Electra understood this to mean that her interesting, and interested, guest was willing to speak frankly but she was gathering herself, flushing the servants from the room before she spoke openly. The servants, in this case, were Basil Le Cherche’s bosun, and Trotter, his personal valet, who followed him on shore as well as at sea. Electra smiled. “Trotter and Joe discovered that little shop within an hour of touching foot on land. Sugar is their siren call. I’ll send them off to lay waste to its riches. Again. They’ve been there three times this week—most excellent servants.” She rang her little bell and sent them off, their departure leaving an echoing silence for the minutes before Madame de Lac spoke again.
“The world can be an ugly place, Mademoiselle Gates, and I know you have seen some of its darker corners. I knew Henri’s habits very, very intimately.” She opened her light silk coat to expose the soft flesh. A jagged red scar sliced down and around one perfect breast. Electra gasped. The jacket was buttoned again.
“Henri Le Cherche did this?”
“No. Another of his kind. There are many of his kind, my dear, as I suspect you already know. Mine happened to be one who loved a sharp blade. He was my first and I hope only complete lapse of judgment.”
“Was this the man you were in love with?”
“He was.”
“Did someone help you … escape him?”
“I destroyed him myself.”
“I am sorry,” Electra whispered.
“Perhaps I am, too, but not very much. From him I learned to recognize any number of monsters—all kinds of monsters—and most of them expressed their hatred of the world through their relations with their women. Strange. Yet they are fairly legion among us, hiding sometimes behind judge’s robes and sometimes in ragged simple oilcloth cloaks. We walk among them, and they hate us.”
Electra waited quietly. She knew that what Madame de Lac said was true, but she also knew that it was not the only truth.
Her visitor went on: “I know you know this about the world. Yet you are not held captive by fear. You do not withhold trust. You are free of cynicism and loneliness. I am not.”
“You could be the same.”
“I cannot. You have experienced something that I no longer believe I ever will know. I no longer even seek it.”
“What is that, Madame?”
“You fell in love. And you fell in love with a man who was worthy of it.”
“Madame de Lac, I have heard of your lovers, who are legion. You are married to a rich and powerful man. You seem to seek love with a passionate intensity.”
“Many of them are the kinds of conquests that a woman collects as amusements or insurance—decent men who can offer protection from the monsters, so to speak. Others, men that are not merely conquests … I have hoped to change, to love one of them. But I cannot. To change, one must cast aside self-protection, all the while knowing what could happen if one does. I live surrounded by luxury and flatterers. But I live deeply alone.”
“Madame de Lac, I remind you that your life is not over. You speak as if from the grave.”
“You are young. You do not understand the binding quality of decisions that have been reinforced with decades’ worth of other very small, apparently insignificant decisions. They gather momentum and carry you so far that you cannot go back. I am not saying I regret my life, Electra Gates. I am only looking at the beginning of yours with great interest.”
The cookies arrived, carried in by a grumbling Trotter, who dropped the tray between them and left.
“I take it your man is not familiar with the niceties of pouring?” Madame de Lac said, one eyebrow arched. “Yet he understands a mistress’s desire for privacy—a valuable skill in any servant. Allow me.” She served them. “Electra, I see your mother’s card sits on the table in the front hall.”
“It does.”
“I take it from your tone that you did not receive her.”
“My mother understands nothing. Speaking with me would only upset her more.”
“Perhaps. But pity is seldom wasted and you might offer some to her. Like many before her, she can only see a daughter who betrayed her mother’s highest hopes for her. She does not see the daughter who is faithful to her own self, her own hopes. The woman lacks courage, but so do most of us. And after all, my dear, you are in love—you glow in the wake of what it has brought you—and you can afford a little generosity to one who has never known such a state. Pity her.”
So uncharacteristic were these compassionate words from Madame de Lac that Electra took them to heart and the next time her mother came to her door, Madame Gates was admitted. She entered weeping, clutching her bosom. “I have tried to forgive you,” she cried. “I have suffered, and I have wondered, and I cannot understand. And you know this but do not care!”
“No. I do not.”
“Because of you I have been shamed and impoverished—I live on the crumbs of the few who allow me into their homes simply in order to pity me!”
“Reject their pity. Scorn them,” Electra advised, her eyes narrowing.
“You think that is a simple matter without money? Heartless creature! Soulless wanton vixen!”
“Wanton, perhaps. Heartless and soulless, no. Mother, I have access to a great pool of material wealth and can easily divert a stream of it toward you. An excellent address, some beautiful clothes—these things will silence most of the harsher judgments directed at you now.”
Her mother was stunned by this unexpected turn in the conversation—confused and hesitant now where she had been so sure of her feelings only a moment before. “You are changed,” she said at last. “I hardly know you.”
“Basil Le Cherche and I are to be married, Mother, at the spring flood. We sail for the West Indies the very night we wed, and it is possible that you and I will never see one another again. I never meant to hurt you,” she added gently. “But I must be free to be what I am. All that I am—and that involves Basil Le Cherche.”
“Nothing will dissuade you? You mean to marry this man?”
“Yes. I do.”
And so she did, swathed in white silk, her train streaming behind her like another sail as she stood by Basil’s side on the Cat’s quarterdeck and they swore before the world to love and cherish each other for the rest of their lives. Celebration spilled over the entire city and its harbor, for those who were grateful for the removal of Judge Henri Le Cherche from the face of the Earth sailed alongside, their rigging crowded with cheering men, and as they slipped from their moorings and into the great channel, a stream of accompanying ships fired a thirty-gun salute before unfurling pennants that signaled “Success in Battle.”