“Are you blind? Look around. There are plates and glasses everywhere. Clothes dropped wherever you took them off. Empty bottles of wine gathering dust.” His jaw was tight, his hands clenched into fists. His anger was a red aura around him.
But I was angry, too. We never referred to the time I’d lost my eyesight. He knew better than to raise the specter of my nightmare, and yet he had. And so callously. And he knew it.
“I’m sorry, Delphine. But you are being so stubborn. Always stubborn.” Picking up his cup, he stomped into the kitchen and made more noise than was necessary, first cleaning out the coffeepot and then starting a new one.
I often felt Sebastian’s fury inside my own chest, like a ball of fire, burning me. I also sensed his fear as cold, puckering my skin. His sadness affected me, too. As if the ground under me was giving way.
His pleasures eluded me, though. When passion overwhelmed him, I wasn’t aware of it. If he was happy, the only way I could tell was by hearing laughter in his voice.
My mother always said my judgment was clouded when it came to the negative aspects of my brother’s character. She loved him, too, of course; he was her son. But she said she saw his faults and I didn’t. How could I? He was my savior and protector. Maman said I made him into a star that shone too brightly and that it wasn’t good for either of us. Whenever she could, she would point out one of his failings, but instead of listening to her, I’d become defensive and argue with her that she wasn’t being fair to him.
Now Sebastian walked over to my easel to inspect the drawing of the faun on the zebra rug. The silence in the studio was broken only by the sound of a bird outside. After a long minute, he turned back to me.
“A debauched life, Delphine, is poison for a talent like yours. You were given an amazing gift of sight and the ability to translate what you see onto a canvas. You create mystery and magic. You can’t throw it away over people you barely knew who made mistakes that weren’t your fault and a man who didn’t have the guts to stand up to his parents for you.”
“I know. Tommy was . . .” I sighed. “I’d been wrong to think that we ever had a chance.”
“You couldn’t have known. Clifford told Maman. Tommy insulted you by throwing you over, and his parents have insulted our entire family. What confuses me is that I know you didn’t love him. So why—”
“I don’t want to talk about him or his parents.”
“You must exact revenge.” Sebastian’s eyes twinkled. “Come home with me. Come back to Cannes. We’ll relaunch your career. Your star will shine. You don’t need the Prouts and their money. You don’t need to be a part of their collection. One day soon, they’ll beg me to buy one of your paintings, and I won’t sell it to them. Now, won’t that be sweet?”
As a child, I was too sensitive to being teased, and my school years were filled with tears. It’s easy for children who don’t understand infirmities to make fun of them. For fourteen months, I was blind, and then, until age fourteen, I wore thick glasses while my mother continued working her magick. During that time, I was the recipient of much cruelty. No one ever teased me twice, though, because anyone who made me cry was subjected to Sebastian’s retaliation.
From frogs in lunch pails, to homework assignments mysteriously missing, to rumors about cheating on tests, Sebastian was a master at exacting revenge. When the unkindness to me was especially malicious, Sebastian would get me to read the troublemaker’s secrets and reveal them in anonymous notes to our classmates.
My parents didn’t approve of his efforts at all. They forbade him to retaliate, but he flat-out ignored them, risking and then suffering their ire. Whenever he was caught, they punished him severely, taking away all privileges. More than once, I overheard my parents talking about Sebastian’s mean streak and how worried they were for him. I didn’t see what he did as cruel. I was never brave enough to retaliate on my own behalf, and I loved my brother all the more for stepping up as my defender.
Sebastian could be devious and vengeful and, in business, ruthless, but I always saw it as proof of his love for me. My mother warned me that I was wrong. And what transpired in the summer of 1925 proved it.
Chapter 13
Almost as soon as we’d left New York Harbor and I started breathing salt air, I began to escape the tight confines of my own thoughts. The stranglehold of the images I’d drawn at the party and those I’d witnessed as Monty fell to his death began to loosen its grip.
The farther we traveled and the more space there was between me and the buzzing metropolis, the less frenetic I became. Walking the deck every morning and afternoon with Sebastian, eating three meals a day, and not disappearing into my complicated canvases settled my soul a bit.
On our third day out, I woke up early and went on deck to watch the sunrise. I was contemplating the vast ocean and its ceaseless swells. Thinking about how little control any of us had. The sea’s motion lulled me into a state of calm. Suddenly, I understood that it wasn’t Monty’s death or my relationship with Tommy that I’d been mourning in New York all those weeks. I hadn’t been drinking to drown the sorrow of those losses. But rather, it was because I couldn’t accept that my gift, my own precious gift, was evil.
But how could it not be? I’d ruined my own life with it and now the lives of three strangers. And yet I still yearned to put on the blindfold. The magick of seeing was a drug.
I’d been trying to resist its pull by sedating myself with wine, by entering into a series of paintings more provocative than anything I’d ever done, so much so that I was almost embarrassed for anyone to see them. And neither effort had succeeded.
I couldn’t imagine my life as an artist without wearing my silken mask. But I knew that doing so would be too great a risk. The bigger problem now was how I was going to convince Sebastian that he couldn’t ever ask me to wear it again.
During the crossing, we discussed my professional future often, and while he promised me that the work he was getting me was all on the up-and-up, he made it clear that the shadow portraits were where I would make my mark as an artist and that if I wanted the kind of success our mother enjoyed, I couldn’t abandon them for long.
Each time he brought up the shadow portraits, I remained silent. I had never been able to talk my way out of Sebastian’s control before, and I was very uncertain about how to do it now.