Arden recalled Mr Justinian’s tale, of the woman dragged out to the islands and wedded in the terrible, brutal ways. Of her return to Vigil bloodied, bruised … and married. Suddenly a piece of the puzzle fell in to place.
‘I take it the deepwater folk didn’t accept her at all.’
‘If I hadn’t wedded Bellis, they’d have killed her. Fed her to the sea and maris anguis, the great serpent. But I meant my vows when I gave Bellis my name. I didn’t take them lightly. But though she is protected now, like I said, I cannot be with her. Since my family … since they died I am no longer welcome back to my ancestral lands. I am a Riven in name only. It is a strong name, but I wear it in sufferance.’
So something had happened out there beyond the storm and in the islands where the monstrosities were venerated as gods, but of it Mr Riven would not elaborate further. Some horror on the Deepwater Night, when the abyssal King of the Abyss came up and stole away a woman for a wife.
‘I’m sorry if the rumours about our marriage were troublesome, Mx Beacon.’
‘Oh, I tried not to listen to them.’
‘We never consummated our wedding,’ he continued hesitantly, as if the reality needed softening, and evidence of him not doing Bellis harm.
Arden stilled again. Jealousy and envy only worked had it the scaffold of a coveted thing. In a blink Mr Riven had changed the rules. ‘Not consummated … you mean, you and Bellis … not ever?’
Mr Riven shook his head. ‘Our marriage was so sudden. The time was not right so soon after the ritual – we never discussed making it a union of the flesh and in the end, the time never came for us. She was, she was poorly in spirit. The threat of the Order was a great strain on her.’
‘I’m quite … I’m quite stunned.’
‘Why?’
Arden struggled to reply. How could she articulate loneliness and monkish yearnings, the flesh which burned through her fire-aligned blood, the whisper of flame in her mind? How could she tell this man that he’d provided the face for her ruminations in the bleak and endless nights, and even now if he was to ask, she would say yes, yes, and take him into her embrace at once?
‘I thought you might have been with her that way. Because you loved her.’
He lay down, adjusted his head on the tassel-fringed cushion, looked up at the ceiling. ‘She no longer needs me. Nobody will dare touch her, and that is why I can confidently say I will not do as the Lions ask tonight.’
‘I’m still worried, Mr Riven.’
‘Of what?’
‘That I might have stumbled into a bigger theatre than just encouraging the pair of you to sail off to your happy ending. The Eugenics Society never lets any endowed child stay in Fiction. Mr Lindsay spoke words of care and gentleness, letting her mature at home, but I don’t believe him, not one inch! The moment her talent was revealed, she’d have been sent to Lyonne, sick mother needing care or Mr Harrow forbidding her or not.’
The wounded look came back, and this time interlaced with fear. ‘There are always exceptions.’
‘What exceptions? Tell me! I am completely jealous.’
The gramophone stilled. The room grew quiet, and the perfumes stifling.
‘You would not want what Bellis had.’
‘What do you mean, sanguis petrae is a golden – oh!’
In her distraction she’d let the wine glass fall out of her hand. Without waiting, Mr Riven rolled off the couch and picked the goblet from the floor, wiped the rug and the hem of Arden’s dress with the old Baron’s silk handkerchief – and then stilled as he realized where he was, looking up at her, his hot blue eyes darkening the same way they had when he’d seen her on that pebble beach, clothed in scraps of gold.
With an anxious swallow, he stood up and put the glass away. ‘Enough wine for you tonight, perhaps. Now you need not worry about the Lions, Mx Beacon. Bellis certainly would not.’
The room was warm. Arden stood up and examined her skirts. The feathered dress beneath, all silks and softness, remained intact, despite the night they’d spent.
Mr Riven watched her all the while. Another expression came over him now, and this one not so rigid and disciplined. If Bellis was an object of worship, then Arden was some other inarticulable manifestation altogether – something unfamiliar and intriguing.
She blurted, ‘You speak pretty words of friendship and duty and risking your life to marry her before she got turned into serpent food … but did you ever desire her like a grown man?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said hesitantly. ‘It would be demeaning to think of her in that way.’
