Chapter 16 #2
“Milady!” Beau handed me gallantly up onto the bench, wine and cakes balanced somewhat precariously on the ledge under the sliding panel, and soon we were watching the French court dance below in a mesmerizing swirl of music and masks and velvet, swigging Burgundy straight from the bottle and cramming down sweet almond cakes.
I couldn’t help humming through a mouthful of marzipan, swaying to the rhythm of the music.
“Did I mention that I love the new threads?” Beau said as my billowing satin skirts brushed against his legs.
“Thanks.” I was all huge sleeves and cleavage and pearls this time around: beaver hat with curling cream feathers, some sort of tabbed doublet in tawny velvet with pearl clasps, gold satin petticoat billowing down to my embroidered slippers.
“Have to admit the stabby thing in the corset is handy.” Dipping a hand down my bodice, I managed to extract the long strip of carved ivory that stiffened the front of my stays—it came to a decent point, and I’d managed to stab Chester 5.
0 with it right before the royal pikeman reduced him to an empty shirt.
“It’s not a ‘stabby thing,’ it’s a busk.
Helps keep the shape of a seventeenth-century bodice .
. . and ladies gave them to their lovers sometimes, as a favor.
” Beau squinted at the etchings on mine.
“Oooh, you got one with dirty carvings. That’s definitely a threesome carved into the back side of—”
“Hey, now. Stop ogling my X-rated underwear.” I wedged the busk back down my bodice and rested my arms on the ledge again. “Nice to get a bit of a breather, I have to admit.”
“C and C have been finding us pretty fast.” Beau frowned. “How exactly are they tracking us from book to book?”
“I have no idea. I’m making all this up as I go along.”
“I know I haven’t been here all that long, but is it starting to feel personal?
” Beau saw my questioning look and elaborated.
“I mean, I don’t know how these warnings were targeted before, but it was all aimed at the Librarian, and we can assume they know the Librarian.
Now everything’s aimed at you—how is it they know so much about you, right down to your personal vision of what Library Security looks like? ”
“Well, we can assume they have access to the Library’s files on Patrons—”
“Can we? You said the Librarian kept things pretty locked down. How do they know?”
I chewed my lip, thinking. Had someone been feeding the Board information on me?
Was that why I kept imagining my mother in this book or that painting, images of her being slipped in just to unsettle me?
But who would be doing it? Not the Librarian, and I had equal faith in the integrity of the Gallerist and the Programmer—they both gave the impression they’d fall on a sword rather than betray the people we were trying to protect.
The people we were trying to protect . . .
“I wonder,” I said reluctantly, not liking the idea one bit, “if it might be a Patron.”
“Who?”
“There was one I met from the world of Sherlock Holmes . . .” Smart, resourceful Sarah who had soothed the hyperventilating Stephanie out of a panic attack and shepherded teenage Larry along with a sympathetic hand, but who had looked me in the eye and said, I’d let that entire place burn down, and this one too, if it meant keeping myself safe from Ty.
Briefly, I told Beau about her. “I liked her, but she said point-blank that she’d throw anyone and anything under the bus to save herself from her husband.
If the Board somehow got hold of her and asked for information on me . . .”
Yes, I could see her giving it. If it meant she could stay free and stay hidden.
“But how much does she know about you?” Beau pointed out. “You only met her a day or so ago.”
She knew I was a foster kid; knew about my mother—I could hear myself tramping along through a pea-soup London fog, saying, I walk into the world of a book, just like every reader has wanted to do since the dawn of time, and all I can do is fantasize about finding my mother.
How much of a bad Freudian cliché is that? Sarah knew quite a lot about me.
“This is all just speculation,” I said, blowing out a frustrated breath.
“I don’t even know if the Board can make contact with our Patrons in hiding, so it’s probably nothing.
” I didn’t like to think that someone the Library had offered sanctuary to might betray us all, so I did my best to shove the thought out of my mind.
Not like I could do anything about my roiling suspicions, anyway.
Beau passed me the bottle of Burgundy and I took a long swallow, looking back down at the dancing still going on below.
Patterns like flowers, coming together and breaking apart again in this quiet pocket of untamed time .
. . The French queen was so graceful, a swan in blue satin. “I could stay here forever,” Beau said.
