Chapter 12 Zaria
ZARIA
ZARIA LET KANE CLEAR A PATH THROUGH THE CROWDS, WHICH he did with surprising ease.
His hands were occupied with placing hers in the crook of his elbow, and it felt horribly intimate.
The warmth of him was tangible even through the fabric of his jacket.
Every one of her muscles was tense, but somehow she managed to take step after step, letting him guide her.
The worst bit was how utterly comfortable Kane appeared.
“Could you relax a little?” he said, directing a winning smile at someone Zaria didn’t bother to take note of. “You’re meant to like me, you know. I’m not leading you to the gallows.”
“I am not interested,” she muttered through her teeth, “in pretending to be your fiancée. Can’t I be your—your cousin, or something?”
This got Kane’s attention. As they passed through a turnstile, he looked down at her, brows drawing together in abject horror. “No, you may not be my cousin.”
“And why not?”
He inclined his chin to where a man stood at the Exhibition’s entrance, laughing loudly with two people who must have been organizers.
Zaria recognized him immediately. He was the chap Kane had been speaking to a short time earlier.
Ambrose Taylor, if she recalled correctly. A member of the Royal Commission.
“If you’re going to help me pull this off,” Kane purred in Zaria’s ear, “you’re going to have to work on your acting.”
“What’s my name again?”
“Eleanor.”
“And yours?”
“Theodore,” he replied, turning that sickly charming grin on her again. Why was he always grinning? “But my friends can call me Theo.”
“In that case, I’ll stick to Theodore.”
Kane uttered a mocking laugh, though it turned into the real thing as they approached Taylor and his company.
There was another man with them now. He was portly with a rather bulbous nose, deep-set eyes, and a beard that started where his chin ought to have stopped.
Something about the way he held himself made Zaria suspect he was important.
“Mister Cole!” Kane disentangled his arm from Zaria’s, flashing teeth as he extended a hand toward the newcomer. “An absolute honor. I didn’t realize you and Mister Taylor were acquainted.”
Zaria’s heart skipped in her chest as she fit the pieces together. Henry Cole, chief administrator of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition? She wouldn’t have recognized the man, but she knew he was a rather prominent civil servant who’d been instrumental in planning the event.
Cole drew himself up tall. He did not, Zaria was unnerved to see, appear won over by Kane’s overindulgent greeting, though he allowed the handshake nonetheless. “And you are?”
“Master Wright,” Taylor was quick to inject, giving a half bow as he gestured in Kane’s direction. “And his charming future wife.”
Zaria felt heat climb her face. The next moment Kane had set a hand on the small of her back, and she bit the inside of her cheek so hard that she tasted blood.
“Please,” Kane said, still addressing Cole, “call me Theo. I’m apprentice to Charles Fox—I’m sure you’re familiar.
How wonderful it is to stand before this magnificent feat of architecture and engineering.
” He spread his arms wide to indicate the palace.
“And may I offer you and the rest of the commission my congratulations? You have truly outdone yourselves in organizing this event so quickly.”
Cole considered Kane the way someone might consider a plate of food before deciding whether or not they wanted to eat it. “I didn’t know Mister Fox had an apprentice.”
His demeanor set Zaria on edge. She shifted her weight, fearing he might somehow mark Kane as not, in fact, being Theodore Wright. Kane flashed another easy smile.
“That’s the rub, isn’t it? We must work in the shadow of the more accomplished man until we possess the skill required to rise through the ranks.
In this case, however, working under men such as yourself and Mister Fox is no hardship at all.
It’s truly a privilege. Although,” Kane added, “I daresay you don’t need to be told about the value of hard work. ”
“I certainly don’t,” Cole said gruffly, but Zaria could see that he was softening. “Well, I won’t hold you up any longer. Taylor will take your invitations. Enjoy yourself.”
Kane’s teeth flashed again. “I appreciate it, sir. God bless.”
He managed to make it sound genuine as he shook Cole’s hand once more, and Zaria forced her expression into what she hoped was reminiscent of a smile.
Then Cole was mercifully gone, his short stature engulfed by the slew of patrons.
Taylor took the two slips of paper Kane procured from his pocket. “Thank you very much, sir. Ma’am.” With a wink, he indicated that they should pass through the next turnstile.
