CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Adrienne turned on her side on the narrow couch. Tears slid slowly from the edges of her eyes and dropped onto the satin fabric. She stared at the bay window across the room. Beveled glass caught the sunlight, bent it, spread geometric shapes around the walls and ceiling and floor. How could she not have known? If her powers to see, to hear, were truly so great, how could she not have known that she carried a child—his child—inside her?
She felt dirty. Shamed to the very core of her being. She blushed, even now, at the look she had seen in the doctor’s eyes. She heard his broken attempts to tell her, to explain what was wrong. She heard him, standing in the hall, breaking the news to Julien and Marie.
She saw her grand-père’s face, and bit her lip, burying her head in the couch cushion. She could not look him in the eye, not even in her imagination, with this new development. She pictured Gerard—saw his eyes, dark and gentle, as the two of them had stood at Grand-père’s grave in the blustery winds of winter twilight. She shook her head, trying to blot out the image. What would Gerard think of her now? What would anyone think?
Marie pushed the door open and carried a tray into the room. She laid it on the floor, pulled a small table next to the couch. Its legs scraped against the wood. She bent, picked up the tray, and placed it on the table. She looked at Adrienne. Adrienne did not meet her eyes; she did not speak. Marie stood for another moment, her skirts still moving slightly. She turned and left the room.
Adrienne glanced at the tray: teapot, cup and saucer, sugar and creamer, a delicate silver spoon. There was a plate with two slices of buttered toast. Adrienne looked away. She would never feed this . . . this . . . Her breath caught, hung in her throat. This baby. This child of a nightmare. She would never eat again.
She lay on her side, staring out the windows. She watched as the light changed, slowly, from the bright glare of morning to a softer, clouded gold of afternoon. When the color had started to fade, when the room had dimmed, the door opened.
Marie looked at the tray beside Adrienne, untouched. The cold toast was shriveled and hard. Marie picked it up and carried it out of the room. Several minutes later, she came back, another tray in hand.
Adrienne almost smiled into the cushion: Marie, waiting on her. Marie, carrying a tray, just like a servant. Marie, forced to be the one to care for Adrienne. Julien could not, would not. And Marie was unwilling to take the chance and ask the nuns on the hill for help. There was always the chance that they might talk about Julien, that the sisters might spread word of Adrienne’s “illness.”
Marie slid the tray onto the table. She turned toward Adrienne. She picked up the cup, poured the tea out in a slender, steaming stream. She dropped in a lump of sugar, poured the cream. The spoon clinked against the sides of the cup.
Marie held the cup in front of Adrienne’s unfocused eyes. “Drink your tea, Adrienne,” she whispered. “It will make you feel better.”
Adrienne’s eyes shot up to her aunt’s face, dim and smoky in the waning light. She’d heard that tone before . . . Where was it? It seemed many lifetimes ago. “Drink your tea, Adrienne. Drink your tea, Adrienne.” The words echoed in Adrienne’s head. “Drink your wine, Adrienne.”
Adrienne looked up at Marie, who stood holding the teacup in her hand. Adrienne looked at it, at the thin, almost translucent china of the cup. She pushed herself to a sitting position, took the cup and saucer in hands that shook. The cup rattled and sloshed. Adrienne brought it down to her lap, raised the cup in her right hand, and sipped.
Marie breathed a long, slow sigh.
Adrienne looked up at her. She sipped again. She stared at Marie, as she slowly drank every drop. She held the cup and saucer out to Marie. “Merci,” she whispered. She only thought the rest: there was no need to say the words out loud. “Thank you. Thank you for the poison. Thank you for helping me get this over with. I certainly hope you’ve been able to find something stronger than laudanum.” They knew, they both knew, all the ways that Marie had been wrong. Adrienne lay back down on the couch, on her side. She pulled her legs up, curled into herself, like a baby.
Marie took the tray and pulled the door closed when she left.
Baby. Baby. The word bounced around the room. It screamed inside her head. Baby. Julien’s baby.
