She was folded up onto herself on this street corner because, while she wanted to see the new posters pasted to the Campbells’ building brick, she didn’t want anyone to steal the package in her arms. She didn’t have a lot of control over her own life, but she could control whether tonight her father slapped her full across the face again.
“But then,” she said to Beatrix beside her, “if he notices that I’m missing one of the socket wrenches he paid for, he might do it anyway.”
“Hush. He won’t notice, you know he won’t even look through the bag until the morning. And besides, you know I’m good for it.” Beatrix craned her neck, trying to get a better look at the poster. “I’m never going to get this engine working if I have to rely on my own coin for the materials. Let’s consider it a donation.”
Claire smiled, despite herself. “Is it a donation if you’ve forced me to do it?”
“I’m not forcing you. I’m forcing Jeremiah Emerson. And we hate him.” She said it like it was fact.
Claire supposed it was. She shifted the knobby bundle to her other arm. “I still can’t see what it says. We can come back tonight, after the day’s died down.”
“Your father won’t be home yet, you don’t need to rush. And anyway, it’ll be about the Fair.”
“Of course it’s about the Fair. It always is. It’ll still be about the Fair when we come back. And besides, I’ll be gone by week’s end, does it really matter if—”
“Everyone will know already,” Beatrix said, and as if the thought spurred her on, she propelled herself forward. Though she was tiny, her wild blond bouffant made her easy to follow. It had survived both her work at the stockyard and her long, hot walk home in a boater hat. Now her hair survived the crowd, sure and steady as a halo above her pale face.
She was back in moments, face grim, and she took Claire by the arm to pull her away—careful, as always, to make sure she didn’t touch Claire’s skin with her bare hand.
“What did it say?” Claire asked, but Beatrix was two steps ahead and affected not to hear. Down Augustine Street, past the orphans from the Home for the Friendless marching in their long gray lines, their lunch pails hanging from their grubby hands. The little girl who had died had been one of them, Claire knew. She dropped a coin into one of their buckets.
Through it all, Beatrix moved like a dancer, and Claire her poorly practiced partner. You’d never think she was the one who was half blind, Claire thought, but she supposed it made a certain kind of sense. One only had to look at the cloth-of-gold eye patch her best friend wore to know that Beatrix had to watch her steps. The watchfulness made her graceful, and that grace carried them through the congested streets.
Beatrix stopped at the foot of the stairs up to the El railway station, at the end of a very long line of men. She adjusted her skirts, and then, discreetly, her corset.
Claire gave her a sympathetic look. She was struggling, too, to catch her breath under her laces.
“It’s going up tomorrow,” she said. “The Fair. That’s what the poster said. It’s going on, as scheduled.”
“You were expecting another delay,” Claire said.
Beatrix hesitated. “I was hoping for one. For you. We’ve had so many, and so close to the scheduled start—I was just hoping that if you’d have some good news for him tonight—”
Claire hardly heard her. She wasn’t sure why it was such a surprise, that the Fair would go on. But then, when it had been delayed for so long, who could blame her?
“I can tell your father for you,” Beatrix was offering.
At that, she snorted. “That would make it worse, and you know it. Sunday just needs to come and go without him suspecting anything.”
The two of them climbed the metal stairs, slowly, as the crowd boarded the train. It waited, sleepy as a cat, painted as always in the governor’s midnight-blue livery.
“He wants to be paid for his work.”
“I understand, but if he won’t get paid until after his Barrage, you’d think he’d want it to happen sooner—”
Claire lowered her voice. “There’s still a problem with the Barrage.”
“I’m sorry?” Beatrix laughed, shook her head. “No. But you said—”
The unexpected April heat, the awkward weight of the package she carried, the long black curl plastered to her temple. The dread of seeing her father not twenty minutes from now. “He swears it will work,” Claire said, fiercely enough that her best friend blanched. “And we’d all better hope it will, because if our creditors come by again, they will break his hands, Beatrix, and God only knows what Duchamp will say—” The woman behind them coughed delicately. “Governor Duchamp will say. Much less the General. We have a permanent pavilion waiting. It has our name on it. Our name—and if the Barrage isn’t a success, if my father fails, and if Sunday comes and he’s in one of his rages, I won’t be able to—”
“All aboard!” The conductor’s voice was a trumpet. “This is a Monticello train, calling at Lordview, Woodlawn, Delaware, and Almondale!”
The crowd surged forward, taking the two girls along with it, and as she clutched her package to her chest, Claire seethed. She had never seen anything like this in her seventeen years. So many bodies. People from all over the First American Kingdom, there to gawk at the city Claire lived her life in, like it was an amusement or an oddity. They were there in that train car with her, people from her own province, Monticellans and St. Clouders and the backwoods farmers who tithed corn and soybeans to their Governor; Livmonians, those settlers from the province of Livingston-Monroe, weathered in their muslin shirts; wasp-waisted girls from New Columbia with their parasols, their clutching children; folk from every corner of their country and from Britain and Persia and Japan besides. All of them here for the Governor’s Exhibition and Fair.
They had been here for a month now, clogging up Monticello’s dusty roads, lunching by Monticello’s glimmering lake, making Claire’s life louder and harder and just all-around worse, and tomorrow the Fair they waited on would actually open. The axe would finally fall.
“All aboard!” the conductor shouted again, and Beatrix yanked her skirts away from the closing doors, and all at once the train fell silent as it rattled away from the station.
“I’m sorry I was cross,” Claire said. She was horribly aware of the man next to her, of the two inches of skin between her gloves and the long sleeves of her dress. How close he was to touching her.
“I know,” Beatrix replied. They had said it to each other before. They would say it again.
“Come by at eight tonight? One last hurrah.”
“Eight,” Beatrix murmured back. “Don’t forget my tails.”
The train had emptied out before pulling into the station at Lordview. The neighborhood had originally been called Lakeview, for its sweeping view of Lake Michigan, until one of Governor Duchamp’s courtiers had been granted the bluff overlooking the bathing beach to build his own mansion. Now, instead of the lake, the neighborhood gazed upon the high walls that surrounded Lord Anderson’s gardens. Some wag had started calling it Lordview, and that was that.