The Inquisitor's Apprentice

only thing she cares about is being rich and beautiful and in control. She doesn’t even have time for her own daughter unless it makes her look good in front of her rich friends. So you tell me, Sacha Kessler, why would she waste her time on you?”

Sacha opened his mouth to return her insult in kind — but then he saw something in her face that made him swallow his anger. It wasn’t snobbishness that had made Lily sneak him into her house, he realized. It was shame. Lily Astral was ashamed of her own mother. So ashamed that she had been just as desperate to keep Sacha from meeting Mrs. Astral as Sacha was to keep Lily from knowing he lived in the Hester Street tenements.

A tickling little mouse of a thought scampered through his mind. He wasn’t ashamed of his parents, it whispered to him. Now that the beautiful Maleficia wasn’t in front of him, he could see that her charming small talk had mostly been mean-spirited gossip. Sacha’s hardworking father had a dignity that Mrs. Astral would never match, for all her jewels and money. And as for Sacha’s mother, the most embarrassing thing she’d do if she ever met Lily was stuff fattening food down her throat and shrei about how skinny she was. So if Lily was brave enough to let Sacha meet the mother she was so ashamed of, then surely he could be brave enough to tell her that he lived in the tenements?

But somehow he couldn’t. In fact, knowing how Lily felt about her mother made it even harder. And he knew why, too, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself. Lily wouldn’t despise his family for being poor. She’d do worse than despise them. She’d feel sorry for them. She’d want to help them. And the last thing on earth Sacha wanted was Lily Astral’s charity.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. Up the River

WOLF’S INQUIRIES at the Patent Office must have paid off, because a few days later he received a thick envelope by special courier from Washington, vanished into his office to read it — and then abruptly announced that they were off to see a Mr. Worley in Ossining.

“Ossining?” Lily said with a predatory gleam in her eye. “You mean he’s been sent up the river? We’re going to visit him in the slammer?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Wolf said mildly. “But he only lives there. Believe it or not, lots of perfectly innocent people do.”

“How vexing of them!”

“Quite.” Wolf checked his watch. “We can just make the one twenty train if we leave now.”

As he hurried along behind Wolf, Sacha couldn’t help marveling at his new life. Who would have imagined a boy from Hester Street would be climbing onto a real train with a ticket in his hand that cost more than all the clothes he owned put together, in the company of an NYPD Inquisitor and a high-society debutante? He glanced at Lily, but she seemed to think that taking a real honest-to-goodness train was nothing at all out of the ordinary. He imitated her blase expression and told himself he’d better not stare too much.

But of course that was impossible. From the minute they stepped into the lofty waiting room of Grand Central Station, Sacha was confronted with one wonder after another. Grand Central’s magnificent glass-roofed train shed rivaled the Eiffel Tower as one of the engineering marvels of the age. But in New York the pace of progress was so frenetic that it was already considered out of date — and a public safety hazard to boot. It had been slated for demolition for years, in fact, and the only reason it was still standing was that Cornelius Vanderbilk and Tammany Hall were fighting over who would get the lion’s share of the bribes that needed to be paid before construction could begin.

Sacha had read that Vanderbilk planned to fund the construction (and the bribes) by burying the train tracks and building an entirely new street on top of them. It was supposed to be called Park Avenue — probably in the hopes that people would forget it was sitting on top of a train yard — and the boosters and speculators were hard at work convincing people to buy, buy, buy. But looking out the window at the blighted wasteland of slaughterhouses and shantytowns that was the Upper East Side, Sacha couldn’t believe any decent person would ever want to live here.

Soon there were better things to look at, though. they passed the polo grounds, where the Yankees played. Morning practice had already begun, and Lily glued her nose to the window next to Sacha while they tried to spot their favorite players.

“I guess you go to games all the time,” he said wistfully.

“Only stupid, boring polo,” she sighed disgustedly. “My mother disapproves of letting young ladies watch baseball.”

Then the polo grounds were behind them and the train was launching itself off Manhattan’s northern summit and rattling across the soaring trestles to the mainland. Sacha had thought they were going fast before, but now they were fairly flying. They shot along the rails mere feet above the glittering sweep of the Hudson River. They were now farther north than Sacha had ever been. He thought about how the Hester Street housewives called the Bowery “America,” even though it was only a few blocks from home. But this really was America. and it seemed to go on forever. Sacha had never seen so much water. Or such cliffs. Or a sky so vast that the flocking seagulls seemed lost in its blue infinity.

Wolf tapped him on the shoulder. “Have a look at this.”

He was pulling a thick sheaf of papers out of his pocket. They were freshly pulled blueprints; Sacha could see the cyanotype-blue ink staining Wolf’s fingertips as he handled them. Wolf spread the pages out on the train seat so Sacha and Lily could see them.

They were from the Patent Office — stamped reproductions of the technical drawings that Thomas Worley had originally submitted to obtain the patent on his Soul Catcher. And the device shown in page after page of detailed drawings was identical in almost every point to Edison’s etherograph.

“So Edison stole the etherograph from Worley?” Lily asked.

“Not stole, bought.”

“But shouldn’t he give him credit, then? And why would he do that anyway? Just so he could say it was his idea and people would think he was a great inventor?”

Wolf shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe there really is some difference between the two machines that we don’t understand yet. That’s why I need to talk to Worley.”

Wolf put the drawings away, looking thoughtful, and they passed the rest of the train ride in silence. Wolf had bought a whole collection of morning papers — in between his usual contributions to New York’s panhandling population — and he was reading them with the occasional raised eyebrow or snort of amusement. Lily had curled up in one corner of their compartment and gone to sleep. And Sacha was free to stare out the window to his heart’s content.

He couldn’t get over how green everything was, or the way the endless forest seemed to roll to the horizon in every direction. People must live here, but he couldn’t see any sign of them beyond the occasional distant road or church steeple. How could there be so much empty space in the world? And this was just one small corner of New York State, which was just one small corner of the United States! It was hard to understand why people got so upset about immigrants. It looked to Sacha like you could move all of Italy, Ireland, and Russia put together into the Hudson River valley and no one would even notice the difference.

But of course it wasn’t lack of space that made so many Americans hate immigrants the way they did. And even the beautiful scenery couldn’t keep Sacha from brooding over the dybbuk. What would Inquisitor Wolf do if Sacha told him about it? Would he help? Could he help? Or would the Inquisitors just arrest every Kessler in sight and let a jury of “real” Americans sort the guilty from the innocent?

Lily woke up just as they passed Sing Sing prison and started asking Wolf a bunch of ridiculous questions: Could his Inquisitor’s badge get him in there? (It could.) How many criminals had he personally sent there? (Too many.) And had any of them been put to death in Thomas Edison’s electric chair? (If they had, he wasn’t saying.)

Sacha looked up at the grim gray walls with their jagged crowns of barbed wire and shuddered. If Wolf’s investigation took an unlucky turn, it was all too possible that his grandfather could end up in this awful place. A