“The power to… make men do as I wish,” Grace said, uncertain. “And to make them love me?”
Tatiana smiled like the blade of a knife. “You will see, Grace. Love leads to pain, but if you are careful with the way you wield it… you can use it to wound, as well.”
* * *
The very next morning Grace awoke to find that her mother had packed her a trunk in the night, and that they were leaving that afternoon for Paris. She didn’t want to go, for Jesse couldn’t accompany them. It was too risky, Tatiana said, to attempt to move his body, and previous experiments had indicated he could not travel far from it. Grace was horrified that she wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye or explain where they were going, so Tatiana allowed her to leave him a note. Grace wrote it in a shaky hand, with her mother watching, and left it on her bedside table for Jesse to find. And then she was whisked away to Paris.
In that glittering city, Grace was dressed in fine gowns and brought to mundane balls. She was swept from ballroom to ballroom, introduced to bejeweled strangers who complimented her roundly. “What a beautiful child!” they would exclaim. “How enchanting she is—like a princess from a fairy tale.”
The change in her life staggered her. In a short time, she went from speaking to no one but her mother and her spectral brother in a dark, silent house, to chatting with sons of Europe’s noble families. Grace learned that it was best to say little and appear to be transported to ecstasy by whatever it was these stuffy adults and boring boys had to say. In any event, her mother had made it clear that they were here for practice. And so Grace practiced.
When she tried her power on grown men, they thought she was a delightful curiosity, like a beautiful vase or a rare flower. They wanted to give her gifts—toys, dolls, jewelry, and even ponies. Grace found using her power on boys her own age more annoying, and yet Tatiana insisted she do so. The problem was not that the boys didn’t like her—it was that they liked her too much. They invariably hoped to kiss her or propose marriage—preposterous, when they were only children and marriage wouldn’t even be possible for years at least. They seemed desperate to do whatever they could to make her love them back. In an effort to steer them away from kisses, Grace asked for gifts, and she reliably received them.
The youngest son of a German duke gave her the necklace, a family heirloom, off his own neck; the third younger brother of the Austro-Hungarian emperor sent her home one night in a carriage and four horses that were hers to keep.
Despite the attention, Grace felt staggeringly alone without Jesse. She began to feel the poison of loneliness cutting into her, as it had hollowed out her mother. These boys would do anything for her, but none of them knew who she truly was. Only Jesse knew that. Grace went to bed every night feeling desperately lonesome, without Jesse to sit with her until she fell asleep.
And so her requests grew stranger. She asked the nephew of a Czech viscount for one of the two horses attached to his carriage, and he gallantly untethered it for her before awkwardly riding off with only his left horse. She took to eccentric dietary habits that changed at every event: a tall glass of cold milk for her meal, or fifty of one kind of canape. And this way she learned more than her own power. She learned how power worked within the halls of the upper classes. It was not enough to be able to cloud men’s minds—she had to understand which of those men had the power to produce what she desired.
For once, Grace had a way of earning her mother’s approval, however unethical the method. During their time in Paris, Tatiana was often in great spirits, finally pleased with Grace. She would smile at Grace in the carriage as they returned home from a particularly successful night. “You are your mother’s blade,” she would say, “cutting these arrogant boys down to size.”
And Grace would smile back, agreeing. “I am my mother’s blade indeed.”
11 CROWNS AND POUNDS AND GUINEAS
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
—A. E. Housman
Cordelia rose the next day to find that it had snowed during the night, wiping the world clean. The streets of London sparkled, not yet turned to churning mud by carriage wheels. Roofs and chimneys were wreathed in white, and snow sifted gently down from the boughs of the bare trees along Curzon Street.