I murmured a thank-you, and left my room. But something kept me from returning downstairs. Mother would be angry, but I’d rather face a lecture tomorrow than the stifled conversation and blatant elbowing for David Dana’s attention tonight.
Instead, I climbed a wide set of stairs that led to a third-story balcony. It hung above the doors to the ballroom, open for the party, and I could hear the delicate clink of china and silver, the low cultured murmur of the guests. Sweet music spilled out over the terrace and down the stairs to the garden where thousands of lights were strung.
It all looked so beautiful and effortless. It was easy to forget the days the gardeners had spent tending to the garden, the hours the servants spent hanging lights and dragging out solar heaters so that the paths would always be the perfect temperature for strolling.
I sat down on a bench and took off my uncomfortable shoes.
“Hello,” someone said from behind me.
I jumped.
A young man stepped forward into the twinkling garden-lit balcony. The lights shined on his white-blond hair and sharp but pleasing face. I recognized him immediately from Marianne Wilder’s foyer.
“You,” I said.
He lit a cigarette. “Yes, me.”
“Do you always hang around in the dark, smoking?” I asked, irritated that my hiding place had been claimed.
“Only when beautiful girls come visit me.”
He emitted charm like a particle emitted light—I could feel it in the way he leaned toward me, the way he drew out his vowels in a slightly southern drawl. But I could feel something caustic underneath all that charisma, something trapped and restive.
“Would you care to dance with me later?” he asked. “I love to dance.”
“Which would explain why you spend most dances hiding from everybody?”
“Maybe.” A wide grin—I could see his teeth gleaming in the dark. “You are very opinionated, you know.”
“And you are in my way.” I indicated the doorway. “I’m leaving now.”
He came closer. “Please stay.”
I felt a tug somewhere in my stomach, begging me to linger on the balcony with him. Stop being stupid, I told myself. He wasn’t different from any other guy I’d gone to the academy with.
“Despite all appearances to the contrary, I would like some company,” he said. “You’re the most interesting person I’ve met so far, and that includes the famously intimidating Alexander Landry. Now tell me again what you think about the Rootless?”
“What do you care?”
He leaned against the doorway and tapped his cigarette, thinking. Then he changed the subject, looking down off the balcony to the trickle of guests wandering in the artificially heated garden with their glasses of champagne. “It’s the superiority that’s the worst,” he said. “It was like this in Atlanta, too. And at the same time that they’re congratulating themselves on being the happiest people in the world, they’re either being manipulated or trying to manipulate someone else. It’s wearing.”
“You come from Georgia?”
“I just moved here with my mother. The name is David, by the way.”
“David? You are David Dana?”
“What, you thought I was a leprechaun?”
I sat back down. “No,” I said. “It’s just the way people talked about you, I thought you would be . . . different.”
He raised his eyebrows. “How so?”
I coughed a little. What I meant was that I had anticipated someone like the Lawrence brothers: spoiled, arrogant, handsome in the way that made you think of movie stars and clothing models. I hadn’t expected David to be as bored as I am with dinner parties, and I hadn’t expected him to be so quick and honest with his conversation.
It must have shown on my face, because he gave a little laugh. “I see. You were thinking I’d be more like those boys down there. Well, maybe I am.” He took a step closer. “Would you still like me if I was?”
“Who said I liked you in the first place?” I said.
“You sat back down, didn’t you?”
I brushed my fingers across the skirt of the dress Mother had commissioned for me to trap a husband. A leprechaun would be easier to deal with. “My feet hurt.”
David grinned a self-satisfied grin, which nettled me into standing once more. He ignored me and walked over to the balcony, leaning over the railing. “I suppose the army will be the same way,” he continued soliloquizing. “After all, it’s just a place for gentry boys with no estates and middle-class boys without enough money. A chance to claw out a living and some influence.” He tossed his cigarette onto the path below the balcony. It slowly winked out against the cold rocks. “My father was in charge of the Atlantic fleet when I was a boy, a navy man through and through. It’s why I chose the army instead. That, and I get seasick.”
At that moment, high-heeled footsteps echoed in the hallway to the balcony.
“David?” Cara called. “We’ve missed you. The dancing is about to begin.”
I considered a moment. If Cara saw me alone with the man she was currently pursuing, there’d be no end to her anger, and I needed her amenable when I approached her for answers.
“David?” Cara called again.
I scrambled away from the bench and hid behind a large potted plant, tucking my dress behind me. David opened his mouth to answer, frowning in my direction. I held a finger up to my lips and shook my head.
“I was just having a smoke,” he said smoothly.
Cara stepped onto the balcony, giving him a flirtatious smile. ”I would have come with you if you’d asked,” she remarked, sliding an arm around his.
“Well, if there’s dancing, we should hurry back,” David said. They headed inside, arm in arm, with him casting an intrigued look back at me before disappearing out of sight.
Strange. David Dana was certainly exasperating and self-indulgent. And there was something jarring about him. But it wasn’t unpleasant. Not unpleasant at all.
I couldn’t help wishing I could have spent more time on the balcony with him.
