Again.
“You’re looking for Bertie and Olivetta, aren’t you,” Claire said. She’d seen that bird-dog look on Beatrix before. “Are they even here?”
Frowning, Beatrix accepted a glass flute from Perpetua, who always capitulated when it came to the champagne. “This business with the Fair has attracted a lot of flies.”
“Flies?” Claire coughed. “The Wright sisters are flies now?”
“Flies. Thieving mayflies.” And Beatrix threw back the champagne as though she were a sailor and it were very good rum. “Excuse me.”
Claire watched her friend weave through the crowd in her ill-fitting suit. The electric lights found her gold eyepatch, lit it like a star. Her meeting was due to start in ten minutes, but in the meantime, Beatrix appeared to have another agenda.
“I think she might be off to start a fight,” Perpetua observed.
“More likely than not.”
“You won’t go stop her?”
“Of course not.” Claire stood, champagne flute in hand. It was their last night together, after all. “I’m off to join her.”
The orchestra had struck up a tremulous waltz. Claire sidestepped a box-stepping soldier, then another, her drink cradled to her chest. The room was hot, the lights low, the music loud. She craned her neck to see Beatrix slip off the dance floor and past a table of dicing men to a doorway beyond. With a glance over her shoulder, Beatrix slipped inside.
“Whoa there, fancy man,” a red-coated soldier said, grabbing Claire’s arm. She could hardly hear him over the noise. “A lady dressed as a gent?”
If she were Beatrix, she’d have a snappy rejoinder. She wasn’t. Claire settled for shaking off his hand. “Excuse me,” she said, but the man cursed and followed her.
“It ain’t right,” he bellowed, reaching for her again. “You ladies shouldn’t be in a den of sin in the first place, much less masquerading as your betters.”
Claire sped up—past the dice table, the men screaming for sevens; past the waiter with his tray full of empty glasses; into the small hallway that led, she knew, to Beatrix’s meeting, and safety.
“Slow down,” the man huffed, like a child.
Past the tall leafy plants, the statuary and the elegant vases, the portraits of Perpetua all in a line (Perpetua as the English Queen; Perpetua as Demeter, bow hunting in a glade), Claire could see the shapes of women slipping into a doorway, her friend with her hand on the knob.
“You’re coming?” Beatrix called. “I didn’t think you were coming!”
“One moment,” Claire said, and turned neatly on her heel. The soldier behind her had slowed, blinking. He was, she noticed, very drunk.
“This is not a place for you,” she said, enunciating in the quiet of the hall. “Do you understand?”
“The powder room?” He looked down again at her trousers. “But you aren’t in skirts—”
“Every other place,” Claire said, pulling off a glove with her teeth, “in this god-awful world might be for you, and you alone. But this one isn’t.” She drained her champagne, then thrust the flute into his hands, making sure to brush her fingers against his. “Get me another, will you?”
But no matter how she wanted it to be true, Claire didn’t grant her own wishes.
Claire perhaps didn’t grant any wishes at all.
The man fetched her no champagne. He stood and stared, and Claire stared back, right into his eyes, and who knows what would have happened if Beatrix had not returned to drag her through the doors of the Daughters of the American Crown headquarters.
Four
It was, in fact, a powder room. The man had been right about that.
Perpetua’s boasted quite a nice one: tufted, overstuffed divans, sinks with golden swan-necked spouts. Mirrors everywhere for her clients to admire themselves in. The toilets were in the room beyond, an afterthought. This was first and foremost a lush little sanctuary, funded in no small part by the Daughters of the American Crown.
Claire didn’t know how many members there were altogether, but the opening of the Fair at long last had brought in Daughters from all over the country. A good twenty of them were here already. Draped over chaise lounges, adjusting a stocking by the cosmetics table, checking their faces in the mirror. They were all in skirts, all immaculately turned out. All of them but Claire and Beatrix.
“What on earth were you doing out there?” Beatrix asked as they perched on a pair of gilt chairs.
“Testing a theory.” She would have said more, but a thin, angular woman in a green-striped dress leaned over her as though she were a piece of furniture.
Claire knew her face. She braced herself for impact.
“Beatrix,” the woman said, pleasantly. “You look absurd. What ridiculous point are you trying to make, wearing trousers like that?”
“Hello, you old weasel,” Beatrix said. “Still flying your glider in a hoop skirt? Tell me . . . what does that do to your aerodynamics? Have you ever caught a stray gust and gone airborne yourself? Become a rather unbecoming balloon?”
“Please,” Olivetta Wright said. “I’m the brains. Bertie does the flying.”
“Ah.” Beatrix smiled. “I wouldn’t dare fly one of your gliders either.”
“You mannerless child!”
Claire rolled her eyes. This was clearly the most fun either of them had had in ages. They kept on bickering merrily as the final members trickled through the door.
“I should go,” Claire said in Beatrix’s ear, and stood. “I imagine that lurker is gone by now, and if he isn’t, I’ll just leave through the window.”
Beatrix tugged her back down. “Sit. Learn something. What are you going to do out there, anyway? Brood into a glass of bubbles at the bar?”
Claire had, in fact, planned on doing exactly that.
“Stay,” Beatrix said, then grinned wickedly. “If you hate it, you can always excuse yourself to the powder room.”
“Beatrix.”
A matronly woman had arranged herself in front of the only exit. Her hair was piled high, nearly as high as Perpetua’s, but her face was solemn as the Bible.
Claire was trapped. She might as well listen.
“Ladies,” she said. “It’s so good to see you all here. A warm welcome to our sisters from our scion organizations in the east, west, and south who have traveled all this way. We give thanks for the Fair. We will rarely have this good a cover for a national meeting again.”
The woman next to Claire chuckled to herself. “My husband thinks I came all the way from Carolina to ride the Ferris wheel,” she murmured. “Like I would set foot on that thousand-foot death trap.”
“As some of you know, my name is Rosa Morgenstern.” The woman at the front clasped her hands before her. “I have the honor of leading this chapter of the Daughters of the American Crown. Let’s begin with news from our scion organizations. Ladies, if you’ll join me?”
They stood.
Claire had never seen people from every corner of their kingdom before, not all in one place. The rain-lush valleys of Willamette. Alta California and its cliffs, its palm trees, its fruit hanging heavy on the branch. The mountains of Livingston-Monroe that gave way to plains that tumbled sweet and low and hot into the waters of the gulf. Nuevo México, its deserts, its horses; the tiny hostile duchies of West and East Florida, ruled by a pair of Washington cousins in perpetual war; and New Columbia, the grande dame of them all, the seat of their King. Claire had heard that its residents still spoke an English that had the pricked-up consonants of their British forebears. St. Cloud was the last, the smallest save for the Floridas.