“Rare called the Alchemist ‘Father.’ But she can’t properly be his daughter . . . can she?”
“Many things are proper where adoption’s concerned.”
“So if he’s her lawful father, why do you both have girls’ clothes about that suit me?”
He sighed. “Keeping a wardrobe of Rare’s old things might make me a rather too tolerant custodian of her clutter, but that’s between us. The Bear and Leyah adopted Rare when she was a little younger than you are. After Leyah died, she came to live with me.”
“Leyah?” Rowena paused. “Is that . . . ? He was married?” Rowena studied Meteron, her brow furrowed. “But what’s Rare doing with you if you en’t family, and you en’t—” And then, the tumblers in her mind rattled into place, and she knew the answer. “Oh. I see. Sorry.”
“That was two questions in a row, Rowena Downshire.”
“So even us up. Try me a hard one.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How much have you stolen from me since you came here last night?”
Rowena’s jaw slackened. She scrambled to shape the look into a glare, something suitably offended. “I en’t taken anything. God’s honor. It’s my turn now. How’d you lose the finger?”
“Tragically deep paper cut opening the morning post.”
Silence, sudden and absolute. Meteron’s eyes scraped the pieces of her up on a set of balances, massing them out. To Rowena, all those jagged bits seemed suddenly, impossibly small. She stabbed at her food a sullen while.
“You’d be surprised what you can stuff up a good set of bloomers,” she said at last. “I’ve got an ivory comb. A little clasp mirror, like for a lady’s handbag. And three of those tiny silver forks—what do you call ’ems?”
“Crab forks.”
Meteron set his cigarette in the ash stand, finally cutting into his cold breakfast. For a time, only the scrape and clink of silver and plate filled the room.
“How’d you know?” Rowena asked.
He tossed his serviette onto the tray. “You work for Ivor,” he said. “You must be desperate.”
She didn’t nod. She didn’t need to.
“He’s quite taken with you,” Meteron suggested in a consoling tone. There must have been panic in Rowena’s eyes, for he added, “The Old Bear, I mean. You’ve slid right under his thick skin.”
Rowena bit her lip. “Can’t think why.”
Her host shrugged, a movement of one shoulder. “I had been hoping this little interview might help me figure that.”
“So, have you?”
“Life doesn’t afford many second chances,” Meteron said, examining his cigarette’s ember end. “Things didn’t go well between him and Rare, after Leyah passed. Perhaps a new orphan will assuage his conscience.”
“I’m not an orphan,” Rowena said, then winced. “My mum’s alive. She’s just . . . she’s in Oldtemple.”
Meteron nodded. Even a man of his means, Rowena supposed, would have to know the only thing Oldtemple was famous for—a debtors’ prison four thousand inmates strong, all but overflowing.
“Silver and ivory fetch a good price if you hawk ’em at market,” she explained. “Helps me keep ahead of her fees a bit, make a dent in the debt. I’m getting close. Just five hundred left. That’s . . . that’s not too bad.”
Now that she was saying it aloud, it came rushing out, like a pumped tap running dry. “I think I can get it paid off, if I find a good job with some other courier or something. I can do my sums a little, and I work hard. I’m used to it. The accountant clerk tells me I should have it all settled in about four years.”
He nodded again. Rowena could tell his agreement was as much a lie as her claim had been. The accountant clerk had told her no such thing. And no job she could get would keep ahead of the keeping fees or wear down the debt in so short a time. Certainly not if she expected to feed herself in the meanwhile. But Rowena had decided on the lie long ago and told it to herself over and over again, until it seemed true.
“It’s a worthy plan,” Meteron answered, toneless.
Rowena scrubbed at her nose. There was a little tingle in it, and she had to drive it out before it brought along a company of tears. “I have another question.”
He spread his hands.
“En’t you afraid of the Alchemist?” She saw the crease between her host’s brows deepen. “You’re a liar. I mean, begging your pardon, but that’s about the size of it, right?”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Seems to me the last person in the world you’d want to be hanging about is some witchy mind reader.”
“We’ve had a long time to reach an understanding.”
