to be a show of marvels, of ingenuity. Electricity and great pleasure. Wheels and some dancing. Was that why Duchamp was looking at Claire with haunted, furious eyes?
“Come down from there,” Duchamp ordered.
Her father released her wrists. He’d still been holding them as though she were a marionette. “You’ve brought shame on our house, girl,” he said, sorrowing.
She could hear it, then, the sound of her escape plan collapsing.
There was nowhere else to go. Claire drew her chin up high and descended the steps from the platform, the slight wind teasing the skirt at her ankles. A faraway part of her noticed that her hands were altogether soot to the wrists, her nails caked under with her father’s powder. The hint of a flame would set her blazing like a Catherine wheel.
“Come,” Duchamp said again, as she paused at the bottom of the platform, and when she didn’t move, he took two steps forward and seized her by the arm, fingers closing over the bruises the General had left, and she hissed.
Duchamp paid no notice. With an authority he hadn’t yet shown, he hauled her to the podium. Another man handling her as though she was his property.
Perhaps she was.
“What you have seen,” Duchamp said, “what you have all seen now, is a miracle.” His voice carried easily this time—and was it her imagination, or had his accent vanished? His vowels were open like doors to the prairie. “And did I not promise miracles? Did I not promise feats beyond your most distant dreams? You came from Nuevo México, from Alta California; you came from beyond the Atlantic Ocean; you came by railroad and by horse, you came on your own ambitious feet. You came to see what St. Cloud has accomplished. What America can do. This is but—a rehearsal for what is to come! We will fire again at the Fair’s closing!
“For now, tell me—do you see this young girl? Look at her in her white dress, as though she stepped off a marble pedestal from our great Hall of Wonders.” His words belied his ferocious grip on her arm. “Let her be the conduit for our men’s imagination! Let her usher in our era of change! Let us open our great Fair!”
His people, the people of the Great American Kingdom, roared.
In this moment, they loved him.
How to square this man with the uncertain boy who had promised cows, and cuisine, and dancing? Who are you? Who did you just become? Claire stood, shuddering, stripped bare by the crowd’s eyes, and when she tipped up her head to look at Duchamp, she saw his eyes were fixed on her with wonder.
“I will take her to my mansion,” he said, wrenching his head back to the crowd. “She will sit in St. Cloud’s great room as our angel. She will remain there until the last fairgoer leaves this place, filled with our spirit of ingenuity, off to go into the world, changed! Now go—go and find your own delights!”
Duchamp sliced his free arm through the air, and a brass band stumbled out from the wings. Under the roar of the music, the crowd began to dissipate.
Claire shook herself free from Duchamp’s grip, but he reached for her again. “Let me go,” she said, sidestepping, as he passed a hand over his face and said roughly, “God, who are you?”
“I am not your captive,” she said. “I’m not your spirit, nor your angel.”
Tomorrow, she thought. I was supposed to leave tomorrow.
“You?” His eyes were as cold as water. “You are someone who knows something I do not.”
In her fury, she stumbled through her words. “You’ve laid claim on me like—like I was a cow! Like I was a thing.”
“I didn’t plan to do it,” he said quietly, “until I spoke the words. And still it doesn’t matter what you think, does it?”
Her father. The General. Remy Duchamp. “I will not go,” she said, and already she was planning it—she and Beatrix would ransack her workshop, they would take up their bindles and ride the railroad all the way to West Florida and disembark down into the swamplands, they would build a little wooden house in the wilderness and bolt the door. No one would ever see them again.
“You will,” Duchamp said.
If it wouldn’t have ended in her death, she would have hit him full in the face. “I won’t be your ornament.”
“All you are is responsible,” he said, his hand against the bare skin of her arm. “For the Emerson gun!