A Golden Fury

differently, but…” He sighed. “I have procured you a passport to leave France—”
“I will not go! If I leave now I might not be able to come back! I have a British name—”
“Precisely, Thea, you are a British subject. The National Convention grows more warlike by the day. You don’t know how dangerous the situation has become. Even I—” He paused, then shook his head. “You must go while you still can. If Britain declares war, you could be arrested.”
I stared at my mother, limp on the ground with her mouth open. If the Comte was so certain I was in danger here, perhaps it really was why she had wanted to send me away, not simply to be rid of me. A welt blossomed on her forehead where I had hit her. My stomach cramped with guilt.
“You’ll go to Oxford,” said the Comte. “To your father.”
I knew very little about my father. Only that he and my mother had made their first forays into alchemy together when they were very young in England, and that now he was a respectable fellow at Oxford. This was quite a bit more than he knew about me. My mother had never even told him of my existence. She did not wish to share me with him.
“Won’t that come as rather a shock to him?”
“He will recover. He could hardly refuse to take you in under the circumstances.” This was very little reassurance, and my face must have shown it. The Comte’s voice changed. “Any man would be proud to have you as his daughter, Thea. If he has half your wit, he will see that.”
The Comte looked at me with strangely bright eyes, and it occurred to me that he might cry. Mother often complained of Adrien’s excessive displays of feeling. Though, to be truthful, the occasion did seem to call for some emotion. Still, I looked away.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
Even if my father turned out not to have half my wit, he was an alchemist. He would have a laboratory. I could work as well there as here, and with no danger of the National Convention interrupting, either to arrest me as a British spy or to make me work on their weapons. I would make the Stone. Then, I could bring it back to heal my mother. I looked down at her limp form. I would succeed in all we had ever dreamed of doing, and then save her from herself. She couldn’t deny that I was a worthy alchemist in my own right, then. Not when I had succeeded without her and given her sanity back to her in the process. Everything would change between us. It would have to.
Just imagining it was as satisfying to me as anything I had ever done.
In any case, I could do my mother no good here.
England had always loomed in the background of my life. I’d been born there. My father was there. I would never have admitted it to my mother, but I did want to meet him.
And he wasn’t the only one I wished to see in England.
I helped the Comte carry my mother back to her room, and then took to mine.
I went to my morning table and took out yet another sheet of paper. Finally, I knew what to write to him.
Dear Will,
My mother has gone mad. I am coming to England now, because of the war. I will stay with my father. He does not know I was ever born. I miss you. Perhaps we will see each other soon.
And perhaps we would.

4
I watched the Oxfordshire countryside roll by from the window of my coach. Thus far, I was not at all impressed with the English spring. I had left Normandy at its best, the air sweet with apple blossoms and bright with fresh grass and sunshine. Here, the sun hid resolutely behind low-lying clouds, and all you could smell of spring was the musk of recent rain. Everything from the gray sky to the damp taffeta strings of my bonnet promised disappointment.
I had left France only two weeks ago. When my mother woke, and remained as mad and violent as the night of her attack, what was left of my hesitation vanished. Little as Adrien and the doctor could do for her, I could do even less. She was violent and malevolent as a demon, and the sight of her made me wild myself, as though I could not possibly get far enough away from her. Her animal screaming echoed in every corner of the chateau. I packed in haste and did as the Comte had arranged. And though the English would believe I ran from the dangers of the Revolution and war, in truth it was my mother and her madness I fled.
My stomach twisted when I thought of it, and I could not stop myself from thinking of it, no matter how I tried. Fear had taken root inside me, and guilt with it. I knew that the fear was as much for myself as for my mother, perhaps more. The doctor had said these things ran in families, especially in females. She overexcited herself, he said, with her dreams and her experiments. And if one has a family tendency to such imbalances …
I’d dismissed him at the time. He spoke as if total madness were a natural result of a woman pursuing rigorous scientific endeavors, as if he had seen it many times before. He hadn’t. My mother’s change was utterly strange, utterly uncanny. This was no common madness, not something for him to sigh over as if she could have prevented it only by listening to him. And yet, something had caused it. And I could not deny that madness might be a family trait, as I knew nothing at all of my mother’s family. The more I pushed my fear down, the more it grew. I could think of nothing worse than to become what my