Godspeed (14 page)

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I waited and watched as everyone took a seat at the table — everyone save Schuyler, who was serving the food, and Doctor Godspeed, who seemed quietly amused by my inability to decide upon a place to sit.

“Anywhere you like,” Schuyler said, saving me from the endless-ness of the moment. I chose the chair next to Marielle; the doctor took up the one straight across from me.

I wondered how I would ever manage to put a bite of food into my mouth with him watching me so closely.

“I'm starving!” Jib announced.

“You're always starving,” Marielle replied.

“I'm just a growing boy. That's what my mother always tells me. Good thing they're so well off, or I could literally eat them out of house and home!”

“There you go, bragging again,” Marielle sighed.

“I can't help it if I'm proud of my parents.”

“As well you should be proud of them,” the doctor interjected, as Schuyler placed a portion of chicken onto his plate. “They, and you, have done a lot of good for a great many people with their wealth, including every soul seated at this table.”

“Happy to do it, Doc.” Jib shrugged; minimizing, I could tell, the true magnitude of the assistance in question. “If having the Magistrate of Fairever and the heiress to an airship fortune for parents doesn't let you do a few good things for people, then you're just not living life right.”

“Amen,” Schuyler said softly, continuing his rounds.

“Though I wish I knew more about this lovely new addition to the Chorus.”

“Jib…” Schuyler cautioned, for reasons I would understand in a moment.

“The Chorus?” I asked.

“The Freak's Chorus!” Jib crowed. “That's what we call ourselves.”

“That's what
you
call us,” Penn objected softly, as he poked a fork into his food, but looked unsure whether he felt up to eating it.

“Why…on Earth—” I stammered.

“‘Cause if you own it, then the word can't hurt you,” Jib explained. “Come on, you can't tell me that you've never been called a freak before. Well, maybe not you, Elsewhere, because you never leave the ivory tower here. But the rest of us, all of us been called freak one time or another, am I right?” He paused, eyes shifting around the table. “Right? Penn? Marielle? You too, Lilibet, I know you're listening.”

Lilibet continued eating her food without giving any indication she'd heard.

“Right. So you take the name as a title and wear it proud, and nobody can hurt you with it anymore.”

I nodded gently.

“Eat your food, Jib. Before it gets cold,” Schuyler encouraged.

“Yes, I should, and I should let someone else talk. That's how I got my nickname, you know. ‘Cause I talk so much. When I was
little my mother would say ‘what are you jibbering about?’ and it just sort of caught and stuck. But anyway…” He barely breathed between sentences; just listening to him made me tired. “Tell me about you. I know you don't want to talk about your name, but what about your family? What's the story there?”

My eyes dropped, and I stared into my plate of untouched food. A lump took up residence in my throat, ensuring that I would not be eating anything now. I could feel Quinn staring right through me. “I don't have any family.”

“Come on, everybody has family.”

“Jib!” Schuyler cautioned much more sternly.

“Everyone has family, even if they're dead.” Jib insisted.

“Mine is!” I exclaimed, with an edge to my voice I had not intended. “My parents are dead.”

The sound of plates and utensils meeting came to a sudden and distinct halt. That was, except, for Lilibet's. She continued on, as ever, as if nothing was going on around her.

“Sorry,” Jib said sincerely, his tone changing. “How?”

The doctor opened his mouth to speak, but Jib raised a hand himself now.

”Sorry, I'm sorry.”

“It's all right,” I replied, casually as I could, considering it wasn't. “My mother died when I was small, and my father died last year of Dread Fever. I almost did too, that's why the doctor is taking care of my heart now.”

Penn turned pale, excused himself, and exited the room, leaving the remaining food upon his plate untouched.

“I've said something wrong.” I caught my lip between my teeth and held it there a moment. “I should apologize.” In truth, I had no idea exactly what I'd be apologizing for, but still I felt I should do it anyway.

“Leave him for now,” Schuyler advised, reaching over and patting me gently on the hand. “I am certain that there is no way you could have prevented upsetting him, and you had no knowledge of the fact that the subject would upset him. So you have nothing to apologize for.”

