Chapter 23
As the year drew to a close, we upperclassmen of Helshire gathered on the grassy slopes of the amphitheater for Spring Convocation.
The ceremony was full of Latin proverbs and oblique references to Peter—the inseparable skeins of tragedy and joy. But no mention of how the Old Campus had burned, a lightning strike on a recent rainy night.
A flock of starlings drifted from tree to tree as the provost spoke, restless observers.
Faraday sat beside me, holding my hand and pressing iced coffee to her forehead.
The Daisy Singers performed the alma mater, its martial lilt turned slow and tender, an elegy for those soon to depart, and one never to return.
That night, Faraday and I went to the Terrace Burn, to watch old textbooks, broken furniture, and thesis notes disappear into an ever-growing bonfire. It was wasteful and exhilarating, the heat pushing us back until the circle was a hundred feet across.
I shared the celebratory flask Aunt Veronica had sent: milk-washed gin and nocino, like burned walnut pie with ice cream. Dessert after a year-long meal.
“Hey, look,” Faraday said, late in the night. “Your long-lost cousin.”
Sebastian walked toward us carefully, as if very drunk. He wore a crisp new suit, already more like a plucky intern than a Morton.
“I have to pee,” Faraday said, disappearing into the dark.
Sebastian hadn’t spoken to me for two weeks, since my confession in the rain. He and I had promised no more secrets, and I’d kept the only one that mattered.
Now he didn’t trust me not to kill him, if the order came.
He handed me a neatly wrapped gift. I opened it there, the bonfire shadows dancing around us. It was the skull of a crow, the head maggoted to perfect whiteness, its plague doctor beak still black with keratin.
Something Peter would’ve given me.
“Thank you,” I said, but Sebastian was already walking away.
Alone on the train to New York the next morning, I texted him:
I’ll always keep your secrets.
He began to type something in return, but the dots soon disappeared.
I remembered my last trip to New York City, eight years before.
My cousin Thomas had just turned nine, and I was leading him on his first nightwalk.
Uncle Orrin dropped us off at midnight, on the steps of a library larger than the Great House, two stone lions flanking its entrance.
Per tradition, we had to visit all four of the family’s city properties by noon the next day.
Walking toward Brooklyn on the dark streets, we were quiet, a little nervous.
It was our first trip away from home since Uncle Max’s visit to the woodshed.
My own first nightwalk had been guided by slight, doomed Yvonne, and her last screams haunted the city’s squealing brakes, the subway shudders under our feet.
Gradually, though, New York’s scale began to soothe me—the hundreds of fire escapes beckoning to be climbed, the bridge towers brushing clouds as we crossed over to Brooklyn and back.
I made it exciting for Tom, letting him steal our food. We built a small fire in Central Park to ward off the cold, the cliffs of skyscrapers pressing at the edges of the trees. Our only real challenge was the ordinaries worried about a pair of underdressed kids wandering alone.
A tall twelve, I told them I was sixteen and to fuck off.
Our nightwalks taught us that no metropolis was more dangerous than the forests we’d explored as children. The landscape here might have different rules, different threats, but it was easier to be invisible in a city than in the listening, watching wild.
When my train arrived at Penn Station, the early summer afternoon didn’t match my dark memories. New buildings loomed everywhere, their glass sides angling the sun around corners.
I walked down to Garrett’s, my wheeled suitcase rumbling on the ragged sidewalks.
He lived on an elbow-shaped street in the West Village, leftover from before Manhattan was a grid.
It was one of the Mortons’ original New York properties, and I remembered checking in during my last nightwalk.
Waiting on the stoop, Garrett had given Tom a bottle of water and told us to keep moving.
Today, his greeting was equally terse. He opened the door and looked me up and down.
“Only one suitcase,” he said. “Good.”
We went through my clothes first.
“No. No. Definitely not. With the right jacket, maybe.” He pulled out a kilt in blue and yellow tartan. “Color at last! Whose was this?”
“Uncle Merwin’s.” I turned to Aunt Arabella. “Didn’t you wear it, your freshman year?”
Arabella, who was looking on in silence, gave me a fractional nod.
She lived here too, overseeing Garrett’s enterprises. He ran the gallery and its money manipulations, but he’d never killed anyone. A blooded Morton was a necessary presence, even if she was only twenty-five.
“Love the blue,” he said, tossing the kilt on the four-poster bed. “That’s proper vintage.”
I looked at the discards on the floor. “This is all vintage, Garrett.”
“But it’s inherited.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Sedate, moneyed, decorous. It fits together too well, like a family portrait.”
“It is.”
“But you—Jessica Anderson—are an impoverished grad student, freshly arrived in New York. Your clothes are from musty thrift stores, rummaged from the castoffs of a small city with a design college.”
“Savannah,” I said. “We discussed this.”
“So your wardrobe has to be charmingly chaotic, a mirror of your as-yet-unformed self. You must appear unfinished.” Garrett hurled more clothes on the floor. “And not like the exquisitely tailored product of a centuries-old murder dynasty.”
I held up Uncle Orrin’s waistcoat. “This?”
