A Golden Fury

by Samantha Cohoe

  I stepped out of the carriage and looked at the beautiful house I had once thought of as home. Summer in Normandy was as splendid as ever. This was the kind of scene that seemed designed to invoke pleasant nostalgia. But all my fond memories here were of Will and alchemy. The scent of the wildflowers turned my stomach.

  “It’s a castle.” Dominic’s eyes were wide with wonder. “I didn’t know you lived in a castle.”

  “It’s only a country house,” said my father. “And not a very large one.”

  I knocked on the doors. There was no answer. I knocked again.

  The Comte didn’t keep many servants, but there should have been someone to come to the door.

  “Do you think they left?” asked my father.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps they had to go…”

  “There have been reports in the newspapers of French nobles leaving—”

  The door opened, and the Comte himself stood before us.

  I stared. I had never seen him so informally dressed before, even in the dead of night when we both ran in our dressing gowns to my mother’s sickbed. His hair was unpowdered, uncurled, and pulled back with a simple leather thong. He wore a gray shirt so plain and workmanlike that I could hardly believe it belonged to him.

  “Thea!” he exclaimed. He threw his arms around me and began talking rapidly in French.

  “Mon dieu, Thea, how did you know? How could you know she was awake when it was only last week—” He pulled back and broke off, staring at my father and Dominic, then back at me. “But you cannot be here! What are you doing here, Thea! It is not safe! But come in, come in.”

  We all entered, and the Comte led us past the grand parlor and through the dining room into the kitchen. Every room we passed was half emptied or more, and the furniture that remained was covered in white sheets. Even the kitchen appeared depleted, with the absence of the cook and kitchen maid and the baskets of produce and baguettes they brought in every morning.

  There was a wooden table in the center of the kitchen, and Adrien motioned us to sit.

  “She is well—quite well, Thea,” Adrien said as he bustled about. He put a kettle on the stove and cut some round peasant bread. “I was just making her some breakfast. She said she was hungry. Hungry, Thea! Can you imagine!”

  He offered us bread and butter from a blue porcelain crock. We all helped ourselves.

  “You must be Thea’s father … Professor Vellacott, yes?” Adrien asked my father. “It is good to meet you. But—truly, you will have to see your mother and leave at once. I myself will be going as soon as Marguerite is strong enough to travel.”

  “You’re leaving?” I asked. “But where are you going?”

  “To Austria. It is all arranged. I have cousins there, you know, and some capital.” Adrien handed Dominic a piece of bread, then stared like he hadn’t noticed him before. “Who is this? A servant?”

  I was grateful Dominic did not speak French. “No, no,” I said. “He is a friend. His name is Dominic. A good and worthy man. But … he cannot go back to England. There was a misunderstanding, and…”

  I looked between Adrien and Dominic for a moment. There was skepticism on the Comte’s face. Now was not the best time to spring my plan on him, perhaps, but from the haste with which the Comte moved and spoke, time seemed to be in short supply.

  “I hoped he could stay with you, Adrien, but if you’re going, then I hope he can go with you.”

  The Comte’s face clouded, but I pressed on.

  “He wants to be a doctor,” I said. “I hoped you could sponsor his studies, as a favor to me. Please, Adrien.”

  The Comte turned a frank, assessing stare on Dominic.

  “Tu ne parles pas Français,” he said to him. “Sprichst du Deutsch?”

  Dominic shook his head.

  “He can learn,” I said quickly. “He’s very intelligent.”

  “He is,” my father said. “He was my apprentice in Oxford. He would make a good doctor. If you can take him, make the introductions for him, then I will pay his way.”

  I looked at my father in surprise, and then wondered at myself. It should no longer surprise me when my father did the decent thing. I had seen it enough times now to expect nothing less. I smiled at him, and he smiled back with a trace of sadness.

  “If you wish it, Thea, then I cannot say no,” said the Comte. “But what about you, ma chérie? I hope you will come with us as well.”

  “Oh,” I said. Strange as it seems, I had not given a moment’s thought to where I would go after I saw my mother. I felt as though my future had gone blank when I destroyed the Stone, and now I was simply going about tying up the loose ends before disappearing with it. My father and the Comte both looked at me in mute appeal. My father looked away first, lowering his eyes. There was faint hope in them, tinged with fear of disappointment. Seeing it, I realized for the first time: my father truly hoped I would go back to Oxford with him. He feared that I would not.

  “Thank you for the invitation,” I said. “But I should like to speak to my mother first.”

  “Of course, of course!” said the Comte. He poured the nearly boiling water into a teapot and placed it on the breakfast tray he had assembled. “Let us go.”

  * * *

  Adrien went in before me. He set the tray on my mother’s lap and murmured to her for a while. I hung back, gazing around the room to keep from looking at her. It was unchanged. Nothing had been packed or removed. Bottles of cosmetics of her own making crowded her vanity, as if she had only just used them. My mother sat by the marble hearth in a high-backed chinoiserie chair, staring into the fire. She did not turn her head when Adrien went out, and I approached.

  I stood beside her for several minutes before she looked up and stared at me in silence.

