"You're curious."
"That's what I said."
Madeline sighed and supposed it was her own fault for not voicing any real objections. There was no danger in coming here like this; Nicholas was adept at assuming different personas and she had faith in her makeup and her own acting ability. But she could think of better things to do with her afternoons than look at drowned young men. They would be starting rehearsals at the Elegante about now, she remembered, and then tried to put it out of her mind.
There was a thunk from the heavy door and the sound of bolts being pulled back, then it was opened by a man with thinning brown hair wearing an apron over his suit. He said, "Ah, Doctor . . . ?""Doctor Rouas, and my nurse."
Madeline dropped a little curtsey, keeping her eyes downcast. The other man ignored her, which was the attitude most physicians took with nurses and what made it such an effective disguise, almost as good as making oneself look like an article of furniture. He said, "You're here for our latest unfortunate from the river? It's this way."
He motioned them through and locked the door after them, coming forward to lead the way down.
This hall was stone and stank even more strongly of carbolic. Madeline knew the heavy door and the size of the locking bolts were not current precautions, but holdovers from when this place had been part of the dungeons of the old prison that had once stood on this site.
The doctor led them down the hall, past ancient archways filled in with brick and modern wooden doors. Finally they turned a corner into a wide chamber with something of both the laboratory and the butcher shop about it. There were shelves containing chemical apparatus and surgical equipment. There was also an air that led one to expect chains, torture devices, and screaming captives. Perhaps it's only the weight of the past, Madeline thought. Or her imagination.
In the center of the room was a steel operating table and atop that a limp form wrapped in burlap.
There was another doctor present just now, an older man, with gray in his receding hair and in his neatly-trimmed mustache and beard. He was washing his hands in the basin against the wall, his sleeves rolled up and his coat hanging on a peg nearby. He glanced up at them, his expression open and friendly.
There is something familiar about that face, Madeline thought. He said, "I'm just going."
"Doctor Rouas, this is Doctor Halle," their guide said.
"Ah." The older man dried his hands hastily and came forward to shake hands with Nicholas. He nodded pleasantly to Madeline and this gesture of uncommon politeness on his part she almost met with a blank stare. She recovered herself in time to smile shyly and duck her head, but her mind was reeling.
Doctor Halle. Of course she knew that face. Only once before had she seen it at such close range: two years ago at Upper Bannot when Ronsarde had almost uncovered their plot to steal the jewels in the Risais ancestral vault. This man was Doctor Cyran Halle, the good friend and colleague of Inspector Ronsarde.
She had been in disguise then, and far more thorough a disguise than she was wearing now. The other times she had seen him had been at a distance and in innocuous circumstances: the theater, the grill room at Lusaude's, in a crowd outside the Prefecture. He couldn't be suspicious and indeed, he didn't seem so, but Madeline became acutely aware of a nervous flutter in the pit of her stomach.
With an expression of easy goodwill, Nicholas said, "Doctor Halle, I'm familiar with your work. It's an honor to meet you."
"Thank you." Halle appeared honestly pleased with the compliment. He nodded toward the body as he rolled his sleeves down. "You're here to make an examination?"
"No, I'm to attempt an identification only. One of my patients has a son who's gone missing-though the rest of the family believes him to have run away on his own. The mother isn't well and I agreed to come here in her place."
"A sad duty." There was real sympathy in Halle's voice. He put on his coat and took his bag from the stained table. "I'll be out of your way, then. Pleasure meeting you, Doctor, and you, young lady."
Madeline had to remind herself that this man was dangerous to them, even if he did have impeccable manners and was as genial as a favorite uncle. If he knew who we were, she thought, if he knew Nicholas was Donatien, the man Ronsarde has been searching for all this time. . . .
Nicholas had moved up to the slab and turned the burlap sheet back. Madeline caught sight of a face, hardly recognizable as human, discolored as if it was some nightmare creature of the fay. Nicholas said,"He resembles the boy slightly, but I don't believe it's him." He shook his head, frowning. "I'd rather be absolutely sure. . . . Has his clothing been saved?"
"Yes, it has. Doctor Halle advised us to do so." The other doctor turned to open one of the cabinets and as he rummaged through its contents, Madeline took the opportunity to glare at Nicholas with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation.
