Muse (Muse #1) - Brittany Cavallaro Page 0,3

parasols, their clutching children; folk from every corner of their country and from Britain and Persia and Japan besides. All of them here for the Governor’s Exhibition and Fair.

They had been here for a month now, clogging up Monticello’s dusty roads, lunching by Monticello’s glimmering lake, making Claire’s life louder and harder and just all-around worse, and tomorrow the Fair they waited on would actually open. The axe would finally fall.

“All aboard!” the conductor shouted again, and Beatrix yanked her skirts away from the closing doors, and all at once the train fell silent as it rattled away from the station.

“I’m sorry I was cross,” Claire said. She was horribly aware of the man next to her, of the two inches of skin between her gloves and the long sleeves of her dress. How close he was to touching her.

“I know,” Beatrix replied. They had said it to each other before. They would say it again.

“Come by at eight tonight? One last hurrah.”

“Eight,” Beatrix murmured back. “Don’t forget my tails.”

The train had emptied out before pulling into the station at Lordview. The neighborhood had originally been called Lakeview, for its sweeping view of Lake Michigan, until one of Governor Duchamp’s courtiers had been granted the bluff overlooking the bathing beach to build his own mansion. Now, instead of the lake, the neighborhood gazed upon the high walls that surrounded Lord Anderson’s gardens. Some wag had started calling it Lordview, and that was that.

As Claire walked down her neighborhood’s dusty streets, she brooded over the package in her arms.

The Fair.

The Fair, a grand show of American ingenuity, of wonders the public had never even dreamed of. A fair that St. Cloud had won the rights to host against every other province in the First American Kingdom. A fair that had stood half completed, its great Ferris wheel still just bones and timber when the Governor was laid to rest in the mausoleum overlooking the Jefferson River, when his young son took the reins.

It would be years late, and the bane of Claire’s existence.

She mulled all this over as she walked the road back to her house, her lumpy package clutched to her chest. The sky was fading from its milky yellow to the milkier red of sunset, and all along Belmont Avenue, the streetlights were turning on. The suburb stretched out in all directions, a plan more than a place. So much of it was still just mud and churned-up dirt. It had been built to grow into. Here and there, a house stood like a tooth in an empty mouth.

If she walked more slowly than she usually did, if she let her mind wander, it was because she knew what waited for her at home. Her father in their too-expensive house, sequestered in his study. Their young maid slaving over the wood-burning stove, trying to turn out a dinner that would make Jeremiah Emerson smile. Nothing made him smile, and the maid resented it, resented that she alone was left to deal with the household while Claire was sent off on special errands. Genius girl, she called her, because when Claire returned home, she was ushered into her father’s study, and there she often stayed until dark.

The house came into view through the ever-present smog. It was pretty, she supposed, gabled and painted blue, though as she approached, she saw that the glass in their sitting-room window was cracked. She stopped for a moment to stare.

Who had done such a thing? A creditor, surely. Still, it had been expensive to buy a pane of glass so large, and it would be expensive too to replace it. She walked through the wooden door and right through the kitchen, where the maid, hair hidden under a kerchief, was frying up rashers of bacon.

“Have a good day?” Margarete asked. It wasn’t a friendly question.

“No,” Claire said, shortly, because she hadn’t, and though the other girl would never believe her, she would have traded their places in an instant. It wouldn’t be a problem if Jeremiah Emerson didn’t heap the work of three servants on his housekeeper’s small shoulders. “Any callers?”

Margarete correctly heard “callers” as “creditor thugs.”

“Only the one,” she said, her accent lingering at the edges of her words. “We hid. He went away. It wasn’t so bad.”

“After breaking the window to send a message.”

“As you saw.” Margarete turned back to the stove. For a girl fourteen years old, she had a surprising gravity to her manner. “He’s in his study, talking to