A Beggar's Kingdom Read online

  Or is this real?

  Julian clutches the sleeping girl to him, embraces her in a brothel built into the wall of a palace that’s about to crumble and be dismantled for marble. Josephine, Mia, Mary, Mallory, he whispers. I really believed our time had run out, even as I continued to search for you in the London of my nightmares—or is it the London of my dreams? You are my love, the heat of my heart, raising me in flames above my mundane days and dropping me naked at your feet. Where will all this lead us? Where will all this end? I wish I knew. I wish I could see the future. Because sometimes, even when we are like this, it feels to me that you and I are nothing but winged phantoms, Josephine.

  6

  Infelice

  THE FOLLOWING EVENING MALLORY’S AT HIS DOOR AGAIN. “The lord is back.”

  “He’s here every night now?” Julian says. “Doesn’t he have some government business to attend to? A bill to veto? A bishop to consecrate? A family of his own, perhaps? You’d think a man of his, um, stature had some other hobbies.”

  “He’s a widower,” Mallory says. “He works late, and to unwind he comes here to spend a little time with me. I offered him a double with me and Marg. But all he wants is you and me.”

  That’s all I want, too. You and me. Quietly Julian sits. His body throbs for her. Though not on these terms! he pretends to justify to himself.

  Even that’s a lie.

  To his marrow, Julian is relieved that the girl in his hands is real. That someone other than him sees Julian make love to her and says, yes! I see her. She is under him, and she is alive. Her arms are around his back. She wraps her legs around him. His hands grip her hips. She bears his weight. She lives. She is not a hallucination. She is not his imagination.

  Look, I, the vile creature, see it, too.

  The pearls are cast before swine, yes, but they are pearls, and they are cast.

  Once again Fabian asks Julian for all sorts of things, and Julian complies. With every fevered caress, Mallory grows more vivid, Fabian more dim, and the silver piles up on the table next to the wine.

  Julian almost forgets the man heavy in the chair and sees only the light moaning girl under him. After it’s over and it’s nearly dawn, she knocks on his door again and climbs into his bed. As he cradles her in his arms, he tries to make pillow talk in the foggy minutes before they’re both unconscious. “What kind of name is Mallory? Is it derived from Mary?”

  “Mother thought so,” the girl replies. “She was sore mistaken. When she went to baptize me, she found out Mallory was derived not from Mary but from France.”

  “Did your mother love France?”

  “Oh, no,” Mallory says. “Hence her predicament. When she found out that my name meant suffering in French, she hated France even more.”

  Julian also doesn’t like that her name means suffering. “Mallory is a good name.”

  “Thank you, sire.”

  “I like your name, your face, your voice. I like all of you.”

  “Thank you, sire.”

  “You can just go ahead and call me Julian.” As you used to.

  “Very well.” Then: “Is your name derived from Caesar? Like a conquering emperor, strong in battle, virile, constant as the northern star?”

  “I don’t know about that. Maybe the constant part.” He lifts his head off the pillow and leans over her to study her sleepy face. “Mallory, are you quoting Julius Caesar to me?”

  She smiles. “I saw it in a playhouse once. Mother and I were walking past the Fortune a few years back when it was still open. They let us in for half a penny. I liked it.”

  “Oh, you would, Mal. You would.”

  She nestles into him. “Julian…yours is my favorite name in the whole world.”

  And the next night, and the next, lust and love abounding.

  When Fabian is away one night, Julian falls into a panic. He cannot be without her.

  “He’s not here today,” Mallory confirms, peeking into Julian’s room. “You must be so grateful we don’t have to work—again. Now you can finally get a good night’s rest, be refreshed for the morning.” She vanishes before she can see his wounded expression.

  Half a minute goes by before she reopens the door and pokes her head in. Her face is lit with a luminous smile. “You keep saying you don’t think I’m funny, sire,” Mallory says. “I just wanted to prove you wrong.”

  ∞

  Julian utterly loses himself in this version of his girl. She is quiet, unassuming, agreeable. She is never painted, yet her mouth is always red; she is youthful and lovely. Her body is abundant everything. Every night Julian’s carnal strings are pulled by his naked puppet master, first in front of Fabian and sometimes by themselves in the conjoined intimacy of his bed.

