by M. K. Hobson
Emily bared her teeth.
“Why should you tell me?” she spat. “What do you want from me?”
“There’s a woman at the Erebus Academy,” Dmitri continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “She recruits young men to serve the Temple. She takes them as lovers if they please her. The General’s own wife, Alcmene Blotgate.”
Emily blew out a breath as if she’d been punched in the gut.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I want you to admit that he’s lied to you. Every time you turn around, you’re faced with another one of his lies. He wants you to love him for who he is not.” Dmitri’s voice filled her ears, hard and demanding. “I want you to understand that he doesn’t care if you’re hurt.”
“That’s not true.” Tears were standing in Emily’s eyes now. Seeing them glitter, Dmitri nodded with harsh satisfaction, as if they indicated awakening understanding.
“You will be hurt when he dies, will you not?” Dmitri said. “In ten years, five years? He will leave you a widow, your children orphans. He doesn’t care. If he did, he would have taken the cure from Zeno when he had the chance.”
Emily looked up, stricken.
“There is no cure.”
“He could have been cured anytime.” Dmitri spoke the words with relish. “Anytime before Zeno was kidnapped. That was what Perun was speaking of, only he was too gentle to make you face the truth.” Dmitri stood, stalking the length of the room, fists balled. “Zeno spoke of it once. An old custom called Touching the Evil. It takes nothing more than a coin, a touch-piece of silver. Your fiancé could have asked the blessing of his Sophos, and his illness would have been lifted.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “Like that.”
“I don’t believe it,” Emily whispered.
“Of course, the cure comes at a cost. All magical channels in a man’s body must be fused, closed permanently. It would leave him unable to work magic. But I suppose that would be too much to ask. I suppose you’re not worth such a great sacrifice. And anyway, it’s too late now. Zeno is dead, and your fiancé’s fate is sealed. And he never told you.”
Dmitri stood in silence for a long time, looking down at her. Tears spilled down Emily’s cheeks, and she wiped them away angrily.
“Leave me alone,” she said finally. “Just … go away.”
Dmitri did not move for a long time. When he did, he came to stand next to her. He put a hand on her shoulder, let it rest there for a moment.
“I am sorry, Emilia Vladimirovna,” he said softly. “I really am very sorry.”
Emily lifted her head. She didn’t know if she intended to strike him or scream at him. But she could do neither, for Dmitri was already at the door, and in an instant he was gone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Ruined Woman
The press conference was scheduled for 10 a.m. “After breakfast and before lunch,” Miss Jesczenka explained, “when the reporters will be at their peak of attentiveness.” But Emily and Miss Jesczenka began their preparations well before dawn. Dmitri and his men moved silently in the early-morning darkness, some leaving to take up secure positions around Twenty-third and Broadway where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stood, some preparing the nondescript carriage that would take them there, some loading and polishing what sounded like an arsenal of rifles. Dmitri himself carried a large trunk up to Miss Jesczenka’s room and set it down with a heavy thunk. The woman stood, going to the trunk quickly and throwing it open to make sure that nothing had been left out. She pawed through mounds of silk and lace, seemingly satisfied.
“Thank you, Dmitri,” she said. “You’ll have to leave us alone now. We must get her dressed.”
Instead of leaving, Dmitri went to Emily’s side. Emily didn’t look at him, but he would not be ignored. He seized Emily’s hand, the one of ivory, and held it for a moment, looking at it meaningfully. Then he bent over it with the stiff courtliness of a soldier.
“Think about what I told you,” he said. “There are always other choices, Emilia Vladimirovna.”
He straightened and walked from the room, closing the door behind him. There was the familiar scrape of a key in the lock.
When Emily turned, she saw that Miss Jesczenka was staring at her. Emily flushed and gritted her teeth.
“All right,” Miss Jesczenka said quickly, turning her eyes down to the trunk. “The press conference starts in less than two hours. I need you to listen closely while I brief you on one of the most important elements of this little drama we’re going to be staging.”
Emily was already removing her clothes in preparation for being put into what she expected would be another extremely formal gown, if the profusion of shimmering silk peeping from the top of the trunk was any indication.
“I’m listening,” Emily said, pulling her dress off over her head.
Miss Jesczenka reached into the trunk and produced a portfolio. She opened it, and nodded with satisfaction at the contents. Inside were letters. She handed the letters to Emily. It was a fat bundle; surely Miss Jesczenka couldn’t expect her to read them all right then? But she seemed to expect no such thing, and was ready instead with a precise summary.
“Remember I told you that the Institute had ammunition against Fortissimus? That’s the ammunition.”
Emily looked through the letters. They bore familiar addresses, in both the delivery and the return sections. The addresses were those of the Fortissimus Presentment Arranging Agency and Tammany Hall.
“Those letters provide irrefutable evidence that Fortissimus’ Agency extravagantly padded city contracts under the administration of Boss Tweed,” Miss Jesczenka said. “Shocking, of course, but hardly fatal given that just about everyone in New York was the recipient of Tweed’s graft. Without the leverage we’re going to bring to bear, such information would hardly dull Fortissimus’ shine. But it’s the way we’re going to give it to the reporters. We’re going to call upon a belief more ancient, more deeply held, and more fondly cherished, than even the American urge to root for the underdog.”
