From her window, Claire Emerson watched the carriage as it wound up toward Wardenclyffe Tower.
It moved slowly, more slowly even than the others she’d seen make this approach. To those visitors it must have looked like magic: the tower in the distance, cables and wires spiraling up its sides into the sky. And below it, light, like the constellations had all fallen to earth. A thousand light bulbs pushed into the black ground and burning bright.
If you plucked one, held it in your hand, you’d find there was no cord to feed it. The earth itself was crackling with power.
What better place from which to rule?
“Ten minutes, then,” Claire was saying over her shoulder. “Five to see them the rest of the way here, and then five to have them cool their heels in the parlor. It’s long enough for me to finish my meeting.”
“But Mrs. Duchamp . . .” Helplessly the young maid held up Claire’s slippers again. “And your hair—there’s to be a photographer, and pardon my saying, ma’am, but you look fit for the stables—”
Claire smiled as kindly as her patience allowed. “Georgiana, you’re doing a lovely job, this being your first day, but if I want to be a horse, I’ll be a horse. I need you to find me Margarete, and then you can see if they need any help . . .” What on earth do maids do, and why do I have one again? “Polishing furniture.”
Georgiana hesitated. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but this is the only room with nice furniture. Well, other than the Governor’s sickroom, but everywhere else in this place is still all concrete and awful laboratories filled with God knows what—machines with wires running everywhere, making black magic, and I—”
“No polishing, then,” Claire said. She eased the slippers from the girl’s hands. “Why don’t you, ah . . . go help in the kitchen? Go peel some leeks. Just find me Margarete first?”
“No need,” Margarete said, stepping into the stateroom as Georgiana rushed out past her. “Oh no. Are you terrorizing the help again?”
Two weeks ago those words would’ve been as barbed as a fishing lure. But quite a bit had changed since then. Margarete wasn’t the urchin that Jeremiah Emerson plucked from an orphanage and brought home to wash his floors for free. Now she was the private secretary to the lady wife of the Governor of St. Cloud, and Claire saw to it personally that Margarete was paid a small fortune.
“Tell me where we’re at with provisioning for the dinner tonight,” Claire said, taking a seat at her desk. She put her feet into the embroidered slippers and wiggled her toes. Ten dollars for a pair like these, far too much for something that disappeared under your dress. They looked ridiculous against the poured-concrete floor, but she’d lost the only other pair of
From her window, Claire Emerson watched the carriage as it wound up toward Wardenclyffe Tower.
It moved slowly, more slowly even than the others she’d seen make this approach. To those visitors it must have looked like magic: the tower in the distance, cables and wires spiraling up its sides into the sky. And below it, light, like the constellations had all fallen to earth. A thousand light bulbs pushed into the black ground and burning bright.
If you plucked one, held it in your hand, you’d find there was no cord to feed it. The earth itself was crackling with power.
What better place from which to rule?
“Ten minutes, then,” Claire was saying over her shoulder. “Five to see them the rest of the way here, and then five to have them cool their heels in the parlor. It’s long enough for me to finish my meeting.”
“But Mrs. Duchamp . . .” Helplessly the young maid held up Claire’s slippers again. “And your hair—there’s to be a photographer, and pardon my saying, ma’am, but you look fit for the stables—”
Claire smiled as kindly as her patience allowed. “Georgiana, you’re doing a lovely job, this being your first day, but if I want to be a horse, I’ll be a horse. I need you to find me Margarete, and then you can see if they need any help . . .” What on earth do maids do, and why do I have one again? “Polishing furniture.”
Georgiana hesitated. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but this is the only room with nice furniture. Well, other than the Governor’s sickroom, but everywhere else in this place is still all concrete and awful laboratories filled with God knows what—machines with wires running everywhere, making black magic, and I—”
“No polishing, then,” Claire said. She eased the slippers from the girl’s hands. “Why don’t you, ah . . . go help in the kitchen? Go peel some leeks. Just find me Margarete first?”
“No need,” Margarete said, stepping into the stateroom as Georgiana rushed out past her. “Oh no. Are you terrorizing the help again?”
Two weeks ago those words would’ve been as barbed as a fishing lure. But quite a bit had changed since then. Margarete wasn’t the urchin that Jeremiah Emerson plucked from an orphanage and brought home to wash his floors for free. Now she was the private secretary to the lady wife of the Governor of St. Cloud, and Claire saw to it personally that Margarete was paid a small fortune.
