Winterspell (56 page)

Dr. Victor could not move as he took in the sight of her, his pistol still in the air. His astonishment could not have been more complete.

“But I aimed . . . ,” Clara heard him mutter. “I aimed right at him. Not at her.”

“Murderer!” someone screamed.

Chief Greeley shouted at his men, and they rushed at Dr. Victor, restrained him. When the gun was ripped from his hand, he seemed to awaken.

“But I wasn't aiming at her!” His eyes were wild. He struggled to break free, but the officers held fast. They wrenched his arms behind his back, locked him into chains. “Something jarred my aim, right at the last . . . It was you, wasn't it?”

He jerked his head at Clara, the force of his hatred pointing at her more than any hand ever could have. “She did it.
She
did it. I don't know how. . . . Get off of me! The little devil-bitch . . . There's always
been something off about her. Listen to me. Listen, all of you!”

Chief Greeley took out his club and struck him in the stomach. Dr. Victor went limp.

“Get him out of here,” Greeley said, disgusted, and his officers dragged Dr. Victor away, his boots making dirty tracks in the snow.

“Clara, are you all right?” Her father was there, within the protective circle of police coats. Immediately Felicity latched on to him. They were being herded down from the stage and into their carriage, where two officers held the spooked horses by their bridles.

Just before the door shut, Clara looked past her father's shoulder. There, looking lost and furious and even, Clara thought, a bit frightened, were the Merry Butcher and the Proctor brothers.

“Father,” she whispered, nodding at them, “go to them. Say something now, or someone will reach for Plum's power. Assert your authority. We aren't safe yet.”

He shot her a queer look but went without another word. Clara watched him from the carriage window, Felicity shivering in her arms. He clapped his hands on the Butcher's back, shook Hiram Proctor's hand. The police standing guard at his back, the sympathetic, bright-eyed hands reaching for him in the crowd, did not go unnoticed. A certain light went out of the Butcher's eyes. He nodded, tugged his coat tighter around him, and melted into the crowd. The others followed suit.

Clara smiled. It was not the end of Concordia; it would take long months, even years, to cut the many strings of Patricia Plum's web. It might become even harder now, with Concordia's most powerful figures fighting to control the fractured pieces of the empire. But it was a beginning, a step in the right direction. At least now, she hoped, her father would have more conviction to do what must be done.

“Clara?” came a small voice.

“What is it?”

Felicity frowned up at her. “You've got something on your wrist.”

Clara laughed lightly and drew down her sleeve. “Oh. An ink stain, I expect. You know I was helping Father draft his speech earlier.”

“
Silver
ink?”

“Don't be silly. There's no such thing as silver ink.”

Felicity looked entirely unconvinced, but then the door opened, admitting their father and a gust of snowy wind. The door shut, and the carriage began to move.

“Father!” Felicity cried. She went to him and sniffed prettily in his arms as he smoothed her hair. “Oh, how awful that was, Father. Were you very frightened?”

“It happened too quickly for me to be frightened, sweetheart. Not to worry.”

Clara kept her eyes fixed on the world passing outside her window, but even then she felt her father's attention upon her.

“You are remarkably calm, Clara dear.”

“I suspect I'm in shock, Father,” she said, letting her voice waver.

“Indeed.” He was quiet for a moment, shifting Felicity under his coat to warm her. “Or perhaps it is that you also had a strange dream last night?”

Too stunned to think better of it, Clara whipped her head around. His face was pensive, his eyes distant, and it occurred to Clara that perhaps John Stole knew more about his wife's past than Clara had assumed. A chill came over her as she thought of the sum of history and memories and secrets that she had yet to uncover.

But now—with the church bells chiming midnight behind them and the new year with its work looming ahead of them—was not the time to ask.

Instead Clara said, “Happy New Year, Father,” and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

O
ne more hour—a photo or two, a clever quote for the reporters, and the carriage ride home—and Clara Stole could finish packing.