And the Great Exhibition opened up before them.
The interior of the Crystal Palace was beyond imagining.
The impossibly high ceilings were paneled in the same glass as the walls, allowing the sunlight to stream in, and mezzanine-like structures jutted out to form a second story.
Above it all, a glass dome arched to make room for several lush elm trees.
Once Zaria managed to tear her gaze downward, she noticed a towering pink crystal fountain splashing joyfully in the center, the noise a backdrop to the excited chatter of the wealthy patrons who surrounded it.
The building’s iron framework was visible everywhere she looked, but it didn’t detract from the experience.
How could it? For around her were colors—more than she’d known existed.
Red banners declared the names of companies and their respective countries.
Blue woven carpets hung from the walls. Gilded furniture and ivory statuettes sat beside printed glassware.
There were carriages and clothing, art and animal skins, pottery and porcelain items. And machines!
For manufacturing, for science, for transportation and medical applications.
It seemed humanity’s creative genius had been condensed into a single space bursting at the seams with ideas and veritable worth.
It was so overwhelming, so impossible, so…
absurd. That moment of wonder shattered to the ground around her, a delicate glass orb slipping from clumsy fingers.
Once she managed to digest the sight, she saw it for what it was: audacious.
The empire’s flagrant boast. The Exhibition had been promoted as a unification of sorts, but Zaria suspected the goal was unification only insofar as it remained inherently, inextricably British.
And yet how many of these things weren’t British at all?
How many had been taken by force from faraway places in the name of expanding an empire?
While they were building the Crystal Palace, filling it with priceless items, how many people in the slums had starved?
“This entire event,” Zaria said under her breath, “is just an elaborate way of showing off.”
“I could have told you that from the moment I saw the first pamphlet,” Kane returned, though even he couldn’t quite hide his astonishment. “It’s a global competition. An attempt to be the best. The most progressive, the most enlightened.”
All her earlier wonder melted away, replaced by a sense of profound injustice. “What are we waiting for? Let’s steal from this place.”
“That’s the spirit,” Kane said mildly. “Though perhaps lower your voice a bit.”
Despite the overwhelming number that had gathered in Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace itself was fairly empty. Small groups of people milled about, each more rich and important-looking than the next.
“I thought it would be busier,” Zaria said, and Kane loosed a short laugh.
“I told you, this is just a private viewing. The Royal Commission will be here, along with their families, and all those involved in constructing and organizing the Crystal Palace and exhibits. As long as we don’t run into Mister Fox, nobody should notice I’m not Theodore Wright.”
“Do we know what Fox looks like?”
Kane’s shrug was remarkably unconcerned. “More or less. Don’t speak to anyone but me, and everything should be fine.”
Zaria refrained from noting that she didn’t particularly want to speak to him, either. When she’d woken this morning and prepared to meet Kane in Hyde Park, she hadn’t imagined she would be thrust into his world—a world of cons and scheming—right off the bat.
“You could have told me we were going to be doing this,” she said. “Pretending to be other people, I mean.”
“Ah, but would you have agreed?” Kane pointed out. “You would have gotten in your head about it, and everything relied on my ability to con Ambrose Taylor.”
“Everything relied on me not selling you out, you mean.”
“I wasn’t worried about that.”
“Why not?” Zaria demanded hotly.
He ran his free hand through his hair, looking amused. “I’m good at reading people. I was almost positive you’d do better if I didn’t let you worry about it ahead of time. You’re good in stressful situations, but you panic if you know they’re coming. Am I right?”
She lifted her chin, a bit miffed. He was right, but she wasn’t pleased he’d managed to ascertain that after meeting her only a handful of times. “Almost positive isn’t going to cut it when we have to do this for real.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“How could I not worry? Do you see how much security there is already?”
“Yes, and we’ve planned for it. As a special constable, Fletcher will be briefed over the next week, taking note of the planned security rotations.
There are hundreds of officers on the payroll, but the ones we can trust—I say that loosely, of course—will be positioned near the necklace.
Of those men, Fletcher will find out which ones need to be avoided; plus, he’ll map out the floor plan and all the most accessible escape routes. ”