace,” the chevalier protested urbanely. “It has been a long time since I’ve been persuaded by anything said from a pulpit.”
The bishop clamped his mouth shut and then, to Ezekiel’s shock, stepped out of his footwear. He bent to the leather sandals, picked them up and deliberately slapped them together, shaking the dust off their soles and onto the marble floor of the Palais du chevalier.
“I curse you,” he said coldly, his calm tone at odds with the fervor of his words. “I curse you that your body will not sleep and your mind will know no rest. I curse you that you will waste and wither, that the tree you plant will bear no fruit and the field you till will lie barren, until the day of your repentance. I will unmask you all, and if I fall in the attempt, then I curse you in the name of the Lord God with a successor who will plague you even more.”
Then he stepped back into his shoes, turned, and stalked out the door.
Ezekiel realized he had been holding his breath. He let the air out in a long hiss.
Berkeley collapsed onto a sofa. “I need a drink.”
“The Imperial Consort!” Ezekiel exclaimed. “Captain, do you know what he’s talking about?”
Berkeley didn’t meet his gaze. “Damned priest,” he said, and Ezekiel felt a chill in his spine. So it was true! Thomas had murdered Kyres Elytharias, and Captain Berkeley knew. Well, he had been one of the Blues when Elytharias had died, fifteen years earlier. Ezekiel couldn’t blame Thomas for removing the Unsouled stain from the escutcheon of the Penns—wasn’t he about the same business, trying to capture or kill Elytharias’s daughter? And the chevalier was blackmailing Thomas; Ezekiel felt anger, but if Thomas wished to pay the chevalier, it was not Ezekiel’s business.
And Ezekiel needed the chevalier’s help to find Witchy Eye.
Ezekiel sat down and took deep breaths.
The chevalier was eyeing Berkeley closely; scrutinizing him.
“Gentlemen,” the chevalier finally said, setting his cigar down. “I believe I can be of assistance to you.”