She turned away from the shabby gray building behind her and back to the crowd, in their winter coats and fur muffs, their scarves billowing in the sharp wind off the Hudson. The air smelled of winter; it would be the first snow of the year, and Clara could hardly keep still for her excitement.

Excitement—and, if she were honest with herself, apprehension.

Would it be the same, after all this time? Two years here;
eight
in Cane. After carving out a place for herself here, would she be able to do the same
there
?

Her blood surged in eager affirmation.

Not yet,
she scolded it, and somewhere distant, an answering, patient tug stirred warmth deep in her belly.

“They say that a civilization can be judged on how it treats its defenseless and unfortunate, its young and its old,” she said, raising her voice to the crowd. The faces that stared back at her were so different from the wary, pinched ones that had watched her at the Bowery Hope Shelter two years ago that, for a moment, it took her breath away. Much had happened in that time.

In the wake of Patricia Plum's death and Dr. Victor's incarceration,
and most especially given her father's upsurge in popularity after his near assassination, Concordia had fallen. It still existed, of course, as pieces of its former whole, and it was not a danger to be dismissed. But its members had scattered into the shadows like roaches, and though their relative dormancy might be temporary, it was something. There was hope on the streets again, and money in the collection plates at churches throughout the city, and the holly they had put out on the park lampposts to usher in the holidays was fresh and green.

Under Clara's close supervision, Trifles & Trinkets had reopened with a new toymaker in residence, a Mr. Peter Hoffmann, who had so delighted in seeing Godfather's fantastic inventory for the first time that he had had to be administered to with a fan and cool cloth, like some simpering debutante.

Pangs of loss came to Clara every time she paid Mr. Hoffmann a visit, and every time she stood beneath the mobile in her bedroom and spun it, letting the shadows of dragons and nightbirds flit across her skin. But she knew Godfather would have been proud of her—
had
been proud of her—and that, though it pained her to think it, he had probably been glad to die, after those long, lonely years of being so near her mother and yet never near enough. Several times since hearing Nicholas's story she had tried to muster up anger against Godfather—for loving her mother so blindly, for betraying Leska not once but twice. But Clara could not manage anger for long; he had suffered enough by his own doing, and so she kept the memory of him close and dear and free of blame.

Clara snapped the shears closed. The bright red ribbon floated away on either side of her, and applause rippled up from the crowd.

Beside her, plain-garbed, rosy-cheeked Mrs. von Meck grabbed Clara's hand and shook it. She was to be the headmistress here, and was without doubt one of the most pleasant and intelligent women Clara had ever met. The girls would be in good hands.

It was one less thing for her to worry over, one less thing to feel guilty about leaving.

“This,” Mrs. von Meck gushed, “is the most remarkable day, Miss Stole.” There were tears in her eyes. “This will be a place of hope for many.”

Clara smiled up at the imperious gray facade with its marble pillars and the words
HARROD HOUSE
etched severely into the stone. It still unnerved her somewhat, to think that this place had once been Dr. Victor's, that the classrooms now gleaming with polished wood and lined with books had once been cells holding bloody cots and shivering girls.

No longer. Now it would be a school, and those girls would not be cowering in their cots but rather huddling in them late at night to study for examinations or share the latest gossip. It would be open to any who wished to further their education, who looked to university and beyond. Their classes would keep their minds sharp, and their exercises would keep their limbs strong, and none of them would have reason to be afraid.

Clara squeezed Mrs. von Meck's hands. “It already is a place of hope for me,” she said, and turned to smile for the photographer.

* * *

Later Clara stood in front of her mirror, her bags at her feet, and raised her chin.

“I have done what I said I would do,” she told her reflection. “I have put Father back on his feet and on the path to righting Concordia's wrongs. I have looked after Godfather's work, ensured my family's safety, and helped rebuild my city . . . and I have flourished doing it.”

She paused, stepped closer to the mirror. Her nose almost touched the glass.

“So, you can try to make me feel guilty any moment now,” she said firmly, “but it won't work. I have nothing to feel guilty about.”

