CHAPTER EIGHT
ELIN
Cécile looked down at my hand where it gripped her wrist.
The color had returned to her face, and her eyes still shone with the astonished joy of what had happened at the pianoforte. I hated that I had brought fear into that joy. I hated Adrian more for making the two impossible to separate.
“Do not be alone with him,” I said again.
Her gaze moved past me to Adrian.
He stood beside the pianoforte, pale and immaculate, regarding us with perfect composure.
Nothing in his appearance suggested that moments earlier he had been waiting in a frozen bedchamber at the opposite end of the house.
His white shirt was smooth. His dark waistcoat sat precisely against his body.
There was no frost upon his hair or dampness upon his boots.
Yet I could still feel the cold of his room inside my bones.
Cécile touched her throat.
“He h-helped me.”
The words came with difficulty, but she forced them out for his sake. That frightened me almost as much as the ice.
“He was upstairs,” I whispered. “In the blue room. He spoke to me in Swedish.”
Her brows drew together.
“He knew my name. He knew things I have never told anyone here.”
Cécile glanced at Adrian again.
He did not deny it.
“Miss Andersdotter has endured an alarming evening,” he said. “Fear does not always arrange events in their proper order.”
His voice was gentle enough to sound concerned. Only I heard the warning beneath it.
“The water froze,” I said. “The whole basin. He was standing beside it, Cécile. He said they came to collect what is owed.”
Her eyes widened, but her attention returned to the ivory card upon the pianoforte. Adrian's silver pencil lay across it. She picked it up and wrote quickly.
He was here with me.
She turned the card toward me.
“I know.”
She wrote again.
Then you are mistaken.
The sentence hurt more than it should have. Cécile had trusted my understanding when my English failed and trusted my silence when speaking would have placed us both in danger. Until that night, neither of us had needed proof from the other.
“I am not mistaken.”
Madame Lebon reached us before Cécile could answer. The wonder she had shown when her daughter sang had already hardened into irritation.
“Elin, you have disrupted the entire room. What happened to Mr. Fairhaven's water?”
“It froze, Madame.”
“Do not be absurd. It is July.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“And you have spilled it down your dress.” She looked at the wet mark as if clumsiness were a greater offense than terror. “Go upstairs and make yourself presentable.”
I remained beside Cécile.
“Now, Elin.”
Cécile reached toward me, but Adrian moved closer to the pianoforte. He did not touch her. He did not need to. Her hand lowered before it reached mine.
“Go,” she whispered.
The single word emerged almost clearly.
I released her wrist.
As I crossed the drawing room, conversation began again behind me in cautious fragments. Nicholas laughed near the fireplace. Octavia said something that made Augusta Dewey gasp and Lavinia George hide a smile. The ordinary sounds closed over what had happened as neatly as soil over a grave.
At the doorway, I looked back.
Adrian stood beside Cécile with one pale hand resting near the ivory card. She had turned toward him, her expression uncertain but hopeful. He bent his head and said something I could not hear.
Her uncertainty disappeared.
He had not merely given Cécile a voice. He had made himself the guardian of it, and now every warning against him would sound like an attempt to take her miracle away.
Hours later, the house still refused to sleep.
Long after the beeswax candles in the grand drawing room had sputtered out, leaving behind only the heavy stench of hot tallow, sour wine, and dying gardenias, the floorboards above continued to groan under the weight of restless, pacing feet.
Downstairs in the main hall, Monsieur Lebon, Judge Dewey, and Reuben George remained shut inside the study, their muffled, frantic voices rising and falling behind locked doors like cornered beasts arguing over a bone.
Midnight had come and gone, yet the suffocating July heat still hung in the air like a wet wool blanket, pressing dampness deep into every brick and timber of Le Champ des Fleurs.
I made my way down the dark, steep steps of the rear staircase to the outer kitchen, seeking a draught of cool well water and a moment away from the oppressive, watchful stillness of the upper corridors.
The brick kitchen was quiet, illuminated only by the dull, dying red embers of the hearth.
Dinah sat alone at the long pine worktable, a small kerosene lamp casting a soft amber glow over her dark, worn hands.
She was mending one of Cécile's blue lace collars, her needle moving in precise, rhythmic strokes that barely made a sound against the linen.
She did not look up when my slippers scraped against the cold flagstone floor. “You ought to be in your garret, child.”
