by Joseph Fink
“Henrik?” called out one of her fellow sailors, turning in confusion to find his friend gone. Rebekah crawled on her belly to the bar as the commander of the soldiers announced himself to the startled crowd.
“Let it be known,” the commander boomed. Conversation died out instantly, and everyone fidgeted in the dangerous silence. “Let it be known,” the soldier said again, “that her highness the Lady Nora of the royal house of Luftnarp was singularly disrespected while disembarking from her paid transportation to your filthy city. The penalty for insolence to royalty is death.”
None of the soldiers were among the men that Lady Nora had been traveling with earlier that day. Those had been shouting scarecrows, suitable for pushing a crowd around. But these men were skilled and dangerous. Rebekah, having wriggled her way into a little nook in the bar, began searching her bag for any disguise that could save her. The barkeep glanced down at her, the only one in the room who could see her, and she looked back with pleading eyes. He said nothing about her presence, and she silently thanked him for his kindness.
Her bag contained a bewilderment of costume elements. It was too unwieldy to carry about entire disguises, and her skill was such that she didn’t need them. Instead she carried bits of clothing, small props, wigs and false facial hair that could be assembled into some suggestion of a new person, a person then brought to irrefutable life by her performance. As quickly and neatly as she could, given the lack of mirrors and her awkward position, she altered herself to look like another barkeep.
“Fortunately for you lot,” the soldier continued, “Lady Nora is the soul of mercy. And so she has granted her pardon.”
The room, as one, began to breathe again. Rebekah didn’t pause at her work, rolling out from her nook and popping up from behind the bar, trying to sell through her posture the idea that she had been there the entire time, even though many soldiers saw her appear. Her ability to inhabit a truth was more convincing than their own wavering memories, and their eyes slid past her.
“As a result of this pardon, we will only behead one in three men in this room. Soldiers, gather them.”
There was an outcry and some desperate attempts to fight, but the soldiers were well armed and utterly ruthless, and even before the crowd was gathered, already several men lay dead. One of the soldiers eyed the two barkeeps, but the commander waved him away.
“Not them,” he said. “The sailors.”
And so Rebekah was saved, but still she had to stand and watch. The soldiers were true to their word, and they were very efficient.
Having finished her story, she slumped back onto the attic floor, futilely closing her eyes against the memory.
“Thanks to the Lord that you are safe,” said Lora.
“Yes, I would have been heartbroken,” said André.
I said nothing, only held her hand, felt relief with each pulse of her heart. Finally I spoke.
“Who in the hell,” I said, “is this Lady Nora of Luftnarp?”
3
After the stern face of the North Sea it was a relief to return to the Mediterranean.
The way was dangerous because of the clashes between the Napoleonic army and the ragtag forces of the Green and White uprising. The war had started in a small region of Luftnarp where a group of peasants and craftsmen, outraged at the blatant thieving by the local lord from their guilds and fields, had formed a council to present their complaints formally to King Torrid IV. The King’s advisor, Lord Fullbright, a kind man, had advised some swift show of justice, to demonstrate that the order of society was for the good of all, but the local lord in that region was a boyhood friend of Torrid, and so with some polite smiles and murmurs of appropriate action, the complaint was shunted aside.
Unfortunately for the King, the peasants could smell bullshit from all the way down in the fields, and so they just went and murdered the lord, who had been so confident in his safety that he had not bothered to use his ill-gotten gains on any real security. Even as the peasants pounded down his door, the regional lord sat smirking in an utter confidence that lasted the same few minutes the rest of him did. Their bloodlust and their sense of justice risen, the small army of peasants marched off to see if their neighbors had any problems with the nobility, which in fact they did. Soon the message and the methods of their army were spreading across the continent. It was said that their revolution spread as quickly as wildflowers and as hot as fire, and so they gradually became known by their colors: the Green, for the green of rapidly growing plants, and the White, for the pure heat of the flame.
The Green and the White from the east had met Napoleon’s growing empire from the west, and soon the whole continent was roiling. A traveler such as I was sure to wear clothes that did not have any element of green or white, lest there be any excuse for my rapid execution. A war is only ever good for business, and so we of The Duke’s Own slipped in and out of the cracks of this righteous uprising of the workers, making money where there was some to be made.
Soon I made it to the coast of Spain. It was brutally hot that summer in Barcelona, and so every window and door was left open, and that meant a constant cacophony was a trade-off for whatever breezes managed to make their way through the winding backstreets. An old woman stooped over the front step of Edmond’s house, passing a frayed straw broom across it slowly.
“Good day, Señora Bover,” I called. “You should be resting until the evening. It’s so hot now.”
She shrugged off my concern. “It’ll be hot in the evening too. How is our girl, back from rolling up kings and emperors like a rug?”
“Tired,” I said, honestly.
“We are all always tired,” she said. “But we are all always working.”
I laughed affectionately and passed her on my way up the stairs, three flights, to the door of the man who saved my life. Edmond called me in on my first knock. He had certainly heard me talking through the window, but made a show of fussy surprise from his desk.
