Chapter Forty Patrick
The Artisanal influence of Lavnonshire seemed to worm in, seeping into the black brick rendering of houses as though they were mid-transformation.
The wagons became horseless, the people weak-chinned. The building facades cleared themselves of soot. The briny air, though still tinged in the stench of industry, lightened.
The Artisan houses were made of stone and looked to Patrick like mausoleums. Wrought-iron garden gates rusted with salt and columns at the entrances.
Polly walked ten paces ahead with her hands clasped in front of her stomach.
She was now dressed, he supposed, in what Artisan women deemed proper.
It entailed more skirt layers than he cared to understand.
He wondered if the swanks had their Crafter maids peel the clothing away for them every evening.
She dragged her feet like she was walking to the gallows and ducked her head from the people she passed.
Some ways behind her, John and Patrick pulled their caps low over their brows and toted chimney sweeps over their shoulders, lit cigarettes between their lips.
Eyes slid right by them. There were plenty of Crafters mixed among the swanks, selling fruit from shoulder bags, playing fiddles, begging on street corners, selling newsprint.
Polly stopped abruptly before a picturesque limescale house, ivy climbing trellises to the gutters, opposite jewelers and a tea parlor.
It wasn’t the largest of homes, but there were rosebushes by the gate, a neatly edged path, a polished brass knocker on the door.
A chimney flue puffed. Someone was home.
Polly took moments to galvanize, straightening her spine rung by rung, then stepped through the gate.
John tsked. “How do you figure the odds here?”
Patrick sighed. “Not a fuckin’ hope in hell.”
They crossed the lane to the street corner, where a coal bin and streetlamp created a mite of cover.
John and Patrick warmed their hands with their breath and languished against the outer walls of the jewelers.
The swanks passing with their canes and parasols would only think them lowlifes, shirking their labors in favor of a smoke and some weak sunshine.
The window at Patrick’s back showed a collection of shining pocket watches. He eyed their ticking hands. “We’ll give her till quarter past the hour,” he muttered, settling in.
John stalked toward a nearby Crafter stand selling limp produce, and said, “Johnny!” as brightly as though he’d known him from birth.
The young Crafter frowned some. “Johnny’s me Dad,” he said warily.
“Bugger me. Goin’ blind in me old age,” John barked a laugh. “You look right like him.”
Patrick leaned against the brick and crossed his arms over his chest, watching his father as he struck up conversation about the weather next, then politics.
His hand disappeared into his coat frequently.
First with a box of matches, next a packet of rolled smokes, then a handful of plums. He bid the vendor a “fine afternoon,” and returned, already lighting a new smoke.
Patrick hesitated when his father offered him his own, but the needle on the watches had already revolved twice.
Anticipation cracked open in him like a beast hatching.
He took the cigarette and dragged deeply.
“Are we regressin’ to cheap tricks now?” he asked his father.
In Kenton, they’d take a man’s finger for theft.
“Still got some sleight left in these old bones,” John said, leaning beside him. He whistled as an Artisan woman passed them, her waist so tightly corseted it looked painful. “They do got some talent among these swank ladies, though, I’ll give ’em that.” He tipped back his cap to better see.
Patrick’s sights were oscillating between the windows of that limescale house. He pulled smoke into his lungs as though it gave him sustenance. “Lord, that’s good,” he muttered, his muscles relaxing some.
John was eyeing him. “You sound like a man starved, son,” he said.
Patrick flicked ash to the pavement. “Nina don’t like the smell.”
John shook his head pityingly. “Lord, boy. She’s got her talons in you.”
“No help for what’s done,” Patrick said absentmindedly. Another minute lapsed. No Polly.
“She’s a pretty girl, Pat. I won’t deny it. But you gotta keep your sights in the right place.”
“My sights ain’t your concern,” he said, his irritation mounting. Artisans continued to intersect in the lane. The door to Polly’s family home remained shut.
“She’s a liability, Patty,” his father was saying now. “I taught you this, didn’t I? Everyone we let close to us becomes a weakness. A crack in the hull.”
“She ain’t my weakness anymore.”
