The Virtu (20 page)

The Gauthys both looked like people going downstairs in the dark who’d just found out the hard way there was one more step than they’d thought. Me, I was fighting the urge to just strangle him then and there and have done with it. And the look he gave me said he knew it.

But he had some sort of plan, something in view that I couldn’t see, and there wasn’t nothing I could do—nothing useful anyway—but go along with it. So I got out of the way and let him ask questions.

He started with the simple stuff—when had they last laid eyes on Florian, would he have talked to his sisters, were there friends’ houses he might have gone to, shit like that. But Felix didn’t come up with nothing the Gauthys hadn’t already thought of for themselves. So he started asking about what Florian had done the day before—I think just to buy himself time—and Mr. Gauthy was telling him all about Florian’s mathematics and history lessons, when I remembered the thing Florian had started to say on the
White Otter
and stopped. And I hadn’t pinned him down ‘cause I hadn’t figured it was any of my business. Nice going, Milly-Fox.

I said, “Where’s his teacher? Mr. Tantony?”

They all three looked at me like I’d started barking. Fuck, I thought, but I said it again, slower, and right then I forgave Felix a whole bunch of things, because he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he said without batting an eye, “An excellent question. Where
is
Ker Tantony?”

Mrs. Gauthy said, “But it can’t have any bearing on—” At the same time Mr. Gauthy said, “But Jeremias would never—”

Felix was trying hard not to look like a cat given cream, but it was all in his voice when he said, “I beg your pardon. I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Ker Tantony left the house very early this morning, before anyone else was up.”

“Thank you, Theokrita,” Felix said. “And what evidence do you have that he didn’t take Florian with him?”

Mr. Gauthy said, “Well, he didn’t exactly
leave
, so much as that just at the moment he can’t be found. But he would never hurt Florian. He’s been with us five years, and his references were excellent.”

Powers and saints, the things people can talk themselves into believing when they want. And the bourgeoisie more than most. Felix snorted, and I knew he was thinking the same thing. He said, “So if Ker Tantony didn’t leave, but yet can’t be found—and somehow this story is sounding awfully familiar—what has become of him?”

A pause. Mr. Gauthy went scarlet. Mrs. Gauthy said, “Witchcraft.” And suddenly I thought the whole nasty thing made sense. They’d found out somehow that Felix was a hocus—gossip from the captain, would be my guess—and probably they hadn’t thought much more about it ‘til Florian and his teacher went missing, and then they drew the obvious conclusion, same as I would’ve done in their place, except for how this time I knew it was wrong. Felix hadn’t been witching nobody.

Thank the powers they ain’t realized he’s molly, I thought, and then saw Felix had gone white as a sheet and needed me to buy him some time.

“What’re you saying exactly?” I said and had to repeat it twice. But Mr. Gauthy was perfectly polite about answering.

He said, “We thought if someone had spirited Florian away by magic, you would be able to tell us.” He split a glance between us.

Felix said in kind of a croak, “Why not just go to the authorities?”

Mr. Gauthy made a face, like it was rude to even mention the idea. “Most undesirable publicity. And while the Imperial officers are most excellent fellows, they are common.”

“Vulgar,” said Mrs. Gauthy.

Felix turned to look out the window like he’d just spotted a dragon or something. I said, “Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

“I thought Theokrita had,” Mr. Gauthy said, puzzled as puzzled could be.

She didn’t even blush, the bitch. “I wanted to be sure
he
didn’t know anything first.” I’d got my story turned around. They knew Felix was a hocus, but they didn’t believe he’d ever do anything wrong. I was the one they thought—well, Mrs. Gauthy thought, anyway—would go snatching people, but if it wasn’t me, then it was some random hocus come walking out of one of Florian’s storybooks or something. Not
Felix Harrowgate
, good gracious no.

Fuck me sideways ‘til I cry.

Felix, on the other hand, had swung round and got his bounce back. “Well, I can’t do anything from here. If there’s any thaumaturgie residue at all, it will be in the subject’s room.”

Blank little silence.

Felix rolled his eyes. “If I’m going to find any traces of magic, it will be in Florian’s bedroom.”

“Oh,” Mr. Gauthy said. “All right. Now?”

“No, Leontes, let him consult his appointment book,” Mrs. Gauthy said—well, basically snarled. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder whether you have an ounce of paternal feeling in your entire body.”

Felix said in a hurry, “I am at your disposal,” and gave me a look that said I was coming whether I wanted to or not. Which I didn’t really, but I also couldn’t help thinking maybe I could do something useful about finding Florian. And that mattered more than whether the Gauthys wanted me along or not. Or whether I wanted to go.

The Gauthys’ house was built in what I’d been given to understand was the common eastern Kekropian fashion: a three-story rectangle around a central courtyard, with the public rooms on the side facing the street and the kitchens and servants’ quarters at the back. The family’s rooms were along the inner sides, each with a window overlooking the courtyard. There were a number of entrances from the house to the courtyard, but only two from the house to the outside world: the massive, formal front door and the kitchen door debouching onto the alley behind the house. Both doors were bolted at night; both had been bolted before Florian said good night to his parents and (presumably) went up to his bedroom. The kitchen door had been unbolted by the cook when she came into the kitchen shortly before dawn, and between then and the discovery that Florian was missing, there had been at least one person in the kitchen at all times, and frequently more like four or five. The front door hadn’t been unbolted until after the housemaid Hetty had found Florian’s room empty and his bed unslept in. All the exterior windows were barred.

Mildmay and I stood in Florian’s bedroom. We had been permitted to inspect Jeremias Tantony’s closetlike room with its pristinely unrumpled bed, but it had told us nothing, and I had convinced the Gauthys that I needed privacy and time to detect the residue of any spells that might have been worked in Florian’s room, when the truth—as I could have told them in five seconds—was that there was no residue to detect. No one had enchanted Florian Gauthy out of his bedroom.

