The Queen's Necklace (8 page)

Francis Purcell looked up from a brief inspection of his own discreet ruffles. Surely no one here deserved to be condemned on account of vanity. Purcell was dressed with neatness and propriety in sober broadcloth and thread lace, the king with somber elegance as became a man still in half-mourning, and as for Luke—his clothes were excellent and he had the kind of slim, broad-shouldered figure which ought to compliment them, but except on the most formal occasions he wore them so carelessly he was the despair of his valet.

“Let us become too energetic,” Lucius was saying, “let us become too industrious, too inquisitive, and we'll go the same way the Rowans did, fifty years ago.”

The king picked up an antique bronze flagon liberally embellished with tritons and fish-headed monsters, and poured himself
another cup of the dry red wine. Doctor Purcell made a hard little sound at the back of his throat. “In the case of the Rowan family, there were those two dangerous marriages. One brother to the niece of the Duke of Nordfjall, another to a cousin of the Prince of Lichtenwald. Perfectly legal, all according to the letter of the law, but not in keeping with its spirit.”

“Those marriages—” Lucius dismissed them with a wave of his hand. His handsome face was so pale and earnest, there was such a glow in his fine dark eyes, it was plain he was speaking from the heart now and not just choosing a cause at random, as was often his habit. “They certainly served to attract attention to the family. And once people started looking too closely, what did they find? That the Rowans, unlike other noble families who live by the sweated toil of their tenant farmers, had invested some of their money in trade. Also, they read too much, travelled too much, had too much influence in too many places, and two or three of them took rather too much interest in vegetable poisons—though merely, as it later developed, with an eye to exploiting their medicinal properties.

“All this stirs the public imagination to the point where wild stories start circulating: about murders, poisonings, and intrigues of every description. What follows next? Trials, imprisonments, executions, and the family is in a fair way to be wiped out.”

He paused to take a sip of wine. Across the table, Jarred made an impatient gesture. “Go on, Luke. Don't leave us in suspense. I've always wondered why
any
Rowans survived.”

“They survived because the winds of conservatism suddenly started blowing in their favor. It seems there have been Rowans—if not forever, at least since the fifty-first century when the world was perfected—so it naturally follows that the family must play some essential role in the Grand Scheme of Our Revered Ancestors. No Rowans at all would be almost as bad as too many and too powerful. So the surviving few are retried, and amazingly, the chief witnesses
begin to recant. All too late, of course, for the men and women who had already been executed, or who died in prison under suspicion.”

“You take a warm interest in the fate of a family not personally known to you,” the scholar commented dryly.

“I hardly remember a time when I was not fascinated by the Rowans. When other boys were playing at rebels and Maglore, I always fancied myself as one of the Wicked Rowans going to the scaffold in high style, putting on a brave face while the mob screamed for my blood.” Lucius turned to the king. “Surely you remember those games we played?”

“As I also remember you were invariably pardoned at the last possible moment, when one of the other boys came racing in with the necessary reprieve,” Jarred replied, with a sardonic lift of his dark eyebrows. “Even in play, Luke, you never had to face the consequences of your odd ideas. I wonder if you believe you will always be immune?”

That should have been a home thrust, but Lucius affected to shrug it off. “Shall I continue my argument, or do I bore you?”

Jarred pulled out his crystal pocket watch, flicked it open, and glanced at the dial. “You don't bore me, but we have been talking here for two hours, and I have still to dress before my guests arrive. Perhaps you can present the rest a little more succinctly?”

His cousin sat gathering his thoughts for almost a minute, sitting with his brow furrowed, staring moodily into the soup.

“I've little to say about the middle class.” Lucius bowed to Purcell across the table. “All the virtues that Man allows are embodied in the able, energetic middle class. A clever craftsman—say, a glass-blower or a coach-maker—is always free to introduce some new trick or fancy, just as an inventive genius like Francis is perfectly free to play with his clocks and dancing automatons. But let either one of them, the craftsman or the philosopher, discover or invent a thing which improves the lot of his fellow Men in anything more than the
smallest particular, or advances the total of Human knowledge by anything more than the tiniest fraction—and Society will brand him a renegade.”

