CHAPTER TWELVE
CéCILE
The second song ended beneath my hands, but the last chord continued trembling through the pianoforte long after the room applauded.
I lifted my fingers from the keys.
Adrian stood beside the instrument, watching me with the same grave attention he had offered when I could scarcely force a greeting past my lips. While his eyes remained upon me, my throat felt open and bright. Every word waited obediently behind my teeth.
“Another,” my mother urged from the sofa.
The request pleased me more than it should have. All my life she had displayed my music as proof that one imperfect faculty might be compensated by another. Now she wanted the song and the conversation afterward. She wanted all of me because, at last, all of me could be shown without apology.
“Perhaps later,” I said.
The sentence came beautifully.
Mother smiled as if I had presented her with a jewel.
Around us, Le Champ des Fleurs glowed beneath the flattering gloom of its crimson curtains.
Footmen carried iced tea through shafts of red light.
Augusta Dewey reclined beneath the new ceiling fan and pretended not to watch Octavia.
Philip George laughed too loudly at something Nicholas had said.
Warren hovered near Elin’s abandoned place by the oak doors, though Elin herself was gone.
I had seen her leave.
I had also chosen not to follow.
The knowledge rested beneath my happiness like a small stone in a satin slipper—easy to ignore while seated, painful the moment I tried to stand.
“You have lost your audience,” Octavia observed.
She reclined upon the velvet chaise, immaculate in cream silk. Her painted fan moved in a slow, measured rhythm. Gardenias opened and closed across its ivory leaves.
“I have hardly lost anyone,” I replied.
“Not anyone.” Her dark gaze drifted toward the empty doorway. “Someone.”
Heat climbed my neck. I turned away before she could see that the little barb had found its mark.
My father stood near the drinks table with Judge Dewey and Reuben George. The three men were no longer pretending friendship. Reuben’s mouth moved rapidly while the judge kept one hand clamped around his elbow. Father glanced first at Adrian and then toward the hall.
Adrian did not appear to notice.
He had moved to the far windows, where he listened to Lucien describe some disastrous foxhunt with Nicholas. Yet when Father led the other men from the parlor, Adrian’s fingers tapped once against the glass.
The clock upon the mantel answered with a single chime.
No hour had passed.
Curiosity stirred, but it was not my newfound voice that made me rise. It was Commander Vale’s name, spoken that morning on the porch, and the memory of my father flinching from Adrian’s hand.
I crossed the parlor slowly, pausing to answer Lavinia George when she praised my playing. My reply was graceful enough to make Mother beam from across the room. Then I passed through the oak doors and entered the central hall.
The air beyond the parlor was several degrees colder.
The long passage lay empty beneath portraits of dead Lebons.
Men in high collars and women with narrow mouths stared down from silver frames, each face painted with the confidence of someone who believed the house would remember only what flattered them.
Beneath their watch, I followed the runner toward my father’s private study.
The three men had stopped before my father’s private study. Father pulled the handle once, then again.
“Why is this locked?” he demanded.
Reuben George looked over his shoulder. Judge Dewey tried the handle himself, as though the door might respect his authority more than it respected my father’s.
“Use the other key,” he said.
I retreated into the bend of the corridor before they could discover me. Metal scraped within the lock. The hinges complained, three sets of footsteps entered and the door closed again.
I waited until a key turned from the other side.
I should have returned to the parlor.
Instead, I pressed my ear to the cold mahogany.
“Fairhaven named the Sea Nymph,” Reuben said. His voice carried clearly through the panel. “He asked whether she found the inlet difficult last November. How could he know that?”
“Keep your voice down,” Father snapped.
“Five hundred souls in a year, étienne. Five hundred. Vale recorded every one of them.”
My hand slid from the door.
The words made no sense at first. They entered my mind as numbers without objects, a sum awaiting its proper column.
Then I remembered the ships Father sometimes inspected near Norfolk, the unexplained journeys, the money that had arrived faster than cotton or timber could earn it.
I remembered men coming to the kitchen after midnight with mud upon their boots and seawater whitening their coats.
Five hundred souls.
Not passengers. Not immigrants. Human beings brought through hidden inlets years after the trade had been outlawed, sold so that my mother might order French mirrors and my father might pour brandy from Waterford crystal.
My blue silk tightened around my ribs.
“The papers died with him,” Father said.
“Did they?” Reuben demanded. “The Fairhavens know the ship. They know the landing. Adrian looks at me as if he watched us dig the grave.”
The corridor tilted beneath my feet.
“Vale did not survive,” Judge Dewey said. His voice was quieter than the others and therefore more terrible. “That is the only certainty we possess.”
Silence followed.
I could hear my own pulse. Each beat seemed loud enough to travel through the door.
Then Father spoke.
“No one knows where we put him. The lime took everything.”
A floorboard complained beneath my slipper.
Inside, a chair scraped violently backward.
I gathered my skirts and fled two steps down the hall before shame stopped me. I was not ashamed of listening. I was ashamed that some childish portion of me still wanted to enter the study and demand that Father deny what I had heard.
The men who had arranged my life, corrected my manners and measured my worth had murdered Nathaniel Vale because he objected to the purchase and sale of human beings.
And Commander Vale had spoken of my voice.
Had he tried to protect me from the truth? Or had Father used my future—as Reuben’s frightened words suggested—to excuse what could never be excused?
The thought sickened me.
A soft rustle sounded behind me.
Octavia stood at the crossing of the halls.
