The house came into view through the ever-present smog. It was pretty, she supposed, gabled and painted blue, though as she approached, she saw that the glass in their sitting-room window was cracked. She stopped for a moment to stare.

  Who had done such a thing? A creditor, surely. Still, it had been expensive to buy a pane of glass so large, and it would be expensive too to replace it. She walked through the wooden door and right through the kitchen, where the maid, hair hidden under a kerchief, was frying up rashers of bacon.

  “Have a good day?” Margarete asked. It wasn’t a friendly question.

  “No,” Claire said, shortly, because she hadn’t, and though the other girl would never believe her, she would have traded their places in an instant. It wouldn’t be a problem if Jeremiah Emerson didn’t heap the work of three servants on his housekeeper’s small shoulders. “Any callers?”

  Margarete correctly heard “callers” as “creditor thugs.”

  “Only the one,” she said, her accent lingering at the edges of her words. “We hid. He went away. It wasn’t so bad.”

  “After breaking the window to send a message.”

  “As you saw.” Margarete turned back to the stove. For a girl fourteen years old, she had a surprising gravity to her manner. “He’s in his study, talking to someone from the Governor. Waiting for his genius girl, I’m sure.”

  “Of course,” Claire said, staring up at the staircase, and then heard what she’d just said. “Margarete, you know that I’m not—you know that it’s a punishment, don’t you?”

  “A punishment?” Slowly she held up her ash-blackened hands, her skin white beneath. “Let’s talk about punishments, then, the next time I’m to do the laundry. Maybe you can haul the water or work the press.”

  Few maids would have spoken that way to their employer’s daughter. But few maids were girls adopted as a sister and then treated as a servant.

  Claire set her jaw. It was fair for Margarete to say it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. “I’ll be in his study.”

  “Tell him I’ll have supper in thirty minutes!” Margarete called as Claire climbed the stairs.

  Though their house was lavish looking from the outside, on the inside it was spare. The walls were unpainted, the floors unpolished. The Emerson house was one meant to be tended by an army of servants and decorated with an expert’s touch, but there wasn’t any gilt on the trim or paintings on the walls. It looked like what it was. A house purchased with the promise of wealth, left bare when that wealth never arrived.

  Jeremiah Emerson wouldn’t be paid again for his Barrage until it exploded its terrifying fireworks across the Monticello sky.

  Claire lingered in the empty hallway, outside her father’s study door. He would have spent his day down at Jefferson Park, in the pavilion that had been built to house his inventions. When Governor Duchamp had first ordered the pavilions built, they had been little more than wood painted to look like marble. Then the Fair was delayed again, and again, and eventually it was clear that the pavilions needed to be reinforced if they were to survive the harsh Monticellan winters. They became, in fact, the things they had been only meant to reference. Buildings of gleaming white marble, speckled and veined like something out of ancient Rome.

  Jeremiah Emerson would have arrived with the dawn at the building that wore his name. He would have spent the day inside with his workmen, tearing down and rebuilding his mighty gun, the gun that only fired for its inventor on those days that his daughter had blessed him.

  And on the days it failed, Emerson would come home and take those failures out on his daughter.

  At least today she had a moment to compose herself out here on the landing. The housekeeper hadn’t said who was in with her father, but she knew who it was.

  The General. He had a name, but no one ever used it. Why would they need to?

  “—we can’t countenance another delay. We need a show, and an impressive one. That boy may very well think that this Fair is about our kingdom’s ingenuity. I suppose leaders need to have ideals.” His tone was acid when he spoke of his young Governor. “What I need is an assurance that our borders aren’t invaded while we’re congratulating ourselves on our smarts. The Livmonians need to be afraid of us. Properly afraid.”

  “Then give me another day to get it right,” her father said. “Let the Barrage go on the second day, or the third. Or next month! If the Fair’s to run until fall, we can build anticipation—”

  The General snorted. “You’ve had enough time. There were German firms that were offered your contract, as you well know. But all I heard from that boy was of your gargantuan gun. Well, your gargantuan gun still doesn’t damn well work. And you know the real reason for this show. Our neighbors to the west need to see some real might. They want to get a taste of us, take our lands? We’d blow them to smithereens. So much for that.” A thud, like he’d swung his boots down to the ground. Had he been sitting on her father’s desk? Claire felt a wash of annoyance and admiration.

  “So much for my genius, you mean.” Her father’s voice was sour.

  “As you said. I’ll expect you in the morning.” Claire scuttled back from the doorway as she heard him approach. “Tell your pretty daughter hello for me.”

  A shot, expertly aimed. “Of course,” Jeremiah Emerson said, and Claire was almost proud at how he hid his despair.

  She waited with her hands clasped at the top of the stairs for the General to leave. What she saw first was what she always did, what she was meant to see. His uniform. The fitted jacket, midnight blue, and the softer blue of the pants below, the half cape with its ermine trim, and everywhere, gold scrollwork, like an endless poem made of thread. That thought would be lost on the General, a man whose neat dark mustache looked like it was trimmed against a ruler.

