“The next time you see something like this,” Juliette said slowly, “find me, understand?”
The maid’s confusion only grew. “May I ask why?”
Juliette stood, still holding the petal. Its natural color was a pale pink, but in this light, with so much mud, it almost looked entirely black.
“No particular reason,” she answered, flashing a smile. “Don’t work too hard, hmm?”
Juliette hurried away, almost short of breath. It was a stretch. There were plenty of peony plants across the city and even more patches of mud where those plants grew.
Then she remembered her father at that dinner so many months ago, when he had claimed there was a spy: no ordinary spy, but someone who had been invited into the room, someone who lived in this house. And she knew—she just knew—that this particular petal came from the peonies at the Montagov residence, from the back of the house where the petals shed from the high windowsills and settled into the muddy ground.
Because five years ago, Juliette was the one tracking these all over the house.
Kathleen was in another Communist meeting.
It wasn’t that Juliette kept sending her to them, but rather that the Communists kept meeting up, and if Kathleen was going to maintain appearances and get invited back to the next ones through the contacts she had painstakingly cultivated, then she had to keep showing up, as if she were another worker and not the right hand of the Scarlet heiress.
At last Kathleen finished pinning down her hair, having adjusted her whole style in the last five minutes while the speaker at the front talked about unionizing. She had learned by now that the initial speakers never had much of a point to them: they were there to ramble until the important people arrived and the seats filled well enough to avoid rustling when latecomers shifted into the open gaps. No one paying attention to Kathleen when she tuned out and squinted into a handheld mirror from her pocket, determining that the complicated plaits Rosalind had made earlier were a little too bourgeois for this meeting.
“Excuse me.”
Kathleen startled, turning at the soft voice behind her. A little girl, missing two front teeth, was holding one of Kathleen’s pins.
“You dropped this.”
“Oh,” Kathleen whispered back. “Thank you.”
“That’s okay,” the girl lisped. She was swinging her legs, glancing momentarily at the woman seated to her left—her mother, perhaps—to check whether she would be told off for talking to a stranger. “But I liked your hair better before.”
Kathleen swallowed a smile, reaching up to touch the pinned curls. Rosalind had said the same, lavishing praise on herself as she was plaiting. Her sister was rarely in the mood to sit around and chat these days. She would likely not refuse if Kathleen caught her around the house and asked for a moment of her time, but the trouble was precisely that she was never around.
“I liked it too,” Kathleen replied quietly, and turned back in her seat. She almost wished she hadn’t taken it out now, ruining her sister’s handiwork.
The room suddenly broke into applause, and Kathleen hurried to follow suit. As the speakers changed, she sat up in her seat and tried to shift her attention back to listening, but her thoughts kept wandering, her hands idly reaching up to touch her hair. Their father had visited again last week, more insistent on their move out to the countryside. Rosalind had rolled her eyes and stormed off, which their father hadn’t taken very well, and Kathleen had been the one left behind to entertain his theatrics about the state of the city and where its politics were taking it. Maybe that was the way the two of them split their duties. Rosalind talked back and pushed all his buttons, but when their father wasn’t watching, she stuck her nose into his work and did his business for him. Kathleen smiled and nodded, and when their father needed the assurance, she did everything expected of the thoughtful, demure Kathleen Lang that this city knew. She had always known that adopting this name would mean taking a part of her sister’s personality, if not for the sake of appearances, then purely for the sake of ease. Sometimes her father spoke to her as if he had truly forgotten that the real Kathleen was dead. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she spoke the name “Celia” before him again.
Kathleen shifted in her seat. Nevertheless, she was more worried about Rosalind than she was worried about herself. If she was being honest, she was a little miffed that Rosalind had stopped her from going to Juliette’s aid so many months ago, yet found no problem hanging around the cabarets on neutral territory, socializing with Frenchmen in the city’s trade network.