“Oh, don’t get up for me old man,” I teased. “I’d hate to be what finally kills you.”
He put a hand over his heart to indicate the depth of the wound I had dealt and then sprang up with an energy younger than his years and swept me into a hug.
“I worry so much when you’re off doing a job,” he said into my shoulder. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you too.”
“Maybe you should stop giving me these jobs,” I said, as we disconnected and settled into chairs on either side of his desk, which was, as always, an eruption of papers and candles just this side of a disastrous fire.
“Ah, if you didn’t get your crimes from me, you’d have to get them on the street. And my crimes are far more interesting.”
After the Order of the Labyrinth had killed my father and burned his estate, Edmond and I had fled to a representative of The Duke’s Own he had been in contact with, a gentleman of certain affiliations who kept an office on a narrow canal in Amsterdam. What I remember most are the sounds. The guttering cough of the candles caught in the draft. The soft splash of cold and clouded water outside, so different from the warm and clear water I had known my whole life. The heavy hiss from the largest man’s nostrils every time he breathed out. The dark purr of the smallest man’s voice as he put pause to Edmond’s explanation and turned to me. “And who do we have here?” he had said. I trembled, but held his eyes. That moment of eye contact, where I looked back afraid but steady, was the start of my association with the organization. Everything that came after was a formality.
The more time I spent in the company of thieves and murderers, the more natural it became to me. This was where I belonged. I was good at this, and they grew to rely on me. I rarely thought of Albert, and our sunny days swimming in a secluded cove. I even more rarely thought about my father, because the hurt was so fresh that letting it in felt like poking at a bleeding wound. I trained myself to separate from the pain, in order to become more efficient at what was keeping us alive.
But back to
a sunny day in Spain.
“About Hamburg,” I said.
“I heard.” Edmond frowned. “Dreadful.”
“What do you know about this Lady Nora?”
“A cruel noble.” He sighed. “My spies in her court say that she has a harsh reputation, even by the standard of nobility.” Edmond, with his unintimidating presence but crafty mind, had quickly found his place organizing the spy rings of The Duke’s Own. To make money off the troubles of royalty, one needs to know what was going on with the royalty, and so any noble of a certain stature had at least a few and probably several servants of The Duke’s Own on their staff, and many of those reported in some way to Edmond or his underlings.
“There are limits even to a spymaster’s knowledge,” he said. “If I had known she was on that ship, I would never have sent your crew anywhere near her.”
“I don’t need protecting,” I said with the absolute certainty of someone who probably does. “And now I’m interested in her.”
“We don’t need to be interested in anything,” he said. “We’re criminals. We steal. We smuggle. We collect gold. That is the goal.”
“That is your goal,” I said. “My goal is different.”
He threw up his hands. “The Order of the Labyrinth. Haven’t we learned enough to stay away from them?”
“They haven’t learned enough to stay away from me.” I saw the same terrible day repeat for me every time I closed my eyes. Memory lives inside the eyelids.
“I know. You have your plan,” he groaned. “Impress the Order of the Labyrinth so much that they invite you to join, and then destroy them from the inside as an act of grand revenge. But have you considered what your father would want for you? And god forbid I mention so humble and meaningless a consideration as my own wishes for you? That you live a long and fantastic life? Can’t the length and happiness of your life serve as revenge enough?”
I looked in the eyes of this man who had acted as my father since my father died. “It could,” I said. But what I thought, and I hated myself for thinking it, was: What does it matter anymore what my father would have wanted?
4
From Barcelona, I made my way on horseback to Paris, the heart of Napoleon’s empire. He had, through a combination of cruel imperial efficiency and the wealth expropriated from the lands he had conquered, managed to mostly restore the city from the liberated turmoil of the revolution, and now it was safely back to a thriving metropolis of suffocating order and brutal social stratification. A grand arch had been commissioned, a crown upon the head of that grand old lady the Champs-Élysées, but the construction had only just begun. In the meantime, a wooden and canvas version of the arch had been put on the site, a temporary and fragile approximation of grandeur, as good a monument to Napoleon’s reign as any.
I went directly from the town gate to a towering structure on Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, the family home of one André du Lièvre.
André welcomed me at the door, beaming and tossing his hellos like they were flowers to adoring crowds. He had been raised in a merchant family that had done very well for itself during the early days of Napoleon’s rise, and had established itself as a member of the post-revolution aristocracy, a less dangerous social status in Paris than it had been a few decades before.
The family must have been pleased to have a baby as beautiful as André, who became a child as beautiful as André, who became a man as beautiful as André. Early in his life, they introduced him to the work of negotiating and glad-handing with clients, and he took to it like beauty takes to a mirror, making others more charming as they reflected his charm back at him. When it came time for him to start courting, the consensus was that he had his pick of Paris, as long as he picked from the few correct families of course. After all, what woman would not want to be with a man of his panache and wealth? But André had no interest in women, which led to worried murmurs until it became clear that André did not have any interest in men either. André found people exciting, and wonderful to be friends with, and he had no interest in romance with anyone. This was not an absence from his life and it was nothing he regretted for a single breezy, smiling moment. His life was not better or worse for who he was, his life was the only version of himself he could be.
