Chapter 13
Sebastian was missing that afternoon, not at the archery range, nor in the Commons. My texts went unread.
I didn’t like my cousins knowing more about Peter than I did, not with his blood on my hands. You’re such a simple girl. That’s why no one tells you anything.
I wound up back at Lavernick, reading borrowed Behavioral Econ notes in the Sun Parlor, letting the reassuring math sink into me—impulsive behavior in a crisis. The neuroeconomics of childhood hunger. Optimal consumption in addicts.
Human beings weren’t always rational, but their disarray could be predicted. Any pattern, observed enough times, gained its own logic, like a certainty forged in the muscles by throwing a knife a thousand times.
Even chaos bowed to math.
Was it a coincidence that Gertie had mentioned Xavier Lindqvist so soon after my mother had expressed her fears?
I downloaded some actuarial tables and tried to calculate just how unlucky the Belmonts had been.
Even when I pushed it, their misfortune was less than two standard deviations from the norm.
Xavier wasn’t my ancient enemy. He was just a fellow legacy, someone I’d hooked up with, then beaten at archery.
“Jessica! Here you are!”
Faraday was at the glass doors, clutching a bottle of champagne. She wore an antique raccoon coat like one of Grandpa Dwight’s, and darker lipstick than usual.
She bustled into the Sun Parlor, dislodging the chairs in her path, leaving a corner of the rug upturned. The freshmen who’d been sketching each other by the fireplace looked up.
“Quiet hours are over,” I told them, and they started gathering their things.
Faraday sat beside me, filling the air with her mother’s perfume, and pulled two glasses—miraculously unbroken—from a coat pocket. She placed them on my Econ textbook.
“Can you pop the cork?” she asked. “I’m hopeless.”
I took the bottle, stripped the foil. “Krug? Fancy.”
“Guess why.”
“A return to financial security?”
Faraday let out a shriek, and one of the freshmen gave us a last glance—scandalized, envious.
“They dropped the case today! Or agreed to our terms, however you say it. Marlow’s terrible contract is null and void.”
I punctuated her news with a pop. The cork pinged off the tin ceiling, smacked a window, and wobbled across the floor to hide beneath an old claw-footed table.
The bottle frothed in my hand, the particular Krug scent of lemons and rot spilling out.
“That’s splendid.” I poured two glasses, slowly, to keep the fizz from lathering over. “But this champagne is traumatized. Did you run here?”
“All the way from the store. You like it cold!”
“I like it at fifty Fahrenheit, dear. Exactly what it is outside.”
“Oh, right.” Faraday sloughed off her coat onto a chair, sat down on it. “But we won!”
I handed her a glass, raising my own. “To winning.”
We drank—all bubbles at first, but they resolved into liquid against my tongue, oily and bright.
“To the Mortons,” she added.
“That goes without saying.” I gave her a serious look. “So don’t say it.”
“Right, of course. None of them knows why it happened—not even Marlow, which is annoying. He’s taking credit, when it was me fixing his fuckup.”
“He’s irrelevant. He didn’t sign.”
“He should still praise me.” Faraday sat back, smiling. “Oscar Junior just got into Harvard. Imagine if we couldn’t afford it. How embarrassing!”
“I’m so pleased, dear.”
“The Victorian house is back on for next year. I can still kick Salinger out. We should live together, Jessica—as allies.”
I smiled back at her, pretending to sip.
Aunt Veronica had warned me it was like this sometimes, right after a family’s incorporation. The bubbles overflowing the glass.
“I’d miss my dorm sisters,” I said.
Faraday scoffed. “They aren’t family.”
“But we are.” I took her hand and kissed it. “Whether we live together or not.”
With that, she was happy again.
We finished the bottle, my usual tricks hardly needed to make her drink more than me. When the porter came in to light the fireplace, we moved up to my room.
The sunset had caught fire by then, and Faraday wanted to go out onto my widow’s walk. We took the last of the champagne in half-empty glasses.
“No coat?” she asked.
I looked at my bare arm, the goose pimples budding there.
“I like the cold.”
“What did your family do? To make them give up?”
“Don’t ask,” I said, with nothing behind the eyes.
Faraday bravely held my gaze before turning back to the red sky. “Funny. I thought you’d say you didn’t know.”
