Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

The switch in the matron’s attention redirected the focus of the whole room, so that Mrs. Markeson looked put out that her moment of glory had been cut so short.

  “Let me see,” I said, pretending to reach into my memory. “Ratsbane?”

  “Rathbone,” Mrs. Dearbeloved corrected, ignoring—or not seeing—Constance’s flash of mischievous delight at my error, “a most respectable gentleman, with family in the old country. His grandfather was chamberlain to the last king before moving to our humble colony.”

  “Mr. Markeson,” I said, acknowledging his wife with a smile, which went some way toward banishing the cloud of pique that had descended on her when we stopped discussing her shawl. “Mr. Barrington-Smythe…”

  I laid the name out like the snares some of the Lani use to trap woodcock, though I wasn’t sure what I was trying to catch. Its effect, however, was instantaneous. Mrs. Dearbeloved draw herself up to her full height and snorted with indignation.

  “Barrington-Smythe,” she repeated in a voice loaded with all the disdain she could muster.

  “You do not like the gentleman?” I asked.

  “I do not know him!” snapped Mrs. Dearbeloved, as if that was condemnation enough. “No one does. He has no family in the city, no crest, no old school friends. The man is a kind of nothing. Yet here he is, lounging with the very best of us.”

  I was surprised by her candor, and it was clear from the faces of the younger women that they were shocked by how much she was confiding, but Agatha Markeson showed the same hauteur.

  “Three nights ago,” she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice a fraction, but spitting the words as if they might contaminate her, “I saw him slap my husband on the back like some Southend dockworker and call him ‘mate.’”

  Several of the ladies put hands to their mouths.

  “What did Mr. Markeson say?” asked a staggered Lady Alice.

  Something strange came over the older woman, a sudden worried discomfort that registered in her face even as she tried to brush the question away with a flick of her hand.

  “Well, what could he say?” said Agatha. “You know Thomas. He’s the soul of decorum and politeness. He gave the fellow a stern look, and I fancy he had words with him in private later.”

  “Scandalous!” huffed Mrs. Dearbeloved. “I never thought I would see such people in this building.”

  The room fell into a thoughtful and uneasy hush.

  “How does one become a member of the club?” I asked.

  “Recommendation by existing members,” said Mrs. Dearbeloved. “Followed by a vote.”

  “So Mr. Barrington-Smythe must have had some friends inside the club?” I said, as if I was smoothing things over.

  The thoughtful silence returned, and there was a tension to it now that registered especially in Agatha Markeson’s face.

  “Sometimes when a senior member is especially insistent,” said Constance meaningfully, “the vote becomes something of a formality.”

  “Ah,” I said. “A bit like your city elections, then.”

  Someone gasped. I had overstepped my bounds. The tension thickened, and I felt Mrs. Dearbeloved swelling, like a steam boiler about to burst. Only Constance seemed delighted by my observation, or the outrage it had caused.

  “Of course, in Istilia we have a very large royal family,” I said, “and no elections at all, so this is all quite strange to me.”

  This seemed to open the stopcock on Mrs. Dearbeloved, and her steam began to drain harmlessly away.

  “Oh, do tell us about life in the Istilian court!” said Lady Alice. “Do you live in a palace? How many servants do you have? Do you change your clothes many times a day?”

  Whether anyone else cared to hear such stuff or not, they seemed glad not to be discussing politics, and for the next ten minutes, I responded to Lady Alice’s gleeful questions with everything I had studied over the last few days, embroidering in a few fanciful details when the mood took me. I saw no sign that anyone doubted my account, and I was careful to give them what I thought they wanted: an Istilia that was romantic and luxuriant, but fundamentally primitive, lacking both the decorum of Bar-Selehm’s high society and its industrial might. This seemed to please, but I was glad when a light supper was served and the bland northern food received more of their attention than they could spare for me.

