Iron Cast (13 page)

She took a step back.

“I have to go see my mother,” she said. The heat rising in her cheeks was almost unbearable. She tugged her hand free and shoved it into her coat pocket so that he wouldn't see the trembling. She took another step back, finally daring to meet his eyes. The wound she had inflicted was manifest in his features. Her chest was aching so fiercely that she couldn't breathe.

“Ada,” he said, but he couldn't seem to find more words.

“I meant what I said,” she told him. “I want to be with you. I just . . . I have to go.”

She walked away from him, her hands deep in her pockets, her eyes to the ground. She counted her steps until tears blurred her feet past recognition.

The Wellses hosted a dinner party for a few neighbors that evening. Corinne wasn't in the mood for high society, but she knew her mother liked to show her off to their friends. Corinne was usually able to fib her way through the awkward conversations, though most of the time she was longing for Ada to be there, playing a song on her violin that would make everyone crave utter silence.

One thing she did enjoy about the parties was that it inevitably meant a new dress. Tonight's number was already hanging in her closet when she arrived. It was midnight blue with silver trim, with sleeves falling well past her elbows and a skirt falling well past her
knees, but the cut was so flattering that Corinne didn't mind. She paired it with some black shoes and a long silver chain dotted with pearls. Her short haircut had flabbergasted her parents when she'd first arrived with it; but since then her mother had made peace and even on occasion mentioned how well it suited her round face.

When Corinne went downstairs to greet the guests, she had to remind herself with every step to keep the smile plastered on her face, lest her expression give way to a grimace. The house was old enough that it was predominantly stone and wood. Sometime after Corinne had left for school, her mother had gone on a redecorating rampage and replaced all the old fixtures with the latest styles. Thankfully the latest styles all happened to be brass. Corinne didn't like to think about what stepping inside the house would have been like with its original iron hinges, knobs, and latches. She still had to avoid the kitchen at all costs.

With the guests' arrival, she could sense the iron alloys in their jewelry and cuff links like an ache niggling at the base of her neck. Apparently not all of her parents' friends could afford to wear pure gold and silver to cocktail parties. She could handle a little iron, though. It was the small talk that drained her. After twenty minutes of exchanging inane pleasantries, she was exhausted.

She was trying to decide if it would be worth the effort to fake a fainting spell when her mother grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to greet the newest arrivals. The young couple was only a little older than Corinne, arm in arm, with smiles that had probably taken years of practice to look so genuine.

“James, Madeline, we're so pleased you could make it,” Mrs. Wells said, taking each of their hands in turn. She was flustered from all the preparations, and her complexion was splotched with uneven red. If she'd known about the stain on the silk of her dress,
she would have been mortified. Corinne decided not to mention it.

“How could we miss our dearest Corinne's homecoming?” Madeline asked.

Madeline Gretsky was tall and proportioned like a catalogue model, with dark curls and cherry-red lipstick that somehow didn't look cheap against her pale face. The Wellses had known Madeline's family since Corinne was in diapers and Madeline was dressing her up in homemade costumes and reenacting scenes from her favorite fairy tales. Madeline's husband, James, had come along a few years ago, wooing high society with his charm despite his solidly middle-class upbringing. James was Madeline's perfect complement, with golden hair, sleepy blue eyes, and a face like poetry. He offered Corinne a languid smile.

“We never see you around the Mythic,” he said.

“I go to school in Pennsylvania, remember?”

“Right, right.” He wrapped his arm around Madeline's shoulder with lazy ease and kept smiling.

“I'm so sorry that Perry and I haven't made it down to your little theater yet,” Mrs. Wells said, her hands fluttering uselessly, as if she couldn't decide what to do with them. “We're so terribly busy, you know. With the wedding.”

Corinne snorted. Her parents' refusal to attend a play at the Mythic Theatre had nothing to do with their schedules and everything to do with its less-than-grand premises and reputation for attracting uncouth artistic types.

