9. Needle and Bough
9
Needle and Bough
Without the fire’s light the beach seemed suddenly dark, the narrow strip of lantern light on the sand and the sliver of the rising moon doing little. Luce knew a surge of regret—she should not have stayed so long. Down at the water’s edge, the witch-boat was gone. Farther out, the horizon softened as a sea fog rolled in to the coast.
‘Come on.’ Samuel, too, seemed edgy. He led the way to the cliff path, then helped Luce up the steep, rocky trail.
‘I can manage the rest of the way,’ she said when they reached the top of the cliffs. ‘You don’t need to walk with me.’
‘I know.’ He stiffened as the wind lifted from the Manche, ruffling at his hair. ‘But that’s a strange, ill-omened sort of breeze, don’t you think? And that fog... I have a feeling tonight is no longer a good night to be out of doors.’
He fell in behind her as she resumed her walk along the path. There were tree roots and slippery sections of gravel to manage, and she was careful to take her time.
‘She spooked you, didn’t she?’ Luce asked. ‘The groac’h.’
‘She didn’t spook you?’
‘No more than usual.’
They followed the winding path along the clifftop. Below and to their left the shore ebbed and flowed, its sands pale in the moonlight, its coves and rock-spills velvety dark. The fog had drawn closer, shrouding the water and the deeper rocks. It was eerily silent.
Luce stopped at the place where the path veered off through the woods toward the malouinière.
‘I’ll be fine from here,’ she said. ‘You really don’t have to come the rest of the way—’
‘Do you see that?’ Samuel was looking out over the shore, eyes narrowed. ‘There. On the sand. There’s something moving.’
‘You are being ridiculous,’ Luce said, shoving him slightly to hide her growing unease. She could feel it, too. The sense that all was not right with the world. ‘Come, Samuel. Let us go.’
‘Hush,’ he hissed. He reached for the lantern in her hand, extinguished its glow. ‘They’ll see us.’
‘Who...?’
She peered along the dusking shore. Was that...? Yes. There was something moving down there. Something the size and shape of a man, but moving like something... else.
‘There are more of them,’ Samuel whispered. ‘Look.’
Luce let her gaze relax, let the shapes and shadows of the beach speak for themselves, rather than what her eyes assumed them to be. Samuel was right. The narrow cove below, the stretch of open beach beyond, was scattered with the same dark, lumbering forms. The shallows, the water... they were there, too. Walking out of the foggy sea, stumbling onto the sand. Moving up the beach. Toward the forest.
‘Drowned men,’ Samuel muttered, swallowing hard. ‘Or their lost souls, at least.’
Luce nodded. She had heard the tales—stories of the sea’s unclaimed dead walking the shore, the land, at night, though she herself had never seen them before now. From the look on Samuel’s face, neither had he.
‘Papa always says the dead never hurt the living,’ she whispered.
‘Is he sure about that?’
They exchanged a glance.
Samuel moved first, dropping the lantern and grasping Luce’s hand. He sprang toward the forest path, his long legs fast and sure over roots and stones, needle and fallen branch. Sparks of discomfort rose in Luce’s feet as she followed him, a stinging that she knew would soon worsen into real pain. She tried to ignore it, tried to keep up with Samuel, swift and surefooted beside her.
‘Samuel,’ she panted. ‘My feet...’
‘I know. I’m sorry. But if we don’t move fast they’ll cut us off.’ He ran harder, pulling her with him. She did her best to disregard the pain now stabbing into her feet, shooting into her legs. Just when she thought she could go no farther, Samuel stopped, chest heaving. Following his gaze, Luce saw the sea mist wending pale tendrils through the pines and oaks on either side of them. And, between it, dark, lumbering figures, their ragged clothing hanging in tatters. Looking back, she saw the path behind was lost in a wash of sea fog, the lurching movements of the drowned men moving eerily in its depths.
‘Keep going,’ Samuel muttered. He broke into a run once more, Luce’s hand gripped in his. Luce tried to keep up but lost her footing on the slippery path. She stumbled, fell to one knee. Samuel barely broke stride. He slid one arm beneath her knees and another around her back, hauling her against him as he straightened.
‘Hold tight,’ he breathed.
Luce threw her arms around his neck, clinging to him as he rushed along the path. Her fall, however, the extra moments it had taken for Samuel to scoop her up, the slower pace he could not help but keep now that Luce was in his arms, had cost them. Three dark figures loomed out of the fog ahead, blocking the way.
‘Christ,’ Samuel gasped, chest heaving as he slid to a halt. He whirled around. In every direction, mist. And moving through it, slow and hideous...
