Chapter Eighteen #4
“Lest you forget, brooding bastards from the colonies,” Silas said. “But I shall make it up to you. I pride myself on collecting spare secrets when they become available to me.”
“I did not take you for a gossip,” she said.
“A gossip, no. But during the social season, secrets are as silver. I make sure my coffers are stocked.”
Elswyth appraised his face: his keenly intelligent eyes, his sharp jaw, the stubble on his chin.
Looking up at him, she realized that she would only need to stretch a few inches to reach his lips.
Their moment of mutual lust in the conservatory came back to her in a reverie, the feeling of his hand on her thigh, his bare chest so close to her face…
She turned away, ignoring the heat in her belly.
“And what do you expect in return?”
He smiled. “Perhaps I’ll call on you one day. But for now, the pleasure of your commiseration is enough.”
Silas leaned down to whisper in her ear, and a single black curl fell against her cheek. “Now. Look over there. Do you see the girl in the honeysuckle gown?”
Elswyth subtly turned her head as they spun about the floor. She spotted the girl, black-haired and olive-skinned, in a pink gown speckled with dangling flowers. “Miss Petunia Florissant,” she said, “second daughter of Anther Florissant, Viscount of Canterbury.”
“Well done. Yes, Miss Florissant. What do you think of her?”
Elswyth shrugged slightly, careful not to be too obvious with her observations. “Lovely enough, if a bit simple. Well bred.”
“It would seem so, wouldn’t it? But it’s said that her mother, the Lady Costa Florissant, is quite close with their family’s groundskeeper. An Italian. Swarthy fellow. Now, look at Lord and Lady Florissant, watching their daughter dance.”
Elswyth did. Lord Florissant was pale as paper with bright orange hair and blue eyes. Lady Florissant was an English rose, red-blond hair and hazel eyes, with a smattering of freckles across her nose.
“Do you think…” Elswyth started.
“You’re the botanist. Surely you’re aware of recessive traits and how they function. If it helps, the rest of the Florissants are as pale as her father.”
Elswyth grimaced. She watched as the man Petunia had been speaking to drifted away, losing interest. She was still speaking when he left, and her look of excitement faded into a frown.
“I doubt she even knows,” Silas said, “but everyone else does. Beautiful she may be, but no respectable family will pollute their line with bastard blood.”
Elswyth risked a look at Silas, searching for a reaction. He merely stared at Petunia pityingly, his eyes dark and serious.
“Now: Miss Calanthe Thistle, in the gray gown, standing by Lord Barnett.”
Elswyth scanned the room. Calanthe fidgeted with her wineglass while she talked to some elderly lord. Her smile was strained, and her fingers kept drifting toward her hair.
“Premature warping,” Silas whispered. “Nothing serious, of course, only cosmetic. But rumor has it she makes a servant trim her growths before every ball. If you look closely you can see the stumps on her scalp where the branches have been clipped.”
“That’s awful—to lose control of one’s floromancy so young,” she said.
“Yes, perhaps,” Silas said. “It would be quite tragic if she weren’t such a reprehensible person.”
Elswyth turned to him. “She is suffering from a disease.”
“And that absolves her? She dismisses all her servants without a reference once she’s done with them. All but assures they never work in another noble house. Their families go hungry, and Calanthe gets to keep her little secret. The saddest part is that everyone already knows.”
Elswyth watched the girl—lovely, blond, well bred. Seemingly so innocent. “That’s monstrous,” she said.
Silas smiled, eyes tracing over hers. “We are surrounded by monsters, Elswyth. The sooner you learn that, the safer you shall be.”
“I do not believe that. Good exists everywhere, as does evil, with the poor and the rich alike.”
“One could argue otherwise. That to have privilege and power—like everyone at this ball—and to not tirelessly use that power to do good is, in effect, a form of evil. Sometimes evil is the things we do, and sometimes evil is the things we fail to do.”
Elswyth looked around the party at the beautiful girls fussing over their gowns, at their fathers drinking and eating, at their mothers flattering and posturing. She thought of the sick and starving in the Rows and how no one, not once that evening, even deigned to mention them.