I knew.
“It seems like magic, is all,” she added softly.
“That’s the best way to think of it.” Though, really, it was more like clockwork.
People are machines. They have inputs and outputs, pinions and springs. You can stop them, overwind them, reset them.
Faraday took a long drink. “Where are you spending the summer?”
“New York, I hope. At Garrett’s gallery.”
“The hot non-uncle! He’s an artist?”
“A gallerist. He finds artists and makes them famous.”
“I didn’t know you liked art.”
“I’m learning to,” I said.
Peter’s collection of animal bones now lived in my room. Sometimes I took them out and arranged them on my desk, creating hybrid creatures, impractical weapons, spiraling patterns of eye sockets, spines, jaws.
The results were pleasing to look at, but nature had done most of the work.
“Sebastian was so sweet at the funeral. I think I need to kiss him.” Faraday turned to look at me, her expression more intent than her tone. “Those soulful eyes.”
I had to laugh.
“What?” she demanded. “I’m not joking.”
“I know, dear. But you’re funnier when you aren’t trying to be.”
Faraday sighed. “Do you think it’s unwise?”
“Has wisdom ever stopped you?”
“Not my own, but yours might. It seemed polite to ask. I mean, he’s your cousin.”
“Third cousin.”
“And adopted, which is the point.” Faraday took an anxious little breath. “Did you two ever…”
She was waiting for me to complete the question, as if that would soften it. I wondered why everyone was asking for my approval today. Ashton with his repayment, Gertie with her cat’s name, now Faraday with her crush.
“Did we ever what?”
We had kissed once, when we were children, a few months before Uncle Max’s havoc. The day Sebastian completed his mors curae, a vivisection, a test of surgical skill—revealing Ratface’s still beating heart, then extinguishing it with a pinch.
He came to my room, shivering with triumph, streaked with blood. We stared at each other, uncertain what would happen. I’d already given him my curae gift—a winter cap knitted from red yarn.
Sebastian took a step inside, closed the door behind him, then kissed me. He pulled away, radiant. He smelled of iron and sweat.
I stared at him, full of something new and aching. But his grin of conquest brought me back to myself.
Was that kiss about his mors curae? Or me?
“Salty,” I’d said, wiping the rabbit’s blood from my lips.
“Jessica!” Faraday spluttered, here on the balcony. “You know what I mean! Have you ever—”
“Kissed?” I ended her torment.
“For starters, yes.”
“We haven’t.”
“You haven’t but you will?” Faraday offered. “You do but you don’t?”
We are but we haven’t. We might but we can’t.
“None of it,” I said, recalling Hiromi’s uncalculating smile.
Faraday turned back to the sunset. “Why am I always wrong about everything? The world’s never as interesting as I want it to be.”
“You just answered your own question, dear.”
“But why should things be boring?”
“I thought you wanted to kiss Sebastian yourself.”
A shrug. “Maybe not anymore.”
“Was this your first bottle tonight?”
“So many questions.” Faraday let out a dramatic sigh. “I hope you get that New York thing. I’d love a glamorous summer job!”
“You have a family to run.”
“Yes, but I could come down and visit you—and Garrett.”
“He has lots of beautiful art.”
“Well, then.” Faraday poured out the rest of her glass over the rail. She leaned out to watch the drops tumble into the darkness. “I shall buy some, to pay you back.”
“Unnecessary. Like Garrett said when you signed, there’s plenty of money for everyone. Loyalty is all we require.”
“But loyalty for what? What does your family want from me?”
I shrugged. Garrett had told me about one New York socialite he’d incorporated twenty years ago, of whom we’d never asked anything but a free hand in rearranging the seating at her dinner parties. We Mortons build our power slowly, like the pressures of sliding continental plates.
“Small things,” I said.
“I want to give you big things! Because I keep needing big things from you. Like, when Marlow is troublesome about money. He’s the eldest, and Mommy listens to him, and he’s always in my way.”
“He didn’t sign,” I said. “You did. You have a problem, we fix it.”
She smiled—my answer had met her requirements. And I realized that the houses, horses, and Paris had always been more important to Faraday than her family. She wouldn’t have an issue with the clockwork, no matter whose mainspring needed to be snapped.
“I guess Marlow won’t be a problem then,” she said.