He frowned at her. He hated to break character in the middle of a performance and normally so did she, but it wasn't every day that one encountered one's second most deadly opponent.
The doctor returned with a metal bucket, which he upended on the table. "There's not much left," he admitted. "Fragments of a shirt and trousers, the rags of a coat. No shoes. Nothing in the pockets, of course."
Nicholas used a pencil from the workbench to fastidiously poke through the damp stinking collection, "No, you're right, that's not much help." He tossed the pencil away and took the doctor's elbow, turning him back toward the body on the slab. "I take it you noticed these marks on his arms? What is your opinion on them?"
With the other physician's attention engaged, Madeline slipped a pair of sewing scissors out of her sleeve and quickly cut fragments from the torn and bedraggled coat and trousers. She folded the pieces in her handkerchief and tucked it away in the pocket of her apron, then turned back to the two men.
Nicholas took their leave shortly after that and within moments they were back out in the dank corridor on the other side of the ironbound door.
"Interesting that Ronsarde is taking notice of this," Nicholas said in an undertone. "He must have sent Halle-the man doesn't stir a foot from his house unless Ronsarde sends him."
Madeline wouldn't have put it that way; she had always found Cyran Halle the least objectionable one of the pair, but Nicholas had never forgiven the doctor for describing some of Donatien's activities as "the products of an hysterical and badly disturbed mind" in a letter to the current head of the city Prefecture. "Interesting? Is that the word for it?" she asked dryly.
"My dear, he suspected nothing."
They were nearing the stairs up into the main part of the building and Madeline was prevented from answering.
The dingy corridors on the ground floor were far more crowded and it was almost impassable near the public area. Here one of the walls was a glazed partition, behind which stood two rows of black marble tables, inclined toward the glass wall and each cooled by a constant stream of water. They held the bodies of the most recent unidentified dead, usually lost souls found on the street or pulled from the river. Each was left three or four days, in the hope that persons who were missing relatives or friends might come and claim them. Over half the corpses found in the city were eventually claimed this way, but Nicholas had told her that many were probably identified incorrectly. It was just too difficult for the bereaved to recognize even close relations under these circumstances.
They had expected to see the drowned boy on display, but had been told that they could find him in the examination room instead. Madeline wondered if it was Doctor Halle who had saved the nameless young man from this fate. As Nicholas forged a path through the crowd for her, she could see that few of the people here looked as if they were searching for loved ones; most of them looked remarkably like well-dressed tourists, drawn here by the grotesque nature of the display.
Once they were outside in the late afternoon light and relatively fresh air of the street, Madeline had decided it was useless to argue. The day had grown warmer and the morning clouds had given way to brilliant blue sky, incongruous after the morgue. The nights would still be cold, but the snow last night had probably been the last of the season and winter was in its death throes. She asked, "What were yousaying about the marks on the boy's arms?"
"They were shackle galls. He was obviously held prisoner before he was killed."
"Killed, and not accidently drowned? It does happen, you know."
"Not in this case. His throat was torn out. It could have happened after death, if something in the river attacked the corpse, but Halle didn't think so. He had left some case notes for them on the table and I managed to glance over the first page."
Madeline considered that, frowning. They had to walk two streets over, to where their coach was waiting for them. Nicholas hadn't wanted it to wait in front of the building so that no one would associate it with the ordinary medical doctor and his nondescript nurse, and she was glad of it. Meeting Cyran Hall wasn't the same as running into Sebastion Ronsarde, but it was far too close a brush with the famous Inspector for her comfort. "Well, do you think this boy was killed by the same creature, or same sort of creature, that attacked you under Mondollot House?"
"I won't know that until I have the substance on the corpse's clothes examined and compared to the substance on my coat. I wish Arisilde. . .. But there's no help for that."
"I could see there was something on the clothes other than river sludge; it was a sort of silvery grease.
If it is the same, what does that tell us?"
"At this point, not much."
Nicholas leaned back in his seat, resigning himself to waiting. From the height of their private box he could watch the crowd swarming into the stalls below. Reynard was late, but then lateness at the theater was eminently fashionable. Nicholas had never managed to catch the habit of it himself. He had spent the first twelve years of his life in the Riverside slums, among decaying tenements and human misery, before Edouard Viller had taken him in. He still found the theater a delight.
