Chapter Fifty-Two

Even now memory sieves those hard stones of grief. But I must draw back the shade. Hold a mirror up to that night. Her truth now forces me to set mine down also, to face myself and what I’ve done. Forcing me to bleed, and bleed again. I feel sure I can come close to the truth of it, which is as certain as we can ever be about the truth.

A breath.

And here it is.

I couldn’t sit still, I went downstairs in search of her. Through cold rooms, through narrow passages, through the darkened hall. The windows shrouded in fog. I couldn’t hold onto anything, tried to grasp the table, but I stumbled. Fell. The grandfather clock shuddered. The hall was empty and dim, but there was light and life in the drawing room, and it drew me. The very same longing that had driven me to her rooms in the dead of night. Polished wood gleamed like eyes, the doors gaped. Dark shapes twisted against the walls: people circling, talking. Most of them turned and gawped at me. A crush of skirts and perfumes and hair. Violin music coming from somewhere far away. I stopped, stared.

Benham took a step, raised his hand. Stay back. I saw Hep Elliot. Laddie.

Her.

She was beside the long window, at the heart of a small crowd. Head tilted, glass raised. Laughing. When I saw that it split my heart like a cord of wood. She moved from one guest to another, then the next. When she saw me, she came to a stop. The room went still. Their murmurings fell upon me like rain. Meg’s strange, darky maid.

When I reached her, I lifted my chin, gathered my breath.

‘Sssh. Frances.’ Her nails pressed into my arm. ‘Sssh.’ I tried to shake her loose, but she wouldn’t let go.

This is death.

Linux shouldering through the crowd, Charles in tow. Forgetting her manners. Her wide jar of a mouth, her eyes sour as plums. But it was Madame who told me to leave. ‘Please. Do not make a fuss.’ Her eyes black. I saw fear in them, and the coil of some darker thing.

The room breathed again as I turned on my heel.

Charles took me to the attic. But I went back down, to her room, sat on the bed. I kicked my feet against it. Books slumped in piles, like dark stones in a well, and the walls pressed in. I felt the same sick clutch at my stomach that had taken hold of me when I saw her. I got up, lit a candle, remembered how they’d all been congratulating themselves. Congratulating him.

What a debate! What a speaker! What a man!

While I had been forsaken. I was being turned out again.

Earlier that day, I’d come up from the kitchen to find her in bed, drapes of blood on her legs, the gown bunched up around them. Not her own blood. The baby had finally let go, and she lay curled around it. A little beached thing on the sheet. A little mulatta. Like me. All babies are pale, did you know that? You can only tell how dark they’re going to be by the fingers and the toes. This one slipped into my palm; a little girl; a tiny blood-dark head; feet small as nails.