  “Miss Emerson,” he said, reaching out to take her hand in a way he surely thought was charming. He was a handsome man, but it was an afterthought. His uniform was fit to swallow any beauty he had.

  “A pleasure.” Claire kept her hands where they were, and after a moment, he dropped his.

  “Your father”—he said this conspiratorially, as though Jeremiah Emerson weren’t still five feet away—“will be the death of us, you know.”

  “I thought that was why you hired him.” When he raised his eyebrows, Claire said, “Death.”

  “Yes.” The General smiled. “Of course. He’ll do it well, when all’s said and done. And tell me—”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I’ve been holding this bag of wrenches for three hours now.” With her foot, she shut the door behind her.

  Claire knew she should be more careful with him. The General could fabricate some offense, have her thrown in jail. He could withdraw her father’s contract. He could finally make the marriage proposal he’d been threatening for months; he could make it, take her to bed, then withdraw the offer immediately. He could wreck her life in any of a dozen ways for mouthing off to him, but Claire was Claire, and she’d never met a bad decision she didn’t like.

  Sunday, she thought. Sunday. All I need is to make it till this Sunday.

  “Your wrenches,” she said, dumping the bag on her father’s desk.

  Jeremiah Emerson scowled. He was a beefy man, with thick, corded arms and a thatch of dark hair. He strutted around in shirtsleeves, looped his fingers through his suspenders, left his jacket crumpled in a ball on the floor. Claire often thought that he had cultivated his idiosyncrasies in the same way as his inventions—deliberately, with great care.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “What did the General want?”

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear.”

  Claire kept the desk between them. It was safest that way. “What do you need me to do?”

  He studied her. “Open the bag,” he said. “No. With bare hands. Come on, girl, you know better than that.”

  She drew her head up high. Gently, she pulled off one glove, then the other, and laid them before her.

  “On with it.”

  Claire untied the grosgrain ribbon and tugged open the mouth of the bag. The wrenches inside gleamed dully. The study wasn’t bright enough to allow for intellectual pursuits or professional exploits; the electric lamps that were everywhere else in the city were missing here. This room was still lit by gaslight, another money-saving measure. Any real work Jeremiah Emerson did was at his pavilion in Jefferson Park.

  This room was for conversations with the Governor, and the Governor’s staff. It was for organizing his notes for the next day.

  For tormenting his daughter.

  “The wrenches.”

  Claire wanted to take up the lot of them and pitch them into her father’s face. Black his eyes. Knock out his teeth. Rattle the brain that wasn’t smart enough to get them out of the mess he had created, that relied on this insane superstition instead. She’d gone far enough to lift a pair of torque wrenches when her father clucked his tongue.

  “One at a time,” he said, his eyes bright with anticipation.

  He didn’t have to give her instructions. She knew what she was expected to do. In one open palm, she cradled the tool. With the other, she drew her fingers together over it, like a priest would sprinkle water on a child.

  “I bless this tool,” her father said.

  “I bless this tool,” Claire said, low.

  His chin went up sharply. “Did you mean it?”

  “I meant it.”

  His hands seized, and in a galvanic motion, he lunged forward to pull it from her hands.

  “You have to mean it, girl,” he breathed, the wrench bright in his fingers. “You have to mean it, or else I’ll be in the same place I was this morning. Do you know how they looked at me when I walked in? All those porters, those immigrant whoresons I found down in the stockyard—I gave them better lives, I offered them clean work, to lift and carry and mind my work, and after my failures, those same men had the audacity to look at their employer and pity him today! I will not have that! I will not be threatened by foreigners who were not born to this great American Kingdom, these—these Germans who want my contract, and moreover, I will not have sedition in my own house! You know that you are blessed—”

  Claire took a shuddering step back, hands clutching her skirts.

  “—you know that you are blessed and that it is required of you to share those blessings with me. I am your father. You have been standing each night in this house I have raised over your head and you think that you can fool me? That you can withhold what is mine by right because of your feminine whims and caprices? No.” He was whispering still, harsh and forced, his hands convulsing around the wrench. “No. I say no to that. I say you will not bring down this dishonor upon my home.”

  Some small, screaming part of Claire thought, He’ll beat me with that wrench. She thought, He should have been a preacher. She thought, No one will ever believe just how powerless I really am.

  “I bless this tool,” he growled.

  Claire swallowed. “I bless this tool,” she said, and the words were crackling and strange in her mouth.

  With a clang, he dropped the wrench onto the pile. He held his hands out, like she was a child again and needed help climbing up to her feet after a fall.

  She placed her hands in her father’s. By now, she knew what he wanted.

  “I bless this man,” he said, and waited.

  Claire looked into his horrible, eager eyes. “I bless this man,” she said, and what she thought was, I hope you die in your sleep, and though every night she wished it, every morning she woke to him still there, still breathing.

  “Bless my work in this exhibition. Bless it, and mean it, goddammit, or it’s your head on the platter too.”

  “I bless his work,” she whispered.

  If that was the case, if she had so little control, how much power could a girl like her possibly have?

