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I imagine Quinn leaning over the rails, the moon catching the reflection in his dead wolf’s eye. His hands loose in his pockets as he turns away from me, just as he’d turned away from his brother. His mind carefully, detachedly preparing his alibi.
Quinn is doubtless correct, in every word, about how my death will be perceived. Alas, poor Jennie, she never did move past her grief perhaps it is all for the best.
Maybe they’re right. What use is my life if I’ve been wrenched from everyone who meant most to me? I have lost so much. Love made me mad with pleasure, but loss has made me mad with grief. What a pleasant sleep my death will bring. Unplagued by nightmares or grim reawakening.
But this is not the way it will be. For he is here, as he always has been. Pressing colder, pressing upward. I can’t perceive, I can’t touch, I can only sense the overriding force of his protection and love. Enormous and quick and unexpected, it lifts me sharp under my arms as if I’m being offered to heaven itself. Forced up against the current, I rise in a rush of vertigo.
A spy must… A spy must…
I open my mouth to cry out, and water rushes in to fill the scream. My story is not over, and today is not my death day after all. I break through the surface of the water, gasping and reborn.
30.
A ghost will find his way home. But I am not a ghost. And this house is not my home.
My feet are frozen and blistered and bare. I hardly feel the pinching pain of the gravel. My hand on the front door is a muddied bird claw. My sodden skirts drag along the carpet runner, then the polished parquet floor, as I tread steady, a sleepwalker, down the familiar hallway and into the drawing room, which overspills its gilded jewel box of assembled guests.
After so many hours in the dark and pouring rain, all this heat and light, the spiced and fruited perfumes and powders, the voices richly lacquered in wine and laughter, seem to wrap over me in a bracing clench of humanity.
Their awareness is gradual. And then I am the entire performance. All jaws drop mid-gape. All eyes round. Fingers lift to press over mouths and chins.
Scandalized murmuring, whispering, but ultimately silence becomes the disease, spreading through the room and infecting everyone. Oh, but I am a sight worth seeing. I find the full specter of myself in the mirror above the mantel. My face is ghoulish, as deadly as the Du Keating girl. My eyes are fear-gored, my skin is scraped to blood. My hair has fallen from its pins to hang in a dripping shroud. Mud and scum streak black marks over my neck and arms.
And in my own expression, I see my beloved. That hot August day. Will’s face twisted in fury. His sketches wet and streaming, ruined. As angry as I’d ever seen him. It is the core of that rage that shoots through the ether, a jolt of his life energy pumping through my own outraged blood.
“You’ll be true to me forever?” he’d asked me once, almost with anger. No, not anger. Passion.
“Always and forever,” I’d answered. “With my whole, entire heart.”
In the mirror I am one of Will’s ruined sketches. And yet I have survived. I have lived to avenge the betrayed, to damn the culprit.
I’ve sensed him from the moment of my entrance. Moments before he became aware of me. There is something in the way Quinn stands. Perhaps it is the angle of his head, or maybe it’s just the luck of an opportune moment, cozied into a corner and basking in Aunt’s attention. How could I never have seen it? That inexorable devotion, that primal and insistent blood tie between a mother and her only son?
Who was I to ever think I could come between them?
Who was I to them?
“Careless, careless. I suppose you were anxious to get back to playing host.” My words are to Quinn, and my voice carries through the room, a clarion call for everyone to hear. “But such sloppy work, Quinn. You ought to have held my head under the water for three minutes. Or checked my pulse to make sure it had stopped.”
“Fleur, darling,” says Quinn, forcing a smile as he stands and steps away from Aunt. I can see and smell his fear. It is palpable to me, no matter how intently he tries to look both unconcerned and dutiful. “You’re not well. Come, I’ll take you up to your rooms myself.”
“How very kind of you. But unnecessary.” My gaze flicks to Uncle Henry. “Am I to presume that the bill for this party you cannot afford will be subtracted from my trust?”
Uncle looks so startled and abjectly shamed that I want to laugh. Good. Let him crumble. Let him be the talk of Brookline, of Boston. Let his worst nightmare of public scandal come true.
“Jennie, I must insist.” Quinn, ever the actor, signals to Doctor Perkins, who half stands despite being pink with drink. Quinn knots his hands together while furrowing his brow, trying to look helpful, though his good eye has a cast of madness to it. “Sir, my apologies. I ought to have engaged you sooner,” he says, “for I’m afraid that our dear Jennie has been very ill.”
“If I am sick, it is only with disgust.” I speak quietly, but the silence in the room picks up my every syllable.
The Wortley sisters, tucked into a far corner of the drawing room, are stupefied. Finally they are eyewitnesses to the event of the season. How it will be gnashed on and licked up in parlors and sitting rooms all over Brookline and beyond.
But none of this interests me.
“I can only stay a minute.” I steel my eyes to Quinn’s. Every ear listens for what I am going to say. “I’m here to collect Mavis. And then I must go.”
“But…what has happened?” Aunt Clara blinks at me as though seeing me for the first time. Her eyes are wide and childlike. So overwhelmed, she cannot take any ownership, not just yet, of what in days and weeks to come she will recall in horrific detail and brutal shame. Thankfully, she will have plenty of time to reexamine every moment from the self-imposed exile of her boudoir.
But now all she can do is blink, her voice piping with feigned, girlish innocence. “What…what has happened to you?”
“I am alive,” I say simply. “That’s all.”
And that’s enough. The night is over, but my own journey has only just started.
Epilogue
Mavis didn’t come with me that night as I’d hoped. Rarely does life work out so smoothly. I took the cat instead. Mavis endured another fifteen thankless months at Pritchett House before breaking free one crisp November afternoon in a storm of tears and a full season of unpaid labor to arrive last week at my modest doorstep.
This is good timing. For I am eighteen years old now and newly landed in the bed of my inheritance. Or at least my worth is enough to move from Madame’s Broussard’s upstairs spare room into tasteful apartments of my own on Beacon Hill. And I have the space and money to keep Mavis, for which I am grateful. But I will continue to supplement my income doing fine lacework for Madame, even though sitting for so long drives me to distraction, not to mention the strain it puts on my eyes. It’s an honest living, and Madame and I enjoy a cordial relationship. We’re busy, too. Now that the war is over, the city wants to heal. It is taking down its crepe, bravely lifting its chin, and starting to feather itself with new money.
