Firebrand

by A. J. Hartley

  “Have they learned anything about the intruder?” asked the ambassador.

  Alice shook her head earnestly.

  “They think he came in while we were at dinner,” she said, “and made his escape during the fireworks display.”

  I liked that “he.”

  “An assassin?” I wondered aloud.

  “More likely to be a common thief,” she said, “but a clever one. Mr. Wellsley thinks it’s someone trying to take the place of Darius, the cat burglar who died last week. Whoever it was broke into the office upstairs but couldn’t get into the strongbox.”

  Despite her panic and embarrassment, something of her girlish excitement was starting to show again. A part of her was thrilled at the prospect of having been in the same building as the thief whose exploits—like Darius’s—would soon be all over the gossip pages.

  “No one saw him?” I asked, trying to sound mildly outraged.

  “Mr. Wellsley saw him briefly,” she answered, “but doesn’t remember any details, and the man was disguised. He must have been big and strong to overpower Wellsley, though.”

  I turned away so they couldn’t see the ghost of a smile I couldn’t quite suppress.

  “Probably one of the servants,” Alice added. “They only let whites work on the member floors, but Wellsley says they have all sorts working in the kitchens.”

  “Lani?” I asked pointedly.

  “Blacks too,” she said, realizing only after she had said it what I had been driving at. “Not Lani like you!” she said, horrified. “I mean, the ones here aren’t like you at all, are they? You are so sophisticated and beautiful and … well, you know.”

  Silly girl.

  I nodded, biting the inside of my cheek, wanting more than ever that evening to tell her what I was—what I really was—under this thinnest veneer of fabric, cosmetics, and secondhand manners.

  This mask.

  But I did not.

  The door opened again, and the two of them broke apart like startled monkeys, each furiously pretending to be doing things by themselves, so that a mean-spirited part of me wanted to point and laugh at their absurd charade.

  It was the doorman, his head bandaged, another ridiculous sight that made me want to giggle. I needed to get out of there before I unravelled what remained of my disguise. That impulse was fueled further by the man who followed the doorman in. Richter.

  “Apparently the people who might be targets are being gathered here,” he said, amused by the idea that his reputation made him worthy of assassination.

  “I think I would like to leave now,” I said, millpond calm. “Kindly notify my man.”

  “The constabulary are on their way, my lady,” said the doorman.

  “Oh, I can’t have that!” I said, suddenly struck by real panic. Any conversation with the police would surely expose that I was not who I claimed to be. “I will not be interviewed like some common criminal when I have done nothing wrong.”

  “No, my lady,” Wellsley agreed. “No one thinks you are in any way—”

  “Then fetch Namud to prepare my things. I want nothing more to do with the whole sordid business.”

  “Yes, my lady,” he said, retreating to the door and ducking out.

  I waited, stilling my nervous fingers when I realized they had begun to tap rhythmically on my thigh. The room felt stuffy, the ceiling too low. I turned to Alice to distract myself from the delay and to avoid Richter’s imperious stare. He in turn shot a question to the ambassador.

  “What’s all this about, Marino?”

  The ambassador shrugged and looked away. His manner was embarrassed, even furtive, as it had been when he had tried to play down his relationship with Alice.

  Curious.

  “Do you think we’re safe here?” Alice asked me. It wasn’t a real question. The girl—she was about my age, but her demeanor reminded me of one of Rahvey’s children—just wanted reassuring.

  “That lady before,” I said, “Violet Farthingale. Did something happen to upset her?”

  Alice’s doelike anxiety evaporated, replaced by a stiffness that would have suited Mrs. Dearbeloved.

  “Well, I wouldn’t like to say,” she said, “but I’ve always thought that you can be happy or you can be moral. Not both.”

  She stared at me, daring me to question or contradict her extraordinary pronouncement, and in the next instant, the door opened again and Wellsley appeared.

  “Your man, my lady,” he said.

  I met Namud in the hallway.

  “We’re leaving,” I said, haughty as before in the hope that people would see only my indignation at being thrust into criminal proceedings, not my fear.

  Namud nodded gravely, and I privately noted that I owed him a good deal of thanks when this was all over. I gave a smiling nod to the ambassador and Alice, and something rather more perfunctory to Richter, who merely watched as I slipped out.

  We walked past the lobby and up to the stairs while a cab was summoned. I should probably have waited where I was, but I needed to be doing something and not talking to anyone, so I went with Namud. As a result, it was my hand that turned the handle to room 236, my hand that pushed it open, my eyes that were the first to see Agatha Markeson sprawled across my bed, the pillow stained and stiff with blood.

  CHAPTER

  16

  THE BODY WAS STILL warm. I knew because I touched the woman’s pallid, hawkish face, an almost instinctive act, which horrified me even as I did it. I felt for a pulse, but Agatha Markeson’s eyes—though still aristocratically haughty—were quite sightless. Dead, but not long dead. Minutes, maybe. No more than that.

  While I was in the library for my own “protection,” then. That’s when it had happened. Whoever had killed her had known this room would be empty. The suitcase was still locked, so there was no reason to think that whoever had done it had also discovered my disguise and tools. She looked exactly as she had done last time I had seen her—accusatory and affronted, as if at the audacity of someone killing her—except that the high heel of one of her new shoes was missing.

