We reach the end of the hall and wriggle into another hidden passage. It ends in a servants’ quarters, a warren of dank little rooms, lit only with the occasional guttering lamp. We pass rows of empty shelves, a basket of vegetables, rotting into puddles of dark liquid, a kitchen, a blackened oven with no fire inside. No one is here. It feels as though no has been here for some time, though surely that cannot be.
My legs begin to ache from running. I have hardly done more than pace and brood for months, and now my body rebels. Jacques’s gaze is fixed ahead, as if he is following some thread only he can see. He pauses from time to time and flattens his back against the mirrored wall. There is no sound but our own breathing. Even the hideous, waspish buzz is gone, and in its wake is less than silence, an absolute, deadening void.
We leave the serving passageway through a hinged portrait and step out directly in front of a blue-and-black lacquered door.
“It will be locked—” I start, but Jacques draws a key from his pocket, ornate and toothy. The head is a butterfly, made of iron.
“One of the master keys,” he says, and I want to ask him where he got it, but he is already inserting it, the lock clicking back, the door yawning open. And there are my sisters, sprawled across the furniture of a gloomy boudoir. They are rather unkempt. Charlotte has overturned a chair, and is poking her head from under it like a mouse from its hole. Bernadette lies on the bed and does not move. Delphine stands huddled against a small rocking horse. Her little gown is ripped at the sleeve. It has been stitched up with a caterpillar of bad sewing, as if one of the girls tried to mend it herself.
I run to her and drag her to her feet.
“Delphine,” I say, crying and hugging her neck. “Delphine, are you well? Come to me, all of you, come! We are going now! We are leaving!”
They approach me now, cautiously, and I gather them up, and the four of us clutch each other, kneeling on the floor like a swaying, many-armed beast. They make hardly a sound as I embrace them, simply cling to me. Even Bernadette, who before would not have embraced me for all the jewels of Spain, does so now, weeping quietly into my shoulder.
“We are going now, my sisters, oui?” I murmur. “Upstairs.”
I look at Jacques. He stands by the door, smiling.
I pull my sisters to their feet and turn them toward him. “This is Jacques,” I say, lifting Delphine to my hip. “He is our friend. Put on your shoes now, and let us go. Quickly, and not a word, yes?”
Delphine tries to say something. I cannot hear it. She repeats herself, twice, a third time, her voice oddly stretched and cooing, as if she has forgotten how to speak: “Where is Mama?”
“Mama is not here,” I say, and I look up at the ceiling, because I cannot bear to look at Delphine. “She has gone up ahead of us, she—”
A sound behind me stops my lying tongue: a light step, deeper in the chambers.
I clutch Delphine to me and look over my shoulder. “Bernadette?” I say, and my insides twist. “Bernadette, are you alone here?”
The hum is back, that twitching, intoxicating whine. It is the sound of a thousand nervous bees, boiling within their hive.
“Bernadette?” I whisper frantically.
She turns to me, her eyes wide. Her back is to the door into the boudoir and one of her hands is clutching at something, a fine toy that seems to be made of bone. The buzzing rises, crawling into my ears. I take hold of Delphine’s hand—“Bernadette, take your sister. Follow Jacques, quickly!”
Someone is there. In the doorway behind Bernadette, someone is standing, a small figure in livery, red and gold, and his face, oh heavens, his face . . .
I wake up in an enormous bed. Cupids stare down at me from the corners of the canopy, blank eyed and creepy, like they want to eat my face. Red velvet curtains are drawn around the bed, dimming the light on the other side. A thick, embroidered comforter lies heavily across my chest. And I’m clean. So clean my skin feels like a peeled egg. All that sweat, blood, and grime—all gone.
I lie for a second, reveling. My bones feel weird, like they’ve started to gel, like they haven’t moved in ages.
I blink a few times. Wrinkle my nose.
I fell out of a chandelier.
The thought comes to me slowly. Now the next one: the bed smells awful. Like dust, and locked-up sheets, and the time I had to render my own soap out of cow fat during summer camp in Wyoming. I hear the hiss of gas lamps. The flat, no-sound air.
I’m still underground. They caught me. So why haven’t they killed me yet?
My eyes flick from side to side. I hear the tick of a clock somewhere beyond the drawn curtains. I imagine someone sitting in a chair right next to the bed, waiting.
I sit up slowly, soundlessly, pushing back the comforter. I’m wearing an old-fashioned nightgown. Frills and white cotton and tiny persimmon-seed buttons. My hair’s been washed. The cut on my ankle is still exposed, an ugly scab. That’s disturbing. Someone washed my hair and dressed me up like a pilgrim, but they didn’t bandage my ankle?