“From ‘The Sick Muse.’ Also apt.”
They sat in silence. Eve waited for more questions, but René seemed content to gaze at her. She slipped down into the black pool, and this time woke slowly, swimming back to consciousness, the pain strangely blurred. René’s chair was empty. The sinuous, sliding texture of the jade green silk walls swam as Eve searched for him. She blinked as the walls expanded and contracted like the eye of a kaleidoscope. She shook her head to clear it, fastening her gaze on the Tiffany lampshade. There was a peacock in the shade, tail fanned out in a thousand hues of blue and green glass, and Eve cried out as the peacock turned its head. Its glittering eyes found hers, and every eye in its tail feathers turned to look at her too. Evil eyes, wasn’t that what they called the eyes in peacock feathers? They reared up toward Eve, rippling out of the lampshade with a tinkling sound of moving glass.
You’re imagining it, Eve thought blurrily. But when she blinked again, the glass peacock was still there, perched on top of the lamp, tail arrayed in a poisonous fan, all those accusing eyes staring. She was suddenly pouring sweat.
The peacock spoke, its voice brittle as the glass it was made of. “Who is the woman you were arrested with?”
She cried out again. Her mind had snapped; she’d gone utterly mad. Or René gave me something, she thought, something in the brandy— But that thought flew away, gone before she could grasp it or make truth of it.
The peacock spoke again. “Who is the woman, Eve?”
“I—I don’t know.” She didn’t know anything anymore; she’d fallen sideways into a world of nightmares and nothing was certain. The bust of Baudelaire sat on the table, his marble eyes open and filled with blood. Red drops slid down his marble cheeks. “Who is the woman?” he asked, words grinding harsh from his marble throat. “You do know.”
There were lilies in a slender fluted vase on the mantel, long-stemmed and graceful. Evil-eyed lilies, fleurs du mal, kept forever in glass. Eve’s mouth burned, looking at the cool water around their green stems. “Thirsty,” she murmured. Her tongue had turned to dusty stone.
“You shall have water when you tell me who the woman is.”
Eve was still staring at the lilies, which stared back with bloody eyes. “To quench the terrible thirst that torments me, I’d have to swallow all the wine it would take to fill her grave.” Lilies’ grave. Lili’s grave. Eve cried out. The pit was opening at her feet in the middle of the Aubusson carpet, yawing black earth—
“Le vin de l’assassin,” the marble statue said, naming the poem. “‘The murderer’s wine.’ Very good, Eve. Who is the woman?”
The chuckle sounded like René, but Eve couldn’t see him. He was gone. She could see only the swimming green walls that breathed in rhythm with her hammering pulse, the peacock fanning its glass tail, and the bust with its bloody cheeks. The yaw of the pit at her feet. There was something down there at its bottom, some great ravenous beast. She pulled against the rope about her wrists and it wakened the pain in her hands. The beast was out of the pit and it was eating her hands, chewing its way up her wrists. If she opened her eyes, she would see its gleaming teeth slowly devouring her broken fingers. She screamed again, pulling frantically against the ropes, and the agony roared. She was going to die of this pain, eaten alive and conscious to the end. She wept, head moving mindlessly back and forth as the teeth of some rough slouching beast chewed languorously up her wrists.
“Who is the woman, Eve?”
Lili, she thought. Did the beast already kill you? She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember. Drops of sweat slid down her neck from her sodden hair.
“Who is the woman?”
Eve forced herself to open her eyes. She would look the beast in the face as it killed her. She looked down at her hands, expecting to see them clamped in a fanged maw, and then she shrieked. Her hands were not gone—they had changed somehow, the shattered fingers trying to regrow themselves. She had twice as many fingers, every one painted in blood and tipped not with a nail, but with an eye. All the eyes blinked at her in unison, accusing and blind.
The beast is me, she thought in utter agony. The beast is me. Did I kill Lili? Did I kill her?
“Who is the woman, Eve?”
Did I kill her?
Eve’s lips parted blindly, and the mad, pulsing world went dark. Waves and waves of blackness and pain, terror and teeth.
Time to wake up, pet.”
Light stabbed Eve’s eyes as she peeled them open, but nothing stabbed like the silver needle of René’s voice. She sat upright, a jolt of agony coursing through her hands. She was still roped to her chair, mouth dry as cotton and her skull splitting. René smiled, leaning against the window overlooking the street. He wore a gray morning suit, his hair was combed and oiled, and he had a teacup in hand. The light came through the window strong and bright. It was morning, though Eve couldn’t tell which morning, if a night or two nights or a month’s worth of nights had passed in that storm of pain and—
Teeth. Pulsing walls, evil eyes, teeth. Eve’s gaze flew wildly about the study, but it looked the same as it ever had. The green silk walls were not breathing, the peacock on the Tiffany lampshade stayed confined in glass, the lilies in their fluted vase were just flowers.
Lilies. Lili. Eve’s heart skittered, and she looked back at René. He smiled, taking a sip of steaming tea.
“I trust you are more comfortable.”
Eve looked down at her hands for the first time. They had been bandaged in clean cloth, bulky anonymous mitts that hid the horror underneath. She still wore her soiled clothes, but her face and hair had been sponged. René had expended some effort to make her presentable.
“Herr Rotselaer is bringing his men to arrest you,” René explained, glancing out the window to the street below. “They should be arriving—oh, perhaps in half an hour. I thought you should look at least a trifle tidy for your captors. Some of these young officers are still squeamish when it comes to hurting women. Even English spies.”
The relief crashed over Eve like an avalanche. The Fritzes are coming for me. She was not going to die here in this room. She was going to a German cell. Perhaps she would only come out of that cell to face a firing squad, but right now, it was enough that the cell would not have René in it. He had given up tormenting her. Given up.
I held out, she thought in a kind of numb wonder. I endured.
In her mind, Lili smiled. Perhaps she would see Lili in prison, and Violette. If they could stand together, they could face anything that came. Even a line of guns.
“Your friend,” René said as though reading her mind. “Give her a hello from me if you should see her in the adjoining cell. She sounds like a rather extraordinary woman, your Louise de Bettignies. I’m sorry never to have met her.”