Another gentry bachelor. Wonderful.
“We need to meet him before anybody else,” she continued, and I forced myself to pay attention. “Especially with Addison on the prowl. She wants David for her daughter, Cara, and mark my words, she’ll do whatever it takes. She would not hesitate for a second to invent a romance between you and your cousin Jamie.”
I sighed, but she didn’t hear, since she was already waving and moving toward some of her friends, her small frame disappearing in the crush of people.
The Wilders may have had a small ballroom, but it certainly met the gentry standards for quality and opulence. The floor and artwork had been flown in from a palace in France two hundred years ago, right after the Last War when the gentry and their estates were formed. All the Kansas City families were here, and the women wore their most splendid gowns—all low-cut bodices and seed pearls and filmy skirts that released the smell of jasmine when they moved.
Thankfully, Jane Osbourne arrived and came to stand beside me, offering a smile but no idle conversation. Jane was an eldest daughter, and therefore an heir like myself, and was well read and sensible and just as quietly reluctant to participate in the marketplace of privileged marriage. We frequently found ourselves together in these types of situations—wallflower heiresses. We shared a plate of strawberries in companionable silence while the other guests danced and chatted around us.
A group of laughing people came in from the patio outside. I craned my neck to try to see if Jamie was one of them but, at that moment, a booming voice announced Marianne’s entry. Two heralds in green costumed livery blew into gleaming trumpets as the doors to the ballroom opened.
Preceded by her parents, Marianne Wilder and Mark Everly walked arm in arm, the skirt of her kelly green gown brushing against his legs. Her dark skin was striking against his white tuxedo, her long braids swept up behind a tiara set with emeralds. She was followed by another couple, the debut equivalent of a maid of honor and a best man, both of whom looked distinctly unhappy to be paired together.
Usually the rest of the family followed the debutante and her escort into the ballroom, but only Marianne’s parents and grandparents trailed beaming behind her. Her older brother, Philip, was absent. I could hear a few disappointed girls murmuring behind me. Though the Wilder estate wasn’t large, the family owned several lucrative orchards out west, and Philip still hadn’t found a wife. For most of the single girls in the room, the math was easy.
“Let all men and women find a partner for the first dance!” a voice announced. People scrambled around—shuffling boys, giggling girls, hopeful young men and women trying to find the dance partner who would spark their own debuts—or if they had debuted already and not gotten engaged, hoping to win a proposal by the end of the ball. Jane—very pretty and too polite to refuse—was snatched up by one of the Lyons boys right away.
“Looking for a partner?” a gentle voice said next to me.
“Jamie!” I breathed a sigh of relief.
Smiling, he led me out onto the floor, where we lined up in rows facing one another. He bowed—glossy black curls bobbing—I curtsied, and we touched hands. I had to reach upward because he was so tall.
“See, how could you think of leaving all this fun behind?” Jamie said as we circled each other. “There is no dancing at the university. I should know.”
“Dancing is only as fun as your partner,” I pointed out as we stepped forward in the line, turned, and traded partners. My new partner was short, acne-riddled, and wasted no time in trying to squeeze my bottom when he slid his arm around my waist. He had terrible breath.
When I got back to Jamie, he conceded my point. “Maybe you would be happier cloistered in the university libraries. But how could you live without Landry Park? Even for just a few years?”
I didn’t respond right away. To my parents, I’d offered up a defiant answer, but Father could see through my uncertainty, and I knew Jamie would, too. “I ask myself that question every day,” I finally said.
“And?”
“Every day the answer is different.”
The music ended, and I curtsied again. He offered an arm to lead me off the floor while the band struck up a reel, and as he did, a terrible noise, sharp and shrill like a rabbit about to be slaughtered, came through the open patio doors, piercing through the merry strings of the violins. The band stopped and people looked around, as if expecting the screamer to materialize underneath the chandelier or by the buffet.
“What was that?” I asked Jamie. “It sounded like a girl.”
“Maybe it was an animal,” he said.
