“The men of our nonce raiding party were, I think, relieved not to have to kill anybody, there being no one there to kill.”

  “Do you think they have it in them, at some future date, to kill in the service of Christ?”

  “If Your Grace had blessed them before they—”

  “I will have no direct personal connection to any such raid.”

  “May I bless them?”

  “Not in my name.”

  “I was thinking of … blessing them like Knights Templar … in the name of Jesus?”

  “And have them called my ‘Jesuit army’? No thank you.”

  Thrower stood patiently.

  “Why are you still here?”

  “I offer myself if you have further need of me for any task now or in the next few days.”

  “You know what your task is! Your only task, a duty from which you have not been excused.”

  Thrower still stood there. The bishop slapped the table and things bounced.

  “Your Grace,” said Thrower, “I think you are speaking of my duty to purge this world of a particularly diabolical presence.”

  “I was carefully not mentioning that duty, but yes. We understand each other.”

  “He has gone to America, Your Grace.”

  “And you have been in America. Indeed, you have citizenship in the United States.”

  “I was present in a state when it joined the Union, making me a citizen auto—”

  “Have you never in your life managed to speak with less blather, or is this what I should expect from your forever?”

  “Your Grace, I am an inveterate blatherer, as my professors in the seminary said, ‘Only death or a sudden onset of wisdom would silence this blatherskite.’”

  “And which did you choose?” asked the bishop.

  “I practice self-control daily, Your Grace, and I say less than one in ten of the ideas that come into my mind.”

  “I will count myself blessed on that score,” said the bishop.

  They waited.

  “Reverend Thrower,” said the bishop. “You are still here.”

  “How will I be able to let you know that I have achieved my purpose?”

  “How did you imagine? A letter carried by a packet boat? A proclamation by heralds with horns?”

  “I didn’t think—”

  “No, you didn’t, you never do. Why did God waste a perfectly good head by putting it between your shoulders? I know, I know, every idiot comes with a head, whether they ever use it or not. Speaking of heads, I will look forward to seeing one particular head in a box.”

  Thrower felt a thrill of fear run through him. “Through the international post?”

  “A valise will do. Bring it to me in a valise.”

  “In person, another Atlantic crossing.”

  “By balloon this time. In Paris they’re talking about having a man ride across the ocean in a basket under a balloon, carried by wind and having no fear of collision or potholes or weather, since they say they fly above the clouds.”

  “I don’t think I—I don’t know if I could—”

  “Calm yourself, my friend. A newspaper clipping, hand delivered to my secretary should be sufficient. The man is famous enough to warrant an obituary, isn’t he?”

  “So you wish it to be a public death, rather than a stealthy one, where no one ever knows what became of—”

  “Why must you speak of death? It comes to all of us, and always too soon. Why should this young American blacksmith be any different?”

  Thrower bowed his head and strode from the bishop’s office. Immediately someone else was ushered in, and Thrower wondered, not for the first time, how much of what was said within those walls was overheard.

  All of it, thought Thrower. The bishop is vain, and he will want all his words recorded for posterity. There are scriveners hiding in the walls, taking down every word. Words of mine, that can be used against me. The bishop wasn’t the “servant of all” that was extolled by Christ. In his own pious way, he was the enemy of all.

  Thrower was halfway to his assigned room in a former monastery that now was a dormitory for visiting church dignitaries before it dawned on him. The bishop serves only himself, certainly not God, but he is not the enemy of all. Thrower knew who was, knew him well. Into his mind flashed the image of the charming, beautiful face of the angel who had first given him the mission of killing Alvin Miller, Junior, as a child.

  Why would that face come into his mind when he was thinking of the enemy of all? That was Alvin Miller, Alvin Smith, Alvin “Maker,” a blasphemous title. But when he thought of his worst enemy, he did not imagine the face of the bishop, nor did he think of any of Alvin’s cohorts that he had been tracking for years. Nor of Alvin himself. Instead he saw the kindly, loving face of his spiritual friend, his Visitor. Was God whispering something to him?

