Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
He opened the shop early, for the first time in weeks, and for a little while the world remembered how to be ordinary.
Durand Antiquities had sat mostly dark through the whole of the fires, its bell silent, its cases gathering the fine gray dust of a city too frightened to shop for old things.
This morning the door stood open to the street and the light came in gold across the cabinets, and customers wandered in off the banquette to finger the estate jewelry and haggle over a cracked Sèvres cup, and the small ordinary business of it was a balm he had not known he needed.
Delphine came down and worked the counter beside him and teased the tourists into buying things they did not need, A regular wandered in who had been dead since the Storyville days and liked to price the pocket watches he could no longer wind, and Bastien let him browse, because the shop had always kept a place for the kind of customer no one else in the room could see.
For an hour or two the fires and the memories were only a rumor from some other life.
He had a music box open on the workbench in the back, a walnut cylinder piece a century old, its comb gummed and its governor seized, brought in by a woman who wanted her grandmother's lullaby back.
He had the mechanism apart under the lamp and was easing the last of the old oil out of it when his hand slipped on the stop-work and the cylinder turned, and the comb caught its teeth, and the box began, all on its own, to play.
It was a small tinkling waltz, thin and sweet and very old, and it filled the back of the shop before he could stop the cylinder. And behind him, at the counter, Delphine went utterly still.
He was around the workbench and across the room before the second bar.
No smoke. No fire. No warning at all, only a hundred-year-old tune from a stranger's music box, and it had reached into her exactly as the burning houses had, and taken her down into a life.
He caught her against the counter and held her while the little waltz played itself out, and he understood, with the box tinkling its lullaby into the dusty gold light of the shop, that the door in her did not need the fires anymore and perhaps never had.
It only needed the right key, and the world was full of keys, and any of them would do now.
She came back with white blossoms in her eyes, if such a thing were possible, a soft and faraway and unfrightened wonder.
“It was the garden again,” she said, when he had gotten her upstairs with tea she did not drink.
“Charlotte's garden. I was sitting beside you under the trees, and you were reading to me, out loud, from some book, and you had gone so far into it you had stopped seeing me at all.” She laughed softly.
“I remember teasing you about it. I told you a woman could grow old and gray waiting for you to look up from a book.
And you did look up, finally, all startled, as though you'd forgotten I was there, and I was not even a little bit angry, because—” She stopped, searching for it.
“Because I loved that about you. That was the thing I remember loving. The way you could forget the whole world existed. I told you so. I told you I loved the man you were when you forgot everyone else was in the room.” Her eyes found his.
“And then we danced. Under the trees, with the white flowers coming down, no music at all, just dancing. I have danced with you under trees before, Bastien. In a life I never lived.”
He sat with her and let the tea go cold and said nothing that would give it away, and inside a quiet astonishment was working through him that had nothing of fear in it at all.
He had loved Charlotte in that garden two hundred and more years ago, and she had loved him, and the reason she had given him then, laughing under the flowering trees, was the very same reason Delia had loved him in a boarding house a century later, and the very same reason the woman in front of him loved him now.
The absorption. The forgetting. The way he went so deep into a thing that the world fell away.
Three women, three faces, three centuries, and the same soul had looked at the same man each time and loved the exact same thing in him.
It was not three love stories. He saw that now with a clarity that took his breath.
It had only ever been one, told over and over, in different dresses, on different streets, and he had been too busy grieving the endings to notice that the beginning kept coming back.
Delphine, being Delphine, refused to let it stay solemn. She studied him over the cold tea for a moment, and then a wicked light came into her that he had learned to brace for.
“I have a very important question,” she said gravely. “About these memories.” She waited until he was properly worried. “Have I always found you this handsome? In all of them? Or is that a new development, because I would like it on the record that I have excellent and apparently consistent taste.”
He laughed before he could help it, the tightness in his chest breaking apart. “I am afraid I have no objective opinion on the matter.”
“No,” she agreed, entirely satisfied. “But apparently I do. Across two hundred years. That is what I call commitment.” She sipped the cold tea and made a face and set it down.
“I think that is the part no one warned me about. Everyone would tell you a thing like this should be terrifying. Remembering dying, remembering a whole other life, remembering a life before that one. And some of it is. But underneath the terrifying part, Bastien, every single one of these is a love story. They are all just me finding you. Over and over. How am I supposed to be frightened of that?”
He had no answer that would not have undone him, so he kissed her instead, there in the lamplight over the cold tea, and let her feel what he could not yet find the words for.
The kiss began as punctuation and became something else.
She did not let him pull back from it. Her hands came up to his face and held him there, not urgently, with the steadiness of someone who had been waiting and finally can stop.
He went still under them. Then he stopped going still and simply stayed, and the staying was different from anything he had managed before, and she knew it — he could tell she knew it by the way her grip eased, just slightly, into something closer to rest.
He was thinking about Charlotte. He was always thinking about Charlotte now — the soul in front of him who had loved him in a garden two centuries before this lamplight, had crossed back to find him, had done it again, was doing it now.
She must have felt him go somewhere, because she drew back just far enough to look at him, her thumbs still resting at his jaw, and what was in her face was not patience.
It was something quieter and more decided.
"Stop," she said. "Whatever room you just walked into. Come out of it."
"I was not—"
"You were." She did not say it unkindly.
"You do it even now. Someone hands you something good and you take it and then you go somewhere I cannot reach you and you look at it from a distance, alone, the way you have looked at everything alone for two hundred years.
" Her thumbs moved once against his jaw. "I am right here. Be here with me."
He looked at her. At Delphine, who was also Charlotte and also Delia and who was most essentially and irreducibly herself, this woman in this lamplight, with the cold tea between them and the Quarter breathing through the open shutters and her hands on his face.
He had spent two centuries at a remove from his own life, watching it like a man standing outside a lit window. She was asking him to come inside.
He reached for her.
Not carefully, not holding anything in reserve, braced for the cost of wanting.
He kissed her with the whole of himself present, and she made a sound against his mouth that was partly surprise and entirely satisfaction, because she had known it was in him and she had been patient and now she had it.
He stood and drew her up with him and she came willingly, her hands moving from his face to his chest, learning the difference between him holding back and him not, and approving of it with a thoroughness that left him briefly unable to think in consecutive sentences.
He walked her back from the table. She went, guiding them both, because she had always known where they were going and he was only now catching up.
The bedroom held only the last of the evening coming through the shutters in long amber bars, and in that light she turned to face him and reached for the buttons of his shirt with the calm, finding no reason to rush it.
He let her. He stood in front of her without an inch of himself kept elsewhere, which was what she had been asking since the beginning, and her hands moved and he watched her face and she glanced up and found him watching and did not look away.
"There you are," she said softly.
He answered her with his hands.
He had learned her by now, knew the places that made her breath catch and the ones that made her laugh and the ones that made her say his name in the way that reached past everything he had built to keep himself at a distance from the world.
He went to all of them deliberately, unhurried, a man not bracing against time for once in his long existence.
She was not fragile. She had never been fragile.
She had survived dying and remembering dying and she had looked at the full weight of what he was and what he had done and she had stayed, and the staying deserved everything he had, which was what he gave her.