The Hidden Goddess (10 page)

Emily smiled wearily. It had been little more than a month since their actual adventures had been completed, and Stanton had spent every moment of it safely in New York, preparing for his Investment under the guidance of Emeritus Zeno. But on pulp pages squeezed between chromolithographed covers, he’d already reclaimed three mystical artifacts of unparalleled magnificence, defended the Austrian throne against the depredations of a golem, and solved some mystery involving the recently delivered hand of a big French statue they were going to erect in New York Harbor. Emily could hardly keep up.

“I hope he’s recovered from the grievous wound the Dark Sorcerer delivered him! Is he feeling well? The Investment is tomorrow, and he’s got to be at his best!” Rose’s face was taut with worry. “We brought him a card.”

“I’m going to see him now,” Emily said. She squeezed Rose’s hand—a strengthening gesture. While Emily was frequently astonished at Rose’s credulity, and was sometimes just slightly jealous at the way the girl’s brown eyes lit up when she spoke of Stanton, she was genuinely fond of her. “I’m sure he’ll pull through.”

“Please give him our best,” Rose said. “And would you give him this?” She proffered a large card in an envelope that was printed with brilliantly colored flowers and addressed in a careful, intricate script.

Emily tucked it into her bag, next to the slate with the leaping lambs. “I’ll make sure he gets it,” she said.

“Oh, thank you!” Rose said, clenching her hands together. “Thank you!”

The afternoon air was sticky and dead calm, and even the thin green silk Emily wore seemed too warm. Little rivulets of sweat trickled down the sides of her forehead as the carriage carried her along a twisting cobblestone path through the park. She found herself missing San Francisco’s milder clime. A fresh breeze off the ocean offset a lot of Aberrancies in her book.

Stanton’s note had directed her to meet him in Central Park, but had failed to specify exactly
where
. So she went to the place that was her favorite—the park’s wild northernmost reaches. It was an easy distance from the Institute’s opulent, expansive (and somewhat incongruous) headquarters on Eighty-fifth. Emily had heard it said with some pride that the Institute owned all of the Nineties from the park to the Hudson. Emily supposed that was quite grand, in its way. But given that most of the valuable property in New York City lay below Twenty-third Street, and the Nineties pretty much consisted of squatters’ shacks, small farmholdings, and wide dirt roads that turned into mud slogs whenever it rained, Emily didn’t quite see what there was to get so excited about.

Because of its remote location, the Institute also maintained an imposing facade downtown, on Lexington Avenue near Gramercy Park, but it was not large enough to house all the Institute’s students and activities, so it was little more than an extravagantly splendid shell with a few offices and a Haälbeck door connecting it to the mansion uptown. Emily had found that it was most convenient to travel from the wild reaches uptown to downtown by Haälbeck—as did many others. While primarily an establishment of magical learning, the Mirabilis Institute also had quite a profitable sideline in interurban travel. Mirabilis had cornered the market on Haälbeck timber many years ago, and since only small amounts—hardly more than a sliver—were needed for travel over such short distances, the Institute had built doors all over the city.
For a dollar, businessmen could flash downtown, uptown, and across in a thread-stretched twinkling. Certainly much more convenient than clopping through crowded streets in a cab, or riding on one of the clattering streetcars.

The Institute’s carriage let Emily out near the big stretch of water called Harlem Meer. The area surrounding it was rugged, less daintily landscaped than the park’s groomed southern reaches. Beyond the Harlem Meer, farms and muddy roads stretched to the northwest. It was like being home; there were jutting outcroppings of gray mica-flecked stone and the good clean smell of trees and grass and water. Downtown always smelled like sewage to her, even though Stanton insisted he couldn’t smell it and she must be imagining things. But it did smell; it smelled like things all crowded together and moving too fast.

But here it was quiet, fragrant with good living soil. And there weren’t as many people, though she still found herself amidst knots of strollers out enjoying the warm summer afternoon, beautiful children in short white dresses, and nurses pushing prams. Even New York’s most deserted places bustled, Emily had found, and she was certain she’d never get used to it.

