CHAPTER THREE
The dresses arrived on Thursday, and Laurell came down to dinner in the forest green.
Remy had been in the middle of pouring a glass of wine, and afterward he could not have said with any confidence whether he’d finished the motion or simply stood there with the decanter tilted like a man who’d forgotten what wine was for.
The color did something extraordinary to her eyes.
Mrs. Curry had sent a maid up to dress her hair, and it was pinned in a soft coil at her nape with the weight of it gleaming almost black in the candlelight.
“It fits,” Laurell said, a little defensively, as though he might argue.
“So I see.” He set down the decanter. “Sit down before the soup goes cold.”
They had taken to dining together. It had happened without discussion; the first night she’d had a tray in her room, the second night Mrs. Curry had simply laid two places, and Remy had found he hadn’t the will to countermand her.
The dining room seated eighteen. For twelve years he had eaten at one end of it with a newspaper.
Tonight he watched her eat—properly, with appetite, a second helping of the veal without being coaxed—and thought about how thin her wrists had been on the night he brought her home.
“I mean to ask you something,” he said, when the plates were cleared, “and you may tell me to go to the devil.”
Laurell’s fork paused. “That seems unlikely.”
“I want his name.”
The color went out of her face so quickly he half rose to catch her. She set the fork down with great care, as though it were made of glass.
“Why?”
“Because in three days I have to decide what happens to you, and I’m making decisions in the dark.” He kept his voice even. “Because if there’s any chance the man can be made to do his duty—”
“There isn’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I do know it.” Her hands had gone into her lap.
“I went to him, Remy. On my own, with my maid waiting at the corner, which was the last brave thing I ever did. I told him and he laughed at me. He said—” Her throat worked.
“He said a girl who’d go into a garden once would go into a garden twice, and how was he to know whose it was. ”
Something cold and very old moved through Remy’s chest.
“Come into the library,” he said. “The servants have ears, and you’re about to cry, and you’ll hate yourself if you do it over the pudding.”
That startled a damp, unwilling noise out of her, and she let him take her arm.
THE library was the smallest room in the house and the only one Laurell had come to love. Remy put her in the leather chair nearest the fire, poured himself a brandy he didn’t drink, and sat down across from her without saying anything at all, which was somehow harder to bear than questions.
“His name is Philip Marchand,” she said at last.
The glass stopped halfway to his mouth. “Marchand. Of Esplanade Avenue?”
“You know him.”
“I know his father. I’ve dined at their table.” He set the glass down. “Go on.”
So she told him. It came out badly and in the wrong order, months of it at once.
She’d met Philip at the Bergerons’ in September.
He was three years older than she was, handsome enough that other men laughed at his jokes, and for two months he had been the whole of her world.
He’d sought her out at every event. He’d sent notes by way of her sister, which had made Rachel important and therefore willing.
He had told her, in a garden on Prytania Street in November, that his father would object to her portion but that he intended to have her anyway, and that he could not be expected to wait for a woman he already considered his wife.
“I believed him,” Laurell said. “That’s the whole of it. I wasn’t forced and I wasn’t drunk and no one deceived me except as people will when you want very badly to be told a certain thing. I believed him, and I went into the garden, and a month later I understood what I’d done.”
“And when you told him?”
“He’d already asked for Céline Bouchard.” The name still tasted of ash. “The banns were read at Christmas. Everyone says it’s a splendid match.”
Remy said nothing for a long moment. When she looked up, his face was perfectly composed, and yet the room felt several degrees colder.
“And your father?”
“My father called me a whore.” She said it flatly; she’d had time enough to get used to the word.
“My mother stopped speaking to me altogether—she still hasn’t, not one word since the first week of December.
They told the household I was ill. I wasn’t allowed downstairs when there were callers.
And then Madam Giselle came to collect what my father owed her, and asked for Rachel, and my father”—her voice cracked, and she pressed on through it—“my father said he had a daughter of no use to anybody, and would she take that one instead.”
The fire popped. Remy rose, and for one terrible moment Laurell thought he meant to leave the room, that she had finally said the thing that would make him look at her like all the rest of them. Instead he went to the window and stood with his back to her, one hand braced against the frame.
“Marchand has a house on Esplanade,” he said, “and a father with three municipal contracts.”
“Remy.”
