The Mercury Waltz (26 page)

Outside the triangulated corner sends Haden splashing one way, down the avenue toward Minerva and the office of Martin Eig, and Istvan on to several errands, in narrow little shops where the owners know him by names older than Hilaire or Dieudonne, shops that sell items not displayed upon the counters, oddments for jesters and the friends of jesters and thieves, securing what he needs before heading back to the Mercury—

—where Tilde has ceased to wait for Frédéric unarrived, without him she has tidied the devil’s locks and made the angel’s halo, that angel with refurbished wings and a fine new mechanism at his back; both of whom now seem to gaze upon her with confidantes’ sympathy, as if they can guess what will happen next, what she can wait no longer to do. Herself all spiffed and tidied, in starched hat and brown work dress—not the blue wool, she cannot fit anymore into the blue wool—and with the cameo retrieved from her sleeve and tied carefully about her throat, the queen’s white stare, the sky-blue tulle more faded than before; it scratches her skin. All is as carefully arranged at the backstage table, hot pot and china cup and shiny spoon, the mineral water and matches, the table set for Sir as he returns, smelling of whiskey, a great darkness in his eyes that has little to do with how little he sleeps, though she knows he is not sleeping, she can hear him up and pacing while she herself lies awake into the dawn.

Now “Sir will take chocolate,” she says, as he wipes the rain from his spectacles. “
Šálek cokolády.
”

Rupert smiles his thanks, sits and sips; he smiles again. “No one makes it as well as you do, Tilde. Are you glad that you came to us, from that café?” the question posed so seriously that she almost laughs: Glad? To be here, mistress of this place with him, with them? Since the days when Tanti was an infant, she has not had a family nor a home; now she does, if only she may keep them, so “Yes,” she says, minutely repositioning the spoon. “That skinflint worked us hard and paid us half of nothing, and the mice were big as my fist. But Die Welt was better than when I first came—” her story all prepared to tell, seamstress and sweeper-girl, the dance academy and Paris, the tale of a girl who takes care of herself—

—but all at once she cannot speak for thinking of the creeper, faceless and furtive to make what grows inside her, what she finally tells to Rupert without a word: reaching for his hand, still warm from the chocolate cup, she puts it to her sloping belly, holds it there as his startled gaze questions, then sharpens, then “A child?” Rupert asks; his voice is hard. “Whose child?” Seeing her, how has he not seen it before? that little body like a seedpod, she must be more than halfway gone. All that casting up in the mornings, and the fainting—“Tilde, answer me. Who did this to you?”

“Sir.” Tears brim in her eyes, as blue as glass. “Sir, I am not a whore.”

“Oh Jesu,” rising from the chair so swiftly he spills the chocolate, reaching to grasp her arm—and she flinches, a flinch Rupert marks with a wince of his own as “Sir,” she gasps, “I swear to you—I never,
never—
”

“Stop that. Tell me who—”

—but now all she can do is cry, hands to her face against the sudden soundless torrent: perhaps it is all her tears at once, a young lifetime’s tears for the father left forever at the table, the mother whom she will never see again, for Tanti and Jean and the constable’s clout in the Park and the dry, wheaty taste of the stolen buns; perhaps even for herself,
folle-farine
with her skirts flipped up over her head by the one who made her what she never thought to be, a girl just like Annabell, a girl looking to a man to shelter a child not his own so “Just let me have it here,” Tilde sobs, “and I’ll go. I’ll take it and go, you’ll never have to—”

“Listen!” so sharply that she stops, hiccupping and distressed and “You’ll go nowhere,” Rupert says; he tugs off the skewed Infanta’s hat, he gathers her under his arm. “You’ll stay right here, you’ll have what you need, we’ll get a girl in to help you—”
have it here,
oh Jesu, yes, some woman will need to deal with
that.
“Whatever you need, it will be fine, do you hear? For you and your child, it will all be fine. Don’t cry.”

He strokes her hair, she stands eyes-closed beneath his arm, the wool of his coat warm against her cheek, the smells of tobacco and rain. Finally she pulls away to wipe her blotched face with the apron, while he swabs at the spilled chocolate; silence rests between them until “The man,” Tilde’s voice thick and small, “the one who… He came at me from behind, in an alley down by the fishmongers’ stalls. I never saw his face.”

“I’ll hope,” says Rupert, “to see his face one day.—All right, now?” as she nods, resuming with dignity her hat, reaching to retrieve from him the towel—“Sir will take another cup”—on the widening curve of a smile, a smile of relief so vast and deep it is almost unmooring: she feels light enough to float, to fly, like a bird homing back to its roost. Perhaps her child feels it, too, for it moves inside her then, a little rolling twitch, for the very first time.

