The Privilege of the Sword (52 page)

A gentle knock on the door made it necessary to stop. No one might care if we screamed, but one of us did have to say, “Come in.”

Nan Glinley was everyone’s vision of a perfect mother: small, round, placid and pleasant-faced. She was gowned in grey, and her hair was modestly coiffed in the manner of city women. I could tell from the way she looked at me only once that she knew who I was. But she spoke to both of us. “How can I help you?”

“Um,” I said, and Marcus said, “We’re investigating.”

“My house,” its mistress asked, “or yourselves?”

Was it that obvious? I guess it was. With the little sense left to me, I realized that if we stayed in there alone, Marcus and I could very well end up naked on the couch, and that was not what I had come to Glinley’s for. “I want to see a man,” I said imperiously. “A really, really handsome one. Dark haired, not too young—experienced, that is. Classy, though. Not trash.”

“I see.” She turned to Marcus. “And you?”

“Me, too,” he said swiftly, having caught my plan. “We’re together.”

“Shall I show you what’s available?”

I nodded. We would find Lucius Perry in here, actually see him in place in the halls of Glinley’s House of You-Know-What. Why waste the chance? After that, we could go.

“You may select a partner first, if you like, and then we can all discuss what sort of setting you’d prefer, and what combination. Or we can sit down together now and decide in advance—”

“Oh, lord!” I exclaimed gauchely as I caught her drift. “I mean—we just want to look—to see—”

“Ah.” Nan Glinley nodded. “Hidden observation? We can accommodate that.”

I let out a breath of relief, and only hoped she didn’t hear. No way on earth was I ending up on a couch with Lucius Perry, and neither was Marcus.

“Discretion, I think, is key here,” she said, “given your tender years. We’ll let you go masked while you search. Excuse me just a moment.”

Nan Glinley left the room. Marcus and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Hidden observation!” That’s what we’d been doing all along.

“We’ll never get away with this,” Marcus chortled nervously.

“What if they throw us out?” I put my hands over my mouth to keep in the laughter.

“Get a grip on yourself and they won’t. Start thinking up a story—”

Nan Glinley came back, carrying a bundle. “You might like to disarm,” she said. “Your weapon will be safe here. Unless that’s part of your personal preference…?”

She knew perfectly well it wasn’t. But she was treating us like real clients. I was impressed. If I ever really did want a little experience, this would be the place to get it, with a nice woman like that taking care of me. I took off my sword with a rueful smile to say of course we wouldn’t be needing it in this lovely woman’s house.

Nothing was forbidden at Glinley’s, but privacy was respected. We were encased in silk capes from neck to toe, surmounted by masks with animal faces. I was a cat, and Marcus was an owl. He cut a caper in the corridor, so that his shadow danced wingéd on the wall. “Come,” said Mistress Glinley, and we followed her through the halls.

We started by looking through peep holes into bedrooms decorated in various styles. They were also decorated with young men sitting or lying around trying to keep themselves amused. It was too early for them to be busy, but clearly they were expecting to be very busy soon. One was painting his nails, one practicing the guitar. Another was smoothing oil all over his body; I was tempted to stay and see what happened with him next—but it wasn’t Perry, after all.

“No?” Nan Glinley asked us at the end of the corridor.

We shook our heads.

“Then let us try the Flower Garden.”

The Flower Garden was amazing: an indoor room with a pool surrounded by plants, strewn with a variety of bodies scantily clad. We picked our way amongst them, feeling almost indecently overdressed, and moving strangely because we had to turn our heads to see anything through the eyeholes of the masks. Cloaked as we were, we had no gender. Bodies of both men and women did what they could to entice us: a languid glance, a flutter of fingers, a roll of the hips. Suddenly it all seemed possible—not seemed, but was—to take one by the hand, go off and learn to minister to desire in perfect safety. I licked my lips. That one…or that one…the golden hair just edging above the trouser line, but how swiftly they’d slip off to reveal the whole…the soft breasts floating unconfined beneath the gauze, to be nuzzled, stroked, explored….

“Come
on
!” hissed Marcus.

“Are you made of stone?” I whispered back.

He said, “They’re only whores,” as though their very availability rendered them worthless.