Unfortunately his family was less than understanding of his disinterest in marriage, which for them was a necessary social move and had nothing to do with their son’s interest or lack of interest in romance. They pressured him constantly, until he decided that it would be easier if he got into business on his own. Seeking funding, and needing it quickly, he got himself predictably entangled with The Duke’s Own. Being a low priority for their attention, they sent me, still only a few years past being a child. A test, perhaps. He tried to charm me, of course, but I had too much ambition to be charmed. Fortunately for him, I saw his usefulness, and instead of removing the digits of his hands one by one, the usual method for wringing coins out of a broke man, I offered him a job, which he eagerly accepted. While the start of our partnership might have been under duress, André took to a life of crime with absolute enthusiasm and glee. He found it thrilling, and I don’t think I could have convinced him to quit even if I offered more gold than he could spend, or threatened him with every lowlife for hire in the City of Lights.
“Welcome! Welcome!” he boomed as I entered the home. His family, thinking he had in fact successfully started a merchant business, had grudgingly accepted him back in their lives, and their massive house in Paris was a convenient and secure place to meet. “We’ve all been waiting for you.” He put his arm around my shoulder and swept me through the entrance hall.
Neither of us noticed the man in a well-worn soldier’s uniform across the street, watching me enter, spitting on the ground, and slipping around the corner to let his superiors know I had arrived.
André led me up through the grand entranceway to the more modest bedrooms upstairs, the comforts of a family that had once held a lower station, and so preferred, in privacy, a simpler life. Still, each piece of furniture, each item on each shelf, was perfectly crafted and lovingly chosen. They valued what they had with the full sincerity and insecurity of a family pretending to have a place in life they didn’t quite believe they deserved.
In his childhood bedroom, the other two members of our crew waited. Lora was stretched out on a divan at the base of the bed, her legs like two fallen trees, and her massive arms flung over her head. She was the picture of carefree relaxation. Rebekah, on the other hand, stood in the corner, where there was the least light. She was never in her element when she had to be herself. She much preferred to be someone else.
André’s father, a hard-faced but kind man named Gilbert, waved away the servants and served us a platter of expensive fruit carted in from Provence. Gilbert had always had a soft spot for André, even if the family’s place in society always had to come first. He didn’t approve of André’s new life, just as he didn’t approve of André’s complete lack of interest in even the appearance of courtship, but he had come to a place of accepting André’s happiness, and our group of friends made his son happy. Gilbert nodded his head at us silently, turned, stopped to fix a silver figurine on the shelf that was slightly askew, checked to make sure all other perfect objects were in perfect order, then left the room.
“Affairs certainly seem better here than the last time we visited,” Lora boomed.
“Better, worse,” André said. “They’re family.” He smiled and waved us to the food. “Oh Rebekah, come out of that corner,” he said with a deep fondness. “If it helps you may put on a false mustache before eating.”
She joined us without speaking. She never much liked to talk without her deep repertoire of put-on voices and accents. Whenever she had to, she spoke softly in an accent that sounded of the shtetl, of forest and snow.
We talked and ate, enjoying a restful moment in our hectic lives right up until the soldiers broke down the front door downstairs.
Shouting and screami
ng. The sound of many boots. Looking out the window I saw a small army gathered in the street. I recognized the coat of arms on their chests, two roses crossed over a growling dog. I had seen that same coat of arms on men in Hamburg only a few weeks before.
“It’s Lady Nora’s men,” I said.
“Why in the world was she looking for us?” André asked, a more than reasonable question at a perhaps unreasonable time. He was preparing to fling himself out the door and take on all of the Lady’s men in order to protect his family, but it was my job to recognize a hopeless cause when there was one.
We had to get out of this bedroom alive. Only then could we worry about protecting anyone else.
“Rebekah, meet us outside. Lora, André, to the window.” Rebekah nodded. As always, she would remake herself into whatever identity was needed to slip out of the situation. She rummaged through her bag of disguises as she ran from the room. Meanwhile we went out the window, shuffling along the narrow stone of a decorative ledge, some stories above the neighbor’s roof. The wind was fierce, and my shoes felt ludicrously slippery. Why had I worn such impractical shoes? I could almost hear Edmond in my head: A good thief is always ready for a trip out the window or up the chimney. Well, I wasn’t ready, but here I was anyway.
Then my foot slipped.
I was upside down four stories above the streets of Paris, swinging like a clock’s pendulum as Lora held onto my ankles with one hand and the frame of the window with the other.
“I have you,” she said.
“Aaaaah,” I replied.
I heard the boots of the men reaching our floor, and then bedroom door after bedroom door kicked down. They would find us soon. Lora and I made eye contact, her sweaty face upside down from my dangling view. The door to André’s room crashed open.