I smiled, forgetting Sarah and my ugly suspicions in the dreamy bliss of his expression. “What made you fall in love with Alexandre Dumas?”
“Some movie adaptation I caught on TV as a kid. I wanted to run around in lace cuffs, getting into sword fights . . . And it was more acceptable, you know?”
“Than what?”
Beau’s eyes were still trained on the dancing, but his smile faded.
“My older brothers always dressed up as Batman or Superman for Halloween, or their favorite football player. I always wanted to be something fancy, a Disney Prince or the Cavalier from the Nutcracker—something gay, they always teased me. So I came up with the Three Musketeers, because it’s fancy but it’s still badass.
The tabards and the swords make the lace collars and the feathered hats just not gay enough, right?
” A snort. “So my brothers dressed up with me, and the three of us ran around all night getting into sword fights.”
“Did your brothers do that a lot? Tease you?” For some reason I remembered a girl in my sixth or seventh foster home, a year older than me, the one who called me fatty and made oinking noises whenever I picked up my fork.
I probably would have ended up with a nice little eating disorder if she hadn’t tried to stab another foster kid with a pair of pinking shears and gotten her bitch ass moved out, thank God.
Beau shrugged his elegant shoulders. “My brothers were pretty good to me. Always beat up anybody who picked on me at school. But then they’d turn around and say, If you didn’t act like a fag, nobody would pick on you—that kind of thing.”
“Didn’t your parents shut that shit down?” My experience of parenting wasn’t exactly standard, but didn’t parents usually referee the kids, prevent the teasing? Wasn’t that a parent’s job?
“My dad was a running back at the University of Alabama. Roll Tide!” Beau pumped a fist, mockingly.
“He loves me, not saying he doesn’t. But I wanted a Singer sewing machine for my thirteenth birthday rather than anything from Dick’s Sporting Goods, so I puzzled him.
Still do. And he’s, you know, a manly man with a nice little wife and three boys at home, so he just .
. . finds it easier to turn a blind eye whenever a guy turns up on my Instagram feed.
I post a pic arm in arm with someone like Ysabel or Tyesha or Marleigh, my father will be on the phone in twenty-four hours asking me if I’m bringing her home for Thanksgiving.
I could post a pic actually lip-locking with Deryk or Rhys or Marcus, and suddenly Dad’s stone blind. ”
I kept my eyes trained on the spectacle below: a courtier in silver satin surreptitiously adjusting the pasted-on beauty spot below one eye in between complicated passes; a dwarf attendant aiming a look of suppressed loathing at the woman whose train he was carrying.
“Your mom do the same thing? Not acknowledge the boyfriends?”
A shrug.
“But they’ve still got to be proud of you,” I persisted, not entirely sure why I was pressing this except that .
. . well, someone like Beau was supposed to have it all, right?
Sure, he was stressed out and overworked, but he was still the gorgeous, confident, independent product of a childhood spent in an actual house with a yard, his parents neither divorced or absentee or routinely feeding the grocery money into the slot machines.
If Beau didn’t have it all, what hope was there for anybody?
“I know you’re stretched to the limit right now, but you’ve still got your own business, half a million Instagram followers, a movie star about to wear your dress on the red carpet.
That’s success any way you want to define it. ”
“Because my dad lent me the money to start the shop.” Beau took a swig from the bottle of Burgundy.
“He didn’t get why I wanted it, but he was trying so hard to be fair.
Because he loaned my brothers money too, when they each got married and bought houses, so he was going to do right by me even if he didn’t understand why I wanted it, and I got the same deal: start paying it back in three years.
” Pause. “That was nearly three years ago.”
“And you’re worried about paying?”
“Of course not!” He flashed me the practiced, dimpled, easy smile I’d seen so often before the tumultuous last two days—the smile that said Hi, gorgeous, ain’t life grand?
—and jumped down from the bench, apparently losing interest in the dancing below.
“I’m the guy who’s Made It! The guy who has all his books in the black.
The guy who can start paying his dad back without batting an eyelash. ”
“Are all your books in the black?” I took his extended hand and hopped down from the bench in a billow of satin, remembering that tidy QuickBooks account I’d been hired to set up at the start of our acquaintance.
He’d been cash-strapped back in those days, but everyone was when just starting out a business. Surely now—