Muse Read online

  Dedication

  For Emily Henry and Chloe Benjamin, for believing

  Epigraph

  In the dusk of the evening as I stroked Macak’s back, I saw a miracle which made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light, and my hand produced a shower of crackling sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house. . . . My mother seemed charmed. “Stop playing with the cat,” she said. “He might start a fire.” But I was thinking abstractly. Is Nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? . . . I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvelous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself, what is electricity . . . ?

  —Nikola Tesla

  . . . you who have existed

  to resist me as I made you up.

  —Stephen Dunn, “Loves”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preamble

  Map

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Brittany Cavallaro

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preamble

  MAY 1782

  He had heard the rumors for weeks before the letter reached Mount Vernon, but when it finally arrived, he found himself unprepared to answer.

  The envelope sat on his desk where he’d left it, leaning against a tallow candle. It was before dawn, perhaps four or five in the morning, and he’d passed an uneasy night considering the implications. He was so seldom home in Virginia, and at first he allowed himself to think that was the reason for his restlessness. At the presidential mansion in Philadelphia, he was often woken up by little sputterings of noise: a carriage rattling down the brick road, a tomcat howling at the night sky. At Mount Vernon, all was quiet, like a heavy blanket over the mouth.

  And now he was awake.

  He made his customary rounds, lighting the fire, quickly bathing, buttoning his shirt as daylight stole in. The letter slept on his desk.

  Before he turned to face it, he took a breath, and considered the fields outside his window. He had left this place when the country had been founded; he had hired workers to tend his fields while he went north to tend to his country instead. But he was here now, overseeing the last of spring planting—well, looking in on the planting, at least. Virginia didn’t need him anymore.

  He didn’t miss it, Virginia, not in the way he thought he should. Instead it stole over him in strange moments: midnight, ink-stained, reworking a letter with Monroe’s notes in mind, and suddenly he was fourteen again, copying out The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior, his quill nib leaking all over his palms. Mount Vernon’s spring breathing in through the window.

  A cockerel crowed outside, and he knew he must open the envelope.

  He had to do it now, before his household was awake. But first he let himself do the thing he’d been avoiding.

  He let himself imagine what it might say.

  One thing he knew for certain: the American army was afraid. They had just won a decisive battle against the British and the French, and they were justifiably proud, and now they were afraid, because soldiers who were paid only through the goodwill of individual states—and not through, say, taxes imposed by Congress—were soldiers who didn’t rightly know where their next meal came from.

  They were soldiers who didn’t believe in their Congress. In any Congress at all.

  And say that, rather than passing laws to pay the army, Congress refused. Say that, perhaps, those generals who were tired of waiting met one night under cover of darkness. That they each swore an oath to secrecy before beginning to speak. Together, they would write their president a letter. They would remind him how their country loved him, how a benevolent monarchy had ruled Britain well and for years. Why shouldn’t America improve on their idea? Why, they could even imagine a country without something as inconvenient as a Parliament or, say, a Congress.

  What was the purpose of elected officials? None that they could see. Only partisanship. Infighting. Disunity.

  He was reading the letter now, he had it in his shaking hands, and though he wanted to throw it in the fire—this letter that asked him to destroy all he’d built—he told himself to stop first, and think. To consider, fully, the question.

  He trusted his own judgment. He knew those who among his men would make good leaders. James Monroe, perhaps, and Thomas Jefferson. (Had Benjamin Franklin not been struck by lightning, he’d have been an excellent choice as well.) If they were not forced to cater to the whims of the public, if they did not need to seek reelection in Congress—why, they could certainly accomplish the work that was important to them. Give them each a territory, the way the British did with their colonial Governors. Let them rule it as he saw fit.

  And his grandson, George, was only a year old, but he and Martha had the raising of the child, and he knew that he’d instill in him the values he’d grown up with. The ones he’d so painstakingly copied out when he himself was a boy.

  Little George would make a good king someday, he was certain.

  When you considered the idea—considered it, mind you, not yet acting on that consideration—it made a certain kind of sense.

