CHAPTER 15
THE ROOM GOES QUIET
POV: NOEMI
Four hundred people stop talking at once.
It happens from the top of the stairs down, like a wave going out.
We come through the double doors onto the landing above the ballroom of the Beauregard, and the string quartet is playing something by Vivaldi, and the talk is a roar under the chandeliers.
Then the people at the bottom of the stairs look up.
And then the people behind them.
And then the whole room.
The quartet keeps playing. That's the only sound. Violins, and four hundred people holding their breath.
Gideon's hand is at the small of my back.
"Down," he says quietly.
We go down.
I can hear everything. That's the strange part.
On the ladder in Delacroix, he said I didn't hear the band.
Tonight I hear every note. I hear a woman's bracelet slide down her wrist. I hear a man at the bar say that's the nun to the man beside him.
I hear Luc Delacroix's girl and the one from the convent and good God, look at her neck.
I count.
Six exits: the double doors behind us, two service doors behind the bar, two glass doors onto a terrace, one door by the stage with a red sign over it.
Air conditioning set too cold for bare shoulders.
Every woman in the room wearing more on her throat than my father made in his life.
The pearls on the one nearest the stairs would pay off his whole debt to Ambrose with enough left over for a car.
I don't have anything on my throat.
Just the mark.
Everyone is looking at it.
I lift my chin and let them.
***
The head table is on a low platform in front of the stage, under a banner for the Archdiocesan Relief Fund. White orchids. Crystal. The Archbishop in the middle in black with red piping, talking to a woman with a helmet of blonde hair.
An old man stands as we come up.
I'd know him anywhere, and I've never seen him before. He's Gideon at seventy. The same height, the same straight back, the same mouth. Silver hair, brushed back. The eyes are Gideon's too, but paler, like somebody left them in a window too long.
"Mademoiselle Delacroix." He takes my hand before I can decide whether to give it to him. His palm is dry and cool. "Augustin Valcourt. My son has been hiding you."
"He hasn't been hiding me very well."
"No." He smiles. "He never could keep anything to himself."
He bends over my hand. His lips don't touch my skin. He stops just short, and I feel his breath on my knuckles, and when he straightens, his eyes have gone to the ring.
The halo.
Something passes through his face and is gone. He doesn't let go of my hand.
"How lovely," he says. His eyes move up. To my throat. To the bite. "My wife had skin like yours. So fair. It marked so easily."
On the little finger of the hand holding mine, there's a ring. A woman's wedding band, small, old gold, worn thin.
I look at it.
I look at him.
"Father," Gideon says.
It's one word. Augustin lets go of my hand.
"Sit, sit. You're beside me, Mademoiselle. I insist."
***
Across the table, there's a man in a white dinner jacket with three gold rings on one hand.
He raises his glass to me.
"Sister," says Ambrose Boudreaux.
The last time I saw him, I was zip-tied to a pipe with my bare feet on a tile floor, and he was drinking chicory. He looks the same. Soft. Warm. A funeral director.
He looks at my throat, and then at Gideon, and his smile doesn't move at all.
I hear myself answer.
"Mr. Boudreaux," I say. "How are your boats?"
The smile stays. But the glass stops halfway to his mouth, and it stays there, and I watch him understand that I know. Six shrimpers sitting outside the canal locks with full holds and nowhere to go. Madame Odile told me on Sunday, in the kitchen, in a whisper, like it was a love letter.
"Rotting," he says pleasantly. "Thank you for asking."
Beside him, a young woman laughs.
It's a real laugh, surprised out of her, and she puts her hand over her mouth to stop it and doesn't quite manage.
She's my age, or a little older. Tall even sitting down.
Black hair cut blunt at the jaw like a French film star.
A white dress with nothing on it, no beading, no lace, the kind of plain that costs more than anything else in the room.
Her eyes are very dark and very bored and, right now, very interested.
"Clémence," Ambrose says, not looking at her.
"Sorry, Papa." She isn't. She looks at me across the orchids. "I like her."
***
We eat. I don't taste it.
Augustin talks to me the whole time, pleasantly, about the diocese and the weather and the history of the Beauregard, which his grandfather used to own.
