CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Adrienne bolted upright in her bed, holding the covers up to her chest. She gasped. Moonlight spilled through the picture window to her right, bathing everything in a blue glow. She scanned the room. There was her wardrobe in the left corner. Directly across from the foot of the bed was the fireplace, cold and gray in the early hours. To her left was the dresser, the mirror reflecting the image of the door directly across the room. It was closed. The light caught a cut-glass perfume bottle, a tiny frosted dove, wings outspread, floating on the lid. Her father had given it to her last Christmas.
Her eyes moved to the picture window. The white curtains looked pale blue-gray in the moonlight, shimmering and dancing like spirits above the window seat.
Adrienne sighed and lay back against the pillows.
In the dream, the room was very small. There were no mahogany furnishings, their tops covered in creamy white marble. There was no wardrobe, no fireplace. In the dream, the room was cramped; it held only one narrow bed, one tiny table. A small window looked down to the street, far below. The moonlight caught the leaves of the tree, not tall enough to reach its arms as high as the small, dark room. In the dream, Adrienne had tried the door. She rattled it in the frame, but it wouldn’t open.
She sat down on the bed. The room was cold. Dark. She heard the drip-drip-drip as tiny beads of moisture plopped on the floor. The smell was overpowering: a dense, metallic odor. She dipped the tips of her fingers in the pool at her feet. They came away dark, covered in something slick and thick, like oil. She brought her fingers to her nose and sniffed. The tangy smell of blood flooded her senses.
Adrienne’s breath quickened; her heart began to race as the images of the dream came back to her. Fear tightened her throat. She sat up, threw the covers off, and stepped over to the window.
She’d had this dream before, long ago. She’d been very young. But she knew she had seen that little room before, had noticed the stones, the tiny drops of darkness that seeped, and grew bigger, and plopped to the floor. What wasn’t clear was whether it was Adrienne herself in that room, or someone else. Some other woman that Adrienne sensed through the woman’s own eyes, her own hands?
Adrienne shook off the images, and threw open the window. She leaned out into the cool fall air, forcing herself to take long, slow breaths. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, breathing in the night. It smelled of snow. She remembered standing in this very window as a young child, breathing in the scents of spring. She remembered a time when her visions made her smile, as if they were stories and secrets designed for her amusement, like fairy tales. Now they left her with questions, with a deep sense of something dark and foreboding. An owl hooted, somewhere in the trees to the left. In the village, she heard a dog bark. A street away, another dog added his voice to the chorus.
Adrienne leaned back into the window seat, resting her back against the sidewall. She pulled her knees up underneath her nightgown, wrapped her arms around her legs, and laid her head on her knee. She stared at the sky.
Everything had become so much more complicated. When she was little, the visions were clear and easy. She thought of the times that her visions had shown her the truth. She had known about Emelie and her yellow hair. She had seen the death of the maid, Madeline, in childbirth. But there was so much that she didn’t know—and could never know for sure. She had seen Julien, poisoned at the chalice, but was that what had really happened? Or was it true, the story she’d heard, that he had been on a secret mission for the French government?
This was different. Not just what she had seen and felt at dinner a week ago, but this dream tonight. And she knew that she had dreamt the same thing years before. This required skills of interpretation that she did not have. Was it the past, or the future? Was it happening to her, or to someone else?
She stared out into the dark. She thought of the story in the Bible of Joseph being sold into Egypt and interpreting dreams for the pharaoh. Seven fat cows, seven skinny cows. How do you interpret things like that? How do you understand what it means for stones to bleed?
In the near distance, she could see the west wing of the chateau. Built of white limestone over three hundred years before, the chateau had been in her family for many generations. The moonlight turned the stones into a soft, glowing pink, and Adrienne stared, watching as the shadows of trees and leaves danced across the walls.
She sat up with a jolt, her back straight, her eyes fixed on the walls of the other wing of the castle. Maybe it wasn’t a secret in Manitou Springs, in the new castle that Julien was building. Maybe the secret was here. Maybe her dreaming mind had jumbled it all up. Because just now, in the dim light of the moon, she could swear that it looked as if the stones were bleeding.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Stefan stepped into the morning room, his face almost hidden by the stack of boxes he held in his arms. He was followed by Renault and another servant, each of them bearing a similar burden. The boxes were wrapped in brown paper, tied together in bundles of three or four. They placed them on the rug since there was not enough table space to hold everything.
Adrienne and Emelie had been leaning together on the settee by the fire, examining a new piece of music. It fluttered to the floor in the excitement, and they both moved to examine the packages, looking for handwriting they recognized, a return address.
Genevieve looked up from her desk in the corner. “What’s this?” Sunlight streamed across her desk. It highlighted the tiny lines around her eyes.
Stefan stepped forward and handed her a letter. He bowed and he and the other servants left the room.
Genevieve stared at the envelope. It was from Pierre, gilt flourishes framing the envelope. She opened it, her hands shaking, and let the envelope drop to her desk. Marie looked up from her own desk, in the opposite corner of the room.