  She is amiable and kind. This is how Julian knows the other girls are mendacious fools. They call Mallory wanton and cunning. This could not be more false. She holds his gaze, speaks truth to him with courtesy. No matter what he talks about, she listens raptly. She even tolerates his homilies on the fauna and flora of London’s public gardens. She tolerates them especially well. She is endlessly fascinated by his tales of the plants and flowers that have been imported from faraway lands like China and India and planted in the royal gardens of the kings and queens. On Sunday afternoons, they walk together arm in arm through the Westminster parks like a gentleman and a lady, he in his velvet waistcoat, she in her Sunday best. “Mallory, why do you keep your eyes to the ground when we walk?” Julian asks.

  “That’s where the pennies and the berries are, sire.” Mallory smiles as she devours his heart. She likes St. James’s Park most of all, because that’s where they have the most exotic foliage, and the crocodiles in the ponds and elephants grazing. Once she and Julian even saw two camels! She’s amazed by this; he no less so. It’s remarkable to see a crocodile in the middle of post-plague Westminster in 1666.

  Mallory loves to hear about the blooming things. She listens to him as if he’s reciting poetry, sonnets he had composed for her, borne of love and loss. She listens to him wax and wane about oleander and elephant ear, larkspur and lily of the valley, about golden chain and bleeding heart. She adores his stories of rosary peas and laurels, jasmine and azaleas, wild cherries, oak, and yew. Moonseed and mistletoe please her, hemlock and nightshade enchant her.

  And in return, on their weekday morning trips to Covent Garden, Mallory entertains Julian with the things she loves. In lavish detail she recounts for him the one play she’s seen besides Julius Caesar and tells him about her modest dream of one day being able to attend the theatre like a rich lady—which to her means any time she chooses. He loved his wife so much, he built her a theatre so she could attend the opera any time she wanted, echoes in Julian’s overfilled heart.

  “You don’t wish to be on stage yourself, Mallory?”

  Coquettishly she dismisses him. “I don’t need to be on stage, sire. I told you, my life is my stage.” She confesses that if she could be in any play, she’d like to be in The Honest Whore, the backdrop for Othello. She saw it five years ago at the Mermaid Theatre by Puddle Dock when she was fifteen. Her mother took her. It was subtitled Humors of the Patient Man and the Longing Wife. Julian and Mallory are walking back from Covent Garden, pushing a cart filled with red peonies and yellow daisies as she regales him with the colors of the play. “The Duke of Milan fakes his daughter’s death so her lover Hippolito will leave her alone.”

  “Why does he need to fake her death?” Julian asks. “Is Hippolito very persistent?” He smiles.

  “Very,” she replies. “It’s one of Hippolito’s most endearing qualities.”

  “But not his only endearing quality, right?”

  “By far not his only endearing quality.” Mallory covers Julian’s hand with hers as he pushes the flower cart. “The daughter’s name is Infelice. Which means unhappiness.” Mallory shrugs. “Almost like my name. Don’t look so suddenly glum, sire. Unfortunately for Infelice, a whore named Bellafront also falls in love with Hi
ppolito. He doesn’t want to love Bellafront back, because he wishes to remain faithful to Infelice, but he cannot help himself. He falls in love with Bellafront, too.”

  Julian stops walking near St. Martin-in-the-Fields and waits for the church bells to stop ringing as he draws the girl to him. “Mallory, my beauty, have you considered the possibility that the new seductress and the former lover are one and the same?” He kisses her.

  “That can’t be. Infelice is dead.”

  “She is not. You said so yourself. She’s hidden.”

  “Hidden!” As if the thought had never occurred to her.

  “Yes. Bellafront is Infelice disguised.”

  Mallory looks thrilled and stunned by this development. “You don’t say, sire. You don’t say. Well, well. Was I too young when I saw the play and simply missed such a vital detail?”

  “Yes, Bellafront,” he says fondly, his arms around her. “I think you missed it.”