Nicholas glanced at Madeline and smiled. She was watching the activity around the stage below with a jeweled lorgnette. She had started as a member of the chorus in the opera five years ago, working her way up to last season, when she had taken a leading role at the Elegante. It was only because of Nicholas's plans for destroying Count Montesq that she hadn't accepted a role for this season.
Members of the demi monde had wondered why a fashionable young actress had taken up with a restrained and often reclusive art importer, no matter how wealthy he was. Nicholas still wasn't sure he knew, either. His original plans had never included Madeline at all.
Three years ago he had sought her acquaintance on impulse, after seeing her several times in her first ingenue role. Before he knew it he was helping her extricate herself from a tangle involving a rather predatory lord who habitually stalked young actresses. Though by the time Nicholas had arrived, the only help Madeline had really required was instruction in the little known art of artistically arranging a body to make its injuries look self-inflicted. After making certain the lord's death would appear to be suicide, Nicholas had taken Madeline back to Coldcourt. At some point during their first night together, he had been shocked to discover that he had not only told her about his identity as Donatien, but blurted out his entire life story as well. He had told her things that only Edouard, or Nicholas's long dead mother, had known. It hadn't just been a haze of lust clouding his brain; he had never had that kind of rapport with anyone before, never felt that kind of bond. He had certainly never expected to find instant camaraderie with a country girl, self-educated and come to Vienne to be an actress.
But Madeline had more than native wit. She had had no intention of staying in the chorus and had prepared for a career in classical theater by reading every new play she could get her hands on and studying the history behind the old period pieces. She had taught herself to speak and read Aderassi soshe could take roles in the opera if she had to, but her real goal was the dramas and comedies played out on the stages of the big theaters of the fashionable district.
This theater was the Tragedian, one of the newest in the city. The wide sweep of the stage was lit by gas jets and the walls were delicately molded in white, pale yellow, and gold. The overstuffed seats in the boxes were stamped velvet of an inky blue, matching the plush seats of the stalls, and the curtains were yellow silk brocaded with flowers.
The curtain around the door was swept aside and Reynard appeared. He said, "Did you know the opera is absolutely full of thugs?"
"Well, there is a Bisran composer there," Nicholas said. Anticipating the request, he started to pour Reynard a glass of wine from the bottle breathing on the little table nearby.
Reynard leaned down to kiss Madeline's hand and dropped into the nearest chair. "Besides him. The place is stuffed with thugs from the Gamethon Club and they're blowing whistles, of all things. Of course, it doesn't help that the damn Bisran is crouched up on the stage, giving alternate signals to the orchestra.
It's driving the conductor mad." Reynard was dressed much as Nicholas was, in black trousers, tailed coat, and straw-colored gloves appropriate for the theater. Reynard's black satin vest only had three buttons as was de rigueur for someone who carried themselves as a bit of a dandy and Nicholas's buttoned further up the chest, exposing less of his starched shirtfront, as befit his persona as a young though staid businessman.
Madeline lowered the lorgnette in alarm. "If someone blows a whistle during Arantha, I'll have him killed."
"My dear, I would be devastated if you did not demand the favor of dispatching such an undiscriminating character from me personally. But to continue, the reason I went to the opera was to speak to someone about your Doctor Octave."
"I'm relieved," Nicholas said. "Go on."
"Octave appeared on the scene in just the past month, but he's already done circles at three or four homes of the beau monde-not the sort of places I could get invitations to, mind." Reynard leaned forward. "Apparently, at one of the first of these exhibitions, the host hired a real sorcerer, from Lodun, to watch and to certify that Octave was not a sorcerer himself and that he was not performing any sort of spell. That's what made his reputation."
"That's odd." Nicholas shook his head. "There's a sorcerer in this business somewhere." He had taken steps through acquaintances in the Philosopher's Cross to meet with a spiritualist who might have an insider's view of Octave's activities, but real spiritualists were apparently elusive beasts and it would take a day or so to arrange the meeting.
"What do people say about him?" Madeline asked Reynard. "Are they afraid of him?"