Emily laid the letters aside on the desk as she came to stand before Miss Jesczenka. “And what ancient, deeply held, and fondly cherished belief would that be?” she asked. Zeno’s powerful command, the one he had driven deep into the flesh of the thing in the pit, flashed through her mind. “Good shall triumph over evil?”
Miss Jesczenka looked at her like an elementary school student who’d just spouted the solution to a trigonometry problem.
“Why yes, that is a credomantic concept of exceptional power,” she said wonderingly. “Have you been reading Mr. Stanton’s textbooks?” She paused, then shook her head. “But no. That’s not the one we’re going to use. It is not specific enough for our purpose.”
“What is then?” Emily said.
“ ‘True love conquers all,’ ” Miss Jesczenka said, pulling a chemise down over Emily’s head with a jerk.
“The human belief in true love is perhaps the most powerful belief known to credomancy, next to the rather more general one you just quoted,” Miss Jesczenka said as she tied Emily’s corset strings and then left them to stretch, as she’d done before. She slid her arms along Emily’s firmly compressed sides, apparently satisfied that Emily’s waist was small enough, even without the benefit of a measuring tape. “Everyone wants to see two people who are truly and deeply in love come together in a happy union, regardless of the fact that the lovers must pass through trials of fire. It’s trials of fire that observers like the best, as a matter of fact. They serve as proof that the love is true, and powerful enough to survive whatever cruel fate throws in its path.”
Emily thought about cruel fate, and everything it had thrown in the path of her and Stanton. She pressed her lips together. Unlike a heroine in a romance story, she’d had her doubts. She had them still. Would her love be true enough?
Emily smiled wanly to herself. That last sentence certainly sounded enough like something out of Ladies’ Repository to fit the bill. But the smile d
id not last, as she followed the metaphor along its logical paths of association. Because in all those romantic stories, the hero never had murderous blood sorcery in his past. He would never leave the heroine to face brutal villains on her own because his work demanded him elsewhere. And heroes in stories were honest and forthright and decent.
Stanton was not honest. And he certainly wasn’t forthright. Well then, she could only pin her hopes on the last one. She had to pray that he was decent. And not decent the way the Stanton family defined decency. She could only hope after everything he’d done, after everything he’d been, there was an irreducible part of him that was the man she had fallen in love with. The man she imagined she saw in his green eyes when he looked at her.
That was all there was left for her to believe. Would it be enough? It would have to be.
“Hold your arms up,” Miss Jesczenka said.
Miss Jesczenka had arranged for an exquisite afternoon dress of a tender pinkish hue. It was light silk, and skimmed over Emily’s form with a delicate elegance. It suggested gardens, laughing hope, and swings decorated with flowers.
“Just the color,” Miss Jesczenka said with approval, smoothing the fabric down over Emily’s body. “Like a virgin’s blush.” At the word “virgin,” Miss Jesczenka’s eyes darted, ever so briefly, to the door through which Dmitri had exited.
“Then it will suit me perfectly,” Emily bit back, snatching the skirt away from the woman’s fussing hands. Without a word, Miss Jesczenka rose and began doing the dozens of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons that ran up the back.
“Mr. Stanton loves you very much,” she murmured as her nimble fingers made the buttons fast. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I wish I could hear it from him,” Emily said, dropping her head as Miss Jesczenka’s fingers moved to her nape. When the woman had finished the buttons, she took Emily by the arms and turned her. She looked into Emily’s eyes, her brown ones soft and imploring.
“You have to believe that he does.” She gave Emily a little shake. “You have to believe it in every bone of your body. If you could see what I’ve seen, if you could see how worried he’s been about you … you’d know. He’s not here to tell you himself, but he would want me to tell you. He loves you, and he never wanted any of this to happen.”
Emily looked into Miss Jesczenka’s eyes.
“A horse is tied to a ten-foot rope, and there’s hay twenty-five feet away,” Emily murmured thoughtfully. She was remembering another day, another dress, another life.
“Miss Edwards?” Her companion’s voice was puzzled.
“The simplest answer is that the horse can’t eat the hay. It’s impossible. Some things just aren’t meant to be.” She paused. “I don’t think that’s the answer he was looking for. It’s not the answer I was looking for. But maybe it’s the right one.” She looked at Miss Jesczenka, her eyes focusing. “You want me to be the heroine in a love story. But there’s one thing missing. A hero. You say he never wanted any of this to happen. But it did. And he couldn’t stop it.”
“No, he couldn’t.” Miss Jesczenka’s voice was firm. “Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to do with reality. Reality requires pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards—if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.”
“And what’s that?” Emily said softly.
“That love is not enough. But it’s a start.”
She released Emily’s arms slowly, stepped back to look at her.
“You look beautiful.” She smiled. “You’ll do just fine.”
At 9:30 a.m. precisely, Dmitri knocked softly on the door and told them that the carriage was ready. He led them downstairs to where a large black landau waited, harnessed horses stamping impatiently. Two men sat atop the carriage, behind the driver, and two sat on the carriage’s back railing. They all had rifles.
