CHAPTER NINE
CéCILE
The morning after the Fairhavens’ first night beneath our roof, the sun rose pale and sickly over the James River. Elin had sat awake until dawn, though I did not know it then. I knew only that when she came to my room carrying my parasol and shawl, her face looked drawn and her eyes avoided mine.
Dinah had already dressed me in a white morning gown sprigged with blue flowers. She had fastened the last pearl button at my wrist without remarking upon Elin’s lateness, although Dinah rarely failed to remark upon anything. The silence between them told me they had spoken before entering my room.
Perhaps they had spent the night deciding how best to protect me from my own happiness.
I sat before the mirror while Elin arranged the ribbons at the back of my hair. Her fingers were careful and cool. Usually she hummed while she worked, some Swedish cradle song with a tune that wandered sadly and never seemed to find its way home. That morning she made no sound.
The words she had spoken in the drawing room returned to me: He was upstairs. He spoke to me in Swedish. He said they came to collect what is owed.
I remembered the terror on her face. I remembered the water darkening her dress and the cold that had followed her into the room.
I also remembered what I had written upon Adrian’s card.
Then you are mistaken.
The sentence had been cruel. I knew it even as I wrote it.
Yet beneath my guilt lay something harder: resentment that Elin had brought fear into the most beautiful moment of my life.
For eighteen years, every joy offered to me had arrived with a physician’s warning, my mother’s correction or a stranger’s pity attached to it.
I could not bear to have Adrian taken from me by another person’s caution.
When Elin finished my hair, our eyes met in the mirror.
I could have spoken to her then. Alone with Elin, words usually came more easily. I might have apologized. I might have asked what truly happened in the blue room.
Instead, I stood and held out my hand for my gloves.
She placed them in my palm.
By ten o’clock, the mugginess had settled over Le Champ des Fleurs like a damp quilt.
The roses bowed beneath the weight of the heat, and the brick arcade beside the garden had begun to sweat.
I sat upon the wrought-iron bench in the shade with a leather-bound volume of poetry resting unread in my lap.
I was not reading.
I was waiting.
Adrian appeared beneath the archway without announcing himself.
One moment the path beyond the roses was empty; the next he stood within the shadow of the brick columns, pale and immaculate in a dark waistcoat and white linen shirt.
The heat had touched everyone else in the house.
It had curled Lucien’s hair, wilted my mother’s lace and driven my father to drink watered brandy before breakfast. Adrian bore no sign of it.
His collar remained crisp. Not a drop of perspiration marked his brow.
“Miss Lebon.”
He bowed as though we had arranged to meet.
My heart struck once, hard enough to hurt.
Elin stood near the pillar behind me, holding my parasol and shawl. I felt her attention sharpen.
Adrian glanced at the book in my lap. “Tennyson?”
I turned the spine toward him.
“A dangerous companion for a garden,” he said. “He makes sorrow sound so beautiful that one may forget to escape it.”
I smiled. A reply arrived perfectly formed in my mind, but when I attempted it, the first consonant caught.
“I—I d-don’t—”
Shame threatened to close the rest of my throat.
Adrian waited.
He did not glance toward Elin for assistance. He did not supply the word or tell me to take my time. His patience was not the bright, careful patience strangers displayed when they wished to be praised for tolerating me. He simply looked into my eyes as if the silence belonged to our conversation.
“I don’t intend to escape it,” I finished.
“No,” he said softly. “I do not believe you do.”
The answer should have unsettled me. Instead, pleasure warmed my face.
He sat at the opposite end of the bench, leaving a proper distance between us.
From the upper windows, my mother could observe nothing more scandalous than an eligible gentleman discussing poetry with her daughter beneath the supervision of a companion.
Adrian understood appearances as instinctively as Octavia understood envy.
“Commander Vale told me you preferred music to poetry,” he said.
At the sound of Nathaniel’s name, the garden seemed to contract around us.
“He h-heard me sing once.”
“More than once, I think.”
I looked at him sharply.
Nathaniel had listened outside the schoolroom when I believed myself alone.
Once, after I finished, he had applauded from the corridor and made me laugh so hard I could not scold him.
He had promised never to tell my mother that I sang without difficulty, because she would have turned the discovery into another performance I was required to perfect.
I had never spoken of that afternoon to anyone—not even Elin.
“What else did he tell you?” I asked. The sentence emerged slowly but whole.
“That you possessed a voice this house did not deserve.”
The roses stirred though no wind passed through the arcade.
I lowered my eyes to the book. “Did he tell you why he left?”
Adrian was quiet for so long that I looked up again.
“Nathaniel did not always understand the difference between leaving and being taken,” he said.
The answer made little sense, yet grief moved beneath it. I wanted to ask what he meant. I wanted to know where Nathaniel had gone, why my father paled at his name and why the Fairhavens had arrived carrying his secrets like letters addressed to the dead.
