Imperfection
It has been nine years since John Baker swept down on a small village in the forested wilds of Massachusetts and snatched up the niece he barely knew like a diving kestrel snatches a mouse from the grass, clutching her tightly in his talons and sweeping her away from everything she’d ever known.
Nine years of lessons and lies, nine years of the strangest drought ever to take hold of Boston.
The servants complain about it constantly, with no small amount of smugness in their tones; his property has always included a luxuriously large greenhouse, the walls made of thick-paneled glass that amplifies and focuses the sun.
More importantly, because the greenhouse is enclosed, inside, he’s able to control the weather.
The air is always hot and moist, and herbs and simples thrive in the near-tropical conditions he creates.
If only half of them are for use in the kitchen, no one has to know that but his staff, who would never dream of commenting.
They have rosemary and basil for their table while the houses around them go without, no matter how wealthy their masters might be, and if they also have foxglove and nettles and dead man’s trumpets, well, those are easy enough not to harvest for the stew.
Asphodel—she has been Asphodel now for longer than she was Floretta, and on the rare occasions she has to remember the name she once went by, she regards it with curiosity and some small measure of disdain, like a snake might regard its shed and rotting former skin—walks the greenhouse most mornings, preferring the humid warmth of the world inside the glass to the punishing sun of the world outside.
She is a hothouse flower in her own manner these days, rarely seen outside without a parasol to cover her head and keep the sun away.
(Even in times of drought there must be rain.
It thundered last summer, just before her fifteenth birthday, and she spent the full duration of the storm in the backyard, dancing in the rain like she had no idea when she was ever going to see it again.
She’s always seemed most alive during storms. John has watched her when he’s had the chance, when he wasn’t struggling to harness the storm to his own ends.
She’s always lovely, his strange orphan niece, but when the rain comes down and the heavens split wide, he thinks she might be beautiful.
He thinks her beauty might be the kind that destroys the world.)
Nine years in his keeping has trained a wild woodland nymph into a respectable Boston socialite, sixteen years old and set to make her debut into society in just two years more.
Her hair is still copper, tamed into thick curls that cascade over her shoulders and down her back; her eyes are still layered blue like river water running over stones.
If her tongue is also sharp enough to flense skin from flesh, and her clever hands more suited to scalpels than embroidery needles, those things don’t show in her face, and she’s well-trained enough to keep her mouth shut and smiling when she has to.
Asphodel will never be an alchemist in her own right—her femininity is too indelible, and cannot be stripped out of her through any means he’s been able to discover, even when she’s begged him, voice raw and aching in the air.
But she’ll make a fabulous alchemist’s wife once he’s had the chance to break her to the idea.
There have been no Moons since Deborah, although the little room has been far from unused; his art requires a certain amount of blood and bone, and a winsome teenage girl is a fabulous lure for a hunter.
They’ve dismantled several unlucky souls in that same space, portioning them into canopic jars and white glass vials, and Asphodel has always been eager in her work, always cunning-handed and more than willing to bloody her pretty, slender hands.
Now, morning has broken on a dry, frozen December day. Lines of ice slash across the grounds, but there is no snow. Snow, which is only frozen water in the end, has been in short supply these last few years. The trees are suffering.
At the request of his groundskeeper, John has consulted with the local rainmaker, a toothless old alchemist who used to live in farm country, where he made his fortune calling rain out of empty clouds.
The man is famous in certain circles, for his ability to control the weather.
He wasn’t able to summon up so much as a drizzle.
“Something’s taken a dislike to Boston,” he said, almost leering.
“Something doesn’t think we deserve the rain.
Can’t say what it was, or who, but something has it out for us, and won’t let me through.
There’s powers greater than alchemy in this world.
” His eyes turned canny then, focusing on John.
“This all started about when you brought that girl of yours home. Could be a virgin sacrifice would break through the wall.”
“We’re men of science, not superstition,” John snapped in return.
“Asphodel is a good girl with a good head on her shoulders. She’s going to make a fine alchemist’s wife one day, and whoever wins her hand is likely to climb to the height of our field solely on the basis of her support.
We’re not … slitting her throat to bring back the storms. The notion is absurd. ”
“There’s something connecting her to the strangeness in the weather. If we snap that connection, things may return to normal.”
“I came here to request rain, not discuss the sacrifice of my ward. This conversation is over.”
He’d stood then, leaving his brandy behind as he turned and stormed out of the old alchemist’s office, leaving him and his outdated old ways behind.
That was almost two months ago. The old man’s house burned down a week after their meeting, the rainmaker still inside.
It was the sort of accident that makes the papers for days after, a true tragedy, especially since all the homes surrounding his were left untouched by the flames, which had been intense enough to devour the structure whole.
The idea of arson was never suggested. No one had been seen going into or coming out of the old rainmaker’s house all day, and that sort of fire would have been impossible to orchestrate without someone on-site.
Miss Cottingsly had smelt of lamp oil and smoke for days afterward, and had been required to stay in the kitchen when the constabulary came to inform John of his colleague’s death, out of the path of anyone who might have had their suspicions raised.
It perhaps says something about John’s character that he thought murder was a perfectly measured response to the mere suggestion that Asphodel might be part of the force keeping Boston drier than a bone, and could serve them best by being removed.
She is his, his property from stem to stern, and until he hands her to another man for safekeeping, he won’t tolerate even the impression of a threat against her.
He can’t.
But this is December, and Asphodel walks the back garden alone, slipping out of the kitchen door with her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders, heading for the greenhouse.
John watches her from the dining room window until she vanishes around the glass corner of her destination.
Only then does he look away. He won’t be able to see her once she’s inside. He never can.
And so he doesn’t see when, upon getting out of sight of the house, she shrugs her shawl off and hangs it on the skeletal structure of a nearby bush, turning toward the fence.
Dried-out ivy clings to it, some of the leaves still a dark, waxy green, all of them laced with frost. Even in the absence of snow, the cold comes.
There is an old gate in the fence, half-covered by the ivy, long since locked by the groundskeeper and given over to the tangled, matted vines.
She’s not sure her uncle has ever known the gate was there; it existed before he bought this house, and it opens onto a narrow stretch of green between their property and the next, a boxed-off remnant of an older arcade that must have been among the first structures in Boston before it was forgotten and left to fall to ruin.
She discovered the gate through discovering the arcade, following the shapes of broken arches from the sidewalk to the back of the block, taking note of the shape they made between the houses.
She can escape from the property whenever she wants to, and only the fact that her uncle provides her with everything she could ever wish for keeps her from running.
When she was Floretta, she would have run without hesitation, fleeing back to the forest and the doddering old priest who’d had the custody of her early childhood. Now, the gate serves another purpose.
As she watches, it inches slowly open, and a man—a boy—no, a man is revealed.
His hair is black as midnight, spangled with specks of ice like tiny, shining stars, and his eyes are the color of the frost on the ivory, white layered over green.
He’s wearing a summer suit, not at all appropriate for this weather, and his smile when he sees Asphodel is as warm as the summer sun.
“Hello, pretty sparrow,” he says, voice rich with the developing accent spoken in the bright young state of Maine, a region still finding its identity in the snowy lands below the Canadian border.
It’s French and New England and a little bit of broad Appalachia.
She thinks he sounds incredible. She could listen to him speak forever if she had the chance.
She’s not going to have the chance. She knows that, and she accepts it. For right now, she smiles and drops one shoulder, tilting her chin toward the other, the gesture practiced and coy and designed to show the long pale sweep of her neck, graceful and lethal as a swan’s.