  They gossiped about minor scandals, about debutante balls, about which musicians and painters were being extolled by the society papers, and about where they might spend the hottest months of the summer or the coldest months of the winter. Mrs. Dearbeloved remarked upon the scandalous influx of all those brown and black people trying to come to Bar-Selehm from north of the desert to leech off the state. I said nothing, trying not to think of the little sandal shrine by the river, focusing instead on making sure I was using the right knife. I pretended that my ignorance of all they thought worthy of discussion came from the fact that I was as elevated and remote as an exotic bird instead of a sewer rat they would cross the street to avoid if they saw me in my normal clothes. Mrs. Markeson tried to draw me into a conversation about the terrible falling off of “our poor Lani” from the nobility of their origins, but I dodged like a prizefighter and, more to the point, managed not to stab her through the hand with my salad fork. The young woman who had left us to get some air, Violet Farthingale, did not reappear, and no one mentioned her.

  I declined an after-dinner sherry by claiming I had a headache and wanted a moment to relax before whatever passed for after-dinner excitement in Elitus or Merita. Constance gave me a shrewd look at this and, not for the first time, I thought she had seen through all my playacting, but the others seemed blissfully unaware of my desire to escape. Indeed, they were probably glad of the opportunity to discuss me in extended terms.

  I would have wanted to get out even without a mission to complete, but I was acutely conscious that for all their talk around the subject—some of it suggestive—I still didn’t know who had brought Barrington-Smythe—or whatever his real name was—into the heady ranks of Elitus. It was time I got a look at those membership records.

  CHAPTER

  14

  EXCUSING MYSELF, I LEFT the room, managing not to pause and listen at the door as the discussion of their illustrious guest began, and found Wellsley, the liveried doorman, who summoned Namud from a servants’ smoking room off the lobby.

  “Will you be rejoining the gentlemen?” asked Wellsley.

  “I believe I will take a few moments to myself first,” I said.

  “Certainly, ma’am,” said Namud, offering me the key to my retiring room. “I will bring your things.”

  I nodded again, took the key, and ascended the stairs, shoulders back, spine straight, chin and eyes level for the benefit of the doorman. I kept that up till I got to my little room, which faced an ornate floral display in a huge urn, unlocked the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. Then I threw myself onto what was probably called a fainting couch and screamed my silent frustration into a bolster.

  Namud’s discreet tap roused me a few minutes later. He offered me the suitcase, checked the hallway, and stepped quickly inside, half closing the door behind him. Given how careful he had been to maintain a very Feldeslandian decorum, I was surprised, more so when he reached into his breast pocket and drew out a slim bundle bound with cord. He untied it and unrolled a pouch of slender tools.

  “You know what these are?” he said in an undertone.

  I nodded.

  “And you know how to use them?” he pressed, giving me a level stare.

  I had been a steeplejack in the Seventh Street gang. Plain and simple. But not all my gang mates had been so exclusively legitimate, and I had seen lock picks before. Morlak had kept some in a toolbox—along with three different padlocks for practice—and some of the boys had picks of their own refinement, carefully modified with file and hacksaw. They would pass the padlocks around and challenge each other to see who could get them all open fastest. I generally only
tried when the others had gone to bed, and I was no expert, but yes, I knew how to use them.

  “Why do you have these?” I asked.

  “The room may be locked—,” he began.

  “No,” I said. “I mean why do you have these?”

  He hesitated, then reopened the door behind him, his face blank.

  “I will attend your ladyship downstairs,” he said. “Please do not hesitate to call if you need me. There is a bellpull by the bed.”

  There was indeed. He bowed, cracking not the smallest of smiles—the consummate professional—and walked away. I closed the door behind him and unlatched the case.

  It should have contained a change of formal wear and whatever absurd cosmetics ladies went armed with to places such as this, and it did indeed have a few vials and toiletries nestled in a pink satin gown trimmed with silver thread. All these I dumped onto the carpet in pursuit of what lay underneath: charcoal gray trousers, close-fitting smock shirt, sturdy boots, a work belt with pouches, a pair of well-forged crowbars, a hammer, a hacksaw blade, a chisel, a paper of matches, a stub of candle, and a coil of rope with a grappling iron on one end. After everything I had been through this evening, it felt like coming home.

