The Golden City

The paper had an address on it, one down near the river. It wasn’t a good neighborhood, but she couldn’t afford a good neighborhood, not with what little she had stashed in her portmanteau. Oriana looked back up at Carlos. He was watching her, but had one eye on the house’s back door, she could tell. “Thank you, Carlos.”

His eyes focused on her, one corner of his lips twisting up into a smirk. “And if you can’t pay, I’m sure we can work something out.”

I should have known Carlos wasn’t acting out of kindness. A paid companion was considered above the household servants, but given her current circumstances, the footman might well think a dalliance with her within his reach now. She’d had some of Isabel’s suitors try their hand at seducing her before. It had been an easy matter to frown at them and shake her head, but she’d been under Isabel’s protection then. Now she had no one to guard her against unwanted advances. Still, while she might not like Carlos, she needed a place to stay, a place where they wouldn’t ask too many questions about a woman showing up in her bedraggled condition. She forced herself to smile at him. “We’ll see.”

Carlos spotted the butler come out looking for him then. He winked at her and jogged up the steps toward the back of the house, nose in the air as he went.

Oriana leaned back against the stairwell wall and covered her face with her hands. Why do things keep getting worse?

* * *

Duilio’s mother sat alone at the breakfast table. He stopped at the threshold and gazed at her, worried. She looked completely human and had human manners. She had excellent taste in clothing, always comported herself in a manner befitting a Portuguese lady, and had elegantly decorated the Ferreira home, managing to work in the occasional garish item brought back by her seafaring husband. None of the social set who knew her would have any reason to guess that she was a selkie.

At the moment, she stared toward the dining room’s west-facing window, her hands cupped in her lap. She absently rubbed the tips of her fingers with her other hand as if they ached. With her somber garb and desolate countenance, most would assume she mourned her husband’s death still. Duilio knew better.

She was pining for the sea.

He hated to see her this way. When he’d left the Golden City to travel abroad, she’d been vivacious and mischievous—a loving, attentive mother. She’d helped oversee the family’s business investments and kept firm control of the household. Now most days all she did was sit in the front parlor and gaze in the direction of the river. It seemed her spirit had slipped away from her body.

And, to some extent, that was his fault. If he’d stayed home, perhaps none of this would have come to pass. Perhaps he could have stopped . . .

His mother’s head turned as if she’d caught scent of him standing there. “Duilinho?”

He smiled. She persisted in calling him by his childhood pet name. He settled next to her at the table and covered her hand with his own. “I’m here.”

Her seal-brown eyes fixed on him, a rare moment of concentration. “Are you well?”

He must look tired after his sleepless night. Even as distracted as she was, she always worried for him. “I’m fine, Mother.”

Her eyes slipped back toward the window, and she turned that direction as if she heard the sea itself calling her.

Duilio pressed his lips together. It troubled him that she spent most of her days cooped up in the house. His father had been dead more than a year now. Duilio expected that his mother would prefer to remarry eventually. She was a lovely woman, even approaching fifty as she was. But her social reemergence must be put off until she was better.

One of the footmen brought him his regular breakfast, a large plate of eggs and chourico along with a pot of coffee. Duilio waited until the man left before starting in on his food. Between bites, he told his mother of the bizarre information he’d gotten very early that morning. He wasn’t certain she was attending. Her coffee was almost untouched, and she’d eaten only half her croissant. Her preferred newspaper—the trade daily rather than the Gazette—lay unopened next to her elbow. He talked to her anyway, in the hope that she caught something of his words. He would hate for her to feel neglected.

“So I’m going to go see Joaquim,” he finished, “and ask if he can help me find her.”

His mother continued to stare at the window.

“Shall I bear your greetings, Mother?”

That caught her attention. She blinked and turned halfway toward him. “To Filho?”

Apparently she had been paying attention. Just as she addressed Duilio by his childhood name, she called Joaquim so also. Joaquim Tavares and his father shared a name, so Joaquim was simply Filho—“son”—to her. He set down his napkin. “Yes, Mother.”

Joaquim and his younger brother had lost their mother at an early age and had come to live with their cousins, the Ferreira family. They had stayed for the next eight years, until their father retired from his sea travels to take up boatbuilding. The younger son, Cristiano, had joined that business, but Joaquim had chosen to make his career in the police.

Duilio might have selected that profession himself, had his own father not been set on his sons being gentlemen. He’d dutifully studied law at the university in Coimbra—an acceptable profession for a younger son—but then had proceeded to travel abroad for the next five years to work with various police agencies on the continent and in Great Britain. His father had not been pleased. But when his elder brother Alessio died, Duilio had been forced to return home to shoulder the responsibility of managing the family’s considerable investments . . . and to take care of his mother.

She brushed her hands along her skirts and picked up her newspaper, a rare show of energy. “Please tell Filho to come visit me.”

“I’ll ask him, Mother,” he promised.

“I wonder . . .” She laid down her paper and touched the smooth brown hair dressed in a simple knot at the nape of her neck.

Duilio hadn’t inherited that hair. He had his father’s, darker and with a tendency to curl. The only feature he’d inherited from his mother was her eyes. He wished he resembled her more, as Alessio had.

He waited for her to finish her sentence, but instead she stared down at her newspaper as if she had no idea what it was doing there. Sighing inwardly, Duilio rose and took his leave of her, kissing her cheek in farewell. Her maid, Felis, bustled past him, no doubt eager to get her mistress up and about her silent day. Duilio paused and watched the elderly woman fussing over his mother’s unmoving form.

His mother’s pelt was missing, stolen from the house three years before. In a feat of magic that Duilio’s intellect never could grasp, a selkie could remove his or her pelt and be left in human form. Half-human, Duilio couldn’t do that himself, but he’d seen it done many times. It still baffled him. And even in human form, that pelt remained part of the selkie, an eternal tie to the sea and her life there. Without her pelt, his mother couldn’t go back to the ocean she loved.

Duilio hadn’t been around at the time of the theft. If he had, he might have stopped it, but he’d been in London instead, studying the police force there. Alessio had written and mentioned a theft, but hadn’t told Duilio what was stolen, a gross oversight. He would have come back to hunt the thief himself if only he’d known. But Alessio and Father had thought they could find the thing without help. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been the case.

Then Alessio had died.

His death nearly a year and a half ago had been suspicious. He’d gotten involved in an argument over a lover and ended up dueling another gentleman in a clearing outside the city. Both parties had seen it was foolish and in the end both men deloped, firing their guns into the air. Yet somehow Alessio was shot through the heart. Duilio had talked to witnesses, and none had any idea from where that fatal shot had come. With no evidence to the contrary, the police had called it an accident.

Duilio wondered if that stray bullet was linked to Alessio’s hunt for their mother’s pelt. In his journals, Alessio had indicated he was close to a breakthrough right before his death. But he hadn’t recorded that breakthrough, whatever it was, leaving Duilio in the dark.

It turned out they actually knew who’d taken the pelt from the house: a footman hired only a month before.