Chapter 8
The Great Hall was almost full, more Mortons than I’d ever seen together in one place.
As intended, Peter’s death was a public tragedy. Even the tabloids down in the city had run stories: “Death by Misadventure” and “Ivy Fall,” neither headline technically correct. At least now I understood why Grandmother had ordered such a dramatic end.
I sat between Sebastian and Faraday, near the front. Faraday wore the little black dress she’d packed, more cocktail than funeral except for her birdcage veil. Sebastian was elegant in his black three-piece and dark silver tie, but his lack of blood seemed boyish now.
It was everywhere: scarlet leather gloves, an agate brooch, tourmaline in a pierced ear. Aunt Iris’s ruby ring, the spray of greenhouse amaranth on Aunt Beatrice’s wrist. A delegation from the Wolvaardt family in red socks, the Seths with henna on their palms.
And me, shirtless inside my mother’s jacket, the silk lining against bare skin.
“How come nobody’s in heels?” Faraday asked, looking down at her spiky-toed stilettos.
“We always dress to move,” Sebastian said—in case a funeral turned truly red, as one had in 1880.
It was the wake of a Morton matriarch, and a drunken Lindqvist aunt started a fateful fight. Fists became knives, my mother’s many-great-grandfather was killed, and the perpetrator absconded. The feud embroiled both families for forty years.
Since then, we and the Lindqvists attend one anothers’ weddings, feasts, and competitions, but never funerals. Neither side has forgotten—especially not my mother’s line.
“Oooh! Will there be dancing later?”
“Obviously,” Sebastian said.
“Who’s that? She’s fabulous.”
“Grandmother,” Sebastian and I said together.
“To both of you? I thought you weren’t first cousins.”
“Third,” Sebastian said. “We’re lax with family terms around here.”
“So she’s everybody’s grandma,” Faraday said. “The patronne de la famille. I mean, that dress.”
My other relatives wore mere dashes of red; Grandmother was wrapped in oxblood velvet—the same shade as my silk lining. She looked very much the boss.
“And matching lipstick!” Faraday said, then frowned. “Huh. I know that guy.”
Sitting behind Grandmother was Aldridge Brinley, an ordinary of long association. His Boston Brahmin family had been incorporated by the Mortons more than a century ago.
“He’s from Boston,” I said.
“Methinks I banged his son.”
Sebastian chuckled. “Small world.”
“The Brinleys are a big deal,” Faraday said quietly. “I didn’t realize.”
The service was short, and perhaps somewhat cryptic for outsiders.
All three speakers made sly references to Mister Fluffernutter, Peter’s rabbit.
His yearlong bond with Peter had been terminated by a quarter stick of dynamite.
Enjoyable at the time, but it can’t have helped my cousin’s ledger.
The killing of a mors curae rabbit is meant to be a solemn occasion, not a fireworks display.
Peter’s hobbies were cataloged, his bone collection, his love of the wild, the way he’d stare into the kiln for hours when firing pottery. Cyrus told a few of his favorite riddles, his eyes finding me as the crowd laughed.
And then it was done.
There was no solemn march to a grave, no casket to be carried, lowered, buried. Peter was already composted in the greenhouses, still working for the family.
Like our childhood rhyme: We’re just meat.
As we stood up, the younger cousins went to work, taking away the wooden chairs to fold and stack around the edges of the room. Long tables of food and drink rolled in.
“Whoa,” Faraday said. “That was quick.”
“We’re more about wakes than funerals.” Sebastian linked arms with both of us. “To a shameful degree.”
“You’re talking to a half-Catholic girl.”
We beelined through the milling crowd toward the bar. Aunt Veronica, my mentor since childhood, was already setting up.
“Darling Jessica,” she said.
“This is my good friend Faraday. She likes cocktails.”
Veronica considered her for a moment, then nodded. “I have something special for you both.”
Sebastian began to speak up, but Veronica waved him silent.
“For you, rum and Coke.”
“I should be offended, but I like rum and Coke—since there’s no margarita machine.”
Veronica ignored this outrage, reaching beneath the bar to pull out a dusty, half-empty bottle of Campari. The bottle was fatter than usual, the logo an unfamiliar cerulean.
“I thought we didn’t like Campari,” Faraday whispered to me.
“Not usually, but that bottle’s from last century, when it was made properly. With beetles.” I’d never been allowed to drink it before. Not after my mors curae, nor when I’d left for Helshire.
“Because beetles are…good?” Faraday asked.
“The cochineal cactus parasite.” Aunt Veronica set to work on a block of ice with her chef’s knife. “Full of red acid to ward off predators, and used as a dye by the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs. This is the amaro primeval.”
With a dozen swift strokes, she cut four diamond-faceted chunks of ice, plopping each into a glass. Faraday flinched at the wide swings of the knife, the spray of chilly fragments.
“How come you never cut your ice by hand, Jessica?” she asked.
Veronica never had for me either. It was a privilege she usually reserved for aunts and uncles, people who’d been blooded. Did she know?
She poured shots of the vintage Campari into three of the glasses, lightened them with gin, shaded them again with red vermouth.
Veronica’s tiepin held a small piece of eudialyte, pink and gently radioactive. She’d been blooded for serving her signature Upstate Sour to a troublesome federal judge: bourbon, egg white, lemon juice, maple syrup, a gentle float of Malbec, and ricin.
She set the drinks before us—one dark brown, three as bloodred as the lining of my jacket.
We toasted without saying Peter’s name.
The first sip turned my spine into a flutter of bones. Present-day Campari tastes like cough drops and sugar-glazed donuts; this was fresh cherry jam and marshmallows. The bitterness rolled lavishly along my tongue.
“Okay, yeah,” Faraday said, louche against the table.
“Smells like cough medicine,” Sebastian said.
“Drink your soda,” Veronica replied. “The adults are talking.”
As I sipped, I remembered being seven, and Aunt Veronica telling me about the Aztecs’ blood rituals, the mass sacrifices that were necessary to keep the sun moving across the sky. The beating hearts that fed the gods of light.
The Aztec name for cochineal dye: the blood of the prickly pear.
“Does it taste like you thought it would, Jessica?” Veronica asked.
“Like letting an arrow fly,” I said, “when you know it’s going to hit.”
I wondered which way she’d voted.