Adrienne sat up, threw off the blanket. She paced to the window, pulled back the lace curtain, stared into the blue dark of twilight. She laid her head against the cold glass. Tears made silent trails down her face, glistening in the pale light of the moon. The decision came quickly. After all this time, after all this loss, her determination was rigid and unyielding. She had tolerated far too much suffering.
She turned, walked across the room, turned the handle, and softly pulled the door open. She leaned forward into the hallway, looking, listening. The castle was dark. Everything was quiet. She heard no noise in the parlor, could see no glow from the fire, or the lamps. She moved across the hall, into the kitchen. She opened the drawer with the knives, the same knives she had used to cut the cake for the Creighton family not so long ago. She reached in, picked up a long, slender handle, the blade curving slightly at the end. She looked at it, ran her finger over the tip of the blade.
She laid the knife against her skirt and moved quietly back across the hall. She closed the door of the chapel behind her, the click just a soft note in the quiet room. She sat down on the couch and held the knife in front of her. She ran her fingers over it, again and again, stroking the silver blade.
Adrienne looked up. She looked into the dark eyes of Archbishop Lamy, a portrait Julien had purchased when he left New Mexico. Her eyes rose to the rosary draped on the wall next to it. They flicked to the statue of Jesus hanging on the cross. It clung to a narrow strip of wall between the windows. His shoulders were slumped, his forehead dripping blood from his crown of thorns. His eyes, like hers, were unfocused, unseeing, as he waited for the agony to be over.
She stared at him. Waiting for the agony to be over. That was a feeling that she knew far too well. Here she was, not twenty years old, and her life had been one agony after another. She could not remember anything else; all that had been good in her life was lost, ripped away. All she felt at this moment was a horrible, swirling soup of shame, fear, revulsion, anger. But the worst of all was the hopelessness. She no longer expected God to help her. She no longer believed that anyone could help her.
Adrienne’s eyes dropped to the knife. She pictured Marie sitting at the dressing table in her room. She pictured standing behind her at the dressing table, the knife held hidden in the folds of her skirt. She pictured grabbing Marie by the hair, yanking her head backward. She pictured drawing the blade across that neck, blood shooting onto the mirror, and the floor, and all over her hands.
In her mind, she walked, in a trance, down the hall to Julien’s bedroom. She pictured sneaking up on him, the way he had snuck up on her. She pictured standing next to his bed, watching as he became aware of her—watching as he woke from sleep to find her standing over him, holding the knife in both hands. She pictured raising her arms above her head and driving that blade as hard as she could into his chest. She could see the fountain of blood; she could see his eyes fill with shock and horror as life escaped his body.
Adrienne ran her finger along the blade. She looked at the way the silver caught the moonlight, sending slender streams of pale white light flashing around the room. She turned the knife slowly and then laid it against her wrist, testing the weight of it, the feel of it in her hand. She watched her vein pulse from the pressure. She looked up again, at Jesus. At the savior. She thought of all the teachings of the church, all the words of Père Henri as he cautioned a much younger Adrienne about the “wages of sin.”
She would go to hell. She knew that. For what she’d just thought—for what she was about to do. Hellfire. Eternal damnation. But could hell be any worse than this? Hell was living in this prison, tortured by two people she hated, pregnant with the child of a man she abhorred.
Her eyes dropped to her wrist, pale and creamy in the moonlight. She turned the blade on its edge. She drew a deep breath, pulled the blade across her wrist, as deep as she could make it cut. The pain caused her eyes to water. Blood oozed, and then began to pour. Her hand grew wet and sticky. Blood ran down her arm, onto her skirt. She dropped the knife. It bounced on the floor.
She sat, staring into the moonlight coming through the windows, waiting for her life to leak away. Her eyes grew heavy. An exhaustion heavier than anything she had ever known pulled at her, dragging her down into its murky depths. She lay down on her side, her bloody arm between her body and the couch, but held out, like a stiff branch. Blood poured onto the floor, a slender river cascading from her arm. She closed her eyes. Sighed. A smile turned up the corners of her mouth. It was almost over. The fear, the pain, the shame. Almost over. Relief. At long last . . . relief.