In the morning Melas dresses in slightly too-casual clothing, with a rapier at his side, and goes to Signora Huera's house to deliver the "important message from his aunt to her old friend."
The directions Osmundo gave him are specific enough, following the only reliably open thoroughfare through Scornbul - the river. The further he gets into the dock quarter the more the town's sobriquet is explained, as no where else in the Republic do streets double back on each other, twist, end, rise and fall with such abandon. Even the river road has areas where the sky is blocked by the encroachment of higher stories reaching out above the lower ones, not unlike oak trees expanding their branches to claim every inch of sunlight from the plants under them. More surprising are the occasional twist around a house that the river moved to claim and the owners refused to abandon, raising the abode by bracing the areas now in the water and building new levels above the old ones, leaving areas where the river traffic is little congested, and places where silt and weeds grow up around these Fen Houses.
Eventually the Andres apartments are located. They are in a building that might once have claimed some grandeur in the quarter, but now at its sesquicentennial has had other buildings built directly up to its walls on all sides. the only holes between it and its neighbors are ground levels spaces large enough for halflings and gnomes to walk single file. Still, the bright and cheerful paint on the exterior is a few years fresh, indicating that the home is owned by people and a business of quality. The lower level contains the offices of the Andres shipping lines with evidence of a recent accident, as the bay window that should display clerks busily working has been replaced with waxed paper whose bare translucency that must leave the interior awfully dim and uninviting. To the right of that window is the door to the family apartments, which Melas' keen eyes can discern has just been reinforced with two new locks, and likely iron bars on the inside. Signor Osmundo's description of the upper shutters is also accurate: their closed state and obviously recent tarring to a coal hue give the house as a whole the appearance of a painted courtesan whose eyes had been blackened by an irate customer.
A knock at the door eventually produces a scabrous man in an ill fitting frock coat, with lace sprouting unevenly from his cuffs and boots more appropriate to a dockhand or leg-breaker than butler. Again, Osmundo's information is accurate, as the men is clearly blind - the bandage across his eyes dips deeply enough to show the hollows where orbs once were, and the faded scarring above and below that indicate to Melas that fingernails or claws were the instruments in the surgery.
"What nonsense!" Melas uses his strength, dexterity, and functioning vision to push/dodge past the man into the house. He's going to try to keep moving and not let the underling get a word in. "Signora Huera and my aunt are _dear_ friends and in her time of grief there is nothing -- _nothing_ -- so comforting as word from an old friend. I was given this commission _personally_, and if you know _anything_ about _anything_, my good fellow, you'll understand that when my aunt tells someone to deliver a letter to someone else, she means _that_ someone must deliver _that_ letter to the someone else, not some other someone else who's probably a nobody in any event. Good gracious, what a pigsty this hall is! Don't you chaps know which end of a broom to use? Why, you could grow potatoes in all this dust, if it weren't so dark. Mushrooms, perhaps. I adore mushrooms myself, except for the big ones which scream when you get too close. Although now that I think about it, the screaming ones might not be too bad it you sliced them thinly and sauteed them with plenty of butter. Assuming that they don't go on screaming during the meal, which would put rather a damper on conversation, I should think..."
The doorman puts up some resistance, briefly getting a hold of Melas with an arm whose corded muscles bespoke many years at sea, but a well aimed 'accidental' elbowing to the solar plexus causes the grip to go slack long enough for the nobleman to make it up the stairs into the primary chamber, with the doorman staggering up after him. Melas' keen ears do pick up the sound of the door being closed - and locked - behind them.
His spontaneous analysis of the stairs and the hall are accurate, at least as far as the dim light allows. Were it not for the sight afforded by his elvish heritage Melas would be as blind as the doorman. What light is in the room comes around the edges of the blackened shutters and from a candelabra set under a darkening mesh; a contrivance not uncommon in houses unable to afford Dwarves as night servants and forced to make due with Halflings and their less than perfect darksight. Despite the ill kept appearance of the room there is little clutter and plenty of wide corridors of movement for the blind men.
There are several chairs in the room, all over stuffed push things, and in the central chair next to the candelabra sits a thin woman in mourner's black, obviously tall but stooped, wearing a full veil that covers the whole of her head. In the chair next to her is a blond man with a relaxed posture and clothes that indicate some sea based wealth - a merchantman, or ships officers. The pair were obviously in some important, secretive communication before Melas' unanticipated arrival, and there is a new tension in the room.
"I'm sorry, Signora, he barged…" came the voice of the doorman from the top of the stairs, but the woman tutted softly, quelling his excuses.
"What's done is done," came the reedy voice, followed by a croaking cough that reminded Melas of the sound of gasses bubbling up from the peat marsh near his uncle's estates. "Good day, gentle lord. How may our humble house assist you?"
She extends one hand at the end of an extraordinarily long arm and her black velvet gloves are cut to allow her long, immaculately kept nails to extend a full two inches further than the tips of her fingers. Those nails almost brush Melas' elbow in the move to hand her the letter, meaning that either her arm is longer than it ought to be (a fluke of birth with which Melas himself is subject, though not one mentioned in Signor Osmundo's descriptions) or the combination of the dim room, her crooked back and the over sized chair is concealing her true height.
This enforced distance is enough to keep Melas from getting an close look at her face through the veil, and the veil itself is nearly an impenetrable barrier. He can make out eyes, a nose, a thin lipped smile and little else - even her color is washed out from the veils and the dimness of the room, but her face appears sallow, with just the slightest hint of shading to her lips and eyelids. Melas, from having seen others perform elaborate mourning rituals, knows of the application of ashes as a perverse rogue of in honor a dead husband amongst the eldest of elves, but to have a human woman in a town so distant from the center of elvish culture would be extremely unlikely. But what else could account for the slight tinge?
Signora Huera gracefully takes the letter, bringing it close too her veil and peering at it for a second before emitting another bubbly cough which this time Melas can identify as a laugh. "Why dear lady Agatha Vienne. So kind of her.... Please, my lord, have a seat so that I might discuss the affairs of the family with you." She gestures to the seat at her other side before turning her head to the blond man.
"Reme, I hate to cut our meeting short, but I trust that the opportunity to handle changes in personnel is in your capable hands. Please come back this evening, after your affairs and we shall discuss more."
The blond man nods agreeably, and the sense of tension that Melas' arrival engendered has vanished. He gives Melas a companionable smile and a bow. "Lord Beliseca, my thanks to you for conveying comfort to our dear Signora Andres in her time of grief. I trust that we will meet again soon, at a time when we can more readily talk, but I would never wish to intrude on this quiet moment."
The blind footman, who had remained in the room during this, has acted with some surety of movement to fetch the man's cloak.
"Indeed, Sir. If you have no engagements this evening, I would like to fight at your side against a squad of red-blooded glass soldiers in cork hats. Say, at the Star at sunset?"
"If my business does not allow me to attend I will certainly send someone to explain why and make payment against the first wave of the enemy. But I have no doubt we will be meeting again soon." While his voice is smooth and his smile charming, Melas' experience with his own family lets him detect a trace of humor in the man's eyes, as if this were the punch line to a nasty joke. With that the man dons his cloak with a flourish, bows deeply to the Signora and, with the footman's assistance, makes his way down the darkened stairs, where the door is unlocked and, once Reme is gone, relocked. Melas is alone in the room with the subject of his inquiry, though the scrabbling of sounds from the next chamber makes it clear that there are other members of this brotherhood of blind pirates about, with no clear means of egress.
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