Chapter 10: The Man Is Mine

He had no voice, so he used his eyes.

He had tested it twice on the way to the door: opened his mouth on a short word, the kind a man says without thinking, and got nothing out of it. Not a rasp. Not breath. His throat worked — he could feel it working, the way it had always worked — and nothing came up. He put the finding where he put everything else. Voice: gone. Onset: this room. Duration: unknown.

His eyes were streaming. The room had done that to him an hour ago and had not let up since. He blinked, hard, to clear them, and put what was left of the evening into what he had: the protest, the demand, the whole of the last hour and a half, from the top, in order. He did it twice, slowly, in case the first pass had gone wrong.

The Duke of the North Marches stood four feet away with the open door at his back, and read the blink, and not the thing behind it.

Then he threw the handkerchief.

It was the one from twenty minutes ago — plain linen, hemmed, nothing worked on it, nothing in the corners, damp through — and he threw it down on the boards between them the way a man throws down a bill he has already decided to pay. It landed short of Ambrose’s boots and lay there.

Ambrose looked at it. The man had wiped his hands on that a minute ago, in this room, and now it was on the floor, and whatever it was for, it was not being explained. He left it where it fell.

“Stop blinking,” the Duke said. “I know what you came here for.”

Then, before Ambrose could assemble an answer he had no mouth to put in:

“Don’t be in a hurry. I’ve made arrangements.”

He went out.

Ambrose stayed where he was with one hand flat on the doorframe and watched him go — three strides down the landing, past a lamp with soot on the inside of the glass, past a door with a woman’s laugh behind it. He stopped at the head of the stairs. The lamp was behind him there, and there was nothing left of the man but a black shape with one lit edge.

He came back.

Ambrose knew why. On the landing the light was behind him and there was no reading a face against it. In here, there was.

He stopped closer than a man stops who means to go on down the stairs. He looked, and found whatever it was he had come back to find, and what he had come back to say was:

“Chancellor. The killer isn’t me.”

Ambrose’s shoulder moved. One degree of a motion, the whole vocabulary the evening had left him. Then he stepped past the man and out of the room, and the door stayed open behind them the way it had been left, and neither of them closed it.

He went down with the Duke at his shoulder, half a step behind and to the left, close enough that the rail on that side was not the handiest thing in the world. It was the second time in an hour that the man had decided, without saying a word, where in a building Ambrose was allowed to be. Ambrose kept a list of such things; it had grown a great deal in the last two days.

The stairwell smelled of lamp oil and spilled wine and, from below, something sweet and heavy that did not belong to any kitchen. Below, the house was loud and finishing. The drum had gone quiet. The monthly selection was over — he had heard the result land from up on the third floor, at the tail end of the longest hour of his professional life, and there had been nothing to do about it from there — and the woman they had chosen was standing on the little stage at the far end of the floor, alone, forty feet away, in a dress built to be seen at that distance and no closer.

He could see her shape, the pale line of her shoulders, the way she was holding her hands. He could not see her face. Neither could anyone else on the floor. Houses did not light a stage from behind by accident.

Ambrose looked at her and did what he always did, which was to ask what happened next and who signed for it. There would be paper. There was always paper — a term, a name, a figure, and a clause about what happened when the figure was late. Somebody in this building had her month written into a document, and the document was behind a door that was not the front door, and this was the fourth month running, by his own count, that a woman had come off that stage and gone through that door and not come back down the floor.

“Is she pretty?”

At his ear. The man had moved in the time it took to blink.

There was no way to answer him. That, Ambrose had already worked out, was the point of the question. He could feel the whole of the Duke’s attention sitting on the side of his face, waiting, patient the way a man is patient when he knows no answer is coming and wants to watch you find that out.

He caught Ambrose’s sleeve between two fingers — the left one, the one with the road mud dried into the cuff — and turned him out of the aisle and down into a chair at one of the small tables along the wall, the ones where men sat facing the room with their coats over the backs of their chairs and their faces in shadow and did not order much. Then he took the corner opposite and put both hands flat on the table and looked at Ambrose the way a man looks at a bill he has already decided to pay.

“Don’t be in a hurry.” His mouth grazed the edge of Ambrose’s ear and came away, and the sentence arrived with a second meaning already attached that Ambrose had not ordered and could not send back. “The good part hasn’t started.”

The vein at Ambrose’s temple made itself known. It had begun the evening in a state of complete rest.

He set the item down in the margin of his notes on the Duke of the North Marches, which had been getting long since Tuesday. The man liked putting his hands on people. He set it next to the door held shut with a forearm and the two fingers on his sleeve and the mouth at his ear, and did not date it, and moved on.

On the stage, a man in house colors came up the steps and took the woman by the elbow and brought her down. She went without a word. No announcement, no paper read out on the floor, no name said aloud. She was taken off past the bar and through a door at the back, and gone.

Ambrose stood up.

He stood faster than he had meant to and turned straight into the aisle, and the aisle belonged to somebody else.

The man was drunk. You could smell it from a foot off — that sweet grain smell that gets into wool and stays there until the coat is burned. He was wide, and he was going somewhere, and Ambrose was in his way.

“Who the hell can’t see where he’s—“

He got a look at Ambrose and stopped. He rubbed his eyes with two knuckles, the way a child comes in out of the dark and rubs the dark out of them, and the swearing went off him all at once, and what came in behind it was worse.

“Well,” he said. “Well, look at that.”

He put his hand out. It was not a handshake. His fingers were already spread, and his thumb and forefinger were already aimed at Ambrose’s jaw, the way you take hold of a piece of fruit to find out whether it’s ripe.

“Hey, now,” he said. “Aren’t you a pretty thing.”

The yelp came a breath later.