  The weeks of her madness had taken a toll on her beauty, though I imagined it might be temporary. Her hair was combed back and hidden under a cap. Her rosy cheeks were sunken and sallow and her eyes were as bloodshot as Dominic’s.

  After several moments of silence, I stepped back and sat in the chair beside her.

  She poured herself a cup of tea, took a drink, and set it down again. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked quietly.

  I knew what she meant, but I did not answer.

  “You destroyed the Stone.” She took another sip of tea and stared back into the fire.

  “How did you know?” I asked her.

  “I knew when I woke that it was gone,” she said. “I could feel it.”

  I considered this, and discovered I could feel it, too. Here, in this room, the contrast was particularly striking. There had been an energy here before, a drive that was gone. I had thought it only in my own mind, but my mother had known. Something had gone out of the world with the Stone.

  “Alchemy is dead,” said my mother. “And you, my daughter, killed it.”

  She gripped her cup more tightly. I watched her fingers, whitening on the porcelain, instead of her face.

  “I had to,” I said. “I would have been its slave. And you would have stayed in your madness forever. It would never have released you. This was the only way for you to be free.”

  She made a tortured, dry sound that after a moment I recognized as an utterly mirthless laugh.

  “Free? Is that what I am now? And what am I free to do, Thea? To languish? To be forgotten? To become like every other helpless woman in this dreadful world of men?”

  Her words cut through the layers of shock and denial to the core of my own fears. I didn’t want it to be true, that there was nothing for us now. But I felt it, too.

  “You will never be like anyone else, Mother,” I said. “Alchemy or no.”

  “If I am not an alchemist, I am nothing,” she said with the finality of a curse.

  It grated on me like sand on an open wound. I had said the same thing, but I hated it now. It was all I could do to keep sitting.

  “You are Marguerite Hope,” I said. “You are a brilliant scientist.
A scholar.”

  She didn’t respond, as though what I said was too inconsequential even to be worth denying.

  “You are my mother.”

  The words hung in the air like the unanswered question they were. She seemed to consider them.

  “The mother of the last alchemist,” she muttered after a moment, and from the bitter tone in her voice I knew she found the title as ironic as I did now. “All that work, all that training. I succeeded, in a way. I made you great. And for what?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t look at her.

  “I was a good mother for an alchemist,” she said. “But there are no alchemists now. You saw to that. I do not know how to be an ordinary mother to an ordinary girl.”

  I wiped my eyes carefully. She wasn’t looking at me. With any luck, she would not notice. I cleared my throat.

  “You could learn,” I said. “You are very intelligent.”

  She took another drink of tea, then a small bite of her bread. A cool calm descended on me. I remembered it. It was the detachment I had learned to feel when I wanted something from her that she certainly would not give.

  “Does your father want to take you back to Oxford?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “I do not know.”

  She looked at me again, but I did not meet her eyes.

  “He isn’t like me,” my mother said. “He does not need alchemy to give him a place in this world.”

  I nodded. He had his fellowship.

  “Does he care for you, Thea, do you think?” my mother asked.

  I looked at her then. I might have thought it an insult, my mother asking if my father cared for me. But I saw in her eyes that it wasn’t. She wanted to know.

  “He does.”

  “I thought he would,” she said. “I was afraid of it, for the longest time. It was why I never told him about you.”

  The fire was burning down in the hearth. I went to it and put a log into the embers and watched it catch fire.

  “Adrien and I are going to Austria,” said my mother. “But you should go with your father. When we are settled, perhaps you can visit us.”

  I nodded. My throat was too thick for speech. I rose, kissed her cheek, and left.

  * * *

  My father waited for me in the hallway. He stepped forward as I stepped out.

  “I know you probably wish to go with your mother to Austria,” he began at once. “I know the Comte has more money and more connections even abroad than I could offer you. But—I realized I had not said it—I do hope you will come back with me to Oxford, Thea. I would so like to be your father.” He winced, then shook his head. “That isn’t quite what I meant to say—”

  A hideous noise escaped from my throat. It was a sob, but it might have been vomit from the mortifying sound. I clapped my hands over my mouth and turned aside, shaking, desperately blinking back tears and swallowing down weeping. My father put a hand on my shoulder and said something I could not hear over the noise of my efforts not to fall apart. When I could, I looked at him.

  “Thank you, Father,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’d like to go with you.”

  A smile lit his face like daybreak. I nearly burst into tears again at the sight of his happiness. It was more than I had expected him to feel at the prospect of so much time to spend with me.

  “Good, good!” he said. He took my arm, and we walked back toward the kitchen. “I was thinking I could give you private chymistry lessons, if you like. It’s not as thrilling as alchemy, of course, but you have such a gift for it, and there is much good work to be done in the field. Or perhaps philology? I know several scholars who would be happy to work with someone of your talents. Alchemy isn’t the only field where you could make a contribution, Thea.”

  “Make a contribution,” I said. I liked the sound of that. It was the sort of thing dependable people with good hearts and clear minds did. The sort of thing Dominic would do.

  “Oh, I know it doesn’t sound very exciting—not compared to, well…”

  “No, I’d like that,” I said.

