“It’s me, Mama.”
“Ada, what is wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I just . . . wanted to talk to you.”
Ada bit her lip because she didn’t know what else to say. She needed to ask if the two agents were still parked out front, but she didn’t want to frighten her mother.
“I am sorry I was angry at you, Ada,” Nyah said, after a few moments of silence. “I wish we had not fought.”
“It’s my fault,” Ada said. “I wanted to come see you, but I can’t—I can’t get away.”
“I know.”
The way she said it was so solemn and resigned that tears pricked suddenly at Ada’s eyes.
“I have to go,” she said before they could spill. “I love you.”
“Good night, Ada.”
Ada hung up with more force than she intended. She hadn’t even asked about the agents, or if the police had come by. She hadn’t said anything she meant to say.
She swiped her hand across her eyes and picked up the receiver again. She asked the operator to connect her to the Red Cat. A gruff voice answered. Ada could hear the sounds of musicians warming up their instruments in the background. Someone was laughing raucously. It was a normal night there, with music and patrons and clinking glasses. In that moment, it seemed so far away from the deathly silence of the Cast Iron that Ada was disoriented. The voice spoke again, even gruffer this time.
“Is Charlie Lewis there?” she asked before he could hang up.
The sounds became muffled, like he was covering the mouthpiece with his hand. Ada held the receiver away from her ear during the ensuing scrapes and clatters and muted shouts. When Charlie answered, he was out of breath.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“Hey there, Ada.”
Ada leaned forward in her chair and rested her elbows on the desk. The knot in her chest loosened, if only slightly.
“Are you busy?” she asked.
“Got a set in a few minutes, but they can wait.”
“You sure?”
“Not like they can start without me.”
She heard his grin through the phone, and she smiled too. She could picture him in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, with his hat tilted at a rakish angle. The tattoo on his arm would be visible, with the inked tree branching like veins. Somehow, the night felt less empty. She wished she could see him in person. It wasn’t safe for her to leave the club, though, and she would never ask him to come here, not after what had happened to Stuart Delaney. She had just wanted to hear his voice.
“I wanted to make sure everything was okay,” she said.
He was quiet for a few seconds. “Sure, I guess so,” he said. “You sound different. Is something wrong?”
Johnny was dead, and the Hemopath Protection Agency was lying in wait. Everything was wrong.
“No, nothing’s wrong,” she said. “You sound different too.”
Another pause.
“I can’t stop thinking about Stuart Delaney,” he said.
His voice was low, and Ada thought she heard a tremor.
“There was nothing you could do,” she said.
“Maybe.”
Ada listened to his breathing. She wound the telephone cord around her finger, counting the seconds that passed.
“None of us are safe anymore,” she said at last. She was thinking about the agents in her mother’s home. “We can’t go back to the way things were.”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. He hesitated. “I think—I think if anyone can manage it, you and Corinne can.”
Someone called Charlie’s name, and he hollered at them to hold their horses.
“Sorry,” he said to her.
“No, I’m sorry,” Ada said. “I knew you had a show. I shouldn’t have called.”
“I’m glad you did.”
Ada’s heart skittered at the simple honesty in his voice, and she squeezed the receiver until her fingers hurt. Three days ago he’d told her he loved her. She still didn’t know how to say it back, or if she even could. The words were a precipice, and she was too afraid to leap.
“Go play your set,” she told him. “And stop flirting with me.”
She could hear the grin again, like music through the line.
“You’re the one who called me.”
“Good-bye, Charlie.”
“Good-bye, Ada.”
She hung up the receiver and slumped back in the chair. Her heart was still pounding an uneven rhythm, echoing in her ears and fingertips. She wondered if this was what it was like for patrons at the club, listening to music that filled them with unfamiliar emotions, letting that music carry them to places they could never reach on their own but always, always trusting that it would lead them safely home.
Giant double doors at the end of the ballroom opened onto an adjacent room with two parallel dining tables. Between shoulders and elbows, Corinne caught a glimpse of ornate candelabras and flower arrangements. The bride and groom, whom Corinne had been avoiding all night, entered first, followed by their parents. Corinne grabbed Gabriel’s arm.
“My mother is going to try to seat us at different tables,” Corinne said. “If you let that happen, I will possibly never forgive you.”
“I’m not sure what you expect me to do about it,” he said, but he was smiling.
Corinne’s name placard was near the head of the larger table, across from her parents. Gabriel thoughtfully pulled her chair out for her, then took the placard beside her and tossed it unceremoniously away.
“Someone named Hamish Everett,” he said as he sat down beside her.
Corinne snorted. Her mother, who had been saying something to Mr. Wells, eyed Corinne and Gabriel but apparently decided not to raise a fuss. After some shuffling at the lesser table to accommodate a miffed Hamish, the dinner was under way.