Rowena pulled a face. “About irrational magical hoodoo?”
“It’s not quite so prosaic as that.”
“But are you afraid of him?” Rowena pressed. “That’s the question. Birdseed for birdshit, remember?”
He smiled darkly. “Of course I am. But I’d be much more frightened to call him my enemy than my friend, after all we’ve done together.”
Rowena pursed her lips. Meteron was following the rules. She almost wished he wasn’t. After all we’ve done together. . . .
“How’d she die?” Rowena asked.
“Sorry?”
“The Alchemist’s wife. Leyah.”
“Ah.” Meteron’s brow furrowed. He stabbed his cigarette into the ash stand. “Badly, and a long time ago.”
“How’s an alchemist’s wife die badly?”
He studied her face. “You missed a room,” he said at last. “Follow me.”
Meteron touched a wall plate, opening the gas chambers in the dining room’s alchemical chandelier. The long, draped table shimmered under the crystal lights. He walked to the china cabinet, and Rowena followed.
“No, I’ve been here before. The crab forks, remember?”
“You’ve been here,” he allowed, pulling the second silver drawer out and reaching deep into its back, his four-and-a-half-fingered hand groping for something. The wall shuddered, the whole cabinet rattling porcelain music. “But you haven’t been here.”
Master Meteron shifted the china cabinet aside, moving it as easily as the ladders on rollers at the Stone Scales. He gestured through the open passage. Slowly, Rowena approached.
It was an office or study, though not the paneled and rustic sort like in Chalmers’s rectory. Like the rest of the suite, it was white and cream and gold and silver, startlingly clean, with polished fixtures and shining wood. It was like Chalmers’s study in that it had shelves full of books, but that was as far as it went. All similarity ended with the display case, glass-fronted and running the length of a wall, filled with equal parts stringed instruments and weapons.
Rowena stood by, gaping. She had never seen such an arsenal before. It was arranged like a museum, old wheel locks and trumpet-mouthed muskets mounted beside lean flintlock rifles and snub-nosed alley pistols. There were punching daggers, and blade breakers, and stilettos half the length of Rowena’s arm. The case even boasted a few of the heavy carbines the gendarmes of the constabulary carried in the rougher districts. Here and there, the wall of weapons was broken up with a violin, or a guitar, or other things with necks and strings and bows.
“This,” Meteron explained, “is a little remnant of what you might call the family business.”
Rowena pulled her gaze from a fierce, broad-barreled contraption that seemed practically a hand cannon. “What exactly did you do?”
“You must know why men like Ivor make a brisk business smuggling.”
She shrugged. “You need things, and there’s no way of getting ’em lawful, or maybe there’s something you want moved around that needs the wrong hands kept off.”
“Our business was like that, but with people. We did things the constabulary doesn’t do, or won’t. Some things even criminals can’t do for themselves. Or won’t.”
“Like . . . what?”
“Kidnapping—sometimes, rescues. Theft or retrieval. Keeping secrets
or exposing them. Different sorts of jobs, different sorts of clients.” Meteron sank with a yawn into a wingback chair. “This is a world of plutocrats, Rowena Downshire. Get your hands on enough money and you earn with it problems requiring creative solutions.”
“How’s a body go from that to running a nightclub?” Rowena was still looking around at the cases as she took up the chair opposite her host’s. “Or an alchemist’s shop?”
Meteron’s face shifted into an expression Rowena didn’t recognize. Slowly, she realized it was the nearest thing to uncertainty she’d yet seen in his flinty eyes.
“You retire. And then, for a while, you unretire,” he answered, scanning the weapons cases as if they were points on the horizon, impossibly distant. “And then, things go very wrong. As they do.”
“So, this is how you knew Ivor and the Alchemist.”
“This is how.”
“Why are you letting me see all this?”
Meteron smiled faintly. “You really have to ask?”
Rowena bit her lip. No. Not really. The room was a warning. Meteron was leveling with her, all right—leveling his watchful gaze, the sights of a gun, and a promise that whatever she took out of this room or any other, it would be only and exactly what he chose. He was telling her the absolute truth in little parcels of half-truth.
