“You—what?”
“Don’t worry. I have other means of extracting us when the time comes.”
Suddenly all Elizabeth could think about was Gabriella. A thousand miles of physical distance and a century and a half of Hilbert space stood between Elizabeth and her daughter, a divide deeper than any of those misty Sierra Nevada canyons they had crossed on the way here. Now Kemp was telling her he had torched the only bridge. “Other means?”
“Look, obviously I have no intention of being stranded. I’ll get you home, Elizabeth. You and Mercy both. I promise. But first, you have to find Mercy.”
* * *
Elizabeth mulled over the news while Jesse said good-bye to Sonny Lau. The tong man left with barely a glance at her, probably confused about the role a badly dressed white woman might have to play in this game of guns and threats. She was a little confused about it herself.
She wanted to tell Jesse what Kemp had said, but they were called to dinner before she could speak to him privately. It was a lengthy meal—Soo Yee served each course with great ceremony, and Jesse made a point of praising everything—but to Elizabeth it just seemed like Something Soup followed by rounds of Boiled Something. Other means, she kept thinking. Soo Yee turned up the gaslights as daylight faded (here was something else that made Elizabeth feel uneasy, all these little fires burning in their sconces like promissory notes of disaster), and Abbie began to talk about the future. Or, as she pronounced it, The Future, the words spoken reverently, as if she were talking about a sacred grotto in some Greek myth. “I think some people resent the City of Futurity because they feel chastised by it, especially since those rogue letters have been published. But I wonder if that’s fair. If there is such a thing as moral progress, the future will inevitably seem to admonish us for our sins.”
The remark was meant to be flattering, or at least to communicate Abbie’s open-mindedness, but it sounded too much like the kind of high-minded bullshit August Kemp’s copywriters produced for the press back home. “I’m not admonishing anybody,” Elizabeth said.
“No, Elizabeth, of course not. All I mean to say is that, for instance, concerning the rights of women—”
“Okay, stop. I mean, there’s some truth in what you’re saying. I can vote, which is great, and we don’t get yellow fever and we don’t hang people for stealing horses, but the idea that what I have waiting for me back home is some kind of Utopia? No. Sorry.” This wasn’t how polite conversation was supposed to go, but Elizabeth felt as if she had lost the ability to steer the words, much less stop them. She flashed on all the times when her friend Chanelle had come over to the house, Friday nights when Gabriella was still in her crib, how they would share a couple of glasses of wine or even a joint (furtively, in the bathroom, with the ventilator fan turned up to carry away the smoke) and complain about Elizabeth’s jailed husband or Chanelle’s troubles as a Walmart sub-manager, letting the indignation boil over until it turned into laughter or tears. “It’s true I was a soldier, but you have no idea what it means being a woman in the armed forces, the kind of crap you put up with on a daily basis, and sometimes worse than crap, sometimes very much worse, and good fucking luck if you try to complain about it. I’m a veteran and a single mom, and the reason I’m here isn’t because I enjoy outdoor plumbing and coal smoke. It’s because this is the only job that’ll pay the rent on my falling-apart house and buy groceries for me and Gabriella and maybe leave enough after taxes that I can think about moving as far as possible from my crazy ex before he gets out of prison. Which is something else we have a lot of—prisons—though you won’t hear Kemp boasting about it. We also have wars, not big scary wars but little wars that go on for years and years and never seem to accomplish anything. Wars without victory, whatever victory would amount to. And good luck if you come home needing help, because the VA hospitals—they, uh—”
Jesse and his aunt Abbie were staring. So was Phoebe. Even Soo Yee had gone stock-still in the servants’ doorway. Elizabeth’s urge to talk evaporated as suddenly as it had come.
“I’m sorry,” she finished. “I mean, if I used offensive language.”
Silence followed, one of those weighty silences that accompany a weapons-grade breach of etiquette, until Phoebe spoke up: “Jesse said in his letters that even the best people of the future are freer with their language than we’re accustomed to. He made it sound quite comical, the way he described it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe not so comical at the dinner table. I apologize. It’s been a long day.”
“He often wrote about the unusual words he heard at the City of Futurity. Didn’t you, Jesse?”
“The printable ones,” Jesse said stiffly.
“And I committed them to memory,” Phoebe said. Elizabeth was chastened by how hard the girl was working to make her feel better. “Smartphone. Video game. Cool and uncool. Elizabeth?”
“Yes?”
Phoebe’s smile curved under her scarf, up into the papery white scar tissue there. “I think you’re cool,” she said. “I think you’re awesome.”
15
In the morning Jesse prepared to venture into the lower part of the city. He left the buggy he had arrived in with the servant Randal and arranged to borrow Aunt Abbie’s more spacious carriage and two horses from the stables.
He had slept apart from Elizabeth even though it might have been their last night together. It couldn’t be helped—Aunt Abbie’s views on courtship were modern but not infinitely elastic—and he wasn’t sure Elizabeth would have wanted his company in any case. The news that Kemp had sent the last train east had unnerved her. She was worried about getting caught on the wrong side of the Mirror. It was a reasonable fear, but it had made her sullen and temperamental. When he asked whether she had slept well, she said, “Not really. Nice bed and all, but this mansion? The wallpaper, those creepy little bronze statues everywhere? It looks like every haunted house in every horror movie that ever came out of Hollywood.”
Jesse couldn’t imagine a home as spacious and well-appointed as Aunt Abbie’s ever seeming haunted, a word he associated with séances and European castles, though Elizabeth might have a point about the statuary—he remembered his own uneasy fascination with the miniature bronze of the Capitoline Wolf on the table at the top of the stairs.
He hoped Elizabeth’s judgment hadn’t been affected by recent events. In truth, he wasn’t sure how helpful her presence would be. She was a deft hand with a pistol, he had learned that from experience, but they might need to go places where a woman would be unwelcome or outrageously conspicuous. But nor could he proceed without her. Kemp had sent her on this mission for many reasons, not the least of which was to make sure Jesse persisted in it.
Jesse told his aunt and his sister he’d be back to see them soon. Probably he would. But first he had to find Miss Mercy Kemp and deliver her to her wealthy father. And after that—unless he wanted to live the rest of his life in abject fear—he would have to come to terms with Mr. Roscoe Candy.
Only then could he consider the future. Not the City future, not the flying-machine future. His own future.
Should he have one.
* * *
He had arranged to meet Sonny Lau at noon in a trinket shop off Dupont Street.
Jesse adjusted his slouch hat to shade his face, but he felt vulnerable and exposed holding the reins as the carriage rattled down California Street. After four years at the City of Futurity, the streets of San Francisco seemed both utterly strange and intimately familiar. As they approached Chinatown he half expected to see his younger self darting through the crowds, all the red-painted doorways once again known to him, the cellar cigar-rollers, the eating houses with smoked ducks and pigs’ heads hanging in their windows, the houses where you could buy a bit’s worth of twice-laid opium, the noisy Chinese theaters, the gambling houses with their spring-lock doors: a foreign land that was simultaneously his native land. San Francisco defied geography the way the City of Futurity defied time.