Mrs. Breen sighed. “Do you never think of it?”
“Think of what?”
She hesitated, uncertain. Sophie? Coketown? Both? At last, she said, “I wonder if they reproach me for my effrontery.”
“Your effrontery?”
“In daring to take a place at their table.”
“You were charming, dear.”
“Charm is insufficient, Walter. I have the sweat and grime of Coketown upon my hands.”
“Your grandfather had the sweat and grime of Coketown upon his hands. You are unbesmirched, my dear.”
“Yet some would argue that my rank is insufficient to partake of ensouled flesh.”
“You share my rank now,” Mr. Breen said.
But what of the stripling she had feasted upon that night, she wondered, its flesh still piquant upon her tongue? What would it have said of rank, tethered in its box and fattened for the tables of its betters? But this was heresy to say or think (though there were radical reformers who said it more and more frequently), and so Mrs. Breen turned her mind away. Tonight, in sacred ritual, she had consumed human flesh and brought her grandfather’s ambitions—and her own—to fruition. It was as Mr. Browning had said. All was right with the world. God was in his Heaven.
And then the window shattered, blowing glass into her face and eyes.
Mrs. Breen screamed and flung herself back into her husband’s arms. With a screech of tortured wood, the carriage lurched beneath her and in the moment before it slammed back to the cobbles upright, she thought it would overturn. One of the horses shrieked in mindless animal terror—she had never heard such a harrowing sound—and then the carriage shuddered to a stop at last. She had a confused impression of torches in the fog and she heard the sound of men fighting. Then Mr. Breen was brushing the glass from her face and she could see clearly and she knew that she had escaped without injury.
“What happened?” she gasped.
“A stone,” Mr. Breen said. “Some brigand hurled a stone through the window.”
The door flew back and the coachman looked in. “Are you all right, sir?”
“We’re fine,” Mrs. Breen said.
And then, before her husband could speak, the coachman said, “We have one of them, sir.”
“And the others?”
“Fled into the fog.”
“Very well, then,” said Mr. Breen. “Let’s have a look at him, shall we?”
He eased past Mrs. Breen and stepped down from the carriage, holding his walking stick. Mrs. Breen moved to follow but he closed the door at his back. She looked through the shattered window. The two footmen held the brigand on his knees between them—though he hardly looked like a brigand. He looked like a boy—a dark-haired boy of perhaps twenty (not much younger than Mrs. Breen herself), clean-limbed and clean-shaven.
“Well, then,” Mr. Breen said. “Have you no shame, attacking a gentleman in the street?”
“Have you, sir?” the boy replied. “Have you any shame?”
The coachman cuffed him for his trouble.
“I suppose you wanted money,” Mr. Breen said.
“I have no interest in your money, sir. It is befouled with gore.”
Once again, the coachman moved to strike him. Mr. Breen stayed the blow. “What is it that you hoped to accomplish, then?”
“Have you tasted human flesh tonight, sir?”
“And what business is it—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Breen said. “We have partaken of ensouled flesh.”
“We’ll have blood for blood, then,” the boy said. “As is our right.”
This time, Mr. Breen did not intervene when the coachman lifted his hand.
The boy spat blood into the street.
“You have no rights,” Mr. Breen said. “I’ll see you hang for this.”
“No,” Mrs. Breen said.
“No?” Mr. Breen looked up at her in surprise.
“No,” Mrs. Breen said, moved at first to pity—and then, thinking of her grandfather, she hardened herself. “Hanging is too dignified a fate for such a base creature,” she said. “Let him die in the street.”
Mr. Breen eyed her mildly. “The lady’s will be done,” he said, letting his stick clatter to the cobblestones.
Turning, he climbed past her into the carriage and sat down in the gloom. Fireworks exploded high overhead, showering down through the fog and painting his face in streaks of red and white that left him hollow-eyed and gaunt. He was thirty years Mrs. Breen’s senior, but he had never looked so old to her before.
She turned back to the window.
She had ordered this thing. She would see it done.
And so Mrs. Breen watched as the coachman picked up his master’s stick and tested its weight. The brigand tried to wrench free, and for a moment Mrs. Breen thought—hoped?—he would escape. But the two footmen flung him once again to his knees. Another rocket burst overhead. The coachman grunted as he brought down the walking stick, drew back, and brought it down again. The brigand’s blood was black in the reeking yellow fog. Mrs. Breen looked on as the third blow fell and then the next, and then it became too terrible and she turned her face away and only listened as her servants beat the boy to death there in the cobbled street.
“The savages shall be battering down our doors soon enough, I suppose,” Lady Donner said when Mrs. Breen called to thank her for a place at her First Feast table.
“What a distressing prospect,” Mrs. Eddy said, and Mrs. Graves nodded in assent—the both of them matron to families of great honor and antiquity, if not quite the premier order. But who was Mrs. Breen to scorn such eminence—she who not five years earlier had subsisted on the crumbs of her father’s squandered legacy, struggling (and more often than not failing) to meet her dressmaker’s monthly reckoning?
Nor were the Breens of any greater rank than the other two women in Lady Donner’s drawing room that afternoon. Though he boasted an old and storied lineage, Mr. Breen’s was not quite a First Family and had no annual right to mark the beginning of the Season with a Feast of ensouled flesh. Indeed, prior to his marriage to poor Alice Munby, he himself had but twice been a First Feast guest.
Mrs. Breen had not, of course, herself introduced the subject of the incident in the street, but Mr. Breen had shared the story at his club, and word of Mrs. Breen’s courage and resolve had found its way to Lady Donner’s ear, as all news did in the end.
“Were you very frightened, dear?” Mrs. Graves inquired.
Mrs. Breen was silent for a moment, uncertain how to answer. It would be unseemly to boast. “I had been fortified with Lady Donner’s generosity,” she said at last. “The divine order must be preserved.”
“Yes, indeed,” Mrs. Eddy said. “Above all things.”
“Yet it is not mere violence in the street that troubles me,” Mrs. Graves said. “There are the horrid pamphlets one hears spoken of. My husband has lately mentioned the sensation occasioned by Mr. Bright’s Anthropophagic Crisis.”
“And one hears rumors that the House of Commons will soon take up the issue,” Mrs. Eddy added.
“The Americans are at fault, with their talk of unalienable rights,” Mrs. Graves said.
“The American experiment will fail,” Lady Donner said. “The Negro problem will undo them, Lord Donner assures me. This too shall pass.”
And that put an end to the subject.
Mrs. Eddy soon afterward departed, and Mrs. Graves after that.
Mrs. Breen, fearing that she had overstayed her welcome, stood and thanked her hostess.
“You must come again soon,” Lady Donner said, and Mrs. Breen avowed that she would.
The season was by then in full swing, and the Breens were much in demand. The quality of the guests in Mrs. Breen’s drawing room improved, and at houses where she had formerly been accustomed to leave her card and pass on, the doors were now open to her. She spent her evenings at the opera and the theater and the orchestra. She accepted invitations to the most exclusive balls. She twice attended dinners hosted by First Families—the Pikes and the Reeds, both close associates of Lady Donner.