She waited to feel it, some lingering sense of responsibility that would keep her here, but none came. Her reflection was calm.

She had finished here. It was time.

“What are you doing?” came Felicity's sharp voice from the doorway.

Clara immediately returned to her packing, tucking her mother's portrait beneath a layer of underthings. “Packing, of course.”

“No, I meant before.” Felicity sat primly at the vanity, arranging her skirts. “You were talking to yourself in the mirror.”

Clara smiled. She had rarely been able to truly fool her sister, and that ability had lessened even more in the last two years. If Clara had flourished during that time, then Felicity had done so tenfold. She still enjoyed her pretty things—the lace on her skirts, her silver hairbrush, her favorite ribboned hat—but she was constantly at her father's side, learning politics, learning government, and everyone who met her whispered to John Stole, “Watch out for that one; her mind's twice as keen as yours,” and every young man who met her grew flustered and tongue-tied, much to John Stole's dismay.

“I was giving myself courage,” Clara said, tying the bag shut. “It's a hard thing, leaving home for the first time.”

Felicity was quiet, watching as Clara went about her room, straightening things that didn't need straightening.

Finally she said, “Clara, are you really going to university?”

Clara turned at the window. The biting air outside pulled at her, insistent.

“Of course I am,” she said, laughing. “I'm boarding a ship this afternoon. You know that, you silly thing.”

“Yes, going abroad to school. To see the world and find adventures. To stretch your legs.”

“You'll want to do the same yourself someday.”

“Perhaps.” Then Felicity leaned closer, thoughtful. Clara had never seen her so serious. “Will you come back?”

“I'll visit often.” Clara kissed her cheek, then teased, “Perhaps I'll even bring a husband back with me!”

Felicity burst out laughing, and with that the moment had passed. “You? Clara Stole? The day you bring home a husband is the day I sprout wings and fly.”

Clara threw a pillow at her, and Felicity squealed and rushed out the door, her ribbons streaming behind her.

Alone, Clara waited until she heard Felicity's voice mix with her father's down the corridor, then grabbed her bags and hurried downstairs. They would be upset with her for leaving without a formal good-bye, but even though her blood was ringing like bells in her ears, and she could hardly keep the nervous smile from her face, she feared that seeing them and being wrapped in their embraces would stall her courage.

She hurried out into the oncoming winter and shut the mansion's great doors softly behind her.

As she turned the corner onto Sixty-Sixth Street, a coach-and-four splashed muck onto her skirts and a group of boys raced past, tossing a ball between them. The daylight was dimming, washing the city in shades of cold pink and gray. When she reached Trifles & Trinkets at Twenty-Third and Sixth, Clara paused at the window and let her fingers touch the glass.

She closed her eyes and let the sounds of the city wash over her—the streetcars and the clomps of horses' hooves, the bells of shop doors and the laughter of passersby and the deep barge horns from the river.

Then she took one last look at the familiar shopfront and its curling gold letters, and turned into the nearby alleyway.

She set down her bags and took out the headset from the folds of her coat. Hands trembling, she placed it on her head, beneath the ribboned brim of her hat, and switched on the mechanism at her ear.

“Hello?” She sounded uncertain, and younger than she had felt in a long time. “Is anyone there? Bo?”

A pause. A heavy, unbearable stillness. She heard nothing but a dim crackling noise, thin and spotty. Then a high whistle and the sound of someone clearing her throat noisily.

“Well,” said Bo, “it's about time.”

Clara heard the familiar grin in her voice, though it was older now, and she went weak with relief.

“Bo, I—”

“Not to worry. I'll patch you over to him right now.”

“What?” Sudden panic struck her. She wasn't ready; it was far too soon. “Bo, wait—”

A snap, a change in the silence, as if whatever magic connected the two worlds had tilted, shifted.

Then a voice said, “Clara? Are you there?”

It was different, this voice. Older, richer, lined with the passage of several years and the wisdom that came with it.