CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELIN
Cécile’s scream seemed to remain in the air after the last panes fell.
I covered my head as glass rained over us, chiming against the flagstones and breaking into pieces no larger than sugar.
When I looked again, Monsieur Lebon was on his knees beside the open grave.
The blue roots had wound around his boots and climbed beneath the cuffs of his trousers, tightening with a patience more terrible than violence.
He fired the empty pistol a second time.
The hammer struck with a useless click.
“étienne!” Madame Lebon rushed forward.
I caught her around the waist before she reached him. She fought me with a strength I would not have believed her capable of possessing, tearing one sleeve against my buttons as she stretched both hands toward her husband.
“Help him,” she demanded of Adrian. “You have made your point. Whatever Nathaniel promised you, I will pay it.”
Adrian stood beyond the broken grave with a flattened pistol ball resting in his palm. Behind him, Nicholas and Octavia watched without expression. Nathaniel Vale lay between them beneath his covering of blue gardenias, untouched by the collapse of earth and stone.
“You have already paid,” Adrian said. “Every day of your life has been purchased with him.”
The roots pulled.
Monsieur Lebon fell hard upon one shoulder. His pistol skittered across the floor and disappeared among the white blossoms. He clawed at the flagstones, but the broken edges sliced his palms, leaving bright smears upon the pale stone.
“Cécile!”
He did not call to his wife. He called to his daughter.
Cécile took one step before stopping. Blood ran from a shallow cut along her cheek where the falling glass had touched her, but she appeared not to feel it. Her father reached for her with both ruined hands.
“Tell them,” he gasped. “Tell them I am your father. Tell them what becomes of you if I die.”
The effort of speech shook her entire body.
“Y-you k-killed him.”
Monsieur Lebon’s face changed. For a moment, fear loosened its hold and left only offense, as though she had accused him of cheating at cards before the wrong company.
“Nathaniel Vale would have destroyed us.”
“He meant to expose you,” Adrian said.
“He meant to destroy my children’s future!”
“No,” Cécile said.
The single word carried no stutter because she gave it no place to hide. She pressed one hand against her throat and forced the rest through.
“Y-you d-did that.”
Monsieur Lebon stared at her. I saw the instant he understood that obedience had left his daughter before life left him.
He turned upon the Fairhavens.
“Dewey signed the orders. George arranged the ships. If there is blood beneath this house, there is blood beneath theirs.”
“There is,” Nicholas said.
Hope flashed across Monsieur Lebon’s face, hideous in its eagerness.
“Then go after them. I can give you records, names—everything Vale possessed. Let me out of this, and I will deliver the judge and Reuben George to you myself.”
Octavia smiled. “How generous men become when they are offering other people’s lives.”
“Their houses will answer when they open their doors,” Adrian said. “Today, this one answers.”
Monsieur Lebon screamed as the roots drew him over the broken rim.
Madame Lebon tore free of me and threw herself upon the ground.
She caught one of his wrists with both hands.
For several seconds they clung to one another while the roots strained in the earth beneath them.
The diamonds at her ears shook loose, one falling into the grave and the other vanishing beneath the folds of her skirt.
“Do not let go,” he begged.
“I will not.”
It may have been the first honest promise I ever heard her make.
The root nearest her hand lifted its blue head. It brushed the inside of her wrist with almost tender curiosity. A white line appeared across her skin, spreading frost beneath the surface.
She cried out and released him.
Monsieur Lebon vanished into the grave.
There was no thunder and no triumphant voice from the earth. Soil slipped from beneath the flagstones in a steady dark stream, covering his legs, his chest and finally the hand that remained raised toward us. His fingers closed upon nothing before the ground swallowed them.
The grave sealed itself.
For one breath, a narrow seam divided Nathaniel Vale from the place where Monsieur Lebon had fallen. Then blue roots stitched the earth together. Gardenias opened along the line, their white petals turned upward to the ruined roof.
Cécile made a sound too small to be called a sob.
I took her hand. She did not look at me. She stared at the blossoms covering her father and Commander Vale as though the two men had been joined in a marriage only death could arrange.
Madame Lebon remained upon her knees.
“He did not kill Nathaniel alone,” she said.
No one answered.
She raised her face to Adrian. Without the diamonds, with her hair loosened and dirt upon her mouth, she appeared both older and more human. It should have made me pity her. It did not.
“Judge Dewey held him,” she continued. “Reuben watched the garden door. étienne struck him, but they were all there.”
“And you?” I asked.
Her eyes moved to mine.
“I was in the music room.”
I remembered the letter hidden inside my mother’s Bible. I remembered Nathaniel’s unfinished sentence: I heard the pianoforte while they—
“You played,” I said.
Madame Lebon looked away.
“The servants were not to hear.”
Cécile’s hand tightened painfully around mine.
Her mother had filled the house with music while men murdered Nathaniel Vale in the garden. Afterward, she had dressed her daughter, ordered dinners and walked past the abandoned glasshouse beneath her parasol. She had done it for years without once allowing the wrong note to disturb her sleep.
Adrian stepped over the bed of new gardenias.
