6. On the Privileges of Sex

The rapping awoke Holly just after sunrise. She frowned blearily at the papers and books surrounding her head, then shifted stiff muscles when she heard the sound again. Someone knocking on the window? He said they’d watch from the trees, she thought, a prick of fear confusing her until the past evening’s odd events coalesced in her memory. Cautiously she pulled the curtain open, and saw a large woodpecker startle at the motion and fly off. Annoyed, she opened the drapery further, and wan grey light filled the library. She blinked, clearing the sleep from her eyes; she’d succumbed at last to the exhaustion of her nerves while at the desk, and never even undressed, much less arrived at her own chambers for a more comfortable slumber. Everything felt creaky, as if rusted in place overnight. Holly peered to one side, then the other, searching the trees outside the second story, but saw nothing suspicious. Had she imagined what the doctor had said?

Then she tried to open the sash, and a blue spark of chilled air blasted over her arms. Drawing back and rubbing them, she stared dismayed as the energy of the ward subsided, ripples settling until the panes of glass appeared clear and deceptively unobstructed again. Damn him! Does he truly expect me to sit caged in here, like a docile canary? The more industrial uses of that bird came to mind, and she grimaced. Indeed, I am a canary for him, set to sing if Mr Villard’s men return...or to cease singing. She suppressed a shiver, more of the evening’s discussions returning clearly to her thoughts. Well. Which is worse, to venture out and see what may be seen by the light of day, or to remain holed up here alone, and await my fate? Uneasy, she returned her attention to the notes she’d made while digging through dictionaries and grammars last night. She’d done her best to recall the sound of the words Dr Vonken had spoken as he cast each of the wards, and searched through the books until she was reasonably certain of a translation, rough and stilted though the words appeared to her on the paper now. She’d then written out three possible passwords, but had no idea whether any of them would allow her to pass through the protections the Coldspark had cast on her house. And now she hesitated, paper in one hand, wondering if going out was really her most prudent course.

Take extra care while I’m gone, Mikael had said to her each time he left on one of his dotty expeditions – as if she, with servants behind the strong, storm-weathered walls of this old manse, in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods, should fear anything more than the brother she loved not returning from the savage wilderness of the Interior! She sniffed. And yet...what if that weaselly man with the gleaming red lens like an evil monocle was indeed still outside, watching for her? If Vonken was correct, and Villard’s employee did try to force his way into the house when she was out, these wards would certainly frustrate him. Would he then pursue her? Would he follow her if she ventured into the marketplace, or the plaza, or to Mikael’s gravesite?

Her only alternative, of course, was to await the doctor’s eventual return...assuming he hadn’t run afoul of bad company. Or someone from the Northern Pacific Airways Company. Which might amount to the same thing, if I can believe all he told me. But really, what had the enigmatic surgeon told her? She frowned. Damned little. Insulting a man of stature and power in my home, without telling me what nonsense my brother was engaged in, why he was killed, what Mr Villard even has to do with any of it...and then expecting me to sit tight like a child, unquestioning, and simply wait? Oh no. No, I think not. Holly had felt many times throughout her twenty-two years that her entire life was controlled and constrained by the men who, by mere dint of their gender, had legally sanctioned positions of authority over her. Her father was gone, her brother was gone...was she then to allow this usurpation of her new independence by some half-mad stranger who wouldn’t even grant her the right to know how she was involved in all this? Holly glared around the library. Her library now, in her home, where already men of questionable purposes had fingered her books, rifled through her desk, tracked dirt upon her rare Persian carpets...!

Her small jaw set in a scowl, and for a moment she clenched the paper in her fist. “This house is mine now,” she whispered, and hearing the words aloud made her nod in growing determination. “It’s mine, and it’s all I have to show for my life...so far...” The realization dismayed her. Though she might have an education to rival any of the students graduated from Concordia University, their strictly-male policy barred her from claiming the degree she had longed for as a child. She owned Autumn Hill only by the default of there being no blood male relation to claim it; had she even a distant cousin of the other sex, she could have been turned out in the street, as had happened to her friend Violet Constance. As a young lady of the wealthy merchant class, she was expected to marry some well-established widower probably twice her age who needed a young wife to bear the son his late lady of the house had failed to produce...assuming she herself didn’t expire in childbirth in such a venture. All that, of course, even hoping some complacent pillar of the community would be gracious enough to accept her, impoverished as she now was... What a hideous history I have had, she thought suddenly, feeling a wave of dizziness. She sat down. Her gaze traveled slowly over the books she had devoured through the years: history, geography, science, the arts, mathematics and myths. So many years, I have been just a silly bird in a cage. Doing as I was told. Reading, reading everything, storing up all these facts and figures, and to what end? So that I may sit here meekly while complete strangers fight over my future – over some mysterious thing my reckless brother is supposed to have sent me? What good has all my self-schooling been, if I do nothing with it?

