Page 18 of Garden of Poisoned Delights

“I can explain,” Sabre said.

“Oh, no, Yves just opened the window in a wedding veil,” Nanette said, as Crystelle let out a cry of outrage on the street outside.

Laurent drained half of his glass in one go and gave Sabre a dry look. “I hope you can explain, Sabre, because if you really did insult Crystelle the Magnificent, you have no idea what you just unleashed.”

* * *

Crystelle the Magnificent had showed up at the House of Gold with no references, no finesse, a loud voice and a fantastic outfit. They’d sailed into the parlor reserved for guests, not courtesans, especially not ones without a house contract, in a blur of silk and smelling like citrus and sugared candy, a look in their eyes that said, if you don’t hire me, I will burn this house to the ground.

Then, they’d pretty much said that—out loud, in the interview. And Julien had hired them, which had seemed to a bemused Laurent and a deeply amused Absolon that it was some reaction to Laurent’s recent sudden and unexpected eradication of his own house debt. Oh, it was possible for courtesans to pay off their debt, but often, the more popular you were, the harder it became. Laurent had some theories on why that was, and once he and Rose were out of this house, he had some ideas.

Because Laurent also had a plan, and that plan rested entirely on the old House of Clay, a letter from Isiodore de Mortain he’d kept safe in a false bottom drawer in his room, and an inked zero next to his name in the house register–-Laurent de Lune, because Julien was the worst sort of tyrant, the completely unoriginal kind who came up with wildly embarrassing names for his courtesans. He hadn’t even gotten to appreciate the zero for all that long, as Julien had only begrudgingly let him look at the entry for about three seconds.

It was a good thing he had only the so-called “Farewell Week” left in his tenure as a courtesan. Laurent didn’t think he could maintain the facade of a perfect, submissive whore anymore. The whore part, he didn’t mind, but the submissive act was running on fumes. So it was with the air of a courtesan who’d made his debt that Laurent had met Crystelle, and perhaps he hadn’t been in quite the right frame of mind to play pretend and act as if life in the House of Gold was one sexy slumber party.

Besides, he’d assumed that they wouldn’t be hired. People needed to be vetted, and the process was a lengthy one, as Julien preferred to take in younger apprentices. They didn’t take clients until they were of age, of course, but it was both easier to make a courtesan malleable when you had enough time to get them in the right mindset, and the debt would be harder to repay when you had so much tacked on that couldn’t be, until the courtesan was of age.

Crystelle wasn’t the right age, though Laurent had a feeling they were older than they pretended to be or even looked. They were too much, just in general, for a man who believed that courtesans, like children, should be seen and not heard. Laurent smiled briefly at them with the same false smile he’d perfected over his time in the house, and figured that was the last he’d ever see of Crystelle. Instead, he and the other courtesans watched with ill-concealed shock as they’d simply…moved in.

Laurent, who’d wanted nothing more than to finish out his week and think about his and Rose’s future, had found himself with far more free time than the others, given his “Farewell Tour” was only to include clients he himself wished to entertain, and that there were a precious few who he genuinely liked. Crystelle was clearly determined to both make a name for themselves and take the top earner’s spot in the house–there was no subtly at all in their attempts to ingratiate themselves. Absolon told Laurent, in a voice torn between amusement, awe, and irritation, that he’d found Crystelle measuring the windows in the top earner’s room, breezily informing Absolon that they wanted to have some specialty curtains made, and “by the time they’re ready, I’m sure this will be myroom, darling. Don’t be put out, just look at me. If you want to move out, though, I’m sure I’ll deal with these…interesting…shades you have here.”

They’d seemed to take both a personal interest and a maliciously cheerful dislike towards Laurent—or maybe not, it was hard to tell. Crystelle was constantly saying things like, “Oh, Laurent, you’re so delightful, if only I could toss you into a moat,” or “Oh, Laurent, how do you manage to wake up with your hair like that every morning, hmm? Why, I bet you’d have your hair curled in that fashion if you were smothered with a silk pillow in your sleep!”

Laurent had no idea if Crystelle was insulting or complimenting him, which was very confusing. They were surprisingly kind to Rose, though, so Laurent let the death threats delivered in syrupy promise and silky, vague menace slide. When he’d made his grand announcement the day he’d left, his and Rose’s things in a hired carriage out front, Rose in a new traveling gown with a pretty paste jewel brooch, Crystelle had shrieked at him.

“You’re becoming a House Lord? Why on earth would someone like you do that? No, I simply will not have it, La Lune!”

“It’s Laurent de Rue, now, actually,” Laurent said, waving the sealed parchment with his newly-approved lordship etched on the paper and signed by not only Isiodore de Mortain, but the king himself. “Even if I wasn’t a lord, I wouldn’t be La Lune. It’s not a real name, you know.”