I passed the rest of the evening lingering at the edges of the party, avoiding my mother and trying to catch Cara alone. But she was in full coquet mode, clinging to David’s arm, claiming every dance and doing everything she could to monopolize his time.
I went to bed vowing I would find her later this week. If she was well enough to attend a dinner, then she was well enough to have me over for tea and tell me what had really happened the night of Marianne’s debut.
“It’s me again.”
I startled out of a doze, a book sliding off my stomach and onto the now snowless lawn. The blanket I was lying on was bunched and twisted underneath me, and it was slightly damp from the wet grass.
David Dana stood above me, squinting in the sun. In the long light of the afternoon, I could see his face in full detail. He wasn’t as handsome as the pictures that had been circulating on the wall screens made him out to be, or even as good looking as I’d thought him last night. His nose had too much of a curve to it, and his smile was too wide, showing too many teeth—like a wolf. His blond hair was too pale and too fine, and his skin was almost swarthy from a winter spent surfing and drinking on tropical beaches. He looked like an overgrown boy.
“Hello,” I said.
David cast himself on the ground next to me, ignoring the grass on his white shirt and pressed cream slacks—both Italian judging from their style. “Now, I have been thinking since last night, and I’ve come to the conclusion that a girl smart enough to hide from Cara is a girl I’d like to know. Even if she is constantly skulking in dark corners.”
“I just don’t like balls,” I said. “Or people, really.”
He was close enough that I could see the individual lashes that framed his eyes and the long shadows they cast on his cheeks.
“You don’t like parties or people. So what do you like?”
“I was in the school choir before I graduated,” I offered
. The breeze blew and I could smell that spicy smell again, the scent I smelled the first night I met him.
“Did you like it?”
Cloves maybe. Or coriander.
“I didn’t not like it.”
“Your enthusiasm is palpable. Surely there is something else that you enjoy? I will wager a guess . . . it’s books, isn’t it? You look like the scholarly type.”
“What an astute guess, given that I have a book with me right now.”
But I smiled.
His face lit up. “So she does smile! Now tell me about these books. Hobby? Hopeful career?”
Maybe cardamom and cinnamon. The scent wasn’t overwhelming . . . but it was impossible to ignore.
I gave a small nod. “I want to study history and literature at the university.”
“I could tell you were a reader when I first saw you,” David said. “You have that dreamy look in your eye, like you’re wishing yourself onto a page.” He took my chin in his hands and looked deeply into my eyes. Even in the dazzling afternoon light, his eyes were bluer than any lantern. “It’s easy to see in the way you hesitate before answering my questions, before asking any of your own. You’re not used to talking to us flesh-and-blood types.”
I knew he was flirting, that I shouldn’t let him touch me, but his hand was so warm, like sunlight lived inside his skin.
“Can I hazard another guess?”
I nodded.
“I think I know what your favorite stories are.” He pretended to close his eyes, but I could see him eyeing the book in the grass.
“You’re just reading the spine of my book.”
“Okay,” he conceded. “But I would have guessed the tales of King Arthur and his knights anyway.”
“Because you know so much about them?”
“Sure. Young boy with a warrior-king father is left to find his own fate, and when he does, he becomes the king of Britain. He founds an equal partnership of knights to bring justice to his wildlands. Tintagel is his birthplace, Camelot is his home, and Guinevere is his wife. You wouldn’t like Lancelot—you believe in happy endings, and he complicates things too much. You like Merlin, not for his magic, but for his wisdom. Bedivere for his loyalty and Galahad for his purity.”
“You forgot Mordred and Morgause,” I said.
“Mordred the Ambitious, Morgause the Power Hungry. You wouldn’t like them very much, would you?” His voice was quieter now.
“I’m impressed,” I conceded. “And why would you have guessed this before you saw my book?”
“Because we are alike,” he said, dropping his hand.
And there was that weird tug in my stomach again.
“I hate Lancelot for being weak enough to betray his best friend, and as soon as Mordred is born, I almost want to stop reading. Which is a shame, because it’s a beautiful example of people struggling to be their best selves, even when it would be easier to abandon the Grail, or leave the damsel in the tower, or leave the sword in the stone.”
“It’s not true though,” I said, almost hating myself for breaking the spell of the moment. “There were no knights errant, and there is no such thing as an ideal or humane form of feudalism.”
“Not even now, when Madeline Landry is at the top of the feudalism food chain?”
I’d guessed that he knew who I was, since he found me lying in the grass at Landry Park, but I didn’t like the way he said my name. As if he was mocking me.
I didn’t answer.
“Imagine my surprise when I learned that my mysterious skulker-at-balls was none other than the heir to the Landry Estate. Jacob Landry’s direct descendant.”
The tug in my stomach went away.
“You know, they say his ashes are interred somewhere on the grounds.”
“They’ve never been found. And they can stay that way, for all I care.”
He squinted at me. “So you don’t revere him like everyone else?”
I sat up. The fractal doubt was there again, impossible to ignore. I decided I didn’t really want to talk about this right now. “What a pointless question. What does it matter if I revere him? He’s been dead almost two hundred years.”