And then he stood, dusting absently at his silk trousers. “I hope you’ll pardon me, but there are a few matters to which I must attend. There’s still breakfast in the solar, of course. Finish, if you like. Benjy will clear up if you ring for him.”
Rowena stood, then felt awkward in her skirt and tunic, not knowing what to do. Follow her host out, so he could close up his little nook and the secrets it held? Shake his hand? Curtsey? Meteron was no gentryman, but he was something.
It turned out not to matter. He sketched his shadow of a bow, and a moment later was in the passage beside the china cabinet, stopped short by Benjy.
The boy carried a note on a silver charger—a hastily scrawled clerk’s rendering of a spark.
Meteron plucked the note up and scanned it. Rowena noticed his jaw tighten, chewing something his scowl suggested was a curse.
“Something wrong?”
“There should be a coat with an ermine collar in your room’s chiffarobe,” he said irritably. Meteron balled the note and flung it into a wastebasket. Rowena watched him reach into the china hutch, searching for its switch. She scrambled up, nearly tangling her ankles in her skirt in her haste to avoid being entombed behind the sliding cabinet.
Meteron rolled the cabinet into place, his face dark. A teacup toppled and ran free on the shelf.
“Get that coat and a pair of shoes,” he instructed. “Meet me in the hall in five minutes. We’re wanted at the constabulary.”
Rowena blinked. “But why?”
“So we can bail the Old Bear’s fool arse out of trouble.”
21.
Though anyone attending the Decadal Conference’s laity lectures that cold, bright Elevenmonth morning would have had a cache of rumor and superstition ready to describe “the Alchemist,” most had no clear sense of what kind of man belonged to the name. The two young gendarmes Haadiyaa Gammon dispatched to find him, though, left the constabulary armed with a good description and a sense of urgency. Their city inspector’s orders had come on the heels of a message brought by a runner in the Ecclesiastical Commission’s own livery. It complained of an unexpected request for a meeting with the Council Bishopric, and was signed by the Decadal Conference planning committee—Xuahtili, Chatham, Bonaventur, Tran, Grigori, and Meteron. Only the last name of that list mattered. It was the name that had made Gammon pull the bell rope for the gendarme’s bull pen and summon the two lads to her office, with orders to double-time down to the Cathedral campus.
The boys were back in an hour, bearing a full report and a foul-tempered old man they’d left sitting in an interrogation room down the hall.
“Went well enough, ma’am,” Cortes said with a crisp salute. “No fuss. Some reverend doc was raising a ruckus with a page about missing equipment as we were calling the old man in. She wanted us to stay on and start an investigation, but we had our orders, so we told her to send a page down to central.”
Gammon glanced up from the reports and warrants littering her desk. “Missing equipment?”
“Stuff gone from her lab overnight, a good crate’s worth of galvanic testers and such. En’t so odd given all the folk coming in and out of the lectures, I suppose.”
Missing equipment. Gammon made a mental note to discuss the matter with Regenzi. If his lordship’s agents were getting sloppy, then the bishop would have to intercede before long, and His Grace had already been moved to do more than Gammon would have wished for one day.
“He did ask for his right of contact, ma’am,” Cortes said hastily, following Gammon to the holding room. “Regency Square. We had a boy see to it.”
“The boy sent the spark already?”
The young officer flinched at Gammon’s tone. “Yes, ma’am. Quarter hour ago, I think. He wasn’t under arrest, exactly, so we couldn’t just put the clamps down.”
Gammon nodded, sighing. She’d known she would have to deal with Anselm Meteron sooner or later—but did it have to come so much sooner? “It’s fine, Cortes. You did well.”
Cortes looked relieved. “And . . . that’ll be all, ma’am?”
“Here.” Gammon passed the lad a folded sovereign note. “Be sure to tell Madigan I’m pleased with you both. Buy yourselves a round tonight.”
Cortes lacked the grace to resist unfolding the bill then and there. It was enough to stand their pints for a whole night.
“Much obliged, ma’am.”
