“Each in its own time, as Heaven wills,” Mama had said.
Tess wished, uncharitably, that Heaven had picked Jeanne first. While she enjoyed being so much taller than her sister that she looked years older (rather than mere minutes), it wasn’t worth the cramps and misery.
She was curled on the couch with a hot compress against the small of her back when there came a knock at the door. “Papa! The door!” she cried, but her father was in his library, culling beloved books with an eye toward selling some. She pried herself out of the upholstery, groaning, and opened the door to Kenneth.
“You’re come awfully late,” she snapped, concealing the hot compress in the folds of her skirt so he wouldn’t see it, guess why she’d stayed home, and feel uncomfortable or disgusted.
“I suppose there’s no supper left?” Kenneth brushed past Tess, heading for the kitchen. “Only I haven’t eaten since noon, Tes’puco, and I’m famished.”
Tessa-puco was Ninysh for “stupid-head”; Kenneth had bestowed the nickname on Tess when she was nine, after one of her pranks had landed him in the river. It was a term of endearment now, one only Kenneth was allowed to use.
“Were you out with the dark barges?” asked Tess, wrapping her arms around her aching belly while Kenneth dug through the pantry. If the Belgiosos were smuggling, the barges had to be unloaded at night. It was early to have finished that kind of work, though.
“Noph,” Kenneth said around the end of a sausage, piling rolls and cheese on a plate. “In fact, I cut out early. Uncle Leo will flay me tomorrow, but it was worth it. Is there any mustard?”
Tess located the mustard, curious as to what Kenneth would find worth a flaying. “What did you sneak off to do, you naughty thing?” She rubbed her lower back. It didn’t help.
Kenneth, oblivious to her discomfort, waggled his eyebrows at her. “Astronomy lecture.”
That hardly sounded worth skiving off work for. “Never. You were meeting some boy at the Soggy Lamprey.”
“Saints’ bones, I wouldn’t lie to you, Tes’puco,” said Kenneth, kissing a knuckle toward Heaven. “It was the public lecture at St. Bert’s. A pair of astronomers—one saar, one human—talked about using lenses to examine the sky.”
“A spyglass, you mean? Like a pirate?” It always came back to pirates for Tess, even when she was thirteen and taller than her mother and should have outgrown such nonsense.
“It’s true, I swear. The dragons say there are other worlds out there, and you can see ’em, even without the glass. They’re the traveling stars, the ones the pagans took for gods and the Saints called Heaven’s lanterns. They’re other worlds, Tess, circling the sun.”
Tess shook her head unconsciously, not because she didn’t believe him but because her imagination was caught already. Other worlds! Pathka would’ve loved the thought of sailing the skies, exploring and marauding upon other seas like some Dozerius of the air.
“You still don’t believe me,” said Kenneth, leaning against the kitchen table and licking his fingers clean. “There’s two lectures per week, open to the public. They aren’t always about the skies. Next one’s on electrostatics, I think. You should come with me.”
Tess burst out laughing. “That’s not even a word! And how am I to come?” Her belly twinged. “Mama would never allow it.”
“Pshaw. She’s not such an ogre. I can handle her,” said Kenneth, waving dismissively.
He returned the next day, pointedly winking at Tess’s doubts, and helped clear the table and wash the dishes, which raised Anne-Marie’s suspicions. After dinner, when the family gathered in the parlor—even Papa, who typically would have retreated to his library but couldn’t bear to face the new gaps—Kenneth flopped onto an armchair and said languidly, “So. Which of my little cousins wants to come to a free lecture tomorrow evening at St. Bert’s?”
Nobody jumped to their feet or raised their hand or cried, “Me!” Tess kept quiet, petrified to give any sign or get her hopes up.
Anne-Marie, darning socks, frowned. “Is that what you’re skulking about for?” she asked her baby brother. “You don’t want to go alone?”
“Quite the contrary, I already went alone,” said Kenneth, jutting his chin. “For my boldness, I was rewarded with some edification. I peered at the moon through a spyglass.”
At this, young Paul and Ned pricked up their ears.
“It’s all pitted on the surface, like it had the graypox,” said Kenneth smugly. “But you wouldn’t know from ogling it with your naked eye.”
“Kenneth! Language!” cried Anne-Marie, clapping her hands over Neddie’s naked ears.
“It’s what the astronomers say, sis,” drawled Kenneth. “Nothing to be squeamish about. Anyway, tomorrow’s nothing so scandalous as moon-gazing. They’ll explain electrostatics, the power that runs quigutl devices. They’ll have machines you can play with.”
He aimed his last words at the boys, whose eyes grew eager. This, Tess understood, was Kenneth’s strategy for getting her to the lecture: preying on Anne-Marie’s indulgence of the boys—an indulgence well remembered from his own boyhood.
It was working. Paul and Neddie were at Mama’s knee, clamoring to play with the wonderful devices.
Anne-Marie frowned, unsure, but Kenneth saw the seams in her resolve and began picking at them: “If you don’t want to go, sis, I don’t mind taking them. I’ll keep a close eye out, or if that won’t put your heart at ease, maybe Tess would be so kind as to help me. That’s one boy apiece. No way we can lose them. What say you, Tes’puco, old love?”
Tess, a natural thespian, knew exactly how to answer. “I have to escort the boys all the time! Surely it’s Jeanne’s turn.”
“I don’t mind doing it,” said Jeanne.
“No,” said Mama crisply. “Tess will accompany her brothers. Caring for younger siblings is a duty, Tess, which you shirk at every—”
Tess suppressed a look of triumph. She had this speech memorized, but she groaned as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
Outside Anne-Marie’s line of sight, Kenneth winked. He’d been right; he could handle his sister.
“But this is just one lecture,” Tessie fretted the following night as they traversed the dark streets behind the bounding boys. “How do we convince her next time?”
“Already wanting to attend a second when you’ve yet to see the first?” said Kenneth laughingly. “At some point, little coz, we won’t have to convince her. She’ll be accustomed to the notion that going to St. Bert’s is something you do. Or, failing that, we find a way to sneak you out. Ever climbed out your window?”
She’d tried. “Jeanne’s a light sleeper,” Tess grumbled, but a radical notion occurred to her. Did she and Jeanne have to share a room? What if she moved into Seraphina’s old room? Had her existence become so stifling that she could consider abandoning her sister and their midnight conferences?
She had to do something. She felt like a rat in a trap.
They arrived at Old St. Bert’s, in the heart of Quighole. Time was, this neighborhood had been locked up at sundown, its wrought-iron gates chained shut. After the war, however, Queen Glisselda had decreed an initiative of normalization. Quighole would no longer be cordoned off, public lectures would occur at the old church in the close, and the human denizens of Lavondaville would learn both natural philosophy and how not to be afraid of the saarantrai and quigutl around them.
That was the theory. The lectures had not achieved broad popularity yet.