Chapter 5: She Said She'd Wait for Me

She Said She’d Wait for Me

“Four of them, Your Majesty,” Justice Winslow said. “Two out of the licensed houses. Two out of respectable homes.”

The paper was in both his hands. His eyes were red to the rims and his voice had gone to a rasp overnight.

The hall was hung in black. It had been black since Aldous died and it would be black a while yet: the old King lying at Greyhill Abbey in his state robes, the men who carried him there standing in the same room at the same hour, doing the same work in the same order. There was no music in the hall and there would be none for months. Only now there were four dead women standing in the middle of it.

“They were ill-used,” Winslow said. “All four. Before they died.”

He said ill-used instead of the other thing, and every man in the hall heard him choose it and put it down where the child couldn’t reach it.

“Two of the houses reported them missing,” he said. “Two families did. I don’t have a name I can write on the paper yet. That’s where I am.”

The King sat in the chair at the head of the hall with his hands flat on the arms. He was ten years old. His feet didn’t reach the floor. He looked down the rows of men to the front of the room, where his Chancellor stood, and waited to be told what to do about it.

Ambrose stepped out of the front rank, so the boy would have something closer to look at, and gave him a small unhurried smile. Nothing here is yours to hold yet.

“Your Majesty,” he said. “The realm is in mourning. If four women died in a season of mourning because men of rank were out buying company, the law for that is exile.” He let it sit the length of a breath. “Exile keeps the scaffolds empty. Nobody has to be hanged while your father lies at Greyhill.”

“That’s well argued,” said Osric Dray.

He came out of his place to say it — the Warden of the Capital, the King’s uncle on his mother’s side — so the hall would see where he had been standing when he said it.

Ambrose kept his face exactly as it was and thought something unkind about him.

“The case has to be proved before it can be sentenced,” he said.

“You have the evidence,” Dray said.

“I have four bodies, my lord Warden,” said Winslow.

He had come forward without being called. He was hoarse and gray and he did not look at Dray while he said it, which somehow made it worse.

“I have four bodies. I don’t have the room where it was done. I don’t have one soul who saw it done. I don’t have the thing that put the marks on them.” He rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Four bodies isn’t evidence. Four bodies is four bodies.”

Everybody in the hall knew Winslow. In a case he spared nobody’s feelings; he had never learned how, and he was not going to start going around the King’s own uncle to spare them now.

Blood came up the Warden’s neck and sat in his face. His fists closed at his sides, and the hall went quiet, every man in it watching to see whether somebody would strike a Justice of the High Court in front of the King.

He didn’t. He stood with his jaw working until he had swallowed it, and stepped back into his place, and the room watched him swallow it.

Winslow yawned into his fist, and then seemed to remember the chair.

“Your Majesty, give me a little time with it and I’ll bring it up whole for you.”

The boy looked at Ambrose. Ambrose gave him nothing but a nod.

“Seven days,” the King said, in the high careful voice the household had taught him, and because he said it in front of the whole court it became the order of the day.

Ambrose had meant to hand the boy an answer. He had handed him a date, and he had handed the Warden an idea.

Dray had taken the fastest half of it and left the rest. Nobody hangs, nobody bleeds, the mourning stays clean — put that way, exile stops being a sentence and starts being a way to have the whole business finished by nightfall. He had not needed the argument. He had needed the excuse, and Ambrose had stood up in front of the court and handed it to him.

There was one more thing, and no proof under it. Moray had written his report out the night before — three women out of his own cistern — and sent it up to the Warden and the High Court both, so that paper had been in the Warden’s house since before the hall was hung in black, and the Warden had come in this morning wanting the whole matter dispatched before anybody had to look at it. That could be a man who did not want to see a thing, or it could be nothing at all. Ambrose had no way yet to tell the difference, so he kept it, with everything else he couldn’t spend.

He never hurried where the hall could see him, so he came down the long gallery slowly, and the Duke of the North Marches was ten paces ahead of him the whole way.

Between them a lord of the household caught Ambrose at the second window to ask about the seating for the funeral, and Ambrose answered him in three sentences without once taking his eyes off the back in front of him, and the man thanked him and got out of the way, satisfied, and never noticed he had been handled.

