by Kaye Chazan
Two kinds of sound fill Covent Garden: the kind that stops and starts, and the kind that does not. There are so many people, hawking and haggling and coughing through the square, that even when one stops to breathe or count or consider, a thousand others fill the voice’s void, leaving an almost insectile buzz that hovers just over Aelister’s head. But the sounds inside the buildings stop and start, and those are music, rich orchestral music and unearthly singing. In the center of the square is a building on a great stone table, with doors between its legs and a fan of glass and iron, and it seems to shake with all the music it contains, like it knows about that incessant drone and has built a flickering shield of sound. Not to mention the stones themselves seem to be echoing, despite having no place to echo to.
If Aelister could see anything but the skirts and waistcoats of the people surrounding him, he’d guess it to be beautiful. Since he can’t, he swings himself up onto the fence and tries to climb out of this swell, broken arm and all. He gets a shoulder in the cast for it, and then another, but soon he’s high enough on the opera house fence that he can feel the orchestra inside, and see over all the wide feathered hats and parasols.
Of course, because it is extremely impolite to climb fences even if they belong to everyone or no one at all, the very first thing Aelister hears over the crowd is “Get down, boy!” Aelister assumes it is directed at him, but the prospect of being back on the ground and smothered by linen and gauze is almost as distasteful as going back home altogether, so he shouts back, “Mind your own!,” and holds on to the iron.
But, like most things grown-ups tell us, there is a kernel of well-meaning in that reprimand, and the gate opens from the inside, flinging Aelister along with it like so much paper in the wind. He holds on valiantly at first, but a shake of the gate deposits him in the street, and if it had been awful walking all entrapped by skirts and tails, lying with his face to the stone and soot is downright loathsome. A woman trips over him, the hoop of her skirt pokes him in the side, and then another dodges him into the path of a rolling cart. It is almost as if a great gap has opened and all the vile noise of the square is rushing down at him, like maggots to the eye of a rotten boar. Aelister shuts his eyes and covers his ears, or tries, but the arm trapped in its cast protests this and wracks pain through his body until even the stones are red.
He crawls forward, toward the first shift in light he sees, a gap between a gold skirt and a green—and then again, between someone’s long plaid trousers—and again, holding on to the bars of a sewer grating to haul himself to the sidewalk.
He sits, just there on the edge, and rubs at the blood of his skinned knee. To think, just weeks ago he bet a schoolmate he’d never have to wear short pants. What a fool he’d be made, if he were going back to that dreadful school at all. A good thing, then, he thinks, that I’ll never see those boring louts again.
Now that he is farther from the opera house, and the gate is open, he can see the crowd part and throng against the doors. It seems all the chaos was caused by just one man, but to look at him, Aelister can guess why. He wears a white suit and hat, and the shade of the buildings and bustles and carts does not seem to touch him. When he finishes sneezing and wipes his nose with a white pocket-handkerchief, his short beard is nearly as white, and his skin an eerie almost-gold. Once there is room enough in the street, he waves to a hansom, steps up to it without an ungraceful pull, shuts the door, and is all but gone.
But because of the abundance of white that he wears, it is all too easy to see the green parcel fall from his waistcoat and hit the stones.
Aelister is up and running for it before he even considers what might be in that purse. He shoves and shoulders through the clutch of people just like they’ve been shoving at him all afternoon, and ignores the pain in his arm and in his knee to slide between two carts before someone runs it over. He snatches the parcel up from the stone and tears after the cab, heedless of whether any of the yells and blasphemies are meant for him. That man made them part for him, Aelister thinks, running the way he’s only seen horses and dogs do, that man made everything stop. He’s right. He’s righter than anything I’ve ever seen. And if Aelister isn’t careful, he’ll lose sight of that hansom, black and nameless like all the others in this city.
He’ll never be as fast as a horse! He thinks it, and shuts his eyes and shoves that thought away. Eyes on the cab, he sings, like the stones and the stop-and-start violins, eyes on the cab, and no matter who he pushes over or how his eyes start to tear up from the smoke and the soot, he does not let it stop him—reaches forward to grab on to the foot-ledge, purse still in hand—
It is luck, or it must be, when another hansom crosses the intersection first, and this one stops behind its horse. It is rotten luck that Aelister isn’t able to slow down before he catches his toe on the cobblestone and crashes face-first into the black lacquered door. Well, perhaps it is as much a fact of physics as it is rotten luck, but either way, he comes up rather dizzy.
But the door opens all the same, and a white-gloved hand reaches down to yank Aelister in by the scruff of his collar.
He sits down—or more precisely, he is sat down, with hands not his own directing his body all through—in the backward-seat of the carriage. The leather moulds to him, and squeaks, lets out air through its seams. The window-curtain snaps shut on rings and Aelister spins further into darkness than he’s ever been outside of sleep.
“You were supposed to keep it,” the man in white says, though it’s hard to see all that white with how he’s sitting in the dark, and how that dark swells, pushes in on the sides of Aelister’s eyes like a headache.
