Chapter 7: Nobody Comes Here With Eyes Like Yours

Nobody Comes Here With Eyes Like Yours

The Primrose kept its best room on the third floor, at the corner, and built it for the work the house did.

Mirrors on two walls, angled so that whatever a man had paid to do in here he could watch himself doing it. A low bed heaped with cushions, not one of them dented. A dish of incense on the table between the windows, burned down to a thread of smoke — the house’s own mix, sweet enough to catch at the back of the throat well before it reached the head. It was burned in every room above the second floor, and there was nothing subtle about what it was burned for.

Ambrose sat with his back to the glass.

He had counted the ways out of the room before he counted anything else in it. The door he had come in by, and the stair at the end of the landing beyond it. A curtained alcove behind the bed that was either a closet or the top of a service stair, and he had not made up his mind which. And a seam in the wainscoting at the corner, where the joinery didn’t meet — a fourth way out, off the sight line, if the seam led anywhere at all.

The mirrors were for the men who paid. He had worked out in the first quarter hour that they were also most of the room’s light, and that the girl used them to watch the door without ever turning her head.

One girl, then. He had looked at her three times in two hours, which was noticeable, and had been noticed.

He had borrowed the coat. It was white, found in a cupboard in his own house and carried to him by a servant who assumed it was for a wedding, and he had worn it on the theory that in a house like this a man in white would pass for a man who belonged in it. That had lasted about a minute. The minute had bought him the two hours after it, and the two hours had bought him what he came for, and by that arithmetic the coat had done its job. He still didn’t care for it.

Two names, and two weeks. Dahlia and June, the names the house had given them and not the ones their mothers had. Bought out clean, the pair of them: no debts carried, no bad blood left behind. Both dead inside the month.

Clean was the thing he kept coming back to. A woman rarely left a house like this owing nothing, and where there was a debt there was a name on the far side of it, and a name was what he had come up the stairs for. He turned the two of them over the way he turned over statements that wouldn’t line up, and left them sitting.

He had not drunk the tea.

“You’re not going to drink that,” the girl said.

She was sitting up against the headboard with her knees drawn up, in a green wrapper and no shoes, working a handkerchief between her fingers and thumb. She had been crying earlier, in the manner of someone who found it more useful than not, and had stopped when it stopped being useful.

“I might,” Ambrose said.

“Two hours, and you haven’t touched it once. That cup’s gone cold twice.” She tilted her head. “I’ve been watching you the whole time. You didn’t notice that, either.”

“I noticed.”

“You didn’t.” She said it without heat. “You came in and stood at the door like a man reading a notice. Then you sat down and looked at the ceiling, and the windows, and the gap under the bed. Then you asked me about Dahlia and June like you were taking down a statement, and you have not looked at me once since. Not once.”

Ambrose said nothing.

“Faces are my business,” she said. “Eight years at it, and I know which men are looking at me and which men are looking through me. You look through me. I’d call it insulting if it weren’t so funny.”

“You can laugh, if you want.”

“I already did.” She laid the handkerchief flat on the coverlet and smoothed it with two fingers. “You’ve got a mark under your left eye. Do you know that?”

“I know.”

“It’s the first thing I saw when you came in. Not the coat.” She looked at him a moment longer, and then away, at the mirror on the far wall, where she could see him without having to look at him. “Nobody comes here with eyes like yours.”

She said it the way a physician says a bone is broken.

“What eyes are those,” Ambrose said.

“Eyes like you’re counting something.” She picked the handkerchief up again. “You could take the coat off. You could put the lamp out. Doesn’t help. You walk in here in white, and half the house knows before you’re up the stairs.”

“Knows what?”

“That you’re not one of the men who come here.” She turned the handkerchief over in her hands. “The ones who come here, they wear the coat or they don’t and it’s all one, because they walk in already decided. You walked in undecided. I’ve never had undecided in this room before.”

Ambrose turned his cup a quarter turn on the table and set it back down in the same ring.

His collar had been warm for an hour. It was the air in the room, or the two flights of stairs, or the hour — he had decided at the first breath that it belonged to the house and not to him, and gone on about his own business. He was aware of it anyway: of where it had settled behind his ribs, and of how slow his own hands had gone around the cup, and of how little he minded sitting still. He hated that. He put it with the rest of what he was not going to look at tonight.

“I work out of the Warden’s office,” he said. “I’m here on an inquiry. I came in quietly because I wanted the inquiry to stay quiet, and it has, and I want one more thing out of this room, and then nobody in the house needs to know I was ever in it. I’m sorry for the pretense. It was aimed at the house, not at you.”

The girl looked at him.

“The Warden’s office,” she said.

“Yes.”

“His people came here two days ago,” she said. “Three of them. They sat in the front room with the madam for an hour and they drank her wine, and they went away. They didn’t come up the stairs. They didn’t ask the girls anything. And when Dahlia’s name came up in the conversation, one of them changed the subject.”

Ambrose did not move.

“So which is it,” she said. “You’re the Warden’s, and the Warden’s people don’t know the case is open. Or you’re not the Warden’s at all, and you picked his name because nobody in this house would ever think to go and ask him.”

“That’s a good question.”

“It’s the only question.” She folded the handkerchief in half, and in half again. Her hands were steady. “I’m not stupid, and I’m not brave, and those are the two most important things about me. If you’ve brought something into this house that gets me hurt, I want to know what it is before the hurt gets here.”

“You haven’t been hurt yet.”

“Half the women I’ve worked with are dead or gone, and three of the last five are one or the other, so I’d say I’m running behind.”

Ambrose let that stand.

