“What’s it to you?”

“It’s whatever I choose to make it, you insolent young pup.” He looked over at IdrisPukke, who was still looking out of the window and smiling. Vipond turned back to Cale. “I would have thought you had more sense than to imitate IdrisPukke in anything. You should look to him as an example of how things should not be done. As for smoking-it is a childish affectation: a habit loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, causes the breath to stink and makes any man who takes it for long enough effeminate. Now get out, both of you.”

25

Four hours later Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist were settling themselves into their comfortable rooms in Arbell Materazzi’s quarter of the palazzo.

“What if they find out we don’t know anything about being bodyguards?” said Kleist as they sat down to eat.

“Well, I’m not going to tell them,” said Cale. “Are you? Anyway, how difficult can it be? Tomorrow we go through the place and make it secure. How many times have you practiced doing that? Then we stop anyone new from coming in and one of us stays with her wherever she goes. If she leaves here, which we discourage, she can’t go outside the keep, and two of us plus a dozen guards go with her. That’s all there is to it.”

“Why didn’t we just take a reward for saving her and get out?”

Kleist’s question was a good one because it was exactly what Cale knew they should be doing, and if it wasn’t for the way he felt about Arbell Swan-Neck, it was exactly what he would have done.

“We’re just as safe here as we would be anywhere else” was all he said. “We’ll get the reward we were promised and the money for taking care of business here. This job is money for old rope, and the truth is we’ve got an entire army guarding us from the Redeemers. If you’ve got somewhere better to go, be my guest.”

And that was that. That night Arbell Swan-Neck slept with Vague Henri and Kleist outside her door. “We’d better be careful until we can make a plan of the place tomorrow,” said Cale, planning all the while how he was going to make his entrance the next day as her all-powerful protector. He would show her his disdain for everything about her, and she would be cowed and afraid, and he would be delighted with himself as well as devastated.

It was nine o’clock the next morning when Arbell Swan-Neck emerged from her private apartment, having been told by the maids who’d brought her breakfast that there were two guards outside accompanied by two scruffy-looking herberts who they’d only seen before clearing out the stables.

Wearing her coldest face, she was put out to discover that, besides the two guards standing formally to attention on either side of the door, she was faced not by Cale but by two boys she’d never seen before either.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“Good morning, lady,” said Vague Henri affably.

She ignored him.

“Well?” she said.

“We’re your bodyguards,” said Kleist, controlling his urge to be bowled over by her staggering beauty and covering it with a look that signified he had seen any number of beautiful aristocrats in his life and he wasn’t impressed, especially and particularly, with this one.

“Where’s your…” She couldn’t think of a word insulting enough. “Ringleader?” she said, at last, unsatisfied.

“Looking for me?” called out Cale as he turned the corner from a nearby passage accompanied by two men carrying several long rolls of paper.

“Who are these people?”

“These are your bodyguards. This one is Henri, the other one is Kleist. They have all my authority and you will please do as they ask.”

“So, they’re your familiars,” she said, hoping to be as offensive as possible.

“Familiars? What’s that?”

“Devils,” she replied triumphantly. “Like the flies who go with Beelzebub whenever he leaves hell.”

Unsurprisingly this put out Henri and Kleist but delighted Cale.

“Yes,” he said, smirking at the two of them. “These are certainly my familiars.”

“They’re a little on the puny side for bodyguards, wouldn’t you say?”

Cale looked at them regretfully. “I’m sorry about their condition-I wouldn’t want to have to look at them all day myself. But as for puny? Perhaps you’d like to set a couple of Materazzi on them, then you’ll see how puny they are.”

“So they’re killers like you?”

Henri was deeply offended by this, but Kleist clearly liked the insult.

“Yes,” replied Cale easily, “killers exactly like me.”

Unable to think of a reply, Arbell Swan-Neck walked back into her apartments and slammed the door behind her.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door, and Arbell Swan-Neck signaled her personal maid to answer it. When she did so, the maid was pleased to see that Cale’s eyes widened with astonishment. It was Riba.

Riba’s rise to such an exalted position had been as strange in its own way as Cale’s. As soon as Anna-Maria had supervised Riba’s ejection from Mademoiselle Jane’s apartments, the old servant made her way quickly to the palazzo occupied by the Honorable Edith Materazzi, mother to Arbell Swan-Neck and the estranged wife of the Marshal. It should be said that since their arranged marriage twenty years before, they had never been anything but strangers, and the conception of Arbell Swan-Neck must have been one of the chilliest royal mergers in history. The Marshal’s attempts to avoid his wife at all costs were often successful, but much less so his attempts to deny her all power or influence over the course of Memphis affairs. The Honorable Edith Materazzi was a woman who knew where the bodies were buried, and there was very little that took place in Memphis that was murky or underhand about which she was not, in some way, informed-or, when occasion demanded it, the origin of. Despite having no official power of any kind-something expressly seen to by the Marshal-the Honorable Edith Materazzi had influence backed up, often as not, by her knowledge of those skeletons and lapses prone to inhabit every family be they never so proud and great. So it was that within thirty minutes of Mademoiselle Jane’s conniption attack over Riba, the Honorable Edith Materazzi knew of it from her spy, Anna-Maria, and had arranged for the angry if bewildered Riba to be a given a room in her own palazzo.

When Vipond heard what had happened and that Riba was now in the Honorable Edith Materazzi’s clutches, he summoned Mademoiselle Jane immediately and gave his niece a most frightful bollocking. She emerged from his office, sobbing and wailing in terror, but there was nothing to be done but wait and see what the old witch was up to.

The Honorable Edith Materazzi did not waste time. She knew that something was up and that it involved her daughter. There had been wild rumors about her absence after visiting Lake Constanz three weeks before, rumors including a secret marriage and a secret birth. None of them so wild, however, as the truth itself. The Honorable Edith Materazzi had spent much time and money to get to the bottom of what happened but with little success-and little success was not something she was prepared to tolerate.

“Have they been treating you well?” asked the Honorable Edith Materazzi as she patted the sofa beside her and signaled with a warm smile that Riba should sit. Nervously, but also warily, Riba did as she was asked. She was already experienced enough in the social distinctions of Memphis to realize that something odd was going on-respect for the slightest difference in rank was insisted upon as if it had been ordained by God himself, and outsiders were treated with ridicule no matter what their status in the provinces. Riba had heard it said repeatedly of the Countess of Karoo, who had come to Memphis more than ten years ago, that she paid for the journey by selling her pigsty. This was a grotesque slander, as everyone well knew, because the people of the Karoo regarded swine as unclean. Why then, wondered Riba as she sat, was a woman of such eminence treating her with such kindness?