CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ELIN
“Cécile, no.”
My refusal came from fear, not authority, but my fingers closed around her wrist as if I still possessed either one.
She stopped before touching Adrian’s hand.
The blue fire had reached the upper gallery of Le Champ des Fleurs.
Behind us, windows burst one after another, sending bright fragments into the garden.
The flames made no ordinary crackle. They moved through the house with the sound of pages turning, swift and dry, as though every room were another chapter being read aloud and condemned.
“You do not know what he is,” I said.
Cécile looked at Adrian, then at Nicholas and Octavia waiting beyond him.
“Neither do you.”
“That is why you must not follow him.”
Her wrist remained small within my grasp, but it was no longer weak.
“I have f-followed what other people knew for me all my life.”
The truth of it loosened my hand.
I had told myself I loved Cécile differently from her mother.
I waited when she spoke. I interpreted the questions she could not finish.
I stood between her and shame whenever I was permitted.
Yet even love could become another room in which a person was kept for her own protection.
I had been so afraid Adrian would take her choice that I nearly took it first.
“Then ask him what the choice costs,” I said.
Cécile faced Adrian.
“If I go with you, may I come back?”
“Not unchanged.”
“Will I die?”
“Everything dies to one life when it chooses another.”
I hated him for the beauty of that answer. Beautiful words were often curtains drawn over ugly rooms.
“Answer her plainly,” I demanded.
Adrian’s gaze shifted to me.
“Her heart will continue to beat. She will hunger, sleep and wake. Time will touch her, though not as it touches you. She may leave us if she wishes, but she cannot return to the girl she was this morning. No road permits that.”
Cécile pressed her free hand to her throat.
“And my voice?”
“Is yours.”
“Will you make it easy again?”
“No.”
The answer startled both of us.
Adrian lowered his hand without withdrawing the offer.
“What I gave you before was borrowed ease. It taught you the danger of mistaking fluency for freedom. If you travel with us, your words may still catch. They may fail when you most desire them. We will wait.”
Cécile’s eyes filled.
“Always?”
“As long as the word requires.”
She drew one slow breath and placed her hand in his.
Nothing miraculous happened.
No frost climbed her skin. No silver voice poured from her throat. Her brown eyes remained brown, wet with grief and red at the rims. Adrian simply closed his fingers around hers and waited while she gathered the words she had chosen.
“I w-will go.”
The blue fire bowed in the broken windows.
“Cécile!”
Madame Lebon stood upon the terrace with a square rosewood casket clutched against her breast. Smoke had darkened one side of her gown, and the diamonds she had gone to retrieve glittered through the open lid.
Behind her, the music room burned with a light so blue that the pianoforte appeared black against it.
“Come away from him,” she ordered.
Cécile did not release Adrian.
“Come away from the house.”
“They murdered your father.”
“Father murdered first.”
Madame Lebon descended one step. “And you would reward them by joining them?”
“I am not a reward.”
The sentence came slowly, broken in two places, but not one of us looked away.
Her mother’s face tightened.
“You are confused. You are grieving. Give me your hand, and we will find Lucien. The Georges will shelter us until your father’s attorneys restore what can be restored.”
Even with Le Champ des Fleurs burning behind her, she arranged the future as she had arranged the drawing room: placing each person where the light would flatter her and calling the result order.
“Lucien is gone,” Cécile said. “He is safe.”
“Then we shall follow him.”
“Yes. Come with Elin. Go to the road.”
Madame Lebon looked toward the servants crossing the distant field and recoiled from the sight of her own household walking beyond command.
“And arrive where? Covered in soot, carrying a single casket, begging passage from people who dined at my table?”
“Arrive alive.”
“There is no life for me without this house.”
Cécile’s fingers trembled inside Adrian’s hand.
“Then d-do not come as Madame Lebon.”
Her mother stared at her.
“Come as my mother.”
The rosewood casket slipped an inch in Madame Lebon’s arms. Jewelry spilled over its rim—a rope of pearls, two emerald bracelets and the diamond earring lost in the glasshouse.
For one moment I saw the woman she might have been before Le Champ des Fleurs taught her that possession was the nearest thing to love.
Then the front doors slammed open behind her.
A furnace of blue light filled the foyer. Every portrait along the gallery wall turned its painted face toward the terrace. Generations of Lebons watched their last mistress standing outside with ash upon her gown.
“I will not be seen running like a thief from my own house,” she said.
“No one is watching,” Cécile whispered.
But Madame Lebon was surrounded by the dead whose opinions had governed her entire life.
She stepped backward into the foyer.
“Mother.”
“If you cross that garden with them, do not call me that again.”
Cécile flinched as though the words had struck her.
The doors began to close.
She tore her hand from Adrian’s and ran.
I followed. We crossed the terrace together, but a section of the upper balcony gave way before we reached the entrance.
Burning timber crashed between us and Madame Lebon, scattering blue sparks across the stone.
Through the blaze, I saw her standing beneath the chandelier with the rosewood casket at her feet.
