“He’s in charge now,” Mrs. Finn replied. “We don’t have to put up with your lot anymore.”
“What lot would that be?” Katie asked, peering around the room. Row certainly wasn’t here, and she saw no clues. Katie wondered whether she was going to have to beat the information out of his mother. Could she even do that? Perhaps not, but every word out of the woman’s mouth made the idea seem easier. Mum was dead—Katie’s mind shied away from the thought, closing it off—but this horrible woman lived on, still making excuses for her son, even now.
“All of you,” Mrs. Finn snarled, “thinking you’re so much better than us. Ignoring my smart, brave boy for that weak nancy over there. All those books, they haven’t helped you, have they? My boy wields the weight in this town.”
“So you’re jealous of Jonathan as well,” Katie remarked, fingering her knife. “Just like Row.”
“Jonathan Tear is a fraud!” Mrs. Finn snapped. “He’s not his father, and why should he be? His cunt of a mother ruined everything!”
Katie drew a wounded breath. Of all of her memories of Jonathan’s mother, in that moment she could only think of the portrait that hung on the Tears’ living room wall: Lily, bow in hand, beatific smile on her face, and her flower-strewn hair streaming out behind her. Though she knew it from books, Katie had never heard the word cunt spoken aloud in her life, and the hate in that single syllable stopped her cold.
“You used to be Row’s friend, girl. I remember, and he remembers too. They just had to crook their fingers, and you dropped him cold.”
“Where is Jonathan?” Katie demanded. It occurred to her then to wonder why she hadn’t been taken with Jonathan, but that answer came easily: Row wanted his crown back, and hoped Katie would lead him to it. She didn’t understand the world that Row and the Tears lived in, jewels and magic and things unseen, but she could recognize that the crown meant nothing but trouble, and in that moment she resolved never to go near it again. It could rot in the soil forever.
Mrs. Finn smiled, spiteful. “My boy doesn’t need you anymore. He has his own gifts. William Tear can’t hurt him any longer.”
Katie narrowed her eyes, trying to make sense of the last statement. So far as she knew, Tear had never paid the slightest bit of attention to Row; indeed, that lack of distinction, the sense that Row had never been valued according to his worth, was the fundamental problem. Row had always thought that he deserved better. But William Tear had neither culled Row nor praised him, not even when it was warranted, not even when he should have, given Row’s intelligence and resourcefulness. Tear had ignored him so successfully that it must have been deliberate . . . and now a horrid suspicion grew in Katie’s mind. She stared at Mrs. Finn, already trying to reverse her thoughts, because she didn’t want an answer to this question, didn’t want to know—
“I have been reading all morning,” Mrs. Finn announced. She reached for the table and Katie jumped forward, so keyed up that she was sure that Mrs. Finn must have a knife of her own. But Mrs. Finn raised nothing more than a book, leather-bound, with a gilt cross on the cover.
“Do you know the story of Cain, child?”
“Cain?” Katie asked blankly. She had read the Bible, of course she had, to make sure she understood what was flowing from Row’s pulpit. But in that moment the name meant nothing to her.
“Cain. Unfavored son, ignored and passed over through no fault of his own. God’s will.” Mrs. Finn smiled again, and the smile was no longer spiteful now, but ghastly, as though she were peering through an aperture toward her own death. “I’ve read Cain and Abel many times. We had a god in this town, unjust and corrupt, but he’s gone now. My son will have his rightful place.”
“Your husband—”
“My husband died four years before the Crossing!” Mrs. Finn snapped. “We were coming here to make a better world, and how does he start? By choosing her! Even before the first boat ran aground, everyone knew!” Mrs. Finn clutched the arms of her rocker, her voice lifting into a scream. “I was four months pregnant and he left me for an American!”
Katie backed away, narrowly resisting the impulse to clap her hands to her ears. Mrs. Finn would never give Row up. But if Katie stayed here, Mrs. Finn would keep talking, and Katie didn’t want to hear any more. She thought of her younger self, sitting on a bench with William Tear in the fading sun. If she had known everything then, would she still have said yes?
“I know my Bible,” Mrs. Finn muttered with grim satisfaction. “We’re godly people in this house. Cain rose up.”