“Then that would of course include the two of us, Sir Silas,” Elswyth said.
“Of course it does. That’s the difference between us. I don’t pretend to be good.”
He was staring intently at her, his amber eyes serious. Their gaze locked for a moment, and something passed between them, a frisson that carried up her spine and through her chest. She could feel his hard body beneath his suit, pressed so firmly against hers.
She looked away, her cheeks burning.
“If what you say is true,” Elswyth said, “then the existence of power is the existence of evil. One cannot exist without the other, and those with the most power, no matter how they wield it, are inherently the most evil. I wonder, then, what that says about her.”
Elswyth nodded subtly toward the queen. Viscaria was speaking with the prime minister, but her rheumy eyes lingered on Elswyth and Silas.
“You do not need to muse philosophically about Viscaria’s evil, Elswyth. I assure you, it is quite concrete.”
“Wearing a crown does not make her evil,” Elswyth said. “Cruel as she may be.”
“Perhaps the crown does not. But her actions do. Famine in India, opium in China, massacres in Africa… even the poverty and violence in her own city.”
“She is a figurehead, Silas. Those things are the fault of the empire, yes, but the empire is a more complicated beast than a single woman. Those atrocities were committed under different political regimes, at least five prime ministers…”
“And yet she is the only constant. For almost a hundred years she’s sat on that throne, whispering in the ears of politicians and generals.
Her power might be subtle, but it is power, and Viscaria is the spider at the center of the empire’s web.
They do not call it the Whispering Throne for its branches alone. ”
Elswyth looked to the great elderwood throne where Viscaria sat. Thousands of white leaves scraped against each other, barely audible behind the music, like the distant voices of ghosts.
“It is not so simple,” Elswyth said.
“Is mariticide simple enough for you?”
Elswyth blinked. “Certainly you are not implying…”
“Tell me, what do you know of her husband, the late prince consort?”
“He died of heart failure. Decades ago.”
“So the story goes. But it is well known—among those who pay attention—that the late prince consort was a man who enjoyed his drink and his women. Much like his grandson, Prince Oliver, I hear.”
Silas nodded to where Prince Oliver stood, brooding over a glass of brandy. A small crowd of young women lingered near him, accompanied by their ambitious mothers.
“They say he was going to run off with a courtesan that he’d fallen in love with, thus besmirching the good name of the Crown. Queen Viscaria couldn’t let that happen, of course. And so the Viscarian Age began with a nightshade’s kiss, and we received our widow queen, long may she live.”
“Silas,” Elswyth hissed, “if anyone heard you, we’d be tried for treason.”
“Oh, nothing so public as that. It would bring far too much attention. Likely you’d be shipped off to your father’s house, locked away on the queen’s orders.
Perhaps, a year from now you’d die mysteriously in childbirth or falling from a horse.
I’d be put on a ship to India straight away, but of course that ship would never arrive. Tragic, how these things happen.”
The waltz rose to a crescendo and Silas spun her, the skirts of her gown flaring. The song finished, and the crowd applauded. Elswyth pulled away from Silas, then curtsied. Her heart pounded in her chest.
She moved to leave, but Silas took her hand again. He leaned in close, so that she could smell the juniper and bourbon on his breath, and the sea-salt smell of his sweat. “Luckily, though, secrets have a way of staying secrets. Do they not?”
“I have not betrayed you yet, have I?” Elswyth asked.
“No. And I appreciate that, Miss Elderwood. Knowing who to trust is the only thing keeping us alive.”
She examined him, his calm, almost featureless expression. “You have told me everyone’s secret but your own, Sir Silas. What is the mysterious Blackthorn hiding?”
Silas smiled, but his eyes were strangely distant. He bowed deeply, then took her hand. His lips grazed her fingers, eyes peering through dark locks of hair.
“Some secrets are better when kept,” he said. “Good evening, Miss Elderwood.”
And with that, Silas stood straight, turned away, and disappeared into the watching crowd.