An odd rebellion came over her then, against the Lions who would have her chase the jewel of love and an independent life. She wanted to remove the dress, have Mr Riven behold her naked body, invite him to touch her. This man, who belonged to another, was a man more forbidden than Mr Castile ever had been. Oh, but the room was hot, or maybe she was hot, a furnace banked and under pressure. She fleetingly imagined him aroused, wanting her, and the relief he would bring in all his maleness, his scent, his body tender and coarse at the same time.
If he noticed her mood he made no sign of it, turning over on the chaise. ‘If I snore,’ Mr Riven gruffed, ‘you are welcome to throw a shoe in my direction.’
He grabbed the end of a crocheted throw, rolled over and turned away. Arden, abandoned, watched the coke-flame flicker in the grate, and took far longer to sleep.
19
Vigil in the morning
Vigil in the morning became an exceptionally sorry place, dank and dreary, with the sulphurous smell of coal and the odour of the night-soilman’s cart. Mr Riven woke early, at the first ray of light though a tiny window set into the sloping ceiling.
‘How are you getting home?’ he asked, as she stirred on the bed. Arden squinted into the grey dawn, pulled the coverlet to her chin.
‘Heavens. I hadn’t thought. I’ll need to hire David Modhi to take me back.’
‘Don’t bother. I’m heading in your direction. I can pull my boat up to the pier if you don’t mind the walk.’
‘Well, that makes you handy indeed.’
That made him smile, and his face, normally so hard and flinty, softened about his eyes.
Arden dressed behind the room divider and despaired at the stained satin of her formerly pretty blue shoes. She had not slept well. Mr Riven had not snored, but the thought of him nearby had been a terrible distraction. She had hoped to escape and dream of anyone else – if not Richard, then maybe one of her first sweethearts – but Mr Riven had persistently slid into that place.
How disrespectful you should think this way, her heart whispered. He is both married and a gentleman. A hero even, assisting his wife in escaping from the Lions and the deepwater savages.
‘We should thank Fionna for her hospitality,’ Arden said when she emerged from behind the screen. ‘I hate taking off without a polite gesture.’
‘That guinea you left on the mantelpiece will be the best thanks you can give her, along with the extra hour sleeping in,’ Mr Riven said. He opened the door and ushered Arden out onto the landing, before walking down the stairs first so he might help her over the two missing ones at the bottom. At the courtyard he added, ‘Better than rag-paper dollars. Anyhow, she won’t be up until noon. We’ll be back on the promontory before—’
‘So, the old bitch Betsey was right.’
Mr Riven halted suddenly at the male voice. Trapped behind him, Arden had only the view of his shoulder blades, but previous meetings had made her more than familiar with the voice’s owner.
‘Well, what do you know, lads? The mongrel had time to stop at the whores to wet his pecker before leaving. Shaved, too.’
‘Let me pass, Alasdair,’ Mr Riven said. ‘I do not wish to argue with you.’
Arden squeezed out from behind Mr Riven. Mr Harrow stood in front of them, grinning broadly. His two deputies, very much the worse for wear. A third deputy lingered nearby, this one newly minted by the shiny pewter
star on his shabby coat lapel. Gregor Tallwater, probably trying to earn an honest coin. Altogether, they made a crowd of the little outside yard. The skull-grin on Mr Harrow’s face faded as soon as he saw Arden.
‘Lightmistress? What are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you the same thing, Postmaster.’
‘I have come to arrest this reprobate for assaulting my men. Best you step aside now, Guildswoman.’
‘No,’ Arden said. ‘Best you step aside. I do not take kindly to threats upon my person or the people of my acquaintance.’
With that she took Mr Riven’s hand in her own.
He resisted for a few seconds, but she squeezed hard with caution until her coin hurt. Flicked out with a little finger so it might touch the heel of his hand. An obscure signal of the docks, but if he’d had any experience in prison hulks and other places of ill-repute, he would know what such a secret sign meant.
Trust me. Follow my lead.
