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The Marquis de Carabas, like everything else here in London Below, is an invention. He's a fantasy, even to himself - a myth, self-created, self-perpetuated. What is real is only what he makes real, every day. It's his reputation, carefully maintained, his seemingly random acts of cruelty or kindness, his perfect and blatant manipulation of everyone he comes into contact with.
Richard knows.
Door warned him, once, after she'd come back from that first futile search for her sister. She's one of the few who understands, who trusts the complex system of give-and-take de Carabas has built if not precisely the man himself.
The Marquis maintains an intricate network of favours, not sitting in the centre of the web but moving along the strands with a spider's agility, tapping and testing them, reeling people in, offering and demanding according to a system only he understands. Everyone is caught in the web, even the Marquis himself, but he is the only one who knows all the strands.
Door is one of the few who dares walk the high wires of the web with confidence, trusting not so much in the benevolence of the spider but in the sanctity of the web itself: it's what he lives on, and he will maintain it.
She warned Richard: The Marquis is all façade, all show, and no one has ever breached that surface. He's lived and died here for several lifetimes, but no one knows just who he is beneath the carefully constructed persona.
Perhaps the persona is all there is; perhaps it's as real as anything ever is on the Underside. Who can tell the difference?
Richard finds that he's strangely all right with that.
Door warned him not to expect more; he never did. If the Marquis is as impenetrable as any of the other mysteries of London Below, that is no reason to keep him at arm's length. He's let the Underside into him, let himself be touched by it, and there is no way back. His one attempt at returning to London Above left him tired, empty, and yearning for something he can't quantify.
Something that comes within reach as the Marquis's wide, condescending and supremely arrogant smile welcomes him back through that door he'd feared forever closed.
Something he finds, here, every day.
He finds it in the tunnels, the pipes, among the rats and the pigeons, the hustle and bustle of the Floating Market. He finds it in Door's smile, the Earl's scatter-brained approval, in Lamia's hiss whenever he comes across her. He finds it with his back pressed against intricate Victorian brickwork, deep in the sewers where no one from Above will ever again see the craftsmanship. He finds it on his knees in a dank and muddy tunnel, somewhere between anywhere and nowhere, when here is all that matters. He finds it under tattered blankets, arms and legs thrown over his body possessively, braids trailing across his skin. He finds it with the smell of the City's bowels in his nostrils, and the taste of the Marquis on his tongue.
He finds it in the touch of a man who is still and will always be strange to him, in a world he'll never fully learn to understand.
He's still not quite sure what exactly it is. He does know that it's here.
It's here, where he belongs.
And if he belongs to the Marquis, too, in those moments, well, then that is only fitting, isn't it?
He doesn't need to understand. Here, he is content to be.