CHAPTER 30
GOLD LEAF
POV: GIDEON
"Take off your shirt," she says.
It's nine at night. She came back from the Quarter at eleven this morning in her black dress with the dime missing from her purse and gold dust from somewhere on her fingertips, and she hasn't said a word about it since.
She sat with me. She ate lunch at the table with the Sacred Heart on the wall.
She read to me from a book on Venetian gilding when the morphine made it hard to keep my eyes open, and I listened to her voice go on about bole and gesso and the angle of the brush, and I didn't hear a word.
I watched it all this morning. Every second.
The owner of Café Sainte-Anne put a camera over his bar four years ago, when I bought his debt. I lay in this bed with my phone propped against my knee and watched her carry the cups to the counter and turn her back on the room.
I watched her open the tin.
I watched her tip it in, the way she tips leaf onto size, over the long spoon, without a puff.
I watched Clémence Boudreaux see her do it in the mirror, and fold her sunglasses, and look away.
Drink your coffee, Papa. It's getting cold.
I watched Ambrose drink.
Clémence took him home to Chalmette at half past ten. He's still alive, somewhere across the river, lying in his bed with his hands on his stomach, telling his daughter it was the oysters.
He won't be alive by morning.
***
"Take off your shirt," Noemi says again.
"I can't lift my arm."
"I know. I'll do it."
She does. She undoes the buttons one at a time and eases the shirt off my good shoulder and then, very slowly, down the bad one, over the dressing and the sling, the way she'd lift a sheet of leaf off the cushion. She folds it and puts it on the chair.
Then she opens her kit on the bed.
The cushion. The knife. The squirrel-hair tip. Three books of leaf, twenty-three karat, double-beaten. A little pot of something that isn't size.
"Honey," she says, when she sees me looking. "Honey and water. The old women in Chalmette used it to put gold on the faces of the saints for Easter, when the priest wouldn't let them use size. It holds on skin." She unscrews the lid. "Lie down. On your stomach."
"Noemi—"
"On your stomach, Gideon."
I lie down on my stomach on the iron bed, with my face turned toward her and my bad arm strapped to my chest under me.
She kneels on the bed beside me.
She doesn't say anything for a long time. I feel her looking at my back. At the scars. The long thin white lines from my shoulder blades to my waist, crossing and recrossing, with little hooks at the ends where the buckle bit. Six years of them.
I've never let anyone look at them in the light.
She dips her fingertip in the honey water and draws it along the first scar.
Slowly. From the top, where it starts under my left shoulder blade, down to where it ends at my spine. Cool. Sticky. I feel the line of it, exactly the line of the scar, because she's laying it the way she lays size on a halo, precisely, following the edge.
Then she takes a square of leaf on the tip and lays it down.
I don't feel the gold. It's too thin to feel. I feel her breath on my back as she lays it, held, and then let go, and the soft touch of the brush as she tamps it down.
She does the next one.
And the next.
I lie with my cheek on the pillow and watch her face while she works. She's holding her breath for every square. Her eyes are fixed on my back. There's a line between her brows. Her lips are moving, counting.
She doesn't hear anything. Not the traffic in the alley, not the bar across the way, not the bell of the church through the wall at ten.
She doesn't hear the band.
Thirty-one scars. She gilds every one of them.
When she's finished, she sits back on her heels on the bed and looks.
"There," she says.
"What does it look like?"
She takes a hand mirror off the dresser, and holds it so I can see over my shoulder.
My back is covered in gold.
Thin bright lines of it, crossing and recrossing, from my shoulders to my waist, shining in the lamplight like the cracks in a bowl that's been mended with gold.
Every mark he ever left on me. Every night I lay on my stomach in my room on Prytania at nine years old and didn't make a sound because a Valcourt doesn't carry tales.
Gold.
"They were his," she says quietly. "Now they're mine."
I can't speak.