“Out. Everything Morton is out. Including your monosyllabic answers.”
“Noted,” I said.
“We’ll go shopping tomorrow.”
Aunt Arabella and I exchanged a glance. Ordinaries went shopping. My only store-bought clothes were technical synthetics—for climbing, stealth, wicking away sweat. The rest of my wardrobe had descended upon me from the family stores, mended, washed, and softened by other Morton hands.
“Now this is perfect,” Garrett said. He held Sebastian’s skull. “Do you have a chain for it?”
“It’s not a necklace.” Or part of a costume—it was a ghost of Peter.
Except everything was a costume now. I was Jessica Anderson, gallery assistant, and bones were my art. Peter’s collection had traveled with me to New York, wrapped in protective paper and wool.
“I’ll find you a leather strap,” Garrett said. “Wear the skull tonight, and the kilt. And dye your hair—blue.”
“Tonight?”
“The Xenakis opening. Didn’t I mention it?”
Sophomore year, legacies took a class in disguise, and on the estate we kids were encouraged to play dress-up, answering to made-up names for days on end. One summer, Sebastian and Gertie pretended to be twins who spoke their own invented language, and no English.
Sebastian had tried to play the twins game with me, but the make-believe had fallen flat. I was always Jessica Morton.
That had to end now. My lurking in Hiromi’s socials, my afternoons onstage in Uncle Wolfie’s class, my arrangements of Peter’s bone collection—all of it had to become real.
Jessica Anderson had started as a sculpture major, but when her work showed no particular promise, she switched to an arts business program. She still wanted to be in this world.
Garrett lent me a black leather jacket, scraped down one side in some long-ago accident. Motorcycle boots would’ve been perfect, but all I had in black were ballroom shoes. My hair almost matched the blue of the kilt.
To make the crow skull a necklace, Garrett’s leather strap was threaded through the eyeholes, a worm in the grave.
The overall result was certainly chaotic—half art student, half Scottish road-witch. It felt unMorton to be so striking.
I wondered what polished, elegant Hiromi would make of me.
“Memorable,” Garrett said when I presented myself.
“In a good way?”
He only shrugged. Aunt Arabella sipped her tea.
I sat down with them at the wrought-iron table. My chair was unsteady on the uneven stones.
The backyard was the size of a small greenhouse on the estate, with stunted trees and bushes in pots. Ivy spilled across the wooden fences. It felt crowded, partly by the centuries of bones beneath the flagstones.
Garrett poured me tea.
“Will Hiromi Kennedy be there tonight?” I asked.
He smiled. “You’re excited to see her.”
“She knows we’re related. What about my new last name?”
“I told her about our little pretend. Said you’re afraid of being accused of nepotism.”
“So my cover story has a cover story. Uncle Wolfie would not approve.”
“You two sharing a little secret—it creates intimacy.”
“With a struggling artist?”
Neither of them said anything.
Sometimes a summer internship was just undercover practice—three months spent answering to a new name, creating a new self, maybe seducing a target or two. But this was New York City, and I was already blooded.
“Don’t tell me this is a dry run,” I said.
“You don’t always have to be a prodigy,” Arabella said. “We might just need you around to put out fires.”
I didn’t react—was she referring to Halcyon Hall? Maybe the Lindqvists were making noise.
She waved a hand. “I thought you had booze to buy, because Garrett’s ‘pedestrian white wine’ was beneath you.”
I sipped my tea before answering. Aunt Arabella had been blooded six years early, the youngest Morton this century. She was proud of that, but in a prickly and uncertain way. She hadn’t delivered the death blow to Uncle Max, and there were rumors that her first assignments hadn’t gone well.
What if she’d never really killed anyone?
“I’ll stock the bar,” I said. “But I want to know what my assignment is.”
Garrett looked at Arabella. She nodded her assent.
“The gallery isn’t just about money,” he said. “A gallerist must be on intimate terms with the wealthy. We hear their dreams. We sit at their dining tables. We tell them which Van Gogh goes with the couch.”
Arabella sighed. “You’ve never sold a Van Gogh, Garrett.”
“An obvious example, for Jessica’s benefit.”
“I audited Art History 101,” I said.
Arabella looked at me with dismay. “Audited?”
“No, she’s perfect like this,” Garrett said. “Part of the Morton mystique is that we never quite fit in.”
“Tell me the assignment,” I said.
“We’re interested in one of my collectors, but we can’t get his attention. When we push him, he doesn’t wobble.”
I smiled. Faraday had wobbled so easily.
“His weakness is jealousy—a need to dominate and control. He’s an obsessive, and he’s obsessed with the art of Hiromi Kennedy.”
“You want me to seduce his favorite artist? That’s a very Garrett strategy.”
“Favorite living artist—he owns three Kandinskys. Your job is to get close to her.”
“But why do we care about him?”
“Dr. Lyon is a psychiatrist,” Garrett said. “But he collects art like a billionaire. His clients buy it for him. Millions of dollars’ worth.”
“Why?”
Garrett looked at Arabella, who put down her teacup with a little click.
“He doesn’t run a psychiatrist practice,” she said. “It’s more like a cult.”