Mayfair

She escaped on the nineteenth day, and the most surprising thing about it was how easy it was.

There was no plot to it. There was no guard on the door, no bolt on the window, no manacle on her wrist. The Viscount had written You shall not attempt to leave the house without my knowledge, and had then, with perfect confidence, left the house at eight in the morning for the docks, taking Tobias with him. Mrs. Hatch had gone to Smithfield to quarrel with a butcher. Madame Verrier had sent a note to say that she was indisposed. Odette was asleep after a bad night. And the front hall of Wynmore House stood empty, with the sunlight lying across the black-and-white tiles in long bars, and the door a few feet beyond it, painted green.

She stood on the bottom stair and looked at it.

Seventeen steps across the hall, she thought. Eleven to the street.

A promise is a promise.

But there was a pulse in the soles of her feet, and it had been growing for nineteen days. It beat all through the house, by day and night, like an enormous second clock, and at some hour of the previous night it had stopped being a sound and become a tug, a physical tightness behind her breastbone, as of a hook set deep in flesh. She had lain in her bed with her fists clenched and her eyes open and the whole room humming. She could no more have stayed than she could have stopped her own heart.

I will go and look. Only look. I will be back before they notice.

She took her shawl from the peg. She did not take a bonnet; she did not know where they were kept. She opened the green door, very quietly, and stepped out into London.

…

The air hit her like a blow.

Noise: a wall of it. Iron wheels on cobbles, the cries of costermongers, a dog barking, a hundred hooves on stone. Smoke, and horse-dung, and fresh bread, and wet wool. Light, thin and silver, slanting between the tall houses. She stood on the step with her hand to her throat and watched the world go past like a river.

Nobody is looking at me, she thought, with astonishment.

It was perfectly true. A woman in a gray gown with her head covered by a shawl, walking quickly, with her eyes down, was invisible. A maid, a seamstress, a governess on an errand. No one looked twice. The gentleman at the corner touched his hat to a lady in a carriage. The lady ignored him. A boy darted past with a basket of rolls. Ixara drew her shawl closer, and stepped down into the road, and followed the pulse.

It led her north.

Through Hartwell Square, with its dusty plane trees, and into a street of tall pale houses; across a broad avenue thick with sedan chairs; into a labyrinth of narrow lanes behind a church, where washing hung between the windows and old women sat on steps. She did not look at the street signs. She could not have read them. She followed the thing in her chest, turning where it turned, hurrying when it quickened, until the lanes opened onto a square she knew.

The Meridian Hall stood at the far end, pale as bone.

She stopped at the edge of the paving, with her heart in her throat.

It was larger than it had seemed from the carriage. The portico was supported by six fluted columns. A flight of steps, with a carved balustrade, led up to a pair of high bronze doors; above them, framed in stone, was the great arched window with its panes of colored glass. There were carriages drawn up in front, and footmen in violet livery, and ladies and gentlemen going in and out in silks, laughing and talking in the thin summer haze.

A gathering, she thought. A day when the Hall is open. She remembered Madame Verrier's lecture, delivered with scorn: the conversazione, mademoiselle, the Friday gathering, where the great ladies of London go to be seen listening to lectures on electricity.

She could not go in by the steps. But the Heart was not up there. The Heart was down. She felt it now with perfect clarity, an ache, a yearning, drawn toward the earth.

She went round the side.

…

There was an alley.

It ran along the east flank of the Hall between the pale stone wall and a high brick one, narrow and cold, and strewn with straw. At its end was a service yard, with a coal-hole and a pump. Along the foundation of the Hall ran a row of low barred windows, level with her ankles, half sunk in the cobbles. She dropped to her knees in front of the nearest. Her palms were wet.

Through the grating, in the dark, she saw light.

Blue light.

She put her face against the bars.

Below her, thirty feet down, at the end of a long vaulted passage, a chamber had been cut into the rock beneath the Hall. It was circular. Its walls were white tile, its floor black marble. And in the center of the floor stood a plinth of polished granite, and on the plinth, under a great dome of glass bound with brass, rested a stone the size of a child's fist.

The Aurelith.

It lay there in the glass, exposed, imprisoned, blazing. All the blue of the deepest sea, laced with emerald and violet, swirling and slow, was straining against the walls of its cell like a bird against a window. Brass wires ran from the dome to a cabinet of instruments. Two men in black coats stood before the plinth with notebooks, one reading a gauge, one holding a lens. A third sat on a stool, drawing.

Ixara made a sound she did not recognize.

