Swordpoint (13 page)

'It's just a rose. No note.'

Richard looked across the theatre to the nobleman who loved roses; but he was deep in conversation, and didn't look up.

There was plenty of time between the acts for the nobles to socialise in each other's boxes. Michael relinquished the pleasures of his friend for a talk that Bertram Rossillion seemed bent on having.

'Your friend,' Bertram said, 'Berowne...'

'He's a relation,' Michael answered the question. 'By marriage. On my mother's side. We've known each other forever.'

Bertram's soulful brown gaze slopped itself all over his face, with particular emphasis on the eyes. Michael stepped back, but Bertram came on. Michael said in an undertone; 'Tonight is bad for me, my dear. I'll be out late, and too tired when I come in.' He was going to Applethorpe's. Tiny creases appeared around Bertram's eyes, and his mouth pinched in the corners. 'I've missed you terribly,' Michael said, gazing back. 'You don't know how___'

'Look!' said Bertram, 'the duchess.'

She was entering one of the boxes across the way. Already her footmen were unfurling the Tremontaine banner. Her dark skirts billowed around her, and under a tiny hat crowned with ostrich plumes her fair curls tumbled, each in careful disorder.

'She's late if she's come to see the play,' Richard observed. All eyes were off them for the moment.

'She hasn't,' Alex answered gruffly. 'She's come to make trouble.' He stood at the back of the box, huddled into the corner by the door. His hands were tucked in his sleeves, making him look more than ever like a sulky black bird.

Richard looked at the tiny, elegant woman surrounded by her well-built edifice of clothes and manners. 'I wonder', he said, 'if I should go and see her?'

'You can see her perfectly well from here, she's taken care of that."

'I mean to talk to. Ferris is gone, he doesn't have to know I've done it. You're right, you know; I should find out what she thinks herself.'

He'd expected Alec to be pleased; after all, it was his misgivings Richard was trying to allay. But the tall man only shrugged. 'She hasn't invited you, Richard. And she's not going to admit to anything.' 'If I made it a condition of the job... ?' 'Oh, of course,' the light voice mocked angrily. 'If you make

Conditions. Why don't you ask her to do your laundry, as well? I'm telling you, stay away -'

A knock interrupted him. He flung open the door, so that it crashed against the wall. A footman in the Tremontaine swan livery filled the doorway. Alec dropped the doorlatch as though it had burnt him.

'The duchess's compliments,' the servant said to St Vier, 'and will you join her to take chocolate.'

Alec groaned. Richard had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. He glanced at Alec, but the scholar was once again trying to hunch himself into nonentity. 'I'll be delighted.' He looked around at the accumulated greenery. 'Should I take her some flowers?'

'It's an insult', Alec said hollowly, 'to the senders. Save them to throw at the actors.' 'All right. Are you coming?'

'No. Stay there for the last act, if she'll let you; you'll be close enough to tell if Jasperino really is wearing a wig.'

Richard began to follow the footman. 'Wait,' said Alec. He was twisting the ring on his forefinger. 'Should I wear the ruby?' St Vier asked. 'No.' Alec shook his head fiercely.

For a moment Richard broke away from the footman's presence. 'What's the matter?' Alec's nervousness was physically palpable to him. Something had undermined Alec's arrogance; he didn't even deny the charge. He retained just enough of his usual air to press his fingers to his brow in mockery of the acting. 'I have a headache. I'm going home.'

'I'll come with you.'

'And leave the duchess waiting? She probably wants to find out who your tailor is. Hurry up, or you'll miss the chocolate. Oh, and if there are any little iced cakes, get me one. Say it's for your parakeet or something. I am uncommonly fond of little iced cakes.'

Not long after he left the theatre Alec realised that he was probably being followed. At least, the same two men seemed to have been behind him for several turnings now. They were the demonstration swordsmen from outside the theatre. They weren't Riversiders, they couldn't be going his way to the Bridge. His heart was clanging like a blacksmith's anvil, but Alec refused to alter his pace. If they wanted the rings, he supposed they could have them. Richard or his friends could probably get them back.