Mr. Wells wasn’t at his best during parties and focused mainly on his food. Corinne’s mother kept shifting in her seat, her smiles brief and fluttery, her eyes constantly darting. Corinne finally realized she was avoiding looking at Gabriel. He hadn’t said a word and wasn’t shoveling food with his hands or anything, so Corinne couldn’t figure out her mother’s problem. Maybe she was just angry that he wasn’t Hamish Everett, who was supposedly Boston’s most eligible bachelor now that Angela Haversham had snatched up Corinne’s brother.
Phillip and Angela were in fine form, holding hands under the table and sneaking kisses when they thought no one was looking. To please her mother, Corinne exchanged a few polite words with them, but she couldn’t look at Angela’s expensive gown or multitude of diamonds without thinking that the entire ensemble had been funded by Haversham Asylum. And now her brother was a part of it. If her father had his way, Phillip’s upcoming political campaign would revolve around an expansion of the asylum.
When it came time for Corinne’s toast, she was two glasses of red wine deep and having trouble picking up her fork. Finally she managed to clink it against the side of her glass. Gabriel stood up, ostensibly to pull out her chair, but he ended up holding her elbows as she found her feet.
“You’re drunk,” he whispered in her ear.
“Only a little. It’s when I do my best work,” she said.
He shook his head and sat back down.
“Thank you all for coming tonight,” Corinne said, keeping both hands on the table edge to steady herself. “As most of you know, I’ve only just come back from school, and I’m afraid there’s not enough time between studies to write a meaningful speech.”
She chanced a look at Phillip and Angela, who were holding hands again. Their smiles were bland and practiced. Corinne was surprised that Phillip hadn’t interrupted yet to say something patronizing.
“Instead,” she continued, “I’d like to offer a poem I came across recently, by Lewis Carroll. I thought of my brother and soon-to-be sister when I read it.”
She conjured a sweet smile for the bride and groom. She’d actually memorized the poem years a
go, and her brother had been the last person on her mind.
“A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July . . .”
Corinne kept a gentle cadence as she quoted. Despite its cheery beginning and lyrical rhythm, the poem wasn’t a romantic one. It was about golden memories and the inevitability of their fading.
Under her left hand, Corinne brushed her thumb across the brass of her grandfather’s watch, using the familiarity of it to center herself. If her grandfather had been here, he would be the one making the speech, telling some anecdote about his travels, sneaking a wink at Corinne. Maybe after it was all over, she would join him in the quiet warmth of his study and he would tell her about Alice the acrobat or Alice the fortune-teller.
Corinne had to blink away the memories to get through the last lines of the poem. She hadn’t meant to drink quite so much before dinner, but between the relatives and her mother and the iron in Gabriel’s damn gun, itching at the edge of her sanity, she didn’t see how she’d had much choice.
She lifted her glass with her right hand, letting her focus fall away from the room, into the abstract. It was a delicate art, finding the balance between the minds of the people she was trying to deceive and the deception itself, which she had to draw from her own mind. She’d spent years perfecting it. Trying and failing. There weren’t very many wordsmiths who could conjure a tiny, detailed, lifelike illusion—one that would appear in the eyes of a room full of people. It was the movement that was the hardest. The trick was giving them the first glimpse and letting their minds fill in the details. Once they thought they saw something, then it might as well be real.
Everyone raised their glasses. Corinne brought hers to her lips. Then a gray, twittering rat ran down the length of the table, inciting uproar as it went, before finally leaping into the bride’s lap. She thrashed and screamed, falling out of her chair and kicking Phillip in the chest multiple times as he dove to help her.
Ignoring the panic, Corinne calmly set down her glass and leaned across the table to catch her father’s wide eyes.
“I don’t feel well,” she told him. “Gabriel is going to take me home. Good night.”
She and Gabriel slipped out right as the serving staff arrived with brooms and mops to go in search of the culprit. They had to wait in the lobby for the footman to fetch their coats, and then wait again outside for the valet to bring the car around. Corinne hopped impatiently from one foot to the other. Her feet had gone numb in her shoes, which was preferable to the aching of before. The snow hadn’t started again, but the night was still bitter with cold.
The Ford was just pulling around the corner when Phillip came outside. “Corinne, wait,” he said. “Where are you going?”
He hadn’t put on his coat and stood with his hands crammed into his jacket pockets. Corinne remembered when he had been a gangly teenager, with pimples and hunched shoulders. He used to stand the exact same way, even though military school was supposed to train that sort of posture out of its students.
“Gabriel’s taking me home,” she said. “I’m sick.”
She didn’t bother pretending to be sick. They had already escaped. It wasn’t like he could drag her back in.
“You were just going to leave?” he asked. “You’ve been avoiding me all night.”
The valet had opened her door. Gabriel was hovering uncertainly beside her, and she waved for him to get into the car. Phillip wore an expression that Corinne hadn’t seen on him before. He looked wounded.
“I told you, I’m sick,” she said. She didn’t know what else he wanted from her. She had been on her best behavior all night—the rat incident aside, but he didn’t know that was her.
“I told Mother not to invite Hamish.”
“I don’t give a fig about Hamish,” she said. “Go back to your party. I’ll see you at the wedding.”