Madeline's smile was beatific, making a matching set with her husband's.

“It's perfectly all right, Mrs. Wells,” she said. “We understand.”

“Thank you so much for the invitation,” James said.

“Of course,” Mrs. Wells said, waving her hands in a way that
Corinne thought resembled a frenetic bird. “But you'll have to excuse me. I think the maid mixed up the place settings.”

Mrs. Wells glanced toward the dining room in distraction and moved off.

“So wonderful to see you,” Madeline said with a dainty wave. She waited until Mrs. Wells was out of earshot, then smacked Corinne on the shoulder.

“What was that for?” Corinne asked, rubbing her arm reflexively.

“Why didn't you come to
Glass Staircase
in November? You promised you would.”

“No I didn't!”

“You said you would try, at least.”

“I believe my exact words were: I'd rather jump off the Custom House tower.”

“She's right, Maddy,” James said musingly, resting his chin on top of her dark hair. “Those were her exact words.”

“Oh, hush,” Madeline said. She batted him away. “I'm trying to win an argument here. I was a positively thrilling Lucinda.”

“I don't know who Lucinda is,” Corinne said. “No one has ever heard of your ghastly plays.”

Madeline's lip puckered into a pout, and she crossed her arms. She glanced around, but none of the other guests showed any interest in eavesdropping on their conversation.

“James and I are good enough to keep your secret, Cor,” Madeline said, dropping her voice to a forceful whisper. “The least you could do is support our theater.”

“No,” Corinne said as the dinner bell rang. “The least I can do is not tell anyone
your
secret.”

“Another excellent point,” James said, still unperturbed.

Madeline rolled her eyes but didn't seem to have a retort.
Corinne took that as a victory and led the way into the dining room with a smile.

The dinner portion of the evening was more or less predictable. Corinne was an expert at having food in her mouth every time someone asked her a question about school. Madeline was called upon to regale the table with tales of her studies in Paris, which Corinne was grateful for. Not only did it distract the guests, but it kept Madeline from provoking her—one of the older girl's favorite pastimes. James did lean over at one point during a particularly flamboyant segment of Madeline's story and ask Corinne about Ada and Saint.

“Ada's fine,” Corinne said, and frowned. “I thought Saint would have been spending his time at the Mythic. He hasn't been around much since—”

She cut herself short, and James raised an eyebrow. Before he could ask anything further, Madeline called on him to do his impression of the French prime minister.

“He's better at being Clemenceau than Clemenceau is,” she told the table, eyes bright with laughter.

James winked at Corinne and obliged, donning a ridiculous French accent and somehow capturing the essence of a walrus mustache with just his expression. Their conversation was quickly swept away by the merriment of the guests.

Once the party had adjourned to the parlor, Corinne took her usual spot in the northwest corner, which was the farthest from any iron and kept her headache to a dull roar, easily silenced with some aspirin and a few swigs from her hip flask when no one was looking. She was in the middle of a furtive sip when someone slapped her back roughly.

“Please tell me that's medicinal,” came the booming voice.

“Phillip,” she said through her coughing. She barely had time to stash the flask before her mother breezed across the room, arms wide to embrace her son.

“Phil, when did you get here?” Mrs. Wells cried. “You slip in without even a word? Where's Angela?”

Her questions went unanswered for a few minutes as the other guests noticed the new arrival. There were handshakes all around and congratulations on his upcoming nuptials. Corinne was trapped in the corner behind the tall bulk of her brother, and she eventually just sank onto an ottoman to wait it out. After declining dinner and wine and cheese and everything else their mother tried to shove at him, Phillip finally took a seat. He shared their mother's brown hair, though his eyes were blue like their father's. He'd inherited all the height in the family as well, towering even over Mr. Wells. When she was younger, Corinne had started a game with herself, trying to keep count of the number of times people told the Wellses how dashing their son was. She'd lost count somewhere in the hundreds.