At the top of the stair the duke turned his head half an inch to the left at the sound of a voice behind him. Then he reached up, took something small and pale out of his ear, and put it away in his sleeve, and went down the stairs without ever looking back.

Ambrose stopped where he stood.

He decided it was cotton, because cotton is what a man puts in his ear, and he never learned otherwise. What he knew for certain was that the Duke of the North Marches had walked into the Great Hall that morning with something in his ear, had stood the whole of the court with it in, and had taken it out only once he was through the doors.

It took him four paces to understand that it wasn’t him the man was shutting out. It was his voice. Which was worse, if anything.

“Is it really that bad to listen to,” he said, under his breath.

“To what?” said Winslow, at his shoulder — and his hand came down on Ambrose’s sleeve.

Ambrose knocked it off without turning around.

Winslow looked down the gallery at the duke’s back. Then he looked at Ambrose, and whatever was in his face, Ambrose did not want it aimed at him.

“Don’t,” Ambrose said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Winslow.” He turned around. “Is my voice hard to listen to?”

Winslow reached up and laid the backs of his fingers against Ambrose’s forehead for a moment, and looked at him with real, uncomplicated pity.

“And you so young,” he said.

“Mm,” said Ambrose, and put his face back on.

He was young for the office and he knew it. He had built the face for it in his first month — a small crease between the brows, the mouth held slightly tight, everything else held back — and it had done more for him than any argument he had ever made in that room.

“Your case,” he said. “How far have you got?”

“Nowhere. Nothing.” Winslow fell in beside him and matched his pace, which was considerate of him and also annoying. “I have to go at all four of them through their own people. Who bought them drinks. Who walked them home. Who they told things to. Whoever did this handled them the same way, one to the next, and a man doesn’t do that to four women he has never met.”

“Or he does it to four women he knows very well.”

“That’s the worse version, yes.”

Ambrose thought about it for twenty paces.

“Whoever it is, he’s bolder than he needs to be,” he said at last. “And he likes it more than he should.”

“That is the shape of it.”

“Then I don’t like the Duke of the North Marches.”

Winslow stopped walking. “The Duke.”

“Mm.”

“He’s a strange one,” Winslow said slowly. “Strange is the whole job. Everybody in this city is strange by Tuesday.”

Ambrose didn’t answer that. Half of what he had couldn’t be said standing in a corridor, and none of it would hold up in front of a Justice: two houses of one blood on one lane, four women out of the water in a single day, and not one name written down for any of them. That wasn’t proof, and he was not going to hand another man a thing that wasn’t.

“What if he can’t perform?” he said instead.

Winslow just looked at him.

Ambrose watched it happen. The four dead women and the particular ugliness of how they had died, the duke’s coldness down the whole length of the hall and the duke’s temper the last time the two of them had been in a room together — all of it went home in the man’s head like a bolt into a lock, and lit him up.

“That’s—“ Winslow said. “Huh.” Then: “How do you know he can’t?”

“A lucky guess,” Ambrose said into his own sleeve, and coughed.

Winslow gave him a long, warm, entirely wrong look, and blinked twice at the middle distance, and the back of Ambrose’s neck went cold.

“Something you need, Winslow?”

“Actually,” Winslow said, and took hold of his sleeve again. “Yes.”

“You know who I run cases with,” he said, pulling him along. “Ivo Moray. Half of everything I file has his hand in it, and he’s better at the paper than I am by a mile. And yesterday three women came up out of a cistern in his own uncle’s garden, so he can’t go near this, and no Justice in this city is going to take the Moray house apart with a Moray sitting at the table. I can’t say I blame them.”

“Which leaves you.”

“Which leaves me and the walls.”

“Ambrose. I can’t go into the Primrose.”

“No.”

“It’s one conversation.”

“You are a Justice of the High Court. Go and be one.”

“My mother,” Winslow said, “would know before supper. She holds the title in her own right and she has the respect of every housekeeper in this city, and if she hears her son walked into the Primrose I will not see Sunday. She would know before I got to the door.”

“No.”

“One evening.”

“No.”

