Finding Bikker was easily enough done, for a man with the right connections.
Malden headed across the city again, this time taking the bridge that ran high over the Skrait to the Royal Ditch. He kept clear of the Goshawk Road there-that place was only for the sons of rich men, idle and carrying too much coin for their own good. They would have been an attraction for a man with his deft fingers if not so well- guarded. At every corner of the Goshawk Road armed men lounged, looking out for people like Malden. The guards, employed by the gambling houses and upscale brothels of the Road, would take him down an alley and beat him senseless without bothering to ask any questions first.
Besides, Malden’s destination was in a far more humble part of the Royal Ditch. A part of the city he knew very well. He should, since after all it was where he’d grown up. As he headed down Pokekirtle Lane, a few haggard whores leaned out of doorways to shout propositions at him, but he ignored them. Too drunk to recognize him, they let him pass without impugning his manhood too severely.
Malden had to knock on the door of the Lemon Garden for ten minutes before he was answered-and then only from a window on the second story. Elody, the madam of the house, leaned out into the dusk, her shoulders barely covered by a frayed silk shawl. She clucked her tongue down at him. “Sorry, love, we’re not open yet. Come back after dark.”
“Afraid a customer will see the pox sores on your rump if they aren’t hidden by darkness?” Malden asked.
Elody’s painted face turned dark with anger-until he stepped back away from the door so she could see him. Then a wide grin split her face, showing her missing teeth. “Malden! It’s been ages!”
It was true. It had been years since he’d returned to his childhood home.
Elody slammed the door shut, and he heard her racing down the stairs to get the door. She must have alerted the others inside to his presence, because half a dozen girls were squeezed in the portal when it opened, all of them giggling and simpering for him. He favored them with a warm smile, and a dozen soft hands pulled him inside and shut the door after him. The older “girls,” some of whom had worked alongside his mother, tousled his hair and poked him in the ribs to see if he’d gained any weight. The younger doxies reached for other parts of him, only to have their hands slapped away by Elody.
“He isn’t here for that,” she scolded, “you spavined sluts. Malden’s not a customer. He’s family. He could have girls younger and more talented than you for the price of asking but he never does.”
“Maybe he just hasn’t tried someone his own size yet,” a slender girl said.
“Or maybe he doesn’t like seafood,” one of the oldsters told her. “You might try washing it out after you use it all night.”
“Maybe he doesn’t like girls.”
“You do like girls, don’t you, Malden?”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Learn some manners!” Elody shrieked. “Mirain, fetch him some wine. Gerta-you get some pillows together, make him a pile to lie on. The rest of you go finish putting your faces on, it’s only an hour till we open. You don’t get paid for fawning over our boy! Malden, Malden, it’s good to clap eyes on you. How you’ve grown. Come in, come in!”
Elody was a madam who knew more of hospitality than any ostler. After all, she’d been entertaining men all her life. She let him take her plump arm and directed him into the courtyard garden that gave the house its name. A single withered lemon tree swayed there over piles of freshly strewn rushes. It was here the tupenny whores entertained their clients-the penny trulls (called penny uprights, sometimes) never bothered to lie down. In the rooms above, which had curtains instead of doors, wealthier clients might be entertained by girls who advertised themselves as virgins (unlikely) or by their varied specialties, which ranged a wide gamut.
Malden was led beneath the tree and provided with a bed of cushions and a cup of mulled wine. It wasn’t very good, but he pretended to sip at it to appease his hostess. She smiled and saw to his every need and asked a million little questions about his life since leaving this place that had once been his mother’s house. These questions he answered only vaguely, or with outright lies-Elody knew perfectly well how he earned his living, and wasn’t asking for real information anyway.
He imagined he could have found this same reception in any brothel between the Golden Slope and the city walls. One of his jobs when his mother had still been alive was to run errands back and forth between the various houses of prostitution, and he learned early on that whores had three special talents other women lacked: one was the obvious, but another, less widely advertised, was that they took care of their own. They had to-even by the liberal standards of the Free City of Ness, a working woman was on the absolute bottom rung of the societal ladder. If they had problems, they turned to one another to solve them, because no decent citizen would ever stoop to aid a whore. The children of whores were treated like royalty among their number-because outside the walls of the brothel, they would be treated worse than livestock.
“It’s been so long,” Elody said, playing with a curl of her hair. The henna she used for dye left it thin and fragile, but she could never stop playing with it. “Why didn’t you come back sooner?”
Malden smiled at her but made no answer. When he left, when he’d grown too old to be a baby of the house, when the previous madam of the place shoved him out in the streets, she’d not been unkind but was firm. There was no place for him there any longer. The house that had been his only home when he was a boy had suddenly seen him as a seed between its metaphorical teeth, and spat him out into the streets of Ness with as little ceremony. He could still remember the look on the faces of Elody and the other “girls” that day. They’d fought with themselves not to show him any pity. And they’d won.
For a while afterward, while Malden tried to find honest work-and then when he began his life of crime-he’d sworn to himself he would never return.
Now, seeing how Elody received him, he realized what a fool he’d been.
The madam patted his hand and let his silence go. She filled it with her own words instead. “So much has happened that I must tell you about. Wenna had her baby, she’s a pretty little thing, and Gildie actually made good on all her promises, and bought out her contract, and is living with a wood-carver now, she’s an honest woman at last. She who was the most scurrilous of commodities once, as you’ll no doubt remember.”
“Really? I thought she was all bluster, that one.”
Elody laughed. “Nothing stands still for long these days. Even old baggages like me can change our ways when the wind blows-oh, and have you heard the latest? It’s all the talk today. The Burgrave’s tower fell down! It seems a wonder, even now when I’ve had time to grow accustomed to the notion. Eight hundred years it stood. They say it was lightning that done for it.”
“I hadn’t heard,” Malden said.
“You must be the last.” She squinted at him suddenly. Malden tensed, thinking she might guess he’d had some hand in the tower’s collapse. She was a shrewd woman, Elody-one had to be to get to run a bawdy house in Ness. Could she see it written all over his face? “There’s something different about you,” she said finally.
“I’m the same as ever,” he protested.
“No. What is it? What do I sense here?” Her face opened wide with a bright smile. “You’ve met a woman! You must tell me all, at once!”
Malden’s shock could not be overestimated. “I-I-ah-yes,” he finally said, simply glad to change the subject, not thinking overmuch on what he said. “But-how did you know?”
“You’ve combed your hair!” Elody said, exploding in laughter.
Malden reached up and touched his short hair. It was true he’d groomed himself before heading out that morning. He’d wanted to look presentable when he turned over the crown. It did not occur to him that he had done so thinking that he would see Cythera again, but “It’s nothing,” he protested. “She’s a beauty, and far beyond what I might hope to attain. I’ve done nothing but make a fool of myself when I’m around her. Surely she’s not interested.”
“Some women like that,” Elody told him. “But I can see your discomfort talking on this, so I’ll let it be. For now. Tell me, Malden, why you’ve really come here,” she said, a sparkle in her eye. He knew he hadn’t heard the last of this. “I know you aren’t here just for advice on love.”
He set his cup on the ground and looked up at a shriveled lemon hanging from a branch above him. “I’m looking for someone. Either of two people, actually-a man and a woman.”
“We’ve plenty of the latter, to meet all requirements,” Elody japed.
