“Thank you for the invitation,” I said. “But I should like to speak to my mother first.”
“Of course, of course!” said the Comte. He poured the nearly boiling water into a teapot and placed it on the breakfast tray he had assembled. “Let us go.”
Adrien went in before me. He set the tray on my mother’s lap and murmured to her for a while. I hung back, gazing around the room to keep from looking at her. It was unchanged. Nothing had been packed or removed. Bottles of cosmetics of her own making crowded her vanity, as if she had only just used them. My mother sat by the marble hearth in a high-backed chinoiserie chair, staring into the fire. She did not turn her head when Adrien went out, and I approached.
I stood beside her for several minutes before she looked up and stared at me in silence.
The weeks of her madness had taken a toll on her beauty, though I imagined it might be temporary. Her hair was combed back and hidden under a cap. Her rosy cheeks were sunken and sallow and her eyes were as bloodshot as Dominic’s.
After several moments of silence, I stepped back and sat in the chair beside her.
She poured herself a cup of tea, took a drink, and set it down again. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked quietly.
I knew what she meant, but I did not answer.
“You destroyed the Stone.” She took another sip of tea and stared back into the fire.
“How did you know?” I asked her.
“I knew when I woke that it was gone,” she said. “I could feel it.”
I considered this, and discovered I could feel it, too. Here, in this room, the contrast was particularly striking. There had been an energy here before, a drive that was gone. I had thought it only in my own mind, but my mother had known. Something had gone out of the world with the Stone.
“Alchemy is dead,” said my mother. “And you, my daughter, killed it.”
She gripped her cup more tightly. I watched her fingers, whitening on the porcelain, instead of her face.
“I had to,” I said. “I would have been its slave. And you would have stayed in your madness forever. It would never have released you. This was the only way for you to be free.”
She made a tortured, dry sound that after a moment I recognized as an utterly mirthless laugh.
“Free? Is that what I am now? And what am I free to do, Thea? To languish? To be forgotten? To become like every other helpless woman in this dreadful world of men?”
Her words cut through the layers of shock and denial to the core of my own fears. I didn’t want it to be true, that there was nothing for us now. But I felt it, too.
“You will never be like anyone else, Mother,” I said. “Alchemy or no.”
“If I am not an alchemist, I am nothing,” she said with the finality of a curse.
It grated on me like sand on an open wound. I had said the same thing, but I hated it now. It was all I could do to keep sitting.
“You are Marguerite Hope,” I said. “You are a brilliant scientist. A scholar.”
She didn’t respond, as though what I said was too inconsequential even to be worth denying.
“You are my mother.”
The words hung in the air like the unanswered question they were. She seemed to consider them.
“The mother of the last alchemist,” she muttered after a moment, and from the bitter tone in her voice I knew she found the title as ironic as I did now. “All that work, all that training. I succeeded, in a way. I made you great. And for what?”
I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t look at her.
“I was a good mother for an alchemist,” she said. “But there are no alchemists now. You saw to that. I do not know how to be an ordinary mother to an ordinary girl.”
I wiped my eyes carefully. She wasn’t looking at me. With any luck, she would not notice. I cleared my throat.
“You could learn,” I said. “You are very intelligent.”
She took another drink of tea, then a small bite of her bread. A cool calm descended on me. I remembered it. It was the detachment I had learned to feel when I wanted something from her that she certainly would not give.
“Does your father want to take you back to Oxford?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“Do you want to go?”
“I do not know.”
She looked at me again, but I did not meet her eyes.
“He isn’t like me,” my mother said. “He does not need alchemy to give him a place in this world.”
I nodded. He had his fellowship.
“Does he care for you, Thea, do you think?” my mother asked.
I looked at her then. I might have thought it an insult, my mother asking if my father cared for me. But I saw in her eyes that it wasn’t. She wanted to know.
“He does.”
“I thought he would,” she said. “I was afraid of it, for the longest time. It was why I never told him about you.”
The fire was burning down in the hearth. I went to it and put a log into the embers and watched it catch fire.
“Adrien and I are going to Austria,” said my mother. “But you should go with your father. When we are settled, perhaps you can visit us.”
I nodded. My throat was too thick for speech. I rose, kissed her cheek, and left.
My father waited for me in the hallway. He stepped forward as I stepped out.
“I know you probably wish to go with your mother to Austria,” he began at once. “I know the Comte has more money and more connections even abroad than I could offer you. But—I
