The Rose Garden's Courtesan

I wept and wept before Lift, who sat watching me in silence.

By the time we found our way back to conversation, the sun had already risen in full. I had cried so long that my nose and ears felt stuffed shut, and all I wanted was to rest — but Lift, who had stubbornly kept to my side until the tears ran dry, showed no intention of leaving it at that.

When I had finally, barely, composed myself, he broke the long silence in a voice without rise or fall.

"So. You know nothing of what was in the letter, then?"

I nodded, dabbing at the corners of my eyes with a handkerchief gone damp.

"Dorothy Cecilla left behind one strange letter and took her own life. That's the story."

"Dorothy did not kill herself!"

I forced the words out as firmly as my failing voice would allow. A ghastly accident involving snake venom I might have believed — but she was never a girl who would have done a thing like that. Which meant I had to know what had happened to her. I had to know how my sister died, and why her death was being so thoroughly turned away from. It was the last thing I could still do for my poor sister.

I was steeling myself not to give up, no matter how long it took, when Lift's next words struck like a thunderbolt.

"Then you believe Dorothy Cecilla was murdered?"

The instant I heard him, it felt as if someone had struck me across the back of the head. I had been certain it was not suicide — but the assumption of murder was another matter entirely. That, too, was something I had never even considered.

"That's absurd! Why would Dorothy—"

"Because the Rose Garden's Courtesan had no shortage of enemies. Though her one and only sister seems not to have known."

The unexpected phrase sent heat flooding into my face — pure humiliation. The undisguised contempt on his face and the sneer in his voice were mocking my sister and me both at once.

I had no time to think. My body moved first. I swung at the man who had called my dead sister a whore, but my hand was caught before it ever reached his cheek.

"That sort of behavior won't do, my lady of House Dvorden. I've already indulged quite enough of your tantrums."

His amber eyes flashed cold as he warned me. Then he released my wrist as if flinging it away.

Lift was a man accustomed to overwhelming others with a look. That high-handed air — the kind that crushed a person's spirit before a word was finished — lent his speech its weight. He was the ruffian who had insulted Dorothy, and yet I found myself nearly believing that I was the one being rude.

Rubbing my wrist, which still stung, I glared at him as viciously as I could.

"Don't you insult my sister."

Lift looked at me as if I were faintly ridiculous, and asked,

"Are you telling me you truly had no idea what Dorothy Cecilla was in Caliwood?"

"What?"

"House Cecilla has been sending your family considerable support these past four years. Did you never wonder how your sister came by that money?"

"It wasn't support. It was a loan. We're still paying it back."

My voice dwindled as I offered what sounded, even to me, like an excuse. After Father died, House Dvorden's finances had been poor, and Viscount Cecilla had written out promissory notes for us more than once. They had been issued in Viscount Cecilla's name. Not Dorothy's.

And that money had been Dorothy's?

Even if their circumstances had not been lavish, Dorothy had been born and raised a baron's daughter. How could a girl who had never earned a coin in her life have come up with a sum like that? What on earth was this man talking about?

"You… what are you? What do you know about Dorothy?"

"A good deal more than her own sister, it would seem."

"Stop playing games and answer me properly! What are you?"

"Let's say I'm the only person besides you who believes Dorothy Cecilla did not kill herself."

Lift's flat reply closed my throat. I had so much to ask, and no voice left to ask it with — because the nameless man in front of me was telling me my sister had been murdered. It had gone so far beyond any horror I could absorb. I had thought I'd cried my tear ducts dry only moments ago, and yet the tears came pattering down again.

Lift frowned as if the sight disgusted him, and hurried on before I could start weeping in earnest.

I stared up at Lift's face, dazed, and another tear slid down my cheek in the interval. My head felt dull — from crying too much, perhaps. There was so much I needed to think about, and nothing would come.

Ever since I had arrived in Caliwood, nothing had happened that I could make any sense of. Viscount Cecilla said Dorothy had killed herself. Lift insisted she had been murdered. I could trust neither of them. But what mattered was this: the man in front of me was not, like Viscount Cecilla, someone whose face I had not even been allowed to see.

It was not a straw I was clutching at. I would have seized even a shadow — and that desperate need to hold onto something, anything, moved my lips.

"What do I have to do?"

"For a start, do something about those broken tear ducts of yours. I'll tell you what you'll be doing in due course."

With that, Lift rose at once. He left me in the deep-green room and walked out without a backward glance. The sound of the door closing was the last of it; I was left alone in a silence so complete it felt unreal.

I became a part of that silence, watching the darkness recede in a daze until my mind was capable of something called thought again.

When I could finally lift a body that felt as heavy as waterlogged cotton, I picked up Dorothy's letter from where it had been left lying and climbed out of the bed.

Six fifty-six. I checked the clock above the fireplace, then drew back the curtains, and morning light stabbed at my eyes as it came rushing in. The twenty-second of March. It was the fifteenth day since Dorothy had died.

I washed my face in the bathroom, pulled clothes from my bag and changed — and a maid burst in as if she had been waiting, setting down breakfast.

"Where is this? Whose family's estate is this?"

"I wouldn't know, my lady."

"Are we even in Caliwood?"

"I don't know."

"I need to go to Viscount Cecilla's residence. Could you call a carriage?"

"That's beyond my authority, my lady."

The answers came clipped and immediate, without so much as a glance at my face. She had no intention of giving me a proper reply, no matter what I asked. The maids at Viscount Cecilla's had been the same. Did every maid in Caliwood receive the same training? In Dvorden, we lived with our servants as if they were family.

I picked at breakfast more than I ate it, and once it was cleared away I was abandoned to the quiet once more. I wanted to look beyond the room, but the door was locked from without. I had no choice but to sit on the sofa with my sister's letter in my hands.

"Count Noerd."

I said aloud the only name that appeared in my sister's letter. No matter how I turned it over, I had never heard it before. Then again, there was no reason I would know the names of the central nobility who resided in the capital. The only connection House Dvorden — a provincial barony — had to Caliwood was Countess Heinrich, who had served as chaperone so that Dorothy might take her first steps into society.

If Viscount Cecilla stood me up again today, I meant to seek out Countess Heinrich. If anyone would know what had happened to Dorothy, it would be her, wouldn't it?

I thought I would ask Lift, when he returned, to let me write to Countess Heinrich — and then found myself turning over his identity once more. He had said Dorothy was murdered. And so he had told me to cooperate in catching the culprit.

I did not yet believe that my sister had been murdered — but even if he were right, it was strange. Every time he spoke of Dorothy, his reaction had been anything but kind. Why, then, was he hunting the person who had killed her?

"The Rose Garden's Courtesan..."

The contemptuous epithet Lift had left behind rose in my mind, and I clicked my tongue without meaning to. Whether what he said was true or not, he was as vile a man as his manner of speaking. If his claim were true, I was the surviving family of a murder victim. A man who would insult the dead in front of the family who believed she had died unjustly could hardly be a decent person. There was no need to take such a man's words at face value.

Dorothy had been a cheerful girl who loved company — but she had also been innocent, and easily frightened. What's more, Dorothy and Viscount Cecilla had been a couple so plainly, abundantly in love that anyone could see it. Which made the viscount's present attitude all the more incomprehensible — but regardless, Dorothy would never have committed an unfaithful act against the husband she loved. If she was laboring under an unjust misunderstanding, that, too, was something I, as her sister, would have to set right.

And to do that, I would first have to meet Viscount Cecilla...

Even after luncheon, the door remained firmly locked.

"First abduction, and now imprisonment."

Before a door that gave no answer no matter how I knocked, I passed the time fighting a restlessness that gnawed at my heart.