“What I need,” he said, “is the name of the man who bought their paper.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Then who signed it.”

“Nobody signed anything in this room.” She set the folded handkerchief down on the bed and stopped touching it. “That’s not how it’s done anymore. There’s a broker on the north side who does it for girls all up and down the Row. A man wants a woman out of a house, he goes to him. The broker finds the house. The broker’s man brings the money around with a note, and there’s no name on the note, and the money’s good, and the girl goes out the back where there’s a carriage waiting, and the note burns.” She raised her eyes. “So the answer to your question is a man I’ve never met, standing behind two men I have met and can’t name, and the whole thing paid for with a piece of paper that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“That’s the third time this month,” Ambrose said. “Or the fourth.”

“You’re keeping count. Good for you.”

“Three months of queens,” he said, “and every one of them the one the house put up in front of a full room, and not one of them lasted out the month.” He didn’t say the rest of it aloud. Any man with the money could buy a woman out of any house on the Row, any night of the week. Somebody was buying the one the house had just put under the lamp, and that was the part with an answer inside it. “Tonight is the next one.”

“Tonight’s the election.” She said it the way she might have said the rain was coming. “The drum goes, the doors come open, they call the names down in the hall, and the house picks its queen for the month. It’s why the price doubles and why half the men in the city are in the front room right now with their gloves off.”

“And you think something happens to the one who wins.”

“I think three months running, something happened to the one who won, and every one of them went out of here with her chin up.” She drew her wrapper tighter at the collar. “Which is the part I mind. Going out is nothing. Going out proud, and then the two of them dead — Dahlia and June heard the same speech I’m hearing. They thought they’d been chosen.”

“They were chosen.”

“By somebody. Yes. That’s what I object to.”

Ambrose stood up.

“You’re leaving.”

“I can’t be seen going out the front with the drum on it.” He stood a moment with one hand on the back of the chair, working the order of it. The hall downstairs would be full of men by now and fuller in a minute. “What’s behind the curtain — a stair, or were they using the alcove to store the extra cushions?”

“Stair.” She didn’t stand. “Comes out behind the house, by the stables. There’s a door at the bottom and a man who takes two crowns to forget it.”

He put the coins on the table. She looked at them and left them there.

“They’ll see you came up,” she said. “The madam already knows. One man, borrowed coat, up the stairs, a girl who used to sit with Dahlia. You can’t get down a stair fast enough to outrun that.”

“Then I won’t be in a hurry about it.” He had already decided against the stair. Behind the house meant the stable yard, and the stable yard was where a carriage would be waiting tonight, and a man who took two crowns to forget a face did it for a living. He would go out the way he had come in, and he would go when the house was otherwise occupied. “If she asks who was in this room — a clerk. Some clerk from the courts, about a lease. Nothing worth remembering.”

“You’re a strange one,” she said. “I still don’t know what you wanted.”

“What I came for,” Ambrose said, “was two names and a pattern, and I have both.”

“I meant me.” She said it as if he had misunderstood on purpose. “You sat in my room for two hours and asked after other women the whole while, and you never once asked after mine. Not as a joke, not as a courtesy, not to make any of this easier on either of us. Which is the only reason I said anything to you at all, and I want you to know it, because I won’t say it twice and I won’t say it tomorrow.”

Ambrose looked at her. It was the first time he had looked at her directly since he sat down, and it made the room take a step sideways, because she had been right about him and there was no help for that now.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t.” She pushed the coins and the handkerchief together with the flat of her hand. “Out the way you came, then. Go on.”

The drum started while he was reaching for the door.

It came up through the floor first — a low thing that found the boards under his feet — and then a second strike on top of the first, and a third, faster, and somewhere below in the hall a hundred voices came up at once and swallowed the fourth.

Behind him the girl got up at last and came as far as the doorway, listening with her ear tipped down toward the floor.

“There it is,” she said.

Up here the landing would be clear for the length of an election. He had come up that way, past one door, and he would go down that way, past the stair at the end of the landing, and if he met anyone at all it would be a man going the other direction with his mind on the hall.

Ambrose opened the door.

The door across the landing came open the same second.

A lamp burned to the left of the stairs and laid its light across the landing at an angle, and the man standing in it was already looking at him. Dark coat, no hat, too good a coat for the street it had come in off — and a face he had last seen that morning, at the front of the Great Hall, saying nothing at all through the whole of the king’s business.

There were two men in this house tonight with no business in it. He was one of them. The Duke of the North Marches was the other.

He had built everything he had on the exactness of what he said and did not say, and he heard himself start the wrong sentence.

“Your Grace —“

A hand closed on his collar and hauled him back through his own doorway, chest to chest for the length of one step.

Out on the landing the girl got three words out — the start of a complaint, in the voice of a woman who had spent all night being told things and was finished with it — and the man shut the door on her with his boot, without ever taking his eyes off Ambrose. The rest of it stopped at the wood.

The back of his head knocked the panel hard enough to bring his teeth together. A forearm came down across his collarbone. A palm came flat over his mouth, and the heel of that palm pressed up under his jaw and held his tongue down.

The drum went on, up through the floor, into his ribs.

He did not move.

He had spent two hours in this room calling the heat under his collar the room’s business. Now there was a man’s weight down the length of him, and a hand over his mouth, and his own blood gone hard and warm in his throat, and the two hours were not going to stay where he had put them. Something in him had turned over and answered the grip before he could stop it — slow, and low, and entirely his own — and he wanted no part of it. He wanted the hand off his face. He wanted the door at his back. He wanted his own coat.

He breathed through his nose, in and out, even and unhurried, and did not move, and did not give the man anything to read.