  Julian doesn’t need to exaggerate any aspect of his present life, doesn’t need to embellish any part of his existence by hyperbole. In every sense, in every way, without any help from heightened metaphor, Julian’s love-soaked days here with Josephine are altogether marvelous and good.

  Except…sometimes near Covent Garden, as they pass empty lanes of such dismal misery that they must put their heads down, Julian glimpses something else in Mallory. Something hidden. To comfort her, he tells her that the ruthless epidemic that took her mother and aunt is the last such epidemic England will ever have. Mallory doesn’t believe him, and why should she? Seeing the world as it is, especially around the nearly abandoned Drury Lane, his words are impossible to believe. She bristles as he carries on about the need to cleanse London of the parasitic scourge. “Please, sire!” she exclaims with barely concealed scorn. “What do you think we need here, an overflowing volcano, like Pompeii? The brimstone fire of Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  “Yes,” Julian says. “A fire.” Slightly his limbs shake. He wishes he knew the exact date of the Great Fire. It was in 1666, right? He’s not sure of anything anymore.

  “Look at the way we live,” Mallory says. “Fire, no fire. What do you think a little flame will do? Drury Lane will remain the same fetid alley, riddled with the dead. And my mother will still be gone. She’s the only one who ever loved me, the only one who tried to keep me from harm.”

  Your mother is not the only one who ever loved you, Mallory.

  “What does it matter to Mother what might happen in the future? She’s dead. Frankly, what you’re saying is nothing but cold comfort, sire.”

  In the night, when they are warmer, Mallory divulges things about the Black Plague. They had suffered bouts of the pestilence before, and no one paid much mind to the initial stages of the plague. At the first sign that it was a real epidemic, not just a flu that was going around, Anna sent Mallory south to live with her sister Olivia. As everyone around her continued to die, the mother finally abandoned her house of bawd and traveled across the river to reunite with her daughter. She carried in her hands bouquets of wormwood, a most bitter smelling and tasting flower. “Mother had heard that it might protect me from harm. She made me drink a potion made from vinegar and wormwood. Oh, was it ever vile!”

  “Did they paint your door?”

  “With a bloody cross? Yes,” Mallory says. “Death is a pale horse, but it shall not come near thee, Mother prayed over me. Then her buboes burst, and she bled to death.”

  Mallory shows Julian a sheet of yellowing parchment. It’s from the parish of Clerkenwell. The paper is called the Bill of Mortality. Every week, the parish publishes the causes and numbers of the local dead. Anna ripped it from the priory wall as she was fleeing.

  Diseases and Casualties this Week:

  Apoplexie 1

  Burned in his bed by a candle 1

  Canker 1

  Cough 2

  Fright 3

  Grief 3

  Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1

  Lethargy 1

  Suddenly 1

  Timpany 1

  Plague 7165

  Seven thousand people dead in one parish! Out of how many? “Eight thousand,” Mallory replies. Julian shudders. She leaves the list with him when she goes to start her day. “For safekeeping,” she says.

  Does she mean the Bill of Mortality or her?

  What happened to you, Mallory? Julian asks when they lie in the hot bath together.

  I don’t know what you mean.

  Once upon a time, you used to be in such revolt.

  When was this?

  When I knew you last, Julian whispers.

  Who has time to revolt, sire, Mallory says, her face turned away from him. I don’t have time for such frivolity.

  The steam from the bath fills the room and escapes through the open window. Mallory hints she might like to escape, too. Where, he says, and she replies, what’s it to you. She is smoke herself, her skin translucent crepe paper, once real, now an ashen vapor.

  ∞

  Carling and Ivy, the cleaning girls Mallory shares the room with, have confronted her about her mysterious absences from their quarters behind the kitchen. They demand she pay them, or they’ll tell the Baroness she’s up to no good. Julian pays them. Blackmail doesn’t sit well with him; he knows it’s a temporary fix. Now that the urchins know he will pay, they’ll keep raising the price. But what choice does he have? The Baroness will not take kindly to his poaching the orphaned niece entrusted into her care by her two dead sisters.

