It had been two days. It was hard to guess how long Clyde intended to enforce this banishment, because she’d never seen him this angry before. She sat on her bed and stared at the four walls, counting the ways she could have lived the past six months differently. She could have been more honest with her parents about Luke or been more forthcoming about negotiating a truce with the Delacroixs. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but she owed her parents more than she’d given them.
But was it all her fault? If she could design a perfect family, no one would ever fear being kicked out or shunned. Over the last few months she’d learned terrible things about her family, but none of it could stop her from loving them. She had been planted in this family, put down her roots with them, and clung to them as naturally as a vine clung to a trellis. She didn’t want to be ripped out and torn away. No matter how badly they treated her, she still wanted to belong.
A gentle tapping on her bedroom door made her sit bolt upright. It wasn’t time for dinner yet, so perhaps Vera was coming to see her at last.
“Yes?” she asked, racing to the door and tugging it open, but it was only Bridget, the downstairs maid. Marianne tried not to let her disappointment show.
“This came for you in the mail today,” Bridget said, holding a package. It had been opened because Clyde was inspecting everything going in or out of her room to prevent communication with Luke.
Marianne took the package without looking inside. “Thank you,” she said. “How is everyone downstairs? Has my mother’s migraine lifted?”
“Oh yes, ma’am. She’s been right as rain for more than a day now. She went out shopping for a new tea set this morning.”
“Good.” Although it wasn’t good at all. If Vera was feeling better, she could have come to comfort Marianne. Or yell at her. Or intervene for her. Instead, Vera chose to ignore her, which was the most painful of all.
“What about Andrew and Delia? Are they still here, or have they gone back to Baltimore?”
Bridget glanced down the hall in unease. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m really not supposed to be speaking to you.”
Marianne nodded and watched the maid go. It wouldn’t be fair to risk someone’s job just because she was lonely and afraid. She closed the door and pulled the wrapping away from the package, and her heart nearly stopped.
Don Quixote!
She’d ordered a copy from the bookseller months ago, and now it was here. The front of the book was beautifully embossed with gold foil, showing the silhouette of a gangly man holding a lance, staring at a windmill in the distance. The top of the book had the title Don Quixote in a lavish font, and at the bottom was the author, Miguel de Cervantes. Marianne opened the front cover, where Luke’s name was listed as the translator in much smaller font. Whoever was screening her mail obviously hadn’t inspected the book carefully, or it would have been thrown into the fire.
He’d done it! Luke got this book across the finish line even though the process terrified him. She hugged the heavy tome to her chest, so proud of Luke but desperately wishing he could be here to share this moment.
Well! At least now she would have something to fill these long, dreary hours. She hopped onto her bed, cradling the book and savoring its weight and all that it represented. This was a monumental accomplishment, a labor of love that proved Luke Delacroix was no feckless dabbler. He was a man of immense talent and dedication, even if he hid it beneath a layer of breezy charm.
She gazed at his name on the title page, then turned it over to read a brief dedication.
Amazing women have inspired men from the dawn of literary history. Cleopatra, Helen, Guinevere, Juliet, and Dulcinea.
To these legendary heroines, I add my own,
and her name is Marianne.
She couldn’t even breathe. Oh, Luke, what a wonderful, magnificent dreamer. Thank heavens her parents hadn’t seen this, or she would have been banished to Siberia!
She shot off the bed, energy prickling through her veins and making it impossible to be still. For the past two days she had let herself be boxed up in this room. No more. She had to be worthy of that dedication. She had to be worthy of Luke and her own God-given intelligence to make a difference in the world.
Luke was locked up in jail because of her. She had to do something to help, but what? She couldn’t storm the jail to break him out or make a legal argument in a court of law. She wasn’t a person of influence who could call on connections.
She paced. It was time to stop counting the ways she couldn’t help and think about how she could. She’d give anything for even a fraction of Luke’s connections. He was a prince of the city and had a thousand friends. She was a newcomer and had no one.
That meant she had to be clever about this. She needed to rouse an army of Luke’s allies and supporters, and she instinctively knew who they were.
The Poison Squad.
If those bombastic, hyper-competitive men knew Luke had been locked up for publishing a story about noxious chemicals, they would climb over each other to be first in line to help. All she had to do was figure out a way to get to them without alerting her father.
She waited until four o’clock in the morning to make her escape because no one in this household was an early riser.
Men on the Poison Squad were. Luke told her that St. Louis got up at five o’clock every morning to train for the Olympics before breakfast, and the Rollins brothers rose early to study. Marianne expected at least a couple of the men to be awake to greet her.
Guilt ate at her as she snuck out of her bedroom. The house was dark, and she crept in stocking feet down the hall. Even the sound of her heart pumping blood in her ears felt loud as she tiptoed downstairs, clutching a pair of shoes to her chest. She waited until she was outside to tug them on.
Twenty minutes later she was on the sidewalk outside the Poison Squad’s boardinghouse. A light illuminated one of the upstairs rooms, and she scurried up the steps, knocking with vigor to get that unknown person’s attention.
It was St. Louis, already dressed for an early morning sprint through the deserted city streets. “Aren’t you the photographer lady?” he asked.
She stepped inside the house. “I am. The last time I was here was the infamous night of the mass poisoning. You ran to fetch Dr. Wiley.”
“I remember,” he said. “You were holed up with Delacroix over there on that window seat all night. Say, where is he these days? He disappeared on us.”
“That’s what I’m here about.”
St. Louis’s eyes widened in disbelief when she told him about Luke’s arrest and why he’d been taken into custody. He rounded up the Rollins brothers and Princeton, the only other men awake at that hour. All were aghast at what had happened to Luke.
“Was he the one writing articles for Modern Century all along?” St. Louis asked.
She nodded.
Princeton’s normally gregarious demeanor was unexpectedly grim. “Are you telling us that Congress knew those chemicals could make people sick and buried the test results?”
“It was only a single committee that knew,” she said. And one of the men on that committee was her own father, which made it hard to hold up her head, but that was the reason she was here.
“How can we help?” Princeton asked, and Marianne smiled, knowing she’d come to the right place.