“He has a wedding in April and a great deal to lose.” He turned. “Give me a week. I’ll have him at your feet.”
“No.”
“Laurell—”
“No.” She stood, and was surprised to find her legs held her.
“Do you imagine I haven’t thought of it?
Do you think I haven’t lain awake making him say the words?
I could have you go to him. You’re the mayor of this city, and his father needs you, and I daresay you could frighten him into a church by Sunday.
” Her hands were shaking. She flattened them against her skirts.
“And then I would be married to a man who was made to have me. Every day for the rest of my life I’d look across a table at someone who wished I’d had the decency to disappear, and my child would grow up in that house, and know it.
I lived in a house like that from October until Tuesday.
I won’t go back into one, not for the sake of a name. ”
Remy was staring at her.
“I don’t want him,” she said, more quietly. “That’s what no one seems able to understand. Everyone has been so busy deciding what’s to be done about my ruin that not one person has thought to ask me what I want.”
“Then I’m asking.”
The simplicity of it undid her more thoroughly than any of the rest.
“I want to raise my baby,” she said. “That’s all.
Somewhere no one knows me. I’d take in sewing, or keep house for someone, or teach letters to children in a place too small for anyone to have heard of the Marchands.
I know how ridiculous that sounds coming from a woman who can’t so much as dress herself without help.
But it’s what I want. I’ve wanted it since the night I understood what was happening to me, and I never once said it out loud, because there was no one to say it to. ”
She stopped, mortified, and waited to be told how impossible it all was.
Remy crossed the room. He stood in front of her, close enough that she had to tip her head back, and for a wild instant she thought he might touch her.
“It isn’t ridiculous,” he said.
Remy did not sleep that night.
He lay in the dark listening to the house settle and heard, through the connecting door, the small sounds of a woman turning over in a bed that had waited twenty-one years for someone to use it.
He had been prepared, in some part of himself, to hear a story that made her a fool or a schemer.
He had heard a great many stories in a great many parlors.
What he had not been prepared for was the arithmetic: a girl of two-and-twenty had believed a young man’s promise, and for that she had lost her family, her name, her sister, her freedom, and very nearly her body, and had come within seventy-two hours of Abelard Gauthier.
And Philip Marchand had lost nothing. Philip Marchand was going to be married in April with four hundred people in the cathedral, and would dance at his own wedding breakfast, and would live to be eighty.
There was no ledger in the world that balanced.
And under that, running like a second current, was the thing he could not stop turning over.
I want to raise my baby.
He had been thinking of it as a complication.
That was the shameful part; he could see it clearly now, laid out in the dark.
From the moment she’d said the word expecting in his study, he had filed the child under difficulty—an obstacle to any respectable arrangement, a thing that made her harder to place, like a flaw in a deed of sale.
He had been no better than her father, only politer about it.
It was a child. In eight months there would be a person in the world who had done nothing to anyone.
A boy, perhaps, learning to walk on somebody’s floor. Somebody’s hand steadying him.
Remy stared at the ceiling and made himself finish the thought, because he had never in his life been a coward about anything except this one thing.
He had wanted children. He had wanted them so badly at eighteen that he’d married a girl from Baton Rouge four months after meeting her, and he had wanted them still at nineteen, standing in the rain while they put her in the ground with the baby that had killed her, and somewhere in the long gray years afterward he had simply stopped saying so at all.
Twenty-two years. He had built a career, a fortune, and a house with fourteen rooms nobody entered.
Down the hall was a room with a bed nobody had slept in, full of gowns nobody had worn, kept like a shrine to a girl who had been dead longer than she’d been alive—and now a living woman was sleeping in it, and Remy found that when he tried to summon Mary’s face tonight, what he saw instead was a startled laugh in a study doorway and a green dress in candlelight.
He rolled onto his side and swore at the wall.
In the morning he sent for Winston.
“The small room at the end of the third-floor hall,” he said. “The one that looks over the garden. Have it aired and the furniture uncovered.”
Winston’s face did not move by so much as a hair. “Very good, sir. Shall I have anything brought up?”
“No. Nothing.” Remy shook out his newspaper with a snap. “It’s damp, that’s all. Damp is bad for a house.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Winston, who had been with him nineteen years, and who went upstairs and had the nursery opened.