But then there was another scream.
The room rippled in panic. People began to yell and shove their way to the doors, and Arthur Lawrence rumbled for someone to call the police. I saw my father push his way outside, calling for a lantern. Marianne Wilder’s father and our neighbor William Glaize followed him. Jamie gave me a look and made for the doors.
“I’m coming, too,” I insisted.
A small set of doors opened onto a flagged patio. Our breath came out in steamy clouds in the chill air, and I immediately regretted not getting my pelisse from the coatroom before I came outside. Jamie shifted his weight from foot to foot as the cold damp from the stones crept through the thin cardboard on the bottom of his shoes. Seeing my shivers, he shrugged off his jacket and handed it to me.
“It came from the grove,” Mr. Wilder said. His butler scurried out with two Cherenkov lanterns that emitted a vivid blue light. Leaded glass allowed the glow of the radioactive material to shine out steadily, while the rest of the water-filled case was made of a lightweight polymer that blocked radiation, which made the lantern completely safe to handle. It was these Cherenkov lanterns that built the Landry fortune over two centuries ago.
Father took a light and we walked toward the grove, the bobbing blue lights from the lanterns making swinging arcs along the path.
“It could just be an animal,” Mr. Wilder suggested. “It must be. Nothing like this has ever happened on our property.”
“Things are changing,” Father said brusquely.
Mr. Glaize nodded. “I heard they’ve been having trouble with the Rootless in St. Louis. My cousin found his entire stable of horses dead the other week. Almost hundreds of thousands of gentry dollars, lost in a single day.”
“But surely there is no evidence that the Rootless did that,” Mr. Wilder huffed, trying to keep up with my father’s long strides. “The horses could have taken ill?”
“And in Dallas, that terrible penthouse fire,” Mr. Glaize added. “The old man who lived there almost lost his life. As it is, his hands are so badly burned that he’ll never be able to feed himself again.”
Father said nothing, but the tense set of his shoulders spoke volumes. Based on the amount of time he’d spent on his wall screen in his study recently, I guessed that none of this was news to him. He’d always been extremely attentive to the actions of the Rootless. As the caste in charge of handling the nuclear material that powered our lives, they were both vital to the gentry way of life and an ever-present liability.
The grove spanned no more than a half-acre, and the thick carpet of pine needles kept the undergrowth to a minimum. “It should be easy to find someone, if there’s anyone out here.” Father held his lantern high, the blue light turning his red hair purple. “Madeline, stay with me. Gentleman, shall we spread out?”
My slippers crunched on the frosted needles. A small brook ran midway through the grove, and I could hear its trickling ebullience from several yards away. Jamie and my father were both walking too quickly for me to keep pace easily. “Wait!” I said, but a high wind whistling through the trees and the noise of the stream drowned me out.
I suddenly felt uncomfortable in the dark, even with the lanterns bobbing in the distance and the Wilder House lit up like a festival behind me. I started jogging and then running to catch up, paying no attention to where I put my feet, just looking ahead to Father’s
bluish figure. My breath came in cloudy pants, and a sharp pain stitched itself in my side. Just before I reached the stream, my foot caught a tree root, black and invisible, and I fell hard. What little breath I had left was knocked from my chest.
I looked up, hoping that the men had heard me, but instead I saw a girl in a ball gown, her green eyes gleaming in the frozen darkness.
She was crouched on the ground behind a tree, as if she had been hiding. Her pink gown was ripped up to the thigh, exposing a long leg and a very swollen ankle. Blood clustered around her nose and lips, a dried streak trailing from the corner of her mouth down to her neck, and her hair was yanked and tangled out of its elaborate twist.
As I got closer, I could see that it was Addison’s daughter, Cara Westoff, tormentor of my childhood and the most sought-after girl in Kansas City.
“Oh my God,” I said when I could breathe again. “Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” she snapped.
“You look like you spent the night in a gibbet cage,” I told her, and tried to brush a clump of hair away from a scrape on her cheek. She slapped my hand away. If we had been in any other situation, I would have walked away.