At that moment, Emily was surprised to hear the sound of a lamb baaing. As if that were not surprising enough, the baaing was coming out of her bag. Exploring further, she discovered that the baaing was, more precisely, coming from the slate. She drew it out curiously.

LOOK IN FRONT OF YOU
, the writing in Stanton’s angular hand now read.

She looked up, seeing nothing but a swarming mass of pigeons. But then there were hands on her shoulders, and the brush of very warm lips against the bare place on the back of her neck. She shivered pleasantly.

“You missed my mother’s lunch,” came the voice of the man to whom the warm lips belonged. Pleasure became annoyance with startling rapidity. Emily spun and stomped a foot.

“If people don’t quit saying that to me, I’m going to—” Stanton grinned and leaned forward to stop her threat with a
kiss—an action that had to be averted at the last minute as a group of loudly conversing German tourists came strolling past. He put his hands behind his back, looking sidelong at the Germans.

“Was your mother furious?”

“She’ll get over it,” Stanton said. “Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there’s still hope.” From somewhere inside his coat he produced another student slate, the exact match of the one she’d found under her pillow.

“Have you called me here to do sums?” she asked. “I hate math.”

“All right, we’ll stick to geography,” Stanton said, wiping his slate with his sleeve and scribbling something new on it. Emily’s slate baaed. She looked at it. Now it read:
WHERE WERE YOU, ANYWAY?

Emily laughed with delight.

“Turn around,” she said. She steadied the slate against his back with her ivory hand and rubbed out the letters with her good hand. She wrote shakily, for it was her writing hand Caul had taken:
CALIFORNIA
.

Stanton’s slate baaed. After a moment’s pause, he looked at her over his shoulder.

“Instead of going to my mother’s lunch, you went to
California
?”

“I wanted to see Pap.” Emily tucked the slate pencil into its slot. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stanton, really I am. I didn’t mean to miss it. Things … happened.”

“Oh, well. Things happened. How nice to have that cleared up.” He lifted an eyebrow. “And by the way, why do you persist in calling me Mr. Stanton? Don’t you think that’s a bit formal? It hardly matters while we’re engaged, but after we’re married, it just won’t do.”

He was right, of course; running around calling him Mr. Stanton after their wedding would make her sound like his sixth Mormon wife. But try as she might, she could not make Stanton’s given name sound at all right. It sounded ludicrous coming out of her mouth.

“Dreadnought,” she said experimentally. “Dreadnought,”
she tried again, more lightly. She shook her head. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to change it.”

“What on earth is wrong with my name?”

“You have to admit, it’s one fly-killing cannon of a name,” Emily said. “Can you imagine what it will be like after we’re married? Dreadnought, please pass the toast … Dreadnought, please close the window … Dreadnought, shall we paint the walls yellow?”

“What an appealing vision of married life,” Stanton said drily. “One hopes it will include more intriguing things than toast passing and window closing.”

“One hopes,” Emily agreed. “Didn’t you have a nickname when you were younger?”

“The Senator always called me ‘boy.’ ” Stanton’s tone was contemplative. “Mother, on the other hand, would call me ‘Not,’ as in the adverb used to express negation or prohibition. Or, I suppose, as in ‘zero.’ Neither interpretation appeals to me very much.”

“How about ‘knot,’ as in something difficult to untangle?” Emily thought suddenly of the discussion she’d had with Pap.

“I hardly think I’m that complex,” Stanton said.

Emily bit her lip. “All right, then what’s your middle name?”

Stanton paused, then drew himself up. He took on a look of steely resolve. “I won’t tell you.”

She drew back, blinking surprise at his unexpected vehemence. “But it can hardly be worse than—”

He took her chin in his hand, kissed her quickly to stop her talking, then pulled back before the Germans could see.

“Never mind. Call me whatever you like. ‘Dear’ will do nicely.”

Emily did not much like to be kissed to be shut up, but she did like to be kissed. It sweetened her disposition enough that she decided to refrain from pestering him for his middle name. For the time being, anyway. She filed the pester away for implementation at some convenient future date.

