“It doesn’t,” I said, the words coming out without anything like deliberation.
He gave me a look that was surprised, even indignant, but he couldn’t keep it up. “No,” he said, managing the saddest smile I had ever seen. “I didn’t really think it would.”
CHAPTER
17
“YOU WERE RIGHT,” GASPED Dahria as soon as we had gotten a safe distance from the shop. “This is fun!”
She fanned herself extravagantly. She had given me a shrewd look at my strange connection with the shopkeeper over his absent father, but said nothing, and if I had seen something like understanding in her face, she had pushed it down and laced it up tight as her corset. Now she was beaming, and I, far from clear about our relationship, let the moment go, turning instead to the mystery at hand.
“So Berrit had a fragment of luxorite,” I mused, “but the Beacon hadn’t been stolen yet, and no one reported any thefts, so where did he get it?”
“The boy must have had connections to dealers or thieves,” said Dahria.
“If so, they were new connections,” I said. “He was nobody in the Westside gang. He said he had friends in high places, but if so, he made those friends recently, right around the time he was traded to Morlak.”
“So we talk to this Morlak fellow,” said Dahria.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” she demanded.
So Willinghouse hadn’t told her. I thought for a moment, took a breath, and related what Morlak had tried to do. She stared at me, horrified, disgusted by a version of the world she had barely known existed. When I was done she said nothing, but I thought her sense of me had changed.
“I could speak to this Morlak without you,” she said at last.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I’m capable of thinking for myself, you know!” she snapped. “I don’t need you spoon-feeding me.”
“I just don’t think he will respond to someone of your breeding,” I said carefully.
“And I think you just like being in charge for once,” she shot back.
“You’re proposing to walk over to the headquarters of a street gang in the Numbers District dressed like that?” I demanded, my exasperation getting the better of me. “If you got out with merely a mugging, you’d be lucky.”
“So what would you have us do?”
I considered the street. I thought of Billy the pickpocket, and nodded toward Macinnes’s place, where Dowager Hamilton had purchased her mysterious necklace. “Get me a half hour with the scullery maid in there.”
“How?”
“Any way you like,” I said. “You’re in charge. And when we’re done there, I suggest we get tickets for tonight’s opera. It turns out I’m available.”
*
MACINNES’S SHOP, THOUGH ACROSS the road from Ansveld’s, was an entirely different kind of establishment. Though it justified its position on Crommerty Street through the sale of luxorite, it was clear that most of its trade was more mundane. Inside, it was less the elegant showroom we had just left and more a glorified pawnshop, dealing in watches and knives, firearms and pewter, porcelain and assorted statues, mostly plaster. Everything was kept inside metal cages, and though the merchandise was not so rich as at Ansveld’s, the security measures were more conspicuous. A guard with a pistol and truncheon at his belt considered us closely as we entered. Despite the presence of luxorite—much of it amber and fading—parts of the shop stood in deep gloom, and large candles had been positioned around the store to make up for the absence of windows. A NO COLOREDS sign on the counter matched one in the shop window, but when I gave it a querulous nod, Dahria shook her head minutely.
A short man in shirtsleeves and a bowler hat, attracted by the ringing of the bell over the door, sauntered out from a back room and watched us appraisingly.
Dahria drew herself up, staring down the security guard, and led me to a corner cabinet, pulling me in close by my sleeve with one hand as she reached for the oversized candle with the other. To my astonishment, she proceeded to tip the candle toward me, spilling hot wax all down the front of my dress.
“Good gods!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You clumsy wretch! Look at your pinafore! Why can’t you watch what you are doing?”
The man in the hat began to bustle toward us. “Now, ladies,” he was saying. “Is there something I can do to help?”
“You can get the wax off this dress immediately!” Dahria announced with breathtaking arrogance.
“Not really my department,” said the man, who I took to be Macinnes himself. “I’m sure when you get home—”
“You think I’m going to walk through the street with a maid looking like this?” Dahria exclaimed, gesturing up and down my spattered pinafore. “See to it, man!”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t really see how this is my problem,” he began warily.
“They are your candles, are they not?” Dahria demanded at her most imperious.
“Well, yes,” said Macinnes, quailing.