Iron Cast(40)

“Morning,” he said.

Ada blinked.

“Morning,” she said, after a few seconds’ delay.

“Can we take a walk?” he asked.

Ada studied his features in the dusky light, the crinkling at the corners of his eyes from his habitual grin, the crooked length of his nose, though he swore he’d never broken it. He didn’t look like he wanted to argue with her. He looked relaxed. She nodded.

“You kids be careful,” Gordon said, spitting out a sunflower seed.

It was the first time Ada had seen Gordon express concern about any of the Cast Iron’s goings-on. She wasn’t sure how to respond to him. Charlie gave him a cheerful wave and opened the door.

“See you later, Gordon, old pal,” he said.

Gordon made a sound somewhere between a snort and a grunt and spat out another seed. It was the closest to a farewell that Ada had ever received from him. When she told that to Charlie, he just laughed.

“Gordon? He’s a big softie. Just ask him about his cat sometime. He’ll melt like butter in June.”

Ada hadn’t known that Gordon owned a cat. She stared at Charlie’s profile, trying to detect some hint of sarcasm, but it wasn’t there.

“What?” he asked, looking at her. “I got something in my teeth?”

She shook her head. They walked toward the street, elbows brushing every few steps. Ada wanted to take his hand, but she wasn’t sure how he would react to that. Their last conversation still hung between them, barbed and broken.

“I didn’t expect to see you today,” Ada said at last, unable to stand the silence.

“I heard about what happened last night. I was worried about you.”

Ada hugged herself against the rising wind. Across the street a nun was leading a gaggle of orphans down the sidewalk. Trailing a block behind was an elderly couple, both with canes. The man was chuckling and clutching his hat in the wind. The woman reached out with a shaky hand and brushed something invisible from his shoulder. Ada looked away from the simple intimacy of the moment and sucked in a short breath. She stopped walking and pulled Charlie to face her. The question burned her throat, but she had to ask it.

“Charlie, was it—was it Carson? At the docks?” She searched his face. Corinne swore that deception was always in the eyebrows, but Ada wasn’t sure what to look for.

Charlie shook his head. She didn’t know if he meant that it wasn’t Carson or that he didn’t know.

“There’s a lot they don’t tell us, Ada,” he said.

“They?”

“Carson. Johnny Dervish. I know it feels like a family sometimes, but it’s not. You can’t think that.”

“What do you mean?”

He broke away from her gaze and stared down the sidewalk for a few seconds. His chapped lips were parted slightly as he gathered his thoughts. The sky today was a pale blue. The sun gave no warmth but glistened on windows and lampposts in sparks of pure white. A couple of blocks away, a trolley rolled along the track, its bell clanging as it passed through the intersection.

“Come out with me today,” Charlie said. He grabbed her hand with a suddenness that startled her.

“Today?” she echoed. “Where?”

“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Don’t you want to get away from this—just for a while?”

Ada hesitated.

“We don’t have to talk about anything important,” Charlie said, rubbing his thumb across her palm. “I just want to be with you, Ada.”

She wanted to be with him too. She wanted everything to be easy again, like it was before the asylum, before the Bengali banker. Maybe it could be, just for tonight.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Corinne ended up spending most of the morning on the phone with her mother, trying to convince her that this unnamed friend Mrs. Wells had never heard of was in dire need of Corinne’s tender ministrations and could not be abandoned for another day at least. In retrospect it was the “tender ministrations” that made the story difficult to believe. Constance Wells knew her daughter too well for that.

With her mother finally appeased enough to not come after her, Corinne spent the rest of the day ranging around the basement of the Cast Iron, picking up books that she could barely concentrate on and pretending to straighten up the common room, though she really just shifted the mess and rearranged the piles. All this occurred under Gabriel’s vaguely amused watch from his seat on the couch. She noticed that he hadn’t moved much since making his way there from the closet with the cot, though he swore that his wound didn’t hurt that badly.

Corinne wanted to go out and do something, but there was nowhere to go. She also felt strangely guilty at the thought of abandoning Gabriel, even though she was under no obligation to tend to him, and he probably wouldn’t have let her if she’d tried.

She had told him about her plan to go to the theater tonight with Ada, mostly because she figured that being able to disapprove of something would aid his convalescing. Gabriel disapproved, but he didn’t bother trying to dissuade her. And when he calmly insisted that he was coming along, she put up only a token amount of resistance. “You probably won’t be able to walk that far anyway. And I hate taxis.”

In reply, Gabriel struggled to his feet. Corinne forced herself not to jump out of her chair to help him. She concentrated on glaring at him in a way that might convey how stupid she thought he was.