Luce waited for the sea-dead to spy them. To change their staggering course and come ever closer.
They only lumbered through the woods, silent, slow.
‘They’re barely looking at us,’ she whispered. ‘Do you see? It is like... it is like they cannot see us at all.’
Samuel swallowed. ‘What are you implying?’
‘I think we should stop. Be still. Let them pass.’
He met her eyes, torn. The urge to flee was strong in him still. Luce did not blame him. There was nothing she would have liked more than to be away from the eery, silent woods, the strange fog and its unnatural presences. To be safe within the high walls of Le Bleu Sauvage.
‘We can’t be certain they won’t hurt us,’ he whispered. ‘We don’t know what they’ll do, what they want...’
The sailors drew closer, fog swirling around their sloping shoulders and dripping clothes.
‘To Hell with it,’ Samuel muttered. He stepped off the path, moved deeper into the woods.
When there was nothing but fog and pine trees in the darkness around them, he set Luce on her feet. She glanced round, searching for somewhere to hide. An old maritime pine, easily the largest tree in the woods, loomed before them. She dragged Samuel toward it.
No sooner had they reached the trunk than the dead men appeared, trudging through the night. Pushing her back against it, Luce seized the lapels of Samuel’s aged overcoat and drew it up to his face, pulling him in close. Perfectly still, perfectly quiet, the rough, brown folds of the coat melding into the bark, they would look, she hoped, like part of the tree.
‘Shhhh,’ she breathed, as the sea-dead shuffled and creaked in the woods around them.
Samuel, eyes glinting in the dark above her, nodded.
As the sound of that slow, morbid shuffling increased—more and more sailors were passing through the forest now—Samuel drew even closer, pinning the edges of his cloak to the bark with his forearms, sealing them both in the darkness. He was nervous. Luce heard it in his rough breath, felt it in the set of his wide shoulders. She smelled his scent, salt and leather, the sweet afterthought of cider. A set of footsteps shuffled closer, and closer. Samuel reached down to slip his knife from his belt, and part of the coat slipped away from the tree.
Luce flinched as a pale, rotting face appeared beside her, so close she could have touched it. A pale, rotting face with empty sockets where eyes had once been. And below it, a tattered, reddish-coloured shirt.
She whimpered, her body straining of its own accord, desperate to be as far as possible from that awful, bloated face, familiar despite the ravages of saltwater and decay.
‘It’s all right.’ Samuel lifted the coat to the tree once more, hiding the dead sailor from her sight. ‘I’ve got you, Luce.’
Panic consumed her, stealing reason and sense. She clung to him, pressing her face into the worn linen of his shirt.
‘It’s the sailor from the wreck,’ she breathed. Rolling hideously in the water beside her, bloody foam leaking from his nose. ‘From underneath the Dove. This is the Dauphin ’s crew—’
‘I know.’
‘He’s—it’s—right there, Samuel,’ she hissed. ‘Right next to us.’
‘It’s not.’ Samuel released the other side of the overcoat, slipping his arm around her, cupping the back of her neck with astonishing tenderness. ‘It’s already moved on. You were right, Luce. They’re not interested in us.’
She turned her head, expecting to see that face staring sightlessly back at her. Instead, she glimpsed, through the sliver between coat and bark, empty forest, swirls of fog.
‘See?’ Samuel’s palm moved up and down her back, infinitely soothing. ‘They’re leaving.’
She nodded against him, unwilling to let him go. ‘Why are they here?’
‘Who knows? I have never seen anything like this before. I already believed something terrible must have happened aboard the Dauphin. Now, I am certain of it.’
The last of the footsteps in the undergrowth faded. The night settled around them, releasing its dusky breath.
‘They’re gone,’ Samuel murmured.
Luce waited for him to release her. Silently ordered herself to release him . The Dauphin ’s haunted crew, the aching in her feet, faded from her mind. She was intensely aware of all the places Samuel’s body touched her own: his hand at her nape. His fingers in her hair. His cheek against her brow. His arms, chest and thighs.
She could smell the sea in his hair.
Samuel bent his head still lower, and she felt the scrape of his lips against her neck. A thrill of desire ran through her, but she kept herself perfectly still. Terrified, aware that even the smallest movement might startle him and shatter the spell that had settled over them both. Like the sea mist still drifting through the woods, it was delicate, fragile. The barest breath of wind could break it apart.
Those lips of his touched her neck again and her skin burned deliciously. He nuzzled in deeper, breathing in, she realised, the scent of her hair. She tilted her head back, letting him in, hope and desire and something more, something nameless and wordless, rising within her.