“We need her to perform a job,” John continued.
Another minute fell away. His fists clenched. “And she’ll do it. She’s on our side.”
“I don’t doubt it,” John grumbled darkly.
“But when the hammer falls, she may revisit her former principles, Patty. Women are funny like that. Their hearts get in the way of their heads. Logic don’t play a part.
She might grow nostalgic or tired or bored of the work.
She might decide she don’t want to get her hands dirty for the Union—”
“You don’t know her.”
“—and if that time comes, she’ll fall into your lap cryin’. She’ll tell you how she can’t go on. How she’s had a change of heart, and she’ll beg for your understandin’. And you’ll have to rip out the talons then, Patty. You’ll have to ignore the weepin’ and turn her back to the dirt.”
“Stop.” His vision was closing, narrowing, the way it did before it turned red.
“It don’t matter what she says, Patty, even if she says it with her mouth ’round your cock—”
Patrick took his father’s collar then, the same way he would with any other pig. He rammed John’s back into the wall hard enough for his head to crack into the brick, hard enough to rattle his teeth.
John laughed. “Ah,” he said knowingly. “How deep do the talons go, Patty. Eh?”
“Deep enough,” he said, seething. His breath seemed hot as blood, flooding out his nose an inch from his father’s.
He squeezed his hand tighter around the scruff of his shirt.
He was stronger than his father now, he realized.
When had the scales tipped? “Mention her mouth again,” he said. “And consider yourself short a son.”
John’s grin melted into something much more sinister. Something he generally reserved for dark business. “So that’s the order of it, then?” he asked. “Your Charmer girl first, then the rest of us.”
Patrick realized too late that he’d been baited. He’d seen his father do it before, and he should have seen it now. His hand loosened. “She’s on our side,” he repeated. “My loyalty is to the fuckin’ Union. As its always been, and so is hers.”
“But is she willin’ to do what we are, son?” he asked. “Is she willin’ to shed herself of the softer parts to get the job done?”
He thought of the way Nina clenched her teeth together now. How she lost herself, at times, to the churning of her thoughts. How anger bloomed across her expression even in the quietest moments. “She’s been stomped on enough times,” Patrick said. “She’ll do what needs to be done.”
Patrick let his father go then, noticed the way he sagged on the wall for a moment before straightening, as though he, too, was surprised to learn just how much stronger his son was.
Across the way, two Artisan women had stopped to gape at their confrontation but hurried off when Patrick scowled at them. The jeweler’s watches showed a quarter past the hour. On the limescale steps, Polly appeared.
Patrick glanced once more at his father. “If there comes a time when Nina wants no more to do with the Seam, then I’ll cut her loose,” he said plainly. “And we’ll mine it ourselves. And if you try to move against me on it, Dad, I will beat the breath from you.”
John shook his head as though there wasn’t a river of boiling anger funneling beneath the surface.
“I stayed away too long, I know,” he said to Patrick.
“I left you with a lot of… burdens, and it pained me to think of you shoulderin’ it all without me.
But perhaps you’ve grown fond of ’em. Perhaps it’s a threat to have me back.
Is that it, Patty? Is it the chair you want? ”
Patrick looked at him with as much venom as he was capable. “You know it ain’t,” he said. “Of all people, you know it ain’t.”
John made a noise of disbelief. “When did you start turnin’ away from me, son?” he asked. “When did you start seein’ me as your adversary, eh?”
“The moment you gave my name to Lord fuckin’ Tanner.” He looked his father straight on and saw him flinch. “Yeah,” Patrick muttered darkly. “Tell me, Dad, what father sells out his own son?”
Silence, just whorls of smoke, ash dropping to the toes of John’s boot. Polly retreating down the lane.
“It weren’t me,” he denied, and yet it was quiet, uncomfortable. “Lord, Pat…” But he found nothing more to say. His mouth hardened into a grim line.
And Patrick nodded, feeling as though he’d only ever seen his father from afar, that a veil had been lifted. He turned his back on John Colson and walked down the street in the direction Polly had gone, feeling a weight settle itself inside him.