  Oh, it was absurd. He would answer the letter quickly and put on his workman’s boots and ride Nelson out through the morning fog until he forgot this notion altogether.

  George Washington set himself down at his desk. He took up a piece of good British paper and shrugged up his cuffs and dipped his quill.

  Dear Sirs, he wrote, and then he stopped, his nib dribbling onto the page.

  It was, he had to admit, a hell of an idea.

  Map

  Prologue

  When George Washington is crowned sovereign of the First American Kingdom, he decrees that his country be separated into provinces, each led by a Governor selected from his most trusted lieutenants. As new territories are claimed for the Kingdom throughout the nineteenth century, King Washington—and his heirs, the King Washingtons that follow—draw new borders and appoint new white men to lead.

  To the west, Alta California and Willamette; to the south, Nuevo México and the tiny duchies of West and East Florida. Livingston-Monroe, named for the men who purchase the territory from France, make up the country’s heartland. St. Cloud stretches down the Mississippi River, while the seat of the King, New Columbia, extends along the eastern seaboard.

  Once Washington is declared King, elections cease altogether.

  In the years that follow, Governors pass on their territories to their sons, who become Governors in turn. Hungry men, these new Governors: eager for glory, eager for progress and for action.

  These Governors are skeptical of what they call “foreigners.”

  These Governors are determined to keep power however they can.

  All except for Remy Duchamp, the youngest Governor in the American Kingdom. He is interested in intellect, invention, innovation; he is less interested in maintaining the armed borders of his province, St. Cloud. Now, in 1893, he looks to put on a great Fair the likes of which the world has never seen.

  But the great Fair is months
late, and St. Cloud has grown restless. There are rumors of trouble on the western border. Rumors of war.

  And in St. Cloud’s largest city, Monticello-by-the-Lake, a girl holds the nation’s future in her hands.

  One

  APRIL 1893

  It was death to stop at the corner of Augustine and Dearborn in the city of Monticello-by-the-Lake at the end of a working day.

  Claire Emerson knew that, standing beside her best friend, Beatrix, in the crowded road. Even now, as she stood on her toes to look up at the posters pasted onto the brick wall of the Campbells’ building, she had her elbows drawn in to her sides. Not to clear a path for the horse-drawn carriages; not to make way for the electric trolley squealing up the street, its cables throwing off indifferent sparks; not as a courtesy for the people streaming past—the working girls off to the dressmakers’, the men with their hats and coats and grim, sun-scrubbed faces, the newsboys waving their rags, the scientists smelling like ambition and smoke, the soldiers like last night’s liquor. Not to make way even for the lumber cart rattling along down the road, its long, bristling logs threatening to break free and roll like the thunder of God himself straight down Augustine Street to the glistening lake beyond, flattening every last thing in their way. It had happened last week, killing two horses, three steelworkers, and a seven-year-old orphan. It would happen again whether or not Claire cleared a path.

  She was folded up onto herself on this street corner because, while she wanted to see the new posters pasted to the Campbells’ building brick, she didn’t want anyone to steal the package in her arms. She didn’t have a lot of control over her own life, but she could control whether tonight her father slapped her full across the face again.

  “But then,” she said to Beatrix beside her, “if he notices that I’m missing one of the socket wrenches he paid for, he might do it anyway.”

  “Hush. He won’t notice, you know he won’t even look through the bag until the morning. And besides, you know I’m good for it.” Beatrix craned her neck, trying to get a better look at the poster. “I’m never going to get this engine working if I have to rely on my own coin for the materials. Let’s consider it a donation.”

  Claire smiled, despite herself. “Is it a donation if you’ve forced me to do it?”

  “I’m not forcing you. I’m forcing Jeremiah Emerson. And we hate him.” She said it like it was fact.

  Claire supposed it was. She shifted the knobby bundle to her other arm. “I still can’t see what it says. We can come back tonight, after the day’s died down.”