Another quick salute and he was gone, trotting down the hall to find his partner and report their spoils.
Let them be happy, Gammon thought. They had to collect the bloody Alchemist and keep from soiling their trousers doing it. It’s the sort of thing they’d be proud of.
Gammon turned the knob of the holding room’s door. She wondered what she’d have to be proud of come day’s end.
The Alchemist stood by the narrow window cut into the room’s outer wall, his shoulders squared and arms crossed. Whatever he saw out in the dusty alley below commanded his full attention.
Gammon cleared her throat. “Thank you for com—”
“You’re welcome,” the Alchemist said coldly. “I’ve been nearly half an hour in this room, so I assume whatever brings me here isn’t urgent.”
“I’m sorry for your wait. The Decadal Conference has us busier than usual. Petty thefts and larceny always rise when the city is full.”
The Alchemist grunted something that might have been agreement—or indigestion.
“If you’d like to sit, I can explain the situation more fully,” Gammon offered, gesturing to the room’s single teetering stool.
“There’s no reason my standing would prevent you from doing that, Inspector?”
“None, sir.”
“Then I’ll keep my feet, and you’ll keep matters brief.”
Cortes and Madigan earned every clink of that bill. “Last night, two of my men went to the Scales to execute a search warrant. They found the premises had been robbed and someone murdered there.”
The Alchemist’s dark eyes narrowed. “Home breaking, robbery, and murder. I’m surprised that doesn’t take precedence over petty larceny.”
“We recovered the stolen goods on the thief. They’re in case storage down below. I had hoped you might be able to identify the body.”
“I can try. Why was there a warrant in the first place?”
“There’s a lift down the hall. We can speak candidly as we go down.”
They walked the building’s central corridor, stopping in a vestibule where a brass-gated lift waited for Gammon and her ring of keys. She turned one in its lock and scrolled the grating aside, letting the Alchemist enter before her. Inside, Gammon hauled down the lift’s segmented inner
door, latching it at the floor, and put a hand over its ivory-handled lever.
“The Reverend Doctor Nora Pierce was murdered at Smallduke Regenzi’s manor yesterday. Toxicology shows some kind of a conium concentrate in her bloodstream, probably administered through a spiked drink.” Gammon looked at the Alchemist meaningfully. “Regenzi tells us he was in your shop earlier that day.”
“A lot of people were in my shop that day.”
“He claims his mistress made a purchase—or that you donated her something.”
“Did he tell you of his own purchase?”
“He may have. The case is complicated, and we’re very busy. I find it hard to recall details at a drop.”
“Conium. Thirty percent of a solution, suspended in glucose.”
Gammon lifted her eyebrows, incredulous. “You’re confessing to acting as an accessory in Reverend Pierce’s murder?”
“I’m confessing to the preparation and sale of a substance used in the treatment of arthritis.”
Gammon snorted. “At thirty percent concentration?”
“Conium is toxic in any concentration. Regenzi purchased a fortnight’s supply. If it were taken at once, it would be fatal.” The Alchemist shook his head. “I can’t assume liability for customers who don’t heed my usage instructions.”
“I see.” Gammon pulled the lever for the lowest level. The carriage lurched down its chain. “Smallduke Regenzi and his mistress remember things differently.”
“Is there a version of the truth you would prefer to hear, Inspector?”
Gammon considered the Alchemist.
“No,” she said at last. “That’s a question you’d be better served to ask yourself.”
The carriage staggered to a halt, and Gammon set about opening it once again.
The lift opened onto a dim, alchemically lighted corridor with just two doorways, one labeled “MORGUE AND LABORATORY” in vivid block letters, the other “CASE STORAGE.” There was a tall desk beside the second door, manned by a bleary-eyed clerk who looked as if he saw the light of day about as often as the contents of the room he managed.
The clerk scurried back into storage and emerged with a large canvas envelope, a claim tag dangling from it. He checked the tag against a ledger and handed it over for Gammon and the Alchemist’s signatures. As Gammon turned toward the morgue doors, the Alchemist paused to rifle the envelope’s contents.
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