It was now that I noticed that Jib and Marielle were both mutely staring down at their plates. Marielle, even though she could not make out the sight, still folded her hands and stared intently at it.

“Please, sir,” I said, slipping back into my old custom in my distress. “Tell me what it was that I said so that I will not so injure him again.”

“You simply mentioned Dread Fever, that is all.”

“Is that how he—” I gasped, and suddenly my stomach tied itself in a series of tiny, intricate knots.

“How he lost not only his hearing, but his entire family,” Schuyler informed me sadly. Watching the tears suddenly pool in my eyes he leaned over, put his hand atop my shoulder, and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Now, now, please don't cry. He wouldn't want that.”

“Schuyler is right, I would not want that. It's all right,” another voice said suddenly, and I looked up to see that Penn had returned and stood in the doorway, his hands clasped behind his back and eyes fixed upon the ceiling as he tried to blink back tears of his own. “I wouldn't want you to cry on my account, and I apologize, it was rude of me to leave just now as I did. I hope that you can forgive me.”

“I feel terrible. I had no idea, I… please, Penn, don't even—” I could say no more, and Schuyler gestured for Penn to return to the table.

He did so, picking up his fork and making the attempt to appear as though he was going to finish his dinner. Within moments, Schuyler redirected the conversation to something lighter, which seemed to be a gift of his under most circumstances.

I was, I believed, the only one in the room who noticed that while Penn put on a good show, not a single further bite of food crossed his lips.

C
HAPTER
17

WE BID OUR VISITORS GOOD NIGHT.

Schuyler and Penn returned to the kitchen to finish the last of the washing up, and as the doctor held the door for me, I begged a moment longer, standing in the open doorway.

He seemed highly nervous about my being there. Finally, he tugged me inside gently by the sleeve, then closed the door behind me.

I frowned, deeply, and he sighed. “Must you look at me that way? Like a kitten who has had his stolen ball of wool yarn taken from his grasping paws?”

“I'm sorry, sir. It's just that it has been such a long time since I've felt the air so crisp on a night such as this.” I wandered a few steps forward, objecting no longer.

A moment later, I heard him sigh again. “Come on, then. This way.”

My eyes lit up as he led me toward the back of the apartment: toward the balcony.

I had wanted to take in the view from that balcony many times before, but was told that my health was not yet stable enough to risk it; the fact that he was willing to consider it now told me that I must be making some actual progress.

It was a beautiful night, chillier than one might expect for this time of year, and the cold both thrilled and surprised me. It reminded me that I could still feel, all on my own, something of the world around me, though I felt so removed from it most of the time.

He saw me shiver and shook his head. “I should take you back inside.”

“Please, just a few moments more.”

He rolled large blue eyes heavenward and slowly removed his waistcoat. He draped it over my shoulders and instantly I was overwhelmed. It was warm from the heat of his body and smelled of the familiar, only barely detectable scent of his cologne. It was dizzying, it was maddening, and just as the man who wore it, too perfect to be believed.

He leaned over the railing of the balcony so far, I was certain that he was going to fall. He seemed completely oblivious to the danger and at the same time, everything about his posture dared gravity itself to try to overpower the strength of his will to defy it.

He glanced back at me over his shoulder, the edge of his lip curling upward slightly on one side. “You look as if you're about to see catastrophe unfold right before your wide, innocent eyes.” He scoffed as I visibly relaxed the moment he returned to a safer distance from the edge.

“It's not the obvious dangers in this life you must beware of. It's the ones that you cannot imagine that cause the most mortal harm.”

I couldn't help but wonder what mortal harm had befallen him, when he least suspected it. Quickly I changed the subject though, to try to prolong the exchange. “Schuyler seems, at times, so unhappy. It concerns me.”

“Schuyler will never be happy,” he observed. “His priorities in life are skewed, offset from balance. A man must know what it is that he is seeking from life if he is ever meant to find it.”

“If he is offset from balance, sir, should you not, as his oldest friend, be able to help set him right? To show him the way down a more sure-footed path?”