“I did,” Aelister says, or thinks he does. “I just brought it back. I thought you dropped it.”
He holds the parcel forward until the shadows eat it. The man in white takes it back, and opens it, but Aelister can’t see what’s inside. “Not something you wanted to keep?”
“I didn’t even look, sir,” he answers.
“Your Grace,” the man in white corrects, for he is in fact a duke, and whips out his handkerchief before he sneezes again, powerfully. “God’s blood, when did they last clean back here?” he adds, wringing it out. “Vile. Either way, lad, no one sent you?”
“Not as such, your Grace,” Aelister says, lowering his eyes, both because he thinks that might help them focus in the dark and because he’s never been in the company of a duke before and thinks the Duke will appreciate that.
“Well, then, whose are you?” the Duke asks. “You can’t be an urchin, not with such care taken with your arm. When did you break it?”
“Just yesterday.”
“And how?”
“I fell from a tree.” He chooses not to lie—though he wishes to, very much.
”A tree? Do you serve a house in London?”
“I don’t serve anyone.”
“And you’re not from London either, not by that voice. Well, boy, it seems you’ve built a mystery about you. It would behoove me to report you to the proper authorities and set you on your way—”
“No!”
“—my,” gapes the Duke at so vehement an outburst, and he leans forward elbow-to-knee so that his face is in the scant red light from beyond the little window-curtain. “Say that again, boy, and properly, if you know it.”
Aelister looks over and over the Duke’s face, from plane to plane and hair to hair. It isn’t precisely unsightly, but eerie in its symmetry, as if cast from wax all over. His eyes are large and pale at the edges, but in the center as black as pepper.
“If it pleases you, your Grace,” Aelister stutters, choosing his words very carefully indeed, “do not take me to the authorities. I only meant to return your purse.”
The Duke reaches out a gloved hand again, and pats the drying blood on Aelister’s knee. It leaves a stain, still slightly wet, and Aelister watches the little bits of red-brown scab fall as the Duke rubs his fingers together, the way Aelister has seen housekeepers do when they check how we
ll the dusting’s been done. “And return it you did,” the Duke says. “Which leaves, of course, the question of why.”
Aelister’s throat is as dry as it’s ever been, and no amount of churning the spit on his tongue will save it.
“State your game, boy.”
A lie gathers on Aelister’s lips, ready to be told: that he needs work, that he means to send the money home, that he’s only done a bit of Christian charity and can he go now, please?
“The way you move through crowds,” Aelister says, with that lie still parceled up like a letter to a dead man. “I want it. Your Grace.”
The Duke laughs, and in laughing sneezes again, and while the handkerchief covers his mouth it does not stop the deep and chilling sound from filling Aelister’s dizzied ears. “Then you’ll have to spend a great deal of time with me,” he says when his face is clean and pointed again, “won’t you?”
Four nights a week, the Duke is about, at parties or meetings or the devil knows what. It has been a month, almost exactly, and Aelister has kept certain count. Aelister has not been permitted to go with him—he says, smiling, that these parties are no place for children—but the Duke tells him a great deal, over breakfast and tea. The other three nights (Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday) the Duke is in, and though he occasionally has guests, they do not get up to the kind of lavishness that Aelister used to suspect of sub-royalty. So far, he has entertained only two friends from the country, and the other nights in, he keeps to himself and settles his accounts and reads.
Aelister has the run of the place, though he’s not permitted out any windows or up onto the roof or down in the servants’ quarters. It is just as well, since there’s been barely any sunshine since he came to the city, and the gutters and windows are always slick with rain. The house is large, for only one man to live in it, with no wife and no children and only four servants. Aelister, when he learns London (as much as one can learn, from the back of a hansom and the house of a solitaire), finds that the Duke’s apartments are in Islington, and that he oughtn’t be out after dark, no matter how lovely the houses on the street. The house is not built for entertaining, as such, but suits the Duke very well the more Aelister explores it, with a study far larger than any of the bedrooms and a dining room with walls that slide apart like the leaves of the table. So much is brightly colored here, with stained glass windows like in church, though these depict fruit and flowers instead of saints, and lamps from America and the East and Spain, and small statues that, even if they are not really from Greece, try very hard to be so. The walls are papered and painted in every room, and the cushions thickly stuffed, and the bed he gives Aelister has a mattress so soft and warm it nearly eats him whole.
But it is strange, and strangely school-like, that no matter whether the world is to see him, or whether only Aelister and the servants have the pleasure, the Duke is always dressed impeccably, and nearly all in white. Once, there were thin black stripes down his trousers and coat. Another time, he set a green brooch on his cravat, and another, a fire-orange flower in his lapel, and a third (for a party, he later described, at which there would be only gentlemen), cuff-links of darkest black, very like his eyes. But all through it is always white, and Aelister wonders if what magic he had seen in Covent Garden was not magic at all, and merely a trick of costume and smoke, like that Actor in the alleyway.
