The priest looked at her with something like pity.
Pity: the province of the lazily superior.
“Have a very moral evening,” she bit out, and she fled before she could hear any other reply.
Through the streets of the Levee, past the boardinghouses and hotels full to bursting even now, even this late, windows open and ablaze, Livingston-Monroe soldiers dicing outside a shuttered restaurant. A coup, she thought, and thought again of the two men at Perpetua’s, their interest in her father’s Barrage. Right under our noses. She watched them for a moment more, the longest she could stand there without attracting their attention. Her face was in shadow under her top hat.
What would King Washington say if his kingdom went to war? West and East Florida had been toying with the idea for decades, but this—this would be something else.
One of the soldiers leaned forward over his dice, looking under her hat, and Claire took off down the street. At the steps to the train platform, she hesitated. Though it was nearing dawn, the El would be running all night—a benefit of the Fair.
She should go home, she knew. Only hours from now, her father would be rousing her from her bed to accompany him to the opening ceremonies. The mayor would speak, and then Governor Duchamp would speak, and then Jeremiah Emerson would have his moment—a display of might the likes of which St. Cloud had never seen. Progress and war-making, hand in hand.
And Claire would be an ornament on that hand.
Gas, shuddering smoke—a train was approaching the station. She looked again at the platform.
“Claire!”
She sighed and turned. “Beatrix.”
Her friend was flushed, her mouth a smear in the gaslight. “Aren’t you going to ask how many?” she said, weaving.
Claire suppressed a smile. “How many?”
“Two. Two offers to take me away from this miserable place. To show me ‘a better life.’” Beatrix blinked owlishly up at the platform, at the waiting train with its open doors. “How many did you have?”
“One,” Claire said. “Or one half. Does it count if it comes from a priest?”
“It counts twice!” Beatrix crowed. She clasped Claire’s arm with both hands. “It doesn’t matter, though. You are leaving this miserable place. You aren’t going home now, are you?”
Above their heads, the train doors rushed shut. “Not on this train,” Claire said, drily.
“No. Of course not. Come to my workshop. Stay the night there.”
“The night before the Fair? My father would skin me alive.”
Beatrix smiled, tipsily. “He could charge for it. Might make a nice exhibit.”
“Don’t give him ideas.” Claire was tired, so very tired, but Beatrix, as always, fairly burned with energy. When the two of them were out at Perpetua’s, drinking and dancing, one often wilted while the other bloomed. “What is so important that I risk my father’s wrath?”
Beatrix stepped out into the street to hail a hansom cab. “You haven’t forgiven me yet,” she said, arm up in the air like a flag.
Hours later, and Claire was clawing herself out from the grip of a dream. She’d been leaning over the starboard prow of a ship, looking for something glimmering in the deep. The salt whip of the air, the low, scraping groan of the anchor hauled from the water, a hoarse shout that land had been spied in the distance.
A strange dream, she thought, stretching, and then opened her eyes to find herself in the stockyard, the smell of blood rich and salty in the air. In the distance, shouting. The terrified lowing of cattle.
Claire had much preferred the ship.
“Hello, little bird,” a voice said.
Claire struggled up to her elbows. She’d fallen asleep in her dress jacket. One of the brass buttons had come off in her fingers in the night, and she held it up confusedly like a coin. “Bea,” she said, fighting a rising wave of panic. “What time is it?”
There was light outside the window. Her father would have looked for her and found her missing.
He’ll kill me, she thought. He’ll kill me, he’ll think me dead and when he finds me, he’ll kill me for certain—
But below that voice, another. A new one. He can’t kill what’s gone, the voice said. And you’ll be gone tomorrow.
Claire forced her muscles to relax, stretched her hands above her head. The idea still felt good. Let him wait, she decided.
She distracted herself by taking one last good look at her favorite place in the world.
Beatrix’s workshop in the morning was not unlike the girl herself: eccentric, bright, unexpectedly beautiful. It wasn’t any bigger than a garden shed, though it had a high ceiling that was ringed with small square windows that caught the eastern light. One could only work here before noon if one hoped to see anything at all.
This morning, the light was coming down in ribbons—across the tools mounted above her small wooden workbench, across the jars of nuts and bolts, the lengths of chain, a leaning stack of stiff heavy paper, the supply of soft red leather Claire had spirited away from her father’s study. Blueprints were tacked up above her makeshift drafting table—variations on Beatrix’s glider that she had drawn out herself, alongside diagrams torn from books of pelicans and red-tailed hawks, a crumpled pencil copy of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and of course, the patent diagram of the first glider model from the much-maligned Wright sisters. Claire had been sleeping on Beatrix’s “cot,” a sheet thrown over a pile of hay for those nights Beatrix wanted to begin her work with the dawn.
The place smelled of sawdust and spilled ink. It was cramped, drafty, hot in the summer and teeth-grindingly cold in the winter. No matter the season, it smelled like death—of hogs, of cows, of the men with the sharp little knives who slaughtered them.
It was also irrevocably Beatrix’s, which was more than Claire could say of anything of hers.
When Beatrix’s father had died, her mother had tasked Beatrix to sort through his papers, as Mrs. Lovell couldn’t read. Mr. Lovell had been a spendthrift and a gambler, a man who’d win and lose a fortnight’s pay in the back room of the bars he frequented, and so Beatrix hadn’t been surprised to find, among his papers, the deed for a little outbuilding in the stockyard. It had belonged to one Thompson Gummit of Darling and Company before a disastrous round of catch-the-ten whist.
Beatrix had pocketed the deed to show to Claire, and the girls had decided, huddled together on the street outside the Emerson house, to keep it a secret from all but Beatrix’s older brother. Women couldn’t inherit property; the place would never be hers. So when she visited her workshop, she told the stockyard workers—startled by the sight of a girl who wasn’t somebody’s wife—that she was the inventor Barnaby Lovell’s assistant, undertaking his more dangerous private experiments while he busied himself running his Edison-esque empire.
And the real Barnaby Lovell—a twenty-year-old freight handler at T&E Fertilizer Works who, like the rest of the known world, had an all-consuming fondness for his kid sister—made an appearance every few weeks to hover in the doorway of the outbuilding, hemming and hawing loudly over Beatrix’s latest prototype while the bemused hog butchers watched from a distance.
Such was Beatrix’s world, and the means she was making to escape it. “I’m going to give that fancy man Tesla a run for his money,” she’d say, bent over a blueprint with a pencil in her teeth. “That boy Edison will beg to come work for me.”