Clio’s hiccups were gone. She ran headlong down the alley, struggling to listen over the sound of her panting, her eyes straining in the darkness. She slowed her pace, concentrating, and even still she almost missed it.
“I’ve got you,” a voice said behind a door just beyond her on the right. Clio crept back and put her ear next to it, listening.
“How would you like to feel these, eh? They’re sharp, they are. Sharp enough to teach you a lesson you’ll not soon forget.”
Clio pushed the door open and walked in. Toast, gagged, was hanging upside down by his legs from the large hand of a red-faced man. She had never been in this room before but she had been in the shop just beyond it, and she recognized the man with the hand as its proprietor, Arthur Copperwith, apothecary, slightly less than sober.
“Aye, Miss Clio,” he greeted her. “Saw this little devil running down the street and thought I’d show him what I think of his behavior.”
Clio kept her voice level. “What exactly has Toast done, Mr. Copperwith?”
“What’s he done? Why, what he always does. Robbed me blind, that’s what he done. Just the other day when you were in the store purchasing my serum. Snuck in here and helped himself to almost my whole stock of ourali.”
The behavior the apothecary was describing was not beyond Toast, Clio knew—he had a way of making anything edible disappear into the folds of his doublet and had in fact produced a handful of lavender lozenges after their last visit—but Clio had read about the herb Copperwith claimed Toast had taken and knew it was poisonous, smelled bad, and was decidedly inedible. Plus, Clio had made it a practice to keep a close eye on Toast in public for that reason, and did not recall him leaving the front of the store during their last visit. “Are you sure?” she asked, frowning.
“Sure as this little devil is a monkey,” Copperwith nodded. “You came in to get my famous serum, and after you left I walked back here for a little nip and what do I see but half my supplies gone.”
Clio looked at Toast. “Did you steal anything from this room?” The monkey shook his head furiously and Clio turned her gaze to the apothecary. “He says he did not do it. Couldn’t someone else have taken it?” Clio suggested.
The man was unmoved. “Says he did not do it, does he?” He gave Toast a violent look. “Didn’t have any other customers that morning. Had to be your friend. But that is the last time.” He brandished the pair of shears he had been holding in his free hand and brought them to Toast’s ear. The monkey wriggled in the man’s grasp, looking at Clio desperately. “Going to make sure he listens to me good next time I warn him.”
“Wait,” Clio commanded. “Put him down.” When Copperwith gave her only a suspicious frown in reply, she rushed on. “I will pay you for whatever he took. But don’t hurt him.”
The shears receded slightly from Toast’s head. “Pay me? When?”
“Tomorrow,” Clio answered positively, as if she had crates of gold inconveniently filling her foyer. “But you must put him down.”
Copperwith reluctantly, and not gently, lowered Toast to the floor. He scampered over to Clio and leapt into her outstretched arms.
“Thank you,” she said. She examined the monkey to be sure he was intact, then asked, “How much do I owe you?”
Copperwith looked around the storeroom for a moment, adding. “Ourali is mighty rare. Comes over from the New World, got to steal it from savages you know. And I’m about the only person around who’s got it. Should be eleven pounds twenty. But since you are a good customer, I’ll let you have it for ten pounds.”
Ten pounds was enough to feed Which House for a month, albeit not extravagantly, but one did not haggle over one’s best friend’s ears. “You may send someone for it tomorrow,” Clio agreed, wondering where the money would come from.
Copperwith glared at Toast for a moment, then nodded. “You be careful Miss Clio. Just a bit of that stuff and you’d be dead faster than you could say a prayer, and he stole enough to kill off half London. I wouldn’t want the little devil near me with that poison on him.”
“Thank you, Mr. Copperwith,” Clio said as she untied the gag from Toast’s mouth. “I’ll be cautious.”
“I was you, I’d lock that monkey in the house and never let him out again,” the apothecary said as he opened the door to let them out. “He’s going to get you killed, Miss Clio, mark my words.”
“I would trust Toast with my life,” Clio replied, little guessing how soon she would have to.
The Great Hall at Dearborn House had long since ceased to vibrate with the sounds of men laughing, women’s heels clicking, gossips whispering, gallants complimenting, and fine silks swishing when Lord Edwin Nonesuch entered his mother’s chamber to ask if she heard the infernal whistling outside her window that was keeping him awake.
Thirty-six women with distinct and highly varnished expressions looked at him from under thirty-six distinct hair-arrangements as he crossed the threshold. Or rather, thirty-seven, for Lady Alecia herself sat among the busts that held a portion of her famous collection of hairpieces, scrutinizing them.
