“What is?” Reever asked.
“That song.” Jessamy breathed out, a strange huff that wasn’t quite a sigh.
Reever looked back down at the bar top between them and saw that she still clutched pieces of the glass she had destroyed. He took her hands in his and gently uncurled her fingers. One by one he removed the shards carefully from her palms, where small spots of blood had begun to seep through her pristine pink gloves. Then he held her hand for a moment when he had finished, watching her face.
She did not appear to notice any of this, and he could hear no song.
After a moment, Jessamy took her hands back and got to her feet. Self-consciously she tucked a stray bit of hair into place and smoothed it back with her palm, a gesture that left a small rose-tinted streak among the pale blond finger waves over her ear. She walked out of the lounge and across the hall, then slipped into the parlor. Petra and Madame looked over sharply, but when Jessamy closed the door behind her, they relaxed.
The song, improbably, had not yet begun to slow. “Do you want to dance too?” Maisie asked, reaching for the newcomer’s hand, ignoring the blood that marked Jessamy’s gloved palm like stigmata.
Jessamy spun Maisie around by the fingers that held hers, but her feet stood firm on the floor as she shook her head. “I don’t dance,” she said with a smile. “But I know that song well. I tried to play it once, but it’s more difficult than it sounds. I was a musician, you know. Long ago, back in another lifetime.”
Musician or not, Miss Butcher is a dancer too, thought Maisie, who could always tell. I wonder what her secret is.
There were six other people at the Blue Vein. The Haypottens, of course, and Sorcha, the maid, who was sixteen, plump and black-eyed, and utterly smitten with Negret Colophon, a thing that had shocked everyone who’d realized it, because in the same inn there was Sullivan, whose face was so perfect it would’ve been blinding except for that tiny scar he wore under one eye. But Sorcha, like Maisie, was a girl, not a fool, and she sensed unerringly that there was danger in that much beauty. And even though he wasn’t precisely what you’d call handsome, there was something about Mr. Negret, with his face obscured by the swirling pattern of dotted tattoos, that made her need to look closer, and to sneak surreptitious glances whenever she came across him looking through the books on the shelves in the lounge, or the atlases on the mantel in the parlor, or the decades’ accumulation of assorted bound material that stuffed the corner bookcase where the stairs turned midway between the first and second floors. Not to mention that when he thought no one was paying attention, he sang under his breath as he pieced his paper scraps together into hand-stitched tomes or stood at a window, reading by whatever light managed to filter in through the rain.
But of course, in an inn, the maid, at least, is almost always listening, and more than once when she went around at night to bank the inn’s fires after everyone else had gone to sleep, Sorcha had caught herself singing the words of the firekeeping prayer she’d learned from her mother’s father to the tune she’d gotten from Negret.
The last three guests were in the public bar at the front of the inn, where they were allowed to smoke. There was Antony Masseter, a tall traveling merchant whose right eye was green as a cat’s and whose left was hidden by a rust-colored patch. Mr. Masseter had a round, dappled scar like a firework on one palm and appeared to suffer from insomnia that drove him to wander the halls of the inn at night. Between his light footsteps and the rain, he was almost soundless, but Sorcha and one or two of the others had caught glimpses of him, when nightmares or thirst or the need for a bathroom or the fear of the fires going out or something else had driven them out into the halls in the darkling hours.
Three nights ago, when Petra had caught him at it, Mr. Masseter had given himself away with music. As she’d been returning to her room, she’d caught a faraway, barely audible spill of tiny notes from somewhere down on the first floor of the inn: “High Away,” the song played by a red casket on the bottom shelf of the glass cabinet in the parlor. Petra had paused at her door, trying to remember whether she had given the key back to Sorcha after she and Maisie had finished with the music boxes in that cabinet earlier in the evening. She glanced over her shoulder to where Sullivan was frowning in his own doorway. Their eyes met. “Masseter,” he had whispered so quietly that only the sibilants were audible. “He’s always up late.” He nodded to the door of the next chamber down the hall to the right. “I hear him go out.” Then he’d touched his fingers to his lips, not quite a blown kiss, and disappeared into his room.
Sullivan, as Sorcha could have told everyone, did not sleep either. She’d heard him later that same night pacing in his chamber when she passed on her way from her own tiny room to the kitchen to sing the firekeeping prayer as she checked the stove to be sure it hadn’t gone out.
Sorcha usually slept soundly, but something about all this rain gave her nightmares. The peddler who’d sold the hot watter system half a century ago hadn’t had the parts on hand to heat every room in the inn and he’d never come back in all those years to finish