It was very much the room of a child of the prosperous bourgeoisie, the furniture sturdy and functional, the contents of the wardrobe showing some wear, but all made of the best materials and none of them hand-me-downs. The housemaid said one pair of shoes was missing, plus the clothes Florian had been wearing yesterday and the coat that needed the left elbow darned; all of which suggested strongly, as Mildmay pointed out, that Florian had left of his own volition.

The wallpaper in Florian’s room had clearly been of his mother’s choosing; no child would want that rather oversophisticated green print, and I was not sure I would have either. Florian’s personality was imprinted on the room by the model ship on the bookcase and the collection of rocks, bird feathers, some small animal’s jawbone, coins from Norvena Magna, Norvena Parva, Ervenzia, Troia, Skaar—all rather oddly piled in one corner.

Mildmay was inspecting the contents of the bookcase in a fashion both bemused and wondering. He was only barely literate, but he seemed fascinated by the mere existence of these books, his fingers running along their spines as if to prove their reality. I wondered if he’d ever seen that many books in one place before and thought that I should have taken him into the Nephelion’s library, whether he would have admitted to wanting to go or not.

I said, “Why has he left his things in the corner like this?”

Mildmay abandoned the bookcase and came over to see what I was talking about. He picked up one of the rocks, a water-polished piece of quartz. “You’d want this where it’d catch the light,” he said thoughtfully, turning it over in his fingers. “Wouldn’t you?”

“As for example on the windowsill,” I said.

The window was large, double-sashed, and wide-open. Not surprising at the sweltering end of summer, but also, in this instance, suggestive. I was just about to propose that we see what reason Florian might have had for opening the window and clearing off the sill when there was a knock on the door.

Mildmay and I looked at each other. He shrugged. I said, “Come in.”

A woman stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, then stood regarding us calmly. She was my age or a little older, an inch or two teller than Mildmay, brown-sugar-colored hair scraped back in a knot; her small mouth, slightly receding chin, and snub nose gave her a childish air entirely contradicted by the intelligence of her gaze. She wore round-lensed spectacles, and her dull brown dress muffled her figure almost completely.

“I beg your pardon, Keria… ?”

“Mehitabel Parr. I’m the governess.”

She certainly looked the part. I said, “And you’re here because?”

Her gaze moved deliberately from me to Mildmay and back again. “I thought you might need some help.”

“Help? Of what sort?”

“I know more about Jeremias Tantony than either of our employers does.”

“And you think Ker Tantony is central to this enigma?”

“He
is
missing.”

“Yes.”

“And I can assure you that Jeremias Tantony would
not
simply vanish. He would have a plan.”

“Then you do not subscribe to the evil wizard theory?”

She snorted, for a moment not like a governess at all. “I subscribe to the my-employers-are-at-their-wits‘-end theory, with the addendum that it isn’t much of a journey.”

I couldn’t quite choke back a laugh, and she smiled at me before sobering to add, “I want Florian to be found, and since Ker Gauthy refuses to speak to the civil guard, you look like the best hope of that happening.”

“Florian? Not Ker Tantony?”

“Jeremias is an adult, and I feel no responsibility for him. But I think he talked to me more than anyone else in the household, and I am willing to put that knowledge at your disposal.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We were just about to see why Florian left his window open, if you would care to join the investigation.”

“Gladly,” she said.

Mildmay gave me an indecipherable look; he went to the window and leaned out.

“Nice strong ivy,” he said. “Somebody’s been climbing it.”

“Keria Gauthy would have five fits,” Mehitabel Parr said, forestalling my mostly ironic question as to whether this was a habitual pastime of the household.

“One person,” Mildmay continued, leaning even farther. “Climbing down.”

“But why would you climb down—or up, for that matter—when there’s a perfectly good staircase?”

“Which creaks,” said the governess, “like Hell’s own hand organ.”

“Ah,” I said. “So entirely useless for clandestine purposes.”

“You might even call it counterproductive.”

“But where does climbing down the ivy
get
you?”

Mildmay said, “One way to find out,” and swung out the window.

I leaned out after him. “Are you
mad
?”

He didn’t even look up at me, just said, “Meet me in the courtyard,” and kept climbing down.

I watched for a moment, but he seemed to know what he was about, and if he did fall, there was nothing I could do. I pulled my head back in and said to Mehitabel Parr, “We are to meet him in the courtyard.”

Her eyebrows went up. After more than a week with only Mildmay and his stone face for company, I was so grateful for her ordinary human reaction I could almost have kissed her. She said, “Does he often do things like that?”

“I don’t—” I bit back the word
know
. “Will you lead the way, keria?”

“Of course, Ker Harrowgate.”

I had not been paying attention to the stairs on the way up, being more concerned with convincing the Gauthys to leave me alone, but following Miss Parr down, I observed that she was right; they did creak abominably, and if I had been Leontes Gauthy, I would have had strong words with my carpenters about it. Certainly, this would not be the route one would choose if one wished to go unnoticed.

At the bottom of the stairs, we turned right, and a short passageway brought us to a door opening onto the courtyard. Mildmay was kneeling awkwardly under Florian’s window. He glanced around as we came out and said, “Two people in this flower bed. Kid-sized feet’d be Florian, and the other guy in the flashy pointy-toed boots—”

“Jeremias,” Mehitabel Parr said and sighed.

“Thanks,” Mildmay said, but not quite as if he meant it.

I said, “So they were both here in the courtyard. But why? And where did they go?”

“Since it looks as if they did not obligingly stay in the decorative borders,” the governess said, “they must have gone into the center.”