Uncle Orrin met us at the station. He stood on the wrought-iron platform, a storm cloud in a dark suit, his black homburg blooded with a red feather.
Upper Falls is a small town, nestled in the hollows clawed by glaciers during the Ice Age. Our river is stained red with alluvial clay, the skeletons of old brickyards on its banks. Most of the buildings on the half mile of Main Street are a hundred years old, and need a paint job.
The Mortons once allowed Upper Falls to prosper, but since the 1930s we’ve gently choked the town, letting it grow quiet and forgotten, a cloak around us.
“Welcome home,” my uncle said to me and Sebastian, and turned to Faraday. “I’m Orrin. Thank you for coming.”
“Faraday Wilbert-Lee. You’re very kind to have invited me.”
She spoke with the careful formality of the slightly drunk. I’d brought a flask of Lagavulin-laced tea for the train, to help extract more details of her family’s financial situation.
Uncle Orrin took Faraday’s suitcase and headed toward the car park stairs. He walked like an unfinished golem—heavily, askew, the result of a knife wound in the 1990s. Not his only scar.
He’d driven the Bentley, my favorite of the family’s aging fleet. In their youth, Orrin and his cousins had hunted rabbits with it at night, riding the sideboards across the fields, crossbows in hand, the Bentley’s headlights paralyzing their prey.
With Faraday’s luggage in the trunk, Orrin retrieved a briefcase from the driver’s seat and opened it toward us.
Sebastian and I dropped our phones in.
“Oh,” Faraday said. “I thought you were kidding.”
Uncle Orrin only smiled, waiting until she too gave up her phone. No networked devices, no cameras, were allowed on the estate.
“It’s quite freeing, really,” Sebastian assured her. “You’re here to unburden yourself.”
Faraday placed her phone in the briefcase, but gave me a skittish look as we got into the back seat. Ordinaries are like horses: scared of loud noises, soft noises, leaves blowing in the wind, new smells in the stable. Introducing Faraday to my family was going to test her, but she needed our help.
When I’d asked Grandmother for permission to bring her to the funeral, she’d been practical. “Nothing wrong with a new customer taking a tour of the factory floor.”
Faraday had been giventhe rooms next to mine, which belonged to Aunt Andrea. She was in deep cover, or perhaps dead, her Trust shares inactive, her clothes back in circulation—her forest-green jacket now hung in my Helshire closet.
Andrea’s windows overlooked the Barrow Marsh, an expanse of shallow water the color of slate, furry with reeds, full of old bones. Beyond that stood a line of leafless oaks, a few red maples dusted with early spring buds, patches of fugitive snow in their shadows.
“It’s beautiful here,” Faraday said as she unpacked.
“And calm,” I said, mirroring her word from the other night.
We Mortonsarecalmer than ordinaries. As the Bentley had passed beneath the front gate archway, serenity settled over me, as wide and unassailable as the cold gray sky.
“It’s sad why we’re here, of course,” she said, hanging her black dressin the closet. “But good to get away. No ruggers singing. No one blasting music.”
“We save music for dance classes.”
Faraday looked dubiously at Andrea’s couch—midcentury, Danish, uncomfortable—but sat down. “It’s pretty intense, all you Mortons living together.”
“It probably seems odd.”
She shook her head. “My dad used to say you can trust people from big families. All those eyes on them when they’re little.”
“Sebastian and I never lacked for guidance.”
“I never realized your family was so…established.” She stroked a handsewn repair in the upholstery. “Mommy’s always buying new things. She’s so middle class.”
I nodded, confirming that we Mortons were Old Money—as venerable as the Wilbert-Lees of Boston, as genteelly threadbare. Asking for our help didn’t have to feel gauche, or ominous.
We’d been incorporating families like hers for a long time.
“There’s a little ritual of mine, for homecomings,” I said. “Why don’t you tag along?”
