“What is the meaning of this, boy?”
The room was spinning a little, but Jack forced himself to stay upright. “The meaning of what? I’ve been abed for—” He looked to his mother. The days had all run together. “How long have I been up there?”
“Three days, dear,” she said, a small, sad smile on her face as she beamed at him. “You should sit down. You’re not well.” She went over to the tufted chair closest to him and began arranging the pillows.
He couldn’t stand her constant fussing, like he was still a child. It was how they all saw him, he knew. And they were all wrong. “I’m fine,” he said, waving her off.
He wasn’t fine, but he damned sure wasn’t going to admit it in front of his uncle and his cousin. The last thing he would be was weak in front of them. “I’ve no idea what you’re referring to,” he told Morgan, meeting the old man’s gaze. “Perhaps if you’d stop shouting and explained it, I could offer a response.”
Morgan glared at him. “Who did you talk to?”
“Recently?” Jack asked. “No one but my mother and the ever-present parade of doctors and maids who insist on constantly intruding on my rest and recovery.”
Most of the maids were pretty enough, but all the doctors had been a nuisance, constantly checking on him and telling him to rest, when all he wanted to do was study the Book he’d hidden beneath the mountain of pillows and blankets the maids piled onto the bed. Day and night, he wanted only to pore over the pages and unlock its secrets.
“Then how did the Herald manage to publish this story?” Morgan thrust the paper at him.
Jack swayed a little on his feet, but he opened the crumpled page to find a headline about himself. He let his eyes skim over it. “What of it?” he asked. Nothing seemed amiss. “None of this is untrue. Darrigan and the girl were on the train before it derailed. The authorities said that there wasn’t a bomb, so it might well have been magic that caused the accident.”
“None of that matters,” Morgan said. “I don’t care about some damn train derailment. I care about the fact that this reporter knows what happened at Khafre Hall—that the fire wasn’t an accident of faulty wiring. Do you know what lengths the Inner Circle undertook to ensure that the truth of the Khafre Hall disaster did not become public? It was a delicate thing, to steer the press away from the real cause of the fire, and yet here it is, a full-page spread that reveals not only that we were robbed of our most important artifacts, but that we were robbed by common trash. This article knows everything. Who did you talk to?”
The past few days were a haze of pain and morphine . . . and the thrall of the Book. Jack could have talked to Roosevelt himself, and he wouldn’t necessarily have remembered. Not that he would admit that now. “No one,” he said instead. “I’ve no idea how this . . . Reynolds, whoever he is, knows any of this.”
“Well, he does, and it’s made a damn mess of things,” Morgan said, ripping the paper from Jack’s hands. “Do you know how weak this makes the Order look? We’re already getting word from the other Brotherhoods that they’re concerned about the state of the Conclave—about the Order’s ability to host it. After all, if I can’t control my own family, how can we possibly think to arrange an event as important as the Conclave?” He tossed the paper aside.
“I don’t know why you assume it was my fault,” Jack said, bristling at his uncle’s tone.
“Because it usually is your fault,” his cousin said. “It’s one scheme after another with you, Jack, and none of them are reasonable. You don’t think things through. Are you sure you didn’t give this interview?”
Jack clenched his jaw to keep from railing at the snideness in his cousin’s tone. Across the room, his mother was still looking at him with a sadness in her eyes that made him want to smash his fist into her precious collection of figurines. When he spoke, it took effort to make his words measured and calm. “This is the first I’ve even been out of bed.”
But his cousin wasn’t listening. “Maybe we should give Jack something of a holiday, to recuperate,” his cousin suggested to his uncle. “Until this all blows over.”
“It’s not going to blow over,” Morgan spat. “This isn’t a private family matter, like the problem in Greece last year. That damn article is everywhere, and the other papers are picking up the story as well. If we send him off now, it’s going to look like we have something to hide. That’s the last thing we want—it would give credence to the story.”
“What else can we do with him?” his cousin asked.
“I’m standing right here,” Jack said darkly. He felt out of breath just standing there, but thankfully, the morphine he’d taken before he came down had eased the pain in his arm and in his head.
“As though that matters in the slightest,” his uncle sneered. Then he turned back to his son, Jack’s cousin. “We’ll demand a retraction.”
“From the Herald?” His cousin shook his head. “It’s not much more than a gossip rag these days. They don’t care whether the story’s accurate, so long as it sells. It might be better to meet them on their own terms. Get another story out there, one that sheds some doubt on this one. I can talk to Sam Watson, if you want. You remember, I introduced you at the Metropolitan. He’s been a great friend to the Order, first with the theft at the Met and then in the past few weeks with his editorials about the dangers of a certain criminal element. I’m sure he could do an interview with Jack and reframe the story.”
“I don’t want to do any damn interview,” Jack said, but no one was listening.
“Do that,” his uncle said, pacing. “It’s a start, but it’s not enough. Retracting the story doesn’t change the fact that this Reynolds has made the Order look like old fools.”
Which you are, Jack thought. But even with the morphine loosening his mind, he managed to keep his mouth shut tight. He didn’t need to worry about his uncle or the Order any longer now that he had the Book.
“It sounds to me like what you need is an engagement,” his aunt Fanny ventured.
Morgan turned to her, impatient. “Thank you, dearest, but this matter doesn’t concern you.”
His aunt ignored the dismissal. “If you’re trying to neutralize unwanted gossip, you need something more exciting for the press to focus on than an interview, Pierpont. Trust me. The world of gossip is one I am intimately familiar with, and I have far more experience at controlling it than you do. When a girl’s reputation is soiled, the best thing her family can do is to get her engaged, and quickly. There’s nothing like a big society wedding to distract the gossips. Isn’t that right, Mary?” she asked, turning to Jack’s mother.
His mother, a small, weak woman who’d become even more so with age, looked troubled. “I don’t think Jack’s in any condition to court anyone,” she said tentatively, “though I suppose the Stewart girl might be interested since she had such a dismal season.”
“I am not being shackled to some failed debutante,” Jack said. He certainly wasn’t going to allow his mother and aunt to arrange a marriage to save his reputation, like they might for some ruined girl.