It happened to the side and it happened fast. The man went over sideways into the corner of a table, shoulder first, and took a glass and a bowl with him, and the noise of the floor folded back on itself the way a room’s noise does when something real gets in among the talk.

He was down across the tabletop before Ambrose had finished turning his head. He stayed there a second, folded over the wood, all of him working on nothing. Then he came up with his face twisted, hunting for whatever had hit him, and found the Duke of the North Marches standing exactly where a man stands who has hit somebody.

“You—“ He got his feet under him. “Who the hell are you? Do you know who I am?”

The Duke put a hand flat on Ambrose’s chest and moved him back one step and stood in front of him. Then he took the drunk, who was halfway up off the table, and put him the rest of the way down with the flat of his boot — off the wood, onto the floor, where he landed on his back, slid a few inches, and stayed.

The floor went quiet. Not all of it. The part that mattered.

The Duke looked down at him. He spoke the way he gave orders to servants, in a voice that did not have to be raised, which was the whole reason the room stayed as quiet as it was.

“You put a hand out toward him. He’s mine. You must want to die.”

They got the drunk up — two of them, one under each arm, the way you lift a man you would rather not have lying on the floor of your place of business. He spat on the boards. He was afraid; it sat on him plainly and everybody could see it. But he had an audience now, and an audience is a kind of drink.

“Two men who go at each other,” he said, “and they come to a cathouse. A wonder of the age.”

The Duke put his tongue against his back teeth.

“He’s mine,” he said. “His ass is mine.” Then he looked the drunk over from the boots up and took his time about it. “And you. Ten to one you couldn’t get it up with the doors locked and every woman in this house standing in a line. And you had your hand out for somebody else’s.”

Ambrose, from behind him, where he had been put and where he had stayed, reached out and closed two fingers on a fold of the Duke’s coat and pulled.

The Duke turned around.

What came onto his face then, Ambrose had no name for. He had built a version of that face over the past several days out of court records and other people’s accounts and one very long hour in a rented room: quick, bored, pleased with itself, dangerous when crossed. This was not that. This was, for about a second and a half, the gentlest thing that had ever been aimed at Ambrose, and it was not for the floor and it was not for the drunk, and he had nowhere to put it, so he did what he did with everything he could not classify: nothing at all.

He let go of the coat.

Whatever the Duke of the North Marches had been when Ambrose came up those stairs to do a night’s work, he was not that anymore. A man you could steer back to a door by the sleeve would have kept something on for the room. This one had turned around in front of forty witnesses and shown him the other face, and had not hurried to put it away.

The floor had stopped watching the stage some time ago. There was nothing on the stage in any case. What there was to watch was the Duke of the North Marches standing over a drunk, and the Chancellor of the Realm at his elbow with his mouth shut, and two men carrying the drunk out by the arms.

“Now that’s devotion,” somebody said, near the door. An older man, coat buttoned wrong, the kind of face that would be behind a counter at nine in the morning.

Ambrose heard him.

Buddy, he thought at the man, because there was nothing else he could do with it. Have you ever in your life seen a devoted couple come to a cathouse together?

He took the floor apart once, without moving his head, the way he took any room apart. Thirty-odd men left, most of them still drinking. Two behind the bar. Door staff at the front. The stairs behind him, that he had come down. Eleven of them had watched the whole thing from the first yelp. By tomorrow the eleven would be forty. By the end of the week the forty would be a number that got said in a coffee house and then written small in a broadsheet next to something else entirely, and there was not one syllable of it he could take back, because the whole trouble was that he had none.

Seven days. He was one night into it, and he had nothing he could carry into a courtroom: no name, no paper, no woman. He had come to this house to watch one thing, and he had spent the night behind a door.

The Duke’s hand closed on his arm above the elbow — not hard, with the whole decision already made behind it — and turned him toward the front of the house.

He went, because there was no other direction available to him. He could not shout. He could not explain. The one lead he had was in a room at the back of this house at this moment, and he had no way to find it and no way to say so.

So he went where he was turned, past the tables, out of the lantern light of the floor and up the three shallow steps into the passage. Behind him the floor picked the story up again and started, in its low and pleased way, to tell it to itself, and he could hear the shape of the version that would go out the front door and the version after that, and there was nothing he could do about any of it.

The entry hall was a wide room with a stone floor and a board on the wall, and the board said what the house was willing to have known: so much for the room, so much for the girl, so much for the night, in a neat clerk’s hand.

Beside it, at eye level, was the notice. He had read it on his way in and had not needed to read it again, and read it again anyway: a licensed house, and any officer of the Crown found in one forfeits his seat, no appeal, no exception, posted where the house could not be accused of keeping it to itself.

He was an officer of the Crown. He was standing in the middle of one. It had been quoted at him as law two floors up an hour ago by a man who had walked in and out of the place all evening without so much as a doorman looking at him twice.

What the house knew about who bought what, and for how long, and on what terms, was behind a door at the back of the floor, and the board on the wall did not mention it. Ambrose read the board on his way past, because it was the only thing in that entry hall that would answer him at all.

The front doors stood open on the street. Cold came in off it and moved the lamp smoke around. The doorman stood aside for them, having already found the word for what he was looking at, and having already decided who was going to hear it.

He would have to come back. That was the sum of it — come back to this entry hall and get behind that door into whatever the house kept, and he had no voice to ask with, and no leverage, and one night already gone out of seven.

The hand on his arm had not moved.

He did not take it back. He set the borrowed cuff straight with two fingers instead, one-handed, because the coat was not his and it sat wrong at the shoulder and he wanted it off him. While he did it he looked once, past the bar, down the length of the floor, at the shut door the woman had gone through. The doorman stepped back and the cold took the room, and the hand turned him, and he went.