The Inquisitor's Apprentice (20 page)

The tea arrived, and Mrs. Astral made a point of serving Sacha personally. She asked him how much milk and sugar he wanted in his tea as if he were a grown man instead of a boy. And when she handed him his cup, her hand brushed his in a way that made him feel very grown-up indeed.

"Now, Sacha," she said, fixing him with her brilliant green gaze, "you
must
tell me
all
about your fascinating work with Inquisitor Wolf! He's my hero! I'm simply desperate to meet him!"

"Then why don't you invite him to dinner?" Lily interrupted.

Mrs. Astral cast a cool eye upon her daughter, as if she'd just noticed her presence and wasn't entirely pleased about it. "Darling, what
are
you wearing? If you
must
go out in public like that, can you take some decent clothes in a bag and change before you come home? What if someone saw you?"

Before Lily could answer, Mrs. Astral turned back to Sacha.

"Where has Inquisitor Wolf taken you so far, Sacha? I hope he's not keeping you too much under wraps. I hope he's introducing you to the kind of people who can help your career. Has he taken you to see Teddy Roosevelt yet? They're great friends. Or at least they used to be, back when poor Teddy was still the commissioner of police." Mrs. Astral's lovely face clouded over as if it made her unutterably sad to even think about "poor Teddy" not being police commissioner anymore. "It was so hard on him, being run out of town by that distasteful scandal! Why, he was so mortified that he ran off to Africa on safari and still hasn't come back."

"Yes," Lily said with relish. "And when J. P. Morgaunt heard Teddy was gone, he went straight down to the Union Club, opened a case of champagne, and made a toast: 'May the first lion Teddy meets do its duty!'"

"Lily!" Mrs. Astral chided. "I'm sure dear Mr. Morgaunt would never say anything so bloodthirsty!"

Actually, Sacha thought this sounded like exactly the kind of thing dear Mr. Morgaunt would say. But it did seem rather coarse of Lily to mention it in polite company. And Mrs. Astral's shock seemed like just another proof of her refined nature and womanly delicacy.

She leaned forward to pour Sacha another cup of tea. "You must be a tremendous help to Inquisitor Wolf. I'm sure he's made use of your extraordinary talents already. Is it really true that you can see witches?"

"Well," Sacha said modestly, "I don't like to brag about it."

"Oh, but you can tell
me.
I wouldn't think it was bragging. I know all sorts of extraordinary people. I cultivate extraordinary people."

"Like mushrooms," Lily muttered. "By keeping them in the dark and burying them in mounds of bull—"

"What's that, darling?" Mrs. Astral interrupted. "You really should learn to stop mumbling. And try not to frown like that. It makes you look even more ill-tempered than you are. I'm sorry, Sacha, you were telling me about how you help Inquisitor Wolf catch witches. How
do
you spot a witch? What is it that gives her away to you?"

On the other end of the sofa, Lily slammed her teacup into its saucer with an outraged rattle, but Sacha ignored her. "Well, uh ... I don't see the same thing every time. Sometimes it's a kind of aura or halo. And other times it's more like feeling than seeing."

Mrs. Astral rested her chin on one hand and leaned forward as if she couldn't wait to hear more. "And does a witch have to
do
magic for you to see these emanations, or can you see them all the time?"

"They have to do magic in front of me," Sacha said. But this sounded rather unimpressive to him. And he definitely wanted to impress Mrs. Astral. So he added, in what he hoped was a grown-up and mysterious voice, "Most of the time."

Mrs. Astral sat up and seemed almost to catch her breath at this. "
Most
of the time? What about the other times?"

"Well, you know ... there are different clues."

"Such as?"

"The usual," Sacha said haltingly, trying to stumble out of the lie he'd tangled himself in. "Pointy noses, and warts, and wrinkles—"

"Oh!" She laughed in a way that struck Sacha, just for an instant, as not very nice. But then she smiled at him, and he forgot about it. Her green eyes glittered as she leaned forward to pat his hand. "How very clever of you!"

Mrs. Astral yawned and glanced over Sacha's head at the monumental grandfather clock. "My, how late it's gotten!" she cried. "How time passes when one's in such charming company! Tell me, Sacha, how were you planning to get home? Is your family's car coming to fetch you, or can I offer you a ride in ours?"