She sets the mirror down. She leans over me and puts her mouth on the back of my neck, on the Valcourt crest my grandfather started putting on every Valcourt boy at sixteen, and then lower, between my shoulder blades, on the gold, and I feel her lips come away sticky with honey and bright with leaf.
"Turn over," she says.
***
I can't kneel. Not properly. Not with a hole in my shoulder and my arm strapped to my chest.
I kneel anyway.
On the floor of the priest's room, on the thin rug, in front of the chair where she's sitting. She's pulled the black dress up to her waist. She's watching me with her hands on the arms of the chair and her knees open and her face perfectly calm, the way she watched Ambrose drink his coffee.
"You're going to tear your stitches," she says.
"Let them tear."
"Dr. Roux will be angry."
"Let him."
I put my good hand on her knee.
She lets me.
I put my mouth on the inside of her thigh, above the top of her stocking. Then higher. She tastes like salt and honey. There's gold on her fingertips, and when she puts her hand in my hair, I feel it come off on me.
I worship her.
There isn't another word. I've spent three years in the last pew of a church without once going up to the rail, and now I'm on my knees in front of her, and I use my mouth on her like a man who's finally found something worth praying to.
Slowly. Carefully. The way she laid the leaf on my back.
Her hand tightens in my hair. Her other hand grips the arm of the chair.
Her thighs close on either side of my head and open again.
"Gideon," she says.
I don't stop.
"Gideon—"
She comes with her head back against the chair and her hand fisted in my hair, and she says my name to the ceiling of a dead priest's bedroom, and it's the holiest sound I've ever heard in a house of God.
I don't let her rest.
I get up off my knees, which costs me, and I don't care. I pull her up out of the chair with my good arm and she comes into me, and I turn us both, and sit down in the chair, and she climbs into my lap the way she did in the choir loft.
She's careful of my shoulder. She puts one hand flat on my good side and the other on the back of my neck, and she sinks down onto me, slowly, watching my face.
"Look at you," she says.
The gold on my back is against the leather of the chair. I can feel it flaking off, sticking. She looks down at my chest, my stomach, my face.
"Look at you," she says again, softer. "My monster."
"Yours."
"Say it again."
"Yours. I've been yours since the ladder."
She moves. Slowly, and then not. Her hands on me.
My good hand on her hip, holding, not guiding, because she doesn't need guiding.
She takes what she wants from me in a dead priest's chair with gold coming off my back and blood starting to come through the gauze on my shoulder, and I let her, and I watch her face the whole time, the concentration in it, the line between her brows.
"My queen," I say.
She stops moving.
She looks down at me. Her eyes are very dark.
"Say that again."
"My queen."
She comes down on me hard, all the way, and holds there, and shudders, and I feel it take her, and I go with her, my face in her neck, my good arm around her so tight I'll leave marks.
When it's over, she doesn't get up.
She sits in my lap with her forehead on mine. There's gold on her face now, from my back, from my hands. A smear of it across her cheekbone, where she wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
Exactly where it was on the ladder.
"You're bleeding," she says.
"I know."
"Dr. Roux is going to be very angry."
"Let him."
She laughs. It's the first time I've heard her laugh like that, all the way, not at a saint, not at something Sister Perpetua said. At me. Low and tired and a little bit wild, with her forehead against mine and gold on her face.
I close my eyes and listen to it.
***
At a quarter to two, three knocks and one more on the steel door.
I go down in my trousers with gold still in the creases of my back. Ansel is on the step with his phone in his hand and a look on his face I've never seen there.
"Clémence," he says. "She called me. Not you. Me." He looks at the phone like it might bite him. "Her father died at a quarter past one. In his bed. The doctor says bad oysters. She said to thank you for the papers." He stops. "She asked what time the council meets on Tuesdays."
"What did you tell her?"
"Noon." He turns the phone over in his big broken hand. "She said she'd be there. She said, Tell the queen I'll be there."
He goes back down the steps into the alley.
I stand in the doorway for a long moment in the cold, with the gold on my back and the taste of her still in my mouth.
***
The council meets on Tuesday at noon in the nave of Saint Casimir's.
