The courtyard was awash with blood. Tea-Master Louen had come to stand on his porch to enjoy the dawn breeze before the House was awake and found it like that: a sea of sticky, stomach-churning red. He gazed at it dispassionately; being the tea-master in the town's most prestigious brothel had inured him to the worst of human excesses but blood wasn't usually on the list. Not like this.

He watched a delicate pale blossom float from the apple tree above him; it came to rest in a pool of darkening gore, and sank, forever stained. His mouth twisted in disgust. Even a pot of the sweetest clementine-spice tea wouldn’t wash that cloying odour off his tongue. The air was infected with the plague of it.

That’s twice now. Twice I’ve risen before the sun and come out to a courtyard slippery with blood. How can I drink tea in these circumstances?

He didn’t bother to wonder who had died; he didn’t care. But someone here had dark magic, and this worried him - not because a brothel with a death-mage in it was liable to find itself knee-deep in law-trouble as well as corpses, but because it wasn’t magic that he himself had and he didn’t know if he was its target. He had no real reason to suspect he might be, but then neither could he think of any real reason he wasn’t. People like him were always the target for somebody’s bile. Brothels always attracted nefarious sorts and Tea-Master Louen had had more than one run-in with disgruntled customers who took their failure in the bedrooms out on him.

He never worried overmuch, because he never saw those customers again. Neither did anybody else, but he took care that there was nothing that could lead back to him.

The urchin mopping the gore stopped, leaned on her mop, and pushed her unkempt black hair out of her eyes to glare at him. ‘What are you looking at?’

Tea-Master Louen shrugged. This had gone on for a month of mornings already, since she’d turned up from nowhere. He enjoyed it. Her cheekiness put a spring in his step. There was none of the gentry's false courtesies with her. ‘You tell me, you insolent drab.’

‘You’re high and mighty for someone so low as to work in a whore-house. Serving tea. Who gave you your airs and graces?’

He swept his arm over the courtyard. More blossoms joined the first, some settling on his pristine silk sleeve. He brushed them off. ‘Do you know who did this?’

‘Should I?’

‘I’m asking you.’

She shook her head, mute, and lifted the mop. Plunging it into a bucket of filthy brown water, she slopped it back over the cobbles with enough vicious energy to spatter a few drops across his hem.

He stepped back. ‘Curb your audacity, brat – remember that I can have you whipped.’

‘Whip me yourself then, and don’t shirk your threats or go pestering your betters with trifles.’ Slap, plunge, thwap. ‘I don’t take orders or punishment from you, Conceited Master Louen.’

‘You’re very bold! And insolent. Address me correctly.’

‘Everybody is bold when they mop dead men from the floor.’ Splash, thrust, slap. Her tone turned mocking. ‘How should I address you, Conceited Master Louen? Shall I say sir, and my lord, and cower at your feet and clutch your robes and beg for you to spare my poor filthy hide from your silken flail?’

Something in her black eyes sparked unwanted mirth in him. His lips twitched. ‘If that’s what you enjoy then I should be pleased to oblige, miss. I’ve been here long enough to know there is no end to folks’ creativity for pleasure but I’ve yet to meet someone who would enjoy begging me to whip them – I might like it. Feel free to try.’

‘I meant…’ she began, but he held up his hand for silence.

‘Enough. I tire of your rubbish. Mop this place clean. If you do a good enough job of it, come to the kitchen and I’ll give you some tea to wet your cheeky tongue. Remember that this is my courtyard. My dominion!’

He swept himself off inside and didn’t listen to her spluttered insults.

Menys watched him go, thinking what a conceited popinjay he was, and that being said, what a handsome popinjay too. Tea-Master Louen was the main reason the brothel was always rolling in money: wealthy wives came in the drowsy afternoons to drink tea and eat delicate almond meringues with him, and sometimes their husbands came too, rouged and powdered and doused in so much sickly perfume it made the air curdle. Sometimes the husbands came alone, and sat pining in the pavilion while Tea-Master Louen served them with his long, white fingers. He lounged with indolent grace among his white jacquard cushions and let the peach curve of his mouth soften at their jokes, his light brown eyes crinkling at the corners. Ladies and gentlemen and all the stone-cut low-born folk alike swooned when Tea-Master Louen crinkled his eyes at them. Sometimes, she’d seen the flash of gold between their fingers and Tea-Master Louen thrust it back: he never offered more than tea.