  Jeremiah Emerson waited, head cocked, as though some angel was going to whisper in his ear. “Let me get my clothes for the exposition,” he said finally. “You’ll bless those. You’ll bless my notes. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours. You won’t need to know a thing about them, of course. I wouldn’t expect you to.” He sighed. “I only wish that I could take you to the pavilion tonight. But I can’t risk it. Not until tomorrow. A man shouldn’t show his weakness that way.”

  “In what way?” she asked into the waiting silence.

  “No one should take his heart out with him in public. No one,” he said, and swept off to his bedroom, leaving Claire to stare disbelievingly after him.

  Two

  Jeremiah Emerson’s madness, as his daughter understood it, had begun after her mother’s death. More precisely, it had started in the weeks before.

  Her brother was already training furiously for his escape; he intended to play baseball for the royal touring team. Her father had been working at a munitions firm, developing a project he called a “grenade,” and when he came home at night to their little tenement apartment, his face and neck were dusted with the black powder that was the mark of his trade. The talk was all of explosives, of their potential in combat. He tinkered and tinkered, but he could make nothing explode.

  Claire had been eight years old. Her father was her own private king. The last Governor Duchamp—Leonard, the current Governor’s father—hadn’t ever put too much stock in women, and though reformers put on men’s trousers and stomped through the streets howling for work and respect and autonomy, they were eventually rounded up and put into asylums, where they could get the help they needed. One had to appreciate one’s place in society.

  Everyone knew that women were the angels in the house. They inspired men to do good works out in the evil world; they made their homes a place of comfort for those men to return to.

  Claire’s father might have been her king, but her mother only paid lip service to his rule. Every morning, Susannah Emerson kissed her husband at the door, and when it shut she took Claire into the kitchen, pulled food from the larder, and began quizzing her on mathematics as she mixed up the dough for her buttermilk biscuits. While the two of them pressed the clothes they’d spent hours scouring, Susannah taught her daughter Milton and Donne. She sewed their clothes while teaching her geography and the history of the American Kingdom, and Claire threaded her mother’s needles while she listened. Sometimes the little neighbor girl with the eyepatch would come by with apples or new-made cheese or a cloth of her own to sew, and Susannah would set her a place for her to listen, too.

  But Beatrix wasn’t there on the day that Claire remembered best. That day, while making a dress for her daughter—a gray poplin with billowing sleeves, the last of her mother’s dresses Claire would ever wear—she asked what Claire thought of their young Governor.

  Claire shrugged. “He’s French. I don’t like him much.”

  Susannah Emerson had pursed her lips as she laid a half-finished sleeve out on the table. “Do you know the story?” she began. This was how all her mother’s history lessons began. A story. She smiled down at the length of poplin before her. “The Duchamps have been woven into the fabric of St. Cloud for nearly a hundred years.”

  The original Governor, Montague Duchamp, had been a Frenchman who had helped the young American Kingdom win the War of 1812. He’d been a spymaster; his agents embedded themselves into the British units up in frigid Canada, fed them lies about their American enemy. Fifteen cannons became twelve. Five hundred troops became fifty. The British underestimated their enemy’s resources, and because of it, their American enemy won.

  In thanks, King George Washington carved out a province for Duchamp. The long stretch of land that swaddled the Mississippi was given into his keeping; at that time, it was the farthest west the American Kingdom stretched.

  Duchamp, in an attempt to maintain the peace, named his new province St. Cloud after the town in Île-de-France where he had lived as a boy. And if by chance his new subjects found their ruler unpatriotic, they would be appeased by his ruling seat—Monticello-by-the-Lake, a city perched on Lake Michigan, a city named for Thomas Jefferson’s estate that he’d so admired on his visit to the country’s capital to meet the King.

  By all accounts Duchamp ruled his own province fairly and well.

  His grandson Leonard hadn’t. When the neighboring province Livingston-Monroe began to nibble away at their western border, establishing military outposts on the Mississippi’s western banks, Leonard Duchamp shrugged at them. Let them have what they would; his focus turned ever back to Monticello.

  This Duchamp patronized artists, built skyscrapers, paved the roads. Had his guard ignore the brothels and the dance halls if they looked respectable enough from the street. All the lines between “looks nice” and “is nice” began to blur. When the first European prince deigned to visit the city, he disdained a soiree at the Governor’s Mansion for a night in the city’s sordid Levee district, where, in a gilded pool hall, he played roulette with thieves and sipped his champagne from a courtesan’s shoe. The city grew ever wilder, ever lusher, ever hungrier to rage out beyond its borders.

  And when Leonard Duchamp died suddenly a year before his Great Exposition was to be staged, his young son, Remy, was thrust into his role and told to make the marvel happen.

  “It’s a complicated place, our city,” her mother had said, holding her piecework up to the light. Claire had abandoned her work to listen, her chin resting on her hands. “But I don’t think it’s a bad place to live.”

  “Father thinks it’s evil,” Claire said.

  “Not evil. Alive.”

  She shook her head. “Father doesn’t want me to go out into it alone. Not without someone to keep watch over me.”

  At that, her mother paused, then set the unfinished sleeve onto the table. “Never be afraid of being alone, Claire. I’ve taught you well enough, and why? For you to be your own best company. You can mind yourself.”