“Tell me where we’re at with provisioning for the dinner tonight,” Claire said, taking a seat at her desk. She put her feet into the embroidered slippers and wiggled her toes. Ten dollars for a pair like these, far too much for something that disappeared under your dress. They looked ridiculous against the poured-concrete floor, but she’d lost the only other pair of
biscuits slathered with a sweet corn jam (you could, Claire had learned, make jam from corn), and some sort of hot corn stew that Augusta the housekeeper dreamed up. It was absurdly delicious, for all that it looked like slop.
Amid all this bartering, the soldiers on the western border kept to their orders: hold the line. Claire received reports from their commanders each day, studied her maps, moved counters, felt increasingly out of her depth. At night, she fell asleep reading the book on military strategy that one of her corporals had loaned her out of pity. She was uneasy wielding this much power—a consequence of having been so long powerless—and she wanted to get it right. To keep them all alive. Claire was doing her damndest, and still it was nowhere near enough, not with the King’s visit so quickly approaching. She knew that the Duchamp court in exile reeked of weakness.
And then yesterday, she had awakened at dawn with a spark of an idea.
“Two milk cows and another for beefsteak,” Margarete was saying, moving her pencil down the page. “A calf for tonight’s fete. Got a fair price for those. A butter churn that Private Henderson bought off some old lady’s porch. From the mayor of Tarrytown two miles south, a gift of lumber, clay for making bricks, lots of windows left from a church renovation—”
Claire sat up. “Enough materials to begin building housing for the soldiers?”
“I’d say so,” Margarete said, “though we’ll consult with the local builders to be sure. Our men will be happy. They’ve been sleeping on straw pallets on the floor.”
“And Tesla?”
“Do you need him to design a better . . . straw pallet?”
“Has he,” Claire said patiently, “eaten yet today?”
“Well, we’ve learned that he’s allergic to corn.”
“Dear God. He survived the General and the coup and the flight from Monticello and now we’re going to kill him with corn. Do we have anything else he can eat?”
The day after Claire and Remy arrived at Tesla’s hideaway, the inventor himself had arrived in a wig and cap, driving a smart little team of horses. He’d laden his cart down with barrels; though passersby might assume he was hauling sugar and flour and tea, those barrels had in fact been stuffed with cables and copper wire and glass.
(“Did you enjoy pretending to be a cooper?” Claire had asked him.
Tesla had clasped his hands together. “Yes. It was wonderful.”)
On the seat beside him had been Beatrix, rosy-cheeked as a farm girl, his “apprentice cooper.” She’d been delighted by their days together on the road; she’d had endless access to Tesla’s brain, and him with no distractions. He, in turn, had been impressed by her engineering chops, and upon their arrival the two of them had sequestered themselves in the largest of Tesla’s workshops on the east side of the building to do whatever two strange geniuses did with their days. They emerged only for meals, dusty and sooty and perpetually
pleased, heads close together over their meal as they sketched their next advancement on blueprint paper.
Claire hadn’t quite forgiven Beatrix for abandoning their friendship for the Daughters of the American Crown’s set of half-baked ideals, their “grab what you can and damn the cost” approach to women’s liberation; she hadn’t quite forgiven Tesla for keeping her in the dark about his sham alliance with the Livmonians, and then disappearing just as Claire’s life was on the line.
And even though she didn’t want to see either of them, Claire was still the mess of contradictions she’d always been. Because she also couldn’t quite forgive Beatrix for replacing her as Nikola Tesla’s assistant.
Still, Claire woke up most mornings in the haze of a half dream. She’d been back in her grand escape, the glider dive from the top of the Palace of Fine Arts, the wind snapping the ends of her hair. She remembered Beatrix’s hands stretching the canvas over the glider’s bones, Tesla’s lightning rifles in the hands of the soldiers guarding her back. Despite her fear, despite their betrayals, she couldn’t shake the magic of those moments in the sky.
I have enough enemies. I should try, at least, to forgive my friends.
“I’ll send away for some figs,” Margarete was saying. “And what does Beatrix eat?”
“Anything and everything.”