‘Why do you come here with false accusations?’ she continued. ‘Mr Riven was never at the Justinian residence, and has been with me all night.’
‘You left the Manse with him. Witnesses saw you leave. Which means he consorted at the Manse with you during the Master’s Ball.’
‘I certainly did not leave or consort with Mr Riven in the Manse. I left with Mr Castile, a friend and chaperone. Then I came here to the Black Rosette to spend time with my … lover.’
Beside her, Mr Riven tensed. Mr Harrow swallowed, affected disgust.
‘Lies. My men arrested this fellow in the guest house. He got away. Clearly with your help.’
‘You mean, Mr Justinian’s pleasure house. A room stocked with all manner of drugs and recreational pharmaceuticals? These men here, still so inebriated they can barely see as much as when I stumbled across them last night, now concoct a story so they may excuse whatever general shambles they may have caused in their carousing? Why, you can ask any of these so-called “whores” to vouch for our presence here all night.’
Mr Harrow bared his teeth like a cremelo highland ape, and his wispy yellow hair crackled with his rage. The sorry deputies cowered.
‘You think you can cover for this monster, Lightmistress? You think your succumbing to his depravity without hurt is a privileged game for you blooded folk?’
Mr Riven squeezed Arden’s hand so hard she nearly cried out from it. But she knew what Riven meant. The Postmaster’s invective was mere talk: Mr Harrow was a man grieving, lashing out. Let him vent, let him direct his anger to her, and then be on his way. If Mr Riven fought them, he would go to prison, and to the hulks and to his death.
In a tempest of bitterness Mr Harrow ranted at Arden, his eyes wild when he saw her silent. ‘Does it give you perverted pleasure, when he ploughs your furrows with the same tool he used to rape my daughter and take her maidenhood? Does it excite you to think of how she would cry and try to fight him every devil-damned night? How she came to my house, her undergarments rent, stinking of kraken oil inside her and this creature’s sexual odours, begging me to dissolve the marriage? My only joy is that his rotted seed could not infect her with child!’
He continued for a solid minute. Behind him, only Mr Gregor Tallwater had the grace to seem embarrassed by the foulness that emerged from Mr Harrow’s mouth. The other two deputies had clearly heard it all before, glad enough that Arden should be the target of Mr Harrow’s displeasure instead of them.
Mr Riven lurched close to an anger-induced fit. His neck turned near-purple in his effort to keep calm.
At last Mr Harrow took a breath. He had no more to say.
‘Are you done, Mr Harrow?’ Arden asked, flatly.
‘I am done.’
‘Then can we pass?’
He jerked his head sideways. ‘Get out of my sight.’
‘Gladly.’
She dragged Mr Riven across the courtyard duckboards. Only Gregor shared with her an apologetic glance, and it appeared he would not have argued if Arden had dragged him away from this unholy indictment as well.
As soon as they were in the streets and had made their way in silence across the town square to the salty fog of the harbour, she seized Mr Riven’s chin so that he would meet her eyes, not go to dark places in his mind.
‘Jonah,’ she said, using his first name as if he were a hurt child. ‘It’s for the best that Mr Harrow exhaust himself on his own illusions. If he had truly loved his daughter, she would never have got into her mess. She’d have gone to Lyonne a golden talent princess and eaten honey sweets and sat on velvet chairs and grown fat among silks for the rest of her life.’
He turned on her, despair making his blue eyes gleam almost incandescent. ‘You think me a dupe, for helping her and not getting real love in return?’
‘No. I think everyone is a dupe, for putting so much stock in sanguinity. The damned Sainted Isles and their unmanned rockblood wells. This cursed town. Bellis’ fool idea of using you to escape the Lions and secure her place in the Islands by putting fear in the hearts of other men. The devil knows there are enough women in the world who live in a marriage of such abjectness for real. They cannot be whisked away to some mysterious islands with a lover when it all becomes too much. Bellis did not need to add her story to theirs, however the end may have been justified in her mind. You may have been the only good thing she had while she was here. She didn’t deserve you, Mr Riven.’
