10. Shallows
10
Shallows
Luce was in Veronique’s bedchamber, bathing in the huge copper tub—brought to the first floor, with no small amount of difficulty, by the laquais—when Veronique swept into the room, effervescent with excitement.
‘I was thinking I could help with your hair tonight, Luce,’ she said. ‘If you’d like.’ The events of the night before had taken no toll on Luce’s oldest sister. Perfumed and powdered, she was as fresh and pink as a rose in her chemise and pink-ruffled peignoir as she happily checked her reflection in one of the three mirrors, festooned with an alarming amount of pink silk taffeta, on her dressing table. ‘Morgan promised to dance with all three of us tonight. We must look our best.’
Morgan. The very sound of his name conjured a confusion of thoughts and emotions, each one warring against those that arose whenever she thought of what had passed between herself and Samuel in the woods the night before. The memory of his rejection of her, the shame of it, was like a knife to her heart.
Instead, she focused on Morgan, his cheek pale against the Dauphin ’s shattered hull as she swam out to rescue him. The dark gleam in his eyes as he leaned against the figurehead on the Lucinde.
His long finger, slow and luxurious against her wrist.
Her blood surged at the memory.
She stood up in the bath, the silky water pouring from her skin and hair as Nanette took a towel from the stand before the little fireplace and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Veronique grinned. She turned to Nanette. ‘Go and help Anna-Marie, won’t you, Nanette? She’s bringing fresh water for Charlotte’s bath.’ She gazed about the room, small hands bunched on her hips. ‘Where is Charlotte? I’ve not seen her all afternoon.’
‘I’ll find her,’ Nanette said with a sigh, taking up an empty pitcher and leaving the room.
Veronique helped Luce into her undergarments and peignoir, then sat her before the sunny window and brushed out her hair.
‘What kind of style would you like?’ Veronique asked, running her fingers through the long dark lengths.
‘I really don’t know,’ Luce said. ‘Charlotte was going to help me. But now...’
‘Don’t let her ruin this for you,’ Veronique said firmly. ‘You are coming with us tonight, and that is that.’
The warmth of the sun, the rhythmic slosh of falling water as Anna-Marie and Nanette tripped back and forth with hot water for the bath, and the delicious tickle of Veronique’s hands on her scalp and shoulders as she lifted Luce’s hair this way and then that, muttering to herself about curls and ribbons, hair powder and pins, soon caused Luce to relax. Her uneasiness returned, however, the moment Charlotte came into the room.
‘Where have you been?’ Veronique demanded.
‘I went for a walk,’ Charlotte replied.
‘You will make us late.’
‘You and I both know it will be you who does that, Vee.’ Charlotte waited patiently while Nanette helped her undress, then stepped into the bath.
‘Your hair really is too long, you know, Luce,’ Veronique mused. ‘Perhaps we should cut it? It would make drying it so much easier.’
‘I’d rather we didn’t,’ Luce told her sister warily. She was fond of her hair, the dark, thick waves that fell to her hips. Unbidden, the memory of Morgan’s fingers, buried in the long, wet strands as he kissed her, sprang into her mind.
Did he remember that kiss? Would he want to kiss her again?
She wanted very much to know.
‘Whatever you prefer,’ Veronique said good-naturedly. ‘That’s as dry as we’re likely to get it, though. Let’s put it up.’ She led Luce to the little stool set before the dressing table, its lacquered mahogany bristling with Veronique’s expansive collection of powders, perfumes, and pots.
‘You have sand in your hair, mademoiselle,’ Nanette said, as she lathered Charlotte’s hair.
‘Do I?’ Charlotte glanced at the pink-framed mirror, met Luce’s eyes in its reflection. ‘It was windy on the headland.’ She tilted her head, inspecting what Veronique had done with Luce’s hair. ‘That’s too high, Vee. Here, let me...’
She finished her bath, dressed in her underclothes and morning gown, and took the brush from Veronique’s hand. ‘You need to do it like this, see? Luce and I had it all planned.’
She twisted and looped Luce’s hair, creating a glossy black construction at the back of her head. ‘Voilà!’
Veronique nodded her approval. ‘That is perfect, Cee. How clever you are.’
Nanette stepped forward, pins at the ready.
‘Thank you, Cee,’ Luce said to her sister’s reflection.
Perhaps Charlotte had forgiven her, after all.
Late in the afternoon, when the sisters had finished powdering their faces and pinning their hair (or, in everyone but Luce’s case, powdering both face and hair) and stepped into silk stockings and ribbon garters, petticoats, panniers, and stays, they assembled in Gratienne’s bedchamber, where the ball gowns, freshly pressed and readied that morning, were waiting. One by one the maids brought them out from the dressing room: rose-pink, sky-blue, and...