Winslow let the sleeve go. “All right,” he said, which from him meant later.

Ambrose said no on the steps, and no crossing the yard, and no at his desk with the day’s papers in three stacks around him and the light going out of the window. Then he sent the seal and the coat home in the carriage and told his clerk he would be at the College for the evening, which was a lie he told well and did not examine.

He told himself he was going for names. A house like that would know who bought there, and who behaved there, and whose carriage waited at the corner, and a duke was a name it would know. He did not put the rest of it into words, then or on the walk down — that he wanted to see where a man like that went once the doors of the Great Hall were shut behind him, and whether he went there at all.

By dusk he was standing outside the Primrose in a plain dark coat, no seal on his finger, nobody behind him.

It was one of three houses in the city licensed to sell what it sold, and it was run like a bank: lamps lit at the hour, women in the door, the price fixed. Three of them were out on the cold step in silk with wool shawls pulled over it, calling to the men going by in the flat familiar tone of women who knew every man on that street by his boots and his coat.

He got within three steps of the door before he was caught. A woman took him by the elbow and drew him in against her, and her hand went flat on his arm, and she put her mouth up near his jaw.

“There you are, sweetheart,” she said. “I’ve been waiting on you since Sunday.”

Ambrose kept his hands where they were and didn’t shake her off, which cost him something, and ducked his head like a boy, which cost him nothing.

“I came for Iris,” he said.

Something in her face stepped back and then came forward again. “Iris.” She kept her smile where it was. “Iris is gone, sweetheart. Bought out. Gone respectable.”

“Who bought her?”

“Somebody with money.” She shrugged with one shoulder and let the shawl move with it. “That’s all it takes in here. I don’t see the papers, dear. I see the guests.”

Ambrose looked down. He had a face people wanted to hand things to; he had known that since he was fifteen, and it had got him an appointment, a signature, and one very bad afternoon. He let his shoulders come down and his eyes go wide and hurt, and said it quietly, in the voice of a man who has been saying a thing to himself a long while:

“She said she’d wait for me.”

The woman went still.

He didn’t help her. He stood with his eyes on the step between them and gave her all the time in the world to make up her mind about him.

Her face came off duty. She might have had a girl of her own somewhere, or a Tuesday like that once; whatever it was, it went through her and settled, and she put her hand back on his arm, gentler this time.

“Come here,” she said. “Poor thing.”

“Tell me about her,” Ambrose said. “Just talk to me. The talking I’ll pay for.”

He took out coin and put it into her hand. She closed her fingers on it and looked at him differently, and it worked. It kept working. She talked, and she talked a good deal, and Ambrose made the right sounds and kept his eyes where hers were and heard about a third of it. The sad young man who had come for Iris was a coat he had put on at the carriage and would take off at the corner. Underneath the coat, all evening, he was counting: the tables, the door, the two men drinking at the top of the stairs, the girl who came out twice with a jug and never once looked up from her tray.

Except at the end.

When the woman said respectable, something crossed his eyes that did not belong to the coat. Quick and dry and older than the rest of him, the look of a man finishing a sum, and then it was gone, and she missed it, because she was watching his mouth.

She kept his arm going up the steps, and at the door he stopped, and turned, and looked back down the street.

He had heard, or thought he had, a voice he knew.

At the bottom, where the lamplight turned a hundred strangers into one dark mass, a tall man in a dark coat was going the other way, through the people instead of around them, the way a man walks when nobody has ever made him step aside.

Ambrose knew that walk. He had spent the morning watching that back go away from him at ten paces.

By the time he looked properly, the man was gone, and the street had given him back a flower seller and a cart and two clerks going home. He was not certain. He was nearly certain.

He didn’t call after him, and he didn’t ask the woman anything about it on the step, because a woman at a door sells what she knows to the highest bidder, and he did not intend for the Duke of the North Marches to hear by noon tomorrow that the Chancellor had been asking after him at the Primrose.

He would ask inside. There were always people in a house like that paid to remember a coat and a pair of boots and a night, and he knew better than to do it from the step.

“Come in out of the cold, sweetheart,” the woman said, and drew him in by the sleeve, and the door of the Primrose shut the street out behind him.