Son of Fortune (14 page)

“There's one professor at the academy who followed every battle and reenacts them in class with little lead soldiers and tiny paper flags,” Christopher explained. “He'll go on for hours with this charge here and that flanking there. It's to teach us military tactics, though I don't know why. It's not like any of us are ever going into war!”

“What if you had to?” Aiden asked.

“Had to what? Go to war?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Maybe there was something worth fighting for?”

“Well, anything worth fighting for, we would just buy,” Christopher said, genuinely puzzled. “Or pay the politicians to give it to us! Why ever go shooting people? Unless, I suppose, you've invested in guns and powder or cannon factories—then a war does make sense. But even if, for some reason, some stupid reason, we absolutely had to have a war—well, we would simply pay some armies and generals who know what they're doing, right? I mean, I don't have to personally know about flanking anybody!”

Aiden was still never exactly sure how much Christopher was teasing him. The little circle of wealthy families certainly did seem rich enough to buy pretty much anything they wanted, including armies and the governments that made them work. The real question, Aiden realized, was exactly how did they get that money in the first place? And—as he grew more used to the luxury it offered—how could he get some himself?

Christopher spent every afternoon working in the office with his father, so Aiden had a few hours alone in the library. Here the world was opening up to him in ways he could not have imagined. It was like he had an axe and was chopping his way through all of civilization. He burrowed through the stacks, from the Magna Carta to the American Constitution.

Then, at three or four each afternoon, Elizabeth would come home and here would be a whole other world altogether. Even after a month, Aiden had no idea what to make of her. Sometimes she flirted and teased him like a pretty waiter girl would; sometimes she wanted to discuss Darwin for hours. Sometimes she felt like a sister, sometimes like his heart's desire. How was a man ever supposed to know? When he was around her, Aiden felt nervous and peaceful, happy and confused, all at the same time. There really needed to be an
Atlas of Girls,
he thought. For all her dainty posturing, Elizabeth was a physical girl who came home each day restless and eager for exercise. Her choices were limited, of course. There would be no wild gallops to the ocean with her, certainly no rambles through the city, but within the protection of the estate, they were allowed to walk together or play tennis on the lawn. They often walked through the zoo, talking of nothing at all, just happy to be away from the prying eyes and ears of the servants.

Aiden's days fell into a comfortable routine. He worked with Peter, played with the ducklings and tidied up after Christopher, defusing or winning his battles as needed. He escaped for easier nights with Fish whenever his friend was in town between trips. He read books until his brain hurt. He watched this new world and tried to understand it. And so the months passed in the house of riches.

For most of Aiden's life, the turn of the calendar page from February to March had always been a day of grim cheer. It was a mental leap toward spring, but in reality, the snow was still waist-deep and the winds promised only more harsh days. Real spring, the end of winter's attempts to kill you, did not usually come until April.

But in San Francisco, March was a real shift. It helped that the winter was mild to begin with, but even with that, there were such quick changes day to day that spring felt generous and real. There was lettuce growing outside by April, and fresh peas at the end of May. He watched jealously as the kitchen girls sat out in the sun shelling them, their quick fingers splitting the pods open and spilling the sweet contents into copper bowls. The first few dinged like hail, but after that, with a cushion already at the bottom of the bowl, the peas made a soft tattoo. When he saw a girl pop one into her mouth, he nearly died of desire. He was both amazed by the bounty of the spring and oddly angry. Scarcely one year ago, he was a stick man of a hundred pounds, with nothing to eat but clay and grasshoppers.

t was June 25, the night of Christopher's graduation. One of his friends was hosting a grand house party, but Christopher was in a strangely dour mood and not eager to go.

“It's everyone I've seen all my life,” he said. “And celebrating only what we were supposed to do all our lives, and what we are now supposed to go on to do with the rest of our lives, which is all laid out and all the same. University, then business, then more business, then die.”

“There may be a bit more to it than that,” Aiden laughed.

“Not for me,” Christopher said. “My future is fixed.” He spun a gold collar stud around on his dressing table. “And infinitely dull.”