“And the preparations for tonight . . .” Again Margarete consulted her notes. “They’re complete. More or less.”
“More or less?”
“Tesla ran the experiment again this afternoon. He was quoting Shakespeare. ‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’ And cackling, a bit. Have you heard that man cackle?”
“Do you think the show will have the desired effect?”
“I certainly hope so,” Margarete said stoutly. “You’ve spent enough of our goddamn money on this exhibition.”
Claire stood. “And you’ll be the unseen hand ensuring all goes to plan. Meet with Augusta. Direct the soldiers. Make whatever decisions seem right, spend whatever coin you need.”
“Remind me again why you’re putting me in charge.”
“Because I can’t,” Claire said, “be seen to be in charge.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tonight, I need to begin acting like an utter fool,” Claire told Margarete, “so that the King trusts my husband to govern.”
The reporter was a woman, and she had dark skin. A white man trailed behind her, laden down with bags and a camera on a stand.
“John Mackenzie, from the St. Cloud Star,” the girl said, extending a hand.
Claire suppressed a smile. “Remy Duchamp, in exile,” she said, and shook it.
The reporter laughed. “Point taken. John Mackenzie is my byline; my real name is Lizzie Cochrane. But the Star has me put on a man’s mask so I can write the stories I want to.”
“That’s progressive of them.”
“More like the opposite,” Lizzie said, as the man behind her hung back. “They want plausible deniability in case anyone picks a bone with a story written by a girl. It’s like that woman Eliza Blackwell. Have you heard of her? So determined to become a doctor that she did the whole course in trousers. They thought she was a boy. She got top marks all the way through. After she had earned her license, she gave her real name, and they tried to take it away.”
Claire winced. “I’m . . . not surprised.”
“Me neither. She held on to it, though, with her teeth. Practices here in Monticello. Every now and then she gets held up by the preachers as an example of the degradation of society. We have tea sometimes, her and me.”
“That sounds like a good time,” Claire said.
“It is.” Lizzie waved her assistant over. “That’s Bill, by the way. He’s my Trojan horse. He gets us in the door, pretends to be both writer and photographer.”
Bill nodded to them, and then busied himself with his tripod.
“And what do you pretend to be? His secretary?”
“Most times. But I figured we didn’t need to put on the show for you.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “We have our own show here, running day and night. Nosebleed seats only.”
Lizzie guffawed. “All right then. Let’s get down to brass tacks, Mrs. Duchamp. Tell me about the government of St.-Cloud-in-Exile.”
After the General’s attempted coup, Claire and Remy had fled from Monticello-by-the-Lake on a boat that Rosa Morgenstern had chartered for their escape. They had gone north, and then west. After a short overland journey, they had arrived at Wardenclyffe Tower with five loyal soldiers, a physician, and the clothes on their backs.
Remy, more than half dead, was immediately installed in a makeshift sickroom.
He insisted that he did not want to see Claire, and so Claire saw him not at all. Not that it was a hardship. She didn’t care about him, about his delicate constitution, about his delicate little moral compass. Remy kidnapped her, and then found a way to blame her for spying on him? No, Claire thought, the acid rising in her throat even now, the hundredth time she’d turned it over in her head. It’s even more unfair than that. Remy kidnapped her, then the Daughters of the American Crown blackmailed her into spying on him, and still she did everything she could to keep the young Governor in power.
Remy, the boy king who had no desire to rule. No, he deserved nothing from her, especially not a visit to his sickbed.
(I thought you were on my side, a little voice inside her cried out. I thought I finally had someone on my team. What
little faith he had had in her, this man who said he was in love.)
But Claire didn’t wander the halls in black, mourning her sham of a marriage. Instead, she did something Remy had never done, not really: she took charge.
“Tell me,” the reporter said, “about your fortress here. It looks impressive.”
Wardenclyffe Tower had concrete floors, concrete walls, windows that refused to fully close. It had messes of wires and sparking fuses and light that came from nowhere, connected to nothing. It was staffed by a small group of men who worked tirelessly to send and receive messages from what they called “the dish,” the gargantuan bowl on the top of the tower that traded information with every last corner of the First American Kingdom.
(“Tell no one we’re here,” Claire had instructed them. At that, one of the men had ducked his head and said, “Ma’am, we’ve spent the last month workin’ on sendin’ a picture of an Irish setter to a station in Alta California using nothing but the air and these wires. We work magic here. Nobody much cares about you and your secrets.”)