Now the door swings opens, a wet and throaty wind to carry with it Istvan, tossing down the soaked bowler, saluting them both: “Noah sends his kind regards, and asks if you would care for a deck chair.” Rupert, frowning, turns from the table for the stairs, Istvan determined to follow until “Wait,” Tilde says, putting herself in his path, a warding hand to his arm. “Better to leave be, just now—”

“Little girl,” cold, “never tell me how to speak to him,” stepping rapid after Rupert, into their bedchamber a half-pace behind—though saying nothing once there, only turning up the gaslight, pulling off his tie, rifling through the wardrobe for the evening’s work ahead. From the corner of his eye he sees Rupert readying the razor and mirror, Rupert again so bristled and poorly shaven since he has not allowed Istvan to do it for him these last few weeks, will not allow it now as “I only noticed,” Istvan says coolly, “that you look a proper tramp,” Rupert taking back the soap brush with perhaps more violence than is necessary. “I said I’d be your barber, didn’t I?”

“Did you also ‘notice’ that Tilde’s to have a child?” Rupert takes off his spectacles, stares at the little mirror in the wavering light, Istvan’s face a watching blur behind. “May be your backdoor spy can find the father. And that newspaper lad seems to live here, now—is that your doing? Like your Juliet boy?”

“No worries for the ‘Juliet boy’—he’s gone, he’s dead. And you’ve fucking lathered the floor, you might want to—”

“Dead? How?”

“What difference?” brisk and brutal, head cocked to one side. “Where do
you
go, that’s the question I want answered, what the fuck passes with you since—”

“Benjamin de Metz,” says Rupert, and in those words, that name, is everything that follows: the
Snow Youth
and the Garden of Eden, electric lights and stout doors and “We could do worse,” Rupert says, not looking at Istvan, staring into the mirror as if it is a window to another, more perfect world. “It’s made for us, he said, it would be a gift—”

“A gift?” aghast. “Like a noose is a gift to the neck. And already we’ve this place, why would you even consider—”

“There’s safety there, beneath that roof, that’s why! Tilde, and your young fellows—no one would ever touch them there, no constables or Commission or—”

“And who’ll touch you, Mouse? Is that it, has the Happy Prince finally grown man enough to—”

“Stop.”

“You go there, you bide there, and he sings you some siren song of patronage, yeah? The fucking quality! Have you mellowed, or can you miss it all, coddling ‘Belle’ and all the pretty flowers and—”

“Oh, mock, messire, you’ve done your share of hobnobbing, you’re the one who hauled me into it! And you took her deathbed money quick enough!”

Silence then, a dreadful precipice silence, the silver mantel clock ticks inexorable as Time: then “I always took their money,” Istvan’s face very pale, a pallor even Rupert has never seen before. “I took what they had and what I wanted, I took until there was nothing left or until I grew weary in the taking. Because they could give me nothing. Not like you.”

And as Rupert fumbles for a towel, Istvan rips coat and hat and florid gold cravat from the wardrobe, turns on his heel at the door to kiss his fist in awful, acid gesture, past Rupert’s cry—“Come back here! Come back, or don’t at all!”—to storm both flights, disregarding Tilde, who stands taut, hands pressed to lips, as he snatches up Mr. Castor and a long cape, slams the door behind like doomsday thunder, and is gone; then all is still.

Upstairs, in the echo of that thunder, Rupert with shaking hands picks up, again, the shaving brush, takes a ragged breath to calm himself; yet when steel touches skin there is stinging, there is blood, a red line on his jaw as if from a footpad’s sticker. Still shaking, he drops the razor to the jumble of the dressing-table, between the soapy bowl and the miniature of desert-red morocco, to stare at the room around him as if he has never seen it before: purplish ferns and stately drapery, narrow windowside cot, rosewood bed and satin coverlet, Istvan’s jacket flung atop it with the white rose
boutonnière.

Cards are neutral, every gambler knows this, or learns it later as sadder knowledge; cards speak only for themselves. Even cards like Tilde’s, the leaping hares and solemn priests and trumps like Hangs-a-man, all use exclusively their own language, not careless but uncaring of decipherment:
tolle lege,
and let him understand who will.

