Page 67 of The Beautiful Ones

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CÉCILE

Day three arrived beneath a blood-red sun.

I woke to wheels pounding over the drive and men shouting in the lower hall. Elin was no longer in the chair beside my bed, but the hollow in its cushion and the folded damp cloth upon the table told me she had remained until morning.

I called her name.

“E-El—”

The first sound caught. The second came rough and small.

I sat very still.

The birds in my mind had not died. They had merely struck the glass again.

Adrian’s miraculous voice had been effortless because it had never belonged entirely to me. My own voice remained where it had always been: behind my teeth, impatient and frightened, waiting for me to pay the price of using it.

Below, my father roared an obscenity.

I rose, pulled on the blue cotton morning dress Elin had laid across the foot of my bed and went to the gallery.

Le Champ des Fleurs had spent generations training its inhabitants to disguise disaster. That morning, the house abandoned the effort. Doors stood open. Trunks blocked the foyer. Servants crossed one another without direction while the stopped clocks chimed at random from distant rooms.

The Georges’ carriage waited before the steps with Lavinia already inside. Reuben shouted at a footman to fasten a trunk that had been strapped twice. Philip stood beside Lucien near the open door, both young men pale beneath the red morning light.

Across the drive, Augusta Dewey clutched her traveling bag while Warren argued with the judge. Warren’s gaze kept returning to the house, searching the windows for Elin.

Judge Dewey seized his son by the collar and dragged him toward their coach.

“You’re a madman, Étienne!” Reuben called toward the front doors. “Keep your cursed house and everything buried beneath it.”

Father appeared in the foyer in yesterday’s shirt, his hair disordered and a dueling pistol hanging from one hand.

“Run, then,” he shouted. “Both of you. But when those papers reach Richmond, remember whose money purchased the judges who will burn them.”

The judge stopped with one foot upon the carriage step.

“Your money?” he said. “You mistake the place where we met for the whole of the enterprise.”

For twenty years the three men had protected one another with friendship, business and fear. It took less than a minute for terror to divide their guilt into separate portions.

“This is your grave, Étienne,” Judge Dewey said. “Lie in it alone.”

He shoved Warren into the coach and climbed after him. The driver cracked his whip. Four horses lunged forward, carrying the Deweys beneath the oaks without farewell.

Reuben turned to follow.

Lucien caught Philip’s arm. “What is happening?”

“I don’t know,” Philip said. “Father says we must leave.”

Lucien looked toward the foyer, where our father stood with the pistol. Then he saw me above him.

I ran down the stairs.

“Cécile?”