“To peace and prosperity. To the future we shall build!” I dared to look up at the pale, sweating faces that surrounded us, their glasses twinkling in the chandelier’s prisming light, their applause breaking around me like ocean waves.
Mr. Locke’s arm unclamped from my shoulders and he spoke in a much lower voice. “Good girl. Meet us in the east smoking room at half past ten, won’t you. I’d like to give you your birthday gift.” He made a lazy circle with his finger to indicate the “us” he meant, and I realized the Society members had gathered like suit-wearing moths around him. Mr. Havemeyer was among them, watching me with his gloved hands resting on his cane and a polite, well-bred species of disgust on his face. Bad’s hackles spiked beneath my palm and he growled so low it was like an undersea earthquake.
I spun and dove blindly away, Bad trailing stiff-legged at my heels. I aimed for our safe, invisible corner but couldn’t seem to arrive. The crowd eddied and swirled in dizzy patterns, their faces leering, their smiles too wide. Something had changed—Locke’s speech had dragged me to center stage, like a reluctant elephant prodded into the main ring at the circus. I felt gloved fingers stroke my skin as I passed, heard a trill of scintillated laughter. A tug on my pinned and burnt hair.
A male voice far too close to my ear: “Miss January, isn’t it?” A bluish-white face loomed above me, his blond hair slicked against his skull and gold cuff links flashing. “What kind of a name is that, January?”
“Mine,” I answered stiffly. I’d asked my father once what had possessed him to name me after a month, and particularly such a dead, frost-eaten month as January, and if there were any more normal-sounding names I could have instead. It is a good name, he’d said, rubbing his tattoos. And when I pressed him: Your mother liked it. The meaning of it.
(Don’t bother looking up the meaning. Webster’s says: The first month of the year, containing thirty-one days. L. Januarius, fr. Janus, an antiquated Latin deity. How enlightening.)
“Now, don’t be rude! Take a turn outside with me, won’t you?” The boy leered at me.
I hadn’t spent much time with people my own age, but I’d read enough school stories to know gentlemen weren’t supposed to take young ladies out alone into the dark heat of a summer night. But then, I wasn’t really a lady, was I?
“No, thank you,” I said. He blinked with the stunned expression of a man who knew the word no existed but had never actually met it in the flesh.
He leaned closer, one damp hand reaching toward my elbow. “Come, now—”
A silver tray of champagne materialized between us and a low, unfriendly voice said, “May I offer you a drink, sir?”
It was Samuel Zappia, dressed in the crisp black-and-white uniform of a hired server.
I’d barely seen him in the last two years, mostly because the red Zappia grocery cart had been replaced by a neat black truck with a closed cab and I could no longer wave to him from the study window. I’d driven past the store with Mr. Locke once or twice and caught blurred glimpses of Samuel out back, unloading flour sacks from a truck bed and staring out at the lake with a distant, dreaming expression. I’d wondered if he still subscribed to The Argosy, or if he’d abandoned such childish fancies.
Now he looked clear and sharp, as if he’d come fully into focus in a camera lens. His skin was still that golden-dark color mysteriously known as olive; his eyes were still black and bright as polished shale.
They were fixed now on the blond gentleman in a flat, unblinking stare, beneath eyebrows raised in faux-polite inquiry. There was something unsettling about that stare, something so blatantly unservile that the man took a half step backward. He stared at Samuel with an expression of upper-class offense that generally sent servants scurrying to make amends.
But Samuel didn’t move. A fey gleam lit in his eye, as if he were rather hoping the young man would attempt to chastise him. I couldn’t help noticing the way Samuel’s shoulders pressed against the seams of his starched suit coat, the wiry look of his wrist holding the heavy tray; beside him, the blond man looked as pale and squashy as unrisen dough.
He spun away, thin lips curled, and skittered back to the protection of his peers.
Samuel turned smoothly toward me, lifting a shimmery golden glass. “For the birthday girl, perhaps?” His expression was perfectly bland.
He remembered my birthday. My dress suddenly felt itchy and hot. “Thank you. For, uh, rescuing me.”
“Oh, I wasn’t rescuing you, Miss Scaller. I was saving that poor boy from a dangerous animal.” He ducked his head at Bad, who was still watching the retreating man with his hackles raised and his lips curling back over his teeth.
“Ah.” Silence. I wished I were a thousand miles away. I wished I were a yellow-haired girl named something like Anna or Elizabeth who laughed like a clockwork bird and always knew just what to say.
The corners of Samuel’s eyes crimped. He folded my fingers around the stem of the champagne flute, his hands dry and summer-warm. “It might help,” he said, and vanished back into the crowd.
I downed the champagne so quickly my nose fizzed with it. I raided several more silver trays as I made my way through the parlor, and by the time I reached the smoking room I was placing my feet very precisely and trying not to notice the way colors sloshed and oozed at the edges of my vision. My dark veil, that invisible Thing that had curled around me all day, seemed to flicker and warp.
I took a breath outside the door. “Ready, Bad?” He dog-sighed at me.
My first impression was that the room had shrunk considerably since I’d last seen it, but then, I’d never seen it crammed with a dozen men wearing crowns of bluish smoke and conversing in low rumbles. I recognized this as one of those important, exclusive meetings that I’d never been permitted to attend: those boozy late-night congregations of men where the real decisions were made. I ought to have felt pleased or honored; instead, I tasted something bitter in the back of my throat.
Bad sneezed at the cigar-and-leather reek, and Mr. Locke turned toward us. “You made it, dear girl. Come, take a seat.” He gestured to a high-backed armchair in the rough center of the room, around which the men of the Archaeological Society were ranged as if posing for a portrait-painting. There was Havemeyer, and the ferrety Mr. Ilvane, and others I recognized from previous parties and visits: a red-lipped woman with a black ribbon around her throat; a youngish man with a hungry smile; a white-haired man with long, curling nails. There was something secretive about them, like predators stalking through tall grass.
I perched on the armchair, feeling hunted.
Mr. Locke’s hand landed on my shoulder for the second time that evening. “We’ve asked you here tonight for a little announcement. After much careful thought and discussion, my colleagues and I would like to offer you something rather rare and much sought-after. It’s quite unorthodox, but we feel it is warranted by your, ah, unique situation. January”—a dramatic pause—“we’d like to offer you formal membership in the Society.”
I blinked at him. Was this my birthday gift? I wondered if I ought to be pleased. I wondered if Mr. Locke had known how, as a girl, I’d dreamed of joining his silly society and trotting around the world having adventures, collecting rare and valuable objects. I wondered if my father had ever wanted to join.