  I changed hurriedly, noting the way the sari’s pleats and folds were gathered so I could get it back on unassisted later. Fastening my hair back, I pulled a black silk mask—basically a bag with a letter-box slit for my eyes—over my head, pocketed Namud’s lock picks, then unshuttered the room’s single window. It looked down upon a courtyard lined with dwarf trees to form a small cloister with a bronze statue on a plinth in the middle. This was the heart of the Elitus block. I checked Willinghouse’s paltry notes. The records office was on the corner of the uppermost floor, which was, I supposed, intended to maintain their confidentiality. Approaching from the inside, up stairwells, along corridors, and through locked doors would afford Elitus’s officers plenty of opportunities to apprehend anyone who wasn’t welcome.

  Which is why I was going in via the window.

  I considered the courtyard. It was cobbled. Hard enough to do real damage if I fell from my window, and enough to kill if I fell from the fourth floor. I coiled the rope and slipped my head and one arm through it, so it hung diagonally to my waist. A pair of canvas awnings had been set up in the courtyard beneath the formal trees, but the center with the bronze was open to the sky. As I watched, a black servant came out of the ground-floor door and moved a handcart under one of the awnings. Another, a woman, appeared with an armful of long-stemmed flowers. Something was being prepared, an event of sorts. I had to move quickly, before the courtyard was bustling with people, any one of whom might look up and see an Istilian princess, cunningly disguised as a Lani steeplejack, breaking into their records office.

  Ledges of decorous stone ran around the courtyard below every window, and there were downspouts from the gutters in each corner. With care, I might not need the rope at all. I checked the traffic below, leaned out of the window, and grasped the top of the shutters as I lifted first one leg, then the other out and onto the ledge. It was a little over two inches wide. Enough for no more than the toes of my boots. I sucked my belly in, spread my arms, and found just enough purchase in the mortar lines with my fingers to stop myself swaying backwards. Then I turned my head so that my cheek was flush to the wall. I had no fear of heights, but a fear of falling was—as the steeplejacks always used to say—just common sense. Closing my eyes, I thought about Madame Nahreem’s mask. My heart rate slowed. Everything that wasn’t the feel of the ledge beneath my feet and the texture of the mortar lines under my fingers faded away. Slowly, I inched my way along.

  Maybe the maddening old woman wasn’t so crazy after all.

  I paused at the first shuttered window, looking for light through the crack, moving more swiftly to the next and the one after that as I got used to my surroundings. I heard a snatch of conversation from the courtyard below, but no panic or alarm. I relaxed a little as I reached the deep shade of the corner and could straddle the gap, gripping the drainpipe. It was quality iron, well maintained and anchored. For someone like me, it was as good as a ladder.

  I made it up to the fourth floor in a half minute. The store room’s window was shuttered and bolted, but I had come prepared. I found the wooden lip of the shutters where it closed over the seam in the middle, satisfied myself that the room beyond them was totally dark and therefore empty, then splintered the wood away from the gap with my chisel. I slipped the hacksaw blade in and slid it up and down until I found the bolt, which I cut, the metal dust blowing away in a little silver plume. After that, the shutters opened easily, and seconds later, I was inside.

  Once I had the shutters closed again, I removed the stifling mask and lit my candle, hoping against hope that the membership ledger was in some desk drawer or cupboard, rather than a safe. In fact, though there was indeed a safe and there was a heavy lock on the door to the corridor, the ledgers themselves were sitting on the desk. One marked ELITUS, one marked MERITA. Their large, leather-bound covers were open and the page set to today’s date.

  No need for Namud’s lock picks after all.

  Probably just as well. I was a steeplejack, not a housebreaker. I wondered what my chaperone had been before he became a butler. Something different, that was for sure.

  I lit the candle and bent over the Elitus volume, tracing the lines recording who was present till I found my own name, or rather that of my Istilian alter ego. My arrival time had been recorded and a note made: Special guest of the club, invited by the leadership. That meant someone had to come up here to sign people in and out constantly.