No one knew exactly how many wigs she had, but she could go for more than two months without appearing in public in the same one twice, each more elaborate than the last, and all made of real human hair. Her most valued pieces were those taken entire from the heads of the dead or dying, and it was these that stood arrayed around the room. Every time she acquired a new treasure of this stature she had a stand for it made in the exact image of the person whose hair would sit atop it. Indeed, she had earned a bit of a reputation in France for delaying the execution of a golden-haired shepherdess, supposed to be a witch, long enough to allow an artist to make a sketch of her face that could later be applied to a bust. By far the most esteemed piece in her collection was the Anne Boleyn, which had reportedly been scalped from that unfortunate at the very moment of her execution. She had just had that bust redone, having deemed the older version too morbid, and it was toward the now smiling face of that doomed queen that Lady Alecia gestured.
“Do you think Annie would be better tonight?” she asked her son before he could speak. She was on familiar terms with all of her heads. “The Mary Hatfield kept getting in my eyes last time and distracting me, but I worry about sending the wrong message,” she explained. “It is really a question of whether one prefers to play the seductress or the murderess.”
Edwin frowned. “Why should it matter? Who will see you in bed? Did you hear someone—”
“Bed?” Lady Alecia laughed hollowly, interrupting him. “Whatever gave you that idea, Edwin? We shall not be abed for many hours.”
For a moment Edwin looked at her in horrified silence, then he mouthed the word, “No.” Finally finding his voice, he said it aloud. “No. We cannot. You promised we would not do it again.”
Lady Alecia’s face hardened. She reached for the Mary Hatfield—the famous murderess who had served a pie made of her husband and children to the neighbors who had come to support her in her time of loss; she would have gotten away with it, too, if the bullet her husband had lodged in his kneecap had not gotten caught in one of the guest’s throats—and lifted its long brown tresses carefully to her head. “I promised no such thing.”
“But you will ruin us,” Edwin said, almost stuttering. “You will destroy us all. As soon as anyone finds out, we are done for. Do not do this, mother,” he implored.
Her expression was anything but maternal. “You are a fool, Edwin. You have always been a fool. No one knows anything about it. They do not even begin to suspect.”
“But how long do you think you can cover it up?” Edwin whined.
Lady Alecia clucked with disapproval. “Idiot. Don’t you see? Everything is perfect. Something happened at the ball tonight that I could only have dreamed of. No scandal will ever touch us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t and I don’t care to explain it. But trust me.” Her voice softened as she finished pinning the wig on and turned to look at her son. “Haven’t I always been right before?”
Edwin hesitated. “Yes.”
“And I shall not fail now. This is it. The moment and the means of our triumph are here. We need only grasp them.”
“But someone is going to have to pay,” Edwin half pled, half moaned.
“Someone will,” she assured him, picturing the face in her mind, and the long, brown hair—similar to the wig she was now wearing and yet much more precious to her—that she had coveted for so long. “Someone will.”
I wonder if the hairpiece could be done in time for Mariana’s wedding, she thought as she left the room, dragging her son behind her. It would look so lovely with my dress.
Miles stood at the open window of his room, drinking. From his position he could have heard the hum of crickets and occasionally have seen the faint glimmer of a firefly, but what he was hearing and seeing was not outside. It was in his head, a dreamlike vision he had seen many times before, a vision he tried to keep at bay.
Three years earlier he had begun purging himself. First of love. Then of hate. He had intentionally organized his life so that slowly, all emotion faded from him, like the ink of an old manuscript, growing fainter and fainter until its traces were impossible to make out. He felt nothing now; his insides were blank. He had his work and his wine and everything in between was empty. He was like an elaborate binding that endured even when the pages it contained had yellowed and crackled away.
Only three things remained. Anger. Pain. And the vision.
She lay on her side, her hair splayed like a golden curtain out over the crisp white linen of the pillow, one arm thrown over her eyes. Her wrists were blue and green and purple with bruises. There were dark marks on her smooth shoulders where someone had held her struggling body down. And on her neck were the two brown pricks.
“Liar,” Beatrice’s voice said in his head with the rich Devonshire accent it acquired when she was angry. “You said you would always protect me. You failed, Miles. This is your fault.”
You failed you failed you failed.
He drained his glass and reached for the carafe again.
The Royal Astrologer, up early to cast the queen’s chart for the next day, looked up at the sky and made the following notation in his book: 4 hours past midnight. Moon—one degree beyond half-full. Waning.