  We walked back toward the kitchen, but very slowly. My father kept glancing at me, as if trying to guess my thoughts from the look on my face. I nearly asked him what he had gathered, so unsure was I of what was occurring in my own heart. It felt pitifully weak, like a newly hatched bird, featherless and blind. So much of what my heart had long loved had been uprooted. The only things left were young and tender. They were fresh green sprouts in newly turned earth, where before there had been weeds.

  I could salt the earth, as Mother did. Refuse to tend new loves when the old had failed.

  But I would not. They would grow. I would see to it.

  “I don’t know how to be a daughter, you know,” I said to my father. “But I would like to learn.”

  “We will learn together,” he said.

  And I believed him.

  * * *

  Dominic wasn’t in the kitchen. I went to look for him outside and found him sitting in the sunshine by the stream, sinking his fingers into the grass, his eyes closed.

  “It’s such relief,” he said. “Like coming back from hell.”

  I sat beside him. I turned my face to the sun and closed my eyes as well.

  It was a relief, when I let myself feel it. The torments were over. The task was done. Nothing hung over me now, except the rest of my life.

  “Your father says the Comte will take me to Austria. Sponsor my medical training.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You will have to learn German.”

  “Will you come with us?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He looked at me then. “You’re going with your father.”

  “I am taking your advice. You kept telling me to give him a chance.”

  Dominic smiled. “I suppose that’s true.”

  The stream was fast moving and deep with summer rain, yet clear enough that we could see straight to the bottom. Fish swept past. One jumped through the surface and fell back again with a small splash. The sunlight caught the rippling surface and gleamed like jewels.

  It was such a beautiful day.

  “I shall write to you,” I said. “And I shall visit.”

  “Good,” said Dominic. “Thank you. I hope—”

  He broke off, then turned his face toward the sun again. I knew what he hoped. It was what I hoped for him. The sunlight, the babble of the stream, the summer air was full of what we hoped for each other.

  “I know,” I said. I thought of my father and the house he would find for us to live in as a family. I thought of the work I would do, and the work Dominic would do across the sea. There had to be a place in the world for someone like Dominic. It was a test of the world, more than a test of him. “So do I.”

  Dominic nodded, then stood.

  “Take care of my mother, if you can,” he said. “I’ll do what I can for yours.”

  I laughed a little at this as I rose to my feet, and so did he.

  “I think I have the better end of that bargain,” I said.

  “She can’t be all bad.” He shrugged and turned to me. “She raised you.”

  And today, with the sun on my face and a new chance at hope in my heart, I could let myself believe even that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When you’re a practical person whose insubordinate heart gives you a highly impractical dream, it takes a lot of people believing in you to make it happen. I am incredibly lucky to have those people in my life and it’s because of them that A Golden Fury exists. Here are my heartfelt thanks to you all, in no particular order:

  To Caleb, thank you for not only supporting me, but also for always assuring me that you wouldn’t have if you weren’t sure my writing was really good. You weren’t nearly so enthusiastic when I wanted to get into sewing, for instance. To Leslie Weinzettel, my first friend and also my first “reader,” thank you for listening to my dumb Tolkien-rip-off stories so
avidly when we were kids. Good thing my writing and your taste have improved since then! To Dad, for all the very early writing advice, some of which I don’t ignore! And for the beta reads and encouragement. To Micaela, for liking this book enough to read it more than once, and Matt and Mom, who will read it one day, perhaps. Love you guys.

  To my phenomenal agent, Bridget Smith, and the team at JABberwocky Literary Agency. You knew what this book needed and, once you pointed it out, I did, too. You said this would be a great debut, and look! You were right. I never stop being thankful to have you on my team.

  To my wonderful, talented, dedicated editor, Jennie Conway. I’m so honored that you loved my book enough to make it your first young adult title. Together we’ve made it something I’m incredibly proud of. There’s no editor I’d rather have shepherding my books.

  To Coral Jenrette, thank you for the many, MANY insightful critiques, for always being ready to console me after every setback and celebrate with me at every success. To Derek Reiner, thank you for your refreshingly bleak outlook on publishing, your alchemical expertise, and your ever-encouraging feedback. Sorry about the migraines you have suffered on behalf of my manuscripts. I hope they were worth it. To my Critters: Kellye Crocker, Oz Spies, Lisa Hernbloom, Derek, and Coral. You make my writing and my life so much better. To Catherine Egan, my first critique partner. The first time I really believed I was a good writer was when you loved Heirs. I wish we still had hours and hours to stand around talking about books and Buffy while our babies tired each other out.

  To DJ DeSmyter, Meghan Harrington, Melanie Sanders, Chrisinda Lynch, and the entire team at Wednesday Books. You are so, so good at what you do, and I’m incredibly grateful to benefit from it. To Kerri Resnick, design wizard, for my BEAUTIFUL cover. I wanted so badly to love it, and thanks to you, I do.

  To Shannon Doleski, Prerna Pickett, and Jenny Elder Moke. Thank God my impractical dream came true, because it meant I got to meet you pervs. You’ve made my whole debut year. To #TeamB, thanks for all the moral support and advice. You are my kind of people, to a woman.