He might still return to the theatre; lead them there by another route, and find Richard. He discarded the idea as soon as he'd had it. He wasn't going back. The shops and houses went by like images from another life. Inns and taverns passed, while his mouth grew steadily drier. It was not unlike the effects of poppy juice.

If he got as far as the Bridge, he might see other Riversiders who could help him, or at least tell Richard what had become of him. What was going to happen to him? They were letting him get far from the centre of the city, into the lonely area you had to cross to reach the Bridge. It would be violent, and extremely painful; all he'd ever imagined, and probably something he'd managed to leave out. He'd been waiting a long time for it, and now it was going to happen.

Now, the ground said, each time his boot-sole struck it. Now. He tried to vary the rhythm of his walk, to get it to stop. He managed to slow it down to a whisper, and in the shadow of a gateway they caught him.

He had time to say, 'You know, your swordplay would make a cat laugh'; and then he found that it was impossible not to struggle.

'They are all jealous,' the duchess said, nodding graciously at her peers across the theatre, 'because they are all cowards.'

Richard St Vier and the duchess were alone in the box, with the chaperonage of about five hundred spectators. It didn't bother him; he was intrigued with her portable silver chocolate set. A blue flame heated the water under a little steel-bottomed pot suspended over it on a chain. There was a silver whisk, and china cups with her arms on them.

'They're not as well equipped,' he answered her,

'They could have been. Not only cowards, but stupid.' It was all said in a pleasant, intimate manner that took the sting out of her words, as though they were not meant so much to denigrate the others as to establish the boundaries of a charmed circle that included only the duchess and himself. Alec did the same thing; much more abrasively, of course, and more sincerely; but the sense it gave Richard of belonging to an elite was the same.

'You might have brought your servant, he would have been welcome. Perhaps I failed to make that clear to Grayson.'

He smiled, realising she meant Alec. 'He's not my servant,' he said. 'I don't have one.'

'No?' She frowned delicately. With her postures and careful expressions, she was like a series of china figurines displayed along a chronological shelf. 'Then however do you manage those great townhouses down there?'

She might be teasing; but he told her anyway about the manors that had been turned into rooming houses, or brothels, or taverns, or those warrens for extended families whose generations moved slowly down floors, with the youngest always at the top.

She was enchanted with it. 'That would put you where, now...' looking at him critically '__in the upstairs ballroom perhaps, with room to practise-or have they turned that into the nursery?'

He smiled. 'I don't have family. Just rooms: an old bedroom and I think a music room, above a... laundress.'

'She must be very pleased to have such a lodger. I have wanted to tell you for some time now how much I admired your fight with Lynch - and poor de Maris, of course. Although I suppose he deserved what he got, jumping in to challenge you when it was already Lynch's fight. I imagine Master de Maris had tired of Lord Horn's service, and wanted the chance to prove to his party guests how employable he was.'

Richard considered the pretty lady with renewed respect. This was exactly his own estimation of de Maris's peculiar behaviour in the winter garden. Horn's house swordsman probably thought his lord didn't give him enough chance to show off, and he wasn't really needed as a guard; who would want to kill Horn? By killing St Vier he would have won himself an instant place back at the top of the swordsmen's roster. He should never have tried it.

'My lord Karleigh will be out of the picture for some time, I think.'

On the surface, it was a continuation of her compliment, assuming that Karleigh had fled because St Vier killed his champion. It was what everyone thought. But she seemed to be waiting for an answer - something in the posing of her hands, the cup held not-quite-touching the saucer... as though she knew that he could tell her more about the duke. He couldn't, really: he'd taken his payment and that was the end of it for him; but it meant she knew who his patron had been.

'I've never asked', he said evasively, 'why the duke and his opponent insisted on such secrecy for themselves, but still chose to have their fight in public. Of course I've honoured my patron's wishes.'

'It was an important fight,' she said; 'such are best well witnessed. And the duke is a vain man, as well as a quarrelsome one. He never told you what the fight was about, then?'

She left him little space for an ambiguous answer. 'He never told me anything,' he said truthfully.

'But now it may be coming clear. A political issue, worth a couple of swordsmen but not their patrons' lives. It put a healthy fear into Karleigh, but that may be wearing off. Lord Ferris will know when he returns from his trip south whether the duke stands in need of another sovereign dose.'