Menys was almost sure that the rest of the clients not drinking tea came to gawk at him. Then they went to cool their arousal in the silken beds in the back room, paying generously after it for enough wine to drown their sorrow at his unassailability.

Sometimes, an hour in Tea-Master Louen’s company was enough to turn a man’s mind to madness for what he couldn’t have.

But Tea-Master Louen never gave in to their pleas.

He didn’t have to. One gracious smile from him bought him all his dinners for a month.

No wonder he was a conceited ass.

Master Louen is a paragon of virtue in a palace of debauchery. Master Louen is a perfect example to us all of how a gentleman should purport to live. Master Louen, Master Louen; bloody, bloody bastard Louen! Menys rammed the mop into the bucket and flung red-slimed water over the cobbles. If I had half that arrogant devil’s beauty, what could I do? Who could I command? What crown could I wear?

She dropped the mop, picked up the bucket, and threw the contents over the yard. Then she went to fetch fresh water, and worked like a dervish until the yard was clear.

When the cobbles finally sparkled with their former glory, she went in to Master Louen’s kitchen and leaned on his polished birch counter. ‘I finished the yard, popinjay.’

He set teacup, saucer and milk jug before her and then a bowl of lemon-water, together with a towel, looking askance at her blood-crusted fingernails and rusty hands. Then, with precise and practiced movements of long pale fingers, he made tea. Menys washed, and watched like a hawk as he measured the correct weight of leaf, added water just off the boil, and put the pot on the warming plate to brew. A bowl of white sugar appeared, along with a delicate silver spoon. Menys snatched it up to peer critically at the engraving: a stag’s antlers. She made to slip it up her sleeve.

Master Louen took it back. ‘Thieving child,’ he chided. This had also gone on for a month of mornings. Neither had tired of the game yet.

‘What’s silver to you? And I’m not a child.’

He smiled, and poured the tea. Then he went to greet a party of three young women and one older one who had come for his company, and left her alone.

‘They might have fine silks and bright jewels but they’re still in a whore-house desperate for a man to properly fuck them!’ she shouted after him. She shoved a handful of his tiny cherry-blossom wafers into her mouth and chewed them into a shower of sugary crumbs down her front.

Tea-Master Louen glanced over his shoulder, and Menys heard him soothing his guests with apologies, his tone low and contrite and charming. He could have charmed the stars out of the heavens if he’d wanted. She grimaced and hurled the tea down her throat, stole a handful of spoons from their tray on the shelf above her, and scampered out across the courtyard and into the scullery.

Once she’d got the linen cupboard pulled out from the wall a little, she shoved the spoons behind it on the stone flags, and pushed it back.

He’s too damn good for the likes of them, the little primped tarts! He knows it, too. But what’s a man like that doing here?

A moment later his shadow loomed over her, and she handed the spoons back before she knew what had got into her.

‘Aren’t you going to punish me?’ she asked, puzzled and disappointed, as he turned to walk away again.

He paused. ‘Do you want me to? Will it teach you something?’

Menys fingered a fold of her coarse sack of a dress. It was so ugly, so unbecoming. She considered taking it off and laying bare her backside to his cane, but then she’d have to spend the day hobbling about the place afterward. She didn’t have the luxury of laying abed for days while healing from a lover’s overzealous bedroom games. She still considered it. She knew what games they played. She’d watched through the peepholes enough times to know they enjoyed them too.

What would it be like? Would I like to be tied up and spanked with Tea-Master Louen’s delicate, strong hands?

Maybe he wouldn’t like it though. Maybe he prefers to be on the other end.

Hmm! I wonder if his arse is as white and soft as his lily-petal hands? I might like to beat him. I could truss that conceited bird up like one of Master Tyrn’s turkeys and stripe his lovely skin red and white, like Madam Nyvah did to Lord Gallant’s wife.

She felt her cheeks warming at that memory.

Tea-Master Louen gave up waiting for her answer and walked away, shaking his head at the fickleness of scullery brats with too much hair and too many soft curves.

He’d have happily spanked her silly, and then weighed her down with his body and shared just how pleasurable pain could be. His cock hard and aching, his temper plummeted and it was with a bad grace that he brewed the Duchess’ tea and served the Earl dainty cream-stuffed buns no bigger than his bulbous eyeballs, which Tea-Master Louen itched to pull out of his vacuous head and throw to the magpies on the pavilion roof.