She could still have escaped through the drawing room doors. They stood open to the side lawn, untouched by flame.
“This way!” I shouted. “Madame, the side doors!”
She heard me. Her head turned toward the daylight.
Then the great mirror above the foyer table split from corner to corner.
Madame Lebon looked into the broken reflection and began smoothing her hair.
Cécile screamed for her.
The chandelier fell.
Blue light consumed the foyer, and the front doors closed upon it.
Cécile struck the panels with both hands. She called her mother again and again, each attempt tearing differently through her throat. I wrapped my arms around her from behind when the bronze handles grew too hot to touch.
“She chose,” Adrian said from the garden.
“Do not speak of choice to me!” I shouted.
“Elin.” Cécile turned in my arms. Tears and soot streaked her face. “He is right.”
The admission did not make the death gentler. It merely returned the cruelty to the person who had committed it.
We moved away from the doors as the portico began to groan. The columns cracked along their painted seams. Behind the house, the gardenias lifted their white faces through smoke that smelled of old paper and summer rain.
Adrian had not followed us. He waited where Cécile had left him, his hand lowered at his side.
She walked back to him.
That second crossing mattered more than the first.
She had chosen him before losing her mother. Now, with every reason to blame the Fairhavens and every opportunity to run from them, she chose again.
“What are you?” I asked.
Nicholas glanced at Octavia as though the question had amused him for several centuries.
“What men call us changes whenever they require a new explanation for fear,” he said.
“Nathaniel called us friends,” Adrian replied.
“And what will Cécile call you?”
“Whatever we prove ourselves to be.”
It was not an answer that comforted me. Perhaps none could have.
Octavia approached Cécile and began removing the pearls from her hair.
One by one, she drew the pins free and allowed the dark curls to fall naturally around her shoulders.
She did not comment upon the soot or the torn cotton dress.
When the last pearl lay in her palm, she cast them into the blue fire.
“Those were my mother’s,” Cécile said.
“Yes,” Octavia answered.
Cécile watched them disappear. Then she touched her unbound hair and gave the smallest nod.
Nicholas led me toward the garden gate.
My Swedish trunk stood beneath the rose arbor.
The gray wood was scorched along one corner, but the iron bands remained secure. My mother’s Bible lay on top, its leather cover blackened along one edge. Beside it rested a plain wool cloak, a pair of sturdy shoes and a purse heavy enough to bend the leather drawstring.
“I cannot take your money,” I said.
“It is not ours.” Nicholas lifted the purse and placed it in my hand. “Nathaniel left instructions with his letter. étienne destroyed the page, but not the intention.”
I thought of the commander writing my name while his own danger gathered around him. Perhaps he had meant to free me. Perhaps he had merely wished to provide enough money for passage home. The dead do not always explain the kindness they leave behind.
“Why did you save the trunk?”
“Because it belonged to you.”
Such a simple distinction. Le Champ des Fleurs had spent years making it impossible to see.
Dinah waited beyond the arbor with several servants. The little boy still rested upon her hip, half asleep despite the bells and fire. She had found a handcart for my trunk and two young men to pull it.
“Road’s clear,” she told me. “Most everyone’s gathered by the old chapel. We can reach the river town before dark if we keep moving.”
I looked back at Cécile.
The ivory carriage had drawn near. Nicholas and Octavia climbed inside while Adrian held the door. Cécile stood beside him, appearing more like the disheveled girl I loved than one of the beautiful creatures waiting to receive her.
I went to her.
“Come with us,” I said. “You need not decide the rest of your life today.”
“I am not.” Her mouth trembled. “Only t-today.”
I wanted to argue. Instead, I took her face between my hands as her mother had done that morning, but I did not turn it toward a flattering light.
“If they hurt you, leave them.”
“I will.”
“If they tell you that suffering is the price of becoming beautiful, do not believe them.”
“I know.”
“And if you need me—”
“I will f-find you.”
She embraced me. Her heart beat hard against mine, fast and human.
“Tell Lucien I am alive,” she whispered. “Tell him I chose.”
“Tell him yourself someday.”
“I will try.”
She stepped into the carriage.
Adrian followed, and the door closed. The driver gathered the pale reins without looking back. As the gray horses moved beneath the oaks, Cécile leaned from the open window and raised one hand.
Her eyes were still brown.
I lifted mine in answer.
The carriage passed through the gate and disappeared into the red morning without leaving a mark upon the road.
Behind me, Le Champ des Fleurs collapsed.
The sound rolled across the fields like distant cannon fire. When the smoke parted, the roof and upper floors were gone. Only the front steps remained between the two ruined columns, leading upward to a door that no longer existed.
Around the glasshouse, the white gardenias continued blooming.
Dinah put a hand upon my shoulder.
“Come on, Miss Elin. Day’s not waiting for us.”
For the first time since crossing the Atlantic, no one owned the hours ahead of me.
I took hold of my mother’s Bible, and together we began the long walk toward the road.