He had a horror of their tenement home that he claimed was tainted by sickness. But he didn’t air the place out or move his family. He didn’t do anything; he didn’t seem to mind if that sickness he so feared took his daughter.
He waited. For what, Claire didn’t know.
In the meantime, she played by herself, dirty and unkempt, her own best company. She snuck out to eat meals with Beatrix’s family, and though the Lovells had so little to share, they welcomed her to their table. When their tenements felt too small, Beatrix and Claire ran wild through the Monticello streets, and Jeremiah Emerson never knew the least of it. When he came home in the evenings, he seared his meat on the stove and cut her off bits with his knife, as though she were a dog. Most nights he left it at that, left the dishes to molder on the kitchen sideboard and his daughter to put herself to bed.
Claire prayed every night for her brother to come home to help, to fix things, but their mother’s death didn’t seem to affect Ambrose at all. At the very least, it didn’t bring him back to Monticello-by-the-Lake. Instead he sent Claire letters and money, when all she wanted was for him to come and take her up in his arms and carry her away from this place.
Two years passed. Then her father brought a girl home. A German orphan from the Home of the Friendless, meant to cook for them and do their chores. She would treat Miss Claire like a lady, Jeremiah said, and in return she would have a place to sleep. Margarete scowled from underneath her new bonnet and said she would.
While the urchin rolled up her sleeves and got to cleaning their kitchen, Jeremiah Emerson took his daughter by the hand and sat her next to him by the fire. He expressed surprise at her height, as though she’d been doing all this growing in purposeful secret.
“Things are going to be different, girl,” he said.
He was making progress on his work. He was developing a new kind of gun. Something that could make big explosions, ones he indicated with his hands, as though explaining to a dog the size of a promised bone.
Claire wanted to bristle at the implication. Her mother had taught her calculus, but she had taught her too to love her father. She settled on nodding, as though she were amazed.
A promotion would be coming soon. Did she understand what that was? And when Claire nodded again, so happy to see her father’s joy, he looked down at their clasped hands and said, “Do you know? I feel like maybe we should all have ourselves a treat. Lemon ices!”
She nodded again, bewildered. There hadn’t ever been money for treats, or so she’d thought.
“Lemon ices and—no. I’ll send the girl out for ices. I have an idea for—an idea. I won’t say what. Here,” he said, and dug a handful of coins from his pocket to put on the table. “Go. I’ll be in the other room.”
Margarete looked up from the kettle she was heating over the stove. “That’s enough coin to feed this family for a week,” she said, bitterly, and Claire realized, despite her lessons, how little she knew about the world.
The promotion came the next day, as her father had promised. He would oversee the team building the gun he had spoken about; from now on, he would come home with his face clean. Again he sat with his daughter in front of the fire and took her hands. “Let me tell you about my day’s work,” he said, and the next day, “Let me tell you about my successes,” and the next he told her of his triumphs, and then his quick rise to the top, the house that he had bought them in Lordview, the servants that they would have, his giant hands clutching her small ones until she thought that she had lost them entirely, that he would take her hands from her altogether.
He touched her, his only constant, and he claimed that her touch brought on miracles. As though that half-heard story she’d told him about blessing her brother had rooted in him somewhere, grown wild in the absence of the sun.
She had her mother’s spirit, he said; it was in her, animating this magic, spurring his successes. She was blessed, and she would never leave him, and if someday he would grow to despise her for the very things he now worshipped, if she dreamed of him choking to death on his black powder in the night—well, it was no matter. A good daughter would never disobey her father.
Three
Back in her room, Claire rang for Margarete.
It wasn’t something she was in the habit of doing. She didn’t like to treat the girl like a servant, and so when Margarete rapped on the door, Claire answered it with bills in her hand.
“Three dollars,” Claire said, “if you go downstairs, count to one hundred, then loosen the screws on the pot rack.”
It was an outrageous sum. Still, Margarete’s eyes narrowed. “I can’t do this again.”
Two months ago, when they had last pulled this trick and the pots fell all at once in an explosion of sound, Emerson had thundered through the house, shaking with anger at the builders who had so poorly installed his kitchen. But he hadn’t shouted at Margarete or brought in a man to reinforce the ceiling. He’d just screwed the rack back in and hung the pots back up. For Claire’s father, that was remarkable restraint.
And for the time it’d bought her, she thought it a good bargain.
“Four dollars,” Claire said, “and another dollar Saturday night. My final offer.”
They looked at each other.
“Fine,” Margarete said, and snatched the bills.
“Count to one hundred!” Claire hissed after her. She shut the door as quietly as she could, then rushed over to her massive four-poster bed, counting in her head.
One hundred: silence. One hundred twelve: noise. A riot of noise. And Claire pushed.
Her bed moved a full foot. The sound was excruciating, and still it was buried under the sound. Through the wall, Claire heard her father curse and shove back his chair. “Margarete!” he yelled.
Claire was already pulling up the loose floorboard under her bed. She had about ten minutes until her father asked why her door was closed.
Closed to him, he would say. He liked to have his daughter where he could see her at all times.
Under the floorboards was everything of value Claire owned. Two full suits of male clothes, with gloves and top hats to match, the name Ambrose Emerson embroidered inside the jackets. Twenty-two dollars in cash (well, seventeen, after she paid Margarete), a full year’s savings. A photograph of her mother, an infant Claire on her lap, both of them staring hard at the camera. A train ticket, from Monticello-by-the-Lake to the city of Orleans in Livingston-Monroe; an immigrant identification card under the name Mary Wallace. A cardboard box. And a stack of letters tied with blue ribbon.
Claire reached down into her corset and slowly, carefully, pulled out a leather sheath. Inside was a hunting knife, which she added to her cache.
She’d purchased it on her father’s credit that afternoon. Despite everything, some small part of her had flinched at the thought of adding to his financial misery—but she would be long gone by the time that bird came home to roost.
It had only been a minute. Her father was still storming around downstairs. Her hands moved, as though of their own accord, to the bundle. I just need to remind myself it’s real—
Still kneeling on the floor, she shook out the most recent letter and read.
Dearest penguin,
I spent the morning straightening up what is to be your room. My teammates had a good laugh at my expense, doing women’s work, but I aim to take every precaution. Housekeepers can be bribed, and Father knows the name of our hotel. When you arrive, I want everyone to believe you’re Cousin Mary just over from Ireland. I have your papers for you, enclosed. Don’t ask from where—it’s best you don’t know.