Chapter 16
CHARY
Chary’s supposedly dead brother chose that Sunday, amongst all the other Sundays that had passed since he’d been staying in Berryfield, to attend St. Michael’s morning mass.
Chary was so startled to see him, he gasped; heads turned in almost every pew.
Chary clutched at his calf as if charlie-horsed and waved.
Heads turned politely back. Most of them.
August sat, snickering—in plain sight, in chauffeur’s livery!—at the aisle edge of a middle pew, right next to Brasher and Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Leonard, the housekeeper.
Chary hissed at him in passing. “Have you lost your mind?”
August didn’t look over, but the golden mustache couldn’t hide a smirk. “Didn’t see me in the cab?” he murmured. “Your new stained glass looks a beauty, Mr. Wright,” he said, louder.
There were parishioners behind Chary in the aisle, pending, impatient, and his face was burning; he couldn’t stop. He swept on.
August had sat in the cab? The Caddy’s front driver’s seat wasn’t enclosed at all.
What if Laurie Tulley hadn’t been an atheist and had decided to accompany him to mass this morning instead of staying behind?
What if he had seen August from a window as they left?
Chary should’ve walked to church. The Cadillac wasn’t even his.
It had been purchased at August’s insistence, eight months earlier.
He couldn’t focus on the service for catastrophizing, unto the point he almost felt he had to apologize to Father Newcomb, with whatever goodwill he’d wrought with the new stained-glass windows and the Church Ladies’ society evaporating fast.
In his imagination, anyway. Nobody treated him any differently, even with the state of his beaten-up face. (“Perils of a New York City carriage,” he explained it away.)
After the service, August awaited him, smoking, in the old part of the cemetery that stretched into the shade beneath huge, hundred-year elms and towering native pines.
The August leaning against one shrouded obelisk was a soberer version of the man he had been three years before—the man Chary had seen when first putting eyes on his long-lost brother: sleek, assured, sly.
Laurie might like him, he thought suddenly. It was strange to wish that Lawrence Tulley would like his brother when they could never meet. When there was no reason for Chary to wish they’d get along.
“I told you that everything is fine,” Chary said, reaching him. “Imagine he had come along to service and spotted you straightaway!”
“He who?” August said. “Chary, you told me everything was ‘fine’ as I was dyin’ and Sidney was rollin’ me into a shroud. Screamed it. Your barometer’s leaky. I can’t trust it.” He sipped smoke, then let it curl out diabolical beneath incisors.
“Well, it was true, wasn’t it? In the end? You were fine. You are. And so am I.”
August looked doubtful. “Enh. Your face, Chary. You look… awful.”
Chary scowled.
August snorted. “Yes, all right, everything is fine. Business is great, Dow’s at seventy-nine and S he knew he was the usurper changeling, who by being born had taken everything from his brother.
Charles Edward was the elder and the stronger and the more beautiful, a victim of circumstance; he should have inherited.
August had deserved a chance to live as the man he was born to be. Normal, if he wanted. And Chary had thrilled when his brother begun calling him Chary—it was clever, it wasn’t like it wasn’t also his name, and he’d never liked August as a name anyway, not for himself—and taken his place.
It’d felt like righting a wrong.
“If you’re not more careful,” Chary said, “he’ll really find it out, August. The truth about you, the switch, the inheritance, all of it. You must stay hidden.”
“If I am not careful?” August taunted. “You are sleeping with a communist reporter in my house.”
“I’m not, and I didn’t invite him, for God’s sake. He broke in. I warned you to stay away, not to show up at Mass. And—and—you haven’t been careful, and not just here. You’ve been to the city recently; don’t say you haven’t.”
August jerked his head to look at him. “Gotham?” He huffed. “How do you know that?”
“Mr. Tulley accused me of union-busting. I should say he is continuously accusing me of union-busting. Or, rather, accusing a blond, bearded man whom he believes was me, who has been attending flint glassworkers’ meetings.
Ostensibly to spy on them and prevent Wright Glass unionizing.
” He paused. “Hm. Perhaps he does theorize some conspiracies.”
August put his forehead on marble shroud and blasphemed softly. “I do not suppose you could’ve fucked an incompetent communist.”
“Or does he theorize?” Chary demanded. “Is he correct? August, what are you doing, going to Local meetings?”
“Not union-busting, Jesus.”
“What, then? Why Brooklyn Glass? Do you wish to draw Raberding’s attention back upon us? Upon you? After everything we’ve done?”
“No,” August said wearily. “I don’t. But you did all that, Chary.”
He had. Chary had done all of it. He’d paid off police, the coroner, the witnesses, even brought the ice that’d chilled August’s limbs, brought the stain to make his lips blue. Had physically carried, with Brasher’s help, a dangerously unconscious August out of the Algonquin hotel room.
He’d have moved heaven and earth to get August away from Tjofabier Raberding and his fist-wrapped declarations of “love” and his hostile-takeover sweet nothings; if he had to, he’d do it again.
“Do you try to ruin him somehow? I cannot blame you. But it looks as though you would ruin both of us instead. And if Laurie had seen you firsthand in his surveillance—if he does see you—”
“I am not scared of a rag-man reporter.” August sneered.
“If anyone saw you. All it would take is one word in any paper, and you know it.”
“All right,” August said. “I’m thirty-seven and the syphilis hasn’t yet reached my brain. I don’t need a lecture. I feel bad enough about your face already.”
“You don’t have syphilis, do you?”
August rolled his eyes. “But there is another thing you should ask your socialist, maybe to distract him? What he thinks about union thugs roughing up glassworks gaffers in broad daylight.”
“Laurie’s already asking questions— Now, wait a moment. The Local? You think my attack on 2nd St was related to your attending those meetings?”
He wondered: had Laurie considered that possibility?
“Of course it was,” August said. “It must have been. They thought I was you in the meetings and you were me in the glasshouse, and… they were meant to. I meant for them to think that. I put down your 2nd Street address as contact. It’s my fault you were attacked.”
“Oh.” What on earth would make the Local #68 want one gaffer—him—scared off or dead? “Well, that isn’t anything new, I suppose. You’re very good at being me. What were you saying or promoting?”
Laurie’s reasoning came back to him: “But if it was another gaffer, or a boy, but he doesn’t know you’re the boss, then why want his fellow gaffer dead?”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“It absolutely does! Were you saying I was trying to organize Wright Glass? Because four men have died, and—”
August came close and gripped Chary’s arms beneath the shoulder.
It was almost, almost an embrace, except it was rough and angry.
“It’s still my fault. This time, you were almost killed, body and soul.
Not just your name. Sidney’s been giving me hell for it and I deserve it.
He told me the bruising is bad, but I can see now it’s worse than that. Can I…?” He reached for Chary’s hat.
Chary flinched and jerked away, clutching his hat firm.
“It isn’t so bad. And my name? Our names are our father’s name rehashed.
Not even our own. You know I don’t give a damn about the name nor the inheritance.
I’d give you it again if I had to. My life, too, if I could.
More has been done to you from blame of me than anything you could ever do to me. ”
“Short of murder,” August muttered. “Chary—”
Father Newcomb came tromping around the corner of the church, unencumbered from his heavy vestments. He was on the path for the outhouse. He hadn’t seen them.
“Take the Caddy,” Chary said hastily, backing away. “Take it to town. Anywhere. I’ll walk home. Stay with Brasher in the cabin. Don’t come back to the house until I send word. Please, brother. No more risks.”
August scowled and, before Chary turned around, shoved back on his chauffeur’s cap of a disguise. He saluted and said: “Back to house arrest, then. Amen.”