She recalled, in sudden perfect clarity, a street-sermon given a few years ago by the local stump-preacher, one Reverend Pitheous Arrack. She and Mikael had been on their way home from a concert in the plaza, a Sunday afternoon in midsummer, when the rantings of the reverend had drawn a small crowd and the siblings found themselves jostled in among them by the movement of curious people around them. Arrack preached on one of his favorite subjects, the danger of emancipating the female mind, “which in its natural weakness poses an unwitting threat to all Society, if mistakenly encouraged to embrace those intellectual pursuits which only the minds of men have the capability to grasp and use as our Maker intended!”

For ten minutes, Holly had stood uncomfortably among the audience at the edge of the plaza, disliking every word out of the preacher’s mouth. Mikael had evidently been much amused and would have stayed for the entire sermon if Holly had not complained of the heat. Certain phrases had stuck with her, like itchy burrs upon her stockings: “females ought to diligently tend those matters which Nature has gracefully endowed them for: mainly, the bearing and nurturing of children!”...”we know much about the unfortunate sway of what the doctors of the mind call hysteria, upon the weaker sex; and it is this terrible tendency of females to exaggerate their own emotions in all matters which makes them unsuited for the business of law, politics, or faith. Our curse, this Dust upon our land, has only made these weaknesses worse”...and the one which had stung her most deeply, still ringing in her ears years later: “God will not forgive a woman who commits the prideful sin of wanting to be independent. Such a woman will bring ruin not only on herself but on her offspring, her parents, her siblings, and her husband, and she is the greatest scourge to our peace and happiness!”

Worst of all, of course, Holly had seen a number of women in the crowd...and most of them were fervently nodding agreement, sanctimonious in their accord, complicit in their subjection.

One of Holly’s favorite books, one which had been the property of her late mother, was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father didn’t discourage her from reading it, and other tracts which the Reverend Arrack would have tossed into a bonfire on sight; but he did caution her about “expressing views in public which might lead your peers to label you a freethinker.” Such young ladies, Hubert Autumnson had stressed quietly to his daughter, “would never find a good match, and end up spinsters.” Holly wished to please her papa, and agreed never to voice her doubts about the superiority of the male brain. Not while he lived, at least.

Dr Vonken called me a scholar, she thought, and turned over the more startling idea: and he said Mikael implied I would have beaten him for his post if I’d been allowed to compete for it. All along...Mikael thought I was clever? More clever than him? She looked back at the notes she’d made, and began to smile a little. Clever enough to break your wards, Doctor? Let’s see.

Excited, nervous, she approached the window again. She silently read the words she’d painstakingly parsed from the Dutch language textbooks, trying to memorize the odd syllables, hoping she could mimic the accent she’d heard last night. She raised her left hand and began the intricate tracing gesture for unlocking a ward...another thing she, as a woman, wasn’t supposed to be dabbling in. She briefly wondered how women Coldsparks put up with the disapproval of their peers. Speaking as steadily as she could, she offered up the first possible key: “Open deze sluis!”

The ward shimmered, but she wasn’t sure it had worked. She reached for the window-sash and received the same shock of cold as she had before. Stepping back, she shook her arm, wincing, then steeled herself and tried the process again. “Laat mij!”

Another rebuff proved her research incorrect. One option left...or else she would have to go back to the books. The possibility sent a weariness all through her. She took a deep breath, gestured again, and snapped at the window: “Ontsluiten!”

An odd pause, a shimmer of blue energy, but then the rebuff yet again. “Ow!” Holly complained, jerking her fingers away from the sparking aetherfire. “Damn it!” Cursing, like many other privileges, was also in the domain of male authority, but Holly was too angry to care. Frustrated, she made as if to grab the energy surrounding the window, wishing she could just turn an invisible key and be done with it. “Vonken, you –“ she muttered...and the ward flashed golden.

Holly stopped. She stared. Cautiously, she made the grabbing, key-turning motion again. “Vonken?”

With an uncurling of golden tendrils, the ward parted from the window, gleaming and writhing around its edges, waiting for her. Holly placed her hands on the sash without pain, and slowly opened it. Cool, moist morning air swept into the room.

A laugh bubbled up out of her. She stood there, breathing in the October mist, a whole minute before she slammed the window shut, watched the ward turn blue and sweep over it again, and then ran from the room to wash and dress. She had an errand to run today. She’d noticed the good doctor had forgotten his cane in her parlor; certainly he’d want it back, and after all, she had no one left to do such a menial task for her. And while she was politely returning his property to him, she planned to make him answer a few questions.

She felt her female brain quite capable of comprehending whatever he had to say.