Iren opened the paper and let Ann pull her arm down so she could read along with her. Ann was a much faster reader, though Iren’s attention had stalled on the etching, which took up a full quarter of the front page. It was of a slight woman in a white nightgown leaping between rooftops. The likeness wasn’t perfect, but her short dark hair was unmistakable.
“It’s the evening edition,” Ann said, and began to read aloud: “‘The Sphinx’s niece was spotted last night running about the rooftops of our fair city in her nightgown. Lady Voleta Pennatus Contumax, who is rapidly making a name for herself, startled Prince Francis by pouncing on his terrace. The prince was in the midst of entertaining Duke and Duchess Kinneer, Duke Patrick …’” Ann stopped, glancing up at her attentive listeners. “It’s just a lot of titles for a bit. Let me skip down. ‘According to Prince Francis, Lady Voleta’s acrobatics were quite entertaining. He said that he hopes she sparks a trend among young women to go skipping about the skyline in their negligees. The prince also remarked that “she was a pretty little thing,” raising the specter of a possible romance, which we can only hope will blossom into the coupling of the summer.’”
“Coupling? Pretty little thing?” Voleta said, balling her fists. “Who does he think he—”
Xenia grabbed Voleta by the shoulders and began jumping up and down. “Oh, you’re going to have his purple-eyed babies!”
“Stop that!” Voleta said sharply, then seeing the hurt in Xenia’s eyes, quickly added in a kinder whisper: “I don’t want to seem overeager.”
A knowing look came over her host’s powder-flattened face. Xenia smiled. “I see. Oh, aren’t you clever. You want to play coy. I know coy. I’m the queen of coy. I’ve played coy loads of times.”
Voleta wanted to tell Xenia to stop saying coy, but she resisted the urge. “Really? What’s your technique?”
“Well, I stick my finger in my mouth like this, and I put my hand on my chest right here, and I open my eyes wide, just so, and the boys fall all over themselves and do all sorts of silly things trying to impress me.”
It dawned upon Voleta that her host was an insatiable flirt. “You’re obviously an expert, Xenia. And I still have much to learn.” Voleta hooked her arm through Xenia’s, trying her best to seem pleasant and friendly. The crowd shifted forward, and they made a little progress. The orchestra inside the hall rumbled and swelled. Voleta ginned up a little enthusiasm and said, “Oh, listen to that! Music! I adore music. It’s my absolute favorite thing in the world.”
“My favorite thing is a chocolate éclair dipped in pink champagne,” Xenia said.
“Well, those are good, too. I’ve heard an awful lot about this pianist they call the Mermaid. Have you ever heard of her?”
“Have I heard of her?” Xenia scoffed. “She’s only the most wonderful singer in the world! And she has the most perfect story. She was lost in the Baths and rescued by a duke. They had a whirlwind romance, right out in front of everybody. Her rise to fame has been meteoric!”
“Meteors go downward, my lady,” Ann interjected.
“The other one then,” Xenia snapped her fingers. “A stalactite!”
“Still no,” Ann said, but hurried on before Xenia could try another word. “I’m sure that both of you can find more interesting and wholesome dance partners than Prince Francis. Isn’t he a bit too infamous? He’s a little rough around the edges, isn’t he?”
“Oh, Ann, don’t be stupid! If Prince Francis wants to be rough with my edges, he’s welcome to them. No, he’s not perfect, but I’m sure if he ever found the right woman to love and dote on him, he’d polish up perfectly well. Even a golden train makes a little soot!”
They reached the bottom stair, frilled like the lip of a clam shell. Above them, through the tiers of skirts, dress trains, and eager ladies, they saw the pages checking invitations, their gloved hands flashing from envelope to envelope. Inside, the warm baritone of the herald announced the newest arrival. Voleta felt an unexpected flutter of anticipation. “Will she be here tonight, the Mermaid? Can we meet her?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Lady Xenia said. “She doesn’t come to these sorts of parties anymore. She’s too famous now; she’d just be mobbed. Since her return last month, she’s been a bit of a ghost about town, really. She surprised everyone by making an appearance at the Lighting of July a few days ago, but that was unexpected. Your best chance to see her is onstage. I’m sure we could get tickets to see her perform. Papa never has trouble getting tickets to shows.”