"Not that I could tell. I spoke to several people and they all thought him a bit odd, but that's fairly normal for someone in his business. Though the people I questioned were friends of friends, you understand, not anyone who had been at one of these circles. But tomorrow night Octave is descending far enough in society to preside at a spiritual evening at Captain Everset's house. Everset used to be invited to court, but then there was that gambling scandal with the son of the Viscount Rale, so he's a member of the fringe at best, now. He's stark raving wealthy, though, which keeps him in company. The circle is being held at that new place of his a few miles outside the city proper. I managed to bump into him at the opera and coaxed an overnight invitation out of him."
"Was it his idea to invite Doctor Octave for a circle?" Nicholas asked. "If we're going to walk into the good doctor's lair, I'd like to have a little more forewarning than this."
"No, it was his wife's idea. From what I've heard, she's merely bored, sick of Everset, and trying tobe fashionable." Reynard appeared to consider the matter seriously. "Everset is flighty, and not terribly clever. Not the type to be involved with this, I'd think." He sipped the wine and held the glass up to the light. "He's invited me along to liven things up, but I wouldn't have the man on a bet."
"Very good." Nicholas nodded to himself. "That should do nicely. I'll come along as your valet."
"Good." Reynard downed the last of his wine. "It'll be fun."
"It won't."
"And what do I do?" Madeline asked, her voice caustic. She lowered the lorgnette to eye them critically. "Stay at Coldcourt and roll bandages?"
"But my dear, if Nicholas and I are killed, who else can we depend upon to avenge us?"
Madeline gave him a withering look and said, "What if he recognizes you? He knew Nicholas, he might know you as well."
Reynard shrugged philosophically and made a gesture of turning the query over to Nicholas, who said, "That's a chance we have to take. Octave wanted something at Mondollot House and he was afraid that we had somehow discovered what it was. We have to find out how he knows about us."
Madeline was right; spiritualists catered to people who knew nothing about real sorcery. Most were tricksters, fakes for the most part who couldn't attract a ghost in the most haunted house in the city. But speaking to the dead was dangerously close to necromancy.
Necromancy was primarily a magic of divination, of the revealing of secret information through converse with spirits and the dead. There were plenty of simple and harmless necromantic spells, such as those for identifying thieves, or recovering lost objects or people, that did not require the spilling of human blood. There were scarcely any apprentice sorcerers at Lodun, at least not when Nicholas had been studying at the medical college there, who had not used a simple necromantic spell to derive hidden knowledge from visions conjured in a mirror or a swordblade. The more powerful spells did require the use of a corpse, or the parts of a corpse, or a human death, and the whole branch of magic had been outlawed in Ile-Rien for two hundred years or more. If any of the spiritualists had really been necromancers they would have found themselves on the wrong side of a prison wall long before now.
That they were ignored by both the law courts and the sorcerers of Lodun showed how powerless they really were. Why would a sorcerer capable of making a golem bother posing as a spiritualist?
Nicholas turned his own glass to the light, watching the blood red sparkle. His hand still ached from the oil burns, though they hadn't blistered. You don't have time for this, he reminded himself. Octave was distracting him from the destruction of Count Rive Montesq, his real goal. Montesq had caused Edouard Viller's death, as surely as if he had personally fired a bullet into the gentle scholar's head, by making it appear that Edouard was experimenting with necromancy. Nicholas still didn't know the full story; he had been away finishing his education at Lodun when it had happened and Edouard had said only that he had regretted accepting Montesq as a patron and that he had discovered him to be dishonest. The only explanation Nicholas could arrive at was that Edouard had learned something about Montesq that the Count found dangerous. What that was, Nicholas had been unable to discover and Edouard had refused to tell anyone anything about his work during the last months of his life.
Nicholas had managed to convince himself that the why didn't matter; Montesq had done it and he was going to pay for it.
But Nicholas couldn't simply ignore Octave. He knows we were in the Mondollot House cellars. If he also knows about the Duchess's Bisran-stamped gold, then we can't use it to frame Montesq.
And he couldn't afford to ignore the danger. Octave could send another golem tonight, even, he thought.
