Sedition (10 page)

“I’m looking for nobody,” Annie said. “I’ve made a mistake.”

“I don’t believe you,” Alathea said. “You followed me from Newgate Street, and you must have followed me there from Manchester Square. If you want my father, you should have waited for him at your home.”

“I’m not looking for your father,” Annie said. “I don’t know him. I’ve made a mistake.” She contemplated rushing the door.

“Did my father set you to spy on me?”

“Let me leave, please.”

“Perhaps you’re a stooge of Mrs. Frogmorton’s? She likes to know others’ business.”

“I don’t know Mrs. Frogmorton,” Annie said.

“You don’t seem to know anybody.” Alathea shook off her cloak. “Yet you were following me most particularly. I know you were.” She threw the cloak over a chair.

Annie seized her chance, slid past, and turned the door handle. Alathea held up the key. “Are you a thief?” she asked. “Did you want my jewels?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Why were you going to ring the bell then?”

Annie shook her head. She was shivering, and in the sepulchral chill of the hall, Alathea began to shiver herself. “Come,” she said, and when Annie did not move, she pulled her away from the door, past the stairs and shrouded statues, into what had been a card room. Beneath the mugginess of wet garments Annie recognized the smell of musk. Her gorge rose. She could imagine Monsieur with this girl. If only she still had the acid! As it was, her nails were not long enough even to scratch. Alathea kicked the card room door shut and tried to flick back Annie’s veil. Annie resisted strongly. There was enough light from the windows for Alathea to see her lip, and this Annie could not allow. Scorn would be tolerable; pity outrageous. Annie caught her veil with both hands and pulled it tight. Alathea abandoned the veil, locked the card room door, and closed the two sets of window shutters to prevent Annie breaking through the glass. She seemed desperate enough. Alathea struck a flint and lit a small lantern. Annie was again a shadow. “Take off your cloak and remove that veil,” Alathea commanded.

Annie did nothing.

“I want to know what you look like,” Alathea said. Annie clung to the veil more tightly. Alathea held up the lamp. “I’ll let you go when I know who you are. Take off the veil.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“You can. You will.” Alathea put the lamp down. Annie ran to the door and rattled it. Alathea was after her at once, forcing her back around, struggling for the veil. She pulled it right off. Annie reeled back into the room, seized the lamp, and waved it at the sheets covering everything except one sofa, one table, one upright chair, and one oval miniature, a portrait, hanging on the wall. Alathea sucked her lips. If the girl fired the house, she would have to unlock the door. She dropped the veil. They tussled for the lamp, splashing oil. Flames guttered. Alathea stamped them out. A sheet caught. Alathea bundled it into the hearth. Finally, she wrested the lamp from Annie and raised it high. At once, Annie began to curl up. Alathea was quick. She caught Annie’s hair, yanked her head back, and spilled light all over her face. Annie stopped struggling at once. Her humiliation was complete. Alathea blinked. “Who are you?”

“This is who I am,” Annie said.

Alathea tugged her hair. “What is who you are?”

Annie gritted her teeth. “You can see.”

Alathea let go of Annie’s hair. “I see your face but I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m Annie Cantabile,” she said. “I’m the daughter of the man who made the pianoforte you’re playing.”

“The pianoforte in Manchester Square?”

“Do you have another?”

Alathea ignored that. “What on earth do you want with me?”

Annie backed into the sofa and sat down. Her skirt was flabby, her feet soaking, her veil a rag. Alathea kept hold of the lamp and sat in the stiff-backed chair she thought of as her father’s. A considerable pause. “I know Monsieur Belladroit,” Annie said. “You’re his pupil.”

“Are you a pupil too?”

“No,” Annie said. “I’ve no need of lessons.” Alathea’s ignoring of her lip was as insupportable as Alathea gloating over it. She felt like a circus bear waiting for the dogs.

Alathea considered Annie, the whole of her, sitting bolt upright. “You may not need lessons at the pianoforte, but you’ve something to learn about following people. I’ve noticed you for a fortnight and today I knew you were behind me before I got to the end of Newgate Street.” She got up. “I’m going to ring for some tea and ask for the fire to be lit. If I unlock the door, will you run away?”

“You have the front door key,” Annie said. Her lip twitched. She could not stop it. She half bent her head, then decided against it. She would stay upright and hold on to her dignity.

