“YOU WERE RIGHT,” GASPED Dahria as soon as we had gotten a safe distance from the shop. “This is fun!”
She fanned herself extravagantly. She had given me a shrewd look at my strange connection with the shopkeeper over his absent father, but said nothing, and if I had seen something like understanding in her face, she had pushed it down and laced it up tight as her corset. Now she was beaming, and I, far from clear about our relationship, let the moment go, turning instead to the mystery at hand.
“So Berrit had a fragment of luxorite,” I mused, “but the Beacon hadn’t been stolen yet, and no one reported any thefts, so where did he get it?”
“The boy must have had connections to dealers or thieves,” said Dahria.
“If so, they were new connections,” I said. “He was nobody in the Westside gang. He said he had friends in high places, but if so, he made those friends recently, right around the time he was traded to Morlak.”
“So we talk to this Morlak fellow,” said Dahria.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” she demanded.
So Willinghouse hadn’t told her. I thought for a moment, took a breath, and related what Morlak had tried to do. She stared at me, horrified, disgusted by a version of the world she had barely known existed. When I was done she said nothing, but I thought her sense of me had changed.
“I could speak to this Morlak without you,” she said at last.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I’m capable of thinking for myself, you know!” she snapped. “I don’t need you spoon-feeding me.”
“I just don’t think he will respond to someone of your breeding,” I said carefully.
“And I think you just like being in charge for once,” she shot back.
“You’re proposing to walk over to the headquarters of a street gang in the Numbers District dressed like that?” I demanded, my exasperation getting the better of me. “If you got out with merely a mugging, you’d be lucky.”
“So what would you have us do?”
I considered the street. I thought of Billy the pickpocket, and nodded toward Macinnes’s place, where Dowager Hamilton had purchased her mysterious necklace. “Get me a half hour with the scullery maid in there.”
“How?”
“Any way you like,” I said. “You’re in charge. And when we’re done there, I suggest we get tickets for tonight’s opera. It turns out I’m available.”
* * *
MACINNES’S SHOP, THOUGH ACROSS the road from Ansveld’s, was an entirely different kind of establishment. Though it justified its position on Crommerty Street through the sale of luxorite, it was clear that most of its trade was more mundane. Inside, it was less the elegant showroom we had just left and more a glorified pawnshop, dealing in watches and knives, firearms and pewter, porcelain and assorted statues, mostly plaster. Everything was kept inside metal cages, and though the merchandise was not so rich as at Ansveld’s, the security measures were more conspicuous. A guard with a pistol and truncheon at his belt considered us closely as we entered. Despite the presence of luxorite—much of it amber and fading—parts of the shop stood in deep gloom, and large candles had been positioned around the store to make up for the absence of windows. A NO COLOREDS sign on the counter matched one in the shop window, but when I gave it a querulous nod, Dahria shook her head minutely.
A short man in shirtsleeves and a bowler hat, attracted by the ringing of the bell over the door, sauntered out from a back room and watched us appraisingly.
Dahria drew herself up, staring down the security guard, and led me to a corner cabinet, pulling me in close by my sleeve with one hand as she reached for the oversized candle with the other. To my astonishment, she proceeded to tip the candle toward me, spilling hot wax all down the front of my dress.
“Good gods!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You clumsy wretch! Look at your pinafore! Why can’t you watch what you are doing?”
The man in the hat began to bustle toward us. “Now, ladies,” he was saying. “Is there something I can do to help?”
“You can get the wax off this dress immediately!” Dahria announced with breathtaking arrogance.
“Not really my department,” said the man, who I took to be Macinnes himself. “I’m sure when you get home—”
“You think I’m going to walk through the street with a maid looking like this?” Dahria exclaimed, gesturing up and down my spattered pinafore. “See to it, man!”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t really see how this is my problem,” he began warily.
“They are your candles, are they not?” Dahria demanded at her most imperious.
“Well, yes,” said Macinnes, quailing.
“Then see to it!”
For my part, I had shrunken somewhat, my face half in my hands, and as close to tears as I could realistically suggest. In truth, it wasn’t hard. Faced with Dahria’s aristocratic contempt, it was all too easy to imagine myself less than the dirt beneath her heel.
Macinnes faltered, shooting a look at the security guard, and Dahria took the opportunity to step close to him. She snarled into his face, “I assume you have a scullery maid?”
