“No, I thank you,” Mrs. Pemberton said very decisively, cutting short Laurence’s question and De Guignes’s immediate response, and Hammond’s own interjection as well. “I have felt my own lapse of duty most keenly, gentlemen; and while I hope Miss Roland will pardon my having deserted her so long—” Miss Roland’s expression made it abundantly clear she would more easily pardon the desertion than the reverse. “—I cannot allow it to continue.
“Thank you, M. De Guignes, for your generous hospitality, and pray give my thanks again to Mme. Récamier for her kindness, and the gift of the dress,” she added, holding him out her hand, marshaling somehow in the midst of an open plaza and surrounded on all sides by ragged soldiers all the authority of a chaperone thirty years older delivering a set-down in the midst of St. James.
De Guignes took his dismissal in reluctant part, outdone only by Emily Roland’s visibly truculent looks; but when he and his men had made a few more polite remarks, they at last retreated to their own distant encampment on the other side of the square, leaving Mrs. Pemberton to stand in place, incongruous in her neat gown and gloves and calm looks, until Laurence had arranged her a seat contrived from a coil of the belly-netting, with several of the local capelets thrown over it for upholstery.
De Guignes had brought her to Cusco with his party. “And regrets it now extremely, I should say,” she said, when she had seated herself. “He was not in the least enthusiastic about permitting me to rejoin you, and I believe if I had not witnessed your arrival directly with my own eyes, he would have been as glad to keep the intelligence from me as long as he might.”
“I should be sorry to imagine M. De Guignes would ever behave so little like a gentleman,” Laurence said, startled by her condemnation of one who, it seemed to him, had only intended to assure her comfort.
“Oh, I do not say a word against him, Captain, I assure you,” Mrs. Pemberton said. “He has let me go, after all, and one cannot really blame him for regret in the present circumstances; he scarcely can rely on my discretion.”
“Certainly not,” Hammond said with enthusiasm, “of course not; how should he expect that a subject of the King should keep his confidences, in any matter that concerned her own nation; madam, pray tell me: have the French been admitted to the presence of the Sapa Inca, themselves, or only their beasts?”
“Not all their party,” Mrs. Pemberton said, “but yes: they are at court every day—”
“Every day!” Hammond cried, dismayed. “Good Heavens: we must find a way to persuade them to let us in; Captain Granby, you must exert all your powers over Iskierka—you must convince her to promote an invitation—”
“Sir,” Mrs. Pemberton said, “I have been invited to come again tomorrow, myself; I would of course be happy to—”
“What? You have met him?” Hammond said. “How was it arranged, were—”
“Her, Mr. Hammond,” Mrs. Pemberton said.
“I beg your pardon?” Hammond said.
“The Sapa Inca is a woman,” Mrs. Pemberton said.
The Empress, Mrs. Pemberton was able to explain to them, was the widow of the previous lord, and the daughter of the one before him. “So far as I can tell,” she said, “he died of the pox. As she herself had by then already survived the illness, while he kept his sickbed she took on the role of intermediary and spoke for him to the court; and he seems to have taken an unconscionable deal of time dying. They have a most peculiar custom of preserving the dead here, instead of a proper burial, but I gather his remains are not fit to be seen, and have been sequestered away instead under a shroud.”
“Properly gruesome,” Granby said. “And when she couldn’t prop him up in a corner any longer?”
“By then, I gather,” Mrs. Pemberton said, “she had persuaded the chief dragons of the court that a woman was better suited to the role of empress: where it would be the duty of a man to go forth and lead the army, she might remain at home under their protection. The argument has carried a great deal of weight with them.”
Laurence asked, “Ma’am, how certain are you of this intelligence?”
“Perfectly certain,” she said. “I have had most of it from the Empress herself, or her handmaidens: she speaks French already, and has asked me to tutor her in English.”