He asks me about gilding. He knows the word bole.
He knows the difference between oil and water gilding.
He's charming, and he's done his homework, and every time his hand moves on the tablecloth, the little gold ring on his pinky catches the light.
Gideon doesn't talk at all.
He sits on my other side with his hand on my thigh under the tablecloth, and he watches the room. I watch him watching it. His eyes go from face to face to face. He's counting too. Exits. Men. Hands.
Between the soup and the fish, the Archbishop leans across to ask him something about the Relief Fund, and Gideon turns his head to answer.
Augustin's hand comes under the tablecloth.
Not to my knee. To my lap. He puts something there. A fold of paper, stiff, like a card.
I look down.
A check. Drawn on a bank in Zurich. My name written in a beautiful old-fashioned hand, and a number with so many zeroes I have to count them twice.
"Two hundred thousand," Augustin says pleasantly, to his plate. "And a first-class ticket to anywhere in the world that isn't here. Tonight. My driver is outside. Nobody would ever have to know you didn't simply go to the powder room."
I stare at the check.
Two hundred thousand dollars. Five times my father's debt. More money than every sister at Saint Veronica's will see in her whole life.
"You could restore altarpieces in Florence," Augustin says. "You could have your own studio. Your own name on the door. You'd never have to belong to anyone." He cuts a piece of fish. "Consider it a kindness. From one who knows what the Valcourt men do to the women they love."
I look at the little gold ring on his finger.
I pick up the check.
I fold it in half, and in half again, into a small hard square, the way I fold the bills into the spine of my missal. And I lean across and tuck it into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket, behind the silk handkerchief, and pat it flat.
"I've been bought already, Mr. Valcourt," I say. "Three years ago. You're late."
He looks at me.
For the first time all night, the charm goes out of his face, and I see what's under it. It's very still, and very pale, and it's looking at me the way you'd look at a crack in a foundation.
Then Gideon turns back from the Archbishop, and Augustin smiles, and asks me if I've ever been to Florence.
After the fish, a waiter bends and murmurs something to Augustin.
Augustin folds his napkin.
"Gideon," he says. "A word in the library. About the canal. It won't take long."
Gideon doesn't move.
"Now, please. Before the speeches." Augustin rises. "Mademoiselle Delacroix will be perfectly safe. She's among friends."
For a long moment, Gideon looks at his father.
Then he stands. He bends and puts his mouth against my ear.
"Don't leave this table."
"Where would I go?"
He looks at me. He goes.
***
The moment he's gone, the table changes.
It's like a cold draft coming through a door. Ambrose leans back in his chair. Remy, three seats down, who hasn't said a word to me all night, turns his whole body toward me and smiles.
"So you're the one," he says. "The one my cousin's burning down the river for."
"I haven't asked him to burn anything."
"You didn't have to ask, did you?" Remy swirls his wine. "That's the trick with Gideon. You never have to ask. You just have to be there when he decides."
Clémence leans across the corner of the table toward me. Her voice drops.
"Don't worry," she says. "About me. I don't want him."
I look at her.
"I've met your Gideon three times," she says. "He's never once looked at my face. Not once." She sips her champagne. "The one who stands behind his chair, though. The tall one with the broken hands."
"Ansel."
"Ansel." She tries the name out. "He looked at my face."
A shadow falls across the table.
"Mademoiselle."
A man stands over me. Sixty, heavy, in a tuxedo that pulls at the buttons. Pink hands. A red, wet mouth.
"Philippe Arceneaux. Parish council." He holds out one of the pink hands. "The quartet is playing a waltz. I'd be honored."
"No, thank you."
"Oh, go on." Remy's voice, lazy, from down the table. "It's rude to refuse a councilman, Noemi. Especially in this family."
"I don't dance."
"Everyone can waltz," Arceneaux says. "I'll show you."
He takes my hand off the tablecloth.
I could pull it back. I could make a scene. Four hundred people and the Archbishop, and the girl from the convent in the red dress refusing to dance, shouting at a councilman.
I look at the library doors. They're closed.
