cards and folded them, cut and shuffled and cut again. She finished with a flourish as she set the deck down and flipped the top card faceup: the ace of spades.
“That was all right,” said Thalia. “Now make it look easy.”
Nell worked through the trick again, still not quite as smoothly as Thalia would have liked, but better than before.
“Good,” said Thalia. “Now roll up your sleeves. Let me see your wrists.”
Nell straightened indignantly. “That’s not fair.”
Thalia congratulated herself on distracting Nell entirely from her manticore sightings. She pushed her own cuffs back. “I’ll show you.”
Thalia ran through the trick again. As she produced the ace of spades on cue, Nell exclaimed, “I wish I had a kinetoscope. You go so fast, I can’t see it properly. If I could watch moving pictures of you, I could learn to do it better.”
“I don’t know what a kinny-whatsit is, but if you practice enough, you won’t need one,” Thalia advised.
Nell chuckled to herself. “A kinetoscope records pictures of things moving. When the film is developed, it’s projected on a white surface. You get moving pictures.”
“Sounds expensive,” said Thalia. “Show me again.”
“My birthday is coming soon.” Nell shuffled the cards dreamily. “Maybe I’ll ask Nat to get me one.”
Thalia was firm. “Just keep practicing.”
* * *
When the lesson was over for the day, Thalia left Nell still practicing. She let herself out of the workroom and walked alone through the magnificent house. In the courtyard, the chauffeur retrieved the Pierce-Arrow and brought it near the front steps.
The odd feeling Thalia had experienced the night before, that utter certainty that she was being watched, returned in full force. Thalia stood poised on the mansion’s wide stone steps, scanning her surroundings warily, while the car idled gently below. There was the courtyard. There were the servants. There was the street, just visible beyond the gates. Thalia’s surroundings were not deserted by any means, but she could see no threat, nothing to explain the pins and needles she felt at the back of her neck.
“Coming, ma’am?” called the chauffeur.
Thalia entered the backseat and settled herself comfortably as they moved slowly across the courtyard. Two servants opened the wrought-iron gates, and the car moved through them into the street.
The chauffeur was shifting gears when a man threw himself at the Pierce-Arrow and struck at the window nearest Thalia. She gave a squawk of surprise and shrank back in her seat. The window glass held, but the attacker’s intention was unmistakable to Thalia. He was after her. He meant to attack her. Not the chauffeur. Not a random passerby. Her.
The pallid face pressed to the glass was wild-eyed, the mouth agape. He smelled terrible. Even with the windows shut, the attacker’s breath was a stomach-turning mix of rotten meat and stale urine. Thalia gagged. The smell of him clogged her nostrils. Thalia remembered how she had felt that night in Philadelphia when everything had gone wrong. There was something she must do. She didn’t know what it was, but a strange urgency seized her.
The chauffeur, startled by the attack, ground the Pierce-Arrow’s gearbox. The car was just outside the wrought-iron gates, and still moving forward slowly.
The attacker, balancing on the running board and clinging to the roof, raised his hand to strike again. Thalia saw that he was holding a stone, clearly intent upon shattering the glass of the rear passenger window. When he came through the glass, he would try to kill her.
Thalia, her deftness turned clumsy, fumbled with the elaborate fittings designed for a passenger’s convenience. She managed to unlatch the panel that dropped to reveal the writing desk. She seized the penknife. In her other hand, she clutched her reticule. The soft cloth of the purse held a handful of coins. It might serve as a makeshift blackjack. Thalia’s icy fingers had gone pins and needles.
A second man threw himself at the Pierce-Arrow, this one younger, taller, and much, much cleaner. He grappled with the first. The attacker kicked him, but rather than renew his attack when the cleaner man doubled up in pain, he scrambled beneath the car and emerged on the other side, running away as fast as he could.
Thalia lost sight of her attacker when he rounded the corner of a nearby brownstone mansion. That strange urgency, that drive to do something although she didn’t understand what, faded abruptly. Thalia, light-headed with relief, turned her focus back to the clean man. By now, he was back on his feet, wincing as