“Acting strangely?” Agnes asked, surprised. She’d always been so obsessed with learning about her mother, she’d never given much thought to how her father might have been back then. She’d assumed he was simply the same as he was now. “How?”
“They weren’t rightly home much,” Mrs. Phelps said as she worked some gardenia shampoo through Agnes’s hair. “Traveling all the time. And the parties, with foreign foods and all sorts of people—not proper company, if you catch my drift. She was wild, like I said, and it rubbed off on him for a bit. Wouldn’t even deign to have you and your brother born at the hospital in Old Port. No, it was some private facility outside the city, that was the only place that would do for her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Servants talk, my dear. I may not have worked in this house then, but gossip like that travels fast, especially in this city. The McLellans left Old Port together, and only you children and your father returned.” She tilted Agnes’s head so she could look into her eyes and smiled. “But that woman gave us you and Leo, and that’s all that matters. Ah, Hattie.”
The young maid came hurrying in with a bucket of water, steam rising gently from its surface. She dumped it over Agnes’s head, rinsing away the shampoo.
“All right, that should do it,” Mrs. Phelps said. “Up you get.”
She covered Agnes in a big fluffy towel as she stepped out of the tub. Hattie wrapped another towel around her hair and led her off down the hall to Agnes’s room. Leo was lounging in the doorway of his own room, looking as smug as a cat with a fresh kill.
“Father wants to see you,” he said.
“Where did they take her?” Agnes demanded.
“Please don’t fight,” Hattie begged, glancing over the railing to the foyer below.
Leo shrugged. “Ask him yourself. If he’ll even tell you. I’m going to be seeing her tomorrow, though. I’ll send your regards.” Then he sauntered back inside his room and closed the door.
Hattie wanted her to wear one of her nicer dresses, but Agnes did not feel like dressing up to be yelled at. She chose a simple white blouse and gray skirt instead, shoving her damp hair up into a bun. Hattie stuck a few decorative pins in it and laid out a gold necklace with a Solit triangle pendant. Before she left for Xavier’s study, Agnes checked the door to her lab to make sure it was locked. Now that Sera’s hair was hidden inside, she felt herself becoming paranoid.
Her father stood leaning over an open desk drawer when she knocked. The drawer clicked, locking as he closed it.
“Sit,” he said without preamble, gesturing to one of the two hardback chairs facing the desk. Xavier liked to keep his guests uncomfortable in this room. Agnes sat in silence—she knew that no amount of apologizing would help her cause. He would punish her as he saw fit.
Besides, she wasn’t sorry, and she wasn’t going to lie and say she was. Xavier leaned back and studied her. The grandfather clock ticked loudly, and Agnes tried to focus on its steady beat. She felt as though he was looking inside her, peeling back the layers of her skin, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of seeing how much it unnerved her.
“If only you had been born a boy,” he said at last, and the words were a knife to Agnes’s heart. She knew, of course. She wasn’t stupid enough to think that her gender did not offend him, or that at the very least he wished she would act like a regular girl. Leo commented on it all the time.
But her father had never said it out loud.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said. His stare somehow became even more penetrating.
“No, you aren’t.” He turned in his chair to look out the window. “I have been far too lenient with you. The lab, your behavior, letting Eneas teach you Pelagan . . .” Agnes’s chest seized up. “That ends now. Ebenezer Grange’s father has made a very good offer for your hand, and I have accepted on your behalf. You will meet with Ebenezer tomorrow and make it official.”
“What?” Agnes yelped. She had always thought that when the time came, at the very least she would be involved in the decision. She knew her father would have the final say, but this was cruel even for him. The Granges were a social-climbing merchant family; Ebenezer was a thin, nervous boy whom Agnes had never given much thought to. Now, all of a sudden, she was to marry him? “Father, don’t you think—”
“Do not tell me what to think, Agnes, and be grateful I am not sending you away to a sanatorium for hysterical young ladies.” He turned back to face her. “I should never have indulged you, but I thought . . .” He clenched his teeth, and Agnes knew he had been about to mention her mother. She drew on every shred of courage she had left to ask a question that had been brewing for years.
“Couldn’t you send me to live with my grandmother? I wouldn’t be such an embarrassment in Pelago, and perhaps . . .” But the words died on her lips. Agnes remembered what Hattie had said, that Xavier had turned to stone with anger when he’d discovered she was gone. She saw it happening again now. One hand curled into a fist and his eyes narrowed a fraction. Otherwise he was completely still.
“You think sending you to that godforsaken country to live with your witch of a grandmother will make you less of an embarrassment?” His voice was slow, deliberate. “I thought you were the smart one, Agnes.”
The knife in her heart twisted.
“Mother would have wanted me to know her,” she blurted out.
Xavier slammed his fist down on the table, rattling his fountain pen and making her jump. “You do not know what your mother would have wanted,” he snarled. “And you certainly don’t know the first thing about Ambrosine Byrne. You think your grandmother is some kindly, gray-haired schoolmarm? Think again, Agnes.”
Heat rose in her cheeks, because to be honest, that was exactly how she’d pictured her.
“Tell me about her then,” she said. “If I’m so stupid, enlighten me.”
“I did not say you were stupid,” Xavier said. “If I had to choose a word, it would be naive. You romanticize Pelago, and your mother, and her family. The Byrnes are not what you think they are—they are selfish and greedy. They are arrogant. You have created a world that doesn’t exist. You are living in this world and you must abide by its rules.”
“I wouldn’t have to romanticize Mother or her family if you talked about them,” Agnes said. She knew she was pushing her luck, but she couldn’t help herself. What did he mean by selfish and arrogant? Maybe he was making up a tale to dampen her desire to know the Byrnes. Eneas had called her grandmother formidable, which made her seem like a woman of stature. Agnes had always pictured her as someone noble and respected.
She was sick of getting only bits and pieces of information. The spectacular unfairness of it all was making her irrational. “Mrs. Phelps said you and Mother used to travel all the time together. That you threw parties here with all sorts of people. She said you were different then.”
Xavier’s face had become a mask, but Agnes could sense some strong emotion pulsing beneath it, and she immediately regretted bringing the housekeeper into this discussion.
“Mrs. Phelps hasn’t the faintest idea what she’s talking about,” he said coldly. “She was not in my employ during that time.”