Son of Fortune (13 page)

“Mr. Madison, may I present my daughter, Miss Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Aiden Madison.”

She extended her hand. “I'm so pleased to meet you. I've heard so much about you.” Aiden hadn't heard anything about her. Christopher had referred only to a flock of little sisters, and though she was clearly a sister, there was nothing little about Elizabeth. She was small in stature like her father, and more delicately boned, but she had her brother's strong features, the same bright confidence and easy manner. Her eyes and her dress were the color of the ocean, and this time Aiden longed to sink.

“I'm very pleased to meet you,” he managed to say. He gingerly touched the very tips of her offered fingers, afraid they might break off like sugar flowers on a fancy cake.

“I understand you have many stories to tell,” Elizabeth said. “Will you be staying long?”

“Yes,” Aiden said. “I believe I might be.”

iden never knew life could be so soft—the feel of new shirts against his skin, the buttery leather of his new boots, this goose-down comforter like a cloud. His room had carpets, and his bed was big as a horse stall. Even after a month here, he woke up startled every morning, disoriented and incredulous at his fortune.

The kitchen had two iceboxes—the estate had its own icehouse, with ice brought down from the Sierra Nevada. Milk was delivered every day. There was a greenhouse that grew lettuce even now in February, and whole chickens were common as potatoes. He and Christopher could come home at midnight on any day and forage up a feast. There was hot water whenever he wanted to bathe, no stove to light or bucket to boil. It simply came from boilers somewhere deep in the house. Each morning silent servants appeared with pots of coffee and freshly baked bread.

The whole family rarely ate supper together, but they were always gathered for breakfast, stretched out around the huge dining room table, Mr. Worthington at one end, his wife at the other. Edith Worthington was not yet forty, a good twenty years younger than her husband, though his first and only wife and the mother to all seven of the children. She was a little taller than her husband, a sturdy woman to whom the years had not been terribly kind, but who had clearly contributed some of the best features to the beautiful children. The fair skin, pale hair and gray eyes that once must have made the younger woman as lovely as the painted shepherdesses on the walls of the Elysium now, in the morning light, made her wan. Even after a month in the house, Aiden hardly knew her. She had accepted his new position in her household with a distant politeness and little more interest than if he were a new animal in the zoo.

“Oh, how lovely to meet you. A tutor for Peter? What a good idea.”

She was a loving though distracted mother, more than willing to trust the details of daily care to a staff of nannies and nursemaids. After raising Christopher and Elizabeth largely on her own for four years back east and shepherding them safely across half the world to rejoin her husband, she had given birth to Peter and had assumed her family was complete. She had begun to enjoy the life of leisure that their new fortunes allowed. There was a party, the theater or a concert every night of the week. There were long luncheons and teas with the other wives, and drives in the countryside. Then suddenly little girls started showing up: Charlotte, now eight; seven-year-old twins Annalise and Annabelle; and finally Daisy, the oddest of the odd quartet. She was a solemn, dark-haired child who, although barely five, spoke in long and often complicated sentences. “I do not want the dog to sit there,” she would declare as she pushed the poor spaniel out of the afternoon sunbeam. “She dirties the sun.”

These little girls, Aiden had discovered, were connected to the rest of the family only at their choosing, living most of the time in their own world, like a little tribe of changelings. They often spoke in a private language, full of odd allusions, sometimes with no more than a gesture or a glance.

The boy Peter, though eleven, was nearly as small as Daisy, with a mild palsy that kept him mostly in his wheelchair. Mr. Worthington had shipped in doctors from all over the world, but none offered a cure, or even a diagnosis. No one knew if his mind was normal, but most thought not. He would not look directly at people and seemed not to understand anything that was said to him. He was transfixed by objects, especially a collection of smooth river stones. He would stare endlessly at sun patterns on the floor of the conservatory. There was a private live-in nurse to tend to Peter's bodily care, so Aiden's duties were devoted to the boy's mind. Peter could barely speak, and though the ducklings had an uncanny ability to understand his attempts, their translations were limited by their own childish sensibilities. “He wants to sit in the garden,” Charlotte explained. “He says he would very much like some treacle taffy,” said Annalise. “He would like us to dance for him now, not go to bed.”

“
Candy
is his word for anything good,” Daisy explained. “This is the candy cat.” She pulled the enormous orange cat up and dropped him onto Peter's lap. “The word for
bad
is
tsin
—for
medicine
. That one”—she pointed at the striped cat—“is the cat he doesn't like. That is the medicine cat. Tsin!”