Voleta hid her disappointment with a smile. “I would like that. Please ask him. It’s wonderful to have such well-connected friends.”
“Yes, you are lucky!” Xenia beamed.
“It must be awful, though—to be so famous that you can’t even go to balls anymore. I wonder if the Mermaid goes out at all,” Voleta mused aloud.
“Oh, she probably still goes to teeny-weeny rooftop parties. Not the sort of thing I get invited to, unfortunately.”
“But you’re a lady!” Voleta said with an admirably straight face.
“Yes, but we’re standing in a crowd of ladies!” Xenia exclaimed as she handed her invitation to the doorman. “Ladies are ten a penny. I’d have to be a duchess or a princess!” The herald took Xenia’s card and announced her to the room.
While Xenia was making her entrance, Voleta pinched her chin and scowled with thought. Iren leaned down and whispered in her ear, “You’re going to try to befriend the prince, aren’t you?”
Voleta looked up, smiling at how transparent she was to Iren. “Well, you heard the lady. He’s a golden train.”
“He’s full of soot,” Iren said. “He’s a cad.”
“I’m sure he is, but we have two days to have a private chat with a ghost who only appears onstage in front of hundreds of people. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”
Voleta presented her invitation to the doorman the same moment Iren said, for all to hear, “If he lays a hand on you, I’ll kill him.”
The doorman’s eyes widened with fright. He looked down at the envelope held suspended between the lady and himself. His gloved knuckle was touching the tip of her finger.
Voleta patted him on the shoulder and said, “It’s all right, she’s talking about the herald.”
Chapter Nine
I have seen men pierced by a wink and women gored by the cut of an eye. The gaze is a martial art.
—Oren Robinson of the Daily Reverie
Prince Francis Le Mesurier stood beside the set sun, which was much larger up close than it appeared in the glazed sky. From tip to tip, the wavy rays of the brass star stretched nearly twenty feet. It hung upon its iron rail, unlit and silent, wearing an expression that was meant to suggest delight, but which in shadow looked more like worry.
The prince reached out his wineglass and tapped the point of one ray, saying, “Cheers!”
Reggie Wycott, a fat, porridge-faced earl, and also the prince’s most reliable friend, laughed at the jest. But then, the Earl of Enbridge laughed at everything. He seemed to believe that if he laughed hard and often enough, people would think he had a sense of humor. But Francis knew better: Reggie was an anti-wit, a comedic deficit, an ill-humorist. Francis liked having him around not for his contributions but for the flattering contrast: Reggie’s flaws brightened the prince’s virtues.
The party was off to a horrid start. Francis observed the full ballroom and all his mingling guests with a vague sense of revulsion. They squawked like a canyon full of geese. They had carried in with them a cloud of cologne and perfume that poorly masked the reek of their anxiety. None of them belonged here. None of them deserved this evening, and they all, deep down, knew it. Of course, it was not his fault the cotillion was terrible. He had filled the hall with wine, music, and a horde of hospitality girls who circulated with trays full of exquisite morsels and exotic cigarillos. He had hired professional dance partners to occupy the floor so that it never seemed empty, though the predictable fact wa
s most of his guests were more interested in kibitzing than waltzing.
He could gin up almost any luxury, any treat, any wonder of the world except worthy company.
He suffered from what he called the anguish of excellence. He was cursed with an acute awareness of the idiots of the Tower, and he had a thorough understanding of their undeserved but pervasive influence upon the world. Because idiots outnumbered intelligent men, they had skewed all the folkways in their favor. The idiots wrote the laws and decided what constituted “decency,” which was just a weakling concept to protect a weakling class. The fact was, most of the women of Pelphia were dumb and whorish, most of the men were toadying and impotent, and almost every one of them wanted to use him like a rung on their imaginary ladder to success. They all thirsted for distinction without understanding in the slightest what made a man worthy of notice, service, and devotion. That was the trouble with idiots: They believed their low birth and mental vacuity could be transcended with works—as if a house cat could become a lion by hunting a sufficient number of mice.