The house lights dimmed and the noise of the crowd swelled in anticipation before levelling offsomewhat. It would never quite cease, but the performances of the actors and actresses in this play were absorbing enough that it would stay a background hum and not rise to drown out the dialogue entirely.
Any more discussion among themselves now, however, would cause Madeline to become agitated.
And besides, Nicholas wanted to see the play himself. He said, "We'll work out the details at dinner tonight."
Chapter Four.
The late afternoon air was chill, but Nicholas had lowered the shades on the coach windows so he and Reynard could view the approach to Gabrill House. The wide packed-dirt road led up through a stand of trees toward a triumphal arch, perhaps fifty feet high and wide enough for four coaches to pass through side by side. As they drew nearer Nicholas could see the stones were weathered and faded as if the thing was a relic of some long forgotten age. He knew it had been built no more than ten years ago.
"Strange choice for a garden ornament, isn't it?" Reynard said.
"If you find that odd, wait till you get inside. This place was built by a wealthy widow from Umberwald. She had two grown sons, neither of whom she allowed to inherit. She had smaller homes built for them-one on either side of the main building." Constructing opulent houses outside the city wall had become all the rage in the past few decades and they had passed many such, of varying degrees of size and wealth, along the way. It allowed for large gardens and the dirt roads out here were wider and tended to have better drainage than the ancient boulevards within the city proper. "Before Everset bought it last year the owners were selling tickets for people to come out and look at it."
"Yes, I'd heard that." Reynard adjusted the set of his gloves as their coach turned off the road and passed under the arch. "You're not a sorcerer, Nicholas. What do you intend to do if this Octave takes exception to your presence with something more than another golem?"
Nicholas smiled. "Only you would ask that question as we are actually driving up to the house where Octave is." Two paved carriage ways led toward the house from the entry arch, splitting off to bridge a sunken garden where they glimpsed the tops of tall stands of exotic foliage. The house had been built backwards, so the facade facing them was a large colonnaded oval, which in other homes of this design would have given on to the back garden. But the architect had planned it well and the graceful columned portico had a mound of natural rock at its base, connecting it to the grotto of the sunken garden their carriage was passing over and giving the whole front of the large house the look of an ancient temple in ruins.
"Oh, I've no sense of self-preservation," Reynard replied easily. "That's what I depend on you for."
"I suppose we should have brought Madeline, then, because that's what I depend on her for. But even your reputation wouldn't support a female valet."
"I don't know about that." Eyeing Nicholas thoughtfully, Reynard said, "Seriously. What if Octave resents your intrusion?"
"Seriously, I only mean to observe Octave. For now," Nicholas said. There had been no disturbances at Coldcourt or at any of his other headquarters last night, though several of his henchmen had kept watch with firearms just in case.
The hooves of the horses clopped on stone as the carriage passed under an arched opening to theright of the portico and into a well-lit stone-walled passage. They were going through the ground floor of the house itself now. One of the flaws in the backward-facing design was that this was the only practical way to reach the carriage entrance.
The passage opened out into the cool air and late afternoon sun again and their coach pulled up in the semi-circular carriage court, overlooked by the elegant pillars of the back facade of the house.
Reynard collected his hat and stick. "We're on." He nodded to Nicholas. "Good luck. And don't embarrass me, my good fellow."
"If you'll do me the same favor," Nicholas murmured. A footman was already running to open the coach door. "Reputation of the firm, you know."
"Of course."
As Reynard stepped down a man appeared between the carved set of double doors and came down the steps toward him. Our host, Deran Everset, Nicholas thought, and he looks quite as dissipated as Reynard said he would.
Everset's clothes were foppish in the extreme, his waistcoat patterned with a loud design and his cravat tied in an elaborate way that seemed to interfere with any attempt to move his head and his lanky frame wasn't well suited to the fashion. He was pale, with a long face and limp blond hair, and he was consulting a jeweled watch on a chain. "My God, you're late," he said, by way of greeting. "And since when have you kept a coach?"
"It's on loan," Reynard said, "from a very, very dear friend of mine." He clapped Everset on the shoulder, turning him back toward the house. "I hope you have a wild night planned for us."
"None of this was my idea. ..." their host protested, the rest of his answer lost as the two men passed inside.