If one were to lay as a spread this night of competition, first frame it with the rain still falling past the unseen sunset, pooling in the gutters, running down the greenish copper roofs; let it flood the Cemetery like spilled lager, bedraggle near to drowning the Lady’s Garden, set the gypsies cursing past their wheel in the Park, all fires doused. See it swamp the shoes of the trudging scholars and daily maids, splatter the archbishop as he alights from a cab, splash the gowns of those arrived at the de Vries townhouse itself like a jewel beneath the sea, lit and glowing with flickering doorside torchieres, decked with birds-of-paradise and peacock feathers, as the servants fill the towering glass fountains—champagne, and black Turkish wine—and ready the quail croquettes and stewed hearts of palm. Deal up like pip cards the rigid, hope-filled, overdressed Cowtans, and stolid Gilbert Fairgrieve, and Alban Cockrill sweating in a hired tailcoat with prop top hat; place with them at the lesser of the tables Edgar Rue, to hold court with the ladies at his either sides, a charming if inconsequential deuce; and Tibor Banek, a would-be Jack quite angry at this placement, his punishment for speaking out of turn.

Next to him sits Martin Eig in black with an unaccustomed splash of color, a new cravat as green as grass; call him a Jack of Maces, if there were such a suit, or an incipient Lord of Crowns, for ever since the
Snow Youth
riot he has been exulting: Who now can fail to see the rottenness of the old guard, their irrelevancy, their inability to control even an upstart little theatre? The wheel is turning for good this time, soon everyone will know it. Let his heated gaze roam that gorgeous room and its varied and heedless guests—though not all are heedless; Tibor Banek is not, nor the mayor, nor Morris Robb of the bank—but return, again and again, to the self-contained Queen of Flowers, Christobel in her black and green emeralds in such happy match to his own attire. Yet let her gathered gaze less ignore than fully fail to mark his: he is not a signifying card, she does not count him in her hand at all.

Leave an empty place, then, next to that Queen, the spot where her King should be but is not; call Benjamin de Metz the Lord of Flowers, as he stands alone in the lobby of the Garden of Eden, his eyes half closed to breathe in the scent of roses, white roses everywhere, like a greenhouse or a garden path. He is ravished by memories: of a harlequin mask, a midnight café, and a cab ride, the taste of whiskey tasted from the lips of the man he loves; his blood surges, he turns the ring around and around on his finger, he counts the minutes as they pass. Outside, in the rain, waits his own Knave or Jack, Emory, who adores his master the way the sheath adores the knife; with his arms crossed, hands tucked into sleeves, he waits upon the advent of a visitor, call that man the King of Staves, that theatre man of no birth or fortune or lasting account, who is nonetheless his master’s unaccountable lord of hearts. Emory has learned all there is to know about that King and his own Jack, the heartless, stateless, laughing puppeteer; and that one’s Jack, too, the slippery St.-Mary whose drugging lily-boy Herr de Vries has used and discarded; and if Emory does not yet conflate Frédéric Blum with this company, or the servant Tilde who is not a servant, he will before too many hours have passed.

Now Herr and Frau de Vries are dealt their places, hand on arm as a queen entering with a king, a Lord and Queen of Crowns certainly, though both tonight are tarnished: he furious at the unexplained, untoward absence of Benjamin de Metz, that puppy scampering off this night of all nights, to pleasure himself in some unknown way; and she pouting at her secondary position to Christobel de Metz, who has tried, this night of all nights, to dress
à la mode
,
à la Parisienne,
so unsuitable to that mare’s face and those emeralds, emeralds fit for an empress that would suit Frau de Vries so entirely! When these two are finally seated, the other guests applaud; now the puffing philharmonia raises their collective bow for a medley composed especially for the occasion, “A Meditation on Arden,” as
Twelfth Night
was the maestro’s inspiration for this evening honoring the theatre.

The next cards to last are dealt out in darkness, two foxy Jacks to slip bowing through the servants’ way, a third small figure unseen between them like the ace in the hole: Haden in bowler and blood-red stripes, Istvan smiling above his bright cravat, Mr. Castor a knobby hunchback beneath the cloak: they are the evening’s jolly entertainment, Frau de Metz herself has invited them, look! at the rose-stamped stationery, at the mercilessly pleasant smile, at the yellow gaze that blinks so decorously as it marks, marks, marks every door, every window, every hidey-hole, every spot where two men in a pinch might make a bolt. If Haden’s face is known to several of the servants, if one even thinks to say so— “An’t that the feller who deals?”—he is corrected at once: “They’re the
players,
slackwit. Now help me move this trolley.” The two men disappear past the kitchens to a little serving-pantry, an entryway that opens directly to the banquet hall, Haden leading, Istvan whisking out Mr. Castor as they go; now the spread is almost complete, for these bring the necessary tension to the table, as expert gamblers always do, and seed chaos, as Taroc always requires; for without chance, what chance is there of any real truth or its telling?