But he didn’t, and he felt much pleased with himself at his restraint. He let the silly toad-faced Earl sweet-talk him into a better mood and tried not to think up places he could leave the tin spoons, polished so bright they resembled silver, so tempting for a light-fingered little chit who wanted nothing more than a man inside her and thought that stealing from him was the way to get it.

And the courtyard still stank of viscera, despite her meticulous and energetic efforts to dispel it. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to think. Not easy with the Duchess wittering on like a hedge full of starlings, and the Earl tittering like a pack of hyenas. If they’d only leave, he could do what he could only do with no-one watching and clear the gory residue out of the air.

Maybe it was time to leave, he thought. He’d been in the brothel for five years and had never meant to stay so long anyway. Just until the King’s witch-hunters had lost their vigour. The King had died two months ago, not long after his wife had died of the pox, and they had a Queen now, a light little child of sixteen, with glorious golden curls and rosy cheeks and a laugh like a cascade of silver bells. He’d heard her speak once, on her coronation, and had gone away again with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, though he couldn’t put his finger on why.

Verana. He rolled the name around his head and thought he liked it. Much better than Menys.

His gaze wandered into the courtyard but there was no sign of that lazy little scullery brat.

‘Master Louen, might we prevail upon you for another pot?’ simpered the Earl, touching Louen’s arm with fat fingers heavy with rings.

‘And more of those delicious cakes,’ added the Duchess. She fluttered her false eyelashes, first at the Earl, then at Louen, and treated him to a ridiculous pout. ‘Would you also send the order up for a room for us, my dear?’

‘Certainly,’ said Louen, his smile frozen in place. He’d already drafted the gilt-edged missive to the manor. One snap of his discreet fingers and it would wing its way there in a jiffy. He had yet to decide if he would snap his fingers. That depended entirely on the Earl. If he behaved, the note would go in the stove.

If he didn’t…well, Tea-Master Louen’s fingers would click together and the letter would fly to the destruction of the Duchess’s happy life with the Duke.

He’d never needed to send any letters.

Later, his pavilion fastidiously cleaned and the pots washed and ready for the next day, he made his way to his bed, a narrow and simple cot in what had once been a broom cupboard, until the day he’d thrown the brooms and spiders into the scullery and brought in a bed. He slept there because it was the only place in the brothel he did not have to lie awake with the sounds of sex in his ears, forcing his dreams in to a pulsating, hot darkness that had him waking covered in his own semen. He hated that. And it happened anyway, now that the scullery brat had arrived. It meant a morning wheedling the workshy little toad into washing his sheets for him, while she doubled over with laughter and never let up on him the whole day.

Gods, he wanted to roll her in that overdue heap of laundry so badly.

‘Popinjay, is there anything you want before I retire to my bower?’

He spun around, already closing his door, and shocked to hear her behind him. ‘No! There’s nothing. Get out.’

She flashed a cheeky smile at him and went away, her arms full of blanket, of suspiciously good quality, and he decided she’d pinched it from one of the bedrooms and he’d have good enough excuse to report her to the Madam and have her whipped.

Whatever got into him the next moment, he couldn’t help it.

He called the girl back to him, made her wait while he scrawled a quick note and folded it.

‘Can you read?’

‘Not a word,’ she said.

‘Good. Take this and give it to Madam.’

She took it from him and held it gingerly aloft, as if it would bite. ‘You’re reporting me?’

‘I thought you said you couldn’t read!’

‘I can’t. But I know your face like the back of my hand, popinjay. I know that light you get in your eyes. It means you want to fuck me.’

He nearly choked. ‘What?’

‘You heard.’ She simpered at him. ‘So you’re sending me to Madam with an order for my punishment, just because you can’t toss me on your sheets. Aren’t you?’

‘Come here!’ He didn’t let her obey but grabbed a handful of her dress and hauled her up under his nose. ‘Shall I do it now? Would you like it face down on the table or shall I force you up against the wall? You’re not getting the luxury of my sheets!’

He nearly choked again as he found himself spun around and his hands pinned to the table. He couldn’t move. And she hadn’t budged an inch.

An invisible force pushed his head further down, so that his cheek pressed against the smooth, golden oak of his own table. He ground his teeth against the sheer indignity.

Menys patted his head. ‘I guess I like it face down on the table. Well, good night, Tea-Master Louen!’

He couldn’t say anything as she walked away, her curvy hips swaying under her dreadful dress, and he smashed his fist against his table, then went to bed and kicked the broom cupboard door shut behind him.