We nearly missed Lucius Perry altogether. He was dressed like some nobleman wandered down from the Hill, in black brocade and silver lace. But his face was painted like a mask, skin powdered to white, and his eyes, with blue and gold on the lids, were lined with black, so that they seemed immense. His lips were stained red as old blood. He was sitting solitary by a fountain, staring at the water. He looked very helpless, fragile and alone. It wasn’t only his painted face that made him unrecognizable—I’d never seen those qualities in him before. I wondered if he was doing it on purpose, if it was a mask he liked to wear. He did have a choice, after all.

Marcus raised his arm and pointed. Perry’s eyes flicked our way, and he rose in one graceful movement. But Nan Glinley came forward and put her hand on his arm and murmured something low to him. He nodded and walked out of the room.

“You like him, do you?” She smiled. “You’ve made a good choice. And you’re in luck; he’s got some clients arranged, and he doesn’t mind being watched tonight.”

Now was the time to tell her,
No, that’s all right, we don’t want to see any of that, thanks; sorry to bother you, we’re just leaving….
Nobody’s ever really died from embarrassment, have they? I turned to catch Marcus’s gaze so I could pick up his thoughts, but of course the stupid costumes made it impossible. My friend was an owl. And I was amazed to hear his muffled voice saying, “Good,” from behind the mask. “I’d like that. I want to see what he does. I want to see how he does it.”

Well, if he did, so did I. This was better than anything we’d see at Teresa Grey’s—or anything we wanted to see there—wasn’t it? The final piece to Perry’s puzzle, and practically with his consent.

She led us to a little cupboard of a room. We took off our capes and masks and gave them to her. “I’ll be back in an hour,” Nan Glinley said. “That should be enough.” Well, it should. I could always close my eyes if it got to be too much. I turned my attention to the room.

There was a long slit in the wall, a sort of narrow window covered in mesh through which we could look into a luxurious bed chamber, dimly lit and gloriously appointed. It wasn’t very tasteful; it practically screamed wealth and power—or at least, wealth. There wasn’t a thing, from firetools to candlesticks to bedposts, that wasn’t gilded or carved or ornamented in some way.

In his lace and brocade, Lucius Perry looked like yet another ornament, and not a very tasteful one, either. He sat in a chair next to the bed, as still as he had sat by the fountain in the Flower Garden. Gold candlelight on rich hangings made it look like a scene in a painting.

I wondered what he was thinking. Did he know we were there yet? Probably not, or he’d be doing something more enticing, wouldn’t he? Why didn’t he have a book to read? When would something happen? Marcus shifted in his seat and I moved away from him; there wasn’t much room in there, but we were careful not to touch each other.

We both jumped when a knock on the door to the room broke the stillness. Perry turned slowly. A man came in and threw his coat on a chair.

“Well, hello.” Lucius Perry smiled.

I peered at his customer. The man was short and a bit stout; he could have been anyone you’d pass on the street without a second thought. He stood staring at Perry as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. God, you’re gorgeous. They were right.”

“I’m here for you. Name your desire—or better yet, don’t name it, just show me.” Perry began advancing on him, but the man held up his hand.

“No, wait. I want to look at you.” Perry stopped, obedient. “You are…exquisite. But the paint—the eyes, and whatnot—it’s a little much. I wonder if you’d mind wiping it off?”

“That,” Lucius said, “I cannot do.” As the man drew breath to object, he added swiftly, “But why confine yourself to looking, when you can touch?”

“Yes,” the man said again. “Yes. Come here, then.” He put his hands to either side of Perry’s face, and pulled his mouth down, kissing him. He pulled Perry’s head back, and traced his eyes, his cheeks…the paint was smeared all over his face, making the mask all the more effective, but the way he held his body—I watched Lucius Perry melting, melting in a fluid surrender, as though sinking into a water of anonymity…. The man’s hands were all over him now, opening his jacket, plunging under his shirt, squeezing and pulling on his body, and Lucius Perry flowed with it all, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. He loved being touched. He loved being admired. Glinley’s was made for him.

But the client wasn’t really interested in Lucius Perry’s pleasure. He was undoing his own breeches now, and guiding Perry’s hands down to where his tool sprang out. I shut my eyes for a moment, and heard moaning. I peeked through my lashes. Lucius was kneeling before him, obscuring the worst of the view. It was perfectly obvious what they were doing.