What Claire feared most was the General. His men were foaming like rabid dogs at the border, waiting for God knows what signal to come and overwhelm them at Wardenclyffe. Each night, Claire worried over a string of what-ifs as though they were rosary beads. What would happen to her if the Livmonians overtook St. Cloud? What would happen if the General was still alive? If he was, what if he still had the loyalty of enough Monticellan troops to shore up his position in the city? If he had their support, what if he made himself St. Cloud’s figurehead, if he moved into the mansion and fortified it—if the King decided it was easiest to crown a military man who’d already taken over, rather than the sickly boy no one had ever much liked anyway?
And the moment he was crowned, to solidify his position, the General would find and kill that sickly boy, and his young wife with him.
“What do you know of the mess you left behind you, in Monticello?” Lizzie Cochrane asked, flipping through her steno pad. “Do you care to comment?”
Claire didn’t.
There were too many unknowns, not enough spies loyal to the Duchamps. On no fixed schedule, messages came in from Captain Miller, who refused to disclose his location. On Monday, his report said that the General had reportedly died from his injuries; on Tuesday, that no, the General was reportedly alive and kicking and sleeping in Remy Duchamp’s abandoned bed. Captain Miller went silent for two days and then cabled them from Alta California; three days later, he was laying low in Orleans.
Recently the messages had all been from Monticello. They appeared to be coming from one of the General’s own signal towers. Claire didn’t know what that meant, whether Miller had gone over to the General’s side—even though she’d last seen him with his hands around the General’s throat, she could
believe Miller to be a turncoat. The General was his father, after all. Had he turned double agent? Was he feeding the Duchamps misinformation? Or was he simply a more skilled spy than they’d thought?
And then, three days ago, his messages had stopped altogether.
Despite her worries over Miller’s loyalty, she’d read and reread his last report, looking for a reason for his disappearance. But his last message had only echoed what she’d read in the papers. In St. Cloud’s capital, soldiers drew guns and lightning rifles on each other in the streets; preachers and teetotalers clashed with lightskirts; tourists, amazingly, still poured out of their trains to come visit the Fair. It was as though the rough-and-tumble Levee district had grown and spread overnight until its boundaries were the same as the city’s. The Levee, where you could find a drink, a kiss, and a fistfight on every corner.
For all intents and purposes, Monticello had no ruler. St. Cloud had no ruler. At least not until King Augustus Washington arrived tonight at the Wardenclyffe Station on his Royal Limited train, then waved his scepter (at least, Claire imagined there would be a scepter) and put someone in charge of this godforsaken territory.
And it had better be Remy Duchamp. Not because she still loved him or thought she did. Not because she thought he’d make a good ruler.
Because he was her only chance of escaping this mess alive.
If Remy was restored to power, they’d have the protection of the King’s military. She might persuade him that, if they could get past their mutual enmity, the two of them could forge some kind of alliance. She could help him strategize. She might, God forbid, be able to persuade Remy to take a passing interest in his citizens. To do a little good.
It was better than spending the rest of her life on the run from the General’s men, hunting down every loose end that might come back to wrap itself around his neck.
And as Lady Duchamp, wife of the Governor, all she’d have to contend with would be the desperately corrupt Daughters of the American Crown pulling her strings and her madman of a father off proselytizing in the streets.
In comparison, that would be a holiday.
Besides, it was in the interest of St. Cloud to have an uninterested ruler rather than a downright evil one. The General, if he managed to wrest power from the Duchamps, would immediately ramp up his campaign of “insurance” payments from local businesses, diverting money from education and infrastructure to beef up St. Cloud’s military. Then he’d throw away those soldiers’ lives in war.
For the General only knew more and bigger. His thirst for power could not be slaked; it would invade every corner of St. Cloud, from its military barracks and livery stables to the bedrooms and bank accounts of its citizens.
Once, in a council meeting, she’d heard him throw his support behind a bill that would let men commit their wives to insane asylums and take possession of their money.
“It shouldn’t just be wives. Fathers should have the right to do that too,” the General had said at the council table, casually, as Claire tried very hard not to vomit.
No, she had one choice, and one choice only. ...
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