  I didn’t have much time.

  Three lines below my own entry was one for Barrington-Smythe, but the note beside his name said merely M. Member? Perhaps. I riffled through the previous pages, but they were no more than a catalog of comings and goings. Struck by a possibility, I turned to the back and flipped the book upside down. The first page was titled “Membership.”

  It was not so long a list as I might have expected, particularly given the fact that it went back over twenty years, and I saw several names which had been bracketed and marked Deceased. Living members seemed to total about forty. Each one showed the date they were admitted and who had sponsored them. Barrington-Smythe had been a member for only three months. His sponsor was Thomas Markeson, the booming, red-faced man I had met with the others in the Great Hall, husband to Agatha, the woman in the unusual shawl who had expressed such outrage at the dangerous man with the bland smile calling her husband mate.

  Interesting.

  I put the books back as I had found them, snuffed out my candle, and opened the shuttered window once more. The sound from the courtyard rose up immediately. People. Rather more than there were before, all bustling about. Worse, the central area by the statue now held a series of standing braziers all blazing merrily and throwing light around the courtyard. I would not be leaving the way I had come in.

  I took a steadying breath and considered my options. I could make my way to the front of the building, find a window onto the street, and make a run for it, but that would mean leaving Namud to face the music when it became clear that the Istilian princess had vanished into the night and the club’s precious records had been broken into. The alternative was to leave through the door, make my way through the galleries and staircases to my own room—dressed as the Lani steeplejack I was—and hope I didn’t meet anybody. One thing seemed certain: Lady Ki Misrai had made her final social appearance.

  I flattened myself against the door and listened.

  Nothing.

  I tried the handle. Locked from the outside.

  I felt the aristocratic steely calm I had been so careful to cultivate melting away as my heart rate quickened. Someone could come at any moment, and there was nowhere to hide if they did. I checked the shuttered window and found the courtyard brighter and busier than ever. I had to get through that door and quickly.

  If I ha
dn’t been worried about alerting anyone outside the door, I’d have shoved the pinch point of my pry bar in between the door and the jamb and wrenched it, clearing the rest with my hammer and chisel, but this was not the time for that. Breath quickening, I unrolled Namud’s picks and considered them. Some were little thicker than wire with angled bends, others were more like skeleton keys, sturdy but slim with bevels and flanges slender enough to enter the keyhole and unlatch the tumblers if used with a steady hand. I imagined Madame Nahreem’s mask once more and tried to shut out the swelling bustle of the courtyard outside. It sounded like musicians were warming up down there. Of traffic in the hallway beyond the door, I could hear nothing.

  Maybe everyone is gathering outside, I thought. I could use a little luck.

  The first key I tried fit into the lock but was too big to turn inside. I went three sizes smaller but had to angle it to connect with anything. I tried the next largest one, forcing myself to breathe …

  Neutral …

  And rotated the shaft between thumb and forefinger till I felt something engage inside. It turned, then slipped.

  Almost.

  I tried again, ears straining for footfalls in the hallway only inches from my head, and this time turned the pick all the way. The thunk of the lock disengaging reverberated through the timber, and I felt it sag slightly. I put my tools away, replaced the silk mask over my head, and cracked the door open.

  The hallway was wood floored with a worn carpet runner, and the sconces on the walls were powered by gas, not luxorite, suggesting that this story was not meant to be seen by club members or their guests. If the servants were busy below, that meant I might just get the luck I needed.

  I left the room, nudged the door shut behind me, and walked briskly past a series of unmarked doors toward a narrow staircase. The stairs creaked as I scuttled down to a landing and the next staircase down—wider than the previous flight, its balustrade shaped from dark, elegant wood—and had just set foot on the first stair when I heard the distinctive snap of a door below me. I hesitated, conscious that while I was invisible to whoever had opened the door, I was now perfectly obvious to anyone who might appear on the fourth floor. Should the newcomer below me be on his way up …