Did she want Halliday killed and Karleigh out of the way? It meant destroying two opponents, and leaving the field open for a third man __Ferris? The duchess hadn't named Halliday; if anything, she seemed to be defending him. Richard gave up: he didn't know enough about the nobles and their schemes this year to figure it out. But one thing still troubled him.

He looked at the duchess directly. 'I am already at your service.'

'Gallant,' the duchess chuckled. 'Are you really, now?'

She made him feel young - young, but very secure in the hands of someone who knew what she was about. He said broadly, to be sure, 'You know how to find me.'

'Do I?' she said with the same amusement.

'Well, your friends do,' he amended.

'Ah.' She seemed satisfied; and so, for the moment, was he. He hoped Alec would be too. Trumpets sounded for the play to begin again. 'Do stay,' said the duchess; 'you can get such a good view of the costumes from here. Some of the wigs are beyond belief.'

The swordsman whose tragedy it was lasted until the end. His revenge against the evil Duke consisted of a series of love letters from an unknown lady with the same initials as Filio's mother, whom the Duke fell in love with. The letters demand that the Duke do increasingly odious things to prove his devotion. After a colourful series of rapes, beheadings and one disinterment, even the most loyal of. Duke Filio's courtiers had amassed several reasons to kill him. The only nice person left onstage, a doctor from the singing madhouse, stated the opinion that the prognosis for the Duke's mental health was not good.

In the final act, the giant staircase again dominated the stage. The Duke, labouring under the promise that the lady of his affections would at last reveal herself to him at midnight, came to the bottommost step. As the bell once again tolled the hour, the figure of his sister, wrapped in her bloody cloak, appeared above him. Too unhinged to be adequately frightened, he muttered,

Nay, I'll not flee, but mount the tower of heaven

And from your chaste and softly smiling lips

Suck forth the secret of eternal life!

The Duke ran up the staircase, but suddenly the figure flung back its hood. To no one's surprise except the Duke's, it was the swordsman:

Not life, but death's cold secrets will you kiss

-Now please your mistress, let her give you joy of her.

Come, come, and bid farewell to all Earth's pleasures in one last ecstatic howl.

His gleaming sword plunged down from above into Filio's heart (leaving his own front completely unguarded, but affording a fine view of his gory clothes), and the Duke screamed, 'At last! It is the end!"

It wasn't, of course. The Duke had no final speech, but a crowd of courtiers came running on. Finding the Duke in the arms of a cloaked figure, presumably his mysterious lover, they shouted, 'Vengeance! Vengeance!' and fell upon the pair, hacking to bits the already dead Duke, and delivering to the swordsman his mortal wound. It left him strength for one last declamation:

Now is the trapper trapped, and in my blood

Steel strikes on steel, and kindles a great flame.

I burn, I rage, and shortly welcome death

That long has been my handmaid, now my spouse.

Are there no tears to put this fire out?

Only my own, and those I will not shed

So long as he regards me with his sanguine orbs.

We'll too soon be two skulls, and jest at grinning then,

But all our plays produce no single laugh

From lungs no sighs will ever fill again.

I hadn't planned on this - but hadn't planned

Beyond it, either. Things were clear enough:

I loved your sister, and I hated you,

Pursued you both and killed you. Now all's one.

Write Nothing on my tomb, that's all... I've done.

The swordsman was by then halfway up the staircase, where he died. While everyone was reacting to this, a nobleman rushed in to announce that a chimney sweep had discovered the Duke's secret diary, in which were lovingly detailed all his heinous crimes, beginning with his treatment of his sister. The people agreed that the swordsman was, in fact, a hero, and will be given a hero's funeral, interred next to Gratiana, while the Duke will be cast into a bottomless pit. The virtuous and amiable old counsellor, Yadso, will be called back from exile to become the next Duke of wherever it was. And that was the end.

The audience's applause seemed as much for the happy resolution as for the actors. As they took their bows the duchess observed to St Vier, 'In the end, you see, it all comes down to good government. There can be no state funeral for the hero without a state; and true lovers cannot meet on a staircase that hasn't been properly maintained. I'm sure Yadso will make an excellent duke.'