Cara and I were born days apart from each other to mothers who were best friends and rivals. We were both firstborn children and both destined to be heirs. But while Cara was born blond and plump and cooing, I was born red-faced and scrawny and stone-eyed. Cara was beautiful and vibrant, while I was quiet and racked with frequent bouts of the mysterious illness that plagued all the Landrys as children. She had everyone—parents, servants, strangers—convinced that she was the sweetest girl ever to twirl on the earth, and maybe even I believed it for a time.
However, it soon became clear she had a wild streak. As children, our games of hide-and-seek sometimes turned into vicious hunts that ended with hair pulling and Indian burns. She took my desserts at dinner and kicked my legs under the table. And any time I dared protest, she’d play sweet-voiced and contrite, probing whatever new bruise or scratch she’d left with long fingers.
“See? No harm done,” she’d say, eyes flashing from my face to the corners of the room and back again.
When she was nine, she dared a servant boy to kiss her on the mouth and then watched without emotion when the boy and his family were removed to a distant farm. When she was twelve, she stole a pouch of her father’s opium and smoked an entire pipe of the stuff, falling asleep right at the dinner table, then blaming her torpor on a late night spent studying. And the year after that—the year I became sickest of all—she tried to run away from home, but was caught after driving the family car into a ditch. She told her father that I’d convinced her to do it, had made her steal the car to come fetch me so that we could run away together.
I’ll never forget Harry Westoff’s face—ruddy and furious—looming over my sickbed like a malevolent moon.
“Daddy,” Cara had said, her voice lilting up in that syrupy-sweet tone. “I’m sure Madeline didn’t mean any harm.” Even through my fever-racked haze, I could see her eyes darting around, just as they had when she tried to convince me that she hadn’t hurt me.
“I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding, Harry,” Father said, his hand heavy on my burning forehead. “At any rate, I will not have you accosting my daughter while she’s sick.”
Father’s word, as always, was law for other gentry. Harry glared at me before sweeping out of the room. Cara stayed to brush her lips against my cheek and whisper in my ear.
“See? No harm done.”
We talked less after that. I remained housebound and frail for almost a year, and by the time we started the academy at fourteen, she’d quickly ascended the pyramid of popularity while my reserved nature and frequent absences kept me in relative obscurity. She chose dresses; I chose books.
We stopped writing to each other on our sleek white tablets, and even our mothers—the sole impetus for our infant companionship—stopped trying to bring us together.
As I stood next to Cara, our past flitting through my mind, I realized that this was the closest we’d been to each other in years. And she’d slapped me, as if I needed another reminder that we weren’t friends—or even friendly—anymore.
“I’ll go get my father,” I told her. “My cousin Jamie is here, too. He can look at your ankle.” The words came out softer than I expected; I realized that I did want to help, no matter how she’d treated me before. She looked so brittle and so uncertain with her shredded dress and bruised skin.
“No!” she said. “Just—just help me up and get me back to the house. No one needs to know I was out here.”
“Cara, they’re turning the house upside down to find out who screamed. How do you plan on blending in with blood on your face and an injured ankle?”
“I don’t know! But they can’t find me like this, they’ll think—”
I never found out what she was worried they’d think because Father and Jamie finally noticed that I wasn’t with them anymore. With a shout to the others, they came straight over to us, Jamie jogging and my father walking in long, brisk strides a few yards behind him, their lanterns casting strange shadows over Cara’s face.
Jamie wasted no time in kneeling on the frozen needles and raising a hand to Cara’s battered face. “May I?” he asked. She looked like she wanted to say no, but my father was standing next to her, his face cold and sharp, and Mr. Wilder and Mr. Glaize were approaching, so she simply rolled her eyes.
“Might as well,” she said.
“Cara Westoff!” Mr. Wilder sputtered, his words labored from his hurry over to us. “What in the name of heaven are you doing out here?”