She climbed into the car, thinking only afterward that maybe she should have hugged him or congratulated him or something. Then the valet shut the door, Gabriel kicked the car into gear, and she’d lost her chance.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Despite the hardened, graying snow on the sidewalks, the city was bustling with pedestrians wrapped in warm coats. Corinne cracked the window for some fresh air and could hear them laughing as the car rumbled past. She dug under the seat for the aspirin bottle and shook a few into her hand.
“I hate this rattling death trap,” she murmured.
“Does that help?” Gabriel asked, nodding toward the pills.
Corinne swallowed them dry and considered. “Not really,” she said. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window. The jolting worsened her headache, but her face was so hot she couldn’t stand it. The night rolled by in a blur of golden light and shadow.
“What does it feel like?”
Gabriel’s voice was barely audible over the engine, and for a second Corinne wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. No one had ever asked her that before. The doctors and scientists who studied hemopaths’ blood hadn’t found a satisfactory explanation for their aversion to the iron element—or for anything else. In the eighteenth century, when the terms witchcraft and magic were replaced with hemopathy, it was generally agreed that there was something different—and therefore diseased—in hemopath blood. There was never any further consensus reached about the exact nature of the difference.
Iron was painful to be near and excruciating to touch. Alloys like the steel in the Ford were less severe but still unpleasant. Corinne never thought much about the cause that was hiding somewhere in her blood. Her body’s reaction to iron was just a natural part of her life. She couldn’t touch fire or drink arsenic either.
“You know when you put two magnets together and they repel?” she asked.
Gabriel didn’t say anything, but his gaze slid away from the road and onto her for a moment. Corinne decided that was his way of saying yes.
“It feels like that,” she said, closing her eyes. “As if every drop of blood in your body were one magnet, and the iron were another. Or like holding a red-hot brand half an inch from your skin. Except the pain is waiting everywhere. It’s in the ceilings and the walls and the floors. It’s in the simplest objects that no one else ever thinks twice about. The whole city is a minefield.”
Gabriel’s reply was a long time coming. “I’m sorry.”
Corinne wondered if he was sorry for his gun or for the car or just for her in general. She would gladly accept apology for the first, but the second he couldn’t help, and even the notion of the last infuriated her.
“I wouldn’t trade it,” she said. “Not for anything.”
His eyes met hers again. Corinne could feel her heartbeat in her head, pounding once, twice, thrice. Gabriel looked forward again. He had to keep the car at a crawl on the slick road, and Corinne watched the passing streets through the frosty window.
They were only a few blocks from the Cast Iron when Gabriel spoke again.
“I wish you and Ada would reconsider going to Down Street.”
He didn’t look at Corinne this time. She studied his profile, but she couldn’t read him in the uneven shadows. She could see that his hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
“Johnny wouldn’t want us to give up,” she said. “We have to figure out who’s responsible.”
“And what about when the HPA catches up with you? Or the ironmongers? Dammit, Cor, it’s not a—”
He had to swerve to miss a car that was backing into the street. Corinne slid across the seat and into him. He turned his head, and for a split second their lips were a hairbreadth apart. He smelled of champagne and cigarettes, and she could feel the hard line of his shoulder against her chest.
Outside, a car horn rang out, and Corinne blinked out of her daze. She dragged herself back to her side. Gabriel swore again under his breath and straightened the car. Corinne saw the storm brewing in his expression, but he was silent now. She’d n
ever seen his temper crack before. It was almost a relief to know that his control wasn’t as perfect as it always seemed.
“Johnny gave me everything,” Corinne said. “I was sick and alone, and he was there for me. Without him I would never have become a wordsmith. I would never have met Ada. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him, even now that he’s dead.”
Neither of them said anything more until Gabriel braked the car in front of the Cast Iron.
“I don’t know what to think about you,” Gabriel said.
The way he said it was like a confession. His grip on the wheel had loosened. The amber glow of a streetlight through the window softened his features, until all the angles and severity were faded, and he seemed suddenly unguarded.
“Think the worst,” Corinne said. “I don’t like expectations.”
She was watching him closely, so she caught the smile that brushed his lips. It felt strangely like a victory.
At nine thirty, Ada was waiting in the common room, with her coat already buttoned and her hat firmly in place. Corinne and Gabriel were supposed to be back an hour ago, and telling herself not to worry wasn’t doing any good. Her heart was still clenched tightly, and nerves burned at the base of her throat. Saint was still in the armchair with his sketchbook. Occasionally he would squint toward the ceiling, trying to visualize, then hunch over again. The sound of pencil on paper was soothing, but not enough to ease the ache in her chest.
When the panel slid open and Corinne skipped down the stairs, Ada didn’t know whether to hug her or smack her.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
Corinne raised an eyebrow at her and headed for their room. She was barefoot and held a shoe in each hand. “Well, after the party we had to catch a show,” she said over her shoulder.
Ada heard some scrambling, and then Corinne reemerged wearing her ankle boots. More suitable for the weather, but not for the evening gown she still wore under her coat.
“Then we had to get a nightcap,” Corinne continued. “And of course there was some passionate necking in the back of the Ford.”
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