CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CéCILE
Day three arrived beneath a blood-red sun.
I woke to wheels pounding over the drive and men shouting in the lower hall. Elin was no longer in the chair beside my bed, but the hollow in its cushion and the folded damp cloth upon the table told me she had remained until morning.
I called her name.
“E-El—”
The first sound caught. The second came rough and small.
I sat very still.
The birds in my mind had not died. They had merely struck the glass again.
Adrian’s miraculous voice had been effortless because it had never belonged entirely to me. My own voice remained where it had always been: behind my teeth, impatient and frightened, waiting for me to pay the price of using it.
Below, my father roared an obscenity.
I rose, pulled on the blue cotton morning dress Elin had laid across the foot of my bed and went to the gallery.
Le Champ des Fleurs had spent generations training its inhabitants to disguise disaster. That morning, the house abandoned the effort. Doors stood open. Trunks blocked the foyer. Servants crossed one another without direction while the stopped clocks chimed at random from distant rooms.
The Georges’ carriage waited before the steps with Lavinia already inside. Reuben shouted at a footman to fasten a trunk that had been strapped twice. Philip stood beside Lucien near the open door, both young men pale beneath the red morning light.
Across the drive, Augusta Dewey clutched her traveling bag while Warren argued with the judge. Warren’s gaze kept returning to the house, searching the windows for Elin.
Judge Dewey seized his son by the collar and dragged him toward their coach.
“You’re a madman, étienne!” Reuben called toward the front doors. “Keep your cursed house and everything buried beneath it.”
Father appeared in the foyer in yesterday’s shirt, his hair disordered and a dueling pistol hanging from one hand.
“Run, then,” he shouted. “Both of you. But when those papers reach Richmond, remember whose money purchased the judges who will burn them.”
The judge stopped with one foot upon the carriage step.
“Your money?” he said. “You mistake the place where we met for the whole of the enterprise.”
For twenty years the three men had protected one another with friendship, business and fear. It took less than a minute for terror to divide their guilt into separate portions.
“This is your grave, étienne,” Judge Dewey said. “Lie in it alone.”
He shoved Warren into the coach and climbed after him. The driver cracked his whip. Four horses lunged forward, carrying the Deweys beneath the oaks without farewell.
Reuben turned to follow.
Lucien caught Philip’s arm. “What is happening?”
“I don’t know,” Philip said. “Father says we must leave.”
Lucien looked toward the foyer, where our father stood with the pistol. Then he saw me above him.
I ran down the stairs.
“Cécile?”
I took his hand and pulled him beyond Father’s hearing. So many words crowded my throat that for one panicked instant none could pass.
Lucien waited.
He had always waited differently from Elin—not with her patient stillness, but with a crooked smile that promised to make a joke of the silence if I needed him to.
There could be no joke that morning.
“G-go,” I said.
His fingers tightened around mine. “Not without you.”
“With P-Philip. Find the m-magistrate.”
Philip stared at us. Behind him, Reuben demanded that he enter the carriage.
“Why?” Lucien asked.
I forced myself to look into my brother’s face.
“Father k-killed Commander Vale.”
The words did not come beautifully. They came with breath, pain and a visible struggle that made every syllable impossible to mistake.
Lucien’s smile vanished.
“What did you say?”
“The glasshouse. He is b-buried there.”
Philip went white.
“Cécile, come with us,” Lucien said. “Both of you. Where is Elin?”
“She has the p-proof.”
The lie was small enough to protect us. Elin had the beginning of proof, not enough to save anyone if Father caught her with it.
Reuben seized Philip’s shoulder. “Get in.”
Lucien resisted when Philip pulled him toward the coach. I put both hands against my brother’s chest.
“Go,” I said again.
This time the word came whole.
The shock of it held him for one second. Then he kissed my forehead, climbed onto the rear-facing seat beside Philip and shouted to the driver.
The George carriage rolled away. Lucien twisted around to watch me until the oaks swallowed him from sight.
Two guilty houses had escaped Le Champ des Fleurs. My brother had escaped with one of them.
I did not know whether I had saved him or placed him upon the road toward another reckoning.
“What have you done?” Mother asked.
She stood beneath the archway in lavender silk, dressed as perfectly as if the morning had been arranged for callers. Only her bare throat betrayed her. The diamonds she wore from breakfast until bed had been left behind.
“I sent Lucien for help.”
My sentence broke in two places, but she understood it.
“You sent the heir of Le Champ des Fleurs away in a George carriage?”
“He is not an heir if there is n-nothing left.”
Mother crossed the foyer and slapped me.
Pain flashed across my cheek. The servants nearby looked away. Father did not. He watched us with the distracted irritation of a man whose property had begun quarreling among itself.
“Go upstairs,” Mother said.
“Father murdered Commander Vale.”
She went motionless.
I had expected denial. Its absence was worse.
“Who told you?” she whispered.
“You k-knew.”
“I knew your father had enemies. Men of consequence always do.”
“You knew.”
Her face hardened around whatever confession she refused to make.
“A wife does not dig through her husband’s affairs looking for reasons to destroy her children’s future.”
“No. She spends the m-money and asks no questions.”
Mother raised her hand again.
I did not flinch.
Something in my face stopped her. Perhaps she saw that I was no longer the daughter who measured safety by the softness of her approval.
“You are a Lebon,” she said.
“So are you.”
The sentence emerged slowly, each word scarred by effort, but it silenced her.
A bell began ringing beyond the rear windows.
It came from the abandoned glasshouse.
The glasshouse had no bell.
Father lifted his pistol.
“Fairhaven.”
He crossed the house toward the garden doors. Mother called after him, but he did not turn. He descended the terrace steps and strode across the lawn beneath a cloud of blue butterflies.