Alathea unlocked the door without looking back. “Crouch,” she called. From somewhere, footsteps echoed and an old man appeared in a frock coat dirty beyond cleaning and shabby beyond mending. He, too, had been bequeathed by the house’s previous occupants, glad to be rid of him since he was never where expected or doing what was required. “A fire, and tea. Two cups. I have a visitor,” Alathea said. She had never before uttered those last four words. She stood for a second. A visitor.

She returned. Annie had not moved, not even to replace her veil. The girls sat without speaking as Crouch shoved aside the singed sheet and lit the fire, shrugging at Alathea and with no interest in Annie, at whom he did not glance. Crouch was interested in only one person and that person was not here, nor ever likely to be. Every day since God had carried off his wife and child, Crouch dreamed of turning assassin and going to Rome to kill the pope, whom, for reasons he explained to nobody, not even himself, he held directly responsible. But life had kept him a footman. Alathea and her father suited him. Their demands were small and they never checked the bills. He had a tidy sum stashed away. He returned with tea, hoping visitors were not going to become a habit. He saw Annie’s lip as he deposited the tray, started, faltered badly, and shuffled swiftly out, slamming the door as though Annie’s lip were alive and might escape.

Alathea poured the tea. She set a cup on the floor beside Annie and drank her own, standing. The fire sulked. Alathea kicked it several times. Her shoes steamed. “So, you’re Annie Cantabile, daughter of the pianoforte maker, and you’ve no need for pianoforte lessons.”

“No,” said Annie. She was determined to force Alathea to acknowledge her lip. She must get that over with.

Alathea’s face still registered nothing. “Monsieur Belladroit taught you until you reached this happy stage?”

“No. He has never taught me.” Annie kept her face raised high. Say something, she willed. Then we can fight.

“I see.”

Silence. Alathea looked as though she could remain silent forever. Annie could hardly bear it. She had achieved nothing. She tried something else. She picked up the teacup and sipped, and when a drop dripped from her lip, she didn’t dab it. Now, surely, with the lip glistening and the tea dripping, Alathea would at least blench. After people blenched, so Annie had learned, they usually felt the need to say something. Alathea neither blenched nor spoke. Instead, Annie found herself speaking. “Monsieur’s living with us while he teaches at Manchester Square. I believe there’s to be a concert.”

“Monsieur Belladroit told you about the concert?”

“No. Your father told us when he came to buy the pianoforte.” Annie made an assumption.

Alathea shook her head violently. “Drigg! That oaf! Not my father.” She put her teacup on the table. “We’re indebted to your father, though. The pianoforte is remarkable.”

Annie’s feet were so cold it was hard to be still. “It’s just a pianoforte.”

Alathea frowned. “Is that what you think?”

Annie did not want to have a conversation about the pianoforte. She huddled into herself. She needed the fire. Suddenly the world moved—or at least the sofa. Alathea was pushing it forward toward the blaze and was now kneeling, her hands untying the laces of Annie’s boots. “No,” Annie said. Without her boots she could never escape. Alathea was determined and deft. The laces were undone, the boots were off, and Annie’s stockinged feet were set on the hearthstone. The flames were more lively now. The heat was wonderful.

Alathea shifted to one side, still kneeling. “You’ll ruin your boots without overshoes,” she observed. “What neat feet you have. I’ve neat feet too. Sometimes I look at women with large feet and feel sorry for them, don’t you?”

“Sorry for them?” Annie was astounded. She should feel sorry for women with large feet!

“Yes, sorry for them. You can’t do anything about large feet. They’re there, like dinner plates, sticking out. I always look at feet. It’s how I judge people. Yours are fine feet, the feet of a lady.” Alathea chose what she said with care. She was not sure, at the moment, how she wished things to continue or end.

“I can’t bear this!” Annie burst out, pulling her feet away. “Let me go home.”

“Can’t bear your feet to be judged? Why not? You came to judge me on behalf of your father, didn’t you? He knows what his pianoforte is. He can’t have wanted to let it go to people like the Frogmortons.”

“I didn’t come for my father.”

“For whom, then?”

“You know why I came. You saw.”

“Oh, the acid. Were you really going to throw it?”

“Why else would I have brought it?”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t throw it, and I’m glad you came. I’ve never met anybody else who had no need of pianoforte lessons.”

