Bethany Hagen - Landry Park

I ordered lunch and waited for Philip Wilder to appear.

After I’d finished a light meal of roasted pheasant and jasmine rice, he finally walked in with Mark Everly and Stuart Lawrence, Tarleton’s brother. I stood, smoothed out my dress, and strode over to him before I could lose my nerve.

“Hello, Philip,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “Would you like a drink?”

Stuart barked out a short, mocking laugh, but Philip looked genuinely surprised. I never talked to him—or to any of them—unless forced to while dancing or by an unfortunate seating arrangement. Mark Everly gave me a small but friendly smile. I tried to smile back, but found myself struggling with the effort.

Philip nodded to Stuart and Mark, then took my elbow and steered me to the bar. He looked a lot like Marianne—he shared the same wide eyes and high cheekbones—although he was much taller and broader. Strange to think that in the twentieth century the Wilders wouldn’t have been let into the country club with their dark skin, or the Lawrences with their ancient roots in Mexico, or even the Thorpes, who’d come from India two centuries ago. In fact, most of us wouldn’t have been let in back in those days. Our tradition of marrying only other gentry had given many of us mixed ethnicities, and so most of the gentry were now dark-haired and olive-skinned, like my mother, which made my own pale skin and eyes all the more unusual.

We sat at the bar and Philip ordered us each a glass of plum wine. Philip kept glancing between the glass and me, as if he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to start the conversation.

“I heard you and Tarleton Lawrence got in a fight a couple weeks ago,” I said after a few awkward minutes.

He shrugged. “We were boxing, and he cheated. He always cheats. And sometimes, I let my temper get the best of me.”

“Would you say you get angry often? Angry enough to hit someone?”

“What kind of question is that?” he asked, the irritation plain in his voice.

I gripped my glass tighter, fighting the urge to run away.

“Only if they deserve it,” he finally answered. “I hit people if they deserve it. And believe me, Tarleton deserved it.”

“Did Cara Westoff deserve it?”

His mouth dropped open, and I felt stunned myself. I couldn’t believe I’d just blurted that out.

“What are you suggesting?” he asked heatedly. “That I hurt Cara?”

I cleared my throat. “Maybe.”

“What the—” he stopped and, looking around, lowered his voice. “Why the hell do you think I would do something like that? Cara is one of my friends. Why would I hurt her?”

“I don’t know. Why would you? Did she refuse you or something? Did she turn you down?”

He gave a quick angry laugh. “Cara refuse me? Hardly.”

“Then what happened? Why would you say that you put Cara in her place and you’d do it again?”

“How do you know I said that?” He frowned. “Are you spying on me or something?”

“I am not spying on you.” I took a drink to hide the shaking in my voice. I wasn’t used to confronting people. “I want to know what happened. I think it’s a mistake to go after the Rootless; I think that they’re innocent. I know Cara’s lying about something to protect the gentry or to protect her reputation. I intend to find the truth and to tell everyone when I do.” I took a deep breath. It was getting easier, bit by painful bit, to push past my quiet nature.

Philip didn’t say anything for a moment. He just swirled the remaining wine in his glass. “I was going to meet Cara at Marianne’s debut that night,” he admitted. “She had seemed interested for a while, like she wanted to date, and then she asked me to meet her in the gallery, which would have been empty during the party. But I’ve got my eye on someone else and didn’t want to meet her. The Lawrence boys thought it would be a great prank to stand her up—you know, embarrass the great Cara who has humiliated pretty much every boy in this city.

“But at the last minute, I lost my nerve. I didn’t want to fool around with her, but I also hated the thought of her waiting alone. So I went up to the gallery to tell her that it wasn’t going to happen, that I wasn’t interested. But she wasn’t there and that’s when I heard the scream.” He drained the last of the wine. “I haven’t told any of the guys that I went to the gallery. I let them think that I had really tried to stand her up. Stuart and Tarleton and Frank, well, you know how nasty they can get. I guess I just got carried away joking around with them.”

A bleak smile. “The ironic thing is that if Cara was in the grove, then she was planning on standing me up, too. Guess it is a good thing I decided not to meet her.”

“Philip, I’m sorry,” I said. “That I thought…”

He shrugged a powerful shoulder. “I suppose that’s my fault. If people think I could be capable of something like that, then I must have done something to deserve it.”

I left him alone then, trying to sort through my thoughts. I had to readjust my impression of Philip. I’d always assumed he was cut from the same cloth as the Lawrence boys, but he wasn’t. He’d been honest and polite, much more like his sister, Marianne, than his friends.

And most importantly, if Philip was innocent, then the perpetrator could still be anyone and I was back to knowing nothing.

That evening, I paced the length of the observatory, watching the coming dusk through the glass roof and walls. Usually I would have been reading or preparing the telescope for the coming night, but at the moment I was unable to focus on a single task and was possessed by a need to move. The sunlight was glinting off the modern skyscrapers downtown near the river, but I turned my eyes south and west, where I could see the windows of Glasshawke, the Glaize estate, reflecting the orange and pinks of the sun.

I stopped at one of the north windows and leaned my head against the glass. There was nothing I could do about Cara’s attack at the moment, but knowing that didn’t make me any less restless. I wanted to be out of the house, out of the endless churn of dances and dinners, away from the tedium that had followed the conclusion of my academy studies. And then I knew exactly what to do.

I walked downstairs and found Father reading in his study. The dusk filtered into the room, the orange light revealing galaxies of dust motes sparkling and swirling the air.

He set his book—an old one, judging by the worn leather cover—on a stack of similarly aged books and stood. “Care for a walk?” he asked, as I’d hoped he would.

“Yes,” I assented with a smile.

After leaving the house, we walked arm in arm down the wide stone steps to the gardens, Father quizzing me about Edmund Burke and different species of plants as we went.

“We have just received several black irises from Israel this morning,” he was saying. “I ordered them to be put in the greenhouse, but our gardener thinks perhaps next year we could attempt to grow them outdoors.”

I nodded, wondering how to phrase my question without seeming abrupt and overeager.

“I really find them quite striking. Jacob Landry is said to have bred black roses using some of the genes from the black iris, but unfortunately, those roses no longer grow on the estate. I wish that we still had some experts in genetics in the city who I could commission to breed them again, but as you know, there are none.” He sighed. “Of course, physics and astronomy are nobler sciences than biology, and so I don’t begrudge the fact that gentlemen limit their studies to these. But what is a man to do when he would like some black roses for his garden?”

“The vaccines and treatments require biology,” I murmured.