An explosion of stars glimmered through the murky-white pine needles above. Slowly, slowly, Luce ran her hands down Samuel’s chest, slipped them beneath his shirt. Found the smooth, bare skin of his chest, the hard muscle beneath.
He drew back and looked down at her, eyes glinting in the half-dark. For one sweet moment Luce thought he would press his mouth to hers. She had imagined kissing him a hundred times. Had dreamed of it, and more, waking in a storm of confusion and longing, her sheets rumpled, her nightgown askew, one hand between her thighs.
Surely he could see it in her face? Surely he knew?
And then, ‘I’m sorry,’ Samuel muttered hoarsely. ‘I can’t... We can’t do this, Luce.’
A brisk salt breeze rose up from the Manche, pushing through the trees, catching at that delicate sea mist where it clung to needle and bough, to starlight and dream, ripping it to shreds.
Night had cloaked the malouinière in velvet darkness when Luce returned, the house still and dim.
‘Go lightly, tall one,’ the lutine murmured sleepily as Luce passed. ‘’Tis quite the risk you take.’
Luce nodded grimly and crept across the lawn, careful to avoid the gravel as she rounded the house and came to the servants’ door. It was, thankfully, still unlocked; her father’s valet or the maids were no doubt still awake, working over last-minute alterations for the ball. Quietly, quietly, she slid into the dimness of the domestiques’ hall, closing the door behind her with a melancholy little click.
Her face gloomed out of the shadows as she passed the mirror hanging near the coat-hooks: a pale oval, tear-smudged and grim beneath the wild black tangle of her hair. She sighed at the thought of leaving her hair in such a state till morning—it was too late to brush it now—pausing at the bottom of the servants’ stairs to remove her shoes. Sand scattered over the worn timber, and she brushed it hastily away, catching at her skirts and climbing the narrow, winding stair to the first floor.
As it turned out, her efforts to remain quiet, and leave the stairs tidy, were entirely wasted.
Gratienne was sitting in a chair on the shadowy landing outside her daughters’ bedchambers, a candelabra blazing on the lacquered table beside her. She had been embroidering, her hoop resting in her lap.
Luce’s belly iced with dread.
‘You are home late,’ Gratienne said. Candlelight played upon the ruffles of her peignoir, catching at the embroidered butterflies and roses. Her blonde hair, glimmering with strands of silver-grey, was loose. She had been beautiful in her youth, the most beautiful young woman in Saint-Malo, and the shadows smoothed her age away, playing on her fine cheekbones and long, elegant neck—so similar to Veronique’s.
‘I am sorry, Maman.’
‘Where were you, Lucinde?’ Gratienne rose from her seat, setting her embroidery hoop beside her. Her worried gaze roved over Luce, from the top of her damp, disheveled head to her sandy hem, missing nothing.
Honesty, then.
‘I was at the cove, Maman.’
‘The cove?’ Gratienne frowned. ‘At this time of night?’
‘I was swimming, Maman.’
‘ Swimming? ’
‘Yes. There had been a lot of pain since the shoemaker’s visit’— not entirely untrue —‘and I thought the water might help.’
‘Ah, yes. Your feet.’ Gratienne glanced down at the offending limbs as though they too were guilty. ‘How did you get out?’
The time for honesty was over. She could not, would not, reveal the chapel’s secrets.
‘I climbed over the wall,’ she lied.
‘You climbed ?’ Gratienne’s voice rose an octave. The closest door—Charlotte’s—opened a crack.
Luce nodded. ‘It was not so very hard.’
‘I heard music on the headland,’ Gratienne said. ‘Did anybody see you?’
‘No, Maman.’
‘What would people think, Lucinde?’ Gratienne demanded. ‘What would they say if they saw the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Léon wandering about in the dusk like a common fishwife? And let us not even mention what might have happened if someone had seen you— this countryside is full of rough people—fishermen and smugglers— ill-mannered men who would take one look at you and... and...’ she trailed off, uncertain. ‘It is not safe. ’
What would your father say if he knew you were here with me?
A second door clicked open. Veronique, her hair like spun gold in the candlelight. Like Gratienne, she was careful not to touch it, adhering to Jean-Baptiste’s unswerving rule.
‘I’m sorry, Maman,’ Luce said. ‘It’s just—I cannot bear to be contained all the time. I need to be outside. I—I cannot help it.’
‘You must learn to help it,’ Gratienne said, not ungently.
Veronique and Charlotte were no longer attempting to hide their eavesdropping. They had opened their doors wide and were gaping at Luce from behind their mother’s back.