  “What do we do?” asked Namud.

  He had been silent as usual since we came in, but he had been shocked out of his habitual equilibrium and looked, for once, quite young. I thought fast and decided.

  “We leave,” I said. “Now. We get our things and go as if nothing has happened.”

  Namud gaped.

  “With her lying here?” he asked.

  “There is nothing we can do for her. If we stay, we’ll be detained, and things will get very complicated very quickly.”

  “Can’t you explain things to Inspector Andrews?”

  “Later,” I said, “yes, but not now, not without exposing who we are and who we work for.”

  That did it. Namud’s nervous uncertainty evaporated like rain on hot metal. He was the loyal retainer once more, as if I really was someone in authority who knew what I was doing.

  “Very well,” he said. “After you.”

  As he picked up the suitcase, I set to putting on the Istilian persona and drew my shawl up over my head. The action gave me pause.

  “Her shawl,” I said, turning back to the body on the bed. “Where is her shawl?”

  There was no sign of it.

  “Does it matter?” asked Namud.

  “Probably not,” I replied. “Come on.”

  And we left her. As Namud locked the door behind us, I glanced up and down the hall. On the wall opposite the door was the vase of lilies sitting on a plinth no higher than the lip of a fireplace. One of the flowers was bent over, its stem broken, and there was water on the ground, as if someone had spilled the vase and then carefully reset it. I stooped to it, running my fingers along the cold, hard edge of the plinth, but then Namud was finished and we were moving to the stairs. All of my former anxieties, all the imposter’s baggage I had been dragging around since I set foot in the building, felt heavier and more cumbersome than ever.

  The cab had arriv
ed.

  So had the police. Three uniformed officers were standing in the lobby as Wellsley explained the situation to them. Namud gave me an uneasy look, but I shook my head fractionally and smiled at the doorman. It was good that the police were there. That meant they’d find the body quickly and would be able to estimate when Mrs. Markeson had died. The longer she lay there, the harder that would become and the more possible that Namud and I might become suspects. In this case, accuracy and truth were my best alibi.

  “Good evening, my lady,” said Wellsley, halting the irritated officer he was talking to with a single raised finger. “I regret the circumstances of your departure.”

  “As do I,” I said, “though I hold you innocent of any responsibility.”

  He smiled at that, grateful, and a moment later, we were out in the street and climbing into our cab.

  “Well done, my lady,” whispered Namud in the dark of the taxi, as he reached out and rapped on the roof with his knuckles so that the driver stirred the horses into action.

  “Pass me the suitcase,” I said, watching through the window as Elitus fell behind us.

  Namud did so, giving me a questioning look as I flipped it open.

  “I’m changing,” I said.

  “Here?” he said, disbelieving.

  “Lady Ki Misrai has to vanish for a while,” I said. “Maybe forever. Look away.”

  This time he did not protest and pressed his face to the upholstered headrest like a frightened child. As I undressed, shimmying into my dark smock and pants, I recalled Madame Nahreem’s making me change in front of her and wondered if she had somehow known how my evening would go.

  Modesty intact, I see, she had remarked.

  Quite. I unsnapped the latch on the cab door.

  “What are you doing?” asked Namud.

  “Disappearing,” I said. “Check out of the hotel. I’m going to Willinghouse’s town house. We’ll meet there, and you can tell me why you carry lock picks.”

  “I wasn’t born a servant,” said Namud, in the dark.

  “I’m beginning to see that. Does Madame Nahreem know?”

  There was an odd silence, and I could almost sense his raised eyebrows.

  “You don’t know her very well, do you?” he said.

  It was a taut, loaded remark that hinted at … I didn’t know what.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “You will,” he said. “I think you’ll find it worth waiting for.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, trying to recover a little of my defiant swagger and then thinking better of it. “Namud?” I added.

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  I was out before I realized the scent that I caught on my fingers, a dull and unsettling smell with a metallic edge, was Agatha Markeson’s blood.

  * * *

  WHATEVER HAD HAPPENED TONIGHT at Elitus involved Markeson, and the sooner I learned all I could about him, the better. The city was asleep, but I knew at least one person who wouldn’t be.

  Bar-Selehm’s major daily newspaper was the Bar-Selehm Standard, produced in morning and evening editions, which meant that there were reporters hard at work at all hours. The Standard’s offices sat in an ornate, white-fronted stone building facing Szenga Square, its relief carving of a woman representing Truth glowing a frosty blue in the gaslight. There were lights on in the upper stories, but the lobby was quiet and the doorman wasn’t for letting me in.

  “I’m here to see Sureyna,” I said, when he finally eased the glass-paneled front door open a fraction. “She’s a reporter.”

  “I know who she is,” said the doorman.

  He was white, midtwenties, and he didn’t take kindly to being disturbed from his reading by a Lani girl dressed like a steeplejack. The fact that the person I was asking for—Sureyna, formerly Sarah—was the only black reporter of her age in the building probably didn’t help.