It rose from somewhere under her ribs, a low, cracked, animal sound. It was not a cry. It was the keening note that the women of the island made at a burial. She pressed her hand to her mouth to stop it. Hot tears ran over her wrist. She had not wept in the hold. She had not wept in the storm, or at the first sight of the city. She wept now, kneeling on the cold stones with her forehead pressed to the iron, because she was looking at the beating heart of her people, and it was in a box.

Forgive me, she thought wildly. Forgive me. I'm here. I came. I'm so sorry.

The Heart pulsed.

It was a single hard beat, louder than the rest, and the blue flared against the glass. The man with the gauge looked up, startled. The draftsman dropped his pencil. A tremor ran through the dome.

And through the grating, she felt it: recognition. Joy, and rage, and grief, and a great vast longing, all poured toward her through twenty feet of cold stone. It knew her. It had been calling her all along, and she had come, and she could not reach it.

"Dear me," said a voice behind her. "You are going to wear a hole in your knees."

Ixara spun.

…

A woman stood at the mouth of the alley, framed against the bright rectangle of the square.

She was tall, and very fair, and expensively dressed in a gown of dove-colored satin with sleeves of ivory lace. She held a closed parasol, though there was no sun. A rope of pearls hung to her waist; another circled her throat. Her hair, piled high in the new fashion, was a pale, shining, improbable gold, and her face, thirty-five, perhaps older, beneath its careful artifice, was handsome, humorous, and tired.

She was smiling. It was a very sweet smile, and Ixara felt every hair on her arms rise.

"Don't get up," said the woman. "I never mind a person on the ground. One sees so much more from there." She strolled a few steps nearer, her skirts whispering in the straw. "I am so sorry to have startled you. I hate to interrupt a private moment. But you were making such a very peculiar noise, and I rather thought someone had trapped a cat."

"I—" Ixara scrambled up. She smoothed her skirt, clumsy, her face hot. "I dropped a... a penny. In the grating."

"Did you? How careless. How interesting." The woman tilted her head. Her eyes were hazel, bright and quick, and they flicked over Ixara's face, her damp cheeks, her bare head, the shawl clutched to her breast, and came back to her eyes. "Well, I shall not tell. I was never a great one for pennies myself."

"I should go."

"Oh, but you shouldn't. You've only just arrived." The smile deepened. "You're from Hartwell Square. Wynmore's household. Don't look so alarmed; it's written all over you. Nobody else in London has that sort of look."

"What look?"

"The look of a girl who has been very carefully told to stay indoors." A soft laugh. "I am Perpetua Strand. Lady Strand, to the vulgar. Garrick calls me Perpetua when he is cross, which was formerly often, and nothing at all when he is frightened, which is more recently. You are, I presume, the famous Miss Merrow."

Ixara said nothing.

"Of Lisbon." The gloved hand rose, a lazy wave. "A ward. A guardianship. A pitiable orphan. It is quite the most delicious thing to have happened in town since the Hamiltons' elopement. I haven't heard a word of anything else in a week. Do you know, the Marchioness of Tavistock has a wager running with Lady Sefton on whether you are a bastard or a Papist?"

"Neither," said Ixara.

"Quite so. I put my money on a mistress."

She said it lightly. It struck like a dropped plate.

Ixara felt blood climb her throat. "I am his ward."

"Of course you are." The hazel eyes were soft, almost kind. "And I am the Queen of Sheba. Come, dear. I shall not be unpleasant. I am rather fond of him, you know. We were great friends once. It was a long time ago."

"You were his lover."

"Ah." Lady Strand's smile faltered, just barely. "They told you."

"No one told me. I only looked at you."

There was a pause.

For the first time, something flickered behind the pale, painted, charming face, a flash like light on water, there and gone. When she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its lilt.

"You are rather terrifying," she said quietly. "Aren't you? I thought the Duke exaggerated."

Ixara went still.

"His Grace speaks of you often." Perpetua tapped the closed parasol against her palm. "He is very curious about the lady of the carriage. I saw him on Thursday, and he asked me, so casually, whether I had met Wynmore's ward. As though it were a thing of no importance." The hazel eyes lifted, steady. "I thought, how odd. I thought, why would the Grand Master of the Meridian Society be interested in a young woman from Lisbon?"

"I do not know."

"No. I don't suppose you do." She glanced past Ixara, at the little barred window, and then back. A line appeared between her brows. "But I do know that Alaric Draymoor does nothing without a reason. And that the Hall has been remarkably busy since the Sable Albatross put in. Men in and out at all hours. Carts. Instruments. A great deal of lead." Her voice dropped. "And a smell. A sort of sweetness. You can catch it, if you stand near the cellar door. Like burnt fruit."

