Chapter Eleven #2
Yet I do not know it. I trail my fingers across old fences and try to remember what people may live in the houses they protect.
I pass by low stone walls and try to imagine myself balancing atop them like children do, try to imagine myself visiting the dress shop and trying on gowns of silk and lace.
A church looms at the end of the road and I wonder if I went to Mass each week or knelt in confessional to beg forgiveness for sins I cannot recall making.
"I've met you once before, you know?"
Who was it that Theodore met? A woman freshly dead with memories still enduring enough to know this village? Or a remnant of her, following a path she somehow knew but could not explain why?
I wish I could see her as he did. An angel, he called her. Surely she must have been beautiful to receive such a title. Surely she was not so caked in sand and waterlogged as I am, my skin prickling with thorns and flowers growing from my lungs.
I'm not sure how long I wander the village streets before I finally find my way to the small graveyard that sleeps behind the church.
A part of me feels foolish for it—my body rests at the bottom of the ocean, her sand beds my final casket—but I have learned recently that I am a curious thing, and foolish or not, I desperately want to know something. Anything.
It does not take me long to find. The mausoleum is a small one, but it towers over the nearby gravestones like an aged giant.
A single lamp hangs from a hook near the door, shining just bright enough to see the engraved plaque on the wall.
I trace my fingers over the letters, trying to reconcile the shape of them with the emptiness of my memories.
Kolfina Everleigh de Klein
'La mort est de l’immortalité.'
Death is immortality.
It says nothing else about the woman the structure was built for.
No epigraph about her life or the things she did.
No hint as to why she died or how she lived.
There is no body inside the mausoleum, no casket or urn to hold my remains.
Just a name, a quote, and a small granite moth set into the stone beneath the plaque.
Is that all I am now? Is this all I will ever be? The name of a woman lost to memory and time? A wolf that left its forest and came home to nothing but empty decay?
The sound of a twig snapping behind me makes me jump, and I whirl around to face the dark shadows wavering through the night.
There, just at the edge of a circle of lantern light, is a man.
I have to step closer to truly see him, tucked away beneath his flat cap and his well-loved outercoat as he is, but I recognize Theodore's father, nonetheless.
He looks the same as he did that day at the chateau, though the exhaustion in his shoulders looks weighed down from a long day of work, rather than the anxious fretting they held the last I'd seen him.
He holds a bundle of daisies and lilies in his hand, wrapped in a pretty blue paper and tied with a simple bow.
Curiosity bites at my ankles as he kneels before a small headstone and places the flowers at its base, but I dare not draw any closer.
It feels all too much like an invasion of what is clearly a private moment between the man and his wife, even if he is unaware of my presence lingering nearby. Still, I watch, and I wait.
It doesn't take long before he is laying a hand atop the gravestone and offering his wife a parting smile, using his grip to heave himself back onto his feet. I hurry after him as he turns to leave the graveyard, my curiosity still nipping at my legs like a school of angry fish.
This man's son knew me, somehow—remembered something about me that I myself could not. Would Mr. Villin know me as well? Had he seen me that day I visited his wife? Would he see me now?
No. He is none the wiser to my presence as I come to walk at his side.
There is no sign of him knowing I am here at all as he leads us through the winding streets of the village, only stopping once he has reached a sweet little house nestled up against the edge of the woods.
A windchime hangs from the edge of the porch awning, the little metal thimbles and old sewing sheers tinkling softly in the gentle night's wind.
As if the house itself sings its welcome home.
I think perhaps I should feel guilty when I follow him inside—this is not my house; I have not been invited in—and yet, I find myself too desperate to care.
There must be a time where I was not trapped in the maze that surrounds my chateau.
A time where the fraying threads of my rug did not tangle so tightly around my ankles that they cut through the fragile skin. A time that someone remembers.
I want to remember.
The home is a humble one, though clearly loved and well-lived in.
Various coats hang from wooden hooks beside the door; books are scattered across tables and chairs and countertops; patterns and fabric scraps are abandoned on the dining table or tossed over the back of chairs.
