Chapter 9
Drinking never affected me much. What alcohol suppresses in ordinaries—inhibitions, anxiety—my mors curae had already excised.
But in the gyre of Peter’s wake, drinking the blood of the prickly pear, gravity’s hold on me began to loosen. I’d learned to move on this parquet floor—ballet, fencing, Muay Thai. My footsteps were lighter here; my viewpoint seemed to rise above the crowd.
I saw my cousins, aunts, and uncles looking twice at me, as if expecting to see Peter on my coattails. His shade lingered, his absence part of my presence.
The last Jessica, at last.
“Christ, I thought my family was big,” Faraday was saying. “I don’t even know this many people.”
“This isn’t all of us,” Sebastian said. “Someone’s always hiding.”
There were perhaps two hundred blooded Mortons in the world, but never all in one place. No one but Grandmother Elizabeth knew the exact number.
“Everyone seems so cheerful,” Faraday said. “Happy to be together, even if it’s a funeral.”
I knew what she was sensing: the collective animal that forms whenever my family assembles. Bonds of tradition, forged of spilled blood and stopped hearts. The loyalty that remained after the death of care.
“I knew you’d feel it,” Sebastian said to Faraday. “We don’t invite just anyone. You belong with us.”
A delicate pink fanned her cheeks as she looked away. She wasn’t used to this much attention from Sebastian. On the train, he’d helped me prime her for this visit.
But the spark in his eye wasn’t just about Faraday. In any large gathering, my cousin’s primal instincts switch on—network, dazzle, seduce. A moment later he’d spun away to charm a group of jet-lagged Seths in funeral white.
“I need another drink,” Faraday said, and headed to the bar.
I felt a gentle touch on my shoulder.
“Garrett,” I said. “We missed you at dinner last night.”
“Came in this morning, with a guest.” He gestured at a woman standing alone. She wore a dark gray asymmetrical dress, a sculpted storm cloud in a black sky.
“One of your artists?” I asked.
“Rather obvious, isn’t it?”
Garrett ran a gallery in the city, one of the family’s money laundries. He wedded the art world to the occult mathematics we studied in Forensic Accounting.
“You two should talk,” he said.
“Because?”
“She’s the gallery’s future. So prolific.” Garrett guided me across the room. “If you catch her eye, you might see a lot of her this summer.”
“Ah.” With only two months of the school year left, I’d wondered where my internship might be, but hadn’t dared hope for New York. The city was where the family had first arrived in the New World, three centuries ago. It was where our money was transformed into power.
Sebastian—on the other side of the room, flirting with some Wolvaardts now—would kill to dip his toe in city politics.
“Is this a competition?”
“A closed audition.” Garrett affixed a smile. “Be memorable.”
The artist turned as we approached. Fine featured, bright-eyed, memorable herself.
“Hiromi Kennedy,” Garrett said. “This is Jessica, my favorite Morton.”
“Out of so many?” Her eyes danced around the room, came to rest on me. “An artist, perhaps?”
“Aspiring,” Garrett answered. “A late bloomer.”
“Very aspirational. I wouldn’t call myself an artist,” I said.
Improvisation was part of the test. An internship in New York City would require passing as an ordinary—all day, every day.
“If you make art, you’re an artist,” Hiromi said. “What’s your medium?”
“Bones,” I said, thinking of the bag I’d taken from Peter’s room.
“Bones?”
“It was what was around.”
“Jessica wasn’t always a creative child,” Garrett said. “She had a pet rabbit when she was little—she named it Rabbit.”
“He looked like a Rabbit,” I said.
“Her logic was impeccable.” Garrett pretended to spot someone across the room. With a wink, he headed off, leaving me to charm this woman on my own.
I took a drink of beetle blood, steeling myself for more questions about my art. But Hiromi was content to enjoy the spectacle of my family. In our silence, a bubble formed around us—an alliance of two people watching a party.
When I finally spoke, I tried to sound conspiratorial.
“Garrett doesn’t usually bring his artists upstate. He must like you.”
“He’s indulging me. You know how some people love weddings? I’m all about funerals. The stories that get told about us, the frailty of memory.” Her eyes came to mine. “I’m talking like a gallery press release. Were you close to Peter?”
“He was my first cousin, but more like a little brother,” I said, putting it in terms an ordinary would understand.
“Oh. I’m very sorry.”
Be memorable. “He left me his favorite knife.”
“Peter…liked cooking?”
“He liked knife-throwing. I taught him, when he was little.” I took another sip. “For real proficiency, it’s best to begin at five.”
Hiromi took a moment. “I thought that was languages.”
“He wanted to be a native speaker.”
“Of knives?”
Of bedlam. “Peter was unusual. Even for a Morton.”
“I’m sad I never met him.” She moved a little closer. “I always thought Garrett was a bit odd. Now I’m wondering if he’s the normal one.”
“He isn’t. He just lives far enough from the rest of us to pass.”
She smiled. “When we drove through the gate, a gentleman took my phone—he doesn’t get out much, does he?”
“Uncle Orrin. Not anymore.” Except for necessary mayhem.
“By the way, it’s clever to call a rabbit Rabbit. It’s unexpected, and funny.”
“The humor was unintentional.”
“Kids are always funniest when they aren’t trying to be.”
“Mortons too,” I said.
Hiromi laughed at this, swaying a little, her shoulder pressing against mine. A soft current began between us. “I’m sure Rabbit loved you, whatever you called him.”
I thought of his soft fur, his trusting eyes. The noises he made in the dark, while we visited the other Jessicas.
“I loved him too.” For care to die, love must be complete. Slay the rabbit, spare the child.
“Was red his favorite color?”
