Page 40 of The Beautiful Ones

The sentence hurt more than it should have. Cécile had trusted my understanding when my English failed and trusted my silence when speaking would have placed us both in danger. Until that night, neither of us had needed proof from the other.

“I am not mistaken.”

Madame Lebon reached us before Cécile could answer. The wonder she had shown when her daughter sang had already hardened into irritation.

“Elin, you have disrupted the entire room. What happened to Mr. Fairhaven's water?”

“It froze, Madame.”

“Do not be absurd. It is July.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“And you have spilled it down your dress.” She looked at the wet mark as if clumsiness were a greater offense than terror. “Go upstairs and make yourself presentable.”

I remained beside Cécile.

“Now, Elin.”

Cécile reached toward me, but Adrian moved closer to the pianoforte. He did not touch her. He did not need to. Her hand lowered before it reached mine.

“Go,” she whispered.

The single word emerged almost clearly.

I released her wrist.

As I crossed the drawing room, conversation began again behind me in cautious fragments. Nicholas laughed near the fireplace. Octavia said something that made Augusta Dewey gasp and Lavinia George hide a smile. The ordinary sounds closed over what had happened as neatly as soil over a grave.

At the doorway, I looked back.

Adrian stood beside Cécile with one pale hand resting near the ivory card. She had turned toward him, her expression uncertain but hopeful. He bent his head and said something I could not hear.

Her uncertainty disappeared.

He had not merely given Cécile a voice. He had made himself the guardian of it, and now every warning against him would sound like an attempt to take her miracle away.

Hours later, the house still refused to sleep.

Long after the beeswax candles in the grand drawing room had sputtered out, leaving behind only the heavy stench of hot tallow, sour wine, and dying gardenias, the floorboards above continued to groan under the weight of restless, pacing feet. Downstairs in the main hall, Monsieur Lebon, Judge Dewey, and Reuben George remained shut inside the study, their muffled, frantic voices rising and falling behind locked doors like cornered beasts arguing over a bone.

Midnight had come and gone, yet the suffocating July heat still hung in the air like a wet wool blanket, pressing dampness deep into every brick and timber of Le Champ des Fleurs.

I made my way down the dark, steep steps of the rear staircase to the outer kitchen, seeking a draught of cool well water and a moment away from the oppressive, watchful stillness of the upper corridors.

The brick kitchen was quiet, illuminated only by the dull, dying red embers of the hearth. Dinah sat alone at the long pine worktable, a small kerosene lamp casting a soft amber glow over her dark, worn hands. She was mending one of Cécile's blue lace collars, her needle moving in precise, rhythmic strokes that barely made a sound against the linen.

She did not look up when my slippers scraped against the cold flagstone floor. “You ought to be in your garret, child.”

“I could not sleep,” I said, taking a tin cup from the wooden shelf and filling it from the earthenware pitcher on the washstand. The water was tepid, tasting faintly of iron and river silt, but I drank it greedily. “It feels as though the walls are closing in up there.”

Dinah set down her needle. “Walls have a way of doing that when they are built on secrets.”

I sat opposite her and pulled my apron tighter around my waist.

“Adrian Fairhaven was in two places tonight.”

The needle rolled from Dinah's fingers and came to rest against the lamp.