No door had opened. No footstep had announced her. One moment the corridor had been empty; the next she occupied it completely, pale against the dark paneling in her cream gown. Her fan was closed now. She held it loosely at her side like a narrow ivory blade.
I tried to say her name.
The O formed easily. The first hard consonant did not.
“O-Oct—”
My throat seized.
The miracle had vanished with Adrian’s gaze.
Octavia watched without pity. Somehow that was worse than pity and better than kindness.
“You heard them,” she said.
I nodded.
“All of it?”
“E-enough.”
The word tore on its way out.
Behind the locked study door, Father said, “Someone has been in here.”
I stared at the brass keyhole. Until that moment I had assumed the men were alone.
Octavia’s eyes followed mine. A faint smile touched her mouth.
“Someone else reached the truth before you,” she murmured.
Elin.
Fear drove the next word past my stutter.
“Who?”
Octavia lifted one pale finger to her lips.
The gesture was playful, almost girlish. The cold that spread along the corridor was neither.
Through the narrow space beneath the door, three shadows moved across the carpet. A fourth shadow remained still near the far wall.
I stepped forward.
Octavia caught my wrist.
Her bare fingers were colder than winter iron. Frost whitened the blue silk beneath her touch, spreading through the weave in delicate branching lines.
“If you open that door,” she said softly, “you will not save her. You will only join her.”
“L-let me go.”
She released me at once.
From inside came Reuben’s frantic voice: “Someone was listening.”
Father moved toward the door.
I backed away, my skirt brushing the threshold. A narrow edge of blue fabric slipped beneath the door and vanished.
“Cécile?” Father called.
For one terrible instant, I nearly answered.
Octavia’s smile deepened.
I retreated into the bend of the corridor just as the study fell silent again. My breath came shallowly. The cold place on my wrist burned.
“Are you going to kill them?” I whispered.
Octavia considered the question as though I had asked whether rain might spoil the evening.
“Men are always disappointed when consequence resembles death.”
“My father. Judge Dewey. Mr. George.” Saying their names cost me, yet I forced each one into the air. “All three?”
“Not every debt is collected beneath the same roof.”
The words settled between us.
“Then why are you here?”
She turned her face toward the portraits. The Lebon ancestors stared back with their painted certainty.
“Your mother invited us. Your father buried an honest man in Lebon soil. This house warmed itself with money taken from the suffering and believed beauty would disguise the smell.” She looked at me again. “Le Champ des Fleurs opened its own door.”
“The Deweys and Georges profited too.”
“Their names have not been forgotten.”
A violent thump shook the study door.
I jumped. Octavia did not.
From beyond the corridor windows came the soft, gathering patter of wings. One blue butterfly struck the glass. Then ten. Then hundreds descended in a cobalt cloud, battering the panes until daylight vanished behind them.
Reuben shouted inside the study.
Wood cracked. A casement flew open somewhere beyond the wall.
Octavia’s attention shifted toward the garden, and satisfaction moved across her lovely face.
“There,” she said. “Your friend has found her way out.”
I ran to the nearest window and dragged the curtain aside. Below, the dead gardenias thrashed although no wind moved. A pale head flashed between the shrubs. Elin ran bent low toward the rose garden, one hand pressed against her bodice.
Relief weakened my knees.
When I turned, Octavia stood close enough that her perfume filled my mouth: gardenias preserved beneath ice.
“What did she take?”
“Something your father was willing to murder to keep.”
“Will she be safe?”
Octavia’s gaze drifted past me toward the parlor, toward the room where Adrian waited.
“Safety is a small promise. We do not make it.”
The butterflies lifted from the study windows all at once. Sunlight returned in a white blaze. In the garden below, Elin had disappeared.
Father tore open the study door.
I heard him before I saw him: boots striking the runner, breath ragged with rage. Reuben and Judge Dewey followed. They rushed in the opposite direction toward the rear stairs, never noticing me in the shadowed alcove.
Octavia watched them go.
“The others will run,” she said. “Men like that often mistake distance for absolution.”
“And my family?”
For the first time, something almost gentle entered her expression.
“Your family will remain exactly where it has chosen to stand.”
She opened her fan. Painted gardenias spread between us.
“Adrian is looking for you, little bird.”
I followed her back toward the crimson parlor because the corridor behind us belonged to my father, and I no longer knew which direction led away from him.
The room had scarcely changed. Nicholas still entertained Lucien and Philip near the drinks table. Augusta complained of the heat. My mother rearranged a vase of roses that required no rearranging. Only Adrian stood apart, one hand resting upon the pianoforte, his dark eyes fixed upon the doorway.
Upon me.
My throat opened in answer.
I could have crossed the room and told them all. I could have named the Sea Nymph, the hidden inlet, Nathaniel Vale’s grave. The words gathered, perfect and obedient, waiting for courage to give them shape.
Then Father’s voice thundered from the rear hall, ordering the servants to bar the gates.
Mother glanced toward the sound with irritation rather than alarm. Lucien laughed at something Nicholas whispered. Around me, the beautiful room continued breathing as if five hundred stolen souls and one murdered man were not buried beneath its splendor.
Adrian extended his hand.
I understood then that he had never offered me a cure.
He had offered me a place from which I could speak—and waited to see what I would become once speaking carried a cost.
I did not take his hand.
Neither did I call for my father.
I stood between them, silent by choice for the first time in my life, while somewhere beyond the windows Elin carried the truth away from Le Champ des Fleurs