The scholar was quiet, evidently taking these words to heart. He had gained some fame as the creator of dancing dolls—clockwork figures ranging from the miniscule to the more than life-sized, from the comical to the sublimely beautiful—ormolu music boxes, miniature planetariums set with tiny gemstones, and other delicate mechanical toys of his own invention. He had gained a secondary fame as a collector of nautical clocks, astrolabes, and other instruments of scientific measurement. He had assembled a remarkable collection over the years, and he was always taking them apart and putting them back together again with small improvements.

But of rather more significance: in one corner of his laboratory there stood a curious device, made up of bronze wheels, lead weights, and rotating compound magnets. On this particular creation Purcell had bestowed the name of “Celestial Clock,” hinting to his pupils that it would ultimately fulfill some hitherto undreamed of function—yet he had been working on his invention for eighteen years without ever daring to bring the design to its full perfection, or even explaining its purpose.

To cover the sudden awkward silence, Jarred spoke to Lucius. “And can you dispose of the lower classes so neatly and briefly?”

“Even more so. The lower classes live very little better than the Padfoots and the Ouphs, and the Ouphs and the Padfoots live like dogs.”

“All very well,” said the king. “But now you've dissected our entire society and found it wanting, what has that to do with what you said before? Why do you doubt—or pretend to doubt—that the Maglore ever existed?”

“Because the world is so sick and stagnant. Because—because without the dreadful example of the Maglore in all their wickedness
to scare us into submission, how could Society hope to stifle our natural curiosity, our natural ambition, and our creative imagination?”

“And so—?” said Jarred, not quite following him.

Lucius laughed that bitter laugh again. “I doubt their existence for one reason only: because they are just too
damned
convenient.”

Y
s followed Lord Vif down three steep flights and out through a low door, to the moonlit alley where the Ouph fortuneteller and her troupe waited in the cart. Madame Solange whispered a few words in her ear, then someone offered Ys a large calloused hand. A moment later, she was sitting on a wide bench next to the driver: a great dirty brute of a Man, with bloodshot eyes and bristling jowls, who stank of sweat and cheap spirits.

Lord Vif stepped back, the driver spoke to the horses, and the cart began to move. They turned left at the end of the alley, jogged down a narrow street for a quarter of a mile, and then came out on a broad boulevard. It was nine o'clock, but it might have been any time between noon and midnight. All hours were the same, this far north, and would remain the same until the sun finally inched above the horizon two weeks hence.

But an immense blue-white moon with a silver halo hung just over the pointed roof-tops, and the aurora borealis played in pastel streamers across a black velvet sky already studded with a thousand diamond pinpoints of light. The city shimmered, resembling nothing so much as a great spun-sugar confection, under its dusting of ice crystals and snow.

Progress through the town was noisy, between the rattling of the flimsy two-wheeled vehicle over the icy cobblestones, the twittering of Madam Zaphir's Prophetic Canaries, in two tin cages down in the straw under the seat, and the whispering and muffled laughter of the ragged entertainers. They took turns riding and walking, alternately tumbling in and out of the cart like acrobats.

Well, they were excited, Ys realized that. Though none but Madame Zaphir, with her ugly little eyes and her cringing, obsequious manner, had any idea what it was all about. They only knew they had been paid in gold to perform a mission of utmost importance to the grand lady who employed them. And since it was impossible for that gaudy company
not
to attract attention as they entered the center of Tarnburgh, where the moonlit streets were still crowded even at this hour, best to make their approach loudly and openly, so that no one could suspect any sinister purpose.

For all that, Ys felt a burning blush color her cheeks at the thought of being seen in such company. She sat stiff, silent, and embarrassed inside her sealskin cloak—until something about the route they followed forced out a protest.

“This is not the way to the palace gate! Where are you taking me?” Fear of treachery stabbed at her heart. If the fortuneteller had guessed who she really was, if the others knew they were harboring one whose very
existence
was a capital crime anywhere in the world—

From her place at the back of the cart, Madam Zaphir spoke. “We must enter Lindenhoff on the other side: the servants' entrance. What did Your Ladyship suppose? It's not as though we've been hired to entertain the king's guests. We are only there to amuse the cooks and potwashers after their labors.”