  “Your father won’t be home yet, you don’t need to rush. And anyway, it’ll be about the Fair.”

  “Of course it’s about the Fair. It always is. It’ll still be about the Fair when we come back. And besides, I’ll be gone by week’s end, does it really matter if—”

  “Everyone will know already,” Beatrix said, and as if the thought spurred her on, she propelled herself forward. Though she was tiny, her wild blond bouffant made her easy to follow. It had survived both her work at the stockyard and her long, hot walk home in a boater hat. Now her hair survived the crowd, sure and steady as a halo above her pale face.

  She was back in moments, face grim, and she took Claire by the arm to pull her away—careful, as always, to make sure she didn’t touch Claire’s skin with her bare hand.

  “What did it say?” Claire asked, but Beatrix was two steps ahead and affected not to hear. Down Augustine Street, past the orphans from the Home for the Friendless marching in their long gray lines, their lunch pails hanging from their grubby hands. The little girl who had died had been one of them, Claire knew. She dropped a coin into one of their buckets.

  Through it all, Beatrix moved like a dancer, and Claire her poorly practiced partner. You’d never think she was the one who was half blind, Claire thought, but she supposed it made a certain kind of sense. One only had to look at the cloth-of-gold eye patch her best friend wore to know that Beatrix had to watch her steps. The watchfulness made her graceful, and that grace carried them through the congested streets.

  Beatrix stopped at the foot of the stairs up to the El railway station, at the end of a very long line of men. She adjusted her skirts, and then, discreetly, her corset.

  Claire gave her a sympathetic look. She was struggling, too, to catch her breath under her laces.

  “It’s going up tomorrow,” she said. “The Fair. That’s what the poster said. It’s going on, as scheduled.”

  “You were expecting another delay,” Claire said.

  Beatrix hesitated. “I was hoping for one. For you. We’ve had so many, and so close to the scheduled start—I was just hoping that if you’d have some good news for him tonight—”

  Claire hardly heard her. She wasn’t sure why it was such a surprise, that the Fair would go on. But then, when it had been delayed for so long, who could blame her?

  “I can tell your father for you,” Beatrix was offering.

  At that, she snorted. “That would make it worse, and you know it. Sunday just needs to come and go without him suspecting anything.”

  The two of them climbed the metal stairs, slowly, as the crowd boarded the train. It waited, sleepy as a cat, painted as always in the governor’s midnight-blue livery.

  “He wants to be paid for his work.”

  “I understand, but if he won’t get paid until after his Barrage, you’d think he’d want it to happen sooner—”

  Claire lowered her voice. “There’s still a problem with the Barrage.”

  “I’m sorry?” Beatrix laughed, shook her head. “No. But you said—”

  The unexpected April heat, the awkward weight of the package she carried, the long black curl plastered to her temple. The dread of seeing her father not twenty minutes from now. “He swears it will work,” Claire said, fiercely enough that her best friend blanched. “And we’d all better hope it will, because if our creditors come by again, they will break his hands, Beatrix, and God only knows what Duchamp will say—” The woman behind them coughed delicately. “Governor Duchamp will say. Much less the General. We have a permanent pavilion waiting. It has our name on it. Our name—and if the Barrage isn’t a success, if my father fails, and if Sunday comes and he’s in one of his rages, I won’t be able to—”

  “All aboard!” The conductor’s voice was a trumpet. “This is a Monticello train, calling at Lordview, Woodlawn, Delaware, and Almondale!”

  The crowd surged forward, taking the two girls along with it, and as she clutched her package to her chest, Claire seethed. She had never seen anything like this in her seventeen years. So many bodies. People from all over the First American Kingdom, there to gawk at the city Claire lived her life in, like it was an amusement or an oddity. They were there in that train car with her, people from her own province, Monticellans and St. Clouders and the backwoods farmers who tithed corn and soybeans to their Governor; Livmonians, those settlers from the province of Livingston-Monroe, weathered in their muslin shirts; wasp-waisted girls from New Columbia with their 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 hurra
h.”

  “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.