The corners of Genevieve’s mouth quivered as she read, as if she fought to keep her smile in check, as if she couldn’t believe what she read.
“Your father . . .” she began, and had to stop. She scanned the letter again, making sure she had read it correctly. Her eyes flew up to meet those of her daughters. “Your father wants us to come to Paris.” Her smile was firmly fixed now. “He wants to take us to the opera. He wants to take Antoine to the embassy.” The note fluttered, like a nervous white bird, from the trembling of her hand. Her smile grew, radiated into her eyes, which had looked so tired and haggard just a few moments before. It lifted her shoulders, traveled down her arms and into her hands. “The boxes are things he picked out for us to wear. He says we may have to do a few alterations, but he hopes we will find them suitable for the opera.”
Genevieve clutched the letter to her chest. She was suddenly luminous in the early-morning light.
Adrienne and Emelie turned toward one another, and Emelie grabbed Adrienne’s hands. She began to skip in a circle, trying to get her serious older sister to dance with her around the room.
Antoine jumped up from his geography book. “Let me see that,” he demanded, with ten-year-old manliness.
Genevieve pulled the letter away from his grasping fingers, and held it above her head. “No, you don’t, young man. This is addressed to me.” Genevieve’s smile returned again. “Just be thankful for the invitation. Your father wants to introduce you to his work.” She beamed. “As he should. That’s what fathers do with their sons.”
Antoine began a gangly and awkward dance around the big room. He took Emelie’s hands, and the two of them reeled and spun. Antoine’s streaky blond hair spilled across his forehead.
Adrienne stood in the center of the room, watching them. She turned to look at Lucie, sitting quietly at the corner table. Their eyes met and Lucie smiled.
“Well, let’s look, shall we?” Genevieve moved to the boxes, her letter opener in hand, and began slitting the paper and handing out gifts. Emelie, Antoine, and Genevieve could not contain their joy. It bounced off the walls and windows and ceilings, threatening to break statuary.
Adrienne opened the box with her name on it, and her eyes flamed with color. Inside the layers of tissue paper was a pale teal-colored taffeta, spun here and there with copper threads. Tiny embroidered roses climbed the bodice. She gasped and held the dress to her chest. It was done in her favorite colors, like the ribbon she’d been admiring in the fabric shop just last week.
Emelie was dancing around the room, holding her sky-blue gown against her chest and singing, an awkward and ear-splitting version of an aria from La Traviata.
Marie watched them from behind her desk. Her lips were pinched, that same thin line of disapproval she always wore. The corners of her mouth went neither up nor down. They revealed nothing about how she felt. “So . . . when does this excursion take place?” she said.
Genevieve looked up from her own box of treasures. Happiness was etched in every line of her features; she smiled in a way that made her look years younger. “Two weeks from today.” She clutched deep-green velvet to her chest. She looked at Marie. “Of course, we’d love for you to accompany us, Marie.” Her voice did not quite match her words. “The embassy has a box at the opera house. I’m sure there will be more than enough room.”
“I have missed the opera, since the death of my husband,” Marie answered. “That would be lovely.”
Lucie beamed as she hung Adrienne’s new dress in the wardrobe. She put one hand on Adrienne’s waist, grabbed her hand with the other, as if they were dancing partners. She spun her around the bedroom. “Oh, Adrienne! The opera! Isn’t this wonderful?” Her skirts continued to spin, even after Adrienne broke away and collapsed in the chair by the bedroom fireplace.
Adrienne watched her governess, watched the joy that radiated from her hands and arms as Lucie pretended to dance with a partner, her skirts sashaying around the room.
“Lucie . . . did you do this?”
Lucie stopped swaying, stopped her humming. She moved to the package on the bed and folded the shawl, the opera gloves, the tiny beaded handbag that had all been part of Adrienne’s box. She sat down on the edge of the bed.
Adrienne studied the dark eyes of the governess. “Did you write to my father?”
Lucie’s gaze flickered to the window for a moment. “I had to, Adrienne.” Their eyes met for an instant. “It breaks my heart, the way you live here. The way you’ve been so shut off from everything beautiful and wonderful in life. You are alone far too much. And lately, it seems as if you have been even more distant than usual. More lost in your own thoughts. So I wrote to him. I suggested, as the governess, that a trip to Paris could be highly educational for all the children. I told him that here you are, sixteen years of age, beautiful and intelligent, and that it is high time you were introduced to society.” Lucie stopped for a moment. “Well . . . not in those words, exactly.”
Adrienne stood and walked over to her governess. Adrienne was now a couple of inches taller than Lucie. She stood behind her, put her hands on Lucie’s arms. She stared at the image of the two of them in the mirror.
“I had no idea how your father would respond,” Lucie continued. She smiled into the mirror they faced across the room. “This is far more than I expected.”
Adrienne rubbed her hands on Lucie’s arms.
“Thank you,” she whispered. She closed her eyes, her chin pressed into Lucie’s shoulder. For one brief moment, she smiled.