Iron Cast(31)

“She’s so considerate,” Mrs. Wells said, beaming with pride at her son’s choice of bride.

Corinne ran her fingers through her hair and thought it much more likely that Phillip was tired of Angela’s family, but she wasn’t keen on being pulled into the tedium of wedding preparations. As far as Corinne could tell, Angela was much more comfortable dictating her preferences from a tea table at a country club.

The conversation ran swiftly toward the stress on young brides and from there on to the economy and which neighborhoods were going downhill. Corinne lost its thread for a while, so she was caught off guard when the discussion suddenly turned to hemopaths and the Harvard Bridge.

“Are the police even trying to find them? Surely out of all the people on that bridge, someone remembers them.”

“It’ll be the Hemopath Protection Agency that’s after them, not the regular police.”

“Charlotte Dower said her cousin was there, and he barely remembers a thing. Still swears up and down those elephants must’ve been real.”

“I’ve been saying for years that hemopaths are a danger to us. If they know how to get inside your head like that, what’s to stop them from doing it all the time?”

“Is the law even enough to stop them? I’ve heard they still host those parties in secret. The police can’t shut them all down.”

“Maybe the ironmongers have the right idea.”

The man who said that was one of her father’s business partners. An uneasy silence fell over the room at the suggestion. The masked vigilantes who kidnapped hemopaths from their beds were hardly a topic for civilized conversation. Corinne squeezed her hand into a fist and concentrated on the pain of her nails cutting into her palm.

“There’s no need for anything like that when there’s Haversham Asylum,” said one of the women from her mother’s bridge club.

“Did you hear that some hemopaths are petitioning the governor to shut it down?”

That set off a new flurry of titters. Corinne had to hold her breath to keep herself in check. She knew where the conversation would go. She’d heard it so many times, it was like a hated song on a phonograph that she’d memorized completely but never learned not to despise.

“They say there’s torture going on there. Some kind of experimentation.” The man speaking was trying to sound informational, but he obviously just wanted to scandalize everyone.

“Torture? In Boston? We’re not the Bolsheviks.”

“Can you imagine the nerve, petitioning against a prison that was built solely for their comfort?”

“Judging from the crime rates, they should be expanding the asylum. Phillip, maybe you can talk to Angela’s father about that.”

“Yes, I’ve told him as much,” Perry Wells said, placing a hand on his son’s shoulder. “If you’re serious about running for office, that’s your campaign platform right there.”

Her father was not a man of many words, so each one of those cut Corinne to the quick. Her father had no idea that she was a hemopath, of course. That didn’t make it hurt any less to hear him talk about the asylum in such generous terms.

Her brother just shook his head, his lips turned up in a slight smile. Corinne watched him closely, though part of her wanted to find an excuse to leave the room.

“It’s an interesting situation, that’s for sure,” Phillip said. A standard answer for polite society. “Seems like a better platform might just be reminding voters that our esteemed Councilman Turner paid twenty-five hundred in taxpayer dollars to a couple of hemos for a poem and a song.”

“Twenty-five hundred?” Corinne echoed before she could stop herself.

Phillip cocked his head at her, his eyes bespeaking a hidden amusement. “To the penny,” he said. “I play golf with one of the city accountants, and he saw the requisition.”

“A disgrace,” said her father, shaking his head.

“Indeed.” Corinne pressed her hand to her lips to conceal a smile. She and Ada had conned Councilman Turner out of only two thousand, meaning that five hundred dollars had mysteriously vanished. Johnny would be interested to know that the councilman was skimming off the top. That kind of information had value.

“Well, surely that’s enough of this topic,” Mrs. Wells said, her hands twitching nervously in her lap. She hated anything that verged on controversy, so touching hemopathy and politics in the same conversation was a social catastrophe.

Corinne had never been so grateful for her mother’s delicate sensibilities.

“Mother’s right,” she said. “Next thing you know, we’ll be talking about anarchism and women’s suffrage and racial equality, and then the gates of hell might open up right in this parlor.”

There were a few titters at that, but most people looked at their feet in awkward silence. Corinne wasn’t sure why she felt quite so pleased about that. Only Madeline was still looking at her, lips quirked in amusement. James was shaking his head, perplexed either by her manners or by his wife’s tacit approval of her manners. Suddenly Phillip laughed, a thunderous sound that always made Corinne jump. He probably would have tousled her hair again if she hadn’t been subtly scooting the ottoman farther and farther away from him.

“You’d think a school like Billings would be able to train the sarcasm out of you,” he said. “I thought Father was paying for a proper young lady.”