It's always met at my father's library on River Road. There is no library on River Road anymore.
Eight men and one woman sit on folding chairs in a half circle in front of the old altar rail, where Tee-Jean knelt.
The four harbor captains. The lockmaster.
Superintendent Broussard, in plain clothes, sweating.
Two of the old men from Algiers who've run the west bank for my father for thirty years. Ansel, standing behind my chair.
And Clémence Boudreaux, in black, with her father's three gold rings threaded on a chain around her neck.
She doesn't look at Ansel. Ansel doesn't look at her. The air between them is so thick you could cut it with a gilder's knife.
I sit in front of the altar rail with my arm in a sling and the gold still in the creases of my back under my shirt.
Noemi sits beside me.
Not behind me. Not at my shoulder. Beside me. In a chair of her own. In her black dress with her hair up and six pins in it and the halo on her hand.
Every man in that half circle has looked at her. Every one of them has looked away.
"My father is dead," I say. "My cousin is dead. Ambrose Boudreaux died last night of bad oysters. Mademoiselle Boudreaux speaks for her family now." Clémence inclines her head. "The canal is open. The port is open. The tithe is what it always was."
Nobody says anything.
"There's one change," I say.
I look at Noemi.
"The port answers to her now."
A silence.
One of the harbor captains, Guidry, a big red-faced man with a gold anchor in one ear, clears his throat. He's Earl Guidry's older brother. He knows what happened to Earl's hand, and why.
"With respect, Deacon," he says carefully. "She's— with respect. She's a girl out of a convent."
Noemi turns her head and looks at him.
"Captain Guidry," she says.
He blinks. He didn't know she knew his name.
"Your boat is the Belle Chasse," she says.
"Sixty-foot tug out of Algiers. You've been running three barges a week past the Industrial Canal locks since August without paying the full tithe on the third.
You tell the lockmaster it's empty. It isn't. It's scrap copper for a man in Houston.
" She folds her hands in her lap, over the halo.
"You owe my husband eleven thousand dollars since August. I'd like it by Friday. "
Guidry's red face goes white.
He looks at the lockmaster. The lockmaster looks at the floor.
He looks at me.
I don't say anything.
"Friday," Guidry says. "Yes, ma'am."
"Madame," Noemi says.
"Yes, Madame."
Beside me, Clémence Boudreaux makes a small sound, like a laugh swallowed.
Broussard shifts on his folding chair. He's been sweating since he sat down.
"If I may," he says. "The federal matter.
Agent Brandt." He wipes his forehead with a handkerchief.
"The Bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility opened an inquiry this morning.
They've frozen every file he touched. Every informant, every warrant application, every open case.
" He glances at Noemi and away. "Including the one he'd opened on the Valcourt family three weeks ago.
It's done. Nobody's going to pick up anything with his name on it. Not for years."
"Thank you, Superintendent."
"I didn't do anything," Broussard says.
"No," Noemi agrees. "You didn't."
He sweats harder.
Clémence Boudreaux uncrosses her legs.
"Madame," she says. It's the first word she's spoken.
Her voice is low and cool. "My father's dock slips on the east bank.
Four of them. They were closed to us by the Deacon's order two weeks ago.
" She doesn't look at me. She looks at Noemi.
"I'd like them reopened. Under my name. I'll buy two boats with what's left of the insurance on the ones that burned.
The tithe will be paid on the first of every month. In full." A beat. "Not in dimes."
Somebody in the half circle coughs to cover a laugh.
Noemi looks at her for a long moment.
"The slips reopen on Monday," she says. "You'll pay the tithe to Ansel. In person. The first of every month."
Clémence's face doesn't change. But her hand goes to the chain at her throat, to her father's rings, and holds them.
Behind my chair, I hear Ansel stop breathing.
"In person," Clémence says. "Of course."
I let the silence sit. I let every one of them look at her, and look away, and understand.
Then I say it again, so there's no one in that nave who hasn't heard it.
"The port answers to her now. So do I."