‘You are no longer a child, Lucinde,’ Gratienne said. ‘Your father spoils you, it is true, but at some point you must understand that every poor decision you make reflects badly upon him. Upon all of us. Think of your sisters. If word of such unseemly behavior was to get out, it might affect their chances of securing advantageous matches. Everything we have worked for, planned for, trained for, will be undone.’
Luce looked guiltily down, her gaze resting on the garment in her mother’s hands. It was not, she realised, a new piece, but one she knew well. The baptismal gown was Gratienne’s most beloved possession. Small and creamy-pale, it had been worn by Gratienne herself, and her mother, and her mother before her, a long line of noble women held safely in their mother’s arms while they received the water of God. Veronique and Charlotte had both worn the gown for their baptisms, while Luce, of course, had not. As children, her sisters had taunted Luce about this fact. Indeed, Charlotte had done so with particular vehemence, so much so that even now the sight of the tiny white gown filled Luce with remembered loneliness and shame.
‘It hurts me to do this,’ Gratienne said. ‘But I fear I have no choice. You must be punished.’ She took a bracing breath. ‘When we attend the ball at Le Loup Blanc tomorrow night, you shall stay behind.’
The silence that followed was a plunge into a sea of ice.
‘ Maman! ’ Veronique exploded at last, as though bursting, lungs screaming, to the surface. She stared between her mother and Luce, horrified. ‘You cannot mean it! It is too cruel, too—’
‘I do not make this decision lightly, Veronique,’ Gratienne said wearily. ‘You must think of what might have happened, who might have seen—’
‘But Maman,’ Veronique said, one final valiant effort. ‘Luce’s new gown. It is so beautiful. She must wear it!’
‘The ball is all anyone will be talking about for months,’ Charlotte added. ‘You cannot expect her to miss it.’
‘I have made my decision,’ Gratienne told her daughters. ‘Luce will not attend. Now, please. Return to your beds.’
There was a creak and groan as Jean-Baptiste’s door opened. He stepped onto the landing, the floral brocade on his dressing gown lustrous in the candlelight.
‘What is all the commotion about?’ he roared. ‘Can’t a man rest in his own house?’ He glared at all four women. ‘And did I just hear someone say that Lucinde will not be attending the ball?’
‘I am astonished, Luce,’ Veronique whispered. ‘Truly. You climbed the wall ? Whyever would you do such a thing?’
‘ How she could do it is the question you should be asking,’ Charlotte, pressed close between her sisters, hissed. She glanced pointedly at Luce’s feet. ‘Climbing a wall that high would be difficult for anyone, much less—’
‘Hush, Cee,’ Veronique cautioned. ‘Maman’s getting very angry now...’
All three sisters, clustered against their mother’s chamber door, stilled. Jean-Baptiste’s voice, a low, displeased rumble on the other side of the gold-edged oak, faded as Gratienne cut across him.
‘She is wild, Jean-Baptiste. Wild and willful. Wandering down to the shore alone and coming home in the dark without a care in the world—’
Luce, her face pressed close to the cool wood, might have laughed had circumstances been different. If the terror of the Dauphin ’s ghostly crew, and the confusion, the hurt at... at what had happened after were not still so raw.
‘What if someone had seen her?’ Gratienne demanded. ‘What would they have thought?’
Lucinde imagined her father’s shrug. ‘The girl loves the sea. And why should she not? Hasn’t it given us everything? All that you hold dear has come by its grace. Besides, you said it yourself—no one saw her. She got home safely. I’ll have the portier inspect the walls, patch up any weaknesses. It will not happen again.’
‘You have spoiled her for too long,’ Gratienne said. ‘No good will come of it.’
‘I hardly think—’
‘You cannot tell me that you deem it appropriate for Luce to be out alone at night?’
‘Of course not, but—’
‘You are too soft on her,’ Gratienne said. ‘Indulging her whims, bringing in tutors, filling her head with nonsense. And now this ship you have gifted her—why, Jean-Baptiste? You know as well as I that it will never truly be hers. You are allowing her dreams and hopes that can never be—you are leading her toward disappointment.’
Jean-Baptiste was silent.
‘I know you love her,’ Gratienne said, softer. ‘But you know as well as I that Lucinde must marry. Must find her match and do her duty, as Veronique and Charlotte must do. As we all must do.’ Was that a trace of bitterness in Gratienne’s voice? Had she once dreamed of something more? Something of her own? ‘It is her duty as your daughter. As a Léon. ’
‘And who are the Léons? Royalty?’ Jean-Baptiste scoffed. ‘We are merchants, Gee. Traders and sailors. It was generations of hard work that got us here, not blood or lineage. Never forget that.’