“Angela's staying with her parents until tomorrow,” Phillip said, completely comfortable under the weight of the entire party's attention. “She wanted me to come early to help Mother with the final preparations.”

Corinne couldn't suppress a snort of laughter at that.

“And to spend time with family that's coming in,” he continued. He leaned over to muss Corinne's hair with just a little too much force to be tenderly affectionate. She jerked away from him and almost fell off the ottoman. He knew how much she hated when he did that.

“She's so considerate,” Mrs. Wells said, beaming with pride at her son's choice of bride.

Corinne ran her fingers through her hair and thought it much
more likely that Phillip was tired of Angela's family, but she wasn't keen on being pulled into the tedium of wedding preparations. As far as Corinne could tell, Angela was much more comfortable dictating her preferences from a tea table at a country club.

The conversation ran swiftly toward the stress on young brides and from there on to the economy and which neighborhoods were going downhill. Corinne lost its thread for a while, so she was caught off guard when the discussion suddenly turned to hemopaths and the Harvard Bridge.

“Are the police even trying to find them? Surely out of all the people on that bridge, someone remembers them.”

“It'll be the Hemopath Protection Agency that's after them, not the regular police.”

“Charlotte Dower said her cousin was there, and he barely remembers a thing. Still swears up and down those elephants must've been real.”

“I've been saying for years that hemopaths are a danger to us. If they know how to get inside your head like that, what's to stop them from doing it all the time?”

“Is the law even enough to stop them? I've heard they still host those parties in secret. The police can't shut them all down.”

“Maybe the ironmongers have the right idea.”

The man who said that was one of her father's business partners. An uneasy silence fell over the room at the suggestion. The masked vigilantes who kidnapped hemopaths from their beds were hardly a topic for civilized conversation. Corinne squeezed her hand into a fist and concentrated on the pain of her nails cutting into her palm.

“There's no need for anything like that when there's Haversham Asylum,” said one of the women from her mother's bridge club.

“Did you hear that some hemopaths are petitioning the governor to shut it down?”

That set off a new flurry of titters. Corinne had to hold her breath to keep herself in check. She knew where the conversation would go. She'd heard it so many times, it was like a hated song on a phonograph that she'd memorized completely but never learned not to despise.

“They say there's torture going on there. Some kind of experimentation.” The man speaking was trying to sound informational, but he obviously just wanted to scandalize everyone.

“Torture? In
Boston
? We're not the Bolsheviks.”

“Can you imagine the nerve, petitioning against a prison that was built solely for their comfort?”

“Judging from the crime rates, they should be expanding the asylum. Phillip, maybe you can talk to Angela's father about that.”

“Yes, I've told him as much,” Perry Wells said, placing a hand on his son's shoulder. “If you're serious about running for office, that's your campaign platform right there.”

Her father was not a man of many words, so each one of those cut Corinne to the quick. Her father had no idea that she was a hemopath, of course. That didn't make it hurt any less to hear him talk about the asylum in such generous terms.

Her brother just shook his head, his lips turned up in a slight smile. Corinne watched him closely, though part of her wanted to find an excuse to leave the room.

“It's an interesting situation, that's for sure,” Phillip said. A standard answer for polite society. “Seems like a better platform might just be reminding voters that our esteemed Councilman Turner paid twenty-five hundred in taxpayer dollars to a couple of hemos for a poem and a song.”

“Twenty-
five
hundred?” Corinne echoed before she could stop herself.

Phillip cocked his head at her, his eyes bespeaking a hidden amusement. “To the penny,” he said. “I play golf with one of the city accountants, and he saw the requisition.”

“A disgrace,” said her father, shaking his head.

“Indeed.” Corinne pressed her hand to her lips to conceal a smile. She and Ada had conned Councilman Turner out of only two thousand, meaning that five hundred dollars had mysteriously vanished. Johnny would be interested to know that the councilman was skimming off the top. That kind of information had value.