A Golden Fury

Thea,” I said. Not quite everyone. Thea meant “goddess,” and Will had felt the need to come up with another name for me.
Certainly you’re a goddess, he had said. But you intimidate me enough without that particular reminder.
“Thea. You don’t look like her.” He was staring now, pretense abandoned. “If my memory serves me,” he added, as an unconvincing afterthought.
People often said that, and it was not a compliment. My mother was everyone’s idea of the perfect beauty. Petite, porcelain blond, and small-featured. I was her opposite: too tall, with wild dark hair, a long nose, and high color.
“Mother always said I looked like my father.”
And that had never been a compliment, either, though now that he was before me I didn’t mind it so much. Whatever else he might be, Vellacott was without doubt a handsome man.
“Your father,” he repeated, and cleared his throat. “Ah. Yes. A Frenchman, I suppose?”
I shook my head slowly, and his hopeful look died.
“How—how old are you?”
“Seventeen.” I looked him straight in the eye. He might be ashamed, but I refused to be. “My birthday is June the tenth, 1775.”
Vellacott set down his cup very slowly.
“This is a jest of Meg’s, I think,” he said with forced calm. “She found a dark-haired girl of the right age—”
My jaw tightened as I swallowed my anger.
“No,” I said.
“But she said—she said she lost it—”
Vellacott went very red, then very white, realizing, perhaps, that he was looking at it. He stood, his chair scraping the bare wood floor loudly, and crossed to the window. He gripped the sill, then turned back to me. He made a striking figure, tall and slim, with a profile well suited to dramatic poses. I assumed he was aware of this.
“This couldn’t have come at a worse time,” he groaned, and put a hand to his high, pale forehead. “You cannot stay here, Miss Hope. I’m terribly sorry, but it is simply impossible! If anyone knew—”
I couldn’t look at him anymore. I took a sip of my tea and swallowed resolutely, though my throat was attempting to close.
“I’m close, very close to winning recognition for the official study of alchemy here,” he said, with a note of pleading now. “I have a contract, you know, with the Royal Navy. To do what your mother did for King Louis! And a very distinguished alchemist recently arrived, one who has his own department of alchemy at the University of Bologna! We are very close to making a discovery that could prove to everyone— We could have a whole department. A department of alchemy at Oxford, Miss Hope, the first in England!”
I eyed my cup but couldn’t help nodding. I understood the significance perfectly. To most scholars in the academies and societies, we were counterfeiters, charlatans, or fools. Things had only grown worse in recent years, as scholars sought more and more to purge their fields of superstitions and unsupported traditions. Many scientists took the continued existence of alchemy as an offense against their discipline. The support of an institution of Oxford’s significance would be an enormous change—but not for me. I thought of the forbidding walls that I had been so briefly and begrudgingly allowed to enter. It was painfully clear to me that even if alchemy were allowed to make its home there, I would not be.
“The scandal this would cause! It’s impossible— Your mother ought to know that much! What was she thinking of? Why did she send you?”
“She did not send me.” My voice was brittle with cold. “And as for what she is thinking, I cannot tell you, for she has gone entirely mad.”
“Mad?” My father turned to me, his pale face creasing with sudden, genuine concern. “Meg? What you do mean, mad?”
“Mad,” I repeated. “Mad as mad can be. Violent. Her reason has deserted her. She doesn’t know herself, or anyone else.”
Vellacott’s mouth worked some inaudible word as he stared at me. He lowered himself back into his chair, then in the same movement dropped his head into his hands.
“My God,” he said after a moment. “My God.”
Far from softening me toward him, this show of emotion irritated me. He had not seen her in seventeen years. He had not sought her out or showed concern for her welfare. He hadn’t been there when the madness took her. And it had not been him she tried to kill.
“Where is she now?” he finally asked.
“In Normandy, near Honfleur,” I said. “Her patron is caring for her. She could not be moved.”
“But—there must be somewhere else you can go—some relative—”
“Surely you know my mother is an orphan,” I said. “If I have other relatives, you will have to tell me who they are. I do not know them.”
I stared coldly while my father’s mouth hung open, trembling with failed speech, and considered my options. There were no relatives, true, but there was somewhere else I could go, although not with any sort of propriety. I had Will’s letter in my pocket, with his latest address. My cheeks burned at the thought of showing up at his doorstep unannounced and unchaperoned. I could not bear to imagine what he would think it meant, what anyone would think it meant. And yet I wasn’t sure I could bear to stay here with my disappointing father. My mother had been right about him. That was almost the worst part.
Still, he had a laboratory.
“Perhaps you do not know that my mother continued to pursue alchemy after she left England.”
“Of course. Everyone heard of her contract with King Louis.” He waved his hand. “The armor.”
I nodded. The armor was what made Mother’s reputation. Astonishingly light yet strong and impervious to rust. It was the sort of thing monarchs hoped alchemists would make, when they weren’t calling us charlatans and passing laws against us. The armor gave her enough success that she could afford to scorn that kind of work now. We had focused all our energies on the Philosopher’s Stone for several years.
“Yes, the armor. I