There is a warmth to this house that feels fermented in its very bones, a warmth that wraps around me like a mother's embrace.
It is so unlike the sharp, gripping chill that claws through my own home that it stuns me for a moment. There is no fire yet lit in the hearth to bring such a warmth about, so why does it seep into my skin so easily? Why does it drape over my shoulders like a comforting blanket?
Accompanied only by Mr. Villin's quiet humming as he putters about putting his things away, I drift through the house in search of something familiar. A room once used as a sickroom, a bed I stood by as I sang to a dying woman.
There are only two bedrooms in the home, and it isn't difficult to know which is Theodore's and which is his father's.
The younger of the two boasts a heavy oak desk against one wall, so large in the small room that it takes up nearly as much space as the bed and so covered in books and parchment that one could wonder if there is a desk beneath it at all.
The other room is only slightly larger, though no less cluttered—unfinished designs pinned to one of the walls, a lovely sewing machine tucked into a corner, bolts of fabric and baskets of scraps taking up most of the empty space.
It certainly does not look like a sickroom for a dying woman, though I suppose that shouldn't surprise me. It has been nearly twenty years by now. Twenty years of moving on, of living.
"Come, Petite Miette, let us wash her clothes. She should look beautiful for the Lord when he comes."
Sharp, knowing eyes. The cloying scent of illness. It's all muffled, as if I am experiencing it from beneath a layer of water or from behind a thick, hanging cloth.
I can almost see it as I stare down at the bed, my fingers brushing the bedpost, the ocean rising in my throat.
"No! We can't leave her—what if the angel takes her away?"
"It is not yet time, little one. Soon, but not yet. We have until the angel stops singing. Nous dépêcherons, oui?"
The floorboards creak beneath memory-laden footsteps; somewhere nearby, a woman chokes out a painful cough.
I can feel it in my own throat, itching behind my teeth and scraping in my lungs.
It builds and builds until I am gasping with it, her pain lacing through every inch of me.
I can feel her weary eyes on mine, can see the familiar freckles across sunken cheeks as she draws in a wheezing breath.
In my memory, I reach for her, my fingers brushing over her sweat-soaked brow, tucking strands of pale, oil-thick hair behind her ear. My hand twitches with another wave of pain, but the agony in the woman's face eases with it, for which I am grateful.
That feeling builds in my throat again, though it's different this time. Softer, kinder. It tickles the roof of my mouth, parts my lips like curious children peeking through the curtains. A hazy figure waits at the foot of the woman's bed, patient and eternal.
Not yet, I want to tell it. The boy is not back; you must wait a few moments longer.
It is then that I hear the singing—or perhaps I'd heard it all along. It feels ancient, that mournful lullaby. I do not recognize the voice, nor understand the words, but I grip the sick woman's hand tightly in mine as if it might hold her here just a little bit longer.
"There, you see, Petite Miette? The song is not over. We've time to say our goodbyes."
"Must we? Can the angel not heal mama?"
"Non, mon chéri. Death is a patient beast, but he will always follow the ones who sing for him. She will feel no more pain, and the Lord will watch over her until you see her again. Now go, wake your papa. The song is nearly done now."
The lullaby grows louder with an aching that trembles deep within my bones. My lips part with every rise and fall of ancient notes, and though it is only seawater and rotting petals that spill out, somehow I know that the singing is me.
The figure at the end of the bed reaches out a hand, softer and more life-like than I am expecting. I cannot see his face, but I remember the shape of his smile as I place the woman's hand in his, and I know the sound of his voice as he promises to take care of her on her journey onward.
I cannot tell if the tears on my cheeks are my own, or those of the memory-shaped boy clutching the lifeless body on the bed. I cannot tell if the cry that fills the room is my own crescendo, or the wretched anguish of a grieving man.
'La mort est de l’immortalité,' my placard read.
Is immortality worth it, I wonder, if the sacrifice itself causes so much pain?