Dedication

  For Andrew, today and every day

  Epigraph

  Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?

  —Sarah Waters, Affinity

  We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or be confined by.

  —A. S. Byatt, Possession

  Map

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Brittany Cavallaro

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  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 shoes she had sailing off the roof of the Palace of Fine Arts during her and Remy’s escape from the General, in a glider made mostly from wishes and dreams.

  These shoes had arrived in a little ribboned box. The enclosed note had read Thank you for walking with us. It was signed The Daughters of the American Crown.

  If Claire’s life this last month had been bound up like a story, she’d have thrown the book across the room by now.

  Margarete was taking out a notebook and a nub of a pencil. “I must say, I thought it was rather brave to send the maid to the kitchens. It still looks a bit medieval down there. I don’t think Augusta has two leeks to rub together.”

  Claire closed her eyes. “I almost told the girl to go lawn bowling. I still don’t know why I need a lady’s maid when I eat all my meals off this desk.”

  “Propriety,” Margarete said, flipping a page. “The papers would have a field day.”

  “We have mice. I’m fairly sure I have small biting things living in my stockings. The papers aren’t interested in that?”

  “We’ve informed them that our court in exile is rather . . . rustic.”

  “That’s of course why we have a pony living in the parlor,” Claire said. “You know, when Georgiana told me I looked like a horse just now, I realized she might have thought that Smokey was my sister.”

  “The stable needs a new roof. Poor Smokey kept getting rained on.”

  “Poor Smokey keeps pissing on the rug—”

  “This attitude, you know, is how you scared off the last one.”

  “The last horse?”

  “The last maid, Claire.”

  “All she wanted to do was paint my face and”—Claire’s face twisted—“Ask questions about my whirlwind romance.”

  At that, Margarete finally met her eyes. There was pity there; well-meant, but it curled Claire’s stomach. No one wants to talk about Remy, she thought, least of all me. How to explain a “romance” that had begun by being kidnapped by her province’s Governor because he thought her able to grant his wishes with the touch of her hand, to make him a better leader? A romance that ended in a sham marriage, a marriage of convenience, as he lay dying on a boat in the middle of the lake?

  Remy hadn’t died—not yet, at least. But his feelings for her had. Claire didn’t know what was worse, that the two of them had fallen in love somewhere along the way, or that they had just as quickly fallen out.

  Claire’s own feelings were a stew of betrayal and longing that she had neither the time nor the inclination to sort out.

  “Fine,” Claire said to Margarete, after a moment. “We’ll keep Georgiana, even though she told me I look like I need a feed bag. Provisions. What were you able to find today? Just an overview, the first of them will be here any moment.”

  “Do you think it’s terrible,” her secretary said, “that we’re organizing a feast when our soldiers are toe to toe with the enemy at the border?”

  “This is a biblical feast. This is a feast that’s meant to save our lives.”

  Margarete sighed.

  While the few hundred men who were loyal to their Governor stood guard at the border, watching the Livingston-Monroe guard towers and fingering the triggers of their lightning rifles, Claire had asked Margarete to take the youngest and greenest of them for a “special mission.” They’d been tasked to scour the countryside for staff and supplies. They put out the word that if Duchamp was to properly govern from his temporary exile, he would need their help. Word was that his gratitude, when he was restored to his rightful home, would be immense. And fulfilled in gold.

  The folk along St. Cloud’s western border were, historically, not the most ardent supports of their Governor. At the best of times, they felt abandoned out here, so far from Monticello and its sprawling lake that brought so much of the trade to their narrow province—and now was not the best of times. Abigail Monroe, the wife of Livingston-Monroe’s Governor and the real architect of their province’s conflict with St. Cloud, had disappeared into a dungeon, and her province’s fragile alliance with the General had held. The Livmonian soldiers would support the General’s bid to overthrow Governor Duchamp, and even now their redcoat soldiers were swarming the border they shared with St. Cloud, waiting for a chance to invade. And the first fields they’d burn and pillage would be those here, around Wardenclyffe Tower.

  St. Cloud’s western citizens didn’t like this, not one bit. “When is that whelp Duchamp going to grow up and throw some punches?” a farmer had furiously asked Margarete. When Claire arrived and took stock of their surroundings, she realized she didn’t know who the citizenry hated more—the Duchamps, or Livingston-Monroe.

  That was a problem.

  So Margarete’s handpicked squadron of soldiers went into the countryside to make nice. The farmers out here weren’t used to this kind of personal attention from their Governor, and the response had been, at first, grudging interest. Some out-of-work locals were paid to convert Tesla’s wireless laboratory into a working manor, laying wooden floors, assembling furniture, glazing windows. Coin began to flow into the local coffers. After they overcame their initial hesitation, St. Cloud’s westernmost farmers realized they were happy to sell their produce to Wardenclyffe—why wouldn’t they be, when Duchamp paid three times what they would get at market? But given the region and the season, what they had to sell was . . . corn.

  So much corn. I’m go
ing to grow an extra pair of ears if this keeps up.

  Corn cakes. Corn fritters. Corn risotto and corn fricassee and a pork loin festooned with bright streamers of corn. Corn 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.