Annie raised her eyes. Before she could snatch them away, a tiny spark. Alathea smiled. Annie stayed very still. “There are five of us learning with Monsieur,” Alathea said conversationally. Conversation was certainly not her usual custom, but then having a visitor to tea was not her custom either. “The others have barely an ounce of talent between them.”

“I’m sure they’ve nice feet.” Annie meant her voice to sting.

Alathea laughed. “Everina’s and Marianne’s feet are not hopeless, which is just as well. They certainly can’t rely on their faces.”

Now, Annie thought. Now she’ll say something about my lip. The poker was within reach. She could seize it. She would seize it. She prepared herself. “We’re all to be married, you know,” Alathea said. “Our concert is supposed to increase our value—not monetary, you understand. Our fathers are rich. It’s to make up for our parentage. You’ve played our pianoforte?”

“Of course.” Annie was still contemplating the poker.

“Does Monsieur Belladroit speak of us?”

Annie’s voice was clipped. “I do not speak to Monsieur about you.”

“But you’d like to know what he feels about us.”

Annie fixed her eyes on the portrait. It was too small to see any detail except that it was a child. Her jailer-hostess? Alathea’s own eyes flicked briefly to the portrait, then back. “Monsieur’s the reason you followed me.” She wondered why she had been so slow to guess.

“Of what interest could Monsieur possibly be to me?” Annie made herself stand up.

“The same as for any other girl,” Alathea replied. “Monsieur may not be young but his charms are undiminished.”

“Monsieur’s a friend,” Annie said tightly.

“A man like Monsieur can only be a friend to old women, or women possessed of no beauty, and that, Annie Cantabile, is a category to which neither of us belongs.” Alathea’s response was not remotely thoughtless. She waited for Annie to break.

Annie broke. She collapsed back onto the sofa. “Are you blind? Do you see nothing?”

“I see everything,” Alathea said.

“Well then,” Annie cried.

“I think we may be quite similar, you and I.”

Annie pointed to Alathea’s perfect lips and then her own. Not content with that, she pulled her lips wide and thrust them in front of Alathea’s. The musk scent was overpowering and Annie’s lip pulsed hard enough to hurt. She thought it might burst. She hoped it would drench Alathea in blood.

Alathea grabbed Annie’s hands and locked them together, forcing the girl backward. Furious, resistant, despairing, powerless, Annie tried to imagine she had the acid, that she had thrown it, that Alathea’s purple pupils, so dense, so cool, were shrinking and shriveling instead of softening and spreading. Annie shook her head. A quirk of Alathea’s cheek. A certain unconscious pleading in those lips, those lips whose perfection, if there had been any justice in the world, should have been matched by Annie’s. Pleading? Alathea was making fun of her. Annie punched against the spell being cast about her. And something worse. Perhaps it was the warmth, perhaps it was the desperation, perhaps it was even something in the tea, but tears arose. Annie bit them back, wrenched Alathea’s hands from her shoulders, and crouched down facing the fire. Alathea crouched too. “I’ve always had a strange taste in beauty,” Alathea said. At last, an acknowledgment. The relief was intense. Annie remained crouched. From the corner of her eye she saw Alathea pick up one of her boots. “Is your lip painful?”

Annie kept her eye on her boots. “No,” she said.

“I’m glad.” Alathea put the boot where it would dry more efficiently.

“Are you an idiot?” Annie began to rock. “It pains me every minute of every day.”

Alathea picked up the other boot, then dropped it. The singed sheet, toasting on the hearthstone, had begun to smoke again. With a sudden swoop, Alathea bundled it over the logs. The blaze thundered, enormous, threatening the chimney, pouring warmth into the room, and making the other sheets billow. Annie threw up her head. Alathea’s own head was thrown back, her throat entirely exposed. Annie could reach for the poker unhindered. She wanted to. She even made a small movement. Alathea turned. She put her hands on Annie’s shoulders, the pressure intense as the heat. Annie wondered whether they were both about to go up in flames. She felt half drugged. She wondered again about the tea.

“I think you have two lips,” Alathea said softly, “this one”—she ran a finger first over Annie’s bottom lip—“and this one.” She ran a finger over the top lip, which took a little longer. She grasped Annie’s index finger. “And I think that I have this one”—she ran Annie’s finger over her own top lip—“and this one.” She kept hold of Annie’s hand. “Come,” she said. “I’ve something to show you.”