Cara tilted her head up to him. In the light, I could see the blood on her face more clearly, and bruises, too, running along her throat like a necklace. “I got lost.” Her voice was surly, proud. Pure Cara. “And I don’t need any help, thanks.”
Father pressed his lips together, examining her with steel eyes. “You’ve been assaulted, Miss Westoff.”
Mr. Wilder choked at the word assaulted, and Mr. Glaize started roaming the area around us, as if he expected the assailant to be skulking behind the nearby pines. I myself felt a twinge of fear. If someone could catch Cara, as athletic and tall as she was, by surprise, it wouldn’t take much for them to overpower me, short and thin and with muscles just strong enough to pull a book from the shelf.
“We’ll take it from here,” Father said when Cara remained silent. “Did you see your assailant? Hear anything important?”
“Is he nearby?” Mr. Glaize asked, still tramping around the clearing. “Do you know if he fled?”
“Was he at the debut?” Mr. Wilder asked in a trembling voice. “Not a guest, surely, but maybe as a servant?”
Cara gave me a fierce glare, as if somehow this was my fault, but she didn’t answer.
Father shook his head slightly. “I’m afraid the police will need to question you, and they’ll want to do it promptly. It’s best to get this taken care of quickly, for your sake and for ours.”
Mr. Wilder pressed a hand against his chest, rubbing it as if something was burning him from the inside. “Surely, Mr. Landry, we do not need to involve the police?”
“It’s your property, Mr. Wilder. But a gentry girl’s honor and health are at stake, and you can imagine Addison and Harry Westoff aren’t going to rest until they’ve brought the assailant to justice. I assume you don’t want to seem reticent to help the Westoffs?”
“Reticent? Of course not! Obviously, I’ll do whatever it takes to help the Westoffs. But a brazen attack here at Wilder House, and on Marianne’s debut night . . .”
Father ignored him and knelt in front of Cara. Jamie was still peering into her face, gently lifting her hair to probe the bruises along her jaw, but Father waved him away. “Miss Westoff, before the police get here, is there anything you’d like to tell us—about what you might have seen? Who you might have been out here with?”
Her lips parted as if she was about t
o speak, but she closed her mouth and shook her head. Her green eyes flicked to mine, then back to my father’s.
She’s hiding something, I thought, recognizing those darting eyes.
Just then, Mr. Glaize came crashing back to us, holding a battered leather satchel. Inside, one nuclear charge blinked red. Expired.
In order to be light enough to be carried and replaced easily, the charge boxes were made of a temporary polymer that only lasted for six months before they leaked radiation. It was a modified version of the same polymer that the Cherenkov lanterns were made of, except instead of casting off a small pool of light, these charges powered entire homes. And it was the job of the Rootless to remove these charges before they expired and began to leak radiation inside the houses of the gentry, and also their job to replace the expired boxes with new ones.
“A Rootless was here,” Mr. Glaize said. “Maybe here to change Mr. Wilder’s charges? Maybe he found Miss Westoff out here alone and took advantage?”
“It’s just a bag,” I pointed out. “It could have been there for weeks.”
It was ridiculous how willing the gentry were to blame everything on the Rootless. Missing jewelry and mysterious pregnancies were never openly attributed to carelessness or forbidden trysts. Everything from a broken wall screen to a bad harvest could somehow be traced back to the Rootless.
Cara made a sound between a laugh and a sob. We looked at her, but she just looked down. Wetness glistened on her cheeks.
“No harm done,” she whispered to herself.
I breathed in sharply. I’d heard that before.
“What was that?” Father pressed.
She looked up again, and all signs of defiance and shock where gone. “I said, I think maybe it was a Rootless,” she answered. She could have been acting the part of a trapped princess, the pout and the trembling voice were all so staged. But the men leaned in closer. “I thought I saw dirty clothes and that leather bag. But it happened so fast.” She buried her face in her hands. I thought I could see the glimpse of a bright green eye in between her fingers, as if gauging the reaction of her audience.
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