Part 5 - Who are you?
The chamber is one of Madame's best, well-maintained and spacious, with a four-poster bed and a separate area near the windows with a small table and lounge. There is a modest fireplace, its coals glowing, with a cloud of candles waiting to be lit, and a lamp gracing the low table beside the bed. Featherington paces into the room over deep carpet and casts around, his mind split as to whether he is the conqueror of the moment or a guarded confidant.
Catia softly closes the door and leans against it, watching him. She has been schooled in flattery and the pleasuring of men since her early teens. She knows many kinds of men. This one... well, perhaps not the finest figure of a man she has ever seen but he has a certain… sim, ele é charmoso! – much more so than the dissolute bucks downstairs.
The back of Featherington's neck prickles and he turns quickly to get his second shock of the evening. He is being assessed like a leg of mutton in the market by the tantalizing creature at the only door. As he watches, Catia locks that door in a leisurely way and, without taking her gaze from him, drops the key indifferently onto the card table standing there and begins her advance.
"This, um," Featherington starts, then rallies himself. In his perambulations he has seen more than one assignation room in this brothel and most of them are small and not all that clean, for the supposedly highest-priced establishment in the neighbourhood. "This seems a very well-appointed room," he says, watching her glide toward him. "If I may ask, Miss, er... who are you?" Each word seems to come out more easily the closer she comes.
"I am Catia," she says simply, "agent of the Council to his Highness João the Prince Regent of Portugal, come to England to give what assistance I may." She stands not a foot away now, smiling.
He goggles. "You're the one everybody's talking about! Cumbersome-Smythe's… er… umm…"
Catia's smile widens, a mesmerizing sight. "Senhor Herring's courtesan?" she coos, "Sim, I come with him and his women. He must show me to the belo mundo, your 'Ton', and then discard me so I am forced to take refuge with Madame. I am to be known but free to speak with those I choose or who choose me." But I do not speak to all who choose me, she thinks. That child downstairs, no. Poor Herring, although he tried hard on the voyage, no. Both are little boys with eyes bigger than their stomachs… but this one, he is different. "Come," she says out loud, "sit, we will talk."
She takes a spill from the mantel pot and lights a candle, then takes it to the pair of windows in the corner overlooking one of the better streets. Outside, the view is deepening to black with the onset of night. Only a lone gas light across the way holds off the darkness. A tray with a decanter and two glasses stands on the table beside the lounge but there is no other chair. Catia places the candle next the glassware, looks back at the man, and laughs softly as she sees his hesitation. He is casting about for somewhere other than the lounge to sit.
In a moment, though, Featherington realizes where he is and with whom and twits himself for caring about the proprieties. He hands the woman down onto one end of the lounge and seats himself at the other, flicking back the tails of his coat as he does so. "And Madame allows this?" he asks, wondering where to lean since the lounge has only a partial backrest and Catia is presently half-reclining on that.
"Madame gives me this room for now," she tells m'lord, running her eyes over him. Poor Herring, he can't hope to compete now, no matter how sorry for him I may feel. She sees the question in her man's eyes and adds, "Madame has been… ungenerous in her, how is it, her impostos? With your Treasury?"
"Taxes, you mean?" Featherington guesses.
"Sim, yes, taxes. Senhor Holmes arranged with Madame to 'fix' this in return for assistance."
Having been blindsided with Holmes' bluff bullying efficiency himself, Featherington briefly imagines what 'arranged' could mean in this case. Madame's horror at being threatened with ruination would have made her eager to grasp at anything that might shield her, no matter how troublesome to her household. For a time, at least.
"And you are, m'lord?" She sounds amused.
Featherington jerks his eyes from the mauve gown's neckline, an elegant double curve just barely containing her firm breasts. "Baron Featherington," he coughs out, "fifth of the title, going back to –"
She stops him by slipping warm fingers into his gesturing hand. "Não, not your title, your name, meu charmoso," she whispers, quiet laughter in her sultry voice.
His Portuguese is non-existent but her hand sends a strange, steady current into him, conveying forgiveness and forbearance, and it has been a long while since anyone wanted to know him and not his title. "It's – Archibald – my dear," he adds, looking now into her depthless eyes.
"Arr-chee . . .?"
Her face peaks upward and he isn't sure whether this is honest puzzlement or artful coquetry, but he doesn't care. "Yes, Archie, m'dear." The memories of when he was something to be reckoned with amongst the women, long before Portia and the blasted title, are creeping back apace. "You are... quite exquisitely lovely – Catia."