‘But where is your dress, Luce?’ Veronique asked.
Luce peered into her mother’s dressing room. Nanette was riffling through the gowns hanging in the enormous armoire, her face a picture of confused dismay. ‘It’s not here!’
‘Not here?’ Veronique, already lacing her pink underskirt, came to look. ‘Whatever do you mean, Nanette? How can it not be here?’
‘It’s gone,’ Nanette said in despair. She met Luce’s eyes. ‘I swear, Mademoiselle Lucinde, I put it right here this morning...’
‘It’s all right, Nanette,’ Luce said, squeezing the maid’s hand. ‘I believe you.’ A cold kind of knowing was seeping into her, darkening her heart. She glanced at Charlotte. Her sister was carefully arranging her pale blue underskirt over her panniers, her face impassive.
‘It is not all right!’ Veronique was holding her arms behind her as Anna-Marie helped her shrug into her open dress. ‘A dress does not simply disappear.’ She twisted her shoulders, allowing the heavy silk to fall into place. ‘Go and find Maman, Anna-Marie. Quickly.’
Luce glanced again at Charlotte. She had hung her gown on Gratienne’s silk dressing screen and was arranging the long pleats at the back. ‘Don’t just stand there, Nanette,’ she said to the stricken maid. ‘Come and help me. There is no point in all three of us standing about.’
Luce’s parents came into the room, with Anna-Marie and Madeleine close behind.
Gratienne had already donned her silver-grey gown, and powdered her cheeks and hair. A glorious silver feather arched above her head, its base nestled in a clutch of diamond-studded hair pins. ‘The dress is missing, you say?’
‘It is gone, madame.’ Nanette wringed her hands helplessly. ‘I cannot explain it.’
‘Well, find it!’ Jean-Baptiste was wearing a powdered wig and his best suit, a sleek affair with lashings of golden embroidery, and a lace jabot and cuffs. At his tone, the three maids burst into action, rifling through the dressing room with renewed vigor. Gratienne took over from Nanette, pinning Charlotte into her dress. Veronique, her stays peeking out between her unpinned gown, helped.
‘Careful, Vee!’ Charlotte snapped. ‘You will pin me instead of the stays!’
‘I found the shoes,’ Nanette said, emerging from the dressing room with a pair of deep blue slippers. ‘But the gown is still missing, Monsieur Léon.’
‘How can a dress go missing?’ Jean-Baptiste was growing angry. ‘What do I pay you domestiques for, if not to keep order in my house? Find it—or you will be paying for it yourselves. And mark me, it will take you a long, long time to make good your debt.’
Luce looked at the crestfallen Nanette, at the other maids, desperately searching. Her disappointment, bitter though it was, was as nothing compared to what they would endure—the terrible burden of a debt they could never hope to repay, or, even worse, the loss of their position completely.
‘It was me,’ she blurted.
Seven faces turned to her in shock.
‘ You? ’ Veronique demanded.
‘Yes.’ Luce fumbled for a reasonable-sounding story. ‘I took the dress out this morning to—to admire it.’ She glanced at her mother’s face, dark with disapproval, and an idea came to her. ‘But my hands were dirty—I’d been looking at soil—’
Charlotte made a face. ‘ Soil ?’
‘Yes. Monsieur Daumard and I had been discussing the relationship between plants and the way different soils help or hinder their growth. His microscope has finally arrived from Paris, and I wanted to fetch some samples for our next lesson.’ It was only half a lie. Monsieur Daumard had been teaching her about soils just yesterday, when he mentioned the arrival of the microscope. ‘And I... I ruined the dress—marred it with my hands. I felt so terrible, I hid it.’
Below, the old ship’s bell clanged.
‘Well, fetch it,’ Veronique said. ‘It is almost time to leave!’
‘It is too late for that,’ Gratienne said wearily. ‘We cannot clean and press the dress now. There is no time.’
‘Well, fetch another gown, mon trésor.’ Jean-Baptiste looked distraught. ‘Surely there are others? What is the point of trading in silk if my daughter has nothing to wear?’
‘Luce can wear one of mine,’ Veronique offered.
‘Or mine,’ Charlotte added.
‘That is kind of you both,’ Luce said, nodding gratefully. She wanted more than anything to go. To see the gardens at Le Loup Blanc, the steps leading from the house down to the Rance, glimmering with starlight and torches. To hear the music as she stepped from the carriage, and see Morgan de Chatelaine in his finery, greeting his guests, handsome as the night. Wearing one of her sisters’ gowns would not be the same—not at all—but it was far better than missing out completely.
‘What of your mask, mademoiselle?’ Nanette asked in a small voice.
‘Is it not there, Nanette?’
The chambermaid shook her head. She looked as though she might cry.
Luce went to her mother’s dressing room and riffled among the thick swathes of skirts hanging to the floor. There was no sign of the mask.
