“Oh, Ann. It’s lovely!”
“Will you be my maid of honor, Gemma?”
“Of course.” I laugh. “Felicity will be green with envy, wherever she is. Paris. Rome. I can’t remember. You know Fee—she bores easily.”
“She’s here. In New York. She arrived Tuesday.” Immediately, Ann’s face betrays her mistake. She’s a good actress but not enough to fool me. “Oh. Oh dear. I—I’m sure she meant to pay a call, Gemma….”
And just like that, my chilling conversation with Mr. Dwight and my excitement over seeing Ann vanish like a magic trick, only to be replaced by a familiar irritation. Bloody Fee.
“Where is she?” I demand.
* * *
Of course, Felicity Worthington would take rooms at the venerated Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square. Only a hotel dubbed “the Buckingham Palace of New York” would do for our Fee. When we arrive, she is finishing up with a milliner, making final choices from an array of hats, each one lovelier and more ornate than the last.
“Ah! You’re here!” Fee says, as if she’s been expecting us all along. She has the audacity to be even more beautiful than the last time I saw her. She is dressed in the latest Parisian fashion, her blond hair, lightened by the sun, heaped upon her head in Gibson Girl voluptuousness. “Which do you think—the burgundy velvet or the deep green ostrich-plumed with veil?”
“They’re both very pretty,” Ann says at the same time that I snap, “Why not wear them both at once? Be bold!”
Fee’s eyes flash. “I believe I shall have both. What an excellent idea, Miss Doyle. Thank you, Miss Forman,” she says to the milliner, who, sensing storminess in the air, seems quite happy to take her leave.
The suite is enormous. I think of my own modest room at the Ashfield. It would fit inside this suite twice over. I glance about at the half dozen flower arrangements. “Were you planning a funeral as well, Felicity? Is that why you need the proper hat?” I say, removing my gloves and dropping them beside a vase that I’m certain is more expensive than my tuition.
“I meant to pay a call, Gemma. Honestly, I did. But none of my hats were suitable. My favorite blew off my head whilst I was boating across the Rhine. It was a tragedy. I tell you, a good hatpin is worth everything,” Felicity says blithely. She bites into a chocolate, makes a face, and returns its half-eaten carcass to the box. “Marzipan. Je déteste le massepain!”
I exhale loudly. “Must you speak French?”
“Oui. Je dois.”
“I adore marzipan,” Ann says, playing peacekeeper.
Felicity offers her the box and the half-eaten one.
Ann’s lip curls in distaste. She picks around the mangled chocolate and takes a fresh one.
“We are not here to discuss hats and sweets,” I say, dropping onto a fat, tufted ottoman. “It seems there’s a crop of women here in New York who want to become a new Order and rule the realms, if Mr. Dwight is to be believed.”
“Who is Mr. Dwight?”
“He’s an agent of the Rakshana,” Ann says around a mouthful of chocolate.
Felicity looks to Ann, then to me, clearly upset that she is not in the know.
I smile. “If you’d bothered to pay a call, perhaps you’d know more.”
“The very nerve of those ladies! Well, they can’t be the Order. We are the Order,” Felicity sniffs, ignoring my jibe. It is such a Felicity Worthington answer, elitist and yet slightly funny.
“Is it a coven, do you think? Witchcraft and blood rituals?” Ann asks. In addition to her beloved schoolgirl melodramas, she’s begun indulging her thirst for macabre tales by reading penny dreadfuls.
“I’m sure it’s not a coven,” I say. “I’m not even sure it exists at all.”
“It could be a coven. You don’t know everything,” Ann mutters.
“What if this is another of the Rakshana’s attempts to wrest control of the realms from us and have it all—as if they don’t already have gentlemen’s clubs and cigars and brandy and the vote!” Fee protests.
“That’s what I said!” Ann asserts once more, till I fear it shall become her patented line, like Lady Macbeth: All the perfumes of Arabia…
With reluctance, I put aside my peevishness with Felicity for not calling on me as soon as she arrived and tell her of my meeting with Mr. Dwight. When I’ve finished, Fee claps her hands, eyes alight. “At last! A proper adventure!”
“Two dead men and a missing Rakshana agent isn’t an ‘adventure,’ Fee. It’s trouble.”
“Trouble is always an adventure. I say, Gemma, you’ve become a true bore now that you’re a university student!”
“Miss Worthington, are we certain that your presence here in New York isn’t because you’ve been run out of every other city in the world for being a nuisance?”
“Now that would be an adventure!”
“You could have let me know you were here,” I bark. I’d meant to keep it inside but the cork has come loose.
Felicity glares. “I was choosing a hat!”
“Ladies, please,” Ann pleads, and it’s hard to know if she’s exasperated with us or jealous of the way Fee and I can fall into argument so easily, our strange little dance of friendship that leaves her on the outside.
“I suppose you’ve made all new friends here in New York,” Felicity says whilst fluffing her skirt to show that she doesn’t care, when, in fact, she does. It is tempting to say, Why, yes, I’ve made simply heaps of new friends! Why, I scarcely remembered your name. But that would be a lie. I’ve made precisely two friends in the time I’ve been in New York: Juliet Stevens, a suffragette who arrived at Barnard last year and lives on my floor in the Ashfield Residence. And Samuel Henson, who works at the morgue and offers occasional instruction in vivisection at Barnard.
“No one like the two of you,” I say.
“Because there is no one like us,” Fee asserts.
“Thank heavens for that,” I snipe.
And then, for no reason I can name, we are immediately convulsed in laughter. We come together in one fierce embrace, and just like that, it’s as if I’ve been wandering for ages and have finally seen the light of home.
“What do you make of these symbols?” Felicity asks, looking over the note I took from Mr. Dwight. “Egyptian?”