  Of course not.

  He prayed for two hours before going to bed. But still his angel did not appear.

  Maybe the bishop was supposed to be his angel now, the representative of God who would give him his missions. That was it. He did not need the angel anymore.

  He closed his eyes to sleep.

  Sometime in the darkness he woke up weeping. O my angel, my angel! How I need thee! I need thee now!

  21

  ELIZA NUTBUTTER ROSE from the bed in darkness. It was not her bed and she was not in the cabin she rented behind the tavern—a no-alcohol tavern, such an absurd thing, but people did come most nights to sing and dance and drink either Adam’s Ale or a concoction supposedly invented by Alvin Smith himself. It had tickly bubbles in it. It made her need to either belch or break wind, both potential obstacles to her work.

  Adam’s Ale it was—and it was the purest, clearest, most refreshing water she had drunk in her life. Not that she was a connoisseur of water. She usually drank liquids with at least a little alcohol in them. Or enough of something else to take away the taste. Rum was the foulest of the hard liquors, and so she was fascinated with it, could not leave it alone, always experimenting to find some way to mask the vile taste while preserving the proportion of alcohol.

  Calvin was still in bed—he liked to sleep long and hard, especially if he had worked long and hard the night before. But to her surprise he was awake, watching her dress.

  “So many layers of cloth between the living body and the eyes of the world,” said Calvin.

  “Our clothing makes us beautiful,” said Eliza.

  “Your clothing hides everything that makes you beautiful except your face, your hair, and your stature.”

  “And my graceful hands and arms, and my shoes that peek out from under my skirts when I walk, and my lower legs, which you glimpse when I spin around in a dance. Oh, there is so much of my body on display. It’s a shame that wide, deep necklines are not fashionable in Crystal City.”

  “They’re fashionable in my bedroom,” said Calvin.

  “No matter what I wore, you’d have it off me in fifteen seconds after we got into this room.”

  “When has it ever taken that long?” asked Calvin, acting hurt.

  He was a charming boy, and he might prove very useful later. But right now, Eliza Nutbutter had an errand to run.

  “Did anyone see you come here?”

  “No one ever sees me when I want not to be seen,” said Eliza. “You know that’s my knack.”

  “I thought your knack was escaping from anything and anyone, anywhere.”

  “When I come to you, my darling boy, I’m escaping from all the prying eyes of Crystal City. Still well within my knack.”

  “Just so you don’t escape from me,” said Calvin.

  “My darling, darling boy—”

  “What does that even mean, ‘darling.’ I’ve never darled, have you? Darled?”

  “You’re the clever one, you tell me.”

  “We use ‘ling’ endings to express affection for things we own. A piglet suddenly becomes a darling pigling when it’s time for the slaughter.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Eliza. “I’ve never been present at the slaughter of a pig.”

  “Nor should you ever be,” said Calvin. “No blood should ever be spattered on those fine—”

  She looked banefully at him.

  “Clothes. Your gownling, your corsetling—”

  “I know what you were going to say, and I approve of the sentiment, just not the saying of it. Calvin, I don’t need to escape from you. I’m not your prisoner, I’m not held against my will, and I tell you everything.”

  “Or so you say.”

  “Everything. Every bit of nice or nasty gossip that I hear, everybody who is losing money or making money, all the people committing adultery on the sly.”

  “But you never hear about me, do you?”

  “A few scattered rumors, weeks apart, and usually about something audacious you said or did back in your childhood. Which you’re barely out of, my duckling.”

  Calvin chuckled. “So now it’s duckling instead of darling.”

  “Darling starts with dar, which used to mean dear, as in something of great cost or value. So dear, add on the affectionate ling, and … darling.”