“Hmph,” Marcus muttered beside me. “He could have had that on the corner for a whole lot less than he’s paying here.”

“Hush,” I hissed. The man dug his fingers into Lucius’s hair, and arced his back, and shouted so loud I thought the whole house would come running. But nothing happened. The man subsided onto the bed, and Lucius handed him a towel. The man wiped himself off and started to get up, though you could tell he didn’t really want to move.

“There’s no hurry,” Perry said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

The man drank a glass of wine. From his face, I guessed it was better wine than he was used to.

“Thank you,” he said. He began putting his clothing together. “I wish that I could stay, but…” He shrugged. Glinley’s was expensive.

Perry nodded. “Come back,” he said. “Come back and see me, when you can.”

The man smiled. “Don’t tempt me. I’ll dream of you, first, for a good long time.”

He closed the door softly behind him.

So that was it, was it? Did they all do that? A solid hour of this would be the end of me. Our hiding room wasn’t very big, and it was dark. I couldn’t see Marcus, but I could hear his breathing next to me, shallow and a bit uneven.

“Are you all right?” I whispered. I wondered if we really should have come.

“Fine. Don’t fuss.”

Lucius Perry was carefully putting himself back together again. Like an actor, he cleaned off his face—and for a moment, I saw the man we knew, his skin pale in the candlelight, his eyes bright. He was staring into the mirror over his dressing table. He turned his face from side to side, examining it as if trying to see what it was that other people saw. He touched his lips, ran his finger down the straight line of his nose, smoothed his eyebrows, stuck out his tongue and laughed. He took out little pots from a drawer and began layering the paint back over his eyes. The colors made him look magical, like a creature in a dream. The last thing he did was his lips, drawing his crimsoned finger across them slowly, savoring the sensation. He rubbed them over and over, until they were saturated with color. If you didn’t know about the paint, it was as if he had flushed them with stroking. He picked up a comb and drew it down through his tangled hair, again and again until it lay sleek on his head. Then he peered critically into the mirror and ran a hand through his hair, and looked up.

I had missed the knock. Another man came in. Lucius Perry stood, and bowed to him. The new client was dressed like a merchant, a shopkeeper, perhaps. He looked around the room at the canopied bed, the hearthfire, the tapestry; at one point he even looked straight at us, which gave me a scare, but our peephole must have been part of something like a picture or a hanging, and I suppose he was admiring it. “Well,” he said. “A nobleman’s bedroom. I’ve never been in one of these before.”

Lucius Perry drawled, “You’ll find it’s much like any man’s.” He sounded quite a lot like the duke, actually.

The client’s hands were clenching and unclenching. “And are you much like any man?”

Lucius preened. “I’m better. Look at me. Don’t you think so?”

“A better man than I? I do not think so.”

“Don’t you? Maybe you need a better look.”

“Anyone looks good with thirty royals’ worth of clothing on his back. Take it off.”

“How dare you?” Perry said arrogantly. Oh, he was enjoying himself, even I could tell, being just as horrible as the man expected him to be. This was different from the last one. There was a contest here, and a sort of drama. “This coat alone cost fifty.”

“I deal in cloth, you slut. I know exactly what that getup’s worth. You’ve probably passed my shop a hundred times and never looked at me. But you’ll look at me now. You’ll look at me, and like it.” He was breathing so hard, I was afraid he was going to hit poor Lucius. But the younger man showed no alarm.

“I’m looking,” Perry said.

“Keep looking,” the man growled.

“I’m looking.” They were both starting to breathe hard.

“What do you see?”

“I see you. I see you, and I like it. You make me want things I shouldn’t want.”

“Such as?”

“I want to take my clothing off for you. I want you to strip me naked. I want you to see me the way no one’s ever seen me before.”

“Your noble friends would not approve.”

“My noble friends cannot imagine the pleasure. Strip me. Reveal me.”

“Strip yourself,” the man said thickly. “I want to watch.”

Perry lifted a hand to the buttons of his coat and slowly undid them, and his breeches as well, ’til he stood there in his shirt, lovely as ivory, with the silver lace framing his shoulders.