“Dull? But you can do anything you want.”

“What should I want?” Christopher flung back. “Maybe I'd like to be a farmer. I've never dug a hole—is it satisfying?”

“No,” Aiden said. “Not at all.”

“But then you get to plant seeds and watch them grow.”

Aiden stifled a laugh. “That's plowing. Holes are what you dig for fence posts. Holes are just work.”

“Well, exactly my point—if I don't even know a plow from a hole, how can I know what else I might like to do?”

“Believe me, you wouldn't like plowing.”

“Still, I'm tired of my future being all laid out,” Christopher said. “And I don't want to go to this party.”

“You've got to at least make an appearance,” Aiden said, well versed in protocol by now. “It would be rude not to.”

“What good is it being rich if you can't be rude sometimes? Anyway, it's early. The party will go on forever. Let's go play a few hands at the Elysium.” Christopher pulled out his pocket watch. “It's barely eight o'clock. We can arrive at the party by ten and no one will even blink. We can make it eleven with a good story. Come on—we've plenty of time!”

Of all his “guard duties,” the most difficult for Aiden at first was playing poker. He could not avoid the game, for there was no excuse for him to go out with Christopher for an evening and just sit idle for hours while his friend played. He had learned to play in the lumber camp, but only enough to know how much he didn't know. So he found a book about poker in the library and began to deal practice hands with Peter and the ducklings. Aiden wasn't sure if the boy could discern the suits, or even red from black. He had tried twenty different ways of communicating with the boy by now: a giant chart of letters; colored blocks, red for
yes,
blue for
no.
He had tried wrapping a pencil in rounds of cloth to make it easier to hold, even tying it to Peter's hand and guiding him to make letters, but Peter would only scribble madly or smash the pencil so hard it broke. Aiden brought in a box of damp sand that he thought Peter might trace in, but when he pressed the boy's finger into the sand, Peter howled and jerked back as if a wasp had stung him. Peter had a bell on his chair, but Aiden could not get him to ring for
yes
or
no.

“He doesn't need
yes
or
no,
” Daisy finally explained one day.

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever is usually fine.”

“Do you mean he doesn't care? Or he doesn't notice?”

Daisy looked down and pulled at her dress. “He notices more.”

“I don't know what that means,” Aiden said. “You don't care if you have applesauce or bread?” Aiden asked the boy directly. “If I read to you or someone plays the piano?”

Peter only looked up at the draperies, as he often did—mesmerized, it seemed, by the scrolled pattern.

“
Yes
and
no
don't matter the same way to him,” Charlotte explained, though it explained nothing.

“In his head,” Daisy said, “he can make anything be whatever he wants.”

“So he can make bread taste like applesauce in his head if he wants to?” Aiden pressed, frustrated. Peter turned his head back and forth, and Aiden was sure he was laughing.

“No,” Charlotte said. “It's that bread has a thousand ways to taste and applesauce has a thousand ways to taste and he hasn't finished all the ways with either of them yet.” The other ducklings smiled in agreement, happy that their biggest sister had managed to explain.

“I expect it will change,” Charlotte added. “As he gets older.”

“After he tastes all the thousand ways?”

“Yes!” The four little girls nodded together in perfect solemnity.

“But he does communicate with the four of you,” Aiden persisted.

“Oh yes.” Daisy nodded, as if it were a silly question.

“How?”

“We are inside his head.”

“Can I go inside his head?”

The ducklings conferred in their secret way of looks, then solemnly shook their heads.

“Maybe sometime,” Charlotte offered kindly. “Now you have too many colors.” She brushed her hands alongside her face as if flicking away spiderwebs.

“Colors?”

“Mad colors,” the others said in accidental unison.

“I have no idea what that means.” Aiden sighed. He dealt a new hand of cards out on the table. “But look at his cards and ask him what he wants to bet.”