I stand up.
***
He holds me too close.
The dance floor is crowded and nobody's looking, and everybody's looking. His hand is on my waist, and then it isn't. It slides down, slowly, a little further with every turn, over the silk, over the curve of my hip, lower.
"There," he says in my ear. His breath smells like bourbon and oysters. "You're a natural."
"Move your hand."
"I've always wondered," he says, like I haven't spoken, "what they keep under those habits. All that grey cotton. Now I know." His hand squeezes. "Gideon always did get the good toys first."
My whole body goes cold.
Not afraid. Cold. The cold of the shrimp plant. The cold of the tiles under my feet.
"Augustin says you'll be available again after Christmas," Arceneaux murmurs. "Once the boy's married. I told him I'd be very happy to put in a bid."
"Take your hand off me," I say, "or he'll kill you."
He laughs. The wet red mouth, right by my ear.
"Sweetheart. Gideon is in the library getting his ears boxed by his daddy. He isn't coming out till—"
He stops.
He stops laughing and stops dancing, and I feel his hand go still on me, and I look where he's looking.
Up.
Above the dance floor, there's a mezzanine, a balcony with a gold railing that runs along three sides of the ballroom. The library doors open onto it.
Gideon is standing at the railing.
He's alone. His hands are on the gold rail. He isn't moving. He's looking down at the dance floor, at me, at the pink hand on my hip. From here I can't see his face clearly, only the shape of him in black against the gold, the stillness of him.
It's the stillness that came over him when he looked at the blood on my chin.
Around us, one couple stops dancing. Then another. They look at Arceneaux, and they look up at the balcony, and they step back.
Arceneaux's hand falls off me like something dead.
"Well," he says. His face has gone a strange color, grey under the pink. "Well. It was just a dance."
I step back from him.
I don't hurry. I lift the red skirt an inch off the floor with one hand, the way Madame Odile showed me this afternoon, and I walk off the dance floor toward the head table, and every person in the room gets out of my way.
***
A spoon rings on a glass.
"Friends." Augustin's voice, from the stage, amplified, warm. He's standing at the microphone under the Relief Fund banner, glass raised, silver hair shining. "Your Excellency. Friends of the Archdiocese. Thank you all for coming."
Applause. I stand by my chair and don't sit.
"Tonight we've raised more than two million dollars for the families of this city who have nothing." More applause. He waits for it to pass. "And I have one more gift for you. A personal one. It is my very great joy to share it with the people I love most."
He turns his glass toward the head table.
"My son Gideon," he says, "and Mademoiselle Clémence Boudreaux—"
The applause starts.
It starts in the front, polite, and spreads back. People turning to find Clémence. Clémence sitting very straight with her champagne in her hand and her face perfectly blank.
It doesn't get far.
Because Gideon is coming down the mezzanine stairs.
He comes down them at a walk. Not fast. He crosses the bottom of the stairs and the edge of the dance floor, and the people in his way part for him the way the sea parted for Moses, without being asked, and the applause thins and falters and dies.
He comes to me.
He takes my left hand.
He turns and lifts it, and the chandelier light hits the halo, and it throws little sparks across the white tablecloth and the orchids and the Archbishop's red piping.
He doesn't use the microphone. He doesn't need to. The room is so quiet the quartet has stopped.
"My father is mistaken," he says.
His voice carries all the way to the back.
"This is the woman I'm going to marry."
Nobody moves.
The Archbishop has his fork halfway to his mouth. The woman with the blonde helmet has her hand at her throat. Ambrose Boudreaux has gone the color of his dinner jacket. Across the table, Clémence leans back in her chair and lets out a long, soft breath that sounds almost like a laugh.
On the stage, Augustin lowers his glass.
He smiles.
It's his son's smile, exactly, on an older face. He sets his glass down on the lectern very carefully, like a man setting down something he intends to come back for, and steps away from the microphone, and comes down the three steps from the stage to the head table.
He stops across the orchids from us.
He looks at my hand in Gideon's hand. At the ring. At my throat.
When he speaks, he doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. The first four tables hear every word.
"Then the Valcourt name dies with you."