With an effort at regaining her composure, Ys subsided. Bitter as it was to accept, the Gobline was right. How else to enter the king's house unannounced—which was the only way that Ys
could
get in—but through the servants' entrance?

For life as Ys knew it had rarely included elegant ballgowns or jeweled slippers. More often it meant wearisome travel, by mail coach, diligence, and packet, and an endless procession of cheap lodgings and second-rate inns. It meant changing names and playing new roles in every new city where she and Madame Solange happened to find themselves—here as a music teacher and her devoted daughter, there as a widow and her paid companion—and more often than not it meant dresses, once beautiful, that had to be mended, let out, and turned inside out, in order to maintain the illusion of genteel poverty.

“
We dare not attract their attention
,” said Madame Solange, when Ys was still very small. “
That is something that every Goblin and Gobline knows
.” As she grew older, Ys had come to realize that quite as much as it was for the Padfoots and Ouphs, the Grants and Wrynecks, this was the key to her own survival.

But all that began to change on the day Madame first gave Ys the necklace and the phial containing her mother's ashes. Remembering that day, Ys pressed her hand to the front of her dress, felt the strange stones and the heart-shaped pendant lying so cold and malignant between her corset and her skin.

“
Those who murdered your mother are dead. The Maglore are no longer divided. Though our numbers are few, we are now united in one great purpose,”
Madame had announced. “
And while it is not possible that we could regain for you the entire world overnight, it has been decided that you should at least reclaim a small part of it. We are going to arrange—an advantageous marriage
.”

After that memorable day, there was a flurry of activity, a frenzy of plotting, a calling-in of hidden resources, all leading up to this night. Ys could only hope that Madame Solange had not given in to a last frugal impulse and neglected to pay the fortuneteller so handsomely the thought of treachery never even entered her mind.

As the ugly cart continued its awkward, lurching progress, Ys
glanced back at her disreputable companions. They had little enough, it was true. Yet, unlike Ys, they seemed to value what they had, to get the most enjoyment possible out of their rude, uncertain existence. She did not know whether to pity or to despise them.

Then she remembered something else Madame had said, the last words her governess whispered as Ys climbed into the cart. “
After all, any humiliation you suffer tonight can be easily erased. Just as soon as the first part of our plan is successfully completed, once Jarred falls in love with you and makes you his queen, we'll make certain nobody remembers
.”

Ys knew what that meant: that tools once used may then be discarded, that those who knew the degrading details—Madam Zaphir, the seamstress, these other nameless wretches, even Lord Vif—could be ruthlessly and permanently eliminated.

But O Madame Solange
, Ys thought with a shudder,
be careful what kind of monster you are raising me to be. Be careful lest someday I grow so heartless, I decide I can just as easily dispose of you!

There was an uneasy silence in the clock tower workshop, as the king and Purcell, temporarily forgetting the ball and the guests so soon to arrive, sat and considered what Lucius had just said.

“Your arguments are tortuous,” said Jarred at last. “And I wonder if you mean half you say. Or rather, I'm certain you mean every word of it now, but what will you mean tomorrow?”

The philosopher gave another dry little cough. “You said something; I am not quite certain if I heard or understood you correctly. You said, ‘We are the Maglore.'”

Lucius tossed off the contents of his glass. “And when I said ‘we,' I was naturally referring to all Mankind. I ask you to consider what we know about Goblins. Take any Ouph or Padfoot: bones brittle, sinews ropey, hair like straw, skin dry and cold, the whole combination highly combustible. They burn like paper at the touch of a flame, they can't eat more than minute quantities of salt or
they die in agonies, and there's something in the blood that boils if it comes into contact with seawater. But what do the stories say of the Maglore? Why, that they were outwardly indistinguishable from Men. It seems likely that the Maglore were no more Goblins than you and I, and it is only the passage of time that has embellished their legend.”