“And where-about was this theatre, boy?” the Duke asks, when Aelister expresses this very concern.
“I don’t know,” Aelister says. “Not far from Covent Garden, I couldn’t run so fast. And there was a bakery, and everything smelled like smoke.”
“Well, that’s the whole of the city.” The Duke laughs, and coughs. He seems to have gotten over the worst of his cold. “Smoke and fire.”
There is roast pig at breakfast, and the smell is intoxicating, spicy and laden with fat. Aelister has found himself rather hungry these days. The Duke says it must be Aelister’s healing arm—which, though it hurts less every day, still gives him trouble at night, no matter how soft his pillows or how warm the milk he drinks before he sleeps. “The whole of it?”
“London burns,” The Duke says, slicing into a charred tomato on his plate. “London’s always burned. Like the bush, in the Bible, only it’s not the voice of God you hear as it snaps. Whether it was the Romans, or the Gauls, or the Vikings, or even her own, London’s always been aflame.”
“Awful lot of people living in a city on fire,” Aelister considers.
“Too true.”
“Is that why it rains so much?”
“Oh, it rains through all of England, boy. But yes, I should think. Some say it feeds the river, to keep the soul of London from setting the world aflame.”
There is a great deal Aelister could say to that, or ask of it, for though it seems a dreadfully queer thing to say, it makes as much sense as poetry about busy bees and old men and rings of roses. He has learned to check his words around the Duke—for to say too much might well get him sent to the authorities, and then home—but to check his words and to say nothing are two very different things, and Aelister cannot abide saying nothing.
“Can you see the fire?” he asks, when the tangle of words and possibilities is undone.
The Duke answers, but the front door-bell rings just at the same time, and Aelister does not hear him.
“Just as well,” the Duke says, and has the butler bring the visitors in. “Come, boy, you’re to be dressed for tomorrow evening.”
“Tomorrow evening?”
“Yes. The Prince of Wales is coming over for cards. You’re to play as well, of course. Didn’t you tell me you wanted to learn?”
Before Aelister can answer—and the answer, he thinks, would be jubilant glee—he is swept up in a flurry of feathers and fur, and whirled up the stairs before he can finish chewing his bite of ham.
“Quick, quick, we haven’t much time!” the first voice says, and the second, higher voice adds, “Oh, it must be very like your birthday, little man, you’re going to be such fun to truss up, won’t he, Mistress Milliner?”
“Oh I dare say so, Mistress March! Look at him all blushing like a schoolgirl! Now don’t you worry, you won’t be wearing anything of the kind—“
The door to Aelister’s bedroom shuts, and he whips around to face his captors.
For the most part, the ladies are very alike, the way that most women of fashion are very alike so long as they are not too different in age. From the neck down, one might take them for cuts of the same, on different days, though the lady in green has more on top to balance out her bustle than the lady in brown. They wear day dresses with tight jackets and enormous ruffles that peek through every buttonhole and slit, and little lace gloves. But from the neck up there would be no mistaking them for one another, for Mistress Milliner (in green) has a hat spilling free of ribbons and feathers and beads, over hair as red as a summer cherry, and Mistress March (in brown) wears a bonnet almost like a nun’s, with long dangling bows on either side.
“There now, little man, take off your clothes,” Mistress March says.
“—What?”
“Oh, his Grace didn’t tell you? You haven’t a proper suit of your own, not one to meet the Prince of Wales in, that’s for sure. Come come now, have off with them—unless you need us to start it for you, what with your arm, you poor thing.”
Aelister protests, but they don’t take it as a question, and soon they have him stripped down to his shift. Their little lace gloves are starchy and cold on his skin as they take his measurements and cluck over his skinny legs and poor posture. “But don’t you worry,” one of them says, presumably Mistress Milliner—now that they’re this close to him it’s a bother to remember which—“we’ll make sense of you in no time.”
“Your hair wants cutting,” says Mistress March. “Such a lovely color, though. So dark! But other than that you’re all light, aren’t you, creature? Why, you could shine like a teakettle if someone polished you right!”
Mistress Milliner and Mistress March both seem to find this scandalously funny, muffling their laughter in Aelister’s clothes. Aelister grits his teeth and lets them throw fabric at him, button him into a shirt and chalk at his trousers and pinch the sides of a waistcoat to create new seams.
“You’ll be a perfect shadow for the Duke, won’t you, little man?” Mistress Milliner asks, around a mouthful of pins. “Oh, how wonderful it must be for you, to meet the Prince with him! Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Aelister says, not altogether truthfully.
“Well, you ought to know! His Highness is at the height of fashion! The spire, really. Oh no, that won’t do, Mistress March, unbutton that last button at once!”
“But the boy’s so thin, Mistress Milliner, there’s no need.”
“Need or none, it must be done. Or undone, I should say!” She snaps the lowest button on Aelister’s unfinished waistcoat open, and then returns to tightening the seams. “His Highness is very particular.”