Louis’s reputation with maids was notorious, even though he tried to keep it within the walls of his large home. Louis Antoine hated the opinions of outsiders. Gossip had plagued him his whole life, even when he was a child and innocent of wrongdoing. Louis Antoine’s father was a moron and lost all the family’s money in bad investments. He did what people normally did when they had a reversal of fortune like that—he blew his head off in his office. His mother had a cup of tea and arsenic and followed suit.
Louis Antoine had wanted to marry someone very pretty. He was very pretty, so he thought he really deserved to marry someone pretty. He believed he had exquisite taste in girls. He could rank who was the most beautiful. He didn’t consider himself shallow because he also took into account women’s personalities. He believed that a woman’s happiness enhanced her looks. He believed a woman looked her most beautiful right after she laughed. Her cheeks were flushed pink and her mouth was partly open. Equally, he admired the way they looked after they had been dancing. They were sweaty, their curls stuck to their forehead, and they looked desperate to take their clothes off.
But the most beautiful and eligible girls were always encouraged to marry rich men, because they could. They courted men who were less charming and beautiful than him because those men had large fortunes. The only woman he could get to marry him was Marie’s mother, Hortense. Her parents had also died when she was young, but they had left her with an enormous fortune and an entire sugar factory. She was so rich that she could afford to marry a handsome, penniless aristocrat. But she was plain and melancholic.
He met Hortense at the Ice Ball when he was nineteen. What had the theme been that year? It had been Cyrano de Bergerac. All the men were wearing large prosthetic noses attached to their faces with elastics. And they had swords on their sides. There was something unexpectedly perverse about the costumes.
Hortense sat on a bench by the wall all evening. She was too self-conscious to skate. She was always about to burst into tears. Every time he saw her, he thought she was crying, even if she didn’t actually have tears in her eyes. She couldn’t bear to embarrass herself. How boring someone that self-conscious would be in bed. No one else wanted to marry her. However, none of the other young men were for sale in the same way that he was. She could afford to buy his love. And so he was purchased.
She understood. And she knew it was her money in large part that he was after. Yet he was kind to her. He plied his seduction with her. She was, of course, insulted when her aunt and uncle insisted he only wanted her money. Because how else could she interpret it other than them implying that she was unlovable. And so that was how it came to be that two very unlovable people came to be wed. One got what he wanted, and the other was deeply depressed and killed herself before her daughter’s first birthday.
There’s no one more brutal than a rich man without money.
After his wife’s death, Louis insisted all the girls working in the house be jolly. He said he didn’t care if they were incompetent as long as they were happy. He had had enough of women’s sadness. He viewed his wife’s sadness as something he had endured. Something he’d had to live through. He acted as though he’d had to cope with his wife’s suicide. It was a selfish act she had perpetrated against him and also against Marie.
The maids in their household changed all the time. They lost their joie de vivre abruptly once Louis seduced them. They inevitably went mad. There was a maid who spoke only French who tried to run off with Marie when she was a baby. She left the father a note that said, You took my heart, now I will take yours. But she had written it in French and Louis had no idea what she meant. She took the train with Marie all the way to a small town outside of Trois-Rivières. They slept together in a bed at an inn. They were too tired to even take the blanket off the bed. They lay on top of it and fell asleep in each other’s arms, and that was how they were found by the detectives.
But of all the strange fates the maids who were Louis’s lovers had in store for them, it was Agatha’s fate that made the most impression.
Marie was always affectionate with the maids. She accepted the runoff of emotions they had for her father and relished it. But she was always wary when Agatha was solicitous of her. She found it alarming, although she couldn’t put her finger on why. And she knew she was being unfair to Agatha. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help but put her defenses up around this maid. It felt as though Agatha was always asking Marie for some sort of reciprocal attachment she had no right to demand.
That day, while getting dressed, Agatha looked out into the magnificent rose garden below. For a moment she considered it to be her own. And then her heart fell into her stomach, her face went pale, and she screamed, “Oh no!” and flew out of the room half-dressed.
She had spotted the two girls engaging in a duel. It was to be the end of her.
CHAPTER 6
Eulogy for a Pair of Pistols
The girls had been practically knocked off their feet by the force of the guns’ blows. They were stunned that there were bullets in the gun. They stood there with tiny clouds of gunpowder over their heads, wondering if they were ghosts, whether they were going to be made aware that bullets had entered them and had stopped their hearts. They knew there were consequences to what they had just done, but they couldn’t ascertain what they were.
The maid lay on the ground with two bullets in her chest. The front of her chemise was soaked in blood. It kept spreading outward. There was no saving her. She didn’t move a muscle. She looked wide-eyed up at the sky. Although neither girl had encountered a dead body in their lives, it was clear they were now looking at one.
Marie seemed to react first. She threw the gun onto the ground, as though it were a live thing, an accomplice that would cause her to murder someone else.
She had a look of such panic on her face that Sadie knew she would have to save her friend. Of course Marie was going to react more strongly. She had seen this woman alive so many times. So naturally the fact of having to look at her dead was overwhelming. But Sadie did not know the maid. She seemed as though she had run out of the house with the express wish to become a corpse.
Their eyes met, and Marie’s whole being begged for Sadie to help her. Ordinarily, Sadie’s face would have the same look of aghast comprehension that Marie’s had. But Marie had beat her to it. They could not both be petrified. Sadie would bestow the privilege of being alarmed and hysterical to Marie. She would take care of this mess and then Marie would know just how much she loved her and would make her sure to always, always keep Sadie at her side.