Elin appeared from the servants’ passage carrying a bundle wrapped in her gray shawl.
“Lucien?” she asked.
“Gone with the Georges.”
Relief crossed her face. She glanced at my reddened cheek and then toward Mother, who stood rigid beneath the archway.
“Good,” Elin said. “Now we go.”
“Father is going to the glasshouse.”
“Let him.”
The bell rang again.
Gardenias perfumed the foyer so strongly that my eyes watered.
“Commander Vale is there,” I said.
Elin’s expression told me I was right.
“You do not need to see him.”
“Yes.” I took her hand. “I do.”
Mother ordered us to stop. Neither of us obeyed.
We followed Father into the garden.
Morning heat pressed upon the lawn, but frost silvered every place his boots had touched.
Blue butterflies circled the glasshouse in vast turning columns, entering through the broken roof and pouring out again.
Their wings made a single low sound—not a flutter but a hum, like voices gathered behind a wall.
The dead gardenias had opened.
White blossoms covered every bush around the rotunda. Their petals were perfect, their leaves brown. The beauty of them was obscene.
Elin and I stopped behind the ruined rose arch as Father kicked open the glasshouse door.
The Fairhavens waited inside.
All three wore black.
No servant had unpacked those clothes. Their narrow cases had been empty.
Yet Octavia stood in a gown of midnight silk, Nicholas lounged upon a moss-covered bench in a black coat, and Adrian occupied the center of the rotunda as though the iron ribs and shattered panes had been constructed around him.
Father crossed the threshold with his pistol raised.
“Get off my land.”
Adrian looked toward the open doorway.
“You are no longer welcome here,” Father said. “I withdraw every courtesy of this house.”
“The welcome was not yours alone to give,” Adrian replied. “Your wife opened the door. Nathaniel’s blood held it open.”
Father’s hand shook. “What do you want?”
“Nothing you can keep.”
Nicholas turned a white gardenia between his fingers. Octavia watched from the shadows, her face bright with terrible anticipation.
“Dewey and George are gone,” Father said. “If you came for payment, they have cheated you.”
“They have merely carried their debts home.”
The words traveled through the glasshouse with the soft certainty of winter entering an unlatched room.
Father’s gaze darted among them. “And what of my daughter? Is this about Cécile? Take the girl if you want her. Take the Swedish servant too. Their contracts are worthless to me now.”
My stomach turned.
Elin’s hand tightened around mine.
Adrian looked past Father and found me behind the rose arch.
“Your daughter is not yours to offer.”
Father spun toward us.
For one instant, naked fear crossed his face. Then anger covered it.
“Cécile, return to the house.”
I stepped into view.
“No.”
The word struck the glass dome as clearly as the bell had.
Father stared at me.
“You will obey me.”
“No.”
It was harder the second time. It was mine both times.
Adrian’s eyes held mine, but he did not lend me his voice. I knew the difference now. My throat hurt. My heart raced. The birds struck glass, recovered and flew again.
Father raised the pistol toward Adrian.
“Leave my daughter out of this.”
“You used her future to excuse your trade,” Adrian said. “You used her name to bargain with Nathaniel. You brought her into this long before we arrived.”
“You know nothing about my family.”
“I know what it cost.”
Father cocked the pistol.
“Shoot me, étienne,” Adrian said. “Show her what kind of man built Le Champ des Fleurs.”
Father fired.
The shot exploded beneath the glass dome. Smoke and flame burst from the barrel. Panes shattered overhead, raining bright fragments among the white blossoms.
The lead ball struck Adrian above the heart.
He did not move.
The bullet flattened against his black coat and fell to the flagstones with a small metallic sound.
Father dropped the pistol.
“What are you?”
Adrian looked almost sad.
“The consequence you believed would never come.”
He stepped forward.
The flagstones split beneath his boot.
A crack raced across the rotunda, branching through the floor and up the low stone walls. The earth groaned. Iron shrieked. Wet soil and white lime erupted through the broken pavement as the center of the glasshouse heaved upward.
Thick blue roots emerged from the ground.
They were the width of a man’s wrist and luminous beneath their dark skin. They coiled around splintered pine boards, lifting the ruins of a buried box through soil that should have concealed it forever.
The grave opened at Father’s feet.
Nathaniel Vale lay within it.
Time had not touched him.
His naval coat remained dark blue, its brass buttons bright, its gold braid unstained by earth or lime. His face was pale and still, the expression emptied of pain. Over his heart, where his coat had been torn by the fatal wound, blue gardenias grew from the cloth.
I remembered that coat bent beside me at the pianoforte. I remembered his finger resting upon the music, never upon my mouth. Take your time, little bird. A song does not become less beautiful because the singer must breathe.
My knees weakened.
Elin held me upright.
Father crawled backward through mud and broken glass.
“No,” he whispered. “The lime—”
“Preserves some debts poorly,” Nicholas observed.
Adrian stood at the edge of the grave. For the first time since entering our house, his composure gave way to something that resembled grief.
“Nathaniel waited while you drank his port,” he said. “He waited while your wife wore jewels purchased with human lives. He waited while you taught your children to call blood money an inheritance.”
Father shook his head as though denial might close the earth.
“He waited for you, étienne.”
Octavia stepped from the shadows. She did not look at Father. She looked at me.
“Watch closely, little bird,” she said, her voice sounding inside my mind. “Watch what becomes of men who build their kingdoms upon the bones of the innocent.”
The blue roots surrounding Nathaniel’s body began to move.
They slid over the fractured floor toward Father’s legs.
I found my voice.
“Father!”
My scream shattered what remained of the glass.