“I support you in all your endeavors,” Claire said. She hadn’t meant to upset her friend. “But my support isn’t the same as my participation. You know that. And besides, what does it matter? I’m leaving.”
Beatrix tipped her head to the side. Her cloth-of-gold eyepatch glinted, caught the light. It had been a gift from a fellow she’d met a few months back, a speculator who’d replaced her black eyepatch with an accessory as golden as her hair. “You don’t fit in this world any better than I do, Claire Emerson, and making pure little wishes with your pure little heart won’t do anything to change that. Sometimes compromise is necessary. No matter where in the American Kingdom you live.”
At that, Claire whistled. “A shot across the bow.”
“That was rather too harsh,” Beatrix reflected.
“Were you practicing for the next man you need to cut down to size?”
“Only if I’m using your sword.” Beatrix’s fingers tightened on Claire’s arm. Skin on cloth. This was allowed. “Fine, then. Don’t come to our meeting. Go find yourself a forward-thinking man in Perpetua’s mews instead. It’s a fine night for a short romance, don’t you think?”
They took the train back from Lordview to the Loop, and a hansom cab from there to the Levee. As their carriage clattered down Dearborn Street, Beatrix rolled up the curtain so the two of them could see out. This close to the stockyards, you could still smell the butchered meat, and though Claire knew it would mark her as an outsider to the neighborhood, she covered her nose anyway. Two girls in violet gowns, arms trailing with ribbons, ran past down the gravel road into Freddy’s Fast Feet on the corner, and as the girl in front wrenched the door open, the sound from Freddy’s flea-bitten orchestra came spilling out into the street like blood.
One of the girls screamed. Claire shuddered.
“She’s only meeting her beau,” Beatrix said. She hadn’t covered her nose the way Claire had. “Not being murdered.”
“She’s screaming as though she’s being murdered.”
Beatrix shrugged, and Claire could tell her nonchalance was as affected as her two-tone brogues. “Maybe that comes later.” It was the Levee, after all.
Their hansom shuddered to a halt in front of the Perpetua Club.
The doorman looked at Claire and Beatrix, dapper in their tuxedos, and gave them a small smile. Claire pressed two dimes into his palm: their admission fee. With one white-gloved hand, he pushed the door open. The music that thundered out was a storm of brass. A trumpet keening.
“Ladies,” he said, because at the Perpetua Club, everyone knew about the long hair hidden under their toppers.
Claire was shaking hers out, but Beatrix, as usual, had kept hers on. It depended on her mood, whether she took off her disguise. “It depends whether I want to be in control or not, really,” she’d said.
“You’re always in control,” Claire had countered.
“Well, yes,” Beatrix had said, surprised, “but it depends if I want that known or not.”
The butler took Claire’s hat; he winked at Beatrix, and only took her cane. It was hard to see him in the dim light, to hear his hellos over the crash and echo of the orchestra. Already more men were piling in behind him, more girls in fluorescent gowns. Some were far more expensive than their garish colors would have suggested. On the daytime streets of Monticello-by-the-Lake, social class was easy to suss out, but the girls behind Claire could be either dignitaries or washerwomen.
The one thing they weren’t were prostitutes. Once, the Perpetua Club had been called something else, had served a visiting prince his wine out of a courtesan’s shoe, but the club didn’t run girls anymore. Not since Perpetua (no last name, thank you very much) had taken charge. As usual, she was pouring drinks, her white hair beautifully, architecturally piled up onto her head. In its tilt and scope, it echoed the tower of champagne flutes she had built before her on the bar.
“Beatrix,” she said, holding a smoking bottle of bubbly like a gun she’d just fired. “Here for a meeting?”
“The Daughters of the American Crown don’t convene for another half hour,” Beatrix said, flopping down onto a stool. “I do hope the sandwiches we ordered will be appropriately quaint and delicious.”
Perpetua raised an eyebrow. She knew the true nature of the DAC; they met in her club, after all. “Well, then. How goes the flying machine business?”
“Wretched.” Beatrix tucked her delicate hands up under her chin. “Make a girl feel better and pour that champagne, will you?”
“This isn’t for you, dear, it’s for the Guard and their guests.” Perpetua nodded her head toward the tables at the edge of the dance floor. Claire could see the sea of the St. Cloud men’s midnight-blue uniforms and—shockingly—the red of the Livmonian soldiers among them. The men were laughing and elbowing one another like they’d never been at odds. Like their provinces were allies, not in an uneasy stalemate.
A coup, Ambrose had written. Something was coming.
“Strange bedfellows,” Claire said quietly, under the din.
Perpetua must have been reading her lips. It was a skill that served her well, running the city’s loudest—and most notorious—dance hall. “You’ve got sharp eyes, girl,” she said. “But a common cause can build bridges.”
“What’s tonight’s cause, then?”
“Besides promoting the well-being of our beloved monarchy? Booze,” Beatrix said, and Perpetua threw her head back and laughed.
“Let’s not talk about the Fair or the crown. Let’s talk flying machines,” Claire said, settling in next to Beatrix. “Let’s talk about my genius friend. How did the rest of your day go?”
“Wretched,” Beatrix said again. As always, her friend was distracted, peering out toward the dance floor like she was looking for someone particular in that garish sweep and sway. It made it hard to hear her. “I adjust the angle of one wing, the glider banks. I adjust the other? The glider banks. I want the glider to bank? It crashes. In full view of the men at the stockyard. Sometimes, I swear to you, they see me as their entertainment. I’m not looking to be a one-woman carnival.”
Claire was sure that was what the stockyard men had thought when they’d first clamped eyes on Beatrix: a bit of fun, some sad little girl with one eye and a hammer she surely didn’t know how to use. Even with the protection of her brother’s presence, she was a laughingstock. Claire loathed being underestimated. It made her push the world further and further away. But Beatrix took double the punishment her best friend did, and it made her draw danger, make it dance.
The fourth time her warehouse was robbed, Beatrix had turned up on Claire’s doorstep drunk. “I hate them so much,” she’d said, “that I want to celebrate it.”
“Who are you looking for? You’re going to crane your neck right off,” Claire said, watching Beatrix scout the dance floor. “If it isn’t already broken from the last time you took your glider out to play.”
“Say that, and I won’t invite you out the next time I do.”
Claire knew that Beatrix was joking, but it twisted her heart anyway. Saturdays on the beach with Beatrix—the wind, the postcard light, her best friend in her ridiculous goggles—were the only times Claire knew that she was happy. She even loved the magnificent blunder of her crashes, so long as Beatrix didn’t almost drown, or break her leg, or fracture her collarbone.