I turned to look at her. “Rabbit’s?”
“Peter’s.” She swept an arm across the crowd. “I’ve never seen this much red at a funeral before.”
Uncle Merwin’s pocket square. A Wolvaardt aunt in ruby slippers. The streak of red in Pava Seth’s hair. Grandmother, resplendent in oxblood, smiling as Garrett paid court to her. It was impossible to pretend it was all coincidence.
Besides, I felt pleasure in Hiromi’s scrutiny.
“You have sharp eyes. The red isn’t for Peter though. It’s one of our traditions.”
“Are you socialists?”
“Within the family, yes—we reserve capitalism for everyone else. But this is something older.” I decided to be honest. “Not the red of the French Revolution, but of the White Horse People.”
Hiromi only shook her head.
“Like Aztecs,” I said, “in Oxfordshire.”
She considered this as I sipped the last of my beetle-red drink. The wake seemed to turn a little wilder around us. Olga and Beatrice, Sebastian’s mothers, had taken to the dance floor.
“You don’t sacrifice your party guests, do you?” Hiromi asked.
“Not since the Late Bronze Age. And never friends.”
“Are we friends already?”
“We can wait, if you prefer. But why?”
“Why indeed.” Her smile confirmed what was growing in the air between us. Something that fluttered and fizzed.
I wanted very much to spend my summer in New York—even if it meant pretending to be an artist.
“Peter didn’t have a favorite color,” I said.
“What kinds of favorite things did he have?”
Explosives, bones, shiny stolen objects.
“Me. One summer, when he was thirteen, he walked into town every Friday and came back with a box of my favorite candy.”
Her hand went to her heart. “That’s so sweet.”
“Bitter lemon, actually.” The flavor hovered at the edge of my tongue, threatening to unloose the ashen memories of that summer. “My turn. What kind of art do you make?”
“Headstones,” she said.
“You do like funerals.”
“Not the gothic kind! Simple inscriptions on granite, made from commercial headstones. I also build robots. Garrett wants me to focus—emerging artists should be consistent.”
“What kind of inscriptions?”
“My next series is about the erosion of legacy. Whenever I smell power, I ask people for their favorite Martin Luther King quote. Come to think of it.” She reached into a pocket and pulled out a small notebook. “Do you mind?”
“Do I mind…giving you a Martin Luther King quote?”
“I don’t have one from a knife-thrower.”
I stared at the notebook in her hand. Most of my education was focused on havoc, the rest on rubbing elbows with the powerful—smatterings of political gossip, history, languages.
Civil rights was not a strong point. We smelled like power, not justice.
“My favorite MLK quote?”
“It doesn’t have to be profound, or accurate,” Hiromi said, her pen ready. “Whatever words are in your head.”
Something came to me dimly. “For evil to flourish, all that good has to do is…nothing?”
“Aha,” Hiromi said, writing. “Spoken like a knife-thrower.”
“It’s a comforting thought.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “It is?”
I was being too honest now.
“If you turn it around,” I said. “If evil did nothing.”
“Right.” She was still scribbling. “For a year, nobody commits intentional harm. No corporation steals its employees’ pay. No politician takes a bribe. Evil takes a year off—imagine what good could do.”
I tried to think it through, but my mind kept hitching. How soon before everyone noticed? How could you game the absence of evil for profit? How long till the world fell apart?
All those meticulous arrangements and alliances, all those spreadsheets, crumbling at once.
Was this how artists thought?
Over Hiromi’s shoulder, Garrett was headed back to us. My audition was over, and there wasn’t time to say anything profound. But with Veronica’s cocktail in my blood, I could be memorable.
“Evil can’t switch off, Hiromi. It lives too close to the heart.”
“I know,” she said, with quiet certainty. I wondered what else she knew.
Go for broke. “Are you spending the night with us?”
Hiromi shook her head. “Garrett and I are headed off soon. An arts festival on the Hudson.”
The buzzing inside me settled, just a little.
“Hope to see you again,” I said. “Maybe in New York.”
“Your Uncle Garrett’s pretty hot,” Faraday said when the three of us had found one another again.
“Not an uncle,” Sebastian said. “Not hot.”
“I thought you were lax with family terms!”
“Uncle and aunt are terms of respect. Garrett hasn’t earned it.”
Garrett was part of the family, but unblooded. After passing his mors curae, he’d never taken an assignment. Art and money were his mayhem.
“Harsh,” Faraday said.
“He was our dexterity teacher,” I said. “When we were little.”
“Dexterity?”
“Eggs,” Sebastian added bitterly.
Faraday looked confused.
Dexterity was the formal name for locks, safes, card play, and pilfery. Before every class, Garrett made us peel a hard-boiled egg in thirty seconds. If we left a nick or tear in the thin membrane between egg and shell, we had to peel another—and another, until we got it right.
When that got too easy, Garrett switched our eggs to soft-boiled. I loved the daily practice, Sebastian did not, but it had given us both the fingers of Victorian pickpockets.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised when, twenty minutes later, I found the note Garrett had slipped into the breast pocket of my mother’s jacket.
We’re ready for her. Sky Room. 10 a.m.
I leaned close to Faraday. “Before we leave tomorrow, we should chat with someone—about Marlow.”
“The day after a funeral?”
“The best time. I’ll come get you for breakfast. Nine o’clock.”
“No phones, dear. How will we know it’s nine?”
“From clocks,” I said.
“Oh, those.” Faraday looked at me, a little cousin in the old barn’s hayloft, working up the nerve to jump. She was starting to see us Mortons for what we truly were, and to understand that she’d be throwing her family in with mine.
Houses. Horses. Tuition. Paris.
“As long as there’s coffee,” she said at last.