“That sounds like a no.”
“This house and this park and the farms outside the city all belong to us, and I’m thankful. Thankful to him for building it. I was born here, and ever since I was a girl, my father told me I was part of the house and it was part of me.”
David opened his mouth to answer and shut it, as if not sure what he wanted to say.
“I think about Jacob Landry inventing the Cherenkov lantern to give light to people in countries with no infrastructure, and then the nuclear charge, which saved our world from a climate disaster.”
“But his charges were a little late, weren’t they?” David pointed out. “We lost the coasts to the rising sea levels, our Gulf cities to massive hurricanes.”
“That’s like arguing that the discovery of penicillin is less important because it was discovered thousands of years too late for Neanderthals.”
“What about all the misery that comes from those tiny boxes?”
“You mean the Rootless?”
He nodded.
“They shouldn’t be enslaved. But it’s not my family’s fault.” I remembered my father, and his diatribe about the Rootless. “Not entirely our fault,” I amended. “And, wait—just the other night, you were all for the police arresting the Rootless. Did you agree with me then? That it’s wrong for us to blame them?”
“Do you agree with me that nuclear charges are not a gift to humanity?”
“I can be proud of my family and still perceive unfairness in my world,” I said defensively.
David hastily changed the subject. “So what is it like to be the offshoot of the founder of the gentry? To have the oldest and most enviable estate in the country?”
I snorted. “Right now it’s surviving on money from Canadian banks because our credit here is so poor. What would everyone think if they knew the cornerstone of the gentry empire was hollow and riddled with debt?”
David laughed. “Do you know that you’re the only person I’ve ever met who has been honest about her family’s finances? If I have to hear one more whispered suggestion that someone’s family is worth untold millions of gentry dollars . . .”
Suddenly, I remembered that he probably had scores of girls trying to entice him with their dowries and land and family ski chalets. The thought of all that posturing surrounding him at parties, the ballroom math of annual income and acreage, made me tired.
“I should probably go,” I said.
David put a hand on my arm. “My mother is having tea with your mother and I don’t want to go back in there. I’m begging you, give me an excuse to escape the stories of secondhand ball gowns and who copied whose hairstyle.”
Well, it was rare to meet someone who hated tea with those women as much as I did.
“Do you want to see the grounds?” I heard myself ask. In answer, David pulled me to my feet, his hands tight and strong around mine.
In the faintly warm and slowly fading afternoon, I showed him the rose garden, the herb garden, and the long terraced lawns. We toured the gatehouse, the guesthouse, the carriage house, and the lily pond. And still he seemed anxious to see more. We walked down a thin gravel path to the western edge of the estate, where a wooden door was set into the thick hedge. The neglected door had red paint curling off in long strips and a broken handle coated in rust. I opened it, and David and I walked through.
David looked around in wonder. “A maze.”
“It’s very old,” I said. “It was built before the Last War, when the Uprisen were still meeting secretly.”
“The people who reshaped their world and the lives of everyone in it,” David said. “They still meet secretly, don’t they?”
I thought of my father’s conversation yesterday morning, about his decision to gather the Uprisen. “The descendants of the original Uprisen still communicate,
yes.”
Even though I’d been open about my family’s money earlier, I felt less inclined to tell a stranger about our connection with the Uprisen. For Father, it was a point of pride, and he never wasted an opportunity to remind me that blood, legacy, and land were intertwined. That one day I would be among the circle to carry on the tradition.
It did make me fiercely proud to know a Landry had been involved with all of our nation’s major decisions since the gentry’s inception. On the other hand, the Uprisen also scared me. Especially now that they might align themselves against the Rootless on the word of a lying girl.
David and I moved slowly, even though I could walk the path in my sleep. He examined every statue and every bench along the way, marveling at the relics of a world lost to two centuries. We finally arrived at the center of the maze, greeted by a marble building covered in moss and grime.
“A mausoleum?” he asked. “Am I about to see the mortal remains of Jacob Landry?”
“Hardly. It’s mostly empty inside.” I pulled an old key out from the pocket of my yellow poplin dress and turned the lock. “This is where the Uprisen met to plan without arousing suspicion.”
The door jerked open to a windowless room. Prewar electric lights were mounted on the walls, but they didn’t work since no one had bothered to retrofit the system with nuclear charges. I uncovered the Cherenkov lantern I kept inside, illuminating walls still covered in crumbling maps and a chalkboard still drawn with intricate battle plans—so faded after the two hundred years that only the faintest of lines were visible. The maps still showed the pre-2100 coastlines, the ones without New-New York City and the expanded Lake Michigan, renamed Lake Chicago since the rusted spires of buildings could still be seen from the shore.
“This is where it all happened,” David said, running his fingers over a moldering map. “Where they met and decided to fight. The end of democracy. The start of a new world.”
David picked up an old handgun from the table and pulled back on the empty slide. “Whosoever pulls this sword from this stone . . .”
“. . . is right wise born king of all the land,” I finished.
Landry Park Page 5
