“Miss Emerson,” he said, reaching out to take her hand in a way he surely thought was charming. He was a handsome man, but it was an afterthought. His uniform was fit to swallow any beauty he had.
“A pleasure.” Claire kept her hands where they were, and after a moment, he dropped his.
“Your father”—he said this conspiratorially, as though Jeremiah Emerson weren’t still five feet away—“will be the death of us, you know.”
“I thought that was why you hired him.” When he raised his eyebrows, Claire said, “Death.”
“Yes.” The General smiled. “Of course. He’ll do it well, when all’s said and done. And tell me—”
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I’ve been holding this bag of wrenches for three hours now.” With her foot, she shut the door behind her.
Claire knew she should be more careful with him. The General could fabricate some offense, have her thrown in jail. He could withdraw her father’s contract. He could finally make the marriage proposal he’d been threatening for months; he could make it, take her to bed, then withdraw the offer immediately. He could wreck her life in any of a dozen ways for mouthing off to him, but Claire was Claire, and she’d never met a bad decision she didn’t like.
Sunday, she thought. Sunday. All I need is to make it till this Sunday.
“Your wrenches,” she said, dumping the bag on her father’s desk.
Jeremiah Emerson scowled. He was a beefy man, with thick, corded arms and a thatch of dark hair. He strutted around in shirtsleeves, looped his fingers through his suspenders, left his jacket crumpled in a ball on the floor. Claire often thought that he had cultivated his idiosyncrasies in the same way as his inventions—deliberately, with great care.
“You’re late,” he said.
“What did the General want?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear.”
Claire kept the desk between them. It was safest that way. “What do you need me to do?”
He studied her. “Open the bag,” he said. “No. With bare hands. Come on, girl, you know better than that.”
She drew her head up high. Gently, she pulled off one glove, then the other, and laid them before her.
“On with it.”
Claire untied the grosgrain ribbon and tugged open the mouth of the bag. The wrenches inside gleamed dully. The study wasn’t bright enough to allow for intellectual pursuits or professional exploits; the electric lamps that were everywhere else in the city were missing here. This room was still lit by gaslight, another money-saving measure. Any real work Jeremiah Emerson did was at his pavilion in Jefferson Park.
This room was for conversations with the Governor, and the Governor’s staff. It was for organizing his notes for the next day.
For tormenting his daughter.
“The wrenches.”
Claire wanted to take up the lot of them and pitch them into her father’s face. Black his eyes. Knock out his teeth. Rattle the brain that wasn’t smart enough to get them out of the mess he had created, that relied on this insane superstition instead. She’d gone far enough to lift a pair of torque wrenches when her father clucked his tongue.
“One at a time,” he said, his eyes bright with anticipation.
He didn’t have to give her instructions. She knew what she was expected to do. In one open palm, she cradled the tool. With the other, she drew her fingers together over it, like a priest would sprinkle water on a child.
“I bless this tool,” her father said.
“I bless this tool,” Claire said, low.
His chin went up sharply. “Did you mean it?”
“I meant it.”
His hands seized, and in a galvanic motion, he lunged forward to pull it from her hands.
“You have to mean it, girl,” he breathed, the wrench bright in his fingers. “You have to mean it, or else I’ll be in the same place I was this morning. Do you know how they looked at me when I walked in? All those porters, those immigrant whoresons I found down in the stockyard—I gave them better lives, I offered them clean work, to lift and carry and mind my work, and after my failures, those same men had the audacity to look at their employer and pity him today! I will not have that! I will not be threatened by foreigners who were not born to this great American Kingdom, these—these Germans who want my contract, and moreover, I will not have sedition in my own house! You know that you are blessed—”
Claire took a shuddering step back, hands clutching her skirts.
“—you know that you are blessed and that it is required of you to share those blessings with me. I am your father. You have been standing each night in this house I have raised over your head and you think that you can fool me? That you can withhold what is mine by right because of your feminine whims and caprices? No.” He was whispering still, harsh and forced, his hands convulsing around the wrench. “No. I say no to that. I say you will not bring down this dishonor upon my home.”
Some small, screaming part of Claire thought, He’ll beat me with that wrench. She thought, He should have been a preacher. She thought, No one will ever believe just how powerless I really am.
“I bless this tool,” he growled.
Claire swallowed. “I bless this tool,” she said, and the words were crackling and strange in her mouth.
With a clang, he dropped the wrench onto the pile. He held his hands out, like she was a child again and needed help climbing up to her feet after a fall.
She placed her hands in her father’s. By now, she knew what he wanted.
“I bless this man,” he said, and waited.
Claire looked into his horrible, eager eyes. “I bless this man,” she said, and what she thought was, I hope you die in your sleep, and though every night she wished it, every morning she woke to him still there, still breathing.
“Bless my work in this exhibition. Bless it, and mean it, goddammit, or it’s your head on the platter too.”
“I bless his work,” she whispered.
If that was the case, if she had so little control, how much power could a girl like her possibly have?
Jeremiah Emerson waited, head cocked, as though some angel was going to whisper in his ear. “Let me get my clothes for the exposition,” he said finally. “You’ll bless those. You’ll bless my notes. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours. You won’t need to know a thing about them, of course. I wouldn’t expect you to.” He sighed. “I only wish that I could take you to the pavilion tonight. But I can’t risk it. Not until tomorrow. A man shouldn’t show his weakness that way.”
“In what way?” she asked into the waiting silence.
“No one should take his heart out with him in public. No one,” he said, and swept off to his bedroom, leaving Claire to stare disbelievingly after him.
Two
Jeremiah Emerson’s madness, as his daughter understood it, had begun after her mother’s death. More precisely, it had started in the weeks before.
Her brother was already training furiously for his escape; he intended to play baseball for the royal touring team. Her father had been working at a munitions firm, developing a project he called a “grenade,” and when he came home at night to their little tenement apartment, his face and neck were dusted with the black powder that was the mark of his trade. The talk was all of explosives, of their potential in combat. He tinkered and tinkered, but he could make nothing explode.