Emily settled into her seat, drawing a deep breath as Dmitri fastened the door behind them. She looked at the letters she held in her white gloved hand, then at Miss Jesczenka, who had settled across from her.
“Well, you’ve told me everything about true love,” Emily said as the carriage lurched and got under way. “But you haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do with these.”
“You are going to show them around to the reporters. Let them paw over them with their greasy hands and read enough to know that they want to read more. Whet their appetites, give them confidence that the letters are genuine. But make sure you get them back, and I’ll make sure that everyone gets copies afterward.”
Emily nodded, but the woman continued to look at her.
“But the letters aren’t the most important thing. The most important thing is for you to charm them, to make them believe that you love Mr. Stanton so much that you’re willing to throw yourself on their mercy for his sake. They’ll love having a pretty girl supplicating them, even if you’ll have them entirely at your advantage, as you will by the time you’re finished with them. A few discreet tears would be nice, but don’t overdo it. No one likes a sniveler. If things get really bad, faint.”
“You really think I can do this?” she asked, half to Miss Jesczenka and half to herself.
“You must,” Miss Jesczenka snapped. “You must, so that Mr. Stanton can be redeemed, the Institute saved, and Rex Fortissimus destroyed. Destroyed completely and utterly.” There was bitter delight in these last words, more bitter than Emily had ever heard from the woman, or from any woman, for that matter. She looked at Miss Jesczenka as the carriage rocked them softly from side to side.
“Perun said he knew something about you and Rex Fortissimus,” Emily said.
“He is trying to destroy everything I’ve ever worked for.” Miss Jesczenka spoke as if the words were rehearsed. “Of course I dislike him.”
“No, you don’t dislike him,” Emily said. “You hate him.”
Miss Jesczenka was silent for a long time, and Emily thought that the matter would end with her silence. The woman looked at the window, reaching up to brush aside the drawn curtains, then thinking better of it. She touched a finger to the corner of her eye. Finally, she spoke again.
“It is not a polite story for a virginal bride,” she said. “But since I’ve already told you about true love, I suppose I can tell you.” She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath.
“I was sixteen years old,” Miss Jesczenka said. “I had just come across from Poland. I didn’t know anything about New York. I barely spoke any English. And the Mirabilis Institute wasn’t taking women at the time.” She paused. “I went to Fortissimus’ Agency, knowing only that it was a place of powerful magic. I was looking for work, any kind of work that would help me learn magic—learn to have the kind of power the men I’d grown up around had … the rabbis, the wise old men of the minyan. They told me I could never study the mysteries of the cabala, that it was forbidden to women. They told me I should calm myself and learn to be a good, observant wife. That was power enough, they said. I did not agree. So I came to America. Because in America, anyone can do anything they want.”
She paused, chewing her lip—a strangely nervous gesture from the woman Emily was used to seeing so calm and composed.
“A slimy little weasel of a man hired me to do simple clerical work for Fortissimus’ Agency. I was overjoyed. I believed I could work my way up, learning as I went. Looking back, the fact that I was hired at all should have been a warning. I wasn’t anything like a promising prospect. Except in one very specific regard.”
She paused.
“I learned later that the slimy weasel of a man who hired me took presumptuous girls like myself off the street all the time. Girls wh
o thought they wanted to learn something about the man’s world. It was a great joke between him and Fortissimus, teaching us.”
“Teaching you?”
“We would be directed to work late. And Rex Fortissimus would be there, waiting, in the dark offices with the heavy doors.”
Horror spread through Emily’s body.
“He … took advantage of you?”
“The word is rape,” Miss Jesczenka said. “And yes. That’s what he did.”
She was silent for a long moment, looking thoughtfully at the curtain that she seemed still to long to push back, to let the light in.
“It wasn’t just that he took my body. He took my ambitions. He made me a ruined woman.” She looked at Emily. “And I mean that in a very specific credomantic way, just as Fortissimus certainly meant it.”
“I don’t understand,” Emily said.
“Almost as powerful as the belief that true love conquers all is the belief that a ruined woman will never recover from her ruining. Fortissimus’ rape wasn’t simply a physical attack, though that was low and ugly enough all by itself. His attack was infinitely worse, because it mocked my desire to wield the kind of credomantic power that he was master of. By making me into a ruined woman, he attacked me with the force of belief. He made me into something that he believed I could never recover from being.” She paused, her voice going almost too soft for Emily to hear her next words: “And indeed, it has been very difficult.”
“But you did it,” Emily said.
Miss Jesczenka nodded, a small movement.
“At a cost. I must maintain the weeds of a spinster to avoid any hint of the past I have defeated. That is a very lonely road.” She looked at Emily, smiled sadly. “Everyone likes to believe that true love might one day find them, and I’m no exception. But in my case, I can’t let it. Not ever. I must be satisfied with lesser consolations.”
Emily thought of the young man she’d seen with Miss Jesczenka the night before the Investment. She watched the light play over the woman’s face. She wanted to reach out to her, but she felt that it was better not to.