  But the second reason Julian pays off Carling and Ivy is Lord Fabian. Because things have changed in Room Two, and not for the better. A week earlier, as Julian was in the final pangs of his exertions, he felt a fist strike him between the shoulder blades. It was Fabian. He’d gotten out of his chair, waddled over to the bed and hit Julian. “Stop it!” Fabian hissed. “You’re hurting her. You’re tormenting her.”

  “No, my lord,” Mallory said, underneath Julian, peeking her head out, controlling her panting breath. “He’s not hurting me.”

  “You were crying out.”

  “Not from pain, my lord.”

  After that night, Fabian stopped requesting Julian’s presence in Room Two. That is why Julian pays off the hooligan maids—so Mallory can continue to share his bed.

  Sometimes in the afterglow, while she lies in his arms, he tries to talk to her about a future that doesn’t involve the Silver Cross or Miss Tilly’s girls, or Lord Fabian, but Mallory always falls asleep, and the next morning is up and out before he wakes.

  The bells ring, the children play, the ink dots on his arm multiply like summer bug bites.

  He and Mallory walk along the Thames, through the parks, through green lanes. They stop for fireworks and carriage races. Whitehall Palace is open to the public. They stroll through the royal gardens, and when they’re not discussing unusual plants, Julian attempts a conversation about a life that might include something for just the two of them, that might include marriage and even babies. He talks about it in fantabulous terms, in the language of dreamers not realists, not as in, let’s get married, but more as in, what if we were a prince and a princess and got married and lived in a white marble palace like this one? Wouldn’t that be something? Mostly Mallory nods.

  The immutable tattooing makes Julian feel ridiculous. Count the days, Devi said, but a few times Julian gets on with his day without marking the days—on purpose, not on purpose.

  He and Mallory still haven’t talked about the future in the language of realists. He doesn’t want to rush things, push things, like before in L.A. when he ruined everything with his hurry, as if he had felt on some subliminal level that Josephine was running out of time. Here in post-plague London, he wants to live with her—and does live with her—the way most people live. As if they’re going to live forever.

  7

  Dead Queen, Revisited

  AT THE END OF AUGUST ONE OF THE PATRONS OF THE SILVER Cross dies in the night.

  A panting, irritated
Baroness Tilly bangs on Julian’s door. She was woken up by the one-eyed Ilbert, who said the dead man’s blood dripped through the floorboards into his cubby below. “It’s the last thing we need,” the Baroness says to Julian. “Today is a Saturday, our busiest night of the week. Nothing could be worse for business than death. Julian, let’s hurry and take care of it before the stench takes hold.”

  It’s Lord Fabian.

  In his velvet robes, the man lies face down on the floor. He has collapsed, hit the iron leg of the table, and smashed his head open. He may have bled to death, but it’s hard to tell. Why would he fall in the first place? Julian and the Baroness stand in shock.

  “His heart must’ve finally gave out, the poor fat bugger,” the Baroness says. She is probably right. Nothing is out of place, except the overturned table, the silver decanter on its side, the broken crystal glasses, and the enormous corpse.

  “This is the kind of thing that closes down establishments!” the Baroness says. “People are so superstitious about death. And this is one of our best rooms. Bugger it. Bugger it all to hell.”

  Fabian’s head is turned to the side. His eyes bulge out of their sockets, as if he had suffocated before he died, not simply lost consciousness after a fall and a blow to the head. The suffocation seems odd for a cardiac event. Blood spills out of his filled-up mouth. There’s foam around his lips—as if he’d been gasping for breath before dying. From the disturbance around the armchair and the knocked-over table, it looks to Julian that the man could’ve gone into convulsions. The foul mess under his swollen body suggests a severe gastric disturbance.

  To keep from retching, Julian and the Baroness breathe into their velvet sleeves. He opens the windows to let in some air. It’s already miserably hot, though it’s barely sunrise.

  Lord Fabian is a nobleman, a temporal lord, a peer in Parliament. He is a well-known figure around London, and there’s going to be an outcry if his desiccated, exsanguinated corpse is found in a brothel. Someone will get charged with murder. Not may. Will. Someone will get quartered. In 1666, they disembowel first and ask questions later.