  “If you knew—”

  “Silly,” said Eliza. “I didn’t know at all, till you started explaining it, and then I understood at once what you were going to say. Is that a knack I have? Or have I already heard everything that any man has to say, so it just comes back to me when I need it?”

  “Someone explained to you the origin of the word ‘darling’?”

  “I don’t remember, darling. Or if you were a bear, should I call you ‘barling’?”

  “I like that. As long as you never call anyone else by that name. I’ll know if you do, by the way.”

  “My all-knowing, all-seeing barling, the junior Maker.”

  His eyes darkened and he rolled under the covers, turning his back to her.

  “Don’t pout, my duckling,” said Eliza. “I need to run a little errand and I don’t want you to worry when you don’t see me for a couple of weeks.”

  “Weeks? An ‘errand’?”

  “There’s something I need to do in Irrakwa.”

  “Didn’t Alvin rescue you from Irrakwa?”

  “He gave me safe passage. What he rescued me from was unimaginable wealth.”

  “You have no idea how much wealth I can imagine,” said Calvin. “How do you make your money, Eliza? You never ask me for any.”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “I’m a Maker. If I need money, I can make it.”

  “So you say. Never saw you do it, but why should I doubt?”

  “Who pays you?”

  “Nobody pays me. Nobody hires me. They give me gifts, lovely gifts, mostly the clinky coiny kind of gift. Which I carry between my breasts like any sensible woman, because, while men are constantly trying to get an angle to peer down between them, it is very dark, my bag of coins is fuliginous, and therefore they are deceived into thinking that they have seen nothing but an unfathomable deep bay of black.”

  “You could have said ‘sea of black’ or ‘ocean of black.’”

  “There isn’t room here for more than a bay, a little inlet.” Her corset in place, the stays doing their noble, uplifting labor, Eliza settled the fuligin purse into place. Calvin had never seen anything so black. It wasn’t a purse, it was a hole in her chest leading, not to the back of her body, but into the starless dark of space, infinitely deep.

  “You can’t take your eyes off my coins, is that it?”

  “I have never seen such complete and perfect black. Black itself would look pale compared to it.”

  “Fuligin. I had never heard of it either. But an Italian woman in Philadelphia told me that her knack—we were being quite open with each other—her knack was to take soot and lampblack and make a dye that could turn the whitest cloth into the color fuligin, which she promised me was blacker than black. And it is true, don’t you think?”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Philadelphia, for all I know.”

  “How did you pay her?”

  “It’s so complicated,” said Eliza.

  “And yet, if you tell me the truth, it will be so simple.”

  “Are you going to make me walk home in the light of dawn?”

  “You helped her escape, since that’s your knack.”

  “Well. Yes. That wasn’t my plan. I was arrested for walking on a public street an hour after dark. The Quakers can out-puritan the Puritans sometimes. The law assumes that an unaccompanied woman on the street at night must be in a much-wanted but apparently never-available trade.”

  “So they threw you in jail.”

  “They gently led me to jail. I was dressed like a lady, I spoke like a lady, and so the constables were a little bit in awe of me. They didn’t put me in a crowded cell, but in a smaller one with only one other occupant.”

  “Your Italian blackmaker.”

  “Fuligin. Yes. I happened to mention that I had a knack for escaping and probably wouldn’t be there by morning. And she said, ‘Ma’am, I have two babies at home to feed. Would you take me with you?’

  “‘With your enormous powers, you need my help?’ says I to her. ‘My powers!’ she says. And I say, ‘Somehow, before this night is over, you’re going to conceive, carry, and bear two babies and somehow smuggle them out of here and into your home, so that you can fulfill your word and have two babies at home to feed.’”

  “So you called her a liar, and she made you a purse, and you took her with you.”

  “Not in that order, of course. She didn’t have the makings of my fuligin purse, but her gratitude was the rare kind that lasts for more than an hour.”

  “What if I came with you on this errand?”

  “Then I wouldn’t go.”

  “Because your errand is secret.”

