CHAPTER 33
THE CORONATION
POV: NOELLE
I choose the dress myself.
It’s the first thing I’ve bought in a month that he didn’t choose first. I go to the shop on Royal Street that dressed his mother and his grandmother, with Bastien at my shoulder and his arm still in the sling, and I stand before the long mirror in the back room while the old woman who owns it brings me black, and ivory, and gold, and I shake my head at all of them.
“Red,” I say.
She looks at me over her glasses. At the yellow shadows on my throat. At the gold. At the key hanging a quarter inch beneath it.
“Red,” she agrees, and goes into the back.
It’s the color of the sanctuary lamp at St. Anselm. Silk velvet, long-sleeved, cut straight across the collarbones like the black one was, so the gold sits alone on bare skin. It fits as if it had been measured. It wasn’t. I’m simply the size of the women who have always worn this family’s dresses.
I pay for it myself, with a card that has my name on it. Noelle C. Delacroix. The old woman runs it and hands it back and says, “Madame,” the way Marchand said it on the crypt stairs.
***
At seven I sit at the vanity and paint my face.
Odile offers. I say no. I do it myself, the way I’d do a portrait.
Charcoal dark at the eyes, smudged with my ring finger the way I shade a jawline.
Red on the mouth, the same red as the dress, one clean line and then filled in.
I pin my hair up, heavy and high, off my neck, and push the pencil through the knot.
Lucien is in the doorway.
He’s been there a while. I watched him arrive in the mirror.
He’s in black, the silk band at his collar, the rosary on his wrist, and above the collar on the left side of his throat, the mark I left in the Atchafalaya, gone the color of a plum.
He hasn’t covered it. Everyone on the river has seen it by now.
“War paint,” he says.
“Portrait.”
“Of whom?”
I look at myself in the mirror. The dark eyes. The red mouth. The gold and the key.
“The woman who’s going to sit at the head of your table tonight,” I say.
“Your table.”
“My table.”
He comes into the room. He stands behind my chair and looks at me in the mirror, the way he looked at me in the loft, in the dark, before I knew his face. He lifts one hand and lays two fingers on the key, just below the lock.
“You could open it,” he says. “Tonight. Before.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you?”
I meet his eyes in the glass.
“Because then it’s just a necklace,” I say.
***
The Magdalene is lit from the waterline to the top rail for the first time since the fire.
New windows on the river side. New carpet.
The smell of paint over the smell of smoke.
Cars along Esplanade all the way to Decatur, the same as All Saints.
The same families. The same judges. The same senators.
A different room.
When we come through the doors, it goes silent the way it did three weeks ago.
But this time I know why. And this time it isn’t his hand on my back that does it.
He walks beside me, half a step back. The way Bastien walks. The way a man walks beside the thing he’s guarding. He doesn’t touch me. Every eye in the room goes to my face and my red dress and the gold at my throat, and then, only then, to him, to the mark on his neck, and back to me.
I walk the length of the room without looking at anyone.
At the long table in the center, Marchand stands behind the chair at the head. He pulls it out.
I sit.
Lucien sits at my right.
At my right. The place I sat at his table every night for three weeks because he told me to. He takes it without a word and lays his hand flat on the white cloth near mine, not touching, and the whole room watches him do it.
There’s a menu at every place. Heavy cream card, the Delacroix crest in gold at the top, the courses printed in black script. Gumbo first. Made from a recipe card in my mother’s handwriting.
I turn the menu over. The back is blank.
I take the pencil out of my hair.
Nobody says anything. The judge on my left watches me lay the card flat beside my plate and set the pencil next to it. The senator’s wife across from me stops talking to her husband.
At nine-fifteen the doors open again.
Cormac Brannigan comes in under his flag.
It’s a real flag. White silk on a short pole, carried in front of him by a boy of maybe twenty who looks terrified. Behind the boy comes Cormac, in a dark suit instead of a cardigan, swinging his braced leg stiffly with every step. Behind him, two men.
One of them has a face I know.
A red, puckered seam from the corner of his eye to his chin, stitched with black thread. It’s healing badly. He sees me at the head of the table and stops walking, and the man behind him walks into him.
I look at him.
He looks away first.
Cormac is seated at the far end of the long table, facing me down its whole length, twelve places away. The white flag is propped against the wall behind him. His two men stand at his back.
He looks at me. At Lucien at my right. At the mark on Lucien’s neck. Back at me.
“So it’s true,” he says. His voice carries in the quiet. “The girl has the chair.”
“The woman,” Marchand says, behind me.
Cormac smiles a little.
“Madame Delacroix,” he says. “My condolences on your father-in-law.”
“Thank you,” I say. “He fell.”
A ripple runs down the table. Someone coughs.
“I’ve come to make peace,” Cormac says. “Like grown men.” He glances at me.
“And women. The east docks split along the Industrial Canal. The Garzas take the Houston boats. Fitz, Kinnane, my men at Pier Nine, your men, your father-in-law—all of it forgotten. Nobody owes anybody. We go back to being neighbors.”
He spreads his big hands on the tablecloth.
“That’s my offer,” he says. “It’s a generous one. I’m an old man, and I’m tired, and I’ve buried enough.”
I pick up the pencil.
I don’t answer him right away. I look at him. At his heavy face. The white beard trimmed close. The pale eyes. The broken veins across his nose. The way the left corner of his mouth pulls down further than the right.
I start with his eyes.
“Madame?” Cormac says.
“I’m listening,” I say, and keep drawing.
The room is so quiet I can hear the pencil on the card.
“You came here under a flag,” I say without looking up, “so I’ll tell you the truth.
You’re owed that much under a flag. On Wednesday I sat in the office of the United States Attorney on Poydras Street for forty-one minutes.
I gave her Grant Whitlock’s phone, and every message he ever sent you.
I gave her eleven years of your business on the east docks, in my mother’s handwriting.
Ships. Customs. Your man at the Port Authority.
” I shade the hollow under his cheekbone.
“She told me you’d be in federal custody by Christmas. ”
Cormac’s face doesn’t move.
“So there’s nothing to split,” I say. “Nothing to forget. No neighbors. There’s just you, for the next five weeks, and then a cell in Pollock.”
The senator’s wife puts her hand over her mouth.
“You didn’t,” Cormac says quietly.
“She did,” Lucien says. It’s the first thing he’s said all night.
Cormac looks at me down the length of the table, and doesn’t speak.
Then he laughs. A short, dry, disbelieving sound.
“Claire’s girl,” he says. “Claire Arceneaux’s little girl.”
“Yes.”
“She sold us both out, and you finished it.” He shakes his head. His hand has gone flat on the cloth. Very flat. “And you think I’m going to sit here and eat your gumbo.”
“No,” I say. “I think you’re going to try something. And I think my husband is going to stop you.”
Behind Cormac, the man with the stitched face has slipped his hand inside his jacket.
Lucien’s hand, beside mine on the white cloth, hasn’t moved.
I finish Cormac’s mouth.
I turn the menu around and slide it down the table toward him, past the judge, past the senator, past the untouched bowls of my mother’s gumbo, until it stops in front of his plate, face up.
His own face looks up at him in charcoal.
Dated in the corner.