Crystelle stared at him, and that’s when Laurent had seen it—the first hint of whoever they were under the posturing and the dramatics. They had a look he recognized all too well, steely determination and a certain kind of coldness.

“They made you a noble?” Crystelle said, staring. “You?”

“Me,” Laurent said, giving them a half-bow. “Laurent de Rue, peer of the realm.”

Crystelle’s eyebrows went up. “They gave you a lordship and a title that means of the streets? And you’re happy about it?”

“I appreciated the irony,” Laurent said, “even if it’s not quite true. I was on my back on silk sheets most of the time, but there’s already a Lady de Soie and she might not appreciate a new member of the family.”

As he turned to leave the House of Gold behind him for good, Crystelle grabbed his arm. “You,” they said, in a voice that was low, venomous, and yet still clung to that tendril of sweetness like a poison, “are a sellout, and you have to know he won’t let you get away with upstaging him.”

“I’d like to see him stop me,” Laurent said, pulling away. He was finished letting people touch him whom he did not want to do so. Then, he paused. “What makes you think I have any intention of upstaging him? I’m simply taking my sister and living my life.” If Crystelle, a newly-arrived courtesan, knew about Laurent’s plans for the House of Clay, that might be a problem. But how could they? If Laurent could trust anyone with his secrets, it was Isiodore de Mortain.

Crystelle had leaned in, and in a voice that was nothing like their brittle, cheerful prattle, said softly, “I thought you’d been here long enough to learn you never trust a noble or their gifts, La Lune. A lordship is just another bauble that they don’t care about enough to want to keep, which means it isn’t priceless, or meaningful, or even sentimental. It’s a thing they buy you with, and that’s what they’ve done.” They clicked their tongue, much like Julien, earlier in the office. “It’s a good thing it doesn’t matter a whit to me where you and your hair end up.”

He still wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not.

Laurent hadn’t seen much of them after that. He’d been too busy with a little sister who needed a tutor and friends her own age who weren’t apprentice courtesans, living in an apartment over a flower shop that felt like a palace after years of cramped quarters. Laurent had no memory of where he’d lived before he’d woken up one morning in the House of Gold with years of his life already signed away to Julien, but there was something oddly familiar about the way the light would filter through the window in their small apartment, a tingle at the back of his mind like an itch he couldn’t scratch when he washed up their supper dishes at the small sink. He wasn’t at all a chef, but all his money had to go to the purchase of the House of Clay, and that meant figuring out ways to feed him and Rose.

As much of a whirlwind as those weeks had been, he always thought of them fondly in the years to come, sitting at the chipped wood table with the colorful flowers from the shop below in a vase in the center, helping Rose with her homework. If nothing else, the tutors at the House of Gold had done their job with her—she was clever and bright, and since she too was now a noble, the official adoption papers being the final gift de Mortain had presented on their last evening together, she would have to speak like one. Other than a tendency toward preferring plays and Katoikos melodramas over schoolbooks, Rose was doing just fine.

He could give her everything he’d wanted when he’d knelt so desperately for Julien that day so many years ago, and if anything, that was the real treasure he’d brought with him from the House of Gold—a family. He had someone who loved him, who played dice with him and cheated and pouted when he called her out on it, who had her own room but still crept in to “tell him a story” when it stormed, to throw her arms around him and hug him when he came home from yet another meeting.

As the House of Onyx slowly came to be, Laurent kept tabs on his old associates. Absolon, he would have dearly loved to hire, but Absolon was clearly the current darling of the Pleasure District, and would likely not give that up for an upstart lordling’s new establishment. Besides, Absolon was not the right fit, as lovely as he was and as good at seduction as Laurent knew he could be. But maybe, when the tides made their inevitable turn and someone else was moving into the top earner’s rooms, Absolon would come to him, and he was one of the people Laurent wouldn’t turn away, even if he had to find him a broom closet instead of a proper room.

Crystelle wasn’t exactly popular, but they were a bit of a novelty, which made Laurent angry in a way he couldn’t quite express. He’d see them sometimes, out in the market, paying children to hold the back of their voluminous gown so it didn’t drag on the street, which Laurent suspected they’d only worn so they could give a few coppers to the children for their work. Once, Laurent and Rose had woken up early on a snowy winter morning to serve stew and warm bread to the citizens of the lower city who were struggling to make ends meet, and he’d spotted someone familiar expertly slicing bread a few tables over.

The way they wielded a knife seemed too perfect, too precise, too familiar to Laurent. It reminded him of the easy, casual familiarity with which Isiodore de Mortain handled a sword. He would probably cut bread like that, too, if he ever did such a thing, being the second-highest ranked noble in the country. While Laurent thought him a better man than most, he still had a hard time imagining Isiodore smiling at small, dirty, hungry children when handing over soup and pretending to pull a copper from behind their ears.

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