Francis’s father, the influential treasurer of Pelphia, often accused him of going in search of trouble. But it wasn’t trouble he was looking for—it was vigorous stimulation and an honest challenge, which were hard to come by in a place where all the men wanted to be your friend and all the women wanted to have you corrupt them in the cloakroom or debase them in the wine cellar. He was bored of the fox chase. He wanted to hunt something wild, something clever, something with claws and teeth.
“It’s a real screamer of a party, Frank,” Reggie said, raising his glass. Reggie’s hair was as black and thin as candle soot, and he touched the fringe of it obsessively.
Francis’s eyes sparkled. “You think so? I think it’s rather like feeding birds. I throw out a handful of crumbs, and they scramble like they’ve never been fed before.”
“Only you could look at a room full of pretty girls and think of pigeons.” Reggie shifted the black threads on his forehead. “The trouble is you’re spoiled. You’ve eaten so many sweets you can’t taste them anymore.”
Francis nodded at his friend’s paunch. Reggie’s tuxedo shirt swelled like a full sail. “I think you have the two of us confused.”
“You need to roughen up your palate. Eat a lemon. Drink some vinegar. Bed a homely girl. Then maybe you’ll be able to savor this again.”
“Look, just because you got caught with that horse-faced harlot, Beatrice, doesn’t mean I—” The words faded on his lips when he caught sight of her: short haired, olive skinned, broad mouthed, her slight figure wrapped in silver. “There she is. That’s the little foreign girl I was telling you about. The one who jumped onto my roof last night. She told me her name … what was it? Valet? Viola?”
“Lady Voleta Pennatus Contumax, niece of the Sphinx,” the earl said, reminding the prince of the other reason he kept him around: He was good at remembering all the dreary details. “She came aboard that great brute of a warship that’s stopping up our port.”
“Yes, I know. The question is, why is she dressed like a penny whistle?”
“Where are you going?”
“To cleanse my palate,” Prince Francis said, handing his friend his empty glass.
Ann nearly had to pry Iren from Voleta’s side, a sight that wrung Voleta’s heart a little. Though she never meant to, she had a knack for tormenting the people who cared for her the most: first Adam, now Iren.
Ever the diplomat, Ann promised Iren she would be able to keep an eye on Voleta from the servant’s vestibule, which was separated from the ballroom by only a screen. Before following her counterpart into quarantine, Iren bent down and told Voleta, “If anyone lays a finger on you, I’ll snap it off.”
“And I’ll feed it to them,” she replied, and chucked her friend on the chin.
News of Voleta’s nocturnal adventure seemed to blow in from the street with her. The crystal chandeliers, large as wedding cakes, shivered with whispers and laughter. There she was! The girl who had leapt from roof to roof, right into the arms of a prince! The next morning’s edition of the Daily Reverie would declare it “an obvious romance, a natural fit: a wild woman for the reckless prince!”
Voleta felt the room’s attention like a change in air pressure. The atmosphere felt thinner, the light less warm. The feeling surprised her. She was not one to suffer from nerves. But it wasn’t nerves exactly. No, it was the same suffocating sensation that had chased her out of bed the night before. She felt a primitive impulse to run, to return to the ship, to fly away and not come back. For the life of her, she couldn’t determine what had triggered that sense of dread. There was nothing very threatening in the hall, just champagne fountains, fancy dresses, and the same multitude of gazes that had followed her since she’d come ashore. The most unnerving element of the ballroom was the dopey-eyed sun monitoring the dance floor.
Voleta wondered if she wasn’t suffering from too little sleep or too much rich food. Xenia had been stuffing her with cakes and chocolates since breakfast. She decided that must be the culprit.
Ignoring the alarms that were ringing inside her, she decided to charge straight at her goal.
Prince Francis, who was standing onstage beside the cradled sun, seemed to mark her the same moment she spotted him. Skirting the edge of the parquet dance floor, she strode toward him as he descended the stairs. Beside her, dancers swept about in one another’s arms, their necks stretched, their heels hardly grazing the floor. Their expressions were as vague as sleepers.
Xenia was trying her best to be coquettish, but Voleta could tell she was having a hard time flirting at a full trot. The young lady was curtsying and greeting noblemen without waiting for a reply.
