20.

The day of my wedding. Springtime. A Renaissance painter had been revived to dramatize the secular April sky. I did not know what I wanted, for it to rain or for it not to rain. In my cream silk wedding gown, I walked through the bramble of palmettos. I wanted to bleed, though I knew no thorn could halt time.

Gabriel was standing on the beach, tiptoeing gently toward a wild horse, whispering to it in a language half human. We had been on Lyra for only a week. It still might have all been a dream. I touched his shoulder rather than say his name, for he was so close to petting the beast. No matter—it shrieked and ran from us.

“You know what I’ll miss?” he said, without turning to me. A gray legion of clouds was marching in from the Atlantic. Suddenly, I longed for a monsoon. “I’ll miss the snow. It doesn’t just fall down, you know. It’s not like the rain. It swims in the wind. Winter’ll never come here. The seasons are why I went north in the first place. Down here, it’s always just nice. Or hot. All the year round.” Gabriel kicked a heap of sand into the air. “But we’re just here for a little while. Like you promised. Enough time for you to get some money out of the divorce without it looking suspicious.”

My throat choked. Mascara began to bleed down my cheeks and, without my noticing, onto my dress.

“The difference between you and me,” Gabriel went on, “is that my heart is quiet. That’s why that horse didn’t run from me. Not till you showed up. My heart’s not afraid. Is your heart quiet, sweet cousin?” He drew me to him and kissed my wet eyelashes.

I reached for him, wrapped my arms around his waist. I adored the hulk of him, the way he felt, like a statue of a man. “This was the biggest mistake,” I said aloud, unsure whether I meant bringing Gabriel to Lyra or marrying Simon before the sun set later that day.

“So don’t go through with it at all,” Gabriel whispered into my ear. “You don’t have to. That’s the biggest secret they don’t tell you when you’re born. You can just say no.”

My heart was not quiet. I could feel its violent drum work against Gabriel’s chest. I shoved him off me suddenly, as if I were the terrified horse. He sighed and lit a cigarette. He was further away from me than he had ever been. “Go, then. I’ll be the one who can’t hold his peace.”

“Don’t hold it,” I yelled, already running away from him.

Ethel was waiting for me at the edge of the garden, her hands pressed together anxiously as if she were my own parent marrying me off, though she was only a child herself.

“We’ll need to fix that,” she said, pointing to the black smear I hadn’t noticed on my dress. Terror consumed me. I had never owned, let alone worn, something so expensive and in front of so many people. All concern for Gabriel and our tenuous plans for the future fell away. Propriety has been my Achilles’ heel. Or perhaps propriety is a toxin of money; we become paralyzed by it.

“Baking soda,” she said, seeing the look in my eye. She shuttled me off to the guest cottage and started working on the dress with a cloth. “It sure is nice you have your cousin working here with Mr. Simon,” she said. “I can’t imagine having none of my family around for my wedding day.” She has always been good at filling the disquieting spaces with conversation.

“Sure is,” I said, but I was shaking beneath her hands.

“Just nerves,” she said. “I had ’em, too.” We’d known each other only a handful of days, not long enough for me to know her intentions, whether she meant to spy on me or be my friend.

“When were you married?” I asked her.

“Three months ago.” Ethel smiled. “Happiest day of this girl’s life.”

I glanced down at the dress; the stain was already fading. “You worked a miracle. Thank you,” I said. “Will you be attending the party?”

“You’re funny, Miss Elle,” she said. “We stay back here in the guest cottage in case you need anything.”

I blushed at already having given my naïveté away.

“That’s all right,” she said. “We have our fun. I reckon more fun. Now try and smile a little. You’re about to be the richest girl on Lyra.”


It never did rain. The night I married Simon there were billions of stars in the sky, and in the coming years, millions of people would be shaved and stripped and gassed, and men would unleash a nightmare by splitting an atom in two, and the soul of the world would be forever desecrated beneath that blast.

That day, Simon walked among our guests like a king. But the Clarkes were there shadowing him. They have always been lying in wait.

When Simon was not spinning me around and dipping me over to the romantic swing band gathered on the lawn, I sat alone at our two-person dining table, a frail speck. My flesh felt made of snow. There were stars and songs and laughter and the fizzle of champagne, platters of oysters and prawns, a feast of color and liquor, even fireworks in the end, but Gabriel never appeared. Gabriel had held his peace. I hunted all night for his face among the guests. I never stopped. The drunker I became, the more my propriety faded. I fantasized him coming for me, atop one of those wild white horses, and taking me away. But all that night he was hunkered down with the rest of the help in the guest cottage, sipping on a stolen bottle of Scotch, nourishing himself on the blue legend that would ultimately undo us all.

I awoke to the first pinch of sunlight on the horizon. Simon was asleep on the floor of our wedding chamber, still in his suit, snoring off the booze. I remained in my slip in our wide and unsullied bed. From the window I heard the chatter of a few remaining guests, saying their farewells in the loud tenor of drunks. Among them was the booming, sonorous voice I later knew as Elijah’s: “Now, Gabriel, don’t you go out there hunting that blue and shiny! I know the ocean better than anyone on this island, and I been looking for it since I was a boy and still seen no sight of it. Just get your drunk self to bed!”