But the fougas had withdrawn after these two strikes; although many died in the streets, and the lazars’ gleeful wailing kept us all from sleep for several hours. Since then more rumors raged through the City of Trees. Everyday life took on the shocking and explosive nuances of the tales we enacted.
The morbidly superstitious House Saint-Alaban enjoyed an unprecedented wave of popularity in light of the City’s recent misfortunes. Death became the fashionable theme at masquerades. Red, the Paphian hue of mourning, colored everything from hair to dominatrice’s hoods. The Botanists were unable to meet the demand for a particular shade of crimson henna. Scarlet love apples adorned every dish we ate for two solid weeks, and every invitation to a ball was writ in sanguine ink. An Illyrian eunuch inspired his Librarian Patron to compose a long poem entitled “The Coming of the Gaping One.” When recited at the Illyrians’ Semhane Masque, three Saint-Alabans fainted. A fourth was found dead afterward, hanging from an apple tree.
Fashion began to reflect these macabre preoccupations. Paphians my own age or younger emulated the startling deshabille of the ill-fated Raphael Miramar as he had last been seen at the Butterfly Balclass="underline" deathly pallor enhanced by powder of lead, crimson tunics carefully torn; fillets of twigs and vine woven upon their brows and hempen ropes worn about the neck in lieu of the customary wreaths of blossoms or bijoux. Raphael Miramar himself had become a sort of romantic figure in death, mourned by his many friends and lovers. An ardent cult sprang up around his memory; a violent tango was named after him, and a dangerous means of achieving sexual gratification by use of a rope.
Fin-de-sècle thinking, a renowned Librarian christened it all. The phrase was enthusiastically parroted by the Paphians, although few of them recognized the language it came from; and no one could have guessed what century this was, or whether or not we approached its end.
My star continued to rise amidst all this confused speculation. My amazing resemblance to Raphael Miramar had of course already been remarked upon. Now it became our stock-in-trade. Paphians from the remaining Houses flocked to each performance at our theater. A masque was no longer considered proper entertainment unless we were there in attendance, and we turned down countless invitations to perform.
Throughout I enjoyed the attention of myriad admirers. I eschewed Raphaelesque garb save onstage, as when I played Lear’s Fool. I preferred my own restrained taste in clothing, although I did indulge in accepting gifts of feathered caps and bandeaux from the Zoologists, once they learned my fondness for these. The mode Raphael was risky for me, since it involved a certain amount of exposed flesh.
“You should be more careful, Wendy,” Justice scolded late that night. Our performance for the Historians had been an enormous success, but afterward I had grown cocky waiting for my curtain call. Inspired by his recent triumph, Fabian and I staged a mock duel backstage. He had playfully torn my blouse with his sword. I took my bow with the ripped cloth flapping, my hair tangled, flushed and grinning from our game. The Paphians in the audience had cheered madly. Some even rushed the stage. I made a scarce retreat down the trapdoor before they could capture me and adapt my wardrobe further. Miss Scarlet had been aghast at this unprofessional behavior—“ Quite unlike you, Aidan,” she had remarked sternly—but Fabian and the rest of the troupe seemed pleased that Aidan had dropped his prim hauteur for a few minutes.
Justice of course sided with Miss Scarlet. “What if they had caught you?” he demanded.
He and I had taken to sharing a room, twin sleigh beds drawn up against opposite walls beneath curled photographs of unconvincingly histrionic thespians. This arrangement kept me from being bothered by my admirers. It also put off the questions of others in the troupe regarding my amorous tastes. Since our visit to the House Miramar, Toby Rhymer had regarded me suspiciously: with more respect, perhaps, but also with skepticism, fueled by envy of my success.
“Our dear Aidan is more than what he seems to be,” he often said, affection vying with malice in his tone.
But as a roommate Justice, like Miss Scarlet, was above reproach. He wanted only to act as my friend and conscience (but still hoped to take me as his lover). I found that I liked his company: sober and intelligent for a Paphian, and relatively chaste. After that evening at the House Miramar he had made no more overtures toward me. His intrigues tended to be brief: a very young sloe-eyed refugee from Miramar; an Illyrian gynander with a jealous Naturalist Patron; this continuing flirtation with Mehitabel, under Gitana’s reproving gaze.
Now he sat curled up on his bed, weaving colored wires and tiny bulbs of glass into his braid.
“Do you think you could do that to my hair?” I asked. A Historian had given me a brooch after my performance, a flat square of plastic embellished with letters and numbers. “I’ll give you this—”
“No,” he said, glancing up and shaking his head. “Your hair’s still too short. Aren’t you listening to me, Wendy? What would have happened if they’d caught you and found out they’d been fooled all this time?”
I held the brooch to my breast. I decided it was ugly, and tossed it to the floor. “I don’t know,” I said. “Does it matter?”
“It should. It wouldn’t go very well for the rest of us, I can tell you that. People don’t like being made fools of.”
I felt flushed from that intense rippling joy that remained with me after a good performance: better than my acetelthylene had been, better than almost anything except tapping new blood. “But it wouldn’t be my fault, Justice. It would be Aidan’s! I’m not responsible—Wendy can’t be responsible.”
He gazed at me, wrapping a wire around one finger. “Is that what you think, Wendy? Is that what you really believe—that this is like the Human Engineering Laboratory, that Dr. Harrow’s out there somewhere to protect you and save you if you go too far?
“Because you’re wrong. Terrible things are happening. If the Ascendants are really looking for you then you’re in danger all the time, and so am I, and Miss Scarlet and probably every single other person in this damned City. And if the man in the Cathedral is the same one who ordered the purge at HEL —”
I knelt to retrieve the brooch, so he wouldn’t see my face.
“At the very least, Wendy, you shouldn’t make it harder for those who love you and are the only wall between you and the dark.”
I put the brooch in my pocket. I sat on the floor for a minute, then reached for the bottom drawer of my bureau. I withdrew a feathered bandeau, the one Andrew had given me at HEL . I stared at it a long time without speaking; because I felt ashamed, and angry, and frightened.
Because something terrible was happening in the City: something terrible was happening to me, but it was not what Justice or anyone else might imagine in all their gory nightmares.
No: I felt within my head a new thing burgeoning, jealous and implacable and tender and bewildering by turns. Even my dreams had changed. They held not the faces of Dr. Harrow or Morgan Yates or the other subjects at HEL , but those of myself and Justice, or Miss Scarlet, or others I met each day in the City. And as I stared at the bandeau a terrifying thought came to me: that after seventeen years I was changing, that something had changed me: something even Emma Harrow had never dreamed might happen to her sacred monster.
A few weeks later an emissary from the Zoologists arrived. It was the morning of our performance at the Masque of Owls. We were sitting at breakfast together in the oak-paneled dining chamber, picking over the remnants of one of Gitana’s peppery frittatas.