“And what do you want of me, in return for this kindness? You could have immediately reported me.”
“I want to know what you know,” she said. “I am curious about the world outside Delphinium. I wonder what has become of it, and why a soldier would come here.”
He turned his head in her direction. “I was sent,” he said at last, “to find a woman. To give her a message.”
Treason sang through her sinews, making her breath catch in her lungs. Sent to find a woman— and found unconscious on the road to her home. “And what woman was that? What message?”
“I can’t tell you if you are not her. What is your name? I cannot see your face.”
She hesitated, rolling the syllables around on her tongue. The temptation to know was strong, so strong. All she had to do was give her name, give up the safety she had bought herself with her brutality. It was simple. Easy.
Impossible. There was too much risk all around her to add more to the pile.
She retreated to the doorway. “No,” she said. “I cannot trust you not to use that information against me. You’re a clever man, you understand the position I am in. Your blindness is a blessing.” He sucked in a sharp inhalation, as if she had stabbed him. “It’s the only thing that will allow you to leave this house alive.”
Two nights later, she scanned the many chairs and tables and reclining couches of Countess Urvenon’s salon, looking for the black and gold flash of a Judiciary officer’s dress uniform. Half a dozen men wore startling ascots of amber, but their otherwise unremarkable eveningwear took up all the air in the room, leaving no space for Pollard. One layer of tension unknotted in her belly, leaving only the roiling tangle of being in another’s home, in public, under examination. Outside, her world threatened to go up in flames, but in here there was no Judiciary, no soldiers, no strange and staring girls by the side of the road.
“It is a surprisingly robust crowd,” said Reginald Danforth from where he leaned against the arm of her chair. Evelyn spared him the barest of glances. He had attached himself to her like a limpet not fifteen minutes after she arrived.
That he was even here spoke to how the decay of the city suffused the air. Unlike her, all Danforth had was money. He had no title, and his estate was all new construction. Even two years ago, Countess Urvenon might have exchanged pleasant greetings with him on the street, but would never have allowed him to enter her home.
But rents were falling, and what was a nobility without its empire? The city alone was too small for all of them. They would begin feasting on one another soon, devouring dwindling pots of wealth. Danforth’s presence hinted that it might have already begun. Those who formed alliances with and let themselves be ruled by the merchants would have their funds a little while longer, at least.
She’d expected Danforth to move off to one of the pretty young women who flitted about in his imported silks and lace, but he stayed by her side. Most meetings at the club, he was the best at forgetting she even existed. The change unnerved her.
“I heard,” he said at last, “about the unfortunate happenings among The Verity’s crew. How many men have you lost now?” Ah. He was here to press her position in private, where the other men couldn’t see it play out. “Seven,” she said.
“And is it true that the doctors are calling it a new plague?”
“Hardly,” she said, refusing to look up at him, refusing to surrender any inch in uncertainty or weakness. “There have been no new cases since the night we put into dock.” The girl had gone unconnected, and passed into nameless obscurity. “I have been assured that The Verity has been cleared to sail again as soon as her maintenance is complete.”
“How very lucky,” he said. “Is that the doing of our friend, Officer Pollard?”
He was needling, looking for a reaction. She would not give him one, not even stoic remove. She must be at ease. “In that he completed the paperwork, yes, but I have cooperated fully. It is a tragedy for my men, but not a concern.”
“I hear he was invited to tonight’s event,” Danforth put in. “He has better sense than to blow out his eyes with glitter,” she said, shrugging. “He is an admirably self-possessed man. I am certain I have never heard his name spoken together with graft. It is reassuring, that we still have such men.” A pointed threat—do not try to suborn him. It will not work.
Danforth shifted his weight, taking the message. “Still,” he said, “what strange times we live in. I would think we would all feel much more at ease if the Judiciary were to do a thorough review of the matter, independent of the work Officer Pollard has already done. Just, you understand, to reassure everybody that we may continue visiting the same ports without fear of some... revolutionist plot.”
“I should think,” Evelyn responded, hands loosely clasped in her lap, “that the Judiciary, in such a case, should extend its review to The Orrery as well, as it came into port so close to The Verity, and had a much wider route. It is my understanding that the Judiciary is considering the possibility that this is not plague at all, but an imported vice new to the shores. My ships’ manifests are well-kept; it won’t take long for the Judiciary to compare them to what was unloaded. That should give them ample time to inspect The Orrery’s, as well.”
It was the same maneuver she had almost made in front of Pollard, and from how Danforth’s smile twisted briefly into a grimace, she suspected it would have been an effective one. Now, of course, he would have time to make sure to scrub his records.
But it at least set them onto neutral, level soil. “Of course,” he said, after his momentary faltering. “I will make my offices available.” He pushed off of the chair and inclined his head to her. “I do hope your employees recover,” he added. “The last thing we need these days is the loss of a good ship.”Because if her ship was burned for plague, it would be one less he could potentially acquire.
This was exhausting. She inclined her head to him in turn, and watched him leave, stiff-backed and annoyed. He’d be drinking heavily tonight, then, and she only hoped he would keep his mouth running strictly on the topics of imported wines and the turning of the season’s storms.
Evelyn wanted to relax into her seat, but there would be no chance of that until after dinner, likely until after she had left entirely. Even with Danforth gone, there were eyes on her, so many eyes. It had been three months since she last appeared at one of these functions. She expected half a dozen practiced approaches from the fine women spangled about the room as stars upon the sky, their low-cut silks earning them hoards of admirers pacing out the boundaries of their skirts. The meetings would happen on the balcony, or in a hallway, or even here in the far corner of the room, opposite the musicians. And there would be two or three less-practiced attempts, young girls stumbling over requests for purging medicines, or creams for their faces.
She wasn’t looking for new girls to help. Five years ago, before the coup, before the blockade, she would have supplied some of them. Most of them, perhaps, if they were deferential enough and seemed inclined to secrecy. But secrecy was a relative concept. That the younger faces at this party already knew to come to her spoke of the breakdown of secrecy.