“You did not strike him,” he said. “You merely gave the killing a song and taught the house to keep time.”
Madame Lebon rose unsteadily. “I protected my family.”
“You protected its name.”
“They are the same.”
“Only to those who have nothing else.”
From somewhere inside Le Champ des Fleurs, a bell began ringing.
Another answered from the servants’ passage, then another from the upper floor. Within moments every bell in the house was clamoring at once. The sound poured across the garden, summoning servants to rooms whose owners had fled and masters who would never command them again.
The first blue flame appeared behind the glass of the music-room windows.
It moved across the panes like reflected water. No smoke rose, yet the curtains blackened from hem to cornice, revealing the shape of the fire room by room. A second flame awakened in my attic window. A third traveled along the roofline, outlining Le Champ des Fleurs against the red morning sky.
The servants came out.
They did not emerge in an orderly line. They ran through the kitchen yard and side doors carrying children, shawls, loaves of bread and whatever small possessions could be seized in passing.
Dinah crossed the lawn with a little boy upon one hip and an old woman leaning upon her shoulder.
She looked toward Cécile, then at the grave beneath the gardenias.
“Go,” Cécile told her.
The word trembled, but it reached her.
Dinah nodded once and continued toward the fields.
Madame Lebon watched them leave with growing disbelief.
“They cannot simply go.”
“They can,” Nicholas said. “No bell in this house will ever call them again.”
“The contracts—”
“Are burning.”
She turned toward the mansion. Through the tall windows we saw papers lifting in the blue light, each page curling into ash before the shelves and carpets caught.
The strange fire chose ink and seals before silk or timber.
It climbed the ledgers in Monsieur Lebon’s study and moved from name to name.
Madame Lebon gathered her torn skirt.
“My jewelry is upstairs.”
Cécile looked at her mother as if she had spoken in a foreign tongue.
“The h-house is b-burning.”
“Then I must be quick.”
“Mother.”
Madame Lebon stopped. For one hopeful instant, I believed the sound of her daughter’s voice had reached whatever living part remained within her.
Then she lifted her chin.
“I am a Lebon,” she said, and walked toward the house.
Cécile did not follow.
The bells stopped the moment her mother crossed the terrace.
In the silence that followed, Nicholas approached me carrying a thin folded parchment tied with dark blue silk. I recognized the red wax before he placed it in my hands.
My contract.
I had imagined stealing it, burning it, tearing my name from the page and feeding the pieces to the kitchen fire. I had never imagined receiving it politely beneath a red sky while the house that owned me turned blue with flame.
Madame Lebon saw the paper from the terrace.
“That belongs to us.”
“No,” I said.
The word surprised me with its ease.
I loosened the ribbon. My name stood at the bottom in the careful hand I had used before Virginia taught it to tremble. Beside it was the mark of the man who sold my remaining years to étienne Lebon.
I tore the contract once through both signatures.
Then again.
The pieces slipped from my fingers. Before they touched the ground, blue butterflies carried them upward, white scraps among their luminous wings. They rose through the broken glasshouse roof and scattered toward the four corners of the morning.
“Elin Andersdotter,” Adrian said. “Your debt to this house is ended.”
I wanted to feel only relief. Instead, freedom opened before me like a road in darkness.
I had no money, no husband waiting in Virginia and no certainty that the Swedish trunk beneath my bed had survived the fire.
I possessed the dress I wore, the letter hidden against my heart and the hand of the girl beside me.
It was more than I had owned an hour before.
Adrian looked at Cécile.
She had not released me. Blood dried along her cheek, and fragments of glass glittered in her dark curls among the pearls her mother had chosen. She seemed very young until she met Adrian’s gaze. Then something in her face settled—not age, but decision preparing its place.
“What happens to me?” she asked.
Her voice broke across the question. Adrian did not rescue it.
“That is no longer mine to decide.”
“Y-you c-came for my father.”
“I came because Nathaniel called us and your mother opened the door.”
“And now?”
“Now we leave.”
Beyond him, the ivory carriage waited at the far end of the garden, though I had not heard its wheels approach.
The four gray horses stood beneath the oaks with their heads bowed.
Octavia had changed from black to white without my seeing her do so.
Nicholas’s coat had become summer pearl.
Only Adrian remained dark against the burning house.
He offered Cécile his hand.
“You may go with Elin, if that is your choice. You may find your brother and build whatever life remains to you. Your voice will be difficult some days and merciful on others, but it will be yours.”
Cécile swallowed.
“Or?”
“Or you may come with us.”
I felt her fingers loosen around mine.
Adrian’s expression did not soften, but neither did it command.
“I will not promise you ease,” he said. “I will promise that no one among us will require you to become smaller so that we may feel large. No one will make you speak for our comfort or ask you to be silent for our pride.”
The house groaned behind us. Somewhere within it, Madame Lebon called for a servant who had already crossed the fields beyond her reach.
“Cécile,” I whispered.
She looked at me. I saw affection, grief and apology pass through her face, each too quickly for me to hold.
Then Cécile lifted her hand toward his.