Ixara's mouth went dry.

"It is the same smell," said Lady Strand, very softly, "that you are wearing."

…

The silence stretched.

A coach rattled by in the square. A child laughed somewhere. In the alley, nothing moved but a wisp of straw, stirring in the draft from the area.

Ixara thought of the knife at her waist, which she had not dared to bring. She thought of the green door, the four hundred and twelve steps. She thought of a pyre, which she had never seen, but which she could see now, rising in her mind, with the clarity of a prophecy: a flicker at the edge of a crowd, a rope, a lamp.

She said, in a very steady voice, "Are you going to tell?"

"Tell whom?"

"Anyone."

Perpetua looked at her for a long time.

It was an odd look. Not triumphant. Not cruel. If anything, it seemed to Ixara to contain a kind of weariness, the slow gray exhaustion of a person standing at the brink of a decision she has already made a hundred times.

"I had a sister," said Lady Strand abruptly.

Ixara blinked.

"Younger by six years. Rosamund. She was a clever girl, rather odd. She grew herbs. She sat up at night with the sick. She had a way with fevers." The parasol turned in her hand. "In the winter of 'sixty-three, a man called Osmund Crale, who was then a young priest of the Consistory and is now its Magister, came to our village to inquire about irregularities. He found my sister. He found her garden. He found, in her cottage, a book of recipes that she had copied from our grandmother." A tiny pause. "There was a trial. It was rather quick. They did it at Lantern Green, on the feast of St. Lucy, the shortest day. I was twenty-seven. I was in London. I received the letter on the following Tuesday."

"I am sorry."

"Yes. Everyone was." The hazel eyes were dry and bright. "It is a very odd thing, you know, to attend a funeral at which the guest of honor is a pillar of ash. One doesn't know where to look."

A cold, unwilling pity rose in Ixara's chest.

"So you will not tell."

"Oh, my dear, I tell everything." Lady Strand smiled again, but there was something in it that hadn't been there before, brittle, bright, ironic. "I am a woman of fashion. It is my profession. I tell Crale, at his request, whom I have seen and what they were wearing, and in return he allows me to keep my house and my pension and my hat. It is a perfectly respectable arrangement. It has served us both for eight years."

Ixara stared at her.

"I shall tell him that I met a pretty ward of Wynmore's in the area of the Hall," said Perpetua, "and that she looked rather lost and I sent her home. It's quite true. I shall tell him she seemed a simple, grateful girl." A pause. "I shall tell him she did not smell of anything at all."

"Why?"

"I couldn't say." She considered. "Perhaps I'm tired. Perhaps I wish to see what Garrick does. He is, after all, the only man in London who ever made me laugh." The corner of her mouth curved wryly. "Or perhaps I simply have a weakness for girls who weep at gratings."

She turned the parasol and offered Ixara her arm.

"Come. We shall walk out to the square together, as friends, and you shall let me put you in a hackney. And you shall never come here again, do you understand? Not to this alley. Not to this Hall. There are eyes in the walls."

"I cannot promise that."

"No." Lady Strand looked at her for a long moment. "No, I don't suppose you can."

They walked down the alley together, side by side, into the bright, loud noise of the square. A footman bowed. A lady in blue waved and mouthed a greeting. Perpetua waved back, laughing, charming, effortless, and Ixara walked beside her in a daze, and felt a hundred curious eyes slide over her and away.

At the curb, a hackney waited. Perpetua pressed a coin into the driver's hand and gave an address in Hartwell Square. She helped Ixara up the step with the exquisite care of one assisting an invalid.

"Mrs. Hatch will be at the butcher's until noon," she said, low and rapid, as the door swung shut. "Go in by the kitchen. Say you were taken faint. Do not tell him where you were. If he is a sensible man, he will know."

"Lady Strand—"

"Perpetua." The hazel eyes met hers through the window, quick and bright and unexpectedly grave. "I shall tell you one thing more, my dear, and then I shall go and take tea with the Duchess of Argyll, and be very, very amusing."

The hackney lurched. The wheels began to turn.

"In this city," said Perpetua Strand, "everyone wears a mask."

Her gloved fingers touched the pearls at her throat, and for an instant, the clever, painted, charming face stilled.

"The trick," she said, "is to choose your own."

The hackney bore Ixara away. Behind her, in the pale gold sunlight, the woman in dove-gray satin turned and walked back up the steps of the Meridian Hall, and the bronze doors swung wide, and swallowed her whole.