He nearly laughed at the thought, but held back from fully doing so, as he ever did. True laughter was not something that was a part of who he was, and I had to ask myself now if it ever, once, had been.

“He would find that idea insulting at worst and amusing at best,” he replied. “You see, he has taken it upon himself to keep these wandering feet of mine upon the ‘straight and narrow’. I am loath to tell him that he can spend the rest of his days in the attempt, but they are still surely meant to stray from the course he'd have me trod like a dutiful workhorse.”

“I find it difficult to believe that a man of Schuyler's…” I fought to decide upon the appropriate description for the aura that Schuyler projected. “That a man of Schuyler's artistic sensibilities would be so concerned with keeping anyone on a mundane, earthbound path.”

“For all his fluff and artistry, Schuyler is at heart just that — remarkably earthbound,” Quinn continued. “He is much more concerned with what is right in front of him, in this moment, than what has come before or what may come tomorrow. He cannot truly appreciate the dimming of day for its adventure into night, nor the dawning of sunlight for the promise of morning. No, Schuyler is a being entirely trapped in his pursuit of the reward that has eluded men of deeper intellectual concern for centuries.”

“What reward is that, exactly?”

“His own happiness.”

I blinked, startled that the doctor spoke of this everyday occurrence, people trying to find their happiness, as if it were a negative thing or worse, a flaw of character.

“He does many good things for other people. That seems to me to be the primary focus of his life,” I said, feeling a need to come to the defense of the character of the man who had saved me from certain death. “A kind man, with a great depth of intellect and a curious mind. A good man, a quick and bright man.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” He waved away my indignation with a sweep of his hand. “He is all of those things… and,” his tone darkened, “many others. He is also, however, another thing that you neglected to mention.”

I waited as he considered his next words carefully.

“He is empty.”

The moment the words were spoken I knew them to be true; the sadness in Schuyler that I had observed, but not been able to put a name to, did in fact have one, and that name was emptiness.

“If there is to be anything of substance to this pale, hollow thing we call life, any true shape or depth of meaning, it can only be in this…” Quinn clasped his hands behind his back as he tilted his head, staring up at the misted, blue-black twilight. “If a man seeks his own happiness, it shall forever elude him, and the continual hunt becomes the trap that will snap shut upon him and imprison him for
the remainder of his wretched time upon this planet. But to seek the happiness of others through betterment of their lives…” He breathed a soft sigh, one not quite of contentment, but the weary resigned sound of longing.

“Then perhaps he will find his own contentment on the journey.” I completed the thought for him and he slowly turned his eyes toward me.

“I knew there was more to you than the mind of an everyday—” he stopped, seeming to change words mid-sentence and mentally correct course. “Everyday schoolgirl.”

“I am no longer a schoolgirl, sir.” I felt my cheeks taking on color and the sting of embarrassment. I may be only just a few months beyond the age of majority, while surely Godspeed had already passed the age of thirty, but I was beyond it.

“No, you are not, are you? Woman-child, then, mostly grown. And yet,” his expression altered, hardening. Those blue eyes I adored so took on the shining glint of steel. “So unaware of the darkness that exists inside men's hearts.”

“I know much of the darkness within the hearts of womankind at least, sir.” I thought back to the many ways Nastasia Argent had educated me in that very subject.

A true scowl took hold of his features and twisted them into something unnaturally grotesque given their natural, inherent godliness.

“Truly spoken,” he said, indicating it was time for me to go back inside now with another sweep of his hand. “Truly and correctly spoken.”

I wondered what had been the name of the woman who had taught him the same harsh lesson.

“Come on, then.”

“Wait, I just want to look down a moment, at the garden below? Can't you smell the flowers, sir?”

“I suppose…” He sighed, looking side to side before making up his mind that I could yet remain, “ … that it has been a very long time since you have been able to.” He seemed to settle into his stance again, and I leaned a little ways over the balcony and took in the glory of spring, even in the coolness of the evening air.

“Schuyler's mother was well named Rain, as she was lovely and could make anything grow,” he said, explaining the bounty of the garden. “This was her project. She used to bring her family out here for picnics on evenings much like this, when Schuyler's father was too absorbed in his work to come home.”