Mélusine by Sarah Monette Read Free Book Online

so her neck looked long, like a swan's. She was wearing pearls in her ears, boring little things as genteel as that fichu, and she looked like she belonged in an old story, the sort of gal that heroes rescue from dragons and shit like that.

    I stepped out of the doorway as she passed, and said, "What's with the dress?"

    "Oh!" She jumped a little, and her cheeks colored. "Dennis. I… I work in a shop on the Road of Carnelian. I didn't have time to change."

    "What kind of shop?"

    "Oh, you know. Perfume and maquillage and lingerie—ladies' goods."

    She had long-fingered, delicate, lily-white hands. I could imagine them among the silks and the cut-glass bottles.

    "It's boring," she said, "but it pays the rent."

    "Yeah." We were at the door of the Spinning Goblin, and I said, "Let the clerk think whatever he wants. Okay?"

    Her blush got redder. She wasn't real demimondaine, just a bourgeoise trying hard to make it. "All right," she said, and I thought again that she had guts. She wasn't flinching from what she'd started.

    We went in. I gave the clerk a half-gorgon. That got us a room for an hour. He pushed a key across the desk. "Room six."

    I jerked my head at Miss Thomson, and we climbed the stairs. Two flights up and down at the end of the hall, there was Room 6. I unlocked the door, waved her in like a gent, locked the door behind us.

    Miss Thomson looked around, at the bed, at the table and two chairs, at the fashion plate somebody'd cut out and pinned to the wall two septads ago. I saw the way her hands tightened on her reticule, and I knew what she was thinking.

    "I ain't gonna," I said.

    She jumped again, and blushed, and lied, "I didn't think you were."

    If she really hadn't thought so, she would have said, Going to do what?
    I shrugged out of my topcoat, the one I didn't hock unless I was really a half-centime this side of starving. It had been tailored careful, so you could carry a fair amount of stuff under it and it would still hang all right. I'd balanced the dancer on one side with the clock and the box on the other. I put them on the table.
    Miss Thomson gave a little squeak of excitement and brushed past me—I felt the soft weight of her dress and breathed in her perfume. She touched the clock and the dancer—just little pats, like she had to prove to herself they were really there—and then pressed her hands down on the box. That wasn't only greed, and I wondered just how nasty Ellis Otanius had been.

    I said, "Is the dancer Tolmattin?"

    Her laugh was half a gasp. "Oh, yes. El—Lord Ellis's mother wrested it from her older sister at their father's funeral. It is the family's great Pride."

    "Nice people. You got a key for that box?"

    "Oh! I didn't even think—"

    "Hang on." I had my lock picks in my inside waistcoat pocket, where nobody was going to find 'em unless they were specially looking for trouble. I got them out and forced the lock again. I didn't fuck up in front of Miss Thomson, either, and it didn't take but a second longer than a normal key would have.

    I glanced up into a narrow-eyed look of interest. "Is that a particularly easy lock?" she said.

    " 'Bout average for jewelry boxes."

    "Could you tea—I mean, could one learn to do that?"

    "I guess. It ain't all that hard."

    "It looks like a useful skill."

    She reached to open the box. Our hands touched for a second, and then I backed up out of the way. I won my bet with myself. The first thing she went for was the rubies.

    I said, "Know a good fence?"

    "And what makes you think I won't wear them myself?"

    "Ain't your color."

    "True," she said, with a cute little grimace that it looked like she'd practiced. It was the sort of face to get a guy to kiss her on the tip of her upturned nose and give her anything she wanted. "Actually, I have a buyer. They're supposed to be off Corundum Gate."

    "Oh pull the other one!" I said, and she laughed.

    "No, I promise. Is provenance the right word?"

    "Yeah. If you mean where they