‘Surely we have others?’ Jean-Baptiste asked of his wife, his daughters. ‘This is hardly the first masque to be held in Saint-Malo.’
Veronique shook her head. ‘Anna-Marie always pulls my masks apart and uses the feathers and jewels for other things.’
‘And mine are all back at the town house,’ Charlotte said.
‘As are mine,’ Gratienne added, with a sigh.
Disappointment was a stone on Luce’s chest. That finely crafted sliver of satin was the only reason she had been bold enough to attend the ball at all. Without the anonymity it would afford her, she would be terrifyingly visible—especially as every other face would be hidden. Tears tightened her throat, but she forced herself to speak lightly. ‘Well, that settles it. I really shall have to stay behind.’
‘Stay... behind ?’ Veronique repeated the words slowly, as though Luce had spoken in a foreign language.
‘You cannot be serious, Lucinde,’ Charlotte said.
‘I cannot attend a masque without a mask,’ Luce told her reasonably. Would Morgan notice that she was not there? Would he be sorry he could not show her his father’s curiosities? ‘In truth, I would prefer to stay here.’
‘ Prefer it?’ Veronique looked like she might be sick. She turned to her mother, appalled. ‘Maman, make her stop!’
‘I find I am in no mood for balls, or people, now,’ Luce lied smoothly. ‘Besides, you will all be late if you do not leave at once.’
‘Oh, let her stay, if she wants,’ Charlotte said, impatient. ‘She will only hide in a corner all night, anyway. It’s not as though she will dance. ’
There was an awkward silence as the weight of Charlotte’s cruel words settled over the room. Luce looked at the blue silk slippers lying forlorn on the carpet, and blinked away her tears.
‘Well?’ Charlotte said, defiant. ‘We were all thinking it.’
When the sounds of the carriage finally faded down the drive, Luce burst from the house and into the chapel, throwing the battered overcoat over her peignoir and pulling on her hat and boots. She hurried toward the comfort of the cove, her stockingless feet burning in the rough leather of the boots, the bones shrieking in protest at the pace.
The pain rose with every step, a storm against the earth.
Even so, she did not slow until she reached the edge of the cliffs, catching at a pine to steady herself while she caught her breath. Below, the beach, empty but for hulking lumps of rock, dark with lichen, and a smattering of pebbles and weed.
And there, drifting in the cool, greenish shallows, easing gently back and forth in its own dreamy dance, was her blue gown.
Charlotte’s last words, her coldness and cruelty, came back to Luce in a rush. She had disappeared that morning, and said she had been walking. Nanette had found sand in her hair, and she had looked up, met Luce’s eyes in the mirror.
Could she... could she have taken the dress?
Her sister could be harsh, it was true. Jealous and quick to anger. But was she truly capable of this?
Luce slipped and scrabbled down the rocky cliff path, nearly falling to her knees as the slope gave way to sand. A cloud of sea campion nodded their white-petals at her sadly as she pushed herself up, not caring that her tricorn had fallen from her head, and her hair, so carefully arranged, had come loose. That the shimmering pink powder Veronique had smoothed across her cheeks, the red paste she had dabbed so carefully upon her lips, was brushing away. She stumbled down to the water, knelt in the shallows, and cradled the dress in her arms.
How could Charlotte have done such a thing? Did she truly care so little?
Luce cried, then. Held the dress against her while the grey-green water lapped consolingly over her thighs. Her mask, too, was there, the ribbons floating sadly in the shallows. A silver gull flew overhead, its wretched cry echoing across the water. As though it, too, felt her pain.
When Luce’s tears were spent, she wiped her ruined face and slumped back in the water, her morning gown floating around her.
Just a dress, she told herself, taking a shaky breath. Just a silly dress. Pieces of silk sewn together, lace and trim and lining. The loss of it doesn’t matter.
But the loss did matter.
Losing Charlotte mattered.
‘What’s this? A little seamaid crying in the shallows?’
Startled at the sound of a voice close by—she had thought she was quite alone—Luce looked up.
The groac’h was standing on the sand behind her.
This close, the tide-woman appeared much younger than Luce had supposed; younger, even, than Gratienne. Her hair was as long as Luce’s and just as wild, a shade of blonde so pale and silvery that it glowed like the moon. She wore a ragged chemise, its sleeves rolled up to her elbows, with a bodice made of what could only be fishes’ scales—thousands of them, sewn cunningly together. Her rust-coloured skirts were tattered, overlaid with swathes of ruined fishing net cinched roughly around her waist with a piece of old rope. Her feet were bare. Yet it was her face that caught Luce’s gaze and held it. Her eyes, glinting like the silver coins she had once found on the beach after a winter storm. Her mouth, where two of her front teeth jutted from between her lips, great curving shards of bone like walrus tusks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Luce sniffed, brushing at the tears on her cheeks. ‘I did not mean to disturb you.’ Out of respect, she had always kept as much distance as possible between herself and the fae woman, avoiding the entrance to her cave and the patch of sand where she was wont to rest her little witch-boat. She glanced again at those extraordinary teeth and went to rise. ‘I will go.’
