One
From her window, Claire Emerson watched the carriage as it wound up toward Wardenclyffe Tower.
It moved slowly, more slowly even than the others she’d seen make this approach. To those visitors it must have looked like magic: the tower in the distance, cables and wires spiraling up its sides into the sky. And below it, light, like the constellations had all fallen to earth. A thousand light bulbs pushed into the black ground and burning bright.
If you plucked one, held it in your hand, you’d find there was no cord to feed it. The earth itself was crackling with power.
What better place from which to rule?
“Ten minutes, then,” Claire was saying over her shoulder. “Five to see them the rest of the way here, and then five to have them cool their heels in the parlor. It’s long enough for me to finish my meeting.”
“But Mrs. Duchamp . . .” Helplessly the young maid held up Claire’s slippers again. “And your hair—there’s to be a photographer, and pardon my saying, ma’am, but you look fit for the stables—”
Claire smiled as kindly as her patience allowed. “Georgiana, you’re doing a lovely job, this being your first day, but if I want to be a horse, I’ll be a horse. I need you to find me Margarete, and then you can see if they need any help . . .” What on earth do maids do, and why do I have one again? “Polishing furniture.”
Georgiana hesitated. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but this is the only room with nice furniture. Well, other than the Governor’s sickroom, but everywhere else in this place is still all concrete and awful laboratories filled with God knows what—machines with wires running everywhere, making black magic, and I—”
“No polishing, then,” Claire said. She eased the slippers from the girl’s hands. “Why don’t you, ah . . . go help in the kitchen? Go peel some leeks. Just find me Margarete first?”
“No need,” Margarete said, stepping into the stateroom as Georgiana rushed out past her. “Oh no. Are you terrorizing the help again?”
Two weeks ago those words would’ve been as barbed as a fishing lure. But quite a bit had changed since then. Margarete wasn’t the urchin that Jeremiah Emerson plucked from an orphanage and brought home to wash his floors for free. Now she was the private secretary to the lady wife of the Governor of St. Cloud, and Claire saw to it personally that Margarete was paid a small fortune.
“Tell me where we’re at with provisioning for the dinner tonight,” Claire said, taking a seat at her desk. She put her feet into the embroidered slippers and wiggled her toes. Ten dollars for a pair like these, far too much for something that disappeared under your dress. They looked ridiculous against the poured-concrete floor, but she’d lost the only other pair of shoes she had sailing off the roof of the Palace of Fine Arts during her and Remy’s escape from the General, in a glider made mostly from wishes and dreams.
These shoes had arrived in a little ribboned box. The enclosed note had read Thank you for walking with us. It was signed The Daughters of the American Crown.
If Claire’s life this last month had been bound up like a story, she’d have thrown the book across the room by now.
Margarete was taking out a notebook and a nub of a pencil. “I must say, I thought it was rather brave to send the maid to the kitchens. It still looks a bit medieval down there. I don’t think Augusta has two leeks to rub together.”
Claire closed her eyes. “I almost told the girl to go lawn bowling. I still don’t know why I need a lady’s maid when I eat all my meals off this desk.”
“Propriety,” Margarete said, flipping a page. “The papers would have a field day.”
“We have mice. I’m fairly sure I have small biting things living in my stockings. The papers aren’t interested in that?”
“We’ve informed them that our court in exile is rather . . . rustic.”
“That’s of course why we have a pony living in the parlor,” Claire said. “You know, when Georgiana told me I looked like a horse just now, I realized she might have thought that Smokey was my sister.”
“The stable needs a new roof. Poor Smokey kept getting rained on.”
“Poor Smokey keeps pissing on the rug—”
“This attitude, you know, is how you scared off the last one.”
“The last horse?”
“The last maid, Claire.”
“All she wanted to do was paint my face and”—Claire’s face twisted—“Ask questions about my whirlwind romance.”
At that, Margarete finally met her eyes. There was pity there; well-meant, but it curled Claire’s stomach. No one wants to talk about Remy, she thought, least of all me. How to explain a “romance” that had begun by being kidnapped by her province’s Governor because he thought her able to grant his wishes with the touch of her hand, to make him a better leader? A romance that ended in a sham marriage, a marriage of convenience, as he lay dying on a boat in the middle of the lake?
Remy hadn’t died—not yet, at least. But his feelings for her had. Claire didn’t know what was worse, that the two of them had fallen in love somewhere along the way, or that they had just as quickly fallen out.
Claire’s own feelings were a stew of betrayal and longing that she had neither the time nor the inclination to sort out.
“Fine,” Claire said to Margarete, after a moment. “We’ll keep Georgiana, even though she told me I look like I need a feed bag. Provisions. What were you able to find today? Just an overview, the first of them will be here any moment.”
“Do you think it’s terrible,” her secretary said, “that we’re organizing a feast when our soldiers are toe to toe with the enemy at the border?”
“This is a biblical feast. This is a feast that’s meant to save our lives.”
Margarete sighed.
While the few hundred men who were loyal to their Governor stood guard at the border, watching the Livingston-Monroe guard towers and fingering the triggers of their lightning rifles, Claire had asked Margarete to take the youngest and greenest of them for a “special mission.” They’d been tasked to scour the countryside for staff and supplies. They put out the word that if Duchamp was to properly govern from his temporary exile, he would need their help. Word was that his gratitude, when he was restored to his rightful home, would be immense. And fulfilled in gold.
The folk along St. Cloud’s western border were, historically, not the most ardent supports of their Governor. At the best of times, they felt abandoned out here, so far from Monticello and its sprawling lake that brought so much of the trade to their narrow province—and now was not the best of times. Abigail Monroe, the wife of Livingston-Monroe’s Governor and the real architect of their province’s conflict with St. Cloud, had disappeared into a dungeon, and her province’s fragile alliance with the General had held. The Livmonian soldiers would support the General’s bid to overthrow Governor Duchamp, and even now their redcoat soldiers were swarming the border they shared with St. Cloud, waiting for a chance to invade. And the first fields they’d burn and pillage would be those here, around Wardenclyffe Tower.
St. Cloud’s western citizens didn’t like this, not one bit. “When is that whelp Duchamp going to grow up and throw some punches?” a farmer had furiously asked Margarete. When Claire arrived and took stock of their surroundings, she realized she didn’t know who the citizenry hated more—the Duchamps, or Livingston-Monroe.