Over the months, the nursery room poker games did sharpen Aiden's skills. The little girls played with both the impulsive glee and the simple logic of children. Annalise and Annabelle didn't care what cards they were dealt, they just liked to raise each other. Charlotte was good with numbers and tried to figure out her odds. Daisy had the simplest strategy, only betting when she had a good hand, never bluffing. She understood the concept of bluffing—but she thought it the same as lying, and lying offended her. This was not for any moral reason, but because she thought it just messed up the games and made them boring.

These games, however odd, did give Aiden good practice, and soon he began to hold his own in the real games and finally to win more than he lost. His strategy was a combination of Charlotte's and Daisy's, though improved by his own discipline. He made only small bets and quickly folded when he had bad cards, but went bold when he knew he had a strong hand. Even if other players recognized this strategy, it didn't hurt him, since they were more likely to fold when Aiden bet heavily. They knew he didn't bluff. It drove Christopher crazy. Christopher's strategy was exactly the opposite. His play was as mercurial as everything else about him.

This night at the Elysium, Aiden was doing especially well, and after an hour he had a great pile of chips in front of him. They were playing with nine men; bets tended to be fifty cents to a dollar, and few pots topped twenty dollars. Christopher, still in his funk and distracted, had lost almost everything. It was an ordinary night with an ordinary group, but the energy of the table changed when a new man sat down. He was a brown-haired man of average height, clean-shaven, though not in the past few days. He was not soft as a gentleman nor roughened as a laborer, though his hands, Aiden noticed, bore signs of hard use: callused palms, tiny scars, swollen knuckles. But he had no accent to place his speech, no posture or gait that would mark him in any way. He was in fact of such unremarkable appearance that you could spend a week with him and still not pick him out of a dozen other brown-haired men of average height and build. Unless you looked into his eyes. There was a haunting about him.

“Welcome, sir,” the dealer said. “Your entry?” The man opened a purse and tipped out a pile of coins. The dealer gave a quick nod to a floor man, who quickly came over to judge the worth. There were so many coins and notes in use it took an expert to know what they were worth. The floor man placed stacks of chips on the table. The man barely looked at them before giving a sharp nod of acceptance. The dealer snapped the cards down, and the game continued.

The man gave his name simply as Newgate. Aiden, as he always did, watched the man closely, but got few clues. He hardly seemed to breathe. It was as if he were trying to take up as little space in the world as possible.

The game went around for an hour with shifting stacks of profit, but gradually the better players built piles and the lesser ones dropped out. Aiden continued to win, though Newgate also accumulated a steady pile. Christopher was playing badly. He called in all his credit, which was plenty, and continued to lose. Newgate sloughed off both wins and losses with no emotion. Another player dropped out, so there were only five of them left now. Aiden felt vague misgivings—Newgate was manipulating the game in some way, but he could not tell how. Aiden had learned to spot all the common cheats and scams, but there was nothing clearly wrong here, just a sense that the man was steering the game a certain way. There was no obvious sleight of hand, no flagrantly stupid bets, but no real sense to it either. Aiden could usually tell when men were working in partnership, but the only one profiting from the game was himself—and that made no sense at all. Why would a complete stranger turn a game his way? Twice, when it was down to just Aiden and Newgate, Newgate had folded, even after having raised several times. It wasn't all that suspicious, since Aiden's technique was pretty obvious. He had had very good hands both times, but because Newgate folded, neither of them had to show their cards. Aiden began to worry, for if he felt it, the other players must have sensed it too and might think he was cheating.

“We need to take our leave soon,” Aiden said. “We've already stayed far too long and are late for an engagement.”

“Not that late,” Christopher said brightly. “We can't leave while you're on a streak and I've still got, oh, nearly two dollars left! Cover me this one round, and if I lose, I'll step out. I promise. Truthfully and swearing.”

The betting went two rounds to the draw and three after. One of the other players won with three fours. Christopher had a pair of twos, Aiden a pair of tens, Newgate a pair of nines; the fifth man had bluffed with nothing, having tried to draw to a straight. There were no clocks in the Elysium, but one of the players pulled out a pocket watch and announced with dismay that it was a quarter to ten.