"No, thank you!" Sacha practically yelped. He could just imagine the look on the chauffeur's face when he got his first glimpse of Hester Street.

"Really, I insist. In fact, I can't think why I never thought of it before." Lily's mother rang the bell and a uniformed maidservant appeared so fast that Sacha wondered if she'd been listening at the keyhole.

"Biddy," Mrs. Astral ordered, "instruct the chauffeur to drive Mr. Kessler home. And tell him that from today forward I desire him to drive Mr. Kessler home every night when he picks Lily up. That will give you two a little time to relax and chat after work every day. Won't that be fun?" She smiled graciously at the two children and swept out of the room in a fragrant cloud of frangipani and orange blossoms.

As soon as her mother was gone, Lily kicked the coffee table hard enough to send tea sloshing into the saucers. "I don't know why she's being so nice to you!" she snarled. "She must want something, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is!"

"What's that supposed to mean? You think I have nothing to offer because I'm poor? You think that makes me not worth talking to?"

"Frankly, yes. At least as far as my mother's concerned. She's a dreadful snob."

"It seems to me like you're the snob, not her. She's not the one who could barely bring herself to invite me here!"

She rolled her eyes. "I knew you were rude. But I didn't know you were stupid, too!"

"
I'm
stupid? How stupid is it to take a job where you're too embarrassed to even introduce the people you work with to your mother?"

He expected Lily to fire back a blistering retort, but instead she just stared at him with her mouth hanging open. "Wait a minute. You think I was embarrassed to introduce
you
to
her?
"

Before he could make sense of that question, she half dragged him across the room and pointed to a framed engraving on the wall. "You want to know about my mother? Take a look at
that!
"

The engraving showed two women shaking hands with each other in the middle of a ballroom. Both women were dazzlingly beautiful, and one of them bore a striking resemblance to Maleficia Astral. They smiled at each other as sweetly as if they were the best of friends—but each one held a vicious long-handled ax hidden in the silk folds of her ball gown.

The caption below the picture read "The Reigning Beauty Greets Her Newest Rival."

"
That's
my mother," Lily announced. "And what's more, she's proud of it. Proud enough to hang that picture on the wall and laugh about it. The purpose of her life is running New York society. The only thing she cares about is being rich and beautiful and in control. She doesn't even have time for her own daughter unless it makes her look good in front of her rich friends. So you tell me, Sacha Kessler, why would she waste her time on
you?
"

Sacha opened his mouth to return her insult in kind—but then he saw something in her face that made him swallow his anger. It wasn't snobbishness that had made Lily sneak him into her house, he realized. It was shame. Lily Astral was ashamed of her own mother. So ashamed that she had been just as desperate to keep Sacha from meeting Mrs. Astral as Sacha was to keep Lily from knowing he lived in the Hester Street tenements.

A tickling little mouse of a thought scampered through his mind.
He
wasn't ashamed of
his
parents, it whispered to him. Now that the beautiful Maleficia wasn't in front of him, he could see that her charming small talk had mostly been mean-spirited gossip. Sacha's hardworking father had a dignity that Mrs. Astral would never match, for all her jewels and money. And as for Sacha's mother, the most embarrassing thing she'd do if she ever met Lily was stuff fattening food down her throat and
shrei
about how skinny she was. So if Lily was brave enough to let Sacha meet the mother she was so ashamed of, then surely he could be brave enough to tell her that he lived in the tenements?

But somehow he couldn't. In fact, knowing how Lily felt about her mother made it even harder. And he knew why, too, though he didn't want to admit it to himself. Lily wouldn't despise his family for being poor. She'd do worse than despise them. She'd feel
sorry
for them. She'd want to
help
them. And the last thing on earth Sacha wanted was Lily Astral's charity.

W
OLF'S INQUIRIES
at the Patent Office must have paid off, because a few days later he received a thick envelope by special courier from Washington, vanished into his office to read it—and then abruptly announced that they were off to see a Mr. Worley in Ossining.

"Ossining?" Lily said with a predatory gleam in her eye. "You mean he's been sent up the river? We're going to visit him in the slammer?"

