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“My father was worn,” I said. “My mother was sad.”

His voice lowered to a whisper. The candle on the desk finally sputtered out. “Were they kind to you?” he asked tentatively, and the tenderness with which he said it did not make it feel like so big an invasion.

“Sometimes,” I murmured. “Sometimes they were too wrapped up in their troubles to remember me at all.”

He became so quiet that I opened my eyes, missing the sound of his voice. I couldn’t see him well in the dark, just the familiar outline of him.The movement of his eyelids. “But you were young,” he reminded me. “Very young when they died.”

I tried not to tense. “Yes. I was young.”

“And it must have been a difficult life for them. There aren’t many who would endorse a marriage between an Artisan and a Crafter.”

I said nothing. I didn’t need to widen the divide between him and me. Between myself and everyone.

“Sommerland just declared intentions for their first strike, actually,” Theo continued. His hand had stopped its hypnotic ministrations. “The sheep farmers and wool millers are all walking out at the blow of the whistle in two days. Bloody Miners Union.” I saw his head shake in the dark.

My lips pressed tightly together. “You think them fools.” It wasn’t a question.

“My father says you can’t strong-arm a governing house to increase wages by simply walking out. After all, we have Tailors! We have Smiths and Masons. If the Crafters won’t pick up their tools, the Artisans will use their mediums. The millers and farmers of Sommerland will soon see how irrelevant they are.”

“Irrelevant,” I repeated. It rolled off my tongue like a tidal wave. “Do you believe Crafters irrelevant?”

“Of course not,” he laughed. “Nor does my father, or the House of Lords, by the way. I only mean to point out how easily the Crafters will be persuaded, by merely giving them the illusion that they can be easily replaced.”

“There’s only one Artisan for every ten Craftsmen,” I reminded him. “Surely, they won’t be so easily duped.”

“I think Tanner knows how persuasive hunger will be when the wages stop altogether. Sommerland has a lot of children who will go without food for as long as the strike holds.”

“And the House of Lords will be in their stately homes, with their cooks bringing five courses each evening.”

Tension coalesced in the air, as it tended to where Theo’s father wasconcerned. Lord Shop was determined for Theo to follow in his political footsteps, and yet Theo often seemed to me as though he wanted to resist. He would never say so aloud. It was only ever evident in the tightening of his lips, or the way his eyes hardened at his father’s mention. And his father was mentioned quite a bit. It was a large part of Theo’s popularity among our peers.

“Speaking of dinner, father asked if you would join us this weekend?”

I grimaced. I’d already declined the last two invitations. Recently, the lord had taken a keen interest in me. I wondered, and not for the first time, what Theo’s father would do if he knew where I truly came from.

“For what it’s worth, Iwouldlike to have you there this weekend at dinner. It’ll be much less insufferable with you in the room.”

I peered up at him, but it was too dark to see if he meant it. He pulled me tighter to his chest, and I was floating again, lighter than oxygen. His hands grazed the curve of my spine.

“Come with me,” he said, then pressed his mouth to mine.

We stayed that way for a while, his lips taking hostage of my cheeks and throat. Eventually my nightdress was swarmed above my hips and the ribbon at my bust had come undone, and I was pieces of airborne dust, not really of any substance at all.

CHAPTER 28NINA

In the first year of unrest, I’d hocked Theo’s emerald necklace to a boatman in Baymouth. It had bought me canal passage on a tightly packed long rig. Sometimes I wondered where that emerald necklace had ended up.

On the highest floor of Colson & Sons, Theo followed me inside room fifteen and closed the door behind him.

The two of us stood a foot apart, a pipe moaned at the wall, the cherry blossoms distended, and weak orange light filtered through the window.

“Clarke,” he said. The name clicked off the roof of his mouth, as it always had.

He was a little taller, his jaw a little darker—shadowed in week-old growth. His edges weren’t as sharp, the perfectly tailored robes with their severe lapels now gone. I realized that I’d hardly ever seen him without them.

I noticed his hair did not wave so deliberately. It seemed a little overgrown. He wore suspenders and an undershirt tucked into faded trousers. There was a small cut beneath his left eye, a bandage around his wrist. If he weren’t otherwise wholly familiar, I might mistake him for a Crafter.

“Theo,” I said again, my hands tightly gripped behind my back. What else to say to the man you once loved? “You’re here.”