* * *
I WAS PROPELLED—UNSTEADILY in those ridiculous shoes—through a stockroom and into a hallway where stairs descended to the servants’ quarters and kitchen. I descended cautiously, the security guard at my back, listening to the fading sound of Dahria’s rant about candles, shoddy service, and the inadequacies of personal staff. I kept my eyes open for the butler who had turned me out on my ear before, but there was no sign of him, and the housekeeper who had opened the door to me called the scullery maid without giving me a second glance. I blubbered through a handkerchief, hiding my face as best I could, until a girl of my own age entered, looking flustered.
This was surely Billy’s lady friend. She was white, pretty in an ordinary sort of way, with rough hands and a round, kindly face.
When she spoke, it was with the accent of the city’s working poor. “Oh my, you ’ave made a mess of yourself, ’aven’t you?” she said. “Let’s ’ave a look in the light.”
She shunted me close to a patch of sun that streamed in from one of the high windows I had seen from the backyard.
“’Old on,” she said. “Let me get my iron and some brown paper.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You’re Billy’s friend, aren’t you?”
She looked up at that, startled and, judging by the way she checked over her shoulder to make sure the housekeeper was not in earshot, afraid.
I couldn’t blame her. I doubted Billy would be considered an especially suitable catch for someone who worked—albeit menially—on Crommerty Street.
She risked a smile as she put the iron on the stove. “Let’s get you out of that pinafore,” she said. “’Ave a seat.”
I did so, relieved to take the weight off my aching feet. How Dahria walked around in shoes like those all day, I had no idea.
“How do you know Billy?”
“Mutual friends,” I said with an apologetic shrug. “I’m Ang, by the way.”
“Bessie,” said the girl. “You and Billy work together?”
“Nah,” I said, handing her the dress and watching as she picked the wax off before applying the iron. “A little overlap, but different circles.”
“Well, yes,” said the girl, as if that were obvious.
My hackles rose. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“With you being a lady’s maid and all,” she said, momentarily baffled by my look. “You thought I meant because you are…” She hesitated.
“Lani,” I completed for her. “Yes. Sorry.”
“No need,” said Bessie, relieved to get that over. “And to tell you the truth, we don’t see many of your sort around here.”
That was my chance.
“No?” I said. “What about a boy? Last week.”
The maid shook her head.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Positive. Why?”
“Someone said there was a Lani boy going from door to door all down the street,” I tried.
She shook her head again. Her face was guileless, innocent. I would lay everything I had that she was telling the truth. “I think there was a boy at Ansveld’s,” she said. “Across the street. Mr. Savil, the security guard, commented on it, but he never came here.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’d have seen him. I’m never off duty when the shop is open. Mr. Macinnes doesn’t like to be understaffed.”
I nodded. “Fancy district,” I said.
Bessie grinned. “Too fancy for the likes of me,” the maid agreed. “Or ’is Lordship, truth be told.” She said the last in a low voice.
“His Lordship?” I asked.
“Macinnes,” she said, her smile souring. “Jumped-up little nobody, he is. Amazed they ’aven’t drummed him out.”
“It’s a nice house,” I said. “Seems successful.”
“Oh, he makes his money, all right,” she agreed. “But this classy-gent routine is all an act. Why do you think he has the butler and the mahogany sideboard? So no one looks too closely at ’im.”
I matched her grin. “Bit shady, is he?” I asked.
“Oh we get all sorts in ’ere,” she said. “Especially after hours, when the posh folk ’ave gone ’ome.”
“Like who?” I asked, trying not to sound too interested.
“Oh, I don’t get to see them,” said Bessie. “If he knows they’re coming, we’re kept out of the way. They usually show up in the house anyway, not in the shop. Couple of weeks ago, some black fella came in. That was a first. Just wandered in from the street, big as life! And not a local black either. One of them ’unter types from the plains. Old bloke. Scared me ’alf to death, he did. Macinnes kept ’im talking for like a hour as well! I thought they’d just throw ’im out, but he was still ’ere when it came time to close.”
“But no Lani,” I said, guiding her back to the original question.
She shook her head definitely. “There,” she said, looking up from the dress and smiling, proud of herself. “That looks like it’s got it.”
“Very nice,” I said. “No wonder Billy is so keen.”
She laughed at that, but her question—“You think he’s keen?”—was real enough.
“Absolutely,” I said, thinking of Billy’s two purses and his sweet and silly notion of not soiling Bessie’s ring with stolen money.
“Well, that’s nice,” said Bessie, pretending she didn’t really care and smoothing my pinafore. “Just launder it as usual when you get ’ome and Her Ladyship shouldn’t give you any more trouble.”
“Oh,” I said, “she’ll find an excuse.”
“Don’t they always,” said Bessie.