‘Speak for yourself!’ Gratienne seethed. ‘ My father was a baron. And I expect at least one of our daughters to make a match worthy of him!’
Luce winced. This difference in opinion—her mother’s staunch pride in her nobility, her father’s steady faith in his roots, in hard work, in risk and daring—was a tender spot between her parents.
‘Worthy of his high blood and low means, you mean. Do not forget why your father was so quick to agree to my marrying you, Gee,’ Jean-Baptiste said coldly. ‘A title does not equal a fortune.’
‘I am doing everything I can to ensure our daughters secure good, strong marriages,’ Gratienne cried. ‘Just think of the damage Luce’s behavior tonight could do to their prospects! What if someone had seen her?’
‘No one did,’ Jean-Baptiste repeated patiently. ‘And I told you, I will speak to Luce. In the meantime, you will not punish her this way. Let her go to the ball, mon amour. Perhaps attending such a gathering, in such fine company’—there was the barest hint of derision in his tone—‘would be beneficial to your plans.’
‘Perhaps,’ Gratienne said grudgingly. She sounded calmer now, and Luce wondered if the danger might have passed. But then...
‘And what of your plans?’ her mother demanded. ‘Do you not wish to see all your daughters wed? Your line secure? Your fortune in trustworthy hands?’
‘I wish to see my daughters happy,’ Jean-Baptiste said. ‘Their happiness is more important to me than any marriage, any line. And I do not think this constant obsession of yours—this competition you have fostered between them—is doing any of them good.’
Gratienne’s voice was deathly quiet. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, just look at Charlotte,’ Jean-Baptiste said.
Luce felt her sister tense beside her.
‘That girl’s jealousy will be her undoing,’ Jean-Baptiste continued. ‘You want to worry over one of our daughters? Worry over her. ’
‘Charlotte has done nothing wrong!’
‘She pecks at Luce like a crow at a baby mouse. Always has. I may have spoiled Luce, but she has a soft heart. She does not deserve such treatment.’
‘There you go again. Taking Luce’s part, as you always do!’
‘Someone has to,’ Jean-Baptiste roared. ‘Why, between the three of you, she is poked and prodded mercilessly. It is jealousy, nothing more.’
‘Jealousy?’ Gratienne, too, was furious.
‘Indeed. Luce cannot help being beautiful.’
‘ Beautiful? I hardly think—’
‘She is,’ Jean-Baptiste said firmly. ‘She is more beautiful than Charlotte, more beautiful than even Veronique. She cannot help being the loveliest, any more than Charlotte can help being the plainest.’
Charlotte went even stiller, if such a thing were possible. Luce felt a surge of overwhelming sadness for her sister. By chance or choice, Charlotte was never first. Never the eldest, never the youngest. Never the most beautiful, never the most intriguing, never the most talented. Her voice was not the sweetest, her skin—with its smattering of freckles—was not the purest, her waist was not the smallest. She was favored by neither her father (that being Luce’s privilege) nor her mother (Veronique’s). She was always, to put it quite simply, in the middle.
‘We should go,’ Veronique whispered, her face troubled. She reached for Charlotte’s sleeve, tugged it gently. Charlotte ignored her.
‘You spoil Lucinde!’ Gratienne’s rage seeped through the keyhole and beneath the closed door, as relentless as water in a sinking ship.
‘I do not.’
‘You do, and you know it!’
‘Very well then,’ Jean-Baptiste said, his voice frighteningly soft. ‘I do spoil her. And why shouldn’t I? You weren’t there, Gee. You didn’t see her on that God-forsaken beach. Everything she knew, everything she loved, taken from her. No child should have to endure what she did. From the moment I scooped her into my arms, I swore I would do everything in my power to ensure her happiness. In truth, it means more to me than—’
‘Your other daughters’ futures?’
Most men would have demanded their wives’ silence long before, stifling conversations like this—filled with honesty and judgment— as a captain might order his crew to strike a sail. Luce’s father had been an exceptional captain, but he never was, and never would be, like most men. Even so, she wondered how far his patience would stretch.
‘I’ll speak to Luce, Gee. I promise, ’ was all he said. ‘But make no mistake, I will not stand by and see her punished. She has suffered enough.’
He moved, slippers scuffing gently as he neared the door. At once the sisters broke from their places, hurrying toward their bedchambers. Luce slipped into hers, but not before she glanced back and saw the look Charlotte threw her before she did the same. A look so cold and hateful it sent shivers up her spine.