CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lucie?” Adrienne’s voice was faint, trembling.
Lucie sat at her desk, her journal open before her. A candle at the edge of the desk flickered golden shadows across the paper. Her journal had been growing thicker. She still recorded Adrienne’s visions, but ever since the poisoning, she had begun to record her own observations about Marie and Julien, to give voice to her own uneasiness. She thought that perhaps by writing it all down, she might be able to find the thread that led to the truth.
Lucie had been waiting for hours for this moment, for this chance to write it all down before time had made it less acute. Just this morning, she had gone downstairs alone. She used the servants’ steps, something she rarely did, since she almost always had one of the children with her. She hadn’t been deliberately deceptive. But she moved quietly, and the two servants who were whispering together in the pantry were not aware that Lucie was standing steps away, just inside the doorway leading to those back steps. Lucie could see the two of them through the slim space between the door and the wall.
“She’s just like her grand-mère, you know,” Henriette whispered to the other girl. Henriette was nowhere near old enough to know anything about the comtesse, but she was an expert at picking up every tidbit of gossip. “They say it skips a generation.”
“What does?” Noelle was the young girl who helped with the laundry.
“Clairvoyance. The sight,” Henriette whispered, as if she had become an expert. “That’s why Marie and Genevieve cannot see things.”
Henriette glanced around nervously. “They locked her up, you know. The grandmother. The comtesse.” She leaned in close as she shared this latest bit of information. “Kept her in her room. They didn’t want everyone to talk about her.”
Lucie had held her breath, and stood without moving. Every fiber of her being strained toward the whispers coming from the butler’s pantry on the other side of the door.
Noelle whispered in confidence, “I heard she died in childbirth. With Genevieve.”
Henriette looked over her shoulder, but seeing no one, she continued. “That’s the story they told.”
“Story? You mean it’s not true?”
Henriette’s voice was louder in her excitement. “All that blood, a week after the baby was born? Who ever heard of dying in childbirth a week later?”
Noelle was quiet for a minute. “I had a cousin who got some kind of infection when her baby was born. She died four days later. It’s possible.”
Henriette dropped her voice to a whisper. “Yes, it’s possible. But doesn’t it seem rather odd? Here they were, keeping her locked up, away from people, because of how embarrassing her stories could be.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it just looked like she died in childbirth.”
Lucie bit her fist to stifle any sounds from escaping her mouth.
“What are you saying? Do you think she was . . . murdered?” Noelle’s whisper was so soft that Lucie found herself leaning forward, straining to hear every syllable.
“All I’m saying is, this family has secrets. And the comtesse knew them all. There had to be people who wanted to make sure she stayed quiet.” Henriette drew her pause out dramatically. “Just like Adrienne. That little girl would be wise to keep her mouth closed.”
Lucie sat at her desk, and turned to stare out the window on her left, her thoughts turbulent. Everyone knew Henriette loved to talk, that she loved gossip and stories, that she loved being the one with all the inside information. Lucie knew that the information she had overheard could not be trusted, but the story still left her with a shiver. And there were probably very few people alive who knew the truth. The comte, of course, and perhaps Marie. She was thirteen when her mother died. If there was anyone who knew the real story, it was probably she. Lucie was lost in the tangled web of her thoughts, and when she turned her head, Adrienne stood in the doorway between the two bedrooms.
“Lucie?” she whispered again.
“Adrienne? What’s wrong?” Lucie laid her pen on the paper, and stood. Adrienne ran to her and threw her arms around Lucie’s flannel-clad legs.
Lucie maneuvered them both into the rocking chair in front of the big window. She pulled Adrienne onto her lap. The moon was full. Moonlight bathed both girls, in their white nightgowns, turning them into luminous pearls.
Adrienne buried her head in Lucie’s shoulder. “I h-h-had a bad . . . dream.”
Lucie rubbed the girl’s arms and hugged her closer. “There, there. It’s only a dream.”
The girl continued to shake, and Lucie pulled the shawl from her own shoulders and wrapped it around Adrienne.
“I was . . . I was in this little room. It was small and cold and dark. Very high up. I could look out this window, and see the ground a long, long way below.” Adrienne kept her head against Lucie’s chest. “The trees looked tiny from up there. I was cold.” Adrienne shivered.
“And I walked over to the door. I tried to open it, but I couldn’t. It was locked. I couldn’t get out. It was so dark, and so cold. And I got scared. I started to call for someone to let me out. I banged on the door with my fists. I called for Grand-père. And Maman. And you, Lucie!” Adrienne sat up for a moment and looked into Lucie’s dark eyes. Then she leaned back into Lucie’s warmth again.
“But no one came. And after a while, I gave up. And I went and sat down on the bed. And while I was sitting there, the stones . . . the stones that were part of the wall? They started to bleed. There were little drops of blood, coming out of all of them. The blood was getting on my hands, and on my clothes, and on the bed where I was sitting. I screamed! And then I woke up.”
Lucie continued to rock slowly back and forth. The chair creaked against the floor. Her slippers brushed against the wood. “It’s only a dream, Adrienne. It’s not real.” Even as the words left her mouth, Lucie was struck by the similarity of Adrienne’s dream to what she had overheard about the comtesse that very morning. Locked up in her room. Blood everywhere.
Lucie forced herself to swallow.
“You’re right here with me, aren’t you?” Adrienne nodded against Lucie’s chest. “And we’re not so high up. And the door is not locked. And the walls are not bleeding.”
Lucie’s slippers made a sh-sh sound on the floor. Adrienne relaxed into the sounds and her breath slowed.
“It was only a dream,” Lucie whispered once again. She had to force herself to say it, had to convince herself it was true. “Only a dream.”
They rocked in silence for a few moments. Adrienne raised her eyes, caught the flicker of the candlelight on Lucie’s desk. “Lucie? Do you miss your daddy?”
Lucie’s breath stopped. She nodded. “I miss him very much.”
“How old were you when he died?” The two girls held tightly to one another.
“I was seventeen. That’s when I came here. Not long after he died.” Lucie put her chin on the top of Adrienne’s head. She remembered that time, the months after her father had died. She was scared. Alone. Penniless. She was lucky to have found this position, luckier still that she had found Adrienne. Sometimes, like now, when Adrienne was curled against her and breathing softly, Lucie could almost pretend that Adrienne was her own daughter. It was certainly hard to believe that Genevieve would ever care as much about this little girl as Lucie did.
“He was coughing?”
“Yes, Adrienne. He was coughing. He was very sick, at the end.”
“Why do I see so many yellow roses?”
Lucie smiled into the moonlight. “Hmmm. My maman loved yellow roses. She had all kinds of them in the garden. Yellow with orange on the edges. Yellow with pink in the middle. Yellow roses that climbed the porch. She loved yellow roses.” Lucie’s voice smiled with the memory. She could almost smell her mother, the rosewater she sprinkled on her wrists every morning. She could see her, moving about the kitchen, singing, her hands covered in flour as she kneaded bread.
“She died when I was seven.” Lucie’s voice lost its smile. “After she died, my father took care of those roses. Loved them as if . . . as if she were a part of them. As if my mother came back every spring in those roses.”
Adrienne sat up and looked into Lucie’s eyes. She laid one hand on Lucie’s cheek. “Lucie?”
Lucie felt tears pooling in her eyes. She looked down at Adrienne. “Yes?”
“I wish you could be my mother.” Adrienne leaned back into Lucie’s arms again.
“So do I, Adrienne. So do I.”
They rocked back and forth. Outside the window, an owl called out to them in a low, sad voice.
“Lucie?” Adrienne’s voice was soft. “You won’t let them lock me up, will you?”