He let Arden go. Her hand smarted from where he had held her hard. She rubbed it with a wince.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said of her aching hand, and perhaps for more. ‘I have kept to myself for too many years. I know there are stories. Bellis encouraged them. I suspect she knew it would make her eventual disappearance more legitimate, and send a message to the people over the waves that she was not to be trifled with, and neither was I. But what Mr Harrow said … sometimes it’s difficult to maintain that image without feeling ashamed of it.’
She huffed a breath. ‘She wove her protective deception well. You are quite the scoundrel, as everyone was at pains to tell me in no less detail than Mr Harrow did just now.’
‘Yet not knowing the truth, you still came to me as a neighbour, and with dignity.’ He briefly touched the end of Arden’s coat sleeve. Patterns his mother had made, not Bellis. ‘It says much for your character, Mx Beacon.’
‘Does it earn me some credit towards being your friend?’
‘You have earned every right to be my friend.’
She took off her glove and held out her hand for him to shake. Her left hand. Blood to blood. Would he know?
He did. ‘Ooh, and gently,’ she said, as his fingers closed around her palm. His hand was callused with work and bloodletting, deliberate, but gentle too. She need not have worried.
He gave a crooked smile, and that same tightness budded in the centre of her chest. In Clay Capital he would not be at all handsome, too angular and Fictish, his nose too thin and his smile too crooked and his skin kissed by shades of sea foam, not sun.
But still. He was not hers to love.
Somewhere over the waves a woman had asked her best friend to wait. Asked him to protect her by his unseen presence until she was ready to call him back. Like the lich-ship gears, this love of Bellis and Mr Riven’s had been set into place long before Arden had arrived. It would continue upon her departure. She was merely a stowaway upon this journey.
They went to the harbour, where Mx Modhi had already taken her Harbourmistress position in her rocking chair, and her first pipe of the day. She saw them coming, Arden Beacon and a groomed Mr Riven, and did not recognize him at first. Only when he spoke to her did her eyes turn into hard squints.
‘People have been seeking you,’ she said through a cloud of tobacco smoke. ‘Magistrate Harrow especially.’
‘I am aware of this.’
‘You’d best not be up to nonsense, Jonah Riven. My position here does not allow for illegal activities.’
Arden quickly interjected, sensing tensions rise. ‘I assure
you, anything that Mr Harrow may have said is all down to mistaken identity. I can vouch for Mr Riven.’
Mx Modhi obviously had opinions on Arden’s vouching, but chewed on her pipe to stop the words from coming out and costing her the coin of her harbour fee. David Modhi scrambled to prepare Mr Riven’s boat ready for departure, and beamed in joy when Mr Riven thanked him for taking such care. The youth’s wispy moustache trembled with delight. ‘Anything for you, Mr Riven!’
Compared to the pleasure boats of the visiting Masters, Mr Riven’s craft was a shadow coated in pitch. The boat’s name on the black wood became apparent as Arden came close. Saudade.
Now that she could see her without danger of being run down, Arden noted that all her trimmings were the same oily black wood. Mangrove-ebony, a prized timber for shipbuilders if they could ever harvest enough to construct a craft more sizable than a dinghy. The mangrove stands formed floating islands that travelled piecemeal across the Darkling Sea. The largest stands were rumoured to be found in Sainted waters, where the sea monsters sported. It was a monster-hunting ship, down to its bones. Saudade had all the solidity of an ocean transport barge.
Other than the high wheelhouse, the bulk of her was mostly below decks, to resist tipping in hard swells. She had side wheels to keep her hunting-craft nimble and enable her to plough through Sargasso fronds without fouling, but given her speed Arden suspected a screw-propeller under the water too.
Propped up by a winch at Saudade’s stern was a smaller craft, a tender boat made in the same black wood. The little dinghy had a brass motor of some oil-burning type, perhaps kraken or rock distillate.
Mr Riven helped Arden aboard over a mist-slippery gangway. Arden ran her hand along the rail. Intuited that bloodwork had been used aboard her, powerful sacraments.
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