“I could not sleep,” I said, taking a tin cup from the wooden shelf and filling it from the earthenware pitcher on the washstand. The water was tepid, tasting faintly of iron and river silt, but I drank it greedily. “It feels as though the walls are closing in up there.”
Dinah set down her needle. “Walls have a way of doing that when they are built on secrets.”
I sat opposite her and pulled my apron tighter around my waist.
“Adrian Fairhaven was in two places tonight.”
The needle rolled from Dinah's fingers and came to rest against the lamp.
“I saw him in the blue room,” I continued. “Cécile saw him in the drawing room. He spoke Swedish—the old dialect my grandmother used. He knew my full name. He knew I count the marks of my contract every Sunday.”
Dinah's face did not change, but one hand closed around the lace collar.
“What did he say?”
“That they have come to collect what is owed.”
The lamp flame sank.
Dinah looked toward the open archway leading to the courtyard. “Do not say that again.”
“What is owed?”
“Some questions are dangerous because nobody knows the answer. Others are dangerous because everybody does.”
I leaned closer, keeping my voice to a bare whisper. “What happened here last summer? The night Commander Vale disappeared?”
The silence in the kitchen stretched, heavy, taut, and fragile. Outside, the cicadas kept up their relentless screaming in the magnolia trees, a dry thrumming that seemed to vibrate through the stone foundation.
Dinah's hands tightened around the blue lace collar. “I told you before, Elin. Some words are not safe to carry. Not in this house.”
“He did not simply leave, did he? Monsieur Lebon was terrified when the messenger arrived. Judge Dewey and Mr. George are drinking themselves blind. And the Fairhavens know about a ship and missing records.”
“Do not say their name in the dark,” Dinah snapped, her eyes darting toward the courtyard.
A genuine dread crossed her weathered face.
“Those people are not natural. You felt the cold that follows that man. I saw the carriage horses lather and blow the moment they turned down the avenue, though they had not worked hard enough to raise a sweat.”
“Do you know what they are?”
“I know what wrong smells like.” Dinah leaned across the table, lowering her voice until I had to strain to hear her.
“And I know what happened the night Nathaniel Vale vanished.
It was raining—a terrible, sheet-pouring storm that flooded the lower river road.
I was in the washhouse near two in the morning, tending Miss Cécile's fever cloths. I heard heavy wagon wheels coming down the drive. No lanterns. Just a black shape moving through the mud.”
My breath caught. “Did you see who was driving?”
“I saw Monsieur. His coat was soaked through and covered in red mud from his boots to his collar. Reuben George was with him, carrying a heavy iron spade, and Judge Dewey stood under the arcade burning a bundle of papers in the washhouse stove. The next morning, Monsieur ordered the glasshouse locked. Said the iron frame was rusted through and no one was to set foot near it again.”
She leaned back, her hands trembling as she picked up the needle.
“Nathaniel Vale did not run off to Richmond, Elin. He never left Le Champ des Fleurs.”
The realization settled in my stomach like cold lead.
The glasshouse.
The overgrown ruin where blue butterflies swarmed in furious spirals and the air smelled violently of decay.
Before I could ask another question, heavy, unsteady footsteps sounded in the stone passageway leading from the main house.
Dinah's posture changed at once. She picked up her work, her face smoothing into a blank mask of deference. I stood quickly and tucked my tin cup behind the washstand pitcher.
Warren Dewey stepped into the doorway.
He had removed his coat and cravat. His fine white linen shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, revealing flushed skin, and his pale face shone with sweat. He held an empty brandy glass in one hand. When his small, watery eyes settled upon me, a slow smile spread across his thick lips.
“Well, well,” Warren slurred, leaning against the doorframe. “The Swedish maid is up late. Fetching water or looking for trouble?”
“I was returning to my room, Mr. Dewey.”
I lowered my chin and moved toward the back staircase.
Warren stepped into the narrow passage between the worktable and the stairs, blocking my path. He placed his empty glass upon the table with a ringing clack.
“No need to rush.” The sour smell of brandy, tobacco, and heavy sweat rolled from him. “I was thinking about our little conversation. About your contract.”
Dinah rose slowly. “Mr. Warren, sir, Madame Lebon requested the kitchen doors be locked at midnight—”
“Shut your mouth, Dinah.” His eyes never left my face. “Five hundred dollars is a small sum to my father. A word from me, and Monsieur Lebon will sign your indenture over to our estate before breakfast. Three years is a long time to spend in a house that is falling apart.”