She regarded his long spare frame and gaunt face. He seemed thinner, if such a thing were possible. He was
burned—a degenerative blight that made it impossible for him to keep weight on no matter how much he ate.
Ten years to live
, Emily had once been told. Stanton himself had stalwartly refused her the dubious comfort of thinking that it might be longer.
Ten years
. And with the hard work of running the Institute facing him, it might be even less. Fear flickered through Emily’s chest, but she damped it down ruthlessly. They had today. Today, his dark green eyes glittered, and today he was alive. Today—and however many todays came after it—was all they would have.

“I’m not the only one who skipped out on my duties,” Emily said. “You were supposed to speak to Rose’s Admiration League today. You can’t always be ducking them.”

“Having Rose as the president of my Admiration League—indeed, having an Admiration League at all—is an exercise in patience to which I am not always equal.”

“She adores you.” Emily smiled up at him. “She’d walk through fire for you.”

“Sometimes I wish she would.”

“Oh, stop it. You have to take your duties seriously, you know.”

“Of course I must,” Stanton said, with the exasperation of a man who has heard the same thing a million different times from a million different people—an exasperation Emily was intimately acquainted with herself. “But I hadn’t realized exactly how consuming they were going to be. Having to meet you in a public park, as if this were some kind of … assignation? Having to resort to a child’s toy just to get messages to you?” He glanced at the student slate he was still holding in his hand, then tucked it away inside his coat. “But Zeno maintains I have to stay focused. He’s got this odd idea that you distract me.”

“Who, me?” Emily said. “My, what you have to go through, just to achieve the zenith of credomantic power.”

“I just hope it won’t be too much,” he said, raising a hand to touch a shining brunette lock that had escaped from beneath her small feathered hat. He pulled the movement up short when a loud exclamation came from behind them; the Germans, who were still lingering nearby, had drawn out a map
and were consulting it and conversing loudly among themselves.

“For pity’s sake!” he muttered. “Even if they can’t find where they’re going, can’t they at least find their way away from us?”

He went over to the Germans and spoke a few words to them in their own language. They seemed overjoyed at his help and clapped him on the back. When Stanton returned to Emily’s side, there was a wicked grin on his face.

“Did you help them find what they were looking for?” she asked, not quite understanding what had transpired as Stanton took her arm and led her away.

“No,” Stanton said. “But I did share a closely guarded secret with them. Specifically, that all the city’s streetcars may be ridden free of charge if one tells the driver that one’s brother-in-law’s name is Mickey Doogan.”

“Mickey Doogan?” Emily scrunched her nose. “Who’s he?”

“No idea,” Stanton said. “Made him up whole cloth. I haven’t the time to put a bunch of bothersome tourists in their place. The streetcar drivers are better at it anyway. They’ve practically elevated it to an art form.”

Emily looked after the Germans. Having experienced the artful brusqueness of New York’s streetcar drivers herself once or twice, she felt a twinge of sympathy for them.

“You’re just plain cruel, that’s what you are.”

“Not as cruel as not being able to kiss you as much as I like, given how pretty you look today. Come on. We’re going to find someplace less populated.”

Emily tried to match his long strides, but she found herself faltering. In her small boots of tight kid, her ankle was swelling and aching again. He paused, looking down at her foot.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“I’ll tell you about it when we get to that less populated place you promised me.” She squeezed his warm arm closer to her, acutely desiring a change of subject. “Just exactly how many languages do you know, anyway?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever counted,” Stanton said thoughtfully. “Latin and Greek don’t count; anyone with pretensions
to know anything should know those. Same with Sanskrit, Sumerian, and the Dravidian languages, though one needs only to be able to read them. As far as speaking, I’m quite good in French, Spanish, Russian, German, Hebrew, and Arabic. I can get around in Turkish and speak enough Hindi to buy dosas and a mango lassi, if required. Then there’s bits and pieces of others.”

She stared at him for a long moment. She felt as if he’d just hit her over the head with a dictionary.

“You can’t be serious,” she said.

“Well, I haven’t got a stick of Chinese,” Stanton said, making the lack sound egregious indeed. “Believe me, the list I just gave you is unimpressive compared to some credomancers you’ll meet.”

“Where on earth do you put them all?” She tried to imagine knowing thirteen ways to say the word “pickle,” never mind that you didn’t know how to say it in Chinese.