The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,17

take it with him on his travels. My father had held it in his hands, frowning, and said, “You do not look like yourself. You do not look like… her.” Like my mother, I assumed.

I found the picture facedown in a drawer of his writing desk a few months later.

Even in that wedding cake of a dress, and even with Bad and Jane standing on either side of me like glum sentinels, it wasn’t hard to disappear at the Society party. Most people regarded me as either a vague curiosity—having heard the rumors from Locke that I was the daughter of a Boer diamond miner and his Hottentot wife, or the heiress to an Indian fortune—or an overdressed servant, and neither group paid me much attention. I was glad, especially since I’d seen that slinky red-haired fellow, Mr. Bartholomew Ilvane, creeping along the edges of the crowd. I pressed my back to the wallpaper and wished, briefly and uselessly, that Samuel were there with me, whispering a story about a ball and a magic spell and a princess who would turn back into a serving girl at the stroke of midnight.

Mr. Locke was greeting each guest in a jovial, slightly accented boom; he’d gone to school somewhere in Britain as a young man, and liquor tended to burr his r’s and slant his vowels. “Ah, Mr. Havemeyer! Thrilled you could make it, just thrilled. You’ve met my ward, January, haven’t you?” Locke gestured at me, his favorite jade glass sloshing scotch over the rim.

Mr. Havemeyer was a tall, attenuated creature with skin so white I could see blue veins threading his wrists, disappearing beneath those pretentious leather gloves men wear to remind everyone they have a motorcar.

He waved a gold-tipped cane and spoke without looking at me. “Yes, of course. Wasn’t sure I could get away, what with the strike, but I got a shipment of coolies in at the last second, thank God.”

“Mr. Havemeyer is in the sugar business,” Mr. Locke explained. “Spends half the year on some godforsaken island in the Caribbean.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad. It suits me.” His eyes slid to Jane and me and his mouth curled into a smile-shaped sneer. “You ought to send this pair down to visit, if you ever grow bored with them. I’m always in need of more warm bodies.”

My whole body went chill and stiff as porcelain. I don’t know why—even growing up in Mr. Locke’s wealthy shadow, it was hardly the first time somebody had sneered at me. Perhaps it was the casual hunger burning like an underground coal seam in Havemeyer’s voice, or the sound of Jane’s indrawn breath beside me. Or perhaps young girls are like camels, and there are only so many straws they can carry before they break.

All I knew was that I was suddenly shaking and cold and Bad was leaping to his feet like a gargoyle come to terrible life, teeth flashing, and there was perhaps a moment when I could have grabbed his collar but couldn’t quite make myself move—and then Mr. Havemeyer was screaming in high-pitched fury and Locke was swearing and Bad was snarling around a mouthful of Mr. Havemeyer’s leg—and then there was another sound, low and rolling, so incongruous I almost didn’t believe it—

It was Jane. She was laughing.

In the end, things could have been much worse. Mr. Havemeyer received seventeen stitches and four shots of absinthe and was carted back to his hotel; Bad was confined to my room “for all of recorded time,” which lasted the three weeks until Mr. Locke left on a business trip to Montreal; and I was subjected to a several-hour lecture on the nature of guests, good manners, and power.

“Power, my dear, has a language. It has a geography, a currency, and—I’m sorry—a color. This is not something you may take personally or object to; it is simply a fact of the world, and the sooner you accustom yourself to it, the better.” Mr. Locke’s eyes were pitying; I slunk out of his office feeling small and bruised.

The next day Jane disappeared for an hour or two and returned bearing gifts: a large ham hock for Bad and the newest issue of The Argosy All-Story Weekly for me. She perched at the end of Wilda’s stiff, narrow bed.

I meant to say Thank you, but what came out was, “Why are you being so nice to me?”

She smiled, revealing a slim, mischievous gap between her front teeth. “Because I like you.