Claire had been eight years old. Her father was her own private king. The last Governor Duchamp—Leonard, the current Governor’s father—hadn’t ever put too much stock in women, and though reformers put on men’s trousers and stomped through the streets howling for work and respect and autonomy, they were eventually rounded up and put into asylums, where they could get the help they needed. One had to appreciate one’s place in society.
Everyone knew that women were the angels in the house. They inspired men to do good works out in the evil world; they made their homes a place of comfort for those men to return to.
Claire’s father might have been her king, but her mother only paid lip service to his rule. Every morning, Susannah Emerson kissed her husband at the door, and when it shut she took Claire into the kitchen, pulled food from the larder, and began quizzing her on mathematics as she mixed up the dough for her buttermilk biscuits. While the two of them pressed the clothes they’d spent hours scouring, Susannah taught her daughter Milton and Donne. She sewed their clothes while teaching her geography and the history of the American Kingdom, and Claire threaded her mother’s needles while she listened. Sometimes the little neighbor girl with the eyepatch would come by with apples or new-made cheese or a cloth of her own to sew, and Susannah would set her a place for her to listen, too.
But Beatrix wasn’t there on the day that Claire remembered best. That day, while making a dress for her daughter—a gray poplin with billowing sleeves, the last of her mother’s dresses Claire would ever wear—she asked what Claire thought of their young Governor.
Claire shrugged. “He’s French. I don’t like him much.”
Susannah Emerson had pursed her lips as she laid a half-finished sleeve out on the table. “Do you know the story?” she began. This was how all her mother’s history lessons began. A story. She smiled down at the length of poplin before her. “The Duchamps have been woven into the fabric of St. Cloud for nearly a hundred years.”
The original Governor, Montague Duchamp, had been a Frenchman who had helped the young American Kingdom win the War of 1812. He’d been a spymaster; his agents embedded themselves into the British units up in frigid Canada, fed them lies about their American enemy. Fifteen cannons became twelve. Five hundred troops became fifty. The British underestimated their enemy’s resources, and because of it, their American enemy won.
In thanks, King George Washington carved out a province for Duchamp. The long stretch of land that swaddled the Mississippi was given into his keeping; at that time, it was the farthest west the American Kingdom stretched.
Duchamp, in an attempt to maintain the peace, named his new province St. Cloud after the town in Île-de-France where he had lived as a boy. And if by chance his new subjects found their ruler unpatriotic, they would be appeased by his ruling seat—Monticello-by-the-Lake, a city perched on Lake Michigan, a city named for Thomas Jefferson’s estate that he’d so admired on his visit to the country’s capital to meet the King.
By all accounts Duchamp ruled his own province fairly and well.
His grandson Leonard hadn’t. When the neighboring province Livingston-Monroe began to nibble away at their western border, establishing military outposts on the Mississippi’s western banks, Leonard Duchamp shrugged at them. Let them have what they would; his focus turned ever back to Monticello.
This Duchamp patronized artists, built skyscrapers, paved the roads. Had his guard ignore the brothels and the dance halls if they looked respectable enough from the street. All the lines between “looks nice” and “is nice” began to blur. When the first European prince deigned to visit the city, he disdained a soiree at the Governor’s Mansion for a night in the city’s sordid Levee district, where, in a gilded pool hall, he played roulette with thieves and sipped his champagne from a courtesan’s shoe. The city grew ever wilder, ever lusher, ever hungrier to rage out beyond its borders.
And when Leonard Duchamp died suddenly a year before his Great Exposition was to be staged, his young son, Remy, was thrust into his role and told to make the marvel happen.
“It’s a complicated place, our city,” her mother had said, holding her piecework up to the light. Claire had abandoned her work to listen, her chin resting on her hands. “But I don’t think it’s a bad place to live.”
“Father thinks it’s evil,” Claire said.
“Not evil. Alive.”
She shook her head. “Father doesn’t want me to go out into it alone. Not without someone to keep watch over me.”
At that, her mother paused, then set the unfinished sleeve onto the table. “Never be afraid of being alone, Claire. I’ve taught you well enough, and why? For you to be your own best company. You can mind yourself.”
It was the closest her mother ever came, in words, to defying her father, and when the typhus swept through their tenement two weeks later like a wave and took her beautiful mother with it, down and out the front door in a pinewood box, Claire held on to that one moment of rebellion.
Her brother left only two months later. Though Ambrose had always been a fine athlete, he had been so anxious the morning of his tryout for the King’s baseball team that he’d snuck out to vomit in a flower bed. Ambrose had always told her she could be whatever she wanted, a queen or a mathematician, and so she took both her brother’s hands in hers and told him he was the best shortstop in the world. When he didn’t seem to believe her, she took his baseball bat and blessed him, touching each of his shoulders the way a queen might, and he went off into the morning and came back with the news he’d made it through to the next round.
She didn’t bless him then. It felt silly, childish, and anyway she didn’t think he needed it, talented as he was. But Ambrose couldn’t catch a thing the next day at tryouts. Couldn’t hit the ball. The coach told him, bemused, that he’d give him one more shot. That final morning her big brother hauled her out, his “good-luck charm,” to bless him again. He even went down on one knee like he was her knight, and rode off to his tryouts with Claire’s handkerchief in his pocket.
Suffused with confidence, Ambrose made the team. Claire told her father the whole story at dinner, after Ambrose had waved goodbye to them from the window of the King’s train, but Jeremiah Emerson only paid her half attention.
For the rest of her years, she would think back on that innocent story told over cold pigeon pie and wonder. Was that the moment where the train derailed?
Because her father’s work grew wilder and stranger, and he grew stranger with it. After Susannah’s death, after Ambrose’s departure, Jeremiah left his young daughter in the house alone. Often after work he would stay out for hours, carousing in the Levee district he so disdained. When he returned home, stinking drunk, he’d wander into his daughter’s room to cry. “I can’t live in this sinful city,” he’d sob, kneeling by her bed. “I can’t live in this house. This is a land of death.” And then he’d leave his daughter in the dark, to her ever-worsening dreams.
Jeremiah Emerson didn’t touch his daughter, much less hug her goodnight. He couldn’t even look at her straight, this girl with her mother’s face. He arranged for the necessities, and let her grow.