Page 45 of The Beautiful Ones

Then the corridor was empty.

I climbed to my garret and fastened the useless bolt.

For the first time since coming to Virginia, I did not mark another Sunday from my contract.

I sat awake until dawn, wondering what the Lebons had promised, what the Fairhavens had come to collect—and why both families appeared to believe Cécile belonged somewhere within the debt.

CHAPTER NINE

CÉCILE

The morning after the Fairhavens’ first night beneath our roof, the sun rose pale and sickly over the James River. Elin had sat awake until dawn, though I did not know it then. I knew only that when she came to my room carrying my parasol and shawl, her face looked drawn and her eyes avoided mine.

Dinah had already dressed me in a white morning gown sprigged with blue flowers. She had fastened the last pearl button at my wrist without remarking upon Elin’s lateness, although Dinah rarely failed to remark upon anything. The silence between them told me they had spoken before entering my room.

Perhaps they had spent the night deciding how best to protect me from my own happiness.

I sat before the mirror while Elin arranged the ribbons at the back of my hair. Her fingers were careful and cool. Usually she hummed while she worked, some Swedish cradle song with a tune that wandered sadly and never seemed to find its way home. That morning she made no sound.

The words she had spoken in the drawing room returned to me: He was upstairs. He spoke to me in Swedish. He said they came to collect what is owed.

I remembered the terror on her face. I remembered the water darkening her dress and the cold that had followed her into the room.

I also remembered what I had written upon Adrian’s card.

Then you are mistaken.

The sentence had been cruel. I knew it even as I wrote it. Yet beneath my guilt lay something harder: resentment that Elin had brought fear into the most beautiful moment of my life. For eighteen years, every joy offered to me had arrived with a physician’s warning, my mother’s correction or a stranger’s pity attached to it. I could not bear to have Adrian taken from me by another person’s caution.

When Elin finished my hair, our eyes met in the mirror.

I could have spoken to her then. Alone with Elin, words usually came more easily. I might have apologized. I might have asked what truly happened in the blue room.

Instead, I stood and held out my hand for my gloves.

She placed them in my palm.

By ten o’clock, the mugginess had settled over Le Champ des Fleurs like a damp quilt. The roses bowed beneath the weight of the heat, and the brick arcade beside the garden had begun to sweat. I sat upon the wrought-iron bench in the shade with a leather-bound volume of poetry resting unread in my lap.

I was not reading.

I was waiting.

Adrian appeared beneath the archway without announcing himself. One moment the path beyond the roses was empty; the next he stood within the shadow of the brick columns, pale and immaculate in a dark waistcoat and white linen shirt. The heat had touched everyone else in the house. It had curled Lucien’s hair, wilted my mother’s lace and driven my father to drink watered brandy before breakfast. Adrian bore no sign of it. His collar remained crisp. Not a drop of perspiration marked his brow.

“Miss Lebon.”

He bowed as though we had arranged to meet.

My heart struck once, hard enough to hurt.

Elin stood near the pillar behind me, holding my parasol and shawl. I felt her attention sharpen.

Adrian glanced at the book in my lap. “Tennyson?”

I turned the spine toward him.

“A dangerous companion for a garden,” he said. “He makes sorrow sound so beautiful that one may forget to escape it.”