She actually purrs, an enticing sound emanating from an even more enticing throat, evidently pleased that he, in particular, admires her. "Obrigada, senhor," she breathes, slinking ever so subtly closer.
As he leans towards her in response, Featherington thinks he simply has to learn this language. Her voice; so dark, so soothing, so honeyed, a thousand sea miles removed from Portia's stentorian delivery. Her full soft lips so unlike the grim slash of Portia's. And her eyes, seeing only me...
He sits back with a jerk. Portia. My wife. Damn, I'm acting the fool again for a faux enchantment. This lady is not here for me, not in that sense. All this is a smoke screen. She is an agent, no doubt as cold and conniving as Holmes, as cold as I must be. We're here to do a job together, that's all.
He uses his new-found inner Commander to pull himself back from the brink. "I – expected my contact to be a man, you see. One of the gentlemen downstairs, posing as an inveterate gambler, as I am."
"And who can get such 'gentlemen' to talk, m'lord?" Her voice is light and careless but her eyes have lost their sultry glow. "Men will speak anything to a woman in passion. They think to impress me with their importance. As if their foolish boasts could ever reach my heart!"
She reclines onto the backrest, controlled and cool, except now there is a different kind of fire in her eyes. "Do you wish my credenciais? I have worked for the Council since Porto. I have taken secrets from King Nicolas himself, from Masséna, from Marmont, and from any man who could give us what we need to defeat the murdering French bastardos!"
Her feminine softness is leeched away and Featherington looks on with astonishment as her fierce side blazes out; eyes flashing fury, her whole form tensing. She looks more warrior-like than most soldiers he has seen. By heaven, she has a temper! But he has dealt with temper for years… only, as with many a true sea squall, to witness such beauty in the storm is almost worth the weathering.
"You do not understand," she says, contemptuous of his continued silence, "You English! You have not been invaded, you have not seen your fathers shot, your children's bodies broken, your women raped and left to die, all the villages destroyed! If you had perhaps then you too would take up the knife and slit any French throat you find!"
Now Featherington is shocked indeed. "YOU have –?" he begins. A very small piece of him asks if this is real anger or another part of her act. It looks real, even down to the tears beginning to spill from her suddenly tormented eyes.
"I am of Alfama," she says, her voice catching with the force of her emotion, "the poorest place of Lisboa. I have seen death in the streets where I used to dance for coins. I have known hunger and I have learned to steal. I have been beaten and I have learned the luta de faca – the way of the knife. I was also fortunate; an aging courtesan took me in, made me a weapon against men, and I have used it to defend my people. I am not ashamed of this!" And she is not… yet her heart sinks to see m'lord Featherington looking not only doubtful but withdrawn in a way that hurts strangely.
After a moment Featherington's inner Master manages to find the words he needs to put this unpleasantness aside. He has a task to do and he must work with what he has, as this woman – Catia – seems to be doing. "I'm not finding fault with you, m'dear," he says quietly and puts a tentative hand on the nearest part of her anatomy, a knee drawn up under her skirts as she clings to the back of the lounge – meant purely as a gesture of comfort, of course. "Only, it's hard to think of such loveliness marred by murder, that's all."
He still isn't sterling sure whether he's being manipulated or not, "But if you can accept me as a collaborator and even as a friend, I think we may do business. Together we will find the counterfeiters and the plates, and put an end to this treachery. Are we agreed?"
Catia catches up his hand from her skirts and lunges forward to kiss it, then him quickly, on the jaw. "It is agreed!" she says. "My countrymen who carry the money to Lisbon will come to me and I will give them to you."
"And I will go through every gaming hell in England to stop them before they can do so," Featherington replies, with all his heart in it.
END – part 5
*S/P notes: *sim, ele é charmoso = yes, he is charming, obrigada = thank you, credenciais = credentials*
**ffh notes: The Second Battle of Porto took place 12 May 1809, in which an Anglo-Portuguese force re-took the city from the French Marshal General Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult (1769-1851), known as "King Nicolas" in Portugal for his plundering and his intriguing. He had hoped to be named King of Portugal by Napoleon but he never saw his longed-for kingdom again.
André Masséna (1758-1817), one of the 18 original Marshals of France created by Napoleon, was a veteran of the French Revolution sent by his Emperor to Spain to re-take Portugal in 1810. He was halted by Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras, lost battles thereafter, and was replaced by Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont (1774-1852) who was wounded in his second major Spanish battle at Salamanca on 22 July 1812 and retired from Spain permanently.**
