That bitter taste returned, and something else that burned ember-hot on my tongue. I swallowed it back. “Thank you, sir.”
Mr. Locke’s hand knocked me twice in hearty congratulations. He launched into another speech about the formal induction process and certain rituals and oaths that must be made before the Founder—see that capital F like a saluting soldier—but I wasn’t listening. The burning in my mouth was growing stronger, scalding my tongue, and my invisible veil was crumbling to ash and char around me. The room around me seemed to pulse with heat.
“Thank you,” I interrupted. My voice was flat, almost toneless; I listened to it with detached fascination. “But I’m afraid I must decline your invitation.”
Silence.
A silver-eyed voice in my head was hissing at me—be a good girl, mind your place—but it was drowned out by the alcohol thudding in my blood. “I mean, why should I want to join your Society, really? A bunch of fussy old aristocrats who pay braver and better men to go out and steal things for you. And should one of them disappear you don’t even pretend to mourn him. You just carry on—as if nothing—as if he didn’t matter—” I broke off, panting.
You don’t really realize how many small sounds a house makes—the tocking of the grandfather clock, the sighing of the summer breeze against the windowpanes, the moaning of floor joists beneath a hundred pairs of expensive shoes—until you’ve stunned a room into absolute silence. I clutched Bad’s collar as if he were the one in need of restraint.
Mr. Locke’s hand tightened on my shoulder and his munificent smile became something gritted and painful-looking. “Apologize,” he breathed at me.
My jaw locked. A part of me—Mr. Locke’s good girl, the girl who never complained, who minded her place and smiled and smiled and smiled—wanted to fling myself at his feet and beg for forgiveness. But most of me would rather have died.
Locke’s eyes found mine. Chill, steel-colored, pressing into me like two cold hands against my face—
“Pardon me,” I spat. One of the Society men gave a crack of derisive laughter.
I watched Mr. Locke work to unclench his teeth. “January. The Society is a very old, very powerful, and very prestigious—”
“Oh, yes, so prestigious.” I sneered. “Far too prestigious for people like my father to join, no matter how much garbage he steals for you, no matter how much money you make auctioning it off in secret. Am I light-skinned enough to sign up, is that it? Is there a chart I can consult?” I bared my teeth at them. “Maybe one of you can add me to your skull collection when I die, as some sort of missing link.”
The silence this time was absolute, as if even the grandfather clock were too insulted to make a sound.
“Looks like you’ve raised quite the little malcontent, Cornelius.” It was Mr. Havemeyer, watching with a smile of purest malice and twirling an unlit cigar in his gloved fingers. “We did warn you, didn’t we?”
I felt Mr. Locke inhale, whether to defend or chastise me I didn’t know, but I no longer cared. I was finished with it, with them, with being a good girl and minding my place and being grateful for every scrap of dignity they tossed my way.
I stood up, feeling the champagne fizz sickeningly in my skull. “Thank you, gentlemen, for my birthday present.” And I spun and marched out the dark-stained doors with Bad trotting at my heels.
The crowd had grown sweatier and louder and drunker. It was like being trapped in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, green-lit faces spinning around me with ghoulish expressions. I wanted to set Bad on them, all teeth and burnished bronze fur. I wanted to scream myself hoarse.
I wanted to draw a door in the air, a door to somewhere else, and walk through it.
The silver tray materialized again at my elbow. Warm air whispered against the back of my neck. “Outside, west wing. Five minutes.” The tray vanished, and I watched Samuel slide back into the chattering horde.
When Bad and I slipped out the west wing door, feeling like escapees from some hellish fairy ball, we found Samuel alone. He leaned against the still-warm brick of Locke House, hands jammed in his pockets. His neat waiter’s costume looked like it had recently suffered an escape attempt: his tie was loose and crumpled, his sleeves were unbuttoned, his dark coat had vanished.
“Ah, I did not know if you would come.” His smile had finally extended past his eyes.
“Yes.”
Silences are easier to bear outdoors. I listened to the snuffling sounds of Bad rooting through a hedgerow for some unlucky creature, and the scrape and hiss of a striking match as Samuel lit a roughly rolled cigarette. Twin flames glowed in his eyes.
He drew breath and exhaled a pearl cloud. “Listen, I—we heard about what happened. To Mr. Scaller. I am sorr—”
He was going to say how sorry he was, how tragic and sudden it had been, et cetera, and I knew with sudden clarity that I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Whatever lunatic rage had allowed me to storm away from the Society had curdled and cooled, and left me very alone.
I interrupted before he could finish, gesturing abruptly at Bad. “Why did you give him to me? You never really said.” My voice was too loud and false-sounding, like a poor actor in a town play.
Samuel’s brows rose. He watched Bad crunching merrily on something field-mouse-sized, then gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “Because you were lonely.” He twisted his cigarette out on the brick beside him and added, “And I do not like to see people outnumbered. Mr. Locke and that old German woman, bah. You needed someone on your side—like Robin Hood needed a Little John, eh?” His eyes sparked at me; I’d always made him play Little John in our games of Sherwood Forest, alternating at need to Alan-a-Dale or Friar Tuck. Samuel pointed to Bad, who was making a series of unpleasant hacking sounds to dislodge the mouse bones in his throat. “This dog, he is on your side.”
So casually, thoughtlessly kind. I found myself leaning closer, listing toward him like a lost ship toward a lighthouse.
Samuel was still watching Bad. “Do you swim much, these days?”
I blinked at him. “No.” He and I had spent hours flailing and splashing in the lake as kids, but I hadn’t set foot in the water for years. It was just one of those things I’d lost somehow, along the way of growing up.
I caught the tilted edge of his half smile. “Ah, then you are out of practice. Bet you a quarter I could beat you now.”
He’d always lost our races, probably because he’d had to help in his family’s store and lacked the endless summer afternoons I’d had to practice in. “A lady doesn’t bet,” I said primly. “But if I did, I’d be twenty-five cents richer.”
Samuel laughed—a boyish, immoderate sound I hadn’t heard since we were children—and I smiled rather foolishly back at him. And then somehow we were standing closer to one another, so that I had to tilt my head upward to see his face, and I could smell tobacco and sweat and something warm and green, like fresh-cut grass.
I thought a little wildly of The Ten Thousand Doors, of Adelaide kissing her ghost boy under the autumn constellations without a single heartbeat of doubt. I wished I were like her: feral and fearless, brave enough to steal a kiss.
Be a good girl.