Aiden spent the mornings with Peter, often accompanied by Daisy, who was considered too young to join the older ducklings' lessons. Charlotte, Annabelle and Annalise were tutored for two exact hours by a cheerless woman who valued penmanship above all other virtues and wielded alphabet cards at them like a crusader's sword. She wore stiff black dresses, always clasped at the throat with a brooch the size of a vulture's egg. Two days a week, the science teacher came after lunch, and the dancing and arts teacher the other three. The science teacher, Professor Tobler, was a genial old German at least seventy years old who took the girls for walks in the garden, collecting things to look at under the microscope, or tried to get them to copy the parts of a plant from the illustrations in a pebbled-leather folio. They generally preferred to draw volcanoes and lions.

Aiden's friendship with Christopher grew easily; it was mostly enjoyable and definitely never dull. Their lives could not have been more different. In his seventeen privileged years, Christopher had never slept on the ground, killed any animal larger than a fly or gone hungry unless he was feeling too lazy to walk down to the kitchen for some bread and jam. Aiden could never quite forget that he was paid to be Christopher's companion and protector, but they might have been friends anyway, although Aiden would have indulged his exasperation more frequently.

Christopher was either summer or storm. He drank too much. He gambled outrageously. He was kind to the servants and sometimes vicious to his friends. He smuggled sweets to the ducklings and bribed their nannies to let them out for adventures with him, then ignored them completely for days. He loved to roam the city and would talk to anyone about anything with genuine interest, but he also started senseless arguments, which often turned into fights that always left Aiden with more bruises. He was easily bored and often restless, physically vigorous but loath to suffer any discomfort. There were some excellent riding horses on the estate, and he loved to go for long gallops west across the open country to the sea, riding hard for hours. But once home, he fussed like a child if his slippers were not warmed and a hot bath was not ready immediately.

He flirted with every pretty girl he saw, society girl, picnic girl and waiter girl alike, and felt no guilt about breaking their hearts.

“They know how I am.” He shrugged. “I can't control their hopes.”

Even after attending several parties and meeting most of Christopher's friends, Aiden could never speak to a girl much beyond “Hello” and “Lovely weather.”

“How do you think of things to say to a girl?” Aiden asked Christopher after one unsuccessful party where he had thought one particularly pretty red-haired girl would be interested in the details of loading a knacker's cart.

“You've read three shelves of poetry books by now,” Christopher said with a laugh. “Plus all of Shakespeare. If you can't come up with sweet talk, you should probably just throw yourself off a cliff.”

“It's different outside of books. You don't just go up to a girl and smack her with Shakespeare.”

“True. There's rule number one, then—no smacking with Shakespeare. So, rule number two—pay her compliments. Say that her skin is like porcelain and her arms graceful as a young plum tree waving in the summer breeze and her hair spun gold as gossamer!”

“What is porcelain?”

“Fancy china.”

“Like china plates?”

“Yes, but thinner and finer—like my mother's best teacups. You can see light through the bottom of a porcelain teacup.”

“So girls want to look like teacups?”

Christopher shoved him.

“And what if her hair is black?”

Christopher gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well, then, say it looks like a woodland pond shimmering under a full moon! Just use lots of poetry words and pay her compliments. But start off easy—hold off on the porcelain and plum branches at first. Start with her beautiful eyes. Eyes are perfect. Unless she's totally crazy cross-eyed or something, you can't go wrong with the eyes. Hands are good too: ‘What lovely hands you have'—no,
elegant
is better. That can go easily into ‘Do you play the piano?' And there—you have something to talk about.”

“I don't know anything about piano,” Aiden said.

“Well, she will, so just nod and listen. Of course, don't go to piano if she has stubby little fingers.”

“Of course not,” Aiden said. “I'd say what useful hands for a washboard, and has she ever thought about taking in laundry.”

“You asked for my advice,” Christopher said in a wounded tone. “You asked about girls, and I know about girls. If I wanted to know about…farming, I would—well, I'd never want to know about farming, really.”

“All right, compliments and piano.”

“Though you do have to be careful,” Christopher went on. “A really beautiful girl is distrustful of compliments, and the ugly ones know you're faking. But for the average pretty-enough girls, just focus on their good bits. You don't have to get specific, just say something is flattering: ‘That color is so flattering on you.' ‘That hairstyle flatters you.' You're not lying, because it doesn't mean anything, really. A bow on the forelock will flatter any nag.”

“You're awful,” Aiden said, though he couldn't help laughing. “I wish you could be ugly for just one day.”

“It wouldn't matter,” Christopher said. “I'd still be rich. And American. And a man.”

Aiden said nothing. It was simple truth.

For all his protestations about dry old dusty books, Christopher actually did well in school. He had an eager mind and pursued anything that interested him, but he had to work hard at the duller subjects required for graduation: Latin, chemistry and ancient history. Aiden had never gone to a real school, so in every subject that required actual book learning, his knowledge was spotty. He was exceptional with geography and foreign cultures, thanks to reading, at least a thousand times, the
Atlas
of
the
World
. He had a decent command of history, but Christopher knew more about the Civil War, even though Aiden had lived on its doorstep and lost a brother to the fighting.