But Adrian turned his attention toward the garden, and the questions scattered.
“Would you honor me with a walk, Miss Lebon? You might show me the glasshouse before the midday heat becomes unbearable.”
Behind me, Elin drew a sharp breath.
I looked toward the overgrown structure beyond the roses. Its broken panes flashed between the trees. Even in daylight, the mist around its foundation had not entirely burned away.
“It is locked,” I said.
“Locks are often invitations disguised as refusals.”
He rose and offered me his hand.
The gesture was innocent. No glove touched mine. Yet I felt the promise of contact like warmth held near cold skin.
Before I could accept, Elin stepped from the pillar and placed herself between Adrian and the bench.
“Madame Lebon requested that Miss Cécile remain near the terrace this morning,” she said. Her accent sharpened each word. “The sun is already high, and she has a tendency to wilt in the heat. Perhaps you could walk inside the house. There are many rooms you have not seen.”
I stared at her.
My mother had made no such request. She had been delighted to see me dressed for the garden and had inspected my reflection twice before allowing me downstairs.
Elin knew that I knew she was lying.
Adrian’s dark eyes rested upon her. For one brief instant, the courtesy left his face. Something ancient and empty looked through him, regarding Elin not as an obstacle but as a small mortal thing whose resistance had already been measured.
Then he smiled.
“Of course, Miss Andersdotter. We must respect the wishes of the house.”
He bowed to me. “Until luncheon, Miss Lebon.”
He turned toward the French doors.
The moment his back was to us, eighteen years of humiliation caught fire inside me.
Every physician who had pressed a spoon against my tongue stood behind Elin.
Every tutor who had repeated a word until it lost all meaning looked out through her pale, anxious face.
My mother’s fingers were beneath my chin again, turning me toward the light and telling me to make an effort.
Elin had become all of them simply by stepping between me and the first person who had made me feel whole.
“How dare you?”
The words rang through the arcade.
Adrian stopped but did not turn.
Elin’s face went still.
I rose from the bench. “How dare you speak for me? My mother said no such thing, and you know it. You lied to a guest because you have decided that your fear matters more than my wishes.”
Each sentence came faster than the one before it. No sound caught. No syllable closed around my throat.
“You hold my parasol. You fetch my tea. You help me dress because my mother pays for your service. That does not give you the right to govern me.”
Color drained from Elin’s face.
Some part of me saw the injury land. Some part wanted to stop. But the words were pouring out clean and bright, and I had wanted that freedom too long to surrender it merely because the first use I made of it was ugly.
“I am sick of you standing behind me like a jailer,” I continued.
“I am sick of being watched, managed and protected until there is nothing left of me but everyone else’s caution.
He was speaking to me. He was looking at me.
And you ruined it because you cannot bear that I might no longer need you. ”
The final sentence struck harder than I intended.
Elin did not defend herself. She stood beside the pillar holding my parasol in one hand and my shawl in the other, every inch the servant I had accused her of being.
The garden fell silent.
Only then did I understand what had happened.
I touched my throat.
There had been no stutter. No cruel pause while listeners pretended not to listen. The words had flown from me as swiftly as the birds in my mind, each one arriving whole and exactly when I called it.
Joy rose so violently that it nearly erased my shame.
“Did you hear me?” I asked. “Elin, did you hear? I said everything.”
Her eyes met mine.
“I heard every word.”
The quietness of her answer cut through my delight.
I looked down at the gloves twisted between my fingers. “I—I d-didn’t m-mean—”
The first word closed. Then the second.
Panic rushed into the space the miracle had left behind.
Adrian had reached the French doors. He turned his head and looked at me across the length of the arcade.
A cool breath touched the back of my neck.
“I did not mean all of it,” I said.
The sentence emerged flawlessly.
I went still.
Elin heard the difference. I saw it in her face.
“Which part?” she asked.
I could not answer—not because the words would not come, but because I did not know which truth I was willing to surrender.
I resented her interference. I resented needing her.
I loved her. I wanted to hurt her for making me feel afraid.
All of it lived together inside me, too tangled for any voice to make clean.
Adrian extended his hand from the doorway.
“Miss Lebon?”
The distance between us was far too great for him to expect me to take it, yet the gesture felt intimate, as though his palm waited just beneath mine.
I looked once more at Elin.
She lowered the parasol. Whatever answer she had hoped to find in my face was no longer there.
I walked toward Adrian.
With every step, my throat grew lighter. By the time I reached the doors, a hundred beautiful sentences waited behind my teeth. I knew I should have been frightened by the pattern. I knew Elin had seen it too.
But fear had never given me anything except silence.
Adrian had given me words.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered without hesitation.
Behind me, Elin said my name.
I did not turn.
Blue butterflies descended upon the rose garden, settling over every open bloom until a living wall of wings trembled between us