“Slow down!” Xenia hissed in Voleta’s ear.
“But there’s the prince,” Voleta said, nodding at her target.
“I thought we were going to be coy!”
“We are being coy! I just want to get his attention first.”
When Voleta refused to stop, Xenia slipped out in front of her at the last moment, reaching the prince a step before her guest. The golden-haired lady threw herself into a magnificent curtsy and cried, “Your Highness!”
Prince Francis greeted her with his hands in his coat pockets and a rakish smirk on his handsome face. “Ah, Lady Xenia! How are you? How is your father? What a wonderful man. Such solid parties. Please tell him I said hello.”
Still winded from their sprint across the ballroom, Xenia straightened and said, “Ha-ha-ha, yes!”
The prince turned toward Voleta before Lady Xenia could think to say anything more. “And fancy seeing a gargoyle inspector skulking along the ground. I hardly recognize you out of your nightgown.”
Voleta curtsied with all the grace of a hen pecking a tick, popped back up unsteadily, and said, “I’m sorry I barged in on your party last night. I was just so lost in my thoughts.”
“I have a head on my shoulders, too, but I’ve never thought my way onto the rooftops.”
“Well, what can I say? I suppose I’m an aerobic thinker.” Voleta smiled with her cheeks, if not with her eyes.
“What a coincidence! I happen to be a philosophical dancer.” The prince pulled his hands from his pockets, put his heels together, and gave a brisk, formal bow. “May I have this dance?”
At Voleta’s elbow, Xenia gave a single, mournful peep.
Voleta was about to accept when she recalled Byron’s parting advice to her the previous morning: Whatever you do, don’t dance.
The stag had sincerely tried to teach her. Byron had given her several lessons during the week spent circling the Tower. As a pleasure-cruising warship, the State of Art was outfitted with all the essential amenities, including a conservatory, which featured a miniature harpsichord and a modest dance floor. There, she and the stag had practiced the basic steps for hours on end to the militant accompaniment of a music box. Even with two steel feet, the stag had been a dozen times more graceful than her. She bumped against him, stepp
ed on his toes, and crossed in front of him, again and again. It took days for his patience to break, but Byron finally lost his composure when she tripped him, sending him down on one knee. He came up snorting and livid. “How is it you can climb a tree and swing on a trapeze, but you can’t dance a waltz! A waltz! It’s a step made for drunks!”
“I don’t know! It’s so rigid and plodding! It’s dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun!” she said, chopping one hand into the other, mimicking the timing of a waltz. “It’s just like marching in circles!”
“No! No, it’s nothing like … All right, fine. Yes, it’s like a march. It’s certainly not a shimmy. It’s not a stomp. It’s like an elegant, gliding, silky march.”
The moment the prince put his hand on her hip and the music began to play, Voleta knew the undertaking was a mistake. Her wild careening about would not fool or impress a man who’d spent the better part of his life dancing. He would see through the charade at once. Everyone would. She, a seasoned world traveler, who could not dance. It was beyond absurd; it was implausible.
“Although,” she said, dropping her hands from his shoulders and stepping back again. “To be honest, I’ve never been overly fond of dancing. There’s something about it that’s … Well, it’s just a bit tedious, don’t you think?”
Francis made a scoffing sound, which didn’t quite match his expression of surprise. Voleta imagined he was not accustomed to having his overtures deflected, and she watched him closely to see if he would take offense or find her challenge entertaining.
Prince Francis raised his hand to signal the conductor, who silenced the chamber orchestra with a similar gesture. Suddenly, Voleta could hear all the murmurs in the room. She glanced about for Iren, wishing for a friendly face, but found none. It occurred to her that she had just made the same exact error she had the night before. She had insulted one of the ringdom’s most beloved pastimes.
Prince Francis tugged at his jeweled cufflinks. “You know, I have never once heard it said that dancing was anything but the epitome of beauty and culture.” Someone in the crowd shouted out “Hear, hear!” The prince held up a finger to signal an addendum. “But, privately, I have often thought that dancing really is quite dull.” Expressions of shock rippled through the dance hall. The hired dancers, in particular, looked horrified.
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