  “My errand is private,” said Eliza. “What if there were a doctor in Philadelphia who I trust not to poison me with his remedies.”

  “Which are probably rum and lots of strained lemon juice and—”

  “I know that you can tell all the ingredients that any medicine show’s elixirs contain.”

  “Some very harmful.”

  “I don’t have a doctor, so no one gives me potions. I said what if there were a doctor I trust. There is no such doctor. There’s almost nobody I trust.”

  “Am I one you trust?”

  “Implicitly, my duckling, my barling.”

  “Well, that’s foolish of you.”

  “I trust you implicitly to always do whatever you believe is in your best interest.”

  “Not foolish, then.”

  “Like everyone else on God’s green Earth, Calvin. Everybody acts in what they think will be in their best interest. Most people are so stupid or powerless that they can’t figure out what their best interest is, and if they do find it out, they are unable to achieve it.”

  “Even my altruistic brother?”

  “Which one is that?” asked Eliza.

  “Well, you really are cynical.”

  “Is that a nice thing? Is it beautiful?”

  “You know the word perfectly well. I can’t persuade you to stay another fifteen minutes, could I?”

  “You can’t,” said Eliza. “And it never goes so quickly as fifteen minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Not one more minute.” Eliza flounced out of Calvin’s modest house, through the back door, where she knew nobody would be watching, because she thought of herself as escaping, getting away from Calvin’s possessive devotion. So naturally, nobody would be able to tell him, if he asked, which way she went, because nobody knew she was there last night, and they never noticed her this morning. So she walked rather openly, not furtively, along the dirt road, and when she got to the paved part, she walked in the grass beside the road, because cobbled streets were almost impossible to walk on without turning an ankle. “Why do they use cobblestones?” she demanded that Calvin tell her.

  “They last longer than brick, and they don’t get muddy like dirt.”

  “Yes they do, and the mud makes them slick and even harder to walk on. Dirt roads are best—they can be repaired with a bucket of dirt and a rake, they aren’t always trying to break your ankle. Or hip.”

  To which Calvin had only responded with a kiss. “I wish I could make all roads smooth and safe for you,” he said, which was sweet, but also stupid, because if he had half the power he claimed to have, he could do exactly that instead of wishing. But it was a helpful thought, and maybe when he figured out what he wanted to do with his life, he’d figure out how to smooth roads ahead of her wherever she walked.

  In her own little house, she changed into traveling clothes, which covered her more thoroughly than usual. She had a few other things hidden on her person, but within easy reach even if somebody was watching her. No point in hiding them in her bags, which could be snatched out of her womanly hands by any ruffian. The clothes she was taking with her weren’t so elegant that she couldn’t replace them by purchase if they were stolen.

  There was coach service—three a day—from Crystal City to Carthage, the biggest city on the Hio River. It was the first stop on your journey, if you didn’t want to ride on the railroad. On the train, you couldn’t call to the driver to stop. Coachmen were trained to assume that if a lady of quality asked them to stop, she knew what she was doing, so he should stop and stay in his high seat and not watch where she went or what she did. She knew what they assumed, but mostly she did it because she was getting stiff from sitting too long, or she needed a nip of something that had a touch of spirits in it, or she wanted to flounce provocatively in front of another passenger who would feel very well paid for the effort of looking out the window.

  What will I ever do if I get fat? Some men won’t be put off by that, but others will, and my world will shrink. But just as awful to turn into a rail-thin old biddy with veins and creases in her neck crying out, Look how old she is!

  Her only consolation at such thoughts was to remember one of her best sayings: I’ll be dead before any of that happens. She had already been shot at several times—not when she was escaping from something—and stabbed once, but not deeply enough to score a vital organ. Dying was never all that very far away, and she rarely minded thinking about it. I’d rather die when I still look good enough in my coffin that people will say, What a shame, I would have liked to get to know her well. Because men were not above thinking such thoughts about an attractive corpse.