"Sorry to disappoint you," Wolf said mildly. "But he only lives there. Believe it or not, lots of perfectly innocent people do."

"How vexing of them!"

"Quite." Wolf checked his watch. "We can just make the one-twenty train if we leave now."

As he hurried along behind Wolf, Sacha couldn't help marveling at his new life. Who would have imagined a boy from Hester Street would be climbing onto a real train with a ticket in his hand that cost more than all the clothes he owned put together, in the company of an NYPD Inquisitor and a high-society debutante? He glanced at Lily, but she seemed to think that taking a real honest-to-goodness train was nothing at all out of the ordinary. He imitated her blasé expression and told himself he'd better not stare too much.

But of course that was impossible. From the minute they stepped into the lofty waiting room of Grand Central Station, Sacha was confronted with one wonder after another. Grand Central's magnificent glass-roofed train shed rivaled the Eiffel Tower as one of the engineering marvels of the age. But in New York the pace of progress was so frenetic that it was already considered out of date—and a public safety hazard to boot. It had been slated for demolition for years, in fact, and the only reason it was still standing was that Cornelius Vanderbilk and Tammany Hall were fighting over who would get the lion's share of the bribes that needed to be paid before construction could begin.

Sacha had read that Vanderbilk planned to fund the construction (and the bribes) by burying the train tracks and building an entirely new street on top of them. It was supposed to be called Park Avenue—probably in the hopes that people would forget it was sitting on top of a train yard—and the boosters and speculators were hard at work convincing people to buy, buy, buy. But looking out the window at the blighted wasteland of slaughterhouses and shantytowns that was the Upper East Side, Sacha couldn't believe any decent person would ever want to live here.

Soon there were better things to look at, though. They passed the polo grounds, where the Yankees played. Morning practice had already begun, and Lily glued her nose to the window next to Sacha while they tried to spot their favorite players.

"I guess you go to games all the time," he said wistfully.

"Only stupid, boring polo," she sighed disgustedly. "My mother disapproves of letting young ladies watch baseball."

Then the polo grounds were behind them and the train was launching itself off Manhattan's northern summit and rattling across the soaring trestles to the mainland. Sacha had thought they were going fast before, but now they were fairly flying. They shot along the rails mere feet above the glittering sweep of the Hudson River. They were now farther north than Sacha had ever been. He thought about how the Hester Street housewives called the Bowery "America," even though it was only a few blocks from home. But this really was America. And it seemed to go on forever. Sacha had never seen so much water. Or such cliffs. Or a sky so vast that the flocking seagulls seemed lost in its blue infinity.

Wolf tapped him on the shoulder. "Have a look at this."

He was pulling a thick sheaf of papers out of his pocket. They were freshly pulled blueprints; Sacha could see the cyanotype-blue ink staining Wolf's fingertips as he handled them. Wolf spread the pages out on the train seat so Sacha and Lily could see them.

They were from the Patent Office—stamped reproductions of the technical drawings that Thomas Worley had originally submitted to obtain the patent on his Soul Catcher. And the device shown in page after page of detailed drawings was identical in almost every point to Edison's etherograph.

"So Edison stole the etherograph from Worley?" Lily asked.

"Not stole, bought."

"But shouldn't he give him credit, then? And why would he do that anyway? Just so he could say it was his idea and people would think he was a great inventor?"

Wolf shrugged. "Maybe. Or maybe there really is some difference between the two machines that we don't understand yet. That's why I need to talk to Worley."

Wolf put the drawings away, looking thoughtful, and they passed the rest of the train ride in silence. Wolf had bought a whole collection of morning papers—in between his usual contributions to New York's panhandling population—and he was reading them with the occasional raised eyebrow or snort of amusement. Lily had curled up in one corner of their compartment and gone to sleep. And Sacha was free to stare out the window to his heart's content.

He couldn't get over how green everything was, or the way the endless forest seemed to roll to the horizon in every direction. People must live here, but he couldn't see any sign of them beyond the occasional distant road or church steeple. How could there be so much empty space in the world? And this was just one small corner of New York State, which was just one small corner of the United States! It was hard to understand why people got so upset about immigrants. It looked to Sacha like you could move all of Italy, Ireland, and Russia put together into the Hudson River valley and no one would even notice the difference.