  “So?” I said, something of my recent aristocratic attitude resurfacing as he looked me over. “Are you going to let me in or not?”

  “Why should I?” he said.

  “Because I asked nicely,” I said, “and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.”

  “Maybe I don’t need a reason,” he said.

  “And maybe I, after I have found a way to speak to Sureyna—who is a friend of mine—will tell her how you treat the people who bring her news.”

  His eyes narrowed at that. He might have had some standing in the office, but I was guessing that the reporters—even the junior ones—outranked him. Still he managed a sneer.

  “The likes of you bringing news that regular people want to read?” he said.

  “You’d be amazed at what the likes of me can do,” I said. It didn’t mean anything, but I said it with certainty and took a step toward him that seemed to give him pause.

  “Fine,” he said, opening the door. “But see that you’re out within the hour.”

  “Or what?” I asked, hesitating in the door and giving him a level stare. An hour or so ago, I had been a princess. I had broken into and out of a locked room. I had held my own over dinner with Bar-Selehm’s social elite, and I had walked through a cordon of police officers, leaving a dead body in my room. I would not be intimidated by this insignificant weasel.

  He took a step back as if I had threatened to punch him, and his eyes looked troubled. Something that he could not quite put his finger on was subtly wrong with the universe.

  “Thank you,” I said pointedly, and made for the stairs.

  * * *

  SUREYNA DIDN’T SEE ME till I was looming over her desk, and her face when she looked up was tired and irritable. That changed immediately, splitting into a delighted grin. She leapt to her feet and folded me in a tight embrace. She does that occasionally. I stood there, embarrassed, and waited for her to finish, then we sat down.

  The newsroom was a large open area that took up almost the entire third floor of the building. One end had a series of rooms with doors, all closed and dark, which I assumed belonged to the senior editors who were not in yet. It was a dour environment smelling of old coffee and older cigar smoke. There were half a dozen other reporters at work at their desks, all white, all twice Sureyna’s age or more, though I doubted any of them had her extraordinary memory. Everything she saw got stored away in some cabinet in her brain, ignored till summoned and then reproduced with photographic accuracy.

  “What are you working on?” I asked, twisting my head to peer at her great typewriter.

  She groaned and showed me, nudging the long-handled bag that she called a reticule—overflowing with books and papers—out of the way.

  Cucumber award to Hannah Stewart for 4th year running!

  “Ah,” I said. “Yes, I see. The stories that matter.” The paper’s marketing tag. She gave me a bleak smile, so I said, “Want to help me bring about the downfall of the ruling class?”

  “Always,” said Sureyna. She was wearing a brown dress with black ribbons, and her hair was concealed beneath a demure white cap so that she looked something between a shopgirl and a kitchen maid. “What have you got?”

  “Questions, mainly, about the members of an exclusive club,” I said. “And maybe some connections.”

  “How exclusive?”

  “Ever heard of Elitus?”

  Her eyes widened. “Fire away,” she said.

  “What do you know about Thomas Markeson?”

  “The shipping magnate?” said Sureyna, head cocked. “Not much. Should I?”

  “Not sure,” I said.

  “Well, he’s in trade. Import-export, mainly foodstuffs. Well connected but not overtly political so far as I know. Rich, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “What about Nathan Horritch?”

  “Industrialist, mainly soft goods. Inherited a fortune made by his father through the mechanization of weaving. That was his factory that burned last week,” she added.

  “It was?” I asked. “Huh.”

  “Is that
important?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” I said. “I doubt it.”

  “Who’s next?” I mused, consulting a list I had made. “Rathbone.”

  “Abel Rathbone, the cabinet secretary?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “You think so?” said Sureyna, eyebrow raised. She shuffled through some previous editions and flapped one open to a picture of a familiar lean, serious man with a funereal air.

  “Yes,” I said. “Him.”

  “He’s one of the most powerful men in the country!”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling my ignorance about politics and wondering anxiously what I might have missed because of it. “Right.”

  “Professional civil servant,” said Sureyna, reverting to that encyclopedic mode that had so amazed me when we first met. “Well educated, entered the service directly from university, working his way up the ranks in the War Office. Was made head of domestic policy—an advisory position to the prime minister—six years ago, a position he held for two years before rejoining the civil service. Became cabinet secretary six months ago. Not a popular man with your employer’s party.”

  “Norton Richter was there too,” I said.

  Sureyna’s face darkened.

  “Richter,” she snarled. “You know who he is, I take it? What he stands for?”

  “I heard him speak in Parliament,” I said. The hatred was coming off my friend like heat. “Where did he make his money?”

  “Iron and manufacturing,” she said. “Never heard of the Richter process? His people developed a system for mass-producing steel.”

  “He’s that Richter?” I exclaimed. You couldn’t spend as much time around construction as I had without knowing something of Bar-Selehm’s steel industry and its dependence on the Richter process. Half the factories in the city used machines rolled and forged from Richter’s furnaces, and there were catalogs of his wares on the desks of the other half.

  “The city contracted him to supply the platform canopies for the Pump Street underground station,” said Sureyna, “and I think he’s about to start rail production too.”