‘There’s no need.’ The groac’h stepped into the water, her bare feet, sun-browned and rather small, surprisingly ordinary. ‘And you did not disturb me.’
Her voice was gentle, despite those eldritch tusks. Luce half expected her to reach out and help Luce to her feet. Instead, the fae sat down in the water beside her, careless of the cold and her rust-coloured skirts.
Luce stared at her, mouth hanging open.
‘... You will get cold,’ she finally managed to say. ‘And wet.’
The tide-woman tipped her head back and laughed, a beautiful, liquid sound. ‘Late to be worrying about that, isn’t it?’
Despite herself, despite everything, Luce smiled. ‘I suppose it is.’
‘And too late for this, too.’ The shore-woman touched the blue silk, drowned and mournful in Luce’s arms, with a gentle hand. ‘ This was not meant to be ruined by salt and water. This was meant for candlelight and dancing. For hope, and jealous glances, and joy. What thievery has taken place, that it has instead been lost to the sea?’
Jean-Baptiste had oft said that the groac’h was as wild as she was dangerous. She would sell a sailor a fair wind in one breath, and in the next sink her terrifying tusks into his flesh, dragging him to the bottom of the Manche. Or, perhaps worse, into the cold, dank recesses of her cave. Luce tried to reconcile this image with the eloquent shore-woman sitting beside her, and failed.
‘Perhaps it made someone too jealous,’ she said.
‘I see.’ The groac’h was quiet a moment. ‘You meant to wear it to the gathering at the white wolf’s house this night. Yes?’
Luce glanced across at her. ‘You know about that?’
‘My child, everyone knows about that.’ A sideways glance from those storm-silver eyes. ‘I take it you still wish to go?’
Luce glanced at the floating dress. It was spectacularly ruined, well beyond the point of salvage.
‘The dress is spoiled,’ she said slowly. ‘It cannot be saved.’
‘It is,’ the shore-woman said reasonably. ‘And yet, I ask again: Do you still wish to go?’
‘Is that... is that even possible?’ Of all the Fae Folk on the shore, the tide-woman was said to be among the most powerful. She could pluck a wind from nothing with a flick of her wrist; she could summon a storm for spite. But what else was she capable of?
‘Anything is possible when sorrow meets sea.’
Luce frowned. ‘When sorrow meets sea?’
‘Your tears.’ The groac’h gestured to Luce’s red-rimmed eyes, then the water. ‘Your tears fell into the sea. There is magic in such meetings.’
Something flickered in the air, in the water. A low thrum of promise, of power.
‘I will ask you one more time. Do you wish to go? Or...’ The fae woman pursed her lips. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer to stay here. Light another fire, and wait for the storm diver to find you?’
‘No,’ Luce said, too quickly. Samuel’s rejection in the woods was a constant sting in her heart. And now Charlotte had betrayed her, sharp as a blade in her back. Beneath the pain, beneath the loss, something else simmered.
Why shouldn’t Luce have a little happiness?
Why shouldn’t she go to the ball?
‘Thank you,’ she said firmly. ‘I would like to go to the ball. Very much.’
She pushed herself to her feet, ignoring the pain, thinking only of Morgan de Chatelaine’s black eyes, his wicked smile.
‘It’s decided then,’ the groac’h said. She, too, rose, water shimmering in her bodice of scales, at the ends of her silvery hair. ‘We must move quickly. The tide is about to turn.’
Luce was suddenly nervous. ‘What must I do?’
‘Take off that overcoat, for one.’
Luce shrugged out of the sodden coat, and gave it, dripping and awkward, to the tide-woman.
‘And the pretty robe.’
Luce slipped out of her peignoir, handed it over, and stood uncertainly in her underclothes. The blue gown floated still in the shallows, its skirt brushing her ankles.
‘Should I—’
‘Hush now, child,’ the shore-woman said. She closed her wondrous silver eyes. ‘Tears and blue silk,’ she murmured. ‘Tears and blue silk.’
The sun was low, the world silvering toward sunset. A trio of gulls flew overhead, farewelling the day. Luce, shivering, began to doubt her recent choices.
‘Perhaps I—’
‘There.’ The shore-woman opened her eyes and smiled approvingly. ‘Hold your breath, child.’
A moment of panic. Those strange, silver eyes, those outlandish teeth—
No time to finish the thought; the groac’h seized Luce by the shoulders and pushed her backward into the sea.